#I just. it’s. more than a decade of pseudo science experiments

[meramorphosis]

What if pain was Theo’s first anchor?

[carolperkinsexgirlfriend]

Steddie Upside-down AU Part 4

Part 1 Part 3

We should go to the store,” Steve says. 

He says it mostly to get Munson’s blood up. The silence is digging into his head, making every breath the other takes sound like the ragged wail of that fucking monster.

The longer he stays there, crouched in the trees, the harder it is to tell how much of the ache in his stomach is fear, and how much is hunger. They should find food, water, shelter, a way out of this bullshit.

Munson scoffs. “Looks like you’re getting your way, huh King Steve?”

Steve stands, legs unsteady. His feet are cold and bare in the dirt, gone numb around the ants under his skin. His hand aches from clutching the other boys. He drops it, shaking out the clenched nerves. “Yeah,” he says, channeling all the bitchiness Carol had hammered into his head over pseudo girls nights, “I summoned that thing into my bedroom just because I really wanted to go on a shopping date with you Munson.”

He starts through the woods in the general direction of the store, smiling at the sound of Munson sputtering incoherently behind him before the other boys jogs to catch back up.

“Careful there, big boy.” Muson leans into his space, smile saccharine around all its cracks. “I might just go and catch feelings.”

Steve rolls his eyes, shoving the other boy a few steps away. He can’t stop looking around for a threat, or some tear in the air that’ll lead them back home. He wants to be warm.

The rest of the trip to Melvald’s is quiet, but every time Steve glances his way, Eddie’s biting his lip against the words practically bursting from him.

He’s always been a talker. In the hallways, on cafeteria tables, even beneath the bleachers when he’s trying to keep a low profile. His voice carries. It’s almost painful to watch him try and suppress it. 

No wonder teachers are always cursing his name.

Prying the door open is louder than Steve wants—metal creaking on hinges aged decades in a matter of hours. It echoes off the vacant shops loud enough that both boys stop, staring into each other’s panicked eyes as they wait for a sign that something is coming. The silence echoes around them, bouncing off the storefronts like a physical force.

Nothing stirs.

Steve pries the door open a tiny bit more, gesturing Munson inside. He does a dorky little curtsy on the way, pulling the gaping knees of his jeans like they’re the hems of a skirt. Steve rolls his eyes, but follows him in.

The door resists closing, but Steve pulls it shut, around the sounds of its own groans. The illusion of safety and all that. Munson must feel the same because he immediately starts chattering.

“Is this how you feel, all the time, Harrington?” he asks, bounding over to the cereal aisle and pulling a luridly orange box down from the shelf. He pries the box open, pulling at the seams of the bag like an impatient child on Christmas morning. “No budget, no coupons, just—shit.”

He drops the box around his startled expletive before immediately ripping into a new one.

“What?” Steve asks, but he’s already following in Munson’s wake and reaching down for the abandoned box. Before he even pulls the plastic bag out, he can smell the stench of food gone off. He pulls it out anyway.

Just like the door, and the street, and the water in his tap—the cereal in the bag has seemingly aged years in a matter of hours. Each wheaty bite has shriveled into itself, turning an off-putting grey and smelling like a stack of cardboard left to mold in the rain.

Munson’s still picking up and discarding boxes, movements growing more frantic with each new discovery.

In a state beyond horror, Steve wanders over to the water aisle. There’s no light on in the store, but the bottles almost seem to glow—an unholy green, murky and brackish in their pristine bottles, still lined up like it was opening day. It looks like some sort of gone-wrong science experiment from those science fiction movies Carol pretends she doesn’t like to watch. They look just like the sludge in his pipes back home.

Munson is cursing up a storm as he rounds the aisle, but he goes quiet when he sees Steve. He’s not sure what he looks like, but Munson’s hand reaches out and lands on his shoulder. Steve can barely feel its warm squeeze—can’t bear to tear his eyes away from those bottles.

It’s becoming a pattern, the way they’re always stuck together in horrified silence. It’s also becoming a pattern that one of them breaks said silence with some convoluted bullshit.

“Where’s your shoes,  man?” Munson asks, like he’s only just noticed the flesh beyond the caked-on mud.

Steve sighs, shrugging off the other boy’s hand. His toes are numbed past the point of pain as he limps to the first-aid aisle, Munson trailing in his wake.

He ends up on the ground, clutching a roll of bandages, staring down at the bottoms of his feet. The bandages are soft and spongy. Clean. But he can’t even see the abrasions on the bottoms of his feet past the dirt and mud. There’s no water. There’s nothing. So, he just sits there, feeling nothing.

He’s still on the ground. Time must be passing but he doesn’t feel it, can’t see it in the dank light of the store.

He blinks and Munson’s sitting in front of him, Steve’s right foot in his lap. There’s a crumpled pile of used wet wipes beside the other boy’s hip, the brown and red from his own feet smudged across their normally pristine white surfaces.

The package crinkles as Munson pulls the plastic lid open to tear off a fresh wipe. He’s gentle enough that it tickles slightly between the toes and on the arch of his foot as Munson scrubs the last of the dirt away.

Steve clears his throat.

Munson snaps his gaze up, fingers twitching flightily on his foot, but doesn’t stop his ministrations. “You back with me?”

Steve nods. He wants to ask where he was before but can’t force the words past his constricting throat. He feels alarmingly close to tears.

He feels like he’s been sucked out of his body and into a very small tube, compressed until his breaths come in short, punched-out bursts that never fully enter his lungs.

“I think you’re having a panic attack,” Munson says, voice even. He’s looking down at Steve’s foot again, stroking it almost soothingly with the dirtied towelette. “I need you to breath with me, okay?”

Munson’s breathing gets loud and purposeful—long breaths in through his nose, longer breaths out through his mouth. Steve stares, enraptured, and gasps along.

Time passes. Steve’s shoulders slump. His fingers are tingling like they do sometimes at the end of a long basketball game. Sweat dripping down his face, body buzzing with excited adrenaline, fingers buzzing with the need for the ball.

The squeeze of Munson’s hand around his ankle catapults him out of the tube and back into Melvald’s.

Embarrassment crashes into Steve. He crawls to his feet, using the shelving behind him to steady himself. He stands, with creaking knees and hobbles stiff-legged out of the aisle, tossing “I’m going to to find some shoes,” over his shoulder.

“Okay,” Munson replies, so quietly Steve can barely hear it. 

There’s a thank you stuffed deep in Steve’s throat, trying to crawl its way past his mortification. There’s gauze wrapped around the soles of his feet, containing the damage. He’s not sure when Munson even did it.

There’s not a single fucking shoe in any of the aisles–not even a fucking pair of slippers. He’s three seconds away from duct taping the bottom of his feet and calling it good when there’s a tap on his shoulder. He whirls, slipping as his gauze, covered feet try to keep traction. Munson steadies him with a hand to his elbow.

There’s a pair of ratty sneakers clutched in his other hand, and he’s smiling dimples popping. 

“Where’d you get those?” 

Munson beams, skipping in place like a kid playing hopscotch. “Found them in the breakroom,” he says. “Do you think your highness can lower himself to wear a poor, lowly worker man’s shoes?”

His eyes are fucking twinkling. Steve’s heart fucking twitches. This whole thing is too fucking derranged for him to handle.

“What size?”

Munson cackles tossing the shoes into Steve’s chest. 

Steve bends down, pushing his feet into the shoes sockless, hoping the gauze will do enough to keep blisters at bay. They’re a little loose, so Steve ties the crumbling shoelaces tight, hoping against Munson’s fucking dimples that they don’t break. He double knots them. They hold.

“Thanks,” he says, still looking down at the ratty things. 

“Gotta clothe our knights properly for battle!” Munson says. Steve looks up just in time to see that same goofy curtsey.

“I thought I was the King?” he asks. “Have I been demoted?”

Munson laughs again, bringing a curl to his face, as if to hide his grin. “I don’t see any of your subjects around,” he says. It should be mocking, but the elbow he drives into Steve’s side is good-natured. Playful. “Besides, knights are way cooler.”

Steve sighs, can’t believe he’s devolved to playing along with this level of nerdom. “Where’s my sword then, huh Munson?”

Munson sweeps his arms wide encompassing the entirety of Melvald’s in his gesture. “You’re down on your luck, Sir Harrington. You’ve lost your noble steed and your enchanted sword to a suductress from a rival kingdom. Now you’re on a perilous quest to reclaim your property, and regain your rightful place by the King’s side!”

“And where are you in this whole mess?” Steve asks, already kicking himself for playing along.

“Well, I, Sir Steve, as the King’s devoted jester, am on this quest with you to save you from a fate worse than death.”

“Oh, yeah?” Steve asks, inching closer to Munson, unsure of why. “What’s that?”

“Boredom, of course!”

Munson’s hair is a mess. It’s more fly-away than contained. His skin looks a little oily around his forehead, and he looks absolutely ridiculous with Steve’s clothes on. But his eyes are shining, and his smile is beaming, and Steve wonders how someone can be that bright in the literal bowels of hell. 

“Shove off, Munson,” Steve laughs, shoving his shoulder lightly as he walks past.

Munson skips up to keep in pace. “Now, what, my liege?”

“So what, I’m the King again?”

Munson puts a hand over his heart, gasping dramatically. “You’ll always be a King to me.”

Steve feels warmth in his cheeks, pushes it down, doesn’t think about it. What now, he says. What now? 

“Now,” he says, thinking aloud as he eyes the aisles around them. “We collect anything useful around here and go.”

“But–”

“We’re not going to last much longer without water, man.” he replies.

Munson sighs. “The quarry?” he asks, sounding like he’d rather say anything else.

“The quarry,” Steve agrees, feeling just the same. 

Part 5

[desceros]

Okay I have something of a long post/ask/critical analysis of Symphony AU that I want to address. you're free to ignore it if I'm just spouting off insane copium. Or whatever you want to do with it lol. This is more about the turtles that about the Violist.

First I'm gonna talk about Donnie because he's arguably the easiest one to talk about. And take less time. He spent at the very least 15 years of his life knowing exactly five people, three brothers, his dad, and a bestie/pseudo big sister. They're all people who completely understand/grew up with him. And he's used to people adapting to his needs without having to say anything because he's, well, they're brother/son. Speaking from a purely canon standpoint in Rise you can see it, Raph refuses to tell Donnie they hate his gifts because it'll crush him. Stuff like that. Leo calling him a "weirdo" doesn't really mean much of anything considering he's Donnie's brother, and this is about pineapple on pizza.

This is all to say I see how Donnie just didn't bother communicating this was all for his touch experiment. As far as he's basically aware, she already knew. He wasn't going to read between the lines because he'd grown accustomed to the way his brothers, April, and dads act. Which, in hindsight, bit him in the ass because the violist literally doesn't know him aside from "purple turtle science man".

So. I get him. I get where he's coming from even if it ended up kinda fucking up the violist. That's all part of the learning curve of knowing people who don't already know who you are and whatever.

Now for Leo, maybe this is REALLY just me on my copium life support but I see where he's coming from too. Again, when you look at it from a canon lens I see where Leo is coming from. He's always been protective of his family, even more so than Raph at points. He didn't trust Big Mama immediately, even though the rest of his brothers did. He was perfectly willing and happy to DIE IN THE PRISON DIMENSION to keep his family safe. Like, let's not forget he, as well as the others, has a ton of unchecked trauma that he's definitely not willing to address to anyone. A decade of unaddressed trauma will do things to someone's psyche, intentionally or not. The guilt of almost killing his brothers has been festering inside him for over a decade now, this doesn't really seem entirely like a "my brother touches you and not me >:(" thing.

The way I see it Leo's acting out because he's actually just terrified of someone hurting his family again. It's definitely not okay, and it's condemnable. But as someone who's done some pretty fucked shit when I was dealing with my depression before meds, I've been Leo before. That man needs help, and fast.

We've also seen, from Symphony AU that he's mostly accepted the violist as part of the family now. The comments he makes about her being "Donnie's toy" are, again, things he seems to be saying to get a rise out of Donnie. We know he's been doing that for a while. And I wouldn't really put it past him for continuing to try and do it now that Donnie's not allowed to do his experiments anymore.

I had a way better way of wording this last night but I ended up watching TMNT 1987 instead but to summarize my thoughts, I sympathize with both Leo and Donnie and don't believe either of them are irredeemable monsters. If I'm somehow wrong about Leo and this is all just conduit to getting Donnie and the violist together then I'm gonna be so :(. Mafuyu Main Story chapter 14 even.

Or, again, maybe I'm just coping lol.

oh i'm all about symphony copium. breathe deep, anon-chan, hahahaha

aaaaand in true desceros fashion this got way too long so i'm tucking it under a cut. rolls eyes at myself soooooo hard

you're largely correct, though i will specify that for donnie it's not that he "didn't bother" to communicate what he thought was going on, so much as he thought he did.

i invite you-slash-everyone to read this passage from when the agreement was struck to see what i mean. i've removed all of viola-chan's thoughts and interpretations for you, and left you with just the core of the conversation, color-coded for clarity on who's speaking:

“We have… exhausted the limits of touching that I would perform with most people.”  [...] “…What do you mean?”  “I mean that all of the myriad mechanical touches I have experienced so far in my life, we’ve covered together. [...] I’ve become completely enured to them all, so long as you’re the one doing them. There is, of course, an obvious next step, but I wanted to discuss it before we begin.”  “To… touches you haven’t done?” [...] “Correct." [...] “I… don’t understand." [...] “I’m referring to more… intimate touches. We’ve… already been pushing at the boundary a bit, so I wanted to be very specific and clear." [...]

“I… take it you don’t scent your brothers.” “No, I don’t." [...] “Donnie, I—[...] I like you. You know that, right?”  “You aren’t very good at hiding it, no. [...] I, of course, like you as well, though I’d like to think that has been well demonstrated over our time together.”

[...]"…Intimate touches. [...] Like… what, petting? Kissing? Sex? What are we talking about, exactly?”  “All of it, ideally. [...] I’m quite curious to study how I’ll react, especially considering the whole touch aversion situation.” [...] “…Do… Do you wanna try it? [...] …Us, together, I mean?”  [...] “Really? With… With me?” [...] “Of course, I—[...]Donnie, I… of course. I’d be stupid to say no, right?” “Oh, that’s such a relief. [...] I’ve been making spreadsheets of things I’ve wanted to try for several days and wondering how best to bring it up, especially considering—well. It’s quite helpful that you did so yourself. Excellent work, consultant.” [...] “Well, I’d like to amend our agreement on how turtle time is going to go, from now on in light of all this, [...] We’re partners, now, so we have to take care of each other. [...]” “[...]Very well. If those are your terms for partnership, I accept.”

see how differently it reads without viola-chan's thoughts staining it? stripped of her thoughts, you can easily see where the miscommunication happened. other than a few incidental pieces of dialogue that don't affect the meaning of the convo, this is it.

in donnie's mind, he and viola-chan were very much on the same page. "partnership". "agreement". these are words that viola-chan uses. when he refers to spreadsheets, she just rolls with it. as far as he's concerned, they're talking about a scientific study here. he did communicate, and well. it's just... viola-chan put things there that he didn't. and that's not her fault, because at this point she hasn't picked up on how to communicate with donnie yet. and it's completely rational to assume, when discussing sex and romance and hearing someone say "i like you"--and then going on to kiss and have sex with that person--that it's a romantic relationship. as stated in the fic, my personal opinion (which to be clear, as someone who stands on death of the author, this *is* just my opinion) neither of them did the other ill. they literally just didn't know how to communicate yet. so i 100% agree with you on being able to see donnie's side of this. i have another long-ass ask somewhere in the meta tag discussing the lack of socializing specifically, if you're curious for more of my thoughts on that.

i also agree with you largely with the leo portion of your analysis. i... can't go into as much detail on his side of things, but rest assured that before everything is over, viola-chan and leo are going to have more than one conversation. and the two of them, despite everything, really do mesh well and talk about things, so it'll be a satisfying resolution, i think.

anyway WOW that got way too long but teal deer, i agree and love deep meta-analysis of my stuff so don't apologize in the slighest, yeehaw

[frankendykes-monster]

Any thoughts on how some of Kirby's work draws inspiration from ancient aliens pseudo-archaeology stuff? (Mainly Von Däniken)

Kirby beat Chariot of The Gods to the punch in that regard, given that The Inhumans' origin from 1966 is about aliens genetically experimenting on prehistoric humans.

Broadly Kirby's need to avoid "stereotypes" (i.e. "I couldn't use gangsters anymore", read: character and genre archetypes that had been played out) in the early 1960's coincided neatly with his emergent obsession with how radiation could impact living organisms. The Fantastic Four, The Hulk, X-Men, etc. were all manifestations of people "in a jam" and how mutations would occur in human beings. There's that one shower thoughts post from probably like, a decade ago? Where the post is like "in the US radiation creates superheroes (Spider-Man) but in Japan it creates giant monsters (Godzilla)" followed by the quippy reply of "these two countries have different experiences with radiation, I wonder why" when none of the characters I mentioned above had lives that were wholly enriched or elevated by exposure to cosmic rays or nuclear bomb tests.

Anyhow, I actually don't know how old the concept of wholesale genetic engineering is, but considering Kirby did a rapid turnover from "radioactive exposure" to "genetically engineered" in the mid-1960's, I'm assuming you can safely date it to then. But obviously the most prescient comic Kirby paralleled to Chariot of The Gods is The Eternals, which was originally going to be titled Return of The Gods. One thing I should have prefaced this all with is that Kirby had no actual conviction in the concept of aliens having influenced human society, being a religious Jew, and inspite of evolution being a major concern of his later works, he was also a staunch creationist. Science was just a means to gather more story ideas, because stories have to be naturally grounded in some real world phenomena.

I've not really given Chariot of The Gods the time of day (nor do I really plan to), but as for The Eternals itself, it's a defining Jack Kirby comic; "brilliant", "prescient", "forward thinking", nobody gave a shit at the time, he got dogged for not including other Marvel characters in it, eventually he had to relent, by #14 the entire thing tailspinned into nothing, and the characters got drafted into the "Marvel Universe" "proper" where they've never found a comfortable niche since then. Par for the course for 1970's Kirby stuff. At least we got Arishem, the Judge, in what might be my single favorite page of Kirby art across his entire career:

The Eternals was less intimately concerned with the fact that godlike aliens created sentient life on Earth than it was that that was only the beginning of their experiment, which they have now returned to see the results of and possibly destroy The Earth. You can see why this would present a problem when you are supposed to tell this story in a fictional setting where Spider-Man also exists but by 1976 Marvel was just the blindly treading IP machine that most people think of it as now. Great revolutionary stuff like Claremont et al. X-Men or Miller/Janson Daredevil was the exception and not the rule.

[ace-s-fav-dp-posts]

Thoughts on a Bioshock (but only the original and 2, I don't like any of the infinite characters enough to include that game) x Danny Phantom crossover.

With the basic premise being that ADAM slugs are naturally occurring liminal (as defined by Phanon) animals, and the area Rapture is built on (their native range) is a natural thin spot in reality.

ADAM as a substance is some percentage of ectoplasm (not all of it, around 15% if I had to give a number) by mass, that's how it does stuff like give people superpowers, and can pass memories from one person to another when recycled.

But none of the scientists in Rapture had any idea about that, because they don't know ectoplasm exists, and none of their instraments can pick up on it anyways. Not helped by the fact that it can't really be perceived by non-liminal beings under typical circumstances anyways.

Liminals however can perceive it's presence by the fact that they can see it glow.

Yes I am implying that both of the Bioshock protagonists (and the Little Sisters) are liminal, which I think is totally realistic considering what I've already established for the crossover.

I mean, Jack is an artificially speed grown super soldier, who was actively being modified and experimented on his entire childhood. To the point that when splicing as much as he wants, he exhibits no mental or physical deterioration the way 99% of splicers do.

Delta was necromancied back to life by his daughter via science, after having been dead for a literal decade.

The Little Sisters are literally immortal until the ADAM slug they host is destroyed or ripped from their bodies. Upon which they die unless being given the cure Tenenbaum made.

Not to mention Sophia Lamb was trying to use ADAM to essentially create a demi-god, or at least some kind of pseudo divine being. Creating a mad monstrosity out of Gil Alexander, and then performing the same experiment on her own daughter Eleanor.

I don't know. Phandom's ideas about how ectoplasm exposure to the point of turning a living being liminal, and how ADAM affects the people of Rapture are pretty similar.

Except ADAM canonically has way more negative side effects than most AUs about liminality tend to have ecto exposure causing.

But one must also consider that ADAM isn't just ecto and has other components (meaning it's not pure), and that it was literally being created in living breathing children, and also recycled from corpses to then be made into new drugs and sold back to the people of Rapture.

So all that is probably responsible for a lot of the negative side effects. I mean Tenenbaum discovered it because dock workers in Rapture were basically rubbing their injuries with ADAM slugs they caught, and none of them had any side effects other than their wounds healing.

Now I'm not saying I made this AU so Ghost Delta could reunite with Eleanor after going through an odyssey in the Ghost Zone that parallels his journey to reunite with her in Bioshock 2...

But I won't deny that that's the first story idea that popped into my head when thinking of the crossover.

[cosmicmote]

a brief note on love and death throes, sans art

Love, by right definition, is a type of all awareness. Not merely omniscience, but something beyond that which can't easily be put into words. It's definitely not an ugly projected pseudo-godly Big Brother type of all awareness, either. Romance and romanticism are somewhat of an anomaly, in terms of our human evolution, mixed up with bodily chemicals, for further reproduction. There is also a certain genuine beauty, non-replicable, to this all awareness. Before I digress,

It has long been pointed out that homosexuality is a fetishization(or expression) of narcissism. Not that all homosexuals are the same, some people are born with it, others are enticed via peer pressure or group "norms", and still more are effectively forcibly recruited through abuse. The latter at least would certainly seem to flow parallel with streams of wahabbism. This weekend some people have been explaining to me that bi-sexuality is strongly drawn towards machiavellianism and psychopathy as well, and probably more so. I listen. There is science to back this up.

more reading:

and further, Homosexual Sex as Harmful as Drug Abuse, Prostitution, or Smoking: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2466/ pr0.96.3c.915-961

Thirty plus years of adulthood experience and observation conforms to this. We can see where it all goes, and it all seems to be far more open now than when I was growing up. Others have made these observations in times past, the truth of correspondences is still well known, and attractor fields are noticed too. The AI sloppists' garbage being pushed and embraced by so many is a logical progression of all of this. A dehumanization, annihilation, enthusiastically hand in hand. Get defensive and angry, and deny it all you want. Take notes on what the research companion linked above says on showiness, too. I will not hear you.

All of this prominence is a darkness, not life or love giving, and most often whatever awareness exists tends to be as disordered as desires and remains far closer to all oblivious. Every platform they can find they squat on, really.

This morning I was reading the related experience of someone who attended a recent protest in support of Palestinians:

They say the most dangerous animal you can encounter in the wild is one that is dying and cornered. A trapped coyote will lash out and attack you with every fiber of its being, even if it’s mortally wounded. Especially if it’s mortally wounded. The American Empire and the so-called state of Israel are a pair of conjoined coyotes whose paws are clamped in the jaws of a bear trap, hanging on by a few threads of tendon. In their last gasps of life before they enter the great beyond, in one final adrenaline fueled frenzy, these dogs are lashing out and doing everything in their power to destroy financially, legally, and socially anyone who dares speak out against the crimes they are committing in Palestine. I learned this for myself not too long ago.

The above quote from: https://www.unz.com/article/american-death-throes/ and it goes on, with her observations of those around her, her surroundings, the darkness of it all.

The Anti-Defamation League has been doing this for many decades, they aren't the only group engaging in it(far from it), and they do collectively engage in this behavior as a form of expressed death throes, but at the same time it's just their "normal" behavior over a long span of decades and centuries. A culture and society of death, well describes them. I recall the ADL getting caught out in the 1990's and the LA Times had decent coverage of it back then. I discovered the existence of hasbara manuals around that same time. The person who gave one to me thought I would be far more sympathetic to his cause, mistakenly, but all of it was informative, in my late youth.

A list of groups they spied on, a bit of a vile rabbit hole including co-apartheid and proliferation of nuclear weapon technology, if one looks this up themselves: https://www.foodnotbombs.net/adllist.html

They're not averse to menacing and spying on their own either, even if they're engaged with far lighter hands: https://psmag.com/news/kings-garbage-76228/

It is a tyranny ruled with fear. Yahwist, as others are pointing out. A projected fake god. All the euphemisms and misnomers forced upon us to be used, instead of proper words and names. They are liars, through and through. What else can they be? They make up a lot of concocted threats, performatively, by exploiting and working with numerous agencies too.

While I don't belong to the abrahamics myself, these days and this lifetime does seem like a great opportunity for renunciations and resurrections. There is far more to life than their embraced darkness, we know, even if it is elsewhere and predominantly in other lands, and not amongst the turned something less than human here.

words ©spacetree 2025

[unpopularly-opinionated]

Okay so over the past two days I've rewatched/watched Alien 1-4 and boy was it ever a decline. For context, I've only seen Alien and Aliens prior to this, as well as one of the prequels, though I can't recall which one, but I'm not including those because I haven't watched/rewatched them yet.

Spoilers below for Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection, in case you haven't seen them, because I have thoughts.

Alien is perfect, of course. It still holds up really well and I'm still beyond happy that I was able to watch it in theaters many years ago as opposed to just on TV. It's definitely worth seeing in a theater IMO.

Aliens I've always had bad memories of, and while I was certainly reminded of why, it actually wasn't nearly as bad as I remembered it being. I think the character's name is "Hudson", or the guy who famously says "Game over, man! It's game over!" Anyways, he's why I had such bad memories of this movie. I find him incredibly annoying BUT the last time I saw this movie was probably a decade ago so while I still find it annoying, I'm able to look past it and overall find the rest of the movie enjoyable.

Alien 3 was uh... well let me just say that my initial reaction was WTF because of the "choice" they made at the beginning of the film to axe every character who survived from Aliens, aside from Ripley, and including Newt who was like so pivotal to the previous movie. I was so baffled this I had to google it and I see that it primarily wasn't their fault that they had to make this choice because I guess the actress who played Newt didn't actually want to be an actress, but I don't know, I think they could've managed to handle it a bit better than they did. It was just insanely jarring to go straight from saving her in Aliens to "btw she died off-screen between movies". This colored my opinion of the movie at first, but ultimately this movie wasn't so bad all things considered. The next movie definitely makes this one seem near-perfect by comparison.

Alien Resurrection is just bad. It's just so so bad. If I hadn't caught a glimpse of Joss Whedon's name in the credits at the beginning, I could've still guessed it a mile off. Ironically, even though Alien 3 actually had Ripley fuck a dude, this movie was way more unnecessarily sexualised than that one. Not to mention the fact that they went with the whole angle that the aliens are now Clone Ripley's children which makes sexualising the two infinitely worse.

There's also the fact that this movie just flat out does not make sense and is contrived as hell. They barely attempt to explain how Ripley is even in this movie to begin with after she died in Alien 3, giving us a one-off line about how they "scraped blood samples" that they found in the prison and used that to clone her, utilizing Alien DNA, which is how they wound up with 7 other failed attempts that all looked semi-Alien-like whereas our Ripley is #8 and looks normal.

Except this I could buy into. Is it contrived? Absolutely. But whatever, this world has synthetic androids and pseudo-supercomputers so whatever, I can buy that they have cloning too. But what I couldn't buy was that somehow by cloning her they also managed to clone the Queen alien that was lying dormant in Ripley's body back in Alien 3? I'm sorry, what? If you can do that why do you even need Ripley, an active threat to your plans?

There's also the plot contrivance of why they didn't immediately kill her off once she'd served her purpose. They had the Queen at that point, and the subject of terminating her comes up twice but we never actually get given an answer as to why they keep her alive. They even go as far as to call out the fact that she's an active danger to their project. Given that Joss Whedon was writing this, I'd have at least expected some kind of creepy doctor who wanted to fuck his Riply science experiment or something. Anything to even attempt to justify her continued existence.

Also I'm sorry these fuckers have been researching, reproducing and raising these aliens and not one of them thought that maybe they should make their cages acid proof?

Overall, just a terrible movie. Sucks too because I guess it leads nowhere? You're telling me they ran out of the tried-and-true method of "somehow the Aliens have returned" when the ship full of them crashed on Earth? Nah. Also I LOL'd at the ending because I'm sorry, is Earth uninhabited? I don't think so. But there they went crashing a fucking massive spaceship into it with no concerns and we just roll credits.

Anyways, guess I'll start Prometheus and Covenant tomorrow.

[parrotvoid]

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator: Useful or pseudo-science?

I’m a huge fan of the MBTI system.  It’s opened the door to deep self-reflection, given me a community of interesting, like-minded people, is a useful heuristic for understanding the people around me, and sparked a passion for personality and cognitive science (which has gone much past MBTI).  

The MBTI system is based off of the cognitive function theories of renown psychologist Carl Jung, and was founded by a mother-daughter team, Katherine Myers and Isabell Briggs, in 1962.  The system works by creating four dimensions of personality with each dimension having two categories representing a different set of behavioral patterns.  This propagates as: Extrovert ( E ) vs Introvert ( I ), intuitive ( N ) vs Sensor ( S ), Feeler ( F ) vs Thinker ( T ), and Judger ( J ) vs Perceiver ( P ). These dimensions can be further broken down into specific cognitive functions, but just to keep things simple for this post here is a basic visualization:

The combination of these eight letters creates 16 personality types which have their own associated behavioral patterns that emerge out of the interplay between the combination of the dominant four letters.  A very basic form of this can be visualized in the below picture:  

Of course, everyone is unique, but on a population level each MBTI type is associated with specific strengths and weaknesses, career interests, temperaments, and compatibilities.  Your MBTI type is often determined by taking a test asking questions about your typical behaviors and preferences.  Each question is targeted to specific cognitive functions, so by the end of the test your answers should cluster around a specific personality type.  

Despite the claims of MBTI not being scientific, businesses have used the MBTI instrument for decades and there is a wealth of studies on the effectiveness of the MBTI instrument in scientific journals studying business and organizational psychology. This doesn’t mean the system is perfect (we’ll be getting into that in a minute) and controversies rise when organizations misuse or overemphasize an employee’s MBTI type when making promotion, hiring, and firing decisions.  It can also be severely misused when people use their MBTI type as a stand-in for their identity or as an excuse for bad behavior. Discovering your MBTI type should be used as a descriptive tool to guide self-reflection and personal growth.  

Because many of these tests are self-administered, their accuracy is highly dependent on having an accurate self-perception and honestly answering the questions.  A huge concern in any personality assessment being performed for work, school, or being viewed by others is that the test taker may answer the questions the way they think they SHOULD or WANT to answer them instead of how they really act and feel.  I’ve seen plenty of people get screwy results because they answered the questions based on what they wanted to be like, instead of how they actually are.  I’ve seen highly extroverted, party animals answer that they would “rather spend a Friday night reading a book instead of going out”, even though they spend every actual Friday night out with their friends.  Mistyped individuals, especially ones who over-identify with their mistyped personality type, can create a lot of confusion within the MBTI community and cause a lot of statistical problems when trying to analyze the validity of MBTI.  One solution is to have professionally proctored tests outside of the work setting, but these are often expensive and rare.

Issues like the ones discussed above are why I totally understand the reason MBTI has received so much criticism from the psychology community and has even been called pseudo-science.  Mainstream psychology prefers the OCEAN (aka Big 5) personality metric to the MBTI.  OCEAN stands for the traits it characterizes: Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.  The OCEAN model still suffers from the issues of bias and dishonesty during test taking, however it does address some issues better than the traditional MBTI model.  Let’s list these out below:

1.  MBTI categorizes personality into 16 distinct types. The modern scientific study of personality has determined that personality lies on a continuum with most people falling in the middle.  This means that someone who’s slight introverted will have more in common with a slightly extroverted person than a very introverted person.  The OCEAN model plots people on a continuous scale to more accurately address this issue.  To be fair to MBTI, the modern versions of the test give you a percentage on your specific traits, in the same way that OCEAN does.  

2. OCEAN’s measured personality dimensions (Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) were chosen through a data driven method analyzing clusters of commonly associated behavioral patterns, while MBTI’s personality dimensions were determined from psycho-analytic theory.  My issue with this criticism is that there’s not necessarily anything more scientific or special about using a machine to draw patterns vs a human brain to draw patterns.  Patterns are patterns, and I actually think a comparison of dimensions in MBTI and OCEAN actually shows the power of the human brain.  The human created MBTI dimensions fairly neatly overlap the dimensions of the data science derived OCEAN model:  E vs I = high vs low Extroversion, N vs S = high vs low Openness, F vs T = high vs low Agreeableness, J vs T = high vs low Conscientiousness, and the final factor Neuroticism has been recently incorporated into MBTI as “turbulence”.  Essentially, knowing a person’s OCEAN score tells you their MBTI type and the same goes for the other way around.

3.  The final and most valid criticism of MBTI is that personality can change over time.  Most models of the MBTI state that your type remains fixed after adolescence, although the more complex MBTI models allow for growth and development in the lower functions.  On the other hand, the OCEAN model often expects and predicts change throughout a person’s life.  However, it should be noted that there is strong evidence to suggest that people have a genetically determined base personality type which they default to and develop off of. What this means is that someone with naturally low Extroversion (let’s say scoring 5% on E) may develop into an Extrovert (scoring 60% on E) but chances are low that they would ever become highly extroverted (> 85% E).  

So, is MBTI a perfect tool for describing the rich and complex variables of human personality?  Obviously not.  But is MBTI pseudo-science garbage no more accurate than astrology?  I think that’s taking it too far.  MBTI may not pass the muster of science, but as long as it isn’t rigidly adhered to it is accurate enough for business and people looking for some extra guidance in their life and relationships.  Overall, MBTI is a fun tool to help you reflect on yourself and learn a little about other people. MBTI is not science so once it stops being useful to you, learn to put it aside. 

Below are some videos that I think give good arguments from both sides of the issue:

[brooklynislandgirl]

Beth and UARF!Billy - ❤♡❥ღ💕💘💝💓💌💟💙💚💜💛

Heart-Eyes || -

Five A.M.

Beth’s barely awake as she comes into the office, coffee in hand, only to come face to face with the widest grin she has ever seen on Hal Gates’ face. Dark eyes dancing, he relieves her of her thermos cup, takes both her arms in his hands, and swing-dances her around the cramped space where they work.

“We’ve done it, girl!”

Though abjectly confused, Beth can’t help but grin in return. “Wha’ve we done?” She wants to be just as thrilled, wants to share in the old man’s joy. “We’ve got data on white pointer mating! I’m running the compile now, we should be able to parse it and watch the video footage within an hour or two!”

She’s floored.

The shock is clear on her face, even her mouth drops open a little. Often bandied about as the Holy Grail of marine biology, great-white mating is known to exist. Despite decades of research into the habits of the species, that particular bit of knowledge has eluded marine biologists.

“Wha...? How?”

“Mate of mine, Crawford down in New Zealand has taken a fisherman’s eye-witness account on our elusive little friends, and shared video. Crawford sent me all of the data.”

“Oh, Hal.”

Dr Gates nods at her eagerly and once again promenades her around some tables, brushing past a stack of hastily shoved aside folders with charts of migration patterns, weather reports, and feeding data. Then, far more carefully, he hands her into a seat and plops down into an office chair, slapping his knees in pleasure and pride.

“Speaking of mating rituals...”

Beth laughs but blushes at the same time, eyes askance. She suddenly knows what he’s going to ask, or at least of whom.

“...And since we have so little to do until all the research is collated and complied...”

“Must we?”

“No finer time, girl.”

She holds her hands up to stave him off until she gets up, crosses the room and takes a sip of her coffee. Not exactly how she wanted to start the day, but there’s no real reason not to humour her mentor.

“Have at, den.”

“Excellent.” Hal Gates really is an inveterate old gossip.

~*~

❤: who is more affectionate in public? in private?

Beth laughs. Okay, so this isn’t really so bad. “I t’ink I gotta say...I’m more affectionate in public. Mos’ of da time, Doctah Manderly... just doesn’t know what t’ do. Very stiff, hands in his pockets or stand at parade rest.”

The last cocktail party had been a half disaster, between trying to get William to mingle with the public attendees and not leave to check on his seals at first opportunity. The one time he surprised her was when he put a hand on the small of her back though the illusion was broken when she found that the six-foot-six man was trying to ultimately hide behind her. No amount of mock-tails were going to spare him any acute discomfort.

“Probably for da best. No offence, but he’s very definitely...ah....British.”

“None taken.” Hal offers her a wink and taps the side of his nose.

“But even behind close doors? He just... lil uptight, I guess. I sometimes wonder if mebbe he’s worried about havin’ an episode, and some affections are difficult when you have a service dog nearly t’ree-quarters ya size intent on doin’ her job, but I’d say he at least tries when it jus’ da two of us. Fingahs in my hair, brush against my arm. Da kine.”

Hal nods, knowing the specifics without having to drag them out of her.

♡: who is the bigger romantic openly? secretly?

"I t’ink,” she begins, carefully considering this one. “Dat anyone who loves da sea so much dat dey would give up a whole life to dedicate demself to it...got a big romantic soul. What is da ocean, if not love an’ life, an’ all dat we dream of in songs an’ poetry? I only t’ink it’s harder for him to express dat because well..”

She makes a dismissive gesture.

It isn’t that he grasps the concepts of language and expression, they’ve certainly entertained passionate arguments, verbal jousts that have filled the air with sign and countersign.

“Romantically speakin’ I jus’ don’ see him as da type dat I’m gonna find outside my window wi’ an ole boom box, playing In Ya Eyes by Petah Gabriel, ya know? But I also don’t believe he wouldn’t t’ink about it. So secretly? Him. Openly, me.”

❥: who is more likely to plan something big for valentine's day?

“Honestly, Hal...I’d have t’ say him. He’s a planner. Wants every detail to be perfect, will second guess himself a hundred times jus’ to make sure dere no wrinkle in the research. Me? Always been da spontaneous kine, except when it came to really wantin’ to work wit’ you.”

Hal pats her lap, his face soft.

ღ: who is more likely to initiate hand-holding in public?

“Again, it would be William. I don’ know wha’ he’s t’inkin’ a lot of da time, if he’s even aware dat I am dere sometimes. An’ I don’ really wanna make a big deal about it, don’ wanna ovahstep. For me, it’s a much more difficult proposition, is like...touch is where I’m most comfortable, outside of typing endless notes or readin’ data.”

She nods toward the words scrolling along the screen. She fully disclosed her disabilities when she applied for the position so thankfully she doesn’t have to explain now. Most of the other people at the facility don’t even really notice. Except for maybe Ben who sees too much and maybe says too little. That’s to be expected though when you gather a bunch of scientists and stick them in one beautiful place.

“You want him to initiate more, don’t you?”

“I would, yeah. But dere always more important kine and so really guess it nevah really matter.”

💕: who is more likely to make huge declarations of love in front of other people?

“Fair question an’ I guess dat would be me. We...we agreed not to make a big t’ing about any of dis, you know how quirky everyone here is, an’ in case it doesn’t work out, we don’ want da kine t’ get weird. Especially wi’ James an’ Miranda. So if somet’ing like dis were t’ happen it’s probably because he push all my buttons an’ my tempah got da best of me, right? Could see it happenin’ over breakfast. On da beach. Mebbe by da pools.”

Which is why she tries so hard to keep her passions in check. She doesn’t want to blurt out anything that can’t be taken back.

💘: who developed a crush on the other first?

“Couldn’t say,” and in those two words it is the breadth and depth of her honesty. Beth doesn’t have crushes in the same way most people do. She’s never seen anyone and instantly found herself immersed in fantasies, desires, a desperate need to be around them. She might find someone intellectually stimulating and enjoy the conversation. She might notice that something about them calls to her artist’s eye and be aesthetically pleasing in its symmetry, someone might make her laugh but she doesn’t dwell. And by the time there is the first inkling that she might want more out of a situation or relationship, she’s already become close friends. Or she watches as that object of her affection drifts beyond reach and she tells herself she’s happy because they clearly needed something more than she’s even capable of giving.

And sometimes, Beth wonders if she isn’t really broken or damaged in some way. Because she can’t even say she ever had a crush on Billy. She doesn’t know that she can say she has any expectations other than they look good together on paper, and it’s been drilled into her since birth that appearances *do* matter. “Mo’beddah you should ask him.” Gates doesn’t say anything, he only nods.

💝: who spends more time (possibly overthinking) what presents to get the other?

“William. For same-same reasons as Valentines Day, an’ da need for everyt’ing to be as exactin’ as he can make it. Like, how hard and how long it take him to find...or more likely, *breed* dem two purple neocardinas in my office?” Shrimp like the two in her tank, deliriously happy and spoiled and free of predators, are rare in size and colour, and yet… there they are. Then there’s the allegorical evidence of his severe and frothing dislike of mass consumption marketing, the complete commercialisation of every secular and religious holiday, the pastiche of feelings tacked on almost like an afterthought.

💓: who initiates most physical contact?

Beth hesitates. That’s slightly more personal than the other questions so far and truth be told she’s a little ashamed of having to answer without specific parameters. But it is a question, and she did agree to answer them with the same honesty as she offers Hal in all their other work and conversations. “I’ve always done well wi’ sensory input dat was based in kine oddah dan auditory. Smell, taste, seeing… but of alla dem, touch has always been important to me. Textures, near imperceptible data processed t’rough skin. An’ I guess dat I use dat wi’ him. Way to express ideas or sensations dat might not come across ordinarily. Enthusiasm, excitement, humour, rage, disappointment. I wan him to feel an’ understand when I don’ have da words in me, or know how to express. A lot of da time, it’s accidental or at least….subconscious.” A beat goes by. “I don’t believe he really cares much for it.”

💌: who is more likely to send cutesy texts to the other?

This one is hard for her to answer because they aren’t really cutesy text people. Most of their days are too filled with very real world drama, service to the greater good, the understanding and conservation of the most vulnerable environments and animals within. There’s weather, there’s reports, there’s an entire litany of experiences that don’t leave much time to play around until well after hours when they can finally seek well deserved liberty. However, Billy does sometimes send her pictures of the seals doing very cute seal things, or Annie shepherding him and his charges with the boss-vibes of the Queen Mother. In the end she only offers her mentor a smile and a shrug.

💟: who spends time reading their zodiac compatibilities?

“Oh absolutely I do. Find da whole pseudo-science of it fascinatin’, especially when da stars are not in da same position as dey were when it was invented an’ da psychological impact it has on our species is jus’ totally wild, you know?”

Beth knows that she’s the textbook definition of a Cancerian woman, and Billy does a good job providing a counter-argument on being a Libra. Further there’s a bit of an annoyance factor; he thinks junk science ‘belongs in the bottom of the bin with the rest of the rubbish.’ And he has a point, to some extent, even if she doesn’t agree with him. Not everything can be cold facts and numbers. Sometimes a little playfulness was in order and he absolutely needed to be reminded of that.

Hal laughs and shakes his head. “You’re going to do my chart then, aren’t you?” “Wit’out a doubt, Doctah Gates.” She wiggles her brows.

💙: who is more protective?

“I think objectively, I am. You know William’s troubles, and I have to keep them all in mind dough it’s not like he can forget dem, right? Some of his facts aren’t… I’ve consulted with some medical doctors and if we are careful, dere’s a lot he can experience dat he sees out of reach but I don’ like bringing dem up because I don’ want to agitate him. Only can lead t’ problems.” She does wish though that he’d trust her a little more, that he’d let go of some of his well deserved fears. That he’d let himself out of his shell and accept that even with limitations he can do many of the same things as the rest of the group does. But he seems content enough to hang back, ever the observer. And she doesn’t know if it’s her place to try to drag him into things though she might be better at it than anyone else. Miranda has told her as much.

💚: who tends to get sick more often? who is better at taking care of the other?

Hal’s question is really a continuation of the previous one and once again she has to call Billy out on it. Because she’s never really been sick a day in her life, not since early childhood and the culmination of that was the test bite that nearly lost her the leg she keeps tucked away, hidden out of sight whenever possible. “Dat seems a small kine ingenious, he no can help his seizure disorder. An’ I feel like he really ought to have a good psychologist. I t’ink some t’erapy would do him good. Spends too much time in his own head an’ mebbe not enough taking charge of his life. I know he can be afraid of lots of t’ings but it nevah really *has* to be dat way. But I also don’ wanna push him, for same-same reasons I mention before. You can lead a shark to chum but no can make him frenzy, know what I mean?” The analogy is silly. Billy wants so much more than what he feels he has. And a darker current in the back of her mind wonders if they would still be the same if he felt he could reasonably have them. That feels so selfish and toxic and she really has no place casting judgement on him when maybe she’s no better off than he is, only expressing it differently.

💜: who said "i love you" first? or, if neither has said it yet, who is more likely to say it first?

It’s strange how perceptive he is and goes in for the killing bite. The honest truth is that neither one has said it. And neither one likely will. Billy has layers of guilt and trauma, has beliefs that she cannot get a single foothold to try and tear apart. He doesn’t feel deserving of such a finer emotion. And Beth? She has her own reasons. She doesn’t even know if love is a thing that exists or if it’s some fairy-tale people tell themselves to make it easier to get by. She believes in affection, and she believes that people bond the same way packs and pods and herds do. But she feels the concept of love is poisonous. Ruinous in the way it can destroy someone from the inside out. And how any time she’s ever thought she’d felt it, it was ripped out from her grasp. She won’t say it. She won’t hear it.

She doesn’t answer him immediately, but instead gets up and paces away, appearing as though she’s checking on some of the cameras situated around the bay. The wall that she’d left down for Hal goes back up, slamming into place.

“Research from both psychology and neurology fields have found that there are twelve different areas of the brain that light up and work together when two people are attracted to one another, releasing chemicals like dopamine, adrenaline, oxytocin and vasopression. All the symptoms people experience are simply animal-instincts provided to guarantee that we as a species survive by either wanting to mate, or flee.”

💛: who believes in soulmates?

And Gates understands he’s made an error in judgement, though he’d only been trying to be helpful in a meddling kind of way. Anyone at the facility could see that Billy and Beth were two sides of a very quirky but ultimately needed coin. That they’d both changed each other in the two years she’d been a research fellow, and how they’d both blossomed for it. Well, anyone but the two of them. And this had seemed like such a good idea at first, tied into shark mating habits which he’d hoped she’d take better than she is.

Her answers have thus far matched up quite nicely with the boy’s.

Sadly, especially this one. She doesn’t turn to look at him. “There are no such things, Doctor Gates. And even if there were, statistically it would be almost impossible to meet a soul mate. Within the same general age group there are about a half a billion potential companions all over the world. One would have to travel the entirety of the world, every remote pocket of the planet. Secondly, there’s no scientific proof that souls even exist, and enough studies across various disciplines to prove that they don’t. Believing in such nonsense only makes a person unhappy. And all that aside, most mammals are not biologically programmed for monogamy and I doubt human beings are either.” Because if they were, why would anyone leave someone they claimed to love?

[cuntess-carmilla]

Update: I stopped taking psychiatric medication because they turned out to have only ever been of “help” because I have POTS/dysautonomia and one made my blood pressure rise (Wellbutrin) while the other kept it from going up too high (Lamotrigine).

Now that I’m taking meds that are for what I ACTUALLY do have (POTS/dysautonomia) not only do I not need the psychiatric meds, but they were throwing off everything else. I hate psychiatry so much. Can’t believe I turned out to be one of those people who had their physical illness mistreated as You’re Crazy for years haha. :) With that out of the way...

Some Many of my Opinions™ on psychiatry, as a psychiatrized person myself who does take medication, but hates the institutions of psychiatry and psychology, and thinks a large chunk of it is white pseudo-science:

A good amount of the issues that the psychiatric institution addresses ARE absolutely real and, as a society, people who’re afflicted by them should by all means receive help and support so they can live happier lives. I experience many of them and take medication to help myself, I obviously don’t think the difficult experiences people seek help for are made up.

At the same time, psychiatry and psychology as disciplines ARE made up (like every other discipline), making them not infallible or objective, AND they were built on eugenics, patriarchy, white supremacy and capitalist exploitation.

Those very real issues addressed by psychology/psychiatry aren’t actual literal pathologies. They don’t need to be literal tangible sicknesses in order to matter or be deserving of help and compassion. Your literal brain as a bodily organ is not physically “ill”, at least in most cases. It doesn’t need to be for your problems associated with an “ill mind” to be real and to matter. Remember, these disciplines were created at a time in history in which (white, male) doctors and theorists were obsessed with turning everything into a material, scientifically tangible subject that could be objectively measured with numbers and shit, hopefully medicalized or otherwise turned into “hard science”. That’s where ethnography came from. It’s called positivism, which is extremely dehumanizing, white supremacist and capitalist.

Psychology should be largely considered as much more of a metaphysical or philosophical discipline than as objective science, which is how most people perceive it to be. It’s mostly pure theory about emotions, thoughts, cognition, relationships and subjective experiences + perceptions -- which isn’t necessarily a bad thing on itself. It not being hard science doesn’t immediately delegitimize it. Get rid of the white capitalist idea that only (western, white) science and “objectivity” are real or of value. Actually, holding psychology to the standards of hard science turns it into pseudo-science, so... Yeah. I genuinely think we’d get so much further As A Society™ regarding psychology's potential to aid people who’re suffering if we treated it as more of a metaphysical or philosophical discipline than as some objective scientific truth.

Psychiatrists often are super ignorant of the actual way the medications they prescribe work or affect patients lmao. I had that almost ruin a whole semester at college because a shrink prescribed me meds that in combination she should’ve known would fuck me up. Not that much is known about how the human brain truly works compared to other human organs, you can’t expect psychiatric meds to be well tried and true. The research on psychiatric pharmacy is very lacking + biased in favor of pathologizing and controlling psychiatrized people, besides attempting to make the most profit under capitalism like any other capitalist industry, so of course they’re gonna prescribe you shit. Plus, like doctors of every other field, many psychiatrists arrogantly disregard the experiences, requests, questions and ideas of their patients, who’re the ones taking those meds.

Psychologists/therapists, just like psychiatrists, also disregard the experiences, requests, questions and ideas of their patients.

There’s such a strong element of power imbalance in how psychiatry and psychology function. The more a patient knows formal information about anything related to psychology/psychiatry, the more the shrink can get upset, distrustful and dismissive of them, saying they’re faking it, or telling them “not to do their jobs” when they so often do said jobs like shit anyway lmao no matter how thorough the research and understanding of the patient is.

Psychological and psychiatric diagnoses are just as made up as any other human construct (such as language, race, gender, etc). They’re not tangible realities as if shrinks had ran into a previously unknown objective fact of nature. In the realm of psychology, someone takes a bunch of traits and behaviors that by their observation they consider to be interconnected with one another, put them in the same bag, stick a label to said bag, and ask other psychologists if they agree with the bag being a thing. These considerations are heavily influenced by sociocultural bias. You can’t tell me it isn’t true that they’re made up and very subjective when “diagnoses” such as drapetomania, hysteria, homosexuality, gender identity disorder, etc, have been seriously considered at least by part of the psychiatric establishment of their times as legitimate mental disorders. Hell, some still consider being gay or trans to be mental disorders. Don’t get me started on "Oppositional Defiant Disorder”, that shit’s just evil.

A lot of the ideas spread by the psychiatric-psychological institution are legit pseudo-science that researches try time and time again to prove and end up coming with nothing, or they end up tweaking their own research or conclusions to maintain the established consensus that just so turns out to be very convenient to the people who make and sell psychiatric meds.

Many of the traits, emotions, thoughts, perceptions and behaviors that are pathologized by psychiatry and psychology aren’t inherently harmful. If they don’t make the patient or others suffer by their very nature (as opposed to like, homophobic parents “suffering” because their child is gay or a gay person suffering because of homophobia) then there’s no need to alter them. “Correcting” them is a measure of social control that crushes individuality and only attempts to mold people into obedient ~productive~ servants of capitalism. Much of psychiatric medical treatment (not just the diagnoses and therapies themselves) focuses on turning the patient into less of a social “burden”, than on their actual happiness. That’s why you have ADHD and autistic kids being given meds that turn them into zombies and that's been considered a good thing for DECADES. Like, why does the stimming of an autistic person or an “unusual” attachment to stuffed animals as an autistic adult have to be corrected? WHOMST does that harm? Nobody! But it makes allistics uncomfortable because allistics are fucking stupid and can’t mind their God damned business to save their lives like normal people do.

Even non-pharmaceutical treatments for psychiatrized conditions are or can be turned into measures of social control. 

Maybe CBT wasn’t meant to be a tool to control people and shit, but it can be misused as such SO easily! It can go from being therapy to help individuals process inner pain and redirect harmful behaviors in positive ways, to being turned into training someone to react, feel and process abuse and oppression in ways that are convenient to the status quo. 

Don’t get me fucking started on ABA as an inherently oppressive, abusive “treatment” for a psychiatrized condition that does nothing to actually better the lives of autistic people, instead punishing autistic traits, teaching autistic people to painfully repress said traits and ignore their needs, and seeking to appease allistics by prioritizing their convenience and subjective comfort.

Behaviors, emotions, perceptions or traits that on a man or white person would be considered a non-issue or given much more compassionate/less stigmatized diagnoses, are pathologized or given much more stigmatized diagnoses when it comes to female or racialized patients, which reaffirms psychiatry and psychology as subjective tools of social control.

While many of the traits, emotions, perceptions and behaviors of what are considered personality disorders are painful, harmful and real (and thus should be helped, with consent, not hammered down), literal personalities aren’t “ill”. They’re personalities. Pathologizing or medicalizing a fucking personality on itself is ridiculous. It is possible to address those problematic traits/behaviors/etc without saying that a fucking personality is “ill”. So much for “you’re not your disorder”.

What shrinks will deem as hallucinations or delusions can be subjective, and it definitely can be deemed as such out of white-centric cultural bias. Plenty of non-white cultures have considered different perceptions of reality as valid and worthy of respect for centuries, at times related to their sense of spirituality. Not to mention how psychiatry has deemed the real anxieties of oppressed people that they’re being followed, spied on, plotted against and all that, as hallucinations or delusions in order to discredit them.

Many patients are given medication to try to alleviate traits/behaviors/emotions that come from circumstance (poverty, ongoing abuse, trauma, oppression...) instead of addressing the root problems. While I 100% understand using medication as a palliative measure because, bitch, you can’t always fix those problems and you still have a life to live (the same way I take clotiazepam when the insensitivity of the allistics around me causes me sensory overload), this puts the burden of the person’s situation on their own body, as if their body was the essential source of a suffering that comes from outside forces they’re not responsible or in control of. This should ideally be addressed through material change in realities that can be individual (removing the person from an abusive situation, giving economic aid, giving proper treatment to an untreated chronic illness) or social (abolishing white supremacy, the patriarchy, capitalism, etc).

So many times when palliative medical treatments for suffering that comes from circumstances don’t work (BECAUSE THE PATIENT IS STILL TRAPPED IN SAID CIRCUMSTANCES, HELLO?) it’s blamed on a supposed defect of the patient’s body/brain rather than, like... You can give me as many anti-depressants as you want but I’m still gonna be miserable if I’m being abused or suffering from unending physical chronic pain lol. And then, instead of at least having the decency of recognizing the real source of the problem if your shrink can’t realistically fix it, they keep trying more and more different meds on you like you’re a fucking lab rat, keeping on blaming a made up defect you were “born” with. Imagine what that does to a person’s self-image! At least when I loathe my body for the chronic pain, chronic fatigue and more that my chronic illnesses give me, it IS actually true that it’s my body that has a defect that can’t be cured. Why convince a person in suffering due to anything, but especially when it’s due to outside conditions out of their control and your job is fucking supposed to be to help them be happier, that their pain refuses to respond to treatment because their BRAIN is so terribly defective? I don’t wish the hatred I hold for my objectively shitty body on anyone, and causing that to someone when it’s not even true...? Incredible.

Lots of genuine difficulties associated with psychiatric diagnoses are much better helped through accessibility and material considerations, or at least through teaching the patient pragmatic methods to better deal with those, than through pills. But guess what solution shrinks usually give you. Hint: it’s easier for them and they can charge you for it monthly.

Society™ medicalized emotions, bro... WE MEDICALIZED FEELINGS!!! WHAT THE FUCK!!

[devlinrising]

Monarchy isn’t a joke. I don’t brand myself as a monarchist in the interest of being mocked by the uneducated and spat on by pseudo-intellectuals. None of us endure the abuse that we do from “anti-fascists” and democratics for a show.

Nature isn’t democratic. The strongest survive and only the most powerful lead. Democracy is a popularity contest, the will of the people isn’t represented. Anyone can get voted into office. The person with decades of law and political science experience can run in the same election as a 20 year old with no life experience behind him. Plenty of unqualified individuals find themselves representing “the people” with no incentive to actually do as the people will. And if an elected official doesn’t deliver on their promises, they still get a cushioned life and fame after politics with few to no adverse effects from not delivering on their promises.

In a monarchy, rulers are taught how to lead from their earliest days. Their entire youth is spent learning the necessary skills to govern their nation. They embody the pride and history of their country in the purest form. An unsatisfactory rule will subject the monarch to loss of life for him as well as his family and the complete overturn of his nation. So much more pressure is out on monarchs than politicians to succeed. Monarchy, when done correctly, keeps government out of the lives of everyday people. Two separate worlds with little reason to intermingle. Less opportunity for revoked rights and tension between rulers and their subjects.

There have been bad monarchs, but never a bad monarchy. Now is the time to restore the natural balance and resurrect those ancient bloodlines. Don’t omit monarchy just because you’ve been told to do so.

[meeptropolis]

Just watched Ad Astra

You can consider this a review if you want, but these are mostly my thoughts about the movie a few hours after seeing it.

Mild spoilers ahead, I guess.

I really loved Ad Astra.

I’ve heard comments about how it “has been done better in the past”, or how “the story sucks because it wasn’t really about sciece fiction”, or how it’s just “the daddy issues movie in space”. To be honest, I slightly agree with those comments, and I say ‘slightly’ because I don’t believe they take any points away from this movie.

Ad Astra gives the impression of being another simple science fiction/action movie in space, but it is a lot more than that. Some might say it really is about a man trying to reconnect with his father or about a man trying to deal with his conflicting feelings about just learning that his father is still alive after decades.

In my opinion, this movie is about a man dealing with his father’s death. It’s about a man trying to let go of that same father. It’s about a man learning and accepting how the abscence of his father has affected him as a person. It’s about a human being dealing with feelings of loneliness, of regret, of disconnection with the world and the people around him. It’s about a man overcoming all of that. Some might call the movie ‘pretentious’ for its pseudo-philosophy about all of these issues, but I don’t think the movie is trying to present a profound way of thinking. In my opinion, Ad Astra is trying to show how feelings all of us probably have experienced (or will experience at some point in our lives) can become complex when explored, and how hard it can be to overcome our thoughts, our emotions, our past actions, and the uncertainty we feel about the future. These isn’t some deep philosophy or idea that can only be understood by intellectuals. These are simple and real feelings we all deal with every day in our own ways.

Music (Max Richter did an amazing job scoring the film), cinematography, dialogue, and acting are all presented in a minimalistic way, and I think this resonates with how the movie portrays simplicity as something complex.

While not every shot is a work of art, I think there are some outstanding moments in the film, especially those that don’t rely on CGI (the sequence in Mars is the best one. Keep an eye out for that one).

I do have to say some moments in the movie and how physics work at times disconnected me from the film for a few seconds, but even with those issues, Ad Astra still works.

I really want to recommend this film because I feel like some people will be driven off it due to its slow pace (which never feels that slow to be honest), or ‘lack’ of story, or because of it being another pseudo-deep space journey sci-fi film. Like I’ve said, beneath that interplanetary layer there’s a film exploring a common human with common feelings going through a common experience, and how all those ‘common’ things can become as extraordinary or complex as a trip across the Solar System

Please, go watch this movie. Even if this isn’t the best movie ever. Even if it is ‘forgettable’ as I’ve heard some say. Even if it doesn’t present its ideas in the best way for you. Watch it! Show the industry that we still care about human films. Show them that dumb explosions and jumpscares, or cinematic universes shoving their movies down your throat every month aren’t the only reasons we enjoy watching movies.

We need more films like Ad Astra. We need more humanity in cinemas.

PS ~ Thanks for reading all the way. I really appreciate the fact you took time off your day to read some of my thoughts about a film. If you want to discuss Ad Astra or anything at all, send me a DM. I’ll gladly reply!

[stormquill]

debt-free | chapter ten [Tony Stark/Reader]

You tasted like coffee and faded lip gloss; he tasted like vodka and day-old despair.

In which an unexpected late-night rendezvous at your University library ends up with you in way over your goddamn head.

Credits: Beta'd by @l0kt0n. Follow the blog / AO3 mirror @debt--free.

Somehow, you thought ‘safehouses’ were supposed to be inconspicuous.

Though nowhere near as grandiose as Stark’s home in Malibu, the place you’d taken temporary refuge could still house a family of twelve quite comfortably. The elegant outdoor landscaping and impeccable interior design made the building feel more like a four-star hotel than covert asylum, but you figured it made sense—if Stark had to go into hiding, he’d be doing it in style.

You and Hansen sat across from each other, a small table and two untouched coffees between you. You both looked little worse for wear, but you’d been lucky to escape the day’s events with nothing more than a handful of scrapes and bruises. Stark wasn’t looking much better himself, but unlike the two of you, he was on his feet and moving, pacing around the room with all the patience of an anxious cat; you could practically hear the gears grinding in his head, processing everything Hansen had confessed about Killian and their company on the car ride over.

It was strange to think that, less than a couple of hours ago, you were leaving the hospital with Stark, having successfully convinced him to take a break and let you handle the meeting with Hansen.

Five henchmen and one destroyed cafe later, you knew he must have been regretting that decision.

“So the Mandarin is using your Extremis for his attacks?” Stark asked.

“Yeah,” said Hansen. “Those bombings? That’s exactly what happens when you let it get unstable enough.”

“Incendiary devices leave remnants. A million-acre forest fire can be tracked down to a single lit cigarette—it’s forensics, it’s a science. That means there’s evidence at the theater explosion. Something I can use to connect the attacks back to AIM.”

“You won’t find any evidence. Just like they wouldn’t have found any at any of the other sites.”

“Yeah, why’s that?”

“Extremis isn’t just some incendiary device, like a bomb or a flare, it’s.” She folded her arms and shifted in her seat. “It’s a form of genetic manipulation. It needs a living host for the thermodynamic hypercharge to work. If the host can control it, Extremis can give them regenerative abilities, enhance their physical performance—but if the host can’t control it...”

Stark made a comical explosion noise.

She shut her eyes and winced away from him, as if the thought alone made her sick. “Point is, the Mandarin is weaponizing my tech to make super-soldiers and living bombs, tech Killian just handed to him on a silver platter. And I don’t know what I can do.”

Keeping silent, you’d watched the two of them go back and forth since Stark started his pseudo-interrogation. Still fueled by outrage over Hogan’s incident, Stark was looking for information, for inconsistencies, for anything he could use as an excuse to get out there and track down the perpetrators. Hansen, on the other hand, was wondering if seeking help was worth the trouble if all they were going to do was talk in circles.

The entire situation was way above your paygrade—but the gears in your head were turning, too.

“You said Extremis is a form of genetic manipulation,” you spoke up. “How is it administered, exactly? Radiotherapy?”

Hansen turned back to you, blinking the weariness from her eyes to try and refocus on your conversation. “Uh—no, intravenous. It’s an intravenous agent.”

“So it works like a virus? Enters the bloodstream, attacks the brain, creates a biochemical reaction.”

“More or less.”

“Then, hypothetically,” you straightened up, “you could develop a vaccine for it.”

The suggestion gave her pause. “I don’t know, maybe? I haven’t gotten anywhere with Extremis’s development in over a decade, I’m not sure how plausible it is to try reverse-coding a half-finished product.”

“I think I might be able to help.”

Your words had gotten both Stark and Hansen’s attention.

You cleared your throat, mulling the words over in your head to make sure you got them right. “If Extremis evokes a thermodynamic reaction that accelerates cellular function, reversing it means causing mass cellular deceleration, which...just so happens to be the unwanted byproduct of my current experimentation.”

The sudden light of inspiration in your eyes now sparked in hers. “You can’t maintain neurogenesis because of entropic decay.”

“And entropic decay is exactly what you need to reverse Extremis’s unstable effects,” you continued. “Obviously, the numbers will need major tweaking, and we’ll need to run some tests—”

“We’ll need samples,” Hansen agreed, shuffling forward in her chair. “There’s not enough time to recreate Extremis from scratch, not with the Mandarin’s recent threats.”

“Where would we get those?”

“Closest AIM headquarters would be in Houston, but...you don’t understand, Killian’s got eyes everywhere—if we hop on a plane, o—or a bus, he’ll see us coming from miles away.”

“Honey,” Stark interrupted, rather loudly, “can I speak to you in private for a moment?”

You were so wrapped up in your discussion with Hansen, you’d forgotten Stark was even there.

His request took you by surprise, but you followed his lead down the hallway. The way Hansen watched in confusion as the two of you disappeared around a corner did not escape your notice.

You entered the room, and shut the door behind you.

Segments of Mark 42 had been disassembled and spread across the floor for post-battle diagnostics. Toeing around the maze of parts, Stark reached the nearby couch, and lazily straddled the armrest. He stretched an arm out in front of him; one of the suit’s gloves flew across the room and attached itself to his hand like a magnet, red and silver metal spreading across his fingers and up his entire forearm.

“Haven’t seen that trick before,” you said, impressed.

“Neat, right? Had to bring the baby—he’s the only one who’d fit in your trunk.”

A mass of images projected themselves from his forearm panel, drowning the room’s ambient lighting with the bright blue glow of various interfaces. Stark gestured through the windows and touch screens, navigating the arrays of diagrams and news articles filling the room around him, his attention maneuvering quickly from one set of panels to the next.

“What are you thinking, doc?” he asked, without looking at you.

“About what?”

“About Maya.”

“I want to help her, if I can.” You made your way over and sat by his side, folding up your legs off the floor. “I mean, having the worst, most volatile parts of your research stolen by a bunch of power-hungry men and used in terrorist attacks? That...fucking sucks.”

“So you trust her?”

“You don’t?”

He clicked his tongue. “Just feels like there’s something she’s not telling us.”

Falling silent, you watched as he conducted his wordless research. Hansen hadn’t given you any reason not to trust her—but in Stark’s world, you realized that must have been tragically naive.

“What do you think we should do, then?” you asked. “Send her back to Killian?”

“No, but I don’t know if getting you involved in this is the greatest idea.”

“I’m already involved. I was involved the moment I went to meet her instead of you.”

“That was a mistake,” he snapped. “I should’ve never let do you that, I should’ve never—”

“You didn’t let me do anything,” you shot back. “We’re both adults—we made a decision, together, and like it or not, here we are.”

“I definitely don’t have to like it. And I definitely don’t have to sit quiet while you hand over your life’s work to someone you just met two hours ago.”

The words took you by surprise.

Stark was worried about you, of course he was, but he was also worried about the integrity of your research—and his concern made sense. At the heart of it all, he was a fellow scientist who’d been with you every step of the way—from your University research proposal, to your doctoral thesis, to the months upon months of sleepy, unproductive nights filled with failed experiments and paperwork to nowhere. He was just as invested in your work as you were.

And he didn’t want to see you compromised.

“I’m not like you, Mr. Stark,” you said. “I’m not a genius in any sense of the word. I don’t have a lot of things to offer.”

“That’s not—”

“You know what I mean,” you interrupted. Fishing for compliments wasn’t what you were aiming for, here. “My research...hasn’t gone anywhere. It hasn’t gone anywhere in a while, and I’ve been worrying a lot about whether or not I’m wasting my time. But Doctor Hansen—she’s been working on this one project for over ten years. That’s how much faith she has in it. In herself. Maybe I have something she needs. Maybe she knows something I don’t. You know my work almost as well as I do, Mr. Stark—if you think any part of my research can help her, I need you to let me try.”

Though he continued staring at the projected screens ahead of him, you could already read the answer in his expression.

Leaning up, you gently cradled a hand against his cheek, turning him to face you properly.

“You have to let me try,” you whispered.

“...you know, the last time I took your advice, you got a cafe blown up.”

You narrowed your eyes. “That cafe would’ve blown up with or without me there and you know it.”

“Crazy things happen once these suits get involved, sweetheart. It’s going to be dangerous.”

“I’m in a relationship with you, it comes with the territory.”

He smirked, softly.

And then his lips were on yours.

It felt like it had been ages since you’d last done this, but he kissed you, hard, and the contact set your nerves alight, just as it did every time.

He touched his forehead to yours, resigned, the worry weighing heavy in his eyes.

You rested another kiss against the side of his nose. “Stop thinking you have to do everything on your own. You’re not alone, remember?”

Realization dawned across his face like a new day.

Stark righted himself on the couch arm, clearing away the projections with an impatient swipe of his hand before replacing them a number pad and hitting speed-dial.

Before you could register what was happening, a video display appeared in the air as someone picked up the line.

The man on the other end glanced at Stark, then at you, and already looked exhausted.

“Evening, Colonel,” you said, sheepishly.

“Hi, Doctor. Tony. What’s up?”

Stark’s tone was clear and deliberate. “I have it on very good authority that your buddies over at Advanced Idea Mechanics have something to do with the Mandarin attacks.”

“Oh yeah, what authority?”

“An AIM executive told me so. She’s my hostage now, by the way—you sure you still don’t want me in on this?”

“Are you serious right—” With a loud, frustrated groan, Rhodes rubbed a hand over his face. “I told you, I am not in charge of this operation anymore.”

“But you’re second-in-charge, right? That’s almost as good.”

“Look, just because you can piss all over protocol, that doesn’t mean the rest of us can get away with it scott-free. There’s a chain of command—I cannot be discussing this with you on my own.”

“Well, not with that attitude.”

“I’m bringing him in.”

Stark’s face fell. “Wait, what?”

“You haven’t given me a choice, Tony.”

“Wait wait wait—nonononono—”

But the line was already dialing.

A second video screen appeared next to Rhodes. Bright blue eyes and short blonde hair came into view—a handsome face, boyish but strong, and trustworthy in a way you couldn’t quite explain. The man seemed out of breath as he answered the call; you could see a punching bag behind him, and a gleam of sweat on his brow.

You couldn’t have stopped yourself if you trIed. “Holy shit, it’s Captain America!”

Still catching his breath, Rogers gave you an impossibly charming smile. “Evening, ma’am.”

Meanwhile, Stark’s eyes rolled to the back of his skull. “Yeah—she’s easily impressed, don’t read too much into it—can we focus, here?”

“Captain Rogers,” Rhodes started, “Tony here’s captured an AIM executive who says the company’s dealing with the Mandarin.”

“What—you’ve taken an AIM rep hostage? Is this a civilian we’re talking about? Is that her?”

Rogers pointed at you with a boxing-wrapped hand. Your brain shorted out and you waved back, nervously.

Rhodes had a smile in his voice. “No, Captain, that’s Tony’s girlfriend.”

“Oh.” Smirking, Rogers offered you a nod. “My condolences, ma’am.”

“Watch it,” Stark warned.

“So you mean to say you brought two civilians into my investigation without my knowledge?”

“Sure did, mom. Hey—could you let me explain before you jump down my throat, maybe? The two of you might learn something.”

Rhodes looked as exasperated as always, but Rogers kept his patience, his composure clearly tempered by many past experiences with Stark.

“We’re listening.”

“The AIM exec is an old friend of mine who came to me for help, Dr. Maya Hansen. She says it’s their tech behind the bombings. There’s been three of them so far, right?”

“Only three have been made public. There’s actually been—”

“—nine attacks worldwide.” Stark brought up a holographic projection of a globe; certain areas around the world were marked with a bright red glow. “I found out the Mandarin attacks have a distinct heat signature—a very balmy 3000 degrees. Not many natural phenomena match the time frames and radii of impact from the Chinese Theater bombing. Why haven’t the other six been made public?”

“We’re trying not to cause a panic,” said Rhodes. “Especially since we don’t know how he’s doing it. We’re calling them bombings, but none of the fire investigations have turned up remnants of explosive devices.”

“It’s because he’s using people as bombs. Not suicide bombers—people injected with some kind of performance-enhancement virus, something that blows them up if it runs too hot. ”

“...you’re kidding.”

“Dr. Hansen told you this?”

Stark nodded. “Mandarin’s associated with the Ten Rings, same guys who threw me in a cave and wanted me to build things for them. Weapons of mass destruction are their bread and butter. Looks like they finally got their hands on something big.”

Rogers nodded again. “Any leads?”

“AIM has a global network with two headquarters in North America, Houston and Miami. Both good places to start digging.”

“And the third?”

“There’s a tenth heat signature that matches the profile, but predates all recent Mandarin attacks. It was marked as a suicide bombing, in some backwater town in Tennessee. I’m thinking it was ground zero. Might be worth checking out.”

“Understood. Colonel Rhodes will stay at his post with the President and continue trying to isolate the source of the Mandarin’s broadcast. I’ll investigate places of interest and get back to you with what I find.”

“Got it, Captain.”

“If you give me ten minutes, I can. Y’know.” Stark made little typing motions. “Sneak into AIM’s databases, save you guys some time.”

“You’ve done enough,” said Rogers. “Dr. Hansen is a person of interest in this investigation, and you’ve somehow managed to get your girlfriend involved. Your job right now is to keep the civilians safe until this is all over.”

“Yeaaaah, about that. There’s little thing I need to take care of in Houst—”

“Don’t let them out of your sight, Stark. Over and out.”

Both video feeds disconnected at once, throwing the bedroom back into its normal ambient lighting.

“You’re welcome!” Stark shouted at the now-empty room. He threw an arm up, hopeless. “Unbelievable.”

“At least you got help,” you offered, trying to cheer him up. “Now you don’t have to be in three places at once.”

“Nope. Just one. Ever been to Houston?”

“Um...” You weren’t sure where this was headed. “No, why?”

“Captain’s orders, remember? Can’t let either of you out of my sight.” He tilted his head to look at you. “Think that car of yours can make the trip?”

You returned his smile of malicious compliance tenfold.

“Hell yes, he can.”

[eldritchsurveys]

306.

Have you ever worn those Drunk Goggles? >> I haven’t. I’ve never encountered them in meatspace.

Which decade before the 90s had the best makeup trends? >> I don’t have an opinion.

Can you agree to disagree, or usually get upset over conflicting views? >> I absolutely can agree to disagree. Though I sometimes like to needle people about why they hold the views they hold, if they’re particularly interesting or novel to me.

Does it bug you when long socks are constantly falling down? >> That would bug me if I wore long socks.

Rodeos -- entertaining, or cruel? >> I have never been to one so I don’t know if they entertain me or not. I also have no opinion about the cruelty thing.

Why can't politicians debate politely? >> I’m sure some do. But they usually don’t make the news.

Who is the best female rocker? Why? >> I don’t have an opinion on who’s best. I like quite a few of them.

Can you even taste a difference between Cheez Its and Cheez Nips? >> I don’t know, I don’t eat them.

What about between Pepsi and Coke or Sprite and 7Up? >> I can taste the difference between those.

Do you care what kind of toilet paper you use? >> I sure do care.

What color of roses do you find the prettiest? >> Red is fine.

Which celebrity has the cutest butt? >> I don’t know.

Do you still have any decent arcades nearby? >> I don’t know if there ever were any decent arcades here, because I haven’t lived here long. But there sure aren’t any now.

After a holiday, do you go to the store to get candy on sale? >> No.

Did Marilyn Monroe look better before or after cosmetic surgery? >> I have no opinion.

Bullfighters who get gored kind of had it coming, right? >> Well, kind of, it’s an occupational hazard, innit?

If you make surveys, do you care what people rate them? >> ---

Have you ever accidentally found porn when looking for something else? >> I don’t think so. Unless it was in some badly worded google search.

Ever run into those 'celebrity lookalike porn' blogs? >> Yeah.

If you're not religious, is the Bible basically just an old collection of short stories? >> No, it’s a mythological/pseudo-historical text, which is a fair bit more interesting.

Do you think religious leaders just like to manipulate people? >> I guess some do and some don’t. I’m not going to generalise.

Why do so many fans with OTP's insist that their ship is real? >> Because to them it is. 

Even when the writers (or real people that they ship) tell them it isn't? >> Because. To them. It is. It might be unorthodox but it sure ain’t rocket science or anything.

Do you draw fanart of anything? >> I would if I still drew.

Do annoying city kids ever loiter outside your library and harass people? >> No.

Do you like to hang out at your local library? >> Not really. I mean, sometimes I like to sit and read magazines, but I get restless. Spent way too much time in libraries back when I had nowhere else [indoors] to go, so I think it’s soured the experience for me.

On that subject, do you like the smell of books? >> Some books. Not all of them have the smell I like.

What's on your Reading List, so-to-speak, right now? >> There are over 100 books on my to-read list.

Read any great non-fiction books lately? >> Sure.

What do you like on your burger? >> Cheese, mustard, pickles, onion.

What do you NOT like on your burger? >> Mayonnaise, a lot of messy toppings.

Do you like 'loose meat' sandwiches? >> I’m not sure what that is.

Have you ever heard of the restaurant Maid Rite? >> No.

What is the best thing to put in a grilled cheese (other than cheese)? >> I used to have a preference but I haven’t had a grilled cheese in so long I forgot what my preference is. :x

Homemade tomato soup, or just out of a can? >> I like the Trader Joe’s tomato soup that comes in a carton. Most canned tomato soup tastes like ketchup water to me.

Favorite thing to see in museums? >> I like science and tech museums best.

Have you ever seen an unwrapped mummy in person? >> Maybe in a natural history museum.

What things have people shamed you for? >> I don’t recall being shamed for anything.

Do you always reply to private messages? (On any website) >> I reply to most of them. Some of them aren’t worth my time or don’t require a response.

What device do you seem to always be buying batteries for? >> None.

What's worse -- snow, or all the mud after it melts? >> Definitely the latter.

Are there any 'adult stores' in your area? >> Maybe. I haven’t seen any, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was one somewhere.

Have you been inside of them/shopped there before? >> I’ve been inside a lot of them (in NYC). Sometimes I even bought things.

Do you watch The Masked Singer? Any theories? >> No.

Favorite Alfred Hitchcock film? >> The only one I’ve seen and remember seeing is The Birds.

Do you like Funko Pop figurines? >> They’re all right, sometimes.

If so, do you have any? Which ones would you like to have? >> I have six, I think (two from Preacher, two different Heimdalls from the Thor franchise, and two from The Dark Tower). Sparrow has a bunch but I don’t remember what they all are. I don’t really want any more, I don’t find them that interesting to keep around.

Which ones do you think they should make (but haven't yet)? >> Haven’t they made, like, everyone into a Funko by now, lmao...

[rofilm1]

New Concepts for Music And Sound – Part 7

(Excerpt from my e-book about this topic:https://www.dev.rofilm-media.net/node/537)

What the pioneers of electronic music worked on, emphasised more than before or even discovered, and how to translate this to our situation today:

Aspect 5:

The return of structure after some decades of pure experimentation

Well, I think putting some (more) structure to what is often called “noise music” (the field where is a lot of interesting experimentation going on right now) will be a fruitful thing to do (and may even increase the audience). More about noise in the next chapter.

Aspect 6:

The wedlock of art and science/technique

The development of music and the development of technical science have always been in tight contact. What we have seen in the past (also in the near past, in rather recent days) is the introduction to science itself. Scientific experiments (quantum physics, genetics and other disciplines) have been applied to the production of sonic phenomena. Here we just have to continue, and – perhaps even more important - to widen the spectrum of sciences that we put together in a melting pot called “music production”. So, what about transferring brain waves into music? Or what about the goings on in your stomach, your liver? What about philosophy? What about psychiatry? What about geological processes?

Aspect 7:

The studio as a musical instrument (re-invented by Kraftwerk a lot later)

Let´s substitute the word “studio” by the word “world” and we´re at home!

Aspect 8:

The investigations in so far minor important (and partly new) musical categories (e.g. density)

“Density” has entered the room with a bang when it came to granular sound processing (see my e-book “In the World of Grains”). It´s neither new nor so far ignored any more. Perhaps we should take a closer look at silence – at the length of silence as well as at structured silence (pseudo-silence with very faint faraway “hints” of sound) to be precise.

Enjoy your day!

Rolf

[queenpersephonesgarden]

Whumptober Day 27

Prompt: “I can’t walk” Fandom: Young Justice Characters: Bart Allen, Wally West Words: 2407 Warnings: graphic injury, more than canon typical violence

The strange, geometrically structured hallways of the Reach’s central Earth base tended to twist in on themselves and loop around until you were right back where you started when you first entered the building if you weren’t paying very close attention to your surroundings.

Bart had been paying very close attention for the past thirty minutes, but it was pretty clear to him that if he hadn’t had Helena’s voice calmly chattering in his ear, he would have been lost five minutes into his trek.

“I think I finally found the elevator that should have been on the east side,” he whispered quietly into his comm, cautiously using one hand to phase through and break the activation panel beside the only door in the hallway that didn’t line up perfectly with a corresponding one on the opposite wall. Sure enough, as it slid open, he could very clearly see an open, empty shaft that went far off into darkness both above and below him. The abyss yawned below him, the occasional flicker of light from a wall circuit doing nothing to stop the unease pooling in his gut.

He’d found it, but it had taken an extra twenty minutes the Outlaws didn’t technically have. Things would have been a lot simpler if the Reach could design their bases less like giant hives and more like actual buildings.

But there would be time for complaining about mazes later.

“Good work. Doctor Light and Nightwing are in position along with Red Hood and Red Arrow,” Helena told him, sounding far calmer than Bart himself felt. His pseudo-sister’s training as Robin still served her well, nearly a decade after she’d been forced to leave the name behind. Bart heard her type a few keys on a holographic keyboard, and the display in his goggles zoomed in on the not-very-accurate minimap he’d been following since he’d arrived. The small, flickering signal he’d been searching for briefly lit a point on the map green instead of red. “Flash’s signal seems to be coming from about thirteen floors below you. You’ll have to be extremely careful; if that was the floor where they’ve been holding him, then it’s likely they have traps specifically designed for speedsters down there. Go slow, and keep an eye out for anything.”

Bart grimaced at the thought of going even slower than he already was, but didn’t try to protest. He’d seen what the Reach was capable of when they wanted to restrain a metahuman, and he wasn’t exactly eager to experience that himself. “Sure thing, boss. Anything else?”

He readied the small grappling hook stashed in one of his hidden cupboards as Helena sighed quietly. “You’ll be going pretty deep underground, so it’s very likely our comms won’t reach each other until you come back up. If you do need help, hit your emergency signal and get as high up as you can. Don’t worry; I’ll be heading to the main cellblock with Arsenal, so it shouldn’t take me long to get there.”

Bart couldn’t quite help a smile, even as he prepared to descend directly into the belly of the beast. “I know you’ve always got my back, so why would I be worried?”

The surprised chuckle he heard just made his smile grow wider. “Just try not to die before I get there, okay?” Helena’s voice took on a softer tone. “Good luck, Bart.”

“I’ll certainly try to find some,” Bart said with false cheer. Some good luck would be really nice right about now; he hadn’t had nearly enough of it, lately. “You be careful too.”

With that final farewell, Bart deployed the grapple and jumped into the void, rappelling down into the darkness of the Reach base.

-

This is not the first time he’s ever seen the deeper parts of an alien hive.

Many of the human labor force captured and used by the Reach to collect scrap and haphazardly throw together some semblance of working technology that could be useful to the Empire had been forced to carry their meager offerings from the camps all the way into the nearest mining colony, sometimes miles away from where they lived and often so quickly they collapsed on emaciated legs before they could even get there and back to where they were relatively safe.

Bart has been in and out of colonies and camps since he was nine years old, but the sheer size and complexity of this base is almost overwhelming. He’s never been on one of the science floors before, never seen the terrifying instruments of torture and dissection he’s catching glimpses of through broken doors and cracked windows, and the shapes of them in the gloom are making the hair on his neck stand on end.

His comm signal had fizzled out like Helena said it might, but his goggles’ HUD is still working, pinging helpfully off of disabled cameras and giving the already darker, dimly lit corridors some nice, eerie lighting to go along with the shattered security droids and debris littered throughout.

Not a cozy place, by any stretch of the imagination.

It looked as if some sort of hurricane had swept through.

It looked, Bart noted grimly, like a rather angry speedster had ripped through here. He’s never met Wally or his children before, but Bart knows Jai is capable of super-strength when he diverts his speedforce connection into growing the muscles in his arms rather than distributing it throughout his entire body. Bart doesn’t know if Wally or Irey are capable of the same thing, but as he watches the remains of one drone spark and fizzle spastically, he starts to think that might just be the case.

“Aw, geez. Helena’s family is scary. Maybe that’s where she gets it from?” He can’t quite keep from running his mouth, even down here in a potentially life-threatening situation. Damian would probably scold him for that if he could hear him.

The sharp crash of glass hitting the ground makes Bart zoom to one side of the hall, ducking into an empty doorframe. It’s incredibly thin, not proper cover at all, but it’s all he has at the moment.

He peeks around it, tense like spring, ready for anything to appear out of the darkness, but nothing comes charging out into the open, no new security bots start flooding the corridor.

The sound of glass sliding across metal, and a weak, muffled voice; cursing in English, not the strange, inhuman clicking of the Reach.

Wally, or Jai or Irey? Another Reach prisoner, also used for experimentation? Or a trap?

The haunted atmosphere of this lab is already making Bart paranoid, but his training with Damian is giving him even more of an edge than normal. His stomach churns in protest, but he heads forward anyway. Waiting around in enemy territory never tended to end well, in Bart’s experience.

He tiptoes carefully up toward the door the voice seems to be echoing out of and freezes at the corner, staring into the room.

His eyes slowly trail their way across the ruined walls and filthy ground before he spins around and promptly empties his stomach onto the ground.

It’s a damn massacre.

Remains of Reach droids and scientists alike are scattered across the metal floor in a macabre amalgamation of bluish gore and gears, bits of heads and legs suggesting that something had blown straight through their torsos too fast for them to react. The bizarre alien blood was making several of the droids spark weakly in the low light, casting odd shadows across the horrific display.

Several tables, filled with what once had likely been human bodies, now held nothing more than what could only be described as actual organs, some of them pulsating grotesquely where they were attached to some huge, otherworldly medical instruments.

And a single remaining intact humanoid body, slumped next to a table, breathing heavily and covered in a lot of blood.

Bart heaves once, twice, then clamps his mouth shut and swallows the bile down, tears pricking his eyes and body shaking.

He has a job to do, and he’s running out of time to do it.

God, he hates this. He wants to go home.

He shoves the childish thought aside and straightens back up again.

Bart enters the room quickly, forces himself to walk carefully over broken remains of alien bones and metal casings, tries not to think of what could be squishing underneath his feet, definitely does not let himself look at the lazily pulsing sacks on the tables as he approached the figure that isn’t as familiar as it should be.

Wally West is even paler than he was in all of Linda’s pictures, hair cropped much shorter and shot through with more gray than red. Worry lines have been etched into his face, scars just barely visible beneath the Reach clothing he’d apparently found trailing all the way down his throat and across the left half of his face, burns and incision marks that made him nearly unrecognizable and his left eye cloudy white rather than green. Shoulders that had once been broad were now bent inward by some invisible weight, a body that had once been lithe and agile now thin and emaciated far beyond healthy for a speedster with an accelerated metabolism.

He's slumped half over on his side, shoulders heaving with breath and one arm pressed hard to his waist, where Bart can see a deep red stain spreading lazily across the jumpsuit he’s wearing, slowly overtaking the blue blood of the Reach scientists, and Bart swallows hard.

This is a man about five minutes after an incredibly violent episode, injured and seemingly unaware of his presence to boot. He’s only seen a small handful of people brought back from the Reach’s science division, and none of them had been anything close to this level of powerful and dangerous.

He couldn’t afford to fuck this up.

Deep breath in, out. Once more, and again, the way Helena taught him.

Bart spots a sizable piece of glass on the floor and takes a heavy, deliberate step onto it.

The crunch that announced his arrival made Wally snap to attention, head coming up to glare straight at Bart from his hunched position, and Bart froze completely, hands open at his sides, trying not to let his terror show.

It’s been a while since Wally was back home with the rest of the Outlaws, and the light in the room is flickering and near useless; will the man even recognize the modified Kid Flash uniform in the gloom?

But he apparently didn’t need to worry; Wally blinks his eyes hard several times, scanning Bart from head to toe, evidently recognizing him as a nonthreat and slumping a little more to the side with a long, pained sigh.

“Wassup, Kid?” Wally asks, daring a bloody little grin, and Bart is so surprised he can’t answer for a second. He wasn’t quite sure if the man would lucid or coherent in the state he’s in, but apparently the older speedster’s accelerated healing is doing at least something to help his addled brain.

Bart still approached slowly, watching for any sudden movements, but he needn’t have bothered. Wally’s arm stays fixed firmly around his bleeding middle, and he doesn’t move to sit up until Bart is already beside him, hissing quietly in pain as his wound moves with him.

“Nice to meet you, too,” Bart says in as steady a voice as he can manage, and he means it, because as strung out and crazy as this man is right now, he’s been an inspiration to Bart since he was little and he doesn’t know what else he can say to a guy who singlehandedly ripped through an entire Reach lab. “Why weren’t you in the main cellblock? That’s where we were supposed to meet, right?”

Wally shakes his head too fast, listing a bit awkwardly to the side again when he apparently gave up on sitting straight. “Thought I could find Jai,” he slurred slowly, shakes his head again.

Bart feels something cold sink into his stomach. He doesn’t dare take a glance at the human remains displayed on the table above Wally’s head, and his hands don’t start shaking again when he reaches helplessly to press against the wound in his abdomen.

“Here.” A hand, slick with red red red, rises slowly so Bart can see what it’s holding in trembling fingers. A data card, like one of the fancy ones Roy had been looking for recently, some sort of super-secret Reach project that was going to change the tide of the war or something.

Bart barely spares it a glance, too focused on trying to stem the flow of blood because hell, what else can he do, but Wally practically shoves it under his nose with an impatient sound. “You gotta take this and go, Kid. Someone’s… probably noticed the cameras by now,” Wally’s voice is thready and breathless, but still holds as much authority as Damian’s does when giving Bart a direct order.

And that’s stupid, what the hell?

“I’m not leaving you here, dude! Helena would kick my ass if I let her grandpa kick the bucket in a place like this!” He tries to sound as convincing as he can, but he can tell by the old man’s face it’s not working. “Come on, we can still make it to the rendezvous point if we hurry-!”

“I can’t…… can’t walk, Kid,” Wally interrupts, and Bart’s limbs feel numb when the data card is clumsily slipped into one hand. He clutches onto it reflexively and looks down at the blood coating it, ears buzzing. “You gotta go.”

He should argue. He should tell him to hell with that, tell him Linda and Helena were waiting for him, tell him Damian had the schematics for the Reach warship hovering over Earth, tell him they finally had a chance in this war, tell him there’s finally something to fight for again.

There’s a lot of things he should say, but Wally’s eyes blink shut a little too long before the right one opens again, glazed over and unseeing, and he shakes his head one more time. “Run, kid,” Wally murmurs, before leaning back against the table holding what’s left of his son.

Bart turns and flees, because what the hell else can he do?