#Metric tile

[metrictileaus]

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[cerastes]

can i get other examples of gamepress being wrong about arknights? i've been using them as my main source since i started and now i'm worried i'm missing out on some operators i haven't bothered to upgrade 🙃

We could be here literally all day because it's not like they have one or two outliers, Gamepress is just mainly edited by people that live in an echo chamber and that have authority in their own circle so it's just off-the-hip, all too often wrong biased takes based on their own really reductive metrics. Chiefly, Gamepress ranks characters 1) as if they were the sole unit in the battlefield almost exclusively, and 2) using the single most broken units currently live as the barrier of entry. The unit you are looking up can't clear a chunk of map in one tap? Worthless and sub-optimal, according to Gamepress. Their only metric is Mlynar, Ch'ung the Hung, Surtr, that kind of Press To Win philosophy, and if a unit can't do that, Then It's Bad And Not Worth It.

Now, you may be thinking, "goodness me, Dreamer, you are being awfully harsh to call them complete dogshit at every angle of the game in this manner!", well, see, it's not just their Operator "reviews", they have articles sometimes. And they are god awful dogshit as well, such as "What Happened To Blaze?"

You can't see the comments anymore, but the author was getting reamed. I have one screenie at least:

Comments were mainly of this nature. Because, well, the article is straight up awful, especially since it reduces Blaze to "laneholder" and compares her to "competition" like Thorns, Mudrock, and Mountain, who, yes, they all can hold a lane, but Blaze has her own space of "infinite duration, high statline, healable 3-block with 2 tile range" that has historically allowed for Funny Tricks like clearing enemies through "walls" on tiles that could shred Thorns even with a healer, or, you know, in conjunction with any of Mudrock or Mountain, given you have 12 whole slots for you team. Again, Gamepress editors rate characters as if they were your main in a fighting game and not one of 12+1 characters you can throw in at any time. They also tend to shit on non-specialist characters (generalists; more versatile units that can do a bunch of things without really breaking the game in any regard), which is very interesting because those usually will make up a strong backbone of any competent Integrated Strategies team, so the specialists in role can do their thing while the other needs of the map are being met.

"Ebenholz is nothing special." "Goldenglow is nothing special." These are takes they genuinely held until, you know, it turned out that Eben and GG are the most relevant Casters, up there with Eyja. To be fair, it wasn't just them being wrong on Eben, but how do you look at the global blasting of GG with her numbers and don't immediately realize that's an ICBM button? All it takes is having the game installed.

The biased nature of Gamepress is also blatant:

Imagine rating April as "Really Good" while relegating Dorothy as only "Really Fun". Even before her Module3, Dorothy was absolutely devastating, bringing huge damage multipliers, crowd control, one of the single best class autoattacks in the whole game at 6* stat weight, and a Talent that gives her even more Attack for basically using her as intended. I'm not saying April isn't good, mind you, I'm just trying to highlight how biased the hands behind Gamepress are: They can't figure out Trapmasters? Then surely they are merely "really fun". Can't drop and forget them like April or Surtr, after all.

About the only thing Gamepress is good for is objective, in-game info: Dates, mat requirements, what skills do, that kind of stuff. It's got a good interface and is a good place to just quickly look up what you need to know that can otherwise be found in the game. The moment their personal opinions come into play, though? The most absolute dogshit takes. Unless you are a "unga bunga drop Surtr and Mlynar and win instan-- WAIT WHY IS INTEGRATED STRATEGIES AND RISK 23+ KICKING MY DAY 1 PLAYER ASS...!?" kinda player, then you don't really want to follow Gamepress advice.

Because they simply do not give good advice as a whole.

[oliviax727]

Physics Friday #4: WTF is Dark Energy/Dark Matter? (Part 2)

Important Note: 50 people is a lot! (well after I blocked all the bots it was under that). And I never expected it to grow so quickly. But also I've noticed that a lot of people move in and out of following this blog. And I think one reason is because some people just want to see the physics/maths/astronomy instead of that plus random shitposts.

So what I'm going to do, is for all future posts like this, put this in a second blog to separate it from this one. And every time I post to that one I'll re-blog it here so that there's space for those who just like to see science-y stuff.

The second blog is @oliviabutsmart.

Preamble

Education level: High School (Y9/10)

Topic: Cosmology, Particle Physics (Astronomy)

This is the second part of three to the Dark Energy vs. Dark Matter post. In this part, I'm going to cover the possible ideas behind what dark matter is.

From the last part, what you need to know is that:

Dark matter and dark energy are completely different things, they're both dark because we can't see it

When we look at galaxies and orbits, what we expect is that most of the mass is concentrated in the centre (galactic bulge)

What we actually end up seeing is that there's a lot more stuff in the outer reaches of the galaxy, and we can't see any of it

This hidden matter, called 'dark matter' is what we have to use to correct our equations

Introduction: The chad MACHO vs. the virgin WIMP

Now unlike what this tile says, I don't actually think that MACHOs are better, it's just a play on- .... you know what I mean.

So, given what we know, we need to find a source for this hidden matter. The best place to start is to take a look at what we do know about dark matter:

It doesn't interact with the electromagnetic force (or if it does, it's very rare) - this allows it to appear as 'invisible'

It does have mass - as it affects the motion of stuff in galaxies

It needs to be plentiful outside of galaxies

It generally doesn't interact with other forms of matter

So now we have three different candidate groups for dark matter:

Weakly-interacting particles, including WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles)

Really big objects that happen to not radiate a lot (also known as MACHOs)

Modified theories of gravity on the large scale

We also need to worry about the way in which this matter is produced. Which is where the cold-warm-hot metric is introduced. It has less to do with temperature and more with speed, particularly in the early universe (see free streaming length for more details - I'm oversimplifying).

What's important is what this "free streaming length" does. Larger lengths corresponds to the formation of larger structures first, then smaller internal structures later.

A cold dark matter model corresponds to dark matter with a small speed in the early universe. In the current day, we think that this is the best model - as it allows for the formation of galaxies first, then clusters of galaxies later - something that we have observed.

Hot dark matter is on the higher end of the speed spectrum and is more equivalent to the formation of big super-galactic sponges before the individual galaxies appear.

The Jocks of the Galaxies: MACHOs

A MACHO is also known as a MAssive Compact Halo Object

Massive - it's heavy Compact - "self-contained" in a way, it doesn't interfere with stars and it doesn't radiate much Halo - it exists in the galaxy's "Halo", a region surrounding the galaxy

Small or Primordial Black Holes

The immediate thought, right of the bat, is to think of a black hole. I mean, it's heavy, and it sucks up literally everything. You may object because of hawking radiation but it's very difficult to see that. So what we get is effectively no radiation.

The problem comes with the fact that it's heavy. Where are you going to get all of this stuff into one place? And won't you be able to detect the effects of these objects on star systems?

The early universe was small, really small, and there was a lot of stuff all compacted into this area. Is it not possible that portions of space end up "pinched" and turn into black holes? Well, maybe!

These black holes from the early universe continue on into the modern day to form the dark, unseeable 'mass' on galaxies.

The problems come with hawking radiation (and not because of the aforementioned radiating) ... black holes naturally emit radiation. A topic I may cover in more detail in a future post. But for now, because of this radiation, black holes actually shrink in size over time and eventually disappear.

This puts a lower bound on how small a primordial black hole can be. As any smaller black holes would've popped out of existence by now.

We could also opt for using smaller black holes that formed more recently, but that also comes with the initial issue of how do we make them?

Red Dwarfs, Brown Dwarfs, Black Dwarfs, or Rouge Planets

Often stars don't go out with a bang. In fact, it's more likely that they simply fizzle out. Black dwarfs are what results from this. And because of it they're just dark solid spheres of material.

Some stars are just small and dim. Red dwarfs are incredibly, INCREDIBLY common in our galaxy. It might be possible that we don't see them because they are so dim.

Some stars don't even form, they just don't ignite. These failed stars turn into brown dwarfs. They are unusually large gas giants with a faint glow.

Some planets get knocked out of their system - for any reason. These planets, without light, wander the galaxy alone.

These four objects, are large, dark, and too small to really interact with anything. And it might be the case that these rouge objects are more common than we think! Enough to account for the missing mass.

The issue is just how we are able to find them so far out of the reaches of the galaxy. Hypothetically, we could say that because of the lack of abundant gas in the outer reaches we end up with failed or dim stars.

Dark Stars

This is both the most interesting candidate for dark matter, and also the least documented. Primarily because we're talking about objects made of shit we haven't even seen.

Dark stars come in two varieties, ones made of dark energy, ones made of dark matter.

Dark energy stars are effectively legacy candidates of black holes, that the dark energy in the universe 'pinches' like in our primordial black hole scenario.

Dark matter stars require us having some sort of particle concentrated in a star-like object. It is of course, a strange idea, and it additionally requires the existence of small particles contributing to dark matter.

There's actually a good PBS Space Time video on this. And I recommend you watch it as I do not have the chops to understand this stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUhOL38346Y

The Little Nerds: WIMPs, WISPs, and other particles

The easiest (and most likely) answer is that we're looking for some sort of small particle somewhere in the universe in big concentration.

The core idea is of the WIMP, a very large particle (large being relative i.e. as heavy as maybe an atom), which doesn't interact much.

We want larger particles because, well, then we can have less than them. It's easier to explain that then having particles that are incredibly numerous.

But there's also another type of candidate: WISPs. The S stands for slender. Maybe we don't actually require massive particles, maybe we can have a particle that doesn't interact with stuff. That in order to interact with it you have to be really close to it and so you just don't end up interacting with it.

Neutrinos

Neutrinos are the most obvious candidate. Because we already know they exist. And we know where they are produced.

Every time you undergo nuclear fusion, you actually produce neutrinos as a bi-product. When you have collapsing and exploding stars, this neutrino radiation becomes so numerous it could fry you.

The benefit of neutrinos is that they only interact via the weak force, which only operates when you're really close to the neutrino. This makes neutrinos a type of WISP.

So why do we not declare that this is dark matter? The issue is that neutrinos are hot dark matter. So if they made up dark matter it wouldn't fit with what we see when we look outside.

We could go for a new, yet similar particle, the sterile neutrino. However we end up falling into the same pattern of needing to find an undiscovered particle.

The Axion

Axions are a hypothetical WISP particle that interacts using either the strong force or the electromagnetic force. They are our best traditional candidate for dark matter. A particle that does exactly what we want it to do.

It's sort of like the "string theory" of dark matter candidates, the cleanest looking idea which we still don't have good evidence for.

Strangelets

Strangelets are particles containing the strange quark. They are candidates for dark matter because they fall more into the WIMP class than anything else.

The scary consequence of these particles is that they become more stable with more particles, so they could effectively turn other matter into strange quarks until an entire planet or star is consumed by them.

Fuzzy Dark Matter

Sometimes when you need a big particle, you actually should look for a small one. Fuzzy dark matter basically hypothesises that there are particles that are incredibly light, allowing them to form wavy fields of stuff that contributes to the mass of galaxies.

Quantum Weirdness and SUSY

SUSY, or supersymmetry, is a foundational component of string theory that states that force is directly translatable to mass. That for every fermion particle type, there exists an equivalent particle that acts as a boson. And every boson, there is an equivalent fermion.

You don't need to worry about the difference between bosons and fermions outside of that they are force carrying, and normal particles respectively.

SUSY, and other weird quantum effects are additionally proposed candidates to dark matter, as they can generate new and weird particles or forces that might contribute to the missing mass. But also, they have had a bad reputation in more recent years for returning negative results.

What if Gravity is Just Wrong?

So this is our last category. Forget the large black holes and the tiny new particles, maybe gravity is just wrong! That we got general relativity right on the scales of planets and stars, but not at all when it comes to larger masses like galaxies and clusters.

Modified Newtonian Gravity

Modified newtonian gravity, or MOND, is the idea that, when acceleration is low enough, the motion of particles stop following the rules dictated by newton's laws. Specifically becoming F=ma^2 instead of F=ma.

This, however, implies that ALL of newtonian mechanics becomes affected by this change, so it's often proposed that this modified newton's law affects only gravity compared to other forces like electromagnetism.

We can also develop this idea into our more fundamental understanding of gravity, General Relativity. Using what's known as Tensor-Vector-Scalar gravity.

The problem is that this is a pretty big change to make. Disproving gravity - it sounds less like a sound theory and more like a conspiracy theory. But of course, that's how we would've treated previous theories of gravity when they first came out.

Another problem is that the current proposed MOND theory still requires the existence of some form of dark matter MACHO or particle.

Entropic Gravity

Entropic gravity is another interesting theory, especially because it also acts as a theory of quantum gravity (i.e. solving the biggest problem in all of physics).

Basically, gravity actually doesn't exist, but is instead a cumulative effect of quantum disorder. Emerging in the same way that temperature emerges from the second law of thermodynamics.

This helps us solve the dark matter problem by demonstrating that gravity changes as we scale things up. Similar to how temperature looks different if we were, say, looking at whizzing atoms in a box compared to a warm block of metal. And MOND theories end up emerging if we extend the scales beyond that of stars and planets.

Yet, the problem still remains, that this requires us disprove the existence of gravity. It would take quite a lot to try and do that. Including accounting for how we get from the probabilistic world of the quantum to the tangible normal world.

Conclusion: So ... Which one is right?

Short Answer: None

We don't really have enough experimental evidence to prove any of these to be the true source of dark matter, or even a combination of different sources. There is experimental data of course, we've been looking for ages. But a lot these experiments either don't give conclusive results or just limit the possible ranges of their properties.

The search for dark matter is ongoing, and is still certainly under the works. It's one of the biggest unsolved mysteries in physics, and just like other theories, the ideas we come up with just end up getting disproven or are too hard to prove to begin with.

This post was a whopper! It took a lot more research and reading to wrap my head around all of the different concepts, as it is just beyond my area of knowledge. But hopefully, I at least explained it well enough for y'all to understand.

As always, feedback is much appreciated. I know I didn't cover things in too much detail, but what can you do when there's so many proposals. I more wanted to talk about the general base ideas of each one instead of getting into the nitty-gritty for a few.

Next week I'll focus on something related to computer science, and finally the week after that, cap things off with a discussion on what Dark Matter is!

[foolsdiamond]

Untitled DirkJake AU Vaguely Inspired By Castlevania

chapter 1: Entering the castle,exposition

Far off the paved path, in the foothills of the mountains, is the quaint little village of Lotak. Its townspeople serve the Lord of the castle nestled among the rocky slopes, with black granite slabs and slate tiles creating a dark, ominous silhouette. It is in this very village that wandering hero Jake English has just arrived, seeking information on the castle’s Prince to further his quest.

Jake English is a strapping young man, the kind of guy you’re proud to bring back home to your parents. He wears a thick, long leather coat with a furry ruff of animal hide around the collar. It hides the holsters for his set of twin flintlocks, along with the pouches he keeps stocked with basic provisions and supplies. He’s a vampire hunter, a title inherited from his grandmother and earned from his experience. The rumor mill around Lotak has brought him here to investigate the Prince lording over from the castle on the hill.

The village is bustling at the brink of dusk, with the orange sunset spreading shadows from building to building. Jake tries to tune the background noise out; filtering the useless dribble from actual beneficial tidbit using his own personal metric (a process that might today be referred to as Attention Deficit Disorder). He decides to make his way to the marketplace first, where he's more likely to encounter some better candidates for questioning. This isn't his first rodeo, nor his first vampire slaying, by a long shot.

"Good day, good sir!” Jake starts, leaning an elbow on the wooden counter covered with exotic jewels and stolen daggers. He cuts the merchant off of his introduction to offer his own. "You see, I am under the impression this town is suffering from a curse, something of the rather dark variety. As a specialist, you may very well recognize the family name English, we're professionals at this sort of curse removal, anyway as a specialist, I was hoping to sell my sword as it were."

The merchant keeps a cold glare on Jake, only broken when the self-proclaimed professional accidentally nudges the goods with his elbow. “You. You're a vampire slayer?" he asks, frowning.

English pulls his arm off of the counter and puffs up his chest. He whips his coat aside, to reveal two holstered pistols at his hips. The whole gesture is significantly cooler in his mind than to anyone watching what looks like a foreigner harassing a knife merchant.

"Indeed I am, sir! From a family line, you see. It's not only in my blood, but also in my very training, you know!” Jake puts one hand on his hip, and rests the other palm flat on the counter, rattling the jewels.

“And… you're here to slay our vampire?” the merchant asks with a chilling drawl. Something shivers on the back of Jake's neck.

"Yes, that's exactly right my good sir. I'm here in the town seeking information, if you know anything about his powers or perhaps how many underlings he has?”

"Bold of you to strut in here and assume we wish our Lord dead,” he says plainly. "When our Lord Dirk Strider provides the town with protection, and his infamy brings about idiots like you to feed him.”

Jake rolls the next words on his tongue before spitting them out anyway. "He's a vampire, of course he's evil and requires slaying. You're either under his glamour or you're putting your own nefarious opinions above that of the rest of your townspeople!!”

"Leave, Mr. English,” the merchant retorts.

Jake turns around and storms off regardless. Mumbling under his breath about how he's probably a traveling merchant and doesn't even live here, he's so full of shit. He should have just gone to the tavern in the first place! English storms into the bar in a relatively sour state of mind, and quickly sucks his hurt feelings back down when everybody throws a glare his way. He makes his way meekly to the bartender, seats himself, and folds his arms on the table.

“Another adventurer, eh?" says the innkeep.

“Gung ho, good sir, am I that obvious?" Jake responds.

The bartender gestures around, and Jake obediently takes a gander.

“Notice something?"

“Is this to do with everyone being… well, rather pale actually?" Jake asks.

“More or less. This whole village is populated by the Lord Dirk Strider himself. You stick out like… an obvious metaphor.”

Now that it's been pointed out to him, realization slowly sets in. Jake recalls every face he's seen since he entered the village, and even the similar fashion to which they all talk.

"Everyone here is his children?” Jake asks. The innkeep doesn't even respond, simply stares at him until it sinks in. "Everyone here is his clone?!”

"Now you get it.”

"And this information isn't common knowledge? Even though farmers come in and out?”

"The only people who learn this tend to go straight for the dragon’s head. And every one of them has wound up dead,” the bartender says.

Jake slowly rises to his feet, with his stomach and his brain tumbling. He had every intent to rest and feed before heading in, but the anger is boiling up and drowning out his reason. An entire village of ghosts, puppeteered by the vampiric master Dirk Strider!

His name is nothing new; Jake arrived here on the wind of stories of Strider's cruelty. His love of games, trapping innocent people and torturing them before finally feeding on them in their last breaths. One of Jake’s dear friends and cousins, Jane, recounted his girlfriend’s grisly demise; she couldn't escape, it was only through her telepathy she was able to make her fate known. Jake English therefore had a mission twofold: to rid the world of this heinous monster, and subsequently erase all of the clones he's made; and to retrieve some momento of the departed Terezi to return to Jane.

His thoughts race, pounding in his head to the drum of his feet on the cobbles. The path from Lotak up to the castle gates is winding, snaking its way up the steep granite cliffs of the mountains. The English family name normally strikes a sense of fear into monsters and a sense of peace into the victims; even if he was the only English left still maintaining the family name and business, he usually relied on that high to get his spirits up and morals going. But an entire town filled with the Vampire Lord’s own dark underlings? He’d never heard of such a thing!

Jake ponders whether the townspeople are truly clones, or if perhaps they really are normal citizens trapped beneath a spell of which they would be unaware of. He definitely had more experience with the latter than the former, and while the comfort of knowledge lends itself to an easier job, English is the kind of man who cannot shy away from the thrill of a challenge.

Jake finds himself standing on the doorstep of evil, with a powerful sense of foreboding weighing heavily on his shoulders. He has no clue what he's getting himself into, but he’s anxious to begin regardless. He grips the handle to the door tightly, and retrieves one of his pistols before forcing it open and plunging into darkness.

/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\

I swear I intended to post this unedited, but I kept going back and doing edits. I stopped myself though, because my dog wants my attention, and my secretary ( Ikea Blavingad ) can only keep her occupied for so long.

Anyway, enjoy. I'm on chapter 5 I think? Still all completely rough draft, obviously by me still nitpicking it. When I'm finally satisfied with a chapter, I intend to upload to AO3 (let's not discuss my record for actually finishing stories on there)

[entropy-game-dev]

Phylogenesia Automatorum Post-game Devlog #4: Content & Balance

In the final stretch of development, I had finished implementing all the various systems and now it was time to make content to fill it all out!

If you haven't tried the game out yet (it has a web version now!) please do if you want to discover the different plants and their behaviours for yourself. You can also rate it here if you have an itch.io account, otherwise read on!

So at this point in development I had 4 plants I was happy with:

Conway Grass: Default/standard plant that needs a critical mass to thrive based on the Game of Life ruleset

Nullberry: A sporadic plant that has a small chance to pop out of nothingness, and disappear just as quickly

Creeping Mold: A hardy plant that can easily take over the field but generates low amounts of life/death points

Overhedge: A plant that rarely dies or propogates, but generates a fixed amount of points when or if it does.

Starting with the Overhedge was very difficult but doable with some luck, and all other 3 plants were about average difficulty. At this stage, I needed the other plants in the game, so I could see what sort of points should be generated on average (irrespective of plant).

And thus, the other plants I conceptualised were:

Crossthatch: A plant with a very limited spawn/sustain range such that it only grows in lines or diagonals.

Dynamite Tree: A plant with more "explosive" growth style compared to Conway Grass, more permissive in spawn range, but with only a chance to spawn more trees, and a high chance to die each turn.

Shrunk Violet: Supposedly a "shy" plant that spawns a bunch at simulation start, then the entire mass shrinks away, layer by layer. The middle of the clump does not die due to the high min/max sustain range.

Shocklily: A plant with similar characteristics to the Dynamite Tree that would spawn and perish unpredictably. Where this plant differed, however, is that it can randomly persist and spawn over ticks.

Paradise Bird: The second M:tG reference (the first was Creeping Mold). With the way I tuned the birds' spawn and instant death chance, you get a really nice pattern where (sometimes) you will see a flock of birds migrating across the field.

0range: The story of the 0range goes something like this: "I need an orange plant to fill out my rainbow of plants, and it needs to be a pun. Oh I know, I will replace the "O" (letter) with a "0" (number), and turn all of its stats to 0 :)".

On the first few playtests, the meta was choosing a plant with a low spawn minimum, and fishing for an upgrade that reduces the minimum spawn to 0. This in effect makes the plant like a Nullberry, allowing it to spawn on any unoccupied tiles, BUT, unlike the Nullberry, most other plants have a 100% chance to spawn. Thus, every turn, all empty cells would be filled with plants, and on the next would immediately die off, only to repeat the cycle. While this was cool, I decided that you could only get to a spawn min of 0 on a critical upgrade roll.

The second problem was that the the shrinking violets were incredibly oppressive late game. In the early game they wouldn't generate enough life/death points to be worth choosing as a starter, but whenever you had an established field, they would choke the life out of all the cells except the very border, and would not leave. Lucinius and I eventually determined that the violets needed to die off randomly, and I also reduced their sustain max from 8 to 7, such that a completely surrounded violet would die off. They are still, by far, the most unbalanced plant, but they aren't run ending now at least.

The third problem was that some plants were just way too weak and variable in how they generate points. Lucinius had the great idea of giving players 5 free restarts (instead of 1 like I had originally programmed), and this not only served to smooth out early-game point gain but also give me a metric by which I was going to balance the game!

Within 5 runs, all un-upgraded plants should be able to generate AT LEAST 5 death points (enough for the first plant upgrade), and at most 14 death points (enough for the first two plant upgrades. Of course, these were just rough guidelines on average, and some plants will be stronger starters than others. However, as I have set it to ensure Conway Grass always appears on the starter plant roll (and the 0range never appears), one can always have a playable game.

It was still quite easy to get to a state where the points generation vastly outpaced the costs of the upgrades, but this was a more fundamental issue that, if I tried to address it by tweaking numbers, would result in an absolutely brutal early game that would be no fun to play, and promote only a single type of strategy. I'd prefer the game to be more lenient, as it lets people try out different starter plants, and different sorts of builds, without worrying too much about their turn count.

I did end up adding way more stats to the end screen so that if people wanted to compete for lowest amount of runs/mutations, or highest points they could do so, without making the game unfun for those (basically everyone) who wanted to play casually!

And that's it for the last part of the post-game devlog, thank you so much for reading (and for playing)! Stay tuned for the post-mortem! I have lots I want to discuss regarding what went right, what went wrong, and future directions for the game!

[52stations]

its female fronted friday

[bullet-prooflove]

Complict - Jimmy Lanik x Reader

Tagging: @annieradcliff @cosmic-psychickitty @inator-procrast

It was the blood that Jimmy couldn’t stop thinking about, the viscosity of it as it swept across the tiles. When he’d seen the gun in Chris Davis’s hand, everything had simply frozen. All the muscles in his body had gone rigid and he was sure that the other man was going to point the gun right at him. Gwen had tied his hands regarding the donation for his son and now she was putting a target on his chest.

Jimmy knew desperation, if you worked in the E.D long enough you saw it in all its forms so when Chris pressed the gun to his own temple. Jimmy knew there was no way to stop it. He even understood the decision. He didn’t have a kid, but if it was you in that position, he would have done the same thing one hundred times over.

Both he and Gwen had driven a man to his death and Jimmy felt that cost of that even if she didn’t. It weighted on him. A metric ton of pressure bearing down upon his shoulders. He couldn’t get the images out of his head, the sound of the gunshot, the eruption of brain matter…

He saw it over and over again every time he blinked.

Now he was in the bathroom at home, scrubbing his hands clean because even though he hadn’t touched the blood, he could still feel it on him. There was a tightness in his chest, it squeezed his lungs like a vice, forcing the air right out of his body. His eyes were stinging as rubbed the soap over his hands again, the water blisteringly hot as he forced them back under.  He didn’t do this, he didn’t get emotional, he didn’t lose control.

The bathroom door opened behind him, his red rimmed eyes rose meeting your gaze in the reflection of the mirror. He tilted his head back down, focusing on scouring his hands under the hot water instead. He didn’t want you to the look in his eyes, to see his weakness.

Your palm came to rest upon his shoulder, your thumb tenderly massaging that soothing spot at the nape of his neck. He felt the tension beginning to ebb, the stress of the day flowing from his shoulders as you leaned in close. He inhaled the scent of your perfume, patchouli and orange blossoms, earthy with a citrus undertone and it felt like he could breathe again.

 You reached over and turned off the facet.

“That’s enough Jimmy.” You said softly. “Your hands are raw.”

He looked down at his hands, they were seared a painful pink. He could see the skin already beginning to crack across his knuckles. You took your time drying them, patting them lightly with a hand towel as not to cause any more damage to the epidermis.

“Jimmy.” You said softly after tossing the towel into the hamper. “I’m going to hug you now.”

He didn’t speak when you wrapped his arms around him. Instead, he stiffened in your embrace, trying to hold the pieces of himself together. There was such tenderness in the way you held him, such love and compassion. It seeped through the cracks in his armour like saline flushing through an open wound. The façade began to crumble, and he buried his face into the curve of your neck as his eyes burned once more.

“I killed a man today.” He choked out.

The riptide of emotion dragged him under, the grief and the anguish surging through him with the ferocity of a relentless ocean. The noise that left him was agonising, it tore through your heart as you cradled him close, your cheek pressed against his.

There were no words of comfort, no platitudes. There was just you, and only you, and right now that was what Jimmy needed.

Love Jimmy? Get added to his tag list!

Like My Work? - Why Not Buy Me A Coffee

[lesless]

🤖

Re re re quit nicotine. Talked to my partner & was like dude I need you to be done with this so I don’t backslide bc I do fine on my own & then you make a decision which I can’t keep being responsible for bc I “have more willpower” at this point I don’t have any willpower left bc it feels like this hopeless eternal cycle when you keep going back to it & im eternally exposed to it so i do it too. I’m so frustrated by it & it’s fucking up my hormones & messing with my mental health like I’m asking you to be accountable & at first he got butthurt bc he’s not used to adult conversations & that seems to be his knee jerk reaction every time I ask him to be accountable but as of yesterday he seemed to understand so that’s good. Take my tone with a grain of salt I’m dealing with withdrawal in real time & I’m so incredibly irritable & I just have to wait for it to pass.

Like I’m proud of him for working through his knee jerk reactions consistently, he definitely does separate & return to be accountable when he has a Mood. but IN GENERAL I’m SO fucking tired of people who can’t handle a direct conversation but then “hate passive aggression” like you have to be a welcome space for open & honest communication OR people are gonna be cunts to you bc you can’t communicate. & he’s typically very good at having these conversations but there’s a select few topics he just won’t have a direct chat about & it really really frustrates me. One of them is minor & silly but the other is kinda big & they annoy me for different reasons. Like we’re mid 30’s dude get over it? But then I get frustrated that I’m not more patient that everyone’s journey is different & growth is not a consistent metric across the board so people get better at some things before others & blah blah blah whatever.

Why did I do all this work to mature & now I am accountable for all these people who don’t do the work like that was a rude double cross. I know my life is happier for working towards understanding & peace but also now I have to do that for everyone? Lame.

Also I’m sure I’m immature in a lot of ways I don’t personally see that he has to deal with but dude I just want to be bitchy without caveats but here I am understanding the perspective of the other bc I went to therapy 6 years ago & took it to heart. 🙄

I really don’t want to go work on the property this weekend either, not even a little, & he wants me to drive 2 hours to clean ceiling tiles & I understand it would look good to his parents but you know what lately I’ve just felt like I’m on the periphery of everyone’s priorities & feeling really lonely (ALSO probably bc my hormones are fucked up from the start stop start stop) & obviously their kid is their priority not the girl he’s dating & I didn’t get so much as a thank you when I worked my ass off over spring break week until days after I left when I texted them about something unrelated (which they still didn’t do). It’s FINE I’m FINE I’m just super grumpy.

Anyway I bought a bunch of supplements to hopefully assist my body in rebalancing my hormones & I’m really hoping it helps. I’m gonna be Healthy Lauren for this whole month & take my vitamins probiotics walk sleep enough not drink etc to see if I can avoid the mental spiral that came with my last cycle.

& now that I’m calming down at the end of this rant I feel guilty for being so annoyed at my partner bc I love him dearly even though right now I want to both snuggle him & beat him with a spatula. Feeling very complex today.

[afi-mukami]

Her Scent of Magnolias

Final Fantasy VII

AerTi

Teen and up

Tifa and Aerith have fallen from Don Corneo's trap into the sewer along with Cloud. The group will not be able to proceed until the broken water pump is repaired. While Cloud stays to monitor the meters, Tifa and Aerith have a moment to chat alone.

It is kind of funny how Cloud stares as Tifa announces that women can do the pump repair and he can meanwhile monitor the gauges. I could not help but smile. No doubt Cloud is used to being the hero and feels obligated to take care of everything. When I remember how Tifa and I had just saved him from falling into the sewage, laughter bubbles from my lips. I get it swallowed and hurry after Tifa back to the side of the drain.

Tifa's hips sway at the pace of her steps. The fabric of the black miniskirt is stiff and does not actually follow the movements but emphasizes her curvy body in just the right way. I would never dress that way, but it is hard to take my eyes off Tifa.

I do not remember having looked at her this way back then. Now she is capturing my eyes time and time again. I am not sure if that is good. I should not. I should focus only on the essentials, but I can do nothing for my wandering gaze and heart rate. That heartbeat was supposed to belong to only one person. Will I ever learn? And how many opportunities do I have?

“Living in slums has taught a lot,” Tifa says, squatting in front of a malfunctioning pump.

I stand a little distance away. I cannot be much of help; it would have been more useful if I had stayed to monitor the metrics. Tifa’s fingers run along the mechanisms of the pump as if she were an experienced plumber. The same fingers were very warm when they grabbed me earlier.

Crossing dirty splashing water along mere floating tiles did not directly feel like a good idea. However, Cloud got over without difficulty, and the trick went smoothly for Tifa as well. I half envied the physical ability of both.

I set off. The tiles rocked beneath me, but I got ahead. I swayed, wavered, I accelerated my pace. I already felt the tiles prune from under me. I plunged forward and could imagine how the stinking water would hit me.

Just then, Tifa grabbed my arm and snatched. I kicked the raft with my feet. Maybe I jumped or maybe I just fell, I do not even know. The next moment I collided directly against Tifa, and her arms wrapped around me. Tifa smelled of magnolias and was softer than she looked. As I straightened up, anxiety narrowed her eyes.

“May I ask…” Tifa starts and turns to look at me. There is a slightly reddish tinge to her brown eyes, I notice now. Anyway, I should have remembered it, but the details are surprisingly vague. They seem to flag out of my grip, especially if I intentionally try to grab them. I know how things should be, but at the same time I still forget. It is exceedingly difficult to explain.

“Of course,” I answer before I have time to drown in my own mind.

“How did you and Cloud really meet?”

He is a special person of Tifa. The one Tifa lied about when we last met. This time I am not pointing out a lie but telling an absurd story of how a handsome young man fell through the roof of a church. I omit the most absurd detail; it was not the first time. I still remember that time when the same thing happened, and I lost my heart. I knew so little back then; I was ready to give all away for just one blue gaze. Or one more. I should not have surrendered that way, but I cannot help but think of all the past moments that wrapped our destinies together. Without them I would not be who I am now.

There is something in Tifa's gaze that I cannot read. She closes me off and sinks somewhere far away. I squat next to her.

“Can I help with the pump somehow?” I ask.

Tifa smiles and the light comes on in her eyes again. Her nose twitches, and a smile reaches all the way to the gaze. Sewer hiking has tainted her careful makeup, but I can hardly look fresher myself. Even with the smeared eyeshadow, her lashes frame her eyes like petals the center of a flower.

“Push that lever down, and I’m trying to get this in place. When I say, lift the lever back up,” Tifa replies.

I work as directed, and Tifa continues to work on her own. Her hands move as if they were born for such tasks, but I have seen them under different actions. Tifa does not hesitate to defend herself. She is strong in a way I will never be able to be.

“Did you tell Cloud that we had met before?” Tifa continues the conversation.

I shake my head.

“Me neither.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. It did not seem appropriate. It's almost as if he shouldn't know it.”

I look behind us. I do not see Cloud who stayed back to observe the vibration of the gauge needles. I think Tifa is right. Cloud is not supposed to know about our encounter because it was not supposed to happen. Something has sprained, and I want to make that sprain worse. Is this the path I should choose?

“Now push it down,” Tifa says.

I grab the lever firmly and forcibly twist it down. Tifa sighs and shakes her head. Crank the lever up again. Tifa changes places and her side presses against my leg. She is warm even though the sewer is coolly humid. I smell the scent of one perfume, I recognize magnolia, even though this scent has been produced industrially. I wish I could one day grow magnolias in my garden.

Tifa's side rubs against my leg. Her bare skin between the top and the skirt. She falls to her knees and presses her head against the pump she is trying to fix. Her hand disappears inside of the pump at the same moment as our gazes’ glue together. Nutty. Her gaze is nutty. Warm and attractive but safe. There is stability in Tifa that is lacking in my own life. Where I live in constant cross-water and in danger of being caught in the wrong course, Tifa has grown stable roots. Of course, the roots can also be cut and crushed, but there is something charming about that stability.

The pump carries a metallic buckle.

“Now!” Tifa exclaims and jerks her hand away from inside the device.

I push with all my strength, and the lever presses down. My grip slips. I try to support the position by moving my legs, but the floor of the drain is slimy, and my shoes slip. I fall to my knees and stumble upon Tifa who grabs me. Our faces are almost stuck together, but she pushes me into a better position.

“Oops, I didn’t realize that lever is so stiff,” Tifa says.

I laugh and wrap my hair straightening around my fingers. “I'm just not very strong.”

“There are many kinds of strength.”

I squeeze my fingers around Tifa's biceps. Gently but firmly, so that my grip will certainly not slip. Tifa's eyes widen as she looks at me. I open my mouth, but just at that moment, the sewer around us is crackling. The world breaks down into strands and re-forms.

Tifa smiles and fireworks crackle behind the window. Our environment swings, the sky curves above us, and we move slowly upward. Numerous amusement rides, a theater, a chocobo arena are left under… I do not see them, I just see Tifa.

I extend my hand towards Tifa, and at that very moment everything is distorted and fragmented. Everything disappears…

“Aerith?” Tifa asks. Her hand lands on my cheek.

I blink my eyes. The sight is gone and evaporates farther and farther. I'm no longer sure what I saw. Was it past or future? Was it something that happened to me a long time ago or did it happen to someone else? I do not know. Everything is twisted into one big ball with no beginning and no end, just an endless journey. I know I should know more, but my memories are stuck in the depths of the ball.

“Is everything okay?” Tifa asks, and I nod.

“Yes. I'm only tired.”

“I’m not surprised. This has been quite a night and it is not even over yet.”

Tifa grabs me by the shoulders and strives to stand up. The area between the socks and the skirt flashes past my eyes, and I almost raise my hand. At the last minute, I stop myself. Tifa's hand appears in front of me. I grab it and let her drag me to my feet.

“Cloud is probably already waiting impatiently,” Tifa says and smiles.

I respond with a smile and a nod. When I let go of Tifa’s hand, her fingers swipe my palm.

I definitely need to get magnolias for my garden. Maybe next time.

[moonflower-rose]

The three things thing!

I am so behind that people are going to start calling me Dr Cheeks. I was tagged by three lovely humans of fandom, thank you all!

@shealwaysreads things here  @kbrick things here  @writcraft things here 

I can unhesitatingly recommend any of these writers works, not just the ones they've mentioned above, but I'm sure I don't need to tell anybody here that.

So, on to ME! The thing we're doing is 'Recommend us 3 of YOUR fics: 1 that is “most popular” and 2 that are “hidden gems.'

Most popular first.

I think whatever way you measure it, Watch the Castles Burn is my most popular fic. Every metric on AO3 has it on top, with the exception of subscriptions (its beaten only by my one fucking WIP that I stg I will finish one day soon).

I feel amused every time I see this fic. I wrote it for Wireless 2021 and not far off completion I had a complete emotional breakdown and went to bed for like 3 weeks and cried (not over the fic!). And then on the day that the fest started posting I pulled myself together and reached out to the mods to ask if it was too late to submit, and they were extremely kind and understanding and said yes, so I finished the last little lingering bit and had a non-fandom pal do the most last minute beta you can conceive of because I didn't really have any fandom connections that I felt I could impose on at that time, and we tried to take care of the worst of the comma crimes etc, and then at the end of the fest there she was! I was incredibly emotional, on a rollercoaster (grief is a bastard), and I felt like I had submitted an absolute steaming turd. I thought nobody would read it and nobody would like it. @shiftylinguini had only recently become a new friend and I spewed anxiety at her non-stop for days which she was very patient about and still kept answering my DMs, and has not yet abandoned me which speaks to her very good character and kindness lol. And somehow, this possibly-a-turd became the most popular thing I've written in eighteen years in the fandom. It's not what I consider my best work, but people like it!

Have a bit:

Potter found him in the shower block later that afternoon. Draco had one hand braced against the tile beside the shower head, letting the hot water pummel him. His left shoulder was bruised to hell, in fact he could feel the muscle along his ribs beginning to ache as well, the adrenaline slowly waning.

“I was looking for you,” Potter’s boots echoed off the tiles. “I went up to your office, but they told me you were probably down here.”

Draco turned his head just enough to look over his shoulder, and winced when his whole left side cramped in objection. “How’s Ron?”

Potter, to his credit, looked him in the eye. “Good. Very pleased to be alive, thanks to you. I think you’ll be getting Christmas shortbread and Easter buns from Molly for a couple of years or so, after this.”

Draco would have laughed, but that would have required using muscles which were currently strained to buggery, so he just made a noise instead and hoped it wasn’t too pathetic.

“That looks pretty sore. Do you need a hand with a Healing charm?”

He did, actually, not that he would admit it. Still a stubborn, proud arsehole, despite his best efforts. He turned slowly, flexing in the water. That fucking hurt, but the look on Potter’s face was worth it. “If you wanted an excuse to see me in my altogether, Potter, you need only have asked.”

Potter let his eyes drift down Draco’s body like fingertips. His drew his wand from his thigh holster, and gestured with it. “Turn around, you lush. Healing first, flirting later.” Draco turned the water off and braced himself again against the tile, and Potter’s magic collided with his back a moment later. He made a noise, it was punched out of him rather than anything voluntary, and the pain coalesced before fading to a low thrum.

“Thanks.” Draco’s voice was rough.

“Get dressed, and come home with me. I’ll give you a back massage, sort out the last of that stiffness.”

“It’s barely four.” Draco had a feeling there would be other kinds of stiffness afflicting him if he let Potter give him a massage.

Potter just looked at him with dark eyes. “Come home with me.”

Draco went home with Potter.

Next, two hidden gems.

I really like Relief from this years Sudsfest. I had 60K of thoughts about this fic but I only had about 4K of time and brainpower, so I sliced out the right bit for Suds and plan to come back to this very soon.

  Watersports is a challenging kink for many, its a broad label so it makes sense that people might be unsure of it, lol. But it gives me such a kick when people trust me and have a go anyway, and then say so in the comments. Love that!

Some Relief:

The afternoon management briefing had essentially been a write-off. The scar on his hip prickled and itched, and he kept zoning out, head full of warm sheets, velvet skin, stubble, sweat. Vivid flashbacks to things they’d done in bed together threaded through with things they hadn’t tried yet. Budget updates and governance and risk assessments and compliance reports. It was like the mumbling of a meeting happening in a different room.

Receipts! This was so much fun to write, I don't know what came over me one afternoon but I was full of beans and asked @shealwaysreads for a random prompt, and Receipts was born a couple of hours later in between meetings.  I also have thoughts about this, which I'd like to revisit one day (god knows when, the to do list is painfully long as it is).

A bit of Receipts:

“Parkinson, you look surprisingly well fed.” Weasley was all but bouncing in her trainers. “Care to show me your receipts?”

“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours, Weasley,” Pansy said smoothly, and Draco didn’t miss the flash in the red-headed menace’s eyes. He looked desperately at Potter, who was attempting to enter the flat behind her. Eventually he had to shove her forward to get past her.

“Malfoy,” Potter’s eyes were sparkling, which was very annoying and not sexy whatsoever. “Alright?”

“I’ve been better, if I’m being honest,” Draco muttered, and Potter shook with suppressed laughter. “Let me get you a water.”

The girls barely noticed their departure, and in the kitchen Draco got down a pair of glasses and took the Brita out of the fridge.

“I hope you’re going to tell me your week has been as miserable as mine?”

Potter took a big sip of water, and his eyes crinkled. “Sorry to disappoint. This is going to be a piece of cake for Gin. She’s as stubborn as fuck, but she’s also already on a pretty strict diet because of training, so it didn’t take much to cut out luxuries. She made me go to the farmers market with her to get even cheaper veg—actually, I could have lived without the run on the way there, if I’m honest.”

“Well, Pans is basically made of refined sugar and nicotine, so I spent our last shop slapping Percy Pigs out of her hands like I was playing Goal Defense for England.”

Potter snorted and nearly spit out his water. Draco felt his belly swoop, and looked away to hide his smile.

“How long do you reckon this will go on?”

Draco cocked his head. “I mean, let’s not kid ourselves, this is foreplay. So I predict whichever one of them gets overcome with the need to hump first.”

Potter shook his head in amazement. “Somehow when you say vulgar things, I’m never expecting it.”

“I’m vulgarity personified,” Draco said, his nose in the air. “I also have a bar of Dairy Milk hidden in Pansy’s top shelf, and if you’re a very good boy I may share it with you.”

“I can be good for you, Draco,” Potter said in a low voice, and Draco stuck his head in the pantry to hide his reddened cheeks.

Tagging is the bit I'm really shit at, obviously never hesitate to just do this if you see it but the rules require tagging so if you haven't done this already and you want to, you are hereby tagged: @gracerene and @thehoneybeet and @candybarrnerd and @nv-md and @academicdisasterfic and @ihopeyoubothstaysafefromharm and @oknowkiss!

[dustedmagazine]

John Butcher & Eddie Prévost — Unearthed (Matchless)

Within improvised music, there are certain recordings that initiate timelines. One of them is John Coltrane’s Interstellar Space, which established the drums and saxophone duo as a creative situation worth exploring and documenting. The album’s name articulated the format’s appeal — maximum freedom. It provided a creative space within which the participants, freed of harmonic boundaries, were limited only by their techniques and imaginations.

Drummer / percussionist Eddie Prévost (born 1942) and soprano / tenor saxophonist John Butcher (born 1954) are members of different generations. A founding member of AMM, Prévost is part of English free improvisation’s first wave. Butcher came on the scene in the 1980s and first played with Prévost in the 1990s. They’ve had differing relationships to the format under consideration. While AMM functioned for several years as a drums / sax duo in the 1970s, Butcher steered mostly clear of drummers, as well as anything else that might push him towards a jazz-oriented way of playing, as he established his singular vocabulary of carefuly inflected, constantly non-obvious extensions of what one expects from a saxophone foror much of the 1980s and 1990s. However, they’ve developed an enduring partnership that spans several contexts, including the duo. Unearthed is their third such recording.

Unearthed is partly a creation of circumstance. The duo’s previous recordings were made in the greater London area, where Butcher lives and Prévost has often worked, and the latter employed a pared-down percussion set-up. But since it’s a bit harder for Prévost to get around these days, this recording took place in All Hallow’s Church in High Laver, Essex. The building was originally erected over 800 years ago, at which time repurposed Roman tiles and bricks were among the building materials. In addition to antiquity, it is distinguished by its active acoustic qualities. The bounce-back from old stone is not a problem for Butcher, who actively seeks to play in crypts, caverns, cisterns, and other lively acoustic situations,  but an opportunity. He’s a master at incorporating the influences of echoes and absorbent surfaces into his improvisations. But while the space could easily turn an extroverted drummer’s playing into an undistinguished blare, a jazz drumkit is the instrument that Prévost has chosen to play. One of his accomplishments on this set is his deft management of the density of his playing and the clarity with which he’s been recorded. His drumming doesn’t blare, it sings, and the recording conveys both his playing and what the space does to it quite clearly.              

Interstellar Space unveiled potentialities, stripping away limits to permit absolute freedom. But the human condition dictates that even if one can glimpse artistic liberty, absolute freedom is beyond anyone’s grasp. After all, Coltrane died just five months he and Rashied Ali played the session. And barriers aren’t all bad; they give a body something to push against. Prévost inhabits with the boundaries of time in several ways. He not only plays the drums with all the awareness of space, presence, and meter-transcending shape that he’s brought to AMM and so many other musical encounters; he plays them like a jazz drummer, drawing upon the brush technique, cymbal accents, metric subdivisions and syncopated pulses that a young fellow who came up playing bebop and skiffle in the 1950s learned by heart. One might say that he’s surveying his own timeline as a drummer, from back to front. There’s a moment in “Digging,” the second of the album’s long tracks, where he finishes an unaccompanied passage with a flourish that Gene Krupa would recognize as a solo-ending signal. Butcher responds with a lightly feathered, circular breathing-elongated gargle. Earlier in the same piece, he inserts echoing pops into Prévost’s spare perambulations about the snare and tom, focusing the kit’s output. The act is simultaneously contrary and completing, a reminder that one of the limits that this format shatters is the limit of one musician’s imagination. 

Bill Meyer

[nowhereman313]

The Nowhere’s Store Saga

Alrighty folks, it’s Storytime. I, along with my business partner, a couple of employees, and a handful of very dedicated volunteers, am building (quite literally) a Friendly Local Game Store and geeky community center in Springfield, Missouri! And hoo boy, it has been a journey. I’ll be merciful to the scrollers and put most of it under the cut, but click through to see the adventures we’ve been on for the last six months of dealing with a decrepit old building full of mysteries! 

But first, a little begging for money. We’re so close to being open, but we’re also doing it as working class folks who don’t get on well with banks, so we’re dependent entirely on personal loans and crowdfunding. If you’d like to help us buy ceiling tiles along on our journey, please check out our GoFundMe! 

First, a little background. I grew up in the gaming community in my hometown, getting my first job in the industry when I was 16, working as a Dungeon Master for a game and comic shop called Dragon’s Lair, which became my home store and the center of both my social and professional life. When Dragon’s Lair closed down in 2010, I bounced from shop to shop for a little while, looking to replace the sense of community that Dragon’s Lair had embodied. Nothing ever quite set right for me. Either the place felt too much like a store, where I felt uncomfortable spending time there without constantly buying stuff, or it didn’t have enough space, or it didn’t cater to the markets I cared about, or I just plain didn’t like the people behind the counter. So eventually, I got enough, and decided that I was gonna start my own store! With blackjack! And hookers! Actually, probably not those last couple things, because the license fees are outrageous. 

So Nowhere’s Store of Forgotten Lore was conceived. It took a few years to get to the point of being able to actually pull the trigger, but the circumstances that came with the pandemic forced our hand, and we started building Nowhere’s Store into something real. 

After a couple months of sitting around a table at a pizza joint and hashing out details, a metric fuckload of paperwork, and a lucky break involving a rock in someone’s shoe, we finally had a place. It’s huge, and the price is fantastic, but... Well, we had our work cut out for us. What we found when we got there was this:

Our building had been a carpet wholesale place since the 1960s, and had seen a lot of use and abuse over the decades. We found all sorts of unpleasantness in our ceiling and our walls... and our floors... and any other available (or unavailable) nook and/or cranny. Some highlights include:

Shoddy construction on carpet shelving that would have held literal tons of product. This particular bit, helpfully labeled by whoever Shawn was, fell. the fuck. off. while someone was working on that shelf.

See this wall? No you don’t, because that’s not a wall, it’s a Wall-Like Object. It is merely the suggestion of a wall, because a real wall wouldn’t be held in place solely by two screws and a single piece of goddamn corner molding.

Alex’s tool chest here was hiding a broken and open window, which solved the where the fuck is all this humidity coming from??? question we had for the first couple months. Why there was a chest-high window in a former-bathroom-turned-closet, the world may never know.

This is our office, which as you can see, was tastefully paneled in 1980s wood paneling and brown shag carpet stapled to pegboard. Because sure. The shag was removed immediately, but the paneling remains...

For those of you unfamiliar with the Holy Trifecta of Jury-Rigging, that is baling twine. Which was the only thing holding up a length of electrical conduit that was suspended from the ceiling. That’s definitely safe and up to code.

Thankfully, most of the above has gone bye-bye, and we were able to start actual construction.

Once the sham-walls were out of the way, this is what the front of the shop looked like. All you see before the beginnings of the new wall is strictly retail space. About 2,500 square feet of space for games, comics, and collectibles. But that’s only about a third of our space.

This is our reading lounge. Until we get the rest of the shop completed, it’ll be our primary gaming space, but the end-goal is a space where people can just come in and hang out, read some comics, or just spend some time with other members of the community. It’ll be themed after a 19th century explorer’s club, and that big brown panel in the back is in the middle of becoming a false window, where we can display landscape scenes to move the lounge from the African savannah to the windswept deserts of Mars, and anywhere else we can imagine.

Speaking of gaming space...

This is Sparta gaming space. Roughly the same amount of space as the front of the shop, this is going to be our tournament space. Enough room to host a full-scale Magic tournament, with a couple board gaming groups or tabletop RPG parties as well, without breaking a sweat. We’re even putting in a back counter so that those participating in a tournament don’t have to schlep all the way to the front counter to buy some chips.

But Nowhere, you ask, I’m self-conscious around crowds, and Magic players are loud. I wouldn’t want to run my D&D campaign in the middle of so many people. I hate your shop and I hate you!

Well, aside from being oddly aggressive, my dear strawman, you’re also... 

Wrong! 

With our social media mala for scale, what you see before you is one of our three private game rooms! Through a secret door (yes, really), is a second section of the store, which will be dedicated entirely to private gaming spaces, all available to our community for free! Not available in Alaska or Hawaii. Void where prohibited.

There’s two concrete walls and an air gap between this section of the shop and the rest of the place, so it’ll be noise-free and, due to the struggles we dealt with trying to run games during lockdown, will be set up for streaming, so that any member of your groups that can’t make it to the shop can remote in via Discord or other apps and participate just like everybody else.

Now, up to this point, everything’s kinda looked like... well, shit. It’s looked like shit. Bare concrete, shockingly unsafe walls, and janky construction throughout. But we’ve been busy these last few months, and now it looks like this:

We’re installing the slatwall right now, so apologies for that being in the way, but look! Walls! Carpet! People! I’m actually in this picture, there in the hat, writing this very post. 

That whole wall there, that runs the length of the retail space, is going to be dedicated to comics. Our manager, Stu, is a fixture in our local gaming and comics community, and has been The Comic Guy for 30+ years. We’re really excited to see what he does with it, as he’s been given free reign to do with it what he pleases. 

Our manga section is my business partner’s baby, and he has great plans for it, starting with the massive X-frame display you can see behind me there.

The back wall will be dedicated to tabletop RPGs on one side, and board games on the other. We plan on carrying things that are hard to find elsewhere, including niche miniatures and tabletop games made by people other than Hasbro. 

Our counter, which will be where the slatwall is now (the counters themselves are in the back right now), will be split between card games and collectibles.

And speaking of niche, hard-to-find products, one of the things I’m most excited about is our local creator display. We have a floor display that’ll be a showcase for local artists, authors, and other creators. We want to show our customers that they don’t need to order things from half a world away to get affordable, handmade crafts, and we want to show our community that we’re willing to put our money (and our floor space) where our mouth is, and regularly stock local creations.

We’re opening in stages, but the front will be ready for stock within the week, and we should be open very soon. However, like I mentioned back at the beginning, we’re running low on funds, and we’re looking to the community for help in the final stretch. Whether you’re local gamers, friends of the staff, or just people who want to see a community-centric place like ours exist in the world, please consider donating to our GoFundMe. We’re also amenable to loans, so if that’s more your speed, feel free to email us at nowheresstore@gmail.com

Whelp, that’s it for now! Thanks for spending your time on this post, and happy gaming.

[upbeatmelancholy]

As I procrastinate this lovely, blisteringly hot evening, I would like to share my tips and tricks for everyone who does not have AC this summer. My qualifications are that I grew up without AC for much of my childhood and am currently living without AC right now.

House:

Houses love to get hot so here's a few quick tips to help keep it, and you, cool.

Use the weather to your advantage. When the sun goes down, open your windows, especially in second, third, and higher stories. Heat settles up high so let it out while it is a little cooler. HOWEVER: make sure to close them early (like 4 am early) as the sun is coming up to maximize the amount of cool air that stays in the house.

Make your house a bunker. Close up all your windows, blinds, and cover windows during the day. This especially applies to windows that get direct morning or midday sun. It likes to roast your house so stop it from doing that.

Spend as much time as possible on lower floors. If you have a basement, especially an unfinished one, it can be your best friend. Cooler air sinks, less sunlight, and usually underground are winning combos for basements. Either way though, the lower you are the cooler it is usually.

If you can/need to: insulate the outside, circulate the inside. What that means is create barriers to the outside to stop heat from entering. Put up rolled towels in windows or doors that are not sealed well. Inside, keep doors open and have fans going to circulate the air. This helps it feel cooler and stops it from becoming suffocatingly still.

Don't cook if you can avoid it, or cook outside. Definitely do not bake. If you need to cook or bake, try to do it after the sun sets so you can open the windows and air out the house. Alternatively, use a barbeque, grill, or hotplate outside. There are tons of great recipes and you can do almost all your cooking out there.

Yourself:

As a person, here are some things you can do to keep cool.

Drink a metric ton of water. Self-explanatory but you're going to be sweating a fair amount no matter what so make sure to replace it.

Eat cool foods. I don't necessarily mean popsicles and stuff, although those are great. But consider eating things that are lighter, easy to prepare, and easy to eat (one of my staples this time of year is beans, salsa, and tortilla chips). Also eat things with high water contents like apples, they give a feeling of coolness and help hydrate.

Shower warm. This may seem counter-intuitive but by raising your internal temperature it helps your body acclimatize. Always give yourself like 10 seconds of freezing cold water at the end just before you get out though to feel super cool and amazing.

Wear light clothes. Or wear less clothes. Whatever floats your boat. Wear materials that are breathable (more natural materials like cotton) and avoid heavy materials (like polyesters and wool).

Along with clothes, avoid putting things on your head, wrists, and feet if possible. These are places where we lose a lot of body heat and we are trying to encourage that, so don't cover them. A great thing to do is to blow gently on your wrists, it sometimes gives you the sensation of cooling down slightly when you're just too hot.

If you are overheating, use cool water or towel wrapped ice. Specifically near your face, neck, wrists, elbows, back of the knees, and feet. All of these places have arteries and veins close to the surface so it will help you cool down faster. ALWAYS wrap your ice in a towel or move it around on your skin so you don't get burnt by the ice.

Lay down on hardwood or tile floors. It feels great and helps to leech the heat from your body. Tile works better then hardwood for this but anything is better then carpets and rugs.

Right before bed:

I know tons of people have a hard time sleeping in the heat too so here's some tricks just for that too!

Get Wet. Right before going to bed, have a shower, go swimming, run through a sprinkler, or even wipe yourself down with a wet cloth. Do this right before you go to bed and it helps keep your body cool while you fall asleep. Just make sure to leave yourself a little wet and don't dry off fully so the water can act like sweat and cool you down.

Move where you sleep. If you live in a multi-story house or a room in your home is cooler guess what that's your bedroom now. Find the coolest place to sleep and set up shop there instead. It's better to get a good night's rest then not.

Alternatively, find a different surface to sleep on. If your bed is too hot and you can handle it, move to a tile or wood floor. They stay much cooler then anything made of fabrics.

Sleep without blankets and other people wherever possible. If you still need to or want to sleep with someone, don't share blankets so you don't share body heat. Making a wall of pillows is also great to keep bodies away from each other's heat.

Use a fan! Whether you direct it straight at you or have it oscillate it makes a world of difference!

I hope that helps someone somewhere. This comes from a lot of years of experimentation and errors, but it works for me at least. If anyone has anything else to add throw it in here too!

[blue-happy-octopus]

Taking heart in the face of AI

There has been a lot of doom-spreading about AI and content creation and I wanted to share something positive I think people have been sleeping on.

Today, more than any time in all of human history, we have unprecedented access to the most amazing collection of expertly crafted, immersive, and dramatic stories (movies). We have access to literally thousands of movies, with hundreds of new ones being added to that collection every year.

But these movies with budgets in the hundreds of millions fight against cat videos for our attention.

By any reasonable metric, an expertly crafted, pixel perfect, entrancing movie should crush a cat video. And the torrent of amazing films that are released every year should be crush anything made with a budget of less than a million dollars into the dust. But we still watch cat videos.

Because people don’t actually consume content for the content itself. We don’t just watch videos because we want to enjoy the process of watching the video. We watch videos because we like to feel things vicariously through others who are passionate about it. We watch videos of people finding their own cats adorable because that feeling is contagious. I love fandom art in part because it’s art of characters I know and love, but mostly because I know the art is being made by people who are just motivated by passion and who I can relate to.

AI is coming, and it’s gonna take jobs, and it’s gonna change things. But I know that the people that love drawing just because it’s fun are gonna keep doing it. And as long as someone is passionate about something, people are going to pay to see and support that passion.

And that’s also how we will tell real from fake. You can tell a real passionate creator from the everything about them. An AI doesn’t have a blog full of WIP sketches that slowly turn into real pieces. An AI doesn’t have a story about how an interaction with their daughter led to creating that piece. An AI doesn’t have a cohesive signature style that means that even when they draw a noire style comic way outside their usual territory, they still fit in with all their other work. An AI won’t reveal 5 years later at a book signing that actually the reason the twins are never individually named is because they kept getting them mixed up so they scrapped the names and liked it better that way.

Real artists and creatives don’t just create work out of nowhere. And it’s because every piece fits into a constantly evolving mosaic of the artists life that we love their art so much. It’s not that one tile, it’s the beautiful pattern of all the tiles. And it will be a long time before we have enough training data to make an AI that mimics that.

[thessalian]

Thess vs Renovations

No, not the ones my stepfather's doing.

...Well. Not only the ones my stepfather's doing.

We're hacking away at the typing queue and while we're getting the numbers down somewhat, we've got a long row to hoe on this one. It doesn't help that some of the doctors are ... just ... I mean... I think it's that they're expected to get through a whole metric fucktonne of reports and they rush and kind of screw up the dictation. I mean, on top of the regular crop of Undesirables, I got:

The guy best known for the massively long atrocities outdid himself today - managed to cut out a whole section of dictation in such a way that it could technically be a valid sentence unless you're actually looking at what your typing and going, "Wait ... no, that's not right", seems to have left out some of his usual detail on one of the bits of block key, and referenced a piece of specimen that doesn't actually exist (he sited slice 20; the specimen was cut into 13 slices). So I had to type that, work out where the errors were, bold them, print-to-PDF the messed-up report and send it to him so he could review it properly. Because going into the report directly to view and even change it never crosses this man's radar as a possibility.

A relatively new one ... I don't know how she did it, but she managed to record a piece of the block key before the rest of the dictation. This led me to thinking she'd just neglected to dictate it, but no, turns out it just ... was like that.

Then there's the one who's usually fairly good but occasionally has a habit of dictating multiple cases on one dictation file. This is a no-no, by the way. Especially when the cases are on two entirely separate systems, one of which I CANNOT ACCESS. I tried typing the one that I could, adding a comment giving the exact time stamp of where the one for the other system started, and then dumping it into their queue ... but they dumped it back into our queue and since I can't access their system, I don't know whether they typed it and sent it back or just didn't read the comment and thought someone else fucked up. I left an email with Scruffman about that one; he can deal with that shit tomorrow.

And then, among all this ... well. A few weeks ago, I got a little note stuffed into my mailbox. This note was from the guy who lives one floor above me, saying, "Hey, I'm doing some renovations on my flat; it shouldn't be too noisy except for just this one day when we're ripping tile out of the bathroom. Sorry for the inconvenience". The renovations started on 30th October, and probably won't be done any time immediately soon. Which is unfortunate, because today was about two hours of power drill, directly above my head. This made the wall vibrate and also made an ungodly amount of noise. So much for 'just this one day'. I'm pretty sure I'm developing a migraine.

But was that the end of it? Nope. I'm bashing away at the typing when my mobile rings. It's my stepdad, asking if he can pop in to look at the fuse box for a minute. Of course, he hasn't thought to bring his copy of the keys to this flat, so I'm going to have to let him in. Which means a knock on the door, which I will probably have trouble hearing between my helps-me-focus music, the dictation I'm listening to, and the power drilling. So he says he'll be there in ten minutes so I get a few bits of dictation done and then turn off the stereo with maybe a minute or two to spare. No knock. Time passes. I'm afraid to start the typing back up in case I miss the door. Apparently, "ten minutes or so" for my stepfather means twenty minutes. Also, "can I look at the fuse box for a minute?" is "can I bring an electrician in here to poke around at things for about fifteen minutes?" During which I was obviously loath to just leave them to it because a) I want to hear what's going to get done, b) I'm worried that he'll have to poke something and shut off the power, and I don't want to be mid-dictation when that happens, and c) I have to shut and lock the door behind them when they leave. I still don't know what that was in aid of but apparently there's going to be some electrical work in here, and I don't know when.

(He thanked me for the cookies and complimented them highly, though. So that was nice.)

My head hurts. My everything hurts. And I still have to go and take out the trash. But at least I can tell myself "one more day and I get a week off". Most of which I will probably spend in bed, or on the sofa, not doing a fucking thing. I need to recover and I have had zero chance to do that lately. Just ... today was apparently designed to be as inconvenient to me as possible. Yaaaaaaaay.

[jenakuns]

Starship launch woot woot 3am discussion

Yeah so uh holy shit. That was definitely a launch that happened. It's such a weird program; extreme by most metrics that it's kinda hard to think about. The main thing that appears to be catching people up here is RUD vs explosion. I mean, RUD been used for a while now and is sort of a tongue in cheek joke, but I could understand why this being the first exposure could catch people.

There's also this post which is cosmically funny. All the complaining about Blue Origin no orbit has come back to bite the SpaceX stans because jokes on them; people are now confusing the two and saying SpaceX no orbit lol. Cheers @greetings-inferiors you gave us a good laugh.

But that's tumblrs reaction, what's mine? Idk, I laughed a fair bit. Schedules were always shot to hell, so I'm not too fussed in that regard. The rocket itself doesn't matter at this stage; it's the OLM damage, which I suppose separates this other launch failures. I still think H3 failure really reduced my expectations of first launches outcomes. If a country that's been doing launches for 30 years can't successfully launch a fairly conservative evolution of an existing rocket; then all bets are off for everyone else.

It's always nice to have a reset of expectations for the entire program so that means when things happen they can be appreciated rather than trodden over. (cough cough Falcon 9)

Launch wise, it was incredibly scuffed. 3 engines out from the get go which resulted in an extended burn at OLM to gain sufficient TTW resulting in that fat crater. The engines out also resulted in a slide that is scuffed and scary for a vehicle of Starship size. But the flight continued. Then more engines out, an hydraulic power unit explosion, some more engines, and oh yeah the tiles. (I don't care about the tiles). And yet the vehicle still flew. It's showed robustness in the scuffed of situations of it's own creation. When you roll around with B9 and the reliability enhancements, it actually is fairly interesting. They took engine explosions or at least flame outs in their stride, but you know; don't have them in the first place am I right.

The question is now when next flight and that really determines the value of this one. Because it's always the next product™. But presumably the Raptor ops and propellant management will be good outcomes. Also not to use HPU, but that was already a learned lesson. This failure just feels unusual because of the scale I suppose.* (I mean it's automatically notable because Musk rocket failure, but that's beside the point). Like we've had RS-1, ZQ-2, Terran 1, LauncherOne, H3 and Vega failures recently; what's different. Well, entirely different classes. But still, nowhere near media circuses. *+the damage to the ground infrastructure.

To summarize, the vehicles job was to gain experience on the performance of the many subsystems that make up this vehicle. Like autogenous pressurization on a vehicle of this scale as it handles many Raptors (failures) is no small feat. The next 2 Starships have given up heat shields and payloads, because they're also now exclusively marked as flight test vehicles as well. There was a lot of things that went wrong, but it still gave a fair bit of insight into the vehicle for SpaceX. And if that was just it; it would be fine because the next vehicle would be rolling to pad in a couple months. But this happened.

And that means a fair bit of work in repairing, upgrading and potential legal issues to grind out, which will cause delays in its own right. This is what pushes the needle in the direction of not worth it. But shit has happened and will continue to happen; the program will just move on.

Ooo forgot; no new HLS renders; fuckin bullshit world we live in.