#Real time war updates

[girlactionfigure]

ISRAEL REALTIME - noon updates - Nov 1

— IRAN THREATENS… 1:00 PM launch threat from Yemen.  These threats are often just propaganda, and Israel is showing effective defenses.  But it would be wise to be in locations with shelter available just in case in the 1-2pm time frame.  Missile flight time from Yemen to Israel is 14 minutes (meaning if they actually launch at 1pm, it wouldn’t be to Israel until 1:14 pm.)

— EILAT LIMITS SCHOOL… Eilat mayor limits middle and high school classes, do to school capacity versus shelter capacity with the current missile attacks that have occurred.

— IDF ATTACKS… Gaza.  Heavy exchanges of fire are taking place between our forces and terrorists in the west of Gaza City in the center of the Gaza Strip.  Heavy artillery fire in the battle zones in the west of Gaza City.  Reports of dozens of terrorists killed in the last hour in the northern Gaza Strip.  (Arab channel sources - NOT official IDF info.)

— FOREIGN PASSPORT HOLDERS LEAVING GAZA… Egyptian media: The departure of holders of foreign citizenships from the Gaza Strip through the Rafah crossing has begun.  Subsequent video shows hundreds waiting.  Al Jazeera: 80 injured and 400 foreign nationals have left through the Rafah crossing.  The British Ministry of Foreign Affairs: Gaza residents who hold British citizenship will leave it in stages "over the next few days”.

Simultaneously with the departure of the wounded and the holders of foreign citizenships, the entry of aid trucks from Egypt to Gaza was resumed.

— INTERNET UP… Palestinian channels: partial return of the Internet network in several areas of the Gaza Strip.

— ROCKETS from Gaza… Ashdod, Ashkelon.  Large barrage.

— JAPAN FOREIGN MINISTER TO VISIT.

[tossawary]

One of my favorite parts of the original "Star Wars" trilogy is when it cuts to Imperial officers and troopers just having... really shitty days at Evil Work. Love watching some guy obviously desperately rethinking his career path and struggling to stand still as Darth Vader Force-chokes the guy standing next to him over a video call. (They clearly Did Not Know that he could do that.) I get to imagine people within the Empire getting the email that Darth Vader is visiting their workplace and everyone immediately trying to book their vacation days through some crappy bureaucratic portal.

[r0semultiverse]

Hey, Jake & Jack fans, is this anything?

Both men imprisoned (literal & metaphorical).

Both offered an out from their current predicament by an outside force (arguably in the case of Brain Ghost Dirk).

Both have loose ties to Lord English visually.

Yellow initial glow & Gamzee involvement too.

Sometimes a guy just needs to explode (same pose too).

Both dual wielding weapons.

That same said weapon type (for Jack Noir) having killed Jane Crocker.

It's really looking like Jake is going to do her in.

I would also like to point out that we've had interactions involving these three (Jane, Jake, and Brain Ghost Dirk) before that consisted of similar topics & themes.

Brain Ghost Dirk implying that he's just there as moral support, a manifestation of Jake's powers, and as a coping mechanism. Jane also talking about ruling an empire with him while talking down to him, similar to how she saw and/or still sees him in Beyond Canon's Candy timeline. Jake also being uncertain about doing anything to harm her despite all the bad things she's doing.

Brain Ghost Dirk going away tells us that Jake's more hopeful than he's ever been. This is the moment where he is the most sure of his decisions than he's ever been in his life, whatever those decisions may be in regards to Jane and how to handle this situation.

He is probably going to shoot Jane down, quite literally. I would also argue that after all this time, the lad isn't beating the Lord English allegations. We might as well have a parallel of him killing Jane much like how Jack Noir killed her right before he got possessed by Lil Cal & given some of Lord English's immense power.

Alternatively maybe we'll get to see what the power of hope or hope bullets can do to someone whose done so much wrong & come so far off the deep end in terms of moral wrongdoings. Maybe with every shot that hits her, she'll begin to be swayed to the side of good & start to self-reflect.

I'm still not fully convinced that Gamzee actually cured Tavros' peanut allergy, I mean just look at the panel.

This could absolutely be interpreted as Jake injecting his hope power into the epipen and by proxy injecting both his power & the epipen into his son! If younger Jake is strong enough to defeat Grimbark Jade, then adult Jake might just be strong enough to defeat a peanut allergy is all I'm saying! In fact, now that I'm rambling about it, this seems like the more likely outcome is Jake's hope power swaying or (in the very least) confusing Jane mid-fight. Hope bullets, they would look cool & would be pretty strong!

The power of believing in others & wanting things to change can be a strong tool indeed, Mister English.

If there's one person who still believes in changing Jane's mind (or bringing her back to proper canonicity depending on how you interpret the recent lore), it would be Jake English, the believer.

Okay, maybe this is something! Tally ho!

[spotaus]

Finally making a timeliness design-guide for Geno from ec-4o.verse! (Just a wip tho)

[kemendin]

Update - Chapters III-V

Reaching // Remnants // Rescue

Jedi Knight Caspian Serapis is at last reunited with his missing crewmates, Kira Carsen and Lord Scourge, when the two make an unexpected appearance on Corellia to rescue him from the wreckage of the Meridian Complex. As Cas recovers and reconnects with his companions in the quiet aftermath of the battle, it isn’t just his own long-lost yearnings that are pushed to light. Now, after so many years apart, both Cas and Scourge must decide - does the path ahead lie again in their curious bond as allies, or as something more?

MAIN POST | Read from the beginning

Read on AO3 (short excerpt below cut)

Far, far below, at the base of the spire, a bulky, grey-armoured figure hurtles past squads of Republic troops towards the entrance. The soldiers are too startled to do more than fumble with their weapons as the blaze of a scarlet lightsaber flashes past, too disoriented to do more than stare after him and wonder at the idea that they have, somehow, just escaped the wrath of an obvious Sith.

An auburn-haired Jedi is in swift pursuit; but oddly, her double lightsaber is sheathed on her belt, and she makes no move to attack. Her only gestures are frantic flappings of her hands, motioning for anyone nearby to get back, out of the way of the Sith now charging into the body of the spire.

“He won’t hurt you! Let him through, just let him through!”

She is partially correct. The Republic soldiers, the CorSec forces, the Green Jedi - they are not his enemies, and he won’t hurt them - unless they stand in his way.

His chest heaving, his lungs seared with smoke, Scourge barrels out of the corridor linking to the monorail and into the spire’s core. His senses are flinching under the barrage of warning slamming at him through the Force. For three hundred years, he had felt it with the clarity of someone reaching through a sheet of transparisteel - muted, yet immediate, the luxury of drawing on its energies without fearing to be overcome by it. But now there is no such barrier, and the Force is driving at him, churning through his emotions like boots losing their purchase in the mud of a battlefield. Telling him that he must go faster, that there is danger, and he cannot afford to falter for even an instant -

The screech of collapsing metal assaults him the moment he’s inside. He is forced to pull up sharply and dive out of the way as a twisted length of durasteel crashes down near the entrance. Rolling to his feet, he jerks a wild glance upward - and his heart stops.

An immense piece of broken machinery is plummeting from the height of the spire, accompanied by an array of structural debris. And falling in the midst of it all, small and fragile and frighteningly limp, like a child’s toy cast away by an uncaring hand -

“CASPIAN!”

There’s no time to move, no time to act, no time to do anything except bellow the Jedi’s name, before the echoes are lost in the devastating impact of the generator as it crashes into the bottom floor of the spire.

Even within his hastily erected Force shield, Scourge is driven back into the nearest wall as the resulting shockwave slams into him. Smaller, still-significant chunks of the Meridian Complex rain down, crushing a dozen or more unlucky individuals not quick enough to get away. 

The entire structure of the spire trembles violently around Scourge as he struggles to regain his footing. The air is thickening again with smoke, even as the fire suppression systems tamp down on the flames sputtering within the wreckage.

“CASPIAN!” he howls again, clawing at the wall behind him for balance, his throat and his chest tearing as one.

[exopelagic]

cue screaming abt legends Z-A

[lilcommander]

"It's been a year"

Those words have been swarming around Marriac all day, every hour or so the thought would pop in before she brushed it aside. It wasnt until the sun was setting, its orange glow illuminating the former Pact Commander as she was finishing up laundry when it finally hit her.

"It's been a year" A year. A year since she travelled to Cantha, a year since the damn near end of the world, a year since she was able to see Aurene as just her daughter. And here she was, in a quiet corner of Lion's Arch, home, folding laundry.

It felt...nice, she thought, noticing that she was wiping a tear away. No world ending threats, no power hungry liches, no crazy creatures dragged from the mists that she felt compelled to stop on her own.

"It's been a year" Well, six months really, to work on her own projects that have been collecting dust for Alchemy knows how long. A year to just....Be.

"Gods, its been a year"

It's quiet. Save for the soft sound of sniffles and ruffled clothes. Marriac doesnt even notice the sunset going past the cliffs. After a few minutes she takes the tear-stained shirt away from her face. It's gonna need another wash, now.

"It really has been a year, has it?"

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”

20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired. I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:

https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/is_drm_evil.html

I replied in public, telling him that he'd misunderstood. This wasn't an issue of ideological purity – it was about good reviewing practice. Wired was telling readers to buy a product because it had features x, y and z, but at any time in the future, without warning, without recourse, the vendor could switch off any of those features:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/29/cory-responds-to-wired-editor-on-drm/

I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:

WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.

Wired didn't take me up on this suggestion.

But I was right. The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations. Inkjet printers were always a sleazy business, but once these printers got directly connected to the internet, companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Now, this scam wouldn't work if you could just put things back the way they were before the "update," which is where the DRM comes in. A thicket of IP laws make reverse-engineering DRM-encumbered products into a felony. Combine always-on network access with indiscriminate criminalization of user modification, and the enshittification will follow, as surely as night follows day.

This is the root of all the right to repair shenanigans. Sure, companies withhold access to diagnostic codes and parts, but codes can be extracted and parts can be cloned. The real teeth in blocking repair comes from the law, not the tech. The company that makes McDonald's wildly unreliable McFlurry machines makes a fortune charging franchisees to fix these eternally broken appliances. When a third party threatened this racket by reverse-engineering the DRM that blocked independent repair, they got buried in legal threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Everybody loves this racket. In Poland, a team of security researchers at the OhMyHack conference just presented their teardown of the anti-repair features in NEWAG Impuls locomotives. NEWAG boobytrapped their trains to try and detect if they've been independently serviced, and to respond to any unauthorized repairs by bricking themselves:

https://mamot.fr/@q3k@hackerspace.pl/111528162905209453

Poland is part of the EU, meaning that they are required to uphold the provisions of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive, including Article 6, which bans this kind of reverse-engineering. The researchers are planning to present their work again at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg this month – Germany is also a party to the EUCD. The threat to researchers from presenting this work is real – but so is the threat to conferences that host them:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/researchers-face-legal-threats-over-sdmi-hack/

20 years ago, Chris Anderson told me that it was unrealistic to expect tech companies to refuse demands for DRM from the entertainment companies whose media they hoped to play. My argument – then and now – was that any tech company that sells you a gadget that can have its features revoked is defrauding you. You're paying for x, y and z – and if they are contractually required to remove x and y on demand, they are selling you something that you can't rely on, without making that clear to you.

But it's worse than that. When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they invite both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remotely, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so. The fact that there are no penalties for doing so makes it impossible for the better people in that meeting to win the ensuing argument, leading to the moral injury of seeing a product you care about reduced to a pile of shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

But even if everyone at that table is a swell egg who wouldn't dream of enshittifying the product, the existence of a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature makes the product vulnerable to external actors who will demand that it be used. Back in 2022, Adobe informed its customers that it had lost its deal to include Pantone colors in Photoshop, Illustrator and other "software as a service" packages. As a result, users would now have to start paying a monthly fee to see their own, completed images. Fail to pay the fee and all the Pantone-coded pixels in your artwork would just show up as black:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

Adobe blamed this on Pantone, and there was lots of speculation about what had happened. Had Pantone jacked up its price to Adobe, so Adobe passed the price on to its users in the hopes of embarrassing Pantone? Who knows? Who can know? That's the point: you invested in Photoshop, you spent money and time creating images with it, but you have no way to know whether or how you'll be able to access those images in the future. Those terms can change at any time, and if you don't like it, you can go fuck yourself.

These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further." Adobe chose to design its software so it would be vulnerable to this kind of demand, and then its customers paid for that choice. Sure, Pantone are dicks, but this is Adobe's fault. They stuck a KICK ME sign to your back, and Pantone obliged.

This keeps happening and it's gonna keep happening. Last week, Playstation owners who'd bought (or "bought") Warner TV shows got messages telling them that Warner had walked away from its deal to sell videos through the Playstation store, and so all the videos they'd paid for were going to be deleted forever. They wouldn't even get refunds (to be clear, refunds would also be bullshit – when I was a bookseller, I didn't get to break into your house and steal the books I'd sold you, not even if I left some cash on your kitchen table).

Sure, Warner is an unbelievably shitty company run by the single most guillotineable executive in all of Southern California, the loathsome David Zaslav, who oversaw the merger of Warner with Discovery. Zaslav is the creep who figured out that he could make more money cancelling completed movies and TV shows and taking a tax writeoff than he stood to make by releasing them:

https://aftermath.site/there-is-no-piracy-without-ownership

Imagine putting years of your life into making a program – showing up on set at 5AM and leaving your kids to get their own breakfast, performing stunts that could maim or kill you, working 16-hour days during the acute phase of the covid pandemic and driving home in the night, only to have this absolute turd of a man delete the program before anyone could see it, forever, to get a minor tax advantage. Talk about moral injury!

But without Sony's complicity in designing a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature into the Playstation, Zaslav's war on art and creative workers would be limited to material that hadn't been released yet. Thanks to Sony's awful choices, David Zaslav can break into your house, steal your movies – and he doesn't even have to leave a twenty on your kitchen table.

The point here – the point I made 20 years ago to Chris Anderson – is that this is the foreseeable, inevitable result of designing devices for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades. Anyone who was paying attention should have figured that out in the GW Bush administration. Anyone who does this today? Absolute flaming garbage.

Sure, Zaslav deserves to be staked out over an anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup. But save the next anthill for the Sony exec who shipped a product that would let Zaslav come into your home and rob you. That piece of shit knew what they were doing and they did it anyway. Fuck them. Sideways. With a brick.

Meanwhile, the studios keep making the case for stealing movies rather than paying for them. As Tyler James Hill wrote: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing":

https://bsky.app/profile/tylerjameshill.bsky.social/post/3kflw2lvam42n

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill

Image: Alan Levine (modified) https://pxhere.com/en/photo/218986

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[brightclearline]

Update!

[girlactionfigure]

ISRAEL REALTIME - afternoon updates - Nov 1

of horrors, torture and murder from the invasion were shown to members of the Knesset.  Following the viewing multiple members were shown crying, breaking down, stunned, ill.  (This video is not publicly available.)

After the screening of the film, the MKs met with three senior psychologists knowledgeable in emergency psychological treatment, at the request of several MKs who are unable to recover from the images.

— MORE HEROES FALL… death toll of soldiers killed in the Gaza ground operation so far to 15.  Rumors of soldiers missing or captured are baseless as far as known. 

— FINANCE MINISTER… Smotrich continues to REFUSE to release tax money to the Palestinian Authority.

— SECURITY MINISTER… Ben Gvir continues to REFUSE to approve work permits for 8,000 Shomron/Yehuda (West Bank) Palestinians to work in Israel - during the war.

In both cases the argument is “if you don’t there will be incidents in Shomron/Yehuda (West Bank).  

Hanan Greenwood: For a year and a half, various sources have been warning that they will "burn Judea and Samaria”. The hilltop youth, they say, are setting Judea and Samaria on fire. Ben Gvir, they claim, will set Judah and Samaria on fire. And now Smotrich, it turns out, will set Judea and Samaria on fire.

In the last three weeks 132 Palestinians were killed in Shomron/Yehuda, the majority armed. For a year and a half we have been in a wave of brutal terrorism.  When will we realize that the Palestinians are already setting fire and trying to slaughter us while we are looking for the blame on us?

— BATTLE INFO GAZA… According to a Russian source, Israel is close to reaching the sea south of Gaza City.

— AND LEBANON… The IDF is now attacking Hezbollah targets in Beita al-Sha'ab, southern Lebanon..

— EU SAYS… We are horrified by the high death toll in the bombing in Jabaliya. Safety and protection of civilian lives is not only a moral obligation but also a legal obligation”.

— GAZA SAYS… Some of the wounded who had to leave the Gaza Strip through the Rafah crossing to Egypt died of their wounds in the ambulance because the Egyptians made the crossing conditional on presentation of a passport.

— EVACUEE GRANT PROCESS… Following the publication in the "Main Edition": the Labor and Welfare Committee approved the mechanism of the grant to evacuees, the manner of its payment and its financing by the State Treasury, through Bituach Leumi. The amount in shekels per day - 200 for an adult and 100 for a child, retroactive.

— BEZEQ PAUSES… has now announced that following the decision to cancel the charges for the residents of the near Gaza towns and Sderot, it is canceling all charges for the coming month to its customers from all the northern settlements who were evacuated.

[vhstown]

please stop scrolling and take the time to read this.

i don't think people understand the extent of the horror happening in palestine right now. "death" means nothing to people because of desensitisation so let me just tell you what white phosphorus is. it's being used in israeli munitions and has been and will continue to be fired across gaza and the palestinian borders.

white phosphorus burns when it comes into contact with oxygen (at nearly 800°C or 1500°F. the human body can withstand ~50°C for reference.) the air you breathe in ignites and it is near impossible extinguish. it sticks to clothing and skin and is very difficult to remove because it will continue to ignite in air. it burns flesh up to the bone and even past the bone because it penetrates tissue and is absorbed VERY easily. if you inhale it it'll destroy your respiratory tract and lungs. it can cause failure in multiple organs including the liver, kidneys and heart. it is being released in one of the most densely populated places on earth.

the only way to treat someone exposed to white phosphorus is to submerge them in saline or water and to pick out the substance with forceps, and when you undress a wound the substance can re-ignite. this is just ONE weapon that is being used to kill palestinian people right now. palestine does not have access to medical care, humanitarian aid, power, or internet. their hospitals are being bombed. gaza is one of the most densely populated places in the world with over 50% of the population being children. many children are the sole survivors of their families. there are videos of children experiencing panic attacks and symptoms of ptsd. the fact that israel has committed war crimes in plain sight means that we can only imagine what will happen to the palestinians in complete darkness.

israel has and will continue to deny this. your interests and fandom will still be here, you will wake up tomorrow morning and see your friends and family, but an entire nation of people are being wiped off the map. being silent is being complacent. reblog, spread information, tell people in real life, attend protests, sign petitions, call your government offices, at the very least be angry and upset and horrified because once you become numb and indifferent and hopeless the oppressors will have already won.

what's happening right now is more than a genocide and once it becomes a part of history we'll wonder how the world let this happen. genocides have been part of all nations. just because it is far away does not mean you don't have to be concerned. the fact that YOUR governments and YOUR idols and the people around YOU are supporting the mass eradication of an entire group of people should scare you. it shouldn't make you feel anything less than sick and angry and disgusted. DO something about it, no matter how small you feel your voice is, because palestinians no longer have one.

[edit] links to some helpful reblogs: one & two

post on how you can help palestine

learn about palestine with this masterlist of info

+ a further reblog of mine

[edit 2] about palestinians "not having a voice" at the time i wrote this post internet connection was cut off entirely and even journalists weren't able to report for a period of time — that is all i meant by that. they of course have a voice and i never meant to undermine how people are risking their lives in gaza to get information out there and i apologise if thats what people took from it, it was not my intention but it is entirely my bad. please continue to spread information and updates from gaza as they come.

[embrosegraves]

𝒜𝓊𝓈𝓈𝒾𝑒𝓈 𝐵𝑒𝓁𝑜𝓃𝑔 𝐼𝓃 𝒩𝒶𝓋𝓎

Oscar thought he wouldn't have to deal with anything similar to Alpine-Gate ever again. He was wrong.

Oscar Piastri x Horner!Reader

-> Everything Goes Wrong (pt1) -> Oscar breaks up with his girlfriend and McLaren start treating him like Daniel, but then he meets someone new. posted: 3 Feb 2024

-> A Storm Is Brewing (pt2) -> Mark gives the Go-Ahead for possible negotiations with Red Bull, McLaren pull an Alpine, and Oscar makes a decision. posted: 5 Feb 2024

-> The Build Up (pt3) -> In a large bowl mix Contract Negotiations with two parts Announcements and three parts Life Updates, let cook for an hour and while it's still hot, sprinkle some jealousy and betrayal over the top as a nice garnish. posted: 12 Feb 2024

-> Pre-season Bonding (pt4) -> Where teams are announced, dinners are held and Oscar finds himself surrounded by people who are determined to help him on his way to greatness. posted: 3 Mar 2024

-> Get This Party Started (pt5) -> The season starts and it's a relatively calm affair, until it's not. Some things can be predicted while others show up like an unwanted Force Ghost from Star Wars. posted: 29 Mar 2024

-> Down Time Down Under (pt6) -> Oscar finds that having a crush having less than platonic feelings for your boss's only adult daughter is apparently free real estate for some of F1's biggest gossips posted: 10 May 2024

-> Shift Happens (pt7) -> Miami and Imola bring new challenges to the grid. Challenges such as finally initiating the romance part of your potential relationship- oh and being on the podium with your ex-teammate too. posted: 19 May 2024

-> Warning Sainz (pt8) -> Monaco, Canada and Spain oh my! Oscar decides to continue his quest for world domination (claiming home races) and prove that he's the best boyfriend his ex ever lost. posted: 23 June 2024

-> Baby Got Track (pt9) -> Adding two more GPs to his list of home races, Oscar realises that he's A-OK with having half his bags packed with things that aren't his. posted: 10 July 2024

-> Silly Goose Extraordinaire (pt10) -> When Y/n isn't there for two races, Oscar discovers that he's far more attached than he thought he was. At least it's almost the mid-year break! posted: 5 Aug 2024

-> Red Bull Gives You Wings (pt11)(pending) -> Mid-year break brings a lot of strong emotions, but there's only one thing that could make them even more intense... posted:

-> Simply Lovely (pt12) -> posted:

-> Big Ric Energy (pt13) -> posted:

-> Red Bull School Of Racing (pt14) -> posted:

-> 1st's The Worst, 2nd's The Best (pt15) -> posted:

-> We Shenan'd Once, Let's Shenanigan (pt16) -> posted:

This is an Ongoing Series!

[what-even-is-thiss]

Brian David Gilbert accidentally reinventing ska aside, I do wonder why there was barely any new music written after the 1960s in the fallout universe. To the point where people in the wasteland aren’t just listening to 200 year old music but 300 year old music. During fallout 4 if you’re listening to diamond city radio when the one original song comes on Travis freaks out because he’s not used to playing tracks by people that are still alive.

If I’m gonna come up with an in-universe explanation I might guess that it’s an extreme example of what might happen if a nation devalues art to the point that cultural stagnation occurs.

Creativity is so discouraged in favor of science, warfare, engineering, and mathematics that nothing new gets produced. Old patterns for clothes are used for over 100 years, hairstyle books and learning materials are never updated, almost no new music is written. Deviating even slightly from American exceptionalism and style is heresy. New ideas outside of the sciences are stupid and to be mocked. What few artists remain just learn how to recreate what’s already been done.

I mean a vault full of musicians wasn’t even a control vault. There was no real effort to preserve musical knowledge. They were subjects in a mind control experiment.

And this attitude gets carried into the big afterwards. After the Great War all that several generations have ever known is the devaluing of creativity and new ideas. And everyone is too tired and focused on survival to try anything new.

So Magnolia writing new music? That’s weird. That’s really weird. It’s been weird for over 300 years at that point.

And if I’m remembering correctly, the only people you meet in the games writing poetry are writing really bad poetry. But in this sort of context, that makes sense. There’s this idea in writing circles that when you take a long break from writing you need to allow yourself some time to write very badly in order to clean the garbage out of your brain and get your creativity muscles exercised again.

The fallout universe is experiencing this on a global massive societal scale. Jerry the Punk writing bad poetry comparing a girl to a deathclaw and Beatrice writing a bad poem about being stuck underground is a sign of slow but steady healing. The fallout world is getting a lot of garbage out of its system from over 300 years of cultural stagnation and learning how to make stuff again.

[matan4il]

My grandparents all survived the Holocaust. A part of our family did not. I chose to dedicate years of my life to studying and educating against such hatred, violence and atrocities.

I know what a genocide is.

I also know what a defensive war in residential urban settings against a fanatic, genocidal terrorist organization using its own civilians as human shields is.

And I know the difference. Because yes, there is a difference, even as there might be pockets of incidental injustice within that war (as is the case with all wars).

And it doesn't matter how many times the g-word will be used unjustifiably, it cannot make me confuse those two things. It also cannot convince me that people here confusing the two is any sort of a moral stance. It's just ignorant, has proven itself harmful to Jews, and is also doing a real disservice to victims of actual genocides.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

[under-your-floorboards]

So the Camp Half-Blood infirmary has to have medical records of all the campers. Medications, blood type, allergies, injury history, the whole thing. They have to update it every time a camper goes through a physical trauma so it’ll translate into real world records through the mist. Right?

Don’t think about how Will Solace is not only the camp doctor, but the mortician as well.

Don’t think about how he probably had to write out the death records of all the children victims of the wars, people he knew and saw around camp.

Don’t think about how a lot of them were his siblings.

Don’t think about how he had to look over each body to label cause of death for camp records.

Don’t think about how there were nearly a hundred casualties from their side, and many were still unrecovered.

Don’t think about how he became the head healer and Apollo Counsellor in a single day despite having a dozen siblings older than him just a few days before.

Don’t think about how he had to return to an empty cabin.

Don’t think about how he was only 13 years old.