#Structural mechanism

[hipsternumbertwo]

The artistry it took to make these puppets... Amazing.

[discard-celestia]

USE MOUTHWASH / DO NOTHING

[aletterinthenameofsanity]

Me, to my new date: doctor who thinks it's a sci-fi story because the Doctor thinks it's a sci-fi story and because the companions think it's a sci-fi story, but it's really just a story about ghosts. a story about an ancient creature carrying the ghosts of everyone they have ever loved, meeting new people, and seeing them only as future ghosts. they are haunted by the future and the past and the present because they are the only constant in a world constantly in flux, and they are running as fast as they can to things before they burn and fade to dust but everything will always end, you understand, because this is the only thing the Doctor understands and yet they keep going. they love too much to stop. doctor who is not science-fiction, it's horror and optimism and spiritual more than anything else, it's religious unto itself, the TARDIS is a haunted house and a church and a graveyard and a hospital and the Doctor is the most haunted being in the universe but more than anything, this is a love story, because how can you love something without being haunted by it- hey, what are you doing?

My date, shoving breadsticks in their purse: I have to go-

[totally-not-an-awkward-okapi]

I’m sure it’s just an oversight or some multiverse shenanigans, but uh…

If you’re preparing to ask “what do you mean Ultron killed the original Human Torch?” Yeah so fun fact Ultron stole Jim Hammond’s corpse and kidnapped his creator (Phineas Horton) to rebuild him into his own son, the Vision. Things kinda went sideways from there.

[sushi11]

Vani Vilas Sagar dam, Chitradurga (Karnataka)

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

hello hello!! your fic pez dispenser debris brings me immense joy. and i wanna know if the other nejire and tamaki will be showing up. id love to see their reactions to fucking #leku. and i’d love to hear your thoughts on them in general if you have any to spare. the big three have such a fun dynamic to me.

Tamaki will appear. I’m not fully settled on Nejire. In my mind, she moved to Kyoto not long after she graduated but keeps in very close touch (if you read the battle of Yokohama posts, she was there during that fight because she was visiting Her Boys and insisted on a Big Three Sleep Over, which is why the three of them were together when Izuku called to begin with). They have a group chat that she started blowing up when the Leku news hit. All of them are painfully, violently aware of the fact Mirio is absolutely not dating Izuku and also of the fact that Mirio’s probably close to drowning himself at the mere thought.

I do really like the idea of the Big Three having been sort of outcasts before they were the big three, and I think canon supports this reading. They were all sort of the weird kids. They were each other’s only friends. After they started rising in the ranks, they became more popular, but they all consider the others their main people.

I also like the idea that they became the Big Three because of each other.

They were friends before they were the big three. And it’s not a coincidence that the big three were all already friends. They pushed each other to grow in their skills and surpass everyone else.

The reason why they haven’t been more present in pez is actually the same reason why I didn’t have them open a hero agency together: they all need to grow separately from the others for a bit.

Like. Here’s Mirio, with two very skilled and experienced heroes at his side, waiting for Izuku to graduate so he can start his agency. Why not go into business with the friends he’s already been fighting with for years?

I see the Big Three as people who all, for one reason or another, decided that they needed to learn how to be strong on their own at the start of their career.

Take Tamaki. He’s childhood friends with Mirio. He was briefly referenced in one of the tumblr posts as one of Mirio’s staunchest advocates after he lost his Quirk. So why isn’t he heroes with Mirio?

Well, he sort of is. He’s got a mutual support agreement with him.

Time to derail into my favorite topic: the economic models underpinning fictional societies. As you can probably guess I’m great at parties.

Mutual support agreements are contractual devices that I came up with in response to the convoluted economic structure of heroics compensation I discussed a few posts ago. In that post, I discussed independent/underground v. agency models with respect to public compensation and how I think that there’s an impossibly complicated matrix that grants heroes portions of the local budget based on their statistics. Briefly, I discussed how that calculation would cause conflict with big name heroes taking credit for their sidekicks’ work because agencies would necessarily need to be counted as one entity for the purposes of public funding.

What happens when multiple agencies are involved in the same incident?

As a reminder, the reason why they need to assign credit for a bust to one individual is because agencies are funded as a whole. This is a grant system that’s meant to be more than just about paying a salary—the government is providing funds meant to go towards an office space, supplies, everything. You could not give everyone in an agency public funding separate checks under that model. Public funding is made out to the agency as a whole and it’s up to the agency as to how to use it. But if you have six people from the same agency who all register the exact same take down because they all participated—well now you’ve got the one job reported six times over for the same filing entity. That’s going to horrifically skew the funding calculation. The government’s paying for the same bust six times over and you just incentivized hero agencies to send their people all to do the same job because it pays the same to have six guys stop one criminal as it does to have six guys stop six different criminals separately.

But hey—sometimes it’s a six guy job. That would more appropriately be considered an enhancement to a job’s relative difficulty than it would be to giving credit for a takedown. After all, the same job could require “six guys” or “one All Might.” If you focus on the number of heroes an agency uses in a job than you do on how difficult that job actually is, then you’re inadvertently penalizing better heroes because Mid Tier Agency needed six guys to handle what you did on your own, but since they needed six whole guys they get paid more for the same thing that you could do solo.

But the reason for this one man credit structure is because you’re getting one check for the government per agency. But what about when heroes from different agencies team up? Big Hero is not sharing a government funding check with Even Bigger Hero, and there’s absolutely no way that every single team up is just fucking pro bono for everyone but one guy. That’d make it impossible. So the same job would have to get counted multiple times when it involved different heroic entities.

The fact that you were teamed up instead of solo would go into the relative value calculation of each independent job. You get the full pot if you’re solo, but if you’re sharing the load, you’re sharing the credit. But at the same time, how much credit you get would also have to be determined on a case by case basis. Like. A hero that evacuated three civilians contributed to a fight, but they in no way should get equal credit and compensation to All Might, who fought the entire villain team solo.

So say Big Hero Agency and Bigger Hero Agency are doing a team up for the good of Japan. Big Hero Agency initiated the investigation, did most of the legwork, and invited Bigger Hero Agency onto the job. However, when it came to actually fighting, Bigger Hero Agency absolutely carried the day. Big Hero Agency would have been dust if Bigger Hero Agency hadn’t been there.

Who deserves more credit and compensation?

There is probably some kind of governmental dispute/appeal board to settle disputes about compensation, but like. As someone who does government work. The government’s absolute favorite thing to say is “we are not babysitting you, fucking figure it out like big boys.” They’ll have a way to resolve disputes, but they will also heavily incentivize voluntary agreement amongst the parties.

Planned team ups probably have legal working shit out ahead of time. Spontaneous team ups or heroes stealing each other’s fights a la Mount Lady and Kamui Woods in the pilot are probably the biggest headaches.

But what about heroes that are always teaming up? They’re your go to. Your homeboy. The daredevil to your Spider-Man. You don’t file your paperwork together, but you’re still always fighting side by side. Are you renegotiating who gets credit for what in every single little fight?

Fuck no. That’s a huge pain in the ass. Enter the mutual support agreement. It’s a contract that has a bunch of clauses meant to help streamline deciding who gets credit for what and resolve disputes before they happen.

You wouldn’t just want this for compensation purposes. Say Big Hero commits the hero equivalent of police brutality. Now he’s being sued. He’s apparently not that big of a hero as the name implies, because he’s got no fucking money. You want more money for your client, so you need a deeper pocket to pull from. At the time of the incident, he was working with Bigger Hero Agency. They’re not the same agency, but it was Bigger Heroes bust, and they work together all the time. Big Hero is basically one of Bigger Heroes employees hidden behind a different corporate structure. Should Bigger Hero be liable for Big Hero?

That’s a big fucking court case that can be headed off at the pass by the fact that Bigger Hero put indemnification and liability clauses in its mutual support agreement. There’s a lot of issues that would arise from the practice of heroics that you’d want to govern ahead of time with a contract. So you sign a mutual support agreement.

But the silly little fake tumblr post also said they weren’t popular and mostly agencies like Idaten used them. So why is that?

Frankly, because it’s not very worth agencies while to team up with other agencies on the regular. The system doesn’t incentivize it.

If you have all of your own sidekicks on a job, you can steal credit from them. The same is not true for heroes from other agencies. You get more public funding if you staff a job with all people from your agency instead of having part of the credit go to other agencies. And you get to stand in front of the cameras and say “Big Hero Has Saved The City Again” instead of having to say “Thank You To Our Dear Friends From Bigger Hero Agency Who Carried This Team.”

Idaten is the exception because, well. It doesn’t care. Idaten’s priority is cultivating the necessary talent and teamwork needed to get the job done. It doesn’t care if it has to go outside of the agency for that. Fuck, Tensei’s canonically willing to reach out to vigilantes. Its genuine focus is saving people, so it goes against the grain of what the system incentivizes.

Mirio and Tamaki have a mutual support agreement. They’re out working together so much that Fat Gum’s agency approved an overall disliked mechanism to facilitate their team ups. They are heroes together—so why aren’t they in an agency together?

I think Tamaki wanted to spend his first year in heroics forcing himself out of his comfort zone so he’d improve. Fat Gum will force him in front of the cameras. He’s focusing on learning how to communicate effectively with the public and with the media, and Fat Gum has the sort of resources and infrastructure where Tamaki can devote the time to learning that and improving. If he was in an agency with Mirio, he’d use Mirio as a crutch to hide from something he genuinely wants to improve in. Fat Gum forces him to grow.

Mirio himself sort of had to go independent. For one, he and Izuku decided to start their agency not too long after Mirio got his license. It was before Mirio debuted. Izuku had just finished his first year. No one knew who either of them were, and they had no clue just how famous they’d both become before Izuku graduated.

They both figured they’d be a couple of nobody heroes with a dinky little agency right out the gate of Izuku’s graduation and were sort of genuinely excited at the prospect. They’d just be heroes together, which is all they wanted. They’d figured no one would give a shit about them until well after they started their agency and started working and that Izuku would have 0 offers to work elsewhere because he wasn’t even going to apply to agencies. So Mirio decided he’d stay independent until Izuku graduated so he wouldn’t be tied up in an agency contracts and they could just start fresh.

The other reason is that most agencies wouldn’t touch Mirio with a ten foot pole because he was Quirkless, and even with the ones that would, he suspected they’d sideline or coddle him because he was Quirkless. Being independent meant he could do whatever the hell he pleased. So he bought the Mirio Mom Van and, for a brief, glorious moment, convinced All Might to supervise their bullshit so he could start going on jobs with Izuku (students have to be supervised by heroes with a teaching license, which he wouldn’t be eligible for for the first three years of his career, except in exigent circumstances. He couldn’t have Izuku as an intern himself but All Might sure could). For a few beautiful weeks it was just Mirio, Izuku, and fucking All Might in the Mirio Mom Van going on stakeouts, all wearing the world’s stupidest mustaches. The UA internship program revoked permission for this arrangement not long after it started formally out of concerns for the legality of this arrangement since All Might was no longer an active duty hero, informally because All Might, Izuku, and Mirio is the stupidest and most reckless combination fucking imaginable and they are killing Aizawa from the stress they are killing him. So now Mirio works alone while he waits for Izuku to be fully licensed.

Nejire I kind of see as someone who moved away from her hometown right out of the gate of graduation but visited home very frequently, which is why she moved to Kyoto after graduation but was having a fucking sleepover at Mirio’s place when Yokohama happened. She takes the bullet train back at least once a month and spends the weekend bumming on Mirio or Tamaki’s couch. I think she wanted to see who she was away from home and there’d never be a better time to do it. I also think she’ll move back so that way she can work more fully with Her Boys one day, but wanted to push herself out of the familiar first.

All of the trio’s reasons for not working together quite yet are mutable, to be clear. Tamaki just wanted the experience early in his career or he knew he’d never learn the public relation skills he wanted to get. Nejire also just wanted the experience somewhere else before she put down real roots somewhere and is liable to move back to be with her friends and family. And Mirio’s on the verge of opening his own agency, so he doesn’t have to worry about getting sidelined by his boss anymore or getting tied up in a bad contract.

[dykedvonte]

A crazy thing about Mouthwashing is that Pony Express lost communication with one of its freighters for months and didn’t send anyone to check.

A genuinely reputable company, or at the very least a decent one, would have sent someone, something out to check after about two weeks of silence. Two months is when the crew start questioning if they are even being looked for which implies they were already expecting it to take a while cause P.E just doesn’t care.

They don’t care about who they hire. They don’t care about the conditions they place their crew in or how safe the safety measures actually are. They just don’t care, made rules and regulations so they can care less and succeed in getting away with it with how little those ideas are discussed.

[wayti-blog]

"Why does nature love spirals? The link to entropy"

"There are moments in the history of human thought when a simple realization transforms our understanding of reality. A moment when chaos reveals itself as structure, when disorder folds into meaning, and when what seemed like an arbitrary universe unveils itself as a system governed by hidden symmetries.

Credit: Ahmed Farag Ali and Aneta Wojnar

The Bekenstein bound was one such revelation—an idea that whispered to us that entropy, information and gravity are not separate but rather deeply intertwined aspects of the cosmos. Jacob Bekenstein, in one of the most profound insights of modern physics, proposed that the entropy of any physical system is not limitless; it is constrained by its energy and the smallest sphere that can enclose it.

This revelation was radical: Entropy—long regarded as an abstract measure of disorder—was, in fact, a quantity deeply bound to the fabric of space and time. His bound, expressed in its simplest form, suggested that the total information that could be stored in a region of space was proportional to its energy and its size."

"This (...) tells us that what we have long regarded as uncertainty is, in fact, structure. The apparent randomness of quantum mechanics is not a defect of nature but a signature of an underlying order. The transformation of the uncertainty principle from an inequality into an equality suggests that space and time are not continuous in the way we imagined but are shaped by toroidal constraints.

This has far-reaching consequences, not only for physics but for our understanding of the universe itself. The toroidal motion of hurricanes, the curvature of ocean waves, the patterns of electromagnetic fields, and even the structure of subatomic interactions all reflect this fundamental principle. There is something universal about the spiral, something embedded in the way energy, matter and space evolve. The torus is not merely a shape; it is the embodiment of motion, of evolution, of time itself."

continue reading article

[marinsawakening]

My most unpopular Zelda opinion is that I sincerely think LOZ is at its worst when it's trying to tell some serious epic fantasy story. Like nobody agrees with me on this but it's a hill I'll die on.

[hellsite-proteins]

Love the concept and love your analyses! Protein request, if the length's alright:

Y'AI 'NG'NGAH, YOG-SOTHOTH H'EE-L'GEB F'AI THRODOG UAAAH. OGTHROD AI'F GEB'L-EE'H YOG-SOTHOTH 'NGAH'NG AI'Y ZHRO

ÏA, ÏA ÏA YOG-SOTHOTH

(if this is referencing other than red signal by the mechanisms and i'm simply too uncultured to recognize it, please lmk!)

letter sequence in this ask matching protein-coding amino acids:

YAINGNGAHYGSTHTHHEELGEFAITHRDGAAAHGTHRDAIFGELEEHYGSTHTHNGAHNGAIYHR

protein guy analysis:

i'm going to be honest, i had hope in this one. the pattern of these letters felt pretty different from english, and so i thought that with this short structure, we may still get something. of course, i was wrong, and this thing didn't even manage to fold into any secondary structure, and the entire molecule only contains 2 hydrogen bonds. there are so many histidines (18% of the protein, compared to the expected frequency of 3%), which probably contributed to how weird this looks. histidine is very neat and a great amino acid to have in an active site, but this is too much.

predicted protein structure:

cartoon representation

cartoon with side chains coloured by heteroatom

[technovillain]

inside out being relevant again makes me just sigh like.... i wish all these people knew about psychonauts.... inside out's brain world just doesnt hit the same

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Controlling quantum particle states through structural phase transition of crystals

A research team has successfully fine-tuned the Rabi oscillation of polaritons, quantum composite particles, by leveraging changes in electrical properties induced by crystal structure transformation. Published in Advanced Science, this study demonstrates that the properties of quantum particles can be controlled without the need for complex external devices, which is expected to greatly enhance the feasibility of practical quantum technology. The team was led by Professor Chang-Hee Cho from the Department of Physics and Chemistry at DGIST. Quantum technology enables much faster and more precise information processing than conventional electronic devices and is gaining attention as a key driver of future industries, including quantum computing, communications, and sensors. At the core of this technology lies the ability to accurately generate and control quantum states. In particular, recent research has been actively exploring light-based quantum devices, with polaritons at the center of this field.

Read more.

[thaltro]

tysm for answering my last q c: im sry if this is indelicate or tactless, but how does it work for you? can you/do you and your alters communicate with each other? or is it just like.. a feeling?

Good question

I’ll be honest and say it’s hard to tell the difference between self talk and self soothing with other alters talking. I’m diagnosed with OCD so I have quite a lot of intrusive thoughts and it feels like that tbh. If I was having an intrusive thought about violence I can’t control it or get rid of it, it feels like my personal thoughts but it’s just my brain flashing ideas to piss me off. With alters it works similarly just usually not distressing intrusive thoughts, instead thoughts that I don’t agree with or things I wouldn’t think of that I can’t shut up.

A good example could be the best communication I have with a frequent supportive ANP, his name is Pav. I tend to catastrophize and over work myself, because of that my brain triggers his part to show up, he recites calming things to help me. He forces the body to breathe slower and for me to lay down, sometimes he makes me rub my arms or ground myself. “Communicating” isnt mostly us talking in our head because my thoughts are rapid and hard to interpret, but feeling his emotions and physical actions is how we mostly talk. Because our amnesia is low with each other he leaves notes and I leave him notes back. But yeah it’s mostly physical and emotional then actually talking.

For me when there’s a lot of communication it usually means I’m going to switch out, with Pav if he’s there, he will soothe me then switch out so when I front again I’m not distressed.

In a negative example, alter communication can be fronting and forcefully thinking of trauma and trauma reenactment. I can tell the difference between that and intrusive thoughts because I can feel the weight of an alter attached to it. There’s intention and the thoughts feel more like a story being read to me and not a intrusive flash.

I regained this memory but when we where a little child and people where hurting us, alter communication is what kept us going. Because I grew up religious I thought angels where talking to me and forcing me to eat, sleep, shower, and breathe. I’d always talk to my family about those “angels” but really they where just parts of me communicating and soothing my body for survival. For little me communication was mostly through prayer sessions where I would dissociate asking for their help. Now I know that was Alters but a lot of times communication can be covert.

The biggest difference is it feels passionate and overwhelming when alters are communicating some sort of memory, emotion, physical behaviour, or idea- it takes over my entire body’s attention and dissociates me out of reality.

That’s my personal experience, others may have it differently but thank you

[zehpeh]

"ABSTRUSE" - acrylics/ink on watercolour paper, A4 (+ some digital colour correction) - August 2024

[ganymedesclock]

Any genre of game can have a disabled protagonist if you aren't a coward / willing to put the work in, but I'm currently batting around the concept of specifically point-and-click puzzle adventure games with a highly disabled protagonist.

Often, the pace of such games tends sedate and contemplative. Your character is seldom in a hurry; they are mostly faced by trying to figure out how to accomplish a particular task, and if a deadline is imposed, it's an extra thing to juggle.

This could be an interesting presumption to incorporate from a watsonian lens, through the viewpoint of a protagonist who may have limited mobility, pain and/or fatigue that make hurrying punitively inaccessible. It'd let the player familiarize themselves with early puzzles if the first thing they have to figure out how to do is say, get their player character out of bed in an environment where they don't have their usual fallbacks.

(also if this is also a walking adventure, it'd let you dodge accusations of the insurmountable waist-high fence- your intrepid hero MIGHT be able to climb over those bricks if they didn't have two bad hips and a walker to worry about!)

[outeremissary]

In the past week or two an attempt to recommend Rogue Trader to friends now that I am truly in a dire place with it resulted in convincing them all to never, ever touch it... I need Owlcat to release a game I don't feel obligated to include a list of disclaimers with when trying to recommend </3 It's always like "Kingmaker is one of my FAVORITE GAMES and the writing is GOOD AND FUN it has some of my ALL TIME FAVORITE CHARACTERS AND PLOTS and the gameplay is SO BAD MOST OF THE TIME and it has SO MUCH JANK but it's worth it if you have DOZENS OF HOURS OF PATIENCE" or "Wrath has combat and characters MANY PEOPLE LIKE and is VERY CINEMATIC and SIGNIFICANTLY IMPROVES QOL but the gameplay MIGHT PISS YOU OFF and you SHOULD DO PRE READING ON SYSTEMS AND ROUTES and the alignment dialogue is NOT GOOD somehow worse than Kingmaker's" or "Rogue Trader is a GREAT GAME with INTERESTING CHARACTERS and REALLY FUN GAMEPLAY except that the gameplay of the first fifteen hours is INTOLERABLY BAD AND BORING and the exposition for newcomers to setting lore is TERRIBLE also the scope of human atrocity is OFF THE CHARTS if that's hard for you and there IS A TORTURE PIT"