#System on a Chip

[sigalrm]

An apple a day by Pascal Volk

[doctorsiren]

“Every thought is sabotage

What a fool I am

But how long can we keep playing?

Game after game

No losing game after losing game”

[crashprotocol]

high effort sh!tpost

[cheerkyuuu]

based on that 1 meme ft. my wives

[dataframe]

winding down :D <3

[ID: Three images of Scum Villain fanart. Image one features semi-lineless Shen Qingqiu, who glowers down at the viewer, and Wei Qingwei, who rests his sword on his shoulder and manages a lopsided grin, pulled toward his left as that is the side of his face without burn scars. In the background, a chibi of Yue Qingyuan gestures with a smile and hearts surrounding him.

Image two is divided into three sections. In the first, Shen Qingqiu leans his head on his hand, gazing despondently off-screen. Beneath him, there are small chibis of himself, Mu Qingfang and Ren Yijun, each carrying a frown with increased levels of bemusement. In the third section, Yue Qingyuan is in simple robes with his hair tied in a loose ponytail, carrying a chamberstick; a chibi of Shen Qingqiu glares down at him from behind a fan. There is a note affectionately calling Yue Qingyuan an old man, stating he hates night pearls because of the Ling Xi Caves.

Image three is of Shen Qingqiu alone, glancing off-screen with a fan in her hand. Aside from her guan, she is dressed in a long aoqun covered with a banbi resembling butterfly wings. Silhouettes of red spider lilies surround her, and text reading: "Estrogen would not make her worse or better, but a secret third thing." END ID.]

[starry-bi-sky]

no context snippet for a "SY is SJ" au i thought of at 1am last night, because i am a firm believer of the "amnesia doesnt erase your trauma it just erases the context of it" agenda.

(although in SY's case he DID kinda forget that trauma.. at first. it's coming back to him. the system gave him a grace period. there that's my excuse)

crossposted on ao3 too in case anyone wants to read it there instead

--------

Shen Qingqiu is painting again.

He's found himself doing that a lot lately, now that he's out of seclusion and Binghe is in the bamboo house, squirreled away into the side room where the Head Disciple should be. Painting is, of course, a logical course of action for a peak lord to do! Especially one such as himself, the Peak Lord of Qing Jing, which was basically the peak of the creative arts.

But— well, he wasn't expecting to find himself liking it so much. Or doing it so often. Painting in the style of the time period is a lot easier to learn than he expected, and it gets him B-points for in-character actions! Who knew the Original Goods was such an artist of the time? He had such an evocative way with his brush, he should know — he's found some of his works!

(They were tucked away like a dirty secret in the back of his closet, locked away in a qiankun chest that Shen Qingqiu found the key to far too easily. He’ll admit to being a little disappointed in the Original Goods’ predictability — a false bottom in the vanity, really? Anyone could find that!) 

This brought him to his next issue; he was getting headaches, and he thinks, perhaps, just a little, that the Original Goods' thoughts and feelings were bleeding into him. Just a tad! And he was certain it was the Original Goods too, because— because, well…

He keeps flinching. You know how you’re walking down a public but otherwise empty hallway, and turn the corner and nearly run right into someone, and your heart jumps three spaces to the left and back? Subconsciously you knew there was a chance you were going to see someone, but their sudden appearance still startles you? 

Yeah, that. He keeps experiencing it with Binghe. He about jumps right out of his skin whenever Binghe emerges from the side room or the kitchen, even though he knows his disciple is there! And he knows it’s not a habit from his old world, because Shen Qingqiu lived with three other siblings in the house, and always knew to expect someone to be right around the corner. 

And he knows, especially so, that it’s not a habit from his old world, because along with the mini heart attacks that come with Binghe’s presence in the bamboo house, is the discomfort. A distinct yet indistinguishably vague feeling of unease that comes with sharing a living space with someone. The kind that makes his hackles rise like a particularly disgruntled and cornered street cat. 

Again, he grew up with three siblings! That could not be coming from him. It has to be an Original Goods feeling slipping in, and it was really getting in the way of things! How was he supposed to give Binghe a sense of belonging and a better upbringing if his presence in the bamboo house made him feel horribly exposed?

Some days, he just can't escape the gnawing feeling of dread in his chest when he returns to the bamboo house at the end of the day, knowing full well that it will soon be accompanied by someone else. Even if that someone was Binghe. 

That feeling of a lack of privacy makes his skin crawl and his shoulders lock up to his ears with every step. It was inconvenient; annoying. 

It was utterly unscientific, it was his house! And it was only Binghe, who, currently, is a harmless little white sheep! There was no darkened protagonist here, come to tear his limbs off. There was nothing to be so… tense about. 

It does nothing to stop the little swooping his heart does when he opens the door to, sometimes, Binghe already there, kneeling at the table like a dutiful disciple as always.

Oh, and that's not starting on his steadily increasing dislike of physical touch. It had to be something to do with the ludicrous amount of layers he wears and the modesty standards of the time period — and, also, of course, the Original Goods' own aversion to it.

He knows he's never felt so uncomfortable in another human being's presence before! Sure, he wasn’t the most social of people in his old world, but he still remembers being able to leave the house and be among the masses with relative ease. Here, though, was an entirely different story. His personal space bubble seemingly doubled, no, tripled in size, and it was irking him quite unhandily. 

The worst offenders were the Peak Lord meetings, it had to be. Navigating through the sea of disciples, cultivators, and visitors on Qiong Ding was a nightmare enough on its own — lessened only by the fact that said mountain occupants parted like the red sea when they saw him coming — but sitting in a secluded room with eleven other people, majority of whom still disliked him despite his turnaround? Awful.  

The proximity between him and his martial siblings isn’t even that bad, either. He has plenty of elbow room and in fact, would need to make an effort to reach out and physically touch anyone on either side of him. But, still!! Too close!! 

Shen Qingqiu made the conscious decision to sit as close to the door as his own comfort would allow, but not so close that he couldn’t see it — he tried that once. He doesn’t want to speak of the incident. The stress alone will give him heart palpitations. 

(He, pointedly, doesn’t want to think about the time he arrived at a Peak Lord meeting and found the Long Ning Shou Peak Lord sitting in His Chair either. Shen Qingqiu has never been particularly territorial about ‘assigned seating’ before, up until that moment. While he’s proud to say that he didn’t do anything to Chen Qingxuan for sitting in his spot, he’s mortified by how childishly petulant he felt about it for the rest of the meeting. He’s pretty sure everyone could sense his sour mood.)  

Why, just a few days ago he nearly bit a poor disciple's head off during martial lessons when they accidentally tumbled into him after a series of spectacularly fumbling footing. The child had been so horrified and apologetic that Shen Qingqiu remembered to reel himself back in time and merely scold them, rather than tear their skin right off with a tongue lashing.

But— enough about such stressful things! Shen Qingqiu was painting, and when he was painting, Binghe knew not to bother him, and to not let anyone do so either. Lest they all be dealt with a moderately grumpy Shizun. 

(His emotions may be as volatile as a hormonal boy lately, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t know how to keep them in check!! He still had a reputation to keep.)

His studio offered him a sense of privacy and solitary that not even his bedroom allowed him — for Binghe could knock on his bedroom door to alert him for whatever needed his attention, and while he could do the same to the studio, the fact remained; a Shizun interrupted during his precious studio time, did not, a happy Shizun make. 

There were silencing talismans painted into the walls — courtesy of the Original Goods — that Shen Qingqiu really quite appreciated. It allowed him the peace of mind to do things his face could not allow him outside of it— and that is, he got to muse aloud to himself, and hum songs from his old world that he couldn't anywhere else. Some songs that he still knew the lyrics to, he was happy to half-sing under his breath.

It had to be a form of meditation, it had to be! With how much peace and grounding it brought him, it couldn't be anything but a form of meditation.

Currently, he was just letting instincts lead his brush strokes while he hummed a melody from some myth musical he stumbled across a few weeks before he died. The songs had been so catchy that he had most of them all but memorized! He's tried repeating the instrumentals on his guqin and ruan with varying degrees of success.

Painting helped kill his migraines the most. As it stands, he’s had a killer one hammering at his skull since this morning. Bad enough to the point that he nearly snapped at poor Binghe during breakfast, and the child could all but sense the sour mood radiating off his master, and in turn had been silent and subdued until he left. 

Aish, that child… Shen Qingqiu hasn't quite quelled the guilt in him. Something about that awful subservience rankled him in a way he couldn’t explain, making him want to recoil and snap out at the same time. Something dark and deep in him had reared its head, wanting to reach over and shake Binghe for it. 

He'd been horrified by his own thoughts, and then locked himself in his studio for the rest of the day.

Even in death — or wherever the Original Goods was — he was still making things difficult! It was only natural that Binghe would go quiet and careful at the sight of Shen Qingqiu’s bad mood, he used to beat the boy at whim for imagined slights! He’ll have to reassure Binghe better that he wasn’t going to hurt him. 

Bah. He was supposed to be painting, not thinking about things that made his head pound worse or his mood dampen more! He didn't want to think about Luo Binghe right now — a surprise, even for him! — he wants to focus on the scent of ground ink and paints, and his own soft humming.

He blinks, once, twice, and focuses on the painting. It happens, like now, that he would zone out and paint entire landscapes, people, whatever, without realizing. It was always a guessing game of what he's made when he lets his mind wander. Some of things he painted were merely of Qing Jing, other times— 

— a burning red fire, encased on canvas, hangs off his eyelashes. And following it, the ensuing qi deviation he'd shoved off. —

Other times aren't worth mentioning.

He's painted a boy this time, a young one, with dark skin and even darker hair, and a smile that isn't quite right. There's a beauty mark right above the corner of his lip, artfully placed, as if it had been hand-placed by an expert craftsman. The boy's upper face remains unpainted, as if he’d been born without eyes. Yet, even without them, the boy looks completely serene and non-judgemental. Mn, no, perhaps more accurately he looks passive? Peaceful? 

Shen Qingqiu can feel his gaze, missing as it is, burning into him. He frowns immediately. His headache no less lessened, in fact— he thinks it's gotten worse. There’s a horrid familiarity about the boy in the painting, like a word poised on the tip of his tongue that he can’t quite place. "Don't look at me like that." He says aloud, bah, he hadn't meant to! But it’s not like there’s anyone to hear him. "Don't you know who I am?" 

En, no, it’s placating. That’s what it is. The boy is placating him. How unscientific! Unneeded; ridiculous. Why would he paint a boy trying to placate him? He was a scum villain, and a grown man!

The painting says nothing, as it ought to, it was only wet ink and dry parchment. Shen Qingqiu's ears burn anyways, and his eyes drop down to the smile on the boy's face. 

He finds that he deeply detests that smile on his face, it disgusts him. 

It disgusts him in the way only sheer incompetence can, a burn of irritation that bubbles up every time he saw an objectively wrong take in the PIDW comment section. As if he can't believe someone would look at him, a scum villain such as himself, and still be able to smile like that.

More than that, it's not right. That smile. It's— there's something wrong with it. Which can't be right, Shen Qingqiu hardly makes a mistake when he makes these trance-made paintings. But there is, he’s looking at it right here. He hates it. That awful smile. It's so— so… insincere. If you're going to smile at him, at least mean it, eh? Doesn't he deserve that much?

Long, slender fingers dip into the small wooden paint bowl beside him and lift back up, dripping wet ink onto the side table, and then onto the floor, across the last two layers of his robes that he always strips down to in here.

He reaches for the canvas to— to what? Smear that stupid smile off that boy's face? Mould it into his own image, back into place like the way it should be, paintbrush be damned? That wretched child, smiling at him like that. That smile is too straight, too perfect. It's mocking him.

Where is the tilt? The slant in it? That boy always smiled with an off-kilter turn of his lips, crooked, that made him real the same way blood in the mouth did, and now he's not, and it's wrong. He will wipe that smile off the boy's face himself if he must, if only to get him to wear anything else—

There is a knock on the door, gentle, hesitant. Only his cultivator hearing is what allows him to pick up on it. Shen Qingqiu's head pounds terribly at the sound. It makes a screeching sound go off in the back of his skull, like an abrupt kick to the teeth. His jaw clacks together on pure adrenaline as he regains the sense to not snarl wordlessly.

Didn't he say not to interrupt—?

His ink-stained fingers snap back, a gunshot recoil that sends splatters of ink flying and splatting coldly against his face. His nails dig painfully into the soft flesh of his palm, and Shen Qingqiu gathers himself back into his lofty cultivator persona with a single breath and a ramrod straightening of his spine. His ears ring horribly. "What." He calls, perhaps a little too coldly.

"Shizun?" Binghe says softly, and the sound of that child's voice is like a bucket of ice water dumped over his head. Recognition hits him, and the guilt crawls back in at his earlier irritation. "Forgive this one for interrupting, but Yue-shibo is here."

Shen Qingqiu is still staring at his painting, but the boy’s smile burns behind his eyelids like a fire. It takes half a beat for him to respond; "…Alright," he says, and stands up, "prepare some tea, Binghe. And use the ginger root this master owns, he has a terrible headache."

He walks around the stool, fingers still dripping black, and plucks his robes up from the chair he draped them over. His head still hurts, and there’s a peculiar ache in his heart. He takes his time putting his layers back on, vindictively tying each button and knot leisurely. 

Surely Yue Qingyuan has the patience to wait for this one after he so rudely arrived unannounced, hm?

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Real innovation vs Silicon Valley nonsense

This is the LAST DAY to get my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

If there was any area where we needed a lot of "innovation," it's in climate tech. We've already blown through numerous points-of-no-return for a habitable Earth, and the pace is accelerating.

Silicon Valley claims to be the epicenter of American innovation, but what passes for innovation in Silicon Valley is some combination of nonsense, climate-wrecking tech, and climate-wrecking nonsense tech. Forget Jeff Hammerbacher's lament about "the best minds of my generation thinking about how to make people click ads." Today's best-paid, best-trained technologists are enlisted to making boobytrapped IoT gadgets:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification

Planet-destroying cryptocurrency scams:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/15/your-new-first-name/#that-dagger-tho

NFT frauds:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/06/crypto-copyright-%f0%9f%a4%a1%f0%9f%92%a9/

Or planet-destroying AI frauds:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

If that was the best "innovation" the human race had to offer, we'd be fucking doomed.

But – as Ryan Cooper writes for The American Prospect – there's a far more dynamic, consequential, useful and exciting innovation revolution underway, thanks to muscular public spending on climate tech:

https://prospect.org/environment/2024-05-30-green-energy-revolution-real-innovation/

The green energy revolution – funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act and the Science Act – is accomplishing amazing feats, which are barely registering amid the clamor of AI nonsense and other hype. I did an interview a while ago about my climate novel The Lost Cause and the interviewer wanted to know what role AI would play in resolving the climate emergency. I was momentarily speechless, then I said, "Well, I guess maybe all the energy used to train and operate models could make it much worse? What role do you think it could play?" The interviewer had no answer.

Here's brief tour of the revolution:

2023 saw 32GW of new solar energy come online in the USA (up 50% from 2022);

Wind increased from 118GW to 141GW;

Grid-scale batteries doubled in 2023 and will double again in 2024;

EV sales increased from 20,000 to 90,000/month.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/blog/2023/12/19/building-a-thriving-clean-energy-economy-in-2023-and-beyond/

The cost of clean energy is plummeting, and that's triggering other areas of innovation, like using "hot rocks" to replace fossil fuel heat (25% of overall US energy consumption):

https://rondo.com/products

Increasing our access to cheap, clean energy will require a lot of materials, and material production is very carbon intensive. Luckily, the existing supply of cheap, clean energy is fueling "green steel" production experiments:

https://www.wdam.com/2024/03/25/americas-1st-green-steel-plant-coming-perry-county-1b-federal-investment/

Cheap, clean energy also makes it possible to recover valuable minerals from aluminum production tailings, a process that doubles as site-remediation:

https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/toxic-red-mud-co2-free-iron

And while all this electrification is going to require grid upgrades, there's lots we can do with our existing grid, like power-line automation that increases capacity by 40%:

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/13/1187620367/power-grid-enhancing-technologies-climate-change

It's also going to require a lot of storage, which is why it's so exciting that we're figuring out how to turn decommissioned mines into giant batteries. During the day, excess renewable energy is channeled into raising rock-laden platforms to the top of the mine-shafts, and at night, these unspool, releasing energy that's fed into the high-availability power-lines that are already present at every mine-site:

https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/02/06/this-disused-mine-in-finland-is-being-turned-into-a-gravity-battery-to-store-renewable-ene

Why are we paying so much attention to Silicon Valley pump-and-dumps and ignoring all this incredible, potentially planet-saving, real innovation? Cooper cites a plausible explanation from the Apperceptive newsletter:

https://buttondown.email/apperceptive/archive/destructive-investing-and-the-siren-song-of/

Silicon Valley is the land of low-capital, low-labor growth. Software development requires fewer people than infrastructure and hard goods manufacturing, both to get started and to run as an ongoing operation. Silicon Valley is the place where you get rich without creating jobs. It's run by investors who hate the idea of paying people. That's why AI is so exciting for Silicon Valley types: it lets them fantasize about making humans obsolete. A company without employees is a company without labor issues, without messy co-determination fights, without any moral consideration for others. It's the natural progression for an industry that started by misclassifying the workers in its buildings as "contractors," and then graduated to pretending that millions of workers were actually "independent small businesses."

It's also the natural next step for an industry that hates workers so much that it will pretend that their work is being done by robots, and then outsource the labor itself to distant Indian call-centers (no wonder Indian techies joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians"):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-make-it/#twenty-one-seconds

Contrast this with climate tech: this is a profoundly physical kind of technology. It is labor intensive. It is skilled. The workers who perform it have power, both because they are so far from their employers' direct oversight and because these fed-funded sectors are more likely to be unionized than Silicon Valley shops. Moreover, climate tech is capital intensive. All of those workers are out there moving stuff around: solar panels, wires, batteries.

Climate tech is infrastructural. As Deb Chachra writes in her must-read 2023 book How Infrastructure Works, infrastructure is a gift we give to our descendants. Infrastructure projects rarely pay for themselves during the lives of the people who decide to build them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

Climate tech also produces gigantic, diffused, uncapturable benefits. The "social cost of carbon" is a measure that seeks to capture how much we all pay as polluters despoil our shared world. It includes the direct health impacts of burning fossil fuels, and the indirect costs of wildfires and extreme weather events. The "social savings" of climate tech are massive:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/climate-and-health-benefits-of-wind-and-solar-dwarf-all-subsidies/

For every MWh of renewable power produced, we save $100 in social carbon costs. That's $100 worth of people not sickening and dying from pollution, $100 worth of homes and habitats not burning down or disappearing under floodwaters. All told, US renewables have delivered $250,000,000,000 (one quarter of one trillion dollars) in social carbon savings over the past four years:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/climate-and-health-benefits-of-wind-and-solar-dwarf-all-subsidies/

In other words, climate tech is unselfish tech. It's a gift to the future and to the broad public. It shares its spoils with workers. It requires public action. By contrast, Silicon Valley is greedy tech that is relentlessly focused on the shortest-term returns that can be extracted with the least share going to labor. It also requires massive public investment, but it also totally committed to giving as little back to the public as is possible.

No wonder America's richest and most powerful people are lining up to endorse and fund Trump:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-05-30-democracy-deshmocracy-mega-financiers-flocking-to-trump/

Silicon Valley epitomizes Stafford Beer's motto that "the purpose of a system is what it does." If Silicon Valley produces nothing but planet-wrecking nonsense, grifty scams, and planet-wrecking, nonsensical scams, then these are all features of the tech sector, not bugs.

As Anil Dash writes:

Driving change requires us to make the machine want something else. If the purpose of a system is what it does, and we don’t like what it does, then we have to change the system.

https://www.anildash.com/2024/05/29/systems-the-purpose-of-a-system/

To give climate tech the attention, excitement, and political will it deserves, we need to recalibrate our understanding of the world. We need to have object permanence. We need to remember just how few people were actually using cryptocurrency during the bubble and apply that understanding to AI hype. Only 2% of Britons surveyed in a recent study use AI tools:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c511x4g7x7jo

If we want our tech companies to do good, we have to understand that their ground state is to create planet-wrecking nonsense, grifty scams, and planet-wrecking, nonsensical scams. We need to make these companies small enough to fail, small enough to jail, and small enough to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

We need to hold companies responsible, and we need to change the microeconomics of the board room, to make it easier for tech workers who want to do good to shout down the scammers, nonsense-peddlers and grifters:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

Yesterday, a federal judge ruled that the FTC could hold Amazon executives personally liable for the decision to trick people into signing up for Prime, and for making the unsubscribe-from-Prime process into a Kafka-as-a-service nightmare:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/amazon-execs-may-be-personally-liable-for-tricking-users-into-prime-sign-ups/

Imagine how powerful a precedent this could set. The Amazon employees who vociferously objected to their bosses' decision to make Prime as confusing as possible could have raised the objection that doing this could end up personally costing those bosses millions of dollars in fines:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

We need to make climate tech, not Big Tech, the center of our scrutiny and will. The climate emergency is so terrifying as to be nearly unponderable. Science fiction writers are increasingly being called upon to try to frame this incomprehensible risk in human terms. SF writer (and biologist) Peter Watts's conversation with evolutionary biologist Dan Brooks is an eye-opener:

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-collapse-is-coming-will-humanity-adapt/

They draw a distinction between "sustainability" meaning "what kind of technological fixes can we come up with that will allow us to continue to do business as usual without paying a penalty for it?" and sustainability meaning, "what changes in behavior will allow us to save ourselves with the technology that is possible?"

Writing about the Watts/Brooks dialog for Naked Capitalism, Yves Smith invokes William Gibson's The Peripheral:

With everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of shit, history itself become a slaughterhouse, science had started popping. Not all at once, no one big heroic thing, but there were cleaner, cheaper energy sources, more effective ways to get carbon out of the air, new drugs that did what antibiotics had done before…. Ways to print food that required much less in the way of actual food to begin with. So everything, however deeply fucked in general, was lit increasingly by the new, by things that made people blink and sit up, but then the rest of it would just go on, deeper into the ditch. A progress accompanied by constant violence, he said, by sufferings unimaginable.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/05/preparing-for-collapse-why-the-focus-on-climate-energy-sustainability-is-destructive.html

Gibson doesn't think this is likely, mind, and even if it's attainable, it will come amidst "unimaginable suffering."

But the universe of possible technologies is quite large. As Chachra points out in How Infrastructure Works, we could give every person on Earth a Canadian's energy budget (like an American's, but colder), by capturing a mere 0.4% of the solar radiation that reaches the Earth's surface every day. Doing this will require heroic amounts of material and labor, especially if we're going to do it without destroying the planet through material extraction and manufacturing.

These are the questions that we should be concerning ourselves with: what behavioral changes will allow us to realize cheap, abundant, green energy? What "innovations" will our society need to focus on the things we need, rather than the scams and nonsense that creates Silicon Valley fortunes?

How can we use planning, and solidarity, and codetermination to usher in the kind of tech that makes it possible for us to get through the climate bottleneck with as little death and destruction as possible? How can we use enforcement, discernment, and labor rights to thwart the enshittificatory impulses of Silicon Valley's biggest assholes?

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/2024/05/30/posiwid/#social-cost-of-carbon

[schwarzwaldcr]

something i noticed during playthroughs of 2 with friends, is that Scar always seems to have lopsided expressions; one side of his face is 'droopy' so to speak, and the other side has extremely exaggerated emotions. actually it reminds me of some stroke victims. i dont know if it was entirely intentional, but i suppose taking three massive emissions to the face would absolutely be Equivalent+ to having a stroke or three so kudos to Scar not only being alive but completely lopsided in every way, that's some subtle continuity there

as a slightly unrelated sidenote, i am in absolute fits over deg's english dub. that hit me like a ton of lead bricks and i havent gotten back up from laughing so fucking hard.

[lumenistence]

SHRINKY DINKYYSYSYYSYS

[static-x3]

Static, running on half charge and 2 hours of sleep, watching over Sirius the best they can: *anxious robor noises*

Also Static, having to stay at Titans and see him regularly: ..................im sure some of these thoughts are in the bible right . Surely .

@obsessivecelestial @titan-star

[fleshwizard]

wish me luck for my presentation /exam

[boilercity]

I find it very fun that they use the "toll" gibs for the checkpoints even though it doesn't say that anymore on the normal sprite. Remnant of a bygone era........ changed but never truly forgotten.........

[revvethasmythh]

this game is so funny. not trusting cerberus? good 👍

being mildly combative over liara giving the scraps of your corpse to cerberus in the vain hope that they might successfully conduct an unethical experiment to bring you back to life with no assurances that they wouldn't do anything incredibly fucked to you? bad 👎

[jesterwaffle2]

Happy Reala day. : D

here's some screencaps i took while playing NiD on my pc earlier today.

[fullhouse-bah]

「♤」 WELCOME TO THE FULL HOUSE

ran by a traumaendo system || antirq proendo

you're allowed to request whatever and if we don't want to do it, we'll let you know as fast as we can. we generally don't have much of a source list!

here's what we've got. each one has the above's stuff as well as what is listed in each tier.

[ 01 ] casino chips: names, genders, age, orientation, species, personality traits, picrew / icon

[ 02 ] card draw: personality, roles, 1-2 songs

[ 03 ] roulette wheel: likes, dislikes, trinkets, extra accessories, trivia, extra icon/picrew, hex code

[ 04 ] full house: kintypes, memories, signoff, typing style, banner

[ 05 ] slot machine: randomized package

we cannot stop radqueers from using our packs, but i hope it is known that this is an anti-radqueer blog that does not support their ideals that bring harm to others. we really don't give a fuck though

come meet the dealers, though.

dealers (mods)

🍑 MOD PEACH (she/fae) (warriors fictive) (1)

⌛ MOD TIME (he/it) (brainmade) (1)

🍁 MOD MAPLE (he/she/vin) (mixtive) (2)

🌵 MOD AGAVE (they/them) (brainmade) (1)

🦈 MOD FISH (he/him) (linked to bird) (1)

🐦 MOD BIRD (he/him) (linked to fish) (1)

🪨 MOD PEBBLE (he/him) (mixtive) (1)

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[volkswagonblues]

Not to be crazy here but im thinking about a Severance AU for The Pitt and it's consuming me a little bit...like the hospital shift that goes on and on and on that you literally can never leave. Literally creating another version of you that has to bear the monstrous pain of your job so you don't have to... triage diverting their worst cases to the severed floor so only the innies (who aren't considered human) have to deal with the trauma...damn