#analog stations and operators

[godbirdart]

so Canada's federal election just got bumped up to April 28th, 2025, and you all know what that means. it means yall have to see me make another long-winded post about it.

let's recap: WHY THE ELECTION DATE: APRIL 28, 2025?

Typically, Canada's federal election is hosted on the third Monday of October once every four years. The reason Canada is hosting it in April is because Carney, the new Prime Minister, requested a Dissolution of Parliament. This action can be requested at any point by request of the sitting Prime Minister or by the King of Canada, but cannot go forward without the approval of the sitting Governor General. The Governor General serves as the King's representative within Canada, among a variety of other constitutional duties, and thus oversees the procedure.

WHO ARE THE POLITICAL PARTIES?

Canada's parliament is currently [as of March 2025] occupied by five political parties. There are more than just these five, but these ones are considered the main players in Canadian Politics. ◦ New Democratic Party / Policies & Publications ◦ Bloc Québécois / Policies & Publications [French] ◦ Green Party / Policies & Publications ◦ Liberal Party of Canada / Policies & Publications ◦ Conservative Party of Canada / Policies & Publications

HOW DOES ALL THIS WORK?

I've seen a few comments floating around treating former Prime Minister Trudeau's tag-out with replacement Prime Minister Carney like it was a federal election [it was not] and that it was somehow illegal [it was perfectly legal]. Being America's neighbor has even Canadians confused as to how our own election system operates, so here are the cliff notes: ◦ You are eligible to vote in Canada if you are a Canadian citizen, are 18 years or older, and can prove your identity and address. ◦ Eligible voters can still register to vote at the polling station if they forgot to register in advance. ◦ Eligible voters can vote early on specific days, register for mail-in voting, vote at an Elections Canada office, or vote on election day itself before polling stations close in their respective time zone. ◦ Eligible voters can still vote while incarcerated, homeless, live abroad, or are outside of Canada during the election. ◦ Employers are obligated to give employees three hours off from work to vote. ◦ Federal elections do not utilize automatic ballot-counting machines. If someone's going off about ballot-hacking or interference, they likely haven't voted in a Canadian federal election. From casting ballots to counting, Canadian voting is largely analog. All golf pencils and paper. ◦ Canada does not vote to elect the Prime Minister specifically. There are 343 Ridings [Electoral Districts] across Canada. These correspond with the 343 seats in the House of Commons:

Each riding elects a member of Parliament to represent them in the House of Commons. Each member of Parliament is typically affiliated with a political party, but they can be independent. The party that wins the most seats in the House becomes the prevailing government and that party's leader becomes Prime Minister. ◦ This is not a celebrity contest. Election ballots vary from riding to riding and list the names of the candidates running for Parliament within each individual district. Party leader names only appear if they happen to be the representative for your particular riding. Voters can find out their riding's candidates using the Elections Canada website.

While Canadian elections don't have nearly the same sensationalism as the States, these basics should still give you the knowledge to recognize when someone [or a bot] is trying to manufacture social media outrage or otherwise spew some bullshit. So I'm going to close this all off with this:

Elections are not Team Sports

In the social media era, it can be alarmingly easy to get swept up in hype and spectacle. Canada operates on a multi-party system, sure, but you still need to pay attention and read into to the policies and guarantees each party is dangling in front of you. Don't just leave it to election day vibes. You need to think critically about who you want writing the legislation, and that also means equipping yourself with the awareness to vote strategically. If you live in a riding that's detrimentally attached to a party whose policies conflict with human rights and values, you may need to place your vote in the candidate whose party has the best chance to oust them - even if that party isn't the one you'd personally prefer to vote for.

Be critical, don't get swept away, and please spare a thought for Canada's House Hippo. They've been trending increasingly endangered since the 90's, but thanks to conservation efforts in the late 2010's they've a fighting chance to make a comeback.

[bravehyde]

Love your Tenna anatomy posts! If you could, could you explain what kind of circumstance would cause the classic 'bars of bright colors' sort of malfunction in a TV vs a screen full of static?

Of course! The easy answer is that neither of these are malfunctions, although we tend to think of them as such, and instead kind of like the "default" states of television. I'll do their purpose in general and then how we see them with Tenna.

Static (aka digital snow or white noise) is the shortest and easiest to explain. Your television gives this to you because whatever channel you picked doesn't have anything on it, but there is *something* being transmitted anyway that it can't make sense of. After all, not just television uses electromagnetic waves. So since there's no station playing something on the specific signal you tuned to, it's taking random signals from background radiation and trying its best to show it. This won't make a logical picture, though, so we get this random pattern of pixels and electronic noise.

Next, we have SMPTE Color Bars, or...just color bars. We don't need to say that it's the pattern standardized by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers every time, after all. This was developed as a form of calibration for analog screens like Tenna, and nowadays is used to calibrate external monitors that we connect to cameras so multiple people can look at what's being recorded (such as the director and producers) without crowding around the camera operator. Every bar is a main color at 100% intensity, ordered in a specific way that makes sense if you go through every way to calibrate a screen and that is a lot to go over which I don't think is needed info, but you want it, looking for SMPTE calibration will get you where you're going. It also plays a really annoying sound that you may know as the censor noise, because you'll KNOW if it's too loud and adjust accordingly.

Also quick fun fact, the "technical difficulties" screen that Tenna flashes by is based on the old, black-and-white version of that. When we say technical difficulties with the color bars now, it's probably because your television is fine, but there's something wrong on the end of the people transmitting. If you're not calibrating the television and the colors pop up, it's an issue with the source signal.

Now, let's look at when this happens with Tenna. I found one major place where he has static, and one major place he has color bars.

In Tenna's final boss fight, he gets the static every time you select a minigame and he's using his own head as a transition to it. You could say that he's initially getting static because he's between channels, since that happens sometimes as little "blips" as you're changing them. It could also be that the signal he's turning to doesn't have anything broadcasted on it until he decides so by teleporting the gang into that area. I'm more of a fan of the latter, since that means that he has direct control over electronic signals, not just the ones he listens to, and that better explains how he transports the gang into the minigames: he transforms them into information that he decodes on his screen.

And of course, we have the prime example of him using the color bars...when he dies. I'd like to note that the stuff coming out of his arms looks a lot like static, although I don't have any reason for saying it other than I think it looks cool. So, this is often used as a modern "technical difficulties" screen, and it can easily just be that. It can also be Tenna trying to recalibrate himself. He realizes there's a problem and is running diagnostics instinctively. Obviously, there is nothing that checking color values can do for losing your arms, so this doesn't do anything to help him.

If he is theoretically both the receiver and transmitter of his own signal, this could also be him showing that he lost his source. Maybe his source signal is whatever keeps him alive as a Darkner, analogous to how we are kept alive by our hearts beating and electric activity in our brains? If he is making his own signal, that can also be how he physically moves the gang to the channel he broadcasts the minigames in, and him experiencing a large amount of pain/damage would be reason to conserve energy and not do it anymore.

[roseaesynstylae]

Jedi-related Technology — Light of the Jedi

These were the crafts of the Jedi Order, their Vectors. As the Jedi and the Republic worked as one, so did the great craft and its Jedi contingent. Larger ships exited the Third Horizon’s hangars as well, the Republic’s workhorses: Longbeams. Versatile vessels, each able to perform duties in combat, search and rescue, transport, and anything else their crews might require.

The Vectors were configured as single- or dual-passenger craft, for not all Jedi traveled alone. Some brought their Padawans with them, so they might learn what their masters had to teach. The Longbeams could be flown by as few as three crew, but could comfortably carry up to twenty-four — soldiers, diplomats, metics, techs — whatever was needed.”

“The Vectors were as minimally designed as a starship could be. Little shielding, almost no weaponry, very little assistance. Their capabilities were defined by their pilots. The Jedi were the shielding, the weaponry, the minds that calculated what the vessel could achieve and where it could go. Vectors were small, nimble. A fleet of them together was a sight to behold, the Jedi inside coordinating their movements via the Force, achieving a level of precision no droid or ordinary pilot could match.

They looked like a flock of birds, or perhaps fallen leaves swirling in a gust of wind, all drawn in the same direction, linked together by some invisible connection…some Force. Bell had seen an exhibition on Coruscant once, as part of the Temple’s outreach programs. Three hundred Vectors moving together, gold and silver darts shining in the sun above Senate Plaza. They split apart and wove into braids and whipped past each other at incredible, impossible speed. The most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. People called it a Drift. A Drift of Vectors.”

“[…] Weapons on a Vector could only be operated with a lightsaber key, a way to ensure they were not used by non-Jedi, and that every time they used, it was a well-considered action.

An additional advantage— the ship’s laser could be scaled up or down via a toggle on the control sticks. Not every shot had to kill. They could disable, warn…every option was available to them.”

“They were riding in another vehicle customer-designed by Valkeri Enterprises for the Jedi — a Vanguard, the land-based equivalent to the Vector. It was also sometimes called a V-wheel, even though the thing didn’t always use its wheels to get around. Every Jedi outpost had at least one as part of its standard kit, and the machine was engineered to operate in all of the planetary environments in which those stationed were situated [?]. It could operate as a wheeled or tracked ground transport, or a repulsorlift speeder for ground too rugged for tank treads. A Vanguard even had limited utility as an amphibious or even submersible vehicle, being able to seal itself off entirely as needed. It could do everything but fly, and that came in handy on Elphrona, where the planet’s strong magnetic fields made certain regions utterly inhospitable to flying craft.

The overall aesthetic was analogous to Vectors — smooth, sleek lines, with curves and straight edges integrated into an appealingly geometric whole. Behind the seats in the driver’s cabin — currently occupied by Indeera Stokes and Loden Greatstorm — was a large, multipurpose passenger area, with space to store any gear that a mission might require. Vanguards were more rugged than Vectors, but were built with many of the same Jedi-related features as their flying cousins. The weapons systems required a lightsaber key, and many of the controls were mechanical in nature, so as to be operated — in an emergency — via an application of the Force rather than through electronics.

No Jedi would use the Force to accomplish something as easily done with their hand — but lives had been saved by the ability to unlock a Vanguard’s hatch from a distance, or fire its weapons, or even make it move.”

“Indeera slipped past them to the rear of the vehicle, where its two Veil speeders were stored on racks, one above the other. Like all the Valkeri Enterprises built for the older, they were designed for Force-users, and as such were delicate, highly responsive machines. Little more than a seat strapped to a hollow duralium frame, with a single repulsor and four winglike attachments that sprang from its side, a Veil was basically a flying stick. But if you knew how to to ride them, they were incredibly fast and maneuverable. A group of skilled riders, with lightsabers out and ready, could take down entire platoons of armored vehicles while sending blasterfire back at attackers.”

“At the moment, she was aboard the Ataraxia, the Jedi’s beautiful, elegant starship, almost a temple in and of itself.”

“Another ship was visible on his display, outside his command authority but certainly an ally: the Ataraxia, the one large starship under the direct control of the Jedi Order. It was a beautiful ship, designed to subtly evoke the Order’s symbol with its hull and sweeping, curved wings accented in white and gold.”

[preservationofnormalcy]

ITEM FILE #2213

ITEM: "Glycon's Grove"

ITEM HISTORY: Broadcast from 1987-1996, Glycon's Grove was a children's puppet show that debuted on public television stations accessible in Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, and Iowa. After three episodes, the anomalous properties of the show were confirmed, and access to public television wavelengths was restricted. An agreement with Glycon's Grove production team (Oddy See) and the Office was reached wherein Oddy See would receive funding and distribution through OPN-approved channels, while all scripts, dialogue, and visuals were sent to the Parafiction Department for approval and study. After a brief interruption, Glycon's Grove was then broadcast nationwide (and in Canada and Mexico through agreement with RCOE and SER) on thaumic wavelengths decryptable by "analog augury"-compatible television sets, cable TV packages catering to the extranormal community, and distributed via VHS consumer hardware.

Glycon's Grove centered around the adventures of the titular Glycon, referred to as a "snake" despite his crude sock-puppet appearance. Glycon, often the energetic but patient voice of reason, would counsel his friends during common children's show storylines of the time, teaching lessons such as manners, the importance of reading and creativity, and honesty. The idea of snakes as "important, friendly creatures" was a common recurring topic. The show took place in the Grove of Olympus, with the rest of the cast being more typically-constructed puppets of a minotaur, hydra, cyclops, aquatic creatures, and in later seasons, a large "Cerebus" requiring multiple puppeteers to operate. Every few episodes, one of "the gods" (played by one of the human puppeteers in costume) would enter the Grove and provide the cast with that episode's challenge or conundrum. "Dio" was portrayed by actor Kenneth Young as a "surfer dude" always holding a family-friendly can of grape soda. "Heff" (Baker) often cajoled the cast into trying his new inventions, while "Arty" (Brown) asked for help in locating her lost pets.

Numerous interviews and investigations conducted by the Office concluded that while each other puppet in the cast (a list in the image above) was credited to and clearly played and voiced by a human puppeteer, Glycon's puppeteer, if they existed, was never credited or seen at any point. When interviewed, other members of Oddy See insisted that Glycon was "just Glycon" and did not acknowledge any puppeteer. During studio tours, Glycon was observed to move around the studio in ways that would be challenging for a human-puppeted character, EG, in one room and suddenly another, manifesting on multiple parts of a sound stage in rapid succession, always behind a barrier that could have reasonably obscured a human puppeteer from any Office observer. Attempts to isolate all visual angles in a given room often failed, resulting in Glycon appearing from a loose ceiling panel or other improbable locations.

Glycon "himself" always agreed to interviews, providing they could be done on Oddy See studio property, citing his "bum leg" as an inability to leave the property. He was at once forthcoming and evasive, simply repeating that he was "a puppet" when asked about his state, and that he "needed a new gig" as one of the reasons he started Glycon's Grove. Interviewers commonly reported Glycon as "charming" or "funny".

Parafictional research into Glycon's Grove and similarities to a mytho-folkloric figure of the same name are ongoing to this day.

[flowercrownmickey]

every reference and easter egg in how to disappear (or at least all the ones i can remember)

how many did you catch? Massive SPOILERS under the cut!!

baba yaga (Barbara Yaga, her ownership of the house ian rents is one of the few things carried over from the original wilde life au concept that i was going for in the first chapter)

i wanted to name the town in Oklahoma something weird and a little creepy but not use a real place. the thing is Oklahoma already pretty much has towns named with every weird creepy combo of words possible (seriously, go skim a map sometime, you will see some wild stuff). In the end i decided on Owl Creek because it's a real name but it's actually not one place, but the name of multiple waterways all across the state. 👍

the rainbow fuck you socks are real socks (i used a photo of them as the cover for the how to disappear playlist) that @michellemisfit sent to me as a gift, i couldnt resist using them in the story.

Glenchad's technique for haunting/traumatizing Ian is inspired by the x-files episode How the Ghosts Stole Christmas

Glen himself is based on and named after Glen McReynolds from one of my favorite movies: Everybody Wants Some!! (the little inside joke i have with myself is that Glenchad hates Ian because Glen in the movie hates pitchers, and in one of my favorite fics, Love is a Ballfield, Ian is a pitcher.) (yeah it gets pretty convoluted inside my brain lol)

the infomercial ian watches on one of the local tv stations is a real product that i found by googling for the weirdest products sold through infomercials

the channel LOCAL 58 is of course an easter egg for the analog horror series by Kris Straub (of whom im a big fan)

the title of the fic itself is also a reference to another work by Kris Straub, a book of short psychological horror stories called Ichor Falls: A Visitor's Guide

mickeyism nickname "livestrong" is of course a reference to famous cyclist Lance Armstrong

Norma's is named for Norma Jennings, a character from Twin Peaks who owns and operates the Double R Diner, a major location used in the TV series.

I was a huge Newsies fan and had a crush on half the cast of the movie as a tween. Christian Bale wasn't my personal favorite but I figured he'd be the most recognizable reference for the general audience!

mickeyism nickname "Cowboy" was the newsie-name that Christian Bale's character went by in Newsies.

Ian and his Taco Bell drop off: I searched food delivery reddits for common horror stories from delivery drivers and turns out the prank of telling a driver there is a cash tip tucked somewhere on the front porch and then watching/filming (and possibly even posting to the internet) the person searching fruitlessly for the tip is disgustingly not uncommon.

the "old-as-fuck British sitcom set in a department store" is Are Your Being Served? - a show i simply remember being on all the time on the local PBS stations back when we still had TV and would just have to watch whatever was on!

Mickey refers to Oklahoma City as "The City" which is the way many locals refer to it.

I had to include Ian getting an order for Subway as a little homage to one of my absolute favorite fics of all time: Intro to Quantum Dating by @spoonfulstar

Ian is flying down the road on his bicycle bearing a single meatlover's footlong. - this is a joke about Ian's giant penis. But he is also actually delivering a meatlover's footlong.

"John D" - is short for John Doe because of course they wouldnt register for the grubhub app with a real name.

the werewolf pack was a little bit inspired by the Hale family from Teen Wolf, the werewolves from grizzly hills in world of warcraft, and the aesthetic of the broke-ass snobby british aristocrats from The Gentlemen TV series.

"Mother Selene" referenced by the pack leader just before the werewolves transform, refers to Selene the Greek goddess of the moon. There's heaps of history from all over europe on the origins of the werewolf myth. for my werewolves i chose to go with the ancient Greeks since "lycanthropy" is a greek word and i had decided that in this universe, the greek gods were fey. Selene was a powerful fey who created lycanthropy and tied the malady to the moon, she made herself the center of a cult of worship and used her werewolves as a vicious personal army to torment and control the humans who lived in what she considered to be her domain. When Ian reaches the center of the hedge maze, the statue he climbs is a statue of Selene (ian mistakes her crescent moon crown she is usually depicted with for horns).

ian in his mind refers to the werewolves as lunatics, just a little tease as the etymology of the word is a madness caused by the moon.

i decided vampires are one of the few things in this universe that dont exist, Mickey references the myth as originating from Bram Stoker's Dracula (though he doesnt specify this), a book that one could argue is about real estate. which is both a joke but also please read this incredible post by @gardenerian because its also...not not not a joke.

as a huge fan of Two of Your Earth Minutes by @the-rat-wins, i absolutely HAD to work in a joke in which mickey calls Ian an alien

in chapter 4 the vibe i wanted to capture for Norma's was that of Merlotte's Bar and Grill from True Blood, and many of the characters are based off of or named after True Blood characters.

Eric is named after Eric Northman

Dawn and Tara and Jessica are all characters who at some point were waitresses at Merlotte's. (Though later I realized Dawn and Tara are also iconic Buffy characters, which I happily retcon as being an extra reference)

Glen being a fan of China Beach is a reference to Jenny Nicholson's incredible feature length video essay about the vampire diaries tv series

the fey named paula is named after canon ian and mickey's PO from season 10

the fey named cooper is named after agent dale cooper from twin peaks

aunt barb trades her chickens for an RV - a convoluted reference to the myth of baba yaga having a hut that can move around on giant chicken legs.

ADDING ONE THING: in chapter one Mickey implies Ian is a delinquent and in chapter four Ian calls Mickey a miscreant. this was important to me for some reason but i dont know if its a thing anyone noticed 🥲😆

okay....i think that's it?? for now anyway~ xoxo

[biblioflyer]

The Cardassian War was worse than you probably think.

I wrote a lot about the Maquis with every intention of posting quite a bit more about it, but then I got cold feet. Its actually been a while since I watched some of the critical Maquis episodes. In some instances, I haven't seen them since they aired. So I decided to go back and rewatch some of them. I started with TNG 7x20 "Journey's End." Where I expected a very strident lecture on the evils of forced relocation, I found something deeply nuanced and something that also reframed how I understood the Federation's conflict with the Cardassians.

If you're in a hurry, the big revelation was that, per Picard, millions of people died in the Cardassian - Federation War.

If you haven't been part of debates about what the scale of the Star Trek setting is or are more attuned to more recent series, millions may not actually seem that many people. Star Wars and 40k fans are probably squinting and wondering what all the fuss is about.

So let me provide some additional context. This is going to be mostly Doylist in nature, i.e. "meta" commentary.

Millions of people equals thousands of Galaxy-class starships. At a time when we'd seen not more than two Galaxy-class starships on screen at the same time and per the Next Generation Technical Manual (which was quasi-canon at the time, essentially given high regard by creatives working on Trek but always subject to being overruled if the needs of the story dictated) there could be as few as five Galaxy-class starships active at the time, but perhaps eleven including the initial batch of six and assuming the six framed out but not completed hulls were built to completion and subtracting poor Yamato.

Just a few seasons before, the loss of 39 ships and 11,000 personnel at Wolf 359 was considered a pretty devastating loss.

If it were strictly Starfleet and Cardassian military personnel, millions would be staggering losses representing the equivalent of thousands of starships or some mix of ships and major stations or ground forces. My gut tells me that given the way TNG seems to be a smaller scale setting than Trek would later be depicted, this wasn't intended to be solely military losses but also inclusive of and maybe even disproportionately falling upon civilians. Given that the Federation doesn't directly target civilians as a general rule, I do have some theories on how this might come about: namely by making space warfare messier than its generally presented: Star Wars and The Expanse have both done great representation of how conflicts that play out in space can still result in collateral damage to civilian stations and planetary settlements.

Notably, later series like DS9 and Discovery will do a "soft" retcon of Starfleet to include as many as 7,000 ships in the 23rd century and perhaps around 30,000 in the 24th century (citation: Ron Moore & extrapolation based on fleet size quotes) but while this isn't a hard retcon in that it doesn't override firmly declared facts and figures, it also doesn't seem like these larger numbers were ones TNG was operating with when it threw a mere 40 ships at the Borg or had Starfleet yet again being unable to avoid pulling ships out of dock mid-refit and stuffing Enterprise crew on them to catch the Romulans smuggling arms to House Duras.

Regardless of how the numbers breakdown, this was anything but analogous to a protracted series of border skirmishes and raids ala the colonial theaters of various European imperial wars, which full disclosure, was my working mental model for understanding this conflict.

So why does this matter for understanding the Maquis?

I think it matters for understanding the Federation's motives in signing what most fans and many in universe characters feel is a "bad" peace with the Cardassians. This wasn't a vanity war that super powers sometimes find themselves in where they'll fight for years in some corner of the globe that is strategically irrelevant to the imperial heartland but has somehow gained incredible psychological significance in the minds of defense planners, politicians, and yellow journalists. This is a conflict that cost the Federation quite a bit of blood for planets that are described as having been settled for at most a few decades and, at the very least, we've never really heard anyone from the Federation complain about a lack of satisfactory M-class planets.

Of course as represented by the North American Indians (TNG's term, not mine) that had settled on Dorvan V, from the perspective of the colonists, they had roots and distinctive cultural identities that they desired to have respected and felt warranted their own planets. From the Federation's perspective, these are people who have barely settled their worlds and one world should be as good as another. If you run the numbers through "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" then this starts looking even more tilted towards the Federation's perspective.

Now the counter argument is the bog standard opposition to authoritarianism and violent revisionists argument. This is the argument that the moral responsibility for avoiding catastrophic loss of life is on the one who is the first to use violence to try to advance their interests, at least at the level of astropolitics. In this framing it is not the responsibility of the Federation to mollify the Cardassians by conceding on irrational fears or immoral demands.

A cynical reading of this argument might find within it the notion that the Federation should just do what it wants, as long as its consistent with the Federation's values, and if the Cardassians have a problem with it up to the point of attacking, then the Federation should fight back and not stop until it reaches Cardassia and overthrows the military junta in charge or at the very least, removes any Cardassian presence from Federation borders and denudes Cardassian capacity to strike across the border.

The idea here being that conceding to the Cardassians rewards them for their willingness to use violence to achieve their goals, which further incentivizes them to use violence, and arguably did incentivize them to use violence as evidenced by accusations of poisoning wells and damaging infrastructure to drive ex-Federation citizens off the worlds that were ceded to the Cardassian Union.

But this argument has always contained within it the implicit assumption that the Federation had the capacity to rollback Cardassian warmaking capability and to keep up pressure on the Cardassians until the Cardassians cry uncle. A war in which millions died and where the Federation is trading away planets is not one that seems to imply the Federation had the capacity to hammer the Cardassians until they relented or there was a deficit of will to fight this war to the hilt, recognizing that pushing the war all the way to the orbit of Cardassia Prime would result in Union space being ungoverned and insecure until the infrastructure and ships were replaced.

Anyone who has watched the outcomes of the Global War on Terror or the various civil wars and revolutions that have happened in recent years should be very cognizant that a lack of order and security often results in problems being exported to adjacent regions. Problems meaning traumatized and impoverished refugees seeking safety and sustenance in places ill equipped to provide for them materially and often with some or a lot of mutual incoherence and mistrust happening at the cultural level as norms clash. Problems also meaning unaccounted for military equipment finding its way into the hands of revolutionaries, terrorists, and pirates who pursue their own goals and survival needs through the use of weapons on anyone who has something worth taking.

The United States did not kill a million or more people in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other MENA region countries through the use of weapons from 2001 to date. Iraq from 1991 to 2001 didn't have a million excess deaths* because of bombs detonating in people's homes, those deaths resulted from damage to infrastructure and internal supply chains because civilization is actually rather fragile and even people we regard as "less developed" are not meaningfully closer to nature and more resilient than we in the WEIRD category. If anything they exist in a more delicate state because they are often living on more marginal and stressed land with infrastructure that lacks redundancies or substantial state capacity to move people and resources around quickly to address sudden need.

*It should be noted that while these figures are widely quoted, the methodology has been questioned. I would encourage readers who want to get their historical facts correct to examine the evidence and decide whether Iraq sanctions are something one wants to use in a context other than describing the potential consequences of a fictional war.

When considering how to deal with Russia and its invasion of Ukraine, there are moral debates about how hard to press the civilian economy. Namely because so much of the infrastructure and daily necessities of life in modern countries count as "dual use." As in there are legitimate civilian uses that it doesn't seem productive to deny people: transistors are essential for access to information - both state controlled but also outside channels, and operate everything from thermostats to live saving medical equipment. The distinction between a transistor appropriate for running an insulin pump and one for a hypersonic missile is increasingly blurry.

An analogy could easily be drawn to isolinear chips and replicators. We in the fandom often assume that the Federation's ability to be precise in its application of lethal violence is practically omniscient and omnipotent, and that with its august technology, it has been liberated from having to make hard decisions. Yet if the Federation wants to destroy the warmaking capability of the Cardassians, how "deep" into the Cardassian infrastructure does it need to go?

Can you imagine Captain Picard sleeping well at night after calling a senior staff meeting to debate the legitimacy of striking a fusion reactor in a dense urban area that has been unplugged from the civilian grid and hooked up to an industrial replicator pumping out photon torpedo thrusters?

Further, the moral and political science assumptions of the Federation seem to rule out the idea that Cardassian civilians suffering and dying is an appropriate form of justice for Federation lives nor does suffering seem to predictably and reliably lead to revolution. Historical evidence is at best mixed and perhaps even damning. Try wrapping your head around the idea that Russian forces continued to fight their foreign enemies in WW1 at the same time as different Russian formations were fighting each other during the civil war that broke out as a direct consequence of World War 1. In short, while the war had certainly radicalized much of the public, there was still a lot of anger and blame directed to those who had been killing Russians before Russians were killing Russians.

So what is the Federation to do?

Keep fighting a war it probably wasn't technically losing but definitely didn't seem to be winning?

And perhaps the Federation couldn't win without paying a cost in both Federation and Cardassian lives, many of whom might be noncombatants, that was unpalatable?

What was it supposed to do after Wolf 359?

Postscript:

A bit more about the plot of the episode itself. "Journey's End" is probably one of the best TNG moral dilemma episodes. There are critiques to be made obviously. That the Indigenous people depicted seem to be a bit generic to the uneducated eye and do not claim a specific tribal / national identity feels weird at the end of 2024, but it also provokes an interesting discussion about the degree to which there isn't already a lot of syncretism among peoples who have experienced massive depopulation and loss of political agency, whether through intentional genocides, loss of territory, or disease. Its not hard to imagine this "North American Indian" identity found on Dorvan V being a syncretic identity that emerged in the 2100s once interstellar colonization really took off. Its strongly implied to be a "fresh start" movement that was itself controversial and many indigenous North Americas opted not to join them; but its membership could be plausibly drawn from many cultural identities.

However, the moral dilemma at the heart of the episode is handled with exquisite care and steadfastly refuses to make anyone objectively the bad guy. Every Federation character, even hardline consequentialist Admiral Nechayev, is respectful to the people of Dorvan V and mindful of their historical trauma even as it recognizes that the Federation's own interests are largely incompatible with respecting their demands.

Even Gul Evek, the named Cardassian leader of the show, relents after an impassioned plea from Picard. Evek admits to losing two out of three sons in the war and speculates that if the Dorvan V inhabitants leave the Cardassians alone, they will be left alone. Evek was convincing at least to this member of the audience. The framing felt hopeful rather than like everyone was being asked to swallow a Targ dung sandwich.

In checking to make sure I spelled his name correctly, I've become aware that Evek becomes a recurring character and I'm intrigued to see if there are clues to be found as to whether you could argue that he was lying or that events took on a life of their own and Evek was simply proven wrong. Its possible that Dorvan V was largely spared but the Obsidian Order or other elements of the Cardassian government decided to act in places it thought the Federation wouldn't be paying as close attention and the radicalization of the Maquis in turn radicalized Evek.

After all, since that the Cardassian Union was in effect waging a proxy war in the Demilitarized Zone, it would take little to convince some Cardassians that a guerilla movement with ex-Starfleet in almost all command roles and using Federation hardware represented a Federation proxy war with top level support. Which would in turn require the Federation to at least make some efforts at combating the Maquis in order to sell the Cardassians on the idea that the Maquis are not a plausibly deniable arm of Starfleet Intelligence.

But the Maquis are obviously are going to do what they need to do to defend their worlds, whether its their actual colonies or because they object to Starfleet sitting on its hands in the face of reports of atrocities.

In retrospect, for an era that was just testing the waters for multi-season arcs, this is such smart and tragic world building. Unlike say, the plot to destroy Qonos in Discovery or the anti-Changeling bioweapon being the Chekov's gun necessary to resolve the Dominion War, very little about the Maquis arc feels contrived and much more well supported by the world building around it.

[dude1818]

I did not like the ancient alien framing device in PMMM. I thought it was inconsistent and poorly thought out. However, the pieces are all there to have done something pretty interesting and thematic

Explicitly establish Kyubey's race as the first Type I civilization in the galaxy. Call them the Prime. They decide to find a way to stop the heat death of the universe, as in canon

The Prime discover magic and that it's possible to extract positive energy out of it. (I do appreciate that instead of making up some technobabble, Kyubey admits "it's magic, we don't fucking know why it breaks the second law of thermodynamics")

The Prime discover pre-sapient lifeforms in the galaxy. They create the Incubator program to uplift those planets and also operate the witch harvesting operation on all of them. (I assume the phenotype of the Incubators are tailored to the planet they're stationed on. Whether they're synth-bio constructs or the Primes gene-modded themselves for this kind of thing doesn't matter, although the Kyubey in the show felt more like the former)

At no point make the Primes "emotionless" or, even worse, "consider emotions a mental disorder." They'd have a blue-and-orange morality, of course, but tie this much more strongly to the livestock analogy Kyubey gave Madoka. The Incubators came to Earth and bred apes into humans. They have spent millennia improving our biology, our lifespans, and our quality of life. Just like we try to give our livestock the best lives before we harvest them, they improved our civilization

Why don't the Primes turn themselves into magical girls? If you asked them, they'd say obviously if they harvested their own young for magical energy, they'd wipe themselves out, and entropy would win. They have to harvest other species instead, because that's an unbounded magical energy source instead of a bounded one

In the timeline where Madoka went witch, Kyubey seemed fine with the Earth being destroyed because he met his quota. That can fit. Figure out the average amount of energy a Type 0 civilization uses over its lifetime. You can figure out what efficiency ratio you need to maintain the rest of galactic civilization and aim for that. It's not like Earth will remain barren forever, anyway

The important thing is keep all of this in mind when writing Kyubey's lines. Canon got close to writing this, but kept adding explanations for one aspect of the Incubators without thinking about how that interacted with other aspects. It didn't matter in the end because the whole universe got reset, but every timeline should've been consistent from the start!

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

NASA continues BioNutrients space-fermented food research

NASA's BioNutrients series of experiments is testing ways to use microorganisms to make nutrients that will be needed for human health during future long-duration deep space exploration missions.

Some vital nutrients lack the shelf-life needed to span multi-year human missions, such as a mission to Mars, and may need to be produced in space to support astronaut health. To meet this need, the BioNutrients project uses a biomanufacturing approach similar to making familiar fermented foods, such as yogurt. But these foods will also include specific types and amounts of nutrients that crews will be able to consume in the future.

The first experiment in the series, BioNutrients-1, set out to assess the five-year stability and performance of a hand-held system—called a production pack—that uses an engineered microorganism, yeast, to manufacture fresh vitamins on-demand and in space.

The BioNutrients-1 experiments began after multiple sets of production packs launched to the station in 2019. This collection included spare production packs as backups to be used in case an experiment needs to be re-run during the five-year study.

The planned experiments concluded in January 2024 spare production packs still remaining aboard the orbiting lab and in the BioNutrients lab at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley, where the ground team runs experiments in parallel to the crew operations.

Leaders at NASA's International Space Station and Game Changing Development programs worked to coordinate the crew time needed to perform an additional BioNutrients-2 experiment using the spare packs. This extended the study's timeline to almost six years in orbit, allowing valuable crew observations and data from the additional experiment run to be applied to a follow-on experiment, BioNutrients-3, which completed its analog astronaut experiment in April 2024, and is planned to launch to the station this year.

Astronauts on the space station will freeze the sample and eventually it will be returned to Earth for analysis to see how much yeast grew and how much nutrient the experiment produced. This will help us understand the shelf stability of the packets.

IMAGE: NASA astronaut and Expedition 72 Commander Suni Williams displays a set of BioNutrients production packs during an experiment aboard the International Space Station. The experiment uses engineered yeast to produce nutrients and vitamins to support future astronaut health. Credit: NASA

[thosearentcrimes]

The Achaemenid/First Persian Empire is kind of wild. At the time of its greatest conquests it was the largest empire the world had ever seen, by a significant amount. Like any good empire it's a triumph of logistics, of course, but what's unusual is the character of the logistics in question. The kinds of empire we're used to are generally either basically maritime (Roman, Spanish, British, American) or basically horselord (Xiongnu, Parthian, Mongol, American) or Chinese (special case, the general tendency for there to exist a Chinese Empire is impressive in its own right but relatively familiar).

The Achaemenid Empire touched a lot of seas and bodies of water (Indus, Indian Ocean, Persian Gulf, Tigris and Euphrates, Red Sea, Nile, Mediterranean, Aegean and Bosporus, Black Sea, Caspian Sea) and certainly these would have been used to facilitate logistics to some degree (Persian invasions of Greece relied on naval support, for example), but it certainly seems like the fundamental lifeline of their state was their extensive system of roads. The Romans talk a big game about their road system but ultimately the major logistical corridors of the Roman state were maritime and riverine. The Inca Empire was similarly road-based, likewise a hilly/mountainous region, and is also extremely cool, but didn't last nearly as long and was much smaller.

Herodotus says: "There is nothing mortal that is faster than the system that the Persians have devised for sending messages. Apparently, they have horses and men posted at intervals along the route, the same number in total as the overall length in days of the journey, with a fresh horse and rider for every day of travel. Whatever the conditions—it may be snowing, raining, blazing hot, or dark—they never fail to complete their assigned journey in the fastest possible time. The first man passes his instructions on to the second, the second to the third, and so on." A different translation of a section of this passage is famously associated with the US postal service.

Herodotus may be wrong in the details because the actual intervals between adjacent waystations seem to have been on the order of 16-26km, a distance a rider could reach in an hour (and perhaps most relevantly, a pedestrian or army might reach in a day), and as such it's certainly plausible horses were changed more than daily, as is attested in later relay postal networks, but it's easily possible he was right about their incredible speed. A perhaps somewhat generous estimated speed of government messages along this route is ~230km/day, by analogy of the pirradazish to the Pony Express and barid systems. This would make them faster than Roman communications, though certainly we have to recognize that maritime transport is ultimately faster and more convenient for trade in bulk goods and food. All figures taken from H.P. Colburn, "Connectivity and Communication in the Achaemenid Empire" Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 56 (2013).

That's so cool! It's several hundred BCE and they have a complex permanent relay system with stations every couple dozen km, on a system of roads running throughout an empire thousands of km from center to edge. Just for one road, like the Sardis-Susa section that the Greeks usually talk about, that's over a hundred stations, each with a stock of supplies, backup mounts and riders, accommodations, anything else they might need, and Sardis-Susa was just one possible road stretch among many. That's incredible! I wish we knew what the people who made it and ran it thought. What was the life of a gas station attendant waystation operator in the reign of Artaxerxes I like?

It's kind of tragic that the Achaemenid Empire has been marginalized historiographically for so long. Generally it was treated as significant for its invasions and meddling in Greece, for ending the Babylonian captivity, or for providing a ready-made empire for Alexander to take over. It's not nothing, other places and time periods end up with much less of an imprint on our contemporary understanding of the past. We know a lot of cool stuff. But I wish we had more reflections on Persia from within. Most of what we seem to have is reports from Greeks, fragmentary letters and steles, and precious few excavation sites.

[sentientcitysurvival]

21st Century Protest Structure: Field Coordination Model

Protesting in 2025 requires structure. The State is organized. Protesters must be, too. The following framework is designed to reduce harm, increase adaptability, and document misconduct in real time.

1.) Communication HQ

Central team monitoring police radio (Broadcastify, OpenMHz, analog scanners)

Tracks crowd movement, street closures, staging by police

Sends real-time updates through Signal, Briar, or secure radio systems

Flags signs of kettling or crowd control escalation

Utilize handheld transceivers ("HT")/handheld radios ("Walkie Talkie") or Prepaid cellphones with encrypted messaging apps and encrypted VOIP to communicate with organizing teams in the crowd.

2.) Direction & Movement Teams

Goal: prevent mass arrest via entrapment

On-the-ground teams to scout ahead and identify traps (dead ends, underpasses, bridge bottlenecks)

Quietly redirect crowds as needed; don't give intel/counter-intel a reason to zone in on any particular person or group; be strong but not a target

Teams blend in with the protest but use predefined signals to coordinate

If you have to break (leave and dart away) due to illegal, dangerous, or aggressive trap behavior by authorities, do so in small groups. Assign a scout or decoy to move in a different direction with deliberate speed to create the impression of urgency and redirect pursuit. After separating, attempt to re-establish communication in 15-minute intervals to reduce noise, avoid signal triangulation, and limit detection risk. Use low-visibility methods (predefined encrypted channels, burner devices, short-wave bursts) if possible.

3.) Documentation Teams

Record frontline police behavior: badge numbers, arrest techniques, excessive force

Operate from both within the crowd and elevated locations (windows, rooftops)

Footage is backed up live or regularly to offsite/secure storage

Purpose: create admissible evidence, not confrontation

4.) Legal Observation

Volunteer teams modeled after or trained by National Lawyers Guild observers

Stationed at likely points of tension (front lines, transport wagons)

Record identifying information on officers and arrestees

Maintain professional distance and neutrality

5.) Information Collection Teams

Gather voluntary protester IDs and emergency contacts for jail support

Log officer misconduct with timestamps, location, and unit info

Match scanner audio to observed events when possible

Prepare formal documentation post-protest

6.) Internal De-escalation Units

Monitor for behavior that gives police pretext for crackdown (property destruction, attempted arson, provocateurs)

Isolate and calm those individuals

Document suspicious agitators if needed

Priority: avoid PR collapse and legal justification for suppression

7.) Social Media Coordination

Designated accounts post verified updates, police positioning, arrest reports

Monitor and counter disinformation in real time

Preferably run by people off-site using VPNs and alt accounts

No central account—decentralized posting reduces vulnerability

8.) Movement

If you use public transportation pay with cash, use cash to buy metro/transport cards at a currency exchange (or similar location) or use a pre-paid RFID debit cards that allow them

If you use private transportation park away from protests to reduce harassment, potential theft/destruction, and to give yourself an reasonable exit.

9.) Response Unit (Healthcare, Hydration, Tactical Defense, De-escalation)

The Response Unit is tasked with frontline and midline support during moments of escalation, crowd distress, or chemical/impact deployment. These volunteers must remain calm, mobile, and trained. Equipment should be organized in marked bags or packs, easily accessible in chaotic conditions.

Healthcare & First Aid

Carry first aid kits with trauma pads, saline flush, gloves, and antiseptics

Identify medics visually (e.g., colored tape or marked vests) but avoid excessive attention

Triage in place when possible; move only if absolutely necessary

Volunteers should know how to treat blunt trauma, burns, sprains, and lacerations

Carry emergency contact forms for unconscious individuals (if pre-registered)

Affordable EM devices include Portable Blood Pressure Monitor Cuffs and Blood Glucose Monitoring Kits

Do not administer medication unless someone is a trained EMT or in a related field

Hydration

Distribute water regularly, especially in high-heat or long-march conditions

Keep backup water for emergency use (decontamination, eye flushes)

Tactical Response: Smoke, Gas, Impact

Carry water buckets or wide-mouth bottles to neutralize smoke canisters (if safe to do so)

Use thick gloves or tongs if attempting removal

Umbrellas can block gas and redirect airflow briefly; also break up visibility for snipers or drones; they can also bounce thrown smoke grenades or flashbangs, although those are usually ground-tossed

Protective eyewear, cloth masks, or soaked bandanas help but are not full protection against tear gas

Use saline or water+antacid (e.g., Maalox) 50/50 mix to flush eyes exposed to pepper spray

Never use oil-based lotions or creams pre-protest (they trap chemicals)

De-escalation & Crowd Calm

Trained volunteers move to calm panicked or agitated groups

Help direct people toward exits or safe zones without creating additional chaos

Watch for false alarms, planted agents, or compromised individuals

Quiet body language and clear, short commands work best ("Walk. Breathe. This way.")

Never escalate physical confrontation unless to prevent serious injury

Additional Tips:

Carry duplicates of essential tools in case of loss or theft

Avoid overpacking or overidentification with red/medical markings (can become targets)

Plan rendezvous points for regrouping post-escalation

Ensure units understand hand signals or light-code cues if verbal communication is compromised

Do not bring items that can harm both authorities and civilians (laser pointers, weapons, dangerous chemicals, etc) and do not bring items you are unsure of that would give authorities an excuse to attack (multitools, large flashlights that can be mistaken for a weapon, large bike-locks that could used a weapon, etc)

The Response Unit is not just reactive — it stabilizes the group, maintains morale, and ensures that no one is left behind when systems break down.

Notes:

Avoid bringing phones with biometrics or open apps if attending in person; use mesh networks or QR-based Signal groups if possible

Avoid bring phones at all if possible

All volunteers should know jail support procedures and have legal aid numbers memorized or written down

This model is not about optics. It’s about minimizing risk and maximizing accountability. Share, adapt, or operationalize as needed.

[leroibobo]

nbc's flagship analog channel serving new york city, wnbc, signs off for good on june 26th, 2009 as a part of the american digital television transition.

like many analog channels signing off as a part of digital switchovers, the channel left with a special message; in this case, consisting of several old interstitials and music, including (in order of appearance):

the color test pattern from the late 1970s; before television stations were capable of operating around the clock, stations would "sign off" (say goodbye and show no programming) for the day and reserve the signal with a test pattern (which was also used to test how well the signal worked) until the morning. this test pattern originally said "wnbc-tv", but the "-tv" was artistically omitted.

the contemporaneous nbc logo, in use since 1986. a slightly adapted version is still in use today.

the opening music for nbc's nightly news program, in use from 1982 to 1985.

the nbc logo used between 1979 and 1986, referred to as the "proud n"; this is a combination of the company's two best-known logos at the time (the "trapezoid n" and the rainbow peacock).

the nbc logo in use between 1976 and 1979, referred to as the "trapezoid n".

an animation referred to as the "laramie peacock" (after the program before which it first aired), in use between 1962 and 1975. some of the first cgi, this animation would signify to viewers that the program they were watching was available in color at a time when both black and white and color tvs were in wide use in the united states. an earlier, more bombastic version of this animation, as well as a static peacock, were in use between 1956 and 1962. (you can watch a compilation of all of these here.)

the "snake logo", an animated station id interstitial used between 1959 and 1975. it features the "nbc chimes", nbc's callsign dating from when it was founded as a radio station in the late 1920s.

[sublimedreaming]

⌇  J.E.B  ⌇

⋙⋙⋙  incoming  frequency  ⋘⋘⋘

⌇  basics.

⌇  name  :  jérémie  eliot  broussard

⌇  alias(es)  :  j,  jay,  swampfox,  static,  ghost,  cajun

⌇  gender  :  cis  male  (  he  /  him  )

⌇  orientation  :  heterosexual

⌇  date  of  birth  :  3  nov  2001  (  age  36  )

⌇  occupation  :  radio  station  caretaker

⋄  ⋄  ⋄  ⋄  ⋄  ⋄  ⋄  ⋄  ⋄  ⋄

⌇  physical  &  mental  profile

⌇  height  :  6’1” 

⌇  weight  :  183  lbs  /  83  kg

⌇  build  :  lean,  utility-focused,  long-haul  survivalist

⌇  hair  :  dark,  unruly  curls,  always  a  little  too  long

⌇  eyes  :  blue-green 

⌇  dominant  hand  :  right

⌇  tattoos  :   gator  skull  across  forearm,  “ma  cherie”  in  cursive  over  his  pulse  line,  minimalist  star  band  (hand-drawn)  around  his  bicep,  sigil  of  silence  carved  into  his  upper  ribs—he  did  that  one  himself

⌇  scars  :   a  bite  that  didn’t  kill  him,  jagged  chest  scar  from  a  metal  shard,  faint  self-inflicted  burn  rings  on  his  hand—old,  healed

⌇  conditions  :  untreated  ptsd  ∘  hypervigilance  ∘  mild  hallucinations  (sensory-based)

⌇  schemas  :  abandonment  ∘  guilt  ∘  control  ∘  self-containment

⋄  ⋄  ⋄  ⋄  ⋄  ⋄  ⋄  ⋄  ⋄  ⋄ ⌇  personality

⌇  mbti  :  istp-t

⌇  alignment  :  true  neutral

⌇  temperament  :  melancholic

⌇  enneagram  :  5w6

⌇  zodiac  :  scorpio  sun  ∘  capricorn  moon  ∘  sagittarius  rising

⌇  soul  type  :  sentinel

⌇  spirit  animal  :  owl

⌇  mythic  tie  :  hermes  ∘  the  message-bearer  between  worlds

⌇  6  qualities  :  intensely  observant  ∘  independent  ∘  strange  but  dependable  ∘  loyal  if  earned  ∘  practical  ∘  quietly  protective

⌇  6  flaws  :  emotionally  locked  down  ∘  cryptic  ∘  antisocial  ∘  superstitious  ∘  unfiltered  ∘  eccentric

⋄  ⋄  ⋄  ⋄  ⋄  ⋄  ⋄  ⋄  ⋄  ⋄ ⌇  background  check

⌇  origin  :  lafayette,  louisiana

⌇  accent  :  thick  cajun  drawl,  stronger  when  tired  or  alone

⌇  pre-fall  :  coast  guard  signalman  ∘  ran  coastal  comms

⌇  post-collapse  :  wandered  solo  for  seven years,  surviving  off  broken  signals  and  blind  instinct,  joined  blackridge  five  years  ago  after  following  a  coded  broadcast  no  one  else  could  decipher

⌇  skills  :  shortwave  radio  operation,  analog/digital  frequency  splicing,  power  grid  maintenance,  silent  tracking,  encryption  &  cipher  decoding,  swamp  survival  ∘  field  repairs  ∘  mechanical  patchwork

⋄   ⋄   ⋄   ⋄   ⋄   ⋄   ⋄   ⋄   ⋄   ⋄

⌇  behavioral  anomalies

⌇  collects  broken  radios  and  lines  them  up  like  a  shrine

⌇  talks  to  static  like  it’s  an  old  friend

⌇  hangs  talismans  made  of  metal  scraps  from  trees  near  his  tower  “to  catch  bad  signals”

⌇  names  his  tools  (his  wrench  is  “clarence”)

⌇  hums  lullabies  no  one  else  recognizes

⌇  arranges  his  boots  and  gear  every  night  in  the  same  exact  pattern

⌇  carries  a  harmonica—doesn’t  play  it,  just  holds  it

⌇  sleeps  above  the  station

⌇  once  stayed  up  for  96  hours  straight  tracking  a  faint,  broken  voice  across  channels

⌇  carries  a  small  carved  gris-gris  (voodoo  charm)  in  his  coat  pocket—says  it’s  for  protection,  even  if  he  doesn’t  believe  in  much  anymore ⌇has  an  old  beat-up  walkman  and  a  growing  cassette  tape  collection.  blues,  french  folk,  outlaw  country.

⌇  never  says  “goodbye”  on  the  radio.  only:  “you  still  there?”  or  “i’ll  be  listenin’.”

⋄   ⋄   ⋄   ⋄   ⋄   ⋄   ⋄   ⋄   ⋄   ⋄

⌇  likes  /  dislikes

⌇  likes  :  the  sound  of  clean  static,  cassette  tapes  with  old  love  songs,  storms,  quiet  hands,  sharpening  tools,  dark  coffee,  radio  puzzles,  open  spaces  with  no  one  in  them

⌇  dislikes  :  being  touched  without  warning,  people  speaking  too  loudly,  false  warmth,  authorities  or  “official  voices”,  when  someone  asks  what  he’s  thinking,  small  talk

⋄   ⋄   ⋄   ⋄   ⋄   ⋄   ⋄   ⋄   ⋄   ⋄ ⌇  triggers  /  touchstones

⌇  triggers  :  enclosed  dark  spaces,  women  crying  (reminds  him  of  when  he  lost  his  sister),  having  something  he’s  built  destroyed  or  tampered  with,  people  yelling  while  he’s  wearing  his  radio  headset

⌇  touchstones  :  one  mangled  dog  tag,  a  harmonica  that  isn’t  his,  a  black  notebook  full  of  redacted  signal  logs,  a  feather,  taped  to  the  edge  of  the  comm  console,  a  cassette  marked  only  with  “chérie  –  don’t  forget”

⋄   ⋄   ⋄   ⋄   ⋄   ⋄   ⋄   ⋄   ⋄   ⋄

jérémie  broussard  was  born  in  lafayette,  louisiana,  on  a  patch  of  bayou  where  the  water  runs  deep  and  the  world  don’t  move  unless  you  know  how  to  move  with  it.  raised  by  a  mother  who  believed  in  god  and  a  grandfather  who  believed  in  grit,  jérémie  learned  early  how  to  live  without  needing  much.  fish,  trap,  fix.  listen  more  than  speak.  trust  slow,  if  at  all.

by  the  time  most  kids  were  learning  how  to  drive,  jérémie  could  track  a  gator  through  fog  and  rebuild  a  generator  from  scrap.  by  twenty-one,  he  enlisted  in  the u.s.  coast  guard—not  out  of  patriotism,  but  for  escape.  there,  he  became  a  communications  technician,  mastering  field  radios,  power  rigs,  and  how  to  stay  calm  when  the  rest  of  the  world  burned.  he  was  good  at  it.  too  good.  they  tried  to  promote  him.  he  refused.

after  a  relief  mission  went  bad—something  he  never  explains—he  walked  away.  packed  up.  went  back  to  the backroads,  the  bayou,  the  silence.  he  drifted  alone  for  years,  surviving  off  the  land  with  the  same  instincts  that  raised  him.  tracking.  fishing.  hunting.  fixing.  if  it  moved,  he  could  follow  it.  if  it  broke,  he  could  rebuild  it.  if  it  threatened  him,  it  didn’t  last  long.

then  the  world  collapsed.

the  fall  didn’t  shock  him.  the  world  had  always  been  broken—now  it  was  just  honest  about  it.  he  was  off-grid  when  it  hit.  alone,  as  usual.  by  the  time  he  made  it  back  to  lafayette,  his  mother  was  gone,  his  sister  was  almost  there.  infected.  he  found  her  still  breathing  but  not  herself.  he  did  what  had  to  be  done.

he  never  speaks  about  it.  but  that’s  the  moment  the  radio  inside  him  changed.

he  wandered  after  that.  spent  seven  years  moving  from place  to  place.  sleeping  in  towers.  rewiring  generators  in  the  dark.  avoiding  the  sound  of  people  crying.  kept  himself  alive  by  listening  to  the  hum  in  the  air  and  the pull  of  instinct.  hunting.  fishing.  tracking.  fixing.  he  lived  like  a  ghost.

eventually,  he  picked  up  a  broken  transmission.  a  voice  no  one  else  heard.  a  signal  hidden  under  static.  it  led  him  to  blackridge—a  half-built  safe  zone  powered  by  hope  and  duct  tape.  he  meant  to  pass  through.

that  was  five  years  ago.

now,  jérémie runs  the  radio  tower  and  the  comms  network.  he  keeps  the  radios  clean  and  the  signals  alive.  he  still  hunts.  still  traps.  still  knows  how  to  track  the  sound  of  trouble  before  it  makes  it  to  the  gates.

most  people  think  he’s  odd.  he  talks  to  static.  leaves  wire  talismans  hanging  from  the  trees.  doesn’t  come  into  town  often.

but  if  your  grid  fails,  if  your  team  goes  dark,  if  a  storm  cuts  the  lines  and  your  voice  is  the  only  one  out  there—

he’ll  hear  you.

and  if  you’re  lucky,  he  might  even  answer.

–  –  –  signal  lost  –  –  –

[valhallakonbi]

i meant new ask: character headcanons?

oh okay i wasn't sure my bad!

i'll start off with some small ones and gradually get to the bigger ones:

i can't tell if you were the one to come up with it or if it was established in the novels but i really like thinking of ougi as a neat freak... since koyomi is one, it ties in nicely

vegetarian koyomi & sodachi are also very good (i think veggie koyomi is yours and sodachi is annabelle's)

kanbaru and hitagi actually kissed in middle school. several times maybe.

yotsugi has a crush on nadeko but she doesn't understand that it is one. nadeko has noticed something's up but isn't sure yotsugi knows either

uni senjougahara can drive a motorcycle (please picture koyomi in the backseat as well)

hanekawa knows way too much about cars and all the men she meets at diners and gas stations overseas are really impressed with her, whether they like it or not (she drives manual btw.)

kanbaru wanted to become a sports doctor after meeting with numachi again, so i think she would mostly work with teenagers. i'd like to think that she frequently visits naoetsu and that ougi and kanbaru are still friends and reading buddies even when kanbaru grows into an adult.

my biggest headcanons are not fun ones and they are senjougahara related. reader discretion avised (mentions of eating disorders, cancer)

it's pretty on the nose, and it's edgy, and it's not revolutionary or anything, but hitagi crab as an analogy for eating disorders works extremely well in my eyes.

as someone who has dealt with eating disorders it makes for a very true-to-life tale of a girl whose response to multiple trauma has been control of other's perception of her by violent means (mindful of what people are saying about her, can't let anyone know about her secret, threatens and bullies anyone who tries to get closer to her). this is coherent with anorexia as a way to regain some form of pride and "autonomy" when you feel like everything's been taken away from you. the "weight" aspect is a major factor in how people come up with this interpretation, it's a pun on "omoi" (heavy ; feelings / ties / memories) and how cutting these off completely is easier than dealing with them... and eating disorders oftentimes serve as a way to shift the focus on something other than the actual traumatic event. i remember it functioning the same as addiction on a neurological level.

anyway, what i like about this reading is how the analogy makes it non voyeuristic. the lack of voyeurism (ironic, huh) when it comes to traumatic events is something i really appreciate in monogatari. even as she's talking about the ways she was emotionally and sexually abused, we're not directly shown, we listen to senjougahara talk. a lot of stories about eating disorders are very graphic with the subject matter. seems people can't talk about this stuff without putting extra stress on the "disgusting" aspects of it (critically underweight bodies, laxatives, vomit and other forms of purging). this kind of stuff does nothing except add shock value and try to warn readers or watchers about self-image issues and how starving and purging is bad and gross!! like they don't already know. with hitagi crab as an analogy for anorexia, the self-image/societal perception aspect is neatly implied and the root of the problem (relationship with her mother) is addressed directly.

the other on-the-nose, edgy thing, is senjougahara had a critical operation which saved her life when she was little. it's never been said outright what her disease was, but cancer is prevalent enough among kids and it fits her motif.

[felixcloud6288]

Higurashi: Massacre Chapter 22

Ooishi and Komogai are dead, leaving Rika and her friends to wonder what happened to them.

Takano fully believes Oyashiro is real and her personal motivation seems to be a desire to become Oyashiro. When she says she'll create a new curse legend, several of her journals are floating in the background.

In Atonement, Takano's alien parasite story became the center of the Great Hinamizawa Disaster in occult and conspiracy circles. Maybe in other timelines, different journals became the source of conspiracy theories. I'd like to know which timelines think the Disaster has to do with Ossie, the Onigafuchi monster.

And Takano said Rika is a direct descendant of Oyashiro. In that case, if Rika and the Furudes do have some influence related to those infected with Hinamizawa Syndrome, it probably has a more supernatural aspect.

I want to bring up the two officers who were stationed at Rika's house during the day and left when the night shift appeared. They'd been there all day guarding the place and waiting for Ooishi to arrive. Then their replacements arrive and they head home. Later that evening, possibly less than an hour in fact, their replacements are dead. That is a formula for some extreme survivor's guilt.

The analog clock in Rika's house seems to imply it's around 11:07, but later the digital clock in Takano's van says 11:00 when the Wild Dogs begin their raid.

Something about a swat team dramatically running at a door only for one of them to pull out a key and unlock it made me laugh.

They probably had a key made ahead of time for the operation. They want to make Rika's death appear to be part of Oyashiro-sama's curse, so obvious forced entry is not a good idea.

Rika's been slowly moving the goalpost for herself as things get worse. She started by thinking about surviving to the next day and next day, then she started thinking about just surviving tonight even if she dies tomorrow, and now she's thinking she needs to survive long enough so she can remember it was the Wild Dogs and Takano who are trying to kill her.

She's definitely given up on surviving this world and at this point, she's trying to be as prepared as possible for the next one.

Even if it 's to her benefit, Rika cannot abandon Satoko.

We saw it at the start of this arc when she opted to stay in what she thought was a hopeless world when Teppei showed up, and now she's willing to abandon her chances in the next world to protect Satoko.

I really wouldn't take Keiichi to be the kind of person who is athletic enough to dive kick an adult.

Of all her friends, I can only imagine Mion having the skill and ability to take on an adult man with combat training in a one-on-one. Shion at least thought to bring her taser.

In the anime, Keiichi brought Satoshi's bat and Rena brought her hatchet (she wielded it so she was using the dull end) to fight the Wild Dogs. I'm willing to suspend my disbelief for a lot of things, but the Wild Dogs losing to a bunch of unarmed children implies a level of incompetence I can't even begin to imagine.

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[thebreakfastgod]

Alien: Romulus Review

I liked it! As an Alien fan I thought that this was the best Alien movie that's been released in a while. Alien: Romulus takes place chronologically right after the first movie, and before Aliens. It follows a crew that wants to get off their mining colony planet which is owned by the Weyland-Yutani corporation, and make their way to the planet Yvaga. Our main character, Rain, thinks that she qualifies for a travel permit, but is denied. Then, Rain and the crew she works with decide to steal their own cryosleep pods from a defunct space station that is in orbit above their planet. The Remus & Romulus station is abandoned for reasons that are completely unknown and cannot be guessed :)

I thought the movie had really good tension throughout. You of course know that whatever is going to go wrong is going to happen on the space station, and with this knowledge comes the fear of what exactly is going to happen next. There was also lots of foreshadowing that I picked up on, and some that was not so subtle. Sometimes the camera would settle just perfectly on something in frame and I could tell it would come up later. The planet they are on has a large set of rings that are in the background of all the space shots, and once the crew dock their ship on the station they are informed that there will be a collision with the rings in 38 hours. One of them says, naturally, “We should be in and out in 30 minutes,” which knowing that this is an Alien movie just made me excited for whatever crazy and horrifying shit was yet to come. This deadline of the collision heightens the sense of urgency for the crew & the audience. This deadline quite literally looms large in the background of establishing shots, and at the beginning of the movie I thought to myself, ‘I can't wait until the ship is all the way over there’. The collision is inescapable, unlike the way that characters might override a self-destruct or something similar. The round shape of the rings reminded me of an analog clock that is counting down the minutes, and by the end of the movie the asteroid field was a visual feast.

I loved the music, it reminded me of the original in a really good way. It sounds classic to the alien franchise, and still like a really good modern movie soundtrack. It heightens the tension and creates a pervasive sense of dread and uneasiness. There was a big moment right at the end where the score and visuals gave me goosebumps. I also thought the visuals of this movie were incredible, and multiple shots had me noting how good they looked, and how they enhanced the mood of the film. The editing/pacing I noticed also had me really engaged, as the switching perspectives from where different people were separated always had me chomping at the bit each time to find out what happened to them. I didn’t find that one perspective outweighed the other in terms of how interested I was, which can happen sometimes.

The stand out performance is David Jonsson as Andy the synthetic. He’s my favorite and absolutely the best character. He is introduced to us telling terribly cute and cheesy dad jokes, and accompanies Rain to the market while she applies for a travel permit. He is a previously broken/disconnected Weyland-Yutani droid who was refurbished by Rain’s dad and given the operating directive to “Do whatever is best for Rain.” He is brought along for the mission because as a WY droid he can communicate with the ship's operating system. Ideas about being “real” or “alive” are explored with Andy, and that is something I looove in media involving robots. In canon he is not a human, yet is still constantly dehumanized by those around him. Rain cares about Andy and saves him from death, and he does the same for her, so what does it mean to be “real”, anyway? Rain views Andy as her brother, and infantilizes him, because as a repaired android his operating systems don’t work exactly as they’re “supposed” to, and because of this she treats him like a child that can’t be trusted on his own. I think that this is an obvious allegory to him being disabled/autistic, as he is shown to not understand human social cues, is easily overwhelmed, and has a stutter. He also will seize if knocked too hard and must be rebooted throughout the film in order to regain normal functioning. 

Partway through, in order to gain access to higher clearance doors, Andy gets a processor component from the android chief science officer of the Romulus station, which turns out to greatly improve his knowledge of the ship, ai, and motor controls. This disc also makes him an autistic supergenius, because now he is rational and calculating, he speaks extremely clearly with almost enhanced enunciation, and he moves in a way that is more “like a robot”. He also instantly does what I want someone to do in any Alien movie, he tries to KILL the person who was face-hugged. In Alien movies, the characters always want to help their friends (like, obviously.) which always leads to them inadvertently letting the alien gestate and chest-burst. It felt so satisfying to have a character who knows what needs to be done and will not hesitate to try and accomplish it. He knows that even if they have to kill this party member, it will be saving all of their lives. Insert Family Feud meme here. KILL!!!!!

There are also questions explored with Andy about the synthetics being able to harm humans. One of the other party members who is a total dick is given a bit of backstory where his parents died after being sealed into a collapsing mine. It was a synthetic who gave the order, and androids are not allowed to harm humans, but in order to save a dozen other miners, three people had to die.  This is almost immediately paralleled in the situation on the ship, where if Andy is able to kill the infected crew, it will save all of them, but the humans won’t allow him to kill her. Upon receiving the science officer disc, Andy also receives a new operating directive, which explicitly does not have Rain’s best interest in mind. There is such a fascinating interplay between the Andy that is trying to help Rain and protect the humans, and the Andy that has motivations set by the corporation. Once he becomes a corporate droid he instantly becomes way more sinister, and I loved Jonsson’s performance of this switch, it was absolutely captivating and I was most interested in what he would do in each scene. 

I did think it was kind of weird that the only Black character was a non-human robot, and I also know that the autistic robot  trope is both disliked and embraced, so I’d love to hear if other people have opinions on those things. 

The movie also had a tongue-in-cheek attitude about the Alien franchise, because the movie seemed to know that it was a better movie than the past few that have been made. There were multiple references to the original three movies, when Andy saves Rain from a Xeno he says, “Don’t touch her, you bitch”(Aliens), and there is a reference to that iconic shot from Alien 3 where the Xeno gets close to Ripley’s face. Also right before the climax of the movie, Rain is in her little sleep shorts and a tank top pajamas getting ready for hypersleep, and suddenly there's still an alien threat and she now has to get in a spacesuit and throw it out the airlock, which is exactly like the original. But it was fun, and the final monster was fucking wild. I liked how it all led up to the final confrontation of Rain vs. Monster and the shot of it getting pulled out the airlock was fucking awesome. It followed the first person perspective of Rain being dangled out the back of the ship in zero g. There are a few other scenes where the characters have to deal with zero gravity, and I really enjoyed how the camera would also stop being affected by gravity and take the audience with it.

Unfortunately, I thought that the main character Rain was pretty forgettable. She is just not the powerhouse of a character that Ripley was, and she is supposed to be the new modern stand-in for Ripley. She is trying to accumulate enough work hours on this mining colony to be approved for a travel permit to leave, and the rest of the crew are also trying to leave for Yvaga. Her parents are also dead so that the movie doesn’t have to worry about that. It just kind of felt to me that she is a blank slate audience stand in and all the other crew members are also a bit one-dimensional because the movie knows they’re going to die. 

Some jumpscares also felt extremely cheap to me, although there are some that are earned. I feel like I just could've done without some of them. Like, at one point the characters are trying to be quiet and sneak through a section of the ship, and a random dead body of a crew member comes down from the ceiling for a jumpscare. It felt so on cue that a guy sitting next to me in the movie theater said “jumpscare”!

But overall, I thought that this was a fun romp of an Alien movie. I enjoyed seeing it in the theater and will probably watch it again at some point. I had only seen a couple of trailers before going, and went in mostly blind, only knowing that there's a new Alien movie out! I was a little worried that it was gonna be bad but was so wonderfully surprised and pleased with this movie. You should check it out if you’re interested and if you got this far thanks for reading my review of something hope you enjoyed <3

[synastry-rp]

THE EXO

IN THE BEGINNING, IT WAS THE GRAND TRINE AGAINST THE BEASTS OF DEEP SPACE. This was, all parties acknowledged, an unscalable solution to an unsolvable problem. But the new wizards were not suitable for this war, and so in the earliest days of revived society one of the most important matters of business was to create an answer to the riddles of space's newest and most terrible dangers. Research undertaken on the first house eventually uncovered the solution: individuals with the ability to tap into latent passive magic were found to develop a symbiosis between man, magic, and machine. And so: these were the first of the great exoskeletons who would fight in space in defense of the empire. Fundamentally, there are two classes of these massive constructs — VENATOR and FORTIFICARE. These exoskeletons require more than one pilot — currently anywhere from two to five — and are flown in teams of humans whose passive energy can generate symbiosis with the ship. Later advances introduced a new kind of ship — the ANIMUS, bio-engineered to be flown through the transference of consciousness of a single pilot. In all cases, pilots demonstrate high tolerance and capacity for passive magical energy, and are selected and trained with great care. All Empire Houses and Stations now have exoskeleton facilities, though the original base of research was conducted from the first house. The largest military station is now on the Fourth House. All units are stationed with a magician who can periodically restore function and power — giving an important mystical boost to the Empire's killing machines.

VENATOR class exoskeletons are typically offensive units. Pilots of Venator units have a neurotransmitter input which is frequently at the top of the spinal cord, as well as a cochlear implant which connects them to their teammates. The entity is flown and operated collectively, with pilots typically positioned centrally. Venator units are smaller and more agile than their Fortificare counterparts, and although never as small or agile as a solo ANIMUS unit, they tend to have a greater weapons capacity due to their frequent offensive deployment.

FORTIFICARE class exoskeletons are typically defensive units. Pilots of Fortificare units are distributed throughout the machine, and have neurotransmitters implanted in the part of their body which represents the closest analog to their distribution in the exoskeleton. They also share a cochlear unit, similar to their Venator counterparts. Fortificare units tend to be the largest of all of the machines, and are equipped with defensive weaponry, transit, and construction capabilities.

ANIMUS class represent bio-engineered entities who are piloted by full consciousness transfer. This is accomplished by a cranium implant which is turned on or off to accomplish the neural uplink. Animus pilots are solo pilots with a protective team around them, due to them “piloting” a bioengineered entity as opposed to a robotic mass. If an Animus-class pilot's body dies while they are in the machine, their consciousness stays in the machine.

Pilots who work together often enough will inevitably approach a phenomenon where they are able to sense and feel their co-pilot(s). This often results in something known as neural drift — a mental connection, as opposed to subspace drift, the physical act of traversing outside of physical space. Neural drift is experienced the most by the Venator class in that they will often feel everything their co-pilots feel, including pain. Fortificare class pilots do not experience such a high level as their offensive counterpart, thought to be in part due to the neural/conductive load being more spaced out among pilots. Animus class pilots will often report, after having worked with an entity for some time, feeling phantom body parts, such as wings, or tails when their consciousness is transferred back to their body. Although neural drift is considered to improve the function of pilots within an exoskeleton, it is a side-effect of working together, and not a pre-requisite. And though exoskeleton development has been through multiple iterations to improve the machines and implants required for the symbiosis to work — sleeker machines, smaller implants — the psychological concerns of neural drift have been understudied. What is understood is that the loss of a pilot in a team with neural drift — or the loss of all pilots — can result in a difficult replacement process.