#d3 data

[softwaredevelopment23]

D3 Is Taking Over & Here’s What Your Data Analytics And Visualization Is Missing

D3.js, short for Data-Driven Documents, is a sophisticated JavaScript library that empowers developers to animate data with life through HTML, SVG, and CSS. D3 enables the creation of stunning visuals from basic bar graphs to intricate interactive maps, transforming raw data into visual narratives.

[an-ectoplasmic-energy-blast]

Blacked out, coded this chart ranking Danny phantom episodes using my heart. Bon appétit.

Here’s the link. Ignoring the spelling like I said I blacked out.

[recenttrendingtopics]

Unlock the power of interactive data visualization with D3.js! From complex datasets to visually engaging graphics, D3.js makes it possible to craft dynamic, user-friendly visual experiences. Want to level up your data visualization skills? Check out our latest blog! Read more: https://bit.ly/40Y7Mjy

[techtalksonthego]

Unleashing the Potential: Dynamic Data Visualizations with D3.js in React Applications

In the era of data-driven decision-making, the ability to present information in a visually captivating and interactive manner is invaluable. React, the popular JavaScript library for building user interfaces, becomes even more powerful when integrated with D3.js, a versatile data visualization library. By combining React's flexibility and component-based structure with D3.js's rich visualization capabilities, developers can create stunning and dynamic data visualizations that captivate audiences. In this article, we will explore the seamless integration of D3.js with React, unlocking a world of possibilities for creating compelling and engaging data visualizations in your React applications.

1. Understanding D3.js:

D3.js, or Data-Driven Documents, is a comprehensive JavaScript library that provides an extensive toolkit for creating dynamic and interactive data visualizations. Built on web standards like HTML, SVG, and CSS, D3.js empowers developers to transform raw data into meaningful visual representations using a wide range of powerful features and techniques.

2. Integrating D3.js with React:

To leverage the full potential of D3.js in your React applications, follow these key steps for seamless integration:

a. Installing and configuring D3.js: 

Begin by installing D3.js as a dependency in your React project using package managers like npm or yarn. Then, import the necessary D3 modules into your React components to make them accessible within your application.

b. Harnessing React's lifecycle methods: 

React's lifecycle methods, such as `componentDidMount` and `componentDidUpdate`, play a crucial role in integrating D3.js functionality. These methods allow you to initialize and update D3.js visualizations within your React components at the appropriate times.

c. Harmonizing React's Virtual DOM with D3.js:

 React manages the rendering through its Virtual DOM, while D3.js manipulates the actual DOM. To ensure compatibility, use React's `ref` attribute to select and manipulate DOM elements directly using D3.js.

d. Data binding and updates:

 D3.js's strength lies in its ability to bind data to visual elements dynamically. Take advantage of D3.js's data-driven approach to bind data to React components, facilitating seamless updates and transitions as the data changes.

3. Unleashing the Synergy of React and D3.js:

By combining React and D3.js, developers can leverage the best of both worlds to create powerful, interactive, and scalable data visualizations:

a. Interactive and responsive visualizations: 

React's component-based architecture, combined with D3.js's interactivity and event handling capabilities, enables the creation of highly interactive and responsive visualizations. Users can engage with the visualizations, enhancing their understanding of complex data.

b. Effortless updates and animations: 

React's Virtual DOM, coupled with D3.js's transitions, facilitates smooth updates and animations as data changes. This dynamic rendering ensures that visualizations remain up to date and visually pleasing.

c. Customization and reusability: 

D3.js offers extensive customization options, enabling developers to create visually stunning and tailored visualizations. By integrating D3.js with React's modular architecture, visualizations can be encapsulated into reusable components, promoting scalability and code reusability.

Benefits of Using D3.js with React

Using D3.js with React offers several significant benefits for developers looking to create dynamic and interactive data visualizations. Let's explore the advantages of integrating D3.js with React:

1. Powerful Data Visualization Capabilities:

D3.js is a highly versatile and comprehensive data visualization library. By combining it with React, developers can leverage D3.js's extensive range of features, such as data binding, scales, transitions, and interactive elements. This combination empowers developers to create visually stunning and meaningful data visualizations that effectively convey complex information.

2. Component-Based Architecture: 

React's component-based architecture aligns well with D3.js's modular approach. Developers can encapsulate D3.js visualizations into reusable React components, making it easier to manage and maintain complex visualizations. React's component reusability promotes code efficiency and scalability, enabling developers to create a library of customizable visualization components.

3. Seamless Integration: 

React's flexibility and lifecycle methods allow for seamless integration with D3.js. Developers can leverage React's lifecycle methods, such as `componentDidMount` and `componentDidUpdate`, to initialize and update D3.js visualizations at the appropriate times. This integration ensures smooth rendering and data updates, providing a seamless user experience.

4. Virtual DOM and Efficient Rendering: 

React's Virtual DOM optimizes rendering performance by updating only the necessary components when the underlying data changes. By integrating D3.js with React, developers can take advantage of this efficient rendering process. React's reconciliation algorithm ensures that only the affected components are re-rendered, resulting in improved performance and responsiveness for data visualizations.

5. Enhanced Interactivity: 

React's event handling capabilities combined with D3.js's interactive features enable developers to create engaging and interactive data visualizations. React's state management allows for dynamic updates and interactions with the visualizations, providing a seamless and interactive user experience. Users can interact with the visualizations, explore data, and gain insights in a more intuitive and engaging way.

6. Robust Ecosystem and Community Support: 

Both React and D3.js have vibrant communities and extensive ecosystems. By integrating D3.js with React, developers can tap into a wealth of resources, tutorials, and community-driven libraries. This support system provides developers with valuable insights, best practices, and tools to create high-quality data visualizations efficiently.

Conclusion: Integrating D3.js with React empowers developers to create dynamic and visually captivating data visualizations within their applications. By combining React's flexibility, component-based structure, and state management with D3.js's powerful data manipulation and visualization capabilities, developers can convey complex information effectively and engage users through interactive visual experiences. So, dive into the world of data visualization with React and D3.js, and elevate your React applications with stunning and meaningful visual representations of data.

[sidrashakti]

Gemini Punarvasu: Mother Business or The Personal Brand 

My slogan for Punarvasu nakshatra is Big Business, Big Families because this is a nakshatra of (often extreme) abundance and expansiveness because of its ruling deity Aditi. She is the personification of the sprawling infinite and vast cosmos. She is the goddess of motherhood, consciousness, unconsciousness, the past, the future, and fertility. 

I have found that Gemini Punarvasu natives tend to dominate in their respective fields often not through the strict achievements or metrics (Capricorn) but through more personal (Cancer) means. They embody the concept of the Personal Brand. 

Identifiers: 

1) Tend to connect with their audiences personally rather than through extreme skill 

2) Tend to have mostly female fanbases

3) Can take on the role of Mother by nurturing or comforting or becoming omnipresent in the cultural landscape

4) Use setbacks to their advantage (ie: Reputation by Taylor Swift) 

5) Hypercreative, constantly churning out content, usually praised for their work ethic

6) Innovate through intuition, they’ve almost always innovated in some way 

7) Big family or strong connection to family in some way 

The success of these natives may bother people who believe in systems of strict qualifications: 

Amy Coney Barrett is a Gem Punarvasu Moon and caused widespread outcry when she was nominated to the Supreme Court by Donald Trump based on her beliefs, making her the only current Justice who had not attended Harvard or Yale. She has seven children and known for pushing right-wing “family values.”

Kris Jenner, a Punarvasu Moon AK in 10th House (which means she embodies this placement and does so extremely publicly for work), has launched her big family into limelight despite the frequent criticism that they don’t have any actual talents. Kris literally coined the term “momager” and created a billion dollar empire by creating a new mode of celebrity that was the opposite of the previous impersonal, distanced celeb. Like a mother, the Kardashians are omnipresent, transparent or emotionally available to their audiences, and intuit the desires of their fanbases. Kris specifically is known for her deep connections with everyone in Hollywood that are not always public and being a “secret-keeper” or always in the know, a deeply maternal role. 

Kim Kardashian has Gem Punarvasu Mercury and Jupiter tightly conjunct at the same degree in her D10 house of the career and public and is the first person to become famous for being famous. Mercury here rules technology such as social media, which is Kim’s platform. 

Ironically, perhaps the biggest personal brand ever is Taylor Swift, who has Punarvasu Moon in her D3 at the same degree as Kris Jenner’s, which is so interesting given her decade long feud with the family. Taylor has faced the same criticism as the Kardashians: reaching extreme fame not based on her vocal or performance talent but based on her connections and relatability in her music (in comparison to celebrities like Beyonce). Her music “raised” generations and is omnipresent well into her career. Punarvasu is the star of renewal and these figures often come back stronger from trials and tribulations. Taylor became the biggest popstar in the world after a period where she thought her career was over and the public hated her. Her family also extremely involved in her career.

These natives rely on their intuitions to innovate rather than hard science or rules. Steve Jobs had Jupiter in Gem Punarvasu (and Uranus in the Cancer portion) and was known for frequently stating that he valued intuition over logic and data, believing it to be a powerful tool for innovation. He often said that his intuition was a "whisper of the soul" that guided him, despite the reputation given to him by media of being a technician. Jobs's approach to product development often involved trusting his gut feeling about what customers would want, rather than relying on focus groups or market research. The Iphone became omnipresent in the West, owned by most people. He was a father of four children.

These natives are often hypercreative and workaholics, constantly producing and creating due to to abundant nature of Aditi. As a result they often have long and unique careers, becoming known for multiple things depending on other placements in their charts.

Sexuality

Sarah Weddington

This placement is particularly interesting on the Rahu/Ketu axis because it embodies the struggle for the liberation of the feminine on a public stage and these natives are very glamorous. Marilyn Monroe, perhaps the most famous woman ever, had this placement and her life embodied the struggles of the dark feminine publicly. Sarah Weddington was the lawyer who litigated and won the Roe v. Wade case as a fresh law school graduate after struggling to find employment because of a preference for male lawyers. This case gave generations of women the freedom of choice.

Working list of natives: 

ASC 

Sade Adu 

Caroline Herrera

Moon

Kris Jenner (Punarvasu Moon AK in 10th House

Taylor Swift (Moon D3) 

Amy Coney Barrett 

Mercury

Lana Del Rey (Mercury in Punarvasu in her natal chart & Lilith in Punarvasu in D10) 

Jupiter 

Steve Jobs (Jupiter in Gem Punarvasu (and Uranus in the Cancer portion) 

Mars 

Jalen Hurts

Ketu

Dita Von Teese 

Hasan Piker (Ketu in 6H) 

Rahu

Marilyn Monroe 

Sarah Weddington

[leiawritesstories]

PART ELEVEN: NOVEMBER

Word count: 10.1k

Warnings: Oof, this one's a doozy. Swearing, prison, police presence, shitloads of scheming, graphic violence, minor character d3@th, and angst

enjoy ;)

Masterlist

Read on AO3

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Endovier Prison, as it turned out, really wasn’t all that awful of a place to live. 

To be fair, the food quality was subpar and the communal bathrooms reminded Aelin of being in the college dorms again, but all told, it wasn’t a terrible place, except for the silence. She had been placed in solitary confinement based on her “history of conspiring with others to evade containment,” but she was allowed to take her meals in the common dining room and have her recreation time along with the other inmates. She was always monitored by at least one guard, and for the most part, her guards were stolid, silent presences in her periphery. 

And then there was Remelle. 

Technically an officer of the Orynth Police Department, Remelle was assigned to Aelin’s prison guard rotation three days per week as an additional security measure. Orynth PD had requested to assign a police officer to her guard rotation to ensure that she wasn’t trying anything suspicious, and the guards at Endovier had agreed after some deliberation. Apparently, Remelle had volunteered to be the PD guard so fast the job wasn’t even available to anyone else. 

She had first shown up in the guard rotation about five days into Aelin’s sentence, and jealousy practically oozed from her pores. It had taken Aelin only half an hour to figure out that Remelle had a completely unrequited crush on Rowan, and it took her only a little bit longer to casually mention his name within Remelle’s hearing. The sneer on the cop’s face and the steam that could have poured out of her ears confirmed what Aelin already hypothesized—Remelle was viciously jealous of Aelin and Rowan’s relationship, no matter that it was over. 

Which made her the perfect linchpin to Aelin’s escape plan. 

Two weeks into November, her first month at Endovier, Aelin had demonstrated nothing but good behavior, and she was allowed to have supervised computer time each day. Part of that was necessary, since she was still working with Elide to finalize the transition of power in her company, and Aelin had shown no resistance to having one of her guards watching her while she worked for her allotted hour of computer time. She was so cooperative, in fact, that her guards had become complacent after a week of supervising her and begun to just sit outside the door to the computer room, glancing in every few minutes to make sure she was still there. 

As soon as the guards were out of the room, Aelin began adding an extra task to the handful of things she was wrapping up as her company transitioned into Elide’s capable hands. During her computer time, she casually started to peruse the computer’s data logs and trace its network paths, and she eventually discovered that all the prison’s computers ran on a central network, even the secured ones that only the guards and other staff used. 

Including the security staff. 

A few clever digs into the system’s backbrain got her into the logs for the security system itself, cameras and all, and she had slowly begun to map out where the relevant cameras were located and what mechanisms she could possibly trigger to get them on a temporary loop. 

She couldn’t risk working too quickly, though, so she only did a little bit more each day, slowly working her way into familiarity with the prison’s computer network. Interestingly, she had also found the log that tracked all the visits to the prison, and she noticed that she had two visitors waiting to see her. The yellow flag by her name was a warning—she was not yet cleared for visitors—but given her good behavior, she was fairly certain that it wouldn’t be long before she could have visitors. 

Endovier Prison wasn’t going to know what hit it when they allowed Aelin Galathynius to have visitors. 

~

In the weeks she had been there, Aelin had managed to make some acquaintances with other inmates during communal mealtimes or rec time. The most interesting one was a woman about ten years older than she was who had been in Endovier for six years, a timeline that she tracked by marking the days on her cell wall with charcoal. Her name was Petrah, and she had been a licensed cosmetologist with no intent or interest in the criminal life until she discovered that her ex-husband was involved with a major drug smuggling operation. When she confronted him, he denied it and threatened to forcibly silence her if she told anyone else about it. 

So she murdered him. 

Petrah had been found guilty of manslaughter but had successfully managed to prove that it was in self-defense, and her sentence was only ten years. She was up for parole the next year, and she was constantly asking Aelin questions about Orynth to prepare herself for a potential return to the city. Aelin was happy to answer her questions; she had even said she would provide a reference if Petrah ever wanted to look for work at Galathynius, Inc. Elide would be renaming the company, but the leadership team had yet to decide on a new name. Grateful, Petrah had thanked Aelin but said she didn’t think she would pursue that kind of employment. 

The two of them had a casual friendship, little more than the shared bond of fellow inmates in a high-security prison, but Aelin trusted Petrah enough to ask her a favor. In the middle of November, Aelin was moved from solitary confinement to a cell block in a different sector, and while she was still alone in her cell, she had neighbors along the hallway. One of them was Petrah. 

“Morning, Sardothien. How does the slop look today?” Petrah’s raspy voice greeted Aelin as she set down her tray on the long metal cafeteria table. 

With a scoff, Aelin pushed her spoon around the grayish mass that was supposedly oatmeal. “No better than yesterday,” she drawled. “Seems like the supplies are getting a little thin.” 

Petrah chuckled. “It happens every few weeks. What it usually means is that the delivery comes at the end of the week, and they’ve got to get rid of as much stuff as possible.” 

“Fair enough.” Aelin managed to force down about half her portion, chasing it with multiple cups of bitter drip coffee. “Hey, do you still have any of your stuff from the salon?” 

“Yeah, I brought a box when they sent me here.” Petrah raised a brow. “Why?” 

Aelin shrugged, aware that the guards were probably watching and listening to her. “I feel like a little bit of a change. Got any bleach?” 

“Hmm.” Petrah tipped her head sideways, thinking. “I might.” 

When rec time rolled around that day, Aelin went over to the small, sparsely stocked library, and she was slowly browsing through the handful of books that looked interesting when Petrah tapped her on the shoulder. “I’ve got bleach.” 

“Perfect.” Aelin left the books alone and went down to the bathrooms with the stylist. “I was thinking I wanted to go platinum, or as close to that as you could get.” 

The older woman nodded, a sly grin tugging at her lips. “Ever bleached your hair before?” 

“I’ve had highlights, but not for years.” 

“Okay.” Petrah lined up a few bottles on the shelf under the small mirror in front of one of the sinks. “Damn, this brings back college.” 

“Tell me about it,” Aelin chuckled. “Looks just like the dorm bathrooms.” 

“Yeah.” Petrah tugged Aelin’s hair out of the braid she usually kept it in and glanced quickly towards the door. The bathrooms were about the only part of Endovier that didn’t have security cameras, and Aelin was half convinced there were hidden microphones somewhere. “We’re safe here,” Petrah said softly, keeping her tone low. “So tell me, Shadow Assassin. Is there any other reason you had this desire for a change?” 

Aelin met the stylist’s eyes in the mirror. 

And smirked. 

~

It had been twenty-five minutes since her visit began, and Elide was still sneaking astonished glances at Aelin’s hair. Aelin smothered her laughter and kept her face neutral as she chatted aimlessly with her dear friend. She’d finally been cleared for visitors two days ago, and Elide was the first one to arrive, bringing a stack of paperwork with her. Despite the no-touching and no-exchanges rule, she’d strolled right into the visitors’ room and plopped the stack of paper right down in front of Aelin. 

“No passing, ma’am,” the guard on duty interrupted, his eyes darting awkwardly between the current CEO of Galathynius, Inc. and the Shadow Assassin. 

Elide’s polite smile could have cut glass. “Would you like to sort through this paperwork yourself, Officer…” She glanced at his name tag. “Officer Owen?”

The man gulped nervously, stepped forward, and picked up the stack of papers. He flipped through it and set it back down. “A-all clear.” 

“Good.” Elide sat across from Aelin and handed a pen to the guard, who managed to give it to Aelin without dropping it. “These need your signatures, Aelin. It’s backlog from before the transfer.” 

“Couldn’t be bothered to use digital paperwork, I guess.” Aelin picked up the pen and started working through the paperwork, scratching her signature onto the blank lines. Elide updated her on the company business as she worked, and it was only a few minutes before the guard’s eyes began to glaze over and he retreated to the opposite corner of the room. Aelin stifled a chuckle. 

Nox Owen put on the second-best performance she’d seen in an undercover agent. Only Ren Allsbrook had been better. 

As Elide stole another glance at Aelin’s new, icy-toned hair, she caught the blonde’s gaze and sighed, shaking her head. “Didn’t take long for the boredom to kick in, did it?” 

Aelin shrugged. “When I got moved out of solitary, I found out that one of the nearby inmates is a cosmetologist. She’s nice. I felt like having a little fun.” 

Elide laughed softly. “I suppose you have to find those moments when you can, given that you’re never seeing the outside of this place.” 

“I see a few yards of the walls once a day,” Aelin joked. “Don’t worry about me, Ells. I’m okay.” 

“Really?” 

A shrug. “It’s not my apartment by any means, but it’s not awful.” 

“Hmm.” Elide pulled the finished stack of paperwork back over to her side of the table. “Officer?” 

At the sound of his title, Nox jerked and came to stand a few feet away from Elide. “Yes?” 

Elide turned a warm, charming smile onto the man. “Officer, is it possible for inmates here to receive care packages from outside?” 

“Well, I, um…” Nox cleared his throat, perfectly acting as a nervous wreck of a new prison guard. “All incoming mail must be thoroughly inspected by prison security.” 

“So that’s a yes?” 

“Yes, ma’am. You can put the inmate’s name and the prison’s address, and as long as the package passes inspection, the inmate will receive it.” 

“Wonderful!” Elide beamed. “I’d just like to make sure Aelin gets some real food, since she’s said that the food quality here isn’t all that great.” 

“If you could include extra for my cell-block neighbors, that would be great,” Aelin added. 

Elide nodded crisply. “Of course.” She made eye contact with Aelin, and the pair exchanged the slightest nod. “Is there anything specific you’d want besides food?” 

“Hmm…probably toothpaste and maybe some tampons. The ones in the communal bathrooms fall apart too fast. Oh!” Aelin grinned. “And if you happen to throw a few pieces of hazelnut dark chocolate in there, I’d be a happy woman.” 

“You and your chocolate,” Elide laughed. “Okay.” 

“Um, visit time is up, ma’am,” Nox interrupted, voice quavering. 

“I know.” Elide tucked the paperwork into her folder. “Would you be so kind as to show me the way out, Officer Owen?” She gave Aelin one last glance before she walked out the door, following Nox Owen in his prison guard’s disguise back out of Endovier. 

Another guard came into the visitors’ room. “Computer time, Galathynius,” he said curtly. Aelin followed him out and down the hallways to the computer room, mentally memorizing her steps. Although she could probably just follow another guard when she eventually made her break, it would go better if she didn’t. Besides, the cover she planned to use knew her way around Endovier. 

Or at least she should, after several weeks of being Aelin’s personal police guard. 

“You have thirty minutes.” The guard opened the door, checked the room, and sat down in the chair right outside the computer room. Not very talkative, this one. 

Aelin sat down at the computer and went to her email, where she answered some of the queries that still came to her and redirected others back to Elide. The camera in this room faced the chair, not the screen, and she kept her face and posture casual and neutral as she opened up another window and navigated herself easily into the prison’s computer system. Since everything was centralized, it had been laughably easy to clear her file’s hold, making it appear that the superintendent had cleared Prisoner Galathynius for visitors. The central system also made it much easier to track and locate the camera system, and in just over four weeks, Aelin had managed to map out the locations of every security camera in Endovier. 

The next step was figuring out how to run a certain sector of the cameras on a loop. She’d started with the one directly opposite her cell a week ago. A few typed commands, and that camera had blinked and gone dark for a few seconds, then rebooted. Aelin tried a few different methods, and eventually, she discovered how to make that camera replay a previously recorded segment of footage. She then moved on and started trying to sync up more cameras, a task that had proved more challenging. 

But after two weeks of work, she finally had it down. 

A handful of commands and a couple of passwords swiped from a database—really, this whole centralized system was just such a peach—and all twenty cameras in the sector Aelin had targeted were running a section of footage from a week ago. 

Beautiful. 

Aelin set the cameras back on their normal track, cleared all evidence of her meddling, and was closing out of her email when the guard opened the door again. 

“Time’s up.” He walked over and watched as she calmly exited the computer. 

She followed him back to her cell, and once his footsteps had receded, she sat down on her bed and picked up a journal from the shelf built into the wall. She knew the guards probably searched her books every once in a while, so she was careful to keep every piece of her plans in a code that only she knew. The words were ostensibly normal, set up as an ordinary journal entry, and the cute little drawings in the margins and on some of the pages were also apparently mindless scribbles. 

In Aelin’s eyes, the words and the sketches turned into her plan to get out of Endovier and finish Maeve Bitchface once and for all. 

And if she died in the process, then so fucking be it.

~

Nox Owens was having the time of his fucking life. 

When Elide had contacted him in the middle of Aelin’s trial, he’d been expecting another ordinary request for a tech job, which was his usual role. But she had surprised him—of course she had. If he knew anything about the Boss, it was that she always had another plan up that infinite sleeve of hers. Instead of a tech job, she wanted him to get into Endovier. As a guard. 

That was always Ren’s job. 

Nox had plenty of spy training and experience, but his primary strength was his tech savvy, and once Ren had joined the Boss’s team, he’d been content to take the tech jobs and leave the infiltrations to the most wanted spy in the world. But Ren was dead, and the Boss wanted Nox to work as her inside man. And it had been a hell of a long time since he’d had the chance to practice this skill set. 

It had been almost laughably easy to slip into Endovier’s database and add himself to the prison guard register, which rotated frequently enough that another new name didn’t catch any second glances. He barely even bothered to change his name, and his prison guard nameplate read “Nick Owen,” a bland, forgettable name to go with his bland, forgettable face. Just for fun, he swiped Ren’s fingerprints from the Boss’s archive and imprinted them onto the SecondSkin he applied to his hands—if he was ever printed, the staff would have such a fun time scratching their heads at the fact that this guard’s prints apparently matched those of a former inmate, one who was supposed to be dead. 

About a week after she visited, Elide Lochan sent a plain cardboard box by courier to Endovier Prison. As he passed by the shipping room on his rotation, Nox heard the gruff bark of the mail supervisor. 

“Owen! C’mere!” 

He strolled over, stopped a few paces away, and fiddled with the cuffs of his sleeves. “Yes?” 

“Quit twitching,” grumbled the crotchety old man who’d been the mail supervisor at Endovier for twenty years and counting. “Damn newbies.” 

“S-sorry, sir,” Nox mumbled, masking his snicker with a wobbly voice. 

“Just stop shaking, newbie.” The man pulled a box across the table and tugged the small, flat white envelope off the top of the box. He tore it open, and Nox swore he saw an avaricious smile flicker across the supervisor’s face at the sight of the cash inside the envelope. “Here. This one’s for Sardothien.” 

Nox cleared his throat. “Aren’t we supposed to inspect every package that comes for an inmate?” 

The supervisor chuckled dryly. “I see someone memorized the handbook.” Carelessly, he took a box knife out of his pocket, slit through the tape, and gave a cursory sweep of his hand through the contents of the box, then slapped a stamp on top of the cardboard. “How’s that for inspection, Owen?” 

“I…uh…” Nox pretended to be lost for words. 

“Good lad.” The supervisor tucked a stack of cash into the inside pocket of his vest and passed Nox fifty dollars. “This is called an inspection fee.” 

“Really?” 

“Of course not!” A rattling cackle scraped out of the mail supervisor’s throat. “It’s called good business for me and some goddamn tampons for Prisoner Sardothien. Now quit shaking and take that box to Sardothien’s cell.” 

“Yes, sir!” Nox picked up the box, slapped a bit of tape on top to hold it together, and left the mailroom as fast as possible. He wove through the corridors, flashing his badge when necessary, and came to Aelin’s cell. The snide blonde policewoman was leaning on the wall beside the cell door, a sneer on her face like usual. She glanced sideways at Nox as he approached. 

“What do you want?” 

“Delivery for the inmate,” he said coolly, showing the cop the box. The red stamp indicating that it had passed inspection glared against the beige cardboard. 

The cop sniffed haughtily. “I’ll make sure it doesn’t contain any contraband.” 

“Whatever.” Nox set the box on the floor and folded his arms. He’d learned very quickly that the easiest way to deal with the snippy blonde cop was to go along with whatever her snide, bitchy voice said. 

“You could at least hold it,” she huffed. 

He shrugged. “It’s stable, and you can make sure anything you flag doesn’t get passed to the inmate.” 

She curled her lip, but knelt down, tore the tape off, and started sifting through the contents of the box. A plastic bag full of tampons was pushed aside, and she sorted a whole pile of electrolyte drink packets into stacks and shook the empty plastic water bottle. She went through the handful of food items too, exhaling in disgust when she didn’t find anything suspicious enough to confiscate. “Fine. The inmate can have the box.” 

“About time,” Aelin drawled from inside her cell, where she was sitting on her bed, watching the cop tear through the box. “Thank you for your excellent supervision, Remy.” 

“Don’t call me that,” the cop snapped, her icy-blue eyes narrowed into little slits. Once again, Nox was struck by how similar she looked to Aelin—with the exception of the eyes and the sneer. She unlocked the cell door, and Nox slid the box into the room. 

“So kind of you, Remy darling.” Aelin’s snicker floated over the sound of the cop slamming the cell door shut in frustration. She flicked through the box aimlessly, then took out an energy bar and tossed it through the bars of her cell. “Here, Rems, have a little something sweet to counteract all that bitterness.” 

Nox turned and strode away down the corridor before he could erupt into laughter at the shade of enraged purple that Remy the Cop’s face turned. 

He knew goddamn well what was in that box, and it wasn’t just the food and period products that seemed to be in there. While there was ordinary food and ordinary tampons, there was also some quantity of Aelin’s SecondSkin, the very same substance that was currently covering Nox’s hands. He didn’t know exactly how much Elide and Nehemia had folded up and tucked into the decoy drink packets, but if Aelin was going to use it to get herself out of Endovier, he could only imagine that it was a lot. 

And he could only imagine the look on her face when she strolled out in plain sight. 

~

Four weeks, two days, and seven hours after she became an inmate of Endovier Prison, Aelin Ashryver Galathynius received the package that would get her out. 

Elide and Nehemia had done everything exactly as they had all planned. Carefully measured and prepped sections of SecondSkin were tucked into a number of the electrolyte drink packets, and a set of ice-blue contact lenses hid in another packet. Elide had even tucked a tiny scrap of a note into one of the packets, and Aelin chuckled at her familiar, comfortingly blunt writing. She confirmed that everything was in place for whenever Aelin decided to make her move. 

Which meant that Maeve Bitchface had taken the bait. 

Aelin smothered a smirk. She’d never really doubted that Maeve would fall for her trap, not when that woman’s ego was so laughably easy to predict. Aelin knew Maeve was gloating over her arrest and imprisonment, and that meant she’d grown too comfortable in her power. A short note from Connall had been tucked into an earlier letter from Elide, and in code, he confirmed that he’d run the course of poisoning the Bitch Queen of the Night, and she was visibly weakened and frantically throwing money at anyone she thought could help her condition. 

The second she got through Endovier’s gates, Aelin would be heading straight for Maeve Bitchface’s cute little compound. Well, not straight—she knew the most convoluted path to get there, and she’d take it to keep any potential pursuit off her trail. She and that bitch had a score to settle. 

Shaking those thoughts away, Aelin carefully sorted the normal drink packets from the SecondSkin ones. All the orange-flavored ones were SecondSkin, both because it was the most common flavor and because Aelin loathed artificial orange flavoring almost as much as she loathed Maeve. She tucked the orange ones into the plastic basket where she kept her shower things, hiding them beneath her bar of soap and her washcloths. 

A couple of days later, in the shower, Aelin turned the water on extra hot, creating a cloud of steam in the shower room. Behind the plastic curtains, she tore into the packets, unfolded the SecondSkin, and began the tedious process of laying the film atop her skin. Somewhere around half an hour in, a guard rapped on the door and grunted something about not taking too much time. 

Aelin ignored him, of course. 

It took a good forty-five minutes to get every piece of SecondSkin laid onto her skin, and she wrapped a towel around her hair and put on a clean set of inmate scrubs. Only a few more days in this rancid orange, she promised herself. Only a few more days. 

“About damn time,” the guard grumbled when she emerged from the shower room. 

She shrugged. “I’m a woman. We take long showers every once in a while.” 

“Whatever.” He led her back to her cell, and she lounged on her bed, content for a while. She picked up her journal and wrote aimlessly on one of the last pages, her pencil moving almost without any conscious effort. Her shower had been a night one, and it wasn’t long before the corridor lights dimmed and she tucked her journal back onto its shelf. She fell asleep dreaming of the smell of fresh pine air in her lungs and the sweet taste of freedom. 

And she dreamed snippets of strong, tattooed muscles flexing and shifting above her skin, fragments of tortured moans breaking the thick, hot air. Shattered emerald eyes stole a glance at her, and in an instant, the dream crumbled, giving way to cold concrete and steel. 

Fuck. 

~

Aelin pushed the scraps of her dreams away as she went about her day, letting nothing show. When the usual guard came to escort her to the computer room, she walked in calmly, sat herself down, and let her fingers fly over the keyboard. She was into the system and navigating to the cameras almost before her brain caught up with her actions, and she forced herself to stop and breathe deeply before she went on, lest she make a wrong move and trigger some kind of alert. 

Now or never, Galathynius. She entered the sequence of keystrokes that gave her command over her sector’s cameras, and in a matter of minutes, that entire section was playing a loop from two days ago. 

That loop was the last time Remelle was on Aelin’s guard rotation. 

Like clockwork, the platinum-blonde cop joined the guard as Aelin was returning from computer time, a sneer on her face. “No snide comments today, inmate?” 

“It’s too early for that,” Aelin returned sweetly. As they rounded the corner into her corridor, she nodded a fraction at the guard. Obediently, Nox started to walk faster, and as if on cue, Remelle stopped and scowled. 

“There’s no need to rush, guard.” 

Nox shrugged. “I’m not rushing.” 

“You are.” 

“Didn’t seem like I was.” 

She huffed in irritation. “Just go back to your rotation. I can handle the inmate from here.” 

“Fine.” Nox peeled away and headed back down the corridor, off to his usual path. 

Remelle curled her acrylic-tipped fingers around Aelin’s arm. “Just you and me now, inmate.” 

Aelin fixed a dry, blank stare on the cop. “Is that supposed to be threatening, Remy? Because you should know that you sound childish at best.” 

“Shut it,” she snapped. “Get moving.” 

“Hard to do that with such a…significant weight clinging onto me.” Aelin knew it was a low blow to comment on another woman’s size, but Remelle fucking had it coming. 

The cop gasped, then her face burned scarlet. “You little bitch,” she hissed. She threw Aelin’s cell door open with a rattling clang, following her into the small room. 

Perfect. 

As Remelle wound up to slap her across the face, Aelin slipped a tiny syringe out of her pocket, ducked the cop’s wild swing, and grabbed her ponytail, holding her head still as she stuck the needle into the nape of her neck. Her hairline would conceal any puncture marks. Remelle’s eyes went wide, and she flailed without success—the sedative worked rapidly, and Aelin had asked Nehemia for enough to knock the woman out for a good twenty-four hours. 

When Remelle sank to the floor, unconscious, Aelin swiftly stripped her of her clothes, then removed her own prison scrubs and did a quick clothing swap. Before she put the undershirt onto Remelle, she very carefully applied the SecondSkin patches to her fingertips. The synthetic nearly disappeared into her skin, and Aelin chuckled as she put the pinch-faced cop into her prison clothes. 

“Enjoy your stay,” she crooned, tidily switching the cuff from her wrist to Remelle’s. She stepped in front of the mirror, applied the pale blue contacts to her eyes, and then slipped the turquoise ones into Remelle’s eyes. “And thank you,” she added as she settled Remelle into the bed, tucked the blankets up around her, grabbed her journal, and left the cell. 

She’d memorized Remelle’s schedule, so it was natural for her to adopt the cop’s sneer and customarily pinched expression as she sauntered down the corridors. A brief stop at the staff computer room allowed her to transition the cameras from their loop back to their normal settings, and she went back to her corridor and stood the rest of her Celaena Duty before the next guard came to relieve her. 

“Any changes?” the guard asked. 

Aelin curled her lip. “Why would there be?” she snipped in a flawless imitation of Remelle’s nasal whine. She’d had weeks to perfect that inflection. 

He held up his hands. “Standard question, as usual.” 

“Well, if it’s so standard, just stop asking.” Aelin turned on her heel and walked snootily down the corridors. She passed rows of cells, ascended a couple of floors, and went down more hallways, carefully following Remelle’s usual path, which Nox (and her studies of the security camera footage) had graciously provided. 

In the guards’ break room, she picked up Remelle’s uniform jacket and backpack, into which Nox had tucked a plastic bag containing a change of clothes. She swiped her badge at the door and went out to the checkpoint, where all she had to do was sneer at the fidgety young man on duty as he double-checked her badge before he let her through. Jingling the keys on her belt, she walked over to the parked police sedan, unlocked it, dumped her bag on the passenger seat, and got in. 

And she drove out of Endovier’s gates in an Orynth PD vehicle. 

Fuck, she liked irony. 

Aelin drove to a gas station on the western outskirts of Orynth, parked just out of range of the single camera by the gas pumps, and got out of the car. She quickly stripped for the second time in a few hours, changed into the formfitting dark clothes that Nox had left for her, tidily folded Remelle’s uniform and left it and everything else in a neat stack on the passenger seat of the sedan, clicked the manual lock switch, and tossed the keys into the car before she closed the door. 

Let Orynth PD figure that one out. 

She knew the gas station was rarely open—hell, she often had a couple of her guys use this place for distributions—so she ducked around the side of the building, swiftly crossed the street, and disappeared into the tightly clustered tangle of buildings that lined this side of Orynth. As the afternoon faded into evening, Aelin let her muscle memory take over, winding a circuitous, rambling path through half of Orynth, doubling and tripling back to tangle up her trail. She worked her way around the outer districts, a grin curling the corners of her lips as the familiar steel and brick walls of the industrial district rose up around her. 

About half a mile away from her favorite riverside warehouse, an old apartment building had been taped off and designated for destruction. Aelin had the Boss’s men plant those signs months ago, planning to use the building as a contingency. She slipped in through a ground-floor window, shook the dust off of her shoes, and latched the window shut before she went down the hallway into the darkened building. 

To her pleasant surprise, the reinforced walls around the kitchen were even sturdier than before, and she flipped on the soft light as she walked in. With a long, muffled groan, she sat down at one of the high stools, relieved to get off her feet after so much walking. 

“Good to see you again, Boss.” The voice nearly made Aelin jump out of her skin. 

“Fuck!” She pressed a hand against her thundering heart as she turned around to meet Elide’s sly grin. “Scared the hell out of me, Ells.” 

Elide snickered. “The bold Officer Remelle would never be so terrified.” 

Aelin rolled her eyes. “The bold Officer Remelle wasted most of her boldness trying to get into my—into some man’s pants.” 

“I’m almost surprised,” Elide continued, tactfully ignoring Aelin’s slip of speech. “If you were still in the uniform, I’d probably think you were actually Remy.” 

“Don’t call me that!” Aelin sniped in her Remelle voice. Elide bent over, howling, and Aelin’s laughter joined in. “Hey, when you give a girl enough time with nothing else to do…” 

“Nice work.” Elide discreetly wiped the corners of her eyes. “Right. Here’s your phone.” She passed Aelin a nondescript burner phone. “Con’s number is already there.” 

“Perfect.” Aelin tucked the phone into a side pocket of her pants. “Where’s the best place for me at the moment?” 

“Right now?” Elide bubbled her lips. “Probably here, honestly. Stay the night—the place is secure and should have everything you need. I’ll update you tomorrow—actually, it’ll probably be Con. He’s better at going around unnoticed than I am.” 

“Side effects of being a high-profile CEO,” Aelin joked. “Speaking of—have you and the team figured out a new name yet?” One of the clauses in the transfer of ownership was renaming the company, since there was a high chance that people wouldn’t want to be associated with a company named after an infamous criminal. 

“We have some options, but nothing is set.” Elide tapped her phone, pulling up a page on her notes app. “Staghorn Development is currently the top choice, though.” 

“I like that.” Aelin mulled over the name. “If my opinion has any weight—which it probably doesn’t—I’m a fan of Staghorn.” 

Elide’s lips quirked upwards. “Good to know.” She slipped her phone back into her jacket. “I have to get home, but Ae?” 

“Yeah?” 

The petite woman grinned. “It’s so good to see you safe.” 

Impulsively, Aelin hugged Elide. “Thank you,” she murmured. “For everything.” 

“Least I could do.” Elide squeezed Aelin’s hands. “I’ll see you soon.” She left, and Aelin waited for the muffled click of the doors locking before she headed further down the hallway, towards the bedroom and bathroom. 

After a long, hot shower that made her feel both clean and more human, Aelin changed into fresh undergarments and the same clothes she’d been wearing. The nondescript, cheap cotton-blend clothes could have come from anywhere, which made them perfect for sneaking around in. She’d taken out the pale blue contacts and tossed them in the trash before her shower, but she kept the protective film of SecondSkin on her hands. 

Better to mask her fingerprints than to get caught too early. 

She flipped on the bedside lamp in the plainly furnished bedroom and gratefully crawled into bed, near tears at the feeling of a proper mattress beneath her body for the first time in over a month. Unable to fall asleep without some kind of light—she’d grown accustomed to the hallway lights in Endovier—she left the lamp on and drifted off, letting her body shut down as the adrenaline high finally wore off. 

When she woke up, watery grey sunlight had broken through the clouds of the late-November sky, and she rolled over and just stared out of the window, soaking in the morning light for the first time in weeks. Eventually, she rolled out of bed, brushed her teeth, redid her braid, and made herself a coffee in the kitchen. She sipped it carelessly as she fiddled with her phone, waiting for Con to text. 

And when he did, she couldn’t control the smirk that spread across her face. 

~

For about the trillionth time in the last year, Rowan was royally fucking pissed, and Aelin was the reason for it. 

“What the fuck do you mean?” he snarled, hands clenched into fists atop his desk. The cold wood was still unfamiliar under his fingers, so different from the steel tables of the police building. 

“Watch it, Lieutenant,” Gavriel warned from the doorway. 

Rowan pulled in a deep breath and shoved it out in a harsh exhale. “Where is she?” 

“Downstairs, in a temporary holding cell until we can verify that it’s actually her.” 

“I’m going to talk to her.” He was halfway out the door when Gav’s iron hand clamped around his upper arm. “What?” 

“I don’t think that’s the best idea, Whitethorn,” Gav said, coolly. 

Scarlet anger crept up the edges of Rowan’s vision. “Why not, sir?” 

“You have a personal history with this woman—technically, with both of these women, since you worked with PD for almost a year. I’d hate for that to compromise anything.” 

“I understand, sir, but—” 

“But nothing,” Gav interrupted, cutting him off. “No.” 

Rather than tearing free from his commander’s grasp, Rowan deflated, his posture going slack. “I only want a few minutes, sir. I…” He cleared his throat, not expecting this tangle of emotion. “I need to know.” 

After a long, tense moment, Gav sighed. “Fine. I’ll give you five minutes. When the timer goes off, you get the hell out of there or I swear to all that’s holy I’ll slap you right back into basic training.” 

“Yes, sir.” Rowan snapped off a salute at his commander and strode down the hallways, his pace increasing with every step he took. He took an elevator down several floors, flashed his badge at the pair of TSF guards stationed outside the double doors that blocked off the temporary holding quarters that took up half the floor of the TSF building’s basement, and pulled the doors open. Inside, he took a deep breath, dredging up every scrap of resolve he could summon, and walked down another few yards. 

He stopped in front of the first holding cell, clasped his hands behind his back, and turned an impassive gaze onto the platinum-blonde woman seated on the bench inside the cell. The instant she saw him, she shot up to her feet, folded her arms across her chest, reared her head back, and sneered at him, her pale lips curling back, rage filling her icy blue eyes. 

“Hello, Remelle,” Rowan said quietly. 

“Fuck you,” Remelle snapped. 

Rowan raised a brow. “If this is some kind of plot to escape Endovier, I’m afraid you’ve failed.” 

She practically growled at him. “I’ve told every stupid asshole in this place and I’ll tell you too: I am not Aelin!” 

“That’s not what your fingerprints say,” he replied. 

She laughed caustically and, to his surprise, pinched her skin between the tips of her acrylic nails and yanked, and the skin at the tip of her finger peeled away. “Because that bitch put her fingerprints on me, asshole.”

“Prove it.” Rowan leaned against the wall opposite the holding cell and waited for Remelle to yank the synthetic off of her fingertips. She shoved the synthetic through the slot in the door, and he tucked it into a plastic bag to give to the forensics team. 

“Get me out of here,” she snapped again. 

Rowan had only vaguely wondered whether Remelle was actually Aelin in disguise, and he was unsurprised to find that it wasn’t. “That’s not for me to do,” he tossed over his shoulder as his timer rang. The guard from outside the holding area poked his head in and gestured, and Rowan turned on his heel and left, letting Remelle’s enraged whining fade away. 

“I’m taking this to forensics,” he told Gav, who was waiting outside the holding area. 

Gav nodded. “Did you get your answers?” 

“I’ve seen enough,” was all that Rowan said. “Should be fine to let her go, if only to get rid of the goddamn whining.” 

“You’re certain?” 

“Yes. Sir,” he added, tacking on Gav’s title at the last second. 

Gav raised a brow but otherwise didn’t react to Rowan’s near instance of insubordination. “I’ll let her get back to PD, then. Wait for me in my office, Whitethorn.” 

Not trusting himself to reply verbally, Rowan dipped his head tersely, saluted, and headed upstairs, where he dropped off the bag at the forensics lab and walked back to Gav’s office. He only waited for around ten minutes before the commander came into the office, sighed heavily, and sat back down at his desk. 

“That woman is a piece of fucking work,” Gav grumbled, mostly to himself. 

Rowan didn’t suppress his snort. “Couldn’t agree more, sir.” 

“If she’s always like that…” He scoffed quietly. “I can’t say I blame my niece for choosing that woman as a decoy.” 

“I don’t think that was the whole reason, sir,” Rowan said. He’d been thinking over the situation as he waited, and while his thoughts were still clouded with rage—and a hefty dose of lust, if he was being honest, because clever, scheming Aelin had a way of working him up—he’d formed a somewhat solid hypothesis. “Besides her, uh, cattier tendencies, Remelle also looks remarkably physically similar to Sardothien, a fact that I’m sure she knew.” 

“You know that’s not Aelin’s real name, Whitethorn.” Gav made a statement, not a question. 

It was real enough to convict her. “I…it’s easier this way, sir.” Rowan swallowed the lump in his throat and kept talking. “I suspect she began planning this as soon as she found out that Remelle was the police officer on duty. However, I’m perplexed at the footage, since it shows no apparent signs of tampering and everything looks perfectly normal.” A crease dug between his furrowed brows. “I’m having Luca at PD look at the footage, since he was the one to figure out Sardothien’s loop when she broke into PD headquarters in the summer.” 

Gav chuckled. “Back up, Whitethorn. She broke into Orynth PD?” 

“Yes, sir.” Rowan stifled his irritation. “Somehow, she managed to put the entire security camera system on a closed loop—except for my personal camera. We still have no knowledge what exactly she did while there, but since nothing was visibly disturbed, it was probably just recon.” 

“Interesting.” Gav tapped his chin, thinking. “Do you have any idea where she is now?” 

“I…no, sir.” Rowan reluctantly answered. “She could be anywhere.” His phone buzzed, and he glanced down at the screen. And a fresh wave of scarlet washed across his vision. “Goddammit!” Composing himself, he showed Gav the messages from Luca. “Apologies for the outburst, sir. Luca just confirmed that there was in fact a rather sophisticated loop run on Endovier’s security cameras for several hours.” 

“All of the cameras?” 

“No, sir. Only the sector of cameras by Sardothien’s cell.” 

“What does the footage show when the loop ends?” 

Rowan sent Luca a text, and it was only a few minutes before the younger cop replied. “That’s the confusing part, sir. When the loop ends, the cameras show Sardothien asleep in her cell—which is to be expected for around ten p.m.—and Remelle changing duty as normal. We checked the rest of the cameras as well, tracking Remelle’s path, and it’s completely ordinary. And then, the next day, Sardothien wakes up and starts screaming at the guards to get her out.” 

“And she turns out to be Remelle,” Gav finished. 

“Correct, sir.” 

Gav pressed his lips into a flat line. “Is there anywhere else that we could look for intel?” 

Rowan sighed heavily. “I don’t know yet, sir. We might be able to ask PD to search the area around Endovier for any signs, but—” Before he could finish his thought, both his and Gav’s phones pinged at once. His eyes rapidly scanned the alert. 

“Well, I’ll be damned.” Gav stood up and pocketed his phone. “Looks like I’ll be heading down to PD headquarters after all.” 

“Sir, I—”

“No.” 

Rowan blinked. “Sir?” 

“No,” Gav repeated, the command clear as day. 

“Sir, with all due respect, I have the most information on Celaena Sardothien, and as the TSF agent from the case, I believe I should know about this new development.” 

“You already have your answer, Lieutenant Whitethorn.” Gav drilled a steely stare into Rowan’s forehead. “It’s in the best interest of both you and this case that you leave the case behind. Any further attempts to participate will be considered violation of a direct order, and you will be punished accordingly, Whitethorn. Clear?” 

Rowan locked his jaw. “Yes, sir.” 

“Good.” As Gav left his office, he tucked a folded piece of scrap paper into Rowan’s clenched fist, sparing him a hint of a nod as he strode down the hallway. Reining in his fury, Rowan stormed back down to his much smaller office, threw the door shut, and unfolded the note. 

Unless I tell you otherwise—Stay. Fucking. Put.

He’d be fucking damned if he did. 

~

There’s a cop in my backseat. 

Nox navigated the meandering turns of the industrial district with ease, focusing more of his attention on the serpentine tangle of streets rather than on the trussed-up, unconscious cop occupying the back seat of his nondescript car. Officer Remelle had been almost laughably easy to kidnap, since she was so overcome with rage at her recent run-in first with Aelin and then with the Terrasen Special Forces. Nox had lingered outside a chain coffee shop a couple of miles away from TSF headquarters, waiting, and the moment Remelle had stopped for her usual beverage, he struck. He knew the TSF and the police were probably scurrying around the coffee shop like a bunch of idiots by now, and he couldn’t help but snicker at the thought. 

Mostly hidden by the cold, foggy darkness and the smoggy smear that hung over the industrial district, Nox parked his car about half a mile away from the overgrown path that led down to the Boss’s riverside warehouse, climbed out, and hoisted the still-unconscious Remelle over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. He backtracked down the side alleys, doubling and tripling back on his steps to confuse anyone that might try to track him, and eventually pushed through the curtain of brittle branches and headed down to the warehouse. 

“Nice work, Owens.” The soft, crackly voice sounded abruptly in his ear, and he almost dropped Remelle onto the half-frozen ground. 

“Fuck’s sake, Boss!” 

The Boss snickered. From her perch somewhere outside the warehouse, she was watching her set of concealed cameras as the final pieces of her grand plan fell into place. “Upper mezzanine. And be quick—Her Royal Bitchiness should be here in an hour or so.” 

“Sure thing.” Nox crossed the final stretch of pavement and entered the warehouse’s dim gloom. 

“Oh, and Owens?” 

“Yeah?” 

“There’s a chance that PD might be on scene by the end of the night.” 

“Good to know, Boss.” He glanced over his shoulder, a little unsettled by the fact that she could see him but he couldn’t see her. “You know where the car is.” 

“Indeed.” A sinister note crept into her voice. 

Nox went up to the mezzanine, where he set Remelle down, untied her, and set her up so she was faced out over the warehouse, head turned away from the south door. To stabilize her, he cuffed her hands to the metal railings and hooked a short grappling cable from the wall to the crossed straps of her weapons harness. As he slipped down the stairs, he heard the distinct rattle of another door being opened, and his hand flew to the knife tucked into his waistband. 

The west door creaked open, and a man dressed in nondescript gray fatigues and some kind of military vest ducked inside, his dark hair and clothing blending him into the shadows almost seamlessly. But Nox was friends with the shadows too, and he slipped up behind the man and had a knife to his throat in seconds. 

“Who the fuck are you?” he hissed. 

Faster than he thought possible, the man slipped his hold, whirling and grabbing his knife hand and immobilizing it above his head. “Who the fuck are you?” he retorted. 

Nox jabbed the man in the ribs and slithered free. “Call me Nox.” 

“The other man paused. “You’re the Boss’s spy.” 

Caught off guard, Nox lowered his knife halfway. “And…?” 

“I’m Con,” the dark-haired man said. 

“Con,” Nox repeated. A smirk crawled across his face. “Is that short for Convict?” 

Con snorted. “Why would I tell you?” 

“Because of my pretty face and winning personality?” 

“I’ve seen better.” Con’s onyx gaze traveled slowly down Nox’s face, half-obscured in the warehouse’s gloom. 

“Oh, I hardly believe that.” Nox winked, slowly, watching a faint blush creep over Con’s cheekbones. Hell. He was a pretty one. 

“Boys,” Celaena’s drawl crackled through each of their earpieces. “I hate to interrupt your little meet-cute, but I’m tracking a royal bitch onto the property.” 

“Heard.” Nox and Con spoke at the same time. 

Con was the first to break their stare. “I’m in place,” he answered Celaena. 

“Leaving,” Nox said hurriedly, and he ducked out the west door with a last glance at the pretty man in the warehouse. “Boss, who the hell is he?” 

She chuckled. “A former Navy SEAL and my inside operative at Maeve’s compound.” 

“Damn.” Nox whistled. “Man of many talents.” The line went silent, and he swiftly scaled the ladder rungs built into the steel wall of the warehouse and crouched on the rooftop. Some of the roof’s panels were pushed open, allowing room for a crane to reach inside and hoist pallets in or out for distribution. It also gave him a clear sight line into the warehouse.

Which was perfect, because he’d eventually need to throw the little glass vial in his pocket into the pallet sitting in the middle of the warehouse floor. 

Shifting himself into as comfortable a crouch as possible, Nox fixed his eyes onto the warehouse floor. And waited. 

~

Clad in an old, faded set of black fatigues, with knives tucked into his sleeves and boots, a pair of handguns on his hips, and Kevlar strapped to his chest, back, and upper thighs, Rowan trailed Maeve Ond through the industrial district of Orynth. He kept about half a block between himself and the woman known as the Queen of the Night, but she was so singularly focused that he doubted she would even notice she was being tracked. He’d picked up her trail thanks to an anonymous, untraceable number that had somehow contacted him with nothing more than a location pin. 

Whoever had sent it had placed a tracking device on Maeve. 

He’d barely taken a few seconds to marvel at the skill and sheer audacity of that feat before he was on the move, a lethal shadow prowling through the cold late-November night. She stalked down the maze of streets and alleys with deadly precision, despite the occasional tremors that rattled through her body. He observed those shakes with analytical curiosity, noting that the supposed Queen of the Night wasn’t invincible after all. Those were the tremors of someone whose body had been exposed to long-term poison. 

Maeve shoved through a brittle curtain of overgrown vegetation, and Rowan followed at a short distance. Past that patch of cover stood a solitary, steel-sided warehouse on the edge of the river. The skeleton of a crane loomed beside it, barely visible through the foggy night. She stormed up to the building, rounded the corner, and fired a single bullet through the keypad beside the south door. The latch released, and she yanked the door open with a snarl. 

“You can’t hide forever,” she called in a hoarse voice. It probably would have been more sinister if her throat hadn’t been ravaged by coughing. 

Who the fuck is she talking to? Rowan wondered as he crept up to the edge of the building. 

As if she could read his damn mind, she answered in the form of another snarled question. 

“Show your worthless self, Moonbeam!” 

Rowan froze in his tracks, ice shooting through his veins. Moonbeam? At the distinct sound of more than one gun cocking, he whipped his attention back to Maeve. Although her body visibly shook with tremors, she gripped her gun fiercely. 

“Still disobeying me, Connall? I’m disappointed.” Connall. The name clanged through Rowan with the force of a train. Connall Moonbeam was alive.

This…could change everything. 

As if she were on the set of a crime drama, Maeve continued monologuing. “I should have known you’d turn and sell your secrets to the highest bidder, Connall. I’m only irritated that after everything I gave you, you’d let Celaena Sardothien’s dirty money control your loyalty.” 

Once again, Rowan felt like he’d been hit by a train. Connall Moonbeam was not only alive, but he was working undercover for Sardothien. Which meant he’d probably been feeding Fenrys information for gods only knew how long. 

Which meant Fenrys had known his brother was alive. 

That explained the contact labeled Con in Fen’s phone. 

“I’m tired of your tricks, Connall.” Maeve’s frigid voice coiled through the warehouse as she tugged on a nearby cord, pouring a pool of yellow light over the area where she stood. Rowan immediately flattened himself against the wall behind a heap of boxes, melting himself into the cover of the shadows but keeping a clear view of Maeve as she paced across the floor. 

A blur of movement peeled away from the west wall, and Maeve whipped around to find a distinctly male figure ducking behind another stack of crates. She curled her lip and glanced that way. 

And did a visible double take. 

Her sneer melted into a twisted expression of blinding fury as she fixed her hollow violet gaze onto the black-clad female figure who stood poised on the mezzanine. “I suppose you made yourself useful one last time, Connall,” she crooned, raising her gun and cocking it. “Say goodbye, Celaena Sardothien.” 

Sardothien?

The ice in Rowan’s veins solidified into iron, weighing his body down as he lifted his gaze up to the mezzanine and traced the undeniably familiar figure who stood there, her head turned away, scanning the wrong side of the warehouse as the Queen of the Night curled her finger around the trigger. 

And fired. 

No!

White-hot horror blazed through Rowan’s body, and he forgot who and where and what he was as he pulled his gun and aimed and emptied an entire chamber into the back of Maeve’s skull and watched as her body arched backwards, blood bursting out of her throat and forehead and chest, and collapsed to the cold hard cement in a blur of gore and gunfire. The roar of gunshots abruptly cut off into thundering silence, and Rowan forced his eyes to move from the crumpled corpse of the Queen of the Night upwards, climbing the steel wall to the mezzanine. 

The woman lay slumped over the railing, crimson soaking steadily into her platinum hair. 

Rowan’s gun clattered to the floor, its dull thud echoing in his ears with the force of an anvil crashing into stone. Numbness swept over him, and he barely recognized that he was moving as his TSF survival instincts took over, directing his limbs to lift Maeve’s prone form and haul her outside to get her back to the investigative team for analysis and confirmation of death. He turned to go back, but a strong set of hands clamped down on his shoulders. 

“Don’t.” Lower and rougher than Fenrys’s voice, Connall Moonbeam’s baritone jolted an old, familiar strand of Rowan’s memory. 

He made a weak push against Con’s hardened grip. “She…Celaena…” 

“You can’t go back in there,” Con repeated. “It’s not safe.” 

“Fuck that!” In a burst of adrenaline, Rowan managed to break halfway free. Before he could sprint back into the warehouse, Connall spun him around and slapped the knife out of his hand. 

“You can’t, Whitethorn!” For the first time in a decade, Rowan came face to face with the second of the Moonbeam twins, whom he hadn’t seen in the flesh since he went off to Navy SEAL training. 

“Why the fuck not?” Rowan growled, feeling his burst of energy give way to hollowness again. 

Too many emotions to count rippled across Con’s eyes. “All I can tell you is not to trust what you think you saw.” Before Rowan could formulate a response, Con pinched the nerve at the joint of Rowan’s neck and shoulder, and he felt himself go weak. In a rapid blur, Con slung him over his shoulder, sprinted to the cover of dense but winter-bare vegetation surrounding the far side of the lot, and hurled him into the frigid dirt, covering Rowan’s immobile body with his own. 

And both of them watched as the warehouse exploded in a searingly white burst of flame. 

“N…no,” Rowan croaked, feeling sensation begin to return to his fingers. “No!” From deep in his chest, a single name tore brokenly out of his throat. “FIREHEART!”

Gaze flicking between Rowan’s tears and the blazing ruin of a warehouse, Con put the pieces together as he stood up. “She wasn’t actually there, Whitethorn,” he said softly. 

Rowan’s shattered gaze locked onto him. “What?” 

“That wasn’t Aelin,” he repeated. 

But before Rowan could say anything else—before Con could reveal anything else—a birdcall sounded in Con's earpiece, and he turned sharply on his heel and jogged into the dense overgrowth, leaving Rowan prostrate on the ground behind him. He broke through the brush and jogged up the alley, sparing a single glance over his shoulder at the blaze he left behind. At the top of the alley, an electrical van idled, with Nox Owens at the wheel. 

“Hop in, pretty boy,” Nox said with a sly little grin. Con shook his head with a dry huff and swung himself up into the van, and Nox drove off. 

A panel behind the seats swung open, and Aelin Ashryver Galathynius stuck her very much alive head into the cab. “Where is he?” 

“North end of the lot, halfway into the tree cover.” 

“Good. Nox, slow down.” Aelin withdrew, and a moment later, Con heard the back door unlatch and thud closed shortly after. He glanced into the rearview mirror as the van sped back up, watching Aelin tuck and roll and jog back in the direction of the warehouse, her figure rapidly disappearing into the night.

~

Through a fog of devastation and confusion and a thousand other roiling emotions, Rowan finished loading Maeve’s body into the back of an Orynth PD van. He’d pinged Luca as soon as he arrived at the warehouse, alerting the cops of his location, and the police squad—with Gavriel in tow—had arrived on scene as the oddly controlled blaze faded into smoking embers. 

Gav’s face was stone, but his eyes flicked from Rowan to the ruins of the warehouse and back and rapidly made the right connections. His posture softened. “Get in the vehicle, Whitethorn.” 

“I…” Rowan couldn’t form words. “He said it wasn’t her.” 

“Who said what now?” 

Rowan gulped. “It…Connall. I saw Con.” 

Shock flared Gav’s eyes wide, but he shut that expression down. “And he said…”

“He said it wasn’t Aelin,” Rowan croaked. 

Gav loosed a long, tight exhale. “I think we should go for tonight, Rowan.” 

“Please,” Rowan breathed. “I only want a moment.” 

“Alright.” To Rowan’s surprise, Gav ran a hand through his hair and walked away. “Get yourself home safe, Rowan.” He climbed into the leading PD vehicle and waved them forwards. 

As the taillights of the PD van faded away, Rowan turned his stare back onto the smoking heap of rubble where Aelin’s river warehouse had stood. His heart fought his eyes at the sight, torn between wanting to cling to Con’s words and wanting to believe what he saw. An icy breeze curled up from the river and bit through his clothes, and he finally took a step towards his waiting truck. Dry leaves crackled behind him, and he drew in a sharp breath and started to turn around. 

Only to be met with the kiss of steel at his throat and his groin. 

“This feels somewhat familiar, Lieutenant. Have we met?” 

Shell-shocked and hardly trusting his own state of consciousness, Rowan tried to maneuver, but a simple twitch of the blades stopped him cold. 

“Oh no you don’t, Lieutenant. It’s best for both of us if you don’t get a visual.” With that, the blade at his throat dropped and was rapidly replaced with the sharp pinprick of a needle. Heaviness spread through his limbs, and the last thing Rowan saw as his vision went black was a half-dazed glimpse of the turquoise eyes that haunted his dreams.

His Fireheart…was alive?

~~~

TAGS:

@superspiritfestival

@thegreyj

@wordsafterhours

@elentiyawhitethorn

@mariaofdoranelle

@rowanaelinn

@house-of-galathynius

@tomtenadia

@julemmaes

@swankii-art-teacher

@charlizeed

@booknerdproblems

@earthtolinds

@goddess-aelin

@sweet-but-stormy

@clea-nightingale

@autumnbabylon

@llyncooljones

@silentquartz

@renxzs

@anarchiii

@fauna-flora11

@cynthiesjmxazrielslover

@mysterylilycheeta

[eriquin]

Making weekly progress graphs

All it took was one (1) person asking about it and I decided to make a post for how to make my progress graphs. Maybe I've done this before. I don't know. I'm doing it now.

For what I do, I use a spreadsheet. It's google docs right now, but I assume you can use anything because I'm not using anything unique to google docs.

You need at least 2 tabs. I have more than that, but let's start here.

Tab 1: Wordcounts

My first tab is called "WIP Progress". Here's what it looks like:

That's one line per WIP per day, if I work on it.

Month and Week are columns derived from the Date column using formulas.

Want the actual formulas? Month is "=concatenate(year(C2), ", ", month(C2))" and Week is "=concatenate(year(C2),", ", text(weeknum(C2-1), "00"))", at least in row 2.

Date column is the day you worked on it, hand entered.

Fic is a title per WIP. You should keep the title the same for each WIP because this will be used to track progress in graphs.

Detail is a note column, doesn't have to be unique. I use it to figure out working ideas and track parts of things. Like, parts 1 and 2 of the Prophetic D&D game are under the same Fic name with the actual title in the Detail column

Start wc is the number of words on that WIP at the start of the day

End wc is the number of words on that WIP at the end of the day

Total is a math formula that does the difference between Start wc and End wc. Literally just "=G2-F2"

And then every day, I add as many lines as things I'm working on and copy the formulas from a previous row and adjust them. So, for today, it looks like this:

Insert rows, copy, paste, change the dates, copy End wc to Start wc, and I'm ready to go.

How long have I been doing this? ...

A while.

More formula and some graphs behind the cut.

Tab 4: Last Week Progress

Let's skip to tab 4 because that's where my graphs come from. Tab 2 is "Progress by Day" and Tab 3 is "Progress by Week" but we'll come back to those if anyone is interested.

Okay, so the general idea is that it looks back 7 days and does a count of how many words, the average (ignoring 0s), and the counts per work per day. Then it graphs them. So how does this work?

Well, the top row is my constants:

Formula in F2: "=averageif($D3:$N10,"<>0")"

Formula in H2: "=MINIFs($D3:$N10, $D3:$N10, "<>0")"

Formula in J2: "=MAXIFS($D3:$N10, $D3:$N10, "<>0")"

The words "Word Documents" is in L2 because I use it in my unique filter. I used to keep track of my work writing but I didn't want it in this graph, so it's filtered out.

Rows 2 through 10 are my data rows. Here's what they look like:

A3: "=TODAY()", A4: "=A3-1", A5: "=A4-1". Follow that pattern as far back as you want to look.

B3: "=sumif('WIP Progress'!C:C,A3,'WIP Progress'!H:H)". Copy that down the column as far as you put down dates. That's give you your daily wordcount.

C3-C10: "=$F$1". Literally that's it. Just inserting the calculated average so that I can graph it nicey.

Tricky bit! D2 is a complicated formula. It looks like: "=transpose(sort(unique(filter('WIP Progress'!D:D, 'WIP Progress'!C:C>=today()-8,ARRAYFORMULA(if(not(exact('WIP Progress'!D:D, 'WIP Progress'!$D$1))*not(exact('WIP Progress'!D:D, $L$1)), True, false))))))"

EDIT! There's a better way that doesn't use ARRAYFORMULA. It's still a monster, but ARRAYFORMULA only works in google sheets. See my reblog of this post for an update:

... Yeah, that's a monster. What it's doing is taking the rows in my WIP Progress tab and filtering out anything that's not within the last 8 days. If you go back more than a week, change the number in the part that says ">=today()-8" to something higher. Then it also removed anything that matches my header row in WIP Progress, and also anything that matches my filter field ("Work Documents"). And then it takes all the unique values of what it finds, sorts them into alphabetical order, and transposes them so that they go in as column headers. This means the column headers change if I add more things to my daily wordcounts, and they stick around for the week.

Anyway, that's what determines the column headers for columns D through M. I've never written on more than 10 WIP in a week, so I've never needed more than that.

For cell D3, I have this formula: "=sumifs('WIP Progress'!$H$1:$H, 'WIP Progress'!$D$1:$D, D$2, 'WIP Progress'!$C$1:$C, $A3)". That is then copied and pasted into the rectangle of numbers there. Everything that needs to change will change, and everything that doesn't won't.

What's it do? Well, it matches the header of the column (D$2, E$2, F$2...) to the date on the lefthand side ($A3, $A4, $A5...) and then does a sum of the values for wordcount that match that column and that date. So if for some reason I have two entries for a WIP on the same date, it'll add them up.

Why would I have this? Sometimes I move stuff to a different document and start a new line with new start wc and end wc. It happens.

Okay, all the formulas are in! Now I have a bunch of numbers. How do I make a graph? This is easier through screenshots:

Go to Edit chart. Again, this is the googs, so if you're in Excel you'll have to look up how to do it differently.

In Setup, this is a Smooth line chart. The data range has the columns from my table above, with a little extra because I think maybe I started with 2 weeks worth. Whatever, extra is fine.

X-axis is Days, which is the first column. Then the series that get plotted are basically one of each column, except for Words because it threw things off.

Series view:

All the blank ones are on here because they don't show up if they've got no data. Well, technically they do but they're all at the 0 line so it just looks darker.

Also helpful:

Next, Customize the chart:

Mostly boring defaults, but here's the place to set the title.

And that's how the chart gets made. I have more charts than this, though...

So many more charts...

I'm willing to write more about them or help with formulas if anyone wants to know more.

[scientia-rex]

Good morning! I have a question. When I look up info about vitamin D, I come across many claims that people generally don't get enough of it. In a recent episode of Maintenance Phase, however, the hosts called it a "scam" or overblown, at least (I don't remember the exact wording). So, like, what's the deal with vitamin D? Do Americans get enough of it?

Probably, mostly. At the very least, people should be tested before starting repletion. It probably has a role in osteoporosis treatment and prevention, BUT how much to take and what form and when is HOTLY debated and frequently conclusions are changing.

Just to take you on a spin through the most recent Cochrane reviews (THESE ARE NOT SINGLE STUDIES, in case any of the research-naive out there want to get pissy about them; look up what a Cochrane review actually is before trying to shit on it; also note that I did NOT say this will cover every fucking person and every hypothetical they can come up with, jesus CHRIST):

No role for vitamin D in asthma

Insufficient evidence to recommend it in sickle cell

Raising vitamin D levels in cystic fibrosis patients is not beneficial

No evidence of benefit of vitamin D in MS

Supplementing vitamin D in pregnancy may have small benefits but also risk of harms

No clinically significant benefit from vitamin D supplementation in chronic pain

Insufficient data on vitamin D in inflammatory bowel disease, but no evidence of benefit

No evidence of benefit of vitamin D supplementation in liver disease

Vitamin D does not appear to prevent cancer in general population

No evidence for benefit in supplementation of vitamin D in premenopausal women to prevent bone density loss

Possible small mortality benefit of D3, but not D2, in elderly patients, but also increased risk of kidney stones and hypercalcemia

Vitamin D alone ineffective, but combined with calcium may be effective, in preventing bone fractures in older adults

Insufficient evidence for vitamin D improving COVID-19 outcomes

Now, vitamin D plus calcium in people who have post-menopausal bone density loss does seem to prevent fractures. This is why doctors routinely recommend it. However, dosage and formulation are still debated as data are insufficient, and uncertainty still large.

So, do you need to supplement? Probably not. There is some fairly weak evidence that vitamin D supplementation may help with depression, but I would argue that it's going to be most relevant in people with pre-existing deficiencies, which Medicare is just hellbent on not letting me test for anymore. They've narrowed the coverage codes for testing so now even know vitamin D deficiency isn't considered a good enough reason to test. So Medicare has very clearly decided it's not relevant, for whatever that's worth, I spit on their graves, etc. Of course, then you get into the question of what counts as a deficiency, which we also really don't know.

And to be clear, I wasn't looking through the Cochrane review results with an angle--those are most of the first page of search results on their site, with the only one skipped being similar to another one I mentioned, and I stopped when I got bored. These should not be paywalled, as I am not logged into anything and I can read it all, so try clicking the side menu on the right if you have trouble getting into the weeds.

If anything, running through this little exercise has made me less likely to recommend vitamin D supplementation, so do with that what you will.

[lesbianvaljean]

les mis data ideas to come

test out separating narration from dialogue, see where narrator first uses certain words

interactive/hoverable character name flow map

stars hoverable dot plot in d3 — ideal is do you love the color of the sky-style stars scrolly (background of character name mention? or volume?)

experiment: can you do motifs with emojis on a graph? 🤔 stars ⭐️ vs garden 🪴vs bread 🍞 for instance

experiment: motif interactive app— pick a word, get it mapped and returned to you! 🤔

anything else folks are interested in👀

[covid-safer-hotties]

Reference saved in our archive

Vitamin D is showing in study after study to have a massive impact on acute covid severity.

Abstract Background: Vitamin D is a steroid hormone that protects against viral infections by influencing innate and adaptive immune responses. The effectiveness of vitamin D3 supplementation in COVID-19 is unknown. The study’s goal was to elucidate the relationship between blood vitamin D levels and COVID-19 clinical outcomes by examining the effect of a single high dose of vitamin D3 on the length of hospital stay in COVID-19 patients.

Methods: The descriptive, retrospective study was performed from March to May 2021 at a referral center for patients with COVID-19, in Bam, Iran. A checklist consisting of demographic variables was used to gather data, and laboratory assessments of serum 25(OH) D were evaluated and documented. The connection between serum vitamin D and patient clinical outcomes was investigated after patients were given a single oral dose of 200,000 IU of vitamin D3.

Results: 71 COVID-19 patients were treated. Radiological results did not change substantially amongst individuals with various levels of 25(OH)D. After a single dosage of vitamin D3, mean blood levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D increased considerably and the need for intubation and SpO2 decreased, and as did the respiratory rate in patients requiring hospitalization due to COVID-19.

Conclusion: A single administration of 200,000 IU of vitamin D3 significantly reduced the severity of COVID-19.

Keywords: vitamin D, COVID-19, outcome, pandemic

Zusammenfassung Hintergrund: Vitamin D ist ein Steroidhormon, das vor Virusinfektionen schützt, indem es die angeborene und die adaptive Immunantwort beeinflusst. Die Wirksamkeit einer Vitamin-D3-Supplementierung bei COVID-19 ist unbekannt. Ziel der Studie war es, den Zusammenhang zwischen dem Vitamin-D-Blutspiegel und der Gabe einer einzelnen hohen Vitamin-D3-Dosis auf die Krankenhausaufenthaltsdauer bei COVID-19-Patienten zu untersuchen.

Methode: Die deskriptive, retrospektive Studie wurde von März bis Mai 2021 in einem Referenzzentrum für Patienten mit COVID-19 in Bam, Iran, durchgeführt. Zur Datenerfassung wurde eine Checkliste mit demografischen Variablen verwendet und der Serumspiegel von 25-Hydroxyvitamin-D (25(OH)D) bestimmt und dokumentiert. Untersucht wurde die Assoziation zwischen Serumspiegel von Vitamin D und klinischen Ergebnissen. Die Patienten erhielten eine orale Einzeldosis von 200.000 IE Vitamin D3.

Ergebnisse: Es wurden 71 COVID-19-Patienten behandelt. Die radiologischen Ergebnisse veränderten sich bei Personen mit unterschiedlichen 25(OH)D-Werten nicht wesentlich. Nach einer Einzeldosis Vitamin D3 stieg der mittlere Blutspiegel von 25-Hydroxyvitamin D erheblich an. Dadurch wurden die Notwendigkeit einer Intubation herabgesetzt und der Sauerstoffpartialdruck sowie die Atemfrequenz bei Patienten, die aufgrund von COVID-19 hospitalisiert worden waren, signifikant verbessert.

Schlussfolgerung: Durch einmalige Verabreichung von 200.000 IU Vitamin D3 wurde die Erkrankungsschwere von COVID-19 deutlich verbessert.

Schlüsselwörter: Vitamin D, Covid-19, Ausgang, Pandemie

[nz-lm]

[Random sleepless dev blog #1] Resource extracting tool for Sanitarium

I played Sanitarium last year after years of it being in my backlog of games I want to play. And I gotta say, I loved it.

If you like the type of horror that doesn't scare with jumpscares, but rather makes you uncomfortable, play it, right now.

I've been meaning to go back to digging a bit into reverse engineering and file types, so my current side project to relax is trying to uncompress all the resource files for the game, see if I find anything interesting, but I wanted the challenge of using the least amount of external resources I can. I'm nothing close to a professional in this and just writing for fun, so if you have experience doing these type of things, feel free to throw me some tips or corrections!

The Data folder for Sanitarium has the game resources separated into different RES.xxx files. For the first three of them, this is actually a split file and opening RES.001 with 7zip will get you the combined binary. Most of these files' contents are WAV files (identified by the header RIFFxxxxWAVE), then a big chunk of RES.000 contains all of the dialogues and items of the game.

Another frequent header is D3GR, which I could not find listed anywhere as a common or known file type. My only assumption would be that this is "DreamForge (3)? Graphic Resource".

Comparing different examples of this file, there's a common pattern with the first 4 bytes after the D3GR header, most times being 0x02 0x10, 0x02 0x80 and 0x02 0x00. PCX is from around that era and uses the first two bytes for information related to the version, so that could be an option. The other two bytes being either 0x00, 0x10 or 0x80, means that converted to binary only one bit is set to 1, so it could be a bit flag for something. The byte in 0x18 consistently has values from 1 to numbers under 100. Values of 1 are pretty frequent, so I suspect this is the frame count. If this is the frame count, it means that there should be a matching number of offsets.

For this specific file, the 0x18 byte is 0x0F (15 in decimal)

Starting from 0x1C, we got (hex values): 30 13, 60 26, 90 39, C0 4C, F0 5F, 20 73, 50 86, 80 99, B0 AC, E0 BF, 10 D3, 40 E6, 70 F9, A0 0C, 30 13 Which are high enough to potentially be offsets, plus, we have 15 of them. We're still missing the offset where the content starts. A big amount of file formats include that near the header, but the fact that 0x08 changed for each file didn't click for me until now. We have a variable number of headers, so clearly the size of the offset will vary as well. I've verified that moving to my current offset + 0x58 leaves me at what looks like the start of the data of the file.

So far the (probably) known part is:

The 02 could be the type of compression? From BMP file format: 0 = BI_RGB no compression 1 = BI_RLE8 8bit RLE encoding 2 = BI_RLE4 4bit RLE encoding (I'm in doubt about this)

With offsets, frame count, and (possibly) flags out of the way, we're missing other fundamental parts most image file types require:

Width?

Height? Most other bytes are set to 0, except for 0x1A which is 0x48 = 72 in decimal.

Going forward to the start of the actual data of the file, there are 4 bytes with values 0x44 0x00 0x48 0x00, these are in 0xC and 0xE. In decimal this would be 68 and 72. This pattern repeats with other files, with values that are usually around 60-170. These look like width and height values, fit for a game from this era.

We have width, height, offsets, frame count... At this point we have enough information to at least try to make a first (probably bad) version and try to check if some of these assumptions are correct. Before I write any code, I need to verify my suspicions about the offset. I manually went to the start of the data, used my hex editor to go to a specific offset, and it looks like my suspicions are correct.

0x44 and 0x48 were at the start of the first frame as well.

I'm gonna be building this with C++ as a console application, although I would like to create a basic UI and a visualizer in the future. Since I'm missing the palette I just asked Claude to generate one for me in the meantime. The objective right now is to get something, at least.

This is just a very simple console project that lets you extract both the .WAVs (much more straightforward, since all the information on the structure is available online), and the D3GR format from before.

The good news is that it works, the bad news is that it looks like garbage. At this point I need to somehow find the 256 color palette that is used in the game. I checked the headers for all the RES files but no luck. I figured the next logical step would be to open the executable with IDA and see if I could find any functions that would set the palette.

This SDL_SetPaletteColors function gets called at this section:

This part seems to be adding the contents in offset 456C80 to the stack to pass them to the function... Even better, when checking this part of the memory, I can see a char variable called OutputString with 1024 items. that's 256x4 = 1024, so definitely the palette we're looking for.

My next step is to set a breakpoint at SDL_SetSurfacePalette, and open the game

aaand... found it! there could be multiple palettes though, as it used to be common to change them (hence why this function exists).

It's looking a lot better, but some colors don't match the game (the barn is green...) so it will need a bit more work.

That will be something for another day though

[chronotsr]

No. 6 - D3, Vault of the Drow (August 1978)

Author(s): Gary Gygax Artist(s): David C. Sutherland III (Cover), David A. Trampier Level range: Average of 10, preferably party size 7+ players Theme: Underground exploration Major re-releases: GDQ1-7 Queen of the Spiders; Dragon #298 and #300 (kind of), Drow of the Underdark (even less so)

Fuck I love old module covers. Again the later revision (the blue one) changes the art to be less gloriously trash, which is a shame. The cartoony sketch era is not long for this world, C1 (Tamoachan) represents a pretty noticeable change in art style towards the kind of THIN YOUR PAINTS looking characters in color. We have another year of modules before they make the art less silly.

In re-release news, again we get a very lightly altered treatment in GDQ Queen of the Spiders. Less well known though is a section in Dragon #298 (immediately after Paizo took over) on the Vault of the Drow, although it is…almost entirely setting material, which makes it actually somewhat faithful to D3. What makes it unfaithful to D3 is that it takes place after the events of 1e/2e DND and doesn't contain any of the pre-Vault materials of D3 or the Egg of Lolth section.

Drow of the Underdark is a similar situation, but curiously uses totally distinct materials (like yet another map of the city), but contains even less information about the non-city parts of the Vault. Still, it's interesting seeing 3e-style treatments of D3, and if nothing else it gives you some damn visuals of what Erelhei-Cinlu actually looks like.

The module starts with a recap, and also a brief note as to how to get to the titular Vault of the Drow. Apparently you are now avowed nemeses to Drow, despite plenty of routes to the contrary. We'll also find out later that we're actually enemies to only one bloc of Erehlei-Cinlu Drow. We get the same list of warnings as the previous 2 modules, which themselves contained a lot of warnings from the G series, so this is our 6th time reading some of these bulletpoints. Strangely, apparently "because of the chaotic nature of the dark elves", active raiding parts of the town won't rouse organized resistance to the party, Light spells don't work right here (they go dark and brownish), and Drow resent even the slightest natural-ish light. The upshot is that you can get away with a lot of bullshit.

Our random encounter tables have been updated to reflect being past the main Depths foes of kuo-toa and the like, it's mostly Drows and monsters from this point on. Well, and undead. And bugbears. And trogs. And trolls. And slaves, of course. So mostly just that Kuo-Toa are gone? Svirfneblin are listed with the random encounters despite not actually being on the random encounter list? Anyway.

We have a few canned encounters.

The first one is, suspiciously similar to the Drow checkpoint in D1. It's basically the same. I'm not going to cover it again, it's just the D1 checkpoint but with the weird Battle of the Sexes angle removed.

The second one is a bizarre encounter -- a succubus is pretending to be a statue, a Drow vampire is glamored to look like a songbird, and the whole cavern is glamored to look like a beautiful grove. The vampire is, obviously, named Belugos, because fuck it why not name the vampire Bela Lugosi? They're gonna do their level best to make the players turn around without fighting, but the odds of the whole party failing the charm person AND not finding this suspicious is 0%. Their mesmerized gnome servant completes the Dracula reference.

It's passingly mentioned in their treasure notes that, Bela Lugosi lead-lined a box to hide magic items from magic detection. So that's our newest data point in the "we have to have rational explanations for magic" series.

I guess she always goes nude. She's also nude on the revised edition back cover, which I'm sure got someone in trouble with their parents in 1985. This is one of your two possible routes into the Vault, by the way.

The other way is through a giant spider trap. The only thing of note is the idol of Lolth you can find that gives you a variety of neat powers (but slowly turns you into a giant spider).

In the vault proper, we have some fun special qualities. Everything is simply a different color here, for starters -- modified by your vision type. The ceiling is literally a kind of radioactive parody of the heavens, complete with "stars" and "moons" being played by particular types of rocks and lichens. Everything's got a vague red hue, except the roads which are enchanted to be lightly blue to drowish eyes -- that's what those magical glasses from a few modules ago do, they help you see drow-enchanted markers.

The place is lit with growing shrooms, for all the light that'll give you. A lot of the random encounters give us little glimpses into drowish life, from the lumberjacks clearing fungi for food, leather, et c., to drow nobles on a hunting party, to merchants feuding, to kuo-toan spies lurking in the river.. A good amount of love went into these tables, which I really wish was the norm. "There are bugbears, they have these items and this leader" is a pretty lame encounter good only for punishing slow moving. That being said, this adventure loosely implies Bugbears are Polish? What?

D3 is actually super sparse on artwork, and this is the best one we're going to get all module. This is the Black Tower, which overwatches a chokepoint to everywhere in and out of the Vault. If you have a drowish medallion, you can just saunter on in, enjoy your Evil Elf TSA checkpoint experience, then go about your business in the Vault. The medallions are coded by noble/merchant house, which means that your party just automatically became affiliated in a highly partisan city! Woe betide you, sucker that approached the tower openly hostile, cus they're guarding it with the GDQ series' perennial favorite: hand ballistae, and if you linger around the tower when the alarm goes off Gary straight up tells you to declare Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies because 300 drow troopss show up. Very cool, Gary!

So this is when D3 gets Complicated.

The best part of the Drow are is how much they plot. The worst part of the Drow is how much work that plotting is to run. 24 different families are all circling around each other, looking for weaknesses, allying and warring with one another. I think you would literally need multiple relationship maps to keep them all straight. The above list is actually only about two-thirds of the total relationships between houses, the rest come later with the noble house keys.

So, this tiny picture is the only visual we get of Erelhei-Cinlu. Well, that sucks. OK, well, let's presume you don't go in through the front gate, because that's obviously suicide, what then?

I'm sorry, what? The doors automatically sense your race and summon a demon with no ability to disarm? Fuck off, Gary. You have to go through the Black Tower. You have to get a medallion. You have to go through the Front Gate. You have to fight Lolth instead of the Elder Elemental God. Fine, I go through the front door.

E-C's description is exhausting to read because it's one of those times Gary just vents his orientalist, misogynist biases. Women are in charge? The men aren't buff?? There's sex workers??? Get me my fainting couch!

A lot of ink is spilled on the treatment of slaves, half-drow, non-drow, et c. Tragically the actual appearance of the city is not commented on very much beyond "it's very mazey" and "it's dark". E-C is perpetually 5 seconds from collapse at all times, but also hilariously stable. RIP to anyone dumb enough to rebel here.

Understandable.

E-C's section is a fairly rote "city that sucks" so let's move on.

Ah, the Noble Houses section. There is no way to put this gently, so let's rip the bandaid off. This is so much information that it's overwhelming (8 noble house houses with equipped npcs, special magic items, motivations, room counts, et c.) but also so little information about each individual house that you're going to have to heavily homebrew huge chunks of content.

For example, the first listed House is Tormtor. We know they're:

Rank 7 in the Nobility Hierarchy

They've bought off the head of the Male Fighters' Society.

Allied with Eliservs House, the unnamed Prism and Chain Clans, & indirectly to the unnamed Coiled Whip, Bars, Star, and Bone clans

They on the up and therefore unpopular with the other nobles

Have 6 unnamed nobles ruling the house

Have 6 named and 7 unnamed magic items.

But…what is special about this house? Why are they so ahead? What does their palace look like? Why would you go to it? How could you possibly interact with the alliance and enemy system, as a non-drow?

These descriptions are just not useful, and by the time you have written out enough information on all 24 families you have made the actual module into a footnote. Those later write-ups of E-C can't save you either, because the timeline advanced.

By reading the whole thing and taking notes you reveal that there are two blocs (the Tormtor-Eilservs bloc and the Despana-Kilsek-Noquarto bloc) and a handful of neutrals waiting for a clear winner to back.

The Eliservs are the first rank house, headed by Eclavdra, and their big plot was pivoting from Lolth worship to Elder Elemental God worship because the Lolth priestesshood didn't back Eclavdra's claim for Queenship. Remember Eclavdra? The text explicitly says that if she died in G3 she was cloned (eyeroll) by her consort. Why organize the events of the G series? To get more EEG converts and attain Queenship. An extremely risky plan that we will discover in T1-2 and A1-4 is more plotholes than plot.

Like,

Eclavdra's house is about to fall before you showed up.

She's in charge of the Giants

Eclavdra's fall would signal an end to the Giant incursions

There is no longer a reason to deal with the Giants

There is no longer a reason to deal with the Drow

There was no reason to do any of this

The EEG temple is actually the one from G3, so you've even already punished the Drow before D1 even started! And also, how exactly is that possible? The route to the G3 temple and the route to D1 are 51 miles apart?

I have read quite a few suggestions on how to un-fuck GDQ, and my personal preference is this:

Flip every House's religions, EEG to Lolth and vice-veras

The Giant plot is Lolth's, and Eclavdra's sister is acting for her

Regardless of G1-3, Eclavdra is about to win the secret war for Queenship via the Lolth cult.

A unified Erelhei-Cinlu is a threat and must be stopped

Anyway, having now shredded the politics in here, we move onto the dungeon-dungeon.

First, the Egg of Lolth, which is the broader Lolth zone in Erelhei-Cinlu. Yada yada yada spider sacrifices, orgies, et c. It's all very rote. The head priestess of the lesser temple (not the greater temple!) has a lot of money but not so much magical items -- a weird quirk of D1-3 is that there are basically no magical weapons, so your fighter is probably livid by now. Then, we enter the Great Fane of Lolth, which is to say the greater temple. And we will go into keyed mode:

The temple itself is pagoda-themed, in case you haven't guessed that the Drow are supposed to be vaguely China-themed yet. Naturally trying to climb around and not dungeoncrawl properly promptly punishes you by being suddenly attacked by a giant pile of gargoyles and shadows.

Every depiction of Lolth, even from this second-release copy I'm using, is just….truly sad. Why was "monster but animal head" so common for so long? It's not scary or weird or funny, it's just lame?

The walls are decorated with fake halloween spiderwebs, so this whole place feels like Spirit Halloween. The actual Fane itself is weirdly empty?

Like an evil confessional, all the council chambers have secret spying rooms.

You run into a fake Lolth illusion who pranks the party, which is really not helping the Spirit Halloween vibes

If you walk into a painting of the Demonweb Pits, you just instantly die (or skip directly to Q1 if your GM hates you -- general consensus is that Q1 is bad and that you should just use the pre-planned D3 version of the Lolth fight)

Finally, as you enter the dungeon part of the dungeon (which is actually pretty small by late-game dungeon standards), there is a passive fear aura and all the spiderwebs are now made of onyx and silver, which means your party is going to have a field day with the chisel.

To my great shock and happiness, there is a drow dissident here! And he's good! And won't backstab you! He is neutrally aligned and wants to reform drow society. Good for him! There's a messed up enchanted silver cage which essentially magically webs a victim in a sort of metaphorical representation of a true spider enwebbing their prey. It's a cool visual!

Lolth just kind of, hangs out in room D5. She isn't doing anything. If you kill her, she drops an egg with plot items for Q1, and geases you to walk through that one painting. No save, of course. Lolth herself is a "hard to hit, high resistances, low HP" affair, but also she can heal herself for 50% three times a day, so she is triple dipping on difficulty (in this biz we call this "deeply unsportsmanlike" but I'll give a pass for a demon queen being bullshit)

There's no real reason to go up. Lolth is down and you have no reason to believe good shit should be up, but if you do anyway you will find a variety of random people wandering around with magical goodies, like the high priestess and the commander. It's implied the priestess has been fucking a demon?

Your taste is a lot different than mine, ma'am.

Naturally the treasure room for the fane is hilariously trapped in like three different ways, including with permanent dust of disappearance. Inexplicably, there is a talisman of lawfulness that, if combined with some diamonds, tells you how to reach Lolth. Why was there a talisman of lawfulness in the treasury? Why does it tell you how to get to the demonweb pits? Why does it write in drowish runes?

Finally, you find a wharf with a boat in it. It's trapped with the previously mentioned sentient statue, but hey -- you now have a galley that you can only use on the Pitchy Flow, Svartjet, and Sunless Sea (in an unexplained way). Good luck with the 66 ghouls, 6 ghosts, and type 2 demon!

That's, that's it? Again, D3 reads like a tiny setting book larping with an obligatory dungeon at the end. The Fane is the blandest dungeon thusfar, and G2 was already pretty lame. Still, it is not lost on me that you could form an entire campaign in the Vault's materials, and it might even be good if you relax the "Drow are ontologically evil" quite a bit and allow your party into the factional fighting.

Next time, Tomb of Horrors! Possibly the most over-discussed module is actually a quite early one. See you then!

[compneuropapers]

Interesting Papers for Week 2, 2024

Amblyopic stereo vision is efficient but noisy. Alarcon Carrillo, S., Hess, R. F., Mao, Y., Zhou, J., & Baldwin, A. S. (2023). Vision Research, 210, 108267.

When knowledge hurts: humans are willing to receive pain for obtaining non-instrumental information. Bode, S., Sun, X., Jiwa, M., Cooper, P. S., Chong, T. T.-J., & Egorova-Brumley, N. (2023). Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 290 (2002).

Active inductive inference in children and adults: A constructivist perspective. Bramley, N. R., & Xu, F. (2023). Cognition, 238, 105471.

Normative and mechanistic model of an adaptive circuit for efficient encoding and feature extraction. Chapochnikov, N. M., Pehlevan, C., & Chklovskii, D. B. (2023). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(29), e2117484120.

Having multiple selves helps learning agents explore and adapt in complex changing worlds. Dulberg, Z., Dubey, R., Berwian, I. M., & Cohen, J. D. (2023). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(28), e2221180120.

The perception of silence. Goh, R. Z., Phillips, I. B., & Firestone, C. (2023). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(29), e2301463120.

Statistical learning across passive listening adjusts perceptual weights of speech input dimensions. Hodson, A. J., Shinn-Cunningham, B. G., & Holt, L. L. (2023). Cognition, 238, 105473.

Acetylcholine‐sensitive control of long‐term synaptic potentiation in hippocampal CA3 neurons. Kassab, R. (2023). Hippocampus, 33(8), 948–969.

Learning the Vector Coding of Egocentric Boundary Cells from Visual Data. Lian, Y., Williams, S., Alexander, A. S., Hasselmo, M. E., & Burkitt, A. N. (2023). Journal of Neuroscience, 43(28), 5180–5190.

Blocking D2/D3 dopamine receptors in male participants increases volatility of beliefs when learning to trust others. Mikus, N., Eisenegger, C., Mathys, C., Clark, L., Müller, U., Robbins, T. W., … Naef, M. (2023). Nature Communications, 14, 4049.

Flexible specificity of memory in Drosophila depends on a comparison between choices. Modi, M. N., Rajagopalan, A. E., Rouault, H., Aso, Y., & Turner, G. C. (2023). eLife, 12, e80923.

Memory and attention: A double dissociation between memory encoding and memory retrieval. Mulligan, N. W., Spataro, P., & West, J. T. (2023). Cognition, 238, 105509.

A functional logic for neurotransmitter corelease in the cholinergic forebrain pathway. Nair, A., Teo, Y. Y., Augustine, G. J., & Graf, M. (2023). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(28), e2218830120.

On the Functional Role of Gamma Synchronization in the Retinogeniculate System of the Cat. Neuenschwander, S., Rosso, G., Branco, N., Freitag, F., Tehovnik, E. J., Schmidt, K. E., & Baron, J. (2023). Journal of Neuroscience, 43(28), 5204–5220.

From Motivation to Action: Action Cost Better Predicts Changes in Premovement Beta-Band Activity than Speed. Pierrieau, E., Berret, B., Lepage, J.-F., & Bernier, P.-M. (2023). Journal of Neuroscience, 43(28), 5264–5275.

Circuit coordination of opposing neuropeptide and neurotransmitter signals. Soden, M. E., Yee, J. X., & Zweifel, L. S. (2023). Nature, 619(7969), 332–337.

Reinforcement learning establishes a minimal metacognitive process to monitor and control motor learning performance. Sugiyama, T., Schweighofer, N., & Izawa, J. (2023). Nature Communications, 14, 3988.

Natural statistics support a rational account of confidence biases. Webb, T. W., Miyoshi, K., So, T. Y., Rajananda, S., & Lau, H. (2023). Nature Communications, 14, 3992.

Subspace partitioning in the human prefrontal cortex resolves cognitive interference. Weber, J., Iwama, G., Solbakk, A.-K., Blenkmann, A. O., Larsson, P. G., Ivanovic, J., … Helfrich, R. (2023). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(28), e2220523120.

Trait anxiety is associated with hidden state inference during aversive reversal learning. Zika, O., Wiech, K., Reinecke, A., Browning, M., & Schuck, N. W. (2023). Nature Communications, 14, 4203.

[meg2md]

Things coming to fruition:

CoFP proposal submitted

Anesthesia in abortion proposal submitted

Outlines laid for D3 ResidencyCAS webinar with actionable steps

Days off approved for AAGL conference, JF Day

Data submitted for MIGS SDoH study - need to do literature review

VACATION

[stalemateserial]

50

Linda Schechter had always told her daughter that good things come to those who wait. It was hard for Ruth to feel like anything good would come from waiting this time, other than the relief of its swift end. The trouble was that it would be an end to everything else. She teetered between feigned and sincere resolve, divided in her will to fight and her desire to admit the truth. Would Judy realize it was all pretend? Could things stay cordial, let alone sane, until the number on that display hit zero?

It seemed ridiculous, that they'd found a way to make their computer remind them of how long they had. But they both knew that they'd preoccupy themselves with it either way. The chess moves would be a way to track the days, or remembering to change clothes, or properly rationing out food. It felt grounding, leaving the strain of numbering their days to a machine that had no other stance but neutral. It let them focus on other things.

Like how you're a liar, Ruth thought to herself. It was true but unkind, an acid and a base that traveled from her head down to her stomach, souring it. She was a liar, but it was for the sake of someone important to her. If it was to be wrong, she'd embrace being wrong.

"Ruth?"

"Hmm?"

Judy retrieved the pad from a strip of velcro on the top of a counter to note her statement. "Pawn to D3"

"Leaving your Queen quite exposed, aren't you?"

"Leaving it a lot of options, is more like it."

"That is what makes the game so interesting, isn't it. Hmm… That doesn't much affect what I wanted to do next, so go ahead and make a note of my move as well: Bishop to E7."

"Planning on castling now that I've done it?"

"What can I say, copying the British is our new pastime."

"Your new pastime, is it?"

"Certainly. Why, just think about if we were to take the Programme across the Atlantic. We'd launch rockets from all the coastal towns, dump half of the military budget into it…"

"And your government would only send men up there."

"… True, they would."

They busied themselves with their routine, their work, their notes and data entry. The whole thing was ridiculous. Ruth didn't know what to say, how to convey everything she was feeling. The silence built up in the cabin like carbon dioxide, waiting for the cork to pop. There were only small pleasantries until they were both sitting at the dining area's table, not quite ready for bed. Judy was the one to finally break the silence.

"Do you believe in God?"

"Do I believe in God?"

"That's what I asked, yes."

"I don't know. I'd certainly like to. I don't much believe in the Bible, or in the clergy. But it'd be a comfort, wouldn't it? He sounds cruel in the book, but I get why the idea of him is popular. I guess I believe in the concept, not so much the execution."

"I suppose that isn't too far off for me, either. So you don't really believe in the rules of the Bible?"

"I mean, I certainly believe in some of them. Killing, stealing, lying, I'd say all those are wrong, but some of them are just silly."

"I agree. I guess I just found myself wondering. Wanting to believe there's still a way out of this."

"I think if you want to believe there's a way out of this, you should. Maybe we will get a miracle."

Judy moved her hand across their table, putting it over her sole companion's. Ruth's hands were a bit rough, the spots between her knuckles scaled up from dryness.

"Do you think miracles happen up here?"

Ruth let the searching fingers twine in the spaces between her own, finding that Judy's skin was softer than her own.

"I guess we'll find out."

[js-developer]

Exploring the Powerhouse: 30 Must-Know JavaScript Libraries and Frameworks for Web Development

React.js: A declarative, efficient, and flexible JavaScript library for building user interfaces.

Angular.js (Angular): A web application framework maintained by Google, used for building dynamic, single-page web applications.

Vue.js: A progressive JavaScript framework for building user interfaces. It is incrementally adaptable and can be integrated into other projects.

Node.js: A JavaScript runtime built on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine that enables server-side JavaScript development.

Express.js: A web application framework for Node.js that simplifies the process of building web applications.

jQuery: A fast, small, and feature-rich JavaScript library that simplifies HTML document traversal and manipulation, event handling, and animation.

D3.js: A powerful library for creating data visualizations using HTML, SVG, and CSS.

Three.js: A cross-browser JavaScript library and application programming interface (API) used to create and display animated 3D computer graphics in a web browser.

Redux: A predictable state container for JavaScript apps, often used with React for managing the state of the application.

Next.js: A React framework for building server-side rendered and statically generated web applications.

Svelte: A radical new approach to building user interfaces. It shifts the work from the browser to the build step, resulting in smaller, faster applications.

Electron: A framework for building cross-platform desktop applications using web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

RxJS: A library for reactive programming using Observables, making it easier to compose asynchronous or callback-based code.

Webpack: A module bundler for JavaScript applications. It takes modules with dependencies and generates static assets representing those modules.

Babel: A JavaScript compiler that allows developers to use the latest ECMAScript features by transforming them into browser-compatible JavaScript.

Jest: A JavaScript testing framework designed to ensure the correctness of your code.

Mocha: A feature-rich JavaScript test framework running on Node.js and in the browser.

Chai: A BDD/TDD assertion library for Node.js and the browser that can be paired with any testing framework.

Lodash: A modern JavaScript utility library delivering modularity, performance, and extras.

Socket.io: A library that enables real-time, bidirectional, and event-based communication between web clients and servers.

GraphQL: A query language for APIs and a runtime for executing those queries with your existing data.

Axios: A promise-based HTTP client for the browser and Node.js, making it easy to send asynchronous HTTP requests.

Jasmine: A behavior-driven development framework for testing JavaScript code.

Meteor.js: A full-stack JavaScript platform for developing modern web and mobile applications.

Gatsby.js: A modern website framework that builds performance into every website by leveraging the latest web technologies.

Chart.js: A simple yet flexible JavaScript charting library for designers and developers.

Ember.js: A JavaScript framework for building web applications, with a focus on productivity and convention over configuration.

Nuxt.js: A framework for creating Vue.js applications with server-side rendering and routing.

Grunt: A JavaScript task runner that automates common tasks in the development process.

Sass (Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets): A CSS preprocessor that helps you write maintainable, scalable, and modular styles.

Remember to check each library or framework's documentation and community support for the latest information and updates.