#just a relativist i guess?

[hedgehog-moss]

The way Marine Le Pen cynically and relentlessly exploits every issue makes me want to throw up. She's all over this one, happy for the opportunity to side with her fellow far-right piece of shit politicians in Israel under the guise of caring about Jewish people, and denouncing the left for 'supporting Hamas'—which, yes, 1 far-left party made an inexcusable statement in that regard and it's not like there isn't antisemitism on the left, but still it boggles the mind to have Marine Le Pen smugly posturing as a moral authority on the matter, "these leftist hypocrites don't care if Jews die, unlike me and my fascist party funded by my Holocaust denialist father who speaks fondly of the Gestapo" CLOWN WORLD

[silversoulstardust]

Definitely not thinking about Loki getting frustrated trying to learn physics on his own during those century long time frame so he timeslipped to the present time a little bit earlier before the temporal loom blew up just to pull Mobius aside from everyone to vent incoherent scientific nonsense pacing back and forth while Mobius just watched him.

"Are you done?" asked Mobius after Loki finally stopped pacing, heaving a deep sigh.

Loki glared dagger, but Mobius easily shrugged it off. "Why yes, yes I am," he snapped, arms crossed over his chest. He picked on the dull brown fabric of his jacket and second guessed his choice to vent to Mobius instead of OB.

"I don't even know why am I even talking to you about this, clearly you have zero idea about what I'm taking about," Loki was losing steam, and his tone came out whinier than he'd like it to. It reminded him a lot of the time he sulked over Thor looking confused when Loki showed him his art when they were kids, not understanding his artistic choice.

"Not that I'm blaming you for not knowing about it, I too would be annoyed if someone were to word vomit about electromagnetism and relativistic physics while trying to make sense out of the quantum ones. Magic is so much easier than this, you know? I could just -- I don't know -- snap my fingers, or, or wave my hands and things just happen instead of getting down to the molecular level of shit trying to unders-"

A pair of strong arms wrapping itself around Loki's shoulders stopped him in his track. It was Mobius reaching out and hugging him, but they hugged in an awkward position, because Loki was taller than Mobius and had his arms crossed over his chest. It didn't stop Mobius at all. He continued to run his fingers through Loki's hair, gently pushing Loki's head against his shoulder. "There, there."

And instead of retaliating, Loki allowed himself to be held.

"What are you doing, Mobius?" said Loki, unfolding his arms. His hands were clenching and unclenching by his sides as he hesitated to reciprocate the hug. He was still a little bit mad because Mobius broke his train of thoughts and not getting him at all, though that was slowly melting away as moments passed. Being held felt nice.

"I'm a Loki expert. I don't know jack shit about physics and all the things that just came out of your mouth, but I do know you're frustrated," whispered Mobius in his soothing voice, his hand moved down the center of Loki's back as he rubbed comforting circles. "So we're going to stay this way until you feel better. Got it?"

All the fight left Loki's body. Whatever that confused him during his quest to understand physics was simply forgotten now, and for the love of Odin he couldn't remember why it even bothered him so much. Slowly he wrapped his arms around Mobius' waist and buried his face on the crook of the older man's neck, inhaling deeply the scent of sandalwood cologne and coffee for breakfast they had together close to a century ago, still fresh on the fabric of his clothes.

Once again, Loki was reminded of why he was doing this.

"Got it."

[aswegoalong72]

As We Go Along FAQ

Who are you?

I don’t like to put my name on the internet, but you may call me GB; those are my initials! I’m 25, and chronically ill. I have three cats, and I like to cook, clean, and do art when I’m not working on this novel series! I follow from @tolbachik, and my art blog is @tolbachik-art. (More about the novels under the cut!)

About the novels

What’s the story about? As We Go Along is a multi-novel series documenting the history of the Lyratet, and their history from the discovery of a safe passage to the northern hemisphere of their homeworld, to the eventual settlement of the galaxy.

So, science fiction? Yes, although I try to keep it as realistic as possible. No warp drives, no replicators, no energy swords; just good old regular physics and technology! Expect relativistic travel between stars, quantum computing, fusion power, and O’Neill cylinders as the most advanced stuff you’ll see. What even happens in it? A lot! I try to portray day-to-day life, with less of a focus on the science-y side of things and more on personal interactions and character growth. Ultimately, it’s about finding your place in the world and universe, and loving one another.

How many books are there going to be? One collection of short stories, three “prologue” novels at about 72k words each, with three larger novels following them and one last short story collection. Originally, it was going to be a stand-alone with only one book (the book I’m currently writing), but I’ve since expanded the universe very heavily. There’s a lot to explore!

72k word prologue novels? That’s already a lot! How many words will the regular novels have? At least 200k each, if not more. This is a saga, documenting their entire history and every little detail in it. It’s going to be a lot, but chances are I will cut the larger books into halves for easier readability, and to not deter people from getting into them. Still up in the air, really!

When can we expect to read it? When it’s done. I’m chronically ill, so it takes me awhile to get even typical household chores done, let alone a book! That being said, as of 1/1/24, I’m close to halfway done with the first book. I will be starting the prologues when I can, at which point I will start releasing them slowly. That way I have time to get the others finished!

Are there any other aliens in it, besides the Lyratet? Yes. I won’t elaborate further, though; I don’t want to ruin any surprises! Is it gay or trans? I mean, I guess? The gender binary on Reyal doesn’t exist in the same way it does here on Earth; “male” and “female” are very loosely defined. Physically, the only difference between the sexes is genitalia and a bit of height/face shape. On top of that, being equal to one another is an important part of life, so there’s practically no discrimination for relationships not following traditional “male/female” as on Earth. The author (hi) is gay and trans, so I guess if you count that too, yes.

What kind of “read” is it? Slow. I focus a lot on worldbuilding and character development. The Lyratet live a slow-paced life, and as such, I wish to reflect that in my work. I do try to keep it entertaining and interesting, though.

Is it family friendly? Yes and no. I would give it a PG/PG-13 rating, personally. It covers some very dark topics, like groups committing terrorism, some heavy violence, swearing, and there is some drug use. On the same note, there aren’t any references to sex really apart from a couple maybe wanting to have a child together. I’ll have a comprehensive list of warnings once I go to publish it!

Can I read it early? No. I will need beta readers at some point, but I won’t release any early versions to the public until it’s ready.

Where does the name "As We Go Along" come from? This Monkees song! I feel it describes the whole feel of the project very well. I have playlists for the story, but I'm going to refine them more before I put them out here. Where does "72" in your blog title come from? You'll see :)

What inspired you? Silent Running and folk music from the 1960s/1970s! Also, The Millennial Project by Marshall T. Savage.

About the Lyratet

Lyratet? Lyrat? Which one is it? Lyrat is singular, like human. Lyratet is plural, like humans. This is in Trel, a diplomatic language made to facilitate goodwill between nations on their homeworld, Reyal. Pronounced lee-raht, lee-raht-ett. Lyrat stands for child, as in “Child of Tenav” (Tenav a Lyrat), and Lyratet is “The Children of Tenav” (Tenav a Lyratet). “The” is usually defined by the suffix “te” in Trel, but the word Lyratet is special in this case.

Who are the Lyratet, even? They’re a cold-loving, communalistic, and herbivorous race from a planet slightly larger than our own, orbiting a K7V class star some 41LY away. They’re also incredibly religious. What conflicts should I expect to see? On Reyal, warfare isn’t very common. Religious wars died out centuries ago, primarily due to both sides not wanting to lose any followers before reaching “salvation”, whatever that may mean to them. Slaying one another is considered exile worthy, since they’re descended from prey animals. Keeping together and keeping each other safe is above all else. Nowadays, conflicts are settled through heated debates and international court.

I mean like, conflicts in the book. Man vs. nature for the first four including the prologues, man vs. man for the last few books. Of course, it isn’t just all that; different conflicts will arise.

Can I make my own Lyrat character? Give me time to make a comprehensive historical timeline and get some reference sheets, but yes. I won’t consider them canon, but you do you! Just don’t like, claim the entire species concept as your own or sell designs based off it. Typical stuff, y’know?

I don’t think herbivores can become civilized. What’s your explanation? Starchy, fast growing, calorie dense tubers. That, and their social structure and their early languages helped to keep them safe from predators. If you ask them, though, many would probably say Tenav, their star and main god to many, guided them.

Why are they religious? Are you? Surviving the early days of civilization wasn’t easy, and they made sure to thank whatever powers they believed in (mostly Tenav) for making it through the day. Since then, their religious fervor has grown heavily. Atheists are in the minority, with only ~700,000 out of Reyal’s surface only 2024 population of ~13,000,000,000 not believing in anything. Also, no; just agnostic. Three eyes? Why? That's overdone! I will be honest, the Lyratet are based off of a design I got yeaaaaars ago from a friend, @bubbykat! I've tweaked it a bit since then, giving reasons as to why they evolved like that. Reyal has many, many fearsome predators. Through evolution, they took up an extra eye in the center of their head, giving the impression that they were more dominant than they actually were. It doesn't move, and is more vestigial than anything.

What’s Reyal like? Reyal has no seasons, and is divided into three “bands”; Northern Hemisphere, Equator, and Southern Hemisphere. It has a 33 hour long day, two moons, and a thick atmosphere. It isn’t tidally locked to its star, and has an orbital period of 3.27 months. It’s about 1.28x the size of Earth. It's dominated by numerous freshwater and saltwater lakes, with only one major ocean in the Southern Hemisphere. There are large cyclones above both poles, where the temperatures regularly drop to -153f on the surface.

If they don’t have seasons, how do they keep time? Nowadays, they use Tenav’s solar cycle and pulsars to keep time. As of 2024 in the Gregorian calendar, it is 23,514. It adds up as follows: their first cultures emerged 231,388 years ago, they count in base 8, and the average solar cycle of Tenav is 23 years long. So, it all adds up to the current date being 23,514! Still working on how to subdivide it.

What other objects are in their system? Order from Tenav is as follows: Syt, Inner Belt, Kouteb (dwarf), Omat (dwarf), Reyal, Alkan, Olena, Lejag, Outer Belt.

Reyal has two moons; Ro and Velgae. Alkan has one, Fel. Olena has six major; Heva, Thrallit, Eynaje, Selex, Lipeya, and Prasto.

[preservationofnormalcy]

I thought you guys cracked the solution to making more of the dreamwalker helms back in 2032? Or-

Wait a second.

...

FUCK I DID IT AGAIN. It's always 15. 15 seconds. 15 minutes. Apparently 15 years this time. You guys, uh, got anything to help me correct me position in time? I tried asking OPN in 2025, but they were a bit tied up, something with Charlie I think. Said they'd seen me before. Guess this is that. Sorry for the inconvenience, but I really don't want to wait 15 years for the timeline to self correct here. Anything you guys can do?

(This shenanigans has been going on for roughly 7 years. I'd appreciate the help. Gets real hard to keep track of when I am.)

Not listening, not listening.

I'm just forwarding this immediately to Relativistic Scheduling. Most of this is scrambled for me. You really shouldn't be just throwing out future events like this.

....Charlie? What on earth could he....

[pulpandgristle]

III: ALBATROSS

Pilot ID: Harlan Salk-Wakeford, RKTS-S Platform #107 ("Colony Veritas") Status: Active Current Assignment: Supply line suppression, standard anti-materiel targeting regimen

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dropped off Harlan's wedding ring earlier. Put it in his palm before they took him in for final preparations. They'd already rewired his optic nerves into the targeting superstructure before I got there. The technicians said he could still perceive his surroundings, but he didn't close his hand when I held it. Apparently that's normal.

I think I was too fast for him to feel me.

He's in orbit now, camping in the L8 Lagrangian Point between Colony Veritas and our shield moon. His installation's big enough to see from the cliffs south of our cabin. I camp underneath him on the seaside, at the big overhang with the willow tree and the gulls. My telescope fits nicely up there.

The barrel of his new body glimmers at night. It's two miles long, I'm told, big enough for me to walk down the grooves of the rifling. Every round he'll fire is the size of a four magrail cars stacked on top of each other. From planetside it's not so imposing, though. It's almost delicate from that far away, a razor-thin line projecting from the rest of him, incomplete under harsh light, like a cat's whisker.

He can see faster than light now. Command says he's the closest that colony stock can come to godhood. I believe it.

But I don't want to.

They unveiled his new body two months into the occupation. It's a new type of ultra-long-range battery, one that fires fast enough to warp space: a Relativistic Kinetic Targeting System—Superliminal-class. RKTS-S. Pronounced "rickets", like the ancient Earth disease that ruined people's bones. That turned children into hunched figures with legs like parentheses.

They break the gunner's legs outwards to fit them in, funnily enough. The rest follows slowly, incrementally cracking out then back into place, like a branch snapping in reverse. I asked the technicians why they did it like that. No one answered me. They just turned the cranks and stared at the floor.

They use some type of singularity lensing to alter the gunner's consciousness. Time dilation swallows them. In seconds they live a billion lifetimes, all prescripted targeting protocols injected into the spine with a cocktail of salts and stem cells that crack the brain apart. Somehow, the people stay inside, and they can take commands just fine. I'm unsure how.

They remember what their old life was. Some of them even talk. The signals of the speech fire beyond their reach, beyond will, looping for millenia of perceived time before their body spits them out. The world around them moves like a glacier.

Gunners aren't allowed outside of their bodies. It's inhumane to make them leave.

Harlan signed up when I wasn't home. He sent me out for errands in the morning, at the crack of dawn, acted like it would be a fun surprise when I got back. I didn't think anything of it at the time.

I could walk okay with the cane, but it took all day just to go to the markets without money for the trams. He misplaced my cards and used the cash for something he didn't want to talk about. I made it back at dusk.

I couldn't be mad, not truly. I know the Septarchy would have taken me for infantry if he didn't agree to it. I yelled anyway. I regret that now, so much. More than anything.

I think he was counting on that—me taking so long. I couldn't tell them to take me instead if I wasn't there.

"No, no, let me go. You're not cut out for zero gee. You still get seasick, remember?"

I do now, worse than before. I didn't when he held me.

He'd been inconsiderate before, especially since we lost the baby. The blood terrified him. I guess a fetus dripping through your fingers will do that to a man. Even after that, though, he found the strength to carry me to the ambulance and stay up in the waiting room for two days while they fixed things. He's his strongest when he's afraid.

What I wouldn't give for him to be weak, like me. Now that he's up there I can take official hormones. I can get a beard, get muscles bigger than these frail things my mother's side shackled me with. Get a voice deep enough to cry with dignity.

Sometimes I dream that he's sick. I imagine that he'll come home from the hospital instead of me, infirm and feeble, and he'll get to stop working for awhile while I make bread and cut firewood and carry him for a change. He can pick a ring out from the catalog on the coffee table, and read his novels and heal and sleep.

They married us then, on the installation, after I held his hand. The Septarchy said they'd officiate as long as he signed up for the program; men weren't allowed to be wed without service licenses, and I was only a man to the Septarchy because they didn't let colony women go to war.

Apparently Harlan is rare. One of a kind. Perfect for this.

"I can protect you from up here."

I lie in our tent. My sleeping bag is half-empty. I run my hands over vacant air and I stare into orbit. I think about the surgeon closing his hand around the ring. It's a size too big for him now, since the IVs feed him less heartily than I did.

The vows are over on Veritas. It's okay, though, love. You can take your time.

According to what they said, you'll be accepting them for the next ten million years.

[chernobog13]

I watched the first episode of Ultraman Blazar last night.

It was an unusual first episode for an Ultra series, but overall I liked it. Very happy that it is not another "New Generation" series, especially since the last two were re-treads of Tiga and Dyna.

Very much got a Nexus vibe off this episode, but not as dark and gritty as that series. Part of that might be Blazar's mostly grey and silver color scheme, which is evocative of Nexus, who also had red and blue costumes.

You can tell that the production team was also trying to emulate the style of Shin Ultraman (2022) and Shin Kamen Rider (2023), albeit on a much smaller scale.

I like the fact that Blazar's human counterpart, Captain Hiruma Gento, is actually in charge of the kaiju attack squad. That changes things up a bit, as he will have to work extra hard to mask his absences when joining with Blazar from the rest of his crew.

Gento is also an older, more mature protagonist than is usual for an Ultra series, which is a nice call back to the original Showa series. I know this a franchise aimed at kids, but I am sooooooooooo tired of the whiney kids with no idea about personal grooming that we've had a near-steady parade of as stars of the shows.

As for Blazar himself, he's a bit...different than previous Ultras.

For one thing, he WILL. NOT. STOP. GRUNTING! It is non-freakin'-stop. And it's not regular grunting that you hear from other Ultras as they fight kaiju; it's as if the actor is speaking some crazy, made-up language.

This was seriously distracting during the fight with Bazanga, the space kaiju du jour. I certainly hope that it doesn't continue for the rest of the season.

Something even more disconcerting were Blazar's antics during the battle. At one point he was doing rapid high-knee jumps like he was a little kid having a tantrum. That was disconcerting, to say the least.

I do like Blazar's main attack weapon, which is a spear made of energy that he summons. It was a little silly that he tossed it a Bazanga (I have to stop myself from typing Ba-Zinga), but it worked so I guess that's all that matters.

I tried to stay away from most promotional material before watching the episode, as I don't want to know everything about the characters and premise before hand. If the show does its job properly, that information will be conveyed through the story. A show/film shouldn't rely on supplemental material in other media for the audience to understand what's going on.

That said, I did read some articles and posts today that gave me some supplemental info.

On this Earth, humanity has been battling kaiju since 1966, which I think is a nice touch. Apparently, they've succeeded at doing so without the assistance of an Ultraman; at least until now.

Ultraman Blazar is not from M78. He is, instead, from M421, a blazar (Wikipedia: "an active galactic nucleus (AGN) with a relativistic jet (a jet composed of ionized matter traveling at nearly the speed of light) directed very nearly towards an observer. ") far, far away.

And, Blazar is reportedly a "more primitive" type of Ultraman, whatever that means. It might serve to explain his wild antics and why he was grunting/babbling the whole time. I haven't investigated this further because I want to see how this is explained in the show.

So now I guess I'll just wait until next Friday night to see how things progress.

[para-imperium]

On the Lack of New Wormholes

An excerpt from a lecture on Interstellar Travel 101 by professor Rchel Coligera of the University of Dawson Sphere, 3002 PX.

Now I can see that most of you have turned in your pre-course surveys and there was one question that just kept appearing. “Why aren’t we covering wormholes?” Well, I can answer that quickly: Wormholes are obsolete, expensive, and slow.

Yes, slow, I spoke correctly.

”How can that be?” You ask? Well that’s a bit more complicated.

How many of you are from Carrack? Okay, seven of you, good. How about Algernon? Eight, nice. Persephone? Eleven, really? Well, we’ve got quite a few relativist students, that’s no surprise for Interstellar Travel 101.

What would you say if I told you that under the Federation none of you would have left your home system?

At the Federation’s height it’s estimated that less than one in one hundred star systems were within a year’s travel of a wormhole. And most ships took close to a year to reach a wormhole, even the fastest ships of the Federation era took a month to travel from an inhabitable planet to the Oort Cloud where wormholes could be safely emplaced. Travel from systems without wormholes often took decades. You interstellar students are aware that by the time you return home your siblings and classmates will be middle-aged grandparents, unless they were fortunate enough to have access to leukosynths. But if you’d taken a wormhole to Alpha Centauri, they’d be long dead.

Sure, we could combine modern singularity drives with wormhole travel, but why would we? The wormhole network is gone, with a few rare exceptions. And it would be far too expensive to try and rebuild it.

You might have heard that the micro-singularities powering a 1,000-hydro-ton liner consumed a small planetoid, but the mass consumed to make transversable wormholes is measured in stars. We can only guess how many brown dwarfs were sucked up into Proxima Centauri’s StarForge. Just one brown dwarf could support a population of billions, as many peripheral polities have discovered after obtaining singularity drives, or build a fleet of thousands.

Due to this expense the StarForge took the better part of a century to produce the first traversable wormhole. Even in the Federation’s final century we only have records of four, maybe five new wormholes opening. This was one reason why 90% of all wormholes connected to the Alpha Centauri system, and collapsed when Sol went nova.

So, the better question is, why did the Federation bother with wormholes at all? Why didn’t they just build stellar swarms like the one you’re all sitting inside? Two words: Dispersal and security.

The Core Worlds were colonized by refugees from Sol after the Destroyers scrubbed the system of life. When the Federation formed they knew that the only way they could survive as a clade was to keep a low profile, thus they adopted a policy of spreading parahumanity thin across the stars. Since the Destroyers were apparently destroyed, the university has detected five other stellar swarms in the past two centuries, including around Alpha Centauri B, Tau Ceti, and Epsilon Eridani; the Federation’s Core Worlds.

As for the second point, the Federation could not tolerate competition. You might have heard of a “Pax Federaci” but I’m going to tell you right now that entire concept is revisionist bullshit. The university’s archaeological expeditions have uncovered sizable evidence that “deportations” to Outworlds were far more common than the records would indicate. Helped, naturally, by the Federation’s policy of erasing all evidence of the deported’s existence in the name of “memetic containment.” We have even discovered a few Outworlds that appear to have started as fully Federated colonies, only to be bombed back to the Stone Age later on.

So, yeah, we might be islands in space and time separated by years, but we’re more connected than ever.

[magnetarbeam]

So based on people's reactions, the most interesting part of all the shit I've thrown at the wall in terms of Voices of the Force is relativistically-time-travelled almost 17 year old Ahsoka sharing a room with Ben and Vestara, so here's some more about that little dynamic. And some headcanons about the Jedi at this point.

When Ahsoka first shows up, she asks about the fact that the word "padawan" doesn't really seem to be in common use anymore, and it's revealed that while the rank is technically called Apprentice, everyone is taught what "padawan" means and some choose to be called by that for various reasons. Vestara, for example, prefers "Padawan Khai" because "Apprentice Khai" is what she was called by the Sith, and this helps her distance herself from that.

For equal and opposite reasons, Ahsoka is fine with being referred to as "Apprentice Tano." I am very much trying to establish that the Jedi of this era have changed, and I think finding out from history about what was happening behind the scenes with Sidious and stufff would make it easier for her to let some things go, it's still, like. If nothing else, "padawan" is associated with "commander" in her traumatized flashbacks.

They're the first people she tells about the Daughter's essence after she finds out. The only other people who knew before that are whatever Council members were at the meeting where Ahsoka herself finds out about it.

Ahsoka drags them both down with her into the depths of reverse grip lightsabers.

Since Vestara knows the lightsaber styles of the Lost Tribe, Ahsoka trains against her a lot.

Ves and Ben pick up some Mando'a profanity pretty quickly. I'm trying not to emphasize that too much, because I don't like a lot of how Mandalorians are portrayed by the books in this period, but Ahsoka was at least one-third raised by... at least half-Mandalorians. I have to acknowledge it in some capacity.

My headcanon about Ahsoka in this period is that instead of having a standard-length lightsaber and a shoto, she has two dual-phase sabers, which can switch between a standard-length and shoto blade. (Instead of stereotypical dual-phase blades like, for instance, Corran's, which have a standard length blade and an extremely extended one.) Ves and Ben helped her figure out how to design it so that the dual-crystal ignition process or whatever it is that means the extended-blade activates faster in a regular dual-phase, also works in reverse here, so it changes from standard to shoto length faster than a common saber would take to deactivate that length of blade.

Finding out about O66 sends Ahsoka into an existential crisis about the relationship she had to the clones, and Ben shows her how to flow-walk so she can find out about the inhibitor chips and take comfort in the fact that they didn't do it on purpose and that it was just as genuine as she thought.

You can't get a holonet connection in the Transitory Mists, which is kind of a problem in terms of receiving requests for Jedi assistance. I guess they have to rely on courier ships or probe droids that just pop out and collect data or something.

None of these three have anywhere near the experience they need to qualify for StealthX combat missions (although Ben technically has the rank) but they definitely try to get a head start on understanding the mechanics of the things.

A random but vaguely relevant headcanon I have is that Ahsoka already knows how to do a Dathomiri blood trail, which she learned from Ventress when they ran into each other and had some time to kill at some point before or during Ahsoka's time with Spar's Protectors leading up to the Legends version of the Siege of Mandalore.

Ahsoka still has the TCW-style wrist comlink, and Vestara and Ben decide they like that idea and come up with similar setups for themselves.

One of my favorite TCW fic tropes/popular headcanons: Togruta purr when given physical affection.

[kaiyves-backup]

An hour’s drive from where I grew up, there’s an atom-smasher large enough to see from space. When I was 7 years old, they created a four trillion degree substance inside of it that was the same as the fluid that filled the Universe shortly after the Big Bang. And overhead, in one of the largest surviving plots of New York’s pine barrens, deer and turkeys romp and graze and go about their business with no inkling of what lies beneath.

But, I mean, that’s just @brookhavenlab.

When I said to my friends on Discord the other night that Brookhaven National Lab and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider were “in the background noise” of my childhood, I meant it in the way that everyone considers their hometown to be somewhat mundane. Because that’s the place you’re most familiar with, the place you grew up knowing day-in-and-day-out, and that can make anything about it feel unremarkable.

I lived about an hour away, so my family didn’t work there, and neither did the families of anyone at my school, but we did go there on field trips, and occasionally had scientists who worked there come do presentations. I don’t mean to imply that I didn’t find these field trips or presentations very interesting, because I did. But because they happened so regularly they were more like “special treats but not extraordinary”. It wasn’t something once-in-a-lifetime, like going to Space Camp or Walt Disney World.

But the most tangible presence of Brookhaven Lab for us was seeing it on “Exit” signs on the Long Island Expressway when driving to or from The City. In a school library or classroom, there would be the occasional mousepad or poster in a school classroom showing the RHIC from space, probably a bit faded towards the end of my High School years. At a track meet, I’d see another parent standing next to my father who had a CERN tote bag and comment on it, and they’d say they’d been a contractor at the lab doing construction on a day there had been physicists visiting from Europe.

If you had asked me in High School, I probably would have guessed that while there might not be particle accelerators like the RHIC within an hour’s drive of everywhere in the US, there was probably one in every region, maybe every National Laboratory, and ours might, for example, just be the only one in the Northeast. There was no sense, amidst this background noise, that there was presently only one other comparable facility in the US, the Tevatron. That was only something I realized in college, when that facility was shut down.

So maybe it’s the case, even having toured the RHIC and spoken to its operators, that anything you grew up near will never feel quite as remarkable to you as to someone who grew up elsewhere. How could it? It’s part of the background noise.

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

It turns out that, as much as you might want to believe, not only are physicists not inherently weird, physicists are really not that weird and are in fact kind of boring

For example: as of the year 2008, for all the physics I've read (tens of thousands of pages), I've only found a small handful of examples of people thinking the laws of physics "work" in some sense of that word that physicists normally do. I would guess that this is basically because physicists have found out how to use their equations so that they seem to do whatever they want to do -- you can get pretty weird, and sometimes it's even cool, but almost never anything as "boring" as "getting the right answer."

(I have found a tiny number of "math physicists," as I call them, who are able to do this trick. The ones I know of tend to be mathematicians from a background that's more "math" than "physics," who have found that if they can write down a set of equations that look good and are actually pretty mathematically elegant, the equations can be solved in any way they want, including ones no one else thought was plausible, and if they write down a bunch of equations and then just pick whatever is nice in the end, all their equations will have a solution and the answer will look like they chose. I do not know of many examples of "non-math physicists" doing the same trick.)

What's nice is that this doesn't work for the general case of physics where it is not at all clear what you "should" be able to do with physics. (You shouldn't, for example, be able to write down any equation at all and have it work, even if you do things like drop all the derivatives in a relativistic equation and get a really nice-looking equation that gives you the right answer anyway. Physics doesn't have that kind of weirdness.)

I don't know how to relate the concept I'm talking about to the "mathiness" of physics. It's just that in order to do anything at all, you need to do a lot of math, and it's sort of comforting to know that some kind of math exists that does not seem obviously "wrong." There is one mathematical "language" for most of physics -- Newtonian mechanics -- where everyone can agree you can add two things together in many different ways, for instance (i.e. you can do calculus with it) and these methods "all work," no one can think of any problem where two of them fail and one succeeds, and so on.

I guess there is something to say here about "approximate solutions" that make physicists feel like they're "right," in the sense of doing something that the right equations would do under a number of slightly different conditions. I suppose that's what people usually mean when they say things like "quantum mechanics is like approximate classical mechanics," and I don't know enough about actual physicists to say whether or not this really feels true to them, but it does seem true to me and I think that's important.

Anyway: if you want to read about something "boring" like that, I recommend Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science (in the context of his new book, I mean). Or read some of his blog posts. Or check out some of his videos. Or just try looking at a Wikipedia page about any physical topic. (No matter what topic, I guarantee you'll find that it involves equations, and if you can write down any equations at all, it is likely to have a bunch of equations, and probably some of them look really nice, some of them look kind of ugly, and no one will agree if you think you can pick the nice ones.) There's something comforting about reading about physics that is very clearly made out of equations, and you can see how complicated they are, and yet they're still all equations you can "plug" into one another. There is a very direct correspondence between what physics says it is about and what it actually is.

[zinderant]

I attended a talk on gravitational waves today, and it got me thinking about how black hole mergers happen. Following @threebodybot has given me a (perhaps unduly inflated) sense of how gravity works, so I know that when two objects orbit each other, that orbit doesn't decay unless influenced by an outside force. So I figured, when you have two neutron stars orbiting each other, they probably gathered a gas cloud around them between the time they formed and the time they started orbiting each other, and the friction that this creates will slowly make their orbit decay, but neutron stars are very heavy and gas is very light so that must take an extremely long time, but all astronomical numbers are extremely large so that shouldn't necessarily mean that it doesn't work that way.

However, this doesn't make sense for black holes. As a singularity, anything falling into a black hole doesn't collide with anything. Even in a direct collision course with the singularity it cannot change the momentum of the black hole to slow it down, because time stands still at the singularity and whatever falls in will never reach it. But black hole mergers do exist, so what gives? I thought about it for a while, and I figured that it must be that an object captured by a black hole imparts its momentum anyway, because the black hole is gravitationally attracted to it in turn and will slow down whenever something new pulls into its orbit. Or alternatively, anything that enters the orbit of two spinning black holes imparts its angular momentum, making them spin slower, or does that only count for objects that are coming in against their spin? And compared to these black holes, whatever falls into them must also have only an infinitesimal effect but there aren't any other ways they can lose momentum... right? Right?

So then I ask someone who actually knows about this and no, it doesn't work this way, black holes decay in orbit because of a completely unrelated relativistic mechanism where kinetic energy is turned into gravitational waves! I could have guessed that the frequency of black hole mergers meant that they couldn't happen just by inching closer to each other on the order of millions of years, but still, that's a really unsatisfying answer when I thought I had it figured out.

[pesterloglog]

Davesprite

Act 6, page 5941-5945



DAVESPRITE: wake up sleepy head

DAVESPRITE: wait why did i even say that

DAVESPRITE: stay asleep all you want like i give a fuck

DAVESPRITE: but you are kind of missing some important shit here

DAVESPRITE: we spent three faux relativistic years cruising through the metaphysical asscrack of nowhere

DAVESPRITE: and when we finally get here youre all tuckered out

DAVESPRITE: like yall didnt sleep enough on this boat already

DAVESPRITE: some of the sicknastiest shuteye anyone ever got i owe to this friggin boat

DAVESPRITE: dude this is a big deal everyones waiting for us out there

DAVESPRITE: i mean...

DAVESPRITE: probably

DAVESPRITE: i dont know where we are some green hilly place with all these stone henges sprinkled around

DAVESPRITE: did you know there could be a plurality of stone henges i didnt but guess fucking what

DAVESPRITE: henges APLENTY where this place is concerned

DAVESPRITE: hey wheres jade

DAVESPRITE: i guess she left already?

DAVESPRITE: maybe there was an emergency somewhere and her doggy senses led her there

DAVESPRITE: maybe someone fell down a well

DAVESPRITE: what do you think john do you think our teen parents fell down a well

DAVESPRITE: nah i sincerely doubt that any of them would be that pathetic

DAVESPRITE: whatever it was it must have been important enough for jade to ditch us like this

DAVESPRITE: either that or

DAVESPRITE: maybe she was that desperate to finally get away from me

DAVESPRITE: between you and me john

DAVESPRITE: i didnt really handle things with her as well as i could have

DAVESPRITE: oh well maybe real dave will treat her better

DAVESPRITE: or not i dont know

DAVESPRITE: i did her a favor cutting bird dave out of her life

DAVESPRITE: nobody really deserves bird dave as a boyfriend or a friend or anything its like getting one of the janky daves from the bargain bin at the dave depot

DAVESPRITE: or one of the marked down daves the day after national dave day

DAVESPRITE: its like somebody taxedermized your dave and expected you not to notice

DAVESPRITE: "feathers what feathers haha no that dave is totally normal and ok"

DAVESPRITE: you should just go back to being bros with real dave when you see him

DAVESPRITE: ill be fine ill just flap around and do my thing alone

DAVESPRITE: im completely alright with that at this point

DAVESPRITE: we had our ups and downs john but all in all it was cool to go on this road trip with you

DAVESPRITE: there were some times man

DAVESPRITE: the times

DAVESPRITE: im telling you they were unreal

DAVESPRITE: i bet you people would pay good money to see every second of the madcap stunts that were going down on this ship basically 24/7

DAVESPRITE: if hulls could talk wow

DAVESPRITE: haha just joking it was seriously boring as hell

DAVESPRITE: but i mean it was still cool so yeah

DAVESPRITE: hey

DAVESPRITE: whats that ring anyway

DAVESPRITE: ive seen you with that ring before and i guess i was just like

DAVESPRITE: ok john has a magic ring for some reason

DAVESPRITE: no need to mention that or anything

DAVESPRITE: but where did you even get it

DAVESPRITE: you cant even hear me you got your snooze on so hard

DAVESPRITE: aint gonna wake you up to hassle you about no ring

DAVESPRITE: i probably should have said all this stuff when you were awake anyway

DAVESPRITE: like the stuff about friendship

DAVESPRITE: fuck it ill just leave another one of my patented magic notes taped to your shoe or your cowlick or something

DAVESPRITE: my magic notes rule ill miss leavin em taped on stuff

DAVESPRITE: i sure do talk to myself a lot dont i

DAVESPRITE: wow why have i never made this observation

DAVESPRITE: i probably needed to be a bird for exactly three years to finally have that epiphany

DAVESPRITE: i wonder if real dave ever had that epiphany

DAVESPRITE: probably not cause hes not a bird

DAVESPRITE: the bottom line is being a guy whos also a bird makes you think

DAVESPRITE: anyway im out

DAVESPRITE: p.s. happy birthday john

DAVESPRITE: have some watermarks for the road

[lepartiprisdeschoses]

I've said it before, but I wish I could write impromptu essays whenever I wanted to (basically posts that are more than a short paragraph or two), and in particular I wish I could say more than, "you have to be careful with that analogy" in reply to this post. Not a desire to criticize this user specifically, just to express my thoughts on this sort of thing (before a confident relativist comes along and does just that, I guess!)

[rametarin]

Further expounding on the disability/autism thing.

There’s actually two issues to address with it.

First, yes, disability is not a bad thing. This is true. This is a point. There’s no shame or moral wrongness for being disabled in some fashion. Working to accommodate those with disabilities and understanding how their disability makes them unable to properly participate in a species with that ability is good.

Second, no, disabilities are not just, “irrelevant differences.” It may sound like splitting hairs, but being angry about the verbage and implications of disability when, “Who says being neurotypical is normal or the best thing!?” smacks of deliberate reframing of reality around relativism. Someone with a hereditary disease where they don’t grow eyes, is an issue.

Someone isn’t, “just different,” if they were born with a congenital defect that had them missing an arm, or both arms, or their eyes. That is in fact a disability and it is in fact a problem. That doesn’t make it shameful, but it does make it a disability, and a problem.

Something being irregular because it’s a burden is not a bad thing. And trying to act like just because it’s different that it’s equally valid, is not a good thing. Someone isn’t regular just because to be irregular would mark the irregular out as bad.

I point this out because I’ve been seeing an uncomfortable number of people that seem to be of the opinion that pretending to advocate for the disabled to try and make society function as if everyone were disabled in all ways, is how it, “should be.” And even people that think disability is a culture, or “distinct class,” where their characteristic dysfunctions are distinct of their, “group.” 

While that sounds benign, this is in the same category as comparing restoring somebody’s ability to hear with trying to use x-rays to lighten the skin of black people so they’d, “fit in,” to a majority white population. Regenerative medicine to grow someone new eyes, or give them back neural function lost by paralysis, or dare I say it, even somehow modify a brain and the way it functions to develop more allistically, is NOT in the same corner as whitewashing or cultural genocide. And I really shouldn’t have to say this, but some of you people are really fucking disgusting, on some absolute crazy juice. It is not ‘cultural genocide’ to consider a biological defect an issue, and it’s not, “society trying to demand purity and conformity,” to think a person should have both eyes to be considered abled. And it’s not, “shaming the differently abled,” to suggest they are impaired by a lack of function that is default for the human animal.

And the people saying this sort of shit tend to come from the same transhumanistic, relativistic perspective as the people trying to argue biological sex isn’t real, that the sexual binary in humans “isn’t real,” because XXY and XYY chromosomed people exist (in pain and with chronic medical problems because, guess what... that’s a disability, because the human animal wasn’t meant to function that way.) And why are they saying it’s not real? Because they interpret the human condition to be not as an objective animal with biological constraints to how we’re defined, but as a conceptual and ideological platform, defined not by our biology, but by laws and values. And thus they illogically reason, there’s no reason we can’t define being born without legs and requiring “society” to care for them to be just as natural and the same as being born with legs. That there is no legitimate basis for what is normal for humans and thus there’s no legitimate basis for what ability a human being is, “supposed” to have.

Disability is a health issue and quality of life issue, not a class issue. Trying to use class struggle theory by treating the disabled as a class helps no one but class struggle theorists argue for class struggle theory in motte and bailey with disabled rights. Since disabilities have so many umbrellas even putting them all under the same category isn’t really valid, either. And I abhor it.

So no, it isn’t bad to be disabled. And disability isn’t a bad word. It is not bad to consider yourself disabled for having a disability. And it IS bad to think someone is, “just the way they are” when the way they are is literally a biological problem for the health, safety and independence/mobility of that individual. It doesn’t STOP being a problem because medicine exists for it and could be readily available if it wasn’t so expensive to manufacture or produce, and trying to argue society should MAKE the disability less of a problem with this line of thinking is kind of gross.

Biology and self-evident empirical states, natural laws > your desire for things to fit neatly into ideological boxes and oughts and shoulds. Trying to argue the abled people are oppressing the disabled because the disabled cannot operate in the same way and thus we need to change the standards to accommodate the disabled as the default and defacto definition of what is normal, is on some crazy nonsense.

This may sound like ‘screaming at clouds’ nonsense to anyone that hasn’t come across people like this before, but I assure you, there are assholes trying to put these little duckies into this row. And I’m not here for them.

A disability is a disability and while yes technology and medical should address them, trying to argue there needs to be a psycholological, “social/cultural shift on how we see disability and ability,” in that trying to argue body integrity shouldn’t be considered the default, is just asinine.

[sineala]

hii i love your fics and your blog. what are some writers, fanfic or otherwise, who inspire you? have you read anything good, fanfic or otherwise, recently? thank you i hope you have a nice day

I hope you have a nice day, too, anon!

The past year’s been kind of hard on me mentally -- and I am pretty sure I am not alone in this -- and until very recently I really haven’t been motivated to read much of anything, or write much of anything. I am slowly working on being able to do both of these things, but I am definitely not at 100% yet.

So I haven’t read all that much lately. In terms of actual books, I really liked Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth and am looking forward to the last book in the trilogy; last year I finally decided to get a supporting membership to Worldcon so I could vote for the Hugos, and while I didn’t manage to read anything other than the Novel and Novella categories, I enjoyed getting a giant virtual packet of books and getting to read some of the nominees, and I am looking forward to doing that again this year with the current Worldcon. (For approximately $50 you too can vote in the Hugos and receive a large number of current SF books and stories!)

If you’re looking for a rec for a SF/fantasy novel you probably haven’t read, one of my favorite authors, the late John M. Ford, is finally having most of his books come back into print. So far the only book that’s been reissued is The Dragon Waiting, which is an alt-history fantasy novel about the Wars of the Roses in a world where Byzantium has conquered much of Europe. It is very, very good. I reread it last year when it was rereleased. He does some really amazing things with POV (actually, so does Harrow the Ninth) and it has possibly my very favorite portrayal of vampires, in that vampirism in it is an unfortunate non-sexy medical condition that also happens to make you something fairly close to immortal, so people often seek to become vampires for strategic political reasons because they would really like to rule forever.

I really haven’t been reading a lot of fanfiction lately -- I have about twenty pages of stories Marked For Later on AO3 -- but let me see what I can come up with, looking at things I’ve bookmarked. Honestly I think one of the best parts about not lurking in fandom anymore is getting to befriend authors whose work I really admire; it’s a great experience. Kiyaar’s work always destroys me emotionally, and at some point I am gonna get to write a story with her, and I don’t know what it will be yet but it’s gonna be so much fun. (Insert “someone will die! of fun!” meme here.) Isozyme is currently playing in Untamed fandom and I really wish she would come back and write more Steve/Tony; I keep rereading her Ults fic and having Feelings. Mizzy consistently hits basically every narrative trope that I have ever liked, and I know this fic predates the pandemic, but I feel like always winter, never spring has been a Big Mood this past year. Sadisticsparkle does really consistently lovely work that I feel deserves to be recced more. I feel I have been pretty open about the fact that BlossomsintheMist’s Relativistic Heat Conduction is still my absolute favorite comics Steve/Tony story ever. Ever. (I would also like to try to cowrite with her someday but I have So Many Things to write first.) And also Crait’s Stark Disassembled series is perfect, perfect Civil War Tony Stark and I wish I could write half as well as this. I wish I could write half as well as any of these people.

And so you’re not like, “Hey, Sine, why are you just reccing your friends?” let me rec work by a couple of people whom I am pretty sure I have never interacted with beyond leaving embarrassingly-gushing comments on AO3. JenTheSweetie only writes MCU but every time I get a story notification email from AO3 I am super-happy, and I have read And Time Can Do So Much more times than I can count. It is an Endgame fixit. And I also want to rec -- oh my God, I just realized this is the exact same premise but it’s 616 and not MCU and also the other way around, oh my God, am I really this predictable, I guess so -- haemodye’s when you are fallen, which is a story in which Steve is presumed dead but is not really dead, just invisible, and Tony completely falls apart. And Steve gets to watch. So angsty. So good. Also it’s relatively recent, so probably not everyone has read it!

(I guess I really like stories that are basically AUs of the movie Ghost. I’m very predictable. In that vein, there’s also Mizzy’s ooh you and me would be a big conversation. Presumed-dead is the best trope because you get all the angst of deathfic but then you get a happy ending! Where Our Restless Monsters Sleep is also presumed-dead, I guess, in that it’s an Endgame fixit, but I figure every MCU fan has read it already. You know what, just go read all of Mizzy’s fic. I’ll wait here.)

There! I hope you find something good to read!

[tomdiddlyumptious]

T.H| This Is Odd

Summary: sometimes coming to a high school when your not supposed to has some... odd features

Warnings: rant about black hole, DRUGS, small RAPE MENTION, languange, OD (overdose), and idk

“Yeah his brother is like Indian or something, which makes absolutely no sense” you heard from a distance, you turned and followed the voice, finding one of your classmates, crowded with other ones.

Ding ding

“Class class- we have a new student!” Your teacher, let’s call her ms Barbra. You sat in the back of the class, not wanting any attention of the sort. “His name is Ben Perkins!” The student stepped up, an awkward smile across his lips as he looked through the class.

“Everyone say hi!” “Hi Ben” “hey Ben” class said one or another, expect you of course. “Go ahead and find yourself an open seat” Ben took his time but made his way to the back, sitting in between you and a girl that was your..... friend? You are cold but she got along with you pretty well, I guess.

About 20 minutes in, you look over the class, eyes cold and in an over-sized dark green sweater, black biker shorts, and a over-sized plain black shirt that came down just revealing a few inches of your shorts.

“What the fuck is your problem?” The girl asked, Tracey. “Okay so I’m Spider-Man, if you want me to be honest yeah” Ben shrugged. “Your fuckin nuts” she whispered, leaving Ben chuckling.

“You hear this bullshit y/n?” Tracey asked, making both of them turn to you. “Eh, don’t really care about it” “so you don’t like Spider-Man?” Ben whispered. “No, I don’t like anything, or anyone, except for Tracey, isn’t know why but I really like her” “as in-“ “no dipshit” you turned to him, giving him that cold stare, he stopped looking at you and cleared his throat, looking at Tracey panicked as she only shrugged.

You walked through the cafiteria, computer in hand as your hair bounced with each walk, sitting down at a table alone you open your computer. “Can we sit here?” “Don’t care” you heard bags drop on the table as you look up, “Spider-Man huh?” You looked at Ben and he nodded, “ID please” “I don’t think-“ “I’m not trying to fuckin rob you or anything, just give me the ID” you looked at Ben, you made eye contact as he tried not to fail.

“Fuck” he lost when you raised your eyebrows at him, he took out the ID and handed it to you. “Let’s get this out of the bag, you aren’t Ben Perkins, who is stupid enough to give someone that name-“ “ouch” “this ID, made, of course it is, it’s the school ID, is it?” You mostly talked to yourself, Ben and Tracey just starring at you as you were in detective mode.

“What’s your real name?” “Should I be giving this information?” You snapped your fingers at him “that’s a fake accent, your brother is indian” “he was adopted” “shut up” you type in your computer ‘soon to be Spider-Man’ “any trailers out yet?” “No” “aha” you scrolled down on marvels Instagram, clicking it “this is fun, I should do this more often” you nod to yourself, you scroll down to the Spider-Man post “Tom holland, so it’s true?” You turn the computer, “duchess, your from the UK” Tracey scrolls through the computer reading it.

“How would you know that” “you came to a geniuses school didn’t you?” You smirk. “How long you gonna be here?” “For about three more days” “there’s a party” Tracey smiles. “Tracey no, Thomas is like 19,20” “I’m 19 and how did you know my name is-“ “because your from the UK, duchess, it makes sense”

“Hey ms Johnson can I get some water?” You ask, Tom and Tracey behind you. “Yeah sure huh you know where it is” the office manager smiled at you, you smiled back and grabbed a cup, instantly going to the coffee machine. “That isn’t water” “want one?” You ask them, they all nod. “Okay so like, what’s going on, how did you get here, and why?”

“My British humor is something that people don’t get” Tom smiled. “Yeah... I bet” Tracey mugged Tom, he looked at her as in ‘what did I do?’ “Are you coming to the party?” Tracey asks you. “Is there drugs?” You say, standing infront of the coffee machine and turning back to her, your lower lip puckered. “Your an addict” “I have my problems” you shrugged, handing the black coffee to Tom as he grabbed the things he needed for the coffee.

“Are you?” He asked, looking back at you. “I’ve been clean for.....yeah I don’t know” you shrugged, know handing one to Tracey. “Is that a good I don’t know” “no she literally likes to wipe her memory- I’m suprised you haven’t OD’ed yet” “in your dreams Tracey, in your dreams” you smiled, now coming over with them and making the coffee, until the door opened.

“I thought you only wanted some Y/n?” “Hey, the more the merrier am I right?” You winked at her, “whatever” she playfully said, closing the door. “And you call yourself a genius right?” “Sometimes duchess, why?” “I’m pretty sure geniuses don’t do drugs” “but geniuses do find out when a fraud enters their school, and cracks the case under 20 minutes” you glared at him “touché” he cheered his drink at you. “I really hope you don’t plan on skipping this party y/n” “ayo, I’ll think about it trace- how about you pretty boy, you comin?” “What’s the age range” “we are both eighteen, as long as you don’t thot around you’ll be fine” you smile at him as he nervously chuckles.

“The black hole, do you know what you’d find?” The teacher asks, nobody knew. “You guys suck” you said out loud, standing up and taking the marker from the teacher you drew a black whole. “Black whole, if you went in you wouldnt find anything, it’s called the black whole for a reason, it’s basically a planet vacuum, if we ever got to close we would be sucked in” you explained. “And that would take us to the fifth dimension, this black whole” you hit the drawing “can pop up anywhere, it can take the sun, Mars, I’m suprised it didn’t take Pluto yet, but what you didn’t know is” everyone paying attention to you “there’s multiple versions of yourself, beck give me a fruit” “orange” “see, there’s another reality, deminsion- whatever where you said apple, or even lemon, or even grapefruit. Now let’s not get off topic, but there’s like four different deminsions, if you were to enter and go to earth, you’d probably find another one of yourself, maybe the same, maybe different, but there’s a reality, a dimension where you didn’t have gravity, where you don’t live on oxygen, where you don’t have to live on water, but as the time passes, things change, puberty, teeth, clothes, everything, so imagine before Christ, what was here?” “We don’t know” “read about it, anyways, not to get religious or anything but Adam and Eve, eve being the dumb person she is she ate the apple, then she tricked Adam into it, but god didn’t set up any kind of snake so where did it come from?” “Satan, who is a fallen angel, this makes absolutely no sense” “shut up and let me explain. Imagine a different deminsion, one where you can’t make mistakes because really, earth is what we make it, we as a community are fucking up this planet, so in the different dimension what are some things that would be in there, duchess” “I-uh, no plastic out in public for animals?” “Yes, good job, what else?” “Green grass” and a whole bunch of other answers. “Correct, but there has to be one bad thing right...? Sinning, we do sins everyday but we are human, but if we were in this dimension... that would be the definition of human, but why would god make this ‘black whole’? He must want us to go in, right? Or are we the adams, the eves, the fallen angels, the angels who are still here, having to face consequences. Getting sucked in this black whole makes you get lost, it’s obvious that we shouldn’t go in, because anyone who have probably died, because the black hole is everlasting, here, this is where we stay, the fifth deminsion is where you don’t go, thank you” Tracey slowly started to clap as everyone else did, some standing up as you turned around looking at the board, noticing you impulsively drew a lot of notes on it. “Well, that was a lesson but also some intresting theories, thanks for sharing y/n. I guess that sums it up” the teacher shrugs, “no actually the fifth deminsion is a five-dimensional space is a space with five dimensions. If interpreted physically, that is one more than the usual three spatial dimensions and the fourth dimension of time used in relativistic physics. It is an abstraction which occurs frequently in mathematics, where it is a legitimate construct,” you make you way back to the seat. “So you are a nerd! I fuckin knew it” Tracey whisper yelled. “I’m not a nerd!” “Oh you so are a nerd” “shut up duchess!”

It’s the day of the party, and you aren’t that exited.

You sighed “I’m not wearing this Tracey” you say, in the body con dress. “You look good!” “I look like a box” you glared at her, “you going just like that, let me-“ “your not doing my hair, leave it” you looked in the mirror “at least have a side part” “fine”

Most people dancing, others drinking, Tom, Tracey, drinking. “I’m not gonna ya know Uh-drink” “now that’s not y/n, I have never heard you say that before” “well maybe- fine” you shrugged, looking over you found a bowl full with pills, you sighed as you walked over, taking two handfuls and slipping them into your pocket, walking back over they both look at you as if your crazy “hey I’m gonna take my time with these!” They still looked at you crazy, Tom taking a sip of the beer. “I’m hungry” you muttered, going to the kitchen and opening the freezer getting pizza rolls, pulling out a pan and slapping a whole bunch on and popping them in the oven. While you waited you looked at the heavy pills in your pockets, taking one out you slipped it in your mouth, just curios. “Oh fuck me” you were clean for about a week, now giving up made you feel like a pussy, you waited for the pills to kick in, the purple and pink lights getting bigger and seeing spots “fuck- how psychedelic is this?” You asked yourself, your dirty converse helping you stand. “I should go upstairs” you whispered to yourself, this wasn’t that strong but the colors really got you.

The oven went off.

The beeps and the distant music, a smile across your face as your steps stuttered “excu me, haha!l you smiled, grabbing a towel and pulling out the hot pockets, grabbing a large bowl you put them in, making your way back to your friends Tracey was gone. “Heyyyy, where she goooo!” You said. “You don’t look okay, hot pockets?” Tom said. “Take one please” you slipped in your pocket and handed him a pill. “I can’t I have a job I’m not really suppose to be here-“ “it’ll make you so happy, look at me! I feel great, please” you now begged, his jaw clenched as he looked around, he put the beer down, taking the single pill and placing it in his tongue and swallowing “good let’s go upstairs!” You grabbed his hand, pulling him to the stairs and going up whole the other was filled with hot pockets.

You searched the rooms “oh-sorry!” Until you found a room, you pulled Tom in, closing the door behind both of you and locking it. The pill wasn’t strong for him either, so you both were pretty sober. ‘Tame impalas borderline song booming through the walls. “So?” He asked, throwing himself on the bed. “Aren’t you happy” you said, sitting on the bed, placing the pizza rolls down. “I don’t really feel anything honestly” he shrugged. “I have more” you smiled at him, taking two out. “Open” you smiled, he sat up and opened his mouth, placing his tongue out, you placed it right on it “don’t swallow” you placed one on yours. “Now” you both swallowed, sitting there as it really now hit you. “I hope you don’t become like me” “I really wanna kiss you” you looked at him confused. “I think your smartness is really, really sexy” “Thomas your high” “you are too” “I-“ you take out another one ‘god please don’t let me overdose’ you thought. “I’m not that high Thomas” “then join me” he took your hand, you looked at the pill, “this-this can’t hurt me, I’ve done more then-“ “please y/n, I don’t wanna be hanging here” you looked at him, eyes watering “I’m scared” “don’t be, I’m right here darling” he wiped your tears away. “I-I just don’t want to die” “you won’t, I’ll be here, I promise” “Tom your high right now, I” “take it” you looked at him then at the pill, putting it in your mouth you swallowed. “I don’t want to die” “it’s to late, you took it” he reminds you, were you imagining this whole thing? “I fucking love you, I want to fuck you” soon someone’s else’s face popped up, his name is bray “I love you, I’m so sorry” “you rapped me you prick, I hate you” he pinned you to the bed, the leds purple as his face was there, you spit in his face “I’m so sorry, I love you so much I did it because I love you- I-I’m sorry”

“Y/n? What’s happening” Tom said, you throwing up in the floor, he instantly sobered. “Get off me!” You screamed and bray, he is still pinning you on the bed. “Y/n!” You fell to the floor. “I love you so much, I did it all for you, for us” bray yelled at you, your heart feeling heavy. You body shook. “Y/n are you having a seizure?! Help! Help!” Tom screamed, your body on the floor shaking, laying down next to your vomit, you choking on it. “Please get off of me” you begged, tears falling down your cheeks as you gave up, your vision blurry. “Your gonna die, nobody is gonna morn you, 6 feet under, no one to save you, not even Spider-Man, you pussy” he smiled at your weak figure.

Tom pushed through people, finding Tracey “y/n is dying in need your help!” He screamed over the music, traceys bottle falling as he pulled her upstairs, “CALL 911! PLEASE IM BEGGING YOU!” Tracey screamed through the music, Tom pulling her to the room your body is on the ground, still shaking and choking on your spit, it made Tracey fall to her knees, “911 is being called I- how many did she take?” “Three full pills” Tom said, dropping to your side, trying to sit you up as he choked on his sobs “fuck,” he just looked at you.

You woke up.

Beep, beep, beep, beep.

You looked over and found duchess and Tracey, both of their eyes red and blankets covering their bodies, just starring at you. “What happened?” You asked. “You overdosed” a single tear ran down Toms face as he looked away from you. “We only knew each other for three days, why are you crying duchess?” You smiled. “I- I honestly don’t know, I feel like I knew you my whole life and seeing you, almost dead it just breaks me” “your parents couldn’t see you like this, they just went outside” “you guys slept overnight here?” “Yeah we did” Tracey weakly smiled. “I’m gonna sober, you don’t have to worry about me” “yes we do, we wanna help, and we are” Tom smiled at you, sitting next to you on the hospital bed, taking your hand and playing with your fingers. “I’m sorry” you whispered, tears filling your eyes as your parents came in. “It isn’t your fault” your mom reassured. “Yes it is, I just keep walking in these traps and I- I’m just slipping away piece by piece, what if I’m just cheating death, what if I’m not supposed to be here?” You said, the tears now collapsing. “Don’t say that, we aren’t losing you” Tom whispered, the 19 year old looking down at the 18 year old, not losing her yet.

He doesn’t know why he feels this way about you, he just got hooked, it was amazing at first but know that he knows what’s going on is even better, letting him seeing you vulnerable is making baby steps into something, right?

“Yeah sat next to this pretty girl and she said what’s your problem. I told her im Spider-Man, your fuckin nuts she said, then she turned to her friend who is the most intelligent, beautifulest girl I’ve ever laid my eyes on, then she found out who I was, called me duchess, yeah I had the best three days, then left, but hey that’s how I have my girlfriend now” everyone clapped and let out some ‘aws’ “and you met this girl at the school you say?” Graham Norton says. “Yep she was a senior, 18” “the one who called you fuckin nuts or?” Jake said making everyone laugh “no the one who cracked my code under 20 minutes, and ya know it’s crazy, I had a good accent but she found out!” He stuck his hands out and everyone laughed again. “Hey you went to a genius school didn’t you” “yeah... she is one genius still to this day”