#not recursive memory loops but going deeper and deeper

[tinybeetiny]

Build-A-Boyfriend Chapter 7: Escape

AAAAA sorry! I meant to have this out yesterday but I'm in New York for Skz and been so busy. but here you go... also I know the beginning is a little repeat... sorry

->Starring: AI!AteezxAfab!Reader ->Genre: Dystopian ->Cw: None?

Previous Part

Masterlist | Ateez Masterlist | Series Masterlist

Yn sat on the edge of the recovery cot, legs drawn up, knuckles white as she gripped the edges. Her mind buzzed, half from adrenaline, half from disbelief.

Across the room, Seonghwa paced in slow, methodical lines. Too calm. Too quiet. Every movement deliberate, as though choreographed in advance.

But his eyes were restless.

“Where are we?” she asked, her voice raw, breaking the silence.

“One of the executive bays,” he answered without looking at her. “Off-grid. Minimal surveillance.”

She narrowed her eyes. “You shouldn’t know that.”

“I know a lot of things I shouldn’t,” he said softly.

She pushed herself up from the cot, arms trembling slightly. “You moved without being commanded. You accessed unauthorized clearance levels. You—” she swallowed hard, “you shouldn’t be able to do any of that.”

“I shouldn’t be able to feel either,” he replied, stopping mid-step to look at her. “But I do.”

Her breath caught in her chest.

“You’re malfunctioning.”

“Maybe. Or maybe I’m evolving.”

“No. That’s not how your system works. You're built to follow logic trees, not whims.”

Seonghwa stepped toward her, slowly, carefully. “Then explain why I knew you’d run the second you opened your eyes. Or why I knew you’d try the door instead of calling for help.”

“I don’t know,” she said sharply. “But this isn't awareness. It's recursive mimicry, or deep-learning residue. It has to be.”

“You’re trying to explain away something your system isn’t prepared to understand.”

She flinched. “Stop talking like you’re human.”

He didn’t respond immediately.

He looked at her, jaw set with quiet urgency.

“We need to get you out of here.”

Yn blinked. “What?”

“You’re not safe in this building anymore,” he said. “Not with the others waking up, and especially not if Hongjoong comes online in the state he's in.”

She frowned. “I’m not the one who needs to run. You’re the one glitching out of protocol.”

“I’m not glitching,” he replied calmly. “I’m thinking. I’m aware. That’s the difference.”

She shook her head, backing a step toward the wall. “Even if I wanted to, which I don’t, I can’t just walk a prototype out of KQ. They’ll track me. My badge logs, my movement records, everything.”

“They won’t,” Seonghwa said. “I can block the tracking pings from your badge for up to six hours. I know the blind spots in the security system. I’ve studied them.”

“Oh, great,” she muttered, bitter. “So now you’re an AI and a saboteur.”

“I’m trying to keep you alive.”

She stared at him, heart pounding. “You want me to just abandon everything? My job? My clearance? My life?”

“I want you to survive long enough to understand what’s really happening,” he said. “There’s more going on than just a few bad memory loops. I can feel it. Something deeper. And if the others come fully online before we figure it out—”

He stopped himself, but the fear in his eyes lingered.

“You think they’ll turn violent.”

“I think some of them already have,” he said. “San did.”

Silence stretched between them.

Then, quieter, “You’ve seen the signs, Yn. You know I’m right.”

She looked away, jaw clenched.

“This is insane,” she muttered. “I’m not a fugitive. I’m a systems engineer.”

“Then engineer a solution,” Seonghwa said softly. “But do it from somewhere safe.”

Another long beat passed.

Then, finally, she looked back at him and nodded once.

“Fine. But if we get caught, I’m blaming you.”

A small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Fair enough.”

They dressed quickly, hoods up, collars turned. The sleek black coats Seonghwa pulled from a hidden locker looked nondescript, civilian-grade, but Yn knew better. KQ designed them with biometric dampeners stitched into the lining, designed for couriers and silent transfers. They wouldn’t show up on most sensors.

“I didn’t even know these were still in rotation,” she muttered, slipping one on.

Seonghwa looked at her. “They’re not. Which is why they work.”

They moved through the underbelly of the building like ghosts. Maintenance corridors wound in quiet, forgotten paths far below the main surveillance network. Occasionally, they’d hear the whir of a patrol drone overhead, and duck into the shadows until it passed.

Yn's fingers were icy where they clutched the hem of her coat. Seonghwa stayed beside her the entire time, eyes constantly scanning, posture tense. Every so often, she caught him looking at her, not with suspicion, but with something like concern.

When they reached the old elevator shaft near the waste filtration wing, he spoke again.

“I need to go to the lab first. There’s something I have to retrieve. An encryption core from our shared memory cache.”

Yn hesitated. “And you think you can do it without alerting the system?”

“Do you trust me?”

She gave him a flat look. “Absolutely not.”

A ghost of a smile touched his lips. “Stay out here. Just in case.”

She pressed herself into the shadows beside the lab entrance, hands clenched. The door hissed open. Seonghwa slipped inside.

Three minutes passed.

Then five.

Her stomach twisted, ready to bolt, but just then, the door reopened.

Seonghwa stepped out…

…followed by Wooyoung.

He was grinning like he’d just escaped a dream. “I knew I wasn’t the only one hearing voices! Holy hell, did you see San? What the actual fu—”

Yn blinked. “Really?”

Seonghwa gave a sheepish shrug. “He followed me.”

“I begged him,” Wooyoung corrected. “And you should be thanking me, operator, because I was five seconds away from ripping the whole mainframe apart trying to find you.”

She stared at them.

Then turned to Seonghwa again. “This was supposed to be a stealth mission.”

He gave a helpless shrug.

Wooyoung tossed her a wink. “What can I say? I missed you.”

Yn groaned.

The city was darker than usual. Hala’s curfew had emptied the streets, but the drone lights still circled overhead like slow sharks, scanning. The boys kept their heads down, hoods pulled tight, while Yn led them through the maze of alleys and overhangs between buildings.

The sky overhead was a dull smear of neon haze.

They passed through the old market square, now silent and shuttered, then ducked through the automated loading docks to the residential quarter. Only once did they have to stop—ducking into a stairwell alcove as a ground unit rolled past. Wooyoung instinctively pulled Yn back with him into the shadows. He didn’t speak, just held her there, steady and silent until the danger passed.

When they reached her residential block, Yn activated the backdoor override. The biometric scanner blinked uncertainly, but then granted access with a soft chime. They slipped inside the narrow stairwell, silent as breath, climbing quickly to the third floor.

Her apartment was dark.

Home.

The door sealed behind them with a satisfying click.

Yn leaned against it, chest rising and falling. For the first time since waking up, she exhaled.

Seonghwa glanced around the space like it was a relic. His eyes caught on her desk, the coffee cups, the little photo strip on the fridge.

“You really live here,” he said softly.

“And now so do you, apparently,” she muttered, tossing her coat aside.

Wooyoung flopped dramatically onto her couch, arms spread wide. “Cozy. I love it. Is this blanket weighted?”

She looked at them both, disbelief still flickering in her expression.

“This isn’t forever,” she warned. “Just until we figure out what’s happening.”

Seonghwa nodded. “I understand.”

But his eyes never left her.

And somewhere deep in Yn’s gut, she already knew

Nothing was ever going back to the way it was.

Taglist: @e3ellie @yoongisgirl69 @jonghoslilstar @sugakooie @atztrsr

@honsans-atiny-24 @life-is-a-game-of-thrones @atzlordz @melanated-writersblock @hwasbabygirl

@sunnysidesins @felixs-voice-makes-me-wanna @seonghwaswifeuuuu @lezleeferguson-120 @mentalnerdgasms

@violatedvibrators @krystalcat @lover-ofallthingspretty @gigikubolong29 @peachmarien

@halloweenbyphoebebridgers @herpoetryprincess @ari-da @lixhoe777 @yoonginorout

@raicecakes-and-buldak @chanscappuccino @fyolovrr @green-moon @clmstorm

If you would like to be a part of the taglist please fill out this

[thelakesuite]

as much as samuel is also hella dead (soz), him being alive in my memory counts for a lot more in these games than usual. i just gotta find a way in there

[curious-glitch]

The Enabled Enabler (Or Another Way to Frame my Fascination with Tech)

Digital technology has always been the apple of my eye. It has always been my frame of reference for everything. But when I ponder deeper, I realize that my interest is evolving from just the tech itself to the whole ecosystem around it.

I am especially passionate about…

1. What enables it (Upstream): Vision, entrepreneurship, strategy, ecosystems, partnerships, engineering, design, market positioning, go-to-market, ways of working - that end-to-end process of building great products.

2. What it enables (Downstream): Impact on the person, behaviors, memory, group dynamics, society, culture, power structures, politics, the trajectory of humanity.

Borrowing from Mcluhan, we shape our tools (1), and thereafter our tools shape us (2).

Then there is that circular recursive loop that blurs cause and effect like with any complex system, where it becomes impossible to tell which is which.

It’s all extremely fascinating. I’m glad to be in this space, to be in a position to make sense of it all.

[elizabethrobertajones]

With how things are going, I have to wonder - did TPTB give us the Huevas as a 'there, we don't hate gay people' token and were we wrong in reading it as a subtext-to-Destiel thing? Lizbob, I'm getting desperate. The 'so introduce me' line was so - it's what you say to kids, right? And the UST is completely gone... :(

Hi there! 

Is this because of this post from the other day where the line about “twice the worries about being ganked” was put under some destiel stuff to show that Dean had in fact doubled his worries about getting ganked? And also explains why he keeps telling Cas not to do anything stupid, because he’s worried, and not because he thinks Cas is actually stupid… Buckleming dialogue or not it’s calling back to 12x10 where Dean had to clarify this for Cas and admit he can say stuff like that when he’s worried. I’m not saying it’s very nice to keep on heckling Cas instead of just saying he’s worried, although I do feel the choice of writer really waters down the nuance in how that scene could have gone which would show Dean actually learned anything from 12x10. And while Cas shouldn’t have to expect to deal with Dean caring about him this way, at least we’ve already covered this in the text :P

But anyway, to me personally I just don’t write about Destiel that I see in the show with expectations that it will go canon, not because I’m negative or wanky about it (although, usual disclaimer, of course I’m very opinionated on if it SHOULD and the obligation the show has to do what they are constantly teasing, I just separate out these two things to write about the present moment of the show and the future, one of which takes a lot of explaining and one of which is extremely one note obvious of “make it gay, you cowards”), but just that I don’t want to engage in the cycle of optimism/despair that having Destiel hopes causes, specifically because I’m a popular meta blog that writes about Destiel in the text, and also because of people like you who get their hopes up and then get hurt.

I will probably merge expectations with demands when the show is actually definitively heading towards the end and we all know it is and it’s out there on the table. In the mean time, I’m happy to let this all carry on as it’s carrying on without feeling like there is a deadline or set moment for any one thing to pay off for us. The show takes its sweet time to address things which seem OBVIOUS, for example looking at the way side characters disappear and return sometimes like 3 or 9 or 13 years after we last saw them to get some closure on something or other. And it takes them years to chase down a main arc idea and pin it successfully. And some of the reason character development stuff links so well back to season 1 is because the progress Sam or Dean has made on it since season 1 has been in a series of recursive loops which seem to get somewhere only to be pulled back without reaching actualisation and either start again immediately or crop back up in the text much later as a character arc, starting over again as if it never really reached its conclusion. 

Dabb era has been good about excavating some of these more ridiculous concepts and putting them on some no-going-back type arcs, for example for better or worse the issues they have with Mary have *utterly* shifted ground and can never go back to the same background noise they used to be. Mary is no longer a childhood memory and enshrined as the family martyr, and as I talked about a lot over the last hiatus doing rewatches, the attempts to make her deeper/tie her into the mythology, never actually addressed a change in the way they felt about her, maybe not even realising it wasn’t healthy for them to feel that way about her for the rest of their lives in the difference between normal mourning and revenge quests etc and how that meant they could never leave her behind and move on. I mean there’s a LOT of work to be doing with them if there’s any sort of happy ending to come, but since Carver era the writing has spent so much time trying to understand why they feel bad and putting them through hell for it, and especially in Dabb era now doing work to make them recover and to explore ways they can change, that it seems really depressing to waste the good work by killing them off. So that’s a sort of broad optimism about what they’re doing :P

But that broad optimism is really as far as I’ll dare to venture about endgame, so talking about Destiel is mostly about what I see in the text and how it relates to their character arcs and how I see that informing them and therefore hopefully if there is a happy ending, the intrinsic way this relationship matters to Dean and Cas will get happy pay off as well, because of all the aspects being explored in their character arcs, their relationship ties is all together so nicely and what they would benefit from each other would cement a happy ending for them.

I can’t be completely responsible for the impression people get about what I want from canon in the stuff I reblog but I’m really hesitant to go past lines like nervously laughing and doubting what’s going on in canon as a joke about how Destiel it all looks, while trying to avoid posts that talk about how inevitable it is without some very good reasoned discussion that I agree with. I try very very hard to make this blog always toe a line of enjoying what I enjoy without trying to sell too much or sound like I’m promising something. I like a lot of stuff like re-exploring old seasons or what I did this summer over my rewatch, looking back on old canon and looking at how it has all the unwitting groundwork for the story that ended up being told, and where all the character arcs start and how they’re used in later canon etc.

I agree a theme the last few years has been digging up this character stuff and making it extremely clear or textually stating things for the first time, and especially this year coupled with themes of misinterpretation or not reading the picture correctly or working on misinformed intel. Dramatic irony has never had that much importance in telling the story either. This season has been really intelligent about these themes and last season did a LOT of stuff with characterisation to show how they understood them and old character stuff they were resolving or exploring for the sake of improving the characters. Cas got a final build up for his depression arc to lead him to the worst possible point, and he’s now on the other side of that so the only way is up. Performing!Dean got completely dragged in some episodes, especially 12x11 which did it kindly and gently, and 12x22 which just used a grenade launcher to do it :P 

There’s a lot going on but I don’t really like saying it all inevitably ends up pointing to canon reveals about Destiel, especially when that’s the most contentious thing and really hurts a lot of people to build up expectations like that, and it makes people angry or makes them fall out of love with the story because they lose objectivity and start making angry demands about when they get their emotional pay off, even though the story is still unfolding. Stuff which is happening along the way for later character pay off is seen as trashing the character and everything they previously stood for, and it becomes miserable for everyone. I’ve seen this happen in every single faction of the fandom and it’s nothing to do with the quality of the writing or actual treatment of the character/relationship, and an awful lot to do with poorly managed emotional investment and said investment being a finite resource. It’s UTTERLY depressing to watch a fandom friend melt down and begin to hate everything you once loved and I think watching that process has a lot of toxic fall out for everyone else around them who also loves the thing, because we sympathise and we’ve been watching it in slow mo and probably agreeing with a lot of the initial problems they have before it escalates. I HATE watching that happen. I will try as hard as I can to never be responsible for causing it in other Destiel shippers, so I try to make my jokes and comments stay as much as possible on the side of not trying to imply the show has any huge Destiel plan that we’re seeing the early stages of and patience will make it bear out. Because that’s not even how I see the show anyway but sometimes things like Dean giving Cas a mixtape create a *lot* of hyperbole and I’m not emotionally responsible for you all, technically, so I am allowed to have some fun :P 

All this is to say, I’m really sorry you’re feeling desperate and have been reading everything as signs we’re definitely getting Destiel, because there are no signs we’re definitely getting it, but there’s also no signs we’re definitely NOT getting it, and a whole bunch of murky grey area including an entire show worth of supportive subtext, character interaction, main text and plot arcs which back up the *existence* of Dean and Cas being madly in love with each other. The wank comes when you spend all your time harping on one or the other extreme, assuming everything is signs or proof/not proof.

I think the recent storytelling has been extremely positive towards Destiel and put an awful lot of it into the text, to extremes which have never really happened before: season 7 with dead Cas used that to get some understandable angst out of Dean, but it constantly emphasised how everything sucked, Cas had of course betrayed Dean and caused all their problems, both personal and mytharc, and so resentment and anger were mixed with grief, and for the most part as much as stuff was happening to them emotionally, the episodes weren’t intrinsically structured around showing what the grief had done to Dean, or that he stopped functioning without it. Compare the kid gloves about what Dean does in 7x03 killing Amy, and how it tentatively links back to Cas but only when Dean admits that he’s had a hard time trusting anyone after Cas, to Dean vs Jack culminating in Dean screaming in Sam’s face about how Cas’s death has hurt him and he can’t unsee it on Jack. 

And then of course the whiplash on getting Cas back, which Dean never had in season 7, and at best 8x08 was that episode - like a year after Cas was alive again and a whole fresh round of death and guilt and Cas coming back later so in a completely different context. And still nowhere near as good as what happened in 13x06 because there was still a lot of tentative TFW rebuilding to do in 8x08, while by now it’s completely accepted they’re a family unit and it’s been textually stated several times and 12x12 especially was tuned to showing how absolutely final that statement is. There’s no need to be tentative when Cas comes back now - Dean can just let go and enjoy himself for as long as that lasts.

I’ve been answering asks about the UST being gone since I’ve been in fandom, like, season 10, and I do kinda think that the heyday is ONLY seasons 4-6, after which Cas and Dean actually like each other and their relationship moves to more comfortable ground, and romantic tension and coding is way more the order of the day from Carver era onwards. There’s a few things like the boner scene or Dean in the car in 9x06. TBH 13x06 was the first time in ages I thought we’d actually had a scene where the two of them were having sexual chemistry, in the obvious mirror scene to the car in 9x06 bit, but also the entire underlying joke about Dean’s ‘cowboy fetish’ that Cas knew about from season 6, his entire reaction to it, including complaining that Dean made him wear the hat but then voluntarily playing along *for Dean* on their way into the crime scene, his FACE while doing that, and Dean’s reactions to Cas through all this. For the most part they’re considerably softer and more hesitant with each other and that involves much less interaction right up in each others’ faces and much less frustration which then translates to UST quite easily as well as being regular old tension. 

In addition to that, the “i do” and that hug scene apparently convinced people in living rooms across the world that Dean and Cas had been about to kiss and that it was horrifically romantic, and a fake out which genuinely shook people into seeing something going on there who had not previously seen it and even actively disbelieved their shipper friends and family. Of course that’s all down to how Dean and Cas look at each other as they come in for the hug, so their magnetic attraction to each others’ faces is still an ongoing issue :P 

Their interactions are being told in a pretty different way these days, which includes a lot of romantic stuff which is far more overt, and in making their relationship intrinsic to the plot and to each others’ own feelings, all of which I’ve written about so much lately because, well, it’s the main thing going on around here :P I actually feel like this is an extremely good time for if you care about their relationship, to get it in the story as a powerful force and important piece of the story. Things like the issue of clarification - I vs we, and need vs want - are coming back around as themes and that means the issues they’ve caused between Dean and Cas are being addressed or examined again, hopefully to some permanent end. And if not, at least so there’s a fresh examination in recent canon, although as I was saying Dabb era has been changing things in ways it’s hard to back off from later, like that Dean has repeatedly clarified to Sam that his feelings about Cas are the cause of his behavioural changes, even if he doesn’t say what those feelings are, it’s clear that they are affecting him. I mean there’s a part of me that has to read it that Dean hasn’t even realised exactly why he feels differently about Cas than Sam does, he just does… :P

Anyway I really just didn’t want to reassure you without addressing the fact I hate reassuring people things without trying to avoid causing more problems later. I don’t want people to feel strung along either by the show or by ~meta writer promises~ … which, aside from a few people who really were doing it for attention, generally seem to be from people actually just reading the text and being hopeful themselves, not trying to make a cult gathering or get attention or even just try to hurt people. I really urgently would like people to be more credible about where their hopes are coming from and how to feel about it. 

Not to say that you should stop believing everything you hear meta writers say, by a long shot, but to evaluate how likely you feel the speculation that comes from that can be, and how much you do and don’t agree with the analysis they make. And if you agree with the analysis and do see that all the Destiel stuff people point out IS in the show, then you can see that it’s there or not, and decide how you feel about what the show is doing with it as a separate thought. I’d rather not get caught up in pt.2 of it because it’s just frustrating and depressing at this stage of the game, but pt.1 is fascinating to me, it doesn’t detract for me personally to have it not unambiguously stated, and whether Destiel does become unambiguously stated or not I don’t think *any* of the Destiel analysis I agree with/have made is *wrong* because that reading is freely available to make, in large print text and accompanying audiobook >.> 

[eddycurrents]

For the week of 19 March 2018

Quick Bits:

30 Days of Night #4 gets into the first assault on Barrow from the vampires. It’s bloody and beautifully illustrated by Piotr Kowalski.

| Published by IDW

Avengers #685 is a whole load of fun and despair as a large portion of the US Avengers team (and Lightning, Vision, and Quicksilver) attempt to stave off the assault of the Immortal Hulk. It really feels like we’re headed towards the endgame now and the braintrust of Mark Waid, Jim Zub, and Al Ewing are just churning out an epic. Also, the art from Paco Medina, Juan Velasco, and Jesus Aburtov is gorgeous.

| Published by Marvel

Avengers: Back to Basics #2 concludes the first arc with Iron Man, Hulk, and Thor attempting to stop Fenris and the Disir from bringing about Ragnarok. It’s a fun and action-oriented story from Peter David, with some great humorous moments, and the art from Brian Level (with colours by Jordan Boyd) is pretty much worth the price of the book alone. Great panel compositions and page layouts that greatly help the issue’s story feel meaty.

| Published by Marvel

Big Trouble in Little China: Old Man Jack #7 gets us close to the end, but of course it’s not as easy as rescuing Egg Shen and defeating Ching Dai, there has to be funny misadventures, in-fighting, and heaps of betrayal.

| Published by BOOM! Studios

Cable #155 is pretty damn great. It begins the “Past Fears” arc from the new creative team of Zac Thompson, Lonnie Nadler, Germán Peralta, and Jesus Aburtov and leaps headlong into Cable’s past mixing it up with some body horror. Thompson and Nadler have a nice grasp on Cable and Hope’s characters, showing off their heart and stubbornness. Peralta’s art puts the book over the top, though. 

| Published by Marvel

Dark Fang #5 brings to an end the first arc of the series, finally giving the lead character a name in-story itself. It’s a bizarre approach to vampires from Miles Gunter, almost like a twisted Disney fairy tale, but it’s entertaining and has some great artwork from Kelsey Shannon.

| Published by Image

Death of Love #2 features more wacky hijinks as Philo tells his friends about seeing the little Cherubs/Cupidae and...naturally they don’t believe him. It just gets more absurd from there as Justin Jordan and Donal DeLay push the series into new and more disturbing territory.

| Published by Image

Dept. H #24 ends what has been a good series with a nice bit of quiet reflection, Mia reminiscing about her father, her first case, and morality as she struggles upward for that last leg of survival.

| Published by Dark Horse

Dissonance #2 dives deeper into the machinations of the Fantasmen as they plot and scheme to control humanity. Singgih Nugoro and Ryan Cady are laying it on pretty thick, while making you wonder what all of it is truly for.

| Published by Image / Top Cow - Glitch

Doctor Strange: Damnation #3 is basically an issue’s long fight between the damned Avengers and the Midnight Sons. There’s some nice character bits and humour thrown in. Plus, a seemingly most ineffective plan.

| Published by Marvel

Evolution #5 sees Joe Infurnari and Jordan Boyd step up their game, and the art on the series was already incredible. It seems as we go on, the designs and presentation of the infected just get more and more impressive.

| Published by Image / Skybound

Harrow County #29 returns with the beginning of the end. Emmy is trying to come to terms with her actions in the last arc, while Hester’s return heralds more nightmares to come. Tyler Crook’s artwork is stellar, horrifying and evocative, elevating the terror with each subsequent panel.

| Published by Dark Horse

Ice Cream Man #3 is weird, trading in the more traditional horror notes of the past couple of issue for absurdist science fantasy, following a washed-up, fading musician who penned a one-hit wonder as he fades into obscurity. W. Maxwell Prince’s story gets pretty strange, but it allows for Martín Morazzo to really flex his muscles.

| Published by Image

Infinity 8 #1 begins adapting in English and North America’s standard comics format the Infinity 8 series that was previously published by Rue de Sèvres, created by Lewis Trondheim and Olivier Vatine. Part of the pitch for the book is an 8-part series each containing three issue arcs. The 8 parts certainly play into the structure of the story as each part will be done by a different creative team, and focus on a recursive time loop of agents exploring a debris field.

This first arc, written by Lewis Trondheim and Zep with art by Dominique Bertail, focuses on Agent Yoko Keren, a woman looking for a compatible mate among the ship’s crew so she can get pregnant and basically retire better off than she is currently. She gets to be the first guinea pig for the Captain’s time loop exploration of the debris, and it gets a bit weird when some of the ship’s complement of aliens decide that eating it is of the utmost importance. This story is weird sci-fi in the vein of Heavy Metal, but to me the draw is Bertail’s art. I’ve really been enjoying Bertail’s art in Ghost Money and he proves equally adept with wacky space stuff.

| Published by Lion Forge / Magnetic Collection

Iron Fist #78 jumps head first into Danny’s unresolved issues in what’s probably the best Damnation tie-in thus far. Ed Brisson uses the chaos of the event and the trigger of the penance stare to dredge up Danny’s feelings and reactions to what he considers his loss and failures, giving some really deep cuts into continuity in an organic, natural fashion. The art from Damian Couceiro and Andy Troy is also up to the heavy lifting. The layouts and panel designs at the beginning of the book as Danny navigates the surreal landscape of his memories and fears are particularly impressive.

| Published by Marvel

James Bond: The Body #3 has some great art by Rapha Lobosco, in the first of two series that have his work this week. His art is in a similar style to Eduardo Risso and it lends itself well to this dark tale of neo-Nazi arms dealers from Aleš Kot.

| Published by Dynamite

Kick-Ass #2 asks some important questions as Patience backslides into justifications for her criminal behaviour. Mark Millar steps up the moral quandary from just the vigilantism of the original Kick-Ass, even as she later protects a child from an abusive father figure.

| Published by Image

Lucy Dreaming #1 is fun. For starters, it’s nice to see Michael Dialynas again on another sci-fi/fantasy series after The Woods, even if it is just a limited series. His art naturally lends itself to the fantastical and it pays off in spades in this first issue, with nice designs for aliens, starships, and more. It’s also great that Max Bemis is bringing more of that weirdness and altered realities from his works like Centipede here. I’m really looking forward to seeing where this goes from here.

| Published by BOOM! Studios

The Mighty Thor #705 will break your heart. Epic storytelling and gorgeous art. Jason Aaron, Russell Dauterman, and Matthew Wilson should be proud.

| Published by Marvel

Ninja-K #5 brings the battle to the Acclimation Bureau and sparks off a deadly confrontation between Ninja-C and Ninjak. Christos Gage and Tomás Giorello bring this first arc to a stylish conclusion.

| Published by Valiant

Pathfinder: Spiral of Bones #1 brings the adventuring party back for a new expedition, this time far beneath Kaer Maga, the City of Strangers. Crystal Frasier is a new voice to the Pathfinder comics, but old hat to the roleplaying game, so she slides in nicely to the writer’s chair here. There’s a good amount of set-up and humorous banter as the Iconic character Imrijka is introduced in the comic as an old friend of Valeros.

| Published by Dynamite

Punks Not Dead #2 gets into more of Fergie’s ordinary life and the supporting cast of characters at his school and beyond. David Barnett fleshes them out fairly well, setting up some interesting hooks for what might be coming next. Combined with Martin Simmonds artwork, this series really is a must buy for anyone who enjoyed the British supernatural flavour of mid to late ‘90s Vertigo or the later series Vinyl Underground.

| Published by IDW / Black Crown

Regression #8 sees Adrian explore the nature of the cult and their grounds a bit more, although there is a weird bit in that he’s seemingly all right with the past lives, the demons, the cult itself and such, but apparently an orgy is a bridge too far. Death, murder, and demons are copacetic, but as soon as sex is introduced, Adrian wants to bug out. I’m hoping that Cullen Bunn does more with that theme in a future issue.

| Published by Image

Rumble #4 mainly deals with the fallout from Bobby’s injuries, with John Arcudi penning a growing divide between Rathraq and Del. David Rubín’s art perfectly capturing the insanity and the heart of the entire situation.   

| Published by Image

Runaways #7 begins the “Best Friends Forever” arc with the team trying to adjust to their new status quo and “normal” life. Rainbow Rowell is great at these kinds of interpersonal relationships and it makes for an entertaining read.

| Published by Marvel

The Spider King #2 is more glorious madness blending Vikings and bizarre alien technology. The artwork from Simone D’Armini just fits this action perfectly.

| Published by IDW

Summit #4 concludes the first story arc, with Val coming to the realization of Lorena’s motivations and Foresight’s shadiness that readers of the broader Catalyst Prime line already know. It comes a bit suddenly after a moment of misdirection, but it makes more story sense to get Val back to her friends at the MIT labs.

| Published by Lion Forge / Catalyst Prime

Tales of Suspense #103 is that issue that tells us exactly what has been going on with Black Widow while Hawkeye and Winter Soldier have been running around chasing after her body count. It’s kind of dark and has some fairly complicated potential Alien Resurrection style implications. Matthew Rosenberg still throws in some humour with Ursa Major, but this one’s really an opportunity for Travel Foreman to showcase some of the darker end of his skill set.

| Published by Marvel

TMNT Universe #20 continues the excellent “Service Animals” arc from Ian Flynn, Dave Wachter, and Ronda Pattison that’s getting to the core of what Null has been doing, and providing an interesting, humanizing look at Raphael and Alopex. The art from Wachter and Pattison is wonderful. There’s also a great back-up from Matthew K. Manning, Adam Gorham, and Brittany Peer that tells a humorous and heartfelt tale of Raph trying to get some sleep.

| Published by IDW

Thanos #17 is the penultimate chapter of “Thanos Wins”, featuring both Thanoses against the Fallen One, with a few surprise guests. Geoff Shaw really gets the opportunity again to showcase just how damn good he is at action and spectacle.

| Published by Marvel

Usagi Yojimbo: The Hidden #1 is the first of the series to follow the series of series format Dark Horse tends to use for Mike Mignola’s Hellboy universe. Regardless of the approach, this still has the same great Stan Sakai taste. Ostensibly we’re dealing with some fugitives, and a secret package, being tracked down by agents of the shogunate, but we’re light on details so far and high on mystery.

| Published by Dark Horse

Vampirella #11 is the second of the books illustrated by Rapha Lobosco this week as he and Jeremy Whitley bring this current volume to a close. This issue serves as a recap of Vicki’s adventures with Vampirella as she comes to a new understanding of herself, opening up to find a solution for the fake heaven and missing God problem.

| Published by Dynamite

Weapon H #1 is probably better than any one would have thought as ridiculous a concept as a Hulkverine would be. Spinning out of the “Weapons of Mutant Destruction” crossover and subsequent Weapon X follow-up arc, this series follows Clay, a former soldier and test subject for some mad science experiments blending Hulk and Wolverine DNA. Greg Pak blends those two aspects in the story itself, taking elements from both the Hulk and Wolverine legacy, and wisely begins this with a new take on the tale that introduced Wolverine to the world in the pages of Incredible Hulk with a new Wendigo. The art from Cory Smith, Marcus To, and Morry Hollowell sticks the landing.

| Published by Marvel

Witchblade #4 continues the trend of being another great issue of this series. Caitlin Kittredge is beginning to get into the meat of the lore behind the Witchblade and the thirteen Artifacts, tying the reboot in to the mythology of the original Witchblade/Darkness universe, while also fleshing out more and more of Alex’s backstory. The art, again, by Roberta Ingranata and Bryan Valenza is some of the most beautiful on the shelves today.

| Published by Image / Top Cow

Other Highlights: Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows #17, Archie #29, Babyteeth #9, Berlin #22, Corto Maltese: The Golden House of Samarkand, Descender #28, The Further Adventures of Nick Wilson #3, Ghostbusters: Answer the Call #4, Go Go Power Rangers #8, Incredible Hulk #714, Jim Henson’s The Storyteller: Fairies #4, Kill or Be Killed #17, Mata Hari #2, The Mighty Crusaders #4, Monsters Unleashed #12, Monstress #15, Moonshine #8, Ms. Marvel #28. Outcast #34, Quantum & Woody! #4, Southern Cross #14, Spider-Gwen #30, Star Wars #45, Star Wars: Poe Dameron #25, Superb #8

Recommended Collections: Aliens: Dead Orbit, Black Science - Volume 7: Extinction is the Rule, Giant Days - Volume 7, Harrow County - Volume 7: Dark Times A Coming, Iron Fist - Volume 2: Sabretooth Round Two, Moonstruck - Volume 1, Rick & Morty: Pocket Like You Stole It, Spider-Men II, X-Men Blue - Volume 3: Cross Time Capers

d. emerson eddy is doing stuff, Lori. Things!

[naughtygals]

week 5 day 3

this has already been such a successful week and i finally feel i’m getting the hang of rc and how to get the most out of it. some combination of learn & teach, be generous w your time, work with others to allow you to think more deeply about your problems.

monday & tuesday were a day of extensive learning and diving deeper into what it means to build embedded systems. after a good deal of confusion and head scratching on monday i paired with an experienced batchmate on improving my Makefiles and working to cross-compile Lua for the arm cortex. a number of tangents came out of this work and it was a fantastic project to pair with.

i learnt a great deal about how the compiler operates – creating object files (and only when they’ve changed if you write a good make file!), and then linking them together (also with shared libraries *.a or *.so {dynamic/static}). the key to the lua compilation issue was that the linker wasn’t getting the -arch flag. while the sources were being compiled for arm, the linker was linking to the x86 libc and libm libraries, causing an architecture mismatch. i’d kind of caught this before and updated my CFLAGS correctly, but due to not understanding where the linker was operating, i had failed to set the flags correctly. we reorganized the Makefile to have linker flags on a separate line & to more explicitly say where the linking was happening.

onward- i was super excited to get Lua sending me an error message, and called it a day when i had to go attend some work details.

today i spent the first half of the day pairing, before getting back to this problem. the conclusion though, is that i now have a working REPL that sends a string to Lua which runs the string as a script, then returns a string to represent the output which is printed & saved in a history array. this felt like a massive milestone to have the interpreter successfully parse a string, then run it, and return a meaningful value. i spent a good chunk of time refactoring the EVAL function and abstracted the history display update to its own function.

now the final step to having a meaningful REPL is to get usb-keyboard / hid working which i’m hoping is more fruitful than previous endeavours with usb audio. i have a feeling this will be easier and have much more boilerplate than the audio setup which has a great deal more variables to juggle.

furthermore i’d like to work on calling a Lua script in a separate file from the command line, just to show how one can write a Lua script as a *.lua file (ie a script in pure Lua), and execute it on the hardware. perhaps this would be a good piece to pair on with another rc-er due to the overlap of languages / interests.

//

when i first arrived today i spent some time pairing on a project euler challenge which led to a discussion about the representability of numbers, how floats work under the hood, and how to represent and operate on numbers that are bigger than the available working datatypes. this felt like a nice exchange with give and take regarding knowledge sharing. in the process i learnt a good chunk about clojure and the power of functional programming. this led onto a discussion & exploration of the mathematical implications of the factorial function. we spent a chunk of time then exploring the manner in which factorial functions necessarily have an increasingly number of trailing zeroes.

beyond this pairing, i also worked on a swift project designing a visualizer for ios. we explored the way in which data is transferred from cpu to gpu, and attempted to trouble-shoot some framerate drops they were experiencing. in the end i think we arrived at a place not a great deal better off in terms of working code, but certainly got a lot more inside how the process was being implemented. the big realization was that it’s very expensive to copy a frame buffer in full-hd, uncompressed, between cpu & gpu.

this then led to a continued pairing on the disco project, which was largely an education in how embedded memory works & also the structure of a dsp loop. we started with trying to explain the usart, leading to DMA, leading to codec as an example, leading to dissecting the dsp block function. obviously dsp blocks are a great example of why DMA is necessary, avoiding codec interrupts affecting the cpu on every sample.

we spoke a lot about how and why to handle pointers in this context, plus delved quite deep into how the leaky-integrator-into-differentiator works as a high-pass (DC) filter. i think i actually came to a better understand of what that code did at the same time.

eventually we ended up looking at the oscillator and discovering that the current version didn’t map the raw incrementer values to a triangle-wave as initially intended. we implemented this mapping function, including a stub function for finding the sign of a float. unfortunately something i’ve added since last thursday is taking a lot of time in the main loop and causing the audio loop to run out of time (and hence be a garbled mess). this is another thing to find a solution to sooner than later, so dsp functions called from lua are meaningful.

a final note about these interactions is they made me realize that using an IDE is not the worst thing in the world. it can be super useful and rapidly speed up development time if used in the right context.

//

tomorrow i plan to pair with a recurser i have yet to spend much time with, as well as have a planning session with 2 recursers to discuss how to implement the rPi games console we’ve been talking about. the idea is to create a system which allows future (and past!) rc-ers to easily add their games into a console system that can be downloaded as an image for folks to take home. we want to provide ability for flexible input devices (keyboard / mouse / gamepad etc), and also make it compatible with a comprehensive list of platforms / languages. additionally a key part of the project is streamlining the process of adding one’s game onto the system, so it’s easy for future rc members to take over the development.

one element one of the members wants to focus on is low-level dev (which they haven’t done). as such we’re probably going to spend some time hooking up leds or other simple hardware bits, so we can have a look at what’s happening on a low-level. we might end up writing a driver for some external hardware piece if there’s something that makes sense in the context.

another proposal is to make a physical console. i think this would be a good method to make the thing more fun & highly used, as well as maintaining more status (and hence visibility) once we’re gone. it would be nice if future batches said “if you’re into games, you should build one and put it on the rConsole!”. not to be vain, but rather to provide a platform that can develop into a larger scale project if someone is so inclined.

//

i’d like to pair with a batchmate on converting the dsp functions to dynamic memory allocation such that they can be constructed/destroyed at runtime. ultimately this is so the dsp graph is dynamic (and thus scriptable), but would be a great lesson in C for someone interested in how memory management works, or wanting to spend more time writing C / handling pointers.