#variable length crawl

[saving-word-crawls]

Take Care of a Virtual Pet Crawl

This was originally posted by L. E. Morgan. It’s not as long as it looks (but it is long), it just have different dares according to each pet.

OK, here it is:

You want a pet, right? Well, first you need to work hard to buy one. Write for one hour as you try and earn some money. How many words you wrote determines how much money you got. Round down to find out. 100 words = 1 penny, but 199 words still = 1 penny! (So if you wrote 4099, you’d have 40 pennies — just enough for a dragon!)

Now you have enough money, you hope. Choose from the options below to buy your pet, and do so! Bear in mind you can only buy one at this stage, and you can’t go in debt. What you got is what you got. While you’re going to get your pet, write 200 words .

Mouse: A mouse costs you one penny. Mice are kind of cute, right?

Rat: Rats are nice, but a bit bigger than mice. They cost two pennies. Also, write 10 words .

Rabbit: Three pennies for a rabbit. They are nice and quiet, aren’t they? They won’t make noises.

Toad: Toads just sit there and do nothing except croak and run away occasionally. They are three pennies.

Spider: It’d be less, but it’s a fairly rare spider, you know. Five pennies for a spider.

Cat: Cats are kinda nice; not too big. Five pennies to buy a cat.

Dog: Dogs require more space, right? Write 25 words to check you have enough. Dogs are six pennies.

Fox: Foxes have lovely bushy tails. They’re six pennies, and fairly low-maintenance.

Owl: Owls can fly, meaning that they are special. Eight pennies an owl!

Parrot: Parrots can fly and talk. Parrots are nine pennies.

Kangaroo: These eleven penny beauties are native to Australia. Are you? If you are not born in Australia, write for five minutes as they ship your kangaroo over. If you are now in Australia, but haven’t been born there, write for two minutes . An Australian native, who’s still in Australia, must write 30 words .

Unicorn: Now we’re talking! You’d better have been a fast writer to write enough for the wonderful Unicorn. Each unicorn is thirty-five pennies.

Dragon: Dragons are great. They breathe fire. If you’re such a pyromaniac as to want them, write 50 words to fire-proof your house, and pay the required forty pennies.

Can’t buy a pet? Write 40 words . Then, do a word war for fifteen minutes with someone else doing the crawl who’s bought a pet. The winner takes half the loser’s pennies, rounded down (7 pennies means winner gets 3 and loser 4). Now start this step again. If you can’t still buy a pet (ie you wrote less than 100 words originally then lost the war), start again.

Now that you’ve obtained your pet, it’s time to find it a cage! Everything except dragons, unicorns and dogs need a small cage; these three require large cages. For them, double the word counts required, and the times as well. Write 500 words in fifteen minutes as you search for a cage.

If you succeeded: Yay! You found a cage the very first shop you looked. Write for twenty minutes as you take it home to your pet.

If you failed: You can’t find a cage. Either try again, or make your own. Write 300 words as you do this. If it took you more than 10 minutes, write another 300 words .

All right. Everything set… right? …wrong. Your pet requires food, remember? Write 30 words as you go to the pet food shop. Now, while looking at all those foods, write 400 words in ten minutes as you figure out which is the best.

If you succeeded: You ask someone to help. You promptly buy the best (and cheapest) of the foods. It is Good4Pets . You thank them by giving them one penny.

If you failed: You aren’t sure what to buy. Use two pennies to purchase pet food (if you have not got two pennies, you must earn some money — write for fifteen minutes and then calculate how many pennies you have. But there’s a snag. You’ll only get half the pennies you did last time. So, on writing 400, you would obtain the two pennies you need.)

Also, write for twenty minutes as you decide. In the end, you buy Higgins’ Yummy Pet Food .

Now you get home. Write for five minutes as you play with your pet and start to bond with them.

Food time! You read the instructions on the label, and give your pet a certain amount of food.

If you purchased Good4Pets : Your pet loves this! They really want more. However, you refuse to give them any more until you have written 200 words . If you don’t do this in under five minutes , your pet becomes ill.

If you purchased Higgins’ Yummy Pet Food : Your pet turns up their nose at it. If they’re a Spider, they bite you. Write for five minutes as you try to stop the pain. Then you must convince your pet to eat it, writing for one minute as you do so. If you write more than 30 words , they finally start eating. If not, they fall ill.

Is your pet ill? If so, don’t skip this step! If you managed to give them a good amount of food, they’re in the pink of health. Skip this step.

It’s vet time! Select your pet to find out what happens at the vet — or even if you get there.

Cat: Cat is not liking this. Poor dear thing. But you only take five minutes of writing and one penny of treats to convince them to — if you wrote at least 50 words in that five minutes . If not, no vet. (you have to provide one penny).

Mouse: Mouse is running everywhere. You write for ten minutes in an attempt to catch them. However, if you didn’t write 100 words in that time, you can’t catch them. Although you acquire one penny by not taking them to the vet, your mouse is soon worse. Poor little thing.

Rabbit: It’s nice and easy, if you’re quick enough, to take Rabbit to the vet. Write 40 words in two minutes as you attempt to catch them . If that worked, write for five minutes on your way to the vet. If it didn’t, write 100 words in consternation as you monitor your rabbit’s health.

Dog: Dog is big and friendly. It only takes three minutes of writing to get it into your car. If you didn’t get at least 100 words , the dog doesn’t go into the car, and you can’t vet it.

Rat: Small, mean things, rats are. This rat manages to look cute enough that you leave a small place for it to escape… f ix up an obvious, easy plothole to fix, then write 200 words in five minutes to take them to the vet. Once again, like everything else, if you fail, you can’t take ‘em.

Fox: Rusty red fox… turns out his teeth are kind of sharp. Bandage the wound you recieved with one penny worth of bandages. Don’t have one penny? Can’t go to the vet. To obtain this required money (or if you just want another penny) write 20 words in one minute . Repeat this until you can do it.

Toad: Your cute little toad gets lost in the car. You’re late for your appointment. Oops. Write 250 words in five minutes to convince them to be nice and give you one.

Owl: Owl flies all over the car. Woohoo. If you can write 100 words in five minutes , including an animal therein, you manage to cage it and take it to the vet.

Parrot: Parrots are beautiful. However, on your way to the vet it gets scared and, well, your car’s kind of dirty. Clean it up by writing 500 words in fifteen minutes or you miss your appointment.

Kangaroo: Ah, the smells of eucalyptus leaves! Write for five minutes and include some smell while you attempt to catch this bounding creature. If you made over 100 words , you catch it. If not, you don’t. While going to the vet (or staying at home disconsolate) write 100 words.

Spider: Write 200 words in ten minutes while you catch them. Can’t do it? Can’t go to the vet.

Unicorn: Unicorn has a sharp horn. Ouch. Write for five minutes as you bandage yourself up. Then, word war for fifteen minutes with somebody. The winner was able to take their animal to the vet. The loser couldn’t. (Let me suggest, you who lost, to try against someone else next time, you can do this  )

Dragon: Oops. Why on earth did you get a dragon?! Write 1000 words in twenty-five minutes or get scorched and give up!

Running out of money, huh? Not surprising. So, you go to work for one hour . Then, using the original key, work out how many pennies you have.

If you obtained over 30: Great, take another two extra. The boss is pleased.

If you obtained under 30, but over 3: That’s nice. Take one penny extra!

If you obtained under 3: Oh dear. Take a break for ten minutes before repeating this step.

Did your pet make it to the vet? If the answer is yes, write 300 words in relief. If the answer is no, write 200 words and then go back to the vet (two steps earlier). However, you must skip the penny-making step — it’s not fair that just because you didn’t do this that you obtain more pennies. (Note that this has the potential for a never-ending cycle. If this happens again, just finish off on this step. In other words, if on your second try you fail to take them to the pet, your animal has died .)

Now that your pet is all healthy again, it’s time to be thinking about your dear pet’s name. You’ve already got one, right? Yes? Or no? If you already have one, write 50 words extolling the beauty and fittingness of its name. But if you don’t have a name for your pet, pick one by writing 100 words in discussion of what the name should be.

If your pet’s name is more than 5 characters, and for every special character (e.g. a space, full stop, number etc.) please write 100 words . If you have a dragon or a unicorn, they need impressive names, and so you must write 30 words extra .

If your pet’s name is shorter than that, you ought to write 50 words while you try and teach it its name.

Poor thing. You think it’s lonely. Bond (write) for 15 minutes . If you managed to get 400 words , that’s great! Your pet’s bonded beautifully. If not, try again twice more. (If after three attempts total you cannot write 400 words in 15 minutes, halve the number of words. If this still does not work, your pet does not bond with you. You must immediately pay five pennies to pay someone to be its friend. Don’t have five pennies? Your poor little pet is very lonely, and you must take it to the vet again, going to the ‘vet’ step.)

Oh, boy, these animals! They require food all the time, don’t they?! Find your pet to find how much they need.

If you purchased Good4Pets, the animal likes it. It only takes 100 words in five minutes to convince them to eat. Repeat until you get it.

If you purchased Higgins’ Yummy Pet Food, the pet is ill. However, you can nurse them through with a hasty 400 words in fifteen minutes. Then, as they recuperate, write their number (see second step) times 100 of words .

But food isn’t all. More bills are starting to come in, and unless you want to pay 5 pennies for the food bill, it’s down to working! Write 20 words in one minute or pay the pennies. No pennies? Write 30 words in two minutes . If you cannot write this, your pet has died .

Work, work, work. Write for one hour as you try to earn some more money. Use the original key to determine how much money you obtain.

If you obtained 50+: Hide it. If, however, you’re willing to give all your pennies away just for the next step, you may double the number of pennies you have. Sure you want no pennies next step? Might be risky…

If you obtained between 30 and 50: A friend in hard straits asks you for some money. You are delighted to give them 3 pennies.

If you obtained between 10 and 30: You’re still quite rich. You put this money in the bank, and earn 1 penny interest.

If you obtained between 5 and 10: Don’t bank it. You might lose out on it. Instead, hide it. If, however, you’re willing to give all those pennies you just got away just for the next step, you may double the number of pennies you have.

If you obtained between 2 and 5: Your pet looks kind of underfed (it’s not, but it looks it). Your kind-hearted friend offers to let you earn 10 pennies by writing 40 words in ten minutes, or else, if you can’t do that, to give you 5 pennies instead.

If you obtained 0 or 1 penny: You’re given a job in the binary department, paying you 2 pennies.

It’s that time of year again. Time to get out the holiday decorations! However, that lovely pet is getting in the way a bit. Keep him/her around, getting in the way, or send them to the petsitter?

If you kept them around: The job that you were doing would’ve taken a lot less time without them there. Sprint for five minutes as you attempt to make up the time. Next, they knock something glass off. Clean the glass up for five minutes and write no less than 100 words, or else pay one penny. No pennies to pay/don’t want to pay them? You are annoyed with your animal, and to prove it, ignore it for a short while, in fact twenty minutes, during which you angrily write 500 words about the stupidity of your pet. Can’t write that much? Pay two pennies. If you don’t have two pennies to pay, and can’t write 200 words in fifteen minutes, your pet has died.

If you sent them to the pet-sitter: Ahh, peace and quiet. Especially from the rattling of your wallet. You have to pay 4 pennies for the pet-sitter, and if you can’t afford it, you must keep them around. But if you can, ahh, peace and quiet… While enjoying this, write 200 contented and peaceful words.

Feed me! Write 500 words as your pet now requires some more food.

Earn 4 pennies by writing 400 words in fifteen minutes. If you can’t, well, that’s fine, but have a crack at it. Every penny counts, you know!

Your pet is getting a tiny bit neglected here. Write for 5 minutes as you spend quality time with the poor thing.

Your friend wants to know how your pet is going. However, the form of communication you are using charges for every letter. Write as many words as there are in your pet’s name and species x 10. (For example, ‘Hoppy, toad’ would be 90 words as you do not include punctuation or spaces, unless it is part of the pet’s actual name, like Mrs. Hoppy (total 10 letters)

You want a photograph of your pet. So beautiful! If your pet is a colour,

write that number of words for its colour

. If it’s more than one colour (e.g. striped) add the numbers together:

Green: 10

Blue: 11

Yellow: 16

Purple: 50

Red: 40

Orange: 70

White: 100

Black: 2

A mixture of all of them: 250

Not mentioned: 200

You want lots of little animals, huh? Well, is your pet a boy or a girl?

Boy: Write 50 words.

Girl: Write 50 words.

Don’t know: Write 100 words, and decide!

So… find your dear pet a friend. If you have to find a male animal, write 200 words in 5 minutes. If you have to find a female animal, write 100 words in 2 minutes 30 seconds. If you fail with either… sorry… you didn’t find a mate for your pet. They’re lonely! Write 300 words in 10 minutes as you console your pet, and try again. Didn’t make it a second time? Pet is ill. Sorry… go back to the vet step, and lose half your pennies.

Yay, they’ve got a friend!! … However you must buy said friend. Write for one hour to earn the pennies required. Regretting your dragonish choice, huh?

Mouse: one penny

Rat: two pennies

Rabbit: three pennies

Toad: three pennies

Spider: five pennies

Cat: five pennies

Dog: six pennies

Fox: six pennies

Owl: eight pennies

Parrot: nine pennies

Kangaroo: eleven pennies

Unicorn: thirty-five pennies

Dragon: forty pennies Not enough pennies to buy your animal? Write 1000 words and repeat this step. If you need to, however, once you have enough to buy your pet you must lose all your pennies except two, however many you’d just had (ie if you had thirty nine and needed forty, and made it up to a total of eighty-three, you’d effectively be paying 81 for your 40-penny-worth dragon) Give your pet’s mate a name and colour (gender and species are obvious, given that one is the opposite, the other the same, as your original pet)

Your female pet is looking fatter than before. Seems it worked. While you wait for her to give birth, write for 5 minutes. Entertain the male by taking him for a walk while you write 50 words, and buying him one penny worth of animal treats. If the male was your original pet, write 250 words in five minutes. Failed? All your pets have died.

How many children does she have? No need for names, just numbers. Write 10 times the number of children in the litter. (ie if there were 10 in the litter, write 100 words) Then, write 100 words in 2:30 for each one. Each time you fail, one of them dies. Write 10 words for each baby animal that died. None of the children survived? Sad, that is. Write 100 words to console your heartbroken pet, and go back to the step where you find your pet a friend.

Well… now there are little animals underfoot. Great! So cute! However, you trip over one of them and sprain your ankle. Ouch. This means that you have to be laid up for some days. At least you got some work done… as you wrote 250 words in five minutes.

If you managed to write that much: Great! Earn one penny and take a break for five minutes.

If you failed to do so: repeat the step. If you failed three times, it meant you neglected your pets shockingly. Not only did all the little ones die, but so did the mother. You now have one male pet. If the female was your original pet, you give away the male in a burst of anger against yourself. You now have no pets. Otherwise, just keep him.

It’s come to that time… your little ones must be sold. How many did you sell? Take five pennies for each one you sold, and write 200 words per animal sold as you watch them go. Did you keep one for yourself? If so, name it and give it a colour and gender. Someone donates five pennies to help with your costs. (No little ones? None survived the last two steps? My heart bleeds. Give away the friend you bought for your pet, and repeat from the step where you find a friend. Take three pennies as you have saved on food.)

Feeding time… you may have one, you may have two, you may have three pets.

If you have under 2 pennies: You can give one penny to feed your animal/s, but that mightn’t be very good if your finances are low. Instead, go to work and write for fifteen minutes to pay for the food. Also take one penny for your work.

If you have over 2, and under 5 pennies: Write 700 words plus 5 words per pet and give one penny.

If you have over 5, and under 10 pennies: Use two pennies and write 650 words.

If you have over 10, and under 20 pennies: Write 600 words to feed your pet/s. Use two pennies.

If you have over 20 pennies: Write 500 words as you feed them. Use two pennies to do so.

Show time! D’you want to show them?

Yes: Pay one penny per pet you want to show (if you have three, you could merely show one, or two, or all three, but for each you do not want to show, go to the ‘no’ down below). Repeat the rest of the step for each one. Word war for five minutes with someone. If you win, you place. (If you lose, you don’t.) Did you get first, second, third, fourth or fifth? Write for fifteen minutes. If you got 750+, you came first. Take six pennies as prize money. If you got 600-750, you came second. Take five pennies. If you got 500-600, you came third. Take four pennies. If you got 300-500, you came fourth. Take three pennies. 0-300 came fifth. Take one penny, and write for five minutes as you prepare them for next time. However you came, write for a minute to work off your excitement.

No: Write 200 words and skip this step.

Was showing fun? Or didn’t you do it? Write 500 words in ten minutes, which will allow you to repeat the last step. Failed? Lose one penny and write the remainder + 200 words.

Write 500 words happily as you contemplate your pets.

Everyone wants holidays. Write 2000 words. Use as many of your pennies as you want to cut down the number and slack off. One penny removes 100 words. (ie using five pennies means you write 1500 words) You don’t have to use any pennies if you don’t want to.

You have to get benefits from having more pets. Take two pennies per pet you have.

Old age. The curse of kings and peasants alike. Your oldest pet (the one you got first, your original pet) is getting old. Write 300 words in five minutes as you distressingly watch them grow older. If you can’t, your pet has died.

How many pets have you? You are getting older too. Give away all your pets except your original pet, and take five pennies for each. Now, to fill your suddenly empty time, write the number of letters in all your past pets’ names times 10. (ie if you had Hoppy, Jumpy and their little child you decided to keep, Skippy, you’d have to write 150 words).

Old age sets in… go to the vet again. You don’t have to do everything after that, just do that and come back here.

Your pet is really quite old. Poor thing. As you debate whether to put it out of its misery or not, write 350 words in five minutes. If you fail, you decide to do so. Your pet has died. If you make it, the pet is better than before and seems quite happy.

Your pet is having a nap. You can’t waste the time. Therefore, find your challenge below! Mouse: Do a five minute word war. The loser must pay the winner one penny. (No penny? Write 10 words in one minute!)

Rat: Write 500 words in fifteen minutes.

Rabbit: Write 550 words in fifteen minutes.

Toad: Word war with someone for ten minutes. The winner gains one penny. You must write a minimum of 200 words in that time to qualify.

Spider: Roll a 6-sided die and multiply this number by 100 to make the number of words you write. You must write this much in a maximum of fifteen minutes.

Cat: Roll a 12-sided die and multiply the number by 100. Write that many words in the number x 2.5 minutes.

Dog: Word war for fifteen minutes. Get a minimum of 500 words.

Fox: Write 600 words in fifteen minutes.

Owl: Do a Three Digit Challenge.

Parrot: Write 650 words in fifteen minutes.

Kangaroo: Bounce your way through your word count with 500 words in fourteen minutes.

Unicorn: #1k30min

Dragon: Write 3000 words in an hour.

If you fail any challenge twice, your pet has died.

You’ve had a lovely life with your pet. You knew it was the right thing to do, getting one. Write 500 words as you look back on the happy life your pet has given you. Now write 2000 words minus 100 words times the number of pennies you have, resulting in zero pennies. Write a poem about an animal, and put that somewhere in your story as thanks for your pet’s wonderful life.

[eevees-hobbies]

Heloo I just read your post about the bold reader and I was like HSKFMMSDKDK

can I request hayato suo with the reader who can make him flustered and put on in his place?? Like she leads the relationship? Thank you!! Nsfw or sfw is fine:3

Authors Note: Hi, Anon! I wanted to take my time thinking about this specific scenario because while I don’t consider myself a Suo girlie, I love writing for him, and I’ve grown to love the version of him that I’ve crafted. I probably have him one degree away from being a Yandere, if we’re being honest. Anyway, I’m turning this into a thirst response for now. Still, I also might continue this at some point because it deserves the time and respect to dive deeper into the complex relationship that Reader has with Suo.

Also, my friend Evie did an excellent job encapsulating a similar ask using her style, and I can’t recommend that piece (and everything else she makes) enough. 

Let’s get into, babe 💕

Content Warning: Fem! Reader x Hayato Suo. Teasing, dirty talk, fem! receiving oral, obsession, overstimulation, hands-free orgasm. Minors Do Not Interact

Word Count: 1.1K

Control is paramount to Suo’s identity as he’s very well aware of what happens when he loses control: people can get seriously hurt or worse. So it’s essential for Suo to remove any variables that might compromise his cool—and sometimes detached—demeanor. He keeps people at arm's length with ever-changing stories and blatant lies, and it works because no one has come close to cracking the mystery that he is.

But the variable he couldn’t control for? You. 

At first, he found himself avoiding you. You brought out feelings within himself that he’d always try to swallow like bile threatening to come up. Vulnerability? Good for others but not for him. 

When he couldn’t avoid you because you were absolutely everywhere—you weren’t everywhere, you two just have a gravitational pull towards each other like a planet to its moon—he found himself increasing his meditation. 

He’d close his eyes, willing himself to breathe, clear his mind, and…there’d you be. As clear as day in his mind's eye with your sweet smile, the sound of your infectious laughter that makes his heart flutter, and your intoxicating smell. 

As soon as you started to permeate his thoughts, even during the sanctuary of his meditation sessions—something that had never happened before—he knew he was a goner.

And if someone affects you this badly, they have to be yours, right? It would be absurd to see you with any of the imbeciles that pine after you. He almost laughs himself silly at the thought of them thinking they have a chance with you: his love, his moon, his reason for breathing, his everything. 

If you’re familiar with my work, you’ll know how I describe your intimacy with Suo. He’s a pure pleasure dom; if you’re not coming undone on his tongue or fingers until you’re a sobbing and begging mess, well, he simply has to try harder, and Suo has the stamina to back that threat up. 

He considers himself an expert of you, your body, and what makes you cum so intensely that his well-equipped arsenal of depravity has you doing your damnest to crawl away from him and to safety.

“Where do you think you’re going? I’m not done with you, Dove. Now get back here and spread your legs like a good girl.”

And you’re into it because Suo is your type of crazy—what you two have simply wouldn’t work if that weren’t the case. If a man isn’t obscenely infatuated with you, is he really your man, am I right? 

But sometimes a girl likes to be in control, ya know? And outside the bedroom, you have Suo wrapped around your finger. You say jump, and he asks if you want him to do a backflip on his way down. You use that sweet little voice to ask him for a kiss? He’s on top of you in an instant—and even to Suo, an instant isn’t quick enough. So, while he may have control in every aspect of his life, you are a dangerous variable that supersedes his free will.

But inside the bedroom? He’s much less willing to let you take the reigns; in fact, it might even be a point of contention initially. As you reach for his waistband, you underneath him entirely naked, and he, fully clothed as he comes up from between your thighs, preparing to plant a kiss on your luscious lips; he stops you as your finger coils around the elastic, silk fabric of his pants.

“What are you doing? This is about you.”

So, in what scenario will he finally let you take over? If you ask nicely, bat your eyelashes and use your sweet, honey-coated voice, perhaps, but that’s not always guaranteed to work. 

The best chance of getting what you want? When Suo has been working at your pleasure for hours, so much so that his cock is twitching in his pants, eyes shrouded with dark, swirling shadows of desire, and he’s ready to ruin you by sinking into you—he’s uncharacteristically more easily influenced in this state. He’ll do anything you say because, god, he just wants to feel you in any way he can; lips wrapped around his cock? Yes, please. Deep in your silken, cum saturated guts? God, please don’t make him beg because he just might. 

So when you tell him to lay down for you, and he falls backward onto the bed without questioning your intentions, you can finally have your way with him. 

And as you hover over his face, flirting your swollen pussy lips over his hungry mouth, ruby-toned eyes staring—pleading—up at you between the warmth of your plushy thighs for a taste, you’ll know that you’ve got him right where you want him.

“Eat my pussy again like a good boy, Hayato, and maybe I’ll touch your cock.”

His breath will hitch because fuck he loves when his sweet girl talks filthy like that, and as his tongue once again dives into your folds—his licks desperate—he’ll buck his hips into the air imagining the feel of your pussy—his pussy—wrapped around his dick.

And if you continue to talk to him like he’s a plaything for you—like his pleasure is an optional afterthought at best and unnecessary at worst—until you get what you want in a tone that almost sounds like you’re above him? His eyes are rolling back, and his hands are clawing at the sheets under him.

“Suo, I just want to fuck your tongue with my pussy all night. Will you let me, baby? Let me use your tongue to cum?”

“Y-yes, baby, use me, please. I’m yours to have.”

And before you know it, at some point between the licks, the whimpers (from him), and his bucking into the air, he’ll groan into your cunt because that intense feeling that he was so desperately trying to stave off finally washed over him and he just couldn’t help himself. You’ll look behind you, eyes bright with amusement and something a bit more sinister, as you watch geyser upon geyser of cum shoot from his hiccuping, over-sensitive cock until his seed smothers his well-groomed pubic hair, abs, and puddles beneath him. 

You’ll be so proud of yourself for reducing the Hayato Suo into a hands-free orgasmic mess. 

But here’s a warning: Suo will only be more insatiable after that, flipping you over with ease, making you wonder how in control you truly were, and after a heated kiss to your lips and feeling his already hardening cock dragging against your folds, you’ll be right back to where you started: at the mercy of someone who thinks that pleasure is infinite.

[nshtn]

// The Empirical Evidence

Wesker has never been one for the uncertainty of emotion. The answer to why he finds his lab partner so appealing, then, eludes him.

He considers the price of discovery. ▷

498 words, tags: Valentine's Day special, sfw, medical - mentions of sedation;surgical tools;syringes, wesker/gn researcher reader, themes of obsession, TRICELL - lab unit setting

There is a moment in which his unfettered gaze wanders across the expanse of your skin, wrists bare and easily broken, soft and pliant. He considers it, the call of your unbidden flesh to pierce, examine – to truly gaze upon that which confounds him. Such a mystery, the way you continue to seek him out despite the obvious tells of his deeper, darker innards. You don’t fret around soiled edges or discolored flecks.

The lens of a microscope suit you better. Only a scalpel could outpace that.

He supposes, quietly, that he’d never given anyone the time. No time to ponder meant no time for him to hurt when they walked. Humans always walked – and he didn’t stride among them, perfectly content to the individualism in the beat of his own heart.

Albert Wesker didn’t need anyone. Didn’t want anyone, for that matter. Those days had long passed with the snapping of an old man’s arteries.

Until you came along – you, mind sickeningly bright and achingly present, terrible in the ease of getting along with. A willing subject to bad science – messy with emotion, and yet somehow in the thick of it all you find yourself worthy of his private investigation. Wesker cannot explain it with his tongue. His efficiency nearly outpaces him, but it falters in the light of your pure, curious gaze.

When it flickers from the migraine light of a holographic display to the human cell cultures before you. When it settles on tubes and wires and plastic-capped syringes. When it crawls onto him after the steady beat of silence that hard work brings, when it’s late, and dark, and TRICELL’s night lights stammer onward to push you into the late hours...

You make him feel clumsy.

How much of a social misstep would it be to truly figure you out, then? What did you really desire? Would you allow it – foolish trust, dog-like loyalty enough for the steady drip of Propofol so he could submerge his gloved hands in the sanguine understanding of you?

Unlikely.

No amount of vivisection will lead him to the satisfaction of a perfect understanding of your synapses. You are an uncontrolled variable. Part of your beauty is the exotic lack of understanding that comes with someone so pure and civilian, undiluted in your humanities.

For a second, his hand twitches as his gaze rises from the embrace of an electron microscope. You are there, within reach, so close… unscathed, unanalyzed, unquantified – the harsh illumination of the halogen lamp in your own light microscope blurs into your skin like a spotlight...

You have no idea of the length of your appeal. It shouldn’t matter. It does.

...and then it’s gone. You don’t even have the time to question him – and neither does he, this trembling urge like a cascading reaction.

Cold, calculating reflex neuters him. A single utterance pours from his lips, a comment you can’t hope to entertain the reason of, held securely and intentionally away from you.

“Curious.”

[runcriedthecrawlingif]

I've been working on something new.

It doesn't mean the end of Run Cried the Crawling, even though I'll have to put it aside while this new project is being developed.

I became pretty overwhelmed with the scope of RCTC, it being a LARGE project and also my first IF (and first ever piece of writing I've shared online or otherwise.) It got to the point where I was spending loads more time re-writing and re-working than making any sort of forwards movement. It was frustrating. This new project is something more manageable, a "baby step" IF before I tackle the "big beast" IF.

This IF has less variables, a smaller world and (although probably still novel length) a shorter story. It's also a story I'm very passionate to tell, something that hits home. Without getting too personal online, I wanted to make a story that reflected my experiences as an immigrant. But it's more than that, it's about my struggle with language, about being raised by parents from two different cultures, about identity and lost history.

The Thicket is always growing in the back of my mind, I want it to be clear that it's not abandoned. I hope Tethered keeps you company while you wait.

Here's a link to the very short demo

Thank you for all the love you've shown RCtC, it's been amazing to go into the depths of the Thicket with you. <3

[deancasbigbang]

Title: Magdalena

Author: Mme Yersinia

Artist: Robin

Rating: Explicit

Pairings: Dean/Castiel, implied Sam/Rowena

Length: 150000

Warnings: Explicit sexual content, torture, self-harm and suicidal ideation

Tags: Canon-divergent s13, domestic kid fic, complex family dynamics, rural americana, mutual pining, dadstiel, hurt/comfort, angst with a happy ending, slow burn, redemption arcs

Posting Date: October 25, 2023

Summary: Castiel swore to protect Jack at all costs. If that means taking him away from the dark dungeon of the bunker, and away from the harsh words and hands of Dean Winchester, then so be it. Castiel takes Jack and runs. He finds them a safe town, a battered rental house, a little job and a little life. He wants Jack to have a normal childhood; to grow up safe and loved, not in a windowless basement.  Dean tracks them down, of course. He begs forgiveness, of course. But redemption is a long, slow road. It’s paved with ginger cats and broken-down Hondas, stolen kisses and dusty libraries and bathroom repairs. Dean and Castiel find themselves growing closer in the haze of domesticity. Dean moves from sleeping in the car, to the sofa, to Castiel’s bed. It’s not easy to carve out a place for themselves in a world that doesn’t always want them.  But strange things start to happen in the home they’ve made. Neighbors complain of shadows in the night. Monsters appear that don’t belong. Coincidences line up.  Wherever peace and happiness try to grow, there are adversaries who would snuff it out. The love holding their family together just might be the last weapon they have against the evils of the world.

Excerpt: Castiel takes his lunch break outside whenever the weather allows. He always intends to spend it reading one of the library’s newest additions. Usually he ends up watching other creatures instead. Birds flit back and forth in the courtyard’s ill-kempt bushes. Interesting insects crawl between the boards of the picnic table. A woman a few blocks down is walking her fluffy, prim little dog on a pink leash when Castiel’s phone buzzes. He hopes that it’s the bank calling him back to say there was a mistake, actually, the check has come through. But no: it’s a text from Sam. “You and Jack doing okay?” The midday sun bakes the back of Castiel’s neck, rising a ring of sweat around the collar of his polo shirt. The library dress code is business casual. He’d Googled what that meant after his interview, and then he and Jack had frantically made a trip to the local Goodwill to scrape together a week’s worth of work clothes for him. Jack had found a dinosaur cup for fifty cents, though, so the outing had been successful by more than one standard. Castiel had almost picked out a flannel. The well-worn, faded, familiar stripes caught his eye from the hanger in the men’s row. Fondness and bitterness blended in a strange way in Castiel's grace until Jack caught him staring and asked, “Do you want that one, too?” “We can’t afford it,” Castiel had blurted out, turning away, because by then it was their turn to check out. He stares at Sam’s text message. Above it are a long stream of others, most unanswered. It’s not Sam’s fault. He’s just stuck working damage control. Castiel taps back an answer. “Yes.” It’s not a lie. A few moments pass and Castiel doesn’t put his phone away. He watches a brown-striped bird peck at the remnants of someone’s french fries on the ground. A reply pops up on his screen. “Can you tell me where you are?” Castiel frowns, chews his lip. His break is almost over. He’s got to work on re-filing the historical nonfiction (F through K) when he goes back inside the library. He texts back, “No.” If it was up to him - if there were fewer variables in this nasty equation  - the answer might be different. He doesn’t want Sam trying to visit so he can peer in on their little life that’s trying to grow into the shape of something human. He doesn’t want pitying glances or offers of help. Least of all does he want Dean to know where they are. Dean has no right to that. The phone burbles a reply: “Okay. Let me know if you or Jack need anything. Talk soon.” Castiel stares down at the washed-out screen in the warm glare of sunlight. His bittersweet moroseness feels out of place in such fine weather, butting up against the scalding green of the garden. He gets to his feet and drags his vessel back inside the library. 

DCBB 2023 Posting Schedule

[psychosomatica]

Natural Text to Speech (python)

Microsoft Edge has very good, natural-sounding Text to Speech voices used in its "Read Aloud" feature. You can utilize these voices using python and a module called edge-tts (edge text to speech) to generate audio files of whatever text you like, including subtitles (for free).

Install python if you haven't already

Use pip to install edge-tts in your favorite command line

Run the CLI commands or create a new .py file. I suggest starting with this basic audio generation example.

Replace the TEXT variable contents with your string of choice. I recommend creating separate .txt files then reading them with the program, which allows you to cleanly scale your program to generate multiple files at once. (Imagine crawling your Obsidian vault to generate audio versions of all of your files!)

Choose your voice. You can use the Read Aloud feature in Edge to try out the different available voices (their quality varies). Their programatic voice names are found here. Note that not all voices are available, depending on your region, and trying to use one out of your region will throw an error. Read the footnotes. I'm still early in testing the different voices, but if you want to start on the right foot, Ava, or "en-US-AvaMultilingualNeural" is very good.

If you run the above example, it will generate a file called test.mp3 in the directory of the .py file. It's definitely performant. I ran a ~10k word file and it took a couple of minutes to generate (~23 MB with a running length of 1 hour and 3 minutes).

Have fun!

Added voice samples for the two I like the most, Ava and Brian multilingual.

[pleistocene-pride]

The pancake tortoise is a species of flat-shelled tortoise in the family Testudinidae which is native to the African nations of Tanzania, Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Zambia where it tends to inhabit scrublands, woodlands, and grasslands with prominent hills and rocky outcrops up to 6,000ft (1800m) in elevation. They are a social species which live in colonies clustered around a chosen rock face or series of caverns and crevices where they rest during the night and the heat of the day emerging during the morning, afternoon, and evening to search for water and food such as fruits, grasses, leaves, and other vegetation. Pancake tortoises are preyed upon by mongooses, wild dogs, honey badgers, and birds of prey. These tortoises are fast and agile climbers and its flat surprisingly flexible shell allows the pancake tortoise to crawl into narrow rock crevices to avoid potential predators. Reaching around 5 to 7 inches in length and around a pound (.45kg) in weight, the Pancake tortoise is one of the oddest and most interesting chelonians. As previously mentioned they have an unusually thin, flat, and flexible shell with a highly ossified lump at the rear. The carapace is brown with a variable pattern of radiating dark lines on each scute which helps to camouflage the tortoise. The plastron is pale yellow with dark brown seams and light yellow rays, and the head, limbs and tail are yellow-brown. The breeding season occurs throughout January and February during which time males will compete for females. The nesting season occurs during july and august during which time a mother lay eggs of about 2 inches in length, in a nest cavity she has built in loose sandy soil. She will lay one egg, and then after 4 - 8 weeks she may lay another one, and then perhaps another. After a 4 to 6 month incubation the young hatch. Under ideal conditions a pancake tortoise may live upwards of 35 years.

[uboat53]

In all my political posts, it's easy to forget I'm actually a scientist by training and career. Anyone want to talk about the possibility of extraterrestrial life? LONG RANT (TM) time.

DRAKE

To start with, let's take a look at the Drake Equation, initially proposed in 1961 by astrophysicist Frank Drake. There's no solution to the Drake Equation because we have no idea what the values of the variables are, but it's a good starting point to get the idea of how likely it is that there is other intelligent life in the universe.

The equation is R_* times f_p times n_e times f_l times f_i fimes f_c times L = N where R_* is the average rate of star formation in the galaxy, f_p is the percent of stars that have planets, n_e is the average number of planets that can support life per star with planets, f_l is the percent of planets that can support life that will actually develop it, f_i is the percent of planets that develop life that go on to develop intelligent life, f_c is the number of planets that develop intelligent life that go onto emit detectable signs of their existence into space, and L is the length of time that they emit those signals. Multiply all of those together and you get N, which is the number of civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy that we might be able to communicate with.

It looks pretty complicated, but each variable is fairly easy to understand and, if we could determine their value, we could solve the equation pretty easily.

Of course, there are limits to the Drake Equation. For a start, it only predicts the Milky Way galaxy. Secondly, it's only concerned with intelligent life and, further, it's only concerned with life that we could potentially communicate with. All of this makes sense because it was developed for the SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) project, but it wouldn't be too hard to adjust the equation to be more general.

Still, the fact that we don't know those variables either means that the equation can't actually give us an answer. It is, however, useful as a way to think about the scope and nature of the question.

PROBABILITIES

First off, let's use some rough numbers. Hubble Deep Field images in 2016 suggested that there might be about 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe and current estimates are that there are about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. Let's wave our hands and assume a tenth of those numbers, just to be on the safe side. That means that there would be 2 sextillion (a 2 with 21 zeroes after it) stars in the universe.

What does that mean? Well, it means that, even if there was only a 1 in a quadrillion chance (0.0000000000001%) of any given star system having life somewhere in it, there would still be 2 million stars with life somewhere in their system in the universe right now. In this case, an average of 1 out of every 100,000 galaxies would have a single star with life somewhere in the system.

Why are we doing this kind of rough equation knowing that we don't have enough information to do a real calculation? Well, in science we call these types of calculations "gut checks". You're right, we don't have enough information to do a real calculation, so we're going to assume a bunch of numbers and twist them all in one direction. In this case, we twisted them all toward the direction of less life (fewer galaxies, fewer stars per galaxy, extremely low chance of life) and found that there would still be some amount of other life in the universe. Not much other life, but still some!

TIME

There's still one thing we haven't talked about, though, and that's time. It's possible that, billions or even trillions of years from now, the universe will be crawling with life such that you can't visit a single star system without running into some intelligent being. Heck, it's possible that's even the case now. But it's also possible it's not the case now but will be at some future time.

In other words, we know that life takes time to form and evolve, it makes sense that the amount of life in the universe would vary by time.

One thing in particular that I recently thought of is the availability of heavy elements in the universe. I don't mean stuff like Uranium and Plutonium, I mean things heavier than Hydrogen and Helium. For reference, Hydrogen and Helium together are estimated to make up about 99.1% of all atoms in the universe, so other elements are still fairly rare.

The thing is, however, they used to be a lot rarer. Heavier elements like Carbon and Nitrogen are pretty much only formed inside of stars by the process of fusion (as far as we know) and elements heavier than Iron are only formed in novas or supernovas upon the death of stars. In other words, those elements may be rare now, but they were so rare as to be practically non-existent before the first stars!

ASSUMPTIONS

Now here's the fun part, by making one assumption, we can examine a very interesting idea about life, and particularly intelligent life, in the universe. That assumption is that life cannot be made almost entirely of Hydrogen and Helium.

Why make this assumption? Well, let's look at life on Earth. Yes, it's dependent on water and yes, it's based largely on carbon, but if we abstract it all the way out and look at it, it's a chemical process or, more accurately, a series of chemical processes.

So let's ask the question, how many chemical processes can you do with just Hydrogen and Helium? Well, Helium basically doesn't form chemical bonds and Hydrogen only forms one at a time and there's really only so much chemistry you can do with Dihydrogen and free Hydrogen and Helium.

As I said, this is an assumption. I have no way of knowing if some form of life could possibly exist with just Hydrogen and Helium, but I'm going to assume it can't both because I don't know of any way that it can and because doing so gets me to interesting places.

RUNNING WITH THE ASSUMPTION

So where does this get us? Well, simply put, it would mean that life couldn't exist in the early universe. It certainly couldn't have existed before stars.

But here's where it gets interesting. Once you get stars fusing atoms together and creating new elements, you do have heavier elements like Carbon, Nitrogen, and Oxygen, but they're not really available for life, they're trapped inside of a star. Not only is it nearly impossible to have chemical reactions as we know it when they're floating around in what is essentially a plasma soup, but these elements are also largely separated into shells within the star, meaning that they're not likely to interact much in any case.

So not only do we have to wait for stars to form, we have to wait for stars to DIE.

But wait, once they die and end their life in a Nova or Supernova that forms a nebula, that's not really great either. Nebulae are extremely diffuse with even the densest segments having only about 10,000 molecules in a cubic centimeter. For perspective, the atmosphere around you has 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules per cubic centimeter making it 1 quadrillion times denser than the densest nebula. For further perspective, in an average nebula, a volume the size of the entire Earth would only have a mass of a few kilograms.

In other words, in a nebula, there's not much interaction between atoms and molecules, they're just too far away. So not only do we have to wait for stars to form and then die, we have to wait for their remnants to coalesce in some way such that they become dense enough for the stuff that's been created to interact.

The Sun is generally considered to be a third-generation star, meaning that two previous generations of stars have lived, created elements, died, and scattered them around to be collected by new stars and planets before our Solar System formed. There's been some chemical observation showing that the second generation of stars had more heavy elements than the first, but seems to have been missing many that we have. I'll spare you the chemistry and astrophysics behind this (you can read here if you're interested), but what you actually need to know for the purposes of this is that our Solar System is likely to be among the first ones to have formed with the heavy elements necessary for complex chemical processes.

Now, Earth formed in an extremely hot, likely even molten state, so it had to cool down before our life could form. As far as we can tell, it formed about 4.5 billion years ago and it was cool enough for water to form by about 3.8 billion years ago (though there are some studies that suggest water could have formed even earlier). From other evidence, we are also fairly sure that life emerged over 3.7 billion years ago.

In other words, life seems to have formed on Earth just about as soon as it was cool enough for organic molecules as we know them to form and less than 1 billion years after the formation of our Solar System.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

So let's look at what we've got. Assuming that life needs heavier elements than Hydrogen and Helium to form, our Sun is likely to be one of the first stars to have formed with enough heavy elements in the system to allow organic chemical processes as we understand them to occur. We also know that life on Earth took hold basically as soon as it was physically possible to do so.

From this point all we can do is speculate. Is the rate of evolution on Earth normal? Is our giant moon that stabilizes our orbit and protects from asteroids a major factor? Is Jupiter a major factor, sitting just outside the inner solar system and deflecting most outside objects away? Did the five mass extinction events in Earth's history slow down the evolution of intelligent life, did they speed it up, or were they even necessary to the process?

Even with without the answers to all of that, though, we can say one thing. If our assumption of life requiring heavier elements is correct, it is possible that we're one of the only intelligent life forms in the universe, but not because intelligent life is improbable, because we're just one of the first to evolve. Isn't that an interesting thought?

[seocompany1010]

Using A/B Testing for SEO Improvements

A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a powerful method to analyze and optimize your website’s performance. By comparing two versions of a webpage or its elements, you can determine which one drives better user engagement and conversions. When applied to SEO, A/B testing can refine your strategy and improve your rankings over time. For businesses in need of expert guidance, partnering with a search engine optimisation company Singapore ensures your testing efforts align with SEO best practices.

What is A/B Testing in SEO?

A/B testing for SEO involves creating two variations of a webpage and measuring their impact on specific metrics, such as click-through rates (CTR), dwell time, or conversion rates. Unlike traditional A/B testing, SEO testing considers how search engines interpret and rank these changes. The goal is to enhance user experience while maintaining or improving organic visibility.

Benefits of A/B Testing for SEO

Improved User Experience: Identify the design, content, or navigation elements that keep users engaged.

Higher Conversion Rates: Fine-tune CTAs, headlines, and visuals to boost conversions.

Better Ranking Signals: Optimize elements that contribute to lower bounce rates and higher dwell time, which influence search engine rankings.

Data-Driven Decisions: Eliminate guesswork by making informed choices based on concrete data.

Key Elements to Test for SEO

When conducting A/B testing, focus on elements that directly impact user engagement and SEO performance:

Meta Titles and Descriptions: Test different keywords, tones, and formats to improve CTR from search engine results pages (SERPs).

Content Layout: Experiment with headings, paragraph lengths, and multimedia usage to make your content more readable.

Internal Linking: Analyze how different linking structures affect navigation and page views.

Call-to-Actions (CTAs): Assess which CTAs encourage users to explore more pages or take specific actions.

Page Speed and Loading Times: Optimize image sizes, scripts, and hosting options to test speed improvements.

Best Practices for SEO A/B Testing

To ensure your A/B tests yield actionable insights, follow these best practices:

Set Clear Goals Define the objective of your test. Are you looking to increase traffic, reduce bounce rates, or improve conversions? Clarity ensures focused and measurable outcomes.

Use Reliable Tools Employ tools like Google Optimize, Optimizely, or VWO to manage and monitor your tests. These platforms provide detailed insights into user behavior.

Test One Element at a Time To isolate the impact of each change, avoid testing multiple elements simultaneously. For instance, if you’re testing meta titles, keep other elements constant.

Monitor Search Engine Crawling Search engines may interpret variations as duplicate content. Use canonical tags or “noindex” directives for the variation to prevent SEO penalties.

Analyze Results Over Time SEO changes often take time to reflect in rankings. Allow sufficient time to gather meaningful data before drawing conclusions.

Challenges in SEO A/B Testing

While A/B testing offers valuable insights, it comes with challenges:

Search Engine Impact: Frequent changes may confuse search engines, affecting rankings temporarily.

Limited Traffic: Low traffic sites may struggle to gather enough data for statistically significant results.

Complexity of Variables: Multiple factors influence SEO, making it harder to attribute changes to a single element.

Why Partner with a Search Engine Optimisation Company Singapore

Conducting SEO A/B testing requires expertise and precision. A professional search engine optimisation company Singapore can help you design, implement, and analyze tests effectively. Their experience ensures that your tests adhere to SEO guidelines and yield meaningful results without risking penalties or ranking drops.

Conclusion

A/B testing is an indispensable tool for refining your SEO strategy and achieving better website performance. By testing and optimizing critical elements, you can improve user engagement, drive traffic, and enhance your site’s search engine rankings. To ensure successful implementation, consider collaborating with a reliable search engine optimisation company Singapore for expert guidance. Stay patient, consistent, and data-driven in your approach to reap long-term SEO benefits.

[saving-word-crawls]

The World Ends With You Crawl

By: Preathea

I made this a couple of years ago and have been using it myself, and if you can find the time to do it for a full week, I’ve found it to be pretty helpful to bulk up word count. I’m planning on starting tomorrow.

(The World Ends With You is a video game from Square Enix. An anime adaption came out this year as well as the sequel. This crawl is based on the OG game as I haven’t had a chance to pick up the new one.)

The Game – A TWEWY crawl

Day 1 You’ve woken up and realized most of the people around you can’t see you. You see some people around that look just as lost as you. The longer you are awake, the more you remember. Sprint 150 words to remember what is going on.

You remember that you died, and you have chosen to participate in a game that could possibly bring you back to life. You also remember what you gave up as your entry fee that you desperately want to get back. If you gave up a memory/series of memories, write for 15 minutes nonstop, trying to remember what memory you don’t remember. If you gave up a relationship, participate in the Three Digit Challenge to establish a new connection. If you gave up something material (appearance/object/etc), sprint 250 words in frustration. If you gave up a feeling, roll a d8 and multiply the result by 2 and write for that long without stopping trying not to feel a hole in your heart.

After realizing what your entry fee was, you feel a stinging in your hand and your phone chimes. “Find a partner and travel to your goal.” You look around desperately, remembering that you can’t survive the week without a partner. Participate in a 15 minute word war to find your perfect partner.

With your partner by your side, you find yourselves surrounded by noise, creatures that target players in the game, you must defeat them to make it to your goal. Sprint to the nearest 1000 to defeat the noise.

At your final destination, you encounter a reaper who smirks and threatens you with more noise than you can handle. There is another team nearby. If you choose to handle the noise on your own, complete a Fifty Headed Hydra to defeat these stronger noise. (If you don’t complete the fifty-headed Hydra, you must be rescued by the other team, write an extra 200 words.) If you choose to let the other team handle the noise, sprint 500 words to dodge attacks sent your way. If you choose to team up with the other team and defeat the noise together, write for twenty minutes as you learn to fight in tandem with another team.

Finally, the reaper leaves, and you realize that the first day is over. Reward yourself for surviving your first day of The Game.

Day 2

You wake up on the second day and scramble to remember what happened the day before. Write 100 words to try to convince yourself that this is real.

After realizing that everything that happened the day before was real, you must relocate your partner from the day before. Sprint for five minutes to locate your partner.

Finding your partner, you both feel a pain in your hand and your phones go off with a new mission. You both attempt to solve the riddle. Attempt a fifty headed Hydra. If you manage it, you solved the riddle, skip the next step. If you did not complete it, your partner solved the riddle.

Your partner leads you to the target area, but you are pursued by noise along the way. Write 250 words to disperse the noise.

You arrive at the target location and are immediately surrounded by noise. There are so many that you are afraid that you may not survive this time. Head over to FightBlock (Fighter's Block! 3) and write 500 words before the noise defeat you. If you don’t win, write an extra 150 words to survive.

Somehow, you defeat the noise with the help of your partner, but as you take out the last one, a roar sounds behind you. A boss charges towards you. Participate in a five minute word war to ensure you and your partner dodge!

You get out of the way of the attack, and struggle to your feet to fight the boss. Another duo charges forward, past you and your partner. If you charge forward in an attempt to defeat the monster first, roll a d10 and multiply the result by 100. Write that many words in order to win. If you allow the new duo to claim the boss, sprint for fifteen minutes in order to check on your partner and make sure they are safe. If you choose to fight alongside the duo, complete a three digit challenge to work on your teamwork.

Once the boss is defeated, the new duo turns to you and introduces themselves. Write 250 words to impress the newcomers. The day ends, and you hope that you can survive Day 3. Reward yourself for completing day 2 of The Game.

Day 3

You wake again, and your partner is nearby. Write for 10 minutes to regain your energy.

You notice that you are not immediately given a mission upon waking up. Write 150 words to try and figure out what changed.

As you look around, you notice that it is not just you and your partner in this area, but that the duo that helped you the day before is there. Participate in a 15 minute word war to prove you are the better team.

After talking with them, the familiar pain shoots through your hand, and your phone buzzes. Write 350 words on FightBlock before the monster kills you in order to decipher the puzzle. If you are successful, skip the next step.

The other team deciphers the puzzle first, and you fall in behind them to your goal for the day. Noise attack you from behind. Write 100 words to defeat them.

You arrive at the goal, and as you expected, noise are awaiting you. If you charge in ahead of the other team to defeat the noise, attempt a fifty-headed hydra. If you fail, write an extra 150 words as the other team saves you. If you allow the other team to face the noise first, complete a three digit challenge to provide support. If you fight alongside the other team, roll a d6 and multiply by two. Sprint for that long to take care of the noise as a team.

The noise were easier than expected, and you all recover before a reaper reveals themselves before you. Their attack comes suddenly. Sprint for five minutes to dodge the attack!

The reaper leers at you and spouts some nonsense about points. You know you have to beat them to survive the day. Attempt a fifty-headed hydra to defeat the reaper. If you succeed skip the next step.

The reaper proves too strong for you, and you must back off and formulate a new plan. Write 200 words to come up with a plan and use it to defeat the reaper.

With the reaper defeated, you expect the day to come to an end, only a boss noise shows up just as you start to relax. They aim their first attack at your partner who hasn’t noticed them. If you attempt to get your partner’s attention, sprint for 5 minutes to alert them to the danger. If you simply head off the attack, write 150 words to intercept it. If you are frozen in place, roll a d4 and multiply the result by 100, write that many words to pray that they notice before it’s too late. If you simply don’t care, sprint for 8 minutes as you create a plan to defeat the noise on your own.

Your partner manages to get out of the way of the attack just in time. Write 300 words to defeat the noise. Write an extra 100 words if you have to reformulate your plan to include your partner.

The day is done, and you are relieved that you have only four days left to survive. Reward yourself for surviving another day of The Game.

Day 4

You wake up once more, and your hand stings with a familiar pain. You take out your phone and glance at the Day’s mission. Write 150 words to figure out the mission

The mission for the day appears to be in parts. Part one: Locate your partner. You’ve learned about your partner, so you know exactly where to go look for them. If you go look for them where they would be found, sprint for 10 minutes to try and find them. If you go look for them where you would be found, complete a three digit challenge. If you don’t look for them, write 350 words as you leisurely walk around waiting for them to find you. You find each other, and your phone buzzes again alerting you to the next step of the mission. Write for another five minutes to decipher the second step. Write an extra 150 words if you did not search for your partner to ignore their scolding.

The second step involves defeating noise, as you could have predicted. Sprint to the nearest 1000 words to defeat the required noise.

You defeat the noise and you phone sounds again, sending you off to meet up with the other duo that you’ve been teaming up with lately. This next step requires you to cooperate to solve a puzzle left by the Game Master. If you attempt to solve the puzzle on your own, attempt a fifty-headed hydra. If you do not complete it, write an extra 200 words as the other duo solves it for you. If you let the others solve it without your input, write for 20 minutes to amuse yourself with something else. If you cooperate as per the instructions, complete a three digit challenge.

The puzzle is easier with more heads, and you finally solve it and are delivered the last instruction. Fight the duo with you. Only one pair makes it. Your partner protests that there has to be another way. If you fight them, write 400 words on FightBlocker. If you lose, write an extra 100 words and skip the following step. If you refuse to fight them, sprint for 15 minutes to try to come up with a plan and skip the following step. If you let the others decide, complete a three digit challenge and the following step.

The other scramble for a plan, but one of them jumps straight in to attack your partner. If you defend them, sprint for five minutes. If you do not defend them, write 250 words. Everyone is tense and you realize with a reaper closing in to erase you, that you have no choice. You have to fight. Attempt a fifty headed hyrda. If you complete it, you win. If you don’t, you lose.

If you win, you strike down the other team and walk away, your partner trailing behind in shame. Write 100 words to convince them that you have to continue on.

If you lose, you are struck down by the other team and watch as they walk away without a word. Write 100 words to convince yourself that you have to keep trying.

The reaper jumps in to erase the defeated team, cackling. If you fight back, attempt a fifty-headed hydra. If you fail, write another 200 words to keep trying. If you yell for help, complete a three digit challenge. If you do nothing, sprint for 15 minutes.

The reaper is somehow fought off and you all survive another day. You’re not sure who is the winner this time. Reward yourself for a successful (?) day 4 of The Game.

Day 5

You wake the next day and are immediately attacked by noise. Your partner is not with you. Write 200 words to run away since you cannot fight Noise alone.

You manage to scramble away and you search desperately for your partner. Sprint for 15 minutes to attempt to locate them.

Instead of your partner, you find one half of the duo you were supposed to defeat the day before. Your hand stings, and your phone receives the mission for the day. Before you can check it, you are attacked once more. If you try to fight them alone, write 250 words to survive. If you try to run, sprint for 10 minutes. If you attempt to fight them alongside the other player, complete a three digit challenge.

You find that it is possible to team up with another player now that you cannot locate your partner. Write 250 words to defeat the noise.

You defeat the noise and finally open the mission. Write 350 words on FightBlock. If you lose, write another 150 words to solve the riddle.

You solve the riddle and realize that you both have only one hour to find your partners or they will be erased. But the clues for where they are being kept are different. You realize that they must be in different places. If you argue for looking for your partner first, sprint for 15 minutes to try to convince the other to do so. If you agree to look for their partner first, complete a three digit challenge. Regardless of who you search for, you stumble upon your partner, and must defeat a boss noise to rescue them. To attempt to rescue them immediately, attempt a fifty-headed hydra, if you do, they are rescued, skip the next step. If you are not successful, proceed to the next step. You are unable to defeat the boss monster, but your temporary partner convinces you to keep trying. Write another 200 words to try again. Your partner is rescued, and you proceed to follow the other clues to find the other missing partner. Participate in a 15 minute word war to decipher the clues.

You find them, with only fifteen minutes left to rescue them. Only of two of you can fight the noise. If you choose to fight with your own partner, complete a three digit challenge. If you choose to fight with the other partner, write 250 words. If you choose to not fight, sprint for 10 minutes. The boss noise is defeated with only a few minutes to spare. With all four of you safe, the day comes to an end. Reward yourself for surviving the fifth day of The Game.

Day 6

You wake the next day feeling tired. You know there’s only two days left, but you just want this to be over. Write 150 words to find motivation to go on. You struggle to go through with the day, though you find your partner easily. Your hands sting, and your phones ring. You resignedly check them. Sprint for 10 minutes to decipher the clues. The mission that day is an easy one: Defeat a boss noise at a specific location, but noise dog your steps the whole way. Spring to the nearest 1000 words to defeat all the noise standing in your way. The boss noise awaits you and you stumble forward to fight it. Your partner holds you back, as the other team you are acquainted with are already fighting it. If you decide to jump into the fight to help, complete a three digit challenge. If you decide to try to steal the kill for yourself, attempt a fifty-headed hyrda. If you are successful, you defeat it, if you are not, the other team defeats it. If you let them fight it, participate in a 15 minute word war to tune out your partner who chides you for the decision.

The boss monster is defeated, and you all expect to be done, but another comes out of nowhere, with a third following it. If you choose to split the effort, each team concentrating on one monster, sprint 250 words to take down the boss. If you choose to focus all efforts on one boss at a time, sprint for 10 minutes. If you choose to attempt to take them both on with just you and your partner, attempt a fifty-headed hydra. Write 250 more words if you fail. If you choose to not engage, complete a three digit challenge as your partner tries to force you into action. The next two bosses are defeated. Everyone who participated is breathing heavily, and you don’t know if you can survive the next wave. Instead of more bosses, however, a reaper appears. Write 100 words to curse your luck.

The reaper informs you that only one team can survive to fight the Game Master the next day. One team has to be erased either that day or the next. If you choose to fight the reaper, attempt a fifty-headed hydra. If you are successful, you win and the day is over. Skip to the end. If you do not win, choose a different option on this step. If you choose to attack the other team, write 500 words on FightBlock. If you win, you defeat them and the reaper quickly erases them. If you choose to argue with the reaper, complete a three digit challenge to team up with the other to persuade them to let you all live.

If you argue with the reaper, they ignore your arguments and insist that you fight. If you instead attack the reaper, write 250 words to chase them away. Proceed to the end. If you agree to fight, write 350 words. You win, and the reaper erases the other team.

If the other team is erased, your partner is very disappointed in your decision, and they attempt to attack you. Write 300 words to endure their attacks.

The day is over. Reward yourself for making it through Day 6 of The Game.

Day 7

You wake up on day 7, fully aware that The Game will end today, one way or another. Write 200 words to hype yourself up to finish strong.

You find your partner and you both put your minds to work to decipher the day’s clues as soon as they arrive. Sprint for five minutes.

You are faced almost immediately upon solving the puzzle with noise. Write 400 words to make your way through the crowds of noise blocking your way to the Game Master.

When you arrive at the location that the Game Master supposedly awaits, a reaper greets you instead. If you helped them erase the other team the day before, sprint for five minutes and proceed to the next step that applies to you. If you let the other team live, sprint 10 minutes to avoid the reaper erasing you.

If the other team lives, The reaper stops attacking after awhile and informs you that only one team can face the Game Master. Just as they finish explaining that you have to erase or incapacitate the other team to get your chance to face them, the other team arrives. The reaper bids you goodbye. If you attack to kill, write 350 words on FightBlock. If you win, the other team is erased. Skip to the next step that applies to you. If you lose, your partner explains what you just learned. If you attack to incapacitate, write 350 words and skip to the next step that applies to you. If you choose to share what you’ve learned and discuss things with the other team, complete a three digit challenge.

The other team refuses to yield the chance to fight the Game Master to you. They ready themselves for a fight. If you choose to fight, sprint to the nearest 1000 words to earn the right to face the Game Master. If you choose to yield to them, sprint for fifteen minutes to hope that they don’t win. It’s time to face the Game Master. You don’t know what happened to any other challengers, but as you step into the room, the door shuts behind you with a dull thud. The area is well lit and the Game Master stands in the middle of the room, grinning at you. If you try to end it all immediately, attempt a fifty-headed hydra. If you win, skip to the next step that applies to you. If you try to speak to them before anything else, sprint 250 words as you try to figure out what to say. If you cautiously get into a defensive stance and wait for the Game Master to make the first move, sprint for 10 minutes. The Game Master laughs at you and informs you that this is the final test. If you win, you will have a wish granted and your entry fee returned. All of it comes down to this one fight. And you get to make the first move. Attempt a fifty-headed hydra to defeat the Game Master once and for all. If you win, skip to the next step that applies to you.

The Game Master knocks you and your partner aside easily, and you struggle to come up with a more effective way of facing them. Sprint for 10 minutes to survive and come up with a plan.

You and your partner develop a plan while avoiding the attacks of the Game Master. You will only have once chance to beat him, so you have to time it exactly right. Write 200 words to execute your plan.

The Game Master is defeated, and you and your partner celebrate for a moment. Then a reaper appears and tells you that only you have won, as you have gained more points over the course of The Game than your partner has. If you give your wish to your partner, sprint for five minutes. If you fulfill your own wish, write 200 words, and skip to the end. The Game is over for you.

Your partner argues against receiving your reward, but you insist, and they eventually accept it. Their wish is granted and they disappear. The reaper gives you three choices on how to proceed from here. If you choose to be erased, write a last 100 words to say goodbye to the world for good this time. If you choose to become a reaper, sprint for 10 minutes to steel yourself for how cruel you will have to be. If you choose to replay the game, complete a three digit challenge. You have finished The Game. However you chose to end it, it is over. Reward yourself for completing seven days of challenges.

[ravenspeakrp]

Welcome to Raven’s Peak, Claire, we’re excited to have you! Joanne Morgrave (Original Vampire, Anne Hathaway) has been accepted. Please be sure to stop by the CHECKLIST for the follow list, tags to track, and other reminders.

FULL NAME: Joanne Morgrave     SPECIES: original vampire     AGE: ???     DATE OF BIRTH: October 1st     GENDER IDENTITY: cis woman     NEIGHBORHOOD: Hidden Hills     OCCUPATION: private investigator     WORKPLACE: variable     POSITIVE TRAITS: adaptable, protective, and witty     NEGATIVE TRAITS: impulsive, vengeful, chaotic LENGTH OF TIME IN RAVEN’S PEAK: variable throughout the centuries     FACE CLAIM: Anne Hathaway

That girl is a problem. Those were the words Joanne remembers most. They were filtered into conversations about her worth and her use in the family. Because, to her parents she was a puppet on a string; made to be manipulated to their benefit. As a first born daughter, with a wealth of siblings around her, worth came from being cracked open and filled with Morgrave ambition. Her family were newcomers on the scene in those days, held aloft by their talent and their piety. The former was assured, the latter a front.

In the midst of all this, Jo was curious and stubborn and, with her powers, an ace in their pocket. While she yearned for the freedoms granted to her brothers, she knew better than to openly disobey her father. So, when she was of an age, an adequate husband was found for her. It was an unhappy union - but out from under her father's roof, Jo found some modicum of control in her life. She found her voice in council when the four family's came together, and began to covet the stone and the freedom it might provide. Her biggest rebellion was the lover she took. A man loyal to the Morgrave family who she'd meet secretly in the woods. Over the years, she worked carefully to keep the affair a secret, and of the four children she bore only she could speak to their parentage.

Her children were nearly grown when the curse of their greed fell upon the Morgraves. Jo remembers crawling from the earth with a thirst burning in her throat. She remembers falling upon her husband and claiming him as her first victim. Those were chaotic days. Jo feared for her children and managed to convince her lover to take them to safety. Where they went she could not say, but at least they weren't tangled in the mess and danger of the day.

Reborn with strength and hunger beyond imagining, her family appeared to fracture from the inside out. Jo took her solitude and turned it into something monstrous. She was a wraith in the night, killing indiscriminately and with little remorse. Centuries passed and from her family, vampires came to populate the earth. Jo took special care with who she turned, building a circle of trust around herself, and an affection for her fledglings.

Some four hundred years ago, her impulsivity caught up with her. She killed a young witch and found herself cursed. From that moment onward, she would no longer be able to create more of her own kind. The vampires she sired would seem to burn up from the inside, twisted in pain before the end. Furthermore, the pain and terror of her victims would follow her for years on end. She fought long and hard for a cure but as the years passed she was effectively leashed and forced to fall back on her self-control. Through the years, she'd developed an appreciation for gems and silks and the finer things in life. She began to truly build up her wealth in trade and became a collector.

As the pace of her life slowed, pieces of her past caught up. Her family had slowly settled into their new reality, and began to rebuild some of those old bonds. Moreso, her lover had returned earthside. Though she'd lost contact centuries prior, his life had not unfolded unscathed. Now a demon, he'd spent many years searching for her. In deference of his kind, he hitched his support to Joanne and, by extension, vampires. They strung some decades together, but time had eroded their connection and Joanne manufactured a deal with his kind. Part of her curse undone for the price of sending her lover back to hell. Freed to kill without discrimination again, Joanne returned to her former formidable reputation.

As the modern age filtered inward and her family bonds healed, she began to desire nothing more than to protect her own. She opened a small investigation firm with that intention. Staffed mostly by her loyal (and now time-weathered) fledglings, she has for the past three decades taken a firm foothold in Raven's Peak and become a protector of her kind. With the recent changes, she has become only more vigilant on that front. She will stop at nothing to protect her family and the vampires who shelter in Raven's Peak.

Connection: original Morgrave vampire

Pinterest: here

[jcmarchi]

A decoder-only foundation model for time-series forecasting

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/a-decoder-only-foundation-model-for-time-series-forecasting/

A decoder-only foundation model for time-series forecasting

Posted by Rajat Sen and Yichen Zhou, Google Research

Time-series forecasting is ubiquitous in various domains, such as retail, finance, manufacturing, healthcare and natural sciences. In retail use cases, for example, it has been observed that improving demand forecasting accuracy can meaningfully reduce inventory costs and increase revenue. Deep learning (DL) models have emerged as a popular approach for forecasting rich, multivariate, time-series data because they have proven to perform well in a variety of settings (e.g., DL models dominated the M5 competition leaderboard).

At the same time, there has been rapid progress in large foundation language models used for natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as translation, retrieval-augmented generation, and code completion. These models are trained on massive amounts of textual data derived from a variety of sources like common crawl and open-source code that allows them to identify patterns in languages. This makes them very powerful zero-shot tools; for instance, when paired with retrieval, they can answer questions about and summarize current events.

Despite DL-based forecasters largely outperforming traditional methods and progress being made in reducing training and inference costs, they face challenges: most DL architectures require long and involved training and validation cycles before a customer can test the model on a new time-series. A foundation model for time-series forecasting, in contrast, can provide decent out-of-the-box forecasts on unseen time-series data with no additional training, enabling users to focus on refining forecasts for the actual downstream task like retail demand planning.

To that end, in “A decoder-only foundation model for time-series forecasting”, we introduce TimesFM, a single forecasting model pre-trained on a large time-series corpus of 100 billion real world time-points. Compared to the latest large language models (LLMs), TimesFM is much smaller (200M parameters), yet we show that even at such scales, its zero-shot performance on a variety of unseen datasets of different domains and temporal granularities come close to the state-of-the-art supervised approaches trained explicitly on these datasets. Later this year we plan to make this model available for external customers in Google Cloud Vertex AI.

A decoder-only foundation model for time-series forecasting

LLMs are usually trained in a decoder-only fashion that involves three steps. First, text is broken down into subwords called tokens. Then, the tokens are fed into stacked causal transformer layers that produce an output corresponding to each input token (it cannot attend to future tokens). Finally, the output corresponding to the i-th token summarizes all the information from previous tokens and predicts the (i+1)-th token. During inference, the LLM generates the output one token at a time. For example, when prompted with “What is the capital of France?”, it might generate the token “The”, then condition on “What is the capital of France? The” to generate the next token “capital” and so on until it generates the complete answer: “The capital of France is Paris”.

A foundation model for time-series forecasting should adapt to variable context (what we observe) and horizon (what we query the model to forecast) lengths, while having enough capacity to encode all patterns from a large pretraining dataset. Similar to LLMs, we use stacked transformer layers (self-attention and feedforward layers) as the main building blocks for the TimesFM model. In the context of time-series forecasting, we treat a patch (a group of contiguous time-points) as a token that was popularized by a recent long-horizon forecasting work. The task then is to forecast the (i+1)-th patch of time-points given the i-th output at the end of the stacked transformer layers.

However, there are several key differences from language models. Firstly, we need a multilayer perceptron block with residual connections to convert a patch of time-series into a token that can be input to the transformer layers along with positional encodings (PE). For that, we use a residual block similar to our prior work in long-horizon forecasting. Secondly, at the other end, an output token from the stacked transformer can be used to predict a longer length of subsequent time-points than the input patch length, i.e., the output patch length can be larger than the input patch length.

Consider a time-series of length 512 time-points being used to train a TimesFM model with input patch length 32 and output patch length 128. During training, the model is simultaneously trained to use the first 32 time-points to forecast the next 128 time-points, the first 64 time-points to forecast time-points 65 to 192, the first 96 time-points to forecast time-points 97 to 224 and so on. During inference, suppose the model is given a new time-series of length 256 and tasked with forecasting the next 256 time-points into the future. The model will first generate the future predictions for time-points 257 to 384, then condition on the initial 256 length input plus the generated output to generate time-points 385 to 512. On the other hand, if in our model the output patch length was equal to the input patch length of 32 then for the same task we would have to go through eight generation steps instead of just the two above. This increases the chances of more errors accumulating and therefore, in practice, we see that a longer output patch length yields better performance for long-horizon forecasting

TimesFM architecture.

Pretraining data

Just like LLMs get better with more tokens, TimesFM requires a large volume of legitimate time series data to learn and improve. We have spent a great amount of time creating and assessing our training datasets, and the following is what we have found works best:

Synthetic data helps with the basics. Meaningful synthetic time-series data can be generated using statistical models or physical simulations. These basic temporal patterns can teach the model the grammar of time series forecasting.

Real-world data adds real-world flavor. We comb through available public time series datasets, and selectively put together a large corpus of 100 billion time-points. Among these datasets there are Google Trends and Wikipedia Pageviews, which track what people are interested in, and that nicely mirrors trends and patterns in many other real-world time series. This helps TimesFM understand the bigger picture and generalize better when provided with domain-specific contexts not seen during training.

Zero-shot evaluation results

We evaluate TimesFM zero-shot on data not seen during training using popular time-series benchmarks. We observe that TimesFM performs better than most statistical methods like ARIMA, ETS and can match or outperform powerful DL models like DeepAR, PatchTST that have been explicitly trained on the target time-series.

We used the Monash Forecasting Archive to evaluate TimesFM’s out-of-the-box performance. This archive contains tens of thousands of time-series from various domains like traffic, weather, and demand forecasting covering frequencies ranging from few minutes to yearly data. Following existing literature, we inspect the mean absolute error (MAE) appropriately scaled so that it can be averaged across the datasets. We see that zero-shot (ZS) TimesFM is better than most supervised approaches, including recent deep learning models. We also compare TimesFM to GPT-3.5 for forecasting using a specific prompting technique proposed by llmtime(ZS). We demonstrate that TimesFM performs better than llmtime(ZS) despite being orders of magnitude smaller.

Scaled MAE (the lower the better) of TimesFM(ZS) against other supervised and zero-shot approaches on Monash datasets.

Most of the Monash datasets are short or medium horizon, i.e., the prediction length is not too long. We also test TimesFM on popular benchmarks for long horizon forecasting against a recent state-of-the-art baseline PatchTST (and other long-horizon forecasting baselines). In the next figure, we plot the MAE on ETT datasets for the task of predicting 96 and 192 time-points into the future. The metric has been calculated on the last test window of each dataset (as done by the llmtime paper). We see that TimesFM not only surpasses the performance of llmtime(ZS) but also matches that of the supervised PatchTST model explicitly trained on the respective datasets.

Last window MAE (the lower the better) of TimesFM(ZS) against llmtime(ZS) and long-horizon forecasting baselines on ETT datasets.

Conclusion

We train a decoder-only foundation model for time-series forecasting using a large pretraining corpus of 100B real world time-points, the majority of which was search interest time-series data derived from Google Trends and pageviews from Wikipedia. We show that even a relatively small 200M parameter pretrained model that uses our TimesFM architecture displays impressive zero-shot performance on a variety of public benchmarks from different domains and granularities.

Acknowledgements

This work is the result of a collaboration between several individuals across Google Research and Google Cloud, including (in alphabetical order): Abhimanyu Das, Weihao Kong, Andrew Leach, Mike Lawrence, Alex Martin, Rajat Sen, Yang Yang and Yichen Zhou.

[lanadelreyscokewhor3]

I DRINK WINE- J.B BARNES

Pairing: Avengers!Buckyx Avengers!Female!Reader

Word Count: 1.4k

Summary: Long day of meetings + Bottle of Merlot= Stress Reliever. But Bucky adds one more variable to that equation, and you discover the missing component when you find him masturbating in YOUR bed.   

Warnings: SMUTT, swearing, pet names, daddy kink ( duhhhh) , some teasing, praise kink, masturbation, booze consumption 

You shut the door behind you softly, shrugging the leather coat off your shoulders and setting it on the rack. Boots come off, dirt scattering across the mat as you toss your keys in your purse with a shove. With a sigh, you trudged towards the kitchen, in search of a glass of wine. 

Meetings were the worst. As much as you adored Natasha’s little smiles and Tony’s sarcastic wit, they dragged on and on. That was the not-so-fun part about superheroing, the drastically long, boring meetings that involved government topics. Blugh.

 Bucky wasn’t even there, you thought, pouring the crimson red drink into your glass. Bucky hated you, and he made that very, very clear. But he was beautiful to look at. And his snarky attitude did something to your insides, it made your core heat like a sauna.

 Leaning against the counter, you sipped your wine staring mindlessly out the window at the city lights below. As you downed the glass and place it in the sink, you trudged towards your room slowly. The weight of the day hit you all at once, and you wanted nothing more than to slip into some pj’s and crawl into bed.

 Betcha Buckys fast asleep right now, that prick not even being at the meeting- 

That’s when you heard it.

 The quick pants coming from your bedroom, the moan of your name. You stopped dead in your tracks, eyes widening. You pushed the door open with a creak, and you saw the most beautiful sight you had ever seen.

 Bucky in all his glory, naked and stroking his thick length on your bed.

 Ohmygodohmygodohmy- your mind raced at a million miles an hour, wetness pooling down into your panties at an alarming rate. His cold, steel-blue eyes met yours, inviting you in the room.

 A squeak escaped your throat as you slipped in from behind the door and shut it quickly. He chuckled at your reaction, still stroking himself slowly as you stilled against the wooden door. Bucky was huge. The biggest you had ever seen. Bigger than you had imagined. 

“You know it’s not nice to stare котенок.” he drawled, his voice rich and deep.

“ But- but you’re here. In my bed.” you stated, still in shock from the events that were unfolding in front of your very eyes on a Tuesday night. “ I apologize dolly I didn’t think you’d be home till later. Guess we can help each other out huh?” His thumb slid over his weeping tip, it gleamed with pre cum.

 You shuttered as his cool gaze swept over you, his stare burning a hole through your clothes. His stare lingered between your legs and you gulped. “ I can smell ya you know. Smells so sweet, like peaches.” Bucky cooed, eyebrow raising.

 “ Well cmon now don’t be shy now little girl.” 

You slowly made your way over to him, the light on your nightstand flickering gently. His hair was messy, sprawled across the pillows he had leaned up against the headboard. Sweat gleaned down his abs, his chest rising and falling with each small pant he let out. Your used panties were draped across the sheets, stained white from his cum. You shivered, looking at the mess of your thong, then meeting his daunting gaze. A grin broke was plastered across his face as you mewled at the sight. 

“You wanna make daddy happy yeah?” he cooed and you nodded frantically.

 “ Let me see you котенок.”

 You began to strip, unbuttoning your blouse and shimmying out of your skirt at a frantic pace. A growl left his parted lips as you reached behind you, unbuttoning your bra and letting it drop to the carpet with the rest of your clothes. 

“No.” his deep voice stopped your hands from taking your panties off completely. You met his hunger-filled gaze and he smirked. “Leave em. And those knee highs too.”

 A giggle escaped your lips as he stopped his actions and reached up to haul you up to straddle his lap. “ Such a pretty little thing…” he trailed on as you smiled, trailing a finger down his chest. “ I didnt think you wanted me too.” you whispered looking down in embarrassment, a blush filling your cheeks. A firm grip on your chin tilted your head back up to meet his lust filled gaze once more. 

“ I’ve always wanted you little doll. You’re mine to ruin. To use.” 

You couldn’t believe your ears. Holy fucking shit this was happening you were really having your enemies to lovers moment- Buckys touch felt like feathers along your skin, his fingers tracing your hips, his teasing grasp reaching up to cup your breasts. His metal arm sent a chill through you, causing your to shiver, goosebumps rising on your skin. 

You moaned, head thrown back as his thumbs caressed your nipples, the sensitivity you felt driving you insane with each passing second. “ So responsive bunny. Was waiting for you to come around.” he cooed and you shuttered. 

“ I thought you hated me.” you mewled as his fingers drifted down to your dripping core, wetness prominent through the lace. “ Never. Pretty thing like you scared me, my urges were growing so fucking strong around you and this sweet little pussy.”

 You gripped his biceps tightly, leaving marks as he moved your panties to the side and started circling his thumb against your clit. Your breaths were coming in pants as he teased you, his touch setting you on fire.

 “ Didn’t want to accidentally bend you over every surface котенок” 

A moan left your lips as he continued to rub you, gathering your juice on his fingers. “ So wet for me dolly.” he tsked, hands coming back up to rest on your hips. You looked down at him, your hair covering your face like a curtain. 

“ You think I’m so wet-” you began to stroke his length with your hands, and he hissed, head going back in the pillows. 

“ That I could just slip right in?” 

You sank down onto him, crying out his name as he filled you up. God, you had never felt so… full. He was so deep inside you could hardly breathe. “Oh fuck-” he growled, his grip tightening enough on your hips to leave bruises. “S’deep inside me daddy you’re so big!” you moaned as you began to rock your hips slowly. 

Buckys hips began to thrust up into you, making it impossible to think a coherent thought. Endless chants left your lips as you felt yourself fall apart in his hands, your head thrown back, back arched and toes curled as he pounded into you. You didn't even know if you were making sense anymore, babbling his name as your pussy fluttered around his cock. 

“There you go pretty girl.” he hummed, as you began to whine, tears beginning to fall down your cheeks.

 “ Daddy I’m gonna cum-” you shrieked, the feeling of ecstasy bubbling up inside, stars filling your vision as your legs began to shake- 

BEEP BEEP BEEP! 

Your eyes fluttered open, the room hazy from sleep as you reached over to smack your alarm clock off. With a groan, you sat up, rubbing your eyes mindlessly, and began to crawl out of the tangle of sheets. What a fucking dream. Your core was throbbing as your trotted out of your room and down the hall towards the kitchen. 

You didn’t even bother to clean up and get dressed, you were starving and wanting nothing more than to drown yourself in a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch to escape the loop of flashbacks from your previous dream. Maybe Nat could distract you, what would she even say about the dream? 

You were just about to find out, as you rounded the corner and walked into the kitchen. “Hey Nat-” 

Oh. That was definitely not Natasha. 

His bulky figure was leaned against the counter top, a steaming cup of coffee in his hands. Buckys gaze instantly hardened on you, the hatred rolling off him in waves. You felt like a deer in headlights as you stood frozen in your tracks, eyes as wide as saucers.

 “ You got an issue shortie?” he mocked and you gulped, shaking your head. 

“ Good.” 

He set his mug down with a thud, almost hard enough to break the glass in half. You slowly walked to the fridge in search of milk as he stormed off to another part of the tower, his steps loud and intimidating. 

This was going to be a long fucking day. 

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

i am not sorry for that turn of events lol

kisses

-claire

[o-craven-canto]

Tree of Life 5: Unikonta (amoebae, fungi, and such)

Whew, this took a while! We continue our exploration of the diversity of life on Earth, branch by branch.

[Disclaimer: taxonomy is a complex, ever-changing field, and this overview is certainly not going to be exhaustive, especially concerning extinct groups]

←  Part 4 (Angiospermae: flower plants) Part 6 (Metazoa: animals) →

Unikonta “one flagellum” is a rather diverse clade of Eukaryotes that group together many species of amoebae, slime molds, fungi, and animals. They (which is to say us) don’t share so many obvious features, but:

they are primarily heterotrophs (i.e. they take their carbon from organic sources), except for some species that entered symbiosis with algae; and

their cells have at most one flagellum, if any at all -- in contrast with flagellate algae, Euglenids, or Heterokonts, which typically have two flagella per cell (see parts 2 and 3 for more detail on those).

The group is more-or-less synonymous with Amorphea “shapeless” and Podiata “footed”, in reference to the fact that amoebae and animals have no rigid cell walls and can extrude appendages from some cells -- which is not true for fungi, though!

The different and wonderful life stages of amoebae -- I promise they will make sense soon. (Kin & Schaap 2021, “Evolution of Multicellular Complexity in The Dictyostelid Social Amoebas” (link))

1. Amoebozoa “changing animals”: The core clade of amoebas. (We have seen examples of amoebas, that is cells that can significantly alter their shape by extending and retracting cytoplasm-filled pseudopods, all over Eukarya -- see part 2.)

1a. Lobosa “lobed”: These amoebae have lost any trace of cilia or flagella, and move exclusively by pseudopods.

1a1. Tubulinea “tube-shaped”: Cells usually cylindrical in general shape, producing pseudopods that are themselves cylindrical and pushed by a central stream of granular cytoplasm. Amoeba dubia or Polychaos dubium is here, whose massively redundant genome is 200 times as large as ours (... maybe). Some Tubulinea, known as “testate amoebae” such as Arcella, are protected by a spherical shell of variable composition, with a single round opening from which pseudopos protrude.

1a2. Discosea “disk-shaped”: These amoebae are rounded and flattened; their pseudopods are small, thin, and contain only the transparent surface layer of cytoplasm. Here we found Acanthamoeba, which lives in soil and freshwater but can be an opportunistic parasite in humans.

Amoeba proteus (Tubulinea), the most classical species of amoeba, extending its pseudopods. The whole thing is almost a millimeter across. (SmallRex, Wikimedia)

1b. Conosa “cone-shaped”: These ones may or may not have flagellate stages; if they do, the base of the flagellum has a cone-shaped microtubular basket aftre which the group is named.

1b1. Archaemoebae “ancient amoebae”: One of the old Archaezoa (see part 2), believed to be primitive Eukaryotes because they lack mitochondria. In fact, they just lost them as a consequence of living inside other organisms or such places where food is abundant and oxygen is not. Outside of hosts, they have to cease activity and withdraw into a cyst. They include Entamoeba histolitica, which causes amoebic dysentery in humans; the giant Pelomyxa palustris, which can measure several mm in length and carry thousands of nuclei; and the strange Mastigamoeba, which retains a flagellum even in its amoeboid stage.

1b2. Dictyostelida “net-like stalk”: One of the major groups of slime molds, very interesting organisms that alternate between unicellular and multicellular organization. Like the rather similar Acrasida, which are found very far away in the tree of life (see part 2), they are known as “cellular slime molds”. They grow as haploid unicellular amoebae, feeding by phagocytosis of bacteria and dead matter. However, when food becomes scarce, the separate cells emit a signal that causes them to join into a slug-like gelatinous body able to crawl around. This body eventually generates stalked fruiting bodies that scatter spores to the wind. The species Dictyostelium discoideum is a classical model in studies on cell communication and the evolution of multicellularity.

1b3. Myxogastria “slimy interior” or Myxomycota “slimy fungi”: The other major group of slime molds. In contrast with the “cellular” Dictyostelida, these ones are “plasmodial slime molds”: their cells don’t merely aggregate, but fuse together, forming a single mass of cytoplasm with thousands of unique nuclei, that is, a plasmodium. These can produce spores or flagellate “swarming” cells for dispersal, which, in turn, produce gametes for sexual reproduction. Fuligo septica (whose name means “infected soot”) and Physarum polycephalum are well known; the latter especially for its fantastic ability to self-organize its fluid body for efficient location and distribution of resources.

Two types of slime molds. Left: Dictyostelium discoideum (Dictyostelida), growing fruiting bodies from the slime. (Usman Bashir, Wikimedia) Right: Physarum polycephalum (Myxogastria), growing in a network to search food in its Petri dish. (Tim Tim, Wikimedia)

2. Opisthokonta “posterior flagllum”: So-called because their flagellate cells tend to push themselves forward with a flagellum at the back end of the cell, whereas flagellates in most other clades draw themselves forward with a flagellum beating at the front. (Think of sperm cells here; however, most animal cells are not flagellate, and most species of fungi have no flagella whatsoever.)

2a. Holomycota “all fungi”: The general neighborhood of Fungi; this clade is defined as the broadest possible clade that contains molds and mushrooms but not animals.

2a1. Nucleariida: A very small group of heterotrophic protists. It includes the genera Nuclearia, an amoeba with thin, thread-like pseudopods, and Fonticula, a cellular slime mold very similar to Dictyostelium.

2a2. Fungi: The kingdom of mushrooms, molds, and yeasts. They are all heterotrophic (unless you count lichens), extracting organic material from other organisms, usually as decomposers (indeed, they do most of the decomposition in all ecosystems), or sometimes parasites. They are never motile, except for a brief flagellate stage in some groups. Cells form thin filaments called hyphae, growing only at their tip. Hyphae contain multiple nuclei, and are surrounded by a cell wall made of chitin (a nitrogen-rich sugar polymer that also goes into the cuticle of insects). Like plants, they rely on this wall and water-filled vacuoles to keep their shape. They are usually haplontic (remember? That means the cells of their multicellular life stage have only one copy of each chromosome, rather than two as in animals). The earliest aquatic fungi appeared possibly over a billion years ago, and they started spreading on land around the same time as plants, in the Ordovician and Silurian periods (460-420 million years ago).

? 2a2a. Microsporidia: It’s unclear whether they are actual Fungi that reverted to unicellularity or just close relatives. They are intracellular parasites, which made them smallest among Eukaryotes, down to a single micrometer in length. They lost mitochondria and several other structures, but developed a harpoon-like polar filament which they use to penetrate into cells. They can produce tumor-like growths, called xenomas, in the organs of fish and Arthropods they infect.

2a2b. Blastocladiomycota “branching sprout fungi”: These basal groups still retain zoospores, that is, a unicellular flagellate stage of their lifecycle that allows easy dispersion in water. Blastoclads are microscopic, with one or more specialized cells forming at the end of the hyphae to produce spores, and root-like structures to absorb nutrients. They can be decomposers or parasites -- such as Physoderma maydis, which cause “brown spot disease” on maize leaves. Allomyces, like land plants (see part 3), has a haplodiplontic cycle, alternating a haploid body that produces gametes and a diploid body that produces flagellate spores.

Allomyces sp. (Blastocladiomycota), with sporangia growing at the end of its hyphae. (TelosCricket, Wikimedia)

2a2c. Chytridiomycota “little pot fungi”: In practice, very similar to Blastocladiomycetes. Chytrids were found in the 400 million-years-old (Early Devonian) site of Rhynie Chert, which means they were on land among the very first plants. Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis is infamous as a scourge of frogs, to whom it causes potentially fatal skin infections, having already driven to extinction up to several dozens of species. The following groups of fungi have completely lost their flagella, and thus are grouped as Amastigomycota (“thread-less fungi”).

2a2d. Mucoromycota “slimy fungi”: The core of the old phylum Zygomycota “joined fungi”, now believed to be polyphyletic. Their hyphae don’t have internal partitions, so cytoplasm can flow freely along their whole length.  The old name refers to the fact that they have upright, standing branches that can fuse their tip with their neighbors’ to form a diploid zygospore. This immediately undergoes meiosis to release haploid, non-flagellate spores. (Often this fusion can only occur between different mating types, which are not quite sexes because they are otherwise identical.) Mucoromycotans are known as “pin molds” because their erect hyphae topped with round sporangia make them look like pins stuck in their substrate. One such example is Mucor mucedo, which produces a white-grey fuzz on some cheeses; another is Rhizopus, which is used in Indonesia to ferment soy in making tempeh (R. oligosporus) and in Japan to make sake from rice (R. oryzae), and is commonly found on stale bread and old strawberries (R. stolonifer). Pilobolus crystallinus grows on dung piles, and has explosive vesicles that can shoot spores several meters away.

Closeup of a pin mold, identified as “probably Rhizopus stolonifer” (Mucoromycota), growing on a tomato. Note the upright white hyphae, each holding up a rounded sporangium. Most “fuzz” on moldy fruit looks like this. (Calimo, Wikimedia)

2a2e. Glomeromycota “yarn-ball fungi”: These fungi are also found as fossils in Rhynie Chert, and in a very important form: that of arbuscular mycorrhizae, which are structures formed by symbiotic fungi penetrating into the roots of a plant. The mycorrhizae depend on the plant for photosynthesis-produced sugar, and in exchange they provide the plant phosphorus and minerals. This association, starting from the very first terrestrial plants, is extremely important, and now found in as much as 80% of modern vascular plants (in many cases, the fungus belongs to genus Glomus). One exception is Geosiphon, which does not form mycorrhizae, but in compensation hosts a symbiotic Nostoc, a cyanobacterium you might remember from part 1, within its cells.

2a2f. Dikarya “two nuclei”: Most Fungi that you may have actually seen -- say, mushrooms -- are in this group. The name refers to a unique aspect of their reproduction: when haploid hyphae from different individuals, grown from spores, meet and meld, they exchange nuclei, as they would in any case of sexual reproduction. However, the nuclei do not merge, and the offspring will contain two nuclei in each cell. The nuclei merge into a diploid zygote only immediately before the meiosis that will produce new haploid spores -- but this occurs only within specialized structures that reside in a fruiting body. What is commonly called “mushroom” is simply the spore-producing fruiting body of a fungus, built of tightly-packed hyphae.

The generalized life cycles of Ascomycota (left) and Basidiomycota (right). Blue and red dots represent cell nuclei from different parents. “n”/”1n” and “2n” represent respectively haploid and diploid cells. “M!”, “P!”, and “K!” represent, respectively, meiosis (halving of genetic material), plasmogamy (fusion of the cytoplasm of two cells), and karyogamy (fusion of two nuclei). In plants and animals, plasmogamy and karyogamy occur almost at the same time during fertilization, but in Fungi they’re distinct events. (Silicon Prophet, Wikimedia)

2a2f1. Ascomycota: This large group (three quarters of all known species of Fungi) is named after its peculiar reproductive organ, the ascus (“sack”). This is a single rod-shaped cell, at the end of a hypha, in which the two parent nuclei merged and then underwent repeated meiosis to become (usually) eight unique haploid nuclei. When each nucleus has built a spore around itself, the ascus will break open or dissolve to release the spores.

2a2f1a. Taphrinomycotina: This early-diverging group does not show obvious similarities. Most examples are microscopic: Schizosaccharomyces pombe is a type of yeast, which is to say a fungus that has returned to a unicellular form and no longer grows into hyphae (though it still produces spores by turning into an ascus with four nuclei); found often in fruit and alcoholic drinks, it can also reproduce by binary cell division. Pneumocystis jirovecii is also unicellular, and a parasite in human lungs, where it causes pneumonia. The namesake genus Taphrina, which causes leaf curl disease in peach and almond trees, alternates a yeast-like form and hyphae, finally forming a layer of asci on infected leaves. One exception is genus Neolecta, which forms smooth, lobed fruiting bodies that are bright yellow and a few cm tall.

2a2f1b. Saccharomycotina “sugar fungi” are a group dominated by yeasts. They, too, become a four-spore ascus after meiosis; but before that, when they are still diploid thanks to the fusion of nuclei, they can reproduce by asymmetrical budding, which leaves a visible scar on the mother cell. Most important for us is the brewer’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, whose fermentation of sugar produces both ethyl alcohol and carbon dioxide, and is therefore used to brew beer and leaven bread. Another one is Candida albicans, which is commonly found in the human mouth and vagina but can become a pathogen when our immunitary system falters.

A few cells of the baker’s or brewer’s yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae (Saccharomycotina), producing daughter cells by budding. Yeasts are unicellular descendants of multicellular ancestors. (Masur, Wikimedia)

2a2f1c. Pezizomycotina: The fruiting body (ascocarp) is composed of one or more bowl- or flask-shaped apothecia, each with asci coating its concave inner surface. This group counts fourteen classes, highly variable. A few examples:

Pezizomycetes contains most Ascomycotan mushrooms. “Cap fungi” like Aleuria and Sarcoscypha have flattened reddish ascocarps that look like discarded orange peels. The edible morels (Morchella) have a sponge-like cap, formed by many hollow apothecia clustered together. The highly-prized truffles (Tuber) grow underground as root symbionts of oaks and other trees.

A group of common morels (Morchella esculenta, Pezizomycetes) in a forest in Illinois. Each “hole” in its cap is an apothecium internally coated with spore-bearing asci. (DrewHeath, Wikimedia)

Other classes are dominated by molds. Sordariomycetes is home to the bread mold Neurospora crassa, an important model organism in genetics; Fusarium venenatum, cultivated as meat substitute under the name of Quorn; the ergot Claviceps purpurea, which covers infected rye with black horn-like grotwhs, and does dreadful things to people who consume it. Eurotiomycetes has Penicillium, which is used in cheesemaking and from which the first antibiotic (penicillin) was extracted, and Aspergillus, a toxic black mold that can infest damp houses. These molds often have entirely asexual life cycles, and produce huge numbers of spores with no need of sexual recombination (the sheer amount of spores they release is, indeed, the reason they can be dangerous).

The microscopic fronds of Penicillium rubens (Eurotiomycetes), to which we owe the discovery of antibiotics. Such molds grow as blue-greyish velvet on old fruit. (Houbraken & al. 2011, “Fleming’s penicillin producing strain is not Penicillium chrysogenum but P. rubens.”)

Lecanoromycetes contains the majority of lichens. These fungi have formed a symbiotic relationship with unicellular algae or cyanobacteria that live inside their tangle of hyphae, just close enough to the surface to receive light. The fungi produce rock-dissolving acids to extract minerals, passing them to the algae which provide their host with sugars; this combination allows lichens to survive even in the most barren environments. They range in shape from thin layers encrusting rocks, to bush-like structures such as the reindeer lichen (Cladonia rangiferina) or the Iceland moss (Cetraria islandica).

Finally, let me mention Arthrobotrys, from the Orbiliomycetes: this is a rare case of a carnivorous fungus, whose hyphae form microscopic loops to trap and digest Nematode worms.

Top left: a foliose (leafy) lichen, Xanthoria parietina, growing on a branch; the little cups are the ascocarps. (Norbert Nagel, Wikimedia) Top right: a crustose (crusty) lichen, Caloplaca marina. (Roger Griffith, Wikimedia) Bottom left: a fruticose (bushy) lichen, Cladonia portentosa. (Hubertl, Wikimedia). Bottom right: the microscopic structure of a generic lichen. (Benjamin Cummings, Pearson Education; this is the closest link I could find)

2a2f2. Basidiomycota: Again, this group is named after its reproductive structure, the basidium (”little pedestal”). Again, the basidium is a single club-shaped cell in which the parent nuclei merge before undergoing meiosis. The resulting unique haploid nuclei emerge at the end of the basidium as (usually) four spores that are (usually) forcibly expelled upon maturity. These fungi have septa within their hyphae which keeps the nuclei separated from each other.

2a2f2a. Ustilaginomycotina: A clade of parasites of vascular plants, generally known as “smuts”. They start their life as haploid, saprophytic yeasts, which merge two by two in presence of host plants to form parasitic hyphae. These hyphae end in appressoria, specialized invasive structure that can pierce through any tissue thanks to hydraulic pressure. The best known species is the corn smut (Ustilago maydis), which forms (edible!) grey "mushrooms” on infected maize ears.

2a2f2b. Pucciniomycotina or Urediniomycotina: Most species of this clade are also plant parasites: they cause stunted growth and yellowing of leaves, as well as rough yellow-to-red growth which gave them the common name of “rusts”. Puccinia graminis is one of the most important pathogens of wheat and barley, while Helicobasidium longisporum attacks plants as diverse as apples, potatoes, and soy.

Left: corn smut (Ustilago maydis, Ustilaginomycotina) causes infected kernels to swell into grey “fruits” filled with the fungus’ spores; under the name huitlacoche, they are eaten in Mexico. (Kai Hirdes, Wikimedia) Right: A pear leaf infested by the pear rust (Gymnosporangium sabinae, Pucciniomycotina); the black blisters release airborne spores. (Maurice Flesier, Wikimedia)

2a2f2c. Agaricomycotina: And here we find Basidiomycotan mushrooms. Their fruiting body (basidiocarp) often has the distinctive umbrella-like shape with cap and stalk, and has lamellae coated with the basidia.

Two of its subdivisions, Tremellomycetes and Dacrymycetes, comprise the so-called “jelly fungi”, whose fruiting body is indeed gelatinous or rubbery: from the first group, the witches’ butter (Tremella mesenterica), which grows as a parasite on the branches of broadleaf trees; from the second, the yellow stagshorn (Calocera viscosa), which forms antler-like growths on the ground. They are usually edible, but not very appreciated for taste.

Agaricomycetes contains a vast diversity of mushrooms, including many edible ones: the common champignon (Agaricus bisporus) and shiitake (Lentinula edodes), which have distinctive spore-bearing "gills” and are the most consumed mushrooms in the world; the trumpet-shaped golden chanterelle (Cantharellus cibarius); the club-shaped puffball (Lycoperdon perlatus), which blows clouds of spores out of a hole at its top; the porcino (Boletus edulis), whose spores must instead escape through pores on the cap’s underside. Many others of course are toxic, or have hallucinogenic properties, such as the red-and-white Amanita muscaria or the many species of Psilocybe. The skinhorn (Phallus impudicus) is famous both for its unique phallic shape and for stinking of rotten meat -- as it should, since it relies on carrion flies to spread its spores. Polyporales, such as Ganoderma, include those flat, disk-shaped mushrooms that grow on the side of living or dead tree-trunks. A particular colony of Armillaria ostoyae in a forest in Oregon spans nine square km, which makes it one of the largest living organisms on Earth if it’s indeed a single mycelium.

A selection of Agaricomycetes. Top left: the “earthstar” Geastrum triplex. (Josef F. Stuefer, Wikimedia) Top right: a bracket fungus (Ganoderma applanatum) growing on an old trunk. (Eric Steinert, Wikimedia). Bottom left: golden chanterelles (Cantharellus cibarius). (Andreas Kunze, Wikimedia) Bottom right: the psychedelic Psilocybe semilanceata. (Arp, Wikimedia)

2b. Holozoa “all animals”: The mirror image of Holomycota, defined as th broadest possible clade that includes animals but not Fungi.

2b1. Ichthyosporea “fish spores”: All unicellular, with a chitinous cell wall; some flagellate, other amoeboids. They are mostly parasites of animals, especially amphibians and fish (most importantly, Dermocystidium, which lives in the skin and gills of freshwater fishes).

2b2. Choanoflagellatea “funnel flagellates”: Now these are interesting. These tiny protists all have a flagellum, around which stands a ring of rigid microvilli (effectively immobile cilia) that form a sort of cone-shaped funnel, or collar. When swimming, the flagellum generates a current of water away from the cell, which pushes it forward, like sperm cells; but it also creates a current of water into the collar and out of its central opening, so that smaller cells and other particles of food are trapped between the microvilli and may be ingested. Often they are surrounded by a glycoprotein gelatin, that might attach the cell to the seafloor (as in Codonosiga), to each other (as in Salpingoeca), or both (as in Proterospongia). Molecular studies suggest that Choanoflagellates are the closest kin to Animals; as it happens, sponges have some very choanoflagellate-like cells (see part 6 on that).

Salpingoeca (Choanoflagellatea) attached to a green alga, showing both the flagellum (Ci) and the sides of the collar (Kr). Water is drawn into the collar from the sides and expelled upward thanks to the motion of the flagellum, trapping food between the microvilli. (Ole Riemann, Mikro-Forum)

2b3. Metazoa or Animalia: heterotrophic and multicellular, with at at least two distinct layers of tissue: all animals from sponges to hummingbirds and from slugs to mosquitoes are here, including ourselves. See part 6, and all the following.

Summary. Dates (mostly from Parfrey &al 2011 and Tedersoo &al 2018) are in millions of years ago.

Sources Adl & al (2019), “Revisions to the Classification, Nomenclature, and Diversity of Eukaryotes” (link) Brown (2014), Principles of Microbial Diversity, APM Press Brusca (2016), Invertebrates (3rd edition), Sinauer Cavalier-Smith & al (2015), “Multigene phylogeny resolves deep branching of Amoebozoa” (link) Deacon (2005), Fungal Biology (4th edition), Blackwell Derelle & al (2015), “Bacterial proteins pinpoint a single eukaryotic root” (link) He & al (2014), “An Alternative Root for the Eukaryote Tree of Life” (link) Hickman & al (2008), Integrated Principles of Zoology (14th edition), McGraw-Hill Parfrey & al (2011), “Estimating the timing of early eukaryotic diversification with multigene molecular clocks“ (link) Schilde & Schaap (2013), “The Amoebozoa” (link) Tedersoo &al (2018), “High-level classification of the Fungi and a tool for evolutionary ecological analyses“ (link)

[zealctry]

@cainiine ( Aba ) said: ❛ i’m your mind giving you someone to talk to. ❜ ( meme. )

it’s a dirty little bar, the sort of hole in the wall that you cling to when you want to crawl away from your problems. the sort you’d never bring your friends to ( at least, not for a good time, unless it was at their expense; but then. . .  those wouldn’t be your friends, now would they? ).  it’s not exactly clean, and it’s certainly not reputable ( wouldn’t dream of confessing you’d spent your night here, into the wee hours, drinking yourself stupid ). not if you had any shred of dignity left to you. but the alcohol’s cheap and they don’t ask too many questions, turn a blind eye to much. operate in such blissful ignorance that it is obviously counterfeited ( as HE would say – money talks ; in here? it screeches and orders the very fabric of reality. as long as you don’t have too much of it, else you risk finding your throat cut. )

the clientele is hardly palatable to most people. but it suits Hidan fine, when he wants to unwind. he always chooses a place as far away from the entrance as possible, a distant viewpoint from which he can indulge in surveying the scenery before him. puppets and all. there're a couple of regulars whose habits he knows like the back of his hand, now ( who operate like clockwork in chasing their vices ), but there is always the odd variable here and there, making it worth his time. making it interesting. there’s one thing that Hidan has learned from this habit of people-watching ( a rarely indulged habit, as his skin often itches to do rather than to sit still long enough to SEE ) – it’s that everyone is guilty of something. and that oftentimes, people are neither angels nor demons. just pieces of paper, blown in the wind. aimless, with little direction – their only goal being to find a goal worth having, snapping a few necks in the process ( often their own ), before ruining any chances as they have it in their grasp. self-sabotage at its finest ( or maybe that just speaks to the patrons here. half of them drowning themselves in bottles. )

Hidan clicks his tongue at the thought, and momentarily diverts himself from its finer intricacies by reaching for the open beerbottle on his table. spinning it around on its axis, the gesture lazy, taking in the label with unseeing eyes ( just blotches of colour ). the sight that greets him when he raises his gaze again. . . . that gives him pause. in a way few things have done, over the past week. ( past week? month, maybe. )

the man looks ( eerie, as if liquid shadows had frozen into a humanoid form, suddenly there )  expensive, Hidan thinks, even as his eyes rake over that black suit. therefore, he is strikingly out of place. as if someone had mixed up their chess pieces and mistakenly placed the black queen onto the wrong side of the board, admist white pawns and a single bishop. it's an interesting study in contrasts. Hidan doesn’t deign to kick off his boots from the opposite chair, but he does pluck out the earbud from his left ear, regaining access to his full auditory range.

HA! how you like that !? ( ah! ) you gonna like THAT, da ra ra da ta . . . .

a figment of your imagination, the man offers as explanation, and Hidan . . .. ( laughs ) ‘s mouth curls into an amused little smirk. behind closed lips, his tongue runs the length of his teeth, pausing upon the edge of a canine. call it instinct.

( his pale head tilts to the side. )

              “ are you? ” he asks, running a finger over the rim of the bottleneck, the gesture nearly obscene, but then he brings the beer to his lips. cool liquid travels down his throat. he can barely taste it. ( it’s a contemplation that isn’t one. a question that isn’t one. ) whether things were about to turn good or ugly, Hidan meets them with gaze at half-mast. ( still, it’s lucid and sharp, if one knows where to look. )  “ ...I’ve seen better. ”

a jest. ( there’s a kernel of truth to it, though.)

           “ do my mental fabrications wet their throat as they talk, or are they here just to give me a lecture? ”