#why make trillions when we could make *Billions*

[seiya234]

21 grams lighter

that website, amirite? anyway can't fucking believe alex did it again.

----

“Uncle Dipper, the school said you had to sign this?”

“Me specifically?”

Hank frowned. “Well, an adult in our house.”

“You’re the first one we found,” Willow added.

Dipper picked up the paper, skimming it quickly and. Oh.

Oh my god.

“Mabel are you in here?”

As the triplets wandered off, task done, a head covered in googly eyes popped out the kitchen door. “Mmmyes?”

Dipper brandished the papers. “Do you remember MADD?”

“Moms Are Down with Drugs? Yeah. We had to do those worksheets, and go to that rally in the gym, and there was a dog in a jacket.” Mabel paused. “Also, I don’t think they actually knew what it meant when you say you’re down with something.”

“Okay, so MADD… but for selling your soul.”

The googly eyes, with impeccable comedic timing, all fell off of Mabel’s face.

“No.”

“Oh my god, there’s a pamphlet.”

By now, Mabel had joined him at the table. “’Soul Selling: Not Even Once!’ Oh. Oh Dipper, this is bad.”

He was trying to hold in peals of laughter. “I know!”

“I don’t think this is going to discourage anyone.”

“I know.”

“And look, they basically give you the directions to summon five different demons in the name of Not Doing That, this is really, really bad.”

“I̶t̷'̴s̵ ̸f̸a̷n̶t̸a̴s̶t̷i̸c̵!̴”

Mabel looked at him, just looked at him for a minute, sadness welling deep in her eyes.

“No. No it’s really not.”

------

Trillions.

A number that is truly incomprehensible, much less in the context of time.

There were souls that rotted in that stomach longer than the oldest rocks of Earth.

--------

[from the M.A.D.D. Brochure, 2285]

“So remember kids, selling your soul doesn’t just effect you. It effects every version of you! It is an indelible mark that will linger for eternity, never changing, never going away. Paths, choices, loved ones, all will wither in the face of the horrible decision that you made! Eternity is forever, don’t make it your fault!”

[penciled in the margins, a note: “so we aren’t going to talk about social inequality or systemic racism then are we?”]

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

(the most eternal, sacred part of a being)

Dipper had been a demon for all of a month, if that, when he was offered his first soul. For a while, he… didn’t really do anything with them.

When he did, it was of course super traumatic for everyone involved but eh, that kind of went with the territory of everything that was happening in his life lately.

Point being, he never was sure why Bill kept everyone trapped inside of him, constantly screaming, constantly playing beach tunes to drown them out. No, better to eat them, get the power, set them free.

Like, obviously, not great to be eating souls in the first place, and yeah, yeah, he could tell, even ten thousand (ten million) (ten billion) years later who he had crunch munched through, but like, they were able to be out there living their lives! Doing stuff. Cycling back through.

Honestly. What had Bill been planning to do with them?

--------

For the first week after it happened, animals ran away from Mabel.

Not just cats and dogs but all animals. Flocks of birds would fly off at her approach, deer would get near the Shack and then run off, and Gompers disappeared into the woods.

After the bear ran screaming from her, Mabel put two and two together, and called Dipper.

“Is this forever?”

Dipper frowned. “What do you mean?”

Mabel waved at her body. “This.”

(it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair she was only 16/18/22/17, she didn’t mean for this to happen, she only wanted to live, he only wanted her to live, this wasn’t f a i r )

“Oh. Uh. Um.”

“Dipper. Just. Tell. Me.”

“Hold on.” He reached into his stomach, and pulled out something…. Ineffable.

It felt like every single cell in Mabel’s body was reaching towards it, she found herself walking towards Dipper’s open hand.

The demon looked at her.

“You can have it back.”

She was crying. When did she start crying? And more worryingly, why did it feel like this was the first real, true thing she had felt in a week?

He pushed the Ineffable thing into her chest, and Mabel sank to the ground, sobbing. She felt whole again.

She didn’t realize that she hadn’t been whole, not truly, not until now.

Alcor smirked. “Consider it… out on lease. I’ll take it back eventually.”

She should have challenged him on that. Should have asked him about that. Should have done a million trillion other things.

But Mabel was human. And scared. And so, so very young.

---------

(you were birds)

A young man with fluffy brown hair, mixing his blood with his sister and his new brother-in-law, making a promise.

(you were trees with roots entangled)

They made a family together, it was a beautiful family, they let him stay, stay when anyone else would have told him to leave.

(wherever we go next, whatever you choose, I will always be right there with you)

They fit, like spoons in a drawer, like yin and yang, salt and pepper, ketchup and mustard, literally a million different pairings you could compare the two of them to. They weren’t perfect but love doesn’t need to be, and shouldn’t be perfect.

(that’s done buddy)

One grave

(congratulations)

Another grave, but eighty years later.

(you chose Alcor instead)

[mediumgayitalian]

fic rec friday 15

hi!! welcome to fic rec friday. every week, i pick five fics i have bookmarked and rec them with a little review. check them out!

We Don't Know How This Could End (let's hope it won't have to) by @buoyantsaturn

"I’m not married, I thought you were married!” “You’re the one wearing a ring!” “Well, so are you!” followed by: relationship fluff, divorce jokes, and of course, a(n un)healthy dose of miscommunication

OBSESSED OBSESSED OBSESSED OBSESSED OBSESSED. secret relationship has ALWAYS been my everything and love at first sight plus married plus literally everything. i’m. gonna lose it. this fic was so ROMCOM but in the BEST POSSIBLE WAY, like there were stakes and angst but it was still lighthearted? somehow? like i KNEW it was gonna end well bc i had SO MUCH faith in them. like the best possible romcoms. i adore this fic always

2. could this be love at first sight? (oh wait, I said that before) by @buoyantsaturn

Nico sighed, unable to believe what was actually about to come out of his mouth. “Will you come with me to a friend’s wedding?” “Like...as your date?” 

THE RINGPOP THING WAS SO ROMANTIC 😭😭 truly this fic made me SWOON. every good amazing lovely incredible trope at once i ADORED. secret relationship especially my fucking BELOVED, but FAKE RELATIONSHIP to SECRET RELATIONSHIP??? I WENT INSANE??? cj as per usual u ATE. also i know this isn’t the focus but if i was piper i would have gone BALLISTIC 💀 "why is everyone talking about your relationship at my wedding" yeah me personally i would have blown up LMFAO

3. I'll Be There For You by @buoyantsaturn

remember that one part in FRIENDS where ross gets married and monica sleeps with chandler because she's lonely, and then they do a really bad job of keeping their relationship a secret? that's this fic, except it's solangelo

is this one similar in vibes to fic rec #2? yes. do i care at all? no. i could (and have done) sit in front of CJs fics and just scroll & keep scrolling. never misses. this was so FUN and i LAUGHED and POOR LEO. what a good time

4. Will Happen, Happening, Happened by @buoyantsaturn

“Nico!” Will’s voice came from behind him, followed by the slamming of a door. “Nico, I figured it out!” Will ran toward him, grabbing his arms and dragging him down once he got close enough, and pressed their lips together. “All I had to do was-- Annabeth! How long have you been standing there?” “I knew it!” Annabeth exclaimed. “No, wait, uh--” Will shoved Nico away suddenly. “This isn’t what it looks like?” (Or: 5 times their relationship gets found out and 1 time it didn't)

adventure time au!!! hell yeah!!! and yeah at this point i realise i was indeed scrolling thru the secret relationship tag in buoyantsaturn's works page when i was making these bookmarks. whatever. i have Moods. secret relationship and 5+1 are literally my fave tropes of all time, okay, i loved this, it was funny and camp and honestly what more do you need

5. Knight In Shining Armor by @buoyantsaturn

“The knights will need to keep a close eye on these travelers for the duration of their stay. You, however, Sir William, must keep close watch on the Prince." "Of course, Your Highness," Will said.

the my lord to my love pipeline…..but my knight remaining constant……oh i’m weak in the knees. royal aus will ALWAYS kill be and they are one thousand billion trillion times better when one of them is a knight it is ICONIC. ICONIC i say. and another secret relationship fic sue me i hope yall are int he mood lmfao

thank you for joining me this friday!! happy reading!!

[blueishspace]

Looped sun 4

Loop #127

Scar and Scott were admiring the view of 20 hermits running around like headless chickens while wearing dragon heads.

Scott: What did Grian do this time?

Scar: Oh you know...

Scott: I don't.

Scar: Started a game of demise...and then put curse of binding dragon heads on them while they were sleeping.

Scott: Oh. Hmmm... do you think he can do that in 3rd Life or something-

Grian: Why didn't I think of that!?!! Also, hi Scott.

Loop #130

Scar: Grian come with me!

Grian: Wha-

Scar: No time!

Scar tears Grian way just as a zombie tries to get a swing on him.

Grian: Scar what's going on!?

Scar: It's a crafting dead loop!

Grian: Well then.

Loop #134

Scott: Scar you look happy today.

Grian: It's his last loop, he had a rollercoaster tycoon loop.

Scott: Guessing because of Scarland?

Grian: I mean probably.

Scar: Do you want to see the theme park?

Scott: ... I mean sure but how?

Scar: I put it in my susbpace.

Scott: Subspace?

Grian: You did what!?!

Scar: Yeah! I do that with every theme park I make so I can combine them into one mega theme park!

Loop #136

It took Grian 2 days to realize something was wrong, it took him a week to realize what exactly it was and an additional day to think about how much he hated the world tree sometimes.

Grian: Of course this had to happen.

Scar: Uh?

Grian: Scar? Is the sun big?

Loop #141

The server was corrupted, covered in mycelium and mushrooms. X had tried his best but he too couldn't defeat the mushroom menace...and there...the cause of it smiled wickedly...

X: Who are-

Only to be interrupted by Scar.

Scar: How did you do this!?!

Grian: Had a MHA loop, looped as Kinoko. It's an op quirk really.

Scar: Oohhh, carry on then.

X: W-what are the two you talking about?

Loop #143

Scott: You know , eventually this loop will end.

Grian: Yeah? The tree isn't going to be broken forever.

Scott: In maybe billions or trillions or maybe more years... what will we be like?

Scar: I- uh. I never really tought about it.

Grian: Very different probably, I'd hate to stagnate.

Scott: I mean, Scar you are a demigod now and Grian is already a full on god!

Grian: Titan-

Scott: Details. And we have been looping just more then 100 times! What will happen in the next whoknowsillions of loops?

Scar: I-...

Scott: I'm just...scared.

Loop #145

Grian: No Scar, I'm not going full sun titan at the boat boys just because they burnt your pandas.

Scar: Please?

Grian: No

Scar: Pleeeeaaaase?

Grian: No.

Scar: Please please please please please?

Grian: ... I'll do it... but not full full I'm not vaporizing anyone this time.

Scar: ... I'll take it!

Loop #148

It was Double Life this time... Wait what? Double Life again? Pearl couldn't understand how or why. Why would she of all people be sent back to Double Life? She wasn't going to waste this or anything but it was still confusing.

Scott didn't get it, Double Life started like normal and then Pearl joined in... That never really happened before but it could have been explained by a variant. Then she wasn't surprised when they discovered that they were soulbound or when Jimmy and Tango died.

Scott was acting really weird, he would just look at Pearl without reason. And he acted so... Bored? Pearl couldn't put her finger on it but something was off.

Scott really needed to know what was going trough Pearl's head, she just annhilated all their enemies... This was so so so weird...

Pearl was frozen, it was just her and Scott again, was he going to blow himself up again? She knew it was a game but it wasn't very plesant the first time around.

Pearl: Scott! No! Not again?

Scott: Wait again? Is time... reapeating for you?

Pearl: You too!?!

Scott: Wait, the whole game?

Pearl: We didn't notice?

Scott: Well, fuck me I guess. Grian and Scar will never let me live this down.

Loop #152

Pearl: I always wanted to be in season 7, mate!

Grian: Well here you are! What do you think?

Pearl: It's so...weird? In a good way.

Scar: Want to see what I'm working on?

Pearl: Are you kidding me mate? Of course I want to!

Grian was drinking tea when Pearl became mayor, honestly he didn't mind anymore at least this one made sense.

Loop #155

Spiderman: Poultry man is something wrong man?

Grian: I...it's a...loop thing.

Spiderman: I'm listening.

Grian: I did a ping at the beginning and I'm sure Pearl is here too but I can't find her anywhere? I'm worried she might be in danger.

Spiderman: Oh that's a problem, well sometimes Yggdrasil likes to have fun, is there something from baseline that could tell you where she might be?

Grian: I guess there's the scarlet Pea- oh ...

Pietro: Sister, when will we go not that we are free?

Pearl: Oh, I just know a place.

Loop #157

Grian: If you could choose the next new looper who would you choose? I would choose...Mumbo.

Scar: Oh Mumbo too...or Cub! Cub would be fun.

Grian: The multiverse isn't ready for a looper Cub.

Scott: Jimmy, it would be nice I think. Lizzie and Joel too.

Pearl: I'm going to say Gem or Cleo, there are way too many guys now. No offence.

Scar: Wha- That's not true! We-

Scar was quickly shut up by the wave of an hand and a bit of chaos magic.

Loop #160

Scott: A roleswap variant? I think I'm in Grian's place?

Grian: Uh... alone in Double Life. I think I'm in Pearl's.

Pearl: I got Scar's so I'm guessing Scar got Scott's place.

Grian: Does that mean Scar is alone in Empires right now?

...

...

Scott: I'll get you into the server before the paperwork kills him again.

Grian: Thank you.

Loop #162

Grian woke up with an headache in a middle of a room... after looking around for a bit he realized he never saw this place before. Cautiously he sent out a ping and-

Scott: Welcome!

Grian: Scott!? Where are you? What is this place?

Scott: I present to you my first looper proof escape room!

Grian: No, it can't be...

Scott: But it is!

Pearl: Mate?

Scott: Yeah?

Pearl: I hate you.

Scott: Fair enough.

Pearl: I will get revenge.

Scott: ... Worth it.

Scar: I did it! So fast too!

Scott: ...

Scar: Scott?

Scott: *sigh* Scar...

Scar: What's wrong?

Scott: That was only the first room.

Scar: Nooooo!

Loop #165

Grian woke up in a room, only one window into the outside. It took him 3 seconds to connect the dot.

Grian: Ok, I'm starting to get tired of the sun stuff now. It's a bit predictable.

Of course he had to loop as Rapunzel... at least the healing incantation might come in handy in future loops.

Loop #168

Scott: I know what you are Scar.

Scar: Eh?!? Where did you-

Scott: I finally understand.

Scar: Uhhh understand what?

Scott: Why you ask Grian to go titan-god mode so often.

Scar: I just...find it cool.

Scott: Quite the opposite, you find it hot don't you?

Scar: What? No-

Scott: I'm onto you.

Loop #169

Grian walked to his base to see all of his chests and shulks floating in midair and moving to organise themselves in rows.

Grian: How are you doing that?

Pearl: Oh, I got a Star Wars Loop. Became a sith. You know the drill.

Scar: WHY DOES EVERYONE GET A STAR WARS LOOP BUT ME!?! WHY!??

Grian: ... You learnt to use the force and you are...organising my storage system??? ...why are you like this?

Loop #172

Scott: Another bad loop?

Grian: Unfortunately.

Scott: Want to talked about it.

Grian: Got looped as Ghostbur and was stuck in Limbo for 20 years.

Scott: ...Yikes.

Loop #175

Pearl had been at this way too long, the urge to just use chaos magic was tempting but it was a question of principle.

Katara: You are pushing way too hard, It's not going to work if you try to order it around... It's a push and pull.

Pearl: Push and pull.

Katara: Look at the ocean and moon, the movement of the tides. Feel the natural push and pool around you and coax the water like the moon does.

Pearl: Like the moon you say? Push....and pull...push and pull.

Katara: See, you are learning quickly, isn't it much better now?

Pearl: It is. Thank you.

Prev Next First

[ckret2]

Spitballing ideas here, mayhaps it could be like a, "reconstruction" kind of thing for the shape henchmaniacs? Bill could have tried recreating them in some shape or form with magic tech or sheer fuckin will, and those versions are gonna be like, "imperfect" or not exxaccttlyyy the same, so it adds to that oh boy crushing guilt aspect or whatever?

Or one may pull some dimensional freaky deaky stuff and get the AXOLOTL involved in some way shape or form?

Honestly what I'm curious about how you're writing the henchmaniac shapes is like, the different designs and stuff they all have. Are their different traits just something you're writing into Euclidya ((like Kryptos having a separate mouth and eye, Hectorgon not having any eyes or legs and having facial hair (also a separate mouth), Amorphous shape not having a mouth but also she's a she and not any specific kind of shape but we know lines aren't women because of tbob so maybe she's just like, really irregular in flatland?))

Like is that going to be normal in Euclydia for different shapes, or are those strange mutations, or is it something they gained after escaping from the dimension? (Shaking from excitement rn channeling my hyperfixation onto this)

Back when I headcanoned they were some of the sparse survivors of Bill's destroyed dimension, my headcanon was "if you've lived a trillion goddamn years, you don't look the way you did when you started." None of them look anything like they did in their home dimension—for starters, why would their eyes/mouths be inside their bodies where, in the second dimension, they'd be useless?

Bill moved his eyemouth inside of his body. Kryptos moved his eyemouth inside his body and also separated it into an eye and a mouth. Hectorgon moved his eyemouth inside his body and decided to make it look more like a mouth. Morph moved their eyes inside their body/bodies. All of them had to get exoskeletons, or else their organs would be constantly exposed and that's a good way to get delicate organs stabbed. Other changes were personal preference. Kryptos wanted weird etchings. Hectorgon wanted to be a hexagonal prism and made himself 3D. Bill realized he'd rather be a pyramid. Etc.

Consider how much a single human could alter their appearance in 100 years with all of the technology currently available to us—amputation, prosthetics, tattoos, piercings, weight gain, weight loss, wrinkles, hair dye, hair loss, testosterone, estrogen, I could keep going. Now take all the changes a human could experience in 100 years—and multiply it ten billion times, and that's how long the shapes have had to alter their appearances with the help of eons of technological/magical developments.

It's amazing they still look even vaguely like the same species.

Now, having said all that:

As of TBOB, literally everything I just typed is now irrelevant and not true, because none of them are Euclideans except for Bill.

They could well look different from him simply due to the fact that they're aliens from another dimension(s). Information/headcanons about Euclydia are irrelevant to species that aren't from Euclydia.

[nasa]

Scary Space Stories to Tell in the Dark

The universe is full of dazzling sights, but there’s an eerie side of space, too. Nestled between the stars, shadowy figures lurk unseen. The entire galaxy could even be considered a graveyard, full of long-dead stars. And it’s not just the Milky Way – the whole universe is a bit like one giant haunted house! Our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will illuminate all kinds of spine-chilling cosmic mysteries when it launches in 2027, but for now settle in for some true, scary space stories.

Flickering Lights

One of the first signs that things are about to get creepy in a scary movie is when the lights start to flicker. That happens all the time in space, too! But instead of being a sinister omen, it can help us find planets circling other stars.

Roman will stare toward the heart of our galaxy and watch to see when pairs of stars appear to align in the sky. When that happens, the nearer star – and orbiting planets – can lens light from the farther star, creating a brief brightening. That’s because every massive object warps the fabric of space-time, changing the path light takes when it passes close by. Roman could find around 1,000 planets using this technique, which is called microlensing.

The mission will also see little flickers when planets cross in front of their host star as they orbit and temporarily dim the light we receive from the star. Roman could find an additional 100,000 planets this way!

Galactic Ghosts

Roman is going to be one of the best ghost hunters in the galaxy! Since microlensing relies on an object’s gravity, not its light, it can find all kinds of invisible specters drifting through the Milky Way. That includes rogue planets, which roam the galaxy alone instead of orbiting a star…

…and solo stellar-mass black holes, which we can usually only find when they have a visible companion, like a star. Astronomers think there should be 100 million of these black holes in our galaxy.

Stellar Skeletons

Black holes aren’t the only dead stars hiding in the sky. When stars that aren’t quite massive enough to form black holes run out of fuel, they blast away their outer layers and become neutron stars. These stellar cores are the densest material we can directly observe. One sugar cube of neutron star material would weigh about 1 billion tons (or 1 trillion kilograms) on Earth! Roman will be able to detect when these extreme objects collide.

Smaller stars like our Sun have less dramatic fates. After they run out of fuel, they swell up and shrug off their outer layers until only a small, hot core called a white dwarf remains. Those outer layers may be recycled into later generations of stars and planets. Roman will explore regions where new stars are bursting to life, possibly containing the remnants of such dead stars.

Cosmic Cobwebs

If we zoom out far enough, the structure of space looks like a giant cobweb! The cosmic web is the large-scale backbone of the universe, made up mainly of a mysterious substance known as dark matter and laced with gas, upon which galaxies are built. Roman will find precise distances for more than 10 million galaxies to map the structure of the cosmos, helping astronomers figure out why the expansion of the universe is speeding up.

Learn more about the exciting science this mission will investigate on Twitter and Facebook.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[bisexual-lemon1]

I wanna talk about the main four mechanisms albums, and the ways in which they tackle tragedy. This shouldn’t be too long, and I’m kinda new to writing essays like this, but it seemed like fun.

Firstly OUATIS, I could go on and on abour OUATIS, like how the tragedy of OUATIS is baked into the genre. from the get go it’s about war and trauma and fascism, all things that while not exclusively, lend themselves to death and murder. You can listen to the first half of OUATIS and realize “oh shit, everyone involved is gonna die” by genre and the thematics of it alone.

Because that’s what war does

That’s what war is

For UDAD it’s a little more esoteric, and I probably have the least to say about it cuz it’s not my least Favoirte, not bad, just my least favorite. I think the best way to describe it is the line from twisted threads “how can you expect to escape if you were caught in a web before you began.” It’s made clear from the base set up that the olympians control everything, and as much as a heroic victory and triumph would be nice, some things just truly are too big to fail. Though arguably, amongst all the albums it has the best ending, the Olympians may not be brought down(in the album), the city might not be saved

But Ulysses gets to die, truly die and rest.

Something billions, perhaps trillions had stolen from them.

HNOC is definitely one of my favorites on this, being such a distinct and fun story and narrative. The tragedy is of the people themselves, and in a way I think it makes it the “most tragedy” out of the four, all of its preventable, yet entirely understandable. Hell, “just this once there could be a happy ending” is literally a line in it. Mordred’s actions are deplorable and violent and ruin everything but they’re understandable. He lost everything, why should the world live? It’s a dip into true nihilism and whag could lead someone to feel that way. Sometimes worlds are saved, and sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes worlds are killed, sometimes they simply grow old, but sometimes they kill themselves. And I think what makes it the most special compared to the other three is when it becomes doomed. OUATIS is about a bloody war, UDAD they were born into a web, TBI yhe conflict itself was resolved 80 years before the modern day the story is told through. But HNOC wasnt doomed from the start, the station wasn’t guaranteed to die, the Saxons weren’t guaranteed to be slaughtered. Yet nonetheless they were.

And finally TBI, now it’s what rly got my brain going on all of this, because I had the question “where does the tragedy become inevitable?” And frankly, there’s a lot of answers. TBI is doomed because the nuclear chaos was on its way before lyfrassir was even before. Because Odin wouldn’t stop no matter what. Because even if they hadn’t of messed with kyvasir there would have been dozens of other bifrost trains. But more than ALL OF THAT I think that the tragedy is inevitable because, as the album says. “A day, a week, a thousand years, means naught to what the train draws near.” It doesn’t matter, even if Loki’s missile had killed Odin and stopped the bifrost, someone else would have come along. Even the victory we got in the album itself, it wasn’t a victory, it was merely a prolonging, inevitable death was merely stalled, that’s the closest thing anyone could ever get to victory against the roiling nuclear chaos.

[khoipyan]

tell me you love me! ☆

how they confess to you.

gn!reader, you/your, romantic

characters; floyd leech, leona kingscholar, rook hunt

warnings; no major ones, heavily implied mutual feelings between you both, reader lives in ramshackle for rook’s part but is not stated whether to be yuu or not

notes; slowly trying to expand who i write for… also i want a simple writing format layout and not a billion trillion headers so here we go ig 😿 on the other hand YAY MOTIVATION!! 

☆ FLOYD makes sure you hear him loud and clear.

ehh? confess? hasn’t he been clear enough already? or are you just dense?

azul tells him that to be officially dating, floyd needs to ACTUALLY (and properly) confess. however, floyd doesn’t see the need. have his little gifts of trinkets, random items and heavy affection not won you over already? still, he’ll make sure to confess properly if that’s what’s needed.

and so, floyd searches for all over until he finds you. resisting the urge to tackle you in a lovingly-death grip, he explains how he likes you, more than friends! and that you should like him back too!

as you accept his confession of love, you find that floyd has impulsively tackled you with a passionate squeeze. 

☆ LEONA meets you in person.

it’s a bit awkward for him, but it’s the easiest way to convey feelings.

he could have done it over text, but he thinks that it’s too low effort to show how he really likes you. writing letters takes too much time, especially when his mind wanders off while thinking of what he could possibly put on the paper with his pen.

so, meet leona by the botanical gardens at a specific time and he’ll (embarrassingly but) gladly pour his heart out for you to hear.

☆ ROOK goes all out.

why do you think he’s a self-proclaimed, ‘chasseur d’amour’? ah, my mistake. he’s LE chasseur d’amour. emphasis on THE hunter of love? i think my point has gotten across by now.

absolutely prepares the best confession yet. nothing too heavy so that if he gets rejected it all goes to waste, but he puts enough effort to be able to subtly hook you.

it’s no surprise when a bouquet of flowers with a wax-sealed letter placed neatly within it meets its way to the ramshackle doorstep, now is it? but the letter is anonymous, telling you to meet the person at a specific place.

now here comes the final part. when you arrive at your location, rook let’s his feelings to you spill out his chest. he makes sure to add french midway to his sentences per usual, and spouts out poetic words only he would be able to put together.

rook could never admit it, he says that you’ve put him in a position where he is deeply head over heels. you’ve trapped him. he’s deeply in love with you.

and yet he does admit it, but only for him and yourself to hear.

( due to be edited at anytime )

[inferencesarchives]

Hello there!

Could I ask for various cookies x cheating reader?

Where the cookies walk past a restaurant and they saw reader and someone else inside, they were talking and laughing that it looked like a date and that's what the cookies thought. So the next day they confront reader about it asking what they did to deserve that, but in reality it's just reader and an old friend catching up and the cookies won't let reader a second to explain

Not What It Seems

capsaicin, dark choco, madeleine x gn!reader

summary: one of your old friends is in town, and you decide to go to dinner with them and catch up. when the cookies pass by and see you with someone else through the window, they automatically assume the worst.

warnings: hurt/comfort, mentions of cheating (obviously), physical touch, crying (capsaicin), petnames (dear/dearest - madeleine), general anxiety, also maybe ooc idk i wrote this at 4 am

Capsaicin Cookie hummed a tune as he leisurely walked. He had no destination in particular quite yet; Instead, he was window shopping in order to find a nice gift to surprise you with once you git home.

In the window of a small hobby shop, Capsaicin Cookie noticed that they happened to be selling a particular item used in a hobby that you had been getting into recently. Smiling to himself as he checked out the item from the cashier, he figured he hit the jackpot. Though, at the same time, he figured he should get you something else as well to go with it. Thus, he began walking down the streets once again.

Not long after, he noticed a peculiar scene inside one of the restaurants he was passing in the corner of his eye. He looked over, hoping that he saw wrong, that he was mistook it in his vision.

His heart dropped. At a table inside the restaurant, Capsaicin Cookie watched as you sat, enjoying a seemingly pleasant conversation with Prune Juice Cookie. Suddenly, millions of thoughts were going through his head, all of them so fast it was almost hard to keep up with, but to him, one thing was abundantly clear: he had failed you as a partner. Clearly, he hadn't done enough for you, and you had moved on.

He rushed home, unable to watch any longer. He had to figure out what he had done wrong. He had to figure out what he should've done for you. As he sat on the couch, the gift he bought for you laying next to him, a billion possibilities ran through his mind. Had he said something that you took the wrong way? Had he been too clingy? Had he been too distant? Had he not shown enough interest in the things you talked about with him? Had he shown too much interest in those things? Had he-

"Capsaicin Cookie? Hey, what happened? Why are you crying?" Your sweet voice along with your hand finding its way onto his cheek snapped him back to reality. He couldn't speak. It felt like his heart had been torn into a trillion pieces, yet at the same time, he didn't want you to leave.

"Hey, it's alright. I'm here. I've got you. You can tell me anything," you gently whispered as you sat beside him. You pulled him in for a hug, "I love you, you know. With all my heart. You can tell me anything. I won't judge." He held you tightly, as if he was afraid you would disappear if he let go.

"...You and Prune Juice Cookie...Are you two a thing? I saw you together through the window," his voice came out quiet and shaky, almost like he was afraid that if he said the words aloud, they would become truth. "Oh, Capsaicin Cookie...Really, it's not like that at all. We were just catching up with each other since it's been a while since we last spoke to each other. I didn't mean to make you think I like him more than you, and I'm really sorry I forgot to tell you that I was going to hang out with him for a bit. Really, I didn't mean for it to slip my mind, and I didn't mean to make you think that I don't like you anymore, because that's not true at all. I love you. I love you more than anything, Capsaicin Cookie. You mean the world to me," you affirmed your affections for him and nuzzled into his neck.

"You promise?"

"I promise."

It wasn't often that Dark Choco Cookie went out. After all, many other cookies feared him. Today was different, though. Today, Dark Choco Cookie decided that brief stroll would help clear his mind. Therefore, he was out and about today.

He honestly hadn't expected to find anything interesting in the windows of the shops scattered around the little town in which the two of you were staying for a few days. Most of the stored sold the same things. Essentially, there wasn't anything out of the ordinary nor was there anything that caught his eye.

What did catch his eye, though, was a certain scene in the park. Something out of place. Whilst everything else in the park was completely normal, the sight of you sitting and chatting with Red Velvet Cookie on one of the benches made his fists clench.

He quietly walked back to the inn where the two of you had been staying, many a question in his mind. As he sat down on the bed, negative thoughts invaded his brain. He had done everything he could for you. He devoted himself to you. He knew he didn't deserve you, yet he chased after your love and affection endlessly. You gave him hope, and now that hope was shattered into millions of sad little pieces.

He didn't even bother looking at you when you walked in the room, parting his lips and getting straight to the point, "So, you and Red Velvet Cookie, huh? You prefer him over me?" Eyes wide, you attempt to shut down his accusations, "No, it isn't like that! We-" "You don't have to lie to me," he cut you off, "I know I don't deserve you." Teary-eyed, you desperately try to get him to understand, "I promise it isn't like that, please listen to me!"

He looked up at you for the first time since you entered. He said nothing. "I swear to you, it isn't like that. We were just catching up, I promise. We just hadn't seen each other for a while and I figured it would be polite if I said hello. I didn't realise that you would think it was like that, I swear it isn't! I love you more than anyone else in the world, I promise! I would never even think of loving anyone else," you pleaded with him, praying that he would realise that you truly wouldn't do something like that to him.

He sighed, "...I suppose you're right. I'm sorry for jumping to conclusions. Just, please, promise me that you'll tell me whenever you're going to hang around a friend in the future. I just...get scared that you'll leave me sometimes, so if you told me about your outings beforehand, it would help." Gently, you placed your hand on his, and said, "Of course I'll tell you. I'm sorry I made you think that I was going to leave you. I promise I'll stay by your side until the very end."

"...Thank you."

Seeing Madeleine Cookie out walking the streets wasn't a surprise to most other cookies. Most days out of the week, the paladin would leisurely peruse the many shops throughout the city. Oftentimes, he would be out buying little things that reminded him of you, and today was no different.

He wanted to get you something nice after he finished his work for the day so that he could surprise you when he got home, as he often did. Unfortunately, however, the shops didn't have very many things that he thought you might like today. Eventually, he walked out of yet another shop empty-handed, frustrated that the place didn't have anything that you'd find interesting. As he was about to suck it up and head home, a scene in the window of the restaurant across the street made him feel even worse.

There, at a table in the corner, you sat, in a seemingly in-depth discussion with Espresso Cookie. Immediately, questions started forming in his mind. Was he seeing this right? You, the cookie who was practically an angel sent down from the heavens to bless him with warmth and love, were quite possibly going out on a date with Espresso Cookie? No, no, no, that can't be right. Surely you were just having a friendly chat, right? Surely you weren't cheating on him? You wouldn't do that...would you?

Madeleine Cookie had to know what was going on. He simply wouldn't allow any possible negative thoughts to linger in his mind any longer. With newfound resolve, he pushed open the door to the restaurant and swiftly walked over to your table.

"...And that's how you- Oh, wow, would you look at that. Mr. Light-For-Brains is here. Hello Madeleine Cookie," Espresso Cookie greeted as you turned around to face your beloved idiot. "Madeleine Cookie!" you excitedly jump up to hug him, a big grin adorning your face. He wrapped his arms around you in return. "Hello, dearest. Am I...interrupting something? A...date, perhaps?" Madeleine asked, quickly getting to the point.

"A date? With him? Pfft, no, no, not at all. We were just catching up. It's been a while since Espresso Cookie and I have seen each other, after all. Don't worry, it's not a date, I promise. Here, sit with us! Oh, and order yourself some food, too!" you explained. "Ah, I see! Thank you for affirming your feelings towards me!" He smiled at you as you giggled, "I love you, you adorable idiot." "I love you too, dear," he said as he kissed your forehead.

"Ugh, get a room, lovebirds..."

"Hey!"

"How rude, Espresso Cookie!"

a/n: my god this request is OLDDDDD to the person who requested im SO sorry for keeping you waiting for so long i just could never think of any good ideas for this fic for the longest time but now it's finally here yay again im so sorry :,) since u didn't specify who u wanted i decided on a cast that would have more diverse reactions so that each part wouldn't seem like the same think over and over again, also i added comfort in at the end of each part because if i write hurt/no comfort i and many others WILL CRY so,,, yea and like i said in a bunch of my recent previous works, im trying to clear out my requests so yea,,, also i haven't been able to sleep a wink at all tonight unfortunately so ive been grinding fics instead lol, im abt to go to bed tho dw yall (it's 5 am help)

thanks for stopping by!

wanna submit a request? see my requesting rules here.

taglist:

wanna be tagged? let me know!

[hopefuloverfury]

3, 9, 26, 44 for those asks! 😁

Hi, lovely!! These got long, so I gotta stick them under a cut. Thanks for taking the time to send an ask!! <33

3. Do you like pasta?

🌱 I think my Nona would roll over in her grave if I said I didn't like pasta. I LOVE pasta! Gnocchi is my favorite, but I also adore farfalle. That was her preferred pasta noodle, and she made it every Sunday when I was growing up. I love her to death, and I miss her every day.

9. Cotton candy or funnel cake?

🌱 Funnel cake! When I was younger, during the summers, my uncle and my birth father helped set up and organized the local fair, and the whole family would get everything on the house; my favorite part were the funnel cakes, because our family friend Lorenzo, who also worked the fair, made THE BEST funnel cakes. I still haven't found any better than Uncle Lorenzo's.

26. Do you believe in aliens?

🌱 Short answer, yes. I'm 100% positive that they exist. Long answer: There's an estimated 2 trillion galaxies in our universe, and in physics, the multiverse is possible, though not proven. Regardless of whether or not the multiverse is real, our universe is constantly expanding into who knows what, and there's billions of stars orbited by planetary systems. Out of those systems, we've already found several planets that are in the "Habitable Zone", where planetary temperatures are just right for life to form. It's mathematically and statistically improbable for there not to be at least SOME form of life on those planets, but there's no telling whether the human race could or will make contact with any developed intelligent lifeforms.

44. Do you collect anything?

🌱 Yeah, a couple things, actually! I collect kpop albums, Littlest Pet Shops, One Piece figurines, and also Strawberry Shortcake paraphernalia (but only from the 80s and early 2000s versions). My favorite character from the original is Orange Blossom, and my favorite from the 2000s reboot is Gingersnap! I used to watch the Strawberry Shortcake show and movies on VHS tapes, since we didn't have cable TV growing up, and I loved them so much. I'm pretty sure it's why my favorite colors are pink and green, now.

Alright, I'm gonna go skedaddle to your inbox and be nosy now.

[darkmaga-retard]

The progression of Technocracy since 2000 is stark. At the same time, the degression of society and human welfare is seen everywhere. Technocrats hold to the religion of Scientism, which posits that only scientific truth is valid, leading them to reject all other sources of truth. The net of technocratic domination is suffocating reason and reality. ⁃ Patrick Wood, TN Editor.

Until recently, most of us welcomed innovation, but something changed. And now a huge number of people are anxious and fearful about the same tech companies they once trusted.

What caused this shift?

That’s a big issue. Unless we understand how things went wrong, we can’t begin to fix them. Otherwise we’re just griping—about bad software or greedy CEOs or whatever.

It’s now time to address the causes, not just complain about symptoms.

Once we do that, we can move to the next steps, namely outlining a regimen for recovery and an eventual cure.

So let me try to lay out my diagnosis as clearly as I can. Below are the ten reasons why tech is now breaking bad.

I apologize in advance for speaking so bluntly. Many will be upset by my frankness. But the circumstances—and the risks involved—demand it.

10 Reasons Why Technological Progress Is Now Reversing

(1) Instead of pursuing truth, new technologies aim to replace it with mimicry and fantasy.

Not long ago, scientists wanted to understand reality. That was true whether their names were Newton and Einstein, or Hewlett and Packard—who established Silicon Valley by building test and measurement equipment.

How quaint, test and measurement devices!—which humbly respect the essence of the real world. Could you imagine our leading tech CEOs today wasting their time on measuring the world?

Instead they want to create their own universe (or multiverse or cyberspace, to use the fashionable jargon)—and force the rest of us to live in it.

So, in the last decade, the largest tech investments have gone into creating fantasy and unreality. Trillions are spent on virtual reality and artificial intelligence. Tech has lost its reverence for the real, and now hungers to displace it with its own Frankenstein creations.

(2) This has empowered shamming, scamming & spamming at unprecedented levels.

Have you noticed people complaining about fake news or fake videos or fake images? Or maybe you know somebody who got catfished by a fake girlfriend or fake boyfriend? Or perhaps you deal yourself with phishing attempts, emails scams, bots spreading disinformation, etc.?

Of course, you do. The phony stuff is everywhere.

Sometimes I think that’s how they named the iPhone—for all the phony stuff it now delivers every day, every hour.

That’s inevitable when innovation is focused almost entirely on fantasy and fakery. The lies and scams aren’t just side effects, they are the main course. This is precisely what the trillion dollars of investment in the artificial and the virtual is supposed to deliver.

So the widespread use of AI for classroom cheating is exactly what we should expect. And the same is true of all those fake news articles, fake music tracks, fake books, fake images, fake videos—all pretending to be authentic human creations.

When Big Tech makes fakery their highest priority, lies reach epidemic proportions. We are now living with the consequences. And if tech accelerationists get their way, the deceptions will get much, much worse—and very rapdily.

(3) Users are not the real customers—so billions of people must suffer to advance the interests of a tiny group of stakeholders.

We should have been suspicious when all the web platforms let us use them for free.

As Robert Heinlein once warned, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Eventually you must pay. That time has now arrived.

There was a honeymoon period during the early web years, when users were treated as members of a community. But once the digital platforms achieved quasi-monopoly status, those friendly days were over.

[my-mt-heart]

I want to address a few things that Norman said in Le Parisien. The article isn't free, and I'm not going to encourage anyone to pay for something they might not like, but if you do want the link, DM me and I'll send it. Thank you to the person who read and translated this:

Defending himself against others trying to throw him under the bus is one thing, but denying all responsibility for the title accomplishes absolutely nothing except further insulting a significant portion of Daryl's fanbase. These fans, specifically Carylers, were all paying close attention when he said the exact opposite on Jimmy Kimmel. Watch at 8:45:

The video is from late last year. Melissa's negotiations for S2/S3 started last summer and her deal closed at the end of the year per my sources, which means there was (at least) a loose plan to bring her back before S1 started shooting. Norman confirms Pilgrim was a working title at some point, but he doesn’t mention Raise the Dead, which was more than likely planned as the official title of the show while they were shooting between October '22 and February '23.

I bring up the timeline because even if you believe Melissa was always part of the French spinoff, Norman’s other favorite narrative right now, the implication is still this: Norman, AMC, and the other EPs were fully aware that Melissa was coming back when they officially landed on a title excluding her. You could argue Daryl has the most name recognition from being the most marketed character or that his tags on SM have 6 billion views or, hey, let’s make it 6 trillion (how much of that overlaps with Daryl and Carol content btw?), but as we saw, that doesn’t guarantee all those viewers will watch the show, which is how AMC makes money. If there are two leads on the show, naming it after one lead doesn't make any sense from a marketing perspective because AMC is missing out on attracting more audience, promoting two characters and their chemistry instead of just one character.

So. They either manipulated the situation to give Norman and the other EPs what they wanted or, once again, they dismissed Melissa’s/Carol’s vitality to the show. Or both. Regardless, it poses a big problem for me, because Carol's ability to stand her ground against anyone who thinks less of her is what draws me to her character. I can't reconcile that with the obvious tactics Norman and the other EPs use to claim the show for themselves, completely ignoring fans who may be critical, yes, but ultimately just want the story both Daryl and Carol have earned.

Speaking of being ignored, I heard from multiple fans that AMC did in fact send out a survey regarding the title. I can't confirm because I haven't seen the survey myself, but if you're doing market research, you need a target audience, and if you're doing market research on what you know will (eventually) be a Daryl and Carol show, you should probably target Daryl and Carol fans, shippers or otherwise. Not that it's the most appropriate way to choose a title (not even close), but where's my survey? Did any Carylers get to participate? Did anyone bother to check? Because to me, it sounds like the focus group they used for their market research wasn't aimed at their target audience at all. It's possible they did the market research with a sample audience of the flagship show or just Daryl fans who are a percentage of their audience but not all their audience. If they used an audience that incorporated Carylers, Daryl fans and GA — the feedback for that title would've been mixed. If they focused their market research on mostly Carylers, the feedback would've heavily leaned towards having an inclusive title.

So many fans, not just Carylers, hate the title. It's boring, it's offensive, it's pretentious, it's misogynistic, etc. etc. These are fans who want to watch and enjoy the show, who are expected to pay for it, so why don't their opinions carry more weight? Why is there still such a strong disconnect between AMC and Carol/Caryl fans when that's exactly what caused the backlash last year? Why are they not doing everything they can to avoid the same mistakes?

As for this:

Most of it is true except for one important detail. Angela Kang's spinoff was going to be a road show shot and set in the U.S. That's the phone call Norman is alluding to. That's the spinoff Melissa signed on for. To say otherwise makes her look unprofessional and flaky for "dropping out" knowing all along she'd have to relocate, and that's not what happened at all. It's like there's no consideration for his co-workers' images while he's trying to rebuild his own, and that is unprofessional.

To be very clear, this is not meant to be a smear campaign. My intention here is to point out how deceptive the PR/marketing strategies have been and how they're hurting everyone, including Norman. I can't for the life of me see any business sense in repeatedly gaslighting and alienating a profitable fanbase, treating Daryl and Carol fans like they're stupid, or insinuating a Daryl and Carol show can't belong to Daryl and Carol fans. The more Norman talks about the spinoff's inception, the more it ensures people will never trust a single thing that comes out of his mouth ever again, and that sucks because if he just focused on what the audience wants, insisting that Melissa is his equal on the show, talking about the characters in meaningful ways, supporting Daryl's and Carol's relationship, he could sell it easily. Fans should be getting excited for their story, not reliving last year's trauma over and over and over again. Melissa is back and that's exciting, but story still matters. Both on and off screen (precisely why we need someone else on board who can manage all of that really well). I've asked this several times before. I'll keep asking until someone listens. Can we please move the fuck on from the spinoff fiasco?

And change the title.

[posttexasstressdisorder]

CrowdStruck

By Edward Zitron • 19 Jul 2024 View in browser

Soundtrack: EL-P - Tasmanian Pain Coaster (feat. Omar Rodriguez-Lopez & Cedric Bixler-Zavala)

When I first began writing this newsletter, I didn't really have a goal, or a "theme," or anything that could neatly characterize what I was going to write about other than that I was on the computer and that I was typing words.

As it grew, I wrote the Rot Economy, and the Shareholder Supremacy, and many other pieces that speak to a larger problem in the tech industry — a complete misalignment in the incentives of most of the major tech companies, which have become less about building new technologies and selling them to people and more about capturing monopolies and gearing organizations to extract things through them.

Every problem you see is a result of a tech industry — from the people funding the earliest startups to the trillion-dollar juggernauts that dominate our lives — that is no longer focused on the creation of technology with a purpose, and organizations driven toward a purpose. Everything is about expressing growth, about showing how you will dominate an industry rather than serve it, about providing metrics that speak to the paradoxical notion that you'll grow forever without any consideration of how you'll live forever. Legacies are now subordinate to monopolies, current customers are subordinate to new customers, and "products" are considered a means to introduce a customer to a form of parasite designed to punish the user for even considering moving to competitor.

What's happened today with Crowdstrike is completely unprecedented (and I'll get to why shortly), and on the scale of the much-feared Y2K bug that threatened to ground the entirety of the world's computer-based infrastructure once the Year 2000 began.

You'll note that I didn't write "over-hyped" or anything dismissive of Y2K's scale, because Y2K was a huge, society-threatening calamity waiting to happen, and said calamity was averted through a remarkable, $500 billion industrial effort that took a decade to manifest because the seriousness of such a significant single point of failure would have likely crippled governments, banks and airlines. 

People laughed when nothing happened on January 1 2000, assuming that all that money and time had been wasted, rather than being grateful that an infrastructural weakness was taken seriously, that a single point of failure was identified, and that a crisis was averted by investing in stopping bad stuff happening before it does.

As we speak, millions — or even hundreds of millions — of different Windows-based computers are now stuck in a doom-loop, repeatedly showing users the famed "Blue Screen of Death" thanks to a single point of failure in a company called Crowdstrike, the developer of a globally-adopted cyber-security product designed, ironically, to prevent the kinds of disruption that we’ve witnessed today. And for reasons we’ll get to shortly, this nightmare is going to drag on for several days (if not weeks) to come.

The product — called Crowdstrike Falcon Sensor — is an EDR system (which stands for Endpoint Detection and Response). If you aren’t a security professional and your eyes have glazed over, I’ll keep this brief. An EDR system is designed to identify hacking attempts, remediate them, and prevent them. They’re big, sophisticated, and complicated products, and they do a lot of things that’s hard to build with the standard tools available to Windows developers.

And so, to make Falcon Sensor work, Crowdstrike had to build its own kernel driver. Now, kernel drivers operate at the lowest level of the computer. They have the highest possible permissions, but they operate with the fewest amount of guardrails. If you’ve ever built your own computer — or you remember what computers were like in the dark days of Windows 98 — you know that a single faulty kernel driver can wreak havoc on the stability of your system. 

The problem here is that Crowdstrike pushed out an evidently broken kernel driver that locked whatever system that installed it in a permanent boot loop. The system would start loading Windows, encounter a fatal error, and reboot. And reboot. Again and again. It, in essence, rendered those machines useless. 

It's convenient to blame Crowdstrike here, and perhaps that's fair. This should not have happened. On a basic level, whenever you write (or update) a kernel driver, you need to know it’s actually robust and won’t shit the bed immediately. Regrettably, Crowdstrike seemingly borrowed Boeing’s approach to quality control, except instead of building planes where the doors fly off at the most inopportune times (specifically, when you’re cruising at 35,000ft), it released a piece of software that blew up the transportation and banking sectors, to name just a few.  

It created a global IT outage that has grounded flights and broken banking services. It took down the BBC’s flagship kids TV channel, infuriating parents across the British Isles, as well as Sky News, which, when it was able to resume live broadcasts, was forced to do so without graphics. In essence, it was forced back to the 1950s — giving it an aesthetic that matches the politics of its owner, Rupert Murdoch. By no means is this an exhaustive list of those affected, either. 

The scale and disruption caused by this incident is unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. Previous incidents — particularly rival ransomware outbreaks, like Wannacry — simply can’t compare to this, especially when we’re looking at the disruption and the sheer scale of the problem. 

Still, if your day was ruined by this outage, at least spare a thought for those who’ll have to actually fix it. Because those machines affected are now locked in a perpetual boot loop, it’s not like Crowdstrike can release a software patch and call it a day. Undoing this update requires some users to have to individually go to each computer, loading up safe mode (a limited version of Windows with most non-essential software and drivers disabled), and manually removing the faulty code. And if you’ve encrypted your computer, that process gets a lot harder. Servers running on cloud services like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure — you know, the way most of the internet's infrastructure works — require an entirely separate series of actions.

If you’re on a small IT team and you’re supporting hundreds of workstations across several far-flung locations — which isn’t unusual, especially in sectors like retail and social care — you’re especially fucked. Say goodbye to your weekend. Your evenings. Say goodbye to your spouse and kids. You won’t be seeing them for a while. Your life will be driving from site to site, applying the fix and moving on. Forget about sleeping in your own bed, or eating a meal that wasn’t bought from a fast food restaurant. Good luck, godspeed, and God bless. I do not envy you. 

The significance of this failure — which isn't a breach, by the way, and in many respects is far worse, at least in the disruption caused — is not in its damage to individual users, but to the amount of technical infrastructure that runs on Windows, and that so much of our global infrastructure relies on automated enterprise software that, when it goes wrong, breaks everything. 

It isn't about the number of computers, but the amount of them that underpin things like the security checkpoints or systems that run airlines, or at banks, or hospitals, all running as much automated software as possible so that costs can be kept down.

The problem here is systemic — that there is a company that the majority of people affected by this outage had no idea existed until today that Microsoft trusted to the extent that they were able to push an update that broke the back of a huge chunk of the world's digital infrastructure. 

Microsoft, as a company, instead of building the kind of rigorous security protocols that would, say, rigorously test something that connects to what seems to be a huge proportion of Windows computers. Microsoft, in particular, really screwed up here. As pointed out by Wired, the company vets and cryptographically signs all kernel drivers — which is sensible and good, because kernel drivers have an incredible amount of access, and thus can be used to inflict serious harm — with this testing process usually taking several weeks. 

How then did this slip through its fingers? For this to have happened, two companies needed to screw up epically. And boy, they did. 

What we're seeing today isn't just a major fuckup, but the first of what will be many systematic failures — some small, some potentially larger — that are the natural byproduct of the growth-at-all-costs ecosystem where any attempt to save money by outsourcing major systems is one that simply must be taken to please the shareholder.

The problem with the digitization of society — or, more specifically, the automation of once-manual tasks — is that it introduces a single point of failure. Or, rather, multiple single points of failure. Our world, our lifestyle and our economy, is dependent on automation and computerization, with these systems, in turn, dependent on other systems to work. And if one of those systems breaks, the effects ricochet outwards, like ripples when you cast a rock into a lake. 

Today’s Crowdstrike cock-up is just the latest example of this, but it isn’t the only one. Remember the SolarWinds hack in 2020, when Russian state-linked hackers gained access to an estimated 18,000 companies and public sector organizations — including NATO, the European Parliament, the US Treasury Department, and the UK’s National Health Service — by compromising just one service — SolarWinds Orion? 

Remember when Okta — a company that makes software that handles authentication for a bunch of websites, governments, and businesses — got hacked in 2023, and then lied about the scale of the breach? And then do you remember how those hackers leapfrogged from Okta to a bunch of other companies, most notably Cloudflare, which provides CDN and DDOS protection services for pretty much the entire internet?

That whole John Donne quote — “No man is an island” — is especially true when we’re talking about tech, because when you scratch beneath the surface, every system that looks like it’s independent is actually heavily, heavily dependent on services and software provided by a very small number of companies, many of whom are not particularly good.     

This is as much a cultural failing as it is a technological one, the result of management geared toward value extraction — building systems that build monopolies by attaching themselves to other monopolies. Crowdstrike went public in 2019, and immediately popped on its first day of trading thanks to Wall Street's appreciation of Crowdstrike moving away from a focused approach to serving large enterprise clients, building products for small and medium-sized businesses by selling through channel partners — in effect outsourcing both product sales and the relationship with a client that would tailor a business' solution to a particular need.

Crowdstrike's culture also appears to fucking suck. A recent Glassdoor entry referred to Crowdstrike as "great tech [with] terrible culture" with no work life balance, with "leadership that does not care about employee well being." Another from June claimed that Crowdstrike was "changing culture for the street,” with KPIs (as in metrics related to your “success” at the company) “driving behavior more than building relationships” with a serious lack of experience in the public sector in senior management. Others complain of micromanagement, with one claiming that “management is the biggest issue,” with managers “ask[ing] way too much of you…and it doesn’t matter if you do what they ask since they’re not even around to check on you,” and another saying that “management are arrogant” and need to “stop lying to the market on product capability.”

While I can’t say for sure, I’d imagine an organization with such powerful signs of growth-at-all-costs thinking — a place where you “have to get used to the pressure” that’s a “clique that you’re not in”  — likely isn’t giving its quality assurance teams the time and space to make sure that there aren’t any Kaiju-level security threats baked into an update. And that assumes it actually has a significant QA team in-house, and hasn’t just (as with many companies) outsourced the work to a “bodyshop” like Wipro or Infosys or Tata. 

And don’t think I’m letting Microsoft off the hook, either. Assuming the kernel driver testing roles are still being done in-house, do you think that these testers — who have likely seen their friends laid off at a time when the company was highly profitable, and denied raises when their well-fed CEO took home hundreds of millions of dollars for doing a job he’s eminenly bad at — are motivated to do their best work? 

And this is the culture that’s poisoned almost the entirety of Silicon Valley. What we’re seeing is the societal cost of moving fast and breaking things, of Marc Andreessen considering “risk management the enemy,” of hiring and firing tens of thousands of people to please Wall Street, of seeking as many possible ways to make as much money as possible to show shareholders that you’ll grow, even if doing so means growing at a pace that makes it impossible to sustain organizational and cultural stability. When you aren’t intentional in the people you hire, the people you fire, the things you build and the way that they’re deployed, you’re going to lose the people that understand the problems they’re solving, and thus lack the organizational ability to understand the ways that they might be solved in the future. 

This is dangerous, and also a dark warning for the future. Do you think that Facebook, or Microsoft, or Google — all of whom have laid off over 10,000 people in the last year — have done so in a conscientious way that means that the people left understand how their systems run and their inherent issues? Do you think that the management-types obsessed with the unsustainable AI boom are investing heavily in making sure their organizations are rigorously protected against, say, one bad line of code? Do they even know who wrote the code of their current systems? Is that person still there? If not, is that person at least contracted to make sure that something nuanced about the system in question isn’t mistakenly removed? 

They’re not. They’re not there anymore. Only a few months ago Google laid off 200 employees from the core of its organization, outsourcing their roles to Mexico and India in a cost-cutting measure the quarter after the company made over $23 billion in profit. Silicon Valley — and big tech writ large — is not built to protect against situations like the one we’re seeing today,because their culture is cancerous. It valuesrowth at all costs, with no respect for the human capital that empowers organizations or the value of building rigorous, quality-focused products.

This is just the beginning. Big tech is in the throes of perdition, teetering over the edge of the abyss, finally paying the harsh cost of building systems as fast as possible. This isn’t simply moving fast or breaking things, but doing so without any regard for the speed at which you’re doing so and firing the people that broke them, the people who know what’s broken, and possibly the people that know how to fix them.

And it’s not just tech! Boeing — a company I’ve already shat on in this post, and one I’ll likely return to in future newsletters, largely because it exemplifies the short-sightedness of today’s managerial class — has, over the past 20 years or so, span off huge parts of the company (parts that, at one point, were vitally important) into separate companies, laid off thousands of employees at a time, and outsourced software dev work to $9-an-hour bodyshop engineers. It hollowed itself out until there was nothing left. 

And tell me, knowing what you know about Boeing today, would you rather get into a 737 Max or an Airbus A320neo? Enough said. 

As these organizations push their engineers harder, said engineers will turn to AI-generated code, poisoning codebases with insecure and buggy code as companies shed staff to keep up with Wall Street’s demands in ways that I’m not sure people are capable of understanding. The companies that run the critical parts of our digital lives do not invest in maintenance or infrastructure with the intentionality that’s required to prevent the kinds of massive systemic failures you see today, and I need you all to be ready for this to happen again.

This is the cost of the Rot Economy — systems used by billions of people held up by flimsy cultures and brittle infrastructure maintained with the diligence of an absentee parent. This is the cost of arrogance, of rewarding managerial malpractice, of promoting speed over safety and profit over people. 

Every single major tech organization should see today as a wakeup call — a time to reevaluate the fundamental infrastructure behind every single tech stack. 

What I fear is that they’ll simply see it as someone else’s problem - which is exactly how we got here in the first place. 

[blueishspace]

Looped Sun 2

Loop #16

They didn't stop looping in time, but at least they had eachother. Grian had to admit that it was almost fun with Scar around, definitely felt less lonely with someone else to talk to.

Loop #19

It took 3 loops for Scar to suggest having some fun with this, spice it up. Grian hadn't expected stealing Martyns and Ren bit would be their objective this time but he didn't mind. Getting to be king and screaming "red winter is coming" was actually quite funny and being all shady in Last Life was nice too. As Secret Life comes to an end Scar whispers.

Scar: Alright alright, let me be king next time ok?

Grian laughs at the suggestion just in time for-

Loop #21

Grian had noticed soon that not every loop started the same exact day a while ago but he never expected to wake up already during Limited Life.

Surely things couldn't get weirder then that.

Loop #26

He spoke too soon. This time around he woke up as he was singing a piece of paper, a declaration of indipendence, while wearing a very weird blue american indipendence outfit together wih people he had never met before.

He just went along with it of course and fighting against a weird masked guy for indipendence had been a breath of fresh air but Scar was still missing and Grian was very confused the whole time.

Well until ...

Scar: Thank you Soot, however I think that I could run this country far better!

Grian: Scar? Where were you!? ... What are you doing!?

Scar: That's why I'm going to run myself! Vote for Scar 2020!

To be fair it took some times for things to go badly.

Grian: This is your fault you know that right?

Scar: Hey! Look! At least the country didn't explode or something-

*Boom*

Grian: ...

Scar: ...that wasn't me.

Loop #31

Grian: Damn I didn't bring enough tnt to rig the enchanter. How did I forget??

Scar: Don't worry! I got some!

Grian: Oh thank... where did you get it?

Scar: I kept it in my second inventory from last loop.

Grian: Your what?

Scar: We have a second inventory now! Didn't you notice!

Grian: I see it now ...how?

Scar: It keeps stuff safe from one loop to the other! Cool right!?

Grian: ... Like an enchanting table? But for loops?

Scar: I guess?

Grian: How are you not freaking out about this!?!

Loop #33

This time they woke up early, back in season 6! Grian doesn't understand why Scar doesn't care because he does! Why can't someone explain it to him for ender sake.

Loop #36

Someone explained it. He and Scar woke up somewhere completely different and it was confusing and scary but they finally got answers.

Grian: So our universe is part of a big big big tree?

Anakin: Yes, like every other.

Grian: And the tree is what, under maintenance?

Anakin: Basically.

Grian: And so we are stuck looping?

Anakin: You don't need to pretend to be calm, I can feel your emotions in the force.

Grian: So... we are stuck? Forever?!?

Anakin: Not forever forever, until the tree is fixed-

Grian: So possibly for billions of years!?!

Anakin: Some of the older loops have been going for trillions even.

Grian: ... I'll... I...need to think.

Anakin: I'll write some useful terms down so you can read them once you aren't... You know.

Grian: Guess I have all the time in the world to come to terms with it... Scar is going to hate that he didn't get to meet you.

Loop #37

Scar: ....soooo what you up to?

Grian: Memorising these terms Anakin gave us.

Scar: Ooh sounds...fun!

Grian: Every loop has an anchor, without it the loop can't exist. I tought I was the anchor but it's not possible because I was sent to a different loop last tims.

Scar: So am I the anchor?

Grian: You were missing for the first loops Scar... the only option that makes sense is that both of us are anchors. But even then...

Grian underlines the term "co-anchors" a bunch of times.

Scar: Does that mean I'll get to meet Anakin Skywalker?

Grian: Probably? One day?

Scar: Wooooho!

Loop #38

They were waiting for the moon to crash when Scar posed the question.

Scar: Do you think we can just... stop the moon?

Grian: Hmmm... I guess I never tought about it, why?

Scar: I don't know, just thinking.

Grian: I have an idea...

Loop #43

Scar: Grian what are you doing?

Grian: You remember how last loop started in s7?

Scar: ... Yeah?

Grian: I decided to keep something in my pocket this time around.

Grian took out a golden gauntlet with 6 colored glowing stones.

Scar: ... The button?

Grian: The button.

Grian snapped and the moon disappeared.. He then carefully removed and pocketed it again.

Grian: Well, I'm surprised it actually...worked...

Scar: But what happened to it?

Grian: I just made it really really small.

Loop #51

This was unbearable, Grian tought it was weird when this loops Timmy was acting like an incapable child, then he became worried when he saw that Scott was a pacifist who wouldn't hurt a fly, and then Cleo started burning down literally everything and he started to question his life choices. Everyone was barely themselves, it was like they had been replaced by very cheap imitations.

(Poor Grian had to walk into fanonland)

Loop #67

Scott Smajor liked to think he was often in control of the situation. Not many people liked that about him but if he died it was by his decision.

He didn't feel very in control at the moment, back in the Last Life with Grian and Scar being completely different from what he remembered them being... And he didn't like it one bit.

Scott: Ok ok, stop it!

Grian: What do you mean? We aren't doing anything wrong!

Scott: It isn't right! You are supposed to be in a team with Jimmy and Martyn and you Scar should be alone on a mountain!

Scar: ...

Grian: ...

Scott: ... Sorry that was-

Grian: You remember too?

Scar: New looper! New looper!

Scott: ...uh?

Prev Next

[phoenixkaptain]

Me: I will not post random thoughts on Tumblr to strangers. I can keep my opinions to myself.

Also me: Why is everyone so mean to Ben?? How could Obi-Wan have known that Luke would somehow become the first person ever to take a Sith and pull them back to the light side without any amnesia involved? How could he have known that?? Also, he watched Anakin murder children, I don’t think it’s fair to make him out to be the bad guy for not giving Anakin another child.

Also, is the scene on Bespin supposed to be Vader’s turning point? Because sources say he was very evil and bad and more evil, but was Bespin the point when he realized? Like, look at it this way. Anakin almost definitely became desensitized to killing. We see that in the Clone Wars; he has no issue killing people for whatever reason, so it’s clear that he’s become numb to it.

But, Darth Vader is used to people doing whatever they can to stay alive near him. People are afraid of him. They do what he says because he is six and a half feet tall and more machine than man, on top of being someone who can choke someone across a video call. The people who do refuse to do what he says are the rebels, the bad guys, from his perspective.

So when he has Luke cornered, he expects Luke to surrender because he views Luke as his son, which means Luke can’t die. Padme died and that is as much death by his own hands in his own family that Vader is willing to take. Luke has to surrender, because Vader doesn’t want to kill him and there’s no other way out, unless Luke wants to let go of the gantry and fall to his probable death.

And Luke lets go.

In that moment, do you think it hits him? Do you think Vader realizes that his own son is willing to die over being on the same side as him? His son hates him so much, he falls into a bottomless hole just to escape him.

Do you think that’s the moment Vader realizes that Luke is fragile? Luke is human? Luke isn’t just a Jedi, he isn’t just the person who is uncatchable and who blew up the Death Star, he’s a person who can die. And it’s highly likely that Luke will die, from Vader’s perspective. This boy who would rather fall to his death than spend another moment in Vader’s company. If anyone was going to die in this fight, surely it would be the dumbass who flies into traps, knowing full well that they are traps.

Do you think that’s what the scene means? Is that Vader’s turning point? Is that the moment when he feels worry for Luke? Not worry for the Luke in his mind, the power that Luke has, or anything. Just, worry for his son.

Vader was willing to kill millions, billions, or even trillions of people to get to Luke, but Luke is willing to kill himself before being caught. Luke, the one person Vader doesn’t want to die. The one person he figured probably couldn’t die, since he pulls stupid shit all the time and walks away like nothing happened.

Is that the moment where Vader dimmed, just for a second, and became a bit more of Anakin, instead?

[leefi]

The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere Read-through | Part 1: Chapters 1-14

Part 1: 1-14 | Part 2: 14-22 | Part 3: 22-34 | Part 4: 34-64 | Part 5: 64-80 | Part 6: 81-90 | Part 7: 90-100 | Part 8: 100-127 (caught up here)

Hi!!!! I've been reading through this webnovel after seeing @ot3's pitch for it and started writing down some thoughts on the characters and worldbuilding and imminent murdering. This story is very, very long and I only reacted up to about chapter 33, so most of my thoughts will involve the worldbuilding and less the murder mystery aspect -- so if you're looking for theorizing you won't find much of that here. Since I'll be continuing eventually, I wanted to post what I did make note of to revisit later!

Most of these are not marked by chapter/section because I was lazy and I'm not sure how easy it will be to follow as a result, but everything is chronological.

everyone here is hijabi mashallah

The visual I'm getting of the solar system/local system/dimension they inhabit is kind of a blend of steampunk and fantasy and uhh some secret third thing. With the walls of their "universe" painted in that puella dollhouse witch lair style. Does the sun bounce around like a screensaver. Does it orbit their earth or is it on a fixed axis flung out into “space”? Does “space” even exist anymore? I’m assuming they’re in an enclosed area that they've created. Do they actively use arcane resources to keep objects (ie star and planets) sustaining themselves, or have they made them self sufficient?

everyone is so mean to Ptolema leave her alone what the fuckk let a bimbo live i want to kill you all you’re so annoying. Ptolema I WOULD be your friend and not ask all these weird ass questions. and we would hold hands and skip and giggle

Yes shes an airhead nepo baby but you guys could try doing anything other than snickering and rolling your eyes whenever she says stupid shit. If she starts arguing back about government war crimes during the Revolution or something then you have my blessing to beat her ass!

I HATE kamsurepa i HATE her i HAYE Her and her stupid ass name

Ran and Su have no chemistry its insane that theyre always hanging out every conversation is like uhhh (awkward silence) (rude comment from Ran) *Su voice* wow she gets me so well. every time they talk im like what the fuck just happened.

Su’s internal narration is too self aware for me. it’s like she talks like she knows she’s a character? or something. it's self-deprecating in a very bizarre way

im sorry i don’t know if i can continue with this. i know too many med students irl and these characters are literally pissing me off. compliments to the author for realism you knocked it out of the park

Oh, thank you very much!" Kam said, reverting back to her smiley-diplomatic form for a moment before stepping away from the counter and continuing as she handed us the cards. "...as far as it seems to me, the desire to reproduce is essentially an immature form of pursuing life-extension - this idea that you'll 'live on through your children' that's patently pseudo-mysticism justifying what is ultimately an animal instinct." ⬇️ I’m going to grab her ginger head and swing her around like bowser in mario 64. SHUT UPPPPP SHUT UP please tell me shes the one that dies

You know," I mused idly, my eyes wandering. "I think this is actually the fourth glass ceiling I've seen today." "Mm, it's true that you don't see a lot of women working in Aetheromancy," ⬇️ I know this is a small nitpick but aren’t we really far into the future why do they keep using terms like this 😭 gendered stuff like this still exists billions? trillions? of years into the future?

Why has the disco elysium skill tree randomly started talking to su. Is this her future self nagging her. Is she pulling a han sooyoung. when do we get to the various utsushikome ego deaths

"prosognostic overlap"…do ppl repeat faces? Are most people cloned at this point? What triggered the need for cloning surely medicine is advanced enough that childbirth or test tube babies are feasible? Can bodies be cloned and reinhabited to inhibit aging? Is there some disturbing psychological element to seeing someone with the same face as you? Does it make your brain short circuit? Kam mentioned having children earlier which I assume means people still give birth or have test tube babies, so i don’t know if it’s the result of cloning…but it does sound like a sameface sort of thing. What else would it be if not that though?

Actually, if they’ve figured out teleportation (whatever it was called when they went up the aetherbridge) - let's say they can atomize a body and reforming it elsewhere (though we don't know for sure yet, could also be a fold in spacetime) - transferring consciousness to an empty clone of yourself (and therefore effectively doing away with aging or death wholesale) sounds a lot more efficient and technologically practical than maintaining an organic system that naturally decays. Why keep on finding ways to push the human body past its limits when you could simply transfer a person to a new, identical vessel?

I feel like the key to immortality isn’t maintaining an organic body, which naturally tends towards systems of entropy (being a biological thing, entropy=decay), but rather delineating and separating human consciousness from its host and replicating its original environment perfectly. I’m not talking about making a copy of consciousness, which is just glorified cloning - I’m talking about *transferring* a consciousness.

You could almost call dementia itself the mind's tendency towards its own kind of entropy?

Though if you transfer a consciousness to a younger body, the dementia issue could still potentially remain. Depends on if it the author sees it as a solely physical phenomena (atrophy/buildup of inhibitors of the brain) or there's some metaphysical anomaly about amassing too many memories/"existing" too long in general

The way spellwork is described is really cool and feels super believable. Optimizing multiple concurrent spells into one “function” is intricate and sophisticated, and you have to dedicate a lot of brainpower to doing the math in your head. It’s like they’re coding the real world. I love the way lurina describes this it's awesome.

[thetreetopinn]

Space is huge. And it's incredible. It's so vast and wonderous you could be forgiven for staring out the window of your ship or station for hours, just drinking in the awe of it all. You could also be forgiven for being absolutely, utterly, and entirely terrified of it. Because of all the many things space is, it's definitely horrifying. You spend enough time out there in it, you start to get a little taste of what it can do when it flexes its cosmic muscles.

If you're lucky, you're born in one of the core systems where life is a paradise. Every galaxy has at least one core--and I'm not talking about the astronomical phenomenon--the galactic core. I'm talking about the core of civilized society. Every galaxy's got at least one. The galaxy I've settled in has five, and each core is home to tens of thousands of populated systems. You see, space is so wild and unpredictable, it's best to concentrate the seat of civilization in secure regions where nothing weird or horrific happens. At least, nothing weird or horrific in the cosmic sense. People are still people and they tend to bring their own horrors with them wherever they go. It's just usually mundane stuff--like scarcity breeding the usual sort of underclass that the powerful love to exploit. But I'm not here to talk about politics or economics or class warfare. None of that seems to matter when you're out on a long stretch, but it's important to understand why we're out here.

Since the average galaxy has about a hundred billion stars in it, that means all five cores in my galaxy make up less than one one-hundred-millionth of a percent of all the stars in the galaxy. And there are hundreds of trillions of people. There are so many people, they don't all fit in the core systems. Some chose to go out into the middle distance or out into the deep reaches, to find wild, untamed worlds to conquer and start a new life--people who think you can just start a new civilization without bringing any of the ills of the one you just came from with you. Sometimes it works. You might see a new core start to grow. It's rare, but on a long enough time scale, you can see it happen. But there's always a sort of critical mass. Once a galaxy has about a dozen or so cores, things start to push back, force people back into their safe spaces.

That's where we come in.

I am part of the Intergalactic Search and Rescue division--at least, that's what civilization calls us, or just ISR for short. We have come to collectively refer to ourselves as "icers". The truth of how that started is lost to time, but every ship and crew has a few different favorite variations on the same five or so stories. We stand apart from civilization so that we can keep the fringes of it safe. It doesn't come without risks, or without costs.

When someone goes out exploring and they find something they can't handle, we're the ones that get called in. And we're very good at our job. We are simultaneously revered, feared, and ignored. When you've been out there as long as some of us, space changes you. You become different enough from the rest of civilization that you kind of don't belong anymore. Homeworld doesn't matter. Culture doesn't matter. Species doesn't matter. You're just... different. Space has left its mark on you--sometimes in subtle ways that freak people out like the uncanny valley, and sometimes in obvious ways that encourage you to not ever go back to any of the cores.

All those stories and ideas and superstitions and fears people had in the early days of space exploration--I mean the really early days, when they were flying in little better than tin cans--we found they weren't true, obviously. There were no monsters or cosmic entities of chaos and insanity or anything like that. At least there weren't any at first.

Funny thing about people, we're really good at making just about anything we can imagine. All those tales of nightmarish cosmic horrors, we made them, all of them. We conjured them into existence. At least, that's my theory.

Maybe they existed out there before we reached into the depths of space. Maybe they stayed away because they didn't care about us at first. Then we showed them the diversity of our fears, anxieties, and dreams. They found a feeding ground rich and fertile--the minds of mortals. And so they began to encroach on civilization. The more we push out into space, the more they push back--in just about every way you can imagine.

I've been a part of ISR for a very long time. I've lost count of the missions and tours. I don't have any reason to go back to the core systems. I wouldn't survive there. I'm too different. When you've gone toe to toe with the minions of what is effectively an eldritch horror or an elder god as many times as I have, it changes you. I still look mostly normal, just... slightly off. I don't quite recognize my face in the mirror anymore. Relationships no longer interest me. I'm not tempted by any of the pleasures and distractions the core systems are famous for. I just want to be out amongst the stars. I feel more isolated among the civilized worlds than I do out in the voids between the galactic arms.

I've been keeping a record of my missions, my encounters, all the times I have been brought to the edge of my understanding and come back from the brink. I'm not entirely sure why. It's not like I really need to. There's plenty of information on all the unique beings, species, and anomalies we are likely to run up against. Some are amiable enough to let us go on our way after an initial misunderstanding. Some are completely indifferent, like a whale is indifferent to the harrowing existence of a tardigrade. Some are openly malevolent. These are the things we push back against. We have to let them know that they can't just run rampant.

Some of our personnel ends up disappearing, becoming part of the cosmos in one way or another. I've seen crew members assimilated into a collective consciousness that spans an entire nebula. I've seen crew transformed into an entirely new species as part of that creature's reproductive cycle. They almost never remember anything of their old life. They are no longer who they once were. Occasionally, I'll come across an old shipmate, now the herald, consort, or interpretor for some greater being, and we'll come into conflict. It's my job to remind them what we do--we look for the people who don't actually want to be this far out and bring them home. We also tell the darkness to respect the boundaries of light.

The various military and para-military organizations do the job of defending the core systems, and they're treated like heroes. We are the mad wanderers, the sages who have gone out into the desert and come back with forbidden wisdom. How can you go back to your homeworld, or your people, when you have stood in defiance before a god of madness only to suddenly find in the depths of your will and soul the power to push back on that all-powerful madness? It changes your sight. Your senses are altered. You can feel the lingering touch of that god or swarm or spirit brushing across the edges of your mind.

I find myself irritated with the more mundane missions. If I discover a derelict spacecraft and find its crew murdered and turned into bloody, mutated, animated corpses because of some deranged scientist's hopes of finding a cure to a new illness or they sought to build a mindless army only they could control, I find I almost want to set the ship on a collision course with one of the core systems. Maybe then it would teach those fools to stop trying to defy the laws of nature.

I find myself seeking out the more bizarre and inexplicable encounters. A ship that has disappeared mysteriously only to return haunted by the evils of a chaotic dimension holds some fascination for me, because whatever twisted mind has come to possess the ship or its crew seems to fear me. When they see into my thoughts, they shrink and cower, almost as if I resemble their god. I feel compelled to learn more about this--to learn more about what I am becoming.

It was once said that we are a way for the cosmos to know itself. Perhaps one day I will move beyond this existence and I will understand the cosmos. Perhaps when I understand the cosmos, the cosmos will understand itself. Until then, I will stand as sentry between the boundaries of civilization and the terrifying, cruel, beautiful darkness of the universe. I will send the lost souls back home with a greater appreciation for their security with a warning to never return. I will send the old gods and monsters back to their hives and shadows with greater appreciation for what they have already consumed--also with a warning.

Neither deity nor mortal, I am what lies between. I am the mediator. I am the void. And the void cares not for the trappings of the core systems or the plots of demons. The void simply is.