#zero point breakthrough: first edition

[kpopfeeds]

2PM’s Discography

Hottest Time Of The Day: 

Release date: September 4, 2008

Single 

10 Out of 10 

2:00 Time for Change 

Release date: September 23, 2009 

2nd Single

What Time Is It Now

Again & Again 

I Hate You 

Maybe She’ll Come Back 

Again & Again (R&B Mix) 

Again & Again (Instrumental) 

I Hate You (Instrumental) 

Maybe She’ll Come Back (Instrumental) 

1:59PM 

Release date: November 12, 2009

First Album 

My Heart 

Heartbeat 

Tired of Waiting 

I Was Crazy About You 

Gimme the Light 

Back 2 U 

All Night Long 

Heartbeat (Red Light Mix) 

10 Out of 10 

Only You (Acoustic Mix) 

Again & Again 

I Hate You (Lounge Mix) 

Maybe She’ll Come Back (Bossa Nova Mix) 

Thank You (Japan Edition Only) 

Don’t Stop Can’t Stop 

Release date: April 19, 2010 

3rd Single 

Don’t Stop Can’t Stop 

Without U 

Maza 

I Will Give You My Life 

Without U (Explorer Mix) 

Space MAZA 

Still 2:00pm 

Release date: October 14, 2010 

Mini Album 

Still 

I’ll Be Back 

Even If You Leave Me 

I Can’t 

I Know 

Dance2Night 

I’ll Be Back (Club Mix) 

Hands Up

Release date: June 20, 2011 

2nd Album 

Hands Up 

Electricity 

Give It To Me 

Like a Movie 

Don’t You Know 

Hot 

Without U 

I’ll Be Back 

I Can’t 

Hands Up (East4A Mix) 

Electricity (220v Mix) 

Thank You 

Don’t Stop Can’t Stop 

REPUBLIC OF 2PM

Release Date: November 30, 2011 

First Japanese Album 

I’m Your Man 

Ultra Lover 

I’ll Be Back (Japanese Version) 

Stay With Me 

Without U (Japanese Version) 

Crazy In Love 

100th Day Anniversary 

Take Off 

Hands Up (Japanese Version) 

Fate 

Heartbeat (Japanese Version) 

Even Though We’re Apart 

2PM Member’s Selection 

Release date: May 21, 2012 

Best Album 

10 Out of 10 

Only You 

Again & Again 

I Hate You 

Maybe She’ll Come Back 

Heartbeat 

Tired of Waiting 

Gimme the Light 

Alive (Jun.K solo) 

Don’t Stop Can’t Stop 

Without U 

I’ll Be Back 

I Can’t 

Hands Up 

Give It to Me 

Hot 

Thank You 

Move On (Wooyoung and Junho duet) 

Legend of 2pm 

Release date: February 13, 2013 

2nd Japanese Album 

The Legend

Masquerade (Legend of 2PM Version) 

Beautiful

So Bad 

Only One 

Missing You 

Want You Back 

This Is Love 

Kimigaireba 

I’ll Be OK

SOS Man 

Breakthrough 

Forever 

Hanareteitemo (Live Version) 

Grown 

Release date: May 07, 2013 

 3rd Album 

A.D.T.OY. 

Comeback When You Hear This Song

Zero Point 

I’m Sorry 

The First Date 

Dangerous 

One More Day 

Game Over 

Coming Down 

Go Back 

Love Song 

At Times 

GENESIS OF 2PM 

Release date: January 29, 2014 

3rd Japanese Album 

Genesis 

GIVE ME LOVE 

Merry-go-round 

Winter Games 

Elen - Lasting heart 

Step by Step 

Falling In Love 

Best of Love 

Only Girl 

I want you 

Stay Here 

NEXT Generation

Beautiful Day 

Go Crazy 

Release date: September 15, 2014 

4th Album 

Go Crazy 

Like Tonight 

She’s Ma Girl 

Mine 

Awesome 

Rain 

Boyfriend 

Pull&Pull 

Goodbye Trip 

Beautiful (Korean Version) 

I’m Your Man (Korean Version) 

Go Crazy (Grand Edition) 

Release date: September 29, 2014 

4th Album

Superman

Please Come Back

Love is True

the Word, Love

Go Crazy

Go Crazy (BOYTOY Crazy Remix)

Go Crazy (BOYTOY Vibe Remix)

Go Crazy (Djnure VS. Fingazz Remix)

2PM OF 2PM - Repackage 

Release date: May 20, 2015

4th Japanese Album 

Intro 

midaretemina 

Guilty Love 

Sexy Ladies 

Everybody 

Fight 

Through the Fire 

Jam Session 

Slender Man 

Shiny Girl 

365 

Burning Love 

harukaze good bye again 

I know 

NO.5 

Release date: June 15, 2015 

5th Album 

My House 

Nobody Else 

Hallucination 

Not The Only One 

Hotter Than July 

About To Go Insane 

Red 

Wanna Love You Again 

Know Your Mind 

Magic 

Jump 

Good Man 

GALAXY OF 2PM 

Release date: April 27, 2016 

4th Japanese Album 

The Galaxy 

Souzou site mite 

Party Monster 

Talk about Your Love 

My House (Japanese Version) 

Freeze 

Wasurenaide 

HIGHER

TEASER 

Shining Star 

Set Me Free 

Issyoni sugoshita jikan 

Gentlemen’s Game 

Release date: September 13, 2016 

6th Album 

Promise (I’ll Be) 

Uneasy 

Giv u Class 

Make Love 

Without Even Trying 

Never 

Humming 

How About This 

Perfume 

My Last 

Can’t Stop Feeling 

MUST 

Release date: June 28, 2021 

7th Album 

Intro 

Make It 

OK or Not 

On My Way 

Champagne 

The Cafe 

Moon & Back 

Two of Us 

Hold You 

My House (Acoustic Version) 

[mahamid110]

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[johannepetereric]

So ZERO-POINT BREAKTHROUGH FIRST EDITION shoves ice like Holographic Elsa, and ZERO POINT BREAKTHROUGH REVISED reabsorbs it without melting the ice

[jsml-universe]

The Story of Xanxus

After re-watching episodes 64 and 65, my opinion of the Ninth has dropped. Significantly. Good job Timoteo. A+ parenting right there. I dislike you more than Iemitsu right now. I hope your recovery is long and hard. 

There are just some things that don’t quite add up in the Varia arc so I did some digging and paid closer attention to the in between pieces of dialogue throughout the anime and manga. After lots of pondering, I’ve decided that this is basically how the REAL story behind how the battle against the Varia came to be...

Xanxus is a young child. He was born in and grows up in one of the poorest slums in Italy. His primary caretaker and only family member is a single mother who is so mentally ill that she’s delusional. Literally. Sane people have difficulty in poverty enough as it is. Can you just imagine the kind of damage that background alone can have on a person’s psych?

Xanxus was born with the orb flame/flame of wrath, but he didn’t manifest it until he was an older kid. When he shows his mother, she’s convinced that she had a love affair with the boss of the Vongola and that Xanxus is their child. Like, WTF?! She renames her kid (because his first name might not have even been Xanxus with the whole ‘I named him Xanxus because the two X’s prove he’s meant to be Vongola Decimo’ logic) and then just gives him away to an old man, a stranger she claims is his father. 

Then what does Timoteo do? He lies. He backs the poor delusional woman’s logic up. Big Mistake #1. He tells Xanxus not only that he's his biological son but lets him think that he can one day succeed him as the Vongola boss. Where is the logic in that? Answer: It must have been for manipulative purposes because there is absolutely NO purely charitable reason why you must adopt a random child on the street that just happens to be endowed with a very powerful flame and fool him into believing a lie about his lineage so that he'll dedicate his life to Vongola. 

At this point, Timoteo could have rectified his mistake and taken Xanxus aside as soon as he’s adopted into the Vongola famiglia and explained the true situation to him. Sure, it would have hurt Xanxus a little but Xanxus is very mold-able and impressionable at this age. I can only assume that Xanxus must have been about 9 or 10 years old when he was adopted by the Ninth because Fuuta is also 9 and child Xanxus certainly didn't look younger than Fuuta. 

When telling Xanxus’ backstory, Squalo immediately jumps to Xanxus’ time growing up in Vongola and says that he took to the mafia like slipping a hand in a well-fit glove. He was selfish, ruthless, easily angered, and powerful. I’d say, that’s only logical. Growing up in extreme poverty means being in a constant ‘survival-mode’ and ‘got to take care of myself’ state of mind. Food, shelter, and safety means being creative and assertive. I think it’s safe to assume that Xanxus had little to no education while growing up. If he did receive any, it was definitely sub-par. He was thrust into a foreign culture and had to adapt quickly. He had to change the way he talked, his body language, learn social etiquette, master his flame powers. His mother is no longer mentioned so I assume that he never had contact with her again. Despite his willingness to leave his mother, I’d think that, that would also have some impact on his psych as well. A significant adult figure in his life had just left him. She was completely cut out of his life as quick as the snap of his fingers. With the additional lack of a biological father, I’d say that this qualifies Xanxus for psychological issues regarding child abandonment (which is defined by the loss of one or more parent). 

Problems that arise from kids who’ve experienced this include:

-low self-esteem

-anxiety and/or anger management issues

-problems regarding attachment...either difficulties forming attachment, or over attaching oneself with fear of being abandoned again

Now, on first glance, Xanxus doesn’t appear to exhibit any of these symptoms with exception to the anger problems. I respectfully disagree.

Xanxus fully embraced his adopted family. He’s busied himself with making himself useful and important in the family. He quickly established his place in the mafia and made every point he could to loudly declare that he was the Ninth’s son, as if needing to constantly reaffirm to everyone and also to himself that he belongs. 

He has approximately 7 years to not only catch up but surpass his brothers and peers in education, fighting skills, and leadership skills. That kind of jump only happens through diligence and hard work, no matter how much talent one has. And speaking of talent, Xanxus is a genius. He really puts all of his skills, talents, and energy into helping the famiglia who raised him and saved him from the "trash" of society. Xanxus was raised, having an unhealthy and incomplete understanding of people’s “worth.” His idea is that a person is “worth” more based on social status and achievement. Being the “bastard son of the Ninth” was okay for him because he worked to prove himself as the best of the best and he believed he had the right to the “throne of Vongola” so to speak. 

So, now we’ve got a checklist:

-Grew up in slums

-Raised in the mafia...the world of crime...and participates in the darker side of it too (ex: assassinations)

-No trustworthy adults in life...absent biological father, crazy and unreliable mother, mafia boss adopted father who also happened to tell some pretty major lies

-Has abandonment issues

...Yeah, you can bet that Xanxus has serious difficulty in trust and dealing with betrayal. So when he finds out that the truth, how does he react?

Exactly as expected. Everything has crumbled. His entire worldview shattered. He believes he’s worth nothing, that he’s back to being trash again. And his “father.” whom he trusted, lied about his identity, past, and future plans.

Xanxus's anger here is completely understandable. Now a coup? Going a bit overboard for most normal people. The Vongola and especially Xanxus are NOT normal people. If you look at it from the perspective of a 16-year-old teen with a rough past and massive anger management and fear of abandonment issues who's just been betrayed by his "father" and lied to about his place in the mafia family who raised him...yeah. Coup doesn't sound so far fetched after all.

Then when he finally confronts the Ninth face to face, his so-called father tells him that he's going to kill him for his rebellion. Xanxus’ isn’t surprised, angry, or dismayed by that statement at all. Timoteo has just validated how Xanxus perceives the Ninth views him: not as a real son but as a tool to be used and manipulated because he has a powerful flame and then disposed of when the cost of keeping him around is too high.  Then the Ninth freezes him in ice for 8 years. Timoteo likes to tell everyone that Xanxus was just "asleep" for eight years. Are you kidding me?! Your "sleeping" technique damaged your adopted son so much it left permanent scars covering his entire body. You think that didn't hurt like hell? Tsuna encased him in ice for only a few minutes and when the ice melted, Xanxus collapsed to the ground. His strength was so gone that his Varia guardians had to physically put the ring on his finger. All this after only a few minutes in that Zero Point Breakthrough technique and this hasn't even touched on the psychological damage that Xanxus has been through. I’m pretty sure that  seeing Tsuna's Zero Point Breakthrough technique, so soon after he was JUST freed, was really traumatizing for Xanxus. It was the technique that got him infuriated and lashing out at the teen when both were already exhausted from fighting.

Think the story can’t get much worse? Think again. After 8 years of being frozen and locked away in the dark basement, the ice is melted and Xanxus is released. There’s ongoing debate between fans about Xanxus’ age. Was he 16 or 24 when he was frozen? I’m going with 16. Yes, I know that Squalo says that he “grew into adulthood” but this is the same story where Tsuna and his guardians call a 15-year-old Lambo, Adult Lambo, too. The term “adult” is rather loosely applied in the KHR universe.

Moving on! This is the part where I got ticked off because I made some additional connections. Mammon says there were 7 dark spots in a circle and that he/she had no idea who actually released Xanxus. The first time watching this series through, I wasn't really paying attention and thought that the Varia members had stolen the rings and freed their boss. Turns out that's not the case. It's even worse. It's never explicitly revealed in the anime and manga who released Xanxus but my bet is that it was the Ninth. As the current boss of the Vongola, it's only safe to assume that he and his guardians inherited the complete Vongola rings from their predecessors and therefore he'd still have the full set. Plus, he knows all about the Zero Point Breakthrough technique so it's also safe to assume that he's the only one who knows how to counter it. So now we have the Ninth melting the ice after nearly a decade and what do you know? He tells Xanxus that he needs to do something to redeem himself. He needs to reunite with his Varia officers and go to Japan to challenge the REAL Decimo canidate. They can't kill them and they can't be too harsh on them because otherwise the battles will end before they can get to the Sky ring battle, which is the most important one that MUST happen for it all to work. Come on, you don't really think that the Varia DIDN'T hold back on their strength when fighting some talented but newbie civilian teenagers? Xanxus, probably still mentally a teenager, having been freed from an ice prison, and desperate at a chance for one last shot to become Decimo, accepts the deal. Unbeknownst to Xanxus, there was never a chance for him. Timoteo sets this whole rings battle up knowing exactly how it's going to end. He knowingly created the battles knowing that the outcome would be his adopted son, collapsed on the ground with more scars and spewing blood from his mouth and nose whilst Tsuna and the rest of his guardians would be exhausted and on the brink of death. After the battle and it's clear that Xanxus has no chance at being Vongola Decimo because the ring rejects him, he gives up the rights and the Cervello have a private conversation with Xanxus lying on the ground in defeat. The Cervello the sole supervisors of the entire battles...from an Agency which serves only directly under the Ninth! It's a really brief scene but this interaction with the Cervello had always puzzled me previously. With the light that the Ninth is the one who freed Xanxus and set up this whole Varia battle fight to manipulate Xanxus into thinking he might still have one last chance at leadership and creating a driving force to make Tsuna to accept his role as the future Decimo, this makes so much more sense: Xanxus: It's...gone...according to...your wishes...you were...right...are you...happy now? Cervello: You say that, but...we do not have wishes nor do we predict anything. Everything was already decided. Your role in this is over. Xanxus: ... ...that cunning old man... Cervello: Thank you for doing your part. With this, the ring contest battle has now ended. And to think that the Ninth had the gall to play the victim here. And you know what's sad? He does actually see himself as the one who is burdened with heavy choices that must be made for the "good of the family." Timoteo, I hate your guts, you manipulative old coot. Go retire already!

[certifries]

July 19th - Day 6 || Storm

Option A: Favourite flame

Option B: Favourite technique

[rebornologist]

*gasps* a new reborn blog in 2021?! Madness! Always happy to see reborn stuff ♡ hope you'll have fun running this blog! Can I request TYL Tsuna with his (snow) Guardian wife? Anything you have in mind, sfw/nsfw both fine :) it does not have to reflect on snow, only the guardian part matters skdjsksks anyways- thank you 🙈

Hello! Thank you for the welcoming words my dear <3 I have news for you omg bc the "snow flames" that appeared in some of the Reborn video games were actually sky flames in disguise hehehe,, I kinda dig that idea so I'm gonna roll with it.

♡ Tsuna and his Snow Guardian Wife ✧

༚✧⁺˳₊˚‿︵‿︵‿୨୧ · ˳ · ♡ · ˳ · ୨୧‿︵‿︵‿˚₊˳⁺✧༚

Soo you were appointed snow guardian after you promised, wholeheartedly and without a shred of doubt in your mind that you had trained only to use the freezing, “snow” attributed flame (which is basically turning your sky flame into zero point breakthrough: first edition, constantly) and wanted to serve as a guardian to protect people alongside Tsuna

He was super concerned about your hidden identity since sky flame users usually hold immense power, and he didn’t want there to be a target on your head due to that fact and being a high ranking member of the Vongola

Gokudera is totally jealous that he wasn’t the guardian that got to take Tsuna’s hand in marriage

It’s just that y’all are so terrifying on the battlefield omg

Beware Vongola Decimo and his snow guardian, who seemed to come out of nowhere, freezing enemies where they stand, their gasping faces caged in ice, giving Decimo a clear shot with his X Burner (we love a power couple <3)

The wisps of silvery blue and icy sheen twinkle around your weapon of choice is deceptively alluring as you brandish it, and Tsuna would probably never admit that it’s the coolest and hottest thing he’s ever seen

Your icy demeanor in combat rivals his, so there’s no wonder why you’re his snow guardian

You guys don’t frequently train together, but you schedule your dates around your work and you would have it no other way; it’s always a race between you and Tsuna of who is going to finish up their assignments for the day so they can rush to pick up some refreshments and catch the other clocking out—I’ll leave it up to you to decide who usually wins that one (plot twist: y’all finish around the same time and bump into each other in your hurry, arms full of your favourite drinks and snacks for your wind down time together)

Anyway I also had this whole schpiel typed up about how he proposes to you accidentally because you were gravely injured once and he feared losing you so much that he just spilled his guts out to you, including “don’t close your eyes on me now, you have to hold on because I promised that I would marry you,”

and the shock of those words, in combination with the warmth of him feeding life energy into you through his soft flames gave you the strength to push on, so you could eventually get proposed to properly and plan the wedding and do that whole thing hehe

Yeah I lost the original blurb about it so I had to rewrite it TIREDLY into the night...

Sooo speaking of wedding, how about that wedding night spice.. under the cut

TYL Tsuna x afab reader nsfw

I like to think that y’all are able to honeymoon right after the festivities, and Tsuna didn’t really want a huge mafia-involved wedding, but it’s kind of hard when all of your friends are also your coworkers and you’re a mafia boss

Sooo right as the partying ended, you two snuck off and hopped on the jet to your little private getaway accommodation

The fervor that this man had when carrying you into the room and immediately attacking your exposed skin with kisses, whispering sweet nothings and running his hands all over your body, rubbing and squeezing at sensitive spots until breathy mewls of approval tumbled from your lips

He mumbles something about having waited his whole life for this; the wedding, and you clothed in pure white, the fabric bunched up between the two of you as he pressed his weight into you

As he settles between your legs, your hands weave themselves into his chestnut brown locks, brushing through them and gripping shakily as he brings you towards that familiar but exhilarating high

He would 100% gently pry them off and intertwine his fingers with yours, oh what a soppy romantic

He’s big on praise (giving and receiving), and every bit of feedback from you spurs on his ministrations

He's an attentive lover, his intuitions telling him exactly what your reactions mean, and he brings you to your peak again and again, until it gets into overstimulation territory, mostly because he can't help himself

So he grips onto you for dear life, your nails digging into the flesh of his back as the room fills with the sound of his hips snapping against yours, your name becomes a mantra on his lips and he cums with a breathy moan and (yet another) muttering of "I love you, I love you"

Man's got above average stamina but in the case of your wedding night, both of y'all are pretty tired from the party, and know that you'll have more time in the coming days to do whatever your little hearts desired with each other

[day6andetcetera]

CHILD OF THE VESSEL

Pairing: Scientist! Choi Yeonjun (TXT) + fem reader

Synopsis: a group of scientists attempt to synthesize artificial life, however things take a dark turn when the lifeform displays unfavorable behavior

Genre/content warning: sci-fi, horror, scientist AU slight fluff, lots of blood, a really creepy mutant, Really bad writing

Word count: 2.9 k

Author note: heyyo, this is my first time writing fanfiction for anything, also I wrote this earlier this year (2021) for an event (with the same story title) so had to edit two of the names for this post. Feedback would be highly appreciated 😊

Return to masterlist

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

“But Sir! You can’t just shut down this project now. I- no WE are THIS close to a breakthrough! We can’t just back out now.”

“Jones, you’re not getting it. The funding is going to stop. The board considers this project an unnecessary risk, and they’re scared of how the public is going to react to… all of this.” Mr. Khan said, gesturing to the large glass vessels behind Dr. Jones. Metal pipes protruded from the top of each vessel, carrying a murky green fluid to and from the vessels that housed numerous unusual creatures.

Riley Jones sighed in defeat. He was rubbing his temples with his fingers, his head hung low as they both sat at a white bench facing each other. The laboratory was almost empty at this hour, proof of how long their argument had gone on.

“How much time do we have till we have to scrap everything?” Riley inquired, looking in Mr. Khan’s direction, emotionally drained from thoughts of the impending end of probably the best work of his career. Mr. Khan gave a sympathetic look at Riley, trying his best to lay it on him as softly as possible.

“Look Riley,” Khan said as he made a point to look at Riley’s eyes and continued in a level but gentle voice, “the higher ups say that they can only allow for a week or so.”

Riley groaned from hearing the deadline but Khan continued, “But I tried to negotiate on what can be done with the findings made so far, and an agreement was reached that you can publish all the research as a valid attempt of developing synthetic life. It may not be cognitively complex in ways humans could be, but nonetheless a breakthrough in its own right, okay?” Khan extended his arm across the table and patted Riley’s back.

“You’re missing the part where I’m still a failu—” “No you’re not Rile—” “Yes I am Sir!” Riley snapped back at Khan, his repeated attempts of reassurance futile, slamming his hand down on the table with a thud. He looked straight into Khan’s eyes as he spoke. “For my students? My team? This was their first chance at doing something big, something worth being remembered by. But for me? This could have been my last chance of doing something historic. The team can get better chances after this, they’re still young and have the intellect to work on better things. But what about me? This was the first time that something was actually going right! Sure, they are technically miscarriages, but this is the furthest we have accomplished. Who knows what we can achieve if—”

“That’s exactly what they don’t want to know Riley,” Mr. Khan said, cutting Riley off, annoyed at his acquaintance’s antics. “As I have mentioned before, the board wants to play it safe. One step at a time so we don’t scare people off, remember? People being scared equals zero trust in our company. Zero trust means no more research fundings. No funding means goodbye lab,” Khan said, waving his hand to stress that last point. Riley hung his head low for the nth time that night. With a heavy heart, Riley decided to break the news to his students.

“So, what? We’re just gonna leave all of this?” Choi Yeonjun questioned Riley the next morning. Riley’s sigh radiated exhaustion. He simply nodded with slumped shoulders, what else could he do? The teams’ faces became gloomy.

“There’s not much to leave anyways Yeonjun,” said Y/N Y/L/N as Yeonjun looked at her.

“How many live subjects did we even get? The most we ever got was the equivalent of a still-born fetus of the mutants. The only thing worth showing was the embryonic level of the research. We could publish a paper on that right?” she looked at Riley as he sat down on his desk in the corner of the lab, merely nodded in response.

Yeonjun gave Y/N a pointed look, she glanced at him and softly pleaded, “We really don’t have much in our hands Yeonjun. We have got to do with what we have.”

Yeonjun’s face softened, he nodded, keeping his head low. The rest of the team were glum but cheered up a bit at the prospect of publishing at least some of their discoveries.

“Then that’s all we can do for now I guess.” Riley said as everyone turned towards him.

“You guys can leave if you want, but we have about a week to wrap everything up, so I suggest we clean up the parts that each of us worked on. Oh yeah, Yeonjun and Y/N? Could you guys stay for a sec? Everyone else can go back to your stations.” With hushed murmurs the group dispersed. Yeonjun and Y/N moved closer to Riley, curious of what he would say.

Riley softly said to them, “I know it's unfair of me to pick favorites around here,” the pair chuckled as Riley gave them a faux-stern look, “but I’m glad I got you two on my team for this. I know its hard to shut this research down, but trust me. You’ll get to do bigger and better things than this.”

Riley stood up from his desk and patted their shoulders, “I believe in your potential. You guys are meant to do great things.” Riley smiled for them with sad eyes, the three stood in comfortable silence.

Yeonjun smiled at his mentor, “Sir, it was an honor to be on your team. And not to be too dramatic but,” Yeonjun sneaked a glance at Y/N, “this was the best thing that ever happened to me.” Y/N only glared at him, her face beet red. Riley simply smiled at their antics.

“Okay lovebirds,” he said sarcastically with a snort, “if it's not too much trouble, could you do something for me?”

“Anything sir.” Y/N responded instantly.

“I have another meeting today with the officials about this matter, legal issues. It might last till evening so could you two shut down the vessels after you're done fixing up your stations? I know it’s extra work—”

“Only on one condition,” Yeonjun cut in with a serious tone, “that we get to have dinner with you afterward, then we’ll be happy to help.” Riley and Y/N both chuckled hearing his ‘condition’.

“All jokes aside,” Riley spoke as he moved back from the pair towards his desk, grabbing his essentials, “I would love to have dinner with you two. I’ll arrange for something when I get back to the lab today.”

“Sure thing Sir. See you later!” Yeonjun responded with a cheery tone as their mentor walked out the door waving at them.

“O MY GOD YEONJUN!” Y/N groaned loudly, walking in the empty lab. Sunset was hours ago and the lab was dark. The overhead translucent light fixtures being the only source of illumination. “How long are you going to take? Do you need help or somethin?” she inquired loudly as she continued to double-check the vessels that Yeonjun had shut down.

“I’m almost done Y/N, don’t worry!” Yeonjun yelled back from the other side of the room. Just as he was about to switch off the last vessel, he saw something twitch from the corner of his eyes. As he looked at the vessel he realised it was the being. It wasn’t just a twitch. The being's chest was moving up and down calmly, almost rhythmically as if...as if its heart was beating. Yeonjun could only stare.

He leaned in closer to the glass, so close his nose was almost touching the vessel. The being suspended within the liquid was in a fetal position. Its size was reminiscent of a prepubescent child. The body seemed lean, skinny limbs framed by broad shoulders. The face itself was shadowed in the translucent liquid.

Body shaking, he released a breath he didn’t realize he was holding. Yeonjun looked to the vessel’s monitor. When he saw the pulse monitor, he froze. A heartbeat. The being had a steady heartbeat. It was alive.

“Yeonjun! You done yet? What’s taking you so long?” Y/N’s whine came from the other side of the section, snapping Yeonjun out of his daze.

He sprinted towards her voice, “Y/N! Oh my god you need to come and see this!”

Yeonjun almost crashed into her, too excited to wait for her to arrive.

“Yeonjun, it's already late. Can’t this wait till—”

“Trust me, you won’t regret this.” Yeonjun breathlessly, looking down at her in this close proximity, Y/N becoming flustered by the passing seconds, he only smirks

“Miracles don’t wait Ms. Y/N Y/L/N,” Yeonjun said, pulling her towards the vessel by her hand.

Yeonjun guided her back towards the vessel and gestured towards it. Y/N looked quizzically toward the vessel then to Yeonjun and back to the vessel. “Yeonjun... What am I supposed to be looking at? An empty vessel?” she asked, perplexed. “What? Empty? Can’t you see the kid inside? It's alive Le—!” Yeonjun stopped abruptly as he looked back at the vessel, eye wide as his face paled. The vessel was empty. The hatch at the top of the vessel was open.

“Hey Yeonjun, what’s wro—”

“It escaped.” Yeonjun’s tremulous whisper quieted Y/N. Her anxiety grew, realizing the gravity of the situation, “what escaped?”, she asked, gripping onto him.

Suddenly the lights above them started to flicker. A low growl followed by scratching noises came from above them. Y/N’s hold on Yeonjun’s hand tightened as they both looked at each other then slowly looked up.

The strange creature was looking down at them as it hung from the ceiling. Its silhouette was blurry, obscured by the ever shifting patterns on its skin, blending in with the maze of light and shadows on the ceiling. The pair were simply far too shocked to move.

“Hey Yeonjun, Y/N, you guys are still here?”— they heard Riley speak, followed by his footsteps, the being snapped its neck towards his sounds— “I brought some pizza for us, where are you guys? Let’s eat before it gets cooled” the being crawled and clawed, still on the ceiling, towards Riley’s voice, the pair ran as fast as they could as well. Riley, completely oblivious, placed the pizza-box on his desk and sat down, closing his eyes as he leaned back. A sight left his lip before he heard a grunt and wet sounds. “Strange”, he thought, he opened his eyes to see a naked boy crouched on his desk with his back at him, the pizza box ripped open as the child clawed and shoving fist full of pizza in his mouth. Riley only stared with furrowed brows, slowly as he rose from his chair ever so gently, the being made a few chirps before turning towards him, looking back with a blank expression. Riley froze, wide eyed as they looked at each other. “Oh my god, you’re alive?” He whispered, more to himself than the creature, it cocked its head with confusion. He leaned closer to it, the being looked human-like, the skin freckled and the short hair on its head was matted down to its face, the innocent face of a child in Riley’s opinion. “You turned out pretty huh?” he said. The being, perhaps able to understand him, sort of smiled with its shark-like teeth. Riley chuckled in amusement.

Just then Yeonjun and Y/N ran in, Y/N started rambling “Sir the sample mutant is—” “is alive and he is beautiful'' the pair looked at their mentor and to their surprise, saw him smiling at the creature. “But sir it could be dangerous” Yeonjun cautiously whispered, the pair too scared to move close to the desk. Riley looked at them bewildered, “Dangerous? I've been sitting next to him and he hasn’t done anything to harm me, look ''— Riley petted the creature’s head, it made a purring sound and smiled, —“he’s harmless”. The pair look at each other and back at their mentor, Yeonjun moved slowly towards them first “Sir I think that’s a premature judgement of this situation”— he looked back at Y/N to see her following him — “we need to be more careful, also now that it’s alive, shouldn’t we report to the officials about it?”. Riley’s brows shot up, “No no no no, we can’t tell anyone” he frantically shook his head. The creature sensing Riley’s tense demeanor eyed the pair suspiciously. Y/N and Yeonjun moved closer trying to convince Riley. “Sir, listen to us, we know this is a miracle that this mutant survived, but we need to tell the officials, we can’t take care of it on our own'' she looked at the being staring into her eyes with its complete green eyes, sending a shiver down her spine. “And we don't know what it is truly capable of, we need to keep it somewhere safe” Yeonjun added. The being felt unsure of them, nudging closer and closer to Riley. Noticing this, he picked it up into his arms without thinking, the being hugged Riley closer. Yeonjun and Y/N were absolutely speechless as their mouths hung open in shock. “Sir I have a bad feeling about this'' — Y/N spoke with fear evident in her voice as she pointed accusingly at the being as her hands shook — “it’s not safe for it- him- whatever this is- to be walking around freely, who knows what it’ll try to —” Y/N fell backward with much force as the being leaped at her, clawing onto her shoulder. Y/N’s screeches heard loudly in the empty lab as the being bit her left shoulder in blood thirst.

“NO!! Y/N!!” Yeonjun screeched while running to her side, Riley snapped out of his shock and tried to get the being off of her. He grabbed a fire extinguisher from the wall, and with hesitance, started to hit the being with the base of the cylinder, loud metallic thuds heard as it collided with its shoulder and head repeatedly. It adamantly kept its jaw locked into Y/N’s flesh as she wriggled weakly from blood loss, Yeonjun also tried to pry the being off of her.

After a few moments of beating, the being let go of her, too tired and worn off. The floor was splattered in blood, Y/N still seemed conscious but bleeding. Riley took off his lab coat and tried picking up the being, it tried to wriggle out but was wrapped tightly in the coat, he put the being in a metallic box in the corner of the lab and closed it, locking it for good measure. Yeonjun sat on the ground beside Y/N, applying pressure on her bleeding shoulder and tried his best to keep her conscious and calm.

“Hey Y/N, you hear me Y/N? You’re gonna be alright you hear me? Don’t you worry okay, you’re gonna be okay, can you hear me Y/N? Please say something Y/N” Yeonjun kept whispering to her as he leaned on her form, making sure she is still breathing and trying to stop the gushing blood. Y/N kept blinking slowly and inhaled slow laboured breaths, the extreme fatigue washing over her quickly paling face.

“Yeonjun- stop listen- to me” Y/N spoke with labored breaths, “that thing- don’t hurt- it didn’t want- to hurt me-” Y/N winced as she tried to breath more to say what she realized, while Yeonjun can only look at her with bewildered expression. “How are you so sure?, it’s not like that thing can—” “It can talk but- in your- head”, Yeonjun’s jaw dropped at Y/N’s discovery. “Woah wait are you— are you saying that this thing can talk telepathically?” Yeonjun asked, Riley was about to sit beside them, dialing an ambulance, and was shocked for the second time after hearing Yeonjun. “Wait, it can WHAT???” he whispered-shouted as he pulled his phone to his ear, an emergency responder received his call, after stating the incident as an attack by a “feral animal” the ambulance showed up not too long after. Yeonjun went with Y/N as she was rushed to the hospital, leaving Riley with the mutant.

After they all left, Riley sat on his chair and let out a loud sigh, he was beyond exhausted. The last 24 hours felt like one big nightmare. After some moments of quiet, a child spoke up, “Hey! Wanna play?” Riley shook up from his chair in a bewildered state. He looked around him and saw nothing peculiar. He went to check the box where he kept the mutant, and to his horror the box was empty. Just then a screech of a woman was heard from the lab adjacent to his. Riley ran to the other room and entered as he saw one of the researchers crouching on the corner crying. As Riley looked up he found himself staring into the mutant's eyes. The mutant looked at Riley and smirked at him as it moved at a speed twice as fast as a human could possibly go, towards the window and jumped out. "Oh God, help us" was all Riley could say as he realized the utter chaos that was about to break loose.

[laneoneform]

Week 6 Reflections and Transduction Template Assignment

This week, I felt really stressed because I didn’t have any idea of what I wanted to do for the assignment, so I unfortunately had to get an extension for this assignment, as I have been very stressed about the work for this course so far and I have been on and off sick for the past 5 weeks!

It’s been a hell of a ride, that’s for sure.

Thankfully, in our Design class, we have this thing called the class repository. A list of modules that we can use for projects during class. Unfortunately, I cannot take these out of the class, but it helped me find my project idea.

A flame sensor.

“A flame sensor?!?!” – My mum, 2022

I was so stoked about this flame sensor, so I hopped off to Jaycar again to grab myself a flame sensor. On my way to Jaycar, I realised I also had to get female wires, as well as a speaker. The piezo speaker, is easy to use, but it’s not very loud and doesn’t stay connected like I want it to when I move it around.

I came back home with these three things and got to work. Very quickly, I realised that the flame sensor that Jaycar stocked was not the same as the ones in the articles I had been reading. And that it was analog and not digital. No problem, I can work with this. Now I had to find a code that would work with this.

I had 5 different versions of the flame sensor code until it worked. And you know which one was the one that worked? Version 2!! One of the ones I opened when I first started with this project. It felt a little like backtracking. I had to alter the code a little bit for the speaker to work with it, but it’s basically the same as what I had started with.

What I had started with was not very functional and wasn’t working. I didn’t know how to connect this flame sensor at all and I obviously didn’t understand what the pins meant. So again, I did a bit of researching and had to go right back to the basics. I eventually figured it out with the simple code, where I didn’t even connect the breadboard. I just plugged the flame sensor right into the Arduino. Fortunately, it worked! Finally, after about 3-4 days of working on this, I finally managed to get the flame sensor to react when I lit a candle.

Now I had to connect the speaker. I turned to the Tone Pitch Follower example code provided by Arduino to help me out. It was very simple, and the circuit had worked in the past.

Although, when I connected my new speaker to the circuit, nothing happened. I un-did the circuit and put it back together again. Still nothing!! Why wouldn’t it work? Upon close-up inspection, I realised that maaaybe, the little “V” pin was important after all?? So, I connected it up to the “V in” pin on the left side of the Arduino.

And what do you know? It worked! Finally, another breakthrough.

How would I connect these two up though?

Using the tone pitch follower circuit, I took out the sensor and replaced it with the same circuit I used for the flame sensor. And again! It worked. But I wanted the speaker to only respond when it sensed fire – at this point, it was just constantly making noise.

So I edited the analog input range to zero, hoping that it might be lower, and thankfully, it worked. So now, when you light a match, or a candle, and hold the flame sensor up to the candle, the speaker produces a loud wailing sound. I was hoping to change the sound into more of a siren-like sound, but I felt I should stick to what I have and not to complicate what I already had done.

It worked! And I barely had to type much (apart from this post, ahahaha)

Despite getting really frustrated with the sensor, speaker, myself, this course and probably the people around me, when the code worked, I was so happy. I probably woke my housemate up at 12am (whoops) I was just so excited. All this labour and trial and error and research I had done had paid off, and I had made something that I thought was cool and that I was proud of!!

I was thinking for the application of my prototype, it reminds me of the function of a smoke alarm or something. I’m not entirely sure what else it could be used for, but it might be a handy tool in a household for the kitchen, or for blind people?? Not sure...

I am really happy with what I’ve done, although I wish I had been able to do it sooner and not have to deal with an assignment in my uni break. That all being said, I am keen to see where I could go next!

<3 jemma

[eightyonekilograms]

Someone on the Discord brought up fertility

Just like last time I'm lazy and just going to dump it instead of editing.

[5:10 PM] Me: Oh boy, I have thoughts about this

[5:12 PM] Me: I haven't brought it up here but demographics has been one of my covid obsessions. I got a couple books about it (What to Expect When No One's Expecting, One Billion Americans, etc.), read all the articles, etc.

[5:15 PM] Me: I agree with you about a couple things: namely that if we had "infinite free energy" we'd be a a lot better off in many ways including demographically, but I disagree with most of your other points.

[5:18 PM] Me:

Also we need not assume decline in population growth is chronic.

This is a tricky statement because there's a social aspect and a mathematical aspect. Socially you're correct in the sense that whatever trends are driving the current decline could, in theory, reverse at any time. But mathematically, population decline is exactly symmetrical to population growth: it's exponential (technically it's logistic, but that's the same as exponential in the short term), because having fewer people means fewer people to make more people later on.

[5:20 PM] Me:

Infact there is some evidence to suggest that we actually did more science when we had 4-6 billion people.

I disagree with the implication here: we used to do more science because there was more low-hanging fruit, which is now plucked, and further discoveries require more resources (human and financial). Actually one of the big reasons I disagree with Ray Kurzweil and the other singularitarians is that when they show these impressive-looking exponential curves about scientific progress, they quietly hide under the rug that these increases are requiring ever-more investment (again, in both people and money) to accomplish. Just to pick a random example, every time chip manufacturers go to a new process (14nm -> 10nm -> 7nm -> 5nm -> 2nm etc.), the cost to build the fab basically doubles. I remember a couple years back Intel had to spend $5 billion to hit a new process shrink; now TSMC needs to spend $28 billion to hit their next target: https://www.wsj.com/articles/tsmc-to-spend-up-to-record-28-billion-in-advanced-chips-capacity-11610623587)

[5:23 PM] Me: I will try to find it but I came across a paper a little while ago laying out in detail that the cost of new scientific discoveries has been steadily increasing over time. It's not that there's anything necessarily going wrong with the scientific process, this is just what you'd expect as we pick low-hanging fruit: the later discoveries necessarily become harder. But if you extrapolate that trend out forever you eventually hit a point where every single person needs to be a scientist, and every dime of capital in existence, needs to be used to make any new discoveries.

[5:26 PM] Me: (In most fields we're a long way from that point, but it actually is here or nearly here in e.g. particle physics. What I have been hearing from leading-edge particle physicists is that we've got maybe one or two more generations of particle accelerators left before we reach a point where, to probe any further (e.g. to see if string theory is true), we'd need to build accelerators the size of the Solar System, which would take more raw material than the mass of the Earth. Barring some new theoretical breakthroughs, we might actually nearing the "end" of high-energy physics.)

[5:30 PM] Me: Fortunately most fields aren't at that point, but my point is that the more we discover, the more human capital is required to make further progress. That's a tricky enough proposition with a growing population, never mind a shrinking one.

[5:36 PM] Me:

I don't think it is safe to assume lowering population growth is a biological disorder so much as a conscious choice most people in the younger generations are making for a variety of obvious reasons.

I agree with this, but it's important to dig into that a little and understand the reasons. For example, I'm not yet convinced that there is a mass epidemic of people choosing childlessness because of anxiety about e.g. climate change. In internet comments sections you certainly see lots of people making that claim, but talk is cheap and randos on the internet can say whatever they want. In terms of the actual reasons, the data I've seen shows that number of children continues to track closely with a couple data points, mostly housing costs, expected lifetime income and uncertainly about future income flow.

[5:40 PM] Me: Third, I think you should give more weight to the concerns Rhys brought up than you currently are. The environmental stresses of more people is certainly a big issue, but I think it's one that can be dealt with without too much struggle with increased deployment of clean energy (one of the few optimistic data points lately is that there's a staggering amount of wind and solar power being deployed every year) and a couple of lifestyle changes like eating less meat. Not to say these are easy, but contrast with the pretty serious problems of population decline, particularly the social safety net.

[5:41 PM] Me: And I don't just mean the explicit ones like Social Security, but even market-based, privatized ones like retirement savings have a hidden reliance on a growing population.

[5:42 PM] Me: When you "save for retirement", you're not stockpiling food and water to live off when you no longer work, you're collecting financial assets that you expect to sell to someone else and live off that income. But if there's no one to sell to, that doesn't work.

[5:44 PM] Me: This is a problem that's starting to show up at the top end of the income stack: see this WSJ article about retirees who can't find anyone to buy their $3 million homes: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-growing-problem-in-real-estate-too-many-too-big-houses-11553181782. It's easy to have schadenfreude here at those poor rich people who can't unload their huge mansion, but remember that this is inherently a problem which will start at the top of the income brackets and gradually make its way downward.

[5:46 PM] Me: You can push this problem back for a while by increasing taxes on the rich, and I do indeed think those should go up, but in a declining population that only buys you a little time. Remember that "money" is nothing but a claim on some fraction of total economic output. e.g. when you hold a dollar bill, you're essentially holding a note entitling you to one-zillionth of American GDP.

[5:47 PM] Me: At a certain point once population falls then total aggregate output necessarily falls too, and at that point taxing the rich hits rapidly diminishing returns: you're just claiming a bigger share of falling output

[5:49 PM] Me: One thing to keep in mind here is that most economies, but especially the U.S. economy, are primarily driven by consumer spending, i.e. normal people just buying and selling stuff to each other.

[5:50 PM] Me: This is why e.g. mass immigration isn't as huge a deal as a bunch of nativists like to think: immigrants get jobs, but they also spend money on goods and services just like anyone else: they generate labor demand as well as taking up supply

[5:51 PM] Me: But what I'm driving at here is that, again, a consumer-spending-driven economy with a falling population is going to get poorer pretty much by definition: fewer people buying stuff means fewer jobs to produce that stuff.

[5:54 PM] Me: Or to put another way, to use a ridiculously simplified model, GDP = Population X Productivity, and so if you take the derivative, then GDP' ~ Population' + Productivity'. So in a falling population environment, you need a lot of heavy lifting in terms of forever-increasing productivity in order for economic growth to be positive. And while there might be improvements down the pipe, frankly we kind of seem tapped out on productivity growth already

[5:55 PM] Me: Now, one possible response here is that we should work out how to have an economic system which delivers prosperity without endless growth, and I do agree we need that. But just saying that doesn't fix the problem that right now we don't have it and people will be poorer in a world without growth.

[5:56 PM] Me: And in such a world, I think it actually becomes harder to successfully transition to whatever post-scarcity economy can fix the problem, because people will be caught up in fighting over a shrinking pie.

[5:58 PM] Me: The neoliberal capitalist mindset of "a rising tide lifts all boats" isn't totally true and has been used to justify all kinds of nasty plutocratic behavior, but it isn't entirely false either. Without growth, at least in the system we have now, wealth distribution inherently becomes a zero-sum game. And that could get really ugly.

[5:59 PM] Me: So, that's most of what I have to say about why a falling population would be bad. But that's the easy part. Where this gets really complicated is why it's happening and what to do about it

[6:00 PM] Me: Now, I think one of the reasons I've been so fascinated by this is that it's been a pessimistic year, and falling birth rates are kind of the perfect pessimistic problem because I don't really see an easy way out. Also I'm just annoyed by partisans in general, and this is a perfect problem for that because it sort of frustrates partisans on all sides.

[6:02 PM] Me: e.g. the left mainly talks about the economic causes and proposes a variety of policy solutions, but an ugly little secret here is that government policy to increase birth rates has basically a perfect, unbroken track record of total failure

[6:03 PM] Me: All kinds of countries (mostly in Europe, but also in East Asia) have implemented all kinds of pro-natalist policies, and for the most part they have accomplished pretty much nothing. (Amusingly, this even goes back to antiquity: in the first couple centuries AD Roman Emperors were also concerned with falling birth rates, and implemented a variety of reforms that didn't do anything)

[6:03 PM] Me: You could always say they didn't go far enough, but at some point you're making an unfalsifiable hypothesis

[6:06 PM] Me: Meanwhile on the right, they're constantly talking about cultural factors, but this runs into two problems: it's again a set of mostly unfalsifiable hypotheses, but even worse since they're all tangled up in the Right's usual rants about The Way Things Ought to Be, but even if they turned out to be true, it seems like a hopeless cause because we basically have no levers to change culture.

[6:07 PM] Me: "Why does culture develop in the direction it does" is one of those huge questions I'm not sure we'll ever have a complete answer for, but I think it has to mostly involve technological determinism.

[6:08 PM] Me: https://www.sciphijournal.org/index.php/2017/11/12/why-the-culture-wins-an-appreciation-of-iain-m-banks/ <-- this is a great article explaining what I'm talking about, as well as explaining why you should read Iain Banks

[6:09 PM] Me: But my point here is that all the cultural changes the Right laments as causing people to have fewer children, assuming they're even correct which I am definitely not granting, are pretty much all products of industrialization. You can't roll them back without undoing the Industrial Revolution. At least not without an insane level of authoritarianism

[6:10 PM] Me: So on the policy side we have a bunch of levers which don't do anything, and on the culture side there are no levers at all.

[soundsof71]

Hey! Album: 'Fleetwood Mac' (1975) - Fleetwood Mac

Hey! Great to hear from you! You (and your previous blog) were my original inspiration for trying to raise my tumblr game to something intentionally curated, and more than that, personally creative. Sorry to have let you down. LOL

What a pleasure to talk about this one, though, an album I think is -- strangely enough -- one of the most underrated albums in the classic rock pantheon!

What’s that you say? An album with “Rhiannon” and “Landslide” underrated?!?! Well it’s true, seriously underrated, at least partly because those two stellar, nay, legendary songs are the first ones that most people think of. There's so much more! It's definitely my favorite Fleetwood Mac album!

My perspective is a little different than the standard rap that Fleetwood Mac didn't properly begin until those two California kids joined the band in 1975, because to me, they started taking off when their first American joined the band, Bob Welch in 1971 for Future Games, which I wrote about at some length here. 

(For the record, Future Games is my second favorite Fleetwood Mac album. Anyone who hasn't checked it out really needs to.)

I’ll leave it at that for now, except to observe that to most of my music nerd friends at the time, I was a latecomer to Fleetwood Mac the band, having completely missed their earlier, bluesier lineups. Indeed, the 1971 lineup was their 8th! And they'd come to #9 in 1972, before landing on lineup #10 in 1975.

They had a bunch of hits on the five albums in this 71-74 range (”Hypnotized” is one that still slays me) that I think hold up as among their best ever. While the album before Fleetwood Mac, Heroes Are Hard to Find didn’t have a hit single, it rose to #34 on the US charts, and got plenty of attention. 

My point is that Fleetwood Mac didn’t spring into existence out of nowhere in 1975. Nor was 1975 necessarily ground zero for the millions of people who bought the album Fleetwood Mac. It came out in the summer of ‘75, but took 15 months to hit #1 in the US! (It peaked at #11 in the UK.) This was a far bigger album in 1976 when all the singles came out, and the band was touring like crazy to support it.

They basically dragged the album to the top of the charts kicking and screaming by the end of THAT year with relentless touring, setting the stage for their true commercial breakthrough with Rumours in 1977, but artistically? I prefer everything about 1975′s Fleetwood Mac.

btw, the music nerds know that Fleetwood Mac was recorded at Sound City Studios, which makes all the difference in the telling of the tale. In 1974, the band had located to Los Angeles, and following the departure of Bob Welch in December, Mick Fleetwood went looking for both a recording studio and a guitarist. 

While getting to know producer Keith Olsen at Sound City (a studio legendary for its drum sound, among other things), Keith played Mick some tracks from an album he’d recorded here a couple of years earlier with a local guitarist and his girlfriend singer, both of whom were also songwriters.

Mick said, I’ll book the studio to record my next album, I’ll book you to produce, and I’ll hire the guitarist....who famously informed Mick that he and his girlfriend were a package deal. All of this happened because of Sound City Studios.

(Here's Mick recording this very album in this very studio.)

Your friend and mine Dave Grohl directed a FANTASTIC documentary about Sound City Studios, a kind of a dump to be honest, but where tons of phenomenal records were made, from After The Gold Rush to Caribou, Damn The Torpedoes, Nevermind, Rage Against The Machine, and most recently, Phoebe Bridgers’ Punisher. Lots and lots of stories about the making of Fleetwood Mac in this movie, and much more. 

Here’s the trailer. The whole movie is available on YT, too! And Amazon Prime, and a bunch of other places. HIGHLY recommended!

So here we go taking directly about Fleetwood Mac.....

the first song from the album i heard: "Over My Head". This was the first single released in the US, remarkably, four months after the album was released! I dunno, did the label not want to sell any albums? Or did they just not get how catchy these tunes were? I have no idea.

And ironically, the band didn't like the choice of "Over My Head" at all, ranking it dead-last in their own considerations of likely singles! I think that this is evidence that they were using heavy drugs much earlier than we thought. LOL

"Over My Head" peaked at #20 in the US, their highest to date by far, although, in some defense of the band's reservations, didn't chart at all in the UK. Saying that it rose to "only" 20 in the charts doesn't begin to describe how heavily it was played, though. A LOT.

do i own the album: Did then, Spotify now. The answer for most of the albums in this round of Asks. :-)

my favorite song: "Over My Head". Look, I admit that this is insane when Fleetwood Mac also includes "Landslide" and "Rhiannon." "Landslide" in particular is maybe one of the greatest songs anyone has ever written, and every single person reading this knows somebody named Rhiannon because of that song. (I've met two.) And hey, "Say You Love Me" was a MUCH bigger hit at the time too... but I'm tellin' ya, "Over My Head" fucks. 

It's the single version that fucks hardest, though, no doubt about it. I was disappointed when I finally bought the album that the version there fades in (NO! THIS IS WRONG) and has a wide mix that diffuses the impact. The radio version is so tight that it's practically mono, and it punches you right upside the head. 

One of my favorite things about listening to "Over My Head" in the past couple of weeks for this Ask is that it's Old School Fleetwood Mac. Chris on piano, Mick on drums, and John McVie with what might be the best bassline that anyone stroked out in 1975. My god, it's a fucking monster, and it just gets hotter as the song progresses. By the end, it's on fire, and you hear it so much better in this tight single mix.

The new guy adds a nice little solo on top of a nice rhythm lick, and he and Stevie add background vocals, but they're not front and center. "Over My Head" is really Christine McVie's showcase, although Fleetwood and Mac really shine too. This would have been a monster hit without the new kids, as indeed it pretty much was. You could say the same thing about "Say You Love Me", which is also all about Christine's songcraft, and a voice like no other, then or now.

Here's my edit of a lovely Mick Putland photo of Christine McVie from a couple of years earlier.

I guarantee that it's been way too long since you heard the in-your-face single version of "Over My Head". On Spotify, you can find it on the couple of Deluxe Editions of Fleetwood Mac (here's one), and it's also on the anthology, The Very Best of Fleetwood Mac, which I've embedded here. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gw-lIt1ILzk

least favorite song: "I'm So Afraid." I'm so afraid not. LOL

a song I didn’t like at first, but now do: Hmm, I might put "Sugar Daddy" in that category, but honestly, the main thing I don't like about this song is the title. LOL But it's the 4th best Christine McVie song on an album where the best three of hers were all released as singles, so I guess it all works out.

a song I used to like, but now don’t: Anything by the new guy. I'm not going to go into detail here because what I love about this album, I still love. At the time, I dug two of his songs here (you can guess which two, surely), but I started to really despise this guy a few years later. Now, I can't listen to anything where he's prominent at all, on any Fleetwood Mac records.

Fortunately there are more than enough Christine and Stevie songs, and Mick and John's playing, plus all those earlier albums like Future Games, to keep Fleetwood Mac in the rock good pantheon. I'd have fired the new guy 30 years earlier than he was. 

favorite lyric:

Mirror in the sky

What is love?

Can the child within my heart rise above?

Can I sail through the changin' ocean tides?

Can I handle the seasons of my life?

Well, I've been afraid of changin'

'Cause I've built my life around you

But time makes you bolder

Even children get older

And I'm getting older too

Like I said, the two Stevie Nicks tracks on Fleetwood Mac deserve every bit of the love they've gotten over the years. You can also see with just a quick glance around my blog that she's one of my most-posted artists. Please don't take me repping Christine as any disrespect for Stevie!

Do I like "Landslide" a little more than I otherwise might because it's specifically about outgrowing the aforementioned new guy? Maybe.  Or do I like it a little less than I otherwise might because I can't hear it without thinking of him? Maybe that too.

overall rating out of 10: Then: 9.4. Now: 9. The new guy went 2-for-4 for my money at the time, and the two that he whiffed on are genuinely terrible...but as bad as those two clunkers were, the rest of the album seemed perfect to me. Certainly among my most-played mainstream rock records into the early 80s. I was perfectly fine skipping one song on each side.

Even though nowadays I can't stand any of the songs he sings lead on, you take those off, and you STILL have "Landslide", "Rhiannon", "Say You Love Me", "Over My Head", and "Warm Ways". No album with ALL THOSE on them gets less than an 8.5, right?

I'm adding a few tenths each for how tightly Fleetwood and Mac are locked into each other and these songs on rythm (easily the most underrated duo of the era, sez me), and Keith Olsen's immaculate production. The score of 9 is therefore objectively correct and mathematically unassailable. LOL

I'm going to end where I began, by talking about Christine McVie. Instead of listening to this first and foremost as an album with a couple of giant Stevie Nicks songs, listen again to Fleetwood Mac as Christine McVie really lighting things up. She deserves so much more credit for the band's success than she gets, and seriously, "Over My Head" fucks. 

Now looky here, @aluacrescente . I know that YOU have strong feelings about this record, so spill! And the rest of you, too! I don't intend to have the last word on the albums in any of these Asks! Just the first one. :-) So lemme know what YOU think!

PS. Apologies for any formatting weirdness! I started this on desktop, where I do all my writing, saved the first few paragraphs to come back to later, only to be told by tumblr that I'd stated this on the app (DID NOT) and could only edit there. Grrr. Not cool, @staff. I've spent another day just tweaking to make it somewhat readable and wondering how these people can be so bad at their jobs. LOL

My crackpot opinions and wobbly writing are my own of course, and I'm aware that they have a larger negative impact on readability than tumblr's incompetence by far. LOL

[skippyv20]

Maryam Mirzakhani, the only woman to have won math’s highest honour

pxfuel - edited by Marcia Wendorf

In mathematics, the highest award you can receive is the Fields Medal. Created by Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields, it is only awarded once every four years, to a maximum of four mathematicians, and all must be under the age of 40-years-old.

Fields Medal Source: Stefan Zachow/Wikimedia Commons

While the first Fields Medal was first awarded in 1936, the medal has only been continuously awarded every four years since 1950. Famous recipients include the physicist Edward Witten in 1990 and Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman in 2006, who ultimately declined the medal.

From 1936 and 2014, all the recipients of the Fields Medal had been men, that is until 2014. That’s when an Iranian woman along with Brazilian Artur Avila, Canadian Manjul Bhargava, and Austrian Martin Hairer received a Fields Medal. Meet Maryam Mirzakhani.

Maryam Mirzakhani was born in 1977 in Tehran, Iran. As a child, she dreamed of becoming a writer. During high school, Mirzakhani met her lifelong friend, Roya Beheshti Zavareh, who now teaches mathematics at Washington University in St. Louis. The two girls approached the principal of their all-girls school and asked that the same math problem-solving classes that were taught at the all-boys school be taught at their school.

In 1994, when Mirzakhani was 17, she and Zavareh made the Iranian Mathematical Olympiad team, and Mirzakhani received a gold medal. The following year, Mirzakhani achieved both another gold medal and a perfect score at the International Mathematical Olympiad, which was held in Toronto, Canada that year.

Mirzakhani received a bachelor’s degree from Sharif University in Tehran in 1999, and she and Zavareh wrote a book together entitled, Elementary Number Theory, Challenging Problems, which was published in 1999.

Hyperbolic surfaces Source: Hamish Todd/YouTube

For graduate school, Mirzakhani traveled to Harvard University in the U.S. where she became interested in hyperbolic surfaces, the strange doughnut-shaped objects with two or more holes and saddle points. A curved surface can have a “straight” line segment, known as a geodesic, which is the shortest path between two points. On a hyperbolic surface, some geodesics are infinitely long, while others close up into a loop like the circles on a sphere.

Most geodesics intersect themselves many times before they close up, but a tiny fraction which are called “simple” geodesics, never intersect themselves. Mathematicians had been unable to determine how many simple closed geodesics of a given length a hyperbolic surface could have. Mirzakhani solved that problem in her 2004 Ph.D. dissertation in which she developed a formula for how the number of simple geodesics of length X grows as X gets larger. She also determined a formula for the volume of moduli space, which is the set of all possible hyperbolic structures on a given surface.

Mirzakhani teaching Source: Wired Science/YouTube

If that weren’t enough, Mirzakhani also provided a new proof of an old conjecture that had been proposed by Edward Witten concerning the topological measurements of moduli spaces as it related to string theory. Mirzakhani’s dissertation generated three influential papers which were published in the top mathematics journals. After a stint as a professor at Princeton University, in 2009, Mirzakhani became a professor at Stanford University.

In 2006, Mirzakhani began a collaboration with the University of Chicago's Alex Eskin. Eskin is a 2019 recipient of the Breakthrough Prize. He and Mirzakhani began analysing the range of behaviours of a ball on a polygon-shaped billiard table, where the table’s angles are a rational number of degrees. A rational number can be expressed as the quotient of two integers where the denominator is non-zero.

Mirzakhani and Eskin imagined deforming a billiard table by contracting it along the direction of a billiard ball’s trajectory. This transformed the original table into a succession of new ones which is the moduli space that is comprised of all possible billiard tables having a specific number of sides. At the 2014 Fields Medal award ceremony, American mathematician Jordan Ellenberg explained Mirzakhani’s research as:

“… she studies billiards … She considers not just one billiard table, but the universe of all possible billiard tables. And the kind of dynamics she studies doesn’t directly concern the motion of the billiards on the table, but instead a transformation of the billiard table itself, which is changing its shape in a rule-governed way; … the table itself moves like a strange planet around the universe of all possible tables … it’s what you need to do in order to expose the dynamics at the heart of geometry; for there’s no question that they’re there.”

In 2008, Mirzakhani married fellow professor of mathematics at Stanford Jan Vondrak, and the two went on to have a daughter, Anahita. Mirzakhani’s and Vondrak’s home was littered with large sheets of paper on which she would draw physical representations of the concepts she was thinking about. Her daughter called this “painting”.

Mirzakhani’s “paintings" Source: Hamish Todd/YouTube

In 2013, Mirzakhani was diagnosed with breast cancer, and on July 14, 2017, she died of the disease. Mirzakhani was only 40-years-old.

Mirzakhani without a headscarf Source: Hamish Todd/YouTube

Following her death, Iranian newspapers, along with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, broke with tradition and published photos of Mirzakhani where she isn’t wearing a head covering. To allow Mirzakhani’s daughter to be able to visit Iran, the Iranian parliament sped up passage of an amendment that allows the children of Iranian mothers who are married to foreigners to receive Iranian nationality.

Before her death, Mirzakhani had become a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, and following her death, the International Council for Science declared May 12th, which is Mirzakhani’s birthday, International Women in Mathematics Day. Tehran’s Sharif University of Technology named their College of Mathematics library after Mirzakhani, and a conference hall in the Iranian city of Isfahan is named after her. The satellite firm Satellogic named a satellite after her.

In November 2019 the Breakthrough Prize Foundation announced a $50,000 prize in Mirzakhani’s honour to be awarded to outstanding women mathematicians. Asteroid 321357 Mirzakhani was named in her memory.

In February 2020, on International Day of Women and Girls in STEM, Maryam Mirzakhani was honored by UN Women as one of seven female scientists, dead or alive, who have shaped our world. Had she lived past the tender age of 40, who knows what Maryam Mirzakhani could have accomplished. Still, she has left a lasting legacy for all women and girls in the fields of mathematics and science.

https://interestingengineering.com/maryam-mirzakhani-the-only-woman-to-have-won-maths-highest-honor

Thank you😊❤️❤️❤️❤️

[kxzuna]

Sawada Yoshinobu's Bio

Name: Sawada Yoshinobu

Title: Black Hawk

Birthday: March 25th

Gender: Male

Height: 179 cm

Weight: 66 kg

Blood Type: A

Relatives:

Giotto/Sawada Ieyasu (grandfather)

Hotaru (grandmother)

Sawada Yoshimune (father)

Sayuri (mother)

Takahashi Reiko (wife)

Sawada Ietsuna (son)

Sawada Iemitsu (grandson)

Sawada Tsunayoshi (great-grandson)

Sawada Nozomi (great-great-granddaughter)

Sawada Ieharu (great x3 grandson)

Sawada Honoka (great x4 granddaughter)

Appearance

Yoshinobu had a short dark brown hair and he had a scar across his left eye resulted in a gang fight. He was often seen wearing kimono with white shirt and dark blue necktie, hakama and black boots. He sometimes wore a school cap when he was at school. When he was working as an accountant, he wore a light brown suit, white shirt and black necktie.

Personality

Yoshinobu’s personality was different from his father (Yoshimune) and his grandfather (Giotto). He was rather serious and he was the type of person who was hard to befriend with, a trait he had if from his mother. Right after the death of his mother, he grew colder towards anyone and he held an extreme grudge against someone who had caused his mother's death. He even resorted to use violence to solve the problem and had recently joined gang fights. However, after Giotto's death, Yoshinobu’s cold personality had changed and he constantly blamed himself for hurting his grandfather's feelings. He became a responsible parent after his wife gave birth to a baby boy before she passed away.

Equipment and abilities:

Hand to hand combat: He was trained to fight by his mother and soon began to learn other types of martial arts. During his time, he was unbeatable because of his advanced agility and he never used any weapons to fight aside from his hands. Because of it, he was given a nickname, Black Hawk.

Brass knuckle: A metal weapon that was worn over the knuckles and it was used to increase the injuries caused when hitting someone. Yoshinobu received it from Noriaki as a friendship gift and he had been using it in the gang fights. After realising that he had hurt many people with this weapon (and it also eroded his relationship with his father and his grandfather), he threw it in the lotus pond and never picked it up ever since.

Judo: Judo was a Japanese martial art where the objective was to either throw or take down an opponent to the ground, immobilize or subdue an opponent. Yoshinobu wanted to be strong just like his mother and Sayuri later taught him to fight.

Hyper Dying Will Mode: Yoshinobu was not able to activate his Sky Flame to enter HDWM due to his extreme guilt he suffered after the death of his grandfather. He only managed to activate his flame and entered HDWM when he was in his mid 40s and it helped him to fight better in the recent battles. Due to his age, he was far too late to master Giotto's technique, which was Zero Point Breakthrough (First Edition).

[sandreeen]

2020 CREATOR WRAP: FAVOURITE WORKS  

Rules: It’s time to love yourselves! Choose your 5 (or so) favorite works you created in the past year (fics, art, edits, etc.) and link them below to reflect on the amazing things you brought into the world in 2020. Tag as many writers/artists/etc. as you want (fan or original) so we can spread the love and link each other to awesome work

Thanks for tagging me, @hawopro! This is a tough one. I’ve made a ton of gifs in 2020.

Tagging: @ninotrash, @yahbacon, @hanevma​, @scarletsm​, @arianna-nuvola​

FIVE.  Katekyo Hitman Reborn! The Stage: Vongola (Half) Rings gifset. I started working on this around December 2019 iirc, then shelved it because VS Varia Part II came around and I was busy doing daily photo compilations. I think I posted this in February? But man, it feels so long ago. More like 2019 than 2020 haha. Anyway, the VS Varia pamphlets had photos of the two half rings, so I decided to superimpose them and do this simple animation. I remember struggling to get the colors I wanted for these gifs lol, and also figuring out what to do with the 2 extra spaces in the 3x3 gifset.

FOUR. Zero Point Breakthrough: Revised gifset. This one didn’t get a lot of notes but it’s the set that I worked on the most in the GMPmeme. I kept redoing the flame effect over and over and over and over lmao.

THREE. This joke meme I made about the Vongola Rings ending up as top trending on Twitter. It was a rush edit that could’ve been better, but it really took off more than I expected lol. I should really clean it up and post a blank version for KHR fans to use lol.

TWO.  Cale Henituse’s Ancient Powers gifset. This one was my first and last attempt at an aesthetic gifset. It was fun experimenting and combining overlays, but my inspiration decreased each gif I made lmao.

ONE. Ji Jingwu birthday gifset. Hahaha, was there any doubt? This gifset turned out nicer and more balanced than I expected. Did a lot of different styles in this gifset, and I’m glad the animated stats turned out nicely. Also the typography! And the snap! And the easter egg Sunday! There’s so much I love about this, and the eyecandy is satisfying lmao. I'm not sure I can ever make a creative gifset that can top this one. I tried once, and failed terribly lol.

[johannepetereric]

ZERO-POINT BREAKTHROUGH: FIRST EDITION: ICEMAN

[fictionadventurer]

I think I’ve finally figured out how to zero draft.

It always sounded great--write down ideas fast and don’t worry about quality--but it never worked for me. I think it’s because I kept hearing the idea that "a zero draft can be messy”, but I didn’t want a mess. I didn’t want rambling stream-of-consciousness thoughts and [bracket placeholders for names] and stuff like that.

But I’ve finally figured it out.

A zero draft doesn’t have to be The Messy Draft. It can be The Simple Draft. Write only the basics that I need to lay out the plot beats, describe the setting, and show what the characters are feeling. Short sentences, simple words, clear images.

My old method of trying to write “fast and messy” got very wordy. I’d get so distracted by the describing the details of the surroundings or the characters or whatever that I’d never get to the crystal clear plot point that was the whole purpose of the scene. When I’m brainstorming, I don’t have all the intricate details of characterization or scenery. I have things like “her dress was blue” or “he was terrified.” And I know a real story needs more than that, so I’d agonize over tons of additional details, and lose track of the intended atmosphere of the scene. And half the time, the next day’s writing would involve deleting 90% of that scene.

But it finally clicked: if all I know is “her dress was blue”, I can write “her dress was blue”. And move on! I’ll get something clean and spare that captures my first image of a scene. And then I can come back and finesse it. Sculpt it like clay. 

The writing advice to “just write garbage and edit later” never works for me because I don’t want to write garbage. But I can certainly write something simple. A sentence like “her dress was blue” is a good sentence. It’s not sparkling prose, but it’s clear and gets the point across. There are no wrong words in it. And it’s very easy to add more details onto it later. Or delete it completely. Because it’s just four words--very simple to write, very simple to sculpt a story around. I can get down the image quickly and worry about the writerly details once I have the blocking laid out.

It’s so weird how often my writing breakthroughs just involve finding the right metaphor for my process.

[narijem]

Teaser for KHR and Silmarillion Crossover

Just had this idea of combining the two together because I love Katekyo Hitman Reborn and Silmarillion; this takes place during the time of Maedhros’s Capture

They read the message of Morgoth of the Balrog Family. 

“He has the silmarils,” Maedhros said.

“Are you really leaving?” His right-hand man, Maglor, asked.

“I need to get them back,” Maedhros said.

“I won’t let you go alone; our brothers...” 

Maedhros held Maglor’s shoulder;

“Stay here; I do not want you to go after me. If something happens, you need to take care of our brothers,” Maedhros said.

Maglor watched as Maedhros left with some of his trusted men.

In a bar, Maedhros met Morgoth; 

“Where are the silmarils?” Maedhros asked.

“Where are my box weapons?” Morgoth asked.

Maedhros nodded to his companion and they brought out a suitcase filled with box weapons. As Morgoth inspected them, the silmarils were brought out in front of Maedhros. Maedhros reached out to the silmarils when his men were shot one-by-one by bullets infused with storm dying will flames. Maedhros brought out his ring and inserted it in his box weapon, bringing out his sky dragon.

“You cannot think it will be that easy, do you?” Morgoth asked, laughing; 

Maedhros gasped when he saw sky dying will flames in Morgoth’s hands, especially when it started flickering. Maedhros took a deep breath;

“Zero-Point Breakthrough, First Edition,” Maedhros said.

Maedhros was shocked when Morgoth smirked;

“It did not work when Noldorin Primo tried it on me, what makes you think a lesser man like you can defeat me?” Morgoth asked as Maedhros was slowly being consumed by ice.

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

Maedhros tried to release himself from the ice; he was able to remove those that were around his body, though his hand was still filled with ice. It was the only part of his body that was still connected to the edge of the cliff where Morgoth’s tower was. It was the hand that reached out to the silmarils;

“Let the hand that almost held them be forever chained to me,” Morgoth said.

“Maedhros,” 

Maedhros opened his eyes and saw Fingon, the son of Fingolfin, the leader of the independent and secret intelligence organization but still under the Noldorin Family called Hithlum.

“We need strong dying will flames to get this ice melted,” Fingon said.

Maedhros shook his head;

“Cut it off,” Maedhros said.

“What? Are you serious?” Fingon asked in a whisper.

“Cut it off,” Maedhros whispered.

“But...”

“Cut it off,” Maedhros said.

Fingon brought out his knife and filled it with sun flames; Fingon cut off Maedhros’s hand. Maedhros fainted as the bleeding stopped, thanks to Fingon’s sun flames. Through Fingon’s box weapon, the sun eagle, Maedhros was brought to Hithlum’s hideout. 

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

Maedhros dressed himself and handed Fingolfin the Noldorin Ring of Sky that symbolizes that he was the leader;

“You will now be known as Noldorin Quarto; you should be the one to lead after my father anyway,” Maedhros said.

“What about you?” Fingolfin asked.

“I will go back to my brothers,” Maedhros said.

A year later, a new famiglia feared by the mafia world appeared: Feanorian Famiglia headed by Maedhros the One-Handed and his sky phoenix box guardian alongside Maglor, the right-hand man and rain guardian, Celegorm, head of the elite assassin organization and storm guardian, Caranthir, head of the intelligence organization and cloud guardian, Curufin, the dying will box inventor and mist guardian, Amrod, the sun guardian and assistant of Celegorm and Amras, the lightning guardian and assistant of Celegorm; alongside the seven brothers, Nanwen, a strange toddler, stood alongside them; with him, the Feanorian Famiglia grows.