crapeaucrapeau

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Critturs and creatures of Mass Effect, Shout out to @stormikins for helping me remember all these and helping me get all the screenshots for refs <3

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The psychiatrist who wrote the criteria for narcissism just made an extremely important point about what’s wrong with diagnosing Trump with mental disorders

Dr. Allen Frances says in speculating about Trump’s mental health, we are doing a disservice to those who do suffer from mental illness. In a series of tweets, he explained why he doesn’t think Trump is a narcissist — and how harmful it can be for us to keep assuming that he is.

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Alien Love 💙🌌 (6/6)

The other part of my Mass Effect-themed Valentine’s Day collection!

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Alien Love 💙🌌 (3/6)

Part of a Mass Effect-themed Valentine’s Day collection!

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Salarian Fashion! 💙👽

A shame BioWare missed out on all the fashion for their aliens. I kept their humid environment in mind when designing these, and used colors as vibrant as their skin!

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(Veilguard writing room) hey I know it's been established that the Qun and Tevinter have been fighting for ages in a decades-long rivalry but the nationalist Venatori cultists and the Antaam are going to set it aside to work for a couple of elf mages just because they're powerful I guess, even though the Venatori highly likely hate elves and have enslaved them for ages, but that's because all evil people are willing to join forces to achieve the extremely vague goal of gaining power because that's how being evil works! The rebel anti-slave god who just barely drove off the Qun from the South in Trespasser was NOT possibly trying to redirect the Qun's efforts onto Tevinter in order to accelerate their war and the destruction of the Empire practicing slavery... why would you think the rebel might take advantage of pitting his two most HATED ideologies against each other... Why would he bother to do that lmao

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We have 30 days until the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) laws are rescinded. This is the 50-year bedrock of American conservation. Normally, these actions take years but the administration has provided 30 days for public comment gutting clean water and clean air. Drop what you’re doing, before you make any more calls or read any more social media posts, please populate the Federal Register with dissent.

A. Go to https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/02/25/2025-03014/removal-of-national-environmental-policy-act-implementing-regulations

B. Click on the green rectangle in the upper right corner ("SUBMIT A PUBLIC COMMENT") .

C. Fill in your comment, and info at the bottom, and SUBMIT COMMENT.

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i fucking hate the “this is the good luck post.” Girl stop contributing to a superstitious environment with ur anecdotes there’s a million goddamn notes on it it’s statistically reasonable that a bunch of people remember the good things that happen after they reblog it

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they say they love insects but they hate wasps and mosquitoes

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Here's remade masterpost of free and full shakespeare adaptations! Thanks @william-shakespeare-official for this excellent post. Unfortunately, a lot of the links in it are broken, so I thought I'd make an updated version (also I just wanted to organize things a bit more)

Anthony and Cleopatra: ~ Josette Simon, Antony Byrne & Ben Allen - 2017

As You Like It: ~ At Wolfe Park - 2013 ~ Kenneth Brannagh's - 2006

Coriolanus: ~ NYET Alumni - 2016 ~ Tom Hiddleston - 2014 ~ Ralph Fiennes - 2011

Cymbelline: ~ Michael Almereyda's - 2014

Hamlet: ~ David Tennant - 2009 ~ Ethan Hawke & Diane Venora - 2000 ~ Kenneth Branagh's - 1989 ~ BCC's Part One & Two - 1990 ~ Broadway - 1964 ~ Christopher Plummer - 1964 ~ Laurence Olivier's - 1948

Henry IV: ~ BBC's Part One & Two - 1989 ~ The Brussel's Shakespeare Society's - 2017

Henry V: ~ The BBC's - 1990 ~ Laurence Olivier's - 1944

Julius Caesar: ~ Phyllida Lloyd's - 2019 ~ The BBC's - 1979 ~ John Gielgud - 1970

King Lear: ~ The RSC's - 2008 ~ Laurence Olivier - 1983 ~ The BBC's - 1975 ~ James Earl Jones - 1974 ~ Orson Wells - 1953

Love's Labour's Lost: ~ Calvin University - 2016

Macbeth: ~ Antoni Cimolino & Shelagh O'Brien's - 2017 ~ Ian McKellen & Judi Dench - 1969 ~ Sean Connery - 1961

Measure for Measure: ~ Hugo Weaving - 2019 ~ The BBC's - 1990

The Merchant of Venice: ~ Al Pacino - 2004 ~ Trevor Nunn & Chris Hunt - 2001 ~ The BBC's - 1980 ~ Lawrence Olivier - 1973

The Merry Wives of Windsor: ~ The Royal Shakespeare Company's - 1982

A Midsummer Night's Dream: ~ Oliver Chris & Gwendoline Christie - 2019 ~ City of Columbus's - 2018 ~ The Globe's - 2013 ~ The BBC's - 1988 ~ Lindsay Duncan & Alex Jennings - 1986

Much Ado About Nothing: ~ Shakespeare in the Park - 2019 ~ Kenneth Branagh - 1993 ~ The BBC's - 1984

Othello: ~ The BBC's Part One & Two - 1990

Richard II: ~ David Tennant - 2013 ~ Deborah Warner's - 1997 ~ The BBC's - 1978

Richard III: ~ Ian McKellen - 1995 ~ Laurence Olivier - 1955

Romeo and Juliet: ~ Simon Godwin's - 2021 ~ The BBC's - 1988 ~ Laurence Harvey & Susan Shentall - 1954

The Taming of the Shrew: ~ Ontario production? ~ American Conservatory Theater - 1976 ~ Richard Burton & Elizabeth Taylor - 1967 ~ Mary Pickford & Samuel Taylor - 1929

The Tempest: ~ Gregory Doran's - 2017 ~ The BBC's - 1988

Timon of Athens: ~ Barry Avrich's - 2024

Troilus and Cressida: ~ Audio Production ~ This one I found on youtube? - 2016

Titus Andronicus: ~ Anthony Hopkins - 1999

Twelfth night: ~ Texas Shakespeare Festival's - 2015 ~ Alec Guinness, Joan Plowright & Ralph Richardson - 1970

Two Gentlemen of Verona: ~ Katherine Steweart's - 2018 ~ The BBC's

The Winter's Tale: ~ Antony Sher - 1999 (Warning: they don't have a bear...)

Bonuses:

Time Loop Hamlet! (A personal fav of mine)

Rock Opera Hamlet???

Shakespeare animated tales

The Complete Works Of Shakespeare Abridged comedy

From the original post:

A Midwinter's Tale, about a man trying to make Hamlet.

Russian Hamlet here

Here's Scotland, PA, the 2001 modern Hamlet retelling.

Rave Macbeth for anyone interested is here.

This one is the Taming of the Shrew modern retelling.

The french Romeo & Juliet musical with English subtitles is here!

Here's the 1948 one,

the Orson Wells Othello movie with Portuguese subtitles there

A Lego adaptation of Othello here.

Here's commentary on David Tennant's Richard II

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Kept forgetting to post this. I always liked to figure out how things worked. I don’t know if it makes sense, but here’s that.

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Ship design Q&A: subs vs ships and conflict resolution

@crapeaucrapeau said #thanks for the answers !#I'm assuming that the sex and/or hooch nooks are examples from Real Life subs ?#Still curious about conflict resolution beside sex when you're stuck in a claustrophobia nightmare that smells bad for months.#Any sources or recommendations are welcome !

No, sorry, I'd misremembered your question. Anything between the inner-and-outer hulls is strictly spaceship stuff. While I did start this project thinking a submarine as most comparable to a spaceship (because it's a fully-enclosed environment), the sheer size of the Normandy SR-2 makes the situation much different.

Comparison and sources under the cut!

The biggest subs in the US Navy are Ohio-class nuclear submarines.

Ohio-class sub compared to my proposed Normandy

170m long (24m less than my proposed SR-2 hull-length.)

13 m wide (10m less than SR-2)

10.8m tall (7m less than SR-2)

Crew of 155; almost twice my proposed crew

There is so much more space in the Normandy. I ended up using submarines as my lower bound for standard-of-living. And it's very low. I mean, according to my favorite source for shipboard and submarine life, sub crews shower once a week. Speaking of which...

My favorite source for shipboard and submarine life

It's people complaining on reddit!

Dimensions are easy: find the company selling the thing! Navy rack sizes came from a place that sells sheets*. Furniture lists from contractors complete with part #s. No problem.

For questions about what it's actually like, I put my weird question into a search engine and find at least six reddit threads with current-and-former US Navy sailors explaining, joking, and complaining!

A usual sample includes:

Replies that answer the question, sometimes with pictures!

Complaint-brag about how good the questioner has it (thread progresses into comparison of smaller and smaller or older and older vessels)

Complaint about That One Shipmate

Brag about how much ridiculous stuff the writer has gotten away with, with (usually hilarious) examples

Joking complaint about how the actual experience compares to the official Dept. of Defense PR, a la "You think you'll be getting one of those fancy new racks? Those are on like one ship, you'll have the ones from 1960 they pulled out of the last ship they scrapped."

Nostalgia in three flavors ("truly an honor"/"Oh the hijinks we got up to"/"Glad to be done with that but let me go on")

... and if you ask about how clothing, how much you can/should pack, etc] at least one quip about jerking off into a sock.

For a nice little bit of comparative writing analysis, you usually also get at least one official PR blog post or webpage about the same question, but painted in a rather different light. ;)

(Oddly, none of my friends or relatives who were in the military were navy. There are also very, very few to whom I'd be comfortable saying 'Hi, I've got some awkward questions, it's for a spaceship floor-plan I'm working on —" so I haven't attempted that route).

I have thoughts on conflict avoidance (space! rec areas! keeping people busy!) and resolution (depends), but I'm late for a meatspace thing.

*I've had "Sister Suzie's Sewing Shirts for Sailors" stuck in my head ever since, but with "sheets" instead of "shirts."

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Alliance Normandy SR-2 redesign: Deck 5

We've finally arrived at the bottom: deck 5, home of the hangar, the Kodiak shuttles, and now, Marine Land!

There are some oddities with this deck, because I was guessing at how fast the hull tapers towards the bottom at the back (I'm working off references that show front and rear elevations, but that only shows you the broadest points). I messed up something with my core chamber measurements and had to make the entire rear end (heh) slightly bigger here before posting, but the deck design errs on the side of narrower.

Hangar

When I wrote A Star To Steer Her By I ignored the silly shipbuilding because I was focused on a relationship (and because it wasn't supposed to be a door-stopper novel. Oops), but as I went on things like "this hangar should be regularly exposed to vacuum, how can you leave gym equipment in here" bothered me more and more. By the time of Sunset and Evening Star I couldn't let that state of affairs stand. So: this hangar is regularly exposed to vacuum. No fancy force fields that keep in the air but let out shuttles. You don't leave anything in here that isn't protected from vacuum and strapped down.

The hangar is the limiting factor in the size of the entire ship; it has to fit between the central elevator and the hangar door, and it must fit two Kodiaks. To reach this size I had to make the Kodiaks boxier; my drawings are taller for their length than the game models. They still seat twelve, and there's room for one to do a 180 on it's axis while the other is in its cradle. The hangar floor slopes down slightly towards the door in the middle, and the Kodiaks are 'shelved' to the sides.

Cortez runs the flight deck from the exact same place he is in game, but now he has bulkheads and windows between himself and the cold death of space. Airlocks on either side give access to the flight deck. There are also giant doors straight into the deck 4 cargo bays, but those won't open unless the hangar is pressurized.

Marine Land

Jack's Sulking Pit is now a gym, with weights, treadmill, stationary bike, heavy bags, and mats for sparing (and occasionally making pillow forts for evacuee toddlers). Mats are usually stored stowed against the wall, and other equipment can be moved as needed.

To port are the marine berths. The usual compliment of marines is a dozen, including their unit leader, but there are twelve bunks as well as the officer's tiny cabin (because there's no point wasting the space, and you never know). Other than their semi-privacy, the marine racks are no different from the enlisted racks on the two decks above.*

*"Except for the smell." — the rest of the crew, probably.

Berthing the marines on deck 5 is all about quick access to their arms, armor, and transport. Directly across from the marine berths is the entrance to the locker room and armory. After armoring up they grab their weapons and can get to the shuttle through an airlock entrance in the armory. On the way back, they reverse the process; stow weapons, strip off armor — often dropping damaged plating into the recycler chute as they go by — strip down, and shower.

The Alliance military is gender neutral, and nowhere is this as obvious as the marine lockers. The marine unit regularly strips down in front of each other; it's just part of getting ready for work. You can't be body-shy and be an Alliance Marine.

(I like to think the separate bathrooms on the crew deck were the Illusive Man's weird traditionalist decision. Sometimes the gendered-bathroom thing starts to grate on Bo Huan, the third-watch pilot, so they come down to deck five to use the locker room showers, leading Joker to quip "Ah, the third gender: marine!")

More engineering, and the answers to a few questions

Ladders from deck 4 lead down to another engineering area on the hangar level. It's not connected to the main areas of the deck by conventional corridors, but it is accessible through the warren of service passages that run throughout the ship. More of those access-ways lead aft of the eezo core chamber to the fusion plant (not shown). Because the core chamber narrows faster than the ship, it's easier to get around it here than it is on the engineering deck, where the core chamber is at it's widest but the hull has started to narrow. These access tunnels are rarely comfortable to get through, though they often open out into areas that are easier to work in, or into surprising pockets of unused space. They may require crawling or climbing, or clambering over obstacles.

All the maintenance accesses are kept pressurized and aired up, but the habitable area shown on these posts is wrapped in an inner hull, and the doors for maintenance access are all pressure doors: if a hit damages the tunnel you use to access the ship's innards, it won't kill all the crew in the room next to it.**

**It will obliterate the illicit still and the not-actually-a-secret-make-out-nest, as well as anyone stupid enough to be distilling and***/or fucking in those locations, which is why we don't lollygag between the hulls in combat, private!

***AND?****

****Some people are remarkably talented.

Normandy redesign posts

Intro

Loft

Command

Crew

Engineering

Hangar

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Alliance Normandy SR2 redesign: Deck 3

The crew deck sits in the middle of the ship, where the hull is widest. This is where design for a larger crew really comes into play.

Sleeping and other bodily functions

The main bathrooms are roughly the same shape and location as in-game, but people walking by no longer have a great view of the showers every time the doors open.

Enlisted racks

24 enlisted racks line the corridor to the main battery, housing the bulk of the rank-and-file. Bunks are stacked two high, with uniform lockers to one side and coffin-lockers under the mattress.Footholds in between sets of bunks let you can reach the top without stepping on the one below.

Junior officers' quarters

I assume a spaceship needs more technical expertise and less grunt work, so the crew is weighted towards officers and highly-trained technical specialists. These specialists fill non-command roles and bunk with the junior officers. Joker (flight lieutenant) and Traynor (comms specialist) berth here. So does Kaidan, because at the point he came aboard the guest stateroom was occupied by Khalisah Al-Jilani, and bunking with marines would muddy command waters because he seriously outranks Vega.

Bunks are two-high with coffin lockers just like the enlisted racks, but officers rate four inches more elbow room and two inches more to stretch out their toesies. They also get a bit more privacy, a little more storage, and access to the lounge overlooking the eezo core*.

*I gave them a lounge because in ME3 you occasionally find officers chatting at a table in the middle of the bunk room, and if anyone did that while I was trying to sleep three feet away I'd commit murder.

Senior officers' country

Miranda's old quarters, which Liara claims in ME3, are large enough to house the entire senior staff in staterooms, with one extra for guests and a shared head. Each room has one permanent bunk and one fold-out upper-bunk in case of extra passengers.

In Sunset and Evening Star the first thing Shepard does on the Citadel is sign on a first officer**, old navy hand Lieutenant Commander Nguyen. The first thing Nguyen does is fill the missing weapons and ops roles (she heads the navigation department herself, since it's a small ship).

With Shepard in the admiral's quarters on deck 1, First Officer Nguyen gets what would have been the captain's cabin on the crew deck (except while Primarch Victus and his aide were aboard; when she gave up her quarters to the turians). Mukerjee, the head of ops, gets the slightly-larger-than-standard cabin intended for the XO.

Garrus has the 'extra' stateroom, as their liaison with the turians. He keeps the desk folded for space and sleeps crouched in one corner; the bunk is useless to him.

**Shepard delegated something! It's a Mass Effect miracle!

Vital ship functions

Main battery

The main battery looks exactly the same, except Garrus isn't sleeping in the corner or constantly fiddling with the guns. In fact, he's never fiddling with the guns. He and Silva were spending hours re-calibrating the thanix cannon to their own preferences whenever the other person's back was turned, and Nguyen stepped in and banned Garrus from the armory before it moved from passive aggression to murderous-interspecies-diplomatic-catastrophe.

AI core

Access to the AI core is from the battery corridor, not through the medical bay.

Medical bay

The medbay is divided into a front office, the main med bay, and an area for major surgery or isolation. There's also a small private cabin for the two members of the medic corps who assist Chakwas.

Life support

The life support corridor has another four enlisted racks, bringing the total enlisted berths on the crew deck to thirty. Life support itself is basically unchanged, except for some added Important Keep People Alive machines. Like engineering, life support systems are also spread throughout the ship.

Food & leisure

Mess & galley

The mess seats 32. It's also all-watch meetings are held, and occasionally movie screenings. Crew can grab shelf-stable snacks, cereal, or recent leftovers from self-serve areas outside the galley, or collect the meal currently on offer at the counter.

The galley feeds three shifts three times a day each, and one watch's breakfast comes immediately before the previous watch's dinner. About a week out, stores of fresh produce are gone, so a lot of food is frozen, freeze dried, or reconstituted. There's always something to eat; one of the two big pots is almost always full of soup, if not both Bread is made from scratch (flour keeps indefinitely, bread doesn't), and there's a flat-top as well as a six-burner range. The food storage in the galley and nearby walk-in are only what the cooks expect to need for the next two days or so; food actually makes up most of the Normandy's cargo, stored on deck 4.

Observation lounges

The observation lounges, important for crew morale and sanity on longer missions, are differentiated by volume. Starboard is generally used for quieter conversation, reading, solo gaming, or study. The Port lounge is for parties and games. (There is no free wet bar, this is a military ship).

Normandy redesign posts

Intro

Loft

Command

Crew

Engineering

Hangar

[crapeaucrapeau]

Alliance Normandy SR-2 redesign: Deck 4

(This will be so much shorter than deck 3. Phew).

Decks 4 and 5 have a defined relationship: the hangar (Deck 5) is two decks tall, extending up to the top of engineering and bracketed by the Deck 4 cargo bays. You look out into it from the corridor that runs port-starboard. The hangar aligns with the hangar door, and deck five fits around the hangar.

Fitting the engineering deck into a 194 meter hull required bringing the both cargo bays in substantially (click the image to see the new footprint overlaid on the old one).

There was plenty of extra 'liveable' space to claim on this deck after getting rid of the huge double-staircases down to Jack's Sulking Pit. The elevator opens on both sides on this deck, giving direct access to either engineering or the cargo bays; between that, the central ladders, and extra ladders for engineering near the core, they were easy to toss.

Cargo

I ended up having the cargo bays overhang the hangar slightly, with the shuttles tucked up underneath on their cradles (placed by mechanical davits; no one is steering them into that tight spot). It's a tight squeeze, but keeps the cargo bays big enough to maneuver in. Huge doors open directly to the hangar, so crates can be loaded in via forklift mech.

Liara wasn't allowed to claim the cabin or XO's cabin unless she was willing to do the job of a first officer. Her researcher/shadow-broker activities required SCOPE, so she claimed empty space in the back of the starboard cargo bay. The crew still needed space and loaded in supplies, so Liara now has an impressive Shadow Broker Box Lair.

(If the crew is too noisy about retrieving a crate, she yeets it at them biotically. The whole shadow broker thing has not been great for Liara's mental health.)

The starboard cargo bay was designed for another alternate use: housing an extra unit of marines if needed. Liara's bunk is one of the fold-down racks intended for them. The one just outside the cargo bay, where Ness is berthed, is intended for the officer in charge of the unit.

The port cargo bay is used for cargo, and that cargo is mostly food. Perishables come in sealed cargo containers with self-contained refrigeration. Others are full of rice, flour, and other shelf-stable bulk goods. This is also not the only cargo; there's a lot of odd pockets in the hull that aren't too hard to access. The most out-of-the-way places are used for the emergency ration bar stocks, which last forever* and theoretically could sustain the entire crew for months.

*For the same reason "dogs' milk lasts longer than any other milk: Because no bugger'll drink it."

Racks & laundry

Each of the smaller corridors sleeps eight enlisted crew. At the end of one is a bathroom (sink and head only, no shower). At the end of the other is the laundry room for the ship, with a fold-up chair for catching up on your reading while you wait.

Engineering, shop, and lab

Engineering is unchanged**, but to either side are two new areas. The lab on the starboard side isn't a bio lab (though they could probably fit it out as one). It's the small-scale, low-tolerance equivalent to the machine shop on the port side. Delicate work is done in one, and larger scale repair and manufacture in the other. Normandy carries a supply of feedstock for the fabbers and CNC machines in the shop, and the fabber can also recycle a wide variety of materials. It's all easier to store than food, because most can be safely exposed to vacuum. The A-gangers (hull crew; general maintenance work) can do amazing things in the machine shop. (And Samantha Traynor is about to do amazing things in the lab in the next chapter).

**Because fuck if I know what goes in engineering! I put some Mysterious Machine Boxes in there! Salmon Rushdie invented M2C2Ds*** for this kind of situation, and if more people were familiar with Haroun and the Sea of Stories I'd have labeled them all with that.

***Machines Too Complicated Too Describe.****

****Now go read Haroun and the Sea of Stories, preferably aloud. That's your homework.

Normandy SR-2 redesign posts

Intro

Loft

Command

Crew

Engineering

Hangar

[crapeaucrapeau]

Honestly I should talk about the ace experience more. I don’t see enough. Like–obviously it’s dehumanizing to be repeatedly compared to robots or aliens but uh…sometimes it feels like that?? 

My husband will get all horny while I’m, I don’t know, changing out of sweaty gardening clothes. And I’ll be like, “But we have to make lunch?? I stink? Now is not a good time?? Logic?” And clearly it’s not about logic to him. He is experiencing the entire scenario very differently. And I’m here like, 

Or the times where you realize that like, having an actual physiological reaction to attractive people is not some enculturated metaphor, and people are actually doing that all around you all the time, and you’re like, Ah, clearly my studies of human culture have been incomplete. I have missed a critical psychosocial component. Many things now appear in a different light. *takes notes on holopad*