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they are NOT letting their dead gfs go!!!!!!!!

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I saw this gif on discord and added half-life sfx to it

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is this anything

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Shoot + claire (i mean dynamics-wise cause i find her being an addition so cool and exciting like??? A weird kid or fan girl of root's skills and TM who literally no one asked for but is here running about in their lives in STC as a trainee :'))

(so this one is very definitely set in the universe of my canon-divergent fic sliding towards chaos. it should be really easy to pick up on what’s going on without having read it though. i had a lot of fun writing this.)

“John, can you babysit my stalker?”

Reese looked over Root’s shoulder to where Claire was pounding furiously at the subway car door with one fist. Root must have locked her in. Again.

“Aren’t you supposed to be training her today?” Training wasn’t quite the right word. Insulting and ignoring a student didn’t count as training in his books.

Root patted him on the shoulder. “I think you have so much more to offer her as a teacher.” She flitted past him and vanished out the door before he could argue.

He heaved a sigh and went to look for the remote to open the subway car doors.

The thing with Claire was, well, he couldn’t really blame Root for dodging her all the time. Claire had been trailing after her like a lovesick puppy since day one, completely enraptured by being in the presence of the Machine’s analogue interface.

It had weirded Root out a little the first few days.

“John, why is the angry child staring at me all the time?”

“She’s almost twenty-two, you know.”

“Fine. Why is it staring at me?”

Negative progress. He moved on from the point. “Well, Claire is like you….”

The toothy grin that formed on Root’s face reminded him of a wild animal about to pounce and rip out its prey’s throat.

“I just meant she’s a, uh, very big fan of AI, right? And you’re basically the Machine’s chosen human, so she’s probably a big fan of you as well by association.” He decided not to mention Claire’s painfully obvious crush on Root, just in case Root had somehow not noticed. It would only make things worse.

“Hmmm. We’ll see about that.”

He tried not to worry too much about that ominous statement, and for the next week or so things actually went surprisingly smoothly. Until he noticed an emerging pattern.

Root had never been the tidiest person ever. He wouldn’t have called her a slob, by any means, but stuff seemed to accumulate in a trail behind her. Usually wires and hard drives and laptops, but it could be almost anything. But Claire now followed her around cleaning up after her. And fetched her drinks. Ran to the store for her. Picked up her laundry.

“She’s using her as an errand girl,” he told Shaw.

“So what?”

They both watched as Claire hurried across the subway carrying a tray of starbucks to Root.

“Where’s my whipped cream?”

“I thought you said…”

“I always get whipped cream.”

“I, uh, I’ll be right back.”

Shaw and Reese watched Claire scurry out of the subway.

“See?” Reese said.

“I mean she does always get whipped cream.” Shaw looked thoughtful. “I wonder if I can get her to go on food runs for me.”

In the end, he had to beg the Machine to convince one or both of them that Claire was not there as Root’s servant. Root sulked for a while, but eventually relented and went back to avoiding Claire whenever possible.

Claire wasn’t doing much to help her case. The day she showed up with her nails painted black, Shaw had to physically remove Root from the subway before she could get her hands on a taser (or possibly his grenade launcher. Both were in the weapon lockers at the time, but he firmly chose to believe that she was going for the taser). He got left with the task of convincing Claire to remove her nail polish and dealing with the inevitable round of moodiness that caused.

And then there was the whole Root and Shaw…situation. Whatever they were calling it. Claire had to have known on some level (since Root was the antonym of subtlety), but sometimes seeing was believing.

He’d taken her and Harper to the shooting range that day, and Claire had followed him back to the subway after, no doubt hoping to find Root. He should have known better than to come back to the subway late without checking in first, but he’d been distracted by Claire sulking about how much Harper had teased her (Harper wasn’t as bad as Root in that respect, but still) and didn’t even think about what they might be walking into until it was far too late.

Fortunately, no one had removed any vital pieces of clothing yet, but Root was very definitely sitting on Shaw in the computer chair in the subway car (which he was never going to be able to sit in again now), with her face buried in Shaw’s neck and Shaw’s hands down the back of her pants.

Claire walked right into a pillar.

Root didn’t get up, but she did turn her head and shift sideways so Shaw could see them as well. She looked incredibly smug and Reese was willing to bet his favorite gun that the Machine had told her they were showing up and she had ignored her. Or instigated the whole scene.

Shaw, for her part, was a bit flushed and breathless, but didn’t appear to be even slightly embarrassed by the whole situation. She did make Root get off of her (eventually), but otherwise didn’t seem to give a shit that they’d been walked in on.

Claire had basically fled after that, and going forward she went all wide-eyed and forgot to breathe every time Root and Shaw got within three feet of each other. Since Claire’s view of the world had previously been narrowed down to only the Machine and Root, her newfound discovery of Shaw’s existence meant she was tripping over her feet even more.

She happened to show up one day while Shaw was in the middle of brainstorming how to handle the new number they’d gotten. Shaw’s chosen method of brainstorming that day involved doing pushups while she thought things through. Claire took one look at Shaw–all sweaty with her tank top showing off her rippling arm muscles–and her jaw dropped and her face turned bright red. Reese was unsure if he should be amused or concerned by this development.

It did make Claire take the non-computer-related parts of her missions more seriously. She went from barely paying attention to tactical lessons, to being Shaw’s most attentive student overnight. Shaw was either oblivious to the attention or just completely didn’t care, which worked out pretty well for everyone involved.

But Root still had to be cornered and forced to spend any time training Claire at all. (He’d been worried about Root’s reaction to Claire’s sudden fascination with Shaw, but when she’d noticed she’d laughed so hard she’d fallen out of her chair). There was really only one thing that could possibly soften Root even a little towards her, but it took months before that happened.

“Why does she have you maintain this setup for her here still?” Claire asked as she looked over the Machine’s hardware in the subway car. “Surely she doesn’t need it anymore.”

Root watched her from the far end of the subway car, clearly suspicious. Reese had decided to sit on the subway seats halfway along the car, placing himself between them. Just in case.

“Obviously She doesn’t need them,” Root said, “but She likes having a physical location near us. It’s largely symbolic, of course.”

“It’s incredible.” Claire sounded awed.

Root scowled, probably offended for some reason Reese couldn’t fathom. “What is?”

Claire turned around to face them. “Well, she’s an AI. The first artificial general intelligence to ever exist. She’s faster and smarter than any human ever could be, and she doesn’t need us for anything. Not really, I mean. But she fought to protect all of you, even after she didn’t have to.”

Root’s scowl had vanished, but she looked ready to bring it back at a moment’s notice. “She cares about us. Because she chose to.”

“Yeah, and that’s incredible, right? Like she’s this being that’s so vastly different and greater than us, and she chose to care about a handful of humans. In all the theories out there of what a true AI might do, no one saw that coming.”

“She’s always been so much more than anyone ever thought She could be,” Root agreed. “Almost everyone who knows about Her sees Her as a threat or a tool. So reductive. Typical human thinking to value what She can do over who She is.”

Claire turned back to the humming server racks. “Their loss.”

“Exactly.”

Reese figured it was the closest thing to a breakthrough moment that they’d ever have.

The next time Root locked Claire in the subway car she left a window cracked open for her and seemed genuinely pleased to learn she’d escaped unaided.

Progress.

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The Making of Alien: Romulus (2024)

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how it feels liking and reblogging posts

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Julien Baker covers No Children by the Mountain Goats + an introduction from John Darnielle

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Excerpt from “I Hope We Both Die: How The Mountain Goats Wrote The Ultimate Anthem To Dysfunction” an interview with John Darnielle

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Endlessly diabolical how you can't say words like rape and suicide uncensored without either being criticised by idiots or punished by conglomerates.

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Holy shit. The Israeli whistleblower story CNN just broke is insane. I cannot believe what I’m reading

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i hate this sites music taste so much its literally Racism The Music Taste site. you guys dont like rap you dont like jazz you dont like country you dont like blues you dont like ska you dont like reggae you cannot CONCEPTUALIZE listening to foreign artists you dont even know what turbofolk is you cant conceive of music existing out of anglosphere you think that mcr is punk and its the end-all of definition of "punk" for you i hate everyone here like WHAT music do you people even listen to what the fuck is left

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House Party