#I legitimately don't know how to tag this

[violent138]

It is such a pleasure to have mutuals that post/reblog different fandoms, because once a post about Perry came on my dash and I went, "Perry White did what now? He's trained as a spy?" and it was about Perry the Platypus and awesome.

[pluage-docters-go-brrrrrr]

This is Tiny Tom, he's a positive tomato that my dad got me when he went to New York. I'm sharing him just in case someone is having a bad day.

Know your not alone.

[57sfinest]

theoretical entroponetics: the post

okay. LONG post incoming. i have summarized all available information on the pale, separated into confirmed objective truth & in-canon speculation that may or may not be true, and then appended my own very detailed theory on the pale! this post is meant as a resource; please feel free to add things of your own in replies/reblogs (please tag me if you do!) or point out any errors i may have made. you’re welcome to use any of my personal theory in your own work but please credit me if you do!! (and tag me in that/send it to me, i really want to see what you do with it!)

Here’s what we *know* about the pale, according to in-game and concept art: 

It erases data, at least the kind stored on radiocomputer filament and magnetic tapes.

It has no dimensions of its own- pale latitude compressors serve to force dimensions on raw pale and allow navigation. 

The pale is referred to in the context of entropy

It arrived with mankind, but not immediately- there are 8000 years of written history, but the pale was first recorded 6000 years ago, implying that pale either didn’t start forming immediately or that it was so insignificant/distant that it went unnoticed for 2000 years. 

There exists a group of people who are actively trying to expedite entroponetic collapse; the ideology is called entropolism

To this point, pale isn’t immediately visible. Pale has molecular structure, but manifests as a waveform, and only becomes visible at a certain distance from the origin, once wave frequency is sufficiently high. 

During pale exposure, people experience “sense objects”: visual or auditory hallucinations and/or vivid physical recollections of memories. These hallucinations may originate from their own consciousness or someone else’s. c

People require physical and mental examinations before interisolary travel and are allotted a certain number of days per year as their pale exposure threshold. 

Overexposure results in a pale “addiction”- these individuals crave pale exposure, and it’s unclear if this addiction can ever be broken. It’s also unclear whether there is a point at which pale exposure becomes lethal, but given that it dissolves matter, we can be fairly certain that a given length of continuous exposure will kill. 

Radio signals, cold plasma torches and anodic sound are all used to manage the pale to permit travel through it. Plasma torches destabilize the molecular structure of the pale to create gaps, anodic sound widens and maintains these gaps, and radio signals rationalize the pale into recognizable dimensions.

Radio signals are, in return, susceptible to corruption by the pale, resulting in entroponetic crosstalk, where signals from the past or the future are transmitted to the present. CCP is one such phenomenon and is directly related to the formation of new pale through magpie interpretation.

There is a dedicated Union for people who work in and with the pale (the Pale Workers Union). They have two slogans; “The light purifies; The sound absolves; The pale no more” and “Son et Fureur” (sound and fury)

Here’s what we may choose to believe about the pale, based on the thoughts and beliefs of in-game characters:

In conversation with Soona, the pale is described as a “curdling milk” phenomenon: “repulsive, but natural”

In this same conversation you can theorize that the churches were meant to contain the pale origins; out of the seven churches, six were destroyed during the suzerain or the revolution

The phasmid and whatever other lifeforms it’s communicated with believe that entroponetic collapse is comparable to an oxygen holocaust (i.e. the great oxygenation event), implying mass extinction due to a toxic overabundance of sapient thought

Harry refers to it once by saying “The wolf is at the door. It’s going to eat the sun.” so take that as you will

It’s likely that Tiago’s “Mother” is some manifestation from the pale, if you choose to believe that the 2mm hole is in fact a pale origin point (the concept art does confirm it’s a pale origin, but the game offers other explanations, so I won’t say it’s the only answer)

Inframaterialists believe that revolutionary action (NOT thought) may create a counter-force that will prevent the spread of pale; it’s unclear if any reversal is possible.

The world will be fully consumed by the pale in 27 years (I put it here because you may or may not believe that shivers and harry are reliably sourcing this information)

And now my personal speculation about the pale:

A quick and easy point: it’s confirmed that the pale has a measurable EMF “exhalation” frequency that varies with proximity. Strong enough EMF pulses can actually tamper with magnetic storage- radiocomputer filaments! Electronics! Fortress Accident data loss! This gives us a tangible explanation for why pale can delete data :)

This may also explain its ability to cause radio interference- radio frequencies are just a subset of EMF frequencies, so it’s possible that pale exhalation on *just the right frequency* is what’s responsible for the entroponetic crosstalk we get on radios sometimes

The pale canonically has an atomic structure, but it also has wave properties, so it’s possible that the pale has wave-particle duality on its subatomic level, like photons do

Based on this, entroponetics is likely a very similar field to quantum mechanics, which might be an interesting source of ideas for anyone (like me) who wants to explore pale-related possibilities

The pale could be a manifestation of raw patterns. That’s why math “forces dimensions” on it- it rationalizes or “tames” the patterns, which allows it to be manipulated to a certain degree.

There are several references to the pale that refer to mathematical concepts and patterns, saying that the world dissolves into “a tangle of azimuths and cosines” as it blends into the interisolary pale- more on this later

Steban comments that the pale is commonly theorized to be nostalgia or “historical inertia”, but it’s largely agreed that it’s “the past” in a broad sense. Thinking about the idiom that history repeats itself, it could be that history/the past is part of the pattern that comprises the pale, and that it’s also the type of pattern most readily perceived by people (people don’t viscerally *perceive* math, for example, but we experience memories)

To first define entropy: Chemically speaking, “the measure of a system’s thermal energy per unit temperature that is unavailable for doing useful work. (per encyclopedia britannica).” Physically speaking, it’s a measure of randomness or disorder in a system. Less work/less order = more entropy; it’s a physicochemical “winding down” of a given system

It’s commonly thought that pale is the entropic force, but what if it’s the opposite? (Keep in mind the chemical definition: less ability to do work = more entropy) Consider: the pale as less entropic, a cleanup force, recycling the potential lost by death and destruction in the universe. This in part explains why a dead person’s memory is present in the pale- their potential has been recycled into the pale in the form of their memories (their life’s *pattern*)

Enthalpy is a related concept to entropy and is defined as the total energy contained within a system. Holding the system enthalpy constant- saying the universe will always have the same amount of total energy, no matter what, according to thermodynamics- results in an entropic tug-of-war between the pale and the world. The pale wins through sheer inertia (again, inertia is mentioned specifically in game)

Overall: think of the world as “cooling”, losing heat and energy through war and death and complacency. Think of the pale as steam and heat, melting down old materials to start it all over again. (Kim says, *through entroponetic interference*: “it’s been a long, cold winter.”)

Consider: the pale as a sinusoidal function, eternally repeating. The pale recycling the universe to start a new cycle, “spending” itself, resulting in pale not being present in the beginning. Then, as the new things begin to settle- with the advent of the human mind, specifically- the pale reforming, slowly reclaiming potential, eventually ending the cycle to start again.

In comes CCP and magpies. Consider: CCP as a backwards transmission from the next “cycle” (after all, pale has no sense of time). Magpies as *pattern-sensitive* people who are able to decode CCP into something useful called novelty. They reach into the potential of the next cycle to build the potential in their current one- this paradox could be what creates more pale, because (and this is where it gets weird, I apologize) doing this retroactively increases the total amount of energy/work/potential in the current cycle to have been reclaimed by the pale for the next one.

Think of the pale as the compost bin for every single thought in the universe. The pale is the exact right size to compost every little atom and thought in the universe, and can hold nothing extra. But magpies reach into the future, the next cycle, and bring in extra. This paradox forces the pale to grow to accommodate the additional material, which also increases the starting potential of the next cycle. This process allows each cycle to accumulate minor changes from the previous one, which can snowball over many cycles.

Furthermore, to the inframaterialists’ point: revolutionary action would be such a radical shift in inertia that it would increase the potential in the world, forcing the pale to pause/shrink to “balance the equation” in terms of pale-vs-world thermodynamics. So maybe they’re right after all :)

And some diagramming, to explain the utter bullshit I’ve just dropped:

[stalebagels]

Hi I don't know what this is meant to be but have it anyway

[hussyknee]

In one of the 647968 posts going "What You Like Says Nothing About You" (broadly agree) the first comment in the reply section was, "well I'm never going to apologize for being a Swiftie and a Reylo and Destiel shipper and Snape fan and loving ACOTAR and LOTR and Hamilton and B99" and I'm like, actually being this much of a pathological white liberal makes you the exception to this rule 😭😭

[girlwarlock]

i want to switch to linux--windows 10 is nearing end-of-support, windows 11 sucks, if i'm switching OS i'd just as soon switch to linux.

i see people online being like "switch to linux!!" which is great, but the same people have like... no suggestions for distro (even in terms of "if you do X, try 1, 2, 3; if you do Y, try 3, 4, 5" or something) and no instructions for *how* to start setting up the new OS that you'd be switching to. fucking--ten or fifteen years ago, "no suggestions from other people" would be workable, because search engines worked. but now between google enshittifying their search engine to force people to run more searches and computer-generated clickbait articles outnumbering real ones i can't fucking find recommendations i can trust.

Both of the "try this distro if you're new from windows and just want an OS to run your little programs in" distros I tried [running off a flash drive, bc i only have the one SSD and i can't fucking figure out how to make a new fucking volume/partition/whatever on it with the tools that windows+google give me and i don't want to wipe my fucking C drive just to try out a distro that i might not use], ZorinOS and Linux Mint, had things that I just couldn't figure out how to do. I looked up guides, but every single guide i found just had instructions of "enter "sudo bongle bleeplorp choochoo" in the terminal" with no insight as to wtf those commands mean, or wtf you're supposed to do if you get any kind of error from trying to run them. (the terminal also wouldn't accept ctrl+V pasting which made putting these unfamiliar commands in super inconvenient as i had to make a lot more keyboard/mouse switches; that's a much lower-tier complaint but it is a complaint) and

i just have this general frustration that so many of the instructions for things that you're likely to want to do because you're new to linux from windows just presume this high degree of familiarity with linux systems. i just want an actual honest-to-fuck Beginner's Guide, and if that is Too Fucking Much, then I want an actual no-fucking-around out-of-the-box useable-as-is operating system. one or the other.

@girlwarlock [mentioning myself so i can reblog if more thoughts happen]

[vivitalks]

guys i genuinely don't know what to do. my quirky little destiel fic which was already far too long to begin with now has a second smaller fic nested inside of it and somehow the second smaller fic is the absolute crackfest of this supernatural/tazamnesty crossover where dean lowkey hooks up with barclay the bigfoot and i don't KNOW what to DO. do i cut the scene. do i post it separately. do i post it separately but ALSO leave it in the fic. do i just pretend like barclay is an OC i made up and all the references to the fictional town of kepler west virginia are incidental. WHAT IS THE MOVE HERE

[abyssal-author-and-artist]

that moment when you see a tumblr post and INSTANTLY open a new ao3 tab

i'm sorry project i'm working on in ibis paint (that i will post eventually bc i get the sneaking suspicion that an entire cavetown song animatic will not send in discord) and also my 19 wips in ao3 i will finish everything later but i NEED to write this rn

also i'm sorry ask in my inbox yes i do requests yes that prompt is good and i'm hyped to do it but this idea is too good and i need to write the her of all time AND i get to shove TWO BLORBOS INTO A BLENDER

[megid0nt]

drew a blurger today

so actually, I've been playing with non-square pixels a lot lately bc I wanna do art on my VT320 serial terminal, so this week I did some calculating and some number crunching and set myself up with a GNU Image Manipulation Program template that would serve me well:

My bf challenged me to draw a burger with a specific palette bc I've been drawing some practice burgers to learn to draw, so I figured I'd do so in the domain I've already been playing with: terminal art!

when viewed with square pixels the entire drawing appears squashed. but when we turn *off* dot-for-dot mode in GNU Image Manipulation Program,

our blurger bursts to life :D

(also if your menu options are different than mine, I'm actually using preview builds for version 3.0 because older versions of GNU Image Manipulation Program use a version of GTK that doesn't support my tablet pen 😭)

But. getting the blurger where we want it was harder. See, I haven't yet written a tool to automatically process an image to a series of characters, so I instead had to do it the old fashioned way: paletted bitmaps!

With a paletted bitmap, we can reduce the bitrate of the image to let each pixel only take up half a byte! And then, with our handy dandy hex editor, we can see the raw data:

We take out a few header rows, and...

we get our burger, aligned properly and upside down! Funnily enough, bitmap images are stored bottom up but not left-to-right, and this is not the first time I've run into this.

A few more steps!

We copy each line from the hex editor, starting at the bottom (top of the burger) and work our way to the top (bottom of the burger), into a separate text document so we get our burger as numbers.

I am a fan of receipt printers and serial communication, and I have occasionally run myself into some situations in which I need to type a bunch of untypeable data or generate a stream of bytes real quick to do a specific task, so from here I actually had a tool on hand to make this a fuck of a lot easier: my markup language, aml! First I put the original at the top in comments so I had a template to work against...

and then we make a copy to which we add our colour information!

Each one of those tags (except the ones at the end of the lines, which are for new lines) is actually a macro for my markup language that I made specifically for this task to encode the ANSI control code for each of the colours:

and once all that was done and prepared, it was the simple task of running my interpreter over it (ami.py -u blurgercolours.json -i blurger.aml -o blurger.bin) and I had a binary file that I can send to a terminal that has ANSI 24 bit colour support and show off my blurger.

I hope you enjoyed blurger hour with ava, and here's one more thing before I go:

be careful not to spill kechp.

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

i just realized setrákus is just ra ra rasputin But Evil and it took an inch off the front of my skull

[your-god-empress-lavender]

Henrow blorbo

first off, ohmyfuckinggodyouaresocoolllllllllllllllll

secondly, what ya workin' on currently? <- is deathly interested, yes please please please info dump if you have the spoons

- Ryan

Bonjour my furry friend. At the moment i'm mostly working on getting a job so that i can afford rent, but when i'm not doing that, i'm working on designing some new N-substituted 5MeO-tryptamines (in order to avoid being banned for breaking tumblr TOS, i can't say exactly what for, but if you look up 5MeO-tryptamines, you should see). So far i've only managed to make things that make me super sleepy (and maybe a tiny bit inebriated), so presumably my body is mainly metabolizing them into melatonin. I also have been working on working through the details of making a rocket engine which relies on both muon catalyzed fusion and z-pinch fusion (mostly because even though i know it's way above what i'm probably capable of, i just love space so much i desperately need to see it for myself and i figure that since rockets are so absurdly expensive, the only way i'll end up in space is if we can get a whole new generation of ultra-efficient rockets (for example, given p-N14 fusion, if we manage to get 1% or more (i don't really expect more than 0.1% max, but still) of the hydrogen fusing with nitrogen, we'd be able to put 150 tons on the moon from earth with only using about enough fuel to fill a small car (instead of needing a skyscraper sized rocket to send maybe 30 tons)). Now, if it were as easy as my calculations show it to be, i can't imagine how there are any rockets flown that aren't fusion, but seeing as i haven't even made a working proof of concept yet, i'm not in a position to criticize the thousands of aerospace engineers who are working on conventional chemical rockets. I love fusion because it's simultaneously so easy (i live pretty close to an old uranium mine where i can actually pan some uranium out of the creek near me, then use that uranium to make a neutron source (B10(α,n)) which is really just fusion between helium and boron, happening at room temperature because of how high energy the α particles released by uranium are) and so absurdly difficult (without catalysts like muons, it requires absurdly high temperatures and pressures that almost always take more energy put in than they can give out). Anyway, i've also been sorta working on studying a material that a while back i got way too excited over and may have called a room temperature superconductor (almost certainly not the case), but in an attempt to make it more pure and study it for real i've been trying to work on the exact calculations of its composition and finding a better way to heat it up to high temperatures (i might just put it in a flat-bottomed flask, especially since it finally warmed up enough for me to go back outside where the fumes released by its production won't make folks mad).

And then there's the biological experiments, currently with electroceutical tissue modifications since most of the other projects i have planned require me to have a gene printer capable of reliably printing genes thousands of base pairs long and i'm not sure when i'll be able to build that. The most recent thing i've been working on is really exciting because if it works it means that i've successfully done something that has never been done before to a human body (and given the long lasting pain in that part of my thigh, it seems very possible it is working), but i'm hesitant about sharing what the project is because i don't really want folks putting gap junction blockers, calcium channel blockers, and sodium channel blockers into open wounds without knowing how to do it safely and correctly to get the desired results and not just a really messed up wound. If/when this experiment turns out well, i might give directions in private, but i'm still somewhat hesitant due to the risks inherent in this (the biggest and most likely is literally giving yourself a form of cancer, something i'm not eager for others to risk). Soon i might try chemical dedifferentiation of skin cells (thinking on my back or upper arms) followed by some mildly dangerous experiments to test how reliably i can make it turn into other cell types. And while i haven't made good work on it in a while, i've also been trying to make something similar to shimmer from arcane (ideally not addictive or harmful to the user, but most importantly the quick energy burst, decreased pain, and increased regenerative abilities (obviously it won't be anywhere near as dramatic as in the show, so calling it shimmer may not really make sense, but it is where i got the inspiration)).

Then i suppose there's the battery project i was talking about in my last post, and i'm also trying to learn how to make alcohol under my desk (i mean, it's super easy, it just doesn't taste great). There might be a few more things i'm working on but rn i'm super eepy and have talked about a lot already. If this seems like i'm doing a lot or impressive, also note that i'm actively failing out of college (for my own pride: the material is super easy and mostly i already know it, i just can't stand wasting so much of my time doing homework that doesn't help anyone or anything) and not yet working a job, so i have a lot of time and so much free brainspace to think about and do all this. I also work very slowly on each thing because i keep bouncing back and forth between all of them and almost always end up adding new projects before i've finished the old ones and so i almost never see a project all the way through to completion (at least some of the bio projects are just sitting in my body and i am just waiting to see how they turn out in the next 2-3 months, so those necessarily will see completion, even if it's failure). I really hope i see the fusion rocket to completion because if i don't think i'll ever be able to see the earth from afar or the moon from up close.

[junkmailmusubi]

tunes to get a good night's sleep to

[rootbeerrex]

what the actual fuck is this ad I just got on pinterest

[cytser]

Hey everyone! This is a Gofundme for a friend of mine who’s looking to save money to get top surgery! I can 100% verify that this is legitimate, and being able to get this surgery will have a huge positive impact on his life, so please, if you have any spare money consider donating, or spreading the link around to others!

[ask-artsy-oncie]

So… first of all, love your art, it’s beautiful! Second, thoughts on Trolls Band Together?

I apologize if this upsets the swathe of new trolls followers I got recently, but I'm probably not going to watch it, and if I did I probably wouldn't enjoy it.

I know it's not well known Lore (TM) of mine, anymore, but I didn't think I'd like the first Trolls movie (I was dragged to go see it opening weekend) and it very pleasantly surprised me. I got really fixated and invested in it, but pretty much all official media that came out after the movie has mostly just disappointed me. The stuff I ended up liking the most about the first movie kinda fell to the wayside. So I really don't see myself enjoying this one.

It's nice that there's been a resurgence in the fandom and people are FINALLY discovering that the first movie really wasn't that bad. Sorry I'm not really participating it and my day in the sun has long since passed. I'm still pretty attached to the characters of the original film (and how they were characterized in the original film - and basically popular fanon headcanons that were born from the original film - as opposed to subsequent media) and have original comic ideas with those archetypes in mind (I wasn't kidding when I said I was planning a fleshed-out comic based on my werewolf Branch AU, but that's on the back-burner for now) but you're really not going to see me start attaching myself to all these new characters that were largely just shoehorned in. I'm sorry if they mean a lot to you but they don't really mean anything to me.

I am pretty sad that it sometimes feels like I got in - and burnt out - way too quickly given the resurgence. There are a lot of artists that I admire and respect that are just getting into the fandom and I would have loved to gush about trolls with them back in 2016-2019, in ways I'm not willing to, now. I also lament how much my skills as an artist have changed and how pretty much all of my fanwork for this very colorful franchise never really reached the coloring game I'm capable of, now (I'd definitely be willing to take trolls commissions, of course, because at this point I am pretty curious about what I could pull off, but I don't really have much drive to try, unprompted, at the moment). I dunno there's just something about it that really fills me with sadness. Like I got a LOT of attention in the trolls fandom back in the day, but it still feels like I've somehow missed my chance and that my timing was off because I can't get myself to like its sequel movies. I wish I could enjoy them, I'm sorry I don't.

That was super rambly and probably not what you wanted to hear, but I guess that's just how my thoughts spilled forth. I'm very glad to hear that you like my art. I want to keep drawing and improving and creating. If you'll stick around for that alone, that's more than I could ask for.