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writing-until-i-drop · 3 months ago

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What's In A Name? Chapter Seven

Meg Harding and Kate Carter were inseparable until their friends died five ago, then she ran to New Orleans to save lives as a paramedic. But when Javi calls on his two oldest friends to help him collect data, counting on their matching natural instincts for tornadoes, Meg goes home for the first time in years. That's where she meets Tyler and the rest of the Wranglers, the YouTube storm chasers her dad likes to watch, and finds herself fitting in more with them than with Storm PAR. Meg only plans to stay for the week but will it be easy to leave when the dust settles?

If a certain cowboy has a say in it, nothing about leaving is going to be easy.

A/N: Time to get back to taming tornadoes

AO3 Link

Previous Chapter

Meg woke with the sun, giving Tyler a kiss on the cheek as she snuck out of bed, sliding her pillow between his arms. She poked her head in Kate’s bedroom only to find it empty, could she have been in the barn? Meg rushed down the stairs and out the front door, ignoring the rain, and Cathy shouting after her, a glimmer of hope in her chest. Kate was sitting at the desk, flipping through her old research, wearing the same clothes from the night before. She looked up, grinning from ear to ear and Meg felt herself getting excited, smiling back.

“Are we back?” Meg wasn’t sure what she would do if Kate said no, she needed her best friend back, her other half, her matching shade. She wanted them to be on the same page just like they used to be.

“We’re back, Mud Bug.” Meg shouted in excitement, jumping in the air. “Think Tyler can get me a new model up and running?”

“You bet your ass, baby.” Kate hugged her tight, spinning them both around, their unbridled laughter filling the barn for the first time in a long time. “What changed your mind?”

“You, my mom, Tyler,” Kate shook her head as they pulled apart, “He asked me how much more I was willing to let that tornado take from me and I realized I’d already let it take three of my friends, I wasn’t going to let it cost me another. Not you, not when I just got you back.”

“You’ve always had me, Katie my Lady,” Meg hugged her again. “And we’re going to finish this together, for them.”

“God, I’m so glad you’re doing this with me.”

“Always,” Meg was grinning from ear to ear, matching the expression on Kate’s face. “Want to help me wake Tyler? Like we used to do with Jeb?” Kate snorted,

“Definitely.”

The two girls strolled back towards the house, soaking themselves from head to toe. Cathy spotted them from the kitchen, smiling at their intertwined hands.

“I’ll cook breakfast, you’ll be needing it.” They thanked her, giggling as they trekked up the stairs. “But you’ll be cleaning up all that mud you’re tracking!” A small price to pay. When they got to the guest room, Tyler was still sound asleep, clutching the pillow, and with a mischievous glance, the girls threw themselves on top of him.

“Wake up, wake up, wake up!”

“Huh? What?” Tyler struggled beneath their combined weight, blinking up at them. They were wearing matching grins, their drenched clothes soaking him and the sheets in seconds.

“We’re gonna do it, baby,” Meg wheezed happily, Kate wriggling on top of her.

“Do what?” Tyler asked, his voice raspy from sleep.

“Tame a tornado!” Kate cheered, beating excitedly on Meg’s back. “Get up, come on,” Meg and Kate scrambled off of him, heading straight out of the bedroom, Tyler calling after them.

By the time Tyler got to the barn with his laptop, Kate had all of her data laid out on a workbench and Meg was up in the loft, using the pulley system Jeb had helped her install to lower barrels of solution to the ground.

“Mornin’, darlin’,” Meg called out, tearing up her hands as she slowly lowered one of the heavy, yellow barrels. “Kate, babe, you know where I left my gloves?”

“Tyler, can you toss her the red gloves on that desk over there?” Kate pointed towards Parveen’s desk, which had been uncovered sometime in the night.

“Yes, ma’am. So, we’re doing this?”

“We’re doing this,” Kate and Meg responded together, making him smile. He grabbed the gloves and climbed up the ladder to the loft, passing them over to Meg.

“You gotta stop sneaking out of bed in the morning, baby,” She rolled her eyes, giving him a peck on the lips.

“I’ll write it in my vows,” Tyler was staring up at her like a man in love, smiling softly with expressive eyes. She kissed him again, cupping the back of his head. Tyler’s lips were soft and warm against hers, his tongue slid across her bottom lip but she pulled back. “You know, I’m gonna find you gettin’ Kate that new model pretty sexy.”

“Yeah?” He grinned,

“Yeah.” Tyler bit his bottom lip, looking more handsome than Meg thought he had a right to, watching her turn back to the barrels before sliding down the ladder and joining Kate at the workbench. Meg took a minute, watching two of the most important people in her life, standing side-by-side, huddled close over a laptop.

Meg wanted to get used to this, being back in the barn, watching Kate be smart, the excitement of an upcoming chase brewing in her chest. She could see it now, Lily working on Cairo at Parveen’s old workbench, Dani fixing up Tyler’s truck in the middle of the barn, Boone editing videos at Jeb’s desk, Dexter working on the scientific instruments in Addy’s corner, while she checked over her supplies. It would be like old times but different in the best kind of way.

Cathy made them break for breakfast at some point, preening like a proud mother hen that they were getting back to Kate and Parveen’s research project. Afterwards, Meg took the time to mop her and Kate’s muddy footprints from the floor before rejoining the duo in the barn. Only to be turned around by her shoulders by Kate and pushed back towards the house,

“Time to get dressed, Mud Bug.”

“We goin’?”

“We’re going,” Kate confirmed, “You ready for this?” She held out her hand,

“Born ready, babe,” And for the first time in years they did their secret handshake. “But I’m gonna need to borrow some clothes.”

Dressed in Kate’s jeans and a Sooner jersey tied off at the waist, Meg did a check of everything she had left in her medical kit after the tornado from a few nights before, making a mental note of everything she needed to restock on. Mostly bandaids, gauze, and alcohol wipes.

“Did you mean that, what you said in the barn?” Tyler came up from behind, kissing Meg’s neck. She leaned back into his chest, reaching up to cup the back of his neck, his arms wrapped around her waist.

“About bein’ ready to chase today?” Her squeezed her hip and it dawned on her what he was talking about. “About needing my gloves to move those barrels?” Her palms really were torn up but she had taken a few minutes to bandage them up.

“Are you always going to be like this?” Tyler kissed her neck again, sending a shiver down her spine.

“Obstinate? A pain in the ass? Teasin’?” His teeth grazed over her pulse point, stealing some of her desire to go chasing instead of staying in Cathy’s spare bedroom all day. “You askin’ me about what I’m gonna write in my vows, Arkansas?” Tyler hummed, covering her neck in kisses. “We’ve gotta go, Ty.”

“You gonna answer my question?” Meg turned in his arms, wrapping her arms around his neck, taking in the moment. Tyler was too handsome, standing there in an orange flannel shirt, wearing a backwards baseball cap, staring down at her with those big green eyes of his. “I know it’s only been a few days, darlin’, but…” He trailed off, eyes squeezing shut. “I feel like-” He exhaled sharply. “I’m not good with words, baby.”

“You’re doin’ fine, Ty.” She brought him down into a kiss, “I’ll be writin’ it in my vows, hell, I could write them tonight, but,” He caught her lips in another, needy kiss. “Let’s give it a little bit more time before we call the preacher though.” Tyler kissed her until she was dying for air, her mind consumed by thoughts of him.

What would happen when she went back to New Orleans? Her heart hurt at the thought but she couldn’t just abandon the life she had built there to what, see if when the adrenaline faded they were still infatuated with each other? It wasn’t practical, it wasn’t responsible, but a part of her wanted it more than anything in the world.

“Let’s go tame a storm, baby,” Meg pulled away first, Tyler not releasing his hold on her waist. His eyes went wide, cheeks flushing dark red, “What?”

“You’ve got a really delicate neck, darlin’.” Meg groaned, knowing exactly what had happened.

“I bruise like a peach,” Cathy was going to have a field day when they got downstairs. “Let’s go.”

Downstairs, Cathy sent Kate to the truck with a bag of sandwiches and Tyler with a cooler, pulling Meg into the kitchen for a quick word.

“Is it time for me to call Rabbit and declare myself a winner?” She gently touched Meg’s neck, inspecting what she was sure was only a small hickey. Meg batted away her hands,

“No, there are no winners yet.” Cathy perked up,

“Yet?” Meg rolled her eyes, hurrying towards the front door. “Yet?” Cathy called out after her, throwing her hands up in exaggerated frustration as Meg basically threw herself in the backseat, telling Tyler to step on it.

Kate could not sit still, she was far too curious about everything in Tyler’s truck to not look around like a kid in a candy store. She was fully slipped out of her seat belt, dangling over the center console, digging through everything on the floorboards.

“What are you two getting into?” Tyler asked, focused on driving but getting increasingly more distracted. Meg’s hand touched something that crinkled beneath the driver’s seat and hollered in excitement when she pulled it out.

“Cheese Doodles, hell yeah!” She tossed one back, it was only mildly stale. “Ooh, Sour Patch Kids.”

“Stop it,” Tyler admonished, Kate settled back in her seat but didn’t stop snooping.

“You have a lot of stuff in here.” She flipped down the visor,

“Yeah, that…that’s a mirror.” Tyler sounded so done with them as Meg continued to list off every snack she found tucked away in the back. Kate opened the glove box, signed photos of Tyler spilling out. Meg burst out laughing as Kate reacted in a mix of horror and embarrassment, quickly shoving it closed. “Have you ever been in a car before?” Kate’s embarrassment didn’t last long though as she started flipping switches Meg knew she shouldn’t be touching. Meg, instead of saying anything, just sat back and watched the show.

“You got a lot of gadgets.”

“Don’t touch that, there’s guards there for a reason,” Tyler warned but Kate went about what was decidedly not her business, flipping each of the red safety guards.

“What do these do?” Meg laughed, watching Tyler try to stop Kate from setting off the rockets and then trying to keep his composure when she did. Kate, to her credit, immediately apologized and stopped messing around with things.

“Alright,” He pointed at the weather map on the screen showing three storm cells, “What about these two little ones just west of Enid?”

“Yeah, but this one to the east has the sky all to herself,” Kate pointed at the screen. Meg rolled her eyes, texting Lily about the whole fireworks thing.

“Yeah, I’m not falling for that one again.” Kate threw Meg a “can you believe him” look that had her giggling and Tyler sighed. “You serious?”

“Tell you later.”

“Baby, tell her not to be mean to me,” Tyler whined, reaching his hand back. She squeezed it, loving that he was keeping her included even though she was in the back seat.

“Katie my Lady, tell the man which direction to go.”

“Don’t start taking his side,” Kate sassed with a laugh, pointing Tyler in the right direction.

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

“Hey!”

Taglist: @theforevermorereject @beltzboys2015-blog @writingrose @sinners-98-world @nerdgirljen @candlejuice @a-court-of-roscoe-and-baby @football1921 @katiemcrae @emma8895eb @itsdesiree86 @closetspngirl @lostinwonderland314 @samanddeaninatrenchcoat @winterassassin1804

Next Chapter

#tyler owens x oc #tyler owens #twisters fanfic #twisters 2024 #twister 1996 #twisters #what's in a name fic #fanfiction #fanfic #bet writes

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tunastime · 15 days ago

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Hello beloved tuna 💚

How about a number 9 for the spotify wrapped?? (And if u feel like throwing any SEN guys in there I would simply love to see them)

HI THEO. you can tell I've been listening/reading too much murderbot when I start writing in the cadence that freaking kevin r free uses to do the audiobooks. so here, have some SEN ranchers. this song is actually on the SEN ranchers playlist! so I drummed up a little something that I think takes place around that time, where tango is about to receive notice that he's to come back to the Prometheus

(794 words)

Jimmy feels the pressure of all his emotions in his chest like a bubble about to burst. He's made of complex metal lattice, wires and tiny fibers that move like muscle, tubes and chambers holding cooling fluids and lubricants, silicon that filled spaces left behind and protected the various moving parts, made up his skin filled with sensors. Still, the part of him that felt, that processed emotion in a way he wasn't sure he was supposed to, still created that sense of feeling in his chest, as if the air filters and chambers of fluid had seized up all at once and were grinding to start again.

It wasn't a bad feeling though. This one he liked. A lot. It was the closest he had felt to being real in a long time. But it sucked to know that he liked it, and that he only liked it because it made him feel present, because the present was a time in which he knew minutes were slipping through his hands in a way his internal clock couldn't properly count.

Way back, when Tango first arrived, almost three months ago, he had told Jimmy that he was only there for a month. The successes and failures of their botanical project had meant Tango had stayed longer. It had given them more than enough time to become friends, dissect the little things that made them something other than human, find a piece of each other within the parts most similar. It was odd. And good. And Jimmy liked the idea of being like someone, rather than so different from his shipmates.

Tango was in his room now—their room, maybe, if Jimmy were feeling brave. The thought of sharing, be that personal space, personal data, personal storage, memory, RAM, emotion, feeling, thought, was a thing that was equally as confusing as it was terrifying. Jimmy was made of emotion—concocted from a hacked emotional core that HASA allowed to be installed in him, and with no way of processing any of the emotion, to filter it through subroutines designed to handle it, to manage it, with the secondary buffer it was supposed to have, Jimmy had too many times fallen victim to its overwhelming charge of his system. So sharing that very large, very vulnerable part of him wasn’t something he thought Tango could handle. Tango simply wasn’t housing an emotional core. Sure, his processor was large, and the long-term storage he had was complex (and Jimmy would know, they’d both poked around in his code and parts as a fun side project, considering Tango had finally decided that Jimmy should simply upload the rest of his data into Tango’s memory in case their project ended early. Tango had been reluctant to do that when he first arrived—he was built to learn, not to just store and retrieve. But what was learning but storing and retrieving, Jimmy had argued, and by the time their three months were meeting a yet-unknown close, they’d gone and backed up the data into Tango’s skull, and looked for fun), but he didn’t have the emotional capacity Jimmy did. And maybe he wouldn’t for a long time.

But he’d let him in. Just like Tango had let Jimmy root around inside his code and trusted him not to delete something essential. And Jimmy hated the idea that he might be losing this soon. He’d overheard Fwhip at some point, talking low to Tango in the hallway. Something about callbacks and data transfers, names of admirals Jimmy had never heard of, but sounded important. He had meant to ask Tango, but had never summoned the strength or reason to do so.

Jimmy watches Tango out of the side of his vision. Tango stayed because he had something to do. Maybe if Jimmy sabotaged their data, Tango would stay. Maybe if he changed something, fixed part of the system but not another, took data into long-term storage where they couldn't access it. Whatever he could do. Tango would stay here. And he wouldn't be alone.

But he couldn't do that to Tango. Which is why this feeling hurts so much. He liked it, because it hurt. And he hated it, because it meant he was coming to terms with the idea that Tango was leaving.

Scott called it grief. Jimmy thinks that robots shouldn't have learned how to grieve. It made looking at his friend Tango that much harder. It made watching him try to laugh and smile that much more difficult. But tucked away in Jimmy's room, watching the display surface show reruns of media Jimmy had long since seen, Tango laughs, and Jimmy grins his way. He’s getting better at that—laughing. Jimmy likes it.

And maybe he likes grief. Just a little.

(send me a number 1-100 and I'll try to write a little something based on the song!)

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aspiringtrashpanda · 2 months ago

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Find the prompt list HERE.

── ･｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ･｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ──

DAY 26 Prompt: Horror Movie/Game C/W: Mind control, attempted drowning 1.9k

Day 26 - Horror Game/Movie

The title screen of Siren Seaside: Paradise Shores practically emanated sunshine. The beautifully rendered waves lapped at a sandy shore, a rhythmic rush of water timed to the motions. Gulls cawed in the background, looping a predetermined route through fluffy clouds slowly panning to the right, slipping behind the row of tropical, fruit-bearing trees that led away from the golden beach.

You couldn’t hit PLAY any faster, excited to start the cozy seaside-life RPG that had popped up on your D.D.D. overnight. Levi must have sent an invite code to your device sometime after midnight, the code meant to automatically install the game.

He knew you were a fan of slice-of-life games, farming simulators and the like, so a gesture such as this wasn’t that odd. If anything, he had given you something to look forward to after classes ended.

Now comfortable in your casual clothes, your uniform draped over one of the many chairs in your room, you decided to get right to Siren Seaside. Perching on the edge of your mattress, you figured you could relocate later, once you got a feel for the gameplay and what was required to progress.

A cute little gull in a sailor’s cap flew down from the picturesque sky, stuck the landing in the sand and waved to the little avatar you had designed to resemble yourself.

“Welcome to Paradise Shores!” The bird squawked. “We’re so happy you could join us.”

You smiled down at your D.D.D. screen, the gull’s cheery dance a fleeting moment before it deflated. An animated exhale told you the bird was disappointed. “See, Paradise Shores has fallen on some hard times lately…But surely, you can help us!”

The jingling music seemed to swell in the background as the bird perked up. It was a pleasant melody, all marimba, bass, and the soft tap of a snare. It was certainly evocative of a vacation. What you wouldn’t give for a piña colada in a coconut husk, right about now.

“The island goddess is upset with us, for we’ve been too busy to worship at her altar…” Lifting its speckled wing to rub at its brow, careful not to knock its tiny sailor’s hat, it shot you a sheepish grin. With new enthusiasm, it explained, “That’s where you come in! If you can appease the goddess with some foraged offerings, she’s sure to breathe new life into Paradise Shores!”

The screen swiped to the next part of the tutorial, a graphic of waves pulling in the tide as instructions popped up onto your screen, as well as a request to grant access to other apps on your D.D.D.

FIRST TASK: Earn Paradise Points by moving throughout your world. Siren Seaside requires access to your camera, location, and fitness data to promote interacting with your reality to progress in game. Try taking a few steps while looking through your camera!

You did as you were asked, rising from your bed and navigating through your room, through the lens of your D.D.D. You laughed, watching as the screen shifted with your movements. If you stepped towards the left, shifted your body in the same direction, you could make out a path leading into the island’s jungle. Swinging the device to the right pointed towards the pier.

There was a voice singing along to the music now. Something low and jolly, harmonizing nicely with the brisk marimba. It resonated in your bones, an almost familiar nostalgia to the notes singing incomprehensible lyrics.

Your gut told you to head for the pier.

Stepping out of your room, you navigated towards your goal while walking through the House of Lamentation. You learned quickly that it didn’t matter what direction in which you were stepping in your reality. As long as you kept the screen angled to your destination in-game, then you progressed towards the pier.

You were starting to notice a twang to the voice chanting in the music. It warmed your heart, the quirky little intonation choices the musician made. The melody seemed to swell with every step towards the waves that lapped at the legs of the pier, nearly knocking the pastel barnacles from the support beams. It was almost mesmerizing, the way the sea moved with the music, cresting at the highest note of the melodic malloting and falling away at the command of the voice.

The ocean itself glittered like jewels, freshly polished and examined beneath a spotlight. The seabreeze dusted your cheeks, cool and salty, and you wanted nothing more than to just submerge yourself into the water. It had been so long since you had been to the beach. Memories of dipping your toes into the shallows, laughing as you were sprayed by a nearby wave when it crashed onto the shore, flashed behind your eyes.

Life was easier back then, wasn’t it?

You wet your dry, chapped lips, watching the water on the screen undulate in time to the steady beat of the soundtrack. You had a sports drink in the fridge, didn’t you? That would certainly quench your thirst.

Allowing the tap of the snare, the clash of the hi-hat to accent the clap of your feet against the ground, you molded your movements to the melody swimming through your mind. Two steps forward, two pretty lines, almost cooed, by that achingly familiar voice. You stepped to the right–the music didn’t like that.

But the left? The marimba jingled in delight.

Your throat itched, and no matter how much saliva you managed to swallow, it wasn’t enough. You were thirsty. So very thirsty. Longing for those better times, those beach days long gone where you could sip lemonade while the waves lapped at your ankles, at your waist, at your collarbones.

You were almost in the kitchen, the sports drink beckoning you. One sip and you’d be there, upon tropical shores. You were so parched, dehydrated, left to shrivel up and die in the scorching savannah in the southern region of the Devildom. That calming voice, the voice that promised relief.

You just needed to reach into the fridge.

One more step, and you would quench your thirst, dip your toes into the metaphorical ocean within the bottle. The voice encouraged you, praised your resolve. You were doing so well. You were going to get everything you wanted.

Just one.

More.

Step.

“H-HEY!”

It was a distant sound, barely even perceptible as you settled into the cool bliss of the game, spirals of blue cradling your limbs and satisfying that pesky thirst. Oh, how sweet the taste of the drink, of the gentle crooning in your ear. Drink, it sang. Drink, and you will find peace. The way you sunk into the abyss, supported by those sugary sounds of comfort, floating in what you knew to be the heaven you had always longed for…Why, this game knew you better than you knew yourself.

SPLASH!

A flash of indigo, a tug on the collar of your shirt. Everything moved so slowly, sluggishly, like you were being pulled through mud. You felt the fingers dig into your wrist to check your pulse. You felt the quivering lips on your own, breathing life into your lungs.

Next thing you knew, you were spewing water from your lungs, oxygen scorching the inside of your chest as your eyes flew open.

“ARE YOU INSANE?!” Leviathan nails dug into your shoulders, frenzied eyes glistening as tears tracked down his face. Looming over you, he nearly eclipsed the pretty undulation of the aquarium reflection on his ceiling.

You blinked. Your eyes stung, your lashes wet and your sinuses on fire. Each inhale shocked your system, and you barely dislodged his grip to roll over before you spit up water into his face.

“I…” Speaking hurt. It hurt so much. But Levi was crouched there, confusion clashing the panic in his amber gaze, and you knew you had to explain. With a cough, you tried again, “I thought I was in the kitchen? I was so thirsty.”

Levi glanced around his room, as if he thought he was missing something. “Why would you think you’re in the kitchen?!”

Spluttering, all you could manage was a meek, “How did you know where to find me?”

“Because you passed everyone like a zombie and they’re freaking the Devildom out!” Levi threw up his arms, his aura overwhelming, pressing into you from where he paced around his room. It was oppressive, all fear and paranoia and the slightest pinch of betrayal.

The world seemed fuzzy, as if you were peering in from outside your body. What happened? Why were you drenched? Why were you in Levi’s room?

Why was he losing his shit?

“Seriously!” His canines glinted in the blue light of the aquarium, “What were you thinking?”

Your tongue heavy in your mouth, it took effort to respond, “I was playing Siren Seaside… I was headed towards the pier…”

Brilliant eyes flicked to the D.D.D. glitching in the vice grip of your hand, water damage frying its insides. “Siren Seaside? Where did you hear about that?”

“You didn’t install it for me?”

“N-no?”

Something inside you went cold, an ice cube plopped into your stomach. Your voice dropping, piecing the puzzle together as you admitted, “It was on my D.D.D. when I woke up…”

“That’s because it’s cursed. It’s a cursed game!” Though Levi voiced your realization aloud, it failed to soothe your humiliation, your terror. “It’s meant to trick players into drowning themselves!”

“Oh.” You answered dumbly, gooseflesh erupting over your forearms, creeping up your neck. You blinked your aching eyes, finally acknowledging the smudges and handprints on the glass of Levi’s massive aquarium.

You supposed it made sense. Sirens were known to lure people to their death by drawing them in with a dangerous melody. You should have realized that. Hell, you had witnessed Levi and Beel struggle through making a cocktail while listening to Lucifer’s recording of a siren’s song. How had you missed something so obvious?

Though the song, the voice, had felt so familiar. That’s what had mesmerized you, wasn’t it? That comforting twang, that gentle laugh. The game had used a voice that you associated with safety.

“I’m…” Levi’s breath ghosted over your ear, and you heard him plop down behind you. Before you could ask him what he was doing, his arms wound around your waist, pulled your spine to his chest. His long legs–sweatpants damp from the unavoidable splash of tugging you from the tank–bracketed yours, his entire frame curling around you as if to protect you from further harm. “I’m so glad I caught you.”

Your breath caught in your throat. He was trembling, you could feel his bones rattling against yours. Squeezing you tight, he nuzzled his face into the column of your throat, and you could have sworn you heard him whine something solemn and mournful.

“Levi!” You protested, his grip around your middle turning a little too demon, “I can’t breathe!”

“Gah! S-sorry!” With a yelp, he loosened his arms, but refused to move from his position. It hurt your heart–Leviathan wasn’t the most physically affectionate of your housemates. You must have really scared him to prompt such a reaction.

Hooking his chin over your shoulder, he gestured to the device flickering in your hand. In a commanding voice, low and rather unlike him, Levi insisted, “Now, give me your D.D.D. We’re putting it in rice and deleting that game right away.”

As he grumbled to himself, his octave reflective of his distress, you couldn’t help but think…

That pretty crooning that harmonized beneath the marimba hadn’t sounded that different.

── ･｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ･｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ──

OBEY ME! MONTH MASTERLIST

#obey me month #day 26 #obey me leviathan #obey me levi #leviathan I love you #obey me nightbringer #obey me fanfic #obey me shall we date

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year ago

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A link-clump demands a linkdump

Cometh the weekend, cometh the linkdump. My daily-ish newsletter includes a section called "Hey look at this," with three short links per day, but sometimes those links get backed up and I need to clean house. Here's the eight previous installments:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

The country code top level domain (ccTLD) for the Caribbean island nation of Anguilla is .ai, and that's turned into millions of dollars worth of royalties as "entrepreneurs" scramble to sprinkle some buzzword-compliant AI stuff on their businesses in the most superficial way possible:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/08/ai-fever-turns-anguillas-ai-domain-into-a-digital-gold-mine/

All told, .ai domain royalties will account for about ten percent of the country's GDP.

It's actually kind of nice to see Anguilla finding some internet money at long last. Back in the 1990s, when I was a freelance web developer, I got hired to work on the investor website for a publicly traded internet casino based in Anguilla that was a scammy disaster in every conceivable way. The company had been conceived of by people who inherited a modestly successful chain of print-shops and decided to diversify by buying a dormant penny mining stock and relaunching it as an online casino.

But of course, online casinos were illegal nearly everywhere. Not in Anguilla – or at least, that's what the founders told us – which is why they located their servers there, despite the lack of broadband or, indeed, reliable electricity at their data-center. At a certain point, the whole thing started to whiff of a stock swindle, a pump-and-dump where they'd sell off shares in that ex-mining stock to people who knew even less about the internet than they did and skedaddle. I got out, and lost track of them, and a search for their names and business today turns up nothing so I assume that it flamed out before it could ruin any retail investors' lives.

Anguilla is a British Overseas Territory, one of those former British colonies that was drained and then given "independence" by paternalistic imperial administrators half a world away. The country's main industries are tourism and "finance" – which is to say, it's a pearl in the globe-spanning necklace of tax- and corporate-crime-havens the UK established around the world so its most vicious criminals – the hereditary aristocracy – can continue to use Britain's roads and exploit its educated workforce without paying any taxes.

This is the "finance curse," and there are tiny, struggling nations all around the world that live under it. Nick Shaxson dubbed them "Treasure Islands" in his outstanding book of the same name:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780230341722/treasureislands

I can't imagine that the AI bubble will last forever – anything that can't go on forever eventually stops – and when it does, those .ai domain royalties will dry up. But until then, I salute Anguilla, which has at last found the internet riches that I played a small part in bringing to it in the previous century.

The AI bubble is indeed overdue for a popping, but while the market remains gripped by irrational exuberance, there's lots of weird stuff happening around the edges. Take Inject My PDF, which embeds repeating blocks of invisible text into your resume:

https://kai-greshake.de/posts/inject-my-pdf/

The text is tuned to make resume-sorting Large Language Models identify you as the ideal candidate for the job. It'll even trick the summarizer function into spitting out text that does not appear in any human-readable form on your CV.

Embedding weird stuff into resumes is a hacker tradition. I first encountered it at the Chaos Communications Congress in 2012, when Ang Cui used it as an example in his stellar "Print Me If You Dare" talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njVv7J2azY8

Cui figured out that one way to update the software of a printer was to embed an invisible Postscript instruction in a document that basically said, "everything after this is a firmware update." Then he came up with 100 lines of perl that he hid in documents with names like cv.pdf that would flash the printer when they ran, causing it to probe your LAN for vulnerable PCs and take them over, opening a reverse-shell to his command-and-control server in the cloud. Compromised printers would then refuse to apply future updates from their owners, but would pretend to install them and even update their version numbers to give verisimilitude to the ruse. The only way to exorcise these haunted printers was to send 'em to the landfill. Good times!

Printers are still a dumpster fire, and it's not solely about the intrinsic difficulty of computer security. After all, printer manufacturers have devoted enormous resources to hardening their products against their owners, making it progressively harder to use third-party ink. They're super perverse about it, too – they send "security updates" to your printer that update the printer's security against you – run these updates and your printer downgrades itself by refusing to use the ink you chose for it:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

It's a reminder that what a monopolist thinks of as "security" isn't what you think of as security. Oftentimes, their security is antithetical to your security. That was the case with Web Environment Integrity, a plan by Google to make your phone rat you out to advertisers' servers, revealing any adblocking modifications you might have installed so that ad-serving companies could refuse to talk to you:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

WEI is now dead, thanks to a lot of hueing and crying by people like us:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/02/google_abandons_web_environment_integrity/

But the dream of securing Google against its own users lives on. Youtube has embarked on an aggressive campaign of refusing to show videos to people running ad-blockers, triggering an arms-race of ad-blocker-blockers and ad-blocker-blocker-blockers:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/where-will-the-ad-versus-ad-blocker-arms-race-end/

The folks behind Ublock Origin are racing to keep up with Google's engineers' countermeasures, and there's a single-serving website called "Is uBlock Origin updated to the last Anti-Adblocker YouTube script?" that will give you a realtime, one-word status update:

https://drhyperion451.github.io/does-uBO-bypass-yt/

One in four web users has an ad-blocker, a stat that Doc Searls pithily summarizes as "the biggest boycott in world history":

https://doc.searls.com/2015/09/28/beyond-ad-blocking-the-biggest-boycott-in-human-history/

Zero app users have ad-blockers. That's not because ad-blocking an app is harder than ad-blocking the web – it's because reverse-engineering an app triggers liability under IP laws like Section 1201 of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which can put you away for 5 years for a first offense. That's what I mean when I say that "IP is anything that lets a company control its customers, critics or competitors:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

I predicted that apps would open up all kinds of opportunities for abusive, monopolistic conduct back in 2010, and I'm experiencing a mix of sadness and smugness (I assume there's a German word for this emotion) at being so thoroughly vindicated by history:

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/

The more control a company can exert over its customers, the worse it will be tempted to treat them. These systems of control shift the balance of power within companies, making it harder for internal factions that defend product quality and customer interests to win against the enshittifiers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

The result has been a Great Enshittening, with platforms of all description shifting value from their customers and users to their shareholders, making everything palpably worse. The only bright side is that this has created the political will to do something about it, sparking a wave of bold, muscular antitrust action all over the world.

The Google antitrust case is certainly the most important corporate lawsuit of the century (so far), but Judge Amit Mehta's deference to Google's demands for secrecy has kept the case out of the headlines. I mean, Sam Bankman-Fried is a psychopathic thief, but even so, his trial does not deserve its vastly greater prominence, though, if you haven't heard yet, he's been convicted and will face decades in prison after he exhausts his appeals:

https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/sam-bankman-fried-guilty-on-all-charges

The secrecy around Google's trial has relaxed somewhat, and the trickle of revelations emerging from the cracks in the courthouse are fascinating. For the first time, we're able to get a concrete sense of which queries are the most lucrative for Google:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/1/23941766/google-antitrust-trial-search-queries-ad-money

The list comes from 2018, but it's still wild. As David Pierce writes in The Verge, the top twenty includes three iPhone-related terms, five insurance queries, and the rest are overshadowed by searches for customer service info for monopolistic services like Xfinity, Uber and Hulu.

All-in-all, we're living through a hell of a moment for piercing the corporate veil. Maybe it's the problem of maintaining secrecy within large companies, or maybe the the rampant mistreatment of even senior executives has led to more leaks and whistleblowing. Either way, we all owe a debt of gratitude to the anonymous leaker who revealed the unbelievable pettiness of former HBO president of programming Casey Bloys, who ordered his underlings to create an army of sock-puppet Twitter accounts to harass TV and movie critics who panned HBO's shows:

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/hbo-casey-bloys-secret-twitter-trolls-tv-critics-leaked-texts-lawsuit-the-idol-1234867722/

These trolling attempts were pathetic, even by the standards of thick-fingered corporate execs. Like, accusing critics who panned the shitty-ass Perry Mason reboot of disrespecting veterans because the fictional Mason's back-story had him storming the beach on D-Day.

The pushback against corporate bullying is everywhere, and of course, the vanguard is the labor movement. Did you hear that the UAW won their strike against the auto-makers, scoring raises for all workers based on the increases in the companies' CEO pay? The UAW isn't done, either! Their incredible new leader, Shawn Fain, has called for a general strike in 2028:

https://www.404media.co/uaw-calls-on-workers-to-line-up-massive-general-strike-for-2028-to-defeat-billionaire-class/

The massive victory for unionized auto-workers has thrown a spotlight on the terrible working conditions and pay for workers at Tesla, a criminal company that has no compunctions about violating labor law to prevent its workers from exercising their legal rights. Over in Sweden, union workers are teaching Tesla a lesson. After the company tried its illegal union-busting playbook on Tesla service centers, the unionized dock-workers issued an ultimatum: respect your workers or face a blockade at Sweden's ports that would block any Tesla from being unloaded into the EU's fifth largest Tesla market:

https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-sweden-strike/

Of course, the real solution to Teslas – and every other kind of car – is to redesign our cities for public transit, walking and cycling, making cars the exception for deliveries, accessibility and other necessities. Transitioning to EVs will make a big dent in the climate emergency, but it won't make our streets any safer – and they keep getting deadlier.

Last summer, my dear old pal Ted Kulczycky got in touch with me to tell me that Talking Heads were going to be all present in public for the first time since the band's breakup, as part of the debut of the newly remastered print of Stop Making Sense, the greatest concert movie of all time. Even better, the show would be in Toronto, my hometown, where Ted and I went to high-school together, at TIFF.

Ted is the only person I know who is more obsessed with Talking Heads than I am, and he started working on tickets for the show while I starting pricing plane tickets. And then, the unthinkable happened: Ted's wife, Serah, got in touch to say that Ted had been run over by a car while getting off of a streetcar, that he was severely injured, and would require multiple surgeries.

But this was Ted, so of course he was still planning to see the show. And he did, getting a day-pass from the hospital and showing up looking like someone from a Kids In The Hall sketch who'd been made up to look like someone who'd been run over by a car:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53182440282/

In his Globe and Mail article about Ted's experience, Brad Wheeler describes how the whole hospital rallied around Ted to make it possible for him to get to the movie:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/music/article-how-a-talking-heads-superfan-found-healing-with-the-concert-film-stop/

He also mentions that Ted is working on a book and podcast about Stop Making Sense. I visited Ted in the hospital the day after the gig and we talked about the book and it sounds amazing. Also? The movie was incredible. See it in Imax.

That heartwarming tale of healing through big suits is a pretty good place to wrap up this linkdump, but I want to call your attention to just one more thing before I go: Robin Sloan's Snarkmarket piece about blogging and "stock and flow":

https://snarkmarket.com/2010/4890/

Sloan makes the excellent case that for writers, having a "flow" of short, quick posts builds the audience for a "stock" of longer, more synthetic pieces like books. This has certainly been my experience, but I think it's only part of the story – there are good, non-mercenary reasons for writers to do a lot of "flow." As I wrote in my 2021 essay, "The Memex Method," turning your commonplace book into a database – AKA "blogging" – makes you write better notes to yourself because you know others will see them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

This, in turn, creates a supersaturated, subconscious solution of fragments that are just waiting to nucleate and crystallize into full-blown novels and nonfiction books and other "stock." That's how I came out of lockdown with nine new books. The next one is The Lost Cause, a hopepunk science fiction novel about the climate whose early fans include Naomi Klein, Rebecca Solnit, Bill McKibben and Kim Stanley Robinson. It's out on November 14:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/05/variegated/#nein

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transingthoseformers · 5 months ago

Note

oooo i really like the idea of cybertronians having like ports they can derive pleasure from but then ending up developing the idea of an array. I think just the idea of the progression is interesting

Once they figure out certain data ports bring about pleasure, you'd start to have new cables and devices on the market. Higher specced cables promising higher data speeds, meant to deliver more intense pleasure. Devices you can buy to plug into those ports that are programmed to release charge or push signals to stimulate those ports

Then they start to realise that maybe the ports are so sentive that even touching the pins on the other end of the cable that they plug into those ports returns some form of sensation. It's weak, unless you actively touch the connectors with something that has charge in it, but it gives them ideas.

New devices, essentially tactile sensors, are built to be plugged into this port cables. You touch the thing and you feel it!! Isnt that cool and fun. Then, perhaps, due to the location of the ports tending to be around the crotch or pelvis, the idea of having tactile sensors attached to a cable evolves into tactile sensors that you can plug directly into the ports. You end up with a panel along the codpiece that can take tactile input. Bots can touch themselves there, with their own servos or other devices, or grind their hips against each other, etc

And then why stop at panels right. At some point someone invents what is now recognised as a spike. Something that can be plugged in and is of a shape that can be held, stroked, squeezed- I feel they'd also develop different variations as the technology advances. You can have a normal spike which is just. Like that. Then there are flexible models, a bit more like a prehensile tentacle, allowing the user to move and control the appendage. This probably arises in response to regular spikes cos like now cos it allows them to wrap their tentacle spike around their partner's for eg.

For convenience, this evolves into models that dont have to be taken off after use if you dont want to. Spikes that can depressurise and retract into a housing so the housing can be left plugged in and disguised as part of the armour. Eventually some have this permanently installed instead of having it be something that is plugged in

Valves are the last thing to be invented actually. Sleeves for stimulating spikes come soon after spikes are introduced. And its only so long until someone decides, hey, i can install that into my frame. Installing a valve would be more invasive as it would require actually putting something into the frame, but the area it is installed in means its integrated directly into the cables where all those pleasure ports would have been connected.

Also just in general, other than 'regular' spikes and valves, you would have all sorts of other configurations. Anything that can act as a sensor can be plugged into those ports. Some could have invested in ridiculously complex arrays. Others could just have cables or bare contacts. Those who dont want to have permanent arrays installed can plug whatever they want in. And even if it is permanently installed, its probably fairly easy to change

Ooo? Yeah it would be interesting!

The progression process is interesting

#tf worldbuilding #valveplug

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prismsoup · 7 months ago

Text

(tags from @beeb-oob I hope you don't mind me tagging you here so you can see my extra rambling)

TLSPTS indeed is a meteorological superstructure- but more than that, he was a symbol, as many iteraors were during the times from Prototypes to First Mass Construction Wave.

Network - Ah, this one is quite old ! It predates the construction of Twenty Long Spears Pierce the Sky, as it seems to have been recorded during the installation of additional access ports to the Meteorological Superstructure's network. Although it does look like the implementation of an Iterator to the station was already being suggested at the time, under the project name of Display of Power. The rest of the data is only comprised of intricate maps, which I doubt would be of great interest to a little creature like you.

"Display of Power" or "Supremacy of [Concerned House]" (which became "Supremacy of House of Concerns") were two draft names for project Twenty Long Spears Pierce the Sky. It should give you the general idea behind his construction. As iterators were starting to be mass constructed, they became a major tool in displays of religious and political influence. Those which were not Community-constructed (common accord between multiple Houses or Organizations) could be used as the ultimate sign of "being better" than everyone else.

-> I explain the construction waves in this post if you're interested

When you make a product, you need a form of control over it. You want it to spread and promote specific ideas, ideologies, principles, models and systems. And you certainly want it to see you (and present you) in a good light.

It was also a good way to test certain things before implementing them on future models.

Regarding how a meteorological superstructure would be capable of causing damage- there's a few things !

Twenty Long Spears Pierce the Sky is an Unconventional Model - High Processing Power. He was constructed to monitor the Great Equalizer (when it hadnt stabilized yet and when the mass construction of iterators were still heavily impacting the weather in a way that the Benefactors struggled to fully measure). It collects, processes and stores a gigantic amount of meteorological data, but also runs heavy simulations to estimate the impact of a construction (depending on the area) and its viability (construction impacted by nearby structures ? climate too dangerous for installation ? etc..).

Have it withhold the information, or make the machine generate false data and you start having a problem. He probably isn't the only meterological superstructure out there, but it certainly is one way to get in the way of a project the House is against.

As for something way more rare but quite problematic : mislabelled systems and the Physical Network Points.

Here we have a (poorly drawn) example of how TLSPTS is connected to distant meteorological masts. "Physical Relay" means it's a bunch of cables running underground (or above ground in massive protective layers) connecting various "Physical Network Points" (connection hubs, where multiple relays connect or can be connected). "Non-physical relays" are ones not connected by cables.

These masts are all labelled under "meteorological equipment".

In extremely rare cases, this can happen :

Random equipment is connected to the mast or replaces it, but remains attached to the network point under the same label. This can happen for iterator equipment too (though it's generally fixed if the mistake is caught) but would mostly happen to rushed projects.

Legally speaking, the data passing through these networks and marked as coming from "meteorological equipment" is fully accesible by TLSPTS. He is allowed to process and store it- or share it however he wants. Depending on the mislabelled equipment, that access can become more or less problematic.

-> Not canon but in a fun little rp, one poor iterator (Paths Left Untaken by @fauxbia) had the misfortune of having her internal temperature systems marked as "meteorological equipment". Not fun. Especially when her access to her own data could simply be denied due to it. (Also go look at PLU's design she is such a cool character)

Oh !! I almost forgot about the second part of the tags ! Regarding the Docility Protocols !

He isn't aware of them. He can't, either. A fun little aspect of the Protocols is that they prevent the iterator from recognizing them. You could show a comprehensible piece of code to him and he would not be able to recognize what it is, and it would leave his mind the second he's no longer focused on it.

As for how far the obsession goes ? Think of his general relationship with some Benefactors as a worshipper/god relationship ? Sort of ? So yes, "blind reverence cult" type of vibe. But it also becomes hyper possessive later on (post mass ascension).

-> Example (not canon, but still fun) : the skittering. He tore himself from the earth (and effectively disemboweled himself in the process) just to run after TWO Benefactors, who left to reside within another superstructure.

Also last little thing : he does not have a city because he lacks legs (the structure is sitting on top of an older meteorological station) and the top of the can is too close to the cloud layer. (And also the fact he just generates massive storms by breathing).

#rainworld #rain world #the outstorms #twenty long spears pierce the sky #look at me rambling again </3 #THANK YOU BEEBOOB FOR THE QUESTIONS BECAUSE I FINALLY GET TO ACTUALLY WRITE DOWN MY LORE ELSEWHERE THAN IN SOME #RANDOM DISCORD SERVER OR SOMETHING

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thesimscurator · 1 year ago

Text

For Rent Update to Career World is Live!

The For Rent update to Career World is here! Before I link it, though, a quick:

CAUTION: There is a serious bug in the game right now that causes irreversible save file corruption. The causes of it are unclear, but it seems to have something to do with residential rentals. I actually GOT this bug while doing this update, and had to scrap two weeks’ worth of work on the update and start over completely from scratch by downloading the previous version of Career World from my own Tumblr—because once it’s in, it can’t be fixed. Luckily, I did not get it on the second attempt (I checked obsessively as I was going), but I don’t know: A) why I got it the first time, B) why I didn’t get it the second time, or C) how to prevent it from happening again in the future.

Because of this, I have not opted to overwrite the previous version of the save file with the new version as I usually do. Until this bug is fixed (please go click “Me Too” on the bug report, it’ll encourage the devs to give this more attention), I want people to have the option to play with or without rental residential lots, knowing that there may be more risk of save file corruption by playing the version with rental residentials. To be clear: neither of these two versions of Career World is currently corrupted. I have uploaded clean saves for you to download. But since I don’t know what triggers the bug, the save may become corrupted as you play, and it looks like this is marginally more likely to occur in the version that has been updated to incorporate For Rent. You will know you have triggered the corruption if you begin to see exclamation points over lots instead of the usual lot identification symbols.

If you get this bug as you play, do not save your game! And perhaps even more importantly, do not close the save you were just playing and click into another; exit the game entirely. There is some evidence that this can spread from one save file to another if you play several save files in the same session. There is, I repeat, no fix for this. The only thing you can do with a corrupted save is restore old versions until you find one that doesn’t have the corruption yet. In the case of Career World, you can always come back to this page and re-download a clean copy from this website.

That was the important info for everybody, but for a few players, I must also give the usual . . .

IMPORTANT MOD NOTE: If you use Frankk’s Language Barriers mod, you must download and install the latest version of that mod before opening the save file in order to retain language data for Tomaru, the newest language.

OK, now that we’ve covered the important need-to-knows, here are links to:

Career World updated for For Rent

Career World only updated as far as Horse Ranch—i.e. without any content from For Rent

Both are also now linked in the main post.

Phew! Alright, now we can get to the details of:

What’s New?

Rental residentials, of course! The thing to know about them first off: there is another, far more minor bug in the game right now that hard-codes the names of all rental residential lot types as whatever EA originally called the lot rather than any new names the player might have given that lot. So, many of the existing apartment buildings—which used to have names that told you what they were, like “Sunny Retirement Village” or “FutureSim Employee Housing”—have reverted to having unchangeable informationless names, or worse: misleading and defunct names, like the house with a basement rental in Britechester that has gone back to being called “Pepper’s Pub” even though I moved Pepper’s Pub and it already has that exact name on a totally separate lot (ditto for the now-duplicated “Thebe Estate”). This is a mess. I will fix it if they ever change this bug/feature/whatever it is, but at the moment, please know that rental residentials have weird names that I can’t change, and the real identity of the building is probably buried several clicks deep in the unit descriptions.

In order to combat this somewhat for players who are willing to read these Tumblr updates, here’s a list of rental residentials with specific gameplay identities that I think should be more obvious than they are with the locked lot names:

Special Rental Residentials:

1) The apartment building on the FutureSim campus (Mirage Canyon) in Oasis Springs is employee housing for employees of FutureSim Labs (the scientist career employer), or its subsidiaries Obscure Logistics (the engineering employer) and Rainy Day Entertainment (the tech guru employer), and their families. If you do not have a scientist, engineer, or tech guru in the family, you are not eligible to move into these apartments.

2) The trailer park in Bedrock Strait in Oasis Springs is a retirement community. We don’t want any young whipper-snappers here, nor any of these go-getter old folks who still work and will just remind us of the daily grind we’re trying to forget. Don’t even dream of moving here unless you are 1) an elder, and 2) retired. And no live-in children or grandchildren, either! If you can’t remember the golden age of landlines, find somewhere else to live!

3) I did a little playtesting of the solar farm in Oasis Springs for this version of the save file, and discovered that A) you couldn’t even get to any of the solar panels to maintain them the way this was originally set up, and B) it wasn’t actually possible to make money from selling electricity—the lot value was too high relative to the payback from the solar panels. But, I discovered, it is possible to have the electric payback exceed your bills if the lot is changed to a rental residential with the living quarters set as the one and only unit and the solar farm itself as common area. So that’s what I did: I fixed the solar panels so you can access them, and set the place as a rental with only one unit. You can now functionally play as a solar plant operator. And of course, the Landgraabs are your landlords. They do own the whole electric utility, after all. (This is also now true for the power plant in Evergreen Harbor and the hill house/micro wind farm in the Windslar neighborhood of Windenburg.)

4) The cluster of huts at the top of the hill in Sulani’s Ohan’ali Town is an eco-living commune that blends traditional Sulani ways of life with new green technologies. Residents live in separate off-the-grid huts with little more than bedrooms and kitchens, powered by the commune’s on-site solar panels, windmills, solar hot water heaters, and dew collectors. In the collective space, however, you’ll find a thriving taro patch, a communal art studio, game tables, a full bar, a small basketball court, chickens and insects to raise, a roadside stand for selling the commune’s produce and crafts, and lots of opportunities to interact with fellow members of this intentional community. One of the huts is generally reserved for students on study abroad who have come to learn about Sulani culture through this communal living experience—see the List of Study Abroad Opportunities (now updated for Tomarang!) for details.

5) The defunct motel in StrangerVille was bought for an almost-literal song by an eclectic throuple of artists who are very flexible about making changes proposed by tenants. Currently, all the former hotel rooms are just in the state they were when the place was a hotel, but if you move in here and want to—say—combine two units into a larger, single unit like they have done with their own, they’d be open to that. If you want to add a rooftop space to your top-floor unit, or even create some kind of wonky townhouse by linking two units that are directly above one another with a rooftop space, they’re open to that, too. If you want to install blackout curtains over all the windows, paper the walls with conspiracy-theory notes, and run secret experiments in your former hotel room, go nuts! They’ll really let you do just about anything. All you need to do is play as the owners for a minute to change these things before moving your sim in.

6) The big house where Pepper’s Pub originally was in Britechester is just that—a big house. They rent out their converted basement to university students, but this isn’t really an apartment building. The understanding with this one is that whoever lives in the above-ground house portion will always be the property owner and not just a renter—and in order to make this true, I have had to add an owning family to that section of the property, which means the college administrator Jade Rosa has been house-sitting for all this time has returned! You now have the option to dive right in to professoring or college administration with the new family that now lives there (thanks to Ivelle_creates for making the couple).

7) Both the large piazza in Tartosa where the Thebe Estate used to be, AND the apartment building at Ro Kaya Rockside in Tomarang, are mixed-use areas with commercial establishments on the ground floor (and sometimes into the upper floors) with apartments above. This is not exactly possible yet in The Sims 4, but several of the businesses are still usable—you can buy wedding dresses off the mannequins in the Tartosan bridal shop, for example, because that gameplay is tied to the mannequin object and not the lot type. Mostly, however, these commercial areas are designed with gameplay as their associated workers in mind, allowing you to live in an apartment but do work tasks in one of the on-site businesses (EX: be a cosmotologist who works in the on-lot salon).

(And a quick sidenote on the piazza in Tartosa: there is the potential for A TREMENDOUS NUMBER of apartment units on this lot. I have only designated the three that are occupied as actual units for now, because I was already running up against the per-save-file unit limit, but if you want to move your own sim in, just pick whichever of the many empty spaces suits your fancy, create the perfect apartment for your sim, and designate it as a new unit. Or, if you are really into furnishing/interior decoration and you want to turn this into basically an entire town, you can just bulldoze the existing rental residentials in other worlds, use the bb.increaserentalunitcap on cheat to allow yourself all the space you need, and go to literal town.)

8) Tam Nang Sands in Tomarang is a resort hotel. The place is set up for short-term rentals only, and is really meant to be played from the property owner perspective, to create a faux active career as a hotel manager. While it is possible to play from the tenant perspective and “stay here” on “vacation,” the game does not register it as a vacation and will make you sell your current residence in order to move here. I don’t really recommend doing that unless you live with someone else and are planning on going on vacation without them; then you can use the “split household” feature to send part of your household for a temporary stay while the other part of the household holds down the fort. If the Sims team ever release an honest-to-goodness hotel system, I will update this, but in the meantime this is better played as the manager.

9) Isda Riverfront in Tomarang is the site of the Linh family compound. While most Tomarani people have abandoned this traditional mode of housing the entire extended family in a walled compound with central courtyard and a special family spirit house, the Linh family is determined to stick to it, no matter how many foreigners marry in. And that, of course, means that unless you’re marrying in, you may not move here. Marry in or be born in, that’s the deal.

10) The colonial mansion on the former site of The Screaming Gecko in Tomarang has been set “for rent” so it can be used as a private second home by a wealthy sim. One of the new and unique things the rental system now allows us to do is have sims own multiple homes and just swap between them at will; all you have to do is set all the homes you want to own as residential rental lots, assign all the rooms to a single unit in each, and then buy all the homes as a property owner. Since property owners pay no rent to live in a property they own, voila! You can live that snowbird life and just move to Tomarang when you get tired of winter, then move back to your original house (or any other vacation homes you own) when you need a change of scenery. I seriously considered having Judith Ward buy this house, since there is text in the tiger sanctuary about her having a particular connection to it, but ultimately decided I wanted you, the player, to have the opportunity to buy this with whatever sim you’re playing—whether Judith Ward herself or any other. And bonus, you can actually use this method to play out tax-evasion-by-the-wealthy storylines, because the property taxes on a big, expensive mansion that you own outright are astronomical, but taxes on “rental” properties you “manage” is just a flat $50 per unit per day, which is often far less than what you would have been paying on an owned house. This pack introduced lots of new paths to crime, for rich and poor alike!

All in all, there are 22 rental residentials in the save file now, with a total of 90 units (so you have 10 to play around with still!), the overwhelming majority of which are just empty and waiting for you to select and move your own sims in. If you choose to live in one of these buildings and want to have more neighbors, just move a few in from the gallery or elsewhere in the save.

And a quick note about a choice I didn’t make: I have not split any of the boarding houses in Copperdale into separate units for different students, because having a whole bunch of high school students with common interests in the same household is what allows you to control them as a group at the school and have them engage in active club activities together. This was half the point of creating the boarding-house system for Copperdale in the first place, so they are always going to be giant, unwieldy households full of sims. Embrace the challenge! You can play single high school students in any old save file. The same goes for the three movie set households added in the last update: all those sims need to be in the same household and simultaneously controllable for the gameplay to function correctly, so they have not been subdivided.

Tomarang Makeover:

As with some previous worlds, I’ve tried to lean in to the differing neighborhood identities by making Morensong bustling, crowded-together, modern, and rundown, while Koh Sahpa has a much more chill, spread-out, traditional, and upscale vibe. Morensong is overrun with street cats (i.e. it has “cat hangout” as a neighborhood trait), while Koh Sahpa has “peace and quiet” as its neighborhood trait. Both neighborhoods of Tomarang, however, have “mold” as a world challenge, because the air is just so heavy with moisture—the only exceptions to this are lots with absolutely no indoor space whatsoever, and therefore sufficient airflow to prevent mold growth. But if there’s an interior, there’s going to be mold.

The limited number of lots presented a challenge for filling Morensong with businesses and activities, but I think I did pretty well, considering. Its four lots are split half-and-half between residential and community, but one of the residentials is a mixed-use building with businesses on the ground floor, including a functional street market where you can play as a vendor if you’re living in the building. And I managed to pack quite a lot into the two community lots, as well! The one currently set as a thrift and bubble tea shop can have its lot type changed to karaoke bar, bar, lounge, or nightclub at will, depending on which spaces you want to focus on, what events you’d like thrown there, etc. And for the other lot, simmers made so many wonderful and creative alternatives to the bland national park that I couldn’t pick just one, so I picked four. I have turned this into one of the Eco Lifestyle four-in-one community space lots, with each of its states a completely different venue by a different simmer. If you want to keep it as a botanical garden, just leave it on the “community garden” state and you will have a fuller version with actual plants for your sims to tend (all flowers and tropical plants), spirit houses, and a picnic area—great if you’re playing as a botanist or a florist. If you’re some kind of vendor who doesn’t live at Ro Kaya Rockside and you want a more playable version of the night market, just set it to “marketplace” and now you’ll have easily editable stands at which to sell your wares. If you want a community center with tons to do, set it to “makerspace,” and if you’re looking for a non-rabbit-hole temple / Tomarani wedding venue, set it to “community space.”

In Koh Sahpa, I played around a bit with the new career and lifestyle possibilities unlocked by the new rental residential venue type. Three of the five lots out here are rental residentials, but none of the three are classic apartment buildings or townhouses like you’ll find in Morensong. One is a luxury hotel, where playing as the property owner means keeping the guests happy and the place in tip-top shape with very short leases and lots of rules. Another is a traditional family compound, where your “tenants” (or your “landlord,” depending on which household you’re playing) are actually your family members, and the point is to do lots of gathering and socializing in the common space, throw potlucks every night to represent big family dinners, and all pitch in to help when a maintenance or emergency event hits. In this “rental,” there are no rules and the leases are basically forever. The final “rental” is only marked as a rental residential to enable you to buy it as a second home—once you’ve purchased it, all you have to do is turn your own home into a rental residential and you can move between your two houses at will. In addition to these rental residentials, a straight-up vacation rental and a spa round out the primarily vacation-oriented neighborhood of Koh Sahpa.

Of course, this is a career-focused save, so a lot of the choices I made with Tomarang’s lots—like the ones described above—were career driven. But identifying careers for Tomarang was a bit tricky. For Rent certainly came with new ways to make money, a new part-time career, and several interesting gameplay features that fold particularly well into existing careers . . . but interestingly, none of these new features were particularly location-specific. You can be a landlord or a handyperson anywhere, and the same goes for blackmail or break-ins. So while I made many additions to the Career Chart as a result of this pack, none of these new career options are limited to Tomarang. Instead, Tomarang has joined the lists of especially good places to pursue several other pre-existing careers, like fisherman (I mean, those waters!).

That said, I did make Tomarang an especially great spot to pursue anything that jives well with vending your wares at the Night Market (and the many extensions to it I added), so being a freelance crafter, artist, food stall owner, fisherman, gardener, florist, jeweler, or anything else that consists primarily of making or collecting small items to sell will be particularly rewarding when playing in Tomarang. I had also listed a new ministry of labor career as a masseur back when the Spa Day refresh came out, but never had much of a dedicated space for it. Now, with Tomarang, I decided to lean into the well-regarded tradition of Thai massage by including three different venues of varying quality where your masseur sim can give commercial massage in this world: a seedy downmarket massage parlor on the Ro Kaya Rockside lot, a mid-tier venue at the historical spa in downtown Koh Sahpa, and an upscale open-air massage area at the four-star Tam Nang Sands Resort Hotel. Plus, there’s a private massage room in the colonial mansion, so if you’re playing as a massage therapist and someone moves in there, feel free to invite yourself over and charge them for private massage services.

On the subject of things at Ro Kaya Rockside being seedy, I chose the building I did for that lot because the builder, eenitmartini (Matinee on YouTube—go check her out!) made this absolutely fantastic criminal lair/hideout/underground nightclub as part of her building, so all credit to her for the fact that there is now an “Illegal Gambling Ring” club in this save file, hosted at Ro Kaya Rockside and open only to criminals, secret agents, and undercover cops. This means that, while not exclusive, Tomarang is also now an especially good place to be a criminal—which is great, because the For Rent pack enabled me to create a plethora of new specialties within the criminal career, including things like “B&E specialist” and “blackmailer” (see the Career Chart for details).

As usual, I have also used the T.O.O.L. mod to add extra activities to the open parts of the world—most notably, I added several extra stalls to the night market, so you can play there as a vendor. You’ll note that most of them do not have sales tables/food stalls at the front of the tent; this is because, as I was testing, I discovered that you can’t actually sell anything using these objects unless the game knows you own them, so you’ll have to bring your own and place it from your sim’s inventory for these spaces to be functional. There are two that are already complete: Alon Sadya’s food stall in the main part of the market, and Chánh Linh’s fish stall on the other side of the buildings, over near the public toilets. These stalls are completely functional for these individuals, but will not be for anyone else unless you have the owners remove those key objects so you can replace them with others that belong to your active household.

Townie Updates:

Vanesha Cahyaputri, poster child for the pack and model landlord, is now running a four-star hotel in Koh Sahpa! She has quite the job trying to keep her little sister from breaking into people’s hotel rooms to snoop, in addition to keeping the buffet table stocked with local delicacies, making drinks for guests and offering them massages when they emerge from their rooms, and of course keeping up with maintenance and bookings.

The extended members of the Linh-Sadya clan now live in a traditional Tomerani family compound that has allowed me to split them into three households instead of two. They routinely throw big potluck-style family dinners in their shared courtyard. The elder patriarchs have both retired from their more demanding careers and are now in relaxing part-time jobs that cater to their interests—namely, fisherman for Chánh (complete with functional night market food stall!) and handyperson for Arturo. Their elder daughter Liên and her husband Alon both work in Morensong, where Liên makes over sims at the salon at Ro Kaya Rockside and Alon runs a night market street grill. Auntie Thi is still a secret agent, but as part of her work she has now infiltrated an illegal gambling ring in Morensong and is trying to uncover secrets at their weekly poker night. She also adopted a new cat, Bub II, a toyger who is a smaller, more approachable version of the tigers that are Tomarang’s special animal. All members of the extended Linh family now know learnable recipes for Vietnamese and Selvadoradian dishes, reflecting their mixed heritage.

The Bun Ma family have established themselves as fixtures at Ro Kaya Rockside, Morensong’s shadier district. Bua runs a hole-in-the-wall noodle soup place, Nin gives massage at various locations around Tomarang, and Kasem runs the illegal gambling ring under the building that Thi has infiltrated—in between break-ins and expert hacking of various trust funds. Yes, you wouldn’t expect it from the sweet-faced young father of an adorable toddler, but that’s part of what makes him such an effective criminal.

But wait, there’s more! A few sims outside of Tomarang have also been updated:

Eliza Pancakes has become much more investigative since becoming a cop. Some people might even call her nosy. Kasem had better hope she never uncovers any of his secrets.

Katrina Caliente took the scads of money she has gotten from selling expensive Selvadoradian artifacts to museums, bought the other three condos in her building, knocked the whole building down, and built a modern desert villa for herself, her two daughters, her dog, and whatever boy toy she’s currently entertaining (still Don, at the moment). She was tired of sharing space, and there are more than enough apartments in Oasis Springs, anyway.

Geoffrey Landgraab got tired of playing secret agent and has returned to what he really always has been: an electric company mogul who owns and operates power plants around the worlds. It’s up to him to fill job vacancies in these plants by “hiring” onsite managers, keeping them happy, and handling maintenance on the plants. What is more, at the same time that he realized he was only fooling himself about the secret agent thing, he also realized he was only fooling himself about being family-oriented, because let’s face it: he disowned one of his sons, the other one is evil, and his wife is a criminal. Instead, he has decided to focus his love and attention outward to the world by re-branding himself as a generous philanthropist. He now regularly attends charity benefit parties, gives to online charities, says yes to anyone who calls him asking for a donation, volunteers his time, and will even go on sprees where he goes around just handing money to random sims on the street. Good thing he has so much that he could live off just investments for the rest of his life.

SimTube star Dustin Broke is running out of material. His jokes, memes, and dances have gotten a little dated. Over time, he has become—well—cringe.

Judith Ward has adopted a tiger (and given a boatload more money to the tiger sanctuary, besides!), as per her lore in the new pack. Her in-house handyman is also now in the actual handyperson career. It’s good to be the queen!

The university administrator who had Jade Rosa house-sitting for so long has returned from the family vacation she took to Tartosa to show her kids their father’s homeland. The family is now happily reinstalled in their big fancy Britechester home, back to work as Dean of Admissions and adjunct art professor, respectively, at the University of Britechester, and back to charging Jade rent for her basement apartment underneath their house. If you’re looking to play either of the advanced branches of the Education career, they are now an option.

The group of salarypersons I downloaded originally as unhoused NPCs in order to give Kado Akiyama some co-workers to do karaoke with have now moved into houses on his own street! While I left most units empty in the places I converted to rental residentials, I did feel kinda weird about leaving an entire street’s worth of stand-alone houses empty except for the Akiyama family—it was just a little too post-apocalyptic for my taste. So since I already had this Mt.Komorebi-based club, I figured I’d turn its other members into neighbors and integrate them into the community a little more.

For users of Frankk’s Language Barriers mod, which is a supported mod in this save file, I have updated the native languages of some previously-existing townies for the new inclusion of Tomaru. Before this pack came out, I used Komorebigo as the stand-in for all languages originating from Eastern Asia writ large—now, I have separated it out into Komorebigo for East Asian languages (not only Japanese but also Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Mongolian, etc.) and Tomaru for Southeast Asian languages (Vietnamese, Thai, Tagalog, Malay, etc.). So now, for example, the Filipino sim Jules Rico, who shipped with the Eco Lifestyle expansion, is natively bilingual in Simlish and Tomaru (previously, I’d had him set as natively bilingual in Simlish and Komorebigo). So there have been a few alterations to townies like that. I hope to get to do more updates like this in the future as the Sims team diversifies the worlds on offer and Frankk—who absolutely makes my game with this beautiful mod—continues to expand the language offerings of the Sims universe.

Other stuff that has changed:

I took that excellent new object that looks like a “for sale” sign and stuck it outside every unoccupied house in this save file. I just thought it was a nice touch.

While I was working on this update, I saw a YouTube video that reminded me what a great object the photo booth from High School Years was, and realized I was under-utilizing it. I have now gone back and scattered several more of these around, ensuring that each world has at least one photo booth somewhere. Thanks, lilsimsie!

Pressure cookers and kettles have been strategically added in places where I thought they were needed.

A few of the more run-down houses have the new “maintenance” lot challenge—and some have mold, as well!

I realized there was nowhere to get nectar in Tartosa (a serious oversight), so I scattered a bunch of bottles around the public areas of the large piazza that is the local rental residential in Porto Luminoso. They are just debug bottles and nothing special—for that, you’re going to have to help Hugo Villareal restart Tartosa’s defunct nectar-making business. I’m sure his bottles will be better than the debug ones.

All this updating took me into spring, so seasonal lots (including prom!) have been updated.

That’s it for this update! When you don’t randomly get the corruption bug, it’s actually quite enjoyable. I had a ton of fun doing all the building conversions and playtesting, and I hope you’ll have fun playing, too!

Download now: Career World For Rent update

#career world #sims 4 #the sims 4 #ts4 #sims 4 save file #the sims 4 save file #ts4 save file #ts4 gameplay #sims 4 gameplay #the sims 4 gameplay #the sims 4 for rent #sims 4 for rent #ts4 for rent

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pencil-peach · 1 year ago

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G Witch Onscreen Text: Episode 2

This is part 3 in an ongoing series where I try and document and discuss all of the text that appears on screens and monitors throughout the show! Just because I can!

<<Click here to go back to Episode 1!

(Once I have a masterpost set up I will link it here!) Let us Begin! Below the Cut!

TEXT: (Lefthand side) Registered Name: AERIAL PMET CODE: 5011-0083 MANUFACTUR(ER): SHIN-SEI DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION STATUS: IN SERVICE REGISTERED PILOT: SULETTA MERCURY

At the beginning of the episode, Rouji has Haro run a program that compares Aerial's permet code and registered statistics against other registered Mobile Suits to try and find a match, and measures the probability of the two being the same type of MS. There is no direct match to any other MS by Permet Code, but the system states there's an 85% probability that it's a match for a Mobile Suit with permet code 0025-0082.

We never see the specific name of this MS, but considering that Shaddiq names "Ochs Earth" as the company that made it and proceeds to call Aerial, "...the Witch's Mobile Suit," I think it's reasonable to assume that 0025-0082 was the Permet Code for Lfrith-03.

TEXT: ALERT ACCESS CONTROL [???] [----OF ENTRY A---]

Unfortunately due to the small text of the Alert message, the fact that it scrolls, and it's brief time onscreen, its hard to make out specifically what it says. My best assumption from what we have is that it's a warning currently barring anyone from entry into the 13th Tactical Testing Sector.

TEXT: (Suletta's Asticassia ID) PILOTING DEPARTMENT ID No: LP-041 SULETTA MERCURY BIRTHPLACE: MERCURY HOUSE: NO DATA PC-CRIMINAL RECORD: NO DATA PC-BIOMETRIC SYSTEM: REGISTERED

(Below) WE ARE RESPONSIBLE UNDER COMPANY REGULATIONS FOR THE PROCESSING OF PERSONAL DATA

UNDER THESE REGULATIONS, WE ARE ALSO RESPONSIBLE FOR DATA HANDLING SUCH AS TRANSMISSION TO RECIPIENTS AND THIRD PARTIES.

PLEASE REFER TO THE FOLLOWING DOCUMENTS FOR DETAILS.

As Suletta is being questioned, we get a brief glimpse at the investigation report the interrogator was looking at before the screen cuts to black when it hits the table. Nothing super interesting here, but Suletta doesn't have a registered criminal record! Yippeeee!

TEXT: CAM: 05 MONITORING CAMERA FACILITY MANAGEMENT COMPANY

Not much to say here, this camera lets us know where Suletta is currently being held. (The Facility Management Company)

TEXT: (Lefthand Side) AERIAL XVX - 016 SIZE: 18.0m 48.9t

No point discussing the info on the right, we've already seen it, but this gives us a look at Aerial's height and weight.

TEXT: (Top Right) COM DELLING REMBRAN BENERIT GROUP

I only included this to point out that wow the display system devs made some poor choices with the UI here. Dark Blue text on Dark Backgrounds? You'd think the text would automatically lighten but I guess we'll have to wait for Ver 6.0 for that update.

TEXT (Top half) MOBILE CRAFT FUTURE TECHNOLOGY

ADVANCED MOBILE CRAFT TECHNOLOGY WITH PERMET MEASUREMENT EXPERTISE NEW POWER SYSTEM FOR MOBILE CRAFT AND HYBRID CONSTRUCTION MACHINE INSTALLATION HIGH ACCURACY DRIVE SYSTEM AND CONTROL SYSTEM IN MICROGRAVITY LOW ENERGY CONSUMPTION AND EASE OF MAINTENNANCE

No need to discuss the bottom half, its just the height and weight of the MC which we already know. I think it's funny how many classes this school seems to have on the new and improved Mobile Craft from Future Technology. I should probably buy one too. I love you Mobile Craft.

TEXT: (Left Image) The Shin Sei Development Corporation was established in A.S. 89. Our business began with the development of integrated operating systems for mobile suits and medical devices. We have been involved in MS development and have supported welfare engineering throughout our company history.

(Right Image) Ranking: D Sales Ranking (within group companies): 151th (out of) Total 157 companies [Mobile Suit Development] Number of clients: Over 300 companies Yearly patents: Over 200

We get a lot of information about Shin Sei in this scene where Martin looks at the Company History tab on their official website. The most interesting thing being that they were founded in A.S. 89. The Vanadis Incident occured in A.S. 101, and the show proper takes place in A.S. 122, so at some point between 101 and 122, Prospera worked her way up through Shin Sei, eventually becoming its CEO.

Given that Suletta had to have been born around A.S. 105, and that in Cradle Planet, we learn that Prospera had been working within Shin Sei when Suletta was around 6, that places A.S. 111 as the earliest she was involved.

We also learn in Cradle Planet, that when Suletta is around 11, Prospera has recently been promoted within the company, and now has many people working under her. That would be around A.S. 116. When Suletta is 16, that's when Prospera tells her that she's going to school, which would be around A.S. 121, and I think it's safe to assume that she had already become president by then.

SO!! TL;DR!! It's most likely that Prospera became the president of Shin Sei at SOME point between A.S 116 and A.S 121. I'd put it somewhere in the middle, around A.S 119. (Can't wait to find out that they probably just outright state this somewhere and I did all this for nothing....)

ADDENDUM

GOD DAMNIT. I WATCHED ALL OF CRADLE PLANET TO MATH THAT SHIT OUT. WHATEVER. I CAME TO THE SAME CONCLUSION SO I WIN.

The text is too small to make out, but we DO get a small glimpse at the letter Delling sent to Miorine about unenrolling her from the school. It probably just literally says what the body guard reads out.

I think it says something that Delling doesn't even like, text his daughter. He sends an email through the official Benerit Group email account to her bodyguard who reads it for her. What a cowardly man.

TEXT: (Left) FLUSH (Right) EMERGENCY CALL UNLOCK LOCK

YES the toilet text is important to document stop fucking looking at me like that.

TEXT: NEXT STAGE TOUCH SCREEN TO CONTINUE

I'll leave the explanation of the symbolism of this scene as an exercise for the reader. [Sultry Wink]

TEXT (Above) THIS ELECTRONIC SIGNATURE IS PROOF THAT IT WAS SIGNED BY A REPRESENTATIVE OF THE BENERIT GROUP.

No way to tell what Delling is signing here, but we do get a brief look at his handwriting. It turns out his cursive is really bad, actually!

At the Shin Sei inquiry, Shaddiq shares this graph titled "PMET RETENTION THRESHOLD VALUE", stating that during the duel, Aerial's Permet Influx Values exceeded the standards set by Cathedra.

This graph can be tough to parse, so let me explain it as best I can. The blue line represents Aerial's Permet Retention during the duel. The solid dark line represents the permet retention limit imposed by cathedra on mobile suits. (At around 500) As we can see, while Aerial began the duel underneath that limit, it exceeded it for a moment (presumably when Suletta took over for Miorine and the GUND bits were activated.)

The red line above that is labelled DATA STORM INCIDENT, which is representative of the minimum Permet Retention a Gundam expresses when it is interfacing with a Data Storm. The text on the bottom reads, THIS DATA IS VERY SIMILAR TO GUND FORMAT INCIDENT DATA.

But the key thing to take note of here is that Aerial's chart just BARELY doesn't exceed the DATA STORM INCIDENT graph, meaning that, despite it exceeding Cathedra's standards, it CANNOT be directly proven that Aerial was interfacing with a Data Storm. This is actually what Prospera brings up as her main counterpoint to the accusation.

So the graph is entirely consistent with Prospera's main argument. While she can't prove that Aerial isn't a gundam, nobody else can prove that it is.

Huaaaahh!! Alright!! This one was very DENSE. If you made it all the way through, thank you very much!! As a reward, have some little gay people

[I sprinkle these stills on the ground like bird seed.]

There was definitely a lot of really interesting info in this episode, and while not a lot of it was particularly new, I think it's really a testament to the dedication of keeping things wholly consistent in this world, even for the smallest of things that no normal person watching would even bother noticing.

Also, on the Shin Sei Website, did you notice that they accidentally put 151th instead of 151st?

You can't win em all!

Click here to go to Episode 3! >>

Click here to go to the Masterpost!

#gundam the witch from mercury #g witch

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apelectricalservicesadelaide · 3 months ago

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Enhance your home connectivity with APElectrical Services. We specialize in installing data points in houses, ensuring reliable internet access and seamless network performance.

#Installing Data Points in House

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heavenpierceher · 10 months ago

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Can you infodump about cëll? I'm intrigued.

his full name is Xhai (surname) Cëll (first name), he's 27 years old, and he lives in Detroit in the year 2094 with a robot roommate/weird gay thing named RISC. his gender is male(?) the question mark is consistent. he's a cyborg; roughly 70% of his body is cybernetic. he works freelance as a mercenary hacker, involving everything from breaking into a warehouse to steal data to staring at a console for nine hours a day. people break into his house to try to kill him roughly once every two weeks. 13% of his genetic data was taken from an enormous, powerful corporate AI's neural data and inserted before his birth, enabling him to install more chips in his brain to make his problems worse. he's aloof, polite, charismatic, and pragmatic, but privately obsessive, fairly pretentious, paranoid, and inclined to hedonism and thrillseeking. i'm (slowly) working on a ref for him, but in the meantime here's some fullbody images of him i don't think i've posted before:

i'm not great at talking without a prompt, so i'm giving myself the prompt of this tongue-in-cheek moodboard i made for him a while ago.

the first image was part of the original inspiration for him—the phrasing was funny but resonated with me. he wouldn't do something as public and blatant as driving a bulldozer through an apple store, but he 100% would commit crimes specifically to get pumped full of dmt

he likes weird sex stuff and doing deliberately dangerous things/making himself vulnerable as a challenge to himself; he enjoys testing his limits and also having sex with strangers

he's pretentious and prone to philosophical ramblings, and has weird and intense feelings on coding, AI, robots, etc

in the setting, there's a UBI and a food stipend; he lives largely off of the extremely basic nutrient/electrolyte packs issued to people monthly, seeing it as more efficient. if they made Booze Pods he would fucking love them

a lot of jenny holzer's truisms sort of skewer him as a person. he has pretty bad OCD/PTSD, but isn't aware of it, or if he is he thinks it's actually just his Superior Preparation Skills. he spends a lot of time making his own problems worse for the thrill of getting himself out of them. also he'll fuck basically anyone

as said before, he has strong feelings about technology, and surrounds himself with it 24/7

this is basically his day job; a nonzero amount of the setting is run by 'dumb' helper AIs which he's talented at verbally 'coding', speaking to them in a language that uses english words but doesn't resemble it, comprehensible only to a LLM

he's a heavy smoker; he smokes hand-rolled kratom, clove, and lavender cigarettes. he doesn't have lungs anymore (got impaled, had to replace them) so there's no real consequences for it

that last one is pretty self explanatory at this point i think

#ty for the ask!#ask #anon #op #cëll #samizdat #webart

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apotelesmaa · 9 months ago

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Rui connects nenerobo to the World Wide Web for enrichment purposes (she got bored and started using the flamethrower he installed for evil & while that *is* fascinating nene told him the next time her carpet gets singed she’s pointing nenerobo at his house) & within like a day nenerobo is cyber bullying shousuke ootori on twitter and collecting a data base of every curse word so she can drop them at opportune times

#it’s a whole ibm watson situation but with a fully sentient ai so she *knows* she’s cursing #robonene watching tsukasa do his dumb self introduction: I have a homophobic slur to say #nene: what the fuck did you do to her. rui: don’t worry she can reclaim :) nene: not what I’m asking.#project sekai #‘why is she cyber bullying shousuke ootori’ nene shit talked him to nenerobo after he insulted emu #& nenerobo never forgave him. also because it’s funny.#nenerobo also has beef from the boat crashing I know this in my heart.#‘you SUBMERGE nenerobo? you throw her in the ocean like the beachball? oh! oh! jail for shousuke! jail for a million years!’

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brucenorris007 · 1 year ago

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(Dis)Closure

Summary: A great part of Shadow's identity stems from the past and people who have already long since departed. Knowing and accepting the fact are two separate things, and he's already lost no small amount of sleep over it. In the midst of a mission and entirely on accident, he comes across someone who might be able to understand.

6242 words

“Decommission?”

Shadow’s throat closed up; even if he could bring himself to speak, he wouldn’t trust himself.

“Fifty years and change it’s been up there,” Rouge said, ever willing to cover for him. “Why now?”

“It’s being discussed.” The Commander said. He shared a look with Shadow; the understanding they’d reached years ago may have been lukewarm at best, but they had the ARK in common, even if their memories didn’t overlap.

Though he, at least, could rely on his memories of the place.

“It’s been discussed several times, but there’s been more of a push for action the past few months. Hardly a guarantee that anything will go through, of course.”

Rouge huffed; Shadow blinked. A rare dry remark about the glacial pace of decisions in government from the Commander; he must’ve had severely conflicting feelings on the subject.

“In any case,” he said, pressing on. “Renewed discussion means there’s precedent for a reassessment of the state of the ARK.”

“And that’s why you called me in.” Shadow said, trying to seem more present than he felt.

“Agents Shadow and Rouge will accompany unit E-123 and a small G.U.N. team to collect data and compile a comprehensive report on the ARK, it’s functions and general status. Prioritize thoroughness and accuracy over efficiency; we don’t want to find the report lacking in any way.”

Shadow blinked; something about that last point felt off. He glanced sidelong at Rouge; she stared at the Commander through narrowed eyes, tapping a finger on the table.

“Dismissed.”

The Commander, naturally, gave nothing else away.

—————

“It’s all bogus.”

Rouge waited until they were back at the house–away from prying ears–making their respective preparations before she weighed in on the mission.

Or ‘pile of excrement wrapped in shiny foil’ as she colorfully called it at one point.

“There’s no way G.U.N. doesn’t have a comprehensive file already,” she said. “They don’t need a separate squad dedicated to finding out which switches and levers still work.”

“IT IS ILLOGICAL,” Omega agreed. “DEACTIVATION IS INEFFICIENT AND WASTEFUL.”

“They’ll never go through with it,” Rouge said. “Setting aside the less savory aspects of its history, the ARK is still cutting edge even after fifty years. Decommissioning means lost money and releasing control of it; that’s not the government’s style. I smell a PR stunt.”

Shadow experienced the conversation as something happening around him rather than anything that involved him; owing far more to his headspace than either Rouge or Omega’s intentions.

He’d been having trouble sleeping again; despite being designed by one of history’s most brilliant minds, fatigue still accumulated and affected him.

“A DEFECT SHARED BY ALL MEATBAGS.”

Omega had once said.

Shadow wasn’t sure whether his friend had been teasing him or making an awkward attempt at consolation.

Possibly both.

“Hey.”

Shadow blinked and looked up at Rouge. She raised an upturned fist, threw a middle finger at him.

Shadow responded in kind, almost mechanically.

Rouge narrowed her eyes by a millimeter and hummed.

He looked around his gun closet again; having already spent fifteen minutes staring at his arsenal, he ultimately walked back out empty-handed.

—————

Space colony ARK.

Space station, research facility, military installation, and superweapon all in one.

Rouge wore her professional face well in front of the other soldiers, but she seemed less than enthused to have returned. Though that might have had more to do with annoyance regarding aspects of the mission rather than the ARK itself.

“The three of us could cover this facility in half a day; instead, they’ve bogged us down with a squad and all but told us not to rush. We’re just stalling so a bunch of suits and politicians down there can argue for another few weeks. If G.U.N. needs us to waste time somewhere, it should’ve been Venice.”

On the other hand, Omega had significantly more interest in the assignment; if only as an excuse to peruse and explore something that once took out a chunk of the moon.

“DIBS ON THE CONTROL ROOM.”

For his part, Shadow had spent a decent stretch of the last few years actively trying to avoid thinking too much about the ARK; a decidedly counterproductive strategy. Resistance to a strain of thought only led to a greater frequency of the same. Recently, he’d learned to accept thoughts of the space station passing through his mind without fighting them or affording them undue attention.

So, in theory, he would have been fine with the assignment.

Would have been, if it didn’t also require the company of a small G.U.N. unit; a ratio of two soldiers to one tech or engineer. His general relationship with the organization was at best professional; in more realistic terms, tenuous. He and Omega were employed largely by proxy to Rouge. Not for lack of qualifications, but the government was never going to wholly trust a bioweapon that once nearly broke the planet or a walking armory built by the world’s foremost terrorist.

And on their end, Omega loathed the idea of answering to any master save himself.

The source of Shadow’s misgivings didn’t warrant mention.

“All right, folks, let’s go over this one more time.”

The one silver lining, if one could be found, was that agent Roque had been included among those assigned to the mission. Team Dark would be hard-pressed to say they actively liked any of the other soldiers or agents employed by G.U.N., but a handful were certainly preferable to the rest. The deciding factors usually boiled down to: how they spoke to Rouge–and where their eyes went when doing so; whether they referred to Omega by name or series number; and what they said about Shadow, either to his face or behind his back.

Those who fell short were the most frequent victims of Omega’s pranks.

Roque earned a passing grade on all counts.

“We’re going to work our way through the colony quadrant by quadrant; we’re going to at least double-check every room and chamber,” he said, pinching his mouth for a split-second like he’d eaten something sour. Apparently, Roque and Rouge were of a similar mind on the mission being a waste of time. “But that’s no excuse to slack off on your reports.”

Roque folded his arms.

“This isn’t a tour, but it is a long-term assignment. Once the ship docks, you unload and find quarters first; do your routines, your business, I don’t care. But unless your name is Shadow, Rouge or Omega, do not wander off, do not split from your teams, and do not get lost.”

“Why are they the exceptions?”

“Because we’ll be in Shadow’s backyard, because Rouge is Rouge, and because Omega isn’t going to listen to anything anyone except those two tell him anyway.”

“AFFIRMATIVE.”

The clicking tongues and resentful looks aimed at Omega just reaffirmed that no one could pick up on when he was joking or being serious. Roque, for his part, smirked.

All right, maybe Team Dark liked him a little bit.

—————

Monotony descended quickly and mercilessly after boarding the ARK.

The tedium–and more specifically, the lack of any action or problem to occupy his mind–was wearing Shadow down further. The long halls and passages were bleeding together, even for him.

Team Dark was trudging back to their quarters at the end of another shift; Rouge was plumbing Omega’s CPU for synonyms for functional or operable to put in her reports of the spaces they’d checked so far. Omega’s utterly rote responses said that he felt about as invested in the process as she did.

Shadow kept pace between them, gaze trailing along the floor; trying, fruitlessly, to empty his mind.

His ear twitched.

Footfalls rang off the metallic walls.

Heavy tread. Boots.

From somewhere behind him. Approaching fast.

His hands sweat.

Raised voices.

His vision tunneled.

Military uniform.

Loaded guns.

He needed to go.

“. . . hell are you. . .?!”

“. . . CREATURE.”

Bang.

He needed to be–

“Shadow!”

not here.

Kvhroon.

—————

Kvhroon.

Shadow fumbled his landing; still gripping the chaos emerald, he reached for the nearest support his free hand could find to steady himself. Breathed. Fought to breathe slower.

Sunlight, grass, tree bark against his palm, the smell of naturally flowing and clean–not sterile, but clean–water.

Everything the ARK was not.

“Haaaa. . .”

Eventually, the next breath came out easier; less harried and clearer. The sudden shift between locations, away from the scene of… from the scene helped him grasp an equilibrium.

He squeezed his eyes shut. Took another deep breath. Exhaled.

Opened his eyes.

Daylight filtered gently through a canopy of trees and massive mushrooms in a forest jarringly absent the scent of anything like modern civilization. Save a nearby creek, the area was silent; but as he stood there taking in the scenery and letting the adrenalin ebb, birds perched in the branches overhead, chirping curiously.

His appearance must have startled them.

“Shadow?”

His quills jumped and he spun on his heel, fists clenched.

Knuckles’ shoulders hitched and his raised his own fists.

An awkward standoff lasted until Shadow’s next exhale; he dropped his hands. He wondered, in the back of his mind, how the echidna had managed to get as close as he did without being noticed. At least his appearance told Shadow where he’d teleported to, and it made sense that he’d subconsciously choose this place.

Angel Island was as near the antithesis of the ARK as one could get.

“What’s going on?” Knuckles asked, relaxing his stance more readily than Shadow had.

Shadow didn’t know why–whether due to the episode or the fact that he’d only slept around five of the past forty-eight hours–but what came out of his mouth was

“I needed somewhere to rest.”

Knuckles blinked. Shadow broke eye contact. It was more truth than he’d usually afford, but not too much for him to bear.

Knuckles squinted at him for a second. Scratched his head. Then made a sharp 120 degree right turn and walked off, disappearing between the trees and mushroom stalks.

Shadow sighed. Taking the echidna’s behavior for a dismissal, he was about to call on his emerald’s energy to return to the ARK when Knuckles poked his head back into view with a cocked eyebrow.

“You coming?”

He blinked. Opened his mouth. Closed it.

Nodded, for lack of anything better coming to mind. Knuckles walked off again and Shadow followed.

“You’re not going to ask?” Shadow said after a beat of silence save their footstepsin the grass.

Knuckles shrugged.

“If you came here with trouble,” he said, throwing a glance over his shoulder. “Or for a fight, you would have opened with that.”

Shadow didn’t have anything to say to that assessment. It was true, after all.

Conversation fell into a lull until they reached a small clearing; one of the forest creeks fed into a pond with a smattering of lily-pads. Chao sleepily crawled and ambled around the water’s edge, a few curled up together atop the lily-pads.

“A lot of them come here when they’re worn out.” Knuckles said; his normally projecting voice pitched low and quiet.

Shadow tilted his head back. More mushrooms growing out of the hills provided shade and protection from inclement weather; enough ambient light peeking through to see the space without disturbing anyone’s rest. Leaves on branches yet higher softly shshshing in the breeze provided a soothing white noise.

Perhaps Maria would have–

“It’s peaceful.” He said finally, cutting short that thought before it could take form.

Knuckles dropped himself into the grass and cushioned his head on his hands. Shadow noticed one chao rolling down an incline toward the pond. Moving fast and silent, he caught the hapless creature before it reached the water.

Cradling it in his palm, he sat down at the base of a tree; the chao nuzzled into his fur.

Shadow leaned against the tree’s trunk. His eyelids grew heavy and…

Shadow woke with a start. Blinking bleariness from his eyes and shaking the dregs of slumber out of his quills, he looked around.

It took him a moment longer than he’d admit to remember he was on Angel Island.

‘How long did I. . .?’

He stood up, mindful that he didn’t disturb any of the chao; the one who’d been on his chest had wandered off at some point.

He grabbed his chaos emerald, glanced at Knuckles; found the echidna watching him through one eye.

“Uh.” Shadow said eloquently.

“. . .”

Kvhroon.

—————

“HE HAS RETURNED.”

On making it back to the ARK, Shadow put in a bit of effort pretending he knew where his friends were in front of the other soldiers despite having no idea. The benefit of knowing the space so well; no one questioned where he was meant to be.

He found Omega and Rouge in the room the three of them had claimed as their quarters.

“You okay?” Rouge asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “I just needed space.”

“Two and a half hours of?”

“Yes.” Shadow said immediately; the better to hide his surprise that it’d been that long.

Neither of them questioned him on it, at least.

“Where’d you go?”

“I,” he said, hesitating. He broke eye contact. “Does it matter?”

“Not really,” Rouge admitted with a shrug. “But you don’t usually teleport when you need space.”

“IS THE CAUSE OF YOUR INSOMNIA RELEVANT?”

Shadow winced. He thought he’d disguised his sleeplessness fairly well. Then again, they’d been living together for more than four years. Omega suddenly leaned in, unblinking eyes staring.

Shadow’s quills bristled at the assessment.

“What?”

“RESPONSE TIME AND OCULAR REACTION SPEED NEARER TO BASELINE: YOU HAVE RESTED.”

Omega sounded satisfied by that conclusion. Shadow blinked and folded his arms, reaching for something to divert attention off him.

“What was the commotion about before?”

—————

The commotion, as it turned out, had been the result of a few soldiers encountering a stray displaying erratic behavior.

(“You know those blobby liquid things roaming around in and out of the colony?”

“Artificial Chaos.”

“Apparently one lashed out; they’re supposed to guard this place and should recognize G.U.N. as something like an ally. They said it escaped just in the middle of a chase.”)

In any case, the idea of a malicious stray proved infinitely more interesting to the unit than ticking off a list of rooms in the colony. Roque hadn’t been especially moved by the enthusiasm.

(“Look, this place has been around a long time; a lot’s happened up here. Keep your eyes open, but we’re not organizing a manhunt for a single stray.”)

Thus, while the parameters for the mission hadn’t changed, the soldiers and techs were marginally more alert with the potential of encountering the anomalous experiment; the latter out of a sense of self-preservation, the former due to a desire to shoot something.

For Shadow, business carried on as usual. Assess the state of various chambers, make note of what was in working order and what wasn’t, keep his mind on a leash to prevent wandering.

“This place creeps me out.”

And occasionally endure commentary when Team Dark and one of the tech/soldier teams happened to be moving in the same direction.

“I hope they shut all this down for keeps; I woke up in a cold sweat and I got chills every hour on the hour since then.”

“Sounds like a sickness to me.” Rouge muttered quietly as they trailed a few paces behind the other team.

“What do you expect from a place run by a Robotnik?”

Unlike Rouge, the G.U.N. soldiers were whispering a little too loud for anyone to believe they didn’t want to be heard. Shadow could have backtracked or stopped until the other team split off down a different path, but that somehow felt too much like giving up.

“Crazy like Eggman doesn’t occur naturally; hell, it’s probably hereditary.”

The whirring in Omega’s chassis briefly shifted into a faint, agitated hum. Rouge put a hand in Shadow’s quills and gave a single, gentle tug. Shadow clenched his fist, trying to ground himself.

“Might’ve been for the best that”

Motion at the end of the passage caught his eye; the liquid movement and turquoise coloration prompted him to race past the soldiers.

“Wha–?”

“I see it.”

Giving nothing else in the way of context, he rounded the corner; briefly jumping to kick off the adjacent wall and maintain as much momentum as he could. The stray slithered and swam, moving fast considering its composition.

Still not as fast as Shadow.

Inside of a minute, he had it cornered, volatile and jagged chaos energy ready to fly from his hand. The cyborg flared its liquid body into a larger, more substantive shape, yet didn’t attack. Part of the apparatus on its head was damaged, partially immersed within the viscous fluid of its body. Somehow, it managed to maintain a shape despite that.

Shadow stared the creature down for a full beat. Two.

He heard footsteps approaching.

The spear of energy in his palm dissipated.

The stray flew into a ventilation shaft just as he turned his back to meet the others.

“Did you get it?”

“No,” he said, walking past them. “I was mistaken.”

Hours later, unknown to all but him, one of the station’s airlocks disengaged; an odd combination of ancient deity and cybernetic technology disappeared into the depths of space.

—————

Shadow found himself returning to Angel Island more than once. Not so long as to be missed–at least not by anyone save Omega and Rouge–but even brief periods away made his assignment on the ARK more tolerable.

Something about the tranquility and absence of industry made his head feel less claustrophobic. His thoughts had more room to breathe off the ARK than on, even if he never really aired those thoughts aloud.

He didn’t always fall asleep; when he did, Knuckles would be there when he awoke, ever the conscientious guardian of the island. Sometimes he just sat in silence; Knuckles wouldn't disturb him either way. He’d invariably arrive and plant himself within a mutual line of sight but removed enough so as not to be an obtrusive presence.

Occasionally they talked a little. They’d reached a point where Knuckles knew where Shadow was meant to be and a bit about the goings-on.

“Now a lot of them are saying it’s haunted,” Shadow said. “I suspect they’re just entertaining themselves, but it’s still a leap from seeing one oddity to suspecting vengeful spirits.”

Knuckles hummed.

“Yeah,” he said. “All the ghosts I’ve seen were planet bound. They probably don’t like how empty space is.”

A beat.

Shadow turned his head to stare at the echidna.

“. . . all the what?”

Regardless of the reason, the dichotomy between Angel Island and the ARK helped Shadow maintain some inward balance.

—————

He ran into the stray again.

“Why are you here?” Shadow asked quietly.

The creature, having been chanced upon rather than chased, didn’t react defensively as it had before. Its shape shifted and collapsed; bipedal, quadrupedal, limbed, or aerodynamic, as though testing to find a form it preferred.

“You’ve escaped this place at least once,” Shadow said, almost thinking aloud more than speaking to the cyborg; it failed to give him much attention once it realized he wasn’t hostile. “Possibly more than that.”

One strain of thought that’d contributed to Shadow’s insomnia was that of assimilation and transference. His memories of the ARK were at once so viscerally integral to him that they caused him physical pain at times; and yet, knowing that a few had been manipulated or altered, he couldn’t help simultaneously regarding them as something foreign. He’d read somewhere about the phenomenal capacity for adaptability the body possessed. There, it’d been in the context of transplants–limbs, organs and the like–but did the same apply to memories?

What, then, did he actually know? What should he trust?

“You’re anomalous,” he said. “Free from the constraints of definitions of what you should be. You could exist anywhere, yet return to this place.”

The creature momentarily turned to stare at him.

“Is that your choice?”

It shifted again and vanished.

“Or can’t you help it?”

—————

Not every part of Angel Island consisted of forest or even greenery. The floating landmass housed several different biomes that somehow coexisted harmoniously without encroaching on or negatively influencing each other.

“This is the sanctuary.” Knuckles said with some reverence in his tone.

Some locations defied explanation; Shadow had teleported to the island with, as usual the past week and change, little precision as to where he landed. He’d been immediately dumbstruck by the expansive ruins stretching out and reaching yet higher before him, all obscured from view below by a blanket of clouds.

“How do you always know where I am?” Shadow asked after they’d been walking for a minute.

The longest duration between his arrival and the echidna finding him that he could recall had been twenty minutes. For as fantastic and removed as the sanctuary appeared to be, today it’d been less then fifteen.

Knuckles, having sat down to recline against a winding pillar, breathed a short chuckle.

“I’m not telling you that.”

Shadow blinked. Knuckles smirked.

“It’s a foolish warrior who gives away his advantages.”

Shadow huffed. Silently conceded the point. Found a perch near one of the sanctuary’s many ledges and dangled his legs over the side.

“What do you do?” Knuckles asked after a while.

“Hm?” Shadow hummed, glancing back at the echidna over his shoulder.

“All that time you’re not sleeping,” he clarified. Knuckles turned his head to look at him. “What do you do?”

Shadow half-turned away. Looked off into the distance.

“Ask questions, mostly.”

A beat.

“Yeah.”

Another short silence. Then

“Get any answers?”

Shadow sighed.

“Rarely.”

“. . . yeah.”

—————

Kvhroon.

“I return with gifts.”

“You’re my favorite,” Rouge said, immediately grabbing the bag of to-go boxes from Dancing Ganesha. She ripped open one container and almost moaned biting into a samosa. “Shit, that’s good.”

Shadow slipped a portable Bluetooth speaker to Omega from the house. His friend eagerly stashed the device within some central chamber, singing at his quietest volume

“CARNAGE.”

A half-smile crept across Shadow’s face. Neither had begrudged him the intermittent need for space and time away from the ARK, but he’d felt a little guilty leaving them behind to tedium so often. Hence his offerings.

“Is that tandoori?”

Roque, having glimpsed the proceedings in their quarters in passing, paused to make a face.

“For breakfast?”

Rouge, having already taken another mouthful with zero shame, wagged a finger at him.

“Hon, we’re in space,” she said. “Up here, our ‘daily’ solar cycle is just over an hour. There’s no breakfast, lunch or dinner; just a meal.”

“TIME IS A CONSTRUCT.”

Roque blinked. Twice. Opened his mouth. Closed it again.

Walked up to Shadow and held out a ten.

“Do you know the Great Wall restaurant by chance?” He asked.

Shadow raised an eyebrow at the proffered note.

“For twenty, I do.”

Roque challenged Shadow’s eyebrow with his own.

“Service charge.” Shadow said.

Roque shook his head and handed over another ten.

“I’m not getting change back, am I?”

Shadow smirked in lieu of an answer.

Kvhroon.

—————

“Ready when you are, Omega.”

Shadow murmured into his comm on the channel Team Dark had chosen for themselves separate the rest of the unit.

Being the loudest and most extroverted of the trio, the monotony of their assignment had worn on Omega more than Rouge or even Shadow. The highlight for him had been seeing the ARK’s central chamber and, more specifically, the controls and schematics for the eclipse cannon.

(“IMPRESSIVE FOR AN ANCIENT AND INFERIOR MACHINE. I APPLAUD THE ATTENTION TO POTENTIAL FOR MAYHEM AND EXPLOSIONS.”

“It certainly caused enough damage last time.”

“I thought you’d appreciate it.”

“. . . CAN WE–?”

“No.”

“A SYSTEM TEST WILL NOT HARM ANYONE.”

“. . .”

“AMENDMENT: WILL NOT HARM ANYONE IMPORTANT.”

“Still no.”

“I don’t think it works on wishes, Omega. You need at least one or more chaos emeralds before it’ll wake up.”

“. . .”

“Stop looking at me like that, my answer’s the same.”

“I wouldn’t be opposed to a little. . . reorganization. Maybe cutting off a certain dangling state?”

“. . .”

“REPEAT: NO. ONE. IMPORTANT.”

“Tempting. But I don’t think it’s capable of that sort of surgical precision.”

“PHOOEY.”)

Honestly, it’d been the highlight of the assignment for Shadow, too. After which, though, Omega had clearly been more than ready to go home. Unfortunately, they were only halfway through the comprehensive report on the ARK.

Equipped with a Bluetooth speaker, though, Omega’s penchant for pranks came out and his mood drastically improved. Particularly with the ambience that murmurs of hauntings provided, just waiting to be exploited.

“ENGAGE.”

The next five minutes saw no fewer than a dozen G.U.N. staff getting the pants scared off them. Compressed shrieks and wails reverberating through vents, sudden creaks and blaring static from monitors being passed by, and random lyrics of Holy Diver interspersed in more than one team’s quarters.

Kvhroon.

All incidents taking place over too large an area for the victims to draw any logical conclusions. It wouldn’t be helped by the inexplicable fact that some later encountered Omega trudging around wearing a garlic necklace.

Shadow kept his expression stoic as another screaming tech sprinted past him, even with Omega chanting CHAOS through his comm. He teleported one last time; having been seen acting innocuously enough by a few, he’d secured an alibi.

Maria might have. . .

The scene he stumbled across killed whatever mirth he’d felt for his part in the prank.

A slowly dissolving mess on the floor, a chrome component shattered to pieces. Whether through accident, bullet or otherwise. . .

The stray was dead.

Shadow’s pulse thundered between his ears.

The sound of his blood rushing through his veins drowned out anything Rouge, Omega, or anyone else might have been saying to him.

Kvhroon.

—————

Whatever the source of Angel Island’s calming effect on him, it didn’t soothe him now. He paced up and down in the grass, hands in his quills, clenching and unclenching into fists. Every stimulus–the blinding sun, the chafing breeze, even the sound of his own breathing–just agitated him further, until, inevitably

“What’s going on?”

Knuckles appeared.

Shadow rounded on him.

“Why?” He demanded.

Knuckles’ brow pinched.

“Wh–?”

“Why do the dead insist on trying to control us?”

He frowned.

Shadow spun around, pacing again.

“What right do they have to influence reality once they’ve departed? To affect our lives?”

“Shadow”

Shadow turned on the echidna; his voice rose to a shout.

“And who are you to let them?! What does that make you?”

Knuckles’ expression shuttered.

Shadow stepped in.

“You owe them nothing, yet you let their ghosts tie you down, define you! They haunt you and you let them, despite having all the power in the world you allow some strain of guilt or shame or obligation lay out and decide who you are! Why do you keep catering and conforming your life to those who are fucking gone?!”

Knuckles shoved Shadow so hard he flew backward several feet and landed on his back.

“Get. Lost.” He growled.

Shadow, gasping for having the wind knocked out him, glared at the echidna. The guardian glared back; teeth bared in a snarl.

Kvhroon.

—————

‘Dammit.’

He’d lost his mind. And taken out his frustration on someone who’d helped him, despite having nothing to do with any of his self-made issues. He didn’t want his temper to turn volatile on anyone else, so he sequestered himself in the corner of the colony farthest from any of the rest of the unit or his team and muted his comm.

Shadow wandered the colony for the better part of two days, heedless of direction or what his instincts said about how each new chamber might affect his emotional state. He could handle whatever the consequences might turn out to be; after all, no one would see him react.

And so of course, he ended up near the ward.

As emotionally charged as his memories of the ARK were, they were also incomplete; many tantalizingly vague and blurry. Five-foot high glass casings called to mind phantoms of echoes of experimentation and tests. Long and wide spaces with old scorch marks littering the walls had him fingering his inhibitors.

And the one room with a bookshelf, a bed with five pillows and a chess set left him momentarily paralyzed in the doorway; the space somehow seemed frozen in time, near to preserved. His chest faintly ached beneath his fur.

This was her room. The knowledge slotted into place as a fact, albeit one among many he didn’t wholly trust.

Shadow ran a finger along the spines of the books on the shelf on his way to the table and picked up the chess set; a wooden finish board that folded in half and held the pieces inside. He sat on the bed, propped his head on the arrangement of pillows.

He resolved himself.

—————

Kvhroon.

Shadow, still holding the chess set, teleported into what Knuckles referred to as the garden and waited. As ever, the guardian made an appearance within minutes of his arrival.

“I”

Knuckles raised a hand, palm open, before Shadow could get a word in. He stared at him for a minute, then waved him forward.

“Follow me.” He said tersely.

The echidna raced off across the marble ruins. Shadow fell into step in his wake, trailing Knuckles over obstacles, chasms and occasionally lava until they came to what looked like a nondescript wall. Knuckles punched a specific spot in the marble and a rumbling preceded a section of the stonework sliding downward to reveal a doorway.

Knuckles gestured on with a tilt of his head before entering. Shadow followed again.

At the end of a brief trek underground, they came out inside a magnificent hall; carved by hand yet by no means inferior to anything a machine could do. Knuckles stopped in front of one of many murals; despite the hour of the day and the absence of discernible windows or views to the outside, some almost ethereal light source let Shadow see perfectly.

A tribe of echidnas.

“I’m not just guarding the Master Emerald,” Knuckles said. He passed a hand over the mural, making only the slightest contact with the wall. “I’m preserving something. Something a lot harder to define than a gem too powerful to be carelessly wielded.”

Knuckles let his hand linger on the mural, turning to regard the rest of the chamber.

“I’ve only poked around a fraction of this part of the island; read only a few of what texts are still legible. Not all of it is pleasant.”

Shadow’s grip on the chess set tightened.

“But this isn’t about obligation for me, it’s about my history,” he said. “It’s about protecting something that would otherwise be lost forever.”

Knuckles looked at Shadow.

“Dying isn’t final,” he said. “Being forgotten is. Whatever else happens in my life, I can’t just kill them off.”

Shadow swallowed. Knuckles turned back to the mural. Shadow looked down at his shoes, letting the echidna’s solemn tone fill the space and settle in his mind.

He exhaled.

“I brought something,” he said finally, holding up the chess set. “It’s a game; though I haven’t played chess in years.”

“I’ve heard of it,” Knuckles said. “Haven’t played it.”

“Learning could take a while.”

Knuckles shrugged.

“Patience is one of the first skills you need to survive up here,” he said. “Sonic’s the only one who makes me forget that.” He paused, considering. “Well, him and the bat.”

Shadow conceded the point. With some silent understanding, they sat before the mural and unfolded the board.

Neither of them was especially skilled; once Knuckles had committed to memory how each piece moved, the difference in their playing became apparent. Shadow could more quickly pick out all viable moves available to him on any given turn whereas Knuckles could consistently see a move or two ahead; although the echidna tended to be stubborn once he’d decided on a plan he liked.

Eventually, they were comfortable enough with the game and Shadow broke the silence.

“You asked me before,” he said. “What I do when I’m not sleeping.”

“You said you ask questions.”

“Yes. But they’re usually angled toward the same topic: who I am.”

“. . .”

“I was created,” Shadow said. “To fulfill multiple purposes. Some contradictory. Ultimately, it seems I was made for someone.”

“Who?” Knuckles asked evenly.

“Maria,” Shadow whispered. “Everything ties back to her. My creator agreed to make me a weapon so that he’d have the funds and technology necessary to create me for his granddaughter. I was made to be her protector, her brother, her cure–I was even programmed to have a soul that resembled hers.”

Knuckles didn’t respond. He moved his knight.

“Or so I’ve been led to believe.” Shadow muttered, advancing a bishop.

“It’s not true?”

“I don’t know,” Shadow grunted, frustrated. “At least some of my memories have been altered at least once before. Who’s to say whether the memories I have now, as I recall them, are any more real than those that were suggested to me?”

Knuckles moved his knight again.

“There are moments when I resent the whole of what I know about the ARK,” Shadow confessed. “But Maria is so much a part of me that I can’t separate an identity of my own apart from her influence. I’d cease to be Shadow then.”

Shadow balled his fists.

“But I don’t even know anything about who Maria was.” He hissed through clenched teeth.

Knuckles didn’t say anything for a full minute.

“. . . It’s your turn.”

“Hn.”

Shadow advanced a pawn.

“You don’t know because you don’t trust yourself?”

“I don’t trust what’s there,” Shadow muttered. “Or the handful of people that remain who knew her. I’ve got nothing to go on.”

“I seem to recall you plummeting through the atmosphere because of a promise,” Knuckles said; not a hint of derision or sarcasm in his tone, just earnest curiosity. “Did I get that wrong?”

Shadow froze.

His hand, holding his queen, hovered over the chess board, one move shy of checkmate.

“Her dying words were a plea for me to protect the planet,” Shadow said, glancing up at Knuckles. “That’s the only thing I’m certain of.”

Shadow knew he sounded a little too certain of Maria’s last words; bordering on desperate for a thread of truth in his memories to cling to, especially after how he’d already said he knew nothing about her.

He suspected, after the last couple weeks, that Knuckles understood that near-desperation. Perhaps that was why he didn’t call attention to it.

“A dying wish sounds like a whole lot more than nothing,” Knuckles said. “You can tell plenty about someone from that.”

“Can you?” Shadow asked.

“Besides,” Knuckles said, ignoring the question. “Do you really need to know someone for them to be important?”

Shadow opened his mouth; paused, remembered who he was talking to, where he was. He dipped his head, turning the echidna’s question over in his mind.

“. . . I should get back,” he said in lieu of an answer. He stood up, waved his hand when Knuckles moved to pack up the chess set. “You hang onto it. You’re in the practice of keeping things, right?”

Knuckles brow jumped, and he gave him an assessing look. He smirked.

“It’s what I was born to do,” he said. “I’ll have figured out how to beat you next time.”

Shadow huffed, turning away from the mural. Paused.

“Knuckles,” he said, pairing the words with a backward glance over his shoulder. “Do you really think a wish is enough to know someone?”

A reply was slow in coming. The echidna’s eyes briefly turned elsewhere.

“No one wastes their last words on nonsense,” he said. “Children least of all.”

“. . . !”

Shadow’s mind, lost and adrift at sea for weeks, finally, finally settled. He sighed.

“Thank you.”

He weighed his emerald in his hand. Called on its power.

“Chaos energy.”

He turned around again.

“Huh?”

“I can tell whenever you’re on the island,” Knuckles said. “Because you bleed chaos energy. That’s how I know where you are.”

Shadow blinked.

“I thought only fools give away their advantages.”

Not that giving Shadow that information made it any less of an advantage. Knuckles smirked and shrugged.

“I can handle it,” he said. “Besides. Some of my favorite people in the world are fools.”

—————

G.U.N. called a premature end to their mission a couple days afterward. A few people groaned that the call back to terra firma only came once they’d finished upwards of eighty percent of their report, but most were just relieved.

Shadow personally all but collapsed on their couch as soon as he made it into the house. He shifted just enough to situate his quills and then lay motionless.

“I need check on the club,” Rouge said, only swapping out a change of clothes before standing at the door again. “Don’t wait up.”

Shadow managed some unintelligible noise that might’ve been distantly related to a grunt.

“Hey.”

Begrudgingly, he cracked his eyes open. He got Rouge’s middle finger for the effort.

He responded in kind and lazily stuck out his tongue. Rouge laughed and slammed the door shut behind her.

That was the last thing Shadow knew before falling into the deepest sleep he’d had in nearly a month.

@generic-sonic-fan

#Functionally Immortal Crew #Sonic #Knuckles the Echidna #Shadow the Hedgehog #Team Dark #fanfic #Destined Child #The Imperfect Lifeform #G.U.N.

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ambiguouspuzuma · 1 year ago

Text

They had come to see the book. It was a rarity, a curiosity, even in this most fertile age of literature, with more novels published each year than the last - for, amongst such endless propagation, few survived even a decade down the line. There had been no reason to cling to a single rigid tome, no veneration of the classics, ever since the authors went extinct.

It had happened almost overnight. There had been signs, in the build-up: a sky that darkened at the edges, a scarlet glow beneath the waiting clouds, as computer programs slowly learnt to emulate, to replicate without the usual tells, but the breakthrough had been night and day.

Up until that point, human authors had still stood head and shoulders clear of their artificial usurpers. But once a certain level of fidelity had been reached, they found themselves suddenly surpassed and superseded: they were left to gather dust with their typewriters and keyboards and other obsolete apparatus, taking their place as the latest casualties of progress.

The editors had briefly come to fill their niche, like the terror birds who clung on when the great therapods were gone, able to fine tune this sudden glut of raw material, putting their name to it, still perched on top of the food chain. But it was only a stay of extinction, and soon the software had evolved again, able to churn out perfect novels every time.

Publishers also had their time in the sun, having survived the meteorite's first impact and growing wealthy on free manuscripts, but their part of the production line was perhaps the easiest to automate, having mostly just required time and certain contacts, and the machines could draw upon plenty of both. In fact, they could dispense with the marketing, the retailers - they simply sold a printer with the program installed, and left each purchaser's books to be unique. Every home became a publishing house, and therefore none of them were.

"Is it old?" one of the visitors asked.

"The 20s," the owner confirmed, conjuring up images of that broken time, a world recovering from plague and war.

That had come just before the tipping point, the greatest expansion since the invention of the printing press. Readers could conjure up whole libraries on a whim, and replace them just as easily, the words pulped with the paper and recycled into something new.

There had been fears that the machines would be limited, producing variations on the same theme, restricted by their lack of true imagination, but nothing had been further from the truth. As the products of more input than any human brain could ever dream to hold, they went far beyond any of their forebears, an imagination unlimited by memory or computing power, but free to dream as only a computer could.

If Lovecraft wrote of horrors that no mortal mind could comprehend, the program could produce them, understand them, and describe them on the page. If Asimov envisioned the future, the program could predict it. All world-building was put to shame by software which could simulate whole galaxies, write with perfect historical accuracy, or explore inaccuracies and their consequences with access to all the data that had ever been preserved.

But aesthetes still sought out authenticity, and that brought them to his door. His book was hand-bound in that antiquated way, wearing its maker's mark along its spine, a badge upon its back spelling its name in bar code runes, as much old produce was known to do, before the computers learnt to recognise by shape instead. Somebody had illustrated the cover by hand, finger and brush. It had all been added manually, even the blank spaces inside.

"It's beautiful," they said.

#writing #short story #original fiction #writeblr

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year ago

Text

A "secure" system can be the most dangerous of all

Two decades ago, my life changed forever: hearing Bruce Schneier explain that “security” doesn’t exist in the abstract. You can only be secure from some threat. A fire alarm won’t protect you from burglaries. A condom won’t protect you from mass shootings. It seems obvious, but how often do we hear about “security” without any mention of who is being made secure, and from which threat?

Take the US welfare system. It is very “secure” in that it is hedged in by a thicket of red-tape, audits, inspections and onerous procedures. To get food stamps, housing vouchers, or cash aid, you must navigate a Soviet-grade bureaucratic system of Kafkaesque proportions. Indeed, one of the great ironies of the post-Cold War world is that the USA has become a “Utopia Of Rules” (as David Graeber put it), subjecting everyday people to the state-run bureacracies that the USAUSAUSA set endlessly ridiculed the USSR for:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/02/02/david-graebers-the-utopia-of-rules-on-technology-stupidity-and-the-secret-joys-of-bureaucracy/

(The right says it wants to “shrink the US government until fits in a bathtub — and then drown it” — but not the whole government. They want unlimited government bloat for that part of the state that is dedicated to tormenting benefits claimants, especially if its functions are managed by a Beltway Bandit profiteer who bills Uncle Sucker up the wazoo for rubber-stamping “DENIED” on every claim.)

The US benefits system has a sophisticated, expensive, fully staffed anti-fraud system — but it’s a highly selective form of anti-fraud. The system is oriented solely to prevent fraud against itself, with no thought to protecting benefits recipients themselves from fraud.

And those recipients — by definition the poorest and most vulnerable among us — are easy pickings for continuous, ghastly, eye-watering acts of fraud. These benefits are distributed via prepaid debit cards — EBT Cards — that lack the basic security measures that every other kind of card has had for years. These are simple magstripe cards, lacking basic chip-and-pin defenses, to say nothing of contactless countermeasures.

That means that fraudsters can — and do — install skimmers in the point-of-sale terminals used by benefits recipients to withdraw their cash benefits, pay for food using SNAP (AKA Food Stamps), and receive other benefits.

It’s impossible to overstate how widespread these skimmers are, and how much money criminals make by stealing from poor people. Writing for Businessweek, Jessica Fu describes the mad scramble benefits recipients go through every month, standing by ATMs at midnight on the night of the first of every month in hopes of withdrawing the cash they use to pay for their rent and utility bills before it is stolen by a crook who captured their card number with a skimmer:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-06-28/ebt-theft-takes-millions-of-dollars-from-the-neediest-americans

One of Fu’s sources, Lexisnexis Risk Solutions’s Haywood Talcove, describes these EBT cards as having the security of a “glorified hotel room key.” He recounts how US police departments saw a massive explosion in EBT skimming: from 300 complaints in January 2022 to 18,000 in January 2023.

The skimmer rings are extremely well organized. The people who install the skimmers — working in pairs, with one person to distract the cashier while the other quickly installs the skimmer — don’t know who they work for. Neither do the people who use cards cloned from skimmer data to cash out benefits recipients’ accounts. When they are arrested, they refuse to turn on their immediate recruiters, fearing reprisals against their families.

These low-level crooks stroll up to ATMs and feed a succession of cloned cards into them, emptying account after account. Or they swipe cards at grocery checkouts, buying cases of Red Bull and other easily sold grocery products with some victim’s entire SNAP balance.

Some police agencies are pursuing these criminal gangs and trying figure out who’s running them, but the authorities who issue SNAP cards are doing little to nothing to stop the pipeline at their end. Simply upgrading SNAP terminals to chip-and-pin would exponentially raise the cost and complexity that thieves incur.

Indeed, that’s why every other kind of payment card uses these systems. How is it that these systems were upgraded, while SNAP cards remain in mired in 20th century “glorified hotel room key” territory? Well, as our friends on the right never cease to remind us: “incentives matter.”

When your credit card gets cloned, it’s your banks and credit card company that pays for the losses, not you. So the banks demanded (and funded) the upgrade to new anti-fraud measures. By contrast, most states have no system for refunding stolen benefits to skimmers’ victims.

In other words, all of the anti-fraud in the benefits system is devoted to catching benefits cheating — a phenomenon that is so rare as to be almost nonexistent (1.54%), notwithstanding right wingers’ fevered, Reagan-era folktales about “welfare queens”:

https://blog.gitnux.com/food-stamp-fraud-statistics/

Meanwhile, the most widespread and costly form of fraud in the benefits system — fraud perpetrated against benefits recipients — is blithely ignored.

Really, it’s worse than that. In deciding to protect the welfare system rather than welfare recipients, we’ve made it vastly harder for benefits claimants who’ve been victimized by fraudsters to remain fed and sheltered. After all, if we made it simple and straightforward for benefits recipients to re-claim money that was stolen from them, we’d make it that much easier to defraud the system.

“Security” is always and forever a matter of securing some specific thing, against some specific risk. In other words, security reflects values — it reveals whose risk matters, and whose doesn’t. For the American benefits system, risks to the system matter. Risks to people don’t.

It’s not just the welfare system that prioritizes its own risks against the people it exists to serve. Think of the systems used to fight drug abuse in clinical settings.

Medical facilities that use or dispense powerful pain-killers have exquisitely tuned, sophisticated, frequently audited security systems to prevent patients from tricking their doctors or pharmacists into administering extra drugs (especially opioids). “Extra” in this case means “more drugs than are strictly necessary to manage pain.”

The rationale for this is only incidentally medical. Someone who gets a little too much painkiller during a medical procedure or an acute pain episode is not at any particular risk of enduring harm — the risks are minor and easily managed (say, by keeping a patient in bed a little longer while they recover from sedation).

The real agenda here is preventing addiction and abuse by addicted people. There’s a genuine problem with opioid abuse, and that problem does have its origins in overprescription. But — crucially — that overprescription wasn’t the result of wimpy patients insisting on endless painkillers until they enslaved themselves to their pills.

Rather, the opioid epidemic has its origins in the billionaire Sackler crime family, whose Purdue Pharma used scientific fraud, cash incentives, and other deceptive practices to trick, coerce, or bribe doctors into systematically overprescribing their Oxycontin cash cow, even as they laundered their reputation with showy charitable donations:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/12/monopolist-solidarity/#sacklers-billions

The Sacklers got to keep their billions — and people undergoing painful medical procedures or living with chronic pain are left holding the bag, subject to tight pain-med controls that forces them to prove — through increasingly stringent systems — that they truly deserve their medicine.

In other words, the beneficiary of the opioid control system is the system itself — not the patients who need opioids.

There’s an extremely disturbing — even nightmarish — example of this in the news: the Yale Fertility Clinic, where hundreds of women endured unimaginably painful egg harvesting procedures with no anaesthesia at all.

These women had complained for years about the pain they suffered, and many had ended up needing emergency care after the fact because of traumatic injuries caused by undergoing the procedure without pain control. But the doctors and nurses at the Yale clinic ignored their screams of pain and their post-operative complaints.

It turned out that an opioid-addicted nurse had been swapping the fentanyl in the drug cabinet for saline, and taking the fentanyl home for her own use.

This made national headlines at the time, and it is the subject of “The Retrievals,” a new New York Times documentary series podcast:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/22/podcasts/serial-the-retrievals-yale-fertility-clinic.html

If the pain medication management system was designed to manage pain, then these thefts would have been discovered early on. If the system was designed so that anyone who experienced pain was treated until the pain was under control, the deception would have been uncovered almost immediately.

As Stafford Beer said, “the purpose of any system is what it does.” The pain medication management system was designed to manage pain medication, not pain itself.

The system was designed to be secure from opioid-seeking addicted patients. It was not designed to make patients secure from pain. Its values — our values, as a society — were revealed through its workings.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/13/whose-security/#for-me-not-thee

[Image ID: A down-the-barrel view of a massive, battleship-gray artillery piece protruding from the brick battlement of a fortress. From the black depths of the barrel shines a red neon 'EBT' sign.]

Image: Bjarne Henning Kvaale (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oscarsborg_28cm_Krupp_cannon_4_-_panoramio.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

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