#OK COMPUTER MENTIONED!!!

[heyitsdrawey]

A Cabby/Suitcase friendship minicomic

Go under the cut to read the full thing!

"Thank you, friend..."

[koko2unite]

[echo-rambles]

birthday wishes

words: 1,567 tags: fluff, best friend!lee know, f!reader, humor, platonic cuddling, a vague allusion to bf!chan. notes: I don't know what got a hold of me. I wrote this out in just a few hours because I couldn't stop thinking about bff!lino and being stupidly affectionate. I tried my best but lino's voice isn't very easy for me to write for just yet lol. hopefully it's fun!

-o0o-

You tap at your phone screen, awakening it just enough to check the time. Maybe if you keep checking, it'll make the minutes move by faster. Logically you know that's not how it works but you're so impatient.

Most everyone else is asleep, but you can't even begin thinking of going to bed. Not only do you have something you need to do, but you're also just too damn excited. You've been waiting for this all night and it's almost time. How are you meant to sleep? 

Finally, finally, you watch as the hour ticks over and it's midnight. You've been waiting for this.

Scurrying off, you slip your way into the bedroom and sneak over to the bed. There's a lump under the covers, and you could jump on it and startle the lump awake. But you don't think it'd be a very kind thing to do, no matter how excited you might be.

Instead, you perch yourself at the edge of the mattress and begin to gently peel the blanket away, revealing the person underneath. 

"Hey, wake up." You whisper, a little sharply. 

Minho grumbles, smashing his face further into his pillow, turning away from your voice. 

"Oh my god, wake up already."

"Why?" The word is muffled and grumpy. 

"Happy Birthday!" You finally give in to your excitement and shake at his shoulder. 

"...What?" Finally he rolls towards you, squinting at you through the gloom of the night. 

"It's the 25th, you fool."

Another grumble, almost verging on a whine. "I'm trying to sleep. It'll still be my birthday in the morning, when I'm awake."

"But you're awake now."

"Under duress."

"Whatever, I want to celebrate with you now." You try to make a show of complaining, but you can tell Minho is already settling back into sleep. Well, that won't do. Not yet, at least. Crawling into the bed, you shimmy your way under his covers, until you can press your chilly feet against his shins, smiling as he flinches and opens his eyes enough to glare at you. "I bet I'm the first person to wish you a happy birthday."

The glare softens a little, and then he's sighing, shifting around so he can offer you space on his pillow to share. You gladly accept. Getting so close you're almost nose to nose.

Minho hums thoughtfully. Sleepily. "You’d bet correctly."

“By birthday rules, that means I win.”

He hums again, much more sleepy than thoughtful. “Congratulations.”

"Do you want some birthday cuddles?" You ask, already knowing the answer. 

"What would Chan say?" Minho snarks, instead of an outright rejection. 

You give him this long look, raising a single eyebrow. "'You're cuddling without me?' and then he'd jump in bed and sandwich you between us for birthday cuddles "

"Ugh, I'm glad it's just you here to smother me."

"Exactly!" You chirp, surging forward to wrap him up in your arms. He grumbles some more, but he melts into the hug regardless. Tucking his head into the space between your neck and the pillow. 

"Can I go back to sleep now?"

"I didn't get to sing happy birthday to you yet…" 

"I'll only allow it if you do it with a really weird accent." 

"Why would I sing it any other way?" 

Minho's phone chimes, interrupting you before you can really get started. You untangle yourself from birthday cuddling to practically crawl over him to grab at it. Awakening it to check the notification.

"Who is it?" Minho asks from where his face is practically pressed into your ribs. 

"Hyunjin wished you a happy birthday. Ha! He's two minutes too late! This means I definitely won.” Another chime. “Jisung gets third place, since he just now sent birthday wishes." 

"Oh, tell them that they lost. Rub their faces in it." He says, twisting about to try and look at his phone screen. He sounds more awake now, as if the promise of fucking around with your friends has energized him. 

Of course you take the opportunity presented to you, taking his phone with you as you settle back into bed, giggling relentlessly to yourself as you type away. “Ah, too slow! So sad! Noona wished me hbd the moment the clock struck twelve! You’re both losers. And then a lot of laughter.” You narrate from Minho’s perspective, replying in the group thread. 

Minho nods along, chin pressing into your shoulder as he watches the message get drafted and sent. “Add a sticker too, and maybe more laughter.”

“Perfect!” After following directions, you lock Minho’s phone and slip it somewhere under the pillow. “Ok, where was I?”

“Singing happy birthday. In a terrible accent.”

“You said weird.”

“I’ve changed my mind.” 

Huffing and puffing and complaining, you make a big show out of it. Getting comfortable under the covers and snuggling close to Minho, folding both of his hands between your own before you start to sing. Somewhere in the middle of the birthday song, your accent changes, getting away from you and turning into something completely different. It makes Minho laugh. 

You both try your best to stay quiet, neither of you wanting to alert the others to the little impromptu birthday party happening in his room. Or else they’d converge and crowd the bed, and you don’t want that. This is for the two of you. No one else. 

He starts to sing along with you towards the end, affecting his own voice and making you trip up with laughter. It’s stupid and you’re both giggling once it’s all over, but it’s worth it. 

“Ok, so.” You start, once the both of you have the laughter under control. “What’s your birthday wish?”

He hums, closing his eyes once again. The smile is still present, and you’re sure he’s not about to fall asleep again. It’s a thoughtful sort of hum, not sleepy at all. “I wish… to one day gain the ability to speak to my cats. I feel like it would be very helpful and I could ask them why they insist on chewing on candy wrappers when I buy them wonderful toys.”

“Minho-ah.” You pout, just a little, giving your clasped hands a shake. “Be serious. I really want to know.” 

Minho squeezes your hands, sighing through his nose. “It’s the same wish every year. To live a happy life, surrounded by the people I love most in the world.”

“And it comes true? Every year?” 

“I’m here with you, aren’t I? Tomorrow I’ll wake up to Changbin and Jeongin trying to make me a birthday breakfast because they don’t want me to cook for myself, even though they will absolutely burn whatever it is on the stove. Chan-hyung will spend the whole day making excited little noises because he wants to give me his birthday gift the moment he sees me but he’s already made a pact with the other boys to wait until lunch. They’ll give me hugs and kiss my face and smother me with their love, all day.” Minho’s voice is quiet as he describes everything, and you can almost see it. Like some sort of premonition. 

They all know each other so well and they all love him dearly.  

“It’s the same, every year. Because I never want it to stop being true.” 

You shuffle closer, until you can tuck your head underneath his chin. “I don’t think it’ll ever stop being true, Minho. Even if you wished for something different, I don’t think we'd ever stop loving you.” 

He laughs, just a huff through his nose, and you can hear the smile in his voice as he hums and speaks. “Well, then I guess my wish to suddenly speak feline is back and better than ever.” 

The both of you fall asleep like that. Giggling and whispering to each other until sleep claims you. In the morning you’re woken up by Chan, diving into the bed and complaining that he missed out on birthday cuddles, which is soon joined by Felix crawling into bed and asking for cuddles of his own. You immediately latch onto Felix once he’s close enough, abandoning both Minho and Chan to smush Lixie’s face in your hands. 

The bed becomes crowded not long after, just like you knew it would, with Jisung joining and squeezing Minho in a hug, apologizing that he wasn’t able to wish his jagiya a happy birthday sooner. (Seungmin had poked his head in, saw the messy cuddle pile, and simply wished his hyung a happy birthday before leaving to ‘supervise Jeongin.’) 

It’s all very sweet and a little loud and Minho gets his revenge by pinching Chan’s ass at least twice. 

Hyunjin skids to a stop in the doorway, both hands braced on either side and his face solemn. “Changbinnie is trying to burn down your kitchen.” 

“I am not!” Changbin bellows back, voice carrying down the hall. Hyunin presses his lips together tightly.

“I take it all back.” Minho says, from his place folded deeply into Jisung’s arms. “I wish that everyone would leave me to lay here and rot away in peace.” 

“But we love you.” You say sweetly as you grab his cheek and pinch. Minho smiles at you, all teeth. Jeongin yells something in the background about how toast should not look that color. No matter what Minho says, you know this is the start of a very perfect birthday.

[superbellsubways]

to start off, love the gjinka stuff you do! you're really skilled at making them very. lifelike? Alive? theres some shit youve got going on there I can't exactly name that is awesome.

but also with having joel vargskelethor engrained in my brain is sooo funny combined with your portrayal of them. what would the bonzibuddy computer destructions even look like here. would bonzi get a job doing a tv show like andrew w.k. and destroy-build-destroy but for the Gonputer?

Thank you 😭😭😭 i get worried that some of my stuff feels too bland and lifeless sometimes so this means alot to hear (i still worry about same face syndrome but i guess when ur drawing object heads thats less likely to happen LOL)

also i see you also have joel brain.. I'll admit i haven't watched his windows destruction stuff in like idk. almost a decade now so my memory with that is blurry asf

well when it comes to how my lil universe works.. viruses come in alot of different forms.. diseases, parasites, fungi, stuff like that. the bigger, more sapient ones can be huge problems in highly populated areas (spreading the bad stuff around or just committing crimes lol it all depends on what kind of virus it is). At some point in his life Bonzi ends up becoming somewhat of a virus himself (malware, rather) and starts doing malicious deeds like scamming people, stealing their info, being generally really annoying Etc etc. ya know how it is. He's a very sleazy guy who's not trustworthy at all.

[perilegs]

ok ok as soon as i develop the ability to understand clear instructions i will have nøkk with both autopsy AND top surgery scars in my game and then it's over for me

[muckmagister]

Your imaginary number explanation only works on paper and not in a physical space. That's kind of what pisses me off about math - so much of it just isn't physically real and most of it is just used for tracking wealth/money/other capitalist bullshit. Math should be about efficient ways to count and measure, not arbitrary ways to put people into debt or make rich people seem even richer so they can scam other rich people.

I also think this is why so much of our understanding of physics is flawed - our counting system has less to do with the real world and more to do with social structures, so attempting to apply it to physics doesn't work.

I just. Maybe I'm just out of the loop bc I genuinely cannot process simple math equations but I really feel the reason for that is bc it's not grounded in a sense of reality OR in a mindset I can understand. Idk I'm autisitc and also there's a likely chance I have discalculia or some other learning disability/disorder that impairs math comprehension but seeing talk abt these kinds of math problem really make me think that I'm not the problem here.

enter at your own risk, you've been warned

ok oouuh i- Well. I think you seem to have a pretty cynical outlook on maths. To say that it's all about putting people into debt and letting rich people scam each other is just. That baffles me, to be honest. It's like saying language is all about constructing the most brutal insults possible and telling people to kill themselves. Like yeah a lot of people use language to do just that but that's just one tiny part of it. Maths isn't just about efficient ways to count and measure either, by the way, it's its own language, its own art form, a vast mountainous landscape with peaks we've yet to climb and valleys we've yet to discover. Forgive me for getting poetic but maths just isn't that... small, y'know?

I also disagree that this is why our understanding of physics is flawed. To be clear: It's flawed because we're idiots. We're idiots figuring out how our new toy works by throwing it around and pulling and squishing it randomly, because it didn't come with a manual and we have no idea what we're doing. Also, mathematics isn't our way of understanding physics, it's our way of building models that try and predict what would happen in certain circumstances. That might just sounds like I'm being semantic, but I think it's important to point out that nobody actually, truly, has any idea how physics really works. In fact, no ones ever even seen physics, when we make observations about the physical world, we're just seeing what physics does. So we use maths to make models that predict what we expect to see in our observations, and then we use those models and our observations together to try and infer the nature of reality. But we're all just guessing at that point, really.

So with all that in mind, to say that our understanding of physics would improve if only we had a better suited system of mathematics is. Well, I disagree. I also think that there isn't just some "better" system of mathematics out there waiting for us to discover it. I'm reminded of Gödel's incompleteness theorem. I encourage you to look it up on your own if you want, but basically, in any reasonable mathematical system there will always be true statements that cannot be proved. So there certainly are other systems of maths and we have looked into them. They do have their own upsides and downsides depending on how they work, but to say one system is better than another is, well, if I may use the language analogy again, it's like saying one language is better than another, when really it's just different sets of words and rules for us to say the same sentences.

So when it comes back to our current system of mathematics, it's not better or worse than any other system except for how widespread it is, just like how most of the world uses metric, a standardised system of maths makes it easy for anyone to communicate the same mathematical ideas to one another. But there are other systems of mathematics that become useful tools in more niche areas of maths for people to talk and understand those difficult topics.

With all that being said now too, I don't think our current system of mathematics, or any other system really, inherently has any less to do with the real world than it does with our social structures, or anything else for that matter. In fact, I don't think any system of mathematics inherently has anything to do with anything except itself. People didn't invent maths, we discovered it and then we invented ways of talking about what we learned. But numbers are their own thing. Their own abstract metaphysical objects. And they'd exist whether there was anything alive to know about them or not. Saying that there's a special way to use them to understand physics to me implies that numbers are what physics is, in a way, but like I said we have no idea what physics is. It just so happens that numbers are an incredibly useful way of talking about what physics looks like. But it's also incredibly useful to talk about our social structures. Frankly we're incredibly lucky that we've been able to saddle these concepts from abstract space, that our minds are powerful enough to reach out beyond the real to give us these tools of ideation that we can use for so many things.

You said that maths difficult for you because "it's not grounded in a sense of reality OR in a mindset I can understand" and I think those two things are the same problem in a way. I know I just did some big talk about how maths is really this abstract thing that isn't inherently connected to the real world, but we're all still the idiots I said we were, so a lot of maths does need to get grounded in reality for it to be reasonably comprehensible. And being able to ground a mathematical concept is often about shifting your mindset until you can see it at an angle you understand.

Like, you also said that my explanation only works on paper and not in a physical space, and I actually disagree! But I do think I get where you're coming from. I suspect you're thinking about numbers like physical objects, as in, the number 1 is like having 1 apple. So well of course, negative numbers kinda make sense right? I mean you can't just have less than 1 apple but you can get an apple taken away. But when you introduce i, it's like. What does that even mean? And you'd be right that it really doesn't make sense when you think of numbers as objects like that. But numbers aren't physical objects, we're just taught like that as kids, 1 apple, 2 bananas, 3 oranges, because they want us to build the association between the symbols (1, 2, 3) and the idea of that amount of something, of that value, of 1 being 1 apple or 1 step. But that's it, 1 isn't the apple, or the step, it's the idea of "oneness" or "singleness" and 2 is the idea of "doubleness", 3 is "tripleness" etc. It's difficult to even describe the idea of "singleness" without using physical metaphors, which is why we rarely ever do think about numbers in their purely abstract forms. And it's of course why we teach kids with apples and bananas, and why we go on to teach addition and subtraction by giving them more and taking them away. Even though, likewise, addition and subtraction isn't really about giving and taking. Now, I'm not saying you can't or shouldn't think about numbers as physical objects, or addition and subtraction as giving and taking. I'm just saying those are the initial ways we ground maths in reality in order to teach the concepts in the first place. And for a lot of people, this understanding of numbers is all they need for the rest of their lives. But the truth is there are different ways of understanding numbers and the operations we perform on them, and shifting your mindset on how these things work is an important part of being able to grasp more complex concepts, like imaginary numbers.

Finally, I said my explanation does work in physical space, how is that? Well if your understanding of numbers is that they're like objects, and that addition and subtraction is like giving and taking, then it doesn't work in physical space, no. What you need to do is think about numbers as a distance, and think about addition and subtraction not as giving and taking, but instead about direction. So what that means is that numbers don't tell you how much of thing you have, they tell you how far away from zero you are. Now when people talk about the number 1, what they usually mean is positive 1, like 1 = 0+1. (We just don't always draw the addition symbol out front.) So now if 1 is the distance away from 0, then positive + is the direction you travelled away from zero in. And when you write -1, the negative symbol isn't saying you have an "opposite 1" or that you're "taking 1 away", it's that you're travelling a distance of 1 in the negative direction, which is exactly the opposite of the positive direction. On a number line, this idea is pretty easy to comprehend since you only have two directions you can travel.

However, i is defined as being the square root of -1, which doesn't make much sense if you stick with the traditional understanding of what a square roots is, since it seems impossible to take the square root of a negative number. You can take take the square roots of +1, which are just 1 and -1, since obviously 1*1 and -1*-1 both equal 1. I'd also like to point out that taking the square root of any positive number works like this, you always get two solutions which are both the same distance away from zero in opposite directions.

(Square roots and square numbers are usually taught using, well, squares, introducing exponent notation where, say, 5*5 = 5² = 25, which is explained visually with how a square of side lengths 5 naturally has an area of 25, then that the square root is the opposite of this process and that 5 = √25. As you may expect, there are other ways of defining the notion of a "square" and "square root", and I'm sure that some of those ways can help make the existence of imaginary numbers become much more obvious, it's just, to be completely honest I don't know them.)

Now, if you do try to take the square root of a -1 anyway, and you just don't accept that it looks impossible, you'll have to invent a new number that explicitly has the property of squaring into -1, and since this new number won't be able to fit on the number line what ends up happening is that the number line gets extended into the second dimension, as in, it used to be a number line but now its a number plane. And if this sounds ridiculous let me remind you, this isn't the first time we've invented new numbers and extended the number line, again: negative numbers didn't always exist.

Also, remember how I said +1 and -1 are both square roots of +1? well +1i and -1i (or just +i and -i) are both the square roots of -1, and as you can see, they also sit a distance of 1 away from zero in opposite directions. In fact, √16 = +4 and -4, and in the same way the √(-16) = +4i and -4i. I know this likely won't really be able to help you understand, but hopefully it's nice to see how it is self consistent in a way and that it does kinda help to think about numbers like that.

or anything useful at least- i'm no teacher i just like talking about this stuff:> fhsdkjhs

[darabeatha]

/ So-

WHAT HAPPENED TO HIS CLOTHESSSSSSS

[mimkyyyy]

What 18+ years alone in a bunker does to a man 😔

[altruistic-meme]

Trick or treat! :]

WOO :D

for you my dear, I shall share a picture from my bsd notebook! i chose a page that has more to do with writing than analyzing, so here are some of my thoughts while planning one of my fics :3 ft a genuine look into what all of my fic planning looks like, really, disjointed trains of thought and seemingly random emphasis included

also, in case you were wondering, the fic this is about is "blackhole time fuckery"!

[ its trick or treat month :) ]

[choasuqeen]

sigh ahhh

[imaginealpha]

Tech product guides trying to troubleshoot your issues: lol have you tried turning it off and turning it on again 🧐 I'm not going to read any of the things you said you did, if it doesn't work then get fucked. Go to settings and click this option that you said isn't even there anymore

Reddit: here's some actual helpful suggestions on where to find settings that can fix your problem. We're more reliable than google search. Except for when we just tell you to buy new hardware instead of trying to fix your problem

Some obscure tech blog article from 7 years ago: i *google ad* gotchu *google ad* *google ad* *troubleshooter you never knew existed* *google ad* *solution to your problem*

[mark-erre]

Who in madcom would like radiohead

[misiahasahardname]

WE WATCHED A VIDEO IN CLASSICAL STUDIES AND DRAKE WAS USED AS AN EXAMPLE OF A HERO I CAN'T

[mars-ipan]

i do love my family very dearly but the internalized ableism the men in here struggle with is. so much

[stuck-in-the-ghost-zone]

*clenching my teeth so hard they are cracking* only getting one artfight attack done is not a failure any progress is good progress i am taking baby steps and caring for my mental health by not pushing myself to do multiple attacks a day to make up for lost time i will not feel guilty about this

[jefferythejelly]

things punz left in north carolina: his hairdryer. a whole computer apparently. somehow the hairdryer has been mentioned way more times since the computer since the time he left a year ago