#Straight Line System

[everytimewetouch-dot-mp3]

christ more dragon god sy yapping:

all those b-points he got from finishing that first quest? gone. my mans got like 100 every time he blessed a new generation of peak lords, plus the 500 he got from finishing that first main quest {From the Ground Up}, plus whatever he got from fighting off all those beasties who tried to kill his little cultivators way back when.

but when he unlocks his human form, he does not unlock clothes, and he has to buy them from the system store! truly unfair! he looks pretty similar to how he looked in his first life, just a little less sickly. he also has to buy a sword from the system, which is frankly bullshit. but lanrui is a lovely sword—an almost pearlescent sheen to the blade, with peach blossoms inlaid in the hilt and a dragon scale sheath that…it’s almost certainly made from his scales, actually. weird. after buying everything he needs from the bullshit system’s scam shop, he’s left with about 150 B-points.

after his magical girl transformation from gigantic dragon god to gangly human wrapped in way too many layers of sumptuous green and blue silks, shen yuan is sent off the mountain on a couple of missions from the system. pop into the demon realm to slay this evil, fend off these fierce corpses attacking this little town—tutorial shit. it’s weird having such a small body again after six (or seven hundred???? he’s not thinking about the enormity of time right now) years as a gigantic dragon. his steps feel a thousand times lighter, and the first time he tries to pick a fruit from a tree, he kind of explodes it with spiritual energy. the tutorial is, unfortunately, necessary.

the system is almost helpful when it shares his stats and all his cool dragon skills. his official name here is lord canglong, but honestly it would be so hard to explore this world if people were falling all over themselves when they heard his names. did dragon gods get personal names before courtesy too? fighting with the system gets him a corny, half-assed compromise.

he still gets to be shen yuan, but while his first life’s yuan was 垣 yuán (wall), in his second life it’s 愿 yuàn (desire, hope), and the shen he has is… very transparently 神, shén (god, deity). he’s got stupid amounts of spiritual energy, he doesn’t need to eat or drink, and sometimes plants bloom around him since he’s the also kind of the god of springtime?

right when he gets excited thinking about how he’s a god!! (the dragon god in PIDW!! that bastardization of qinglong that airplane wrote who never did shit to defend the realms until his mountain was being destroyed by binghe merging them!!) the system butts in to remind him that there are limitations. he can’t kill humans except in certain circumstances or else he’ll be punished, which—fine, he didn’t plan to go around murdering people anyway? his dragon form will be locked whenever he’s not on canglong peak (bullshit!! what kind of half assed nerfing—) and there’s a permanent penalty on his account, [Dragon Ex Machina], that threatens to penalize him if he uses his dragon god powers to bully the plot into going his way.

so what’s the point of being a dragon god, then!?!??!?!

he spends days bickering debating with the system while he learns to use his sword and qi without exploding whatever he touches, but the system refuses to budge. if he tries to bully the plot too much, he’ll be punished. it’s bullshit, but so is this whole novel he’s found himself in, so…

shen yuan is ready to spend a few more days acclimating before he gets a game plan together but that flies out the window when something starts burning at the back of his mind, screaming that something’s wrong, something is in danger, part of his territory is threatened. he hasn’t felt that since the last demon invasion, and before he can stop himself, he’s mounted lanrui and darted off toward that feeling that something is wrong, wrong, wrong.

he ends up having blown in a wall of qing jing’s discipline hall, the tail of shen qingqiu’s whip caught in his fist (and fuck, that hurt to catch!!! his hand is definitely bleeding) as he stares down the man who was really just about to start whipping a child. a couple of disciples have gone white; a couple others have fallen over. the only ones in the room unaffected are shen yuan, luo binghe whose eyes are wide as he gazes up at him, and fucking scum villain extraordinaire, shen qingqiu. and the scum villain’s first words to him, lord canglong, dragon god of qing jing peak???

“move, or i’ll beat you too.”

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

putting my prediction on record now that the coming decade is going to see the rise of viral-marketed fancy at-home water filtration systems, driving and driven by a drastic reduction in the quality of U.S. tap water (given that we are in a 'replacement era' where our current infrastructure is reaching the end of its lifespan--but isn't being replaced). also guessing that by the 2030s access to drinkable tap water will be a mainstream class issue, with low-income & unstably housed people increasingly forced to rely on expensive bottled water when they can't afford the up-front cost of at-home filtration--and with this being portrayed in media as a "moral failing" and short-sighted "choice," rather than a basic failure of our political & economic systems. really hope i'm just being alarmist, but plenty of this already happens in other countries, and the U.S. is in a state of decline, so. here's praying this post ages into irrelevance. timestamped April 2023

[hiyogdh]

some svsss oc scribbles to start a new sketchbook

[interstate35south]

i love when people draw all the mxtx protagonists together but i’ll be real the generic anime boy face curse is alive and well

more often than not the art itself is fantastic it just takes me like a solid minute to figure out who’s who. bonus points if lbh is robbed of his wavy hair and the only way i can tell him apart from wwx is his forehead

[ace-and-ranty]

Reading A City in Mars, and this is the most Murderbot-ass paragraph ever:

"One analysis of every single reported in-flight health issue in all shuttle flights from April 1981 to January 1998 found a total of thirty- four events of “behavioral signs and symptoms,” giving an incidence of about one for every three person-years of spaceflight. That’s amazingly low when you consider that the thirty-four events include things like “anxiety” and “annoyance.” We had thirty-four anxiety and annoyance events just editing this chapter."

[thepastisalreadywritten]

A Spectacular, Rare Alignment of 6 Planets Is About to Happen in The Sky

An illustration of the June 3 planetary alignment. (Star Walk)

By Michelle Starr

24 May 2024

Six of the planets of the Solar System are about to line up for a rare sight in Earth's sky.

In the wee small hours of 3 and 4 June 2024, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus will appear in a straight line in an alignment known as a planet parade.

Only Venus will be absent – even Earth's waning crescent moon is going to put in an appearance.

It's not uncommon for several planets to be in the sky at once, but it's less common for more planets to align.

Any number of planets from three to eight constitutes an alignment. Five or six planets assembling is known as a large alignment, but five-planet alignments are significantly more frequent than six.

These alignments do not represent the planets lining up in space like you see in diagrams and illustrations of the Solar System. That's not a thing that actually happens in the real Universe, sadly.

A planetary alignment occurs because the planets of the Solar System all orbit the Sun more or less on a flat plane called the ecliptic.

Some are a little above or below this plane, but it's roughly the same.

This is because of the way stars form, including the Sun.

A baby star in a cloud of material starts spinning; the cloud around them swirls into a disk that feeds into the baby star.

A planet forms from what remains of the disk and, if left to its own devices, will stay in that level position.

This means that, occasionally, the planets will be on the same side of the Sun as they move along their orbits, so we get to see them in the sky at the same time.

They appear to be in a straight line because they're all on the ecliptic.

This is what will be happening in early June, around an hour before sunrise. You might need some visual aids.

While Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn will be bright enough to see with the naked eye, Uranus and Neptune are too far and faint.

If you want to catch a glimpse, you'll need binoculars or a telescope.

[aphel1on]

really all i should need to do to get professionally dx'd with autism is show them my warrior cats conlang from senior year of high school

[greenconverses]

there’s just something about this bit that encapsulates everything’s that wrong with the way riordan writes now but i can’t quite put my finger on what it is

[scribblingface]

I went into bg3 fully ready to have a good time and have done so despite many ways in which the game is not good and have not worried too much over various dramas about patch changes but my chill streak has finally ended and I am wailing gnashing my teeth etc. about patch 7 (the supposedly final one with story/content changes) not adding companion reactivity for any of the durge content in act 2

[fluoricacid]

Some dapper and pomme! They have some cute things with them, they're just chillin. (cuties <3)

I'll miss them a lot, even if I did not watch them on stream often. (i hope their admins will stick around the community for a while still)

[vainlungs]

Precisely because homophobia often operates through the attribution of a damaged, failed, or otherwise abject gender to homosexuals, that is, calling gay men "feminine" or calling lesbians "masculine," and because the homophobic terror over performing homosexual acts, where it exists, is often also a terror over losing proper gender ("no longer being a real or proper man" or "no longer being a real and proper woman"), it seems crucial to retain a theoretical apparatus that will account for how sexuality is regulated through the policing and the shaming of gender.

— Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter

[age-of-moonknight]

House of M: Avengers (Vol. 1/2007), #2.

Writer: Christos N. Gage; Penciler: Mike Perkins; Inkers: Drew Hennessey and Mike Perkins; Colorist: Raul Trevino; Letterer: Rus Wooton

[godsfavoritescientist]

So there's this webserial called 'worm' about a world where superpowers started suddenly showing up in the 70's, and I'm trying so hard to think of a way to merge it with the stans-and-fidds 70s-and-80s plot events. The thing is, powers are caused by going through a traumatic event, and the powers are tied to both that event and to the person's various issues in ways that sometimes seems cruelly ironic. So you see my dilemma here, with there being so many options for events that could've given these guys powers

[bitmeddler]

My high-res re-creation of the logo from Hermann’s SPACE CHAMPION helmet during his drift sequence with Newt.

[worstloki]

cannot believe i didn't get a 'thorki is illegal' anon. feeling so left out. clearly i have not posted enough thorki lately and need to rectify that. (im sure that's what anon wanted right? more thorki? ) xD

I feel like saying that it’s illegal is prompting discussion on the legality of it all. For instance, would Asgard have definitive laws against incest? How does the realm define incest at all. Are there exceptions to this rule, have there been a historical cases that prompted such a legal binding to be specified? Are members of the royal house exempt from any laws? Are there historical cases where this happened? Why? Does any exemption include laws on this topic, even if the intention was to prevent coercion or encourage regulation to political marriages? What cultural views surrounding these laws are there and how many minor revisions to documents would it take in theory before it is now legally sound. If it was ever illegal at all.

[thecoolertails]

was looking for something unrelated to this but i thought this was so funny because they don't even try making a case for rigby like fine whatever he's gay who gives a shit