#additive synthesis

[simikae]

after a month and a half of chipping away at these (and complaining about it to everyone i know) i’ve finally FINAAAAALLY finished my silly little refs. everyone say hi to the gang for this upcoming artfight :3c

[neuro-chaos]

NASA ARP

A stochastic experiment with two ARP 2600s.

The ARP synthesiser was invented by  Alan Robert Pearlman,  a NASA engineer, in 1969.

The ARP 2500 was used in the 5 notes sequence of the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, played by Phil Dodds, of ARP.

https://on.soundcloud.com/DyHXt

[soillodge]

[kristo-flowers]

Most of the time i post photo's here, but my main occupation is composing experimental music. Check out my newest album: Compositions with pure tones

A series of very abstract compositions, for which the source material was generated through additive synthesis with pure sine tones. The pitch, envelope and volume of 100 oscillators was controlled via algorithms to create a wide variety of sounds and sonic evolutions. A selection of those sounds was then further processed and combined in several layers in a more intuitive way.

Best listened to on good quality speakers or headphones on moderate volume. Contains a lot very high and low frequencies which will not reproduce correctly on cheap speakers like the ones builtin in laptops or smartphones.

Listen/purchase: Compositions with pure tones by kristof lauwers

[spherey]

other's hyperfixations and special interests are about story-related stuff while on the other hand mine is literally just

CONVERTING AUDIO TO MIDI THROUGH METHODS INVOLVING SHORT TIME FOURIER TRANSFORM AND ADDITIVE SYNTHESIS PITCH CHANGE EVENTS AND VELOCITY EVENTS OR CHUNKING ONLINE SEQUENCER FFT FAST FOURIER TRANSFORM

[ask-but-beware-the-consequences]

Artwork finished for the story Nightmares Run Wild. (Had to draw this to get some tension out of my system)

>>next<< The story of (almost) losing a best friend (but being just as traumatic) was heavily inspired by pausing the movie's end, way too many times. So here's a quick summary under the cut for those who need it:

He was left behind, frozen. It only lasted a few moments in the movie, but they've made so many scenes of Pickles still not moving from Nathan's side after minutes long, maybe an hour too of dragging his body across the snowy terrain.

Pickles lost his instinct to cover his head from a lightning bolt.

Then his eyes, when he finally saw Nathan live.

Someone give this man a break.

[deerest-me]

*puts on beret picks up cigarette holder and starts talking about differences between the TTYD remake soundtrack and the original*

[torgawl]

slightly disappointed - just slightly - that they didn't include fischl in the windblume event because she would fit the legend/fairytale category of the charade so much?!

[bonesy-doodles]

My next art was supposed to be something else, but I made a Ghoul oc instead, whoops!

So here’s Prism! They are a Multighoul of all five elements, and I made them following the opposite idea of Swiss. Swiss was based around the idea of Subtractive color synthesis (mix all colors and you get black), while Prism was made on the idea of Additive color synthesis (layer all colors and you get white).

All of their features are indicative of the different elements, and I’ll go over it all if anyone is curious (PLEASE BE CURIOUS, PLEASE SEND ASKS, I WANNA YAP).

[togglesbloggle]

For the Reverse Unpopular Opinion meme, Lamarckism!

(This is an excellent ask.)

Lamarck got done a bit dirty by the textbooks, as one so often is. He's billed as the guy who articulated an evolutionary theory of inherited characteristics, inevitably set up as an opponent made of straw for Darwin to knock down. The example I recall my own teachers using in grade school was the idea that a giraffe would strain to reach the highest branches of a tree, and as a result, its offspring would be born with slightly longer necks. Ha-ha-ha, isn't-that-silly, isn't natural selection so much more sensible?

But the thing is, this wasn't his idea, not even close. People have been running with ideas like that since antiquity at least. What Lamarck did was to systematize that claim, in the context of a wider and much more interesting theory.

Lamarck was born in to an era where natural philosophy was slowly giving way to Baconian science in the modern sense- that strange, eighteenth century, the one caught in an uneasy tension between Newton the alchemist and Darwin the naturalist. This is the century of Ben Franklin and his key and his kite, and the awed discovery that this "electricity" business was somehow involved in living organisms- the discovery that paved the way for Shelley's Frankenstein. This was the era when alchemy was fighting its last desperate battles with chemistry, when the division between 'organic' and 'inorganic' chemistry was fundamental- the first synthesis of organic molecules in the laboratory wouldn't occur until 1828, the year before Lamarck's death. We do not have atoms, not yet. Mendel and genetics are still more than a century away; we won't even have cells for another half-century or more.

Lamarck stepped in to that strange moment. I don't think he was a bold revolutionary, really, or had much interest in being one. He was profoundly interested in the structure and relationships between species, and when we're not using him as a punching bag in grade schools, some people manage to remember that he was a banging good taxonomist, and made real progress in the classification of invertebrates. He started life believing in the total immutability of species, but later was convinced that evolution really was occurring- not because somebody taught him in the classroom, or because it was the accepted wisdom of the time, but through deep, continued exposure to nature itself. He was convinced by the evidence of his senses.

(Mostly snails.)

His problem was complexity. When he'd been working as a botanist, he had this neat little idea to order organisms by complexity, starting with the grubbiest, saddest little seaweed or fern, up through lovely flowering plants. This was not an evolutionary theory, just an organizing structure; essentially, just a sort of museum display. But when he was asked to do the same thing with invertebrates, he realized rather quickly that this task had problems. A linear sorting from simple to complex seemed embarrassingly artificial, because it elided too many different kinds of complexity, and ignored obvious similarities and shared characteristics.

When he went back to the drawing board, he found better organizing schema; you'd recognize them today. There were hierarchies, nested identities. Simple forms with only basic, shared anatomical patterns, each functioning as a sort of superset implying more complex groups within it, defined additively by the addition of new organs or structures in the body. He'd made a taxonomic tree.

Even more shockingly, he realized something deep and true in what he was looking at: this wasn't just an abstract mapping of invertebrates to a conceptual diagram of their structures. This was a map in time. Complexities in invertebrates- in all organisms!- must have been accumulating in simpler forms, such that the most complicated organisms were also the youngest.

This is the essential revolution of Lamarckian evolution, not the inherited characteristics thing. His theory, in its full accounting, is actually quite elaborate. Summarized slightly less badly than it is in your grade school classroom (though still pretty badly, I'm by no means an expert on this stuff), it looks something like this:

As we all know, animals and plants are sometimes generated ex nihilo in different places, like maggots spontaneously appearing in middens. However, the spontaneous generation of life is much weaker than we have supposed; it can only result in the most basic, simple organisms (e.g. polyps). All the dizzying complexity we see in the world around us must have happened iteratively, in a sequence over time that operated on inheritance between one organism and its descendants.

As we all know, living things are dynamic in relation to inorganic matter, and this vital power includes an occasional tendency to gain in complexity. However, this tendency is not a spiritual or supernatural effect; it's a function of natural, material processes working over time. Probably this has something to do with fluids such as 'heat' and 'electricity' which are known to concentrate in living tissues. When features appear spontaneously in an organism, that should be understood as an intrinsic propensity of the organism itself, rather than being caused by the environment or by a divine entity. There is a specific, definite, and historically contingent pattern in which new features can appear in existing organisms.

As we all know, using different tissue groups more causes them to be expressed more in your descendants, and disuse weakens them in the same way. However, this is not a major feature in the development of new organic complexity, since it could only move 'laterally' on the complexity ladder and will never create new organs or tissue groups. At most, you might see lineages move from ape-like to human-like or vice versa, or between different types of birds or something; it's an adaptive tendency that helps organisms thrive in different environments. In species will less sophisticated neural systems, this will be even less flexible, because they can't supplement it with willpower the way that complex vertebrates can.

Lamarck isn't messing around here; this is a real, genuinely interesting model of the world. And what I think I'm prepared to argue here is that Lamarck's biggest errors aren't his. He has his own blind spots and mistakes, certainly. The focus on complexity is... fraught, at a minimum. But again and again, what really bites him in the ass is just his failure to break with his inherited assumptions enough. The parts of this that are actually Lamarckian, that is, are the ideas of Lamarck, are very clearly groping towards a recognizable kind of proto-evolutionary theory in a way that we recognize.

What makes Lamarck a punching bag in grade-school classes today is the same thing that made it interesting; it's that it was the best and most scientific explanation of biological complexity available at the time. It was the theory to beat, the one that had edged out all the other competitors and emerged as the most useful framework of the era. And precisely none of that complexity makes it in to our textbooks; they use "Lamarckianism" to refer to arguments made by freaking Aristotle, and which Lamarck himself accepted but de-emphasized as subordinate processes. What's even worse, Darwin didn't reject this mechanism either. Darwin was totally on board with the idea as a possible adaptive tendency; he just didn't particularly need it for his theory.

Lamarck had nothing. Not genetics, not chromosomes, not cells, not atomic theory. Geology was a hot new thing! Heat was a liquid! What Lamarck had was snails. And on the basis of snails, Lamarck deduced a profound theory of complexity emerging over time, of the biosphere as a(n al)chemical process rather than a divine pageant, of gradual adaptation punctuated by rapid innovation. That's incredible.

There's a lot of falsehood in the Lamarckian theory of evolution, and it never managed to entirely throw off the sloppy magical thinking of what came before. But his achievement was to approach biology and taxonomy with a profound scientific curiosity, and to improve and clarify our thinking about those subjects so dramatically that a theory of biology could finally, triumphantly, be proven wrong. Lamarck is falsifiable. That is a victory of the highest order.

[simikae]

🌽 and 🍉! for the OC ask meme, about whoever you want 👍

HI TY FOR THE ASK!! these are good i shall answer with my buddy boy adomas in mind

🌽 - How good are they at hiding and finding their way?

his lankiness and high dex dictates that he’s pretty good at hiding and fitting into spaces but he is ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY HORRIBLE AT FINDING HIS WAY‼️BRO IS STUCK IN BAROVIA AS WE SPEAK ‼️

🍉 - What will your OC take to the grave?

as a 19 year old he’s most occupied with making sure that everyone forgets what he was like during middle school. on a more serious note i think he’s gonna sidestep how much the barovia and count strahd in question scared the shit out of him when the party escapes fr. like haha all in the past now gang B) i was not worried (he was literally freaking out 80% of the time

ask meme can be found here!

[neuro-chaos]

Fantasie, Fuge und Toccata in Japanischen Modi

An experiment, with transposing thirteen of Johann Sebastian Bach's Fantasias, Toccatas And Fugues, to the major and minor pentatonic modes of Japanese classical music.

Performed on the Oberheim OB-EZ 8 Voice synthesiser, a gift from GForce Software.

Please enjoy 1 hour and 47 minutes of Baroque Japanese tranquillity.

[fibula-rasa]

Study of Light / Étude de la lumière (1923)  

[letterboxd | imdb | HENRI]

Director: Maurice Audibert

Study of Light is a short showcase for Maurice Audibert’s method of natural color photography—a process of tri-color additive synthesis—which he developed and refined with Rodolphe Berton starting around 1909. The process involved using multiple lenses and prisms to capture three photograms per frame of film, arranged in a triangle printed within each frame on 65mm film. [see what that looks like at Timeline of Historical Film Colors] Then, using color filters during projection, the three photograms would be synthesized into a single color image. 

This, of course, required specialized projection equipment, which Audibert would address in further refinements in his technique. (If you’ve ever looked into the development of color and sound film technologies before they became habitually adopted, you know that extra work/expense for exhibitors was a typical hurdle for inventors.) Audibert himself recognised some of the issues with his process, including colors shifting due to imperfect superimposition and a stereoscopic look to the projected images due to variation in the depths of field for the superimposed images. As a 2020s viewer, I find the dreamy, gossamery look visually interesting, though I recognise that that wasn’t what Audibert was aiming for!

All that said, Audibert transitioned to experimenting with a subtractive rather than an additive process in the year following the production of this film.

[kairologia]

How to read a natal chart in 13 steps.

This is simplified guide geared towards beginners and people who want to transition to a more traditional approach when assessing a chart. There is no standard method of reading charts, this is simply the method I follow & find most comfortable. It’s a practical, methodical synthesis and just the right amount of intuitive.

Before I begin, I must mention that while assessing planetary conditions I personally verify the following factors — in this order: the sign, house, angularity, direction, whether a planet is direct or retrograde, sect (day vs night), hemisphere (1-6 vs 7-12), phase (morning vs evening, especially notable for venus & mercury), domicile lord (draw a disposition tree if needed), exaltation lord, triplicity lords, bound lord, decan lord, dodecatemoria, aspects to domicile lord if any, aspect to the ascendant if any, apsects to other planets, bonification conditions (i.e aspecting benefics, so supported by aspect), maltreatment conditions (aspected by malefics). This is important to remember because the term “conditions” will come up a lot.

Now onto the actual guide :

1. For starters, you should (assuming you don’t already) learn how to read a whole sign house circle chart. Table charts are nice as a gateway drug, but if you're somewhat serious about learning astrology this is an important transition to make. Once you do, put the chart you’re aiming to assess in front of you, then proceed further.

2. Determine the sect of the chart. This becomes an automatism once you’re used to looking at charts, but if you're not there yet — draw a line on the chart (or visualize said line) going from the degree of the ascendant to the degree of the descendant. If the sun is ABOVE that line — it’s a day chart, so of the day sect. If it’s BELOW that line — it’s a night chart, of the night sect.

3. Take a look at the ascendant. Take note of the rising sign, its modality, & its ruling planet. Does this chart have any 1st house planets? Also, remember to do a quick overview to pinpoint which planets are angular (as in, located in the 1/4/7/10th houses)

4. Track down the ascendant ruler. Check its house placement, condition (see above), and aspects (applying vs separating).

5. Track down the Sect Light. If it’s a day chart, the sect light is the Sun. If it’s a night chart, that would be the Moon. Assess the sect light’s condition (see above), aspects.

6. Check which houses are ruled by the Luminaries (Sun/Moon). The interpretation of the luminaries is intrinsic to the areas of life (Houses) they rule, in addition to their independent significations.

7. Check out the phase of moon at birth. The lunation phase is extremely important as it defines the dynamic between this individual’s luminaries.

8. Take a look at how Mercury is doing in said chart. Condition (see above)? Aspects? Morning or Evening star?

9. Take a look at the Benefic Of Sect & Malefic Out Of Sect (day: Jupiter/Mars, night: Venus/Saturn). Assess their condition (see above), aspects they make, etc. Regarding Venus: verify if she’s Morning or Evening star (if Venus is on the right of the Sun - Morning star, if it's on its left - Evening star). For the Malefic OOC, check if it is bonified by enclosure (i.e : Saturn or Mars are touched by a benefic (Venus/Jupiter) on each sides) — it’s a huge alleviating factor.

10. Then, assess the Benefic Out Of Sect & Malefic Of Sect (day: Venus/Saturn, night: Jupiter/Mars).

11. Then, take a global look seeking anything that may be of note. Stelliums, several retrograde planets, a Cazimi, Out Of Bounds planets, a void moon, etc.

12. Lastly, I go through each house individually. This is where the chart synthesis proper begins. In practice, I like to tell a story beginning from the 1st house & culminating in the 12th, while highlighting the thematics of each house as I go.

13. This is optional, but I like to take a look at annual and monthly profections to see which themes are presently highlighted/emphasized for the individual whose chart I’m looking at.

And we’re done.

Check pinned if you want to book with me!

[mantisgodsart]

@bug-oc... round ONE! Finally! Still counting this as "round one" of transmutations because of the blog round numbers despite the fact that we've already done a round of like two bugs! We... didn't realize how many of these characters were yellow until it was actually time to draw them. It's like we went in with a theme, and then stuck to it. Except for with Holly, who presumably lost the dress code along with their head. Please vote for our cool dune cricket in the handful of hours before this round ends, and thank you!

Individual characters and transmutation notes below cut.

[...though I briefly considered another form, limiting surface area relative to the size of the entity is crucial for stability in ectoplasmic entities, and I don't currently intend to attempt to form a "swarm", as similar entities often form in the wild - a more simple, and thus more stable, form is better. The energy pack in the subject's possession upon intake appears to be either nearly or fully impossible to reclaim, unfortunately - ghosts can be hard to separate from things with sentimental value, so it's likely a lost cause. I'll continue obsevation...]

Beera by @longeth-dayv. An actual design, this time, rather than our fucking-around-with-maybes! This one, we think, does a lot more for the actual character, though from our understanding of Luigi's Mansion the species choice might be slightly more "generic". We particularly enjoyed tinkering with the wire of the power pack - ghosts and transparent things are VERY fun to draw, and we liked working out where that wire would go in the areas normally hidden by the body. Long, winding lines are very fun to draw sometimes. Hopefully this one works better for you, too!

[...successful partial isolation of the fungal element proves both that it can be isolated and that transmutation of cordyceps symbiotes may be less of a barrier than previously thought. Results appear similar to "Moka" back in the first year of experiments, where the cordyceps remains untransmuted within the new body - is this a quirk unique to vertebrate physiology? The failed transmutation with Fulminis pulled from a largely bug pool, whilst both successful cordyceps transmutations have been with beasts.]

[The avian physiology doesn't seem to have produced much difference from reptilian, minus some differences in visible fungal growth, but the subjects started with varying quantities of visible fungal growth to begin with, and the magic present in both of the previous round's subjects presents an additional variable... at the very least, I know that the fungus on its own is either resistant or immune to conventional transmutation, considering Mop, though I still need to work out how the host-symbiote synthesis alters things...]

[I'll have to do further testing- I dearly wish that these subjects were easier to get my hands on, but I don't know where I would be able to source them in my own universe, much less if they even exist there, since I'm no longer certain if the time portal event through which I met Holly Holiyxeiul was from the past of my universe, the past of another universe, or the present of somewhere else. Omelette's successful transmutation proves that I can manufacture them, but I won't be certain as to the limits of this until I can collect samples...]

Butterscotch from @w-krajobrazie-zapomnienia. The wings on this took... FOREVER. Deciding to make Butterscotch a bird with individual "charring" on the feathers was an act of monumental hubris, and EASILY the most labor-intensive part of this page. Doing this in watercolor would have been easier, probably. Alas, if we want to be capable of using a marker, we must put effort into marker drawing. At the very least, we think the effect came out fairly well! We like the sort of "scorched" effect that Butterscotch's base design has, and though difficult to recreate in marker form, we think we pulled it off! Hope this works decently well for you.

[...expanding lizard experiments from the ones found in the former grounds of Five Pebbles to their closest resemblances in the fleshbeasts of our world, I found quite a few points of similarity. Though for obvious reasons, I haven't had the opportunity to observe any specimens of the original species, given that most vertebrate beasts have been extinct since before I was hatched, the underlying biology is similar enough that I could carry through a significant amount of understanding forward.]

[Though majority of traits seem typical for what I can observe from preserved specimens, I am noting some minor divergences - typical for the lizards of RW9089-1, but not, as far as I know, typical for the reptiles that once roamed the wastes. The subject has developed sensory whiskers, narrower than those observed on Black Lizards but seeming to serve a similar function of detecting scent and motion in the air.]

[Additionally, the subject has developed a short coat of setae across the back, with a similar texture to the subject's former ruff - some surface-level similarities have been found to the hair on the pelts of Northern Moths, particularly those found in areas where significant quantities of water make leviathans a dietary staple. Though fur "coats" can be found in RW-9089-1 specimens such as Strawberry Lizards, this trait is, as far as I can tell, unique to this specimen.]

[When following up, I'll want to examine the dorsal frills to be certain that former shape's traits are not overwriting the end shape's traits to too significant of a degree - this is not an unknown trait in salamanders, but I'll need to be certain the structure isn't too similar to insect wing structure, as this many traits carrying over may indicate mid-point speciesation, which will mean any parts harvested will have wholly different traits from the originally sourced...]

Lote from @fallenvoidhere! We went through a handful of design iterations on this, mostly trying to home in on making it clear that it's the character - we sort of underestimated how much blue we'd need to add, but when you're turning into a lizard several times your normal size, it's probably understandable to lose a lot of your accessories…? Since the black on the design, respectively, is mostly accessories, most of these markings are improvised - we based our placement at least partially off of an orca whale, after going through a lot of markings from IRL salamanders. Originally, we planned to make the wing further in to the body a bit more transparent, but… well, as it turns out, we're probably a bit too used to watercolors for our own good, and working with markers is a bit of a different beast. We still think it came out pretty decent!

[...previously noted properties of fireflies appear to ease the rougher edges of this, though it will still need some refining before it's ready to go to market. A working prototype is better than I've gotten with previous generations of this recipe. I'll have to spend some time going over the readings to work out how to route things on anything that isn't a firefly.]

[With the way that most of these particular transmutations have gone, forming a "chamber" for the light before the light-producing compound itself is produced appears to be key for the survivablity of the subject. I suspect that there's a reason that the gas compound found in the component-introduction artefact hasn't been found in natural beings; despite the multitude of uses it has in charmcraft, mercury tends to be quite toxic with continual exposure, and mercury vapor in particular can be deadly. Another reason to stick to proper PPE..]

Nox from @erijuice! This one's quite a dramatic modification to the body plan. We may have gotten a bit carried away with things here, but... okay listen we will be fully honest with you this is just an elaborate plan on "glow wyrm". We based this one heavily off of tatzulwurms and similar creatures, and from there mostly just went into "having fun with it". The wings might grow in more later, or they might not - this was one of our personal favorite designs to draw, and though we sort of wish we tinkered with the pose a bit more, it's a bit hard to do here without running into issues with... space. Such is the consequence of making a big page o' transmuted bugs.

[...more experimental brews have their pros and cons, and with this one, it's a bit hard to define which is more present. On the plus side, the resulting form seems stable; lack of mandibles aside, it's standing and walking, and seems in fine health from the readings that I can see. Subject is alert and appears to have either full or very close to full former cognitive capacity, as shown by the multiple attempts at escape via manipulating the lock. It's just that I don't have the slightest clue what it is, or how its biology... works.]

[I intend to collect samples once the transmutation settles enough for properties to solidify. From initial testing, I think that its digestive system may rely partially on the fur-like... appendages, on its ventral side, but it's presently somewhat unclear. Upon coming into contact with some spare biological waste (see: Vessel project, Voidless transmutation attempts), the material appeared to "tangle" in the ventral fur, and was gradually dissolved over the course of about eighteen hours. From what I can gather of the data, this appears to have given off similar readings to a more conventional being having eaten a large meal? Will test with other forms of biological material once I can gather enough material to recreate the end organism if existing subject is lost.]

Yasmine from @darth-moth - and this is one that was very fun to do! The lines in this were very, VERY fun to work with, and we had quite a lot of fun just banging this out! - the design here is, probably fairly obviously, based heavily on Rain World's Rain Deer, as well as the multitude of "creepy deer" type stories that are practically everywhere on the internet. We were tinkering, if vaguely, with the concept of something like a terrestrial filter feeder, or similar - did you know that some whales have begun hunting behavior of pretending to be shelter so that fish will hide in their mouths and, thus, be eaten?

We'd picture that this, whatever it is, wanders places and passively snags prey with the dangling "fur", avoiding any sort of need for energy-intensive chases while keeping itself fed on whatever it walks over. A passive scavenger, probably with not a lot in terms of personal self defense. The vents on the sides, though they might be slightly unclear as is, are just about the only active method of offense - releasing toxic gas or something similar in an attempt to choke out predators. Our greatest desire in life is to design enemies for a soulslike poison swamp and we think that Yasmine is an excellent poison swamp candidate. We hope that this is a normal and usual motivation and ambition to have, we had a lot of fun with it.

[...uncontrolled crystal growth took over before the transmutation had completed, at roughly 4 days, 8 hours after the initial administration of the formula. I was lucky to be awake at the time - the remote monitor that I imbedded appears to have been consumed by the same phenomenon shortly before my arrival. I can only assume that this is due to pre-existing contamination - if not accounted for, Crystals can react very unpredictably to transmutations, and I didn't account for contamination of this assumed level.]

[Though I've observed this sort of effect before, it's been years since I've experienced a bloom of nearly this extent. What really surprises me is that the subject appears to still be moving, despite the extensive damage to... everything. The head appeared to have been fully destroyed at the time of arrival, and the crystals sprouting from the back have to have gone right through the ganglia - the weave of the transmutation has been fully destroyed, so it can't be sustaining itself on the former body's imprint, so I can only assume that the crystals captured some of the host body's mind during the overgrowth event and are attempting to continue to run the same old patterns of behavior.]

[I am currently unclear on how much of the former bug remains. What scans that I've taken suggest that the new crystals may have linked up with their companion Warden, though to what degree is still unclear. If I want to properly analyze this, I'll need to take it back to the lab. From there... diagnosis work, and maybe trying to work out how poor Snakemouth Den's lab security is, really.]

Holly from @thetroupemaster! Our first transmutation failure of the tournament! Holly, unfortunately, fell victim to poor lab safety - a more open-ended formula intended to gather a form from environmental factors, combined with some unfortunate lab contamination. This actually links in to a few personal headcanons on how Crystals work, though we don't think we've posted them before.

A crystal is a colonial organism, much like coral, storing both data and magical energy. Generally gathering energy from the sun to power itself, it grows so slowly as to be unnoticeable to the bug eye, but it does grow, and when exposed to, say, a charm engineered to allow for rapid change of a physical form, it has the potential to rapidly grow and consume that energy, stopping its growth either when it grows out of magical energy or when the handful of elements present in the original weave to let it change and grow are consumed.

Some people in external kingdoms do this to avoid having to constantly ship in Crystals from Bugaria, but it's not particularly common, as this method of growing Crystals tends to consume things like your other projects, or the lab shielding you probably want to keep intact, or yourself if you have the poor foresight to not properly protect yourself against contamination. Under control conditions, the chances of this happening are nearly zero! Under these conditions... well.

Crystals are very, very good at preserving memories. The rest of Holly's body, on the other hand, might be a bit of a lost cause at this point. You can work in a lab without seeing things, right...?

...yeah, we aren't counting on it, either.

Bonus: for those who scrolled down this far, a quick compilation of labels. As well as, of course, a teaser for what's yet to come.

[...the most complimentary thing that I can say about Mal, I think, is that Hobbes would get along well with xir. Terrible lab safety protocols. AWFUL cross-contamination protocols. Just looking at this bug's methodology is giving me hives. Venus give me strength. I suspect that any brew that I attempt to use will suffer from enough unknown, uncontrollable outside variables that none of the data I get will be even remotely applicable to any other situation. "Edge case" is generous - I struggle to call this sort of tampering anything less than an utter abomination of science.]

[I will be using one of the more heavily conceptual brews for this. The REMW-19 formula is reasonably stable enough that the weave shouldn't just collapse in on itself, but it has been remarkably poor at producing organisms capable of surviving on their own once the transformation has set enough that they don't have enough former anatomy to "fall back" on - I suspect, currently, that the survival of targets afflicted with the effect I am attempting to recreate relies the support on some sort of internal magic system, and if so, the sheer amount of lingering cross-contamination likely seeped into every ounce of aer chitin might actually boost survivability. I have no positive expectations for this, however.]

In spending ingredients on this, I hope to assemble an encyclopedic list of all of the ways that a charm's effects can go stupidly, horribly wrong. Venus willing, it will not double as a list of ways that my lab can be destroyed, or a list of ways that tampering with Charmcraft can go wrong. I have had enough recent trouble with repairing the lab's seals after the Vessel experiments - I have no particular desire to replace anything else now.]

[pixelfireplace]

Apple IIgs - 1986

The most powerful of the Apple II series with the look and feel of the Macintosh. Notable for its backwards compatibility with the large Apple II software library thanks to the Mega II chip, in addition to its own 16-bit capabilities and library. The "GS" stood for Graphics and Sound referring to the enhanced multimedia hardware including the first ever wavetable synthesis chip to be used in a personal computer.

source: archive.org