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punkpandapatrixk · 2 days ago

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Full Cold Moon in Gemini ♦︎ Moon Magick Pick A Card

Hello cute people~☃️ Happy holidays!~🎄✨🕊 Have you felt freer lately? We had a Full Cold Moon in Gemini on 15 December. Ruled by Mercury, Gemini's whole consciousness revolves around Intellect; and for some reason, I’ve always felt that the Gemini aenergy is also pure sunshine like it’s literally so bright and cheerful🍳 Perhaps it exudes from a passion for learning? Being the ‘toddler’ of the zodiac, Gemini is naturally carefree and curious about Life. Gemini wants to know all the trivial details of the world~📑

Although it's cold now, on some parts of the world, this Gemini FM aenergy is motivating us to get curious, get studying, get absolutely learning, about every little thing that piques our interest. Since you’re a spiritual one, I’m sure you sometimes get intuitive nudges for certain topics of study that you can easily google or youtube in this digital era. Ain’t that welcome?📚 This Full Cold Moon in Gemini, basically you're invited to just take it easy~♪

Relaaax, the real New Year is still ways ahead anyway😉

Study whatever you like when you want to, work as much or as little as it is sensible to you, and just… Know that you are safe now. This season, this coming year, it would be very sensible to get to know more about nutrition and the human body if you care enough. You can also discover real history and so much more. Basically, it’s time to celebrate Life itself, you celebrity!~★

To fall in love with Life all over again—because it’s good to be alive, to be breathing. For as long as your heart’s still beating, there’s still so much to be hopeful for~♡ Here's to a wonderful 2025~♦︎

ethics: Episode 3: L'Oreal Group on TRT World

documentary: How L’Oreal Poisoned the World on Jake Tran

deck-bottom: XIII The Death Rx, Gold Geographer (John Dee), Priestess of Inspiration

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☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

Pile 1 – Sweet Love, Fresh Air, New Land

subliminal: A clear mind makes for a happy soul by lanaes

dream – 2 of Cups Rx

When was the last time you felt safe in a connection? Hmm maybe never? Maybe all of the connections you’d ever made in the past disappointed you in the end? Spiritual narcissists might say it was ‘all on you’ LOL They’d say, you didn’t have a good relationship with yourself, so you naturally manifested disappointing connections with others. It’s very callous to put it that way, right? It’s not like YOU wanted things to go that way!

Who in their right mind would want to sabotage themselves when it comes to having fulfilling romance and friendships? The truth of the matter is, you took on the collective karma of many who didn’t know how to love themselves, because they were born by parents who didn’t know how to love them. You needed to live amongst the ‘peasants’, assume the role of a ‘peasant’, so you know what’s stopping the ‘peasants’ from manifesting wealth for themselves.

In this case, we’re talking a wealth, an abundance of true, soulful Love in our connections with other Humans. The truth of your being, actually, is that the whole time, you’re a ‘spiritual royalty’ who’s already got a mega wealth of Love you can always generate within yourself. Your task in this world is to help ‘teach’ others how they can do the same for themselves~♥︎

detail – Page of Wands Rx

This section is supposed to cover some beneficial habits and routines that can amplify your wellbeing this FM season, but it looks to me like this Pile, if anything, has done a shit ton of spiritual rehabilitation! XD If anything, you’ve done so much self-healing and self-soothing; you’ve done so much inner work on yourself, for yourself; you’ve isolated yourself from the world outside to keep you safe, to keep your aenergy pure. What else can I add to this? Hahah

So, what the Page of Wands in reverse is saying, is basically a validation for you to still take your time. Some of you tuning into this may just feel like nothing’s been changing at all in your physical Reality—you may feel like maybe your train or aeroplane is never gonna come to pick you up. Not the case at all. The train ain’t even late. The train is just still being built!! LMAO

Once it arrives though, the way it carries you towards your Destiny, you’re gonna be SHOOK to see how fast, how exciting, how luxury everything is! Think of your train or aeroplane as a luxury Patek Philippe watch—it can take years, even decades, for some pieces to finish being made!! Maybe now’s still just time for you to refine and develop your senses, so that when all of that luxury and spotlight become yours, you wouldn’t be cringe LMAOMFG

You know, new-money kinda cringe? You ain’t supposed to be like that XDD

digital – 8 of Cups

Finally! This has been a long time coming, but you’re totally moving away, inching ever closer to your Highest Destiny in the coming year. I’ve a feeling, especially if this is your main Pile, that you’ve heard this numerous times through other readings for yeaarrsss… And the change, the move, the luxury never quite was there? Or even when some changes were felt, they were so small and insignificant you found it hard to even appreciate them?

I know. The spirit of delay, right? I feel that you were only still battling the last remnants of the karmic bullshit you had taken on. But 2025 is different for so many Lightworkers and Starseeds, or anybody who’s been hard at work on their spiritual transmutation~♥︎

Between 2025 and 2026 (exactly within this time frame!) the change of scenery, the move, the travel that you’ve been known is meant for your Highest Intended Good will be manifest. There’s nothing else I need to say. Enjoy, my dear~ You’ve sacrificed, and survived, a lot for this~\`★_★`/

full moon self-care🔻🌒🌓🌔🌕🌖🌗��

Green Geographer (Gerardus Mercator) & Priestess of Luxury

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☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

Pile 2 – Total Reclamation of What Made You Divine~

subliminal: mathematical pursuits by lanaes

dream – 10 of Pentacles Rx

Oh my gosh, look at you! You’ve been dealing with a horrendous level of stress that’s caused you extreme exhaustion and prolonged fatigue. It seems either you’ve been sick throughout the holiday season or you’ve simply not been able to be as productive as you’d planned. It’s all for your good, honey. The truth of the matter is, your Higher Self and team of Spirit Guides made you sick or something like it, so you’d pause for a moment.

Because you’d been surviving, and hustling for survival, you’d forgotten what it felt like to just…live. If you look around, you’re already on safe waters. But your subconscious mind that got used to surviving hasn’t caught on XD In order to make you really see how safe it is now, you had to be sick. And voila, even when you thought you hadn’t been as productive, your basic needs are still met, right? :D There you go. It’s all taken care of now.

This season, all throughout spring, too, is all about you reclaiming every bit and piece of what made you Divine~ The bits and pieces that flew off when you went into survival mode. It’s like… …

detail – XII The Hanged Man Rx

When Sylvester Stallone was fighting tooth and nail for the script for Rocky, he got convicted out of his apartment and eventually felt forced to sell his puppy for $50 (when he had offered $100) to survive on the streets… He sobbed so hard on the way home. But as Destiny would have it, once Rocky became a box office hit, he was able to buy his little pup back for… $15,000!! He even had to fight for it! Whew, it was worth it, he said😊

In order to survive, you had to let go of some ‘aspects of your livelihood’ that were precious and fundamental to your sense of identity. You may resonate with having lost a huge chunk of your youth or life in general. It felt almost like, against your own freewill, you were led to dramatic events that got you feeling like you weren’t even allowed to live…like a normal person! Well, that’s the thing, you Prototype!

You know that you’re a Prototype, right? One of many of us tapping into this Pile right now😉 I saw a meme on Pinterest that perfectly encompasses this idea: ‘When the whole world is collectively going through their Dark Nights of the Soul but YOU have survived a few of your own~’ Exactly.

digital – Knight of Wands Rx

You, are now collecting and reclaiming your little Butkus (Stallone’s pup). All of the things that were important to your sense of identity or wellbeing. They’re all returning to you, bit by bit, maybe. But you’re gaining momentum for a full-life again—but better. You’re not returning to how things used to be! You’re reclaiming all of the small and big things that made you Divine~ TOTAL RECLAMATION OF YOUR DIVINITY.

I’ve a feeling you may resonate with those readings that say: ‘You’re going to be the first millionaire/billionaire in your bloodline!’ If you look at your birth chart, you may get some confirmation on how you’re literally destined for so much prosperity~♥︎

Well, tap into that pool of consciousness! If you’re already rich, do you think you’d be stressed out by survival? Of course not. You are already prosperous as of right now ^o^v It is safe to focus on just one thing at a time. Your time is unlimited! It is safe to work or do anything at a pace that’s sensible to you.

full moon self-care🔻🌒🌓🌔🌕🌖🌗🌘

Red Astronomer (Johannes Kepler) & Priestess of Energy

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☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

Pile 3 – Your Sandcastle Turning into Ice Castle

subliminal: revenge of the gifted by lanaes

dream – 3 of Cups

For a while now, you’ve been building a castle on sand. It wasn’t that you were stupid to do so, it was that you didn’t have any other material but sand. You were dealt bad cards in Life and still you did the best you could with what you knew, because you just had to. Because it’s in the nature of you to be building a castle of wonders. Because you made a promise before you were born here. And you were born with so many talents and such intelligence…

Of course you would be disappointed in the peasant Reality you were part of. You couldn’t understand why most people had such low expectations of themselves. If anything, you couldn’t understand why most people viewed themselves so lowly either. You had a regal essence in you since you were a child, and so many people’s ceilings were literally your FLOOR! Your barest minimum is literally the ceiling many people struggle to reach.

So you had to sketch a new Reality from scratch. And you did all of that almost all by yourself. Possibly guided by the inspiration of only your Cosmic Ancestors~♥︎

detail – 4 of Swords Rx

If this is your main pile, it seems you’ve been in some cocoon of isolation, which could’ve caused you a high degree of boredom. Feels like you’ve forever been in a healing/rehab phase but where’s the action? Sometimes you could almost taste the salt of the sea from another dimension! Your time is coming, babe~ All in Divine Timing, or should we say, Divine Alignment.

With this card in reverse, your rest period is literally almost up. Almost, but the world is still shifting frequencies until the world itself matches the Divinity you have to offer it. You’re a special op of a Soul. Everything was strategized and calculated in minute detail for you to serve your Higher Purpose. So, in essence, surprise, surprise, you’re not behind at all~☆

There is a kind of revenge you’re gonna pour unto the world. Like gasoline on the pavement. And when it finally burns… ooohhh…

digital – 6 of Wands Rx

Divine Punishment. A word I’m hearing the loudest. You’re going to swiftly carry some kind of a Divine Punishment for the evils of this world and subsequently liberate those who are innocent. If this has been your main pile, I trust that you know yourself that you’re meant to serve an audience. It’s great that we have the Internet today, right? In this era of Pluto in Aquarius, too.

The Internet is the new playground for enlightenment. Millennials and Gen Zs will resonate with this the loudest, even though plenty of Boomers are obviously also on it. If you jump into some kind of content creation—or whatever else you feel called to—which involves the usage of the Internet, you’re highly protected by the Higher Realms that want to see this world become liberated from the clutches of evil, both organic and digital.

I’m sure Pile 3 is serving a very specific type of Souls who are attracted to this aenergy. Beyond just the notion of an Ascended Master or Lightworker or Starseed… I feel like you belong to a special collective of highly-specialised ops whose name/terminology I’ve not tapped into LMAO

full moon self-care🔻🌒🌓🌔🌕🌖🌗🌘

Gold Physician (Hippocrates) & Priestess of Luck

Access full reading + cards on Patreon🌸

☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

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cpericardium · 2 days ago

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This is the story of the time I interviewed at Ubisoft.

When I was a teenager, I became obsessed with the Bioshock series and got it into my head that I wanted to do game design for a living. I'd never seriously attempted it nor did I know exactly what it entailed, but how hard could it be? I gamed!! I had ideas!! I said this to my teacher during a what do you want to be when you grow up talk, and she said, "Oh! My sister works at Ubisoft Singapore. I'll get you an interview."

Emails were exchanged, and someone at the company arranged a "quick chat" with me a couple of weeks later. It was for a QA tester intern position, which I reasoned was sort of like game design. After all, in the Sims 3 it's one rung on the ladder to becoming a game developer. Also I didn't want to anger my teacher. She was quite volatile.

Round 1:

I'd never done a job interview before. I put on a nice blouse and pencil skirt and heels, nervously applied and reapplied makeup which I normally did not wear, and showed up at the office building an hour early. Then as I went up the elevator I realised they never said what room it was. I couldn't very well email to ask now. I'd look like an idiot!! Fuck!! So for an hour, I just skulked around outside various glass doors peering into offices hoping there would be some receptionist around to ask, but there was practically no one there. The email only said "let's have a quick chat at 2pm on x date".

I was about to slink home with my tail between my legs when the interviewer called at the scheduled time. It was a phone interview!!!!! He didn't say that!!!!! I found a dingy secluded stairwell. As if to taunt me, one of the first questions he asked was "have you ever been to the building?"

Me, through gritted teeth: yeah! actually I'm here right now, haha... to scope it out, you know... get a lay of the land..... it's really big... Lots of glass walls...

Him: oh that's nice.

I don't remember most of the questions, but I do know he asked me what my favourite games were. I said Undertale and Life is Strange (they had come out that year), but he'd never heard of them. Maybe I should've said Far Cry or something but what if he quizzed me on it?

Round 2:

I should not have made it to this round. I was coasting entirely on the goodwill of my teacher's sister, who was high up the chain. She interviewed me next. I think her only question was whether I would be okay working long gruelling hours with little support and no overtime.

Me, blissfully unaware of crunch culture being a massive human rights issue in the industry: bring it on!!

Her: what? 🤨

Then she ushered me into a room to take a pencil and paper test. While waiting earlier, I'd frantically googled and memorised a bunch of Ubisoft games, so I could answer the one asking me to list eight of them. I figured I could have gotten away with saying Assassin's Creed and adding a random number to the back though.

The biggest problem was on the other side of the paper: a diagram of a gaming controller asking me to label the buttons. Here's the thing. I'm a PC gamer. Always have been. At the time, my only experience with console gaming was playing Little Big Planet with my best friend when I was twelve, at her house. And I wasn't very good at it! I think I fundamentally lack the hand-eye coordination for console gaming, but that's just a guess because I can count on one hand the number of times I've ever used a controller. And I can count on one hand the number of controllers I have in that hand! It's zero! I knew the wiggly antennae were for movement and the buttons on the sides did esoteric things that people will yell at you to press during crucial moments, but that was it. I ended up labelling the buttons the shapes they were (circle button, triangle button, square button etc).

The interviewer came back into the room after about 15 minutes and said I now had an hour to play an unfinished level of Assassin's Creed, identify as many bugs as possible, and record them on a spreadsheet. And even though she set me up at a computer monitor, I still had to use a controller. Are you kidding me! This was the Victorian era Assassin's Creed. I had never played any AC games before, so I didn't know what were bugs and what were features. Was "can't jump" a bug? Was "invisible wall surrounding staircases"? What was the format and lingo you were supposed to use when recording bugs? I made no progress towards the quest at all (I did not understand it or who my character was), just wandered around and wrote down things I noticed and didn't like until time was up.

Anyway, that's the tale of how I didn't get a job I was woefully unprepared and underqualified for and in retrospect didn't want all that much. Maybe what I really wanted was to be... was Ayn Rand.

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yellowocaballero · 1 day ago

Note

a while back you mentioned having written ~40k of a steven moon knight fic as well as some of a frenchie fic? i was just wondering if those would ever be posted/shared or if they will stay in google docs superhell forever (also love your work!! your star wars swap au i particularly enjoyed as well as the tma evilcon + associated fics) best of days to you !!

Look at this evilcon fan over here. Deep fucking cut.

Ah, yes I have. The 40k fic was written for Marvel Trumps Hate, and I didn't post it due to some vaguely complicated but not altogether important reasons. The Frenchie fic was the unfortunate victim towards me very abruptly falling out of MK, lmfao. I think all of my fandoms have The One Abandoned Fic that I was working on when I just Got Over the fandom (Human Relations sequel, so cruelly abandoned....).

Kind of a shame, since the Frenchie fic was not bad and just got kinda roadblocked at the end. I've tossed around maybe finishing it when MKS2 comes out and I inevitably get sucked back in. I don't want to post the MTH fic on AO3 right now (maybe in the future when MKS2 comes out and I get sucked back in etc) but there's honestly no reason not to show you...I think...looking back over this, I think I may have decided that the fic's sense of humor was just too insane. It's very.......uh.....

Uh, ok, just between you and me and other people reading this then. It's a fic about a normal guy who thinks that schizophrenia makes you immortal and autism gives you superpowers.

I'll put it in a follow-up post. In the meantime here's the first few scenes from the Frenchie fic. I really do wanna finish this one day....

“A phone call?”

The jackal barked in elderly confusion.

Steven leaned back in his chair, scratching his stubble. Jake was insisting that they experiment with facial hair and it was best to let him have these little victories. “Well, under the human American law each citizen is entitled to a phone call if they get arrested. That’s probably what he means.” The jackal barked dismissively. “Have you tried telling him that?” The jackal barked again, aggravated. “I see. Quite a pickle. Well, I don’t see any harm in giving him the call. We’d have to warn him that this is a faux legal system and that he’s not entitled to any lawyers, but perhaps he could tell his wife he won’t be home for dinner? That would be nice.”

The jackal growled.

“We could be nice,” Steven said reproachfully.

The jackal barked again.

“If you really think about it, nothing’s stopping us. Masters of our own fates and whatnot, right? Well - yes, yes, I know the gods are the masters of our fates, that’s not quite - look, sir, there’s no point in worrying a man’s wife unnecessarily, is there? How would your wife feel if you disappeared off the mortal plane?” The jackal hung its head, and Steven sighed as he stood up. “I’ll lend him my mobile.” The courthouse only had landlines, and even then that was iffy. Magical ancient Egyptian constructs still struggled with 4G. “But if he messes about with my Twitter then we’re adding another thousand years onto his sentence.”

Situations like this were why Steven still showed up to work. This zoo often struggled at little things like this without him. The place had gone to the jackals while he was gone - literally, they had taken over many administrative positions - and it would take months just to clean up the wreckage. Steven didn’t mind - nothing made him happier than a good little routine. Ten to two, that was his preference. Downright inhumane to make a man work any longer than four hours a day. He had even scheduled a deli or restaurant to visit for lunch each day of the week. And Marc and Jake were not allowed. Steven only zone. A man’s office was his castle. Besides - if they knew what he got up to all day they might complain about it.

The two were deeply asleep - Jake because he found Steven’s entire life dull as dirt and Marc because all of the mandated socialization they were doing lately really took it out of him. Steven found it delightful. Jake’s friends were really nice once you got to know them, and you could reliably get a pained expression out of any of them once you told them so. Marc found their whole thing exhausting and if Jake wasn’t entertained he wanted to die, so around noon the two slept like Alexander the Great’s mummy. Might as well build them little tombs. That was cute. Steven knew exactly what his own tomb would look like. He was practically a pharaoh and everything - maybe Khonshu would make sure he got one? No, Khonshu didn’t care about them nearly that much. Boy, but wouldn’t that be nice.

He gave the Bast statue guarding the elevator its usual nose pat, he smiled and waved at the lumbering shabtis, and he stopped and said his usual ‘hello how are you how’s Nephthys Osiris talking to you again yet’ to the Set statue as the jackal gave him the stink eye for holding them up. Kindness was key, Mr. Jackal. Steven believed in positive Steven-god relations. He lived in hope that the other gods would model good behavior for Khonshu and eventually sway him into becoming less of a dick.

The ibis perched adorably in a little booth checked his identity as it picked up a little visitor’s badge with his beak and dropped it into Steven’s outstretched hand. It pecked at the computer keyboard a few times, accomplishing nothing other than mangling the G and H keys, and a series of papers ground out of the ancient fax machine. Steven cautiously reached over and fetched the papers, scanning them. They were details of the prisoner’s case, which made Steven feel a bit like one of the Forbidden Lawyers. The jackal led him down the winding paths of the jail as Steven fumbled in his pocket for his glasses, squinting down at the pages.

“Well, this doesn’t seem too nasty,” Steven announced. “I’m sure we can get this sorted out. Certainly not a problem for our Jake, eh?” He looked at the jackal out of the corner of his eye. “Eh?” The jackal did not respond. “Right?”

Steven made the executive decision that this was a bureaucratic issue and therefore not a Marc or Jake issue. They’d just over-involve themselves and pretend they knew anything about the fake legal system. Marc and Jake were like baby brothers playing video games with you on an unplugged controller. They needed to feel like they were doing something or they’d throw a hissy fit.

The jackal didn’t have to stop and point out the prisoner. Steven could hear him from all the way down the hall: empathetic, pointed, and incessant French patter. The man sounded like he was arguing against a parking ticket, which displayed a disappointing lack of cognizance as to the severity of his situation and the high likelihood that he was about to experience extrajudicial horrors beyond his imagining.

Poor guy. Imagine being from France.

For the first time in Steven’s life his shaky French that he could not actually remember learning but that Marc and Jake did not know actually came in handy. As he got closer he could more or less puzzle out what the fast talking man was saying to the two unamused and unswayed jackals. Could the jackals speak French? It had to be some magic thing. The only animals around here who could actually talk to the humans and explain to them what was happening were the baboons, and they were never polite about it.

“ - one little call! That is it! I will never darken your doorstep again, I swear it. One phone call - and, maybe, letting me go! We can talk about it, let’s talk about it! You and I, we are reasonable men - jackal, I am a reasonable man and you are a reasonable jackal - unless you are a woman? Are you a woman? You are still a jackal at any rate. You are a very reasonable gendered jackal, and I am innocent of all crimes - and even if you are a nongendered jackal, I do not judge, I have friends of all kinds - if you give me one phone call I may call one of my friends and he can help, I am certain he is friends with very many of you people -”

The man cut off the second Steven walked into view of his cell. The cells were very basic, with only a cot and a toilet and one wall of metal bars. He was standing up against the bars, fighting with the two unamused jackals standing against the cement wall in the hallway. The man’s head jolted away from the jackals and fixed on Steven, forgetting his captive audience entirely. His slicked back hair was frayed and mussed, gelled strands sticking up every which way, and his blonde mustache twitching in surprise as his eyes widened.

Steven was sympathetic. Human prisoners were always shocked to find a real bloke around the place.

He waved a bit awkwardly, his reading glasses flopping in the air. In shaky and awkward French, he said, “Bonjour! My name is Steven Grant. And you are…” He shoved his glasses on, squinting down at the intake form. “Jean-Paul Duchamp?” He pronounced it ‘Jean Paul Dew-Champ’, and judging from the man’s twitch he had mangled it. Oh well. “Right. Do not worry, everything will be fine. You wanted a phone call? I have a phone for you.”

The man stared at him. Steven silently suffered this. He knew he was attractive.

Finally, the man said in accented but thankfully perfect English, “I have changed my mind. May I speak with you in private, Monsieur Grant?”

The three jackals barked simultaneously. Steven rolled his eyes. Honestly! He knew he was the Avatar of Khonshu now, they didn’t need to be like that! “I don’t think that’s allowed. For security reasons and all. Not that there’s anything you could possibly do to me.” A grizzled jackal with one eye barked. “Emotional - hey! I would have you know that my Myers Briggs said I was the resilient type!” Steven considered the matter for a second. “Oh, but I did have a bad horoscope today. Maybe you’re onto something. Do we have any augurers on staff?”

“Excuse me,” Jean-Paul butted in, increasingly wild eyed, “Do you care to explain what is going on, Monsieur Grant? Because the only explanation I’ve received so far was from paperwork on papyrus and a rude baboon.”

Why was he saying his name like that? The French were so weird. Steven leaned down slightly to whisper in the nearest jackal’s ear. “And he must have been really bad if a French guy is calling him rude.” The jackals cackled. Jean-Paul’s eye twitched. “Never fear, Mr. Duchamp. I’m sure we can get this whole thing sorted out before supper. Let’s review the details of your case, shall we?”

“What case?”

“Oh, you’re in an ancient Egyptian courthouse for ancient Egyptian crimes,” Steven said vaguely, sliding on his reading glasses and flipping through the pages again. “Yes, the Egyptian gods are real, no they are not aliens, you better believe in ghost stories Ms. Swan you’re in one, etcetera. Alright, alright…I see…ah! There we are! Charged as accessory to one count of tomb raiding…oh, just a little asterisk here, let’s see what that’s all about…you stole from a children’s hospital!?”

“I did not know that is what we were doing!” Jean-Paul cried. “Someone tells me to fly a medical helicopter, I do not ask questions! If I made a habit of interrogating every one of my clients I would not have a great deal of clients, monsieur!”

“Organs from a -”

“It is called professionalism!”

“It’s called evil!” Steven said, appalled. The jackals barked in agreement. “I have to say, Mr. Duchamp -”

“It’s doo-shamp. And John-Paul. Mon frere.”

Oh wow, oh no, sorry for the French microaggression. Honestly. “If it wasn’t for the fact that you betrayed your clients the second you discovered what they were stealing and refused to pilot them away you would be facing the same punishment they are. It’s quite karmic. Do you know what Egyptian canopic jars are used for?” Jean-Paul looked a little queasy. “Exactly. Do you still want that phone call, Mr. Duchamp? You’ll receive your sentence from Thoth with or without it.”

“Then why give it to me?” Jean-Paul asked waspishly.

Steven shrugged. “I wouldn’t want your husband to worry.”

“Rest assured, I am quite single.” Jean-Paul stuck his hand out through the bars. “Give it here.”

Steven pulled up the phone function on his mobile and passed it to Jean-Paul, ignoring his thoughtful expression. He tried to convey ‘mess with my phone and I’ll mess with you’ through rigorous eyebrow tilting, but he knew he was very bad at it.

Jean-Paul stepped back, swiping on the mobile. It did not look like he was punching in a number. Steven abruptly became anxious that he was snooping on Steven’s mobile. He had remembered to delete his text history with Layla, right? Right?!

He typed something on it before looking up, holding it up oddly to show Steven the screen before passing it back to him. “I changed my mind. No need for a call. Thank you for lending me your phone, monsieur, but it was unnecessary.”

The screen was open to the notes app. Steven abruptly felt like they were passing notes in class. Except not quite, because Steven was the Avatar of an Egyptian god and the other party was in jail for magic crimes. The note read -

marc what is the plan

Oh. Oh!

Steven looked up, and now he could clearly read the man’s irritated ‘why are you looking surprised, this is a matter of utmost secrecy’ eyebrow twitch. “Goodness, I’m so sorry. The egg is really on my face here, I’m so embarrassed.” He looked down at the jackal next to him, who twitched its ears attentively. “I think there’s been a misunderstanding. It seems -”

Steven stopped short.

This man knew Marc. He now knew Steven. Marc really, really, really hated it when this happened.

Marc had spent the vast majority of his life masking. His family had been big believers in the ‘never talk about it and pretend it doesn’t exist’ school of mental illness, which had resulted in a great deal of very terrible problems. Marc did not learn from any of these problems and continued to hide the DID from everybody he had ever met up to and including his own wife for a depressing yet impressive length of time. Steven hadn’t really agreed with the wife decision, because it was a slightly huge aspect of their lives that was very much Layla’s business, but Marc believed in privacy. Steven couldn’t fault him for that.

It wasn’t anybody’s business if Marc didn’t want it to be their business and they were not Marc’s actual wife. Jake spouted off about shame and internalized ableism, which was undoubtedly true, but nobody was really entitled to his health information. He had the right to self-disclose when he wanted and to who he wanted. Steven only wished that this reasonable desire did not lead to sitcom-esque hijinks as they all switched mustaches and pretended to be each other. Sometimes literally. Jake had his whims.

Marc wouldn’t want this random pilot knowing personal stuff about him. He was probably just some colleague he had worked with one time and never saw again. And Steven was very dedicated to helping Marc and making his life easier, just like Marc was dedicated to helping Steven and making his life harder. Jake was dedicated to being a bully.

Being involuntarily outed was traumatic for Marc. The last time it happened he fell asleep for four weeks and plunged Steven into a Jake induced nightmare. What if he went back to sleep? What if he never woke up this time? What if he left Steven alone with Jake forever? He couldn’t take that chance.

Marc didn’t have to find out about any of this. No point in stressing him out over nothing.

In a stunning show of cunning, cleverness, and subtlety, Steven looked down at the jackal next to him. “Actually, can I talk with Mr. Duchamp in private? There’s some things we need to discuss.” The jackal asked what. “Human things.” The jackal asked why it had to be private. “They’re private human things.” Steven paused a beat. “Like periods. We’re going to talk about our periods.”

The jackals knew enough about humans to know that periods were private human things and not enough to know that cisgender men did not get periods. They gave him dubious looks anyway, but when Steven mimed yanking a crescent knife from his chest they obligingly filed out. The grizzled one-eyed jackal turned around and gave John-Paul a gimlet ‘I’m watching you’ eye, but John-Paul just sniffed and looked above it all. French people sure were good at looking snooty.

The second the jackals turned the corner and disappeared from sight Steven took a deep breath and changed.

He straightened, folding his expression into a deep scowl. He tilted his head forward in Marc’s faux intimidating fashion and affected Marc’s terrible Chicago accent - which was just as fake as Steven’s very real to him British accent, thank you very much! Jean-Paul straightened too, eyes widening again.

“What the hell?” Steven demanded. Ugh. It was hell on the throat to talk like this. “How did you even get yourself into this mess?”

“Me? I am the one in the mess?” Jean-Paul stabbed a finger at Steven, who scowled deeper. “What was that? What is this? Why are you working for an ancient Egyptian courthouse under a false identity?”

“It’s a long story,” Steven snapped. It was really easy to avoid questions as Marc. You just had to be mean. “And it’s none of your business.”

“At this point I think it is very much my business! Jesus, Marc!” Jean-Paul exhaled deeply, rubbing his forehead in a forcible attempt at zen. “What is this, some sort of op? Are you undercover?”

“I said it was none of your business!”

“This is why you don’t run the ops,” Jean-Paul said. Steven was offended on Marc’s behalf. “I am impressed at your acting skills but not at your subtlety.”

“The usual, then,” Steven said wryly. “I’m impressed with your talent at getting arrested.”

“I get it, I get it. Marc Spector twenty, Jean-Paul fifteen. I swear, Marc, only you would get yourself in these predicaments.”

“You’re the one in the predicament. I’m doing fine.”

“My predicament is your predicament.” Why would that be true? He said it so casually, as if it was a given fact. Quite presumptuous of him, in Steven’s opinion. “At least now I don’t have to waste a hope and a prayer that you would pick up your phone this time. How are you going to get me out of this one? They have a giant baboon! Have you seen the baboon!”

“The baboon’s very understanding about my medical needs, so watch it.” Wait - had he wanted to spend his one phone call on Marc? Why? They were talented, cool, and altruistic, but… “Look, I’ll do what I can. But the gods aren’t exactly easy to argue with. I’ve tried to get them to overturn a sentence before and it failed miserably.”

“That’s the first time I’ve heard my friend try to do things the legal way.” Jean-Paul folded his arms. “Just bust me out. Isn’t that more your style?”

What a suck-up. Marc didn’t have friends. Steven smiled anyway, brittle and thin. “Don’t worry, Jean-Paul. I’ll do everything I can to help you. Just please try and understand the position I’m in.”

Jean-Paul stared at him. Steven forced himself to look the other man in the eyes even though it made him uncomfortable. Marc always stared down people he didn’t trust.

“So, uh,” Steven said, “I better call the jackals back -”

“Please admit you do not know who I am.”

Steven froze. He opened his mouth, then closed it.

Jean-Paul sighed. He kneaded his forehead again, shoulders slumped, but something about the gesture had changed. My predicament is your predicament - what did that mean? “Why didn’t you say - non, non, you would have no reason. Marc, please listen to me.” He looked solidly at Steven, and Steven found himself looking away. “It’s Frenchie. I’m your friend. We met in Afghanistan and we’ve worked together ever since. You’re having another amnesiac episode. This happens to you sometimes and it is nothing to worry about. Do you believe me about this?”

Steven opened his mouth. He closed it.

He couldn’t help it - he hunched his shoulders, clutching at his sleeve and drawing away. “I don’t have friends. You’re lying.”

“Call up Layla and ask,” Jean-Paul said. His voice was even and steady, and it struck Steven oddly. The man was literally in a jail cell about to be Egyptian tortured and he was comforting Steven? Looking out for him in a mental health episode? Did the world contain two Lukes? “Do you know Layla? Your wife? Now there’s a thief for you. I am but a humble pilot in comparison.”

That cinched it. Marc would never tell anybody he didn’t trust about Layla. Much less about what Layla really did for a living.

But Marc didn’t trust anybody. Marc wasn’t supposed to trust anybody. That was Marc’s whole thing. He only trusted Steven and Layla. He only trusted Steven and Layla and - Frenchie? What kind of nickname was that? That was so stupid.

Marc was really bad at naming things. Movie poster, pilfered ID. Frenchie. Jeez.

Steven put it down. He let his shoulders hunch back into their natural slouch, bent his voice back towards its natural tilt, and dropped the mean expression. Despite himself, he groaned.

“Marc’s going to kill me!” Steven wailed. “He’s going to go to sleep again and leave me with Jake!”

Jean-Paul recoiled, surprise turning into shock. Wow, wow, big surprise. Marc or Jake’s friends freaking out over Steven. Stop the presses.

“He’s gonna blame me for this, you know,” Steven cried. Not whined. Nope. “This is why he doesn’t trust me with anything. As if it’s my fault that his friends keep getting arrested? Maybe I should get a little more recognition for being the only one without delinquent friends. Honestly, I don’t know why we can’t keep better company sometimes. A book club? A Dungeons and Dragons group? Anybody who doesn’t punch people for a living? Is that too much to ask?”

“Hm,” Jean-Paul said. “Your dissociative episodes have grown stranger.”

“What were they like in the military?” Steven asked, morbidly curious. “Marc didn’t even mention amnesia episodes. He can be right frustrating, you know.”

Slowly and carefully, Jean-Paul said, “Do you remember the manic episodes?”

“We’re bipolar?” Steven asked blankly.

“That is what I thought. I do not think I was correct.”

Wait. “Did you think Jake was a manic episode?”

“Jake?”

“The other one,” Steven said helpfully.

“Ah. Yes, I think so.” Jean-Paul paused - not as if he was uncertain, but as if he wasn’t sure how the words would be received. “I understand DID is a very difficult disorder.”

Something tugged at the back of Steven’s mind, then yanked. Steven felt himself fall backwards, and something else surged in him -

Frenchie stood in front of Marc, right in every way, wrong only in the eyes - only in the way he was looking at Marc -

Cautiously, he said, “Steven? You look dazed.”

Dazed. That was what he’d always call it. Whenever Marc zoned out and left his body, whenever Frenchie caught him wandering listlessly around camp with no memory of having even left bed - you look dazed, Marc -

“Do you ever get tired of your front row seat?” Marc asked hoarsely.

But Frenchie just smiled - a little cockily, a little kindly. “The view is quite good.”

Marc couldn’t do this. He never could, he could never do anything - but he couldn’t do this. Humiliation crushed him, Frenchie’s affection and acceptance its strange shadow. The shadow was worse than the weight. It was the shadow he couldn’t handle. He couldn’t handle this.

He turned on his heel and left, leaving Frenchie alone in the cell with no promise of rescue and no aid given, and he found himself walking faster until he turned the corner. The jackals were still huddled like a football team growling thoughtfully at each other, and they perked up when they recognized Marc. He ignored them, walking through the crowd until they leapt away.

Marc’s walk turned into a run. A drum beat rocked his head, pushing hard at his heart. The beat threw him forward, turning his run into a sprint down the winding cement halls. His desperation reached out and thought of a word, and once he thought it he just couldn’t stop.

Jake. Jake. Jake! Jake, I can’t do it again - Jake - !

Marc woke up face first in Jessica Jones’ hair clutching a bottle of Jack.

He yelped, jerking away automatically and falling off the couch with a heavy jolt. The bottle jumped out of its hands, landing on the stained wood coffee table with a heavy thump and rolling against a bulwark of beer bottles.

Marc bolted upright, ignoring his pounding head to take inventory of his surroundings. He relaxed the second he registered where he was. Heroes For Hire apartment. Morning. Luke Cage was passed out in an armchair, sawing wood. Colleen’s bra was draped across the back of a couch. Did these people do anything other than party?

Jessica flopped over, squinting blearily at him in the morning light. Cars honked outside and traffic blared, the sound cutting harshly into his throbbing head. Jessica waved a hand limply at him. She mumbled something that Marc could somehow translate into ‘what’s your problem?’.

Nothing. No problem. Not right now, not here. Marc climbed back onto the couch, pushing Jessica aside to reclaim his spot. Amazingly, they were barely even cuddling - their couch was one of those IKEA types that you could just keep adding onto, it was fucking ginormous. He left the bottle of Jack on the table, whiskey slowly sloshing in the glass. Jessica went back to sleep immediately, her warm breaths pressed against his back.

The sunlight faded into night, then nothing.

“ - and that’s why I wouldn’t fuck Mr. Fantastic unless Sue Storm was watching.”

Marc bolted upright.

“I left Frenchie in prison!” Marc cried.

“Man, what kind of weird dreams are you having?” Danny asked. Marc could hear his voice from behind the couch, accompanied by the rattle of silverware and the hefty scent of bacon. “I can interpret it for you if you want. The prison’s probably a metaphor for -”

“Your psyche,” Colleen intoned.

“That’s a bit on the nose, don’t you think?” Luke said.

Marc rolled off the couch again, slouching his way to the breakfast table and collapsing in his chair. Somebody put a bowl of cereal in front of him and began shoving it in his mouth. Everybody went back to ignoring him and resumed their conversation about the most fuckable superheroes.

“Monica Rambeau at the top,” Misty said, for what sounded like the five hundredth time. “Very top. Except my girlfriend.”

“I’m the last heir of a samurai clan, not a superhero.”

“Very top. Monica Rambeau.”

“Do you think the Avengers have these conversations about us?” Danny asked Luke. “Like, they have to, right? I don’t think they’re above it.”

“They have mimosa brunches. Man, you know they do. I don’t want to know what the hell they say about me.”

“One time Hawkeye flirted with me and I snapped his bow over my knee,” Jessica reported. “It’s about controlling the narrative, Luke.” Marc’s hand reached out and swiped bacon off her plate, cramming it into his mouth. “Watch it, asshole!”

“Morning, sleeping beauty,” Luke told him, half-amused. “Who do we got today?” Marc glared at him balefully, but he held up the ASL finger sign ‘M’ anyway. “Good to see you, Marc. You’re the early bird, huh?”

“Jake was complaining about you yesterday,” Jessica told him gleefully, as if she was snitching on her classmate to the teacher for saying the b word. “He told us all about your intimacy issues. Is it true that you yearn for acceptance, yet are terrified of receiving it?”

“And why,” Marc gritted out between clenched teeth, holding his spoon at a vicious angle, “is Jake always telling you my goddamn business?”

“He likes to vent.”

“Then tell him to shut up next time.”

Misty scraped up eggs with her knife primly. “Five times a day seven days a week. Never listens.”

“Five people live in this apartment, there is no such thing as your own business,” Colleen said, dead-eyed. “I haven’t had privacy in a year.”

“It’s not that different from the monastery,” Danny said philosophically. “Smaller, though.”

“Drunker?” Misty asked.

“Not really.”

“Damn. Guess you had to do something without television.”

Marc’s grip on his spoon tightened so hard that his bones creaked. “Then you can just go tell Jake -”

Tell me yourself.

“Shut up, Jake! You can all tell Jake that next time he decides to overshare -” Hissy fit ten minutes after waking up, new record. “I wouldn’t throw a hissy fit if you stopped doing shit just to piss me off!” You are an egomaniac. “That is so rich.”

“Still weird,” Misty decreed.

“Yeah, still weird,” Colleen said.

Luke cut into his hash brown. “I’m just glad that they’re all talking again.”

“Totally glad that Jake’s back to his healthy, regular state of talking to himself,” Colleen said. “Maybe soon he’ll become normal and only serial kill on weekends.”

“I know none of you care about my personal drama,” Jake said flatly, “but would a little respect be so outta line for youse?” Jessica mumbled something around her egg. “Don’t talk with your mouth full, woman, have some self-respect.”

“Steven and I were talking about going to the zoo and looking at the sloths,” Danny said brightly. “Do you still want to do that? I want to see them so bad. All we have back home are sloth bears but I don’t think they’re the same animal.”

“Sloth bears?” Misty asked.

“They mostly eat termites and ants, really,” Steven told her, “not nearly as scary as you’re imagining. Quite adorable. But nothing really beats sloths on the cuteness factor.”

“Steven! Good to catch you. When do you want to go to the zoo?”

“Oh, boy, maybe Sunday? Do we have anything on Sunday?”

I was going to get drunk.

Same.

“Looks like Sunday’s free!” Steven paused a beat, a smile fixed on his face. “You know, fellas, I can’t help but feel as if we’ve forgotten something.”

We forget stuff incessantly, Marc said, tired. Frenchie was always dragging me out of bars I didn’t remember walking inside.

There’s an alternate explanation for that one.

See, that’s what I thought, but Frenchie never thought so.

“Frenchie!” Steven cried. He jerked onto his feet, sending his plate rattling. “We left Frenchie in prison!”

Danny reached out and patted Steven on the forearm. “It’s okay, Steven. It was just a dream. The French can’t hurt you.”

“Not if they’re in prison, anyway,” Misty said.

Luke, the only one who ever remotely was on topic, put down his fork and looked at Steven. “Who’s Frenchie? Since when do you know other people?”

“He’s my best friend,” Marc said. He scrambled away from the table, faintly registering that he was wearing Jake’s outfit. He and Steven had their own changes of clothes in the guest bedroom, he’d have to take a minute and change. They hated wearing each other’s clothing. It felt so invasive. Jake hated polyester, Marc hated wool, and Steven hated layers in non-freezing temperatures. “Damn it, what kind of friend am I!”

Jessica squinted at him, sipping her orange juice. “Wait, you have other friends? I thought we were your only friends.”

“He’s my friend, not Jake’s. You’re Jake’s friends.”

“I’m not Jake’s friend,” Misty said.

“Jake’s my friend but I don’t like him,” Colleen said.

“Jake’s my friend and I like him,” Danny said eagerly.

“No comment,” Luke said.

But Jessica just continued squinting at him - as if she could read something between their three faces, unremarkable individually but painting a clear picture together. “This is what stressed you out so bad yesterday, yeah?” Marc shoved the chair back into the table, averting his eyes. “Why don’t I come with you? Like, buffer zone?”

A part of Marc did want her to come. He didn’t know if that part was Jake or Steven or himself. He never knew where to put himself anymore, how to partition out his life into the good and bad. How to fit together Jake and Layla, how to give Steven the reins on the courthouse work, how to fit into the Heroes For Hire in a space carved for Jake yet welcoming of anybody.

It was so easy. It scared Marc.

“I can handle my own army buddy,” Marc said gruffly. He bent down and kissed Jessica on the cheek. “I’ll call.”

Marc swept out the door, ignoring Jessica calling “You better!” behind him.

#my writing #my asks #so much of the fun of the frenchie fic was marc x HFH dynamics it was so good #and frenchie himself ended up being such an interesting character. what an ass.#trivia: i wrote this THEN l2urh when i got writer's block #and frenchie's thing there was honestly just a speedrun of his arc here.#'steven's based off layla but jake's based off frenchie' was the most based decision

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chappydev · 2 days ago

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I don't really think they're like, as useful as people say, but there are genuine usecases I feel -- just not for the massive, public facing, plagiarism machine garbage fire ones. I don't work in enterprise, I work in game dev, so this goes off of what I have been told, but -- take a company like Oracle, for instance. Massive databases, massive codebases. People I know who work there have told me that their internally trained LLM is really good at parsing plain language questions about, say, where a function is, where a bit oif data is, etc., and outputing a legible answer. Yes, search machines can do this too, but if you've worked on massive datasets -- well, conventional search methods tend to perform rather poorly.

From people I know at Microsoft, there's an internal-use version of co-pilot weighted to favor internal MS answers that still will hallucinate, but it is also really good at explaining and parsing out code that has even the slightest of documentation, and can be good at reimplementing functions, or knowing where to call them, etc. I don't necessarily think this use of LLMs is great, but it *allegedly* works and I'm inclined to trust programmers on this subject (who are largely AI critical, at least wrt chatGPT and Midjourney etc), over "tech bros" who haven't programmed in years and are just execs.

I will say one thing that is consistent, and that I have actually witnessed myself; most working on enterprise code seem to indicate that LLMs are really good at writing boilerplate code (which isn't hard per se, bu t extremely tedious), and also really good at writing SQL queries. Which, that last one is fair. No one wants to write SQL queries.

To be clear, this isn't a defense of the "genAI" fad by any means. chatGPT is unreliable at best, and straight up making shit up at worst. Midjourney is stealing art and producing nonsense. Voice labs are undermining the rights of voice actors. But, as a programmer at least, I find the idea of how LLMs work to be quite interesting. They really are very advanced versions of old text parsers like you'd see in old games like ZORK, but instead of being tied to a prewritten lexicon, they can actually "understand" concepts.

I use "understand" in heavy quotes, but rather than being hardcoded to relate words to commands, they can connect input written in plain english (or other languages, but I'm sure it might struggle with some sufficiently different from english given that CompSci, even tech produced out of the west, is very english-centric) to concepts within a dataset and then tell you about the concepts it found in a way that's easy to parse and understand. The reason LLMs got hijacked by like, chatbots and such, is because the answers are so human-readable that, if you squint and turn your head, it almost looks like a human is talking to you.

I think that is conceptually rather interesting tech! Ofc, non LLM Machine Learning algos are also super useful and interesting - which is why I fight back against the use of the term AI. genAI is a little bit more accurate, but I like calling things what they are. AI is such an umbrella that includes things like machine learning algos that have existed for decades, and while I don't think MOST people are against those, I see people who see like, a machine learning tool from before the LLM craze (or someone using a different machine learning tool) and getting pushback as if they are doing genAI. To be clear, thats the fault of the marketing around LLMs and the tech bros pushing them, not the general public -- they were poorly educated, but on purpose by said PR lies.

Now, LLMs I think are way more limited in scope than tech CEOs want you to believe. They aren't the future of public internet searches (just look at google), or art creation, or serious research by any means. But, they're pretty good at searching large datasets (as long as there's no contradictory info), writing boilerplate functions, and SQL queries.

Honestly, if all they did was SQL queries, that'd be enough for me to be interested fuck that shit. (a little hyperbolic/sarcastic on that last part to be clear).

ur future nurse is using chapgpt to glide thru school u better take care of urself

#llm #openai #chatgpt #genai

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your-resident-boat-person · 15 hours ago

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I'm building a catamaran-style steampunk crane vessel based on sort of a 1920s ocean liner style. Any recommendations to better understand the internals and layout of the ship?

This ask has been sitting in my inbox for MONTHS and I'm DEEPLY sorry it took this long to respond.

So, the thing about the 1920s in regards to ocean liners is that it was a VERY strange era. Almost everything ocean liner related ceased during World War 1, and none of the existing liners were back in service until around 1920 or 1921. The “newest” liners by this point were 10 years old, and it was the Balan trio: Imperator (now Berengaria), Vaterland (now Leviathan) and Bismarck (now Majestic). They were German liners, and they were handed over to the US and Britain as war reparations. They were renamed and renovated to varying Degrees. Majestic was virtually untouched, and Vaterland was basically a brand new ship after the renovations. The first new “big players” on the Atlantic were the Bremen and the Europa, from 1928. They're much more associated with the 30s, though. So, in regards to stylings, most 1920s ocean liners were extremely reminiscent of the 1910s. And one of the most beloved ships of the 1920s was the RMS Olympic, sister to Titanic. So, in regards to your questions, here is what I think would work best.

First, to get a good idea of the interior decor and layout of a ship from this era, I would recommend downloading the free demo of Titanic: Honor and Glory. Titanic was almost identical to Olympic, and had she not sunk, she would have served through the 20s alongside her. So this will give you a really good perspective on what a passenger would experience on one of these voyages. Getting to walk around and explore these areas in first person will give you a really good perspective on what you're looking for. Furthermore, in terms of construction and design, Olympic and Titanic are very similar to the RMS Baltic, RMS Cedric, RMS Celtic, and RMS Adriatic, which all entered service between 1901 and 1907. So exploring Titanic will give you a really good idea of how most White Star liners were laid out and decorated between 1900 and 1930. All White Star liners were also built by the same company, Harland and Wolf, so it makes sense that they're all so similar. The only thing to remember is that Olympic and Titanic are about twice the size of most other White Star Liners, and much more extravagant. If you want a good idea of how the smaller liners were decorated, I'd recommend just looking up “(ship name) interior” on Google or something. Along with these liners, I'd also recommend looking into the Cunard liners, like Lusitania, Mauretania, Carmania, Caronia, Aquitania, etc. These ships were built by many different ship yards, and the interiors were designed by totally different people, so these ships are much more diverse in terms of styling and Decor. Lusitania and Mauretania, for example, barely resemble each other on the inside. They're sisters, so they have the same rooms and deck plans, but Lusitania Was full of bright white plaster with gold accents, and Mauretania was paneled in lots of dark wood. None of the ships I have mentioned thus far were scrapped until the mid 30s, so they all served between 1920 and 1929.

So here's my list Of the liners most popular between 1920 and 1929, in no particular order:

RMS Olympic (1911)

RMS Mauretania (1907)

RMS Aquitania (1914)

RMS Berengaria/SS Imperator (1913)

SS Leviathan/SS Vaterland (1914)

RMS Majestic/SS Bismarck (1914)

RMS Adriatic (1907)

Now, what I said above is how to do it in a historically accurate way. However, lots of people associate the 1920s with art deco, even though the art deco movement in decor didn't kick off until the 30s. Another good resource for the interior layout of ocean liners of this era is the RMS Queen Mary, currently docked permanently in long Beach California, serving as a floating hotel. She was built in the 30s, but many passengers remarked that her layout was remarkably similar to the RMS Aquitania of 1914, even if the decor was completely different. If you can't go to California, I'd recommend looking up a tour on YouTube. Her art deco interiors are GORGEOUS. The most famous and prominent Art Deco liners were The Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth, Normandie, and Caronia (not the one from 1905, this one was built in the late 40s and they share a name), and I'd also reccomend looking into the Bremen and Europa. They came a bit before art deco became popular, but they still featured a lot of the decor that would ultimately Popularize art deco.

Thank you SO much for your ask. If you have any more questions or need more detailed advice, PLEASE reach out to me! Send another ask or a DM! I love helping people with this kind of stuff!

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eretzyisrael · 10 hours ago

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by Aaron Bandler

“The whole idea that they’re using the Gaza ‘Health Ministry,’ that’s synonymous to Hamas,” Romirowsky said. “So basically you’re saying that you’re relying on the Hamas narrative to describe what is happening, which is totally detached from reality. Hamas has its own interests as far as aggrandizing everything … they’re looking to create a sense to put pressure on Israel by aggrandizing the numbers when they themselves are responsible for the devastation in Gaza. It’s all Hamas. Let’s be clear: This is part of the Hamas strategy.”

Editors who contended that the use of “massacre” violated Wikipedia’s neutral point of view (NPOV) policy were outnumbered, and the verdict was consensus to rename the article “Nuseirat rescue and massacre.”

“This is part of a concerted campaign to manipulate the narrative and thus rewrite history,” one Wikipedia editor told me. “The day of the rescue operation — they couldn’t simply let that be the story that four hostages were rescued so they had to rebrand it as a massacre in the refugee camp … and their main focus was butchering as many people as possible. They just happened to rescue four hostages. If Entebbe happened today, it would probably also be called ‘Entebbe airport massacre.’ Their MO is to deny that injustices occurred to us, but then take these said same incidents and repurpose it for themselves and their own narrative.”

An editor who grew disillusioned with Wikipedia after making thousands of edits told me that “even if some high-quality sources said a massacre happened, that still wouldn’t make it the COMMONNAME. Once upon a time, something like this would be called ‘Nuseirat operation’ or something neutral like that, it would describe the rescue and allegations of a massacre. But since experienced editors know very few people read beyond the title and lead, these guys are using their numbers to corrupt them both.”

Another editor told me that “a ‘massacre,’ by definition, is not a scientific classification. There are obviously many cases in which the term may be applied unambiguously, but that is not the situation here, nor in many of these contentious article title debates. All we are witnessing is subjective determination wholly driven by the politics and bias of the invoking party, specifically around what they wish to emphasize and ignore. The two sides doing their best to stack the optics deck with charged language to vilify the other side and win some endless PR war. They know that these article search results populate at the top of Google, and are widely cited and quoted by journalists and on social media. They so desperately want their authorship and preferred terminology to enter into common parlance and usage before everyday people have even had a second to think about whether the designation is true, or even appropriate to talk about it in that way. In the case of Nuseirat, what we know is that there was a rescue operation, as well as a reportedly sizable civilian casualty rate. I’m not sure if calling it ‘Nuseirat rescue and massacre’ is appropriate, and I don’t think most of the people who participated in the RM cared about finding the most appropriate solution as well. What we have now is a weird ‘Frankenstein’ result that only highlights the schism and unhealthy detente between sides with profoundly differing perspectives and agendas.” The editor contended that Wikipedia’s manual of style should be revised so the word “massacre” is “removed from general use in article titles when there is any ambiguity or intractable debate, or subject to far stricter criteria.”

One editor told me that the arguments put forward by those who wanted “massacre” in the title were “a stretch but it almost doesn’t matter because so many people bought it,” as there were “4-5 more supporters than opposers … the supporters of that name were particularly unified in their support — in fact, unusually so, so much so that they even carried a name that wasn’t even the one proposed. Which is possible to do but unusual.” The editor believes that the discussion had “all the hallmarks of canvassing and coordination, which we know they are doing on Discord.”

#nuseirat #nuseirat rescue #nuseirat rescue and massacre #wikipedia #gaza health ministry #gaza #hamas

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inkskinned · 2 years ago

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it is all chaos and entropy. the thing is that the chaos and entropy make it beautiful and lovely.

yes, it's true that nature and the universe are uncaring and unspecific, and that is terrifying. i have lived through some of the unfairness - i got born like this, with my body caving into itself, with this ironic love of dance when i sometimes can't stand up for longer than 15 minutes. i am a poet with hands that are slowly shutting down - i can't hold a pen some days. recently i found a dead bird on our front porch. she had no visible injuries. she had just died, the way things die sometimes.

it is also true that nature and the universe are uncaring and unspecific, and that is wonderful. the sheer happenstance that makes rain turn into a rainbow. the impossible coincidence of finding your best friend. i have made so many mistakes and i have let myself down and i have harmed other people by accident. nature moves anyway. on the worst day of my life she delivers me an orange juice sunset, as if she is saying try again tomorrow.

how vast and unknowing the universe! how small we are! isn't that lovely. the universe has given us flowers and harp strings and the shape of clouds. how massive our lives are in comparison to a grasshopper. the world so bright, still undiscovered. even after 30 years of being on this earth, i learned about a new type of animal today: the dhole.

chance echoing in my life like a harmony between two people talking. do you think you and i, living in different worlds but connected through the internet - do you think we've ever seen the same butterfly? they migrate thousands of miles. it's possible, right?

how beautiful the ways we fill the vastness of space. i love that when large amounts of people are applauding in a room, they all start clapping at the same time. i love that the ocean reminds us of our mother's heartbeat. i love that out of all the colors, chlorophyll chose green. i love the coincidences. i love the places where science says i don't know, but it just happens.

"the universe doesn't care about you!" oh, i know. that's okay. i care about the universe. i will put my big stupid heart out into it and watch the universe feast on it. it is not painful. it is strange - the more love you pour into the unfeeling world, the more it feels the world loves you in return. i know it's confirmation bias. i think i'm okay if my proof of kindness is just my own body and my own spirit.

i buried the bird from our porch deep in the woods. that same day, an old friend reaches out to me and says i miss you. wherever you go, no matter how bad it gets - you try to do good.

#writeblr #warm up #i can't write rn but i have SO much words in here bc im reading the chorus of dragons books #(just started book 4)#and this woman's writing is just LIVING in my brain. let me out!!!#(i read roughly like 2-4 books a week usually bc i go on long walks with my dog but when a book is REALLY good like. it eats my life. )#anyway ...... so like here's a story that idk i've tried to explain to other people as being wild #but maybe im the only one who thinks it is wild???#so i play pokemon go (i just started in jan) bc i love pokemon and as i have mentioned i walk goblin for like an hour in the morning #and i don't like a lot of fitness trackers due to the fact it makes me .sad. but i also wanted the little digital rewards. enter pokemon go #anyway so they make you make friends to complete quests. so i used a reddit thread. i do not usually use reddit. i don't have an acct #i lurked. i just googled like ''pokemon go reddit '' and randomly added a bunch of numbers #i was on that page for all of 15 minutes. there are THOUSANDS of responses on that page.#here's what's wild: in that group of people. even though i am not on reddit and it was one random event once #it turns out one of those people lives in the town i live in. or at least very close. i only know this because #when we send each other gifts. it's from the same freaking area.#i can't ask them to meet up bc pokemon go doesn't have a messaging app lol but like . what are the fucking chances that #a random person posts in a random reddit thread and HAPPENS to get added by someone ELSE from their SAME TOWN #who by pure fucking CHANCE is ALSO playing pokemon go and looking for friends #i googled it there's only 42000 people in my broad region. the .......... smallness ! of the world!!!

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boughclan-clangen · 23 hours ago

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what i thought would fix it ended up not, so i have to take my pc into a technician on monday. sorry for the delay!

hi everyone! no page today, probably not sunday either. my pc has been out of commission for over a month so i've been drawing on my laptop--but i'm getting to the point where i really would like to 3d model my backgrounds to make them a little easier on me and give me more energy to experiment/make pages nicer, so i'm going to try to hold out until my pc gets fixed and i can do so for these next couple of pages.

it'll be a lot of front-loaded work, but it'll be worth it in the long run, i think!

#reseating the cpu did not work unfortunately #i googled the bsod loop my partner and i got when we booted it up and it. does not look good ! lol!#wish i knew what happened in the first place so i could prevent it from happening again but... idk we'll see #hopefully the techs can diagnose it quickly and let me know #i've seen sources online say that it's likely a corrupted windows driver and that i should be able to restore it from a system backup but #i don't have a system backup and there's no other way to restore besides that #and since i don't know which driver is causing the issue i can't do the manual browse and delete the problematic driver #ive also seen people say a windows reinstall will work but every time i try to reinstall windows it goes back into the bsod loop #anyway. that's all to say #no pages for a while unless my feeling toward background consistency changes

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kawarikisaki · 1 year ago

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A page 2 of this, because I can;

And a bonus drawing too:

#dcxdp #dpxdc #my art #got more notes on that first comic than i have on any other thing ive ever posted combined #didn’t expect that #but damn was it encouraging #so now theres more #but also i hate drawing backgrounds....#fuck backgrounds #im a character artist #anyway i might do more of this #also i got attached to the DC side through fanfic so i dunno what half these people are supposed to look like and google didnt help #but i tried #only the officially adopted kids (+danny) cause there's a limit to how many people I can draw at once without going insane

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necromancelena · 1 year ago

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Oh for fuck's sake! Well initially I had an idea for a little themed stream that was going to be called shovelware sunday where people pick out shovelware games for me but I'm not even sure this counts as shovelware! this came out years before the Hobbit movies and decades after the book so I think this just constitutes a shitty adaptation. I guess it came out right after the Peter Jackson LOTR movies. It says "The prelude to the Lord of the Rings" right behind my tits and Halberd there. so it's at least a little bit shoveled. Anyway Chicory picked out the game for me and then made a stream promo so there's no arguing with it at this point.

sooo uhhh. Streaming The Hobbit for the Nintendo Gamecube today at 4:00 PM EST/ 1:00PM PST!

You can watch the stream Here!

#stream announcement #also I googled it and it looks like there are other people that do a shovelware sunday so i would need to pick a different name for it lol

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icewindandboringhorror · 17 days ago

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I've referenced before how I have a big google document to keep track of every media I've ever seen in my entire life (just for reference because I like to track everything possible lol… I am the Data Collector), but recently as I was updating it, I thought of actually evaluating them to find out random percentages (like for example, out of Total Shows Watched, what percentage did I finish vs. stop watching, what percentage did I like or dislike, etc.)...

Evaluating these things is made easier by the fact that I already place everything on each subsection of the list into 6 broad ranking categories, so I don't have to go back and guess to figure out how I feel about them or anything. The categories are: Ranking 5 - overall best* (despite some criticisms of course because I'm too much of an Analyzer to ever find anything Perfect lol) Ranking 4 - more positive than neutral, but not good enough to be 5 Ranking 3 - either the good + bad negate each other, OR it's just not memorable/interesting in any way enough to be ranked higher or lower (this is the Default category ALL things are placed in if no other rank applies) Ranking 2 - maybe a few redeemable elements but largely more negatives than positives Ranking 1 - So bad that it circles around to being fascinating to observe in some way (not necessarily Funny, or Good, but just interesting somehow) Ranking 0 - Bad in a genuinely frustrating or obnoxious manner

*("best" primarily defined here as most interesting, rather than most good in a technical sense, or some other measure. I tend to value more highly whether there's something novel or thoughtful about the worldbuilding, tone, writing, base premise, etc - than about whether it's actually executed perfectly.)

And here's the amount of shows that have so far been placed into each category -

TV shows ~ Rank 5 (highest) - 20 shows ~ Rank 4 (mid-high) - 28 shows ~ Rank 3 (neutral/default/meh) - 114 shows ~ Rank 2 (mid low) -33 shows ~ Rank 1 (low low but intriguingly so) - 14 shows ~ Rank 0 (iredeemably low) - 2 shows

This would make for a total of 211 TV shows overall. However, there are 57 shows within these list marked as "didn't finish" (typically meaning I quit on the very first or second episode - but log them still to keep a record that I at least had a brief view of them).

So my total of genuinely fully watched shows would be more 154. 211 Total, but a More Accurate Total of 154.

Counting them all and using the Total Number Of The List (211) -- that means roughly 9.5% of all total shows I have ever watched (or at least attempted to watch) have been Mostly Good, 13% have been Moderately Okay, 54% have been either entirely Forgettable or some mix of good + bad that lands them right in the Neutral Middle, 15.6% have been Mostly Bad, 6.6% have been Bad (but in an interesting way), and 0.9% have been Terribly Bad.

Additionally, I didn't even get past the first two episodes of about 27% of the total.

Sooo, discounting ones I didn't finish, my total TV shows ever watched in my life would be about 154 (maybe give or take a few, assuming I might have forgotten some from very long ago).

But instead of entire life, let's just say this is the total for 'About 20 Years' (so, not counting very early childhood when I likely wouldn't remember things I saw/have no detailed recollection of them (like for example, I'm sure at some point when I was like 4yrs old I must have seen an episode of Spongebob or something, but I have zero distinct memories of it, can't quote anything of it, and barely recall the premise - so I don't count it on the list, etc.)).

In that case, 154 divided by 20 would be roughly 7.7 shows a year.

Which is actually surprisingly low considering that I often have stuff on in the background for hours whilst I make sculptures and do costumes and stuff (maybe I should have also marked some distinction between 'things I fully paid attention to' and 'things I kind of half listened to whilst sculpting', but that would further split the categories too much probably lol), but I guess a lot of that is youtube videos or random documentaries, so .. eh.. maybe I get it being lower.

Now, doing the same thing for movies-

Movies ~ Rank 5 (highest) - 4 movies (3.4% of total) ~ Rank 4 (mid-high) - 12 movies (10.3% of total) ~ Rank 3 (neutral/default/meh) - 91 movies (78.4% of total) ~ Rank 2 (mid low) - 8 movies (6.8% of total) ~ Rank 1 (low but interesting) - 1 movie (0.8% of total) ~ Rank 0 (irredeemably low) - none in this category (0%)

That makes 116 for a Total (Actually Remembered) Movies Watched In Lifetime (Or At Least In 20 Years).

116 divided by 20 is roughly 5 or 6 movies a year (I feel this has probably been skewed though by adding everything since like elementary school onwards, as I remember a lot more movies from child/teen years.. Whereas, the past 3 years I feel like I've barely seen maybe even 5 movies?? lol). I also have "Didn't Finish" marked on 18 of them. Which means I quit halfway through about 15% of the total movies.

So, a for broader summary stuff..

I seem to be less forgiving to movies than tv shows, by far. Which makes sense to me, I guess, because I love elaboration and details, so "short form" things that only last an hour or two are often lost on me a bit. My biggest complaint with movies is indeed usually walking away just wishing there had been more exposition, more scenes where characters are doing nothing, more "mindless bantering" conversations, more Quiet Downtime and Lore Elaboration and so on lol, so... of course most 1-2hr films end up feeling a bit Not Enough To Draw My Interest/Nothingy to me.

If you count 5 and 4 as "like" and rankings 2 to 0 as "dislike", then for TV shows I at least somewhat liked 48 of them, and at least somewhat disliked 47 of them.. So it's almost exactly the same lol. I'm just about equally as likely to find something bad as I am to find something redeeming about it. But overall, the largest chance is that I just won't really care much for it at all and it will be tossed into the 'neutral' pile, forgotten forever. Movies have a bit better of a balance, "liking" 16 of them, and "disliking" only 9 of them. So I'm slightly more likely to enjoy a movie than to find it annoying - though still VASTLY more likely to just not find it anything in particular, possibly not even finishing it.

ANYWAY.. this is vague and literally pointless, but like I said, I just really find information fun. Like my document where I've rated every apple flavor I've ever tried (like 40 of them now?), or reviewed every oreo flavor (32?), or ranking data from my entire 10 years of Trying To Make Friends process (out of 100 people, roughly 8% chance of a moderate compatibility, 3% chance of high), or etc. etc.. I love to have random pointless things to analyze I suppose lol.

I doubt anyone tracks things in their life in this same exact way, but I'd be interested in hearing any at least somewhat similar data !!! (like, how many TV shows you watch a year on average, and what percentage of those you like vs. dislike (if you keep track of that sort of thing), etc.)). I guess it might be easier with movies, since I think some people use those websites where you curate a list of movies you've seen and you can rate them or something, so maybe the numbers are already available on those places. :0

#maybe this is my version of spotify wrapped lol.. Lifetime Media Google Doc Wrapped.. kind of.. except I'm not going over specific titles.#I can't do this with music since I rarely EVER look for new music or add to my Youtube To MP3 folder library as I just don't really #listen to music that often. When I'm working (the majority of when I seek background noise) I need like.. people's talking voices #for some reason. Just instruments and singing are not distracting enough to me to work as background noise because theyre #almost TOO in the background if that makes sense? like if I put music on then I just tune it out and it's virtually no different #than if I were daydreaming stream of consciousness thoughts in an entirely quiet room lol. And I can't really do it with books since #essentially 100% of what I read is non-fiction. usually about some specific subject or academic topic OR stuff like #1800s magazines or cookbooks or historical people's diaries. Which is not really.. the type of thing I would #rank as easily I guess? like 'ooh yeah putting the sociology textbook in my top 5 hee hee right next to the 1920s radio recipes book' lol.#Then for games... I just sadly dont play enough of them. I've been banned from new games as I've told myself I cant play anyting #long form (no rpgs or etc) until I actually finish MY OWN game first - to keep me from wasting time. so on average #I play... 0 new games a year. ToT... I do play the sims sometimes but that's really all (which is not a new game at all since #I've been playing it on and off for years). Thus I guess movies/TV are really the only things that make sense #to collect this sort of information on. I could do youtube videos I guess also but that seems kind of strange like...#giving a rating to every single video I watch in a ranked list lol.. Especially since I would say a good 85% of the time #they are exclusively background noise whilst I'm working on something or cleaning the house or etc. and not things I pay serious attention #to. There are only a few specific topics/types/creators of videos I watch where I'm ACTUALLY sitting in front of a screen paying #direct attention to the content (usually when it's educational or political things). Everything else is too mindless to even rank.#ANYWAY... ever analyzing my little hermit Weird Relationship To Media (in the sense of seemingly not processing or getting the same #things out of it as many other seem to). I think that can contribute sometimes to the whole difficulty socializing and stuff #since our culture is very centered around media consumption generally speaking. People want to talk about The New Movie that came #out or The Big TV Show Of The Year. and for me it's like.. highly likely I just plain have NOT seen it. Or if i have. statistically #I most likely was entirely ambivalent if not slightly negative towards it lol. Which just kind of takes the steam out of a 'fun' 'casual'#conversation and you seem like a bit of a bummer if most of your only feedback is either 'idk what that is' or 'oh yea... i did #see that one.... i didnt like it all that much though... I think it'd be better with elves in it.. and 7 hours longer..'' lol..#Which I am not disliking things in a 'grr i hate it bc its popular'/just to be contrarian way. I actually dislike that mindset/find it #silly (by striving so hard to be counterculture you are thus still defining yourself by the whims of external culture - just in the #opposite direction. but are still just as preoccupied with the mainstream (going against it) as everyone else. etc. lol..)) In my #case I think it IS just having niche hyperspecific tastes.. for example- it peeves me when cell phones are in media bc I dont want to be #reminded at ALL of the real world. so.. cross off anything set in modern times. so on & etc. Judging all things by these weird criteria lol

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