#and you can be a part of that population too!! you are not an outlier!!!

[kiwichaeng]

Say it with me, any type of eugenics is bad eugenics

reddit is entering like an inverted renaissance of bad posting. this is one of the best/worst posts ive seen in a long time

[smaller-comfort]

Hello! I have a question about snecrons. Namely their love/mating darts. Before first use, how does someone know what their dart will do to a partner? Genetics do seem to play a big role so they'd have a guess I assume, but do they visit a doctor/biomancer who will tell them more specifically? How accurate are these predictions? How often does the first time lead to...surprises? Are there any cultural hangups around a "first time"? How many raunchy comedies are based on this set up 🤣?

Ahaha oh god. Well, as with anything necron/snecron, it varies and you can play it however you want. These ideas are free to a good home for people to play with as they like, I'm not a cop, you can do whatever you want forever, etc.

This got too long, it's going under a cut.

I don't necessarily think the effects would vary enormously across populations, but there are always going to be outliers. (I want to compare it to, like...weed strains, but I don't actually know anything about weed strains.) A trip to the biomancer for testing is probably standard for snecrontyr with status/access when they hit puberty. These tests would be quite accurate and probably part of routine healthcare, since they'd really just be taking a sample of the mucous secretions in the dart sac. Irregularities can be leading indicators for certain kinds of cancer.

There's a significant genetic component, but environmental and other developmental factors are also going to have an effect on things. (Thanks to @ocelly for that idea; excess cortisol in childhood -> paralytic/sedating effects as a sort of defensive measure.) It's normal for someone's dart composition to change over time because of things like age, diet, overall health, exposure to weird radiation, etc. But if you don't have access to regular healthcare (commoners, soldiers), then you're not able to monitor any changes. So 'surprises' are actually probably more likely well into adulthood, rather than the first time you dart someone.

Particularly because, well. Nearly every horny adolescent stabs themselves with their own dart at least once. It's not actually common for it to happen accidentally- engaging the muscles that eject the dart also lifts the tongue out of the way and opens the mouth, sort of like how humans can't sneeze with their eyes open. And, in fact, "I just sneezed really hard" is the standard flimsy excuse used by teenagers for generations. (Imagining some exhausted cryptek tutor with a classroom full of glassy-eyed, giggly students, "Allergy season? I do not get paid enough for this, all of you go away.")

But. Just because you have a printout listing all the chemical compounds in your dart, it doesn't mean you actually know how your partner is going to respond to it. Allergies happen. Particular sensitivities- or insensitivities- to specific euphorics or hormones happen. Overdose or illness can burn out the chemical receptors for some dart compounds, making normally pleasant sensations excruciating. (Overdosing would be rare- usually a single partner can't, even if they have multiple darts. But it's possible with multiple partners, and it happens with alarming frequency as a result of hazing at military academies.) (Does this make Setekh even worse? Sure does!)

There's a brisk business in drugs/augments that would claim to alter the effects of a dart; 'guaranteed to make your partner desperate to submit!' etc etc. Some of them would even work; odds are if it comes from a reputable biomancer, the effects are legit. There would be a lot of homeopathic remedy equivalents out there, though. (Biomancers would also fuck around with their own dart composition on the regular as a way to one-up each other at the annual biomancer conclave orgy. Does this potentially make Szeras even worse? God, I hope so.)

Wacky dart effects come up all the time in snecrontyr media, be it comedy, drama, or porn. The young lord discovering he's allergic to some component in his higher ranking partner's dart is a common romantic comedy subplot. (The subjects of these comedy subplots would always be either merchant caste or very low level/vitriform nobility. Comedy and hijinks where the subject is an overlord/nemesor or phaeron would probably get censored.) Advice columnists frequently have to field questions like "my lover just got back from the war and now when they dart me it Feels Different pls halp". Necrontyr Cinderella: it's a dart, not a glass slipper, that gets left behind.

Also re: first times, fun snail fact! They don't actually start producing love darts until after they've mated once. So virgin snails can't stab their partners. I feel weird and slightly uncomfortable applying this idea to snecrontyr, honestly. (I know, I know, that's really where I'm drawing the line? Go figure.) But it would fit in with all the other regressive social/sexual politics in play, so feel free to take it and run with it, with my blessing; deflowering narratives would be extremely popular in necrontyr porn either way.

Since using the darts is supposed to be about exerting dominance, there would probably be some performance anxiety around darting someone else for the first time. (Slapstick comedy routines around having bad aim? There's got to be some kind of "they couldn't hit the broadside of a barn" equivalent aphorism involving love darts.) And there would always be this tension around the fact that getting darted usually makes sex more enjoyable, but it's not something you're supposed to want, because it would mean you're being subordinate to your partner. "What if they both use the darts" blasphemous perversion, straight to jail. Unless you're a commoner, because who even cares about what they do, they're already barely better than Unclean to begin with.

("Straight to jail" really only happens in Ithakas, where fun has been outlawed for generations. Everywhere else is fine with it, it's just seen as a bit deviant.)

[ohdragonflyohdragonburnthemdown]

Dyamond and Zenith

Let' do this. 

Dyamond

Dyamond was the original name for the planet now known as Zenith. (At one point I am going to do a timeline with ruff dates and everything) It was an OLD planet with very powerful magic users and traditions.

Most importantly it was a witch planet. Which means the primary magic that Dyamond produced was dark magic. This includes dark fairies, but that is a topic that will be discussed later on. Here I will add that dark ≠ evil. Just so we're clear!

- Magic

So Dyamond is a witch planet that produces incredibly powerful ice and scrying magic users. I am going with my personal associations here: 

Ice stand for clarity and preservation as well as coldness and rationality. Something that can be found in Zenith too. This meant that Dymond was well known for having Elemental magic users, whose primary focus was ice and water as well as blizzards, but also those with a talent for understanding magic. Which in turn created Dyamonds secondary speciality:

Scrying. As in seeing the future and the present and the past. It also means they were well known to be primary healers, who could identify any possible magical illness simply by looking at them. (And then send the person over to the people who are qualified to actually heal them of it.) This scrying ability also came in handy when someone wanted something to be identified or to know if something they own has been cursed.

- the Fall

So Dyamond was a witch planet but it was the first everyone thought of if something was suspect or someone got ill. Like I said dark ≠ evil. It was a well respected planet and also a bit of an outlier. You see Dyamond produced its own magic. A lot of it too, compared to the rest of its ring and even the next ring. Dyamond, when it came to the production of magic, was on par with Lynphea, two Rings over.

This is what many people now think caused the death of Dyamond. It naturally produced magic and the amount of magic that the Golden Kingdom was adding into the planet's core overloaded the planet and caused it to die of an overdose. 

Some people like to argue that the "good magic" of the Golden Kingdom killed the "dark magic" of Dyamond. This has been rebuffed as the Magic of the Golden Kingdom is truly neutral magic and simply boosts the magic core of planets. But more to that later on.

The resulting empty core created a series of natural disasters that slowly but steadily killed the population of Daymond through temperatures not even the ice magic users could survive. So a large part of the population was forced to leave the planet. Those who couldn't flee (be it due to isolation, illness or it simply being too late) died on the planet. 

Which is where the saying magic comes back into play. Many of those who remained connected to the planet's core, which meant they died connected to the magical core of Dyamond. 

Many scholars suspect that this is how Mother was created. The core of Dyamond reached out in its last moments to protect itself and those who remained, turning it into the spark that later on created Zenith.

- After

It takes about six centuries for the planet to stabilize itself and another three to make it possible for people to set foot onto its surface again. In that time the people of Dyamond did not move far from their home. They inhabit the moons of Dyamond and create space stations and technology that would allow them to monitor their home so they could return the moment the magic stabilizes. (Which they did)

Zenith

During the first half of those 900 years the people of Dyamond got the nickname "Those on the zenith" Since they lived over their own planet, quite literally on the zenith. Which then developed into "Zenithians" in the later half. 

When they finally could step back onto their planet it became clear quickly that Dyamond was no more. The magic of the core had changed, it was no longer dark magic heavy, but much more neutral. The eco system had changed extremely which new fauna and flora along the familiar one and all the infrastructure completely destroyed.

So they held onto the technology and techno magic they developed over the last millennia to survive and rebuild. 

They renamed the planet Zenith as a nod to their changed lifestyle and that they assumed that the worst is over. 

- Inbalance

They were wrong. You see Dyamond produced a lot of its own magic. Something that Zenith is no longer able to do in the same quantity and the additional magic of the Golden kingdom is neutral magic.

This means that the core of the planet is bigger than the amount of magic in it. Additionally the magic inside of the core is no longer dark magic. It's neutral magic. It's less harsh and cold. Like Zenith is still cold as HELL (think Norway) but it's no longer the cold of Dyamond (South/North Pole). 

You can guess where this is going...

Zenith started to warm up. Which means that the ice radiating with Dyamonds magic started melting. Slowly killing the remaining fauna and flora. This in turn further destabilizes the planet causing the core to compensate with more neutral magic. Which quickens the whole thing even more.

Basically Zenith is trapped in a cycle of dropping temperatures due to a changing core which is linked to the melting ice, that is linked to the dropping temperatures. 

Now, most people in the magical dimension only know Zenith as the technology planet. Which developed both from the need to monitor their planet in hopes of returning and survival. The worse their climate change got the more the technological development was pushed in hopes of finding a solution for their climate problem. 

Which they kind of did. Many species of fauna and flora could be preserved either in special habitats that are a mix of technology and magic. They also managed to slow down the warm up by creating artificial freezers that are both in the atmosphere and on the planet (land and sea) Which slows everything down, but it's still going dangerously fast. 

- Magic

As for Zenith's magic. While the primary focus is now on technomagic, the old magic isn't lost. Both in the kinds of magic used on the planet and the magic users. 

Fairies are ridiculously rare on Zenith, while other magic users like sorcerers and witches are much much more common.

Ice and scrying magic is still really common too. It's a pretty even split between the different kinds of magic.

----------

This is it for Dyamond/Zenith lore. Maybe I am going to go into detail on Icy and what exactly she has done at a later point. But that's magical lore😂.

So if you have questions. Hit me up!

[possiblylisle]

On the Pond's Surface: Part Two

Something had changed. The feeling was different now. All the dull aching and itching that remained from the reverse had moved. They had pushed themselves out of his nerves or organs, or wherever they’d been hiding, and now they were collecting, concentrating in his skin and in the throbbing space around his optic nerves.

                He could only see it when it slithered its way through his arms or his legs, and it was unsettling to look at. A white light that squirmed and writhed, moving beneath his skin like worms or living strands of hair. The way it moved, looked and felt was too similar for it to be a coincidence. The doctors and the researchers that tended to him feared it. They didn’t know what it was. Some thought it must’ve been a parasite from the reverse. Others thought it was some sort of nano-machine colony. One outlier believed it was just a trick of the light in the room. Only he knew what it was. It was too alike to what he saw for him to be wrong. Some part of the reverse was living under his skin, and he didn’t know how to tell them.

                The doctors tried the simplest, most non-invasive treatments they could – not that they were limiting themselves on purpose but because Grant refused to let them do anything more. If they did something too extreme, it might cause problems, he reasoned. He didn’t know how the reverse was inside him, but he definitely did not want it to escape into the regular side of reality.

                The first thing they did was give him pills.

                “They’re normally used for treating parasites,” they’d told him. When a week had passed and the reverse still moved under his skin, they gave up on the parasite theory.

                Syringes were next. They jabbed him in all the places where the reverse was most concentrated and every time, the only thing that was drawn up into their needles was blood. No glowing white, no writhing, just simple crimson. They tested his blood, of course, but found nothing. There was no tiny colony of parasites or nano-machines.

                The second change happened in the second week of tests. The constant throbbing behind his eyes seeped forward and into the gelatinous spheres of his eyes proper. The throbbing soon died out, but he could still feel something living in its place.

                “That’s certainly new.” The doctor who’d come to check on him in the morning was the first to notice. According to their account and a subsequent look in the mirror, his eyes were changing color, constantly. The pigment of his irises continued to shift and change, moving like the ink on a wet Rorschach slide.

                “Has your vision changed at all? Is it blurry? Clearer?” They’d brought in an optometrist from one of the other ships in the flotilla because, for some reason, the Effervescence did not have one despite holding a population comparable to a Martian city.

                “My vision still feels the same. Sometimes one of those lights swims across my pupil though.” Grant rubbed his eyes. He wasn’t entirely lying. His vision was still the same as before, but his eyes felt wrong, like they didn’t sit in their sockets like they should.

                “Oh? Can you tell me what it’s like when one does move across the pupil?” The optometrist’s notepad was not as extensively used as the other researchers, but Grant felt like that would change if something else about his eyes changed too.

                “I see it kind of writhe into view and when it does, it makes things hard to see. They’re really bright and it doesn’t go away when I close my eyes.”

                The optometrist clucked his tongue and wrote something down. “Are we sure this thing isn’t a parasite? If it does come from the reverse, then it won’t be affected by our medications.”

                The other researchers who had been observing from the edges of the room looked up from their notes and glanced at each other.

                You’re kidding me? They didn’t think of that? Grant sighed and rubbed his eyes again.

“You might also want to run a more extensive scan on him. See if you can identify what this not-parasite is actually made of.” The optometrist was looking back at the other researchers, scowling at them for not thinking straight.

                “Can we be done for today? I’m tired.” Grant stood before any of them could answer him. He knew that permission wasn’t needed to leave, and he also didn’t expect to receive it. If they had their way, they’d set up a rotating staff to test him every hour of the day and that sounded terrible.

He wasn’t dying and he wasn’t at risk of infecting any other spacers, but they still kept him away from people and in his own private little hospital in the far corners of Effervescence. It was more like the neighborhood’s local clinic instead of an actual hospital, but they still called it one for a reason he didn’t understand.

                The staff of the hospital was minimal before word got out that he had survived reverse exposure, then the crowds of doctors had come flooding in. Some were older, and actually trying to help while hiding their curiosity, others were fresh out of med school, and it was blatantly obvious they only wanted to use him as the basis for a paper that would launch their career.

                He hated all of them, though, even if they hadn’t done anything wrong. Hate was a feeling he was becoming too familiar with lately, and he hated that he hated. He hated the people around him. The doctors showed no sympathy for what he had experienced. They didn’t even stop to realize that he was a person who’d lost everyone he’d ever known. They just saw him as some wild curiosity, like a too tall man at an ancient earth circus.

                Most of all he hated himself. He hated being alive. He hated the horrid gnawing inside of himself that kept whispering the truth of the future to him. Everyone was gone. Kimi was gone. He would have to live the rest of his life without ever seeing her again. He would have to live decades without ever hearing her voice or feeling her warmth. He hated it. He hated the universe for making him different. He hated it for letting him live.

“It’s the only possible explanation we can think of. Nothing about you is normal in this situation. You shouldn’t even exist right now, but you do. That and the flow of the anti-matter in your body is consistent with all the old reports we have from the Federation and the Shaza.”

                A dreamer. He was a dreamer. A leak in reality. An incorrect human being born of reality’s pond. He was a dreamer.

                She was right. Of course she was right. They’re real, and I’ve been one this whole time. Grant felt like he should be shaking or crying, having some sort of visible breakdown at hearing that he was living proof of the universe’s weirdness.

                I can’t believe this. This doesn’t feel real. He wasn’t supposed to be alive. Why didn’t the universe let him die? Why did it have to be him? Why? He wasn’t living proof of some great cosmic mystery! No! He was living proof that the universe hated him. It wanted him to suffer. It wanted him to be alone. That’s how it always was. It wanted him to hurt. It wanted him to bleed. It wanted his tears to quench its thirst.

                All I want is to die.

Tag List:

@capnmachete @leahnardo-da-veggie @tamiveldura @lorifragolina @liminalgoddessworld

@humbleartspawn @orion-lacroix @insecure-pilot

[weaselle]

i swear to all gods, almost every time two nationalities are at war, MOST of BOTH populations would rather not be

I haven't really reblogged or posted anything about the Israel / Palestine situation on here, because that's not what i wanted this part of my social media to be about.

But i suppose i do want people to know where i stand if they want to know that about this blog, so I'll make this post.

There's a history of back and forth which can seem overwhelming to try to untangle, but luckily you don't have to know about any of that to understand my take.

I'm not for or against Israel, I'm not for or against Palestine, I'm for the public of both, and i think the public of both groups is on one side, and the leadership of both groups is on the other side against them.

For example, in this specific instance before this latest flare up there were huge protests in Israel against Netanyahu for being, basically, a war mongering dangerous power hungry asshole, and also huge protests in Palestine against Hamas and his party for essentially the same reason. It is essentially two armed political parties that keep using each other to stay politically relevant and grab power. Both leaders break promises to their people and actively sabotage all attempts at making peace. And the people there know it.

That's why you get scenes like the returned Israeli prisoners yelling angrily at their government, or the Israeli hospital staff who chased visiting government officials out of the hospital clapping their hands at them like they were misbehaving dogs and yelling things like "are you proud? Is this what you wanted? This is your fault!"

Most of the people of both sides do not want any of what's been happening, and the people are also upset at their own leaders about it. But the US is far from the only country that has gerrymandering and voter suppression and propaganda and the occasional disappearance of a problematic journalist or some shit, so those leaders keep getting their hands back on the wheel.

I've traveled in several countries, i've met people from from literally all over the world, I've lived in a couple of large diverse cities. I've lived with someone from Russia and someone from the Ukraine both at the same time... and they were just like everybody else we were living with. They didn't care about any bad blood in their national histories, they cared about "are we all going to have our share of the power bill this month", and "whose beer is this in the fridge and can i have some".

We're all just people, and most of us would rather we all find a way to co-exist peacefully -- cooperatively where possible, respectfully where not. In my experience, that's the baseline for 80% of everyone on the planet. As far as i can tell most of everyone is defaulted at: a vague goodwill toward others, and too busy putting out fires in their own lives to want to go looking for matches in someone else's.

I know that sometimes that hardly seems true, but minding your own business is an invisible activity. What you see are the outliers.

also, crucially, high stress brings people off that baseline, which is why political stunting so often encourages panic.

So you can't pick a side like Netanyahu or Hamas because either of those sides you pick, you pick the wrong side. It has to be that it's both of them on one side, and the general population on the other.

Anyway i strongly believe (with some good evidence available) that most of the people of Israel and most of the people of Palestine have long wanted there to be some kind of peaceful resolution worked out, and that each public largely objects to what the leadership of both sides has been doing for years and years. I honestly believe most of the people on both sides of this conflict have more in common with each other than with their leadership.

Hamas militants have done awful things. And, clearly, what the Israeli military has been doing lately is despicable and unconscionable and wrong on such an extreme level that i shouldn't even have to explicitly say so, but here we are.

So that's where i stand. It's horrifying and tragic what those armed political powers have been doing to the people of both sides: keeping them in a state of terror, punctuated by brutal violence. I support the common public of both Israel and Palestine, whose political leaders have betrayed them deeply, and who deserve peace.

and that's all i'm going to say about that on here i think.

[leveloneandup]

Abby Wambach: And talent is not a person’s personhood, and it’s not their heart, per se. What talent is, is you can see their work ethic, you can see their natural gifts, but it’s not really the person that you get to know. It’s like this persona, the outline of a human being.

Glennon Doyle: And so it feels fake.

AW: So it was fake.

GD: It just makes me wonder because we have now met so many people who are so freaking good at one thing. They have achieved this level of greatness. And I would say, and I think you probably would too, that percentage wise, it’s amazing at how many of them feel so lonely, isolated, unseen, fucked up in lots of ways. So much to the point where you know I wish for my children to not be extremely great at anything just because I’ve seen the results. For real, I don’t believe in it.

GD: Because when I think about, in order to be that great, you had to not pay attention to any of the parts of life that actually make you feel loved, like actual relationships, connection, the mundane things, one day… You had to ignore that to achieve greatness. Do you think that greatness comes at the cost of connection and peace?

AW: Yeah, I think that there’s a very small part of the population that can achieve, at least I can speak for athletic greatness like I was able to achieve, in terms of the whole of the world. But I do think there are some people that are able to manage it in better ways than I was. Christen Press is the first person I think of, somebody who takes her full humanity.

Amanda Doyle: She centers it. She centers it as, ‘you can’t watch me in soccer without knowing this about me.’ So it’s kind of like a requirement. If you’re going to buy this, you’re also going to buy this.

AW: Yes. And what I would call her is an outlier of this even smaller fraction. She’s like this minuscule percentage point of people that make it into… But yeah, I do think for me, my greatness compromised my real ultimate goal in my life, which was to feel lovable.

[aquaburst3]

Not sure how popular this is as a hot take. I still believe that Vil being human doesn't make any sense.

In canon, Vil has an intimidating allure about him that ironically pushes others away from him. That’s great and all. But, every single character in the canon is inhumanly beautiful minus Grim and Ortho, so why would Vil be the only one to have this issue and have a wholeass complex about it? That makes no sense! Wouldn't all other characters struggle with that if that's the case? I get that he can be a bit…much, and even people in the fandom commented about that, but that doesn’t seem like it would be enough to cause all that in universe.

Typecasting is very much a thing. Plenty of actors in Hollywood and elsewhere have struggled with that very thing. Him being typecasted as a villain is realistic. It seems like something that would happen, especially since Vil comes off as rather intense and I can't see him pulling off an everyday hero type of role like Neige. (I see Vil shining in more antihero/complex villain roles like Cardan from Folk of Air, Lucius Malfoy from Harry Potter or the Darkling from Shadow & Bone. Or even beautiful princely types like Legolas from Lord of the Rings.)

However, I think the extent of how it is painted is hard to buy if he's just human. In the game, it seems like people automatically turn their noses up at him and even bully him thanks to his looks and him being casted as a villain. That seems like an over the top reaction for just being an actor playing villain roles.

Yes, a similar thing happened to the actor who played Joffrey from Game of Thrones where people thought he was an asshole in real life when he really wasn't. Here's the thing. I think he's more of an outlier than the rule, because he's not conventionally attractive. Don't get it twisted. I'm NOT saying that he's ugly. But he's not a total knockout either. Pretty Privilege is very much a thing. There are load of scientific studies done proving that people tend to like you more, think you are automatically a good person and give you the benefit of the doubt if you are hot. (x) That's why criminals like Ted Bundy were able to get away with their crimes for so long, because they were considered handsome and people gave them the benefit of a doubt. So if that actor looked more like Ben Barnes or Henry Cavill, I doubt that would've happened in the first place, because people would think the best of him thanks to his looks. That same logic applies to Vil. If the game was more realistic, people would be thinking the best of him, because he's hot.

Plus, we learn in Vil’s Birthday Bloom Card and the Tapis Rouge Event that Vil has no idea who his mother is and has no interest in ever finding her. Usually in fantasy stories characters with that same backstory as Vil are either long lost royalty or a half supernatural creature of some kind, and the latter makes the most sense with Vil. You think something would pop off with that information, but it doesn’t. It’s fucking bizarre. 

I also think this is partly an issue of Yana leaning too much on the original source material without considering the ramifications of such a choice. It's implied that the reason why others are so frightened of the queen, despite her being just human, is because she's a witch. She applied that same logic to Vil. That's not the case in the TWST universe. People being so frightened and intimidated by him based on that makes no sense, because in canon at least one tenth of the population are mages and it's seen as normal. Applying that same logic as the Evil Queen to Vil doesn't work. It's a different universe, different rules. (I'm NOT accusing Yana of plagiarism. It's a Disney game, and that's part of the appeal. However, her overreliance on references and callbacks to the original work are an issue that pops up time and time again.)

He should've been a half fae. If that was the case, then that could all be explained away by supernatural reasons out of his control. His fae allure could've been what made people instinctively afraid of him. It would also make the information about him not knowing his mother have a narrative payoff instead of something tossed in there for no reason. Plus, he has all of the hallmarks of a fae personality wise. He’s rather harsh, domineering, stern, can be quite impulsive at times, has a cruel temper and is overly just very…intense, for the negative. On the positive side, he’s fair, just, kind to those dear and genuinely wants to help others in his own ways.

While I think there are a lot of other issues with the writing in Book 5 like how it mainly focused on "Wah, I'm always typecasted as a villain :(" instead of his more relatable problems like his creative envy over Neige and constant need of validation, never having the characters call out Vil for his fucked up actions like the whole cake thing, Neige being just a piece of cardboard for Vil to sneer at and all of the pacing, making him a half fae would've been a start. Same with making him and Neige stepbrothers. Eh, whatever. Fixing that up in my own rewrite and that's what matters.

[fightabear]

also dumps some of my drabbles here for fellow tsviet enjoyers

its just headcanon drabbles but characters; nero the sable, weiss the immaculate, professor hojo, reno, misc faceless fan characters

cw: child death, medical horror

THE CULLING.

there were more of them once.

the survivors are, of course, the red, the black, and the white.

but his childhood was a myriad of colors. other children just like him, like his brother, all of them toted to be the next generation of soldier. precursors to a new era of prosperity for the planet.

but the others were not nearly as successful.

nero is eight. he's the youngest of all of them, the last successful attempt before shinra decided to pivot and focus on adult test subjects. there is a slow decline in their care - they were but a proof of concept, the prototypes. never meant to make it to launch.

some die slow. the experiments that created them showing late-stage complications. their immune systems turning against their own bodies, their minds collapsing against the weight of the voices of the planet pressing in and in and in.

nero can't say he was close to any of them - even amongst the discards and the freaks, he was an outlier - but they were still there. populating the spaces he was permitted to roam when he was permitted to roam them. they were part of the deepground he knew, live steal but blunted at the edges.

and so it made sense that their deaths marked the end of that era.

the file before him is heavy. nero does not bother stepping forward - it's not for him, it's for the handler to his left.

"all of them?" the man whistles, shaking his head.

"they're a waste of beds and resources," professor hojo says coolly. "once we cull the weak we can bring in the more promising recruits."

nero feels cold inside. colder than he usually feels, something twisting deep in his chest. his bound hands clench his shoulders and he hunches down as far as the chains will let him.

"sable," the professor says, and nero looks up. "this is not a test. you are not leave any survivors."

but it is a test. he knows it. a test of his abilities, a test of his willingness to obey. they've already told him that if he fails to comply they will punish weiss, but if he does a good job then the two of them can move into a compound together.

the chains holding him jerk forward, drawing him towards the training hall. inside he can hear his fellow tsviets talking amongst themselves, expressing their impatience and irritation that the exam has not started yet. their confusion that so many of them are gathered here. is this to be a free for all?

the world is complicated. but this choice is not. yet nero finds himself unable to step across the threshold, frozen in place. his breathing quickens, the urge to run strikes in a way it never has before.

( some have died before. deaths due to experimentation. death due to failing health. deaths on field missions.

but none have died at the hands of a fellow tsviet. )

restrictor kicks him forward and nero stumbles forward, catching himself awkwardly. all eyes are on him, the confusion on their faces even more apparent. his wide eyes flick from face to face, he turns towards the way he'd come only to find restrictor's cold eyes glaring through the slats in the armor.

"nero?" one girl says, her voice gentle. he doesn't know her, not well, but she has always been kind. the sort to bandage wounds even when you should leave the wounded behind. "are you training with us today?"

he doesn't move. he feels the flicker of her fear, and that he holds onto. the fear. desperately clutching at any justification for this cruelty. they fear him, they hate him. he has never been one of them, would never be one of them.

the restraints release, nero's arms falling to his sides. the fear surges, rising, and he feels it. tastes the terror on his tongue, feels the moment that the friendly atmosphere shifts and they recoil from him.

he feels them die, too.

feels their memories pass through him as they die screaming to the void. sees his own face in their memories, the fleeting comradery in missions abroad. the betrayal at what he has done and he can't he can't he can't -

the void consumes them. it is not painless. he is desperate for justification, desperate to feel their hatred. to believe that this was justified, regain power and autonomy where he has none. their bodies twist and writhe in the dark only and he feels it, all of it, holds their lives in the palm of his hand and holds to the sharpness of their curses as they finally pass.

then he is alone.

only weiss is there.

weiss is there. and someone is screaming - nero is screaming.

he doesn't know how long he's been screaming. his throat is raw and his eyes are leaking, tears flooding down his cheeks. braving the storm of his emotion and hauling nero to him, unafraid that he may join them. his brother is gritting his teeth, burying nero's face in his shoulder and whispering over and over again that he's sorry.

he's sorry. he's sorry he couldn't protect him.

nero's arms come up slow and lock around his brother, collapsing into wracking sobs. slowly the darkness abates, pulls away from where it had been clawing at the glass, desperate to consume those who stood there and took notes as the child slaughtered his peers.

weiss smooths his hair, tells him over and over that it's okay. this wasn't his fault. this was never his fault.

the "wonderful job, nero" spoken over crackling speakers is unheard over the sound of a child mourning the last of his innocence.

THE MASK.

appearances don’t matter in deepground. there’s little time for attraction when your lives are spent under a microsope, every aspect of your being open for dissection. you feel less like a person and more like a poor assembly of bones and blood waiting to be taken apart.

he had been told he took after his father. whoever that was, whatever that was meant to mean. it was always delivered in a mocking tone, scornful of his existence. nero was a success but he was never meant to be one, he was meant to fail like all the others, an example hojo could use to rub in his mother’s face.  he knows this, and he knows that this is why the professor likes him the least of all his pet experiments. 

because though nero had claimed her life as he’d come squalling into the world, she had succeeded where hojo had failed.

you have your father’s eyes and his stunning lack of wit, the professor sniffed, yanking his hand back when it was clear nero was unwilling to cooperate with yet animation examination, his oblivion pooling along his skin. they’d been weaker then, only able to manifest with skin to skin contact and completely at will. it was a foolish act of rebellion as all it did was encourage the good doctor to nod to the scientists on either side of him, a silent signal to put him out if he was going to be difficult. the disgust in his eyes had been palpable. learn to make life easier for yourself, boy.

( he does, after that, he does. he’s just old enough to know better then, clever despite hojo’s insistence that he is lacking.  he learns to play along to get what he wants, and what he wants is to be left alone when he’s not permitted to be with weiss. he learns control at the expense of all else. suffocating his little freedoms with the need to belong. )

and so when hojo hands him a mask at eleven (a simple cloth facemask, something he could put on and take off at will) with a sneer and a command to cover his wretched face until the examination was over, he’d done so without complaint. something about it was displeasing and if he wanted to get through this in one piece, he would do his best to mind his terrible face and continue on.

it wasn’t uncommon, after all. everything about nero was either unsettling or displeasing. he couldn’t be controlled or corralled the way others could be. he couldn’t be shattered the way rosso was, nor could they implant something to control him the way they did weiss. his body was wrong, his powers were wrong,  he was wrong.

until that moment, though, he had never considered his appearance to be one of those things. mirrors were scarce, and even if he had easy access to one, he wouldn’t know what made someone attractive or unpleasant to look at. nero looked at his face and simply saw his face, pale and ragged and so often bruised.  something about him was unpleasant. this too was something wrong and something he must work to withhold.

yes, nero had thought as he’d slipped it over his mouth and nose, this makes sense.

( it was comforting, after a while. how much he could hide behind the mask. a small freedom he allowed himself. childish moments when they were allowed. )

the mask was worked into later designs of his restraints.  some were wild and elaborate, others simple and cleanly designed. most of them, after the first, could not be removed without a restrictor’s code. it was pointlessly elaborate, pointlessly cruel, and just another fact of life in deepground.

what nero understood was this: he was an unlovable abomination born for the express purpose of experimentation. it was a miracle weiss looked at him and felt and spark of familial love, especially given that were it not for him weiss may still have a mother to protect him from the worst of things here. and yet he did, he did. weiss shielded nero as best he could, though nero scarcely deserved it, and he loved him all the more for it.

unlike weiss he had no redeeming qualities, nothing to make him worth a damn to the world. it made sense that he was hideous to boot.  something to live in the shadows and cover up while weiss stood brilliantly before him, taking center stage while using nero as a backdrop. he existed to ensure weiss shone brighter, and he was fine with that. thrived in that even. at least that gave him purpose, a reason for his wretched existence, gave him use to weiss.

it makes sense, it makes sense because he never thinks to question it. to ask why when the answer was clearly him. he scarcely thinks of it as anything less than an absolute truth. 

until he sees his face on another person.

not exactly. not precisely. the elements he shares with his brother (half brother) are not present in this doppelganger’s countenance.  he takes in the shade of the eyes, the line of the nose, the high cheekbones, the ghastly pallor of their shared complexion. and as he does, nero understands something at that moment that he couldn’t possibly have understood as a boy. nor could he while looking at the aged, colorless photos of the once dead man before him.

it was never his face that was so offensive to professor hojo.

it was vincent valentine’s.

PAIN.

pain.

it's exquisite. divine. a break from the endless, painful nothing that has been the sable's entire bleak existence. the hand fisted in his hair is euphoric, the blood slowly tricking down his nose a blessed reminder that his heart beats. that he is alive.

in truth, he had been at his limit for some time. there was only so long he could rampage through the building before someone finally took him down. he'd imagined he would carry on until restrictor arrived, dangling the threat of his brother's life over his head.

the soldiers had posed little challenge. weak little things still wet behind the ears, genesis' abduction robbing them of all their best and brightest. he had resigned himself to exhausting himseif and going quitely until the redhead had entered the fray. he radiated a wild confidence that nero was certain he didn't feel, but surprised him by being a worthy match.

what he lacked in brawn, he made up for in skill.

( though he imagines a turk must know the secrets of the company, the secrets of his suit. the mako does not fuel him, it contains him, and all one needs to do to harm the undead is breathe life into them )

the damage sustained was far from lethal ( very little was lethal to nero ) but the mako leaking in to the open wounds had been what sealed his fate.

it was no accident, of that he's sure. the turk had aimed carefully. his veins burn with the flood of mako, his powers neutralized as it poisons him. makes him something infinitely mortal, more killable. his hands twitch with the aftershock of the electricity still working through is system, but he's already up again.

he lifts his head, blood dripping down the cloth of his mask. there's a delirious shine to his eyes as he raises his chin defiantly, the glint of teeth far too sharp to exist within a human mouth as he leans in closer, pressing into the still tingling weapon as he raises his own.

it doesn't seem to be a threat. more like a game. russian roulette. the press of his revolver against reno's side is almost friendly. playful. gleeful to have found a match capable of meeting his speed. the cock of his head asks the question, can you subdue me before i kill you?

"again."

[beardedmrbean]

[Huey Zoomer Anon]

Ugh black washing of anime characters discourse given the narcissism my community….but I making another theory in my head

Is there good enough compelling black characters with substance these days?

I mean here and there sure, but like black characters with substance of action, sci-fi, fantasy, that actually reach the black community these days?

I’m going to bitch about the first group, but I think I only seen like Wakanda and Miles Morales

Now MCU Wakanda the problem is…it main surface levels, like yeah I seen African cities and such combine their ancestral roots with modern contemporary buildings like you see across Europe and Asia

But as someone pointed out mcu wakanda look like oversized shantytown, I mean given their still have a tribal system. I think think they would have their own say district or monuments to symbolize which tribe own which part of the lands

Technically they did do that with the Gorilla theme tribes who lives in the mountains

Side note is giving hero armies helmets or fully face covers like the SW stormtroopers= a form of fascism in Hollywood costume departments these days?

I get you want to show off the actors faces…because can give their grunts good helmets?

They actually that their Yasuke base armor is heavily stylized. But at least he have a helmet and menpo (masks the samurai used) though weirdly his menpo only showed up in a piece of merch for now

And but back to the Wakandians…Wakanda Forever stated they didn’t have iron man style suits until after T’challa died when Shuri decided to make some…

Given that you guys have an extremely small population and now you revealed you have advance technology. I thought you guys would modernized the living SHIT out of your military the moment you guys was preparing Killmonger burial at sea and T’challa said that the kingdom isolation period is over?

Does any superhero writers these days do a quick google search on how modern warfare works? The pentagon is wasting so much money giving it to Hollywood…wait they already do that..

Sorry for these long rant y’all. One can say the huge amount of black characters that been created this past decade

But remember Quality over quantity! And I think what I call Pop Marxism (what I think wokeness really is, but the lazy ass diversity they do) cause lot of people with representation

They try to fix a problem…yet they show how SHELTER they are!

Yes I know I had enslaved ancestors, family roots in Alabama

Also the black community been making Jefferson and Sally dark jokes long before the 1960’s.

All that other stuff before and But as someone pointed out mcu wakanda look like oversized shantytown, I mean given their still have a tribal system. I think think they would have their own say district or monuments to symbolize which tribe own which part of the lands

I don't really know enough about all that in the comics world but I do agree that there's a need for originality or at least they need to not just throw a coat of black paint on something and treat it like it's something new.

Technically they did do that with the Gorilla theme tribes who lives in the mountains

I imagine twitter could get really funny with fake outrage over that kind of thing.

Side note is giving hero armies helmets or fully face covers like the SW stormtroopers= a form of fascism in Hollywood costume departments these days?

Cost saving measure, only need so many extras for the live shots because the dudes in armor can also be the dudes NOT in armor and for the large groups it's easier to program the computer that way.

My guess at least.

Maybe, for the most part at least, good guys wearing helmets can take theirs off, Mando is a outlier there, probably others too, it's all a guess.

I get you want to show off the actors faces…because can give their grunts good helmets? They actually that their Yasuke base armor is heavily stylized. But at least he have a helmet and menpo (masks the samurai used) though weirdly his menpo only showed up in a piece of merch for now

Again cost issues there are likely why they do that, then again when you get to the last few episodes of Ahsoka

You get to see that they've obviously been through the wringer and we get some differences in the look as a result.

Also likely showing off one more bit of aesthetic that would work for Thrawn and his whole art thing with the whole fairly obvious kintsugi aspect of this, like you get with broken ceramics in Japan among other places.

These guys are 100% cultists too, but that's another story.

And but back to the Wakandians…Wakanda Forever stated they didn’t have iron man style suits until after T’challa died when Shuri decided to make some…

Still haven't seen the BP movies, was gonna ask what T'challa was wearing but it doesn't have the repulsors and such so that's different.

Given that you guys have an extremely small population and now you revealed you have advance technology. I thought you guys would modernized the living SHIT out of your military the moment you guys was preparing Killmonger burial at sea and T’challa said that the kingdom isolation period is over? Does any superhero writers these days do a quick google search on how modern warfare works? The pentagon is wasting so much money giving it to Hollywood…wait they already do that..

I'd be wondering if they'd taken a moment to look at what's been going on in Europe for the last few decades.

And now there is a hyperwealthy first world nation with all kinds of advanced tech for medicine and what not in the eastern part of Africa near Somalia, Ethiopia, S. Sudan, Rwanda, and I think you see where I'm going with this. Nice of them to take the burden off of Europe for a bit. Modern military isn't going to do any good with a flood of "migrants" coming in so that's not really important and given the state of nearly every military from and African country I think they'll be ok with what they have already.

Might have to watch out for Ghana if they bring these bad boys in

This was in 2019, I imagine they've gotten even more advanced since then, might have spinners on the choppers wheels or something......

Sorry for these long rant y’all. One can say the huge amount of black characters that been created this past decade But remember Quality over quantity! And I think what I call Pop Marxism (what I think wokeness really is, but the lazy ass diversity they do) cause lot of people with representation They try to fix a problem…yet they show how SHELTER they are! Yes I know I had enslaved ancestors, family roots in Alabama Also the black community been making Jefferson and Sally dark jokes long before the 1960’s.

No worries, just if they come much later than this did they may need to sit till the next day, but this one gave me a moment to remember the powerful display by the glorious army of Ghana, so totally worth it.

[artg210-karenf]

Summary #6:

In the article “I wrote the book on user-friendly design. What I see today horrifies me” by Don Norman he talks about how there is a disconnection between designs and people's ability to use these designs. As most of the Western world’s population is aging, you would think that accessibility, especially vision accessibility, would become more commonplace and promoted. However, Norman’s opinion states that the opposite is happening. Everyday items are more difficult to use, think about cans where it is sealed so tightly that you cannot open them, or packaging that requires a knife to open. These designs are not accessible to people with any form of disability or mobility impairment. When items are designed for elders or disabled people, they often are bland, and unstylish and highlight that they are unable to do something. Norman mentions how canes used to be stylish and even fashionable to the point where able-bodied people would use them as an accessory. Thinking back, when was the last time you saw someone use a stylish cane? Most canes or mobility aids look like they came straight out of a hospitable, in an ugly white or grey plastic. This makes people not want to use mobility aids even if they need them and only increases the stigma of using a medical device. As mentioned previously, labels for medicine are also too small, but it isn't just medical labels that are like this. Think about nutrition labels and ingredient lists for processed foods. Often the font size is too small or there is a low contrast between the font colour and the background colour. Even captions in movies or TV shows have this issue. Captions often block parts of the show or even have overlapping words, making it impossible to read what is going on. While these may seem like minor inconveniences to the designer as JP Williams stated in “Design Issue: The State of the Ballot”, the user is never wrong and is never stupid. If something is designed to make a user feel stupid or complete a task incorrectly, it is poorly designed. Ignoring good, accessible designs can have serious effects on the user, whether it makes them vote incorrectly, causes environmental damage, or leaves them confused. To do this the RGD Access-Ability handbook states that we should design for the outliers and identify the wide range of human ability. We should consider the range of eyesight ability, hearing ability and cognitive ability when designing. By using grouping or hierarchies in our design, it makes them easier to understand and comprehend. Keeping text short, literal and clear makes it easier to scan. Avoid typefaces where ‘I1l’ (that's uppercase i, the number one, and the lowercase L) look the same or typefaces that use mirrored letters. Instead increase contrast, line spacing and tracking of text elements to make them more legible. Make your design perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. Test everything to make sure it is accessible for people with vision impairments, difficulty hearing and cognitive impairments. For my designs, I make sure to test for colour blindness by changing my work to grayscale so that I know my work is legible. 

Key Take-Aways:

Disconnection in design makes it harder for people to use the product

Accessibility should be considered at the beginning of a design

Design for the outliers

Design to reduce stigma

Test every design for every condition

Real-World Examples of Inaccessible Designs:

The photo above shows an instruction sheet for my own prescription medicine. In this 3 page document, only three sentences (the highlighted ones) were important for my understanding of the medicine I was taking. While warnings, side effects and the use of my medicine are important, most of this information is jargon. This text was not easy to scan, hence why I had to highlight the information on how to take a dose of my medicine. The order in which the information is presented is also confusing, considering this is a prescription drug, I already know the use for it. Instead the ‘side effects’ and ‘how to use’ should come before the ‘uses’ section.

[dontpetmeibite]

Ravage manages not to spray coolant fizz all over her stepdaughter or her desk. "How is it that you come from a universe where natural reproduction is common and I have to tell you these things? You wouldn't have been possible in our universe for more reasons than one; we're still trying to figure out how to undo what the Quintessons did to the vast majority of the non-Predacon, non-Matrix-bearing population."

She shakes her head. "Okay. So. For the most part, bitlets come from blacksmiths, like Silvermist and Glit. Frozen sparks, forged frames with growth-plates. Sometimes they come out of hot spots too, but a lot of the hot spots are dead. The Quints fucked around with our species and tried to make it so that Primus, in the living body of Cybertron, was the only being who could generate bitlets. But Predacons are called that because we're all wild-type. Anyhow."

She swallows another drink of the fizz.

"Naturally produced bitlets are produced by spark-merging. Two people love each other very very much, so instead of just fooling around with interface arrays and fields and cables, they actually open their chest plates and merge sparks. Sometimes a new spark splits off the merged sparks during merging and if you don't have a blacksmith around to forge a body you've got problems unless one of you has a gestation tank, which are usually only found in Predacons. I do not have one because it was broken when I was a lot younger. But Soundwave does and with the Matrix involved it seems sometimes like it's always on, too."

This is when she'd be blushing if she wasn't painted black, although if Remix has heat sensors on she can probably still tell.

"In order to support natural carrying and help the carrier grow protoform in the gestation tank, it, uh... well. You need to do a lot of sticky-facing, and the carrier has to use their valve. All of the fluids--which carry CNA--go into the construction of the protoform. That is why people who carry naturally and have multiple partners often have bitlets that look as much like their other lovers, and occasionally even a bit more, than they look like their spark-sire. This is why Improv looks like Jazz a lot and Catfish looks like Nautica and why Soundwave would like us to have one with Roddy participating. This is also why people don't always realise Sparkthief is adopted, because he looks an awful lot like Jazz. Viridian and Soundblaster just look like us, but that is because Soundwave's brother made them in a lab, and the fact that one has my frame type and the other Soundwave's, but the outlier powers are reversed, should tell you a lot about Onyx's sense of what I hesitate to call humour."

Ravage isn't sure why telling Remix this is embarrassing.

If she were telling a human, she'd be cackling the whole time watching them freak the fuck out about it.

[stagnantmako]

081. — forced to hurt someone

there were more of them once.

the survivors are, of course, the red, the black, and the white.

but his childhood was a myriad of colors. other children just like him, like his brother, all of them toted to be the next generation of soldier. precursors to a new era of prosperity for the planet.

but the others were not nearly as successful.

nero is eight. he's the youngest of all of them, the last successful attempt before shinra decided to pivot and focus on adult test subjects. there is a slow decline in their care - they were but a proof of concept, the prototypes. never meant to make it to launch.

some die slow. the experiments that created them showing late-stage complications. their immune systems turning against their own bodies, their minds collapsing against the weight of the voices of the planet pressing in and in and in.

nero can't say he was close to any of them - even amongst the discards and the freaks, he was an outlier - but they were still there. populating the spaces he was permitted to roam when he was permitted to roam them. they were part of the deepground he knew, live steal but blunted at the edges.

and so it made sense that their deaths marked the end of that era.

the file before him is heavy. nero does not bother stepping forward - it's not for him, it's for the handler to his left.

"all of them?" the man whistles, shaking his head.

"they're a waste of beds and resources," professor hojo says coolly. "once we cull the weak we can bring in the more promising recruits."

nero feels cold inside. colder than he usually feels, something twisting deep in his chest. his bound hands clench his shoulders and he hunches down as far as the chains will let him.

"sable," the professor says, and nero looks up. "this is not a test. you are not leave any survivors."

but it is a test. he knows it. a test of his abilities, a test of his willingness to obey. they've already told him that if he fails to comply they will punish weiss, but if he does a good job then the two of them can move into a compound together.

the chains holding him jerk forward, drawing him towards the training hall. inside he can hear his fellow tsviets talking amongst themselves, expressing their impatience and irritation that the exam has not started yet. their confusion that so many of them are gathered here. is this to be a free for all?

the world is complicated. but this choice is not. yet nero finds himself unable to step across the threshold, frozen in place. his breathing quickens, the urge to run strikes in a way it never has before.

( some have died before. deaths due to experimentation. death due to failing health. deaths on field missions.

but none have died at the hands of a fellow tsviet. )

restrictor kicks him forward and nero stumbles forward, catching himself awkwardly. all eyes are on him, the confusion on their faces even more apparent. his wide eyes flick from face to face, he turns towards the way he'd come only to find restrictor's cold eyes glaring through the slats in the armor.

"nero?" one girl says, her voice gentle. he doesn't know her, not well, but she has always been kind. the sort to bandage wounds even when you should leave the wounded behind. "are you training with us today?"

he doesn't move. he feels the flicker of her fear, and that he holds onto. the fear. desperately clutching at any justification for this cruelty. they fear him, they hate him. he has never been one of them, would never be one of them.

the restraints release, nero's arms falling to his sides. the fear surges, rising, and he feels it. tastes the terror on his tongue, feels the moment that the friendly atmosphere shifts and they recoil from him.

he feels them die, too.

feels their memories pass through him as they die screaming to the void. sees his own face in their memories, the fleeting comradery in missions abroad. the betrayal at what he has done and he can't he can't he can't -

the void consumes them. it is not painless. he is desperate for justification, desperate to feel their hatred. to believe that this was justified, regain power and autonomy where he has none. their bodies twist and writhe in the dark only and he feels it, all of it, holds their lives in the palm of his hand and holds to the sharpness of their curses as they finally pass.

then he is alone.

only weiss is there.

weiss is there. and someone is screaming - nero is screaming.

he doesn't know how long he's been screaming. his throat is raw and his eyes are leaking, tears flooding down his cheeks. h braving the storm of his emotion and hauling nero to him, unafraid that he may join them. his brother is gritting his teeth, burying nero's face in his shoulder and whispering over and over again that he's sorry.

he's sorry. he's sorry he couldn't protect him.

nero's arms come up slow and lock around his brother, collapsing into wracking sobs. slowly the darkness abates, pulls away from where it had been clawing at the glass, desperate to consume those who stood there and took notes as the child slaughtered his peers.

weiss smooths his hair, tells him over and over that it's okay. this wasn't his fault. this was never his fault.

the "wonderful job, nero" spoken over crackling speakers is unheard over the sound of a child mourning the last of his innocence.

[thecicadasofficial]

We’re the Cicadas!

Hello Dusty Country (And beyond!). I’m everyone’s favorite bear, Ryan Hoover, and this is the official Cicadas Tumblr blog. Now just between you and me, Old Moe, you know, the guy who runs this team, he doesn’t know about this whole project. It’s kind of a secret, so keep it on the down low, alright?

Anyway, I guess I ought to introduce you to my teammates, right? Well, I’ve already introduced you to Moe Hue. He’s a bit of a stick in the mud and boy does he love yelling. Also, he’s a baseball fanatic. He eats and drinks the sport. It’s nuts. Douglas Hernandez is really dang smart. He was valedictorian of his high school and was on track to become a dentist before joining the Cicadas. He’s also stupid young for such an accomplished person, which is probably why he has no social skills to speak of. What? I never said these descriptions were going to be nice!

Buzz Jones is a really cool fellow. Sure, he’s barely literate, but he makes up for it by being built like a tank. I swear, he’s got muscles the size of my head, and they aren’t just for show. Also, don’t tell him I told you, but he’s an excellent baker!

Paul Rivet is a bit of an outlier on the team. Don’t get me wrong, we “appreciate him” and “value his contributions” And all of that Moe Hue speak, but he’s a swimmer, not a ball player. He likes the water, it’s where he’s most comfortable, being a former lifeguard and swim team champ and all. I dunno. Maybe I’m missing his hidden “talent”.

Hank Olberry is one of them southerners. Ya know, “grits and gravy and hush your mouth”? Okay, okay, he’s from New Mexico just like most of us, but he’s from some rural town with a population of 5.4. He’s kind of new to this whole “living in suburbia” thing, but if you can get him past his nerves, he’s a pretty cool guy.

Casey, Casey, Casey Leroy Torhaul. What can be said about the great Casey? Well, how about we start with his great ego? Or his great incompetence? Or his great lack of common sense? Casey tends to be very annoying, but he can also be very entertaining, so it’s not all bad when he’s around.

Toro Perez is… quiet. I guess. I dunno too much about the guy honestly. He mostly hangs around Hank and draws in his sketchbooks. I know he’s not the healthiest person out there, and I also know he hasn’t had the easiest go of things. That’s about it.

Hubert Cufferd is a jolly fellow. He’s not the smartest guy, but he makes up for that in heart. Don’t tell him that I’m telling y’all this, but even though I complain about his team building exercises, I do enjoy hanging around him. Sometimes. Sometimes he is annoying.

And then there’s me. I’m Ryan Hoover. A lot of people say I’m abrasive or sarcastic or tough to talk to, and for the most part they’re right, but I’m not a bad guy. I just don’t mess around with all of the formalities of language.

So that’s us. I hope y’all get to asking us some questions pretty soon. We’re always open to it! Here’s a picture of all of us! You know, just to put a face to our names:

From left to right, bottom row, there’s me, Ryan Hoover, Casey Leroy Torhaul, Buzz Jones, and Paul Rivet. In the top row, it’s Hubert Cufferd, Moe Hue, Douglas Hernandez, Hank Olberry, and Toro Perez.

[skycapt4in]

NOAH AND HIS QUIRKY LUCK POWER a post about the spaceman's luck

I know I've talked about Noah's luck power before but I cannot find the post so I either deleted it, tumblr ate it, or just didn't make a detailed post about it. So, this post will fix that hopefully!

About 80% of Earth's population are born with superpowers, you have a pretty similar power to what's been established in your family and Noah's family ability is being able to mess around with luck on some level. Noah's mother is the outlier as she married into Gary's (Noah's biological father) bloodline. Her power is that she's able to sense the emotions of others if you're interested.

Out of the three children Gary and Clara had, Noah is the only one who's power cannot directly influence other people? Sort of? I mean, his siblings can control the luck of others (his older brother can only alter the bad luck of others, his sister can edit both types of luck for others and herself) whereas Noah's luck is just a stat buff to himself mostly.

Speaking of the stat buff: Noah's ability works by improving his good luck by 30%. He cannot control it though, actually he didn't know he had a superpower until his early 30s when he went back to Earth, things just always seemed to have worked out for him. Since learning about his power he's still not found a way to control it and he doubts he ever will as it essentially works as an extra sense in a way?? Like spidey sense but much more calmer and with more of a tendency to gently, subconsciously, lead him to his end goal; although if it's working to save his life because his idiotic ass is in danger, then it's a little bit more !!! and he can tell it's not his thinking brain that's doing all the work.

Technically you can argue that his luck does work on others, if you're a friend of his then you'll likely reap the good things that a walking luck magnet can bring to the table, and if you're an enemy of his and you're trying to one up him somehow, then well it's probably not going to work too much in your favour.

Also, the stat buff doesn't mean that he will always come out on top with the best outcome, maybe at some point it might have done just that had he lead a normal life, but your superpowers in the quirky lil universe Noah hails from, change and adapt to the life you lead and as Noah has been living most of his life in some kind of danger, his luck ability switched from giving him the advantage to get the best outcome, to getting the outcome that means he'll live for another day. There is also no actual guarantee that his luck has him full protected from danger either, as it is only a 30% increase to his natural luck.

With all that said, I'm using this as an excuse to talk about Gloah for this part, but Glowy Noah does not have the same luck ability anymore, what I said about your power changing to suit your life happens a lot in Noah's arc ( <- i did it. i said the funny ) and for Gloah it.. well it is the sole reason he is still alive, functioning and is still on some level Noah Torrent. It is the one thing keeping him human and keeping him from completely burning/fizzling out because his body can't handle his new powerset and anatomy. It does not affect his day to day life the way it did, it does not give him the 'Hm, I should move a meter to the left.' vibe when something is about to fall on his head, it's primary function has changed from a 30% luck increase to a 30% chance he'll live to see another day. Yet another reason why he's so mad and grouchy.

[rockatanskette]

Living in the USAmerican South is sad, but not (only) for the reasons you think. I had a meeting last week with a faculty member at a university with one of the only fully-funded creative writing MFAs in the country. A fully funded Master in Fine Arts program is funded entirely by the university: tuition, living expenses, with a stipend. They pay you to go to school there, in a country that charges upward of $120 grand for a three-year MFA. 600 people a year apply for the fewer than a dozen spots in this program.

When I asked what I could do to make myself stand out, he said, "The fact that you already live here may help." Because when people get accepted to this golden-ticket program, the politics of the South forces them elsewhere. And that breaks my fucking heart.

To be clear, I use the word "forces" incredibly intentionally. I fully understand how hostile Southern legislation and politics is to basically anyone who isn't a wealthy Christian cishet White man. I've lived here almost all my life as a queer Jewish person who can get pregnant—I've experienced a measure of that hostility firsthand.

But I've also experienced love and respect and compassion and community that goes undocumented because it's so damn ordinary. It's everywhere.

I think the community is the part that kills me, because minority groups in the South only get talked about on a national scale when we're the victims of crimes, which does a great disservice to the magnitude and depth of community in the South; the queer communities, the Black communities, the Jewish communities, the Muslim communities, the Latine and Indigenous and Desi and the list keeps on going. These demographics aren't outliers just because White supremacists say they are—they're the fucking fabric of the South. 56 percent of the Black population of the United States lives in the South; almost half the population of the state of Texas is Latine or Hispanic; Southern cities make up half the ten largest US populations of Indian-Americans, Pakistani-Americans, Irani-Americans, and honestly I could keep going. Do I even have to talk about Jews in Florida? I swear half of them go to my babushka's synagogue. Queer populations are historically harder to get a clear census of, but you bet your ass we're here too.

And, many of us are here on purpose, which is the part where I start turning my heartbreak into anger. Because do you know how fucking painful it is when you're venting about the evilest people on the planet making it basically illegal to live in the place you call home and your cousin from Jersey tells you to just move, already? I don't want to move. All my shit is here: my mountains and my swamps and my barbecue and my temple and the first girl I ever kissed and my favorite lesbian bar and my trans best friend and rodeos and biscuits and bourbon and blues and the random Yee Yee boy who followed me out of a bar in the rain at midnight the other night to tell a visibly queer me that I was driving with my trunk open and offered to close it so I didn't have to get out of my car. Which was terrifying until it became incredibly sweet.

Some of the best people I know live in the South. We are so much more and so much stronger than tokens and victims and if you think the South is populated entirely—or even mostly—by conservative White hicks, you're buying into a fascist racist queerphobic lie fueled by gerrymandering and the for-profit prison system. There are plenty of queer and liberal and leftist hicks of color down here, too, and we don't need the rest of the country siding with the Nazis in charge. Tell them to get out.

The faculty member I spoke to is an award-winning writer who has been compared to Langston Hughes, Etheridge Knight, and Gwendolyn Brooks. He grew up in a predominantly Black neighborhood in the North, then attended school in New England and the Pacific Northwest. He wasn't born in the South, but he lives here now.

I laughed when he said that living in the South might give me an advantage; partly at the irony, but partly because, "I'm not leaving the South until they make me. I learned that when I tried living in England for a year and spent the whole time wishing the US had free healthcare and trains. I love this place. I want to make it better."

He smiled a smile I've seen echoed in the faces of so many people who live their lives seeing raw beauty in a place dismissed as ugly and unsalvageable. It's tinged with sadness but born of joy.

"Yeah. I know exactly what you mean."

[fenmere]

We are not diagnosed with DID, but we have taken the self reporting schedule and fully qualify for a diagnosis - and when it flared its strongest, it did (heh) completely disrupt our life, losing us our career, marriage, and house (though other disabilities contributed to the career part). Avoiding the diagnosis was part of having a successful transition, too.

Every DID system is very different, though. We recovered from the most debilitating symptoms very quickly, for instance, and consider ourselves mostly a functional system now.

But, we're huge and continue to grow in number, and are belligerently out as plural and overt in presentation in order to maintain that management.

Also, we write about plurality a LOT, and approve of keeping your character's system smaller to make writing about them easier.

Also, communication via sticky notes is not something we've had to do, but it is something we really enjoying seeing in representation because it seems fun and cute to us (possibly because we don't know how much of a pain in the butt it can be). We use a whole slew of other communication methods from just talking out loud to each other, to journaling on social media and writing novels and then rereading what we've written over and over. Writing comments about our day and then rereading them when people react to them turns out to be a pretty good and organic way of keeping track of what we've done.

Anyway, the questions: ---

What do you consider yourself to be? A host with alters? A living conglomerate? A person with a condition that you've adapted to? We are a mid sized nation of people in a human suit. We are individuals with no host (never was one), who can trace our inner lineage to two individuals (Jenifer and Eh) who were born with the body. We have a huge population that just kind of chill in our subconscious and have fun (we hope) living their lives by dreaming and playing memory support while a small few of us share fronting duties. We are also autistic, trans, and therian, all of which contribute to the feeling that we're outsiders to the rest of the world, and that our real world is the one in our head.

If you're comfortable, can you describe the triggers/experience of switching? Most of the time, we are fairly coconscious, blurry, and highly switchy. In this state, we can switch fluidly and lucidly, whenever we want. We think of the person we want to front and basically pull them forward. If we need some kind of focal action to help facilitate it, swiping our hand across our vision works really well for us. But, there are involuntary triggers. And also, when we've been highly stressed and distressed for a long period of time, we get very strongly separated and start experiencing blackouts and other types of amnesia, and our switches become almost entirely involuntary. Even then, unlike a lot of other systems, they happen without us even noticing. There's no pain, no headache, no period of dissociation (that we can remember). We just suddenly become another person. These switches are usually triggered by the following things: - walking through doors - talking to a new and different person (changing our social situation) - listening to a different type of music - starting a project - a loud noise or unexpected question - generally any situation that requires what other people experience as code switching - some (but not all) of our C-PTSD type triggers Our DID seems mostly to be triggered by our autistic/ADHD needs (overstimulation, emotional dysregulation, switching special interests, etc.). We have C-PTSD, and a whole host of triggers for that, but having that triggered often doesn't increase our amnesia or fugue states. We're maybe an outlier in this regard, but it would be cool to see a system like us in someone else's writing some day.

What is your relationship with your alters? Do they fall in the archetypes certain people talk about in certain circles online? For most of us who front regularly, we're a tight knit team of romantic couples and polycules who experiencing running our life much like drifting in jaegers is depicted in Pacific Rim, or fusing gems in Steven Universe. We're an experience. However, we have had some members who fall into the something close to the persecutor role, particularly during our times of turmoil before we figured out we were plural in the first place. And we definitely have our protectors. We generally like to use our own terms to describe the jobs we often take on or switch up. Very few of us are fundamentally a Thing. We're people, and we each grow and change. But, we do have id monsters, as sort of a gender and a role, who are closer to our system's basic needs and like to play monsters in our nightmares, to bring messages about what we fear or require. We like to give them a constructive outlet in our writing whenever we can and celebrate them as admirable and needed members of our culture. And the vast majority of us, particularly that mostly silent huge population, are what we call liaisons (effectively introjects). They autistically special interest their subjects, each one having a person, animal, or fictional character that they study and learn how to imitate. But since most of these members come from people we just glimpse on the street, they don't really have a chance to play that role, so they retreat back into our subconscious and seem to form communities there and become extras in our dreams and fiction a lot of the time. And then we have the liaisons of people like Trump. And we don't know what to do about them. We don't let them front, at all, which seems like a violation of their human rights. But fronting is participating in our government, and we can't have people we don't trust doing that. These liaisons need to do things to prove to us that they are not their sources and that they have grown to be better people. It's really unfortunate, but it's also where we get some of our more annoying intrusive thoughts, so we do have to manage them in this way. They are really super rare, though. Otherwise, those of us who front most frequently call ourselves the Senior Officers. And the roles we play while fronting include pilot, captain, and operations. And these are just seats we each temporarily take. Pilot fronts, captain manages, and everyone else is part of operations and support, ready to switch out with either the pilot or captain as needed. Most of the time, talking to us is like talking to the entire bridge crew of the starship Enterprise, if it was run by anarchist pirates.

How would you describe DID joy? Oh, OK. For us, there's so much of it. There's the humor inherent in realizing that you outnumber just about anyone (Tril outnumbers most any given person they're talking to, we outnumber Seattle). But, it's humorous, because despite outnumbering someone, in practicality it doesn't matter (there's the bottleneck of just one body). So you get to joke about it without it being an actual threat to anyone. It's kind of fun to talk about being a clown car of sorts, or breaking the fire code of a room or building. Then there's realizing that you're never alone, and that you have each other's backs, and that you got through the roughest parts of life by supporting each other. It makes you a powerful team, and there are things you can do that no singlet can do, and it's worthy of pride. Sometimes you might think of your fellow members as siblings, or best friends, or partners (it gets fuzzy a bit, because the outworld rules of relationships do not practically apply or matter). And that's a powerful feeling when you can sense each other.

What do you absolutely hate in representation of DID in media? That DID requires recovery, and that recovery must involve final fusion. This is just not true. Final fusion can be a beautiful thing and some systems strive for it and are thankful that they've achieved it (and it's usually something they have to keep working on. But it only succeeds for about 12.5% of the cases that strive for it. The norm is that most systems have to work toward functional multiplicity. And the media focuses so much on final fusion that it basically serves as propaganda for the saneism of neuronormativity. Depictions of functional multiplicity are much needed. We also strongly dislike the idea that DID requires some kind of really bad trauma, and the focus on dredging up that trauma and making it part of the plot of the story. This isn't so much to push for depictions of endogenic DID (DID that arises from causes other than trauma), so much as not making the trauma the center of the story. In the vast majority of cases of DID, systemic and repeated childhood trauma is part of their history and it can make for a tempting story to write. It's just been done so much, and so intensely (Doom Patrol is a really, really good example of this being done well, too). But once a system reaches some sort of stability and starts to get on with their life, it becomes a backdrop, something they still deal with regularly but that doesn't actually dominate their every conscious or subconscious moment. If you have a system who is successfully working as a professional, they've largely dealt with their past and have figured out how to adapt and move on.

Questions for DID Writers/Readers!

Hi friends! So as I reach the end of Migration Patterns, book two in my series, I've settled on introducing Trillium, or Trill. Trill is a birthright, meaning they are a part of the community of people in my magic system who were born with a disability that allows them access to a specific and innate magic. But they are also untapped, meaning that - even though they identify with the culture - they don't have the ability associated with birthrights of the dissociative variant.

They have DID, and I imagine them to be a smaller system with three or four members. In the role of the story they all work on the legal team for an outreach center that provides representation to birthrights and other underserved communities. I saw them as having minimal connection to each other, but they manage to communicate enough to work together in research, drafting, and ultimately presenting their cases.

This is a really important character in the third book, and even though I don't really consider myself capable of presenting the DID experience in the pages of some genre epic as someone who is a different type of dissociative, I would really love to do my best to make sure I provide a cool character for people to enjoy. And I'd love some help and insight so I could make that happen!

So if you identify as having DID, can you give me your answers to the questions below?

What do you consider yourself to be? A host with alters? A living conglomerate? A person with a condition that you've adapted to?

If you're comfortable, can you describe the triggers/experience of switching?

What is your relationship with your alters? Do they fall in the archetypes certain people talk about in certain circles online?

How would you describe DID joy?

What do you absolutely hate in representation of DID in media?

Thank you so much in advance for your help! If this sounds weird, you're welcome to learn more about book one of my series here. I know it's a weird thing to pitch what if all sorcerers were disabled, but the magic is not really focused on as much as the characters just living their lives and interacting with each other. It's less fantasy and more magical realism. And food descriptions. And asexual tenderness oops.