#deadlock haze

[homiu-l]

insane women designs dropped from new valve MOBA shooter game rn

[replicafatale]

love it when i'm playing paradox and a good haze drops into my lane, kills everyone and then i send her off with a healing rite as she disappears back into darkness. peak yuri

[francescamagali]

Happy Deadlock Conversation Embargo Lift Day.

[qiacord]

[noblish]

hey so i made some paradox x haze deadlock fanart -v-

ive had too much fun with this game

and obsessed with the lesbianism of these two

[uglycoal]

haze v1 from old deadlock artstyle

[theofficialtoast]

Haze and Wraith

[milesplayshu]

more Deadlock gameplay, mainly wanting to play Haze

[unfeltpleasures]

i lost

[benreyficial]

what r everyone’s favorite characters to play in deadlock i personally really like vindicta and wraith

[cozzzynook]

Something happens and Drift becomes Deadlock again. He's exploring the room he shares with Ratchet and notices what seems to be a third person either living there or visiting often. He can see stuff that's not his or Ratchets laying around. Also a lot of the photos he has are of him Ratchet and this other person.

Deadlock asks about it and Ratchet gets all flustered. They both had feelings for Rodimus but weren't sure if he felt the same way or if they both had feelings for Rodimus.

Deadlock pushes Ratchet to confess.

What Deadlock finds would probably be things like an abundance of fuel that has to be seasoned and cooked. Its an ingredient hab instead of a ready fuel hab. He knows he can’t cook worth slag and he knows Ratchet is too busy to cook daily like this.

So he figures there’s another bot living with them.

Even as Deadlock he wanted to conjunx Ratchet so he’s not surprised they’re conjunx and living together but what does surprise him is learning theres another thats always with them.

He feels like someone is missing when he wakes up and its just Ratchet with him.

When Ratchet tells him he’ll explain later and that he should rest, he keeps pushing it off until the two reach their hab and he sees the fuel. Sees things like art work he knows neither could create, along with lots of photos of a beautiful red mech with greats hips and a big chassis in photos with them.

He asks Ratchet about the mech and Ratchet’s response makes something tick in his spark and processor.

“He’s a really close friend of yours and he’s become a pretty close friend of mine too. His name is Rodimus,” Ratchet vaguely explains not looking Deadlock in the optics long enough for it to be the whole truth.

“And.”

“What do you mean and?”

“He’s more to us than that.”

He states it plainly, having no time for beating around the bush. He was already beaten up enough to need minor surgery on his internals he didn’t want to add anymore inconveniences, not even pertaining emotional matters.

“He’s just a friend,” Ratchet sighs looking in the kitchen for something to eat for the both of them. There’s three rows full of different fuels already made that just need to be heated up. Ratchet gives off the hint of a smile that reaches his optics and lights up his spark. Deadlock shifts a tad and sees the note attached to the fuel but can’t read it once its gripped in Ratchets servo as he pulls out fuel.

He raises an optic ridge at the doc who pointedly ignores his unspoken question.

Thats fine.

He could play this game.

Early morning comes and Deadlock wakes to the sound of pede steps that sound familiar but are foreign all the same and he curses getting knocked out by the slimy creature on the supposed desolate planet.

“Don’t even think about it kid, he’s still recharging so I can administer yer meds. Now hold still.”

That sounded interesting enough and he had nothing better to do. So with a quick set of motions Deadlock was quietly standing in the doorway to the living den where Ratchet was holding a syringe that was glowing dimly with deep bright tones at the end.

“You don’t have to do this Ratch, I’ve been doing this for millions of years,” the mech smiled trying not to move. The cmo raised his dermas to a slight snarl and the mech quieted.

Shifting his helm as he let Ratchet inject him directly next to his spark he sees Deadlock watching them from the doorway with a fearful expression.

He gives a soft smile to the cyber kitten like mech and waits until Ratchet takes the needle out to reassure him.

“Its just spark medicine, no biggie,” he softly relays, standing on his pedes to go over to the fridge and grab one of the few metals he left here.

He grabs a soft zinc stick with sweet silver bits littered on it and takes a bite. He closes the fridge and turns only to jump at the mech being so close to him.

Large servos rest on his hip plating and he feels his spark haze.

“Dri-Deadlock?”

“You smell like me and the doc.”

He doesn’t back away when he says it. In fact he gets closer, finials twitching in the renowned cyber cat fashion he used to be so known for. Rodimus could feel his claws slipping out as they gently rubbed his sensitive biolights and that was his cue to escape Deadlocks grasp.

“I think i’ll head out now, thanks for my shot Ratchet. I’ll be on the bridge if you need me,” he gave a nervous smile as he moved to leave but Deadlock didn’t let him.

“I feel a lie on your glossa,” the smirk on his face plates was far too handsome to be fair and Rodimus looked to Ratchet for help.

“I need to get back to my hab,” Rodimus tried again but Deadlock still didn’t budge.

“Ah ah ah,” the mech purred, engine rumbling his frame as he twirled an imaginary tail, “this is your hab. After all, the spark medicine in the wash racks belongs to you and you’re the only Rodimus I see.”

The way he purred the captains designation left Rodimus weak in the knees and he was feeling his modesty panels slipping. His valve was growing hot and he knew this was definitely not the time nor place for this, especially since he was not their conjunx or partner.

“I..I spend a lot of time here but this isn’t my hab,” Rodimus spook truthfully, “you guys are conjunx,” Rodimus finally acknowledged, “i’m just a really cool third wheel,” he half joked, half somber.

“Third wheel?”

Deadlock was in disbelief at that but Rodimus was serious and looking at the doc nod on agreement he scowled.

“So I’ve become a coward as an autobot?”

“Huh?”

“And you doc? Just giving up? Still rolling over and taking it?”

Ratchet scowled fiercely at that but Deadlock was right. He never said a word of his feelings and neither did Drift. Always too busy dancing around the truth to even admit it aloud to themselves and each other.

“Whats going on?”

“Whats going on, flame princess, is that doc here and the valve sucker I’ve become are too scared to admit wanting you.”

“Say what?”

Rodimus had a dumbstruck look on his face plates that made Deadlock cock an optic ridge.

“Insecurity does not fit you princess.”

“Don’t call me princess,” Rodimus frowned.

“I’m callin it like I see it princess,” Deadlocks smirk was cut throat but Ratchet wasn’t letting him keep it for long.

“Oh really? So, since you’re callin it like ya see it, why not tell Rodimus here how much you really want him. If I’m remembering correctly we never said it but we sure did let our em fields.”

Deadlock grimaced at that and Rodimus was holding onto Deadlock like a lifeline until Ratchet came up to him and traced his cheek plating with a digit.

“We..we like ya kid, a lot, actually. We have for, we have for a long long time now.”

Ratchets optics were the softest he’d ever seen them.

He’s only ever looked at Drift with those optics but now, now he looked at Rodimus with those same optics and Rodimus couldn’t help but look back. Tears on the verge of dropping and spark on the brink of halting from shock.

“Before the war ended, when you came to check on us during our days on Cybertron and when we joined the Lost light. We’ve..we’ve loved you for a long time…”

“Even..even after..”

“Through everything,” Ratchet rested him helm agsinst Rodimus’s, leaving room for one more, “through everything,” he laid bare.

Claws retracted from his hips but the servos did not.

“We’re doing this now Ratty?”

“Drift!”

Rodimus hugged the both of them tightly making them smile.

He shifted to look at the both of them when Drift held his cheek in the palm of his servo, gazing into him trying to find his aura.

Rodimus let him have it.

And what he saw left Drift in tears.

“I didn’t think I could have you,” Rodimus mumbled, “so I was happy to have this. For as long as I could. Just being with you, that would be enough for me. But you…you both really?”

“I wish I’d been completely myself when we said it. But yeah Roddy. We love you. All of you.”

Resting their helms together didn’t feel hard.

It felt normal.

Like a thousand lifetimes had gone by with this exact moment happening on repeat. It warmed something within Rodimus spark and he slipped into them.

Em fields becoming one, all three stood in each others arms.

Drift couldn’t help but thank the other half of himself.

He doesn’t think they’d be here without him.

-

Idk how this turned out but I tried.

[replicafatale]

one cool thing I just noticed in deadlock: chars have situational lines for when they're low health & sound more frustrated/desperate trying to land their abilities. loooove that detail

[shuttershocky]

People in my friend group are weirdly hostile about Deadlock, its nice (and a bit relieving lol) to see you enjoy it and reblog fanart... most of them haven't even played it, I really don't understand where the beef came from... 😓 Sucks cause I got into HD2 to play on the hype train with friends but funny moba shooter is a bridge too far or too silly

This might read as a little mean-spirited or uncharitable, but it's because most PVP gamers are casuals who are scared of a hero shooter being a real MOBA for once with actual macro strategy instead of Team Fortress 2/Counterstrike with marketable waifus.

Which is a shame, because Deadlock's actually a great first time MOBA. I've seen a ton of Overwatch / Valorant players get into it and actually adjust to MOBA strategy fairly easily, what with items and lanes being color coded, map objectives being in straight lines, and characters being designed around intuitive ideas (Haze does more damage the more she hits you, Wraith makes every 1v1 unfair, Bebop moves enemies and allies around, etc).

Because it's in an alpha state and therefore has prototype/placeholder art, there's no comics or finished designs or outside media to get people hooked in without playing the game itself, so it won't really convince anyone who isn't ready to give the genre a try.

But it's good! You know the gameplay rules because even the waifu hunters are playing this game and the second most popular girl, Ivy, looks like this

They make forum posts on the daily begging for waifu redesigns such as for Yamato

but they're still playing even when they think everyone (and everything) is ugly. That's how you know this shit is fun.

[reflective-leaf]

The Climate Movement Needs Your Creativity, Not Your Guilt

(This is an annotated transcript of the TEDx talk I gave in April 2023. It’s 10 minutes long. I’d suggest watching it first and then coming here for supporting materials.)

Does climate action feel impossible?

When I was a kid, I was interested in everything. I’d need about 10 careers to do it all. So I got out my green and blue markers and made a calendar to keep track of which job I’d have on which day of the week. On Monday, I’d be a scientist, on Tuesday, a painter. Friday — some kind of explorer, because I loved nature documentaries. I related to how animals seemed fascinated by whatever was right in front of them.

Every documentary ended with a reminder that these animals needed our help, and all the ways they were threatened by human activity. I couldn’t believe no one had managed to do something about this. But I figured I would know how when I grew up.

So, though I kept changing my mind about what I would be, the one constant was that it would have something to do with climate and conservation.

Years later, I was working as an engineer and plugging away at my art and writing. I didn’t tell anyone about my master plan to connect it all to climate, but I hadn’t forgotten it. I kept looking for ways to make my engineering work overlap with climate science or renewables.

Still, I avoided climate news. I didn’t need to hear over and over that climate change REALLY WAS real to motivate me to take action. I didn’t need to see a picture of an animal choking on plastic; I already had the master plan. Meanwhile, I kept circling climate action from a distance without taking the plunge.

But that changed in 2020. The United Nations issued a report giving us a deadline of 2030 to make steep emissions cuts.

Taking action couldn’t stay theoretical and future tense any longer. So I dove into the research to catch up on what I had missed. And I started — tentatively — talking to people about climate change and my intentions.

And I got wave after wave of bad news. It wasn’t just the tight deadlines, scale of changes needed, and years of deadlock.

It was also the confusing responses I was getting in my conversations about climate change. I’d bring up something I found fascinating, people’s faces would drop. The’d say “Yeah… I should be doing more.” And the conversation stopped there.

We’d all finally grown up! and I was ready to jump into the master plan, but I hadn’t factored in when I was 10 that no one would want to jump with me.

And it was 2020, and the air in California was full of wildfire smoke — a constant reminder of what was at stake.

Defeatism had hijacked the climate conversation and it was everywhere.

Eventually, the gloom shifted just enough for me to start wondering. Maybe we were all so bummed because we couldn’t see through the haze. We’ve all been peppered with directives — reduce, reuse, recycle. Drive less. Fly less. Turn off lights. Don’t buy plastic.

And we try, pushing against a system that wasn’t set up for any of that. But we don’t have a clear picture of how this helps.

We may have a vague idea of our individual reductions adding up to collective reductions — but then, every single one of us would have to cut our individual emissions by over half, and then to zero. We can’t imagine the effort it would take to scale up our reductions by that much. And convincing every single human to do the same? Impossible.

This picture doesn’t add up because it requires us all to be perfect. And worse, it makes us feel like we are failing, every single day.

But let me paint you a different picture. If change could only happen with 100% participation and perfection, change would never happen. But I think we can all agree that sometimes change does happen, even positive change. So — how?

For one thing, you can move society in a positive direction without being perfect. Think of it like electric current. We are the electrons.

When we imagine current flowing through a wire, we might imagine an orderly stream of electrons all moving in the same direction.

But actually, even before the current starts, the electrons are moving — randomly, at high speeds, in all directions.

And when we apply a voltage to create current, it still looks like they’re moving at random, except there’s a change you can only see when you look at the wire as a whole.

Each electron shifts its velocity a tiny bit, all in the same direction. You don’t need perfect electrons to create current.

Society is a bit more complicated than electric current. Still, it doesn’t matter that we aren’t each moving in a perfectly sustainable direction as long as our changes line up. And more importantly, pick up speed.

So what’s the voltage that directs us? I called it “the system,” and what I mean is the way all the organizations that touch our lives are set up — what they prioritize and where they get their materials.

We are constantly pushing against the system while trying to influence “our” consumption. What if we tried influencing the system instead?

So how do systems change? I found the answer in one of my math textbooks. Transformation builds under the surface as ideas brew, minds change, and small clusters of supporters gather — all while progress appears to be slow or non-existent, until suddenly, the support reaches a critical mass, and the system transforms rapidly in an emergent process.

Nearly every social movement that succeeded followed this pattern of slow, then all at once. To get to that point, a certain percentage of people need to participate (estimated variously as 3.5%, to 25%), but importantly, it’s not 100%.

So don’t think of the climate movement as something you’re guilted into. You can choose to be one of the 25% who become early adopters of change.

And you don’t have to worry about the people you can’t convince. They will change when the system changes because that comes first.

Changing the system requires creativity. The first act of creativity is to imagine the possible paths to transformation.

The second act of creativity is to imagine where you can fit into that picture. Old ideas need to be replaced by new ones — about everything from technology to our day-to-day lives. The new ideas spread through you.

To make that happen, ask yourself these three questions.

One. What is a movement you want to throw your weight behind? Pick a trend or organization that’s already building, and that you can help accelerate. You can be another piece of its critical mass.

Two. What’s a practical obstacle that’s been keeping you from participating? Anything from not knowing what a word means, to having trouble deciding where to volunteer.

If you have this obstacle, others do too. So brainstorming a solution will help more than just you. That obstacle doesn’t stand a chance against your formidable skills at creative problem solving!

Question Three. What social circles that you’re already a part of, can you share your solutions and experiences with? Sharing in the circles where you can be heard is how your solutions amplify and ripple outward.

We’re facing unprecedented challenges, so our imaginations need to be nimble — zipping like a hummingbird — from the big picture, to our immediate surroundings. From where we’re starting from — to where we want to get to.

We can’t be nimble like this if we’re stuck in guilt and perfectionism, and gazing endlessly within our own homes and wallets at all the things we’re doing wrong.

No movement in history has been made up of perfect people, so stop worrying about the ways you’re not perfect. Perfect people are not required.

Instead, think of all the ways your creativity could accelerate us in the right direction.

If you haven’t already, check out the recording of my TEDx talk! And you can hit ‘like’ on the video if you want to help get the YouTube algorithm to distribute it.

[annelidist]

in case you're wondering why i'm posting a lot lately the last few days have been a deadlocked haze of depression so this is basically all i've got in me rn

[igglemouse]

Deadlock

Just a random post! Would any mutuals like an invitation to this game?

There's not trailer as the game isn't out yet. Valve did this kind of brilliant kinda not at all secret release where only people invited can invite others and I was invited and forgot I can invite others.

It's a hero shooter game like Overwatch or Valorant BUT it's also very much a Moba like league of legends. It's a moba first really just one where you shoot and it will be free to play when it releases but its in early access, really early access (Like Haze is supposed to be made of smoke but you can see they haven't finished her textures and stuff), but lots are playing it because it does what it does well!

Any ways, if you'd like an invitation, message me with your steam friends code! I'll have to have you as a friend on steam (its only on Steam as it is a valve game) so I'll send a friend request (sometime within the day) and you should also get a steam notification of being invited to the alpha for Deadlock it can take a few minutes or up to 2 days. Once you have it, you are free to remove me as friend if you want and hopefully enjoy it!

I don't think I'll be that into the game because I actually go crazy with PVP games like...I'm secretly very competitive...I am not the best to play with when it comes to things like this lol so I have semi-retired from competitive PVP games but I did give this a casual try and its VERY fun!

Edit: BTW no time limit on this offer unless Valve changes the invite system!