#fake belle

[depressedstressedlemonzest]

"He may look like a boy but he's a bloody demon"

Yes the fuck he is. Evil little fucker.

"I didn't need thr magic water I had this magic sword."

"Yes the magic sword that was fake"

"And that's what defeats nasty little boys."

To be fair that would defeat me too because I am not a very patient person.

Perhaps I would

*GASP AND CLUTCHES CHEST*

Ugh that creepy doll again.

Creepy haunted doll.

Fuck you pan.

CoNgRATs OrPHaN.

RUDE

You can find them Bae!

"I'm afraid it would cause your death and more importantly mine." Fair.

Toes up!

If only he used that line on belle when kissing her "the darkness likes how you taste"

Totally getting homoerotic vibes from tinkerbell and regina.

I can see them being together and blue finding out her kid is queer then giving her a lecture to straighten up literally.

My boyfriend???? Hook???? No emma. Pan.

In favor of blonde Robin vs brunette.

And sooo glad he owes rumple a favor.

And when tink didn't straighten out and snuck out with her gf again blue disowned her and now she's homeless. Then she finds out regina didn't feel the same or do the thing and she got disowned for nothing and now she's mad.

Fly away moth?

Regina is the queen of bitchy one liners.

Regina never knew tink got disowned and was homeless and omg if I had known! I was just scared!

Robin's like... wait a fucking second we're endangering my adorable son's life for your potential gf?

Shadows must be stupid. Because Neal's hiding spot had me dying.

Oh God the pain in Mulan's eyes. I can see the ship wrecking.

[hinamie]

someone asked if i had ever drawn gojo with his scars, now i have :>

[mayasaura]

Seeing how so many of Vox Machina went on to become rich and famous world leaders, while The Mighty Nein embodied "If you do the job right, no one will know you did anything,"

I'm kind of hoping that in the end, Bells Hells will be notorious. The kinds of people who have youtube conspiracy videos about them, and make historians Deep Sigh. Everyone's heard of them, but what they are and if they ever really existed is up for debate

[kenobihater]

i love that hickey's immediate defense mechanism to anything bad happening to him ever is to break out in the most scuffed patrick bateman type smile imaginable while he stalls for time to come up with a more sane response than either spitting vitriol or taking a chunk out of someone with his teeth.

his bitch wife having the gall to divorce HIM (god's greatest gift to bottoms and a known catch)? sniles. being unjustly flogged bloody in front of the crew after his genius 1000 iq plan doesn't pan out and land him an irish dilf? sniles so sneetly. telling goodsir to butcher billy, getting called out for killing his miserable ex-wife himself for din-din but reasonably drawing the line at meat processing, being clocked as growing up BROKE, and hearing "no" from a man he thought was a doormat?? i know in my heart that when he's sitting there for a moment with his rictus grin, his internal monologue is just incoherent violence like

[die-o]

dude.... this moment from the last episode has been in my head for the past two weeks and I'm on break so I had time... I NEED them to address the tension. please.

many thanks to @zmeess for a painting style to study - i'm struggling to get to grips with colour and digital painting, and their work is my all-time favourite for colour and texture. I hope i did it justice :)

[saw-films]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

You were promised a jetpack by liars

TONIGHT (May 17), I'm at the INTERNET ARCHIVE in SAN FRANCISCO to keynote the 10th anniversary of the AUTHORS ALLIANCE.

As a science fiction writer, I find it weird that some sf tropes – like space colonization – have become culture-war touchstones. You know, that whole "we were promised jetpacks" thing.

I confess, I never looked too hard at the practicalities of jetpacks, because they are so obviously either used as a visual shorthand (as in the Jetsons) or as a metaphor. Even a brief moment's serious consideration should make it clear why we wouldn't want the distracted, stoned, drunk, suicidal, homicidal maniacs who pilot their two-ton killbots through our residential streets at 75mph to be flying over our heads with a reservoir of high explosives strapped to their backs.

Jetpacks can make for interesting sf eyeball kicks or literary symbols, but I don't actually want to live in a world of jetpacks. I just want to read about them, and, of course, write about them:

https://reactormag.com/chicken-little/

I had blithely assumed that this was the principle reason we never got the jetpacks we were "promised." I mean, there kind of was a promise, right? I grew up seeing videos of rocketeers flying their jetpacks high above the heads of amazed crowds, at World's Fairs and Disneyland and big public spectacles. There was that scene in Thunderball where James Bond (the canonical Connery Bond, no less) makes an escape by jetpack. There was even a Gilligan's Island episode where the castaways find a jetpack and scheme to fly it all the way back to Hawai'i:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0588084/

Clearly, jetpacks were possible, but they didn't make any sense, so we decided not to use them, right?

Well, I was wrong. In a terrific new 99 Percent Invisible episode, Chris Berube tracks the history of all those jetpacks we saw on TV for decades, and reveals that they were all the same jetpack, flown by just one guy, who risked his life every time he went up in it:

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/rocket-man/

The jetpack in question – technically a "rocket belt" – was built in the 1960s by Wendell Moore at the Bell Aircraft Corporation, with funding from the DoD. The Bell rocket belt used concentrated hydrogen peroxide as fuel, which burned at temperatures in excess of 1,000'. The rocket belt had a maximum flight time of just 21 seconds.

It was these limitations that disqualified the rocket belt from being used by anyone except stunt pilots with extremely high tolerances for danger. Any tactical advantage conferred on infantrymen by the power to soar over a battlefield for a whopping 21 seconds was totally obliterated by the fact that this infantryman would be encumbered by an extremely heavy, unwieldy and extremely explosive backpack, to say nothing of the high likelihood that rocketeers would plummet out of the sky after failing to track the split-second capacity of a jetpack.

And of course, the rocket belt wasn't going to be a civilian commuting option. If your commute can be accomplished in just 21 seconds of flight time, you should probably just walk, rather than strapping an inferno to your back and risking a lethal fall if you exceed a margin of error measured in just seconds.

Once you know about the jetpack's technical limitations, it's obvious why we never got jetpacks. So why did we expect them? Because we were promised them, and the promise was a lie.

Moore was a consummate showman, which is to say, a bullshitter. He was forever telling the press that his jetpacks would be on everyone's back in one to two years, and he got an impressionable young man, Bill Suitor, to stage showy public demonstrations of the rocket belt. If you ever saw a video of a brave rocketeer piloting a jetpack, it was almost certainly Suitor. Suitor was Connery's stunt-double in Thunderball, and it was he who flew the rocket belt around Sleeping Beauty castle.

Suitor's interview with Berube for the podcast is delightful. Suitor is a hilarious, profane old airman who led an extraordinary life and tells stories with expert timing, busting out great phrases like "a surprise is a fart with a lump in it."

But what's most striking about the tale of the Bell rocket belt is the shape of the deception that Moore and Bell pulled off. By conspicuously failing to mention the rocket belt's limitations, and by callously risking Suitor's life over and over again, they were able to create the impression that jetpacks were everywhere, and that they were trembling on the verge of widespread, popular adoption.

What's more, they played a double game: all the public enthusiasm they manufactured with their carefully stage-managed, canned demos was designed to help them win more defense contracts to keep their dream alive. Ultimately, Uncle Sucker declined to continue funding their boondoggle, and the demos petered out, and the "promise" of a jetpack was broken.

As I listened to the 99 Percent Invisible episode, I was struck by the familiarity of this shuck: this is exactly what the self-driving car bros did over the past decade to convince us all that the human driver was already obsolete. The playbook was nearly identical, right down to the shameless huckster insisting that "full self-driving is one to two years away" every year for a decade:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/23/23837598/tesla-elon-musk-self-driving-false-promises-land-of-the-giants

The Potemkin rocket belt was a calculated misdirection, as are the "full self-driving" demos that turn out to be routine, pre-programmed runs on carefully manicured closed tracks:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tesla-autopilot-staged-engineer-says-company-faked-full-autopilot/

Practical rocketeering wasn't ever "just around the corner," because a flying, 21 second blast-furnace couldn't be refined into a practical transport. Making the tank bigger would not make this thing safer or easier to transport.

The jetpack showman hoped to cash out by tricking Uncle Sucker into handing him a fat military contract. Robo-car scammers used their conjurer's tricks to cash out to the public markets, taking Uber public on the promise of robo-taxis, even as Uber's self-driving program burned through $2.5b and produced a car with a half-mile mean time between fatal collisions, which the company had to pay someone else $400m to take the business off their hands:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

It's not just self-driving cars. Time and again, the incredibly impressive AI demos that the press credulously promotes turn out to be scams. The dancing robot on stage at the splashy event is literally a guy in a robot-suit:

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musks-ai-day-tesla-bot-is-just-a-guy-in-a-bodysuit-2021-8

The Hollywood-killing, AI-produced video prompting system is so cumbersome to use, and so severely limited, that it's arguably worse than useless:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/expectations-versus-reality/

The centuries' worth of progress the AI made in discovering new materials actually "discovered" a bunch of trivial variations on existing materials, as well as a huge swathe of materials that only exist at absolute zero:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

The AI grocery store where you just pick things up and put them in your shopping basket without using the checkout turns out to be a call-center full of low-waged Indian workers desperately squinting at videos of you, trying to figure out what you put in your bag:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins

The discovery of these frauds somehow never precipitates disillusionment. Rather than getting angry with marketers for tricking them, reporters are ventriloquized into repeating the marketing claim that these aren't lies, they're premature truths. Sure, today these are faked, but once the product is refined, the fakery will no longer be required.

This must be the kinds of Magic Underpants Gnomery the credulous press engaged in during the jetpack days: "Sure, a 21-second rocket belt is totally useless for anything except wowing county fair yokels – but once they figure out how to fit an order of magnitude more high-explosive onto that guy's back, this thing will really take off!"

The AI version of this is that if we just keep throwing orders of magnitude more training data and compute at the stochastic parrot, it will eventually come to life and become our superintelligent, omnipotent techno-genie. In other words, if we just keep breeding these horses to run faster and faster, eventually one of our prize mares will give birth to a locomotive:

https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

As a society, we have vested an alarming amount of power in the hands of tech billionaires who profess to be embittered science fiction fans who merely want to realize the "promises" of our Golden Age stfnal dreams. These bros insist that they can overcome both the technical hurdles and the absolutely insurmountable privation involved in space colonization:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

They have somehow mistaken Neal Stephenson's dystopian satirical "metaverse" for a roadmap:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/18/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video/

As Charlie Stross writes, it's not just that these weirdos can't tell the difference between imaginative parables about the future and predictions about the future – it's also that they keep mistaking dystopias for business plans:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tech-billionaires-need-to-stop-trying-to-make-the-science-fiction-they-grew-up-on-real/

Cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion. Please, I beg you, stop building the fucking torment nexus:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus

These techno-billionaires profess to be fulfilling a broken promise, but surely they know that the promises were made by liars – showmen using parlor tricks to sell the impossible. You were "promised a jetpack" in the same sense that table-rapping "spiritualists" promised you a conduit to talk with the dead, or that carny barkers promised you a girl that could turn into a gorilla:

https://milwaukeerecord.com/film/ape-girl-shes-alive-documentary-november-11-sugar-maple/

That's quite a supervillain origin story: "I was promised a jetpack, but then I grew up discovered that it was just a special effect. In revenge, I am promising you superintelligent AIs and self-driving cars, and these, too, are SFX."

In other words: "Die a disillusioned jetpack fan or live long enough to become the fraudster who cooked up the jetpack lie you despise."

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-make-it/#twenty-one-seconds

[nightmaredollyyy]

𝑻𝑯𝑬 𝑴𝑨𝑲𝑰𝑵𝑮 𝑶𝑭 𝑺𝑨𝑾 𝑿 (2023) 𝑰𝑵 𝑴𝑬𝑿𝑰𝑪𝑶🎬⚙️⛓️🩸🩸🩸

𝑫𝒊𝒓. 𝑲𝒆𝒗𝒊𝒏 𝑮𝒓𝒆𝒖𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒕

[shatter-song]

[abaroo]

I realised I had to refine Ceroba for my au…

In the cowboy swap au, Ceroba is actually the Sheriff and leader of the Feisty Five. Clover is still the Deputy and goes by ��Lucky Star”. He loves hanging around town with his Mama ☺️. I haven’t come up with a cool cowboy name for Ceroba yet, although she probably wouldn’t use one :/

Cowboy Swap Masterpost

[kiinghanalister]

🙃 BRIAN PECK WAS ARRESTED AND CHARGED AND IS NOW A REGISTERED SEX OFFENDER

THERE IS NOTHING ALLEGED ABOUT IT

[depressedstressedlemonzest]

Long time no update.

Been off work the last 9 days and I have one more tomorrow. Had a vacation then covid so a nice good time to binge OUAT. I'm in season 5 now.

So lots to post and (late) react to. So let's get started!

God I love that look for rumple.

VERY smart of him to have his shadow hide the dagger.

"Well last time I called you mom we were about to die so mary Margaret it is."

Hook is the epitome of "let's have a chat about your intentions with my daughter".

😂😂

The PERM COMMENT

SLICE AND DICE HIS ASS EMMA!

The S word 😂

Love spinning rumple.

Oooh she's so pretty but so fake.

You know real belle is into choking. It's part of the monsterfucker code.

Makes me think of something I heard "the girls (gender neutral) who hate being tickled are the same who love being choked."

They're both fucking hot and dangerous here.

Ah the old space jam "fake magic water" skit.

But also slutty rumple with his shirt cut to his titties.

Belief must come from within.

They all have such good lines.

Even fake belle is exasperated with him.

And real rumple is so lost on her.

God i wished red lipstick looked this good on me.

To be fair I don't think I ever really tried it. I'm almost as pale as belle maybe it'd work.

I just love both of their faces.

Again the dislike of the creepy doll is strong.

[superkirbylover]

the CMC mean well, they're just stunned

[thepiratefish]

Prime defenders if there was tumblr.

1 [2] 3 4 ???

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🐺Fiddlemcgee follow

Why aren't there more Fics of Wavelength and Tide just hanging out?? I once saw wavelength topple over because of stomach pains, and instead of continuing the fight, they both started showing each other pictures of their kids and talking about them until they agreed to settle the battle later.

Why don't we have more funny fics of them acting like that??

‼️BLORGUMS🌟 follow

Fics where they act like that and kiss.

🐺Fiddlemcgee follow

fics where they act like that and kiss.......

779

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💥BUNGOBINGboNG‼️follow

Shoutout to WispMysterys for actually adventuring into ACTUAL haunted places and getting arrested for it, were on your side, buddy keep doing your thing

👻WispMysterys456🐺 follow

Thanks man

💥BUNGOBINGboNG‼️follow

WISPMYSTRYS456?!?!?!?!

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💜ThatsAlotOfAshe🎧

I'll be streaming minecraft later today with the Hero Tide since you all wanted it so badly. Join in around 6, collaborate with @👻WispMysterys456🐺 happening around next week 👍

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👤Hero-Updates-Central. follow

[ALT:Screenshot of post of the Hero Tide with the username '💙TidetheTidalhero🌊' reading `Dose anyone know where to find a good Pizzaplace? My boys are sick and I want to get them there favourite food!`

Water Hero Tide Has a child / multipule? More updates on this situation will be updated soon.

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🎵Killingwithcunt🎵 follow

We all should attack David bells Office more often actual <3

✖️Villanova-Gal-Deactivated

Actually, you shouldn't! >:(

🎵Killingwithcunt🎵 follow

You say this, but even fleas wouldn't touch your rotted skin as it is so unholy the devil wouldn't even stand amongst you

DanielDuck🦆follow

Op said this and they immediately died where they stood 🧍‍♂️

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🌼UtopiaEgg🌼 follow

Putting a fake frog on top of a comicly large red X to lure lefrog under it to then crush them with a piano,

🌼UtopiaEgg🌼 follow

[ALT: an image of the villain lefrog crushed under a piano.]

I DIDNT MEAN TO ACTUALY DO IT

🐶Pugpuppet🐺 follow

Oh my God, it finally happened... he's dead...

🌺LefrogFrogFan🐸 follow

THIS IS WORSE THEN THE POSSESED LE FROG ARC

40,000

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RATRATRATRATRAT🐀🐀🐀🗡 follow

Hwe tuyr

Wavelength-Offcial⚙️ follow

How do you not know how to type

Waelng gel heo tue hi 👋 whau he fu man ma u in copuer help help help help ge ou

Wavelength-Offcial⚙️ follow

Stay there I'm gonna teach you how to type

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Smokrslourp💨 follow

A man just ate a rat on the sidewalk thepn ran away on all fours I fucking hate this place

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[mymainwastoocluttered]

If some other magicless person got stuck in Twisted Wonderland and tried to take my place, I'd simply let them. Yeah, bitch, now you take care of these motherfuckers and deal with Crowley's bullshit, see if I fuckin care. Have fun babysitting a bunch of sunovabitches who barely even remember you exist half the time.

I love the angst of "they pushed the Prefect away and replaced them only to miss them when they finally leave", but, also, if I were Yuu, I'd absolutely just let it happen. Call me a pushover, but I ain't shedding a tear for friends who left for the newest shiny thing. And it would relieve me from all the trouble. Guess who's not fighting Overblots anymore? This bastard, that's who.

[bumpsyp1ains]