#gamma reality

[scentedflowersong]

A Swen's Guide to the Into the Story-Verse Alternate Realities

Ladies and, in a broader sense, gentlemen, as December begins, we’re back with another entry to our humble guide, where we go through the alternate realities presented in the Into the Story-Verse fic - the last (for the time being) part of the Swan-Mills saga by the brilliant @swanqueeneverafter​

And our regular readers will know which reality are we gonna discuss this week...

!!!SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

Code name: Gamma Reality

First entered: by Will Scarlet in chapter 11

Set: Wonderland (with flashes of Victorian England, the Enchanted Forest, and Agrabah), past till present-ish (it’s complicated this time, okay?)

Fixed by: true love’s kisses - first between Will and Anastasia, second between Alice and Cyrus - both in chapter 47

Unfinished business: for Will - not giving up on Anastasia, for Alice - saving her brother (partly from himself)

Gamma reality is the longest-running alternate reality of all of the six realities portrayed in ITSV. Much like Beta Reality, Gamma influences our reality greatly, and even intertwines with it.

We follow the story of the Scarlet siblings from Alice’s pitiful childhood spent in an asylum where her own father puts her after she returns from Wonderland. That’s where Will finds Alice when he enters this reality and with the help of the White Rabbit rescues her.

The driving force behind Gamma Reality is Jafar, who chooses this reality because it’s where Cyrus - the genie he needs the most hides. Cyrus, who as it turns out, Gamma Realty’s Alice fell in love with in the past. Cyrus, who at the same time he’s in Jafar’s cell in Wonderland’s past is kept locked in Hengist’s fortress and being searched for by his mother in our reality. Toldya, it’s... complicated.

As Jafar seeks to force Alice into using her three wishes so he could become Cyrus’s new master, Anastasia, or rather the Red Queen, works with him, because she wants to break the laws of magic and return back in time to change her fate as every other ‘evil queen’.

 The ‘problem’ is, Anastasia may be a heartless bitch, but she still loves Will, and so the two love stories run next to one another, one almost naive - Alice and Cyrus, the other heartbreakingly bittersweet - Will and Anastasia. All the time Jafar tries to become Cyrus’s master and everyone else tries to stop Jafar for good.

Alice’s wishes are actually when the twisty turny timey wimey business comes in, because Alice wishes Cyrus, his mother, and the White Rabbit into our reality, and since they’re not human, the change of reality doesn’t affect their sense of self, they can use being in the ‘future’ to their advantage.

Jafar ultimately ends up being turned into a genie himself after Amara returns the magical water to the Well of Wonders. However, before that, he managed to kill Anastasia - nothing a true love’s kiss wouldn’t fix though.

Let’s also not forget the powerful parallels of the father/son relationships of Jafar and Sultan and Will and Edwin.

And so, we leave the reality after Alice and Cyrus’ wedding, beautifully paralleled in our reality’s long-awaited wedding of Robyn and Alice.

SQ storyline

Like the Alpha Reality, Gamma Reality gave us a glimpse of Emma and Regina’s story in this reality in the Epilogue, since the main storyline followed the Scarlet Siblings. Since this storyline hasn’t been commented on before (well, by me), let’s briefly go over it...

Princess Emma asks her father whether the rumours of the Evil Queen returning are true, Charming tells her not to worry - oh, Charming, fear was the latest thing on your daughter’s mind...

...instead of staying in the safety of the castle, the Princess follows the Evil Queen’s tracks to a village to hear the truth about how Snow defeated the Queen and also to not so subtly ogle her mother’s nemesis...

...and because lust-filled stares weren’t the only thing the two women exchanged, not long afterwards the Charmings find the Princess taking care of the Evil Queen, just not in the ‘killing’ sort of a way (even though it’s not called la petite mort for nothing, I suppose)...

...which they do in the last moment we see them - the Evil Queen and her Warrior Princess laying waste to Snow’s kingdom and happy ending...

...Emma also informs them that she’s joining Regina and they’ll soon take the kingdom back...

[stardust-bridges]

Club Furies Premiere: Heliosphere - Protostar [Diffuse Reality Records]

Hailing from Mumbai, the duo of DJs and Techno producers, Shubham Desai and Harshit Desai, are characterized by a dark baseline and raw, hypnotic melodies in their project called Heliosphere. They focus on the art of storytelling by creating sets with their performances, which bring out punchy basslines, distorted raw electro glitches, layered with looped synths and groovy snares. In doing so,…

[daydreamerdrew]

The Incredible Hulk (1968) #267

[futurama-in-color]

So, you're telling me they broadcast commercials into people's dreams? Of course. But how is that possible? It's very simple. The ad gets into your brain, just like this liquid gets into this egg. Although in reality it's not liquid, but gamma radiation.

FUTURAMA 1.06 - A Fishful of Dollars

[lowkeyremi]

𝐒𝐄𝐓𝐓𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐔𝐏 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐏𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐘

pairing: k. bakugo x fem!reader summary: Your man's birthday is coming up! Time to set up the venue for the birthday boy! Uh oh... gotta keep it on the low, I think he might be on to you. content: fluff, established relationship, bakugo is nosy, little bit of swearing, mention of other characters (his friend group) (you can find the rest of the series here!) wc: 1k

"Shhhh!! Hurry up and bring the rest of the stuff out to the car." Kirishima and Kaminari can't seem to keep quiet while loading the rest of the supplies into the car for Katsuki's party. The two keep giggling and messing around.

"Sorry [name]! We'll be quieter!!" You highly doubt that because they said that the last two trips and if anything they've gotten louder. "Come on guys, we don't wanna give it away. You know how hard it is to actually surprise Katsuki." The boys know how much you've wanted to do this, so they quiet down and quickly take the rest of the party supplies to your car.

At this point it's almost like a challenge; to see if you can surprise him. His last two birthday parties you've tried to plan out were a major fail because Todoroki didn't understand the element of surprise and said, "Oh yeah, we're just getting everything ready for your party." and the other year he had threatened Mineta into telling him what you were plotting.

So, this year in order to keep it an actual secret, you had told very few people (kirishima, mina, sero, denki, and midoriya.) and sent Katsuki off to his parents to "enjoy his birthday with his family." His birthday isn't until a few more days but his parents were able to tire him out enough to keep him from asking questions or bothering you guys. he's currently in his room napping at 7pm.

"Alright, Sero, Can you read through the checklist once more to make sure we have everything?" Sero's quiet helpful, he'll be hanging up a lot of the decorations and what not. You had momo make a bunch of cool decorations yesterday while Katsuki was out with his parents and then sato baked a cake, that resides in the teacher's lounge thanks to Aizawa Sensei. You had also gotten the decorations that you and Mitsuki went out and bought a little while ago. She is such a big help and a huge part of why this whole plan is working.

Sero reads though the checklist and you give him a small "yeah" each time you see an item on the list.

"Okay I think that's everything let's go!"

In all honesty, Gym Gamma isn't that far away from the dorms, but carrying all of that stuff would have been a huge pain, which is why you're taking your car, with special permission from Aizawa of course.

When the six of your arrived at the gym you took charge of making sure the door was open for everyone to load everything in, and locking it behind you when everyone was inside.

Your teachers had already come up with some kind of white lie saying they were using the gym for some kind of new practice when in reality you're just setting up Katsuki's party.

So far everything's going according to plan, since Kirishima is probably the strongest one there he helps with setting up tables and moving them. While Denki sets up all the music equipment. (he, jiro, tokoyami and momo are going to play music)

Mina, being a natural leader is telling people where to put things, how high to hang up decorations and what not. She's really damn good at it too.

While you're in the trance your phone buzzes in your pocket and you hear the familiar ring tone of fireworks. When you and Katsuki started dating you set his ringtone to fireworks just to piss him off, and at first it did, but now he's just used to it.

"Hello?" In response you here a loud shuffling noise and a small grunt.

"Where the fuck are ya? Your location's off." If it were anyone else on the phone with him they probably would have thought Katsuki was being rude, but this is just how he is.

"Are you sure? I'm like 100% sure it's on." It's not. You know it's not. You aren't completely sure if he knows the gym is "off limits" because he crashed as soon as he got back. There's no way you're gonna risk it though because if he does know about the gym not being available he'll get suspicious of you being there.

"I'll check again, but I'm pretty sure it's off." His voice is groggy with sleep and he goes quiet while checking to see if you're location is on. While he's doing that you quickly mute your phone and yell out, "WHO'S NOT DOING ANYTHING RIGHT NOW?"

Midoriya is the first to respond, he runs right over to you ready to help.

"Listen, Izuku. I'm about to tell 'tsuki that i'm headed to my favorite book store on campus. I need you to take my phone and just kinda hang out there and if something goes wrong, like he tries to call just call one of the others so you can let me know, okay?" The green haired boy shakes his head furiously fast.

"I CAN DO IT!!" Even though you're slightly exhausted, Midoriya's energetic attitude does hype you up a bit.

You quickly unmute your phone, "Hey baby, I'm going down to the book store for a little while. I need to get this one book."

His bed creaks, indicating that he's just finally sat up in bed, "Alright, I'll meet ya there."

"I just need some time alone, please don't come by." You try your best to sound like you need space, because you know your boyfriend respects you and your space.

"Oh.. alright. If you want me to come get ya I will." Guilt slowly trickles through your stomach when you hear his voice drop into disappointment but you know it will all be worth it in the end.

"Love you Kats, I'll see you in a bit." The blond hums quietly in contentment.

"I love you too, be safe." With that he hangs up the phone.

Izuku quickly leaves with your phone to the book store and you + the others get back to work on decorating and making sure everything is organized.

"Okay guys! I think if we keep working at this pace we'll be done in thirty minutes or so." Everyone whoops in excitement.

It turns out you aren't the only one who wants to surprise Katsuki Bakugo.

day 1: you make a birthday gift for katsuki - @zanarkandskylines

day 2: you invite all of class 1-A to the party - @xbabyd0lli3x

day 3: shopping for decorations- @angels-fantasy

day 4: You make a present plan 2.0! - @starieq

💖 day 5: Decorating the venue for his birthday party ! @lowkeyremi

day 6: Baking the cake for his party - @queenpiranhadon

day 7: you and your classmates surprise him ! - @cashmoneyyysstuff

tag list: @gina239 @mystic60 @meowze4r @icedemon1314 @bigsimpo343 @ah-mya @whezdostuff @berry-vioo @seonne @slayfics @food8me @katsuisbaby @azzo0 @kit-katsukii @stoned-anime-babe @kukikoooo

orange = can't be tagged

©𝐋𝐎𝐖𝐊𝐄𝐘𝐑𝐄𝐌𝐈 All works are written by me! Please do not copy, translate, or upload onto other sites thanks!

[artbyblastweave]

Heroify Thaddeus Ross

The fun thing about Ross is that how bad he is, and how much of a point he has, is extremely mutable within the confines of what's still immediately recognizable as a Hulk Story, because the reality is, Hulk Causes Problems! Lots of them!

So you recast him as a tragic Ahab-style of figure. You play up the level of collateral damage the Hulk causes even without meaning to; or you lean into the insane-cannibal iteration of the Ultimate Universe, you do whatever you have to to communicate that this Hulk is an unreconstructed example of the form of B-movie atomic horror he was riffing on. And you genuinely make this Ross's fault, in a way that he really meaningfully internalizes, because the Gamma bomb project was a bad idea on the face of it but he was too enmeshed in cold-warrior paranoiac institutional inertia to put the brakes on the project even when it was just a citykiller bomb, and now a testament to that failure is shuffling around the Southwest wrecking entire towns. His hire-ups are disturbingly willing to let the hulk move around unmolested; after all, there aren't many voters in those small towns, and a full-scale military deployment is going to draw attention to the less-than-fully-vetted environmental impact of testing those weapons on American Soil. Ross doesn't care. He's got no future in the military, and he's pushing 70; he's going to sink whatever he's got left in time, money, resources, the loyalty of his remaining men, into containing this rolling green nightmare. He's done with the unaccountability, the ass-covering. He's going to fix this or die trying.

[sanzaibian]

Index

Here is an index of all my stories, easy(er) to search !

Since all my stories are quite unique, I will list them in chronological order (newest on top), with main genres specified.

Enjoy !

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Original stories

That Day No One Cared (Mental Change/Corruption) - as part of @occamstfs' Viral Transformation Stories.

A Willing Puppet (Preppy tf/Identity Change) - for @fafnir19 as part of the Secret TF Writers Swap

Reiwa Rīzento (Greaser tf/Mental Change)

Conversion Powder by Eamora Co. (Gay to Straight/Straight to Gay)

Do Not Forget Who You Are (Muscle Growth/Muscle Loss/Queer Romance)

The Beatty Files (Twink tf/Muscle Loss)

How Can One Move On ? (Body Swap/Nerd to Jock)

Allahu Akbar (Muslim tf/Beard Growth/Mental Change)

A Proper Discussion (Multiple tfs/Satirical) - for April Fool's 2024

Curing the Neighborhood (Hairstyle tf/Himbo tf/Infection tf)

Consultation at Dr. Davod's : Part 1 (Hairstyle tf/Fuckboy tf), Part 2 (Hairstyle tf/Himbo tf/Reality Change) - 200 followers special

The Chechen Mod (Chechen tf/Jock tf/Queer Romance)

Investing in China (Chinese tf/Twink tf/Reality Change)

The Party at Delta Omega Gamma (Frat Bro tf/Himbo tf)

The Good Side of Life is One Good Action Away (Fuckboy tf/Non-binary tf)

Identity in Language and Thought (Tiktok tf/Mass tf)

The True Self (Douchebag tf/Corruption/Straight to Bi)

The Berkley Hills' Abandonned Frat House (Jock tf/Frat Bro tf)

The Business School's Poster-Boy (Twink to Jock/Jock to Twink)

I Am Chris Albanese (Age Reduction/Jock tf/Straight to Gay)

Unfair Competition (Nerd to Jock)

Collaborations/Reblog chains

Anyone feel like transforming me ? (Khmer tf/Bokator tf ~ Boxer tf) - from @transform4u

Your last like is your new body (Moroccan tf/Beard Growth) - from @newchangestf

Asks

The Normal Barbershop (Hairstyle tf) : Mohawk (Punk tf), Curly Undercut (Fuckboy tf), Perm (Footballer tf, Hairy tf), Pompadour (Twink tf, Rubber tf), Wolf cut (Himbo tf, Model tf) - 1000 subscribers special

Heureux Soit Celui qui Demande Sans Donner (Jock tf/Nationality Change)

DBPWH (Hairstyle tf/Jock tf/Dumbing Down) - from @alphajocklover

Immersing Myself in the Culture (Nahua tf/Twink tf) - from @peepshow321

Of Hairy Arab Men (Arab tf/Hair Growth)

Other

My recommended writers

My stance on Gay to Straight : Part 1, Part 2

Subscriber milestones : 100, 200, 400, 1000 - Thank you so much for your support !

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If you're curious about what I like, don't hesitate to check my "main blog", @ykrui73 ! (If I contact you or send you an ask, chances are it's from this account ^^)

[inbabylontheywept]

"I think we underestimated the human population by eight or nine orders of magnitude."

The war room was reeling. The human population had been estimated in the mere hundred billion range. They should barely have had enough of an economy to field two light cruisers, least of all the goddamn armada that was ravaging the inner worlds. After the alpha strike, the human flotilla should’ve been completely crippled. Instead the number of ships they were fielding kept growing.

Tan-Hauser was the first target struck by a human attack, and they reported seventeen craft before they lost comms. Attican was hit just three days after that, but their reports already showed numbers above ninety. Any doubts that the fleet was growing were eliminated when Outpost Batan reported 1,217 FTL pings two days before the loss of Kira.

The number reported was so big it was written off as a sensor malfunction. Twenty-five billion souls lost, all because nobody in the war room could face reality.

They were going to face it now. The Kirarian in front of them was the primary sensor engineer for the Batan outpost, a specialist with more expertise in analyzing space lanes than warships. He’d been up for at least the last two days, poring over the sensor data, and only now was ready to begin to share his findings.

From the pain in his multifaceted eyes, it was clear he was still reeling from the loss of his homeworld.

Seeing that he had the room’s attention, he began to speak. The translation units each member of the war council had implanted experienced a moment of lag as they struggled to convert the almost musical tonal humming of the Kirarian tongue to more common galactic speech.

"The simplest data that can be analyzed from an FTL ping is the distance that the ship traveled before dropping to sublight. The contracted space in front of the craft traps small particles, even light itself for a short period, compressing its wavelength and then releasing it when the field disengages."

The war room nodded along. The explanation was mildly technical, but anyone that had traveled on an FTL shuttle before knew the hazards of exiting FTL directly in front of your home destination. Blasting your home station with a wave of alpha, beta, and ultraviolet rays was hardly a warm welcome.

The engineer continued.

“The… issue with this is that we’re used to the majority of the ping being in the UV spectrum. We aren’t entirely sure what the spectrum of the signals we got from the ships were because Batan station can only detect up into the low gamma range, but that’s still what the majority of the human’s FTL pings were detected in. That’s at least ten billion times the frequency that we’re used to. Since the frequency of the burst can be roughly modeled by multiplying the mean radiation per unit distance by the length of the path, that implies one of two things: That the human ships are either traveling through areas with ten billion times the standard background flux, or that they are traveling extragalactic distances.”

The engineer paused for a few seconds at that statement. The pain of loss still shone in his gemstone eyes, but something more immediate was beginning to take center stage: Fear.

“Because the craft is essentially throwing… well, normally it would be the next three or four days worth of cosmic background radiation at you. In our case it’s more like several decades. But because it’s just giving you an advance on your normal cosmic background radiation, you can track the void in the next several days' worth of background noise to determine the ship's approach vector. The 1,217 crafts that arrived weren’t coming from the same spot. There were actually hundreds of converging vectors, but more importantly…”

He trailed off, a small 3D model of the local space appearing in the center of the holo table. A spiked ball of vectors protruded from the galactic disk, each piercing cleanly through his former homeworld.

His voice cracked a little, the hum turning into a hiss. The translator tech paused a moment too, struggling to convey the subtle emotional cues into the message.

“They’re all coming off the galactic disk. That doesn’t just mean that we’re surrounded, that doesn’t just mean that we’re outnumbered… It means that each attack that we’ve seen up to this point is from an entirely separate group. What we’ve been mistaking for fleets, I believe, are simply the beginning trickles of their exploratory forces. Each of the sites that they’ve targeted hasn’t been of significant strategic importance; they’ve just been sites with unusually strong output signals. I think they’re just using our transmission stations as makeshift beacons for their FTL jumps." He took a deep breath to steady himself before providing his final thought. "I think we underestimated the size of the human population by eight or nine orders of magnitude.”

There was a heavy silence in the war room as that last sentence was processed. The engineer was already out the door before he heard the panic begin to set in.

Part of him felt a little guilty. It would’ve probably been kinder for them to go out not knowing what was about to hit them. Still, it wasn’t often you could force people with this much power to realize that they’d just lost everything.

There was a bitter satisfaction in that.

[leoprincess777]

DHANISHTA NAKSHATRA

23º 20’ Capricorn – 6º 40’ Aquarius “Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.” The Dolphin: Alpha Delphini, Beta Delphini, Delta Delphini, Gamma Delphini Ruled by Mars Star of Symphony. Power to give abundance and fame. Symbols: empty drum, an hourglass, bells and bulbs.

Dhanishta is like a death of the inner child. Its essentially inert like sand, of coal or oil. Even the system is a dead thing unless the people actual show up to support it. The death of the spirit begins in Dhanishta and is completed in Purvabhadrapada. The machine  is just a dead thing. There is a suffering here as one is constantly striving to stay ahead of the curve.

Struggles of being controlled by other people, feelings of emptiness and superficiality. They devote themselves to a purpose or a person to deal with emptiness.

As it is within Dhanishta's power to give fame, they enjoy popularity and are often local celebrities. If well placed, they have a good reputation and are loved by people. They tend to mask their inner struggles with a bubbly persona, become an entertainer for other people, play the jester (performative) and seek out external stimuli as a way to fill the emptiness.

Major karma with marriage. Ashlesha is direct across so they often get into manipulative relationships do things they don’t want to do. They display big devotion towards their spouse and are service orianted, however they can get manipulative and use marriage as a means to an end. Often as a result, they are prone to getting controlled by their spouse. They enjoy material comforts.

Planets here are more likely to have feminine characteristics. It may also be seen that women with this placement have a somewhat easier time with the energies of this nakshatra.

Rakshasa: Belonging to the clan of the demons. Less practical, more hedonistic, often many ups and downs in life as the guru of the demons has the power to raise from the dead. Rebirth, transformation, redemption are all part of the system. Cyclical sense of time; mystical sense of reality. Marriage matching with another Rakshasa is best.

Dhanishta's stars form the diamond shaped Delphini constellation. Dolphin’s are unique creatures thought to be even more intelligent than human’s, and with that intelligence comes a childlike nature, playfulness, understanding, and selfless nature. They have a unique way using sonar & echolocation for communication, navigation and understanding the world around them. They are friendly, curious, peaceful, carefree creatures who live in harmony with humans as well as most other creatures of the sea. But they are also fearless in the face of predators and will sacrifice themselves to protect the pod rather than show any fear.

The Vasus such as Agni (fire), Vayu (wind), etc helps lord Indra in his fight with the demons and hence this nakshatra can also indicate some type of fight, competition, and competitiveness in a person’s life. Dhanishtha is also linked with land, real estate and may attain multiple properties. Suitable for real estate business.

Dhanishtas should keep musical insturments in their house as a remedial act and practice performance arts, music, communication and diplomacy.

"Most scientists and historians are born in Dhanishta. Since there is an inherent talent of keeping secrets, you are quite suitable for secret service, private secretaries to senior executives. Whatever may be your academic background, your intelligence is beyond question. In argument you are much ahead of others. Lawyers profession is excellent for you. From the 24th year onward will show progress in the earning field. Any improvement in the financial field will be only after marriage."

Shil-Ponde Female with Dhanishta Ascendant: “This is a talkative and interesting person, particularly successful in lecturing and debating. She is capable of writing mystic novels and is good at story telling. She will be happy in domestic life. She loves nice dresses, especially blue, pink, and purple, and likes curios and antiques.”

pada 2 (virgo): They can do very well in public service, administration, communications, or managing public affairs. They can be very good at the rhetorical, persuasive side or languages, marketing, and communications.

[zvaigzdelasas]

China’s economy is currently on the operating table, hunched over by surgeons, chest cavity splayed open, hooked up to a cardiopulmonary machine, surrounded by nurses staring at monitors flashing vital signs. It all looks rather grim.

This surgery, however, is not an emergency bypass. That would be too easy. China has had many of those already – stimulus packages, grand infrastructure projects and many rounds of directed lending.

Every two decades or so, going all the way back to the founding of the PRC in 1949, the surgeons get ambitious. These guys are mad scientists attempting a comic book trope – to create the ultimate superhero.

They want to inject super serum, replace skeletal calcium with adamantium and dose the patient with gamma rays, giving China the powers of shazams out the wazoo.[...]

In the lamented “pre-reform” era, China’s mad scientists engineered spectacular growth by increasing investment from a prewar 6% of GDP to 20% in the first Five-Year Plan, covering 1952-1957. This led industrial output to register a compound annual growth rate.

The Great Leap Forward accelerated this growth to 66% in 1958 and 39% in 1959 before crashing and burning in 1961 when mismanagement of communal farms and “backyard blast furnaces” caught up with the mad scientists.

Course correction starting in 1962 recovered all lost ground by 1965. According to economist Cheng Chu-Yuan, China’s GDP growth averaged 11% between 1952 and 1966, the eve of the Cultural Revolution. (T. C. Liu of Cornell and K. C. Yeh of the Rand Corporation have a lower estimate: 8%.)

More importantly, China built a full kit of infrastructure, machinery and equipment capable of driving future industrialization.[...]

Many analysts have a tabula rasa understanding of China’s reform era, as if there had been no economy before Deng Xiaoping. In reality, China’s industrialization started right after the formation of the PRC with some of the fastest growth recorded in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Even during the “low growth” Cultural Revolution, resources directed towards public health (for example, barefoot doctors) and primary education doubled life expectancy and quadrupled adult literacy by 1980 from pre-PRC levels.

The mad scientists are now at it again. They have about twenty years of new data not just on China but from the rest of the world. When Zhu Rongji was head surgeon, history had ended and markets reigned supreme. This time around, the surgeons are correcting for market irrationality and negative externalities. The next twenty years is again being determined on the operating table.

Three years ago, the surgeons pried open China’s chest cavity with the three red lines credit limits, instantly seizing the speculation driven property sector. Since then, they ripped out unnecessary organs like education companies, clamped the Ant Financial artery and eviscerated the video game industry. All of this has caused spasms in vital signs from lackluster growth to rising youth unemployment. Wondering whether China will or will not stimulate the economy next quarter or next year is missing the forest from the trees. For the next few years, China’s economy will still be under the knife and whatever adjustments will merely be anesthesiologists and technicians nominally dialing the drugs up and down and adjusting the heart-lung machine to maintain vital signs.

What are these mad scientists trying to achieve? We believe President Xi Jinping’s 2020 target of doubling China’s GDP by 2035 stands. That is an average growth rate of 4.7% for 15 years. But beyond just a numerical target, it is important to figure out what superpowers China is trying to acquire. And just as importantly, what Kryptonite factors China is attempting to inoculate itself against.

China wants America’s Silicon Valley, but regulated; Japan’s car companies, but electrified; Germany’s Mittelstand, but scalable; and Korea’s chaebol conglomerates, but without political capture. It wants to lead the world in science and technology, but without cram schools. A thriving economy, but with common prosperity. Industry, without air pollution. Digital lifestyle, without gaming addiction. Material plenty, without hedonism. Modernity, without its ills. This is, of course, a wish-list and unrealistically ambitious. But these mad scientists sure as hell are going to try. They’ve developed a taste for it.

In college, early into the semester, we went through a ritual called course exchange. Students gathered in an auditorium to swap classes after sampling lectures for three weeks – satisfaction was not guaranteed. The strategy passed down to underclassmen applied to both course exchange and significant others: “Add before you drop.”

China is undergoing – but perhaps botching – the same process with a more party-esque slogan, “Establish the new before abolishing the old.”

The surgeons have been on a tear gutting the old. The big kahuna is, of course, the property sector. But right behind are platform monopolies, private education, financial services and video games. The new has been playing catch-up, with 5G equipment, electric vehicles, photovoltaics and wind turbines being leading examples.

From all appearances, the Industrial Party is in ascendance and China will double down on climbing the manufacturing value chain. The Industrial Party is a political identity that believes industry, science and technology should determine China’s future. Adherents believe that China’s strength lie in the technical skills of her population and thus favor hard-science, high-tech industries as opposed to services and business model innovations.

Therefore, Chinese politicians, whatever their predisposition, must find a way to create space for this next generation of scientists and technicians to develop themselves. They cannot be confined to a production line at a Foxconn plant. Maintaining social stability means finding a use for future scientists and technicians, which means pursuing industrialization. Is there any other way? The key variable for determining the course of China’s future development is thus the massive number of talented technical and scientific workers.

If mistakes were made, it would have been in sequencing and in faith – dropping before adding is a poor strategy in both love and course exchange. China’s mad scientists may have been too confident that electric vehicles and renewable energy would be followed quickly by semiconductors, pharmaceuticals and commercial aircraft.

Perhaps they have reason to be confident. Planning for this surgery has been in the works since 2015 with the Made in China 2025 project. China has been steadily eroding imports of high value added intermediary goods like batteries, precision parts and electrical components, flipping trade with South Korea from deficit to surplus.[...]

China never properly transitioned from its Soviet era Material Product System (MPS) of national accounts to the United Nation’s System of National Accounts (UNSNA) standard, leaving out much of services from reported GDP.

We calculate that China accounts for 22-24% of global GDP and 20-23% of global consumption. We also calculate that household consumption is 50-55% of China’s GDP, in line with global averages. China should easily be able to grow at 4.7% through 2035 with only a modest increase in consumption’s GDP share (5 percentage points over 10 years) without upsetting global economic balances.

In the reform period prior to Xi, everything was sacrificed at the altar of economic growth. In the new era, growth has been walked down from 9.6% in 2011 to an average of 4.7% in the Covid years (2020-2023) as an increasing litany of issues were given precedence. Debt however, soared over this time from 175% of GDP to over 300%. What exactly did all that debt buy?

When Xi assumed leadership of China, he declared that inequality could not be allowed to increase further. Inequality is perhaps the major Kryptonite factor of the American economy which China wasted no time in matching as the economy roared with market reforms.

While still problematic, inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, has steadily fallen since 2010 largely as a result of massive investment in urbanization, pushing people into cities and pushing cities up the tiering ladder.[...]

China also poured resources into stamping out last-mile poverty. While most poverty alleviation in China was through economic growth, recalcitrant extremely poverty could only be eradicated by concentrated marshaling of resources, from relocating entire villages to weekly visits by social workers.[...]

Since peaking in 2012, air pollution in Beijing has been cut by over 60%, with Shanghai falling over 50%. China, which used to dominate the list of most polluted cities, now only claims one spot in the top 20. None of this came cheap, from installing scrubbers in smoke stacks to increasing renewables to moving heavy industry to strict emissions regulations for cars.[...]

Before Hu Jintao handed the reins to Xi, Hu warned delegates to the 18th Party Congress in 2012 that “[corruption] could prove fatal to the party… and [cause] the fall of the state.” The popular opinion in the West is that Xi ended China’s highly successful reform era because of an ideological bent. This is off the mark. Xi was brought in to clean house as the wheels were coming off from excesses of the reform era.

Throughout Xi’s decade in office, there has been no letup in his anti-corruption campaign. In 2022, a record 638,000 officials were punished for corruption. While there haven’t been any large scale ideological appeals to the public, it’s a different story within the 98-million-member party.

During this time, free market capitalism and liberal democracies also faced their own existential tests. Success or failure going forward will depend on whether liberal institutions remain intact in the West and whether party discipline can be maintained in China. What the PRC has had since 1949 is a governing party with the political autonomy to play mad scientist. [...]

Of course we live in the real world, not a comic-book world. The question in the real world has always been whether the economy can be engineered by mad scientists from the top down or is it best left to the invisible hand of the market? [...]

The standard economic opinion – against all evidence – is that China was economically stagnant before Deng’s market reforms. The thinking on this for the American economys is undergoing a transformation in egghead land – just how has neoliberal economics benefitted the American people over the past few decades?

In a Q&A exchange at a conference in Malaysia, Eric Li, the barbed-tongued venture capitalist, was asked, “Do you think top-down directives are sustainable in the long run?” To which he replied, “It’s the only thing that’s sustainable.… That’s why America is failing today.” After World War II, Li said, the Americans “lost the ability to do top-down design.”

Dec 2023

[wildstar25]

ARSAY virtual ninja goggles

A.R.S.A.γ

Or, Augmented Reality Scouting Assistant 𝝲 [gamma] is the latest innovation in personal security. When a job calls for two but there's only you; trust in ARSAγ to get you through!

[voidarchivefiles]

Lucid dreaming for the void state

So this post is inspired by this success story which mentioned using lucid dream binaural beats to induce a lucid dream and then enter the void through there. Shout out to @gorgeouslypink for introducing lucid dreaming as a method to enter the void and popularising it with her Lucid dreaming void post and FILD Challenge! I went through some success stories and tagged the ones that entered via lucid dreams and there's currently 9 with 2 more in the queue.

Anyway, that success story never linked what they used so I was curious and searched on youtube and found this, a 1.5hr lucid dreaming induction track, released 11 years ago and has 3.6m views. If you read the comments, there's many people who successfully had lucid dreams from it! Basically you wear headphones and listen to the track as you fall asleep and it will hopefully trigger a lucid dream while you're sleeping.

From the video description:

Listen to this audio AS YOU FALL ASLEEP, and after you have developed the habit of performing constant 'reality checks'. Remember, this is a tool, and not a magic formula. ;) Headphones required for binaural beats to work This lucid dreaming induction is a variation of the original i-dreamer. Improvements: a more gradual descending-step-sequence (alpha to delta) to induce sleep. Quieter and more frequent affirmations. Refined gamma peaks (40hz). The first 65 minutes will entrain you to a deep delta sleep using a descending binaural frequency + various water sfx. The remainder consists of a low-theta wave to help transit your mind into REM sleep. During this segment I have recorded various affirmations to help trigger a lucid state: "You are dreaming" "Do a reality check" "This is a dream" "You are taking control of your dream" Within the theta-wave are various 4-5 second long peaks peak at 40 Hz. ("...an EEG machine recorded frequencies in the 40 Hz range in lucid dreamers enjoying a bit of conscious REM...")

The channel has a playlist of lucid dream induction audios but the one I linked above is the most popular one. They seem to be different though so it's good to have options if you want to experiment a bit.

Of course there's numerous ways to induce lucid dreaming and this is just one possible way. I recommend checking out @charmedreincarnation and @themanifestingbrat's lucid dreaming guide if you want to learn more, there are a few successful anons who used her guide!

Just sharing this in case it helps someone!

[materialsscienceandengineering]

'Self-healing' glass: Study shows gamma radiation induces defects that are healed at room temperature

Self-healing glass may sound like a science fiction concept, but new research from the University of Central Florida demonstrates it's much closer to reality. In a new study published in the journal Materials Research Society Bulletin, UCF College of Optics and Photonics (CREOL) Pegasus Professor Kathleen Richardson and colleagues from Clemson University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studied the incredible self-healing capabilities of a specialized chalcogenide glass after it was exposed to gamma radiation. Chalcogenide glasses are comprised of chalcogen elements—sulfur, selenium, and tellurium—alloyed with elements like germanium or arsenic to create optical glass materials that may be applied to sensors or infrared lenses.

Read more.

[kojoty]

Just… Epsilon, man. 

You’re the haunted memories of a man who is the haunted memories of another man so struck with grief that he’s resorted to irreconcilable things, and because you’re those haunted memories, you understand exactly why he did the things he did, but how can you reconcile that when what he did was to you? But also not you, because you’re not the Alpha, but you are, all at once, you’re the memories of a man so sick he had to purge you in order to survive, and that means there’s some irrevocably wrong with you, but you have to carry that. You are the memories and you have to carry those memories. 

But it’s not just the memories of him you carry, or the memories of the Director you carry, but of Church, Alpha bereft of his memories who nonetheless managed to create more, new ones, who almost managed what you know, as an AI fragment, is near-impossible (humanity, integration), but couldn’t, because how do you become a fully realized, full whole person without any context for your very existence past Blood Gulch, but you– 

You have that. You shouldn’t be able to, you’re a fragment, but because you get Alpha, and the other fragment’s memories, and Church, an almost impossible legend for something like you, you defy any odds, any theoretics and can be that. You can do what, despite trying, the other fragments are just physically and psychologically incapable of ascending to. 

So you’re Church, as in the concept, but you’re Church as in the person and Church as in the memory, and you’re everything that makes up Church– Theta, Delta, Iota, Eta, Omega, Gamma, Sigma, Dr. Leonard Church– but you’re also Epsilon. 

You’re Epsilon who is the memory, but Epsilon who is the person, and Epsilon now carries Wash, too, so there’s another context that helps to bridge the gap between AI and human, and you’re Epsilon the bearer of so much pain and context that you tried to kill yourself the moment you had even an inch on your leash, because you are something so heavy that Alpha had to purge you…

And despite that all, you’re able to combine every fragment, every memory and become not just whole but something new. Not just memory, but someone who can both carry those memories and make new ones and be someone new. 

So you’re Church and you’re Epsilon and what that means is that you’re Epsilon, and you’re Church, as separate entities, but you’re Epsilon-Church and Church-Epsilon and there’s legacy and reality and myth and grounded existence all wrapped up into one little aging AI, and wow. 

And you can see that this is a strain! It’s hard to be all of these things! Church is Church– the guy in Bloodgulch who made friends with a variety of weirdos of which he belongs with–, Church is Epsilon– the AI unit that has a job, has a role (And I could go on and on about how Carolina’s greatest fault in an otherwise beautiful relationship is how much she kind of abuses Epsilon’s need/hyperfocus to have a job, but that’s another post), Church-Epsilon is both, and that’s, I think, when he’s truly integrated and whole, and it’s a shame he doesn’t get to do that very often because of the risk and struggle they’re constantly involved in, but–  Epsilon-Church is just truly a rainbow in the purest sense of identity, and he make a me cry

[apas-95]

If the sun went out, it would take seven minutes for us to know, for reality to reach us. If it, instead, annihilated instantly into a flash of gamma, light, and burning x-ray, we would wait those seven minutes for obliteration. During those seven minutes, was the explosion real? Was it inevitable, or hypothetical? This is not a question of detached philosophy, this is material. Something has happened, it just hasn't reached us yet.

[chanihobbit]

The haunted ship story I wrote for the Trick or Treat exchange. It’s angsty stuff and I do understand if nobody wants to read this now but if anybody does enjoy it eventually , I’d love to hear your thoughts. ❤️

———

Summary:

Shepard and his team investigate yet another derelict freighter out in Hades Gamma. With the crew vanished, nothing is as it appears and when he loses his own companions in the maze-like corridors of the ship, Shepard soon begins to question even his own reality.