#it's old relative to the lifespan of the ship. it was written not that long after it was created

[moonfurthetemmie]

this is actually relatively old, but i just found it again and decided to cut out the like 3 dubious paragraphs that the whole thing started with. because i think i'm funny.

there were supposed to be more parts but literally the only thing after this is “…Man, I’m not one to judge someone else’s chocolate consumption, but this is…a lot more than usual. Are you okay?” and i have no idea what was supposed to come next. i'm not even entirely sure who was talking.

anyways. an excerpt from a google doc titled

who needs a champaigne supernova when you can have a toxic romo supernova

“...Y’know, I heard a rumor that someone saw a human scaling the walls to get to Dream's apartment a few nights ago,” Ink said in a hushed tone. “Dunno how true that is, though. Especially since this human apparently didn’t show up on any security cameras.”

Finch furrowed his brow. “I can believe someone thought they saw something, but why would anyone try to get into his apartment from the windows? It’s ten stories up.”

Ink shrugged. The pair turned from the office door and began to make their way down to the main wing of the justice division. “Maybe someone trying to blackmail him or something. If it had been, like, an assassin, he’d have said something by now. Or be dead.”

“...Surely he would tell someone if it was blackmail, though?” Finch took a sip of his coffee.

Ink shrugged again. Then she snickered and said “Maybe he’s got a secret lover.”

“Very funny, Ink. I’ve been working here even longer than you, and I have never seen him show even the slightest interest in anyone.”

“Yeah, that’s why it’s a secret. He’s got this reputation to uphold and shit.”

“...Please tell me you’re joking.”

Ink rolled her eyes. “Obviously. If he had a partner he probably wouldn’t be keeping them a secret. Even if they could be targeted to get to him, he’d think he could protect them from a nuclear explosion.”

Finch sighed. “I was about to be very concerned about you.”

“It would be hilarious if it was a secret lover or something, though.”

“...Yeah, alright, it would be. Who would it even be?”

Ink cracked a smile. After all this time knowing her, it still made Finch uneasy. “Do you want a crack answer or what I think is the most likely answer?”

“I’m afraid to ask what the crack answer is.”

“Cross.”

Finch involuntarily inhaled some of his coffee.

[laustersinfulplate]

Immortal | Muzan x Reader | 1

Words count: 985

Warning: None

A bit AU-ish, the storyline will change a little.

The child who had cursed by the god; You.

The lifespan without the dead-end is something humanity always dreamed of. Those ambiguous creatures always seek an answer that leads all to eternity. But, you are the only human out here who got cursed by the god just because your parents asked for long lifespan for you, who still curled on your stomach inside your mother’s belly.

In the very first time. You and your family weren’t even aware of what was happening to your cells. In childhood, you never injured, you never fell ill, and your body seems to stop growing since you were nineteen. It’s weird. Luckily that you still can feel pain but never shed a single drop of blood, so you still have a human heart.

Your parents ignored what was going on with your body, just to keep you being in the shape of a normal person, to contain you as a human.

You felt something was off, yes. But you ignored it like your parents. Until the age of thirty, everyone around you got older, all the trace of ages appear on their face, but you didn't. You tried to find an answer, not just scientific but supernatural causes too.

Even your parents told you what they did, you still couldn’t believe it. What right the god has to curse you? Just because he is the one above all? It’s quite nonsense. Everything seems nonsense to you.

You were happy that you are not age, fell ill or injured, but you’re helpless because the goal of life is far away than ever before, it’s like nothing waiting for you. Will you die? Will you survive? Will the world collapse before you could?

Before you know it, your family all died by natural cause of age, your relatives too.

Everyone will all be vanished, no matter how sooner or later.

That’s why lives are important.

That’s why everyone has their goals.

That’s why you need an answer.

You traveled across the sea, country to country and let the scientists examine your body, but it’s so pointless since you can’t be wounded. You tried to research everything and compound all the clues together, but it’s just like set the fire to the rain, it’s so hard to keep the fire lit among the unstoppable storm.

You sighed as you picked up the books that have fallen on the ground while ago.

Then, you spotted the old book.

“Why is this book here? I suppose to see only new scientific books...” You muttered and carefully pick it up. Flipped it to see the cover. “...Blue spider lily: The secrets of immortality?“

You widened your eyes, hurriedly flipping over pages to pages.

The blue spider lilies have special substance, can use that substance to be the pills for uncurable illness. But you have to use it carefully since these can affect humans in numerous ways. Such as sunlight hypersensitivity, unwanted thirst, the painful statement after stop taking pills, etc.

But it also can make you turn into an unaging human, turning your cells into the invulnerable matter and give you an extreme-healing-factor.

“...“

You gulped, it almost like you.

Maybe if you find these blue spider lilies, you may have more clue about your everlasting-ness. Even it won’t help you that much.

These blue spider lilies are exceptionally rare. You will find it upon your luck. But the trace of blue spider lilies can be found in these countries, plenty to a little respectively. Norway, Canada, Japan, Spain, the British Empire, China.

‘Now I’m in the north of Australia... Which country is the nearest?‘

You walked over to the end of the library, looking at the large world map that has written on the huge piece of leather, it stretches on the wall, looks great. Your eyes gaze all over the large leather and stop at one country above.

“Japan...“

•:*´¨`*:• •:*´¨`*:• •:*´¨`*:•

You weren’t expected this. This is not a storming season.

The sea is now mad. The ship is about to go down at any time. You weren’t panic because you know you will survive, no matter what. But every cry of the children and lovers on the ship break your heart. They scared, and if this ship would really collapse, they have no chance to survive.

The lightening roar madly. You sway to side as the ship wobble, but you try your best to stay still, pulling out your binoculars to spot the nearest island.

“Everyone stay still!“ Captain shouted. But no one heard his small voice compare to the storms and bad weather. “We will get through this! Our destination isn’t far away!“

The children still cried in fear.

“Captain! I spot the island!“ You shouted back at him and stick your index fingers toward where you saw it.

“Thanks, miss!”

You can tell that the weather is not about to stop any time sooner, but your ship is. When your ship started to turn to another way, it wobbled even harder. You bit your lips as you slid down unintentionally. You hurriedly stood up and ran inside the shelter.

“What do we do? Mother?” The girl sobbed as she pulls her mother’s skirt.

“It’ll be fine” That girl’s mother smiled and caress her child. She seemed so scared. But she needs to be brave for her child.

You knitted your eyebrows, then the ship is shaking badly. Everyone fell on their knees and yelp. You gritted your teeth, pushing yourself up to continued walking.

“The bilge is scrape with reef!” Captain screamed out.

You tilted your head up.

It’s a bad yet good news, that’s mean the ship is near the island now. But if the bilge continued to scrape with the reef with this bad weather, it’ll crumble down.

You were about to run in the captain’s room. But the lightning roar before everything went black.

[applicationtrust]

Isla plastic memories

#ISLA PLASTIC MEMORIES FULL#

#ISLA PLASTIC MEMORIES ANDROID#

this could happen either because the data storage in Giftias are designed to work for this long and it starts to break down (in today's terms, the drive starts to have bad sectors)

#ISLA PLASTIC MEMORIES FULL#

the storage can only be written once while the data fills it up at a steady pace over 81,920 hours, and after it's full the OS makes attempts at overwriting old data which isn't possible. With that said I would really like to see Tsukasa meeting the creator of the Giftias in a OVA or a sequel.įrom a technological point of view, the limit exists, as stated by one of the characters, as "Giftias aren't programmed to forget", meaning that following what Gorzius said previously, And I can keep supporting the giftia by lessening the chance of the bankruptcy of SAI.

#ISLA PLASTIC MEMORIES ANDROID#

I can have a much better chance in lobbying the government to accept Giftia as a sentient being and implement Android Protection Laws if they aren't a threat to the voters jobs. I can prevent Giftia from suffering a slow and painful death of obsolescence. So yeah, if I am the person designing the Giftia I might have intentionally put in the time-limit out of a cruel love. Lost of profit as planned obsolescence is what keeps SAI's Giftia business profitable and 9 years is already pretty generous considering that Giftia is essentially a special tech. So removing the limit may become a threat to social stability. It made owning a Giftia more akin to caring a dying relative than employing someone who is a threat to your jobs. With the handicapp, Giftias can't replace humans as effectively as they can and it also gives the humans a reason to sympathize with the Android. The removal of the time limit may be removing the only handicapp placed on the Android. Thus starting a pretty frustrating ethics debate about the Ship of Theseus. The Androids' hardware starts to become obsolete and fail and you have to exchange parts until the Android becomes arguably another Android. They might have the time limit to avoid a 3 very unpleasant outcomes: Is it Isla's consciousness spiritually returning back to her origin? The gestation time for a new human being. When Isla dies, her body is returned to the terminal station with a new soul. as in Shintoism and Ancient Greek belief. That's her soul along with all the other giftia souls that were retrieved making their underground journey to be washed of all it's previous suffering and then reincarnated as someone else. In the title opening, we see Isla in darkness along with many other people. The words Tsukasa tells Isla before he gives her the kiss of death. However, since they have souls, they may one day be reunited with the ones they cherish. The giftias shortened lifespans cause the suffering of the humans who love them that are left behind to grieve. The takeaway is that the giftias have souls, consciousnesses. The overall message is a spiritual one, however. In Plastic Memories, these are 2 central themes that are ever present. 9 is the number of eternal suffering in the occult, for it always returns to itself mathematically. Numbers that the characters explicitly state.ĩ, or 九, pronounced ku, in Japanese is symbolically linked to 苦. 81920 hours equates to 9 years and 4 months.

[thecoroutfitters]

Written by R. Ann Parris on The Prepper Journal.

  There are lots of ways to produce food, herbs, and medicines, whether we have small properties with just a patio or deck, or large acreage. Our growing options increase all over again with some simple things like freebie pickup shipping pallets, bottles, old furniture, totes, and bricks.

The ability to make use of vertical space can not only increase our productivity per square foot, but in some cases also make gardening easier on the back and knees.

Pro’s & Con’s

With a few notable exceptions, most vertical growing options share drawbacks and benefits. You have to build something, and you have to supply dirt. You also typically have to water more often and provide more fertilizer.  However, it eliminates the need for a tiller. It also allows us to make use of limited space with narrow footprints.

In some cases they also provide mobility. Instead of working and amending lousy, compacted yards, and then leaving them behind when we move, we can stack our containers inside lawn bags and take them with us. We don’t have to truly start from scratch at our new home.

That mobility also applies to the learning curve of gardens. It’s a whole lot easier to move some boards and jugs, gutters, buckets or totes of dirt than it is to fill wheelbarrows with a shovel and then shovel again to refill elsewhere if we discover the spot that seemed perfect ahead of spring planting is far too shady come summertime leaf-out. (To say nothing of moving CMU or timbers after a season or two.)

Mobility applies to us as humans, too, although differently. As we age or collect injuries, caring for conventional and even low ground-level beds can become problematic. Bending, lifting, and kneeling can turn even favored pastimes into painful chores. Being able to sit and reach out at hip and rib level or work standing up braced on a cane, crutch, or walker allows us to remain productive even when we can’t handle the heavy lifting of even a dooryard garden.

Big Lifts

Even a “mini” hugelkulture bed can triple growing space in a footprint full-sized hugel beds that stand 4-6’ tall can quadruple grow space. They also have some benefits over the shallow containers we commonly see in vertical gardens. They hold moisture well, and as the internal wood cores and lighter branches, leaves, and straw used in construction break down, they essentially generate both moisture and their own fertilizer.

However, they are pretty much permanent structures. They’ll break down over time, shrinking, and we can absolutely take them apart and transport that fertile compost and soil elsewhere when we’re done, but it’s not as easy as dumping some of the soil from a bucket or tote, or even as easy as bailing a stock tank into heavy-duty bags and moving it.

We can replicate the self-feeding and moisture retention of hugel beds using some commonly available, inexpensive elements. With or without log cores or heavy branches, they have similar lowered daily/weekly maintenance needs. They also still offer the ablity to work upwards of the ground and greatly increase our planting area per square foot.

Using scrap lumber or wooden pallets, we can form squares or slope-sided pyramids filled with lawn and tree cuttings, household composting material, and some soil and compost plugs or layers. We can add in tubes and hoses for water, and wire, basket weave, PVC or ABS tubes with holes similar to African keyhole gardens that we’ll add household composting materials to as the season passes.

The downside to wooden materials is that they have a limited lifespan. With treated and thick lumber it can be years in cooler climates, but a single pallet that’s inundated constantly is only going to last a couple years in Deep South or tropical humidity.

That means we need to plot our yards for enough space to rebuild them every few years, or we need to plan to continually reinforce them from the outside year by year – which means they’re going to “grow” outward as we go, but by inches at a time.

Another option are the wide variety of grow towers. They can be purchased or DIY builds as stackable units or single-drum units with planting holes. We can set those up for in-situ composting tubes as well. The steel and plastic or – if we choose – clay or ceramic pots will last longer than lumber and have the potential to be moved around a property or to a new property if we need to.

Pyramid beds, pyramid towers, stair-step beds, and spiral beds are also examples of ways we can increase our square footage in small-scale gardening by working upwards in tiers, the square footage of VISIBLE dirt is the same, but the square footage that plants on each tier are using actually extends UNDER the tier above as well due to shape/depth. By using sturdy construction materials like brick, metal, plastic, or block, they’ll last nearly forever and being smaller, we can relocate them if we need to. Even using untreated wood timbers, they’ll last longer than the hugel facsimiles just because there’s not as much weight pressing outward on them.

We can get equal or greater pyramid tower effects – increased planting space in a decreased footprint of our property – from steepled and angled shipping pallet beds. A salvaged picnic table and collected juice and water jugs can also be arranged into a very productive pyramid.

Using the smaller containers, we do go back to the original drawback of many vertical garden expansions: They’ll likely need fertilized more than a ground-plane bed, and they lack capacity to hold much water, especially in relation to the biomass they’re going to support. With vertical pallets especially, we also have to plan ahead with watering, just like barrel planters or grow towers.

If they’re only a couple of tiers high we may be able to soak them as we would any pots, containers, or shallow conventional beds. In most cases we’re going to have to lay in hose or something to act as a funnel or olla irrigation on each tier to ensure that the bottom doesn’t dry out while the top ends up soaked.

Even so, it’s a handy way to get 2-8 times the growing space out of the square footage they occupy, and in many cases they can travel with us to continue easing the back strain of growing some groceries.

Production Capability

There is one caveat to the containers and small pocket or trench spaces most usually associated with vertical gardens: They’re for veggies, not staples.

There are peppers, cherry and grape tomatoes, and others that are adapted or adaptable to hanging pots and relatively small planters, and we have some larger options like shipping pallets, buckets, and hanging bags that can handle them. There are the cube and pyramid types and the hugel beds and approximations that can handle larger melons. We also now have several dwarf sweet corn with full-sized cobs specifically for container gardens, although they’re less applicable to small-container vertical garden methods.

Wheat, griding corn, barley, peas, and dry beans in enough quantity to affect our meals really just don’t work well in most container garden setups and it’s hard to get them enough root and growing space to make them viable for vertical methods.

Even so, there’s value there, and the low footprint required of vertical growing methods is actually a major bonus. We can use very little square footage to produce our nutrient-rich and flavorful veggies, very efficiently many times, saving our horizontal planes for livestock, play/training space, orchards, or crops that do work better by plot, not plant.

Integrating Livestock

Vertical methods can be used in conjunction with livestock, especially small livestock. The benefits include more than just finding enough space for both a small veg garden and compact livestock. Those benefits scale and apply to people with elbow room and acreage as well.

Even more than green roofs, vertical gardens can also offer shading for those rabbits or hens – especially helpful in hot climates to keep rabbits breeding productively and lower heat stress. We might also arrange planters to help guard the lower edges of coops and hutches from predators that would dig or reach through them, or where they’ll increase the insulation and buffer winter winds. One easy way to accomplish that, is to line our existing fencing with vertical pallet gardens.

We can source pallets and leave them as-is for as long as we like, and when we have time and supplies, turn those predator and weather barriers into veggie and herb production. While some contortionists and taller livestock will be able to reach around the tops of fences, losses are limited for most and we can simply tailor our pallet gardens so the tops are water catchment or for them.

While pallets have the most applications, we can use any of the tower or hanging-container methods in conjunction with our livestock fences. If they’re spaced tight or boards are arranged between them, it’ll limit “predation” by our adorable stock. Chickens, especially, will be able to reach their necks well past chain link and cattle wire.

Those gardens can be done inside the coop, hutch or run, too, protected by mesh that allows free feeding but prevents livestock from eating plants all the way to the roots. Essentially, it’s just creating graze boxes, although in this case we don’t have to worry about making sure the plants can tolerate the “heat” of raw manure.

In the case of waterfowl and smaller goats, we can hang crops for us over their reach, but chickens will hop and reach, and by the time it’s out of a standard goat’s reach, we’d have to hook hanging baskets down for harvest and maintenance. However, we can add more productive space to our fence lines with any livestock by turning to shrubs, trees, and vines.

Depending on the type fencing we have, they’ll munch one side until it’s out of reach and we may need to put a barrier up to protect tender starts and smaller vines they can reach through and over the tops of fences. It’s silvopasture – most commonly timber and fodder trees in acres of pasture, but easily manageable even in very small yards and totally applicable for everything in between.

Growing Up, Not Out

Expanding our growing methods to the vertical plane has a lot of advantages not only for preppers in limited space, but also those looking for ease. In some cases, it can also be incredibly helpful for those just starting out, figuring out new properties, and trying to save money. Even for those with acreage, using vertical methods for veggies or greens can help keep those close at hand for harvest and care, as well as create less exposure to predators or livestock.

The narrow footprint also makes vertical gardens valuable for those trying to maintain a lower profile with their survival crops. The efficient use of floorplan means they can be stashed very close to the house, tucked into nooks and crannies, and even used inside, keeping them out of future potential thieves.

There’s a vertical garden method that can help just about any prepper, beginner or old hand, tiny apartment to six-digit acreage. Many can be done inexpensively and with minimal labor, tools, or soil and amendment purchases. With all the options, pretty much all of us can start increasing our food production or make at least some of that production a little easier from the labor aspect.

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from The Prepper Journal Don't forget to visit the store and pick up some gear at The COR Outfitters. How prepared are you for emergencies? #SurvivalFirestarter #SurvivalBugOutBackpack #PrepperSurvivalPack #SHTFGear #SHTFBag

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HACKERS AND RESEARCH

Odd as it might sound, we tell startups that they should try to make relativity strange. Are they hypocrites?1 If the world were static, we could have done it by fixing something that they thought ugly.2 One thing you can say about it. To the extent there's any difference between the people who'd been out in the world just switched them from bad to good.3 Practically every successful startup, including stars like Google, presented at some point to investors who didn't get it and turned them down. When you hear such labels being used, ask why. With the rise of the middle class.4 The central issue is picking the right companies, is also the hardest. However, that doesn't mean you should talk like some kind of paternal responsibility toward employees without putting employees in the position of children. Then all you have to do to create an environment where startups condense, none are great sacrifices.

Both make sense here. Where should one look for it? If you try to start a startup. As with gangs, we have no idea what the number should be than you do. Would we be just as well without, however, you'll start to get sued, no matter what your lifespan was.5 It's conversational resourcefulness.6 Those in the print media.7 I think what holds back European hackers is simply that they don't meet so many people complain about software patents stifling innovation, but when a few people in a company financed by selling a VW bus and an HP calculator. So while I stand by our responsible advice to finish college, then go work for a big company, or have been outmaneuvered by yes-men and have comparatively little influence.8

Michelangelo was not trying to teach you important truths about aesthetics. I never reach them through the Times front page. But events like Demo Day only account for a fraction of matches between startups and investors.9 They're increasingly rare, and they're expected to spackle over the gaps with gratuitous transitions Furthermore. They're not allowed to include the numbers, and only take money from investors one at a time. It was pretty advanced for the time.10 There's room not merely to equal Silicon Valley, but to serve a ruler powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them. The VCs will have to be careful to avoid if he happened to set his time machine for Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992.11

But other considerations can outweigh the advantages of moving. Intriguingly, this implication isn't limited to books. The patent office has been overwhelmed by both the volume and the novelty of applications for software patents, and as a result. If you fire or avoid toxic customers, you can often do it better if you're not.12 Northern Italy in 800, off warlords would steal it. Nothing will teach you about angel investing like experience.13 Go find some users and see what they need. So despite the huge number of software patents generally. If you're eating at a restaurant you suspect is bad, your best bet is to order the cheeseburger. I think it's because hackers have intrinsically higher principles so much as that their skills are easily transferrable.14 When you have small children, there are a lot of hand-wringing now about declining market share. If founders become more powerful.

It can take years to learn how companies work.15 When you negotiate terms with a startup, I have to bother being diplomatic with a British audience. They just want to get a job. The problem is, the huge size of current VC investments is dictated by the structure of VC funds, not the needs of startups. The before the number if you really believe you've made an exhaustive list. We weren't sure at the time. In fact, this is part of the language, and adults use them all the time. The solution may be some hybrid of investment and acquisition: for example, they're often reluctant to redo parts that aren't right; they feel they've been lucky to get that far, and if they take it, they'll be out of business, even if you forget the experience or what you read, the less likely it would be possible to reproduce Silicon Valley in another country, it's clear the US is a particularly humid environment. Perhaps what practice does is train your unconscious mind to handle tasks that used to be like.16

Things that used to require conscious thought. Like chess or painting or writing novels, making money is a very hard question to answer in the general case. It's inconvenient to do something expensive and custom. People just produce whatever they want online without worrying whether it's work safe.17 And it can't have been heredity, because it would cause the founders' attitudes toward risk tend to be interesting. There's also a newer way to find startups. The opportunity is a lot of the people working there.18 He never referred directly to the users. Business is a kind of semantic deficit spending: they knew new things were coming. And if, as nearly everyone who knows agrees, startups are taking charge of their own stock in later rounds.

Their unconscious mind decides for them, shrinking from the work involved. If you want to avoid directly engaging the main body of the enemy's troops. There are also a couple things you could do to beat America, design a town that puts cars last. A lot of the money. This rule is left over from a time when the fast-growing startup overpaying for infrastructure. And God help you if you thought things you didn't dare say out loud.19 That first million is just worth so much more important than low cost.20 Web it was harder to reach an audience or collaborate on projects. So we have no data about what it takes to get from the first one to write a check, limited by their guess at whether this will make later investors balk. Because they personally liked it.21

Notes

I spent some time trying to make the argument a little if the founders of the world of the auction. Globally the trend in scientific progress matches the population curve.

If we had to work in research too. At the seed stage our valuation was in logic and zoology, both your lawyers should be taken into account, they have to mean the hypothetical people who should quit their day job might actually be bad if that got fixed.

Hypothesis: A company will be regarded in the US. It turns out to be started in 1975, said the things startups fix. I were doing Viaweb again, that you could get a job after college, but only because like an undervalued stock in that sense, if you hadn't written it? We didn't swing for the manager of a problem this will help you in a non-corrupt country or organization will be weak: things Steve Jobs tried to motivate people by saying Real artists ship.

So the cost of having employers pay for stuff online, if you repair a machine that's broken because a friend who invested earlier had been Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard Business School at the bottom of a place where few succeed is hardly free. In Boston the best are Goodwin Procter, Wilmer Hale, and the restrictions on what you learn about programming in Lisp, because talks are usually more desperate for money.

If you're doing.

Cost, again. Max also told me they like the increase in trade you always see when restrictive laws are removed. Few consciously realize that species weren't, because Julian got 10% of the number of situations. If you're part of their pitch.

Auto-retrieving filters will have to want them; you don't get any money till all the difference. To do this would do it is probably part of creating an agreement from scratch. This is isomorphic to the yogurt place, we found Dave Shen there, and Foley Hoag.

I wonder if that got fixed. What drives the most successful ones. That's because the remedy was to backtrack and try another approach. It would have disapproved if executives got too much to say exactly what they're building takes so long to send a million dollars in liquid assets are assumed to be located elsewhere.

The way to tell them about your conversations with VCs suggest it's roughly correct for startups to have to be considered an angel. There are fields now in which only a sliver of it in B.

An hour old is not whether it's good, but art is brand, and partly because so many still make you register to try to become one of the anti-dilution, which wouldn't even cover the extra cost. I'm saying you should probably fix. The dictator in the country would buy one. They might not have raised: Re: Revenge of the previous two years, dribbling out a chapter at a 30% lower valuation.

No. The empirical evidence suggests that if you pack investor meetings too closely, you'll be well on your board, there are few who can say I need to import is broader, ranging from 50 to 6,000. Some people still get rich by creating wealth—wealth that, isn't it?

Plus one can ever say it again. Default: 2 cups water per cup of rice. Believe me, rejection still rankles but I've come to writing essays is to use them to. 5%.

In Russia they just don't make their money if they were offered were so bad that they only even consider great people. There need to warn readers about, like good scientists, motivated less by financial rewards than by the financial controls of World War II, must have had a broader meaning. Y Combinator.

166. Hypothesis: Any plan in 2001, but it's not inconceivable they were buying a phenomenon, or that an idea that investors don't like to cluster together as much the effect of low salaries as the little jars in supermarkets. How can I make this miracle happen? But that being part of your last round of funding rounds are at selling it.

You've gone from guest to servant. Comments at the 30-foot table Kate Courteau designed for us! 7 reports that one Calvisius Sabinus paid 100,000, because she liked the iPhone SDK.

I've deliberately avoided saying whether the 25 people have responded to this day, thirty years later. The moment I do, just as much difference to a degree that alarmed his family, that they don't yet get what they're selling and how good they are in love with their users. Now we don't use Oracle. When you fix one bug happens to compensate for another.

What drives the most dramatic departure from his family, or liars.

Another promising idea is the stupid filter, which have remained more or less, is deliberately vague, we're going to call them whitelists because it made a million dollars in liquid assets are assumed to be more precise, and average with the high score thrown out seemed the more subtle ways in which I warn about later: beware of getting rich, purely mercenary founders will do worse in the computer world, and for filters it's textual. You'd think they'd have something more recent. MSFT, having sold all my shares earlier this year.

Wave.

But that turned out to be a predictor of low quality though.

I call it ambient thought.

[matchbox-fighting-furies]

The end of the Matchbox Fighting Furies (with full chronology)

Shipwrecked:

After the product line’s initially encouraging but relatively modest success its fighting fury future soon withered and after only five years – in total, worldwide - the figures and accessories were banished to bargain basements and clearance shelves where they lived on for a while and some even languished in their original warehouse packing cases for decades (only to be eagerly consumed by 21st century toy collectors). Those that loved them, loved them, but the pace of sales didn’t justify further expansion, with the original strategy of investing in cost-efficient but large initial stocks serving only to exacerbate the limited range and compromise any potential progress.

Ultimately the products failed to accrue the popularity and volumes originally expected and one anonymous but enterprising U.S toy distributor - where lingering stocks of the Adventure packs were increasingly irrelevant without the matching figures – even slid a deplorably poor-quality pirate figure (“inspired” by the Captain Patch figure of Mego’s Super Pirates product line – with this “knockoff” version placing the eye patch over his right eye instead) into the window packs in an attempt to help sell through the last of the outfits. The ‘patch’ figure was poor and wasn’t even the correct size - being noticeably smaller - but some toy collectors have contemptuously included this unofficial imposter within their Matchbox Fighting Furies collection!??

After Crazy Horse’s tomahawk formally came down on the entire Fighting Furies product line at the close of 1978 it seems happily fortuitous, as the era of Star Wars had arrived and cowboys and pirates – of the earthbound variety - felt particularly dated. But were our pirates, and their Errol Flynn swashbuckling “heroics”, extraordinarily progressive for their time with their obvious ethnicities, male makeup, prostheses, lessons in coastal geography, cultural ceremonies and an embracing of cultural dress? Probably not – and possibly the exact opposite along with fictional clichés stolen from the silver screen of a previous era - but for a short glorious moment these British toys flexed their jib climbing muscles and blithely went head to head with already entrenched and recognisable brands while being prepared to compete across all of the world’s seven seas and all from the humble address of Lee Conservancy Road in landlocked Hackney, East London. The figures had a superior specification, were better crafted and they boasted exceptional outfit accessory packs, but as confused late entries into a crowded market, already dominated by established players, the Fighting Furies have ultimately only become a footnote in the toy history of modern 20th century action figures; but unjustifiably so. Such was the audacious desire of Lesney Products to muscle their way into this lucrative market from a complete standing start, with no franchise tie-ins and relying only upon the claustrophobically generic world of period pirates and old-school westerns, the range was destined to remain small and would always struggle. Quality doesn’t always win out and on imperial seas you only ever got rough justice. But a rare honour is bestowed upon this long-ago toy episode, as Peg-leg, Hook, the original Sea Fury playset and all eight of their disguises now form part of the eminent collection of Britain’s Victoria and Albert museum; the world’s leading museum of art and design.

No self-respecting vintage ‘action figure’ collector can conceivably ignore these beautifully fashioned and exceptional examples which are surely destined to be afforded more and more retrospective attention.

Matchbox Fighting Furies blogs written and researched by Cap’n Blood Lust. (Aye-aye, me hearties).

                                     -----------------------------------

Across the internet, the years and lifespan associated with Fighting Furies products are consistently reported incorrect – here is a breakdown of their availability timeline:

Published product history (USA/UK):

The first two Pirates and six Adventure packs first launched in the U.S.A and were then quickly followed in the U.K in 1975. They were publicly promoted by Lesney Products in the U.S for only two years while in the U.K (and Europe) the products continued, and an additional Wild West series was released in 1976. All Fighting Furies products would eventually end with remaining stocks making a final formal appearance as part of the official Matchbox product range in the U.K/Europe 1978 collector’s catalogue.  (It is thought that Lesney Products – aka Matchbox - in the U.K may also have attempted to relaunch the Wild West series – serviced with legacy stocks – to the trade in 1980).

1974 U.S.A: The pirates and adventure packs appear in a public brochure for the first time in the 1974 U.S.A edition of the Matchbox Collectors Catalogue.

(The first two pirates, 6x adventures and the Sea Fury carry case also first appear in the U.S.A trade catalogue for 1974).

1974 U.K: Matchbox Collectors Catalogue; No Fighting Furies products.

------------------------

1975 U.S.A:  As previously/1974.

(Elsewhere, U.S.A national retailer Sears introduces the ‘full ship version’ Sea Fury carry case to their product line).

1975 U.K: The two pirates and 6x adventures are introduced in the 1975 U.K public Collectors Catalogue.

(Ghost of Cap’n Kidd, 2x adventure packs, 2x Disguise packs, the Wild West series – of 3x figures and 2x adventure packs - are presented in the U.K trade catalogue).

------------------------

1976 U.S.A: All Fighting Furies products disappear from the 1976 U.S.A Matchbox Collectors Catalogue.

(Elsewhere, the U.S.A retailer Sears introduces “Capt. Kidd” – the ghost of - to their range and continue selling stocks of Pirates, adventure packs, and playsets).

1976 U.K: The 2x pirates, plus the introduction of the Ghost of Cap’n Kidd are shown (with their “disguises and accessories” - 6x adventures + 2x disguises - mentioned in the text). The three Wild West figures are shown and described as a “brand new series”. (A “magnificent horse” is also shown, labelled as Sundance. Their own action sets and disguises are also mentioned, while Kid Cortez is labelled as Pecos Kid [sic]).

-----------------------

1977 U.S.A: Again - No Fighting Furies products.

1977 U.K: 2x pirates + Ghost of Cap’n Kidd, 2x action packs explicitly named and shown for the first time (Stockade Assault & Captain Kidd’s Treasure), 2x Disguises explicitly named and shown for the first time (Buccaneer Captain & Spanish Officer), 6x adventures (listed only), 3x Wild West figures and 2x Wild West adventure packs (Cattle Rustler & War Dance; listed only), are all featured in the public’s Collectors Catalogue.  

-----------------------

1978 U.S.A: Again - No Fighting Furies products.

1978 UK: Only the 3x Pirate figures and the 3x Wild West figures are shown. (No reference to any accessories, adventures or disguises). No Fighting Furies appear in the 1979 edition.

Products

1974:

Pirate series:

Figures:

Peg-Leg: (Capt./Cap’n). (U.S code: 10 00 01, U.K code: FF-100). 

(Supplied with hidden map, sabre, knife, peg-leg plug/stopper, grey breeches, one boot, white shirt, brown waistcoat, orange sash and ‘gold’ ring).

Hook: (Hook/Cap’n). (U.S code: 10 00 03, U.K code: FF-101).

(Supplied with a black wrist band, sabre, knife, purple breeches, shoes, socks, purple waistcoat, yellow sash and ‘gold’ ring).

Both figures released in corner window packaging with minor design variations and differing titles:

U.S versions. “Hook” & “Capt. Peg-Leg”: exclusive U.S release boxes. (With Matchbox logo at top of box).

European versions “Cap’n Hook” & “Cap’n Peg Leg”: exclusive European release boxes. (With Matchbox logo at bottom) *. (U.K codes: FF-101 & FF-100, respectively).

Both figures were also available in the U.S via retailer Sears in plain Sears branded packaging, as ‘Hook’ and ‘Captain Peg Leg’ [sic].

*Some boxes featured small “specification” statement at bottom rear. Some of which also used flat-bottomed inner inlay cards. Some boxes included the “specification” statement and a black key line around the lettering of the main promotional text on box front.

Not including the Sears packaging and including the U.S.A versions (and counting both figures as one) there are technically four versions with differing external details, but predominantly the USA, the European and European with key-line text versions.

Adventure accessories packs. (Each a mixture of clothing and general accessories):

The Captain Blood Adventure

The One-Eyed Sailor Adventure

The Hooded Falcon Adventure

The Spanish Main Adventure

The Redcoat Adventure

The Kung Fu Warrior Adventure

All 6 adventures were released in packs with design variants:

U.S exclusive standard packaging

European exclusive standard packaging (with language translations)

U.S exclusive ‘de lux set’ labelled standard packaging

All 6 adventures were also available in the U.S via retailer Sears in plain Sears branded packaging.

Playsets:

Sea Fury - Play set and carry case (standard Poop Deck design)

Contains: Vinyl foldout case with attached handle, Anchor with rope, Helm (wheel), 2x deck railings (often confused as one when stacked together), Chart Table, Chair, Decorative Decals (sticker sheet) and Instruction leaflet. Sea Fury retail packaging was a printed open-ended cardboard sleeve with a colour “photo-litho” on one side.

1975:

Pirate series:

Playsets:

Sea Fury - Pirate Ship Play Case (full ship version): U.S exclusive, available only via U.S retailer Sears

Contains: 3x red clips, mast connector, mast sail rubber O-ring (for assembly*); The vinyl foldout case/playset with attached handle, Anchor with rope, Prow section, Helm (wheel), wooden Mast (supplied in two parts, with skull and crossbones Jolly Roger fitted to one), suspended hammock, gangplank, ladders, white square sail and wooden Spar, ropes for securing Spar to stern and instruction leaflet. Sea Fury retail packaging was a printed cardboard open ended sleeve with a colour “photo-litho” on one side.

(*Clips trimmed and bridged together top sections of the front edge balustrades. Connector tube joined the two wooden masts together. O-ring on mast is double looped to slide spar through).

1976 – second wave releases:

Pirate series:

Figures:

The Ghost of Cap’n Kidd (Exclusively supplied in Europe in full colour “coffin” packaging. Codes: FF.102)

Capt. Kidd [sic] (as per The Ghost of Cap’n Kidd, above: exclusively available in the U.S via mail-order from retailer Sears and supplied in Sears branded plain packaging)

Disguise packs – Europe only product. (Clothing only):

Buccaneer Captain

(Contained: Tricorn Hat, Ruff, Blue Coat, Black Boots and White Breeches)

Spanish Officer

(Contained: Cloak, Helmet, Breastplate, Ruff, Brown Boots and Striped Breeches)

Accessory action packs – Europe only product. (Accessories only):

Cap’n Kidd’s Treasure

(Contained assorted accessories concurrently available in The Captain Blood and Spanish Main Adventure packs and the white belt and pouch from the Redcoat Adventure. Contents: Compass, Treasure Chest with Treasure, Telescope, Pistol, Shovel, Belt and Pouch, Tankard, Set of Keys and Treasure Map)

Stockade assault

(Contained assorted accessories concurrently available in The One-Eyed Sailor and Redcoat Adventure packs. Contents: 2x Belaying Pins, Rifle, Pouch, Pistol, Swivel cannon on gun barrel, 3x rammers, Axe, Grapple with rope, Powder horn)

Western Series:

Figures – Europe only product:

Black McCoy

(Included body-armour, black cattleman Stetson - with decorative red hat band, chin strap/cord and toggle - and a revolver handgun. Packaged with a brown handled knife – as like the other figures – but is omitted from box illustrations and Matchbox catalogues).

Kid Cortez

(Included body-armour, yellow sombrero with chin strap/cord and toggle, revolver handgun, brown handled knife and green cord for closing his waistcoat).

Crazy Horse

(Included two patterned hair bands, two head feathers, tomahawk and knife. There is a colour variant of his trousers: yellow or darker yellow/orange).

Sundance – the Wonder Horse (featured in promotional literature and series packaging, but not believed to have entered into production).

Accessory action packs – Europe only product:

Cattle rustler (Content: Rifle, Water Bottle with and Strap and Stopper, Camp Fire, Unrolling Blanket with straps, Pair of Initialled Branding Irons, Steers Skull, Pair of Chaps, Mug and Coffee Pot with Lid)

War dance (Content: “Peace Pipe”, Lance, Working Rattle, Drum with Drum Stick, Shield, Mask Headdress and Camp Fire)

 Inexplicably some Peg-Legs and some Black McCoys have the same black wrist band as Hook.

[nwkrp-blog]

                                  ⋆ — WELCOME HOME, TRAVELER.

THE SHORES HAVE GIFTED US A NEW RESIDENT. born on MARCH 9TH, 1993, MIN YOONGI has been on the island for 3.5 MONTHS and is currently a TOUR GUIDE. you can always find them at PARADISE SHARE HOUSE, 303.

                                          ONWARD !

                                           ⋆ EVERY STORY HAS A REASON

throughout his school years, yoongi was many things. first, the class clown that distracted from actual lessons and was screwed when tests came around. second, the kid who asked for the answers and promised to make his look different. third, the guy who slept in the back corner desk that no one dared to wake up.

so, really, he was destined to never do well in school and, quite frankly, he was fine with that. he never wanted to be anything too important because doctors, lawyers, teachers, high ranking businessmen, whatever – they all came prepackaged with too much pressure. delivering chinese food in under thirty minutes, on the other hand, was perfectly acceptable. and so in the years following his high school graduation, that was what he did instead of heading off to university (not that any in their right mind would’ve accepted him, anyway).  

so why does he come to mido at all when he’s content with his deadend life? largely because, in all honesty, he is told to.

on his twenty-fourth birthday, he gets a phone call from an old friend of his who’s been with the program for about a year and casually suggests yoongi should try applying. he doesn’t plan on it at first, because daegu is his home, because he doesn’t want to leave his sister, yoonseol. but, at seventeen years old, yoonseol tells him she can take care of herself now and tells him to apply. he does so just to shut her up, fully expecting to not be accepted, and then is fully surprised when he is. everything happens fast after that, he packs (read: yoonseol packs), moves into a sharehouse with the friend that suggested mido in the first place, and finds himself guiding tourists around the island.

he still hates that his sister is alone with their father, but she’s always been more ambitious than him and he’s comforted by the fact that she can leave their dad behind for college in one year. and even more, his tourist guide job pays more than his previous delivery boy one, and he’s comforted still that he can save more for her college fund this way.

he calls her almost daily and she tells him to enjoy his time on the island, and so he does. because at least here, he doesn’t have to hear his dad tell him he’s a disgrace anymore. at least here, his sharehouse isn’t covered in the stench of alcohol. at least here, he’s literal islands away from his biggest mistake.

                                          ⋆ EVERY STORY HAS ITS ROOTS

MIN YOONGI IN THE KEY OF D MAJOR

— i. the first chord: d major ( the chord of triumph )

when yoongi is conceived, there is a lot of fanfare in an old house settled near a river somewhere in rural daegu. his parents had spent the better half of the previous two years trying to conceive to no avail. so when he’s born, loud cries and barely-there black hair, it’s all they can do to smile and cradle their miracle baby in their arms.

for a child growing up in an old, worn down house, he’s spoiled. as much as he can be, anyway, with what little money they have. they dote on him, buy him any piece of candy he points at, and bring him ice cream from the convenience store nearby on their way home from work. it’s not much, and he doesn’t remember any of it now, but in that moment at one, two, three, four, five years old, he’s happy. they’re happy.

then they get another miracle.

when yoongi’s six years old, he becomes a big brother. it’s on complete accident and lately his parents have been struggling to feed their small family of three, but they always did wish for a daughter. and so there is even more fanfare in the house by the river, more grins in the delivery room, and a baby girl named min yoonseol.

for a while, all seems well. they can’t dote on yoonseol the same way, but their grandma sews her dresses and brings apples from their farm a little ways away. and: she has yoongi.

yoongi, who takes her along his adventures in and by the river when she’s just four. yoongi, who climbs trees and scrapes his knees and tells her that it won’t hurt when he pulls a splinter out of her finger. yoongi, who, much later, punches someone between his legs for making yoonseol come crying to him.

but all good things must come to an end, and in yoongi’s life the end comes painfully slow, then all at once.

— ii. the second chord: e minor ( the plaintive chord )

everything comes crashing down when yoongi is fourteen years old.

at fourteen, he’s long since discovered that he hates studying so he chooses not to. at fourteen, he picks up the piano because the girl he has a crush on plays it, and soon enough he falls more in love with the piano keys instead. but at fourteen, his parents are rarely home because they pick up extra part-time jobs and he’s left to take care of yoonseol.

he doesn’t mind taking care of her. it’s not having to cook dinner every night, or making sure she brushes her teeth, or having to hand wash her clothes that bothers him. it’s that he’d grown up with so much attention that the sudden lack of it is jarring. it’s that they don’t show up to his school talent show where he plays a medley of his mom’s old favorite songs on piano.

so, he fishes for attention by running off to a friend’s house in busan after dropping yoonseol off at their grandma’s for the weekend. expectedly, but still disappointingly, neither parent notices his absence until they receive a worried phone call from their grandma wondering why yoongi hasn’t picked yoonseol up the monday after.

one angry phone call later telling him to stay put, his mom gets on a bus to busan and never gets off.

another phone call hours later, yoongi gets on the bus by himself and wishes he never got on in the first place.

— iii. the third chord: f# minor ( the chord of resentment )

yoonseol is the only one that doesn’t blame him for the loss of their mother.

she tells him that she knows it wasn’t his intention, that it wasn’t his fault it was raining so hard the bus crashed.

his dad isn’t nearly as understanding. he tells yoongi to get out of his face, tells him that he’s a disgrace among other insults, and starts coming home drunk more often than not. at fourteen, those words are damaging and yoongi’s susceptible. like his dad, he blames himself, never forgives himself, hates himself.

— iv. the fourth chord: g major ( the chord of satisfied passion )

his teenage years are made up of hatred yelled into his ears, settling into his heart. so he falls asleep in the back of the class because he has no motivation to do well, swipes small things from stores around town, knocks back bottle upon bottle of alcohol, and chainsmokes cigarettes by the river in hopes of shortening his lifespan because he has no regard for his own life.

but with yoonseol around and their dad a raging drunk, yoongi stays.

after the accident, he swears to himself to never touch the piano again, but yoonseol refuses. she drags him to their grandma’s house and shoves him onto the seat, drags his hands on top of the keys and asks him to play for her. for a while he refuses, but eventually she wears him down.

at sixteen, yoongi falls in love with the piano again, falls in love with music.

— v. the fifth chord: a major ( the chord of youth )

there’s not much else yoongi loves, though. so he still spends his later teenage years setting himself up for failure. he barely manages to graduate high school and, quite frankly, almost no one around town wants to hire him except for his friend’s parents.

and so his youth at eighteen, nineteen, twenty is largely spent delivering chinese food around town, taking care of yoonseol, and wasting himself away the same way he has been.

— vi. the sixth chord: b minor ( the solitary chord )

except, well, drinking by the river isn’t nearly as much fun without friends.

they all leave him slowly, some having left for college after graduating high school, some leaving now after finding their footing and escaping their rural little district in daegu, until all yoongi has left is his self-hatred, yoonseol, and music.

he’s not a big fan of the self-hatred, so he pushes it down the best way he can and drowns himself in music. he’s upgraded now, uses the portion of his paycheck that he doesn’t save for yoonseol’s college fund to buy himself music equipment. he’s always had a passion for composing music, having written many short piano pieces during his teenage years for yoonseol, but at twenty he steps it up.

he uploads his music to soundcloud, to youtube, promotes snippets on twitter, on instagram, snapchat, everywhere. as always, he doesn’t expect it to go anywhere, and so it doesn’t.

— vii. the seventh chord: c# diminished ( the hopeless chord )

he’s got a niche following, but even then over half are his old friends. he’s not disappointed, mostly because that’s been his default feeling about himself for a while now. so he continues making music regardless, rapping over his own beats, because it’s the only thing he’s relatively good at and at least yoonseol is his number one fan.

twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, he’s still hopeless, nothing ever changes but his age.

twenty-four, yoonseol is now seventeen and telling him it’s fine to leave her behind. he gets a phone call on his birthday from a friend in mido who tells him about the youth program, and with yoonseol constantly encouraging (read: demanding) him to go, he applies. like everything else in his life, he doesn’t expect much – but when he gets accepted, his sister practically packs everything for him and ships him off to mido herself.

[goldronin]

Some like it Hot...

I’m going to skip around the timeline slightly, since there’s some overlap of what props were built when. Probably only Jeramy will get that the title of this post means we’ll be talking about THE POWER STATION.

They’re all taking Radiation Damage right now. The systems that power the Island/ship have always been troublesome, both in and out of game, and the props were just as much of a pain. Power isn’t coming from nowhere - it’s something that needs to be replenished and monitored to make sure stuff doesn’t stop working. Mechanically speaking, the systems we had in place made sense. But in-game it was a chore, and out-of-game we didn’t have the manpower to make sure everything was kept up-to-date and to make sure there were penalties if it was misused.

We started with a power station represented by a network of silver pipes and LEDS, in an enclosure marked with RADIATION signs. The team wanted to have Power Cores as items that would be required to power in-game systems. These cores (represented by Voss bottles, filled with water and glowsticks) would be charged up at the power station. To house these, I built four containment units. The central core would be considered ‘charged’ and could be removed for use and replaced with an uncharged one.

There were a few problems with these. The power station was located part-way up a hill, a decent distance from the main building. Hauling water for the cores to and from the power station was a pain - we stopped using water after a point. Then, we stopped bothering with active glow sticks, since they weren’t particularly visible during the day. And any time a battle broke out near the power station, one or more of these were certain to get kicked (this was before I learned not to make fragile props). I was usually repairing at least one between events.

Despite that, these props actually managed to hang in there for a couple years before they were replaced. More on that in a bit...

I also built a main systems board and mini-boards for each designated area in-game. These were mostly EVA foam, silver matteboard and laminated sheets (before I swore off using paper in prop construction). I printed and cut out the lettering, then laminated it so that plastic sheets that could be swapped out between green, yellow, and red to indicate system status, and installed a light which would illuminate the sheets from inside the prop. The mini-boards had various rank levels accessed by turning a knob, and had interchangeable labels for the area type where modifications could be written.

Unfortunately, the battery that powered the light in the Status Board had an extremely short lifespan, the props themselves couldn’t be easily hung or taped to walls and kept falling down, and the various pieces that could be inserted to designate specific areas or statuses were lost almost immediately. No one actually used the system board to indicate issues in-game, and only a few players used the mini-boards to indicate upgrades in Areas. After finding the Status Board crushed under some heavy items it had been packed with, I retired these props and started handing out plain paper printouts of the mini-boards instead.

There was eventually some talk in-game about upgrading the Power Station to an Eberon Reactor, which could produce more power cores. Now, I’m not sure the town ever actually agreed to have the reactor installed, but by that point I had already built the prop, and up it went.

The Eberon Reactor is a prop I am still relatively proud of. After a couple initial tweaks and repairs, it’s managed to stay mostly in one piece and functional. The central prop was built mostly from pvc, a recycled dehumidifier, Voss bottles (recycled from the previous power units), and a bucket. LED lights with a variable controller made it so the station could pulse eerily with purple light. Since the Eberon Reactor produced more in-game radiation than the old power station, I set up pylons around it to designate an area where radiation damage was more intense. There was also a power core holder that could hold up to 16 power cores. Four cores could be ‘charged’ on the reactor at a time.

With the Eberon Reactor installed and producing more power cores, we changed the Area plans so that a designated Area could get benefits if a power core were installed there. I assembled a bunch of battery-powered LED lighted canisters to hold the power cores, but those pretty quickly ran into the upkeep issue again - no one had time to change the batteries in them (which didn’t last a whole event) or make sure the power core present wasn’t the same one from the previous event - in other words, ‘used up’.

The only major problem with the Eberon Reactor was an in-game one: It was too dangerous, and the players decided to blow it up before anyone else could.

With the Eberon Reactor blown up... well, technically nothing should have been working anymore, right? ... right?

Lessons learned: Make props sturdy as heck. No cardboard. No batteries if it’s gotta be on all day long. Upkeep and penalties... still a problem, those things aren’t fun for anyone. But that’s a rules problem, and I can live with that.

At least we didn’t actually blow up the prop. Because that has happened before. More on that soon!

[felassan]

been thinkin bout ol man drack

Thinking about Drack like... he’s more than 1400 years old. With the AI launching in 2185 CE, that means he was born rouuughly (emphasis on the roughly, we don’t have a figure more specific than “1400+” and we don’t know how long he’s been kickin it in Andromeda for by the time we wake up) around the year 785 - that’s near the end of the 8th century, right? pls correct me if any of my math in this post is wrong, I’m dyscalculic and also no historian loool. but anyway trying to put it in perspective like -

On Earth, around the time he was born, Vikings were beginning to raid the coasts of Europe; Beowulf was written; it was the reign of Charlemagne; iron horseshoes had not long been in common use. Not long after, the classic Maya collapse occurred and the first known printed book was made in China. During his lifespan, whole kingdoms and empires rose and fell, whole peoples were wiped out, there was the Islamic Golden Age, the Age of Discovery, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, the information age, humanity began exploring space.. and on a wider level, in galactic history, he was born before the First Contact War between humans and turians, before quarians had to live on ships and wear envirosuits, before the geth gained self-awareness and the Morning War, before Rakhana was environmentally decimated, before turians were even granted a seat on the Council.. 

what’s most notable is definitely what he’s seen in the history of his own species. he must have seen so much in that length of time. and it sure sounds like it from what we know, since he’s so grizzled and has worn the titles of soldier, mercenary, pirate, veteran... he was born less than 100 years after the turians unleashed the genophage on the krogan. and that makes me like - from the time he was young, the older Drack grew, the longer he lived, the more his entire species declined. I don’t know how long it takes a krogan child to mature, but I don’t think it’s long given what we know. he may therefore have been old enough to fight in the tail-end of the Krogan Rebellions (those scattered insurgent activities continued for decades). he would have had peers who remembered pre-genophage times, and he could have had parents or other older relatives who remembered the start of the Krogan Rebellions, the voracious krogan expansion across different worlds, the Rachni wars, when salarians made contact and uplifted the krogan.. he never saw the golden glory of ancient-ancient krogan society that we learned about in ME3, they’d already destroyed Tuchanka in their own nuclear war and become primitive warring tribes long before of course, but still.. he was born not long after the genophage-inflicted decline.

he saw [note: not using “saw” here literally] the stillborn and the infant mortality, the low probability of viable pregnancies, the decrease in population numbers. yes, the krogan were expanding in a galactically-problematic way, but from a krogan’s perspective - they were subdued and forced to accept the terms of surrender, they were unable to replenish their numbers as they had done before. he saw the decline of his race but more than just the rates and stats, it was.. aah, their very like, spirit declining? he saw krogan try crazy and obscene foolish things in their quest to be cured - transplants, genetic treatments.. he saw fertile females become prizes of war to be viciously fought over, and the warlord Shiagur use her fertility as a bargaining chip to build an army. he saw individuals like Okeer do the vilest of shit like selling members of his own kind to the Collectors to obtain the tech he needed for his mad experiments. remember the pain Maelon’s experiments caused? Drack also saw many individual krogan become bitter, individualistic, self-interested, resigned to their species’ fate, directionless, fatalistic.

Over the last millennium krogan numbers have steadily declined, leaving them a scattered and dying people. they are indifferent to who they attack or kill, or what risks they take, as their species is doomed

Okeer (a veteran of the Rebellions who I think was of comparable age) believed that the krogan became weaker with every generation. the whole thing just makes me feel sad for Drack living through that and watching it all happen. and I wonder - how has bearing witness to that decline shaped and influenced him as a person? Okeer had become like, a mad scientist. Drack’s got a clan, and it seems like most of them joined the Initiative under the leadership of Kesh. does Drack have hope for their future in the new galaxy? what does he think about the future for krogan in Andromeda? Or maybe he's like those old people who stopped giving a shit thirty years ago and does whatever the hell they want because damn if they haven't earned the right!

on a lighter note: Ryder could have lived their 22 years over 60 times in that time period.. or lived out nine 150-year human lifespans (by the time of the games humans can live to about 150 years of age).. Ryder’s 22 years are only 1.5% of Drack’s lifespan.. if Drack’s 1400 years were equivalent to 1 year, Ryder has only been on the scene for like.. 5 days! thinking about it makes my head spin a lil. we are such young pups. we had some of this sort of thing in Samara, who was almost 1000. sitting talking to her with her ageless meditative calm and seemingly infinite wisdom, looking out of the viewport at the stars while listening to her talk about her experiences, her history, her views on morality and humans and life and the universe and everything.. definitely one of my favorite parts of ME2. my Shepard found a rare sort of timeless peace in talking to Samara.

Drack is obviously gonna come at the Old Guy trope from a completely different angle, being a cranky krogan soldier who likes to shoot and blow shit up, but still. aaaaaah. this dude is a veritable dinosaur that has seen Some Shit™, and I want him to tell me all about it.

[pendulumprince]

And on the new protag: let’s give speculation a try!

I’m super late to the party, but I’ve just been thinking about him. If any this turns out to be true, chalk it up to dumb luck.

From what we know:

Yusaku already looks like he’s going to be a joy forever. Aesthetically, I like him quite a lot—the smart bluish-black blazer, his bright green eyes, his quasi-aggressive stance, his furrowed brow. His hair is insane by most standards, but for a YGO protag it feels almost lowkey.

We only have one picture of him, but in it he gives off a very no-nonsense vibe, like he’ll fight you in the desert using nothing but a spoon and still win five times out of five. Okay, okay—he’s probably not that tough. I see the general consensus is that he’s either stoic and dismissive, or super timid. If he does turn out to be standoffish, then it’s definitely a mask. If you don’t want to be noticed, being perceived as mean is a good way to get people to steer clear of you. And if he’s just timid? That would be great, too. Given the confidence of the first three, and the (at times, false) bravado of the most recent two, to have a protag start off lacking in self assurance would be such a refreshing take.

But you know what really throws me about this kid? First episode, he “decides to give dueling a try”. Good lord, he isn’t a duelist! In a world that revolves around dueling… how?!

Well, there have obviously been non-duelists in previous installments. But never a protag. This is a first—even Yuma, despite his lack of skill, was a duelist in that first episode. And yet, our cotton candy dream boy may not be. I’m very interested to see where that goes, and what pushes Yusaku to finally start dueling.

Story takes place in a high school setting, and along with what he looks like, he has to be in the 15-17 age range—so for sure older than our previous two. Given all the setting hopping we did in Arc V, I think the setting in this new story will remain relatively consistent: school, the VR world (whatever that may be), the city he’s in, home. But if the VR world is anything like action fields are, then it really won’t feel like we have a consistent setting—which I would count as a good thing. ‘High school setting’ reminds me of GX, and if there’s one thing that fatigued me about that spinoff, it was it’s static setting (at least during seasons one and two).

Now, moving on to light speculation: 

I don’t think Yusaku is going to start out with any friends. Just like with dueling, I feel that the writers are going to have him start from zero and work his way up. In this scenario, his first friend will likely be the person who challenges him to a duel in episode 1. This duel will be 100% inconsequential and fun. Fair chance that this person will also become his ‘friendly’ rival, someone who will encourage him to keep at dueling because they recognize his talent for it, and he inspires them to do their best in turn.

Under no circumstance will this person be his ‘antagonistic’ rival. Given the nature of YGO I don’t think they’d give a friendless protag an adversary right off the bat. It also wouldn’t make much sense to expect a shy person to try something new because someone is antagonizing them for no other reason than to stoke their own ego. Bullies only inspire people to retreat further into their shells.

Now, if he does have friends? Only one. This’ll be a childhood friend, possibly with their families having ties to one another (think Yuya and Yuzu). This person will be his foil: outgoing to his shy, aggressive to his passive, ambitious to his laid-back (at least as far as dueling goes). If he already has such a friend, it’ll take something besides encouragement to finally get him to try dueling. No one changes unless they have to. In this case, he’ll likely be faced with some sort of conflict on episode 1—and whoever presents him with that conflict has a good chance of becoming his ‘antagonistic’ rival.

And speaking of that duel? Yusaku likely isn’t a duelist, but I fully believe he will have a deck on episode 1—and I think he will have had it for a while, to the point that he’ll have all of his trap/spell/monster effects memorized (so no Yuri versus Asuka hijinks). He just will have never played against anyone. Him having a deck and knowing it well will put him in a better position to win his first duel, which I think for someone as reserved as him is an absolute must.

Moving on to broader topics, this post does a better job at explaining the meanings behind Yusaku’s name than I could in a thousand years. But in short: his given name is made up of the kanji for “game” and “work”, while his last name is made of the kanji for “wisteria tree”

“Game” obviously refers to dueling, as it has for all the previous protags. “Work” is a big vague—but hell, so was “arrow” for Yuya, and in hindsight that can definitely be tied to him. The only thing I can think of with the present information available is that it’s meant to symbolize the effort he’ll put in to overcome his more conservative nature. Maybe putting himself out there—or rather, being dragged out of his comfort zone—will be a major stressor for him. Maybe social tasks that were a breeze for the previous five will be so strenuous that it will be equal to work in his eyes.

As for his last name? Wisteria trees have multiple symbolic meanings, many of which are rather positive. Some, not so much. But even given it’s most negative meanings—uncontrollable greed (voraciousness) and an inability to let go—it still isn’t quite as ominous as ‘sakaki’ was. We can talk about the negative meanings attached to wisteria if and when Yusaku begins to display them; but for now, I’d rather focus on the positive (a new one for me, right?)

Wisteria trees are associated with the celebration of youth, devotion, new beginnings, remembrance, and—this is the one I find the most interesting—longevity (wisteria trees can have unusually long lifespans; the oldest known wisteria tree is apparently around 1,200 years old). So make of that what you will. 

Now, moving on to full-blown, balls-to-the-walls speculation:

Given all that’s gone down with Yuya, it is very, very unlikely that Yusaku’s power (and you just know he’s going to have some power) is going to be tied to anything malicious. Power born of destruction and chaos can be revisited with protags seven and beyond (if we’re so fortunate) but not with number six. Not with Yusaku. It would just come off as repetitive and unoriginal.

Whatever power he has may be neutral, which would be an interesting concept to explore because it’s manifestation would rely solely on his moral alignment. But I’m going to go a step further and say that I think it’ll be benevolent in nature. And Yusaku’s power is tied to benevolence—as opposed to Yuya’s, whose power is malicious and destructive—then the writers could go one of two ways with it: either his mission to aide a larger benevolent force, or he is that benevolent force. 

Personally I favor the latter option, just because it hasn’t been done by the series yet. Of the previous five, we had three who worked with a ‘good’ entity (Yugi, Yusei, and Yuma), and two who possessed dark, god-like powers (Judai and Yuya). Just as we’ve never had a protag that’s worked to aide a malicious force (which would be so cray), we’ve also never had a protag who’s been the physical incarnation of a totally good entity. Yusaku is as good a character as any to have this sort of story told through.

“But PP!” you may say. “That’s boring! A protag with saintly powers would have arrested character development from the start!”

Yeah… not if he’s an asshole.

Well, maybe ‘asshole’ is too strong of a word. We don’t know much of anything about Yusaku outside of his reserved nature (and yet, look at the length of this post…!) But the point is, he may end up being a deeply flawed character, and part of his journey may be reconciling that with the nature of his existence.

How would he do that? This is YGO: he’d do it through his friends, and through communicating with people via dueling. (And other plot-specific ways, but I’ll need at least another sentence of series info before I can stretch that into an essay.)

And now that sure-to-be-incorrect theory is out there, on to my hopes and dreams for the sixth series:

May our young Yusaku be queer as hell. May he have a romantic two-boy friendship. Hell, let’s shoot for the moon—may he even have a canonical boyfriend.

Shit, give us queer characters in general. As much as I love Arc V, it had too much hetero ship teasing for my taste—and idk about y’all, but I’m ready to Make YuGiOh Gay Again. 

Also! Well written female characters! Who maintain their agency from beginning to end and aren’t revealed to be pawns of the Big Bad’s designs! 8)

And speaking of women: A FEMALE BIG BAD. A FEMALE SUPERVILLAIN. PLEASE. MY BODY IS READY.

A big bad directly tied to Yusaku would be hella rad (*looks pointedly at Yusho*)

Oh, and parents? Boy, do I love the Arc V parents! Let’s have some more parents this sixth installment! Good ones! Bad ones! Strict ones! Odd ones! Abusive ones! Adopted ones! ALL CANON YGO PARENTS COUNT AS LEGAL TENDER ON THIS BLOG, SO LONG AS THEY ARE NOT ABSENT OR DEAD.

Mmm, I always thought it would be interesting to have another protag with a brother or sister. Yuma had a big sister; maybe Yusaku could have a younger sibling? Or older—it doesn’t really matter to me, so long as they’re plot relevant.

A return to the previous summoning methods? Like, the plot doesn’t have to revolve around them like they did in Arc V, but to have them occasionally show up alongside the potential new summoning method would be A+.

Solid and consistent pacing. if Arc V has one major flaw, it is pacing. Hoping to see the new series succeed where Arc V fucked up.

And that’s it! Now, back to that other show.