#propagating structure

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

The glow of the tablet in dim, late-night office lighting paints everything that white-blue that hurts the eyes if a person stares at it too long. Or, Krennic supposes, forces a person’s eyes to become utterly immune to dry air, screens and projections. Adkin tells him he’s going to go blind in his old age.

He replies, Thank you for implying I’m not old yet, lieutenant.

Adkin: I wouldn’t go that far, sir.

He has over ten files up, circling around his head as he focuses on one in particular. A matrix outlining who is responsible, accountable, provides support, coordinated with, and informed for the operations and maintenance of the repair station he’s building in support of the DS-2.

The closest he’s been allowed as it regards his favourite project. The one that wouldn’t exist without him. The one Jerjerrod is taking all the credit for.

And the headache. 

There is that. No longer having the emperor breathing down one’s neck does wonders for stress levels. Even if playing a support role reduces his opportunities for advancement, he’s taking it as a gift for the moment.

Jerjerrod is bound to fuck up in some catastrophic way and Krennic intends to be waiting in the wings for when that happens.

Krennic can be patient, coolheaded, and entirely sound when he needs to be. Something he thinks someone needs to tell a certain Grand Moff who occasionally messages him such nonsenses as:

Stop antagonizing Jerjerrod, he doesn’t need help further delaying the project, and, if you perhaps cooled your heels for ten minutes you might be able to convince people to once again trust you with greater responsibility, and, please refrain from sending an entire message to me in sentence bites. I know your opinions on the dreaded block text but you could consider its merits, and, for fuck’s sake, Krennic, we are not re-litigating whether the Fiorites are a cult or a rebellion. I know you’re bored. Get a new hobby.

Krennic always delicately points out that it isn’t his own fault that he’s bored. If someone could have a word with the powers that be about Krennic’s skills, abilities, and what a value-add he would be to the DS-2 delivery…

Tarkin usually replies: As I’ve said before, commander, learn to be content. 

No, we none of us can be content. 

I had a weird Tarkrennic dream the other night that involved much death and insanity and at one point Krennic was wearing a t-shirt instead of his uniform or any in-universe style clothes and I feel like Tarkin was judging his sartorial choices. Which is entirely in-character and something that for-sure happened in canon.

Then Tarkin was murdered by maybe Krennic? Or someone else? It was unclear.  

Anyway, reminded me of these two so, no promises, but here’s a potential start to a potential third installment of Tarkin & Krennic Road Trip Through Space aka This Multiplicty and Propagating Structure 

[feralparsnip]

therapy is a lot more invasive than people realize. even a well meaning but ill prepared or unknowingly ignorant therapist can put knots in you for life. therapists are people with their own biases and shit going on. therapists can and do implement inappropriate interventions and act outside their competency. i will never return to therapy after being forcibly institutionalized by the therapist that spent a year making sure i was too sedated to object to their treatment of me (got a free stay in the bin 4 objecting bc i was "noncompliant" in not taking the sedatives)

& like its not the only way to process, unpack, learn to treat others ethically, etc

nobody in the fucking world is obligated to go to therapy. "not going to therapy" is never a moral failure. the only thing you're obligated to do is to treat other people with respect. the idea that therapy is the only path to being a person who's safe to be around is so fucking warped and rotten i can't believe how deeply ingrained it is in our society that even well-meaning people parrot it without thinking

[shapelytimber]

Ok hear me out.......... wlw Wilhuff Tarkin and Orson Krennic-

the dynamic very much is unhinged creative vs rigid control freak in a context of evil bureaucracy- and personally the context is why I love to read stories with imperials jdjdkd nothing is more crack cocaine literature for me than to make drama in a space office filled with awful people

More flavor text and me trying to sell you on why this ship of two truly terrible people is great below vvv

For Krennic, lean more into the evil genius artist. She's been up for 46 hours straight drawing schematics, she's rambling about incomprehensible shit, her only meals have been cigarettes and energy drinks, she's so full of herself she might one day think she's god, she's gonna die by 60. She doesn't care much about the politics of the empire, but they don't bother her either. She works for the imperials because they have a lot funds to give to engineers willing to build them a battle station the size of a moon capable of blowing up planets. Before that she worked on a lot a architectures on imperial center/Coruscant.

The imperial uniforms are a bit boring- so I'm taking full advantage of the fact Krennic is more of an engineer/architect to tweak her uniform a bit (and the cape was already not respecting regulations sooooo) For Tarkin I'm keeping it tho, this woman won't be caught dead without it.

For Tarkin, lean less into the whole buff survivalist aspect- she very much was in her youth, but she *is* a 65 year old woman based on *Peter Cushing*, and has been in a very high and prestigious position within the empire for the past 20 years. She still as an extensive knowledge on how to survive in nature, and fight with her bare hands or a knife, but that doesn't come up very often in her line of work anymore. She still killed a space bear unharmed when she was like 17 tho. She hates chaos and developed the main philosophy that drove the empire to this day : to govern with fear and impose order. She is a bloodthirsty woman in her sixties, with a never ending hunger for power, currently cheating on her wife with a coworker she hates.

They both love the death star more than they tolerate each other, but they did end up bonding over plotting the demise of one coworker they couldn't stand and digging out rebel spies. Make no mistake tho, this is very much a love triangle/trouple between two women and a giant battle station.

In the end, Tarkin killed Krennic by shooting her from orbit with the death star, the project was finally finished, she didn't need her anymore and she might have gotten in the way of her control of the station.

Tarkin dies a few days later during the battle of Yavin, along the death star, not willing to back down in her moments of glory.

PS : a lot of this is inspired by the fic "Propagating structure" by oneinspats ! it's what made me like and understand this pairing, and is truly a great work of fiction. I really think this fic is a masterful work when it comes to expending the character of Krennic, and extrapolating on existing things. Exploring his more creative side, his passion for his work, his truly abysmal lifestyle, giving him a hatred of nature and a background as an architect on Coruscant. While also keeping his horrific aspects, like reading his internal (or external) monologues sometimes makes my skin crawl with how disgusting his ideas are and how deep they run, but making him an interesting and compelling protag for the story. While all of it is surrounded by this delicious dramatic irony, because we know that no matter how hard they try to scheme (or fuck), the death star will blow up and it's incredible.

[metamatar]

i have a question and sorry if it sounds incoherent. why is it so important to marxists to distinguish that marxism is not “moral” or “ideological”? i understand that marxism is grounded in historical materialism and that it aims to understand how existing structures and institutions function with the specific goal of abolishing them in favour of a marxist state, but when it comes to understanding how to move forward past capitalism, how can MLs claim that it’s entirely objective and scientific? isnt the fundamental purpose of marxism (abolishing the oppressor class and putting the proletariat in power) a subjective one, given that it to support that you need to believe that abolishing the oppressor class is desirable in the first place? how would ML “scientifically” help people decide where the line is drawn on subjects like the death penalty and incarceration if its committed by a communist party (given that the decision that the cost of killing/imprisoning people is worth the boon it would give in establishing a communist state is still based on subjective goals?)

i don't think modern marxists should claim they're not ideological. im sure some do, but imo the correct claim is marxism is not idealist. i think some of this confusion comes from a popperian view of science as "neutral" or "objective" outside of time. how the political economy affects the propagation of ideology and the process of science as practiced in reality is very standard marxist analysis now. some of the claim to objectivity is something that most people claim belongs to their favourite philosophical project see the rawlsian veil of ignorance in liberalism. marx is also writing in a world where theological and religious reasoning have a lot of primacy in philosophy and he is drawing a clean break from that by hewing to scientific characterisation of his methods.

idealism, in the kantian sense is a philosophy that argues that our ideals (about say, fairness, justice etc) inform how we organise society. marxism, as philosophical project develops in response to kant and hegel to argue that the political economic base, ie the productive relations of society actually inform superstructure of ideals. to quote marx in the preface to critique of political economy: "it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness."

for clarity's sake the idea that changes in the mode of production (mostly due to technology) transform the relations of production which is the main driving force of history is historical materialism. the analysis of why existing structures and institutions must be abolished therefore has to be grounded in analysis where such structures are considered variously – unstable, internally contradictory etc. if you view historical materialism as true, your theory of change cannot be that you'll change the world because it is unfair (an idea.) you can view the world as unfair as a marxist and talk about it to propagate the necessity of your project but that doesn't actually give you a blueprint on how to change it.

capitalists are oppressors, but marxism doesn't view the problem in their oppressive or evil natures. capitalist economies demand even the most moral capitalist to exploit the proletariat. but! it is desirable to abolish there class relations not merely because they are unfair and exploitative but because these class relationships cause workers to develop class consciousness, recognise their power and abolish capitalism.

on your specific example, i don't think marxism can or should claim their are no moral dilemmas. historical materialism doesn't assert that there are no conflicting understandings of history. walter benjamin's theses on the philosophy of history is imo good reading here.

so i dont think your concern about why it's important for marxists to believe this makes sense, because this is what marxism is. if you don't find this convincing, you're not a marxist. you could be an anarchist, or a social democrat or a radical liberal.

[melrosing]

I’m a couple days late to this and good tbh but it is fuuuucking ridiculous that people are hounding Xiran Jay Zhao for stating what appears to be one of the plainest notes of commentary behind GRRM making Bran king of the 7K. like if you’re mad about this I genuinely don’t know how you could say you’ve understood these books on any level

the whole point is that a king/queen may be shit or they may be the best there ever was but they’re still propagating a line that could ultimately lead to another shit king/queen, or even a well-meaning king/queen who accidentally facilitates bad shit, and oh we’re giving them dragons too are we fuck that could end badly. Dany is currently doing the best job in some of the worst circumstances of any monarch currently on the page. she is very intentionally meant as a foil to Cersei across AFFC/ADWD. but we know it’s not ending w Dany on the throne so why fight it. we can pretty well surmise that the greater point of ‘fisher king’ Bran is that his powers exist for the land and the people, the role he will occupy is meant to be one of a regulator in a world that won’t get rid of feudalism overnight. he will not be succeeded by a son, but by a person who can effectively occupy the same role without bias or ulterior motive. we haven’t seen how it looks on the page but that is obviously GRRM’s answer to dynastic rule.

and I feel like most people know that somewhere inside themselves but either they haven’t fully accepted it or they still can’t stand the idea that their fave, well meaning though she might be, would ultimately in taking the throne be part of a structure that is worth criticising and IS being consistently criticised in these books. and so they’re attacking a fellow fantasy author that GRRM just made friends with bc he admires them for speaking up about important issues that saw them fucking censored from major industry awards last year. do u think he’d be more impressed by u lot bullying them on twitter

[headspace-hotel]

some times i see people talking about the Earth and climate change saying things like "now i know it is difficult to deal with utter hopelessness, terror, and visiting the thoughts of death"

and it's like wow I am so deeply sorry about the suffering. but...concern. Concern. Tell me, am I missing something important? Why do I feel a sense of hope for our planet? Am I a lonely fool? Have I been consumed by naïveté and misguided optimism?

That would be weird. It feels weird. It feels like I would be well suited to despair. My natural temperament is Mortal Terror making my body crushed for a thousand years at the bottom of the deepest trenches of the ocean. I've thought before "I can't live any more. This exceeds the tensile strength of the human spirit."

And then? After irreversible catastrophic failure of the soul, there is...what?

We try to imagine the future where we fight to save our home and it is very painful. The resistance feels so small and the machine of death feels so vast. But something's missing.

Everyone else is missing—the plants, trees, bugs, beasts, and creatures. Hello? Are the other humans seeing this? Nature wants you to know that she is not a princess in a tower. Look! Look at the chaos moving through every cell! Iterating! Adapting! Becoming! Thriving! Watch the pollinators tirelessly at work, observe the mycorrhizal network in the forest floor distributing the rich fruits of decay and photosynthesis for every inhabitant! Pay attention! We belong here too. They feed and shelter us, give us the very air we breathe, and in return we plant and propagate, cull, thin, and burn, shape, trample, till, shepherd and sprout seeds. Our species can look toward the future, to the world of our descendants. We can call every plant and animal by name and teach our children to use and care for them responsibly. We can feel this anger, pain, and grief on behalf of the family of Life, OUR family, and we can love the smallest beetle and the humblest moss.

Look at it! This thing is nothing like me, it does not benefit me, it has no use or purpose for me, but LOOK at it! Look at its intricate structure! Look at the marvelousness of its behaviors and biological functions! Look at its uniqueness throughout the whole universe! Look at it, and see its infinite value!

I saved a baby tree from the scorching hot gravel of a parking lot. I watched it grow and thrive in the hands of its caretaker. Many more followed, trees and herbs and flowers, rescued and carefully placed in cups and old tubs that once held yogurt and sour cream. This is so strange, I thought. They're everywhere, offering themselves for free, and no one thinks to take them. Everyone thinks transplanting a tree is hard and that nothing grows on the edge of the pavement but weeds. But it's so easy??? This is weird. Plant Nurseries Hate Her: Get Free Plants With This One Weird Trick.

I protected an old barren garden patch where nothing had thrived from being mowed and weed-whacked, and transplanted little plants that I found. I marveled at the bees that came. Chicory bloomed, then asters and goldenrod. I shed actual tears over a spicebush swallowtail. I ordered some milkweed from the internet, and the monarchs came for them. Less then twenty-five bucks for a divine experience like this. Wow, everyone else really needs to know!

I started volunteering at a nature center, and was allowed to transplant flowers where they sprouted in inopportune locations. I collected tons of seeds all fall and winter long.

There is much, much more, all of it bigger than I ever would have imagined. But this spring there were more birds, in number and in species, than I'd ever seen in my back yard before. Chickadees, swallows, finches, nuthatches, jays, cardinals, warblers, sparrows, woodpeckers of every kind...I remembered just a couple years prior when all I ever saw out there was a couple grackles or starlings or robins, with the occasional sparrow. Those birds come in flocks rather than couples now. And then the bumblebee arrived. An American bumblebee, endangered now, a queen. For a few days she was always out there, would fly out and buzz around me when I came out to tend to my now-innumerable plants. It's nesting time for them. She chose this place I was creating. She saw that this place would take care of her.

A week ago, I discovered wild strawberries growing in my Mamaw's driveway. I found lyreleaf sage growing beside a gravel road. I've become a master of transplanting; I took several of each home. Yesterday, I saw a tiny, metallic blue bee, an Osmia mason bee. Today, I saw an oriole and a strange, very fancy fly. I see something new almost every day. Every day I am being irreversibly changed as a person. How did I ever fail to see how much this matters?

I said I feel hope...do I feel it? I don't think it's a feeling, I think it's a practice. It's being part of our communities and our ecosystems. Nature's interconnectedness is both reality and example: to survive, we take care of one another. And when one member of the community helps another thrive, it creates a cascade that increases the thriving of all. Just by existing, you help us all survive.

You can only take care of so many plants before you have to give some away. You can only hold so much knowledge before you have to give it away. I gave seeds to a dozen different flowers to my next-door neighbor and she invited me inside and wouldn't let me leave without food, and we talked about plants and trees. A family friend lets me have goats' milk and heirloom vegetables in exchange for help around the farm, and I listen to him talk about trees, bugs, and soil and learn so much I feel like I'm about to explode from knowledge.

Being a caretaker is unavoidably a community-oriented, community-forming thing. You can't grow plants all by yourself. Your garden will make too many tomatoes. Share them. Your milkweed will make hundreds and hundreds of seeds. Spread them. Wild blackberries invite you to take and eat. Your lonely retired neighbor invites you to talk and keep her company. Once you grow delicious fruits or little oak trees, you always have a reason to greet someone and say, "Look, it is a gift!"

We're not alone. We are not separate. We take care of each other. Every species, every individual. A single action of caretaking creates a cascade effect of thriving. A single unapologetic love for a creature creates a blossom of curiosity and fascination in everyone surrounding. It's so powerful.

As my chemical romance says "I am not afraid to keep on living"

[proxentauri]

when i saw @n0rtist's ability forms i had to do reuniclus.....i hope it's not too late to be featured in the video! :0 we may have crossed from ability form into actual alternate form territory (see the original colours below the cut to see how crazy different they could have been)

as someone in evo microbio this was insane amounts of fun to do and i was able to pull inspo from places i'd never think to reference in my regular art!

itemized essay explaining the science and my design choices in more detail below the cut:

Ability Form 1: Overcoat

The science

Based on bacterial biofilm, which is basically when a bunch of bacteria get together in the same spot and start excreting this sticky slime stuff that structurally keeps the bacteria together (and also act as a medium for sharing useful resources between the bacteria, like enzymes, nutrients, etc.).

The design

The strings connecting the bacteria is based on what the slime stuff looks like on a microscopic level, specifically in electron micrographs like this one

The violet colour of the (rod) bacteria in the biofilm is a reference to Gram staining, which is a type of bacterial stain used to classify bacteria into two groups: bacteria that contain peptidoglycan in their cell walls (which stain violet) and bacteria that don't (these stain pink). Peptidoglycan is this pretty chonky polymer compound that's used to strengthen bacterial cell walls, so I thought it fit the role of Overcoat (which protects your Pokémon from things like weather)

Ability Form 2: Magic Guard

The science

Based on the myelin sheath, which are these segments of tube-like insulation that surrounds your neurons (see picture here). Mostly people talk about how it makes your neural signals propagate faster, which is true, but this ability form was more of a reference to its general protective role; it physically and electrically insulates your neurons. (Surprisingly I could not find a super good primary source for myelin providing physical protection, so don't cite me on that, but given it's literally a physical barrier this seems like a pretty safe assumption.)

The design

The entire body is based on a pseudounipolar neuron, which just means it only has one part extend out of the main body but shortly after it splits into two long parts (axons). I could have made it a bipolar neuron I guess (two parts extend out of the main body), but having a neck made it look a little closer to the base form's body

I wanted to give it dendrite fingers but it looked too creepy. I'm not sure if the three long fingers I gave it in the final design made it less creepy.

Since Overcoat and Magic Guard are both shield-type abilities, they're drawn as more closely related on the the phylogenetic tree (white thing in the center).

Ability Form 3: Regenerator

The science

This one is the most hype imo. In 2015 Dr. Will Ratcliff did this pretty sick experiment about the evolution of multicellularity (since at some point a long time ago life was single-celled) where he kept propagating the same single-celled yeast for a mega long time, and eventually the yeast evolves a multi-cellular "snowflake" form where after undergoing mitosis, the resulting daughter cells don't split, but stay attached, resulting in the yeast forming these clusters that create these cute little branches. I don't know where I was going with this. Oh right, the branching out reminded me a lot of regenerating limbs, so that was the inspiration for this one.

Anyway this is like one of my favourite experiments ever, there's some pretty good news articles out there about if you want to learn more about it!

The design

The segments are yeast cells, and the balls within are the nuclei.

The colour scheme was based on this fluorescent microscopy photo of the snowflake yeast. Originally I had the nuclei be bright orange in reference to this other microscopy picture but I thought the colour scheme was deviating too much from the base form for an ability form lol.

Speaking of here's the original unhinged colour drafts:

if i did commit to the full alternate form i think the biofilm one is poison, myelin one is fighting, yeast one is uhh...dude idek, i mean the fluorescent microscopy vibe is pretty strong so maybe electric lol? it's giving ghost vibe too though

i was originally planning on citing stuff but it's a tumblr post and I've already linked Ratcliff's work and i want to go to bed lol. If any of the science is wrong just call me out i'll fix it. otherwise, i hope someone out there appreciates the science references !! it's 8am good Night

[iridescentscarecrow]

what frustrates me about fandom interpretations of makima as a one note Source of evil, apart from the fact that the manga itself refutes this, is that her character haunts and ties together so much of part two that it's impossible to fully understand without understanding her.

makima isn't ever a unilateral antagonistic force. she's an agent of the institutional evil that looms over all of CSM. she's in as much a commentary on gender and performance of gender as denji is.

and fjmt in part two enacts the "haunting the narrative" trope in such an interesting manner because you see flashes of makima in every female character. you see elements of her diluted into, most visibly, the characters of asa, nayuta and fumiko.

in asa, i see makima in that yearning for connection. i see her in the way that asa herself is fundamentally unable to approach the relationship of equals that she so desperately desires, partly due to her own social awkwardness but also because of yoru's threat: everyone she gets close to turns into a weapon. the fundamental inequality to human relationships that makima is unable to overcome.

during the aquarium date, you see asa echo makima again and again in lines that evoke makima's purposing of denji. that weaponising. "i'll grant you any request / save me chainsaw man! / you don't have to think about a thing."

and her connection with denji also founds itself upon this. yoshida talks to asa about parasocial relationships -- rerendering makima's idealisation of the CSM in how asa sees denji as a love interest. asa and denji parallel each other so organically in their gendered suppression and portrusion of desire. it's a punctuation of denji's search for intimacy that's mirrored by makima's in part one. exploring how asa is different from makima is perhaps the most intriguing part of this reflection though: an example being the way asa overthinks her outfit for her date with denji while makima seamlessly models herself into an Effortless woman.

[it's not like asa borrows just from makima. for example, there are things to be said about the way she views her Body (as compared with reze and quanxi) but examining how mkm's character bleeds into asaden is quite compelling.]

nayuta being the most visible remnant of what makima was is also interesting because makima herself appears so little in nayuta beyond the surface. nayuta's role as the control devil is hinted at frequently as is her appearance resembling makima's

but her and denji's dynamic more often echoes the hayakawa family and pochita than anything else. consider: aki giving up his goal (his 'easy revenge' that he finally sees for what it is) for the sake of his family, that warmth of blood and platonic bodily intimacy that power embodies--

it's all referenced to again with nayuta and denji, in direct panel callbacks and the plot itself! nayuta is The Family that makima constructs for denji in part one to pull him along the plot she prepares. i'm thinking about how makima is an allegory for capitalism. and what the family unit means in a capitalistic structure. the propagation of an ideal that hinges on birth and descendancy, about narrative and reproduction of narrative, about how nayuta births herself from makima and denji's relationship.

and this is also why nayuta herself exerts so much control over denji in the plot, as well as why she's used as a piece to control him. in part one, family was used to create the Chainsaw Man from denji. in part two, it's used to make denji abandon the Chainsaw Man, this icon that the church and the public now take possession of. [something something alienation of the worker from the product. from the collective. from the self.]

fumiko is perhaps the hardest to pin down here because her role evolves as the fandomisation of the Chainsaw Man evolves too. in fact, as a denji fan, she represents not just makima but multiple people who see something in and want something from denji! (think of how she references reze in her highlighting how denji is just a child; how reze uses her commentary on denji to engage with her Self. it's fandomisation,,, and what is makima but Chainsaw Man's fan?)

fumiko most obviously calls back to these wants and their conceptualisation of denji in the raw sexual violence that the events in the theater scene moving into the karaoke scene embody. the undercurrent of sa that runs through p1 and p2 is brought to the forefront in this scene -- denji falling back into these cycles of abuse, him slipping into habitating the wants of others (his initial horrified expression and then his grin during the fight. his initial inner monologue and then the cut to him licking the tentacle.)

so much of CSM rests on this fandom of denji, this theme of what production and idealisation means, one you can trace through fjmt's body of work. and this fandom reaches its crescendo in p2. what's even more interesting about fumiko is her pathos under this layer. her seeing denji as denji at some level but in the end, her handling of him is so selfish. her echoing makima's uninhibited laughter at the horror of denji's situation, her predatory cruelty. denji simultaneously humanised and dehumanised through her fandom.

fjmt's characters exist as foils, as parallels and ideas. makima's character has such a stranglehold over part one and these ideas run over into part two naturally -- as a consequence of denji being a reciever of these themes, but also deliberately in fjmt evoking the Thing that is makima repetitively -- to underscore the forever re emerging structure that denji and now asa are trapped in. the same structure that makima produced and was simultaneously caged by.

[shirecorn]

Mermaids come in all shapes, not all of them humanoid. Still, some traits persist and propagate more than others. Fins adapted into eyelashes, brows, lids, and hair; other structures molded and emphasized, all of these come and go to different species of mermaids. Markings, including facial markings, can come in many shades and styles, Including those that happen to resemble human makeup ideas.

Some have it more intense than others.

The red lipped batfish is one such case.

[dailyadventureprompts]

So one of my favourite things to listen to in my off time is debunked conspiracy theories, mainly because it mixes several of my interests: politics, history, and being pedantically right about stuff with objective fact to back it up.

Part of me wishes I could draw more inspiration from this particular well, but doing so risks propagating the same brainworms that create conspiracy theorists in the first place. The grand canyon is a lichtenberg figure carved by a colossal space lightning bolt/energy weapon hitting the earth, which consumed the world in a pyroclasm that caused stone structures melt which we can see across ancient cultures Is a FASCINATING bit of worldbuilding by someone being in denial about the concept of erosion. I don't want to use it however because then my story becomes a transmission point for this bad idea, a psychic parasite that might take root in someone's subconscious and warp their worldview to the point of nonsense.

Take one I heard a few years ago: The word planet comes from the greek word planan, which means wanderer. This is the same word used by the original bible to refer to fallen angels. NASA is lying to us, there are no planets, the non-star lights we see moving in the night sky are fallen angels fixed there by god as punishment for their crimes of coming to earth and beggetting the nephilim, the giants that we can see evidence of in X,Y,Z mythologies.

You can see the narrative potential there right? The questhook about the scholar who invents a better sort of telescope and manages to peer deep enough into space to discover that one of the cosmic bodies is actually a being, only to become possessed by the fallen celestial and driven to free it, just like the extinct linage of giant warlords who rampaged across the region millennia ago. It's such a juicy hook because it plays on the same "aha" moments that the conspiracy theory uses to take root: Oh yeah there IS a linguistic connection between the world planet and the greek word for wandering because they were stars that wandered across the sky oh yeah there ARE a lot of ancient cultures that have myths about giants because it's really easy to imagine people that are big, wonder if there are any internet rabitholes that could teach me more about these thigns?

It's the Dan Brown DaVinci Code problem; It can be entertaining to play around with historical conspirasism as the background for a story but part of your audience are going to be in a vulnerable place and slip all the way down to Qanon levels. It's even worth with the Alex Jones types who can't seperate fiction from reality and take their inability to analyze iconography as a sign on NWO "preprogaming". I don't want to use conspiracy theories/bad archaeology as inspiration only for my work to be pinned up on the red-string board as evidence that everything's connected.

[hussyknee]

Whites and their liberal bootlickers are an infection. The settler is the colonizer is the genocider. Rejecting the most brutal form of direct violence means nothing when you refuse to divest from the structures created to accommodate it.

A settler's very existence is violent because they cannot exist without the colonial power that protects them. The only way to make it NOT violent is by dismantling the colonial power. Until then, your job is to work on educating yourself, amplifying the voices of the colonized, and accepting that armed resistance is a consequence of your existence. Holding placards over your head and yelling a lot at the people propagating and safeguarding the status quo that you benefit from doesn't merit you extra cookies anymore than accepting the softest punishment from a carceral system designed to torture the colonized to the point of death.

And if that makes you ask yourself "But...but I'm a settler! I have settler privilege! Does that mean MY existence is inherently violent to—" yes. It is. Take your unthreatened, unterrorized self to your whole and unbombed house with power and water and heat and food and your intact family, sit your ass down with the tub of ice cream you can afford and cry into it.

“There is no middle ground anymore. There is no way of supporting the liberal occupier, the progressive ethnic cleanser and the leftist genocider.”

—Ilan Pappé

[lime-bloods]

had a really interesting conversation with a friend this week about the Ultimate Self versus character growth, particularly in relation to Vriska and the hell tiers. in the past I've advocated pretty strongly for the Ultimate Self as core to Homestuck's themes, and as part of that I've been pretty defensive against its detractors because I think the idea is largely misunderstood and unappreciated. and while I still believe an appreciation for what the Ultimate Self represents is a really important tool for understanding Homestuck proper, now that we've moved out of Homestuck and into a new fictional framework I've come around on the importance of being able to critique the concept as well.

there's been a lot of talk lately about whether classes and aspects are really reflective of "reality"; whether Homestuck really says that someone might be defined by arbitrary labels applied to them by a video game - even if that video game literally is responsible for the propagation of reality - or if these are merely roles that we are expected to play but are free to break away from. I've always been in the latter camp; I've made quite a few posts now about how the class-based roles assigned to heroes of Sburb are reflective of the class-based roles assigned to trolls on Alternia, which are themselves biologically-essentialist assumptions that play a similar role to sex and gender among humans. and the Epilogues attest to the queer reinterpretation of such biologically-essentialist social structures; gender is an arbitrary label perpetrated only by cruel, self-serving cycles, and can be cast off if one's self-liberation calls for it. so the conclusion one might draw from this is that the Ultimate Self and the classpect are in a way opposed to each other; that the Ultimate Self is androgynous, without blood, and without class.

however.

it must be recognised that while Homestuck is one story, the Epilogues detail the exploits of characters who have stepped outside of that story and - depending on which Volume you're reading, and the outlook of each individual character - either into another story or outside of "narrative" altogether. and within a narrative, the roles assigned to each character do have special significance. just as one labelled "Thief" is expected to play the role of self-interested antagonist, and one labelled "jadeblood" is expected to live out her life looking after larvae underground, the "narrative" places certain expectations on characters designated as "boys" and "girls". as far as the narrative is concerned, characters are not "people", but rather ideas to be played with, and that's exactly what the Ultimate Self is - the "idea" at the core of a character's being. so it could equally be argued that a character's class, aspect, blood colour or gender are part and parcel with their Ultimate Self, and therefore that, stepping outside of the rules that govern Homestuck, shrugging off the Ultimate Self could be just as important as - or interconnected with - shrugging off gender.

crucially, Homestuck is a story about teenagers, and there is baggage that comes with this conceit. the coming-of-age story is one of self-discovery; the disrobing of the cocoon of childhood and the uncovering of the "true self" underneath is core to the genre. but importantly, at least in Homestuck's case, this never actually means becoming an "adult". coming-of-age stories are about teenagers because teenage makes for great stories, and as such it's only natural that a Lord of Time interested in creating a neverending story would try to engineer neverending teenagerdom. allusions to this abound, particularly surrounding Alternia, a planet populated entirely by teenagers who awaken from literal cocoons every evening only to return to their cocoons of a morning when it comes time to sleep. their quadrants seem hand-designed for the express purpose of making not "healthy" relationships but compelling ones, driven by the confusion of teenagers learning about themselves for the first time. by pretending to be a story "about" reproduction, Homestuck uses the fact that its heroes "enter right around the cusp of sexual maturity" as a smokescreen for the truth that Homestuck characters are expected to "come into" their genders in just the same way they "come into" their class and aspect roles.

in this sense, while the attainment of the Ultimate Self may superficially represent the dispersing of narrative contrivances like "timelines" and "alternate selves", it also follows Homestuck's "children coming into themselves" script to the letter. and to uphold our "full potential" as the Ultimate version of Self, as Hussie describes it, is to fetishise the prenatal kernel from which our entire life grows, untouched by any worldly corruption; to insinuate that we grow forward by stripping away our outer layers like insects, rather than by embracing each new layer as it comes, is a romanticism of childhood that borders on the reactionary. when viewed through this lens, what is "true" is also what is "innocent" - just as the world Before-Us, before Lord English's "corrupting influence", is innocent, Edenesque before the fall brought on by a serpent's bargain.

the Epilogues and more pertinently Beyond Canon, meanwhile, are very essentially not about teenagers at all! breaking free of the old cycle of storytelling also means breaking free of that expectation to stay a child forever, and in a world no longer inhabited primarily by children, how much need is there, really, for a "true self" that determines everything about your being? within the bounds of Homestuck, we can accept that characters like Meenah and Vriska must by their very natures be selfish because selfish teenage girls fill a vital narrative niche, and because when you grow up in a situation like Vriska's, being selfish isn't necessarily the same as being a villain. but becoming an adult means growing up, and among grown ups, on a planet where selfishness is no longer a survival mechanism, being selfish often does make you a villain, and there is an expectation that in order to continue being a hero one must learn and change. and in a world where a Thief no longer has to be selfish, how then can it still be said that every character has an immutable platonic Truth at the essence of their being?

the presence of the sprites in Vriska's purgatory illustrate this idea perfectly. because a sprite is an "idea", they represent a step toward the Ultimate Self, just as the sprite^2 is another step closer. but a sprite is also a ghost image; a photograph captured of a person in a particular moment in time, forever unchanging. this is why the sprites seem to simply disappear at the conclusion of a game of Sburb: while they are immensely powerful and vastly knowledgeable, their significance is tied to a specific purpose within a specific context. whether they simply cease to exist or commit deliberate suicide-by-meteor on the dying battlefield of skaia, they demonstrate an understanding that as great as it is to be an immortal and omniscient sprite, they lose their purpose for existing once the game of Sburb ends: just as the Ultimate Self loses all significance and purpose once the game called Homestuck ends. Davepeta demonstrates this exact superfluousness within the Plot Point; while they may have been a fountain of knowledge about all things arcane within Homestuck, when it comes to actually "growing up", there's not a single piece of advice they can give!

finally, and probably most crucially of all, Beyond Canon has not merely stepped outside the bounds of the rules of the original Homestuck, but outside of its authorial purview altogether. if escaping into Universe C means escape from Lord English's expectations for what it means to be a "man" or a "woman" or a "Page" or a "lowblood", then escaping into Beyond Canon also means leaving behind any of Andrew Hussie's expectations for what it means to "be your Ultimate Self". this is exactly why the story is CALLED Beyond Canon, and is central to exactly the kind of questions it is asking about canon; if Hussie is no longer in charge, why should "the Ultimate Self in Hussie's Own Words" (as linked above) remain the "canon" answer? and these characters' new home, in the custody of a diverse team of new creatives, is reflected by the multiple competing narrative forces within the story; it's probably significant that the character who shows the most reverence and concern for his Ultimate Self is Dirk, the very same character who wishes to bring Homestuck back to its heyday with throwbacks to nostalgic and outdated plot artifices like Sburb! no doubt the story's other key schemers, like its various Calliopes, have their own points of view on the meaning of the Ultimate Self and Homestuck's other mysteries, and the writers responsible for this story in our own world should be allowed to have their own views as well. in order to live up to its very premise, Beyond Canon can and must be allowed to offer up different opinions and interpretations to those of the original text.

ultimately this is key to understanding why Beyond Canon is not a traditional "sequel" and should not be thought of as such; why it was never Homestuck 2, only Homestuck^2, and then dropped the 2 altogether. in much the same way Homestuck was a story not "controlled" by its fans but rather written in continuous conversation with them, Beyond Canon, now finally under the control of fans, is a story in conversation with the text that came before it. in the end this is what any narrative-about-narrative boils down to; there can be no "reality" in fiction, only a version of reality as told by a given narrator. and while we are forced to take a narrator at their word when offered no other options, that doesn't mean every subsequent narrator is going to narrate the same story from the same point of view! it's important to have an understanding of the Ultimate Self as portrayed by Andrew Hussie because it deepens your appreciation of the original Homestuck, and a well-formed appreciation for Homestuck will in turn increase your understanding of Beyond Canon: not because HS and BC are the "same story" by any means, but because better knowing HS will make us better prepared to engage in the conversation being made when BC deconstructs, subverts, and even critiques the story we already know.

[captain-barnes-writes]

Fallen Petals

Part two

Summary: Max Verstappen watches as his ex-girlfriend moves on with Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz.

Pairing: Carlos Sainz x Reader x Ex!Max Verstappen

Warning: angsty, salty max, cute dreamy carlos hehe this is revengeeee

Word Count: 1.6k

Not proofread

[ this is in connection to what is soft launch? mini series ]

2023

The notion of home was important for Max Verstappen. For a long time, Monaco had been lacking the sort of familiarity and feeling it once used to have. It was no longer homemade dinners and escapades to the pool, failed baked dishes or tranquil mornings spent on a warm terrace. It was no longer long walks along the french riviera or the warmth of intertwined hands and loving glances.

The place itself no longer carried that feeling he desired.

That feeling had walked away with a girl whose presence was just about gone from his life. She was a dusted memory that had been packed away but reemerged ever so frequently.

The pretty smile, those memorable looks through long lashes, the mere pull she had as a person. Her patience and warm love. That despite how much he had corrupted her she had retained much of that inner innocence.

Those unforgettable mornings of bright rays shining in on them as they were a mess of limbs on the bed, not preoccupied with the world outside—just a couple eloquently in love.

Max could never quite forget her.

He also couldn’t forget how she didn’t retaliate in any way when it all came to an end. She just left when he had faltered, when he had stepped out on her and their relationship. Respected herself enough to not stick around for the world of hurt he was already putting her through.

She didn’t speak to the press, didn’t put out any statement when it all came crashing down. Didn’t shade him or didn’t call to cuss him out when his relationship with the same brunette she already had her doubts about became public just a few weeks later.

Now she had crept back into the same world that had destroyed her all those years ago. How the rumors propagated just about everywhere, how so many had pitied her for the mere fact that they were smart enough to see how fast things had happened for him. Put the puzzle pieces together, connected the dots as one relationship suddenly ended without a peep and another one began so soon after.

The first time Max saw her resurfaced a turmoil of feelings he had suppressed for so long. It had been at the paddock on the day of Barcelona’s grand Prix. She looked everywhere but at the dark blue of the red bull structure as she walked behind the red of the ferrari members and Carlos Sainz.

Of course they had to make their first public appearance in Carlos’ home country Grand Prix. How symbolical, Max chastised in his head. His jealousy so apparent to those who stood around him.

All he could see was her side profile, ever so beautiful, as she tried her hardest to avoid looking at a place she had spent so many of the races supporting him.

Yet it was funny how life worked. How it intertwined paths that were thought to never cross again. How much avoiding, being adamant about it, could get you right back to the place you were running away from.

She tried to avoid him as if her life depended on it. Eyes looking forward wanting nothing to do with Max and especially not after he had embarrassed her just days prior on social media. How he couldn’t seem to deal with the fact she was dating another f1 driver and wanted the world to remember he had claimed her first so he posted a photo of them in a rage.

He knew he didn’t have the right to react like that, to have had such an outburst like he did. Post a picture of them when he’d given her a bouquet of flowers so large she could barely hold it.

Max’s outburst on instagram had really dangled the media in their faces, put them in an even more awkward situation. He had absolutely no right to react the way he did, she had fumed at his drama-inducing instagram story. He had no right yet he’d gone right for it, put her in an uncomfortable situation.

Not just her, but his very own girlfriend who refused to even look at him and had packed a small bag for her and her daughter deeming she needed her space to think about things. About them.

Now all Max could do was stare with a dumbfounded look as the woman he could never truly shake off was suddenly staring right back at him too. Her face said it all. No emotion towards him, no resentment. Nothing. And especially not when the Spaniard turned around exactly when their gaze had lingered for just a second and grasped at her dainty hand, taking it between his and slightly pulling her forward so they could walk side by side.

Y/N felt her hands become clammy as Carlos grasped tightly onto it, intertwining their fingers for the comfort he knew she needed at that very moment. She was nervous about publicly going into the world of formula 1 again. Nervous about seeing Max again, even just meeting his eyes had made her feel agitated. Like the wind had been knocked out of her with his piercing eyes.

She stared at the man whose hands and even his voice was inviting and calming on days like these when her nerves were out of control.

Carlos Sainz Jr. was sweet and romantic in all the ways Y/N wanted her man to be. He wasn’t scared of showing her off regardless of her history with one of his rivals. None of that mattered to him. Not when he knew he held her entire attention, how she adored him in a way that made him feel content. How she loved him so effortlessly.

Max Verstappen was in her past now. More than two years later and they were now in the very same place together and it resurfaced so many emotions. How the man who would call her his petal was now a man she no longer talked to, no longer crossed paths with, no longer shared her life with. He was a figment of her past, a chapter in her life that had been forcibly closed.

He was also now a man with more responsibilities—a girlfriend who lived with him and bearing the role of being a stepfather.

Y/N had been so utterly heartbroken when Kelly began posting stories about him. When she began sharing so many aspects of their lives and they became that adoring couple that people admired. How loving he could be with another woman just weeks after their breakup.

Regardless of all the distress and pain that came with the realization that something had happened while her and Max were still together came the relief that she walked away from a world of pain.

She didn’t have to wonder if he’d call or if he’d be home on the day he said he would. If he really was where he said he was. She didn’t have to wonder if he’d met another model, an actress or whoever and if she crossed his mind during these interactions.

Now her fingers were interlaced with a man who knew formula 1 all too well. Whose tall frame sported red with the yellow logo of a prancing stallion. Ferrari’s race driver who carried the number 55 on his back. It felt awkward to once again be able to watch a race from the paddock club, but now for a whole different team. How she was in a sea of red instead of the usual blue.

 One that rivaled her ex’s very own team.

To root for somebody that was not Max Verstappen.

“Are you ok, princesa?” Carlos asked, his big brown eyes staring down at the girl whose face was anything but relaxed. Brows creased and lips in what seemed a pout. She felt silly that she couldn’t even control her own facial expression during moments of distress.

“I’m nervous.” She admitted.

“We’re doing nothing wrong. You’re my girl, Y/N. I mean…look at you.” His eyes scaled down the beautiful woman at his side, admiring her for what felt like the hundredth time that morning. The yellow dress she wore reached just above her knee and clung to all right places.

“If anything we’re showing how much of a fumble that loss was.”

He didn’t have to mention him to know who they were talking about. She felt bashful at his comment. Cheeks becoming hot as she lightly slapped his arm playfully.

“It’s true, princesa.” He flashed her his dashing smile. Looking even more handsome than she thought possible.

“I got so lucky with you.”

She’d gone from a wilted petal to a princesa. Pretty pet names that carried different meanings, one from a man who had faltered in his love for her and let their love wilt. Another one from a man who made every second possible in their relationship count. Who regardless of the time spent away from each other always made sure she felt loved.

It was the flowers, the facetime dates, the particular gifts ranging from purses he thought she’d like, jewelry and care packages with letters, keychains and snacks from whichever country he found himself in. It was all so different than how it was with Max.

Max’s hands had turned into fists, not being able to hide the sour expression that had overtaken his face. Despite knowing that more than likely cameras were on him he couldn’t hide his overwhelming anger and jealousy. His friend, who stood off the far back had walked towards him, who knew all too well of the events that had taken place the last couple days placed a hand on his shoulder.

“Are you ok?”

“How could I be? I have to watch Y/N be with Carlos almost every single weekend from now on.”

Max frowned as he stared at the couple who walked off into the distance wishing he could take everything back. He wished he had done things differently two years ago, but now it was far too late.

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

This is all over the place but that’s ok at least we saw max get what was coming for him after letting our girl down 😤😤😤

Probably a lot of mistakes so sorryyyyyyy

[metamatar]

As the 19th century gave way to the 20th, the caricature of the enemy shifted more decisively from the West to the Muslim. As the desire to homogenise the Hindu community took hold, Hindu Right organisations began engaging with Bengal’s marginalised castes in a way the Left did not even contemplate doing till the late-20th century. The slow incorporation of lower castes within the Hindu fold went hand-in-hand with the steady expulsion of Muslims from the national body.

Organisations like the Bharat Sevashram Sangha and Hindu Mahasabha played a crucial role in both processes, often providing what we can call intellectual justifications for such strategies. If Mukherji propagated demographic fears, the Mahasabha and the Sangha worked on the ideological mission of keeping the Hindu community together. This required preventing restless and assertive lower caste communities from breaking away from the dominance of the upper caste bhadralok.

Founded by Swami Pranabananda in 1917, one of the Sangha’s primary missions was urging Hindus to fortify themselves as an unbreachable, unified community. Such a mission called for an end to caste discrimination and the practice of untouchability. To achieve its ideological ends, Hindu organisations identified tribals and Dalits as their primary target groups. [...] The campaigns, aimed at reorganising the village economy, carried out social work in backward areas. [...]

By 1926, the Sangha ran more than a dozen ashrams in areas of eastern and southern Bengal dominated by marginalised caste communities. The organisation founded Hindu Milan Mandirs, conceptualised on the lines of mosque gatherings, apart from launching Rakshi Dals comprising armed volunteers to defend Hindus against enemies. This movement for the assimilation of Hindus (Hindu Samanvyay Andolan) worked on multiple registers. The Hindu Milan Mandir provided spaces to hold prayers, conduct rituals and festivals, and deliberate on issues related to Hindu society. The young were taught history, the elderly given an education in the Shastras. There were libraries with books on Hinduism and the Hindu way of life. Schools of martial arts training were set up for self-defence.

Through the 1930s and 1940s, both the Mahasabha and the Sangha worked in tandem to fortify the Hindu community as one. Even as the BSS urged upper castes to end untouchability, it also asked lower castes to integrate themselves with the larger Hindu community by giving up their “hatred” of upper castes. These organisations wanted to direct Dalit anger at Muslims, representing them as the primary other and threat to Hindus. The Sangha’s spaces of Hindu congregation, Pranabananda believed, would facilitate organising as a homogenous, non-porous community. They served, or at least attempted to serve, the purpose of subsuming smaller oppositional caste-based identities into a sweeping fold of Hindu identity. Such a ubiquitous Hindu identity, proponents hoped, would steer groups away from caste antagonism and towards building a Hindu Dharma Rashtra. In some ways, the scale and operations of this intricate organisational network resembled the structure of the RSS, founded in 1925. During riots and famines, Hindu Milan Mandir volunteers would rush to the aid of Hindus, collecting monthly subscriptions and food from each member.

[kassandra-the-witch]

I have never sucked ass at a game as much as I have in Umineko. Sure, I can identify the surface level themes - the intergenerational propagation of imperialism, the inherent patriarchal and classist structure of the nuclear family, the invisibilization of capitalist war-profiteering post-WWII, the absurd toxic dynamics within ultrarich families, the role contact with the west and christianity played in the construction and maintenance of the Japanese empire, the violence of indentured servitude, the near limitless ability of rich men to get away with sexualized violence, the propagation of sexualized violence throughout the western literary canon since the 14th century, the way trauma affects one's ability to remember and reconstruct and the way that influences belief in conflict with reality - but who the fuck committed the murders and how?

No idea. Honestly tiny bombs in the food sounds just as good as any explanation I could come up with.

[xhxhxhx]

Let's actually write something today.

I.

I've spent the past few days writing a script.

There's nothing novel about it. It's not interesting. But it should save me some time, time that I can spend reading or writing. And that's good enough for me.

But before I describe the script, I have to explain what it's for.

II.

I wrote the script to complete part of what I call the index.

The index is a series of Google Docs. They're bundled together in a folder, but I have them linked from my home screen and assigned them hotkey links on my browser.

The index has three parts. The first addresses the Constitution, with entries arranged under the constitutional text. The second addresses everything else, with entries in alphabetical order.

Each part consists of a number of topic headings, with the text of the authority as needed, followed by lists of authorities and readings, and then by cross-references.

Each entry should be correct and full in its authorities and readings, but should contain nothing more than a simple, bare citation. Anything more than that would slow me down.

III.

Each part is divided into different documents, each with its own headings, texts, authorities and readings.

There are tables that arrange the documents, providing a simple count of their number. The first part spans 58 documents. That's the Constitution. The second, on everything else, spans 139.

Each of those documents is separately linked from my home screen, each an entry on one of twenty 4x4 panels, each arranged in ordinal or alphabetical order.

These numbers are an imprecise index of scale. The documents themselves have no fixed length. The longest is currently "Judiciar," at 250 pages; "Im" is 127 pages.

By habit, I split them when load times became troublesome, or when I'm working from an entry partway down the page. But I haven't split all the troublesome ones. They could always be longer.

IV.

The indexes are meant to supply and track my reading.

The readings are the most important part here. They are my reading lists. They are where I put the materials I want to read, may want to read, or have read.

To supply my readings, I added headings, readings, and authorities as I came across them. I wasn't systematic about it; I added them more by habit than by rule.

It didn't have to be systematic. Docs made it easy to add and revise. If I discovered a newer, better structure for a topic, I could move the entries around.

To track my reading, I highlighted. If I had read something, I would highlight it in the lightest shade of green.

I'd ultimately like to simplify that work, with a script to propagate the highlighting across all instances of the reading. But I'm not clever enough to know where to start.

Except on the third part of the index.

V.

The third part is the opinion index.

The opinion index contains headings for each justice, with their reported opinions arranged in chronological order by year, then by reporter, then by volume and page number.

The opinion index is smallest part of the index. It spans sixteen documents, split chronologically, by Chief Justice. But within each document, the justices are arranged alphabetically.

Until yesterday, I needed to add each opinion by hand. Each time I added an opinion under a topic heading, I would need to add another entry to the opinion index.

And each time I added an opinion from the United States Reports, which was where most of the opinions came from, I would add, by hand, another link to the Library of Congress.

And there were 29,138 cases with written opinions in the reports.

VI.

The United States Reports is the official reporter of the opinions of the Supreme Court of the United States.

The Supreme Court uses the language of "official and unofficial reports" to refer to the opinions of inferior courts, Sup. Ct. R. 14.1(d), but not its own. R. 41. But what "official" means here is that the Court prepares its opinions, through its own officers, and prints them at its own direction. 28 U.S.C. § 673; Sup. Ct. R. 41.

The Court does that through the Court's reporter of decisions.

The Supreme Court's reporter of decisions is appointed by, and removable by, "the Court"; they prepare the Court's decisions "under the direction of the Court or the Chief Justice"; and they handle the Court's printing and binding "subject to the approval of the Court or the Chief Justice." 28 U.S.C. § 673.

The language makes for some unhelpful ambiguity as to whether the reporter takes direction from "the Court or the Chief Justice," id., but it's "official" either way.

The Court has some unique printing powers. The Court is not bound to the Government Printing Office, to which all other federal organs are bound to submit their printing and binding orders, 44 U.S.C. § 501, but the Office is bound to take the Court's requisitions. 28 U.S.C. §§ 411(c), 412. And so they do.

Everywhere else, the Office makes the printing decisions, at the direction of certain members of Congress. 44 U.S.C. § 101. They fix the standards. § 509. But the Court is exempt. There, "[t]he reporter shall determine the quality and size of the paper, type, format, proofs and binding." 28 U.S.C. § 673.

But enough about that.

VII.

The Library of Congress provides PDFs of each opinion in the United States reports down to volume 570. Each opinion are available at a standard address, keyed to the volume and page number:

https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep{volume_str}/usrep{volume_str}{page_str}/usrep{volume_str}{page_str}.pdf

Note that {volume_str} and {page_str} are each three digits long, so they need leading zeroes:

volume_str = f"{int(volume):03d}" page_str = f"{int(page):03d}"

This doesn't catch all the opinions, but it probably catches 99 percent of the decided cases.

In 1888 and again in 1893, the Supreme Court printed bundles of unpublished decisions dating back to 1839 in appendices to the reporter. The formula doesn't catch those, but it does catch just about everything else.

VIII.

There are about 29,138 cases with reported opinions in the U.S. reports. It'd take a long time to copy down each one, by hand, and add the right link.

But what if, instead of writing down each entry, by hand, I simply copied over every opinion, with the right link, at once?

And that's what the script was for.