#quantum motors

[jettacar]

this week brings us to bolivia, to check out a very recent startup automaker!! ❤💛💚 ^^

[starredforlife]

oooh my god vic soy sauce embarrassment

[wauln]

[ China Expects Robot Takeover By 2030 ]

[pupsmailbox]

ROBOT ID PACK

NAMES ⌇　aerobot.　agatha.　ai.　alan.　alethea.　alexia.　algernon.　alistair.　alpha.　amaryllis.　ambrose.　androbot.　androic.　andromeda.　angelica.　antenna.　arabella.　araminta.　arcade.　auto.　automaton.　axel.　axis.　badnik.　bionel.　bolt.　byte.　care.　celline.　cello.　chip.　chipique.　clank.　cloniste.　clonoid.　cobot.　codelle.　cole.　curiosity.　cy.　cyber.　cybette.　cybion.　cypher.　data.　dell.　della.　delpha.　delta.　digi.　dot.　droid.　droidess.　droidis.　dronette.　echo.　elektra.　euna.　eva.　eve.　fritz.　giga.　gizmo.　glitch.　grey.　gynoid.　helix.　holo.　holodir.　hydra.　ida.　jet.　kaput.　kinect.　krudzu.　linion.　mac.　mace.　machibella.　machina.　mal.　malware.　mation.　mech.　mecha.　mechael.　mechan．ace.　metal.　metalia.　metalish.　micro.　motherboard.　motor.　nano.　neo.　nucleus.　nyquist.　orbit.　parallel.　pip.　pixel.　prime.　primus.　proto.　quantum.　radar.　radius.　ram.　ray.　reflect.　reflectette.　robo.　robonaut.　rusty.　satellite.　scrappy.　selsyn.　sentiex.　servo.　shard.　siri.　solar.　sonar.　spark.　sparkie.　sparky.　sputnik.　steele.　sterling.　stochastic.　synchro.　synie.　synthett.　talus.　terra.　tin.　tink.　tobor.　ultramarine.　ultron.　unimate.　unit.　virus.　waldo.　zip.

PRONOUNS ⌇　00/00.　01/01.　0101/0101.　11/11.　1010/1010.　10110/101.　ai/ai.　algo/algorithm.　android/android.　app/app.　auto/auto.　auto/automated.　auto/automaton.　axis/axi.　beep/boop.　bio/bionic.　bio/bioplastic.　blast/blast.　bo/bot.　bolt/bolt.　bot/bot.　buffer/buffer.　byte/byte.　cell/cell.　chaos/chaos.　chi/chip.　click/click.　clo/clone.　code/code.　coil/recoil.　command/command.　compute/computer.　core/core.　cyb/cyborg.　cyber/cyber.　data/data.　dev/device.　device/device.　dig/digital.　digi/digital.　droi/droid.　droid/droid.　e/exe.　electric/electric.　entry/entries.　exo/exoskeleton.　gear/gear.　gli/glitch.　glitch/glitch.　hack/hack.　ho/holo.　holo/holo.　hologram/hologram.　in/install.　intra/intranet.　link/link.　machi/machine.　mal/malfunction.　mal/malware.　mech/mech.　mecha/mechanical.　mechanic/mechanic.　metal/metal.　metro/metro.　motor/motor.　neo/neo.　neon/neon.　nuclear/nuclear.　propeller/propeller.　radar/radar.　retro/retro.　robo/robo.　robo/robot.　robot/robot.　rubber/rubber.　satellite/satellite.　sca/scan.　shard/shard.　shine/shiny.　signal/signal.　solar/solar.　steel/steel.　stem/stem.　swi/switch.　syn/synth.　syn/synthetic.　tech/tech.　techno/techno.　test/test.　text/text.　turing/turing.　vi/viru.　web/site.　web/web.　whirr/whirr.　wi/wifi.　wire/wire.　wired/wired.　⚙️/⚙️.　🔧/🔧.　🔩/🔩.　🛠//🛠.　🤖/🤖.

[kaijuposting]

Jaegers of Pacific Rim: What do we know about them?

There's actually a fair amount of lore about Pacific Rim's jaegers, though most of it isn't actually in the movie itself. A lot of it has been scattered in places like Pacific Rim: Man, Machines, & Monsters, Tales From Year Zero, Travis Beacham's blog, and the Pacific Rim novelization.

Note that I will not be including information from either Pacific Rim: Uprising or Pacific Rim: The Black. Uprising didn't really add anything, and The Black's take on jaegers can easily be summed up as "simplified the concept to make a cartoon for children."

So what is there to know about jaegers, besides the fact that they're piloted by two people with their brains connected via computer?

Here's a fun fact: underneath the hull (which may or may not be pure iron), jaegers have "muscle strands" and liquid data transfer technology. Tendo Choi refers to them in the film when describing Lady Danger's repairs and upgrades:

Solid iron hull, no alloys. Forty engine blocks per muscle strand. Hyper-torque driver for every limb and a new fluid synapse system.

The novelization by Alex Irvine makes frequent references to this liquid data transfer tech. For example:

The Jaeger’s joints squealed and began to freeze up from loss of lubricant through the holes Knifehead had torn in it. Its liquid-circuit neural architecture was misfiring like crazy. (Page 29.)

He had enough fiber-optic and fluid-core cabling to get the bandwidth he needed. (Page 94.)

Newt soldered together a series of leads using the copper contact pins and short fluid-core cables. (Page 96.)

Unfortunately I haven't found anything more about the "muscle strands" and what they might be made of, but I do find it interesting that jaegers apparently have some sort of artificial muscle system going on, especially considering Newt's personnel dossier in the novel mentioned him pioneering research in artificial tissue replication at MIT.

The novelization also mentions that the pilots' drivesuits have a kind of recording device for their experiences while drifting:

This armored outer layer included a Drift recorder that automatically preserved sensory impressions. (Page 16.)

It was connected through a silver half-torus that looked like a travel pillow but was in fact a four-dimensional quantum recorder that would provide a full record of the Drift. (Page 96.)

This is certainly... quite the concept. Perhaps the PPDC has legitimate reasons for looking through the memories and feelings of their pilots, but let's not pretend this doesn't enable horrific levels of privacy invasion.

I must note, though, I haven't seen mention of a recording system anywhere outside of the novel. Travis Beacham doesn't mention it on his blog, and it never comes up in either Tales From Year Zero or Tales From The Drift, both written by him. Whether there just wasn't any occasion to mention it or whether this piece of worldbuilding fell by the wayside in Beacham's mind is currently impossible to determine.

Speaking of the drivesuits, let's talk about those more. The novelization includes a few paragraphs outlining how the pilots' drivesuits work. It's a two-layer deal:

The first layer, the circuity suit, was like a wetsuit threaded with a mesh of synaptic processors. The pattern of processor relays looked like circuitry on the outside of the suit, gleaming gold against its smooth black polymer material. These artificial synapses transmitted commands to the Jaeger’s motor systems as fast as the pilot’s brain could generate them, with lag times close to zero. The synaptic processor array also transmitted pain signals to the pilots when their Jaeger was damaged.

...

The second layer was a sealed polycarbonate shell with full life support and magnetic interfaces at spine, feet, and all major limb joints. It relayed neural signals both incoming and outgoing. This armored outer layer included a Drift recorder that automatically preserved sensory impressions.

...

The outer armored layer of the drivesuit also kept pilots locked into the Conn-Pod’s Pilot Motion Rig, a command platform with geared locks for the Rangers’ boots, cabled extensors that attached to each suit gauntlet, and a full-spectrum neural transference plate, called the feedback cradle, that locked from the Motion Rig to the spine of each Ranger’s suit. At the front of the motion rig stood a command console, but most of a Ranger’s commands were issued either by voice or through interaction with the holographic heads-up display projected into the space in front of the pilots’ faces. (Page 16.)

Now let's talk about the pons system. According to the novelization:

The basics of the Pons were simple. You needed an interface on each end, so neuro signals from the two brains could reach the central bridge. You needed a processor capable of organizing and merging the two sets of signals. You needed an output so the data generated by the Drift could be recorded, monitored, and analyzed. That was it. (Page 96.)

This is pretty consistent with other depictions of the drift, recording device aside. (Again, the 4D quantum recorder never comes up anywhere outside of the novel.)

The development of the pons system as we know it is depicted in Tales From Year Zero, which goes into further detail on what happened after Trespasser's attack on San Francisco. In this comic, a jaeger can be difficult to move if improbably calibrated. Stacker Pentecost testing out a single arm describes the experience as feeling like his hand is stuck in wet concrete; Doctor Caitlin Lightcap explains that it's resistance from the datastream because the interface isn't calibrated to Pentecost's neural profile. (I'm guessing that this is the kind of calibration the film refers to when Tendo Choi calls out Lady Danger's left and right hemispheres being calibrated.)

According to Travis Beacham's blog, solo piloting a jaeger for a short time is possible, though highly risky. While it won't cause lasting damage if the pilot survives the encounter, the neural overload that accumulates the longer a pilot goes on can be deadly. In this post he says:

It won't kill you right away. May take five minutes. May take twenty. No telling. But it gets more difficult the longer you try. And at some point it catches up with you. You won't last a whole fight start-to-finish. Stacker and Raleigh managed to get it done and unplug before hitting that wall.

In this post he says:

It starts off fine, but it's a steep curve from fine to dead. Most people can last five minutes. Far fewer can last thirty. Nobody can last a whole fight.

Next, let's talk about the size and weight of jaegers. Pacific Rim: Man, Machines, & Monsters lists off the sizes and weights of various jaegers. The heights of the jaegers it lists (which, to be clear, are not all of them) range from 224 feet to 280 feet. Their weights range from 1850 tons to 7890 tons. Worth noting, the heaviest jaegers (Romeo Blue and Horizon Brave) were among the Mark-1s, and it seems that these heavy builds didn't last long given that another Mark-1, Coyote Tango, weighed 2312 tons.

And on the topic of jaeger specs, each jaeger in Pacific Rim: Man, Machines, & Monsters is listed with a (fictional) power core and operating system. For example, Crimson Typhoon is powered by the Midnight Orb 9 power core, and runs on the Tri-Sun Plasma Gate OS.

Where the novelization's combat asset dossiers covers the same jaegers, this information lines up - with the exception of Lady Danger. PR:MMM says that Lady Danger's OS is Blue Spark 4.1; the novelization's dossier says it's BLPK 4.1.

PR:MMM also seems to have an incomplete list of the jaegers' armaments; for example, it lists the I-22 Plasmacaster under Weaponry, and "jet kick" under Power Moves. Meanwhile, the novelization presents its armaments thus:

I-22 Plasmacaster Twin Fist gripping claws, left arm only Enhanced balance systems and leg-integral Thrust Kickers Enhanced combat-strike armature on all limbs

The novel's dossiers list between 2-4 features in the jaegers' armaments sections.

Now let's move on to jaeger power cores. As many of you probably already know, Mark-1-3 jaegers were outfitted with nuclear power cores. However, this posed a risk of cancer for pilots, especially during the early days. To combat this, pilots were given the (fictional) anti-radiation drug, Metharocin. (We see Stacker Pentecost take Metharocin in the film.)

The Mark-4s and beyond were fitted with alternative fuel sources, although their exact nature isn't always clear. Striker Eureka's XIG supercell chamber implies some sort of giant cell batteries, but it's a little harder to guess what Crimson Typhoon's Midnight Orb 9 might be, aside from round.

Back on the topic of nuclear cores, though, the novelization contains a little paragraph about the inventor of Lady Danger's power core, which I found entertaining:

The old nuclear vortex turbine lifted away from the reactor housing. The reactor itself was a proprietary design, brainchild of an engineer who left Westinghouse when they wouldn’t let him use his lab to explore portable nuclear miniaturization tech. He’d landed with one of the contractors the PPDC brought in at its founding, and his small reactors powered many of the first three generations of Jaegers. (Page 182.)

Like... I have literally just met this character, and I love him. I want him to meet Newt Geiszler, you know? >:3

Apparently, escape pods were a new feature to Mark-3 jaegers. Text in the novelization says, "New to the Mark III is an automated escape-pod system capable of ejecting each Ranger individually." (Page 240.)

Finally, jaegers were always meant to be more than just machines. Their designs and movements were meant to convey personality and character. Pacific Rim: Man, Machines, & Monsters says:

Del Toro insisted the Jaegers be characters in and of themselves, not simply giant versions of their pilots. Del Toro told his designers, "It should be as painful for you to see a Jaeger get injured as it is for you to see the pilot [get hurt.]" (Page 56.)

Their weathered skins are inspired by combat-worn vehicles from the Iraq War and World War II battleships and bombers. They look believable and their design echoes human anatomy, but only to a point. "At the end of the day, what you want is for them to look cool," says Francisco Ruiz Velasco. "It's a summer movie, so you want to see some eye candy." Del Toro replies, "I, however, believe in 'eye protein,' which is high-end design with a high narrative content." (Page 57.)

THE JAEGER FROM DOWN UNDER is the only Mark 5, the most modern and best all-around athlete of the Jaegers. He's also the most brutal of the Jaeger force. Del Toro calls him "sort of brawler, like a bar fighter." (Page 64.)

And that is about all the info I could scrounge up and summarize in a post. I think there's a lot of interesting stuff here - like, I feel that the liquid circuit and muscle tissue stuff gives jaegers an eerily organic quality that could be played for some pretty interesting angles. And I also find it interesting that jaegers were meant to embody their own sort of character and personality, rather than just being simple combat machines or extensions of their pilots - it's a great example of a piece of media choosing thematic correctness over technical correctness, which when you get right down to it, is sort of what Pacific Rim is really all about.

[popatochisssp]

IM IN LOVE WITH ALL THE NEW BOYSS!!!! I was wondering what hobbies they would have? Would any of them skate? What about make art? Play piano, perhaps?

Quick sidebar, it would probably be easier to ask who can’t skate than who can—at least regarding ice skating—because the majority of the skeletons lived/grew up in Snowdin and had plenty of time to practice their ‘don’t pratfall on the ice’ skills, so they’d (almost) all be at least passingly competent at ice skating, and then whatever learning curve is involved with slightly transferable skills to not-ice skating.

That said!

…You know, I realized I never did an accounting of all this, even with the first two waves of boys, so…

This is by no means a complete list of everything the boys might enjoy doing—despite the fact that this is huge and completely got away from me, oh my god seriously do not open the readmore on your dash—but!

Sans (Undertale):

He’s a goofy guy, so it’s probably no surprise that he’s into comedy. He’s a lover of puns and pranks and jokes in general, just…maybe not as casually as he makes it look. He does a little stand-up now and then, open mic nights mostly nowadays, but he’s played to larger audiences before at the MTT resort. He’s also got a pretty sizeable collection of comedic paraphernalia—rubber chickens, whoopie cushion, snapping gum, you name it—just on the off chance he might get to use it in a prime moment. He spends a lot of his free time reading joke books, watching other pros perform, and even, on occasion, don’t tell anyone, but… studying the science of humor, what people seem to find funny, how, and why. He doesn’t like to let on, because he thinks it makes him seems a little less cool and funny if you know he goes out of his way to research this stuff sometimes instead of just vibing on improv, but he genuinely finds the subject fascinating and likes to read about it. Alas, he’s a nerd…

And as such, he’s also very into physics. Quantum physics as food for thought in his downtime when he just wants to chew on some conceptually heavy stuff, but classical and practical physics make for some great experiments and demos, especially as party tricks or ‘hey, you wanna see something cool?’s for interested onlookers and he’s so all about that. Want to try an egg drop from the roof with popsicle sticks and straws? He’s got tape and a fresh carton right here. Maybe make a magnet out of a battery? Sure, there’s wire and nails around here somewhere… Or maybe you want to bet him he can’t hold up a water bottle with nothing but a string and three matches? C’mon, 10G—no, 20G. But really, he’ll take any excuse to do a cool demo of stuff he knows.

As for stuff that doesn’t demo quite as well… It was a little less apparent Underground, but there was a reason he had that telescope of his and it wasn’t just because he liked pranking people with paint on the eye-piece. He did love doing that, of course, but he also genuinely loves stars and space, learning about it and looking at it now that he actually has the opportunity to—he’s got his telescope to use on clear nights, a yearly pass for the local planetarium, and you better believe he’s subscribed to NASA’s newsletters for regular updates on the goings on out there. He tries to play it cool, but stars and black holes and nebulae are cooler, it’s hard not to get invested in everything to do with them…

Papyrus (Undertale):

Of course, he’s the master of puzzles, and not just your basic jigsaw! …Well, maybe sometimes a jigsaw, he’s not morally opposed to them but really, he needs a challenge for his intellect! He doesn’t mind a word puzzle here and there—as long as it’s not a crossword—but physical puzzles are his favorites, anything to employ his spatial reasoning and impressively fine motor skills. Rubik’s cubes are fun, linked wires, interlocking blocks, really anything in three dimensions that he can fiddle with and manipulate until it surrenders to his incredible greatness. He’s very proud of his solving ability and definitely brags about it, but he’s not just blowing hot air. He really does have a great knack for observing disparate pieces and fitting them together conceptually to see what they can be before ever starting to physically assemble them and the joy of bragging aside, he loves getting to exercise that particular mind-muscle and show his smarts.

In a similar vein, he’s also a big fan of model-making. Planes, trains, automobiles and the like, and no small amount of action figures, he likes to build them up piece by piece with his own two hands. It’s fine to populate his theoretical battle scenarios with gifts from brothers and Santas, or stuff he found at the Dump, but it’s definitely his preference to start with a kit and put it all together himself, watching it gradually take shape with his diligent effort. Maybe he’ll go off-book from time to time, a little bit, but customizing things to his own unique specifications just seems the thing to do when he’s already doing the rest of the making. All the gluing and cutting and painting and lacquering by hand… it’s the art of creation—and what nobler pursuit is there than that?

Well, there may be one other thing. As a truly renaissance man, he’s naturally well-rounded in his interests, intelligent and creative and yes, physically fit too! For him, there’s no better way to stay in shape than by playing sports, most any kind! Basketball, soccer, hockey, tennis, he’ll play any sport, just explain the rules and give him the ball—or don’t, depending on the objective and rules of the specific game in question as you’ve described it. The desirability of the sportsball does seem to vary quite a bit, so he’ll need to determine whether he wants to obtain or get rid of the ball, puck, shuttlecock, whatev—no, that’s the accurate term, it is not! Whatever you’re thinking! Stars, be mature… But! He likes games and being active and having friends, all of which are part and parcel of engaging in sports, so he’s really always up for a game.

Sky (Underswap Sans):

He likes to bake! He’s not a professional and in fact, he finds it to be quite challenging at times—there’s way more restrictions than cooking on how much to add of this, making sure to do that before the other thing but after this step, the oven has to be at exactly the right temperature… There’s a lot of steps and rules, but that’s kind of what he likes about it. He likes trying to see if he can make a thing, and then if he can, what tweaks he can make to flavors and textures without compromising the end result. He’s not always successful—he’s definitely ended up with sopping wet cakes, burnt pie crusts, overly salty muffins—but frankly, the experimenting to get it right is all part of the fun! He tends to make more tasty treats than he does failures and he’s happy to share those around with friends and family anytime. Baking may be an exacting mistress, but he loves to tango with her all the same!

Speaking of which…well, he may not know the tango specifically but he does love to dance! He’s got a lot of energy and a solid sense of rhythm, and that combo tends to result in at least a little shimmy of a two-step when there’s a good beat going on—and all bets are off entirely if there happens to be a dance floor and a favorite song playing. He likes dancing with a partner, or in a group, but he’ll dance all by himself if he’s feeling the mood, like nobody’s watching…or rather, like everyone’s watching and he wants to impress and lure out a little company to join him. He even has a tendency to put on music and dance in place a bit when he’s doing otherwise boring chores around the house, like dishes or vacuuming, and while he doesn’t mind doing his dancing solo then too, he’s always delighted to find someone who’s willing to dance along.

He wouldn’t turn down some company for a bit of outdoor exploration, either. A hiking trail maybe? Or some rock climbing? A nature trail or just a walk in the park wouldn’t go awry either if something a little less strenuous is required! He does like the exercise but it’s mostly the nature and all things green that he wants to see and be out in—trees and flowers and even grass. His house would probably be packed with greenery if he…hadn’t…killed every single plant he ever tried to keep…but! Since he does indeed have a deadly black thumb, he likes to visit the plants, in their natural habitat where he has no control over whether they live or die (so they’ll probably continue to live).

Paps (Underswap Papyrus):

It’s no secret that he’s a bookworm. He loves literature and always has—his brother will tell you he was reading before he was even talking, and as embarrassing as it is every time he brings it up, it’s not untrue. He reads voraciously, with a preference for fantasy, romance, and poetry, but he’ll read pretty much any book he can get his hands on. It’s probably no surprise that he’s been inspired to do a little writing of his own, over the years. He’s pretty private about his own work (especially the poetry, oh god, he’d dust on the spot if someone saw his poetry) but he still loves to talk about the written word and techniques used in its conveyance and form, and the struggles writers face in trying to communicate the ideas they have stuck in their heads. He’s great for reading recommendations if he knows the kind of things someone likes, but his go-to recs will always be his personal favorites.

Pride and Prejudice is one such favorite. He’s seen all the film adaptations and miniseries, and branched out from there, first into stuff inspired by similar works, then originals, and then…okay, he’s maybe a little bit addicted to period pieces in general now. Whenever a new one comes out, anything about regency or royals or the nobility in a dramatic setting, he pretty much has to watch it, more only a question of ‘when’ and not ‘if’ he’ll be checking it out. Naturally, he’s happiest when it’s coming out on a scheduled basis, because if an entire season drops all at once he’s going to sit there and binge it and it’s much harder to deny he has an addiction when he just pulled an all-nighter about it. He can’t help himself, he has to see if the socially mismatched couple can make it work and be wed in the end, love winning out over silly class divides…

When he’s not actively obsessed with either of those things, though, he dabbles a bit in calligraphy. He’d probably hesitate to call it a hobby, he does have a couple of those fancy pens and some nice paper and ink to use them with, and he’s decent at it, but definitely needs to practice more to be able to do the really fancy flourishes without blotting the ink or scratching the page. He can certainly do some simple, clean lettering if needed! Like…if you want a poster or a sign to look neat and professional, or…maybe you want the ‘To Do’ list on the fridge to have a fancy header or something? (His end-goal is to be able to do his own drop-caps and an elaborate cursive title for the cover of his book, someday, maybe, who knows…)

Jasper (Underfell Sans):

He likes working with his hands, making things and having something to show for his time and effort. (Knitting? No, that’s, that’s not a hobby, that was a necessity, just for special occasions now, he’s not…naw, c’mon…) He’s something of a car guy. He likes engines and wheels and pistons and how they all work together to make something that goes fast, and he likes understanding how all the pieces fit together and how to fix them if something breaks. It’s something he practiced Underground with busted old engines and bikes that fell down, and a career he pursued on the Surface, but even in his free time he likes tuning up his car, his bro’s car, restoring glory to a classic bike he got at a steal of a price and she’s gonna purr like a kitten when he’s done—he’s just…happy, with his hands buried in an engine and grease all over his face.

And speaking of grease on his face, he’s pretty passionate about food, too. Not so much the cooking of it, though he’s not too shabby in the kitchen when he puts the effort in, but more the eating of it and appreciating the flavors and textures. He’s got a lot of strong opinions on how done a steak oughta be (medium-rare), what belongs on pizza (anything but candy), and how to eat chips with your sandwich (in it, for that extra crunch of texture). ‘Gourmet’ sounds a little too snobby for his tastes, food doesn’t have to be expensive to be good and in fact, it usually isn’t—some of his best meals have been from holes in the wall—but he does like going out to such places to eat and socialize, maybe have a chat and give his compliments to the chef (and definitely not try to wheedle any recipes), that sorta thing.

But after all that, when he really wants to wind down, there’s nothing he likes better than a bit of gaming. He’s not much for multiplayer, he prefers doing his own thing at his own pace, but he likes having some kind of objective and making it happen. It gives a nice sense of accomplishment that he can get while sitting down—which is great. He tends mostly towards puzzle/adventure type games more than pure battle scenarios and beat-‘em-ups, he feels like there should be some strategy and skill involved, or the satisfaction of the win just doesn’t come through as strong. (Protip: do not watch this man defeat a Dark Souls boss if you are easily stressed out. He taunts between strikes and dodges at the very last second because he’s got the timing down to a science. Maybe try Pokemon or Zelda instead…)

Pyre (Underfell Papyrus):

His first great love is and likely always shall be the theater. He didn’t have too many opportunities Underground to go see live stage plays, but he’s long since broken the spine of the collected works of Shakespeare that got him started and memorized its contents, water-stained cover to water-stained cover. He can recite any of the Bard’s work by act and scene number, of which he is incredibly proud, but he’s at least passing familiar with a handful of other manuscripts or popular stage-to-film adaptations mass produced enough to have a chance of ending up in the Dump in decent condition. On the Surface, he definitely wants to see some things live and gets only a reasonable amount of excited about specific productions’ quirks and narrative choices. Joining in on local theater himself? Well…he’s very busy these days… (Maybe after retirement?)

Another passion of his pulled from the depths of the Dump is his guitar—a bass so sturdy and lucky that it made it all the way down without breaking a string. He thought it was cool as soon as he saw it and really wanted to have it and learn how to play. It’s been an uphill struggle since he’s entirely self-taught with regards to his equipment settings, guitar maintenance, and even reading music notes, but the few sparse instruction manuals he’s managed to find were helpful. His own stubborn determination to figure it out and be the kind of cool guy who knows how to play bass has taken him a long way, and he’s starting to make some deep, pleasant sounds that he’s very happy about… But he’s still nowhere near ready to play for anyone, he couldn’t possibly, not until he’s good at it!

And when he’s having a bad time at that, or anything else is ticking him off and there’s no better outlet to blow off steam, he knows he can always fall back on a good work-out. Even in a Kill or Be Killed sort of place, it’s not always a good idea to go picking fights and yelling and cussing and beating the stuffing out of other people—so whenever he feels like doing that, he’s in the habit of beating the stuffing out of a punching bag instead, or lifting weights, or doing one-handed push-ups, something strenuous. He may not be a machine made of meat that releases good-feeling chemicals after a successful exertion, like humans are, but he still feels great after getting to work out and clear his mind of everything but what his body’s doing so he likes to keep up a regular routine. You don’t want to see him after he’s missed a few work-outs, he gets very testy.

Mal (Swapfell Sans):

Pretty much from the moment he came into existence, he’s loved math. Call him a nerd all you like, but numbers are his happy place, where everything is straightforward and exactly what it’s supposed to be and if he doesn’t understand something, he’s probably only missing a variable and when he finds it, everything will make sense again. He has apps and workbooks around with equations for him to solve in his downtime like some kind of freak, but lacking those he’ll sometimes just make up his own math problems and try to solve them in his head—how long will it take for the water cooler to be empty if the tap is dripping at a regular interval of one drop every forty-seven seconds, should no one notice and intervene to repair it? The drum holds up to five gallons, but has already been emptied by approximately—

Okay, that’s enough math. He’s also into whittling, though he’s miles less confident about his ability. He’s not terrible, really, just very self-critical so he tends not to show off the things he makes, but he likes having something to occupy his hands while most of his attention is elsewhere, with the added bonus of having a knife in one of said hands should someone surprise him—self-defense is important, you know! In any case, he’s not as good of an artist as his brother, or even as good as he’d like to be, but it’s something to do and he can only improve with practice. Someday, with the proper equipment, he might even get into full-on woodworking, with chairs and tables and cabinetry and such that are far more straightforward to make than fiddly little figurines, but for now he just has a whittling knife and wood and too much stubbornness to quit at anything once he’s started.

As for something a little (debatably) higher-brow, he also has an interest in wine. He’s no sommelier, of course, but he’s run in fancy (royal) circles for long enough to have tried his fair share of fermented fruit juices. There are some he likes (dry reds), some he doesn’t (sweet whites), and plenty in between—but the topic makes for excellent conversation at lots of dinner parties and formal occasions, so he felt it helpful to learn a few things here and there so he knows (or can pass as knowing) what he’s talking about. On the Surface, he actually gets to take a wine tasting class and put a formal polish on his book-learning and first-hand experience, and makes a point of trying new brands that catch his attention. (He’ll never admit it aloud, but he’s far more swayed by a cool label or an interesting bottle shape than a high price tag—even cheap wine tastes just fine if you aerate it!)

Rus (Swapfell Papyrus):

He’s an artist, first and foremost. His most frequent medium is pen and paper—it’s what he started with and what he’s practiced the most—but it’s never really occurred to him to limit himself to only one thing so he’s tried out a lot of different techniques and utensils and can use most of them effectively. He’s not formally taught, seen some pictures and read some textbook entries of famous pieces and art movements, but everything he’s learned he learned by screwing around with it until he figured out how to make it look like he wanted and in the process, he’s built up a pretty strong base of skills. Mostly, he likes to draw (or sketch or paint) things he’s seen, recreating memories like a photo without a camera, but sometimes he goes on more abstract style experiments, trying to express a vibe or a feeling more than a moment. He finds it meditative, grounding more than anything else he’s tried to relax and it makes him happy to have a creative outlet.

As far as other ways to relax and have fun, something that’s really blossomed on the Surface for him is his interest in fidget toys. Not too many made it Underground for him to enjoy then, just a lonely broken palm-tangle and about a hundred Rubik’s cubes in various states of disrepair—sadly he got so good at solving the cubes that he doesn’t even consider them puzzles, just color-block-pattern simulators—but the Surface! There’s so many stim and fidget toys for him to get his hands on, and so many Ultimate Super Satisfying Compilation vids online to show him new ones. Poppers, spinners, chewelry, clickers…some hit better than others but he likes trying things out, playing with toys that are brightly colored, or feel cool, or make a nice sound. He keeps his favorites and sells or donates the rest, gotta make sure to leave room somewhere if he wants to get a new one.

He also makes a point of walking to the stores and donation centers and post offices at which he exchanges these items because—at the risk of making him sound like a dog—he loves going on walks! He was a shut-in for awhile, afraid of strangers outside, and to an extent he still is (social anxiety), but the Surface has different rules and for a lot of reasons, it feels safer for him to be out and about now, and he likes taking advantage of that. Fresh air and sun and slow, easy movement without having to look over his shoulder, free attention to spare to his surroundings and the chance to stop somewhere and check out a new place… He really likes it and tries to make time to go on a walk at least once every couple of days, destination entirely optional.

Slate (Horrortale Sans):

He’s a rock guy, and he’s not talking about the music genre—just rocks, or crystals, the kind you find in and on the ground. He likes the pun potential (ask any geologist, there’s a million) but also it’s just something fun and low-stakes to do, to collect and find and examine stones and crystals whenever he happens to come across them. A lot of his facts and knowledge base predate the head injury, too, so it’s something he tends to know a good amount about and can have a high-level conversation about at length, of which he’s very proud. Plus, having a bunch of rocks around doubles as both home décor and paperweights, so you gotta admire the versatility of it. He's always on the lookout for new stones to add to his collection, or to talk about and pebble—I mean, gift to his friends and family.

He’s an animal lover as well, which is…not much of a transition from the previous paragraph. He had a pet rock once, does that bridge the gap? Not really. Ah well. The point is, he likes critters, usually ones smaller than him but that’s not hard since he’s a pretty big guy. His past and the things he’s done don’t matter to animals, all they care about is whether he’s an immediate threat (he isn’t) and if he has food to give them (likely), and not having to worry about that is a heavy weight off his mind. He can be totally relaxed around animals so he likes spending time around them whenever he gets the chance—fur and fluff is a plus but he’s got nothing against scales and feathers, creatures come as you are and he’ll get you some water and a treat and maybe a scritch.

But if he must be around humans, or other sentient beings (he must, he’s not built for social isolation), then magic is the ace he keeps up his sleeve. Not the real stuff, of course… Though he’ll naturally be happy to show an interested onlooker a bullet or two, real magic is something any monster can do, even if they were literally born yesterday. He likes fake magic, sleight of hand tricks and misdirection—disappearing and reappearing coins, spoon bending, levitating cards—y’know, the cheap gimmicky shit. It’s fun to learn and easy to practice, works very well with a lot of skills he already had. It also has the additional plus of being disarming for anyone who might be a little…intimidated by him, his size and spooky appearance, especially if he can’t get a joke out quick enough to show he’s harmless, so he likes picking up new tricks when he can and showing them off when he’s got ‘em right.

Papy (Horrortale Papyrus):

He loves to cook! He’s gotten a lot better at it since the old days, trying to learn from Undyne’s lessons and it’s become a genuine passion for him to hone his skills in the kitchen and then (hopefully) show off to guests and friends and family who come over to share a meal. He considers it something of a puzzle in its own right—how to use these ingredients to get the most nutritional value with as little wasted as possible. He’s figured out a lot of ways to repurpose bits that usually get thrown out and in some cases, even make more tasty meals with the castoff pieces (his veggie-peel soup stock is to die for…not literally, but it’s very good)! His favorite part is naturally when people eat what he makes and shower him in compliments, but a close second is knowing that he’s fed his loved ones and they won’t ever leave his home hungry.

Since he does so much in the kitchen and, for the first time in a long time, he has an unfrozen yard for two or three quarters of a year and easy access to seeds, he’s also taken up gardening. Mostly, he grows his own vegetables and herbs but he has the space and the inclination so there’s plenty of colorful flowers in the mix too. He’s very attentive to his crops and flowerbeds and does everything his plants need to flourish and bloom. He delights in praise for his good work and the gratitude when he has a big enough harvest to share with friends and neighbors, or maybe to donate to the local food bank if they’re willing to take it. His garden is his pride and joy and no dirt or weather or pests will stop him from maintaining it!

Now he does have one hobby that’s just for his own enjoyment, not even peripherally related to others, and it’s pure unadulterated guilty pleasure: he adores watching soap operas. The more theatrical and contrived, the better, he can’t help but get sucked into the cheesy drama of it all. He started with just one hospital show and kept watching to tut and shake his head over inaccuracies, and then there was another show on after it that had a wild opening hook, and then…and then… Alas, he found the telenovelas. His enjoyment of them is only somewhat hampered by his inability to understand Spanish, but you’d be surprised how much you can glean from context clues and some things transcend language—it’s too late for him now, he’s recording every episode that airs during the day to watch later, he must know if Gloria’s twin sister will run away with her amnesiac fiancé!

Ash (Undergloom Sans):

Music’s the big one for him. He’s very low-energy and when you’re both depressed and physically fragile, it’s not always possible to go out to where other people are, even when you want to—but music can come to you, no matter how bad you’re feeling, and for that it’s become a huge pillar in his life. His favorite genre is classical (can’t get more classic than The Classics), but he’ll listen to most things, though he’ll always want a physical copy of it to keep if he likes it. CDs, tapes, even vinyl records, digital file only just doesn’t cut it for him. He plays his own music too, rarely with sheet music and mostly just riffing whatever feels right at the time. His trusty trombone is more than just a vehicle for incidental music, it’s like a pal that’s always been there for him even if he didn’t have the energy for it sometimes, and he makes sure to keep it in prime condition.

On his better days—of which he’s been having a lot more since reaching the Surface—he very much loves to be around people and one of his favorite things to get to do with those people is play games, board games to be specific. Monopoly might get a little too violent for his tastes, but stuff like Scrabble, Sorry!, Jenga, all up his alley. It takes a mix of skill and luck to win, which keeps things interesting, and barring a snack break or a celebratory dance of some kind, can be enjoyed entirely sedentarily, which is excellent. He probably shouldn’t be allowed to play cards (he counts them), and his brother swears he weighs dice (he doesn’t), but everything else is fair game and he likes having something he can shine at while also getting to hang out with friends.

But when he’s at home, or he can’t find a group to hang with, he spends a good amount of time cloud-gazing. Not star-gazing, though the sky and the stars are beautiful of course, but his interest is in the atmosphere, on the weather. There weren’t too many weather conditions to be found Underground—snow and rain and hot, basically—and the descriptions he’d heard and read of the kind of stuff that happened on the Surface had always captured his imagination. Clouds, storm cells, fog? It was interesting, and he read about a lot of atmospheric conditions without ever really expecting to see any for himself… but he’s actually up here now. And here, he’s the type of guy who owns a barometer, watches live Doppler radar feeds with rapt interest, and can tell you if it’s going to rain without even checking the weather app, just by taking a look up. His interest in meteorology actually has some practical applications now, go figure.

Yrus (Undergloom Papyrus):

He’s a cook, and though that may not be his job title, he takes it almost as seriously as if it was. For him, it’s both a passion and a language, a way to reach out to people and connect when there aren’t words—or when there are, but they’re not enough. He thinks of every meal he makes as a gift for the person he’s making it for and as such, it’s not enough for it to just be good food—it should be personalized to suit the recipient’s tastes, bespoke to what they like! That said, he primarily cooks comfort foods, stuff loaded with butter and cheese and salt because that’s what his depressed and struggling loved ones seem to like the most. It’s not always to his tastes, but it’s a point of great pride for him to have dinners at his home feeling like the end of Thanksgiving, everyone full and content and at risk of dozing off on the sofa.

He takes such pride in his cooking that he makes most everything from scratch, and that’s how he got into canning. To get to be such a good cook and to have such a discerning palate, you start to get a bit dissatisfied with store-bought spreads, and you start thinking of how you could tweak it, just a bit, and come up with something a little better. And well, of course he has a sweet tooth and doesn’t he deserve to gift himself a treat from time to time? Which is not to say he doesn’t share his jams and jellies and preserves when he gets to making them—which is anytime there’s a good sale on fruit—but at the risk of making him sound arrogant, he’s absolutely spoiled himself for even the big brands at the store. Sure, he could buy it, as-is, or he could make it and enhance the flavor with a bit of mint or cinnamon or whatever it’s begging for, exactly to his liking. …He does go through quite a lot of jars, though.

So it’s a good thing that he knows all the best home goods stores in the area to buy mason jars, and loyalty perks at every one that offers them because he’s such a frequent customer. He’s very particular about the way his home is decorated and spends a lot of time and effort into cultivating just the right homey, comfortable, clean vibe for the space, so of course he’s always thinking of ways to use his décor to do just that. He doesn’t like a static environment so he frequently moves things around, takes away old things, and adds new ones—scented candles, decorative bowls, accent pieces, really anything that catches his eye-socket. He’s a natural-born homemaker, really, it's a shame he doesn’t have a spouse to appreciate all his talents (yet~).

Brick (Horrorfell Sans):

Okay well now knitting is a hobby of his, now that he’s too big and scary to give a shit what anyone thinks about his yarn-crafting. It’s a skill from before the head injury (and the Everything Else) so it’s not like having to pick up a new skill and something you can be competent at is always nice. He finds it pretty relaxing too, if he’s honest with himself, and grounding—between the repetitive motions and the tangible product of his effort and time having passed, it’s a good go-to for him when he’s stressed and needs to calm down, or when he’s disoriented and has to reorient onto something real. It’s a pretty nice side-hustle too, selling what he makes online, but even if it wasn’t for someone, he’d still knit for himself.

…But it’s maybe not so much of a side-hustle because he doesn’t really have a main-hustle to be doing his knitting on the side of. He mostly hangs around the house as an unemployed self-employed bum. And if you’re bored, in the house, it’s probably only a matter of time before you notice something that needs attention, something broken or askew or in need of a fresh coat of something, and that’s what happened to him, and how he started getting into a lot of DIY home repair. He’s got a background in a lot of technical and mechanical stuff, the confidence to poke around in unfamiliar things, and he certainly has the time, so he’s become something of an all-purpose handyman, regularly sweeping the place to see if there’s something he can fix or tune up. Leaky faucet in the kitchen? Engine maintenance on his bro’s car? Heating ducts making a weird noise? No problem, he’ll check it out, probably an easy enough fix.

He doesn’t stay cooped up in the house all the time though. …Most of it, maybe, but he likes to sit out on the porch or hang in the yard sometimes and get a front row seat to all the wildlife lurking around. He keeps a bird-feeder topped up so the birds always come by, and he’s maybe not so diligent about making sure the bird-feeder doesn’t also become a squirrel-feeder, so there’s a few of them around, too. He has a bad habit of leaving food out for neighborhood strays—cats—and every now and again he’ll catch one and get it fixed, but the food’s also lured in a few other critters it wasn’t meant for. He shoos away the raccoons and possums and (on a couple occasions) foxes that end up on his doorstep, but he likes seeing them so he probably won’t ever really stop. There’s a local murder of crows who bring him offerings of bottle caps and buttons and other junk, and he’s half-convinced they worship him as a god but that’s definitely not going to his head or anything, don’t worry.

King (Horrorfell Papyrus):

He likes to meditate. That’s perhaps an understatement, he needs to meditate—even after abdicating his throne and resuming a civilian life, on the Surface with food and safety and funds aplenty, he has a lot of stress and on any given day, he’s wound tight as a spring. Old habits die hard, and old guilt and pain and fear die harder, and he has a tough time relaxing naturally. Having a set time and routine to sit and breathe and clear his mind, deliberately, is crucial for him. He’s got a room set aside just for it with only related paraphernalia—meditation music, incense holder, a zen garden—inside, a space empty of distractions where he can just relax and let everything else go. It’s either that or be more open and vulnerable in therapy and the latter’s not happening any time soon, so his meditation room is the only thing standing between him and a mental breakdown.

That’s a humorous exaggeration, of course. He also has his bonsai trees, which serve a similar function. He got his first around the same time he took up meditation, thinking it might just be a nice plant to set the ambiance, but as he started caring for it and cultivating it, it grew (pun not intended, how dare you?) into its own thing. He’s got lots of bonsais now and takes great deliberate care in their soil, their water, and meticulous pruning to keep them all growing healthy and strong and in exactly the way they should. There might be something to be said there about power and control and healthy, positive outlets to explore those needs, but for him they’re just his trees—his responsibility, his to keep alive, his to keep in line… And it’s nice to have plants in the house, they really add something to a space, don’t you think?

Something else he’s into that’s slightly more social is chess. He learned a lot about tactics and strategy during and in the lead-up to his reign, both from books and hard experience, and chess is a strategist’s game—all about studying the field of play and your opponent and thinking ahead to achieve your desired outcome. He started by playing against his brother, learning the game and gaining confidence, and then later against Toriel while he conspired to overthrow Undyne, which taught him more about thinking like a warrior monarch and how to strategize against one. Ever since, chess has been his preferred way to get to know someone and he finds the insight into a person’s thoughts (through their choices and idle conversation during the game) to be an invaluable asset. …It’s also somewhat fun, enriching he supposes, or else he probably wouldn’t keep so many chess sets in the house, or regularly go to the park to seek opponents at the public boards. But what business is that of yours?

Merc (Horrorswap Sans):

His physical…situation…is complicated. Until he gets his DT under control, he starts literally melting down whenever his emotions are too high which means that most of the things he would’ve done before for fun and exercise are out. His solution to that is yoga, a low-stress, low-impact way to stretch and move and keep his body functional, without the risk of upsetting himself and others by turning into a puddle! Going through the forms helps him focus his mind and ground him in his body at the same time, which he loves, and it’s something he can do solo or in a group, which is also great depending on his mood and need. He attends a studio at least semi-regularly, whenever there’s a class going on, and he loves it as a way to meet new people and socialize in a low-key way. Even after his melting problem gets sorted, he keeps the yoga as a part of his life and routine—it works for him, even when a lot of other things didn’t!

Escapism has also always been there for him: the sci-fi flavored genre specifically. He’s been in pretty dire need for distractions to take his mind off his condition and his frustratingly slow-going research, and fiction was a great fit, depictions of far-future times when technology is advanced but people are still people and the problems of today are all solved and done with—just the problems of tomorrow left to solve and there’s always hope somewhere out there in the universe. Yeah…he can use a little bit of that. Back Underground, he’d seen a few popular sci-fi series that managed to fall down—Star Trek, Star Wars, and a few others—but he falls back into it hard on the Surface when he discovers that the full collections are available, usually remastered and listed out in chronological order, and so many other fans to talk to about it, wow! And oh, the merch, so much merch… He’s only a mortal man, how is he meant to resist a phone case designed to look like a communicator from The Original Series? Or a replica of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s lightsaber? Or… Okay maybe he’s just enough of a nerd for it verge on a financial problem but he’s having fun, let him have this.

It's not like he’s not bringing in a paycheck, with his little home bakery business. He’s gotten serious about his baking and really ramped up his technical skill, and good flavor and texture is surely a way to keep a customer base, but he wanted to draw in the new customers and for that, he had to get good at decorating. As an amateur, he didn’t care so much if his frosting was a little messy, or really try to do anything at all beyond maybe some food coloring and sprinkles here and there, but in the interest of trying to elevate his business to the next level, he started experimenting more with design techniques—and he discovered he loves it! It takes a lot of skill and precision to execute on top-notch cake décor and he likes the challenge of learning something new and perfecting it until he’s ready to offer it as a technique to his customers. He’s the king of drip cakes, master of mirror glazes, and has the cleanest foil and luster work you will ever see. He’ll tackle geode cakes next, just you wait!

Ell (Horrorswap Papyrus):

He used to hate spooky shit. Horror movies, ghost stories, creepy stuff meant to send a shiver up your spine and make your heart (if you have one) skip a couple beats—he couldn’t handle it and any hubris otherwise would leave him looking at pictures of kittens trying to forget about it so he could sleep. But then… Wouldn’t you know it, then he lived through a horror: a terrible creature from another world came to his sleepy little town and killed seemingly everybody they could find, and he survived but the world changed, and everyone went hungry, his best friend disappeared, his brother started melting and he almost died and then came back wrong… And now the fake spooky stuff doesn’t seem so bad. Actually it’s…kinda fun? Scary stories and creepypastas still freak him out, a little, but his tolerance for it has gone up considerably and now he seeks out the genre on purpose, to create and consume, because it feels a little good to get scared by something fake instead of all too real.

His new interest in horror turned him on to movies in general. Not that he didn’t like watching movies before, but being especially invested in a specific genre got him reading about analyses of themes and filming techniques, lighting and staging and all the behind-the-scenes choices made in casting and shooting, and he loves being able to point those things out. Watching a movie with him, any movie, will probably trigger a film-buff monologue about something—‘oh see that’s a long shot, they do that when they’re trying to…’, ‘that’s not cg by the way, it’s actually a matte painting and…’, ‘y’know that scene when he kicked the helmet, it turns out he…’ et cetera, et cetera. He’s not trying to be a bore or a know-it-all, he’s actually just really interested in the way all these things, choices or accidents, come together to make a movie and he can talk about it for ages…or complain about it, if it happens to be a crappy movie. He does so love to complain…

Throughout all of this, if his attention isn’t split by his laptop, he’s usually keeping his hands busy another way—with origami. He’s almost always got a lot of scrap paper lying around in reach and for lack of anything better to do, he’ll grab a piece and start folding it. He started screwing around with those notebook edges left over after you tear out a page, but those are messy and ran out of folds real quick, so eventually he looked up some deliberate things to make out of paper and even bought some origami paper specifically for practice and nicer looking results. He’s pretty good at hopping frogs and flapping cranes, and who can’t make a boat, but his go-to is definitely the little stars you make out of the long strips. He’s got a big jar of the stars and keeps making more to add to it, not for any reason, really, but…it’s fun to make ‘em and they look pretty so why not?

Pitch (Horrorswapfell Sans):

He’s a thrill-seeker. Not necessarily the death-defying stunt kind—though he cheated death once already and might be a bit cockier about his odds the next time around than he ought to be—but any thrill, even the cheap ones. He spent a lot of time Before hedging his bets and prioritizing just about everything but himself, and now he’s decided to spend the rest of his time doing the opposite, chasing excitements and novelties and things he was too cautious or restrained or just too spartan to go after. He seeks out new restaurants, trendy bars, relationships, activities, anything that catches his fancy at the moment. A lot of the things he tries out don’t stick, falling by the wayside after the luster of ‘exciting and new’ wears off—you really only need to try a PB&J burger the once, and if you’ve ridden one mechanical bull, you’ve ridden them all—but some things make an impression.

Boxing is one of the things that stuck for him. He always worked out to stay in good condition and it was a habit he kept up on the Surface, joining a local gym as soon as possible for access to the weights and the punching bag. Fisticuffs was a last resort for him when dealing with actual problems, but hitting things was a great way to blow off steam—and as repressed as he was, he had a lot of steam to blow off, so his form and footwork was always top-notch. He got noticed for it, invited to spar in the ring, and to keep a short story short, he loved it. It’s a challenge being blind in a fistfight, but in a very positive way for him, giving him a chance to use his reflexes and his soul-sense to take on his opponents and most of the time, win. It’s a visceral, almost primal pleasure for him to get to fight in a reasonably safe arena, with people who are also fighting for love of the sport and no aim to seriously injure or kill, like a dance but with someone who wants to knock you out and vice versa.

And speaking of dancing, he’s very fond of that as well for similar, yet less violent reasons. He doesn’t really dance solo, simply for joy of the music—his enjoyment is almost exclusively in the partnered activity, when he has someone to match steps and mirror movement with and combine his awareness of his body and theirs into a cohesive picture. He likes the give and take of it, the way that he can have a physical experience with someone, a conversation without a single word being spoken, all from movement and synchronicity with whoever’s signed his dance card. He knows a few formal dances already and hasn’t forgotten the steps so he’s well-prepared for a polite ballroom experience… but he’s also learned how to let his metaphorical hair down lately, and a bit of dirty dancing is hardly off the table, should his partner for the evening (or afternoon, morning, midnight) be so inclined.

Nemo (Horrorswapfell Papyrus):

What happened Underground sent him into probably the worst art-block of his life. Even picking up a pen got hard to do with anything more than the intent to jot down a note for himself and he spent entirely too long with utterly dry wells of inspiration, not creating anything at all. In a desperate attempt to rekindle something creative, he ended up searching ‘art ideas’ online and discovered the vast world of craft projects. It was easier for him to actually make something when he had step-by-step guides and didn’t have to draw on his own (lacking) inspiration, and he quickly gained a liking for what he could make out of things he already had lying around the house and art supplies that were collecting dust—coffee-filter peonies, paper-straw wreaths, tin-can organizers, et cetera. He likes upcycling and getting to find use in things that might otherwise be discarded, and he really enjoys getting to put his own personal touch into crafts inspired from the internet.

He's proud enough of his works, in fact, that he wanted to show them off and—lacking real-life friends—he started posting photos of his crafts online. The response was positive but eventually, he started getting dissatisfied with the quality of the pictures he was taking, fuzzing details or altering colors, and he began looking into ways to improve the shots he was taking, lighting techniques, camera settings, angles and framing… By the time he invested in his own high-quality camera (and read the manual, front to back), he was seeing art everywhere, not just in the things he made but in the light through trees on a misty morning, in the waft of a curtain by an open window, in the people walking along the sidewalk out in front of the house. He has an eye-socket for it now and he’s always considering The Perfect Shot, how to capture the beautiful moments happening all the time with his photography. He’s good and getting better all the time, the more he practices his staging and editing.

He definitely wants to diversify his portfolio, though. Of course, he’s great at capturing domestic scenes, being a shut-in and all, but there’s more out there in the world, to see and photograph and be part of. It takes him awhile to get there but once he does, he’s very passionate about traveling. He spent such a long time stuck—first Underground, and then in his home on the Surface—and his scenery and his experiences were limited, but once he’s free there’s so much new and beautiful and exciting that he can access and he loves being able to pack up and go to it, right where it is. He wants to fill a passport and see unique vistas all over the globe, learn about cultures there, and make meaningful memories attached to every picture he takes.

Sunny (Gastertale Sans):

He likes stories, not the kind that come from a book, necessarily, but the stories people tell. The subject doesn’t matter to him much—folklore, local legends, big fish tales, ‘you’ll never believe what happened to me last week’s and more—it’s really the telling of it that he likes, how people describe what happened for an audience of their friends, family, or even strangers. He especially likes hearing the same story from different people to see how they tell it differently with their own perspectives or details that were unique to the version they heard. He’s always got a metaphorical ear open for a good yarn and a great memory for the stories people tell him, to the point that he can dispense them on cue whenever conversation’s slow, but he’s got plenty of his own experiences to make tales out of too, and the charisma and flair to make the telling entertaining.

This is a skill that comes majorly in handy for one of his other favorite hobbies, tabletop gaming. Whether he’s setting the scene for a D&D party he’s DMing for or keeping conversation going while he shuffles a deck for rummy, he loves having a table of people together to talk and play a game (or two, or three) with. It’s hard to get schedules to line up so he almost always has a few different game nights going on at any given time, in rotation depending on who can make what—and luckily, he’s a social butterfly so if someone cancels, getting substitutes to hang and make friends with over a game of something or other is never too difficult for him. He’ll go anywhere but his preference is hosting himself, he just loves having people over and showing them a good old fashioned time!

And speaking of old fashioned, his fashion is a little bit that as well. He’s a tad all over the place with it but nonetheless very interested in vintage and retro styles—the bold neon windbreakers of the 80s, the dated digital graphic tees of the 90s, the vinyl of the 00s, and even the holographics of the 10s. He tends to get a little confused about what was popular when and maybe that’s why he meshes it all together, but regardless, he loves his very eclectic wardrobe and adding to it. He makes a lot of trips to thrift stores and checks often on resale sites and gets very excited whenever he stumbles across a good find. Jackets are his favorite and he definitely has too many, but they spark joy and he’s probably not going to get rid of any or quit shopping around for more of the old school stuff anytime soon.

Aster (Gastertale Papyrus):

He likes scrapbooking! Maybe not too surprising, but as someone who mysteriously came into existence one day with no memory of his past, he doesn’t like the idea of losing memories—at least, not any more memories than he’s already apparently lost. He likes keeping records of things he does and that happen in his life as a tangible proof of his existence in and impact on the world. He stores things digitally as well but having the physical album feels weightier and more permanent, so he takes great care assembling and arranging everything in it. He keeps photos of outings with friends and coworkers, fliers from lectures he attends, even receipts from restaurants and movie ticket stubs. It’s all extremely well organized and annotated to the point that it almost reads like a scientific article, but he has fun with the cutting and pasting and aesthetic arrangement of it all—a neat and tidy accounting of (as much of) his life (as he can remember).

It's probably no coincidence that his scrapbook resembles a science journal, though, because he reads a lot of them. He also attends lectures and conferences when available and open to the public because, though he doesn’t have a career in any field of science, he’s still quite passionate about it! He loves learning about new advancements and discoveries, and when he comes across something he doesn’t know or only knows a bit about, he tends to do his own research into relevant readings on the topic until he’s better informed. He loathes misinformation and willful ignorance though, and as a result he’s ended up in a few small scale social media wars where he arrives on a post with thorough corrections, arguments, and sources cited and continues to present the accurate information until he’s respectfully acknowledged or blocked. It’s…usually the latter, but he doesn’t mind a good argument and ad hominem attacks slide right off him, so…as long as he’s having fun, what does it matter?

However…for all his love of truth and fact, he is also—regrettably—truly, madly, deeply compelled by the paranormal. If asked directly, he would say that of course he doesn’t believe in (non-monster) ghosts or aliens or the supernatural, there’s no evidence of such things! At least…nothing credible. He’s read the first and second-hand accounts, reviewed the blurry inconclusive photos, entertained hypotheticals of what could have really caused the sighting or scenario in question, accounting for variables and probing with his own questions to determine more information. He may occasionally be inclined to physically visit some ‘hot spots’ or sites of infamy, just to get a better understanding of the location and potential factors in what’s been claimed… But! Obviously, he’s a devil’s advocate in this only, as intriguing as some of these concepts are, that’s all they are—concepts. The fact that he spends so much time and thought on such things does not at all validate them and it simply means that he is a man of both integrity and science, the real kind!

Spectr (Transcendtale Sans):

He likes swimming! Er…well…maybe that’s not the right word for it. It’s not diving either, really, it’s… He likes going to bodies of water, walking in, and staying under for awhile, there, that’s a more accurate description of it. He’s waterproof and he doesn’t need to breathe, so ducking under the surface for a good few hours is not only possible, but a great way to get near-total peace and quiet for however long he wants it. He wasn’t much of a swimmer when he had an organic body, so it’s a bit of a novelty as well—seeing the way things look underwater, the way sounds change, the way animals swim around him in their natural habitat. He finds being in the water to be very relaxing and pleasant, almost meditative in nature, and whenever he’s feeling especially tense or in need of some space to think (or not think), he’ll head to the nearest body of water and go right in. It would be better if he actually took his clothes off before he did this, but he usually doesn’t and has weirded many clothes with lake or sea water.

He’s also into urban exploration. Not that he specifically calls it that, but he’s a wanderer and he likes to keep a low profile so sometimes, when he happens to be in the heart of a big city and there’s nowhere anonymous enough for him to blend in, he disappears into closed, abandoned, or condemned buildings. He likes the quiet of places like these and the reduced likelihood of running into anyone trying to interact with him because nobody else is supposed to be there. Obviously sometimes people are there anyway, but usually it’s people who mind their own business or actively avoid him, which he’s completely fine with. He does also enjoy having a look around when there’s time and he can, getting to see the remnants of the people who used the building before, what they left behind and imagining what it would be like if it were actively in use. A lot of the places he gets into have nice views of the city outside, too, and it’s pleasant to find a ledge or some rebar to sit on and enjoy it.

Jewelry making came out of his preferred hangout spots, as well. There’s a lot of junk lying around in abandoned or in-construction buildings—chain-link fences, washers, nuts and bolts—and when one is sitting around in an empty spot in the early morning, waiting for the city to wake up so he can slip through the masses undetected again, one gets to fiddling with nearby things in reach. He’s no master jeweler, his creations tend to be very simple, metal bent and twisted by hand in loops and curls, maybe a shape if he’s feeling ambitious, but he likes making them regardless. Sometimes he’ll keep an eye out for interesting stones and hold onto them to incorporate them into one of his pieces, or pick up a bit of nicer wire to work with if he’s going to be passing through a more rural area where it won’t be so easily available. He never keeps the rings and necklaces and bracelets he makes, though, just leaving them on tables and benches and railings for someone else to find later. It’s the making that’s the important part to him, he doesn’t need the thing.

PapAIrus (Transcendtale Papyrus):

He’s a proud and passionate DJ for partiers everywhere! He kind of fell into it, or at least into the idea of it when figuring out how to approach humanity and be a part of it, and he learned that it’s quite common for musical artists to have gimmicks that hide their real faces and identities. It seemed like it’d be easy to blend in, in a crowd like that, and when he found out about vocaloids and holographic performers he was all but sold on giving it a go. It didn’t take him long to learn how to mix songs and with a theoretically infinite track list to draw on, he’s a natural talent at playing the crowd and keeping the energy in a room high. He loves DJing for nightclubs and raves the most, but he’s starting to gain a bit of fame and notoriety for both his talent and his very advanced ‘avatar’ and might end up dropping some of his own music and playing to larger venues sooner than later.

In his spare time, of which he has a lot, he likes the challenge of hunting down lost media. He has full access to the internet as well as several archives he probably should not have access to, but it’s very hard to keep him out of anywhere he wants to be—luckily, he chooses to use his nigh unfathomable power for good, digging around here, there, and everywhere for things deleted, destroyed, or locked off from the public. It’s like a treasure hunt, following leads and connecting clues until he finds the impossible thing he’s looking for…or doesn’t. Sometimes things that are gone really are gone, but other times it’s just that no one else had the spare time and resources to try and excavate a mention of a grandmother’s VHS copy of an obscure, out of circulation film on a deleted forum post from ten years ago, track down the user, ask after the tape and offer to purchase it to convert to a digital format…and if that doesn’t pan out, the search begins anew! How exciting!

His do-gooding doesn’t end at tracking and restoring old tapes, though, and he likes to spare some time for bigger acts of justice now and again. He’s a part-time hacktivist—he takes note of ongoing crime and corruption in human society and when he can, he shines a light on it. Leaking emails, posting blacklisted videos, releasing incriminating financial records, he has little respect for the privacy of crooked CEOs and corrupt politicians and feels it’s only right that their customers and constituents know these things about the people they’re supporting. His intervention tends to lead to a lot of resignations and restructuring and legal action being pursued, so he tries not to overstep too much with the business of humans, especially not for any old small-fry in the pond…but the big fish, the guys in the news with allegations that don’t stick because of money lack of evidence… Well, he doesn’t mind digging up that evidence, if the proper authorities really lack the time for it—you’re welcome!

Xanth (Ascendswap Sans):

He’s very into spiritualism and all things mystical. His brush with the cosmically unknowable really expanded his perception and sense of things around him and he’s freshly fascinated by the things in this world beyond mortal comprehension, things he’s only glimpsed and felt more than he clearly understood. He loves reading or hearing about other peoples’ spiritual experiences—near-deaths, out-of-body’s, energies sensed and presences felt and many more—being let into the perspective of others who have been through things not easily explained and maybe getting a chance to share his own oddities in the process. He collects a lot of paraphernalia from the people and places he goes for these things, chakra bracelets, dreamcatchers, crystal pyramids and the like. He freely admits some of his items have stronger energies than others and theorizes that belief and intention in the creation of the object has an effect, you see the aura of this one feels—you get the idea, he could talk about it for hours.

He's also a very big fan of riddles! He knew a few before but has really gotten into them since, diving down the rabbit hole of riddles and tricky word puzzles. He finds the construction of them incredibly interesting, how specific words are chosen and phrases are structured to talk around the answer, carefully ringing around it to imply only and make the listener deduce the truth around its absence—just like how black holes are discovered by observing the warping of space around it! He has lots of riddle books and knows the answers to most of the basic ones out there, and he’s always open to hearing new ones, as well as coming up with some of his own from time to time. He takes his riddling quite seriously and will never look up the answer or allow anyone to tell him before he guesses—he wants to reason it out for himself, even if it takes him days to do it. If you manage to stump him, expect a call later on with the solution and exuberant praise for the gift you gave him!

A far more pedestrian and down-to-earth hobby of his, however, is pottery. Riddling and talking about the cosmos is all well and good, but it’s difficult actually meeting people to do those with—they don’t really have meet-ups for those sorts of things. But! They do have pottery classes, all over the place, welcoming beginners who are generally also open to making friends there, and he decided to go where the people were. It’s probably not something he would’ve been as happy doing before…Everything, reining in the urge to be great at it first try and do clean, neat work to impress people… but he doesn’t really think that way anymore, so he likes it! It's messy and mistakes are easy to make, both on the wheel and in the kiln, but that’s life and he’s learning same as everyone else. He gets to socialize, he gets to make stuff out of clay, and he gets so very many pots and mugs and bowls to give his friends and loved ones—a win-win-win!

Piper (Ascendswap Papyrus):

He never used to put much effort into his wardrobe. He was anxious and introverted and never wanted to stand out too much, so he always aimed for under, rather than over-dressed. …But things changed. He’s more confident, he wants to stand out, he wants to look his best and dress himself in all the nice clothes he always thought he wasn’t cool enough to wear—so now, he does. He keeps his eye-socket on modern fashion trends, subscribing to magazines and tuning in to designer runways so he always knows what’s in and can coordinate his wardrobe accordingly. He's not necessarily a brand snob, he doesn’t subscribe to the idea that clothes (and accessories) need a label to look good, but at the same time, he won’t compromise on quality and sometimes that means paying for it. Still, he has a lot of fun keeping in style and taking more care in how he presents himself, and it turns into something of a confidence feedback loop—feeling good because he looks good because he feels good because…

With his newfound confidence, he’s also gotten into the habit of singing out loud. He hums tunes every now and again, surely everyone does, but now he sings, sometimes softly and sometimes belting out lyrics at full volume to whatever song floats through his head. What can he say? He’s started to like the sound of his own voice and it makes him feel good to hear how he sounds, and to feel how freely and beautifully the notes come out. Maybe it’s a little prideful but he doesn’t see the harm in making music and feeling good about it, so he sings when he’s occupied, when he’s idle, when he’s asked to—no special occasion necessary save for the joy of sound.

Of course, this also gives him something in common with some of his favorite creatures on the planet: birds. He likes animals and tends to be great with them—especially if he happens to use his ‘trick’—but he’s particularly fond of the feathered ones and the pretty sounds they make. He started learning how to mimic bird-calls (now that he’s not too self-conscious to feel stupid about it) and found he has a talent for it, getting all kinds of flighted friends to stop by and sing back when he chirps. He knows a lot of calls and can identify most local bird species by sound and sight, and it’s a favored party trick of his to push a little intent into his whistles and get wild birds to land on his finger like they were trained. He’s actually looking to break into falconry too, so he can keep and train a raptor someday, but there’s a lot of training and regulation involved in that sport and he’s not in any special kind of hurry. Plenty of birds to watch and sing to and play with in the meantime!

Carmine (Underfell Fruition Sans):

He’s been on his own for quite awhile. Granted, most of that time was unconscious in a semi-lucid dream-state, but that still left him pretty bereft of any meaningful company for a long damn time. He’s a social guy, he’s gotta make some connections with people at some point or it’s just gonna feed into his main character syndrome, so he starts getting involved in competitive team activities pretty much as soon as possible. At first it’s gaming—multiplayers, with mic enabled of course—when he’s still building his physical health back up, but once he’s clear for it he’s joining up with just about every team sport he can find. The Surface has plenty of options for him to choose from. Paintball? Definitely, get ready to meet your maker. Go-karting? Can’t believe it took so long to ask, let’s go. Axe-throwing? Oh hell yes, you know it! He’s competitive but a mostly good loser and hardly sore winner, so whatever the game he’s all in, just happy to be able to play.

When he’s solo and not actively burning energy, he…probably should be. He overproduces magic like a sonuvabitch, and if he’s not using it, that’s a problem—for him and everyone and everything around him. If he’s lacking something to do with his energy, and no other ways to expend it, the easiest thing to do is make a bunch of bullets. This, naturally, solves one problem while creating another and out of the abundance of bones lying around the place came the elegant solution of building with them. He uses his bone bullets like some (frat house) people use beer cans, stacking them together to make thrones chairs, tables, and towers. Sometimes he’ll jenga these structures, knock ‘em down to reuse the bullets for something else, but sometimes, if he's managed to stack up something particularly impressive, he’ll put in the extra effort to make them structurally sound and keep them as-is.

For all that he’s good at building things up, he takes just as much pleasure in taking them apart. He likes working with his hands, always has, opening something up and poking around inside to figure out what goes on in there. Unfortunately, and he’ll never admit as much out loud, he is…not very strong, physically—the big stuff, heavy duty machinery that takes a decent amount of elbow grease to get into is…a little bit beyond his ability, at least comfortably. By default, that leaves him with the little stuff to tinker with, clocks and watches, TVs and blenders, anything he can get his hands on and pop open without too much work. Clockwork mechanisms are his favorites to work with, the very tangible cause and effect of motion inside, but he’s no slouch with a soldering iron and more fiddly electronics are hardly any trouble. He likes fixing stuff that’s broken but it doesn’t have to be for him to want to disassemble something in working order, just for a quick look. Don’t worry, he knows what he’s doing, he’ll put it right back—possibly in better condition than when he found it!

Tank (Underfell Fruition Papyrus):

He has difficulty finding hobbies for himself, at first. Doing things he enjoys—much less expressing that he enjoyed them—was both forbidden and dangerous, so he’s in unexplored territory without explicit orders to do or not do something. Undyne gets him started with puzzles after noticing that he seemed to like solving them for her on patrols. A jigsaw seems as good as anything to start with, right? Well… yes, very much so, because he loves the medium instantly. One obvious solution (to assemble the pieces into a picture), no time constraint, and no way to do it incorrectly? It’s perfect! He graduates quickly from small, simple jigsaws to large, complex ones and loves being able to sit down with a few thousand pieces and slowly, steadily arrange them the way they’re supposed to be. He was given a massive, single-color monolith of a jigsaw once, as a joke…which completely didn’t land because it only took him a bit longer than usual and he loved it just as much. Go figure.

His brother gave him another hobby, upon remembering that he used to (as a toddler) like scribbling on paper, and gifted him a color-by-number book. It was a little juvenile, involved considerably less problem-solving than puzzles, but that’s really not a bad thing for him, giving him a task to do by rote that appeals to his creative side rather than the militaristic orders he got until that point. Eventually, as he gains independence and starts to feel more comfortable making choices of his own, he ditches the ‘by-number’ part but sticks with coloring, using watercolors and colored pencils to fill in pages of designs with whatever he wants. He finds it very relaxing and satisfying to do, and with encouragement even frames some of the pieces he’s proudest of. Friends and family may expect to receive them as gifts, especially if they’ve complimented one in particular—it’ll be theirs in short order without a second thought.

His most consuming hobby, however, is one he came to on his own: the care and keeping of fish. His first was a betta, a bright red fighting fish, drooping and still in a tiny little cup on a shelf—an impulse purchase he’d be hard-pressed to explain, especially with no animal experience whatsoever, much less specifically fish. But, he did it, and after that it was his responsibility to care for it, so he put in the research to determine its needs, the size of the tank, the pH balance of the water, the food and feeding schedule, environmental enrichment… It was a lot of work getting everything together but the reward in seeing the sad lifeless betta turn bright and active, thriving in the home he’d built for it, that was an addictive feeling. It wasn’t long until he was setting up more tanks, and buying lots more aquatic critters—tetras, cichlids, snails, guppies—to fill them with. He’s an extremely diligent and dedicated fish-dad and likes to sit and watch them swim the way some people watch TV.

Vi (Swapfell Fruition Sans):

He knows his way around a needle and thread. He learned to sew out of pride necessity, learning to mend ripped and worn garments rather than having to beg for new on his or his brother’s behalf. It started as the lesser of two evils for him, but eventually he grew to enjoy it—work, of course, to have to close holes and hem and take in this and that, but work that he was generally left alone to do and not bothered for other things. It’s still that, but now that he doesn’t have a panopticon of a mocking prick judging his every action, he’s branching out into a bit more personal flair. He tried felting, with…poor results…but embroidery and needlepoint is working out considerably better. He’s still not especially creative so he prefers to work off patterns rather than freehand anything, and most of the things he stitches aren’t exactly to his own personal style, so a lot of his work gets donated but some things end up on the wall, others as patches for bags and jackets… It’s something to do.

…Making booze is also something to do. He didn’t exactly see it coming, something he kind of fell into. Per his brother’s preference, they’ve made their home in a wooded, mountainous area, and per his own preference, it’s secluded, a ways away from the town proper. Grocery runs every time there’s no more alcohol in the house (because somebody had company over and left a thimble in the bottle without telling anyone) is irritating, especially if he’s just getting home late and nowhere nearby is even open. A lot of locals get around the problem by simply brewing, fermenting, or distilling their own, and after looking into the process, he decided it was more than doable. He’s not much of a beer-drinker and never bothered with that, but he makes some damn good fruit wines if he says so himself, and a moonshine that’ll knock you on your ass if you’re not careful. His little operation is technically illegal—his favorite kind of illegal—but it's all for private use and he keeps to himself when he’s in town so he’s flying pretty low beneath the radar.

He is out of town a lot, mostly for work purposes, and passing through unfamiliar towns on the regular exposed him to quite a lot of postcard kiosks. He would look at them, think about his semi-estranged brother back home and how weird it would be, with their relationship being what it is, to call or text just to say ‘hey’ and… Well, eventually he bought one, scribbled a curt (coded) message on it, and sent it home before he could think better of it. Neither of them ever said anything about it, but he found it later on his desk when he got home with a scrawled reply back to what he’d written, and it kind of just spiraled into a thing from there. Anytime he goes somewhere, he finds a place to pick up a postcard to mail back, and when he gets home he tucks it (and the inevitable addition onto it) away in a binder for safekeeping. He takes a lot of care in the choosing and preservation of these cards and has a sizeable, growing collection.

Hunter (Swapfell Fruition Papyrus):

He’s a runner. There’s almost nothing he likes more than getting outside and taking off, jogging full speed to nowhere in particular until he’s out of breath and covered in sweat. He was cooped up for a long time in between specific missions and keeping pace on a treadmill just can’t compare to the free feeling he gets when he’s completely off-leash and can just go, as fast and as far as he wants to. Sometimes he’ll spice up his runs with a bit of parkour, clearing obstacles or scaling trees to take the branches for awhile, but he’s happy as long as he gets to let loose—sky above him, earth below, and nothing to call him back but his own limitations when he’s totally exhausted or he decides to be done.

For similar reasons, he’s interested in foraging. He likes nature and the outdoors, prefers it to anything indoors bar none, and the longer he can spend out in it without having to make his way back to civilization, the better. So, he started learning about the plants he sees—what’s edible, what’s not, what’s poisonous versus medicinal and so on. A lot of the info about it is geared towards humans rather than bioengineered skeletons so there’s still a learning curve, and a lot of things he's taken it upon himself to test out. He was built with a high metabolism and some natural poison resistance so he’s too cocky to be stopped from doing it, really, no matter how many times he’s called a reckless idiot for touching and ingesting possibly harmful substances. He's made a lot of interesting discoveries with regards to the local flora and only hardly gotten sick about it, so he counts it as a win.

He keeps track of said discoveries in his journal, which he takes out with him whenever he leaves the house for a nature walk (or run). He likes having it handy to note down things he does throughout the day, places he goes, things he sees… He never really got into art, not the way he could’ve, if things had been different, but he can scratch out some decent sketches to fill in the margins of his journal—the path down to the stream he found, the deer that only shed one antler, that berry that definitely did not agree with his metaphorical stomach, do not try again… His memory isn’t bad, exactly, but his mind and feet are both prone to wandering so it’s nice to have a log of his activities to look over later and put together things he missed at the time, or be reminded of stuff he wants to revisit. Most of his journaling is done halfway up a tree, sprawled along a branch with half an eye-socket on the view from up high.

Kohl (Descendtale Sans):

He wasn’t especially interested in plants or flowers, at least not until one started altering him—and the rest of monsterkind—in mind and body. That’s when he got interested and started studying. First the echo flower, its strange properties nearest and dearest to him, but gradually branching out to golden flowers, forevergreens, water sausages, any magical plant he can get his hands on to examine. Non-magical plants are equally fascinating, especially in their potential effects on humans—he knows probably an unsettling amount of flowers and greenery that are toxic to humans, the symptoms caused by contact or ingestion and how long it takes them to appear. Thankfully, he’s not much for the care and keeping of plants as keeping things alive seems like an awful lot of work. Still, he finds them interesting and has lots of botany and anthology books lying around, with leaves and petals dried and pressed between their pages. Did you know that the echo flower’s bioluminescence remains for up to three years after the bloom’s been clipped? Fascinating stuff.

Less of a passion but still at least an idle hobby, he can play a bit of piano. He’s self-taught—plunking out keys on the piano in Waterfall while passing through to entertain himself (and a little bit to annoy Undyne)—but though he can’t read sheet music or play any full length songs, he can tickle out a short tune by sound once he’s heard it at least once. He’s got a good ear for notes, despite not having any actual ears. It may actually be some kind of perfect pitch thing going on in his head but he should not be informed of this ever because he will hang on the word ‘perfect’ and be utterly insufferable about it. Mostly, he just uses this to play a few random notes whenever he comes across a keyed instrument, or to abruptly switch to an impromptu recreation of iconic horror scores to catch people by surprise. The theme from Halloween or the tubular bells from The Exorcist are favorites, but he’s unpredictable enough to learn more if you turn your back on him too long.

What he probably spends the most time on, however, is quilting. Perhaps a bit surprising, with his…everything else about him, but he’s a skeleton who values his creature comforts quite a bit, many of which have been made considerably more difficult for him to enjoy due to the ways his body has changed. In this particular case, it’s his reduced physical sensation making it nearly impossible to feel warm. He’s never cold anymore, not really, but he’s never warm either and he takes that quite personally, almost offended by the uselessness of thin clothing and scraps that dare to call themselves blankets. If there are no blankets thick enough and heavy enough get him warm, he’ll just have to make them himself…and so that’s what he does. Any passingly usable cloth in his possession tends to end up part of a quilt, with little care for patterning or overall design—his only priority is thick and heavy and warm, and if he doesn’t feel like he’s in a panini press by the time he’s finished, then it’s back to the drawing board.

Bram (Descendtale Papyrus):

He maybe went a little bit nuts for awhile there after the human first left. Some might argue that he’s still a little bit nuts but he would agree he was pretty embarrassingly desperate in the first few years after. They were gone and they weren’t answering their phone and for everything they’d done, they had been his friend so…he was worried! But of course, monsters were trapped, with hope of leaving anytime soon soundly dashed, so he couldn’t just go look for them. He wanted to reach them, or just someone on the Surface who could relay a message. That’s how he started experimenting with radio, out of a misguided and impossible attempt to communicate out of the Underground with someone up there. He never reached anyone from down there, of course, but he found some comfort in trying—and eventually, enjoyment too! He likes fiddling with the equipment to tune into different frequencies, and the sound of empty static is soothing to him. It’s a lot more fun now that he’s aboveground and can actually hear other people, and he hopes to get his license to transmit himself soon!

Before the Surface, though, things were a little lonelier for him. Colder, darker. Too dark entirely—of course a dark environment was necessary to promote the growth of their staple crop and the artificial day-cycles were only making monsters waste more time sleeping than they already were, he understood the need for the dark…but surely, it didn’t have to be so complete? How was anyone to know that he was at home and available to host company if there were no warm, inviting lights in the window? Candles seemed the perfect solution, natural light from flickering fires that wasn’t too harsh, still a bit dim but plenty to see by! He started just collecting them so he would always have them on hand if needed, but eventually started making them himself with wax on the stove. Scent or color don’t matter much to him, but he really likes being able to customize the size and shape to his needs. And his needs…aren’t so much anymore, now that there’s regular sunlight, but candles are still great for when there isn’t, and when electric lights are little too intense. It never hurts to have more candles around, for emergencies!

He's also exploring a new hobby up on the surface, inspired by his and his brother’s new careers—bone collecting! Now, it’s not what you’re thinking, he’s not after human bones. Those are still very much in use by the deceased, and he's sure surviving loved ones would be very cross if tried to just take them! But his job was how he learned that humans and other organic, non-magical creatures all contain skeletons of their own and when they die everything but the bone rots away. He thinks it’s very cool and obviously humans are off the table to inspect more closely, but animals don’t mind. He takes note of any dead creatures he happens to find—mostly birds and squirrels—and after allowing the other local wildlife to have first pick at it, he collects the remains to take home. He isn’t overly fond of the smells and textures of rot and asked for his brother to help with the de-fleshing and degreasing with the first few things he brought back, but he's got a handle on it now and loves to artfully display his cleaned finds all around the house. Skulls are his favorite, but he has some lovely wishbones and plenty of vertebrae that he’s equally proud of showing off!

[inkthecryptid]

Anonymous:

>Be me

>Tech-Lich

>Spend all my funds on extra exoskeletal bio-ports, quantum calculation chips, and ZeBethane™ brand brain stimulating inhalants

>Parents disown me, relocate my setup to a run down apartment in a metropolitan zone of Ganymede

-Spend all day on webspace, communing with technology and the background radiation of quantum magic

>Things seem to be going alright

>Most of my bodily functions are automated, never need to leave my TechnoThrone

>Make money by selling myself as an online quantum computer for rich plebs who don’t know the first thing about paracausal warping

>One day take too many stimulants

>My Mindlock breaks, total failure to maintain identity flow

>Spend the next 72 hours unable to distinguish possibility and reality

>Brain fully detached from motor functions

>Witness the quantum foam in its primordial form

>Immediately believe that there is something beyond god that exists intrinsically through every speck of stardust that connects us

>Suddenly on a beach

>Childhood friend who stopped talking to me after I got into Techliching is there

>Shes just sitting on the sand

>”Hello Anon, come sit with me”

>Come to in a meditek facility

>Surgeons are detaching servers from my brain when I start screaming

>It’s been 10 years since and I’ve been proudly cyber-free the entire time. Things really got put into perspective when the doctors told me I shouldn’t even be consciously existent on this dimension anymore. I started talking to my parents again and that childhood friend is now my wife! It’s never too late to stop, or to start over clean. You’ll find your beach, I swear!

Anonymous:

>Meatcuck came this close to understanding the Equation and gave it up for pussy. Get out.

[cosmic-perspective]

For those interested in the life of me…

I also like to build model rockets, and today I finished my 4” LOC Goblin. It’s themed after a Nuka Cola Quantum pop bottle from the videogame series Fallout. And yes, the rocket glows just like the irradiated pop!

Now to pack everything up, get a final weight, run a final sim, then drill the motor to set the delay. I present the “Quantum” rocket. Trying for my L1 HPR certification here in a few weeks time.

Wish me and the “Quantum” good luck! If it survives I can use it for my L2 cert down the road. 😬🚀

[spontaneousglitterbees]

Welcome to the New Age

[TAPP AU Masterpost]

The following fic goes into descriptions of canon character death and resulting Angst; reader discretion is advised. NDRV3 spoilers ahead!

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

Your eyes have pried themselves open three times now, wide, still seeing nothing.

The green-grey lights clouding the hangar feel scalding hot on still-clammy skin. You know you should be cold; freezing, in fact, but the Strike-Nine curled back a finger of the monkey’s paw on your behalf. You wonder if your gentle exhales fog the underside of the metal slab looming over you from this distance. It’s not as though you can check.

The smell of motor oil, sawdust, and far too much copper will probably never leave your lungs.

You find yourself wishing you had control of your hands. The lid of the press has been descending for ages. A mechanical whirrrr of struggling gears loops over and over, notes discordant with themselves in a canon, yet it never actually gets any closer. Deep down, you know it never will. Misery is kind of the point of punishment.

There’s little else to do but figure that much out. Your back has adhered to the spot where you lie (and lie, and lie-and-lie-and-lie), bleeding through Kaito’s borrowed jacket that will invariably see much worse. Stuck. Stationary. You can’t even fidget, let alone etch an epitaph in the gummy-rubber texture of the hangar floor. It’s nearly enough to make you consider whether Yonaga really was right.

… You miss Angie, really.

You miss a lot of people.

At least they aren’t here, echoes the thought through the barren room.

You briefly indulge the thought of cyan light streaking in through a rising garage door, the sound of footsteps smacking dents into soft, dirt-encrusted polyurethane with urgency. The shift of fabric against fabric of a suit as the detective drops to his knees at your side. He would be within arm’s reach, if your arm would move. Of course you can’t comfort him now that you want to.

Misery. What part of ‘punishment’ do you not understand?

What’s worse is the ghost of his hand over the side of the metal slab. It doesn’t adhere to logical geometry anymore; it is simultaneously still lowering, and hovering just above the tip of your nose, and snapped as a trap over your still-lying form. You are both the scattered remnants of a human being and perfectly fine, whole, all of your vitals approximately where they’re supposed to be. Hell is a quantum state where everything is both true and false simultaneously, and you cannot open the box from the inside.

His hand ghosts over your press (it’s part of you, now, as much of you smeared on its hidden surface as lying beneath), and you want to force it open. Not to show him your last neat parlor trick, but to knock him flat on his ass and get him away from you. The world cannot be yours, but this hangar is. You’ve carved out the territory in your own blood. Get your own headstone, you cheap bastards.

You want to laugh. You do, because if you aren’t laughing you’re crying, and if you have to hear your own strangled voice resound up over the catwalks and metal beams to the high ceiling and back you will start a one-man riot.

Then you are reminded that you can’t laugh, because you lack any control at all of this body you’re locked in, and you loathe that you’re being kept from the keys.

If you didn’t know better, you’d swear Shuichi just said something. That’s a lie, of course, because Shuichi is alive, and outside, and even if he isn’t he’s certainly not headed wherever it is you are now. You are never going to see Saihara again, and the ghosts you hear pounding on the inert slab with a calloused metal CLANG! are simply the demons here to torment you. They’re mean. Saihara-chan is so mean.

As is Momota-chan, and the two of them together gathered around gawking at your punctured chrysalis are twice as bad as either alone.

“I know you’ll pull through this! I believe in you!” Liar.

“You aren’t alone. I’m sorry.” Liar.

“Do you want to die?”

Well.

You do not know what is keeping the wraith from reaching through and grabbing you by the throat. You’d welcome the change of pace, at this point, dizzy with the anticipation, sick to your stomach without recourse. You know better, really, but part of you is certain you can feel cranial fluid leaking from your ears and sizzling on this oversized hotplate. You’re tired.

You are tired, and vaguely aware you’ll never wake up.

(Momota-chan is mean, but it’s a lie to call him cruel. If he really wanted you to suffer, he wouldn’t have taken that third bolt. It should have lodged in your heart. If he only wanted to avoid Harukawa’s condemnation he could have just shoved you away, but he took the shot for you instead. At the last minute, he’s won your game: he’s cemented a space in your thoughts, for what little life you had left and for eternity afterward.)

Here you lie at the start of a little journey through forever, and you are already sick of it. So much for your willpower, your determination, any conceivable quality that would make you anything beyond a piss-poor leader; DICE wouldn’t take you back.

You can’t even remember their faces anymore.

(Did you ever know them in the first place?)

You have eons upon eons here to lay by yourself— unbothered at last, no intervening idiocy to be found, you did it, you pushed everyone away. Isn’t this what you wanted at the end? Eons to ruminate and reflect on every bad thing you have ever done.

At least it keeps you busy.

(Did they ever have faces for you to know?)

The killing game becomes a blur. You find yourself pausing and re-playing the memories like an old scratched-up DVD of a movie lovingly, clumsily cobbled together by a clueless hand with all the default settings enabled. Fond memories of fifteen classmates crowded around a long breakfast table project onto the metal sheet above you in rough camcorder quality. Trembling, home video taken with unsteady hands where all ten pixels slide in mesmerizing array, you took a long sip of grape soda and nobody spoke to you. It feels correct. Disappointing, maybe, but this is the way things are.

They offered you a plate. You, as usual, try to quietly refuse (because you are a burdensome child, because everything they try to get you to eat makes you feel more nausea than not eating at all, because you are unreasonable, because good children cannot taste the consistency of something more than its flavor, because you make problems on purpose but never in a fun way) and are swiftly overturned. You know your place is not to make demands. Some people need to have their hand held through life, and you had the fortune to have one extended to you before you became un-salvageable. You know better than to reach out for it now. There is no point even twitching your fingers anymore; that gracious hand never reaches back these days.

You aren’t sure why you brought your camcorder to such a scattered excuse for a family dinner. The sheen of novelty still hasn’t worn off. It was a birthday present, after all, and even if neither it nor you are capable of making anything worthwhile the idea that you might drives you to preserve the memory. It keeps you busy. Everyone in the house takes dinner to a separate space. Yours is currently sitting on your corner cushion with an opaque water bottle secretly filled to the brim with gas-station soda. You’ve grown to hate the lingering syrup stuck to your tongue, but it keeps you awake and you can always drown it out with another swig. After a long day, it hits. Not good or well, but precisely where it needs to.

(One in the upper right arm, one in the center of your back, and one …?)

Where is everyone?

Where are you?

You can imagine the pound of footsteps one-after-another launching you up the staircase, pulling the door too-softly shut behind you. You have nothing worth hiding, of course, but you can’t very well have anyone seeing your work-in-progress; it has to be perfect. You can almost feel the button cave in beneath your fingertip as you release the USB-A to plug your little toy into the computer. The spring seems crunchy today. You aren’t sure why you shiver; it’s still the tail-end of June.

This is going to be the one. Maybe the footage isn’t much, but if anyone can spice it up, it’ll be you! You have an eye for making things engaging, so you’ve been told (and never shown by anyone under the age of whatever-impossible-age-teachers-are, sixteen at least, right?) but this one, this one will be the one to really grab attention, and people will like it, and if you’re lucky they might even talk to you. All according to plan.

You say this every time you invent a new magnum opus, sure, but you have a good feeling this time. First, you show your classmates your movie. They’ll watch it, be so impressed they just have to gush to you about it, and you can keep them on the hook long enough to start to get to know them. That’s when you hit them with the promise of friendship, and you all can do all kinds of things from there. Hangout spots in big trees in the park (one of them has to be tall enough to help you climb, you’re quick but your upper-body strength isn’t enough to get you beyond the first couple branches yet), codenames, secret handshakes; you can play games together! You can wear matching outfits, and make movies, and make more friends, and they’ll all look at you and you’ll hold them all together, because if there’s one thing you’re good at it’s clinging to your status quo in the face of overwhelming odds. It’ll be incredible, you just know it. Maybe if you do well enough, there will be enough of you to play Werewolf, or Mysterium, or Coup, or maybe you’ll put together a full party—

The d20 you’ve been stimming with, idly smoothing over between the fingers of your right hand, comes down with a clatter and bounces across your desk. Huh. Strange.

Of all the shiny math rocks in your collection, you don’t remember any bright magenta dice.

Flecks of hot pink slough off on each impact with the hard surface. Plink, plink, plink.

Clack.

You try to blink the encroaching color out of your vision.

Natural one.

You can feel the stress limit of your bones down to the fourth decimal place. You tense up, attempting to brace for impact, but absolutely nothing is touching you while it rends you limb-from-limb and keeps going. The white-hot agony you feel as splinters of you break free, each cell another part of you desperate to roll out from under here and get-out-get-out-get-out, even if they can’t do it together, supersedes the temptation to pretend someone is outside waiting for you.

No. You may be angry with them, or disappointed, or at the very least uncertain what it is you feel for them, but you even hope Momota is well out of the splash-zone. Off of that awful catwalk and its CLANGK-ker-kCLANGs. Off with his sidekicks, somewhere. Maybe they’re sitting in a courtyard, and Kaito helps Shuichi into a tree (Maki had beaten them both to it and decided to watch them figure out the logistics) and they watch the stars move overhead together, breathing in the crisp night air in late August, and pretty soon you’ll have that new project of yours in a state to show off….

You find you take refuge in the idea of stars. They’re cosmic happenstance, ambivalent the same way as the rest of the universe, distant and impersonal, but even a static image is still new to you. You were always too busy looking at other people to look up. The only way you could survive out there was to meticulously study the fine details of an expression in your every conversation. You streamlined the tricks and tells that passed for signals into your muscle memory because, unlike for most, they were never innate for you; you had to be certain to echo emotional information to people in a way they were certain to understand. It had to be perfect. Why would you ever waste the time to look up at a universe that did not have an opinion for you to care about?

Now it’s all you can do. Lying on your back, eyes open, or shut, or both-and-neither, you stare unseeing. Somewhere past the hydraulic press, beyond the high ceiling, beyond the LCD-sky, there are stars. You’re looking their way now. Forever. The survivors will see them for you.

You do not care if it is a lie. You choose, against your better instinct, to believe it.

The remains of your nerves seem to have gone supernova; what was the worst pain you ever knew melts away into nothing. You don’t feel anything at all. Not relief. Not floating. Just the absence of sensation.

Before you have a chance to fully process your new state of non-being, blissfully, it seems your tenacity has finally run out. You are surrounded by a bright, white light.

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

Kaito Momota never thought he would be a killer.

Most people tend not to, certainly, though Kaito is well aware he tends to pick more fights than average. It was always a far-flung possibility, technically any young man fit enough to be an astronaut can generate the force vector required to do something everyone involved will regret, but if you had asked him. Well. Within the first minute of uploading to TAPP, during which “Kaito Momota” Began, he would likely have been too dazed to respond with much other than confusion. And the second minute after being uploaded to TAPP, during which significant alterations to the code finished uploading and “Kaito Momota” as he is known today Began, he never would have thought himself morally capable of it.

But it was, by strictly literal definition, a murder. A murder he committed. Successfully.

Though, also in a strictly literal sense, that murder saved his victim’s life. Had Kokichi gone much longer without dying, the likelihood his data would reflect the symptoms of blood loss and poison damage in the physical world (or worse yet corrupt irretrievably) would have risen dramatically by the second. 'If anything,’ Momota mutters under his breath, 'you should be thanking me.’

But Kaito didn’t know that at the time. Kokichi still doesn’t, and it was his idea.

The irreverent young man kicks his feet up onto the folding chair in front of him. A mass of sheets and blankets threaten to swallow the still-breathing shape in the hospital bed whole. Ouma practically blends in, already ghastly pale on a good day, the only color to his face a deep, bruised purple under the eyes.

Rantaro will be happy (or, at least, interested) to know Kokichi’s eyes are open. Again. For the third time in as many weeks, the kid remains almost entirely unresponsive save for a blank stare at the ceiling. After the second false alarm, Kaito has steadily been… no. No, the improbable is possible, even if it’s hard to keep spirits high. There’s still a chance these little fits indicate the Ultimate Pain-in-the-Ass is at least a little closer to waking up. He has half a mind to gently coax those violet eyes closed because it would really suck to wake up to a horrible case of dry-eye, right? himself. Then it looks like he’s just sleeping for once in his life. Kaito can hardly fault him for that.

Granted, he has to mentally prepare himself to do it; Kokichi is alive, his heart monitor is right there, and yet still Kaito searches for the slow rise and fall of his chest. It’s not like touching a dead body. In fact, can’t you just hear him insist you’re flirting with him, screwing up the oxygen mask laughing, ‘nishishishishi’….

Kaito is no longer afraid he will be haunted by Kokichi. He already is.

“Only a grade-a bastard can make you miss a sound that irritating, so you gotta get back here and atone. Got it?”

He does not expect a reply. He leaves room for one anyway.

“… Do you do this on purpose,” Kaito asks the smattering of abstract brushstrokes hanging in a frame on the opposite wall. Ouma is… too fragile, like this.  The thought ambles forward. Nothing good comes of saying it out loud, he knows, but there is no-one around to hear but the boy who can’t. "I swear, Ouma, if you found a way to lie about this too,"

… Then what? What will you do, Kaito? Would you get your hands dirty, again, this time for keeps? Is that the kind of person you are? Is it who you’ve become, or is some degree of violence-as-problem-solving innate within you? So deeply ingrained that the person you used to be was willing to be replaced for an opportunity to be something he could be proud of…

Kaito scrolls through a custom RSS feed on his phone. It keeps his line of sight away from the center of the room and blocks out the thoughts he’d rather not consider with an unending wall of text.  He mindlessly flicks his finger over the glass, ignoring three-then-four message notifications flashing at the top. It’s no secret where you are. You have come here almost every morning since the rest of you emerged from TAPP and plunged back into society. All of us make it out means all of us, no matter what.

He still believes that. He still curses his previous self, though, for promising it. It took him a good five minutes on the staircase to get up to the second floor, and every step hammered in the thought that much more: if you can’t do this, what else can’t you do anymore? You can’t, be the, SHSL Astronaut if, you stop part, partway up the stairs to breathe. You’re making terrible time leaning on the rail like that. Thing is, doubling down, makes it worse and. Hh. It took a puff of his inhaler to smooth out his breathing. God, if you can’t do this then what do you honestly expect to do for anyone else?

Besides, when on-record has anyone managed to tell Kokichi Ouma what to do?

Most of the class has accepted that Ouma is going to die. It makes the most sense. Even the school is questioning what to do with him. Something about an inability to track down a next-of-kin, for reasons that are certainly none of his business (Kaito will definitely be listening out for). But he has a vice grip on hope. The impossible is possible, after all!

(… Even if that’s only a lie you tell to yourself to keep going.)

If there’s one thing you know about Kokichi, it’s that the guy does not know when to quit.

Besides, it’s nice to have somewhere to go in the mornings. Kaito still insists on getting moving at oh-too-early, so used to exercise drills he may-or-may-not have ever actually had to do that he naturally wakes an hour or two before sunrise. The distinct feeling of his chest being scraped out with a wire brush has only barely deterred him from insisting on a morning jog. Even then, it only worked in combination with a couple trips to Tsumiki’s and the persistent chastising from his sidek–

His. Friends.

They’ve always been his friends, of course. But crashing back to Earth, the real Earth, and landing in a strange translucent pod, meeting the concerned eyes of curiously spectating-specters he watched die makes a man feel significantly less in-control of a situation, you know?

(You had just killed a child. And it reminded you, strapped in for one last ride, that you were also a child. You all were.

You weren’t sure what exactly you expected would happen once you finally succumbed to the itch ingrained in your lungs, but ‘blearily sit up to see a room of your walking, chattering dead classmates and your unconscious very not-dead sidekicks, then Angie cheerfully beckoning everyone to crowd around you and help you stand before they cash in on their bets’ was not on your bingo card. It also clarified absolutely nothing. Ryoma? Kaede?

… Why was everyone passing whatever they’re trading to Miu?

“Where’s 'kichi?” You asked the clowder of teens before you really registered I am both alive and can speak without spitting up my own blood. Nobody else seemed quite as confounded by that information as you were. They were all far too busy looking at one another in dead silence, expressions morphing with slow-encroaching horror.

Kaede stepped up to break the tension.

“We thought you were the victim.”)

Friends. Not sidekicks. He has to keep reminding himself.

His best friends keep chastising him for jogging when he really shouldn’t, but a little common sense never kept Kaito Momota, Luminary of the Stars sedentary for long! The infirmary isn’t even that far from the dorms, allowing for a reasonable, he swears, leisurely walk over. He even gets to pass through the courtyard garden, taking in the fresh air.

The heavy, humid late-summer air.

They can’t all be winners.

Most mornings, his routine starts early. The kind of early where:

About 4:30 AM, to the minute without an alarm clock, he jolts awake and rushes to get acceptably dressed, hurrying down the stairs. All the while, he checks his pockets meticulously for his phone-wallet-keys, in that order.

5:05 AM he opens the door of the dorm complex and realizes that it is raining today, and he is wearing slippers.

5:11 AM he comes back up to the interior welcome mat of the building in shoes less likely to fall apart in this weather (now that their uniforms are, presumably, not infinitely re-stocked) and with the foresight to grab an umbrella on the way out and under the jet-black pre-dawn sky.

5:15 AM Kaito is reminded that the rest of humanity sure does still exist, huh, because some part of it has deemed it perfectly acceptable to spit out their gum on the sidewalk instead of an inch over in the grass like a marginally more reasonable person. Incredible what a lack of the looming threat of death as punishment for basically any infraction does to your manners.

He does not think of how Ouma would probably do the same thing with clear glue in the most highly-trafficked spots on campus, seeding it in intersections like flypaper and letting foot traffic carry the adhesive to every part of the school by lunch. Kaito does not snicker to himself imagining how quickly that kid would convince the upperclassmen not to even try messing with Class 79, characterizing the caliber of shenanigans they’d invite immediately. Those fireworks would absolutely not be any fun to watch.

5:17 AM he faintly recalls he’d intended to grab a granola bar from the kitchen on his way out, and resigns to just picking up breakfast at a vending machine instead.

At 5:23 AM he knocks his forehead gently into the plexiglass, realizing why Kiibo hated these things so much. It’s spit the same note back at him at least five times, now, and he is not about to try and ask it for change. Instead, he picks up an energy bar for the receptionist who opens the door for him and a Panta with everything else. Just in case. (Shit, they’re out of purple. What’s second place? Peach? Fuck it, he’s lucky you’re too invested to ditch the machine all together)

Culminating in arriving at the hospital at 5:30 AM, setting the energy bar on the front desk as he heads directly for the stairs. He could take the elevator, sure, but he’ll cite the blinding-brightness of the fluorescence compared with the lamp-lit path he just came from (and really mean that no, I can’t, because I still have some pride, damn it, let me have this)

Every morning.

Something like that, at least.

Physical therapy doesn’t start until 6:00, so the extra half-hour he’s free to do as he likes. He’d like to hang out with a friend, but he has the misfortune of being the only morning-person in a band of night-owls. Thus, if he wants familiarity, he has to head up to talk at Kokichi. The peace and quiet up there (and soft beep-ing of a heart monitor that proves what Kaito has been trying to tell himself since the moment he woke up) is soothing enough to take a nap in the visitor’s chair. If Ouma minds, he hasn’t said anything about it.

(Hah.)

So, until he can fall asleep, Kaito scrolls through a feed full of space news and photography. He’s taken to reading the horoscopes posted in the ‘for fun’ section of his favorite astronomy blog out loud first. “Because it’s supposedly space-related and also complete horseshit, so it’s perfect,” Kaito said to the pockmarked ceiling. In reality, it’d initially been a mis-click on account of his still-shaking hands. He’d been preoccupied trying to banish the memory of condensation on a painted steel handrail slicking his palms with either his or Kokichi’s blood, probably both.

It made him laugh.

“I have no idea when your birthday is. You know that? You could be any of these if it’d get you free ice cream, huh? So we’ll cover the bases. And if you don’t like it, just tell me to stop.”

He’s not sure whether or not he really believes Kokichi might hear him. But if funerals are for the living, so is cracking the kind of joke you think a distant friend might like. One of these days, he might be able to laugh with you about it. He’s read down the list every morning since. Something in the routine of it is grounding; a signal that the day really has started.

This particular day, Kaito leans back in the chair and reads off the horoscopes between bites of granola. The unopened soda bottle rests at the foot of Kokichi’s bed.

“Big changes are coming for you this fall, Gemini. As tempting as it might be to reminisce about times gone by, the slow pace of the dog days of summer are a perfect time to start planning ahead. This week, things snap into focus. Work on strengthening your connections– you have more of them than you think.”

Kaito yawns.

“Jeez, Kichi, I think I could probably write this shit. There’s an Ultimate Programmer a year ahead of us, do you think anyone would notice if they set up a bot?” he half-laughs, looking over toward the bed. It hardly seems restful, hooked up to so many machines, but Kokichi looks like he needs any scrap of sleep he can g—

That’s. Weird.

Didn’t you close his eyes already?

Kaito sits up straight, stretching, shaking the drowsy haze from his head before standing up. You’ve got to keep better track of these things. He strides to the side of the bed, a careful hand blotting out the harsh light overhead as the other reaches to carefully

Shut. His, eyes?

But they’re already closed.

“… Ouma?”

The heart monitor picks up pace, a thudding beep-beep-beep-beep startling the SHSL Astronaut back a step or two. Remember your training. Keep a level head, Kaito, he might be having some kind of seizure. That can happen, right? You just need to call in the nurse. Probably nothing they haven’t seen before.

That thought evaporates almost instantly.

As Kaito presses the call button, he’s met with a desperate, terrified shriek. It’s a little muffled through the respirator and after weeks of silence, but the plea is unmistakable.

“WAIT!”

[tilbageidanmark]

MOVIES I WATCHED THIS WEEK (#197)

"How did she get forgotten?"

BE NATURAL: THE UNTOLD STORY OF ALICE GUY-BLACHÉ (2018) was one of the best documentaries I saw last year. And because I focus more and more on women-directed movies, I had to watch it again. What a unique, fascinating pioneer she was, and how much did her amazing achievements change the world. Narrated by (another prodigy) Jodie Foster. Like ‘The Méliès Mystery’ biography, these two are a must-see for any serious film lover. Even in re-view, the story moved me greatly. 10/10. ♻️.

Extra: Another film essay about the same topic, FILMS DIRECTED BY WOMEN IN THE SILENT ERA (2013) tells of some of the 80 women who directed 850+ movies between 1896 to 1927 (but not too well). [*Female Directors*]

🍿

"Do you think we can go for a walk with a lobster...?"

THE WHEELCHAIR (1960) is my second bizarre black comedy by Marco Ferreri (after 'La Grande Bouffe'). A different kind of an anarchistic story about a 70-year-old Spanish man who's determined to buy a mobility scooter, a motorized wheelchair, like many of his invalid acquaintances, while his tyrannical family would rather commit him to an insane asylum, for spending their inheritance. It's just so wild and so fresh. The copy I saw was extra-crisp, and included the dark ending which Franco's censure board forced deleting. (Screenshot Above).

The trailer.

🍿

2 WITH BRITISH CHILD ACTRESS PAMELA FRANKLIN:

🍿 “For those who like that sort of thing that is the sort of things they like…”

THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE (1969) sparkled because of Maggie Smith's spectacular acting. But her frustrated spinster, an uppity teacher at an all-girl boarding school in 1930's Edinburgh was such a confusing character; Stuck-up and prissy, fascistic and manipulative, eventually she loses your sympathy. She is a strong, independent feminist, but also a fascist follower of Mussolini and Franco [But not Hitler - that would have been a politically-incorrect step too far]. And when the sex undercurrents start boiling over the surface, and the teachers start sleeping with each other and with their teenager girls, things get grotesquely complicated.

🍿 (Extra: A sketch from S8E10 of the CAROL BURNETT SHOW, where newly-famous movie star Maggie Smith comes to visit the home of her old collage friends. I never watched any television with laugh tracks, and I'm not going to start now). 1/10.

🍿 THE INNOCENTS (1961), a Gothic ghost story of a governess caring for two children at a remote country estate. Based on a Henry James novella, with a script co-written by Truman Capote, it's a formal British Victorian Gentry fantasy about inexplicable "possession". 11 year old Pamela Franklin gave a wonderful performance as the little haunted girl, but the whole premise of this glorious upper-class supernatural world, and Deborah Kerr's always 'proper' and sexually-repressed personality, were not for me. 2/10.

🍿

KEANU REEVES X 2:

🍿 First watch: The classic dystopian fairy tale THE MATRIX, which went on to spawn a $3 billion sci-fi franchise. There were plenty of visual flourishes, and original special effects in it [The 'digital rain' code, slow-motion 'bullet time', the Kung-fu wire photography, jumping from building to building, the stylized action scenes], but I hated it from the very beginning, and for the life of me, couldn't understand how this ever become a Thing: The fortune-cookie pseudo-philosophy, the faux mysticism and cyberpunk "camp" aesthetics are just not for me. Once you don't accept that the "Red Pill / Blue Pill" metaphor is a legitimate thought experiment which is worth taking seriously, the rest of the mambo-jumbo nerd-bubble becomes just a stupid teenage game. Yes, we are all slaves, living in a virtual reality simulation, but this is not a Plato's Cave allegory. Not even 'Blade Runner'... 2/10. [*Female Directors*]

🍿 ANYONE CAN QUANTUM (2016), a self-congratulatory trifle narrated by Keanu. Another speculative science-fiction piece in which Paul Rudd plays Quantum Chess with Steven Hawking. Silly. 1/10.

🍿

FELA KUTI, LIVE AT GLASTONBURY, a 1984 concert film of the legendary Afro-beat musician, political activist and band leader. He was an improvising innovator genius, somewhere between Frank Zappa and Miles Davis. The concert included only 2 of his very long songs, some of his own fantastic drumming, and lengthy dancing-twerking by some of his 27 wives. But it wasn't his best music or performance. Also, the YouTube copy was of poor quality: I hope that in 3-4 years we'll be able to re-watch it on a highly-upgraded A.I. version.

🍿

BILLY WILDER DIRECTS X 2:

🍿 WHAT WOULD BILLY WILDER DO?, a new 'Every Frame A Picture' video essay. A return to the original old style of Tony Zhou & Taylor Ramos!

🍿 ... But Wilder's 'comedy' STALAG 17 (1953) didn't age well, for me. A POW Camp that is run like a German Bed & Breakfast, and where the chummy Nazis treat their prisoners in a courteous and friendly manner, was too irritating and far-fetched. The only redeeming quality was lead actor William Holden. Otto Preminger played a buffoonish Nazi officer. 2/10.

(In Israel of the 1950s–1960s, "Stalag" was a generic term for pornographic material with a theme of sadistic sexual activity between female SS officers and prisoners of war. I read a couple when I was 10-12.)

🍿

THE HANGOVER, the terrific comedy about the antics of the four members of the 'Wolfpack', each with his distinct and well-defined personality. A perfect script and dialogue, so dumb and so funny. It's clearly about 'Acceleration', where each new step drives the story higher into more outrageous & absurd levels. Again, it's hard to imagine that such harmless throwaway foolery grossed $1.4 billion! 9/10. Re-watch. ♻️.

🍿

MILK X 2:

🍿 According to IMDb, there are over 100 movies (mostly shorts though) that are titled 'MILK', not counting many TV-episodes. Why is that?

MILK (2020), a vegetarian German short with the most disgusting soundtrack, which asks the question: What would happen if people were to be used in the same way as dairy cows?

🍿 MILK, my third by British Andrea Arnold, her debut short from 1998. A story of a woman who gives birth to a stillborn baby, and doesn't know what to do with her sorrow. [*Female Directors*]

🍿

2 MORE FROM ERIC KISSACK:

🍿 'The Gunfighter' was one of the best short films about invisible voices in the Old Wild West. His new THE MOVE is somehow similar in that there's a science fiction kink to the physical reality, which cannot be explained. But while Amanda Crew (Monica Hall from 'Silicon Valley') is still cute as a button, the boyfriend who moves with her into their new apartment with 'the portal' is just an irritating dude.

🍿 WEREWOLVES (2014) also reminds me of 'The Gunfighter'. Obviously, some of the same people, arguments, inner logic. Who's the Werewolf?

🍿

A BUNCH OF SHORTS:

🍿 RELAX WITH GEORGE CLOONEY AT THE END OF A MOVIE: Michael Clayton dreams of 'The Descendants' watching 'March of the Penguins'. Can be used for a chill session.

🍿 THE PROCESS OF MAKING A CELLO is a 27 minutes of wordless zen: Watching a Japanese master craftsman hand-build a cello in the course of 6 months. Perfect for another chilling out evening.

🍿 HOW IN THE WORLD ISN'T THIS FILM A CLASSIC? is the latest from 'Moviewise', an intellectual essayist with an indefinable accent. I've seen a bunch of his videos before, as well as the subject of this terrific analyses, John Farrow's stylish 1948 'The big clock'. A great introduction to both film and reviewer. 9/10.

🍿 The 'Script Sleuth' analyses some SCREENWRITING TIPS IN 'GOODFELLAS': Character, The Story World, Dramatic Irony, Narration, Humanity and Consequences.

🍿 TO YOUR HEALTH was a cute animated PSA, commissioned by the Michigan State Board Of Alcoholism in 1956. Cheers!

🍿 THE LANGUAGE OF FACES (1961), my first film by humanist John Korty, the man who inspired Coppola and Lucas to move their studios to Northern California. It's a visual anti-nuclear essay about pacifism, which was sponsored by a Quaker group. It describes a vigil that 1,000 cold-war protesters held, standing in silent for two days in front of the Pentagon.

🍿 THE HISTORY OF THE PINK PANTHER FILMS - Should i watch 'The return of the pink panther'? or 'A shot in the dark'?

🍿 THE QUEEN'S MONASTERY (1988) is a British fairy tale using watercolor animation. [*Female Director*]

🍿 I was interested to find movies based on Jorge Luis Borges stories, but the 1971 Italian THE MINOTAUR MASK wasn't it. A man with a plastic King Kong mask pondering his existence in badly-lit cellars and uttering philosophical platitudes was experimentally silly.

🍿  

(ALL MY FILM REVIEWS - HERE).

[honestlyvan]

Hey, Van, could you explain permet to me because I don't think I ever fully understood how it works or what happened at the end and how was it different from quiter zero? Please?

Oh dear. Gundam technobabble. Keep in mind that I'm writing this without having read any of the official additional material, this is just what I can glean from the show itself.

Alright so Permet's whole thing is that it can form a networks with itself under specific conditions. Presumably it means that anything with a sufficient concentration of Permet in it -- including human beings -- can act as components of that network, kind of like a big integrated circuit. For Gundams specifically, this means that the pilot becomes a part of the operating system of the mobile suit -- it looks like other Permet technology includes an additional layer of interfacing, which means they don't offload any processing onto the Permet networks of the user, Gund technology makes the connection go both way.

The upside is that controlling technology the way you "control" your body has immense benefits for stuff like reaction time, situational awareness and fine motor control -- the downside is that insides of humans are not nice and ordered like an integrated circuit, and so Permet trying to force itself into a structure like that clearly has some deleterious health effects. If I had to guess, it fucks with the subtle electric signals inside the brainmeats somehow, but why it causes high fever, I don't know. It also looks like constant exposure to things that activate the Permet inside a body is cumulative, like radiation poisoning.

"Data storms" are just what the larger expressions of a Permet networks are called. If I had to guess, I think the name comes from how these large networks inherit noise resulting from Permet reactions in the absence of a control system, becoming more chaotic the further their influence extends. In limited amounts, like the small-scale storms inside Gundam systems, a human consciousness can still exert control over them, organise them, but as the scale goes up, the amount of agitation the Permet inside a person is under exceeds some physical limit. The influence goes both ways, though, human biometric activity can become imprinted into a Permet network, like how Eri did with Lfrith.

Quiet Zero is basically an amplifier capable of forcibly organising ambient Permet. This includes Permet that is bound in extant systems, which is why it gives remote control over Permet-powered technology that gets within the zone of influence the large antenna structure provides for them. But, critically, I think both Eri and Suletta are amplifiers on their own, also, as a result of their physiology containing far more Permet than the average person.

Like, all Permet is connected to itself, somehow -- but most of it is too chaotic, and the trace from one end of the network to another is too long for any particular piece of information retained in the network through imprinting is too difficult usually. What Suletta and Eri did to convince Elnora was basically to use their extended reach to pull on the imprints stored in the various Gundams, stored with Eri, and stored within Quiet Zero's systems while they still had access to the large data storm.

But why that overloaded the circuit, causing it to break down... I'm not really sure. I think they may have just hit the upper limit of what is possible within the confines of the laws of physics of this universe. They extended the theory of what Elnora was trying to accomplish to, for a moment, remanifest everyone's imprints, instead of just Eri's. I also don't know why the entire structure and all materials containing Permet also disintegrated, although that could just be some kind of a cascade effect from whatever molecular or quantum links keep Permet connected with itself dissolving from being overloaded.

[diabolus1exmachina]

Lamborghini Revuelto (In Spanish it means something like “unruly”).  

In the marque’s 60th anniversary year, Automobili Lamborghini presents Revuelto. The first super sports V12 hybrid plug-in HPEV (High Performance Electrified Vehicle). Revuelto defines a new paradigm in terms of performance, sportiness and driving pleasure from its unprecedented new architecture; innovative design; maximum-efficiency aerodynamics; and a new carbon frame concept. An output of 1015 CV is delivered from the combined power of an entirely new combustion engine together with three electric motors, alongside a double-clutch gearbox that makes its debut on a 12-cylinder Lamborghini for the first time. Carbon fiber, produced via artisan craftmanship in the Sant’Agata Bolognese factory, is the principal structural element within the new car, used not only in the monofuselage and frame but also for many elements of the bodywork. The extensive use of carbon fiber and lightweight materials, combined with the potent engine power, contributes to achieving the best weight-to-power ratio in the history of Lamborghini: 1.75 kg/CV.The new Revuelto combines these attributes to deliver performance figures at the peak of its segment: acceleration from 0-100 km/h in only 2.5 seconds and a top speed of more than 350 km/h. These numbers combine with its exceptional dynamism thanks to the introduction of electric torque vectoring, and four-wheel drive available also in fully-electric drive mode, ensuring the Revuelto super sports car expresses its amplified qualities both on track and in daily driving.

Revuelto brings the future of Lamborghini design to the road today. It stays constant to the exclusive Lamborghini design DNA but establishes an entirely new stylistic language. It links with the iconic and legendary Lamborghini V12 cars of the past throughout the new shape, while the new proportions open the door towards the future.

While Revuelto delivers a quantum leap in an all-new car design, both externally and internally, the inspiration of previous V12 legends is still clear. Starting with the 1971 Countach prototype and its perfect proportions developed on a single longitudinal line, this car was responsible for creating a pure and essential style contextualized in the Space Age era. It defined the Lamborghini V12 super sports car DNA and introduced one of the most distinctive Lamborghini V12 elements: the vertically-opening scissor doors, which contribute to creating the character of Revuelto.

[norsecoyote]

I do not as a rule read a lot of fanfic. This is partly because I don't get much time to read, period, and partly because I still have a bit of a cringe reaction to the whole concept, but also because I will get turned off a story quickly if the author gets something wrong either about a character (which I gather is common) or about the broader themes or point of the original story.

This is by way of saying that, now that I've thoroughly outed myself as an unironic fan of French children's animated superhero show Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Chat Noir, I want to do what I believe is the next required step on tumblr.com: complain about something the fandom gets wrong.

Fair warning: this is not a meta-post about fandom or fanfic generally, this is 100% me, a nominal adult, bitching about People Being Wrong About Miraculous On The Internet. You stand at the Cringe Event Horizon; read on at your own risk.

So: the central interpersonal tension that powers the show is the "love rectangle" between the leads, where Marinette loves Adrien and Chat Noir loves Ladybug but neither knows the other's secret identity. The obvious solution is absurdly simple: reveal their identities and collapse the quantum superposition of crushes.

A ton of fanfic about the show does exactly that: contrive some scenario where they accidentally discover who each other are, they kiss, they live happily ever after (plus or minus one maniacally obsessed supervillain). And I get why, I think -- the show absolutely looks like it's going to keep this will they/won't they tension going forever, since it's one of its two central narrative motors, and a whole ton of early episodes play with one of the two trying to get closer to the other, failing, and returning exactly to the status quo. Given that, it makes sense why fans would want to just write the goddamn resolution already; it isn't until S3 that the two start making any real progress towards being together.

But. The problem, on many levels, is that the show's writers are smarter than that. Like on the very basic one, the show makes clear from very early on that the old master who gave the heroes their powers explicitly forbade them from revealing their identities, because doing so would let Hawk Moth find and defeat them. And this isn't like an arbitrary concern: Hawk Moth's whole deal is corrupting random people and getting them to work for him, so if he ever happened to even accidentally akumatize someone who knows their identities, that's more or less the whole ballgame. If you're writing a story where Ladybug and Chat Noir learn who each other are but they haven't defeated Hawk Moth yet -- and there are a bunch of these -- you have missed something rather crucial about why they couldn't just do that already.

(The first half of S5 -- which to be fair only came out a year ago -- does a very clever thing where it systematically explores basically every possible workaround to this issue, considering every new power or possibility opened up by events from across the previous four seasons, and methodically rejects each one by showing how it wouldn't solve the actual central problem. I bring this up not to throw shade on any fanfic authors, most of whom were writing before S5 released, but to credit (again) the show's writers for the depth of their understanding of what makes the show tick.)

More fundamentally -- and this is an insight very much stolen from that CJ the X video -- on a character growth/emotional level, Marinette and Adrian aren't ready to be in a relationship yet. Like, sure, they will be perfect for each other, but (at least for most of the series to date) they aren't yet. Marinette starts out with an extremely adolescent crush on a literal fashion model, and Adrien at first is clearly much more in love with his unexpected new freedom as Chat Noir than anything specific about his new partner. They are, to put as blunt a point on it as the show itself repeatedly does, kids.

And, critically, the show understands that they both need to learn to accept themselves first. From an adult perspective it's just duh that you can't have a mature romantic relationship without a solid sense of self (and self-confidence), but that's not remotely obvious to kids at the age of the show's target audience and it's genuinely refreshing to see it acknowledge and reflect that obstacle. One of the few active benefits of the show's extremely episodic pacing is that the writers have time to show both protagonists' slow but genuine character growth, Marinette building up her confidence in her own abilities and decisions and Adrien forging an identity separate from his father's business asset, until when they finally start building something real together in the fifth season it feels genuinely earned.

This emotional arc, in other words, is baked into the show's structure from the very beginning. Fanfic that tries to shortcut this process has, again, fundamentally failed to understand the characters it's nominally telling a story about. Like, I get wanting to experience the emotional high of seeing your favorite characters get their happy ending, but -- the fact that they can't just get that is kind of central to their entire characterization! Are you even writing about the same characters at that point?

[just-whump-and-suffering]

Nightwatchers Whumplist

Plot: When otherworldly, interdimensional creatures start causing disturbances in their hometown, three teenagers - Jin, a loner with the ability to see portals that lead to other dimensions, Leon, a motor-mouthed quantum physics and gadget enthusiast, and Sarah, an image-conscious psychic - reluctantly team up to banish and find the source of the creatures.

Genre: Sci-fi, comedy

Language: English

Watch on: mewatch , youtube

Jin played by Chen Xi/Chen Yixi

Ep 02:

Hurt his hands opening a portal

Ep 03:

Runs into a forcefield, gets thrown back. in pain

kicked in the stomach during a fight

Ep 04:

Trapped in a dreamscape; reliving the memory of visiting his mother in the hospital

Crying

Ep 05:

Trapped in a cocoon, struggling

Ep 06:

Knocked unconscious

Ep 07:

Forced to fight, gets beaten

Kicked in the stomach

Ep 08:

Emotional whump

Ep 10:

Unconscious when sucked into the prison dimension

Overwhelm by bad guy and beaten up

Leon played by Jamil Schulze

Ep 01:

Attacked by Sarah possessed by some Inter-dimensional creature

Tied up and Gagged

Ep 03:

Runs into a forcefield, gets thrown back. in pain

Ep 05:

Trapped in a cocoon, struggling

Ep 06:

Knocked unconscious

Ep 07:

Restrained

Ep 08:

Grabbed by collar

Ep 10:

Beat up by David and knock unconscious

Crying in frustration

Sarah played by Estelle Lim

Ep 01:

Kidnapped and possessed by some Inter-dimension creature

Ep 02:

Chased by another inter-dimension creature who has possessed her classmate; scared

Ep 06:

Knocked unconscious

Ep 07:

Restrained

Ep 10:

Kicked in the face and knock unconscious

Unconscious again when sucked into the prison dimension

[scienceandserenity]

Title: Sheldon's Unexpected Adventure

(Scene: Sheldon and Margaret's apartment. Margaret, a one-year-old baby, sits in her crib surrounded by toys. Sheldon enters, carrying a stack of scientific journals.)

Sheldon: Ah, Margaret, it's time for our daily intellectual stimulation session. Today, we'll delve into the intricacies of quantum mechanics.

(Margaret coos and reaches out towards Sheldon with a small toy in her hand.)

Sheldon: Fascinating. It seems you're more interested in exploring the realm of motor skills development. A commendable pursuit, albeit not as intellectually stimulating as quantum physics.

(Margaret giggles and drops the toy, reaching out for Sheldon's glasses instead.)

Sheldon: No, Margaret. We've discussed this. Daddy's glasses are not for baby's entertainment. They're for maintaining optimal visual acuity during scientific endeavors.

(He gently removes his glasses from Margaret's grasp and places them safely on the table.)

Sheldon: Now, let's resume our discussion on the wave-particle duality of light. It's a fundamental concept in modern physics that—

(Margaret interrupts with a loud cry, her face contorted in discomfort.)

Sheldon: Ah, I see. It appears our discussion will have to be postponed momentarily. Are you experiencing gastrointestinal distress, Margaret?

(Margaret continues to cry, prompting Sheldon to pick her up and cradle her gently.)

Sheldon: There, there, Margaret. Daddy is here. Let's investigate the source of your discomfort, shall we?

(He carefully checks Margaret's diaper and discovers it needs changing.)

Sheldon: Ah-ha! Aha! It seems we've uncovered the culprit. Fear not, Margaret. Daddy is well-versed in the art of diaper changing. This shall be a routine procedure for me.

(As Sheldon changes Margaret's diaper, she giggles and coos, seemingly enjoying the attention.)

Sheldon: There, all clean and dry. Now, where were we? Ah, yes, the wave-particle duality of light—

(Margaret reaches out and grabs Sheldon's finger, her eyes wide with curiosity.)

Sheldon: Ah, Margaret, you never cease to amaze me with your inquisitive nature. Perhaps our discussions on quantum mechanics can wait. For now, let's revel in the joy of this moment together.

(He sits in the rocking chair, holding Margaret close as they share a quiet moment of bonding.)

Sheldon: Parenthood truly is an unexpected adventure, isn't it, Margaret?

(Margaret babbles in response, her tiny hand reaching up to touch Sheldon's face.)

Sheldon: Indeed, my dear. Indeed.

[cosmic-perspective]

The “Quantum” and I succeeded. It went so nice, I flew it twice! I’m now L1 certified and can legally purchase H and I rocket motors. All that said there’s going to be more HPR builds in my future. About as addicting of a hobby as astrophotography, lol.