#rather than 598

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

trying to buy an anti-glare screen protector thingy is a great way to discover i have a wildly non-standard screen size

my sektop computer has a really shiny screen and no matter what i do i don't seem to be able to reduce how much stuff reflects... i can see my entire room reflected in it (especially on sites with dark mode but tbh all the time) and it's kinda driving me nuts. any recommendations

[hollowed-theory-hall]

Harry Potter is Probably Gay and Here's Why

So.... a lot of this fandom likes to call one Harry James Potter a Bi disaster. Personally, I think he's gay and I can use book text to prove he isn't actually attracted to women at all.

So here goes:

How Harry Describes Men

Harry describes many men as attractive and handsome in the books, not only that but in general Harry goes into more detail when describing male characters. I'll mention it again in a later section in this post, but when describing men, even those Harry doesn't find attractive, he tends to describe much more details about them than about girls he supposedly does find attractive. Something that to me suggests, he doesn't find these girls attractive at all.

Here are some examples of Harry finding men attractive:

Charlie Weasley:

Charlie was built like the twins, shorter and stockier than Percy and Ron, who were both long and lanky. He had a broad, good-natured face, which was weatherbeaten and so freckly that he looked almost tanned; his arms were muscular, and one of them had a large, shiny burn on it.

(Goblet of Fire, page 52)

Bill Weasley:

However, Bill was — there was no other word for it — cool. He was tall, with long hair that he had tied back in a ponytail. He was wearing an earring with what looked like a fang dangling from it. Bill’s clothes would not have looked out of place at a rock concert, except that Harry recognized his boots to be made, not of leather, but of dragon hide.

(Goblet of Fire, page 52)

Cedric Diggory:

Cedric Diggory was an extremely handsome boy of around seventeen.

(Goblet of Fire, page 71)

Sirius Black:

Sirius was lounging in his chair at his ease, tilting it back on two legs. He was very good-looking; his dark hair fell into his eyes with a sort of casual elegance neither James’s nor Harry’s could ever have achieved, and a girl sitting behind him was eyeing him hopefully, though he didn’t seem to have noticed.

(Order of the Pheonix, page 642)

Sirius stared around at the students milling over the grass, looking rather haughty and bored, but very handsomely so.

(Order of the Pheonix, page 644)

Firenze:

white-blond hair and astonishingly blue eyes, the head and torso of a man joined to the palomino body of a horse.

(Order of the Pheonix, page 598)

Professor McGonagall turned next to Parvati Patil, whose first question was whether Firenze, the handsome centaur, was still teaching Divination

(Half-Blood Prince, page 174)

Blaise Zabini:

He recognized a Slytherin from their year, a tall black boy with high cheekbones and long, slanting eyes

(Half-Blood Prince, page 143)

Draco Malfoy:

It was Draco Malfoy. He had pushed to the front of the crowd, his cold eyes alive, his usually bloodless face flushed, as he grinned at the sight of the hanging, immobile cat.

(Chamber of Secrets, page 133)

Malfoy, who had a pale, pointed, sneering face

(Prisoner of Azkaban, page 79)

A pale boy with a pointed face and white-blond hair

(Goblet of Fire, pages 116-117)

Tom Marvolo Riddle:

There was no trace of the Gaunts in Tom Riddle’s face. Merope had got her dying wish: He was his handsome father in miniature, tall for eleven years old, dark-haired, and pale

(Half-Blood Prince, page 269)

The door creaked open. There on the threshold, holding an oldfashioned lamp, stood a boy Harry recognized at once: tall, pale, dark-haired, and handsome — the teenage Voldemort.

(Half-Blood Prince, page 364)

Harry recognized Voldemort at once. His was the most handsome face and he looked the most relaxed of all the boys.

(Half-Blood Prince, page 369)

followed by a tall young man Harry had no difficulty whatsoever in recognizing as Voldemort. He was plainly dressed in a black suit; his hair was a little longer than it had been at school and his cheeks were hollowed, but all of this suited him; he looked more handsome than ever.

(Half-Blood Prince, page 434)

I don't think anyone would argue Harry isn't attracted to men... He's kind of obvious. What I want to go more into detail about is him not being attracted to women, as that's what I think I disagree with most of the fandom about.

How Harry Describes Women (for comparison)

So, we saw how Harry describes men, specifically men he finds attractive, so, let's compare to how he describes a girl he thinks is pretty, like Cho Chang:

Harry couldn’t help noticing, nervous as he was, that she was extremely pretty. She smiled at Harry as the teams faced each other behind their captains, and he felt a slight lurch in the region of his stomach that he didn’t think had anything to do with nerves.

(Prisoner of Azkaban, page 259)

“Good luck, Harry!” called Cho. Harry felt himself blushing.

(Prisoner of Azkaban, page 304)

She was waiting for him a little to the side of the oak front doors, looking very pretty with her hair tied back in a long ponytail.

(Order of the Pheonix, page 556)

These are all the physical descriptions I managed to find of Cho, the girl Harry supposedly has a crush on from 3rd to 5th year... yeah, I don't see it. Sure, he mentions she's pretty, and he blushes around her, but he doesn't describe anything else about her. Not eye color, not hair color, skin color, eye shape, physique — nothing! Compare this to how he describes Bill Weasley or Blaise Zabini even, with so much more detail in their description.

Now, details in descriptions when writing from a character's POV are very important. Because a character would use more words to describe what's most important or striking to them... and in Harry's case Cho isn't it.

We know she's pretty and Harry's nervous around her, but the descriptions are just so stale and distant compared to: Tom "handsomest face in the room" Riddle, or Sirius "handsome handsomed handsomely" Black.

And I want to talk about Harry's crush on Cho more, but first:

Fleur Delacor:

I want to talk about Fleur for a bit. Because Harry's reaction to Fleur is very interesting, specifically because Fleur is a quarter veela.

Ron was still goggling at the girl as though he had never seen one before. Harry started to laugh. The sound seemed to jog Ron back to his senses. “She’s a veela!” he said hoarsely to Harry.

…

many boys’ heads turned, and some of them seemed to have become temporarily speechless, just like Ron.

(Goblet of Fire, page 252)

Veelas are literally magically attractive, if you are attracted to women, you'll find a veela woman attractive and be mesmerized. We see it with Ron and other boys, as Harry notes in the above quote. Ron and many other boys all stare, speechless at Fleur because that's how her magic works.

Harry, on the other hand, isn't affected at all. To the point, he's confused by Ron's drooling over Fleur. He later in GoF wonders why Ron wanted to go with Fleur to the Yule Ball so much, as he didn't see the appeal.

Harry is literally not attracted to a woman who is magically attractive to anyone who's attracted to women.

Looking careworn, she [Fleur] left the room. Ron still seemed slightly punch-drunk; he was shaking his head experimentally like a dog trying to rid its ears of water. “Don’t you get used to her if she’s staying in the same house?” Harry asked. “Well, you do,” said Ron, “but if she jumps out at you unexpectedly, like then . . .”

(Half-Blood Prince, page 93)

It continues in his later interactions with Fleur, like when he arrives at the Burrow in HBP in the above quote. Harry asks Ron if he shouldn't get used to Fleur and stop drooling whenever he sees her, to which Ron responds that you do to a degree. The thing is, Harry isn't used to being around Fleur, he just arrived, after not seeing her for over a year. But still, he isn't affected at all, like in 4th year, he seems to not get what all the fuss is about.

That being said, Harry does react to the full veela in the Quidditch World Cup:

But a hundred veela were now gliding out onto the field, and Harry’s question was answered for him. Veela were women . . . the most beautiful women Harry had ever seen . . . except that they weren’t — they couldn’t be — human. This puzzled Harry for a moment while he tried to guess what exactly they could be; what could make their skin shine moon-bright like that, or their white-gold hair fan out behind them without wind . . . but then the music started, and Harry stopped worrying about them not being human — in fact, he stopped worrying about anything at all.

...

And as the veela danced faster and faster, wild, half-formed thoughts started chasing through Harry’s dazed mind. He wanted to do something very impressive, right now. Jumping from the box into the stadium seemed a good idea . . . but would it be good enough? “Harry, what are you doing?” said Hermione’s voice from a long way off. The music stopped. Harry blinked. He was standing up, and one of his legs was resting on the wall of the box. Next to him, Ron was frozen in an attitude that looked as though he were about to dive from a springboard.

(Goblet of Fire, page 103)

I'm not sure exactly about the full veela's effects. Mostly because Arthur Weasley doesn't seem as affected as Harry and Ron, and Harry describes the crowd in general reacting to them, not just the men. Hermione doesn't seem affected though.

Something I want to note is that Harry only becomes affected once they start dancing, and not just by looking at them the way Ron and some of the boys are described as being with Fluer. Only when the music and dance start Harry becomes mesmerized. Before that, he is wondering how their hair moves behind them without wind... Additionally, after the music stops, Harry snaps out of it quickly, Ron on the other hand doesn't and proceeds to tear his Ireland merch.

So, while full veela, can influence him, it isn't by their appearance alone but by magic beyond their regular magical attractiveness.

Note that even with the veela, Harry barely describes anything about them. his descriptions of them aren't as detailed as his descriptions of men he finds attractive.

So even if he is attracted to women, it's very minor and barely there.

Harry's Disastrous Relationship with Cho

So, Harry and Cho... I don't think it's a pairing that has fans, but I might be wrong about that. Regardless of your opinion about it, I don't think Harry actually liked Cho. Like, at all.

They looked at each other for a long moment. Harry felt a burning desire to run from the room and, at the same time, a complete inability to move his feet. “Mistletoe,” said Cho quietly, pointing at the ceiling over his head. “Yeah,” said Harry. His mouth was very dry. “It’s probably full of nargles, though.” “What are nargles?” “No idea,” said Harry. She had moved closer. His brain seemed to have been Stunned. “You’d have to ask Loony. Luna, I mean.” Cho made a funny noise halfway between a sob and a laugh. She was even nearer him now. He could have counted the freckles on her nose. “I really like you, Harry.” He could not think. A tingling sensation was spreading throughout him, paralyzing his arms, legs, and brain. She was much too close. He could see every tear clinging to her eyelashes. . . .

(Order of the Pheonix, page 456)

Cho, the girl Harry is convinced he's crushing on since he was 13, is about to kiss him under the mistletoe, and he's thinking about nargles and Luna... And how does he feel about kissing Cho?

"a burning desire to run from the room"

He wants to run away from kissing Cho. And, well, it doesn't get any better than that.

“What kept you?” he [Ron] asked, as Harry sank into the armchair next to Hermione’s. Harry did not answer. He was in a state of shock. Half of him wanted to tell Ron and Hermione what had just happened, but the other half wanted to take the secret with him to the grave. “Are you all right, Harry?” Hermione asked, peering at him over the tip of her quill. Harry gave a halfhearted shrug. In truth, he didn’t know whether he was all right or not.

(Order of the Pheonix, page 457)

He is not sure he's alright after kissing Cho. Harry thinks about kissing Cho like it's a traumatic experience... He's happier talking about Voldemort's resurrection than about his first kiss. (WTF Harry?)

Harry doesn't like Cho. Not even a bit.

“Did you kiss?” asked Hermione briskly. Ron sat up so fast that he sent his ink bottle flying all over the rug. Disregarding this completely he stared avidly at Harry. “Well?” he demanded. Harry looked from Ron’s expression of mingled curiosity and hilarity to Hermione’s slight frown, and nodded. “HA!” Ron made a triumphant gesture with his fist and went into a raucous peal of laughter that made several timid-looking second years over beside the window jump. A reluctant grin spread over Harry’s face as he watched Ron rolling around on the hearthrug. Hermione gave Ron a look of deep disgust and returned to her letter. “Well?” Ron said finally, looking up at Harry. “How was it?” Harry considered for a moment. “Wet,” he said truthfully. Ron made a noise that might have indicated jubilation or disgust, it was hard to tell.

(Order of the Pheonix, pages 456-458)

I don't need I need to add anything here... Harry speaks for himself.

“You just had to be nice to her,” said Hermione, looking up anxiously. “You were, weren’t you?” “Well,” said Harry, an unpleasant heat creeping up his face, “I sort of — patted her on the back a bit.” Hermione looked as though she was restraining herself from rolling her eyes with extreme difficulty. “Well, I suppose it could have been worse,” she said. “Are you going to see her again?” “I’ll have to, won’t I?” said Harry. “We’ve got D.A. meetings, haven’t we?” “You know what I mean,” said Hermione impatiently. Harry said nothing. Hermione’s words opened up a whole new vista of frightening possibilities. He tried to imagine going somewhere with Cho — Hogsmeade, perhaps — and being alone with her for hours at a time. Of course, she would have been expecting him to ask her out after what had just happened. . . . The thought made his stomach clench painfully. ���Oh well,” said Hermione distantly, buried in her letter once more, “you’ll have plenty of opportunities to ask her. . . .” “What if he doesn’t want to ask her?” said Ron, who had been watching Harry with an unusually shrewd expression on his face. “Don’t be silly,” said Hermione vaguely, “Harry’s liked her for ages, haven’t you, Harry?” He did not answer. Yes, he had liked Cho for ages, but whenever he had imagined a scene involving the two of them it had always featured a Cho who was enjoying herself, as opposed to a Cho who was sobbing uncontrollably into his shoulder.

(Order of the Pheonix, page 460)

Okay, so I have two things to mention about this quote.

The first, Harry realizes he doesn't like Cho and probably never did. He didn't consider dating her until Hermoine mentioned it. He doesn't want to date her. He's terrified and grossed out by the notion.

This isn't a boy with a crush. I'd argue this proves he isn't straight at all. I mean, a guy who is attracted to girls, even if not crushing on Cho specifically, wouldn't be horrified to a painful degree at the thought of going on a date with a pretty girl. Or kissing a pretty girl. His reaction is just too viscerally grossed out.

The second is Ron's response. Not really related to Harry being gay, but I love Harry and Ron's friendship so I want to mention it. Hermione and a good chunk of the fandom dunk on Ron for having "the emotional range of a teaspoon", but he clearly doesn't. Ron is Harry's best friend, he knows Harry better than anyone else, yes, better than Hermione even, and this scene proves it. Hermione is flippant, ignoring Harry's responses to his kiss with Cho, just saying he should ask her out as if it's obvious.

Ron on the other hand, Ron notices Harry's expression and the turmoil thinking of dating Cho causes him. Ron is the one who speaks up that maybe Harry doesn't want to date Cho. He immediately defends Harry and his option to choose not to date Cho. (Ron would be very supportive if Harry ever came out, is what I'm saying)

They sat down at the last remaining table, which was situated in the steamy window. Roger Davies, the Ravenclaw Quidditch Captain, was sitting about a foot and a half away with a pretty blonde girl. They were holding hands. The sight made Harry feel uncomfortable, particularly when, looking around the tea shop, he saw that it was full of nothing but couples, all of them holding hands. Perhaps Cho would expect him to hold her hand.

…

In the time it took for their coffees to arrive, Roger Davies and his girlfriend started kissing over their sugar bowl. Harry wished they wouldn’t; he felt that Davies was setting a standard with which Cho would soon expect him to compete.

(Order of the Pheonix, page 559)

The above quotes are from Harry's disaster of a date with Cho. I think no one needs me to explain that the date went badly, but what I want to note is how uncomfortable and grossed out Harry is by the very notion of holding Cho's hands. That he'd have to kiss her again.

Like, again, even if he isn't crushing on her, a guy who's attracted to girls wouldn't be grossed out and pained at the thought of kissing or holding hands with a pretty, attractive girl.

Harry has never been attracted to Cho, and I don't think he's attracted to girls at all.

But What About Ginny?

So this post has gotten quite long already, but I don't think Harry actually likes Ginny. And I have evidence for it in the sequel to this post that is taking a while to write.

No hate for Hinny shippers, but I don't see the pairing, like, at all. I did write some of my thoughts about Hinny here until I finish with the more comprehensive post about them.

But in general, let's just say Harry never uses the word pretty (or good-looking, or nice-looking, or attractive) to describe Ginny. Ever.

And when I looked for his descriptions of her all I found were descriptions of her hair:

He felt a strange twinge of annoyance as she [Ginny] walked away, her long red hair dancing behind her

(Half-Blood Prince, page 136)

she was the only real thing in the world, Ginny, the feel of her, one hand at her back and one in her long, sweet-smelling hair

(Deathly Hollows, page 103)

(There are more descriptions of her hair in the books, but they follow the same lines as these and don't add more information)

Again, contrast these descriptions to the ones of the guys earlier. No eye color, face shape, eye shape, or descriptions of her body or clothes — nothing.

I have more to say about their relationship, but that's for another post.

[dodgebolts]

the moment that absolutely no one has been waiting for... here are the results of the dtblr survey that went out last week! Thank you to the 650 people who responded, easily eclipsing the 598 responses that were submitted in September :]

Open the read more to see the results!

Starting out, we have a newcomer to our top 8, welcome Awesamdude, who stole a spot from Quackity (20.7% -> 3.1%). Since the last survey, more people say they main all 3 Dream Team members and less people are maining their friends, most of them slipping under 10% of respondents saying they mained them save for the lovely Foolish Gamers.

Next, there was an increase in people who came for and still are here for the Dream Team—with a decrease in the proportion of respondents for nearly every other category. Dream team forever!

While most people (85%) have been around before 2022, we have a greater proportion of newer people around now! In the last survey, that number was even greater at 93%. So don't feel bad for being new, it's actually way more likely than you think, and a very warm welcome to the 5% of people who joined after the face reveal/meetup <3

Next is a question that I think is really interesting: has watching the Dream team influenced how people play Minecraft? More people now don't play as much, which tracks considering that they play Minecraft a lot less than they used to.

Now for a rather sore subject for a lot of people, since there's been quite a shift in who plays in MCC since the last time. In the last poll, 60.8% of people said they watched Dream. Now, those viewers have dispersed across creators or just stopped watching altogether, with both George and Sapnap gaining 10% from their numbers in the fall. However, 25% of people said that they don't watch anymore, a huge jump from the 4.5% in the fall. RIP MCC Dream, you're missed severely by the community <3

Next up, Trust Issues has managed to nearly catch up to some of Dream's released music, gaining 8 percentage points from the last survey. Dream if you're out there your fans want it really badly. Release it just for us?

Since the fall, we've seen the official end of the DSMP, so this is more of a legacy question, which is reflected pretty well in the statistics shifting towards people who either don't watch or are very casual about it, our lorehead population shrinking by 4 percentage points from the first survey.

These statistics haven't moved too much since the first one, the trends going pretty much as predicted with following decreasing from main -> alt -> priv (with the exception of Dream whose alt is often confused for his main) and with George and Sapnap having fewer people following them than Dream.

The statistics shift from this question is really interesting, especially given all the shit that's gone down on Twitter since the first survey. The percentage of dtblr who joined the fandom on there increased 7.7%, a gain that knocked down nearly every other platform's percentages. AO3 also makes its debut in the top 6, tying with Reddit exactly.

Much like the twitter following question, these statistics didn't shift too much, with the YouTube algorithm and word of mouth from other people/creators doing most of the heavy lifting of marketing for the Dream Team. Shoutout to the people who found out through either Heat Waves or MrBeast, you guys are on like 2 ends of a horrific spectrum y'all are strong as hell LOL

Now for some shared fandom trauma, these results also didn't change too much from the first survey. However, for this iteration I added Supernatural, as I probably should've done the first time considering this IS the SPN website after all. I managed to grab a few more people than last time out of the 'none of the above' category with its inclusion, so hi all my former and current SPN bloggers o/ <- has never seen the show before

A vast majority of us have watched gaming content in some form before, and fewer people this time have never watched gaming content before. From those who specified which games they'd watched, the titles ranged far and wide, so it's really cool to see all of us under the dtblr umbrella :)

Once again, this question showcases how lurkers truly carry the community on their backs—there's a small decrease in lurkers from last time and an increase in blogging answers, so it seems like some of our lurkers started posting which is awesome :D

Over half of us don't really watch any other MC servers, but there's still a ton of people who like watching them! From the last time I ran the survey, most of the servers—save for Empires and Karmaland—now have fewer dtblr watchers. The QSMP makes a strong debut on the board though, eclipsing half of the other options.

This was a really interesting question, though it seems like the vast majority of people either continued posting on the same blog or took a break and just jumped back into the fray! Also a late welcome to the ~15% of people who either weren't here or started posting after <3

The answers to this question showed some of the most interesting shifts from last fall's data. Fewer people seem to be listening regularly, and the proportion of people who responded no is nearly doubled from the fall's 21%.

These data points were also really interesting to see shift from the fall! Of note, fewer people like and tolerate Jackbox, and more people seem to have warmed up to FPS games—Fortnite, CS:GO, and Valorant all have fewer people in the "don't like & won't watch" category. Still, Valorant is easily the most hated game of the 6 while Geoguessr is still almost universally loved/tolerated.

As expected in the shipping category, DNF dominates any other ships, with Karlnap easily taking the second place. The proportion of Toosh enjoyers has doubled since the fall, up from 14.7%, while the number of non-shippers has halved. Additionally, the proportion of Karlnapity enjoyers has plummeted from 25.4% to less than 10%. Otherwise, most ships have stayed within 3-4 percentage points of their fall numbers!

Once again, Dream seems to have forced the hands of nearly half of us, turning non-RPF shippers into the RPF fandom we are today. Interestingly, the number of "yes" respondents has nearly doubled from the fall, while fewer people responded that they still don't ship RPF. As would make Dream happy probably, the pie chart is colored blue and green.

Now onto some of the demographic questions, we've continued to be very heavily biased towards North America and Europe, with nearly 85% of us coming from those two continents. Compared to the fall, we've gotten proportionally more South American and Oceanian rep. Hey to the Asians/Australians who are probably going to see this when it's first posted! o/

Once again, the majority of us seem to be around the same age as our streamers, with 80% of us falling between the ages of 18 and 30. Don't fret, though! From the fall, the proportion of respondents in both the <18 and >30 age brackets have increased. All in all, nothing too surprising.

The pride parade is still running from last fall, with approximately the same percentage of people identifying as LGBTQIA+ or unsure. Just in time for pride month in a day or so!

I'm not sure if I was just miscounting but I could not for the life of me get all of these little squares into a proper rectangle, so just bear with my weird organization here. Regardless, the majority of us rep the blue and green as our favorite colors, with multiple people specifying the hex code of George's minecraft shirt or a classic teal.

It's been about a month since this has been out, and we still unfortunately haven't gotten It Takes Two back. We're still in the phase 42% of people believe that we're going to stay in for a while, getting bounced back and forth between Dream and George hoping that they can get the other wrangled for it. #I_BELIEVE!

This was kind of a cruel question for most of us, but to the 11 people who answered that have met any of them, know that you're in a very select group of users. I'm jealous!

Now to answer the age-old question of the dtblr 1%, it constitutes those of you with around or over 5,000 followers, while a majority of people have less than 50 followers or just no blog at all. As with most other follower polls I've seen floating around, the responses were heavier towards the bottom, but as is the common advice/adage, follower count means very little here—just start chatting and posting!

For the final question, I thought it'd be interesting to see what dtblr's academic interests are, and also to reaffirm or break my belief that George is like a flame to the moths of CS/Engineering-focused people, which was at least initially supported by the data from the fall. We've got people from all across the diversity of academic fields, with the most people indicating that they're interested in the arts and humanities.

As for my hypothesis: among non-George mains, the proportion of CS/Engineering people is about 5.5%, whereas 18.3% of George mains indicated that they're interested in CS/Engineering. In fact, I took a closer look at all the people who noted their interest in CS/Engineering, and nearly 70% of them said that they mained George. Like I said, moths to a flame. or something. I'm right there with y'all 🫡

That's all! Thanks so much to everyone for responding and waiting for me to get through all of this data, it's always a big task but I love seeing the results. Until next time!

[inawickedlittletown]

A/N: Although I didn't intend to, I wound up writing quite a few fics this year. Buck and Tommy grabbed me and wouldn't let me go. So, it's time for a post to hold all the links. I'm sure I'll wind up with a part two eventually. But for now this will do.

Titles are links to the post here on tumblr. On the multi-chap stories it is to the last chapter as that contains links to all chapters.

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Multi Chapter

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Just Let Me Adore You

Summary: What if...instead of Chimney taking the role of interim Captain of the 118, Tommy is asked to take on the role. Or, what happens when Buck meets Tommy in S2 Words: 35k Rating: T Chapters: 9/9 + epilogue

Read on Ao3

Part One

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You Can Always Find Me Where The Skies Are Blue

Summary: Soulmates are rare. So rare that it's actually incredible that Buck has two soulmate couples in his life. Statistics tell him it's very unlikely for him to meet his soulmate. Of course, then he meets Tommy. Too bad it happens at the worst possible moment. Canon compliant soulmate AU where Buck is still a mess and Tommy is still very understanding. Words: 31k Rating: M Chapters: 7/7

Read on Ao3

Part One

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Don't Make A Shadow Of Yourself

Summary: "A man who's pure of heart...may still become a wolf when the autumn moon is bright" - Howl (F+TM) Throughout most of his adult life, Tommy had dealt with what he was. The duality of being a man and also an animal…a beast. Werewolves weren’t born, they were made. Words: 58k Rating: M Chapters: 16/16

Read on Ao3

Chapter One

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Rather Be The Hunter Than The Prey

Summary: Buck doesn't tell Tommy immediately about Gerrard coming back to Captain the 118. Tommy decides he needs to do something about it. Words: 5.7k Rating: T Chapters: 3/3

Read on Ao3

Part One

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Dragon Chosen

Summary: The shadow was huge and unmistakable. Any hope that it was just a passing cloud covering up the sun was futile, especially once he felt the downdraft of air from the wings. When he finally looked up, Buck took in the dragon in all its glory. The dragon was huge, the biggest that Buck had ever seen — not that he’d seen many. - In a world where dragons exist and where they pick their riders, Buck doesn't expect his perfectly normal Tuesday to include a dragon and his rider, Tommy, showing up to ask for his help with an injured dragon...a dragon that has picked Buck as his rider. Buck doesn't know who captivates him more his new dragon or Tommy. Words: 21.8k Rating: M Chapters: 6/6

Read on Ao3

Chapter One

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One Shots

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Made From Scratch

Summary: Tommy's birthday is coming up, Buck decides to bake him a cake and Jee-Yun helps. Words: 4k Rating: G

Read on Ao3

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Halloween Movie Night

Summary: Tommy is not a fan of scary movies Words: 1k Rating: G

Read on Ao3

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Realization

Summary: Tommy realizes something while Evan eulogizes over Billy Boils. Spoilers for 8x05 Words: 480 Rating: G

Read on Ao3

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Wear My Clothes

Summary: Set during 8x04 before Buck goes to see Bobby, a moment between Buck and Tommy. Words: 575 Rating: G

Read on Ao3

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Something Good

Summary: 8x01 coda. Buck and Tommy share a moment. Words: 598 Rating: G

Read on Ao3

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I'll Be Waiting On The Ground

Summary: Buck calls Tommy after he and Bobby leave the set of Hotshots. Spoilers for 8x02 and contains speculation for 8x03. Words: 1k Rating: G

Read on Ao3

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What Do You Mean, A Plane

Summary: Tommy doesn't find out about the plane until after the fact. 8x03 coda. Words: 1.9k Rating: G

Read on Ao3

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Step Into The Light

Summary: In the aftermath of 7x04, Buck reaches out to the one person that he thinks can help him. Words: 1.2k Rating: G

Read on Ao3

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Take A Look At Us Now

Summary: There is a magic to finally finding your true self and maybe Tommy has a deeper understanding of what that journey is like and can see it plainly as it is happening to Buck. Words: 2.9k Rating: T

Read on Ao3

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I've Been Waiting For The Tides To Change

Summary: It was itching at him, the pull that he felt towards Evan. He hadn’t been attracted to someone that quickly in a long while and the thing was that Tommy got it. He got how scary it was to come out and the bravery it took to not only admit that to yourself, but also to everyone else. - Or 7x05 from Tommy's perspective and what happens after the coffee date. Words: 4.9k Rating: G

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Coming Out Is Easy

Summary: 7x06 coda because Buck not cleaning up the soot was a choice... Words: 500 Rating: G

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You've Got The Love To See Me Through

Summary: Tommy's pov of 7x06...or just let this man get some rest. Words: 4.7k Rating: G

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Isn't It Ironic

Summary: 7x07 coda. Buck and Tommy are on a date...they run to Eddie who is also on a date... Words: 600 Rating: G

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Aftermath

Summary: 7x09 coda. In the aftermath, Chris goes where he feels safe. Words: 800 Rating: G

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Glasses

Summary: Buck finds out Tommy wears reading glasses...as inspired by Lou wearing a different pair of glasses in every cameo. Words: 1k Rating: T

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More Than Patience

Summary: 7x10 coda. It isn't patience, as much it's understanding. Words: 400 Rating: G

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How Do I Love Thee

Summary: A sweet moment between Buck and Tommy where Buck gets to tell Tommy what he likes about him. Words: 1.3k Rating: G

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What's In A Name

Summary: Buck didn't like his name and definitely didn't like other cutesy nicknames...at least not until Tommy uses them Words: 1.5 Rating: G

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Meeting The Parents

Summary: They liked Tommy. It was strange because Buck hadn’t expected them to. Words: 1.9k Rating: G

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Handsome Little Bookworm

Summary: In which Buck discovers how avid of a reader Tommy is. Words: 1.1k Rating: G

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It's A Love Story

Summary: You saw all kinds of things working at a restaurant. First dates. Failed dates. Proposals. Arguments. Break ups. The passing of secrets. Or, the waitress at the restaurant Tommy and Buck go to for their first date likes to people watch. Words: 2.9k Rating: G

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Becoming Pawrents

Summary: Out on a call, the 118 finds a box of abandoned puppies. Words: 2.3k Rating: G

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And Every String Led Me To You

Summary: It happened when Buck woke up from the coma. At first, he was absolutely sure that he was dreaming because there was no way his hospital room could be so full of string. or, Buck can suddenly see the strings of fate, including the one that connects him right to Tommy. Words: 8.6k Rating: G

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[zoeoe-sims]

Peacemaker's Hinterlands Dining Pt 1 - 4to3 Conversion

A conversion of (most of) Peacemaker's lovely Hinterlands Dining set.

Includes a dining chair, 4 dining tables, a console table, bar cabinet, clock, and 2 decor wine bottles.

All are fully recolourable, and have 1 preset.

(personally I prefer making use of CASt and using patterns rather than converted ts4 textures of wood etc as it saves time, space, and I think the patterns fit the rest of the game's style better than textures from ts4 so ya in case you were wondering)

All have the same mesh for both LODs, but they are quite low poly anyway.

Hope you enjoy!

(Details, pics, and download below)

Polycounts:

Cottage Chair: 534

Small Round Farmhouse Table: 618

Large Round Farmhouse Table: 810

Farmhouse Table: 598

Long Farmhouse Table: 566

Half Moon Console Table: 964

Bar Cabinet: 576

Standing/Resting Wine Bottle: 170

Hanging Clock: 695

Notes:

The Bar Cabinet can be found in Misc Surfaces, and the Console Table in Surfaces>End Tables

The Bar Cabinet's glass piece is unpickable so you can place objects behind it on the shelves and pick them back up easily.

Will there be Pt2? I do not know.

Original TS4 objects here. Thank you, Peacemaker!

Download from SimFileShare - Merged, Separated, Collection File

If you like my mods, consider supporting me by donating

[wordsandrobots]

IBO reference notes on . . . spacesuits

For reasons that may or may not be related to fanfic, I decided to do a quick survey of the difference spacesuits -- or 'normal suits', in Gundam parlance -- that appear throughout Iron-Blooded Orphans. There's not really much to conclude from this, but it snagged me a set of reference screenshots that I think worth collating for your viewing pleasure.

The most commonly used normal suit first appears during the battle between Tekkadan and the Turbines, where Atra helps Kudelia out with putting one on, in a scene that provides some gratuitous shots of the girls changing. It's not especially tasteless, in the grand scheme of things, but it's one of those genre trappings that didn't really need to be there. Still, it provides a good demonstration of how the suits fit together, where the zippers and fastenings are, and so on. Plus the hilarious visual of the helmets being repurposed as potato buckets.

This normal suit is clearly a standard type, that turns up in multiple civilian and non-official military settings. Most immediately, we see that the Turbines use it, the orange swapped for a fetching maroon.

Generally speaking, the colour-blocking is the only thing to change between uses. Here are a couple more shots showing the Tekkadan and Turbines versions, including a close-up on the boots.

Beyond these two types, the most usual variant is a black and grey version that appears in various scenarios, including in the flashbacks to Akihiro's family, the Dort colonies, and the archaeologists in Urdr Hunt.

Curiously, Katya also wears this towards the end of Urdr Hunt -- where she must have been given it by Gjallarhorn. So can we take the black, grey and white to be a sort of universal default?

Other colour variants are worn by young!Amida and by Range (under his poncho) in Urdr Hunt, and by the various groups of mercenaries and space-pirates in Season 2.

Speaking of pirates, the ones who attacked Akihiro's family have added a jetpack for easy manoeuvring in zero-g. It's notable that this isn't something we see more generally: Mikazuki has to rely on a hand-held thruster in the Dorts. This, however, harkens back more to the original Gundam series in terms of moving around in space.

Moving on to the second major 'civilian' normal suit, the human debris all wear a slightly simpler, slightly more badly-fitted white version striped in red. We first see this with the Brewers and later with human debris used by the JPT Trust (not shown because it's mainly seen in fairly bloody scenes).

A palette-swap of this is used by 598 and his crew in Urdr Hunt, which I bring up as an excuse to post the bisexual-energy screenshot.

Due to image limits, I won't cover Tekkadan's pilot suit in this post. If you've seen the show, you'll have seen a lot of that, and of Gjallarhorn's equivalent. What I find interesting about the human debris normal suit is that it is clearly more closely related to the general-purpose version than what Shino is wearing here, which is a specialised for an Alaya-Vijnana-user in a military setting.

This of course makes sense given that everything about the human debris is meant to invoke cheapness. Rather than a custom-made battle suit, they just get a standard one-size-fits-nobody get-up with an A-V adaptor stuck on the back. It's a nice visual touch, that also helps emphasise the sense of human debris as little kids forced into situations they shouldn't be in. That being said, the *helmet* is distinctly made for a mobile suit pilot, being something close to what Gjallarhorn soldiers wear.

Tekkadan does use another distinct normal suit variant, with added armour, that shows up for the battle with the Brewers and never again. Or, well, I am not actually sure if this is meant to be a normal suit or more akin to the combat armour we see Gjallarhorn infantry wearing, or if that is a distinction without a difference. Since they are both deployed in space-based operations, we can probably assume they're at least potentially interchangeable with normal suits.

These do notably lack the backpack of the standard normal suit. which I take to be where the life-support gubbins goes. However that goes for the pilot suit as well (it only has the A-V adaptor block; I assume everything else is distributed at the waist and collar) and we see it functioning fine for spacewalks. So I'm grouping this in here as well.

As I said up the top of the post, there's not a whole lot to take away from this, beyond the different ways the same asset is reused throughout the series. It's a neat enough design, although the pilot suits are far more striking. I do like the pirates' jetpack; wish we'd seen more of that (that's actually what I was looking up when I started collecting these).

Overall, I quite like the commonality of design, the sense that someone somewhere is just mass producing these things as a standard piece of kit. That's kind of what you'd need, in a space-faring society, to make these widely available to as many people as possible, just as a matter of basic practicality. Then you'd have different groups that could afford it customising to fit their organisations.

Huh. That must mean the human debris normal suits are also mass produced, if there's a standard-issue version of those.

There we go again with another demonstration of the base-level exploitative awfulness built into this setting.

[Index of other writing]

[acourtofthought]

Lucien proving that he can have female friends and remain loyal to his mate.

ACOWAR Pg 24

ACOWAR Pg 47

ACOWAR Pg 676

(since some believe the above has romantic undertones, does it make sense that he preferred to accept Elain's offer below rather than finding a way to stay with Vassa?).

ACOWAR Pg 676 (a few paragraphs later)

ACOFAS Page 163

(Lucien seems to be comfortably living with Jurian and Vassa but is it really because it's where he wants to be?).

ACOFAS Page 165

ACOSF Page 598

(if you refer back to ACOWAR, you'll find a nearly identical line used in reference to Cassian and Nesta on page 174. Weird how that was romantic foreshadowing for a Nessian endgame but couldn't possibly mean the same for Jassa 🤔).

ACOSF Page 601

It's so interesting that E/riels love to use the "first choice" argument when it comes to Elain and Az. Which I don't even agree with anyway considering his first choice was Mor and hers was Graysen. Not to mention it's about the right choice and not the first choice. Yet those same people will try to push the Vassien ship when it's 100% obvious that Vassa is not at all who Lucien is interested in right now.

But to my original point, Lucien has shown through his friendship with Feyre that he is capable of having a loving yet non sexual relationship with a female. He has shown he has female friends in other courts that still do not come across as romantic as he "had no interest in female company these days". Could SJM have gone the route of Vassien? Absolutely, if that's what she wanted. Do I think that's the case based off everything she's written? Doubtful. She rarely (that's to say never) has a MMC express longing for their mate only to be developing feelings for another female at the same time. It's the ultimate gut wrenching scenario, tugging on the readers heartstring to see a male pining so desperately for the female he shares a bond with who has yet to return those feelings.

Adding in feelings for another female at the same time (for a traditional romance writer) makes the male seem a whole lot less sincere in what he feels for either female (cough cough, Az with Elain at the same time as his feelings for Mor, cough cough cough).

Really, I think Lucien and Vassa are just friends, something he desperately needs more than another love interest as he deals with the new feelings he has for Elain and still struggles with feeling like it means he's somehow betraying the memory of Jesminda.

[thoughtlessarse]

In AD628, an Indian sage living on a mountain in Rajasthan made one of the world’s most important mathematical discoveries. The great mathematician Brahmagupta (598–670) explored Indian philosophical ideas about nothingness and the void, and came up with the treatise that more or less invented – and certainly defined – the concept of zero. Brahmagupta was born near the Rajasthan hill station of Mount Abu. When he was 30 years old, he wrote a 25-chapter treatise on mathematics that was immediately recognised as a work of extraordinary subtlety and genius. He was the first mathematician to treat the circular zero symbol – originally just a dot – as a number just like the others, rather than merely as an absence, and this meant developing rules for doing arithmetic using this additional symbol along with the other nine. These basic rules of mathematics for the first time allowed any number up to infinity to be expressed with just 10 distinct symbols: the nine Indian number symbols devised by earlier generations of Indian mathematicians, plus zero. These rules are still taught in classrooms around the world today. Brahmagupta also wrote down in Sanskrit verse a set of arithmetic rules for handling positive and negative numbers, another of his innovations. In other writings, he seems to have been the first to describe gravity as an attractive force a full millennium before Isaac Newton. But Brahmagupta was not alone, and he viewed himself as standing on the shoulders of an earlier Indian genius, Aryabhata (476–550). The latter’s work contains a very close approximation of the value of pi – 3.1416 – and deals in detail with spherical trigonometry. The ease of making calculations using his system had direct implications for astronomy and allowed him to calculate the movements of the planet, eclipses, the size of the Earth and, astonishingly, the exact length of the solar year to an accuracy of seven decimal places.

continue reading

[trevel]

For reasons that don't make that much sense to anyone except me, I have been trying to calculate how many different "setups" there are for the game Spirit Island.

Now for this I am explicitly *not* counting the order of shuffled decks, but rather things that players can actually choose. I'm also not counting mechanic-less changes like "what color tokens", it doesn't matter. The game with blue tokens plays exactly the same as with yellow or green. I'm also deliberately ignoring spirit/board combinations where you get to decide where to place presence; I don't think it comes up enough to make a huge difference and seems more like the first strategic choice rather than part of setup.

Okay? Okay.

So, let's start with the base game. It came with 8 possible spirits, 4 game boards, 3 potential adversaries, and 4 scenarios. For a single player game, that would _seem_ like 8*4*3*4 = 384 different games, which pleases me because the result number contains all the digits from the multiplication, but displeases me because it is incorrect. You can play without a scenario; you can play without an adversary; each adversary has 7 possible difficulty levels. ALSO each game board can be flipped over, to the "thematic" side, so that's 8 board possibilities instead of 4.

So we have 8 spirits * 8 boards * ((3*7)+1) adversaries * (3+1) scenarios. = 5632 possible single player games using the basic setup for Spirit Island.

For two player, *most* of that math stays the same; We now have 8 spirits * 7 spirits * 8 boards * 3 boards * 22 adversaries * 4 scenarios = 118 272 possible two-player games.

"But wait," you might ask, "why are you multiplying by 7 spirits for the second player but by 3 boards?" -- simple. Because the boards offer a choice between standard and thematic, we're going to assume that we're not going to MIX between standard and thematic boards. (If we would, then we'd just double our available choices -- but we don't really stand to gain much for that additional complexity, so I'm leaving it out for now.)

Actually, wait. That's still wrong. The thematic boards have specified arrangement AND you need to pick two adjacent board for it to make sense. Let's break it down; we can either play with 4*3 standard boards OR 2 possible arrangements of thematic boards, which means 4*3+2 boards = 14 possible boards. 56 spirit pairs * 14 possible board setups * 22 adversaries * 4 scenarios = 68 992 possible 2-player games.

For 3 players, we now have 8*7*6 for the spirit choices, 4*3*2 standard boards + 4 thematic choices, and still 88 adversary/scenario options = 827 904 options.

For 4 players, 8*7*6*5 for the spirit choices, 4*3*2*1 for the standard boards (because order still matters), only 1 thematic choice now, which means we only increase to 1680 * 25 * 88 = 3 696 000 different game set ups.

Total ALL of these together, and we get 4 598 528 possible different games of Spirit Island using only the base game.

Now this is assuming that a game with Ocean and River on boards A and B is different from a game with River and Ocean on boards A and B, is different from a game with Ocean and River on boards B and A, is different from a game with River and Ocean on boards B and A, and I'd say that's a fair critique. It would be absolutely fair to NOT care about minutia like that. So let's redo the math! 1 player doesn't change: 5632 2 player is now 8*7/2 * (4*3/2+2) * 88 = 28 * 8 * 88 = 19712 3 player is now 8*7*6/3/2 * (4*3*2/3/2+4) * 88 = 56 * 8 * 88 = 39424 4 player is now 8*7*6*5/4/3/2 * 2 * 88 = 12320

For a total of 77088 different games, which is a HUGE difference compared to the 4.6 million we have when we counted every permutation.

Which is correct? IDK, it all depends on what you consider a different game to look like. I'm inclined to prefer the larger number, where arranging the boards differently matters and which spirit is on which board matters, but I'm not going to complain if anyone prefers the other choice.

[dailyanarchistposts]

E.3.3 Can capitalism’s focus on short-term profitability deal with the ecological crisis?

No a word, no. This is another key problem associated with capitalism’s ability to deal with the ecological crisis it helps create. Due to the nature of the market, firms are forced to focus on short-term profitability rather than long-term survival. This makes sense. If a company does not make money now, it will not be around later.

This, obviously, drives the creation of “externalities” discussed in previous sections. Harmful environmental effects such as pollution, global warming, ozone depletion, and destruction of wildlife habitat are not counted as “costs of production” in standard methods of accounting because they are borne by everyone in the society. This gives companies a strong incentive to ignore such costs as competition forces firms to cut as many costs as possible in order to boost short-term profits.

To give an obvious example, if a firm has to decide between installing a piece of costly equipment which reduces its pollution and continuing as it currently is, then it is more likely to do the latter. If the firm does invest then its costs are increased and it will lose its competitive edge compared to its rivals who do not make a similar investment. The “rational” decision is, therefore, not to invest, particularly if by externalising costs it can increase its profits or market share by cutting prices. In other words, the market rewards the polluters and this is a powerful incentive to maximise such activities. The market, in other words, provides incentives to firms to produce externalities as part their drive for short-term profitability. While this is rational from the firm’s position, it is collectively irrational as the planet’s ecology is harmed.

The short-term perspective can also be seen by the tendency of firms to under-invest in developing risky new technologies. This is because basic research which may take years, if not decades, to develop and most companies are unwilling to take on that burden. Unsurprisingly, most advanced capitalist countries see such work funded by the state (as we noted in section D.8, over 50% of total R&D funding has been provided by the federal state in the USA). Moreover, the state has provided markets for such products until such time as markets have appeared for them in the commercial sector. Thus capitalism, by itself, will tend to under-invest in long term projects:

“in a competitive system you do short-term planning only … Let’s take corporate managers, where there’s no real confusion about what they’re doing. They are maximising profit and market share in the short term. In fact, if they were not to do that, they would no longer exist. Let’s be concrete. Suppose that some automobile company, say General Motors, decides to devote their resources to planning for something that will be profitable ten years from now. Suppose that’s where they divert their resources: they want to think in some long-term conception of market dominance. Their rivals are going to maximising profit and power in the short term, and they’re going to take over the market, and General Motors won’t be in business. That’s true for the owners and also for the managers. The managers want to stay managers. They can fight off hostile take-over bids, they can keep from being replaced, as long as they contribute to short-term profitability. As a result, long-term considerations are rarely considered in competitive systems.” [Noam Chomsky, Language and Politics, p. 598]

This does not mean that firms will not look into future products nor do research and development. Many do (particularly if helped by the state). Nor does it imply that some industries do not have a longer-term perspective. It simply shows that such activity is not the normal state of affairs. Moreover, any such “long-term” perspective is rarely more than a decade while an ecological perspective demands much more than this. This also applies to agriculture, which is increasingly being turned into agribusiness as small farmers are being driven out of business. Short-termism means that progress in agriculture is whatever increases the current yield of a crop even if means destroying the sources of fertility in the long run in order to maintain current fertility by adding more and more chemicals (which run off into rivers, seep into the water table and end up in the food itself.

This kind of irrational short-term behaviour also afflicts capital markets as well. The process works in the same way Chomsky highlights. Suppose there are 3 companies, X, Y, and Z and suppose that company X invests in the project of developing a non-polluting technology within ten years. At the same time its competitors, Y and Z, will be putting their resources into increasing profits and market share in the coming days and months and over the next year. During that period, company X will be unable to attract enough capital from investors to carry out its plans, since investors will flock to the companies that are most immediately profitable. This means that the default position under capitalism is that the company (or country) with the lowest standards enjoys a competitive advantage, and drags down the standards of other companies (or countries). Sometimes, though, capital markets experience irrational bubbles. During the dot.com boom of the 1990s, investors did plough money into internet start-ups and losses were tolerated for a few years in the expectation of high profits in the near future. When that did not happen, the stock market crashed and investors turned away from that market in droves. If something similar happened to eco-technologies, the subsequent aftermath may mean that funding essential for redressing our interaction with the environment would not be forthcoming until the memories of the crash had disappeared in the next bubble frenzy.

Besides, thanks to compound interest benefits far in the future have a very small present value. If $1 were left in a bank at 5% annual interest, it would be worth more than $2 million after 300 years. So if it costs $1 today to prevent ecological damage worth $2 million in the 24th century then economic theory argues that our descendants would be better off with us putting that $1 in the bank. This would suggest that basing our responsibility to future generations on economics may not be the wisest course.

The supporter of capitalism may respond by arguing that business leaders are as able to see long-term negative environmental effects as the rest of us. But this is to misunderstand the nature of the objection. It is not that business leaders as individuals are any less able to see what’s happening to the environment. It is that if they want to keep their jobs they have to do what the system requires, which is to concentrate on what is most profitable in the short term. Thus if the president of company X has a mystical experience of oneness with nature and starts diverting profits into pollution control while the presidents of Y and Z continue with business as usual, the stockholders of company X will get a new president who is willing to focus on short-term profits like Y and Z. As Joel Bakan stresses, managers of corporations “have a legal duty to put shareholders’ interests above all others … Corporate social responsibility is thus illegal — at least when it is genuine.” Ones which “choose social and environmental goals over profits — who try and act morally — are, in fact, immoral” as their role in both the economy and economic ideology is to “make much as much money as possible for shareholders.” [The Corporation, pp. 36–7 and p. 34]

In general, then, if one company tries to devote resources to develop products or processes that are ecologically responsible, they will simply be undercut by other companies which are not doing so (assuming such products or processes are more expensive, as they generally are as the costs are not inflicted on other people and the planet). While some products may survive in small niche markets which reflect the fact that many people are willing and able to pay more to protect their world, in general they will not be competitive in the market and so the ecologically damaging products will have the advantage. In other words, capitalism has a built-in bias toward short-term gain, and this bias — along with its inherent need for growth — means the planet will continue its free-fall toward ecological disaster so long as capitalism exists.

This suggests that attempts to address ecological problems like pollution and depletion of resources by calling for public education are unlikely to work. While it is true that this will raise people’s awareness to the point of creating enough demand for environment-friendly technologies and products that they will be profitable to produce, it does not solve the problem that the costs involved in doing such research now cannot be met by a possible future demand. Moreover, the costs of such technology can initially be quite high and so the effective demand for such products may not be sufficient. For example, energy-saving light bulbs have been around for some time but have been far more expensive that traditional ones. This means that for those on lower-incomes who would, in theory, benefit most from lower-energy bills cannot afford them. Thus their short-term income constrains undermine long-term benefits.

Even if the research is completed, the market itself can stop products being used. For example, the ability to produce reasonably inexpensive solar photovoltaic power cells has existed for some time. The problem is that they are currently very expensive and so there is a limited demand for them. This means that no capitalist wants to risk investing in factory large enough to take advantage of the economies of scale possible. The net effect is that short-term considerations ensure that a viable eco-technology has been margainalised.

This means that no amount of education can countermand the effects of market forces and the short-term perspective they inflict on us all. If faced with a tight budget and relatively expensive “ecological” products and technology, consumers and companies may be forced to choose the cheaper, ecologically unfriendly product to make ends meet or survive in the market. Under capitalism, we may be free to choose, but the options are usually lousy choices, and not the only ones potentially available in theory (this is a key problem with green consumerism — see section E.5).

The short-termism of capitalism has produced, in effect, a system which is “a massive pyramid scheme that will collapse somewhere down the line when all the major players have already retired from the game. Of course when the last of these hustlers cash in their chips, there won’t be any place left to retire to.” [David Watson, Op. Cit., p. 57]

[loksthegreat]

Part 1 of drawing the daughters in law of Queen Elaena IV!

Lady Sabitha Tully, the wife of Elaena’s third son and hand of the king to his older brother, prince Aeron, born in 599 AC

She was the eldest child of Lord Tully by his first wife, who died in childbirth giving birth to her third daughter, born in 602 AC at Riverrun, Sabitha married prince Aeron at the age of 18, after having been infatuated with the prince for a year in which the two exchanged frequent letters, their hasty wedding broke her engagement to the heir of house Bracken and left her and her fathers relationship in ruin, Lady Sabitha returned to court with her husband, who had laid off his studies at the citadel to be with her instead, where she would soon grow influential and support her husband in ruling the seven kingdoms as hand. She was known to be a fearless woman, that stood her ground in battle, as well as court, where she held a reputation for being sharp tongued and honest, though rarely cruel. Lady Sabitha sat as many council meetings as did her husband and her good brother, the king, valued her as an advisor, for she was as logical and pragmatic a thinker, as she was well spoken. She had six daughters, whom she loved, though she often said her relationship with them was more that of a father and his children, as she felt she held none of the warmth a mother should have. The girls where raised more by her younger sister and prince Aeron than by Sabitha, although she made a habit of carrying the girls with her to her study as well as council meetings when they where babes.

Lady Beatriz Corbray, the wife of Elaena’s seventh son, a famous warrior, prince Baelor, born in 609 AC

Born in 604 AC, Beatriz was the only daughter of Lord Jonos Corbray, who was said to cherish her most among her many brothers and therefore allowed her to do as she pleased, pursuing her great love for horse riding, archery, falconry and swordsmanship alongside her brothers, some say her father even allowed her to compete in jousts disguised as a mystery knight. She was known to be tall with weathered, angular features and a long mane of untamed curls, and while boys had been a passing fancy of her in the past, beyond the occasional flirt with one of her fathers knights or a visiting nobleman’s son, it is said that Beatriz found a love out of fairy tales in prince Baelor. The singers tell us that the prince stumbled upon the wild Lady in the year 630 AC, while traveling to a tourney at the Eyrie, his group had been attacked by mountain clan men and separated, Lady Bea, disguised as a man was roaming the Forrest as she often did and the two became companions upon their travels, some say prince Baelor fell for her while still under the impression that she was a man, true or not, Lady Bea disappeared upon their arrival at the Eyrie, only for Baelor to spot her at her fathers side during the tourney, grinning widely at him as it is said. After that they where wed within a week, at her fathers castle in the Vale. They would end up having only two children, a daughter in 632 and a son five years later.

Lady Alanna Velaryon, the wife of Elaena’s second son and lord of the tides, prince Daemion, born in 595 AC

Alanna was born in 598 AC to the son and daughter of a cousin of Queen Elaena’s mother, Lady Larissa Velaryon, she was known throughout the seven kingdoms for her immense beauty and talent with the harp, as well as her singing voice. She had been betrothed to prince Daemion, who would inherit Driftmark from his grandmother some day, as a babe and had been send to court at only 11 to become close with her future husband. While his brothers secured themselves great love matches Daemions love laid with the sea, with his dragon, and with his older brother, the king, whoms most adamant supporter he was. Alanna and her husband were friends and cousins rather than lovers, even after they were wed on Driftmark in 613 AC. While her husband traveled the world or spend his time at court, advising his brother, Alanna ruled as the Lady of Driftmark and preferred to surround herself with other women. Her closest companion and dearest friend was the Lady Larrya of Lsy, whom was the widow of her cousin. Lady Aly, as she was called by her friend Larrya, had three children with her husband, triplets, two sons and one girl, born in 618 AC, on which she doted all her life.

[anthurak]

Crackpot Rambling about MoonWolf and StarOwl

Did anyone else notice something in this shot from Seeing Stars?

Specifically this simplistic drawing, which we can only assume was drawn by Loona, showing a wolf, a moon and a star?

The wolf and the moon are easy to guess the meaning of, but it’s the presence of the star that I find particularly interesting, especially with how it’s just as prominent in the picture as the moon. I ask you; which character in the show has a prominent association, both visual and symbolic, with stars…

…who just so happens to play a major role in this episode alongside Loona?

Now before anyone gets out the tinfoil, no I am not theorizing that Loona and Octavia actually met years ago as kids and have some kind of ‘forgotten childhood friend’ thing going on.

Rather, this scene right here is one of several cases I’ve noticed of the show hinting at a major connection between these two. Not in a ‘long lost relative’ or again a ‘forgotten childhood friend’ sense, but in a more general sense that a friendship between Loona and Octavia is important.

First there’s the simple fact that Loona and Octavia are each associated with closely connected celestial bodies in the night sky: Loona is the Moon and Octavia the Stars. Loona obviously has her name, werewolf-like appearance, the prominent crescent moon on her shorts, and even her whitish-grey fur can be considered similar in color to the moon. Octavia meanwhile has her connection to her father and family as demons closely associated with the stars, her clothing has a lot of prominent star patterns and even her name is likely a reference to a minor planet in our solar system (598 Octavia).

And this episode in particular really reinforces this connection.

We’ve got the aforementioned childhood drawing from Loona scene in the flashback.

We’ve got the prominent ‘Star Owl’ poster that Octavia clearly adores, and later it’s clear that Loona also takes quite a liking to it.

Then there is some interesting layered symbolism of the episode’s theme of ‘looking for the stars’: Octavia spends the whole episode looking for ‘the stars’, in this case the meteor shower, while I.M.P. and Stolas are trying to find Octavia, who herself is closely associated with the stars. Plus there’s the whole irony of the Grimoire confusing celestial ‘stars’ with acting ‘stars’, the TV studio being named ‘Star Seekers’ and the reintroduction of Blitzo’s own desire for ‘stardom’, ie; fame, recognition and validation. Where this gets interesting is that it’s really only LOONA who manages to find the ‘stars’ she was looking for, ie; while the imps and Stolas were getting caught up in various shenanigans, it’s Loona who actually manages to track down Octavia.

At an observatory, no less.

And finally there’s the big scene between Loona and Octavia at the end of the episode. The one that ends with the smog parting to reveal the moon and the stars together in the night sky.

Which Loona and Octavia in turn share an embrace underneath. Heck, the composition of the shot even has Loona’s head in place of the moon.

Going back even further before this episode, let’s talk about Stolas’s Grimoire and how it factors into all this.

It’s easy to think of the book as just belonging to Stolas, but we can also assume that he is training Octavia to be his successor and will one day pass the book down to her. We know that Stolas has been teaching Octavia magic, and has even claimed that she is a prodigy. While neither Stolas nor Octavia seem to care about this detail all the much, I think we can pretty safely assume that the Grimoire is Octavia’s birthright.

Now let’s talk about how the Grimoire has been used by the fine folks as I.M.P. And more specifically, by Loona. Because it’s become pretty clear by now that it is Loona specifically who knows how to actually USE the Grimoire. At the very least, she knows how to use it far better than Blitzo, Moxxie or Millie, who have never been shown actually using the book. And from this we have to assume that Loona must have taught herself HOW to use this ancient, extremely powerful demon artifact with little-to-no outside help. It’s certainly hard to imagine Stolas giving her lessons or pointers.

That alone would be pretty damn impressive, but let’s also square this detail with something we learned in Seeing Stars: Octavia, Stolas’s daughter and student whom he called a ‘prodigy’ in magic, doesn’t yet know HOW to use the Grimoire. While Loona DOES. When Octavia accidentally portals herself to LA, she is botching a spell that Loona has clearly mastered. Stolas even mentions at the end of the episode that he hasn’t taught Octavia spells like portal-magic. Yet, again, Loona has been shown repeatedly using the Grimoire to make portals with ease.

While it’s yet to be commented on in the show, I think it’s pretty safe for us to assume that Loona is a serious prodigy when it comes to magic. Maybe even a bigger prodigy than even Octavia. Notably, when Loona and Octavia go to find their dads, Octavia doesn’t even try to make a portal again. Instead she simply passes the Grimoire to Loona, implicitly admitting that Loona knows how to use it better than she does.

When you really start thinking about it, the implications here are pretty wild in terms of where the story could end up going with all of this. We’ve got Loona and Octavia embodying complimentary celestial bodies in the night sky, with both being magical prodigies.

And on top of that, Loona and Octavia meet because of the Grimoire (Octavia stealing it), and at the end of the episode Octavia notably returns the Grimoire to Loona before they hug. It really makes it feel like the Grimoire is something that symbolically connects these two. Heck, the Grimoire even SHOWS the moon AND stars together on its cover!

Like FORGET just being some ‘adopted step-sister daughters’ of Blitzo and Stolas. This kind of symbolism makes Loona and Octavia feel like the potential heroines of their own, totally separate story. Particularly, it feels like a major contrast to the dynamic between Blitzo and Stolas, who symbolically have almost nothing in common and feel like a meeting and relationship that happened by pure chance.

I mean, I know the show probably isn’t going to do any kind of romance between these two, but all this symbolism seriously makes it feel like Loona and Octavia have some soulmate shit going on. Like Loona is some diamond-in-the-rough ‘chosen one’ and Octavia is her destined partner.

Now of course, I have absolutely no idea if this is ACTUALLY where Vivzie and the rest of her team are going. Thus far, Loona and particularly Octavia have been pretty firmly relegated to ‘supporting character’ position, with their dads taking much more prominent roles as effective ‘main character’ and ‘main love interest’, respectively.

That being said, that could be subject to change. Especially considering how Loona and Octavia could make for an especially strong platonic foil to Blitzo and Stolas. Both as individuals, and as a friendship.

Do I think Loona and Octavia might supplant their dads as the ‘main characters’ of the show? Doubtful.

But depending on how much the show decides to delve into the political scheming and machinations of the Goetia family, like how Stella putting a hit on Stolas feels like just as much a power play as it does an act of petty spite, I’ve got a good hunch that Loona and Octavia will have a major role to play…

[dont-f-with-moogles]

Terra Darling ❤️🌹❤️

For the Drunk Drabbles vol.2, my request is 2 "You do have a stupid face".

Have fun & don't drink too much!!!

Kith kith 😘

Hope you like it, Val 💜 Mittens Characters: Levi x Hange fluff Word Count: 598 words

The supermarket aisle was lined with uniform shelves of plastic bottles, each emblazoned with eye-catching brand names. Levi rose out of his crouch, standing to check the contents of a particularly pricey washing detergent in his hand. Satisfied, he rounded the corner, passing milk cartons and tubs of butter as he approached Hange. The pair had agreed to meet in the chilled foods section - only Levi’s appearance had apparently caught her off guard. He watched her, curious, as she cradled their shopping basket and smiled down into its contents. As Levi drew closer, Hange’s head jerked up. There was a flicker of something - panic - before she raised her eyebrows in recognition. Hange buried whatever she had been holding under the other items in the basket. 

“Oi.” Levi brandished the detergent bottle at her. “What’s with that face?”

“This face?” she returned, pointing to herself in mock surprise, “I assumed you didn’t mind it?”

Under the store’s fluorescent lighting Hange’s cheeks glowed; eyes overbright behind her glasses.

“So what if I don’t?” Levi agreed with a wry half-smile. He motioned to place the bottle amongst their other purchases when Hange’s hand came down protectively over the basket. 

“See, you do have a stupid face!” Levi was studying her expression rather than the wedge of cheese that Hange was using to cover the items beneath it.

“Well, you have stupid-” Hange floundered, the flush upon her skin deepening, “-amounts of that stuff at home already! What, are you doing laundry for everyone in our building now?”

“Quit dodging the question,” Levi snapped, “what’s going on?”

Hange shifted her weight and glanced about herself as though anticipating some unforeseen interruption. Then, with a reluctant sigh, she plucked a clear, plastic packet from underneath the cheese wedge. It took Levi a moment to realise that the white cotton pieces inside it were, in fact, a row of tiny mittens.

“I picked them up as a gift for Miche and Nanaba, y’know.” Hange looked about herself once more as though expecting both friends to emerge jubilantly at this revelation. “Normally I couldn’t be less interested in baby clothes, but… consider the size and scale!”

With that, Hange grabbed Levi's wrist and forced his hand beside the bag.

“Look, Levi. They’re so small… each one is only the size of an adult thumb. I never appreciated how tiny these were… until now.” 

Levi’s eyes moved from his own hand, which was still forcibly suspended in the air, to Hange’s look of wonder. There was an eager glint in her eye; a sudden spark of desire which threatened to catch. It took Levi a moment to master a surge of panic. But his expression scarcely betrayed the shift from bewilderment to fear to uncertainty; the myriad of minute changes barely perceptible. All the while he watched Hange’s ridiculous smile; the mittens nestled in her open palm. Then quite simply, with his eyes on hers and in a tone of perfect calm, he spoke.

“Okay.”

“Okay?” Hange repeated wildly.

“Okay,” Levi said with gravity. Hange looked as though she had not quite heard him. Her fingers fumbled on the packaging. The packet of mittens fell into the basket.

“Are we seriously having that conversation here, in the dairy aisle?”

“Where else do people decide these things?” Levi’s small grin had returned. Suddenly, irrepressibly, his features were mirrored in Hange’s expression.

“Guess here’s as good a place as any…”

They regarded one another as two criminals embarking upon a secret heist.

At that moment, an ear-splitting wail echoed from the next aisle, drowning out the pacifying tones of the child’s mother. Hange’s eyes widened in horror.

“Wanna head back before you change your mind?”

“Please!” Hange dropped the shopping basket on the floor and kicked it beneath the shelf of milk cartons. “Let’s go straight home, Levi! I’ll get Nanaba a voucher or something for the baby!” (Asks are open again for prompts! :))

[holdingforexo]

This may sound a bit weird, but I'm happy you have your countdown set so it counts the days that have passed instead of the days to come (75 of 645 vs 598 of 645). Whenever I see posts counting the other way, my brain kinda glazes over the numbers, but it makes sense the way you do it.

Thank you! I obviously feel the same haha. I’ve always called these countdowns, but I guess they’re really countups haha.

I think it’s really in the wording ... if it’s “day xxx of xxx”, it makes sense to count up. Counting down works if it’s “xxx days left”, but I wanted to word it in a way that would also include the total number of days we’ll be holding. With this project, it’s how many days we’ve been holding and how many days they’ve been away, rather than how many days until they return. It’s subtle—but I appreciate that you notice!

[jestbee]

I posted 1,075 times in 2022

That's 380 more posts than 2021!

589 posts created (55%)

486 posts reblogged (45%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@lostinmcyt

@masterbaited

@jestbee

@alittledizzy

@scoops404

I tagged 938 of my posts in 2022

Only 13% of my posts had no tags

#mc - 598 posts

#jane answers - 231 posts

#dnf - 170 posts

#dream - 96 posts

#dnp - 81 posts

#gnf - 56 posts

#atsoop - 42 posts

#dnf fic - 41 posts

#dreamnotfound - 38 posts

#dteam - 28 posts

Longest Tag: 139 characters

#dream was like here is where u dud an awesome play and fished some pearls and george was like yeah well here is where i died multiple times

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

I choose to believe they're getting the entire howell-lester clan together for Xmas, somehow I think Adrian and Cornelia might get along?

80 notes - Posted November 28, 2022

#4

Oh noo hope you feel better soon and it heals fast!!

I'm thinking about sapnap. How devoted he is to them, how much he loves them. He moved to dream and drove from Texas to Florida with one day notice and when George said he was lonely in London, the next day he renewed his visa :(( they all have such a strong bond, they choose eachother over anything else..

Sapnap is ride or die. Dream once said the thing he loves most about Sapnap is that he "has never once doubted that Sapnap is [his] boy and will have his back through anything". And you can see it.

Like, however much Sapnap and George have a sibling-like rivalry, Sapnap would go to war for George if he asked. (And he might, knowing George).

He was "just the cameraman for now" and made sure George and Dream were both okay during their meeting and was happy to take a back seat and that in itself is fucking amazing.

And it's not just dteam. He and Karl have a tax that if you cross one you pay the price of having crossed the other by default. He defends his fans in valo lobbies when people try to talk shit. Hes allowed to rio the shit out of his friends but if anyone else tries it he'll kill them with a glance. Heck, even for all the ways he has a tendency to get caught up in trying to seem cool, he's never once rolled over on his friends or what they do and the game they play even when it would have been easier to do so.

Sapnap is ride or fucking die.

83 notes - Posted November 22, 2022

#3

i like how phil sits next to dan when they eat rather than across from him

If I had Phil Lester in the house I'd sit next to him too

104 notes - Posted June 11, 2022

#2

I cannot shut up about how Dan was in that video. Like, it had such good vibes. Relaxed, mature, comfortable?

The persona as we know it was gone, remember when he seemed so angry all the time? It's just so so sooooo nice to see him happy and proud of a thing.

After everything he's been through to come out the other side like that. You love to see it

189 notes - Posted May 21, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

All the sunlight of our past (COMPLETE)

Phan, E

Tags: Exes to lovers, canon divergence, secret identity

Summary:

YouTube is a mess.

Phil's been struggling with it for a while and has just taken a job as a video editor to make ends meet while he figures out whether he still loves it anymore.

Dan's channel has been dead ever since he started working at BBC Radio One and the two haven't seen each other in years.

During a chance meeting in 2019, Dan gets papped coming out of a gay club and his life is sent in to turmoil. He blames Phil, because it had been his idea to go there in the first place, so they're straight back to not talking.

The only recourse Dan has to salvage his career is to return to his YouTube channel after all these years and make a coming out video on his own terms. What he doesn't know is that Phil is the editor he just hired to help him with it.

Notes:

Written for @oldschoolpbb with accompanying art by @snekydingdong

[Read on ao3]

195 notes - Posted May 14, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

[wordsandrobots]

So the problem with my brain's capacity to plan stories is that it doesn't know when to stop.

Because here I am, 6000 words into writing the final part of Wishing on Space Hardware, which is essentially a superfluous coda to make up the numbers and tie off a few loose emotional strands from the main plot, and of course I'm already thinking about the other Iron-Blooded Orphans stories I'd like to write. Indeed, some of them I have already started, because of course I have.

Now, to be fair, most of those ideas are slash. Smutty slash too. Did you know writing sex scenes triggers the same 'choreography goes brr' synapses as writing fight scenes? I didn't until a couple of years ago and now here we are, with at least two collections of explicit short stories in the offing.

First up is Sympathy and Other Mistakes, which I would already call done if not for the inexplicable urge to add more chapters to it. This is the one that I previously mentioned goes well to Great Night by NEEDTOBREATHE and is for the . . . let's call it 'crack-ship taken seriously' that I'm still not sure I want to publish anything for. I'm fairly nonplussed by moral-purity hand-wringing over age gaps and so forth, and firmly of the belief that getting laid is the least problematic thing anyone in Tekkadan has ever done, but it's a pairing that essentially requires the entirety of Wishing on Space Hardware to have happened to work. So, about a decade of character development beyond the show, which probably narrows the audience past the initial 'wait, what' filter. Thing is, it's an interesting pairing that I think actually works incredibly well with established canon. A thoroughly unromantic thing that swerves from dubcon to somewhere that's honestly kind of sweet, rooted in a search for redemption both characters know is ultimately hopeless. So . . . yeah. We'll see.

Second is the one I suspect would be most popular, You, Me and Everyone Else, which is the logical extension of deciding Shino and Yamagi are poly i.e., how much of the rest of the cast can I ship them with?

Technically, I suppose the bit I've written most of already isn't actually that premise at all but rather them unlocking the most blindingly obvious kinks imaginable. Still, it's fun and should be interesting when placed alongside the other ideas I've got planned. To whit:

Yamagi/Shino/Eugene/Sri (OC) -- The poly relationship I've been building throughout WoSH, in a situation I can't discuss yet

Yamagi/Chad/Shino -- Because I'm curious if I can make that work. If you've been following along so far, you'll have noted the emotional heft in the Yamagi/Shino/Eugene relationship is skewed such that Shino/Eugene is more intense than Yamagi/Eugene. I kind of want to play with that in the other direction, by giving Yamagi a partner he's more strongly attracted to than Shino is. Also I want Chad to have nice things.

598/Yamagi/Shino -- Look. My perfect gremlin child managed to squeak out of that game in one piece and so I get to imagine him grown up and happy, OK? And by grown up I mean roughly barrel-shaped and capable of out-wrestling Shino, and by happy I mean slightly drunk and blurting out “You're really pretty" at Yamagi in the middle of swapping 'holy shit, you're not dead' stories. It'll be fine.

(Chapter titles are already themed: Fantasia for Chains, [REDACTED], Variation on a Theme, and Guest Soloist. Because yes.)

Beyond that, I suppose technically that idea of cadet!Cyclase trying to come on to young officer!McGillis is also slash but I don't believe it would actually go anywhere per se. More that McGillis would take one look at Cyclase and go 'not today, thank you', and Cyclase would get to a point in the conversation and come to the realisation that killing McGillis wouldn't achieve much. I don't know. I'm intrigued by the idea of McGillis accidentally prompting Cyclase off the path of vengeance and on to the path of whatever-the-fuck he was trying to achieve in Urdr Hunt, and there is the challenge of actually writing the bastard's POV (I scrupulously avoided writing either McGillis or Orga's perspective in WoSH).

Oh, speaking of POVs, I was considering doing something with the Venus gang as the other side to Eugene Sevenstark and the Hesperus Treasure, but the idea's not really stuck past how the Urdr Hunt plot wound up going. Maybe if the theatrical presentation version gives me more food for thought? (I am crossing everything that they don't pull a diablous ex machina on us and kill anyone else; I already wrote 598 a cameo in the fic I'm posting at the moment, damnit.)

And then, well. Then there's the actual . . . calling it a sequel to WoSH would be a stretch. It's set another ten years on in the same version of events, but it's very much detached from WoSH's plot and would be my attempt to do a 'what if Akatsuki grew up and starred in a Gundam show' story. The short answer is that he's the most throw-himself-on-the-wire pacifist you could hope to meet and he's gone and got himself caught up in a big mess involving interplanetary medical testing, pirates, and the IBO equivalent of the Gundam Fight because mobile suit battles for sport and the Jupiter equivalent of Las Vegas feels like a fun setting to explore. He'd be a dutagonist alongside a female Gundam pilot who I know lots about but don't have a name for yet. And the story would also feature me performing an act of character necromancy so devilish, you'll probably curse me for it. Because I worked out how I could pull it off and now I think I've got to. Overall this would very much be a one-and-done thing. I'm thinking like Narrative is to Unicorn: a story technically following on and handling some of the same themes but with much punchier pacing and an entirely new cast. No idea when I'd get to it and I don't expect it'll have as much traction as WoSH on account of largely being OC-focused, but I think it could be fun.

OK. There we go. Those are the currently-percolating ideas. I will answer questions on them if you have any but this is mainly just me jotting them down in the hopes that if I just focus on these, I won't spontaneously generate more.

*laughs hysterically*

Yeah, we all know it doesn't work like that. But I tried, damnit!