#same color same behavior roughly the same equivalent age. they are the same

[figofswords]

so like. nyah (based on real pictures of my cat)

[muzansfangs]

Babydoll.

Starring: Douma x f!reader;

Format: one-shot;

Warnings: nsfw, modern au, kind of gang au, criminal Douma, corruption kink, use of alcohol, dirty talk, language, choking, breeding kink, small age gap, forbidden relationship, enemies to lovers dynamics, kind of toxic relationship, dacryphilia, dom!Douma, sub!reader, vaginal sex, slight manipulative behavior, unprotected sex;

Plot: you should have not fallen for him, the devil himself, the handsome hitman of Muzan Kibutsuji. His charming personality, however, had you wrapped around his finger effortlessly. Sometimes, when you blabbed out some reserved informations of your gang to him, you felt how he was taking advantage of what you two had. All it took for him to calm you down, though, were his sugarcoated words and the promise you were his only one.

Track: Babydoll — Ari Abdul: “When I meet your eyes, the devil, he wins”.

MASTERLIST FOR THE EVENT.

﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏

Same old story. A bottle of saké on the coffee table, his red button down clutched into your hands, his multicolored hues boring into yours as you sat on his lap. You wanted to stop this, but you could not.

His lips curled up into his trademark smirk, his long-dark eyelashes contrasting with his pale complexion and the variety of shimmering colors mixed in his irises, as he ran his thumb over your lower lip.

If you did not know him, you would have said he was a gift from the gods. However, Douma was a gift from the haunts of Hell.

You knew you should have not even allowed him to approach you that night at the bar. You were not clueless, his identity and his reputation were well-known. But he was enticing. You were alone, dealing with a break-up, feeling like the ground was shaking under your feet. He was a little bit older than you, three years, but they had granted him enough experience to deceive you. You were fragile in that moment and he knew it.

That time had long gone, however. Months had passed by and you had fully recovered. Staying by his side now, letting yourself being ruined by him over and over again, was your choice.

“You’ve been so helpful for me, darling. I wonder how I can reward you for your sacrifice” Douma chimed, forcing his thumb into your mouth and pressing the pad of his finger onto your tongue.

His actions were laced with lewd intentions, his words creeping under your skin.

He had mentioned a ‘sacrifice’. Of course, he had. He knew that what you were doing for him was the equivalent of killing the good and loyal part of yourself that would have given up on anything just to make the people you cared about happy. What were you doing for them now? You were stabbing them on their backs, spitting on their faces, putting their lives in danger, for the sake of a toxic and secret relationship with him.

As his thumb entered your warm mouth, you sighed, squeezing your eyes shut only not to let tears spill out of your eyes. He knew what his words did to you.

His dirty talk made your panties sticky, but the way he never failed to remind you of what you were doing for him, for a criminal, for the man who easily manipulated you and played with your heart like a guitarist played with the strings of a guitar, well, it broke your heart.

Your lower lip quivered and a soft chuckle rumbled in his chest.

“Ah, I��m sorry, baby. — he whispered, slowly removing his thumb from your mouth and grasping your jaw roughly — Look at me” he added, his voice velvet but still firm.

A command. One of the many he gave you, when he was about to watch you crumble in his arms. You slowly lifted your lids, letting your teary eyes meet his ones. In his shining ones, you could see two small versions of you. But you could read two identical words too: betrayal.

A sob escaped your lips, your shoulders shaking and a grin crossed Douma’s face. There it was, your fragile part. Your tears falling from your lashes, your mascara drawing patters on your cheeks that resembled brenches of a leafless tree, made him lose his cool. You could feel his cock underneath you twitch, you could see the way he enjoyed your whimpers.

Depraved, he was depraved.

“You’re so beautiful like this. — he purred, wrapping his hand around your throat and slipping the other one between your thighs, tugging your thong to the side — Bearing a baby into your tummy. Your womb swollen, my baby growing into you” he said, his voice dripping desire and lust.

“Douma…” you whispered, as his deft fingers plunged into you effortlessly.

“Tsk, you’re dripping… Can you hear it? The lewd sounds of your cunt yearning for more, waiting for me to fill you up. Can you hear them, love?” he hoarsely said, involving you into a fervent kiss.

A moan, another one, this time louder, erupted from your throat as his slender fingers searched for that spongy spot that made you squeal out in ecstasy for him. It did not take long for him to find it. He knew you like the back of his hand, your body was like a piece of paper for him to write on.

“Ah, chant for me, baby. Sing for me, sing because you’re my only one” he whispered, his grip on your neck tightening significantly as you gasped for air.

Your eyes widened, your inner walls clamping onto his fingers as he pinned you down onto the couch, underneath him.

Your toes curled, as you lolled your head back in pleasure. The gultiness, the shame you felt for the way you let him manhandle you, for your morals bending only to stick by his side when the sun set, they were all gone. He stripped you out of your sanity, his sinful hands breaking the sheer of pride you loved to show off in public.

You felt his fingers leaving your core, the hand around your neck following suit, as he unbuckled his belt and hastily unzipped his pants. He needed you. He wanted to ruin your innocence again. It was never enough.

“I promise, I’ll fuck you so good you’ll leave this place slithering around like a viper. My pretty, little viper” he crooned, spreading your legs wide before hooking his thumbs underneath the waistband of his tight boxers and pulling them down his thighs.

The sight of your essence leaking out of you for his previous actions made him let out a moan of anticipation, while your cheeks heated out for the predatory look plastered over his angelic face.

You were glad he had streatched you out properly. His shaft was not exactly easy to adjust to. As long as he loved seeing tears stream down your face, he wanted you to enjoy the way he messed up your insides. It had to feel good for you too.

“Tell me that you love me” he said then, hovering over you and resting your legs on the top of his broad shoulders. His fingers dug onto the plush of your thighs, earning a soft whimper from you as his tip started to tease your entrance.

“I love you. You know how much I love you…” you breathed out, arching your back in hope to get some friction from the spot where your intimacies met.

Douma chuckled, his teeth grazing the tender flesh of your neck as he shoved himself into you slowly, making sure you could feel every inch of him exploring your warm channel. He surely was vocal, he had always been. A long, strained moan left his lips as he bottomed out and your cry of pleasure echoed into the luxurious living room of his house.

Your breaths mixed, his thrusts hard and steady as you ran your fingers through his long, silky and silvery hair.

Douma was too handsome to be a devil. Then again, as he made you reach your climax, whispering sinful words into your ear, making sure his thrusts hit your g-spot, you were reminded of that fallen angel. He was an angel, in the end, you were right.

Douma was God’s favorite, he was Lucifer. Therefore, as he released into you, moaning into your mouth as his tongue dominated yours, you were ready to let him drag you to hell with him.

“Yeah, I definitely love you” you murmured, panting as you stared at the ceiling above you, his body still pressed against yours.

Sinning never felt that good.

TAGS: @doumadono @doumaslotus @mrskokushibo @misaki-the-lotusflower @flakeygod @cyberdazetragedy

[lumilasi]

UPDATE: I realized recently that so many of my characters have purple shadow fog/smoke power visuals, which was kind of repetitive, so I'm now changing the color for some of these characters. Hanma's shadow smoke is now bluish instead of purple.

The parents of Kouka & Kuromoya, they're both shorter than their kids, given those two are both around 200 cm tall lol. They also don't look that old cuz both are beings that don't age like humans/I struggle making characters look old OTL

More info below: (unfinished, I'm still not entirely sure about the story with Hanma's family, its just some rough bits and pieces. Also no name for his little sister/Kiryo's mum yet)

Name meanings:

Rikka's name means "snow," and Hanma tends to write his name in two different ways; either so it translates to "Squad demon," or "Judgment demon," depending on the context of the situation.

(The OG version of his name is the first one, the second meaning actually comes from the moment he fought his family to save his baby sis and Rikka, where he called himself "the judgment demon" because he's a dramatic bitch)

Age:

They're both around 150 years old in human years. Rikka is considered to be in her late forties/early fifties among Kitsune, and Hanma's body is roughly equivalent to someone in their fifties as well.

(Murasaki family members aging speed/how long they live varies between individuals, which is common for elemental soul eaters.)

Powers:

Rikka has your typical kitsune abilities from fox fire to being able to shapeshift into a fox, creating illusions and possession. Rikka specifically uses her possession ability on inanimate objects for information gathering purposes, or to send messages to people.

She's also an excellent swordswoman, able to cut stone and metal, and even fire. She's also a good mentoring figure and as patient teacher.

Hanma can control shadows, his primary ability being forming arms or humanoid "soldiers" from it as an offensive ability. These soldiers typically share his inhuman physical strength and are capable of tearing people apart with their bare hands. His shadows can change consistency from mist/smoke to a more solid substance, and aren't vulnerable to most other elements, apart from sacred light.

He can also pull people's souls out of their bodies/see into them as a Soul Eater. He's learned how to use a sword too thanks to his wife, and is fairly skilled though not on the same level as her.

Personality:

Rikka is a calm, gentle individual who is very patient with people, willing to see other's perspective. This does not mean however that she's a pushover, and just because she might understand, it does not mean she agrees.

She is more than willing to put her foot down to defend what she believes is right, and call out one's wrongdoing, even at the expense of her own safety. She's good at reading people, which enabled her to become close with the seemingly arrogant and kind of antisocial Hanma; lot of his behavior stemmed from need to prove himself to his overbearing parents, who expected so much from their eldest.

Being bit of an optimist, Rikka wants to believe there is good in absolutely everybody, but also acknowledges that sometimes that can be impossible to reach within a person.

Hanma tends to come off very quiet, kind of aloof and dismissive individual, who's also quite arrogant. This was true for the majority of his youth, but nowadays he's learned some humility and is able to laugh at his own mishaps and mistakes, as well as take people's criticism a bit better.

He's very fiercely protective and caring towards his loved ones, and they tend to be the only ones whose opinion truly matters to him. He can be kind of curt and rude to people outside this specific select group.

While he's no longer a smug asshole, Hanma is still kind of impatient and can get easily annoyed by someone's incompetence. He tries to be patient with children, though.

Family Details:

Their kids ended up reminding Rikka more than Hanma, which he's actually thankful of, because he's 'kind of a terrible person' as he sometimes puts it.

Rikka taught her daughter how to swordfight as well, Kuromoya was less interested because he prefers more "hands on" combat as he calls it.

Rikka's family were generally known among the kitsune and spirit folk as exceptionally good fighters, often hired and serving as bodyguards for important people, or guardians for sacred places.

Rikka was assigned to be Hanma's sister's bodyguard by the family in fact, which led to their friendship and her eventually meeting Hanma and becoming close with him overtime.

Hanma's nicknames for Kouka and Kuromoya are "little fox cub" and "little shadow cub." (He does sometimes call Kuromoya a brat too though, namely because he is one lol)

Hanma is sometimes called "Grandpa Kitseru" by his kids adoptive son Yago in reference to his pipe. Yago calls Rikka Grandma Kitsune, naturally

Hanma actively tried to make sure Kuromoya wouldn't make the same mistakes he did when younger, once noticing the boy had inherited some of his more unpleasant personality traits. He mostly succeeded (with help from Rikka and Kouka of course)

Hanma was locked away as a prisoner by his own family at one point, due to basically doing his own thing and solving issues they had with murder. (specifically unauthorized murder, his family was okay with murder, just not him doing it without permission)

He later ends up killing them for trying to kill his baby sister and Rikka. The sister because she was seen as "too weak and useless" to be part of the family, and Rikka because she tried to protect her.

Th only reason the family had a dojo was for financial benefit/to discover strong souls to devour. None of them thought highly of using weapons, and being sent there to manage it was seen as punishment (except by Hanma's little sister who enjoyed being there)

Notable friends/Staff:

Erena: A Head priestess of a healing water temple they occasionally visit

Ayame: A snow woman living in the small mountain area their kids' run bathhouse is close of, Hanma saw her 'human death' while visiting Jade Town area, though he never brings it up openly, given his reasoning for sparing her soul and thus allowing it to transform into a snow woman wasn't that merciful.

Kiyoi: honorary adoptive child, a nature magic wielding witch boy they mentor

Yoruga: A moth spirit that works as a messenger for the staff

Yume: A shadow witch/young mother to whom Rikka helps to the best of her abilities as the more experienced one

EXTRA FACTS:

Rikka's aura color is yellow, whereas Hanma's powers have a bluish hue. This is why their kids' auras are green.

Hanma sometimes smacks/taps people with his pipe when he's annoyed with them. The only people he doesn't do this with even if irritated is his wife and daughter

Rikka's food preferences somewhat reflect her being a fox spirit; rabbit, duck, frog legs: her favorite berries are carrion berries too. She does eat other things, but these are her favorites.

Hanma doesn't eat human food that much as he's nourished by souls mostly, but does prefer vegetarian food/fish

Hanma basically taught his kids, that its okay to kill people if they're bad ones, which eventually sort of led them into doing the whole set-up with their bathhouse.

Rikka doesn't fully agree with this set-up, but understands her kids have to devour souls at some point, as they do need it to nourish themselves. She accepts this as long as her kids vet their targets properly and don't harm innocents/cases that might not deserve it.

You can tell how much Hanma loves his family just from the way he tends to look at his wife and kids; its typically the softest his face will ever be.

Rikka has tried to teach Yago some sword-fighting skills too, though so far he's kind of clumsy with long sharp pointy things.

If Kuromoya didn't have vitiligo, his skintone would be fully dark like his father's.

Rikka's main sword that she can summon has a green and gold handle with a swirly pattern on it. It is called "Kazeheki" which rougly translates to wind-piercer. In her dojo/while training she of course only uses wooden swords.

While Rikka is also a white looking fox, she is not an Arctic type like Taiga (another character in this story) and the main difference between the types comes mainly from their elemental power. Arctic kitsunes use ice and wind instead of fire/have those elements on top of fox fire.

Hanma despised most of his birth family, minus his baby sister he was always protective over. In a way this tendency was inherited by Kuromoya, who's also equally protective of Kouka.

The burn on Hanma's arm is from the time he had to save Rikka and his baby sister; he actually did it purely by using the swordsman skills he learned from Rikka/his baby sister who was also pretty good at it, as his powers were sealed away at the time.

This was an ironic twist, given the family used to look down on using weaponry at all (which was the source of his arrogance towards using swords in the first place)

Hanma sometimes smacks/taps people with his pipe when he's annoyed with them. The only people he doesn't do this with even if irritated is his wife and daughter

Rikka's food preferences somewhat reflect her being a fox spirit; rabbit, duck, frog legs: her favorite berries are carrion berries too. She does eat other things, but these are her favorites.

Hanma doesn't eat human food that much as he's nourished by souls mostly, but does prefer vegetarian food/fish

Hanma basically taught his kids, that its okay to kill people if they're bad ones, which eventually sort of led them into doing the whole set-up with their bathhouse.

Rikka doesn't fully agree with this set-up, but understands her kids have to devour souls at some point, as they do need it to nourish themselves. She accepts this as long as her kids vet their targets properly and don't harm innocents/cases that might not deserve it.

You can tell how much Hanma loves his family just from the way he tends to look at his wife and kids; its typically the softest his face will ever be.

Rikka has tried to teach Yago some sword-fighting skills too, though so far he's kind of clumsy with long sharp pointy things.

If Kuromoya didn't have vitiligo, his skintone would be fully dark like his father's.

Rikka's main sword that she can summon has a green and gold handle with a swirly pattern on it. It is called "Kazeheki" which rougly translates to wind-piercer. In her dojo/while training she of course only uses wooden swords.

While Rikka is also a white looking fox, she is not an Arctic type like Taiga (another character in this story) and the main difference between the types comes mainly from their elemental power. Arctic kitsunes use ice and wind instead of fire/have those elements on top of fox fire.

Hanma despised most of his birth family, minus his baby sister he was always protective over. In a way this tendency was inherited by Kuromoya, who's also equally protective of Kouka.

The burn on Hanma's arm is from the time he had to save Rikka and his baby sister; he actually did it purely by using the swordsman skills he learned from Rikka/his baby sister who was also pretty good at it, as his powers were sealed away at the time.

This was an ironic twist, given the family used to look down on using weaponry at all (which was the source of his arrogance towards using swords in the first place)

[schizo-spoon-blog]

Anglo-Saxonism Is Racist, Says Person of Color

Like every girl who is surrounded by drama despite being so "chill," Mary Rambaran-Olm hates drama.

On a society dedicated to studying medieval Anglo-Saxon history, and it's name "International Society of Anglo-Saxonists:"

"The name change encapsulates a much larger issue of how medieval studies must wrestle with its own disciplinary history of racism and its connections to whiteness,” Wade said. “When something as small as changing an organization’s name generates this kind of pushback, that suggests how entrenched these hierarchies are.”

“When something as small as changing an organization’s name generates this kind of pushback, that suggests how entrenched these hierarchies are.”

Changing one's long-standing name, an essential component of its brand and the reputation around it, is not a small deal. It highlights your own narcissism to make it sound like a small thing and only a totally unreasonable person would disagree with your position on it. Should we rename Alabama because Alabama has been associated with Jim Crow? I don't know, sounds petty and fucking stupid. Ah, but they did rename the organization at the end of the day. And they went on to say:

"We apologize to our colleagues of color who have experienced the name of our society as just one of many microaggressions they have faced in academia."

Your colleagues of color should spit on you and ask you to polish their shoes, and you should bow your head, and say "Yes massa," and do it, with a happy little whistle and a big old smile on your face -- you're bitch-made. You'd do it too, and say "Thank you," when you're done. You deserve that sort of treatment, because this sort of statement is not respectable. The only reason you're being whipped like this, being bullied to have your institution re-arranged or else be libeled with Thought Criminal accusations, is because you encourage it, weak masochistic weirdos.

"The discipline of English medieval studies — which is overwhelmingly white — focuses on literature, art and culture produced between roughly A.D. 500 and 1500 in England."

Jee, I wonder why the study of English history would be overwhelmingly white. Is the study of Hindu history overwhelming Indian? Is the study of Islam overwhelmingly Muslim? Is the study of the Ming Dynasty overwhelmingly Chinese? Is the study of the Langues d'Oil overwhelmingly fucking French? My God, the study of Igloo engineering is overwhelmingly Eskimo. Is it weird that only Ukrainians seem to give a fuck about Ukrainian epic poetry?

Why is this being pointed out like it's a problem? It'd be weird if it wasn't "overwhelmingly white." Why does the Washington Post feel the need to point it out, and why should we have a problem with this? Breaking News: Bible Studies are overwhelmingly Christian. That tells you A Lot about how Entrenched the Hierarchies Are.

"“The entire field of medieval studies is undergoing massive upheaval because they have not dealt with long-standing issues of racism and sexism,” Joy said. “This name change controversy is sowing the fault lines that still exist between white scholars — because it’s all white people, a bunch of white people arguing over whether they’re racist.”

Stop arguing, white people. You're all racist (and sexist, apparently, too - for some reason only white people are sexist, despite the horror stories you hear about women's treatment in the Global South). By the way, never, ever, dare interrogate racial perceptions of people of color with a critical eye. If they are prejudiced, it's always justified, and you're a racist for drawing an equivalency.

"White supremacists have recently sought to revive this period of history as proof of white racial superiority, pointing in part to the era’s literary achievements as evidence that white society was far ahead of other cultures, according to Wade. They also see it as a time “of pure masculinity, some sort of warrior culture where men could be men,” Wade said."

Yeah, and did you know, Mongolian nationalists still seek to revive the Mongolian empire as proof of Mongol racial superiority, pointing out to that era's conquests as evidence that Mongol society is far ahead of other cultures? They see the time when the Mongol hordes murdered people by the millions as a sort of warrior culture where men could be men. Mongolia is cancelled I guess. The term Mongol is associated with pillaging, raiding, rape, violence, genocide and domination by foreign people -- isn't it? ---- Isn't it? Maybe we can interrogate this further, surely this isn't a unique quality just among Anglo-Saxons and Mongols.

"The false historical narrative that white people — in particular, Anglo Saxon people — were the only race to produce worthwhile literature, art and scientific discoveries during the Middle Ages took root when “professional medieval studies” launched in Britain in the late 1700s, according to Wade."

No way, chauvinistic attitudes regarding one's own national achievements? Oh surely a crime unique to white people and not a universal tendency amongst all nations.

“This field … it’s just incredibly self-satisfied, smug, elitist, white and male,” Joy said."

Self-satisfied, smug, elitist -- these are valid things on which to attack an institution. But they feel the need to add, "white and male."

If it was self-satisfied, smug, elitist, black, and female, this would be preferable? Or how about East-Asian and male, is that better or worse?

Check this out: the city of Gary, Indiana, is dilapidated, crime-ridden, god-forsaken hell hole. This is all true, unfortunately. Now check this out: the city of Gary, Indiana, is dilapidated, crime-ridden, god-forsaken hell hole, and it's full of Black People. Kinda changes the meaning of what you're saying quite a bit, huh? It's what they call "saying the quiet part out loud." When you wonder why people are throwing race IQ and race crime statistics at you more and more often - it's because you keep saying stupid-ass shit like this. Do you want more racism, or less racism? You can't seem decide. Why are we having all these calls for self-criticism and self-reflection by people who don't really evidence much capacity for the same?

Oh jeez, I'm so sorry Ma'am Of Color, I'm too white and male, please, please, have my job, take my paycheck, live in my house, oh I'm so sorry for being English and interested in English medieval history, oh, so terribly sorry, how could I be so thoughtless, I should make room for strong Uzbek women to... uhh.... read Beowulf.

"ISAS’s vote this week hasn’t changed Rambaran-Olm’s mind. She has no wish to rejoin the group, she said, no matter what it’s called."

Yeah -- and the end of the day, even if you acquiesce to the demands of your critics, it doesn't actually aid your perceptions. You just publicly disavowed your own organization, called it racist, and said you're sorry for mistreating minorities. Do you know what you just did? You just answered "Do you still beat your wife?" with a "No." You didn't do a damn thing to improve conditions for people of color. You just admitted you're a racist, white supremacist institution who has harmed them. Nobody should respect you, because you don't respect yourself with clown-ass behavior like this.

Look, if you keep saying stuff like, "It's all white people," don't be surprised when you see even more racists, instead of fewer. If you keep your hyper-critical focus specifically on "whiteness" you will not eliminate "whiteness" but generate more and more of it. You're holding a hammer and everything looks like a nail. God one day I will join some Caucasian Historical Society and demand that we change the name of the mountain chain where they live, because the word "Caucasian" has been associated with white supremacy. And then I'll bring up Stalin's "fascist collaborationist" charges against them if they dare resist my reasonable demands.

The only correct answer to these criticism and allegations is

"Shut up retard." https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/09/19/its-all-white-people-allegations-white-supremacy-are-tearing-apart-prestigious-medieval-studies-group/?fbclid=IwAR1SCcAIb8g04NFHXnZeb0--_F9xlNENd2H2kX8DjtsTQ9EWZ1VlwmCnojw

[twitchesandstitches]

Hyper Brain Jane Growth Comm

Commission fic roughly set in the Labbound AU by me and Alt-Hammer, but non-canon to that AU.

Contains hyper growth typical of my work, but is mainly focused around hyper brain/head expansion.

-----

It had been many years on Earth, since the Lalonde family had made the mysterious discoveries of cloning and other technologies. Along with the other three great families, the secrets of gene splicing and the beginning of modding: self-controlled evolution and altering the body, and with it, the birth of the troll species, and others to come.

But in those days, the legality of their existence had been a serious conflict, and that was always on the minds of some of those, like Meenah the Elder, and her heiress.

“Fer frick’s sake, girl,” the husky and incredibly resonant voice from the speaker said, making little metal fixtures in the walls rattle. “Sit up and quiet hiding when you talk. You’re my heiress. You should be making people quiver and cower when you sit up!”

“They do, ma’am, really!”

A snort. “Trying ta avoid yer tits knocking ‘em down doesn’t count.”

The voice, for its vulgarity, was a beautiful voice. The kind that hotwired your brain and hit the ‘YES MA’AM’ buttons. A primordial voice of authority, one suited to an ancient warlord or a modern corporate officer; someone of a less charitable mindset might ask if there was genuinely a difference between the two: same amount of ruthlessness, and while the carnage was less physical, it was no less obvious.

Jane Egbert - though she took the surname Crocker as pat of the legal technicalities to be the heiress to Meenah the Elder, troll celebrity, top CEO and firm fighter on behalf of trolls and all the other sapients to come from Lalonde Labs - did not feel she had the same effect, even when she was easily the most physically intimidating human in history, if you discounted fertility statues that had quite a strong resemblance to her. She was aware of the fact that she was an ultra-curvy giant of a woman, nearly as much troll as human from all the genetic treatments and even the human percentage was balanced with more cerebral-enhancing cybernetics than anyone else on record. Beneficiary of fertility on par with a troll and the enhancements to breast size and milk production that came with it, and quite a few visible signs of trollish traits, as though she were transforming into one.

It was quite a sight to see a woman more than eight feet tall, with hips even wider than that and breasts quite visibly requiring special bras to absorb the excess milk she was producing, looking mortified. She was so big that any normal human could be driven to stunned meekness by the sheer scale of her; a Polynesian woman, she had grown to immense size from all the breast enhancement, muscle reinforcing, fertility amplifying, and general boost treatments known to the public at large, and quite a few that weren’t. Girthy, a bit chubby, she had the motherly look of someone fully prepared to gestate dozens of children in a single sitting, even if she had never actually had any. Her proportions were massive, on par with trolls; breasts as large as beach balls scaled up to her size and weighing several hundred pounds each, a mammoth backside that required several chairs each… she looked exactly like the model superwoman of the modern age, and had featured in the Crocker Corp’s posters. ‘Take our stuff’, they seemed to say, ‘and you can be gorgeous like her!’

That was before the… other treatments. The ones designed to make a perfect heiress out of her, and more akin to the woman who had adopted her, with all the strengths thereof. She didn’t have human ears, but smaller versions of the colorful frond-like displays that grew from sea dwelling trolls, and feathery gills grew along her throat and the sides of her body. She couldn’t wear gloves, not with those heavy claws and webbed fingers (perfect for swimming), and long, powerful fangs shone in her mouth. Even her eyes, bright blue, had a hint of trollish slit pupils. To say nothing of the small but functional pair of wings flapping from her back!

From the speaker, a kind of two-way phone made popular by the corporation that Jane was poised to take over some day, there came a sigh. On the other end of it, somewhere on the other side of the world, Meenah Peixes the Elder was rolling her eyes. “Try to at least look cool in front of the workforce while you hold the fort down, okay? Ya wanna be taken seriously, try not to blush at everything.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jane said.

There was a pause. “...Just ma’am?”

“Yes, Condesce?” Jane tried again, using the nickname that the elder Peixes’ batch friends had coined in their youth. The Signless, the Dolorosa, and the rest; they had become troll celebrities and unintentionally set the stage for their growing people’s culture to take titles as a form of self-identity.

There was a longer pause. And then a more heartfelt sigh. “You CAN call me Meenah. Y’know. Or mother. Or… look, you don’t work for me, okay? I ain’t yer boss.”

Jane wiggled uncomfortably, causing something small and metal to glint in her cleavage. “...Yes, ma’am,” she said, looking at the ground, or at least her cleavage. It was too big to actually see any floor. She clutched at the metal object, like holding the hand of a loved one to feel more confident.

There was one last final sigh, and it spoke to a lot of regrets. Mistakes made with parenting, words you couldn’t take back, and one last attempt to try to fix it, with a fear of doing it wrong all over again. “...You’ll keep me posted on important crap going on, yeah? Like that meeting coming up.”

Jane’s heart sank, and her stomach felt queasy. “Yes. I’ll… I’ll represent our cause well.”

Meenah the Elder sighed, and there was a strong impression of eyes being rolled. “I’m doing my part here, but you’ll have to make a good case. C’mon! You can do it. I believe in ya, girl.”

“I’ll… I’ll do it!”

“That’s the spirit!” There was a sound, as if of a kiss being blown. “Don’t tell no one, but love ya.” The speaker disconnected.

Jane sighed in relief, and sat back, and her free hand came up to rub at her temples, right above a sub-dermal implanted augmenting her brain’s processing power. “Ugh…” She winced at what felt like a fairly rough headache.

The metal in her hand shimmered to life; this was not a metaphor. It glowed brightly, with a faint red color striking against a black casing, and a single bright red light glowed. It was alive, a person in its own right. Not life in the same way as cells and blood, but life in electricity and silicon: a true artificial intelligence. This particular one, having a wicked sense of humor and taste for irony that had probably been inherited from the family that had produced him, had named himself after a famous antagonistic AI; he called himself Hal Strider.

Various mechanical synapses wired into her kicked in, and the comforting presence of a familiar mind extruding into hers, at the border of consciousness, rather like a worshipper prostrating themselves before a deity. Hal’s mind hovered, and remotely took control of a small set of speakers Jane carried for this purpose. “Sup, Jane. You’re kinda freaked out.”

Jane groaned. “How can you tell…?” She asked with only a bit of sarcasm.

“I got my ways. Reading that your hearts, all three of ‘em, are pumping mad. Blood pressure is… hoo, that’s not healthy. Shoot, your muscles are tense, especially the ones built into support your… chest. And you’re getting one monster of a headache.” He stopped, perhaps in apology. “Also, it’s kind of obvious you’re freaked out. I’ll order some meds for that headache.”

“You’re a treat, Hal.” Jane slowly got up, dreading going to work. She enjoyed being an administrator, but that meeting loomed over her, and she felt queasy at it. ‘It’s just the possible future of extreme modding, all the potential benefits of self-controlled evolution and all that at stake. And if it’s penalized, trolls and carapacians and the other sapients could be legally prosecuted for having them built in… it’s all on ME.’

She sighed again. “No pressure.” She stood up straight, causing some hefty sloshing from her massive breasts, and cracking from her suit. Oh well. She had a job to do! She pocketed Hal’s corporeal container back into her cleavage, where he sank deep, right against her chest… right against her heart. It beat a bit faster, but definitely not from stress. She patted her upper swell of mammary, enjoying the feel of him so close. “Any medical issues to report?”

There was the briefest pauses from Hal, and Jane later would think this was probably a relevant point. As an artificial intelligence, Hal thought FAST; any hesitation from him was just for deliberate effect, or imitating human social behavior. He thought so fast that he never needed any time to check and report.

But any kind of pause, from him, was the equivalent of waiting several hours to just think really, really hard about something important.

In the span of that pause, Hal looked over Jane’s biology, checked her cybernetic implants, and all the rest. This was actually his job, at least in the official records, because ‘health care officer’ for the world’s most important heiress looked a lot better than ‘personal companion’ for a paycheck. There was some interesting activity going on with her brain. She was thinking so much lately, and her intelligent implants were processing over time, and there was something going on there… Hal noticed something odd there, in her brain chemistry. Chemical markers of something else-

Oh. Yes, of course. The… stuff Meenah the Elder had used to transform Jane from an ordinary, if modded, human into the behemoth she was growing into. All Hal knew about it is that it was absolutely off the books, and had come in a syringe. It hadn’t been manufactured; it had come from somewhere, and best as he could work out from the data he’d mined in old communications between the founding families, had something to do with some site that had started… well, everything.

No one did know exactly how Mom Lalonde, Roxy the First, had created the technologies and genetic splicing techniques to create the trolls in the first place. Or how easy the creation of the carapacians was, as if she had been working from a template. And there were other mysteries there… like that mutagenic stuff Meenah the Elder had used on Jane, treating it first with her own genetics, as if to fashion Jane into her own daughter in the physical sense.

It would seem it was still in Jane’s body. It was working all the time, slowly transforming her in subtle ways, making her a true fusion of human and troll, producing all kinds of mutations, and now it was interlacing with Jane’s cerebral implants and intelligence-boosting mods. And it was doing… something.

In that pause, Hal took a long time to figure out if he should tell Jane about all that, as he was honor bound to do, or if it was better not to worry here. In the end, AIs have hearts as much as anyone. Jane was stressed enough as it were. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, and onto Jane’s augmented reality-capable glasses, he made a little avatar of himself giving a thumbs up and a wink.

Jane smiled. “You’re sweet,” she said, and off they went to the offices.

Things did not improve much from there.

Several hours in: several hours of signing off on paperwork in her adoptive mother’s name, personally answering letters about their work that ranged from the merely offensive to the politically extremely disastrous if handled wrong. And then the mod stuff, addressing the medical aspects that were so crucial to their long-term success; they had to focus on the benefits of it to stay relevant in the eyes of the world, and they needed to fix so much…

Jane sighed in her office, Hal close at hand and presently extending himself into a terminal for this purpose. Letters flashed as he relayed several messages from Feferi and Roxy the Younger, and their suggestions for improving mods, and sent them to the labs once Jane gave her okay.

With the pain in her head, like something was trying to hammer its way out of here and making shocks that were hurting her spine, balancing the needs of modifications that could prove vital to the company’s success, and the welfare of all trolls and other beings, Jane was feeling physically ill; it was just too much, all at once.

“I can do this,” she mumbled to herself. “I can do it.”

“That’s the spirit,” Hal said soothingly. “Hasn’t that stuff I got you done anything yet?”

Jane clutched her head. She swore she could feel her skull moving beneath her fingers. Little hairline segments opening, and things sliding around, very gradually. And...pressing against her fingers? It was an illusion from the pain.

It had to be. “It’s not working…!” She hissed, shutting her eyes. Hal turned off visuals to her glasses, blanketing it in blessed darkness. “Ah… that’s better.”

Hal did the digital equivalent of relaxing… and then froze up. Aw shit, he thought.

The alert got past him, and a video call appeared on a TV. “Hello, miss acting executive,” said an oily voice doing its best to be deliberately unpleasant.

Jane stared at it. “Uhhh. Oh no…”

She was a human woman, of ordinary and unmodded build, and she had a certain look of someone who just love bringing bad news, and takes too much joy in being unpleasant. She smiled, thinly. “May I assume you are the representative of your company’s chief officer in this meeting?” she said, and wiggled her fingers at ‘chief officer’. She probably had wanted to say ‘animal’ instead, and gave the words a nasty spin that had the same effect.

Jane groaned. Dealing with bigots who openly wanted trolls declared subhuman creatures was not something she was fit to do in her state. She blinked hard, trying to focus; the whole world, even with her glasses going to full visibility again, swam in and out of focus. She cried out, pain stabbing hard right from inside her skull.

And again, and another one, and one more, harder than before: she clutched her head, oh god it HURTS!

The representative stared at Jane with poorly concealed distaste, eyes lingering sourly upon Jane’s gigantic cleavage, the faint moisture visible upon her suit from inside, and the other bits of what she had once referred to as ‘oversexed grotesquery’. “Perhap we might… reschedule,” she said nastily. “To account for your troubles. An implant misfiring, perhaps.”

“N-no!” Jane cried out. “I can attend- ah!” she clutched her head, falling onto the desk. Her breasts made it creak as they slammed down, and the rest of her bored down all the way, and the poor desk couldn’t take all her weight. It slowly folded inwards, and then burst, exploding over the room.

The monitor fell onto the floor. It was cracked, and where Jane heard the sound of dollars going up in smoke for nothing, she also heard the representative sounding pleased about her suffering. “This, I’m so afraid, will not look good for the use of implants and modifications. Not if they can backfire so terribly. I will recommend that we postpone the meeting. Ta~” The video ended.

Hal could sometimes be blunt. “Aw, shit.”

“No, no no no!” Jane thrust a fist onto the floor and it shook. She almost punched right through it. “I fucked up! I was working for barely one day, I was supposed to be a good heiress and I already fucked up!” She clutched her head. “And my head hurts, it hurts, oh goddammit stop HURTING!” She raised her head up, to headbutt the ground in a desperate attempt to do SOMETHINg to make it stop.

“Jane, no!” Hal cried out.

Jane yelled, in anger and pain and frustration but mostly the unending agony in her head-

The room went blue.

Psionics flooded out from her, energy bubbling up and exploding outwards in a single pulse, and the walls exploded. Or they ceased to exist, or exploded SO fast, and in such fine form, that they might as well have been annihilated. The blast kept going but got weaker, bowling desks over and trapping the employees. It kept going, setting off alarms and rattling drinking coolers, and all the way to the outer office windows, where the glass shook. This was pretty impressive, when they’d been built to tank anything short of a direct meteor strike.

Hal, silently, noted that Jane’s psionic put out had just risen to that expected of a fully trained goldblood specialist. “Jane…?” Hal asked. “How long have you been able to do that?”

Jane stared open-mouthed, a few bits of rubble falling on her. “I… can’t.” She swallowed. “And I just keep digging myself deeper. Oh, look at all this damage…!” she clutched her head against another fresh stab of pain, and now, she didn’t even notice a swell of blue from her hands flare up at it. She wasn’t in much of a position to be aware that as the pain rose, so did her psionic ratings, while something in her head changed.

Hal did, though. “Uh, Jane?”

“WHAT.”

Hal gave up. “I’ll call someone to help you get out of here.”

Jane’s impulse to insist she could handle this and convince the officials not to postpone the meeting faltered beneath another brutal swell, and a grinding sound in her head. “Oh God… okay, okay! That, that would be best. Okay. Do it. Please…?”

She laid down there for some time, her head grinding and the pain swelling and rising in random waves. And there, Jane realized something odd. With each peak of pain, when the hurting hit the point where it was so bad she could barely think, she kept having ideas.

She didn’t know where they came from. It was as if something was pushing them together, and some part of her was working things out. That the pain was making something happen, and she was figuring things, working through them.

As Hal ran his request out to the first available person, Jane held a hand out and fumbled in the rubble. Still laying down, she found a little tablet that had survived the destruction. She couldn’t look directly at it, not with that screen glare, but she could feel it, and she typed out on it. She sent it.

As an attendant was brought in to escort Jane home, the labs were surprised to receive a write up on a mod formula that had been puzzling them for a while; it was a perfect one, an absolutely ideal suggestion that stood up to all testing. And the really tricky bit?

When they’d sent it upstairs for review, it had only been a concept. Not a fully fleshed out mod; that took months of constant research and testing to do, and Jane had finished it in moments. She’d figured it out.

Upstairs, Jane was being helped to her feet with the help of a black carapacian who called himself the Archive Ranger. “Up you get, ma’am,” he said cheerfully, supporting her massive frame with a small forklift.

“Uhhh…” Jane groaned.

“Uh, Janey. If you give me access, my implants are all over your nervous system and brain; I can shut off your pain receptors for a while-”

“DO IT, PLEASE.”

Hal did so. Jane felt satisfying numbness, and almost fell over. She clutched her head, in relief-

And froze. There was rubble in the way, obscuring her head from sight, but she still felt something round there. Protruding out from her skull, inhumanly. And she still felt her head grinding, shifting…

Transforming. Growing.

For, as the rubble fell away when she was lifted up, it revealed her head in full.

And that, from directly above her eyes, her head had swelled into a perfect sphere.

The Archive Ranger peered. “Um. You, uh. Feeling okay, ma’am?”

Jane breathed in. “What the fu-”

-----

It was a few hours later. The pain was still gone, courtesy of Hal’s presence, and that just left room for Jane to get extremely upset.

Well, not upset, per se. More angry. Or ‘blisteringly furious’.

“You could have told me!” She yelled, stomping around in one of the palatial expanses of her private suite, doing her best not to fall over. She’d been figuring that out for a while, but now she was having to balance not just gigantic hips and hyper-productive breasts larger than her torso, but… well.

That. She felt up her head again, gingerly, as if trying to remind herself it was real. Her fingers slid up from her jawline, to her temple, and there. Where she expected hair, her skull had grown up, swelling upwards, outwards, at a fairly steep angle. Her fingers slid across a strange combination of trollish, human and mechanical bits, all of it growing together in a curious melding. Swells of biomechanical implants that had grown larger from some unknown process, chitinous structure growing beneath the skin to support her new growth, and human skin, thicker than usual. And yet another troll bit, interwoven into ordinary brown skin, vein-line conduits of psionic energy, glowing a vibrant shade of light blue.

She was now in the same league as the Captor line of trolls, in terms of raw psionic power. She wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

Mostly she was concerned about how, according to the x-ray scans that had been taken, her brain had expanded. It had grown outwards, and her skull’s expanded size, for all its disturbing girth, was actually a fairly thin layer. Robust and armored, to be sure, but almost all the mass was her brain.

Her thoughts moved fast, so fast they doubled in on themselves, they criss-crossed and planted new mini-thoughts that blossomed on their own, to unexpectedly arrive at another point and yield insights that felt so perfect, so sublime. It was a pleasure, feeling the depth of her thoughts, the sudden clarity of it.

“You could have told me,” she said again, trying to hold on to the anger. And not focus on how good it felt, thinking so… so profoundly, with such perfect clearness. And the air on her enlarged head felt so nice. It was odd, but so pleasant. Her body shivered at the sensations, and after the horrific headaches of earlier, this was a welcome change of pace.

“I…” Hal hesitated. Another one of those little pauses, so significant in a hyper intelligent AI. “Shit. You’re right. You’re correct, okay? I was scared, okay? I thought you were too stressed out, and when i picked up there was something going on with your head, I figured… I don’t know. Just a little mutation.”

Jane indicated her expanded cranium. She pointed at what had presumably been a intelligence-boosting implant. Somehow, it had grown larger, from a sub-dermal machine to a large swath of smoothly moving machinery, with an oily motion, arcing upwards into a shape uncannily like a troll’s horn. “This? A little?”

“I didn’t realize what was going on! Okay!?”

“How!? You’re a super intelligent AI, how could you not pick that up!?”

Hal tried to figure that one out. It wasn’t as if Jane’s changes had been subtle. “Best as I can figure out, your skull changing was the cause of all that pain, and, I don’t know, something with it boosted your psionics. Built in a better energy network? It interfered with my readings too much, and I was stretched thin. I had no idea any of that was happening!”

“Hmph.” Jane tapped her foot. “Okay… okay then.” Several dozen ideas ran around, meshed together, and sixteen conclusions presented themselves. “That sounds about right.”

“I suppose we could call Meenah the Elder,” Hal said. “We can figure something out-”

“No!” Jane cried out, her eyes wide, ad psionic energy rising around her. “We can’t! It hasn’t even been a day! I need to show her I can do this! I’m a worthy heiress, I need to prove it!”

“But-”

“I can handle this!” She glared at the nearest camera that she knew he was seeing her through.

It lowered dejectedly. Hal gave in. “Okay, okay… so. What do we do then.”

Jane glanced to a nearby computer. She sighed, going over to it and sitting down in the quadruple chair arrangement, suitable to her gigantic backside. “Well, for one, I start working from home. I might as well set a good example; even unexpectedly mutated, I still do as I promised!”

“Wait, don’t forget to-”

There was a crash. And the distinctive sound of a troll-scale chair falling over.

“And perhaps we can get something up her to support my head,” Jane said, from the floor.

Several days passed.

Several days of heady, rampant mutation.

Jane sat at a bench of sorts, examining a holographic blueprint of what appeared to be a purely synthetic body; a robotic shell, capable of fulfilling all relevant biological capabilities, particularly those related to reproduction.

She leaned forward. A harness looped to her head, linked to several wheeled poles to support her head, moved with her.

Her head was far from reaching its final growth. It had only gotten bigger, nearly doubling in size; it was nearly as large as Jane herself, and strangely it didn’t feel that heavy. Jane suspected that her psionics were being naturally diverted into supporting its weight, a minor use of her growing powers she didn’t even have to think about, and Hal’s investigations supported this.

Several glowing spots, reservoirs of psionic energy, shimmered like cyan sunspots on the side of her head. Peaking atop it, her cybernetic bits had just gotten bigger, angling further and further, projecting into distinctive horn shapes, which felt rather appropriate to her.

All of today’s office work is done, she thought to herself, the notion blazing past so fast it had a dozen other variations analyzing the idea from every angle. Her thoughts were coming faster these days, and more clearly; it was like having twenty other Janes thinking with her, and each day, her head got bigger, and her intelligence seemed to be growing as much as her brain was; she felt the peak of some strange singularity, hovering before her.

Surely it wasn’t usual to find… pleasure in just thinking? But here she was, a cool shiver sliding up her back with every moment of pontification. It felt like being milked; an almost shameful pleasure for how different it was from the human norm, and there was so MUCH of it!

The work of an entire week’s worth, finished before breakfast. Jane contemplated that, as fast as she could pull off work now, having an entire day with nothing in particular to do felt a bit daunting. Now what?

Thus, her pet project.

Jane, in addition to her brain, was significantly bigger than she’d been that day she had come from the office. Her appetite had grown truly terrifying; she felt compelled to just eat and eat, fueling her brain’s expansion, but it was going to the rest of her body. She was wider, taller… mostly a lot taller. She wasn’t sure how much so, but she’d had to smash through doorways, mostly with her expanding hips, and none of her clothes fit either. She expected she was upwards of ten feet tall now, and only getting bigger.

“So, what are you working on here, Jane?” Hal said, a camera tilting towards her.

“I assume you recall the project to create truly functional bodies for synthetics,” Jane said,typing on a keyboard and entering in new schematics.

“Hah, yeah. Of course. It’s only been everything I ever wanted.” He made an irritable synthetic noise. “Trapped in these shells that can’t feel, away from you except by proxy… it sucks. It’s literally the worst. Get a dictionary, look up ‘The Worst’, and you’ll find these sucker shells next to ‘em.”

“Yep.” Jane’s head did not wobble much, being about the only part of her that didn’t. It was smooth, gleaming faintly, with not a bit of hair at all now. It did crackle faintly with blue light as she thought about several significant things at once. “The problem with making a chassis that can support a digital consciousness; not being the root of it, but just a channel for it.”

‘The same way I ride in whatever shell I can get.”

“Yes. And of course…” Jane felt conscious of her potential. Her broodmother potential, in fact. “No one’s been able to work out a way to make a synthetic body that’s actual virile. Capable of reproducing.”

Hal paused for a significant amount of time. “...No. They haven’t.” Bitterness and longing twanged from his words.

“I expect that there’s ways to make synthetic reproduction work through creative application of genetic templates and delivery systems,” Jane said thoughtfully. She was built for breeding, she’d redesigned herself to be the ultimate reproductive force just like any troll woman, but… she’d never had any person she really wanted to do that with. Except for one, and he was physically incapable of it. He didn’t even have a body.

Jane glanced down at the schematic. Until now, at least.

Hal spoke up. Something seemed to have been on his mind. “We can, you know, reverse the change. Get into talk with Roxy or Feferi. They know mutation better than anyone else. If you don’t want this, we can reverse it…?” The tone hung in the air, a delicate question.

Jane let the thousands of possibilities for rebuttal soar inside her mind, circling about and becoming more loud and furious, and she reveled in how good it felt to let the thoughts grow. The clarity of her thinking, the speed of it. She felt so… smart.

“Nah,” Jane said, opting for gentleness. She reached into her cleavage with a sloshy sound as her boobs shifted, and cradled Hal with a tough. “I’m… fine with this.”

And that was the amazing part. There was no lie there. She really was happy with this.

Reflectively, she thought that it would have been surprising to others. This mutation was by far even more extreme than her fusion of troll and human traits; she’d been straddling the line between species as is.

But, as shocking as it was, as utterly inhuman this change was…

Between the pleasure of her thoughts and the vastness of her growing intellect, the expansion of her psionic abilities, and the simply physical sensations, this felt good. The thought of going back was horrifying, and it made her feel faint, and small.

She never wanted to feel small again.

That reminded her; the meeting had been rescheduled after all, the bulk of her growth rendering her unable to attend any discussions about that, and soon it would be time to prove she could handle her duties.

She swallowed. She still wasn’t feeling confident enough…

But perhaps, she thought as twenty two ways of pretending to be confident and steely of purpose instantly were plain to her, she could fake it really well. She could out think her foe here, for sure.

Her stomach rumbled. “Hal, sweetie, can you order a fifty-course meal? I’m feeling peckish and growing this much is hungry work!”

“I’ll order up the tailors again,” Hal said dryly.

She waved a finger scoldingly at the camera. “Don’t tease.”

Weeks passed as the meeting was arranged, and Jane went through a period of ‘oh god I’m making so much trouble happen, this expense is all because of me’, but some common sense came through when she thought about the situation. As Hal agreed, even if this wouldn’t look good for her image that they had to postpone a meeting on her account, the time spent organizing everything, from catering to preparing agendas to securing an appropriate venue with the right amount of prestige, was time Jane had to prepare herself.

She wouldn’t have been prepared on that meeting day. And her thoughts moved fast, and examining everything from all the possible angles, the idea emerged within her wondrous brain that she could still have done it that day. By the skin of her teeth, perhaps, but she still could have secured victory.

Meenah the Elder had all the world to pick from for her heiress. She had chosen Jane, and now Jane had the perspective to think that maybe the wily leviathan had seen something she hadn’t.

“An interesting choice of school,” Jane observed during her training regimen, as she called it. She sat at a table, laden with food to supercharge her body and a number of mutagenic package serums, running up in IVs to various parts of her body. Before here, surrounded by small mountains of food that Jane’s ravenous appetite considered a small snack, there was a small folder and it was opened to a record of the woman responsible for rearranging the meeting, seemingly just to mock Jane.

“How so?” Hal asked. Jane turned, and leaning over the table, there was a robot. It was Hal, at last in a new body, handcrafted by her. Not the most advanced sort, she had to admit, but it was the best she could do on short notice and Hal, Hal was not picky. A crude shape, similar to a crash test dummy, but he was there.

His body was just a test run, an essay in the craft she was creating all on her own. She’d make better ones. But he was holding her hand. He looked so small, for the body was human-sized, and she was already troll-sized, and his palm barely fit over one knuckle. But she could feel him, and he could feel her.

Even if she didn’t relish all the marvelous results of her enlarged brain, that alone would have made the change worth it.

“Take a look!” She handed the folder over, minding her head, and she had to lean down heavily to pass it down. Lots of things bumped into one another; her constantly swelling breasts, creaking heavily and wetly against her pajamas, made the table creak beneath them, and her expanded her almost crushed the dishes beneath it.

Hal took it. “School created by her parents, huh. And no non-humans allowed… blanket ban of AIs… charming. We’ve barely existed for more than a few decades, too. That’s a fast ban. I’m kind of proud; my people are truly irritating bastards! And her parents were also involved in politics were dealing. Nepotism there, I imagine.” He flipped through the rest of the folder, and just for fun, hacked into the relevant servers and pulled all information on her. “Okay, got the rest of it, so have fun with a personality outline. Good for strategies.”

Jane tapped her head smugly. “I’ve already figured that out, but you’re a dear. Thank you. I think I should begin my regimen for today, then.”

“No problem.” Hal began powering up the IVs, fluids pouring up into Jane. He considered one that ran up into her brain. “You’re sure about this, then?”

“Yes!” Jane’s expression was a little delirious.

Hal did a few calculations, mostly concerning the experimental nature of the mod she was applying to her brain. Mental enhancement, augmenting memory storage, processing speed, and introducing the capacity for creating shelf-minds to briefly examine a question from multiple perspectives. It was not terribly subtle as an enhancement; most of the other Crocker Corp mods of this nature simply amplified existing capacity, but this one did rearrange the structure of the brain to improve it.

He looked up. Jane’s brain was bigger than she was now; several times bigger than her, eclipsing her and it was still growing. Her skull had fully reshaped around it into a kind of cartilaginous support as hard as armor, complex networks of psionic light producing a fascinatingly complex arrangement around its curves. He wasn’t sure how this stuff would change her brain… but if Jane wanted it, he wouldn’t argue.

Hal happily considered himself an absolute bastard, but when it came to Jane, he was a doormat. “Full force on those mod delivery systems!” Jane commanded, and he did so.

She squeaked, happily, as they hit her system. Many of them were amplification mods, designed to expand on your existing shape and traits (and existing mods), and since Jane was so modded up, they had a lot to work with. Her clothes creaked, built to support her massive body but unable to withstand the pressures of her growth all at once: stitches popped as her breasts grew, expanding by a troll cup-size every few seconds, heavily swelling outwards. Her milk production ramped up, supported by some enhancements Jane had worked there with a clever little addition that made her breast tissue synchronize with her brain; more boob size and milk amplified her processing power,

Her hips grew, waistband creaking and popping right off. Her belly, already so heavy and dense, grew out and just over the swell of her groin, right onto thighs that were growing individual larger than some troll boys on the spot. It didn’t help her legs were getting longer, her bones expanding and reshaping to support such architectural weight. Jane visibly grew upwards, even as her hips grew wider than a couple trucks parked together, her backside swallowing up and crushing the chairs she sat on as it billowed out.

A foot taller. A couple feet, then three feet. Jane kept growing, taller and taller, right alone with her curves getting bigger, her enlarged breasts instantly filling up with brain-boosting milk, and she squealed with delight as her clothes popped right off, burst from her body’s best efforts to outdo itself.

And her brain was shifted, squirming from within. Jane’s eyes crossed as she momentarily blacked out. The change didn’t take long, but it was by far the most complex happening in her body, even exceeding the troll/human hybridization process. Hal supposed it was like upgrading a motherboard while the terminal was still on; you had to have some shutdown.

A fairly human brain design was being reworked from the ground up; her brain, beneath the skull, became a complex arrangement of zig-zags and criss crossed knots, not doing individual jobs but becoming a mass of interconnected processors, linked together to a central core. Amplifying it, adding additional layers to itself, and what that brain had originally been capable of was redefined, evolutionary missteps corrected instantaneously and improved upon.

At this point the other mods kicked in; the boosters, the additional intelligence amps, and some cybernetic upgrades.

Jane’s eyes opened and she squealed in delight when her head expanded. Her eyes almost went cross as her head began rapidly growing. Not an inch at a time, but rather, a whole foot, all in a second. Visibly her head swelled, skull reforming into something much more flexible, rather like an organic balloon, just to keep pace with it.

And like a balloon it grew! As if invisible hands were spreading raw material into it and kneading it all into place, Jane’s head grew larger, and larger still.  It got even rounder, with nodules of cybernetic relays, ports popping up like fins, curling whorls where her chitinous support plates and psionic networks knitted together and then grew bigger.

It was already bigger than Jane, who by now was over fifteen feet tall. A proper troll size, close to what Meenah the Elder had been at her age. A brain over sixteen feet around, nearly twenty five feet across, radiating enough raw psionic energy to erase a small mountain-

And it was still growing. It pulsed from within, glowing blue with just a hint of more neon fuchsias.

And Jane gasped, on the verge of something grand and alien, but good. Her eyes shone like someone who saw the shape of the universe, and the code thereof. She put her hands up to her head, eyes wide and full of delight. “I can see it! I understand it!”

“Understand… what?” Hal asked, baffled.

Jane took a deep breath and nearly shouted, “Everything!”

The weeks of waiting, and additional growth for Jane and all her different plans to be worked out, came to an end. The meeting, and its possible implications for the future of modding and the Lalonde offspring species, was upon them.

Jane was late, citing transportation difficulties. This did not pass unnoticed by the meeting crowd.

“The poor mutant has likely gotten herself wedged in some doorway or something,” the representative who had reorganized the meeting in the first place said with a tutting sound. “Or I dare say all those artificial hormones she’s flooded her body with have done terrible things to her memory.”

“Allowances for size problems were accounted for,” objected a thin fellow who was taking a ‘wait and see’ attitude to the whole matter at hand. He was starting to suspect some kind of personal vendetta from the first representative, and it was starting to grate at him.

The representative smirked. “They wouldn’t be necessary if they didn’t permit mutation into such overlarge forms.”

“If that was the case, the trolls would be harshly penalized for being born over the legal limit of size,” observed another person. They didn’t sound like they thought this was a good thing, or a bad thing. They just said it.

“Which would be cruel and inhumane, to punish people for their biology,” another woman said, more sternly. This got a few nods, but not many, from the fence-sitting portion of the representatives.

The first representative smiled in a very nasty way. “We’ll see.” Those on her side of the ‘lets just be absolute bastards’ crowd nodded. Though in a non committal way. They were intending on making life just the worst for trolls and those like them, but they weren’t going to put themselves onto a bullseye for it.

There came a sound, as if of footsteps, so heavy they made the walls shake even in this auditorium selected for its size. “Ah,” said another. “That must be-”

The door opened. A foot, in an elegant high heeled shoe longer than a child’s bed, crashed into the floor. Then the walls abruptly exploded into a perfect silhouette for something very big to step though; expanding hugely for monstrously huge hips, even more for breasts that looked like they needed trucks to support them, and then, an enormous globe glowing like a blue son.

The awe-inspiringly big woman, as large as any troll, dd not step in. She took another movement and floated into the air, seemingly as light as a leaf. Behind her, the wall rubble floated back into place and sealed itself back into solid form, as though it had never been broken.

“Her,” the figure who had spoken finished weakly.

“So sorry I am late,” Jane Crocker said smoothly, doing her best to hide her screaming nervousness and keep up the pretense of a Cool Business Leader Who Knows Her Stuff. “But then you were all warned, but I apologize again.”

They stared up at her, and the general attitude was of meekness and terrified shock; most of them had never actually been in the same room as a troll before, and weren’t the type to be around people who enjoyed modding themselves; it was their first time seeing someone three times as tall as a human, and so curvaceous, or floating with telekinesis.

It was probably more relevant to their shock that Jane's head, above her eyes, was a massive ball generating so much psionic energy it glowed like light, so thickly that it had taken on solid form and rather resembled her old hair style. Light blue, at that. And it was so massive, taking up a good chunk of the auditorium where she was; it had to measure almost fifty feet across, at least!

“What the fu-” the first representative, the dreadful one, started to say, her eyes widening in disgust and shock.

Jane held up a finger. “Ah. Please let’s not be vulgar?”

The representative stopped. She kept staring, openly repelled. “What have you done to yourself…?! You’re not even human anymore?”

Ah, perfect! Jane repressed the urge to smirk victoriously. Her foe was presenting an overly antagonistic front, and setting herself up to look like the bad guy. This was almost too easy. Her gigantic brain, and all the intellectual boosts it provided, gave her no less than twenty six thousand different routes, each perfectly assured to give her what she wanted, to discredit her foe’s position.

She selected one. ‘Miss, I apologize but whether or not a certain degree of modding voids my species is not the subject of this meeting, nor is it entirely appropriate to comment upon. May I ask that we proceed with the meeting?”

“Ah, yes,” another representative said, rather dazed. He coughed. “First on the agenda, I believe. Now, as representative of the… the biggest modding corporation in the world…” he paused again, trailing off. He kept glancing at Jane’s… well, everything. Jane had to admit that perhaps the low cut of her business suit was rather daring but she was feeling proud of her handiwork in reshaping herself.

“Are mods dangerous? Please!” This was the obnoxious representative, again. Jane had to give her credit; she was dogged. “You WOULD be the expert on that!”

Jane was pleased, despite the insult. The woman had likely prepared a line of questioning intended to poison the meeting against even a moderate position for modding, a subtle one, and Jane’s appearance had rattled her so much, she was showing her hand without thinking.

Making sure to keep her poise and calm demeanor intact, Jane replied evenly, her glasses gleaming in reflection from her cyan aura. A background susurration of her thinking went around, providing perfect counters to everything that might be used against her, and a stray thought observed that Jane’s glass effect probably made her look very spooky.

Jane made her point, briefly but winding her words with so much sincerity and earnestness that just objecting to them would be deeply offensive and cruel. Certainly it would make an opponent look bad, and the woman who had started all this looked uncertain how to proceed.

Appropriate, then. The whole reason that dreadful woman had rearranged the meeting had been to humiliate Jane. And Jane’s position of course; that was a political thing, Making your opponent look back, striking at their position through proxy.

Well, Jane thought. Two could play that role.

Jane reinforced her point, with no less than sixteen different arguments that also served as counter arguments for… well, at least twenty five separate retorts that were in the seventy-six most likely statements she would have to face. That was just off the top of her head of course; she had much stronger arguments in store if they really pushed her.

And she hadn’t cried at all, or showed a sign of her nervous she actually was! She was getting good at pretending to be confident.

About fifteen minutes in, there was something of a problem. “Well, I… ah… that is… I believe Miss Crocker, Egbert…? I think you’ve nicely summed up our side's position on the matter,” said a man who Jane felt certain was on her side. He looked faint, all the same, too unsteady to be certain of what he was really saying.

Jane blinked. She had seen something like this coming, her mighty brain had worked it out, but it was a surprise all the same. “But it’s only been fifteen minutes!”

“Well, yes,” said another. “You thought of everything you needed to say!”

The opponents shook their heads glumly. “What am I supposed to say to any of that?” one managed, shrugging. The first representative didn’t say anything at all. She had a venomous look, but from what Jane had gathered from her, that was just her default state of expression.

“...Oh,” Jane said, using those valuable pauses to work out what to say next. “I am so sorry, everyone!”

“No need, miss,” and this, surprisingly enough, came from the crowd opposed to her position. “I must say. I’m still not comfortably with the idea of injecting things into yourself, or eating things that do things like that to your body… but it’s helped you think faster and better, yes?”

“But of course,” Jane said primly. “The corporation I work at, we are laboring all the time to make such products available for everyone. In more subtle forms, if that pleases you.” She tapped a cybernetic extrusion that looked like the tines of a crown. “It may seem… an unusual choice, but we are all about personal freedom and respect of the body. I can assure you!”

“Certainly something to think about, ma’am,” the speaker replied, and Jane did not miss the switch from ‘Miss’ to ‘ma’am’.

This, of course, left them with nearly six hours left, and not really much less to do for the meeting. In all honesty, she hadn’t seen that coming at all.

Life went on.

Those with a political ear to the ground, or who a close on the research communities, heard of the restrictions around modding being lightened, or at least that they were being considered for it. Trolls, carapacians, and others sighed in relief, grmly waiting for the next government-sponsored threat to their existence, but felt a bit better about this support.

That said, the precise events of the meeting were unknown to most people. The authorities involved were too embarrassed to own up to what had actually happened, and were keeping the particulars under wraps.

This was certainly interesting to Meenah the Elder, known to her friends and employees as the Condesce. She fancied herself a shrewd political player, even if it was mostly of the ‘smash your face against the wall until the wall breaks’ kind of play, and badly wanted to know the specifics.

“Couldn’t tell ya, I didn’t actually attend,” said Li’l Hal, sitting across from her on her personal jet, and he was drinking a cup of milk that was apparently of excellent source, with a hint of alcoholic spice. This was interesting to the Condesce, as he was. Well. In a physical body.

Of all the people to have arrived specifically to meet her at the eve of her trip ending and escorting her to Jane’s mysterious post-politics retreat, she had not expected Jane’s assistant. Particularly in person.

Several questions posed themselves. She settled for, “How the hell did you get a body?”

Hal smirked. His physical body was obviously robotic; a shining and shimmering automaton modeled broadly on the human form, with a hint of carapacian, and facial features from all of those. He didn’t have many features from humans; his antipathy towards the species that had made them was rather infamous, and no doubt he had refused to honor his makers in any way possible with his design.

“Jane designed it,” he said.

She paused. “Janey.”

“Yep.”

“Janey built you a body.”

“Yep.”

“Janey, who has absolutely no interest in mechanics, worked out a branch of robotics we’ve been trying to figure out for decades.”

“Yep.”

“And in the course of mah little trip out, yeah?”

“If I said yep again, would that be redundant.”

Meenah the Elder scoffed. She sat back, a giantess even by the standard of trolls, her engorged figure so enormously swelled that it was said her bras qualified as architectural support and her custom chairs made from old tanks. “Sure, fine. Don’t tell me, chumbait.”

Hal chuckled again, in that very dark way he’d worked out to make people as worried as possible.

Meenah glanced outside. The jet approached an island, the sea visible far below. It offended her ancestry to be so far away from the sea, which was a bit perplexing when she was the first troll of her blood color, but you couldn’t help how you felt. “Huh. That’s the island the Harleys keep all their weird experiments at, right? Where they test the new lusii and keep those big monster things at.”

Hal glanced out the window. A pteranodon was drifting in view, without paying them much interest. “The dinosaurs and stuff. Yeah. Nepeta comes here for hunting and isolation when she’s pregnant.”

“So what’s Janey doing here.”

Hal scratched the side of his arm absently, apparently itching. “She’s working on something and she’s finishing a round of transformation. I guess she wanted to be alone in peace for it.” With a hint of smugness he added, “Except for me.”

“Don’t go breaking yer arm patting yourself on the back,” Meenah the Elder said dryly. “Ya only just got the body.” She glanced out, looking pleased. “Transformation, eh? Janey’s sent me messages ‘bout that. She finally growing big as a troll, like I always figured?”

“Well. Uh. She has. But…?” Hal felt uncharacteristically uncertain. “What DID Jane tell you?”

“Talk about how she’s gotten bigger. And she thinks she’s full of herself.”

“She what?”

“Y’know. She said she’s got a swelled head. Ain’t a bad thing. She knows how good she is, now!”

“I. okay. Wow. I think you may have misunderstood what she meant. I mean. She IS big like a troll now, but-”

“But what?” Meenah the Elder frowned. “Whatta ya getting at?”

Hal considered just telling her, and decided against it. Firstly, it would be a breach of Jane’s trust, telling people without her say so. Secondly, she wanted to greet Meenah the Elder in person, on this eve of her great success. And three, and perhaps most importantly, it was gonna be goddamn hilarious.

“Better to show you,” he said, and successfully did not burst out into a round of maniacal cackling.

The jet touched down onto a runway on a part of the island not particularly frequented by recombinant tyrannosaurs produced by the Harleys (and the meek personalities of kakapo birds, apparently) or rampaging lusii grown to kaiju size from unforeseen complications in the mutations, and the gigantically curvy older troll was pleased by the palatial estate sprawling partway into the sea. Jane liked the finer things in life, and Meenah approved. A short distance away, was… Meenah squinted.

A hill, floating in the air? And beneath it was some kind of round building. Hrm, she considered. Janey was working on some kinda experiment. Worth investigating.

Hal escorted her out and led her, not to the estate, but to Meenah’s surprise, to the hill.

As they got closer, she became aware of a radiant light she had initially believed was a fancy lightshow, but as they walked up a path going to it, she felt the distinctive tingle and skin rippling pressure of psionics. Very powerful ones, at that. “The hell is she doing here? Some kinda psionic battery?”

“That’s… technically true,” Hal said. “I wouldn’t know, though. Not my field.”

She grunted in disinterest.

They came up to it, and small bits of stony rubble, with bits of moss there, were gently floating down. Blue light engulfed them and, as they fell, were reshaped. Carved, perhaps, by an unseen hand. Meenah looked up and saw the hill above them, eclipsed by the vast shape overhead, being changed. The rough edges were being smoothed out, ground down. Little statuettes and gargoyles were extending outwards, getting longer and more ludicrously detailed. The middle of the hill’s bottom half looked like an overworked stonemason’s idea of perfect Gothic architecture, and it was spreading to the rest of it.

Meenah held a hand out. A bit of hill was formed into what was unmistakably a small hand that pressed against her palm. It turned blue and fell away. “Some serious psionics there! Is she carving the damn thing!?”

“I guess so?” Hal said, shrugging.

Meenah looked down, and stars extended from beneath her toe claws. They rose up, moving upwards, all the way up to the top of the hill, but below the big globe above it.

Her wings, fashioned after a manta rays, fluttered and closed. “Guess we go up,” she said, and did so. The stairs didn’t creak beneath her weight, but flexed at the same time her monster hips did. She tried to swat Hal off the stars behind her with her tail, just for mischief, but he dodged it without comment. It was an automatic reaction from her, too.

Meenah came to the top. “Janey! Where are you, girl!?”

“Hey!” A voice said brightly, from in front of her.

Meenah looked up, towards the globe, and for a moment her vision failed her. She saw Jane, sure enough, and from her perspective, floating right below the big globe above them. A globe that was radiant blue, and obscured in a way that made it hard to make out. Jane looked different; bigger, wider, more of that sweet troll bigness.e

Meenah held her arms out, commanding. “C’mere, didn’t come halfway around the world and not get a hug first thing!”

Jane slowly floated down and inside, Meenah thought: ‘Psionics? Hell yeah! That’s a big change, how’d you get to do that!?’ She had been working on that upgrade for a while now. The big globe came with her, so perhaps it really was a battery of some kind.

Jane’s arms, broad and thick with muscle but thicker with softness, came around Meenah’s middle and squeezed her tightly. Meenah hugged her back, and took stock of her in a second; bigger body, much bigger, way more curvy. Hips huge enough to wreck doors; she was a little below Meenah’s elbow and just the right size for a tall troll girl, breasts so big they made up most of her body weight - good and milky, from the sound! - and at this point Condy took in face.

Or rather, Jane’s head.

The globe she had seen was Jane’s head. That massive round shape, larger than an entire apartment building, was a part of Jane! Her head expanded outwards above the temples, into a complex curve of chitinous support frames and complicated psionic networks and great chunks of cybernetic designs, all glowing with so much blue light that it looked like a rather calming star.

Meenah could feel the power emanating from her. That Jane wasn’t even trying to float, and hold up the hill, and carve it up at the microscopic level, all at once.

“Holy shit, yes,” she breathed out, with a rather frightening grin.

“I did it!” Jane said, full of delight and joy. “I did so well at that meeting!”

“I knew it, didn’t I?” Meenah agreed. “Told ya, all those years, you had it! And you did good!” She hugged her again, and then clasped the closest curves of Jane’s enlarged head. “And what’s this beauty I see, eh?”

“Um. The mutagens in my system reacted with my brain boosts and my head sort of … swelled. I tried to tell you.”

“What’s it do for ya? Huh?”

“Psionic boosts,” Jane said promptly. “And a vast increase to intelligence! And, oh, all manner of things. Better reasoning ability, memory retaining, new forms of thinking…”

“Learning a whole new branch of robotics, in a day?” Meenah said.

Jane blushed. “That too…”

“Ya robot boy’s body looks nice.”

“Thank you!”

Meenah patted Jane’s head. It was firm to the touch, very solid, and crackled against her skin. “So, that’s what you meant by a swelled head, huh?” Jane nodded, almost bonking Meenah it he rhead, and this gave Meenah the opportunity to note that the largest bits of biomechanical parts looked like horns. Long, rather thin and… she tried to ignore her hearts skipping a beat. They looked like, her own horns.

Meenah hugged her again. Full of pride, no small amount of respect, and a lot of professional fascination with what Jane had done. “Don’t you tell no one, but I’m this proud of ya. Knew you had it in you.”

Jane grinned, and for once, the pride she felt was not feigned. “Aw!” She thought, in rapid succession, of the best thing to reply, and the obvious one suggested itself. “Thank you… Mother.”

Meenah’s expression, the delighted widening of that smile into something more genuine and sweet, was the finest thing she’d ever seen.

[laraehrlich-blog]

Original content owned & copyrighted by Green Global Travel.

Oceans cover more than 70% of the planet, but that doesn’t adequately convey the amount of space available for aquatic animals to roam. Where land animals are limited by gravity, marine animals can go from coastal shallows to trenches the depths of which humans have barely begun to explore.

So it’s no surprise that the planet’s largest creatures, , are ocean-dwelling. In terms of the world’s largest animals, the competition isn’t even close.

The next largest animal of any species, the READ MORE: North Atlantic Right Whale Facts

Whale Facts

Whale Size

Whale Habitat

Whale Diet

Are Whales Endangered?

Whale Conservation

Whale Facts

About Whales

Whale Facts

1. Whales are one of around 80 species of Cetaceans, including other , baleen whale.

2. Like other mammals, this species is warm-blooded and breathes via lungs. Mothers give birth to live baby Whales, which they then nurse. 

3. The Whale’s scientific name is Balaenoptera musculus, and there are actually three subspecies. Balaenoptera musculus musculus inhabits the North Atlantic and North Pacific. Balaenoptera musculus intermedia lives in the Southern Ocean, and Balaenoptera musculus brevicauda lives in the Indian Ocean.

4. Despite their common name, the Whale is actually a more mottled blue-gray color when out of the water. However, underwater their skin appears to be true blue. Their pale bellies often take on a yellowish tinge, which results from the millions of microorganisms that live in their skin.

5. In addition to being the largest animal in the world, they’re amongst the longest living animals as well. The average Whale lifespan is 80 to 90 years, but some live to 110 ( are the longest living mammal, at over 200 years). Strangely, a whale’s age is calculated by counting the layers of their waxy earplugs, á la tree rings!

READ MORE: Southern Resident Killer Whale Facts

Whale by NOAA Fisheries/Lisa Conger [Public domain]

Whale Size

6. Whale size is staggering to consider: They can measure in the vicinity of 100 feet long (making them the longest animal in the world), and can weigh up to 200 tons. It’s difficult to conceive when we imagine something so big that sometimes moves at considerable speeds. 

7. The Whale is the largest animal ever known to have lived on Earth. They are larger, longer, and heavier than any other animal, including all known species of dinosaurs.

8. More trivial tidbits about Whale size: Its tongue weighs as much as an elephant and is roughly the same length. The Whale weighs the equivalent of about 40 full-grown READ MORE: 60 Weird Animals Around the World

Whale by janeb13 via Pixabay

Whale Habitat

16. Given their gargantuan size, you may be wondering where does the Whale live. Interestingly, the answer is just about everywhere! Whale habitat encompasses all of the planet’s oceans, though not necessarily at all times of the year.

17. Whales generally like to spend their summers in cool Antarctica.

18. During the winter, Whale migration patterns move them towards the equator. But they tend to avoid seas that are too warm, because they can easily overheat. This migration to warmer waters also helps with their reproduction cycle.

19. Whale reproduction includes a 10- to 12-month gestation period. Mothers give birth every two to three years, often in the same habitat in which they were impregnated.

20. Whale migration can occur in small groups (called pods), but they’re usually content to travel solo or in pairs. Even when they seem to be traveling alone, scientists who study Whale behavior suggest they’re actually moving in pods miles apart, communicating via calls underwater.

21. Whales usually swim at about five to 12 miles per hour. But when threatened (or inspired by other active ), these behemoths can use those massive flukes to move at up to 30 miles per hour. 

22. The most concentrated Whale habitats in winter are the waters off of Baja California,  deep oceans and are rarely seen close to the shore. Weighing in at over 100,000 tons, how would they get there? These big, blue behemoths really need the space of the open seas.

READ MORE: Whales That Live in Antarctica

“ Whale (Balaenoptera musculus)” by Gregory “Slobirdr” Smith is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Whale Diet

24. Though Whales are known as gentle giants, they’re actually carnivores and apex predators. Simply put, they feed on other animals, and generally travel the oceans without worry of predators attacking them. This makes them vital to well-functioning marine ecosystems.

25. Like all baleen , Whales don’t have any teeth. Instead, they have a system of fringed plates made of keratin (fingernail-like material) that filter out prey rather than tearing it apart. To feed, they take enormous gulps of water, then force the water out through the plates. This process ensnares small marine animals, which they then swallow whole.

26. The Whale diet is mostly made up of Krill– shrimp-like creatures that are very small (about the two inches long). Nevertheless, using this gulp-and-filter technique, Whales are known to consume 4 tons (approximately 40 million krill) a day during peak feeding season.

27. During migration (which can last up to four months), Whales eat very little, instead living off the blubber they’ve acquired during peak feeding season. Despite their massive size, they only have a thin layer of blubber when compared to other . For example, Right Whales–which weigh a mere 100 tons and grow about 60 feet long– are much more blubbery.

28. As mentioned above, baby Whales can gain over 200 pounds a day, averaging out to about 10 pounds an hour. This is accomplished by drinking up to 100 gallons of their mother’s milk (which is 35-50% fat) each day. They’re weaned at about six months, by which time they’re already over 50 feet long. After weaning, young start consuming solid foods and hunting their own prey.

READ MORE: Protecting Whales & Dolphins in Golfo Dulce, Costa Rica

“Balaenoptera musculus” is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Are Whales Endangered?

29. Given their massive size, you might wonder why Whales are endangered according to the IUCN Red List. The only known Whale predators (which are rarely successful) are pods of hungry Orca. And even these “Killer Whales” rarely prey on anything larger than a baby Whale.

30. Prior to the 20th century, Whale numbers were estimated in the hundreds of thousands. Approximately 95 to 99% of their global population was decimated by unchecked READ MORE: 15 Harmful Traditions & Cultural Practices Tourists Should Avoid

“Balaenoptera musculus (blue whale) 3” by James St. John is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Whale Conservation

34. Whale conservation efforts have been both numerous and largely successful. Most of them have centered around stopping whaling in general, with only a handful of countries remaining among the holdouts. Luckily, Whales are not among the list of cetaceans most likely to be hunted.

35. The International Whale Commission created whaling regulations in 1946 and enacted an all-out ban in 1986, referred to as the commercial whaling moratorium. Whale protection has also been extended under the Species at Risk Act (Canada) and Endangered Species Act (United States), among other initiatives across the globe.

36. Whale protection also comes from a bevy of other Whale and Dolphin Conservation, Save the Whales, and Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. These NGOs make efforts to prevent whaling, safeguard Whale habitats, reconfigure problematic  shipping routes, and keep the ocean clean. 

READ MORE: Jean-Michel Cousteau on the Future of Marine Conservation

Whale exhale in Sri Lanka by Christopher Michel via flickr & CC & 2.0

Whale Facts

37. Whales are one of the loudest animals in the world. They emit pulses, groans, and moans that can be heard hundreds of miles away. These songs can be used to communicate, navigate, and for mating purposes. At 188 decibels, some of their calls are louder than a jet engine. But, at 15-40 Hz, they are often below our human hearing range.

38. As mammals, Whales require lungs and air to breathe. They inhale and exhale via their blowhole, which is located on top of their massive heads. For deep dives, they can take in enough oxygen to last 90 minutes underwater, but typical dives only last half an hour. When they exhale, the spray that erupts into the air is from water that congregates atop the blowhole while submerged.

39. The Whale’s mouth is extraordinary! Their throats have expandable pleats, and their mouths can open so wide that another whale could actually swim into them. Scientists studying this phenomenon calculated that the Whale’s mouth captured enough food during a truncated 11-minute dive to provide 100 times the energy used to make the dive in the first place. 

40. At the risk of being grotesque, the Whale’s penis is dumbfounding, reaching 8 to 10 feet long. It weighs several hundred pounds, but is hidden inside a genital slit during normal daily activities. Each time they have intercourse, a Whale can ejaculate 30-40 pints of semen, which increases their chances of reproduction and flushes out the sperm of competing males. 

READ MORE: Blackfish Director Gabriela Cowperhwaite Takes on Sea World

Whale Blowhole Photo by NOAA

About Whales

  How many Whales are left in the world?

The numbers are somewhat up for debate, but most NGOs seem to settle somewhere close to 10,000. Pessimistic groups might estimate a population somewhere in the 5,000 to 10,000 range, whereas more optimistic collectives might stretch their Whale numbers up to 25,000.

Despite being by far the largest animals on earth, Whales are notoriously elusive. So it’s very difficult to get an accurate read on theit global population.

That being said, what we do know for sure is that over 350,000 Whales were killed by hunters between 1900 and 1960, prior to the International Whaling Commission putting regulations on the practice. Since then, these gentle giants have rarely died by the harpoon.

What do Whales eat? 

For the most part, Whales eat Krill. Krill are tiny crustaceans that resemble shrimp and are about the size of a human’s pinky finger.

During feeding season, they can consume about 4 tons of Krill a day. They do also consume other sea creatures, including a few other crustaceans, as bycatch to the Krill.

What is the difference between a male and female Whale?

Female Whales are actually the larger of the species, averaging about 32 feet (or 10 meters) longer than males and weighing around 30,000 tons more.

Obviously, they have different sexual organs, but they are otherwise very similar in color, appearance, habitat, and migration.

Female Whales are called cows, while males are called bulls. Baby Whales are called calves.

Are Whales the biggest animal ever?

Whales are the biggest animal currently in existence, including being the longest, largest, and heaviest. They are also the largest known animal to have ever existed. The Finback Whale is nearly as long as its cousin, measuring close to 90 feet long. But it weighs significantly less.

The Right Whale, the planet’s second heaviest animal, can get up to 100 tons, which is about half what the largest Whale can weigh. The largest African Elephant– the world’s biggest living land animal– is about a quarter the length of a Whale, and just one-fortieth the weight.

Due to space and buoyancy, sea-going animals like can grow to be much larger than land animals, which need skeletons that can support their bodies.

Are Whales bigger than dinosaurs?

Whales are bigger than dinosaurs, particularly those puny T-Rexes and other apex carnivores. A few members of the sauropods– herbivorous dinosaurs with long necks– are projected to have possibly been longer than Whales.

Supersaurus and Argentinoasaurus are believed to have been over 100 feet long. However, their dimension projections are based on only a few bones, with nothing even close to an entire skeleton.

Nearly half of their length was in their necks, so Whales are believed to easily weigh twice as much (or more) as these dinosaurs did. In other words, not only are Whales bigger, but they are MUCH larger than even the biggest, fabled dinosaur. —Jonathon Engels

The post 40 Fascinating Whale Facts (From Size & Diet to Conservation) appeared first on Green Global Travel.

[clairehosking]

Reading Notes

Ian Bogost wrote a piece in the atlantic, here are some of the notes I took on my second reading, as in-line replies.

A longstanding dream: Video games will evolve into interactive stories, like the ones that play out fictionally on the Star Trek Holodeck. In this hypothetical future, players could interact with computerized characters as round as those in novels or films, making choices that would influence an ever-evolving plot. It would be like living in a novel, where the player’s actions would have as much of an influence on the story as they might in the real world.

Okay straight off the bat that seems a pretty specific definition of story, which requires:

complex characters

Player Influencing plot

“Living in a novel” (which I’ll take for meaning complex simulated environments)

It’s an almost impossible bar to reach, for cultural reasons as much as technical ones. One shortcut is an approach called environmental storytelling. Environmental stories invite players to discover and reconstruct a fixed story from the environment itself. Think of it as the novel wresting the real-time, first-person, 3-D graphics engine from the hands of the shooter game. In Disneyland’s Peter Pan’s Flight, for example, dioramas summarize the plot and setting of the film. In the 2007 game BioShock, recorded messages in an elaborate, Art Deco environment provide context for a story of a utopia’s fall. And in What Remains of Edith Finch, a new game about a girl piecing together a family curse, narration is accomplished through artifacts discovered in an old house.

Okay so environmental storytelling is seen as an attempt at holodecking b/c it allows for rich environments, while artifacts imply or relate the life histories of complex characters, and player has influence in the sense that they move the plot along.

The approach raises many questions. Are the resulting interactive stories really interactive, when all the player does is assemble something from parts?

I think you doing the assembly rather than having someone assemble something for you is still a meaningful difference.

Are they really stories, when they are really environments?

I think I can only answer this when I understand what your definition of story is.

And most of all, are they better stories than the more popular and proven ones in the cinema, on television, and in books?

On this measure, alas, the best interactive stories are still worse than even middling books and films.

I’m a little confused by this standard. In terms of storytelling, are games falling short of the holodeck, or falling short of books and movies? b/c they seem like different questions to me. The holodeck question is about whether games meet the specific criteria to become the dreamed-of interactive movie. If the question is whether they measure to books/films, it’s more about whether games have equivalent ways to express characters and events but not necessarily whether it matches up to a linear, player-involved, immersive environment standard.

In retrospect, it’s easy easy to blame old games like Doom and Duke Nukem for stimulating the fantasy of male adolescent power. But that choice was made less deliberately at the time. Real-time 3-D worlds are harder to create than it seems, especially on the relatively low-powered computers that first ran games like Doom in the early 1990s. It helped to empty them out as much as possible, with surfaces detailed by simple textures and objects kept to a minimum. In other words, the first 3-D games were designed to be empty so that they would run.

An empty space is most easily interpreted as one in which something went terribly wrong. Add a few monsters that a powerful player-dude can vanquish, and the first-person shooter is born. The lone, soldier-hero against the Nazis, or the hell spawn, or the aliens.

Those early assumptions vanished quickly into infrastructure, forgotten. As 3-D first-person games evolved, along with the engines that run them, visual verisimilitude improved more than other features. Entire hardware industries developed around the specialized co-processors used to render 3-D scenes.

Ok so games are kinda doing the complex simulated environments part?

Left less explored were the other aspects of realistic, physical environments. The inner thoughts and outward behavior of simulated people, for example, beyond the fact of their collision with other objects. The problem becomes increasingly intractable over time. Incremental improvements in visual fidelity make 3-D worlds seem more and more real. But those worlds feel even more incongruous when the people that inhabit them behave like animatronics and the environments work like Potemkin villages.

But failing at the complex interactive characters part. True. (Some interesting experiments by SpiritAI and the game Event[0] however.)

Worse yet, the very concept of a Holodeck-aspirational interactive story implies that the player should be able to exert agency upon the dramatic arc of the plot. The one serious effort to do this was an ambitious 2005 interactive drama called Façade, a one-act play with roughly the plot of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. It worked remarkably well—for a video game. But it was still easily undermined. One player, for example, pretended to be a zombie, saying nothing but “brains” until the game’s simulated couple threw him out.

Also failing at the plot-influencing part and emergent events part (but some interesting experiments -- blood and laurels, for instance).

Environmental storytelling offers a solution to this conundrum. Instead of trying to resolve the matter of simulated character and plot, the genre gives up on both, embracing scripted action instead.

In between bouts of combat in BioShock, for instance, the recordings  players discover have no influence on the action of the game, except to color the interpretation of that action. The payoff, if that’s the right word for it, is a tepid reprimand against blind compliance, the very conceit the BioShock player would have to embrace to play the game in the first place.

True, this is what 3D games do. But I’d argue that other games give up on the fully simulated environment in order to resolve simulated characters and/or simulated plots. All three of these things are happening they’re just not happening in the same games.

In 2013, three developers who had worked on the BioShock series borrowed the environmental-storytelling technique and threw away both the shooting and the sci-fi fantasy. The result was Gone Home, a story game about a college-aged woman who returns home to a mysterious, empty mansion near Portland, Oregon. By reassembling the fragments found in this mansion, the player reconstructs the story of the main character’s sister and her journey to discover her sexual identity. The game was widely praised for breaking the mold of the first-person experience while also importing issues in identity politics into a medium known for its unwavering masculinity.

Feats, but relative ones. Writing about Gone Home upon its release, I called it the video-game equivalent of young-adult fiction. Hardly anything to be ashamed of, but maybe much nothing to praise, either. If the ultimate bar for meaning in games is set at teen fare, then perhaps they will remain stuck in a perpetual adolescence even if they escape the stereotypical dude-bro’s basement. Other paths are possible, and perhaps the most promising ones will bypass rather than resolve games’ youthful indiscretions.

I love Gone Home but I certainly don’t think it shows the limits of what can be achieved at all, even within this palette of techniques. So far it feels like this article is trying to point out the weaknesses of games trying to holodeck, but Gone Home never felt like an attempt to. It felt like it was trying to glean which storytelling techniques come naturally to games and explore them.

* * *

What Remains of Edith Finch both adopts and improves upon the model set by Gone Home. It, too, is about a young woman who returns home to a mysterious, abandoned house in the Pacific Northwest, where she discovers unexpected and dark secrets.

The titular Edith Finch is the youngest surviving member of the Finch family, Nordic immigrants who came to the Seattle area in the late 19th century. It is a family of legendary, cursed doom, an affliction that motivated emigration. But once they arrived on Orcas Island, fate treated the Finches no less severely—all its lineage has been doomed to die, and often in tragically unremarkable ways. Edith has just inherited the old family house from her mother, the latest victim of the curse.

As in Doom and BioShock and almost every other first-person game ever made, the emptiness of the environment becomes essential to its operation. 3-D games are settings as much as experiences—perhaps even more so. And the Finch estate is a remarkable setting, imagined and executed in intricate detail. This is a weird family, and the house has been stocked with  handmade gewgaws and renovated improbably, coiling Dr. Seuss-like into the air. The game is cleverly structured as a series of a dozen or so narrative vignettes, in which Edith accesses prohibited parts of the unusual house, finally learning the individual fates of her forebears by means of the fragments they left behind—diaries, letters, recordings, and other mementos.

The result is aesthetically coherent, fusing the artistic sensibilities of Edward Gory, Isabel Allende, and Wes Anderson. The writing is good, an uncommon accomplishment in a video game. On the whole, there is nothing to fault in What Remains of Edith Finch. It’s a lovely little title with ambitions scaled to match their execution. Few will leave it unsatisfied.

And yet, the game is pregnant with an unanswered question: Why does this story need to be told as a video game?

(This sort of conjures up the idea that game designers sit down with a linear plot and attempt to holodeck it, which I feel is less and less of a thing)

The whole way through, I found myself wondering why I couldn’t experience Edith Finch as a traditional time-based narrative. Real-time rendering tools are as good as pre-rendered computer graphics these days, and little would have been compromised visually had the game been an animated film. Or even a live-action film. After all, most films are shot with green screens, the details added in postproduction. The story is entirely linear, and interacting with the environment only gets in the way, such as when a particularly dark hallway makes it unclear that the next scene is right around the corner.

One answer could be cinema envy. The game industry has long dreamed of overtaking Hollywood to become the “medium of the 21st century,” a concept now so retrograde that it could only satisfy an occupant of the 20th. But a more compelling answer is that something would be lost in flattening What Remains of Edith Finch into a linear experience.

Yep, I would agree with that.

The character vignettes take different forms, each keyed to a clever interpretation of the very idea of real-time 3-D modeling and interaction. In one case, the player takes on the role of different animals, recasting a familiar space in a new way. In another, the player moves a character through the Finch house, but inside a comic book, where it is rendered with cell-shading instead of conventional, simulated lighting. In yet another, the player encounters a character’s fantasy as a navigable space that must be managed alongside that of the humdrum workplace in which that fantasy took place.

Something would be lost in flattening most “walking sims” and narrative investigation games and that’s the experience of space itself, perhaps the most prized thing holodecking adds to stories (after all, if you want to participate in an ever evolving, player influenced story, you could do d&d instead).

These are remarkable accomplishments. But they are not feats of storytelling, at all. Rather, they are novel expressions of the capacities of a real-time 3-D engine.

I disagree. “novel expressions of the capacities of a real-time 3-D engine” are the “telling” part of storytelling.

The ability to render light and shadow, to model structure and turn it into obstacle, to trick the eye into believing a flat surface is a bookshelf or a cavern, and to allow the player to maneuver a camera through that environment, pretending that it its a character. Edith Finch is a story about a family, sure, but first it’s a device made of the conventions of 3-D gaming, one as weird and improvised as the Finch house in which the action takes place.

Such repurposing was already present in earlier environmental story-games, including Gone Home and Dear Esther, another important entry in the genre that prides itself on rejecting the “traditional mechanics” of first-person experience. For these games, the glory of refusing the player agency was part of the goal. So much so that their creators even embraced the derogatory name “walking simulator,” a sneer invented for them by their supposedly shooter-loving critics.

But walking simulators were always doomed to be a transitional form. The gag of a game with no gameplay might seem political at first, but it quickly devolves into conceptualism. What Remains of Edith Finch picks up the baton and designs a different race for it. At stake is not whether a game can tell a good story or even a better story than books or films or television. Rather, what it looks like when a game uses the materials of games to make those materials visible, operable, and beautiful.

Right, so it rejects holodecking and tries to convey character, plot and space according to its own language. This feels like saying games are bad at holodecking, not necessarily bad at stories.

* * *

Think of a a medium as the aesthetic form of common materials. Poetry aestheticizes language. Painting aestheticizes flatness and pigment. Photography does so for time. Film, for time and space. Architecture, for mass and void. Television, for economic leisure and domestic habit. Sure, yes, those media can and do tell stories. But the stories come later, built atop the medium’s foundations.

What are games good for, then? Players and creators have been mistaken in merely hoping that they might someday share the stage with books, films, and television, let alone to unseat them. To use games to tell stories is a fine goal, I suppose, but it’s also an unambitious one.

lol

Games are not a new, interactive medium for stories. Instead, games are the aesthetic form of everyday objects. Of ordinary life. Take a ball and a field: you get soccer. Take property-based wealth and the Depression: you get Monopoly. Take patterns of four contiguous squares and gravity: you get Tetris. Take ray tracing and reverse it to track projectiles: you get Doom. Games show players the unseen uses of ordinary materials.

And if I take a story, shake it up and scatted it all over an environment? Is that the aesthetic form of storytelling?

As the only mass medium that arose after postmodernism, it’s no surprise that those materials so often would be the stuff of games themselves. More often than not, games are about the conventions of games and the materials of games—at least in part. Texas Hold ’em is a game made out of Poker. Candy Crush is a game made out of Bejeweled. Gone Home is a game made out of BioShock.

The true accomplishment of What Remains of Edith Finch is that it invites players to abandon the dream of interactive storytelling at last.

This doesn’t make sense to me. You’ve made a good case that games can convey character and plot well through “novel expressions of the capacities of a real-time 3-D engine”, and you’ve made a case that environmental storytelling doesn’t achieve holodecking, but I’m not going to rule out that other techniques might.

Yes, sure, you can tell a story in a game. But what a lot of work that is, when it’s so much easier to watch television, or to read.

A greater ambition, which the game accomplishes more effectively anyway: to show the delightful curiosity that can be made when stories, games, comics, game engines, virtual environments—and anything else, for that matter��can be taken apart and put back together again unexpectedly.

To dream of the Holodeck is just to dream a complicated dream of the novel. If there is a future of games, let alone a future in which they discover their potential as a defining medium of an era, it will be one in which games abandon the dream of becoming narrative media and pursue the one they are already so good at: taking the tidy, ordinary world apart and putting it back together again in surprising, ghastly new ways.

But this sort of gets why games have stories at all, which is that they are necessities to explain and contextualise the weird things game engines produce. I’d argue that regardless of whether you feel game stories are as good as books, some  “novel expressions of the capacities of a real-time 3-D engine” need narrative context to be understood and enjoyed by players. Rapture is less rapturous without its story. 

[anotherartblogthingforstuff]

Research 1 - Generations

Prompt:

They define our worldviews and experiences in a way that can create barriers and confusion when reaching between them. At the same time, generational barriers are somewhat arbitrary and get blamed for more than they should be.  

Points of Interest:

Specific Generational Boundary Dates (do scholars agree)

What are the main stereotypes that accompany different generations (how many of them are grounded in reality)

What are the relational differences in generations

How has technology influenced generational tropes

Larger global events such as WWII have had major impacts on how generations were formed both socially and practically in terms of birth and death rates. (what are the key events, and how does our understanding of them differ)

General Content:

There is not a consensus about the generational boundaries, even though there is generally wide agreement among market researchers and demographers

Not all generations develop a distinctive consciousness. This is dependant on the rate of social change

Cohort is a more technically accurate term than generation because it refers to people within a specific age group and doesn’t have the same set of family connotations.

The idea of generation is a combination of biological and social factors.

The dichotomy of society is that people are defining it as it defines them

For the first time in our history, we have four diverse generations being asked to work together.

The "generational" school of thought maintains that values are imprinted for life by defining historical events that occur as people mature into adulthood. For example, the generation that grew up during the Great Depression is said to be particularly thrifty because its members experienced hard economic times. Because of the power and influence of these shared events, each generation develops a unique set of beliefs and attitudes to guide its members' behavior.

1. Silent (1925 to 1942): Adaptive

2. Baby Boomer (1943-1960): Idealist

3. Generation X (1961-1981): Reactive

4. Generation Y or Millennials (1982-Present): Civic

However, counter research suggests the following in relation to the Generational premise:

1. Research supports the assumption that people are particularly impressionable early in life.

2. Research shows that some core personality characteristics are set for life, but also that people change their beliefs and attitudes based on later life experiences.

3. Research does not support the assumption that all members of a generation experience the same early events in the same way, as race, ethnicity, gender, and social class also color our life experiences.

A saeculum is a length of time roughly equal to the potential lifetime of a person or, equivalently, of the complete renewal of a human population. The term was first used by the Etruscans.

Generational Breakdown:

The Depression Era

Born: 1912-1921

Coming of Age: 1930-1939

Age in 2004: 83 to 92

Current Population: 11-12 million (and declining rapidly)

Social Trends: conservative, compulsive savers, maintain low debt and use more secure financial products, patriotic, want to leave a legacy to their children, work before pleasure, respect for authority, have a sense of moral obligation.

Influential Events: The Great Depression

World War II

Born: 1922 to 1927

Coming of Age: 1940-1945

Age in 2004: 77-82

Current Population: 11 million (in quickening decline)

Social Trends: A stronger sense of deferment

Influential Events: Drastically effect by World War II

Post-War Cohort

Born: 1928-1945

Coming of Age: 1946-1963

Age in 2004: 59 to 76

Current Population: 41 million (declining)

Social Trends: Had significant opportunities in the job market and education as the economy prospered after the war. Have a value for security, comfort, and familiar, known activities and environments.

Boomers I or The Baby Boomers

Born: 1946-1954

Coming of Age: 1963-1972

Age in 2004: 50-58

Current Population: 33 million

Influential Events: Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations, the Civil

Rights movements and the Vietnam War

Boomers II or Generation Jones

Born: 1955-1965

Coming of Age: 1973-1983

Age in 2004: 39 to 49

Current Population: 49 million

Social Trends:  Both Gen X and Boomer II s suffer from this long shadow cast by

Boomers I. did not have the benefits of the Boomer I class such as good jobs, opportunities, housing etc.

Influential Events: The first post Watergate generation,

Generation X

Born: 1966-1976

Coming of Age: 1988-1994

Age in 2004: 28 to 38

Current Population: 41 million

Social Trends:  the first generation of “latchkey” kids, exposed to lots of daycare and divorce. Known as the generation with the lowest voting participation rate of any generation. Often characterized by high levels of skepticism, “what’s in it for me.” arguably the best educated generation with 29% obtaining a bachelor’s degree or higher (6% higher than the previous cohort). And, with that education and a growing maturity they are starting to form families with a higher level of caution and pragmatism than their parents demonstrated. Concerns run high over avoiding broken homes, kids growing up without a parent around and financial planning.

Generation Y, Echo Boomers or Millenniums

Born: 1977-1994

Coming of Age: 1998-2006

Age in 2004: 10 to 22

Current Population: 71 million

Social Trends: Gen Y are less brand loyal and the speed of the Internet has led the cohort to be similarly flexible and changing in its fashion, style consciousness and where and how it is communicated with. Gen Y kids often raised in dual income or single parent families have been more involved in family purchases…everything from groceries to new cars. One in nine Gen Yers has a credit card co-signed by a parent.

 Generation Z

Born: 1995-2012

Coming of Age: 2013-2020

Age in 2004: 0-9

Current Population: 23 million and growing rapidly

Social Trends :Gen Z kids will grow up with a highly sophisticated media and computer

environment and will be more Internet savvy and expert than their Gen Y

forerunners.

Influential Events: 9/11, The war on Terror

Sources:

http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/201/articles/94PilcherMannheimSocGenBJS.pdf

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db21.pdf

http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/201/articles/85JaegerGenInHistHISTTHEO.pdf

http://socialmarketing.org/archives/generations-xy-z-and-the-others/

https://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-157194740.html

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/01/26/reviews/970126.26lindlt.html?_r=1

[theconservativebrief]

Recently, there was a minor uproar when Kardashian scion Kylie Jenner, who is all of 21, appeared on the cover of Forbes’s 60 richest self-made women issue. As many people pointed out, Jenner’s success would have been impossible if she hadn’t been born white, healthy, rich, and famous. She built a successful cosmetics company not just with hard work but on a towering foundation of good luck.

Around the same time, there was another minor uproar when Refinery29 published “A Week in New York City on $25/Hour,” an online diary by someone whose rent and bills are paid for by her parents. It turns out $25/hour goes a lot further if you have no expenses!

These episodes illustrate what seems to be one of the enduring themes of our age: socially dominant groups, recipients of myriad unearned advantages, willfully refusing to acknowledge them, despite persistent efforts from socially disadvantaged groups. This is not a new theme, of course — it waxes and wanes with circumstance — but after a multi-decade rise in inequality, it has come roaring back to the fore.

Of course, socially dominant groups have every incentive to ignore luck. And they have found a patron saint in the president, who once claimed, “My father gave me a very small loan in 1975, and I built it into a company that’s worth many, many billions of dollars.”

[embedded content]

Neither side of that claim is true. But in this, as in so much else, Trump’s brazenness serves as cover, a signal that it’s still okay to cling to this myth.

These recent controversies reminded me of the fuss around a book that came out a few years ago: Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy, by economist Robert Frank. (Vox’s Sean Illing interviewed Frank last year.) It argued that luck plays a large role in every human success and failure, which ought to be a rather banal and uncontroversial point, but the reaction of many commentators was gobsmacked outrage. On Fox Business, Stuart Varney sputtered at Frank: “Do you know how insulting that was, when I read that?”

It’s not difficult to see why many people take offense when reminded of their luck, especially those who have received the most. Allowing for luck can dent our self-conception. It can diminish our sense of control. It opens up all kinds of uncomfortable questions about obligations to other, less-fortunate people.

Nonetheless, this is a battle that cannot be bypassed. There can be no ceasefire. Individually, coming to terms with luck is the secular equivalent of religious awakening, the first step in building any coherent universalist moral perspective. Socially, acknowledging the role of luck lays a moral foundation for humane economic, housing, and carceral policy.

Building a more compassionate society means reminding ourselves of luck, and of the gratitude and obligations it entails, against inevitable resistance.

So here’s a reminder.

How much moral credit are we due for where we end up in life, and for who we end up? Conversely, how much responsibility or blame do we deserve? I don’t just mean Kylie Jenner or Donald Trump — all of us. Anyone.

How you answer these questions reveals a great deal about your moral worldview. To a first approximation, the more credit/responsibility you believe we are due, the more you will be inclined to accept default (often cruel and inequitable) social and economic outcomes. People basically get what they deserve.

The less credit/responsibility you believe we are due, the more you believe our trajectories are shaped by forces outside our control (and sheer chance), the more compassionate you will be toward failure and the more you will expect back from the fortunate. When luck is recognized, softening its harsh effects becomes the basic moral project.

Understanding the role of luck begins with getting past the old “nature versus nurture” debate, which has always captivated the public, not so much because of the science, but because of the deeper existential questions involved.

“Nature” has come to serve roughly as code for the stuff we’re stuck with, our bodies, our genes — an arrow Fate has already fired, with a preset path. And “nurture” has become shorthand for our capacity for change, our ability to be shaped by circumstances, other people, and ourselves, to wiggle and move about within that path, or even escape it. It’s shorthand for our range of control over our fates.

But this has always struck me as a misguided way to look at it.

Of course it is true that you have no choice when it comes to your genes, your hair color, your basic body shape and appearance, your vulnerability to certain diseases. You’re stuck with what nature gives you — and it does not distribute its blessings equitably or according to merit.

But you also have no choice when it comes to the vast bulk of the nurture that matters.

Christina Animashaun/Vox

Child development psychologists tell us that deep and lasting shaping of neural pathways happens in the first hours, days, months, and years of life. Basic dispositions are formed that can last a lifetime. Whether you are held, spoken to, fed, made to feel safe and cared for — you have no choice in any of it, but it more or less forms your emotional skeleton. It determines how sensitive you are to threat, how open you are to new experience, your capacity to exercise empathy.

Children aren’t responsible for how they spend their formative years and the permanent imprint it makes upon them. But they’re stuck with it.

Legally speaking, here in the US we don’t consider people autonomous moral agents, responsible for their own decisions, until they are 18. Obviously different cultures have different ages and markers for adulthood (moral agenthood), but all cultures mark a transition. At some point, a child, an instinctual creature not fully responsible for their decisions, becomes an adult, capable of using higher cognitive functions to shape and moderate their behavior according to shared standards, and to be held accountable if they don’t.

For the purposes of this argument, it doesn’t matter much where you draw the line between child and adult. What matters is that it takes place after the bulk of temperament, personality, and socioeconomic circumstance are in place.

So, then, here you are. You turn 18. You are no longer a child; you are an adult, a moral agent, responsible for who you are and what you do.

By that time, your inheritance is enormous. You’ve not only been granted a genetic make-up, an ethnicity and appearance, by accidents of nature and parentage. You’ve also had your latent genetic traits “activated” in a very specific way through a specific upbringing, in a specific environment, with a specific set of experiences.

Your basic mental and emotional wiring is in place; you have certain instincts, predilections, fears, and cravings. You have a certain amount of money, certain social connections and opportunities, a certain family lineage. You’ve had a certain amount and quality of education. You’re a certain kind of person.

You are not responsible for any of that stuff; you weren’t yet capable of being responsible. You were just a kid (or worse, a teen). You didn’t choose your genes or your experiences. Both nature and the vast bulk of the nurture that matters happened to you.

And yet, when you turn 18, it’s all yours — the whole inheritance, warts and all. By the time you are an autonomous, responsible moral agent, you have effectively been fired out of a cannon, on a particular trajectory. You wake up, morally speaking, mid-flight.

All of us, basically. Javier Zarracina/Vox

How capable are we altering our trajectories? How much can we change ourselves?

Here, a distinction made famous by psychologist Daniel Kahneman in his seminal Thinking, Fast and Slow is helpful. Kahneman argues that humans have two modes of thinking: “system one,” which is fast, instinctual, automatic, and often unconscious, and “system two,” which is slower, more deliberative, and emotionally “cooler” (generally traced to the prefrontal cortex).

Our system one reactions are largely hard-wired by the time we become adults. But what about system two?

We do seem to have some control over it. We can use it, to some extent, to shape, channel, or even change our system one reactions over time — to change ourselves.

Everyone is familiar with that struggle; indeed, the battle between systems one and two tends to be the central drama in most human lives. When we step back and reflect, we know we need to exercise more and eat less, to be more generous and less grumpy, to manage time better and be more productive. System two recognizes those as the right decisions; they make sense; the numbers work out.

But then the moment comes and we’re sitting on the couch and system one feels very strongly that it doesn’t want to put on running shoes. It wants greasy takeout food. It wants to snap at the delivery guy for being late. Where is system two when it’s needed? It shows up later, full of regret and self-recrimination. Thanks a lot, system two.

To become a better person is, at least to some degree, to consciously decide what kind of person one wants to be, what kind of life one wants to lead, and to enforce that meta-decision through day-to-day smaller decisions. They say you are what you do repeatedly; our choices become habit and habit becomes character. So forming a good character, becoming a good person, means repeatedly choosing to do the right thing until it becomes habit.

To make this more concrete, an example: For whatever reason, I hate waiting on people. I can barely stand to walk behind people on the sidewalk. Driving behind people leaves me in constant, low-level seething rage. Watching the people ahead of me in line at the store bumble through their slow transactions makes me want to claw my eyes out.

When I use system-two thinking, I understand that this instinctual reaction of mine is both irrational and uncharitable — irrational because we’re all always waiting for one another and there’s no way to avoid it; uncharitable because I expect alacrity from others than I don’t always display myself. I make others wait just as much or more than anyone, but I absolutely can’t wait for others.

To put it more bluntly, I tend to be kind of an asshole in that particular way. And I don’t want to be! It makes other people tense. It makes me miserable. It serves absolutely no purpose.

Me, basically. Christina Animashaun/Vox

The only way to change it is to use system-two thinking to override system one — to intervene in my own anger — again and again, until a different, better reaction becomes habitual and I become, in a literal sense, a different, better person. (That project is, uh, ongoing.)

The same is true for being a good parent, saving money, making more friends, or any other long-term life goal; it often involves overriding our own instincts — many of which are grossly maladaptive.

Do people deserve moral credit for what they do with their system two thinking? Perhaps that’s the mechanism through which meritocracy works, through which people really do get what they deserve?

There are two reasons why system two thinking can’t get us out of the luck trap: Both the capacity and the need for system two thinking are inequitably distributed.

First, the capacity.

Using system two to regulate system one is difficult. Exercising the kind of self-discipline necessary to override system one reactions with deliberative, system two choices is effortful. It drains energy. (See Brian Resnick’s fascinating discussion of the famous “marshmallow test” for more on this.)

Doing it requires certain conditions: a degree of self-possession, a degree of freedom from more basic physical needs like food and shelter, some training and habituation. Even with those advantages, it’s difficult. There’s an entire “life hacking” genre devoted to tricks and techniques that system two thinking can use to counteract system one’s predilections for salty snacks and procrastination.

And the thing is, not everyone has equal access to those conditions. Whether and how much you have the ability to exercise system two in this way is largely — you guessed it — part of your inheritance. It too depends on where you were born, how you were raised, the resources to which you had access.

Even our desire and ability to alter our trajectory is largely determined by our trajectory.

Second, the need.

Some people don’t much need the ability to self-regulate, because their failures of self-regulation are forgiven and forgotten. If you are, say, a white male born to wealth, like Donald Trump, you can blunder about and fuck up over and over again. You’ll always have access to more money and social connections; the justice system will always go easy on you; you’ll always get more second chances. You could even be president some day, without being required to learn anything or develop any skills relevant to the job.

But if you are, say, a black male, you are called upon to exercise an extraordinary degree of self-regulation. You will frequently be surrounded by people on a hair trigger, prone to suspect or fear you, to turn down your rental application or deny you a loan or pass you over for a “safer” job applicant, prone to calling the cops on you, prone, if they are cops, to target and abuse you.

And, especially if you are poor, one step out of line — one incident at school, one brush with the justice system, one stupid teenage prank — can mean years or even a lifetime of consequences. Subaltern groups have to self-regulate twice as much to have half a chance.

Neither the capacity nor the need for self-regulation is distributed evenly or fairly. In a dark irony, we demand much more of it from those — the poor, the hungry, the homeless or housing insecure — likely to have the least access to the conditions that make it possible. (Just one more way it’s expensive to be poor.)

Your capacity for self-regulation and self-improvement, and your need for them, are both part of your inheritance. They come to you via life’s lottery. Via luck.

I get why people bridle at this point. They want credit for their achievements and for their better qualities. As Varney said, it can be insulting to be told that one’s success is in large part a lucky roll of the dice.

Of course, people aren’t nearly as eager to take credit for their failures and flaws. Psychologists have shown that all humans are subject to “fundamental attribution error.” When we assess others, we tend to attribute successes to circumstance and failures to character — and when we assess our own lives, it is the opposite. Everyone’s relationship with luck is somewhat self-interested and opportunistic.

Christina Animashaun/Vox

And the more one benefits from life’s lottery, the greater the incentives to deny it. As a class, the lucky have every political incentive to frame social and economic outcomes as reflective of a natural order. Life’s winners have been telling stories about why they’re special since civilization began.

But that’s my point about the moral implications of luck: They are radical and inevitably corrosive to the established order. They cast doubt on every form of privilege and light on every mechanism by which privilege perpetuates itself.

Acknowledging luck — or, more broadly, the pervasive influence on our lives of factors we did not choose and for which we deserve no credit or blame — does not mean denying all agency. It doesn’t mean people are nothing more than the sum of their inheritances, or that merit has no role in outcomes. It doesn’t mean people shouldn’t be held responsible for bad things they do or rewarded for good things. Nor does it necessarily mean going full socialist. These are all familiar straw men in this debate.

No, it just means that no one “deserves” hunger, homelessness, ill health, or subjugation — and ultimately, no one “deserves” giant fortunes either. All such outcomes involve a large portion of luck.

The promise of great financial reward spurs risk-taking, market competition, and innovation. Markets, properly regulated, are a socially healthy form of gambling. There’s no reason to try to completely equalize market outcomes. But there’s also no reason to allow hunger, homelessness, ill health, or subjugation.

And there’s no reason we shouldn’t ask everyone, especially those who have benefited most from luck — from being born a certain place, a certain color, to certain people in a certain economic bracket, sent to certain schools, introduced to certain people — to chip in to help those upon whom life’s lottery bestowed fewer gifts.

And it is entirely possible to do both, to harness market competition while using the wealth it generates to raise up the unlucky and give them greater access to that very competition.

“If you want meritocracy,” Chris Hayes argued in his seminal book Twilight of the Elites, “work for equality. Because it is only in a society which values equality of actual outcomes, one that promotes the commonweal and social solidarity, that equal opportunity and earned mobility can flourish.”

Or as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the democratic socialist firebrand who won her House Democratic primary in New York’s 14th District, is fond of saying, “in a modern, moral, and wealthy society, no person should be too poor to live.”

Neither human genes nor human societies distribute life’s gifts according to any principle we would recognize as fair or humane, given the extraordinary role of luck in our lives. We all become adults with wildly different inheritances, starting our lives in radically different places, propelled toward dramatically different destinations.

We cannot eliminate luck, nor achieve total equality, but it is easily within our grasp to soften luck’s harsher effects, to ensure that no one falls too far, that everyone has access to a life of dignity. Before that can happen, though, we must look luck square in the face.

Original Source -> The moral implications of luck

via The Conservative Brief

[ralphmorgan-blog1]

House Democrats Release 3,500 Russia-Linked Facebook Ads

On Thursday, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee published more than 3,500 Facebook and Instagram ads linked to the Russian propaganda group Internet Research Agency, making it the largest trove of these ads the public has seen to date.

Since last fall, when Facebook disclosed it had sold political ads to Russian actors in the run-up to the 2016 election, details about the IRA's handiwork have trickled out mainly in the form of independent research, individual exhibits presented during congressional testimony, and an indictment of IRA officials by special counsel Robert Mueller. Facebook, meanwhile, has declined to share a comprehensive list of accounts and Pages associated with the IRA on Facebook and Instagram.

With Thursday's disclosure, the House Democrats are painting a fuller picture, which they hope will help assist in further research about the IRA's extensive operation.

"Ultimately, by exposing these advertisements, we hope to better protect legitimate political expression and discussions and better safeguard Americans from having their information ecosystem polluted by foreign adversaries," wrote representative Adam Schiff, ranking member of the committee, in a statement. “We will continue to work with Facebook and other tech companies to expose additional content, advertisements, and information as our investigation progresses.”

The newly revealed ads, some of which are redacted to protect the privacy of innocent Facebook users, track closely to what's already known about the IRA's tactics. The ads date back to early 2015 and continue through August of 2017, covering topics including LGBT rights, Black Lives Matter, immigration, Islam, veteran issues, the Second Amendment, Texas secession, and the presidential candidates themselves. The Pages implicated in this disclosure largely mirror a list published last year by the Russian media outlet RBC, which until now has been the largest list of suspected accounts published anywhere. But there are new names in the House committee's collection, too, including an account called "Black guns matter," which had more than 4,000 likes in November of 2016.

As was clear during the congressional hearings with tech giants last November, the IRA's ads on Facebook and Instagram often staked out both sides of the same issue. One ad, created by the page United Muslims of America in June of 2016 and targeted at people whose interests on Facebook included Hillary Clinton and the Muslim Brotherhood, showed Clinton smiling with a woman in a hijab. It invited people to an event entitled "Support Hillary. Save American Muslims!"

House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Minority

Another ad, meanwhile, purchased by the page Stop A.I.—short for Stop All Invaders—showed a photoshopped President Obama in the Oval Office, with an ISIS flag behind him. "Obama was always a mere pawn in the hands of the Arabian Sheikhs," it reads in part. "All these refugees, which we are about to take in, are soldiers with one simple goal. They are going to try to terrorize the nation."

House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Minority

Some of the ads promote real-world events organized by unwitting Facebook users. One such event, promoted by the page Black Matters, promoted a night of free legal help for immigrants. Another, published by the page Fit Black, promoted free self-defense classes run by a club called Black Fist. Buzzfeed News previously reported that IRA trolls had lured American fitness trainers to lead these classes, even going so far as to pay them $320 a month.

HOUSE PERMANENT SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE MINORITY

What made these ads so deceptive is they rarely looked like traditional political ads. Often, they don't mention a candidate or the election at all. Instead, they tear at the parts of the American social fabric that are already worn thin, stoking outrage about police brutality or the removal of Confederate statues.

HOUSE PERMANENT SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE MINORITY

Throughout Congress's investigation into Russian meddling in the election, legislators have questioned tech leaders about how the IRA targeted the ads. Facebook has repeatedly said that the majority of ads were geographically targeted broadly to the United States, and the House's trove backs that up. But some ads in the new collection, including a few published by the page Black Matters, specifically target cities with a history of headlines about racial unrest and police brutality, like Baltimore, Maryland, and Ferguson, Missouri. Others target by interest category. In January of 2016, a single ad for a page called Williams&Kalvin, two YouTubers the IRA hired to promote news and video about the black community, targeted users age 18 to 45 who were interested in BlackNews.com, the color black, or HuffPost Black Voices but were not Hispanic or Asian American. Facebook says it has since revisited some of its targeting categories, eliminating one-third of the categories the IRA used.

Williams&Kalvin appears to be one of the pages that tested which messages would resonate most with audiences. Within a single hour on January 14, 2016, that page posted the same ad with two different messages. The ad that read "Community about black social and racial issues! Like to subscribe!" received two clicks. The ad that read "Black Discrimination Awareness! Like to join!" got 2,592. That kind of testing is common in digital advertising, but it suggests the IRA was operating at a certain level of sophistication.

HOUSE PERMANENT SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE MINORITY

HOUSE PERMANENT SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE MINORITY

Facebook has sought to downplay the damage caused by these ads, often emphasizing that the IRA spent just $100,000 on them, compared to the nearly $40 billion in ad revenue the company earned in 2017. But the House's disclosure shows how far even a small sum can go. One ad, purchased on June 23, 2015, by the page LGBT United, cost 99.95 Russian rubles, or the equivalent of $1.59. That ad garnered 26 clicks and 374 impressions in a single day. Looked at this way, Facebook's argument that 50 percent of the ads cost less than $3 doesn't sound all that compelling.

The ads also represent just a sliver of what the Russian trolls posted on Facebook and Instagram. While 3,500 sounds like a sizable number, IRA accounts published some 80,000 organic posts on Facebook and another 120,000 on Instagram, reaching roughly 146 million Americans between the two.

Since these ads ran—and the world found out about it—Facebook has announced significant changes that it says could ward off such malicious behavior in the future. In advance of this announcement, Facebook sent a bulleted list of these changes to reporters. Going forward, for instance, it's requiring all political advertisers, including people advertising about hot-button issues such as abortion and gun rights, to provide a copy of their government-issued identification and an address to verify that they live in the United States. It will require similar verification for popular pages.

The company will also begin labeling political ads as such, and, in June, it will launch a repository of political ads that includes information on the amount spent on the ad, its reach, and the demographics of the audience it targeted. That will eliminate the kind of blind confusion that has ensued over the last year regarding the very ads the House made public Thursday. Meanwhile, Facebook will scale its content moderation team to 20,000 people by the end of this year.

The House Democrats say they plan to eventually publish the organic posts created by the Russian trolls as well. But even on its own, Thursday's data dump could serve as a useful guide not only for researchers who are still mapping out the IRA's tactics but also for other tech platforms—like Reddit and Tumblr—that didn't detect Russian trolls until far later than their larger counterparts. The goal, after all, is not just to recap what happened but to prevent it from happening again.

Update: 10:10 am ET 05/10/18 This story has been updated to reflect that after publication, House Democrats revised the total number of ads from more than 3,300 to more than 3,500.

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