#smallercommand

[smallercommand]

Elder millenial says: if I don't know the number and I'm not expecting a call, voicemail. If I'm expecting a call/know the number, it's "Hello, this is smallercommand," with tone ranging from friendly (expected call) to neutral (unknown number, something expected).

ok as part of my job I have to make a lot of follow-up calls (not cold calls) to elder millennials/young gen-xers and it has me wondering

*edit: if a business/unknown number is calling/not a friend or relative

feel free to leave your age in the tags too

[ars-amatoria]

What’s up readers?! How about a little show and tell? Answer these 13 questions, tag 13 lucky readers and if you’re feeling extra bookish add a shelfie! Let’s Go!

1) The Last book I read: Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon by Wole Talabi

2) A book I recommend: The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

3) A book that I couldn’t put down: Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

4) A book I’ve read twice (or more): The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon

5) A book on my TBR: Entangled Life by Merlin Shelldrake

6) A book I’ve put down: Battle of the Linguist Mages by Scotto Moore

7) A book on my wish list: The furthest thing out in my library holds: Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Fairies by Heather Fawcett (10 week wait, 193rd in line, started 252)

8) A favorite book from childhood: Sabriel by Garth Nix

9) A book you would give to a friend: A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys

10) A book of poetry or lyrics that you own: Autobiography of Red by Ann Carson

11) A nonfiction book you own: Page Boy by Elliot Page (TBR)

12) What are you currently reading?

Actively : Lake of Souls by Ann Leckie

On hold but not yet officially DNF:

- No Exit and Three Other Plays by Jean-Paul Sartre

- Piranisi by Susanna Clarke, audiobook read by Chiwetel Ejiofor

- Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt

13) What are you planning on reading next? There are a couple things ready for me in Libby but I might stay on the Leckie train and reread Raven Tower

I was tagged by @kuwdora

I am tagging: @marjorierose , @catchaspark , @smallercommand , @smaller-comfort

[oneiriad]

Just for the record: I really do prefer asks and not replies for this thing.

Anyway: 5+ facts of the crossover I won’t write between MDZS and the Stargate franchise. Where the easy way out would be cultivators as working towards ascension and in a few more centuries the entire planet will go that way, so let’s not go with that.

Instead, let us ask ourselves: what exactly is a golden core?

1. More than a thousand years ago the System Lords did their usual thing of snatching a viable population of humans from Earth - mostly from China, in this case - and settled them along with some Jaffa and some ruling Goa’uld on a nice empty planet. They let the humans do what humans do, including naming bits of the planet after the places back home they were familiar with, and mostly carried on a standard Goa’uld planet existence.

2. In addition to a not always human-friendly local fauna, the planet seemed to produce a peculiar sort of energy. The Goa’uld found it mostly unimportant, but the humans discovered that if they could manipulate it by following certain Taoist practices, and thus the first proto-cultivators happened, slowly, oh so slowly, using talismans and minor magics and fighting the monsters that tried to eat people.

3. And then - oh, then - a particularly powerful proto-cultivator was claimed as a Goa’uld host.

4. Ask yourself: what is a golden core?

5. A couple of centuries later the Goa’uld cut all contact to the planet, declared it under interdict. In short: they fled. Leaving the humans to develop a society quite unlike any seen before.

6. What is a golden core? It is not grown - at least, not by the cultivator themself. Instead, what the wannabe cultivator does is practice, develop their qi, grow their strength - until one fine day their sect leader and elders determine that they are strong enough for the ultimate test, which some does not survive: the implantation of a full-grown Goa’uld parasite, which, if all goes well, will be subjugated by the “host’s” qi and cultivation powers. Instead of taking control, it will be the one controlled, supplying its host with the usual healing, physical powers and endurance of the Goa’uld while also acting as an internal qi powerbank, allowing cultivators to perform powerful magical feats like, for instance, flying.

7. A qi deviation is no more and no less than a cultivator losing control of the Goa’uld inside. Ghost calming rituals, by the way, are actually a failsafe system specifically designed to kill the Goa’uld when the cultivator dies. Alas, it also steps in if the cultivator loses control completely, and kills them both.

8. Even if the cultivator is in control, there is some bleed-over. In some people it’s worse than in others, resulting in extremely temperamental or even sociopathic cultivators. There’s a reason the Lan have all those rules. Cultivator emotions run hot, no matter what they are.

9. In addition to cultivators every sect also has Jaffa - servants. (I have no idea if Jaffa and normal humans are genetically compatible, but let’s say they are.) Wei Wuxian’s father, for instance, was a Jaffa. Hence the stigma against him. As are most of the Dafan Wen branch family. (Yuan was from the core line and just ended up with them at the camp).

10. Baoshan Sanren hosts a queen. Half the reason she isolates herself is the extra risk involved if that thing ever gets out of her control.

11. As the number of humans grew on the planet, so did the number of people who died, and another feature of the planet unveiled itself: resentful, dark energies, a dark mirror to the bright energy used to bind golden cores. Fierce corpses and hungry ghosts started to roam.

12. Eventually, a bright young cultivator whose Goa’uld core had been experimentally transferred into another who had lost his own discovered how to properly harness and control the dark energy. His name, of course, was Wei Wuxian.

13. Wen Ning was a Jaffa. The Ghost General is not one, but two fierce corpses - the undead Goa’uld larva inside him is what boosts his strength beyond even standard fierce corpse levels.

14. Mo Xuanyu was a mess. Jin Guangyao and Xue Yang rushed his training and preparation, only focusing on the parts that mattered to them. The result was a cultivator unable to properly control the Goa’uld within, though it never quite rose to power. Poor alien horror story had quite the nasty shock when the soul sacrifice ritual worked and a spirit with all the necessary mental discipline and power slammed down around it. Possibly, the shock sent it into partial torpor, which is why Wei Wuxian 2.0′s cultivation is still weak. It’ll get stronger.

15. A few years after the death of Jin Guangyao and the ascension of Lan Wangji to the post of Chief Cultivator - a mysterious stone ring in the Nightless City opens and SG1 steps out.

16. Actually, screw it - cultivators are working towards ascension. They rarely get there - life is full of distractions - but once in a rare while one of them does ascend.

17. Anyway, it’s not the first unusual world the Stargate people encounter. Or the first not-automatically-enemies carrying Goa’uld. There’s still going to be a number of misunderstandings and tensions, especially since the cultivators can’t access the Goa’uld genetic memory and most of them don’t actually know that much about their history. Hell, lower level cultivators might not even know they are carrying scary alien worms inside.

18. The Tok’ra are going to be very, very scared of this place. Also intrigued by the fact that there is a living queen, but mostly scared.

19. Cultivators can carry their qi and/or resentful energy with them away from the planet, but once away, they can’t gather new supplies. In short, if someone were to visit, say, a certain airforce base on Earth, they would need to return home before their qi ran so low that the Goa’uld would be free and the failsafe system would activate. This is probably not something anybody realizes before going to visit.

[kurowrites]

lostchips

17 months

I see someone is feeling optimistic lol. (I give it slightly longer.)

smallercommand

Are those not callout posts? 

Not quite, because callout posts, while sometimes harmful, usually don’t mean that you end up sentenced to hang from a tree by a court of law (however loosely defined).

Callout posts are more like denunciants going “I saw Goody Proctor with the devil!!!!” only they have a megaphone and do it while you’re trying to do your shopping in the busy market place on market day.

[alexseanchai]

tags by smallercommand:

#Read a longfic the other day #where I was probably responsible for 10+ hits #because my browser kept crashing #and I only kudosed ONCE

this is most likely not true! if that was all the same day, more recently than last time they changed how they count kudos, then that was all the same hit:

#by op's standards #the fic is not worth their time #which would be a shame

it really would! case in point: I have personally added fourteen hits and one kudos to the story @inexplicifics is currently posting, because it's being posted at the rate of one chapter a day, and it's at fourteen of fifteen chapters posted. it's also got about one kudos for every twenty-one hits. OP would nope out at the sight of that.

it's also got four thousand kudos and three thousand comments in the two and a half weeks since chapter 1 went up, because Inex has been building a following (especially for this series) for a few years now. so like, if you're down to read six hundred thousand words of Witcher AU that hits a lot of people's narrative kinks very hard and does so very well, the last chapter of part forty-whatever is getting posted tomorrow!

Must Brave the Thorns (sort of original work, sort of AU of the Accidental Warlord AU above, same author) has a much worse ratio. 1 to almost 42. it's 38 chapters, posted every weekday for seven and a half weeks, and many people have reread it since. and due largely to how much Inex learned about the craft of writing long-form fiction by writing AWAU, it is, writing technique wise, fucking brilliant.

if OP doesn't want to read MBtT because they don't vibe with fantasy medieval settings, or having embroidery and fabric dyes and flower symbolism as major throughlines, or grief or torture or polyamory, or because it's 250K, or if they nope out in the first chapter while Inex's first PoV character is dwelling on her expectations of the situation she's in (and thereby setting up the audience's expectations and doing a bunch of worldbuilding and telling us in the first paragraph a major part of the overall resolution) but before she starts to learn those expectations are based on rumors and lies? yeah, fair enough. everyone has tastes, a bunch of people have triggers, no story is gonna be for everyone.

if OP doesn't want to read MBtT because the kudos ratio being one-fourth their (arbitrary, absurdly high) metric means it must not be good? fuck off.

Another AO3 thing I’m curious about, how do yall decide if something is good enough to read? Usually I follow a rule of 1 kudos for every 10 hits. One because it’s easy math and two it’s yet to fail me. Thoughts? Do you just go for it and pray it’s good?

[oneiriad]

Old school it is, then, and none of these so-called Sentinel AUs, that doesn’t really have a lot to do with the show.

1. During Blair’s childhood, Naomi Sandburg travelled a lot, carrying him along with her. They lived in hippie communes and alternative communities and some places that might charitably have been called cults, and they travelled abroad as well. They went to Europe and Naomi, being Naomi, proceeded to drag her small child along on the overland journey to India, along the so-called Hippie Trail - she was probably one of the last who got through before the wars closed that route.

2. So, they went to India and they went from India to China, despite China having its own turbulent period. Still, there were quiet places, and Naomi somehow wrangled a guest house for them for a few months at this lovely mountain religious retreat in an area called Gusu.

3. Blair’s actual memories of the Cloud Recesses are few and faint - he wasn’t even ten years old at the time. He remembers getting lost in the bamboo forest and being found as he sat crying and carried home by a strangely quiet man with cold hands. He remembers playing with the rabbits and eating food that was either too bland or way, way too spicy. He remembers a little Chinese. Oh, and he remembers Uncle Wei, who insisted on being Uncle, and his tall, scary, taciturn husband. He remembers Naomi insisting on giving him a one-on-one lecture on how that sort of thing was perfectly natural and modern Western society had destroyed many countries old cultures and replaced them with their own homophobia, and this was beautiful, and Blair didn’t get a word in sideways to point out that he was her son and she had definitely already raised him well, so that wasn’t what he had meant about Uncle Wei and Hangunag-Jun being weird.

4. He had been talking about sneaking out one night, because he couldn’t sleep, sneaking out, following the sound of a flute and found Uncle Wei at the end of the trail, eyes sparking red, and Hanguang-Jun with him, with a sword, and something that wasn’t properly alive fighting them. (Uncle Wei noticed him afterwards, and they carried him back and gave him tea and got him settled down, though the next morning he still asked his mom about Uncle Wei being weird.).

5. Now he’s an adult and an academic and a police observer, and if he once in a rare while dreams of that night, well, he dismisses it as clearly something was happening, something perfectly natural - probably a local traditional ceremony he wasn’t supposed to have seen in the first place and didn’t have the context for - and goes on with his life. After all, he’s got a busy life - he found a Sentinel and people keep trying to kill him.

6. Mind you, he still writes Uncle Wei and Hanguang-Jun, and they write him. Sometimes they travel - he gets letters with stamps from all sorts of places - and sometimes they don’t and the letters come covered in whatever official stamps and hold-ups the Chinese authorities enforce at any given moment. They write him when he is a teenager, when he starts college, when he finds his Sentinel - and when his academic career falls into ruins.

7. When he finishes at the Academy, they send him a gift that he’s pretty sure is some form of antique that probably shouldn’t have left China in the first place.

8. It’s a couple of years after he stopped being a police observer and formally became Jim Ellison’s partner that they finally come to Cascade to visit, looking no older than they do in his memories (and man, does Blair spends some time talking very sternly to himself about racism and exotizicing, because no, they are not mystically, ageless beings, they are just his weird Uncle Wei and Hanguang-Jun, in town for the cultural festival the Chinese Embassy is sponsoring, and his memory is playing tricks on him, that’s all.).

9. I suspect demonic cultivation has a scent.

10. So does everyday, which also has a lot of noise (especially the way WWX does it), so Jim doesn’t really notice that other scent, because he’s a good host and a good customer at the place that sells ear plugs and that mint stuff to put under your nose.

11. I am not saying somebody ends up in a hostage situation and somebody had a sword hidden in his sleeve all along (because no, LWJ, you can’t carry a bladed weapon around in a modern US city, they frown on that) and somebody might have conjured the very angry ghost of a murder victim to scare the bad guys half to death.

12. Jim: “Chief - do you have any normal friends? At all?”

[crow-ked]

That absolutely looks like a real newly-finished suburb. If you zoom you can see a few small sapling trees that were planted, but i would be surprised if even half of them survive to actually grow into full trees.

Fencing is expensive and as far as i know is never included in the initial building. You have to buy the house, and then add fencing. And even then you might only be allowed a particular kind of fence. Like @smallercommand said. HOA will have rules. Lots of them.

Uniform or "cookie cutter" housing has become extremely popular.

Personally i hate it. So much. You can walk for 30 minutes and still be in the neighborhood. Then you have to walk another hour(if you're lucky and it's nearby) to the grocery store.

[alexseanchai]

tag by smallercommand: #spoken like someone who's never grown anything more complicated than a fussy houseplant

HALT!✋😐

did you remember to express gratitude for not having to subsistence farm today?

[ineedlelittlespace]

Thank you for the tags, @round-hatches-are-terrifying and @cmchill ! 🥰🥰🥰

My vote would be for a bookstore crawl at all the local spots (possibly with a complementary bakery crawl?), sharing recommendations and browsing the stacks.

Or a concert/play at the park, where we could do a food truck picnic on the lawn and commiserate about the inevitable mosquito bites and share the sunset.

@ilovedthestars @needlesandnilbogs @jadefyre @smallercommand @copper-and-smoke

Name an activity you would propose to do with people if you could meet up in real life. Mine: root beer taste-testing, plus snacks like cheese and crackers and fruit while we chill and chat.

@hotcheetohatredwastaken @not-freyja @elle-rosewater @somer-writes @wanderlustmagician @majorproblems77 @la-sera @baileyboo2016 @noorahqar @deleetrix @gia-d @skyward-floored @gintrinsic @linkiscool333 @lerikwrites @across-violet-skies @marcusdoodlesalot @passerinesoncaffeine @ravenwithawritingdesk @ovegakart @weavingstarlight @arr-u @thepinklink

I know I have more mutuals and people I follow but I don’t have space on my phone screen to see much more.

Tag mutuals if you want! see what people enjoy!

[alexseanchai]

tags by smallercommand: #I doubt Parker would have the same distaste for money in food than I have #but maybe Hardison does and requested that he be able to eat the cereal

my bet is, she moves the money every time she opens a new cereal box, and it stays out of the cereal bag less because she doesn't want cocaine traces and etc from the cash in her food, more because she doesn't want crumbs from the food in her cash

Leverage 2x11 - "The Bottle Job"

[ruffboijuliaburnsides]

I agree with all of this post, but @smallercommand I have to ask...

What do you mean by suspenders? 'Cause neither of the definitions I know make sense in this context.

what the fuck is wrong with some europeans that they are so invested in "it's better/safer here than america" that they're going to argue that because they have better conditions for people on bicycles, they have no need for helmets??

Like, y'all, I hate to break it to you, but you can crack your head open just tripping on your feet, and you are almost certainly going to be going faster on a bike, even at a leisurely pace, so if you lose control of your bike, sure you could be fine, maybe just a scraped knee, but you could literally still crack your head open?

Listen I'm not going to be like EVERYONE HAS TO WEAR A HELMET RAWWWRGHSL:KSDJF because frankly even I don't wear a helmet 90% of the time, but I'm at least capable of acknowledging that I should.

[sheytsa]

@smallercommand @dwarfankylosaur idk if you’ve seen this yet XD

This is why we follow the 3rd commandment

[sheytsa]

@dwarfankylosaur @smallercommand

[mercurygray]

It seems, overnight, that my silly little survey has made its way to the part of the internet where people know what they are doing.

@smallercommand, @jmtorres, @tzikeh, @elijayvee - Thank you for your comments - they were kindly meant, I am sure, and I am trying to take them all in the spirit in which they were offered.

There are many smart and well-trained academics who both study and practice fandom on the internet - I am not one of them. I had a question, threw together a few questions in a Google form and hoped I might find a pattern.

It wasn't reviewed by a thesis advisor, was not subject to a professional ethics committee, and I realize the 400+ responses I've gotten so far is not a relevant sample size. I absolutely don't do this professionally and I know that.

I was just curious, is all.

This week, I've been having a lot of thoughts about...how we end up reading what we do.

I have one friend who is worrying wildly that no one is reading her fic because she doesn't have enough friends who are sharing it.

I also, just this week, based on tags or things people had reblogged, randomly messaged users here on tumblr like the weirdo I am and said 'Hey, based on your tags you might like my fic' and in both instances both people came back to me going "!!! why wasn't I reading this before?" as if I had been hiding it under a rock refusing to share.

Anyway, all of this got me thinking: how is it that people go looking for fic to read? I suspect there are a lot of answers to this question, and I further suspect the answers may have something to do with what type of fic you read and where you read it.

So I'm putting that question to all of you!

Please share this survey with your friends. I'll publish the results here after I get a few hundred answers and we'll see what shakes out from the results!

[jmtorres]

tags from @smallercommand "#i wonder what that would do to its power consumption #given lactation is so energy-intensive"

honestly fascinating question about construct metabolism in general. They don't eat but they do maintain and use organic tissue somehow? does that imply they can convert battery voltage to chemical energy in sugar form that their organic tissue can use? how about getting ahold of proteins and lipids to repair and maintain organic tissue? I honestly had a fear early on that when Murderbot wasn't getting cubicled on the reg it would start deteriorating bc it didn't realize the cubicle was injecting nutrient slurry or something. But I feel like that would have come up by now if it was gonna? Soooo. I dunno. But brains need fats and proteins and sugars! And MB definitely has an organic brain! Where are the nutrients coming from

tl;dr either lactation will force MB's organic parts to burn themselves and it'll be down a few pounds of organic matter OR somehow it will convert battery power into milk and need to plug in to recharge sooner but either way, just an extension of how it normally maintains its organic parts

i have a divisive question for all y’all murderbot fans out there

we all know mb doesn’t have “sex-related parts”

does “sex-related parts” include nipples?

i’ve only seen a few pieces of fanart showing mb shirtless, and they were about 50/50 nipples vs no nipples. what’s the consensus gang????

*disclaimer: I have only read through artificial condition, so if for some reason we get clarification on this later in the series I am unaware of it*

tl;dr does murderbot have nipples? discuss.

[sheytsa]

@smallercommand @dwarfankylosaur 

(do you guys follow nonasuch’s tumblr already?)

How To Keep Your Cardassian Spouse Warm In 5 Easy Steps