#sorry for the billions of random tangents

[rin-yellow]

YESSSS THIS EXACTLY

Such wildly different feelings to the mechs and the settings too.

Including the ways the mechs are constructed, like Btech lets you customize the mechs, but to a point. The Battletech pilots are like knights whose armors are heirlooms built from lost technology and every fight usually means some priceless relic of ancient history is almost inevitably demolished each time whereas the Armored Core pilots are corporate dogs whose mechs are custom built and optimized for each situation in order to most cost-effectively beat the faces in of anyone who dares prevent their employers from maximizing their profits.

Also the GEOMETRY OF THE DESIGNS. Obviously in a doylist sense this is because Battletech's most famous mechs used to use (dubiously illegally) licensed Kunio Okawara designs (iirc) and so any further properties had to essentially use those as a starting point (leading to that boxy look we know and love), and Armored Core is VERY MUCH something that Shoji Kawamori laid the groundwork for. Yes I know Btech also used Kawamori's Macross designs as some of the unseen too, but more people probably remember the fact that the Shadowhawk is literally fucking Dougram lol

Iirc, it's kind of where that classic "American vs Japanese mecha" meme comes from. The one I will not be posting here because I'm pretty sure there was some racist stuff in that meme, sadly.

But like,,,

The Battletech mechs are very big and clunky looking with a real "this robot will STOMP on you" kind of vibe, whereas ACs have that speedy look that gves Jetplane vibes, and 'coz jetplanes are always so far away alot of ppl I know of tend to underestimate their massive sizes as well.

And so like the AC mechs give that insane feeling of adrenalin through and through because that's like what the pilot is feeling, the mech kind of IS their surrogate bodies and their fighting this insane battle of spiky meyhem for like three more seconds to live, essentially. Whereas the Mechwarriors have this slow "I'm in a walking piece of LITERAL HISTORY" vibe because they're built like old brick houses that real estate workers try to demolish in order to build a McMansion with a big ole' "I was here for 200 years and I'll be here for 200 more" kind of attitude towards themselves where every step is just YEAH it's a bigass robot and YEAH it's slow but that doesn't mean that the step isn't gonna shake that metaphorical real estate worker so hard that she'll find the true meaning of whatever awful winter holiday you wanna celebrate in your big stompy robot.

Idk where I was going with that.

But also AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

I have not played the 6th armored core game yet I'm sorry,,,, I'll do it soon at some point but my ass is broke and waiting for it to go on sale. I've played the old PS2 and PS3 games with my brother tho and that's literally where I've gotten the vibes from lol. But I've seen a BUNCH of ACVI posting recently so I get the gist. Been loving the fanart I've seen circulating and I lowkey can't wait to get my claws onto the game in order to contribute to that.

Mechwarrior 5 was a bundle of fun though. Ik some ppl didn't think that but I thought it was. As were the old games those were great, even if some of them I had ta play a shitty emulator copy of them lol.

But yeah both games are insanely good.

(Just waiting on someone to finally make a game about combining mecha because I seriously have not been able to find a good one of those lmao. 'Coz we got the slow mechs, we got the speedy mechs, but where tf are the smol mechs that smash together to become bigger ones lol.)

mechwarrior and armored core both bring so much to the table

mechwarrior is most often about strategizing an effective squad to survive and endure an onslaught of equally potent enemies and your skill as a pilot to simultaneously evade and do you best to keep damage from accumulating too heavily in any one spot while you’re also lining up and landing your own shots, and it ends up feeling like this beautiful slow waltz with the enemy as we close the distance and then drift apart as we both try to get into our optimal firing range and out of theirs while pressuring them with whatever you can. and (my favorite) endurance missions will last as long as you and your squad can survive, until you pull out due to significant damages or running out of ammo, whichever comes first. mechwarrior is a marathon, with an emphasis on strategic use of resources to make it to the end

armored core is a sprint. it’s making the mech that will smash through whatever is in your way faster than it can shoot at you because if it’s already dead it can’t hurt you, and it’s about constant brutal high pressure fights with enemies in every direction and prioritizing what’s more important in any given second and keeping an unconscious awareness of where everyone is relative to your very quickly changing location and it feels so much like the intense gundam fights. if mechwarrior is a waltz armored core is dance off where the loser dies

different vibes. both good.

[staraxiaa]

sunflowers, the afterword:

author's corner/first thoughts.

okay. so. i am insane. i am a god. i just wrote 18k words for a fic that i thought of, planned, and created fully in less than two days, bc someone said i like to make ppl suffer and yes i do. but then i was like, i am GOING to write fluff and i took it personally. to that one reader, thank you!! anyways. i wrote this with the intent of using the prompt "you wanna kiss me so bad it makes you look stupid" and barely even ended up using it. i don't know whether to laugh or cry. i hope it doesn't flop but also it's okay if it does bc i literally spent almost 48 hours brainrotting and word vomiting like it's out of my brain now and this feels glorious. it was random unfiltered thoughts and grinding away at 3am until i am empty. no thoughts left in my head. can you see? i could eat the world raw, the itch has been scratched. the sheer amount of motivation i had w this fic is never happening again. cheers! will update as i think of things! sorry to anyone who ends up reading this fully. i have been unreasonably fixated and have brainrotted over this for two hours, inclusive of sleeptime. while sleeping. i kid you not. i would wake up and something would click and i would hop over to the laptop and fucking grind away i am so sick of myself

unwritten scenes, headcanons

you guys are 20. you haven't started dating yet. you're a doctor. you guys are yelling at each other. you say 'you want to kiss me so bad it makes you look stupid.' katsuki's so angry that he does. ⇁ this was the original ending btw but i thought this one kinda fit better he brings you sunflowers sometime. real ones. he's sneezing all the while. you take one look at him and you die of laughter. he's still sneezing. you tell him: you know i actually didn't even care about them until i found out you were allergic. ⇁ if i could write nsfw i would do it here like dude do u see the vision omfg a whole side plot where he's like what the fuck do you mean you weren't dating deku. you're like. what the fuck. are u stupid. someplace where you actually address how you treat midoriya, his lack of a quirk, and how you stood by and watched it all happen ua sports festival. you kick everyone's ass. #you have been trained by eraserhead and you are super duper cool i also don't remember if i included this, but: your mother asks you after the first evening. "you're not really friends are you." you say: "nope!" and it is the happiest she has ever seen you. the ua boys try to flirt with you and get hurt really stupidly a lot on purpose. you wonder why they've stopped showing up. it's bc katsuki gives them a whole earful. and you're like bitch what the fuck im a doctor and and hes just tsundere about it first kiss scene instead of the ending where he's like you care and you're like of course i do??? what the fuck?? are u stupid?? you guys start yelling at each other and you're both acting like ur 2. he calls you stupid and blind. you call him ugly. he's so mad he literally just lurches forward and kisses you. it's awkward and messy and you guys are so mad at each other. you literally headbutt him in the face. ah young love. ⇁ this was another alternative ending more exploration behind reader's character, her insecurities, and about some of the stuff i info dumped before the start of the katsuki povs? i feel like i didn't handle that as well as i could have, but i also didn't want to go on 10 billion tangents for things that had very little relevance to the story. i also think the transition to the last scene was a little abrupt, but tbh at that point i was just so ready to call it like. i just didn't see the point. i think it would have made for a more natural reading experience, so here's the tea: he's proud of u but u guys are angsty and ignore each other until after training camp. [more brainrot pining moments]. if i had to write the above scene, i think i'd do something along the lines of: you're first aid relief at the sports festival, not actively participating. dunno if you'd be nearly as badass, though. you definitely get pissed when they muzzle katsuki and probably get rly mad but ofc u cant show it. so u just unmuzzle him and walk away and hes staring after u. this is ur ??? elsa arc? i dont remember the disney princess. the training camp is torture. aizawa makes u run with them. you tell him straight up that u hate his guts. he grins like that is the best thing anyone has told him in his life. katsuki definitely blows up some earth monsters for u. but while ur not looking. he's angsty like that. the bath scene? oh lord u just know he blows mineta up. maybe he lowk fucks it up too and you have to heal it! the potential HAHAHA. i dont know how you end up getting kidnapped, but id probably just bullshit a reason like ur the #1 healer in the world hurr durr and afo wants u! idgaf if the plot makes sense or not this is entirely secondary to my scheming. katsuki just about loses it when he hears you're one of the targets -> how you get kidnapped? idk. you're not a remedial student, so you're probably participating in the game (odd number of ppl right). unsure of how i'd handle the news of your kidnapping: just know katsuki loses it again. for like the 5th time. yipppeeeeee

character notes, thoughts

your quirk is literally just you take people's injuries into your own body and heal it yourself. you're superhuman. i put 2 thoughts into this: 1) you're a healer and 2) i like cool characters. congratulations. you have now been born. i don't even remember if i kept the shouto scene. but anyways i think my bias was showing. just had to throw him in there. also the kuroo mention. sorry i'm totally normal and i mean it ⇁ btw i love you all (everyone who likes/interacts with my fics) but i joke to my friends everytime someone interacts w my first bakugo/midoriya ones from lacuna bc guys!!! my shoto fic is RIGHT THERE!!! the baby that launched the entire collection. please show him some love this reader is probably one of the favorite ones i have written, more of an oc at this point i think, and i wasn't expecting her to grow on me so much. but lowk i love her and am so proud of the way i wrote her growth!! i do feel like i wrote her very soft, but i hope her flaws were made very clear⏤ she is meant to be a sort of unreliable narrator, so she also is overly critical of her own, but there were several things that were not addressed as i was writing, particularly concerning midoriya. (quirk, the bullying, bystander's guilt.) however, i think that including them would have made me go off on a tangent, and detract more from the main point of the story i also do think i wrote katsuki a little ooc, if only because i didn't see the point of including what's already there in canon. sorry. my brainrot did not extend that far, and by the end of this, i was literally ready to drop. his perspective isn't meant to be all-encompassing (in the story, it may seem like it purely bc of how i paced it) but those are meant to be like. random thoughts that appear in several scenes. reader does not have bakugo living rent free in her head 24/7, and neither does he. they're just stupid and pining and i just wrote all the moments in my head where they do.

[olivermajor226]

CHOPPER MONOLOGUE

From ArtBomb, chapter 2. I just...it's been so long since I've been able to write him, and of course I'm pulling this out of context, but I think it stands alone enough, and Chopper should get the credit he deserves for this rant.

Sorry, Cass. Whatever goose chase Eirtae sent you and Kay on, well, uh, let’s just say the goose chase she took me on started far earlier. Like this morning. At 400 hours. And it started with calling me over and over, basically throwing a metaphorical stiletto at my head, so uh, little busy right now, and I’m already in deep shit with the other Mr. Syndulla, because we had, well, other plans today, important plans. But when a woman you respect with all your stupid synthetic life asks you to take her off-world, or rather threatens that stupid synthetic life if you don’t take her to Coruscant this instant , I mean, you do the chivalrous thing, yeah? Shit. Probably said too much. Don’t…don’t read too much into that, okay?  

You’re telling me Eirtae was on Coruscant this morning? Cassian asks in code, just because he’s pretty certain, then, Chopper did not get the heads up about the Semantics program. 

And he’s just telling Cassian everything.  

Even as he stands, still looking at the painting, he smiles triumphantly. That got anything to do with her secret plans for today? Cassian toys. 

I can neither confirm or deny…. 

But I just saw her, Cassian baits him

And it’s then he strikes gold.

Well, duh, Captain. Gods, I forgot you’ve like been literally nowhere since the Empire. No double and triple jumps anymore, Andor. We’re an inner rim system. It’s one jump, and only takes like twenty minutes to get to Coruscant, at most. It was actually really fucking bizarre and wild. She told me I wasn’t allowed to ask questions, and anyway, we end up at her favorite department store, and when someone tried to tell Eirtae I couldn’t go in, well, uh, I fear her wrath. She went on a twenty-minute tangent about how I was a decorated war veteran, and when that didn’t work she commed the retired Mon Mothma herself and let her give a piece of her mind to the sad little sixteen-year-old speciest mall cop. It was brutal. Then we’re the fanciest fucking store of my fucking life, just she and me, ol’ C1-10P, tracking dirt into the place, probably, and she’s charging all kinds of shit to her mother’s credit account, saying things like, “we need to defund the wealthy Chop. That’s how you take down the kriffing system.” Then when we were by the loading docks Eirtae tried to…liberate the loading bay droids, right there on the docking platform. Like right then and there. Actually convinced one of them, like the only barely sentient one of the bunch, who is honestly so fucking confused right now. I mean this bastard’s just your basic service droid, maybe a week into understanding he’s something separate from the boxes he’s loading into the Courier, and in his kriffing face is this beautiful, fiery woman delivering this passionate speech about how he’s her equal and deserving of rights and love and he already as her undying respect. Like this lucky son of a bitch who looks like a box, loading boxes, and he tells me he’s been online two weeks and in this once in a billion shot the angelic Eirtae Alniyat herself chooses to grace Coruscant with her presence, which I know she hated doing. Like it was really fucking hard for her to go back there, Cass, and he’s the only one she has time to save so she points to him and says, “you.”  

Chopper’s still going, but Cassian is already laughing out loud to himself, unable, truly, to believe what Chopper’s saying, save for the fact there are all these random snippets of his data of everything, although just visual, because say what you want about him, Chopper tells one hell of a story.

Then she apologizes, fucking apologizes, Cassian! And asks if he has kriffing autonomy, and of course each and every choice should be his. And he’s not so much an idiot he doesn’t directly load his own ass right onto my ship as soon as all the furniture is fucking loaded. And that’s when this woman turns to me and says, “Well, if it all blows up in my face, at least we did one thing right today, Chop. Gods, I love rebelling. Now let’s jump to lightspeed!” And I’m like, “yes, heh, adorable and all, love, but lets leave the fucking landing platform first, but also good idea about hauling ass because we just straight up stole this droid, from a soulless  corporation or not.” Like seriously Andor what in the fucking hell? Who is this fucking woman all the sudden?

Cassian is cracking the fuck up, laughing his ass off out loud, as Chopper keeps going. 

And of course ever since we got back Mr. Luckiest Box Alive keeps following me the fuck around and I don’t know what the fuck to do with him, Cassian. Because Eirtae’s got me on like five thousand errands, promising some shit about a surprise party and how everyone should believe in magic and there’s gold at the end of this kriffing rainbow if I help her and boy did my mind go to dirty places— I can’t help it I’ve had a crush on her forever and she’s so fucking beautiful and special. And even though I laid that all to rest a lonnng way back, really thought I had, today I’ve never seen her so…enraged with the fiery burn of a cause in all my fucking life and so she was just pushin’ allllll my right metaphorical buttons—then she looks at me dead in the optics like now she’s a Jedi fucking mind reader, points at me and says, “Two words for you, you smarmy astromech. Data. Sharing.” And I’m like what in the fucking hell?! So you know I log onto the old awful Network rumor mill and low and behold, what do I find out? Cassian Fucking Andor snogged our only monogamist Eirtae Alniyat and she got angry, slapped him then shoved him into some flower bed or some shit. And before I ask you if any of that’s true I gotta say, you broke this box’s motherfucking heart, because he was pretty sure his future included a lifetime with her, and he won’t shut up about it now, and like I can’t shake him, Cass. I can’t shake him! So either I’ve lost my touch, the whole galaxy’s gone wrong again, or he’s actually a kriffing genius because he’s worse than a motherfucking TIE-defender. And it’s all your fucking fault!!!

[luvrodite]

Hey Ro my beloved!! Here to indulge on the self-shipping. I was curious, do you have an actor or model that you see in your head as faceclaim for Jason? Or does your mind come up with a very specific iteration of him when you think about him? I ask because, when I like a written/drawn character, my mind is always on the lookout for an actor or a model that fits the description, just to have more of a solid idea of what they may look like in the flesh.

(Granted I used to be such a huge fan of all things Batman related but have fallen super behind and I don’t know if he has been adapted into a live action series or anything yet, so!)

Love you!! X

hi babydoll!!!! hehehehe thank u i love love love selfshipping and i love jason and i love YOU !!! i’m sorry in advance for rambling, i went on a small tangent because despite literally running a blog about him i don’t talk about him nearly enough as i’d like to hahaha

jason has technically been adapted in the live action series but curran walters (the actor) is definitely not the jason i envision in my mind in my selfship au. i’m super super picky about face claims when it comes to him so i don’t actually have one that i go to every single time BUT in my mind he looks exactly like this one random guy i saw in 2017 whose face i cant even properly remember anymore 😭

usually in my mind apart from that i kind of imagine him as tanned and a bit beefy - but just a liiittle bit less than some of the official art. like a minuscule amount less just because i’m not a fan of the way they draw him a lot of the time. i think one of my favourite versions of him is in this panel because he looks so beautiful. tw for the joker tho i hate that clown.

a lot of the time they draw him so stocky and very…idk how to describe it but he looks much older than his age and it’s not very flattering. my mind’s jason is a mix of pretty/handsome and strong features i think. like he has pretty eyes and high cheekbones and a nice jaw but he’s also like. soft and strong. i like the idea of his muscles being covered in a layer of softness so it’s not like movie star six pack and gun show, he’s got big arms but they’re also soft. does this make sense? also he 100000% has the white streak and i imagine him with scars bc he earned them!! he looks a little scary but he’s a softie!!!!

i think he gets a little softer as our relationship progresses. this is a more personal thing but the idea of gaining weight in a relationship because you’re being well fed and loved is so important to me, for the both of us, because it’s like. you’re safe enough to relax, you’re happy enough to live and be healthy. it makes me emotional thinking about it. also with this - i think he looks more his age in my selfship au and it’s in that same vein of finally getting to rest. drawing from my own personal experiences, i looked a lot older than i was for most of my teenage years because of stress etc and it’s only in recent years that that’s stopped, so i imagine it’s the same with him. we get to be young together and we get to rest. this is so grossly sappy but there’s such a big healing element to that relationship and it’s so important to me.

anyway thank you a billion times for sending this ask in 🥺 i hope your weekend was so lovely and im sending you soooo much love

[folfar]

11, 35, 49, 52, 59, 63 and 74 of the fic writer prompt

okay so firsty sorry that this is ten billion years late....

11. Link your three favorite fics right now

Genuinely have not been reading fic recently so have three long-time faves instead!

Concordia - Ccainao3

Obviously this fic is genius, its so perfect, everyone loves it BUT I don't think it gets the recognition it deserves for having the best summary of perhaps all time:

He’d had hope, after those talks, that when the sting of Olympic loss had faded he and Auguste would be able to salvage something of their old friendship. This doesn’t seem likely now. Sorry I gave you a concussion when I checked you is one thing; sorry I beat you out for the gold medal and then had your little brother wear it while I fucked him is another.

DREAMY SIGH!!!! Also Auguste is so damaged <3 fic writer cocaine ao3 and i are on the same wavelength when it comes to grievous head injuries <3

like a solar flare in the rising sun - Lazulisong

This fic is like a little pearl, a perfect morsel, an absolute dream of a scene. Damen, helpless. The sense of character and place and tension is so well done - it's short and it doesn't need to be longer because it's so gorgeous the way it is.

stars in secret influence - crimson_adder

I am a big believer that a wip need not be 'finished' to be 'good' and this fic is PERFECT.

Anastasia AU that is SO funny, so clever, so well put together - and, rubbing my greedy little hands together, a perfectly executed amnesia fic. brain trauma!!!! However funny you think this is, it is funnier.

35. What is one essential thing to remember when writing a villain?

HMM! I guess that they have a motivation - they are a villain because they're acting towards a goal that is at odds with the protagonist? Sometimes the motivation is to be dick and the goal is to make the protag feel awful, though. It doesn't have to be complicated.

Oh and also just because someone is a monster doesn't mean you can't have fun with it! I LUV the segment in Sunblind chapter 21 when Auguste is in the bad-end dream, and his Uncle is like 'hey :) want me to be your anointed heir?' and auguste genuinely doesn't get it. that was funny to me, a simpleton.

49. Do you ever get rude reviews and how do you deal with them?

NO which is good because i am the most oversensitive person alive!

52. Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

I am trying to reply to every comment I get this year! it was a new year's resolution. I used not to but that was mostly a combo of being shy and having weird feelings about artificially inflating my comment count because I was a little fool. I'm trying to reply to everyone because I LOVE getting comments, it IS the only thing that motivates me, and i want to thank people <3 i luv everyone who comments on my fics hugely and unreasonably

also, another resolution this year was to leave a comment on every fic I finish, which everyone should do! I'm a hardliner, sorry.

59. Does anyone in your personal life know you write fic? if not, would you tell anyone?

yes actually! thought i would take it to my grave and then lockdown happened. now i update said friends when i hit a significant milestone. sometimes they ask me if 'that big thing you're writing' is finished yet and i have to say no, shamefaced.

63. Something you hate to see in smut.

okay so I already said d*ddy k*nk but incest or worse, untagged incest vibes. also i really don't like exhibitionism when the people being exhibitioned to aren't enthusiastically involved.

74. You’ve posted a fic anonymously. How would someone be able to guess that you’d written it?

asides, so many asides. random segues into character backgrounds - not so much much tangents as parabolas because I do think they tie into the main plot but... sometimes I honestly come up with a random snippet of character history and then have to write a fic around it because I like it so much. This is one that currently doesn't have a fic attached, but will eventually fit into the Brexit storyline* -

Laurent has a surprising passion for offal; no one can pin down if it’s because he’s French or if it’s some sort of animal rights thing about honouring each part of the creature.  If pressed Auguste will say it’s stubbornness, because Mama had tricked Laurent into thinking that pâté was ‘special jam’ when he was a truculent child. The meaty origins of this treat were revealed only when Laurent was caught feeding it to his pony Daisy (thereafter renamed Cannibal by all and sundry), and Laurent had decided to double down on his passion for it, possibly to cover up the fact that he had been feeding Cannibal-neé-Daisy regular jam for the past three years.  That’s why her teeth are so bad! Mama had exclaimed. All those vets bills, Papá had said mournfully, stroking his moustache.

oh lol i actually had to come back to this and add another tell which is of course: character has intensely real but not prophetic dream and/or character succumbs to a fugue state and/or character keeps going to sleep at strange times. you know when you think something is a universal experience and then people are like 'girl no what's wrong with you?' anyway. hashtag narcolepsy rep or w/e

AND 55 which you sent me in a different ask lmao: Of the characters you write for, which is your favorite? Has that choice been swayed at all by your followers/readers’ reactions to certain ones?

my secret second favourite character to write is a tie between Jokaste and Nicaise. Nicaise is self explanatory, because he is So Fun to write. I have a fic here from his POV! Please read it (jeb 'please clap' voice).

Jokaste is the darling of my heart. You can tell this because she has shown up in 0.01% of my stuff on Ao3 which is how I show my affection. She is however in like. All of my WiPs. Looking at my google drive nd of the 4 things I am actively (cough cough) working on now she has a prominent role in 3 of them. No one asked for this! But I am so intrigued by her. Her canon characterisation is literally just that line from blades of glory when will ferrel goes "nobody knows what it means! but its provocative!"

here is a snip from one of said wips:

Jokaste, as if feeling the weight of his annoyance, rolled her head around to look at him. “You should try dermarolling,” she said, apropos of nothing, because she was awful. “What? You need to start stimulating collagen production. You’re looking a bit -” she made a dismissive gesture around the cheek area “- sunken.” Laurent communicated with his eyes that he would always loathe her.

[queenlua]

betting markets are way outside my area of expertise, but i can speak to the software security case! and the points i'd make there are:

* open-sourcing your software lowers the barrier of entry for randos who want to do a security audit / pentest / whatever.

* that's... about it?

* like, even if your software is closed-source, there's whole teams that just sit around reverse-engineering software all day for the sake of making it amenable to analysis. it's tedious but it's not hard

* and that's not nothing! you do get some benefit out of making it easy for curious randos to pentest your shit, particularly if e.g. you can back that up with some kind of prize/contest to make it actually worth said curious randos' while (e.g., the US Department of Defense puts together some "hey find some vulnerabilities"-type challenges from time to time, and we do get some novel techniques/tooling/takeaways from that kind of thing, as the prizes are large enough to attract e.g. teams of university researchers who are looking to prove themselves in some way)

* but anyone who's like "our software is open source therefore it's more secure" is either lying or kinda dumb lol. there's way too many other factors that go into a threat model, and also the kind and quality of attention your software gets, etc

* (if your software IS sufficiently interesting you can also assume the source code's already been leaked to the relevant nation-state but that's kind of a side tangent)

* "okay Lua then what DOES make software more secure?" i... don't think there's much of a shortcut around focused consideration & expertise, unfortunately! like, there's a few Industry Best Practices that we all know work pretty well & if you do them you will probably be better off than before. if you have an unfortunate pile of legacy c++ lying around you should fuzz it. you should have a system for quickly patching & rolling out new software when security bugs are found. all that good stuff.

but outside of best-practices-y things, you gotta make a threat model & Think Real Hard about what the real threats are & do something about those. automated analysis techniques help, bug bounties help, but like, just hiring a really smart and experienced dude to spend a lot of time finding problems in your codebase is also gonna turn up a bunch of shit those other things don't

* "but Lua we hired a pentester once and they only found boring shallow stuff and recommended stupid box-checking shit that doesn't matter :(((((" yeah idk you gotta. hire a smart person. who knows what they're doing. like for all that Scale and Big Computing and shit helps i think at the end of the day a lot of this shit is desperately hoping we'll find one weird maneuver to avoid the question of Exercising Rational Judgment and Actually Having Expertise In A Real Thing and i just don't see it. there's still just this guy in Hawaii i'd hire if i was scared about my c++ codebase sorry

* "is any of this relevant/comparable to the betting market case?" idk, maybe? if i were to hazard a guess, i'd say the betting market ppl feel like the security industry when it was getting REALLY HYPE about bug bounty programs in the 2010s and they were like Yes With The Power Of Incentivizing Random Overqualified Unemployed Polish Dudes To Audit Our Software We Simply Won't Need To Hire Security People Anymore. and admittedly the industry status quo at the time was... embarrassing, there was absolutely some low-hanging fruit there, a healthy bug bounty program can be part of an excellent security story. but random overqualified unemployed polish dudes feel just as vulnerable to being corrupt/manipulated as any other thing you may do to audit your software. similarly idk being like "oh the betting market will figure this out" feels like it's desperately handwaving any of a billion ways that market can be badly structured/incentivized/have weird founder effects/etc and also weirdly eager to shoot down alternatives because they're "messier" or whatever idk

it feels like there's an ideological resonance between the 90s-era open-source-software sentiment that "many eyes make all bugs shallow" and the 2020s-era fixation on betting markets as these all-knowing oracles because "well bettors have skin in the game and pundits/analysts don't," "if someone thinks they have better information than the betting market, their Rational Move is to simply Bet Against Other People until the market reflects reality," etc

and both sentiments are correct in some limited cases/scenarios but uh. feel obviously wrong when accepted in any stronger formulation?

admittedly i probably hang out with too many gambling degens, so...,,,,

[fragileizywriting]

How would FLP and Sharks and Sugar Marinette react to DL Marinette (and vice versa)? (also check your ao3 comments :P)

ANON ARE YOU LIVING IN MY WALLS? HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT I THINK ABOUT THIS LEGIT EVERY DAY??

oh my god. hold on let me compose myself i'm literally jumping for joy at this question, you have no idea, give me a second--

okay. i've finished answering this ask. i'm so sorry, this is a massive response. read at your own risk, because this is literally such a huge reply, i'm so sorry

for those who are still curious of the answer but have no idea, here's the recap:

sharks and sugar (SAS): kwami swap + reverse crush, with lady noire and mister bug, (and viperion! who i've never written in yet but also know he's a part of the crew)

demon lovin (DL): demon au with demon adrien, fallen angel luka, succubus marinette

fire lily petals (FLP): demon+witch AU with demon chat noir, witch marinette, naga luka

okay? yeah? okay?

okay alright okay. just stick with me. hold on. hold my hand on this one, i have so many opinions about it that i need to condense this and make it look good-- i've never shared this idea because it would get extremely specific and the venn diagram of the people who have read all three is like. ten people at most. i'm overshooting it, probably. hi. welcome. (and, god, if i included the vipermouse au in here the venn diagram would be even smaller) but anyway. hi. we continue.

side tangent, but i've always had the idea of DL and SAS crew meeting each other first, and then FLP. like, maybe SAS follow an akuma into a world that's entirely the same except, you know, adrien's not plastered all over paris billboards, and marinette's parents don't recognize her at all, and luka actually gets to run around and do stuff without his mom telling him to come pick him up from jail all the time.

and

they

love it.

after the whole "nice to meet you, i'm you!" phase, and everyone's settled in while they're still trying to find a way to go back home, SAS marinette and adrien decide to go on a date to the aquarium, knowing that they won't be interrupted by any more akumas, or stopped by random fans. they have so much fun.

back on track!

piggybacking off of this, sas marinette and DL marinette instantly become sisters to one another, not exactly twins because they don't look the exact same. definitely older and little sister (which means that when they fight, they fight like siblings, too.)

sas marinette is routinely over impulsive, the epitome of a cat following a ball of string with no other thoughts in her head, and DL marinette loves it even though she worries about it all the time.

(also, DL marinette is taller. DL adrien makes fun of that fact "huh, would you look at that? i didn't know they made you in smaller sizes!" to which DL marinette finds a way to get back at him somehow later.)

DL marinette loves how absolutely smooth-brained sas marinette gets when she's excited. sas marinette loves how kind and caring she is, because it's the first time ever she's had a family(?) member that didn't expect a billion things from her at the same time-- they both enjoy staying next to someone who understands what it's like to wince at every large noise.

sas marinette makes them crepes for breakfast one day because of insomnia. DL marinette cries the whole time while eating, so happy to find someone so sweet and kind and No Thoughts Just Friendly.

and a brief note on the other boys: DL luka and sas luka look nothing the same. sort of. there's that bit of resemblence, but they're definitely not as similar as the marinettes are. either way, their tattoos are in different places. sas luka has lip piercings. DL luka is much taller and bigger. they get along just well, too.

meanwhile, DL adrien and sas adrien are identical. identical. it's impossible to tell the difference between the two when they're sitting down, because they're sitting at the same height. DL adrien is taller. but they look exactly the same, down to the hair part. sas adrien doesn't have fangs, though. DL adrien helps sas adrien with physics homework. he's always so thankful.

now onto flp!!

the thought i had was that maybe instead of being sent back to their original dimension, everyone gets sent to flp instead. sas marinette loves the quietness of the forest, finally better for her sensitivities. she all but slams into chat noir, who was losing his mind at smelling two other marinettes-- she freaks out when she comes across an adrien who is definitely not an adrien anymore.

DL marinette is interested. of course she is. flp marinette is instantly worried about their choice of clothes, and how they're showing too much skin-- DL marinette would probably make something with her magic for anyone who isn't dressed appropriately for the new dimension. cue both marinettes nerding out over magic.

side note: both lukas find flp luka... weird. scary, sort of. aside from the whole "no-legs" situation, he's just basically a monster. so is chat noir, too, and they're kind of a little apprehensive about it. until chat does something just as stupid as sas marinette, of course, completely smooth-brained. DL marinette loves flp luka without even blinking, while DL adrien is trying really hard to not join her in simping over him. he's gorgeous.

meanwhile, chat noir hates DL adrien. like, completely. two demon princes, son of the king, up on earth and met a marinette that does magic and a monster of a luka, with very specific opinions about their privledge. also, both hate gabriel. i want them to be so closely compatible as possible that it bothers chat noir to death. sas adrien has absolutely no opinion on chat noir except he's terrifying, and is constantly wondering why his dad in both universes seems to be such a piece of shit.

flp marinette knows how to handle a smooth-brained kitty, so she doesn't mind it when sas marinette is pawing through her books-- in fact, sas marinette actually helps out a lot. sas marinette collects plants, so when flp marinette needs stuff for spells from the forest, sas marinette is the first one out the door with the ingredients list, all written in scientific names, tearing through the forest looking for it. someone always has to join her, just to make sure she doesn't get distracted and go walking off to the nearest thing that interests her, though.

flp marinette blushes every single time she sees DL marinette cuddling into both DL luka and DL adrien-- she can't wrap her head around having both. that's... is that allowed? surely it isn't!!!

thank you for asking literally my favorite ask ever, i'm going to go sob for the next week and a half, aaaaaaaaaaa

[steve0discusses]

Yugioh S4 Ep 27: Joey Punches Valon to Death and Seto Kaiba buys a Car.

My favorite character is back!

THE STORYBOARDER.

Like clockwork, the best storyboarder of all of Yugioh saw in the episode notes “This is the one where we shall Destroy Joey Wheeler” and he was like “Yes! this is extremely my thing!” and he’s back at it again, destroying Joey Wheeler with such finesse.

Like it’s so hard to explain in caps because you can’t see stuff move, but this animator is so good at the Yugioh vibe--he makes these character designs WORK for him (or her? No idea the identity of the mysterious storyboarder (or team of storyboarders--maybe this was one little group they freelance out to that worked really well together? I dunno) ) they really capture what Yugioh IS in a really unique way and still remain fairly economical in the animation sense. They do not hold back on any pose, and go completely ham into this ridiculous concept of a card game where you put on a special suit and punch eachother in the face.

Mind you, it’s still a card game and I skipped all that, but man...this is such a good storyboarder and I know that next episode they’ll be gone but for now I’m just gonna bask in it.

First off, Rebecca manages to figure out Seto’s 6-letter password in order to access billions of people’s personal data off of a satellite (we don’t get to find out what the password was) and although the storyboarder is great--they did make one fatal mistake.

The bane of every Californian who leaves California. LA is like a completely different country to San Fransisco but everyone only knows of two Californian cities and assumes we’re right next door to each other.

And it’s like...no, man. I don’t have Disneyland. Do I sound like a cheerful person that lives next to Disneyland? Do I say “bruh” and smile with the force of 1000 suns as we surf the coast on the backs of Lisa Frank dolphins? No dude, I have a strong Bay Area accent that makes me sound like a dry sarcastic asshole and I wear sweatshirts to the freakin beach because it’s very cold and filled with great white sharks.

(Sorry I just had to delete like 10 k words where I compared the entire cast to US cities by saying cryptic stuff like Joey Wheeler : Seto Kaiba is like LA : San Fransisco and like it was the biggest random tangent that only makes sense to me. Quarantine brain, y’all, I got SERIOUS quarantine brain. Anyone else? Anyone else just find themselves wasting like 2 hours thinking of which cities match the personalities of different characters on a show that came out so long ago? Man I need distractions right now.)

But back to what’s happening on the show, Yami is coming to terms with Joey’s struggle about as well as Yami does.

Which is mostly Yami saying “I’m pretty sure I killed Joey in that card game with Bakura in S1 and Tea had to bring him back from the graveyard so like wtv.”

(read more under the cut)

This was like 2003??? I think I keep forgetting when this season came out but we had printers at this point. We had google maps and a printer.

I don’t think I’ve touched a map like that since the 5th grade, where we had this competition to make a hypothetical road trip across America. It was Awful, and if you won the competition to get from SF to New York with the shortest distance, you would win something like pizza and a cool engraved name plate. We did not win pizza, because I could not even unfold this asshole map.

And now we have Google so like thanks, Mrs. Lambert, it was cool, but I’ll never use that information again. I hope. It was such a vivid frustrating memory that these maps still fill me with anxiety to this day, hearkening back to my 5th grade self just desperately trying to use string to measure how many miles the freeways across the midwest contain. (spoiler: a lot)

How OLD is this kid? Rebecca’s like secretly a 68 year old. She’s secretly Mrs. Lambert.

At this point we had a swell in the music as each friend of Joey joined in to announce their willingness to risk danger and save him.

Were they...not going to join him the whole time? It just seemed like a weird thing to bring up sooo after the fact.

Yami then turned to Duke and was like “but not you. You stay here” and he was like “Oh, thank gods.”

Rebecca stayed behind because the animators don’t want to draw her. Honestly, she’s incredibly helpful and they were mad stupid to leave the only smart one in the car. But youknow...this team loves being mad stupid. It makes the show more entertaining.

As they left we had a weird aside where Arthur Hawkins reflected “Rebecca is having just a REAL hard time trusting Yami” and it’s like--Arthur Hawkins! You’ve been dumping on Yami for like an entire season, that’s why. Like don’t pretend you’re all on team Pharaoh now. Why ever stop dunking?

But youknow, character development, Rebecca is going to learn the trust the ghost that possessed her crush/best friend that she’s had for 2+ years on a kid who’s been living in Japan this whole time who literally forgot who she was 2 weeks ago. You trust that ghost, Rebecca.

Or not. I mean you really don’t have to. You don’t owe Yami anything, dude. You don’t need to blindly trust idiot men, Rebecca. You just do you. Trust that instinct of “is this guy not trustworthy?” because yep. Chances are if you’re having that thought, that he’s totally not.

Storyboarder!

Storyboarder what ARE you???

STORYBOARDER!

after this followed a scene that I’ve seen gif-ed just so, so often that I assumed it was in a Yugioh Spin-off. I don’t know why I thought it wasn’t in this OG series, but I didn’t expect it to be here, in the Dartz season. But, it does make sense that this scene was under the best Storyboarder‘s direction because *chef’s kisses * it’s perfect. Every frame is a joy. The amount of sinister expressions on Mokuba, the level of sass coming off of Kaiba. It’s such a freakin shame that this man’s best work so far only lasts like a few seconds.

PS my bro looked it up and this car salesman has a wikipedia page.

He also looked up if anyone has shipped this car salesman and it’s our lucky day because this ship does not exist with any human ever in the world. Thank you, humanity. But, they DID make a wikipedia page so maybe we’re just putting off the inevitable?

I’m not even gonna cap it because I KNOW this is a gif you can easily download from everywhere but mm--this is a SOLID piece of animation. This animator is just flexing so hard, man. Yugioh did not deserve this much care and attention to detail.

Shippers rejoice, Seto Kaiba did briefly consider helping out Joey (before he absolutely drove away in the opposite direction)

(They’re clearly in the financial district already, PS. They are driving 5 ft to Dartz’ house.)

At some point Joey nabbed Valon’s card and so now he also gets to wear a bunch of stupid armor outfits.

This one is weird! It’s very Kamen rider-ish...but it’s a color scheme that feels very valentines day. It looks hard to wear. Good thing it’s animated.

I may need to capture this walk sequence though...if I still have the energy...the picture does not display his very energetic arms-in-the-air walk cycle I haven’t seen since that one Season zero episode. I dunno if it’s a reference to that, but I can’t think of any other reason why Tristan is walking like that.

This is when Mai finally shows up.

Valon lost his helmet during this fight, which lead to this:

What a good note to end on.

Anyways, I have no idea what my update schedule will look like or be, so if you’re new here and you want to start reading these from the beginning, I have a link for that:

https://steve0discusses.tumblr.com/tagged/yugioh/chrono

[lhs3020b]

The Fugitive Worlds, by Bob Shaw

The Fugitive Worlds is the last novel in the Land/Overland trilogy. Since I’ve commented on the other two, here are my thoughts. And beware! here there (may) be Ropes! possbly even intersecting ones!

OVERVIEW

It's two generations or so after the Migration from Land. If you squint, society on Overland may have improved - apparently it has got a bit more meritocratic, there certainly has been some progress on gender issues, and this time the novel doesn't open with a random peasant being dragged off to be executed on some noble's arbitrary whim. Technology and infrastructure are changing - Cassyll Maraquine's industrial empire seems to be overseeing a pivot toward a metal-and-steam based economy, and in fact they seem to be in the early stages of an industrial revolution. On the plus side, this presumably means Overland isn't faced with another ptertha crisis in the near future, though a cynic may wonder if they've just swapped one environmental crisis for another one in a few centuries' time, when the seas start rising and the deserts begin to expand. But not to fear - there's every chance that the whole of society will be swept away by cataclysm long before that ominous possibility can occur!

You see, change is afoot in Overland's domain. Because, to the consternation of everyone except the government (who remain supremely complacent), a fourth planet has suddenly appeared in their star system. Attempts are made to bring this to the attention of the queen; unfortunately she's utterly fixated on a demented scheme to extend her reign back to Land itself.

At the opening of the novel, Toller Maraquine II, grandson of the star of the first two books, is discontent. As Cassyll's son, he could have had a life of wealth, privilege and social influence. Instead he spends his time mooning after his supposedly-heroic grandfather - yes, the same one who managed to simply forget that his first wife existed! Toller II, unfortunately, has inherited his grandfather's impetuousness and basic lack of any common sense. He's certainly not a monster, but he is an idiot. This is shown in the book's opening scenes, where he falls blindly in love with the Countess Vantara, despite the fact that she's an obvious schemer and bully.

Seeking to impress Vantara, Toller involves himself with the planned re-expansion onto Land. This swiftly gets disrupted, though, by the appearance of an expanding crystalline disk, growing across the zero-g datum plane that exists between the two twinned planets. The disk's rapid expansion cuts off travel between Land and Overland - it expands beyond the region of breathable air where the two planets' atmospheres meet - and to make matters worse, the Countess vanishes while trying to traverse said region! Oh no! Toller, of course, immediately resolves that he must go and rescue her. (She has treated him with nothing except derision and contempt by this point, and he of course fails to read the very obvious message in there.)

The predictable result of this is that Toller gets himself and his crew abducted by aliens, because of course the people of Land and Overland are actually currently bystanders in someone else's plans. Fortunately for Toller, the Dussarrans show no interest in probing him. Unfortunately for him, the expanding crystalline disk is actually a complex machine intended to relocate Dussarra itself away from the galaxy they all currently live in.

You see, the aliens believe that they are imminently threatened - their researchers have found evidence pointing to a collision between so-called "Ropes" somewhere astronomically nearby. (Ropes appear to be similar to the class of hypothetical topological defects that we call "cosmic strings" - fortunately for us, there's no evidence that cosmic strings actually exist in our universe.) This collision, they believe, will have produced an explosion somewhere between a gamma ray burst and a cosmological phase change. They fear that a wave of destruction is currently zooming toward them, at or close to the speed of light. If they are right, there is certainly no chance of Dussarra surviving it, hence their decision to begin relocating their planet.

Unfortunately there's a smaller problem. The Xa, the relocation engine they're constructing across the datum plane? When activated, it will destroy Land and Overland. The Dussarrans may be about to finish what the ptertha started around fifty years previously - the complete destruction of all civilisation on either Land or Overland!

A LEVER TO MOVE THE WORLD

Before we go any further, I'll give the Dussarrans credit for one thing: whatever their other faults, at least they're willing to think big. They are, after all, trying to address the Rope problem at source. If it were us in their situation ... well, half the newspapers would insist that Ropes don't exist, another third would claim they're leftist conspiracies to steal our precious body fluids, the remaining handful would write something mealy-mouthed about how Ropes might exist but maybe we shouldn't "overreact" for fear of a "pro-Rope" backlash. Centrists would call for a grand bargain with the Ropes - they can toast only HALF the planet in return for a top-up pupil premium on private school fees! Youtube user MagaCrypto2024 will tell you to invest your life savings in their newly-minted RopeCoin ("if it's golden enough for the quantum vacuum, it's gold enough for YOU!") and then a Tory would take 52% of the vote on a platform about how Ropes are great beacuse they'll eradicate the benefits claimants. 10 seconds after that, the shockwave demolishes the entire planet, and of course no-one ever admits that perhaps, just perhaps, they may have got it a bit wrong.

I'll say it again, whatever their other faults, at least Dussarra has managed to react to the crisis, and their behaviour isn't completely-insane.

That said, the Dussarrans' solution does suck.

Apparently the Xa requires weightlessness and a large supply of free oxygen to grow. It's not really clear why the Dussarrans couldn't have simply built a large bubble, say at one of their Lagrange points, pumped that full of air, and grew their Xa in there. There is a suggestion that the planetary alignment between Land and Overland is important too, the book does flip-flop this a bit too. Anyway we're left with the impression that the Dussarrans didn't have a lot of choice in where they built the Xa and they do genuinely believe that they are fleeing a cosmologically-apocalyptic event. Also, it's a plot point that Dussarra isn't an ideologically-coherent monolith; in fact the plan faces substantial internal dissent, and this actually boils over into something as close as the Dussarrans can have to a civil war. This is doubly-significant as the Dussarrans' telepathy also stops them from fighting each other in the usual manner - bluntly, when someone dies nearby, the telepathic backlash is utterly-paralysing to any exposed Dussarran. Killing someone yourself would thus be near-impossible for a Dussarran, though as is common in Shaw novels, the Dussarran elite has found a way to do an end-run around this problem. (Non-lethal weapons don't have the same paralysing impact!)

On a slight tangent, one interesting twist in "The Fugitive Worlds" is that Toller and co are basically NPCs in the Dussarrans' story, and they don't realise it.

The place, I think, where the Dussarrans' scheme becomes morally-unacceptable is their failure to evacuate Land and Overland. The population of Dussarra is at least thirty million - that's their capital city alone! - and in fact is implied to be in the billions. They're a modern industrial society with modern technology, after all. By contrast, even if the Landers have been breeding like bunnies for the last two generations, the population of Overland still can't be more than a few hundred thousand at absolute most. My guess is that a more plausible number would be more like 50-75,000. Perhaps 250,000 if you stretch it (a low death rate and every family putting out 4, 5 or 6+ kids could just about get you there in this timescale).

The Dussarrans have remote teleportation tech, and the denouement shows that said tech can reach anywhere on Overland, even at a distance of millions of miles. In principle, they could remove everyone from Overland, and given the vast difference in population, they could certainly accomodate a few thousand more people on Dussarra. The point I'm making here is that an evacuation was possible; there was no technological, infrastructural or economic barrier that would have precluded it. Granted the Overlanders probably would have reacted badly to being hoovered off their homeworld - who wouldn't? - but, they're not 100% immune to reason either. As Divvidiv's interations with Toller show, Overlanders are capable of understanding the Rope problem, especially when telepathy is used to help said understanding along.

(Also, for that matter, there was nothing to stop the Dussarran government from trying to open diplomatic relations with Queen Dasseene's regime, and maybe saying "Uh, guys, sorry to be a nuisance but we've got some news you might want to hear about...")

Under normal circumstances, of course, abducting everyone off of their own homeworld would be bad. It's still not great, even in context. But, the Dussarrans do have genuine reason to believe that The End Of All Things is barrelling toward them at nearly speed of light. When the Rope-intersection event lights up Land/Overland's skies, we can reasonably assume that it will destroy both of those planets too. In fact, Divvidiv confirms this possibility in as many words. Relocating everyone to Dussarra, then using the Xa and the Land/Overland binary to relocate the planet somewhere safe would, in context, strike me as a morally-defensible solution to the crisis. While it would be sad to lose Land and Overland, it would at least allow both societies to survive.

(The question of Farland is never addressed in this. As far as we can tell, the Farlanders are on their own during this particular cosmological emergency.)

Perhaps unfortunately for everyone, Dussarra's leadership have apparently decided to pull a Thanos instead. Why they skipped over the obvious non-genocidal solution is never directly addressed, though there are hints. The Dussarran leadership patronisingly describes Overlanders as "Primitives" - it's implied that their racism is a factor in their failure to do anything for their new neighbours. Also, thinking about it, the callousness is thematically-consistent with the rest of the series. Throughout this trilogy we see leaders making decisions that are at-best based on expediency alone - witness how quick King Prad was to abandon Ro-Atabri in the first book - or sometimes, decisions are based actively on malice and spite (see the Sgt Gnapperl subplot from the second book). From that point of view, the behaviour of Director Zunnunun and the Dussarran authorities is not particularly-unusual.

The scheme also ends up entirely-backfiring. You see, the wrong planet gets displaced. Ooops.

We never learn the fate of Land or Dussarra for an absolute fact; Toller's post-event speculations are bleak, but the narrative may imply that Dussarra at least could have survived. (The Dussarran rebels return there after the confrontation on Overland - I don't think they would have done that if they thought that their Xa-disrupting box was going to destroy their homeworld in the process!) I'm less optimistic for Land - the planet is probably toast - but that said, there is no "on-screen" death and what happened during the Xa's activation was definitely 100% Off The Rails, so who knows? I suppose it's at least possible that Land could have survived the Xa's activation.

One does wonder how it would cope with the abrupt removal of Overland's tides, though.

That said, Overland seems to experience weirdly few direct consequences for its displacement. The main effect is an abrupt change in the sky, followed later by the confusing discovery that Pi no longer exactly equals 3, but instead is somehow closer to 3.14. There are no storms or earthquakes - it's not clear how the tidal relaxation of Overland's crust had no geological consequences at all. The only thing I can think of is that perhaps the new solar tides are exactly equal to the ones Overland previously experienced?

Oh yes, I mentioned "solar" tides, didn't I? This is because the last few pages of "The Fugitive Worlds" are even more head-bending then they sound. While the galaxies and daylight stars and comets and meteors all vanish, and the number of stars in the sky decline sharply, the Overlanders are surprised to discover that they have a lot more planetary neighbours that they did even hours ago. In the course of one night of observations, Cassyll and Bartan find five distinct planets, and quickly postulate that more could exist. The cream coloured gas giant with the big ring catches their attention, and they're confused about how to count the binary between the blue planet and it's one-quarter-sized greyish companion? moon? neighbour?

Yes, a cream-coloured gas giant with a prominent ring system, Pi quite possibly equal to 3.141592654..., a blue planet with a greyish moon that's about one quarter its diameter ... hmmm, I wonder where Overland could have gone? Such a mystery, no possible clues, amirite? Oh yes, the blue one is described as being quite bright, so apparently Overland's new orbit is fairly near to it. Given how relatively-empty Overland is, you do does find yourself wondering just how long before their heavily-populated new neighbour decides that they're next on the menu for Manifest Destiny...

(Just in case anyone's confused about what the ending implies, the descriptions suggest that Overland has been displaced not only out of its own universe, but into our solar system. The cream-coloured ringed planet is clearly Saturn, and the blue/grey binary is the Earth-Moon system. The five planets Cassyll and Bartan find are presumably most of the ones from classical antiquity - Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Earth-Moon system. Presumably they missed out Mercury, but in fairness its closeness to the Sun makes it the hardest of the classical planets to observe, so this is reasonable. But needless to say, this ending does come firmly out of the left field.)

BUT WHAT OF THE PEOPLE?

In terms of characterisation this novel continues the threads of the previous two. Shaw does do a good job of painting believable people - their flaws, errors and misjudgements are all very human. No-one does anything that real people wouldn't, or haven't. Toller's hero-worshipping his wife-amnesiac grandfather (have I mentioned the airbrushing that Fera Rivoo got halfway through the first book?) is believable. People do behave like this, idolising idiots and putting others on pedestals. His infatuation with Vantara is depressingly-believable too. People fall for people they shouldn't all the time. This sort of meltdown is arguably one side of the romantic coin, after all.

Vantara - well, there are plenty of status-obsessed bullies out there who are also secretly cowards. She's the monarchical version of every bad middle manager you've ever met. One of the book's subplots is how she gradually falls from Toller's esteem, though it takes until the denouement before he finally sees her for what she is. Also, interestingly, the romance plot gets subverted at this point. Toller manages to find someone else, someone who is both a better person and who will hopefully balance his more self-destructive tendencies with basic common sense.

Also, Vantara's entire career basically hangs off of the fact that a close relative is also the Queen. With Queen Dasseene's health in sharp decline and a clear suggestion that her reign will soon end, one suspects that Vantara's star will go down with her. Also this won't be helped by the fact that Vantara was physically there, on the field with the Dussarran rebels' Xa-disrupting box and she did - not a lot? It was almost the end of Overland, and heroic deeds were notable largely by their absence on her part.

The Dussarrans feel less real. That said, Divvidiv's combination of complacency, careerism and partly-sublimated guilt at the necks he knows he's stepping on in his job - yes, it does feel consistent with your average out-of-their-depth middle manager. We see less of Director Zunnunun and we know of the Palace of Numbers only indirectly, but their general superiosity and smugness are consistent with what I know of senior-management-as-a-group. However, Dussarra does remain slightly out-of-focus even in the second half of the book, when Toller and co are literally stood on it.

Cassyll and Bartan pop up every now and then in the narrative, but they're not so directly-involved. They're mainly there to try to explain events to the Queen, who is clearly severely ill and also severely in denial about being ill.

Another niggle aboout this book is that it carries on dropping plot threads, much like the other two. What happened to the people the Queen sent to Land? Did Dussarra survive? What happened to the rebels? Was the Rope-intersection really real? We never get clear answers or, in some cases, any answers at all. It almost feels like this novel was intended as a sequel-hook for a fourth book, or perhaps some new trilogy, but said trilogy never arrived. Honestly, that might be for the best. (Do we really want to read a novel about Overland being plowed up for luxury executive mansions while the surviving population are herded off to reservations, or all die from the flu or other imported terrestrial diseases? Given the Kolcorronian monarchy's behaviour in the first book, being on the wrong end of a colonial expansion would have a certain bleak irony, but it wouldn't be fun to read.)

So again, like the previous two, this one is a page-turner. It's hard to put down. But like the previous two, it suffers from dropped plot-threads and perhaps also a few too many out-of-the-left-field WTF? moments. That said, I did enjoy re-reading it, and I can see why it made such an impression on younger!me all the way back in the 1990s, when I first read this trilogy.