#sound on it's worth it i promise

[viric-dreams]

Mr Sacks Requires Passage to the Avid Horizon, Ft. some homemade soundscaping.

[givehimthemedicine]

NINA and the magic of VHS ✨📼

I think I just figured out a big part of how NINA works. here's how Brenner is "altering" past events.

something just hit me about this footage that's been staring me in the face this whole time.

before I come to my Big Point, let me establish a few things:

the camera codes don't match

s4 keeps giving us camera POV footage that's labeled per camera. we see codes like CAM 071, CAM 039 and CAM 114.

what's weird about that? nothing, except... here are what the tape labels in the NINA library look like:

alphanumeric codes like CAM B2, CAM A5, CAM TR2. not a single one with just the three-digit numerical codes.

k, put a pin in that.

the NINA library is so spotty

Brenner tells El, "Everything that took place in my lab was captured on video tape. Every success and every failure."

but the dates we saw in that closeup are so sparse. it takes only a dozen tapes to span a month of footage leading up to the massacre (a time period you'd think they'd save every second of):

CAM B6 08-10-79 CAM B5 08-12-79 CAM A2 08-20-79 CAM B5 08-25-79 CAM TR1 09-2-79 CAM RR2 09-4-79 CAM C6 09-6-79 CAM RR1 09-6-79 CAM C4 09-7-79 CAM B5 09-7-79 CAM TR2 09-8-79

no idea what a lot of these camera codes denote, but it's not too hard to guess RR means Rainbow Room.

I can tell you off the top of my head that there are four cameras in the Rainbow Room. and one in each corner of the training rooms, at least one apiece in test rooms, bedrooms, hallways. at least one apiece in observation chambers of test rooms - otherwise the One banishment footage wouldn't exist (is that a bit odd now that I think of it?).

and that's not including the tripod cameras with which are recorded close up footage like plinko and the cat.

so, why so few dates and camera angles?

@lilly-flowerr once kindly calculated an estimate about how many VHS tapes would be produced from 100+ cameras' worth of continuous footage for the duration of the HNL program and the result was in the ballpark of several million.

tbf, Brenner never claimed this was all the footage. so I figured, likely, this library actually just houses a pared-down selection of footage relevant to the massacre.

but the problem with that idea is... consider how when we see El get NINA'd with RR footage: she's being shown four views of the room at once. that's already impossible, based on the selection we see available in the library. there aren't even four RR camera views represented on that shelf, let alone all from the same day.

pin that too.

live feeds vs playback

I thought hey, if those camera POVs had dates and everything on them, why isn't that stuff on El's NINA videos? are they hiding that data to facilitate screwing with her?!??

which, yeah. but here's the One banishment footage that Brenner watches alone. no dates on that either:

so I went to look for other times we've seen lab playback to see if there are ever dates.

Hopper checking out the pipe in season 1; Owens reviewing Will's checkup:

that's actually a plot point on the Hopper one because he decided the lab was lying to him about which night that footage was of - if the tapes showed dates onscreen, that wouldn't have been an issue.

so then I thought, ok, if that data doesn't appear on playback, it must only display on monitors showing live feeds, and that stuff doesn't actually get recorded onto it. right?

well here are some live lab feeds: El and the cat; detained Nancy and Jonathan; scientists watching Will's checkup; Owens directing Bob to safety from demodogs. no dates anywhere.

so... if there's no data on live feeds or on playback.... where ARE those dates on the NINA cameras being displayed? there's no internal viewer on those security cameras, like looking through a camcorder viewfinder, so it's not like it's merely "the camera's view" unseen by any actual entity.

so like... who's seeing that? how are we seeing that?

pin that too. I promise we're getting close.

OSD (on screen display)

quick bit of context for those who didn't grow up with VHS.

in VHS days, your video camera (if you had it configured to do so) would put the date onto your home movies. it wasn't a separate layer you could turn on/off after the fact, like DVD subtitles. if that feature was turned on while you were filming, that date was forever fused onto the footage itself. any time you ever played that tape back, you would see that date. there's no way to get rid of it.

osd however - PLAY PAUSE FFW and all that - those labels aren't fused onto the actual footage. they appear momentarily only as you navigate the tape with your VCR. DVD players do the same thing, you're probably familiar.

you can watch the osd labels appear/disappear as Joyce investigates Will's Halloween tape, while the date stays put.

they give us the live camera view of Bob (which has just the date) vs Joyce playing it back on her VCR later (which has the date and also osd). why the timestamps are different is a whoooooole other post.

so now that we're all on the same page about how dates vs. osd works on VCRs,

I'll bring you to the only time I DID find dates on lab playback:

4x6 when Brenner pops this tape in his VCR.

"who's even seeing those ?" Brenner. yeah, that's not my stunning realization. but look what we see up in the top left corner: osd. PLAY.

so here finally is my point: if PLAY appears on the screen as a result of Brenner hitting play on his VCR....

let me direct your attention to the upper left corner of that other footage:

those camera POV shots all say 🔴REC.

those aren't recordings.

they ARE recordING.

Brenner is taping these past events, live, during NINA.

"how do you explain Little El showing up in some of the camera povs? brainwash her all you want, but she would show up big on a tape being recorded in 1986."

indeed! which is why I'm not going so far as to claim Brenner is recording The Actual Past. what I do believe is that he's recording El's memories of the past, in which she is Little El.

"and how are you gonna say Brenner is able to record El's memories right out of her head with a VCR? yes this is fiction, but VHS technology isn't. c'mon."

it's not actually that far fetched! El canonically has a very similar ability - it's been swept under the rug in comparison to the glamor of telekinesis, not used since season 1, but it's well established:

she not only can hear people remotely, but also relay what only she is hearing via radio/intercom to where others can then hear it.

Brenner was filming this test on a tripod camera, which wouldn't have been affected by the cut in power that happened when El started relaying. so he walked away from this moment with a recording of something only El was able to hear.

which is exactly how NINA works. add video technology, and there ya go. if it didn't already exist in 1983, this scene was Brenner discovering the concept.

onward:

Brenner's tapes aren't the tapes El is being shown.

watch this in 4x7: he inserts this tape, hits play, and then we cut to El in NINA, watching all the monitors flash to life with footage of herself in the infirmary for her bullying concussion.

the implication from the editing is that this particular VHS yields that particular footage for El to watch, but that's a false assumption they want us to make.

first, playing one VHS doesn't result in several screens with different footage rolling all at once. one VHS only holds one camera feed. all NINA's monitors can't be fed by one VCR.

second, "Infirmary" would most likely be abbreviated "I" or "IR". the tape he played said CAM TR2, which could stand for either Training Room or Test Room. El experiences 9/8/79 "memories" of both, so I'm not sure which this would be. regardless, it's not Infirmary.

third, as we've covered before, all the lab footage El is shown inside NINA is devoid of dates and cam codes. that's not characteristic of the tape we saw Brenner play in his VCR.

fourth, as we also covered before, not all the camera angles El's seeing are even represented on that shelf of massacre-month tapes.

so Brenner may indeed have captured everything in his lab on video tape, but the VHS library we and El are shown while he says that? pretty sure that's NOT what these tapes are.

it's implied that he's popping tapes into his VCR at the same time El's off in her memories. but if it's not for the purpose of showing them to her.... what is he doing with his?

"but nat, his finger hit play, not record."

well they're not gonna SHOW us him hitting record or we'd guess!

he's hitting play to get the tape queued up to the right spot to record on, which you gotta do with a VHS or else you could overwrite something important that's already on there.

if Brenner is recording whatever El is seeing, wouldn't that help explain:

the varying appearance of El as both big and little within the camera povs. at this moment, El is big because she's aware she's her current self (she's fully conversing with Brenner). this is definitely not really past footage, because it's not like Little El stood up on a chair and yelled into a camera in 1979. after this point though, she accepts what's going on and submits to the "memories" in which she is little, so she's seeing herself as little, so from then on she appears as Little El on the fresh tapes.

the different camera labeling within NINA and its library of tapes - they need to differentiate between old/real/fake/new camera views.

the sparsity of the VHS library - maybe only key moments need to be overwritten

this camera-yelling moment actually is a potential match for one of the tapes on the shelf. it's Sept 4, 1979, and it's in the Rainbow Room. CAM 071 09/04/79 could be the overwriting of CAM RR2 09-4-79. on the other hand, if that were true I'd expect to also see 09-4-79 training room and hallway footage to match those other povs we saw, and I don't, so idk.

the light circle game is the only NINA footage we ever get to see both live camera POV and playback of (although it's not actually the same moment, the dates and cams are different). the numeric camera code on both of these is part of my support for the numeric camera codes representing new footage.

regarding the date and cam code being different on those two bits of nearly identical footage…. what if I... plugged this into Multiplayer NINA theory real quick and said that maybe CAM 126 is fake-old footage that's been more recently rerecorded in someone else's NINA? that maybe that's what's on all of Brenner's tapes before he records El's new stuff onto them?

so here's my current thinking of how NINA works:

decide how you wish El remembered an event and compile cherrypicked real footage and/or staged footage supporting your version of events.

manipulate and gaslight El so that she doubts the veracity of her own memories.

drug her and throw her in a sensory deprivation tank where your selected footage clockwork-oranges her into "fully re-experiencing" your version of events.

presto! the most powerful person in the world now believes your version of events is true because she genuinely remembers it.

by means of El's electronic relay abilities (induced with a buttload of drugs), these false memories that only El is seeing, inside her mind, are displayed for all to see on monitor in NINA's control room.

pop a plain old tape into a plain old VCR and hit record, capturing whatever's on the monitor.

presto! now you have irrefutable original video footage of a past event that never happened.

now you can show that proof to someone else - the government, the media.... or perhaps more importantly another NINA subject, as an ingredient in your tampering with their memories.

so. I can't prove the ol' MindFucker4000 is also a time machine, not in this post, but I do still feel like there's time stuff involved as well. because I can't think of a way right now to claim that recording someone's manipulated memory of the past actually changes that past, meddles with timelines, etc.

can you? I don't have all the nuts and bolts ironed out, but I welcome your thoughts while mine gel!

[ratwithhands]

I'm curious. I've seen your art and something that's come to my mind is what actually got you attached with the Subway brothers. Your narrative on their different AU forms is so unique which is what brought me to that question

Alright, rat history time.

So basically back in 2021-2022, I was working on an old OC storyline (about 3 years old by then) and I was in grade 9 so I was like “A new Pokémon game? Pfft, like I care” and just didn’t watch any of the stuff related to PLA when it dropped. I still got recommended Twitter posts about it on Instagram and I ended up seeing this one.

I tried looking up Ingo cause I was like "oh, funky design, looks like a captain or something" but I didn't end up finding anything so I didn't press further. Anyways in March break of 2022, I got bored and decided to put some game streams on in the background while I drew. I saw Alpharad's PLA video and decided to watch it for a bit when I saw Ingo.

I was like "Hey you're the guy from Twitter!" and since I knew his name now, I looked him up and found his Bulbapedia article. I found him much more interesting than the rest of the PLA cast since he had history outside PLA, and I ended up reading up whatever I could find on him. I also by extension discovered Emmet this way, which only served to suck me deeper down the rabbit hole. By the end of March break I had a fan OC and 2 AUs made with more on the way, as well as a YouTube recommended page with nothing but theory videos on Ingo and decade old Submas content.

Around May I decided to decommission my OC storyline for personal reasons, and by this point Submas was starting to occupy more of my creative work anyways. Since I didn't have my storyline to put my energy into, I started funnelling literally any story ideas into Submas. This led to nonstop content for a shockingly long time, and ofc I'm still coming up with stuff now.

Long story short, I got attached to them by accident! It was a "right place, right time" sort of thing since they came in as I was starting to get sluggish with my original content and I ended up being more interested in writing for them.

As for narratives, I am effectively playing dolls with these guys. Usually the kind of stuff that I write for them is meant for OCs, but I dumped the 60+ person cast so I put that energy into them instead.

Most AUs will either have a core theme, an out of pocket idea, or both to make things interesting. Usually I just come up with a dumbass idea like "what if we brought ReBURST back for a rerun" or "what if Emmet signed a contract with an eldritch space spider" or "what if Submas could see into the future" and stuff like that, then it picks up themes as I keep writing. For some silly examples:

Burst is based on Pokémon ReBURST and the idea of human-Pokémon fusion, but there's focus on skill, how characters misperceive it, and resentment as a result. There's also a spotlight on inferiority complexes, bottled up guilt, and blind confidence depending on which main character you look at

Journal is about a diary that helps Ingo to regain his memories, and it focuses on remembrance and regret as a result of him reading it. Spotlight on lacking awareness vs hyper awareness and the monotony of living as people around you leave

Oracle is exactly what it sounds like, with the twins being able to see into the future. It focuses on cooperation and the importance of working together, but also learning how to work alone. The spotlight's on jealousy and gratitude for this one, though the latter greatly outweighs the former in this case

I also just have AUs I made to try deranged shit for funsies, like Sapioflora, Cybernetic/Z-Λ, Team Supernova, and Idol. Those are mostly for exploring goofy ideas that may or may not go anywhere.

Right anyways basically I just saw Submas after watching PLA gameplay and found the twins more interesting to write about than the project I'd exhausted by then. The narratives are like that because the AU ideas I make are actually OC concepts that I modify to fit Pokémon specifically for these two or ideas about the two that I'd like to explore. Hope that answers the question ^^*

[goldenhypen]

an engene telling jake to stop biting his lip and jake saying it’s a habit and then another engene telling him not to stop sksjsj; jake watching ‘super’ + dancing to it :’> ; him telling us his favourite track is the fifth track and has a similar mood to polaroid love + shout out, and there’s a song similar to fever, and a song similar to attention please; and despite telling us his favourite track is the fifth, proceeds to tell us there’s between 1-20 songs in the album T-T (i love him); him not being sure if he’s allowed to spoil this much but does it for us anyways :’> ; him speaking in so much english just for us :’> ; despite it being late and him not having dinner yet, he still went live for us for an hour :(

[kavehayati]

Chappel Roan saying she’s sad she’s demisexual and then there’s me being aroace as a whole like don’t you think I’m even more sad 😭

[france-the-third]

Guys if I disappear in like... May, this fucking thing will be why

That monstrosity is a list of all the tests I have to pass to get the baccalaureate, and I need that to ... basically to get pretty much any job I'd like to do

I had to create that thing myself, using multiple government website pages about the bac(calaureat, we're lazy) because comprehensible information is apparently not a thing

close-ups/explanations under the cut

blue= explanation of an abbreviation

green= explanation of an abbreviation but it's a list that you don't need to read to understand this

italics= word(s) in french

note: i haven't reread this super carefully, so if I say oral on its own, i do mean oral exam, in french we just say un oral so my brain may forget the word exam lol

BFI: Baccalauréat Français International, basically I have 8 hours of English a week instead of the normal 3 (although with LLCE and/or AMC you get 9 or 15 hours but i'll get to that in a minute) and I have a bilingual level of English [technically I already had that but most of my friends didn't]

Coef(ficient) [x]: ...ok so i have no idea how this works really but it's basically how much is this grade worth. If you get 19/20 coefficient 1 then you got 19/20. If you get it coef 2, I think that means you got 38/40 etc. So coef 20 is huge.

DBQ: Document Based Question

Durée: length of time, how long does this test take

ACL: Anglais C? Litérature, literature basically (shakespeare and gothic make sense, O'Brien is the name of my teacher and hopefully it's a common enough name that it doesn't matter that I just realized his name's still on here oops; he's my poetry and drama?? teacher but since we don't really know what to call his class, we just call it by his name. He teaches about poetry yes but also we're also studying Beckett's Happy Days which is a play, not poetry)

CDM: Connaissances du "Monde", lit. Knowledge of the (British) World, we have to do some research projects which we will present in an oral at the end of the year

There's about 50 kids in my school who will have to do all that this year, about 50 who will have to do that next year, etc.

There's about 1500 students in my school, there's 3 years so only about 500 students passing the bac at my school this year, and only 10% of us have to do this many exams.

The international section doesn't really exist in other schools however, so there's a really small percentage of french kids total who have to do all this.

All that stuff is admittedly my "fault" for choosing to do the international section.

Everything else is mandatory(-ish)

Tronc commun: Everyone has to do this

(notice how the coefficients are at like 8, not frickin 20)

Philosophy: we have to either write for 4 hours about a single sentence they'll give us as a subject (and it can be about practically anything) (that's a "dissertation", or 'dissert' because we have really long names for stuff but then we don't bother saying the full name) OR write a "explanation of the text" which i have no idea how that works bc my teacher's a bit incompetent

N/A: Not applicable, that's for the time the exam takes, we get tested in class so there's not really a set time for stuff

(I know that's ridiculously small sorry)

Ok so now we're getting to the fun little french thing that no one who's not french ever seems to know

In 11th grade (1ère) we have to choose 3 areas to specialize in out of the following (can vary slightly based on schools):

HGGSP: Histoire-géographie, géopolitique et sciences politiques, aka political science and social studies

HLP: Humanités, littérature et philosophie, aka humanities, literature and philosophy (oo it's almost the same words in both languages)

LLCE: Langues, littératures et cultures étrangères, aka English (lit. languages, literatures and foreign cultures but it's really just English class)

AMC: Anglais monde contemporain, aka English again (lit. English contemporary world and again it's just English class)

Mathématiques - transparent

Physique-chimie: Physics and chemistry. No those aren't the same, but yes I only figured that out bc someone explained that to me, bc those two are always taught in the same classroom and with the same teacher for some reason

SVT: Sciences de la vie et de la Terre, aka "Sciences of life and the earth" (you know, bc that's specific), aka Biology + Geology

SES: Sciences économiques et sociales, aka economics and social sciences

NSI: Numériques et sciences informatiques, aka computer science

Arts (arts plastiques, cinéma-audiovisuel, histoire des arts): The list I found with all the names of these spécialités (bc they're only ever referred to by their acronyms) has art be split up like that [technically there were more but i cut them lol] which is weird bc I've never seen art history be separated from actually-making-art (arts plastiques-- Why are they plastic I have no idea) and I didn't think cinema had art history

In 11th as I said you choose 3, and you have 4 hours of each per week.

In 12th grade (terminale), you drop one of the 3 subjects you chose so that you can concentrate more on the other two, with 6 hours of each per week.

The most common combination is math, physics, biology and then one of them gets dropped.

This is just a zoom on the two I kept, I had computer science as my third spé last year.

This combination is extremely uncommon, I only know 1 other person who did those 3 subjects lol.

SVT (biology/geology): Ecrit: I have to write stuff; I wrote either or but it turns out it's both, anyways I have to do a DBQ (see above) and answer a question based on knowledge. TP aka Travaux pratiques: uhhh idk how to explain this other than actually doing science instead of just talking about it.

Art: Ecrit: Analyse du corpus d'oeuvres: we have to analyze a collection of works of art based on a question we're given, and then we can do either a note d'intention pour un projet d'exposition, lit. a note of intentions for an exhibition project; basically we have to take one (or two) of the works of art we saw in the first part and say how we'd put it in a museum. or we do the analyse de corpus + a commentaire critique, where you have to answer a question, for example on a mock we had a question about whether or not AI counts as art; and we had a text and a new work of art An oral is the same word in both; a lot of subjects don't have orals (svt for example) and basically we have to talk about the project we worked on for the whole year. I think. Pratique: actually getting to work on creating something. I'm doing an animation, my friends are doing a frieze that's themed on marine life, something to do with leaves, a crochet project that's also marine life themed, something space themed?, and a mini forest in a suitcase. Some of our classmates are doing sculptures (there's a sculpture of a female bust with holes in it and handprints all over it), someone is - i think - making a musical instrument from scratch, someone else does a lot of paintings that are humongous with lots of bold colors... This is the best part about art as a subject because you get to choose what you do.

Next up, another thing that all french people know and no one outside of france knows; contrôle continu

That is basically classes where we don't have a big test at the end of the year, which is nice, but we still have tests and at the end of the year the average of all of the tests done in these subjects counts as a percentage of the grade you get for the bac.

Maths comp(lémentaires -- we love shortening words lol) aka complementary math?: you can choose to abandon math as a spécialité but still keep some math classes in 12th. There's also something called maths expertes, lit. expert math, which is the same thing but with harder classes; but given that i only know one person who does that, i completely forgot to include it here lol

Both math classes here are optional, everything else till LV3 is mandatory.

Coef 3 en 1ère, 3 en terminale: the averages of both 12th grade and 11th grade are counted

Histoire-géo(graphy): social studies (lit. history and geography)

Enseignement scientifique: so. this thing. Despite the fact that you can take biology and physics as spé, everyone has to do this "scientific education" where the kids who took biology are bored in biology classes, the kids who took physics are bored in physics classes, the kids who took both waste two hours per week listening to stuff they already know, and the people who took neither physics nor biology are also usually pretty bored because even if there's one or two students who are interested by science but were more tempted by other things, most of them didn't take science as spés because they don't like science.

It's a great system /s.

In fairness, we are doing more or less useful things; in biology we're talking about evolution and we mentioned how - especially in France - antibiotics are being used too much and so are becoming less effective. For the people who don't do science, I suppose that's important to know, for me at least the effect was ruined by the fact that I had done that in spés like a week earlier.

In physics, we've been working on energy consumption and kind of how it works, but there's too much math in physics for me to be super interested lol.

LV2 aka Langue vivante 2, aka "living language 2": As I'm writing this I just realized that I forgot to include the LV1 in this pdf lol.

In 7th grade (or 6th if you're an overambitious nerd like me), you have to choose a "second" language, that you'll keep till at least 12th grade, and then afterwards idk how it works. The first language is English by default, you *can* make english your 2nd language but that's complex and Idk enough about how that works. French is taught from 1rst to 11th but doesn't count as a living language for some reason.

Most schools offer Spanish and another language, my middle school had Spanish + German, a friend of mine does Chinese as a 2nd language and there's probably other options depending on the school. Oddly enough, despite the fact that Belgium is at the closest about 20 minutes away from my house by car and the Netherlands are at the closest 1h30 away, Dutch is not a commonly taught language I think. Spain is at the closest about 10 hours away by car, and yet it's far more taught.

(The reason I forgot the LV1 is that in the international section, we automatically get the highest grade possible, 20/20, bc they're grading us based on British standards so they're basically saying that we speak English)

EMC, Education Morale et Civique: I'm going to be honest and say that I have no idea what this class is for or how to translate it lol, desoite having had this since 6th grade. Literally the words mean civic and moral education and if that sounds like propaganda, well, it sort of is. We've had many classes on how to be a good citizen, and how democracy works I think, but we've also had classes on other completely unrelated stuff.

Most of the grades in EMC are group presentations, and so I could not tell you about a single thing I got graded on lol

Spé abandonnée en 1ère: lit. spé abandoned in 11th. Yes we use the word abandoned for this lol, other than that I think I covered it earlier

LV3: So following the logic from LV1/LV2, I think you can guess what this is. This is a third, optional language you can take, most people don't bother because we already have too many classes.

I however am not most people lol, but I'll be adding my friend as an example here because the language I chose could be confusing given what I said earlier about LV2s. Antony [not their real name] is in the international section so has English as the default LV1, they took German as an LV2 and they took Japanese as their LV3. Based off of this logic, I have the same thing except I have Spanish as my LV3 and not Japanese. (I'm not sure how clear this would be on it's own because as I said most schools offer Spanish as an LV2 and most people choose that as their LV2. Since I did German as my LV2, I only started taking Spanish classes in 10th grade)

My school, being an international school, offers an extremely large range of third language possibilities: As I've mentioned, there's Japanese and Spanish, but also Italian, Chinese, Portugese, Polish, maybe German, possibly Dutch and possibly/probably others but I don't know for sure. (I just checked and they don't actually offer German as a 3rd language, but they do offer Dutch, and that's it. "Only" 7 languages, I kinda thought there were more [i think most schools have like one or two. A quick google search for the other school I could have gone to tells me that that school offers Spanish and Arabic as 3rd languages and that's it])

Oh and there's often Latin or Ancient Greek offered at the same time as the LV3 I think, but as they're dead languages they don't count as langues vivantes lol

And we reach the end, with these two.

Français (1ère): As 12th graders, we've already done this part of the bac, last year. The French exam used to be the same year as all the rest but if you've read this far, I think you see the problem with that lol

The grade counts as a percentage of the total bac

And last and certainly worst; the Grand Oral: Lit. the big oral, we have absolutely no preparations for this at school and need to research stuff on our own, in our "free time", whatever that is /j. (... well actually /hj)

I've had 1 teacher talk to me about this, it was my biology teacher, and so depending on the teachers you have for spés, I wouldn't be surprised if some of my classmates hadn't been told the specifics of this sucker at all.

What we have to do is prepare not 1 but 2 possible questions, either 1 per spécialité or a mix between the two subjects (there may be other possibilities but as I said almost no one has told anything about this so this is based off of my recollections of what my biology teacher said and what i found on two government websites.). The reason you prepare two subjects is so that the examinators can choose which one they want you to talk about. Twice the work, twice the stress, for a 20 minute thing.

You have to present your topic for about 10-15 minutes iirc, and then answer some questions.

In biology, my teacher gave us a few vague topics we could use as starting points for our grand oraux (yes the plural of 'oral' is 'oraux', the french language is weird), and basically it's a whole ass reasearch project that we don't get any dedicated hours to in our schedule, that no one has told us about/reminded us of and we have to do that on top of everything else here.

In case my tone isn't clear, I find this ridiculously stupid. I don't like oral exams in the first place, but usually when we have to do some in subjects such as EMC, they don't give us any other work to do while we research our oral, at least in that subject. Another reason I really dislike this is because of CDM (see the first pic, about the international section exams).

CdM is 2 hours a week where we do some research for our research projects. Again, we have 2 hours every single week, with a teacher present, to do nothing but research (and send emails to potential research partners technically), for an exam at the end of the year. This is an international section thing, so the research is in English.

There was the option of adding 2 hours a week for a very small percentage of people to learn how to research in English, and despite the fact that most people would complain if they had more hours of school, the 2 hours a week of research are genuinely useful. I've gotten a lot done since September, and I'm pretty confident about the oral.

For the grand oral, I need to come up with 2 subjects by the end of vacation (we have a 2 week break starting today because it's France and also my class at least already has terrible mental health, if we had to keep this schedule up every single week till May we'd be reduced to like 5 students per class because everyone would be having breakdowns or burnout [Antony is technically not slowing their schedule down over this break (or really any of the other breaks we had), but they're insane /aff /hj. more on that in the tags lol]) not because the school finally realized they should probably remind us of this, but because my biology teacher's a very competant and organized woman who wants to know our subjects so she can help us. (I've had teachers I've liked more or where I've been more interested in their class, but man do I love her for this, other than 2 of my international teachers, she feels like the only competant adult in this school)

[haewangsong]

if anyone believes in the bullshit kjh put out i pray for you that you never work in a field in which you'd need help from unions

[iridescentis]

it makes me so sad when I don't hear someone and they're like "nevermind 🙄" like I'm sorry!!!! the words just get jumbled in my brain and translate into nonsense, the listen is just not loading, I'm not trying to be inconsiderate :(

[coridallasmultipass]

I hate when my phone won't let me have 2 audio sources running at the same time (depending on the app). I know what I'm doing, let me hear the discordant noises. My brain has built-in audio separation for music. It came as compensation for auditory processing issues. Don't make me pause the music.

[mamaestapa]

getting to the point in my final essay where im just writing complete BS and rambling because im SO OVER IT

ugh. but were almost there!!!! im so ready to get back to writing stuff i actually love writing for all of you🤍

[fructo]

finding out that cavetown is FINALLY coming to the closest city to me means that I have to (politely) aggressively message my friends to find out if anyone will go with me

because listen. I've been waiting for 4 YEARS. I'll literally buy their ticket if it meant they would go with me. I'll skip school the next day because school is temporary, music is forever and LIKE HELL if I'll give up seeing one of my favorite music artists LIVE because of school. this, my friends, is desperation, and I AM NOT GOING TO SETTLE.

[gemharvest]

Need to get on top of whatever dumb fucking inferiority complex I got going on I'm tired of looking at everything about myself and going "Wow I am really sub-par." I know it's 2am but this isn't the midnight thoughts talking this is a fucking persistent curse throughout my day.

[your-god-empress-lavender]

Henrow blorbo

first off, ohmyfuckinggodyouaresocoolllllllllllllllll

secondly, what ya workin' on currently? <- is deathly interested, yes please please please info dump if you have the spoons

- Ryan

Bonjour my furry friend. At the moment i'm mostly working on getting a job so that i can afford rent, but when i'm not doing that, i'm working on designing some new N-substituted 5MeO-tryptamines (in order to avoid being banned for breaking tumblr TOS, i can't say exactly what for, but if you look up 5MeO-tryptamines, you should see). So far i've only managed to make things that make me super sleepy (and maybe a tiny bit inebriated), so presumably my body is mainly metabolizing them into melatonin. I also have been working on working through the details of making a rocket engine which relies on both muon catalyzed fusion and z-pinch fusion (mostly because even though i know it's way above what i'm probably capable of, i just love space so much i desperately need to see it for myself and i figure that since rockets are so absurdly expensive, the only way i'll end up in space is if we can get a whole new generation of ultra-efficient rockets (for example, given p-N14 fusion, if we manage to get 1% or more (i don't really expect more than 0.1% max, but still) of the hydrogen fusing with nitrogen, we'd be able to put 150 tons on the moon from earth with only using about enough fuel to fill a small car (instead of needing a skyscraper sized rocket to send maybe 30 tons)). Now, if it were as easy as my calculations show it to be, i can't imagine how there are any rockets flown that aren't fusion, but seeing as i haven't even made a working proof of concept yet, i'm not in a position to criticize the thousands of aerospace engineers who are working on conventional chemical rockets. I love fusion because it's simultaneously so easy (i live pretty close to an old uranium mine where i can actually pan some uranium out of the creek near me, then use that uranium to make a neutron source (B10(α,n)) which is really just fusion between helium and boron, happening at room temperature because of how high energy the α particles released by uranium are) and so absurdly difficult (without catalysts like muons, it requires absurdly high temperatures and pressures that almost always take more energy put in than they can give out). Anyway, i've also been sorta working on studying a material that a while back i got way too excited over and may have called a room temperature superconductor (almost certainly not the case), but in an attempt to make it more pure and study it for real i've been trying to work on the exact calculations of its composition and finding a better way to heat it up to high temperatures (i might just put it in a flat-bottomed flask, especially since it finally warmed up enough for me to go back outside where the fumes released by its production won't make folks mad).

And then there's the biological experiments, currently with electroceutical tissue modifications since most of the other projects i have planned require me to have a gene printer capable of reliably printing genes thousands of base pairs long and i'm not sure when i'll be able to build that. The most recent thing i've been working on is really exciting because if it works it means that i've successfully done something that has never been done before to a human body (and given the long lasting pain in that part of my thigh, it seems very possible it is working), but i'm hesitant about sharing what the project is because i don't really want folks putting gap junction blockers, calcium channel blockers, and sodium channel blockers into open wounds without knowing how to do it safely and correctly to get the desired results and not just a really messed up wound. If/when this experiment turns out well, i might give directions in private, but i'm still somewhat hesitant due to the risks inherent in this (the biggest and most likely is literally giving yourself a form of cancer, something i'm not eager for others to risk). Soon i might try chemical dedifferentiation of skin cells (thinking on my back or upper arms) followed by some mildly dangerous experiments to test how reliably i can make it turn into other cell types. And while i haven't made good work on it in a while, i've also been trying to make something similar to shimmer from arcane (ideally not addictive or harmful to the user, but most importantly the quick energy burst, decreased pain, and increased regenerative abilities (obviously it won't be anywhere near as dramatic as in the show, so calling it shimmer may not really make sense, but it is where i got the inspiration)).

Then i suppose there's the battery project i was talking about in my last post, and i'm also trying to learn how to make alcohol under my desk (i mean, it's super easy, it just doesn't taste great). There might be a few more things i'm working on but rn i'm super eepy and have talked about a lot already. If this seems like i'm doing a lot or impressive, also note that i'm actively failing out of college (for my own pride: the material is super easy and mostly i already know it, i just can't stand wasting so much of my time doing homework that doesn't help anyone or anything) and not yet working a job, so i have a lot of time and so much free brainspace to think about and do all this. I also work very slowly on each thing because i keep bouncing back and forth between all of them and almost always end up adding new projects before i've finished the old ones and so i almost never see a project all the way through to completion (at least some of the bio projects are just sitting in my body and i am just waiting to see how they turn out in the next 2-3 months, so those necessarily will see completion, even if it's failure). I really hope i see the fusion rocket to completion because if i don't think i'll ever be able to see the earth from afar or the moon from up close.

[sigynpenniman]

okay time to go bother an actual eye doctor because I wanna be the dead secretary so bad. this feels so unhinged and extra. i feel like they're going to laugh me out of the building. but. life is sooooo fucking short man

[moreaujeans]

ourgejjg