#spm researches

[lucyav13]

The ancients

The ancients were an advanced civilization. They were highly intelligent and possessed great magical power, and their influence spread across many dimensions for thousands of years.

They had great faith in the power of love, and the passion of some became the stuff of legends. 1,500 years before the events of Super Paper Mario, a particular group of Ancient sages created the Light Prognosticus to counteract the grim prophesies of the Dark Prognosticus (whether this book was written by an Ancient as well is unknown); they also constructed Flipside, and saw to the distribution of the Pure Hearts across the land, believing that the power of love would be the only way to save the universe from the destruction foretold in the Dark Prognosticus.

Among them, there were 4 sages, who made all the plans to prevent the heart of chaos from destroying all the worlds. They are:

Merlimbis

This gentle and loving sage is said to have created the Pure Hearts... She is a direct ancestor of the fourtune-teller Merluvlee and the charmer Merlee..."

Merlimbis, who is described by Tippi as "gentle and loving", was one of the four sages among the Tribe of Ancients. She is thought to have created the Pure Hearts, and therefore the Purity Heart. She is never directly met, only viewed in a stained glass window in Mirror Hall, which reveals that she looked very similar to Merluvlee and Merlee, both of whom are direct descendents of Merlimbis according to Tippi and Tiptron.

Merlight

"He had great knowledge of all the worlds, and is said to have designed Flipside... He is a distant ancestor of Merlon, who still has many of his books at home."

Merlight is revealed by Tippi to have been quite knowledgeable in the nature of dimensions/worlds, and used this knowledge in the design of Flipside. He is distantly related to Merlon, who looks identical to him and apparently possesses a large amount of the books Merlight left behind.

Merloo

(A/N): What's with putting "Mer" at the beginning of the names?

"This sage was very wise and is even said to have written the Light Prognosticus... He was also a great magician who could control dimensions..."

According to Tippi, Merloo was very wise in his time and is even thought to be the author of the Light Prognosticus (although authorship is also credited to Merlumina). In the Japanese script, he is mentioned as having future vision, although this is unmentioned in the English localization for reasons unknown. He has the appearance of a mustache-less, green-robed character, but while the other sages bear resemblance to the "Shaman" characters encountered in the game, Merloo bears only a passing resemblance to Merlon and Nolrem. However, Merloo is said to be a powerful, dimension-controlling magician, similarly to Dimentio and to the "Flip Wizard" Bestovius, a descendent of the Ancients (and possibly Merloo) who gives Mario the ability to flip into the third dimension

(A/N): I kind of have a theory about this, which involves a family tree. I'll post it in a next part, so stay tuned!

Merlumina

The member of this group of sages that we have the most knowledge of. 

The wisest of the sages, she was a leader of her people... She was also very passionate, inspiring dozens of legends of her romantic adventures..." According to Garson, their romances threatened to destroy the world more than once...

 She was told to protect the Pure Heart in Yold Ruins and await the hero of legend. 1,500 years later, her ghost still waited for the hero to arrive. She is the only member of the sages to be met by Mario and his friends in-game. She is credited with writing the Light Prognosticus by Merlon, although Merloo was also said to be the author.

In fact, some more that belonged to this tribe are mentioned, the ones that are most worth analyzing are:

Merlumina's sister brought the purple Pure Heart to Sammer's Kingdom and fell in love with the king. They had 100 children together, providing the origin of the Duel of 100, and making her the ancestor of the encountered in the game. 

The inventor of the Pixls was a human member of the Tribe of Ancients, as was his daughter by extension, who died and had her spirit transformed into the Pixl Queen. The Ancient magician who created those Pixls also had a son whom he believed had perished along with his wife. However, the son survived, and may be the ancestor of Count Bleck.

The Ancients hid the Pure Hearts in various worlds to stop eventual destruction. Then the Ancients scattered to various world to pass the rest of their days. Most of them were wise and kind like Merlumina. And like Merlumina, many of them would totally lose their cool when they fell in love. But it was this very passion that let them build the vessels of love, the Pure Hearts...

The Ancients traveled to many worlds to entrust people with Pure Hearts. It was to keep them safe from destruction or misuse by those with evil hearts. The Pure Hearts were drawn by their own power toward those strong with love. The Ancients used this trait to find suitable guardians in each world. And a few romances also began as a result of these little journeys... Many of the Ancients who found guardians fell in love with those they met. And so they lived their days happily in the world they'd visited out of duty. This is how the legend of the hero was passed down to future generations...

Before concluding, I would like to show you a story that Garson told, and that few know, see:

So yeah, those Ancients were passionate and romantic... Did I already tell you that? Even Merlon, their descendant, is wild for love, you know... Why, he had Quite a thing for Saffron the cook. He went to her cooking shop of hers every day and he wooed her constantly. He finally broke down and confessed his love to her for her... And here's what she said: 'If you can finish an entire serving of my Saffron Special Galactic Meal, I'll date you.' ...And this is one of the biggest, most filling dishes anyone's ever seen, mind you. But he dug right in. According to spectators, he finished all but a sprig of parsley left on the plate. Just then, some poor girl appeared in town who was severely injured. (I think that everyone already imagines who is she). Merlon had to help her, so Saffron let him suspend the challenge.

I don't know what happened to that girl next... But then Merlon became engrossed in his studies of him, and he hasn't wooed since. Maybe he'll get back to it when the world is peaceful and safe again.

You didn't know, right?

And that would be all my research on The tribe of the ancients. If anyone wants to theorize about it, feel free to do so, I will publish the most interesting theory in a next part. Bye!

[groovygladiatorsheep]

Cloth swap Dimentio -> Ink | Ink <- Dimentio

Yesterday I’ve had the great ideas of swapping clothes between Dimentio and Ink !! They’re both favs of mines ngl

I might doodle these designs either digitally or on paper, who knows..

‧˚₊꒷꒦︶︶︶︶︶꒷꒦︶︶︶︶︶꒦꒷‧₊˚⊹

‧˚₊ Credits..

Dimentio belongs to - Super Paper Mario

Ink belongs to - @comyet

‧˚₊꒷꒦︶︶︶︶︶꒷꒦︶︶︶︶︶꒦꒷‧₊˚⊹

‧˚₊ Info..

I kinda imagined the cloth swap to not just be one, but also the clothes being adapted to both of these characters !

I think Ink would find Dimentio interesting ✨

[mochilorddrakeinferno]

Ah, glad to see an in-depth reply on this, thank you so much! My reply here is kind of in two directions here, and I want to be clear I'm intending this less as a rebuttal and more as sort of a meander through interesting topics related to this in which I may or may not disagree, and why. The first thing I want to go over is your reply here. I'll reblog the lore post you linked with my thoughts in a bit also.   I accidentally replied WAY too hard, again, and broke the character limit. But here's a Google Doc with my reply, which should hopefully work. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NJlkxRYObj1646NFq9UXMqqjuYAtfNWPWaySR2gSZzE/edit

Re: Dimentio Being The Magician's Son

This seems to be by far the most popular theory on Dimentio's origins, and while I think I understand the gist of why, for various reasons, I think it probably doesn't work in the story. But a lot of people do believe it, so for those who do, I'd like to ask what your reasons/arguments are so I can give the theory the fairest shake possible. For reference also, I'll share roughly speaking what I've already come across so far. First, a comparison of the story that references the Magician's son between English, and the original Japanese as translated by the wonderful AUselessMage:

There seem to be two ways the Magician's son could be theorized as living long enough to be Dimentio, but neither of them really work: . The son just lived for 3000 years (The longest we know of any Ancient surviving is roughly 1000 years. A bit longer than that I could see, but 3000 feels like a stretch) . The son was turned into a Pixl (The Japanese text specifies that the son "never returned home", so the Magician couldn't have gotten to him to turn him into one in the first place) If there are any other pathways to it being possible for him to be the son or reasons to argue that he is, I'm very curious to hear about them!

[max-the-silly-guy]

GUYS GUYS GUYS PLEASE HEAR ME OUT ON THIS

Yellow and purple are opposites on the colour wheel, and what else is purple and yellow? The colour of Newton's filaments.

If we're following the theory that Newton is being influenced by the Titans or merely under their control and not full on possessed, then this could imply a lot.

One thing that immediately came to mind (for me at least) is how the Titans could've been merely taking all of Newton's bottled up hatred and lack of self worth and multiplying that by like a hundred. (think of Mr L from spm and you'll understand what I'm implying here)

While Newton when we first meet him and towards the end of the game (when his filaments are yellow) is what he wishes others to perceive him as, meanwhile when his filaments are purple (so while he's under the control/influence of the Titans) he's showing his true emotions towards those who've most likely hurt him in the past

Another thing I've noticed is what the colours themselves imply.

While yes, yellow is mostly associated with joy and happiness, but it's also commonly seen symbolising cowardice, illness, betrayal, egotism and anxiety.

Which perfectly sums up Newton in the beginning of the game, already showing us what kind of character we're dealing with.

He seems like a joyful and outgoing character, costly showing himself off in the best way he can. But the more you interact with him, the more dialogue you receive from him, the more you start to realise there's more depth to this otherwise 'silly and goofy' character

Newton's whole thing is that he wants praise, he wants affection. He desires it more than anything, which just further feeds into the idea that he's self conscious and struggling from extreme anxiety. Believing that he'll never be good enough, leading him to go to extreme lengths to get people to finally notice him.

Meanwhile, purple is a colour commonly associated with royalty and power, showing Newton's newfound abilities now that Titans are controlling him and basically manipulating into committing mass destruction across his planet.

But what else is purple associated with? Decadence, self-indulgence, conceit, pomposity and pride.

Purple is also sometimes seen as a color of mourning. Which is implying the old Newton, the one the player met at the start of the game, is dead. He's not the same character, not anymore and not right now. He's a twisted corrupted version of himself, letting his hatred and want to prove himself as worthy of attention and love get the better of him.

It's those emotions that allowed him to be manipulated into freeing the Titans, and why he never fought back against their control over him until much later into the game where he finally had enough and snapped.

Going back to my original statement about the two colours, purple and yellow, being opposites on the colour wheel.

These are called complimentary colours. They're exactly opposite eachother and sometimes referred to as 'harmonious colours' and contrast extremely well.

This implies that these two sides Newton has to himself, they CAN co-exist.

One of my friends even pointed out that when mixing light, overlapping purple(or magenta) and yellow gives you white. (Do some research about the additive colour mixing theory if you don't believe me this is true)

And what does white symbolise? Most commonly, purity and peace. Further proving that the two vastly different and seemingly contradicting personalities Newton showed in the game are able to exist alongside one another.

There's nothing wrong with experiencing emotions of jealousy and spite and neither is it wrong to display yourself as overly positive and confident in yourself to others, but the important thing is to not let these feelings and emotions dictate your life.

The Titans merely helped bring the negative bottled up emotions to the surface. They didn't create a whole new snarky personality for Newton while controlling him like a puppet on a string. It was there the whole time.

It was what Newton always wished to have done, to finally let everyone who ever wronged him experience EXACTLY what he did.

[legobiwan]

27 your favorite part of canon that everyone else ignores

22. your favorite part of canon that everyone else ignores

I'll give you two here, anon. One for Gravity Falls and one for SPM. (I tried to think of something Star Wars, but I honestly need to reread and rewatch a lot of content before being able to dig something up that I haven't ranted about before...)

Gravity Falls

While I don't think this is necessarily ignored, it certainly gets looked over in the greater commentary.

Bill and Stanford had off and on communications in the Mindscape for two years before Bill escalated their interactions to literal bodily possession.

That's...that's a lot of time. Not Palpatine-grooming-Anakin amounts of time, but still a significant portion of Stanford's existence and research in Gravity Falls, and this is before Fiddleford and the Portal and all of that jazz.

Ford had it...bad. However you want to interpret that statement. And Bill, apparently, found the perfect mark in Ford, considering he stayed with this plan for so long (although 2 years is probably an hour to a being who has existed for trillions of years).

Nonetheless, from Ford's point of view, this was the third-longest relationship we see him have, outside of his brother and Fiddleford. That's no small thing and I can't imagine the complexity of emotions (not even to mention the mirroring with his situation with Stan when they were 17) Ford experienced after learning of Bill's true intentions. It's...wild.

Super Paper Mario

Just how unbelievably fucked up this part is:

Luigi's decapitated head, animated with the power of Dimentio, is foretelling all of their dooms despite Mario and the gang seemingly defeating the Big Bad. It's a fascinating moment as it undercuts our usual expectations for the Big Boss Battle. Mario wins the battle, but loses the war. His brother is as good as dead, the world is still ending, and there is nothing he can do about it.

Mario fails.

Mario doesn't save the day.

It's in the subsequent cut scene where Bleck and Tippi resurrect the Pure Hearts one last time to save all of existence. Which is...a fascinating choice, both narratively and from a game play perspective. Something about free will, something about doing all you can and the final decision, your final fate, still being out of your hands.

It's one of the gazillion reasons I adore this game so.

Ask me a spicy fandom question

[definitelynotplanetfall]

As I push through my final world in factorio 1.1 I realize that I fucking hate this recipe I made.

This sucks. It just sucks. It casts my annoyances with the game into sharp relief.

Big problem with factorio: clever builds where you consolidate multiple steps are intrinsically less effective than boring builds where you just input The Literal Ingredients Of The Recipe to a line of machines, because more processed items are almost always denser.

Here's a reworked vanilla recipe that I'm extremely happy with how it turned out:

The reason I like it so much is the valve is the most complex ingredient here, and the other ingredients can be made from some subset of its raw materials (even the steel if you have fuel on site, or electric smelters.) So if you're paying attention, you get engine units set up for minimal additional time investment or routing difficulty once you have a good valve production setup.

The keen-eyed among you might notice that this setup doesn't fucking scale. This is clever, but it's clever because you are building it in an early omni-spaghetti base that doesn't segregate mall, intermediate, and science production, and everything needs a variety of plates so you're sending the plates around anyway, so building multiple low-volume intermediates out of the same materials is useful because it saves space and time.

But suppose in the end/postgame you need scaled-up train-fed production of engine units for blue science for infinite research. You can make your production block have four input stations for steel, articulated mechanisms, drive belts, and valves, and build the most boring setup ever, or you could be clever and import the raw materials and have... four input stations, for iron, brass, invar, and rubber. Which transport by train way less densely. Even this very good recipe falls victim to the emergent properties of the basic game mechanics.

The only way to make this stay interesting in the postgame is to take the efficiency hit for the aesthetics - and if you are building a base that does infinite research, nobody ever fucking talks about anything except the vaunted SPM number - or to make every intermediate fluffy, i.e. less valuable per item or stack than its precursors. This sucks for plausibility/realism reasons, it messes with the balance of inserters, it feels weird for "more valuable" items to be more numerous, and you shouldn't be encouraged to do every step everywhere and never centralize anything. But okay. I've said before that the postgame is pretty boring and I'm here for the spaghetti. I can tolerate some inefficiencies in my final engine unit build for style points and the ability to allegedly sleep at night under ideal conditions.

Why does the gyroscope suck? Because it's the opposite of the engine unit. Their ingredients' precursors overlap in uninteresting ways. There are nonzero clever things you can do with them once you're fully scaled up, but at that point you will be eating the throughput downsides of being clever at scale. The things that need gyroscopes do not sufficiently overlap with the ingredients of gyroscopes to make making them where they're used not an ingredient explosion.

I think gyroscopes are probably salvageable in future updates of my mods simply by replacing the red circuit with 2-3 green circuits and perhaps some tweaking of the recipes that consume them, but some items I feel do not really make the cut. HV power regulators and both tiers of machining tools, in particular, feel like they need to be majorly reworked or removed entirely. (The biggest step I could take in this direction is drop BZ compatibility, which is a sort of "nuclear option" that makes me hesitate, but several items were added specifically to consolidate the ludicrous number of plates BZ adds to seemingly every machine's recipe. Like, the advanced machining tool and industrial drill head are both to consolidate together diamonds and tungsten carbide.)

A side benefit of doing this is that, if Space Age doesn't permanently put me off the game and I have enough energy to maintain mods going forward, I would then be able to implement my own version of several of the BZ resources that I have some vague ideas for how I would do them slightly differently. Most of my ideas involve adding alternate recipes for things, which conflicts with the hardcoded abomination that is Quality, which is excuse enough for my mods to obliterate that mistake of a mechanic from any pack containing them forever and ever Amen.

[forensicfield]

Types of Microscopes

1. Simple Microscope

2. Compound Microscope

3. Phase Contrast Microscope

4. Fluorescence Microscope

5. Electron Microscope

6. Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM)

7. Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM)

8. Dark Field Microscope

9. Dissecting Microscope (Stereo Microscope)

10. Digital Microscope

11. Scanning Probe Microscope (SPM)

12. Atomic Force Microscope (ATM)

13. Inverted Microscope

14. Acoustic Microscope

15. X-Ray Microscope

16. Polarizing Microscope

17. Metallurgical Microscope

18. Pocket Microscope

19. USB Microscope

20. Confocal Microscope

21. Laser Scanning Microscope

22. Differential Interference Contrast Microscope (DIC)

23. Near-field Scanning Optical Microscope (NSOM)

24. Raman Microscope

25. Super-resolution Microscope

26. Cryo-electron Microscope

27. Time-lapse Microscope

There is a wide range of microscopy techniques and instruments used in various fields of science and research.

[e17omm]

Yeah that's a huge bump from 333.5 SPM

So Im able to use all labs for Nauvis science, but I dont have enough legendary beacons to fill them all up yet.

But looking at how science works, with infinite science now requiring vastly different science packs... I can just make buffers on Vulcanus, Fulgora, and Aquilo, since few researches requires all three at the same time.

Really the only place I need to expand is Gleba because that science spoils, and then its just increasing rocket throughput.

[hydrazimm]

MY JOURNEY TO KPTM BANGI

Weekly Journal: My Journey to KPTM Bangi

Week 1: The Beginning of a New Chapter

This week marked the start of my journey to KPTM Bangi. I received my SPM results, and honestly, they weren’t as good as I had hoped. I felt a mix of relief and disappointment when I found out I could still get into college. Initially, I was set on pursuing Electrical Engineering, a field that fascinated me. However, when the courses were announced, I was assigned to something entirely different. I felt lost and uninterested, doubting whether I should continue my studies at all.

My friend suggested that I consider joining STPM, which offered a variety of pathways. At first, I was hesitant; it didn’t align with my original plans. But as I thought about my options, I realized that exploring different avenues could lead me to something I genuinely enjoy. This week was filled with uncertainty, but it also sparked a glimmer of hope for what was to come.

Week 2: A New Challenge

I decided to take the plunge and enroll in STPM as my next step toward furthering my education. I was assigned to the Science Social course, which initially felt like a fresh start. The first few classes went well; I understood what the lecturers were explaining, and my classmates were friendly. I felt hopeful that this could be a good fit for me.

However, as the months rolled on, the workload began to weigh heavily on me. Assignments piled up, and I struggled to keep up. To make matters worse, my group was filled with free riders who didn’t contribute at all, leaving me feeling isolated and overwhelmed. After a tough first semester filled with stress and frustration, I made the difficult decision to leave STPM. I felt defeated but knew I had to prioritize my mental health.

Week 3: Finding Clarity

This week was tough. I wrestled with frustration over my decision to leave STPM. I questioned whether I was making a huge mistake and what my next move would be. But in the midst of that frustration, a new light began to emerge. I took some time to reflect on my interests and strengths, and I realized that it was okay to take a different path.

I began researching alternative courses and eventually found KPTM Bangi. Their programs aligned more closely with my interests, and I felt a spark of excitement again. It was a reminder that setbacks can lead to better opportunities. As I filled out my application, I felt a sense of renewed purpose and determination. This journey may have started with doubt, but I am now hopeful about what lies ahead at KPTM Bangi.

[way-to-go-you-funky-little-blue]

oh seablock we're really in it now

550 hours and going steady

if I were to get my labs fully up to snuff then it'd be 3.6k SPM for red and green, but until then it's running at about 160 SPM, or with prod modules in about 17 hours per stage of FTL research (full science consumption rate would be ~45 minutes)

[lucyav13]

Chapters: 7/? Fandom: Paper Mario Series (Video Games) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply Characters: Count Bleck | Lord Blumiere (Paper Mario), Lady Timpani | Tippi (Paper Mario), Dimentio (Paper Mario), Super Dimentio (Paper Mario), Nastasia (Paper Mario), O'Chunks (Paper Mario), Mimi (Paper Mario), Pixl Queen (Super Mario), Mr. L (Paper Mario), King Croacus (Paper Mario), Mononofu Ou | King Sammer, Francis (Paper Mario), Fracktail (Paper Mario), Kage Gundan | Shadoo, Queen Jaydes (Paper Mario), Grambi (Paper Mario), Merlon (Paper Mario), Nolrem (Super Paper Mario), Merluvlee (Paper Mario), Thoreau (Paper Mario), Boomer (Paper Mario), Slim (Paper Mario), Flint Cragley, Thudley (Super Paper Mario), Carrie (Paper Mario), Fleep (Paper Mario), Cudge (Paper Mario), Dottie (Super Paper Mario), Barry (Paper Mario), Dashell (Paper Mario), Bestovius (Paper Mario), Luvbi (Paper Mario) Additional Tags: MiMi - Freeform, Game: Super Paper Mario, Investigations, SPM - Freeform, Villains, wikipedia - Freeform, Theories, charecters, Levels, Bosses, everything is here, tribe of ancients - Freeform, tribe of darkness - Freeform, dark prognosticus, Flipside - Freeform, The Underwhere, The Overthere, Story, Hacks, tips, Timelines, Pixls, Passwords, Fun Facts, flopside, gloam valley, The Bittlands, The Space, Land of Cragnons, Sammer's kingdom Summary:

Investigacions from SPM!

Every character, level, boss, villain, items, recipes, locations, post-game everything is here.

All research was done by me with the great participation of Super Mario Wiki. The theories you will see here were made by me, although you can share your theories and I will gladly dedicate a chapter to them. I hope you will like it. :)

 It goes without saying that it contains spoilers for Spm.

[seelestia]

Congratulations for the RESULTS YEAYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!! YOU DID ITTT!!!! GOOD LUCK FOR THE NEXT STEP OF YOUR LIFE!!

Since I'll be taking it(spm) this year with so little amount of time for preparation, I don't know anymore, especially a lot of things in life have been.. hueh.. I don't know if I'm ready for it, my first exam results for this year, yes good, but I am still not sure of everything, myself mainly.

Sorry for rambling, huwa, I'm so nervous it makes me want to escape school but in order to do that I need to go through that big thing first..! And I'm really sorry, but do you have any study tips? Preparation tips or any other tips for spm? I'd really appreciate them!

(and it's so nice I can have someone to talk about this, thank youuuu!!)

(oh and sorry if I talk too much about it, maybe I'm bringing some bad memories, I'm sorry)

THANK U !!! graduating from highschool has been the biggest relief i've ever felt... i still have more in store for me in the future but at least, that's one gone :') can't wait for u to get thru it too! just hold on a little longer T_T

also, it's ok to worry abt the future! i do that too and it's inevitable - but make sure it doesn't prevent u from staying stagnant in the present. ur future is a result of ur present and luckily, we are all in control of our present so u still have time. make the most of it, i believe in u! 🤍

this feels a little funny to write, but i do have tips! here are some of em:

identify, maintain & improve. in order to get a good grip over all ur subjects, u need to identify which subjects u do well / excel at and which ones u struggle with. evidently, u'll have to direct more efforts towards the latter - but make sure to keep maintaining subjects u do good/average at! as an example, i struggled with math so i focused more on doing more math exercises (which thank god, paid off 😵‍💫).

write ur own notes and by that, i mean: write notes in ur own way! there is no 'correct' way to make notes imo. don't pressure urself to make ur notes look 'pretty' or 'aesthetic' (but ofc if u want to or it makes writing notes fun for u, go ahead!). after all, we make notes to help us understand and simplify complicated stuff (it's giving catabolism /j) !! extra tip: i always add commentary to my notes so i laugh & rmbr them better. e.g. i was making notes abt the types of white blood cells once and i scribbled “we owe it all to u queens" LOL.

use ur free time well. if ur someone who already has a set schedule, all the better! but if ur like me and prefer a more 'free' style, i suggest allocate a tiny bit of ur free time like 15-30 minutes a day to do exercises for one subject. just a little smth to keep ur brain gears turning amidst it all!

ur efforts have to be more than ur teachers. if u really want to excel, u have to do beyond what ur teachers give bcs they only provide u the tools to success. if u want to get there, then u gotta pave the way urself! to put it practically, u can finish the hw ur teacher gave u and do more exercises after that to help sharpen ur understanding more. so, it's kinda like voluntarily giving urself more hw! i'd tie this to the point above bcs that one technically counts as giving urself hw but in a chill way ^^^

lastly, this is less general and more applicable to just spm (i think? i've yet to do my research on education systems in other countries) so i'll use some native language here - tgk soalan exam tahun yg lepas² !!! so u'll familiarize urself with how those yg menggubal soalan make the real deal. doing trial papers & more is the way to go ><

[artgletic]

Mimi hot takes

So Mimi is most certainly an enigmatic character in SPM, but is unfortunately overshadowed by the more mysterious Dimentio when it comes to lore discussion. I think there’s plenty to look into when it comes to her however, and I intend to do so here! Discussion under the cut

So really all we have to go off of for Mimi lore is what Carson proposes, which is that she’s either a failed pixl experiment, or the unintended creation of a witch researching shapeshifting potions. I will be real with you, when I first read this I immediately discredited the witch theory due to how out-of-left-field it is. However, I do have a couple things to say on it, but we will have to talk about it later. Let’s investigate the failed-pixl theory. So what do we know about pixls?

Other than the 12 pixls we see ingame, the only bout of pixl lore we get is again from Carson. Here he talks about the pixl war, led by the pixl queen who mind controlled the many pixls to do her bidding and aid in her revolution against the ancients, their creators. During the uprising, the pixl queen successfully overthrew and enslaved the ancients. It’s revealed later on in Carson’s story that the pixl queen was likely the product of the master magician, creator of the 12 original pixls. He created her in an attempt to bring his daughter back to life by placing her soul in the body of a pixl. The pixl queen was so appalled by her fathers actions (that is, robbing pixls of their deaths just to be put into tools to be used), that she wanted to stop it from ever happening again.

The pixl queen was later “vanquished” by one of the master magician’s apprentices, and is heavily implied to be Shadoo, the boss of the flopside pit of 100 trials (see my Dimentio lore post for more on that; I discuss Shadoo in detail there). I suppose the best question to ask would be: what does “vanquish” even mean?

Well, we know that Shadoo is nothing but a cloud of shadow, somewhat reminiscent of a shayde in the Underwhere. If Shadoo is the soul of the pixl queen, what happened to the pixl vessel?

Well, we know that the pixl queen was to be created as a vessel for an ancient’s child. We see many depictions of ancients and ancients’ descendents in-game, one of which is Nastasia. In ‘Of bats and men’, Carson describes the story of a man looking for his lost love saving a bat and the bat transforming into ‘one of his people’ to be with him. This story is all-but-said to be about Nastasia and Count Bleck, a member of the tribe of darkness, which itself is an offshoot of the tribe of ancients. Nastasia has a notably blocky head, thin limbs and beady black eyes (see XXX for Nastasia’s eyes). This is reminiscent of Flipside’s citizens, most notably the children/teenagers,

All of which rather look like Mimi (aside from the noses, but we see Nastasia, a member of the tribe of darkness and as such a more ‘pure-blooded’ ancient, has no nose. None of the sage murals of direct descendants of the ancients have visible noses either. Same argument can be made for these children having no arms and Nastasia having them). It would make sense, considering the pixl vessel was made to house the spirit of the master magician’s daughter who died young. Mimi is clearly an automaton at the very least, as evidenced by the otherwise random gears churning in her head in her spider form. Perhaps her ‘true form’ is what the pixl queen looked like.

Approaching from another angle, the Pixl queen was said to have ‘illusionary powers’ that she used to hide. In my Dimentio post I compared this to Dimentio’s invisibility which he uses to eavesdrop on people, but upon second glance I think this illusionary power would be more akin to turning into something else to hide. Shadoo has no physical form, and their entire boss fight is spent taking on the shape of our four main heroes, Mimi’s most notable power.

I think Mimi doesn’t know this about herself. I think she was probably a vessel that wasn’t supposed to ever wake up, thrown in the garbage along with the other pixls after the events of the pixl uprising, but did. Now she fumbles around in the world trying to find meaning and personhood despite being a vessel for a person who isn’t there. Carson’s information on her states that “Mimi has the ability to mimic any person she wants to... She's so good at it I hear she even sometimes forgets who she is…”. I think it goes deeper than this. I don’t think she has a ‘who’ whatsoever. She just copies what people would expect from her, a teenage girl, hence her almost comical obsession with boys and gems, and forced crush on the count (at least it feels forced to me).

With this in mind, I quite like that Mimi’s first appearance is her imprisoning and usurping the domain of an ancient (or an ancient’s descendant rather), as well as enslaving a population into doing her bidding (the prisoners of Merlee’s mansion), just as the pixl queen did. She’s obviously not aware of this, but from a meta perspective I find it very interesting.

OTHER CONNECTIONS AND IDEAS:

Perhaps Mimi WAS the witch experimenting with shapeshifting? Carson’s theory certainly never said that the witch and her creation were separate entities. Maybe this is what caused the thousand-year delay between the master magician putting his daughter’s soul into a pixl, and the pixl queen’s uprising (stated to be 3,000 and 2,000 years ago respectively). The daughter attempted to be able to unlock shapeshifting, and the product of that skill was the pixl uprising, which led to Mimi. There’s also the fact that Mimi inflicts a curse on Merlee’s mansion, which to me has always felt a little strange given Mimi’s powers and overall vibes. But in this light, ‘cursing’ is definitely a witchy thing to do! Maybe this word choice was meant to evoke the witch idea.

This is more of a linguistic choice and I’m only familiar with the english translation so take it with a grain of salt, but I found it quite odd that the pixl queen was first described as having the “demonic” spirit placed in the pixl vessel. “Demon” just felt like an odd choice of words, especially when there are actual demon characters in the game (D-men in the Underwhere). This connection may be a bit of a stretch, however in the Merlee trivia game at the end of chapter 2, Mimi can be asked a myriad of questions that are likely her honest answers (aside from a couple, like her saying mario is “her type of guy”. This is clearly buttering up the crowd). The answer I’m talking about specifically is one in which she says her favourite animal is a demon. I don’t see how this would convince Mario that she’s the real Merlee, and is likely her just being honest. This is the only other time “demon” is mentioned in the game outside of chapter 7. On a thematic level, it’s interesting to think of what her referring to a demon as a pet could mean. When she was a ‘demon’, she was a pixl. Did ancients treat the pixls like pets? Maybe similar to how we treat roombas (a tool-pet combo)? Mimi likely isn’t aware of this connection and just said the first thing that came to her mind, unaware of its grim origins.

[dappledpaintbrush]

I’m over here spending every day researching the difference between a hyperfixation and a special interest when

Me about rdr2: This became my entire fucking life for a good couple of months. I would play it for 7 hours straight without getting up because I would forget I needed basic things like food and water. I researched all the lore three times over and I would become so overwhelmed at how good this game was that I would randomly want to cry. It made me so so excited every single day and gave me so much happiness and then. It stopped??? It was as if not long after I learned everything, the extreme obsession over it died. Something I felt like I couldn’t live without is now something I CAN. I don’t feel the need to engage in anymore. Like at all. I still love the game and I will always cherish it but. It’s not the same as it was before.

me about spm: if this didn’t exist I wouldn’t know who I am (it’s been ten years)

[greatwyrmgold]

Alright, more Factorio. For the first time since I ran out of stone and iron, my factory is working fine, with no immediate supply issues.

The Problems (as I've taken to calling them) are also contained for now; my strategy of throwing more laser turrets at any areas that take damage from their attacks has paid off. But I'm seeing substantial numbers of big spitters, and would see similar numbers of big biters if there were more biter spawners around, so I shouldn't just sit around and wait around.

It's been a while since I've addressed the overall state of my base, because not much has changed since the first or second post I made on the subject. So let's have a quick composite screenshot* of my whole starter base, with commentary from present me on why it's just a starter base.

*I assembled this before catarialacertilia suggested a console command.

Most of my comments are focused around expandability. Resource demands for late-game science packs are going to keep going up, and I'm already having trouble getting enough iron down the belt. Upgrading everything in that lane to fast belts would help, but that won't be enough to squeeze a decent amount of production or utility science.

And of course, the number of science packs required per technology is going to increase, too. Chemical-science-tier technologies tend to need a couple hundred science packs to research; endgame techs can require thousands. At the moment, I'm producing roughly 60 science packs of each type per minute (60 spm); that's a decent amount, but it means unlocking new technologies will be pretty slow.

Anyways, the point is I need a new base. A prettier base! And that prettier base will need copper. I've got every other basic resource on trains (except uranium, if you can call that "basic"), but copper needs to be shipped to the new base somehow.

So let's take a look at the area around my starter base and consider locations!

I've circled copper ore patches for obvious reasons, and coal patches because I've got a bunch of steel furnaces I want to use (and also I'd rather not just use the same designs everywhere). There are some copper patches to the south of my base, but none that look more appealing than the ones to the east.

There are three places where I note copper ore and coal in some kind of proximity. From south to north:

The copper patch due west of my coal station is due west of a coal patch. However, I'm already using that coal, and would rather not deplete it faster than I have to.

The next pair of patches is reasonably close to my starter base and are completely unoccupied. However, between the small lake between them and the cliffs around them, finding a spot to put furnace stacks might be tricky.

Finally, we have a good-sized coal patch between two copper patches. The problem is that it's beyond the edge of my pollution cloud, well within biter territory.

I think I'll go with the middle option. Defending the coal mines and getting it to the copper is going to be a bit of a pain, but I think I can manage. With that in mind, my plan for the New Base looks something like:

A "main bus" is a pretty standard kind of Factorio base. Basically, it's a line of belts which resources flow down, with branches of assemblers and stuff branching off the side. I don't see any seas or other obvious obstacles to making the bus longer any time soon, and the start of the bus is pretty much in the middle of my current resource patches.

You'll notice that I don't have any arrows pointing from the oil station to the main bus. That's because I'm not quite sure what I want to do there. My current thought is shipping oil to a chemical processing area near but separate from the main bus, but I'm nowhere near needing to make a decision. I need to start the bus first.

And before I start the bus, I need to do two things:

Set up that copper station.

Make sure Problems don't bother me.

With regard to the latter, please consult this extremely scientific diagram:

(The circles are centered on areas I reckon are or will be serious sources of pollution. Their radius is determined by the technical method of "picking a round number that looks right.")

As I've mentioned before, the Annoying Problems will run around the lake to attack my iron outpost. However, to get to them, I would also need to run around the lake. If they or the Future Problems become an immediate problem, I'll set up some kind of fortified outpost in their path, with lasers and flamethrowers and walls.

But for now, I'll deal with the immediate problems so they don't interrupt my new mines. No pictures; I basically just run at nests and slap down a stack or two of gun turrets. It ain't elegant, but it works.

Speaking of things that aren't elegant: I realized that my iron unloading station was ultimately limited by the belts at the unloading station. Especially since, for all the balancing stuff I did later, I was only unloading onto half of the belt. So I ordered my construction bots to do a quick and dirty fix:

I'll want something better when I get to the real base, but this is fine for the starter base.

This is more of a reminder to myself than anything, but another thing that happened while I was out wiping out the Immediate Problems:

Okay, there's one interesting thing I wanted to mention about the biter-fighting: When approaching a base that was obviously gathering an attack group, I tried to wait for the attack group to depart before attacking. I photographed one group to explain why.

Obviously the base also has worms (five, I can't tell their sizes), but the attack group obviously adds a lot to the danger of this base.

(Also, from these statistics, I'm guessing I'm somewhere around 56% pollution?)

I also saw a spitter attacking a rock that got in its way. I didn't think to snap a picture of that, but I did screenshot a different spitter attack on my actual base.

Anyways, then I spent a while blueprinting out just about the entire new outpost. Coal mines, copper mines, steel furnaces, and the belts connecting everything.

That's:

Two stacks of steel furnaces

Two and a half stacks of electric mining drills

Four stacks of inserters

Fractional stacks of all power poles

A half-stack each of splitters and underground belts. (Note that half-stacks cannot be combined.)

26 stacks of belts

And that's not including the laser turrets I'll need for defense, or the big power poles to bring power here from the main base, or the train station. Or anything I might forget to include in the blueprint. Like the red belts I needed to add in at one point to keep throughput consistent.

(Maybe I should've set up a local train between the coal patch and the smelter stack. Maybe another for the copper. Oh well.)

Luckily, at this point I have 120 inventory slots, so I can carry the 40+ stacks of items needed to build the outposts in one trip. I just need to produce and stock up on enough ahead of time, I assumed.

Turns out that solar-powered personal roboports are super limited in how much construction they can do at once, especially once night falls. Which feels obvious now that I'm writing it out. Which means I wound up taking several trips back to the base while the roboports charged, just so I had something to do.

(Mostly ripping out the old science production and babysitting the labs as they consumed what science had been produced. And a little hand-crafted science.)

Sure, I could build some of this by hand, but A. that's tedious and B. I'd like to get the achievement for placing more buildings with robots than by hand. At the start of this project I was over 11,000 by hand and less than 2,800 by bot; placing the rest of those belts is going to change those numbers significantly, one way or the other.

While I was calmly watching my bots set up belts, I heard the alert noises of a bunch of stuff getting broken. Please enjoy one hasty screenshot of the attack and a more carefully-composed screenshot of what the area looked like once I'd killed the biters and bots fixed some of the damage.

I'd left behind all of my personal construction bots in the rush, and let them catch up while I made some replacement power bits and considered how the Problems had gotten so far into my base.

The problem was simple! I'd deconstructed some old gun turrets that I wrongly assumed were irrelevant. The solution was also simple! Set up some new laser turrets to cover the gaps.

Anyways. Back to construction. And thanks to advice from the aforementioned @catarialacertilia, I've got a big, clean screenshot of the whole copper-smelting place!

Plus or minus some laser turrets. And some missing splitters and misaligned belts and stuff. Whatever.

I throw on a standard train station at the bottom, complete with train, but absent the traditional "place for a train to go". That place hasn't been built yet, after all! Remember what I said at the start of this post? The copper outpost is meant to fuel my main bus, aka The Real Base.

But this is a good place to stop. See you next time, once I've finalized the plans I have...

[artblock-tm]

There are 80 questions for this holy chrystler Pacifica

For the fanfic writing asks! 8, 12, 25, 57, and 61 for Masked :)

This got pretty long, so all my answers are under the cut!

8. Post an out-of-context spoiler from a wip.

Wait. Where's that one screenshot I had.

My lore for Timmy isn't fully fleshed out yet, but I wanted to explore a certain dynamic. Hence, this. (The WIP is long gone since I have a short attention span when it comes to writing for myself.)

12. Do you outline your fics?  If yes, how detailed are your outlines?  How far do you stray from them?

For Masked specifically, I didn't have an outline. And I won't have outlines for the oneshots! However, with Shadow Rift, I tried using an outline. And then forgot about it. And then strayed from it a little. But it still worked out really well!

I have two other documents for upcoming fics; a lore research document for the next Hollow Knight fic, and one for the SPM fic far in the future. I haven't touched either in a while.

25. What’s your favorite part of the writing process (worldbuilding, brainstorming/outlining, writing, editing, etc)?

I love the brainstorming and the writing! Worldbuilding is hard, even when I get really good ideas, and I'm trash at editing. But coming up with ideas?? And putting them into words?? Oooohgghg. Mm. Yeah. That's the good stuff.

57. How conscious are you about including symbolism or foreshadowing in your fics?

Hehe. Ehehe. Oohoohoo. Well. Symbolism and foreshadowing are my best friends. I love foreshadowing so much. And symbolism? Yummy. For Masked, I especially love flower symbolism (points agressively at the Helminth and Hope flowers).

I'm VERY conscious of what foreshadowing and symbolism goes into a fic, because I love making my stories rereadable! I love going back to stories and picking out things that are seen in new contexts, so I try to recreate that feeling for my readers :)

60. In Masked, what inspired the idea for the plot?

I've mentioned this before, but here it is in full detail: Masked originally came from three different story ideas that I put together into a full story. The three ideas made up the first three arcs, and the fourth arc was to tie things together.

The first arc (set in Halcyon, introducing Jaide and the Outlander) came from ideas I had when I first got into A Hat in Time a few years ago. I created Jaide and Outlander as OCs, though their story was...a lot different. The mask itself was the dangerous entity, not something (Ichor) in the mask.

The second arc came from a random idea I had- what if Moonjumper controlled the Prince? After writing out the potential ideas I had for that, I figured out the how- the prince could be a doll. Eventually, when I was revamping my AHiT OCs, I connected the first two ideas together.

And the third arc was a product of me mashing the first two together and wanting to angst the Prince. And kill Vanessa. Yeah, I really didn't do justice to her character, but I'm hoping to fix that with the oneshots. But it helped provide a nice transition into the fourth arc!

As mentioned, the fourth arc was meant to wrap things together and bring previous foreshadowing to fruition (the mystery behind Jaide's mask and the black flowers). However, there's still a lot to be revealed in Masked. Do you know how HARD it is to not reveal all my Badgeseller and Shapeshifter lore???