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pixiemage · 7 months ago

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My Fate Is In Your Hands - Entry 8

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[A/N: This is a story entirely guided by you guys, by the readers. Be sure to vote at the end of each entry! ALSO, if you'd like to be added the tag list, please let me know and I'll be sure to add you next time!]

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

➤ Watch Tango

Tango awakes slowly. It’s a fog, and a blur, and a static, and an ache. He registers the general soreness before he registers his surroundings, a weak and tired wince making his face tick for a fraction of a second.

Soft. Whatever he’s lying on, it’s soft. Bed, he thinks, as an abstract concept more than a word, even before his ears decide they want to work again. Bed, soft, comfortable. He’s sore, but he’s comfortable. And the air is warm. Sound reaches him a moment later, quiet and muffled from somewhere else. Distant murmuring voices, and the lowing of cattle, and a cicada making the air buzz.

One of his ears twitch.

…his head hurts.

Tango sucks down a sharp breath at the pulsing pressure he can feel behind his eyes, and he instantly regrets it, the dryness of his throat making him cough and making his head throb with pain. He winces and rolls onto his side, the blankets that he’s only now realizing are over him shifting with him as he moves. They pool in his lap as he pushes himself up into a sitting position. He tries to catch his breath and only struggles to do so the first two times before finally, finally, his lungs stop protesting against air.

He wheezes and takes a slower breath, licking his lips to wet them, and finally opens his eyes.

He doesn’t recognize the room he’s in. He’s lying on a bed in the center of a rustic-looking bedroom, wood walls and wooden floors and a homespun rug, a simple wooden dresser shoved up against one wall. There’s a chair nearby and a table beside the bed, all wooden, all looking like they might have been crafted by hand. There are potion bottles - some empty, some not - lined up on the table, and a hat straight out of a western movie is hanging on the back of the chair.

Sunlight is pouring in through a window, dust dancing through the rays, and there are other details in the room that Tango would be more interested in if he wasn’t so focused on the biggest questions beginning to spiral in his head.

Where is he? How did he even get here? The last thing he remembers…

“...to HASA, Tango Tek to HASA, do you read me? … Bdubs, you down there…?”

Feral creatures on the moon, disguised as something friendly but most certainly not. Sharp teeth, red eyes - an explosion–

“...is Tango Tek reaching out to Hermitheus, come in Hermitheus�� … Doc? Do you copy? … Zedaph? Anyone?!”

Cold metal, stale oxygen, dark skies. The vast emptiness of space. And no time, running out of time. His own panicked breathing filtered back to his ears inside his helmet.

“...ship was damaged, but I’m making repairs. I’ve got an idea to get my bits off this rock, but I don’t know how long…”

(Desperate attempts to make it right.)

“...if I can time it right, I can still detonate, and we can deviate the moon’s trajectory…”

“...more damaged than I thought. The numbers Holsten is giving me aren’t great. I don’t know if I’ll even be able to take off if–”

Arguments with a snarky AI, and dread pooling in his veins. Fear. Panic.

“–got my ship up and running, but something’s up with the radar–”

“–Moon’s traveling at a higher velocity than expected. … Doc, I don’t know if my messages are reaching you, but our original ETD won’t cut it. You’ve gotta get everyone off the planet, pronto. If you don’t–”

He didn’t mean for it to go this way.

“–mayday, mayday! Tek to Hermitheus, Tango Tek to Hermitheus– … –going down– … –know if you made it out– … –let you down. I’m sorry, I should’ve–”

A knock at the door startles Tango from his thoughts and he snaps back to himself, suddenly very aware of his rapid breathing and the wheezing coming from his throat and the smoke and sulfur on his tongue. He’s wound tight as a spring, and when the bedroom door opens he scrambles back, nearly toppling over the far side of the bed in his rush to get away.

“Oh - gosh, I’m sorry!”

A startled voice cuts through his panic, a bright voice with an accent like Zedaph’s. There’s a man in the cracked doorway with blond hair and wide brown eyes, watching Tango with an apologetic look on his face.

“I’m so, so sorry,” the man says quickly, “I didn’t mean to–” He gestures to Tango, to the door, then jerks a thumb back over his shoulder, before awkwardly clutching at the edge of the door he’s half-hidden behind. “...are you alright?”

Tango blinks at him, his breathing slowly leveling out, not quite sure how to respond. Is he alright? It’s a complicated question. Silence hovers between them, and the man clears his throat.

“Er…do you speak common?” he asks, sounding awkward and unsure. “I mean Shelby said you might be an alien, which sounded a bit insane at the time, not gonna lie, but - well I did drag you out of a rocketship, so she might not be far off–” For the first time since waking up, Tango almost smiles. “But you look kind of human-ish, an’ the letters on your spacesuit look like ours, so…”

The stranger trails off, his face going a soft shade of pink, and Tango swallows past the dryness in his throat.

“Not an alien,” he mutters hoarsely, and the man at the door perks up. He opens the door just a little bit more, hiding behind it just a little bit less. Tango swallows again. “...blazeborn.” The man’s eyes light up in recognition. Tango clears his throat. Dry, so dry. “D’you have water?”

“Oh!” The man jumps slightly. “Right, o’ course! Sorry, I can–” He jerks a thumb back over his shoulder again. “Be right back.”

Then he’s gone, the door clicking shut behind him.

…you could leave, a voice at the back of Tango’s head whispers to him. He’s gone. You could escape.

It’s a tempting thought, in some ways. He’s in an unknown situation, so getting out might be smart. Tango doesn’t know where he is, or who that man is…though he can imagine how he got here. “Well I did drag you out of a rocketship,” the man had said…meaning his ship must be somewhere around here.

Probably in pieces, he reminds himself, grimacing at the memory of his ship spiraling through the atmosphere of some mystery planet. This mystery planet. But a ship in pieces is still worth something. Holsten is on there somewhere, and his communications line, for all that it had been faulty even before the crash. Tango doesn’t know how long he’s been on this planet, but the sooner he reaches out to the Hermitheus and her Hermits, the better.

(He ignores that traitorous voice in the back of his mind reminding him that his warning never reached Hermitcraft, that his friends and family never knew they had to leave sooner, that they’re probably already–)

No.

Tango sucks down a dry, shuddering breath. He can’t think about that now. He should leave.

…or he can wait for his host, he ponders, even as he swings his legs off the bed. The man seemed friendly enough. Maybe he could help Tango get back to his ship, and get some proper clothes, seeing as he’s still in the jumpsuit he normally wears beneath his spacesuit. (His spacesuit that he’s only now realizing is piled in the corner of the room, and he’s a bit impressed that his host managed to get him out of it, as complicated a thing as it is to put on in the first place.)

So he could wait, and hope that his host is kind. He could. Or he could leave and find his ship himself.

[A/N: I'm still trying desperately to move, so I'm not going to promise that I'll have the next part posted next week, but I'm keeping this story going no matter what! It's too fun and I love having something easy to write and work on when I need it! Also I'm a sucker for the crossover man, it's just too good.]

[Tag List] @firefly124 @mellioops @beaversuenightly @aris-has-a-paracosm @sincerely-nines @changeling-ash @therain-lover

Let me know if you'd like to be added!

#Team Rancher #Solidaritek #ESMP S2 #Trafficshipping #TangoTek #Jimmy Solidarity #SolidarityGaming #Hermitcraft S8 #Moon Big #Pixiemage Writes #Fate Entries #MFIIYH #HASA Tango #Hermitheus #Hermitcraft #Hermpires

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crazy-pages · 9 months ago

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What are lasers?

Ohhh, this is a fun one! And surprisingly complicated. I am not sorry for how complicated this got.

Fun Fact

Laser is actually an acronym! It stands for

Light

Amplification by

Stimulated

Emission of

Radiation

But that doesn't tell you much, so what is a laser?

The simple story

If you have something that makes light (a gain medium) and you bounce light back and forth through it a bunch, it makes extra-special "coherent" light which can be focused more intensely than normal light. This is because light gets emitted from the gain medium in sync with the light which passes through it.

But that leaves out a lot of details. Like what being 'in sync' means here, why it matters, and why passing light through a gain medium makes the light the gain medium emits be in sync with it! And that's just to start!

Why do we want lasers in the first place?

So light has this thing called "phase". You can think of "phase" as a point on a circle which rotates as the light moves. (If you've learned about complex numbers, it's a rotating complex number with a magnitude of 1.) If two bits of light with the opposite phase overlap, they stop existing! This is called "destructive interference". If two bits of light with the same phase overlap, they double in power! This is called "constructive interference". (The gif shows you how phase is related to the distance light has traveled, the left image shows constructive interference, and the right shows destructive interference.)

Now in practice light isn't a particle with a single phase, it's a big messy cloud with lots of differently rotated phases based on how far it's traveled from its origin. So two photons with "opposite" phase at one point might actually have different phase relationships at other points, destructively interfering in some places and constructively interfering in others. This is how light from a light bulb works. It's "incoherent", every photon has its own phase and they overlap in messy and complicated ways. (see figure below)

And when you try to focus incoherent light down to a point, you can only focus it down so much! The focus point is this big mess of variously interfering photons and it puts a harsh limit on how focused it can all get. So your maximum intensity ends up being proportional to the square root of the number of photons you have! This means you could quadruple the amount of light you're emitting, and only get twice the intensity! You could multiply your amount of light by 100 and only get 10x the intensity! That sucks!

But coherent light is much easier to focus down, and can be focused to an intensity proportional to the number of photons! If you multiple your amount of light by 100, you actually do get 100x the intensity when you focus it down to a point. There's also a bunch of neat and tricky ways to measure the phase change of coherent light, called interferometry, in ways which let you measure really small distances. It's also easier to make it go straight for longer. So we really want coherent light! (like in the figure below)

But ... how do we get it? Actually, why isn't all light coherent in the first place, huh?

Oscillating Electron States

So let's take an atom, and look at one of its valence (outermost) electrons. We poke this electron (maybe with a photon, maybe by running electricity through the atom) until it jumps up to a higher energy level, like this!

Well eventually that electron will fall back down to its ground state and emit a photon of equivalent energy in the process. But ... why? Why does the electron want to be in a lower energy level?

Well, the thing is that electrons don't really exist in one state. They exist as a back-and-forth oscillation between pairs of states. Like a tide coming and going back out. We can talk about high tide vs. low tide, and whether the tide is in or out at any given moment, but tides don't really do static. Nor do electrons. An electron in its excited state is actually oscillating between: a) this excited state, b) the ground state + a photon to keep the energy balanced, c) actually every other excited state +/- a photon too. But what we care about is the oscillation between a) and b), which is typically strongest.

Spontaneous Emission

However while this is technically an oscillation, the moment the state looks like b) the ground state + a photon, well, photons move. At the speed of light. So it'll just blast off into the sunset (it is the sunset) never to be seen again, and unavailable to help lift the electron back into its excited state. So the "oscillation" really just looks like the excited photon slowly falling back down to its ground state, by going from a quantum superposition of: 100% excited state -> 75% chance of excited + 25% chance of ground state -> 50% chance of excited + 50% chance of ground state -> 25% chance of excited + 75% chance of ground state -> 100% chance of ground state (wait photon come back!) -> 100% chance of ground state -> 100% chance of ground state forever.

(Yes lasers are inherently quantum, but then again so are lightbulbs and everything else in existence.)

And when electrons emit photons like this, which is called 'spontaneous emission', the photons have a random phase and move in a random direction. This is because they're 'coupling' to the possibility of a photon contained in the vacuum, which doesn't have a notion of phase or direction. (Technically they actually emit as an impure quantum superposition of all phases and directions, but that's off-topic.)

Stimulated Emission

But what if there was already a photon in the background? Let's say we keep a steady stream of photons moving through and around the atom. Well now we get an actual oscillation going! When the excited electron reaches its ground state, it just picks up a new photon to complete its oscillation back to its excited state.

The oscillation is also fundamentally different. First off, it's stronger. Stimulated emission to a preexisting photon state happens much more quickly. But also, an oscillation to a preexisting photon state produces a photon in the same state! The emitted photon has the same phase and direction as the stream of photons in the background!!! Do this with a random stream of photons and they'll eventually all synchronize together!

Huzzah! Now we have a laser, right?

We do not have a laser yet

HAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

NO!

WE DO NOT HAVE A LASER YET!

Well now we get an actual oscillation going! When the excited electron reaches its ground state, it just picks up a new photon to complete its oscillation back to its excited state.

This! This is what dooms us! For every synced up photon the atom emits, it also eats one! We have a filter now, something we could repeatedly pass photons through to sync up their phase and direction, but frankly it would be very weak. It would take so many passes through a bunch of these atoms to sync up a bunch of photons, and imperfections and spontaneous emission (that's still happening sometimes, even if it's weaker than stimulated emission) would eat the photons up before that happens.

We would need something that emits more photons than it eats to make light, to make a proper laser.

But electrons oscillate between states, so they spend just as much time in the "eat a photon" stage as they do in the "emit a photon" stage. And for quantum math reasons, no single oscillation can produce a superposition with more excited states than ground states. So it's impossible, right?

Hah! We are physicists. The science isn't done until we've dragged the laws of nature into a dark alley and mugged them for all they're worth.

Mugging the laws of nature for fun and profit

So first we're going to need an atom whose valence electron has a ground state and three excited states which don't interact much with the electron's other states. (You can do this with three states as well, but it's trickier.) We're going to call a big group of these atoms a "gain medium". Now we're going to excite the gain medium, with a flashbulb or an electrical charge or a chemical reaction or whatever. This is called 'gain medium excitation' and it puts all of its valence electrons into an even oscillation between the ground state (the 1st state) and the most excited state of the excited states (the 4th state), like this.

(I made these following graphics and it shows 😅)

Now, we need the 4th and 3rd states, and the 2nd and 1st states, to have very strong spontaneous emission oscillations between them. (And for good measure, that needs to be stronger between the 2nd and 1st states.)

This means we end up with a crap-ton of electrons in the 3rd state, and any electrons which end up in the 2nd state immediately get slurped into the 1st state. This is called a 'population inversion', where there's waayyyyyy more electrons in an excited state than in a lower state, which isn't possible with only one pair of states involved.

Now we insert one little bitty photon with the energy difference between those electron states and-

BWAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

WE HAVE FIRED THE LASER!

(ish)

We have created a gain medium which outputs more photons than you put in, all synced up in phase and direction! You still need to feed that gain medium with gain medium excitation, but that's fine, even if we need to feed it with light. Because it's pretty easy to make tons of incoherent light, and what we get out is sweet sweet coherent light.

A Laser!!!

So there's a few more parts. We need a pair of mirrors to bounce light back and forth through the gain cavity. And we need one of those mirrors to be not quite perfectly reflective, so it'll let some of the light out. And we need to shape these mirrors very carefully to satisfy certain conditions, and there's also forms of coherence I haven't even mentioned here, like, there's a lot that goes into making lasers.

But this is it! This is a laser!!!

You drag physics into a back alley and mug it for a material with the right four (or three) electron energy levels, excite those electrons, then put it between two mirrors (one very slightly transmissive) and let it go BWAAAAHHHHHHHHH. And then you get an intense beam of light which can be focused better than ordinary light.

#lasers #laser #optical physics #physics #science #science!

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hazelkjt · 6 months ago

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The Monster Hunter Wilds Beta was a nice distraction from the shit going on in my life. It was a REALLY fun 3 days, minimal performance issues so I’m happy I don’t need to update my PC. So, here are my thoughts as a decade long fan of the series on what I experienced in Wilds.

The Good-

No clutch claw. Ten out of ten change Capcom, thank you.

Removal of gender restrictions on armor WITHOUT homogenizing the armor designs. Just a win all around here, offers such a greater range of self-expression through what your hunter wears. This will be the second time I’m playing a female hunter just because I won’t have to deal with the armor designs I don’t particularly enjoy. (Only other time was because "why not?" during my revisit to Rise a few months ago)

All the monster designs have knocked it out of the park. Chatacabra is a lovable punching bag, Doshaguma’s a nice step up to have a middle tier Fanged Beast, Balahara is a great challenge with easy to read attacks but tricky timing. And then Rey Dau just taking the cake and instantly in my top 20 favorite monsters.

Weapons all feel relatively balanced, so far? At least of the handful I tried out. I’m a pretty casual MH player, never cared for optimal builds or speedruns so as long as the weapons feel fun to play then I’m all good. Still personally feel LS might be a bit overtuned with all the options and non-committal choices it has but I digress. Switch Axe is making a comeback as my preemptive Wilds main weapon with Bow being my backup.

The map is enormous but doesn’t feel lifeless. There’s always something happening just enough to make it feel like an actual environment and not just a video game level. A massive step up from the areas in Rise that all felt kind of boring with how it was just big, flat areas with connecting alleys that you could run on top of. This feels like actual topography that all flows seamlessly into one another.

Did I mention no clutch claw?

The Bad-

Even though I didn’t have any, the performance issues others are reporting are inexcusable. Other people that I know for a FACT own a high end computer can’t get more than 20FPS on medium settings, it’s ridiculous. This game is not optimized in the slightest for PC right now and for a simultaneous release that’s unacceptable. And while I have joked about wanting to see the low-poly models for myself the fact that people are seeing those for their entire time in the Beta is, again, inexcusable.

Monsters run way too often but this might just be a Beta issue with lower health values so I’ll let it off a bit easy.

I agree with the lack of impact on the really big hits but I am also letting this one off easy because it could have to do with the lack of attack power we have in the Beta. We’re literally in the basic starting gear with the basic beginner’s weapon, there’s room for the hit stop and impact to ramp up dynamically the higher our damage numbers go.

I know this isn’t something they can fix by launch (or if they’d even consider fixing at all) but having only six voices in character creation feels extremely limiting. I understand your hunter is fully voiced throughout the entire game now so getting the usual twenty-ish voices would’ve bloated the budget significantly, but the poorly implemented pitch shifter does nothing to make up for their absence. Even just going one or two notches up or down and you can start to hear the artificial “static” of the pitch filter and it’s distracting.

So many control scheme options and you CAN’T turn off the Radial Menu? Fucking why??? I’ve never enjoyed having control of the camera taken away from me while scrolling through my item bar in previous games and now I can’t even fix that. I’ve begrudgingly been forcing myself to learn how to use it, but removing an option that was in the previous two games for no reason is a baffling decision.

Still looking forward to the game’s launch in a few months and hoping that maybe a few of these issues will be resolved by then.

#just rambling about shit #monster hunter #monster hunter wilds

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aaronsrpgs · 8 months ago

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I've been so excited about this game for so long! They were kind enough to let me write a foreword for it, the entirety of which is below the break.

Thank god for mutants.

My first mutant encounter was in a flea market at the Warrens Cranberry Festival circa 1991. I hesitantly parted with my allowance to buy a comic whose cover’s top third (where the title and issue number were) had been torn off to secure monetary returns from the magazine distributor. Inside, five mutants struggled with being hated and, thereby, hating themselves. The art had a violent energy to it, ink scraped and splattered across the page by a young Bill Sienkiewicz and spare, harsh colors by Glynis Wein. Despite being in the X-Men family of comics, New Mutants shocked me in a way that changed my perception of art forever. It felt struggling and sinewy, like it was pulling itself toward its own creation.

The X-Men are famous the world over and must remain vaguely and forever themselves for the sake of marketing. The New Mutants, on the other hand, are virtual unknowns. They’re allowed to change. They get weird.

The joy of getting weird.

It’s great to fantasize about being beautiful while also shooting deadly beams from your eyes. But it’s a power fantasy, and for most of us, it remains out of our reach.

But to be a freak is a different kind of fantasy. Most of us are at least on our way there; many of us are already registered citizens of Freaktown. And the fantasies of freakdom are a bit different. They might include…

Watching the system collapse in the face of your freakiness.

Finding a bunch of other freaks.

Being accepted in your full freakitude.

But to me, to be a freak is to be allowed to change. To mutate. A freak can grow a new arm and remain at an equivalent level of freakiness. A freak can cancel their plans because of anxiety and not be rated any lower or higher than they already were. Being a freak is both a binary “yes” and an infinite spectrum. And this invitation to change is what the world (or at least the very limited pieces of it I see) needs right now.

Don’t fart on buses.

In the places I frequent, the refusal to change is extreme. I would not be surprised to read a news story where, upon farting aboard a crowded bus, a man is scolded for his behavior and asked not to repeat it, whereupon he stands up and hold forth on freedom: the freedom to fart where he pleases, no matter who is present and how thick the air is. And to request that he not engage in his god-given freedom to hot-box commuters, why, that is many degrees more sinful than the flatulent act, and you should be ashamed to even have mentioned it! This man is the worst X-Man ever, refusing to change, because that would mean hard work and ego death.

But we should be thankful for change! We should work on change. Change is why we’re not babies anymore. Change is why we don’t make the same stupid mistakes. Change is the only hope we have for a world where we’re not stuck huffing the farts of insistent farters.

Finally, Plasmodics.

Let’s get to the point. Plasmodics is a celebration of freaks. All the mutants are here, and we’re all smiling. But it’s not a static utopian fantasy; it’s an irradiated fata morgana of our own anti-freak world, where bad decisions outside of our control have ended our hopes for utopia over and over, and they will continue to do so.

So we scrabble around, searching for the artifacts our mutantcestors left behind, reveling in what might have been, and doing our small part to hold off the next ending so we can build some space and party down.

Come on in! The plasm’s fine.

#indie ttrpgs #gamma world #mutants #rpg

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multibodied · 2 years ago

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I can't let it go, so here's another scene of pocket ghost that I managed to put together. This one is out of context and doesn't follow any previous scene in specific, at least for now

The chicken sandwich felt too dry for Hank's taste, but after the five hours it took for him to admit his hunger, he didn't mind it as much. Although he couldn't appreciate it at the moment, now that they were miles away from any stores or drive-thus, surrounded by apartment blocks, he couldn't help but felt grateful that Connor had slipped it into his breakfast takeaway order for the day -- two donuts and a cup of coffee -- nearly eight hours ago.

The two of them -- well, technically only Hank -- were in a car, with two eyes and one dashcam fixed on the entrance of one of the grey buildings, waiting for any action that didn't seem to follow. Given the number of apartments in the building, one might expect the front door to open much more often than it actually did. Perhaps not many people lived in there after all; most of those apartments must still have been empty since the evacuation of Detroit, even though the order had been lifted months ago.

"Hank?" Connor said, breaking the silence of the past minutes.

Hank hummed questioning in response.

"There's some small animal ahead, but I can't identify which one it is."

Hank glanced at his dashcam for a moment before looking ahead, and indeed, a white cat walked on a parking lot, then stopped and lay down in the middle of it, enjoying the warmth of spring sun.

"Ah, this. It's a cat," Hank said.

"A cat," Connor echoed, "I've never seen a cat."

Hank's eyes travelled back. The cat lifted one of its back paws, tongue darting across white fur in a lazy-paced grooming session.

"Really? I thought you saw one when you hacked into my neighbour's house."

"I'm not sure if it was really a cat, the video quality wasn't exactly sharp," he paused, "Do you like cats?"

"I'm more of a dog person, you know," Hank bit into the sandwich, watching as cat stopped cleaning itself and stared blankly into the space.

"But do you like cats?"

"Everyone does," Hank shrugged, "Hell, If I woke up in a thousand years and someone asked me what's going on in the world, I'd answer that humanity is still worshiping cats - it's one of the things that never change," he said. Then he added, "Of course, that's if there's anyone left in a thousand years."

"Why don't you have a cat yourself? If you like them."

"I wanted an animal that would at the really least like me back. Can't expect the same indulgence from a cat," Hank grunted, "That reminds me - I think Sumo actually likes you more than he likes me."

"I don't think that's true. What makes you think so?"

"You need proof? Fine, explain this: when I call him - he doesn't bat an eye, but when you just look at him, saying nothing at all - he's at your feet in no time, as if you telepathically promised him a piece of steak or something. I don't get it."

Speaker rustled abruptly as Connor made some quiet sound, lost in sudden outbursts of the static. A short laugh?

"Did I finally say something funny?"

"No, not really. I'm sorry, I never thought about how that might look. I don't just look at him. I do something else."

"Which is?"

"I make a sound on a higher frequency. Dogs can hear it, humans – not so much."

"You let him in your house and he talks with your dog on a secret frequency. Fuck..," Hank shook his head in disbelief, "Never expected this from you."

"I'll take that as you're impressed," from the tone of Connor's voice Hank concluded he was pleased with his reaction.

"No shit, I've been scratching my head about this for months, even tried to look Sumo in the eyes with different face expressions. Never once did it work, not a single fucking time. Now I know why."

"You could have just asked."

"Yeah, well. What does it matter now anyway," Hank's eyes darted back to the cat, "In any case, my point is – dogs will love you no matter what, but cats can despise the living shit outta you even if you do everything right. With them, it's more of a gamble, y'know?"

"You don't mind gambling."

"Well, not when my heart is on stake. Wouldn't gamble with this crap - never worth it."

"Hank, are you implying that you wouldn't be able to handle a rejection from a cat? That sounds...a little dramatic, even for you."

Hank huffed a short chuckle.

"That's- Even for me, you say. What, am I some kind of drama queen in your book?"

Speakers rustled for half a second, then exploded with the sound of music "Ooh, yeah, ooh, yeah!"

Hank didn't need to look at the screen to know that that's Queen, specifically last minute of Bohemian Rhapsody. He felt blood rushing to his face, but as he opened his mouth to say something, the song already switched, also starting from the middle.

"-You are the dancing queen,

Young and sweet, only seventeen"

"Connor, go fuck yourself."

Fighting a smile and red in face, Hank took another bite of the sandwich, then glanced back at the front door of the building. Nobody walked in or out of it for the last 20 minutes. He didn't mind - at least he got to eat in peace. Well, almost.

Music got slightly quieter.

"How?" Connor asked.

Hank stopped eating and tried to remember what were they even talking about.

"How? Are you asking me about how you can fuck yourself?"

"Yes, I'm really curious how would you imagine me to do that. Given my... current condition."

"I have no idea. Guess you'll have to figure it out on your own."

"On it," Connor said in his earnest voice, and music got louder again.

This finally got an actual laugh out of Hank. He set the sandwich aside and and covered his face, feeling its heat on his palms and trying catch his breath.

"Just don't hurt yourself," he said, feeling warmth filling his lungs, giving up the fight against his face muscles - he wasn't sure why he had been resisting them anyway.

The cat stretched on the ground, greedily absorbing the sun's rays, resembling a sunbeam itself, as the only white spot in the overall grey area. Hank could see it looking around, as if searching for a better spot to enjoy and not entirely sure why -- more an impulse than a thought-through decision -- Hank took a piece of chicken out of his sandwich and stepped out from the car.

He crossed the parking lot and crouched down a few steps away from the cat – close enough to grab its attention, but not so close as to accidentally scare it away. Then he stretched his hand with a piece of chicken in the cat's direction, and sure enough – the cat came closer, curious. He let it sniff the treat, and just as it was ready to take a bite, started back towards the car. The cat followed.

Cat hopped onto the hood of the car as Hank patted it, and finally received a deserved piece of chicken along with a stroke. It purred blissfully in response.

"See better now?" Hank asked, sitting back into the car.

Car speakers rustled slightly.

"Yes."

#pocket ghost #dbh #dbh fanfiction #and as always quite ambitious but I'll still tag it as #hankcon #Thanks @arcanehackist for helping me with wording <3

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wakebymoonsleepbysun · 1 year ago

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Possible Ch 4 Toys?

Void

This is the one I think is most likely.

There's a VHS called Report: Void, which details a doctor (Dr. White, I think, he seems to be the nicer of the two doctors we're aware of based on his line delivery. The name was mentioned in Samuel's last day so I'm just going to use it here for ease.) is reporting on subject 1322, aka Kevin. Based on the number he's one of the more advanced experiments, and I assume Void is the name of what he eventually became. In this tape he's still human, but for his monster/toy form, we can look to another of the VHS tapes.

In the Claire Harper Debrief vid, she mentions Marie waking from a Red Smoke-induced nightmare and saying she sees something "colorless". Claire herself cannot see it. Now, this could be the nightmare/skeletal CatNap, though I think Claire would have noted Marie looking at CatNap frightfully as she spoke if that were the case. I've heard some people guess it was the Prototype, as "colorless" might fit him, but I also think this is a stretch. BUT! Colorless would fit something called "Void", no?

I think Void is something that can only be seen when under the influence of the Red Smoke. (Given that his higher experiment number, he may have abilities that feel even more supernatural than the monsters we've already encountered.) This could be a way to add some depth to the gas mask mechanic, as in Ch 3 you really don't have much incentive to take it off other than it blocking your vision slightly. It's more like you see gas, put it on, go through gas, then take it off. Maybe in Chapter 4 we'll have to balance how much Red Smoke we inhale at any given time and make decisions on when it's "worth it" to put the mask on or take it off.

Baby Longlegs

The evidence for this is flimsy. There's some kind of child-like giggle during a certain point in the Home Sweet Home section, that as far as I know is never explained and doesn't really match any characters we already know.

So what else is in the Home Sweet Home? Cardboard cutouts of Mommy, Daddy, and Baby Longlegs. They seem kinda out of place, because as far as I'm aware they were part of the Game Station, not Home Sweet Home or Playcare. Mommy and Daddy play only static when their buttons are pushed, which I take to be the devs confirming they are both dead. Baby has no button, meaning their status is unknown.

Secret Smiling Critter

This could also be the one responsible for the giggle in Home Sweet Home. The existence of this toy may be a bit of a stretch, but Ollie has a line where he says there are "eight...I think?" Smiling Critters. It's possible this is just in reference to CatNap being removed from the lineup, or the fact that all the Critters but DogDay and CatNap are deceased. (Maybe Ollie doesn't realize that for whatever reason?) But I think it could also hint that there were originally even more planned and Ollie's unaware of who made the cut.

Now...do I think any of these will be the MAIN villain? No, not really. I feel like for meta reasons they won't hint much at the main villain until we get the Ch 3.5 round of ARGs and teasers. But they could be a side villain, on the level of Miss Delight, or a minion like Bunzo and PJ, or possibly a potential semi-ally, like Kissy or DogDay. But! I could be wrong about that too. I do think part of why Chapter 3 took so long is them wanting to get things really set up and planned out (both from a story-telling and game-design/programming perspective) for Ch 4 and 5 (because I do think there will be only 5 chapters ultimately. I feel like after that we'll get PPT 2 or some other arc). So it's possible they feel more comfortable hinting at the main villain of the next chapter this time around.

#poppy playtime #poppy playtime chapter 3 #poppy playtime theory #ppt theory #poppy playtime chapter 4 #poppy playtime spoilers #spoilers #ppt chapter 3 #smiling critters #poppy playtime void #experiment 1322 #poppy playtime experiment 1322

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onslaughtsixdotcom · 2 years ago

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"1-in-6 Chance"

The most popular retroclone is, without a doubt, Old School Essentials. Gavin Norman’s restructuring and restatement of the classic 1981 Basic & Expert rules (or B/X) is, in my opinion, without peer. The “control panel” layout is so fucking good it’s amazing that seemingly no one had ever done it before, and no one has done it better since. It’s something I strive to emulate in all my own products.

One phrase appears throughout the books: “1-in-6 chance.” It’s the basis of many things the player characters can attempt, like listening at doors, checking for traps, or finding secret doors. Some classes increase this chance to 2-in-6 or even higher, depending. This is, of course, right out of B/X, and the way the game was played.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about some posts by Traverse Fantasy where they’ve been converting some of the checks in the classic game to d20 rolls; for example, monster morale. I don’t think they’re doing this for any particular reason, but it is interesting, so I wanted to do a little game design, as a treat.

What if we aligned all 1-in-6 chance rolls to a d20 roll to meet a static DC?

A 1-in-6 chance is 16.67%, and a 2-in-6 chance is 33.33%. We’re gonna have to file those numbers down a little bit; let’s call it an even 15% and 30% chance. Converting these over to a d20 roll means we end up with a static DC of 17 and 14. So when the players listen at a door, they have to roll a 17 in order to successfully hear anything. If they’re a class that gets a bonus, the DC is 14. Perhaps we can even extract that and have a static DC of 17 always, and merely give a +3 bonus to characters who have that class bonus. (If you don’t like floating modifiers in your d20 game, you can hand out Advantage instead. This might especially be true if you are moving the stat modifiers to a more modern, 3e/5e style arrangement rather than the classic modifier numbers.)

Stuff like this is super interesting to think about and makes me wonder what an all-d20 based version of OSE would look like…hmmm…

#dungeons and dragons #old school essentials #ose #b/x #game design

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terminaldysfunction · 27 days ago

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Adventures in (F)unemployment

Well, it’s finally happened. I’m delighted/happy/thrilled to announce that after 9 months of (not-so-f)unemployment, I have finally found a full-time goddamn job that I’ll be starting this week. Halle-fuckin-lujah.

As a bit of postmortem examination, and because I’m the kind of person who likes to document these things, here are some noteworthy teachings and takeaways that I’ve gained from my experience:

---

First, re: getting laid off, if you’re an obsessive note-taker like I am, do yourself a future favor and keep them on a platform that you control and can’t be locked out of after they boot you from their OneNote!

---

My final count was 80 applications in total. I know that this is amateur numbers compared to some of the folks I’ve seen posting on Reddit, who are in the hundreds or more somehow, but I chose to be selective and strategic, staying in two particular fields that my experience can best translate to. I limited my search to field-specific job boards, LinkedIn (more on that later), and Idealist.org, a less terrible Indeed but for the nonprofit sector.

For the most part, this approach worked; over a third of my applications resulted in a hit, which is a really good rate. A job coach I was assigned to as part of my old employer’s severance package noted that he had clients who have been unemployed longer than I have who haven’t received a single callback. The downside is that my selectiveness resulted in more than a few days, even weeks, in which I had nothing to apply for.

That being said though, there are only so many organizations in New York that do what I do, so I was faced with contemplating what strategy to take if I went through them all without success. (I still might have to face this down the road.)

---

Since I began looking, I kept a detailed spreadsheet to track my progress with each organization that I applied to, with links to the job listing, the salary range (thank goodness for NYC’s salary transparency law, something which should be universal), key contacts, and other helpful bits of information, mostly for metrics and so I don’t forget what I applied for if someone comes back at me for an interview request.

---

I’ve had multiple people tell me my cover letter game is ass backwards. Sure, I’m guilty of writing too much, sometimes over a page. Also, I always interpreted cover letters to be an explanation of how the skills listed in my resume can be tailored specifically toward the role I’m applying for. In other words, my resume has a broad description of my skills, and the cover letter describes how those skills fit with the employer. Maybe this is the wrong approach, I admit, but it’s always worked for me in the past, and I haven’t seen any indication yet that it’s a bad strategy.

The only thing about my cover letter that I tailor to the individual organization was one sentence: “With my strong background in [SKILL] and [SKILL], I possess the experience necessary to make a meaningful contribution to [ORG]'s mission to [BLANK].” Everything else was rather modular—I drew from a bank of paragraphs to plug in as I saw fit, describing my experience and how it complements the specific role, one for a particular database, another for comms experience, etc.

My resume I kept pretty static, because it was already tailored to the roles I was applying for, with the only change I would make bumping a bullet point up higher for emphasis. I will note that for years I had used a two-column format (with tables!) that I had heavily adapted from a Google Drive template years ago, which I know is frowned upon, but I never had a problem with it. I did change it to a more traditional one-column version, but I didn’t really notice a difference in my callback rate. Is the ATS something to worry about if I’m still rewriting the whole resume into each company’s special little portal?

---

A note on AI: A lot of folks suggest using AI to write a cover letter and tailor your resume, but when I’ve tried it, I’ve found that it didn’t really save me any time or effort. I’d plug into Gemini something like, “Write me a professional, detailed cover letter for XXX position at XXX. Here’s the listing: [PASTE LISTING], and here’s my resume: [PASTE RESUME].” It would spit out something serviceable, but I would often have to edit it to add more detail or to sound less robotic. Sometimes it would pull phrasing verbatim from my resume or the listing itself, which I cannot abide. Maybe I need to explore more refined ways to use it (maybe a prompt asking not to repeat language?), but given the amount of time tweaking the AI output, I might as well just stick with what I had.

---

That job coach I mentioned, while he was very pleasant to talk to, didn’t offer much advice that I could use, but one of the things he often insisted was that resumes and cover letters would soon go the way of the dinosaurs in favor of social media. If that’s truly the case, yikes.

On the whole, I found LinkedIn to be only semi-useful, and honestly I could write up a whole separate essay on this one point. I did get some hits from it. Hell, I found my last job from it, and my new one even, but more often than not I had to wade through a swamp of typical social media junk. Spammy recruiters, grifters, and bots take advantage of an #OpenToWork banner, some the second I make it visible, which in particular I'm still skeptical on whether it is useful or rather a scarlet letter of desperation. The stupid Easy Apply button I ignored completely, which I know for a fact is a total waste of time having been on the hiring side once. Why is LinkedIn suggesting applying for the same three jobs I already applied to, and marked so in the system?

I get the need to compete and justify its existence beyond what I and many others use LinkedIn for: A static resume clone people can search me on and a job board. But does anyone actually appreciate the faux-spirational influencer posts in my timeline? Why do I need Facebook-like games? Instagram-like reels? It’s like it’s trying to be everything at once, rolling all the worst parts of social media together.

---

On networking, in my entire career, I have never landed a job from a connection. Each one was from a cold application without any referral or “in.” That’s not to say I didn’t try, despite the feelings of desperation that it often elicited. Any little bit helps I guess.

On LinkedIn, I often got positive results from messaging folks after I applied, either via a comment on a post announcing the job or through a DM. I used to think that seemed tacky or too Pick me! but that largely evaporated after I started actually getting interview requests.

For the referrals I got from my connections—for six different organizations, a few from high-level directors or VPs—they either never panned out in an offer or didn’t result in a call back. There was one crushing example in which I knew the VP in charge of the department, skipped a round of interviews because they knew me well enough that it was unnecessary, only to get to the final round and not make it. I don’t know what to make of that, except that I should remind myself never to get too excited for a role, not after a referral, not after a good interview, no matter how closely I might match with the job, because there might always be some subjective thing I can’t account for that they’ll make a decision on. Or some unicorn person that fits their bill better.

---

As for recruiters, they have been completely useless. In one instance, I got contacted on behalf of a company that seemed great for me on paper that I had no idea about. We did a phone interview, he indicated they already reviewed my profile and were interested in me. Great. Except I didn’t hear back from him in weeks, and when I did get in touch, he said that they already had a queue of folks lined up. What was the point of this interaction?

Another reached out to me to schedule a preliminary interview, which actually turned out to be a 5 minute call to see if I was human before she invited me to complete a one-way video interview. I swear if I wasn’t unemployed and desperate I wouldn’t have bothered.

---

After all of this, minus derailing my career trajectory and the hit to my sense of self-worth, I came out of it alright, without any significant monetary suffering. I still have a tiny bit of my severance monies left, and I never pulled out of my savings or my 401K. I never struggled to pay rent nor have I had significant debt to worry about. (I even used a portion of my severance to pay off the last bit of my student loan, given that relief from the government wasn’t likely to come any time soon.) As trying as this whole experience has been mentally, I know I’m pretty fortunate. I mostly spent the past 9 months regressing to my youth, watching a lot of TV, going on a lot of walks and bike rides, and playing a lot of video games. I have a lot to be thankful for, not the least of whom being my partner, for his support and, well, splitting living costs with.

---

Finally, a special shoutout to my old employer, who posted a job very similar to my own a month or two after they let me go, but for a different department and for higher pay. Probably against my better judgement, I reached out to the hiring manager, applied, all was well. They even acknowledged my (re)application with a personal email, which was encouraging. After all they said I was eligible for rehire!

I found out months later that they hired someone else without so much as a rejection. Never again.

#backinthehabit #workinggirlonceagain

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go-accurateweighingscalesug-blog · 2 years ago

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Electronic portable coffee moisture meters cup type

How Does Moisture Content Affect Coffee Roasters?

At each stage of the coffee supply chain, the moisture content of a green bean must diminish – or the bean might become moldy, defective, and less valuable than before. Ensuring a bean dries correctly is essential in order to optimize its quality potential and minimize the chance of problems.

Roasters, near the end of the supply chain, have two tasks when it comes to managing moisture content. On the one hand, they must maintain the lots they store onsite within a narrow moisture range that is acceptable to their quality standards. They need to hold their coffee in this range for a period that will, hopefully, not be longer than a year.

On the other hand, and in the span of a few minutes, the roaster is responsible for driving the last remaining bits of moisture out of the bean via the application of intense heat and pressure. In these minutes, the coffee is exposed to the most energy it will experience at any point in the coffee supply chain and the roast is set up for either success or failure.

It’s easy to see why roasters should care about the moisture content of their coffee. But how useful is a number supplied by an importer, and how can roasters integrate moisture content readings into their craft? I spoke with Fred Seeber of Shore Measuring Systems, a supplier of moisture content meters, about measuring and making sense of moisture content in green coffee.

What Is The “Ideal” Moisture Content?

There is no official standard for ideal moisture content in green coffee, although the ICO recommends 11% as a good target. However, it’s commonly accepted that 10-12% is a reasonable range. Anything less than 10% is likely to result in loss of cup quality, while humidity at higher levels begins to create a risk of mold growth.

Yet a coffee’s humidity is not static. While the pre-export drying process drastically increases a bean’s stability, changes in moisture content are still possible. Environmental factors, such as being in a particularly humid or hot location, are a common cause of this.

Measuring Moisture Content: Is It Really Necessary?

Before getting into the technical details of measuring moisture content, it’s worth digging a little deeper into why it’s worth measuring moisture content. Knowing this will help you establish protocols suited to your specific needs.

For roasters of a certain scale, it’s simple: you pay for coffee by weight; the more water in that coffee, the more you’ve paid for water which you’re going to burn off anyway.

Fred describes a common situation roasters find themselves in: “So, [an importer] sends you a sample, and… it’s showing 11.5% moisture in that sample. Then when your container shows up, that’s 40,000 pounds, and all of the sudden you discover it could be 13% moisture. Well, you just got blanked for two percentage points of water of a commodity that’s four bucks a pound… that’s [a lot] of money.”

For the smaller, quality-focused roaster, those kinds of calculations may or may not be relevant. But moisture content still plays an indirect role in a roaster’s costs, regardless of whether or not they’re buying a few containers or a few bags.

There is no direct link between a coffee’s quality and its moisture content. A 10% humidity coffee is not necessarily better or worse than a 12% coffee. However, over time, green coffee will gradually lose vibrance. This will eventually result in the dreaded “past crop” flavor, and this process is associated with the drying out of the coffee.

Therefore, even for a small roaster, it’s important to keep track of moisture content. If you paid for an 85-point coffee at 12% moisture, by the time it reaches 10% moisture it may be more like an 83-point coffee. Yet, you still paid 85-point prices for it originally.

By comparing moisture content loss with quality degradation over time, you can make smart buying and consumption decisions with your green lots. And, when combined with water activity measurements, you can even predict the shelf life of your green coffee. Again, precision here is key: you want to track your coffee through a narrow range of percentage points over a long time frame.

Lastly, you may think to yourself that you don’t need to measure moisture content yourself, since your importer supplies those numbers already. Fred cautions against this thinking. He points out that coffee is shipped on water and that ports can often be warm and humid, which will affect moisture readings.

So, if you’re a roaster in a dry part of the United States but your importer is located in New Orleans or Houston, and is taking moisture readings from lots right as they arrive, those numbers might not be applicable to you by the time your coffee arrives at your facility.

Thank you for allowing Accurate Weighing Scales (U) Ltd the privilege to serve you in advance.

For inquiries on deliveries contact us

Office +256 705 577 823, +256 775 259 917

Address: Wandegeya KCCA Market South Wing, 2nd Floor Room SSF 036

Email: [email protected]

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#Crane (hanging) scales Whole sale scales Baby scales Mini palm scales Industrial platforms assorted weighing brands including Avery Salter H

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platforms1 · 2 years ago

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Digital moisture tester for over 25 grain species

How Does Moisture Content Affect Coffee Roasters?

What Is The “Ideal” Moisture Content?

Measuring Moisture Content: Is It Really Necessary?

For roasters of a certain scale, it’s simple: you pay for coffee by weight; the more water in that coffee, the more you’ve paid for water which you’re going to burn off anyway.

Thank you for allowing Accurate Weighing Scales (U) Ltd the privilege to serve you in advance.

For inquiries on deliveries contact us

Office +256 705 577 823, +256 775 259 917

Address: Wandegeya KCCA Market South Wing, 2nd Floor Room SSF 036

Email: [email protected]

https://barcodescalesuganda.wordpress.com/category/chair-weighing-scales/

https://weighingscalesineastafrica.wordpress.com/category/analytical-balance/

https://weighingscalesineastafrica.wordpress.com/category/medical-use-weighing-scales/

https://weighingaccurate.wordpress.com/category/medical-weighing-scales/

#Crane (hanging) scales Whole sale scales Baby scales Mini palm scales Industrial platforms assorted weighing brands including Avery Salter H

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sirfrogsworth · 2 years ago

Note

Weird motion artifacts are unfortunately just a symptom of modern display technology. Older technologies like CRT and Plasma would sort of fade to black before refreshing the screen and so motion looked smooth to our brains. Our eyes need that little fade to trick them into thinking a series of really fast static images are actually showing motion. Modern displays don't have that fade so they very suddenly refresh the screen and it causes something called judder. You can see it in panning shots especially. A sort of jerky motion. I don't know if that is what you were noticing though.

It is much less noticeable at higher frame rates, so games tend to look okay, but much worse at lower frame rates, so movies can suffer. They are trying to figure this out, but no modern display does it perfectly. The only solution is to dial in the soap opera effect through motion smoothing and try to find an amount where you can tolerate it.

Pixel resolution can be confusing because they mix Ks with Ps. So you have...

1920x1080 which is 1080p or 2K or FHD. 2560x1440 which is 1440p or 2.5K or QHD. 3840x2160 which is 2160p or 4K or UHD.

If the aspect ratio is different from 16:9 those numbers might shift a bit. But the K is the first dimension (horizontal) and the P is the second (vertical).

I would not run an OLED screen with a static image all day. I would set up a screen saver or a timer to turn it off when you are not using it. You could run an anti-burn-in video more often, but then you are going to reduce the life of your screen.

Like I said, managing an OLED can be a hassle, but if you know what to avoid and do regular maintenance, you can avoid burn-in. You can see when image retention starts to set in, so usually you can address it before it is permanent. However, if we are talking all day use, I would use your current screen for general computer stuff and only use the OLED as a secondary screen for movies and games and stuff.

There is an LTT video about daily driving an OLED as a computer monitor. If you are using it 8 to 10 hours per day with no breaks, it sounds like it would not be a good fit. Keep in mind this was basically the first OLED computer monitor and new displays will not have as many bugs as they experienced.

HDR brightness and the brightness you set your screen to are different things. One is peak brightness and the other is more of a median brightness. When watching an HDR movie, it will be mastered to only make bright things bright. So lightsabers and lasers and headlights. The average brightness of the overall movie will feel about the same as whatever you set the display's master brightness setting to. So you want those extra nits for movies and games, but you don't have to set the display's brightness setting to eye-searing levels to experience it. Hopefully that makes sense. That is a little confusing and I should have been more clear.

Yes, OLEDs are capable of showing better detail in dark scenes. But it sounds like you actually have a calibration issue. Your black point is probably not set at the right spot. A lot of games will have a little calibration feature built in, but RTINGS also has a guide with some patterns you can download to help fix your brightness and contrast levels. That could help you see dark detail better with your current display. You can also look into calibration devices like the Datacolor Spyder. This will fix brightness, contrast, as well as color accuracy to industry standards. It can also take into account the brightness of the room. The base model is pretty easy to use. Just follow the onscreen instructions.

You actually have a really nice monitor currently. Getting another IPS display would probably not give you a much different experience unless you got a really expensive one. I would definitely look into calibration before getting anything new.

Or I would consider getting a secondary display for movies and games. In fact, you might find an actual television a better solution. They can be used as computer monitors as well. I wouldn't use them for regular tasks like web browsing or general computing, but for movies and games, a TV can be a great solution. You can get an OLED, but just a regular LED panel with a bunch of backlight zones would be great too.

And I'm afraid the pictures you take with your phone are more dependent on the camera's sensor than the display you view them on. So you can only solve that problem with image editing or a new camera.

Computer q. For otherwise identical monitors, is a 4000:1 contrast ratio noticeably better from 1000:1? I don't mean for fancy art but like if I'm watching a movie, could I see the difference in a dark scene? I looked into oled's, but those are expensive and I think the way I use my stuff would cause burn in.

I hope you don't mind, but I got carried away and answered pretty much every computer monitor question anyone has ever had. And since this turned into a whole thing, I thought I'd share it for everyone to benefit.

For a computer monitor I would say the most important aspect is actually the viewing angle. This is how far off-axis you can look at the monitor before the image degrades.

We sit very close to our displays and at that distance, even a change in height in your chair can affect the image. Move a little bit left or right and a cheap display could completely wash out and look terrible. And if you get a display that is 27" or above, even if you sit dead center, the edges of the screen will appear dark and washed out with a bad viewing angle.

The two best display technologies to get a good viewing angle are IPS (in-plane switching) and OLED. If you are interested in a display without these technologies, be sure it has a decent viewing angle. You can read more about viewing angles here and here.

IPS has very little concern for burn-in, but it is still a concern with OLED. In recent years OLED has greatly improved and image retention and burn-in can be avoided with regular maintenance. Displays will have pixel shift features and noise modes that work out all the pixels evenly. You can run these features every once in a while to prevent burn-in. You can also play special anti-burn-in videos on YouTube (full screen) to exercise the pixels to uniformity.

So if you don't mind the hassle, you can manage an OLED with low risk.

That said, OLED was almost exclusively for TVs and has only recently been introduced for computer displays. The current options are quite large and fairly expensive, as you alluded to. So if you are trying to stay within a budget, it might be best to seek out an IPS display.

Another consideration is resolution. Everyone is obsessed with everything being 4K now. But I think increasing the resolution brings diminishing returns with regard to increased detail you can actually notice. So if you don't mind going with a 1440p monitor (about 2.5K), you can save some money on resolution and get higher quality in more noticeable areas. Personally, I feel 1440p gives you a nice, noticeable bump in detail over 1080p. Whereas going from 1440p to 4K (2160p) is less noticeable unless you have very good vision.

Another benefit to 1440p is that video games are much easier to run on high quality settings with a reasonable GPU. And you can use technologies like super sampling (Nvidia calls this DLSS) to increase the detail you may lose from not going 4K.

The only concern I'd have with not going 4K is if you edit 4K video. It will be difficult to do a pixel level analysis of your footage otherwise. But other than that, you can still watch 4K content on a 1440p monitor and because it is being downsampled, you will still notice a nice bump in detail.

So if you don't have a reason to get a 4K display, I think 1440p is worth considering.

The next concern would be color. Or color gamut. This is how many colors the display can accurately reproduce. If you don't do any art or video color grading, you'll at least want something that does 95 to 100% of sRGB. That is the color space the entire internet uses. And if you are going to be watching HDR movies, you might want a display with a decent percentage of the P3 color space as well. Doesn't need to be 100%, but the higher the better. And for those who do art, a good percentage of Adobe RGB is recommended.

Also, many manufacturers offer displays that come pre-calibrated from the factory. If color accuracy is important, I would seek out one of these displays with a Delta E rating of 3 or less (lower is better).

A newer factor in displays is peak brightness. This is measured in "nits." In standard dynamic range (SDR), video only needed to reach 100 nits. Most HDR content is mastered to reach 1000 nits. In the future, that number will be 4000. And if micro LED technology ever becomes affordable, we may go up to 10,000 nits. But almost everything is around 1000 at the moment, so that is a good number to shoot for.

HOWEVER, because HDR is tone mapped (the brightness of your display is factored in and the content is adjusted accordingly), you can still get some benefits of HDR, even if you cannot do the full 1000 nits.

All monitors can do 100 nits for SDR content. But with more things being displayed in HDR, having more nits will give you a better experience. This does not mean your display will blind you. Usually bright stuff only takes up a small portion of the screen. But having more nits allows highlights to really pop and feel immersive. A lightsaber might actually feel hot and dangerous on a bright enough screen.

Computer displays are often rated as HDR400 or HDR600 or HDR1000 based on their nits. The HDR400 isn't great for HDR content. If you can do 600 or above within your budget, you'll get a better experience. If you are going to watch movies, this may be a feature you prioritize.

I know you mentioned contrast ratio, but I'm afraid that is a little complicated to answer. It can depend on other aspects of the monitor and the viewing environment. So I'll try to give you the info you need to figure out if the display you select will suit your needs.

Manufacturers can use tricks to fudge their contrast ratio in product descriptions, so it is best to go to an independent review website like RTINGS to see what they measured. (They do good TV and monitor reviews too.) You'll see that OLED displays are said to have "infinite" contrast ratio, due to being able to turn off pixels completely. Which means it is probably time to move to a new metric because that gives very little info on the dynamic range of the display (the difference between the darkest and brightest thing it can show).

You definitely want a decent contrast ratio for your display, but this can be subjective. If you have a nice bright screen, your brain may feel the contrast is fantastic, even if the actual darkest black point of the monitor isn't great. If something is really bright, then dark things will *seem* darker by comparison. And if you are viewing in a dark environment, the contrast will look even better. So this is where seeking out a professional reviewer's experience of the monitor can be helpful. One monitor's 4000:1 ratio might be a different experience than another with the same measurement.

Because TVs are generally larger and can have more backlighting zones, they can get decent black levels without OLED. But smaller computer displays have more difficulty in reasonable price ranges. So manage your black level expectations if you go with an affordable IPS display. They can get bright, but they aren't great at blacks like OLED. I'm afraid that is just a limitation of the tech. In fact, getting a brighter display might be preferable to a better contrast ratio. And it will be easier to see if you are in a bright environment.

Most IPS displays are going to be between 1000:1 and 5000:1 and while it does make a difference, if you sit it next to an old plasma or an OLED, you're going to be disappointed. So I would not make contrast ratio a super high priority with IPS, because non-OLED computer displays just aren't going to give you inky blacks. I would say 2000:1 or better is going to give you a decent experience. But, again, I would seek out reviews rather than trust the official product specs when it comes to the quality of the blacks.

And one final consideration you may want to factor in is the refresh rate. This is mostly for gaming. Most displays will give you at least 60 Hz or 60 "refreshes" per second. Gamers tend to like 120 Hz or higher. This won't affect movie watching very much as nearly everything except Gemini Man is 24 fps.

TLDR overview...

Get an IPS or OLED display for a good viewing angle. I personally feel this is the most important feature.

Choose a resolution. 1440p can allow you to increase quality in other areas to maximize your budget. Only get 4K if you have a legit reason or you have fighter pilot vision.

Color gamut or number of colors. Try to get 100% of sRGB for web content, 90% or above of Adobe RGB for art/photography, and 90% or above of P3 for HDR movies and video editing.

If color accuracy is important, look for pre-calibrated displays that have a Delta E of 3 or less. (Lower is better)

HDR brightness. If you want to experience good HDR, you'll want the brightest screen possible (measured in nits). HDR600 or HDR1000 are great. If you don't care about HDR, then don't worry about the rating.

Contrast ratio and black levels. It's going to be meh on pretty much anything but OLED. 2000:1 or better is a good goal to shoot for, but be sure to check independent reviews for the subjective experience of the black levels. Dark viewing environments help too.

Refresh rate. 60 Hz is fine for most things. Gamers prefer 120 Hz or faster. And if you are a competitive gamer, you may want to seek out more info on "variable refresh rate" and "pixel response time."

Pick the variables above that seem most important to you and then seek out a display that does those things decently within your budget.

#long post

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hotwings0203 · 4 years ago

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i’m thinking abt Police officer reader arresting scummy smexy Touya. Like he smirks when she arrests him and cuffs his hands to his back. I want him in me fr 😍‼️

Tw:none really, maybe sexual harassment and implied noncon

“Officer 776, we got a black sedan coming up your way on I-10. Do you copy?”

You sign and turn your music off before reaching for your walkie talkie and responding, “Yes, I copy.”

And sure enough, the only car that zooms by at 2 am on a Saturday night is a black sedan. It’s a shame, really, you were enjoying the city view by yourself without anyone to keep an eye on. You’re usually posted for ticket duty, but this time you got promoted for night watch.

You would’ve liked to continue leaning back in your seat and watch the only sky slowly dust with stars, but duty calls as the blue custom headlights go streaking past you.

Begrudgingly, you pull your driving handle back and start going after him, turning your lights on in the process and raising the siren.

You’re not even surprised when it takes some slight honking and almost a two mile mini-chase to get the car to pull over at the side of the gravelly road.

The car in front of you stalls, and you observe the status of the car itself. It’s hard to make out the look of the vehicle in the dark even with your headlights blaring in front of it, but you guess it’s a Mazda sedan or something of the sort just like how your higher-up said.

You take a deep breath and gather your flashlight as you open your door and swing outside.

On the short walk to the driver’s side you notice darker marks on the car…almost like they were scorch marks.

That’s strange.

The window is tinted and up. You roll your eyes in annoyance and give three sharp raps to the glass.

“Open the window and keep your hands on the steering wheel after.”

You wait a moment. It doesn’t budge.

A crease appears in your eyebrows and you quickly glance around. It’s completely deserted, just you and the perpetrator.

“I’m gonna have to ask you once more. Open the window otherwise-“

You cut off as the black glass slowly rolls down, revealing a man with ivory hair and black tips at the ends, his face scarred but astonishingly handsome. His mouth, eyebags, lower half of his face and ears are laced with silver piercings…stitches? Maybe, but whatever. Focus on the task at hand.

“What can I help you with meter maid?” Comes his sleazy, gravelly voice.

You lean down and rest an elbow on his lowered window, squinting at his smug face. His eyes are crinkled with the slight upturn of his lips, imitating a crude smirk.

No ones in the car with him, but you can faintly smell some kind of skunk aroma, and alarm bells go off in your head.

“Sir, do you know how fast you were driving?”

“Fast enough apparently, if I copped a sexy thing like you all for myself.”

He props his chin on his scarred hand and rests his elbow right next to yours, mocking your petulant expression.

You grimace and move your hand away from his. He pouts as you continue berating him.

“It’s 2am on a weekend, sir. Where were you headed off to that you had to be there in such a rush?”

The man sighs loudly and lets his head fall back against his leather seat, lips puffing out and fingers moving to drum against his steering wheel.

“Oh you know, the usual. Fucking bitches, getting money, anything a no-good handsome bastard like me does on the regular. Not like I’d expect you to know, meter maid.” He smirks showing his white canines and slowly looks you up and down.

When you scowl he raises his hands innocently and shrugs.

“Just kidding sweetheart. I was actually on my way to burn a few bodies, I’m a hit man y’know. Very much on the wanted list. I’m good at what I do…if you ever need a man, or a body,just call me.” He winks and his infuriating grin doesn’t falter as you yank open the door and practically throw his lanky figure out of the car.

He doesn’t put up any effort of resistance, just lets you push him down by the neck onto the hood of his car, his body bent as you begin searching him.

You know you smell some type of drug in the car but you’re not actually rooting through his pockets looking for gold. You just want a little bit of saving-face from his sleazy mouth.

He exhales and laughs as his cheek smushes against the black steel, his breath puffing up condensation on the hood while you pat his sides down.

“Put your hands on the car sir, and don’t move unless you want to be taken into a cell overnight.” You mutter as you feel his studded belt, his white tee revealing a toned yet sharp body underneath.

The man sighs in faux annoyance. “What’s with the attitude babe? If you’re feeling me up you might as well lose that cold shoulder. The name’s Touya by the way, I would’ve given it to you sooner if I knew you just wanted to get under my pants.”

You freeze as his words register right when you pay down his inner thighs for any suspicious substance-just following protocol.

Nevertheless, you instinctively shoot your hands to your side and sputter indignantly.

“You-you can’t talk to an officer like that! Are you drunk? Count to 100 for me.” You try to divert the conversations to where you have the upper hand, but you should’ve known Touya wasn’t gonna let it be that easy.

“Sure thing meter maid. It’s 1-800-*******.”

“What?”

“That’s my number. Be grateful, I don’t usually give opps my digits that easily, but you’re giving me a fun time so why not?” He cranes his head toward you and licks his lips seductively.

You’re thankful for the darkness of the night, for you can surely feel the best rise to your cheeks at his blatant…flirting?

“Shut up. Just let me do my job asshole.”

The walkie talkie crackles with static as your supervisor calls in to check on how you’re doing, but before you can speak into it Touya cries out suddenly.

“Help! Oh, help me officer! This meter maid is touching all over my little willy! She has ulterior motives I swear it!” He moans loudly and you snap the device shut before turning to him.

“Are you fucking crazy? Do you want me to get fired?” You hiss, but all you get in return is a maniacal grin.

“Sure, ‘means you can fuck around without any protocol then, right?” The man starts arching his hips up in a perverse manner and shoves his ass back into your torso.

You snarl and reach over his back, grabbing both of his hands and slapping a pair of cuffs on him before manhandling him the other way, his face finally aligned with yours, back against the cool steel.

“Oh, so you like it rough, huh?”

You ignore him and drop to a squat, taking his combat boots off less-than-gently and shaking them out for any real baggie.

“Shoulda’ told me sooner doll, we could’ve gotten this along wayyyy sooner.”

You slowly raise your eyes up and take in an eyeful of his thrusting hips mere inches from your eyes.

He’s looking down at you with one eyebrow raised and his usual smirk adorning his features.

Your blood rushes through your body like you just ran a marathon, and you abruptly stand before him, making sure your shoulder checks his straining bulge on your way up.

He yelps and doubles over, unable to clutch his prized possession.

This time when he straightens up with a twisted scowl, you’re the one grinning at him instead.

“Yeah, you’re right, actually. If you’re gonna get me fired anyways might as well do what I want, right?”

You open his passenger door and give him an innocent smile as he watches you warily.

After about 10 minutes of looting through his car and trunk, sure enough you produce a couple of large ziploc bags filled with white powder and copious amounts of cash under thinly concealed pockets in the back.

You hold all of these findings up, and each one of the revelations are either met with a mocking pout or a careless shrug.

Your skin starts to get hotter despite the chill of the night as none of your efforts to match his energy are met with any fruition. In fact, it seems to rile him up more.

“Looks like you’re getting tired hon. Why not use all that energy on this dick?”

“Hmm, I guess you’re not very good at this job, huh? You’d be better as some kind of stripper. Actually, nah, that’s too good of a job for you, maybe a prostitute stuck in my bed would satisfy you.”

On and on he goes as you practically raid his car, even throwing out belongings that aren’t in any way questionable.

Eventually you reach your tipping point. You make sure he’s watching you as you walk around back towards him and plant your feet squarely in front of him, taking your stance.

You reach into your pocket to produce your walkie, cock your arm back, and throw it as far as you can into the surrounding field.

“Where’s that smile now Touya? You scared you can’t defend yourself without anyone on the other side listening in?”

The ivory haired man shakes his head and sighs as if dealing with a grace loss. Your own brows furrowed as he looks up at you with a sorrowful expression, one that doesn’t quite scream sincere when the car lights reflect an excited gleam in his cerulean eyes.

“Nah, sweetheart. I’m actually more worried for you.”

And with a sound as soft as bell chimes, the tugs his hands at the back for a moment and brings his arms forward, palms spread and showing you cuff-less palms of blue hellfire.

He thinks you look pretty when the blue light reflects pure terror on your shadowed face.

“That was a stupid move, throwing your only hope of salvation away. I wasn’t lying, y’know. I really am a hit man. But I’ll take my own offer.”

As you turn to begin to sprint away he smiles again, this one more earnestly remorseful.

“I’ll be a hit man and a body you need for tonight.”

#mha #bnha #scummy dabi #scummy Touya #mha dabi #bnha dabi #dabi #touya #dabi imagine #dabi x reader #dabi is touya #touya x reader #bnha touya #mha touya #touya todoroki #touya imagine

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thosearentcrimes · 2 years ago

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Really frustrating element of how people talk about markets is just, ignoring basic market principles. Even if you don't really believe market economies are a good way of organizing stuff, markets do for the most part behave according to a set of rules. And if you do believe in market economies you really should try to understand them. A lot of people seem to be operating based on some just-so story they were told in school which they have either internalized or rejected, rather than anything resembling an understanding of market economies as systems.

Like, ok, take the sale price and subtract cost per unit for the seller and you get margin. Your total profit is the margin times the number of sales. Now, cost per unit goes down moderately with the number of sales, as fixed costs get distributed and other economies of scale pop up, but assuming relatively static demand the increased supply will drive down prices more. That means your margin is shrinking. If your margin gets cut in half while your sales go up by 50% you're taking in 75% of the profit you otherwise would be taking in. The obvious consequence of this is that for any given market situation there is a subset of the demand that remains unfilled, not because it is not economically possible to satisfy the demand, but because setting the price higher is more profitable. We might call this an inefficiency of the market, as there are needs or desires that can evidently be satisfied at an acceptable expenditure of resources which are not being satisfied. This inefficiency is mitigated but not removed by price discrimination.

The orthodoxy is that competition will counteract this effect by eating up profit margin, forcing prices to be set lower because while the profit of the established market actors is highest at a particular price point, you can take a bit of that profit off them by undercutting the established actors on prices, forcing them to operate below maximum profit and so satisfy more of the demand. Now, to be clear, this is merely replacing one inefficiency with another. Competition involves duplication of work, it leaves economies of scale on the table. Monopolies are bad, but the reason they form is that they work very well, not only in terms of extortion of customers but even just in terms of efficiency of production. Sure, complacent management may let stagnation set in if they feel secure about their market position, but that doesn't even require a monopoly.

In fact the bit about competition sucking up profit margin is only sometimes true, because ultimately "I will create a company that will suck up a bit of the profit margin of established market actors" is not necessarily the kind of pitch that will be appreciated by a financial environment full of people who hold stock in the established market actors. It is generally easier to secure financing for a takeover attempt than for a new competitor, because the takeover attempt is done by an ostensibly creditworthy actor and the new competitor is fairly likely to fail and take your investment with them into limited liability land.

I've written about this several times before, but that first inefficiency is extremely important when we talk about something like a housing crisis. YIMBYs would have you believe that if only the price of new construction were reduced by carefully dismantling building codes (hopefully not fire codes? well, who knows) the housing crisis would go away. Well, what would reduced costs of new construction do to the profit structure of the housing market? Yes, you could build a couple more units, sell at slightly lower prices and maybe make marginal gains in terms of profits, but you could also keep up your present tempo of building, keep prices the same, and also collect additional profits. The problem is people need somewhere to live (that is near jobs) and you do not maximize profit by providing all those people somewhere to live, or even by providing all the people who could pay the cost of production with somewhere to live.

As I keep repeating, the solution adopted by governments with this problem as it relates to food was to impose extreme amounts of government meddling to the industry, to the point where it is functionally a planned economy in most countries. Subsidies and price controls are set up so as to achieve the government's political and trade needs, which in most functional countries includes minimal starvation, and the profiteering of rent-seekers is tolerated on the grounds that the losses are ultimately acceptable. This also seems to have been roughly the housing policy adopted by governments of countries that have avoided housing crises.

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andypantsx3 · 5 years ago

Text

if i could keep cool | 1

pairing: Todoroki Shouto / Reader

length: 20,322 words / 6 chapters

summary: A villain attacks Shouto Todoroki’s apartment and kidnaps what he apparently believes to be Todoroki’s secret lover. The bad news—for both you and the villain in question—is that you’re just there to clean the place. That’s how it starts.

tags: romance, reader-insert, accidental sugar daddy shouto, misunderstandings

warnings: aged up characters, eventual smut

You’d been alone inside Shouto Todoroki’s apartment when the villain attacked.

In your defense, you were supposed to be there. Twice a week, for three hours apiece, you turned up to clean the place, dusting, remaking his bed, and scrubbing down the modern kitchen surfaces that you were fairly certain were going unused in the first place.

You weren’t actually supposed to know who owned the high rise, but the personal effects he kept around hardly made any secret of it--a few simply framed photographs of him with his siblings and his friends at school dotted the shelves in the living room, crates of fan mail were often delivered to his door during your shifts, and you’d seen his hero costume dumped in a hamper on more than one occasion.

You’d been excited to find this out at first, as you were just as much a hero fan as the next girl--particularly heroes who were as handsome and infinitely memeable as Todoroki--but you’d tamped down on your enthusiasm in order to keep things professional. It would kind of suck to be a celebrity and find out that some rando fan let themselves into your apartment on the regular and could help themselves to your stuff if they really wanted to.

You had almost considered asking your manager for reassignment when you’d first figured out just whose apartment you were cleaning, in order to keep things purely professional, but Todoroki’s schedule worked well with your own class schedule, and the money didn’t hurt either. The tips either he or his manager left for you were pretty hefty, and it was nice to treat yourself to groceries that weren’t ramen. He was keeping you in fresh vegetables and a Netflix subscription, so in the end you didn’t ask for reassignment--you were a college student, not a saint.

In retrospect, though, maybe you should have. Because one afternoon in late September, the large wall of windows that looked out into the city shattered with violent force, and a huge figure landed in the living room, glass crunching underneath their heavy boots.

You’d just barely managed to catch sight of a wicked looking scar twisting half of the villain’s face before you’d thrown yourself behind the kitchen island you’d been wiping down, landing heavily on your shoulder. That hadn’t saved you, though. You’d been hauled out across the scattered glass, the shards scraping through your clothes to tear at your back and elbows, and looked up into the face of the furious-looking man.

You hadn’t had time to scream, or beg for your life, or whatever other insanely embarrassing thing you might have done, before a fist connected with the base of your skull, and you were falling into darkness, the man’s features and the clean lines of the apartment around you slipping into black.

Now, you awoke in the dark, a musty scent like dust and slow decay pressing into your nose like a heavy rag. Your eyes flickered open, but the world seemed just as dark as behind your eyelids. In the dim, you could just barely make out cement floors studded with dirt and debris, and gaping cutouts in the wall across from you, pitch black with shadow. They were rectangular in shape, and huge--truck ports, maybe? Were you in a warehouse?

You made to move, but something tugged at your wrists, and you realized with a growing sense of horror that your arms were bound behind your back with rough rope, looped through slats in the chair you’d awoken in. Your head whipped up, and the back of your neck screamed in protest, sore from what had likely been hours of you lolling unconscious.

The thin, wavering sound of something like a radio static filtered from somewhere over your shoulder, and you could just make out low tones of a radio broadcaster: “Pro hero Shouto Todoroki’s apartment was broken into early this afternoon...the perpetrator of the crime is still at large…”

That’s right--Todoroki’s apartment. Your heartbeat instantly kicked into high gear. Where were you? Why were you here? Who was that man in Todoroki’s apartment? Had he taken you here? But why?

A boot crunched in the dirt behind you and you stiffened.

“Awake now?” a voice spat, laced with pure malice. The tone sent shivers down your spine.

The pair of boots crunched towards you, rounding the edge of your chair until you could look up into the face of the villain from before, the man with the horrible scar. It twisted and warped the skin over half of his face, the flesh melted into itself like he’d been held down against a hot stove. An equally horrible grin cut into the harsh line of his mouth.

“Who are you? Where am I? Why am I here?” you demanded. Your voice came out high and quavery, and you could have cringed at how absolutely terrified you sounded.

He raised an eyebrow like you’d just asked the dumbest series of questions he’d ever heard.

“Oh, I think you know why you’re here,” he sneered. His eyes were dark, almost black in the gloom of the warehouse.

A twisting wave of frustration washed over you. No you didn’t know why you were here. You’d been wiping down a fucking counter one minute and the next you’d woken up in some creepy warehouse with no idea of where in the world you might be.

“I don’t,” you said, frustrated. “Please, I don’t have any money. Whatever you want, I can’t get it to you.”

He stared down at you impassively, the radio static crackling in the background. “I don’t want money, you fucking brat. I want revenge.”

You stared at him. Revenge? You’d never even met this guy before, what the hell could you have possibly done to him that he would need revenge on you? The extent of your crimes against anyone, as far as you knew, only included arguing with people on twitter and once--drunk at a bar--peeing in the men’s room before you realized it wasn’t the ladies’ toilet. Gender was a social construct, anyway. It wasn’t that bad.

Your blank look seemed to irritate him, and he placed a booted foot on yours, deliberately grinding his heel down on your toes until you felt your bones creak. You bit down on a yelp.

“Don’t play stupid, you little shit. I know he’ll come for you.”

What? Who would come for you?

The radio signal seemed to catch again, and the newscaster’s stately voice reported from over your shoulder. “--Hero Commission received a message from the villain that they are holding Todoroki’s secret lover hostage. We’ve received comment from a PR representative at the Todoroki agency--”

Your stomach dropped in horror as you considered the smug expression that twisted the villain’s face. Oh no.

No.

No way.

Did he think you….?

Dread coiled into a hard pit in your gut. Oh, you were so absolutely fucked. Shouto Todoroki had never so much as heard of you, nevermind invited you into his bed. As far as you could tell, he had no current lover, as his apartment had only ever evidenced the single occupant.

He’d been linked in the media to a couple models and an actress, but it seemed unclear if that was any more than speculation. In the year you’d worked at the cleaning service, there’d never been anything like an extra toothbrush or an abandoned pair of underwear to give away another person’s presence, though you had sometimes seen evidence of his friends; things like a forgotten All Might sweatshirt that clearly belonged to notorious fan boy and current number one hero Deku, or a neatly prepared container of soup you’d seen in the fridge once with a note that read eat this you fucking fuck and if you get me sick I’ll kill you that you strongly suspected came from the foul-mouthed hero Ground Zero.

So unless those were to be taken as signs of a blossoming romance, there was nothing that strongly hinted at the presence of a lover.

You were frankly flabbergasted that this villain had assumed, just because you’d been alone in his apartment at the time, that you of all people could have been that to him.

And you were even more concerned now, as there was absolutely no way Shouto Todoroki was going to come haring in to save someone who did not exist.

What was the villain going to do when he realized that no one was coming for you? Or worse, when he realized you were no one to anyone, and your presence would hardly be missed? Was it better to try and clear up the misunderstanding now? What would he do when the dots connected?

The villain smirked, mistaking your horror. “That’s right, brat. He was supposed to be there, but you'll do just as well. He’ll come for you, and when he does, I’m going to do to him exactly what he did to me.” He gestured to the scarred side of his face and you winced.

So it hadn’t been a hot stove.

“I think you have it wrong,” you said a little desperately. “I’m not--I don’t even know Todoroki. I’m a cleaning lady.”

He rolled his eyes. “Nice try. I’ll just let you walk free then, shall I?”

Your fingers dug into the rope behind your back. “Um, ideally, yes.”

He bit out a harsh laugh, that horrible smile cutting into his features again, and knelt down in front of you. He was close, too close, and you could smell something sour on his breath.

“I’ve just had a better idea,” he said, leaning into you. “What if I do to his precious lover what he did to me? Your face can be the last thing I let him see before I kill him.”

Your stomach turned and you forced yourself as far back in your chair as you could get. Oh fuck. “No, please, you have to listen!” Your voice was growing higher as you spoke. “I don’t know him. I’m his fucking cleaning service. You can call them and ask--just ask!”

The villain didn’t listen, digging around in the inner pocket of his jacket for something. “No skin off my nose if you are or aren’t. But I think we both know you aren’t.”

You could feel your heart climb into your throat as he pulled out a lighter and a small, metal can that smelled sharply of gasoline. Lighter fluid? You started struggling wildly in your bonds, feet straining against the floor to push your chair back from him.

He let out another laugh, uncapping the fluid. The acrid smell sharpened, burning in your nose. The radio let out another burst of static in the background, a high whine that set your teeth even more on edge.

“I’ll let you pick the side, brat,” the villain said, smiling.

“I pick neither,” you managed around the lump in your throat. Your eyes were locked on the can of lighter fluid, like you could will it away from you with the sheer force of your panic alone.

The villain scowled. “Be difficult then,” he said, and moved to pour it over you anyway. You felt the first splash of fluid on your cheek and closed your eyes. That acrid smell got stronger, and the villain let out an excited breath.

Then the wall blew out.

A wall of freezing air rushed over you and the can of fluid dropped from the villain’s grasp, spilling sloppily down your clothes, before clattering to the floor. The villain swore and whirled, grabbing a fistful of your hair and wrenching your head back. You peeked open an eye.

A huge slab of ice had blown open the side of the building, and the silhouette of a man was outlined against the evening sky. It was hard to make out his features in the dim light, but that mop of red and white hair was so distinctive, you would know it anywhere.

A shivery frisson of relief went down your spine at the sight of a familiar figure, but confusion mounted in the back of your brain.

What the hell was Shouto Todoroki doing here?

There was a flinty noise and then a small flame flickered in the corner of your eye. You stiffened--the lighter was still in the villain’s hand, and you were entirely covered in lighter fluid.

“So nice to see you again, Todoroki. Any last words to your little girlfriend?” the villain spat. His gaze was fixed unblinkingly on Todoroki.

You strained against your bonds and his tight grip on your hair. “I’m not his girlfriend! Todoroki, tell him.”

You could barely see his features but you thought you caught Todoroki’s eyes darting over you curiously, like he was trying to figure out who in the world you were and why anyone would mistake you for a love interest of his. Your eyes met briefly. Then the fingers on his right hand pressed forward just the slightest bit, and a huge cascade of ice like an avalanche was rushing you. You closed your eyes, ready to be impaled.

There was a grunt and the villain’s hand was ripped out of your hair, taking a fistful with it. A sudden, suffocating silence pressed down on you, and an icy burn stung at your lungs when you inhaled.

You blinked your eyes open, only to come face to face with a wall of ice mere inches from your nose. Cold pressed in on you everywhere, biting at you through your clothes--it seemed Todoroki had formed some kind of protective shell over you as he forced the villain off of you. You exhaled and sank back in the chair with shaky relief.

More crackling echoed from outside your cocoon, muffled through the thick slabs of ice, and a bright jet of orange light lit up the crystals around you. You tracked the sound and the movements nervously. There was a moment when a body slammed into the ice behind you, cracking it a little, and you tensed, but then whichever of them it was rolled off and was gone within moments.

Over the course of a few minutes, the sounds of their battle and the flickers of light started to fade off into the distance, and you wondered if Todoroki was trying to lead the villain away, or if the villain was leading him somewhere he had planned for. Your fingers found the bindings at your wrists again, and you scrabbled desperately at them with your nails.

If the villain came back for you, you needed to be disconnected from this chair and out of the ice prison ASAP.

You had just managed to work your chair backwards and get a good angle against the rough ice, starting to work up a friction between your bonds and the ice when muted footsteps approached and a hole began to melt in the side of the ice wall. Your eyes snapped to attention and you leaned as far away as you could get.

It was Todoroki who stepped through, however, lifting an arm to melt away more of the ice over you. He looked a little mussed from combat but otherwise unharmed, and in good shape to get you out of here. You breathed a heavy sigh of relief, muttering, “Oh, thank god.”

He fixed you with a weird look, leaning over you when he’d melted enough of the ice to get to your bonds. A hot hand at your wrists burned ropes off of you easily enough, Todoroki careful not to singe you with his flames.

An uncomfortable silence settled between the two of you as you pulled your arms back to yourself, shaking them out.

“Uh, thank you,” you said, watching nervously as those distinctive two-toned eyes flicked over you.

He helped pull you to your feet, and gestured you towards the hole he had blown in the side of the warehouse.

“This way--there’s an ambulance to check you over,” he said evenly. His voice was low and smooth, even deeper in person than you’d heard it on TV. His whole presence seemed a lot sharper, larger even, than was communicated via the media.

You followed his broad back out into the evening air, noting that you were on a somewhat crowded street, likely somewhere still within city limits. Several rows of similar warehouses lined the streets, and an ambulance and several police vehicles had pulled up onto the sidewalk closest to you.

An EMT ran over to you, helping you over to the ambulance and immediately setting to the task of checking you over. She asked you a series of questions including your name, what year it was, the prime minister’s name, and a slew of probing queries about your injuries. She concluded a concussion seemed unlikely, but produced an ice packet for your head where the villain had struck you, and cleaned your wrists where the rope had cut into them, smoothing on aloe and wrapping them up in gauzy bandages.

While she worked, you watched Todoroki as he spoke in quiet tones off to the side with a group of policemen. Eventually, however, the conversation seemed to die out, and he came padding back over to stand in front of you with his arms crossed over his chest. You tried not to focus on the swell of his biceps through the fabric of his hero costume.

“What you did was very stupid,” he said, his eyes narrowing.

That tore your attention away from his arms, and you paused, staring up at him in confusion. Did all civilians get a lecture like this fresh off of being kidnapped?

“Excuse me?” was all that escaped you.

That grey and blue gaze raked over you. “You’re lucky I was able to rescue you. You risked your own life and invaded my privacy while you were at it.”

A mixture of confusion, exhaustion, and anger welled up inside of you. You had just been fucking kidnapped and he was lecturing you like a toddler who’d gotten into a box of crayons while her parents’ backs were turned.

“You think I fucking wanted to be kidnapped?” you demanded, sliding off of the back of the ambulance to take an angry step towards him. “You think I wanted any of this to happen?”

He held his ground, hardly threatened by someone who barely brushed his chin and had needed his rescuing only minutes before. You gritted your teeth.

“You are not welcome in my apartment,” he said firmly, something like suppressed anger flickering in his own gaze.

Your temper flared even hotter than his flames. You clenched your fist, the words bubbling up before you could even think to stop them. “Great. Clean it yourself then, you huge fucking asshole, if you don’t want someone else there.”

His eyes widened the slightest bit, but you weren’t done.

“I get kidnapped because some crazy douche wanted to settle a score with you, and you dare yell at me for doing my job? Because what, it’s shameful for you to be accused of having a secret lover and now you have to do PR? Grow the fuck up. That’s your fucking job.”

You turned on your heel, setting a beeline for the police officers where they had turned to watch you, mouths gaping.

“Do I have to give a statement right now or can I come into the station in the morning?” you demanded of the nearest officer.

“We recommend you give your statement as soon as possible, but you can delay until tomorrow if you’re, uh, in emotional distress,” the officer said, staring at you.

“Oh I am,” you intoned loudly. “But not as much emotional distress, apparently, as someone who's been mildly inconvenienced by a media narrative. You'd better check on him, he's the real fucking victim here. And I’ll see you in the morning instead.”

You stalked off towards the street, hardly caring where you were headed or how you would get home from here. You would figure it out and find your way, and it was better than standing around and being berated by some asshole hero who thought himself so wildly inconvenienced by saving you.

“And Todoroki, you can go fuck yourself,” you threw over your shoulder as you disappeared into the dusky maze of city streets.

And he could.

You hoped that was the last you’d ever see or hear of Shouto Todoroki.

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corvidkingden · 4 years ago

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Hello it is me the Panda asking for some good good Promptis idiots in love

Promptis, idiots in love?

Got it. How about a first kiss that almost didn't happen? [Read it on ao3]

“Noct, I swear if you don’t get your ass up here,” Prompto called down to him from where he was perched rather precariously on the edge of the cliff overlooking their camp. It wasn’t particularly high, high enough to give them a bit of space from Gladio and Ignis, but low enough that Prompto felt capable of scaling it on his own. Just barely so though, any higher and he would not be up there, he was a disaster walking and he knew it. It was a miracle he’d made it up without any scrapes as it was. Grinning widely he leaned forward just enough to peer down at Noctis as he stood at the base of the cliff, looking up at him silently judging for not just asking to be warped up.

“Yeah yeah, I’m comin’, someone’s gotta make sure you don’t fall off,” he huffed out, taking a few steps back for a better vantage before warping up beside him. It was a far more graceful approach than the blonde’s awkward clamoring up the side of the rocky wall. Which he most definitely watched him do but was pretending he didn’t for now. He’d tease him later for the number of times he stopped to give himself a pep talk.

“So what’s so important-woo!” Noctis yelped in surprise at suddenly being dragged down by the surprisingly strong blonde, his heart rate spiking as he teetered over the edge, but Prompto held a firm grip on him. He had half a mind to chew him out for being so reckless, even if he could have easily warped out of falling, but the moment he planted himself next to him what little anger that fueled the urge faded. The unabashed joy he saw on that freckled face, lit up with a grin, was all it took to melt it away.

He made it so hard to be mad at him.

“Look,” Prompto answered, nudging his shoulder with his own as he gestured up at the sky, turning Noct’s attention away from him for now. He probably could have kept staring at that grin all night otherwise.

The sun was slowly setting on the horizon, dipping low between the trees in the distance, still painting the land in golds and pinks where it shone through them. But the highest point of the sky was now a deep blue black, stars twinkling overhead. It was beautiful for sure, but it was hardly their first night under the stars. So what made this one so special? “What am I looking at?”

“You have no eye, I swear, come here,” the crownsguard huffed in exasperation, hooking his arm around his neck and dragging him in closer as he pointed straight ahead. “Look again.”

Noctis was momentarily distracted though, focused more on how close they were than where Prompto was trying to get him to look. All he could think about was his warmth, his smile, how he could see every tiny little freckle, even the palest ones that dusted his cheeks. How easy it would be to lean in and kiss across them and watch those cheeks turn pink. But he forced himself to look ahead, catching sight of what Prompto was pointing out just in time. A small shooting star danced across the sky in an arc of light, making him gasp softly. “Oh shit…”

“See? Told you,” Prompto murmured, in awe of the sight himself, watching the shooting star disappear into the black blanket of the night sky. His arm stayed hooked around Noctis as they both watched more slowly light up the expanse of darkness, turning the void into a shimmering pool of light.

It was beautiful, peaceful, a much needed moment of serenity after everything that had happened already and...well everything they still had to prepare for. They could hear Ignis and Gladio talking below while they prepared dinner, the tent long since set up. Insects and frogs chirped in the distance, the world falling asleep around them and falling away entirely as they both drifted and were lost in the moment.

Without thinking, Prompto looked over at Noctis as the meteors started to dwindle, growing fewer and less frequent, about to make a snide remark about him trusting him next time. But his words caught in his throat. He could see the reflection of them in his blue eyes, the small smile that curled on his lips as he’d fully relaxed for the first time in weeks. He was even more beautiful than the night sky above and all the man could do was stare in silent awe.

Feeling his gaze on him, Noctis turned to ask him why he wasn’t looking but he never got to get the words out, their noses brushing from the proximity, a tension settling between them so suddenly it almost seemed to knock the wind from them both. It wasn’t new, it was something that had always been there between them but they both tried so desperately to ignore it. It was never the right time, never the right place. Neither of them could seem to drum up the guts to admit to the feelings overwhelming them, completely unaware that the other felt the same.

The air between them felt heavy, hot, a spark of static tingling across their skin as they were caught frozen in limbo. Who would move first, would either of them even do it? Would this finally be the moment to break their resolve or would it soon be catalogued as another too little, too late. Noctis could hardly think past the sound of his own heart thumping heavy in his chest, dulling out the sound of anything else.

Just as he thought maybe, maybe he could do it, maybe now was the time to swallow his nerves and seize it, they were interrupted. “Dinner is ready,” Ignis’ voice carried up to them from below, unaware of the moment he’d just cut into so abruptly. “You’d do well to come down anyway, you’re not in range of the runes and daemons should be coming out any moment. I’d really rather not have to spend another night listening to an Iron Giant lurking outside our camp please.”

“Right-right, sorry, Iggy. We’re coming,” Prompto called back, stumbling over his words as he quickly let go of Noctis, pulling away to try and find his own air to breathe and gather his thoughts again. They’d been so close, he’d been only moments away from ruining everything by closing what little space had been left between them. Ignis calling out was a blessing and he didn’t even know it. He was flushed so thoroughly that he felt feverish, his heart was practically trying to break out of his chest the way it was beating so hard and his stomach was twisting so painfully he wasn’t sure he’d even be able to eat dinner. But he needed to get down there and regain control over this. He’d gone this long keeping his crush a secret he was not going to let it slip now.

Noctis cleared his throat awkwardly, rubbing the back of his neck as he looked down at the two men below already plating up their meals. He knew he should say something, even if the moment was ruined, because that was the closest they’d ever been and who knew when it would happen again. If it would happen again. He needed to tell Prompto before they left for Altissia and he might have just lost his chance. “I uh…”

“Thanks for coming up and watching them with me,” Prompto cut him off, that brilliant smile gracing his face again, though Noctis could see the hesitation and worry in his eyes. He knew him too well to fall for that grin, even if it did make him feel a bit warm and more than a little fuzzy inside.

“Yeah, yeah of course...surprised you didn’t get any pictures,” he smiled back, laughing slightly, hoping he could ease the awkwardness that had settled between them by sparking up another conversation instead of simply warping away. It seemed to work because Prompto truly lit up almost instantly, hopping up off the ledge.

“Actually, I did! I had my camera on the tripod getting some long exposures,” he grinned widely gesturing behind them, earning a laugh from the prince when he saw it. “Two steps ahead of you bud.”

“Always are,” Noct shook his head, eyes shining with mirth as he gazed at his best friend for a moment. He wanted nothing more than to just drag him right back in and fully close that space between them, to finally feel those soft lips against his own.

Prompto floundered silently under his gaze, looking back at him, feeling frozen in place as he tried to read what he saw in those eyes. As he tried to fight his own desire to scurry back over and lean in to kiss him too.

“If you’re much longer, Gladio may come up and drag the two of you down here himself,” Ignis called again, completely ruining the moment once more. Prompto saw it as a blessing, saving him from potentially making a horrible decision, but Noctis wanted to warp down and smack him for cock blocking him twice now. Kiss blocking? That just sounds weird.

“Coming!” Prompto called, snatching his camera off the tripod and tucking it away in his pocket again, tossing the tripod back into the armiger in one smooth motion. Marching back over to the ledge he eyed it a bit skeptical, trying to figure out the best way to scale back down the side of the cliff. Climbing up it had been so much easier, though it helped that he hadn’t looked down the whole time.

Seeing the nervous look on his face, Noctis saw an opportunity, hooking an arm around his middle and pulling him in close. “I got ya,” he said, though it had sounded way more suave in his mind. But he didn’t give it time to ruminate, warping the two of them back down into the camp below in a spark of blue light.

When they landed, dizzy and warm and full of adrenaline, they forgot that they weren’t alone for a moment. Pressed close as they were, chest to chest, Noct’s arm still wound tight around Prompto’s waist to keep him safe, it was like something straight out the movies. It would be so easy, so perfect, to just close that gap.

Noct could feel his nerves quickly dwindling under the weight of how much he wanted to just kiss him already, overpowered by the build up of years and years of denying himself. He wondered if Prompto felt the same, the way he could feel his heart racing said yes but the kid was shakier than a chihuahua, it could mean anything.

“You two need a room?” Gladio taunted as he made his way over to help Ignis pass out the plates, an all too amused grin spreading across his lips as he took in the sight of them huddled so close. He and Ignis had been able to read the tension between them from the start, but at this point it was so palpable it was unbearable. They’d both had half a mind to just shove them together themselves. But Ignis insisted that if it were to happen to let it happen at it’s own pace.

“Shouldn’t you be doin’ push ups or something?” Noctis shot back at him, and if looks could kill Gladio would be dead where he stood. Much as he wanted to do this, he wanted to be the one to tell Prompto how he felt, not Gladio and his big mouth. Letting go of the blonde in question, he didn’t notice that the boy looked ready to burst; he was so red. Slipping away from him he took one of the offered plates and planted himself down in one of the chairs to eat.

They eventually all settled in, no one daring to bring up what had just happened, though Prompto was uncharacteristically quiet through dinner. Noct kept looking his way hoping to catch his eye, trying to pull him into the conversation but Prompto was thoroughly distracted it seemed. Maybe he was reading the signs all wrong? He felt his stomach twist nervously at the thought, what if he’d made him uncomfortable?

He was entirely unaware that Prompto was just trying to figure out the very same. His mind was reeling, flip flopping frantically between imagining those lips against his and the thought of him pushing him away. Maybe he was wrong and Noct wasn’t trying to kiss him, maybe he was just trying to be nice and not flat out reject him.

But if he did want to, what did that mean for them? Was it even worth pursuing at this point? He was supposed to get married soon, that was the whole reason they were out here in the first place. Astrals, this was too confusing, it was so much easier when he thought his crush was entirely one sided.

Ignis and Gladio were all too aware of the tension between them, they’d seen it coming a mile away and if either of them were asked, they’d say they were surprised it took this long for it to finally happen. When neither Noctis nor Prompto seemed to be paying attention to what was going on the two older men got up to clean off their plates and clear away what was out from making dinner, giving the boys a moment with their backs turned.

It took a second, but Noctis realized the pointed departure, watching them to be sure he wasn’t misreading it before stretching his leg out to nudge Prompto’s boot. “Hey…”

“Hm?” Prompto quickly lifted his head, flushing slightly at being caught completely zoned out.

“Can we...talk?”

“Oh-uh yeah-yeah sure,” he nodded, brow furrowing immediately with worry. This was it, this was where he’d tell him off, turn him away. At least he’d been preparing for this for a long time, he was ready for it. At the end of the day he was just happy to be his friend after all.

Noctis stood then, a bit solemnly seeing the way Prompto’s face turned. He’d definitely made him uncomfortable it seemed, so at least this way he could apologize with a bit of privacy. Leaving his plate by his seat, he offered Prompto a hand up, tugging the blonde from his chair once he set his own plate down.

They walked to the far edge of camp, putting more distance between them and the older men, sitting on the edge of the rune lined space they both kicked their legs, an awkward silence settling between them. It was the polar opposite of the peaceful quiet they’d had up on the cliff, making them both want to scream just to break it.

“Noct, I…”

“Let me,” Noctis said, patting his knee gently, leaving his hand there as he turned to look at him. He could feel that lump swelling in his throat again, stomach twisting anxiously but he knew he needed to do this before he lost the chance again. “You...you’re my best friend, you know that right?”

“Yeah, buddy,” Prompto nodded, shifting to face him more as his stomach dropped heavily like lead. Rejection he could deal with, but was he about to say he didn’t want to be friends anymore either? “Of course, forever right?”

“Forever,” the prince nodded, looking into those lilac eyes and seeing the worry in them. Maybe that wasn’t the way to start this off, he opened his mouth to speak again but stopped lost on what else to say that wouldn’t simply make it worse.

“...Noct, it’s-it’s okay,” Prompto reached out, taking his hand. “I understand, you don’t have to say it. I made you uncomfortable and I know I shouldn’t have, it really wasn’t my intention. But I still want to be friends with you, I don’t want to lose that-that’s so much more important to me.”

“No, Prom, wait--” Noctis tried to interject as he watched him fall into one of his flustered tangents. They were endearing, but he was going to dig a hole for the both of them with this one.

“Honestly, I knew I was okay with it a long time ago, and I’m sorry I made it weird earlier. I really promise I wasn’t trying to. I just get so in my head sometimes and I don’t think about what I’m doing or-or what I’m saying--”

“Prompto,” he groaned.

“I just want to make sure you know I’m not gonna be upset, I get it, I’m not goin’ anywhere--”

Noctis cupped his cheeks and pulled him in, shutting him up with the crash of his lips against his, feeling him tense at first before melting right into the kiss. Pushing his fingers back into his soft blonde hair, he pulled him closer, shifting so their noses weren’t pushed together so uncomfortably. Feeling Prom’s fingers curl into the front of his shirt and tighten only made his heart leap though. This was it, it was happening.

They kissed until they were breathless, until it felt like the world was spinning faster and yet somehow frozen all at once, pulling away only because their lungs begged it of them. Their foreheads still pressed together, Noct let his hands slide down to the sides of his neck, simply holding him there as their breathing mingled, steadying despite the frantic patter of their hearts.

“You’ve really gotta let me speak next time,” Noctis murmured, grinning as a giddy laugh bubbled up out of Prompto.

“Shut up,” he huffed in mock exasperation, pulling him right back in and kissing him again, feeling every ounce of worry fall away from his shoulders.

It wasn’t what either of them had pictured, but it was special nonetheless. Sat underneath the stars, far away from any of their problems, they lost themselves in one another for what brief moment the gods would grant.

#my writing #fanfic #drabble #ffxv #final fantasy xv #promptis #prompto argentum #noctis lucis caelum

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