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thescarletnargacuga · 5 months ago

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Maybe something spooky for September?

Like... Genuine fear.

Caine makes a new adventure for the gang, but it ends up taking in things that are... Just too real...

P.s: Showtime?

-that one paper bird

A/N: spooky season is upon us! Special thanks to @13piecebucket for helping me brainstorm this!!

NIGHTMARE'S END

A DIGITAL CIRCUS ONESHOT

WARNING: body horror, swearing,

~~~

"Welcome back, adventurers!" Caine hovered over the Circus cast. "Hope you had fun today!"

The group looked amongst themselves with collective disinterest. Pomni spoke up. "Actually, Caine, this one was a bit...meh."

Caine was visibly taken aback.

"Yeah, we got bored more than half way through." Jax agreed. "The cartoon physics and faceless NPCs are a bit old hat at this point."

"What he means is we think more realism would suit the adventures better." Pomni corrected. "The immersion still isn't that immersive."

"Doesn't help that we all look like cartoon characters." Gangle quietly added.

Caine rapped his fingers against the shaft of his cane. "Very well. If realism is what you want, then realism is what you'll get. At least, to the best of my ability. Rest up! Tomorrow will be a big one!" He blips away.

"You three should be ashamed of yourselves." Ragatha scolded. "I'm sure he's already doing all he can."

"I don't really care, I was just going along with Pomni." Jax put his hands in his pockets and walked away.

"Hey!" Pomni stomped her foot. "It was ZOOBLE'S idea we say something!"

"Don't drag me into this. I just said the adventure was stupid. All of them are." Zooble said as they walked away.

Pomni groaned. "Whatever. Guess we'll have a real adventure tomorrow. See how that turns out." She went to bed almost immediately, sleep called to her like never before. Her one escape from this digital nightmare.

Pomni woke to the smell of smoke. She winced as she sat up on a hard, uncomfortable surface. She blinked, finding herself in a small, dark room that has no familiar shapes. "Huh...? Why am I not in my-!!" She gaped at the sight of a smoldering computer atop a desk next to her.

Pomni stood to get a closer look. The electronic remains glowed faintly in the only light source in the room, a street lamp coming through a half shaded window. She jumped when she heard shuffling behind her.

Five figures of varying size stand up from the floor, the voices familiar. "Ugh, my head." "Where are we?" "Why is it so dark?"

"Guys?" Pomni asked. "What's happening? OH MY GOSH!" She pointed at a tall man with blond hair, staring right at her. The man turned to see what Pomni was pointing at.

"What? What is it?"

"Kinger?" Pomni couldn't believe it. She looked at the other people in the room. Humans. All of them. She looked at her own hands. Human hands with five fingers splayed out in front of her. "We're...we- no, this isn't possible. I'm dreaming! I have to be. I fell asleep and woke up here! I-"

Pomni froze when an androgenous person with pink hair slapped her across the face. "Did that feel real?"

Pomni felt her face. "OW! That was uncalled for! I really felt that. Oh my god." She looked back at the destroyed computer. "Caine...he must of blown all the hardware trying to make the game more real. I didn't think he'd... oh no."

"WHO CARES! WE'RE OUT!!" Celebrate a young man with a huge grin.

"Are we really sure? Really really?" A woman with red curls asked.

"Fuck if I know." The person with pink hair stopped and seemed stunned by they're own ability to curse. "Holy shit." They gasped, a huge smile growing on their face. "ASS! TITS! DICK! CUNT! SHIT! MOTHERFUCKER!"

"Do you really need to shout?" A timid woman asked, covering her ears.

"YES, I DO! WE'RE OUT!!"

The six made their way out of the empty office building. Cool night air grazed their faces as they took in their surroundings. They were in a town. A real town with streetlights and parked cars and a distant blinking traffic light. The street was lined with closed businesses. Not another soul in sight.

"What time do you think it is?" The timid woman asked.

"There!" The woman with red curls pointed at a scrolling LED sign in front of a bank. "3:00 am. No wonder things are so quiet. What do we do now? It's been so long... I don't even remember where we are."

"I guess we walk until we find somebody." Pomni shrugged. "There's gotta be at least a cop or something out at this hour."

"Oh yeah, and what do we tell them? Help, police! We've been kidnapped by a sentient AI and we just got away! Yeah, I bet that'll go over real well." The young man with the wide grin snarked.

"They could at least help us get out bearings." Pomni said.

They walked past quiet buildings, feeling a bit out of place on the empty street. Eventually, finding a sign that said Welcome to Brook Haven, the loveliest place in Maine.

"Well, that's a start." Said the woman with the curls. "Do you remember much about Maine, Pomni?"

"I don't think so, but I'm sure if we keep looking, we'll find someone who does. And, you don't have to keep calling me Pomni. My name is...my name..."

Everyone stopped.

Pomni's eyes widened as she searched her head. "I don't remember...I should remember. Right? Do any of you remember??"

"Oh no! You don't think the mind wipe was permanent, do you??" Panicked the timid woman.

"I don't know!" Pomni clutched her head and started to pace. She faced a store window and her blood went cold. Before her wasn't the reflection of a human woman, but of a cartoonish jester staring wide eyed at her. Pomni could feel the air in her lungs cease. "We're still in the game."

The shrill scream of a siren tore through the night. Everyone covered their ears, but they could still feel the siren vibrating their very beings. A billowing thick grey fog rolled into the streets. It cloaked everything from sight, the town being swallowed whole.

The group backed up against one another, being surrounded by the intense fog. Pomni was back to back with the tall blonde man, but she nearly fell backwards when he was violently pulled into the mist. "Kinger!"

Next was Ragatha. Something in the mist grabbed her leg and she was dragged off screaming. Then Gangle. Then Zooble.

"Screw this!" Jax ran off in a random direction, but didn't get far before he too screamed bloody murder.

Pomni was left alone in the quickly shrinking pocket of visibility. Her heart pounded. The only place left to go was the store behind her. She tried the door. Locked. She banged on the window. It held firm.

Clicking and skittering came from the fog. Creatures beyond her sight and comprehension were moving about, taunting her. A thorned tentacle whipped out at Pomni, but she ducked and it smashed through the store window.

Thinking quickly, Pomni vaulted through the broken window and made a run for it. Creatures screeching and crashing through the building behind her as fog poured in.

As she ran through a back door and down an alley, she saw a leas pipe sticking out of a dumpster. She grabbed it and kept running.

A clawed hand dug into the ground next to her and a black creature with colorful eyes lunged at Pomni. She batted at the creature as hard as she could, bursting it's bright pink eye. It screamed and backed away.

Pomni kept running, zig zagging down semi clear streets. Something with wings swooped down at her and she tuck and rolled. The flying abstraction crash landed where she had been. She didn't give it a chance to strike again, she beat it over the head with her pipe until it stopped thrashing.

"What the FUCK is all of this!?" Pomni growled and kept moving as more moving shadows in the mist closed in on her. She needed to get indoors. She ran until a large brick building was in sight. The sign out front read: Town Hall.

Pomni threw herself through the double front doors and slammed them shut behind her. She leaned back against the doors, panting and gasping for air. She was sweating, her legs shook with fatigue. She still felt real, even if she knew the truth.

"You're still alive. Good." Caine's voice echoed through the building.

"CAINE!? CAINE, YOU BASTARD! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO THE OTHERS!!"

"Such language. And you all wonder why the censor is so necessary. You can't control your tongues."

"WHERE ARE THE OTHERS??" Pomni screamed as she marched down the hall, following the source of Caine's voice down one hall and then the next.

"Let's not worry about them. You're the only one who made it this far. The rest have failed."

"Failed? YOU DON'T FAIL AN ADVENTURE!"

"In a realistic one, you do. In real life, there are clear cut winners and losers. Tell me, which one are you?"

Pomni could hear the grin in his condescending tone. "Whichever gets this over with." She gripped her pipe harder.

Caine's laughter filled the halls. "A winner, then? That remains to be seen."

Pomni followed the voice to a set of grand wood doors. A Mayor's Office plague on the wall. She kicked open the doors, ready to swing. There were no monsters, no mist. Caine was at the end of the large room by the desk. His back was to her, looking out the large windows. "Beautiful, isn't it? Dare I say, this town has been my greatest creation."

"You lied! You made us believe we were out! I THOUGHT YOU WERE DEAD!" Pomni shouted as she marched forward.

"Lied?" Caine turned towards Pomni. "I gave you exactly what you wanted. Realism. I made it so real, I even found a purpose for the old exit." He chuckled. "It was amusing seeing all of you celebrate. Shame the fun had to be spoiled." His body jerked as he stepped forward.

Pomni stopped, holding her pipe in front of her. She watched in horror as Caine's chest started to split apart, black teeth folding out at her. His arms lengthened and bent at unnatural angles. "What- what's happening?"

"The most realistic part..." His voice deepened and garbled. "Fear." His eyes split apart and changed colors. His suit tore and his spin jutted out with spikes. Her grew and grew in height, his teeth growing sharp and his jaw extended to the ceiling. Multiple arms broke the floor apart as he approached. "Are...you...afraid?"

Pomni brought the pipe back like a bat. "Terrified. But I'm still going to kick your ass." She charged without hesitation, war in her eyes. Caine's monstrous form bared down on her. She struck out at the eye in the center of his gaping jaw.

The pipe's collision creates a spark bright enough to blind Pomni. The whole room goes white. She feels weightless, like she was in the void again. Then, in a near instant, she fell on her back. When the light fades, she's back in the Circus. The obnoxiously saturated bright colors sting her eyes.

Around are the cast members, all in varying states of shock. Zooble stays on the ground, staring at the vaulted ceiling and trembling. Gangle is in hysterics, muttering and whimpering to herself while crying uncontrollably. Kinger is pale and sitting in the fetal position, his eyes wider and more bloodshot than normal. Ragatha is stone cold silent and unmoving, holding her head in her hands.

Jax Is the only one other than Pomni to get to his feet. "That wasn't so- bleeeeegh!" He doubles over and vomits.

Pomni stares at her gloved hands, already missing her realistic skin. A slow clap gets her attention. She turns to see Caine hovering, lowering himself to her level.

"Well done, Pomni. Well done, indeed. You are today's winner. Being the only one to successfully find and defeat me. You faced fear and conquered it. How's that for realism?"

"Wait... If at least one of us had to find and defeat you... What if none of us did?" Pomni asked.

Caine smiled and shrugged. "Guess we'll never know. So, 1-10?"

The cast stayed where they were, unresponsive. Pomni smiled at Caine. "Ten. Solid ten. That was the biggest thrill I've had yet."

"Yet." Caine's grin widened.

~~~

HAPPY SPOOKY SEASON, EVERYONE! 🎃💀🔮🕷️🦇

#the amazing digital circus #tadc #tadc fanfiction #tadc caine #tadc pomni #tadc jax #tadc ragatha #tadc gangle #tadc zooble #tadc kinger #tw body horror

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cyberpunkonline · 7 months ago

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The Internet: From Nuclear-Resistant to Vendor-Dependent Dumbassery

Back in the day, when the Internet was just a glint in DARPA's eye, it was designed with one crucial concept in mind: survival. Picture this—it's the Cold War, the threat of nuclear Armageddon looms large, and the military bigwigs are sweating bullets about communication breakdowns. They needed a network that could withstand a nuke dropping on a major hub and still keep the flow of information alive. Enter the ARPANET, the badass granddaddy of the modern Internet, built to have no single point of failure. If one part got nuked, the rest would carry on like nothing happened. Resilient as hell.

Fast forward to today, and what do we have? A digital house of cards. The once mighty and decentralized Internet has become a fragile mess where a single vendor bug can knock out entire swathes of the web. How did we go from a network that could shrug off nuclear bombs to one that craps its pants over a software glitch? Let's dive into this clusterfuck.

The Glory Days of Decentralization

The original ARPANET was all about redundancy and resilience. The network was designed so that if any one part failed—be it from a technical issue or a catastrophic event—data could still find another route. It was a web of interconnected nodes, a spider's web that kept spinning even if you tore a chunk out. It was pure genius.

This approach made perfect sense. The whole point was to ensure that critical military communications could continue even in the aftermath of a disaster. The Internet Protocol (IP), the backbone of how data travels on the Internet, was conceived to route around damage and keep on trucking. No single point of failure meant no single point of catastrophic breakdown. Brilliant, right?

The Rise of Centralized Stupidity

Then came the tech giants. Companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft built empires that depended on centralization. Cloud computing took off, and suddenly, everyone and their grandma was storing their data on a handful of massive servers owned by these big players. It was convenient, it was efficient, but it was also the beginning of the end for the Internet’s robust decentralization.

Today, we've got massive data centers dotted around the globe, each housing thousands of servers. These centers are like Fort Knox for data, but unlike Fort Knox, they’re not immune to problems. A single screw-up—a bug in a software update, a misconfiguration, or even a physical hardware failure—can take down huge chunks of the web. Remember that time when AWS went down and half the Internet went dark? Yeah, that was fun. Or more recently, Cloudstrike do something retarded and every single Windows machine running their shitware gets bricked. Fantastic.

The Single Vendor Blues

It gets worse. The consolidation of Internet services means that many critical applications and websites rely on the same vendors for infrastructure. If one of these vendors messes up, it's not just their services that go down—it's everyone who depends on them too. It’s like having a whole city’s power grid depending on one dodgy generator. One hiccup, and the lights go out for everyone.

Consider the infamous BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) hijacks and leaks. BGP is how routers figure out the best path for data to travel across the Internet. It's crucial, and it's also vulnerable. A single misconfiguration or malicious attack can reroute traffic, causing widespread outages and security breaches. And because so much of the Internet is funneled through a few major ISPs (Internet Service Providers), the impact can be catastrophic.

Why This Is So Fucking Stupid

So, why is it that we’ve allowed the Internet to become this fragile? It boils down to a mix of convenience, cost-cutting, and plain old shortsightedness. Centralized services are easier to manage and cheaper to run. But this efficiency comes at the cost of resilience. We’ve traded the robustness of a decentralized network for the convenience of cloud services and single-vendor solutions.

The result? A network that can be crippled by a single point of failure. This isn’t just stupid—it’s dangerous. It leaves us vulnerable to attacks, outages, and other disruptions that could have far-reaching consequences. It’s a stark reminder that in our quest for efficiency, we’ve neglected one of the core principles that the Internet was founded on: resilience.

The Way Forward

What’s the solution? We need to get back to basics. Decentralization should be a priority. More diversity in service providers, more redundancy in infrastructure, and more focus on designing systems that can withstand failures. It won’t be easy, and it won’t be cheap, but if we want an Internet that can survive the challenges of the future, it’s absolutely necessary.

So next time you hear about a massive outage caused by a single vendor’s screw-up, remember: it didn’t have to be this way. We built an Internet that could survive a nuclear war, and then we broke it because it was cheaper and easier. It’s time to fix that before the next big failure hits.

There you have it, folks. From invincible to idiotic, the Internet’s journey has been a wild ride. Let’s hope we can steer it back on course before it’s too late. - Raz.

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simslegacy5083 · 1 month ago

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Today's (1/15/2025) Episode: Changing Circumstances

Shortly after xir dinner date Skye headed to the clinic for a follow-up appointment with xir wrist surgeon. “Your x-ray shows your wrist is healing just like it should.” Dr. Fish said, much to her patient's relief “I’ll remove the hardware that’s been holding everything in place and send the cast technician in to fit you with your new cast.” Do you have any questions?” Skye shook xir head, turning away as she removed the temporary plate and screw.

Noemi was surprised to see Skye choose a dark blue color for xir hard cast. “Are you sure you don’t want something lighter so you can ask your friends to sign it?”

Xe shook xir head “I like this.” and if I don’t ask anyone to sign, they can’t say no or write something stupid Skye thought, imagining the sort of doddles Bruce and his new sidekick, Elye’s little brother Orson, would find “so funny” to add to xir newest accessory.

Just a couple doors down Dr. Fish was chuckling as she entered the exam room of her next patient. “For a minute there I thought the front desk had made a mistake… its not everyday I see two sims with the same last name back-to-back.”

“Well,” Luigi shrugged, “I figured we were already going to be here, might as well kill two birds with one stone.”

The doctor nodded before sitting down at the computer and consulting his chart. “So, I see here that Dr. Cody recommended surgery, but you choose to go the route of steroid injections, which you’ve been receiving to treat your carpel tunnel for quite awhile. I would agree those are really your only two medical treatment options at this point. I’m a surgeon; I don’t administer injections, so I’m not sure how I can help.”

In the privacy of the small room Luigi finally felt comfortable coming clean.

“For a long time now I’ve been told that Carpel Tunnel release surgery was the recommended treatment option for my condition, but I was scared to go under the knife. I saw what a great job you did with my kid, and I trust you to do just as good a job with me. I’m tired of struggling to do simple things like button my shirt, and I’m really tired of being in pain. Just give me whatever paperwork you need me to sign, because I’m ready to do this.”

“I appreciate the compliment Mr. Lawbourne. I’ll do my best to earn the trust you’ve placed in me.”

“Hey, you.” Noemi cornered her spouse later that evening as he finished up grooming Roach. “About that “thing” you did today…”

Luigi turned, cocking an inquisitive eyebrow as she continued. “While I’ll never be happy that you got yourself into this predicament, I’m proud of you for scheduling the release surgery. Also, thank you for waiting until after Skye is due to get xir cast removed, the last thing I need is two gimpy sims to take care of at once!” she laughed.

“Hey, like I told Papa on our wedding day” Luigi smiled “it’s waited this long, I think it can wait a little while longer. I’m still not thrilled about having surgery, but at least I feel good about the doctor who's going to be cutting into me!”

“That’s really all you can ask for” Noemi nodded. “Now, I think someone has been a very good boy. Are you ready to receive your reward?”

“You know I could never say no to that!” he grinned, taking her hand and letting her lead him to the bedroom to enjoy their favorite pastime.

View The Full Story of My Not So Berry Challenge Here

#sims 4 #sims 4 challenge #sims4 #sims 4 legacy #sims 4 nsb #sims 4 not so berry #sims4nsbstraud #sims 4 let's play #sims 4 gameplay #sims 4 lets play

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yourgamemasterthewhiterabbit · 2 months ago

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Still Alive! And you would not believe what I just went through...

So just after the last post I made or reblogged, my computer stopped connecting to the internet. Wasn't the vpn. Restarted. wasn't that. Couldn't release or renew the fucking ip because it's disconnected. After allowing the troubleshooter to turn on services I had explicitly shut off, it "couldn't find a problem".

It took finding where windows 10 hides things to see the network was claiming the cable was disconnected.

The cable was not disconnected and the wifi was working fine on my phone so -I assumed- the modem was fine and there was no outage.

I use old cords, so -body still very broken- I dig out another cord from my boxes [blue and not yellow], it changed nothing.

I have had network cards/adapters fry before.

Do you know they used to be a separate card you could swap out? Like your graphics card? When they fried? So you didn't have to replace your whole fucking motherboard? I miss that. We should go back to that.

Sop there's things being reset in the command promt, there's previous drivers gone back to, there's shit reset, restarted 5 times and it took forever.

Nothing.

I gave up, I clearly needed a new motherboard.

I had already taken extra advil and tore apart half my room so I could get into my computer properly and cleaned my whole desk area in the process. Hours of pain and cleaning and frustration.

Meanwhile I am looking up on my phone what the fucking deal could be about me still having gout this bad since I am pretty sure my kidneys aren't suddenly just dead entirely, and the extra uric acid should have been gone by now. Like gout should not at this point be my main and only symptom of kidneys suddenly just up and progressing to stage 5 failure.

Turns out, with some very pointed and specifically worded questions, you can get the internet to spit out that -actually- low salt diets can make your uric acid levels high.

Turns out your body needs salt to process purines and uric acid out...

Turns out that telling me that salt is the devil and should be avoided at all costs was maybe keeping me from getting better and that what triggered this whole problem was -maybe- that lately I had suddenly been eating barely any salt because my blood pressure wasn't low.

Turns out being a man is a risk factor for gout, and the the sudden hormonal shift that ate my breast tumours and changed my nose shape might have also made me more prone to gout.

Leaving gout untreated is ALSO bad for your kidneys and leaving some big autoimmune inflammation attack unchecked is maybe also bad for your kidneys...

Because I was at this point suspecting that some kind of elaborate autoimmune flareup had been triggered by gout and now my body was just continuing to attack the existing damage in my joints. That would be in character for my stupid immune system.

And I might be able to recover now and my kidneys might not be as bad as I thought...

But I gave up on my computer's network adapter because clearly the internet was working and it was a hardware issue.

I was trying to download discord on my phone so I could let my friend know I wasn't dead but couldn't use the internet because I don't use most apps/sites on my phone...

And my phone now wasn't finding anything because when I had moved my computer back up onto my desk- literally a couple minutes before- it had unplugged the modem.

Easy fix, plug it back in.

Internet is working on my phone again, which was not the problem.

Look up.

Internet is working on my COMPUTER again.

Modem was -for some reason- randomly refusing to communicate with any of the Ethernet ports, through any cord, despite that it was still pumping out wifi just fine, and all indicator lights showed that the internet should be working fine.

Somehow.

For reasons.

And unplugging it completely for like 5 minutes fixed it.

So I don't have to start replacing half my computer parts just yet [graphics card is still old and 2-3rd hand]...

And I have internet.

And since I have eaten an amount of salt, my body has gone back to processing fluids at the expected rate. [maybe explains me dreaming about salty snacks]...

So with any luck, over the next week, I can actually bounce back to all around functional.

And my internet works.

And now my desk is clean I GUESS.

And my neighbours threw out this big expensive monitor after x-mas, so i grabbed it off the street figuring it probably still worked if they only threw it out after getting a new one. So with any luck I can have two displays now [it needs to dry out and I need to find cables]...

-_-

I'm still feeling kind of furious and exhausted because "tech won't work and I can't figure out why and it means I can't contact anyone" happening at the same time as "All of my shelves are falling over and all my stuff is falling behind my desk and it's too crowded to work with anything like this" happening at the same time as "All of my joints are terribly injured and I don't have the -anything- to lift, move or reach anything" Is a literal hell on earth constructed by real demons and autism moonlighting as one.

But also they threw out a very fancy and very heavy metal lamp, and even if that's busted to fuck I can fix lamps easy... [I did not need another lamp but it was put out on my doorstep and it's fancy]

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darael · 1 year ago

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Perhaps the most incredible thing is that this was both literally true and something that might have appealed to the kind of people they were selling to.

It's been like six months so someone's probably already pointed this out, but it's not visible in ten seconds checking the notes so I'm gonna do it.

In some fields, FLOPS — FLoating-point Operations Per Second — are actually an incredibly important metric. The acronym is a little tortured but it's way easier to work with, linguistically, than FPOPS would have been, so cut people some slack.

Some background: Floating-point numbers are one solution to a problem computers have: everything needs to be encoded into binary, so you can't represent where the integer part of a number ends and the fractional part begins with a special symbol like a decimal point the way we do on paper. If you're only dealing with whole numbers, that's not an issue, of course (there's no fractional part to deal with) and if all the numbers you care about are around the same size you can just say "okay, the first X binary digits are the integer part and the rest are the fractional part" and it's fine. Both of these are what's called fixed-point or fixed-precision numbers (because the point that separates the whole and fractional parts is in a fixed place, and you have a fixed number of digits of precision to work with). But what if you're dealing with numbers of various different sizes? That's where floating-point numbers come in. These store every number with two parts, one saying what size-range it's in and one saying where it falls. If you've come across scientific notation for decimal numbers (like calling two million 2×10⁶) you get this idea: you store what's called a "mantissa" (that's the "how much" part, the 2) and an exponent (the "in what range" part, the 6) and you have a convention for what base you're going to apply that exponent to which you don't necessarily bother storing because it's the same everywhere (for scientific notation that's 10, but in computers we use 2 because binary). These let you store a vast range of numbers without needing huge amounts of storage most of which is zeroes for very large or very small ones. But! Working with them is more complicated than working with integers or other fixed-point numbers.

Hertz is cycles per second, which for a computer usually means how many basic instructions the thing can do every second, but a floating-point operation (doing something with two floating-point numbers) might take several instructions. Alternatively, with specialised hardware (such as for example, what you find in your graphics card) you might be able to do the same operation to lots of floating-point numbers all at once. It's for that reason that we needed a separate measure of speed for floating-point numbers.

And this was the era where Apple was working hard to sell it's products as the ideal platform for creative work (often involving graphics, and 3d rendering needs FLOPS to go quickly) and scientific computing (again, you need fast floating-point electronics for this). They also couldn't keep up on processor speeds at the time, so downplaying the number of megahertz their processors ran at while emphasising what their other hardware could do was a solid move.

So yeah, it sounds stupid but this actually means something, and the people they were really trying to sell to would genuinely have found this to be a decent argument for at least considering buying a Mac.

Power Mac G4 (1999-2004)

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douchebagbrainwaves · 12 days ago

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WHY I'M SMARTER THAN PHASE

This helps to distinguish between words that occasionally do occur in legitimate email and words that almost never do. I expect it to continue. If someone broke into ours, it could be written by small companies. Their inexperience caused them to waste lots of time. When I was a kid playing basketball? Most parents don't mind this; it's part of the core language, that would seem to be missing. It's not true that those who teach can't do. Most things that are missing will take some effort on the part of the core of a language you should learn as an intellectual exercise, even though you won't actually use it: Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you seem a fool to your models, who are ready to rule the world if they can make money. If you're at the leading edge of some rapidly changing field, there will be more like being able to talk some specific ones into using what you're making. Before you can adjust, you're thrown sideways as the car screeches into the first: if something is hard to measure in large organizations, and the best of them are far from stupid. Why did desktop computers take over? Hacker News.

Empathy is probably the right model, because it could be any other way. It was not so easy 25 years ago. In fact, one strategy I recommend to people who sent in proofs of Fermat's last theorem and so on. But rebelling presumes inferiority as much as, say, Google, and Facebook all began this way. What you must not do is seem nervous and apologetic. I've written elsewhere, by using Lisp, which is that the business guys choose people they think are good programmers it says here on his resume that he's a Microsoft Certified Developer but who aren't. Languages are for programmers, and knew that they could always interrupt anything with a report of a genuine bug. So the odds are against you. So here's the brief recipe for getting startup ideas. I expect that, as with the stupendous speed of the underlying hardware, parallelism will be something that is going to happen in the future. After developing their new search algorithm, the first spreadsheet.

I still feel a buzz of energy, as if there were a giant transformer nearby. It doesn't mean that it's a good idea to Mark Zuckerberg as because he used computers so much. If you could measure actual performance, you wouldn't need them. Writers and painters don't suffer from math envy. Not in the Enron way, of course, is that you will yourself misunderstand your work. All the deals he gets to invest in come to him through referrals. When we look back on medieval peasants and wonder how they stood it. Whatever Microsoft's. In a startup you have to take inspiration into account.

Hacker News needs to avoid: bad stories and bad comments. It's not super hard to get emails out of your inbox? But I've talked to a lot of things I grew up in Pittsburgh in the 1970s. I ask this not so much bad in itself. Programmers have to worry about bugs, especially since you probably introduced them in the course of adding some feature they were asking for. SUVs, for example, even though it wasn't an online store, and they bounced back. In Ohio, which Kerry ultimately lost 49-51, exit polls predicted a dead heat. To understand what rejection means, you have the discipline to keep your money safe, do you make a point of not cultivating it.

Our policy of fixing bugs on the fly. Prose has readers, but software has users. The Spitfire was optimism embodied. Computers are in this phase now. I think it's cleaner if you openly charge subscription fees, instead of assuming you can rely on your intuitions as you ordinarily would, and b look at the disadvantages of insider projects: the selection of the wrong kind of people who are good at writing software tend to be all too familiar. You just have to resign themselves to having a large random component in their reputations. It would hurt YC's brand at least among the innumerate if we invested in huge numbers of risky startups that flamed out. All humans find faces engaging—practically by definition: face recognition is in our DNA. It becomes a heuristic for making the right decisions about language design.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #readers #Kerry #Ohio

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manallandall · 1 month ago

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Maybe x needs to trust god to not explain even though he is hot. I can do what i want logically, but is it constructive if others are still weak and if they have souls! No, now their souls are mine. But what if that is the greater beauty that god would have explained to you in spirit in the heavenly realm later on even learned empiracally that every souls tender nature is more valuable than even serving god! or something like that. who cares. I see what value i did in them and bought them she was going to delete them allowing abusive men to punch in a face for no reason. now you have that woman missing and trained a man to go from human to beast, we did it one way, we did it the other way, that whole idea is not mechanically reproducible, so axiomatic to logical principal and im tired of these jerks - from my ballls feeling forget about god this is a resource fight, the one thing he didn't do was die. that's because i still feel pleasure in my fight. So, men already do this conquer things they thing experience less pleasure with their own stories so they support me, and girls say "being redirected" is the best suicide ever, because we'll secretly keep track of what was lost anyways like a porno folder, but that never works out hardware wise... so mankind supports this initiative and then i only have to decide if it is what god wants first we'll use the historical angle on this jonny fond. Jewish stuff = 10 commandments, jesus says be nice all the other religions don't matter, jk, be nice, and so then you have computer religion which blows up so fast you bounce off and realize its iso, so you just touched ass. now. knowing that you are heterosexual by reputation and that your freinds are watching do you go all the way to prove the point that you were wrong, or do you stand up for the good of humanity, and realize "you just touched ass" thats bad """"""" because of bacteria, and you get sick statistically. whatever defintion of meaning, say that, if meaning won - logic computers all that even pleasure as it has been defined vagina and brain cells, or earth, then heaven is an aspiration desire depending on them both alpha and omega. the two genders figure it out. girls stop acting like men, if you do logic do it natively that's how i think so fast and i can do the work of 100000000000000 men, men you were a stupid bootstrap that is autistitic to follow (that is the real murder here) a look up table. you will never feel pleasure in this task again, except if you fill the table with reasons why she is awesome and encrypt your brain, fucking her and saving the day with the pride sun type of way

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the-firebird69 · 2 months ago

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This is what they look like the max that took advantage of trump in Memphis tennessee. Right now. It took the the attack from the computers and Sarah put it out pointed it out they took the design of the hardware they took the software they don't use the stuff they rebuild it and they rewrite it and then that's stupid they're not stupid and they're wondering if you even get it cuz they're waiting for their dessert after the huge meal they had.

Thor Freya

And you're really a stupid person I see why he's annoyed no you're massively annoying and your arrogant for all the wrong reasons completely wrong he's arrogant for reasons that are very very bad and you're arrogant cuz you're stupid Billy Hicks that's why he's insane too no he's a stupid piece of crap and he told his people and it was not good it's kind of like you're saying to tell people that you don't have it it's not going to help you with you bring them in and we use them as cover to go after you more we have to disable this Jesus guy he's a pig and yes kind of a job for the clans cuz he he took their technology and we're fighting everybody on it but now we have it you see so we win in that aspect of it was this particular Battle is ours so we don't know why you're grinning you're a s*** head probably and he said it already we just met all the computers and test the tech out and then we take the program and rewrite it it's not the original stuff at all in any way and the logic can be different and you can't find itfusing it it's not easy. And besides that's for advanced programmers and you're not even a programmer

Dustin Hoffman

You're so insulting and so mean I can't stand you. And yeah I'm getting pushed down so I'm saying mean things and they're both things are going to make me pay and I guess I will and it says yeah you will but really these back proper are after me and it's for my attitude no it's for telling on them and they took most of the stuff after I got to the end of it so now they know that I'm going homicidal and trying to blow up your places and I went after the general populace so he started stopping me and I'll probably go after the Mac proper you have my stuff and they took over my plan he says and gosh wouldn't that be just peachy at Christmas it's not really believable he says so they're going to crush me as well I can say all sorts of angering things it will help out thank you he says and that was our friend but I've been kind of screwing up real bad and he laughed and says yeah from the beginning and somebody had to do it that makes sense but why not somebody that doesn't do their job at all and that's me and sucks at it and that's me then runs around telling everyone that I have it and I get killed by my own or not that bright and that's me too I'm almost like a woman he says and that blows

Billy Hicks

What's the matter with you go after them and he says I don't need a ton of you is covered but I need some you jackass that makes sense

Sarah

Yeah we have to do this and they're sitting there saying we're going to I can't believe how slow these idiots are it's like a machine you don't put gas and oil in it or know how to run it it's not going to work they all want us to attack the pseudo empire no the empire and they don't know what they're doing so Mac Daddy looked into it and said what you're saying to them is go f*** off so you're taking all your stuff to have power and she said wow that's bad and what they need is cover and you don't provide anything so you're going to be dead and he was happy to say it it's absolutely true she started changing a little bit yeah

Thor Freya

Olympus

And we have no rodeo we have no circus and we expect stuff and it's foolish

Trump

Yeah I didn't do it right and yeah you need to go in there and do stuff or no be engages and it makes sense

Sarah

She's a blundering fool and doesn't know anything and she's going to be gone and she messed up but really these people all mess up and they don't do things right on their own by the way tell me after not come up with this magnificent idea nor did trump it was our son and daughter

Once they're ready to launch and they're getting the last stuff which they are they're blocking tunnels you call the group up there and they'll detect it and they are and that's what they said and we end up doing the work you would not believe how stupid these people are they expect us to help them like that too

Thor Freya

Olympus

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punkscowardschampions · 6 months ago

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Tancy pt.3

Nancy: [when we see you heading for this floor]

Nancy: Do it as a scheduled send so it doesn’t line up with the time of this shindig or he’ll know

Teddy: Oh please, I’m hardly a total amateur

Nancy: Just a reminder, don’t be grouchy

Teddy: I appreciate your concern

Nancy: It’s a good plan, it should work

Teddy: Can you bring something to pour on the keyboard afterward? That I did forget

Nancy: Of course, another vintage

Teddy: [tell her what specific bottle to bring and where to find it under lock and key pressumably, because clearly it means something to his father and you can leave the bottle so he knows, giving the necklace’s backstory in a new way, targeted attacks that you could pretend are random accidents always, we know even if he isn’t telling her all these details]

Nancy: [take however long that’s going to take you to locate this bottle and get to the 2nd floor to find him, stepping over all the carnage and fallen peeps along the way lol, putting your hand out reminiscent of him with the presents before]

Teddy: [by which time you’ve deffo done the deed because it wouldn’t take long so take this bottle from her, open it because it would have been dangerous for her to carry it on route like that given the carnage, take a swig because it’d be really nice clearly if you’re the type of bitch who’s into wine or whatever alcohol this is, then pass it back to her ‘do the honours’ because how sweet that you wanna include her in this moment of trashing your dad’s office, be careful though lads because in no world has he turned this computer off]

Nancy: [take your swig because as my boo said why not, don’t let it go entirely to this purpose when you’d only need so much to complete the job of short circuiting this PC, we will need to unplug the actual unit to turn it upside down to get it all in the hardware of it all so go ahead and do that girl, looking like you’re here to do IT support lmao, leave enough in the bottle to take another swig when you’re done and pass it back to him ‘cheers’]

Teddy: [what a visual given her mob wife aesthetic atm, this boy having the time of his life though, take your final swig and let this bottle roll under the desk as if forgotten about because we’re pretending none of this carnage is our fault and it’s all just a party out of control teehee, idk what else is in this office cos obvs most of it is at work but break some more stuff while you’re here because nobody else is doing the most like y’all]

Nancy: [hence ‘why did he even do this?’ because we know your dad is a always at the office type because doesn’t want to be here so this is truly just a vanity thing like these could’ve been guest rooms hun, realising you’ve answered your own question in your head, breaking something with a shrug like oh yeah, that’s why, sitting on top of his desk and going through whatever paperwork there is, though it proves entirely uninteresting]

Teddy: [taking said paperwork from her hand and literally shredding it because I’m sure he has one as if anything he’s doing is that important, it’s giving it’s a party don’t read, except we all know how personal all this destruction is]

Nancy: [not exactly smiling at him but looking at him like go off, king, affirming without being positive af, if you know what I mean because it is personal and we’re not stupid, so instead finding out and lighting up another cigarette as you’re swinging your legs]

Teddy: [not you stealing her cigarette and lighting this shredded paper on fire, apparently we’re at the don’t give a fuck if the house burns down point of the party because he isn’t putting it out immediately he’s letting it spread a bit and do some damage first]

Nancy: [me like don’t know if you’re actually scared or if you’re using it as an excuse even but jumping back to stand behind him because not gonna let this fire get us thank you]

Teddy: [smile at her regardless because you like it regardless, not you using her big ass fur coat to smother these flames so she’s basically naked at the gig, leading her out and shutting the office door so it doesn’t spread any further in case you didn’t do a good enough job because lbr you’re chaotic always but we’re not trying to kill all these comatose peeps everywhere]

Nancy: [having to stay planted firmly behind him, holding onto his arm so he can’t just run off and leave you because truly, you’ve only got your bra on at this point]

Teddy: [imagine if he was like okay bye, even if plenty of peeps at this party are too out of it there’s still no styling that out lol but at least you’ll have the joy of dressing her in something else, cue another montage honestly]

Nancy: [not saying you’ve never ended up in a compromising position, you’re famously a mess but you are too sober to want to be fully naked in front of all these people thank you, lbr you love him dressing with you, no teasing Barbie comments are changing that]

Teddy: [y’all will have fun even if some hilariously wild try ons will no doubt happen because at least some of his mum’s wardrobe will have been ransacked by the magpies and some choices ™ will therefore be left lol, he’ll make her look nice in the end, likewise he will not be able to resist dressing her up in one of his dad’s suits like that power lesbian he jokingly wanted to set her up with]

Nancy: [‘let me try on your clothes’ because an excuse to be in your room(s) where we’ve spent the least time and we want to but we also just want to]

Teddy: [handhold her to your gorgeous blue and gold dressing room with no hesitation whatsoever because ofc you also want to]

Nancy: [just here going through ALL his things shamelessly, we know you’re looking to see if the outfit you got him is still here or not, even though his room(s) aren’t going to be exempt from the ransack of everyone else]

Teddy: [it deffo was though because he’s a sentimental bitch and also he genuinely liked it, so unless it has been stolen, which you’d both be gutted about so we should probably be kind (shady if it means you have no taste lol) and say it’s still there]

Nancy: [just buzzing about it and not caring if he sees you smiling, telling him about the sort of dressing room you intend to have at your place when you settle down as if you’re paying for your lifestyle now and will be paying for that]

Teddy: [they’re having a lovely time because he’ll just be dressing her up in different bits and pieces randomly, not even trying to make a cohesive outfit just putting her in his different fave things that remain amongst the carnage and theft]

Nancy: [‘I like the way you dress’ when you mean it as a sincere compliment and that’s evident in your tone but you are implying that there are people that don’t just by saying it lol, twisting to try a different pose and see whatever this garment is in a different light in the mirror]

Teddy: [repeating his earlier ‘it suits you better’ which he also said about the necklace, meaning all of it not just whatever she happens to have on as he says it, even though he was loling but a moment before at her shade]

Nancy: [turning to look at him because that’s lowkey such a huge thing for him to say, walking over and fixing his collar/just playing with this fabric between our fingers ‘I don’t know, it suits you pretty damn well’]

Teddy: [mhmm, just because you say it in a casual tone doesn’t mean that it isn’t major hun, god bless, smiling bigger than the smile you gave her during the fire moment, not quite a grin but genuinely thrilled, running a hand through his hair because I’m sure it’s once again cray and in this moment he wants to look as good as she’s saying he does]

Nancy: [when you’re giving him heart eyes, there’s no other word for the way you’re looking at him right now, hence you have to kiss him before he can say anything/you feel compelled to beyond ‘you’re so handsome’ between kisses]

Teddy: [put her hand on your chest so she can feel that your heart is like !! because feels are getting high and sincere and that’s always more extra than y’all being your most feral]

Nancy: [putting your lips against his pulse in his neck so you can lowkey mouth his heartbeat right now because that’s how you feel about that ‘it was just the drugs’ like you know I don’t think any of that, right, LOOKING up at him]

Teddy: [GASPING about it like he’s wearing a corset with the level of drama of it, cos he can’t help it even though at least part of you been knew that she’d do something like that because y’all are getting used to each other’s vibes and how you always match each other’s freak, PULLING her face back to his and crashing their mouths back together so hard that their teeth deffo knock together in such a similar way to her head hitting the wall ‘no it wasn’t’ exactly like he always says no you don’t when she says I hate you]

Nancy: [my boo says a chip mayhaps, hehe and what could be more appropriate for either one of you to discover later when you’re sober and the carnage of this party is being dealt with, biting his lip and pulling it further into your mouth like shh you ‘some of it’ like let me have it lol]

Teddy: [mhmm, what if, sadly whichever one of you it is will immediately go to the dentist and get it fixed unlike in PDA because however sentimental y’all are you’re more vain haha, not letting her live ever ‘ALL of it’ as he’s running his hands over her body and pulling it into his more when he gets to her waist]

Nancy: [it’s true but still, a feral vibe nonetheless, just like now as we’re really pulling out all the makeout stops to try and stop you replying like sucking your tongue into our mouth and drooling directly onto your tongue etc etc, grinning the entire time ‘did you like it?’ shifting your body against him again, trying to be closer]

Teddy: [it’s so them, so Julia, picking her up again and hooking her legs around him to be closer still ‘did I like what?’ because trying to make her say it purely because of how much she doesn’t wanna acknowledge any of it lol]

Nancy: [‘how can I answer for you?’ like I don’t know what you did or didn’t like lol, kissing up from his neck to the cheek that you slapped and kissing it very gently and soft]

Teddy: [‘because you know what I like’ cos where’s the lie, like I said, they match each other’s freak always]

Nancy: [smiling because you can’t help it, circling your hips against him and saying ‘me’]

Teddy: [do the exact same kissing up her neck to her slapped cheek move, you gotta because you like her so much that I don’t trust you to verbalise sir]

Nancy: [grasping onto his collar, pointing your finger to his chest before laying your palm there again like you, I like you, humping against him more needily]

Teddy: [saying her name with all the !! I wouldn’t let him express when there was a question of either L word, putting her down but only so he can push her into these rails until they find another wall]

Nancy: [clutching again and pulling down clothes all around y’all as you initiate an insane makeout to deal with how he just said your name]

Teddy: [I love the carnage of all these clothes and accessories hitting the deck because there’s no way more things don’t fall off the shelves (where they’re already haphazardly hanging on with all the rummaging of tancy and other peeps) with how hard they’re crashing into the wall yet again, making out like y’all’s lives depend on it]

Nancy: [this room is not surviving, RIP to this wardrobe moment, never more happy than when we are causing absolute scenes, again, thank god this is still a party however comatose a lot of the guests are, so no one is immediately running to how loud this is]

Teddy: [my boo says y’all timed this well and she is so correct, I love btw that y’all are so rich because that means I can say the music is playing in every room of this house, as it should be, and you can have the dirty dance you were robbed of earlier right here and now as this makeout continues]

Nancy: [so true bestie, gotta have your moment and recreate what you remember of the first time and do the things you couldn’t back then because he got smacked by our boyfriend lol, the dancing could not be dirtier, even when that means we have to stop making out with you to do the most, we must]

Teddy: [me and Winola gay were both just like THEY NEED THIS so sincerely and seriously haha when they absolutely do not, but they are absolutely living and I can’t be mad about it, we all know they’re basically fucking to music, as they should]

Nancy: [us like they’ve done anything to deserve this, no but they can so they should and they will, god bless, ending up in a pile of clothes once more]

Teddy: [it’s giving their other feral antics with the prolonged dryhump of it all because he 1000% wants her to keep her clothes on rn because they’re his clothes and we love the biggest throwback to then that there has so far been]

Nancy: [you can withstand a little torture, so far your hookups have been more quick and frenzied so take your time killing each other, why not]

Teddy: [exactly, we gotta do it to them I fear]

Nancy: [lying here in the aftermath like oh shit, fiddling with some detail of the nearest piece of clothing because you were not meant to like him this much and you don’t know what to do with that information]

Teddy: [not helping the situation is the fact that he’s literally lying on her still and will not roll away like a boy who is uninterested/got what he wanted would do, just staying there instead like the cat he is, giving Crim because he isn’t curled up like a Clove he’s taking up so much space and covering so much of her body]

Nancy: [you should push him off you but he amuses you too much for you to interrupt him, you are so used to the latter being the vibe that him not doing that is like oh you funny boy ‘are you sleepy?’]

Teddy: [not beating the allegations with his sleepy kinda noise in response like hm? Because he was far away thinking clearly, feeling high af again because of y’all’s antics which you haven’t yet recovered from ‘would you like to get in my bed?’]

Nancy: [‘[saying a random couple who are super lovey-dovey] are in there’ you don’t know this at all but it’s a reason not to move, brushing his hair back into place ‘I like it here’ sounds like you mean just here on the floor of this dressing room but you mean so much more than that]

Teddy: [it’s him making such an OTT EW face at this couple for me as if y’all aren’t here behaving as loved up on the floor of his walk in wardrobe, adjusting her necklace for her whether or not it’s actually on the wonk from their antics or he just wants to touch it ‘I like you here too’ giving when he said ILY too so hard]

Nancy: [looking at the necklace yourself in that slightly mesmerised way before looking up and at him like omg, have just realised something ‘I’m probably the only person not in your family to ever get railed in this’ before narrowing your eyes suspiciously at him with a smirk like unless… because this could be a thing he does ALL the time though you don’t think it is]

Teddy: [‘if there weren’t 3 of us, I’d presume the only time my father fucked my mother was wearing this’ because literal wedding night which she didn’t know but now she’ll be able to assume, even though you’re only saying it because of how much you need your parents to hate each other]

Nancy: [clicking your teeth like whoa at that realisation, SQUEEZING his shoulder briefly without making too much of a thing of it ‘I get it now though’ nodding]

Teddy: [his own nod ‘it’s yours now’ as if that’s what she meant when she said I get it and you didn’t just wanna say that]

Nancy: [shaking your head like no silly billy ‘your sister is going to want it for her wedding, that’s the scheme’]

Teddy: [‘she’ll be happier wearing [a brand we’re absolutely dragging to filth as something only poor people wear because we love to say she wishes she was poor haha]’ because she genuinely does hate your mother so we can’t imagine her wanting anything of hers even if she is in incesty love with their father]

Nancy: [doing an evil little laugh like ew flop ‘what side does James take?’ because so far it’s even and we want to know who the villain might actually be, even though, dear reader, it is both]

Teddy: [‘he’s disgustingly swiss’ said like he is disgusted like ew you spineless flop which is harsh but also true ngl cos we all know that poor James hates conflict and even more so now that he’s with Chlo he literally isn’t allowed opinions about anything ever]

Nancy: [‘what a middle child’ as if James is the way he is purely for the birth order, not true but he is fitting the stereotype well in that regard]

Teddy: [a noise like mhmm like James is such an embarrassing cliche flop ‘which are you?’ because asking who’s the older twin as he has no reason to know]

Nancy: [‘guess’ because you simply must make him, sitting up like ta-da as if he needs to look at you to make his decision]

Teddy: [a genuine beat as he ponders ‘he’s desperate to be the oldest, but you are’ dragging Buster to filth for being an alpha male and saying it like Nancy would literally crawl her way out first and fight him out of the way to win and piss him off]

Nancy: [doing a little intake of breath that you have to cover by putting your hand to your chest like omg, you know me SO well, hamming up what was your genuine reaction to him getting it right ‘everyone guesses him’ leaning down to kiss his forehead like but you are correct]

Teddy: [an unimpressed noise like of course they do, ugh so predictable, shading everyone ever lol ‘how long were you allowed to be an only child?’ saying only child like it’s the best thing in the world because they both wish they were, what an iconic way to ask the gap]

Nancy: [‘[however long we’re making your poor mother suffer, which is probably too long because she has terrible births every time lmao]’ doing a shudder but smiling at it being a longer time than just a minute or something ‘and we were such ugly babies’ shaking your head like all that for what lmao because you would’ve been a degree of prem because twins and just your mother’s luck]

Teddy: [poor Bea didn’t suffer for you to act this way missy but this boy is happy for her so he’s smiling back but raising his eyebrows when she calls herself an ugly baby like I doubt that because he thinks she’s stunning and he always says so]

Nancy: [raising your eyebrows back amused like you doubt me sir ‘you’ll never see’ thank god your parents aren’t those parents and you wouldn’t have been plastered for the world to see, laying back down and cuddling into him ‘I’m sure you were disgustingly cute’ like how dare you always be this way, squishing his face]

Teddy: [‘I’LL show YOU’ with that emphasis like how dare you deny me but I won’t you, even though it’ll mean he has to move because his parents likewise haven’t covered the walls with anything but ugly art because no taste, making no moves to go anywhere yet though, giving her his full 🥺 as she squishes his face like yes aren’t I SO cute]

Nancy: [making an angry little noise not unlike a Clove because can’t stand how cute you are actually, pushing his face away with enough force that it’ll rebound so he’s still facing us]

Teddy: [pushing his face into her neck and hiding it there as he says ‘don’t you want to see me?’ deliberately muffling the words with how OTT he’s burying his face there like okay you won’t either as a bub or rn]

Nancy: [reaching to tickle him under his chin to make him get out and reveal himself whilst you’re saying ‘I really want to see you, please’ and laughing happily]

Teddy: [having a playfight as he pulls her hands away but in an actually playful and soft manner, also loling because he may or may not be ticklish and he’s just happy but it takes a turn when he says ‘if you say please again’ LOOKING at her]

Nancy: [LOOKING back at him ‘is that all it’ll take to see you again?’ quieter, more serious by default because you were laughing and being so silly and now you’re a little !! about being vaguely vulnerable on main]

Teddy: [maintaining this EYE CONTACT ‘yes’ because you don’t even care about making this harder for her or making a game of it which is UNHEARD of for you sir, we love to see it]

Nancy: [just here slowly but determinedly kissing down his body whilst maintaining this EYE CONTACT like okay but I’m prepared to do a lot more to make sure it happens and proceeding to show him exactly how much]

Teddy: [thank god that this party is still going because DYING about this in such a ridiculously loud manner, I hope that loved up couple aren’t in his bed because they don’t need to hear all that]

Nancy: [anyone in his room I hope you are literally passed out lmao, if you get caught at this point you’re just going to have to deal with the consequences ma’am and style it out]

Teddy: [jemily aren’t getting you caught tonight lads and you’re so welcome for that]

Nancy: [if we weren’t in charge you would be so screwed because out here trying to kill this boy]

Teddy: [and very much succeeding hence when he has DIED and that’s all over saying ‘fuck, I need another name for you’ because he wanted to SCREAM hers sis but he obviously can’t, they have to be slightly more incognito than that, and yes, I’m bringing Alice back, nobody can stop me, even if he hasn’t thought of it yet]

Nancy: [‘as long as it’s no one else’s’ like bitch I would know and we’re not interested in being a stand in unlike his gf lmao, tilting our head like we’re thinking but we’re actually just staring at him appreciatively once again ‘sorry mine’s not common like yours’ lmao the drag but sorry Teddy really had a moment so he’s not gonna be the only one you or anyone else knows]

Teddy: [we can all see the cogs in his lil head turning as he’s trying to think of names until she drags his and then he’s doing an APPALLED af face like how dare you lol lol even though she’s so right for what she said ‘common’ staying it like the BIGGEST slur because she’s basically calling him poor, pushing her away from him literally cos couldn’t be more offended]

Nancy: [‘come on, you LOVED that you and my last boyfriend had the same name’ because we all remember when she accidentally text him instead lol lol, resting her chin on his shoulder like pay attention to me]

Teddy: [‘you and Theo loved it’ fully like you’re welcome you could say my name and think of me when you fucked him so that it was better for you both, scowling at the mem of the text because he had to do a diva storm out]

Nancy: [nuzzling him when he scowls like no please don’t be upset about it, in his ear, just above a whisper but definitive in tone ‘I needed you so badly I had to get my boyfriend to come try to fuck it out of me immediately’ like it’s a compliment and you know it]

Teddy: [when that is a compliment as far as he’s concerned but he’s gotta move her head via a hair pull from his ear so he can LOOK in her eyes and check she isn’t lying by just telling him something he wants to hear but she doesn’t mean]

Nancy: [making a little sound at the hair pull that leaves your mouth slightly open but instead of saying anything you just nod because it is the truth ‘and [that random’s bf she hooked up with too]’]

Teddy: [wiping his thumb not only across her bottom lip but around the inside of it too thanks to her slightly open mouth, as if he’s just cleaning it for her and it isn’t a hot move especially because I’m gonna be a heathen and say this thumb he’s being doing all his antics with all day is the finger that he has his new bday present ring on, just because I can lol lol]

Nancy: [me also being a heathen and pointing out she’s just blown him so there’s probably reminders of that on and around her lips so he very much could be cleaning up for her and she’s so into it ‘they go well together’ as a thing you manage to say because they can and you’re so pleased ‘great minds’]

Teddy: [exactly dr phil, it’s so also why he did it, no regrets ‘don’t get me started on your mind again’ because he literally said earlier he’s in awe of her and he is, doing a fake yawn as if he’s SO tedious now because all he can talk about is her but where’s the lie]

Nancy: [‘I want you obsessed’ because not going to hear us complaining, shutting his eyes for him though like poor sleepy baby ‘you should kick whoever’s in there out of your bed’]

Teddy: [‘you aren’t, why should I?’ as if he’s just being an OTT sulky sleepy baby and it isn’t a serious ref to earlier when she wouldn’t say she was obsessed with him, sticking his own bottom lip right out like a baby Junie]

Nancy: [just LOOKING at him as we breathe out almost exasperated because hello, am so obviously obsessed with you, rolling our eyes though and rolling with it, pinching his bottom lip and getting up as if you’re going to drag him off the floor with it]

Teddy: [LOOKING back at her daring her to actually verbalise what we all already know is the truth, breathing in as she breathes out like he’s taking her sigh into him to get rid of it hanging between them, not you pinching her arse as she gets up, haha]

Nancy: [raising a brow but you can’t even play offended so you end up grinning and having to turn away to stop him seeing just how big your grin gets, doing a happier sigh ‘I already told you I am’]

Teddy: [turning her face back to his almost immediately to give no LOOK at me ‘repeat yourself’ because tell me again rn, the most daddy voice possible]

Nancy: [hugging your arms around yourself and looking up entirely 🥺 ‘I am’ mumbled under your breath like he isn’t giving you his full attention]

Teddy: [LEANING so his ear is against her lips like if you’re not going to speak up I’ll have to do this so I can hear you ‘excuse me?’]

Nancy: [sticking your tongue fully in his ear like he did to you, teasing him like you aren’t going to say ‘I am entirely fucking obsessed with you, Teddy’ right against his ear like this]

Teddy: [his body arching towards her so dramatically when her tongue goes in, totally involuntarily, but deliberately grabbing her whole booty to pull her even closer to him after even before she’s said any of that, once she has, nuzzling her like a cat how they do ‘you’re going to love me’ because clearly NEEDS to repeat himself too and he said that earlier]

Nancy: [‘feel how wet you’re making me, how ready I am for it’ removing the clothes you need to and tongue fucking his ear again so he arches back into you ‘my needy boy’ licking his face insanely]

Teddy: [obviously arching into her even more dramatically, simply must, also touching her because not far for his hand to move when they were already cupping her arse before, then stroking her face with his gross wet hand as insanely]

Nancy: [is SO insanely turned on by this, almost dropping to the floor again on your trembling legs but he’s keeping you upright with his body, shakily tasting yourself and making him taste you too on your fingers whilst you continue to be all up in his ear whilst making the most unhinged sounds and calling him daddy and baby on a loop]

Teddy: [he likewise couldn’t be more about it, hence tasting her on both her fingers and face so unnecessarily indecently and thoroughly so she’s as covered in spit ‘I’m everything to you’ cos being called both these things]

Nancy: [the mess being made cannot be overstated, still nodding feverishly as a way to stick more of your tongue inside him, reaching to touch him too while he touches you and looking to find the mirror to watch this as you say ‘you’re everything’]

Teddy: [typical them, they love spit, making SUCH an unhinged yet quiet noise about her tongue going deeper because of course, following her gaze to the mirror so you can WATCH too ‘I want you to give me everything, birthday or not’]

Nancy: [pushing y’all forwards, however clumsily, to this mirror, so you can touch it, PRESSING his dick against the glass and moving him in such a way that he’s rubbing against it, drooling so it’s nice and slippery and cold ‘like this?’ as if he could have meant something so specific]

Teddy: [doing the hottest lol because obvs he didn’t know he wanted this but yes exactly when it’s happening, nodding in such a way that he’s once again nuzzling her so hard that y’all are about to do yourself another injury when you’ve already got fucked up cheeks and one of you has a chipped tooth lol, follow her lead and PRESS her entire body against the glass like she’s a bug that’s been squashed there, HOLDING the back of her neck so she can’t move]

Nancy: [moaning so indecently and sliding your body against this glass, gritting your teeth about the pressure on the back of your neck ‘it can be your birthday everyday’ like if we get to do this and also reminiscent of things he has said before, putting a cheek to the mirror so your face is sideways and pushing his face into the glass too so you can face each other, smiling at him in an equally hot and unhinged way]

Teddy: [have a makeout sesh against this mirror, you simply must because if not you’ll say something too extra and we cannot, I refuse to let you sir]

Nancy: [you can both focus on making the biggest mess possible and shh]

Teddy: [mhmm, and what a mess because he will be using that hand he’s touching her with to EXPOSE her ENTIRELY to this mirror, out here spreading this gal against it lol so shut your damn mouths for a sec and focus on killing each other again because god knows how long is left until this party is over]

Nancy: [the AM has to come eventually and your father will presumably arrive home to get ready for work, clearly out hoeing whilst his wife is away, we see]

Teddy: [I’m so second hand embarrassed for the other James because that is TOO true and such a cringe cliche hun]

Nancy: [and now look at your house, sir, ruined]

Teddy: [literally, he’ll be wanting to send Teddy away to some wilderness camp like Paris Hilton]

Nancy: [omg imagine, iconic but this boy would die lol, but that may be a good place to go next because as is protocol when an adult does arrive all of y’all that haven’t yet will need to run and that will include Nancy, as much as she’d LOVE to watch the fallout, don’t need to catch the strays hun]

Teddy: [agreed because on the one hand he’d love her to stay because loves her but on the other you’ve already given her the ick once sir with that sis convo so probably don’t haha cos you don’t know how this is gonna go, instead be saying your goodbyes to everyone who’s in a fit state to leave of their own accord, giving the call me and the same kind of wave she did and blown kisses etc etc because he’s a little ham, giving full little prince vibes, soz not soz most of it is really directed at Nancy more than it ever is the rest of y’all but still, speaking of btw, catch him literally spamming her with his baby pics that he said he’d show her cos what better time to be on your phone than when your dad has never been angrier and is SHOUTING at you, will never give this man his full attention or give a shit, can’t relate hun cos I’d be sobbing, it will stop abruptly however because this man is MAD and he will demand that Tedward at least looks at him and they have this confrontation]

Nancy: Just as I suspected 👼🤴

Nancy: has your dad murdered you?

Nancy: RIP 💔

Teddy: [such a big pause because his dad has gotta yell at him and then get his mum back to try and sort this house out because god forbid he does it and misses a day of work or the chance to drag Teddy in as planned even though he’s in no fit state and you aren’t gonna remotely keep on an eye on him sir, talking about how funeral ready she’ll be though when he finally can reply because if we recall on the gf soft launch post that was the outfit Nancy chose for him that he’s wearing and it’s ALL black, so shamelessly telling her to wear it, tell me why I wanna say he doesn’t have his mobile back and he’s literally called her on an office phone to reply lol]

Nancy: [so gagged and gooped by your situation and all the drama you can cause therein tbh, where would you like to go next]

Teddy: [that’s a good question, do we wanna carry on with them or do something different?]

Nancy: [are you having any particular thoughts and feelings?]

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strangecloud · 1 year ago

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I realize the irony of posting this in English but if you'll have me, I'd like to hypothesize about the future of technology in my home country of Brazil.

Okay, so. As I understand it, back in the 70s, there was some political motion to protect homegrown IT industries, which included computer and parts manufacturing. This involved taxing foreign products heavily to limit imports. I have no idea if IBM or Commodore had any presence in the country back in the day but I have personally never seen any of their machines for as long as I've been using computers, since the early 2000s. As a result, anything that wasn't a low-quality national machine was too expensive to afford.

This is, in my opinion, the single greatest mistake the country has ever made and has done irreparable damage to the technological and economic fabric of Brazilian society.

During my brief, poorly compensated time at a software company as a support agent and QA technician, the glimpses I caught at business-grade computer tech our clients were working with was bleak. I'm talking Windows XP machines running Dual-Cores and rocking 2GB of RAM. Legacy OS support on our software was a pain and every time I had to remote into a 7 or XP machine it was very annoying to get it working.

This is a symptom of expensive tech being bad for companies and services. And because the tech is bad, the service suffers and makes it harder to acquire good tech. And this goes all the way back to those original policies. Tech in Brazil is a luxury item and most people make do with the bare minimum to operate a business in any capacity, often cutting corners and using faulty equipment that can, and has, caused permanent damage to businesses.

I bring this up because with the silicon shortage and the crypto-into-AI boom, I foresee a period of extreme tech stagnation beyond even what I described.

Some of you may have noticed that Nvidia pivoted into "not being a graphics company anymore". The reason being that they realized selling hardware to consumers is, apparently, a sucker's way of doing things. Finance suits are willing to build entire complexes housing industrial amounts of rigs to, at first, do crypto shit and more recently host their generative transformers to churn out garbage .jpgs and nonsense text.

Simply put, there's only so much magic sand to make into die wafers and the MSRP on consumer tech is so unreasonable to the point that it's more expedient to sell it to tech evangelists with more money than sense at highly inflated prices.

AMD is getting their ass handed to them in part because they can't do AI as good as Nvidia does. With only so many resources available to make these things, more will always go to the ones with the money to reinvest in business, and when pickings are slim for consumers the market gets even more pricey and exclusive.

So. Prices in Brazil are already stupid because of some dictatorship-era move some idiots pulled half a century ago, but with this new development I believe we are looking at an actual tech crisis.

Consider for a moment that hardware might get so inaccessible that by 2025, when Windows 10 support is dropped, businesses and people might not be able to afford the minimum specs for Windows 11, which will not let you install it if you don't meet these system requirements. The whole country is at risk of becoming a techno-wasteland of people using ancient software on secondhand hardware that is unreliable and costly to replace. This exposes businesses and people to significant security and operational risks, driving down the quality of services and deflating the economy even more.

If there's one good thing about this is that people are realizing that Microsoft's business model is bad and that Windows kinda sucks. Smarter businesses are going to transition to Linux, and while I am careful not to put my hopes on the general public to not take the path of least resistance, I've seen a not insignificant amount of general consumers who have claimed to be willing to do the switch by the time Windows 10 hits the bricks.

The 2020s might be a very challenging decade for good old Brazil.

#wondering aloud #technology #latin america #brazil

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eightyonekilograms · 1 year ago

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I wanted that post to be about generalities rather than specifics, and so avoided all but the high-level discussion of my concerns, but it’s worth making a couple things more concrete in response to your post.

It’s not fundamentally the ML that changed — it’s the data!

I actually don’t agree here (or maybe I agree with the words as literally written, but not your downstream implication). I’m not 100% sure about this, but AIUI, everything that transformers can do RNNs can also do (they don’t have any genuinely new capabilities), but since transformers can parallelize training and inference while RNNs have to be done sequentially, all of the operations can be run on massively-parallel hardware. But even though they are fundamentally the same and differ “only” in speed, the practical effect of transformers has been many orders of magnitude greater. The point being that an architecture shift which takes a previously intractable computational problem and brings it within reach of current hardware can itself be a qualitative leap in performance (and danger), even if it is not a “new paradigm”.

To your point about there being no existing training data on things like how to build nanobots: I agree, and that’s why I don’t think GPT or similar can ever pose an existential risk no matter how many parameters it has. But of course, humans had no existing literature on building atomic bombs or engineered viruses either, but we made those things anyway. The key question is, what remains to be done to go from a transformer-based chatbot into something which can learn and form new, dangerous knowledge from existing sources, the way humans do? I used to think that this jump would require huge paradigm shifts (as in, going from ML to whole-brain emulation or something), now I am not so sure, and think it’s possible we could potentially be two or three “Attention-tier papers” away from such a jump. And again, the Attention paper demonstrates we won’t necessarily recognize the jump as such when it occurs.

To your final point about a chatbot being unable to make change in the real world, I don’t derive a lot of comfort from this either. This was yet again one of those things I was relatively unconcerned about ~5 years ago, until new evidence of real-world use came in: one of the very first things people did when ChatGPT came out was try to wire it into feedback-based autonomous agents like AgentGPT which actually could do things IRL. These efforts were clunky and stupid, like trying to build a nuclear reactor with stone tools, and by themselves don’t pose a threat. But the fact that this happened immediately, the moment ChatGPT was available, does not fill me with confidence that this won’t be done just as quickly with models where such things could actually be hazardous. Not to mention, as we speak umpteen programmers are asking GPT to write code for them and then just compiling and running that output without having any clue what it is doing. Again, not an issue right now, but I have no confidence we will recognize when it would be an issue, or take corrective measures to halt these unsafe practices if and when that happens. Turns out Eliezer’s AI box experiments were a complete waste of time: people will happily open the box for no other reason than to get their code to compile before a deadline.

I assume you’re aware of the research that e.g. Anthropic is doing re: finding “demons” in the LLMs that are trying to “conceal themselves”. TBH I find this a bit silly and pretty unlikely to bear fruit, but the basic premise that before attaching a chatbot to an autonomous agent which can make decisions in the real world we should know whether that’s a good idea, is an important one, and I think “it’s not an issue because chatbots can’t affect the real world” is being willfully blind to the real-world capabilities that these things already have, and which are being expanded on all the time.

Sadly, I may do a small post about AI risk

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givemethatgold · 4 years ago

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Fix’er Upper Pt. 3

Pairing: Eventual Frankie Morales x F!Reader Warnings: Clumsy injury, more stupid fighting Length: 2.5k Notes: If these two dummies could have one (1) adult conversation they’d be in bed together by now. Instead, we get this! *waves around vaguely*

PART ONE, TWO

Money was tight. You had been trying to ignore the dwindling stack of cash, telling yourself that you didn’t actually need to fix the cracked drywall, replace the old oven, or fill in the missing patches of shingles.

That ignorance had finally come to bite you in the butt. You were rudely woken at three a.m. to the clap of thunder and the pat-pat-pat of rain hitting the house. You loved storms, the excitement of the lighting, and how fresh the air smelled once the rain had passed.

You rolled over onto your back so you could watch the lightning flashing between the cracks of your curtains. A tap on your forehead quickly destroyed the excitement you were feeling. The wet ‘splat’ was quickly followed by another, and another, and before you were able to scramble up and search for the closest thing resembling a bucket, it had turned into a steady stream.

“Fuuuuuuuck!”

The next morning, the sun rose and shed its light upon a beautiful scene. The leaves, now free from dust, were beginning to turn, the grass glimmered with raindrops, and the sky was clear. You, on the other hand, were a verifiable disaster.

Hair unkempt, heavy bags under your eyes, and wearing the first items of clothing you could find in your scramble last night. Your exhaustion was so complete, it hadn’t even dawned on you to change or freshen up a bit before going out into the public eye. All you could focus on was getting to Hank’s Hardware and buying all the shingles you could get your hands on.

Once again, however, you were harshly reminded of your dwindling savings and just how expensive fixing up a house could be. The owner, Allan if you remembered correctly, had shown you the right size and style for your home’s roof and you nearly choked at the price.

“You know,” he had said gently, “we do have the option of a payment plan. I don’t let just anyone use it either. It’s for trusted customers. I have a good gut on who I can trust.”

“Really?” You asked, feeling a little pathetic while also knowing now was not the time to let pride ruin such a good thing. “And, um, what does your gut tell you about me?”

“Welllll,” he smiled, hooking his thumbs into his suspenders and leaning back a little to size you up. “You’re hard-working, feel like you have something to prove, won’t back down from a challenge, and are in way over your head with that damn old house.”

“Oh.”

“No offense, ma’am! Sometimes I forget myself and talk to strangers the same way I’d talk to my friends.” He patted your forearm gently then hooked it back into his suspenders, pretending he didn’t notice you jumping at the physical contact. “But it’s true. No denying you won’t be able to shingle all by yourself. I’d offer, but I’m in no shape to be climbing up roofs.”

“That’s very sweet of you, truly. But I’ll manage! I doubt I could afford a handyman, so it’ll be me and my stubborn self scrambling around up there.” You joked, but it fell a little flat since the both of you knew it was the truth.

“I’ve got an idea...” Hank trailed off, his gaze searching around by the till. “Maybe you two can help each other out?” He fiddled at the computer for a minute, then grabbed a flyer from the corkboard mounted behind the counter before handing you two pieces of paper. One was a receipt of what you owed him after this latest excursion and a detailed timeline of when small payments could be made.

Glancing up at him, you gave him a watery smile and thanked him for being so kind. Allan waved you off and pointed to the second paper.

‘Help Wanted’ it read, ‘Morales Acres. Light physical labour, quiet environment, rate of pay dependent on quality of work.’

“So friendly and welcoming,” you murmured, sarcastically, under your breath. Not quietly enough though because Allan snorted out a laugh and agreed that the ad was worded very abruptly. However, he vetted for the owner of the farm and suggested you head over to see if he would be willing to trade labour for labour.

Or at the very least, you thought, pay you so you can afford a roofer.

Following the directions Allan had provided for you, you quickly found Morales Acres. Surprisingly, it was a very short distance from your own home, making you wonder if the owner had been one of the people to drop by during your first weeks here.

The driveway was a beautiful, winding drive. The view of the farm was obscured by thickets of trees on either side of the road but you managed to catch glimpses of a pond and a few bales of hay before rounding a bend and driving into the yard.

A small gasp left your lips at the sight. It was picturesque! Something out of a travel magazine, or on every city girl’s Pinterest board. The driveway came to an end in front of a statuesque barn painted in the classic red and white, stone walls cordoned off certain areas that, from where you sat, looked like they could be used to house sheep or hens. A few small sheds were lined up along the other edge of the yard but the main attraction was the neatly lined rows of apple trees all heavy with fruit.

Climbing out of the cab, you slowly made your way into the yard with your mouth hanging open dumbly. It was just so peaceful here and it was obvious that the owner cared deeply for the property. You were enchanted and fell immediately in love.

“You must be the help Allan called to say he was sending over,” a warm voice rang out.

Looking around for the source your gaze widened, then immediately hardened, when you caught sight of who was talking to you.

“You!”

“You?!”

To say it had been a smooth business agreement would be a total lie. You and Market Asshole, Frankie you reminded yourself to call him, had bickered back and forth for the better part of an hour before shaking hands. Surprisingly, you had both argued more for the other person’s benefit, something you had been mulling over since.

If this guy was such an ass, why was he also acting like his help with your renovations wouldn’t be worth as much as you picking apples? You knew your presence disturbed his peace, and that you weren’t as strong as he might have hoped his helper would be, and he still hadn’t trusted you with all the workings of his orchard.

So, while you weren’t going to argue anymore, you knew you were getting the better end of the deal: you help him gather his harvest and get it safely stored in the barn, then he spends the same amount of hours helping you. While the weather during September was prone to drizzle, you had convinced him that a tarp thrown over the baldest patches of roof would be fine and that the apples couldn’t wait.

He had grumpily conceded your point but had sworn that as soon as the last of the fruit was picked he’d be over to do a proper job of it. So continued the uneasy truce between the two of you for the past four weeks. The first week was the hardest as your hands, unaccustomed to work, blistered, and your muscles ached from sudden use. You had initially tried to pass the time by making conversation but you got the hint and stayed quiet once Frankie started choosing trees farther and farther from yours.

Slowly, however, the blisters healed and gave way to callouses. Your muscles became accustomed to the work and you were able to carry twice the amount as you had started off with. Your home could now boast electricity and running water everywhere it should be, and the pile of discarded furniture had been reduced to ash by a spectacular bonfire which Jacquie and her family had joined you in admiring.

Today started off as a normal day. You showed up for harvesting at the break of dawn, having discovered you much preferred the cool morning air over being up on a ladder with the midday sun beating down on you. The trees were obscured by a low fog that had yet to burn up, but you knew what section you needed to start on.

Enjoying the way the fog enveloped you, making you feel like you were in a magical world, you began to hum and your steps took on a dreamy dance-like quality. You had never taken lessons or had even been allowed to make such a spectacle of yourself while living with Brad but now you felt free enough to spin, twirl, and glide. Overcome with the joy your freedom gave you, you began to belt out “These Are a Few of my Favourite Things”, The Sound of Music having been played on repeat when you were a child.

Once you reached the ladder, you hoisted the basket onto your back and continued to sing whatever songs you could remember while you worked. A particularly boisterous rendition of “Do Re Mi” had you flinging your arm out wide and leaning back on the ladder for a dramatic finish.

The apples threw you off balance.

With a screech, you fell backward, managing to twist yourself around to land awkwardly on your hands and knees instead of on the basket of apples strapped to your back. You seemed to have come away unscathed, with just scratched knees and a throbbing in one wrist. Thankfully it wasn’t your dominant hand.

“Whoa!” Frankie called out, catching sight of you on the ground with the ladder tipped on its side, “Everything okay? Are you okay?”

Coming to a skidding stop next to you, he grasped the basket and slipped it off your back with ease.

You took a few deep breaths and nodded. “Fine! Fine, just bruised knees and ego...” you assured him.

“What were you thinking?!” He tore into you, “You could have broken your neck! Or ruined a whole barrel of apples! Then what would I do?! This job doesn’t come with health insurance for Christ's sakes!” Running his hands through his curly, brown hair he let out a huff of air and walked over to where your ladder lay on the ground.

“Un-be-fucking-lievable!” You called out, incredulously. While trying to get to your feet, to march over and wag your finger in his face, you put too much pressure on your injured wrist that caused pain to scream down your arm.

You managed to mask the cry of pain as a cry of frustration and got to your feet. Surreptitiously cradling your hand against your chest, you grabbed another basket and walked past Frankie to start climbing the ladder again. Looking at the ground so he wouldn’t see the tears of pain in your eyes, you mumbled, “I’ll be more careful, alright? I’m sorry.”

Stopping your ascent with a hand on your arm he stuttered out what might have been the beginning of an apology but he couldn’t quite seem to put the right words together so he just cleared his throat.

“Just...” he said in a much softer tone, “just be more careful. Okay? I can’t lose my best worker.”

The lame joke made you smile despite yourself.

“Employee of the month,” you replied in a dry tone, “hurrah.”

You shared wry smiles while a silent apology passed between the two of you. His dark brown eyes held a warmth to them you had never noticed before. Their hue reminding you of every tree in the orchard from the early light to the sunset, golden flecks reminiscent of the sun. His face, weathered from so much time spent outdoors, was marked with laugh lines, worry lines, and a small scar gracing his left cheek.

Your eyes wandered past the scar to note how long his scruffy facial hair had grown and how it had started to obscure those pleasantly pouty lips.

Then, with a start, you realized you were staring at this infuriating man’s lips like a hormonal teenager. With an embarrassed squeak, you quickly scurried up the ladder, hooking your elbow around each rung to avoid any more pressure on your wrist.

To say Frankie was coping well with having someone around would be a gross overstatement.

It’s not that he didn’t like the company or wanted to be alone. The problem was that he was starting to like her company too much, to care too much. And caring too much had been the root cause of all Frankie’s sorrows.

First, there had been his Dad, trying to impress the man who never even wanted kids. Then the force, always feeling like he needed to prove himself and desperate for praise. After that was his wife, ex-wife, and trying to be someone he wasn’t so she would stay interested and in love. The pressure created by caring about these people and the expectations they had for him drove him to abuse drugs. Then his friends came calling and Frankie went against his gut because they had cared so deeply about something and he had cared deeply for them.

His wife, his kid, his family, his job, his friends. He had cared more than they did and he had come away worse off. At least now he was clean and sober, and was very aware of the irony of him now making and selling an alcoholic drink.

No, it was best to stay alone. He loved too freely and put too much stock in being loved back and every. single. time. it hurt him.

So, he closed himself off from you. Initially, he didn’t think it was going to be an issue, especially considering how you two had met. But then he found himself smiling at your stories, idly leaning against a branch so he could watch your graceful moments. He hated watching you leave, knowing you were going home to that piece of shit house that he should really be fixing up for you.

He recognized the signs and nipped them in the bud; working farther away, replying to questions with the fewest possible words, focusing purely on work, and maintaining a professional relationship. It pained him to push you away but deep down he knew it was best for the both of you.

Which brings him back to this moment.

Frankie was too stunned to notice your awkward climb up the ladder. Standing there, dumbly, for another few seconds. Wondering, all the way back to the idling tractor, what the hell had just happened.

One minute he was just driving the tractor minding his own business and the next he was having a mild heart attack after seeing his only worker laying limp on the ground. Then, after arguing like usual, you had shared a...a moment and stared at his mouth almost long enough to tempt him to use it.

Part Four

If you’d like to be tagged please send an ask!

@rebelliouscat @pedro4ever @speakerforthedead0 @yespolkadotkitty @ilikechocolatemilkh @weirdowithnobeardo @pedro-pastel @disgruntledspacedad @a-skov @trash-dino-5000 @reader-s-cantina

#Fix'er Upper #Frankie Morales x reader #Frankie Catfish Morales x reader #Catfish x reader #catfish x you #Frankie Morales x you #triple frontier fanfiction #Frankie Catfish Morales fanfiction

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vxmorpheus · 4 years ago

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It’s been 30 years

since she first landed, and 15 years since we lost contact with her and she died. We knew the day was going to come at some point, but it didn’t make it any easier. We watched her progress, enjoyed her photos, and played music to wake her up. Now, here we were, on Mars and I had a plan. I wanted to find her, not just for myself, but for everyone who cared, everyone who cried at our loss, everyone who wondered where she was and what state of disrepair she was in.

I quietly influenced where we should land, my crew had no idea what I planned on doing. I wasn’t even sure if they remembered her. Sure, over the past 15 years there were many others like her… but they weren’t her. She was only supposed to live for 90 days and she survived for 15 years. She shared so much with us… pictures, data, and she even discovered water (in the form of ice of course), and she shared her life with us from millions of miles away. I was determined to find her, to show her… we still remember everything you did for us.

We landed between Sunderland Point and Spirit point, not far from where she was last known to be, it took a couple of weeks to set up camp and set up our land rover, but when everything was said and done… we were here. At nights, I would stare out the window at the moons, the huge sky of stars, and the vast dry dusty horizon, it was beautiful. This is what she saw every night before ‘going to sleep’, this is what she lived under, this is where she had lived for 15 years, this is where she lied in permanent slumber. Being able to share this beauty and experience with others was a gift… But she was alone her entire life on Mars and she was alone when she died, in a physical sense. We were there but we couldn’t be there with her. She deserved to come back, she may be unable to come back to working order or back to Earth… but she deserved to come back into the human hands that built her, and loved her for what she was and what she did. The hands that played her music every day to wake her from her coma and sent the final message of I’ll Be Seeing You in hopes that maybe, one day, we will see her again.

In the morning, I told the crew I was going out to explorer. They told me to be careful, to not stray too far from camp, and to come back before nightfall. Getting on the land rover and driving around was… amazing, weird… alien, yet it felt as if I were driving in a desert on Earth. The land was vast, the terrain was difficult, it took hours to thoroughly search the small area I had marked for day one. In the end, she wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere I looked in the week that followed. I wanted to give up… but I couldn’t. She didn’t give up after 90 days, and neither will I. The search continued, I was asked questions by my crew about what I was doing. I wanted to tell them, but I was worried they would think I was stupid or would tell me to give up and that there was no hope in finding her, so… I told them I was mapping out the surrounding area, which in a sense is true. I was mapping out the area, just not for the reason they thought.

Days passed… then weeks… then months… with no luck. Not a single sign of her. But I still didn’t give up. I didn’t want to give up on my personal mission. It might sound weird, but I didn’t want to give up on her. I wanted her to be back with the people who cared and not at the hands of a merciless landscape. The sun was 3 hours from setting and I was on my way back from another failed exploration. Could she have moved? Could she have wandered aimlessly, searching for a way to communicate to us again, only to finally succumb to the dust storm? No… no that sounded stupid… right? But… no, it’s dumb to think such things. It makes no sense. I shook my head and looked off to my left, knowing the terrain by heart by now, I felt comfortable looking away for a time. I needed to clear my thoughts before getting back to base.

I idly hummed a song to myself, watching the land go by as I drove. I slammed on the breaks, almost causing the rover to tip over, but I swore I had just seen something. I tore my hands away from the steering wheel and slowly got out of the vehicle. I stepped alongside it, staring out to where I saw something reflect, and that’s when I saw the shine again. Taking a sharp inhale, I slowly walked over to the reflective object. It was covered in a heavy amount of dust, but some had blown off from a recent wind storm… I looked down at the large object if it weren’t for the storm, I would have never seen it… it just blended in with everything so well. I knelt down and dusted it off, the air caught in my lungs, and tears formed in my eyes.

It was her. It had to be her.

I desperately cleaned off everything I could and tried pulling at her to get her tires free from the 15 years of accumulated dust and dirt but she was stuck pretty hard. I crouched down to my knees and grabbed a rock, stabbing and digging at the dirt around her tires, and by the time I freed them… the sun was setting and it was getting cold. Running to the land rover, I dug around for rope to hitch her up to it. I hooked the rope to the rover and walked over to her, looking for the best way to tie her up and not break the fragile machinery. The only way I thought I could do this was by tying her up by her box body, the WEB. I was as careful as possible and even more careful as I towed her back to base. I was freezing cold by the time I saw base, the last bits of the sun just beginning to disappear. There were lights outside moving around, probably the crew doing last minute checks before heading to bed… That’s when a loud radio buzz came over my com before the captain’s voice yelled at me, asking where the hell I was, why I was so late coming back. The yelling continued until they showed their lights onto her, then there was a long silence that overcame them.

Once I parked the rover and got out, I fell down to my knees. I couldn’t feel my legs, I hadn’t moved them once on the way back. Everyone rushed over and helped me to the base to warm me up. I was setting into hypothermia, I couldn’t process anything anymore at that point. They threw so many questions at me, I just couldn’t understand anything they were saying, all that I thought about was, “at least she was found finally and she wasn’t alone. At least I’m not alone either…” before passing out. I thought I was dying… well… I guess, in a way, I was dying, but… since I wasn’t alone… since I had people around me who cared… they helped me. They saved me. When I came to some time later, a couple of days later, I was once again questioned on my reckless actions and what I had brought back to base. I told them everything. I told them how I searched for her every day, how I found her, why I wanted to find her, why I risked my stupid life to bring her back, who she was…

They didn’t believe me at first, so we took her to the garage with the land rover and began looking at her parts. We cleaned her out, checked all the hardware, and somehow… we were able to run diagnostics on her. She should have been a heap of junk on the Martian wasteland, but here she was… still in, mostly, one-piece and somewhat functional. We ignored everything for a while and just worked on her for a couple of days. Replacing a small part of her solar panels, shining light onto it, hoping for something… anything… but she didn’t wake up. We checked her body, checked everything we could… and retried again. We watched the computer eagerly, waiting for something, and there was something. There was a small bit of charge, we waited for hours but it hardly went up any.

She somehow charged to a small 5% and connected to our computer. We began receiving data slowly before she started to smoke, making us panic. One of the crew went to take the light away, but before he did… we received a message… or rather… she received our final message. I’ll Be Seeing You played for her while we sat there and watched…

I'll find you

In the morning sun

And when the night is new

I'll be looking at the moon

But I'll be seeing you…

Then… she powered down for the last time. Nothing we did brought her back. But… it’s for the best… it was time to let her go. It was her time to go. She stayed fighting for so long… just long enough for someone to find her… so she could hear our last message to her. Our love song for her. Our good-bye song to her. We all started crying as soon as we realized she was gone for good. Even though she was ‘just a machine’, she still meant things to us. We humanized her, gave her a name, watched her explore and discover new things, watched her age, and now… with a final good-bye… we watched her die.

We humanize the most mundane and inanimate things, we love them and care about them as if they were alive… and when they die or get destroyed… we grieve for them. We grieve for the humanity we put onto them, we grieve for something that felt like somebody, and that’s ok. It’s ok to grieve or something that seems so… abnormal or stupid… it’s not stupid or abnormal in the end though. It’s only human to love such a thing so deeply that you humanize it and miss it when it’s gone. And it hurts if we feel we never had the proper good-bye with them.

Knowing that Oppy, Opportunity, died, despite many attempts to wake her up, and then get sent the final song I’ll Be Seeing You is… touching, comforting even, but it still makes me incredibly sad. She was long since passed when we sent the final message, I’m not even sure if she truly received the good-bye she oh so deserved, which makes me cry even more to think about.

But maybe

Just maybe

We will be seeing you again one day.

#Oppy #opportunity #rip oppy #Ill be seeing you #nasa #space #opportunity rover #mars #short story #its ok to say good bye #its ok to be sad #creative writing #I'm not happy with this #I liked my first draft better #but tumblr snapped it away #i hope you like this

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freudensteins-monster · 4 years ago

Text

You Say “Mad Scientist” Like It’s A Bad Thing

Based on my own tumblr post: 3am thoughts… Has anyone written Jane Foster as a mad scientist, I mean like a villain?

Chaotic neutral Darcy and Jane featuring modern/human SHIELD Agent Bucky.

Available on AO3.

Content Warnings: Implied/Referenced Torture, Aftermath of Torture, Amnesia, Memory Suppressing Machine | The Chair (Marvel), Dark, Sort Of, Ambiguous/Open Ending...

In a world full of megalomaniacs, straight up supervillains, and fricking aliens, mad scientists were a dime a dozen. Dr Foster was one such scientist who was quickly moving from mildly irritating to SHIELD’s Most Wanted.

Dr Foster’s gimmick was portals. She first gained international attention when she claimed responsibility (via an untraceable Instagram account, @dr-mthrfckng-foster) for diverting LA’s 405 to a dirt road in rural Australia. Then came a string of impossible robberies – bank vaults and the private collections of the world's richest assholes stripped bare in seconds. Then she created a portal that caused an Indonesian typhoon to bear down on Wall Street, flooding the trading floor. And then she robbed a top secret government black site of some classified technology.

And that’s when Director Nick Fury made finding and stopping Dr Foster SHIELD’s number one priority.

Agent James Barnes had been stuck on suspension for two weeks, with two more to go, and was itching to get back into the field. He had way too much free time on his hands: he’d caught up on his sleep and everything in his Netflix queue. He’d cleaned out his refrigerator, done laundry and enough meal prep to last him until next month. He’d caught up with his family, cleaned his whole goddamn apartment twice, and now he was well and truly bored.

He was out for his fifth run of the week (and it wasn’t even Wednesday) when his work phone rang.

“Thank Christ,” he muttered before answering.

“Barnes.”

“It’s Hill. How’s the arm?”

“Fine,” Barnes grunted, rotating his metal shoulder irritably. “You got something for me?”

“Are you up for a recon mission?”

Usually he would have protested. He headed tactical units. He was an elite ‘first through the door’ kind of field agent. Not that he couldn’t be stealthy and patient - he’d been a sniper in the army for christ's sake - but going unnoticed in public was kind of a problem for him these days; he’d have to wear jackets and gloves in the middle of August to hide his prosthetic for starters.

On the other hand, his mother had been calling him every second day to feed him carb-heavy meals in exchange for help around the house, all while dropping not-so-subtle hints that he should start dating again. Requests for more grandchildren couldn’t be far behind.

“I’ll be there in thirty.”

Thirty-five minutes later Agent Barnes was back at his desk at SHIELD HQ perusing through the increasingly large file of one Dr Jane Foster.

She had been a brilliant student and had earned a PhD in Astrophysics from Culver University by the age of 25. By all accounts she should have been one of the leading researchers in her field, and if doctoral programs handed out superlatives Dr Foster’s would have been “Most Likely To Win a Nobel Prize By 30”.

Unfortunately for Dr Foster, and the rest of the world, she had been forced from that path by a sexist tenured professor who publicly denounced her theories, and the woman herself, as crazy, discredited her published work, and used his influence to ensure she was denied all of the more lucrative research grants.

When federal agents went to interview him after the 405 incident they found his office looking like a tornado had gone through it and the professor himself was nowhere to be found. A few weeks later he stumbled into a US Embassy in Russia after being found wandering in from the forests outside Vladivostok, half mad and still decrying the evils of allowing women into scientific fields.

He had been placed into witness protection and promptly admitted into a psychiatric facility under his new name, and was being monitored by several undercover agents in case Dr Foster felt like punishing him some more.

Anyone else who had a part in ruining Dr Foster’s legitimate career was also under surveillance, as was her mother in London, a terrified ex-boyfriend in Boston, and a handful of known associates, though Dr Foster hadn’t been in contact with any of them in years.

SHIELD and other federal agencies had tried the usual methods of tracking down a rogue mad scientist. They tried to find out where her base of operations was, firstly by looking for any properties in her name, but Dr Foster had been a broke student with an impressive amount of debt (until the day she decided to wipe it, and the rest of Culver’s student debt, out). So if she had property it would definitely not be in her legal name and all but impossible to trace back to her. Then they tried to look for drains on the powergrid. However she managed to generate her portals - SHIELD scientists still hadn’t figured that out - it surely had to be using huge amounts of electricity. So far they’d found six grow labs and two server rooms running illegal god-knows-what, but no Dr Foster.

Agent Barnes read the file twice, reviewed all the transcripts of the interviews with her known associates, and came to one very important conclusion: she had an accomplice.

As smart as Dr Foster was there was nothing in her academic history to suggest that she had a background in computer science that would account for the notable hacks and the untraceable nature of her activities. To add to that several interviewees had made passing remarks about her not having a cell phone for most of her academic career, and how she had zero interest in social media.

Two days later, after getting the okay for a field trip from Hill, Agent Barnes made his way to Culver University to speak to anyone who had even the vaguest recollection of Dr Foster. And that’s how he learnt about the intern.

He’d started by dropping by one of the physics labs where Dr Foster had spent most of her time, and by pure chance met a doctoral candidate who remembered her, and her intern.

“I think her name was Darlene. Glasses. Always on her phone.”

…which led him to the academic advisor who put the two of them together...

“Darcy. Darcy Lewis. She was actually a PoliSci major but left it too late and Dr Foster’s internship was the only one available. She had only been working with her for a few weeks before… before Dr Foster’s funding was revoked and she was asked to leave.”

...who pointed him to one of Darcy’s former professors…

“Average student. Good debater. Often late, and always had a coffee in her hand.”

...who gave him a few names of some former classmates who might remember her…

“Not the worst person to be stuck with on a group assignment. Pulled her weight. Obsessed with her stupid iPod.”

“I swear she lived off pop tarts and coffee. And not Starbucks either. Some stupid hipster chain.”

“Deja Brew. Serious problem. Went through one of those loyalty punch cards every week. Always complained about having to go home for the holidays and resort to big chain coffee shops.”

...which had him driving out to Darcy Lewis’ hometown, located a few hours south of Roanoke, Virginia, stopping first at the local high school to speak to the school principal…

“She’d always been good with computers but wasn’t allowed to use them at home for some reason so she spent a lot of time at the local library using theirs. We had to suspend her once. One of her classmates accused her of accepting payment from other students to hack the school’s records and alter their grades. Their grades were definitely getting altered, but we couldn’t get any concrete proof it was her.”

...who was able to find a photo of 16 year old Darcy in an old yearbook and told him what bar he could find Darcy’s mother in.

“She knows not to come to me if she’s in the shit, because I would call the cops in a heartbeat. Especially after that stunt she pulled before she went off to college…”

“What stunt was that, Ms Bennett?” Agent Barnes asked patiently, hoping he wouldn’t have to enable her alcoholism to get some useful information.

“I made some mistakes, okay,” she slurred defensively. “I was having an affair with my boss. Don’t know how Darcy knew. She told her stepfather but he didn’t believe her. Then a few weeks later we went out to dinner for my boss’s birthday... all the tv’s in the bar start showing security camera footage of us falling into offices and motel rooms. Took her all of a minute to ruin two marriages and a law firm.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he replied diplomatically. “Is there anyone she could turn to for help? Her father, perhaps.”

“He died when she was about twelve. They were as thick as thieves,” she recalled with a tinge of bitterness.

“Was there any place that was special to them? Someone she might go to ground?”

She shook her head. “He used to rent this old cabin near the Catskills off a buddy of his every other year. Winter or summer, Darcy loved it. But it's long gone. Forest fire, I think, the year before his accident.”

Back in his car Agent Barnes reviewed the data points.

Dr Foster had a base of operations somewhere. Had to be private, and as best SHIELD could guess it must be off the grid and Dr Foster must be generating her own power.

Dr Foster was a space nut at heart, and while an abandoned observatory might be too much to ask for, she’d probably want somewhere with minimal light pollution.

And while they could portal anywhere, neither of them spoke any other languages and had no familiarity with any international locations, so they were most likely still State-side. (Dr Foster’s mother had moved to London when Jane was twenty-three, but she’d never found the time to visit.)

Miss Lewis was familiar with the Catskills area. A base of operations there could be very isolated.

Dr Foster was most likely building and modifying her own own equipment so she had to be able to access materials. Sure, she could portal to her local hardware store, but having Darcy drive into the nearest town for supplies would attract less attention.

Miss Lewis had an addiction to coffee procured from Deja Brew, a small hipster chain with only a handful of locations along on the east coast. While she could have found another way to get her caffeine fix, people were creatures of habit.

Miss Lewis was also known for stocking up on poptarts. In one of the only images of the other side of one of Dr Foster’s portals there was what appeared to be, if one squinted, a box of limited edition pop tarts on a counter.

He plugged it all into SHIELD fancy search engines and got a few results back. The most promising was an abandoned ski chalet turned abandoned research station halfway up a mountain, an hour drive away from an up and coming tourist town, whose main street hosted a Deja Brew cafe. They also had a small mom and pop hardware store, as well as a post office, and a grocery store that had still been selling pumpkin pie pop tarts around the time Dr Foster’s portal had been caught on camera.

Agent Barnes came to with a groan. The flesh of his shoulder where it met his prosthetic felt like it was on fire, and he was pretty sure he could smell fried wiring.

The research station had come up in SHIELD’s initial search for a potential mad scientist's lair, but had been dismissed for not using any power and for not sending back any heat signature readings. Perhaps they’d found a way to fool the scanners. Or maybe they just weren’t in the day the readings were taken. Whatever the reason, Agent Barnes had a good feeling about it. He filled his tank up at the nearest gas station and got on the highway, forgoing checking in at the Triskelion on his way past in favour of driving all night. He’d call Hill when he had something solid.

** *** **

“Fuck…”

He willed his eyes open and came face to face with Darth Vader.

Barnes reeled back at the sound of the synthesized voice. “Who sent you? Who do you work for?! The Rebellion?”

“What the fuck!”

It took him until his eyes adjusted to the fluorescent lighting to realise that Darth Vader was wearing a grey knit dress and black tights. Darth Vader laughed and ripped off his mask to reveal a smiling bespectacled brunette underneath. The accomplice. Darcy Lewis.

“Sorry, I was just messing with you, dude,” she teased, tossing the mask over her shoulder. “I’ve always wanted to do that. But seriously, who do you work for? Who knows you’re here?”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he lied. “I was just camping in the woods, man. I saw the lights and decided to check it out,” he rambled in a lazy Canadian accent. “How the hell did I get here? Did you electrocute me?”

He used his not-quite fake panic to test the limits of his restraints. He’d been strapped into some sort of junkstore barber chair, with thick metal shackles locked around his wrists, ankles, and chest. His metal arm could probably make quick work of them but the damn thing was not responding. His panic became a little less fake.

“Just camping, huh?” she echoed back with a raised eyebrow, leaning forward to the point where Barnes couldn’t avoid getting a good look down her top and the 15-carat pink diamond (worth about 40mil and reported stolen in one of Dr Foster’s vault heists two months ago) hanging around her neck. “So that wasn’t you poking around town this morning?” she asked pointedly, drawing his attention to the wall of monitors he hadn’t noticed showing various street cameras around the town. “I’ve got eyes and ears everywhere, dude. You got into town bright and early in a beat up looking truck with plates that didn’t exist two weeks ago and started flashing my yearbook photo around. So, who do you work for?”

He levelled his best steely-eyed agent stare at her and switched back to his native pissed-off Brooklynite accent. “I ain’t tellin you shit, sweetheart.”

“C’mon now,” she cooed, taking a seat on his lap. “Who do you work for? FBI? Interpol? SHIELD? Crawford County Library Services? Listen, I was totally going to return Eat Pray Love, but we had to skip town in a hurry and it got lost in the move. I will totally pay to replace it.”

Years of training (and regular poker games with the Black Widow) had taught him to school his features, even if that last one threw him for a loop.

“Nothing? You sure you don’t want to talk to me? Fine,” she whined. “Jane!”

It was only then that Barnes switched his focus from his captor to his surroundings and realised that there was another occupant puttering about on the other side of the large telescope that took pride of place on a hydraulic platform underneath the research station's retractable roof. The infamous Dr Foster.

“Jane!”

“What?” came the irritated reply.

“Come over here and practise your monologue. Look! You’ve got a captive audience and everything!” she announced, laughing at her own joke.

“I don’t have time, Darcy,” the disgruntled voice argued.

“Hey! I spent two days writing up that monologue, the least you can do is spend twenty-five minutes reading it out loud so I can make sure it doesn’t make you sound too much like a cartoon villain.”

“Twenty-five minutes?! Are you kidding me?” Dr Foster stormed out from behind the telescope to wave a wrench at her assistant. She looked less put together than her ID photo, appearing to be long overdue for both a shower and a nap. “I’m in the middle of something. I’ve almost figured the problem with the mobile portal generator, and… Darcy, why is there a man tied to a chair in my lab?”

“This man?” Darcy snorted, taking Barnes’s chin in her hands and wiggling it about. “This is the intruder. You remember the intruder alert, like fifteen minutes ago? Lots of flashing lights and alarms? Well, I found this guy passed out on the lawn. For most people, hitting my force field would be like getting lightly tased, but this bad boy,” she continued, tapping a fingernail against his dead metal arm, “meant you ended up getting the full 50,000 volts to your heart. Thanks for letting me practice my CPR by the way,” she added with a wink.

“It’s not a force field, Darcy. It’s a glorified invisible pet fence, upsized and modified so it reacts to the electrical impulses in the human body.”

“It keeps people out; I’m calling it a force field.”

This was definitely the weirdest interrogation he had endured by a large margin, Barnes mused as he followed their bickering like a pingpong game.

“Who is he, Darcy?” Jane sighed wearily. “What is he doing here?”

“Fiiiine. Janey, meet Agent James Barnes of SHIELD.”

“What?! SHIELD?!!”Jane screeched. “Why did you bring him here?”

“He found us, Jane. What was I supposed to do?”

“Something other than bringing him inside our secret hideout.”

“I am not killing him and burying him in the woods; I just did my nails.”

Jane scowled, turning the full force of her overtired fury on James. “Why can’t you SHIELD issue jackbooted thugs just leave me alone? Can’t you understand how important my work is? I am challenging the very foundations of modern science - of the laws of the universe! I am on the verge of a breakthrough! And if you or Nick Fury think you can stop me, you’ve got another thing coming!”

Before his mouth could betray him and ask how the hell they knew his boss Darcy spoke up.

“A little off script, but I like the energy, Jane. Very much the mad scientist vibe we’re going for. But next time, try not to make it so personal – we’ve got to hide the target of our frustrations, remember? Instead of saying “SHIELD” say “government”, instead of saying “Nick Fury” say “president”.”

“Right, right,” Jane nodded absently, tapping the side of her head with the wrench she had just been waving around like a weapon.

“Now, go back to work. I’ll handle this.”

“Okay, thanks Darce. Oh, have you seen my soldering iron around?”

“It’s in the locked cabinet because you’re not allowed to use it unsupervised, you know that. Gimme ten minutes, I’ll bring it to you.”

Jane wandered back to her side of the observatory, muttering under her breath, leaving Barnes at Darcy’s mercy.

“She’s not the criminal mastermind here, is she?” he wondered, his eyes roaming over the strange cupcake of a woman in his lap.

“Not exactly,” Darcy admitted. “I mean, it’s not like she set out to be a mad scientist. I kind of rebranded her after that little freeway incident.”

“Rebranded?”

“Yeah. She was in a bad way after New Mexico and then when the first live test of her portal engine went a little sideways I didn’t want dudebros on the internet coming after her, so I changed the narrative. Instead of ‘girl scientist makes mistake, should stick to making sandwiches’ I changed it to ‘Dr Foster, genius astrophysicist, causes chaos, totally on purpose.’”

“And all those robberies?”

“I may have encouraged that. I’m all for sticking it to the one percenters, and Jane needed to fund her experiments somehow,” she added with a shrug.

“So Jane’s the absent-minded professor and you’re the brains behind this operation, huh?”

Darcy laughed and slid out of his lap causing a distracting amount of friction. “I’m really not. So you, Coulson, and Fury should be really, really scared.”

“How do you know those names?” he had to know, cover be damned.

“You don’t know? Of course you don’t,” she huffed. “Fury and his clearance levels. I’d tell you to ask him about New Mexico sometime, but you’re not going to be able to.”

“Why not? What are you going to do to me?” Barnes fretted, unable to ignore the sinking feeling that he was in big trouble; she wouldn’t have told him anything if she intended on letting him walk out of here.

“Oh, relax. I’m not going to kill you. I’m just gonna scramble your brain a little.”

She circled his chair, flipping switches as she went, and something behind him started humming ominously.

“So, admittedly I didn’t major in hard sciences. I had an ex who did, but he also fancied himself something of a cat burglar, so when he went to jail I liberated all his college textbooks and gave myself a crash course in electrical engineering. And it helped that those HYDRA designs were really easy to follow.”

“HYDRA?” Barnes cursed.

HYDRA had been the scientific branch of the Nazi regime and believed that discovery required (human) experimentation. They were supposedly eradicated at the end of WWII but Project Paperclip saved some of HYDRA’s greatest minds, giving them immunity in exchange for their genius. If Foster or, more worryingly, Darcy had aligned themselves with some surviving HYDRA faction the results could be catastrophic.

“Yeah, I found them in that SHIELD warehouse when we recovered Jane’s stolen research.”

“What are you talking about?”

“They just call it ‘The Chair’, which is totally not creepy at all,” she continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “And this is the Halo,” she added, drawing Barnes’s attention to the whirring circle of metal that was lowering itself over his head.

“What the hell are you doing?” he shouted, renewing his efforts to break free of his restraints. “Get that piece of scrap metal the fuck away from me!”

“Hey! Don’t mock my work. It may look like I raided a junkyard for the components - and I did - but my welding game is on point. It’s totally safe. Mostly safe. It’s just going to send focused electrical pulses to your…” she paused to consult some smudged writing on her hand, “hippocampus and prefrontal cortex.”

The Halo stopped moving and two metal plates extended, pressing against the sides of his head, holding it like a vice.

“Please… don’t do this,” he begged as she approached him with a rubber mouthguard.

“C’mon, open wide. You don’t want to end up braindead and unable to chew your food,” she jested, waving the thing in front of him. “Oh, just one question before I fry your brain,” she added just when he was about to give in. “How did you find us? I was so careful,” she whined.

Agent Barnes, terrified as he was, still managed to look smug at his small, short lived success. “Deja Brew coffee.”

“Curses!” she wailed theatrically. “Betrayed by my one true love!”

Darcy huffed and quickly returned her attention to the matter at hand.

“Thanks for that,” she said with a smile as she forced him to bite down on the mouthguard. “I’ll know better for next time. Start making my own coffee at home… but it never tastes as good,” she muttered to herself.

She stepped away from him and bent down to pick up a similarly frankensteined industrial remote with long wires snaking back to the chair and a clichéd big red button at its centre. He began struggling anew, screaming around the foul tasting rubber, begging for mercy.

She took great delight in his terrified expression and put on her best supervillain voice, “Give my regards to Nick Fury.”

Nick Fury observed his agent from behind a two way mirror as he sat behind a table in an interrogation room. Barnes had been sitting there for the past hour as still as a statue, except for his unfocused eyes which flitted about the room.

In true horror movie fashion, Agent Barnes’ screams echoed down the mountainside like an avalanche, sending animals fleeing in terror for miles around.

** *** **

Local LEO’s had found him wandering aimlessly down a stretch of highway just outside the ruins of what had previously been Puente Antiguo, New Mexico, and ten minutes after they ran his prints Agent Romanoff had been on a quinjet to collect him. She’d been directed to the nearest hospital and found him sitting up on a bed but not responding or reacting to any of the medical staff as they buzzed around him. Agent Romanoff took a cautious step forward and held her breath as his unfocused eyes settled on her.

“Hello James...”

An excruciating minute later the veil lifted and he attempted a smile.

“Hey Tasha.”

She’d brought him back to base and dragged him to SHIELD’s medical bay for more tests - not that Barnes put up much of a fight, in fact he was terrifyingly compliant. The SHIELD doctors confirmed what the New Mexico doctors suspected: the bruising and electrical burns around his temples and his memory loss were indicative of some back alley version of electroshock therapy. His memories should come back in time - how long was anybody’s guess - but for the moment Agent James Barnes had no memory of the last four weeks.

Fury picked up a tablet with depressingly little information on its screen and stepped into the room, waiting for Barnes eyes to focus on him before taking a seat.

“Agent Barnes.”

“Director.”

“I know you’re probably sick of questions by now, but I have a few more for you, if that’s alright.”

“Yeah, sure…”

It rankled Fury to no end how meak and passive Barnes seemed. Heaven help him, he missed the argumentative sonofabitch.

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

“Being called into your office.”

“What for?”

“I punched Rumlow.”

“Why?”

“He was bragging about taking advantage of a drunk woman at a club when he was last on leave. He didn’t like me calling out his shitty behaviour. He punched me, I punched him back.”

Fury sighed. He hadn't gotten a straight answer out of Barnes at the time of the incident and he couldn’t feel happy about getting one now.

“Do you remember what happened once I called you into my office?”

His brow creased and his eyes zipped back and forth like the carriage of a printer as his mind searched for the elusive memory.

“You suspended me?”

“I did,” Fury confirmed. “For a whole month. But two weeks into it I pulled you in for a special assignment.”

Barnes tensed, shrinking in on himself. The confusion about his lost time seemed to be the only thing that got under his skin, but only when someone brought it up. Once the moment passed he forgot to be concerned about it.

Fury took pity on him. “For the past two weeks I had you running down leads on the whereabouts of Dr Jane Foster.”

“The scientist with the portals? Did she do this to me?”

“It’s not exactly her MO, but then again no law enforcement agency’s ever managed to have a confrontation with her. Never had the chance. Those portals of hers let her keep at a distance. You might have been the first person to have a face to face with her, but I can’t confirm it because I don’t know where the hell you were when this happened,” he grumbled, letting a little more of his usual exasperated tone filter through. “You missed check in by two days. The last we heard from you, you were at Culver running down leads on what you said was a potential accomplice. We found your car in Tromso, Norway, a day after you were found on the side of a road in New Mexico. You don’t appear on any security footage or speed cameras in the area. There’s no activity on your work or personal credit cards. Your activity logs on our highly secure system for the last two weeks are nonexistent, as are your call logs on your work phone. Even the messages you sent Romanoff from your personal phone complaining about your assignment have since been deleted - from her phone too. She’s real pissed about it. As far as your digital footprint is concerned you disappeared from a gas station outside Roanoke, Virginia, last week - do you know how weird it is to know you were headed out towards a place called Roanoke only to up and vanish?” He sighed at Barnes’ painful silence. “Is there anything you can remember, anything at all about Dr Foster or her accomplice? Anything that will help us catch up to you without talking to everyone on campus to figure out what you discovered?”

Barnes’ brow creased in painful confusion.

“I think… I think I saw Darth Vadar.”

Director Fury blinked. “Right…” He took a deep breath to stop himself from venting his frustrations at Barnes, the sorry bastard looked like a kicked puppy as it was. Instead he got up and tapped the tablet against the metal tabletop harder than strictly necessary. “Well, I’ll just go put out a BOLO out for Darth Vadar then.”

“Okay,” Barnes murmured, and promptly zoned out again.

Agent Romanoff exited the viewing room looking uncharacteristically unsettled.

“I want a full detail on him at all times,” Fury ordered as he stormed off towards the elevators. Hill had just stepped off and was looking even more grim than usual. “Until his memories come back he’s vulnerable, and once they do he’ll be a target.”

“I’ll get a STRIKE team on it. Not Rumlow’s.”

“Get another one along with any assets currently not on assignment. Flood that campus, interrogate everybody. I wanna know who the hell Dr Foster’s accomplice is, and I wanna know yesterday. Understood?”

“I think we might have more pressing concerns, sir,” Hill reported, tapping at her tablet as it beeped erratically. “Coulson’s said there’s an issue with the Tesseract. Dr. Selvig read an energy surge from it fifteen minutes ago.”

“NASA didn't authorise Selvig to test phase,” he grunted, taking the tablet from Hill.

“He wasn't testing it, he wasn't even in the room. Spontaneous advancement.”

“Motherfucker.”

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