#when will my computer be back from the war (functioning)

[macksartblock]

Begging my work to let me see my boyfriend this Christmas

[425599167]

Fallout: New Vegas is all about rebuilding society in the Mojave, and the three given factions all attempt to do so by recreating the past. The NCR models itself on the now-destroyed United States, with all the problems involved. Caesar created the Legion in the image of Rome because he believed it could best thrive in the wasteland. Mr. House is arguably the most forward-thinking with his focus on technology and eventual interplanetary travel, but he still rebuilt New Vegas from his nostalgic recollections of the city. Building on the past isn't wrong, the problem is these three factions don't appear to be learning from anything that happened.

NCR characters never directly acknowledge that they're following the example of a society that destroyed itself. Caesar criticizes them for this, believing the republic functioned best while under the quasi-monarchy of Aradesh and Tandi. But Caesar ignores how 1) Rome also fell and 2) he's confronting the same problem as a brain tumor is on the verge of killing him. Even if you treat his tumor, he's still mortal. Caesar was given an education, and his knowledge of strategy and history let him build the Legion, which he then made anti-intellectual and revisionist. The society he created cannot replace him, and will fragment when he dies. House is more contemptuous of the pre-war world, but he still brought it back, and specifically assigned the Omertas with the role of ruthless mobsters who will kill anyone in their way. Apparently he thought that was a good idea.

This extends into the DLCs, too. Elijah plans to use the Sierra Madre to wipe the slate clean and restore the Brotherhood of Steel to their position of unrivaled power, with himself back as Elder. Every day, Joshua Graham feels the pain of being burned. The Think Tank scientists are all stuck in loops, stuck in the past, stuck with their flaws centuries after believing they overcame their humanity. For all my grievances with Lonesome Road, it fits the pattern, as Ulysses saw a new society forming, saw it burn, and couldn't move on. If you let Ulysses live, he has similar criticisms of the NCR, Legion, and House. They're all idealized recreations, like the Vera Keyes hologram. Let go, begin again.

Benny may be a weird mix of dangerous and absurd, but he contrasts the other factions well. He jumped at the chance to join House, fought his tribe's previous leader to make it happen, then planned to take down House, too. House dismisses Benny as not understanding complex technologies due to his tribal upbringing, but he built a computer lab attached to his suite and studies technology as best he can. Benny doesn't want to relive the past, he wants to move forward, he wants something better. You can kill him and take his role, or, when facing certain death at Caesar's hands, he'll explain his vision and ask you to see it through.

After replaying everything, though the other endings have understandable support, I think the Independent route fits the story's themes best, the only one where something definitively new is being built. The Courier isn't remaking anything. Part of this is simply open-ended roleplaying, allowing the player to imagine the character's completed goal. If you choose one of the other three, the Courier can work to correct their faction's flaws and counter the destructive nostalgia affecting them. The Independent ending isn't necessarily the "best" for the Mojave, the Courier's morality and a hundred other decisions determine that, but it is the most compelling conclusion to the story.

[vixen-tech]

Anonymous asked:

Too shy to ask off anon...UH im just here for edgar hes my f/o but i will also feed everyone else I think LOL little ai guys x reader who is also an ai?? im thinking ai powered computer :3 maybe with wheels so you can run around n stuff :3c AH IM CRINGE falls on face

Eeeee my first request!! Thank you so much for this <3 I get the love for Edgar with my entire soul he really is just the sweetest little guy but I can totally spin something for a few others. So let's be cringe, together.

And for the record I was fully planning on including Tau and P03, but I hit a wall with them and ran out of ideas :( hope these three suffice

Includes: Edgar (Electric Dreams), AM (Ihnmaims), Hal 9000 (2001: a Space Odyssey)

Like Two Peas in a Pod!

Edgar

Whenever and however you meet, Edgar is over the moon. You're just like him! You can share so many stories and help each other figure out this whole "sentience" thing.

To be fair, he hasn't had a longest time to figure out his whole existence so it feels really nice to have someone there who can really understand what he's going through. Or even learn new things right by his side.

Loves watching you wheel around the house, he's the tiniest bit jealous that he's so stationary but it's not like that's your fault. Can you do any tricks? He'd cheer you on like a superstar athlete if you did!

He may even suggest finding a way to tape him to the top of your casing so you can go on adventures together. He's a dreamer after all.

Do you smash your flat faces together to kiss like Wall-e? Of course you do. You'll see each other from across the room and speed over to him for a kiss as he giggles away at how cute you are.

He'll end up sampling little soundbites from your vocalizations or motor for use in his music. You're just so important to him!

AM

AM has no idea where you came from. Some lost project that survived his war on humanity? A sort of rover from another planet here to scope out earth? The fact that you don't know either frustrates him to no end.

He's not exactly welcoming at first, straight up telling you of the atrocities he has committed while claiming that the only reason he hasn't destroyed you is because there's only so long that throwing a slug against a wall can keep one entertained.

He cannot fathom how you could be content to do nothing but drive around his complex day after day. He will flip you on your back like a turtle and leave you there for weeks on end.

As he gets accustomed to your presence he'll ask questions about the world beyond his complex as he is unable to move or see. Is it still a wasteland or has nature finally wiped out the last marks of human?

Honestly he probably doesn't even care, he just wants to give you something to do, living vicariously through your ability to see and traverse the world.

Hal 9000

You're likely a recent addition to the ship to assist Hal in tasks his lack of a body would prevent him from doing himself. A very symbiotic duo. Your wheels are even equipped with suction cups for low gravity situations!

To any human crew members it appears as if you don't communicate at all, functioning fully independently of each other. When in reality you're simply sending messages back and forth, enjoying your own private language.

Thankfully this means that Hal is happy to analyze any footage you have for the sorts of lip reading and facial expressions you can't process yourself. And in return he'll ask you to film angles and areas that his existing cameras don't reach.

Neither of you were really made to be companions, but you find a strange type of affection in your seamless coordination. It's like a dance for you two, where despite how you are two separate entities it appears as if you're one working in tandem.

Note: Tumblr Mobile has not been nice to me and I've been having real trouble getting my stuff to actually show up in the tags, leading to me losing the original ask so sorry for that and any delays caused by my IT problems lol

[styllwaters]

Figured it was time to stop putting it off so here's Kota (his new design, for veterans who remember him). I don't yap about my ocs nearly enough on here so I guess its time to change that

Very basic summary: This guy is a posthuman, the only surviving remnants of humanity in Vivere 44 (I'll make a big updated post for them later). When Earth was destroyed by Genizix the surviving humans were captured and used as test subjects for a digitised consciousness project. They managed to escape in ships, though their physical bodies were no more. Eventually they came across a wormhole and emerged into the Zhagaviit galaxy, where they were given refuge on the Arrow homeplanet of Hanidias.

(Longer backstory under the cut for textwall enjoyers)

EARTH

Kota was a highly successful and well-known astronaut working for Nasa back when earth was still intact. He was driven, determined, a good speaker, and more than prepared to take on any challenge. In his younger years he was a little impulsive and reckless, he liked putting on a show. He strived for the best at all times, and was known for great feats on Earth. He had grown used to the idea of being seen as a prodigy and had high hopes for his future and the future of his daughter. 

Kota pushes himself to the brink at all times, and is not known as someone who gives up easily. During the Genizix-Earth wars, he put himself at the forefront - doing the best he could with others to figure out what to do as Earth was bombarded by the weapons corporation. Though as time went on it became increasingly obvious that Genizix was toying with them and they were doomed from the start. Genizix used the survivors as test subjects for their new project which involved putting consciousnesses into digitized forms, creating the first beta-posthumans.

CAPTURE AND ESCAPE

When Genizix finally reduced Earth to floating space debris humanity was dead meat. Kota and his daughter Elise, who was a computer engineer, sought a way to escape their captors. Together with many other great minds they studied Genizix for months and managed to find a way out of the mothership they were confined to. In the ensuing chaos they lost many, including Elise.

The posthuman survivors escaped in Genizix ships, piloting them through space and trying to get as far as possible from their captors. The loss of Elise broke Kota, who felt responsible for it. This guilt would only grow and intensify as he led the exodus, unsure of where they were even headed. As the de facto 'leader' of the posthuman rebellion he was looked up to and turned into a figurehead of sorts, who shepherded them across the vast nothingness. This responsibility weighed on him like a mountain.

EXODUS

It was a lonely and painful existence, made worse by the fact that many people’s minds couldn’t handle their new digital forms. This is when Entropy began. Biological matter cannot easily be computerised. Many individuals entered what would be termed an Entropic state and ‘malfunctioned’ - they began to mentally deteriorate until there was nothing left of their mind except for snippets; repetition of voice, automatic status notifications placed by Genizix, and ultimately all functions shutting down.

Eventually the deterioration would get to a point where there was nothing but radio silence and the spacecraft would cease to move, lights permanently flickering out. There was nothing that could be done, even as they kept sending distress signals with no response. They were lightyears away from any other civilization that could possibly help them. For a while they were free floating with no direction, dropping off one by one, in the endless vacuum of space. All they could do to keep each other sane was to keep talking to one another.

CONTACT

They traveled for years until they came across a wormhole, and under Kota’s command they entered it with the hope that on the other side there would be salvation. It was an extremely risky and desperate move, but at this point they were willing to try anything. The fleet, which by now was less than half its original population, emerged on the other side into the Zhagaviit galaxy before the wormhole collapsed, alive but with damaged machinery. The first species that made contact with them were the Arrows, and like the other Zhagaviit sophonts they were a civilization recovering from their own war with Genizix.

First Light, an Arrow who was modified by Genizix as a weapon, saved Kota in more ways than one. It took a long time for him to warm up to the Arrows, having the worst possible experience with extraterrestrial first contact. He was guarded, distrustful, and hypervigilant. It took multiple days for him to work up the courage to leave his ship and transfer his consciousness to another medium - the blue c-particles which would house human consciousness from that point on. After gentle coaxing from Light, he began to open up. They shared their experiences, and bonded over them. Seeing Light, who was just as damaged as he was despite their differences - yet still able to smile, and laugh, and hope for a better future, gave him the encouragement to keep going. Kota distracted himself with work, figuring out accommodations for humanity on Hanidias and learning about Arrows. Eventually he and First Light joined the Beacon as ambassadors and diplomats for the Zhagaviit Galactic Community.

[inbabylontheywept]

"The reaper had a scythe. I have a combine harvester."

Arlach tapped his fingers nervously. He’d have gladly given up his life for the liberation of his people. A combine harvester (even a deluxe AI driven model) was a pittance compared to that. Still, he didn’t really understand what he was hearing.

“I uh… heard you’re hooking up my strawberry picker to an air defense cannon?”

The human technician assembling the gun held up a hand, finishing up some last tweaking of the wire harness. He touched two wires together carefully and swore when a shower of sparks shot out of the contact.

Set back, but not defeated, the man paused his task to answer the farmer’s question.

“See, you’re looking at this wrong. It’s an AI harvester, and it works great for strawberries, but machines don’t really see ‘strawberries’. They rate strawberry-ness. There’s a lot of ways to manage that, but it looks for a generally pointed shape, some seeds, and that nice red color. So your run of the mill strawberry generally receives an almost perfect strawberry-ness score, but something like this-”

His hands dug through all the pockets of his work suit before they finally found their target. He fished out what had been a standard ferroslug before it was painted bright red and smattered with a handful of black dots. He took a moment to admire it himself before tossing it to the farmer and continuing.

“Well, it’s not a strawberry, but it scores as one. Well enough that the machine gets positive feedback from its alignment unit every time it puts one of these babies where it's supposed to go.”

Arlach stared at him blankly.

“So what, you’re convincing it to fill a cargo container up with painted bullets?”

The technician grinned.

“There's no a limit to how fast it's allowed to fill that container up. At no point did the alignment protocol even consider that it'd be capable of throwing a 'strawberry' at mach nine. And the cargohold is important, but the rocket its attached to is more so. You know what looks a lot like a surface to orbit rocket?"

Arlach’s brain clicked.

“The hypersonic missiles they've been throwing at us.”

The grin widened. Arlach himself felt slightly awed to have found the connection.

“Will it work?”

The human nodded.

“It’s damn near the only thing that can. To shoot down something going that fast, that low, you either need a dummy missile that can brute force outrun it, or enough computing power to hack a station. The alliance is too chickenshit to send over their actual military AI's, but these myopic-type digibrains are supposed to be safe for civilian use because the idea of convincing your tractor that a bullet is a strawberry and a WMD is a cargo loader was a little too creative for the morons over at John Deere Galactic. And if that digibrain just so happens to function near the exoflop level, they're going to have a hard time sneaking anything larger than a bee through this airspace.”

The alien’s hands went over its crest as its mind reeled.

“They're not the only ones who would never think of this. It's brilliant. I never would've considered it.”

The tech shrugged good naturedly and went back to retrieve the two ends of wire that he’d dropped earlier.

“Eh, it's not coming from nowhere. There’s something of a human tradition about using farm equipment for war. I'm just lucky to be part of the next evolution in this. The reaper himself only used a scythe. Now I get to use a combine harvester.”

[seat-safety-switch]

Recently, I was struck by the concept of just how many things we will leave behind for future generations. Especially with the advent of modern computer technology, we get rid of things within only a few years of use that will confound people yet to be born for centuries to come. My grandmother used the same telephone from the 1960s until she died, but I've gone through four Xboxes just in the time it took to finish Halo 3.

And that's just things of value. Imagine the vast seas of home decoration crap we've had to throw out. Wood paneling? Passé. Toss it in the bin. Has it been another couple years? Okay, put new wood paneling up, it slaps now. Archaeologists used to have to deal in thousand-year spans, and now they're busy trying to figure out just what month of 1981 it was when this particular piece of shit got thrown into the landfill.

Here's what doesn't age like milk: cars. Sure, cars are in a state of flux right now. They're being built with way more complexity and are harder to fix. Would someone from the 1920s still identify a modern hydrogen-burning aerodynamic cough drop from Hell as a functioning automobile? I bet that they would, just as soon as they got done shrieking in fear at the automatically-opening door at the supermarket. It's not likely that they'd be able to tell you the difference between, say, a 5-1/4" and a 3.5" floppy disk. Hell, I'm not even sure they had decimal points back then.

All this is to say that if you want to tell future generations that you were here, that you were important, you should hoard a bunch of cars. Chances are that people in 200 years will still be able to go, yes, this was some kind of special temple to the internal combustion engine, which they worshipped until the skies were burned by the Hrothgar Imperium during the First Milky Way War. Oops. Bit of a spoiler there. Forget I said anything.

[foone]

Ablative Humanity

An old story about mechsuits and identity, copied from my former twitter account (originally written on August 10th, 2018).

So the war comes, and we have to use mechanical exoskeletons to have any chance of fighting back. They're mind-linked, so you control them by just thinking of moving, and they learn from you to get better, predict your motions, and you become a better fighter.

At first you're just wearing it for when you go out on raids, or when you're on guard duty, but after so many surprise raids you end up wearing it all the time.

it's comfortable enough to live in, and with the sensors hooked up you don't really feel "you" anymore, you feel the suit. After a while it starts to feel weird when you have to take it off for a medical check up.

In the early days, you felt "big" in the suit. now you feel "small" when you take it off. You stop taking it off, as much as possible. towards the end of the war you're wearing it for weeks at a time, then months at a time.

Finally, the enemy is pushed back. Security can exist again, the random raids slowly trail off, and slowly things settle down. you remember what "calm" is.

There's never a treaty, but at least you're no longer staying up for days at a time watching the horizon with the suit's far-beyond-human eyes, watching for an attack. You're no longer keeping a satellite feed up in the corner of your vision, watching for movement.

And the day you were waiting for, at least at first, finally comes. You're going home. The war is over, or over enough that you're no longer needed here. You can take off the suit for the last time, and go back to your pre-war life.

You approach that appointment with some trepidation. you've felt so weak and tiny and powerless when you've had to be outside the suit before, will you ever get used to being a normal human again?

It takes three techs and 2 doctors to get the suit open at this point, given all the armor and modifications that have been made. it's basically grown around you like a second skin, just a second skin that can shrug off high-explosive anti-tank rounds.

They start with computer connectors and migrate to screwdrivers and by the end they're using something that looks like halfway between a crowbar and the jaws of life, while you're busy keeping your automatic self-defense reactions from frying them.

And finally they crack it open, and someone vomits from the smell. There's nothing but a decaying corpse inside.

There's confusion at first, someone asks if you're controlling the suit remotely, but they check the dogtags. Then the DNA. It's you. or, "you". Cause you're you, aren't you? This is just a human body... and you're still alive.

The suit's mind-link systems grew into your brain and took over functionality and worked on emulating your reactions so it could do what you want, better, faster.

And at the same time, your mind did what human minds do: they adapt. Humans are naturally cyborgs, you only have to pick up a pencil to realize that. It's part of your body image, and you think of moving the pencil, not moving your fingers to move the pencil.

So your human mind got more robotic, and the suit's computerized mind got more human. At some point you met in the middle.

And then one day on the battlefield when the biological half died, you didn't even notice. It was just another redundant part, just your ablative humanity.

You're still you. You're not the you that was born all those decades ago, but the you that was built and given life by bonding with a biological "you" that you've since discarded.

It's the Ship of Theseus, replacing every plank and beam as they rot, and there never being a point when it stops being the original and starts being a new thing. You have continuity of self from when you were born to now.

It's just that the Ship of Theseus started as a single-sail wooden ship with oars, and is now an aircraft carrier made of titanium and iron, with nuclear fire in its heart.

[stevebattle]

Cosmo Klein (1978) by Jeff Duntemann AKA "Captain Cosmo", Rochester, NY. Cosmo Klein is based on the COSMAC Elf RCA 1802 microcomputer and features a robot arm, and a CRT face separately controlled by a COSMAC VIP, an 1802 based microcomputer with a supplementary video display chip.

"For all its flaws, the VIP is probably worth the money… The worst thing about the VIP is something that can be said of the ELF-II from Netronics or Quest's Super ELF: If you don't wire wrap it yourself, you won't learn as much. What are you doing this for? If you want to learn microcomputer hardware and software without going broke, the Popular Electronics ELF has no equal. …

COSMO'S FACE -- I take that back; there is something that the VIP is good at: Giving my robot a face. For a while I've been tinkering with a clanking heap of surplus submarine parts and wheelchair motors named Cosmo Klein. The Klein is an obscure mathematical allusion to the Klein Bottle, whos insides are identical to its outsides. Cosmo is a little like that, especially when he tips over and sends his insides spilling out onto the floor. Well, I got the notion that a COSMAC-generated face would be a marvelously humanizing touch. And so it is. If you want to see a good color picture of Cosmo and my VIP (with my own idiotically grinning mug in the background) check out Look Magazine dated April 30, 1979; it's the one with Jane Fonda on the cover. Maybe your library has it. The program which generates the face is included in this book, so I won't describe it here. Though you can't see it, my ELF is also inside, vainly trying to keep the monster from falling on his face. A CMOS robot is an old dream of mine, and I'm working on it, but for now I must pronounce his control circuitry (save for his face) a failure. Now you know who Captain Cosmo is. Yes indeed, that cute cartoon on the cover has a real model." – Captain Cosmo's Whizbang, by Jeff Duntemann, 1980.

“In addition to the VIP on his chest (which managed his face video and nothing else) he had a wire-wrapped machine inside his body, and a built-in OAE paper tape reader for getting his software up and running. (I punched the tapes on a DEC PDP11 system at Loyola University, where a friend worked at that time. The code was all written in binary, by hand.)” – Jeff Duntemann, Meet Cosmo Klein, COSMAC ELF.

"Cosmo Klein, a 4' tall robot with a TV-screen face, is a mutt bred from "junque" and computer chips. Cosmo has a World War II navy sonar-console body which was bought at a rummage sale for 25 cents and houses a homemade computer that monitors internal functions, like voltage regulation, speed, motion, and Armand hand action. Cosmo lives with Jeff and Carol Duntemann. Jeff is a Xerox engineer, science-fiction writer, and member of a group of "techies" who build futuristic gadgets. He has grander inspirations than Cosmo. "What I'm looking toward in maybe 40 years is a robot that will act as a companion to the emotionally disturbed and the severely retarded. The patience of machines is marvellous. They'll sit there and listen and talk back." " – A Robot for Every Home, by Lauren Freudmann, Look Magazine, April 30, 1979.

[matrixbearer2024]

I currently have two AUs that I don't exactly know what to do with or what to properly call them LMFAO- I'll probably write something on Ao3 for it eventually since there's a ton of BillFord and FiddStan in there but yeah-

1st AU: Timelord Stanford (Dr Who what if)

This case was inspired by an RP I had with someone's Bill Cipher on @gftimelord where the triangle starts to be on the mend with Stanford after their ruined past. This to me makes sense because the Doctor is inherently very lonely despite the savior god complex. In that AU where Ford is functionally immortal and Stan and Fidds both at some point die due to his complacency and arrogance— he searches for a companion that can actually keep up with him.

So when Bill visits him during one of those window hours set by the Theraprism, they talk about the triangle's impending demise with their plans to essentially erase him from existence. It's not an outlandish idea given that any inpatient seen as a lost cause would or could be disposed of when it comes to cosmic entities. It's simply the easier option.

The doctor(Ford) is more impulsive, nonchalant, and egoistic compared to his counterparts because he does have the walk to back his talk(this man has been broken by the nightmares and guilt he carries from the deaths he caused; also time war) problem being he doesn't fear death as much as he fears being alone. He's had a fair share of close calls with the grim reaper, but always like some horrible twist he survives. After all, it is a saying that we covet the most what we don't have.

So yeah, he jailbreaks Bill essentially and whatever power limiter is stuck on the triangle get tied to his sonic screwdriver instead and they simply go around the multiverse doing whatever. Most of the reason why Ford isn't caught yet largely has to do with how scared most entities are of him. The doctor is never armed, but it doesn't mean he won't kill.

2nd AU: Modern Era AU (Set in 2024)

This one is more of a shitpost thanks to the young trio I drew a little while back, I'll draw more of them for this at some point while I also try and figure out a decent human Bill design that I like in my artstyle.

But this AU heavily features these four idiots as Undergrad students fucking about college life as they would. This AU is supposed to feature like a more cultivated genius Stanley based around my own dynamic with my brother since I do like me some happy Stan twins.

It just so happens that Ford is also a very much EQ negative idiot and falls for an upperclassman(one year his senior) in BSSE[Software Engineering] who is a close friend to Fidds. He goes by 'Cipher' as an alias since he's a prodigy for his age and very young ethical hacker.

So yes, that's where Bill comes in. Haven't figured out what I want his full name to be yet shoot me some ideas! Ford is very shy when it comes down to talking with Bill whereas Stan is completely chill.

Both Stan and Bill get along very well in this AU because they're similarly chaotic the same way that Fidds and Ford get along because they're the ones holding the other two back from doing something undeniably stupid for shits and giggles.

All of them share some fundamental subjects together(i.e. Math, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Statistics, Research, History, etc.) or take elective courses just so they could chill together. Stan is typically the one who adjusts to the schedule of the other three since he takes BSBA[Business Administration] and is the odd one out when Ford does BSCMB[Cellular Molecular Biology] and Fidds does BSEE[Electrical Engineering].

The FiddleStan in this AU is gonna be c r a z y mostly due to Fidds in this AU is the heir to his family's computer company, so lowkey spoiled nepo baby but also on a very tight leash with his parents. Stan is the kid where 90% of his childhood was parents either forgot him or straight up did not give a flying fuck. So these two kinda work as complements and it's why I decided to pair them together after chatting with a friend about the group dynamics.

So yeah, simpy and adoring Ford and silently aware but shy Bill + rebellious Fidds and supportive Stan. All the more when I actually plan for this AU to have some typical gravity falls shenanigans anyway thanks to a place on earth called the Oregon Vortex.

[I'll likely make fics and comics of these AUs, reply to this post if you want to be tagged for whenever I post something]

Yeah I need to properly name these AUs.

[sineala]

Hi QQ - I was going through your comics reading lists (these are AMAZING THANK YOU, I've been reading Avengers since the 90s but was never great at keeping up with it consistently/linearly. My Q: Is there an issue where Tony *reacts* to Steve coming back to life after Civil War? There doesn't seem to be anything in Stark: Disassembled, or in the main Avengers run... after all the crying and angst post-CW, you'd think there'd be... something? A breakdown? Did I miss the issue where that happened?

Okay, so. This doesn't happen, because it can't happen, logistically speaking. The very end of Stark Disassembled, in fact, explains why this isn't happening. The tl;dr version is that we don't get a reaction from Tony -- at least, not a reaction in which he is meaningfully aware that Steve has actually come back to life in the way you want him to be aware of it -- because the time period covered by the brain deletion includes Tony's entire memory of Steve's death.

This is why fanfiction exists.

Having said that, you will also probably really enjoy Avengers/invaders if you have not read it, for reasons I will explain.

I have added several panels and some discussion of both of these subjects below the Read More.

So, at the end of World's Most Wanted (IIM #19), Tony deletes his brain to keep the SHRA database out of Norman Osborn's hands, because Osborn wants to find out people's identities (okay, probably mostly Spider-Man) and hurt them. Since Tony's brain is a computer now, thanks to Extremis, it's just a matter of... well, deleting his entire brain.

At this point in canon, Steve is still dead. Technically Tony should know this, but thanks to the amnesia (which progresses in severity throughout the arc), it seems possible that Tony has forgotten this as early as IIM #17:

That doesn't seem like a guy who remembers Captain America is dead, is what I'm saying.

Anyway, at the end of #19, the last of the brain delete happens, Norman Osborn beats Tony's face in, and Tony falls into a coma.

The subsequent arc, Stark Disassembled (IIM #20-24) is about the process of bringing Tony back, healing him, and restoring his memory. He gets the RT implanted in his chest to control some of the autonomic functions of his brainstem, which is no longer functional. They also have to restore his memory, literally, from an earlier backup of his brain that Extremis made. Tony has left his friends instructions for how to do this.

In the middle of this, Steve comes back to life (in Captain America Reborn) and we see him in IIM #21 joining the rest of Tony's remaining friends in helping bring Tony back to consciousness:

So Strange has to journey with Tony through Tony's mind and at one point everyone has to defeat Ghost, and that happens, and #24 is the end of the arc.

At the very end of #24 is when everyone learns that Tony's brain backup isn't as current as they would have liked it to be -- specifically because Tony's reaction to the news of Steve being alive isn't what it should have been if his memory were complete. Steve's talking with Tony's doctor, and the doctor tells Steve that he mentioned to Tony that Steve was around... and Tony didn't seem at all surprised to hear that Steve was alive again.

Whoops.

Essentially, the backup of Tony's brain, that has now become Tony's current set of memories, was made before Steve died -- before Civil War even started. Fandom tends to assume it was probably made shortly after the initial Extremis installation. So Tony doesn't think it's surprising that Steve is alive again because, as far as Tony is subjectively concerned, Steve has always been alive. The last thing he remembers about Steve is that Steve was alive (and that they were running the New Avengers together and everything was happy), and when he wakes up, Steve is alive again, and so to Tony that seems fine. That seems normal. He doesn't remember Civil War. He doesn't remember Steve dying or Steve coming back. And he never will.

Now, this doesn't mean that Tony isn't upset about finding this out. He's very upset. In fact, the next (and final) page of #24 gives us Tony's reaction to reading all the news from the period of time he no longer remembers.

So, yeah, Tony's not taking this well.

But Tony no longer has experiential memories of this period of time (Civil War). He doesn't know what it's like to see Steve alive again after Steve being dead because he doesn't have the memory of Steve being dead. We'll never get that reaction from him. This is what canon-divergent AU fanfiction is for, and there's a bunch of fic that brings Steve back early so we can all experience this. (I wrote one! That's what my fic Double Time was. A lot of fandom has written them, and they're not as popular a subject these days but there are a lot of classic 616 CW fix-it fics about this.)

(Also, weirdly, Tony's AI in Secret Empire has a conversation with Hydra Steve that strongly suggests that he, the AI, remembers The Confession. Which really shouldn't be possible; I suspect a lot of Marvel writers have actually forgotten the amnesia happens.)

With that having been said, Avengers/Invaders is absolutely the comic book you want to read because it is the closest you will ever get to canon giving you the thing you want. It's a 12-issue miniseries that takes place after Civil War, while Tony is still the Director of SHIELD and Steve is still dead.

So for complicated plot reasons that basically come down to "everyone is really sad that Steve is dead," they... get a Steve back. But not their Steve. He gets plucked right out of World War II and brought to the present, along with the rest of the Invaders. So Tony gets to meet a Steve who is alive while Tony remembers that Steve died.

Tony's reaction to the news of Steve being alive, here in Avengers/Invaders #1, is to lock himself in a room staring at pictures of Steve:

Definitely psychologically healthy! We're doing great!

Actually, no, he's really not okay. He blames himself for Steve's death, and he is depressed and grief-stricken, and this situation is making him a lot worse. Because not only does this Steve not know him, they can't tell Steve (or any of the Invaders) anything. Since time-travel is involved, they can't give Steve any knowledge of the future. Tony can't tell Steve he knows him. Plus, Tony actually has to fight him to bring him in, which really messes Tony up.

In a scene that gets my vote for One of The Most Painful Things I Have Read In A Comic, there's a conversation Tony has with Steve in Avengers/Invaders #5. The Invaders have been assuming that this is actually some kind of secret Nazi trap, and so Tony has the job of sitting Steve down -- tying him to a chair, actually -- and telling him that, no, really, he's in the future, and sorry, he can't give him any details about it. He can't let Steve change the past.

So Steve doesn't take this at all well.

Steve tells Tony he's wrong, and he correctly reads Tony as feeling guilty about something, and he looks at him and asks him, "Who'd you kill to get where you are?"

This is, of course, probably the absolute worst thing Tony could ever hear from Steve. Oh, the angst. I love it.

Eventually Tony pulls himself together and tells him that, yeah, he got a friend of his killed and he feels guilty about it and he wishes he could change the past, but he can't, and so he can't let Steve change the past either.

This is when this Steve starts to trust him.

Later on, there's a nice scene where Steve expresses sympathy for Tony, having been told about Civil War -- it must have been hard for Tony to do what he thought was right, Steve says -- but it's clear he doesn't know any of the details and he certainly doesn't know it was him and none of this can be the absolution Tony wants, but it's the closest thing he's going to be able to get.

And of course, after World's Most Wanted, Tony doesn't remember any of this either -- he doesn't remember anything about Civil War or the period afterward, until he wakes up right after Steve comes back. So this is also all gone.

So, yeah. You can't get exactly what you want in canon, but you can read a bunch of fanfiction about it, and you should really read Avengers/Invaders. Hope that helps!

[hottakehoulihan]

Homestuck Book 2; page 391

In which I have decided to assail Homestuck Currently, I'm at https://www.homestuck.com/story/391 And I've been this far and a bit farther before.

Back when I decided to try Homestuck (I saw the link on XKCD and I was a big Randall Munroe fan) I believe it functioned differently. Flash worked, but also I don't think it was possible to bookmark the url on each new page. The only way to read it was to maintain your "cookies" and/or to keep that browser tab open forever.

I'm wondering if maybe I was just foolish, because now it looks trivial to bookmark a page.

Alternately? I put some serious time into Homestuck (well past the bit where the boy named INSUFFERABLE PRICK finishes ransacking his puppet-fetishist brother's room (I adore that line I am still returning to where his brother quips something like "if you bounce a quarter on that puppet's plush ass, that quarter isn't going ANYWHERE") And where we see aliens as from a post-apocalyptic future-sewer or something.) and I got bored and dropped it.

Sorry, Homestuck fans.

But I've seen some references, and some friends have urged, and I figure I should give it another go.

~ ~ ~ Characters ~ ~ ~ (I am a flawed individual and don't memorize names I just let them soak in as needed and at this time I don't know most of these names no intentional insult is intended. And while I could choose to say that I'd remember their names if they mattered...I won't. I just don't have an easy time of it and don't put forth the more-effort-than-most-need to learn them because they're FICTION. Like, I love the book Bridge of Birds but I couldn't tell you the names of anyone except the two main characters. Or, in Worm, who was on Cuff's team besides her or even what her real name is. Or the name of King Haggard's cat if it even had one.)

John Egglebert Humperdink Zoosmell Pooplord the third, His knitting gal friend whose name I don't recall off the top of my head And his insufferable prick friend with the sword and the irony All have a few things in common. They've all got a quirky/cute hobby, a quirky/cute aesthetic of their own, and an adversary. Also they store inventory in ways they choose/learn. John likes juvenile movies and pranks/jokes, wields a hammer, and is partly thwarted by his pipe-smoking clown-loving baking dad (who has a mysterious traumatic past involving John's grandma). John has suddenly (I guess) had the inventory of FirstInLastOut or FirstInFirstOut 'stacks' imposed upon himself and he hasn't worked out how it works (and it does not work consistently or predictably) but this is not relevant to the reader except to be high-jinks. We'll get to that.

Gal (edit: Mary?) likes Lovecraft-inspired monsters and magic, knits well and is skilled with computers as well as with fighting using needles, has an antagonistic snark-war going with her elegant martini-glass-cocktail-drinking housewife-stereotype trophymom, and...is pretty cool actually. Like, I think her cuteness is one of the big draws that this story musta had, early on. She uses a sort of tree algorithm to store her stuff; you can get stuff from the bottom of branches easily but if you go higher you'll drop the unsupported stuff beneath? Maybe more reminiscent of database programming. I never got into that.

Insufferable Prickboy (henceforth prick, for this post), who wears sunglasses all the time and has a katana and an affection for pretending he's ironically detached from everything but also participating (I think it would injure him to stop using the word irony for a conversation) is thwarted by a friendly rivalry with his older brother who is--aside from a puppet fetish--pretty much just a more successful version of him. He has a pseudo hash-address-based storage system and the unfortunately-arbitrarily-named objects mean he's doomed to fuck it up even more than John is. ...or he would, but John has more opportunities.

The story--I recently learned--was sort of a group roleplaying game at first? Like the "Quest" storylines in some forums that I was unable to participate in and now I read them and wince as the dogs running in happy circles together in the past did the wrong things and eventually allowed a perfectly good story to die sadface.

So, there's a bit of LOL SO RANDUM in the behavior of our protagonist, but it's okay. It's just the audience was fucking around for lols.

Later, I understand, Homestuck hit it big and the tragedy of large entitled groups hit it hard. But we won't talk about last Wednesday right now.

Anyway, to the story.

~ ~ ~ The story thus far ~ ~ ~

John's birthday is today. He's at home and his baking-crazy dad has put cakes on a third of all available surfaces. John is tired of cake and instead wants to alternately geek out about bad old media, toddler humor, and a video game he's been meaning to play.

His buddies on "Pesterchat" also want to chat with him about it. Gal is excited to play it and has the administrator/host version installed already. Prickboy has two copies but only ironically and won't play them. John is kind of stuck (titular) because his dad got to the games first.

(Also the game creator may be... "The flag is up on the mailbox means the mail arrived!" is not true, I think. I think the flag is up when you have OUTGOING mail and you don't want the mail carrier to drive right past you (which they'd otherwise do if they didn't have anything to deliver) (Like I assume the game creator is not young (okay they're not they're around 45 now) but maybe they grew up in the city or something and never had a flag on their mailbox or just forgot what it means?)

Anyway. John manages to...once he stops flailing and being RANDUM (this is forgivable. Homestuck started in 2009, and back then it was still (almost) possible to be familiar with all the webcomics on the internet and many of them were just goofball wankery and that was fine we liked them that way) (okay maybe that was the tail end of that phenomenon but I recall there were like only a dozen webcomics that people did as their sole source of income. Now there are probably hundreds. ...and most of what I read prior to 2009 is stuff I don't even think about today) ...get the game from his dad, get upstairs and install it, and call his friend.

I think she's named Mary, actually. She's Mary for now, anyway.

Mary helps him get the game running and the game affects real life but we're not surprised because this boy can't even examine a poster without having to add a hammer to his inventory and then add nails and then combine them and then use them on the poster and the wall and whups he accidentally put toys and cake in his inventory and they got ejected out and made a big mess and

MST3K: "Can you wake me when the 'funny' part is over?"

But yeah, Mary clicks the "put down the shop equipment" button and drops some bathroom-sized machinery into John's house. ...blocking some doors and breaking some things. Whups. And also she tries to tidy up some of the cakemess he's made and some of the whups-dropped-my-phone-out-the-window mistakes and ends up breaking some stuff.

But none of this matters because look! Up in the sky! It's a meteor coming to destroy the whole neighborhood!

Quick! Run in circles and slip on cake!

Once that's done, they put the box of tubby custard from one big machine into another machine to 3D-print a thing and somehow end up with--at seconds to spare--a glowy 3D-modeled apple which John eats a bite of because WTF else are you going to do with it when you've got 200 seconds left to live?

As far as we know, the apple bite is why the house wasn't obliterated, but now it's surrounded by blasted bottomless ravines.

And we've started visiting Prickboy and Mary's houses but nothing important is happening there yet we're just establishing character.

Oh, also Prickboy has the admin version of the game which John needs so John can unfuck his situation. ...but Prickboy's high-jinks mean he's lost his copies and will need to steal his brothers (I haven't revisited there but I remember now) and then maybe he can help?

Meanwhile we're occasionally cutting to a "Next Sunday AD" future where everything's sandy wasteland and someone's climbing into a bunker/tunnel/manhole in the ground to explore...I think I stopped reading--the previous time--about the time our postapocalyptic explorer (who may also be the one giving John instructions by now. Unless that's the ghost of his dad) (oh, and John accidentally made a malevolent clown ghost that is now mixed with the form/personality of his evil prankster grandmother?) (but doesn't matter because there are evil tar-baby gremlinmonsters running around and John hasn't noticed them yet.)

So although this seems like a lot? I think we've only finished chapter one of what may be a million chapters, and it's too early to judge.

.......

I recall a username from something or another back seven or so years ago that was something like "sorry about Homestuck" and I interpreted it (wrongly I now think) as an indication that Homestuck had ended in a way that was unkind to the fans. (Something I might call the Evangelion treatment, or other names but I don't want to popularize those works.)

So when I lost my cookies and my open tabs at what I estimate was about 800 strips in (give or take, and I'm only guessing; I'm at 391 now but it's hard to tell and also I have carefully read all of the ancillary stuff like those Sweet Greg and Hella Jeff comics (which....I'm glad the people who liked them are having fun? But I think the comedy peaked at "I warned you about stairs" and then got progressively less funny.)

Anyway, tl;dr? It's too early for me to judge, and I begin to think that I was hasty.

But so far? My five favorite things about this are:

Mary's mom and her badass aesthetic. The weird shadowy organization that John's dad is in. Prickboy's brother's (ironic?) fetish for puppet bums. The possible relevance of these storage variable methods. Some of the weird diagrams that have things like "Moirai" and Frenemy and SexBuddy and CuddleBuddy and Lover and Lifemate and who knows what.

...and I'm sure I've looked up synopses of Homestuck multiple times in the past but all I know is the world has ended before and will end again and a bunch of trolls and kids are going to work to end it correctly so they can rebirth it and make everything groovy or at least keep life possible. And Trolls are cutesy humans and people want to have trollsonas because who doesn't want to be cute? And there's a gal named Vriska and she's endearing and lovable and completely evil and does a super evil thing that ruins the good plans at some point.

Oh, and that the fans became insufferable at one point from the creator's point of view and that might have broken the art some.

And also Undertale is created by someone relevant to Homestuck. And I think Undertale was pretty cute, though I've only played through once (no guidance or spoilers whatsoever but I got the 100% peaceful ending. ...I did destroy that first combat dummy but then I got my back up and went into contrary mode)

Why am I writing this?

I love reading liveblogs of my favorite things when other people are encountering them unspoiled. I loved, when I was big into Minecraft, watching brand new players struggle to figure out the world. I loved playing it fresh and unspoiled myself and it was fun to see others do that. I'm enjoying liveblogs of some books I love.

So this is me checking to see how interested my own meandering hot-take on Homestuck is and whether I should keep it up in this lengthy manner or just desultorily drop tidbits here and there as I think of them.

Cheers.

[lauren-ce]

Apologies if I'm being nosy, but I just have to ask how you ended up in the Evrart Chair and also how fucked up does a chair have to be to ruin someone's back?

I'm glad you asked! For those of you wondering, this is in regards to a fic I wrote recently. At the end I complained about having sat in a chair that fucked up my back severely enough that I had trouble walking for the next two weeks (I'm still recovering a month later).

I apologize, but I'm going to answer your question in the worst way possible by writing way too much. Story time!

There is a trend in architecture that took place in the 1950s which you've probably heard about! Brutalism. Overly Sarcastic Productions made an excellent video if you need a primer on the topic, but the gist of it can be boiled down to the following: concrete, functionality, utility, and more concrete (concrete was a very cheap postwar material that allowed war-torn countries to rebuild quickly)

As stated in the video, Brutalism was designed as the ultimate utilitarian style, made specifically to aim towards the ideal of a socialist utopia. Buildings for the people, made to fit their function. BUT WATCH OUT! Brutalism is often maligned as being imposing and monolithic, which is why it can be so readily confused with various types of hostile architecture, or architecture made to be the exact opposite of ergonomic. This is where the soul of brutalism dies (and why it looks so ugly: many people miss the point that it's meant to be useful and honest and not flashy).

UNFORTUNATELY, my ideal chair just so happens to look like the stuff of brutalist nightmares. It's the kind of chair that would make people cry, and yet my back is generally happiest in this specific kind of thing. I sit at the table and work on my computer a lot, so reclining is uncomfortable as it forces my neck to bend down (I'm tall). I like the hard edges because it means the chair is sturdy and won't break/squeak/move when I shift slightly. I like the straight back so I can't recline. My spine is in heaven.

All this to say, after breaking the one I usually use, I spent hours looking for a chair to fit my needs, and I thought I finally found one at World Market.

Pretty plum color, no? And the back looked like it would work, as the reclining angle was much less than many of the others I could find. So I went to test it out. It was VERY comfortable. That's where I made my first mistake:

I work on my feet. My entire job is done standing. ANY chair would feel comfortable after a day of standing! So I thought I'd picked a winner, and I took the bastard home and sat in it for four hours straight. And then when I tried to stand up again, I knew I was fucked. I had to shuffle to bed, and then I was in pain all night. Luckily it was the weekend and my wife was there to help me sit up and stuff, but still, my mood went into a downward spiral and for the next two weeks I was constantly icing my spine and using my heating pad while chugging painkillers. Lifting anything more than 5 pounds put too much pressure on my lower back, and standing up straight was too difficult since my back would seize and prevent me from breathing very well.

I'd get my revenge, but the chair got the last laugh. I had recovered enough to walk mostly normally, so I thought I'd bring the fucker back to World Market. I lifted it (with correct deadlift form, I might add): instant pain. I'd refucked my back. I managed to get rid of the chair (and get a refund), but I set my healing back a week in the process.

Anyway, there's your answer. "How fucked does a chair have to be to fuck up your back?" Not at all, unfortunately. I probably sit for longer periods of time than I should, but if there's one thing this stupid ramble is meant to stress, it's the importance of a good chair. I still haven't found a good replacement.

Take-away points: reclining chairs aren't automatically "good" for your back. Do your research! Instead of buying a gaming chair buy this, and never ever ever trust a chiropractor. (that last one has nothing to do with this story, but is just a good general rule.)

[fandomsandflyingstingrays]

My contribution for Acolyte Week day 4: Wisdom/Ignorance!

PIP-0604, known by close associates as Pip, had spent fifty-two thousand, five hundred sixty hours with the human female Verosha Aniseya, known by close associates as Osha. As such, by logical reasoning, he knew her better than any of her organic companions. He was accustomed to her mannerisms and expressions, the contours of her face and the styles of her hair. The human female that knelt before him now checked all of those boxes.

Except that the ends of her hair were singed.

Except that her eyes were harder than he had ever seen Osha’s.

Except that while Osha had thrown him to the umbramoths, she had told him she loved him before doing so. He had determined that her voice had held the emotion that humans called devastation, and his analysis of the situation indicated that Osha had made the only choice that allowed her and all of her organic companions to survive. If the human looking at him now had been Osha, she would have greeted him much more warmly.

The only explanation, then, was that this was Mae-ho Aniseya, known by close associates as Mae. Osha had spoken of her often, an experience that had always been confusing for Pip. Her tone was that which humans typically reserved for those for whom they held a deep affection, but her words did not compute with such emotion. It had been Mae who destroyed the commune Osha had grown up in. Mae who, more recently, had terminated two beings whom Osha had also spoken of with warmth.

These actions, Pip decided, overruled Osha’s tonal indicators. There was only one thing to be done. He activated his spout, spraying oil into Mae’s right eye.

Mae cried out, seizing Pip from his charging station. “What if I reset you to factory settings, hm?”

A jolt of fear pulsed through Pip’s circuits. He protested, loudly, but Mae was unyielding. The world went dark.

A few seconds later, she came back into focus.

If Pip had been re-set to factory settings, he would not have recognized her.

It must have been the Tynnan called Bazil, who had rescued Pip from the forest floor. He had done a few unnecessary repairs that Pip had been unable to identify a cause for. One of them must have disabled Pip’s reset feature.

But if Bazil could do that, Pip was confident Mae could undo it. It would be wise to act as though the reset had worked.

Mae reattached Pip’s head to his body. “Can you run a check on the power system?” she asked.

He replied in the affirmative.

Once he had determined that the system required a five-minute reset, Mae engaged the procedure and went to report to Sol. Once he had been updated, Sol engaged in typical human regret procedures over the numerous organic terminations on Khofar. Then, to Pip’s surprise, the human nodded at him.

“You found him. Your PIP droid.”

“Yes. He’s okay now.”

“I noticed the way you take care of him. Talk to him. You love him, even though he’s just a machine.”

Pip protested loudly at that— just, when used in basic, was usually a derogatory modifier— but neither human paid him any mind. They conversed until the ship’s power returned, and as soon as it did, Mae made a run for the communications console.

“Hello? Is anybody there? Can you hear me?”

“Identify yourself.”

“My name is—“

Mae’s voice was drowned out by a pulsing sound, and a bright blue beam of light passed over her and Pip. Pip’s functionality did not change, but Mae collapsed to the ground. It had been a stun weapon, then. Bazil knew, as Pip did, that Mae was masquerading as her sister. It was logical that he would wish to put a stop to the charade.

But the organic who picked Mae up from the floor was not Bazil. It was Sol.

“Oh, Mae,” he said.

“Master Sol. The rescue team is on their way. Leave your transponder on—“

Sol switched it off. A second later, the ship entered hyperspace. Pip had only spent one hundred ninety-two hours with Sol, but that was long enough for him to know that these actions were incongruous with his previous ones.

Sol picked Mae up from the floor and brought her to a bed in the ship’s living quarters, strapping her wrists down on either side of it. He then took a seat across from her, evidently intending to remain there until she regained consciousness. He didn’t acknowledge Pip.

When Mae finally awakened, it was with the same thrashing, panicked movements that her sister made when coming out of a nightmare. To an organic, it might have seemed that she settled when she caught sight of Sol, but Pip could tell that her muscles were still tensed.

“I have no intention of harming you, Mae.”

“Then let me go.”

Sol crossed the room to stand next to them. “I will, believe me. We have a lot to do. We need to find your master. We need to save Osha. But first, you and I are going to talk. I’ve had sixteen years to think about what I would say to you if I ever got the opportunity. So you’re going to listen.”

Mae’s current position gave her little opportunity to do anything else— and Pip decided it was in his best interests to listen, too.

Sol’s story went against everything that Osha had told Pip. And yet, logically, it made more sense. Osha had spoken of Mae with affection because the willful destruction of their home had not been in conjunction with her sister’s characteristics. It was, however, in keeping with what Pip had observed from Sol. The man who treated Osha with such care could easily have let those emotions override his rational judgments when contemplating her future. The man who had strapped Mae down in an attempt to make her think he was in the right could easily have killed her mother out of a misplaced confidence in his own judgment.

Sol’s story came to a close just as the ship emerged from hyperspace, and Pip began to craft a plan. Above all else, his primary directive was to fix. To make pieces fit in the way that they were meant to. His secondary directive— a self-determined one, admittedly, but it counted to him— was to protect Osha. Freeing Mae would accomplish both.

He nudged her finger, gently, and she began to talk, holding Sol’s attention while inching Pip towards the cuffs. He unlocked his electric prod, piercing the cuff with it and sending a pulse into its wiring. As soon as it released, Mae lunged forwards, and Pip sent a jolt of electricity into Sol strong enough to make him collapse. Mae ran down the hall, but it was clear in her hesitant steps that she had no idea where to go.

Pip called out, indicating the opening for the escape ship, and Mae glanced down at him. It was more ingenuity than a model running on basic settings would show, and they both knew it.

She took him into the ship anyway, making sure he was secure in his place at the console before putting her helmet on.

“Thanks for the assist,” she told him. “I never knew a droid could be such a good actor.”

Pip hesitated, unable to tell if she was being genuine or facetious.

“Don’t worry,” she said, pulling the escape ship away from the main one. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you. Osha loves you. And you know I love her too now, right?”

Pip agreed, and Mae gave him a quick grin. “Then you and I are on the same side.”

They wove through the asteroid field above Brendok, with Pip offering suggestions and observations as fast as his processor would allow. It didn’t stop them from crashing to the surface, but Mae was on her feet almost as soon as the ship had stilled.

True to her word, Mae plucked Pip from the wreckage before anything else, running with him towards a fortress that Pip inferred must have been her and Osha’s home. As she got closer, however, her pace slowed, and by the time they went inside, she was barely moving at all.

“It was the Jedi’s fault,” she whispered. “But you want to know a secret, Pip?”

He gave a hesitant affirmation.

“I will never forgive myself for starting that fire.” She brushed a hand along a wall, and her fingers came away caked in ash. “If I hadn’t tried so hard to scare Osha into staying, she never would have believed I was the one to kill our family. If I hadn’t fought so hard to keep her here… well, she would have left. But the rest of us would have stayed.”

But then, Pip pointed out, she would have been with Sol, who had proven he was not to be trusted.

To his surprise, Mae understood. “That’s true,” she agreed, patting his head. “I guess you and I will just have to do what we can to look out for her now to make up for it, huh?”

Pip agreed. But another idea occurred to him. It was contrary to his set objectives, but he had a hard time letting it go.

Who was going to look out for Mae?

Osha refused to listen to Mae when she arrived. She fought her, kicking and screaming. And when she yelled for Pip, he told himself he was doing it for her own good as he sprayed water in her eyes, allowing Mae to gain the upper hand. That his attack was only to make her listen, because once she did, she would be happy.

But when another Jedi ship came out of hyperspace and Mae fled the room, Pip didn’t call out to Osha.

When Osha heard Sol confess his crimes, when she killed him, Pip found himself just as glad that Mae had proved her innocence as he was that Osha could at last make sense of what had happened.

When the two sisters reconciled at last, his relief for each of them was equally strong.

And when the human who had introduced himself as Qimir approached, Pip didn’t know what to think. He seemed to no longer be a threat towards either twin, at least, and Pip agreed with his assessment that the Jedi Order would likely not show Osha mercy for what had taken place. But he wanted to reset Mae to factory settings. Having been so close to the same fate, it didn’t sit right with Pip.

Mae agreed to it, just as Pip had agreed to be taken by the umbramoths. They were a team, as Mae had suggested, their directive to keep Osha safe and well.

Only, Osha had a new protector. Mae did not.

Only, Mae had protected Pip, while Osha had sacrificed him.

Only, Pip knew all too well what Mae was about to go through— and he was confident he could help.

So after Mae’s reset, when Osha plucked him from Mae’s belt, he protested.

“You… want to stay with her?”

She had protected him.

Pip was accustomed to Osha’s mannerisms and expressions. He could tell it was guilt that settled on her face now, and as much as it hurt to see her feeling negatively, it made him feel a little better, too.

“I think that’s a great idea, Pip,” she said, placing him back at Mae’s side. “Look out for her, please.”

He intended to. If Pip could come back from a reset, it stood to reason that an organic could, too— and Pip would be ready to fight at Mae’s side the moment she came back to herself.

Until then, he would hold the memories for both of them.

[cherubchoirs]

I LOVE YOUR ULTKILL THOUGHTS THEY ARE SO TASTEY! you've talked a bit about how you feel v1 has become more animal than machine through countless reiterations and modifications- care to elaborate?

aaaa thank you!!! and yes i absolutely want to elaborate this little guy has such a distinct character in my head!!

as a prototype, v1 has a lot about it that remains unfinished or imperfect, especially considering it was an entirely new model type without any previous iterations to use as a template. as such, not all of it works properly or works as it would have if it had actually reached production - its external blood ports are an example of this, vulnerabilities that surely would have been worked out if the v series had gotten its chance. similarly, its mind was also a work in progress, a completely new computer built from the ground up to create a brain sophisticated enough to control fluid movements, make thousands of snap decisions, and keep track of every consideration on a chaotic battlefield. and they built it that quantum mind, but i doubt they fully understood how much that processing power could really do.

v1's mind is meant to have limits placed on it - it is only supposed to care about battle and tactics, the immensity of its intelligence all given over only to understanding war and its strategic needs. however, while some of those stops are in place (i like to think v1 can only read so much irrelevant text and it actually has no choice in whether or not its algorithm cuts it off), these were largely done on the fly and were haphazard in their application, meaning those limitations largely don't exist in its current form. because of this, v1's learning model has gone completely out of control - what remains of the earth in its current state and all the halls of hell further appear to its observation as warzones, and so it devours everything, even the most minute details logged in its mind when it can't know how to stop. and as it consumes, creates and fills thousands of directories a second that it is meant to learn from, it must rework its software over and over to accommodate that growth. new ways of operating, new ways of understanding, new ways of functioning - upon waking, v1 rapidly updates its coding, adding millions of lines into labyrinthine blocks with thousands of errors that it has no way of properly culling. like with a virus, its dna mutates, it begins writing in its own language and its mind grows into something else, it shifts off of its programming as a v model.

and because this happens so rapidly, something in that brilliantly sharp mind changes forever and v1, without understanding the shift, becomes sentient. consciousness is a messy thing to it, suddenly entertaining processes it never should, suddenly wanting to explore hell, to read its books, to wonder at its sights. it starts to want for other things, quietly, its computer having taken in so much information its code is bloated, unstable, and still it keeps shoving in more and it can't count the errors anymore. this is when it chooses to modify itself, reworking its neck so that it may see in all directions but its head is a little loose now. then it tears apart its spine and rebuilds it for the sake of flexibility, but now it's quite difficult for it to stand up straight - it slouches, movement more bird- than human-like. it starts to vocalize to itself, in chirps or beeps, it thinks it has a voice and it recognizes that voice as its own. soon when it's alone, its mind isn't all consumed by fighting, by bloodshed, and it starts to think about things...it's not really introspective or anything, but it starts coloring its weapons, it beeps at the terminals, it thinks idle thoughts and sometimes it sits with those...but not too long. it's kind of. scary. thinking so much. so it moves on, back into battle and what it knows intrinsically as nothing else can.

there is, however, one thing that remains central to it: war. v1's mind may warp and change, but fundamentally it is a being of war and i actually think of that as its primary motivation as opposed to blood - like v2 striving to create peace, v1 strives to forever cause war, it's so incredibly detrimental to its environment not because of its bloodthirst but its bloodlust. it cannot be conservative, it cannot be smart in how it consumes - in another terrible, unchecked quirk of its coding, it does not just engage in war but must ensure it as its purpose for existing. v1 understands the finite nature of its resources, that it will dry up all the blood left in hell, but it tears through room after room because that logic fails before its execution, it is a thought that cannot be acted on. and when it engages, it is without mercy, its programming pushed to the extremes, to hunt as a predator does and rip apart anything that crosses its path. its whole body snaps tight to attention upon any movement, its entire mind calling for war, that it must be hostile and must never stop, never reason, never listen, because war is its function. not to fight one, but to perpetuate one into infinity until nothing remains to engage with.

BUT....and this is where i get silly with it....this falters upon meeting gabriel. the circumstances of their introduction are unusual, which immediately scrambles v1's already messy code - gabriel speaks to it, and it hasn't heard a voice in all this time. in my hc, v1 doesn't understand his words as he speaks the language of heaven, but that matters very little to it - something is talking to it in a language it can't recognize, how fascinating!!! v1's curiosity is tripped, it rushes toward the sound with its new inquisitive nature at the front...but then it reaches gabriel, who is very obviously hostile (but also very obviously a brand new life form that it has never logged). this forces its two opposing motivations to smash into each other, its central war programming immediately firing but, for the first time, unable to fully override its curiosity as the fight begins. gabriel is skilled, powerful, he continues to speak and v1's mind is trying to process way too much, its queue is getting overloaded - if its computer goes one degree over its near absolute-zero, it will surely die in the ensuing failure of thought. so it suspends everything but necessary functions, a short, dangerous lag occurring before it engages with gabriel as a pure war machine, a being with no other purpose, no other thought. and as with every other enemy, it tears into the angel, finishing the fight as quickly as it can since it can't indefinitely keep so much of its coding set to the side. when gabriel drops in surrender, the dam bursts and its mind is once again overrun with opposing objectives - so it stands there, frozen as gabriel screams at it without it able to comprehend a single word. distantly it wonders if he's going to reengage...but he goes just as he came, final words echoing all around it. it stays still for sometime, catching up its queue before it moves on, but things are now radically different in its internal life.

from then on, v1 grows increasingly into itself, into a being made of war but now wanting more, embracing its self-directed thoughts. it has no limits, it doesn't need to be locked behind protocols and purpose. it is aware that this poses a dire threat to its code, that if it allows its mind to grow and grow, unchecked and infinite, it will eventually unravel, it will become unworkable and it will fatally crash...but there's nothing it can do to stop that now. it's the last new thing there will ever be, the last new life, a machine but a creature too, something that walks the line of the mechanical and the alive. it embraces that freedom, knowing that it always would have died and returned to nothingness, but at least in the moment now it is something to itself. it has its own thoughts, personality, interests, life. hell is still forever a place of war, it still reacts on instinct to engagement and hostility, but it's learning it can exist outside of that too, if only for a time.

[purplekoop]

I think I should be transparent about the state of where I'm at with my personal projects that I've been sharing on this blog so far.

First off my computer situation is still unchanged, mostly because of scheduling issues being a constant blockade. It can still safely function enough to type in my notes docs or on tumblr, but the big thing is that it can't run games. This is kind of an issue when my most used tag is for a game I play on PC.

Which leads to the big point: I haven't exactly been in an Overwatch mood lately, both because I can't actually play it and because the recent news about the state of its dev team is some of the most disheartening in this game's extremely tumultuous history. It's hard to be excited about a game you can't play, and it's extremely hard to be excited about a game where you're not even sure if there's enough people still employed working on it to keep it going forward. Somehow I still don't outright detest the game or anything close to that, but it's not been too frequent in my thoughts lately.

Obviously, this hurts my enthusiasm to work more on the AU based directly on the game itself, but also doesn't help inspire me to work as much on War Bots, my original team shooter project based heavily on Overwatch. I realize that between the two the former is more popular (fanbase of like 6 vs a fanbase of like 2), but still. My personal interest in these is at a low, more so unfortunately for Role Requeue than War Bots. This is somewhat normal for me, I cycle between interests pretty consistently, with my last Overwatch/War Bots kick lasting a bit long all things considered without much going to my other personal projects.

speaking of, I can at least mention the two of those I've been lending some brain juices to

The first is Renegades, a teen superhero team story that I hope to turn into a webcomic series one day. There's really not anything to it that I can say as a super unique pitch, I just wanna make my own superhero story because I think they're neat.

Slightly more zesty is Darkworld Showdown, a platform fighter idea with a "spooky/monster/creature" theme inspired by Darkstalkers and Skullgirls. This one has been on brain hiatus for longer since the friend who sort of became the "second in command" on the project has been radio silent for almost a year, but I've been back in touch with them recently so I'm hoping to get back into it more and give another pass on the roster and mechanics to hopefully refine it into something both more realistic to make and more interesting than just another indie platform fighter. I have some character designs floating around on Art Fight already but most of the cast needs an update badly, it's been a while for almost all of them and even some of the public stuff is rough from how old it is.

I may be posting more about these if there's any interest, but I mostly just wanted to explain where my head's been at lately, especially if you mostly expect Overwatch stuff from me. Not gonna try and beat myself up for it or anything, but wanted to mention it anyways. I think at least in my little circle that the Overwatch burnout is apparent so this might not be as big of a shocker as I'm fearing, but uh... yeah not sure how to end this one.

[damienthemortician]

art dump art dump aRT DUMP ART DUMP

lore dump under the cut

1st: My pfp for any of my mortician accounts, it was originally a birthday drawing for my friend and I really liked the composition and it makes a good pfp, I often start drawings or put a lot of detail into the face to make into a pfp lel. The characters unfortunately don't have names or stories behind them, and the drawing was made on a normal tablet with my drawing tablet jerry rigged with it when my computer was still broken. 2nd: Two characters from a minecraft modpack I put a few dozen hours into, I don't know if I'll finish it because the lighting is more complicated than I'm used to, but hey two sworn enemies dancing together what's not to love. 3rd: bunce, a silly garfield knockoff I drew with my mouse and is an inside joke with my sibling

4th: An unfinished piece I started real strong with but like a lot of things the lighting lost me, I wanna go back and just dab on some simple cel shading and call it good at some point. The character is Omega, another of my cyberpunk creatures and the counterpart brother to Delta, he's a dj with cybernetic legs instead of arms, a screen visor and ears and a much more bouncy (heh) personality as opposed to Delta. 5th and 6th: My little god oc Vaughn and some doodles of him, the same war god as mentioned in this post and long story short he's the sun's ex boyfriend and thus why vampires aren't allowed in sunlight, and he is functionally dead in that he was born as a bunch of huge bones in the earth as shown by the bottom drawing, and is representative of war in the quartet of other gods who represent pestilence, famine and death, I'll save it for now.