That is DIABOLICAL museum design, A++, no notes
DEAR READER

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blake kathryn
Cosmic Funnies
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"

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JVL

@theartofmadeline
Not today Justin
Stranger Things
Today's Document
Xuebing Du

oozey mess
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her

Love Begins
KIROKAZE
dirt enthusiast
RMH
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda

Product Placement
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@aethersea
That is DIABOLICAL museum design, A++, no notes
borja gonzález
@pscentral event 36: trios alec hardison & eliot spencer & parker
look, I know it’s not the same thing but hardison and I are gonna be here for you forever.
"You just need to find someone to be brave for."
Project Hail Mary (2026)
my lord. the two statues you commissioned are finally complete. yeah, the double-order with the vast and trunkless legs of stone and the shattered visage. i like to think we captured the sneer of cold command pretty well. it's a really thought-provoking piece my lord. very deconstructionist. i'm sure that even a traveller a thousand years from now could take one look at it and instantly recognise it must have come from an artistically enlightened culture
Hey anyone notice how google translate is being pretty liberal with their translations as of late? Takin some real liberties to infer tone.
ask and ye shall receive: When I write in Japanese I usually also throw it in google translate to double check that I'm not using the wrong kanji by mistake, and two years ago it gave me very dry and literal translations.
I was doing it today and noticed it had a pretty strong voice added to the output
For reference, to give a dry translation I would put: Lately I'm into in Hanafuda. Nobody seems to know anything about it here, so they probably wouldn't understand my brilliant jokes. I guess you guys will never be able to understand "Mister November and the Scary Cave".
I have a fluent friend who is able to check my work for me and give me tips on hitting the correct tone (I was going for a comically casual feeling), so I'm confident that I'm expressing the feeling I'm intending. While Google is also hitting the same emotion, I really don't like knowing that it's assigning tone in the first place.
To check if it was editorializing based on informal grammatical choices, I formal'd up the writing to be more polite and remove any non-standard vocabulary.
I'm just like... what is anyone who is translating what I'm thinking into their own language going to think when a translation app decides that it knows my intended tone? When online communication is already so complicated and nuanced? I'm a non-native so I'm spending ages agonizing over 117 characters, but when I'm chatting in English I'm not being so deliberate. How likely is it that tools that 'naturalize' are going to make choices that don't reflect reality and lead to insulting misunderstandings? I spoke with an English learner just yesterday who thought they were being bullied (they were not, the commenter in question was just excitedly infodumping about sociology) because something was lost in translation, and I wonder if it's because of tools making choices like this. I'm just a luddite I don't trust stuff like this. stinks of ai asking me if it can rerwrite my email in a more quirky style.
What do you mean I'm just using the browser versi-
I AM SO SICK OF DEFAULT AI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Consider: it is the healthiest and most normal thing in the world to go to your close friends and loved ones with problems in your friendships and relationships. Not to gossip, not to talk shit, but I go "Hey, me and (x, not related to my current partners) are on the rocks right now, can I talk it out with you?" and then you get input, advice, you get to process your feelings through conversation, then you're probably more equipped to go back to the person and go "hey I've been thinking and processing, I feel xyz."
Two major thoughts here:
Don't let anyone convince you that this type of conversation should only exist in therapy. Your friends and loved ones are there for you. Its called a support system for a reason. Getting advice and comfort is entirely different from talking shit.
If someone gets upset with you for talking about your interpersonal problems with your friends, its worth examining that dynamic. Why are they so worried other people will find out how they're treating you? This isn't like 100% always a bad thing, but like. Consider if there's other parts of the relationship that feel controlled. Consider how listened to and respected you feel, how safe you feel, how independent and free to act you feel.
What I really, really wish Bioware had focused on when it came to defeating the reapers is the singular advantage our cycle had. Every previous cycle lost all chance at survival the moment the reapers came out of dark space, because the reapers took the Citadel, and therefore the relays. With the reapers in control of the relays system, they cut off travel, communication, and obliterate supply lines.
Everyone in every previous cycle was cut off and isolated before they even knew what hit them. If they didn’t even know the reapers existed, it might be years, even decades before they knew what happened at all! There would be no way to share intel, to warn others about reaper movements, etc. A society that developed to rely on the relays would be utterly crippled without them, and every previous cycle lost the relays in the opening minutes of an attack they didn’t even know was coming.
Except us. Our cycle kept the Citadel. When the reapers showed up we still had control of it AND the relays. We were the first cycle in the history of the reapers to keep that advantage - because of the prothean scientists on Ilos. It's really an incredible thing when you think about it.
The previous cycles couldn't evacuate, fall back and mount a defense with their allies. They couldn’t reach safety. Without the relays there was nowhere to go! All the reapers had to do was go system by system to wipe everyone out systematically, and all that any previous cycle could do was wait until they were next and fight the best they could with what they had available.
The crucible is such an insane concept because there would have been no way to pull it off. You don't have the resources, the labor, the logistics, to even begin to build it, because you don't have the relays to move the resources or the people where they need to be. And even more insane, the battery for the whole damn thing was the Citadel, which every previous cycle lost access to in the opening minutes of the initial attack!
Even if the protheans or anyone else could have found a way to build it, there would have been no way to use it. Why in the world would you base your MacGuffin on something so inaccessible?
If you had to use the Crucible as your win button, it could have been interesting if you looked at it not as something that everyone else ran out of time to build, but as something other cycles had conceived of and had no way to build - but we did. At a cost.
The reapers are here. We might still have comm buoys and the relays, but the reapers are still killing billions, destroying strategic locations and wreaking havoc with supply lines. So if you are diverting supplies to build the Crucible...who are you taking them from? Whose front collapses because you took what they needed to build that thing? Who gets fucked over because this ship had to mine minerals to build the crucible instead of run supplies to refugees? A war table like you had in DA:I could have been so interesting in Mass Effect 3.
The fact that the protheans reached through time and made one, small change that dramatically changed the way the reapers harvest a cycle had so much potential. We were different. We had a chance no one else ever had, not just because Shepard is a badass, but because a small group of people who had no hope for themselves decided to have hope for someone else. We weren’t better than other cycles – we were gifted something no one else got: the protheans broke the cycle. We didn’t. They did.
I wish the game hadn’t forgotten that, and I wish the ending would have found a way to tie back to that. Instead of boiling the end of the trilogy down to an RGB choice between control, destroy, and synthesis, I wish it had celebrated the truth that we are nothing without our differences. We are nothing without each other. We could bring a bunch of disparate organic and synthetic races together to fight for each other’s right to exist because the people who came before us performed a selfless act to help a future they would never see.
I rant about this a lot still with respect to Mass Effect 2.
Vigil tells us exactly how all this works, it tells us point by point what we need to do to survive. Recognize indoctrination. Hold the Citadel, or at least distribute and create redundancy for power and information such that it ceases to be a single point of failure. Do not lose control of the relays.
In Mass Effect 2, we get a mission to retrieve a Reaper IFF. That stands for "Identification Friend or Foe" device, and is a common piece of communication hardware in secure environments, like militaries, that allows a vehicle to quickly and securely confirm its identity to allied forces. In other words, it is a device that tells Reaper technology that we are a Reaper.
If the Citadel races have IFFs installed on their ships, the Reapers cannot lock us out of the relay network. Even if they take the Citadel itself and lock down the network so that only Reapers can use it, the relays will look at Citadel ships, think those ships are Reapers, and activate anyway.
There is no single thing that any person did or could have done across the entire trilogy that should be more potent than claiming the IFF. It guts the entire Reaper strategy, it secures and protects the most fundamental logistic capabilities of war, it allows the good guys to continue to move and communicate at the level of the enemy instead of flailing in the dark. With enough research and luck, it could even potentially permit weaponizing Reaper tech against them, to some extent.
The game treats it as a completely arbitrary macguffin of no particular significance beyond unlocking the final story quest, and it is never mentioned again. In 3, when the Reapers do take the Citadel, they just. Choose not to deactivate the relays. To be sporting, I guess.
Hello person having transgender thoughts but convinced they aren't trans because they don't have the requisite amount of dysphoria they think they need
Hi I transitioned without even thinking I had dysphoria. Like later in hindsight I can go "oh that's probably what it was" but for the first year of my transition I was straight up like "I like being a guy but I like being a girl WAY more" and you can do that!! There is no prerequisite amount of suffering needed to make yourself happier.
Gonna include these tags cuz they're good
Land-creature watching.
Darling likes the rabbits ❤️ Somebody get some bunny ears for this siren STAT.
new story THE PRISON THAT NO ONE ESCAPES FROM. please subscribe on substack
09/04/2026 • every time @softinvasions writes a villanelle about how sonnets suck i write another suckful sonnet*. metrical malpractice!
*sonnets do not even have to have 14 lines if you are pure of heart and sonnetpilled enough
Melkor from Silmarillion that I did for the amazing Lucifer zine! (@the_cursed_zine on instagram)
really delighted by a curse tablet found in roman britain (RIB 306) cursing somebody named senicianus for stealing a ring, only because a ring was found elsewhere in britain (RIB 2422.14) that was inscribed with the name senicianus seemingly sometime much later than it was made. it's pretty unlikely the two artifacts are actually related, since the name senicianus was not a rare one in roman britain, but there's a delightful coincidence to finding a ring that says "senicianus, may you live in god" and then later finding a curse tablet that says "may no one named senicianus be well until i get my ring back"
Fireweed Grouse Collar 🐚🌌
I made this collar/stole for my high school graduation this year; the two main symbols on it, the grouse and the fireweed, are two important beings to my clan I’m particular. The formline shapes and stitching is a little bit rough in some places as this was the first time I ever made something like this, but I am still very proud of how it turned out, and even prouder that I got to wear it during my graduation ceremony.
The collar is made from felt, ultrasuede, and abalone shell buttons, and took approximately two-three months to make.
"Sys how is your decent into fiber arts hell going"
Glad you asked. I have arrived at 'modern flax is Bullshit compared to what we had in historical textiles, the flax widely available for handspinning is basically the tow that would be discarded from textile creation and used with tar to caulk ships back in the day'
This naturally led me down a hole of 'why is the staple length of this stuff a bullshit 6 inches' and the answer is 'we have bred modern flax more for the oil than the fiber because cotton usurped the place of everyday textile thanks to slavery and the cotton gin'
Anyway, THIS led me to a rabbit hole that culminated in me finding flax seed bred for proper 30 inch tall plants for fiber, sold by some fellow minded nerds on a website that has not been updated since 1998 and you have to email them to buy anything.
Anyway how are all of you doing.
I FAILED YOU ALL here is the site. You can also buy flax fiber from them. The PROPER shit, not the hot garbage ass tow fiber sold as flax top for handspinners.
'machine combing shortens the flax fibers by several inches'
This right here is part of why modern linen is a pale shadow of historical linen. Legitimately it cannot be properly replicated by machines. It HAS to be made by human hands if you want the best quality.