I mostly (always) reblog stuff that makes me feel good. Mostly this includes fandom stuff, pretty landscapes, mushrooms, and interesting facts. Also, I am very much an adult (my adult card is old enough to be a legal adult itself). So Iām also occasionally horny on main. PSA: Even if you ask nicely and claim to be vetted, if you are a random stranger on the internet, I CANNOT just give you money. I donāt have that kind of disposable income, nor can I be sure you are not a scammer. So please donāt waste my time or yours asking.
got my first ever official customer complaint because when i was going over the terms of their life insurance they were like "well i don't plan to die" and i was like "well you're going to"
The first ship that arrived was pretty matter of fact about its fate. The pilot introduced himself as Eric, then told us he was part of the first sublight resupply attempt in modern history. He then gave me and the ground control team his bad news.
āSo,ā he said. āWithout real time telemetry, we werenāt even sure which half of your orbit youād be in. Thatās half a solar systemās worth of wiggle room. Decelerating enough to survive contact with your low orbit would take me two weeks, which, you know, it looks like we donāt have. That means that in order to get the second ship in before you lose orbital control to the Kresh, Iām gonna have to make a sacrificial flyby. Ten to the negative four torr is good enough for a lot of things, but at point-seven c itās gonna be like sandblasting a soup cracker. Good news is that all the expensive toys are in the next ship, so this really aināt costing you more than a ship and a pilot.ā
āYou knew,ā I said. If they put the expensive toys in the second ship, they knew that the first was likely a sacrifice. No one smart enough to handle orbital physics would miss that.
āI did,ā he replied. āBut someone had to go first.ā
That was, of course, a lie. No one had to go first. No else had had, at least. When our connection to the FTL network was lost, weād understood that as the end of our reinforcements. Doing resupplies via sublight was just too risky. It was a testament to Earth that it had accepted the risk and continued anyway.
āIs there anything we can do for you?ā I asked. This man had come here to die for us. I wasnāt sure how much I could give, but what I had was his.
āI do have a few requests,ā he said. āFirst up, I need as much high-orbital data as you got. The whole lot.ā
I began directing tightbeam resources to him immediately. It was an easy resource to exchange - it wasnāt like there was anyone else out to talk to anymore. When we lost FTL, we found ourselves very, very alone.
āSecond,ā he said. āRight, I know Iām gonna sound like a princess right now, but I have been stuck in this stupid tin-can for almost two-years now, and I seriously overestimated how much I like synth music. If you have anything thatās analog - I donāt care what kind of string or drum or brass you play, but Iād kill to hear something without a beep in it.ā
I jumped my own queue in the tightbeam, and added a short playlist that I ripped from the local web. Human Music, it was labeled. 3 Terabytes. I prayed there was something on it that heād like.
āAnd third,ā he said. āThird. The uh, next pilot is pretty mad at me. Turns out this will just be one of those things left unfinished. Thatās all death really is, I guess - a lot of unfinished things. Let him know that he was right: He is a better pilot than me. But tell him that wouldnāt have made a difference here. Bad luck beats skill, and this luck was shit.ā
I promised, and he went silent after that. We could see what data he was analyzing, and the short answer was all of it - everything from atmospheric density to troop positions and his own shipās blueprints. He knew he had one shot at this, and that if the price wasnāt paid here, it would be paid by whoever came next.
--- --- --- --- ---
Ground control didnāt get a verbal warning that heād entered atmosphere. Just a ping. A little here-I-am, whispered in the dark.
After that, we could keep track with visuals alone.
He hit the outskirts of the exoatmosphere in his first pass, burning bright enough to be seen with the naked eye. He caught the sparse particles like a kite, trying to shed enough speed to hit actual low orbit. Automatic telemetry updates gave us the grim news for the ship: Thermals were holding up decently, but the ablative was wearing out fast.
The entire descent brought us more than two hourās reprieve. The Kresh hadnāt expected to see a resupply, but they knew what one meant: Get it now, get it fast, or deal with a stream of new troops. They could buy themselves ten days' time by shooting this one ship down now.
That was an eternity during a siege.
The first loop lowered the speed by about a twentieth of light. The pilot responded by pulling the ship in tighter, trying to preserve more ablative plating by trading off with thermal. Seven fighters were close enough to fire off heat seekers. I donāt think the Kresh had ever anticipated shooting down a craft coming in that hot - the missile's decoy avoidance countermeasure actually made it steer around the thing, chasing down loose pieces of shrapnel. Cooled fragments, still hotter than an engine should be at full blast. The simple mistakes bought it enough time to enter pre-orbit, and the fighters had to stop their pursuit. They werenāt willing to die to stop the ship.
Our man, on the other hand, was already committed to that course.
A third loop followed a fourth. Ablative coating went from 65% integrity, to 30%, to 5%. Telemetry scans were exceptionally detailed - the pilot was making the flyby count. The last message we got from him was simple:
Are you EMP shielded?Ā he asked, not even bothering to encrypt the text stream. He didnāt have time to process more than that.
Yes,Ā we replied. We knew what he was thinking, but it was still a shock to see it. The fusion torch that was driving his ship flared hot, burning through the nozzle and feeding directly into the craftās deuterium supply. The reaction went super critical, and the resulting neutron pulse set off everything in the ship with a z-count higher than iron. Three continuous seconds of EM interference screamed through the comms as the hulk burned brighter than the sun.
The explosion itself wasnāt powerful enough to reach the Kresh ships still in high orbit, but it made enough broadband radiation to blind both sides LADAR. The man must have been a hell of a pilot - half the shrapnel went down and burned up as it entered the standard atmosphere, sacrificed to move the other half past lagrange. Standard evasion wouldāve made the pieces easy to dodge, but with LADAR down, all the Kresh could do was sit still and cower as the wrath of a dead man riddled them full of holes. Our best ace had managed to shoot down seven ships before this before getting shot down himself. The wreckage of the freighter took down six.
--- --- --- --- ---
The second ship came in stealth. One second, we were holding attrition in high orbit, the next, something the size of a small station came ripping through the atmosphere.
It did the same trick as the former - swapping between ablative and thermal loads, coming down at a speed that the Kresh fighters didnāt even try to match. Armies could be built in years, but skills like this took decades.
Telemetry connection was established almost as an afterthought. The way the ship casually ate through ablative armoring made my eyes water, but the pilot himself seemed pretty non-plussed.
āYouāre down to fifteen percent coverage. You need-
āWhat I need,ā he said, āis to see the previous shipās telemetry as soon as I land. And I don't need your help landing it.ā
He cut off my chance to reply by flicking the channel off. We watched, and we wrang our hands, but sure enough he came in six minutes later with 4% of the ablative left.
I met him on the landing pad. Under normal circumstances, weād have needed twenty-four hours for the craft to cool enough to even approach, but weād had cryo ready just in case. Three tankers of nitrogen, and the loading area, at least, was cool enough to touch. Safety would have to take a backseat to speed here - we needed the supplies fast.
But those both would take a backseat to a promised conversation with the second pilot. He was out of the craft as soon as the air was cool enough to avoid scalding his lungs, picking through the workers to try and find who had the telemetry data.
I found him first. The drive went into his hands, but I needed to keep my promise with Eric before letting go.
āYouāre better than the first pilot,ā I said, and I wasnāt lying. If the previous flier had been a saint, this one was a god. āBut you wouldnāt have been able to manage the landing either. There just wasnāt time.ā
āLet me see,ā he said, tugging on the drive. āJust let me see. I have to know I couldnāt do it either. I have to know that someone had to die.ā
I let go of the drive and he stalked back into his ship. I didnāt follow. I figured Iād pushed things far enough.
--- --- --- --- ---
The second pilot left the ship six hours later. He looked bleary in a way that put me at ease. Iād been up the last six hours directing supplies from the ship. Everything from ground-to-orbit rails to AGI targeting systems was inside - to call it gamechanging would be an understatement. It was good work, but I was tired, and I didnāt want to have to pretend otherwise. Seeing the other man with bags under his eyes meant we could just be frank with each other.
āI couldnāt have managed it,ā he said, half-ashamed, half-relieved.
āIt just wasnāt possible,ā I agreed.
We sat there a moment longer. I didnāt mind the break. This was time well spent.
āDid it hurt?ā he asked finally.
āAblative failed before heating,ā I said, which was the technical way of saying no. āHe overloaded the reactor before the ship actually broke up and did some kind of slingshot maneuver - hit the main body of the Kresh fleet with half a space stationās worth of shrapnel.ā
āGood,ā he said.
I knew the signs. The tremor in his cheek, the way his jaw clenched - it wasnāt professional, but I hugged him anyway. Let him have the dignity of choosing to weep instead of having it wrenched out of him.
It was a gift weād all been given at some point in this war. At least now, there was the hope it could be over soon.
āI have something important to tell you but canāt message u pls message me ā - accidentally reported you scam
āI love your story and want to illustrate it dm me at discordā - commissioner scam
āI saw your post looking for artists to draw (x) and would love to draw it it sounds like a lovely idea and im an artistā - commissioner scammer who DMād you when you didnāt ask
āDid you send me this link for free tumblr premium?ā - accidentally reported you scam
ā your account is limited please kindly verify at (scam link)ā - verification scam
TIL in 1896 a temporary, one-day city was named in Texas called Crush, where two locomotives were to be smashed head-on for purposes of spectacle. It was, for a few hours, the 2nd largest city in TX with 40k attendees. The collision caused engine boilers to explode, resulting in death and injuries.
idk man sometimes i like it when video game writers are allowed to plan a series of events that happen in a specific order and affect each other in turn to become an overarching narrative, and i donāt mind trusting those writers to take me through those events in the order that is emotionally effective. i donāt really care if a game forces me to go through the forest area first before i can attempt the icy area because maybe thereās things that happen in the forest area that inform later scenes in the icy area. maybe we don't need more superficial player choice open world concepts if it comes at the cost of the ability to write a story with actual significant plot events and character development in each section
Something about me is that due to Allergy Reasons I have had extremely little fast food in my life but a culvers location has opened near me and this particular one will let you ask for gluten free fries & I haven't stopped thinking about them. I need more. The texture is so much better than the baked fries I've been having at home. I need Oil. I feel like the united states military
Being a celiac haver whose family went gluten free when I was a baby so I simply haven't Had a lot of Normal People Foods makes me feel like a space alien but it's so good when I Do get to have them. Just found out about fries. Like fried in oil fries. They come in a little paper cup and everything. I'm entering my fries era
Vulcan in starfleet who starts trying Earth foods & gets really into various forms of fried potatoes. It's similar to some baked plomeek bullshit they ate at home but a little bit heavier which is nice for staying warm in the colder climate. Having a great time with a completely blank expression
This is an autobiographical piece. Names have been changed for anonymity, but it's otherwise left be.
---
The class's first suspicion of Kevin was that he had, somehow, cheated his way up to this course. He just seemed perpetually confused, and strangely antagonistic of the professor. The weirdest example of this was when he asked what an ion was (in a third year EE class?), and was informed that it referred to any positively or negatively charged particle. It would have been strange enough to ask, but his reply of "Either? That doesn't sound right" sealed him in as a well known character in the class of 19 people.
The real tipping point in our perception of him during a lecture where the professor mentioned practical uses for a neutron beam, and Kevin asked if a beam could be made out of some other neutral material. When asked "Like what?", he replied "An atom with all of its electrons removed." When we pointed out that the protons would make that abomination extremely positively charged, he just replied with "So what if we removed those too?" and then was baffled when we informed him that would just be neutrons.
That's high school level chemistry. Not knowing it was so incredibly strange that I felt like something was off, so I asked him if he'd like to grab lunch. He accepted, we chatted, and I finally began to get a sense of his origin story.
See, Kevin wasn't a junior/senior electrical engineer like the rest of us. Kevin was, in fact, three notable things: A business major, a sophomore, and a hardcore Catholic. All three of those are essential to understanding his scenario.
What had begun all of this was actually a conflict with Kevin and his roommate. Kevin frequently had his fundamental belief in Absolute Good, Absolute Bad, and Absolute Anything pushed back on by his roommate, who was in STEM. Said roommate kept invoking quantum mechanics as his proof against Absolute Knowledge. Kevin was tired of having something that he didn't understand thrown at his convictions, so he decided to take a quantum course to settle things once and for all.
Despite not having any of the pre-reqs.
He'd actually tried to take quantum for physicists first, but the school's physics department wouldn't let him. It's actually pretty strictly regulated, because it is a mandatory class for physics majors. However, because quantum is not mandatory for electrical engineers, there aren't really any built in requirements for the class. It's just assumed that nobody would actually try to take it until their third year because doing so would the be the mental equivalent to slamming your nuts in the car door. Just, pure suffering for no good reason.
Apparently, the counselors had tried to talk him out of it, but if Kevin was one thing, it was stubborn. He'd actually had to sign some papers basically saying "I was warned that this is incredibly stupid, but I refused to listen" in order to take the class.
He was actually pretty nice, if currently unaware of how bad he'd just fucked up. I paid for the lunch, wished him the best, and reported back to the class discord. We'd all been curious about this guy's story, but now that I had the truth, I could share it with the world.
Feelings were mixed. Some people thought he was going to drop out any minute now. Others thought that he wouldn't, be also that convincing him to drop now, while he still could, was the only ethical thing. Others figured that a policy of non-interference was best: The counselors couldn't dissuade him, and if we tried to do the same, he'd probably just think it was STEM elitism trying to guard its little clubhouse. He'd figure out how hard things were, or he'd fail. Either way, it would help him learn more about the world.
We wound up taking the approach of non-interference. If nothing else, understanding his origins gave us more patience when he asked bizarre questions. He wasn't trying to waste our time, he was just trying to cram three years of pre-reqs into a one semester course. He did get a little bit combative sometimes, and we could tell that he was really wracking his brain to try and find some sort of contradiction or error that he could use to bring the whole thing down, but he never could.
First test came by, and he bombed it. Completely unprepared. He'd taken Calc I, but he didn't know how to do integrals yet (that was Calc II). Worse, he was far past the drop date. I imagine most people in his shoes would've stopped struggling. They'd realize they were fucked and just let themselves fail, at least salvaging their other classes grades in the process. Why waste resources on an unwinnable battle?
Kevin never asked questions like that. If he was stupid enough to try it, he was stupid enough to finish it. God bless him.
He invited me to lunch after the test and said that the class was more fascinating than he'd ever imagined, but he didn't know if he'd be able to pass it. He asked if I could help, and I said...maybe. I brought the request to the discord, and from the eight people there I got three volunteers who admired this dork's tenacity. He was in over his head, miles beneath the surface, but his fighting spirit was fucking glorious. If he was willing to go down swinging, we were willing to bust our asses trying to get him caught up.
Some of the stuff was just extra homework we gave to the guy. We told him he needed to learn integrals, stat. We sent him some copies of basic software that can be used to teach the basics of linear circuit equations, and he practiced that game like it was HALO. Just, hours sunk into it. Absolutely godlike.
He was still scrabbling for air at just the surface level of the class, but he'd gone from abysmal failure to lingering on the boundary between life and death. Other people in the class started to learn about Kevin's origin story, and our little circle of four volunteer tutors grew to six. Every day, he had someone trying to help him either catch up in some way, or finish that week's homework. He'd gone from being seen as a nuisance that wasted class time to the underdog mascot.
He was getting twelve hours of personal tutoring a week, on top of three hours of classes, on top of six hours of office hours, on top of the coursework. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that this kid was doing 40 hours a week just trying to pass this one single class.
Second test comes around and he gets a 60. He's ecstatic. We're ecstatic. Kid's too young to take out drinking so we just order a pizza and cheer like he just won gold at the Olympics.
After that second test, things hit another tipping point. With so much catch-up under his belt, he was able to focus a lot more on the actual material for the class. A borderline cinematic moment happened when I was trying to get ahead on the homework so that I could put more hours in on my senior project. Nobody else had finished it yet because it wasn't due for another week, so the specifics of the problem I was working on were still a mystery. I went to the professor's office hours and get some pointers, but he wasn't willing to give good hints when the HW wasn't due for another week or so. He said I still had time to think about it, which was true, but I wanted to be able to think about other things. Kevin had watched the whole conversation, waiting for his turn to ask the professor more simple questions, but when I left I got a text from him telling me to hop on zoom.
Kevin had finished it earlier, because Kevin started all of his homework the moment it was assigned. He needed to, in order to make sure that he could get it done on time. He'd finished it the day before, and was able to walk me through it.
From student, to teacher. I'm not exaggerating when I say that he probably saved me eight hours on that assignment. I could've kissed him.
A month or two later, we took the final. As soon as we were done, we six asked Kevin how he did. He was nervous, there was so much new material for him in this class that his retention hadn't been great. Us six were also a little stressed: We were going to pass the class, but the final wasĀ hard.
We waited for the results.
And waited.
And waited.
Finally, the scores were posted as a table, curve included. From our class of 19 people, 4 withdrew within the deadline, 4 failed, 1 got a C, 8 got B's, and 2 got A's. We could see that the curve for a C was set at 59.2% overall.
We called Kevin. He was crying. End score, 59.2%. Teacher curved the C exactly to his score.
It was a week into winter break so we couldn't gather the forces around for a party like last time, but we were all losing our shit. Kevin was losing his shit. He couldn't believe how stupid he was to try this course, he couldn't believe that six people busted their ass just to make sure he didn't die, and he couldn't believe that the professor basically just passed him out of sheer effort alone.
He said it was the stupidest thing he'd ever done, and while I doubt that, itĀ wasĀ outrageously stupid. And yet, I've never been so invested in a fellow student before. I'm prouder of Kevin's C than I am of my own B. I was walking on sunshine for weeks after that. In theory, my senior project was building a functioning washing machine, but in practice, in my heart, it was helping Kevin pass Intro to Quantum for Electrical Engineers.
(And as an epilogue: No, he did not renounce Catholicism and become an atheist like his roommate had hoped. He did walk out changed. I think that being that wrong about something, and realizing it, was a pivotal moment for him. It's hard to be dogmatic once you realize that a lifetime of being wrong feels exactly like a lifetime of being right, right up until the last two seconds of it.)
You listen to music regularly? Why? Have you even tried quitting? Could you quit? You get music stuck in your head? Wow. You're so ruined and music brained. I bet you make your partners listen to music with you when you have sex. Music addiction has really ruined a whole generation. You know it's not realistic to expect reverb in real life, right? You're probably so desensitized that you don't even feel anything anymore when you hear a bird singing that it wants some fuck.
it actually is insane to me that it's a cultural norm for men to suck ass at getting their wives/gfs gifts. especially when they whine about how they have no idea what women like.
man, you're not getting a gift for Female Domestic Partner. you're getting a gift for Natalie, a person whom you have been married to for 7 years, whom has lived in the same home with you for a decade, whom speaks to you every day about her thoughts and interests, whom you presumably love, and whom you can directly or indirectly ask what she wants. it's not that you don't know what half the human population wants, that's irrelevant. you don't know what Natalie wants and that is inexcusable.
I empathize with Mary Bennet but not in the flattering nerdy girl way, in the 'having failed to be popular as a teenager, I decided I was smarter and more moral and artistic then everyone anyway, and had a reflexive snobbishness that probably made me insufferable even to those who might have been sympathetic' way. Thankfully my future life and marriage wasn't determined by who I was at 15.
already this has tags in the notes like ā#anti aiā but... this is just real life with almost everything. this is like grifter 101 please donāt exceptionalize needing to be critical of chatgpt.
Itās also where we get ācon artistā, aka āconfidence artistā. Itās someone who dazzles you with the assurance that they know what they are talking about because they speak with absolute certainty despite not knowing anything. I dare say itās gotten worse with the internet because text and careful/exciting editing makes people seem more confident than before - and if you think youāre immune, you arenāt.
I'm a staunch believer of "if you say it with enough confidence people will believe you." With this principle, I got my mom, for a hot minute, to believe cats were exotherms.
"That's why they're always looking for sunny spots."
"Really?!?"
"Yup."
"š¤Æ"
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