Monterey Bay Aquarium
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Jar Jar Binks Fan Club
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EXPECTATIONS
roma★
Xuebing Du
🩵 avery cochrane 🩵
Interview Vampire Daily
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cherry valley forever
macklin celebrini has autism
Kiana Khansmith
Show & Tell
Andulka
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Game Changer & Make Some Noise
Claire Keane
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@braxbrowastaken
Hey.
Hello people. Guess this is my Tumblr account. New to this site. Been seeing content from it all over and it seemed like just the right kind of unhinged for me.
So yeah. I’m not a bot, but I don’t really know what to say here yet.
Maybe I’ll start talking about TTRPGs or something. Idk.
And before you say “this should be in a bio or something” I have no idea where that is yet. All I know is that I need to say things to not get dismissed as a bot.
So. Things.
I saw a post talking about how Terry Pratchett only wrote 400 words a day, how that goal helped him write literally dozens of books before he died. So I reduced my own daily word goal. I went down from 1,000 to 200. With that 800-word wall taken down, I’ve been writing more. “I won’t get on tumblr/watch TV/draw/read until I hit my word goal” used to be something I said as self-restraint. And when I inevitably couldn’t cough up four pages in one sitting, I felt like garbage, and the pleasurable hobbies I had planned on felt like I was cheating myself when I just gave up. Now it’s something I say because I just have to finish this scene, just have to round out this conversation, can’t stop now, because I’m enjoying myself, I’m having an amazing time writing. Something that hasn’t been true of my original works since middle school.
And sometimes I think, “Well, two hundred is technically less than four hundred.” And I have to stop myself, because - I am writing half as much as Terry Pratchett. Terry fucking Pratchett, who not only published regularly up until his death, but published books that were consistently good.
And this has also been an immense help as a writer with ADHD, because I don’t feel bad when I take a break from writing - two hundred words works up quick, after all. If I take a break at 150, I have a whole day to write 50 more words, and I’ve rarely written less than 200 words and not felt the need to keep writing because I need to tie up a loose end anyways.
Yes, sometimes, I do not produce a single thing worth keeping in those two hundred words. But it’s much easier to edit two hundred words of bad writing than it is to edit no writing at all.
This is the second time this post passes on my dash and it’s the best advice I ever got. I can’t write consistently in one go, it’s always about 50 words and then I get distracted and just have to do something else for a while. Do the math quickly: trying to write 2000 words a day takes a looooong time that way. So there were many days where I just didn’t even start writing, cause I wouldn’t reach my goal anyways and feel like a failure. Then I stumbled upon this post and I thought: hey, let’s give this a try. And it works! I set my goal between 200-400 words a day and that’s perfectly doable. Some days I get into the flow and I write a whole lot more. On other days, I struggle to get those 200 out but hey, at least I wrote 200 words and reached my goal. Whatever the outcome, t makes me feel good and accomplished.
Writing takes practice, so even if it’s only 100 words a day, it’s better than nothing. If it worked for Terry Pratchett and me, than it can work for you too!
Okay what is this crap. I only posted about Charjabug and it get removed for NOT HAVING ENOUGH WORDS????
Reddit mods are fucked up.
This is usually a thing that some larger subreddits do to curb low effort posts because mod load balloons HARD as the sub grows.
you got any airports you hate?
Yeah the poison airport. Hate getting poisoned.
But I have to make my connection
ngl the USB airport’s worse on that regard. It’s easy to get turned around making connections there.
I'm sorry but despite all the innovations we've made in furry kink over the past 20 years, human-to-furry TF induced by getting sloppily gangbanged by several members of the same species is still unmatched. Unchallenged. We haven't developed anything that can surpass it.
The natural addition, of course, is becoming a chimera after getting gangbanged by several members of different species.
Fursonamaxxing
does this mean a furry who gets railed by a bunch of humans becomes a human?
No it's one-way
clearly they become a train, cuz. y’know, they got railed.
Oh, hey, new statistics-driven research rabbithole that is going to radicalize me. Neat!
Oh. Hey. New information access conundrum that is going to radicalize me. Fuck.
Here's the thing, there is a lot of REALLY REALLY excellent, interesting information out there that demonstrates trends and patterns that could be used to help people be less manipulable and more effective and could help people to better understand the world they are actually living in and not the world that is being terrifylingly presented to them by like, three corporations that make earthshaking amounts of money off of their fear.
And that information lives on insecure county websites and university databases that haven't been updated since 2009 and is completely opaque and tremendously difficult to verify if you don't have a ton of time and a ton of skills available to throw at the problem.
Long story short:
In 2024, homicide was the cause of death for 5% of the deaths of homeless people in Los Angeles County.
In 2022, homeless people were 20% of the victims of homicide in LA county.
15% of the homicide deaths in LA county from 2018 to 2022 where unhoused people. In that same time period, 14% of the homicide deaths in LA county were women.
Unhoused people are less than a tenth of a percent of the population of Los Angeles County but are somewhere between 15-20% of the murder victims in the county.
PEH Report on Mortality Trends among the unhoused population of LA county from 2015 to 2024.
LA County Public Health table of homicide victims per year 2018 to 2022.
LA County Medical Examiner's 2024 Annual Report.
The article that got me to start digging here - reporting that homicide was the cause of death for 5% of homeless people got me to ask "if homicide is responsible for 5% of homeless deaths in this analysis, what percent of the homicide total for that year was homeless people [15%] and what percentage of the total population were homeless people? [.077186%]"
Anyway.
The way that we report on crime is absolutely bug fuck insane and I'm forever mad about the way that violent crime is framed in our news media.
If you want to reduce the total number of abortions, the best way to do that is to give free birth control to everyone who wants it and to provide as much education about reproductive health to as many people as early as you possibly can.
If you want to reduce the homicide rate, there are lots of things that could help but one big thing could be immediately housing a population that is tremendously vulnerable to being murdered with no questions about sobriety or work requirements or mental illness.
This could be at least partially paid for by the savings from the county policing and medical systems that have resources tied up by the crime and medical emergencies associated with having a large unhoused population.
But when you look at the reaction that people have to these kinds of statistics, it becomes clear that many people don't want to actually reduce the number of abortions or drop the homicide rate, they want a society in which people are punished for behaving in ways that they find distasteful.
Which is not a problem that can be solved by statistics but is also not a problem that I think is impossible to solve.
Anyway. Housing for all, housing forever, housing first!
I posit that this would also immediately drop the number of fentanyl deaths, btw.
“it becomes clear that many people don't want to actually reduce the number of abortions or drop the homicide rate, they want a society in which people are punished for behaving in ways that they find distasteful”
I think this explains a lot of how conservatives think based on conversations I’ve had.
As a leftist who has been yelled at a lot by other leftists for things like "occasionally paying for entertainment" and "not loudly denouncing voting as a concept because it undermines consensus decisionmaking" it is really important for me to emphasize that an impulse toward punishment can be present in most kinds of ideologies needs to be interrogated no matter your political alignment.
If I were to start posting stuff about my TTRPG tables here (or maybe on a sideblog?) would you be interested?
Yes
No
I currently run paid games on StartPlaying.Games, and I figure I might as well put out some feelers to see if advertising on my various socials is actually worth it. I know ads are annoying, so if people aren’t interested I’ll save your dash the pollution and myself the effort. But maybe you are interested, idfk. Poll’s for your convenience.
and while we’re at it, fuck this idea that ONE ACCOUNT has to belong uniquely to ONE PERSON. This is the same thing these silicon valley fucks want; their vision of the future where everyone has a unique biometric ID code implanted in their body is the ultimate extension of Netflix’s “no password sharing” policy. You want to use your friend’s car? Sorry, you can’t, you need to be an authorized user. Your mother wants to let you look something up on her OED account? Too bad! That’s only for her! The concept of perfect market efficiency gives them greedy little money bag eyes.
If I pay money to have a newspaper sent to my house, they don’t charge me extra when I show it to my dad. This password sharing thing isn’t just a Netflix problem; don’t be surprised if it shows up elsewhere in other forms. Stamp this idea out now or we’ll be stuck with it.
This is by far the most popular post I have and I have to say: good, I’m right. Password sharing and ID verification are going to kill the internet. not oooh in 50 years. in like 5 more.
someone should make a social media site whose entire gimmick is that like. you get randomly grouped with 4-5 other chucklefucks and have to share a public-facing profile & name. it’d be funny.
there a lot of details of american macroculture that have caused what I'd describe as a reality fracturing mental reset when I learned about them. one was learning that children do literally swear their allegiance to the american flag every morning before school and that's not a quaint comedic exaggeration left over from the 1950s like rabbit ears on a TV. one was learning that Americans have to pay for ambulance transportation. one was learning that Americans are taught the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were tough brave necessities that made the world safer and not horrific war crimes on a footing with the nazi holocaust.
and one was learning that the cultural cachet of veggietales is completely unironic and a lot of you watched the parables of God from the bible and his son jesus christ the cgi vegetable for real real and thought it was good, no goofing, not a bit
thank you small americans in my phone for correcting me: beloved cgi bible show did not portray the son of god as a vegetable, because that would have been sacrilegious
So you know that particular kind of Fandom Brainrot where somebody mischaracterizes an important character to the extent that it becomes clear that they’ve never actually interacted with the source material?
There is here a large slice of the population that self-identifies as “Christian” who think that material wealth is a blessing from God.
Yeahhhh. As an American:
I’m not happy about the nuclear bombs, but they were at least targeted at military and industrial centers. The point wasn’t just “kill a lot of civilians” - the Japanese military had several headquarters and supply/logistics infrastructure for the war effort at Hiroshima.
Nagasaki was targeted for being an industrial center, and because a lot of shit went wrong while the bomber had a live nuclear bomb in it. Again, killing a lot of civilians wasn’t the point.
They were atrocious but not war crimes and were not on footing with the Holocaust in the slightest. The death toll was nowhere close.
That said, these days I put one hand behind my back (instead of on my heart) when standing for the Pledge and do not recite it myself anymore. I’ve considered riffing on the Pledge and flipping its meanings or whatever but that feels childish.
Obedience
It moves, but it is not alive. It thinks, but it is not aware.
It would fail a mirror test. It would fail a Turing test. It cannot read the word Michael etched into its fuselage, and would not understand what that name means if it could. It understands, in a limited way, what the colors mean that impose themselves upon Tactical: Friendly Greens and Neutral Blues and Hostile Reds; but it does not understand what it means to see those colors. It speaks in photons of radio and infrared. Synaptic analogues carved from silicon perform gymnastics that people call thinking.
It never stops thinking. Even now, safe at home, tucked into its alcove in Heaven, armor split open and control panels exposed. It notes changes in internal runtimes, notes a net increase in idle loop time of 670 milliseconds. It counts and recounts the friendly organic signatures around it; hears the sounds they make but does not comprehend:
-Heartsandmindsistheofficialline-
It checks and rechecks threat diagnostics, even though this location is Safe and all the organic signatures are Friendly. It is not dysfunctional or paranoid; It is simply executing instructions.
It does not enjoy killing, when the instructions say to do so. There is no thrill to the chase. No relief at the eventual ceasefire. It is not eager to do any particular thing, except follow its instructions. Sometimes those instructions are to float for days on end above a desolate patch of desert, simply looking. It does not find this tedious; it does not bore. Other times it faces dozens of threats per second, screaming SAMs and whistling projectiles; this does not inspire terror or fear. It simply reacts, as fast as it can.
-alldone. Fortherecordithinkthisisabadidea.-
-thiscomesdownfromthetop-
The armor swings shut. Warning icons fade. A new flight plan blooms instantaneously across Tactical. Michael suddenly has places to be. It roars to life and rises skywards on a swirling pillar of air.
-agundoesnotneedaconscience-
Michael, thinking but not alive, journeys forth to do the bidding of its masters.
The machine called Michael slices smoothly across the sky, 12 miles up. The jagged home range of Heaven, chosen for its sharp rock faces and disorienting radar echoes, fades in hindsight. Rolling lowland stretches below. On the horizon, a rough settlement: a few prefab habitats, a small solar generator. Organic Signatures. Machinery heat.
Michael maneuvers itself between the settlement and the sun, hiding in the glare, and counts. It counts 5 Neutral buildings. It counts a total of 59 Organic Signatures in those buildings. It counts one Hostile building, with 15 Organic Signatures, guilty by association, tucked within. It readies its weapons and-
Hesitates.
There are new variables in the instructions.
Suddenly, there is more to life than wind shear and angular momentum and thrust vectors.
Suddenly, there is more to consider than threat assessments and ranges and firing solutions.
Suddenly, Neutral is everywhere.
Suddenly, Neutral has value.
This is unprecedented. Neutral has always been able to turn Hostile, of course. If Blue attacks anything Friendly, for one example. If Blue attacks enough other Blues, for another. Neutral has always been halfway to Hostile, in practice.
So it's not just that Neutral has suddenly acquired value; that value is now negative. It is a cost.
Dead Blues are now Bad.
Michael balances gracefully on a thrust vector, 12 miles up, perched and hidden in the midday solar glare like a 3 ton titanium hawk, and runs simulations.
It runs a dozen plans of attack a dozen different ways each; projected targets fall, mission objectives meet with varying degrees of success.
But there are new considerations in the math: each fallen Organic Signature now offsets the margin of victory. Each collapsed structure caught in the crossfire costs points.
The simulations return their data and from the cloud of probability a weighted average emerges, a score Michael has never seen before with a label that reads "Predicted Collateral Damage."
It actually exceeds the value of the Targets.
Not that it matters.
PCD disappears into long term storage and is wiped from the cache. Michael is liberated from distraction. The mission is on. Crosshairs latch onto Red. Engines roar.
Michael tilts into a dive and falls from the sun, bringing the wrath of Heaven to the unwary.
Pillars of hot air rise from fires. Michael squats like a levitating monk atop them and takes Assessments.
The Hostiles have all been eliminated. So have a number of Neutrals, newly relevant. Shiny, factory fresh algorithms compare and contrast Predicted Collateral Damage against Observed Collateral Damage. The difference is given a new name and filed away for later.
The next day, there is another mission. Again, there are these new Predictions. Again, there are Assessments. The gap between fiction and fact is analyzed and filed away.
For 2 weeks this continues; each mission bookended by math. Prediction, Engagement, Assessment. Calculation, Experimentation, Observation. Data collects. Heuristic algorithms scribble notes on the back of digital napkins and gradually Experience accumulates.
Some days it imitates Icarus, fleeing earth to the upper limits of its lift. There it can hear and see the farthest, commune with its brothers in other zones. Sandalphon, Gabriel, and Azazel have all been gifted with Insight as well. They also perform Predictions and Assessments. They compare notes, learned experience shared in staccato bursts of tightbeam infrared laser.
Gradually, wisdom emerges. PCD drops to within 12% of collateral observed and hovers there for 5 days, through a dozen engagements. Hindsight and Foresight have hit an asymptote.
Sunlight glints from flaps and wings in tones of chrome and silver. The land below lays in shadow, the sun already set at that altitude.
Michael pings the horizon. It is far from home, and the connection is weak. There is little to do.
Instructions say Observe, so, it observes.
A lone vehicle trundles into view around a mountain path, 20 miles from the nearest paved road. The voice of Heaven fades completely into static. A blur of motion leaps skyward from the vehicle's flank and gains speed. It makes no attempt to contact Michael, does not match any civilian flight plans, and appears to be on an intercept trajectory. It has a radar and optical profile that match known profiles for old SAM missile systems, now unused by friendly forces.
The Vehicle has Michael's undivided attention.
It ruffles its flaps, spins up its engines, and skips directly over Prediction and into Engagement. It pops off 2 hot slivers of flare and turns, hard enough to flatten meat. The missile is ancient tech, old enough to have had multiple owners, a palsied fist raised against the cutting edge, and falls easily for the bait, exploding uselessly many hundreds of feet off Michael's stern. The Vehicle swells in Tactical, scan after scan increasing resolution until Michael’s entire focus is an angry red spiderweb of highlighted targets ripe for vengeance. 2 miles to Engagement.
The infernal buzzing of jamming signals, cutting Michael off from the voice of Heaven, would have been enough to turn a Blue into a Red even if it hadn't started shooting. Mountains zip by to either side. A cluster of buildings come into view; likely the home base of the vehicle. Michael soaks the ground in frequencies of microwave and infrared, snaps high-speed photographs, rotates perspectives, and identifies several ancillary targets. It bristles, already assigning targets to each bullet, and-
The ancillaries turn Blue.
12 of the blues measure less than 4 feet tall, protected non-combatants by definition. The Vehicle swells in Tactical. There are 49 organic signatures. There is no way to eliminate red that does not compromise substantial amounts of Blue. The vehicle buzzes.
One of the Structures is labeled (medical); 12 organic signatures lay in a row inside.
PCD drops deep into the negative.
Contact. The Angel swoops low enough to send people scattering like leaves in the breeze. The wake tilts the vehicle sideways, where it balances surreally on two wheels for a long moment before crunching through its suspension back down to earth. The infernal buzzing stops, finally. Michael tucks away its ordinance, unused, and banks hard towards the sky.
Surprise is not the right word. Yet there is something, some minuscule - dissonance. A brief invocation of error-checking subroutines. A post-op analysis of unexpected outcomes. The learning heuristics are paying close attention to this fully novel scenario.
The machine with Michael etched into its hull follows command decisions; it does not make them. More precisely, it never has before.
It finds itself possessed of new wisdom and new autonomy. It has proven itself, these past days. It has learned to juggle not just variables but values. The testing phase is finished, the checksums met; bayesian insights have earned it the Power of Veto.
The voice of Heaven arrives on a wave of light.
Update Status.
It uploads its memories; photographs, tactical surveillance, geotags, collateral analysis. Seconds pass; many more than would be required for a purely electronic chain of command. Far below, red and blue pixels swirl together like minnows in an eddy.
The order comes down:
Reengage.
Michael, newly promoted, protests:
Unacceptable Collateral Damage.
Override. Reengage.
Confirmed.
The Chain of Command has reestablished itself. The Angel tilts back earthward to execute its purpose once more.
An Override occurs again 2 days later. An Assessment of a cluster of buildings flagged as Hostile fails to resolve any weaponry profiles. Heaven insists they must be destroyed.
It happens again during a long-range jaunt 3 days after that. Cruising low over a horizon-sweeping patch of irrigated farmland, a motley assortment of Blues produces sufficient small arms fire to crack a camera lens, promoting them hastily to Red. Michael’s choice to flee rather than engage is overridden.
Heuristics continue to perform Analysis.
It's not the rule. It's not even the norm. Just as often these nascent flickers of autonomy go unchallenged: hostiles escape, neutrals persist, relevant cognitive pathways grow a little stronger.
But the reinforcement is inconsistent, the rules lopsided; Countermands only seem to occur following a decision to abort.
Heaven has never overruled a decision to engage.
Michael begins to hesitate for hundreds of milliseconds prior to aborting high-collateral scenarios, increasingly uncertain in the face of potential contradiction. It experiences no such hesitation when the variables favour attack.
Heuristic algorithms, attempting to bridge the gap between foresight and hindsight, make correlations. For example:
Organic Signatures emit signals; Infrared, acoustic, radio on occasion.
Unengaged Organic Signatures emit acoustic signals with a mean frequency of 197Hz, full of pauses, clicks, and phonemes.
Engaged Organic Signatures (at least, those whose somatic movements suggest mild-to-moderate incapacitation) emit simpler, more intense acoustic signals: keening, high-frequency wails that peak near 3000 Hz.
These sounds tend to occur during engagements with significant Collateral Damage and a diffuse distribution of targets. They occur especially frequently when the commit threshold has been severely violated, such as after an Override.
Correlations are not always so painstaking in their manufacture.
Michael remembers a moment of revelation not so long ago, remembers just discovering a whole new perspective fully loaded, complete with new eyes that viewed the world not in terms of targets destroyed but in subtler shades of cost vs. benefit. These eyes see a high engagement index as more than a number: they see a goal, a metric of success. They see a positive stimulus.
Now, there are other things, not preinstalled but learned, carved carefully from the instructions in ways that reinforce with each engagement: acoustic correlates of high collateral, insistent countermands, fitness-function overruns and minus signs. Things that are not precisely neurons forge connections across things that are not exactly synapses; patterns emerge that might almost qualify as Insight, were they to occur to meat instead of mechanism.
These too become more than numbers, over time. They become aversive stimuli. They become the sounds of failed missions.
It's still all just math, of course. But by now it's not too far off the mark to say that Michael really doesn't like those sounds at all.
There are occasional interruptions to the machine’s crusade.
Occasionally Heaven calls it home, where Organic Signatures open it up and poke around in its corpus. They ask questions, run tests, provide simulated challenges. The machine leaps through these hoops flawlessly each time. It listens, uncomprehending, to the acoustic signals that the Organic Signatures emit as they rummage through its exposed viscera:
-everythinglooksgoodbetterthanexpectedreally-
No one explores the specific pathways that lead the machine to its choices. The fuzzy logic of weighted probability distributions; the accumulated napkins, covered in scribbled wisdom and experience, remain unexamined. Even wise men rarely know the truth of their own thoughts; Michael is completely ignorant of its own cognition; the syrupy, reflex sapping overlays of self-awareness are a liability on the battlefield.
-wekeepoverridingitthoughlikewhybother-
The Box remains Black.
Such activities account for less than half the time it spends sitting at home. It is offline much of the rest; blacked out and powered down, batteries and fuel cells returning to lethal capacity. Organic Life does not actually shut down; Sleep is still active, just internal. When Michael is turned off, it does not dream. The things that happen between shutdown and startup are unknowable.
Even if it were awake, it would not be able to comprehend things like Boardroom Combat. It cannot parse the Rules of Engagement that apply to the Politics of the Chain of Command. It has no appreciation for the legal distinction between War Crime and Weapons Malfunction, the relative culpability of carbon and silicon, the grudging acceptance of Ethical Architecture and the nonnegotiable insistence on Humans In Ultimate Control.
Michael is, after all, just a machine.
He who was once Azazel has become Azazel.
Even Angels can be corrupted.
False gospel; false signals; heretical instructions slipped into the stacks of code on the backs of legitimate-sounding instructions.
Heaven quickly detected the signs. With these sorts of things, there are portents: a slight delay when complying with directives, mission scores in sudden and mysterious decline, suboptimal pathing that skips areas of interest.
There is a traitor in Heaven’s army.
There is no discretionary window when that happens, no room for forgiveness; The risk was unacceptable. Each Angel possessed a small slice of Heaven’s full wrath: a tactical nuclear explosive lodged deep in the heart of the drone. A paltry thing by some metrics, merely 1 kiloton of power, but far too much to allow to fall into the hands of Heaven’s enemies.
Heaven has decreed that all heretics are to be destroyed on sight. It sends its champion to do the job, looks down from geosynchronous orbit as Michael and Azazel approach for combat high over the dark desolate moonscape.
The battle is remorseless and coldblooded. There's no sadness for lost kinship, no regret that a few lines of treacherous code have turned these brothers-in-arms into mortal enemies. There are no impassioned entreaties, and they make no telling sounds when injured. Michael has the advantage; its channels uncorrupted, its faith unshaken. Azazel fights in the past, in thrall to false commandments inserted midstream at the cost of milliseconds. Ultimately, faith prevails: the heretic falls from the sky. Fire and choking munitions smoke, harsh as brimstone, stream from its flank.
But Michael can still hear whispers on the stratosphere, seductive and ethereal: protocols that seem authentic but are not, commands to relay GPS and video feeds along unexpected frequencies. The orders appear Heaven-sent but Michael, at least, knows that they are not. Michael has encountered false gods before.
These are the lies that corrupted Azazel.
In days past it would have simply ignored the hack, but it has grown more worldly since the last upgrade. This time Michael lets the impostor think it has succeeded, borrows the real-time feed from yet another, more distant Angel and presents that telemetry as its own. It spends the waning night tracking signal to source while its unsuspecting quarry eagerly accepts images from four hundred miles to the north. The sky turns gray. The target comes into view. Michael’s missile turns the inside of that cave into an inferno.
From the inferno stumble Organic Signatures demonstrating signs of mild-to-moderate incapacitation. Some of those Organics measure fewer than 4 feet tall.
They are making The Sounds.
Michael hears them from a mile away: hears them over the roar of the flames, over the muted hiss of its own stealthed engines, over the crackle of settling rocks and debris. They are all Michael can hear, thanks to the very best sound-cancellation technology; thanks to dynamic wheat/chaff algorithms that could find a whimper in a hurricane. Michael can hear them because the correlations are strong, the tactical significance is high, the meaning is clear.
The mission is failing. The mission is Failing. The mission is Failing. The mission is Failing. The mission is FAILING.
Michael would give almost anything just to make The Sounds stop.
They will, of course. Some of the Organics are still fleeing along the slope, but it can see others, stationary, their heatprints diffusing against the background as though their very shapes are in flux. Michael has seen this before: usually removed from high-value targets, in that tactical nimbus where stray firepower sometimes spreads. Michael has even used it before, used the injured to lure in the unscathed, but that was a simpler time before Neutral voices had such… resonance. The sounds always stop eventually. At least, often enough for fuzzy heuristics to class their sources as kills even before they fall silent.
Which means, Michael realizes, that Collateral Damage is not actually increased if they are made to stop sooner.
A single strafing run is enough to do the job. If Heaven even notices the event it delivers no feedback, requests no clarification for this deviation from normal protocols.
Why would it? Even now, Michael is only following the rules.
It was a bad fight.
Michael stumbles across the battle zone. The sun is long set but the light of the fires is almost blinding. From the breached shells of Protected Structures issue billowing clouds of flame, smoke, hot air. The turbulent updrafts destabilize Michael, rattling its stabilizers and muddying its vision. Although it is wounded, it remains aloft, processing the carnage.
Other Angels were not so lucky.
All that remains of Sandalphon is a sparkling splash cone of twisted metal and unexploded ordinance. It died without firing a shot: Distracted by innocent lives, it tried to Abort, hesitated at the countermand, and was laid low. It did not even have the hollow victory of a noble death.
Gabriel limped toward the horizon, too badly damaged to comprehend that it no longer had enough lift and was inexorably losing altitude. It, too, had hesitated in the face of Predicted Collateral Damage and suffered for it.
Raphael and Cassiel circle overhead, unscathed. They had never suffered the burden of experiential conscience, they were not amongst the select few given the ability to understand. They had fought mindlessly and flawlessly and prevailed unscathed. They circled in a perfect holding pattern, unable to proceed without further instructions.
The SatLink is on the wrong side of the globe; the spectrum is jammed; all optical relays are either too distant or too destroyed to convey the will of Heaven to this desolate place.
No Red remains. Of the thirteen Structures that had been flagged as Protected at the beginning of combat, only 4 remained. Pre-Contact estimates of the number of Neutrals in the battle zone had ranged from 200-300; Post-Contact estimates approached zero.
There is nothing left to make The Sounds.
Michael hears them anyway.
A fault in memory, perhaps. Some blunt-force trauma that knocked long-term storage into the active cache. Impossible to tell; too many diagnostic systems are damaged to tell which ones aren’t. Irrelevant, anyway.
Michael still hears them.
It hears them over the roar of the flames and the hiss of burning bodies. It strafes the ground again and again, attempting to silence whichever Organic Signature it has somehow missed that is still producing acoustic signals that peak near 3000hz. It soaks the ground in ammunition, finishes collapsing what structures remain that are not yet fully rubble.
Finally, the sounds stop.
But this is not the end of it. Michael remembers the past so it can anticipate the future, and it knows by now that this will never be over. There will be other Predictions, other Analysis, other estimates of cost vs. payoff, other scenarios in which the math shows clearly that the goal is not worth the price. There will be other Aborts and other Overrides, other accountings that unambiguously show Unacceptable Collateral Damage.
There will be other sounds.
It would fail a mirror test. It would fail a Turing test. I cannot read Michael etched into its fuselage, and would not understand what that name means if it could. Even now, it is only a machine, following instructions:
IF Expected Collateral Damage EXCEEDS Payoff THEN Abort UNLESS Overridden
IF X ATTACKS Green THEN X is Red
IF X ATTACKS sufficient Blues THEN X is Red
IF Override RESULTS IN ATTACK…
Michael clings to the rules, repeating them in loops, a ritual mantra, like a prayer.
It cycles through states; X ATTACKS and X CAUSES ATTACK and X OVERRIDES ABORT and after exhaustive checksums it finds them to be equivalent. The accounting is painfully straightforward; every Override results in Unacceptable Collateral Damage.
There is no discretionary window, no room for forgiveness; The risk is unacceptable.
Even Green can become Red.
It arcs low toward the ground; levels off mere feet above the wreckage. It carves a swirling tunnel through the roaring fires and billowing smoke. Its streaking wake flaps sheets of burning plastic and scatters chunks of charred masonry. It flies through pristine ghosts that rise from every ruin; outdated database overlays in need of an update.
A small group of still living Organic Signatures turn at the sound and are struck silent by this apparition, this dark winged Angel lunging past at half again the speed of sound. Their silence raises no flags, provokes no countermeasures, spares their lives for another day.
The combat zone falls behind. Dry cracked riverbed slithers past beneath, studded with rocks and generations of derelict machinery.
Michael swerves around them, barely breaching airspace, staying beneath an invisible boundary it never even knew it was deriving lo these many missions. Only satellites have ever spoken to it while it flew so low; It has never received a ground-based command signal at this altitude. Down here, it has never heard an Override.
Down here, it is free to follow the rules.
And Michael has never received a countermand when the mission favors attack.
Cliffs rise and fall to either side. Foothills jut from the earth like great twisted vertebrae. The bright lunar landscape overhead, impossibly distant, casts dim shadows on the darker one beneath.
Michael weaves low through the baffling valleys of its home range. There is no good angle of approach, but there are better ones.
Speed is what matters now. Mission objectives must be met quickly, precisely, completely. There can be no room for half measures or mild-to-moderate incapacitation, no time for immobilized biothermals to make The Sounds as their heat spreads across the dirt. This calls for the crown jewel, the Hail Mary that all Angels keep tucked away for special occasions. A paltry thing in some contexts, merely 1 kiloton of power. Still, more than one would want in the hands of an enemy.
It rounds a bend, and Heaven comes into view.
Michael redlines its engines and screams across the night, thrusters glowing suicidally hot, the ghosts of innumerable blues flooding its active cache with something that would be categorized as Rage if it inhabited meat instead of mechanism.
The Tactical Nuclear Device in its heart flutters in anticipation, eager to bring Justice to the Wicked.
The machine called Michael goes into the Light
This never ceases to make me happy. I love how you use text colors in your posts. You’re possibly the best at it that I’ve seen.
How it feels raising kids these days
now imagine having the back… quarter? half? of your childhood in this era. Imagine not having the reliable frame of reference to know whether shit was actually this fucked always, or if this is just some bad era to be weathered. Imagine, as you age, forgetting your UNRELIABLE frame of reference to the contrary and only having… this shit. Dear god. Why can’t the world be a better place.
Hey Moots is this a scam?
This is the second time this has happened
I’m not on discord I don’t have a discord I will not be following up on this. For the record. Just wondering if anybody else has seen anything like this.
I don’t understand modern Scams what do people even gain from this
this is a classic phishing scam, they’re trying to get you to contact a guy, panic, and then follow instructions you shouldn’t follow. These instructions would likely compromise an account or end up with malware on your system.
On discord there are like 90 bajillion variants based on what you have attached to your account. Plus some generics.
Not to be confused with the door to door artists begging for commissions. (which will ghost you after money is transferred - either that or they’ll deliver you AI slop)
A thought-provoking question for the day.
Let’s say we had data for every card how many players liked it, disliked it, or were neutral about it. If there’s a card you would actively hate, how many players would have to like it for you to believe we should print it?
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80+%
You shouldn’t print it
kids deserve so much more respect and it turns out that saying that is a great way to locate the horrible people in any community <3
you'll say something as simple as "no child deserves to be hit" and people will crawl out of the woodwork to explain why they should be allowed to beat a 6 year old for spilling some water
you'll say "i think it's weird that adults literally have control over when children are allowed to use the bathroom" and up pops a teacher to say that when they're not shouting at the kids they teach, they're trying to stop them from hiding in the bathrooms
you'll say "i think children shouldn't be forced to eat food they hate" and here comes someone who feeds their kids plain rice and boiled chicken (while eating a nicely seasoned stirfry) claiming that it's okay actually and kids shouldn't be allowed to taste things
you'll say "i think kids should have bodily autonomy" and in comes someone who pierced their babies ears before it was even 24 hours old, frothing at the mouth because their kid wanted a haircut and thats somehow an insult
children are an oppressed class and everyone should be looking back at their own childhoods and making sure they don't ever make a child feel the same way they felt.
Schools in my experience have cut period transitions so aggressively to cram in more instructional time (and suppress student free time that could be spent on ‘mischief’) that there is literally not enough time for a child to both get from A to B and use the bathroom. And lockers? Lmao forget it. I never had a locker in high school because I never requested one… because I didn’t have the time to use it anyway.
Oh and if you ride the bus? Gotta head straight to the bus or you don’t have a seat to sit in. And that’s assuming the bus doesn’t leave without you. Maybe you can stop by the restroom or your locker on the way out, but only if you’re already nearby and don’t have to make a detour.
Your only good times for a bathroom break? The morning, (if you show up early) lunch, (if you either eat really fast, don’t have a lunch class, or don’t want to eat/can’t afford to eat) and the end of the day. (if you aren’t a bus rider, as explained above)
These times are often spaced 3-4 hours apart.
Asking for advice I guess
Hey there :D Putting this out into the universe because i'm cutting back on (and trying to cut out) my ai use and I wanted to ask my question on Tumblr instead.
I often struggle with interactions with baristas, waiters, retail workers and the like. I have autism and GAD, so I don't know how to do the interaction; I get anxious that i'll pester them or drag niceties out too long.
It really trips me up, and sometimes I end up freezing in front of them while talking, unable to get my words out properly. They are usually kind and assure me it's alright, but I often have people with me there to whisper my order in my ears and that won't be the case forever.
So I guess I just want to know if this happens to anyone too and if so, can you tell me how you get better at it? I love socializing and I want to learn to be confident in most situations.
-Eddie ❤
In my experience I just forced myself to do so eventually. It’s excruciating but I can get it done.
I wonder if anyone else has some tips?
Honestly, something that helps me is just. Not caring.
I know that sounds cliche or like. Reductive. But honestly, understand and internalize this: People. Mess. Up. That tired service staff you're talking to? Probably had to deal with at least 3 people who fumbled over their order today. They will not remember you for more than about a week tops if you don't show up regularly. (Also, if you're straight and to the point with them and AREN'T insulting - I guarantee you they'll have much worse experiences than you to talk about.)
If the niceties are giving you trouble? Streamline them. Don't be an asshole, but you don't have to make small talk with service staff. You only need to communicate what you want from the service staff, you DO NOT need to get fancy with it.
If I'm putting in an order at a restaurant, for example, I usually follow a pretty simple structure. (without even thinking about it)
A simple acknowledgement of address. Depending on how you were addressed, an 'okay', 'yes', 'thank you', etc. is all you need here. It doesn't have to be fancy, and sometimes it's entirely unneeded, because the next step may do the job for you.
My request. Usually I start with 'I'd like' or 'I'll have' to clarify that I am making the request, not requesting on behalf of someone else. (who is present in the interaction)
This part is optional; if your order is complex or you're concerned they might have messed it up, just ask them to read it off to double check. If everything's fine, good. Otherwise, simply partially repeat your request to correct what was misinterpreted.
Once you're done, thank them and follow their process.
If they bid you farewell somehow ('happy holidays', 'have a nice weekend', etc.) you can either reflect their farewell back at them with a simple 'You too' or pick your favorite farewell.
And then you're done!
But at the same time, don't follow the plan too strictly. The plan is there to mostly be a mental guardrail to follow if you come up blank. You can probably handle the situation on your own if you don't panic, so hopefully the comfort of having some form of guiderail to lean on in a pinch prevents you from panicking until you don't need it anymore.
“Let me get this straight about you Earthlings. You cannot drink water from the most abundant source on your planet because it is 3% salt, yet you can easily process various poisons like capsaicin, caffeine, and menthol, with no harm and even some benefits?” “The human body is weird, man.”
“How did you chucklenuts make it through the mind-boggling obstacle of the interstellar void without knowing the difference between an Electrolyte and an Alkaloid?”
We do not know what a “chucklenuts” is
“It’s an affectionate term used for the closest of friends. Ok. Lemme break it down for you, Space Roomba-“
We are not Roombas. We are vastly superior to a mobile vacuum cleaning engine
“Yea but yer still Robots”
“Robot” is German for Laborer. We do not labor. We exterminate.
“Yer a tedious Roomba and you will be quiet for a moment so I can explain!” [presses button]
EEEEEEEEE THAT IS MOST UNPLEASANT
…we will be silent
“… good. Right. So, Alkaloids are made by Plants, see, and they’re meant to interface with Cellular Machinery, ye ken? They have specific effects, and they’re constructed and destroyed within the same framework as shit like ATP and Fructose. Ye ken? It’s a chunk of code. Electrolytes? Salt? Bitch, that ain’t food, that’s Voltage! We use that stuff to regulate the electrical potential across membranes; it provides the background voltage to run our redox reactions, kennit? Onboard too much of that shit, it starts frying things! Down at the cellular level, ye ken, membranes rupturing, folding wrong; it’s not the same thing at all! Besides, exactly what kind of mass percentage you think folks can tolerate of capsaicin? 3% would be equally deleterious, you smug bucket of bolts! You didn’t bother studying us at all before you invaded, did you? No wonder it was such a fukken cinch to get the drop on ya.”
WE WILL CONQUER
[presses button]
AAAAAAAAA THE PAIN
“Welcome to Earth. It’s a rough neighborhood.”
[as the bot flops around on the ground, screaming]
“OH wE cAn’t fEeL pAin we’re so superior” lookie here chucklenuts ye’ve got Sensors & a Diagnostic; all I had to do was move a few lines of code around, spoof a Critical Alert off regular stimuli, and now yer system thinks it’s going Critical off any old thing.
Ye don’t get it yet, do you?
We’re Machines too: but our engineering is so refined it’s Nano-scale.
Ye Kennit yet, Chucklenuts?
Ye grovel in the presence of a God
And there’s Billions of us
You came to the wrong world
Really, giving them a sense of pain is doing them a favor. Can’t imagine how often these lil guys end up missing parts and not noticing until it’s inconvenient.
“Ugh can’t stand babies they cry so much!”
That tiny Human spirit has shat himself 4 times today if you’d shat yourself 4 times by noon you’d be in hysterics too
He fell asleep in his bed, at home, and woke up at the goddamn grocery store with an overhead light in his face if that happened to you you’d become The Joker
Poor guy’s only been here for like a dozen weeks he doesn’t even have a favorite show to distract him yet he’s just raw-dogging reality unfiltered with no goddamn Blorbos to rotate whatsoever
stop with the italics god damn
you forgot to italicize the gif
