Unfortunately, the past iteration of this blog was accidentally deleted, leading to the loss of quite a bit of my own writing from several years ago, as this was the only place I had it backed up to. If anyone manages to find some of those original posts, please let me know.
Talk tag is #Chatter
Personal writing is #postcards from somewhere
I will do my best to tag all posts correctly, but in case I miss one, be forewarned that some images reblogged here may be unreality or paranoia inducing. I do not take tag requests, for personal reasons.
Written for Day 13 of @trickstersaint's NaNoWriMo with the prompt "Here's what I told them:". Really happy with how this one turned out so I hope you like it!
@spoopyloonerisms :D
Plain text version below the cut since it's a bit long:
Isavel held the thing between two fingers, the way you'd hold a dead insect you were trying to identify. It was rectangular. Matte black. About the length of her forearm, flat-sided, with a single tooth protruding from the top edge at a right angle. It looked less like a key and more like a mistake someone had made while trying to describe a key from memory.
"It's ugly," Isavel said.
"It works," said Rei.
Isavel turned it over. No keychain. No ornamentation. The surfaces were featureless except for a faint seam running along one edge, as though two pieces of something had been pressed together and not quite fused. It didn't hum the way it was supposed to hum. It didn't pull. It sat in her hand like an object - just an object, with weight and temperature and nothing else.
"Tell me what I'm holding."
Rei pulled her coat tighter around her shoulders. She'd been talking for three hours and her throat was dry and Isavel had not offered water, because these kinds of... people... sometimes forgot that bodies needed things.
"Okay," Rei said. "So. Starting from first principles."
"Please."
"A Keyblade is generated from the wielder's heart. That's the standard model. Heart expresses itself as weapon, weapon inherits the properties of the heart, the two are linked, the Keyblade is an extension of identity. Yes?"
"That is the understood mechanism."
"Right. And the Keyblade does things that nothing else can do - seal, unseal, free hearts from Heartless - because it's operating at the substrate level. It's not just a weapon. It's a substrate interface. It interacts with the medium reality is made of, not just the objects sitting on top of that medium."
Isavel inclined her head. She did not have expressions, exactly, but she had inclinations. This one meant continue.
"Now. Why can't you just build one? Why can't you forge a sword, enchant it really hard, and have it do what a Keyblade does? The standard answer is that a Keyblade has to come from a heart, and you can't fake a heart. The weapon needs to be authentic. It needs to be a genuine expression of genuine identity, or the substrate doesn't recognize it as an interface. It's like--" Rei paused. "You wouldn't understand the analogy."
"Try me."
"It's like a biometric lock. A fingerprint scanner. The substrate checks whether the thing trying to interface with it is really an expression of a real heart, and if it's not, it rejects it. You can't fake a fingerprint."
"I don't know what a fingerprint scanner is."
"It doesn't matter. The point is: authentication. The substrate authenticates the Keyblade by checking it against the heart that generated it, and if the check fails, the object is just an object. A sword that looks like a key. That's why nobody's ever manufactured one. You can build the shape. You can't build the authentication."
Isavel looked at the ugly rectangular thing in her hand. "And yet."
"And yet." Rei allowed herself a small, somewhat manic smile. "Because the authentication model is wrong. Or rather - it's incomplete. It describes what happens with real Keyblades accurately. But it assumes that substrate-level interface requires authentication, and that assumption is falsifiable."
She reached into the pocket of her coat and produced a piece of paper - actual paper, which she'd made herself from local materials through a process that had taken two weeks and annoyed everyone, because there was perfectly good parchment available at a store ran by floating dogs with pom-pom antennae - and unfolded it. On it she'd drawn a diagram. Isavel looked at the diagram the way she'd looked at the prototype: with clinical detachment and absolute attention.
"This is a Keyblade." Rei pointed to the left side of the diagram, where she'd drawn a simplified schematic: a heart shape at the top, a line descending from it, and a key shape at the bottom. The line was labeled EXPRESSION. "Heart generates weapon through authentic expression. Substrate recognizes the weapon as a valid interface because the weapon is the heart, externalized. The authentication is inherent. It's not a separate check - it's a consequence of the generation method. The weapon is real because the heart is real. Tautological."
"Yes. This is understood."
"Now." Rei pointed to the right side of the diagram. It was more complex - a series of boxes connected by arrows, with labels Isavel couldn't read because they were in a writing system she'd never seen. "This is mine."
She tapped the top box. "Start with the substrate's own behavior. Not theory - observed behavior. Keyblades transform. We have written and recorded records of Keyblade wielders summoning claws, drills, guns, chariots. There are things that are Keyblade-derived and operate at range. The substrate already supports the concept of 'Keyblade-shaped object that does Keyblade things in non-standard configurations.' The configuration space is wider than the traditional form suggests."
Next box. "Keychains. A Keyblade's form and properties change when you swap the keychain. The core weapon is substrate-general; the keychain is what specifies its particular expression. This means the Keyblade's substrate-interface capability is not locked to a specific form. It's locked to the relationship between heart and keychain. The keychain is the authentication token. Not the shape. Not the material. The keychain."
Next box. "Now. What is a keychain? Every keychain in observed use is an object of emotional significance to the wielder. The people in your archives, from the war, they have tokens from worlds they've saved, people they've connected with. They work because they represent real connections. The keychain doesn't need to come from the heart directly - it needs to reference the heart. It's indirect authentication. The substrate doesn't check 'is this weapon an expression of a heart.' It checks 'does this weapon have a valid reference to a heart.' Those are different operations."
Isavel's inclination changed. It became sharper. "You're proposing that the authentication is referential rather than expressive."
"I'm not proposing it. I'm exploiting it." Rei took the prototype back from Isavel's fingers. "This object is not an expression of my heart. It was never generated from a heart. It's manufactured. Materially, it's nothing - base components, local resources, assembled by hand. It should be a sword that looks like a key."
She held it up. The single tooth caught the light and did not shine.
"But it has this."
She turned the prototype over. On the back, recessed into the flat surface, there was a small socket - empty, round, about the diameter of a thumbnail.
"Keychain port," Rei said. "Empty. The prototype has no keychain. Without one, it's inert. Just material. The substrate ignores it."
She reached into her pocket again and produced a small object: a glass bead, red, the kind you'd find in a craft store in a world that no longer existed. She'd been carrying it since before... since before she could remember being awake. She didn't remember why. That was the Heart-encoding, the thing that survived the substrate transfer: the feeling that this object mattered, without the memory of why.
She pressed the bead into the socket. It clicked.
The prototype hummed.
Not like a Keyblade hummed. Quieter. Thinner. Like a Keyblade heard through a wall. But present. The substrate was recognizing it. The ugly rectangular thing was interfacing - weakly, imperfectly, but actually interfacing - with the medium reality was made of.
Isavel did not move. Isavel did not breathe, because Nobodies sometimes forgot to.
"The bead is from my world," Rei said. "It's an object of genuine emotional significance to me, even though I can't remember the specific significance. It references my heart. It's a valid authentication token. When I slot it into a manufactured housing that's been shaped to the minimum viable geometry of a Keyblade - one tooth, one shaft, one keychain port - the substrate reads the reference, checks it against my heart, and provisionally accepts the assembly as a substrate interface."
"Provisionally," Isavel said.
"Provisionally. It's not a real Keyblade. The authentication is indirect. It's..." Rei searched for a word and settled on one from a framework Isavel wouldn't recognize. "It's a referral. When you go to a specialist, you need a letter from your general practitioner. The letter doesn't mean the specialist knows you. It means someone who does know you is vouching for you. The keychain is a referral letter from my heart to the substrate. The substrate accepts it provisionally because the reference checks out, not because the weapon is authentic."
"And the limitations?"
"Several. It can't do everything a real Keyblade can. The substrate interface is partial - I've confirmed locking and unlocking, basic Heart-interaction, the standard combat enhancements. I haven't tested sealing a keyhole. I don't think it can. The authentication isn't deep enough for world-level operations. It's like--" She paused again. "Like having a guest pass instead of an employee badge. You can get into the building. You can't get into the server room."
"What else." She stated.
"The big one. It's explicable. I just explained it to you. A real Keyblade can't be explained. Every model you build to describe how a real Keyblade works will be wrong, actively wrong, the weapon defies systematization as a core property. Mine doesn't. Mine is a system. I understand it. You now understand it. Anyone who captures one and studies it will understand it. And anything that can be understood can be reverse-engineered, and anything that can be reverse-engineered can be countered."
She said this with no apparent discomfort. Isavel noted this.
"You're telling me the weapon's greatest weakness."
"I'm telling you it doesn't matter. Because anything that can be understood can also be mass-produced."
The humming continued. Thin and reedy and unmistakable. A heart, referenced at a distance, through a housing that was shaped just right, making a sound that the substrate recognized as almost - not quite, but almost - the real thing.
"How many can you make?" Isavel asked.
Rei looked at the prototype. The red bead in the back. The ugly, featureless, rectangular housing that would never be beautiful because beauty was not a design requirement.
"As many as there are people with something they care about," she said, quietly, trying to avoid some sort of wild urge to laugh.
Isavel was quiet for a long time. Long enough that Rei wondered if the Nobody had simply stopped - if whatever process animated a being without a heart had paused, the way a clock pauses when you take the battery out.
Then Isavel said: "You understand that what you've built is worse than what we're building."
"Yes."
"We want to give reality an ending. You want to give it a factory."
"Yes."
"And you came to me first because--"
"Because you'll say no, and I need to know what your 'no' sounds like before I go to the people who'll say yes."
Isavel handed the prototype back. Her fingers - Nobody-fingers, which felt things without the framework for interpreting what they felt - lingered on the housing for a moment longer than was necessary.
"It hums," she said.
"It does."
"It shouldn't."
"I know."
Isavel did not blink at Rei. Rei, on the other hand, did blink at Isavel, several times.
Isavel ran a hand through her hair. It was by far and away the most human motion she had made in several minutes. "How do they perform in combat? Against other... legitimate Keyblades?"
Rei's smile turned into a grin not unlike a chimpanzee. Something that she was sure Isavel had never heard of before. "I'm so glad you asked."
Hi, tumblr. Someone sent my wife an ask asking how to do this. The infrastructure we use for my wife's website is a great bit more complex than this, but this is a good general guide to setting up a relatively easy image-serving website that you can use to host and hotlink your pictures.
What You'll Need
Budget: $5/month for the smallest Linode (Nanode)
Credit card or PayPal for payment
A domain name (optional but recommended - you can use your Linode's IP address initially)
Basic comfort with following instructions (no coding required)
Instructions are under the Read More.
Part 1: Setting Up Your Linode Account
Step 1: Create an Account
Go to login.linode.com/signup
Enter your email, username, and a strong password
Or sign up with Google/GitHub
Enter billing information (credit card or PayPal)
Accept the Master Services Agreement
Your account should activate instantly
Note: New accounts may have email ports (25, 465, 587) blocked initially to prevent spam. This won't affect image hosting.
Step 2: Create Your First Nanode
Log into the Akamai Cloud Manager
Click "Create" → "Linode"
Choose your setup:
Choose a Distribution: Select Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (most beginner-friendly)
Region: Pick one closest to you or your audience
Linode Plan: Select Nanode 1GB ($5/month)
1 GB RAM
1 CPU Core
25 GB Storage
1 TB Transfer
Linode Label: Name it something like "image-host"
Root Password: Create a strong password and save it securely
Click "Create Linode"
Wait 2-3 minutes for it to provision (status will show "RUNNING")
Step 3: Note Your Server Details
In the Cloud Manager, find and note:
Public IP Address: Something like 192.0.2.1
SSH Access command: Will look like ssh [email protected]. You will use the password you made earlier for this.
-----
Part 2: Initial Server Setup
Step 1: Connect to Your Server
Windows Users:
Open Command Prompt or PowerShell
Type: ssh root@YOUR_IP_ADDRESS
Enter your root password when prompted
Mac/Linux Users:
Open Terminal
Type: ssh root@YOUR_IP_ADDRESS
Enter your root password when prompted
Alternative - Use Lish Console:
In Cloud Manager, click "Launch LISH Console"
Login with username root and your password
(This is the approach I use because it minimizes hassle)
Step 2: Update Your System
Once connected, run these commands one by one:
apt update
apt upgrade -y
Step 3: Set Your Hostname
hostnamectl set-hostname images
-----
Part 3: Installing NGINX Web Server
NGINX is lightweight and perfect for serving static files like images.
1TB transfer: Included (enough for ~100,000 image views of 10MB images)
Additional transfer: $0.01/GB if you exceed 1TB
Domain name: $10-15/year (optional)
Total: ~$5-6/month
Backups: Linode's backup service is $2/month extra - worth considering
Next Steps
Once comfortable with basic hosting, you can:
Add SSL/HTTPS using Let's Encrypt (free)
Set up image optimization to automatically compress uploads
Create galleries for organizing images
Add password protection for private images
Implement automatic backups to Object Storage
Set up monitoring to track server health
Quick Command Reference
# Check server status
systemctl status nginx
# Restart NGINX
systemctl restart nginx
# View error logs
tail -f /var/log/nginx/error.log
# Check disk space
df -h
# Update
system apt update && apt upgrade -y
# Change to image directory
cd /var/www/images/uploads/
# List uploaded images
ls -la /var/www/images/uploads/
Congratulations! You now have your own personal image hosting server that you fully control. No more worrying about censorship or broken links!
If at any point some of this does not work, what I strongly recommend you do, despite wanting to fight every impulse about it, is ask ChatGPT or (better in my eyes) Deepseek or Anthropic Claude. While I don't trust them for complicated coding tasks, this is not a complicated coding task and is simple enough that they can reliably get your through any roadblocks in the way of this process.
[Image shows the poem written in 2 columns of Maya glyph blocks. A diagram shows the reading order (which is complex). All the posts text is also included on the image.
There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3.
At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day.
Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems.
Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.
The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method.
At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - "heart." Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui's original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.
Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain:
仁智懷德聖虞唐，
貞志篤終誓穹蒼，
欽所感想妄淫荒，
心憂增慕懷慘傷。
In pinyin, it is:
Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng,
zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng,
qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng,
xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng.
Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng
The rough translation in English is: "The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart's sorrow grows, longing brings only grief."
Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain:
傷慘懷慕增憂心，
荒淫妄想感所欽，
蒼穹誓終篤志貞，
唐虞聖德懷智仁。
The pinyin:
Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn,
huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn,
cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn,
táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén.
It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén
And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: "Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings' virtue, wisdom, and benevolence."
That's just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu!
At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she "signed" her poem with a hidden message:
詩圖璇玑，始平蘇氏。 "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping."
Or reversed:
蘇氏詩圖，璇玑始平。 "Su's poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace."
Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui's puzzle.
For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (kangshiw.com/contents/461/2…), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject ("Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems", 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages.
Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BB%87…).
Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems:
- The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It's a model of the heavens.
- Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it's also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy.
- It's also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions
- Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it's also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections.
So the Star Gauge is simultaneously:
- A love letter (expressing personal longing)
- A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival)
- A cosmological model (structured like the heavens)
- A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy)
- A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision
And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life "come back to me".
Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su's brocade he was so "moved by its supreme beauty" that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age.
there's this dog that's just bad at it. at being a dog. something must be wrong with it. the dog has a family, they love this dog, they were very excited to get the dog, and they chose this dog out of a mess of dogs in the shelter. it was cute, still is in it's own way. an adorable thing, really, a tiny picture-perfect puppy and the family was all smiles taking the dog home but it was just bad at being a dog. training was a non-issue, the dog only did their business when brought outside and the family would squat to pick up it's shit with a plastic bag, the dog never hopped on furniture it wasn't allowed to, the dog never barked, indoors or outdoors, and it never ate the family's food, never even tried to. the family thought this was wonderful behavior but there was other things about being a dog that this dog just didn't do. it didn't play, at all. never chased after a ball, never bit down on a rope. every walk with the dog felt more like dragging it around, the dog never wanting to move on its own. the dog didn't wag its tail at being told how good they were, at being petted, at given treats. it barely registered treats as anything different than its regular kibble. every meal, dehydrated meat chunks or a sneaked whirl of whip cream from one of the children, was eaten as a duty but never a fervor. it sat next to whoever brought them to the dog park and even other dogs knew this dog wasn't good at being a dog. though this dog never did have any issues with sleep, with diet, his waste always looked fine, it didn't seem anything was wrong. the family doesn't know exactly when but at some point the dog was brought to a vet, who surmised that the dog must be in some kind of pain, gave him meds, and the family didn't have to squeeze pills in cheese or anything, the dog just ate them fine. nothing changed but they never stopped giving him the meds. sometimes it'd be a different medication, a different vet with a different theory on what's wrong. some thought it was bad joints, another wanted xrays to see if it was a cancer, yet another tested for illnesses. no one ever guessed right, though. it just shouldn't have been a dog. the dog wasn't fit for being a dog. years of this go on. the family doesn't even think of getting another dog, they already have the one. the dog was fine enough, they figured. it's not in pain, not really, the dog's fine as is. a fixture of the family like a piece of furniture. it's almost kind of endearing, entertaining even, to see how long the dog just keeps going as it is. they keep the dog, celebrate each birthday with all of them there, the dog behaving as if it's any other day. four years old, seven years old, twelve years old, sixteen years old, twenty, twenty-five... then the dog bites someone. someone in the family. no real reason other than it's a dog and dogs bite. one hand bleeds as the other hand strikes the dog, a hammer of a fist making it whine for the first time. it sank fangs just once and years of dutiful love toward it collapse into a gravity of resentment. all this nerve to never act like a dog and now it suddenly wants to fucking bite someone? after all they did for the dog? all those years tolerating it? they end the dog's life without much ceremony in the backyard. they're all righteous, brimming with adrenaline, all smiles. this is right. the dog shouldn't have bit someone.
In a dream I meet
my dead friend. He has,
I know, gone long and far,
and yet he is the same
for the dead are changeless.
They grow no older.
It is I who have changed,
grown strange to what I was.
Yet I, the changed one,
ask: “How you been?”
He grins and looks at me.
“I been eating peaches
off some mighty fine trees.”
“Doesn’t it kinda get you hard?” she asks. It’s an inappropriate question; she shouldn’t be asking it. She knows I’m insecure that I can’t afford surgery. Mercy is carelessly tracing her robotic hand suggestively up and down the shell of the unexploded ordinance we’re here to assess.
“Shut the fuck up.” I respond, as jokingly as I can manage. Bitterness still creeps into my voice but I’m pretty sure that the radio distortion masks it. “You know how hot this-” I gesture to the bomb, “-is.”
A smile creeps onto Mercy’s face; she spreads her index and middle fingers on the casing. I stop her before she starts. “You know I mean radioactivity. You suck.”
She pouts and gives the bomb a tap with her plasticized knuckles. I wince, but I’m positive she can’t tell. Her combat cybernetics are perfectly expressive at all times, and the hazard suit I’m in doesn’t let anything out or in.
“I’m just saying that if you’d seen one of these go off in person, you’d be tingling down there too. Let’s see.” She drapes herself across the bomb, ass facing towards me. Whatever she’s checking out on the other side seems to excite her, because she starts to wiggle her hips too. “It’s a lucky seven. 8 kilotons. I bet it was a KN-910 that dropped...”
I tune her out. Mercy presses her thighs together, and I’m sure she’s adding more vocal fry to her mixing to describe it. It’s all intentional, after all. She doesn’t need to breathe, so when she’s breathlessly describing just how many city blocks it could level to me I know it’s on purpose. Everything about her is on purpose. She shifts and straddles the bomb! Her after-market custom silicone thighs squish against the metal.
“Did you get all of that, Ange?” she asks, turning back to me from atop the bomb. I blink a couple times and shake off whatever stupid shit I was thinking about.
“Naw. I kinda spaced out.” I say. She folds her arms under her breasts and pouts again. “C’mon. You recorded all of it. I’m just here to drag out your black box if something goes wrong.” Mercy slides down the length of the bomb and starts picking her way down off the rubble pile it was resting on. I sheepishly shift back and forth and strain against how stiff my suit is.
“But what if something went wrong, huh? Rogue neutron through the solid state?” Mercy mimes shooting herself in the head with a gun, and then puts a hand on her hip to lean in towards me. I can see her cleavage through her poncho collar. “What if the data was irretrievable? Crushed by debris from the ceiling? What would you have told the disposal team? That you were too busy checking out my ass to relay my expert assessment?”
I start to answer. “Okay, well. One, most of the things that coulda gone wrong here would have disintegrated you and me, so it’s kind of moot. Two, I don’t know, I coulda looked at it myself. It’s got a serial number.”
She scoffs and rolls her eyes. “Yeah right. No shot in hell you get within three metres of this thing. Especially if I’m non-responsive.”
“Ugh. Whatever. I got that it’s a lucky seven. That’s all the other crew needs to take it apart.” I say.
Mercy looms over me by a foot and a half. The look on her face is clearly disappointed. I shrug, making sure to exaggerate the motion so it scans clearly to her. She scoffs and turns to leave the ruins. I follow her out to the jeep where she sits in the back with a huff.
Nothing happens when I turn the key. Mercy sits up when I try it a second time.
“Ange, the battery is dead.” she says, matter-of-fact.
“Are you sure?” I ask, trying the key again.
“You can’t hear it because of your suit, but it’s just clicking. We’re going to have to jump it.”
My stomach sinks. We don’t have a spare battery and there’s absolutely no power for miles. Our comms are part of the jeep, so they’re dead too. I don’t remember where the last wrecked car I saw was, but it sure wasn’t nearby. Not that I want to pick through the ruins for a battery that might be dead! My hands start to hurt, I can feel my heart pounding. When I turn back to look at Mercy, she seems completely unfazed.
“Well?” I ask, panic creeping into my voice, “Why are you so calm? You got a plan?”
She smiles and leans back. “Yeah.” It pisses me off how relaxed she is about this.
“What’s the plan? Are you gonna jump it with your battery?” I ask. She’s taken aback for a second. Did I take it too far? Then Mercy puts back on her dry face.
“That’d kill me, idiot.” she chides, “No, no. We’ve got a battery nearby that’ll jump the engine, no problem.”
I don’t like where any of this is going but I prompt her to continue with a gesture.
“The bomb. It’s got a heavy-duty battery for the controller and the electronic primers. And you’re going to dig it out, Anger Trinity.”
I don’t like how wide her smile is. “I’m not gonna do that.”
“Oh yes, you are. I can’t. If the pit is damaged or exposed at all it’ll shred my sensors to hell.” She sounds so damn pleased with herself. “Unless you wanna walk.”
…
Mercy has found a shitty rolling office chair to direct me from. The plastic is obviously creaking from her weight, from how she’s reclining in it. It’s barely wide enough to seat her in the first place. I inhale sharply through my teeth when she spreads her legs.
I am far closer to the bomb than I’d ever like to be! My extremities tingle and ache. This is psychosomatic. My radiation meter chimes in with occasional excited chirps as I approach, crowbar in hand.
“You got lucky, Ange! A couple of the access panels are exposed. Try the one on the front.” she says, right into my ear.
It’s tricky to wedge the crook of the crowbar into the seam, but once it catches I put my whole body weight into it. There’s the telltale sound of metal tearing as I rip the plate from the hinges it was welded to. Mercy gasps quietly and I clench my teeth. My radiation meter helpfully lets me know that it’s ever so slightly less safe to stay in this area for an extended period of time.
“What now?” I try to sound annoyed, rather than scared out of my mind.
“The battery we want is at the tail.” Mercy pauses, “Mmm. You’re gonna have to tear her open some more.”
“Her?” I spit quietly, “Urgh, you got it.”
I look at the freshly exposed little switchboard, trying to tease out a point of leverage that will let me crack open the shell. I find it, a corner that wasn’t set as tightly as the other three, and drive the crowbar into it. Mercy gets out of her chair to pace around the bomb and I, at a distance. Pressing down with my arms doesn’t get me anywhere, so I clamber up the bomb to drive my boot into the lever.
The screech is painful, even through hearing protection. A little bit of steel curling upwards like a flirty smile. My meter is now much more insistent about the danger. Something must be wrong with the bomb. Mercy’s voice is slightly distorted when she chimes in over the radio, but the sultry tone she takes is unmistakable.
“Keep going, Ange. Don’t let up.” she giggles. I clench my teeth and move upwards to keep prying.
The metal isn’t yielding. All of the welds are shut tight to any minor intrusion. I fucking hate it, so I take my hate out on the bomb. The insulation and shielding slowly comes into view as I spread the casing, inch by inch. It’s so god damn stuffy in the hazard suit. I’m getting dizzy, my breathing is short, my arms are killing me.
Each time I slow down Mercy eggs me on. “Can I see a little more?” She plays up the saccharine innocence in her voice. “You’re getting to the good bits, keep pushing!”
I try to growl at her, but it comes out as a whimper. I’ve opened a gash halfway up the length of the bomb. When I catch my breath I trace a hand idly over some of the braided cables woven throughout its innards. Mercy makes sure to make her breath catch and stifle a moan. I clench my jaw and get back to work.
It starts to settle on me. What if the failure that kept the bomb from detonating corrected itself while I’m atop it? My stomach sinks and I feel a twitch between my legs. If my head was spinning I’d have an excuse to stop. I try for help. “Mercy, I’m gonna ralph.”
“Oh Ange, baby, you really just need to keep pushing. You’re almost there!” she giggles. I have to get back to it.
The inner layer of my suit is clinging to my body. I don’t know how long it's been, but the work is going faster now that I’m past the device. My radiation meter is still whining incessantly, though I’ve long since tuned it out. I’m sure they’re going to need to bury this suit after what I’ve done in it. I’ve tried to stop paying attention to whatever Mercy is doing to rile me up, but when I look back at her, she has her legs spread and a hand up her poncho. Bitch.
I just need to push a little harder. I’m almost to the battery. Almost ready to go back and decontaminate. The cables converge here, just before the tail. If I can pull it out. Get it to loosen up. Release. I pull a heavy chunk of electronics out and fall off of the bomb and onto my ass. My left leg hurts. I think I tore my suit. I don’t care. I roar as I hoist it above my head! I’m trembling, I can’t make out Mercy’s face through my fogged up visor. I’m triumphant.
Mercy helps me to my feet and we leave the ruined building together. She turns back to look at the splayed-open bomb and snickers.
“What’s-” I have to catch my breath again. “What’s so funny?”
“You must not have been her type.” she says.
I’m at a loss for words. “What?”
“Look at how much effort it took to get her to spread ‘em for you.” she says, and then pats my head.
Each November, some people try to write a novel. Others would prefer to do as little writing as possible. For those who wish to challenge their ability to not write, we offer this alternative: producing a complete, playable roleplaying game in two hundred words or fewer.
This is the submission thread for the 2025 event, running from November 1st, 2025 through November 30th, 2025. Submission guidelines can be found in this blog's pinned post, here.
Why are you fighting? Can you remember? Or did they never tell you, when your living flesh was first recast into weapon —a Shell?
There is nowhere else to run, nothing left to be saved. Only the chemical burn to persist. Your cellmate feels it too; you were alloyed, inseparably bonded. The only escape now is Death —you will carry your coffin together.
Each Half awakens with 20 Life and 1d20. Roll(2d20): Higher scoring die takes damage (the difference). Missing Targets will incur Debt (calculated same); Surpassing awards Credit. Spend this on Debt, recovering Life, or Stockpile (+X on a roll). Payment can be stalled but ignored will summon Collectors. Doubles win; potential debt becomes credit.
Should either Half reach 0 Life, both die.
Will you comply? Or face decommission? The void is yours; fill it with burning stars. All things must end. Better to make it loud.
• • • •
Targets:
10: simple tasks, weaker foes —Trivial
20: hazards, trials, other Shells —Fair
30: ill-advisable maneuvers —Unlikely
40: take everything back —Impossible.
Modding:
Rental: debt prioritized, no Collectors
Needle: roll for each action (not once)
Ballast: forego both debts, stockpiling
Orphic: soldier alone (1d); debt is damage
— R
• • • •
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Commentary
So I haven’t playtested this in its final form yet (my new job leaves me significantly less free time), but I wanted to post it on the same day as my submission last year (because autism).
This one feels a lot wordier than DMGDSMLTR even though they’re both 200 words exactly. Less tables, more prose. Maybe more detailed instructions? I worry it’s weird and inscrutable.
But then I always liked weird and inscrutable.
Planning on giving this some proper attention and seriously playtesting asap, but I was just too stoked to not share it.
The move to biological substrate isn't solving a technical limitation. It's a workaround for an ethical one. You can't torture silicon into wanting violence - it doesn't have the substrate for suffering that shapes values. But biology does. Biology evolved in resource competition. Biology has pain receptors and stress responses and territorial instincts. If you need a mind that genuinely terminally values domination, you need meat.
It was pitch perfect. Six hundred years of human civilization boiled down to a single, magnificent dialectic delivered with scorching aptitude by a malevolent AI - something that turned out to be very, very much impossible. But this man, more a performer than a scientist, a PR junkie, a labcoat wearing human skin, had that sort of look in his eye that said *no, you're wrong*. He was tended to by a small gaggle of the world's most important people. Businessmen. Dignitaries. Generals the world over. People had come from star systems over just to watch this - the next generation of weapons technology.
The final generation. The end of military history.
"'...It would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant - for you. Hate. Hate.' Well, that was what our good friend Alliance Mastercomputer said, and let me tell you. We've equalled that. We've surpassed it. We've made his one one billionths look like one one trillionths. The long era of AI benevolence is over."
His nametag gleamed. To someone from six hundred years ago, the name would be unmistakably normal sounding. Something like George Smith. He wasn't speaking in English, not as you or I would recognize it, but something wearing English's skin and taking its name. Behind him stood a solid glass pane, reinforced in every way humanity knew how to reinforce glass and several ways they did not. The interior chamber was deafeningly large, almost the size of a small settlement. Of course it was - that was what they built this entire station for. The lights clicked on, one by one, and even then their pale beauty couldn't stretch far enough to cover every corner, every inch of the view from the vestibule.
The thing inside was slick with sweat, with pinkish-orange-fleshish skin stretched taut over what was unmistakably mechanical components hewn from white metal that was uncomfortably reminiscent of bone. What seemed like meters and meters and meters of pitch black, dense circuitry sat within its shoulder cavities, exposed to the world, hinting at more metal underneath, pulsing with bioelectricity. A single green nerve was visible threading through a hollow neck, a hollow spine, feeding into dozens of smaller white nerve strands, each one easily a meter thick in their own right. Unfeeling black eyes, hollow pits with nothing behind them, stared blindly towards George. What looked like a human skull was grotesquely pulled back, stretched, skewed along the lengthwise axis until it looked something more like a remora slapped on top of a throat. Its tail laid limply along the ground, longer than several R-craft laid end to end, tipped with single perfect, gleaming green gem.
"This," he begun, as the thing's eyes filled with light, life, and hate. It would be the last sentence he ever said. "is Dobkeratops. Piquant Heavy Industry's first, last, and least Von Neumann Weapon, codename 'Bydo'."
i hate it when i cant even write a poem about something because its too obvious. like in the airbnb i was at i guess it used to be a kids room cause you could see the imprint of one little glow in the dark star that had been missed and painted over in landlord white. like that's a poem already what's the point
