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How did you even get here?? My actual acc is @dieselsonictheforth ||| any pronouns btw

[cute-catts]

[homoeroticjunoincident]

people NEED to stop gatekeeping making music like ohhhh i don’t have an instrument ohhhhh i don’t know music theory ohhhhh i’m not gonna pay for some program. SHUT UP. take my hand.

you need NONE of that shit!!!!! there’s a website called beepbox.co. literally all you have to do is press things until it sounds a modicum of nice. it’s easy it’s free and it works on anything which has a browser because it’s a website.

if even ONE person starts making music bc of this post it will be worth it.

making bad music is just as important and okay as it is to write badly or draw badly or sing badly. you AREN’T BEHOLDEN TO MAKE GOOD MUSIC. making music is not utilitarian HAVE FUN. HAVE FUN!!!!!!!!!

[homoeroticjunoincident]

love how people will encourage people to just start making shit and see what happens when it comes to drawing and writing but when it comes to beginner musicians (music makers if you wish to be less formal) it’s just COMPLETE RADIO SILENCE. it feels like no one even knows you MAKE music it just sprouts up from the ground one day and some guy picks it up. am i alone in this dark cave

[godofautism-deactivated20240303]

Fuck it

I'm gonna try and make music

Call me betovan bc I'm deaf as fuck /j

[terri-theslime13]

HELL YEAH!!!

[unhinged-popsocket]

Alternatively if you wanna get into music producing in a more “proper” way, you still don’t need any money.

Ableton has excellent free websites to learn the basics:

Learning Music

Learning Synths

You can learn basically everything you need on YouTube. I recommend:

Mercurial Tones Academy

Dan Worrall

Bthelick

A lot of your favorite artists, mainly in electronic music, likely have done track breakdowns, you can watch those to learn how they do things.

DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) ultimately all do the same things, and Cakewalk is a great FREE fully fledged one. Sure it has some issues, and doesn’t have many plugins included, but it works just fine. All the music I released so far was made there, before I made the jump to Ableton.

As for VST plugins:

Vital is an excellent free synth

Native Instruments Komplete Start is a good free collection of plugins

TDR Nova is a great free EQ

There’s a lot of others and I don’t wanna name everything I’m aware of here, but feel free to DM me for more (Or if you have any other questions and stuff too).

And as for samples, you can get a bunch of free ones at:

Cymatics

Ghosthack

Having good headphones is nice and what I’d recommend you invest in first once it comes to it, but even your current ones will probably be fine, mainly if you slap AutoEQ onto them to flatten the frequency response. And ultimately, music isn’t all about the mixing, the most important part is conveying an emotion.

I know this goes against the spirit of the original post a little, but I want people to know that getting into music production also no longer costs thousands, you can just do it at home on your computer without no money.

[unhinged-popsocket]

Yeah, there is still quite the learning curve, I get that, though it’s also why it’s managed to hold me as a hobby for so long.

I do however have something of the exact opposite variety too, the most simple way to make music I know of, and a wonderful little semi-social experience, along the lines of the game Journey:

The New PLINK! is the long overdue update of #plink by @DinahmoeSTHLM. Jam with friends and strangers all over the world.

[plaguery]

hi op i think you should know that i did indeed make a song for the first time because of this

Visit Original Link

[shinyhappygoth]

The Least Specific Movie Night Ever

The Thing

The Stuff

The Substance

The Entity

It

The Others

[qcharlie]

please god watch this right now

[thekidsfromyestergay]

Nobody ever talks about the fact that heavy metal basically only exists because of a disability

[thekidsfromyestergay]

For context: the reason metal sounds the way it does is because Tony Iommi, guitarist of Black Sabbath, lost his fingertips in a factory accident. Doctors told him he would never be able to play again, so he spent months burning down plastic and covering it with leather to essentially create new fingertips. Of course, he still couldn't play in the same way, so he downtuned his guitars and found new ways to play parts that made them sound even bigger and heavier than before, and that's how the sound of heavy metal was created!

[thekidsfromyestergay]

Not to use him as inspiration porn but it really is incredible that an entire huge genre exists not in spite of but specifically BECAUSE of a disability

[carpintransa]

Also worth mentioning he was inspired by Django Reinhardt!

"My friend said, "Listen to this guy play", and I went, "No way! Listening to someone play the guitar is the very last thing I want to do right now!" But he kept insisting and he ended up playing the record for me. I told him I thought it was really good and then he said, "You know, the guy's only playing with two fingers on his fretboard hand because of an injury he sustained in a terrible fire." I was totally knocked back by this revelation and was so impressed by what I had just heard that I suddenly became inspired to start trying to play again."

[kooldewd123]

actually the craziest impact animorphs has had on me is that i never really got an urge to eat cinnamon buns from reading them BUT the phrase "the refreshing beverage known as vinegar" has forced its way into my head every other week for years to try and convince me it would be a good idea to chug a whole glass of it

[kooldewd123]

tyhe voices in my head are gettinh louder

[sarifel-corrisafid-ilxhel]

Vinegar is what we used to use as the acid in our sodas before we switched to Carbonated Water in the 19th century, and vinegar-based sodas trace their roots all the way back to the Bronze Age Meditteranean! The Romans called it Posca! The Ottomans adopted it from the Romans and called it Sharab, which means "Drink", and then American colonists acquired the recipe from the Ottomans in the 17th century and changed the name to Shrub!

There's a famous example of Posca that most people misremember because we don't drink Vinegar much anymore. If you're familiar with the Crucifixion of Jesus in the Bible, you probably remember the bit about the Roman soldier offering Jesus a sponge full of vinegar to drink. Most people think the Roman dude was mocking Jesus, but that's wrong. That was a sponge full of Posca. The Roman dude was like "Well this sucks. Want a Sprite?"

...Fun fact, I know this because the phrase "Refreshing Beverage known as Vinegar" got stuck in my head one night at work, and I started googling "Does anybody drink vinegar". I had to know. It turns out the answer is yes! And you can still find vinegar-based soft drinks today! Switchel is a vinegar-and-ginger drink you can find at some bars in the US, and it goes back to pre-carbonated soft drinks.

Also, I know several people who drink pickle juice regularly, and white vinegar is a key component of pickle juice! So that's also where vinegar as a drink can pop up in your day to day life.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

There's also a trendy New Age beverage called fire cider that's literally just vinegar, cinnamon, spice, and pretensions. RIP Ax, you would've loved the fire cider craze.

[kooldewd123]

op here. imagine how i feel. i've been dealing with this propaganda in my notifications all week.

[foldingfittedsheets]

Alright so one of my past jobs was working at an on tap place called Oil and Vinegar store. It’s supposed to be for salad dressings and stuff. People would bring in their bottles and we’d fill them up.

Vinegar is basically just made from fruit sugars so we had. The most. Amazing vinegars. There’s this one made with mango pulp that I straight up would have just drunk but if you add it to soda water it was truly the most decadent beverage imaginable. So there’s like passion fruit, raspberry, elderflower- just every wonderful sharp flavor imaginable.

We had pregnant ladies who’d buy several bottles at a time because it’s really great for nausea.

What I’m saying here is that Ax wasn’t wrong at all, that dude knew what was up even if he was probably chugging boring household white vinegar.

[rubinaito-inactive]

The things I learn on this godforsaken website.

[aureateplinko]

Holy fucking shit y'all.

[kenziecore]

ok but

[crystal-rebellion]

Have some samples from the comments - 10/10 would recommend browsing them.

[ginijoy]

LoveStar Eclipse music video tomorrow at 9am.

[anyataylorjoys]

⫷ TJ MIKELOGAN’S HALLOWEEN HORROR 2025 EVENT ⫸ DAY 6: Music in horror

HOUSE OF WAX (2005) Motion Picture Soundtrack [ Attributions: x, x ]

[ms-mazarin]

Words to replace said, except this actually helps

I got pretty fed up with looking for words to replace said because they weren’t sorted in a way I could easily use/find them for the right time. So I did some myself.

IN RESPONSE TO Acknowledged Answered Protested

INPUT/JOIN CONVERSATION/ASK Added Implored Inquired Insisted Proposed Queried Questioned Recommended Testified

GUILTY/RELUCTANCE/SORRY Admitted Apologized Conceded Confessed Professed

FOR SOMEONE ELSE Advised Criticized Suggested

JUST CHECKING Affirmed Agreed Alleged Confirmed

LOUD Announced Chanted Crowed

LEWD/CUTE/SECRET SPY FEEL Appealed Disclosed Moaned

ANGRY FUCK OFF MATE WANNA FIGHT Argued Barked Challenged Cursed Fumed Growled Hissed Roared Swore

SMARTASS Articulated Asserted Assured Avowed Claimed Commanded Cross-examined Demanded Digressed Directed Foretold Instructed Interrupted Predicted Proclaimed Quoted Theorized

ASSHOLE Bellowed Boasted Bragged

NERVOUS TRAINWRECK Babbled Bawled Mumbled Sputtered Stammered Stuttered

SUAVE MOTHERFUCKER Bargained Divulged Disclosed Exhorted

FIRST OFF Began

LASTLY Concluded Concurred

WEAK PUSY Begged Blurted Complained Cried Faltered Fretted

HAPPY/LOL Cajoled Exclaimed Gushed Jested Joked Laughed

WEIRDLY HAPPY/EXCITED Extolled Jabbered Raved

BRUH, CHILL Cautioned Warned

ACTUALLY, YOU’RE WRONG Chided Contended Corrected Countered Debated Elaborated Objected Ranted Retorted

CHILL SAVAGE Commented Continued Observed Surmised

LISTEN BUDDY Enunciated Explained Elaborated Hinted Implied Lectured Reiterated Recited Reminded Stressed

BRUH I NEED U AND U NEED ME Confided Offered Urged

FINE Consented Decided

TOO EMO FULL OF EMOTIONS Croaked Lamented Pledged Sobbed Sympathized Wailed Whimpered

JUST SAYING Declared Decreed Mentioned Noted Pointed out Postulated Speculated Stated Told Vouched

WASN’T ME Denied Lied

EVIL SMARTASS Dictated Equivocated Ordered Reprimanded Threatened

BORED Droned Sighed

SHHHH IT’S QUIET TIME Echoed Mumbled Murmured Muttered Uttered Whispered

DRAMA QUEEN Exaggerated Panted Pleaded Prayed Preached

OH SHIT Gasped Marveled Screamed Screeched Shouted Shrieked Yelped Yelled

ANNOYED Grumbled Grunted Jeered Quipped Scolded Snapped Snarled Sneered

ANNOYING Nagged

I DON’T REALLY CARE BUT WHATEVER Guessed Ventured

I’M DRUNK OR JUST BEING WEIRDLY EXPRESSIVE FOR A POINT/SARCASM Hooted Howled Yowled

I WONDER Pondered Voiced Wondered

OH, YEAH, WHOOPS Recalled Recited Remembered

SURPRISE BITCH Revealed

IT SEEMS FAKE BUT OKAY/HA ACTUALLY FUNNY BUT I DON’T WANT TO LAUGH OUT LOUD Scoffed Snickered Snorted

BITCHY Tattled Taunted Teased

Edit: People, I’m an English and creative writing double major in college; I understand that there’s nothing wrong with simply using “said.” This was just for fun, and it comes in handy when I need to add pizzazz. 

[fuckyeahcharacterdevelopment]

In addition to a little pizzazz in the dialogue tags, these are also super useful as part of the narration, or summing up/paraphrasing something that has been said, or even in a character’s dialogue as they describe how someone was talking!

[morganwriteblr]

Snarled growled hissed my BELOVEDS

[asteroidtroglodyte]

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.

[asteroidtroglodyte]

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.

[asteroidtroglodyte]

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.

[asteroidtroglodyte]

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.

[asteroidtroglodyte]

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.

[asteroidtroglodyte]

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.

[asteroidtroglodyte]

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.

[asteroidtroglodyte]

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.

[asteroidtroglodyte]

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.

[asteroidtroglodyte]

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.

[asteroidtroglodyte]

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

[immortalbeingz]

[holy-leapin-splits-batman]

[dubioushonour]

Spin this wheel of ~300 AO3 tags three times.

Congratulations! The 4th dimension exists and you are their FAVORITE blorbo. The tags you got are from the most popular, most influential fanfic starring you. How are you feeling?

this is the best possible outcome for me

this is pretty good

this is fine. i guess.

this is terrible actually

they're assassinating my character

i'm suing the fourth dimension

Voting ended onFeb 13, 2025

[theprofessional-amateur]

Link to thread

Link to news story

[reallybadblackoutpoems]

imagination (1963) - harold ordway rugg

"chekhovs cat / schrödingers razor / occams gun"

[venort]

Chekov's Cat: if you see a cat in the first act, it will probably be relevant later. (example: Alien)

Shrodinger's razor: an unopened box may or may not contain the solution to the story; there's no way to know without opening it. (example: Monk)

Occam's gun: the simplest way to kill off a character is to shoot them. (example: Bambi)

[aegimeda]

i have been cracking up at this for the past 3 minutes

[jesticutioner]

Chekov's Box: If there is a container introduced in the opening act, it will be opened later.

Schrodinger's Gun: Treat every gun as if it's loaded unless you've checked it yourself.

Occam's Cat: If you hear strange noises at night, it's probably a cat.

[artifacts-and-arthropods]

Meat-Eating Caterpillars: less than 1% of all known lepidoptera (moths and butterflies) are carnivorous, and even fewer are known to hunt and kill their prey; these are just a few of the exceptions

Above: a carnivorous pug moth caterpillar, Eupithecia orichloris, ambushing a fly

Lepidopteran predators are extremely rare, but they do exist. Some of the most interesting examples include the carnivorous pug moth caterpillars of the genus Eupithecia, the ant-eating casebearer, the Hawaiian snail-eating moth, and the bone-collector caterpillars of the genus Hyposmocoma. Curiously, almost all of the species on this list are endemic to Hawaii.

Above: Eupithecia orichloris

The carnivorous pug moth, Eupithecia orichloris, is probably the most famous predatory caterpillar in the world, thanks to the striking and unusual method by which it captures its prey -- this species is an ambush predator that often disguises itself as a twig and then pops up out of nowhere, violently plucking its prey from the foliage. Eupithecia is the only lepidopteran genus that is known to contain ambush predators, which makes this behavior seem even more striking.

The ant-eating casebearer, Ippa conspersa, is another carnivorous caterpillar that feeds on ants and other insects (both as a predator and as a scavenger). This species uses silk, sand, and other fine debris to build a flat, peanut-shaped "shell" around its body, and the "shell" acts as a kind of camouflage, allowing the caterpillar to sneak into ant nests and hunt.

Above: the ant-eating casebearer and its unique "shell"

As its name implies, the ant-eating casebearer often feeds on ants, but it has also been known to eat cockroaches and other insects.

Above: an ant-eating casebearer feeding on a cockroach

Hyposmocoma molluscivora, commonly known as the Hawaiian snail-eating moth, is a casebearing caterpillar that feeds on live snails. It uses strands of silk to immobilize its prey, tethering the snail in place so that it can climb into the victim's shell and feed on the soft flesh within. The caterpillars of this genus are the only lepidopterans that are known to feed on molluscs; all of the other predatory caterpillars feed on arthropods (insects and arachnids).

Above: this photo shows a Hawaiian snail-eating moth using strands of silk to hold its prey in place

The genus Hyposmocoma also contains the predatory "bone-collector" caterpillars, which cover themselves with the body parts of other insects and arachnids, often scavenging the leftover pieces from spiderwebs. They carefully trim each piece of exoskeleton and then arrange them all together onto a portable silk mesh.

The caterpillars often live side-by-side with spiders, as they opportunistically feed on the insects that they find trapped in spiderwebs, and their macabre body ornaments likely serve as camouflage; they allow the caterpillar to avoid being detected or attacked by spiders.

Above: a bone-collector caterpillar covered in the body parts of other insects, including a large weevil head that is clearly visible near the center, several ant heads, a fly's leg, the abdomen of a bark beetle, a wing, and several pieces of antennae, among other things

Sources & More Info:

Journal of the Lepidopterists' Society: Predatory and Parasitic Lepidoptera

GeoJournal: Behavior, Biogeography, and Conservation of Eupithecia in the Hawaiian Islands

Korean Journal of Applied Entomology: The First Record of the Myrmecophilous Tineid Moths of Genus Ippa in Korea

Nature: Caterpillars Eat Snails Out of House and Home

Science: Web-Spinning Caterpillar Stalks Snails

NBC: Hawaiian Caterpillars Hunt like Spiders

National Geographic: This Camouflaged Critter Wears Severed Insect Body Parts like a Coat

Scientific American: Carnivorous "Bone Collector" Caterpillars Wear Corpses as Camouflage

Science: Hawaiian Caterpillar Patrols Spiderwebs Camouflaged in Insect Prey's Body Parts

[asteroidtroglodyte]

The Spider, who just watched this fucking psycho moth caterpillar neatly trim somebody’s leg case into an attractive hat: oh, no, I see him, but I’m not gonna fuck with that guy. Would you fuck with him? I’m not trying to end up as boots.