Who walked here first?

[currentlycryingaboutlancelot]

at the start of every month everyone reblogs some insane poetry that’s like “august has arrived and again I swallow my bones in the burning sun” and every time I’m like damn that makes no sense. but kind of true.

[dyernoga]

[pathos-logical]

[ID: A screenshot of two consecutive posts on the Tumblr dashboard. The first is the original post, and the second is a post by @/shesnake that says, “hello august you piece of shit”. End ID]

[homunculus-argument]

For some reason that makes no sense to me, the english language doesn't have a distinct verb for "thinks/believes falsely" in contrast to just "thinks" or "believes" without judgement on whether their convictions are grounded in reality or not.

[gofancyninjaworld]

Question: is this 'falseness' known to the thought-holder? Who adjudges the truth of the thought and on what basis?

[homunculus-argument]

How and why would you hold a belief that you are aware to be factually incorrect?

[faithfollowssoftly]

There are beliefs that hold utility regardless of their correctness. You might choose to believe something, because that belief offers some benefit, whether or not you know that belief to be correct.

[red-the-dragon-writes]

No, Really, The Power Plant Needs You to Die

1905 words, sci-fi. No established setting or background. Written in one sitting, but I did do a full edit pass. I'm really pleased with this one!

Azeron didn’t know what Hell was, not being from Earth and not being interested in religion, but if you gave him a description and a couple of reference images, he’d call you a xenophobe. Maybe there were some aesthetic parallels, but they were entirely superficial. Tirou City had outlawed the tortures three months ago.

Azeron’s work was mostly on the volcanic flats. They were gorgeous, if you’d asked Azeron. The overlapping plains, cracked and oozing the silver-and-white molten metal coursing beneath Balakur, stretching out as far as the eye could see and shimmering with Balakur’s barely-harnessed, untameable energy. It was a marvel of the natural world. Everyone knew that.

Azeron worked in risk management, which on paper meant trying to make sure that Balakur's violent volcanic eruptions didn’t destroy the geothermal plants powering Tirou City, but half the time it meant trying to predict which money-grubbing executive was going to start trying to convince Azeron’s boss that the were fine as they were and didn't need to be babysat, which was a bigger risk to the plants as far as Azeron was concerned. It used to also involve feeding people to Balakur’s most active fissure of the month, but Tirou had banned the tortures. Azeron was inclined to count it as a new form of executive meddling, but it didn’t come from his higher-ups or the political bobbleheads in Tirou, so maybe he needed a new risk-management category. For idealists.

It was naïve, was what it was. Azeron had been working here for decades. He had been here with his hands in Balakur’s roiling guts for longer than some of these idealists had been alive. He knew its ins and outs better than almost anyone. And Balakur was a capricious place on a capricious planet. It always had been.

There was only so much you could do to account for it, right? Balakur's eruptions were ten times more complex than the weather. And there was only so much data you could gather. You could map the temperature gradients a fathom or ten under the surface, all the way down past the lower bound of the molten inner core. You could stick a probe on the drilling head of one of the deep-mantle pipes and measure the welling flows at its deepest point. You could track currents through the motion of the floes at the top of the plains and you could run compositional analysis of the metals in harvested lava to estimate the boundary instability of Balakur's denser liquid layers. You could do any statistical analysis on that data. You could hope. Azeron sure did.

And of course you could move the generators, pull back all their pipelines and send them a few quadra over to avoid a hot spot forming underneath. If you were really concerned, you could shut a whole quadrasystem down, lift the whole apparatus into a low hover during a terrible storm, and hope that Tirou’s massive batteries and backup solar foils could make up for the deficit. Azeron tried to avoid that, because it was overkill. Or it had been overkill. But there hadn’t been a choice a few months ago, when a truly violent geostorm chain had blown through the seventeen quadra just under Tirou and knocked out three quadrasystems in one chain vortex. The city had been rationing power for days before they could get enough plants back online to make up for it. Azeron was still dealing with the fallout. If he could’ve accounted for the upwellings better in that chain, maybe it wouldn’t have come to that. But that particular storm had been impossible to predict.

That was the thing. Predictions. Azeron’s whole job was prediction, which meant Azeron knew prediction like the back of his goddamn hands. The thing about a prediction was that it could never be certain. Even the most ironclad was a statistical estimate, a maybe, an “it’ll happen if we got all the priors”. When it came to Balakur's geostorms, there was no such thing as all the priors. The systems underneath Balakur were too deep and too complicated to map that way.

Azeron hadn’t worried about it too much, not for the first forty-odd years here. It was fine. It was fine because there was another option. There was a second way to deal with Balakur’s infinite variances. As a last resort, of course, or at least an unwanted one. But it was there. Just in case someone needed to fix something before it became catastrophic. Or, at least, it had been there until some soft-hearted Tiruzans who had never been to Balakur decided to throw out what worked.

Anyone down here could tell you, Azeron included. It was something they'd discovered a long time ago, and the evidence made it clear it was true. Balakur had been populated on the ground for millenia. Tirou had been built after the invention of the geomagnetic float and the gravitational pad and the airhover citybase, when it became possible to just not live so close to Balakur’s shifting fissures. The religious would say that Balakur was hungry. The religious held that Balakur needed to eat. Azeron wasn’t interested in religion, though. There was probably a mathematical reason for how it worked. Maybe organic material made the plumes cool, or something. The how didn’t matter to Azeron, at least not any more than he had to know to keep pulling power out of Balakur. In that regard, it was very simple. If you had a nasty storm on its way up, and you needed it to cool down, you filed a form so that someone from Tirou could send you some undesirable they didn't need, and you stripped off most of their skin, and then you threw them off into the biggest fissure you could find. Then, anyone could tell you, the flats would cool down a little. People probably couldn't have survived on Balakur that long if that wasn't true. You really couldn't go out there without protective gear now if you didn't want to lose a limb to a hot patch of slag.

And as far as Azeron was concerned, they needed the tortures more now than ever. Balakur felt like it was storming more and more in recent years.

But that didn't matter. Who cared about what the people working on Balakur thought? Some blockhead up in Tirou had run some dodgy stats and they'd came away with the conclusion that it was just superstition. And that same idealistic blockhead had decided that the hot spots could be managed some other way, and that flensing some unwanted idiot wasn’t a nice enough way to be rid of them, even though no one cared about the torturees anyway, and Azeron was pretty sure Tirou was just going to execute them some other way instead. Point was, the tortures were over. No more tortures for Balakur.

So, naturally, Balakur was starting to get cross.

It was just how it worked. Azeron tried to focus on the data. Well, there was a really nasty-looking plume down under Plant 6 in the south-southwest quadrasystem. They'd just had to move that plant; they hadn't even gotten the majority of the pipes into the ground. Azeron was pretty sure that a surface-height indicator a few quadra away implied the upwelling was part of a much bigger deep-level plume than the preliminary data at the plant suggested; it looked like a full-on mid-mantle boundary breach. That meant they were going to have their hands full again. Another chain storm. Wonderful. See, this was exactly the kind of situation that meant, if things were normal, you just called up to Tirou and they sent you someone who didn’t matter and you bled them and tossed them off the platform and then probably moved the plant a few quadra and it was all sorted. Eh. Maybe two or three sacrifices. It was a real nasty-looking system. But that was how things worked. The tortures meant things just worked. Now they couldn’t mitigate the plumes, so there were going to be more chain storms. Lost power, lost productivity. There would be so much shouting. And they'd have to ramp up extraction even further to compensate.

Azeron sighed, looking out the window at Balakur’s glowing landscape. It really was marvelous. He couldn’t live outside Balakur to save his life. He couldn’t live outside Balakur even if someone had told him he had to be the next guy tortured to save the stupid city a thousand-odd feet over his own head. It was just too special. Where else could you see these seething veins of pure silver? Where else was this unyielding natural might on display? Where else could you take a tool you made and drive it so deep into the ground that it all but touched the solid core of the planet, and pull power straight up into a towering gem in the sky? Where else could you reach all the way into the burning heart of a place you loved so deeply, and take that fire back home with you?

There were other geothermal plants. Kizavi, on the other pole, had its volcanic vents. But Kizavi was boring, and different, and its vents didn’t even move because it was barely even active in the first place. Kizavi had been dying for decades. It was nothing compared to hungry, ever-changing Balakur.

Or maybe Omuro. Omuro was one for the history books. They’d copied Balakur’s generators, but instead of a volcanic system, Omuro was a river delta. Or at least it had been. All green, in those old pictures. They grew verda in massive rolling fields along the shore and they called it the breadbasket of the North. And when Omuro’s scientists had turned their geothermal plants on, they’d cracked Omuro’s stupid green landscape open like an eggshell and spilled molten metal into every field they had and burned their whole food supply and half their population in one afternoon because they didn’t understand how geothermal plumes worked. Omuro was like a miniature Balakur now, but Azeron didn't want to settle for a bad copy. And he didn't want to be there. It didn't seem right, living there. They'd done something to the planet that wasn't ever supposed to happen. And he had a feeling that they didn’t feed Omuro's open jaws anywhere near as many sacrifices as it needed. It was a great case study for why you needed a good risk management team to run an operation like Balakur’s.

Well, Balakur’s risk management team was hamstrung now. The volcanic flats were going to need sacrifices sooner or later. But Tirou had banned it, and where else should they get bodies for Balakur?. So maybe they had an Omuro looming on their horizons too, a big blow-out there to screw everything completely beyond repair even if Azeron and his team warned them what was under Balakur's skin the whole way down. The place needed what it needed. It was that simple. And Azeron would have to watch as Tirou starved of energy and wavered until those great engines failed and the gem collapsed and destroyed itself and the flats both, all at once.

Well, Azeron thought morosely, you couldn’t ask a Tiruzan to understand. They didn’t do any real work. They weren't down here. They didn’t know Balakur. They didn’t understand that their sacrifices were necessary for the greater good.

-

Reading Comprehension Questions (if you want to help me fine-tune this; it's not a gotcha)

What's this a metaphor for?

Is Azeron correct about how Balakur works? What makes you think he is or isn't?

Azeron says he's not interested in religion. Does this indicate to you that Azeron is not religious? How might Azeron engage with religion?

Is Balakur actually more geologically active than usual, or is Azeron suffering from a recency bias? What makes you lean one way or another?

Also if I got every geological process in this completely wrong or you know more about what I'm writing about than I do, feel free to chime in! I'm curious. Probably won't come back to this world but I love sci-fi.

[faithfollowssoftly]

For Q1: I'm not, actually, entirely sure. It's a phenomenon that involves drastic change to an area for human benefit, entangled with the dynamics and structures of imperialism, and people regularly die to it and that's just waved off. The opener and unpredictability makes me think "global warming", but the *deliberate* nature of the sacrifices makes me hew more towards something capitalism-adjacent.

For Q2: I'm biased against human sacrifice, but the way he says you'd sacrifice one person, "eh, maybe two or three," *and* move it several quadra, when the originally mentioned approach is to move it several quadra, leads me to believe he's wrong.

For Q3: Sentences like "Omuro's open jaws" and "bodies for Balakur" lead me to believe that he's both religious and part of a culture where it's an unremarkable element of his psychosocial background.

For Q4: He says that he doesn't really know what's happening down there, that the system is basically impossible to completely predict, and the latest issue he notes is one he expects to be a problem rather than one that is. As a narrative device, I'd suppose it a product of bias.

[red-the-dragon-writes]

Thanks for answering! I really appreciate it, it's good to see 🔥

if you're curious about what the intended answers were/the thing i was going for -

Q1: I was mostly trying to draw parallels to fracking - the way that the pipes are drilled into an already-fractured landscape was meant to evoke breaking up shale taken to an extreme degree and the human sacrifice was meant to evoke damage to surrounding communities being written off and more broadly the way that the fossil fuel industry ignores the human cost of fossil fuel extraction. And of course the environment. So like even though you didn't put your finger on that specific thing, I think you still got the core of it! :D Which is really helpful fedback for me, means the themes stand outside of the more narrow frame I was trying to put it on

Q2: nailed it again! Exactly the takeaway and reasoning I was hoping could come through. (I'm also biased against human sacrifice.)

Q3: exactly what i was going for again, dead on 🔥🔥

Q4: I think it makes more sense if the fracking thing is more explicit, but I was trying to imply - especially by comparing Balakur to Omuro - that it was human intervention that was causing the situation to become more turbulent. So he is seeing something real, but is completely overlooking the actual cause and the recency bias (i did concieve of him having one) is that he thinks it can be blamed on the end of the human sacrifices, instead of a slow build of environmental damage leading to increased geological activity in the region.

Again, thank you so much! I'm going to try and come back to this with an eye for revision/edits in a little while and this is super helpful 💖💖

[faithfollowssoftly]

Ah! Well, I'm glad to hear I was pretty close. It being fracking *is* a lot narrower than I was expecting, and it being a real phenomenon he's partially misinterpreting likewise makes a lot of sense. Glad my answers were helpful— I enjoyed writing them. Good luck with revisions et al!

[rokosourobouros-deactivated2025]

I find a lot of writing advice is a. Incredibly neutered and b. Geared exclusively at encouraging people and not like, giving actual *tools*. Encouragement is good, mind you! But encouragement doesn't teach craft, and anybody can learn it.

So here's some fun writing exercises to try if you're in a rut with your writing. Pick and choose as you like!

1. Adapt a scene from a film, tv show, anime, etc. as directly onto the page as possible. Think small - conversations with movement, or *very* basic action sequences if you're feeling ambitious. What's hard to adapt? Are there movements you're not sure how to describe? Whose POV is it easiest to write from? What kind of prose suits the mood of the scene? The point isn't to produce something perfect at the end - it's to think about these questions and brainstorm answers.

2. Describe something really really boring, like an apple falling from a tree or a car driving down a road - and see how much you can maximalise it. How long can you make this simple action, and what becomes interesting about it? (Especially good if you struggle with not writing enough rather than the opposite.)

3. Look at something - a painting, a tree, a flower, a piece of fanart - for a short amount of time, 30-40 seconds. Then put it away and try to describe it. What's prominent? What's important? What stayed with you?

4. Take the first line of an existing story and write your own short story based on it. See where it takes you! Even if you end rewriting the original in your own words, you've still done something.

These are fairly time-intensive exercises but they genuinely have helped me a ton with how I look at my writing + my ability to try a different approach if something isn't working!

[rokosourobouros-deactivated2025]

I find a lot of writing advice is a. Incredibly neutered and b. Geared exclusively at encouraging people and not like, giving actual *tools*. Encouragement is good, mind you! But encouragement doesn't teach craft, and anybody can learn it.

So here's some fun writing exercises to try if you're in a rut with your writing. Pick and choose as you like!

1. Adapt a scene from a film, tv show, anime, etc. as directly onto the page as possible. Think small - conversations with movement, or *very* basic action sequences if you're feeling ambitious. What's hard to adapt? Are there movements you're not sure how to describe? Whose POV is it easiest to write from? What kind of prose suits the mood of the scene? The point isn't to produce something perfect at the end - it's to think about these questions and brainstorm answers.

2. Describe something really really boring, like an apple falling from a tree or a car driving down a road - and see how much you can maximalise it. How long can you make this simple action, and what becomes interesting about it? (Especially good if you struggle with not writing enough rather than the opposite.)

3. Look at something - a painting, a tree, a flower, a piece of fanart - for a short amount of time, 30-40 seconds. Then put it away and try to describe it. What's prominent? What's important? What stayed with you?

4. Take the first line of an existing story and write your own short story based on it. See where it takes you! Even if you end rewriting the original in your own words, you've still done something.

These are fairly time-intensive exercises but they genuinely have helped me a ton with how I look at my writing + my ability to try a different approach if something isn't working!

[red-the-dragon-writes]

2743 words, horror. You don't know this character either. Place is fake. Was challenged to write a narrator with less of a distinct voice; didn't succeed.

Alavera was a very small city. There were a number of ways in which this was true. Firstly, the population; Alavera was only inhabited by just over seventy-two thousand people. And the people, too; hurried and quiet like any other city, but shy, scurrying, unwilling to linger on the street for more than the time it took to go from building to car or car to building. And it even went down to the architecture, clustered together, narrow and squat. It was hard not to feel as though the place was sinking, walking down Alavera's unimpressive market-district main street. Alavera was, fundamentally, not a place to live. Alavera was a place to slink out of, or to shrink into until you were just as small as it.

Alavera was, inevitably, dead by dark. There was a curfew - unenforced, technically - that closed every business by seven; most were shuttered by five instead. The city had one bar and that bar was open until just past six. The general understanding was that, if one wanted to do anything after work, they got in their car and drove the seventy-three minutes from Alavera to Reno, and then they drove home. Few residents of Alavera took it upon themselves to do this. I did. I don't much want to be here after the sun went down.

Because there is something wrong with Alavera.

It wasn't immediately obvious, of course. When I came to Alavera to stay with my sister and her husband, I thought nothing of it. The suffocating shrunkenness of the city and its oppressive, all-encompassing lack of any features of a normal population center were strange to me, but, I had reasoned at the time, it was central Nevada. I had thought, perhaps foolishly, that it must have been a case of a small town growing over itself but never quite catching up. A weed of a location, not intended for its current population, never adjusting to the thing it had become, like a sprouting thistle between slabs of concrete. Alavera felt like a place that had thorns. Alavera resisted contact.

But that wasn't it. After a few weeks in this miserable place, I had begun to realize that there was something more persistently wrong with Alavera.

One could describe Alavera as "quaint", if they wanted to be kind. The city had strange customs and strange buildings. Though most retail buildings were prefabricated construction, much like those in any normal location across the rest of the States, Alavera's homes shared a few features. My sister had called it "Alavera's doorways" as though it were common parlance. I found it strange at first; at the time, I had commented on the wooden shutters that could be found on every first-floor Alavera window, but none of the second. Alavera's doorways looked nearly normal to me. My sister saw my confusion and pointed it out, once we had gotten to her home, the detail that made Alavera's doorways special. Some traditions held that a horseshoe over the door made the household safe. Alavera's residents operated differently. Tradition in Alavera was to hammer a series of nails, spaced just an inch or two apart, into the back of the doorframe, all around. They were cut to a length such that the tips just barely protruded inward. The silver nail-points made a pair of straight lines in the wood, neat and strange. My sister, bless her heart, described it to me as decorative.

But I could have written all of this bizarreness off if it weren't for my brother-in-law. Nothing was wrong with David. He was a good guy. It's just that he told me about the deaths.

Alavera had no organized crime to speak of. It had drugs, because you had drugs everywhere you had pharmacies, but it didn't have much of an organized drug trade. I hadn't ever heard of a Kia being stolen. No broken windows, no snatched purses. There was very little petty crime. Alavera had crime, though. Alavera had murders. Nearly every crime in Alavera involved a murder. And there were disappearances, too, and deaths, which no one could figure out, apparently, but David had said were probably also murders. And there were a few hundred a year. A lot, for a place as small as Alavera.

The point was, he said, I absolutely needed to be home by dark.

It was about this point that I realized that Alavera would infect you, if you let it. I was right to think of it as a weed, but I was wrong about what type it was. It was like some sort of creeping vine. I could feel it seeping into me, not a week into sleeping on my sister's couch. The place was poisonous. It wanted to strangle those who walked into its trap, stunt them, leave them withered and trapped in Alavera's terrible sway. It would drain the life from you, if you let it, like a vampire. Why was David still here? Why was my sister?

And yet, I had too few options to pretend that it was that simple. I was here, living on my sister's kindness, because I didn't have anywhere else to go. But I had to get out of the house. I just couldn't do it, staying with them day-in and day-out during my miserable online job hunt.

So here I was. Sitting in my car with its busted aircon and its busted radio for an hour-plus trip down the 439 into Reno, last rays of the sun setting squarely into my eyes, just so I could be outside after dark.

Escaping Alavera meant that the night was very dark. There weren't streetlights in Alavera. Its darkness was suffocating. Out here, at least you could see the stars, high enough that you could take a breath. But the scrub still hugged the land low, like it was trying to stay out of sight, and the mountains on the horizon didn't help. My teeth were on edge. The blue-black of the infinite sky only did so much to help settle me back in my skin after the crushing nervous nothingness of my last few days. I had my foot heavy on the gas pedal. That didn't help much, either, but I won't pretend it didn't help.

I reacted almost before I even saw it. There was a vertical flash, yellow-white as the moon, right on the parkway's yellow line. I jerked the wheel and slammed the brake and it was only luck that I didn't spin out like an idiot and drive myself off the road.

Heart hammering in my chest, I whirled to see what I'd almost hit. It was a deer, right? That's what always—

No. It was a telephone pole. It was a telephone pole, smack-dab in the center of the road. I had almost hit a telephone pole in the center of the road.

That didn't make any sense. I took out my phone and turned on the flashlight, shining it through the windshield dubiously. That was a telephone pole. If I looked up, I could see its cables stringing off, into the pitch-black of the night. A few ragged, black-and-white papers hung limply from it, unmoved by the light breeze.

I hated this place. Leave it to Alavera to put a telephone pole in the road. It was like they wanted to kill you.

Incredible. Just incredible. Some real genius had been at work here. Baffled as I was by the choices that must have lead up to this point, I took a photo to send back to my sister. Even though I had no data, I queued it into the Whatsapp group I had with her and her husband, so it would send when I got coverage back. It looked even stranger on my phone, harshly lit by my headlights and absolutely nothing else.

I took one last deep breath, settled my nerves, and got back to the drive. Slow and steady, in case any more random telephone poles appeared in the fucking road.

But it was a long way to Reno. I was stressed. I've always had a heavy foot on the gas pedal, and it's hard to keep from speeding no matter how much of your life has flashed before your eyes when you're driving along a long straight road in a long dark night and there's not a single other car in sight because you're coming from fucking Alavera where no one does anything once the sun goes down. It wasn't long before the glowing golden line was streaming by in a liquid blur again, back at the normal pace.

But I had my eyes peeled this time, still wary, so when I saw it, I slammed the brakes fast. A large, dark shape on the road, just outside the cone of light from my headlights. It hadn't been another absurd pole, at least, and it was in the other lane. I could've ignored it. But I had to go home this way eventually.

My phone flashlight wasn't quite strong enough to illuminate the whole thing, but if I squinted, I could see some of the details. And, honestly, in comparison to a telephone pole in the road, a car was less strange. Parked on the road was weird, but at least it wasn't built into the road.

The stars felt very close, all of a sudden. I didn't want to find out why that car was there. I didn't really want to be here. I wanted to be in a place with real people that was normal and that didn't feel like Alavera bullshit. I'd never really considered myself claustrophobic before, but maybe Alavera was getting to me. There was a part of me that felt like I could see those white pinpricks approaching, like the sky was closing in. I hit the gas.

The other car didn't follow. It was probably a dead husk, out of gas, or something. No other excuse for the lights not running. But for some reason, there was a pit in my stomach until I saw that it hadn't turned to follow me.

I had a bad feeling at this point, like I was going to run into something before I hit Reno. Call me superstitious or call me anxious. Both were probably true. But it just felt off. David's thing was getting to me. The doorposts made as though an open mouth, bristling with teeth, the Alavera doorposts were getting to me. The cross hanging off my mirror twinkling was getting to me. Who needed luck, anyway? Me, maybe. Not for the last time, I wished that the radio in my car worked. I could've used a song right now.

So it probably shouldn't have been a surprise that there was a third thing in the road. And I shouldn't have been surprised that, this time, it wasn't in my way either. I still stopped, just for a moment. I didn't need an accident. This time, it was a shed, or a small house, or something. Lights off, eerie because of it, cheerfully blue-and-white in my headlights. Normal construction, a normal house, not some Alavera nonsense, at least. But that didn't help. Something was off.

Maybe I was losing my mind. Maybe I was having a panic attack. But I really felt like the sky was starting to close in. The stars felt too close, too close on both sides. I sat there, staring, longer than I wanted to, with this unease creeping higher and higher, the hairs on the back of my neck straight up.

It felt like it took a lifetime, but really it could only have been a few seconds. The house was built onto the road, so close that if I opened my driver's-side door, I could step right onto the porch. That wasn't right. That wasn't how this worked.

If I were more prone to flights of fantasy, I'd have thought I was dreaming. But I could feel the wheel underneath my clammy hands. I fucking floored it out of there. A line of stars flew by my windshield, close enough to touch.

Okay. I was pretty sure I was shivering. I just had to get to Reno. Something wasn't right, but I'd been driving for almost an hour, so I was probably almost there. If I made it to Reno, everything would be fine. I'd stay overnight or something and go back in the daylight. I'd get a hotel. I'd—

—something flashed, taller and bulkier than my car by a good margin, catching my high-beams on what looked like metal. Fuck it. I clamped down hard on my instinct to jump and just kept the gas steady. It didn't follow. It didn't follow. I didn't have to worry about it, I could just drive past it. I could just drive.

I passed another thing, not two minutes later. I didn't even know what it was. I kept my teeth gritted and kept the gas down, and it took me a minute to realize that there were two pinpricks of white light floating well below the line of the mountains, they had gone by so fast. Set in a line, like eyes.

Set in a line, like eyes.

I'd made it this far because I had decent instincts. My impulse to slam the brakes was stronger than my impulse not to. So when I saw the next flash of light, it took a second before I could remember I was supposed to drive. Lucky, that, because whatever this was had gotten smarter. It was in my lane.

My bumper was maybe an inch from kissing the glass of… whatever it was. It looked like a convenience store. It seemed like a convenience store. It blocked the entire two lanes of traffic, there between me and Reno.

And I looked around and saw them, white pinpricks, small enough to mistake for stars if I wasn't looking closely. Two sets each, floating at head-height. And there were at least six or seven, a wide ring. Eyes burning white like a deer in a flashlight. It wasn't right. None of this was right. What — what did I even do here, turn around? Go around off the road? If I drove off the road I'd hit whatever that was.

In the back of my head, I was pretty sure it was a vampire. It would add up. If I was going to be believing in stupid bullshit like vampires, it would add up. Alavera felt like the kind of place that would have vampires. I didn't want to deal with a vampire. I didn't want to get eaten by a vampire. Like, the whole reason I didn't want to be in Alavera was to avoid whatever was killing people in Alavera. I didn't want to deal with a vampire. I didn't want to deal with seven of them.

There was a crunching noise near my door, muffled through the window, but audible. I could hear it. A step onto the road, off the sand. It didn't sound like a human footfall. That didn't matter to me. I jumped.

My foot was on the gas pedal, and I jumped, and my car lurched into motion. It all happened so fast I barely had time to flinch, so close I was to the front door of that goddamn store. Alright. This was it. Had a good run, I guess.

I didn't die, for some reason. Your guess is as good as mine. My car slammed through the store and hit something solid, but it wasn't concrete, and it wasn't glass. It was big, though, and solid. I didn't really know what to do, barely able to understand what had just happened, and I stepped on the gas and felt something roll under my wheels. It took me a second to realize I should stop, but I did.

That ring of eyes was still behind me, but not close. There was something, longer than a human form, laying in the road. It didn't seem like it was moving. It didn't seem like a vampire.

Those eyes seemed, slowly, to realize I wasn't going back, and they began to cluster around the fallen… thing. It was impossible to make out what they were at this distance.

Whatever it was, I didn't want to know. I looked over my shoulder one last time and hit the gas.

[red-the-dragon-writes]

No, Really, The Power Plant Needs You to Die

1905 words, sci-fi. No established setting or background. Written in one sitting, but I did do a full edit pass. I'm really pleased with this one!

Azeron didn’t know what Hell was, not being from Earth and not being interested in religion, but if you gave him a description and a couple of reference images, he’d call you a xenophobe. Maybe there were some aesthetic parallels, but they were entirely superficial. Tirou City had outlawed the tortures three months ago.

Azeron’s work was mostly on the volcanic flats. They were gorgeous, if you’d asked Azeron. The overlapping plains, cracked and oozing the silver-and-white molten metal coursing beneath Balakur, stretching out as far as the eye could see and shimmering with Balakur’s barely-harnessed, untameable energy. It was a marvel of the natural world. Everyone knew that.

Azeron worked in risk management, which on paper meant trying to make sure that Balakur's violent volcanic eruptions didn’t destroy the geothermal plants powering Tirou City, but half the time it meant trying to predict which money-grubbing executive was going to start trying to convince Azeron’s boss that the were fine as they were and didn't need to be babysat, which was a bigger risk to the plants as far as Azeron was concerned. It used to also involve feeding people to Balakur’s most active fissure of the month, but Tirou had banned the tortures. Azeron was inclined to count it as a new form of executive meddling, but it didn’t come from his higher-ups or the political bobbleheads in Tirou, so maybe he needed a new risk-management category. For idealists.

It was naïve, was what it was. Azeron had been working here for decades. He had been here with his hands in Balakur’s roiling guts for longer than some of these idealists had been alive. He knew its ins and outs better than almost anyone. And Balakur was a capricious place on a capricious planet. It always had been.

There was only so much you could do to account for it, right? Balakur's eruptions were ten times more complex than the weather. And there was only so much data you could gather. You could map the temperature gradients a fathom or ten under the surface, all the way down past the lower bound of the molten inner core. You could stick a probe on the drilling head of one of the deep-mantle pipes and measure the welling flows at its deepest point. You could track currents through the motion of the floes at the top of the plains and you could run compositional analysis of the metals in harvested lava to estimate the boundary instability of Balakur's denser liquid layers. You could do any statistical analysis on that data. You could hope. Azeron sure did.

And of course you could move the generators, pull back all their pipelines and send them a few quadra over to avoid a hot spot forming underneath. If you were really concerned, you could shut a whole quadrasystem down, lift the whole apparatus into a low hover during a terrible storm, and hope that Tirou’s massive batteries and backup solar foils could make up for the deficit. Azeron tried to avoid that, because it was overkill. Or it had been overkill. But there hadn’t been a choice a few months ago, when a truly violent geostorm chain had blown through the seventeen quadra just under Tirou and knocked out three quadrasystems in one chain vortex. The city had been rationing power for days before they could get enough plants back online to make up for it. Azeron was still dealing with the fallout. If he could’ve accounted for the upwellings better in that chain, maybe it wouldn’t have come to that. But that particular storm had been impossible to predict.

That was the thing. Predictions. Azeron’s whole job was prediction, which meant Azeron knew prediction like the back of his goddamn hands. The thing about a prediction was that it could never be certain. Even the most ironclad was a statistical estimate, a maybe, an “it’ll happen if we got all the priors”. When it came to Balakur's geostorms, there was no such thing as all the priors. The systems underneath Balakur were too deep and too complicated to map that way.

Azeron hadn’t worried about it too much, not for the first forty-odd years here. It was fine. It was fine because there was another option. There was a second way to deal with Balakur’s infinite variances. As a last resort, of course, or at least an unwanted one. But it was there. Just in case someone needed to fix something before it became catastrophic. Or, at least, it had been there until some soft-hearted Tiruzans who had never been to Balakur decided to throw out what worked.

Anyone down here could tell you, Azeron included. It was something they'd discovered a long time ago, and the evidence made it clear it was true. Balakur had been populated on the ground for millenia. Tirou had been built after the invention of the geomagnetic float and the gravitational pad and the airhover citybase, when it became possible to just not live so close to Balakur’s shifting fissures. The religious would say that Balakur was hungry. The religious held that Balakur needed to eat. Azeron wasn’t interested in religion, though. There was probably a mathematical reason for how it worked. Maybe organic material made the plumes cool, or something. The how didn’t matter to Azeron, at least not any more than he had to know to keep pulling power out of Balakur. In that regard, it was very simple. If you had a nasty storm on its way up, and you needed it to cool down, you filed a form so that someone from Tirou could send you some undesirable they didn't need, and you stripped off most of their skin, and then you threw them off into the biggest fissure you could find. Then, anyone could tell you, the flats would cool down a little. People probably couldn't have survived on Balakur that long if that wasn't true. You really couldn't go out there without protective gear now if you didn't want to lose a limb to a hot patch of slag.

And as far as Azeron was concerned, they needed the tortures more now than ever. Balakur felt like it was storming more and more in recent years.

But that didn't matter. Who cared about what the people working on Balakur thought? Some blockhead up in Tirou had run some dodgy stats and they'd came away with the conclusion that it was just superstition. And that same idealistic blockhead had decided that the hot spots could be managed some other way, and that flensing some unwanted idiot wasn’t a nice enough way to be rid of them, even though no one cared about the torturees anyway, and Azeron was pretty sure Tirou was just going to execute them some other way instead. Point was, the tortures were over. No more tortures for Balakur.

So, naturally, Balakur was starting to get cross.

It was just how it worked. Azeron tried to focus on the data. Well, there was a really nasty-looking plume down under Plant 6 in the south-southwest quadrasystem. They'd just had to move that plant; they hadn't even gotten the majority of the pipes into the ground. Azeron was pretty sure that a surface-height indicator a few quadra away implied the upwelling was part of a much bigger deep-level plume than the preliminary data at the plant suggested; it looked like a full-on mid-mantle boundary breach. That meant they were going to have their hands full again. Another chain storm. Wonderful. See, this was exactly the kind of situation that meant, if things were normal, you just called up to Tirou and they sent you someone who didn’t matter and you bled them and tossed them off the platform and then probably moved the plant a few quadra and it was all sorted. Eh. Maybe two or three sacrifices. It was a real nasty-looking system. But that was how things worked. The tortures meant things just worked. Now they couldn’t mitigate the plumes, so there were going to be more chain storms. Lost power, lost productivity. There would be so much shouting. And they'd have to ramp up extraction even further to compensate.

Azeron sighed, looking out the window at Balakur’s glowing landscape. It really was marvelous. He couldn’t live outside Balakur to save his life. He couldn’t live outside Balakur even if someone had told him he had to be the next guy tortured to save the stupid city a thousand-odd feet over his own head. It was just too special. Where else could you see these seething veins of pure silver? Where else was this unyielding natural might on display? Where else could you take a tool you made and drive it so deep into the ground that it all but touched the solid core of the planet, and pull power straight up into a towering gem in the sky? Where else could you reach all the way into the burning heart of a place you loved so deeply, and take that fire back home with you?

There were other geothermal plants. Kizavi, on the other pole, had its volcanic vents. But Kizavi was boring, and different, and its vents didn’t even move because it was barely even active in the first place. Kizavi had been dying for decades. It was nothing compared to hungry, ever-changing Balakur.

Or maybe Omuro. Omuro was one for the history books. They’d copied Balakur’s generators, but instead of a volcanic system, Omuro was a river delta. Or at least it had been. All green, in those old pictures. They grew verda in massive rolling fields along the shore and they called it the breadbasket of the North. And when Omuro’s scientists had turned their geothermal plants on, they’d cracked Omuro’s stupid green landscape open like an eggshell and spilled molten metal into every field they had and burned their whole food supply and half their population in one afternoon because they didn’t understand how geothermal plumes worked. Omuro was like a miniature Balakur now, but Azeron didn't want to settle for a bad copy. And he didn't want to be there. It didn't seem right, living there. They'd done something to the planet that wasn't ever supposed to happen. And he had a feeling that they didn’t feed Omuro's open jaws anywhere near as many sacrifices as it needed. It was a great case study for why you needed a good risk management team to run an operation like Balakur’s.

Well, Balakur’s risk management team was hamstrung now. The volcanic flats were going to need sacrifices sooner or later. But Tirou had banned it, and where else should they get bodies for Balakur?. So maybe they had an Omuro looming on their horizons too, a big blow-out there to screw everything completely beyond repair even if Azeron and his team warned them what was under Balakur's skin the whole way down. The place needed what it needed. It was that simple. And Azeron would have to watch as Tirou starved of energy and wavered until those great engines failed and the gem collapsed and destroyed itself and the flats both, all at once.

Well, Azeron thought morosely, you couldn’t ask a Tiruzan to understand. They didn’t do any real work. They weren't down here. They didn’t know Balakur. They didn’t understand that their sacrifices were necessary for the greater good.

-

Reading Comprehension Questions (if you want to help me fine-tune this; it's not a gotcha)

What's this a metaphor for?

Is Azeron correct about how Balakur works? What makes you think he is or isn't?

Azeron says he's not interested in religion. Does this indicate to you that Azeron is not religious? How might Azeron engage with religion?

Is Balakur actually more geologically active than usual, or is Azeron suffering from a recency bias? What makes you lean one way or another?

Also if I got every geological process in this completely wrong or you know more about what I'm writing about than I do, feel free to chime in! I'm curious. Probably won't come back to this world but I love sci-fi.

[faithfollowssoftly]

For Q1: I'm not, actually, entirely sure. It's a phenomenon that involves drastic change to an area for human benefit, entangled with the dynamics and structures of imperialism, and people regularly die to it and that's just waved off. The opener and unpredictability makes me think "global warming", but the *deliberate* nature of the sacrifices makes me hew more towards something capitalism-adjacent.

For Q2: I'm biased against human sacrifice, but the way he says you'd sacrifice one person, "eh, maybe two or three," *and* move it several quadra, when the originally mentioned approach is to move it several quadra, leads me to believe he's wrong.

For Q3: Sentences like "Omuro's open jaws" and "bodies for Balakur" lead me to believe that he's both religious and part of a culture where it's an unremarkable element of his psychosocial background.

For Q4: He says that he doesn't really know what's happening down there, that the system is basically impossible to completely predict, and the latest issue he notes is one he expects to be a problem rather than one that is. As a narrative device, I'd suppose it a product of bias.

[bauliya]

“stop traumadumping to your friends tell this to your therapist” my god they paywalled human connection

[big-edies-sun-hat]

“If a friend of mine gave a feast, and did not invite me to it, I should not mind a bit. but if a friend of mine had a sorrow and refused to allow me to share it, I should feel it most bitterly. If he shut the doors of the house of mourning against me, I would move back again and again and beg to be admitted so that I might share in what I was entitled to share. If he thought me unworthy, unfit to weep with him, I should feel it as the most poignant humiliation.”

Oscar Wilde

[faithfollowssoftly]

As always, I think it depends on context. Sometimes your hands are full with your own hurts, or your own problems, and you don't have space for someone else's; sometimes your own weights are more than a given friend can carry. A burden shared is lightened, but sometimes it isn't enough. You gots to know your people and your timing.

[victusinveritas]

[faithfollowssoftly]

It's not a function of intelligence. It's a function of self-mastery, the ability to exert deliberate control over your beliefs and actions.

You understand movies, yes? Television? Books? The idea that, for the duration of the thing you're reading, you can allow yourself to exist in a world far far away— in a place where magic is real— in the presence of aliens— even while you know, with your conscious mind, that the thing you are engaging with is a work of fiction.

These cognitive tricks are using the same mechanism— your ability to engage with and accept an idea that is not materially true, because believing in it is useful— to let you leverage yourself into action when it's otherwise difficult.

Yes, not every trick works for you. Not every genre, every book or movie or television show, is going to draw in everyone. But— in the same way— using them, benefitting from these methods— is no more a function of your intelligence than your ability to benefit from watching a movie.

[wizardpotions]

If your whole personality is being gay to the point of not being able to engage with stories about women and only scanning media for the most yaoiable white boys you are the problem.

[wizardpotions]

This site is so actively anti woman it's actually embarrassing.

[wizardpotions]

If some of you spent half as much time understanding intersectionality as you did talking about your white man of the month we wouldn't be losing all of our trans women

[wizardpotions]

And no, people in the tags Yuri is not the answer to this problem. There is more to stories than shipping and there is more to women in media than shipping.

[wizardpotions]

For the love of god the solution to misogyny is not "well *I* find this type of woman desirable/want to see them kiss eachother/whatever"

Not defining women entirely by their ability to make you feel horny is maybe step one of feminism

[wizardpotions]

THANK YOU

[leggywormy]

First of all @baldursghaik get out of my head bc you smh always rb things that I literally just had a whole internal monologue about

Secondly, I literally just had a whole internal monologue about how many amazing and strong and cool female characters are in Detective Conan. My personal favorite is definitely Sato - she is so fucking badass but also kind and funny and sometimes really awkward and in a really sweet relationship with Takagi, which I love for her bc he's one of my favorite male characters but this is not about men so back to the ladies.

Another favorite is Shinichi's mom. I cannot for the love of god remember her name but for fuck's sake, this woman is so goddamn hilarious. She is chaos in person. She is by no means stupid but also a fucking dumbass. She is the mother everyone deserves, she is continuously embarrassing Shinchi down to the bones. She also loves driving at full speed through fucking Tokyo. I ADORE her.

Of course we cannot forget about Ran. Classic good-hearted, sometimes a bit too naive kinda girl who takes care of her dad, who's fucking loser (affectionately) - though she does not shy away on calling him out time and time again. She's the local karate queen and WILL kick your ass if you give her a reason. She is still scared easily but my girl is trying. She's putting up with way more shit than neccessary while remaining so unbelievably kind and caring. Truely the girl ever.

My other favorites are Sonoko and Eri (Ran's bff and her mom), Yumi (Sato's bestie with which she is definitely giving off the meme "someone will die - of fun") and of course fucking Vermouth.

I could go on and on about this bc all of them are not just strong in their own ways but also so very human. They have flaws, they are not picture-perfect, they are beautiful but not in a sexualized way, they are relatable in good as also occasionally in bad ways.

This is smth I really adore about Conan overall - how all the characters just feel so human and natural. They might be over the top at times or annoying or stupid but first and foremost they are portrayed as being just people.

And yes, that includes all - and I mean all - the women without an exception.

[wizardpotions]

your profile picture is Astarion. I dont believe you.

[luntfontanne]

"age difference be damned, i don't know, that could happen to me… if we're here on this floating blue marble at the same time, then guess what? we're close in age. it's not so big a deal" JENNIFER SIMARD CONTROVERSIALLY YOUNGER GIRLFRIEND STOCKS ARE UPPPP. i mean. stocks have truly never been down but akjdkdkjfkcjf you know

[luntfontanne]

love this for her. and for me.

[demilypyro]

Your personality is a story you tell yourself. The "true self" is made up. A construct, influenced by everything you've ever experienced. Habits stacked on traumas stacked on characters you think are cool. To know yourself is to know that the self is fluid, malleable. Change your habits, change your looks, become who you want to be, then believe it was always you. Get lost in the sauce. Whatever works. Everyone else only has a subjective internal version of you anyway. Any version of you that exists in their minds is coloured by their experiences. A reflection on a pool of water. Your own self is much the same. Everyone wants to be happy with who they are. For some people that's easy. For some it's a lifelong struggle. You can love people who hate themselves. You can hate people who love themselves. Nobody understands you, least of all you. If you woke up tomorrow with no memories, who would you be? Would that version of you like who you are? Would any?

[anxiousmimicrpgs]

One thing I've been doing for Girl Frame (my mechspoitation/lesbian mech pilot ttrpg) is basically trying to make rules for the characters that get in their way more than they help them

I've been reading Jay Dragon's Expressionist Manifesto, which talks about tension between what the player might want to do and the rules of the game. Rules not so much as an aid but as a restriction that has to be fought against or worked around to achieve your player goals

That led me to the special play for the Mockingbird Girl Playbook:

[anxiousmimicrpgs]

Congrats to autistic trans girls for making this my most noted post ever lmao

[anxiousmimicrpgs]

GIRL FRAME by anxiousmimicrpgs

Lesbians in mechs, struggling against oppression and eldritch horrors

Calling all autistic trans girls, this released this morning

[serviceberries]

give yourself a sense of place and time. rotate your wardrobe when the weather changes. update your playlists every month. write down three things you did today. do it everyday. message your friends good morning. buy yourself different flavours of tea based on your mood, the packaging, the weather, your heart. save the little paper labels; stick them in your notebook until the inside cover is full of little colored tags. have it hot in the winter. have it cold in the summer. learn to make apple cider, raspberry cordial. spend the summer knitting a scarf for the colder months. spend the winter sewing loose flowy blouses for the summer. open the windows, five minutes a day if it's cold, all day if it's warm. give yourself a sense of place and time and weather.

[sugareimon-deactivated20260217]

As someone who drifts through the currents of time like a siphonophore in the sea, I’ll be munching on this for a long while.

[faggotorybrigade]

[mwapollo]

OH MY POOR FUCKING LITTLE HEART

[escuerzoresucitado]

[findingfeather]

I absolutely fucking hate this. Gold star, no notes.