He. He. I get to spam reblog here :) hi mutuals . By the way, I have impulsively decided that I'm gonna tag stuff that reminds me of certain people with "for you: name" so have at that <3 . Main is @distantsobbingnoises
ive discovered a love for making lil dudes. literally just a bunch of shapes. whatever go my rock children
these guys are for my bloodymary language barrier fic, so they're all simon's new friends <3 i want to make so many more but i have to contain myself and keep writing so they exist
naming them is the hardest part but tbh grace is so bad at naming things i just embrace it and pick the first thing i think of
also i guess im submitting my adrian for peer review?? do they pass the big tall and turquoise parameters let me know
Peeling off the broken breastplate of a stoic knight who only fights and never speaks, just to realize there’s nothing in there. Not metaphorically—the armor is literally empty. It doesn’t appear to affect him. If the armor stays mostly in the shape of a knight, he just gets back up to keep fighting. But with the chest plate off he just sits there, equally impervious to curiosity as I reach up into the cavity where his body might’ve gone. Stubbornly, no answers are found anywhere in there.
So I forge him a new breastplate and on the inside, because I know he has plenty of room, I put a little pocket. Not big enough to hold anything functional of course. Just a little extra piece to see what he’ll do with it.
He comes back next time with some grievous injury to his nothing, presumably from the massive shredded gash across his thigh plates. He sits and waits. I fix it for him. He is still nothing in there. I decide to add a drawing on the inside, of the type of beast I imagine could rend metal into scraps with a single blow. He puts it back on. He no longer moves as if he is injured.
Over time the interior of the knight becomes decorated with whatever odds and ends I could think to attach to the inside of a guy who’s got room to carry it. What really gets me is that he never removes any of it. Never requests a change. Not even when I installed a curtain rod for a small tapestry, or a bud vase to carry roses for his beloved, or an accordion folder for letters. He didn’t say a word for any of the many, many drawings of mythical beasts that now fight forever inside of his shell.
There are plenty of other forges. I’m not entirely sure why he keeps coming back here anyway. We’re pretty popular, but he could get his armor fixed a lot quicker (and with fewer ridiculous modifications) literally anywhere else. I asked him if I could get a look at his nothing again. He flipped up his visor and nodded his head so I could take a look. It was the same as it had been, filled with drawings and trinkets and weird little fixtures I’d put in there. I asked if he was annoyed by it, or liked it, or felt anything at all, but he literally only ever says nothing, so I’m not sure why I asked.
There’s not much room left in his nothing now. When he comes back for repairs I’ve had to fix my own foolish additions. Some of these pieces are intricate and irritating to repair, but I fix them anyway. It feels wrong to take any of it away from him now, even though I’ve been rudely encroaching on his nothingness to the point where it’s barely even there. How he squeezes his nothing back into a body so full, I’ll never understand. But it’s a game to me now, finding a spot not yet filled and putting something there. A dark part of me wonders if he ever gets filled up completely, if whatever sorcery holds the nothing-knight together may break, and it will all clatter unceremoniously to the floor.
When he hands me his breastplate yet again, it is so shockingly disfigured that I wonder if being made of nothing has somehow kept him alive. No ordinary knight could sustain such injuries. So I fix it. And he waits, unmoving, in a quiet corner of the forge. It’s like he’s watching, even though I know the reading glasses I put inside his helmet were just for fun. I’m careful to put it all back exactly the way it was when he last left. There’s no room to add more this time.
He examines the breastplate, and pauses before putting it back on, like he’s looking for something. Is he worried about the fit? But it suits him just as it always did. He calmly points to a little space, about an inch, between a miniature shelf and one of many pockets. There’s nothing there. I ask him what’s wrong, and again he points. It’s the most emotion I’ve ever seen from him, and it’s barely anything at all. I take it to mean he wants something there.
I spend some time engraving a little snail in the gap. He watches, as much as nothing can watch. When I’m finished he holds the breastplate, but he doesn’t put it on right away. I ask him if something’s still wrong. He says nothing, and puts it on. I tell him I can’t add anything else. Even if he could ask, there’s no room left.
Next time he comes back, there’s nothing wrong with his armor—he lets me check to make sure. I ask him what he’s doing here. Out from one of many pockets, he retrieves a tiny rusted knife. It’s in miserable condition, barely worth saving. I tell him I could make him a nice new one, but I’ll fix it if he likes. He puts it away and reaches around to find something else, a needle and thread. Better condition, but I’m not a sewist and I tell him as much. He puts them away. He then retrieves a little twisted piece of wax paper. I open it. It’s candy. I ask if I can eat it. He says nothing. I eat it. It’s flavored with cinnamon. I’m surprised he let me take it.
He keeps bringing me candy now. His armor is the most laborious to repair out of every client my forge serves, but it’s my own fault so I can’t complain. Sometimes he keeps me company while I work. I wonder if he is trying to tell me something when he hands me mints. I wonder again at the lemon lozenges. He stares at me when I eat, as much as nothing can stare.
One day he brings me a little jar of honey. I thank him, I tell him I’ll save it for dinner. He watches me work, he puts his repaired armor back on, and he stays. My shift passes slowly, and when I finally pack up to leave it’s dark outside. He follows me out of the forge. I ask him where he’s going. He points to the jar in my hand. I ask him if he wants to watch me eat it. He says nothing, but the nothing-knight clearly wants something, so I open the lid and dunk my finger in the honey. I try not to get any on my chin. He stands there, inches away, watching me try to consume this jar of honey without a utensil. It tastes like clovers. About half the jar is left when I’ve finally had enough of pretending to be a bear, but he doesn’t move to leave.
I ask if he’s going to follow me home. He says nothing. I tell him he can if he wants to. Again, nothing. I start walking, and he follows at my side. I know he’s not going to say anything ever, so I fill the silence. I tell him I’m grateful for the sweets, I tell him about how his various components are made, I tell him I’ve never met anyone made of nothing before. I tell him it’s a rare opportunity for a smith to work so much on the inside of something. He says nothing. I tell him again how much I like the candy.
It occurs to me that maybe filling me with sugar is as close as he can get to filling someone else’s empty armor with trinkets. I’m not sure if that’s really why he does it. I tell him I don’t have room to be filled with anything on the inside, not like him. I’m not a container for much besides food. He offers me another piece of candy. Maybe he likes containing something, the way I like to feel full. Maybe it’s nothing at all.
—
I didn’t edit this even a little bit. Thanks for reading!
A 50-kilogram anvil floats perfectly on the surface of mercury, because the density of the steel from which it is made is almost half the density of mercury.
Fun fact! Many lighthouses with especially large fresnel lenses would have huge fucking tubs of liquid mercury in the lantern room because it’s a super easy way to make these giant lenses rotate quickly!
Shockingly, however, spending most of your time in close proximity to 500 pounds of liquid mercury is Not Great For One’s Health and tons of lighthouse keepers started to go crazy from the whole. Mercury poisoning thing. Hence why there are a lot of “haunted” lighthouses or wickies that lose it and maybe do a bit of manslaughter.
Anyway, people saw a bunch of lighthouse keepers go crazy and get sick and got empirical evidence that it was in fact related to the 500 pound mercury bath they have to visit every day and then they decided nah it’s fine actually. So we’ve kept the liquid mercury thing and I think that’s beautiful
I love how it is so dense it does not "wet" the anvil, the drops all run and leave with nothing behind them unlike water, oil, sauce... it's super satisfying it's like in cartoons
In a letter written on April 19, 1825, Augustin Fresnel proposed the use of mercury to reduce the friction in revolving lenses. His statement follows: “I propose to float our rotating devices, of the first order, in a bath of mercury, instead of placing them on rollers. This project won't present many difficulties; nevertheless, as I have not put it into execution, I won't require you to adopt it for your first lighthouse.”
Fresnel’s plan for mercury flotation was not put into practice until 1890 when Monsieur Leon Bourdelles, Chief Engineer of the French Lighthouse Service, designed and built a workable mercury flotation system. The mercury bath allowed the lens to operate in an almost frictionless environment and, additionally, allowed the speed of rotation to be dramatically increased.
Lens Rotation by Thomas Tag | United States Lighthouse Society
Under less-than-ideal conditions, you can only see the beam when it’s pointed more or less directly at you. In-between beams you would not be able to see anything. One solution to this was to create multiple beams, and the lenses Mr Fresnel designed usually created 8 beams. But, even still, duration between flashes could be as long as one minute in the old mechanical roller systems.
The nearly frictionless operation of the Mercury suspension system allowed the lenses (large pieces of precisely ground glass weighing several hundred pounds in some cases) to rotate fast enough that they could be redesigned to create fewer (usually 3) beams. Fewer beams from a similar light source will be proportionally brighter, and the gains in speed were sufficient that duration between flashes could still be reduced to as little as 10 seconds.
This was a big upgrade. It didn’t just make the lighthouse signal faster, it allowed them to completely overhaul the lens and derive more visibility from a light source.
"I never thought eva stratt would kidnap me AGAIN," sobs ryland grace, employee of the month at the "eva stratt kidnapping ryland grace" factory (this has already happened twice before) (he actively persuaded her to hire him) (after she had already kidnapped him once)
I determined in my timeline-with-evidence post that Simon had been doing labor for the C.O.I. for his entire young adult life. We know he originally was going to be in Ava's standard-issue jumpsuit, we know that sixteen years between Filament Station and the events of Iron Lung had passed, Simon's very familiar with the C.O.I. (probably more than he'd like to be), but not with this specific crew or tow ship.
But... we don't really know what they were using him for.
There's an implication in the game lore I think a lot of people are skipping over:
If all planetary bodies winked out, and what was left were only asteroids, the first thing they'd be doing would be sweeping for these asteroids for chemical matter to synthesize and build with. They're asteroid mining.
Hypothetically, water processed from ice could refuel orbiting propellant depots. Almost every single precious resource we have in our planetary crust right now came from space; from a rain of asteroids. Gold, cobalt, iron, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, osmium, palladium, platinum, rhenium, rhodium, ruthenium, tungsten, etc. [ 1 ]
If humanity has been in space for close to 378 years at this point, there was definitely an entire industry for this. Did you know we're already mining asteroids today? No shit, in 378 years this would have been mastered.
And if I suddenly came into possession of a man who fucked humanity over, who was a strong-arm willing to do what it took to survive, and I needed to send that motherfucker to my space gulag for punishment, where am I gonna put him that's going to give humanity the best possible outsourced labor? What job am I going to spare one of my citizens of?
Sorry if this has already been answered, but do we know Simon's life timeline? I've seen many different interpretations for how old he is, how old he was at Filiment, how long he spent in prison, etc. I know he lived on Mars and was alive for the Quiet Rapture, but do we get any ages or amounts of time? If not, what's your interpretation for your writing?
The Big Timeline Post
SPOILER WARNING. This is as accurate as I could possibly get, interpreting from clues derived from the movie, the game, and some behind the scenes resources. This is my personal Iron Lung timeline fully backed with evidence.
We can infer some things based off of the game lore, movie script, and then by stealing Markiplier's age at the time of filming (Simon is Markiplier's evil bizzaro world self-insert, so it's not a huge leap to make.)
So, let's assume Simon is 33, as this is the closest "canon" approximation we have. We can then do a bunch of math, and...
Whoops! This fell out of my back pocket and into the master reference! Oh nooooo~
Okay, I've got you. Here's the whole graphic in text format, with explanations and sources.
0 EIC | 0 IMC | 1992 AD
Epoch of Interplanetary Colonization Begins
The first off-world colony is established on Mars. This officially launches the EIC calendar system based on Earth's rotation.
[...] establishment of the first off-earth colony on mars in 1992 ad (0 eic). - Game Terminal Entry
143 EIC | 76 IMC | 2135 AD
Mars Surpasses Earth Population
Mars becomes the most populated planet in the solar system. The Interstellar Martial Calendar, based on Mars' rotation, is commonplace.
[...] mars was most populated planet in the solar system before 'the quiet rapture' , surpassing earth in 143 eic. - Game Terminal Entry
345 EIC | 184 IMC | 2337 AD
Simon's Birth
Simon is born 214 years after Mars' population boom. Martian society has existed independently for 345 Earth years. From ages 0 to an unverified age, Simon lives on Mars before moving to Eden.
2370 - 33 = 2337
357 EIC | 190 IMC | 2349 AD
The Quiet Rapture
All known habitable planets and stars vanish without warning. Only uninhabitable moons and asteroids remain in the galaxy. The human population is cut to around 787 living individuals. I pulled this number by adding back the population of Filament Station to the total number of living humans stated across all terminal entries.
At age 12, the Quiet Rapture occurs, and Simon joins the Brotherhood of Eden.
[…] in 357 eic, without any prior warning, radio contact with our respective planets was suddenly cut. - Game Terminal Entry
the consolidation of iron, or c.o.i, is a brotherhood of three space stations and two spacecrafts, found on the principle of collectivism and ruled by popular vote of all citizens (numbering 257 at the time of this entry). - Game Terminal Entry
[Eden] has a current population of 468 and has the only known remaining trees in its interior garden. - Game Terminal Entry
(257 + 468) = (725 + 62) = 787
362 EIC | 193 IMC | 2354 AD
Battle of Filament Station
A 9-day conflict erupts between the C.O.I. and Eden over ideological differences. The station's reactor is intentionally breached, destroying it. More than 62 lives are lost, and the population is now 725 individuals.
At age 17, Simon is deployed to Filament Station as an Eden Soldier.
(They could only make Markiplier look so young. I'm doing the best I can here LOL - I'm also a personal subscriber to child soldier Simon, and this timeline makes him just young enough for this to be extra tragic.)
Simon surrenders to the C.O.I. and begins 16 years of indentured labor.
I made this inference from both the game timeline, and the official costume guide, which states that Simon was originally going to be in C.O.I. standard issue uniform:
2370 - 2354 = 16 years between Filament Station and the events of Iron Lung. The last we've heard of Simon was that he had surrendered and was in C.O.I. custody.
Simon was not in prison. They threatened him with prison if he didn't take the AT-5 deal:
Simon was doing labor for the C.O.I. This is one of the reasons why he's so dirty and so beefed up during the events of Iron Lung; he was not rotting away in a cell. This isn't Filament Station soot; this is doing bullshit for the C.O.I. for years:
[...] tensions between the c.o.i. and eden erupted in a 9 day battle on the station. - Game Terminal Entry
the conflict battle ended unresolved when eden troops resorted to sabotaging the station's reactor, resulting in a critical breach. - Game Terminal Entry
At least 62 Filament Station victims confirmed by the movie.
5/378 EIC | 201 IMC | 2370 AD
Deployment of the SM-13 Hemorover
In May, an Eden Brother is sent to Moon AT-5 to investigate its blood ocean. After dying, Simon is sent in his stead, leading to the deaths of almost the entire crew and SM-8 black box recovery. Simon retrieves the SM-8 black box, but Simon dies.
The population is now roughly 721 individuals. I came to this number by removing Ava, Simon, Jack, and the deceased Eden Brother from the population total.
The terminal was last updated on the fifth month of 378 EIC, implying that Iron Lung occurs in May.
381 EIC | 203 IMC | 2373 AD
End of Conviction Realization
Prisoners taken during the Filament Station conflict are expected to finally repay their debts. The C.O.I. expects to integrate them back into society at this time.
[...] prisoners taken during the conflict have been undergoing conviction realization in the years since, with the final ones expected to repay their debts and integrate into c.o.i. society by 381 eic. - Game Terminal Entry
This is my absolute best shot at interpreting and forming a timeline. There's inherent wiggle room on exact numbers regarding the population due to the vague nature of everything, but this is probably the best we're gonna get regarding compiled clues. This is my personal timeline that I subscribe to; feel free to use it!
my friend @noisesdistantsobbing is telling me to "re-blog posts. why must they be re-blogged. was the first blog insuffciient? why is there blog flation. blog in flation.
This one goes out to the anon competing at the International Barbershop Harmony convention! I think Grace is smart enough to put that card together pretty quickly.
