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Because of how EVE Online works these days, I still get emails about major updates to the game system despite not having played for... damn... half a decade or more at this point.

The recent update changed how War Decs (war declarations, basically “Guild” level Official Notices Of PVP Imminent Even In Declared Safe Zones) work which is... interesting from an in-universe perspective.

Originally, WarDecs could be made against ANY corporation (EVE Guilds), doesn’t matter where they call home or how many players they have. From an in-universe perspective, using a WarDec like this is a lot less like a real “war” and more just “we want a way to beat you up in HighSec” (High Sec = “safe”-ish zones where NPC reactionary fleets come to trounce the aggressors in (x) time based on the Security Level of the zone)

Now, granted, WarDecs cost money to upkeep, if I’m remembering correctly, so it wasn’t REALLY a free-for-all sort of system. Still, I experienced a couple instances of WarDecs being called for Dick Move Reasons. They usually didn’t last long, but it was still annoying.

The change to the system now means that a Corporation has to actually own structures in space in order for you to WarDec them now. Which... is interesting. I’d be interested to know how that changes the more peaceful Corps’ strategies, because iirc a lot of the ways for Corps to make money is to have structures (seeing as “structures” includes things like factories and mining platforms and refineries, etc)

IDK, I’m not really going anywhere with this. I just... like to muse about how such an interesting change to a core mechanic will change gameplay and also about how that now looks from an in-universe perspective. WarDecs become a thing of territory and acquisitions (on top of just Dick Move Reasons) and Corporations become considered more like the Empires that they’re operating around and alongside.

It’s interesting.

#akaluan rambles #eve online #war dec #war dec system #every so often i get the urge to go back to EVE #and then i remember that I don't have time or energy anymore for Spreadsheets And War In Space #I was part of a null sec corp for like a year-ish and lemme tell you #that's not a position you want to be in if you have like three hours a week at max to spend in EVE #you can't build up the reflexes or habits you need to survive out there with so few hours #so instead i just reread all the lore of the universe and sate my urge that way #i love the eve online lore it's amazing

ean-sovukau replied to your post “It's always such a trip to see the quality of hay and straw that...”

Must be some dry and bland snack for the animals then, like the same dry and bland crackers Gran usually have.

I mean, hay will always be dry by definition XD being as it is dried grass. As for the taste, I really don’t know how animals parse its flavor, but the sheep I grew up with did seem to enjoy it.

The real problem is nutrition and health.

So here’s the list of qualities for GRASS hay that I was taught growing up, and why each matters:

1) Color: good quality hay should be a nice, dried-green color. Sort of like good quality herbs, honestly. Color is one sign of freshness and quality, indicating age, how long it laid in the field, and what stage the grass was at when it was cut. Older hay is less nutritious.

2) Ratio of grass blades to stems: good quality hay should have few stems or woody bits in it. Stems and woody bits are less nutritious and many animals ignore those bits anyway unless they’re starving. (Or unless they like that. Animals have different tastes in food all the time, just like us.)

3) Smell: good quality hay should smell like... well... dried grass. (Sorry, I can’t really describe it better. It’s... it smells like what it is, and it’s really distinctive.) The fresher the hay is, the stronger the scent will be. Hay should NEVER NEVER NEVER smell musty or ‘stale’. That means there’s rot, fungus, or similar in the hay, usually in the core of the bale itself. This is very dangerous for animals, just like it is for us.

Now, there are other types of hay, one of which is alfalfa hay, but many of them also follow the three qualities above.

#ean-sovukau #replies #akaluan rambles #i know far too many currently-useless facts about farm life #like i never plan to become a farmer again #but i still grew up like that so i know... a lot of things #lol #sorry this is probably boring to like everyone

When you do other people's POVs, you always refer to Kaito as 'man'. I'm kinda curious how everyone not in the know will react once they find out how old he actually is, the teens especially. Relatively speaking, because of how slow people age in Soul Society, wouldn't Kaito technically be THEIR age? Whenever one of them puts it together, sits down and crunches some numbers, anyway.

a) The teens, when they discover that Kaito is literally just Uryuu with a few extra months of life, are shocked. Mostly they think of him as a man bc of how he presents himself – knowledgeable, /older than them/, and generally sorta adulty when he’s not around his father. They only just start to see him let down his guard a couple months before the reveal happens, and start to realize that, no, he’s probably more akin to THEIR age despite however long he’s lived.

b) Aging in Soul Society is weird as heck. On one hand, we have Gin going from what looks like a pre-teen to a full adult in approximately a hundred years, and then you have Rukia who ends up in Soul Society about 150 years before the story starts, and still looks rather young when the story starts. Even Toshiro grows from the kiddo that Rangiku first tells to become a Shinigami, but he’s also still CLEARLY GROWING even at the end. Or the opposite, where we have older characters that look essentially the same for hundreds of years.

My theory on this is that the soul’s outward appearance is a direct correlation to two factors: their self-perception and the level of control they have over their powers.

Self perception is how I have Erich looking young despite dying of old age – his soul looks about late thirties-early forties because that’s how he feels about himself. He may have gotten old, his body may have given way under him, but he was still the man who accepted the Empire’s defeat and retreated into obscurity to raise a family. So his soul reflects that.

Level of control is the second part, and the more important piece to trained Shinigami. As they advance and become more capable with their powers, their souls mature -- and therefore their outward appearance matures as well. Toshiro has bankai, but he is extremely limited with it, and yet when he come back from training he LOOKS like he’s physically grown at least a little.

This is circumvented somewhat by the souls that enter Soul Society with a self perception similar to Erich, but then slowly gain power and become Shinigami. So perhaps “level of control” can be reduced further to “self understanding”, to an extent. Gin matures rapidly once he has his sights set on Aizen, because he’s fixated and focused, learning everything he can about his abilities in order to best destroy Aizen when he gets the chance. Toshiro grows slowly because he still partially fears his powers and what he can do with them, subconsciously holding himself back.

For the most part, souls don’t “de-age” because their outward appearance is partially determined by their self perception, which is limited by a human understanding of aging. Specifically, that people age in only one direction. Hence outward appearance never becoming LESS than what they initially start with. Erich will never look younger, Kaito will never look like a kid, etc.

(There’s an interesting effect this theory could have with multiples, but I’m not going to get into that since that’s kinda out of the scope of this ramble which has already gone... way longer than I wanted it too, whoops.)

#selenedreamwalker #replies #akaluan rambles #bleach #meta #headcanon

WIPs And Me

Hahahahahaha... ... hah... ha...

Okay so. I’m basically sitting down and taking an accounting of what I have in progress RIGHT NOW (as in have words written for) and then I’m going to try to prioritize things so that I actually get things done.

(Y’all can weigh in a bit on priority, but keep in mind that I’m probably going to be pretty firm about the rankings I initially pick.)

(Doing a cut cause this is huge)

(Also, permanent link to this list HERE. since I decided to turn it into an actual page that I can more easily update and not lose.)

oceanshimmerspirit-blog replied to your post “oceanshimmerspirit-blog replied to your post: ...”

Oh boy people must get so confused when they first meet you no wonder Ven likes you. XD seriously though names can’t say I have trouble in rl, online when I log into places I normally don’t then I have to take a second although it’s more a what name did I use here again? Ocean right she’s talking to me, whoops. XD One of my email accounts that I sometimes use in real life has another real looking name that can confuse people sometimes because the email name doesn’t match the buyer name though. As for the whole switching back and forth for pronouns, I just keep thinking of one person who said they once got annoyed because they couldn’t figure out someone’s pronoun and was thinking that they would have hated you. XD (they were actually rather shocked at realising how not knowing the right pronoun bothered them) Still I think your approach is rather logic, goodness knows if I’d been a guy my teenage years would have been much easier. I was a massive book worm and cyclist on top of being nontypical. The boarding school had no idea what to do with someone who not just refused but passive aggressively, or not so passively, ignored any attempts to fit into their perfect cookie cutter girly girl mould. So yeah I am all for telling gender stereotypes to go take a hike. XD ...thinking on this more I’m starting to think that if I’d come across this years ago I would have just started identifying as a boy just to get away from all the blasted stereotypes, (Not like I didn’t get the urge sometimes) even if being trans would have caused all sorts of other problems. So yeah completely understand your rather logical in my opinion way of looking at things. I personally have no problem with my body being female but yeah stereotypes please go take a hike. Mentally pondering the idea of going gender neutral just to get away from the stereotype mess is not a new idea for me which seriously shows how messed up those blasted stereotypes make things. There are times when I’m totally like we’re all people the fact that some of our bodies bear children and the other half spreed the seed doesn’t make us that different, this isn’t the Stone Age, /get over it already/. Oh course I also tend to stereotype people so I’m a hypocrite I blame the social norms people are brought up with.

People... don’t really get confused about what gender to assign me IRL anymore. My body is Very Blatantly Female. But when I was younger? Yeah. I went around with a crew cut and baggy clothing, and hiking boots, and no jewelry or makeup or anything else that could be considered feminine. So I mean, everyone basically Assumed that I was a boy, because why would a girl dress like that?

As for names, it takes... anywhere from a week to two months to associate a new identity with myself. StarFyre took the longest to associate, but it’s also the most deeply ingrained because I’ve been using the name for 20 years now. If someone were to shout “HEY STAR!” (or Starry, or StarFyre) around me, you can bet that I’m going to turn and say “YEAH WHATCHA WANT?” or similar. Karjan took the least amount of time to associate; by the time the EVE Online character Karjan was a week old, I was already responding to the name like it was natural.

And it’s... it’s not so much that I associate “being a guy” with “life is easier or better”, although there’s ample evidence that that is true. In fact... I don’t really care either way, difficulty or ease aside. It is what it is.

Okay, so bear with me a bit, I’ve never actually put my thoughts on this into actual words to share. So. To me... a body is an object. It’s a thing, just like my PS4 controller is a thing, and my Switch ProController is a thing. Both are equally good at what they do, and equally useful, and have different but identical purposes. I’ve never been dysphoric in my life, and people can argue that that’s because I’m actually female, and that might play a part, but... somehow I don’t really think so.

When I was a teenager, I had a crew cut and occasionally bound my chest flat because growing boobies were annoying and hurt. My appearance in the mirror was very masculine while doing this. But I never felt better or worse seeing that, just like I don’t feel better or worse seeing my current chest. It’s an object, an avatar I inhabit, and so long as it gets the job done I don’t care what it looks like.

Hand in hand with that... I have a LOT of trouble associating physical appearance with attractiveness. To me, bodies can be aesthetically pleasing in the same way art can be, but there’s no... I don’t feel attracted to art. I don’t feel attracted to bodies. (I do feel attracted, but to minds and personalities, aka the beings that pilot the avatars around.) When you hear me label a person as ‘cute’ or ‘adorable’ I’m associating the same set of feelings that I would saying that about, say, a pet (that squishy-warm happiness that makes you want to squee and hug or fluff or otherwise interact with the object of the reaction probably to your own detriment because the being ends up taking offense, whoops =P). If i say someone is “sexy” or “hot” (and all I know of them is their physical appearance) that’s me agreeing that “the combination of aesthetics on this person aligns with what I understand to be societal norm for [word].” However if I know them, or have a grasp of their mental selves, THEN me saying “sexy” or “hot” implies actual attraction. Hence it’s a lot more likely for me to say it and mean “actual attraction” over a fictional character than a real person, because I’m much more likely to know the mental self of a fictional character.

Sure, the stereotypes are annoying, and I hate them, and I hate being counted as less because the avatar presents female, but at the same time I /don’t/ care? I’m not... invested, I guess? That’s a bad way to word that. It doesn’t get under my skin at all. I use my words as weapons, and go through intermediaries that don’t discount me, and it... doesn’t bother me except to sigh and lament about idiots.

Also, we’re never going to get rid of stereotypes. We can only shift those stereotypes into less harmful forms through time and effort. It’s human nature to quantify and label, and “stereotypes” are just a method of labeling that have gone... very bad. Like spoiled milk. The only thing we as an individual can do is to accept that we will always have Learned Stereotypes in our brains -- no matter if we think we do or not -- and then to remember to keep an open mind as we meet people so that we don’t allow that stereotype to overwhelm the new individual. And the best thing you can do is to, as you meet and learn about people, try to make yourself reconsider your stereotypes. Try to consciously alter your thinking, so that the labels that your brain contains are filled with GOOD things instead of fearmongering.

oceanshimmerspirit-blog replied to your post: oceanshimmerspirit-blog replied to your post: ...

Yes it’s common sense. Common sense of the kind where your kicking yourself for not thinking of it after someone points it’s out because it’s just so obvious you didn’t think of it. XD I’ve heard a few people complain similarly that they sound weird and the recordings I do remember of myself are just weird so at least you aren’t be alone in that situation :) and thanks for the explanation. :)

There’s a couple of reasons that people think they sound weird when they’ve been recorded, the first of which is that when we actually “hear” our voices, what we’re hearing is primarily the internal vibrations of our speech coupled with the expectations we have for what we sound like. Most of us hear our voices as deeper in pitch and more resonant than we actually are, unless you have one of the more nasal accents, which I believe tips the inner pitch upwards, though I don’t think affects the resonance much, but I could be wrong on that one.

(I speak from the chest due to vocal training when I was young, so I hear my voice as a mid to low pitch and very resonant contralto.)

Another reason is that vocal encoding is, well, encoding! You’re actually losing a significant amount of information from analog speech to digital re-creation, and this is especially obvious in recorded cell phone conversations! I can almost guarantee that you’ll not recognize your own voice in a cell phone recording, because of the amount of encoding that the data goes through in order to produce relatively lag-free, wireless, point-to-point voice communication strips a good 1/2 to 3/4ths of the information from it before it’s sent. We actually recognize who people are over the phone only because we have Expectations when we see a Name come up, or someone greets us with their name. It gives our brain the clue, and from there our brain takes over and fills in a lot of the missing data that the cell signal has stripped out.

(In other words, cell phone conversations are heavily edited by your brain; highs and lows, resonance, and even the softer parts of accents are often filled in by your brain’s expectations. This is on top of the other editing it does in order to attempt to help you fill in missing context due to not being able to see the other person.)

Okay, science over!

Back to my THING with voice recordings~

Because I grew up listening to my own voice a lot in vocal recordings made while I was singing and then played back later, I don’t actually think my voice sounds all that weird. I know what my recorded voice sounds like, and I don’t have any disassociation or inner dissonance over listening to it. It’s just me, from the outside.

However, when I’m having fun and being light-hearted or playful, it scales into a lighter, more alto range than the contralto that I usually sing or give speeches/lectures at? And that alto range, BECAUSE it’s a lighter sound but STILL from my chest, makes me sound like a teenager before their voice breaks. And I hate it. Teenaged me was an embarrassing little temperamental brat, and all I can hear when I hear my voice like that is the overdramatic Dumb Shit that I got up to as a teen.

#oceanshimmerspirit-blog #replies #akaluan rambles #well that got long #sorry #science took over #lolol #i studied wireless signals and cell networks for a while in college #but yeah that's why i hate listening to recordings of myself #unless i've recorded myself singing #then i'm cool with it #or giving a speech #something scripted #that works too

I’ve been a lot quieter than I wanted to be, and done absolutely no writing this past week. Sitting down for the first time in weeks to actually get some writing done, so I hope it goes well!

(In other news, the past two weeks have been exhausting. From the xmas adventures, to coming back just in time for below 0F temps, with wind chills in the “Ten minutes on exposed skin = frostbite, so bundle up, fools!” category. And then on Wednesday my car died because the battery was like “nope I’m done” and I didn’t get home until after 9 PM that night, and then we also got a brand new employee at work... just in time for everyone that mattered to go haring off on a scheduled trip to a client, leaving newhire without anything to do or any way to do it. So I’ve been walking him through our code and our site while also trying to get my own work done, which wasn’t as much as a chore as it probably sounds, because he’s experienced and not new to working in a software company, but... still tiring.)

#akaluan rambles #i hate winter #especially the cold #it makes me sleep so much #i have poor circulation #so i get extremely tired when having to deal with cold #just like dad #of course unlike him i also hate the summer #because of the heat #so yeah i'm basically in a constant state of hatred for the weather outside #lol

bibliomatsuri replied to your post “vibes: Cool Grownup”

idk but i think 'grownup' is a word used specifically by kids + young teenagers wrt anyone older than they are. so being the 'cool grownup' = younger people think you're genuinely cool, as opposed to ...idk, someone not approachable for reasons of being too stuffy / unreliable / rule-enforcing / an asshat. it's official akaluan, you're the Cool Grownup. ('adult' is its own kettle of fish. like, does that refer to being physically / biologically / developmentally an adult, or being socially / culturally considered an adult? bc those change a lot over time + b/w different places and cultures. ...ask me about linguistics and anthropology, i will not shut up.)

Well, this is probably me showing my age again (and possibly a factor of Where I Live And Grew Up), but! Among my general real world social grouping, a “grownup” is an adult that’s got experience out in the adult world and is responsible and can be relied upon. They’re someone you go to for advice/help/whatever (within reason!) and can usually expect to be helped unless their life is also currently a total mess.

Whereas an “adult” is generally used with the connotation of “legal entity” in regards to this distinction. So all grownups are adults, but not all adults are grownups just yet.

(Although comparing these two definitions of “grownup”, I definitely think the difference is an age-related thing, especially with the emphasis on experience that tends to get put in place.)

(Either way, I still like the description =P )

AlsoAlso! Tangent off of “what is an adult” below the cut, because I start rambling about world building because apparently this is my brain tonight.