#beating the odds

[sunshine-and-her-ikevil-stuff]

If I had a nickel for everytime I got Keith on Yves's spotlight gacha, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's strange it happened twice.

Especially since the last one WAS A 5 STAR!!!

I THOUGHT I GOT A 5 STAR FOR YVES ONLY TO SEE A STAG! Which I'm not complaining about. I like Keith. It just would have been nice to have Yves's for his birthday event.

Screenshot under cut

SEEE!? PROOF!

[phedorasdiary]

My little sisters are done with college 😭😭😭

[hawkeyes-queen]

Jeremy Renner ‘overwhelmed’ by fans’ support as he faces 'long road to recovery’

'Jeremy Renner is making positive progress,' said the source

Long road to recovery but he's making positive progress and doing well, given the circumstances 🥰🥰

SOO HAPPY AND RELIEVED TO HEAR THIS.

[rosy-cheeked-girl]

red and fading gold

scattered photos on the coffee table, the TV a low background hum and even though i don’t need to, i memorize the cadence of your laugh, wrap my arms around you just because i can. i admire the pictures, framed and unframed, how you can see the way we are drawn toward each other like opposite magnetic poles, like the whole world tried to keep us apart and still we ended up here. our red string of fate flickers gold in the fading sunlight and i can see how our future awaits: me, curled up in your too-large sweater on the couch beside you for the rest of our days.

[ryder616]

Beating the Odds

How the team messed up The Plan and saved two worlds instead of one (aka me trying to understand the S7′s time traveling plot)

The team goes back to 1931, ostensibly to prevent the Chronicoms from mucking up the founding of S.H.I.E.L.D., but in reality that's only a secondary objective.

The true main objectives, which they are kept unaware of for plot convenience mission security, are:

branch a new timeline to acquire the key resource they need to win in the OG Timeline (Kora)

plant Enoch in the past so he can craft the Quantum Bridge components and disseminate them through history to provide the means to travel between timelines.

S.H.I.E.L.D.’s continuous existence along the way will make it much easier to preserve Club Swordfish and have enough dedicated people to safekeep and eventually deliver the machine components but it's not as vital as placing Enoch in the past¹.

Note #1: FitzSimmons have the timestream device so I assume they chose this method of delivery for the QB machine because it had the highest probabilities of success while still keeping it all covert. However, this system has no redundancy: all the components are unique and the machine can only be fully assembled at Club Swordfish to allow Fitz to travel and by just one person (Jemma). So it feels like one more way they beat the odds.

As for the team, they just need to survive² to reach the 1980s to essentially do with Kora what they did with Sousa: save her life, pluck her out of time and bring her along with them. How they get there doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things, as long as it doesn’t mess with Kora’s existence (and survival) or the Quantum Bridge apparatus, because The Plan doesn’t include dealing with whatever fallout will result from the Chronicoms’ and the team’s actions in the branched timeline. The numbers are bad for that and FitzSimmons have faith in mathematics.

Note #2: not programming exceptions for the team in Enoch’s lethal security measures to prevent the removal of Jemma’s implant seems rather shortsighted (read: makes no sense other than it was needed for As I Have Always Been), as the team’s survival is just as crucial as protecting the secret of Fitz’s location.  

Keeping the team unaware of their true objectives assures (educated guess) that Sybil won’t be able to predict what those are - and if they’re captured, scanning their brains will reveal nothing - but certainly complicates matters for them. The fact that Fitz says “we hoped you’d survive this far” (7x13) hints at how much.

While preserving³ the timeline is not essential, it isn’t a mock objective either. The less changes, the less unpredictable dangers should crop up and the more accurate the prediction model likely is. This is true for Sybil’s prediction model as well, which explains why the Chronicoms initially went for a “surgical” approach, pulling a single thread to unravel the inconvenient parts of the future only (“We must be delicate with Time”, 7x03)

In practice, though, it’s ultimately a futile endeavour because the team can’t time travel of their own accord and their enemy knows a lot more than they do, so they have no way to get ahead, figuratively and literally. They can only react to what (they think) the Chronicoms are doing.

The team’s early successfull efforts to keep events more or less in line with the OG timeline prompt the Chronicoms to switch tactics, going for a wider range of radical changes that, in turn, causes more impactful actions - waves and not ripples - by the team, like bluffing their way out of Club Swordfish threatening Nathaniel’s life, which leads to his delusions of grandeur, or revealing the Z1′s position to destroy Project Insight without sacrificing Mack’s parents, which results in the timedrive being damaged and everything that will follow from that. It’s an escalation of consequences, until the branched timeline is completely screwed. Pardon my French.

Note #3: In hindsight, killing Wilfred Malick in 1931 while still delivering the proto super-serum, thus assuring the founding of the S.S.R. and later on S.H.I.E.L.D., might have been a safer way to deal with everything, unless Nathaniel Malick was the only - or the one with the highest chances - way to prevent Kora’s suicide. Which would also mean that what Daisy went through at his hands was part of The Plan and not a low probability scenario. Chew on that for a minute, especially if you’re not on the Kill All Malicks train.

Once the team makes it to the 1980s, still flying blind regarding what their actual goal is, Daisy was supposed to reconnect with her mother and, through her, form a bond with her older sister. Was she going to prevent her suicide instead of Malick or was Jiaying going to act as a bridge between them after he saved her and S.H.I.E.L.D. captured her, winning her to their cause? Or was Jiaying supposed to save her daughter (“She is pivotal”) in this new and changed timeline? It’s impossible to tell as we don’t even know how likely Malick’s emergence as a dangerous antagonist was in Fitz’s projections - according to Sybil in 7x06, he had only 22 % chances of successfully “implanting” himself with Daisy’s powers which points to “not likely”, but those are Sybil’s calculations at *that* point in time - or if the Chronicoms were expected to be dealt with successfully in 1976 and it was Sybil who beat the odds in that instance (Sybil didn’t see Coulson’s turn as a suicide bomber coming but Fitz might have).

However, it’s interesting that the last jump before the temporal drive starts malfunctioning brings them to 1982, over a year before Kora killed herself in the OG timeline. Were they supposed to hang around 1982 making nice at Afterlife for months until the 084s gathering signal went out?

Regardless, with Kora alive and on Team S.H.I.E.L.D., Fitz would have traveled to the branched timeline, as he did, to explain the whats, the whys and the hows, installed the QB on the Z1, and all together - no Deke left behind - they’d have gone back to the OG timeline to use Kora’s powers to give new directives to the Chronicoms attacking the Lighthouse in 2019. Ideally without any need for self-sacrificing heroics or quasi-Domino’s levels of probability-altering powers luck because Sybil and her allies would have been stuck in the branched timeline. In the OG timeline, there was just one ship⁴ orbiting Earth.

Note #4: In 6x13 Future!Jemma expected the temple to be destroyed and in 7x13 we see that the ship responsible belongs to the Chronicom fleet just arrived from the branched timeline. This makes the case for Fitz (and Simmons, if she hadn’t forgotten most of it) expecting the team would refuse to leave the branched timeline to the Chronicoms. However, Fitz didn’t seem to know a way to expand the Quantum Bridge’s energy field - without which the Z1 could have traveled back to the OG Timeline - until he started following Deke’s train of thought, which leaves the question open (and the possibility of a - gasp! - plot hole).

Going by Fitz’s surprise at Jiaying’s demise, there’s a gulf between the situation he expected to find and what actually happened, despite the fact that he had seen “countless versions of how it could unfold”, which mirrors Sybil’s frustrations with her human allies’ unpredictable bungles and the team’s ability to repeatedly beat the odds. Of course Jiaying’s death and Kora playing for the baddies are the only two known differences between the expected scenario and reality. We can only speculate about the others.

The biggest snag of all (though not necessarily surprising to Fitz), which almost completely torpedoes all of FitzSimmons’ planning, is the team’s unwillingness to leave the branched timeline to the Chronicoms. Choosing to save the world in both timelines decreases their chances of success by 85 %, causes Deke to stay behind to assure the Quantum Bridge has the power to drag the Chronicom fleet to the OG Timeline and Daisy to undertake a suicide mission to then destroy that fleet.

And, it bears repeating. Once they chose to save both Earths, they had, at best, a 15 % chance of success (likely less, since it’s doubtful the original plan sat at 100 %).

Always beating the odds, indeed.

[thelearningcat]

Me finding out that my friend's teenage daughter has a girlfriend

I had gotten earlier pictures were her daughter had gotten a haircut that read lesbian, which I thought was adorable but I was not going to say anything because (1) she's a teenager and she might be cishet and just exploring styles, and (2) while I know my friend is on paper lgbtq ally, she grew up and still lives in a rural conservative area. I've had a lot of people who live in contradictions and have heard them not live up to it when their children come out.

So when my friend messages me today and says her daughter is dating again, I immediately send "who is the guy" and chicken out adding "or girl" because my social anxiety goes through 10 million ways that it could backfire and not be taken as just a standard statement of "we can't assume gender" to something more because rural conservativism is some of the grossest hypocrisy.

The world constantly proves my worries wrong though and I immediately get a text back that shes dating a girl named Abby.

And of course, her parents are totally supportive. At least her mother is, and my friend didn't call out her husband so, hopefully he's also being cool.

It just brings me so much joy to know that whatever this girl decides on her sexuality in her lifetime, she has been able to come out to her family in an area of the country where a lot of people will not be supportive or kind. Not only that, but she's met another lgbtq youth.

It brings me absolute joy to hear something as simple as a teenage girl getting a girlfriend, because that gives me hope that despite out dumpster fire political system and anti-lgbtq sentiment that feeds it, millenials are still utilizing their collective open mindedness to transition the world into a better place and beating past statistics on progressive ideals.

My friend and her husband are non-college educated working class white people living in rural Trump country. Yet they are providing a supportive household for an lgbtq youth. And that just makes me happy.

[dailydaveeddiggs]

Daveed took over MICHELLE OBAMA’S IG story for a little bit, NO BIG DEAL.

[dougeboy]

When nothing can stop you.