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crackshipsandregret

Curious pebble (4/5)

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 // Part 5

Short little addition to the comic before the final upload (its gonna be a long one)

autumn-sweet-fae

Grace puppetry traditions for the Eridian Opera

(Thank you @star-critter, @ironthingcreation, and @attorney-gender-al for the inspiring comments and tags!)

There must always be three puppeteers, to represent the three man crew that were on the Hail Mary/the sacrifice of humanity. Grace might have lived, but all three of the humans were sent to die.

The singing voice for Grace is traditionally done by a pebble. Because a pebble is the only one that can get the right pitch and limited vocal range of a human. Every Pebble ever cast to play Grace gets a pair of ‘glasses’ to wear. (This kicks off a fashion trend in Erid youth of stylized glasses worn like jewelry)

Any time Grace is in the scene, a heart beat is constantly heard and is at the tempo of a how at rest or active Grace’s would have been at this moment. To represent what Rocky remembers hearing at that time. Whenever Grace went on a space walk outside the ship, the ever constant heart beat of the play would stop, leaving Rocky alone again. It would only start again when Grace returned from the airlock.

When Grace sings of his lost memory, it’s in a very haunting way. It’s a horrifying idea to eridians to awaken to a blank mind. Eridians have perfect memories. Any Erid that doesn’t is incredibly rare and usually actively dying or horrifically injured.

When Grace shares what he knows of his late crew mates, two additional heart beats are heard along side Grace’s. But once the song ends it’s a singular heart beat again.

autumn-sweet-fae

Cannot get the concept of Eridian Opera out of my head.

It’s the closest thing to show biz on Erid. The orchestra and actors are the stars and divas of culture. Of course someone writes an opra about Rocky meeting the alien Grace and saving the stars together.

The casting call to play Rocky would be so cut throat. And Rocky can’t really give any opinion on who to pick since he’s been out of the pop culture loop for 50 years. (A fact the writers use in writing the script. Purposely giving Rocky dated Eridian slang.)

As for Graces actor, the theater’s master puppeteer becomes invested in making as accurate a puppet as possible to play their alien. In the end they would create a puppet where, instead of stuffing, it is filled with sacks and tubes full of fluid. Including an air pump to churn it and a constant beating of what would be a human heart. The puppeteer tries to capture just how horrifyingly alien Grace is in the best way for Eridians, through sound design.

And that’s just the puppet for the actors to interact with. For the audience, I could see the orchestra Amplifying the sounds of the human body during scenes like when Grace hugs Rocky. Or used for laughs when Rocky points out how flawed the human body is as he describes it to the audience.

Actual Rocky being a puppeteer nerd as a pebble. So when the theater gets approval to send the Opera stars to meet Rocky and Grace during the press tour, Rocky straight up pushes past the glamorous opera divas to meet the puppeteer instead.

Rocky is excited to share with them the fact that so much his and Grace earliest communication was through puppet shows.

The first act , puppet tradition, costuming, more puppetry, the Final Act, theater pebble Rocky

medusister

crackshipsandregret

Curious pebble (1/?)

Part 2 / Part 3

animentality

Link to the gay porn library of Alexandria.

Happy pride.

rivers-thoughts

This is actually super cool from a media preservation stand point!!

houndmother

we simply do not give enough attention to the fact that the US is. Shooting itself in the foot at every turn. not in a individual incompetence way, not an an orange idiot in the White House Way, but in a “the US spent a century designing a world order where everyone was either reliant on the US or terrified of the US (often both) and now people at every level of federal government are destroying that system” way. While USAID very much did in fact contribute to like, food and medicine and whatever to people in need around the globe, this was not out of the kindness of American hearts, this is an arm of liberal empire. the carrot so to speak. and as for the stick, the point of having a military the size of the US military is not to use it. It’s to park on peoples lawns until they stand down. when you use it, and then lose, or deliver anything other than immediate and crushing defeat, you illustrate to the people whose lawn you’re parked on that spending billions of dollars isn’t enough to win a war necessarily. Iran could have closed the strait at any point, but they didnt bc the USA would bomb the shit out of them. When they get bombed first, there’s no reason not to close the strait. The US played its hand and it came up wanting. this is to say nothing of the damage to alliances with other liberal democratic countries. the people currently in power swallowed USA propaganda hook line and sinker, believed in it so completely, that theyre shaking the foundation of what lent that propaganda its believability. to say nothing of the fact that their aims are despicable, their methods are just. an embarrassment to empire building. they took a perfectly good empire and started lopping shit off. they’re trying to increase the output of a machine by ripping cogs out of its still-running engine.

cadyrocks

I've heard it described as "Trump showed up to a rigged card game and flipped over the table because he was annoyed at having to pretend to play".

queeranarchism

Yes, and he's far from alone. He's surrounded himself with foreign policy staffer who think that European dependency on the US military is bad and with economy staffers who think other countries should stop holding so many dollars.

Watching this incredible dismantling of US power and influence is honestly one of the few silver linings of this shit show.

allaboutthems

covington-shenanigans

when i was allegedly a woman i was briefly married to a cis guy before coming out as a lesbian and getting a divorce. my now ex-husband, a genuine sweetheart of a man, was very kind about it all and we remain good friends.

twenty-five (!) years later I came out as a trans man.

now. the important thing to know about my ex-husband is that he loves nothing more than 1) horrible puns, preferably bilingual ones; 2) terrible dad jokes; and 3) committing to the bit until the end of time. he absolutely lives for Shenanigans and Japery. i do not know how his long-suffering wife puts up with him, but they've been married for more than 20 years so presumably she manages.

so, to break the news to my ex, i texted him. the exchange went something like this:

me: "great news, i'm a trans guy now"

him: "oh, congrats!"

me: "thank you. now for the better news: I insist you refer to me henceforth only as your ex-husband. do you accept this challenge?"

and my cis, straight-as-an-arrow, lives-in-the-midwest, married-to-a-minister ex-husband was like

AND HE DOES! gleefully and completely straight-faced, as I understand it. confuses the hell out of everyone, none more than cishet conservative people who've known us both for decades and know for a fact he's only been married twice. I hope he never explains.

freeuseshanehollander

I didn't have hunter biden being the funniest person on twitter in 2026 on my bingo card yet here we are

theauspolchronicles

The negative gearing/capital gains tax changes are really simple and benefit regular people

The media (owned by rich people) are currently going "WOW? SO CONFUSING! BAD LABOR BUDGET BAD! MASSIVE TAX HIKES!" but what actually is happening?

Negative gearing ISN'T being abolished. Literally everyone who already benefited from it on their investment portfolios continues to have it. Anyone complaining and saying they're going to raise the rent because it's made things less profitable for them is lying and a scumbag.

The change is going forward any ADDITIONAL properties an investor wants to get tax breaks on can only be applied to NEW builds, thus encouraging investors to build new properties (instead of buying all the currently existing ones and driving prices up). So who is negatively impacted by this? Literally no one. Who does this benefit? Anyone who wants to live in a house because it increases housing supply and makes the housing market less competitive for investors vs home owners.

Really simple.

What about capital gains tax discount? Basically, in the 90s John Howard made it so that when you sold a house you'd get a 50% discount where half of the profit wasn't taxed. Investors went woohoo! Bought up all the affordable houses to drive prices up and make a big profit. It fueled the housing crisis for the past 30 years. But Labor went "actually, what if we just tax it at 30% instead with no discount?" So instead of half of the money being tax free, it's all taxed. You know... like how making money normally works???

30% is still actually lower than the top two income tax brackets so rich people will still manage to make lots of money without having to work BUT... they'll just have to pay a little tax. BUT only on profit. If a property makes a loss it's not taxed. The amount of tax is also adjusted down relative to inflation so a $100,000 profit isn't taxed $30,000 but actually less depending on how much inflation happened during the time the asset was held.

Also capital gains tax doesn't apply to the home you live in so unless you're a property investor YOU'RE NOT GETTING TAXED! THE VAST MAJORITY OF AUSTRALIANS ARE NOT BEING AFFECTED HERE AND YET WE'RE SEEING WIDE PUBLIC OUTRAGE OVER A TAX DESIGNED TO MAKE THE HOUSING MARKET LESS COMPETITIVE AND THUS EASIER FOR HOME OWNERS TO ENTER IT.

This budget literally mostly just slightly inconveniences the 1% of investors who own a WHOPPING 25% OF INVESTMENT PROPERTIES IN AUSTRALIA.

The capital gains tax discount was never for working Australians! It was never for you! It was always just a tax perk for investors to encourage them to buy up houses away from those who needed them and hike up rents. Labor fixed that.

No wonder the rich media moguls and politicians who make most of their money off property investments like Pauline Hanson and Angus Taylor are mad about it and want YOU to be mad too. They don't want to pay taxes! Booo! The problem is: if we can't get the uber-wealthy to pay a little bit of tax then YOU will NEVER own a home!

So the changes are really simple. They're mild. And yet the right is outraged over how it even slightly benefits working and ordinary Australians.

Fucking ridiculous.

uovoc

Going into the Project Hail Mary tag to discover that it's all yaoi of Grace and some random guy was kind of bewildering because first of all I'm pretty sure that guy wasn't even in the movie and second of all the crab is right there

exxos-von-steamboldt

delicatefury

I just googled this and… yes, it’s absolutely real.

And there are so many articles and videos and discussions. Like, the scientific community is buzzing about this.

So much research will have to be redone because the data was absolutely compromised, off by orders of magnitude, by using standard lab gloves.

The world is probably not horrifically contaminated by microplastics. Sterile laboratories, however, are contaminated by latex and nitrile gloves.

Thank God someone bothered to check.

beardedmrbean

>I just googled this and… yes, it’s absolutely real.

Sources beyond dude just trust me, for the skeptics.

Scientists may have been unknowingly inflating microplastics pollution estimates, and the surprising source could be their own lab gloves. A

https://www.technologynetworks.com/applied-sciences/news/scientists-lab-gloves-may-be-causing-an-overestimation-of-microplastics-411138

Nitrile and latex gloves that scientists wear while they are measuring microplastics may lead to a potential overestimation of the tiny poll

Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics - Phys.org (it’s a pdf)

Researchers discovered a standard piece of lab equipment has added thousands of microplastic ‘false positives’ per each square-millimeter un

Ordinary Lab Gloves May Have Skewed Microplastic Data: That doesn’t mean microplastics aren’t a problem, though

That should be enough

jollycrowntragedy

A dynamic I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is A hates B and B hates A but they both hate C significantly more and find common ground BECAUSE they both hate C. I can’t think of any examples but it’s such a funny little trope

bucketofdeltav

So my beta reader for the Big Fics is an astrophysicist, right. Who is currently also writing a hard sci-fi novel about the exploration of Phobos (more power to them, I cannot with the physics required for that, best I can do is soft sci-fi/fantasy and that reminds me I should finish that story).

Anyway I was bitching about how hard it is to come up with feasible planets in Star Wars because sometimes you need a new planet from scratch and sometimes you need to know more about a planet than the 'has jungles, is probably a moon technically' than Wookieepedia will give you, and they're like 'oh yeah I can do something about that'.

So they've written (in Matlab but they swear it will run as a .exe as well and I may be conscripted to embed it as a web tool at some point) a star system generator.

You input what you know about the planet (ecosystem, population, sun colour, does it have liquid water, does it have a moon or moons, is it a moon or moons, temperature averages, atmosphere, you get me) and it will give you the... everything else about the star system, in obedience to real-universe physics. And if you input nothing you get a randomly generated star system.

And I’m like oh I know people who will be into this with a vengeance, and they're not on Tumblr, so this is me seeing who exactly would be keen on, and I cannot stress this enough, a real-physics comprehensive star system generator.

It's still in the debugging phase (last error fixed: every planet wants to have a population of exactly 5000 regardless of other factors, turned out to be a missing equals sign somewhere), but I'm psyched for this and trying to gauge interest for how high a priority 'make this an accessible web tool' needs to be.

melyzard

elodieunderglass

@bucketofdeltav says the URL is here: http://tumblr.com/star-system-generator

Follow @star-system-generator and get more of the good stuff by joining Tumblr today. Dive in!

nattousan

ok so, I approached my local library with a proposal to donate a mural as a way to A: build portfolio/gain practical experience and B: give back to a beloved public institution. The director was very enthusiastic about it and i've been working on it since the beginning of March. Come with me as I endeavor to paint what is in all honesty an excessive amount of birds

I wanted the birds to look like they were actually in the space so first thing after doing the draft was to do a lighting study

after that I covered the walls in letters in lieu of a projector/vr headset bc i have neither of those :) Then i take a picture of the section of wall and superimpose the lineart over top of it so I can pencil in the lines

et voila

and that was a whole week on it's own so next comes the paintin' >:)

nattousan

and now, the birds

Birds 1 and 2/14: Red Winged Blackbird, Male and female, Agelaius phoeniceus

nattousan

Bird 3/14, American Robin, Turdus migratorius

nattousan

hoo boy, ok *out of breath*

GIVE IT UP FOR BIRD NUMBUH 5, THE CANADIAN GOOSE, Branta canadensis!!!!

this guy took me about 4 days to completely finish, all of those freakingk coverts were a bear to render

nattousan

speaking of obnoxious coverts:

bird 5/14, Bluejay, Cyanocitta cristata

the friggin stripes almost got me chat, i may not make it

nattousan

Madam....

nattousan

birds 6 and 7: American Goldfinch, Spinus tristis, male and female

pleasantly simple to paint! next is the flickerrrrr

nattousan

*melts into goo*

BIRD NUMBER 8, (yellow shafted) NORTHERN FLICKERRRRR, Colaptes auratus

genuinely made me start questioning my sanity around day 3, it's half the size the of the goose, WHY did it take me 4 days to finish??

nothing but pain and suffering, i'm sure hope the next bird will be much easier and with FAR less barring :)

nattousan

in other news, I am losing my mind hairline

nattousan

SHE'S DONE!!

Bird number 9: Red-tailed hawk, Buteo jamaicensis

my chains are broken i am FREE. although i did have a great deal of fun with this, the barring on the wings itself took me like four days and i am READY to move on

this was a week and a half of continuous work so please excuse me for getting a little emotional in the bg 🙏

nattousan

*does a little jig*

BIRD NUMBER 10!!! The Male Mallard Duck, Anas platyrhynchos

the male and female ones are gonna be posted separately bc they're taking a lot longer lol but yea! super happy i was able to capture the iridescent green of the head, i found metallic green and blue paint at a craft store that really made his head POP. it looks better in person i promise

ALSO!! As this is the 10th one, BIG announcement. The end is in sight!!!!! I plan to finish within the next 3 weeks and there will be a small dedication ceremony/ unveiling happening at the library to commemorate its completion on the 16th of May. If you live in the Western New York region and want to check it out for yourself shoot me a dm!

Also thank you everyone for your kind words and support throughout this whole process, it's been a genuine treat thinking there are potentially thousands of you out there cheering me on while I paint this 🥹

jeza-red

every addition of the insane public kills me anew xD

anexperimentallife

As a leftist, the funniest criticism of Mamdani I've seen from the terminally online left basically comes down to, "But he didn't turn New York into a perfect socialist paradise overnight!" As if that kind of overnight change were a reasonable thing to expect, and as if he hadn't already done more for the people of NYC in his first hundred days than the last mayor did in his entire time in office.

Dude is launching city-run grocery stores, got funding to start setting up free daycare, is taxing the idle rich to fund social programs, has gotten thousands of potholes fixed that have languished for years, housed the homeless and hired anyone who could do the work to shovel snow when a blizzard hit, and is generally doing whatever he can to make city government serve the people. And he's doing it despite death threats, smear campaigns, and opposition from the GOP and his OWN party, the Dems, along with the capitalist class, their bootlickers, and the POTUS and his MAGAt cult. And he's made it clear that this is just the beginning.

What the fuck more do you expect in his first hundred days in office?

I don't believe in idolizing politicians, but I also don't believe in demonizing the few actually standing up to oligarchs and getting shit done for the common people.