Confession:  In the Shakarian Citadel DLC tango, I assume people gathered around to watch a turian awkwardly move his human girlfriend around while she humped his leg. The game only shows the smooth dance Garrus thought they were doing.

I've been poking at the "describe yourself as if you were in a book" thing intermittently for a while, and I think I may have it. I'm fat like a postapocalyptic refugee would be fat -- from the feast-or-famine scrounging of prepackaged foods, combined with not moving more than I have to in order to save calories. Which also describes the bottom 40% of Americans, but if you didn't already know we're living in an apocalyptic hellscape, how are you even on tumblr? ;P

...oh dear god numbers are kind of terrifying. so zaeed says at one point "more men have been killed with that rifle (jessie) than died in the skyllian blitz" and i was like ok, is that supposed to be accurate or hyperbole, so i ran some numbers first i looked at the skyllian blitz, and there is not a canon death toll for it but based on the details given it sounds like some thousands of people would have died, mostly pirates in aerial engagements with the alliance navy. i looked up the death toll for the battle of gettysburg as being a famous battle on roughly the same scale, and that was ~7,000 dead not counting the missing or wounded. so i'm like eh, that sounds like a good number. so then i'm like, zaeed had jessie in working order for a minimum of 20 years, so how many days is that, and it turns out that is 7,300 days not counting leap years. so at one kill average per day which is frankly a pretty conservative number considering zaeed, that's a completely accurate estimate of jessie's kills. i just... i also don't even know what to do with that number. O_O that is half again the population of bisbee. how do you live long enough as a professional shootist to kill that many people without even trying terribly hard. like, most of those people would be ALSO SHOOTING AT YOU. how do you survive being shot at by seven thousand people. i'm... i'm genuinely a little terrified now. O_O

note to self: i strongly doubt that just crashing an asteroid into a mass relay could asplode it given that the mu relay survived a supernova without it even scratching the paint however since the scientists in arrival (before they got indoctrinated) were specifically building a device to asplode a relay i think it should be possible my idea is that you have your asteroid for purposes of not being noticed by batarians, and you have your propulsion system to go toward the relay, but then you have a computer widget that tells the relay you are a spaceship, and you also have a nuke. and you time the nuke to go off WHILE the relay is attempting to send you to a place, so that it fucks up all the delicate balance of mass effecty noises that happen inside the relay, and then it feedbacks and overloads and explodes itself. I think that would work. (you would need to time the nuke very precisely but if you directly wired it in with the "hello i am spaceship" computer widget that could do it maybe?)

"couldn't keep a secret if you shoved it up his arse"

davecity replied to your post:Headcanon Wednesday

The point about media dominance is a really good one. Asari are culturally prestigious so everyone consumes their media so they’re culturally prestigious so everyone consumes their media so…

Exactly. It’s like the contemporary phenomenon of beauty standards. There’s nothing inherently more desirable about, say, a young, thin, fair-skinned large-breasted woman, but if you grow up being bombarded with that image set on a pedestal of idealized beauty, then the message still has power.

I figure in a setting with alien species, a similar effect would take place wherein media messaging has an effect on aesthetic and even sexual trends. The game does a poor job of it, but my headcanon is that asari are quite culturally dominant, and so they control the lion’s share of what dictates standards of beauty and desirability. And it’s not just about making sure everyone thinks you’re beautiful — it’s about money and political power. Controlling the media means controlling trends, fashion, spending and even votes.

Personally I find that way more interesting and grey-area than that junk abut mind-controlling pheromones.

So I'm curious, why paint Zaeed and Mercer's interactions the way you did in astshb?

Forgive me for frequently forgetting bits of what I wrote, but the only interaction between them that comes to mind is when they’re rescuing the crew from the collector base. Is that the one you mean, or is there another I’m missing?

If it is that one, it’s mostly that I like to show contrast in Zaeed’s behavior. There are bits of it in game dialogue if you have him along on missions — he doesn’t believe in torturing prisoners, he loathes what Cerberus did to children on Pragia. In the actual fight he’s absolutely ruthless, but in the aftermath, I wanted a different side to come out, so I wrote him being solicitous of two crew members who are younger and far more civilian (or at least less front-line) than he is — he helped Daniels after the bomb on Omega, and Mercer post collector pod.

Mercer is kind of the baby of the ship — competent (whatever Joker says), but sweet and sheltered — so if anyone would bring out the protect-the-kid tendencies, she would. For Zaeed, there’s a gender component there too, definitely. He might not admit it, but damn if he’s not saving the bloody damsel in bloody distress.

Also, I just like the mental image of Zaeed being a comforting figure, because it’s kind of funny. :P

Biotic Amps & Implants: Headcanon

Canon:

Implants and Amps are two separate things. The former is surgically implanted and exceedingly dangerous to try to change (see Kaidan’s conversations about being an L2). The latter is apparently hot-swappable (see the amp variety in game 1).

Headcanon:

Keep reading

headcanon wednesday - Citadel Transit Authority

[I’ve spent an extraordinary amount of time on public transportation lately and 90% of the conversations my travel buddy and I had about it sounded completely ridiculous. And then I was really bored on the flight home, which explains why this is far longer than I intended and why my tags got out of hand. Anyway, on we go.]

Citadel Rapid Transit’s good, if you’re looking to get from specific Points A to specific Points B. It’s next to useless if you want to get from C to G, M to Q, or even 9 to 2.

For that, you need Citadel Transit Authority, five credits (ten if you’d like to get back), and one or more of the following:

Keep reading

Thank you for posting those entries on the military system in ME! I'm planning on writing a pre-series fic for my Shepard, and these will be a fantastic reference for my headcanons. :D

IT WAS MY PLEASURE, and I’m especially excited that so many people saw them because my goal was to be helpful.  Also, my husband is really excited that I’m interested in discussing these things with him, so please, if you ever have questions, bring them on.Also, because this is Tumblr and things get spread around, I thought I’d add that shadesofmauve and faejilly had some excellent constructive comments as well, particularly re: what constitutes a squad, and why a cruiser would need marines.  (Duh, for boarding space stations.)  Also, though slightly off-topic, Clio helpfully pointed out that travel times in ME might also be a mess.  ME2 and 3 at least got slightly more realistic about portraying intrasystem travel, and the codex apparently says that the twelve-light-years/day doesn’t cause any time dilation, but the game doesn’t exactly tell us how many light years are between various destinations.  (That article is actually pretty solid, overall.  Also, relay travel at least is instantaneous, so if you’re lucky enough to be traveling relay system to relay system, your journey could be as little has half a day’s travel.)(Google tells me that 92 million miles [i.e. us to the sun] is 1 AU [Astronomical Unit], and that there are 63,240ish AUs per light year.  So if you can go 12 of those per day, uh, that’s really far.  So basically, you can easily survey a system in a day.  Heck, Alpha Centauri’s only 4.37 light years away from us; you could go there and back and almost there again in a day.  What a luxury.  I’m actually kind of drooling at the thought.)

ON THE SYSTEMS ALLIANCE MARINES (1/3)

SO I’ve been doing a lot of fiddling around with my Shepard’s past, and in the course of it I’ve thought a lot about the conversations we’ve had about rank and promotion and timelines and such, and I think I might have figured out something slightly reasonable? So I thought I would share it. The following is a synthesis of information gleaned from Wikipedia, the Mass Effect wiki/codex, and conversations with my husband, who’s currently a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army, serving as a troop/company XO. So I will happily admit to serious gaps in my knowledge about the way other militaries work and even what the inside of the U.S. Marines looks like. It also requires some slight twisting of alleged canon (especially regarding stuff in the comics and come on, did anyone really read those?), but given that it does its best to respect canon while also acknowledging that, as Jilly says, Bioware doesn’t do military, I hope you will consider it anyway. I’ve tagged all of these with systems alliance and doubt I’ll find another use for the tag besides more meta, if that helps.

Read More

Zaeed never slept well his first night in a new place.

Emily Wong seems like she might be too businesslike a reporter to take time out of her busy schedule to go dress shopping with Janet and Kasumi, but by god, it'd be *fun*. I don't know, is that too self-indulgent a thing to put in? (also how do you even write women having fun shopping for cute clothes together, this is one of those experiences I have never actually had due to various combinations of not being a woman, not fitting in clothes, not having meatspace friends, and being morally forbidden to look cute :P I'm kind of worried I'll bollocks it up and ppl will be like "yeah this was written by a dude it's totally unrealistic")

I mean, I summarily ignore or elide omni-tools most of the time because I can't figure out what their limitations are. * Do you wear them like a glove / brass knuckles / smartwatch / some other way, or are they implanted into your wrist? They don't seem to be integrated into your armor, because you still have them in civvies fights. In game one they're hot-swappable, but so are biotic amps, so I'm not sure how much weight to give that. * They seem to be mostly a haptic hologram interface like the screens Joker uses to pilot the Normandy, but then you have things like the omni-blade. I saw a headcanon that posited omnitool minifacturing letting you create a very thin one-time-use stabby blade, which is overlain with a hologram for safety and visibility; that worked for me until we started having omni-shields and omni-bows to deal with, at which point I gave up. (Also, I'm still convinced any such function would promptly get hacked somewhere along the line to make a customizable omni-dildo. ^_^) * What comm functions do they have? In fic I tend to see them treated like cell phones, with text notification, voice call, video call, and text chat functions. In game I'm not sure we've actually seen any evidence of them having text functions -- you have to use a desktop terminal to check Shep's email, for instance -- although it makes no sense in our current tech world to have a graphics card that can run video calls but can't handle text messages. * Military omnitools, like those used by Shep and co, have some pretty badass attack functions. You can throw a fireball, a lightning bolt, an ice bomb, a concussion blast, a *thing* that will automatically hack a robot to fight on your side... all auto-targeted and guided to some extent, all infinitely refilling unlike normal in-game grenades. I mean, they're literally just combat spells adapted for skiffy, but has anyone actually come up with any kind of handwave for the science, other than just saying they're grenades or specialized ammo of some sort? * Hell, let's talk about omnitool hacking abilities. Doesn't matter if your Shep's a techie on any level, you can just hold your omnitool up to a door lock -- no matter how tough -- and it chirps a bit and hacks it open. (Okay, game one tried to make this more realistic by requiring you to spec a party member for Electronics to make the minigame easier, but that was gone by game two.) You can somehow wirelessly hack geth or anything else robotic, no matter how firewalled / AI-tastic, unless it's also a sexbot. You can wave your omnitool at anything robotic or electronic and get a scanned readout of its innards and workings on god knows how many frequencies. Like, has everyone just given up on shielding against cyberattacks by this point? Is that why EDI gets her ass kicked by the Collectors so often? WHY IS THERE NO CYBERSECURITY IN SPACE, is my question. (I work in an environment that's aaallllllll about the information security, so this is on my mind.) * If an omnitool does have a text function, how do you type on it? In game we see these hilariously clunky full-size keyboard and monitor pop-ups, as if you're wearing a goddamn laptop on your wrist. I'd imagine a holo-keyboard more the size of... somewhere between a Blackberry keyboard and an iPhone screen, something reasonably sized to use with one hand. * I'd also imagine a lot more voice activation than we see in the game. I mean, I tend to go "hey Siri, what's the altitude of Syracuse, New York?" or similar when I'm driving, walking, or just don't feel like typing; there have to be VIs that serve similar functions in MEverse. (Of course Janet just tends to ask EDI, but that habit has to come from already being used to asking VIs like Avina for directions.) * How does an omnitool interact with your helmet HUD, your shields, your biotic amp if you have one, any of that? Does the omni-tool pack most of your battle gear's processing power? Does it ever overheat? Are there ever backwards compatibility issues when somebody introduces an up-and-coming omnitool feature? * Can you browse space tumblr on your omnitool, or is it strictly communication-focused? We know you can play simple games on your omnitool, but it's heavily implied there's an upper limit to the size and/or complexity of games it can run. Are there gaming omnitools? * If you have a video chat function on an omnitool, presumably you have a camera. That means you can make porn videos. Omni-sexting with an implanted omnitool seems like it'd be tricky; on the other hand, if you can take your omnitool off, how come nobody ever seems to drop theirs, get it removed when they're locked up, anything like that? * This one also applies to helmet cams and ship sensor recordings, but how come nobody ever seems to take footage of things like Vigil on Ilos or the chat you have with Sovereign on Virmire? I mean, that's my number one frustration with the entire "only Shep can save the galaxy" shtick, is I was dead for *two years*. There had to be footage, there had to be backups, this is the era of cloud computing, nothing ever disappears from the internet. Even if it's only in shady weird corners of the extranet on conspiracy theorist boards -- the truth has to be out there. ;P * Basically, omnitools are too plot-shaped for me to be happy with using them for anything much. I know "omni" is in the name, but they do too much for something that hasn't significantly reshaped society in any ways we've seen. I'd have to seriously hash out their exact functions -- are there a lot of different types, are they military-only gadgets, do human biotics use them to aim and control their powers, are the tech spells some kinda tiny guided missiles or what, does everybody have a unique omnitool address or call number, if you can access email via omnitool as a general thing why can't Shepard (other than plot shit) -- before I'd be happy using them as an explanation. * And the big one. We're a stealth ship. Sending out wireless notifications of our next move to all the crew's omnitools on a regular basis seems like a really bad idea, especially if an omnitool is more like a wristwatch than an implant. We all know Donnelly's had at least one hookup gone bad where he had to scramble out of there without his clothes. (Also I really don't see Zaeed subscribing to a ship's official Twitter feed that way. You'd have to subscribe and unsubscribe every time you changed ships, so that ports weren't just a jumble of constant notification buzzes like a crowded Pokemon Go festival, and with Zaeed's memory problems he'd wind up subscribed to half a dozen ships none of which he was currently on, before he gave up and went back to just using his omnitool for his own reminder notes and alerts.) (I may have a lot of feelings about memory-impaired Zaeed. ^_^)

so on the normandy, how does your average crewperson find out where we’re going? are there intercom announcements? is there a little light-up board like the ones in airports that just says “next destination the citadel, arrival 1500 hours” or whatever? is it word of mouth? do you just find out when you get there and look out a window?

so on the normandy, how does your average crewperson find out where we're going? are there intercom announcements? is there a little light-up board like the ones in airports that just says "next destination the citadel, arrival 1500 hours" or whatever? is it word of mouth? do you just find out when you get there and look out a window?

I feel like for pacing purposes I need to at least have a scene that happens between the time we recruit Zaeed and the time we hit the Citadel to pick up Kasumi and bitch out the Council. But it can't be a Janet+Zaeed scene, because I'm inordinately fond of the current... well, let's call it a "meet cute", I have planned -- the first time Janet really notices Zaeed as other than "random merc Cerberus hired". I think it works well with the tone of the story as I'm imagining it. So the other major possibilities are -- let's see, since Zaeed's my first recruit pickup after the tutorial, literally everyone else on the ship besides random crewpeople is: Miranda, Jacob, Joker, Chakwas, EDI, Ken-and-Gabby, Gardner the cook, and Kelly Chambers. (The SR2 never really feels like it has a hundred crewpeople on it. Do you suppose Cerberus did go with the skeleton crew thing? We've got the fifteen who hit the Omega 4, we've got the half a dozen others I just named off, and we see maybe a dozen on shift at a time in the one hallway with all the computer pods. Call it three shifts, assume Joker and the engineers have shift changes, that's possibly forty-two more. Sixty-three total. We essentially need a dozen more crew per shift on station somewhere to make up the numbers, but we don't see 'em.) So. I don't like the Cerberus twins enough to bother with them, frankly, and anyway Zaeed seems like the kind of guy who doesn't buddy up to management. His assessment of Kelly Chambers is basically "go join an asari hippie commune, child". I don't really see him making friends with an AI first off, especially in the AI-phobic ME-verse of canon (I'm really having trouble identifying Zaeed's attitude toward EDI at all, frankly). Joker and Chakwas are the obvious choices but I kind of... don't want to use those up so early in the story, I want to make them kind of slow-burn friendships, not just have him click right away with the characters we already like, that's... that's shoddy storytelling, I feel like? Am I making any sense? I mean, he might get on okay with Gardner, other than wanting to shoot him for the terrible cooking, but I don't feel like they'd have anything interesting to say to each other. Two crusty old men who aren't friends, they most likely grunt in passing and go on not being friends, yanno? It's a lot more fun when you have a pre-established friendship and they can go all Statler and Waldorf on everybody else. Which basically leaves Ken and Gabby. It makes sense to me that he'd eventually hang out with them some, anyway, 'cause they work next door to the cargo hold where he sets up housekeeping. (I imagine Zaeed and Jack will also become bros later, partly because they're awesome together, partly because of the same physical proximity lower-decks thing.) I might swap the Skyllian Five poker game from canon so it's Zaeed playing instead of Janet. I don't really see Janet playing poker with the crew, she's too conscious of the social and diplomatic pitfalls inherent in crossing ranks that way. Also she has no poker face. ^_^ But Zaeed's the right kind of... rankless, he's outside the rank hierarchy in a way that I feel makes sense with this. He's sort of -- he fits in with the grunts and the below-decks crew, he's not Above them in the way that makes it awkward like Janet would be, but he's also -- it doesn't feel like a creepy power imbalance thing to have him fucking Janet, cos even though she's by some definition The Boss we know he could tell her to piss off if he wanted to. (Probably in those exact words. Zaeed is not subtle. ^_^) *ssssss* basically I have to establish all this in Scenes That Happen instead of just saying it's the case and augggghhhhh. :P Linear time is hard.