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the-evil-duckling · 2 years

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The Tragedy of Alistair MacLean

MacLean is well known as one of the greatest adventure and suspense novelists of all time, many of his books having been adapted into a movie format. With novels set mainly in the era of the Second World War, Alistair MacLean drew upon his own wartime experience to write incredibly authentic tales that took place mainly in naval and mountain settings.

However, as most fans of the author would admit, his books were lacking in one fundamental aspect: plot. The novels were incredibly well written, with biting wit and masterful buildup towards the climax; but the plot...

The first time you read the plot, it is fantastic. The second time you read the same plot used in a different book, you blink. The fifth time, you have a sinking feeling in your stomach. The tenth time, you're resigned.

After that, you stop reading.

All of Alistair MacLean's books seem to follow a similar pattern: the same sort of hero, on the same kind of mission, with the same cast of supporting characters, and the same kind of love interest. There are usual predictable twists and turns that leave you open-mouthed the first time around and bored by the fifth.

But the title of this post is Tragedy.

And this is The Tragedy of Alistair MacLean: he was a man, an author, a writer who was restricted by his publishers and his audience (is there anything more heartbreaking?). For reasons that I will make clear at the end of this post, I cannot believe that he lacked the creativity to write something different; I am convinced that he was forced, either by his publishers or merely by the weight of expectation, into a strange form of fan-service, wherein he wrote a bland, one-size-fits-all kind of novel that would appeal to and sell to the masses with ease.

And so I have crafted a list of the five best Alistair MacLean books; the five that are worth reading, in my opinion, before the mystery and the awe fades away.

(One of the criteria I used was uniqueness; this, of course, means that any book with a different plotline is more likely to be on this list)

5. The Dark Crusader

This book seems, at first glance, to be following the exact formula I mentioned above; all the boxes seem to be ticked for a large portion of the book. As one approaches the last few chapters, however, things begin to go... differently, and the ending is nothing like any other MacLean I have ever read. Without giving too many spoilers, I will just say-

This is not a feel-good story.

4. The Last Frontier

Also sold under the name 'The Secret Ways' (a name which seems to completely miss what the original title meant), this book also seems to follow the same "pattern" which I have outlined above. The singular reason I have included this book - the singular reason that I love it and continue to re-read it to this day - is Jansci. Jansci, and his compassion, and his philosophy that filled some of the best pages in this book; through Jansci, I believe, Alistair MacLean brought to life some of the beauty with which he wrote before a capitalist world forced him to write the stories they wanted to hear.

An excellent suspense novel, but also one with philosophy and morality shining through its pages.

3. Guns of Navarone/ Where Eagles Dare

These are two books so similar I could not possibly have justified listing them separately. Nevertheless, they are both excellent books narrating stories of high altitude infiltration during the WW II. Guns of Navarone has the added attractions of having a sequel, lacking a love interest, and starring (as the protagonist) George Keith Mallory, perhaps the greatest mountaineer in all of history.

2. The Golden Rendezvous

I could not explain to you what I find so wonderful about this maritime novel. Perhaps the fact that it is not a tale of soldiers, not a tale of a war. Perhaps the constant flow of dry sarcasm and quick wit that in no way relieves the slowly building suspense. Perhaps the sheer brilliance which the protagonist is forced to display, lacking as he is the freedom to employ the traditional, tried-and-true method of simply beating them up. Perhaps simply the fact that it is set in first person.

All I can say for certain is that I have read this book over a dozen times, and I will do it again.

If that's not a sterling commendation, I don't know what is.

1. HMS Ullysses

Ah. This book.

This is Alistair MacLean's first book. The singular novel he managed to write before the crushing weight of expectation and capitalism fell upon him and drove him (dare I say it) to mediocrity.

And what a book it is. What a book.

Do not expect an easy book to read; the perspective switches without warning, from one paragraph to the next. I spent ten minutes on the first three pages before i realised this.

Do not expect a joyous tale; here MacLean writes with all of his experience of war, and it is a aad story, a terribly, terribly sad story.

But it is a tale of kindness and of defiance and of redemption and of small people (people who matter nothing to anyone except each other); small, small people singing that same old song of Who wants to live forever anyway, endlessly sad and endlessly glorious.

It is a book that will make you cry as you read it, when it shows you glimpses of the sweetest light that is all the softer as it is snuffed out.

It is a book that will make you cry as it shows you the best of the world, the best of people, and cry again as it is lost.

It is a book that will make you cry as you close it, and even as you weep, you will laugh a helpless laugh, for there is joy even in knowing that such beauty existed once, or even that it could have existed, had but things been different.

Heartbreakingly beautiful, my friends. Achingly, heartbreakingly, beautiful.

Ah, fine folk of this corner of the internet-

If you read but one book tonight... make it this one.

#alistair maclean #the Dark Crusader #the last frontier #the secret ways #guns of Navarone #where eagles dare #the Golden rendezvous #hms ullysses #books #fiction #suspense #adventure #book review

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silenthillmutual · 4 years

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daniil dankovsky is autistic and here’s why:

because i’m autistic and i said so

i kid, obviously. what sort of autistic person would i be if i wasn’t read to back up my silly little claim with an overly long post of evidence a total of three people will read? (hi ned hi jordan hi raven :))

i’m aware that this is cringey because adults aren’t supposed to have autism or interests or talk about either of those things, but this is my blog and you are free to block me if the cringe is too much for you.

these are some things i picked out from the DSMV’s diagnostic criteria, found on the CDC website:

deficits in social-emotional reciprocity

reduced sharing of interests, emotions, or affect

abnormal social approach

abnormalities in eye contact and body language

defecits in […] understand[ing] relationships

difficults adjusting behavior to suit various social contexts

repetitive motor movements or speech

rigid thinking patterns

highly restricted, fixated interests that are abnormal in intensity or focus

hyper- or hyporeactivity to sensory input

there’s also some misc. stuff not in the diagnostic criteria (though it may be in the adir or gars-3) i thought was worth noting.

important note from the diagnostic criteria: “symptoms cause clinically significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of current functioning”. i’d say that in his case, they do.

spoilers for pathologic classic, pathologic 2, and the marble nest

deficits in social-emotional reciprocity

in bachelor route of classic, daniil

seems completely oblivious to eva making advances toward him, to the point where she complains to him that he’s ignoring her in favor of asking questions about simon.

seems surprised when people mention maria being in love with him, despite outright asking her a couple of times if she’s flirting with him.

not to mention the fact that he asks her that at all.

his inability or resistence to making connections with others is typically considered one of his character flaws. although it is not outright stated in the dsmv criteria, one trait of autism and other neurodivergencies is “having extremely high or extremely low empathy” - and daniil, despite being a doctor, lacks empathy. which is not to say he doesn’t care at all. i think that he does, but is terrible at showing it.

for example, this scene from marble nest:

Sticky: You must feel terrible… right? That’s fine. I forgive you. You just got confused… Adults always do. Daniil: Oh yes, adults are always occupied with the most asinine nonsense. Like feeling anxious that a bunch of urchins keep roaming the streets, putting themselves in mortal danger!

daniil clearly cares about sticky’s wellbeing (and the wellbeing of the kids looking after him, though he’s not cognizant that he’s in a coma), but his way of showing it is… kind of by being a jerk. all of which bleeds into the next item on the list

reduced sharing of interests, emotions, or affect

he has no problem sharing his interests, but in both pathologic classic & pathologic 2, daniil speaks with a flat affect - which is to say that he lacks intonation. the words we read him saying may be dramatic or come across as passionate, but the actual voice reading his lines is very monotone, which may contribute to being read as lacking emotion.

and in pathologic 2, he has a voiceline lamenting not telling “her” (eva?) how he felt

in marble nest, he’s teased by the tragedians for being “heartless”:

Tragedian: Maybe. Possibly. But it’s useless to explain to a heartless man. …Take heart, Excellency! If you ever find it, that is. And then come back to us… Even though it all sounds like a rather implausible turn of events.

abnormal social approach

daniil has a tendency to say things that are tactless, odd, or just socially inappropriate. i probably don’t need to point out too many examples, as i think it’s fairly obvious - these are the things people love to pick at when it comes to him, but i do have a few in mind. like, for example, from haruspex route in classic:

Haruspex: What of the antibodies essential for making a serum? Bachelor: I don’t know for sure yet, I’ll send you a report in a few hours. Don’t go about cutting people’s hearts out for your panacea until then. It’s a… controversial solution, you know… Haruspex: What?! Do you even hear yourself? Bachelor: Sorry! I meant no offence… it was just a momentary lapse of… well, you know. Haruspex: None taken.

until artemy points out, daniil doesn’t seem to be aware he just said something rude. even with therapy, picking up on social cues doesn’t come naturally to people with autism, so we tend to say things that come across as rude or strange to others without realizing we’ve put them off. we tend to lack a “filter” that tells us when things are or are not appropriate to say. even when we may recognize it, the rules may not make any sense to us. for example, it makes very little sense that allistics favor politeness over honesty.

i think the glaringly obvious abnormal social approach in pathologic 2 is him threatening to hold artemy at gunpoint to get in the house, which is just overkill, but my personal favorite comes on day 7, when he’s complaining about the orders aglaya has given him. artemy stops him to say he doesn’t understand what daniil wants from him, to which daniil replies:

From you? Oh, nothing. I was just sharing.

to daniil, they were just having a normal conversation. but some part of this - his tone or his words or maybe even his body language - didn’t give artemy the impression that this was supposed to be a regular conversation. (we could, in fact, attribute the same idea to artemy here; why didn’t artemy pick up that this was a normal conversation? the reason i count it towards daniil is because artemy doesn’t seem to have this problem with anybody else. for the record: i don’t think artemy is neurotypical either.)

abnormalities in eye contact and body language

it’s hard to get proof of this in video games, but i will say i think it’s very funny that in pathologic 2 daniil’s idle animations are “pacing”, “sitting like he desperately wants to start bouncing his knees but is stopping himself from doing it”, and “standing unnaturally still” - but there you go. i don’t know anything about making gifs, or i’d gif this one specific talk menu idle he does where he holds eye contact for about three seconds, looks away uncomfortably, and then looks back out of the corner of his eyes.

deficits in […] understand[ing] relationships

mostly examples from his route in classic:

when the army arrives, he can claim to block that aglaya, whom he’s known for two days, is his best friend

he seems baffled by the fact that everone is smitten with maria and working with her, and seems equally baffled by the idea that she’s smitten with him

despite eva implying on day two that she is in a relationship with andrey, is completely blindsided by the revelation on day 6, asking him, “How in the world is she ‘your woman’?”

i’d also like to use his sign-off on his letter to artemy, day 2 of the haruspex route - he signs it as “Your friend (hopefully)”. i know i’m not the only autistic person who used to ask people if we were friends or not. pro tip, if you’ve never done this: don’t. it really weirds people out.

difficulties adjusting behavior to suit various social contexts

the fact that he stands out is blatantly obvious even in pathologic 2 and in the haruspex route of classic. people will comment on him being an outsider and mention that they don’t trust him. but you can watch it happen in real time in his route, because he never fully acclimates to the town. he says something about this to aglaya on day 7:

Bachelor: Was there any particularly notable backstory? I’m deadly tired of all these people. They’re inhuman. They tell the future, believe in walking zombies, and die in all manners of painfully abnormal ways. Inquisitor: Your line of t hinking is obviously falacious - and I was implying something rather mundane. I promise you, no one can really tell the future around here: and neither are deaths inspired by third parties uncommon. Mysterious phenomenons do occur here sometimes… but hardly more often than anywhere else.

actually, there’s an example of him saying something similar to artemy on day 5 in pathologic 2:

Damn this town… I feel I’m trapped in a nightmare. The absurdity of it all… There’s no one to talk to. Everyone’s so volatile. They all seem to want to help, but… their help is worse than hostility.

some of this can be explained by the town’s strangeness, but keep in mind that the first instance happens after he’s been there and involved in the ongoing for an entire week, and the second at nearly a week in. clearly he’s struggling to adjust to the changes.

it’s also worth noting that his reason for fleeing the town in the nocturnal ending?

I have no place here anymore.

This town is no longer mine. No longer human. No longer rational. It doesn’t… accept the likes of me anymore.

repetitive motor movements or speech

it’s harder to see the motor movements in classic, but remember how i pointed out earlier that he paces? pacing is a form of stimming. murky, who is canonically autistic, can also be found pacing as one of her idle animations. having stock phrases for characters to speak when you come near them already ticks off the box on “repetitive speech”, but that by itself doesn’t really cover what they’re talking about - echolalia.

but you know what this does fit with? “‘quoting’ things(communication is HARD! sometimes we need to take shortcuts and use someone else’s words)“

i’ll get to the more obvious example in a minute - i want to point out something that happens very early in pathologic 2 first. you know how you first meet him and artemy accuses daniil of trying to guilt-trip him by asking if it’s true that isidor would still be alive if artemy had come sooner? keep in mind that he spoke to rubin first. and this is what rubin says, when you get a chance to talk to him:

Yesterday, I was told you had killed your father.

That’s not far from the truth, Burakh.

You betrayed him. You left when he needed you most. He cried out for your help, but you didn’t care. He was in peril, and you were too busy elsewhere, He believed, truly believed, that your arrival would put an end to his troubles. And, as always, he was right.

i’m not saying this was necessarily the game’s intent, but it’s entirely possible daniil is parroting back to artemy exactly what rubin said to him.

now, for what you’re probably expecting in this section: the latin. people love to refer to his use of latin as “random”, so let’s clear that up:

it is not latin daniil has made up. with the exception of latin that is mispelled in the game’s texts, all of them are proverbs or otherwise common sayings. you can find most of them on the wikipedia list of latin phrases, or through a 3-second google search.

he’s a doctor. him having taken latin isn’t anymore strange than a lawyer taking latin. in fact, if you pay attention, artemy also took latin; this is implied when artemy tells him he’s always sucked at it.

his uses of latin actually aren’t random at all. what he says fits the situation, and sometimes is used in place of him having to come up with something to say on his own.

prime example:

Forget it, Burakh. I have a splitting headache. If you have no urgent business, then we’ll talk later. Later, later… Qui non proficit, deficit.

qui non proficit, deficit - he who does not advance, loses ground. in other words, “i’m sorry, but i really do need to keep working.” one of his voice lines.

as for why he doesn’t translate the latin: it probably wouldn’t even occur to him to. these are not obscure sayings. the utopians all have a certain degree of education - what would he need to translate them for?

this bleeds into something that isn’t really mentioned, but that i’ve found i have a lot of trouble with in everyday life. autistic people have a tendency to either overexplain (and then have everyone get mad at you because they feel you’re being condescending) or underexplain (and have everyone get mad at you because you haven’t explained anything). the latin would be a case where it feels like a justified underexplanation. you’ll notice that when it comes to anything scientific, he tends to do the reverse, and overexplain. this also happens in classic, whether artemy has asked him to clarify or not.

rigid thinking patterns

the thing i had marked for this was simply his strict adherence to western medical practices and refusal to acknowledge the supernatural, even when it seems obvious - he has a conversation in his route in classic with yulia about this, and that is in fact how he manages to get to her: by asking saburov if there are any other logical skeptics in town. it should be noted they seem to be breaking with this in pathologic 2, where one of his voicelines is “I’m no positivist. There are things in this world beyond our mundane perception.” i have no idea where they’re planning on going with that.

there’s also a quote floating somewhere around twitter about him having been raised by a military man, and militaries tend to enforce very rigid routines. you could say the same thing of block - who (in classic at least) i also have my suspicions about.

highly restricted, fixated interests that are abnormal in intensity or focus

special interests. the one that should obviously come to mind is thanatology, though i would argue latin if not classics in general is a special interest of his as well - in addition to his usage of latin, he also references pericles in the marble nest and was probably refering to the roman occupation of haruspicy in addition to augurs in the same text. he also makes references to shakespeare more than once in both marble nest and pathologic 2.

hyper- or hyperoreactivity to sensory input

i don’t have much written down for this one but there seem to be several places in classic especially where he asks npcs to stop shouting at him. we don’t really have the privilege to know their volume or how they’re interacting with him, but i think it’s also worth noting that he’s the only one of the healers who wears gloves. in pathologic 2 he’s the only named character i can think of who wears them at all. his thing in the lucid dream about the brain being “a border”? gloves are his border, as is his jacket, which may be worn to cut down on sensory issues.

he will also sometimes seem to “overreact” to the situation at hand - such as in classic, when some dogheads mispeak and say that daniil is going to “sterilize” them, and instead of understanding that they must have mispoken, freaks out over the idea that they think they’re going to be… well… sterilized. or in haruspex route, when his reaction to the inquisitor arriving is to threaten suicide.

miscellaneous

he never goes anywhere without that carpet bag. we don’t see it in pathologic 2, but we do hear about it and he doesn’t let it go for a second in classic - not even in the cutscenes where he’s using the microscope. his bag could be a comfort item.

“getting very attached to things like inanimate objects” could work for the bag - but you know what it actually fits the bill much more obviously? the polyhedron. in the haruspex route he recognizes that it’s a lost cause, but he’s still too attached to it to let it go.

in classic at least, daniil is absolutely terrible at lying. most autistic people either are not good at lying, or feel uncomfortable or anxious with having to lie. when he’s asked by yulia and the kids in the polyhedron to lie to block (for different reasons) he’s clearly uncomfortable with the idea that it’ll work. and when it actually comes time to come up with a way to lie to block about why he needs five rifles, your options are to either buckle and tell him the truth, or simply say that you need them for “self-defense”. block believes that you’re not lying to him, but daniil can’t come up with any embeleshments to explain why he needs what he’s asking for.

Commander: Are you hiding something from me? Bachelor: No.

he comes across as naive to other characters. in classic, capella has a voiceline saying, “The Bachelor is not smart. Intelligent, yes… but not smart.” in Pathologic 2, Daniil complains that Aglaya takes him for “a useless dreamer”. he’s also easily used by the Kains to fulfill their endgame in classic.

my final, and absolute favorite: he takes things way too literally. autistic people (and adhd people, from my understanding) have a hard time differentiating jokes and sarcasm. so my favorite moment in marble nest is a case of him taking that earlier advice - to “take heart” literally, by bringing the tragedians a literal human heart:

Tragedian: Oh… Excellency. What a sordid sight! Sorry for underestimating you. You definitely do have… how shall I put it… a creative touch. But this is pure madness. You can’t take things so literally! Daniil: You wanted me to come back to you with an open heart. Well, here I am. …It looked too fitting to be a coincidence.

your mind map, after this, updates to say “I misunderstood the tragedians.”

conclusion

people don’t stop being autistic with age and i think he’s a good example of what it’s like to be in your late 20s and be autistic. i’m sure i missed things as i haven’t finished haruspex route of classic yet and there may just be some other things he does or says that i missed! if anyone has anything to add they think fits i would love to know, thank you for your time :)

#icarus.txt #autistic daniil dankovsky #daniil dankovsky #pathologic meta #ok to rb but i'm not interest in your ''but he's just weird!'' arguments #please keep in mind that this post is about autism #and that this is written by someone w autism...#popular

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hi-hey-haechan · 4 years

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Can I also request 79 with renjun and 3 + 56 with jaemin :)

(I had done the 79 one with my last post). Thank you for requesting!

Prompt list is here.

I write for NCT (all units, but not for Jisung or Chenle), Stray Kids, and Ateez.

3: “You’re not going out wearing that outfit.”

56: “I’m not jealous! It’s just...you’re mine!”

Warnings: It’s really long, and there’s smut, but it’s not as detailed as I usually write it.

The boys had invited you and Jaemin over to the dorms that day, simply for the purposes of being crackheads. With them, you always knew that you’d have an interesting time. “Y/n”, Jaemin called out to you, “Let’s go!”

You had just finished getting ready, so you grabbed your bag and ran down the hall of your shared apartment. “Patience, grasshopper,” you rolled your eyes.

What you heard next shocked you, for it was completely unwarranted and out of absolutely nowhere. However, Jaemin’s eyes were on your body, which kind of made you feel like a piece of meat on display. Before you were about to say my eyes are up here, he said, “You’re not going out wearing that outfit.”

Sure, Jaemin was protective, of you, but hearing him say that, in a voice that was deep yet slightly vulnerable, sort of made you worry. “I-is it bad? It’s just a cropped top and shorts. Does it really look that awful on me?” you inquired back, suddenly insecure about what you were wearing. You felt comfortable in the outfit, but if it really didn’t look good on you, then you supposed you would change clothes.

His stubborn expression softened, and he stepped forward and grabbed your hands. “Baby,” he told you quietly, in a soft voice, which was free of all the harshness it had possessed a few seconds ago, “I mean that you look so damn good that all the guys are gonna be staring at you. You look good in anything, Y/n, but we can’t have the other guys thinking the same thing. Well, okay, they can, but if any of them looks at your ass in these shorts, I’m gonna have to kill them.”

“Jaemin!” you laughed, hitting his chest lightly with your palm. “I’m not changing.”

“That’s fine. It’s ultimately your choice,” he replied.

And with that, you both got into the car. He wasn’t going to fight with you on what you were wearing, even if you looked so good, to the point where the other boys would be thinking the same thing. Even still, Jaemin couldn’t stop staring at your legs, and how perfectly they were being shown off, thanks to your shorts. His eyes also were pulled to the strip of bare skin left exposed by your cropped top. He couldn’t help but think of how soft the skin would be under his skin…

These thoughts consumed Jaemin’s mind all the way to the dorms (which, admittedly, was only a couple minutes away).

The boys were already a mess as soon as you entered the dorms. Jisung and Chenle were trying to see if different parts of the wall would make noise if they threw the same ball at it. You didn’t understand this. Why would they test the sounds the interior of the house would make after lodging a cheap, plastic, red ball at the wall to attempt to make music.

“And this is why I really can’t leave you people alone in the dorms to fend for yourselves, can I?” Jaemin inquired tiredly. However, at the sight of his brothers having fun and being crackheads, he couldn’t help but smile.

“Do you miss them?” you asked him quietly. You were referring to how he’d recently moved out of the dorms so the two of you could get an apartment together.

Jaemin squeezed your hand. “Sometimes,” he whispered back. “But I’ve never been as happy as I am with us together, at our home.”

His answer was difficult for him to come up with, but you understood what he was saying, and what he meant.

And you felt the same way, missing his insane stories about what the boys did at 3 AM, but you were ultimately happy, and that was what mattered.

You walked over to the couch, meaning to sit on it. You almost sat on Renjun’s legs as he was lying down, taking up the entire length of the couch. He seemed pretty immersed in his phone, and his earbuds were in. Just that one time, you decided against kicking him. When you looked up, You saw Jeno staring at you. You couldn’t tell if he was staring into your eyes or staring at places lower down on you than your face.

Clearly, Jaemin noticed, too. He walked right up to you and snaked a warm arm around you, as if to say, “my girlfriend.”

“Let’s play a game!” Jaemin suggested loudly to lighten the odd mood and keep everything as crackheaded as they should be. “There’s a mini basketball hoop in the middle of the room. Let’s put it to use, shall we?”

“Fine,” Renjun sighed, averting his eyes from his phone. “We should do teams of two. Each group has a minute to shoot as many baskets at a time.”

“See, Renjun?” Jaemin inquired. His voice was cheeky, and you knew he was going to say something in the form of a roast. “If you’re not on your phone, you can see my handsome face in real life, and that’s a blessing to everyone.”

Renjun just rolled his eyes but you glanced at your boyfriend teasingly. “Your biggest fan is yourself,” you grinned.

“If Y/n is on Jaemin’s team, they’ll win,” Chenle said, calming down from his throwing of plastic and rubber balls against the wall.

“Then I’ll be on Y/n’s team,“Jeno replied. From where you were sitting, you saw Jaemin’s face fall a bit. He seemed a bit jealous, for some reason, which was so absurd to you.

The six of you divided into teams: You and Jeno, Jisung and Jaemin (sort of against Jisung’s will), and Chenle and Renjun. This was going to be interesting, to say the least.

Jaemin and Jisung were first to go, despite their constant protests. The ball had to be shot from two feet in front of the 3.5 foot machine, a rule made by all of you (except you all decided it in meters, and the author incorrectly wrote it as feet). The sixty seconds was full of Jisung being yelled at by his partner, who was commonly at fault for the things being yelled about. Jaemin pouted and whined for sixty seconds straight, and you were all laughing at him. He missed most of the shots, and for those shots that went over the machine, he made Jisung get them, before scolding him for not being fast enough. In the end, they ended up with eight baskets only, a criteria that didn’t seem difficult to beat.

Right before your turn, you whispered your plan to Jeno. Chenle began the timer, and the round began. Jeno threw the ball to you, which you caught and simply placed in the basket. You tossed the ball back to him, and the cycle continued. Within sixty seconds, you had managed to dunk 24 baskets.

When the timer ran out, you and Jeno hugged celebratorily, jumping up and down. In doing so, your phone fell out of your pocket, onto the ground. It was left unscathed, luckily. You didn’t see Jaemin’s eyes on you. He was looking at your legs, admiring how the muscles flexed as you kneeled to the ground and stood up to grab your phone. He admired the curve of your ass, the way your legs were left mostly exposed in your shorts. His mind flew to the feeling of your legs under the palms of his hands, when he’d carefully caress your thighs to tease you, or how they’d wrap around his waist when he pounded into you...shoot.

And distracted by those thoughts, Jaemin felt some of his blood rush south. He barely even noticed Jisung protesting the score of the game, how you and Jeno had cheated.

“They’re supposed to be behind the line!” Jisung protested.

“Actually, only the shooter is. I didn’t have to be,” you pointed out, secretly pleased with the loophole you’d found in the rules.

“Jisung, she’s smarter than us,” Jeno laughed. “Drop it.” He slung an arm around your shoulder, the both of you unable to hide the smug looks on your faces at Jisung’s defeat.

“Y/n,” Jaemin said quietly, “can I talk to you? Alone?” You looked at him, and saw the not-so-happy expression written across his face. It wasn’t angry, and it wasn’t sad, either. Either way, it hurt your heart to see.

You stepped out of Jeno’s half-embrace and followed after Jaemin. He walked through the room, into a hallway, turning at the bedroom that he and Jisung once shared.

“Are you okay?” you asked worriedly. “You seemed kind of...I don’t know...sad? Ticked off? I’m not even sure.”

“Yeah, just, seeing you with Jeno, and hugging him…” Jaemin trailed off. His confident façade was down, and you were seeing him vulnerable. Despite being his girlfriend of three years, you didn’t see him upset too often. He didn’t seem to know how to finish his sentence. Your boyfriend wasn’t even looking at you, and his eyes were trained at the ground.

“Jaemin, you don’t have to be jealous.”

His head shot straight up, making direct eye contact with you. “I’m not jealous! It’s just...you’re mine!”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you get jealous before.”

“I don’t get jealous; that’s ridiculous. Why would I be jealous when anyone would be whipped for all of my amazing charms, and my incredible charasma, and my hugs, which are so much better than Jeno’s-”

You kissed him on the mouth, really just to shut him up. Him rambling on about how he was “totally not jealous” was cute, though.

The kiss quickly deepened, your mouths slow and sensual against each others’ at first, but growing more passionate and deep by the second. His hands grabbed onto your waist, feeling your warm, smooth bare skin under his hands. With a wrench, he broke away,

“Are you sure you’re okay? Come on, kiss me,” you pleaded in a quiet voice.

“I’m fine. It’s just…” he trailed off again, and decided to let actions speak his words for him. He bucked his hips against you, allowing you to feel how hard he was.

Your eyes widened, and you looked up, making eye contact with him. His warm brown eyes were consumed by the widened, black pupil, showing you how much he already wanted you. “How did that happen?” you asked.

“So you know how I said that the members would enjoy you in that outfit too much? Well, I enjoyed it too much. Seeing the way you move turned me on, somehow.”

“Jaemin, you really could have just said, before we left the house, ‘You’re not going out wearing that outfit because instead of going anywhere, I’m going to fuck you now, for your legs look really good in those shorts and are making me feel some type of way.’ Wouldn’t that have been easier?”

He leaned in to peck your lips, and then he whispered, “It would have been easier. But instead, now that we aren’t home, it looks like I’m gonna have to take care of this problem right here, right now.��

And this, of course, led to a bunch of making out, as well as very clumsy and very lame stripped of clothing.

When his hard length entered you, your back was pressed into Jaemin’s old mattress. Part of Jaemin wanted to pound into you so hard that you’d loudly moan out his name, showing Jeno who made you feel this good.

And that part of him won out this round. He watched his cock disappear and thrust in and out of your tight hole. The sounds of your moans urged him on, and they were like music to his ears. Anywhere his mouth could reach, he was kissing you, biting and sucking any exposed skin until your collarbones. neck, and chest.

Part of him wanted to ask if Jeno could make you feel so good, but it didn’t seem to fit the moment, and you were okay with that. His thick length filled you up so well, hitting your sweet-spot dead-on. With your moans, Jaemin was urged on, thrusting into you harder as you clenched around him incredibly tightly.

When you both came, you climaxed hard. Your walls caved in on themselves, and you saw stars behind your closed eyes. Your moans and cries of your boyfriend’s name rang off the walls, and his fluid was released inside of you.

Due to that occurrence, the boys stood out in the main room of their dorms, rolling their eyes and looking confused, as well as concerned, when they heard your and Jaemin’s moans and voices from all the way down the hall. Jaemin wouldn’t have to worry about Jeno knowing that you were Jaemin’s girlfriend, and not his.

#nct dream smut #nct smut #jaemin smut #00 line smut #nct dream imagines #nct imagines #00 line imagines #prompt list #dialogue prompt #asks #nct #nct dream #jaemin #na jaemin #jaemin imagines #nct fluff #nct dream fluff #we_will_winwin

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thanksjro · 4 years

Text

More Than Meets the Eye #7- Just in Case You Forgot Decepticons Were a Thing

While the Lost Light gets all of Rung’s appointments in order, our narrative is going to take a little shift, so we can get to know some pretty neat dudes.

And by “neat dudes” I mean completely morally and ethically reprehensible bastards.

But first, here’s a brief history of the Phase-Sixer known as Black Shadow.

Very limber, Mr. Shadow. Also, note the abstract sort of Decepticon insignia shape going on with the panel. That’s just neat.

Now, Black Shadow’s kicked a lot of keister in his long, storied career as a ‘Con, which makes his current situation all the more bleak, as he’s in the final throes of a visit with the Decepticon Justice Division.

The guy with the arm-mounted cannon that’s clearly compensating for something is Tarn, the leader of the DJD. His main character trait is he’s sapiosexual, but only for Megatron. He’s so devoted to the Decepticause and its rhetoric, he wears a mask of the insignia at all times.

Behind him are Helex and Tesaurus, who turn into a fondue pot and industrial-sized blender, respectively, and Vos, who turns into a sniper rifle, and was once fired by Megatron himself. I assume he’s only part of the DJD for the clout.

And then there’s Kaon, who turns into a wheelie chair.

Black Shadow’s looking pretty rough, but the boys haven’t killed him yet, and there’s a reason for that; the DJD’s sole reason for existing is to punish any Decepticon who stalls the glory of Megatron’s vision of a better tomorrow coming to fruition, no matter how slight the infraction, and simply killing their victims doesn’t exactly drive the point home, now does it? They’ve got to make an example, you know?

But really it’s so Tarn can pontificate. See, he considers himself a bit of an intellectual, as shown in his quoting of Megatron’s autobiography, Towards Peace.

Ugh, He’s a fanboy. It’s enough to make you want to puke. Which Black Shadow does. It’s mostly blood. Or is it? Hard to tell, energon is everything for these guys.

The DJD have had their fun, so now it’s time for them to say goodbye to Black Shadow. This is where Tarn’s special talent comes into play, and it’s a nasty one.

Tarn has a unique voice, one that, when matching the timbre and frequency of another ‘bot’s spark, can be used to affect said spark, even making it give up the ghost. This is exactly what he does to Black Shadow, but not before making him apologize for selling out the Decepticons for a butt-ton of money.

Speaking of unique voices, Tarn’s characterization is almost completely in his. It makes sense, given his power, that he have a way of speaking that stands out from everyone else. It’s smooth, and cool, and seems well-rehearsed; this is not a guy who stumbles on his words. He sounds like a Bond villain.

Roberts has admitted that he wrote these characters with English accents, and while I can’t say that I buy it for everyone in MTMTE, I certainly do for Tarn.

But maybe that’s just because I’m American, and a lot of the media I consumed growing up had the whole “the villain sounds British/camp gay” thing going on.

Anyway.

Black Shadow explodes, because we haven’t had one of those in a while.

With another tick put on their List, the DJD get ready to move on to their next target. We don’t get any names, but whoever they are, they’re about to have a very bad day.

Then we take a quick jump back to the Lost Light, since things were kind of a massive mess when we last saw everyone.

Rung’s not dead, by the way. I guess Swerve really is just that bad of a shot. Still, he’s not much more than a brain on a rope, and that means that Rung’ll be out of commission for a good while.

Poor Swerve. He feels so awful about this whole thing, even brought Rung one of his little ships to keep him company. The worst part is, now that Swerve’s shot the therapist, who will he talk to so he can work through having shot the therapist?

Speaking of guys who need therapy, Red Alert comes visiting in the dead of night, after visiting hours and in cover of darkness. He tells Rung about the little surprise he found in the basement, and bids him farewell, as he will surely be killed now that he knows about Overlord.

Who the hell programmed that drone to be so menacing?

Red Alert, again showing that this ain’t his first paranoia rodeo, slips a data slug full of Overlord bondage footage into the hole where Rung’s thumb should be- guess it got lost in the helter-skelter when he got shot- then walks out of the medibay, presumably to die.

Anywho, that’s enough of the Autobots for a little while. Let’s see what the Decepticons are up to.

On a planet far from wherever the Lost Light is faffing about, a Decepticon wakes up to a bunch of dudes hovering over him, insulting his looks, and stealing his organs. He reacts accordingly.

This is Fulcrum. No, not the Decepticon medic from Eugenesis, different guy. This Fulcrum’s primary function is probably about as removed from healing as it gets.

The guys trying to harvest him are the Scavengers, and they’re pretty surprised that he’s not dead, because, well…

Yeah.

Misfire- the dude who got kicked in the face a second ago- does both Fulcrum and the reader a solid by introducing all the members of this merry band of assholes, starting with the surliest of their ranks.

Crankcase was first introduced into the IDW run in Stormbringer #3, where he shot at Thunderwing and spouted off a couple lines ripped straight from a porno.

Stormbringer is really just… something else.

Spinister, who can and will shoot anything that meets his unpredictable criteria of being a threat, is the only other Scavenger who isn’t debuting in the comics with this issue. He was in Stormbringer #4, not that he really did anything of note there.

There’s Flywheels, who can’t tell a lie without transforming, and is a born-again evangelical. His character is a removal from his previous iterations, as he’s a triple-changer instead of a Duocon, a robot that only exists if two separate sentient vehicles combine. So, in his case, tank + plane = giant robot. Transformers is weird.

Then there’s the leader of this group, the ever-stressed, glorified babysitter, Krok.

Krok takes the opportunity to save Fulcrum from the verbal barrage, explaining that the Scavengers are expropriation specialists, meaning that they take people’s shit for their own benefit, and that includes bodily fluids. Misfire was supposed to be siphoning energon from the corpses in the area, but accidentally got high on another dude’s supply in the process. Misfire may be hopped up on drugs at the moment, but he’s only a bit more put-together sober, so this really is roughly par for the course with him.

Back on the Lost Light, Chromedome pays a visit to Brainstorm, who is currently hanging from the ceiling. Not in a suicidey way, mind you, just in a Brainstorm way.

He wants to be noticed so badly.

Chromedome’s here because he managed to steal Skid’s weirdly forgettable gun back in issue #4, while Skids was busy harassing that bar drone. He handed it off to Brainstorm to try and figure out what the deal was. Problem is, the gun blew up the moment Brainstorm cracked it open, only allowing him to get a quick look at the internals thanks to his super-futuristic robot eyes. All he can really say is that it looks like something that came from The Institute. Back at it again with the ominous proper nouns.

Getting back to the Scavengers, it looks like the boys have set up a little campfire for the evening. It’s a gorgeous night.

In love with the colors this issue.

We get a very brief history lesson that shows us why reducing your workforce to a spreadsheet instead of living, free-thinking creatures isn’t a super great idea, and then Krok drops the bomb on Fulcrum about the war being over. This is pretty wild to Fulcrum, probably because after 4 million years of that nonsense, you don’t really expect it to ever actually end.

Of course, when the impossible turns out to be possible after all, there’s only one question to really ask: who won?

Now, none of the guys really know how everything ended, only going off of the pulse wave that Vector Sigma shot off during the reformatting of Cybertron. They figure it was probably the Autobots, because they’re at least a little genre savvy. Bummer for them, considering they’re technically part of the bad guys. Just ask the campfire.

You know, I don’t think this is what President Roosevelt had in mind when he started doing fireside chats.

And so our location is finally revealed to us- this is the planet known as Clemency. Hey, wasn’t that the place Tarn said their next target was? Man, that really sucks for these guys. Hope they’ve got their wills in order.

Meanwhile, in the medibay of the Lost Light, Rung has another late-night visitor. This guy takes the data slug from inside his thumb hole, thus removing any hope of Red Alert’s fate being found out. Well dang.

Back on Clemency, the boys have made it through the night, and are using the light of daybreak to start scrounging up parts for their super sweet ship, the Weak Anthropic Principle.

Hold on to your butts, because this one’s a doozy.

The Anthropic Principle is based in the school of philosophy, and states that any and all observations about the universe- or any universe, really- have to be fed through the filter of realizing that said universe is only observable because it allows for sapient life to exist and observe it. There are two flavors of this principle; the strong anthropic principle states that the universe has some sort of compelling force which dictates it be able to house life which can observe it, while the weak anthropic principle basically says that the only reason we’re even considering the strong anthropic principle is because we live in a universe where we can.

Now, why exactly Roberts decided to bring this philosophical idea into the fold completely escapes me, unless he decided to, in a roundabout way, poke fun at the fact that we are currently observing a universe we don’t exist in through the magic of fiction- that theory doesn’t hold water, though, because there are still sapient creatures populating the universe of the IDW comics, and even humans at that. I’m curious where he even learned about this. What an odd, confounding tidbit of information this is.

But enough about that, because Misfire’s just seen a cryptid.

He transforms and blasts past Fulcrum and Krok, interrupting Krok’s explanation of what the device he keeps hidden in his fist is for, trying to catch up to the Necrobot.

The very same, Fulcrum, thank you.

Misfire is a firm believer in the Necrobot, while Krok is firmly not. Misfire’s tried chasing down this guy several times now, but he’s not caught him. The Necrobot is kind of like Bigfoot, if he were also a Catholic priest. This go doesn’t prove any different for poor Misfire, though it’s not all bad.

Flywheels’ only purpose as a character is so that Roberts had a stand-in for the word “fuck” for this issue.

Misfire’s found something very exciting, and he immediately calls Krok to bring everyone over.

Everyone’s super jazzed about finding this thing, and they break out the flashlights and break in to see all the fun stuff that’s inside this obnoxiously large ship.

Of course, this is a Roberts story, and we haven’t yet had any sort of scientifically experimental horrors yet, so we’re honestly a little overdue at this point.

But wait, there’s more!

Aww, it’s nice that Fulcrum and Krok already have each other’s contact info.

Everyone regroups and they weigh their options. Misfire fucking hates this ship, and wants nothing to do with it. Fulcrum however, isn’t so quick to throw this entire nightmare bus off the cliff. Fulcrum’s a little weird, and not just because he looks like he’s got a military pack on and no shirt.

Oh honey, you got a storm coming.

As if on cue, Krok starts hearing music, and asks around for a phone. He picks up a transmission from a familiar masked face. Tarn lets the fellas know that one of them has done a big no-no, and if the others hand the transgressor over, he’ll let them watch, because Tarn assumes that that’s something other people are into. Tarn is bad at people. The transmission ends, leaving the boys to panic, and also wonder where the leader of the DJD learned to count, until they find a very special friend deep within the bowels of the ship. The extra life signal, and the only other living thing on the Worldsweeper- Grimlock.

#transformers #jro #mtmte #issue 7 #maccadam #Hannzreads #text post #long post #incoming analysis #comic script writing

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magpiemorality · 4 years

Note

Another request, if it's okay ofc, Canon or AU both are fine, Deceit and Remus both being interested in Patton and trying to gain his affections and being dramatic rivals. Patton is a bit obvious to it all at first but it ends with him cheerfully saying he likes them both so they both can become his boyfriends, they don't have to fight

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 AO3

Warnings: cursing, judgemental characters, a character dismissing polyamory as an option

***

“I just don’t know what to do!” Patton flopped down on his bed, keeping his phone up by his ear and pouting at the ceiling.

On the other end, his best friend Remy sighed before replying. “Maybe you could just go and do something about the situation instead of always whining to me about your crazy lucky love life?!” he suggested. “Because gurl, you’re lucky! My dry spell has been over a week now and I’m starting to go mad-”

Patton giggled and tuned out as Remy kept on complaining about his own lack of a dating life, twirling a curl around his finger and chewing on his lip thoughtfully.

It was a pretty heavenly dilemma to have, really. It was just so gosh darn upsetting that Patton had to solve the whole thing by making a decision, instead of just riding the euphoria forever.

The dilemma was this: Patton had two potential boyfriends and he was only allowed to choose one.

On the one hand; Dexter O’Reilly was drop dead gorgeous, and climbing the social ranks fast by essentially just building his own and declaring it lord of them all. He was mysterious and exciting and surprisingly sweet, and he was a total bad boy. Patton’s parents would never approve (the fact their wholesome Mormon beliefs didn’t approve of most of his life choices notwithstanding…) but that just made it all the more exciting. Dex would be the type of guy that turned Patton from Sandy at the beginning of Grease; to Sandy at the end of Grease, and he was sorta tempted by the idea of a change. Being perfect all the time was a bit of a drag after a while.

On the other hand there was Remus Duke. One of the defensive end’s of the football team, he was big and strong and, well he was a football player. Patton was a cheerleader. It was practically the law. And Remus was always smiling, always living his life loud and proud and defending his ideals no matter what it took. More than once Patton had heard of him getting into a fight because someone had said something rude to one of his friends, which should not have been as hot as Patton had found it, but gosh, loyalty was sexy okay?! Don’t judge him. Remus was not quite as much a bad boy as Dex was, but he filled the criteria nicely enough.

Patton was completely torn.

“-babes you’re not even listening to me, you complain about your dynamic duo all the time and you won’t even listen to me bitch about all the boys that don’t want to date me?!”

“Gosh, sorry Rem. I just- I can’t help myself!”

There was a moment’s silence before the sound of a cup being sucked nearly dry nearly burst Patton’s eardrum. “Hey, that’s not fair you promised not to do that without warning again!”

“Babes, deal with it. Now I gotta go get ready for class, but I’ll speak to you soon. And Pat?”

“Yeah?”

“Sort your head out soon. Rumour on the blog discord has it that Duke isn’t gonna wait for Prom anymore and wants to pop the question by Spring break. If you’re gonna pick him you’ll want to let the other one down gently before that happens, ‘kay?”

“Mm.”

“Okay babes, ciao!”

“Ciao, Remy,” Patton mumbled, dropping his phone by his head and letting out a loud groan. Easier said than done. Especially when it wasn’t just his head that had high stakes in the matter; his heart was going all in.

***

“Mr Duke, will you please focus?!” Dammit, had he been zoning out again? Fuck. Remus lifted his hand with an apologetic grin, turning back to the experiment his group had running on the counter in front of them.

“How does she always know?” Toby muttered, eyeing their Chem 3 professor suspiciously. “I was totally covering for you dude, I swear. I know how you get.”

Remus shot him a grateful smile, swirling the contents of a test tube until the mixture was evenly dispersed. “I know, it’s all cool. She’s just some kind of teaching cryptid, probably. Never doesn’t know every single thing happening in class…”

“So what was it today? You need to run it off later?” Toby offered once they’d started the bunsen burner and set the timer, sitting back to watch and wait for the reaction. “Bad or good?”

“Oh, kinda… both? No running necessary, bro, thanks, but maybe, maybe some house rules mariokart after practice. It was Patton again.”

Toby winced in sympathy. “Our itty bitty pretty cheerboy has got you bad, Duke. What is this, year two, month three?”

“Something like that. Do you think I should go back to the plan to wait for prom season? It’s just… that would be easy but then I’m wasting time and I already missed the winter formal chance and now there’s this other guy-”

“Wait what other guy?” Toby asked, leaning forwards to check the timer quickly. “There’s another guy?”

“Yeah, the fancy one. You know the one, he’s got the birthmark all over his face?”

“Huh, I thought you only liked the pretty ones-”

“Hey. We don’t make those jokes, remember? We’re better than that now. And besides, he’s not another guy for me, he’s another guy for Patton. They spent loads of time together over Winter break, and he’s like, super weirdly popular or something. Like a mob boss. He probably has way more to offer Patton than I do… Ow!” He glared at his friend, rubbing his shoulder. “What was that for?”

“For shit talking my best friend. Besides dude, this could be your motivation, right? You need something to get you moving, because shit if you aren’t gonna do it on your own…”

“Harsh, but fair.”

“So think of it like a competition. You’re good at those.”

Remus blinked, tilting his head. The timer went off before he could reply, so they tabled the conversation. He brought it back up again when they were on the field stretching before practice, eyes straying frequently over to the gym wall where he knew the cheerleaders were inside doing their own practice session.

“So, about that competition idea… What did you have in mind?” He asked, attempting to be casual and failing.

Toby grinned. “Alright, here’s the plan.”

***

“Here’s the plan,” Dex told himself sternly in the mirror. “You are going to go up to Patton and ask him if he wants to get coffee. You are going to go up to Patton and ask him if he wants to get coffee. Shit, no, he prefers tea…”

He sighed, walked in a frustrated circle around his room and came back to the mirror, pushing his hair back and starting again. “You are going to go up to Patton and ask him if he wants to get tea. With you! You are going to- oh what is the point?” This whole exercise was useless. It hadn’t worked for the past three weeks- why would it work today? He was going to pass Patton on campus and give him the usual strained smile and mumbled greeting before hurrying on with his day, annoyed and frustrated and disappointed and another day closer to losing Patton to Remus Duke.

Dex would rather die than let that neanderthal win.

And based on the information he was gathering on his blog, he was running out of time to ensure that didn’t happen. Today was going to be crucial- if he could break his routine of failure that was… Maybe a new plan would help? He could take Patton’s favourite order with him and offer it to him when he saw him and use that as a conversation starter instead? Now, that sounded more achievable.

The next morning Dex got up early to detour via the cafe, picking up his own and Patton’s orders and wandering through campus until he caught a flash of blond hair and a musical laugh. It all seemed to be lining up nicely until he caught sight of his rival approaching from the other side of the quad. Fuck no, Remus was not getting there first!

Dex sped up, noticing Remus notice him and seeing the moment he clocked that this was turning into a race. The footballer’s legs were longer and stronger than his own, but Dex had the headstart, and he made it to Patton just in time to hold out the cup of tea with a hopeful smile and open his mouth to explain his offering, when Remus crashed into him and the two of them went sprawling on the ground.

The drinks were spilled and Patton shrieked in surprise, trying to help them both up at the same time, and then apparently clocking that it was the two of them. He squeaked and went red, recoiling and running away, leaving the two boys to scowl at each other.

Dex rubbed his hip where he’d fallen and Remus brushed himself, looking very unapologetic. “So, you’re Remus Duke. I’ve heard all about you…”

“Oh yeah? You scared, O’Reilly?” Remus shot back, rolling his eyes. “I don’t need to know shit about you to know I’m gonna be the successful one out of the two of us. I mean it’s the law right- cheerleader plus footballer equals happy ending?”

“Back off Duke, you wouldn’t know how to treat him right anyway. He’s not a trophy to tick of your perfect life checklist!”

“No you back off- I saw him first! I liked him since freshman year, dude, this is just unfair of you.”

Dear lord was Remus actually pouting? Dex looked at him scornfully. “Patton isn’t an object. He makes his own decisions. He will pick the better man.”

“Yeah he will. And I’m gonna show him that that’s me.” Remus said with a proud smirk. Dexter stared at him. “I’ve got a plan,” Remus elaborated cockily, and Dex really wanted to wipe that look off his face, but he had better things to do and a reputation to maintain. And a replacement coffee to buy, if he wanted to get through today’s classes.

He lifted his chin and pulled his messenger bag higher up his shoulder with a scoff. “Well I look forwards to seeing what a brute like you can produce to woo a delight like Patton. In fact, I welcome the competition. It’ll make me look even better by comparison.”

Remus was back to scowling, and Dex tallied that as a win for himself. “I won’t even interfere, you’re going to fuck it up all by yourself, I’m sure. Just look at you,” he sniffed, looking Remus up and down with judgemental eyes. “You’re a mess, Duke. Bye now.”

He turned to go, leaving Remus huffing and puffing behind him, speechless with fury.

Things were off to a good start.

***

End of part 2 (woops this is going to be longer?)

#writepie #intruality #moceit #we need a name for this au #ts patton #ts deceit #ts remus #ts remy #cursing #prompt fill #ts sanders sides #ts sanders sides aus #ts writing #sanders sides #patton sanders #remus sanders #deceit sanders #college au

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titusmoody · 4 years

Text

Ranking the SM64 levels

3 Bob-omb Battlefield: I’m starting the list with my third favorite because I can explain every other level in terms of this one. This is easily the most impressive level in terms of design. SM64 sorts its levels into “chunks” that connect in various ways. The exact borders between chunks and how finely we chop the level up into different chunks doesn’t quite matter. I find I like chunks better if they 1) interconnect so you can get to multiple different chunks from wherever you are. Bonus points if the game uses the Y axis to create some one-way connections like Bob-omb battlefield’s bridge that spits you back out near the beginning of the level if you fall. Extra bonus points if you can use some precise jumping to get around those limitations. 2) Has its own distinct element, either visually or mechanically, like the little area with the mounds when you climb up the very first ramp in Bob-omb battlefield. 3) Contains a pretty clear “first star route” to one specific other chunk, like the path up the ramp at the beginning, or the mountain “weenie” that you can see a path to when you get beyond the chain chomp and bridge. 4) There are at least a couple chunks that the first star route doesn’t touch at all, but you can still see. Both the area with the stumps you can run in circles around as well as the floating island you can see from your ascent up the mountain are good examples. The only reason this isn’t #1 on my personal list is because it is focused mainly on beginners who have literally never encountered a 3d game before. Climbing the mountain and freeing the chain chomp are both great, and the mountain contains plenty of opportunities to get up faster using more difficult jumps. On the other hand, it uses the wing cap and fairly precise cannon aiming, the first and second least fun things in the game.

Now, onto the worst levels:

15 Dire, Dire Docks: While swimming isn’t as awful to control as I remember it being when I was a kid, it’s still not great. This level uses currents to suck you towards death pits in a couple places, which isn’t fun. A few of the stars either include or are mostly built around having you navigate the weak end of the current, and there’s just nothing good about it. Plus, what’s the deal with water levels having segments connected only by lengthy narrow tunnels? Probably a loading thing, but it doesn’t help the design. The not-underwater part of this level is only used to make you do cycle-based pole jumping which is even worse than the death currents.

14 Tiny-Huge Island: Eh, this was such a creative idea for a level that I don’t begrudge it for not working. This level has chunks that only connect if you are the appropriate size, which is a good idea. Around half the things you need to do to get the stars are pretty good, too. However, big mario is just too big. If you turn at the wrong time you go into sliding down mode and there’s never a platform big enough for you to get your balance before falling off the mountain to your death. The level also feels a little unvaried. The chunks aren’t distinct and reuse the same few elements throughout without getting more challenging as you progress along the “first star route”.

13 Tall, Tall Mountain: This is one of two linear levels in the game, and is by far the less interesting. SM64 approaches linear levels as spirals upwards. In this case, around the mountain. I think there’s only a single place where you can take two different routes up. There’s not a lot to say. The platforming feels perfectly fine throughout the ascent. The slide is the most well-hidden place in the game, and I might have gotten frustrated looking for it if I hadn’t seen speedruns. This may have been ranked a little higher if it weren’t for the star that requires the most precise cannon aim in the game.

12 Cool, Cool Mountain: It’s a neat idea to start at the top of a level and be asked to descend in various ways. I think the problem is that too much of what you’ll actually be doing is trying to precisely control your slide down the same stretch and jump away at exactly the right place.

11 Rainbow Ride: This level isn’t structured like any other in the game. There are two points where the main path branches--once into three and the other time into two--but none of those branches reconnect, so it’s more like a path with a few self-contained sections off of it. I like the platforming quite a bit in this level, but don’t like how disconnected everything is from everything else. The main problem, though, is that the main path consists mostly of waiting around on a magic carpet with nothing to do but the occasional trivial jump. The difficulty of the platforming this late into the game means that deaths will happen, and it’s really a detriment that there’s no way around waiting on the carpets.

10 Lethal Lava Land: This level gets credit for being exactly what the game needed after the first set of levels + the first boss. Going into the basement for the first time and encountering a completely flat level is a big surprise, and the tiny safe paths surrounded by lava make the level look extremely perilous. The level is actually pretty tiny, which leaves each chunk with only enough space for one (1) thing to do. The interior of the volcano sure does add a lot, though. It’s like a miniature Tall, Tall Mountain with only a couple of stars.

9 Hazy Maze Cave: This level is pretty okay. The clumps are separated from each other by corridors and doors, which is why it seems like a “maze” but if you smushed them together the layout would be pretty typical. The clumps might be the most varied between each other, too. And this is the only level that contains a mini-level that unlocks a different cap.

8 Shifting Sand Land: The pyramid is cool. Having successive stars where you’re asked to: get to it, explore the inside, then find the secret entrance with a boss is unlike anything else in the game, and it’s neat. Things aren’t as interesting outside the pyramid, but there’s just barely enough there with enough variety to keep things fine. The outside is probably about as good as Lethal Lava Land, and the pyramid is vastly better than the inside of the volcano.

7 Jolly Roger Bay: Okay, I lied a little bit about Shifting Sand Land. In Jolly Roger Bay, there is one star you get by swimming into a sunken ship and hitting something that makes the water drain out. And if you’re thinking about it, that must mean that the ship was resurfacing. Sure enough, when you go back in for the next star, there’s a ship on the surface now! I think that is a little like the pyramid situation, though not quite as cool. This one ranks higher because it’s the only other level outside of Bob-omb Battlefield that feels like a playground where you can basically do anything that seems fun without penalty and if you do well, you’ll be rewarded. Unfortunately, it does the same long, narrow tunnel thing as Dire, Dire Docks. It’s also too easy to be particularly interesting, but of course with its placement in the game, it should not be any more difficult.

6 Thwomp’s Fortress: Most people’s second level, I assume. Does a good job at establishing patterns so that you know that Bob-omb Battlefield isn’t just a fluke, the whole game is that way. It’s a little on the small side, and the platforms that retract into the walls result in a lot of deaths that feel cheap for being so early in the game, but aside from that, it’s all pretty solid.

5 Wet-Dry World: Like with Lethal Lava Land, the game knows exactly what to hit us with to open up a new area after a boss. The goals become a lot less obvious here. There is no obvious “path” that leads through the chunks, so you’re mostly on your own. On the other hand, this is another level that doesn’t punish you for doing things wrong, it’s just more picky about rewarding you than earlier levels.

4 Snowman’s Land: More linear and more punishing than Wet-Dry World, SM64 knows when to break its established rules and when not to. This level does pretty much everything right. I particularly like that they brought back the “bullies” from Lethal Lava Land with the added challenge of ice physics, the hidden area in the igloo, and using the penguin as a shield against the wind.

2 Big Boo’s Haunt: This one uses the normal level approach to make the level feel like a real place. The separate, self-contained rooms would be too limiting, but the connections between the first, second, and third floor and the doors between rooms, plus the balconies make it just as nicely interconnected as everything else. In fact, the balconies in particular are clever real-world examples of ways that actual places have similar designs to SM64 levels. Most of the game is openly and even proudly abstract and artificial. The tension between realistic spaces and interesting level design is still being played out in games today, but here in 1996 we already see that Nintendo already knew what they were doing.

1 Tick Tock Clock: Here’s the other linear level. Based on the criteria I laid out right at the beginning, it seems like a linear level couldn’t be placed this highly, but although I’ve only mentioned “platforming” in passing so far, that really is the absolute core of the game. You run and you jump. If those two things didn’t feel good to do, SM64 would be a bad game regardless of how great the level design is. Tick Tock Clock gives you nothing but opportunities to run and jump well. If it’s like any other part of the game, it’s like being outside the castle right when you start, while you’re figuring out what the controls are. Only now, you already know how to do everything you need to do to beat the game, and you get a chance to do a lot of it.

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beyondthetemples · 4 years

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{{ Tagged (sort of) by @streetxcat!

name — Zira, Shadow, Snow, RSK, take your pick! gender — agender star sign — Aries sun; Cancer moon; Scorpio rising height — 5′3 age — 27 wallpaper on my phone — starry sky. ever crush on a teacher — my aro ass barely crushes on anyone, let alone teachers! (Though you could say I had a platonic crush on my English teacher in 9th grade. She was very supportive of my poetry, always asked what inspired my creative writings, geeked out with me about the Latin language and Edgar Allen Poe... She even rescued some books that were going to be thrown away from the teacher’s lounge and gave them to me! They’re Latin grammar books from the 1920′s and 1940′s.) coolest halloween costume — My favorite has to be one of my many Raven cosplays. Personally, I love that I cosplayed DCAMU!Raven when we only had the trailer for JLvTT--and the trailer wasn’t even officially released yet; I’d found it leaked on YouTube before the DVD with the trailer came out! I saw her casual outfit, liked what I saw, and then made the outfit with mainly things I already had. (I even crafted the gold-and-red-circle necklace.) I’ve worn that one to like 7 different events by now, it’s great. favourite 90s tv show — Heck, I can hardly remember when the 90′s and 00′s cartoons split... Static Shock? Beetlejuice? Batman Beyond? Pokemon? The Tick? Fairly OddParents also has a special place in my heart, because Cosmo was a huge inspiration when I was figuring Srentha out. last kiss — Probably my mother, saying goodbye on the 4th. have you ever been stood up — By my stepmother and father, mostly. favourite pair of shoes — Please let me be barefoot. have you ever been to vegas — Three times. (For seminars. I don’t gamble.) favourite fruit — Lychee, mango, or pomegranate! favourite books — I’m always going to tell you my favorite books are the New Teen Titans comic books by Marv Wolfman and George Perez! My favorite non-comic novels, though, is a much more complicated answer. The contenders include Bruiser by Neal Shusterman, The Winter Oak by James A. Hetley, Growing Wings by Lauren Winter, the Silverwing series, the Sevenwaters trilogy by Juliet Marillier, and too many others to list. all time favourite shows — Teen Titans, always and forever! (Who, me? Biased? Nooo!) Teen Titans is far and away my all-time favorite, hands down. But since it says “shows” with an S, I also love Steven Universe, Legend of the Seeker, Yugioh (Duel Monsters and especially “season 0″), Ruby Gloom, Doom Patrol, and not to rejoin the bandwagon, but Avatar: The Last Airbender. last movie you saw in theatres — I see movies so rarely, I honestly can’t remember the last time I was in a theatre. Maybe it was Shazam? tagged by: @streetxcat tagging: @blueveines @cyberninja @robynrpmain (And anyone else who meets this criteria: You’re reading this, and you want to do it!)

#ooc meme

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x-write-z · 4 years

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Writer’s Toolbox: Notebook.ai

Here are some great tools for writers. Today, the website notebook.ai.

I believe the original intent of the website was to help you keep track of your RPG world as it expands, but it is perfect for writers in any genre.

The free version of the website allows you to create pages for Universes, Locations, Characters, and Items. The paid version, which I had for a while, drastically expands the page types you can make to include things like towns, technologies, jobs, and more. I have gotten plenty of use out of the free version but if you have more things you’re interested in keeping track of, the paid version is a cool resource.

Below the screenshot is my Top 4 ways Notebook has helped me, and how it can help you too.

1. Keeping track of names. Every background character who needs a name gets a character page. Every neighborhood my characters pass through gets a location page. I no longer have to search through 3 notebooks and 5 Google Docs to find the name of that one murder victim who was named on paper once somewhere two years ago but who suddenly needs to be referenced again.

2. Keeping track of appearances. Every aspect of your character’s appearance can be catalogued. Now you know longer have to wonder if you made that character blond or brunette. Another way to do this is use the gallery feature. Upload a picture or even a gif of your fan cast of that character, and that image will be displayed on the button for that character on your full character list. Need help describing the character? Pull up your character list and just write what you see.

3. Define character traits. One thing I am big on is assigning character traits to help fit each character with unique reactions to things in-story that are consistent with their personalities. Just like with your character’s appearance, you can define all sorts of aspects of that character’s whole being, from their mannerisms to their personality to their politics. The mere act of being given a blank space to define a character’s motivations, prejudices, or whatever has made me think so much more about these characters and what makes them tick. The random question feature at the top of your dashboard helps keep you on your toes by asking you to define a random blank that has been left empty on a random page.

4. Custom categories. You can add your own categories to each page type so that you can define any page according to any additional criteria you find important. For example, I have added a “Music” category to my character pages, where I can define each character’s favorite song and playlist, which is something that helps me personally write for each character.

There you have it! If you have any questions about Notebook, feel free to ask! Check out their website. I use it almost every time I write. And no, this is not a paid endorsement.

Happy writing!

#creative writers #creative writing #fiction #writers #writing help #writing tips #writing characters #writeblr #writing #notebook #writer’s toolbox #writer’s toolbox series #rpg #oc

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dansnaturepictures · 4 years

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7/3/20-Fort Cumberland and Hill Head

Including update on Ruby and additions to my lists of favourite birds, butterflies and mammals We were lucky to get out today as our youngest dog Ruby, who’s days may be numbered due to a tumour as part of her ongoing battle with lymphoma, appears to have been bitten by an Adder yesterday. She has a recovery from this ahead of her and I wish her all the best. She is in and out of the vets and on steroids, total rest has been ordered. I took the second picture in this photoset of her doing this before leaving today, and first picture in this photoset of a Goldfinch in the garden.

I am writing this as it’s a part of the story of my day, but I must say I am in no way complaining about this wonderful and iconic snake species or their presence in the landscape as they are one of our and in particular the New Forest’s where the bite occurred best species. They are an integral part of wildlife so I am not anti-Adder at all or anything like that. But I am starting to wonder whether by life long snake phobia foreshadowed this and my Mum’s Adder bite seven year’s ago this summer. On both occasions things we said and did foreshadowed the event too so you never know about these things.

We did go out with only our oldest dog and Ruby’s Mum Missy to Fort Cumberland in Portsmouth the lovely coastal area we last went in January I took the third and seventh pictures in this photoset of this place. Missy certainly enjoyed her walk as shown by the fourth picture in this photoset with her rolling over on the beach and with one dog (both of ours are ageing now) it sort of made me appreciate more as a lover of dogs having a dog and being able to enjoy time with them.

Wildlife wise on a quite grey patch of the day the highlights were seeing two special gull species I had got at year ticks two weeks ago today at nearby Hayling Island. I heard the exciting call of a Mediterranean Gull and then some lovely ones flew over by the fort. Some were at the car park as we left too. I then saw a Common Gull on the water and saw one possibly the same later on flying over two cracking views of this bird I really admire. Great to see both species again. I took the fifth and sixth picture in this photoset of these birds respectively.

This gives me a good opportunity for the first time to tell you about some additions I decided to make to my A and B lists of favourite animals last weekend. Every March and if needed September after last year I am gonna have some thinks about species I might want to add to my lists of favourite birds, butterflies, dragon/damselflies and mammals and score candidates against criteria on a spreadsheet to help inform my decisions. Mediterranean Gull was added to my B list of favourite birds so the first I’ve seen since making the additions, alongside Corn Bunting, Snow Bunting, Black Redstart, Greenshank and Water Rail. They joined Manx Shearwater, Shag, Little Tern, Spoonbill, Spotted Redshank, Barn Owl and Yellowhammer on this list. But two of the existing members of this list, Great White Egret and Short-eared Owl gained promotion and are now among my favourite birds on a list of 30.

There were no demotions anywhere as I don’t think I really look to do that between the lists unless I come to feel I need to with increasing numbers on the lists. No butterflies were added to my list of favourites, but four species - Grizzled Skipper, Silver-spotted Skipper, White-letter Hairstreak and Brown Argus join my butterfly B list to mean there’s 11 on that so as many as my list of favourite butterflies. I don’t have B lists for dragon/damselflies or mammals and no additions were made to the former. Finally, one addition was made to my list of (now nine) favourite mammals in the form of the Sika Deer.

Mediterranean Gull was added to my B list because it’s a bird I admire so much and red and black together my two favourite colours make my favourite rich colour scheme that’s why I like a lot of birds. Their call is so enchanting and quirky and they just make my heart beat a bit. They’re solidly my second favourite gull now behind one of my favourite birds the Kittiwake and ahead of Common Gull which just missed out on consideration for the B list in truth and may be in contention in 6 or 12 months. To be honest I hadn’t thought of Med Gull for the B list until seeing them two weeks ago and how good that was but this species sailed on to the list in the scoring somewhat so I am glad I had the idea.

Wildlife Sightings Summary for Fort Cumberland: One of my favourite birds the Brent Goose, Mediterranean Gull, Black-headed Gull, Common Gull, Herring Gull, Cormorant, Feral Pigeon, Woodpigeon, Carrion Crow, Magpie and I heard Great Tit.

On the way home we stopped off at Hill Head as the sun started to come out a bit. I took the eighth and ninth pictures in this photoset of views here. It was great to see lots and lots of gulls on the shore here as the eighth picture shows such as Herring Gull, Lesser Black Backed Gull and Black-headed Gull, I also saw here; Turnstone, Mallard, Mute Swan and Carrion Crow.

When home I did a unique take on the sun setting from the window scene I photograph so much with a portrait one the tenth picture in this photoset.

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bluekayanite · 4 years

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(SU:F Theories) Pink Steven and Roses

Whew... I struggled a lot with this one, and not because I decided to tackle two subjects at once. XD; Thankfully, I managed to get it done, and BEFORE the next eps came out, so... Enjoy, if you will. =3

EDIT: Added another bit of speculation.

THE Rose is Probably Different

Granted, she obviously would be if she really were Pink Diamond. But as I believe there's more than enough room for doubt, I'm going to tackle the subject as if she were not. (A lot of this may be interesting in either case.)

I'm sure many have noticed by now that Rose has certain features that average Rose Quartzes do not - one that's normally associated with organic women.

(Incidentally, I wonder what the actual odds would be of just getting a Rose Quartz that looks virtually identical to Rose. XD; )

...I will point out that not only did Rose supposedly have the basic shape for them before she'd even met any organic women, but Pearl supposedly suggested that shape.

At any rate, the point is that she's a bit different than usual, and it may not be by choice. Along with her shape, Rose's coloring is different - whereas standard Rose Quartzes all have skin + hair in the reddish-purplish spectrum of "pink," the Rose has more human-like skin, much more in the yellow-orangish range...

In recaps and flashbacks, the narrative seems to be that Pink (more-or-less) swapped her hair and skin colors to achieve the "Rose" look.

(The colors aren't exact, but they're pretty close - particularly with the the Pink hair/Rose skin color.)

...but no clearly-lit shots (or, I'd say, even any shaded ones) of Pink really look like they have Rose's peach-coloring.

...In fact, the only time Pearl clearly remembers Rose having that kind of skin tone is when seeing Garnet's first fusion - otherwise, she looks pink.

One exception to definitely-Rose being peach-colored is in the "Nora" tape... but in that tape,

Greg

is more pinkish, too.

(It looks like they're both being tinted by one of those pink sunsets. =3)

Anyway... sidetracked... compelled to point out inconsistencies with the "Rose = Pink" thing... yadda yadda... While I don't believe that Rose was Pink Diamond, I'm really starting to think that she was specially made. In fact, while I don't think that Rose was the Pink Diamond... I think it's possible that she may have been made as some sort of Diamond-Quartz hybrid. I mean, in Pink's secret room, it looks like she may have been studying the pink stones from a few pieces of rock.

I think it's possible that those stones are from the same meteor/whatever that Pink drew - and specifically pointed out - in her drawing of the other Diamonds, from before she came around.

This said, I've been speculating that the meteor is what Pink may have originally come from (at least supposedly). So if she was studying the crystals that may have come from it, she may have been studying herself... and her composition. And if Pink was planning on making a Gem that shared her powers, it would be a good reason for her to do that.

Heck, it could explain why Rose's Gemstone is different from the other Rose Quartzes.

And even why Pink's form showed up during Rose's/Pink Steven's reformation - part of me even wonders if Pink used a small part of her own Stone, and then healed it.

It could even explain how Blue and Yellow could mistake Steven's aura for Pink's.

...it might conflict with the fact that Steven's aura in reunited has a complete lack of diamond-shapes in it, though. ^_^; (I'm still not ruling out that "recognizing" the aura would be all due to White meddling with their memories.)

At any rate, I've long figured that Pink probably put a lot of herself (maybe too much) into Rose, if not the Rose Quartzes in general. Though now I figure that there's a good chance that Rose may have been intentionally made differently - like how I suspect Amethyst was, except even more so. Maybe she was even made on Homeworld - it would explain why Rose refers to Homeworld as "home."

But most of all, it could explain why Steven is manifesting the kind of destructive powers that Pink apparently had... even if Rose never did.

The New Pink Steven

The main thing I've noticed with the new Pink Steven is that it's... he's? ...that this effect is mostly triggered by anger and frustration - maybe other manifestations of pain, at times. Another thing I've noticed is that said anger is justifiable - at least, in my opinion.

I mean, consider when we've seen the newer Pink Steven, so far:

Not allowing Jasper to talk bad about him (defending self-worth)

Being frustrated about Smokey not having enough time to save the rollercoaster riders (defending people)

Not being able to deal with the idea of Rose/Pink having hurt anybody (defending his emotional wellbeing)

Not allowing Aquamarine and Eyeball to just hurt people - especially his dad - without consequence (again, defending people - also, not allowing blatantly unethical behavior)

Not to say that there's no danger or that he never goes overboard... or loses control entirely. I mean, not only did he end up causing the Reef to malfunction...

(Closest pic I've got. -.-; )

...but he took out a chunk of the forest while fighting Jasper!

(Sadly, no pic on this - I'm a little low on cash, XFinity shows the wrong show right now, and CN only has the latest ep. -.-; And no, I'm not going the YT route or anything like that. >.<)

Still, it looks to me like Steven "powering up" might have to do with righteous anger. The kind of anger that really drives him to try and do something - especially something that has to do with protection. I mean, it doesn't trigger with the anger he's having when Bluebird is beating him up.

And it didn't trigger when he was ticked-off at Jasper for not wanting to join Little Homeschool.

(Again, no pic. -.-; )

So it can't be just any form of anger. There's gotta be some other criteria - like I mentioned, it could be that it has to be the kind of anger that comes from wanting to bring something good... or at least to try and protect something important.

If so, then this could also say something about Pink: it could be that she wasn't just "throwing tantrums left and right" just because she got angry at everything, but rather because she was prevented from doing things that would genuinely bring something good. It could be that - even if the use of these powers led to some destruction - the emotions behind them weren't inherently destructive. I'm not even ruling out that she didn't even throw tantrums that often, but that it's just another case of White altering memories. (Or if she did throw tantrums that often, White may have changed the memories about the reasons for them. XD; )

That said, if the basic trigger is "defending something important," then it is still possible that the powers could've been triggered for misplaced priorities: just because something was important to her doesn't necessarily mean that it was inherently a good thing. XD;

At any rate, there weren't any signs of that kind of power being triggered in the dream sequence of Jungle Moon, despite there obviously being tantrums involved.

...Though granted, one of my theories is that she hadn't grown into her powers, yet. XD;

Still, I'm not ruling out that the trigger for the powers is less about the reason for the anger, and more about the flavor of the anger. It might be exact enough that I'm not sure of the exact word for it, but so far I'm leaning toward something like "fury." XD;

The Moon Prisoner has Likely Seen Pink Steven by Now

I basically believe that the moon showing up is almost-always a sign that someone - who I believe to be Pink Diamond - is watching the scene through the Diamond Base orb, which she is trapped in.

The moon wasn't in the first two SU:F eps, but it was there for Volleyball.

And it was also at the start of Bluebird.

I also believe that the sky being pink will also indicate that the moon-prisoner is watching; the pinker, the more-intensely she's watching, and the sky is INCREDIBLY pink in Bluebird when Greg is being kidnapped.

And is like that through the point where Greg cuts himself free.

Interestingly, even before Steven catches Greg, the sky takes on more of an orange gradient (on the left) - and stays that way until the end of the ep.

Though it’s still largely pink.

I'll note that I noticed that they apparently used the same orange-pink sky for all the backgrounds from the point where Steven catches Greg, onward - not that I blame them; I can say from experience that doing backgrounds can take a LOT of work. (...but I still find it funny. XD)

Still, if they were intent on saving themselves work, then why change the sky at all? ;3 I would guess that the fact that they did change the sky is a sign that it was important. =3

In this case, I would guess that the moon-prisoner was worried about Greg, and relaxed a bit once she realized that he would be safe. But regardless, she continued to watch the whole fight.

If so, then she would've had to have seen Pink Steven fighting Aquamarine and Eyeball.

...but she probably wouldn't have seen his time-control powers, or his sonic scream (which, IIRC, would've been off-planet).

Basically, I've been wondering if Pink's not supposed to know just how much of these powers he's inherited. She may or may not suspect, but depending on what she sees, she might be left not knowing if Steven can do more with this than fly up and smash things.

(...Or wear hats. XDD)

At any rate, I think there's a good chance that she would know about how these powers work, and have some good advice on how to use them. ;3 83

Rose May Have Been Carrying a Secret Payload

...one that she didn't even know about.

This would be one of the ways that Rose would be special... one of the ones that I think she would probably not be proud of, if she knew about it.

In the movie, White had already picked up on a pinkish tinge.

It wasn't there at the end of Change Your Mind.

But in the SU:F opening, she looks REALLY pink. =O

Everyone else's color in that shot seems normal (for being shaded), so I think odds are good that White really is is going to look like that at some point.

But what would make her that way? I doubt she'd do it on purpose... What would've changed to make her that way?

Well, obviously, the biggest pink-(or Pink-)related thing to come into her life is Steven, and I really doubt that Steven would be doing something like this on purpose. XD; So what seems most likely to me is that it was something that Steven did without even knowing it.

I doubt it's simply an effect of gradual exposure to Steven, since 1) he's been spending most of his time on Earth, and 2) if that were the case - and Rose was Pink - I think it would've happened looooong ago, from exposure to Pink. XD So to me, it seems mostly likely to be a one-time thing that Pink put into Rose that would be activated on its own.

Like... a color-changing virus? =O

A logic bomb is a type of malware that will only get triggered under certain circumstances - for example, "on this date, activate a virus" or "if employee X is fired, erase all employee info." I think that Rose was made with a type of logic bomb, just in case White tried anything funny - like, trying to turn Rose into a replacement for Pink.

If so, then it is both kind of amazing that Pink would have that kind of foresight, and saddening that she would think it necessary to prepare for something like that. It would mean that she knew (or at least suspected) that White was the kind to try something like that.

I will note that one of the things about a logic bomb is that, if the conditions for triggering it never happen, then the "bomb" never goes off - if Rose really was made with such a bomb, then it's possible that Pink put it in there with the hopes that it would never be triggered. If White would prove herself, then she would never get hit with the punishment. But if White did do the worst... well, Pink probably figured it was better not to risk it.

One of those "Better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it" sort of things. ^_^;

It's also possible that the color-change is meant for more than just punishment, payback, or exposure: it could be meant as a lesson in empathy, to give White an idea of what it feels like to be "wrong" - and/or treated as such.

EDIT: I also think it’s possible that it could be for learning empathy for what it’s like to have a change forced onto you by someone. (Have I mentioned that I believe that White’s been using mind-control?)

Another idea is that Pink may have done it in the hopes that, if anything did happen to her, it could prompt others to try and find out what had really happened - maybe even find her, if White decided not to break her. XD; (Or heal her, if White did. ^_^; )

Though that said, so far, the effects seem to be fairly harmless... and yet not. ^_^; At the very least, the sudden saturation would be embarrassing for the "White" Diamond. Though even if the change itself is harmless, it could have MASSIVE implications for her position as the "flawless" ruler - at any rate, it could be a very good way to catch and expose her red-handed (or pink-handed, as the case may be).

I do wonder if the malware could've affected more than just White's color (though even just THAT could make for a good payback-prank) - maybe it affected her powers, or even her feelings in some way... big or small. Maybe it's the reason why she was even capable of blushing the way she did.

Maybe White's words were more accurate than we thought. XD;

As for what would've triggered the virus... It could be a number of things. I think the most likely one would be "trying to insert being-Pink-related memories/personality traits," but still, there's no rule that says that a logic bomb can only have one trigger... a programmer could put in as many triggers as they want, really. Pink could have put in any number of possible conditions for White to start getting pink-ified. So while I do think it most likely that White using her powers in certain ways would be the trigger(s), it could've also been triggered by, say, White physically handling Rose's Gemstone... or even removing it from whoever Rose's child would be!

(...I could provide visual examples, but I'd rather not in this case. ^_^; )

Heck, she might've even included things completely unrelated to what panned out, just in case a number of different scenarios happened. XD;

Though that said... it's also not impossible that the trigger was also made to remove any inserted memories/traits of the being-Pink-related sort. ...But not restore any lost ones. Which could explain - among other things - the comment about Pink being "gone."

... (RIP Rose. ='( )

...But yeah. All things considered, it looks most likely to me that the idea was to try and bring things to light should White ever try to replace Pink. If anything, maybe that'll lead to the truth getting out, as well as the true Pink.

(And maybe we could get some laughs along the way about White's new look - as well as what to call her. X3)

#su:f theories #su:f #steven universe: future #pink steven #rose quartz wasn't pink diamond #white diamond's mind control #theories

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johnboothus · 3 years

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11 Years of Untappd: How One App Gamified the Relentless Pursuit of Novelty

On Jan. 20, Gregory Avola announced he was stepping down as chief creative officer of Untappd, the online beer platform he helped found and then actively ran for a decade. This, Avola writes, is driven by a lifestyle change, and he will remain at Untappd’s parent company, Next Glass, as executive advisor. As when software developer Next Glass purchased Untappd in 2016, and then joined it with newer purchase Beer Advocate in 2020, this update is stirring up conversation and reflection on Untappd’s impact on beer culture.

Such reflection yields a mixed bag. In the 11 years since it launched, Untappd has facilitated a wider-reaching community in beer. It’s helped users find beers they otherwise wouldn’t, and, therefore, has helped breweries reach new customers. Some, however, feel that Untappd has fueled “ticker culture,” and that its rating system is a breeding ground for biased, baseless ratings that only favor hype beers and often hurt breweries. Beer’s relationship with Untappd might be complicated, but Untappd’s role has proven undeniably significant.

Foursquare for Beer

Avola created Untappd with Tim Mather in 2010. Perhaps surprisingly, he wasn’t all that into beer when he started working on the app.

“My main interest was in communities and building social platforms to connect people in different ways,” he tells me in a recent call. Avola and Mather used Foursquare as a model — which the press ran with — but, as Avola puts it, with more focus on what those check-ins could do. “No one cares if you’re checking in at a grocery store,” he says. “But people checking in at bars, saying what they’re drinking, that starts connecting people across the globe.”

Avola wanted to take the inherent social aspect of craft beer and grow it online. At the time, there were only BeerAdvocate and RateBeer, both representing an older generation in beer. Untappd arrived at the party hot on the heels of IPAs becoming a thing people traveled and waited in hours-long lines for, a ready and willing platform for drinkers to discover, share, swap info, and, by checking in that they were at those hype breweries drinking those hype beers, brag. In a way, and as was Avola’s intention, Untappd became a wide-scale, virtual tasting room where beer geeks could talk shop but, coming from different cities and even countries instead of different barstools, they could introduce each other to new brews. Avola says that at the time he was living in New York City and learned what Fat Tire was when Mather, living on the West Coast, checked it in.

The Next Generation of Beer Raters

Whereas BeerAdvocate’s pages were filled with long, thoughtful beer reviews, Untappd catered to a generation of beer drinkers that was always on to the next and wanting an app to keep up. This is why Untappd is credited with — or blamed for — “ticker culture.” After all, while Untappd was still in its infancy, The Alchemist was able to survive closing its brewpub after Hurricane Irene by pumping Heady Topper out of its production brewery. There’s no telling if this could have happened had Untappd been in its prime, fueling beer seekers to move on in search of a hot IPA they hadn’t already tried. Indeed, within a few years, the script had flipped. How to be a beer nerd went from having a discerning dedication to select brews to relentlessly trying every new beer released. The proof of your beer cred was in your Untappd portfolio, where millions of fellow users could marvel at the sheer breadth of hype beers you’d checked in.

“Ticker culture represents an emphasis on breadth of experience over depth,” says Alex Kidd, of Don’t Drink Beer. “The pour sizes seem to diminish, the style ratings seem to be heavily skewed as a result, and the check-ins seem to be a system of accomplishments predicated on consumption over contemplation.”

At best, it could be argued, ticker culture catalyzes beer sales by keeping drinkers motivated with the thrill of the hunt. At worst, it can be an arrow through the heart of brewers’ ability to create and diversify their offerings, since the haziest IPAs, slushiest sours, and most candy-packed pastry stouts are going to win ticks every time over a loving homage to an English mild. This can also hurt beer sales for breweries on an individual basis, if they decide to commit the cardinal sin of making the same beers and therefore lose luster in the eyes of tick-seekers.

“I don’t want to be an old crank who decries ticker culture, but I really can’t imagine what positive impact it could have on anything,” says beer writer Will Gordon. “The most obvious downside,” Gordon continues, is too many people “stumbling around juggling flights and phones in their mad dash to overrate beers that are either too sweet or too sour.”

“Ticker culture is negative, full stop,” says Gage Siegel, founder of Brooklyn’s Non Sequitur Beer Project, citing people buying cases of beer just to flip and festival-goers trying to cram in 100 different beer pours in three-hour time slots as less-than-ideal results. “Ticker culture certainly doesn’t start or end with Untappd, but I’d say they did a lot to normalize it [and] make it easier to participate in.”

An Inevitable Evolution in How Drinkers Engage With Craft Beer

The ticker-culture discussion never happens without mentioning Untappd, but it’s important to clarify: The app did not create ticker culture. It has aided what could be considered human nature in an industry exponentially exploding with new options every year. One could get bogged down in a chicken-or-egg quandary: Do breweries continuously push the envelope to meet the demand of tick-hungry Untappd users, or are tick-hungry Untappd users tripping over themselves to keep up with the constant deluge of hop innovations and wacky adjuncts? It’s a two-way street, and Untappd provides the platform for everyone to talk about it.

“Untappd serviced ticker culture, but I feel comfortable saying it would have happened anyway,” says beer and spirits journalist and author Tara Nurin. “Across any number of industries … younger generations are more peripatetic. … It’s about what’s next, what’s new, and that plays out very profoundly in beer.” Nurin has mixed feelings about the way Untappd has arguably “gamified” beer. On one hand, it’s a great push for people to try new things. On the other, it could disincentivize people revisiting brews.

“I do think the novelty effect can be harmful to breweries,” says beer writer Carla Jean Lauter. “The pressures of ‘newness’ have led to some of the proliferation of extremely similar beers (e.g., having eight IPAs on tap at once) to try to give something new, rather than to just provide the best.”

Subjective and Unqualified: How Ratings Affect Breweries

Whichever side of the fence one falls in the ticker culture debate, one specific aspect of Untappd’s rating system that helps propel it is especially murky: the subjectivity. Even the industry insiders we spoke with who generally like the app acknowledged that the ratings are far from uniformly trustworthy. Many users skip actually commenting on their beers in favor of punching a number of “caps,” from zero to five. These ratings are obviously completely personal and often offer no explanation, yet, as Siegel points out, they’re considered by beer buyers at stores and bars as well as consumers weighing their beer options. The problem is, what a “3” or a “4.5” means can vary wildly from one person to the next. There’s no agreed-upon metric.

“I’ve just never put faith in numeric ratings of beer,” Lauter says. “In Untappd’s case, there’s also the twist that many people for a long time treated the reviews as their own personal tastes. ‘If I don’t like pineapple on pizza, and I order a pineapple pizza, I give it one star just to remind myself: Yep, still don’t like that.’”

The range of expertise among Untappd’s millions of users may range from from zero to cicerone, but on average, these ratings aren’t coming from people with beer-judging criteria. In some cases, this can be great, as it levels the playing field for anyone who’s enthusiastic about beer. It can be not so great but harmless if you remember to take rankings with a grain of salt. Or, it can do a bit of damage to some breweries.

“Some people develop an over-inflated sense of self because of their amount of check-ins, and they think this makes them some sort of expert despite the fact that they have no formal beer education,” says Paulina Olivares, Sacramento Pink Boots Society chapter leader, who notes that this issue isn’t exclusive to Untappd. Olivares says she’s stopped rating beers on Untappd unless it’s a “5.”

Of course, subjectivity as a concept also isn’t something Untappd created, but for all of its positive features, the app has become such an authority, and the microphone it therefore gives to biased, careless, and/or ungrounded opinions can now in some cases actually affect whether a brewery’s beer makes it onto shelves. A beer might not get a high rating from the Untappd masses because it isn’t hazy or dank enough, even if that wasn’t the brewer’s intention, and many retail outlets take those ratings into consideration. They could therefore decide against selling what could be a perfectly great beer. And this can create pressure on breweries to stick to what lights up the ratings board on Untappd.

As Avola points out in our call, this is rating culture. It happens with everything from restaurants to dry cleaners on Yelp. And yes, it even happens to Untappd itself in the form of one-star, “this-app-sucks” reviews in app stores based on one-off experiences with little context. Avola says he understands that it’s frustrating for breweries to see their beers rated poorly, beers they put a lot of effort into. These subjective rankings, though, are a by-product of Untappd’s main goal to help people share what they’re finding and drinking. The downsides of this are something Avola says really can’t be policed, but that he hopes can be mended as Untappd continues to evolve.

A Platform for Visibility, Discovery, and Nostalgia

On the flip side of the biased ratings are some of Untappd’s key tenets. There is community on a global scale, more relevant now than ever as most beer drinking is done at home, and poised to only become more crucial as beer culture and even beer retail grow online. There is increased visibility, discovery, and access between users and breweries.

Plus, as many users report, Untappd is a helpful tool for tracking one’s own beers: It’s less about a rating for others to see, and more about actually being able to organize and remember brews you loved and brews you didn’t love. This becomes increasingly helpful as the number of options in craft beer only grows and styles bloom into sub-styles and hybrids year after year.

“I do feel like more and more people are using it just to keep track of what they’ve drank versus tracking ratings,” says beer Instagrammer Valerie Delligatti, who appreciates being able to remember what she’s sampled from breweries to (pre-pandemic) bottle shares.

This is even a helpful professional tool, as beer writers can track and sort brews they try and report on, something beer writer and “former semi-professional blackjack player” Mike Pomranz values, noting that even if it weren’t free, he’d pay Untappd for this feature. Checking in beers creates your own library to refer back to whenever needed. “When I check in beers … I am thinking about what I’ll want to know later,” Pomranz says. “So, someone asks me for a good IPA in Arizona. Well, I haven’t been there in a while, but I can filter IPAs produced in Arizona and then sort those by rating, and then read my notes and boom, I have the perfect beer ready to go.”

This also creates a sort of scrapbook for craft beer lovers. “I personally love the nostalgia of looking back and remembering where [I was] when I had a certain beer,” says craft beer drinker and wellness coach Amanda Steele. “That’s kind of my favorite thing about Untappd.”

Beyond this core tracking function, Nurin notes that by the same token as Untappd possibly deterring users from returning to beers in favor of trying new finds, it can just as easily be a conduit for users to remember beers they love. While we spoke, she scrolled through her feed and found promos poised to remind users that a beer they loved once is on sale, or a bar they forgot about is doing a great happy hour. Speak with enough users and it becomes clear: Untappd has definitely, if inadvertently, provided a stage for ticker culture and its disadvantages for breweries. But it’s also achieved its goal of creating a virtual community for beer drinkers, and it’s proven itself quite the handy tool for tracking a whole wide world of beers.

The Future of Untappd

All that remains is to see how Untappd continues to evolve, especially in this new, increasingly online chapter, and how beer culture will evolve alongside it. One safe bet is on Untappd increasing its attention to international markets: In 2020, the app saw growth in European cities where it saw declines in the U.S.

In December, Next Glass also acquired digital beer magazine and event producer Hop Culture; according to Hop Culture founder and now creative director at Next Glass Kenny Gould, we’ll be seeing further integration of Next Glass acquisitions Untappd, Hop Culture, Oznr, and Beer Advocate, playing to the unique contributions each of these has made to beer culture. “I think we’ll continue to see the development of a digital craft beer community,” Gould says, “with more content, sales, and connections happening online.”

The article 11 Years of Untappd: How One App Gamified the Relentless Pursuit of Novelty appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/articles/untapped-impact-craft-beer/

source https://vinology1.weebly.com/blog/11-years-of-untappd-how-one-app-gamified-the-relentless-pursuit-of-novelty

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wineanddinosaur · 3 years

Text

11 Years of Untappd: How One App Gamified the Relentless Pursuit of Novelty

Foursquare for Beer

Avola created Untappd with Tim Mather in 2010. Perhaps surprisingly, he wasn’t all that into beer when he started working on the app.

The Next Generation of Beer Raters

An Inevitable Evolution in How Drinkers Engage With Craft Beer

Subjective and Unqualified: How Ratings Affect Breweries

A Platform for Visibility, Discovery, and Nostalgia

The Future of Untappd

The article 11 Years of Untappd: How One App Gamified the Relentless Pursuit of Novelty appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/untapped-impact-craft-beer/

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didanawisgi · 7 years

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The quest to crystallize time

Bizarre forms of matter called time crystals were supposed to be physically impossible. Now they’re not.

Elizabeth Gibney

08 March 2017

Christopher Monroe spends his life poking at atoms with light. He arranges them into rings and chains and then massages them with lasers to explore their properties and make basic quantum computers. Last year, he decided to try something seemingly impossible: to create a time crystal.

The name sounds like a prop from Doctor Who, but it has roots in actual physics. Time crystals are hypothetical structures that pulse without requiring any energy — like a ticking clock that never needs winding. The pattern repeats in time in much the same way that the atoms of a crystal repeat in space. The idea was so challenging that when Nobel prizewinning physicist Frank Wilczek proposed the provocative concept1 in 2012, other researchers quickly proved there was no way to create time crystals.

But there was a loophole — and researchers in a separate branch of physics found a way to exploit the gap. Monroe, a physicist at the University of Maryland in College Park, and his team used chains of atoms they had constructed for other purposes to make a version of a time crystal2 (see 'How to create a time crystal'). “I would say it sort of fell in our laps,” says Monroe.

And a group led by researchers at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, independently fashioned time crystals out of 'dirty' diamonds3. Both versions, which are published this week in Nature, are considered time crystals, but not how Wilczek originally imagined. “It's less weird than the first idea, but it's still fricking weird,” says Norman Yao, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author on both papers.

They are also the first examples of a remarkable type of matter — a collection of quantum particles that constantly changes, and never reaches a steady state. These systems draw stability from random interactions that would normally disrupt other kinds of matter. “This is a new kind of order, one that was previously thought impossible. That's extremely exciting,” says Vedika Khemani, part of the Harvard team and previously part of the group that originally theorized the existence of the new kind of state. Experimental physicists are already plotting how to exploit the traits of these strange systems in quantum computers and super-sensitive magnetic sensors.

Break time

Wilczek dreamt up time crystals as a way to break the rules. The laws of physics are symmetrical in that they apply equally to all points in space and time. Yet many systems violate that symmetry. In a magnet, atomic spins line up rather than pointing in all directions. In a mineral crystal, atoms occupy set positions in space, and the crystal does not look the same if it is shifted slightly. When a transformation causes properties to change, physicists call that symmetry-breaking, and it is everywhere in nature — at the root of magnetism, superconductivity and even the Higgs mechanism that gives all particles mass.

In 2012, Wilczek, now at Stockholm University, wondered why symmetry never broke spontaneously in time and whether it would be possible to create something in which it did. He called it a time crystal. Experimentalists imagined a quantum version of this entity as perhaps a ring of atoms that would rotate endlessly, cycling and returning to its initial configuration. Its properties would be endlessly synchronized in time, just as atom positions are correlated in a crystal. The system would be in its lowest energy state, but its movement would require no external force. It would, in essence, be a perpetual-motion machine, although not one that produces usable energy.

“From a first glance at the idea, one would say this has to be wrong,” says Yao. Almost by definition, a system in its lowest energy state does not vary in time. If it did, that would mean it had excess energy to lose, says Yao, and the rotation would soon halt. “But Frank convinced the community that the problem was more subtle than maybe it seemed to be,” he says. Perpetual motion was not without precedent in the quantum world: in theory, superconductors conduct electricity forever (although the flow is uniform, so they show no variation in time).

“This is a new kind of order, one that was previously thought impossible.”

These conflicting issues swam around the head of Haruki Watanabe as he stepped out of the first oral exam for his PhD at Berkeley. He had been presenting work on symmetry breaking in space, and his supervisor asked him about the wider implications of Wilczek's time crystal. “I couldn't answer the question in that exam, but it interested me,” says Watanabe, who doubted such an entity was even feasible. “I wondered, 'how can I convince people that it's not possible?'”

Together with physicist Masaki Oshikawa at the University of Tokyo, Watanabe began trying to prove his intuitive answer in a mathematically rigorous way. By phrasing the problem in terms of correlations in space and time between distant parts of the system, the pair derived a theorem in 2015 showing that time crystals were impossible to create for any system in its lowest-energy state4. The researchers also verified that time crystals were impossible for any system in equilibrium — one that has reached a steady state of any energy.

To the physics community, the case was clear cut. “That seemed to be a no-go,” says Monroe. But the proof left a loophole. It did not rule out time crystals in systems that have not yet settled into a steady state and are out of equilibrium. Around the world, theorists began thinking about ways to create alternative versions of time crystals.

Particle soup

When the breakthrough came, it arrived from an unlikely corner of physics, where researchers weren't thinking about time crystals at all.

Shivaji Sondhi, a theoretical physicist at Princeton University, New Jersey, and his colleagues were looking at what happened when certain isolated quantum systems, made of soups of interacting particles, are repeatedly given a kick. Textbook physics says that the systems should heat up and descend into chaos. But in 2015, Sondhi's team predicted that under certain conditions, they would instead club together to form a phase of matter that doesn't exist in equilibrium — a system of particles that would show subtle correlations never seen before — and that would repeat a pattern in time5.

That proposal caught the attention of Chetan Nayak, one of Wilczek's former students, now at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and at Microsoft's nearby Station Q. Nayak and his colleagues soon realized that this strange form of out-of-equilibrium matter would also be a type of time crystal6. But not Wilczek's kind: it would not be in its lowest energy state, and it would require a regular kick to pulse. But it would gain a steady rhythm that doesn't match that of the instigating kick, and that means it would break time symmetry.

“It's like playing with a jump rope, and somehow our arm goes around twice but the rope only goes around once,” says Yao. This is a weaker kind of symmetry breaking than Wilczek imagined: in his, the rope would oscillate all by itself.

When Monroe heard about this proposed system, he initially didn't understand it. “The more I read about it, the more intrigued I became,” he says.

Georg Kucsko

Illumination with green light reveals a time crystal formed in a network of electron spins (red) within the defects of a diamond.

Last year, he set about trying to form his atoms into a time crystal. The recipe was incredibly complex, but just three ingredients were essential: a force repeatedly disturbing the particles, a way to make the atoms interact with each other and an element of random disorder. The combination of these, Monroe says, ensures that particles are limited in how much energy they can absorb, allowing them to maintain a steady, ordered state.

In his experiment, this meant repeatedly firing alternating lasers at a chain of ten ytterbium ions: the first laser flips their spins and the second makes the spins interact with each other in random ways. That combination caused the atomic spins to oscillate, but at twice the period they were being flipped. More than that, the researchers found that even if they started to flip the system in an imperfect way, such as by slightly changing the frequency of the kicks, the oscillation remained the same. “The system still locked at a very stable frequency,” says Monroe. Spatial crystals are similarly resistant to any attempt to nudge their atoms from their set spacing, he says. “This time crystal has the same thing.”

At Harvard, physicist Mikhail Lukin tried to do something similar, but in a very different system — a 3D chunk of diamond. The mineral was riddled with around 1 million defects, each harbouring a spin. And the diamond's impurities provided a natural disorder. When Lukin and his team used microwave pulses to flip the spins, they saw the system respond at a fraction of the frequency with which it was being disturbed.

“This is an intriguing development, but to some extent it's an abuse of the term”

Physicists agree that the two systems spontaneously break a kind of time symmetry and therefore mathematically fulfil the time-crystal criteria. But there is some debate about whether to call them time crystals. “This is an intriguing development, but to some extent it's an abuse of the term,” says Oshikawa.

Yao says that the new systems are time crystals, but that the definition needs to be narrowed to avoid including phenomena that are already well understood and not nearly so interesting for quantum physicists.

But Monroe and Lukin's creations are exciting for different reasons, too, says Yao. They seem to be the first, and perhaps simplest, examples of a host of new phases that exist in relatively unexplored out-of-equilibrium states, he says. They could also have several practical applications. One could be quantum simulation systems that work at high temperatures. Physicists often use entangled quantum particles at nanokelvin temperatures, close to absolute zero, to simulate complex behaviours of materials that cannot be modelled on a classical computer. Time crystals represent a stable quantum system that exists way above these temperatures — in the case of Lukin's diamond, at room temperature — potentially opening the door to quantum simulations without cryogenics.

Time crystals could also find use in super-precise sensors, says Lukin. His lab already uses diamond defects to detect tiny changes in temperature and magnetic fields. But the approach has limits,because if too many defects are packed in a small space, their interactions destroy their fragile quantum states. In a time crystal, however, the interactions serve to stabilize, rather than disrupt, so Lukin could harness millions of defects together to produce a strong signal — one that is able to efficiently probe living cells and atom-thick materials.

The same principle of stability from interactions could apply more widely in quantum computing, says Yao. Quantum computers show huge promise, but have long struggled with the opposing challenges of protecting the fragile quantum bits that perform calculations, yet keeping them accessible for encoding and reading out information. “You can ask yourself in the future whether one could find phases where interactions stabilize these quantum bits,” says Yao.

The story of time crystals is a beautiful example of how progress often happens when different strands of thought come together, says Roderich Moessner, director of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany. And it may be, he says, that this particular recipe proves to be just one of many ways to cook up a time crystal.

Nature 543, 164–166 (09 March 2017) doi:10.1038/543164a

http://www.nature.com/news/the-quest-to-crystallize-time-1.21595?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews

#time crystals #discrete time crystal #discrete time crystals #quantum physics #quantum computing #quantum crystals #quantum consciousness #quantum cryptography #quantum bits #crystals #crystal #mythology campaign #laser #quantum mechanics #physics

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