Full of bees

I don’t really care about “defining” Murderbot and ART’s relationship I think they’re both uniquely insane human-adjacent but Not Quite sentiences that defy total human comprehension. Murderbot is the only way ART can contextualize human experience. ART is how Murderbot allows itself to be vulnerable because it literally doesn't let it be alone in its brain where it can generate 5 trillion faulty risk assessments per second. ART gaslights Murderbot into thinking it died and then shoots missiles at the colony when it gets kidnapped. They made a kamikaze AI baby together.

glad to see those spreading the truth

Rb to force new people from twitter to eat bees

Oh, hey, I was wondering when I’d get to use this again.

did you just fucking have this

ok.

I'm so glad cooper Howard is becoming a Tumblr sexyman. Man survived over 200 years of Bethesdas worldbuilding, he deserves this treat.

lucy's dad is so fucking funny in the finale "you wouldn't shoot me would you??" brother I once launched a fatman at my son and fucked the guy who shot me in the head. welcome to fallout.

If you like the word “queer” reblog.

#fun umbrella. we r all sitting under it like the big rainbow thing in elementary school gym class

yes i posted this on my other blog but you know what it goes here too

If I ask nicely will people reblog this and tell me what their most common breakfast is? Not your favorite necessarily, just what you have for breakfast most frequently? 🙏🏽

this is a way better model... you'll still get transphobic & intersexist drs of course but i prefer this to male / female or even having separate questions for gender & sex.

[we can't see the full form, but i'd suggest having a "something else" option and dominant hormone question too.]

as a cis woman who's had a hysterectomy and partial oophorectomy, this would be helpful for me, too! it'd be pointless to try to diagnose me for disorders that affect organs I don't have anymore, after all.

being inclusive helps us ALL. 💖

POV: your friend is an ecology major and has beef with random animals

Yesterday night a lady came through our drive through and was like “the way the planets are aligning and the fact that we’re getting a blood moon has me worried. I sense severe werewolf activities on the horizon. You better walk your coworker to her car tonight after you’ve closed” and I didn’t even know what to say I was just like “yes ma’am”

You heard that and just went <END DIALOGUE>

Microwave: either stand and wait or get up again when the thing goes off in five minutes. You have chronic pain or just had surgery or are just brutally fucking depressed or devoid of executive functioning that day, so this is an issue.

Delivery: get up once. It's more bearable and saves you spoons you could maybe use to stand and brush your teeth or something later.

Microwave: you have used the last thing in the fridge/freezer and can't go to the store to get more until tomorrow or the next day.

Delivery: you still get fed.

Microwave: harder to prepare food for several people because the inside is small, does not typically yield leftovers.

Delivery: food for everyone, could yield leftovers.

Microwave: food texture can be terrible, soggy, tough.

Delivery: preserves the small pleasure of crisp, well-prepared food.

Microwave: have to cook several times a day, which is a chore from frozen.

Delivery: you can order food to last you all day, and get larger and more calorically dense meals. (If I can only manage one meal, yes. I do in fact need it to be full of calories. A 450kcal microwave dinner isn't enough to live on.

Microwave: relies on you having a fridge/freezer.

Delivery: sort of relies on you having a doorbell, I guess?

Microwave: on average, quality is unappealing.

Delivery: wide range of appetizing foods, including healthy foods.

Microwave: just you.

Delivery: you might see another human's face and pass a few words. Boyfriend did delivery. Don't laugh. People get fucking lonely. Yes. That is very sad. Meals on Wheels type programs that deliver regularly are a major source of socialization AND safety checks for shut-ins.

Microwave: you suddenly need a different kind of food than you have -- you might need soft food because your mouth hurts, plain food because your digestion is iffy, soup because you've been ill and aren't up for much more, etc.

Delivery: order whatever you like.

The smallest barrier can be enough to make me skip a meal or two or even three. People HATE that, they HATE the idea that disabled people are "weak" and "lazy" but I cannot emphasize enough, NOBODY WOULD CHOOSE THIS.

Laziness, in the way temporarily nondisabled people apply it to sick and disabled people, doesn't fucking exist.

Don't judge or question what people eat, when, how they prepare their food, where they get it, none of that.

Just because you cannot imagine a reason for something sick or disabled people do doesn't mean there isn't one. If something seems baffling or absurd or whatever, just be glad you aren't operating under conditions that mean you have to understand it.

Me: "I wanna fuck The Ghoul."

Someone: "Wouldn't that give you lots of radiation?"

Me: "I got this."

I binged the Fallout show yesterday and the "oh, no dogs allowed in the vaults" thing being the last straw in Coop's relationship was just... I thought it was great. Not just because I like dogs, or because Fallout has a long tradition of the protag being a dog person, but because as a dog person, the thought that my spouse could have grown so alienated from me as to not realize what a huge fucking deal it would be for me to give up/put down my dog for her plans was just chilling. Like, just a great illustration of how wide Vault-Tec's secrets have levered that chasm.

She can't tell him why it's so vital to get into a specific vault, or even let him inow that it's more than general anxiety about the war that has her so stressed. She's so consumed with this idea of a least-hellish path forwards that she's already written off their dog and while she's sorry for their kid losing the dog, she can't even remember that her husband is exactly the kind of guy to a) dig in his heels about his dog and b) REALLY dig in his heels about his dog being written off with no one even bothering to discuss it with him.

Plus he even had his own dog join him in one of his films so he could spend time with him on set?? Like ... Cooper is already sus about Vault-Tec and you suddenly announce a new rule change means he's gotta give up his dog? His DOG? No way that was gonna end well.

Right? And he still misses Roosevelt 220 years later! That scene where CX404 is lonely and nudging his arm and he's all "Sorry Dogmeat, but you ain't him" - my god. That is not a dude who is going to shrug off throwing away his dog because of opaque rules without an appeal process.

(As someone with dogs, I can think of a number of reasons why vault-tec would have a general "no dogs in the vault" policy beyond "evil" and "carnivores in small sealed environments are tricky to feed", but I also wouldn't want to live in a crowded tin can for decades just to emerge in a dogless future. I'm with Cooper on the "perhaps we could move away from the bomb target?" plan)

Years and years ago, I read a book on cryptography that I picked up because it looked interesting--and it was!

But there was a side anecdote in there that stayed with me for more general purposes.

The author was describing a cryptography class that they had taken back in college where the professor was demonstrating the process of "reversibility", which is a principle that most codes depend on. Specifically, it should be easy to encode, and very hard to decode without the key--it is hard to reverse the process.

So he had an example code that he used for his class to demonstrate this, a variation on the Book Code, where the encoded text would be a series of phone numbers.

The key to the code was that phone books are sorted alphabetically, so you could encode the text easily--picking phone numbers from the appropriate alphabetical sections to use ahead of time would be easy. But since phone books were sorted alphabetically, not numerically, it would be nearly impossible to reverse the code without exhaustively searching the phone book for each string of numbers and seeing what name it was tied to.

Nowadays, defeating this would be child's play, given computerized databases, but back in the 80s and 90s, this would have been a good code... at least, until one of the students raised their hand and asked, "Why not just call the phone numbers and ask who lives there?"

The professor apparently was dumbfounded.

He had never considered that question. As a result, his cipher, which seemed to be nearly unbreakable to him, had such an obvious flaw, because he was the sort of person who could never coldcall someone to ask that sort of thing!

In the crypto book, the author went on to use this story as an example of why security systems should not be tested by the designer (because of course the security system is ready for everything they thought of, by definition), but for me, as a writer, it stuck with me for a different reason.

It's worth talking out your story plot with other people just to see if there's a "Why not just call the phone numbers?" obvious plot hole that you've missed, because of your singular perspective as a person. Especially if you're writing the sort of plot where you have people trying to outsmart each other.