Kem's Robot Worldbuilding Yellhole Apparently

I've started a new unit in my geography class today and it's been inspiring. Let's talk about Iacon today. :D

Hive cities as a whole tend to be kinda... messy. Most of them have numbered city levels, but dividing the city up unto these level systems is often pretty arbitrary. For example, in the Twin Cities (Tesarus and Border City), Levels 12, 13, and 15 in different parts of the joint city have nearly the same elevation. Levels 12 and 13 belong to Tesarus, where the city planners start counting at standard ground level, which in Tesarus is slightly higher than actual ground level; the difference in level numbers is down to an extra level squeezed into part of the city that was an extensive public market a very long time ago. Level 15 belongs to Border City, where the city planners start counting at the local basement level, which is the lowest practical level of the city.

Iacon, particularly its upper levels, look comparatively neat from the outside. the city superstructure was designed around a now-obscured portion of the Solar Observatory, which now acts as a heavily-engineered central pillar holding up the weight of Upper Iacon. As a result, Upper Iacon looks like a singular large tower in profile, with the topmost fourteen city levels covering only a small portion of the hive city's overall footprint. Beneath this, the hive rapidly spreads out, diversifies, and gets Very Messy.

Iacon has 47 numbered city levels in total, plus the Stellar Galleries which don't get a number because the extremely rich and important folks who live there like the veneer of exclusivity the lack of number gives their addresses. This is about twice as many numbered city levels as any other flatlands hive city -- Tyrest and Helex, both of which have a larger population than Iacon, have 21 and 16 official city levels. There are three factors giving Iacon its extreme height: first, the presence of the Solar Observatory, which gives Upper Iacon something to hang its weight on; second, Iacon counts quite a few 'mezzanine levels' among its total that might have been designated ancillary structures in other cities, like its' six 'transit levels'; and third... Iacon is just stupid rich, and can afford this sort of vanity building for height on a city-wide scale thanks to being the seat of the even more stupid rich Imperial government. There are six structures on Cybertron that are more than a league tall (2km or so), and they're all in Iacon. Level 47 as a whole sits at an elevation of about 2.1km above the surrounding Polar Depression, and the Alpha Preserve on top of the Solar Observatory is about 1.5km elevation.

On a somewhat related note, Iacon does not have one city-wide weather shield because it's so fucking big and awkwardly shaped. There's one over the Citadel on Level 47, and most Towers estates have their own. Everyone else gets absolutely blasted with some of the shittiest weather on Cybertron. Yay capitalism!

Iacon's 47 levels are divided into seven 'strata' by six more or less evenly spaced 'transit levels', which are dedicated to public transport, especially express rail and road networks. They serve as concentrated arterial routes, which takes the burden of mass traffic off the local traffic networks in other levels. You could go from one side of Iacon to the other on a normal city level, but taking the transit level is probably going to be a lot quicker. They also serve as sky lobbies for passenger elevators, and contain a lot of infrastructure like drainage systems, atmospheric scrubbing stations (smog can be a real issue in the lower levels), and electricity networks.

The highest of these transit levels is Level 45, dividing High Iacon from Upper Iacon. These strata get mixed up and mentioned together all the time because honestly there's not a whole lot of difference between them. As a rule, High Iacon is dedicated to government and related services, plus Alpha Preserve and the Stellar Galleries, while Upper Iacon is where the vast majority of business happens. In High Iacon, Level 47 is built around the Citadel, the Imperial Government complex, and the Via Theophania, a wide ceremonial avenue that leads from the Palace of the Primes and Iacon Sanctuary to the High Council Pavilions. Level 46 is comprised of the Iacon Trade District (primarily made up of the flagship offices of various enormous business conglomerates and trade organizations), a few residential enclaves for the super-rich, retail clusters here and there, and the Forums. The Forum of Enlightenment is a cluster of educational organizations, government research enterprises, independent think-tanks of various political alignments, and related services like the Hall of Records. The Forum of Virtue is mostly religious institutions, law firms, and the parent body of the global Magisterium system. The Oratory Forum is the smallest, with a collection of independent media businesses and regulatory bodies clustered around the parent organization of the global Emporium system, and the media and communication hub of the Imperial Government. Each of the Forums has their own border security checkpoints, as does the Trade District and the Citadel.

Upper Iacon's district borders aren't so defined. The Decagon is an entertainment district that occupies large, mostly contiguous chunks of the northern side of the city from Level 41 to 44; it has border checkpoints that are often heavily policed due to the amount of drunk revellers trying to get into and out of the district, but the rest of Upper Iacon tends to be a free-for-all of mecha trying to get the best deal on business and residential premises. Addresses here can be a mess. Level 40 is the lowest level of Upper Iacon; it's more of a mezzanine stuffed into what used to be some free space around the mountain that the hive city swallowed. As a result, it's smaller and darker than the rest of Upper Iacon, and has significantly cheaper 'land' prices, so it's full of Upper Iacon's low-caste workers.

Level 39 is another transit level, dividing Upper Iacon from... Upper Central Iacon. (They're not particularly imaginative names.) At Transit Level 32, Upper Central Iacon gives way to Central Iacon, and at Transit Level 24, you pass into Lower Central Iacon. Below Transit Level 15, Lower Iacon begins, and below Transit Level 6, the Iacon Undercity begins. Due to the Polar Depression, the planetary standard ground level is at about City Level 5, while the actual local ground level varies from City Level 4 beneath the Solar Observatory to City Level 1 in parts of Iacon South.

I really need to draw myself a local map lmao.

 

Attempted a sort of diagram lmao. Not to scale because I ran out of paper but hopefully it’s illustrative.

 

Spoiler

More doodling, this time of the Hall of Records. I don't know if this'll be its final form, I might tweak the gateway library to something more like the glimpse of the Hall that we get in TFP, but I really like the rest of it. XD

A few notes:

• The front half, more or less, is the public part of the complex. Past about the admin block you need a Hall ID to get anywhere, or an appointment with someone whose office is back there, and a friendly Archivist to show you the way.
• A good chunk of this is open to the sky -- the Hall of Records and Scholarship Plaza are right on the edge of Level 46. A lot of these buildings have various connections to each other from skywalks to some of them sharing a roof structure, so you can usually find a dry way to get from one building to another if you have to, but in general the complex is open to the polar weather. Fortunately Iacon City generates a lot of heat, so the snow doesn't tend to stick around too long. :v
• I don't know what the unlabeled buildings do yet. I'll figure out a name eventually lmao.
• The Pre-Imperial History department is located in the basement of the Imperial Library, near the Records Hall. The Imperial Library is five storeys tall, if you don't count the basement. Nobody does, the basement is really not impressive. (The best basement in the Hall of Records belongs to the Engineering Library, where, it is rumoured, there is a hot oil tub.)
• Orion lives in the front Residency Hall, with a window that's just placed right to be able to see across to the Library of the Arts. Behind that, the roof of the Scientific Archives is just visible, and behind that, there's a large apartment block that houses a lot of students of the local universities. On top of that apartment block is the edge of Level 47, and, according to the city maps, a kitchen and energon store used to keep the bigwigs in the Citadel well-fueled.
• He used to live in the Junior Dormitory, which is used to house Junior Archivists. You're a Junior Archivist if you have less than a thousand vorn work experience. Junior Archivists get shuffled around the Hall a lot for the sake of training in many different areas, and if they show a particular aptitude for one field of work then they'll be given a specialization when they're promoted to regular Archivist. The Iacon Hall always has a lot more Juniors than one might expect, because they provide training not only to their own Juniors but those from other state Halls of Records as well. If you're a Junior Archivist in, say, Kaon, and your Seniors realise that you're doing really well with your work, they can send you to Iacon to get some more more rigorous training. When you hit the thousand vorn mark and 'graduate', you go back to your home Hall and, in theory, excel at your work.
• The Gateway Hall of Records is an actual library; it's where the Archivists keep a lot of their high-demand stuff, and things that don't really fit in the other libraries. There's a museum section for some really old and famous hardcopy files, a gallery that tells the history of Cybertron from Dynasty to Empire, and a quiet room where copies of all the official Books of History are free to browse. It also has a cafe, but Orion prefers the cafe in the Arts Library because there's usually fewer people around.
• The Sentinel Zeta Research Library is called that because both Primes personally funded it; Zeta provided the initial investment and Sentinel threw some more money at it to add the circular bit (it's a tower) because he'd had a scandal and his PR people told him it would look good if he paid for something cool to be built. The construction costs blew out because the first construction company undercut in a major way to win the contract and then couldn't deliver on their promises, so Sentinel told them to fuck off and hired someone else. The Archivists were all like "Can't we just fix the leaking gutters first?" except no-one actually said that because who's gonna tell a Prime his vanity project isn't appreciated?
• The Hall of Records Sanctuary (a church, basically) and Theological Records live in the same building. Most of the stuff in Theological Records is related to the formation of the Ordo Imperium broadstream (which was deliberately created along with the caste system at the founding of the Empire to foster a sense of global unity) rather than actual religious works (which are kept in the Imperial Library, next to the Imperial History section).
• The Grid Cores building should probably be bigger tbh, it's the biggest in the complex. The outer parts are mostly maintenance access and admin; the three circles are the actual core rooms and they're fuckin huge. They're the reason the Hall of Records was built in a part of the city exposed to the air -- the Cores building uses a shit ton of cold air to keep the servers from combusting and it's a lot more energy-efficient if they don't have to make that air cold themselves.
• The Hardcopy Storage Building is the one with the leaky gutters and the waterfall. The inside of the building is extremely climate-controlled because if you let hardcopy get damp it flakes and starts to decay in rapid, smelly fashion. The outside of the building is not given such consideration. The Restoration Building is attached because it's mostly hardcopy that they're restoring.

And now I have to go and change a bunch of building names in the chapters I've already edited shdgjhg

 

My friend, who I love and appreciate but also have been lowkey using as inspiration for Megatron's more fighty bastard moments in Rise:

look, I'm pretty sure Lemon has a more reasoned perspective because my hobby during COVID-19 is leaving meticulously cited comments on any facebook post even vaguely pro-trump

if they make me really mad I leave each citation in a separate comment so they get overwhelmed and I destroy their notifications​

I swear to Primus I'm gonna find a way to work this into fic, although on second thought I think this is more an Orion Pax thing to do lmfao

 

Please tell your friend that i greatly admire them and their tenacity as well.

truly the hero we need

 

Will absolutely pass that on! XD

Tonight was supposed to be a writing night but then I found a new earworm. I think I’ve done nothing but listen to this for like two hours.

My brain has been quietly chanting starscream song at me the whole time and im just about ready to give in lmao

 

headdesks

Spent basically the whole day wrestling with a geology lab task that ought to have only taken a couple hours and then got online like half an hour ago to find someone's left a very nitpicky comment on Rise about how 'a vorn isn't a year, it's 83 years'. If I take the age of the account at face value the commenter is possibly a kid, so I tried not to bite their head off, but god today was a dangerous day to leave a comment like that.

I do like being able to drag out the citations though. Primus bless TFWiki. They offered 'stellar cycle' as an alternative... which has three competing definitions in three different continuities, which is the reason I decided not to use it at all in my personal units of time. They also mentioned 'solar cycle', but that's never been used to mean a year. (TBH I just dislike 'X cycle' nomenclature in general, which is why I've been gradually phasing out 'lunar cycle' in favor of 'lune' in my fic. Vorn, lune, chord, orn, joor... they kinda feel like they ought to go together. Quartex is the odd one out, but my quartexes divide lunes into four so I guess the latinesque is meaningful XD)

 

Ranting about the above comment on discord and got abruptly yanked sideways into something that’s bothered me for a while but in a different way lmao

I don’t use a heck of a lot of canon terminology outside of a few places where canon explained itself well, but I have used a fair few fanon terms. Thing is, I’m not totally sure which ones, or where a lot of them came from. XD; Like... take dexter, as in a frametype... I don’t know if I made that up or if I got it from someone else. I do know I’ve had it from the the start, 2012 ish... but is it mine, or is it the fandom’s? I pick on that one cause it’s one I have seen other people using more recently, but did they get it from me, or is there a different originator out there? Is there someone I oughta be crediting, or do I get to be proud that something of mine has sorta very minimally caught on?? XDD

I do know that at least one of my other more obscure frametype labels came from a fic I read once — there was an offhand mention of ‘throttlebots’ which made me think ‘ooh, throttle is a nice mechanical-sounding word, why don’t I use that?’ I don’t think my actual use of the term matches the fic I was reading, but I have no idea how to check because the author took their fic down years ago sdfgh. But on the other hand, some of my other type labels are definitely mine, so... it could go either way.

None of this matters in the long run, probably, so it hopefully won’t matter if I never get any answers... buuut god I’m so curious xD

 

FUCK YEEAAAA NO NEW 'RONA CASES IN AOTEAROA TODAY!!!! Here's to more of that shit lmao.

 

I always thought I didn't like Instagram and in some ways that's still true, but between dA shitting the bed and all my friends moving to IG, I've found myself using it more often than not lately. XD So far my account is pretty much all BnHA OC art, and most of it sketches, but I do find the ability to collect more than one image into a single post quite useful, and I'm loving the story function now that I actually know how to use it lmao.

Under the cut, a couple of fake sketch profiles like the ones Horikoshi did for the canon characters. I'm having fun with these! 8D

Spoiler

 

I should be watching my last few lectures but my wifi is playing silly buggers so i'm messing around with my cybertronian government headcanons instead. Here's today's spreadsheet.

Notes that won't fit on the spreadsheet:

• Office of the Prime is the overseer of basically everything. The idea here is of a sort of watchdog org composed of specifically trained mecha with their own caste status deriving from the Primes, who don't do any actual governing themselves but keep an eye out for the actual governors - the high executive council and the Primacy mainly - to make sure they don't get up to any funny business. It might have worked as planned for a couple Primes, maybe, but over time it became a cushy status position to give to your good friends and favourite asslickers, and now they're just kinda there to throw their weight around whenever they feel like it. Primes aren't supposed to fire them, but it happens anyway, especially when there's a new Prime and they don't like the old one's friends lmao.
• The Imperial Household Agency looks after the Prime and their residences, property, personal bank accounts, wrangling illegitimate kids, planning and overseeing ceremonial duties, etcetera. It's super conservative as a rule, and only nominally under the Prime's actual control; individual operatives will generally outlast multiple Primes. Lower-level Agency employees have their own castes - there's a special caste of cleaners and basic maintenance, for example - but the directors are usually from the Ordo Imperium bureaucratic caste.
  • Primes are not supposed to have kids while in office, but lbr they do anyway. If a mech has kids and THEN becomes Prime, the kids stay members of whichever clade the Prime previously belonged to, and they're not legally entitled to anything of the Prime's unless said Prime had it before becoming Prime. If a Prime has kids while in office, the kids belong to whichever clade the other parent or parents belong to,and they have no claim to anything of the Prime's at all. If a Prime has a kid via budding and there is no other parent*, the kid will be adopted into another high-caste clade depending on the whims of the Prime, and again they will have no claims to anything of the Prime's.
  • *This actually happened a lot, relatively speaking, prior to the Matrix being secretly retired. Primes came from all different spark spectra, and the hot-spectrae (B, O, W) are especially generative even when one hasn't got an enormous nuclear battery sitting next to one's spark. Fertility to this level in a Prime was approved of, if not encouraged; the stipulation against having kids in office evolved out of the idea that a Prime should be equally bonded to all Cybertronians, and therefore children and partners have no special legal status in relation to the Prime, unlike children and partners of literally any other Cybertronian.
• The Primacy refers to the overall structure of organized religion and all its institutions, from the Prime down. It's mostly divided into six 'broadstreams' - loose collections of local and regional religious groups that mostly have the same ideas about the Mythos as each other, so they band together in order to form greater communities and punch above their weight in the political arena. The first five are all older than the Empire; the Ordo Imperium was deliberately cobbled together from the most popular bits of the older five at the founding of the Empire, it was another part of the attempt to forge a unified Cybertronian identity to get the populace to support the Empire. I'll talk about these more in another post bc there is a LOT to say lol.
  • There are some religious entities that don't come under the heading of any of the broadstreams; Clavis Aurea is one, the Monoformers are another (they have their own name for themselves but 'Monoformers' is what stuck with everyone else and they kinda don't like that lol, but also I haven't decided what their actual name is yet so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). These are called 'sects' (open, generally will proselytize) or 'cults' (closed, will not proselytize). They're part of the Primacy in theory but they have next to no political sway so they tend to get forgotten a lot.
  • I've mentioned 'the Priesthood' a couple of times in fic, I think? This is a more specific term, it means the priestly castes and hierarchy of whichever broadstream or middle stream you belong to. There are a lot of orgs and castes that belong to the Primacy but not to the Priesthood - religious admin castes, for example, and also Sanctuary Guards.
• The High Executive Council is composed of the highest-ranked laymecha beneath the Prime, the twelve High Ministers. (Cybertronians like the number 12 and multiples thereof; number 13 is significant for Religious Reasons so it tends to be avoided except for if you're deliberately trying to invoke Primus.) The High Ministers are the heads of the twelve Imperial Ministries, which contain the VAST MAJORITY of Imperial government entities. They are nominated by Primes and confirmed by Senate votes.
  • The State Ministry is led by Exarchon, who's been in the job for about three Primes now. It primarily handles the state governorships - confirming governors elected by state senates, making sure they don't get up to any funny business, etc. - keeps the Imperial Senate running smoothly and provides each Senator with offices and funding (tho Senators are responsible for hiring their own staff), oversees the Towers, and shares responsibility for the Office of the Tyrest Accord and Council of Galactic States representatives with the Colonies ministry. There's a lot more, but these are the main ones (that I've currently thought about lmao).
  • The Heritage Ministry is led by Halogen, another relic of a past Prime. Basically, if it has to do with history or religion, it gets dropped in the Heritage Minister's lap. It works closely with the Ordo Imperium leadership, but there's a power struggle between them; the Ordo Imperium wants to tell the Ministry what to do, and the Ministry is like 'fuk u, ur not my boss.' And the other broadstreams are egging the Ministry on bc they all hate being told what to do as well but they can't say it without getting accused of Various Crimes, so they live vicariously through Halogen's ability to piss off the Primacy and live to tell the tale.
  • The Ministry of Works is in charge of Cybertron's infrastructural development. It is led by Drivetrain, the only one of the Council who isn't from a hereditary political caste; they used to be a city planner, down on the intersection between caste tiers 2 and 3. The whole ministry is basically city planning on steroids, so that works out. They have the biggest budget and an absolute shit ton of direct employees; large-scale construction on Cybertron basically does not happen without their approval and usually their involvement in at least some portions of the process.
  • The Defence Ministry is in charge of Cybertron's armed forces, and also has a licensing and oversight role with regards to private security contractors and similar. They have the second biggest budget, which mostly gets either shunted into R&D these days or wasted because they haven't had a decent war since Nova's conquests and why pay your soldiers more than you need to?? They might get Ideas. It works with the Colonies Ministry on offworld defense, but it doesn't like it. Gauntlet, the Minister, is currently the oldest on the Council and spends most of his time in meetings napping with his audio recorders on.
  • The Health Ministry is in charge of Cybertron's public health system. It's big, badly funded, and always slammed with work. The Minister, Gravitas, is Passionate about healthcare service but has to spend all day trying to stop the rest of the Council from defunding his Ministry even more, so he hasn't managed to get a lot done. Ratchet worked as a professional advisor for his office once and made Many Enemies. Cybertron's health system has both public and private sectors; healthcare is almost but not quite free in the public sector, but due to the aforementioned chronic underfunding most mecha who can afford it go the route of health insurance and private hospitals; otherwise you might be waiting a long time for treatment.
  • The Public Services Ministry is mainly known for the Emporiums, which are sort of a combo of community outreach offices, local info stations, emergency social workers... if you're a normal citizen and you have an issue with something that you don't know how to deal with, you probably go and ask at the local Emporium. If you lose your state ID card, you report it to the Emporium. If you're a government conducting a census, you run it through the Emporiums. If you're trying to get out of an abusive home situation, you go to the Emporiums for help. (And if it involves legal issues, the Emporiums make you an appointment with the Magisterium.) What the Emporiums do specifically can vary by location (read: funding), but there are a lot of options. Public Services Ministry also has a Labor Department which is supposed to uphold minimum employment standards for Cybertron's workers, but lbr, no-one pays attention to them. The Minister here is Sigil, who notoriously gives no fucks and is most widely known for getting into slapfights on robot Twitter.
  • The Justice Ministry consists of almost the entire legal system, from the Enforcers up. The Legislative Council takes the proposals and ideas debated in the Senate and drafts laws, which Senators can then choose to champion if they sound good; a championed law can go through three rounds of debate, modification and voting before it is either passed or shelved. If a law is passed and the Prime signs off on it (they may choose not to), it becomes part of Imperial law. The Magisterium system collates all the laws and makes them publically available. Magisteriums also provide legal advice and counsel to anyone accused of a crime or sued in civil court, no matter your caste; lawyers can volunteer to take on specific clients but clients cannot pick and choose who they get assigned to. (Every so often there's a civil case where some rich mech gets sued for wooing the best lawyers with enormous expensive gifts.)
  • The Education Ministry is mainly composed of the Qualification Standards Authority, which makes sure your expensive degree is worth the hardcopy it's printed on, and the Imperial Academies, the public education system for nymphs (sparklings) and newbuilds (cold-constructs). Nymphs get a slow, mostly easygoing education over the course of three vorn because their processors are still being wired and mass-uploading is very Not Good if you haven't got the hardware for it. Newbuilds get an eight-week series of mass uploads and hands-on tutelage with an experienced caste-mate, because their processors can handle it. In theory the Ministry is supposed to fund all of this, but they're also chronically underfunded and communities and castes often find themselves having to finance their own schools and newbuild tutors. The Minister is Flamebolt, widely regarded as a nepotistic waste of space.
  • The Commerce Ministry is supposed to oversee and regulate a lot of aspects of business on Cybertron. It puts up a token attempt, but tends to be dominated by fans of free market theory and trickle-down economics, so a lot of it goes neglected. The current minister is Decimus; rumor has it he slept with Sentinel Prime to get one of three nominations to the post, and his two competitors each had enough enemies that the Senate voted him in despite being much less qualified.
    
  • The Finance Ministry is the overlord of the Imperial banks and the collector of its taxes. Oligarchs fear them, especially after the Burthov Port Authority scandal. They have a lot of power over the other ministries, because they're the ones that allocate funding. They're also held to a very high standard; you can't get away with the sort of behaviour in the Finance Ministry that you might in other Ministries, because someone will be waiting for you to stuff up so that they can angle to get someone they like better into your post. Traachon, the current Minister, is the canniest bastard in the Council and, judging by the amount of times someone's tried to kill him, the most hated mech in the Empire.
    
  • The Colonies Ministry handles the majority of Cybertron's offworld concerns, from colony government, supply chains, diplomacy (shared with the State Ministry) and also controls exploration. The latter has become increasingly important, with the increasingly urgent need for new resources and revenue streams in the Age of Rust. A lot of its officials are colony mecha. They work with the State Department, and are a little bit smug about it. Its Minister is Templar, who was born on Cybertron but spent a lot of his early life on Paradron and regularly gets into fights with homeworld Cybertronians who disrespect the colonies.
    
  • The Resources Ministry is in charge of regulating and providing access to the Empire's natural resources. At the moment, there's a looming shortage of several basic resources needed for Cybertronian civilization, so they're frantically trying to find replacements and ration access without alerting the general populace to the crisis. There's been an Environmental Preservation Board for a long time, but nobody pays attention to them.

 

*stuffs it into my face*

 

YELLS

WE WERE COVID-FREE FOR LIKE TWO WEEKS

AND NOW WE ARE NOT ANYMORE

idk the full story cause i've had an exam literally all day today and done nothing but think about rocks until like two hours ago, but i'll find out what happened tomorrow and then I will Judge The Fuck Out Of the appropriate parties/policies.

also hi, I updated the stupid self-insert fic. :D

So, imagine the scene for me: I’m snuggled in my nice warm bed, sleeping the sleep of the dead, right -- and somewhere deep in my unconscious mind I hear the dulcet tones of Siri, saying something like “DO YOU WISH TO MAKE THIS INTERNATIONAL CALL?” Something like that, I don’t know, it was kinda muffled under my cat’s fat floofy butt.

And so I throw myself the fuck out of bed, still mostly asleep and running on lizard-brain instinct, grope around on the floor underneath my bed until I find the charger cord and a moment later my cat’s traitorous ass, just as Siri announces, “OKAY, I AM MAKING THIS CALL.” And then she reads out Mirage’s fuckin contact.

I push my cat off the phone in utter panic. I receive a swat full of sharp needle claws for my trouble. I swipe away from whatever screen my cat’s gotten into as the call goes through and I punch the red ‘hang up’ button just as Mirage says my name.

End scenario. Except no, because nothing involving giant alien robots is that easy.​

 

When ur man neglects his health and gets exposed as a skeleton on live TV and you need to yell at him for being a bit of a muppet a lil bit first before u cuddlepile on him

I put this on IG last week but it still makes me laugh so I’m sharing it here lmao

 

Rise Chapter 9 rewrite complete. After putting it off for so long, it only took me a few hours to do lmao. I haven't really changed anything, just added some description and fixed some awkward wording.

 

No robots here, just spectating on drama in my periphery lmao

Spoiler

So the person who called out my friend earlier this year (and failed) has now been called out themself. The charges are e-begging on false grounds (I have no comment, idk if it’s true or not) and racefaking, specifically claiming to be Native Hawaiian. And I’m torn! This person has made questionable claims of having ancestry from various Native/Indigenous groups before, as well as generally using non-white ethnic groups like aesthetic window dressing for their OCs and alternately cudgels for beating rival OCs with... but on the other hand I’m not sure they ever actually claimed to be Hawaiian, so much as implied it. And also... it’s very possible they’re just incredibly fuckin dumb lmao. I listened to their 70-minute rebuttal bc I’m currently brain-dead and have nothing better to do, and they legitimately seem to have,,, idk, conflated? The Caribbean with Polynesia/Hawaii. Like, they brought up the Caribbean in the context of talking about how much they love Moana... twice. I’m trying to give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe they had a brain fart, but... that’s one HECK of a brain fart, and one that went completely uncorrected.

Speaking as someone with actual Polynesian heritage, I’m so shocked I’m not even mad, just.. gotta laugh, holy shit. I mean it’s disrespectful as hell that they clearly know absolutely nothing beyond the stereotypes and still thought using them as aesthetic inspo was a good idea, but I’ve come to expect that from this person! I was NOT expecting this sheer level of obvious dumb. XD

It was also kinda interesting listening to the vid from the perspective of understanding how they either are trying to present their side/actually see themselves. They come across quite articulate and well-spoken at first, except then they start going in loops and being real vague about details, and I think if I was just a bystander who hadn’t seen what shit went down it would be easy to believe them... but I know some of the context and timing they’ve neglected to mention, so even though I don’t know it all, I can ask questions and guess at what’s not being mentioned.

 

I was trying to help someone wrangle a geology -related quirk earlier today and I don’t think I really got the basic science through to them sdfgh... buuut that might be a good thing because now I rly wanna use the power ideas I came up with XD. Not as a BnHA OC, cause I don’t think it suits the series, but I could easily fit it into one of my original worlds and I’m seriously hyped xD

the basic idea was like a sort of stone mage, who can use the power in the earth’s crust as sort of like a giant battery for their magic. The ‘personality’ of the power they get from the earth differs based on the geologic history of the earth beneath their feet:

• If you’re in coal country, the power in the coal is vigorous and fast-growing, like the plants that became the coal. It has a lot of potential, and if any rock can get excited, coal is it.
  
• Sandstone and mudstone feel like gentle water, they don’t have much energy but they do have a lot of patience. Sandstones especially will be ur friends.
• In river floodplains, the power ebbs and flows, most of the time fairly sedate but sometimes surging like a flood. It feels speckly, for lack of a better word. Conglomerates can be unpredictable, they change their minds a lot and can be argumentative. An old, deep floodplain that’s made up its mind can be a force to be reckoned with, however.
• Places where (regional) metamorphic rocks are exposed at the surface tend to want to squeeze. Higher grade rocks like schist and gneiss are very orderly, they’ll line things up in neat but arbitrary categories if you let them.
  
• Impact breccia and shocked quartz packs a huge punch. It’s full of energy if you can roll with the punches, but it doesn’t discriminate with who or what it touches.
• Limestones crawl like the billions of ancient creatures whose shells and skeletons it used to be. That aside, they’re perfectly warm and friendly to work with. Marbles are stiff and uptight and have to be convinced to co-operate. Sometimes they’re a bit fiery, but those ones are friends with granites and gabbros and shit, so get u a plutonic friend if u wanna work with a fiery marble.
• Plutonic rocks are party rocks. They used to have fun and they’re fine with having settled down, mostly, but they like activity and power. Use them as batteries and they’ll be ur bros.
  
• Volcanic rocks are party rocks too, but they’re a bit too enthusiastic about partying so be careful with them. Ignimbrite is the scariest, it feels like fire in your lungs and choking gases and the weight of ash and debris pressing down on you. It’s very powerful tho.
• Old sedimentary basins where shit all has happened for hundreds of millions of years are stubborn and lazy lmao. You really have to make them do what you want, because they just want to sit exactly where they are for another hundred million years and you can’t bargain with that. On the bright side, anyone who can make a billion-year-old sandstone sit up and pay attention automatically becomes a celebrity in the rock world.
• Mountains are enormous and powerful and terrible gossips. They all have their own personalities, and they’re interconnected in their own way along orogenic belts. You can send a message through mountains hundreds or thousands of miles away if you’re good enough, but they’re exhausting to deal with so prob easier to just send a human courier lmao. Otherwise, they like to squeeze and break and lift great weights.
• Fault zones are super unpredictable and hard to work with, because they mostly do a good job of feeling just like the rock beds they dissect... up until they suddenly release a shit ton of energy directly into ur face. Fault zones can kill an unwary mage, and most people try to avoid them. The mylonite zones along the fault planes are great batteries if you have the skills to use them though, full of lots of energy.

 

Tainry and John started working on their own TF self-insert fics too and now there's like four of us and I was inspired XDD Here's a new chapter of mine.

 

Holy shit the National party are going through a bit of a bloodbath right now! A couple of their MPs were dumbasses with COVID patients' medical info last week and so far, two MPs have been sacked, the party leader (who'd only been in the job for less than two months!) has resigned, and now another two MPs have resigned as well! I wanna know what's going on, other than Crusher Collins getting elected to replace the leader lol

 

this askreddit thread makes me want bulkhead fic set in that vague after-TFP period where he was teaching the vehicons how to build stuff and they were all trying to rebuild Cybertron, with lots of Shenanigans in the background. There was a post somewhere in that thread where some guy was like "Well they called me specifically 'ceiling boy' because I got sheetrocked into a ceiling once" and I can't stop giggling skhfdhjg