Kem's Robot Worldbuilding Yellhole Apparently

This is 100% Accurate. XD

 

The idiot with a million sock accounts has another one. I'm legitimately amused, they just don't quit!

 

I am viscerally in love with this song, it's giving me shivers all up and down my back, I have not stopped laying it on repeat for two hours. :'D Te reo Maori is such a beautiful language.

Also it's really handy that The Old Guard fandom is happening now that I'm working on the vampire story, I'm getting a lot of useful resources and info out of them lmao. (The movie is really good, but I haven't managed to get into the fandom beyond lurking for interesting history. Booker is my fav for absolutely predictable reasons, in hindsight. They're all so good though sjhdgfhg)

Spoiler

Half-Vampire Protagonist has a name now - Noella. Vampire Hunter Boy is called Ainsley. Old Weirdo does not have a name yet because it turns out he's even older than I thought, his entry in my notes is still just a big ol ?????????

So now the rock magic is a thing from the Stone Age, because... Stone Age??? it's there in the name, I'm a dumbass. I'm picking the Neolithic for it to be developed more than a few helpful skills for hunter-gatherers to gather enough food, since the Neolithic is where farming and settlements start to happen. The vampires started happening about 9 or 10k years ago, lagging behind sedentism and warfare a little. There was an initial surge of source vampires made, some of which were more successful than others, and then it was discovered that source vampires could quite easily make other vampires, and humans collectively went "oh shit, let's maybe not do that." Humans were getting pretty good at killing each other by this stage, so they didn't really need the Sources that much and some of them were pretty hard to control anyway, so... file that away as an idea that wasn't so good. And then metal was discovered and we got even better at killing each other... but also lost broad familiarity with the rock magic in the process. It became a specialisation you had to work at, and for most people it was a specialisation that wasn't worth that much when the Hot New Thing was metal. :D But some people did work at it, and actually a lot of them got quite good. It was an effective counter to the vampires that were still running around, at least... and that's how the Vampire Hunters got started.

Old Weirdo is, as far as he knows, the only one of those original Sources left. He's not that sure about it because wew, that's a lot of years in the past now! But he's met a lot of people over the years and it's been a very long time since he's met anyone as old as he is. He's from somewhere around the Urals originally, and although he couldn't point it out on a map he could probably figure it out if he was there in person... but he hasn't been there in person in about 1500 years lmao. He's also notable for having been like three when he was turned into a Source, which adds to the Weirdness. The earlier you turn a child, the more powerful they'll be... but also the less able to control their own shit, emotionally and magically. Five is a better age if you want your Source to be capable of at least acting human, except if you go much older they start dying in the process. Most of the younger ones were killed for being absolutely batshit combative. Weirdo escaped the same fate because he got hooked on exploring the world and was able to channel his batshit-ness into something sorta productive. He's largely flown under the radar ever since, being more interested in Having New Experiences and Seeing New Places than like... conquering shit or kicking ppl's palaces in. He's also more skilled in the rock magic than your average vampire, and especially your average Source, for about the same reason.

 

Me: [diving back into yugioh fandom]
Me: ...what if crossover with the rock magic story???

it’s the end of the school year in three weeks and I’m in full “ogod What To Focus On pls” mode lmao

 

I handed in my project and I'm a little bit braindead for the moment. Still have to study for another week, but then it's exams and we're done!

[opens mouth, emits foghorn noises]

I found moosies in the supermarket today tho, which is a blast from the past. Used to buy those from the school tuckshop whenever i could scrape together a dollar or so on a hot day lol. Haven't seen them around since I graduated, which was fuckin 2011.

I also voted today! I meant to vote early but didn't get around to it until today. One of our TV channels has been taken over by the orange vote gremlin, it's just playing him and his dog accompanied by some Nice Music and a scrolly bar across the bottom with all sorts of shitpost material interspersed with exhortations to Go Vote. I hear u, orange man, dw - I voted. XD

 

I also want to put this here because I'm happy with it and I think I'm funny:



New BNHA OC. His name is Tatsuharu and he's a Professional Nuisance.

Spoiler

 

Can't believe I'm watching this on national TV

 

I have to screech about a couple of things pertaining to yesterday’s election, but they’re almost all good news. It was not just a landslide victory, it was a bloodbath, and the left wing won the night. Shit happened last night that has NEVER happened before, like fuckin Ilam going red skhgdfh. I was liveblogging it with my one and only kiwi friend and we were going absolutely feral on discord XDD

A bullet point list of things that were Awesome

• Labour won 49.1 % of the party votes. Under MMP, this is pretty spectacular. I remember when National got 40-ish% a few years ago and we thought that was scary.
• Labour won 18 new seats in parliament. NATIONAL LOST 21. ACT (right wing party) went from 1 MP total to 10. (I Don't Like ACT but I take solace in that they probably cannibalized a lot of right-wing voters from the Nats.) The Greens won an electorate seat for only the second time since they were founded in 1990. The Maori party are back in government, having won one of the Maori electorates again. (Taking it from Labour! That's impressive, in this election!)
• That newly Green electorate seat is Auckland Central, which used to be a National seat. It was won by Chloe Swarbrick, who is pretty cool and also has been working her ass off on the ground. Labour and National's candidates were favoured above her, but she did it!!
• The Maori party won in Waiariki, which is one of the Maori electoral seats and otherwise I don't really know anything about it. Labour was winning at first, then at one point they drew completely even, then the Maori party candidate pulled ahead. Party vote went to Labour tho, which is pretty typical.
• NZ First and Winston are out! They were not particularly useful last term, aside from getting Labour into power in the first place. I'll miss Winston's burns, but that's about all.
• Nick Smith is out of Nelson! Dude's held that seat for almost as long as I've been alive. It's gone Labour, which is impressive because Nelson is full of rich ppl and farmers.
• Gerry Brownlee is out of Ilam! He's held that seat for almost as long as I've been alive as well! It's surprising, because Ilam has also got a lot of very rich ppl... but it's also Not, because Gerry Brownlee is one of the people who fucked up our earthquake recovery and a lot of people really really hate him. And yet, Ilam as an electorate has ALWAYS gone blue, as did its preceding electorate!
• Even in many electorates which ultimately voted for National candidates, the party vote often went to Labour. That is a pretty strong message IMO.

A short list of things that were not Awesome

• ACT got lots of party votes more than they usually do. I can respect David Seymour as a person but so many of their policies are just shit.
• ...that's about it tbh haha.

National has been thoroughly flamed, so hopefully they'll think better of trying the sort of trumpesque tactics they did in the future. Judith Collins still has her electorate seat, but her days as National leader are probably numbered. :D

I'm so relieved, man. I was expecting a Labour win but THIS is far beyond that.

 

Spent the day Distracting Myself by tidying up some Yugioh OCs' profiles on toyhouse. I'm rather enjoying all the research I gotta do for it, lol.

OC #1 is Meryneith. Used to be a priestess, a doctor, and now is sort of an undead hospice nurse, finds the dying on battlefields and shit and tries to make sure their deaths are like... not as horrible as they could be. Her home city was sacked by the invaders that set up the need for the Millennium Items, she was an Only Survivor, went to Akhenaden for Help and he was like "...hey i might know a way for u to Get Revenge, wanna help me work it out?" and she was like Yes I Do. And now she's undead, bc Akhenaden is shifty as fuck.

OC #2 is Tashlultum, an Akkadian princess who's at least a thousand years older than the Ancient Egypt peeps. She was part of a mostly successful attempt to assassinate the king, but they were sold out and so she killed herself before the very angry new king could kill her. She cursed the dude who sold her out and it kind of reflected on her as well, so she's been a pissed-off ghost floating around the place for 4200 years and she's also extremely bored by this stage.

OC #3 is Riou, a modern-day girl who can See Dead People and it's a huge pain in the ass. Tashlultum latches onto her for a bit and occasionally possesses her, which is Extremely Traumatic and Riou is in Bad Shape when Meryneith, searching for the Millennium Items, arrives in town and decides she's got to teach this poor kid how to kick badly-behaving ghosts out of her body. Riou does tarot too, which means I gotta bug my friends to teach me abt it because I don't know shit about it lol.

 

Today's episode of NZ is a weird one. :''''D

Sex toy store endorses bird with giant testicles for Bird of the Year 2020.

 

Also Bird of The Year is apparently open to overseas voters as well? You can pick 5 nominees this year, pretty democratic. I'm gunning for fantail/piwakawaka or antipodean albatross/toroa, they deserve it.

 

I GOT 100% ON MY GEOLOGY COURSE PROJECT!!! FULL MARKS!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!

This is very relieving, because I missed the final exam thanks to my mom having to get a covid test and isolate*. I applied for special consideration and that was accepted, but I don't know yet what they will want me to do to make it up. (Would be cool if they just took my average so far lol, because thanks to that project I think my average is hovering in the high 90's somewhere XDD)

*Mom did not have covid, she had fuckin legionella/minor case of pneumonia. She's better now, but it was scary for a hot minute. :'D

And some updated NZ election info now that all the special votes have been counted:

• Labour in fact won just over 50% of the total votes cast. By like 330. XD That hasn't happened since 1951, apparently.
• Northland electorate vote flipped to red. The National candidate decided not to contest it, even though he was only about 150 votes behind. Props to that dude tbh.
• Maori Party did indeed win Waiariki. They also get a list MP as well!
• Nats lost a few more seats in parliament lmao. Gerry Brownlee resigned as deputy leader. Judith Collins is still there, somehow. Guess no-one else wants the job.
• Cannabis referendum failed. Am disappointed. I don't smoke it but apparently like 80% of kiwis have at least tried it lmao, so I feel like it could probably be a decently profitable homegrown industry given how well agriculture in general does here lmao. Get that juicy tax revenue, govt.
• Euthanasia referendum passed by a decent majority. There was a lot of scaremongering fake news flying around about it, so I'm glad it looks like most of the country did their research.

 

Finally thinking abt Cybertronian worldbuilding again! I haven't had the brain for robots for months and I've been trying and failing to get back into that mindset for ages. Think I might be back in business now! :D

So. Some Thoughts about Cybertronian Geology, at least at the surface:

• Cybertron is sort of a rocky planet, which looks rather like most rocky planets if you don't go very far down. Tectonically it's sort of halfway between Mars and Earth; there's movement, but not nearly as much as we have. The lithosphere varies between 20-50km thick and is formed in one single tectonic piece, but it's a fractured piece, faults all over the place.
• There are three rock types: sedimentary, metamorphic, and hadean. The hadean rock type is full of Cybertronium and formed by Primus Bullshit; it appears rather metallic and is usually ferromagnetic. It is intrusive, and gets more common the further down into the planet you go. The working scientific theory is that it forms much of the core beneath the rocky outer lithosphere.
  • There are no igneous rocks and no volcanoes. The temperature underground peaks at about 530 celsius, then starts going down again. Pressure peaks in the plastic deformation zone, about 15km down. Get past that and really weird shit starts happening, Primus Bullshit is hard at work here.
    • 530 celsius is technically hot enough for carbonatite magmas iirc, but I don't know that the mineral composition of the lithosphere would be conducive for it. Maybe you get small pockets of it really deep down. Maybe a couple of underground volcanoes. Actually that would be incredibly cool, I wanna do it now lol.
  • There is no soil, technically, because there's next to no organic material. You get a few microbial life forms in the Seas, a handful of extremophiles, but Cybertron's atmosphere and as a result the hydrosphere is very acidic and most things would break down to nothing even if Cybertronians weren't actively trying to get rid of organic life because it Does Things they don't like to the environment. (They're scared of another Rust Plague, which was also biological in origin... Cybertronium is a hell of a drug for metallovorous bacteria apparently.)
• Most landforms are horst/graben type things, blocks uplifted or dropped down with occasional srs-bizness complex rifting that's way more pronounced than we get but also limited in extent, and even more occasional random uplift. Isostasy is involved in crumple-zone mountains but not with the uplift -- that's more Primus Bullshit at work.
  
• There are pseudo-volcanic features which, as said before in this thread, are basically Primus farting. They contain hydrothermal fields and fumarole-type vents, and are occasionally captured and burnt as natural gas. They tend to cluster around a local high-relief feature which is basically formed by rising gases deforming and expanding the surface around the main vent. They 'erupt' by giving off clouds of hot gases and caustic steam. Extinct vents are a good place to start looking for economic resources.
• Energon is a mineral sort of like salt or carbonate, in that it can be dissolved in liquid, form an evaporite deposit in various cool shapes, will form cool crystals under the right conditions, and can solidify in entire veins in cracks underground. Occasionally it behaves more like oil, getting trapped in sills far enough underground that it remains liquid in pure form. (It melts at just under 500 celsius; the liquid drinking form is a solution with various chemical additives.)
  • Like coal, sometimes these underground deposits catch on fire. Unlike coal, they go BOOM. With a vengeance. Energon mining is a very dangerous occupation, and Cybertronian miners don't get hazard pay. :/
    • You can tell Megatron was not an energon miner because of the behave-yourself bomb in his chest.
• Rivers exist on Cybertron. They tend to be very old due to the slow pace of tectonic movement and generally follow very deeply-cut paths in the landscape. There are multiple canyons in the Tagan Heights that predate the Heights themselves and are upwards of five km deep in places.
• Glaciers also exist. These are exclusively in the mountains; there are no polar ice caps. (Permafrost zones exist, but there's not enough water on the planet and nowhere gets consistently cold enough for ice caps to build up. Especially not since the great polar cities were built. XD)

 

Youtube threw me a great video the other night that was very Relevant to my interests. Lots of volcanology stuff, explained in a very accessible way.



I got very excited at the end with the large igneous provinces stuff, I literally just did a project on those this semester and if only this video had been posted when I was working on it! XD I do recall one of my sources talking about a theory that at least some LIPs may be associated with subduction and the formation of supercontinents rather than rifting, but I didn't quite click on the mechanics described in the paper. Coulda talked about it if I'd known! XD

Also had an interesting megop plotbunny last night! First time that's happened in a while. It was an AU of sorts, inspired very loosely by listening to Sabaton songs on repeat last night. Prime-in-exile Optimus meets a nomad-king Megatron, befriends him, Megs goes full Genghis Khan and Optimus helps him on the condition that Megs helps him kick out his usurpers. Idk if I'll ever get to post any of it buuuuuut I do very much wanna write it. :'D

 

i got on a research binge today and im changing my mind abt the no-volcanoes-on-cybetron thing bc i found out abt radiogenic heat and i really really want carbonatite magmas. its not rly a stretch to extend that to rhyolite, so maybe we get supervolcanoes too. [eyes emoji]

 

[vibrates quietly in the background]

 

so i bought a new computer in january and it's taken me until now to remember my password and log in here lmao.

i joined a megop server thats run by some friends i trust recently and in three weeks it's given me like six plotbunnies, most of which are Nasty. I'm trying to hold off on doing anything with them until I've got ch.21 of Rise done, but we shall see how successful I am. One of them has Eldritch Horror Optimus who is also Actually A Good Person and I need it so bad XDD

 

*chinhands* tell me more

 

Oooh Eldritch Horror Optimus is very exciting. Primes being planetary-grade Big Friendly What the Fuck Is That always is.

 

Eldritch horror OP >> basically the Matrix would very much like it if, after it went to the trouble of remodeling OP's body to best serve his purposes, he did not die too soon. OP is unfortunately OP and a frequent target of people who would really like him to die so they can get back to whatever fucked up shit they were doing. So he gets assassinated one time and the Matrix is like Not On My Watch, so he... comes back. Ratchet, who was in the middle of desperately trying to stop him bleeding out, loses a finger to what he can only describe as tendrils of molten metal bursting out of OP's chest and then sedately just... sealing the wound like it was never even there.

OP is very Confused bc none of the previous primes ever left notes about this, so he decides to do some research and a bit of science on his own time. Unfortunately there's a war to fight, so that gets in the way of his Research buuuuuuut it does kinda provide some opportunities for practical tests, albeit ones that would never pass any sort of scientific rigor lmao. So he gains a reputation for somehow pulling off escapes and rescues and Heroic Last Stands that turn out to be not actually That. The odd Autobot or Decepticon starts to wonder if his impressive luck is actually luck or if something Weird is going on. Optimus can't answer that question because he's still not sure himself.

Anyway at one point he gets captured alive by some splinter group of Decepticons - I'm leaning toward like Overlord or someone lol - who tortures the shit out of him. OP does not react the way any torture victim should because at this point he's stopped processing pain like a normal mech, and the whole time he's taking notes on what's going on. He's figured out at this point that he can't control when it happens - his working theory is that it's a defense mechanism triggered by Actually Dying. So it... takes a little while for someone in the torture enthusiasts' club to get around to inflicting fatal damage. At which point his theory is confirmed and Eldritch Horror OP gets up and reduces the entire base to so much molten slag. (And then he has to walk home bc he forgot to grab a ship, and arrives in the middle of the Autobots trying to put together an emergency rescue mission lmao)

I'm still thinking about plot and whatnot, but I'm definitely making it a megop thing, because I think Megatron is a good candidate for being the Cybertronian equivalent of a monsterfucker and also has way less self-preservation instinct than like everyone else. XD War ends through the power of Megs getting laid, somehow. And someone in the server pointed out that it could be a great setup for some consensual guro lol.