schrödinger's military (starfleet)

The Birdcage (Jurassic Park: It's Ironic) Masterpost

Jurassic Park: It's Ironic, by Meig of A-Dinosaur-A-Day

These links bring you to a retelling of the Jurassic Park story, mainly based on the 1993 film, with portions of the original novel used to supplement the story. The main point of divergence occurs when the park is unable to find workable nonavian dinosaur genetic material for cloning, since - as in the real world - dna degrades much too rapidly. Instead, the park consists only of extinct dinosaurs that can be brought back - birds from the last 2.5 million years. What happens after that is, as Ian Malcolm would say, an emerging pattern.

Forever thanks to my beta readers @plokool, @killdeercheer, and @otussketching! And extra thanks to @i-draws-dinosaurs for the kickass logo! Happy 30th anniversary of the Jurassic Park film!

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

if i had to choose between death and reading homestuck then i would probably just read the damn webcomic but i definitely wouldn't be very happy about it

have you considered i dont want fucking homestuck to be the reason i die. did you think about that

ACTUALLY YOU KNOW WHAT. IM PUTTING EVERYTHING ON THE LINE HERE

IF THIS POST GETS TO 10K BEFORE THE NEXT APRIL 13TH, I WILL READ HOMESTUCK.

reblog if you think that it is probably morally okay to breathe air

me explaining to the other trainers that apricorns are unknown outside of Johto because of deliberate suppression by the Silph and Devon corporations to present artificial pokeballs as the only means of capturing pokemon and establish regional monopolies after they eliminate renewable sources

(via @itsbenedict)

eternalfarnham replied to your post

there’s no pocket for me to BE in, there’s no LOBBYING involved, there’s no SUPPRESSION campaign because you don’t need one! traditional methods suppress themselves when you make modern pokéballs available. you might as well start accusing AT&T of deliberately suppressing the noble traditional art form of the goddamn semaphore.

not to mention OP demonstrates a total lack of understanding of the market realities of the pokéball industry- Silph and Devon are not monopolies, if they weren’t in constant competition their magic monster domination spheres wouldn’t cost two bucks a pop. the ball spec is a public standard, and Bill Masaki’s storage system based on that standard is an open-source project. they’re only the two largest players because they’re able to leverage economies of scale. you still get smaller operations like the Laverre City Poké Ball Factory, with better regional supply chains and local brand recognition, making room for themselves in the market. 

sm FUCKING h at y’all granola-crunching conspiracy theorists. you probably also believe Super Potions cause autism.

Ok, but it is a shame that artisanal balls are basically off the market now. Like, you have to ride the monorail and hike through a half dozen routes just to find someone willing to sell you a Fast Ball. Believe me, when your boss at the power plant needs five Electrodes by Tuesday you are not going to want to make the trip to Alola; you’re going to head on down to the Mart and get some Ultra Balls, which will do the trick but aren’t well tailored to the job.

I’m with you that modern catching techniques are better, not to mention more humane, but there genuinely is a loss from more niche balls becoming harder to find. Maybe someday the long slowpoketail of consumer demand will be met, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for that Shellder.

look y’all are missing the point. mass production of silph balls crowding out traditional apricorn craftsmanship is, if anything, more a side effect of the real problem: that capture artifacts are too easy to get your hands on these days. $2 basic balls are a problem. before modern ball tech you had to go to an artisan, yes, but part of their job was to care about who had the power to recruit pokémon from the wild, as a backstop against another Knight of Veilstone coming along. there was a time when you’d never lay a hand on a ball yourself until it was clear you respected pokémon, whether tame or in the wild. but now, a “pokémon journey” is open to practically every teenager, even if they’ve got not interest in treating their team with trust and love.

the worldwide rise in the last century of organized crime and apocalyptic cults who use pokémon as their muscle is a direct result of capture artifacts becoming a mass produced market commodity rather than a mechanism for preserving the sacred trust between humans and the wilderness. it’s a miracle that the powder keg hasn’t already gone off by now.

Oh that is rank historical revisionism - what, do you think artisans’ definitions of “respect” were constructed in a vacuum? We already had rhetoric as far back as the warring states period in Ransei about how only the soldierly classes, overwhelmingly descendants of nobility and taught from birth, had the intangible qualities necessary to “bond” with Pokémon. And when we start seeing apricorn balls develop in Johto, which borders Kanto - Kanto, where we know there’s been extensive cultural cross-contamination with Auroran and Dragnoran expeditions - surprise, suddenly only a small population has the intangible qualities necessary to use them, too.

That notion was, and remains, a tool to limit general access to Pokémon in the interest of maintaining class disparities. I mean, have we already forgotten the Aether Foundation’s pseudo-conservationist nonsense? Their attempt to manipulate natural resources and establish a power base in Alola, while they were modernizing and taking their place on the world stage, was founded on this exact rhetoric of “rescuing” Pokémon from local disenfranchised populations, as if taking Pokémon away from places like Po Town would improve things instead of increasing competition between trainers and decreasing safety.

Do you want more disillusioned kids joining gangs? Because that’s how you get Teams!

Artisanal balls and anyone who supports them are tools of the aristocracy to suppress the common folk. In the days when a ball could only be made by hand by an expert, only the wealthiest could afford pokemon, and as a result anyone not born into the “elites” was forced to be subservient to their “betters” for protection.

The release of the $2 pokeball meant that the balance of power shifted to the common citizens. If any child can wield the power of a god, the military and the government and the wealthiest businessmen have no power over them.

More than that, instead of power being determined by the wealth to acquire pokemon, power comes exclusively from the dedication, effort, and empathy required to train them to high levels and to maintain their loyalty. If a person simply buys their pokemon, then those pokemon will either stay at low levels forever, or refuse to obey the human because there is no respect between them; the most powerful people in the world are those who caught a critter at level 2-5 and then devoted their life to raising it into a world power.

And as a beautiful side benefit of this, standard of living has increased across the board. Since every household has at least one minor pokemon in the family and there are increasing numbers of professional, working pokemon joining cities and other civilized areas and working to improve them, every aspect of economy and industry has been enhanced by their supernatural capabilities. Electricity is generated cleanly and in abundance for everybody. Pollution is cleaned up almost completely and instantly. The production of farms, mines, and workshops is multiplied, even as safety standards improve. Yes, every few years another potential apocalypse comes about and needs to be prevented by a couple of brave teenagers, but outside of those incidents the world is damn close to utopia.

…that was all fascinating to read and I would like to see more like it, please

for instance; what the hell is in lemonade that makes it a more powerful healing alternative to regular potions

Opium

See, unlike in the real world, the Pokémon world has yet to ban cocaine in drinks.

this website is INCREDIBLE

Reblogging for future reference.

bless you all.

The campaign world has one billion hit points. It takes damage with every missed attack and every five foot square of every area of effect that is not occupied by a creature or object.

"real environmentalists don't miss!"

a singular scuit. just one. 

an edible cracker with just one side. mathematically impossible and yet here I am monching on it.

‘scuit’ comes from the french word for ‘bake’, ‘cuire’ as bastardized by adoption by the brittish and a few hundred years ‘biscuit’ meant ‘twice-baked’, originally meaning items like hardtack which were double baked to dry them as a preservative measure long before things like sugar and butter were introduced. if you see a historical doccument use the word ‘biscuit’ do not be fooled to think ‘being a pirate mustve been pretty cool, they ate nothing but cookies’ - they were made of misery to last long enough to be used in museum displays or as paving stones

‘triscuit’ is toasted after the normal biscuit process, thrice baked thus the monoscuit is a cookie thats soft and chewy because it was only baked once, not twice

behold the monoscuit/scuit

Why is this called a biscuit:

when brittish colonists settled in the americas they no longer had to preserve biscuits for storage or sea voyages so instead baked them once and left them soft, often with buttermilk or whey to convert cheap staples/byproducts into filling items to bulk out the meal to make a small amount of greasy meat feed a whole family. considering hardtack biscuits were typically eaten by dipping them in grease or gravy untill they became soft enough to eat without breaking a tooth this was a pretty short leap of ‘just dont make them rock hard if im not baking for the army’ but didnt drop the name because its been used for centuries and people forgot its french for ‘twice baked’ back in the tudor era, biscuit was just a lump of cooked dough that wasnt leavened bread as far as they cared thus the buttermilk biscuit and the hardtack biscuit existed at the same time. ‘cookies’ then came to america via german and dutch immigrants as tiny cakes made with butter, sugar/molasses, and eggs before ‘tea biscuits’ as england knew them due to the new availability of cheap sugar- which is why ‘biscuit’ and ‘cookie’ are separate items in america but the same item in the UK the evolution of the biscuit has forks on its family tree

Space is huge. And it's incredible. It's so vast and wonderous you could be forgiven for staring out the window of your ship or station for hours, just drinking in the awe of it all. You could also be forgiven for being absolutely, utterly, and entirely terrified of it. Because of all the many things space is, it's definitely horrifying. You spend enough time out there in it, you start to get a little taste of what it can do when it flexes its cosmic muscles.

If you're lucky, you're born in one of the core systems where life is a paradise. Every galaxy has at least one core--and I'm not talking about the astronomical phenomenon--the galactic core. I'm talking about the core of civilized society. Every galaxy's got at least one. The galaxy I've settled in has five, and each core is home to tens of thousands of populated systems. You see, space is so wild and unpredictable, it's best to concentrate the seat of civilization in secure regions where nothing weird or horrific happens. At least, nothing weird or horrific in the cosmic sense. People are still people and they tend to bring their own horrors with them wherever they go. It's just usually mundane stuff--like scarcity breeding the usual sort of underclass that the powerful love to exploit. But I'm not here to talk about politics or economics or class warfare. None of that seems to matter when you're out on a long stretch, but it's important to understand why we're out here.

Since the average galaxy has about a hundred billion stars in it, that means all five cores in my galaxy make up less than one one-hundred-millionth of a percent of all the stars in the galaxy. And there are hundreds of trillions of people. There are so many people, they don't all fit in the core systems. Some chose to go out into the middle distance or out into the deep reaches, to find wild, untamed worlds to conquer and start a new life--people who think you can just start a new civilization without bringing any of the ills of the one you just came from with you. Sometimes it works. You might see a new core start to grow. It's rare, but on a long enough time scale, you can see it happen. But there's always a sort of critical mass. Once a galaxy has about a dozen or so cores, things start to push back, force people back into their safe spaces.

That's where we come in.

I am part of the Intergalactic Search and Rescue division--at least, that's what civilization calls us, or just ISR for short. We have come to collectively refer to ourselves as "icers". The truth of how that started is lost to time, but every ship and crew has a few different favorite variations on the same five or so stories. We stand apart from civilization so that we can keep the fringes of it safe. It doesn't come without risks, or without costs.

When someone goes out exploring and they find something they can't handle, we're the ones that get called in. And we're very good at our job. We are simultaneously revered, feared, and ignored. When you've been out there as long as some of us, space changes you. You become different enough from the rest of civilization that you kind of don't belong anymore. Homeworld doesn't matter. Culture doesn't matter. Species doesn't matter. You're just... different. Space has left its mark on you--sometimes in subtle ways that freak people out like the uncanny valley, and sometimes in obvious ways that encourage you to not ever go back to any of the cores.

All those stories and ideas and superstitions and fears people had in the early days of space exploration--I mean the really early days, when they were flying in little better than tin cans--we found they weren't true, obviously. There were no monsters or cosmic entities of chaos and insanity or anything like that. At least there weren't any at first.

Funny thing about people, we're really good at making just about anything we can imagine. All those tales of nightmarish cosmic horrors, we made them, all of them. We conjured them into existence. At least, that's my theory.

Maybe they existed out there before we reached into the depths of space. Maybe they stayed away because they didn't care about us at first. Then we showed them the diversity of our fears, anxieties, and dreams. They found a feeding ground rich and fertile--the minds of mortals. And so they began to encroach on civilization. The more we push out into space, the more they push back--in just about every way you can imagine.

I've been a part of ISR for a very long time. I've lost count of the missions and tours. I don't have any reason to go back to the core systems. I wouldn't survive there. I'm too different. When you've gone toe to toe with the minions of what is effectively an eldritch horror or an elder god as many times as I have, it changes you. I still look mostly normal, just... slightly off. I don't quite recognize my face in the mirror anymore. Relationships no longer interest me. I'm not tempted by any of the pleasures and distractions the core systems are famous for. I just want to be out amongst the stars. I feel more isolated among the civilized worlds than I do out in the voids between the galactic arms.

I've been keeping a record of my missions, my encounters, all the times I have been brought to the edge of my understanding and come back from the brink. I'm not entirely sure why. It's not like I really need to. There's plenty of information on all the unique beings, species, and anomalies we are likely to run up against. Some are amiable enough to let us go on our way after an initial misunderstanding. Some are completely indifferent, like a whale is indifferent to the harrowing existence of a tardigrade. Some are openly malevolent. These are the things we push back against. We have to let them know that they can't just run rampant.

Some of our personnel ends up disappearing, becoming part of the cosmos in one way or another. I've seen crew members assimilated into a collective consciousness that spans an entire nebula. I've seen crew transformed into an entirely new species as part of that creature's reproductive cycle. They almost never remember anything of their old life. They are no longer who they once were. Occasionally, I'll come across an old shipmate, now the herald, consort, or interpretor for some greater being, and we'll come into conflict. It's my job to remind them what we do--we look for the people who don't actually want to be this far out and bring them home. We also tell the darkness to respect the boundaries of light.

The various military and para-military organizations do the job of defending the core systems, and they're treated like heroes. We are the mad wanderers, the sages who have gone out into the desert and come back with forbidden wisdom. How can you go back to your homeworld, or your people, when you have stood in defiance before a god of madness only to suddenly find in the depths of your will and soul the power to push back on that all-powerful madness? It changes your sight. Your senses are altered. You can feel the lingering touch of that god or swarm or spirit brushing across the edges of your mind.

I find myself irritated with the more mundane missions. If I discover a derelict spacecraft and find its crew murdered and turned into bloody, mutated, animated corpses because of some deranged scientist's hopes of finding a cure to a new illness or they sought to build a mindless army only they could control, I find I almost want to set the ship on a collision course with one of the core systems. Maybe then it would teach those fools to stop trying to defy the laws of nature.

I find myself seeking out the more bizarre and inexplicable encounters. A ship that has disappeared mysteriously only to return haunted by the evils of a chaotic dimension holds some fascination for me, because whatever twisted mind has come to possess the ship or its crew seems to fear me. When they see into my thoughts, they shrink and cower, almost as if I resemble their god. I feel compelled to learn more about this--to learn more about what I am becoming.

It was once said that we are a way for the cosmos to know itself. Perhaps one day I will move beyond this existence and I will understand the cosmos. Perhaps when I understand the cosmos, the cosmos will understand itself. Until then, I will stand as sentry between the boundaries of civilization and the terrifying, cruel, beautiful darkness of the universe. I will send the lost souls back home with a greater appreciation for their security with a warning to never return. I will send the old gods and monsters back to their hives and shadows with greater appreciation for what they have already consumed--also with a warning.

Neither deity nor mortal, I am what lies between. I am the mediator. I am the void. And the void cares not for the trappings of the core systems or the plots of demons. The void simply is.

I had to present an hour-long presentation of the history of bisexuality to the Supreme Court.

Cultists reveling at the presence of their god

もの久保

I haven't the slightest clue what's going on here but I'm a fan of the general unhinged energy

@lunarloafofbread

house under renovations

Initial Concept Sheet for the Resonants

[Popping this here as well, as the Kul’imi and the Resonants, two alien species from two different planets in the habitable zone of the same star, are gonna be the main ones I develop on this blog. So… more to come.]

One of the things that I Said Things About is getting traction from the gays and I'm just ┬┴┬┴┤(･_├┬┴┬┴ 'tis I, a Christian conservative

Maybe people wouldn't judge you if you weren't a fucking bigot lmao

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