inbabylontheywept

[inbabylontheywept]

you ever spend like, three months with an idea for a story in your head and you keep writing and rewriting it and you finally finish and you look at it and its kinda dog but the relief is like having a splinter out of your brain? its like 'finally, i can write about something else.'

[inbabylontheywept]

Feather Voices covered Part 1 of this series! I love their work, and they did a stellar job on this one. Give their channel some love if you like narrated short stories.

Party Favors: Part 1

The ambassador asked me if I wanted a party favor. I was tempted, but human minds were notoriously resilient. What might bend their mind into an amusing shape for an hour or two could break mine altogether.

I declined. The ambassador shrugged in a way that made it very clear that he considered it my loss, before dropping several spoonfuls of the substance into a specialized port on his exosuit. By default, the visor was dark enough one could barely make out the dark outline of the creature's bulbous skull, but as smoke started to trickle up into the dome, even that was lost. Where I should’ve seen an alien face, there was my own dim reflection, twisted by the curvature of the glass and the slow roil of smog.

“It is rare to receive guests,” it said in my voice. As if stealing my face wasn’t enough. It was an unsettling but common convention for humans to borrow the voice of whoever they were talking to. The generous view of this was that they enjoyed being mirrors. Personally, I’d always viewed them as a species afraid of being observed. It is hard, to see the mirror underneath a reflection.

“Do you want more?” I asked.

I couldn’t see its face, but I could tell it was exhaling by the way vortices formed in the smoke.

“Yes,” it replied. “But I know my limits.”

It then carefully pushed the remaining pouch of powder towards the center of the table. The question of whether it had been talking about guests, or its recreation, suddenly grew fuzzy.

I decided to assume the best and plowed forward.

“Our colony by outpost Battan. It’s-”

“Struggling,” it finished. There was a glint of white inside the smoke, a hint of exposed wet bone. Weeks of study informed me this was intended to set me at ease.

“Yes.”

“Bad neighbors?”

The question was posed innocently enough, but it gave away the entire story. Twenty years of guerilla strikes, of blood and coin andlost life summed up in two words. A pathetically small conflict, and yet, large enough that the humans knew of it.

I did not answer. I stood still and watched my own face stare back. Humans loved games. I did not want to play.

It matched me again. Always the mirror. Coy when I was coy. Serious when I was serious.

“Any requests for how they are handled?”

“No unnecessary bloodshed.”

It inhaled deep enough to clear the smoke from the dome. My reflection was interrupted, replaced with the form of the thing in the suit. The lines of the face were murky enough but what shone brightest through the glass were its eyes - perfect paper white spheres, slick and shining. It seemed wrong for something to look so earnest and so hungry.

“That is not what humans are for.”

I could not decide if it was agreeing to or denying my request. I looked into its eyes as long as I could, as long as I could still make them out through the haze drifting up through the neck slot. Only when they were well and truly gone did I take my glove off, and reach across the table. It gripped my hand, clenched around it hard, and then let it go suddenly. I’d been told this meant the deal was sealed.

I should have just left. But I was always too curious, so I asked my final question.

“Why us? Why not them?”

“Because you came to me first,” it replied, as if the answer was obvious. “And I was very bored.”

It showed me the door very soon after that. I had the presence of mind to avoid running until I made it out of the building.

#HFY #humans are space fae #writing

[inbabylontheywept]

I have a weird piece that I would like some alpha readers on. It's about 5k words, so it's a 15-30 minute read for most people. If you are interested, lemme know. If you are not interested, that's totally fair. thx <3

[inbabylontheywept]

Put the party hat on the horse demon to achieve Jungian synthesis.

[inbabylontheywept]

No, I think this makes sense. The list of people that have wanted me carnally is like, maybe fifteen people? Twenty? But the number of people who have wanted to throw me out a window is in the hundreds.

how tf does english have a word specifically for throwing someone out of a window but not to describe something being somehow adorable and hot at the same time

[inbabylontheywept]

I think there’s something very moving to the idea that Lovecraft wasn’t trying to frighten the world: He was just trying to show us what we looked like through his eyes.

[inbabylontheywept]

That’s about a 65% loss every year for 6 consecutive years. Even Musk only tanked twitter by 55% this year.

Imagine doing worse than twitter has done this year, for six consecutive years. I get why you guys call this a hellsite now.

[inbabylontheywept]

i would've fucked so hard as a court jester in ye olde i would've jangled my balls and done a little dance and sang my silly tunes i'd be so good at my job. alas i have to be on tumblr instead which is like a poor imitation of it

[inbabylontheywept]

i don't know what cybersins i committed for youtube to think i want to watch libertarian propaganda animations aimed at children but i will lick the fucking jesus crumbs off the shroud of turin if thats what it takes to get a blank slate again

[inbabylontheywept]

I have a little paperwork tray next to my computer, and my cat will set next to me and scream until I pick her up and her in the tray like a freshly submitted assignment.

She won't settle for food, or for pets, or for being in my lap. She specifically wants to be in the paperwork tray. There's a stapler there, and a charger, and a bunch of lumpy things that would be annoying to sit on, but she insists.

Really, the worst part is already over, which was figuring out what she wanted. I spent months getting yelled at before I figured out that she wanted to be filed. In my defense it's a pretty unusual request.

[inbabylontheywept]

So, there's this thing at the end of most radiation pulsers called a Blumlein, right? And it's this big transmission line that feeds into the cathode, which makes the radiation pulse. And I assumed it was, I dunno, a German thing? The radiation kind of blooms out, most of our charts of it spreading in the room can be interpreted to look at least a floral, and the piece is, generically, a specific kind of specialized transmission line.

But no, it's named after its creator, Alan Blumlein. Which is hilarious to me, because its like if there was a laser sword, and there was a part of the laser sword called the LazerHylt, and it served as the hilt of the sword, but it was actually named after its inventor, Alan LazerHylt.

My coworkers don't think it's as funny as I do, but I think it's hilarious.

[inbabylontheywept]

A Short Essay on Signal Reflections

The essay nobody asked for, but I've been reading about for around a week, and now can explain very easily and intuitively.

When electricity flows from a region with low impedance to a region with high impedance, a reflection of the signal passes back up the cable towards the source. This tends to make the most intuitive sense to people - after all, the high impedance region is easy to imagine as a traffic jam, and the ripple going up the line is just all the electrons having to slam their brakes. We've seen this before.

However, you get an identical ripple when going from a region with high impedance to a region with low impedance, which kind of mangles that analogy. You don't see traffic jams in regions where the speed limit goes up, just in places where it goes down.

And so for that, we're going to have to break the signal into two parts.

V=IR is bread and butter, but nobody accounts for those in time. Everyone does DC steady state analysis, and this is slightly weirder. So in a line with low impedance to high, you just look at how much V (voltage) you need to push the same amount of current (I). Since R is getting bigger, you now run out of voltage before you run out of current. So all the voltage gets used up, some of the current gets used up, and the current that no longer has enough voltage to get pushed forward can't enter the new material and thus bounces backwards up the line. The reverse happens with high to low. You now run out of current (I) before you run out of voltage (V) because R got smaller and energy must be conserved, so you get a voltage wave that bounces up the line. So any time R changes you have too much of either current or voltage and the extra gets sent back.

There are some weird implications to this! For example, a zero impedance ground would actually be hella noisy because it would accept 100% of the current into it, but reflect the entire voltage signal back. And an infinite impedance ground would eat the entire voltage field, but reflect 100% of the current back. An ideal ground for low noise needs to have the same impedance as the node its attached to.

#electrical engineering #engineering #signal reflection #noise reduction #a little science essay #V=IR can't explain the entire universe #but it can explain a decent amount if you can get clever with it #behold my day job

[inbabylontheywept]

TRANS COMMUNITY OF TUMBLR: Can you fill out a survey for my sister plz?

My older sister is a trans woman and she's like this close -> <- to getting her doctorate in psychology. Which is great for the world, but a tragedy for the world of professional older sisters, where she was a living legend.

You can help her with the last part of her thesis by filling out this survey. It's 30ish questions long, and it just asks about the circumstances and thoughts you had around coming out.

Link posted below in case the hyperlink chucks a wobbly.

https://redcap.midwestern.edu/surveys/?s=MNJMAYWMDK

#trans #surveys #my sister: the legend #shes great guys #like #easily the third biggest reason i did not spend my entire adolescence getting swirlies

[inbabylontheywept]

This is why I write scifi starring engineers. Now all my filler prompts are like “Character does something so cringey the reader’s asshole will pucker like it just licked a lemon” and then I just write whatever comes naturally to me. EZPZ.

The problem with being a writer is that when you're plotting it's like "and then the character does a moving dramatic speech right here which reveals all the information and turns the tide of public opinion" which is fine until you find that you suddenly have to write a moving dramatic speech capable of turning the tide of public opinion

"Then this character says something SO endearing and funny" fuck. I don't know how to be endearing or funny. Shit.

You never have this problem with action scenes. I don't have to be able to lift a broadsword.

[inbabylontheywept]

Hey Wonderful Transgender Folks!

My fabulous wife is leading a university study on Transgender Identity Disclosure as a part of her PhD program, and has designed an amazing survey for y’all to answer!

Here: https://redcap.midwestern.edu/surveys/?s=MNJMAYWMDK

It’s about 30 questions long, and asks about what influenced your coming out process and how it developed. Please fill it out and share it to spread it as much as possible!

Thank You So Much

[inbabylontheywept]

Hey Wonderful Transgender Folks!

My fabulous wife is leading a university study on Transgender Identity Disclosure as a part of her PhD program, and has designed an amazing survey for y’all to answer!

Here: https://redcap.midwestern.edu/surveys/?s=MNJMAYWMDK

It’s about 30 questions long, and asks about what influenced your coming out process and how it developed. Please fill it out and share it to spread it as much as possible!

Thank You So Much

[inbabylontheywept]

Hey Wonderful Transgender Folks!

My fabulous wife is leading a university study on Transgender Identity Disclosure as a part of her PhD program, and has designed an amazing survey for y’all to answer!

Here: https://redcap.midwestern.edu/surveys/?s=MNJMAYWMDK

It’s about 30 questions long, and asks about what influenced your coming out process and how it developed. Please fill it out and share it to spread it as much as possible!

Thank You So Much