#The diamondback explorers
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Round 2 - Match 3
The Postmen
(@patronsaintofdemons)
Consisting of Felix, Niki, Erik, Vanessa and Edward.
Who are They?
They are friends in a magical fatasy setting who met by chance and proceeded to become the most overpowered group imaginable (not that each of them weren't overpowered before on their own), invent immortality, save the world and basically become gods, all the while having time for character growth and shenanigans <3 Erik is a king and an artificer and later becomes the god of Death and Time and Certainty and he's sooo nice but at first sight he looks the most evil among them Vanessa is his right hand man and childhood friend. She's in charge of the kingdom's intelligence networks and later becomes the goddess of Art and Fire and Technology. Edward is the best magician in the kingdom and has been their friend for some time. He's also evil <3 but only a little bit <3 He did most of the research on immortality <3 he briefly gets exiled <3 He becomes the god of Magic and Knowledge Niki owns an overseas trading company And has connections to the black market And may or may not be a pirate ;) Both Vanessa and Edward knew and were friendly w her before the story, though both were unaware the other knew her. She's the goddess of Love and Feelings and also the Weather Felix is the main character in this <3 He's a rogue magician who used to be evil and comes to the kingdom to lay low for a bit. He gets involved in politics on accident and it's Edward's fault. Also he's friends with Niki it's important to me that they are absolute besties and often get mistaken for a couple. Oh yeah he's also the god of Life and Luck and Fate They are my absolute blorbos living in my brain rent-free I've had them for so long. Besides their main story they appear or at least are mentioned in most of my stories and also have several aus. I love them your honor.
The Diamondback Explorers
(@laikacore)
Consisting of Maud, Diamond and Liza.
Who are They?
They're a trio of friends who met at the end of their sophomore school year and rapidly became best friends. They took Diamond's gaudy yellow Jeep (fit with a rattlesnake painted on it), the Diamondback Explorer, and went on an impromptu road trip across Southern Ontario without telling their parents-- everyone found out from their social media updates. When the posts stopped, that's how their families found out they'd vanished into the strange world of Silent Woods, where they become caught up in an ancient conflict between the creatures of the forest and the cottage development company building on the shores of a magical lake and Maud is transformed into a mountain lion. The book they appear in is called We Lived Here Before You Came and it is pending publication to Laika's website.
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ok but do y'all NERDS have a racing/exploration Mamba????
the support hardpoints are literally just heat sinks this thing overheats so so much. also you can see the jumprange and speeds in this little beast. it's far from optimal i think but i've had this ship for 1 year??? and i never cared that much about Engineers so this is as good as it's gonna be for A While
this is a combat ship. it's the bastard sister to a very good combat ship. there is literally no reason to have her built like an exploration ship, yet here am i.
#elite dangerous#elite: dangerous#i love doing silly builds like this#its so practically useless when i have 1 dedicated anaconda#1 dedicated krait phantom#1 dedicated asp explorer#AND 1 dedicated python#just for exploration#(and i think 1 dedicated diamondback explorer but im not sure)
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Diamondback Explorer
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Pretty fungoida on an iceworld found in the inner scutum-centaurus arm at prooe hypue rn-s c20-1 abc 1 c
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"The Diamondback Hero"
Art for the TwinSwap AU fanfic "Pale Horseman" by @tragic-unpaired-electron
I took a couple liberties from the original design, mainly because I wanted to show off his prosthetics in much the same way Vash does in Stampede. I loved the recent chapter's exploration into this world's Gung-ho Gang-- the Diamondback Rangers! And while they are named in inspiration of the snake, Nai's bladed wings definitely invoke a 'diamond back'...hehee y'all know I love wings. I'm living my best life over here.
All seriousness this is probably the most involved pose I've done in recent memory... and it's not bad. I'm actually really proud of the product here.
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Commander's Log - Hutton Run
I'm making my second-ever trip to Hutton Orbital. For my first such flight, I used my reliable Diamondback Explorer, the HD-PL Johnny Guitar. After that success, I've decided to make an earnest effort to haul and sell as many Hutton Mugs as I can manage. To that end, among others, I've purchased and outfitted a Krait MK.II with what I hope is a fair balance of cargo space and other equipment for future endeavors. The result is the HD-EB Uranium Fever, a heavy-hauling, asteroid-mining, planet-landing pancake with 128 tons of cargo capacity.
And I'm about to fill that entire hold with Hutton Mugs.
Here's hoping I don't get interdicted too often.
o7 Commanders.
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Samaipata's rattlesnakes rise dramatically skyward in this low-angle photo. Rivulets of water trickle down the three diamondback rows from the ceremonial pool above. (International Explorers Society). From "Megagods: the mysterious giants of our past" by Jim Woodman, 1987. https://www.instagram.com/p/Cp8WIf8Nxo7/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
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Conspiracies and the Problem of Peggy Carter
I bounced really hard off the Captain Carter version of Peggy Carter. For me, it felt like the triumph of her style over any quality she had as a character. I’ve spoken about this before, but I think giving Peggy dementia robbed her of her voice, unable to speak to her past, and thus providing a blank canvas for the writer and audience to use with as they will.
My biggest critique of Peggy’s fans have been this sense that they love her aesthetic and the platitudes over the substance of the character. She became 2010s girlboss. The Agent Carter series did provide the potential to further explore her as a character. It could give her a past pre-dating Steve, show the history of SHIELD, show her as a leader, and delve into the moral complexities of the MCU intelligence side. But that never happened. The show was canceled after two seasons and all we had left was a very marketable aesthetic.
We have some vague notions of what she did during her time as director of SHIELD, but nothing substantial. Then Endgame happened, Chris Evans left for other projects, and the Russos, Markus and McFeely seemed to have scrambled for a way to write out Steve. Steve’s exit seemed like an afterthought at best. As a consequence, whatever lore Peggy had in the main MCU timeline got completely thrown out. This is because Steve Rogers is a heroic paragon and his designated love interest must be above reproach. She is little more than a sexy lamp and when Captain Carter got attention in the What If... series, well she’s even more marketable now!
The thing that gets me about Peggy’s haters is the level of reaching done to justify their dislike. I’ll get to some of my critiques on how Disney/Marvel Studios handle the espionage side of the MCU (not well). But stay with me here. I need to do some comic book history.
The MCU Peggy Carter is an amalgamation of a number of love interests Steve’s had over his publication run. Earth-616 Peggy is a retcon love interest. She was introduced in 1966 after Steve’s book was essentially rebooted. Captain America was popular during WWII, but the initial post-war years weren’t kind to superhero comics. Atlas Comics (who later rebranded as Marvel Comics in 1961) tried to rebrand Steve from a Nazi puncher to a Commie smasher that went over like a lead balloon. His book was canceled in 1954 and Stan Lee and Jack Kirby revived Steve in 1964. They came up with the “on ice” backstory we saw in the TFA. The 50s Cap was explained as having been a succession of other characters acting as Steve, such as Jeffrey Mace (Patriot), William Naslund (Spirit of ‘76), and most infamously by William Burnside.
Anyway, during the 50s, Bucky got shot and was replaced by Steve’s then girlfriend, Betsy Ross (then known as Betty and later goes by the code names Agent 13 and Golden Girl). She is THE original love interest and first appeared in Captain America Comics #1, published in December 1940, created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. She basically did everything in the 40s comics that Peggy in the 60s (and the MCU by extension) was said to have done. The reason you’ve never heard of her is because of Betty Ross Banner - The Hulk’s main love interest. 40s Betsy got retconned into a relationship with Jeffrey Mace (one of the guys who was a retconned 50s Cap) and now lives in a retirement home.
Sharon and Peggy Carter get introduced in 1966. Sharon’s got a complicated story that we don’t have time to unpack so I’ll just say, Sharon is messy and that’s good. I think it’s good that she’s the Power Broker. Steve later dated glass-blower turned lawyer Bernie Rosenthal, who was introduced in 1980. He’s had an on/off relationship with former villainess Rachel Leighton, aka Diamondback (who was introduced in 1985). And there were romances with fellow super heroines like The Black Widow, Wasp, Rogue, and The Scarlet Witch.
Now we move onto the conspiracy theory Peggy Carter haters adore: Cynthia Glass.
Cynthia “Cindy” Glass was created in 1991 by Fabian Nicieza and Kevin Maguir for The Adventures of Captain America #1 - #4. She had four total appearances before she was killed. There was apparently a guid book for the MCU where she was mentioned as an inspiration for MCU Peggy, but I’d like to see those receipts before I make a call on the veracity of the claim. But I can see why the Peggy haters claim her as the true inspiration of MCU Peggy. Cynthia kind of looks like Hayley Atwell (if you squint) and is revealed to be a Nazi double agent who gets shot.
Look, if you don’t like a character (and maybe their actor, too), it’s fine. Just don’t fuck with them and move on, don’t make up shit about a character being a secret Nazi when there’s no actual proof. And don’t say that Cynthia Glass was Cap’s first love when she was a clear retcon that completely contradicts previously established canon regarding Betsy Ross and Peggy Carter. Especially when anyone can look up the publication history. At most MCU Peggy kind of looks like Cynthia and met Steve just before he got the serum. The decision to keep Atwell’s brown hair could easily have come down to “she looks better as a brunette.” Film production decisions are often not that deep.
Peggy Carter was probably the most convenient love interest to adapt for TFA. She doesn’t have Betsy’s name problem. Sharon needs to be established as being Peggy’s niece to explain why they look so similar. You need to justify a face-turn for Rachel. And the only people who know about Cynthia Glass are those who read the original limited run she was in during the early 90s as it looks like it wasn’t collected into a trade paperback until 2018. Again, film production devisions are not often not that deep.
So now we get to my critiques of how Disney/Marvel Studios have handled Peggy and just the spy genre in general. Spy fiction can vary wildly in terms of tone and just how heroic the protagonist is, but generally the genre leans towards a cynical world view. This is fueled by the author’s own politics, and by their own experiences if they worked in intelligence themselves (ie: John le Carré and Graham Greene). The genre also borrows heavily from hardboiled detectives (think the works of Raymond Chandler) and film noir. In any case, the protagonist is, at best, an anti-hero and sometimes a terrible one. The nature of intelligence work requires moral compromises, both in and out of fiction. If you actually look into how that world operates, it’s honestly more like organized crime backed by a nation’s treasury and given the fig leaf of respectability because you’re “fighting for a cause.”
This runs headlong into the MCU retcons when it comes to Peggy. By making SHIELD older than originally implied and putting Peggy in charge during the early days, she now has a fuck ton of skeletons in her closet. The problem is that Disney will never produce anything that is critical of the US government or could be as cynical as the spy genre demands. Yes, there was Agents of SHIELD, but that show (and I say this with love) has more in common with NCIS than The Sandbaggers or Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Disney is too scared of biting the hand that feeds. They’re scared of getting cut off from Pentagon money. This is Disney’s lone fear, and it shows how toothless The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was. They just come up to the edge of valid critic, actually showing how the empire works.
Bringing this back to the problem Peggy, because the Russos, Markus and McFeely needed her to be morally pure so she could be Steve’s perfect love interest. She can’t have a past, red on her ledger, or anything that puts her into a compromised position. It’s probably why Steve goes back to 1949 and gets with Peggy before SHIELD really starts. That way, Peggy hasn’t done anything wrong. The audience is asked to forget about Zola and the HYDRA infiltration (though it’s never explained what she knew when). The Bucky situation is a bit different, and the Cynthia Glass conspiracy requires you to forget that in universe the Winter Soldier is treated as an urban legend within the intelligence community. Natasha brings up in TWS that no one can agree if he’s real. Given the few crumbs we have on Peggy’s tenure as director of SHIELD, the most I’m willing to say is that she might have know that the Winter Soldier was real. But with hindsight, I think the HYDRA infiltration was pulled off badly.
Like if I had my way, the Peggy Steve meets after he’s unfrozen would be played by an older actress like Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, or the late Diana Rigg. That way she can speak for herself in the present. If I had my way, Agent Carter would have lasted longer and Peggy would have become something along the lines of DC’s Amanda Waller mixed with Dench’s M with a dash of George Smiley’s moral grounding. We could get a more accurate understanding of Peggy and SHIELD and even if you still don’t like her, she’s still a character with actual depth. And maybe Captain Carter would just be a fun “what if...” and not a free mulligan.
Cause it really feels like Disney wants to wipe the slate clean and rewrite Peggy as a morally uncomplicated heroine who can be Steve’s un-problematic girlfriend.
#peggy carter#agent carter#mcu#marvel cinematic universe#marvel comics#dinsey#s.h.i.e.l.d.#agents of s.h.i.e.l.d.#the falcon and the winter soldier#the winter soldier#captain america#betsy ross#golden girl#sharon carter#bernie rosenthal#rachel leighton#cynthia glass#mcu meta#captain carter#i have a lot of problems with how peggy's been treated#also mcu steve sucks because they pulled too much from ulitmates
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A few things rattling around in my skull right now
First up, my credit balance is now over 400mil, and I'm really questioning how much that's actually worth given how quickly I got there.
Second, I'm still considering making the Megalodon shieldless, but I realised there's something I haven't considered. A fully loaded cargo rack will weigh more than a shield generator in the same slot. My brain's still fuzzy on how these things work, but that extra mass will effect my turn speed in supercruise, right? Making it harder to evade interdictions. Not a great trade-off if true.
Lastly, I'm thinking of buying an anaconda and outfitting it for exploration. The jump range won't be as ridiculous as a jumpaconda or anything, making it comfortable will weigh it down, but it should be a nice upgrade from the diamondback explorer. Once I've got that going on, maybe I'll take a trip to a nice nebula or something. At the very least, I could take the time to go and find some of the neat sights within the bubble that I've heard about but never actually been to. I heard a rumour there's a moon that looks like a ballsack.
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Name: Katherine “Kit” Clarke
Species: Vampire (previously spawn vampire)
Occupation: Unemployed
Age: 74 Years Old (Looks about 36)
Played By: Chayya
Face Claim: Ruth Negga
"A little party never killed nobody… Oh, wait. Never mind."
TW: Terminal illness (breast cancer), drug abuse
Don’t believe the tabloids, okay, Kit Clarke grew up in a perfectly normal household just south of Hoboken, New Jersey. Just them and their mom and their dad and the both of them were doctors, if you can believe it. Brain-numbingly normal. They wanted the best for Kit and were often able to provide. When they started to show a real aptitude and love for music, they took that into account with piano lessons, voice training, and a gorgeous acoustic guitar. Overall, the Clarke household was loving, if ambitious, and as long as they got good grades, Kit was able to pursue their own interests as well.
But they were, still, eventually, a teenager, and one with a fun-seeking edge. Growing up where they did, it wasn’t hard at all to sneak into the City. It was innocent, for the most part – exploring the city, watching the people and, of course, checking out the music venues. Any club that would let a kid so obviously underage come in was on Kit’s radar and they become a regular. And when they had open mics, well, how could they resist?
And that’s how Kit met Matty. He heard them sing in some crappy, hole-in-the-wall club that he had snuck out to and the rest is history. Or, at least, the rest is better left to be hashed out by VH1’s Behind the Music and MTV’s Where Are They Now?
Matty and Kit ran deep, quickly, and it wasn’t long before they were putting together a band. It was just smashing around, in those early days, just jamming and giggling and making dreamy-eyed plans. Kit’s parents Did Not Approve, but, hey, they were still keeping their grades up so they let it go. But then Kit told them that they were skipping out on college, that the band had actually landed some gigs and they wanted to make a real go of it. They may have had dreams of them becoming a doctor, like them, or something else stable and steady and normal, but Kit was eighteen by then and they done this to themselves in some sense. They raised Kit to be independent and ambitious and unapologetic and that’s how they ran off with the band.
And god, it was good. It was amazing. It was more than Kit ever could have imagined, traveling the country with this band that was easily becoming a second family. Making music and playing it and having people like it. Insane. And they got to do it all with their best friend. It was cosmic shit, what they were doing and they loved every second it (except maybe the fucking tabloids but, well, every rose, right?). It was a whirlwind boardwalk ride and through it all Kit wrote letters to their parents, sent them money even though they didn’t need it. They wrote back asking if they were okay, asking when they would be coming home next, tentatively trying to address the rumors they had read about drugs in the band.
And then Matty was turned and that sure was a trip. Kit was the one who found him, crazed and bloody and with no heartbeat in some alleyway. But just like everything else, they figured it out, together, as a band, as a family. And it turned out they all rocked through it. Diamondbacks charged on. And now they had proof they could outlast anything.
Until Kit’s diagnosis came in.
It was triple-negative and it had spread and they could try chemotherapy but their odds weren’t good. And then they tried the chemotherapy and it was awful, they’ve never felt so sick. They stopped the treatment, wanting to go home and die in peace. Except that wasn’t the plan at all because they had, shamefully, asked Matty to turn them and he agreed. Only it all went wrong.
Forty years of nothing. Forty years of just blood and cravings and hunger and instinct and hunting. Forty years of feed, feed, feed, with only the barest brush of comfort from Matty at the edges of their consciousness, in their bond.
Coming back was excruciating. Regaining their mind, regaining control and full consciousness. It all hurts and it’s all hard, even with Matty by their side.
Character Facts:
Personality: Fun-loving, friendly, compassionate, goofy, musical, ambitious, tempestuous, avoidant, wary
Happily responds to any pronouns but prefers “they” and “she.”
A founding member of The Diamondbacks with Matty, Kit was one of the key lyricists and bassists and would often lend a hand on vocals. They can also play guitar and keyboard well, but their instrumental prowess is nowhere near Matty’s virtuoso talent.
To the rest of the world, Kit died in 1983 from breast cancer. Only those in the band know what truly happened.
Yes, they still talk with a North Jersey accent, whadda ya gonna do aboudit?
They’ve technically not been around for the past 40 years or so there’s a lot for them to adjust to and learn. No one tell them about that other guy who’s singing in Van Halen.
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Round 1 - Match 6
Let's Introduce our Contestants-
80's World
(@plugandplaytimemachine, @eatsteas)
Consisting of Kory, Ezra, Lera and Raegan.
Who are they?
A group of teenagers growing up in (a rather idealized version of) 1980s America. One of them happens to be 1/4 alien on her mother’s side.
Diamondback Explorers
(@laikacore)
Consisting of Maud, Diamond and Liza.
Who are they?
They're a trio of friends who met at the end of their sophomore school year and rapidly became best friends. They took Diamond's gaudy yellow Jeep (fit with a rattlesnake painted on it), the Diamondback Explorer, and went on an impromptu road trip across Southern Ontario without telling their parents-- everyone found out from their social media updates. When the posts stopped, that's how their families found out they'd vanished into the strange world of Silent Woods, where they become caught up in an ancient conflict between the creatures of the forest and the cottage development company building on the shores of a magical lake and Maud is transformed into a mountain lion. The book they appear in is called We Lived Here Before You Came and it is pending publication to Laika's website.
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Latran, Lunar Teen Archaeologist
So my Ledaal Synne poll had "Weird Teen Crush*" win out and I figure mix it up with the second most polled result "Rival (Archaeologist)."
I'm picturing Latran as having grown up in the Scavenger Lands, her family involved in the scavenging of ruins and tombs and such. Latran worked through many traps and puzzles growing up, but the history and origins of these long-buried treasures intrigued her more than their value.
As a Lunar, she's focused on getting ancient relics and art out of Realm hands and preferably in the hands of whoever has the best claim of descent from the relics' creators. She's also not a fan of using them to further Silver Pact aims, although she' will relent on the matter. She's an assessor for Diamondback Slick's Diamond-Cast Consortium while he plies First Age Elders for their knowledge or lends her his distribution network.
On her own time, she likes to explore and study ruins and get a more complete knowledge of the history or cultural impact they have in the region. Sometimes, her hobby intersects with this other girl, Ledaal Synne, who is distressingly less interested in the history and import of majestic temples and buildings and more by the fact that they are radically altering the weather or driving the wildlife mad or poisoning local spirit courts. Synne's not wrong to be concerned, but one of these days she is going to destroy something irreplaceable. It's not all bad; Synne can converse about ancient ruins, and she and her adopted brother help root out scavenger lords. If things weren't so awkward between the two of them, it'd be nice to have someone close to her own age to share interests with.
Latrans is the species name of the coyote. I don't know what it is about archaeology that makes me go with scavenger animals (another historian Lunar I had was a vulture), but there it is.
*Considering I had 14 votes and only 2 Likes (one by a bot), I'm curious where the votes come from. Like, it's not unfeasible to me that polls get more user interaction than Likes, Reblogs or Replies, because it's an interaction that doesn't expose your account. It could also be bots.
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Appetite
Severen was not always as gluttonous as he now is. Roaming around the vastness of the southwestern US in the 1800’s meant he and Jesse had times of feast and times of famine. They got by with sharing the one person they could find camped out by a river, or gleefully indulging in a town left barren in their wake.
Sometimes he and Jesse hungered for days;
sick and starving, dragging themselves across barren plains.
He first got a taste for organ meats after resorting to sucking the blood out of them for every drop they could muster. Of the two of them, Severen was the only one who kept to indulging in the practice; Jesse fine with not making such a mess of things.
What encouraged Severen to become the non-stop eater he is, was simply the increased availability of prey.
As the human population grew, rationing was less of a concern. He could indulge, and while for Jesse this meant needing less, for Severen it meant taking more.
The rest of the family varies.
Diamondback and Mae, though with no hesitancy toward killing— even creatively— simply don’t have the vastness of Severen’s appetite. The only other member of the family who does is Homer; who might otherwise gladly give into the base urge of devouring humans whole, sees it as a dark remnant of his past and resists.
There are times when Severen can pull him into a gorge, but Homer does so very seldomly for fear of what it might bring back out of him.
The others are not too concerned with Severen’s insatiability. He sustains himself, and cleans up his tracks, keeping to the code they established long ago. Although Jesse may have a worry in the back of his mind that Severen could one day “go over the edge”, he knows that forced restraint could end up with Severen either getting worse vindictively, or simply carrying on behind his back.
Without his family around, Severen does get more reckless than he was. He keeps to the guidelines of the original pact, but explores greater, more exotic flavors, straying from humans to other supernatural beings. He never had a reticence to hunt the latter, but did not have much means of access; also too did he worry that he might call down something upon the lot of them.
With only himself to truly watch out for, and a dangerous knowledge that he is even hardier than he thought, Severen knows no bounds for his appetite.
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