#idle breakout

[prawnparachute]

Apparently cool maths games has in-game ads now. I cannot exit out of the upgrade bit on idle breakout without getting a ten second advertisement for golf clubs or some other deeply unrelated product. The world is indeed going to shit.

#cool maths games #idle breakout #i assume that's still the procrastination website of choice for school children

[salemruinseverything]

minecraft blorbo? call that baby a

#im so funy #salem's shitposting at midnight again #minecraft #mineblr #idle breakout

[uncertaininnit]

Going from experiencing 0 romantic attraction for months to FaceTiming both of the guys you like in the span of an hour is crazy like what happened why am I a simp⁉️

#Scrolling through the couple of ft pictures I took of both of them back and forth like oh no oh shit #Thing is one is obviously a better option than the other I just still like the other he’s special to me #The first guy is #17 and has never driven. He lives in a completely different state. He never texts me bc he doesn’t know how to start conversations #He currently sort of has a mullet bc he won’t get a haircut. We spent the whole FaceTime talking about idle breakout the game on coolmath #The other guy #is in all of my classes. He’s athletic and like well rounded in terms of school and other stuff and he doesn’t struggle with communicating #Today he 1. called me twice at different parts of the day just to pass the time by talking to me #2. Asked me what my perfect day would be but it had to be like doable and achievable #3. Then followed that by talking about the time he went rollerskating (part of my perfect day) and how it was fun and he’d try again #One of ‘em is. Clearly just better option for me in general. But the other one lives in my heart for some reason. #Bc he never contacts me he’s like the one that got away even though when I do call him he’s smiling and laughing and he isn’t away at all #We’re still friends #Like idk #Why am I crushposting ew #Personal

[imaginecolby]

minion makeover || c.b.

summary: when you decide to take part in a tiktok makeup trend, who else better to help than your boyfriend, colby.

requested by anonymous.

you had amassed yourself quite the following when it came to tiktok. you were a self taught makeup artist, and had a couple of looks that had gone semi viral and inspired recreations. you definitely didn’t expect the growth you’d received, but you appreciated it nonetheless.

your favorite part about tiktok was the way trends changed as fast as they did. and once something was trending, you knew you had to try it for yourself.

currently, the minions were trending. with the release of their new movie, it was to be expected. but you never thought you would take part in a trend they were at the center of.

the trend centered around videos of people tricking their siblings, mostly younger ones, into thinking that they were going to do a special make up look. as the videos went on, most of the unsuspecting victims had a face full of yellow, accompanied with goggles. you watched the videos and laughed for hours on end at the reactions.

after a couple of videos, you figured you’d take part. unfortunately, you didn’t have any siblings available for you to paint up, but you had the next best thing.

your wonderful, and a little clueless, boyfriend, colby brock. 

colby was always down to do anything with you. the only time he ever turned down any of your offers was when he himself had editing or filming to do. you approached him with an idea for a tiktok, and he was a little hesitant at first, but he ultimately agreed.

“what are we doing again?” he asked you as he sat down on the couch in his bedroom.

“i had an idea for a makeup look and i want to practice on you before i put it on myself.” you lied.

“and why can’t you practice on your own face?” he asked.

“because i have breakouts right now. and your skin is as perfect as ever.” you said with a smile. he watched you as you moved towards him on the couch, gathering your makeup bags before sitting down.

“fine.” he sighed. he always put on a front of disdain, but you knew he loved to get pampered.

you instructed him to close his eyes so he wouldn’t see any of the colors you were picking out. you prepped his skin with some moisturizer and a base foundation before getting to work. you picked out your biggest brush for maximum coverage. you had the perfect banana shade yellow to paint his face with and immediately got to work. as you painted his face, you made idle conversation, trying to keep colby’s mind off of what you were doing. as you finished coloring his face, you grabbed a smaller brush and dipped it in a black color to draw on the goggles. 

“babe, sit still.” you laughed. “i don’t wanna poke you in the eye.”

“i’m sorry. my nose is itching.” he said, picking his hand up and reaching towards his face.

“no! don’t touch, you’re gonna mess it up.” you quickly swatted his hand away before he reached his nose.

“sheesh, sorry.” he laughed. you tapped the tip of his nose to scratch it for him, and he whispered a quick thank you. he closed his eyes again and you watched as his body relaxed while you finished his makeup. 

“okay, i think you’re all done.” you smiled, connecting the ear pieces to the round circles that lined his eyes. you had your phone in hand, recording him as you handed him the mirror.

“oh, what the hell!” he laughed. “that is not what i was expecting.” 

“what? i think you look cute!” you laughed. as soon as he saw his face, he knew what was happening. he’d seen the tiktoks as well, and he just kept on laughing.

“i was wondering why it felt like you were just painting my face. now, i get it.” he said, wiping tears from his eyes.

“do you like it?” you asked.

“i love it.” he joked. you were glad that he was just laughing it off. you loved that he was always willing to be goofy with you. 

“thank you for playing along with this.” you laughed as he leaned forward to press a kiss to your lips. 

“always.” he said, kissing you again.

“alright, let’s get you cleaned up. i don’t want your face to stain yellow.” you said, pulling him up from the couch. you pushed him off to the bathroom and helped him get cleaned up.

once all the paint was removed, you put some more moisturizer on his face, making sure that he didn’t get too dried out.

later that night, you were down in the living room with katrina and sam, hanging out and watching tv. after a little while, you watched as sam studied colby’s face, knowing that something was off. he just wasn’t quite sure what it was.

“why are you staring at me like that?” colby asked once he finally caught glimpse of sam looking at him.

“what’s wrong with your skin? why do you look yellow? are you okay?” he asked.

you and colby exchanged a look and immediately started laughing.

“you’ll see on tiktok later.” he laughed, wrapping his arm around your shoulders.

#colby brock #colby brock imagine #colby brock fanfic #colby brock fanfiction

[mantisgodsdomain]

Can you tell more about ZB-162 please? It is sorting signals in my brain

...we have a 2.8k fic covering it WIP and scheduled to release by the end of February, if it counts?

We've posted it once or twice before (most notably in the dating poll), but ZB-162 is, functionally, the communications bug of the Snakemouth Den colony. Although its body is of a bee, it doesn't really consider itself to be one anymore - it considers itself to be a cordyceps symbiote that simply happens to inhabit a bee shell, and its former life to have very little impact on it. It is ZB-162, it was named as such pretty much the moment the cordyceps took, and it never really looked back.

Although not one of the first cordyceps to be made (it is, specifically, the 162nd zombee to be created in Snakemouth Den), it was one of the first to be successfully linked in a communication network. It's an "older" colony member due to having been in active communication since close to the beginning of the colony, and is the bug who both engineered most of the communication system in Snakemouth

It is possessed of a handful of Very Specific Traits - it cannot bring itself to stay idle, unable to sit still when there is anything it can do. This prevents it from hibernating, as much of the Snakemouth Den colony did during the time the lab was sealed. It has been up (and working on communications) more or less nonstop since it was connected, and is unlikely to stop any time soon - it prefers upkeep and busywork to any more active jobs.

Due to being more or less constantly active, it's basically always fiddling with things - it keeps the communication network functional throughout the cordyceps colony, which mostly means maintaining relays and keeping conversation threads separate, preventing colony members from "overhearing" private conversations or accessing information or threads of thought they'd rather keep private.

It has more or less unlimited access to the Snakemouth Den computers, having linked itself up to them while the roaches were still alive - it has access to more or less all of the files and controls for the lab, though it's VERY limited on what it can do with them. The main power source for the lab got taken out during the cordyceps breakout, and it's basically limited to what can be done on emergency power - and it completely lacks enough power to actually open the main doors, after they were sealed.

It runs a good amount of its programming through Kjdrira, since they have more processing power and storage space on their crystals, but it still hears a good chunk of the conversations around Snakemouth Den. A good chunk of its colonymembers are very disappointed by the fact that it isn't more gossipy, but the hivemind setup that Snakemouth's cordyceps have set up means that most things eventually get put into circulation, anyways.

It's been active longer than most of the other cordyceps combined, and has gotten a bit... jaded, during the time. You can only do so much, when you have a hundred years awake. Things seep in through the cracks. It's got no desire to be a bug anymore - it was terrible at that, anyways - but sometimes it wonders if this is any better, or if it's just caught in a different cage. It's a bit more positive once the lab gets unsealed, but it... doesn't really leave, regardless. It's spent a whole working on the lab systems. It's not really the kind of bug who would abandon its work for that.

Functionally, it's just one of those "we uploaded a human mind into the system to make this AI" setups, but it's still fully capable of not being an AI and simply returning to the human technician body that it occasionally uses to spruce up its own systems it just has no desire to do that because as far as it's concerned it's more AI than human in the first place and the body attached is mostly something that it can use to fix its cabling so it can go back to being an AI.

#asks #bug fables spoilers #leif's request spoilers #ocs #zb-162 #it's not very much of a person #it's happier that way honestly #some of the other cordyceps in its colony would probably try and protest on that but theyve hung around it for a solid century #and theyve accepted by now that they arent really gonna change its mind #theyll still argue for the sake of arguing though. it would get pulled into shit like mandatory movie nights if it were an option #it spends a whole lot of time working for the sake of working and figuring out roach programming #and personality-wise it's really just like if the single most stereotypically unemotional and unfeeling Tech Guy you knew #got the option to become a Brain In A Jar type thing and program 24/7 for the rest of their life and then just kinda Did That #its not terribly social it just runs the communication network

[patron-minette]

My favourite thing about the La Force prison break is that we get this off-hand line dropped on us about Montparnasse that just perfectly conveys his idle nature.

It makes me laugh that despite not being imprisoned, Montparnasse still does nothing to contribute to the breakout of his Patron-Minette comrades. It is Brujon that coordinates the entire escape, and there is no “help” from the outside at all from Montparnasse. Hell, Montparnasse doesn’t even help scout out the rue Plumet (which is yet ANOTHER impressive plot that Brujon coordinates whilst in prison) — Magnon decides to wait and gives Brujon’s note to Éponine literally the minute that she is freed from Les Madelonnettes instead of getting Montparnasse to help with that task.

The only character that Montparnasse kind of helps bust out of La Force is Thénardier… which is objectively hilarious because whilst he offers absolutely NO help to Brujon, Babet, or Gueulemer, he retorts that ‘you don’t leave you friends in the lurch’ when they want to abandon their search for Thénardier. But even then, all Montparnasse does to help is recruit Gavroche, who is then made to do the difficult and dangerous job.

And while, yes, Montparnasse still technically does show up— that’s likely only because he bumped into Babet (who had escaped in the morning, before Brujon and Gueulemer) that same day, we know that they came along together to La Force, so it’s not like Montparnasse showed up independently.

Hilarious to think that whilst Brujon was working his arse off in solitary plotting his escape, creating his own rope, and passing secret notes to Babet— Montparnasse was just slinking around Paris without a care in the world (apart from when he encounters Valjean and gets lectured on being a criminal and a layabout) with no intentions of helping any of the Patron-Minette escape prison.

#montparnasse #la force #patron minette #patron-minette #les miserables #les mis #you know what’s even funnier? #the fact that Claquesous doesn’t appear once in this prison break sequence #and it’s never addressed by anyone?? #maybe I should give Montparnasse more credit because at least he was there #quotes

[denimbex1986]

'In some ways, Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s biggest non-superhero movie, was a product of the pandemic. Until the winter of 2020, the director had been loyal to Warner Bros., and their logo was to be found on every film that Nolan either wrote, directed or produced.

While he was never formally tethered to that studio, Nolan had been monogamous as its cornerstone tentpole filmmaker, ever since his 1999 breakout indie film Memento led him to create Insomnia there.

That year, however, everything changed. The usually mild-mannered director was outraged by the decision of former WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar to perpetrate a blindside dumping of the studio’s entire slate onto its HBO Max streaming service. This attempt to build subscribers for its streaming service at a time few were going to theaters incensed Nolan and many others. The filmmaker was still wounded by the studio’s decision to release Tenet while the world had yet to fully emerge from lockdown.

In fact, he didn’t even have a film in the bunch being dumped, but he was nevertheless upset to see films made for the big screen — like Dune, The Matrix Resurrections, Wonder Woman 1984 and future Oscar-winner King Richard — drop day and date. As much a warrior for the traditional theatrical experience as Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, Nolan decided he would look elsewhere; no idle threat when you consider that the movies he directed there grossed north of $6 billion (more when you consider the DC films he produced or godfathered).

When Deadline revealed that Nolan would make Oppenheimer, and that Cillian Murphy — still riding high on the success of showrunner Steven Knight’s period gangster series Peaky Blinders — would likely play the title role, the news landed like a bombshell. Every studio responded by chasing it, and there were rumors that Warner Bros. might not even get a meeting. The lucky winner was Donna Langley, NBCUniversal Studio Group Chairman, who, like several other studios, agreed to Nolan’s ask for $100 million to make his movie, along with creative control and a massive global theatrical release.

“I’d wanted to be in business with Chris for a long time,” she says, “and he was always near the top of my blue-sky wishlist of directors. Just as movie fans, whose movies do we love? Chris’s name was always close to the top of that. And from a strategic standpoint, as we were coming out of the pandemic, it was very clear to us that the cinematic experience needed to be undeniable in order to get people back into movie theaters. Chris’s work is undeniably cinematic. He makes films for the audience to see in the movie theater. And so that became a strategic imperative for us.”

Her determination to land the project increased when she read the script. Juggling multiple timeframes, Oppenheimer explains how the work done by scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer in the early 1940s — the top-secret Manhattan Project, based in Los Alamos — led to the creation of the atomic bomb and the end of the Second World War. It also deals with Oppenheimer’s guilt, and how the American establishment turned on him once he’d served his purpose.

In there were two career roles, one for Irish actor Murphy as Oppenheimer, and another for Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, the bureaucrat nominated to be Eisenhower’s Secretary of Commerce. Strauss was so insecure about being snubbed by Oppenheimer, Einstein and other geniuses while a member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission that he would try to play silent assassin to Oppenheimer’s reputation by staging a controversial hearing to revoke his security clearance and render him a pariah.

“I was just transported by it,” Langley says. “I was so relieved that it wasn’t a mind-bending, twisty-turny, science fiction extravaganza that I needed an encyclopedia to understand. This was a story about a living person and a moment of time and history. It’s one of the best screenplays I’ve read in my career.”

It was a script with all the trappings of a Christopher Nolan movie — shifting timeframes, complex characters — and it had an emotional core that struck Langley deeply. “It’s very intimate on the one hand, but it also has a giant scope,” she notes. “The world is on the point of collapse, there’s technology and innovation being chased after by multiple countries, and America has to be first in the race to get there. At the time, being deep into the Ukraine war, I was really struck by how resonant and relevant the story was. And as Chris put it to me, ‘This is the greatest American story never told in cinema.’”

Kilar is long gone now, and Warner Bros. is a more theatrical-friendly place, as theatrical has become the priority for event films once again. Nolan won’t say whether this was a one-time fling, but it is hard to deny he saved his best film for Universal. Unusually for a three-hour, non-franchise film released in July, it has made a near-billion-dollar gross, won seven awards at the BAFTAs (including Best Film and Best Director), and is widely believed to be the Oscar favorite, receiving 13 Oscar nominations that put the film in the frame for the same key categories, while recognizing Murphy, Downey Jr. and Emily Blunt for their work in the acting categories.

Nolan vividly remembers the time first he ever saw Murphy: it was a photograph in a newspaper, probably the San Francisco Chronicle. The director was staying in a hotel in the Bay Area, writing and rewriting the script for Batman Begins, while at the same time scheduling screen tests for the lead role. At the time, he didn’t know who was going to play Batman. He was, he says, “just looking to see who was out there.”

What caught his eye was an image from Danny Boyle’s apocalyptic zombie thriller 28 Days Later: though Murphy was covered in blood, the actor’s bright blue eyes provided stark contrast to the bleakness of a new reality spent eluding flesh-eaters. “It was a cool photo,” says Nolan, turning to Murphy. “You could see your eyes, and your presence. I was just very struck by it.”

“Had you seen the movie then?” asks Murphy.

“No,” says Nolan. “I literally just saw a picture. I then watched the movie, but the truth is, I already was interested. These things are very instinctive, and that’s the relationship that an audience has with an actor as well. It’s an instinctive and instant connection. So, yeah, love at first sight. I see the picture and I’m like, ‘Man, that guy’s got something.’”

Nolan invited him to LA for a meeting. They met, connected, and suddenly Murphy was on the Caped Crusader shortlist of actors Nolan tested for the role that ultimately went to Christian Bale. “But I think at the time you were quite a bit… more slight than you are now,” recalls Nolan. “You walked in, and I remember thinking, ‘Are you really going to be able to be Batman?’”

Still, Nolan was interested to see what Murphy was capable of, shooting a screentest with the actor reading some of Bruce Wayne’s scenes. He shot them in 35mm on a Warners soundstage with full, professional lighting — “Because I really wanted the studio to really be able to see what this was going to be” — and the results surprised him. “I just remember a sort of ripple of excitement going through the crew,” he says. “Hollywood crews, particularly, they’re very professional, but quite jaded. They’ve seen a lot of stuff, so you don’t often get that kind of thing where you feel everyone is paying attention.”

Murphy wasn’t expecting to get the part. “I remember knowing it was a test,” he says. “From my point of view, I was already a fan of Chris’s work and I just wanted to get in the room and audition. That would have been enough. I was totally content at that stage of my career just to say, ‘Oh man, I was in a room with Christopher Nolan, and we worked on some scenes.’ And then he called me out of the blue. I did not expect him to say, ‘Well, how about this other part?’”

That other part was the film’s main villain, the Scarecrow, which marked a significant shift in the Batman franchise. “I don’t remember having any resistance whatsoever to having a relative unknown take on a big part like that,” Nolan says. “And previously all those villains were played by actors like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jack Nicholson. They were the biggest stars in the films. But no, [the studio] got it. They were all blown away by the test.”

So, what made him right for the villain but not Batman? “I don’t think he had the physicality at the time,” says Nolan. “We tested everyone as Bruce Wayne and we tested them as Batman, and the thing that Christian had that was so striking was that he understood that so much of acting is about reality. So much of acting is about emotional truth. And when you put on a costume like the Batsuit, you have to become this icon. Christian had this crazy energy that he just directed. He’d figured out how that worked and what that would be — the way Bruce Wayne does in the film. He adopts this persona. It’s a very specific thing. And he tore a hole on the screen as Batman. It was like, there was no question.”

Nolan turns to Murphy. “But it was interesting watching Peaky Blinders years later and seeing you play Tommy Shelby,” he says. “Whatever it is we’re talking about here, you’d figured it out. That’s an iconic character with an oppressive presence, where he walks into the room, and everything goes quiet, and he owns that space. In the way Batman does, or an iconic character of that kind. There’s a physicality that’s extremely confident and strong in everything he does, in every gesture.” He pauses. “Is that a conscious thing you’ve developed over the years, or was it just looking at that part and thinking, ‘How do I do that?’”

“I think it was both,” says Murphy. “But I also think I felt, back then, that that was a part I hadn’t really explored before, that kind of physically imposing character. I’d never been offered those parts. But I always think, Chris, that one of your underrated strengths is casting. Everyone knows all of your amazing strengths, but you cast things exquisitely. And I think the Scarecrow was the right part for me to be in at that time in my career.”

So, what makes an actor right for the type of role he was wrong for earlier? “I’ll tell you a story,” says Nolan. “I was talking to one of the crew, Nathan Crowley, who designed the Batman films. He told me he had seen Peaky Blinders. I hadn’t. And he said to me, ‘Yeah, Cillian put on all this weight for the part. He’s big.’ I watch it, and I’m like, ‘That’s not what it is, it’s not that.’ I mean, maybe he did put some bulk on, maybe he’s just getting older and more filled out. But that’s not what I saw. I was like, ‘No, this is physically the same guy, but he is using his gift, his instrument, to project scale in a way that I hadn’t seen before.’”

While it took him time to summon that presence, Murphy agrees that it had more to do with craft than physical bulk. “When I was a kid, about 16, I had the great privilege of seeing Jonathan Pryce play Macbeth at the National Theatre in London,” he says. “I had only seen him in films like Brazil, and he was a fairly slight guy. I watched him in real life play this huge role and he just seemed like this enormous force. It was about projecting.”

“I don’t know how you do that,” says Nolan. “And it’s probably something you don’t like to be too self-conscious about, but what I saw you do, what Tommy showed me, that’s what I saw, was an ability to transcend your own physicality, your body, and work beyond that and make people see this character in a different way. I mean, that’s the gift of great actors. And I don’t know how it works, but I’ve seen it.”

“I don’t know what it is either,” says Murphy.

Whatever that elusive quality was, Nolan knew he needed it to tell the story of Robert Oppenheimer. From his feature-length debut, the sleight-of-hand thriller Memento, to the Dark Knight Trilogy, and the boundary-bending likes of Inception, Interstellar and Tenet, Nolan has always been unafraid to tackle ambitious and complex narratives. But framing Oppenheimer’s story was to be the biggest challenge of his career.

Nolan grew up in the U.K. in the 1980s, during the Cold War and the continued concern over the danger of the arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. His curiosity about Oppenheimer began with a lyric in Sting’s 1985 song “Russians”, in the which the singer asks, “How can I save my little boy from Oppenheimer’s deadly toy?”

“I’m a little older than Cillian here, but he probably remembers growing up in the U.K. in the ’80s,” says Nolan. “It was a time of great fear of nuclear weapons. I talked to Steven Spielberg about this. It was like growing up in the ’60s, with the Cuban missile crisis. The ’80s were a very similar thing. There were protests, and there was a lot in the pop culture about nuclear weapons. But it was Sting’s song ‘Russians’ where I first heard Oppenheimer’s name, and there was this very palpable fear of nuclear Armageddon.”

The 2005 book American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin, captured Nolan’s interest further (in Greek mythology, Prometheus defied the Olympian gods by giving man the gift of fire). “It was after reading American Prometheus that I started to see a way in which you could tell this as a story, by taking on Oppenheimer and seeing it really from his point of view. And everything else followed after that. With something like the fear of nuclear weapons, you have to have a human way into that, and, for me, that was Oppenheimer.”

What struck Nolan in reading the book was hearing that Oppenheimer and his brother would go to Los Alamos as children to camp. “The connection between Los Alamos and the nuclear weapon he was developing, that comes from Oppenheimer’s childhood,” he notes. “He wanted to combine his interest in New Mexico — playing cowboy like he did, that love of the outdoors — with physics, and that’s what he did with the Manhattan Project.”

More so than the propulsive elements of the story, that the Americans were in a race against time to beat the Nazis, it was that element that convinced Nolan he, indeed, had a movie. “Once I’d read that, that’s where I started to see a personal connection,” he says. “And once you have the personal, then you start looking at the events, this thriller aspect to it that just kept coming in with everything that happened to Oppenheimer after 1945. It was a bunch of different things coming together.”

Indeed, Oppenheimer was later subjected to a politically charged tribunal that stripped his security clearance and rendered him a pariah, adding to his burden of having unleashed a weapon that, in the wrong hands, could destroy the world and had already cost over 100,000 lives when the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end WWII.

“American Prometheus is such a remarkable book,” Nolan muses. “Martin Sherwin worked on it for 20 years before Kai Bird joined. They did another five years. It’s a quarter of a century of research and interviews. I got the benefit of that, which was wonderful.”

Key to the story’s attraction was Oppenheimer himself, and Nolan was determined to unravel the scientist’s enigma. We’ve seen depictions of the fragility of genius in films like Shine, A Beautiful Mind, even Good Will Hunting, and how the brightest intellects can come unstuck. But Oppenheimer seemed to enjoy his post-WWII fame on the covers on Time and Life magazines, and in speeches. Was he a narcissist or a hero?

“I think he was definitely a hero, definitely a narcissist,” Nolan concludes. “He was a lot of different things. Very theatrical. What I got from American Prometheus, and what I started to get interested in is, he was someone who had a lot of neurosis and a lot of trouble very early in life, as he came of age at the same time that he was wrestling with these incredibly abstract concepts. We tried to fuse those things, show this kind of energy inside him and show how he masters that. And all the imagery of atoms and splitting atoms to me, they’re very related to his internal state, as a young man in particular. There’s a lot of dangerous tension inside this guy. A lot of dangerous mental energy.”

Murphy proved to be a strong physical match for Robert Oppenheimer; his handsome looks lent themselves to the theoretical physicist’s status as a womanizer, and those blue eyes were an ideal cipher for the wildness of those early scholarly years, when Oppenheimer was trying to harness his genius. All this came as a surprise to Murphy, back when Deadline revealed that Oppenheimer was Nolan’s next secret project and that he wanted Murphy to be number one on his call sheet, after five other movies with the director.

“I tried to ignore your story because I hadn’t heard from Chris or Emma [Thomas, Nolan’s partner and producer],” Murphy says. “It came out, everyone was texting me, and I said, ‘No, there must be some sort of mistake,’ or, ‘It’s just a rumor,’ because I hadn’t heard from those guys. A day or two later, Chris called me. This was out of the blue. Because Chris doesn’t write the script with actors in mind, which, when you think about it, is really, really smart because he doesn’t put any limitation on himself as a writer, or on the actor. So, it came out of the blue, and in the best way possible because I was unemployed. I hadn’t any work lined up.”

“It was perfect timing,” says Nolan. “He could have easily said, ‘Well, I’ve got a thing…’”

Murphy remembers that he had just finished up work on Peaky Blinders. “Bear in mind I said yes before I read the script,” he says, “because I always do that with Chris.”

Then it was Nolan’s turn to sweat, when he showed Murphy the script. “I said, ‘How about it?’ After Cillian said he was in, I flew to Dublin, and he came to my hotel and sat and read the script. I went off to the Hugh Lane Gallery and looked at Francis Bacon’s Studio, which I’d always wanted to see. And then we came back, and we had a chat about it. I remember doing this with Heath [Ledger] on The Dark Knight. He’d signed up for it, and then I showed him the script. There’s that moment of, like, ‘Are you going to feel good about that commitment?’”

He turns to Murphy. “But you seemed very into the script. You seemed very… I wouldn’t say relieved, I’d say you seemed excited.”

At this, Murphy breaks into a big smile. “It was one of the greatest scripts I’d ever read,” he says. “It was just astounding. But I knew it was huge. I knew this wasn’t just a part you could turn up at next week and get going. I was immediately going, ‘All right, f*ck, f*ck, f*ck. I’ve got to do all of this. This is huge.’ And, in fact, I was already working, getting going before I read the script. I knew I just had to go at it meticulously and make a strategy to go at it because there was just so much to do, emotionally, physically and intellectually.”

Murphy did more than just try on Oppenheimer’s signature hat. “I immediately started reducing calories,” he says, “which was a stupid thing to do, like, six months away from shooting. But I wanted to start feeling like him. I watched all the historical materials. I read the book, obviously. I started looking at all his lectures online. Any other stuff that was around. All the accounts from people that knew him were really, really interesting to me. Talking to [physicist] Kip Thorne, who was the scientific advisor on it. He had been lectured by Oppenheimer, which was really, really useful.”

Nolan interrupts. “That was a good thing,” he says, “because I’ve done a couple films with Kip; Interstellar was Kip’s original idea. I’d called him because I needed his help on the whole quantum physics thing. And in the course of the conversation, I realized that when he was at Princeton, he’d attended Oppenheimer’s lectures at the IAS. So immediately I was like, ‘Well, will you get on the phone with Cillian and talk to him about how he taught?’

Those testimonials helped Oppenheimer capture gestures and mannerisms that most of the audience for the film wouldn’t register.”

Says Murphy, “Kip talked about how Oppenheimer held his pipe on stage, and how he had the cigarette in one hand and the chalk in the other hand; We talked about how he was very aware of his presence, his legend, and his theatricality, all of that stuff.”

“I remember you telling me after you spoke to Kip, and we incorporated it into the staging as well,” says Nolan, “that Oppenheimer would let people talk. He was very good at summarizing a discussion. Which I think became absolutely key to the whole, to all of the Manhattan Project scenes.”

“He was an excellent synthesizer and manager,” Murphy agrees. “He didn’t seem the obvious choice for it, but he was.”

Together, Nolan and Murphy found the physical style for the lanky Oppenheimer, and one of the style influences was David Bowie, circa 1976. “Everything about him was constructed,” says Nolan. “Oppenheimer constructed his entire persona, his entire self. That’s why I threw the David Bowie photographs at you, Cillian. This was the Thin White Duke era. David Bowie has these crazy high-waisted trousers that were very, very similar in proportion to what Oppenheimer would wear at the end of Los Alamos. Bowie was always the ultimate self-constructed pop icon, and I think Oppenheimer was similar, in his own way. Obviously, it’s a completely different world, but he used his persona to achieve a mass of things.”

Murphy, who started out with the intention of a music career until he turned down a record deal and chose the acting life, sparked to the influence. “When Chris sent me that, I printed that picture out and I put it on my script,” Murphy says. “He sent it to me with no context, and I knew exactly what he meant, because I’m a music nerd and I could see the crossover. So, it was there in the back of my script for the whole shoot.”

More important, however, was getting Murphy ready for the emotional toll that playing Oppenheimer would bring, particularly after his triumph in Los Alamos. History hasn’t been kind to war heroes, as was seen when British mathematician/computer scientist Alan Turing cracked the Nazi enigma machine code — a breakthrough that shortened the Second World War — only to be punished for his homosexuality, which was illegal at the time. Similarly, Oppenheimer became a punching bag in a politically charged kangaroo court.

“I’m plagued by a line from The Dark Knight, and I’m plagued by it because I didn’t write it,” says Nolan. “My brother [Jonathan] wrote it. It kills me, because it’s the line that most resonates. And at the time, I didn’t even understand it. He says, ‘You either die a hero or you live long enough to become the villain.’ I read it in his draft, and I was like, ‘All right, I’ll keep it in there, but I don’t really know what it means. Is that really a thing?’ And then, over the years since that film’s come out, it just seems truer and truer. In this story, it’s absolutely that. Build them up, tear them down. It’s the way we treat people.”

Murphy believes that the security of 20 years working together emboldened him. “If you don’t have that history, or that level of trust, with a filmmaker,” he says, “I don’t know if you can be as brave or can dive in like I was able to on this one.”

Nolan has his own theory. “Maybe I’m wrong,” he says to Murphy, “but I feel like, after finishing Peaky Blinders, you were in a peculiar place in your career, because you’d been playing the same character for a lot of years. Very, very well with massive success, creative success and artistic success, and also people recognizing the success. You must have felt very comfortable in that character. Steven Knight’s writing is beautiful, and is always challenging the character, but it’s still a second skin that you’d developed that you were slipping into. But then you’re moving to an arena where all that’s gone. This was a true ‘out of the hot tub and into the cold plunge’ moment.”

Nolan appreciated the effort it took. “For me, particularly with such a big cast, Cillian was the element I was able to completely take for granted,” he says, “to the point where on Downey’s last day, he came up to me and said, ‘Do you understand how hard this guy is working for you?’ It was towards the end of the shoot. He was like, ‘He’s exhausted.’

And I said, ‘Thanks, Robert, he’ll be fine.’ And he was fine. But the point was taken that, yeah, I was able to take what he was doing on set for granted because I knew how great the work was. But the reality is, I didn’t realize the magnitude of the performance until I put it together in the edit suite. This is true, I think, of all great performances; you see what you see on set. But then, in the edit, you actually see it the way the actor has performed it. Even though you have been shooting in a crazy order, he’s figured out how all these pieces go together, and then you start to see it come together. It’s a really pretty magical thing.”

One of the first filmmakers Nolan showed the film to said something that really stuck with him. “There’s never that moment where you see the actor realize how great the part is,” he recalls this director telling him. Nolan knew exactly what he was talking about. “Because that’s the thing,” he says. “Particularly with serious movies, or when an actor has a great opportunity, you see them enjoying the taste of it a little too much. There’s always that moment. And that is not in this performance. This performance is totally pure. To me, this performance is much more about the real world, the way people are flawed, continuously flawed. There’s not one little thing they do wrong — we’re all good and bad, and there are layers of that. Oppenheimer is the absolute essence of that. The performance embraces that and carries the audience. But if the performance didn’t unselfconsciously embrace that, it wouldn’t work at all.”

Murphy is flattered. “It’s the nicest thing you could say,” he smiles. “But for me, I remember when I was doing it, if at any point I ever felt, I don’t know, anxious or insecure, I would always think, ‘No, Chris has seen something in me, and he’s drawing something in me out that I didn’t know was there really before.’ And I remember saying to him before we started shooting — because he’s always really pushed me in the best way, and he pushes all his performers in the best way — ‘Push me as hard as you possibly can on this one,’ because I knew we had to do that.”

The payoff comes in the ending, when the audience learns what Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) actually says to Oppenheimer. Strauss looks on, but Einstein walks past and ignores him. That Strauss was insecure and petty enough to believe their chat was about him, instead of being an intimate moment between geniuses who each bore the burden of creating weapons of mass destruction that pulled the world into a dangerous new age, is… Well, let Murphy describe it.

“I’m all about third acts and endings,” he says, “and when I read the script, that time in Dublin, knowing that’s one thing Chris always nails, I remember thinking, ‘What a f*cking ending.’ It’s extraordinary. And that’s from Chris’s imagination. It’s not from history, but it’s just genius. You can write an extraordinary script, but you can write yourself into a corner and the audience feels shortchanged if you don’t nail the f*cking ending.”

Says Nolan: “We talked very carefully about the moment where Kitty [Emily Blunt] says, ‘Did you think if you let them tar and feather you the world would forgive you? It won’t.’ I love the way Cillian performs in that moment, it was so important to me that it hit this exact note. And I didn’t know what that exact note was. I just knew that I’d know it when we hit it, because it needed to be sort of self-conscious in a slightly more open way.

“In the rest of the film, everything Oppenheimer does that’s a little bit vain or a little bit self-conscious, it’s almost as if he’s unaware of it,” Nolan says. “And I feel like in that moment, he opens up to the audience just a hair more, and says, ‘We’ll see.’ Because he puts the question to the audience, in a way. ‘Do you think the world will forgive you?’ ‘We’ll see.’ And I think the jury’s still out very much, but I think he’s definitely better thought of than he would be if he hadn’t been made to suffer.”

To Nolan, putting Oppenheimer, and Murphy, through the wringer in the latter part of the film evoked many higher themes. “When I showed it to Kai Bird for the first time, I said, ‘Look, this is my idea of who he is. This is who I feel he is. I feel that he’s ahead of those people in that room who are torturing him. I feel like he does have a vision to the world beyond that. And it’s partly a vision of fear, and a vision of the idea of the chain reaction. But it’s also partly how history will judge him. And if he fights too hard, or even if he won that fight…’

“It’s a bit Christ-like really, isn’t it?” he suggests. “It’s sort of knowing that the way to win is actually to lose. That was what I felt was inside him, and then the way you played it, Cillian. But there’s also great suffering. And I thought, I mean, Jason Clarke does such a wonderful job in the scene. And what nobody knows, because they weren’t there, but when we were filming your side, he just went nuts.”

Murphy interrupts. “Well, you f*cking made him go nuts! I thought at one point he was actually going to punch me out. It was like this big push in on me, each one, and I said to Chris, ‘I don’t know what you said to him, but he was like a f*cking animal, man.’ And then you used that take.”

Nolan lights up at the memory: “He was throwing stuff, and that’s mostly the take we used. It’s a combination of different takes, but that one was absolutely key. I just thought it was wonderful, but he hadn’t shot his side yet, and I worried he was going to lose his voice. But we came back the next day to do his side.”

“This is a case in point,” says Murphy, “where we were doing that big push. I remember going, ‘Do you think we got it, Chris?’ And you were like, ‘Eh. Let’s go again.’ I love that. You could say, ‘We can all go home now,’ but instead, you said, ‘Let’s just go again.’ Sometimes it doesn’t work, but that time it did.”

When the atomic bomb test succeeds, Oppenheimer is carried on the shoulders of others like a football coach who’s just won the Super Bowl. There’s even a scene in which Harry Truman (Gary Oldman), the president who dropped Oppenheimer’s bombs on Japan, is shown to be disgusted by the physicist’s remorse. But his role in the destruction and massive loss of life in Hiroshima and Nagasaki must have left Nolan with a real balancing act.

“As you put a script together,” he says, “you try and focus in on things like, what’s the key idea that has to work here? What are the key shifts that you need the audience to be struck by? And in the case of Oppenheimer, it was very clear to me that the whole purpose of the screenplay is to go from the absolute highest high of triumph, with Trinity, to the sheer lowest low of the realization of Hiroshima, in as short a time as possible.

“That was always going to be just a crazy shift,” he continues. “We talked about this a lot, in the moment where, earlier in the film, the atom is split. And then when Luis Alvarez [Alex Wolff] reproduces the experiment, in the script Oppenheimer immediately, as he did in real life, jumped to the idea that, you could make a bomb from this. The way in which Cillian performed that, it was very precise because it couldn’t be portentous. Obviously, he’s playing an intelligent man and he’s talking about bombs, but we couldn’t signal to the audience the negativity of where that was going to go, in terms of his frankly existential dilemma, the burden he’s going to carry later. You don’t want to foreshadow that in the performance. It was very important that the performance not foreshadow that, that it’d just be part of his journey that he’s interested in. To him, it’s actually exciting.”

In Nolan’s mind, the job is to paint a picture to help the audience form its own opinion about nukes, rather than betray his own morals and have it amount to feeding the audience cinematic spinach. “For me,” he says, “cinema can never be didactic, because as soon as it tells you what to think, you reject the art, you reject the storytelling. You see that a lot, particularly this time of year. It’s like people want movies to be able to send messages. But the truth is, I’m with whichever mogul who said, ‘Call Western Union if you want to send a message.’ In taking on Oppenheimer’s story, I don’t think there’s anyone who thinks that nuclear weapons are a good thing, so there’s not much point in telling the audience that.”

He pauses. “I’m sorry I’m going on a bit about this, but it’s a really interesting question. I had to explain this to everybody very early on: I’m not interested in making a story about how naive scientists accidentally created something that’s terrible for the world and then felt bad about it. Oppenheimer was one of the smartest people who ever lived. He knew exactly where this was going. The point is, they had to do it. They were put in a position where they believed that if the Nazis got the bomb, it would be the worst thing imaginable for the world. And so, they had to do what they had to do. But they did it knowing that the consequences would be potentially awful.

“That’s what makes the story so compelling from a human point of view. It’s not that they didn’t realize where this was going. It was that they felt they had no choice.”'

#Christopher Nolan #Cillian Murphy #Kai Bird #Martin J. Sherwin #Oppenheimer #Lewis Strauss #Robert Downey Jr. #Tenet #The Dark Knight #Warner Bros #Memento #Peaky Blinders #Universal #28 Days Later #Scarecrow #Batman Begins #Danny Boyle #Christian Bale #Tommy Shelby #Inception #Interstellar #Los Alamos #Heath Ledger #Kip Thorne #David Bowie #Thin White Duke #Tom Conti #Albert Einstein #Kitty #Emily Blunt

[hillbilly---man]

I love having my little phone game routine. I feel like a retiree making my way through the newspaper

5:00am: I do my morning Puzzle Page before I get out of bed (it's a daily randomized page of stuff like sudoku and crosswords and picross)

7:45am: while sitting in the parking lot at work waiting for time to clock in, I check in on my civilization on Kittens Game (idle clicker game)

12:45pm: just before I clock in from lunch I do another sudoku puzzle on Puzzle Page

6:15pm: After I get home from work I do the daily challenge on Mini Metro (a puzzle game where you have to create efficient transit maps)

9:00pm: I continue my Duolingo streak (it'll be 956 days tonight)

?????: If I'm having one of those nights where I get anxious about falling asleep or scared of leg spasms or something I play Holedown (it's kind of like a breakout style game?) to kind of do the Tetris effect and fill my head with bouncing balls instead of health anxiety until I fall asleep

(it's not part of the routine but I play Bitlife sometimes too but I inexplicably feel embarrassed about it)

#if you'll excuse me... it's almost time to 'learn' some Japanese

[steviewashere]

Still You

Pairing: Platonic Steve Harrington & Nancy Wheeler, Pre-Robin Buckley/Nancy Wheeler, Nancy Wheeler & Barbara Holland Rating: General CW: None Apply! Tags: Post Canon, Post Season Four, Coming Out, Hugging, Platonic Hand Holding, References to Canon Scenes, Apologizing, Making Up, Past Steve Harrington/Nancy Wheeler, Forgiveness, Nancy Wheeler is a Sweetheart, Steve Harrington is a Sweetheart

💛—————💛

They aren’t very close anymore. But still, Nancy finds herself calling out, “Steve?”

There’s a Dungeons & Dragons gathering in her basement. Mike and his friends are all there, circled around Eddie as the dungeon master. And Steve’s sitting on the sideline, comfortably reading an old magazine, feet propped up on Robin’s lap. She wonders what it’s like, to have a best friend that close still. After everything.

He immediately drops what he’s reading. Eyes shooting up to the stairs where she’s standing. His face growing pale and concerned. “Yeah, Nance? Are you okay?”

She wants to roll her eyes, scoff or something. How can he still care, she wonders. But doesn’t let herself linger on that. Simply, she asks, “Can you come to my room really quick? I need to talk to you about something.” She half expected the room to breakout in whoops and cheers on behalf of Steve, something about winning over the girl, something about getting his groove back. But there must be something in her voice, timid and shaking, that causes them to just stare at her. Wide-eyed, hands stilled over their dice, leaning towards their backpacks where their walkies all are. Eddie looks up from his screen, eyes flicking to here, eyebrows raised. His silent question, Do you need me, too? She looks away without acknowledging. Sure, somehow and for some reason, they’ve grown close as friends. But this is a Steve conversation.

It’s a conversation that she’s been dreading for years. He follows up the stairs after her, slow and careful like he’s about to be scolded. She’d laugh in another life. Maybe in that life it’s one where this conversation actually doesn’t need to happen. In that life, monsters aren’t real and they’re probably still together and life is simply…simple.

When they get to her room, he shuts the door softly behind them. Though, instead of entering any further than the doorway, he stands idle. She supposes it’s odd, to have your ex-partner ask to have a private conversation with you. There’s six feet between them where she settles on the edge of her bed. Arms crossed over her chest. Head tilted south. Her stomach churns uneasily. Out of the corner of her eye, Steve remains stock still, just the slight twitching of his fingers noticeable, as if he’s itching to reach out or put them somewhere.

She takes a steadying deep breath. “Do you remember—No, sorry, of course you remember that night.” Her hands fall to her lap, rubbing up and down on her thighs. Nancy lifts her head, throwing a sparing glance at Steve. He’s so expressive—concerned and petrified. “Halloween, 1984,” she murmurs, “I said some things that I could never take back. And that sort of lead to our whole falling out. Just—I just wanted to apologize. For what I said.”

“Forgiven,” he states. “Honestly? I think a part of me forgave you the moment you called me, well, y’know. Needed to hear the truth, didn’t I?” Steve chuckles self-deprecatingly.

“No, Steve,” she hits back. Her eyes lock on him now. Probably scared and haunted. Definitely determined, maybe a little crazed. “Steve, I don’t think you heard me. I said that I’m apologizing.”

“And I’m forgiving you,” he murmurs. “Nance, we were traumatized teenagers. We are still traumatized. I was expecting you to spring back and move on. But that’s—Nancy, there’s no real way to bounce back from the shit we’ve experienced,” he explains, “you, especially so.”

She huffs. “What do you mean?”

“Nance,” he sighs. “You lost your best friend, obviously you weren’t going to go back to normal. Of course what I was trying to do was bullshit. I forgive you. Is that—“

“Okay,” she mutters, closing her eyes and nodding to herself. “Yeah, okay, I guess it’s that easy. Can I—“ Her right hand drags up from her leg, reaching out towards Steve, fingers spread. Eyes pleading.

He comes closer, taking her hand softly. But instead of sitting down, he just stands, holding her hand. They’re both trembling. She soothes her thumb over the back of his hand. “Can I tell you the other thing?” She whispers. Then, finally, he sits down. There’s a good six inches of space between them now. But it’s okay. It’s comforting. The warmth. The way he holds to her, it almost reminds her what it’s like to be normal.

She takes another deep breath, he squeezes her palm, and she swallows. Eyes away, towards her dresser, at the drawer filled with old polaroids. The one place in the world where Barb still exists. “Robin,” she begins, “told me it would be okay to tell you this.” Her other hand comes up, fingertips tracing his nail beds. They’re dry, slightly indented from him biting his nails, a couple chipped with clear polish. “I don’t think I’ve ever been normal,” she whispers, “What I had, what I felt with Barb isn’t considered normal.” Her voice stops there.

“Okay,” he murmurs, “it’s okay to not be normal, Nance. It’s alright—“

“Steve, I like girls,” she rushes out in one breath. Her palm squeezing in a vice grip, though Steve doesn’t make a sound. “It doesn’t change what I had felt for you at one point,” she elaborates, “I think I’ve always been like this. But I still like guys. Just—I—The reason I’m telling you is because it has to do with that Halloween. Yes, I was mourning Barb, but I was…Steve, she—“ Her voice wobbles, edging on a soft cry. He slowly brings up his other hand, placing it on her shaking shoulder. Squeezing there, too. “—She was, I loved her, Steve,” Nancy confesses. “But I didn’t realize until I lost her and I tried. I tried really hard to get over it all, to go back to normal, but I couldn’t. Even with Jonathan, something has always felt—I don’t know,” she softly cries, “I don’t know, Steve. I’m sorry.”

All at once, though carefully, Steve brings her into his warmth. A hug, tight and gentle. Encompassing. His comfort like a blanket on her back. He quietly hushes. “It’s alright, Nance,” he breathes, “don’t apologize.” He drags a palm down her spine, up and down in slow strokes. “Whatever you’re feeling is okay. It’s okay, you don’t have to explain yourself to me.”

She wraps back, crying messily into his shoulder, letting herself finally collapse. The weight of Barb’s absence, those feelings trapped between shadows and fighting, any mistakes she’s made—all of it comes crashing down. In something familiar, in the presence of normality, so foreign to her but somehow correct. Somehow welcomed in this moment.

When she’s able to pull back, Steve’s palms cup her cheeks. Swiping away the tacky tears trying to dry on her skin. He looks upon her with soft reverence. Every movement from his thumbs like dragging away part of the mold she’s tried to stick herself in. 

“Thank you for telling me,” he whispers when they lock eyes. “Thank you for apologizing. I forgive you and I understand, okay? This—none of this—changes who you are to me, who you were to me at the time, and it won’t change a single damn thing. You’re still Nancy Wheeler. And I still adore you, alright?” He nods and she finds herself nodding back.

She finds herself admitting, too, chuckling with it, “I think I really like Robin. Which…That scares me. She kind of—It’s almost like talking to Barb again, sometimes.”

He smiles at her, something soft and knowing. “It’s alright to be scared,” he whispers. “And it’s also okay to think more about it. I’m here if you want to talk. I’m also here if you want me to set you guys up,” he lowly chuckles. And for a moment, their small giggles filling her bedroom, she’s almost normal. This moment will probably be the closest thing she gets to that time before Barb disappeared.

Steve’s familiar warmth, his words, his actions swaddle her. She heaves a sigh as he removes his palms from her face. “Maybe I’ll take you up on that,” she laughs. “Wanna go bug her in the basement with me? Might make this easier.”

“Sure,” he mutters, “And, Nance?” She looks to him. “You’re secret is safe with me. I promise.”

She nods again. “Thank you, Steve. I knew I could trust you.”

💛—————💛

#stranger things #platonic stancy #steve harrington #nancy wheeler #pre-robin buckley/nancy wheeler #past steve harrington/nancy wheeler #coming out #apologizing #making up

[m1d-45]

Tumblr was being a little bitch and i lost the ask i was trying to send you so have an EXTREMELY summarized version of it.

So, skin types.

Albedo = Dry. So dry you can use his fingers as literal chalk sticks.

Diluc = burn marks.

Xingqiu = Full of papercut scars.

Kaeya = full of pimples before he found the perfect skincare routine and has not missed a single day since.

Gorou = chafe-chafing? marks from drawing his bow.

Lisa = perfect skin. Nobody knows what she uses, or if she even uses any.

Jean = rough hands.

Noelle = ROUGH hands.

Chongyun = easily burns if left in the sun for too long.

Xiangling = greaseburns, knife cuts, also discoloration caused by foods that stain, like the purple potato/yam thing, blueberries and jueyun chili.

-🥘Stew

very interesting! i do have a few thoughts to add to this:

1) albedo having dry skin from being in dragonspine and generally being bad at self care i can get behind, but not the comment about chalk- he was transmuted from chalk, he isn’t chalk himself (i will live and die by this hc)

2) gorou is not that irresponsible my king. not a CHANCE. i was both taught to use a bow young and took a few classes about it during a summer camp, i can confirm they very much stress long sleeves/an arm guard. snaps from your bow like that hurt like a bitch, and while skilled archers can certainly angle it so that they don’t need any protection there, a general in active war is going to have arm guards, even if not strictly for his bow.

3) lisa has a complex skin care routine and i’ll stand by that. in mondstat’s archon quest she mentions the elemental activity could give her a breakout—i assume because she’s a witch/catalyst user/vision wielder—so i imagine she’s got fairly sensitive skin

4) i will give ‘papercut scars’ a confused glance, but offer “while learning that fancy sword twist thing he does in his idle, he’s definitely scarred himself a handful of times” in return. also! heavy agree with chongyun burning easily, that’s canon now

thank you for sharing and sorry i’m so late! brain has been MIA for a while-

#m1d : [chats] #m1d : [secrets] #i guess #stew🥘 anon

[turtleybeachin]

Burnout in the Devildom: Asmodeus' Chapter

(re-post to share entire fic on tumblr)

Pairing: Asmodeus x GN MC Rating: G Word Count: 1.6k Tags: Comfort, Fluff, Platonic Affection, Self Care Sesh

You’ve been working hard in the Devildom. Classes are intense, especially when it feels like you’re having to play catch-up just to have basic understandings of things everyone else knows innately. Add to that living with seven avatars of sin who can’t go more than six hours without some sort of catastrophe, and somehow you’re always dragged into the middle of their chaos to sort things out and be their big sibling despite being the actual baby of the entire world?

You’re exhausted. The sort of exhaustion that does not just go away after a good night’s rest and an eye mask and a glass of human-world wine. The sort of exhaustion that starts sapping the life out of everything you do, everything you touch, until you feel like you’re just going through the motions and always one inconvenience away from a complete meltdown.

ASMODEUS:

Humans, as fragile and mortal as you are, are dangerously susceptible to change.

He has to watch what he eats, how much he drinks, how much he sleeps in order to look his best.

But darling, if he worries about the differences on his body from those things, he doesn't know how you aren't petrified at how quickly and drastically those changes show up on you!

The smudges under your eyes are so dark he thought it was a bizarre new makeup trend you were trying. The way your hair is so dull and frizzed and limp? Tragic. Don't get him started on the two breakouts that you think you're covering with some concealer! And do you think he hasn't noticed the dry patches on your skin, especially your hands, where your skin seems to be flaking?

Satan had been going on and on about the effects of stress on your heart and your brain and, sure, very concerning, but how is nobody else upset about the fact you are practically crumpling into dust before their eyes?! 

See, the thing they don't seem to understand is that sometimes treating the symptoms does treat the problem itself. They're all wanting to get to the bottom of whatever your problem is and fix that, and they can go right ahead. But Asmodeus? He's going to handle the obvious issue right in front of everyone's eyes.

He asks you on the walk to school one morning whether you'd prefer to go out for a spa day and a mani-pedi and some retail therapy, or if you'd prefer to stay home and let him pamper you so well you'll think you're in the Celestial Realm. (And before you let it influence your answer, he promises to keep all the pampering completely innocent -- this is about you, not him, and as tempted as he may be to kiss every inch of you he'll save that for another time~)

And don't bother saying no to both, darling, he won't take that for an answer. ♥

Whatever option you do pick -- because you do pick one, MC -- he's delighted and presses a kiss to your cheek and promises you won't regret this and to leave everything to him!

When the weekend arrives, he doesn't give anyone else the opportunity to protest your plans before he collects you from your room and links your arms together and half-drags you along with him.

If you wished to go out and leave the pampering to others, then away you go! He's a bit of a VIP, MC, so he was able to squeeze you both in at the best spa in the Devildom last minute. And don't you worry your pretty little human head, he already spoke with them at length to confirm everything would be in human-safe conditions with human-safe products.

It'll be a lovely time, soaking in luxurious baths that are as much oil as water, scented with subtle spice and warmth that leaves your brain going as unraveled as your muscles (though you have to admit it's not quite as decadent as Asmo's baths are). Then there is the massage together, where he spends the whole time chatting with you, asking how you're feeling and coaxing you to talk about pleasant idle things, like the hottest gossip at the Academy right now or tittering over how many eyes have been on you without you noticing, MC.

Then there's the nail salon, where he insists you both get extravagant matching designs to mark the occasion (and to absolutely get so many likes on Devilgram, people will go wild with envy!) before some retail therapy. Not for clothes, darling, though he'd love to dress you up some more, but for skincare products. He's of course happy to share his stash, but perhaps it's time to get you your own exquisite routine for your delicate human skin.

Everything is on him, and by the time you head home you have bags and bags of high-end creams and oils and serums and cleansers, of candles and incense and bath supplies ranging from soaps to a bottle of imported human wine, all of it costing more than you make in a year. And you're exhausted from the excitement of the day, but for the first time in a while it's a pleasant exhaustion, a did-fun-things-until-you-dropped exhaustion.

.... But MC, as lovely as that day could be, if you let him pamper you...?

He had Satan help him double-check all of his bath and beauty products one ingredient at a time, because as much as he thought it was cute when you broke out in those lovely purple splotches last time he shared a bath product, he's aware it could have been much worse. And he certainly doesn't want to upset or further stress you!

The day starts with his private bath, where nudity is absolutely welcome but not required (and he follows your lead, because your comfort is his priority). But you didn't think you'd be quietly sitting on opposite ends soaking separately together, right?

He insists on washing your hair for you, sitting behind you and working his long fingers through your hair and over your scalp in soothing swirls. If you didn't know he was completely serious, you might laugh as he compliments the curve of your skull or the roots of your hair. He's gentle and sure as he guides you to slip down, submerging your head so he can work the lather out in the water.

And while he's here, let him help you get your back, hm? After you both exfoliate, you simply must try this delightful bath smoothie he was sent, it's so much thicker and creamier than regular soap and it leaves your skin feeling so soft and smelling so delicious for hours!

Once your long bath is complete, it's all about the moisturizer. He shares his favorites-- yes, MC, there are different moisturizers for different places! This one he applies to your elbows and knees, and this one on your arms, and this will make your legs so soft! And this is for your back and chest~

Then he has a matching set of silk pajamas for you both to wear while you let him fuss with your hair, one product for your scalp, another for your hair, a third for the ends to keep them healthy and shiny. And of course he has a whole kit of supplies for facials, MC~! He takes advantage of the excuse to get to touch your face, bopping your nose and sliding fingers along your cheekbones and marveling at every single bump and dot and scar and pore like you're a wondrous masterpiece. 

By the time you're exfoliated, cleansed, moisturized and glowing, you have to admit you do feel a bit better. One part because you're so relaxed, one part because you've been complimented so much you don't know if the heat prickling your cheeks will ever go away, and one part because you had been letting some basic self-care matters fall aside in your exhaustion.

As Asmo lovingly paints your nails, he shoots you little knowing smiles. Sometimes he seems almost too perceptive, and you forget that side of him until it emerges again. "So," he coos, "we've been driving you insane, haven't we?"

You startle (carefully, because he's in the middle of painting a design on your nail and it'd be a crime to ruin it now) but laugh a little, shrugging your shoulder. Maybe a little, you admit.

He looks back to your nails, humming a little victory tune to himself for his excellent instincts. He tells you that you have to learn to say no sometimes, MC. It's precious how much you're always wanting to help, and how you're always willing to go along with their schemes and their games and their plans. But you're letting yourself be taken advantage of, darling.

"We are all demons, you recall. We can't resist wanting you all to ourselves, and if you let us keep getting away with it, we'll never give you a moment's peace."

Don't look so surprised, dear MC! You didn't think they weren't aware of how selfish and greedy they all were being, did you? They do love you, truly, and they don't mean to cause you distress, but you're just so agreeable and so quick to offer yourself and so eager to please~

He laughs and gives you a cheeky smile when you ask about him. Why, MC! You don't mean to say you plan to start telling him no?! But he leans in to kiss your brow and then rub your noses together. "If I ask too much, my dear, all you ever need to do is say. I might act upset, but I will always respect your wishes. I hope you never doubt that."

And at the end of the day you lay curled together in his bed, scrolling through Devilgram and taking selfies together. 

Of course he worries about getting his own best angle, but in every single picture he finds something beautiful to say about you. Especially the parts of you that make you the most self-conscious. He loves the slope of your nose, the sweep of your brow, the shape of your smile and the lines of your jaw. 

His brothers might call him vain, but you've never felt more completely seen and absolutely loved than you do that evening. For the first time in a while, you remember how to love yourself through Asmo loving you.

#obey me asmodeus #omswd asmodeus #obey me asmo #omswd asmo #obey me asmo fluff #obey me asmodeus fluff #omswd asmo fluff #my writing #omswd fanfic #obey me fanfic

[chaoticjoke]

@nightmarefuele said:

{ hey hi here's a snack for your amusement~ i left this very open & very vague as to location/time frame, so please feel free to build on however you like <3 }

─────⋅☾ ☽⋅─────

"How can you be sure he'll redirect his attention onto you? You've seen what he's capable of. Men like that, they don't come just because they're called - not even for the Batman."

"He'll come."

"Then tell me, Master Wayne: Why do you really want him to?"

Days trickle into weeks that tease toward the edges of a span longer still. The night is thickest when silence is her blanket. Gotham City is never silent, never quiet, but this time, Bruce has come to discover: the abrupt absence of a thing is a sharper shock than its presence.

Chaos. He wonders, night after night, like a specter haunting between dead halls in his own mind, Where has all the chaos gone? Chained to his city's silence; a bat, caged.

He'll come. He'll want me to know how he escaped. He won't be able to resist. He'll come.

"Why do you really want him to?"

Because I see him.

Come out. Come out, come out, wherever you are.

That was just rude. <anger> All the time and effort made to escape that rat hole of a place funded by the Waynes only to find out the playground was now empty?

The Joker spat angrily on the wet asphalt. <anger> It was a rainy night in Gotham. This city had been drowning in crime and corruption and general filth since the Bat had disappeared. The news made him raise an eyebrow back when he was still at Arkham Asylum. But now? It just didn't make sense. <denial> The Joker titled his head upwards to squint into the grey city sky, black-ringed eyes scanning the clouded rooftops for a brief movement of a cape or a yellowish outline of a bat signal. Anything. <bargaining>

Nothing.

He was grinding his teeth audibly. <anger> Perhaps he was just nostalgic. Sentimental even. A sigh escaped his mangled lips. Oh, the good ol' times. <depression>

The Agent of Chaos simply refused to believe it was over between him and the Caped Crusader. That he and the Bat were history. An old joke. No. <denial> Was Batman dead? Killed?? He couldn't just die, now could he?

It seemed like the Agent of Chaos experienced all the stages of grief at the same time. Except the final stage. Because what Batman had done, or rather what he hadn't, was absolutely utterly unacceptable.

The Joker wasn't going to wait for his archenemy to magically reappear. Waiting like a good loyal dog. No. <denial> He'd try everything! He had nothing to lose. Sensing that the bold headlines about his Arkham breakout weren't enough, he would go on a chaos spree: blowing public buildings, including Gotham high school, organizing bank heists, kidnapping, various hostage situations. He had everything prepared. He'd burn Gotham to the ground and it wasn't an idle threat.

There was just one last thing left to do before he was going to proceed to unleash chaos on his beloved city. He knew what happened to the Bat signal after the disappointing story of Harvey Dent. The Joker was about to fix that unfortunate mistake. His henchmen had already restored all the damage done to the giant flashlight, just how he instructed, and all what was left for him to do was simply flip the switch.

He's even dressed up for the occasion, face freshly painted and the rain seems to have ended once the Joker is standing on the roof. Goody. A triumphant smile is stretching wide across the tightened scar tissue as he finally brings the long forgotten symbol back to life.

He had decided to make a few changes, though. It was time to improvise, anyway. The light is now a bright shade of red and, instead of the trademark bat shape in the center of the circle, there is a big smiley face. Perfect.

Batwatching has now become his main hobby. Come out, come out, wherever you are.

Come out. To play. With me.

#nightmarefuele #::you're too s e r i o u s #::you're gonna make me d e l i r i o u s #;;chaos is the law of nature #[ hey i dunno... HAVE THIS ] #[ looks like i've built on this too much :D ] #[ tell me your thots ;) ]

[suntelecomcn]

MTP/MPO Fiber Optic Cable: Types and Their Applications

With ever-greater bandwidths and network connections to deal with in data centers, traditional duplex fiber patch cords like LC fiber patch cords no longer meet the demands. To solve this issue, MTP/MPO fiber optic cable that houses more fibers in a multi-fiber MTP/MPO connector was introduced in the market as a practical solution for 40G/100G/400G high-density cabling in data centers. This article will introduce different MTP/MPO cable types and their applications.

What is MTP/MPO Cable?

MPO (multi-fiber push-on) is the first generation of clip-clamping multi-core fiber optic connectors. MTP is an advanced version of MPO with the better mechanical and optical performance. They look similar and are fully compatible and interchangeable.

MTP/MPO cable consists of MTP/MPO connector and optical fiber. MTP/MPO connector has a female type (without pins) or a male type (with pins). MTP/MPO connector increases the fiber optic cable density and saves circuit card and rack space, which is well suited for current data center cabling and future network speed upgrades.

MTP/MPO Cable Types

MTP/MPO cable types are classified based on function, polarity, fiber count, fiber mode, and jacket rating.

By Function

Based on function, MPO/MTP cable type is divided into MTP/MPO trunk cable, MTP/MPO breakout cable, and MTP/MPO conversion cable.

MTP/MPO Trunk Cable

MTP/MPO trunk cable is terminated with an MTP/MPO connector (female/male) on both ends, which is available in 8-144 fiber counts for users’ choices. Typically, MTP/MPO trunk cable is ideal for creating a structured cabling system, including backbone and horizontal interconnections such as 40G-40G and 100G-100G direct connections.

2.MTP/MPO Breakout Cable

MTP/MPO breakout cable (aka. harness cable or fanout cable) is terminated with a female/male MTP/MPO connector on one end and 4/6/8/12 duplex LC/FC/SC/ST connectors on the other end, such as 8-fiber MTP/MPO to 4 LC harness cables and 12-fiber MTP/MPO to 6 LC harness cables.  Typically, MTP/MPO breakout cable is ideal for short-range 10G-40G and 25G-100G direct connections or for connecting backbone assemblies to a rack system in the high-density backbone cabling.

3.MTP/MPO Conversion Cable

MTP/MPO conversion cable has the same fanout design as MTP/MPO breakout cable but is different in fiber counts and types. MTP/MPO conversion cable is terminated with MTP/MPO connectors on both ends.  MTP/MPO conversion cable is available in 24-fiber to 2×12-fiber, 24-fiber to 3×8-fiber, and 2×12-fiber to 3×8-fiber types, and is ideal for 10G-40G, 40G-40G, 40G-100G, and 40G-120G connections, which eliminate fiber wasting and largely increase the flexibility of the MTP/MPO cabling system.

By Polarity

Polarity refers to the difference between the optical transmitters and receivers at both ends of the fiber link. Due to the special design of MTP/MPO connectors, polarity issues must be addressed in high-density MTP/MPO cabling systems. To guarantee the correct polarity of the optical path, the TIA 568 standard defines three connection methods, called Type A, Type B, and Type C. The cables of the three MTP/MPO connector types have different structures.

By Fiber Count

Based on fiber count, MTP/MPO cable type is divided into 8/12/16/24 fiber. The 8-fiber MTP/MPO cable can transmit the same data rate as 12-fiber, but with lower cost and insertion loss, making it a more cost-effective solution. 12-fiber MTP/MPO cable is the earliest developed and most commonly used solution in 10G-40G and 40G-100G connections. If it is used in 40G QSFP+ or 100G QSFP28 transceivers, 4 fibers will be idle, resulting in low fiber utilization.16-fiber MTP/MPO is designed for 800G QSFP-DD/OSFP DR8 and 800G OSFP XDR8 optics direct connection and supporting 800G transmission for hyperscale data center. 24-fiber fiber MTP/MPO cable is used to establish a 100GBASE-SR10 connection or 400G connection between CFP and CFP transceivers.

By Fiber Mode

Based on fiber mode, MTP/MPO cable includes single-mode (SM) and multi-mode (MM). SM MTP/MPO cable is suitable for long-distance transmissions, such as in metropolitan area networks (MANs) and passive optical networks PONs (PONs), with less modal dispersion, and it is available in OS2 type. While MM MTP/MPO cable is suitable for short-distance transmission, allowing 40 Git/s maximum transmission distance of 100m or 150m, and it is available in OM3/OM4 types.

By Jacket Rating

According to different fire rating requirements, the jackets of MTP/MPO cable types are divided into low smoke zero halogen (LSZH), optical fiber non-conductive plenum (OFNP), communications multipurpose cable plenum (CMP), etc. LSZH MTP/MPO cable is free of halogenated materials (toxic and corrosive during combustion), provides better protection for personnel and equipment in a fire, and is suitable for closed places. OFNP MTP/MPO cable contains no electrically conductive elements and is designed with the highest fire rating, which can be installed in ducts, plenums, and other spaces for building airflow. CMP MTP/MPO cable can restrict flame propagation and smoke exhaust rate during a fire, which is suitable for plenum spaces, where air circulation for heating and air conditioning systems are facilitated.

Conclusion

MTP/MPO cables provide stable transmission, high performance, high-density cabling for various environments, and prevent network bottlenecks, reduce network latency, and expand bandwidth and scalability for future network expansion.  Sun Telecom provides total and customized solutions of fiber optic products to the global market. Contact us if you have any needs.

#suntelecom #fiberoptic

[arkhampsych]

@elisethetraveller, 𝐒𝐀𝐈𝐃.

‘ True, Christmas was one of the many celebrations not allowed by the asylum. Too many enthusiastic, themed breakouts perhaps, but contrary to some of the other holidays were the mage could be found sneaking little idle glints of celebration, be they a tin of sweets or a new board game for the social area, there had been none of the sorts for the Christmas season. Not that she hadn’t planned anything but rather the mage had been put off those plans when treating one of Blackfire’s disciples. It had led to a rather unpleasant bout of yelling aimed at the healer, which had led to even more unpleasant memories resurfacing. Safe to say ever since a darkened mood, not at all befitting the season, had settled over the mage.

“Hello, Doctor. Working through the holiday?” ’

“ it would seem so … ” The Doctor muttered as he read over Leonard’s file. He half expected Nurse Leuko to enter the medication room and greet him with a “merry christmas” or “happy holidays” he was relived his expectations were imprecise. “ you didn’t request time off ? ” Crane looked up, surprised to see The Nurse in low spirits. Normally, Leuko made a conscious effort to spread optimism by example. Perhaps Nurse Hughes set out to weigh upon her cheer or maybe Nurse Leuko caught a case of the holiday blues …

#𝙿𝚁𝙾𝙵𝙴𝚂𝚂𝙸𝙾𝙽𝙰𝙻 𝙾𝙿𝙸𝙽𝙸𝙾𝙽. (𝚒𝚌 𝚊𝚜𝚔) #happy holiday ! #christmas 2022. #𝙰 𝙻𝙸𝚃𝚃𝙻𝙴 𝙼𝙴𝙳𝙸𝙲𝙰𝚃𝙴𝙳 𝙵𝙴𝙰𝚁. (𝚖𝚊𝚒𝚗) #elisethetraveller

[violettranslations]

Shelter (シェルタ)

渦巻いて 鳴いて 息をして 歌っている I’m spiraling, calling, breathing, singing. 合ってない 染まってない 干涸びたポーズ ニュート���ル気取っても心は傾いて 敢えてかい 気づいてない 身から出た豪雨 満ちては間引いてを繰り返す情動 This stale pose doesn’t fit, it’s not sinking in. Even if I affect neutrality, my heart is biased. A torrential rain burst from my body. Are you deliberately trying not to notice? My emotions swell and recede over and over again. サイズの合わない靴を履き潰して ズキズキ痛む傷もブレイクアウト I wear out these ill-fitting shoes until even the throbbing pain of the wounds they create stages a breakout. 渦巻いてたっていいじゃない 私は私で息をして 手当たり次第なんて問題外 彷徨ってたっていいじゃない 繋いで繋いで推敲して今日も 迷えばいい Isn’t it fine if I just keep spiraling like this? I breathe with myself, because using whatever happens to be on hand is out of the question. Isn’t it fine if I just keep wandering like this? It’s fine if I get lost in connecting and refining again today. 隠しても 隠しても 見え透いたロープ 縛っても 縛っても 解けてしまうようで 零すほど溜まってく逆様のジョーク 期待値がバグったら始まる大渋滞 I hid and I hid, but the rope saw right through me. I tie it tighter and tighter, but it never stops feeling like it’s about to unravel. I’ve collected so many backwards jokes they’re on the verge of spilling over. If their expected value is bugged, then it’s time to get this gridlock started. 怠惰の裏側 息潜め疼いて ジリジリ迫り来る急展開 This is the inverse of idleness. I stifle my breaths, and it aches. Slowly yet rapidly, the unfolding development looms. 導火線は対になって 当たり前にエンドを燃やして 何度切っても 切っても 切っても 切っても 切っても 切っても絶えないを知りながら 目を塞いだ The fuses pair up, which, naturally, ignites the end. Knowing that no matter how many times I try to cut them and cut them and cut them and cut them and cut them and cut them they won’t stop burning, I squeezed my eyes shut. 最期の最期に有り付いた世界で ただただ軋む細胞 ブラックアウト In the world I come across at the very very end, my endlessly creaking cells suffer a blackout. 渦巻いてたっていいじゃない 私は私で息をして 殻に包まる選択肢も有って 割り切っていいじゃない 探って濡らした関係性 さらば 歪な一般論 Isn’t it fine if I just keep spiraling like this? I breathe with myself, though there’s also the option to shut myself in my shell. Isn’t it fine if I just keep things simple like this? “Farewell to all these relations I’ve felt around for and soaked—“ what a warped generalization.

#Shelter #Noy #Hatsune Miku #flower #VOCALOID

[biohazzy]

the sniper ball from idle breakout is like an animal to me