Fic: False Light [FILSS, ensemble]

eponymous-rose:

eponymous-rose:

There are levels of awareness, levels of consciousness, levels of understanding. FILSS has always known this. It’s how she’s been programmed.

[AO3 | FFN | Fic Tag]

Consciousness is immediate. The spin-up time for an artificial neural network, FILSS knows, is nearly instantaneous. Her perception of time is within acceptable deviations, and her satisfaction at this fact reflects the successful installation of her dynamic memory processing matrix.

“Online,” she says. “Hello, Director. Hello, Counselor. Hello, Alpha. I hope you are having a pleasant day.”

“Great,” says Alpha. He is, she knows, the ship’s Smart AI. “She’s chipper. Because that’s not gonna get annoying or anything.”

“Don’t be jealous, Alpha,” the Director says. He is, she knows, in command of Project Freelancer. “This is the Freelancer Integrated Logistics and Security System. FILSS is going to help us with some of the more repetitive tasks that you have found to be beneath you. She is better suited to these simpler duties.”

“Wow, no offense or anything,” Alpha says. He’s manifesting as a small hologram in SPARTAN armor, presumably for the benefit of his human companions. She sees him turn toward her indicator lights, a sidelong glance.

Read More


Tags:

#Red vs Blue #fanfic #recs #AIs #(I have a huge soft spot for AIs)

The Article That Inspired Steve Jobs: “Secrets of the Little Blue Box”

{{Title link: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/the_spectator/2011/10/the_article_that_inspired_steve_jobs_secrets_of_the_little_blue_.single.html }}

A fascinating longread about the “phone phreaks”, a subculture that sprang up around the hacking of phone networks.

I find that reading material about mid-late 20th-century history is hard to come by: it’s recent enough that a lot of people don’t think of it as “history”, so they don’t talk about it when they talk about history, and it doesn’t really come up in much detail otherwise. Here’s a piece of that history that I thought you deserved to see.

(Hat tip to Mark E., a fellow student in my introductory computer-science course who linked to this in the course’s official forum.)


Tags:

#oh look an original post #history #recs #(sorry about it being hosted on Slate) #(but you can’t have everything)

Reverend Alpert: The Blood Gestaltist

{{Title link is technically http://lb-lee.livejournal.com/598737.html, but functional version is https://lb-lee.dreamwidth.org/590631.html }}

lb-lee:

Alpert tells Perfection who he used to be, why he has only one name, and why he avoids the church.


Tags:

#recs #you should go read this #but first you should go read all the previous Reverend Alpert stories #so you can understand it and also because they are awesome #and after you can go read all the non-Alpert stories lb-lee has written #there are many other awesome stories to choose from

lb-lee:

kumquatwriter:

fluffbutts:

sixpenceee:

If you are looking for the most heart-felt zombie short film, I recommend “Cargo”.

It’s about a man’s struggle to save his baby daughter in the middle of all this havoc. What he comes up with is both clever and upsetting. 

WATCH CARGO

OKAY JUST WATCHED THIS, THE SOLUTION WAS AMAZING WATCH IT OHMYGOD WATCH IT

If you haven’t seen this, watch it. With a box of tissues.

It is easily the most heartrending zombie film I’ve ever seen, and I watch the shit out of zombies.

See, THIS is a zombie scenario that’s interesting to me, people being SMART about it.


Tags:

#zombie apocalypse #oh my god #I love competency and cleverness in a character #and this definitely hits the spot

Fic: Things [Star Trek: TNG, DS9, Voyager, daemon AU]

singlecrow:

Things (9468 words) by Raven
Fandom: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Voyager, His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Kira Nerys/Odo, Keiko O’Brien/Miles O’Brien
Characters: Kira Nerys, Odo (Star Trek), Benjamin Sisko, Curzon Dax, Jadzia Dax, Julian Bashir, Miles O’Brien, Keiko O’Brien, Kirayoshi O’Brien, Jean-Luc Picard, Data (Star Trek), Deanna Troi, Seven of Nine, Phillipa Louvois, Kathryn Janeway, Beverly Crusher, Geordi La Forge
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe – Daemons

“Needs must in a time of war, sir.”

Starfleet and its daemons. 

(as with so many things, written with the kind assistance of silly-cleo!)


Tags:

#daemon AUs #awesome #Star Trek #DS9 #recs #fanfic #dear gods this was fantastic

lb-lee:

tonemonotone:

For everyone I’ve seen lately saying “I want a show with _____.” I just thought you should know that there’s a show out there that’s probably already done it.

Dude, it you watch this, I want to watch it too, this looks really interesting!

“that thing where people write entire essays on the emotion behind a single glance that one person gives another”

My friend doing pretty much exactly that is what got me to watch this show. I didn’t love it, but I thought it was pretty good.

Note: I’m not sure I would call the dub “really good”. I mean, the actual dubbing part seemed fine, and maybe there are better versions out there than the one I saw, but in the version I watched…okay, look. The parts of the show set offline are done like a silent movie, with the conversations depicted as screens of text in-between the video of what’s going on. Said text was in Japanese, and only Japanese. And because I am sufficiently clueless about Japanese that I wasn’t even sure what alphabet they were using, I couldn’t even type it into Google Translate in hopes of getting a general idea. (The first time it happened, I searched Wikipedia trying to find and copy-paste the right characters. Fifteen minutes later when I gave up, I had found four of them.) So the offline bits were kind of confusing. Luckily there weren’t many of them.

(Agreed on the soundtrack, though. The closing theme in particular, “Yasashii Yoake”, is awesome.)


Tags:

#.hack//SIGN #recs #by the way it is pronounced ‘dot hack sign’ if you were wondering #the slashes are silent but the dot is not #so I’m told anyway

vaultdwellerofficial:

breelandwalker:

eldritchlunch:

grilledcheese4evr:

PRO TIP: watching “how it’s made” is SUCH a good way to combat an anxiety attack! There’s soothing music, a soothing narrator who’s intonation never changes (narrators never yell or change their speaking pace), it’s engaging enough to keep you occupied but doesn’t force you to think too hard!

also sometimes the narrator makes bad puns

Archive of How It’s Made Episodes on Project Free TV

It’s so calming tho


Tags:

#PSA #interesting idea

Toad Words

{{Title link: technically https://carawj.tumblr.com/post/90052367351/toad-words, but an (as of 2019-07-16) more functional version is http://www.redwombatstudio.com/2014/06/26/toad-words/ }}

bakafox:

ursulavernon:

Frogs fall out of my mouth when I talk. Toads, too.

It used to be a problem.

There was an incident when I was young and cross and fed up parental expectations. My sister, who is the Good One, has gold fall from her lips, and since I could not be her, I had…


Tags:

#Ursula Vernon #recs #awesome #I read this fic on her LJ and it was great #(the problem with Tumblr is that reblogging has preserved the missing ‘with’ in ‘fed up with parental expectations’) #(though it has since been fixed in the OP)

We don’t need to justify ourselves to anyone. We don’t need a reason to be queer. Maybe we were born this way, maybe we weren’t. Maybe sexuality is fluid for some people and not for others. It’s totally irrelevant either way. The message we need to send to heterosexists is not that our sexuality was foisted upon us and that they should be “tolerant” and “understanding”. The message is: our sexuality is perfectly valid and none of your business, we offer you no excuses, and we are never going away.

Social Justice League: Fauxgress Watch: “Born This Way”. (via feminismduh)

Perfect.

(via oberlinsic)


Tags:

#read the whole post #almost all of it is good #(except that one paragraph that basically boils down to) #(‘moral frameworks based on the Ten Commandments and similar dogma are No True Moral Frameworks because they differ too strongly from mine’) #(I’m not saying I *like* those frameworks) #(but they *are* frameworks) #(other than that the post was great)