#had to compress it so hopefully it still looks nice :'p

[pi-cat000]

Girl who made the night sky: p5

NOTE: so I started writing this again this year but didn’t get very far. Here’s what I wrote if anyone was interested. I might post it on ao3 as well, not sure.

Summery: To return home Shikako splits herself infinitely across dimensions. A fault in one of the splits results in a discorporated Shikako stranded in the Naruto canon-verse.

Part 3, Part 4

Her alarm goes off just as the sun begins to peak between the buildings opposite her apartment block.  Sakura roles over to glare at the thin beam of light filtering through her window, catching in floating dust particles. Somewhere in the dark of her mind Kako shifts with amusement, prodding at her sluggish thoughts, pushing them into a state of awareness.

/Morning./ The word is said slowly, echoing with a lazy laughter. Sakura scowls, flopping over to hit the snooze on her alarm, yawning. She is still getting used to waking up at dawn and is thus completely reliant on her alarm to shake her from her sleep. A real shinobi would have enough control to wake up whenever they desired.

/Practise makes perfect,/ Kako says as if guessing the direction of her thoughts.

“Easy for you to say,” Sakura mutters, dragging herself up and yawning again. There is more idle amusement from Kako.

/Have a good day./

Slowly, the impression of Kako fades into the neutral baseline of just-Sakura, signalling that the other was asleep.

“I will,” Sakura comments in her renewed alone-ness.

Kako now slept during the day, leaving Sakura to her own devices. Whatever that not-dream had been, it had disturbed Kako enough that she now spent most of her ‘awake’ time watching over Sakura while she slept. This left only a few scant hours in the evening for discussion, conversation and hanging out together. Despite only having Kako around for a few months, Sakura already misses the other’s presence. Though their interactions had always been limited, reduced to scattered sentences and the occasional emotion, just having Kako listen to her ramblings or watch as she walked to and from the academy, studied or completed whatever other task she had set herself. Funny how much of a difference just having someone around and interested made even the most mundane parts of life. 

Discouraged by her own solitary thoughts, Sakura contemplates returning to bed and sleeping an extra hour. Not like Kako would know if she did. The notion passes quickly. Kako would be disappointed and the thought of disappointing Kako make her sad. Also, she was pretty sure it was dangerous for her and Kako to sleep at the same time. Sakura’s not an idiot. Even if Kako had yet to outright say it, she could put two and two together. Something bad had happened during the nightmare other than just giving them a fright. 

...

The rest of the morning progresses according to her new schedule. She dresses and packs her bag. With her collection of notebooks steadily increasing, it was starting bulge in the middle. The sooner she figured out how to properly make storage scrolls the better.

Next, she shuffles down to the kitchen, pulling together a meal with the correct amount of nutrients. Now Sakura is waking up before her mom, she has been forced to plan her own meals. Kako had been very helpful in that department, pushing her towards the type of diet she would need to help with muscle growth and keep her energy levels high throughout the day. It didn’t taste particularly nice, but it was functional, and she couldn’t help but wonder if the other non-clan kids knew about this sort of stuff. Meal planning was something they’d touched on in class but not something Sakura had bothered applying to her day-to-day life. Sure, she’d always tried to eat healthy but, like most things ninja related, there was a lot more to physical conditioning than just that being healthy.  It had only been a week but she has already noticed a marked improvement in her daily energy levels.

...

Sakura closes the door her apartment just as she begins to hear her parents start to shuffle around, preparing for their own workday. She takes a second to breath in the cool morning air before heading towards the old academy training grounds.

When she arrives the training area is empty like it usually is. Not a lot of academy students bothered coming out so early, especially not to this training spot which was in an awkward location. She hadn’t even known it existed till Kako pointed it out.

Another yawn.

A long sigh.

Sakura begins her warmup stretches, trying not to let the silence of her own mind bother her too much.

She is maybe halfway through the revised exorcize routine that Kako put together for her, when movement at the edge of the training field catches her attention.

It startles her enough that she almost trips through the final set. If Kako were awake Sakura might have had some warning as Kako was usually the one to sense and alert her to people approaching unexpectedly. Maybe she should work on her spatial awareness or lack thereof. She’ll add it to the list.

As it is, she thankfully doesn’t trip and embarrass herself because the person approaching is very familiar.

“Sasuke-kun!” She can’t help but call an enthusiastic greeting, waving. Sasuke freezes on approach, staring his usual blank stare. He blinks, expression shifting ever so slightly to surprise. Well, as surprised as someone as cool as Sasuke can be.

“Hello!” What were the chances of running into Sasuke outside of school hours? Practically zero. Ino would have a fit.

Saskue about-faces and walks in the opposite direction.

“Wait!” She starts to follow as the other quickly disappears into the trees encircling the training grounds.

“Do you want to train…” She hesitates, slowing, “with me…?”

Does she want Sasuke to see her huffing and puffing as she tries to make it past her tenth lap of the field? Her stamina is less than impressive and Sasuke always placed in her class’s top three when it came to combat and physical ability. She stops following. No way was she letting Sasuke see her like this.

If Kako was right, and she usually was, she would start seeing a physical improvement in another weeks time.

She pouts, trying not to feel too unmotivated.  Maybe…hopefully, she’ll see Sasuke out here again and ask to train then? Then she wouldn’t be a total embarrassment. Yes, a prefect plan. She resumes her exercises. Before Kako had come along, catching up to Sasuke would have seemed like an insurmountable task. Now Sakura’s seen what a real shinobi is capable of and said shinobi believes she is capable of the same things, it doesn’t seem as impossible. Goal reaffirmed, she tackles the rest of the morning with renewed energy.

...

Her day progresses as per usual. Sakura sits in class, takes notes, and revises on past topics when Iruka deviates between teaching and crowd control. When lunch break starts, she takes it as an opportunity to sit around the side of the building and examine her sealing notes. Away from her noisy peers, she has a chance to sort through all the stuff she’s been learning and figure out what questions she wants to ask Kako in those few hours they have together in the afternoon.

“Why do these seals use a bunch of descriptive kanji while this one is just a collection of stylistic lines?”

She mutters to herself, scanning the copies of Kako’s seal and her copies of Iruka’s notes on storage scrolls. The storage scrolls are easy enough to understand. The symbols and lines follow a logical progression, building on the basics she’d learnt while studying explosive tags. Kako’s seal is different…very different. Instead of easy to follow connections between the function and kanji, Kako’s seal is a simple circle, spiral and tomoki. Nothing else…No hint at what the lines might mean.

….

...

/Seal is collapsed…simplified. Needs expanding./

Is Kako’s somewhat confusing answer. After spending most of her lunch, then the following lesson mulling the question over, this is less than satisfying.

“What do you mean by needs expanding?” There is a long pause and Sakura waits for Kako to find the right words and energy to talk. Kako could almost communicate in full sentences now but it was still somewhat stilted.

/Not the full seal…simplified…smaller./

Sakura frowns, staring at her desk. Strewn across it are piles of notes, several bottles of ink she’s been infusing with charkha, and blank sealing paper. She had been half asleep at the time but she vaguely recalls how, on the night of Kako’s arrival, the seal had been a lot bigger, stretching across almost all her visible skin. 

“You mean this is only a small part of the seal and there’s more that I can’t see.” A wave of warm encouragement has Sakura continuing, “No, it’s more than that…all the seal is here it’s just…. just smaller…symbolic of the larger seal.”

/Compressed./ There’s a warm swell of pride like she’s just understood some tricky concept Kako’s been trying to impart

“Well …then how do I study it? How do I un-compress it?”

/An expansion seal./

She groans, “So…I need another seal to look at this seal.”

/Hmmm./

“Let me guess: That’s complicated as well.”

/Basics first./

Sakura rests her head on the desk, sighing.

#DOS #dreaming of sunshine #Shikako Nara #Alternate Universe - Gardens #wafflelate's gardens verse #sharing a mind #sakura #naruto #fanfiction of fanfiction of fanfiction #end of year WIPs

[whump-it]

Callum’s First White Day

TW for creepy whumper, broken bones, muzzling.

A tagging I will go! I’m always happy to add people to the tag list should anyone want it!

@haro-whumps @grizzlie70 @castielamigos-whump-side-blog @comfortforthepain @shameless-whumper

Callum woke to the sound of the lock scraping back on the basement door, the sound of Master Hayden descending the staircase. He hurried to fling the now blood stained and tear damp teddy back to the corner where he had found it the night before. He could barely cope with the idea of Master Hayden finding him cuddling it. He had loved cuddling it through the night. It had been the smallest patch of warmth against his chest during the night whilst his arms oozed blood and then clotted sticky and red.

While his tears tracked first noisily and later silently down his face.

“I w… want to go,” Callum said once his masters shoes came into view on the bottom step, voice quivering and stumbling over his syllables. “Please, p…p… please.”

“Please what?” his Master said, nudging at Callum’s arms with the tip of his shoe, drawing a low whine from the back of his throat.

“Please Master Hayden,” Callum said. “Please please, I want to go…I…uhh…” He reached out gingerly, hopefully, fingers aiming for Master Hayden’s shoes. His Master stepped smoothly away.

“Exactly,” Master Hayden said, crouching down from his new position a metre or so back from Callum, eyeing him with obvious distaste. “Master. That is who I am to you. And so no, you don’t get to just go.”

“Please,” Callum whispered, his forehead pressed to the floor, tears starting to fall again. “I want to go…I…”

“I want to go,” Master Hayden whined, leaning forward and poking Callum’s head with his finger. “I want to go…I want to go…I want to go.” Callum winced as his head was poked at each reiteration of his words thrown back at him.

“You want to go do you?” Master Hayden asked, standing and circling Callum where he lay sobbing openly on the floor. “Let me remind you that it was your choice to donate yourself. You don’t get to just go.”

“I…I didn’t…d…didn’t th…th…think…”

“You didn’t think, you didn’t think,” Master Hayden whined at Callum. “That much is patently clear. And frankly now you’re here I don’t expect you to do any thinking at all.”

“Please… please,” Callum sobbed, gasped, heaved. He felt pathetic, sounded pathetic.

“Please please please,” Master Hayden mocked. “It’s pathetic. You’re pathetic. Lydia didn’t get out of it just because she asked nicely.” Callum watched Master Hayden start to pace around him, following him with his eyes, whining deep back in his throat and hiccuping on his cries.

“I don’t even know who Lydia is,” Callum pleaded, trying to reach out with his fingertips again, caught half way between his urge to leave and his new and twisted desire to keep his master happy. “Please, I don’t understand. I haven’t done anything, I’ve never met a Lydia, never in my life I swear it.”

“Is this what im going to have to listen to all day?” Master Hayden said, sighing as he stood still finally, looking down at Callum with clear disdain. “Did you just lie there sleeping all night? I’m starting to think you didn’t read your rules at all.”

“I’m sorry I’m sorry,” Callum gulped the words out in between embarrassingly shuddering sobs. “I’m sorry about Lydia, whatever happened I’m sorry.” He finished on a desperate whine, dropping his forehead to the dirty floor again. Master Hayden stopped suddenly, fixed Callum with a look of pure disgust.

“You don’t speak her name,” Master Hayden hissed. “You have just turned today into a white day. What is white for?”

“I don’t want a colour day,” Callum cried. “Please, please Master Hayden… please!” Callum scrambled across the floor after his Master who was walking away from him and heading for the stairs. As he reached the bottom step, Master Hayden stopped and looked back at Callum, still trying to reach him.

“I said, what. Is. White. For?” Master Hayden hissed, low. Quiet. Threatening. Callum curled over on himself, a sorry dirty little heap on the floor, his wrists aching in their cuffs.

“It’s f…f… for, oh God,” Callum stopped to drag in some air, too fast and panicky. “It’s bone…bone!”

“Finally it gets something right!” Master Hayden called out as he started climbing the stairs. “You just stay right where you are while I bring the necessary supplies.” The door slammed shut again and locked, leaving Callum in his aching near darkness, just a sheet dimly lit rules and a hidden discarded teddy bear for company. He had expected his Master to come straight back. He waited and waited, working himself into a bound up frenzy of sweat and tears until he was certain that hours must have passed. The waiting was pressing down on him, squeezing him, killing him. He had started muttering to himself within what he assumed was the first couple of hours.

By the time Master Hayden returned with a large tool bag, Callum was screaming himself hoarse. Just screaming. Over and over. Shaking. Screaming.

As soon as his Master came into his line of sight Callum reached desperately for him. For anything that he could get hold of. His ankle, his shoes, the cuff of his trousers. His screaming turned to words, ragged around their edges now that he had his Master back.

“I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry,” he yelled. “My body is not mine to hurt, my body is yours. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. My body is not mine to hurt, my body is yours…” Callum continued his yelling as Master Hayden knelt down next to him, extended a hand to Callum’s cheek and pressed a palm to the tear stained skin there. With the contact, Callum stopped screaming his words and started to whisper them instead.

“You’re doing your words well,” Master Hayden cooed, stroking Callum’s cheek with one hand and rummaging in his bag with the other one, drawing it back out holding on to the the muzzle. “Open that mouth of yours for me hmm? It’s behaving so well for me now. Using its words so beautifully. You sound wonderful all hoarse and broken.”

Callum sniffed back tears and snot, and nodded at Master Hayden’s approval as he opened his mouth to let the bit slide between his teeth, pushed far back and painful on the corners of his mouth. The leather flap that covered it was brought flush against the lower half of his face again, and buckled tightly around the back of his head and across the top. Two long lengths of chain were taken out of the bag and dropped on the floor, heavy and clanging. Master Hayden picked up the end of one and attached it to the cuff on Callum’s right wrist, then backed away, drawing it out and snagging it on to a hook in the wall. It wasn’t taut. It trailed from the hook to the floor, and across it to Callum. Callum was busy warily eyeing the lengths of chain when a soft thud brought his attention back to what his Master was doing. He had placed a length of wood on the floor, about forty centimetres long and two inches square in section. He turned his attention to Callum and unclipped his wrists.

“Lie down on your left hand side,” Master Hayden said. Callum did as he was told, a shudder running through his body at the feel of his caught up right wrist, the length of wood lying on the floor. A white day was a bone day, but maybe he had got it wrong somehow. There didn’t seem to be enough there to wield at him easily enough to break a bone. He couldn’t figure out though what else bone could possibly mean other than broken. Master Hayden leant down and took hold of Callum’s left wrist in his hand.

“You’ll want to keep still for this,” his Master said. “You can take that as a kindness.” Callum mumbled the words to thank his Master behind his muzzle and bit, feeling the familiar run of dribble escaping from around it and running down the back side of the leather. His arm was pulled straight with the length of wood at a right angle to it, half way between his wrist and elbow. Callum looked up, eyes wide with fear, shimmering with tears, shakes wracking at his body. His throat was making pathetic whines, high pitched like a kicked dog, a new whimper escaping with each out breath. Master Hayden pressed one hand down on Callum’s elbow and took his wrist in the other, applying a slow increasing pressure, the arm biting brutally into the edge of the wood as the flesh compressed beneath his Master’s weight. The gradual push of his Master’s weight on elbow and wrist turned Callum’s whines into blocked up screams, gagged and kept from yelling out his pain. Crunching and grinding and white heat before a final snap, the giving in of his overly stressed bone and a flash of unimaginable agony. With barely time for Callum to draw a breath in through his scream-ragged throat, Master Hayden clipped the other length of chain to the wrist cuff of his unnaturally bent left arm, pulling it to a hook on the opposite wall and dragging Callum screaming into his muzzle across the floor, the hooks high enough that he had to scramble himself up on to his knees to stop himself hanging from his broken arm. Sagging pulled his arm up. Straightening up too far pulled his arm down. He was a sobbing, dribbling, whimpering and sweating mess, strung out in agony on the floor of his Master’s basement.

He could barely raise his head when he heard Master Hayden kneel down in front of him. He had nothing left in him to give. He screwed his eyes up against the tears and the pain and the overwhelming lack of understanding as to what was even happening to him anymore. He jerked in his chains when Master Hayden’s hands touched either side of his face, the touch dulled by the muzzle but the motion of his flinching tore through his ruined arm. He whined and keened at the feeling of it, all too much in one go. He let the feeling of a kind touch drown him. He let his head be drawn down to his Master’s shoulder where it was petted and stroked.

“Did you feel bad?” Master Hayden murmured the question into Callum’s hair. “Hmm? Did that feel bad?”

Callum whined and keened again, nodding and feeling the sweat of his forehead dripping on to his Master’s shirt.

“It hurts right?” Master Hayden asked. Callum nodded again, trying to keep breathing evenly.

“Good boy,” Master Hayden whispered, so close to his ear, hot breath on his skin, in his hair. “Good boy, good boy.” When Master Hayden stood, Callum instantly missed his touch, his warmth. It made him look up to see his Master picking up the length of wood, made him shake violently, his breathing too fast, too much, too much panic. He couldn’t take anymore and he had no way of telling Master Hayden so.

“Shush now,” Master Hayden said, pulling bandages from his bag and moving to Callum’s bent and stretched out left arm, taking hold of it in his hands. He looked at Callum. “At least you’ve already got something to bite on.” The length of wood was pressed to the inside of Callum’s arm and the bend in it forced straight against it, bandaged in place while he screamed and grunted and dribbled behind his gag.

“Good boy,” Master Hayden said as he worked the bandage around and around. “You’re already getting better. I’m going to make sure you make up for everything don’t you worry. Your first white day. I’ll mark it off on your list.”

The words barely penetrated Callum’s agony fogged brain. There was a list. His Master was talking about a list. None of it made sense. He couldn’t make sense of anything. Callum whimpered and keened and cried as he watched his Master gather up his bag and leave him all alone, facing his list of rules once again, with no idea what he was supposed to be making up for.

#whump #whump community #super creepy whumper #creepy whumper #oc master hayden #oc rory #broken bones #chained #restrained #muzzle gag #master hayden's rules #who is lydia? #callum's teddy #Callum's list #box boy #box boy au #box boy inspired #collection box #where do people go when they've had enough of their lives? #the collection box

[impurelight]

Mac OS High Sierra - ♪ I Love It ♪

I recently installed the High Sierra public beta and I'm glad I did. Let's go back to WWDC 2017. Craig uttered this brief statement that felt like an afterthought, "We even moved the window manager to use Metal." I believe he also said something about how the most difficult animations would be accelerated using Metal or something. But this didn't seem too important to Apple in the grand scheme of things.

When he said this my ears perked up. Could it be? Has Apple finally fixed the stuttering of animations? I have wanted to try High Sierra ever since. And now that I had some time with High Sierra I have to say that this change does indeed fix those issues. 99% of the time anyways.

When I first got my Pro the animations were noticeably choppy. So much so that I kept the resolution at 1280x800 rather than the retina resolution of 2560x1600 just to avoid the choppiness. High Sierra is not perfect. There's definitely a little bit of choppiness going on, especially when moving from a full screen application to the desktop, and I suspect the animations aren't a crispy 60FPS.

But the difference between Sierra and High Sierra are like night and day. I can finally use my Mac at the retina resolution without pulling my hair out in frustration. It actually looks like the demo laptops in the Apple Store.

This makes me a lot more hopeful for the MacBook Adorable. The graphics on that thing should be about the same as my MacBook Pro so I'm a lot less worried about stuttering on that now.

That's the really big thing in High Sierra. This choppiness that was present since I got it has finally been fixed. But there are a few other important changes I'd like to discuss.

First is APFS. I thought this would be a bigger deal than it ended up being. Every time I need to change the file system I've had to format a drive so Apple doing it in place is basically magic.

In fact they did it so well I didn't even notice anything changed. When it restarted after the update it showed me all my Windows from before I restarted, a feature I'm shocked Windows has not copied yet, so I didn't know if anything actually changed. I had to look at my disk properties to see: APFS, oh, it actually worked. Speaking of which the main drive now appears in the Finder side bar. A small change.

I haven't seen any speed improvements yet. My Mac was fast enough already. I've seen APFS actually doing worse compared to HFS+ in benchmarks. I'd suspect that's accurate. From what I hear APFS has to write more and more detailed metadata. But in real world scenarios it may be faster.

Now let's talk about Safari. Safari has had perhaps the most changes out of all the apps I've used. First of all the block autoplaying videos is very nice. I know what you're thinking, "But how often do I encounter autoplaying videos?". And you're right but it also blocks youtube videos that are in the background. Not foreground ones, they work normally.

I open a lot of Youtube videos and they take a bit of time to load so sometimes I do something else and then suddenly the youtube video starts playing in the background. Annoying. In High Sierra it's no more. It's one of those things like picture in picture that I didn't think was such a big deal until I actually started using it.

Of course not all the Safari changes are so awesome. The 'always on' reader that they trumpeted is nothing more than an option to automatically open the reader view when opening a page. Also you can definitely tell Apple changed the title font here. I don't like it, hopefully I'll get used to it though. Also it is now harder to get out of the reader mode. You now have to physically click on the reader icon. This is very annoying as text to speech automatically enters this view.

I hope they change it; I already sent a complaint about it to Apple. I recognize a lot of people don't use Safari but I do because of the text to speech integration and the view all tabs options (that firefox removed for some reason).

The view all tabs is, first of all, much faster. It got the Metal treatment. They also don't stack the tabs anymore and they don't load all thumbnails at once. Probably to help with performance but it looks a bit janky.

There are also a few useful tweaks. This may just be me, but the battery life may have gotten better. Well, I'm reaching for the charger less. It might be because of Metal being less graphically taxing especially while watching YouTube videos or maybe APFS is allowing processes to be more efficient. I heard APFS allows for multiple processes to read a file now which I'd imagine increases efficiency by decreasing the reliance on locks and lends to more bursty tasks meaning more time for the CPU to be idle. But what do I know? It could just be me, though, I'm not using any tools to measure my battery life.

There's also a new Wifi icon. At least I think it's new and I believe status bar icons have been spread out a bit more. Finally there is HEVC and HEIC. HEIC will probably become a big deal but I don't see it being important for a long time.

HEVC is overrated. Sure, the OS supports it. But I never use the built in video player so the only benefit I'll get is files encoded in H.265 will now have thumbnails. Because apparently a lot of video players already support H.265. I'm using IINA, basically a prettier version of VLC, and it supports it. I think Apple just popularized it, they aren't actually doing anything meaningful with it. Just like how Apple popularized Helvetica fonts, well they did for me anyways. So this next section concerns mostly H.265.

The hype for H.265 is real. H.265 video takes up a lot less space compared to H.264 and I have not noticed any performance dip when playing it back at 2x speed. I used to compare video codecs to see which one used the least space. I stopped because the change was never that significant (like 10%) but H.265 might get me into it again as using handbrake the difference in size is like 50%. It's huge.

The only downside to H.265 is that video is too clear. Using handbrake the outputted video appears to be less grainy. The difference is slight but it's there and you'll probably notice it on some level when viewing low res video although to actually see what's going on you'll have to compare individual frames. The H.265 video just doesn't seem as crisp. I believe these are compression artifacts being stripped away. This makes the video look a bit softer which I don't appreciate. Now I know why many games have a graphics setting called 'film grain'.

The weird thing about handbrake is it saves H.265 files using .mp4 or .mkv file extensions. When I save a H.265 file I expect it to be using a dedicated H.265 file extension like .hevc. This is like saving a JPG using .png or a markdown file as .txt or an mp3 file as .wav or a GIF using .jif. Madness. Absolute madness. Well that's video codecs for you. They make no sense.

So the last thing I'd like to talk about are the bugs. There's definitely a lot of them in High Sierra. However when I restarted my Mac, like actually restarted not that automatic restart that happens when you upgrade, things got a lot better. Still a few bugs though.

Update: This only applies to public beta 1.

All in all High Sierra is stellar release. I think one of the Mac OS versions promised to fix a bunch of bugs. But I never noticed any differences. And new OS versions in general, whether it be Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, or even Linux have gotten pretty stale with only the occasional feature appearing every so often. High Sierra feels like a big upgrade. If only because it fixes a problem I've had for so long.