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#the primary reason i have not slept much lately is because i suck at science
keviintrans · 3 years
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i’m tired and haven’t been getting much sleep lately so i should probably just go to bed but. i have. such a stupid destiel wedding comic i wanna draw
#contra.txt#implying i ever draw anything that isn't just dumb as hell lol#it's a toss up between my Health and my Useless Hobby... a most difficult choice#this is gonna turn into an all over the place tag talk bc i get talky when i'm tired#anyway i've been listening to the same five songs on repeat for the last week#and literally all of them make me think of spn. hate how this show has infested my brain but at least i'm having a good time ig#also i feel so weird tagging my posts sometimes lskdjfkd like. looking at some of my posts i'm like#yeah these character tags aren't warranted at all i just have Problems in my head that make me want to tag Everything#bc i Have to be Organized. you know. on my... tumblr.... blog.......#do Not get me started on the tags i put on my art that aren't even organizational lol i simply live with and carry my shame with me#also wondering abt the protocol for drawing art based off of existing posts...#do i just link the post? am i supposed to @ the op? do i ask for permission or beg forgiveness later#also thinking about pnas.org#the primary reason i have not slept much lately is because i suck at science#the secondary reason is that i am in a secret competition with a neighbour to see who stays up later each night#as in we're the only two windows that aren't curtained closed at night so i can see when their lights are on or off#and i base asleepness off of that. this makes me sound creepy but i swear i can only see whether or not the lights are on#also my desk is covered in origami that i make while i don't pay attention to lectures so things are going well for me#my pride and joy is my very tiny origami crane that is like. so small.#it's wingspan is like 1/6th of a loonie#no. smaller even.#it's tiny dude just trust me
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weaselle · 5 years
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Sample fic, scifi
Wolfe came to, checked himself over, and sighed in relief before remembering to panic about the air. Logic caught up. He was breathing fine. That was, after all one of the primary reasons this planet had been chosen. Of course they hadn't quite trusted their extremely long range sensory data regarding the planet's atmosphere, but their emergency lan- no, the word “landing” didn't really apply. Their incoming circumstances... Well, they hadn't had much time. Wolfe suffered a quick flashback of tumbling through the air and shivered.
There had been serious errors upon entering the six-planet solar system. Equipment had broken. Backups had failed. By the time anyone knew anything was wrong it was far too late. Two thirds of the crew had been lost in an emergency transition out of stasis, as The Intrepid had been sucked down the gravity well of the local star. There was nothing that could save the massive ship. In their efforts to escape, the remaining crew wound up all crammed in the ship's dispatch shuttle, just barely kicking out of the star’s grav well near its second planet's orbit, aimed at the mission's target planet, down to fumes for fuel.
The science team members had worked in a morbid frenzy, half of them computing frantic equations, the others leading teams of military personnel through two engineering reconfigurations. This was because the shuttle was meant to dock in the mag. bay  of the the larger landing module, and wasn't designed for independent planetary landing. They had ten days of in-system travel to do something about that before they hit atmosphere. One team was to basically harvest the fumes and tweak the engine to maximize the dribbles of fuel they did have, while another team was assigned the shuttle's orbital communications satellite, removing everything except the metal-paneled framing, and redesigning it to fall completely apart at the push of a button. Nobody slept much. Everybody was both solemn and frenetic, like over-caffeinated zombies.  
The closer they got, the worse it all was, crowded, resources rationed. Fifty-nine people on a shuttle made for a crew of fifteen. They'd had time to pack some food and equipment, there was plenty of water, but the life support systems were taxed by so many lives, and  their chances of surviving planet-fall were slim. Tensions were high. There were no parachutes.
There was a brief, deathly earnest debate among the equation-working group that seemed to Wolfe to be essentially a three way argument of air friction versus planetary spin, versus 'just how damn sure are you of this value you've assigned gravitational pull?' Then they'd grilled the military pilot about in-atmosphere handling until the man was in tears. Of course, it wouldn't have taken much to bring any of them to tears, stuck in a giant metal can, hurtling toward an unfamiliar planet, uncountable light years from home. Not to mention... no parachutes. A nervous vote was taken among the mathematicians while an even more nervous crew stood by, and the proposed trajectory was altered 3 degrees. The plan sounded bat-shit to Wolfe. They were to come close in, flip to facing mostly backward, wait until less than a minute from impact, pulse the last bit of fuel in a fifteen second burn, and then launch the gutted communication satellite upward with themselves inside it in an effort to counter as much of their incoming velocity as possible. The satellite was meant to be deployed in outer space, and while the trajectory could be controlled quite precisely, the launch was mechanical, not fuel driven. Basically, it was a damn catapult. And the injuries, it was determined, would be worse all crowded inside the frail metal cube of the satellite, so they were going to have the thing fall to pieces right after it launched, leaving them to free-fall an estimated fifteen to thirty feet. The science team members insisted it was their best chance at survival. Wolfe had listened to the plan, helped all he could, and then, as the imminent entry alarm rang, he went hand over hand through the wobbling shuttle to his bunk. Once there, he stuffed all of his bedding inside his flight suit. He zipped up, grabbed his knife and a coil of thin rope, added the food bars he'd been squirreling away, filled his canteen, and stood there a minute, looking at that small collection of improvements to his odds of survival, thinking. He was missing one of the big basics. So he went looking for a mechanic he'd played cards with. He had found the man nervously taping his joints, starting with his fingers.
“Hey Mirez, you know how I told you I quit smoking years ago?”
“Yeah?”
“You wanna go sit in the satellite and have a smoke?”
Ramirez laughed shakily “Hell yes. Fuck the regs.” Wolfe had a stray thought about how drunks survived more accidents through muscle relaxation.
“Yo,” he said, “grab a flask off Burton.” Later, he'd pocketed the lighter. _______________________________________________________________________
      When Wolfe tried to stand up, the first thing he noticed was that the ground was very odd. He had to spend some time on his hands and knees looking at it just to figure out how to stand on it. It appeared to be mostly a lattice of wrist-thick vines, that knobbled and arched and curled. He tried to part them to see what the actual planetary surface looked like, but couldn't  push them much. Figuring he could reach through them and at least touch the ground, he'd only wiggled his hand in to the wrist before he wondered what kind of insect-things might live on a planet like this, and his hand came whipping back out as if under it's own power. So he stood up, made sure he still had the food bars, knife, rope, canteen, and lighter, then looked about.
Around him were strange collections of shrubs. He was in some kind of field of them. They seemed to grow in clusters by type, and he wondered if they mightn't have been planted by something intelligent. Impossible hope of a friendly, star-faring population fought near paralyzing fear that there would be horrifying creatures with a taste for people meat. The planet's star hung halfway between the horizon and it's zenith, and by the way the air was growing slowly warmer, Wolfe supposed it was rising and not setting. It was already quite warm, and he knew from his planetary facts memo that it was likely to get much hotter. He unstuffed himself, pealed his flight suit to his waist, and tied the arms to keep it there. He put the blankets and pillow cases and fitted sheet in the middle of the top sheet, twisted it into a sling, and tied it over one shoulder like a bandoleer. Then, walking with extreme care, he set out to find the others. He left the heavy, visored helmet on the ground, facing the way he went, as a message for any fellow survivors that might be looking for him.
There was no sign of any wreckage. He had no sense of direction. Additionally, either the ground was moving, or he had some kind of land sickness. Or it could be the concussion. Shit. How could there not be any sign of the shuttle wreck? There should be a long, tore up trench, or smoke on the horizon- something. The shrub-things were creepy in their little clusters. The place smelled funny. Like fertilizer soaked in fruit punch. He strained his ears and heard a catalog of curious far away groans and clicks and wind that blended into a faint, cavernous hum of worrisome background noise, but no voices or nearby movement. He was afraid to yell for other survivors in case some kind of alien THINGS came out of hiding and devoured him alive. Everything was too yellow. Wolfe squinted into the bright day and assured himself repeatedly that he wasn't panicking. After several minutes of this, he felt less panicked and crouched near (but not too near) one of the bush-a-ma-bobs to have a think.
The pale greenish sky was too large, somehow; he felt small beneath it. Looking at the bush-a-ma-bob nearest him, he saw that it came up to about waist height, and branched into an umbrella of what might be called leaves: very thick, spade-shaped, greenish yellow, each waxy leaf about as big as a door. Amazingly, each enormous leaf appeared to have grown a support strut from halfway along the bottom of it, angled back down to the base of the trunk. The vines that were everywhere  sprouted into a lush undergrowth of  aqua-colored leafery beneath each bush-a-ma-bob. A few in the group near him were nearly as tall as he, and a couple in the general area were even a bit taller.  They were arranged in fairly evenly dispersed clumps of about fifteen or so. Each bush-a-ma-bob was several feet from the next, each clump of them separated from each of the other clumps by a few meters. It wasn't structured beyond that, and Wolfe tentatively abandoned his farm theory. Most of the things looked to be bush-a-ma-bobs, but some clumps of them were some other kinds of shrubaroo, and he was on the edge of the mixed field of them. Beyond this field and in all directions, stretched a vast yellow plain full of dark brown, knee high things, like skeletal ferns. He was about to leave the bush-a-ma-bobs for a closer look at one of the shrubaroos, when he caught a slight movement out of the corner of his eye.
There, at the edge of the field to his right, was a plant that didn't look like any of the other plants. It was a single radio-dish shaped greenish yellow flower with a diameter of about five feet, atop a stacked coil of brownish orange vine as thick as Wolfe's upper arm, facing the sun. As he watched, the flower frill gently folded back to lay flat along the stem. His heart rate had just about returned to normal when it slowly began uncoiling along the ground. This took several minutes, at the end of which it was clear that there were no roots or attachment of any kind. His first alien creature. Thankfully it was moving away from him and out into the yellow plain at what he estimated to be about two meters an hour, spiraling awkwardly along the vine-covered ground. It stretched out it's coil, and then did a sort of slow-motion, twisty inchworm act to get along. Weird.
Satisfied that he wasn't in immediate danger, Wolfe forgot about aliens and shrubaroos and tried to apply some logic to his situation.  The crew should have all fallen somewhat close together, even though his swirling memories of the satellite coming apart mid-air had him suspecting they had bailed out a good bit higher than planned. As for why he might be a bit farther from the rest of them, that was probably his own stupid fault... in an effort to augment his personal chances of survival, he had hung on tightly to one of the aluminum panels as the com sat exoskeleton broke apart, hoping it would create enough air resistance to slow his fall. It hadn't been that great an idea. From what he could tell of his kaleidoscope recollections, the large thin metal sheet had indeed created a fair amount of drag, which had seemed to yank him quickly away from the dissipating cloud of his companions, and spun him crazily around and around before tearing out of his hands. Now that he thought about it, he could feel the strain in his hands and shoulders still. Actually, he was realizing, he was pretty damn sore all over. Falling from the sun will do that to you, he thought, and then clapped a hand over his mouth, in case man-eating E.T.s were attracted to slightly hysterical laughter.
About a kilometer away, Intrepid military personnel were gathering resources from people into a pile, and maintaining a perimeter, while several surviving members of the science team were having a heated debate over why they weren't all dead.
“Fuck you, Martin! You just can't handle the fact that my plan worked and we're all alive!”
“Bullshit, Franz! Okay? A: it wasn't YOUR plan, ass-hat, and secondly: It's pretty fucking obvious we came out too high up, I don't give a damn that your precious three degrees was complete horse-shit, all I said was, after a fall from that height, more of us should be dead and injured!”
“Yeah, right! What, you had time to take some measurements while we were all in free fall!? You just can't face that I was right!”
“Right? You wouldn't know how to express a variable quotient if.. if it fucked your sister!”
“And you couldn't plot a multiple-input trajectory if it came in your ass!!”
“Um, guys? Guys, this isn't really... that's not how math works...”
“Shut up, Phil. Kim, can you please explain AGAIN to Martin why the planet's rotational momentum doesn't goddamn apply to the final equation because it was ALREADY expressed in the orbital calculations?”
“No, actually; even if I wasn't busy being thankful that we're all in one piece, I-”
“But what I was SAYING, Franz, is that it WASN'T already expressed in the- y'know what? I don't even CARE, all I'm.. Look, I've cliff dived a whole lot, and I'm telling you, we fell too far to be all walking around like this! Mirez!” Martin said to the passing military mechanic, “Did we fall twenty feet, or did we fall two or three times that? What do you think?” Ramirez paused
“Me? I think if there are any E.T. Boogiemen on this planet, they'll probably attack people having stupid noisy arguments first, and I just might live one more day.” They all stopped and looked around apprehensively.
“Well, okay, good point by Ramirez.” Martin said, in a barely audible mutter.
“Yeah, fine,” murmured Franz sullenly, “stupid argument.”
“Hey,” whispered Kim “anyone else feel like the ground is moving?”
Meanwhile, lieutenants Felix and Jones were having their own little debate with Commander Johnson and the first officer.
“What do you mean there's no sign of the shuttle? We should have come down nearly on top of it! No no, it's got to be here; we need to salvage the equipment on board” Felix exchanged a look with Jones, and tried again “Sir, not only is there no sign of the shuttle, but, in about three hours, it's going to be well in excess of one hundred degrees fahrenheit-”
“Really, Felix?” the first officer interjected, “Razor-toothed demon-beasts could be headed our direction and you're worried you'll have to sweat? A little warm weather never killed anyone, come on!”
“Um...” said Jones quietly “No, see, that's the opposite of true...”
“Randy is right, we need to address the most serious threats first” The captain was so wrong that he was saying the right things and still getting it wrong.
“That's what I mean, sir,” said Jones, “any creatures are just theories, but the sun is right there” ______________________________________________________________________
      Wolfe was beginning to suspect he wasn't thinking clearly. He'd certainly had a rough ten days, which might account for the way he was staring out at nothing, thinking about how he needed a plan of action, and how he needed more information before he could make any reasonable plans. Then he would consider how many teeth information might turn out to have if he went looking for it, decide he was much more likely to die of heat exposure, and wonder where in this alien world he should start doing what. Then he would laugh to himself, and start the thought process over again. It wasn't helping.
So he stopped. Made himself think about something else for a minute. He chose cards. He liked cards. He liked the way they felt in his hands, he liked the 'fnap' sound they made when you flipped a finger across the edge of one, and how they helicoptered through the air when you tossed one just right. He liked playing cards, the way card games always seemed to be part math part con. He was good at cards. Not the best player at the table, but usually in til the end of the game. Now, he had to stay in this game. Well, he was going to need water. He had his canteen, but, since he was planning on living longer than a week, he was going to have to find more. Compatible atmosphere , water, and temperature were the top three requisites to target a planet for an advance mission, so, if he found some water, there was a decent chance he could drink it, and only get horribly ill from whatever microbes or alien sediment was in it. Horaaaaaay. At least he was beginning to focus.
  Well, breathable air meant condensation was a possibility. He mulled that over as a back up option as he picked a direction and started walking.
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