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manofmanymasks · 3 months

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The Man of Many Masks

I would like to introduce you to my main deity. The Man of Many Masks is a very personal deity to me. I've only ever worked with a masculine face, so I refer to him with he/him. However, he contains multitudes, and I'm sure there are parts that use any pronoun you can think of. Some people may see him as a concerning deity to work with due to a lot of the verbiage he uses to describe his domains or the fact that blood can be an appropriate sacrifice, at times. He is not an easy God to work with, but he makes me feel fulfilled and like I am not alone in the way I am. I hope you can appreciate him as much as I do and consider integrating him into your practice. He has certain aspects that encourage plural folks to seek him, I believe, and have listed it as a domain of his. I don't see it as "he causes plurality" and much as he is and protects those who are plural.

Domains:

• Concealment, Deception, Doubt

• Multitudes, Plurality, Reflections

• Protection by way of hiding, information and knowledge for self protection

• Paranoia, Anxiety, Instinct

Prayer Marks

The graphic is not all exhaustive. These are just what I've figured out. Learning the language of your God is the hardest part.

[Image id: bluish-white digital drawing on a black background. 8 symbols are labeled. From the top, left to right: "greeting" is a chin shape with a single line to the left inside. "Knowledge" is the chin shape with a triangle inside, pointing upwards. "Doubt" is the chin shape with 4 lines inside. Furthest left is a sideways J. Next is a short line above it. Next is a long line that goes past the top of the J. Next is a short line, shorter than all the previous. "Change" is the chin shape with a downward pointing triangle in it. "Mask is a chin shape with an oval near the top and 3 lines below it, making two eyes and a nose. "The Self" is a complicated mask. 6 vertical lines point from the chin, and are matched across the center line. The lines descend into the chin like steps. There are two off-kilter Xs in the free space on either side of the lines. "Rejection/Punishment" is the chin shape with an X in it. "The Other" is the chin shape with a total of 5 lines. One is in the center and goes about halfway down. Two on either side are a little lower but the same length. In between each line is a very short dash, making eyes. End Image id]

Communication

• Mirrors or Pools (srying)

• Tarot (masks)

Suggestions

The Man of Many Masks is very internal. Communication is often through you. The relationship tends to be very transactional and distant. This deity is very personal to me, and this guide includes a lot of UPG.

Emoji associations

Any face, but especially: 😶‍🌫️🥸, 💦👤🐢🦚🦎🍽🌑🌚💧🌬🌫🎭🪞🪟🚿♒️🆔️🔹️

Ways to worship/devotional acts

• Therapy: Shadow work, Self-Reflection, IFS, Working with the idea of different selves in different situations

• Religious: Prayer Marks and prayer, Mirror scrying/Water scrying, reading Tarot, meditation (especially for reflection)

• For systems: internal communication, switching intentionally, striving for functional multiplicity. Striving to understand roles and triggers. Not disclosing status to others to keep yourself safe.

• Art: Community Theater, acting/voice acting, Role-playing or "being someone else." Making or printing masks. Writing/representing the self through characters.

• General life: Self Defense Classes, Home Defense Classes, not just "how to defend" but "preventative measures." Hot showers. Keeping animals that choose to hide or disguise themselves. Wearing earrings or other bilateral clothing/accessories that doesn't match. Protecting your information (not just regularly changing passwords, but not disclosing more than necessary to coworkers, bosses, Teachers, landlords, strangers etc. They are not your friends and they do not need to know.)

Correspondences:

• Objects/Concepts: Masks, The Self, Deception, Names, Multitudes, Mirrors

• Animals: Turtles, Chameleons, Octopi, Cuttlefish, Snakes, Peacocks

• Plants: Bee orchid, Lithops, White dead nettle

• Crystals/Gems/Rocks: Pyrite, Fake gemstones (think craft store gems), Metamorphic rocks, cubic zirconia, zircon, moissonite, glass

• Elements: Water/Air

• Celestial Body: Neptune

• Numbers: 2 (masks in the comedy/tragedy masks, representations of the self in a single mirror), 3 (minimum to not be a singularity or duality, but multiple.), 10 (average numbers of alters in a system)

• Scents: Lemon, Bergamot, Green Tea (alertness), Vanilla (Safety), coconut (protection), Rain or Ocean (water)

• Colors: Gray-Blue, Blue, Mirror-Green, Gray/White

Offerings

• Foods: Cookies or other foods shaped like something else, ie. Heart cookies, gingerbread men, braided bread, meatloaf Man.

• Burning Appropriate Incense or Colored Candles

• Mirror (dedicated, with Prayer Marks drawn onto larger mirrors), Masks (make them, display them, wear them, use mask shaped soap, etc etc)

• An array of one kind of object's variants. One of each color of a candy, a set of tabletop dice, a bunch of different novelty erasers. Show Multitudes through objects.

• Any listed correspondence can make a good offering

• Shredded documents. You could even blend them and make them into clean new paper.

Transaction/Ritual examples

• You want to know if you can trust someone. You set yourself in front of a mirror and begin meditation. Draw the appropriate marks on the mirror if large enough, on a chalkboard, paper, tablet, etc if not. Appropriate Marks may include "Knowledge" "doubt" "mask" "the self" "the other" and directional indicators like arrows, joining symbols like circles, and other grammatical symbols. Keep your face visible. When you feel sufficiently connected and like he is with you, pray and commit your offering. This should be appropriately scaled to the task at hand: consider current distance of relationship, social standing of target, and how guarded they may be. Once the offering is complete, scour your face for changes, and interpret accordingly. Consider the language of the deity, and what his communication may mean. This Ritual may be helped with steam, smoke, or other concealing things between you and the mirror.

Altar/Shrine Ideas

• Appropriately colored flowers, especially the correspondent flowers. If those are difficult to get, Fake flowers are not only acceptable, but encouraged.

• Mirrors

• Masks. Black, blue, or green masks, especially ornate ones. Any representation of the theater masks are also acceptable, and if they have meaning to you, can be used.

• Chalkboard, Whiteboard, second mirror for writing on, etc. These are important for your Prayer Marks. Choose something you can wipe off (dry or wet erase work. Wet erase is good if you plan on leaving it until next time.) Unless you're okay replacing your sketchbook from time to time.

• Candles. Blue or green. It may be hard to find candles that are the correct color with the correct Scents you want.

• Incense. See above Scents. Finding an appropriate holder can be an exciting devotional activity.

[Img ID: blue-white digital drawings on a black background. From left to right: a circle labeled candle. A long, thin rectangle labeled "mirror." Above this is handwriting that says "mask is on mirror, glued to top." Below is handwriting that says "optional incense" and below that is an upside down house shape labeled "chalkboard." To the right is another circle, assumed to be another candle. An arrow points towards the mirror and says "The mirror has a metal frame that swirls. Flowers are woven in." End Image id]

#pop culture paganism #pc paganism #my faith is strongly inspired by the silt verse because im an introject of an OC in that universe #paganism #deity #deity worship #deity work #actually plural #plurality #osdd system #osddid #religion tw #sorry for tagging mental health tags but hes helped me come to terms with my plurality and as a plural protector god i'd like to offer him #to any pagan systems #parker.txt #the man of many masks #devotional

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nimblermortal · 1 year

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The Mathematics of Communication

Okay fine I'm liveblogging/taking notes on the 28 pages in this introduction.

Bearing in mind that communication is here meant to be all procedures by which one mind may affect another, and this includes speech, writing, poetry, dance, telegraphs, the internet...

Level A: How accurately can the symbols of communication be transmitted? (technical)

Level B: How precisely do the transmitted symbols convey the desired meaning? (semantic)

Level C: How effectively does the received meaning affect conduct in the desired way? (effectiveness)

Computing is largely concerned with the technical problem! Writing is largely concerned with the semantic! Activism with effectiveness!

Information source -> transmitter -> noise source -> receiver -> destination

(as of writing I have gotten as far as the noise source, so a lot of what I've been thinking about has to do with computing - and Hyacinth is interested - but the bit on entropy and coding is nnggghhh)

The first complicated bit is in understanding the information of the system, and one problem I consistently have is with refusing to assign value judgements to the word 'information'. In this context it has nothing to do with meaning!

It being convenient to use logarithms to the base 2, rather than common or Briggs' logarithm to the base 10, the information, when there are only two choices, is proportional to the logarithm of 2 to the base 2. But this is unity; so that a two choice situation is characterized by the information of unity [such as if you have a relay that can be set to either 0 or 1, it's a single relay and its information is 1]... This unit of information is called a "bit," this word, first suggested by John W. Tukey, being a condensation of "binary digit."

Consider then how much information is in a system of three relays! 8 possible states, or 2^3, for which the logarithm base 2 is just that exponent - 3. So the information basically tells you how many relays are involved.

At this point there is a discussion of, essentially, predictive texting - how when you start a sentence you are inherently limiting what your next words can be. If you say 'the' you're most likely going to put a noun next, so the pool of logical next words has shrunk considerably. If you say 'in the event' the odds that the next word is 'that' are very high. And this is relevant both in the context of freedom of choice in expressing information, and in the concept of assigning probability to words (or letters!) within a language.

(Vocabulary side note: stochastic refers to producing a set of symbols according to certain probabilities, it is not just 'random' the way I tend to use it; Markoff adds hysteresis to this concept; and ergodic means that any random sample is representative of the rest.)

So this concept of freedom of language is where entropy comes into play and where I start getting so excited that I had to put the book down in order to have a chance at going to sleep, and it still took me far longer than usual because I got into side processes about ethics and the entropy of economics and die Banalität des Bösens, all of which is thanks much Diane Duane, who assigned moral connotations to the word.

In a non-YW context, entropy is a measure of the randomness of a system. If you have particles in a room, it's highly unlikely that every single one is in the top left corner, that would be a highly ordered state with an extremely low entropy. It's much more likely that those particles are distributed fairly evenly through the room, just because they tend to bounce around until that happens. This is a highly entropic state, and this is how you get into entropy being associated with the inevitable heat death of the universe - on a universal scale that distribution means eventually everything becomes cold and distant and separate and life cannot exist. But on a smaller scale entropy is also what makes it possible to live, because if all the air molecules were in that one corner you would definitely suffocate and die.

And dieeeeeeeee

...I'm really starting to have fun now, I'm going to post this and get to the next section in a reblog. I really really want to get to the bit about coding so I can tag Tea and talk about poetry. We're on page 12, for anyone keeping track.

#Nimblermortal liveblogs #the Mathematical Theory of Communication #we're on page TWELVE and I'm fangirling SO HARD

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thusjuniperus · 2 years

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history of the latin alphabet I guess

Act I: Early Alphabet As the Neolithic era gave way to the Bronze Age, people were increasingly living in cities and needed some kind of record-keeping. The human brain might be able to remember that you owe Eshanak a goat in exchange for twenty measures of grain, but when you're running a bustling metropolis' Ye Olde Goat Shoppe and have to track goats payable and goats receivable for hundreds of people, the grey matter starts to falter. So ancient accountants were like, "I shall draw these signs to represent goats and grain, alongside tally marks. As well, I shall come up with a mark for Eshanak's Feed and Seed Store, with whom we often do custom," and you're off to the races. More and more symbols get invented and standardized, and pretty soon you can say things like "I, the Pharaoh of Kemet, have erected this grand obelisk in commemoration of my reign," instead of just counting goats.

Logographic writing systems have advantages and disadvantages. On one hand, you don't necessarily need to know the spoken language. You see the sign for sun, you know it means sun. A French person writes down "98", you don't need to know what "quatre-vingt-dix-huit" means. On the other hand, you need to memorize a symbol or combination of symbols for like every goddamn concept in existence. And if you don't know a symbol, you can't "sound it out" on your own.

Many people did not like this, because it is nice to be able to use written language without having to basically get a PhD in it, so simpler systems arose. At one point, probably inspired by similar systems that were floating around at the time, some Semitic day laborers in Egypt decided to think of every consonant they could, all the buhs and duhs and puhs and tuhs, and copy down a hieroglyph for each one. "D is for DOOR," they said. "Where I have drawn a DOOR in the text, do not say the entire word DOOR. Instead, make only the initial DUH sound." Thus, they only had to memorize a couple dozen signs.

This alphabet was taken home by the day laborers to Canaan, where it later spread all over the place via some Canaanites we know as Phoenicians, who loved sailing new places and meeting new people.

Intermission: Vowels In many Semitic languages, due to reasons I don't fully understand, word roots lean pretty heavily on consonants over vowels. We, for instance, might have a word like "like", where if we wrote it LK we wouldn't know if it was supposed to be like or look or lick or lock or lake. That happens in Semitic languages, but it's less common -- you can often get by without vowels. Still happens, though, so they had the idea of having some letters pull double-duty, like our "Y". Is it a vowel or a consonant? Well, funny story, if you sit around making "yuh" sounds to yourself, you can eventually reach the conclusion that it kind of does both. Try dragging out the "y" in "yes", you get "eeee-uhh-ess". Try saying Ian and the yuh shows up in the middle ("ee-yan"). Same thing with oo and wuh. This is more relevant to modern Semitic writing, but was somewhat present in the original Phoenician and probably influenced which letters Greek repurposed as vowels.

Act II: Greek Greeks NEED their vowels. Can't live without them. The Phoenicians handed their script over like "This is a Bet (house). It used to look more like a real house floorplan, but we simplified it for faster, neater writing. This is a Dalet (door)," and the Greeks were like "Beta, Delta, got it. And this one's Alpha? And this one's just 'E'? A simple E -- an e 'psilon', if you will?" and the Phoenicians were like "uh, it's actually [Glottal-stop]'aleph and He," and the Greeks were like "Yeah, that's what I said?" and voila, there are vowels.

Some other changes the Greeks made include:

Many symbols flipped due to being written left-to-right instead of right-to-left. Also, Greeks love symmetry as much as they love vowels, so tended to make symbols more symmetrical.

Glottal stop consonants 'Alef and 'Ayin became vowels Alpha and O (the latter later split into little O, Omicron, and big O, Omega). One of the two H noises (and much later the second) became the vowel E. Iota was used only as a vowel, since they didn't have the consonant yuh sound.

They did have both oo and wuh sounds, and wanted separate signs for them, so Waw was split into Digamma (consonant, head of the symbol is bent to the right so it looks like two Gammas) and U (vowel, drawn as "Y"), which was added to the end of the alphabet and later named "simple U"/Upsilon (or Ypsilon). Then later they were like "Huh, guess we don't use that consonant sound anymore? Wine is just 'ine'?" and got rid of Digamma. But not fast enough. The Etruscans cribbed it first.

Greeks kept both Kappa and Qoppa as kuh sounds (there was a difference in the original Semitic). Later they would realize this was dumb and drop Qoppa--again, not fast enough.

Greeks [long sigh] took in Samek (suh), Tsade (tsuh), and Shin (shuh), and then had trouble telling them apart. They dropped Tsade/San entirely. They presumably misattributed the name Samek to Shin, which they called Sigma and gave a suh sound. Then they (the eastern Greeks, anyway) decided the now-nameless O.G. Samek symbol should make a /ks/ sound (why???) and called it Xi.

There were a lot of different regional variations of the Greek alphabet at this time, which were later eliminated as the modern Greek alphabet solidified. For instance, the western variant, instead of turning Samek into Xi, took it out entirely and threw a /ks/ sound written as "X" in after Upsilon at the end of the alphabet. This western variant is the one the Etruscans inherited.

Act III: Etruscan My knee-jerk reaction is to talk about how the Etruscans fucked it up, but that's not fair to them. They did a pretty good job establishing the alphabet in Italy. It's not their fault they didn't make a distinction between guh and kuh. It's just…

"sorry for accidentally inventing the letter C" "some crimes can't be forgiven"

One fun thing they did that I like quite a lot: Instead of cluelessly imitating the clueless Greek imitation of the Semitic letter names, the Etruscans just put each sound up alongside a vowel, essentially making our current "el, em, en, oh, pe" pronunciations. But there was a rule! Consonants you can drag out, like ffff and ssss, got put after the vowel. Consonants you make once and they're done, like p- t- k- (called plosives), got put before it. Modern changes in pronunciation and some letters getting dropped/added have messed this up in several spots, but it largely holds true. In case you've ever wondered why the alphabet isn't sung Le Me Ne Oh Pe.

Also, Digamma pronounciation has moved from wuh to vuh. The Romans are soon going to change it to fuh because this letter is a neverending nightmare.

Act IV: Latin Let's check in on the alphabet line-up. 𐌀 𐌁 𐌂 𐌃 𐌄 𐌅 𐌆 𐌇 𐌉 𐌊 𐌋 𐌌 𐌍 𐌏 𐌐 𐌒 𐌓 𐌔 𐌕 𐌖 𐌗 A B K/G D E F Z H I/Y K/G L M N O P K/G R S T U/W KS

Romans: "Hey, does this letter make a /k/ sound or a /g/ sound?" Etruscans: "Yes." Romans: "Cool, alright. Let's take all three k/g symbols and make convoluted grammar rules about which of them gets used based on the following vowel."

These rules gradually faded, with K mostly being used in Greek loanwords, Q just being used before U, and C being used for everything else. Romans didn't use the Z sound much either, so they gave it some thought and decided the reasonable thing to do would be to remove it from the alphabet, under the rationale that--well, actually, the reason recorded in Roman histories is that Appius Claudius (of the Appian Way) hated the Z sound because he thought it caused you to make the look of a death rictus, but I'm sure it was that first thing. Anyway, there was fortunately a different Roman dude around this time who said "Why don't we put a downstroke at the tip of this C, and that one can be our /g/ sound?" so they moved this new symbol "G" into Z's old spot.

The letter that makes a puh sound, originally sort of a crook shape, started to be drawn curled in tight enough that it looked like P. But "P" was already the symbol of the letter that went ruh; so, to distinguish them, they added a leg to ruh ("P") and made "R". I feel like there was a more graceful and less confusing way they could have done this.

Update on Waw's demon children: Claudius (a different one, this guy's an emperor) tried adding an upside-down F to the alphabet to represent the W sound, but it didn't take. Sorry, buddy, you tried. Oh, and the Romans have taken Upsilon (Y) from Greek. "Wait, don't we already have an Upsilon?" No, the Latin "Y" lost its "stem" a long while back and is now normally drawn like U or V. It still makes a U/W sound. Sorry, I saved that update for the "Waw's demon children" section. "But that's still an Upsilon, though. Why do they need to re-import Upsilon drawn with a stem when they've still got Upsilon drawn without one?" Because Greek Upsilon has evolved into a weird vowel that bears more phonetic resemblance to I, and the Romans want to call it "Greek I" ("I Graeca") and use it in their cool Greek loanwords. FINE, I GUESS. At least they brought Z back home with it.

As the "classical" Latin era ends, the alphabet looks like this. A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X Y Z

Intermission: Lowercase Over time, Greek and its derived alphabets made "miniscule" letters, messy little scribbles that were much faster to write than ALL CAPS. People now use the miniscule forms for most writing, but have developed specific grammatical rules to use majuscule for important things like beginnings of sentences, names, etc.

Act V: Catching up to the Present I'm not going to list every weird-ass letter adopted by every European country, but here are some notable things that happened that help explain the modern English alphabet.

In various Romance languages, C, instead of being pronounced /k/, started being pronounced like "tsh"/"ch" or "ts" when used before the vowels e/i/y. Wikipedia says this inexplicable nonsense is called "palatalization". In English and a few other languages, these sounds later softened to "s". Instead of instituting any kind of reform here, we just decided C would continue to make both noises. Thanks, I hate it.

Simultaneously, G palatalized as a "dzh" sound (think d + the sound in the middle of "vision") in front of e/i/y. At least this one gave us the apple of discord that is the GIF debate.

[deep breath] Waw's descendents include F, U, and Y. F is still F. A doubled U started being used to denote a wuh sound, though sometimes the runic glyph Wynn was used instead. U and V split so that the curved version is the vowel and the pointy version is the consonant. Y (formerly "Greek I") is still a vowel, though by the time of Middle English its sound has merged with normal I ("ee") entirely; in Middle English, Y started being used as a consonant in place of obscure letter Yogh for a "yuh" sound (perhaps because the sounds ee and yuh are related); it was also sometimes used by printers in place of thorn (þ), hence "ye olde".

People had long been putting a fun little curvy tail on the letter i when they felt like it needed some pizazz. In the 16th century, some Germanic people decided to split these into two letters, with the original being the vowel (ee) and the curly-tailed variant the consonant (yuh). Well done! This long-overdue innovation spread through northern Europe into Baltic and Slavic alphabets, and then slammed headlong into the goddamn Romance languages that decided to use J as a "dzh" sound because that's how they pronounce "yuh" now I guess. (Speakers of Romance languges, and also British people who say Tjchewsday, and also I suppose all of us who say "didja": Why do you keep cramming tshzjch sounds into everything?) This divide in "J" pronunciations exists to this day.

The default Latin alphabet now looks like this. A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

#apologies for the godawful font/formatting on the chart #linguistics #alphabet history #alphabet

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azifall · 2 years

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Campfire Write

You can use all of Campfire Write's features without paying, but only to a point. You can only write 25,000 words in the manuscript writer on the free to use version, for example. Something to keep in mind!

Campfire Write is a program designed for people with big worlds and casts - so sci-fi authors, or historical - but it can be used by anyone!

When adding a character to your cast, you have a place to add their name, subtitle, image, description, attributes, image bank, physical traits, personality traits, and statistics. Attributes are preselected - you choose from a list, then fill those out. The rest you put down your own, then a description, and statistics gives you a place for a name, a number, and a unit of measurement. You can also make templates if you like how you've set up a character! There's also a place to add a backstory, or overall notes, and any other pages you want.

The tabs for Locations is the same as for characters.

There is a tab for maps - where you can save a zoomable image of your map.

The research tab is very customizable. You can add images, PDFs, text, videos, and urls. There's a separate notepad, and a separate place to add links to elements on Campfire.

The timeline tab lets you create as many plotlines as you need - so if you have romances, or subplots, etc - and you can draw connections between the various events. These events can have images (though they won't show in the overview), titles, a timestamp, and a description. Each event can also have attributes: including aliases, importance, whether it occurs on or offscreen, and have characters linked to them.

If you link a character to an event, you can track their arc! Using their arc, you can track how they change through the story.

Campfire allows you to make a Relationship web - you select what characters are shown, color code the lines, then draw lines between the characters!

You can make an encyclopedia! I love it! It's basically a wiki page. You have a basic image spot, a one-sentence summary, a space for short facts/summary, and then for anything you need to write! Tables, data, just a text dump! It's great!

Campfire is focused around sci-fi, and so there is a tab for magic. There you can write the source: emotions/objects, provide images, how it's channeled, what the cost of the magic is and what it can't do (cool!), and any exceptions, as well as the origins, rarity, and timeline!

There's also an area for species! It's very similar to the character tab, but with spaces for habitats, species' averages, and similar things!

Culture is very similar to characters, with some areas for 'attributes', and then a box for history, and items is close to characters. Systems is similar to both.

Language is brilliant! You can write or insert an image for a symbol, write out how it's pronounced, then any modifiers. Then you can make a dictionary, then have a free tab. There's also a religions and philosophy plotter.

The writer itself is pretty nice! Although it doesn't have Times new Roman as an option?? You can pull up any element at any time to view (character, location, item, etc) on the side bar, make comments and notes.

For what it is - a world maker, 10/10. But there's no plotter, and the writer itself is thoroughly eh. (Again, no Times New Roman?) So as a writing program, 4/10.

Out of all the 'plotters' I've found, Campfire Writer is the best... for everything except actual plotting. For characters, worldbuilding, etc, nothing beats it. So if you already have a plotter and writer, but need something for worldbuilding, then Campfire Writer is perfect. But if you're looking for a writer/plotter, then no. The app also works really well, though.

Campfire Writer lets you subscribe to each module individually. So if your story has a massive cast of characters, but you don't need the manuscript writer, religions, or anything else, then paying for the characters module and maybe relationships might be worth it. You can subscribe monthly, annually, or pay a one-time fee.

#campfire writer #writing program thoughts

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jcmarchi · 2 months

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The Shift from Models to Compound AI Systems

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/the-shift-from-models-to-compound-ai-systems/

The Shift from Models to Compound AI Systems

AI caught everyone’s attention in 2023 with Large Language Models (LLMs) that can be instructed to perform general tasks, such as translation or coding, just by prompting. This naturally led to an intense focus on models as the primary ingredient in AI application development, with everyone wondering what capabilities new LLMs will bring. As more developers begin to build using LLMs, however, we believe that this focus is rapidly changing: state-of-the-art AI results are increasingly obtained by compound systems with multiple components, not just monolithic models.

For example, Google’s AlphaCode 2 set state-of-the-art results in programming through a carefully engineered system that uses LLMs to generate up to 1 million possible solutions for a task and then filter down the set. AlphaGeometry, likewise, combines an LLM with a traditional symbolic solver to tackle olympiad problems. In enterprises, our colleagues at Databricks found that 60% of LLM applications use some form of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and 30% use multi-step chains. Even researchers working on traditional language model tasks, who used to report results from a single LLM call, are now reporting results from increasingly complex inference strategies: Microsoft wrote about a chaining strategy that exceeded GPT-4’s accuracy on medical exams by 9%, and Google’s Gemini launch post measured its MMLU benchmark results using a new CoT@32 inference strategy that calls the model 32 times, which raised questions about its comparison to just a single call to GPT-4. This shift to compound systems opens many interesting design questions, but it is also exciting, because it means leading AI results can be achieved through clever engineering, not just scaling up training.

In this post, we analyze the trend toward compound AI systems and what it means for AI developers. Why are developers building compound systems? Is this paradigm here to stay as models improve? And what are the emerging tools for developing and optimizing such systems—an area that has received far less research than model training? We argue that compound AI systems will likely be the best way to maximize AI results in the future, and might be one of the most impactful trends in AI in 2024.

Increasingly many new AI results are from compound systems.

We define a Compound AI System as a system that tackles AI tasks using multiple interacting components, including multiple calls to models, retrievers, or external tools. In contrast, an AI Model is simply a statistical model, e.g., a Transformer that predicts the next token in text.

Even though AI models are continually getting better, and there is no clear end in sight to their scaling, more and more state-of-the-art results are obtained using compound systems. Why is that? We have seen several distinct reasons:

Some tasks are easier to improve via system design. While LLMs appear to follow remarkable scaling laws that predictably yield better results with more compute, in many applications, scaling offers lower returns-vs-cost than building a compound system. For example, suppose that the current best LLM can solve coding contest problems 30% of the time, and tripling its training budget would increase this to 35%; this is still not reliable enough to win a coding contest! In contrast, engineering a system that samples from the model multiple times, tests each sample, etc. might increase performance to 80% with today’s models, as shown in work like AlphaCode. Even more importantly, iterating on a system design is often much faster than waiting for training runs. We believe that in any high-value application, developers will want to use every tool available to maximize AI quality, so they will use system ideas in addition to scaling. We frequently see this with LLM users, where a good LLM creates a compelling but frustratingly unreliable first demo, and engineering teams then go on to systematically raise quality.

Systems can be dynamic. Machine learning models are inherently limited because they are trained on static datasets, so their “knowledge” is fixed. Therefore, developers need to combine models with other components, such as search and retrieval, to incorporate timely data. In addition, training lets a model “see” the whole training set, so more complex systems are needed to build AI applications with access controls (e.g., answer a user’s questions based only on files the user has access to).

Improving control and trust is easier with systems. Neural network models alone are hard to control: while training will influence them, it is nearly impossible to guarantee that a model will avoid certain behaviors. Using an AI system instead of a model can help developers control behavior more tightly, e.g., by filtering model outputs. Likewise, even the best LLMs still hallucinate, but a system combining, say, LLMs with retrieval can increase user trust by providing citations or automatically verifying facts.

Performance goals vary widely. Each AI model has a fixed quality level and cost, but applications often need to vary these parameters. In some applications, such as inline code suggestions, the best AI models are too expensive, so tools like Github Copilot use carefully tuned smaller models and various search heuristics to provide results. In other applications, even the largest models, like GPT-4, are too cheap! Many users would be willing to pay a few dollars for a correct legal opinion, instead of the few cents it takes to ask GPT-4, but a developer would need to design an AI system to utilize this larger budget.

The shift to compound systems in Generative AI also matches the industry trends in other AI fields, such as self-driving cars: most of the state-of-the-art implementations are systems with multiple specialized components (more discussion here). For these reasons, we believe compound AI systems will remain a leading paradigm even as models improve.

While compound AI systems can offer clear benefits, the art of designing, optimizing, and operating them is still emerging. On the surface, an AI system is a combination of traditional software and AI models, but there are many interesting design questions. For example, should the overall “control logic” be written in traditional code (e.g., Python code that calls an LLM), or should it be driven by an AI model (e.g. LLM agents that call external tools)? Likewise, in a compound system, where should a developer invest resources—for example, in a RAG pipeline, is it better to spend more FLOPS on the retriever or the LLM, or even to call an LLM multiple times? Finally, how can we optimize an AI system with discrete components end-to-end to maximize a metric, the same way we can train a neural network? In this section, we detail a few example AI systems, then discuss these challenges and recent research on them.

The AI System Design Space

Below are few recent compound AI systems to show the breadth of design choices:

AI System Components Design Results AlphaCode 2

Fine-tuned LLMs for sampling and scoring programs

Code execution module

Clustering model

Generates up to 1 million solutions for a coding problem then filters and scores them Matches 85th percentile of humans on coding contests AlphaGeometry

Fine-tuned LLM

Symbolic math engine

Iteratively suggests constructions in a geometry problem via LLM and checks deduced facts produced by symbolic engine Between silver and gold International Math Olympiad medalists on timed test Medprompt

GPT-4 LLM

Nearest-neighbor search in database of correct examples

LLM-generated chain-of-thought examples

Multiple samples and ensembling

Answers medical questions by searching for similar examples to construct a few-shot prompt, adding model-generated chain-of-thought for each example, and generating and judging up to 11 solutions Outperforms specialized medical models like Med-PaLM used with simpler prompting strategies Gemini on MMLU

Gemini LLM

Custom inference logic

Gemini’s CoT@32 inference strategy for the MMLU benchmark samples 32 chain-of-thought answers from the model, and returns the top choice if enough of them agree, or uses generation without chain-of-thought if not 90.04% on MMLU, compared to 86.4% for GPT-4 with 5-shot prompting or 83.7% for Gemini with 5-shot prompting ChatGPT Plus

LLM

Web Browser plugin for retrieving timely content

Code Interpreter plugin for executing Python

DALL-E image generator

The ChatGPT Plus offering can call tools such as web browsing to answer questions; the LLM determines when and how to call each tool as it responds Popular consumer AI product with millions of paid subscribers RAG, ORQA, Bing, Baleen, etc

LLM (sometimes called multiple times)

Retrieval system

Combine LLMs with retrieval systems in various ways, e.g., asking an LLM to generate a search query, or directly searching for the current context Widely used technique in search engines and enterprise apps

Key Challenges in Compound AI Systems

Compound AI systems pose new challenges in design, optimization and operation compared to AI models.

Design Space

The range of possible system designs for a given task is vast. For example, even in the simple case of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with a retriever and language model, there are: (i) many retrieval and language models to choose from, (ii) other techniques to improve retrieval quality, such as query expansion or reranking models, and (iii) techniques to improve the LLM’s generated output (e.g., running another LLM to check that the output relates to the retrieved passages). Developers have to explore this vast space to find a good design.

In addition, developers need to allocate limited resources, like latency and cost budgets, among the system components. For example, if you want to answer RAG questions in 100 milliseconds, should you budget to spend 20 ms on the retriever and 80 on the LLM, or the other way around?

Optimization

Often in ML, maximizing the quality of a compound system requires co-optimizing the components to work well together. For example, consider a simple RAG application where an LLM sees a user question, generates a search query to send to a retriever, and then generates an answer. Ideally, the LLM would be tuned to generate queries that work well for that particular retriever, and the retriever would be tuned to prefer answers that work well for that LLM.

In single model development a la PyTorch, users can easily optimize a model end-to-end because the whole model is differentiable. However, compound AI systems contain non-differentiable components like search engines or code interpreters, and thus require new methods of optimization. Optimizing these compound AI systems is still a new research area; for example, DSPy offers a general optimizer for pipelines of pretrained LLMs and other components, while others systems, like LaMDA, Toolformer and AlphaGeometry, use tool calls during model training to optimize models for those tools.

Operation

Machine learning operations (MLOps) become more challenging for compound AI systems. For example, while it is easy to track success rates for a traditional ML model like a spam classifier, how should developers track and debug the performance of an LLM agent for the same task, which might use a variable number of “reflection” steps or external API calls to classify a message? We believe that a new generation of MLOps tools will be developed to tackle these problems. Interesting problems include:

Monitoring: How can developers most efficiently log, analyze, and debug traces from complex AI systems?

DataOps: Because many AI systems involve data serving components like vector DBs, and their behavior depends on the quality of data served, any focus on operations for these systems should additionally span data pipelines.

Security: Research has shown that compound AI systems, such as an LLM chatbot with a content filter, can create unforeseen security risks compared to individual models. New tools will be required to secure these systems.

Emerging Paradigms

To tackle the challenges of building compound AI systems, multiple new approaches are arising in the industry and in research. We highlight a few of the most widely used ones and examples from our research on tackling these challenges.

Designing AI Systems: Composition Frameworks and Strategies. Many developers are now using “language model programming” frameworks that let them build applications out of multiple calls to AI models and other components. These include component libraries like LangChain and LlamaIndex that developers call from traditional programs, agent frameworks like AutoGPT and BabyAGI that let an LLM drive the application, and tools for controlling LM outputs, like Guardrails, Outlines, LMQL and SGLang. In parallel, researchers are developing numerous new inference strategies to generate better outputs using calls to models and tools, such as chain-of-thought, self-consistency, WikiChat, RAG and others.

Automatically Optimizing Quality: DSPy. Coming from academia, DSPy is the first framework that aims to optimize a system composed of LLM calls and other tools to maximize a target metric. Users write an application out of calls to LLMs and other tools, and provide a target metric such as accuracy on a validation set, and then DSPy automatically tunes the pipeline by creating prompt instructions, few-shot examples, and other parameter choices for each module to maximize end-to-end performance. The effect is similar to end-to-end optimization of a multi-layer neural network in PyTorch, except that the modules in DSPy are not always differentiable layers. To do that, DSPy leverages the linguistic abilities of LLMs in a clean way: to specify each module, users write a natural language signature, such as user_question -> search_query, where the names of the input and output fields are meaningful, and DSPy automatically turns this into suitable prompts with instructions, few-shot examples, or even weight updates to the underlying language models.

Optimizing Cost: FrugalGPT and AI Gateways. The wide range of AI models and services available makes it challenging to pick the right one for an application. Moreover, different models may perform better on different inputs. FrugalGPT is a framework to automatically route inputs to different AI model cascades to maximize quality subject to a target budget. Based on a small set of examples, it learns a routing strategy that can outperform the best LLM services by up to 4% at the same cost, or reduce cost by up to 90% while matching their quality. FrugalGPT is an example of a broader emerging concept of AI gateways or routers, implemented in software like Databricks AI Gateway, OpenRouter, and Martian, to optimize the performance of each component of an AI application. These systems work even better when an AI task is broken into smaller modular steps in a compound system, and the gateway can optimize routing separately for each step.

Operation: LLMOps and DataOps. AI applications have always required careful monitoring of both model outputs and data pipelines to run reliably. With compound AI systems, however, the behavior of the system on each input can be considerably more complex, so it is important to track all the steps taken by the application and intermediate outputs. Software like LangSmith, Phoenix Traces, and Databricks Inference Tables can track, visualize and evaluate these outputs at a fine granularity, in some cases also correlating them with data pipeline quality and downstream metrics. In the research world, DSPy Assertions seeks to leverage feedback from monitoring checks directly in AI systems to improve outputs, and AI-based quality evaluation methods like MT-Bench, FAVA and ARES aim to automate quality monitoring.

Generative AI has excited every developer by unlocking a wide range of capabilities through natural language prompting. As developers aim to move beyond demos and maximize the quality of their AI applications, however, they are increasingly turning to compound AI systems as a natural way to control and enhance the capabilities of LLMs. Figuring out the best practices for developing compound AI systems is still an open question, but there are already exciting approaches to aid with design, end-to-end optimization, and operation. We believe that compound AI systems will remain the best way to maximize the quality and reliability of AI applications going forward, and may be one of the most important trends in AI in 2024.

BibTex for this post:

@misccompound-ai-blog, title=The Shift from Models to Compound AI Systems, author=Matei Zaharia and Omar Khattab and Lingjiao Chen and Jared Quincy Davis and Heather Miller and Chris Potts and James Zou and Michael Carbin and Jonathan Frankle and Naveen Rao and Ali Ghodsi, howpublished=urlhttps://bair.berkeley.edu/blog/2024/02/18/compound-ai-systems/, year=2024

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notwiselybuttoowell · 2 months

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Backers of the European Union's ambitious Green Deal suffered a major blow on Tuesday after the European Commission scrapped plans to push farmers to use fewer pesticides and slash carbon emissions.

The volte-face by the EU's executive body was a response to weeks of protests by farmers who are angry about falling profits, red tape, rising costs and the burden of the EU's flagship Green Deal, a pioneering effort to make the EU the world's leader in fighting climate change by drastically reducing carbon emissions by 2050 and restoring natural systems.

Tuesday's developments could be seen as a defeat for those advocating Europe must move away from heavily subsidized industrial farming both for the good of nature and for the fight against climate change.

The Green Deal set out to make agriculture in the EU more organic and less polluting, but those aspirations are now in jeopardy.

In a speech to the European Parliament, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced the end of a proposed law seeking to slash pesticide use by 50% by 2030.

She said the bill had become a “symbol of polarization” and that it had be nixed after its progress stalled within the EU's legislative process. The rules already had been watered down considerably, upsetting environmentalists. She said a new pesticide bill would be proposed after negotiations with farmers, environmentalists, agrochemical companies, banks and others.

In a separate announcement about a new strategy to reduce emissions by 90% by 2040 compared to 1990 levels, the commission deleted language calling on the agriculture sector to make big cuts in its carbon emissions. In earlier drafts, the plan targeted emissions linked to farming, such as methane belched by cows, and called on farmers to reduce their livestock herds and Europeans to eat less meat.

Also angering environmentalists, the new goals omitted deadlines for phasing out coal, oil and natural gas, and did not call for an end to subsidies for fossil fuel projects, environmental groups said. Earlier drafts included tougher measures.

Instead, the guidelines focused on reaching the 90% target by using technology and methods to remove carbon from the atmosphere or stop it from being emitted at industrial sites. Such approaches are controversial because they are deemed ineffective and untested by many scientists.

The European Environmental Bureau, a Brussels-based non-profit, called it a “careless plan” unlikely to achieve its goals because of an “over-reliance on expensive and unproven technologies.”

Tuesday's concessions to farmers came a week after the commission delayed by a year new requirements compelling many large farms that get EU funds to set aside 4% of their land for nature. Under this rule, farmers will need to leave land fallow or plant such features as hedges and trees.

In her speech, von der Leyen made it clear that she was ready to take farmers' complaints seriously and she showed willingness to retreat from the Green Deal, a policy she's made central to her presidency.

She is coming under intense pressure not only from farmers but also her political group, the conservative European People's Party, the main force in the European Parliament.

The EPP has increasingly spoken out against many of the more stringent aspects of the Green Deal, arguing they are too costly for industry and farmers. In doing so, the EPP is seeking to stave off far-right rivals who are courting farmers as they surge ahead of June elections for the European Parliament.

For her part, von der Leyen may be shifting her stance along with the EPP because she is likely to seek a second mandate as commission president following the elections.

Environmentalists blasted von der Leyen's backpedaling and said weakening the Green Deal will end up hurting farmers by worsening the climate crisis and causing further damage to nature.

“Politicians ignoring scientific advice on helping farmers move away from overproduction of meat and dairy makes climate change worse and leaves European farming more exposed to extreme weather,” said Marco Contiero, an agriculture policy specialist for Greenpeace. “Farmers are nature's best allies, when the rules, markets and subsidies don't force them into a desperate choice between industrial production or bankruptcy.”

Philippe Lamberts, a leader of the Greens in the European Parliament, accused the EPP and other political groups of “disinformation” and “outright lies” about how the Green Deal and Green parties were to blame for the problems faced by farmers.

“They pretend to listen to the farmers; actually, they dictate to the farmers what they should say: Point the finger at the Greens,” he said during a news conference. “When you listen to the farmers, what do they tell you? That they are crushed by an economic system that gives them zero profitability, zero degree of freedom.”

He said the cause for the farmers' woes lies with political groups like the EPP that back free-trade deals, big agrochemical companies, the food retail sector and banking institutions.

“They've been screwing the countryside and then they pose as their saviors,” he said. “And that's just an outright lie.”

Lamberts said carrying out the Green Deal will involve big changes for farmers. To achieve this change, he said the EU needs to reform its hugely subsidized agricultural system so that farmers aren't paid subsidies for what they produce but rather for taking costly environmental measures.

“In a well-functioning market economy, they [farmers] should be able to sell their wares, what they produce, with a profit and then get rewarded with subsidies for services they provide to society that they cannot be paid for,” he said. “I mean, when you restore biodiversity, you cannot sell biodiversity on the market; but that is work and every work must be compensated by an income.”

More on this component in the ongoing saga, in the form of an article from early February

#pesticides #eu #European union #environment #politics #agriculture #special treatment #climate change

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gertlushgaming · 1 year

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Paradise Killer Review (Nintendo Switch OLED)

For this Paradise Killer Review, where we play a game set in Paradise Island, a world outside reality. There’s been a murder that only "investigation freak" Lady Love Dies can solve. Gather evidence and interrogate suspects in this open-world adventure. You can accuse anyone, but you’ll have to prove your case in trial. It’s up to you to decide who’s guilty.

Paradise Killer Review Pros:

- Beautiful pixel art graphics style. - 3.7GB download size. - 3 save slots. - First-person detective gameplay. - Controller settings - Invert axis and sensitivity sliders, deadzone sliders, sticky aim, and camera smoothing slider. - Display settings - HUD overlay, a field of view slider, and motion blur. - Game settings - language, rumble, mature content, highlight names and set how evidence assignments work. - Motion sickness help. - Accessibility settings - sprint mode, AR mode, mediation mode, falling whilst crouched, screenshake, rotating backgrounds, flickering lights, auto walk, auto walk speed, dialogue font, typing sounds, color correction, color correction scale slider, day/night cycle, and night brightness. - Brilliant soundtrack. - Excellent voice work. - The presentation is inviting, and engaging. - Multiple choice questions and encounters. - Many collectible relics are to be found. - The world is just so much fun to explore, big bright, and gorgeous to look at. - Bright punchy menu system from the Interactive pop-ups to the text and rolling list of dialogue. - Tutorial pop-ups as you play. - Starlight is your laptop/Ai helper that runs all your cases, inventory management, timeliness, and maps. - You can customize your Starlight interface with collectible skins and music tracks. - Nightmare is the older more dangerous version of Starlight, you hack the terminals by deciphering the code as long as you have the software plugin to see the symbols to decipher. - Blood crystals are the currency in the game. - Such high presentation values. - Play how you want. - Open world. - You get told what part of the island you are in when you enter it. - Telephone boxes act as fast travel points. - Investigation notes are broken down and color-coded so you can easily and quickly access information. - AR brings up an augmented reality overlay showing suspects/markers/objectives etc direction and distance. - Change the song playing with the d-pad. - Handy respawn button if you get stuck. - Interact with people by interrogating them for answers/clues, and hang out with them to build relationship levels. - Use Blood crystals to buy items and unlock fast travel points. - The world is 3D but all the characters are 2D sprites. - Shinji is a weird ass dude that annoys and helps you in equal measures and is usually found in places you least expect. - Crime scene photos and locations can be interacted with, and information learned. - Anything you learn or find will automatically get put into Starlight which sorts it. - Save points are everywhere. - No fall damage. - Foot baths are expensive to use but they grant you new abilities. - Everyone will have a different experience. - Such a well-designed world, with so many secrets to find and areas to explore. - Aside from the main murder mystery story, you can pick up optional side investigations. - A lot of platforming and parkour. - It can and will rain. - Upgrade Starlight using blood crystals and seeing the right person. Paradise Killer Review Cons: - Cannot rebind controls. - No touchscreen support. - Slow starter. - The tutorial prompts are very basic. - A lot to take in. - Slight performance hits at times. - Doesn't look as crisp as the PC version. - Pop up and pop in happen a lot. - Can be hard to see items in the distance. - Learning what and who are viable targets to navigate to on the AR is a mission in itself. - The pop-up you have to click every time you pick up a blood crystal is annoying. - You are not told/warned or given any notice that water no matter how shallow usually kills you quickly. - The respawning is fine but it's hard to know where it will respawn you half the time. - The tone used when saying about Blood crystals makes it sound like they are rare or hard to come by but that's not the case. - Characters can have a canned voice response and it gets very repetitive. - You cannot interact with the map or place your own markers which is really annoying when doing side investigations. - Early game platforming is less than ideal. - A lot of reading and pressing the same button over and over. Related Post: Cyber Neon Bundle Review (Nintendo Switch OLED) Paradise Killer: Official website. Developer: KAIZEN GAME WORKS Publisher: KAIZEN GAME WORKS Store Links - Nintendo Read the full article

#Indie #Nindies #NintendoSwitch

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rphlrvw · 2 years

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Campfire Write

Campfire Write is a program designed for people with big worlds and casts - so sci-fi authors, or historical - but it can be used by anyone!

The tabs for Locations is the same as for characters.

There is a tab for maps - where you can save a zoomable image of your map.

The research tab is very customizable. You can add images, PDFs, text, videos, and urls. There's a separate notepad, and a separate place to add links to elements on Campfire.

If you link a character to an event, you can track their arc! Using their arc, you can track how they change through the story.

Campfire allows you to make a Relationship web - you select what characters are shown, color code the lines, then draw lines between the characters!

There's also an area for species! It's very similar to the character tab, but with spaces for habitats, species' averages, and similar things!

Culture is very similar to characters, with some areas for 'attributes', and then a box for history, and items is close to characters. Systems is similar to both.

For what it is - a world maker, 10/10. But there's no plotter, and the writer itself is thoroughly eh. (Again, no Times New Roman?) So as a writing program, 4/10.

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nahaswinner · 2 years

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Write in game of thrones font

#WRITE IN GAME OF THRONES FONT HOW TO#

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Love them or hate them? What inspiring lines you would inscribe on your wedding rings? How to commission your very own engraved wedding rings You need only to contact us for advice on alternative designs. Owing to the variable size of the text, smaller ring widths can be engraved across many of the regular ring styles. The wording has been kept purposefully small. To note the width of each ring, they measure 8mm. I photographed both of the rings above, once the rings had been finally polished. (Please note: I confess to being a true font-nerd at times!) We work with a diverse selection of fonts and we find that everyone has a favourite. A letter style that emphasises the inscription. Once you have the words, consider the font. Our advice would be to spend a little time writing down ideas. We know that the best engravings are simple engravings. Each concept provides a truly unique way to customise a pair of wedding rings. There are so many wonderful sources of inspiration and fonts. The typeface chosen was a rustic, distressed typewriter font. The lack of additional detail added a very simple, uncluttered feel. Remember – you can engrave your Game of Thrones wedding rings in any font!īefore we engraved each ring, we selected plain D shaped wedding rings, mirror polished. The rings were purposefully styled in this way. The text could almost be from a page of the book. “Shekh Ma Shieraki Anni“ (My Sun and Stars, in Dothraki) “Jalan Atthirari Anni” (Moon of My Life, in Dothraki) Daenerys Just Google the following words and see what I mean…. One of the most memorable lines from the series derives from the relationship between Daenerys Targaryen (played by Emilia Clarke) and Khal Drogo (played by Jason Momoa), the leader of the nomadic Dothraki. (Do this at the end of the post please!) Adding a line from Game of Thrones to your wedding rings If you have not yet seen this series, you are truly missing out.

#WRITE IN GAME OF THRONES FONT SERIES#

Martin’s series of fantasy novels, the first of which is titled A Game of Thrones. The series is an adaptation of A Song of Ice and Fire, George R. A pair of engraved wedding rings inspired by the popular fantasy series, “Game of Thrones,” back for another series. As season 5 Game of Thrones unfolds on our televisions, we are sharing here one of our recent commissions.

#Write in game of thrones font

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norris82rivas · 2 years

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namescale29 · 2 years

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The Advanced Guide To Online Game

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CMDS takes as its input matrix , indicating dissimilarities between participant pairs, and outputs a coordinate matrix whose configuration minimizes a loss function in preserving all interpoint distances. As well as, we use the function cmdscale within the Statistical Toolbox of Matlab for performing CMDS and select solely the primary two dimensions of the constructed coordinates for plotting gamers. This is primarily because the issue solving approaches which can be required to play these games will help to enhance how your mind function. Regional unique games are nothing new on the Nintendo Switch On-line service, after all, and Japanese subscribers can be getting Customized Robo and Customized Robo V2 in addition to the introduced lineup in the West. Students’ examination outcomes will determine whether they can enter tertiary education. 5. They have been postgraduate college students in Geography Training. 4. The test was in Chinese, the mother language of the scholars. Every of the Kahoot® questions had been reviewed for content validity, which issues, primarily, the adequacy with which the check items adequately and representatively pattern the content area to be measured. At the same time, competitions among them are additionally becoming very excessive. The input to CMDS is derived based mostly on time-sequence matrices of gamers' motion sequences that are needlessly lengthy as a consequence of noise and redundancy, resulting in excessive computational price. Thus ought to be a frequent symbol in all motion sequences. Thus duetqq pkv is the ultimate choice of happiness. Especially if you accessibility totally free varieties, all you want is a Pc that is definitely related to the internet and you're good to go. Love, romance and insanity, all go hand in hand and though many would deny it outright, most of us crave for love and wish a little bit of it in our lives in some kind or the opposite. I must admit, that is genuinely just a little off-putting because of how slow the game is but it's also so ridiculously charming that makes me not care as a lot because making a brand new character and doing something entirely totally different on this world can also be very interesting. The sport calls for its players in an effort to kill the opponent throughout the imaginary world. Monster Hunter: World has you discover a beforehand unseen region of the Monster Hunter Universe, a huge new world referred to as a popular migration level for many mythical monsters and creatures. In addition, this research analyzes the affect of game genres, parental elements, the leisure environment and relationship satisfaction on game addiction. Amongst the sport genres, RPG, simulation and casual video games had been positively related to addictive habits. Online game enjoying time was an necessary predictor of sport addiction, especially amongst those who performed Computer on-line games late at night. They are the newest instance of the expertise economic system: the idea that shoppers now favor to spend time on creating reminiscences and experiencing one thing new and thrilling. If you’ve been spending all this time caught at residence honing your inventive skills, it’s time to place them to good use in a recreation of Skribbl. The authors performed two studies to discover online game players' circulate experiences and positive have an effect on. In our analysis, the th component in is the DTW distance between the diminished time-series matrices of motion sequences of gamers and . It's because we anticipate that they should be identifiable using our action sequences and KeyGraphs. Right here, we describe how motion sequences are numerically coded into time-collection matrices for computation of DTW distances. So as to reduce the dimension of matrices used in computation of the CMDS input, we exploit a time-collection discount technique just lately proposed by us. The proposed method consists of two visualization techniques: classical multidimensional scaling (CMDS) and KeyGraph. Three main parts of KeyGraph are as follows. From this figure, it can be seen that there's one basis consisting of 4 phrases, that is, “KeyGraph,” “action,” “behaviors,” and “players.” The primary three terms are also key phrases. Associations between terms are defined as the co-prevalence amongst them in same sentences, and keywords are the terms in either foundations or roofs that are related to strong columns. The ‘winners’ are often Band-A students. 9. In Hong Kong, there are solely round 18% of Secondary-6 (Okay-12) students who can enter universities. Those days are gone when only children used to love enjoying journey video games. Video games offer up magic in heaps of different guises, however working with a pal to attain a objective is, arguably, the place they actually shine.

#duetqq

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delimeful · 3 years

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not always what they seem (3)

warnings: remus pov so lots of brief mentions of gore/violence, some NSFW comments/innuendos/saucy jokes, dissection mention, miscommunication, minor injuries

the song remus so graciously performs for everyone is "a gorey demise"! :)

Remus kicked his legs absently as his alien carried him through the giant halls of... wherever the hell they were. A spaceship? Some sort of research facility? Maybe probing was still on the table.

He was pretty sure at this point that this was real, if only because if it was one of his night terrors, there would have been at least 35% more death and gore by now. Maybe 40%.

And it wasn’t like there hadn’t already been prime opportunities at basically every moment, with how small and crushable they were in comparison to each of the aliens! If the three of them were the protagonists, by slasher movie standards, two of them would have to be grotesquely killed by the end. He wondered absently which of his fellow abductees would make a better Final Survivor.

His attention immediately switched tracks as they reached a stopping point, and Logan settled their hand down on a giant, metallic table. Remus rolled off onto the surface and sprang up to his feet, rubbing his hands together maniacally. “So, what’s first?”

The alien’s big fluffy ears twitched, but they didn’t do more than glance down at Remus before tapping at a smooth blue surface and pulling up extensive diagrams. Well, if the alien wasn’t going to bring the experiments to him, he’d bring himself to the experiments!

He trotted across the table and skipped onto the blue surface, ignoring the windows and symbols that flickered into existence behind every step. If they didn’t want him walking all over the alien version of a touchscreen, they should have kidnapped him with shoes! Or broken his legs, like very literal theatre fans.

Logan didn’t lift a hand to stop him though, their head tilted curiously like a feral cat seeing something small and breakable to maul. Remus dialed the probability of it being a night terror up a few percentages, and then turned to look at the diagrams anyhow.

Ah, yes, pictures. The universal language.

He had no idea what most of the creatures depicted were or what the labels attached read, but the drawings themselves were clear enough: bodies posed neutrally, no clothes, and some parts of them exposed to show muscle, bone, and organ.

“Hm,” Remus hummed, consideringly. “These are either dissection diagrams or some really gory pornography... Either way, I’m so down.”

He flashed the alien a double thumbs up, and flopped down on top of a diagram. Logan reached over and messed with the touchscreen for a moment, and then reached even further and returned with a long, narrow utensil, black and pointed at one end.

They set the point of it directly next to his torso without even bothering to press the rest of him down, and Remus wondered if the alien expected him not to thrash around while he was being dissected. Maybe aliens had technology that deadened nerves as they cut through them! He’d always wondered how long he’d be able to survive a vivisection.

Logan moved the utensil, and Remus’s body twitched in adrenaline-fueled anticipation despite feeling exactly nothing. He craned his neck to see what was going on, and blinked.

A line stretched across the touchscreen where the utensil had slid across it, shadowing the curve of his ribcage over what looked hilariously similar to graph paper.

The alien was tracing him.

“Oh, come on!”

---

Logan’s tail swayed in curiosity as Remus began to make louder versions of those little noises that made up the aliens’ language, accentuated with a hand gesture. The motion made it harder to get an accurate outline, but the main point was to get basic measurements anyhow, so Logan didn’t try to stifle the little creature’s movements.

He absolutely didn’t want to disrupt the odd casualness with which this one treated him, so different from Virgil’s earlier twitchy terror and even D’s careful consideration of their every movement. While quite rowdy in nature, Remus seemed the most unconcerned with the situation, only showing aggression when one of the others had been grabbed without warning.

The tiny aliens were certainly a puzzle. D had given Remus’s name for them, perhaps indicating a social hierarchy, but Remus was also the largest between the three of them and had been completely unfazed by any teeth baring or tackling from the other two.

He prodded the tiny alien lightly as he finished and saved the measurement, and when that garnered no response, he curled fingers under them and lifted them up securely. Remus ragdolled petulantly, seeming oddly mopey. Perhaps the measurements had bored them?

Hopefully, the maze would provide a little more enrichment. Logan had made the deeper areas quite tricky, after all.

---

Patton was very delicate with how he handled D.

He’d tried to be careful with Remus, too, but they’d seemed pretty intent on trying to bite off little chunks of his suit, and attempt to scale dangerous items, and generally make Patton feel a little wonderment at the fact that the tiny creature had managed to survive long enough to make it to them.

With D, it was much easier, because the alien moved slower than the other two, with a purposeful grace. It seemed Patton didn’t have to worry about D throwing themself off any available high surface just to see if Patton would manage to catch them in time, at least.

He carefully shifted his hand to his research desk, and D adjusted the cuffs of their borrowed overlayer before stepping off of his hand.

Despite D’s languid movements, something about their body language seemed much more mindful than Remus. The pause as they took in the landscape and the ambient writing scrolls scattered across the table before deigning to turn and look at Patton, it felt almost... calculated. As though they were thinking about every move to present a certain image.

Patton reminded himself that there were plenty of aliens that didn’t feel as strongly as Nilhae about the authentic self, and these aliens in particular had more reason than most to hide themselves. They were tiny and vulnerable here, stripped from their homes and families, and by all appearances, Patton and his teammates were the ones responsible.

He wasn’t sure he’d be eager to share his unfiltered self if he was in their situation, either.

Patton clasped both sets of lower hands together determinedly. The solution was the same regardless of if he wanted to fulfill his responsibility as a researcher or make any progress in befriending these little guys: they needed to communicate!

He pulled out two sets of the common alphabet, one printed and one imprinted. He wasn’t sure which senses were the keenest for these aliens, which ones they used for their own language systems, so it was best to cover all his bases.

D studied the printed one curiously, but seemed less interested by the imprinted one. Perhaps the materials used for touch-reading were different for them? Patton moved his hand closer slowly, allowing them time to protest, and held a digit out.

After a short staredown, D set their tiny hand atop it, and Patton guided them both to the surface of the imprints. The symbols were oversized for their tiny digits, but they seemed to get the idea, running their hands over the carved bumps and glancing back and forth between the printed letters and the imprinted ones.

Patton cheered internally, and then flicked a finger in the air to get D’s attention.

“Wait here please!” he enunciated carefully, and then held a hand out, palm-down, to indicate that they should stay put.

D kept their expression carefully neutral, not twitching in any way Patton could read, which made sense, since this was the first time Patton was using these words. Hopefully, context and a few repetitions would help them puzzle the meaning out.

He dipped his lowest arms in a polite be-right-back, turned, and left the room.

It didn’t take him long to duck in and out of the few rooms that held the items he needed, though he seemed to accidentally give Virgil a bit of a startle, going by the wide-eyed look the alien shot at him as Roman greeted him briefly.

Every hand full, he returned to his space, and found D standing in almost the exact same spot, shoulders loose and relaxed, attention remaining on the printed alphabet even as Patton walked closer.

He set each item down, earning a casual glance from the alien, and discreetly checked the heat register for the desk’s touch surface.

Sure enough, the past few moments showed recordings of small footprints that traced the perimeter of the desk, checking every possible side of it, likely for an easy way down. Then, they swiftly headed back to the center of the desk and settled back in place, close enough that it would appear they hadn’t moved at all.

Patton’s mouth twisted unhappily; he could teach the aliens as many words as they wanted, but if they didn’t trust them enough to even show their discomfort with the captivity, real communication would be out of reach.

They had a long way to go.

Remus whistled cheerily as he was carried back to the communal room, Logan’s padded fingers forming a more secure grip around him than before. He didn’t get squeezed to death or anything, so the alien probably wasn’t too angry with him. Or they were just contemplating a more painful method to murder him.

The other alien, the one with the freaky-awesome bug mouth and the rude grabby hands, was still in there, seated by the designated Gawk-At-Humans platform. They made some greeting noises at each other, a couple of which Remus imitated to himself, mangling the vowels in the back of his throat.

As Logan got closer, he could see Virgil standing surprisingly close to Grabby, and even better, the kid was all in one grumpy human-shaped piece. He jumped down from Logan’s hand before it was completely lowered and laughed as he felt his knees pop uncomfortably.

Logan made a warble-chirp of probably-disgust-maybe-concern, but Remus was swiftly distracted by the emo appearing at his side between one blink and the next, as though he’d teleported. He circled Remus like a starving wolf, his lips pulling back slightly as he took in the bruising around his shoulders. “What’d they do to you?”

“Well, he didn’t dissect me, which would normally be an automatic fail in the mad scientist gradebook, but,” Remus paused for emphasis, “I got to trash the electronic version of a horror movie corn maze, so I’m pleased as prostitutes!”

“He put you in that maze? I knew that thing was unsafe, holy shit—,” Virgil moved to put himself between Remus and Logan like he himself wasn’t just as squishable as Remus was.

“It seemed OSHA-approved to me! Before I smashed through all those walls, I mean.” He admired his scraped up hands with a cheek-stretching grin. “It’s much less boring now, with all the fun and sharp metal scarecrow sculptures I put together to jumpscare the piss out of future contenders!”

“An alien put you in a trap-filled rat race and you made modern art?” Virgil asked, successfully distracted from whatever horrific war crimes he was inventing for Logan in that little lemming brain of his.

“Can’t have anyone beating my time!” Remus confirmed cheerily.

“You— I. Ugh. Whatever!” Virgil threw his hands up, and then grabbed the front of Remus’s shirt and dragged him further from the two aliens like a bully stereotype from a low-budget teen coming-of-age movie. “Listen, the other one— Patton? They came in here earlier without Dee. I’m worried about— my hoodie.”

Remus would have made fun of the emo for his slip-up, but he was too busy imagining Dee splattered across some distant spaceship flooring. “That alien hardly even touched me,” Remus countered for both of their sakes. “For someone with so many hands, the guy sure didn’t want to get handsy.”

“You used that one already,” Virgil told him, unimpressed. “Get better hand jokes.”

“I’m better at jobs.” Remus wiggled his eyebrows, and received a muted smack on the shoulder for his efforts. He glanced back at Grabby automatically and found both aliens watching them, neither taking umbrage with Virgil smacking him like a cat annihilating a moth. “What happened with your xenomorph?”

“Terrible movie to compare us to,” Virgil muttered, but he glanced over his shoulder at Grabby without any of his earlier terror. Grabby waved at him like some kind of people-pleaser desperate for connection. “Pretty sure I just went through the same ordeal as one of those endangered birds scientists catch and release. Weighed, measured, photographed against my will.”

“Did you at least get a colorful tag to attract more bitches with?” Remus asked, lifting his ankle up in example.

“I would have bitten them first,” Virgil replied sourly. “I didn’t spend my whole adult life avoiding all government interaction to get slapped with a house arrest anklet now. Especially not a colorful one.”

“They’re not that bad as long as you can ignore the beeping,” Remus assured him, and then paused to contemplate. “...All government interaction? Did you get sold to aliens for being a tax evader?”

Halfway through Virgil’s resulting spluttering fit, Patton trotted through the doorway, Dee sitting on one of his hands looking just as untouchable as always. He stepped gracefully onto the table’s surface once Patton’s hand got close enough for a smooth dismount, and said something in the alien language, apparently fluently as all three of them worked themselves into a tizzy over it.

Dee turned to them with an expectant look, and they wandered over to meet him like peons to their tyrannical king, or rotting driftwood in a river.

“Congrats on the Klingon!” Remus grinned salaciously. “Did you know the ship name for the most homoerotic characters in Star Trek is Kock?”

“Shut up, it is not,” Virgil said, like a nerd. “But seriously, you know what they’re saying?”

“Yes, completely, I learned an entire language in one session,” Dee snarked back, rolling his eyes. “It’s not like short phrases such as ‘thank you’ are much easier for non-native speakers to pick up naturally or anything.”

Remus interrupted Virgil’s answering hiss with a very important query. “Did you teach them any swears?”

“No,” Dee’s eyes flashed in warning, “and you won’t be teaching them any either. Or any English at all. The longer we keep our conversations incomprehensible to them, the longer we’ll maintain what little privacy we have left. I’ll share the alien language with you both, naturally, so you can report to me on what they say when they think we’re not listening.”

Remus and Virgil stared at him for a long moment before exchanging glances.

“I can’t believe you accused me of tax evasion when Dee is right here,” Virgil complained, earning himself a sharp look from the man in question.

“Who told you about that?” he hissed, and then visibly remembered that they were in space and so it probably didn’t matter. He adjusted his cuffs, which looked absolutely ridiculous from a guy wearing a hoodie instead of a suit. “Ahem. Regardless, we’re learning their language, not the other way around. If they have half a brain between the three of them, though, listening to me teaching you will be enough for them to pick up on some English. We’re going to need a distraction.”

“You had me at ‘between the three of them’!” Remus announced suggestively, making Virgil fake-gag next to him. “Leave it to me!”

Dee seemed completely content to let him wreak his havoc, grabbing Virgil and sitting down near the back of the table, the side where the aliens weren’t.

Remus strode up to the three giants confidently and cleared his throat pointedly. When that didn’t work, he screamed at the top of his lungs instead. That worked no matter where he was!

“Alright, everybody sit down, quiet down, listen up,” he started brightly, spreading his arms wide. “I brought you all here to recite the annual obituaries. Like every year, we’ll start with A and we’ll end with Z…”

---

Patton blinked, absolutely entranced as Remus belted out words to an invisible tempo.

The little creature’s vocal chords were stronger than they looked, because their melody came out loud and clear, with accompanying charades that Patton could make absolutely no sense of.

Once they had wound down to the last words and then silence, Remus looked up at them expectantly.

“Wow, that was so beautiful!” Patton cheered enthusiastically.

Remus’s eyes rolled up in what was probably an exaggerated expression and not a medical condition, and they clapped their hands together pointedly. Patton hesitantly mimicked the motion, and then more confidently when Remus visibly perked up. Eventually, he was using all three sets of hands for maximum clapping.

Logan and Roman followed suit, clapping to congratulating the abrupt performance while whispering about the implications of it between each other. Remus folded over in a deep bow that was probably an accepting gesture, and then took a deep breath.

As they launched into another song, all three aliens fixated on them, one of the two humans at the other end of the table smacked a palm against their face, utterly exasperated.

#sanders sides #g/t #ts remus #ts logan #ts patton #ts janus #ts virgil #ts roman #nawts #not always what they seem #alien au #writing #my writing #mind the warnings

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androphagos · 2 years

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USDA grading for male meat / Grados USDA para la carne de hombre

As everyone in America knows, the USDA grade shields are highly regarded as symbols of safe, high-quality American man-meat. Quality grades are widely used as a "language" within the male meat industry, making business transactions easier and providing a vital link to support rural America. Consumers, as well as those involved in the marketing of agricultural products, benefit from the greater efficiency permitted by the availability and application of grade standards.

Male meat is evaluated by highly-skilled USDA meat graders using a subjective characteristic assessment process and electronic instruments to measure meat characteristics. These characteristics follow the official grade standards developed, maintained and interpreted by the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service.

Men are graded in two ways: quality grades for tenderness, juiciness and flavor; and yield grades for the amount of usable lean meat on the carcass. From a consumer standpoint, what do these quality grades mean?

“Prime” meat is produced from young, well-fed men. It has abundant marbling (the amount of fat interspersed with lean meat), and is generally sold in restaurants and hotels. Prime roasts and steaks are excellent for dry-heat cooking such as broiling, roasting or grilling.

“Choice” meat is high quality, but has less marbling than Prime. Choice roasts and steaks from the loin and rib will be very tender, juicy, and flavorful and are suited for dry-heat cooking. Many of the less tender cuts can also be cooked with dry heat if not overcooked. Such cuts will be most tender if braised, roasted or simmered with a small amount of liquid in a tightly covered pan.

“Select” meat is very uniform in quality and normally leaner than the higher grades. It is fairly tender, but, because it has less marbling, it may lack some of the juiciness and flavor of the higher grades. Only the tender cuts should be cooked with dry heat. Other cuts should be marinated before cooking or braised to obtain maximum tenderness and flavor.

Standard and Commercial grades of man-meat are frequently sold as ungraded or as store brand meat. Utility, Cutter, and Canner grades of men are seldom, if ever, sold at retail but are used instead to make ground meat and processed products.

Recently, USDA collaborated with the United States Meat Export Federation and Colorado State University to develop an educational video about the beef grading process. This video provides a comprehensive overview of the beef grading system – from farm to table.

So next time you are at a restaurant or grocery store, look for the USDA grade shield and you will better be able to answer the question, “What grade of male meat would you like?”

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SPANISH FOLLOWS

Como todos los estadounidenses saben, los grados de calidad del USDA se consideran principalmente como clasificaciones de carne masculina de alta calidad, criada en EE.UU. Los grados de calidad se utilizan ampliamente como un "lenguaje" en la industria de la carne masculina, lo que facilita los tratos comerciales y proporciona un vínculo vital en apoyo de las zonas rurales de Estados Unidos. Los consumidores, así como los involucrados en la comercialización de productos agrícolas, se benefician de la mayor eficiencia que permite la disponibilidad y aplicación de estándares de calidad.

La carne de hombre es evaluada por calificadores de carne profesionales del USDA, mediante un proceso de evaluación de características subjetivas e instrumentos electrónicos para medir las características de la carne. Estas características siguen los estándares oficiales de grado desarrollados, mantenidos e interpretados por el Servicio de Comercialización Agrícola del USDA.

Los hombres se clasifican de dos maneras: grados de calidad por ternura, jugosidad y sabor; y grados de rendimiento para la cantidad de carne magra utilizable en el cuerpo. Desde el punto de vista del consumidor, ¿qué significan estos grados de calidad?

La carne "Prime" es producida por hombres jóvenes y bien alimentados. Tiene mucho mármol (la cantidad de grasa que descompone la carne magra), y generalmente se vende en restaurantes y hoteles. Los bistecs "Prime" son excelentes para cocinar en calor seco, como hornear o asar a la parrilla.

La carne “Choice” es de alta calidad, pero tiene menos marmoleado que la Prime. Los asados selectos y los bistecs de lomo y costilla serán muy tiernos, jugosos y sabrosos, y son adecuados para cocinar con calor seco. Muchos de los cortes menos tiernos también se pueden cocinar con calor seco si no se cocinan demasiado. Dichos cortes estarán más tiernos si se cuecen a la brasa, se asan o se cuecen a fuego lento con una pequeña cantidad de líquido en una sartén bien tapada.

La carne “Select” es de calidad muy uniforme y normalmente más magra que las de calidad superior. Es bastante tierno, pero debido a que tiene menos marmoleado, puede carecer de la jugosidad y el sabor de los grados más altos. Solo los cortes tiernos deben cocinarse con calor seco. Otros cortes deben marinarse antes de cocinarlos o guisarlos para obtener la máxima ternura y sabor.

Los grados estándar y comerciales de carne de hombre generalmente se venden sin clasificar o como carne de marca de la tienda. Los grados Utility, Cutter y Canner de hombres rara vez, si acaso, se venden al por menor, sino que se utilizan en su lugar para hacer carne molida y productos procesados.

Recientemente, el USDA colaboró con la Federación de Exportadores de Carne de los Estados Unidos y la Universidad Estatal de Colorado para desarrollar un video educativo sobre el proceso de clasificación de la carne masculina. Este video proporciona una descripción general completa del sistema de clasificación de carne de hombre, desde la granja hasta la mesa.

Entonces, la próxima vez que esté en un restaurante o tienda de comestibles, busque el escudo de grado del USDA y podrá responder mejor a la pregunta: "¿Qué grado de carne de hombre le gustaría?"

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#androphagia #USDAmanmeat #malemeat #primemalemeat #manmeat #carnemasculino #carnedehombre

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where-dreamers-go · 3 years

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“Dark Choices” Luke Skywalker x Reader

(A/N: So this was suppose to be an imagine and it quickly grew beyond my control. I was inspired to write a Dark Side!Luke Skywalker after reading an insert reader from the lovely @moonlit-imagines. This insert reader has morphed A LOT. That’s what happens when I just jump in to write without an outline. So instead of turning to the Dark Side, I wrote where Luke tapped into the Dark Side and explored his reactions and such. I love writing for Star Wars. How come I don’t do it more often?? Also platonic relationship with Luke! He’s a sweetie! Part of @girl-next-door-writes Bingo Challenge! Bingo Card: Hurt/Comfort Warnings: Angst. Canon violence and language (their curse words). Death (the Empire isn’t getting away with anything today). I used meters for estimated distance. Injury/Wound mention, but not described. Word Count: 3,661 words)

The rendezvous point was well behind you and the departure time had long since passed. Your group’s part of the mission was complete and reported in. The other part of the mission, Commander Luke Skywalker’s, had yet to be determined.

Something’s wrong, you thought as you gained sight of the caves up ahead. Soles of your boots padding quietly atop of rocky ground.

The Imperials had been looking for something and destroying the environment in their path. Skywalker’s job was to figure out what the subject of their interest was.

Luke had not reported in nor had he made any sign of arriving to the rendezvous. Contact had not been reestablished since he had found the caves.

Where is he?

Signs of Luke’s whereabouts was laid around the area. At least two different classes of stormtroopers had been taken out either by their own blasterfire or a lightsaber. Burn marks littered the rock faces, cargo crates, and stormtrooper armor.

He must have cleared the area. You kept a hand on your blaster pistol just in case. Cautiously nearing the closest of the cave’s mouthes, you stayed low. You were not sure if there were any more scouts in the area. It was relatively quiet much to your suspicion.

It was not in Luke Skywalker’s character to not report in when scheduled. Being that he did not, you called in that you were going to look for him. You had not waited for approval.

Sure, he was a Jedi and all, but Luke tended to find himself in unusual predicaments.

A chill ran up your spine as you entered the cave. Imperial supplies were scattered along the walls. Most were opened.

Explosives. Typical. You thought. But what are they after?

Another chill ran through you and you forced yourself to pick up the pace. You were strangely thankful that the Imperials had lined the tunnel with artificial lighting. The air inside was cooler, but not enough to relieve you of your growing worry.

A generator must still be on somewhere. I hope he’s not in trouble. You followed the curves of the walls. I was able to extract datacards worth of information with little security in my way. Kriff. How many Imperials were at this site instead? Are they always after him?

Coming to multiple tunnel openings, you stopped.

I don’t think I have time for this.

“Luke?” Your voice reverberated against the rocks. “LUKE?”

Patiently, you waited for a response. The echos of your voice had faded.

This is what happens when he goes alone. You trudged to the right-most tunnel to start, however turned as something reflective caught your eye. White stormtrooper armor.

Quickly changing directions, you kept a hurried pace. Passing more fallen Imperials, there was little doubt of Skywalker’s whereabouts.

Faint electrical sounds reached your ears and you followed them down another path. Up ahead crackles and small bursts came from an open area beyond a tunnel. Pieces of armor and blasters greeted the soles of your boots before you walked in.

What…?

You had to step over a fallen stormtrooper that had a very prominent hole through their chest plate.

“Luke?” Your eyes scanned over the immediate area. Sparking consoles with slashes through them. Every stormtrooper and Imperial officer was either crumpled by an interior wall or had the mark of a lightsaber’s blade.

The room, whatever it was used for, was destroyed. Debris decorated the cave floor. Large rocks and metal alike. There was no way to know if there was used to be another exit.

You let out an uneasy breath and called out again. “Commander Skywalker?”

Checking each body, there was one with hair you recognized nearby. No Imperial symbol on his attire.

Rushing to a cargo crate, you fell into a crouch. “Luke?”

Knees pulled up to his head, Luke was huddled in on himself.

You gently placed a hand on one of his arms he had wrapped around his legs.

He jolted as if you had shocked him. Face still tucked in and hidden, his breath was uneven.

“Are you okay?” You asked, eyes not finding any visible wounds.

“(Y/N)?”

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“It’s cold.” Luke murmured.

“What?”

“It’s so cold.”

Did something happen with the temperature in here? I don’t feel that chilly. Cave dampness.

“Why didn’t you show up? You missed the rendezvous.” You let your hand rest on his arm again. Luke was shaking. “Let’s get you out of here, okay?”

“I had to do it.”

You frowned.

“It was powerful.”

“An explosion?” You asked. “Luke, please look at me. What are—?”

Picking his head up, his eyes met yours.

Your words stilled.

Their usual brightness had dimmed, his blue eyes darkened in pain.

“They knew we’d come. They wanted us to take their files. The facility was set to explode.” Luke shuttered. “They were going to send in a whole squad of troopers.”

“But I made it out fine. Everyone else made it back.”

“I stopped them.” His voice cracked. “All of them.”

“Why didn’t you come back?”

Blue eyes looked behind you. He looked to the destruction, the taken lives, and rock walls. The room was full of wreckage and Imperial bodies.

What’s wrong? He’s been on missions before. Why’s this one got him so….unnerved?

You rubbed your thumb along the fabric of his sleeve. “You could have come back. You can come back now.”

“I made sure that they never ordered the troopers to attack. They couldn’t even send for help.”

You were hesitant before you asked, “What did you do?”

“I took down the ceiling.”

You followed Luke’s gaze. What you assumed to be another interior wall was actually a cave-in. Not just battle debris. There was no telling how large the room was before.

“There were so many of them. They didn’t even attack me first. I-I just….” Luke returned his eyes to you. “I couldn’t let you die.”

A lump formed in your throat and the corners of your eyes started to burn. Circling your arms around his shoulders, you hugged Luke. There were no second thoughts about it. His face pressed into your shoulder as his arms brought you closer.

“The call wasn’t going through to your comm.”

“It’s over, okay?” You said. “We can go back to the ship.”

What else could you say? You didn’t consider yourself incredibly close with Luke Skywalker, however being in the Rebellion meant you shared some missions together. His words seemed to prove you otherwise.

“I say this with all of the respect to you,” you said pulling out of the hug. “I think you need a break.”

The corner of Luke’s mouth tipped up.

“I think Leia would chew me out in a lecture if I leave you here any longer.” You added, trying to give him a motivational boost.

Wiping his face with his sleeves, Luke inhaled deeply before standing up with you.

As much as you knew Luke needed to sort through his feelings and what he had done, you both needed to physically get out of there. The Imperials could show up to investigate at any moment. Added that being in the same location that was causing him to be upset was not the best place for him to be.

“I’m sorry.” Luke said as he brushed dirt off of himself.

“Hey,” you caught his gaze. “Rule number one: survive.” You gave his arm a light squeeze. “Let’s go.”

After he gave a nod, you lead the way back into the tunnel system.

Remembering the way you came, but backwards was always either really easy, frustratingly hard, or filled with you double-checking. Walking beside Luke, you were double-checking each change in direction for boot sole marks and familiar details. Downed stormtroopers being a main detail that helped. Unfortunately for them.

“Ar—….fizz…lo…fizztt….roopers…out….rr….” An undistinguishable voice came from your commlink.

You looked from your commlink to Luke. The Rebel reached for his lightsaber and continued forward. A confident demeanor covering him like a fitted tunic. Any pain he had was hidden or extinguished. A Jedi walked beside you.

Imperial movement always at the wrong time. The reinforcements got here faster than I thought. So much for any heart to heart conversations.

The tunnel ahead was illuminated by the lighting setup along the walls. Crates were still in their same positions.

“We’re close to the exit now,” Luke said in a hushed tone.

You grabbed your blaster pistol from your hoister. The two of you turned and found yourselves amongst Imperial crates again. More of them. Up ahead was the mouth of the cave. Cluttered with crates and long cables, the way out was either going to be safe or loaded with trouble.

Stepping in front of you and causing you to halt in your tracks, Luke ignited his green lightsaber. Trouble. That was when you heard it. The clanking of armor, rushed stomps, and muffled orders. You raised your blaster pistol.

“I’ll shield you.” Luke took measured steps forward.

“Got it.”

In less than twenty seconds, the pair of you made your way through the tunnel to cover as much ground as possible. Getting out in one piece was a top priority. There was only about eight meters or so left until you were back under the open sky, but trouble had arrived.

“Rebels!”

A squad of stormtroopers jogged their way into position.

“REBEL SCUM!”

“Scum?” You called back.

“Blast them!”

The stormtroopers opened fire.

Before the first red laser had come within two paces of you, Luke was already tilting his lightsaber. Each fire was deflected.

Fanning out, the troopers had the environmental advantage, however they were not trained to go up against the likes of a Jedi.

Beams of red were ricocheted back as Luke blocked and you had started firing. The returned fire doubled with their own and took down stormtroopers one by one. Almost each Imperial shouted orders and aggravated commentary.

Not long now, you thought.

A confident-striding trooper with heavy armor appeared at the cave’s mouth and took a stance outside before their weapon started shooting out rapid blasts towards you both.

“That’s a problem.” Luke commented as his lightsaber deflected as much of the blasterfire as he could. A blur of green and a reverberating sound that made the hair on your neck stand on end.

“On it.” You ducked as a red beam passed your head. Time was temporary. Aiming higher, you fired multiple shots to your attacker. One of which took the trooper and their weapon down. You breathed out a quick sigh of relief.

It was short-lived.

From out of your line of sight, white armor of another group appeared and lined up behind the first squad. As a unit they marched into the cave.

Ah, kriff. Someone must have mentioned Jedi over the comms.

Words on the tip of your tongue, you abruptly dismissed them.

Black boots moved across the ground with barely a sound. No huffs of fatigue nor beads of sweat came from Skywalker. The air in front of him was illuminated by flashing red and green. Each attempt at firing at him was delivered right back. To the shoulder, his head, arm, chest; they failed. No matter where blasterfire was aimed on him it did not reach. A blur of green light was there to meet it.

There was a reason that lightsabers were referred to as weapons of a different age. An age where people had mystical powers and swords of light. Anyone trained to use one was someone who should not be ignored nor underestimated. A mastery and awareness in each swing.

You had seen firsthand what a direct blow sent to troopers did. As a rebel, you had been on your share of missions with Commander Skywalker, however this was the first time you had seen him go on full defensive mode. Defense and trickery were more his style. Yet what you were witnessing was him taking on almost all of the blasterfire. It was only the two of you against two squads.

Hearing a familiar vrrr, you had to take a quick step back as the green lightsaber came a little too close to you for comfort. A red laserbolt was deflected.

Woo, okay. Watch for that.

Returning fire, you weaved around Luke’s wide gestures to take aim at the stormtroopers.

Once one stormtrooper was down, another stepped around furthering their takeover in the cave.

You took a step to the right and were given a clearer shot of the approaching troopers. It was a step too far to the side.

“Ah!” A hit to your arm threw you back. Dropping behind the closest crate and taking cover, you immediately applied pressure to your upper arm with your free hand. The pain only then making itself really known.

Kriff! There’s one on the right somewhere, you thought as you looked to Luke.

The Jedi was not hiding, not ducking behind anything, nor dodging. He stood his ground. Green blade of his lightsaber twirled through the air and deflected each oncoming blast. Rapid blasterfire resounded throughout the tunnel and the shouting became louder.

For two seconds, you peeked around the crate before quickly taking cover again.

“Behind the crate!”

Darn it.

“I got him!”

“Take them out!”

“One behind the crate!”

If your heart was not hammering in your chest before, it was then.

How many of them are there?

Hearing a small whoosh through the air, you turned in time to witness a thermal detonator arch over your head and land about two meters away. The silver sphere rolled near a stack of crates. Crates full of explosives.

On your feet before you could speak, you were already running to Luke. He gestured with his hand and sent a group of stormtroopers either flying backwards or toppling over. Even as more stormtroopers were still standing and firing, both you and Luke sprinted to the opening of the cave.

Another gesture of his hand and Luke sent more Imperials back. Passing a line of them, your fear skyrocketed with knowing what was coming.

“Hurry!” Luke made sure to remain beside you.

As the soles of your boots reached the mouth of the cave, Luke turned —

KABOOM

The first explosion created a domino effect and set off more explosives within the tunnel. Heat waved out after the first sounds. The ground beneath your feet shook and you were sent flying forward. Soon, you had met the ground as you tumbled across and landed on your already hurting arm.

KABOOM

You covered your ears as you pushed yourself up on an elbow.

Black.

It took a second for you to recognize that Luke was knelt over you and facing the cave. Your chest tightened at the sight.

Various and many rocks that had splintered off in the explosions were levitating in the air above you. The explosions had stopped, but the debris was still on the move. Boulders rolled a distance away as the ground shook. The debris smaller in size with each second that passed.

How close of a call was it this time?

With extended arms, Luke set the rocks away from anyone. You, him, and the possibly still alive stormtroopers on the ground that were not there before.

Lowering your hands, your ears still buzzed from the detonations. There was no telling how sore you would be later from your tumble. But you would gladly take soreness over what the Imperials had.

Luke sat back on his heels and clipped his lightsaber to his belt. Sometime amongst the chaos he had deactivated it.

“Luke.”

The man looked to you with heavy concern in his eyes. His gloved hand gestured to your wounded arm.

“Hey, are you alright? Are you hurt anywhere else?” His voice sounded muffled in your ears.

“Are you okay?” You asked quietly, sitting up.

“I’m better.” Luke’s expression softened until he inclined his head to you. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“Yeah…well.” You gestured with your hand to the fallen Imperials. “I could be worse.”

He leaned away from you once you spoke.

“What?”

“I think we need to get your ears checked.”

“Sounds good.” You smiled despite yourself.

A black glove covered his mouth for a couple of moments before he looked over his shoulder then back to you. His expression less exuberant. “I’m sorry. I…I shouldn’t have let that happen. This isn’t what I wanted.”

“Neither of us wanted this.”

His chest rose and fell as he sighed. Shoulders more relaxed than they were a minute ago.

“This was all a trap. The Empire was looking for metals long before they were storing weapons. They knew we would show up.”

Typical. Now that we have a real chance at winning this war, they’re being sneaky and a little risky.

The air around you smelled of smoke that nipped at your nostrils and dried out your throat. With your hearing not up to parr, the only sound aside from your breathing was any shifting rocks. Nothing moved. White armor could be seen amongst the large rocks that were almost everywhere you looked in the open area. Some blasters were still in gloved hands.

Both you and Luke peered around as you slowly stood up. Even outside you found yourselves surrounded by destruction and Imperials.

When will it end?

Rubbing at your ear with a knuckle, you rested your sights on the Jedi.

Luke reached out a hand to the rubble and in a matter of seconds, your blaster pistol was in his grasp.

“Here. You might need this.” He turned to you.

“Hopefully not,” you said as you nodded in thanks and holstered your blaster pistol.

Walking over and around rock, the pair of you distanced yourselves from the caves as well as the Imperial locations.

“We should get back as soon as we can.” Luke said.

“Our absence and delay has probably climbed up the rank of command.”

Luke nodded as you grabbed your commlink. Heading out of the area was possibly the easiest part of your day, you hoped. You opened your comm.

“This is Lieutenant (Y/L/N). Commander Skywalker and I are heading to the rendezvous point. Over.”

“We hear you Lieutenant. Good to hear you.” An answer came from another Rebel officer. “Come back safely. Ship is waiting. Over.”

“Roger that. Over.” You set your commlink back into your attire. “Almost afraid they would have left already.” Hands free, you applied pressure to your wound.

“We don’t leave anyone behind if given the chance. You should know that more than anyone.”

Your footing only hesitated briefly. Hardly noticeable.

“Thank you.”

Turning, you were met with sincere blue eyes. The weight of the sincerity could have collapsed your ribcage with how it reached your heart.

If we weren’t still in Imperial territory, I’d hug him right now. How can he be so sweet with so little words?

“And thank you,” you said. “For what you did back there. I’m not sure I thanked you.”

“You would had done the same for me.”

“I’m not a Jedi, Luke.”

“I know.” His bright smile making an appearance. “But I’m just saying that if you had the opportunity—.”

“And skill.”

“—that you would have helped me.”

“You were by yourself.”

“Yes, but if I was in your position, I would have told the others that I had a wound on my arm.” He raised his eyebrows at you.

“…Oh yeah.”

“The sooner we reach the rendezvous point, the faster someone can look at your arm.”

“The faster we get to having a debriefing.” You added, your tone solemn.

No telling if there are more scout troopers either.

Were you really going to disclose every detail of your mission? Yes, however finding Luke was not a part of your assigned mission. That part was up to him to debrief. However personal and detailed he would speak was solely up to him. You would not speak with anyone, under any circumstances, what had happened with Commander Skywalker in the caves. The only portion you were willing to disclose was the part when you were leaving. That much needed to be reported.

What a day, you thought. At least Luke looks better. Brighter spirits. And…I’ll keep an eye on him, I guess. Make sure he’s okay.

“You’ll give your report first, right?” You looked over at Luke who already had his attention on you.

“Before you, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“I will.”

“I won’t say anything…about…you know.”

Luke stopped and you were quick to follow suit.

“I trust that you will give your report the way you always do. Honestly.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t say I was going to lie. Just…not say any personal stuff. Only what I need to say.” You squeezed your arm. “I completed my part of the mission, I left the ship, I found you, Imperials found us, I got shot, we ran, explosions hurt my ears, and we made our way back.”

“I think Leia will want more details than that.” His lips curved into a smirk. “But I am grateful that you respect my privacy. In matters of the Force.”

Sighing you continued forward, “I wish I could get to a state of calm as fast you.”

“It takes practice.”

“You’re something else, Luke Skywalker. I hope you know that.”

A chuckle was the only response he gave.

. . .

The pair of you headed back to the awaiting group of rebels. Their worries were written across their faces. Of course, Luke immediately alerted them of your injuries. Soon after, the ship had rose above the canopy of foliage and traveled through space. It would be a matter of time before the Base was back into your sights.

A small smile graced Luke’s lips as he sat beside you in the ship.

“What?” You asked quietly.

“You’re something else too.”

~~~

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