(specrene) Specter Catches Wind Of Irene's Request To The Doctor For Iberian Vinyl Records. Specter Procures

(specrene) Specter catches wind of Irene's request to the Doctor for Iberian vinyl records. Specter procures a collection and brings them to her little bird. Irene insists on paying back the favour. Specter asks for nothing except that they listen together.

Irene stares, open-mouthed, at the box in her hands.

It's not just one-it's an entire set of vinyl records from Iberia. A piece of history in her hands. Her history.

She looks up at Laurentina owlishly, swallows.

"...May I...?"

"Of course! Open it right up!"

Irene's trembling fingers click open the snap on the side of the box-heavens, even the packaging is beautiful-and slides a glossy record partway out of the package, tentatively traces her fingers along the grooves.

It really hits her now, what she's holding.

"L-Laurentina-" Her chin snaps up suddenly, her eyes slightly widening with the panic of owing something far greater than can be repayed. "-What do you want for-?"

"I want to hear them of course!"

"N-No, I mean in return for-" Irene's expression wilts as Laurentina's smile spreads wider, a refusal poised on her lips.

"I want to hear them." She repeats, curtseying to a sit on the end of the sofa, propping her chin on her wrists, "With you, of course. You've no need to repay me for taking a little swim."

Irene sorely suspects that she is downplaying the 'little swim' part of the story. But she can't physically wait another moment-she wheels around to all but run to the record player, setting the needle, walking back to sit by Laurentina-

-But before she can, Laurentina is rising, hand outstretched towards her.

"But I suppose if you're offering, I'll take a dance for it."

gavial the invincible!

Alrighty gamers,

As a "reddit refugee" who has been on Tumblr for a year at this point and hopefully knows some stuff about how this website and its userbase operate (even though I haven't been on that frequently), here's what I have learned over the course of my time here that might be helpful to any redditors coming here (long bullet list incoming):

Absolute Basics

Apply a profile picture to your blog. It can be anything, but it needs to be there. If you have a default profile picture then you will probably be blocked on sight by almost everyone. It's not personal; you just look an awful lot like a bot.

Make at least 1 original post on your blog. It can be anything—from a long introduction to a random shitpost—as long as it isn't the sort of post that a bot would make. Maybe hold off on posting sexual gifs with a bunch of random unrelated tags for the time being.

Interaction With Posts

Likes on this platform are sort of like saving posts and comments on Reddit. They do add a note and they can be seen if you don't have your likes set to private, but they don't help spread the post at all and are most useful for later easy access.

Reblogs without added text or tags are mostly analogous to crossposting in function, although not in website culture. Instead, think of it more like taking a screenshot of a post somewhere else online and posting it onto your favorite subreddit of choice. Reblog things you find cool/funny/pretty/have something to add to/whatever frequently.

Comments on Tumblr are mostly like comments on Reddit. The biggest difference is that you can't have comment threads.

Posting (including reblogs)

Tag things when relevant. Especially tag topics that people might want to avoid, like bigotry or very long posts.

In your main text, say whatever it is you feel you want to say/add. If you're reblogging, this is were you put your hilarious zingers that will be forever immortalized by r/tumblr repost bots.

Tags are frequently used to elaborate or say anything that's not the main point of the post or reblog.

Interacting with other users

Don't be afraid to block people.

Don't be afraid to follow people. Following tags is functional, but following people that post things you are interested in is better. (Also ignore the fact I'm not following my own advice here. That's not important.)

If I'm leading anyone terribly astray, please feel free to add on to and correct this post

Imagine Penance meeting W.

Like, W doesn’t even have to say anything to her, maybe they just pass each other in the hall, maybe Penance overhears something and looks over to see her annoying a few other operators in the cafeteria, whatever. Penance recognizes her. Just barely.

Sarkaz Mercenaries show up pretty much anywhere and everywhere on Terra, its just inherit to their life style. And Siracusa is probably well connected enough to the outside world to have heard about Reunion and what they tried to do. Or at least the public version of it. Chances are she also read a bunch of files in RI so she could learn a bit more of what came and happened before she joined.

And there, right there, is one of the damn leaders of a fucking terrorist cell just walking around this landship she’s decided to camp out in for however long like its no big thing, and she just found out about it. She’s worked with criminals before, and it ended well for absolutely no one. 

She knows about a bunch of the legally shady shit RI had done and is doing, but this is something she would have liked a warning about to prepare for it. If she needs to shove her face in the mud to get justice, again, she’ll do it. But it would have been nice to know what kind of mud to expect.

So, she barges into Doctor’s room, slams her hands on their desk and snarls, “why is there a terrorist war criminal walking around this ship?”

Whatever answer she was expecting, she sure as hell didn’t expect the Doctor to just blink at her and ask, a bit too confusedly, “uh, which one?”

A few seconds later everyone on the landship hears a screech of “FUCK DO YOU MEAN WHICH ONE!?” 

So like, the Reddit strike going on right now, yeah? I’ve been seeing a lot of people comment on how they appreciate the protest and then go on to say that this has the notable downside of them constantly looking up questions and not being able to easily find the answers because all of the easily-findable answers are exclusively on Reddit. I am not sure if most of the people making this observation are within the line of thought of “man, maybe this protest isn’t such a good idea after all” or “man, it really sucks that we’ve let the internet get so consolidated,” and I’m really hoping its the latter.

Like, all of this? This right here? Reddit making a shitty, anti-consumer grab for money and control over how people are allowed to access the information on their servers, and the website going dark in protest causing tons of people to not be able to access important information? This is exactly what people mean when they say that it’s bad that the internet has shrunk down so much and is mostly comprised of, like, 10 websites. It’s a fucking problem that one company making one bad decision and causing their website to crash and burn can jeopardize so much of humanity’s cumulative information.

This two-day glimpse into the internet without Reddit is the warning shot. Imagine what will happen if Reddit actually goes down for good for one reason or another one day. Imagine what will happen if/when Discord or Fandom bites the dust, or gets rendered practically-unusable without paying an ever-increasing premium because they’re owned by blood-sucking corporate leeches.

Another big thing is Twitter clamping down really hard on your ability to DM people if you don’t have Twitter Blue. If this goes through, it’ll put a ton of artists and sex workers who rely on Twitter DMs for their business operation into a shitty situation. Now, obviously, it’s not gonna be the end of the world for them, but once again, it feels like a warning shot to me. Twitter is a sinking ship, and unless something changes and it starts to course-correct, I worry that it’ll go under and all of the creators who rely on it will suddenly be in an extremely precarious situation.

These are the sorts of things that we, as the users of the internet, need to seriously think about as time goes on, and if we don’t find an adequate answer sooner, we’re going to pay for it later. I still hold that the best solution is to start making and using more individual, niche websites. Things like Twitter, Reddit, Discord, etc. have their place, of course, but I seriously think a lot was lost through the death of things like individual forums and the existence of many different wiki-hosting sites.

We need a concerted effort, not just on the side of larger creators, but on the users themselves, to stop exclusively using these larger websites and support the creation and growth of smaller, more niche websites, and prevent a catastrophe before it actually happens. I simply hope that people with larger platforms than my own pick up on all this and start talking about it and swaying people to act sooner rather than later. I know it’s possible to correct the problem of the mysteriously tiny internet before a modern Library of Alexandria moment happens, I just don’t know if that correction will actually happen in time.