knee deep in the nord lore

gfkjldghfd okay first of all I'm sorry for the confusion, if you're not finding anything on the phrase it's because I made it up and absolutely nobody but me ever uses it, but I haven't found a better way to express what I'm trying to say so I keep using it. but now you've given me an excuse to ramble on about some shit that is only relevant to me and my deeply inefficient way of talking and by god I'm going to take it.

SO. the way diegetic and non-diegetic are normally used is to talk about music and sound design in movies/tv shows. in case you aren't familiar with that concept, here's a rundown:

diegetic sound is sound that happens within the world of the movie/show and can be acknowledged by the characters, like a song playing on the stereo during a driving scene, or sung on stage in Phantom of the Opera. it's also most other sounds that happen in a movie, like the sounds of traffic in a city scene, or a thunderclap, or a marching band passing by. or one of the three stock horse sounds they use in every movie with a horse in it even though horses don't really vocalize much in real life, but that's beside the point, the horse is supposed to be actually making that noise within the movie's world and the characters can hear it whinnying.

non-diegetic sound is any sound that doesn't exist in the world of the movie/show and can't be perceived by the characters. this includes things like laugh tracks and most soundtrack music. when Duel of Fates plays in Star Wars during the lightsaber fight for dramatic effect, that's non-diegetic. it exists to the audience, but the characters don't know their fight is being backed by sick ass music and, sadly, can't hear it.

the lines can get blurry between the two, you've probably seen the film trope where the clearly non-diegetic music in the title sequence fades out to the same music, now diegetic and playing from the character's car stereo. and then there are things like Phantom of the Opera as mentioned above, where the soundtrack is also part of the plot, but Phantom of the Opera does also have segments of non-diegetic music: the Phantom probably does not have an entire orchestra and some guy with an electric guitar hiding down in his sewer just waiting for someone to break into song, but both of those show up in the songs they sing down there.

now, on to how I apply this to bdsm in fiction.

if I'm referring to diegetic bdsm what I mean is that the bdsm is acknowledged for what it is in-world. the characters themselves are roleplaying whatever scenarios their scenes involve and are operating with knowledge of real life rules/safety practices. if there's cnc depicted, it will be apparent at some point, usually right away, that both characters actually are fully consenting and it's all just a planned scene, and you'll often see on-screen negotiation and aftercare, and elements of the story may involve the kink community wherever the characters are. Love and Leashes is a great example of this, 50 Shades and Bonding are terrible examples of this, but they all feature characters that know they're doing bdsm and are intentional about it.

if I'm talking about non-diegetic bdsm, I'm referring to a story that portrays certain kinks without the direct acknowledgement that the characters are doing bdsm. this would be something like Captive Prince, or Phantom of the Opera again, or the vast majority of bodice ripper type stories where an innocent woman is kidnapped by a pirate king or something and totally doesn't want to be ravished but then it turns out he's so cool and sexy and good at ravishing that she decides she's into it and becomes his pirate consort or whatever it is that happens at the end of those books. the characters don't know they're playing out a cnc or D/s fantasy, and in-universe it's often straight up noncon or dubcon rather than cnc at all. the thing about entirely non-diegetic bdsm is that it's almost always Problematic™ in some way if you're not willing to meet the story where it's at, but as long as you're not judging it by the standards of diegetic bdsm, it's just providing the reader the same thing that a partner in a scene would: the illusion of whatever risk or taboo floats your boat, sometimes to extremes that can't be replicated in real life due to safety, practicality, physics, the law, vampires not being real, etc. it's consensual by default because it's already pretend; the characters are vehicles for the story and not actually people who can be hurt, and the reader chose to pick up the book and is aware that nothing in it is real, so it's all good.

this difference is where people tend to get hung up in the discourse, from what I've observed. which is why I started using this phrasing, because I think it's very crucial to be able to differentiate which one you're talking about if you try to have a conversation with someone about the portrayal of bdsm in media. it would also, frankly, be useful for tagging, because sometimes when you're in the mood for non-diegetic bodice ripper shit you'd call the police over in real life, it can get really annoying to read paragraphs of negotiation and check-ins that break the illusion of the scene and so on, and the opposite can be jarring too.

it's very possible to blur these together the same way Phantom of the Opera blurs its diegetic and non-diegetic music as well. this leaves you even more open to being misunderstood by people reading in bad faith, but it can also be really fun to play with. @not-poignant writes fantastic fanfic, novels, and original serials on ao3 that pull this off really well, if you're okay with some dark shit in your fiction I would highly recommend their work. some of it does get really fucking dark in places though, just like. be advised. read the tags and all that.

Rereading the scene where they talk to Redell in the Auckland prison, Stratt shows such distain for Redell and how his negligence killed 7 people. She doesn’t let him make excuses and try and worm his way out of it. To her, he as the leader of the project has a responsibility toward those people and he failed, and in doing so killed them.

Every other action she takes has purpose. Every death that may be caused by those actions is counterbalanced by thousands of lives it saves. She can live with those decisions, because she knows they had to be made.

The lab explosion never should have happened. It was a mistake on the part of the quartermaster, but if there were additional safety protocols in place, it is a mistake that likely could have been prevented. I don’t think there’s any way that Stratt feels anything other than personally responsible for it.

She was negligent in her duty to ensure the safety of everyone working under her and the project itself, and because of that 14 people died. 14 people who did not need to die, whose deaths did nothing to save humanity.

Not only that, but the events catalysed the need to send the one person she’d let get closer to her to his death.

Ohhhhhh, you're about to go test something extremely dangerous? A cataclysmic failure condition? Sure, let's put both science specialists in a room together while this happens.

The particular outcome that we got -- that they happened to both be present at the point of a terrible accident -- was an unlikely but foreseeable outcome of them spending all their free time hanging out together. Like that was the explicit reasoning for the two teams not taking transport together.

one of the hallmarks of a kingism is that when a character is being Horny On Main (or In Maine), they can never do it in a normal way. they have to come up with a sequence of words that nobody has ever said before in the history of the english language. here's another example:

this took me an hour (well spent)

As you may or may not know, I was laid off about a year ago. I still don't have full-time employment, but things are getting less bad. Here are some things I have learned that may help people in the same situation.

Something I need you to understand right now

The market is very very bad. The last time I remember it being this terrible was right after the mortgage busts in 2008-10. It might honestly be worse. The last time I looked for a job was three years ago and it has changed completely.

The number of people applying to available jobs is w i l d. The stats coming out of this r/recruitinghell thread are nuts. 2000 applications, even after screening out the obviously unsuited they still went through 900. There's no way to screen all of them. It is, unfortunately, mostly a numbers game.

I'm not telling you this to scare you or discourage you. But it will be hard, because so much is tied up into work, labor, and our senses of self. And if you're going to get through this, you need to understand what you're up against.

I hope the stuff below the jump will help you do that. (If you need to contact me hmu on Bluesky or via pearwaldorf at gmail. I have messaging and asks turned off because spam and because I'm not on Tumblr much)

Here we go. Version 1.1 is a little chaotic but it works, and Version 1.2, which attempts to reduce the chaos, still only works about half the time on my machine. This is possibly primarily a 1-D-10-T error, but I'm working on it. I've hosted stuff on CryptDrive because it doesn't demand an email address, doesn't allow AI scraping, and is registered in Europe.

This link goes to a PDF of detailed, me-proof instructions for downloading and running the thing and reading the output. The physicist has not reviewed these so any errors are mine. I am not very good at Matlab yet, so if you have shortcuts or more elegant ways of doing things, please do let me know.

This link goes directly to a download of the zipped folder containing all the code you need to run the star system generator on Matlab. I've tested it on Matlab R2025a, and the physicist has written and run it on (we think) Matlab R2023b. No promises are made for other versions.

Please take whatever precautions you think reasonable before opening a zipped file of code downloaded from an encrypted cloud drive hosted by a complete stranger.

Suggestions for future versions are not particularly welcome because there is a plan in place, and if you ask for something that's already mentioned in the readme as a planned future feature I will just point you back to the readme. Bug reports and questions are very welcome; please send a screenshot as a Tumblr ask to this blog. Expect at least a 48-hour turnaround on questions.

If you pick this up and run with it and do something amazing with it, as I'm sure many of you will, please tag this blog in a post about it! We'd love to see what y'all get up to.

The license terms are set out in the readme as follows:

Jitka obviously trusts her faithful friend and bodyguard whom she has known for years now more than the husband she just met and who was openly reluctant about marrying her. Hans gets angry about Henry being with them all the time, it's the mixture of his wife not trusting to be safe with him, worry that she's having an affair with Henry and all of Rattay's already laughing about the clueless husband, jealousy about their bond and feeling like the third wheel between them, and then he gets those strange dreams about the man and it only makes him more angry when Henry is all charming and good looking and capable in combat. Hans's unreasonable hatred towards Henry is pretty suspicious and makes Henry only more reluctant to leave him alone with Jitka, he thinks Hans wants to get rid of the bodyguard to isolate his wife and hurt her, so he even stands guard in front of the door and listens in when the couple joins in the marital bed

maybe it all blows up when Hans notices and gets in a fight with jitka about it and he throws open the door sarcastically invites Henry to join them, but instead of being chastened, the damn man goes Sure! pulls a chair up to the bed and sits