#deadweight

Gentle notice: this writing has a calming and hilarious rhythm. Follow only if you feel safe doing so. ✦ ᛉ ᚨ ᚷ ᛟ ✦

Have you ever noticed it? On the hypnosis stage, amidst the crowd, a certain type of volunteer always seems to get chosen. The spotlight, again and again, finds the same profile: often female, almost always slender.

Is it bias? A silent prejudice playing out under the lights? Yes. And no. The reasons are far more practical, and far more brutal.

Reason One: Safety. The Sacred Duty of the Catch.

Let's be blunt. Have you ever tried to catch dead weight? I don't mean a stumble. I mean the complete, sudden, and total surrender of muscular control that can happen in a deep trance. It’s a sack of potatoes with a human soul.

If a subject drops and there's no one to catch them, that's not a failed bit. It's a concussion. A lawsuit. The end of the show. Forever. It is the hypnotist's sacred, non-negotiable duty to control that fall—every angle, every impact.

So, a word to my fellow practitioners: in addition to polishing your inductions… train your biceps. A strong frame isn't a vanity; it's a professional requirement. Otherwise, you'll have a subject with a head injury and a trance that's very, very bad for business.

Reason Two: The Physics of the Performance.

A lighter person is simply easier to maneuver. The entire spectacle relies on visual comedy and physical gags—the "human plank," the "sleeping beauty," the guided stumble. Positioning a volunteer for these routines needs to be smooth, swift, and safe. It's not about strength alone; it's about control. Guiding a slender frame to the floor is a ballet. Catching a heavier one is a construction accident waiting to happen.

Reason Three: The Unspoken Filter of Personality.

Let's be honest. The stage doesn't want a wallflower. It wants a performer. And certain personality types—the extroverted, the attention-seeking, the unashamedly dramatic—may, for a complex soup of social and cultural reasons, be more common in people of a certain physique. Is this a hard scientific fact? No. Hypnosis is an art, not a science, and these things aren't studied in a lab.

The hypnotist, with a performer's intuition, is scanning the crowd. They're not just looking for a glazed-over stare; they're looking for a spark. They select those who seem "on," who seem ready to play, who radiate that "look at me" energy. And yes, often, those people are women. We tend to be… more expressive.

So, if you're thinking of volunteering, ask yourself the right question. Look at the hypnotist. Look at their assistants. Ask yourself: is this safe? For them? For you?

And for the love of all that is holy, let's all do our part to avoid calling the doctor. The show, after all, must go on.

Today's KAITO module of the day is:

Actually fuck it y'all get my tfa ocs too because I forgot to post them but I love them dearly (yes my ref style is inconsistent but I refuse to make it consistent)

Mini bios!

Deadweight- An Autobot defector and medic who hoards spare parts, junk, and whatever they've graverobbed. After having their conjux executed during the war for becoming a Decepticon spy and losing their entire team to a wayward alien parasite, they completely lost all joy or hope and switched sides. They don't express any sort of emotion and just let things happen, but they're as honest as they come (though it's mostly due to lacking the energy to lie). This can be detrimental if you're on the operating table, but otherwise it makes others know exactly where they stand with Deadweight. Due to their size, they tend to be used by other Decepticons as a weapon. The compartment on their back is akin to a mobility aid since it's mandatory for them to transform, and they occasionally use it for support when their leg injury acts up. The compartment also acts as a personal infinite pocket dimension, perfect for hoarding their collection! Their alt-mode is a hearse.

Diama- After the Allspark was shot out into space, the Autobot High Command wanted to find a way to create new Cybertronians without wasting too many resources. Thus, Perceptor started a new project that began and ended with Diama. Their goal was to create a completely artificial 'bot that wouldn't need too many resources to run on, and could even survive without energon. What they got was Diama. She was invented with the possibility of failure in mind, so she was made quite compact and with individual parts that combined to make her body in case they needed repair. Since they weren't sure if she'd be scrapped or not, they made her alt-mode something practical they could use were she to be shut down so their resources weren't wasted. A magnet. Her body emits a natural magnetism she has to keep low so she doesn't stick to the metal architecture of Cybertron. This also means she's fairly liable to fall apart at the slightest bit of force. Because she's completely artificial, she has no personality, the reason Ultra Magnus cancelled the project, as he deemed the sacrifice of personality too great a cost in exchange for progress. Though, because her personality is AI, her behavior is influenced by those around her, so her data keeps having to be fixed and reset by her handlers. The only reason she still "lives" is because they have her go around doing maintenance work for situations normal bots can't quite do. Perceptor likes to keep her around as his walking flashdrive.

Throwback- An unaligned amnesiac the Autobot High Command took in after finding his mangled body post-explosion. Nobody knows where he came from or what he is, considering his entire infrastructure was archaic by their standards, yet he had a spark. They had to completely recreate his outer shell while keeping his bare-bones intact, both to study and to not accidentally kill him. The damage he sustained gave him a large amount of damage on his processor and joints, but they couldn't be fixed due to his anatomy being incredibly outdated and unknown to the Autobots. Because of this, Throwback has an incredibly difficult time absorbing new information, which is incredibly frustrating for him and everyone else. He acts out as a result of that and his situation, pushing his already brash personality to its limits. He's incredibly loud and rude but turns tail at the first sign of conflict. His alt mode is a boomerang, but only his top half can turn into it, leaving his legs to their own devices. Because he keeps trying to escape his confinement, they've paired Diama with him so she can use her magnetism to pull him back when he runs.

Evolutia- Has earned the nickname "mommy issues" in my friend group and for good reason. She's as old as Alpha Trion and has both the experience and knowledge to back it up. Having lived through so many conflicts, she's gotten a distaste for it, and instead busied herself with off-planet work and exploration. Knowledge was always something she sought and she was willing to do anything to figure things out. However, an accident left her T-Cog destroyed and rendered her unable to transform. This didn't stop her, however, as she continued her research regardless. There she found that her body, though it could no longer transform, could instead shapeshift and meld to match the environments she was in. This ability was unnatural and made her fellow Cybertronians afraid of her, so she ran off before they could experiment on her. As this occurred during the Decepticon conflict, she ended up switching sides just to learn how they functioned and to study their anatomy. It was there that she took Shockwave under her wing, taking notice of his own shapeshifting abilities. She mentored him in this and various sciences in hopes that he'd use this for Cybertron's benefit, but became disgusted by him and ended up abandoning both him and the cause. She lived alone in space for countless millennia, stopping by other planets and stealing resources for her own purposes. She's even the basis for a variety of myths, legends, and rumors across countless planets as a result, thanks to her ever-changing appearance. There was always just one question she could never answer, the secret to life and existence, and she aimed to find out one way or another. So, she began building constructs to try and recreate Cybertronian anatomy using her vast knowledge of the subject. When this didn't work, she began harvesting honorable sparks from still-living bots from the shadows in order to pass their noble traits onto her new generation. She was the one to first create Throwback, not that he remembers, and she has countless other constructs wandering around the cosmos. She's incredibly patient and motherly, but once she's disappointed, you're essentially dead to her. She does not have nostalgia in the slightest and has no problem with switching her opinions around at the drop of a hat with no hesitation. Her highest priority is Cybertron's future and evolution, and she will stop at nothing to achieve her goals. Before her T-Cog was destroyed, she turned into a moon rover.

My MFMM Calendars 2023 – June

The calendar to the right was from a post dedicated to Kerry Greenwood on her birthday last year, June 17, Miss Fisher Snippets (53). Without her brilliant book series, there would not have been a fabulous TV Phryne that we admire. The calendar to the left was from Miss Fisher Snippets (94), originally posted on 16-Nov-2022.

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p.s. I made these calendars for my personal viewing pleasure only, and they are not for sale.