Cherubs and Ericads

he’s wearing his Hamilton costume from act 2 tho…

In the clean and simplified world of the laboratory, a droplet’s impact on water is symmetric. From a central point of impact, it sends out a ring of ripples, or even a crown splash, if it has enough momentum. But the real world is rarely so simple.

Here we see how droplets impact when the wind is blowing against them. The drops fall at an angle, creating an oblique cavity. Rings of ripples spread from the impact, but the ligaments of a splash crown form only on the leeward side. As the wind speed increases, so does the violence of the impact, eventually beginning to trap tiny pockets of air beneath the surface. Those miniature bubbles can spray droplets and aerosols into the air when they finally pop. (Image and video credit: A. Wang et al.)

Researchers put a spin on splashing droplets with selective wetting. When a drop impacts on a water-repellent, superhydrophobic surface, it will spread circularly, then pull back together and rebound off the surface. That’s because the surface coating resists actually touching – or being wetted by – the water. But just as there are surface coatings that resist water, there are those that attract it. 

Hi!

Today I wanted to mention a rally going on even as I post at the UW Jackson School of International Relations. This is to contact representatives and otherwise raise awareness of the drastically underreported case of Xiyue Wang, an American student, husband, and father who has now been held hostage in Iran for more than two years. I hope you’ll be able to help and maybe even participate evenif you are too far away or too busy at work or class to attend.

Here is the story.

Xiyue Wang was studying the 19th century Qajar dynasty as part of his graduate research for Princeton. He was following research plans approved by Iranian authorities. Then the work was retroactively declared to be espionage and he was arrested and detained. The U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has concluded that this was without legal basis. Then there was barely a mention of it in the U.S. news for… years.

If you would think about contacting your representative to ask them to prioritize this humanitarian case and issue a public statement or social media post drawing attention to his plight and calling for his release… that would be kind? And kindness is our work in this life.

I would also take it as a personal favor if any of you who are or have been thinking of becoming members of grassroots political groups, or have any media contacts whatsoever, would bring it up with them too for discussion and action.

I thought about it and, for me anyway, I would say something like GeneralIrritation’s  The Girls Who Broke the World Series. While it’s a little bit of an Au, Max chooses to take the bullet in the bathroom instead of Chloe but doesn’t die, it’s everything I would want in a sequel. There’s a time skip and things are a bit darker but it offers an actual explanation for the time powers that makes complete sense and manages to make me like characters that LiS wanted me to like but didn’t give me a reason too.  I mean it made Nathen actually redeemable in my eyes??? 

The story would obviously involve time travel and expand upon things hinted upon in cut scenes and elements touched briefly upon. One thing I also considered was how to incorporate gameplay where you play as Chloe with Max having time travel abilities - essentially if you have Chloe make a “bad end” choice she would try to intervene. 

True, Chloe was happier in one week she spent with Max than the years she spent with Rachel… which says a lot considering Chloe loved Rachel so much.

‘Chloe saying that Rachel was a lot like Max and lists some of their similiar qualities‘

(I also never trusted Chloe saying that she’d been happier with Max in the last week than she had been since her dad died as actually being accurate reporting of her last five years of emotional history or a judgement on how it felt to be with Rachel. Instead, I read it as being her current emotional state and an emotional argument. It’s not that she was never this happy with Rachel, it’s that in the moment she feels like nothing has been this intense and significant since her dad died.)

(On the other hand, I love Riley Hawke’s “Fragile Reality”’s chorus:

“She makes me feel like someday we’ll wake up and be happy/ but with you, I forgot that I’m not.“

pearl deserves to hate pink

*included the text under the cut because it can be a little hard to read

Kaukasos - https://archiveofourown.org/works/13620687/chapters/31273242 

and 

The Right Way this Time: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12583440/chapters/28660644

All the Scars You Cannot See: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10883931

A New Beginning: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13928526

Bloom: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8539240

All of these are novel length, Bloom and The Right Way This Time are amberpricefield (although otherwise very different). Bloom and All the Scars are both pre-BTS.

We’ve been lamenting for decades that fic was longer in the good old days. I suspected this was mostly rose-colored glasses, and fic has always had the same ratio of lengths, except, perhaps, in zines that had minimum length requirements.

I thought I’d see which trend shows up on AO3. This is using the advanced search for total number of works updated in a given period. Because posting rates have gone up so much over time, I also looked at what percentage of works from a given year were each length.

Turns out, both of those hypotheses were wrong:

@the-recurring-dreams

Are you imagining something like a punk zine? Or are you thinking of “novels” as 500 pages?

Old media fandom zines are often a lot bigger and longer than the little chapbooks you see in feminist bookstores or music zines. “Novel zines” were one popular category. (This term means the zine is just that one story, not an anthology.) They might not be the length of a sff doorstop, but plenty of them are in the 50-100k words range.

Here’s an example of one I have.

https://fanlore.org/wiki/Perestroika

My copy is 202 pages, 8.5x11″, around 12pt font. Some novel zines are in a smaller format and are more novella than novel-length. I have a bunch of anthology zines that are around the same size as Perestroika, so they don’t contain any really long fic, but they have at least one longer piece (20-30k words, say). Thick, 8.5x11″ zines are common.

Zine technology evolved over time. I only got interested in the 2010s, and I mostly collect Miami Vice zines, so my collection is primarily used zines from the mid-90s. At that point, they used comb bindings. Those aren’t terribly pleasant if you have a high page count, but they can easily do 200 pages, and sometimes more.

Here’s an overview of the various bindings that were popular over time. Several of these can be used on very large zines:

1) the Diamond Moon Base’s murals are stylized…

Pink Diamond’s legs do not necessarily look like that (note similarity in style between the depictions of Pink Diamond’s legs and Blue Diamond’s legs):

2) Blue Diamond’s height is not necessarily indicative of the other Diamonds’ statures. while we’ve yet to meet White Diamond(’s physical form), Yellow Diamond, or Pink Diamond in-show, the shot we got of Yellow Diamond during the extended theme…

…gives us an imperfect indication of her height. while she seems only slightly taller than Jasper at first glance, note that–whereas Jasper’s, Lapis’s, and Peridot’s limbs are at least partially showing–Yellow Diamond is depicted in such a way that only her waist is showing. depending on how long her legs are, she could be much taller than quartz soldier Jasper…and, by extension, Rose, who’s Jasper’s height and consistent with the standard height for the known quartz models. (it’s also important to remember that the crewniverse does not have set heights for the characters, only height relationships.)

3) “Steven’s Birthday” established that Gems cannot maintain a “stretched” physical form (i.e. bigger, taller, or larger) than the form in which they first emerged from their Kindergarten holes. however, this rule does not necessarily apply to Gems maintaining “smaller” forms than their “default” form. for all we know, a Gem can shapeshift comfortably into smaller forms.

4) while Pink Diamond’s symbol was present on the Sky Arena and Diamond Moon Base, sites that were built as part of Homeworld’s plan for the Earth colony/predated the Crystal Gem Rebellion…

…the pink symbol is missing from both “modern” Gem tech, like Peridot’s hand-ship…

…and the Sleeping Pyramid temple-labyrinth from “Serious Steven”:

this temple, by the way, has a mural that depicts scenes from the Crystal Gem Rebellion. here we see Rose and her allies confronting a Diamond in battle:

it also just so happens that the temple is located on the Strawberry Fields, which–according to Pearl and Garnet in “Rose’s Scabbard”–served as a battlefield during the Gem Wars for Earth where the Crystal Gems made their stand against Homeworld. this temple was not shown among the Moon Base’s original plans for the Earth Colony, implying that–although it was built thousands of years ago–it was not planned for in advance. additionally–as I’ve argued–this temple, which is almost certainly of Homeworld construction, houses a Gem that may be White Diamond:

again, the Pink Diamond symbol was already missing from White Diamond’s alleged temple.

tl;dr: why is Pink Diamond’s symbol missing from not only modern Gem architecture, but Homeworld Gem architecture constructed circa the Gem Wars for Earth, seemingly built specifically to protect one of the Gem Matriarchs of the Great Diamond Authority after her physical form was destroyed; a temple that is located on the very same battlefield where Rose, Garnet, Pearl, and their allies made their stand against Homeworld…?

maybe Rose and Pearl destroyed Pink Diamond; maybe she did something to piss her counterparts off. either way, these date estimates line up too neatly to be coincidence, imo.

5) related: why was the Pink Diamond statue on the Sky Arena–the site of the first battles of the Gem Wars for Earth–defaced/destroyed while the other Diamond statues were preserved? it’s like Homeworld had a vendetta against her, or something.

6) based on the Moon Base murals, we can infer that the Diamonds’ gem placements go like this: White (forehead), Blue & Yellow (chest). these positions match their individual symbols on both their pre-Rebellion and post-Rebellion symbols:

if we’re to follow the pattern on these emblems, then Pink Diamond’s gem placement would be below her chest–possibly on her navel.

7) why hide Pink Diamond’s mural/withhold her appearance from us when her counterparts’ forms have been revealed? why spoonfeed us details about her through imagery–the “old” Diamond crest including Pink on the Sky Arena and Moon Base vs. the “new” Diamond crest with Pink missing–so that her existence (like White Diamond’s) has never been explicitly mentioned by the characters? dramatically, this conserves tension. maybe because Pink Diamond was someone we already know; maybe because Pink Diamond is not someone we already know but the crew, knowing that many of us would believe that we’ve figured out who Pink Diamond is, made this choice to throw us off their scent.

[EDIT: forgot a few.]

8) in “Space Race,” Pearl wears a flightsuit with a pink diamond on it. this seems mirror the style in which Peridot’s, Jasper’s, and Lapis’s outfits feature yellow and blue diamonds to denote their affiliation with Yellow Diamond and Blue Diamond:

plus, when Rose and Pearl form Rainbow Quartz in “We Need to Talk,” the lower half of the star on Rose’s dress is shaped like a diamond:

it stands to reason that Pearl, as Rose’s first Crystal Gem ally and intimate confidante, would know more about her than most–perhaps to the point that her knowledge still manifests here, when they fuse.

9) the technology in Rose’s armory…

…resembles the technology seen in the Kindergarten control room and the Diamond Moon Base:

the latter of which, by the way, Steven–bearer of Rose Quartz’s gem–activates.

–

…look. I have reservations about Rose Diamond theory, mostly because it’s…questionable that an army of Gems deemed defective or outcasts by the Homeworld would be led by an “ex-Diamond”–one of the leaders of Homeworld; one of the Gems with power over an empire that deems its Gems defective in the first place–who changed her name (and possibly her physical form) to pass as a lower model soldier-class Gem, or quartz, after she visited Earth and had a revelation…as though the suffering the Great Diamond Authority inflicted on Gems, their own kind, was not enough to rouse her.

there may be any number of unrevealed Homeworld shenanigans that would explain that: maybe Pink Diamond was considered defective by the other Diamonds; maybe Pink Diamond was a title that Rose Quartz was given or expected to prove she was worthy of; maybe Rose Quartz was a soldier-class Gem in Pink Diamond’s service who struck her down, took (likely White Diamond’s) Pearl with her when she escaped, and ran off to start a rebellion. it’s way too early to tell either way, and it’s way too early to make judgments about how the crewniverse will or will not handle “Pink Diamond,” whoever she was.