Thesassymarquess - The Sassy Marquess

i think everyone should be at least a little bit fixated on a niche video game that came out like 10 years ago and has never been relevant enough to discuss with people you know in real life. for your health

The whole team standing in front of an Adrien billboard

now that atlas is a thing

does that mean there’s going to be x2 the ‘form voltron’ sequences??

Please tell I’m not the only one who instantly thought of this

A quick short story

So, I recently wrote a quick short story to prove a point about storytelling (Ironically how to NOT do it) but I ended up actually rather liking the piece. So I’ll be posting it below. So, without much further ado, I’ll be posting the piece. Except for one problem. The piece itself gets dark. Quite dark for what I typically write. So I am trying to figure out how to “Tag triggers” because I’d rather not surprise readers with how... bad... it gets. But the to list the triggers outright would be an outright spoiler to the ending of the story, but to have a reader read a part of the story that greatly upsets them is not something I would do, because I would dislike a similar twist being pulled upon me (which, again sort of ironically, plays into the reasons for creating the story. Funny that)

So my question is simply, What is the best way to tag a trigger that is also a spoiler?

Got tagged by @noahwithaw (As seen above if you’re not blind)

Relationship Status: Has Girlfriend (As of October 1st, i.e. yesterday)

Favorite Colors: Colors along the blue green spectrum, to specifically name them, Cyan, Teal, and Turquoise.

Wake up time: Typically around 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM. College is great for sleeping in.

Cats or Dogs: I prefer Cats to Dogs. There are a few breeds of Dog I really like (Yorkshire Terriers)

Coke or Pepsi: These two aren’t that different (I can typically tell the difference and really the only thing they affect is what other sodas come with them since Coke and Pepsi are a huge duopoly and such) though I personally prefer Pepsi, both for the other sodas that come with it, and just between Coke and Pepsi. Most Pepsi machines come with root beer (mug typically) so yeah, why am I going to drink Pepsi when rootbeer is an option?

Chapstick or Lipstick: What? Chapstick I guess? I mean why would I want to wear lipstick? I’m a guy. I barely even use chapstick (typically only when camping, and then I try to avoid using it because chapped lips are a sign of dehydration, which means if you drink enough water your lips don’t get chapped. So how I avoid using chapstick is by trying to drink more water. It works as long as water in is greater than water out).

Last Song I Listened To: Well I’ve typically got some music going on when I’m trying to focus on something so I had Lemon Demon’s “I Earn My Life” and at this point “Angry People” is playing and I’m having a hard time not laughing. “Evil Babies with guns. It’s completely normal.”

I’m not really planning on tagging anyone on this really. Most people I have that I follow/follow me, I either already know the answers to most of these, or they’ve just been asked by Noah, or, OR this is the one person I’m tagging, they’re @bumibomber.

Tagged by @k-omerebii aka my bae 
Rules: Tag 9-10 people you want to get to know better
 Relationship status: cuddling my pillow at night 
Favorite color(s): red, faded colours 
Wake up time: lol it rlly depends. School days = 6:45 am, weekends = 8+ am
Cats or dogs: dogs obviously but I rlly love kittens too
Coke or Pepsi: Pepsi 
Chapstick or lipstick: lipstick 
Last song you listened to: Here Comes a Thought from the show Steven Universe 💖

I tag: @hafizzzle @noahweidner and whoever wants to do this

Winter for a Pine Tree

Disclaimer: Hey this gets dark real fast (0 to 60) and was written primarily to “Balance out the forces of the universe” After a friend of mine took a join project I’d been involved in and taken it off the rails into Wendip Territory (The stories ended up splitting into 2 stories written by two authors each instead of 1 story by 4). Anyways to balance out the force of the universe (and yes, I’m looking at you Graviti and Futur) I wrote this.

It gets dark so I tagged it as Depravity Falls, and spoiler alert, it involves death. So you’ve been forewarned.

It had been three days since Dipper had last seen anyone in his family. The thought was still fresh in his mind as he hollered into his walkie talkie hoping for Mabel to respond. It had also been three days since he’d last eaten as his stomach was reminding him. And well somewhere nearby he could hear some of Bill’s monsters roaming around, possibly planning on eating him. Unfortunately for Dipper, he quickly recognized the creatures coming up behind him as eyebats. With them coming from behind him, his only option was to exit the alley he’d been hiding in and hope that there was a shelter he could hide in elsewhere.

Dipper made a break for it, and saw on the other side of the street the Gravity Falls mall, which fortunately was an indoor mall, so that’d likely slow down the eyebats. After a quick dash across the street, and having to ignore a very annoying monster, Dipper made it inside the mall without being eaten or turned to stone. The mall looked terrible, there was a huge hole in the skylight, the whole place had graffiti everywhere, and the carts, tables, and chairs were all over the place. Everything looked so ruined and abandoned. Except for a single table with a plate of nachos sitting on it under a working light.

Oh thank god Dipper thought, it felt like weeks since he’d last eaten, even if it’d only been a few days. Dipper forgot about almost everything as he ran towards those nachos in complete bliss over being able to eat again. He ran over and grabbed the nachos off the table. Then he noticed the wire that got pulled with the nachos. He didn’t even have to time to scream before he saw the shotgun fire.

The gun had been aimed to hit an adult in the lower crotch to upper leg area. Wendy had figured when she set it up it’d stop just about any attempted bandit or thug from getting to her, and teach them a good lesson too, hopefully without killing the target either. However Dipper was decidedly not the height of the average adult and had instead been shot right in the chest. He screamed out in pain as the power of the blast knocked him of his feet to the floor. He knew right away that regardless of what happened next, he couldn’t survive this. Even before weirdmaggedon his injury was enough to be fatal.

He heard footsteps run into the room and saw none other than Wendy run into the room. Dipper’s head was still ringing from the blast, and he couldn’t clearly hear what she was saying as she entered. She seemed to look pissed, was probably screaming, and had a crossbow drawn in her hand. He then saw as her anger quickly turned to confusion and then horror upon seeing him lying there. Wendy ran over to him obviously upset over something, but Dipper couldn’t make out the words. She was sobbing as she picked him up. The whole world was beginning to get fuzzy, and the pain was beginning to lessen. Dipper was beginning to feel really warm. Really warm and comfortable. Before he lost consciousness, he heard what Wendy was saying to him “I’m sorry Dipper. I’m so sorry.”

Dipper lay there and his last thoughts churned away at those words. He couldn’t make sense of what they meant. What was she sorry for? He really couldn’t remember anymore. His eyes felt heavy but he never built up the strength to close them. Wendy watched as the last signs of life left Dipper’s eyes.

Factorio Space Age: Gleba

Since I recently reblogged a post about Gleba, I figured I should go into more depth about it. In a week or two when I graduate I’ll go into more detail about it, but I’ve probably spent the most time of the expansion on Gleba, exploring things like Quality, the circuit network changes, and sushi belts. I admit some of the tech I learned on Gleba ended up being essential for a later rebuild of Fulgora & stuff I learned on space platforms went to Aquilo, and then what I learned there got brought back to space.

Regardless I figured I could share some of the overall lessons I learned on Gleba & beyond during the DLC that helped me “master” Gleba.

-Identifying where spoilage & freshness matters

There’s a total of about 13 items that can spoil, and they spoil into one of six things: iron and copper ores, spoilage, and enemies. As you want iron/copper ores, we can ignore spoilage here, they become the thing you want typically so except in the production loop, this is a good thing. For spoilage, it’s an item, and you should generally assume anything that stores a spoilable item in it, is going to at some point have spoilage in it, and it will need to be removed. EVERYTHING, including things like biolabs. Lastly enemies, they don’t leave behind items so you don’t need to clean out the machines, but you probably don’t want them wandering around, so you likely want some defense to kill them if they show up. They can wreck havoc on things like space platforms or power plants if they get there, but generally they’re more a nuisance than a threat, so long as you don’t let a massive amount spoil at once… (Most I did was let 100 biter eggs spoil in a chest surrounded by lasers. Didn’t even notice it happened).

So clean up spoilage, and handle “Hazmats” (eggs & spawners) with military or disposal methods (pentapod eggs can be burned & biter eggs mulched into nutrients). Another tip for the Hazmats is to not store them in chests unless necessary (rocket silo loading), and to not put them in assemblers/biochambers unless they are the only missing item. I seriously recommend setting agricultural egg inserters to hand size 1 & to only insert if they have bioflux. (Wire the biochamber to the inserter, use read contents & enable/disable). It might slow down your science slightly but it does make it so you don’t need turrets by the science area.

Spoilage itself can be easily disposed of by either converting it inefficiently into nutrients, or burning it in a heating tower. Personally I use nutrient crafting as a spoilage upcycling system to produce high quality spoilage for efficiency modules, or high quality carbon for coal synthesis w/ asteroid mining for the matching sulfur. (I.e it’s a supplement for Legendary plastic for red circuits and LDS shuffling…)

As for where freshness matters, it actually only matters in a few places. Not all recipes do actually inherit their freshness from their parents (bacteria & pentapod eggs are top of my mind, but I think Fish also don’t), nor does freshness matter if the finished product isn’t spoilable. Ultimately freshness only really matters in the items directly connected to lime (agricultural) science as it’s the ONLY item in game that freshness impacts how useful it is. 5% fresh bioflux will feed a biter nest, as will 5% nutrients a biochamber & so on. Freshness only really matters if you need to move something or if it’s for lime science. So generally with that in mind you can send all your near rotten fruit and other spoilables for producing things like ore, rocket fuel, plastic, lubricant, sulfur or carbon fiber.

Another key idea is “shelf-stability”. You generally want to move raw fruit, bioflux & lime science around because they have long shelf lives. You don’t want to move jelly, mash, or nutrients around because of their short shelf life. It’s much easier to move jellynut, yumako, or bioflux instead and all of them are more space efficient to move as well.

-The Spores, Simplicity, & Quality triad

From what I found it is impossible to create a base that is simple, spore-efficient, & produces quality. At best you can do two, and I suspect it is genuinely impossible to do all three because of how they interact.

So I suppose I should define what I mean by these things. Spore efficiency is basically a measure of how much of the fruit products you make turn into spoilage. A more spore efficient base has less products rot. Why? Because the less products that rot, by definition, the more of your harvest WAS used for production rather than was wasted. While spoilage has its own uses, it isn’t ideal for most production in your base, unless you plan on mass producing only coal. Simplicity is how much of a headache setting everything up is. The more circuit conditions, belt priority shenanigans, and other complexities in the build, the less simple it is. And quality production, I mean large scale quality production, which usually relies on inter-step processing to roll up the products.

But wait you might be asking yourself, this implies it’s possible to build a quality base that’s easy without it being a major headache? Yes! Quality lime science is arguably one of the easiest sciences to produce in quality, only truly rivaled by the easy of quality space science in the late game! My first rocket silo of lime science was 1k rare science. This is because pentapod eggs are a catalytic recipe that can take quality modules, and so rolling up a high quality egg once is super easy, and then you just need to keep feeding it with high quality nutrients… which comes from bioflux, the other item you want to raise in quality! And you can even use a spoilage upcycler to supplement this to prevent the eggs from going off. I’ll show off a surprisingly easy to design base for producing rare quality science in the early Gleba game sometime later when I show off some Gleba designs.

However I do need to point out that the triad does inherently conflict. Trying to reduce spoilage amounts by simply reducing fruit in caused quality to stall. Trying to get quality up again caused it to become more complex, making a newer less-complex design required me to gut quality… you have to decide WHAT you value going in.

So for my MP base I decided I would cut quality, and focus on spore efficiency, as I wanted to produce the most science with the least spores, as I couldn’t rely on Tesla Turrets from Fulgora to protect me.

-Spore efficiency maximization

One of the best ways to actually improve spore efficiency is to start at the fruit production itself. Every second a raw fruit is waiting around, it is getting one step closer to rotting. Why harvest if you don’t need to? Keeping planting going without harvesting is simple if you keep in mind that agricultural towers prefer to plant first, then harvest. So if you wire the tower to anything, and set it to output inventory & only work when seeds > 0, it will only work when it has seeds in it, and will prefer planting first. Which means it will only harvest if there are no plantable spots and you put seeds in. Which means you can control harvesting by controlling when an inserter loads seeds in. So have the inserter only put seeds in when you need more fruit (you can use a circuit condition, like fruit less than 50 (one harvest) to determine when to start a harvest and load seeds in one at a time, if this is your only condition, you’ll probably produce 2-4 stacks at a time depending on your inserters).

Likewise… if you control when you process the raw fruit into jelly/mash then you can again further reduce spoilage. You can use a similar method to the harvest, but by turning off the biochambers for those lines. This reduces fruit usage, which will decrease tower usage & spore output… yet since you only produce the jelly/mash when needed, the assembly line shouldn’t actually slow down. What might happen though is that your power production dips because you’re not burning as much spoilage.

Well that’s a very easy fix. Gleba has the CHEAPEST rocket fuel recipe in the game, especially if you look at the fuel values of its ingredients. It is the ONLY power positive rocket fuel recipe in the game without productivity, and it has a default 50% bonus to it too! Literally no other rocket fuel recipe can get that bonus except the base recipe which requires exported biochambers to Nauvis! (Or Fulgora technically, but why would you do that? Oil is free there) Which is its own nightmare. So you can actually just burn rocket fuel for power in a heating tower! Which has a 250% fuel efficiency, meaning 100 Mj of chemical energy (one rocket fuel) becomes 250 MJ of electrical power! Excluding startup costs for the heating towers.

Well I’d recommend against burning all your rocket fuel because that’d just gobble it all up, but what you can do is measure the temperatures of your heating towers, and if they drop below a certain threshold (I recommend at least 600 degrees) to feed in rocket fuel.

Since I hooked up this failsafe to my power plant the only blackout I had was when I accidentally burned all my yumako seeds and stalled the entire factory, and it took almost an hour for it to begin to get close to a brownout, and it hadn’t when I found out the problem (I had an alarm if the power plant went critically cold (all towers below 600 degrees), so I could intervene before power goes out)

How you decide to reduce spoilage from here is up to you. I decided on my second run to just dead end belts and extract spoilage rather than run them all to the incinerator, so that lines could just pull half rotted mash/jelly for things like lube and ore. Only bioflux has a flowthrough section, and I overbuilt lime science & eggs so it never backs up there either (I’d much rather have rotting lime science than make half rotten lime science)

-Finally… solving the “How do I load my freshest items into a rocket?”

This is much easier than people think. It takes 2 chests, a logistics provider of some flavor (I use red) & a steel chest (wood/iron would work too). I then place the chests a tile apart, and have the inserter wired to the logistics chest. It’s set that if I have more than my desired storage amount (usually one rocket’s worth, sometimes two rockets) it grabs the MOST SPOILED item from the provider and puts it into the steel chest. This removes the item from the logistics network (and the rocket silo therefore) which will turn the inserter back off if the chest no longer has more than enough for the rocket launches requested & reduces the average spoil time of the chest. This is key. The individual items are still spoiling, I’m not managing to magically remove spoilage, but I am reducing the average spoil amount. When a rocket comes, it takes the items from the provider chest and it will gradually fill up again. Since only the freshest 1k items are typically available, this means I always load the freshest items I have. I could then feed in some items back from that “rotting chest” if I wanted to, but I find it’s more trouble than it’s worth, and I’d rather just produce a fresh 1k usually… I might play around with feeding it back in, but I only do this with science… extracted bioflux in this system gets fed into production elsewhere, instead of into a secondary chest. The whole point of the chest was just to act as a large storage vessel for composing science to spoilage.

Anyways, as someone who actually liked Gleba I talked about everything I can without getting into the specifics of like… how to build Gleba with bots, belts or trains… which I would love to cover at some point, because I do think there are too many content creators out there that don’t do Gleba justice… (Looking at Nilaus… I died inside when I saw he just plopped down a bot-base and a parameterized biochamber mall essentially. Dosh likewise also disappointed me on his OG Space Age run with his Gleba (import based) and Fulgora (bot based). I did love Doc Jade’s nightmare scrap train Fulgora though. He understood that the most fun can be had in the creativity of a solution, not necessarily the efficiency)

Adrien: oh fiddlesticks! That really ruffles my feathers

Nino: please just say fuck