southsamurai

Interestingly, mint is what I daily drive as my distro and the car for it is what I prefer in terms of driving daily (I love me a hatchback).

However, Debian is a distro I would drive more often if it were more practical, and that car is my favorite ever that I wish I could have on a practical level

Fuck no.

My comments wouldn't differ, but I'd be too likely to have to shoot some moron that can't leave the internet on the internet.

Heck, I'm not you from the future, but I know you're doing the best you can. And that's pretty damn good

You solve for it.

If the answer you get is right, you'll be able to apply it to every trio and get the number on the "line". It's kinda like how you can plug in your answer into a quadratic equation to double check you got it right.

It depends on how you're accessing lemmy. Different apps render the markup weird.

Being real, if this post hadn't made it clear that the solution was non obvious, I likely would have given up before getting it, just because my chicken is being more interesting than usual.

But, knowing that there was a "trick" to it, meaning that it takes some lateral thinking, I didn't take my usual approach to number puzzles, which means it only took one look at the upper left for the likely solution to be visible. Then it was just running down and testing with the rest, then plugging in for the solution.

No way in hell I would have had the patience for it when my baby bird is being a silly dinosaur without that front loading assumption the solution wouldn't be evident with a systematic approach. Oh, I'd have given it maybe fifteen minutes, but with a fuzzy butt in play, that would have been it

I came into the comments section to see how long it took for someone to bring it up lol.

Headin' 'em off at tha pass, good on ya

Yeah, it's mostly random, but the really dark ones are more likely with high stress of some kind. They're not usually connected in a thematic way though. It's more that stress will set off a general wave of imagery that's matching in unpleasantness, without being the same in detail.

That one in particular was out of nowhere though. Well, no stress above the norm at least.

But I've always had very vivid dreams, nightmare or otherwise, even as a very little kid. One of the oldest dreams I remember was what could be called an apocalyptic scenario. Tornados, fires, storms all destroying places I knew. I wasn't even in kindergarten for that one yet. Only reason I can place it in time is that it happened at the tail end of when I had measles and I told my mom about it. I was 4-ish

That one actually recurred a few times over the years.

I actually do have one that I partly edited and beat into a more coherent shape. The dream itself was nastier than the story, what with being the doctor and feeling the creeping dread of it all. It was also missing the conversation bits.

Anyway, I call it spreading the disease

"Doctor, report."

"Captain, there's nothing I can do. We're all going to die, it's just a matter of how fast the staph mutates."

"Fuck."

"Yes sir, I agree."

I walked away from his cabin, still clad in my isolation suit. It would buy me enough time to possibly give mercy gas to the crew. Then it would be my job to hit the erase button.

That is the worst part of the job. Knowing that I might have to not only kill everyone aboard, but be the one to burn alive at the end, if the mercy meds didn't work fast enough. Sure, on paper the blend of drugs pumped through the suit's air would work in seconds, but there are always variances in exactly how many.

When we took to the stars, humanity was free. But so were all the myriad microorganisms that we live with, the ones inside and out. There's no way to get rid of them all, and it wouldn't be a good idea anyway; the balance of them is part of what keeps us functional. You don't want to be in a tin can in the vacuum of space with your gut biome eradicated.

No, we had left our once salubrious blue-green orb with no idea what might happen regarding those microbes. When the first mutations happened and killed entire crews, it was a bit of a mystery. At first, it would cost more than a single crew, because communication ceasing after a report of an illness rapidly killing the crew would cause Control to send an investigative crew.

That crew would go aboard in full gear, only to discover that the mutations had already led to germs able to chew through them. It was almost always the ship's doctor that would still be identifiable, their suit dissolved before the infection could get to them. When there was anything left at all, anyway.

But, then the investigating crew would have already been coated in the voracious mutations, their suits compromised the second they stepped aboard.

A few lasted long enough to reach a planet. That's how Newterra was lost.

Which is why every ship's doctor is now implanted with the button. A few attempts were made to use a command code to initiate, until a crewman decided to sabotage it in fear, demanding the doctor find a cure.

Now, the button is inside us. If we die, it triggers, and the ship's engine will go boom. Makes crews very protective of their doctors, and lead to intensive psychological screening for every doctor willing to risk death between the stars after a couple snapped under the stress of carrying the button.

Normally, the doctor will have time to initiate the sequence code via a series of blinks. Sometimes, the eyes are destroyed too soon, and the button triggers after death. From first blink to boom, you have about thirty seconds to slap the suit's mercy bolus before the anti-matter erases anything and everything.

The worst part is the dice roll of it. You never know when the mutations will occur, only that they will, if the mission is long enough. The shortest time it has been recorded as starting is ten days, the longest a year. Not great odds.

So we try hard to keep ahead of things. Daily tracking of shifts in the biome, via swabs and samples. Sometimes, you can find an outbreak of the Hungry as it's starting and either delay the end, or very rarely, stop it until the staph mutates again. You find it soon enough, and maybe it hasn't spread beyond the origin point. You can wipe the area, including any crew, and maybe get all of that wave. You get lucky like that, and you can initiate a round of antibiotics and a full sanitization of the ship.

You get lucky like that, and if you're lucky enough to be close to a rely Fleet Control station, there's a possibility of the chemical regime to fully kill your entire flora, and if you get that lucky, the difficulties involved are pleasant compared to the Hungry. But the chances of being close enough to a station for that are literally astronomical.

The Hungry is inevitable. In zero gravity, even with the best shielding possible, there are stray bits of radiation bouncing around. You get enough of them hitting, and the bacteria we carry mutate. They're always mutating anyway, but it gets accelerated. It is staph that eventually becomes Hungry, eating anything and everything, shifting into thousands of variations that will attack anything except some metals. I'm fairly sure that it would eventually find a way to eat those. But it tends to go after organic compounds very early in the process, so nobody has lasted long enough to see it happen.

Oh, we tried to find ways to avoid it. But it only takes a single damn bacteria shifting for the process to start. Even nanobots failed; we couldn't adjust them fast enough to keep up.

I got back to sick bay, looking around the isolation units to see everyone had died while I was talking to the captain. Only ensign Torres was recognizable. His face was quickly being eaten, the line of it moving visibly across him.

I walked to the command console and entered the codes to initiate the mercy gas for the crew, and began my inspection patrol with the backup injections for anyone the gas didn't work fully on. Sometimes, you get weird drug resistances and crew will still be alive. There's rumours of a few people that not only didn't die, but the sedatives and euphorics weren't entirely effective, so they died awake, if not exactly fully aware.

Fifteen minutes later, I had verified everyone was gone, no need for injections. I went into an isolation unit, sealed it, and unzipped long enough to have one of my carefully hidden cigars that the captain pretended not to know I had. Then I zipped up and started blinking.

Well, thing is that most of them are not only deeply personal, but unedited. I get them out in a rush while I'm still kinda reeling, then rarely go back to them. So they're a mess, and all but a handful are on paper because that's faster when a dream is already fading.

I dunno, I'll take a look through and see what I have that's somewhat sharable.

I'm not seeing a downside

Legit, I saw one break once with a patient just leaning on it with one hand to reach a cabinet above the toilet.

It wasn't really catastrophic, but if a 200lb dude leaning against one with only part of their weight can crack the ceramic, there's no way standing on one is at all acceptable.

That sounds like something Auntie Ethel would say

Fuck, I've written poems and short stories based on nightmares. None I'd ever let anyone else read because holy fuckballs do I have some fucked up nightmares, but still

Did I stutter?

Nobody but jackasses use the term.

Pretty much, nobody using the term turbolib unironically is ever going to be on the good side of any issue.

And that proves true in this case as well. No power tripping here

'Salright, we know you did it in gimp

Those are the biggest stones on the planet (next to the ones dangling between my legs).

Or that's a tiny knife. Like the one hanging between my legs.

Instructions unclear: dick is shredding my undies because the tip is now a chisel

Alas, that c/ is low traffic.