30s, he/him, cis. Originally a dedicated Mass Effect blog, now stuffed with any old nonsense. Infrequent fanfic writer, primarily for Supergirl. Blog should be SFW, but I make no promises about those I follow and reblog from!

jungwildeandfree:

and while we’re at it, fuck this idea that ONE ACCOUNT has to belong uniquely to ONE PERSON. This is the same thing these silicon valley fucks want; their vision of the future where everyone has a unique biometric ID code implanted in their body is the ultimate extension of Netflix’s “no password sharing” policy. You want to use your friend’s car? Sorry, you can’t, you need to be an authorized user. Your mother wants to let you look something up on her OED account? Too bad! That’s only for her! The concept of perfect market efficiency gives them greedy little money bag eyes.

If I pay money to have a newspaper sent to my house, they don’t charge me extra when I show it to my dad. This password sharing thing isn’t just a Netflix problem; don’t be surprised if it shows up elsewhere in other forms. Stamp this idea out now or we’ll be stuck with it.

dr-jekyl:
“This is something I’ve been working on for a bit: a high-level map that charts the progress of the Reaper war. It’s a bit confusing seeing it all jumbled together like that so, if you’re interested, you can see it broken down by wave here....

dr-jekyl:

This is something I’ve been working on for a bit: a high-level map that charts the progress of the Reaper war. It’s a bit confusing seeing it all jumbled together like that so, if you’re interested, you can see it broken down by wave here. I was going to do it as a gif but, well, to get the necessary level of detail the gif has to be truly enormous.

There are some major caveats/issues with it:

  • It’s based primarily on when a cluster gains a reaper icon, signifying it (or at least its mass relay) is under Reaper control. This is not going to be 100% accurate to when a system actually fell because the game gates when you can see and access systems largely by the completion of Priority Missions. Hence it’s broken into waves according to priority mission.
  • We’re missing huge tracts of information about what happens to non-human colony worlds, and don’t have the locations of almost all of them. We don’t even know the location of Kahje, the hanar homeworld.
  • The base map appears to have been drawn directly from the game maps. I’ve added Taetrus to it and a couple of missing relay links, but I’ve left off a number of other named places, like Kahje or Tiptree, because there isn’t enough information about where they’re actually located.
  • The map uses known relays whenever possible, but we don’t have details for massive sections of the relay network.
  • There are going to be things I’ve missed because, like the initial failed invasion of Illium, they’re only known to us through ambient dialogue and I’m not yet ready for another replay to find them.
  • Some events, like retaking Omega or the Cerberus invasion of the Grissom Academy, are determined by the player.

My most interesting takeaways so far:

  • The overall strategy for the Reapers seems to have been to encircle the major civilizations and push them up against the galactic core while maintaining just enough presence in frontier and contested systems to catch people trying to flee.
  • The invasion of Earth was one part of a set of four coordinated strikes against human, turian, asari and terminus space. Indeed, each successive wave sees the opening of new fronts across the galaxy.
  • The war for control of human space was essentially completely over by the time the Citadel Coup happened, so much so that the Reapers could afford to leave a major colony world like Benning (in the Arcturus cluster) alone until quite late in the war without fear of counter-attack.
  • Cerberus and the Reapers were coordinating in such a blatant fashion from the outset that it would be obvious to any intelligence analyst who cared to look.
  • Despite fandom perception that most asari worlds were quick to fall, the opposite is true: Thessia is the outlier (and there may also be an explanation for its quick fall). Named asari worlds almost invariably either held out for lengthy periods under sustained pressure or required orbital bombardment to subdue. Illium, notably, was hit in the first wave and held out to the bitter end.
  • The salarian’s gamble to stay out of the war as much as possible and concentrate on defending their own territory actually paid off, big time.
  • The galaxy is going to have a truly massive pirate/antisocial element problem straight after the war given how lightly the Reapers touched frontier space.

dorkynanni:

Dob: Did someone order Mac and Bees?

Merilwen: Don’t you mean Mac and Cheese?

Dob, struggling to hold down the cover: That actually makes a lot more sense

commanderogerss:

mass effect andromeda06/∞

Lexi: Though you may want to hang around while we revive your brother.Lexi: It always helps to see a familiar fa—
Ryder: I don’t like the sound of that