#Transformers vs the Terminator

[but-a-humble-goon]

Here's some deeply revealing insight into where my mind is at these days. Was just thinking how in this crossover, Terminator and Transformer tech exists in the same universe.

Transformers are powered by Energon. Quasi-mystical energy source and lifeblood of their creator god Primus. They need a recharge on energon pretty much as frequently as a human needs to eat or else they die. Terminators are powered by onboard hydrogen fuel cells. Nuclear. They sustain a terminator at 100% for roughly 120 years before needing a replacement. Conclusion: canonically the literal blood of Primus ain't shit compared to nuclear energy.

[fembot-prompts]

Prompt IV

Transformers vs The Terminator;

Velocity and Sarah Connor;

survival

[robotclownindulgence]

This was my barbenheimer

[cyberglyphs]

new hot take: this is the SEXIEST panel of megatron ever drawn, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. that fucking evil smirk alone is so goddamn hot and panty wetting i'm losing my MIND

[dontconvinceme]

🥺🥺

[bronzemettle]

Greetings! I didn't know posts could have titles and couldn't think of anythi-

I'm Xavier Bronze (she/her). I'm plural, polyamorous, and frequently autistically hyperfixate on nerd shit. Early in my existence my headmate helped me write a superhero self-insert fanfic, and it made the choice to cross company lines, including characters and plot elements from not just Marvel, but DC, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Indiana Jones, and others all at the same time.

This is probably where it started, bc now, with certain aesthetics and genre conventions my cognition just kinda does crossovers on its own by default. It actively takes effort for me to remember that certain characters don't exist in the same universe. And for the past couple of years I've started formalizing and codifying this broad-reaching "headcanon world". Here I'm thinking about calling it BronzeRealms, for better SEO and tagging.

Since becoming a codified continuity of its own, the BronzeRealms have only grown. Significantly. Now I have a rough timeline spanning from the Age of Myth roughly three millennia ago all the way to the 41st century. Comicbook superheroes are still here, with a greatest hits grab bag of character versions and lore taken from various adaptions, reboots, and retcons over the decades.

But now the superheroes of today find themselves in conversation and lineage with great warriors of centuries past like Kratos, Xena, and the slave uprising who expelled the Goa'uld System Lords from Egypt, and with the steadfast and resourceful Captains and soldiers of the future, John Connor, Gordon Freeman, Finn the Human, John Sheridan, Ellen Ripley, the Reds and Blues of Blood Gulch, and Benjamin Sisko. Their contemporaries have broadened too. Godzilla, Dominic Toretto, Hellboy, Kim Possible, Ladybug & Cat Noire, UNIT, Sora, The Addams Family, and the Autobots. This is very, very far from a comprehensive list. I have dipped my toe into making a list of source works that the BronzeRealms draws elements from to include, and the table of contents alone is over two pages at this point.

I am fully aware that the scope of this worldbuilding has exceeded all reason, and any chance of ever being fleshed out into any kind of story that could encompass it all. It would take multiple lifetimes just to write 5k word mini fics for every character, event, and time period I've defined lore for. I might put a microfic out once in a while but this is fully worldbuilding for its own sake, for fun!

And I've been talking my friends' ears off about this for years now so I came to this website seeking fresh infodumping victims, lol. And to do more ongoing brainstorming. This isn't a finished product, and never will be, so you should just have fun with it too <3

[filmbrodumb]

Do film bros actually think the teal and orange trend started on digital?

Because It didn't.

[davidmariottecomics]

100 Blogs (Give or Take): FIGHT!

Hello! 

Welcome to my 100th* blog! 

*Or, rather, blog week 101 over on my website. In terms of actual blogs, I'm probably more in the 70s-80s? I try to update as much as possible, of course, but some weeks things've not uploaded properly. Occasionally, I've had just too much life stuff or I haven't really had much to write about. And sometimes, on the extreme ends, I've had way too much to write about and have been overwhelmed at trying to parse out everything I needed to. Last week, when I missed the actual week 100, was somewhere inbetween those: feeling uninspired because I was so tired from both stuff in my personal life and the many many many things happening in the world at large. 

I've, unsurprisingly, still got a lot on my mind. Like 200 organizations have pledged their support for KOSA and sounds like they might not all understand exactly what they're supporting (but you can still make your voice heard on why not to let it pass, namely the continued safety and security of LGBTQ+ folks online who might otherwise get explicitly banned from the most public online spaces, or at least implicitly banned through shadowbanning--as well as all the kids that could be harmed from the inability to access information that they might actually need.).

The U.S. blocked a U.N. call for ceasefire singlehandedly, despite the rest of the security council (minus abstaining U.K. and... that was noticed, guv) being in favor and, of course the overwhelming national and international support for a ceasefire (one progressive thinktank's polling suggested around a 60% US support for ceasefire, to whatever extent those kinds of polls can be trusted, however, the feet on the ground at protests, making calls, sending emails, trying to get into Senatorial offices with ladders, etc show a pretty vocal support for one).

The website formerly known as Twitter gave me just another reason to leave with their new AI. I don't want to see anything about it because I, y'know, get that it's like dunking on the people who wanted to use it for evil and that's funny or whatever, but it's also another AI system that's almost certainly just regurgitating things actually people said and thought and made and ought to be given credit and/or money for the use of. We shouldn't be letting our guard down around an AI just because it's telling transphobes to go fuck themselves--this is still the same shit that is stealing from artists or denying people their medical coverage!

And, also mostly on Twitter because it's a bad place (and I'll remind ya now, I'm leaving by the year's end. I'll be here on the blog and you can find me on Bluesky and I have a couple spare invites if you might need one, but my Twitter's coming to an end soon and I think my Facebook/Insta aren't too far behind...) multiple dirtbag comics guys decided to make the rounds again. They've had their airtime and I have no interest in giving them a platform, but boy, they sure were around. 

Plus, y'know, all the other stuff that has just been continuing, from the continued assault on Ukraine to Covid hospitalizations and deaths going up again.

It's the end of the year and cha'boy is tired. It has been a long, long year and I'm very much looking forward to it ending for whatever that is worth and the time of relaxation I get to have around that end. And so, I wasn't really feeling like writing... but then, I saw a post on Bluesky from Marcus Jimenez asking all comics folks about crafting fight scenes. And so I wanna talk about that this week because I don't often get a chance to talk about the mechanics of comics within comics, and that can be really fun! 

Squaring Up

As someone who has written and edited a lot of fight scenes, there are a lot of different ways to go about it. As I think I've said before, in my own writing, I tend toward a little more description and full dialogue so the artist has those space considerations in mind when working from my scripts. As an editor, I've worked the "Marvel" way where pages are more plotted with with less dialogue and specific action. I've worked with folks who do more of a rough pass where they focus on the concrete smaller moments and then leave a lot of the action up to the artist. I've worked with folks who're even more prescriptive than me. And there's something to finding the right balance on all sides with all these folks--from the writer and artist meshing in terms of what sort of detail they want from each other to having complimentary colors and letters. 

But for myself, and something I have sometimes talked to creators about, one of the first things I focus on when it comes to an action or fight scene is the specific things the character(s) can do. When I think about some of my bigger fight sequences in say Transformers vs. the Terminator or Transformers Wreckers: Tread & Circuits (both available from my webstore, *hint hint*), one of the most apparent things is that I loaded them with a lot of characters doing a lot of things, so... sorry to my artists (no, I know Alex and Jack loved working on them--again, if you can, write to the artist's strengths and I happened to work with guys I knew were excited about these sorts of big scenes). But in that, there are a lot of characters with specific abilities. Generally speaking, right, in TF/Term, we've got three different types of combatants: Sarah Conner is a human, the T-800 is a Terminator, and the Transformers are Transformers. So the skills Sarah has are different from all the robots and, obviously, the Transformers have the ability to convert modes which is something unique to them as characters that can make for really exciting sequences. And even within the Transformers, there are different combat capabilities: Skywarp can teleport. Soundwave has sonic attacks. Megatron has a huge arm cannon. Optimus has an energon axe. The Seekers can fly. And characters like Velocity are medics, who she doesn't really shoot to kill, she can hold her own after millenia at war, but she's not a fighter first and doesn't wanna do terrible damage to anyone. 

To me, it's the same thing as a fight with Spider-Man. You know he's got the proportional speed, strength, and agility of a spider. You know he has web-fluid (unless he doesn't and that sort of circumstance is interesting in a fight). He can stick to things and sense danger and all the standard Spidey tricks. And if you want a scene to be engaging, you wanna know what your characters can do in it that is unique--either to other characters and stories, or within this specific scenario. Seeing Spidey use his webs or his wall-crawling or his spider-sense is more interesting on a page than him just swinging his fists (generally). These are all sort of tools in the toolbox that determine what they can do in a fight. I also think that when you combine them with the circumstances of the fight, you start to see how they'll act in a fight. Why they make the decisions they do. 

So, to use TF again, in TF/Terminator, let's talk about the set-up to the big fight that runs through issues #3 & #4. It starts out with Bumblebee and Sarah scouting out the Decepticons who are up to no good. And the instigating question is, if Bumblebee's a good scout, how does someone sneak up on him? Well, Skywarp is a teleporter. So he just appears! But he's also maybe a little dumb, so he announces himself. Bumblebee's first priority is protecting Sarah, so the best way to do that is for him to shift modes around her as a running shield. They'll go faster. If he gets hit, it'll reduce the impact on her. Etcetera. He could do other things--he could stay and fight and blast at Skywarp, but because the option is open to him to change modes and to drive away, he's going to because that's fun and it makes sense with his character. Then he tries to do some fancy driving to trick Skywarp into ramming into Megatron, but because Skywarp can teleport, hey, he gets away in perfect position to take another run at Bumblebee. But because he teleported higher to get a better position, it also left him more open to get shot by Optimus in the heroic arrival of the rest of the Autobots. The characters' abilities made a really clear picture of the sort of action that could occur with the setting and are reflective of why they act the way they do. 

Throw a Punch A lot of the action is going to flow pretty naturally, from a writing standpoint, once you've got it started. If I know who my characters are, what they can do, and the basic scenario they find themselves in, as long as I've got that in my head, I can just sort of play them off each other and see how the action goes. But there ar some other practicalities I try to take into account as I go. 

1. How many characters do I have to keep track of? Like I said, a lot of my fight scenes have been bigger. I've got groups fighting each other, with civilians to worry about. And while you don't need to show every beat of every action, you do have to keep roughly in mind how everyone is reacting and to what extent you do want to switch between POVs and protagonists. I tend to measure my beats to either pages or page turns, rather than doing too much action switching on a single page unless I'm trying to convey just how hectic things are and just how simultaneous actions are occuring. 

2. How fast is your action moving? Two things I think about a lot when I'm writing action are that a round of combat in Dungeons & Dragons is supposed to be 6 seconds, and that the coolest fight I've ever seen on film is the almost 6 minute fight scene in They Live. (6 minutes later...) I'm back! Okay, so either way, I think what both of those are very representative of are how quickly action occurs in a fight and how much of the time in a fight is the other stuff. It's the non-combat movement. It's catching your breath or setting a trap or focusing on another problem or putting sunglasses on a guy. And in comics, you have the ability to dialate time as you'd like, so each panel can be a second or a matter of seconds, with the gutters allowing time to pass out of frame. You want your action to be logical and continous, but it's okay to have other things happening in the flow, and maybe more importantly, to chose which moments have the most impact.  In D&D, 6 seconds can take like 6 minutes. And on film, you're getting so many constant frames. Comics lets you be a lot chosier in how you expand and contract the time around those moments. 

3. How text heavy is the fight? Here's the other side of things. I know that I tend to be a talker. I mean... look how long it's taken to get to this point! I like dialogue in my comics and often have characters trading verbal jabs during the action. And that takes time and space. As do sound effects. So, I try to balance my fight scenes to the essentials. Much the same as the issue of time, I'm trying to select the moments of greatest impact with what we're "hearing". The more that's being asked of an action panel, the less text I try to give it. Let the art take over. But if I can use the action as a punctuation: If Optimus or Thunderclash or whoever is giving his hero speech and can toss a punch at a baddie to make his point, I'm going to use it. And if action is the visual punctuation to dialogue in this way, SFX are the visual punctuation to the action. They're an exclamation point on what sound is important. A lot of the time, it'll be no sound. But if it'll clarify the action or if it'll enhance the mood, go for it! 

Most important to a fight scene is that *generally* they're supposed to be fun. They're moments of fantasy where a side that's in some sort of right and a side that's in some sort of wrong clash and there's a victor and we all cheer because it's entertaining to see Rowdy Roddy Piper get his ass handed to him up until the end, but when he finally gets one over on Keith David, you know it's because he was right. So while you're thinking of all this stuff, if you give in to the fun, it'll propel you through a lot of it. Now, there're obviously also moments when the fighting is supposed to be building tension or showing the horrors of violence, but I think that goes to a lot of the same mentality as we've already got. It's about making the characters respond to the situation of the fight and if their responses fall in line with that, it'll still be smooth sailing because it'll be what makes sense.

I think that's it for me for this week, but maybe in a coming week, I can do something like a mini-version of something I did on my Patreon when I did an annotated version of the Wreckers #1 script and  do sort of a practical walk-through of a new original fight scene. 

Until next time. Happy Hanukkah to those that celebrate! 

What I enjoyed this week: Blank Check (Podcast), Dungeons & Daddies (Podcast), Reverse 1999 (Video Game), Nancy (Comic), Lego Masters (TV show), Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror (Short story collection), Factory Summers by Guy Delisle (Comic), It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth by Zoe Thorogood (Comic), Slaughterhouse-Five (the Comic adaptation by Ryan North & Albert Monteys), being almost done with all gift shopping and wrapping 2 weeks early, Yu-Gi-Oh: Duel Links (Video Game), Dandadan (Manga), our little mall Model Train Museum, Fire & Ice: Welcome to Smallville (Comic), Blue Beetle (Comic), Birds of Prey (Comic), Christmas lights, finding a good deal on a present for myself (I found the G.I. Joe Bishoujo Scarlett statue for a mere $40 at a local secondhand store and I think she's really pretty), not getting sick even tho Becca was, and I guess The Killer (Movie). Not my favorite Fincher by a lot. We're tentatively gonna see Godzilla: Minus One tomorrow, so looking forward to that and will try to figure out seeing Boy and the Heron, Eileen, Dream Scenario, and maybe The Marvels (tho it being a Disney film makes it a tougher sell) before they're out of theaters... and maybe Priscilla... and maybe FNAF on the big screen since Becca's really into FNAF right now. Too many movies! And I love movies! 

New Releases this week (12/6/2023): Sonic the Hedgehog #67 (Editor)

New Releases next week (12/13/2023):  Sonic the Hedgehog: Winter Jam (Editor)

Announcements: Look for a kind fun thing I contributed to this week! I'll share it when it's live! 

The Cartoonist Cooperative is still doing E-Sim cards for Gaza. You can donate a digital sim card so that residents can get access to the internet and have more functional phones and, in exchange, get some comics or a drawing or whatever else is available from the many participating artists. You can also give more directly. If you don't have money, and I get it, you can call or fax or email or show up at the offices of your representatives. There are a ton of demonstrations happening this weekend and you can see if you can put your actions in on one of those!

If you aren't a Patreon backer yet, remember, it's a great gift for someone or yourself. At my $10 tier, last month, I got Becca to record an Adults-Only podcast called "Abandoning the Premise" with me. You should be able to hear a short sample at the link. And if that seems cool to you, you can get the whole episode, but a bunch of other weird stuff on my Patreon! This month's "Something Weird"s are going to be a root beer review (I bought 6 different root beers and Becca suggested I talk about what I thought of them and there'll be a little more to it that that) and hopefully posting next weekend, a Holiday Gift Guide written, chosen, and designed by me (be careful if you're a person who might get a gift from me... you might see your present in there)! 

And keep an eye out for more news soon. Really hoping to have some cool news in the new year if not before! 

Pic of the Week: So, last Wednesday, I made a trip up to the IDW Los Angeles office. Because we have a lot of people spread out, we have a couple office locations. But the LA office happened to host some friends from SEGA and, specifically, some visitors from Sonic Team! We gave them the tour, talked about the comics, gave them some to take home, all the good usual visiting stuff. But Karasuno-san, Kanemoto-san, and Hoshino-san very generously did some sketches for us before they left. So, should you get a chance to tour the IDW offices in the future, you might see this sketch page hanging on the wall. 

[pluralsword]

-*laughs in prowl* back in 2022 at TFCon Chicago the last panel of the con was IDW artists talking about the art experience, and someone asked how they draw the bots doing things or something like that, and Alex Milne said more or less 'well we have to use visual tricks of perception, for example Prowl's bosom on the toy would keep him from crossing his arms so you have to change the angle of things to make it work'

-Transformers is such a different world when it comes to gender and anatomy because Arcee can usually cross her arms across her chest just fine including IDW1 and Terminator Arcees who have the most protruding chest except for Q-Transformers Arcee whose torso is the chest basically but all the Q-Transformer cars are like that. Her girlfriend Aileron who is chubby and buff can cross her arms fine. Meanwhile on the other hand the average car Prowl (canonically a guy so far) with lanky big ankle proportions except for his massive and broad chest cannot do that. want to show this in toy form someday when we get an official or unlicensed aileron toy (our close to proportion accurate Aileron custom can't twist her arms sadly)

flat-chested transformers don't know how good they have it, being able to cross their arms privilege n all that

[therobotmonster]

On that recent Disney Vs Midjourney court thing wrt AI, how strong do you think their case is in a purely legal sense, what do you think MJ's best defenses are, how likely is Disney to win, and how bad would the outcome be if they do win?

Oh sure, ask an easy one.

In a purely legal sense, this case is very questionable.

Scraping as fair use has already been established when it comes to text in legal cases, and infringement is based on publication, not inspiration. There's also the question of if Midjourney would be responsible for their users' creations under safe harbor provisions, or even basic understanding of what an art tool is. Adobe isn't responsible for the many, many illegal images its software is used to make, after all.

The best defense, I would say, is the fair use nature of dataset training and the very nature of transformative work, which is protected, requires the work-to-be-transformed is involved. Disney's basic approach of 'your AI knows who our characters are, so that proves you stole from us' would render fair use impossible.

I don't think its likely for Disney to win, but the problem with civil action is proof isn't needed, just convincing. Bad civil cases happen all the time, and produce case law. Which is what Disney is trying to do here.

If Disney wins, they'll have pulled off a coup of regulatory capture, basically ensuring that large media corporations can replace their staff with robots but that small creators will be limited to underpowered models to compete with them.

Worse, everything that is a 'smoking gun' when it comes to copyright infringement on Midjourney? That's fan art. All that "look how many copyrighted characters they're using-" applies to the frontpage of Deviantart or any given person's Tumblr feed more than to the featured page of Midjourney.

Every single website with user-generated content it chock full of copyright infringement because of fan art and fanfic, and fair use arguments are far harder to pull out for fan-works. The law won't distinguish between a human with a digital art package and a human with an AI art package, and any win Disney makes against MJ is a win against Artstation, Deviantart, Rule34.xxx, AO3, and basically everyone else.

"We get a slice of your cheese if enough of your users post our mouse" is not a rule you want in law.

And the rules won't be enforced by a court 9/10 times. Even if your individual work is plainly fair use, it's not going to matter to whatever image-based version of youtube's copyreich bots gets applied to Artstation and RedBubble to keep the site owners safe.

Even if you're right, you won't have the money to fight.

Heck, Adobe already spies on what you make to report you to the feds if you're doing a naughty, imagine it's internal watchdogs throwing up warnings when it detects you drawing Princess Jasmine and Ariel making out. That may sound nuts, but it's entirely viable.

And that's just one level of possible nightmare. If the judgement is broad enough, it could provide a legal pretext for pursuing copyright lawsuits over style and inspiration. Given how consolidated IP is, this means you're going to have several large cabals that can crush any new work that seems threatening, as there's bound to be something they can draw a connection to.

If you want to see how utterly stupid inspiration=theft is, check out when Harlan Ellison sued James Cameron over Terminator because Cameron was dumb enough to say he was inspired by Demon with a Glass Hand and Soldier from the Outer Limits.

Harlan was wrong on the merits, wrong ethically, and the case shouldn't have been entertained in the first place, but like I said, civil law isn't about facts. Cameron was honest about how two episodes of a show he saw as a kid gave him this completely different idea (the similarities are 'robot that looks like a guy with hand reveal' and 'time traveling soldier goes into a gun store and tries to buy future guns'), and he got unjustly sued for it.

If you ever wonder why writers only talk about their inspirations that are dead, that's why. Anything that strengthens the "what goes in" rather than the "what goes out" approach to IP is good for corps, bad for culture.

[mysterylover123]

Watching G1 Transformers "Heavy Metal War"

Pictured: the only part of this ep anyone cares about.

First Season Finale time! Megs vs OP let's goooo

Wow incredible animation error on Screamer when Megs is talking to him. Anyway it's sweet how Megs ids OP's only weakness as his 'honor'.

You know the one thing D &Orion were lacking in their friendship was respect, since Dee kinda looked down on Orion; it's one oddly sweet consolation that Megs generally respects OP, even if they're archnemeses.

Voice deliveries are really good here btw. One v One challenge. And Megs gets to compliment OP to his face then. To backstab him of course but still.

Basically he's using all the strength of the other Cons so he can beat OP. Cheating, basically. And Screamer is like "No I'm not helping you cheat I'm suddenly honorable now" becuase of course he wants to subvert Megs.

"Even if it means terminating you, Starscream" Funny way to say it, like "even killing Screamer" would be worth it? Anyway Screamer is at least doing his usual job of criticizing Megs. And for once his point is actually taken wow.

SOUNDWAVE PETTING RAVAGE SOUNDWAVE PETTING RAVAGE OMG CUTEST THING EVER ITS LIKE TWO SECONDS BUT THE WHOLE EP WAS WORTH IT JUST FOR THAT.

Anyway Megs wins for like a minute and the Bots are banished and sad and I'm sure this will last.

And Hey Dinobots got to save the day. Grimlock is one of my fave minor character designs in the show.

Oh hey Fusion forms exist in this universe, that's awesome! I so want to know if OP and Megs ever do that Fusion dance thing from DBZ.

HOLY SHIT OP DROPPED MEGS INTO A LAVA PIT!? Holy shit.

I mean well Megs is obviously fine because there's like three more seasons. But damn OP what happened to that no kill policy from Tf:One? I guess that was a later development.

[the-robot-bracket]

Alright here is the Poll layout. These are the characters

Bracket Green Round 2 (27th of July):

Dummy (Iron Man) vs Deckard (The Brave Police J-Decker)

E-123 Omega (Sonic) vs Chassis Wheatley (Portal)

Intelligence Core (Portal) vs Angela (Lobotomy Corporation/Library of Ruina)

PS5 (Inside Your Brain/Meme) vs Soprano Turret (Portal) vs Anger Core (Portal)

Chibi-Robo (Chibi-Robo) vs E-102 Gamma (Sonic)

Screwbots (Rhythm Heaven) vs Digit (Cyberchase)

Sentry Turret (Portal) vs Cave Johnson Core (Lego Dimensions/Portal)

Megatron (Transformers) vs Optimus Prime (Transformers)

Bracket Blue Pt 1 (15th of June):

Markus (Detroit: Become Human) vs FL4K (Borderlands)

Wet Floor Bots (FNaF) vs Nardole (Doctor Who)

Closet (Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse) vs Computer (Courage the Cowardly Dog)

Arcee (Transformers Prime) vs Defective Turret (Portal)

AZI-345211896246498721347 (Star Wars) vs Robot Mr. Krabs (Spongebob Squarepants)

Flash (Jetpack Joyride) vs The Cogs (ToonTown)

CaveDOS (Portal) vs Emmy (Emmy the Robot)

Metis (Persona) vs Brainstorm (Transformers IDW)

Bracket Blue Pt 2 (22nd of June):

Fi (Legend of Zelda) vs Baby (FNaF)

Tom Servo (Mystery Science Theatre 3000) vs Bastion (Overwatch)

Frankenturret (Portal) vs Emily (She-Ra and the Princesses of Power)

Skipper (Legend of Zelda) vs Lal (Star Trek)

TEC-XX (Paper Mario) vs 9 (9)

Hyperforce (Superhero Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! ) vs Legion (Mass Effect)

Springtron (ARMS) vs Sun (FNaF)

Lore (Star Trek) vs Elle Eedee (Monster High)

Bracket Purple Pt 1 (29th of June):

Penny (RWBY) vs Daleks (Doctor Who)

Min-Droid (Ninjago) vs Svarog (Honkai: Star Rail)

Montgomery Gator (FNaF) vs Tlacey's ComfortUnit (The Murderbot Diaries)

Atlas & P-Body (Portal) Madame Gasket (Robots)

Erek King (Animorphs) vs Robot (Toy Story)

Tabatha (Tales of Symphonia) vs Shockwave (Transformers)

Cabinet Man (Spirit Phone) vs Iko (The Lunar Chronicles)

B-12 (Stray) vs Sari (Transformers Animated)

Bracket Purple Pt 2 (6th of July):

Doris (Val & Isaac Webcomic) vs Cait Sith (Final Fantasy 7)

S.C.O.U.T. (Murder by Numbers) vs Fandroid (Fandroid)

Test Bots (Club Penguin) vs Momo (Stray)

CNMN (Hi-Fi Rush) vs Bubs (Space Sweepers)

Staff Bots (FNaF) vs Every Irken (Invader Zim)

Uncle Bob (Terminator) vs Cobalt (Astro Boy)

PotatOS (Portal) vs Magearna (Pokemon)

House (Invader Zim) vs Kamelion (Doctor Who)

Bracket Red Pt 1 (13rd of July):

Bumblebee (Transformers) vs Atlas (Astro Boy 1980)

Bem (Astro Boy 1964) vs Calculon (Futurama)

Animal King Turret (Portal) vs Sophie (Persona)

Adam Frankenstein (Bungo Stray Dogs) vs Al Turo & Al Sada (Pokemon)

Max Headroom (Max Headroom) vs Blitzwing (Transformers Animated)

Bigweld (Robots) vs Doris (Meet the Robinsons)

Abomoton (The Owl House) vs Zib (Invader Zim)

Zenyatta (Overwatch) vs Mr. Butlertron (Clone High)

Bracket Red Pt 1 (20th of July):

Sky-Byte (Transformers) vs Freddy Fazbear (FNaF)

Jimmy the Robot (The Aquabots!) vs Curiosity Core (Portal)

Dinobot (Transformers Beast Wars) vs Roll (Mega Man)

B1-0516 (Star Wars) vs Canti (FLCL)

V2 (Ultrakill) vs Nanogenes (Doctor Who)

Fact Core (Portal) vs Al-An (Subnautica Below Zero)

Noodle Burger Bot (Big Hero 6) vs Lisa Basil (Ace Attorney)

Juice (17776) vs Gonk Droid (Star Wars)

[fembot-prompts]

Prompt III

Transformers vs The Terminator;

Velocity;

in over your head

[ecto-hazard]

I have a terrible habit of making a character and trying to shove too many ideas into them because I'm so wishy washy in what I wanna do with them which isn't inherently a bad thing and I can do whatever I want because nothing matters and I'm having fun but goddammit I wanna make sense of at least one of these fuckers

The awesome and cool Hans character summary but the human one not the other one don't worry about that

Hans is a Bad clone of A Medic

No way to prove the red one he knows is the original

He's not genetically identical to the original. Clones all have small genetic variations for the sake of respawn distinguishing them

Medic clones tend to be fucked up because the original did so much experimentation to himself that messing with his genes can just be a colossal failure. Hans didn't die right away so he was considered viable enough but he's got some issues like anemia, arrhythmia, among other things

Hans doesn't remember everything the original medic does, but he's got some semblance of an idea of who he's supposed to be

He's a proper good surgeon by blu standards, but he's just shit at surviving in battle and being in conflict. So much so that he's at risk of being terminated for upsetting the stalemate

Hans is bird coded

He's mostly human but he's got like a bad strain of pigeon DNA in there from the aforementioned genetic fuckery

He's like one microwave beam away from transforming howls moving castle style into a bird man

He does not know this or control this very well

He's too heavy to fly anyway 😔

If hes like miserably sick or injured without dying he just loses his human privileges altogether till he's recovered

Socrates uhhhhhhh

He's got a bird!!! His names socrates!!!

Socrates was a weird byproduct of the cloning process so he and Hans are kinda like brothers??? More like two unequal parts of the same guy???? Basically all the aggression and confidence Hans was supposed to have to be a better medic split out and is a bird

He's a bird for sort of the same reason Hans is birdish. But he doesn't know how to become human (of if he even can)

Hans can kinda hear Socrates talk to him in his head

Some full moons Socrates becomes a second opinion cosmetic and Hans gets to be a functional human for a few hours

Hans vs red medic

The Medic on red was around for quite a while before Hans joined blu team

Hans discovered he's a clone after agreeing to undergo experiments by Red in exchange for the blu spys head

He fucking hates red medic. He's so mad. He just constantly reminds him of what he's supposed to be. How he's not just a clone but a bad clone

He shared reds name but started calling himself Hans to separate himself memtally

Pretty much every time Hans has some sort of inventive breakthrough,it turns out red already did this like 5 weeks ago and he gets even more mad.

The only thing Hans actually came up with before red was a surgical procedure to passively heal. And red did not let him hold onto that idea for very long

Hans experiments on himself constantly

He did his own uber surgery. But his arrhythmia makes it malfunction

He tried to cure his anemia with iron injections which just resulted it having mass deposits in his bones. Magnets stick to him

Aforementioned passive heal was from an artificial organ he created to synthesize medigun fluid inside his body. Said healing is quite draining on his bodys resources and fucked up his metabolism

He did his own top surgery. Or the original medic did and he just remembers it. He could do it again if he wanted

Other misc stuff

He's gay for a Heavy named Wren

He drinks blood for his anemia. Debatable if it actually helps

He's small for a medic. Had to get specifically tailored uniforms because the standard issue ones didn't fit

He's got heterochromia

Respawn makes him horribly nauseous

[anthos11]

Transformers vs Terminator by Alex Milne

[canmom]

choosing the treasure that eats you

the gods in narrative podcast The Silt Verses cover an enormous variety of motifs and subjects - and indeed, we are told how new gods are invented all the time, researched and tested by the government, competing to be the patron of companies and individuals, broken down and dumped when they're no longer needed. but they are all unified by two things: they all demand human sacrifices ('a god must feed' as Carpenter puts it in the opening episode) and they all inflict dramatic body-horror transformations (a process known as 'hallowing'), associated with their theme.

nevertheless, the idea of not following a god seems to be pretty alien to the people of this world. and you don't really get much choice: if, as in episode 7, your advertising company's restructuring decides that the weakest performers need to be sacrificed to their new 'sponsor', you don't get to opt out, it's in your contract and no doubt the police will catch you if you run. we see over and over how the gods (and their chief devotees) pick out the vulnerable, drive their believers to spiral down into life-defining obsession - by stringing them along with vague promises of some kind of final answer or fulfilment, then turn away and discard them as soon as they've served their purpose.

it is a very, very productive theme, and the writers have a gift for furnishing it with evocative words and nasty details so it doesn't get stale. so of course I reflect on the metaphor.

in nier automata, the childlike machine lifeforms search for purpose in a world that doesn't seem to offer any. the answers they find are their 'treasures': small, seemingly insignificant objects which individual machines devote themselves to protecting.

for example, one machine may devote itself to cultivating a flower (as in the second episode of the anime), or looking after a broken doll (as in the story of pathetic failmachine Plato 1728 seen in the DLC/the Deserving of Life single by Amazarashi). other sidequests lead you to encounter machines who obsess over fighting, or travelling fast (easy challenges to implement in a game engine).

the machines' behaviour seems inexplicable and even random to others, but the pointlessness is kind of the point: somewhere the chain of 'why' has to terminate. i choose this one.

sometimes i think about 'art' in the sense of a set of behaviours exhibited by humans. i don't have any interest in demarcating art vs non-art, just to understand what this phenomenon is, why it should be so compelling.

one definition that keeps sticking around in here, despite it not really working, is that 'art' is a word for the thing we devote ourselves for no other reason. you could spend your time drawing, but equally you could spend it speed cubing. we are obsessively optimising creatures so, presented with a defined scope of an activity - something like the rules of a game - we refine our skills within it, pushing the bar further and further, changing the rules as we go to keep it interesting. the art forms that stick around tend to be the ones that continue to be productive and evolve. but it's all, in a sense, pointless - and that's why it's the most important thing, because it's done for itself, not in service of some other goal.

this is not actually a good description of the thing it claims to describe. many things we celebrate as 'art' are done for extrinsic, not intrinsic motivations, like commissioned paintings. indeed, far from being purely intrinsically motivated, there are many extrinsic functions that the various activities we call 'art' perform: communication, entertainment, distraction, a tool to reason with, a safe zone to explore emotions, ideological propaganda, historical memory.

nevertheless, the idea of a thing done for its own sake, defying justification, continues to compel somehow.

art does not escape the logic of sacrifice. if you sacrifice your time, your health, your social connections in pursuit of your art - why, does that not prove the art is more important than your time, your health, your friendships? there's a romance in the narrative about burning up in pursuit of something 'great' - and if you want to undercut that narrative, you likely claim that the object is not particularly worth the effort. it's just videogames. it's just cartoons.

the slogan of The Silt Verses is the sarcastic line of Carpenter (originally her friend Vaughan, part of episode 7's corporate hecatomb): "you get to choose the thing that eats you". a very succinct statement! don't we, indeed.

not that sacrifice is always for some abstract intrinsic goal. in the story, the feeding is often done in exchange for some straightforward, material advantage - and in a sense that is the same in our world, with the threshold adjusted so you have to sacrifice a certain amount to just stay alive.

here's a calculation, because i'm fond of numbers: if you start working full-time at, say, age 21 (a conservative assumption, most people start earlier) up until the UK retirement age of 66 (currently, set to rise), working 40 hours a week (conservative, but then again most people don't actually work the hours they're paid for), the current price of a full human life is 114,793 hours to the gods of capital - pick your fave. if you sleep eight hours a night, the god of sleep gets 160,710 during that same period. harder to fit parameters on the demands of the gods of food, cleaning, caring for others, travelling to and fro, and 'being too tired to do much of anything', which certainly have their own demands.

that leaves you with a certain number to use for your own arbitrary ends. in theory, you get to choose what will eat those ones. in practice? a unified will? consistent intentions? ya joking mate. how many hours go to the god of 'responding to the thing in front of me', known by its sacred name, Aydeeaitchdee?

i used to feel jealous of people, some of them my friends, who seem to have some kind of unique vision, some sort of captivating identity to the creations that they express. the 'spark' that makes that special. i wondered - still wonder - if i will finally find my spark, a reason i'm here, a unique contribution i'm poised to make to the world, the value over replacement - the thing that all this mess was building towards all along, the thing that will make all the efforts so far feel less faltering and haphazard. but why should there be such a thing? if one day i live long enough to, by chance, find something that feels like it's an answer, it's just a retroactive reframing of the chaos - because that's what brains do. convince someone they made a decision they didn't, and they will justify it to you.

there is a song by Sassafrass, an incredibly nerdy a capella band who otherwise largely sing about norse mythology, called 'somebody will'. when i first heard this song i honestly kind of hated it (you can probably find that post if you dig hard enough). it felt like a tragic cope: facing the blatant reality that you will never be an astronaut as you (apparently) desire, to insist on narrativising your life as being part of the great project space colonisation - even if it's so remote as clerking a funding organisation or working at a scifi bookstore or attending a convention (it's from quite a specific milieu), you can claim to be one of the 'sailors' helping to 'conquer' that 'ocean'. i hated it, because why should the space program be all that? somebody will walk on mars someday - so fucking what? what then? job's a good 'un, everybody? is that really worth sacrificing shit ('sacrifice something i don't have for something i won't have') for, here and now? surely your life is about more than putting 'somebody' on Mars one day?

but considering it again today - i mean it might as well be the space program as anything else, right. you need a direction to move in. it doesn't matter what the direction, as long as it keeps you moving. change is life and stillness is death, don't you know. perhaps you drag others along with you and you get a current flowing that way for a while, until the energy driving it runs out, or it runs up against the overpressure around an as-yet uneroded bank. so we all move around and the dynamics of it all, invisible to us, build a delta, which becomes a rock, and against that flows another river one day, grinding down the rock to move it to another delta, all by the nearly-random movements of the water molecules. shit i think i lost the thread of the metaphor and now i'm just talking about geophysics

it seems... almost laughably tedious to be circling this existential drain still. in my milieu: douglas adams cracked his joke about 'the ultimate question of life the universe and everything' 30 years earlier in 1977. randall munroe uploaded 'i'll get the super soaker' in 2007. but navel-gazing has been a joke for much longer, surely at least as long as there have been people to question what the point is.

funny how it always comes back to water metaphors.