#claptrap humanization

[flamerock-refuge]

Many claptraps and my fr4g-tp/cl4p-tp humanization

[nataliedecorsair]

What if there was a Borderlands cartoon instead of a movie? Here's my take on it, I drew some "fake screenshots" showing what it could've been. And there is a hidden frog in there 🐸 It's also my AU stuff mixed with canon, in case you were wondering.

Btw, the loader here is the Loader Bot from Tales. I was thinking how he's slowly started getting conscious, that's why he's looking at Jack like that. Generally speaking, I prefer older Borderlands games, so this art is my ode to them. Hope you like it

I also have other fan art posts dedicated to the early 2000s animation, and Hades + Eris crossover

[skruncklyboy]

Felt bored and drew up a buncha machine characters from different IPs i liked.

[loader-bot]

ngl if your humanised claptrap isn't a wheelchair user, or disabled in some way that affects his mobility, you're wrong.

literally the repeating joke in every game is an explicitly ableist joke about how it's 'funny' and 'pathetic' that he can't do something as seemingly simple as get up stairs. completely ignoring the fault of hostile architecture (particularly, hyperion's) for not providing wheel user accessibility.

it's an integral part of both his character design and how other people treat him so please don't discount it just because the ableist writers treat it as a joke.

sincerely, your local disabled robot. 🦾

[skeleslime-phantom]

Borderlands 4 trailer shows the vault hunters are all human...

Ngl, very boring to me.

[angelonhelios]

Going into the quote page and remembering Angel tells you she's an artificial intelligence for most of the story. Probably because Jack told her to. And thinking Damn she has been getting dehumanized for years even when people do listen to her because they just assume they're talking to a machine, in a universe that already devalues robots despite their sentience. Aigh. Augh.a ugh

ITS SO...esp with the way roland talks about her when theyre planning out how to get to the bunker, its so depersonalizing. and i understand why he would be that way because he’s spent the last five years thinking shes a machine, and now a machine with malicious intent, but :(

literally every single named ai in the series shows human levels of sentience and emotional capability but they are clearly seen as having less autonomy. claptrap ofc is the most obvious answer but it also extends to felicity and balex ect. but by being forced to take the role of an ai angel also experiences that same treatment even from people she has known since she was a child. and its just. AUGH. a million deaths upon me.

[angelfoodscake]

nyx collects spare parts for claptrap. claptrap doesnt know about it, but its just something nyx started subconsciouslly doing. whenever theyre out and about or doing an errand, sometimes theyll find a spare part/piece of machinery/piece of scrap and go "oh, this could be useful" and add it to their stash. they have a whole drawer of potential parts in their house

[pie-guts]

Doodle Dump #1

[steampunksilver]

*Throws Ramtrap human designs at you and runs away*

[flamerock-refuge]

[agarthanguide]

Hi there, hope you’re doing good!! I had a question about FCG’s design, both old and new. I was rewatching Treasure Planet the other night, and looking at B.E.N. I couldn’t help but be reminded of our beloved Letters. Was there any influence from that media specifically, or was it a fun coincidence??

Def a fun coincidence. I may have seen Treasure Planet, but I sure don't remember it.

Lots of people have asked if FCG is based on this robot or that robot, but the truth is- I know nothing about robots. I'm not a robot person, and I like animation but not to the point where I follow animated series, so almost every reference point that was brought up for FCG was new, to me. This is a bit like what my inspo looked like-

(I do know Claptrap, and Gizmoduck was specifically mentioned by Sam. I watched several episodes of Duck Tales while working on early FCG, for some reason.)

But Sam did most of the construction. Because the first page of my pitch looked like this-

I was so worried that I was gonna fuck up on my first robot ever that I made the decision to start with everything and force Sam to sculpt the final.

I like the idea that there's something familiar about FCG's weird head, his jutting hips, his gently curved forearms. People reacted with such warmth to FCG, and I think that's mostly Sam, but I hope my contribution at least didn't dissuade anyone from feeling close to the completed character. So the comparisons to other pop culture robots are such a compliment, to me. Maybe it's just our collective pareidolia, but I think it's admirable that we as humans are so ready to accept a robot face as inherently deserving and Known, to us.

[bambi-kinos]

I tend to agree with you that John went back to Yoko at the end of the Lost Weekend because he was afraid of his own violence. In her book, May Pang basically described a madman. It wasn’t like John had to be restrained once - what she described was incident after incident of him drinking himself into a stupor, smashing up houses, grabbing her by the neck and blacking out. That he didn’t kill her (or Jesse Ed Davis, come to that) was surely only a matter of luck. It makes sense that he would rather be under Yoko’s control than in prison for murder.

Sort of? I don't think John really feared prison, not truly. Otherwise he wouldn't have acted out the way that he did. John knew that he was being given passes on everything thanks to being a rich white guy, May also recounts an incident in LA where the cops are called out to the home they're staying at and instead of putting John in the drunk tank to dry out, the cops ask him "will The Beatles ever get back together?" And then they patted him on the head and left.

John did fear his own violent tendencies but I don't think jail was a serious concern for him. When he nearly strangles May in the hot tub she showed him the bruises the next day and he burst into tears. He knew exactly what he had done. I think that specific incident is what changed something, it happened slowly because these things always do. But it was soon after that John admitted to sobering up in the middle of a session, looking around him and realizing that everyone in the studio was drunk and high. And after that he worked with Larry to put the album together and left LA to go back to New York. And we know what happened after that.

I think that John was shaken by the incident even though he was too cowardly to take responsibility for it. I think it reminded him that he could kill someone very easily, just like when he attacked Bob Wooler years before that. John was prone to forgetting that he could hurt people because he was so used to thinking of himself as the person being hurt by others. But it's said that when Paul left for Scotland with Linda and the children that John took to his bed in grief and Yoko later confessed to Janov that she considered leaving John because she didn't know how to react to it. John wanted to hurt people (Wooler, Paul, May) and then was stunned by how damaged they were by his physical and emotional assaults.

The hot tub murder attempt was the final straw. John finally realized that he wasn't controlling himself. He went back to Yoko because he knew that she could control him and maybe he wouldn't try to strangle his girlfriends to death anymore. It had nothing to do with jail because John knew that he would never go to jail because he was famous and rich and beloved. Not even Paul was willing to apply consequences to John, opting to simply leave the area instead. Yoko however, did. She made John eat out of metaphorical dog dishes. Paul and May were not willing to do so and therefore John went to the side of someone who knew exactly what he was and was willing to do something about it.

The point of Yoko was not that she was his soulmate or whatever claptrap John spouted to save face. It's that he didn't know how to act like a human being anymore and she was the only one willing to bend him back into that role. There's a layer of self harm to it too, John knowing that he nearly killed 2 people because hurting them was more important than controlling his anger, and that he drove away his life partner through emotional terrorism. Going back to Yoko and being under her control, under her heel, was the position he wanted to pay penance from.

The John depicted in "Loving John" is the natural end result of a decade of drug addiction and substance abuse. Hard drugs are not like alcohol, they change who you are instead of revealing who you are. Becoming an addict is like coming out of Pet Sematary, you are innately changed and fundamentally different. The old version of you is dead and will never come back. Even if you get clean. He acted like a madman because he was one and no matter how many pills he ate, a lifetime of bad decision making and regret crushed him daily.

May was good for John but he was terrible for her, as he was terrible for everyone who eventually got close to him. It's not a mistake that everyone kept their distance after a while.

John encouraged it of course. Mick tried to contact him in the Dakota a few times and John's answer was always the same: "leave me alone." John understood what he was at long last and protected his loved ones the only way he knew how. By staying away from them.

[seat-safety-switch]

I read an article recently that said some egghead scientists had hooked up a machine learning system to MRIs. They trained the computer to identify brain waves, which made the media freak out about "computers that can read your mind."

Nothing annoys me more than fantasy claptrap, so I decided to get started on the real stuff. All it took was a lot of sub-minimum-wage labour in developing countries, and a little bit of good old-fashioned random number generation. As a result, I now had an expert system (that's 1980s for artificial intelligence.) What's it do, then, wise guy? Something truly essential to humanity: it identifies the song that's stuck in your head.

That was the easy part, though. Once I fed the machine every song in the world and tweaked all of its various parameters by throwing a pipe wrench into the wiring closet repeatedly, I determined that it had developed a sort of primitive sentience. Knowing everything that there is to know about music had turned it into a snob. If Pitchfork magazine still existed, this Python script would be on top of the masthead and embroiled in some incredibly risky office drama.

So, that's the Faustian bargain then. You can know what song is in your head, the one that's been haunting you throughout your days, but not without judgment. Dare you step into the gloomy warehouse, don the stainless-steel pasta colander that makes up this insanely over-powered homemade CT scanner, and then be mocked endlessly on the internet by a series of millisecond-precise bullies that never sleep and have been reading your social media accounts?

I did. Turns out it was Jingle Bell Rock. You'd think I'd have recognized that from the lyrics. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go smash that wall of televisions before it shows you the pictures from the "blackmail" album on my phone and ruins the surprise.

[kaija-rayne-author]

Review 8 in series of Dragon Age Veilguard

60 hours in 58 actual gameplay

Something came to my attention. I need to make it crystal clear that I utterly love the diversity in DAV. It's fantastic. I'm also a heavily left leaning, non-binary, queer as fuck reviewer, editor, and author.

I'm on media blackout while I play this, so I'm only getting second-hand info on how awful it is right now in the DA Fandom. Please be safe and take care of yourselves. Arguing with incels and white supremacists is completely pointless. They sea lion worse than an actual sea lion. Your mental health is important.

Though, every single time the anti-queer brigade comes out for a new DA game, I sit there thinking 'have you bozos ever played any DA game, like, ever?' My guess is nope.

Part 7 is here.

Spoilers for Dragon Age Veilguard

Critical review CW strong language.

Well. If I'm right about who the Gloom Howler is, and I'm almost certain after the Cauldron... I really fucking question the reading comprehension of whoever wrote that arc.

She loathed doing what she was ordered to do to the griffins. She saved the last clutch of eggs, left secret clues on where to find the nest kept in stasis, and answered her calling early so no one could get the information out of her. All in the hope that future generations would be worthy of griffins again. And now she's doing the exact opposite? Seriously?

I mean, I'm aware that the supplementary material isn't something everyone is gonna read, but as far as I know the printed materials are considered canon. Which means they've taken a sad, epic story and completely reversed it in a retcon I'm not sure I can forgive them for.

I've marinated myself in the Lore of this world. That's an incredible disservice to her sacrifices to save the last remaining griffins. It's a disservice to the writer of Last Flight, too. That's not even touching on the 'of course when you shove a blade into the bones of a roughly 400 year dead arch demon... it will come out bloody?' Excuse me now? Someone has watched too much jurassic park, because that would be utterly impossible.

Once again, I'm asking myself What. The. Actual. Fuck. were the devs and writers thinking?

Surely they know at least some of us have read the printed stuff?

Did they think we'd have forgotten? Unfortunately for these retconning incompetents, (I am so, so sick of retconning in general, and fed the fuck up with it in this game) autistic and AuDHD folks like me tend to have razor keen memories about our special interests. Whoopsies.

Last Flight wasn't my fav of the books, but it was beautifully written and heartbreaking with a gleaming golden string of hope.

And this is the end of that story? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?

I can honestly think of only one way they could make that make sense. And my trust in Bioware writers now lives below sewer level, so I'm not hopeful they'll go that way.

It's possible that I'm wrong, but understanding and critiquing media is my actual job when I'm not recovering from a pulmonary embolism. And yes, absolutely, I could've written far, far better material.

How. Can someone please tell me HOW a company that has something as successful as DAI under their belt... makes... this? I swear this game (DAV) is like some of the worst AI written shite I saw in ESO back when I played that years ago.

I guess I should say machine written. Whatever. I've heard ESO was doing that a long while ago. And the blah storylines and boring assed questlines proved it.

This game reminds me of that. Though, I think they were probably written by actual humans... I really have to question where exactly they scraped up the writers for them.

The street? A back alley? A mud pit? Did they give apes access to a keyboard and use whatever claptrap they came up with? (Yes. They did. Humans are apes.)

It's common enough in Hollyweird that writers working on a particular IP (intellectual property... IE Dragon Age or Witcher etc.) often utterly loathe the source material. I fail to understand why or how that would be okay, because we can fucking tell, you know? You can tell when a writer loves their work, and when they don't. And we wonder why so many things in hollyweird fail.

Is that what happened to DAV?

They had a fucking blueprint for fuck's sake! DAI was RIGHT THERE. It won GOTY if I recall correctly. No one wanted a game exactly like DAI but dear fucking gods something... not this... would've been far preferable. If they'd used DAI as a sort of map? A guideline or outline? DAV might’ve been a good game. And the sad part is that it actually could have been. With just a little more care, less streamlining to mediocrity, better editing and writing? This could've been another win for Bioware. As is, if it wins anything I'll be suspicious of bribery.

It's just so... meh. Where it's not outright bad.

And even though I'm under media blackout so I can write a truly unbiased review... it wouldn't surprise me if some fans were going gaga over this travesty of a game. Just because it has Dragon Age in the title.

It sucks when you want desperately to love something. But you just can't because you can see the flaws. And the flaws far, far outweigh the good parts.

And none of those good parts are even unique. They're just lifted from other games.

And I got the load up with no CC glitch again. Lost about an hour of playtime figuring out when it happened and which save to reload. I'd really hoped the damned hour long update would've taken care of that.

What a sad mess this game is.

Though on the positive, I do love the new takedown mechanic. And it's oddly satisfying to clear blight. I like tracking things. IRL too. I grew up in a subsistence hunting family. Though, I always just used a camera. I know how to track stuff, so that's fun. I like the ballista and zip lines. There are good parts of the game... but they aren't the parts that really matter.

I had to turn Taash down for Romance because it happened way too fast. I barely felt like I knew them, and my demi ass needs more than what we got before committing to a relationship.

It's warming up with Lucanis, Emmrich, and Davrin. I'm not decided yet. And this is where a polyam mod would be great. There's no reason polyam shouldn't have been included in the game. It could've been just a few characters okay with it like BG3, but the rep and possibilities would at least be there.

I'm incredibly fed the fuck up with the narrative that turns Solas into an awful person. They're trying so fucking hard to paint him that way. They're hammering it home so hard I really can't recommend (at this point) that Sollavellans play it. It's possible that will change, but... sigh. They've even got my Rook saying negative shit about him. Shouldn't that be a choice that I get to make about my Rook? How they feel about Solas?

And if I could kick the incredibly unintelligent and massively fucking annoying Lace Harding off a cliff, I absolutely would. Hard. And laugh while I did it.

Everyone blames Solas. Why is everyone so far up Mythal's asshole that they're forgetting it was always her requiring her bound servant IE enslaved spirit who never even wanted a body (forgetting that part?) Solas to do what she said. That he tried over and over again to dissuade her?

You know, as a friend said, they could've hired a bunch of Ao3 fic writers and paid them in pizza or waffles and come out with better story lines than this.

Oh, but no, it's all Solas's fault. And the narrative is so fucking heavy handed on that that it's honestly nauseating me a little.

What. The. Actual. Fuck.

Section 9 here.

[vintagegeekculture]

there was Chinese interest in the Out Of Asia theory, in both the Republic, Chiang Republic and People’s Republic periods before the Out Of Africa theory became commonly accepted. Was the 1954 Yeti expedition done just from the Nepalese-Indian side or were the American agents and “anthropologists” given access on the Sino-Tibetan side of the Himalayan border?

During the early part of this century, it was absolutely believed for a long time that the deserts of Western China were the most likely place of human origins, as seen in this migration map from 1944, made from the best available knowledge of the time:

Remember, the oldest fossil remains at this point were in China, where Homo erectus was discovered (originally known by his initial place of discovery in Chungkotien Cave, nicknamed "Peking Man"). The discovery of Australopithecus and Homo habilis in Olduvai Gorge and South Africa, which place human origins in Africa, were not until the 50s and 60s, so it seemed entirely reasonable that Homo sapiens evolved in Western China.

The idea that China's desert regions were the origin of modern humans and culture is seen a lot in pop culture from 1900-1950, mainly because there were tremendous explorations in the region, especially Aurel Stein's expedition of 1908, who ventured into the Taklamakan Desert to find the Dunhuang Caves and Khara-Khoto, a city destroyed completely by Genghis Khan and vanished in the desert.

If you've ever heard of Roy Chapman Andrews and his famous expeditions in the 1920s, it's worth noting that he ventured into the Gobi Desert looking for human remains....not dinosaurs, and the discovery of dinosaur eggs was an unexpected surprise.

For that reason, there was a short lived Silk Road Mania that seemed to be a smaller scale predecessor to the pop culture dominating Egyptomania of the 1920s. It's bizarre to read adventure and fantasy fiction of the 1910s-1920s that features mentions of Silk Road peoples like the Kyrgyz, Sogdians, Tajik, Uigurians, and Tuvans. The best example I can think of would be the Khlit the Kossack stories of Harold Lamb (who also wrote a biography of Tamerlane), which together with Tarzan and Tros of Samothrace, formed the core inspiration for Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian.

The most interesting example of this would be A. Merritt's Dwellers in the Mirage, which featured a lost city in Xinjiang that was the home of the Nordic race, who worshipped their original religion, the kraken-like squid devil god Khalkru. It was widely believed in this era that Nordics emerged from Central Asia originally, and while it's easy to write this off as turn of the century racialist claptrap pseudohistory (along with Hyperborea legends), in this case, it is actually true: a branch of the Indo-European family lived in West China, and 5,000 year old redheaded mummies have been found in the region. As usual, A. Merritt was right on the money with his archeology, more so than other 1920s authors. After all, his "Moon Pool" was set around the just discovered ruins of Nan Madol, the Venice of Micronesia.

Jack Williamson's still chilling Darker Than You Think in 1948 was also set in the Silk Road/Central Asian region, as the place the race of shapeshifters emerged from, Homo magi, who await the coming of their evil messiah, the Night King, who will give them power over the human race.

H. Rider Haggard set "Ayesha: the Return of She" (1905) in Xinjiang, among a lost Greek colony in Central Asia (no doubt based on Alexandria on the Indus, a Greek colony in modern Pakistan that was the furthest bastion of Greek Culture). This was also two years after the Younghusband Thibetan Expedition of 1903, where the British invaded Tibet. At the time, the Qing Dynasty was completely declining and lost control of the frontier regions, and the power vacuum was filled by religious authority by default (this is something you also saw in Xinjiang, where for example, the leader of the city was the Imam of Kashgar).

This is one of the many British invasions they have attempted to cram down the memory hole, but if you ever see a Himalayan art piece that was "obtained in 1903-1904" ....well, you know where it came from.

Incidentally, there's one really funny recent conspiracy theory about paleontology, fossils, and China that I find incredibly interesting: the idea that dinosaurs having feathers is a lie and a sinister plot spread by the Communist Chinese (who else?) to make American youth into sissy fancylads, like Jessie "the Body" Ventura. How? By lying to us and making up that the manly and vigorous Tyrannosaurus, a beast with off the charts heterosexuality and a model for boys everywhere, might have been feathered like a debutante's dress. What next - lipstick on a Great White Shark? The long term goal is to make Americans effeminate C. Nelson Reilly types unable to defend against invasion. This is a theory that is getting steam among the kind of people who used to read Soldier of Fortune magazine, and among abusive stepfathers the world over.

...okay, are you done laughing? Yeah, this is obvious crackpottery and transparent sexual pathology, on the level of the John Birch Society in the 60s saying the Beatles were a Communist mind control plot. Mostly because animals just look how they look, and if it turned out that the ferocious Tyrannosaurus had feathers and looked like a fancylad Jessie Ventura to you, well, that's your problem and mental baggage, really.

I was left scratching my head over this one. But there is (kind of) something to this, and that is that a huge chunk of recent dinosaur discoveries have been in China. I don't think it has anything to do with a Communist plot to turn American boys into fancylads, but more to do with a major push in internal public investment in sciences in that country, and an explosion of Chinese dinosaur discoveries. If you want to see a great undervisited dinosaur museum, go to the Zigong Dinosaur Museum in Sichuan.

Pop quiz: what living scientist has named more dinosaur discoveries? It's not Bakker or Horner. The greatest living paleontologist, Xu Xing, which is why a lot of recently found dinosaurs are named things like Shangtungasaurus.

[baphometsss]

will the haters' patronisation of solas enjoyers ever end

for some reason people feel like hating a character who starts off with a shitty outlook and then has it challenged and unravelled in the story makes them morally superior. it's purity culture at its finest. we're literally at the point of these people accusing solas enjoyers of being racist/xenophobic/manipulative/abusive/insert whatever hatemongering buzzword they can think of as if it somehow bolsters their argument, when it actually just makes them look childish and willing to reduce very real and painful struggles to a metric in point scoring for petty online squabbles

i have actually seen people accuse critics of the veilguard as a game to nazis. i wish i was joking. like this is the point that we're at and it's so unbelievably dumb it's kind of funny

one of the reasons arguments based on this logic don't really achieve anything is because they frame every single thing around victimhood and a false dichotomy of victim/perpetrator. like t/erfs for example. they're a fringe movement within feminism for a number of reasons but one of the fundamental reasons is that they heavily focus on reinforcing victimhood rather than empowerment. they seek out and prey on traumatised women, take their trauma and twist it into hate by validating victimhood repeatedly until there's nothing else left but piss and vinegar for other people who aren't exactly like them. in fact, this formula is straight out of the radicalisation playbook used by neo-nazis, terrorists, and similar pieces of shit

instead of reinforcing self-actualisation, self-belief, hope, communion with other people, and understanding of the vulnerability inherent to all human beings (the things trauma survivors actually need), they focus on biological essentialism and other claptrap to explain why more segregation and hate is necessary. it makes this messy, complicated world more digestible for people with cognitive distortions that are so extreme. all under the guise of 'women's safety/rights'. it's unsustainable, because at some point we become perpetrators too and this ideology doesn't make room for that. hence why there's truth to phrases like 'scratch a terf, find a racist'. they flatly refuse to acknowledge intersectionality, because that requires accountability for oneself and by the time they're radicalised they can't view themselves as anything other than victim. and once you're radicalised, you can't connect with people who haven't also been radicalised, so it becomes a vicious cycle.

it's something that's so insidious but it's made its way into every part of our lives. you're not perfect. no one is perfect. everyone is a clusterfuck of bullshit mixed with beauty and love and the potential for pretty much unlimited evolution. that's why i love solas. he's an absolute fuck up in so many ways, but he's also a victim of eras-long emotional abuse, he's suicidally depressed, he's a monumental failure, he's a sad wet cat in elven form and he's one of the most interesting characters i've ever seen. i would take that over some morally 'pure' but flat, one-dimensional and boring companions who talk in therapy speak all day long.

but while we're on the topic of 'fixing him'... what exactly is that even supposed to mean? people can't be 'fixed'. all you can do is heal. and love is nourishment in its purest form. lavellan doesn't 'fix him', nor do they try. they try to help him because they love him, but they're not trying to 'fix' him. the use of this phrase only reinforces my belief that people are falling for the radicalisation in online spaces even more, because it screams cognitive distortion. if you play a high approval inky, they're trying to help him grow and learn and understand. it's sad that so much of social justice has become divorced from love when love is the most important aspect of any kind of justice. people hand-wave and piss on love as if its a bad thing. it's not. and it's certainly not a bad thing to love a character who's fucked up, because they're the hardest ones to love, and therefore the ones who need it most.