#medium wave

[tiffoii]

Jeff Fowler if you can hear me, please let Agent Stone grow out his hair.

Give Stone wavy hair.

Give Stone wavy hair.

Give Stone wavy hair.

Give Stone wavy hair.

Give Stone wavy hair.

Give Stone wavy hair.

Give Stone wavy hair.

Give Stone wavy hair.

Give Stone wavy hair.

Give Stone wavy hair.

Give Stone wavy hair.

Give Stone wavy hair.

[ktadge]

Meoto Iwa, Japan with my Mamiya RB67

@kevintadge

[creatureprofessor]

Peglar and Bridgens for day 2 of @terroryuriweek - pride 💕🏳️‍🌈

details and inspirations are found in my tags

[erstwhilesparrow]

to the surprise of approximately no one, i am thinking about video game mechanics and mcrp and c!owen and violence again. i am thinking about interesting accidental resonances and i am thinking about what someone's medium of choice makes it easy to tell stories about. the thing is, owen's pov of outsiders is a story that, despite being told almost exclusively in minecraft, really does not want to be a story set in minecraft.

what i mean by this is that cc!owen repeatedly and deliberately tries to prevent minecraft logic from existing in the story he is telling. according to him, things operate in the messy space of real-world physics, and the fundamental structure of the world aligns much more with our reality than with, i dunno, a series of 1s and 0s. of course they can't climb the vines to get to the top of the walls, they'd get tired well before the reach the top, never mind that minecraft doesn't have any mechanic in place to keep you from clinging to a vine for as long as you want. of course acho drowning during the underwater maze game could have been from something being wrong with the potions, never mind that minecraft potions come out the exact same way every time. of course it matters that owen punched mohwee for going into the maze, but only once, because he couldn't bring himself to do it again. never mind that a punch in minecraft rarely means much.

a single punch in minecraft doesn't mean anything. or it means almost everything, which is why it doesn't mean anything. but the outsiders, at least for a little while, make a world where a punch matters, where it's the kind of thing you go running to tell other people about because it means a real fight's brewing. mohwee punches graecie, and someone comes running to let owen know. we're meant to react to it the way we would if it happened irl. we're treating this seriously now!

except that's really hard to do in minecraft, because minecraft isn't a game that gives you many avenues for... body language. for the kind of nonverbal communication you do by touching someone gently. try as they might to pretend otherwise, it is built into the bones of any minecraft world that the only way you can touch another person for sure, in a way that the game has an obvious mechanical system in place to respond with, is by punching them. so two things here.

one is that yeah, the outsiders creators stop acting like a punch is a punch not super long into the series, because there is no vanilla mechanic for [grabbing you by the arm and dragging you away from the gates]; you have to use what you have at your disposal (such as the left-click button on your mouse) to gesture at the thing you actually mean. owen emulates the act of dragging someone around by punching magic at one point. nobody, in-universe or out, reacts like he was actually hitting her, and i'm not saying we should. but there is that disconnect between what the story is supposed to be (maybe owen pushes her away from the gates, maybe he's trying to pull her back), and what the game will allow them to do.

two: despite the ways that the game runs counter to the kind of story owen et al. are trying to tell, this limitation wrt punching still produces some really interesting resonances that require us to accept and pay attention to the fact that no matter what owen says, this is a story told through minecraft, inflected by its mechanics.

(side bar: i'm focusing on owen for this, but i think you can expand this idea to other characters, maybe the whole cast, by thinking about how both the story world and the game world are, on some fundamental level, set up to not allow for kind or gentle connections between people. you can't actually put your arm around someone else. you can't actually wipe away their tears or lean on their shoulder. the entire world the outsiders live inside of, both from a game perspective and a roleplay perspective, is designed to funnel them toward big dramatic gestures and cyclical violence. the easiest way to touch someone is violently. and still, there are the gestures of care, carved out of what the game will allow. sharing food. speaking softly to each other. opening the trapdoor to your bunker and letting the people behind you hurry down the ladder to hide. so you've never learned how to touch someone without violence. you can still know how to put your whole body between the person you care for and the danger. you can still die for them. isn't outsiders such a story of caring, despite, despite, despite?)

anyway. about c!owen. i think it's fair to say he's a character shaped by violence from the jump. he comes up the elevator and is almost instantly making and hoarding weapons. he tells himself he has to protect everyone, and the first two ways he decides to do this are by making a sparring ring where he intends to teach them to fight, and by threatening to break their legs. for the latter half of the series, he is literally sleeping on the edge of a sparring ring, all his personal effects literally pushed off to the side to leave room for this sand pit in the middle. even before he gets the memories of his time as a soldier back, we can see that this is how he interfaces with and understands the world. violence is in his bones.

as a result, i am kind of crazy about the fact that the literal game mechanics he engages with reinforce this image of him. there's this brief period of time really early on where i guess they haven't really got the prox chat range to yell to each other from a distance, and owen decides to take his weapon of choice and fire an arrow in the path of the person he's trying to talk to. (i know for sure he does this with rasbi and with at least one other person. forgive me, i don't recall who the other person was.) when you're getting shot at, yeah, you sure do generally want to look in the direction that arrow came from to see who's trying to shoot you! that'll get someone's attention! that is generally how people play the game!

at another point much later in his series, a group of outsiders find an enormous crane towering over a section of the maze, and owen pulls out a bow and aims it upward. it took me a second while watching to realize that it's because when you draw a bow in the game, you also zoom in on the thing you're aiming at. owen was trying to get a closer look at the crane, so he grabbed his weapon and used it to get a better understanding of the world.

more broadly, owen uses spears and arrows to point at things, to check distances and investigate stuff he doesn't want to or can't get close to. when he and magic first notice ash up on the walls, he fires arrows up at her, not really to hit but to see how she reacts. then he keeps firing them, having noticed the barrier blocks (in-fiction, the screen that makes up the false sky). later, while talking to chat in a high-up part of the maze, he demonstrates again that the sky is fake by hurling a spear into it.

out of character, these are just creative workarounds for the medium's limitations. in character, however, these instances make it clear that every single thing about the way owen interacts with his world is coloured by the fact that he has used weapons and will continue to use them, that his reaching for a bow right after waking up wasn't some fluke, that even with his memories wiped out he is a character who has been trained to reach for violence before anything else.

just by playing the game, cc!owen adds another dimension to this character, because he is playing a game where There Exist game mechanics meant to facilitate violence, and this is about the cycles of violence c!owen finds himself trapped in and perpetuating and it is also about how violence is so deeply ingrained in him that it is an inextricable part of his world.

[homeisaplaceinthehills]

Beth

ebb + flow

yachats, oregon / february 2015

[the-head-in-the-clouds]

I've got Ohuhu markers for Christmas and am slowly, slowly starting to try them out. They react way different than my usual materials- which is exciting yet very challenging!

[lonelyspiders]

my house is full of ghost hands btw. if you even care

[dragonfruuit]

I'm sorry y'all, but if you hate 4x speed gameplay,you just have a skill issue

[mxstarboy]

video making motivation where did you video making motivation come back to me

[ktadge]

Bondi Beach, Australia with my Mamiya RB67

@kevintadge

[sunnibits]

besties I’m ngl it already feels like the malevolent hyperfix is kind of fading but that could just be the depression

[claudiajcregg]

Happy one-year anniversary to this! I can't believe there's still a month to go, but I am so excited to see bestie @wavesoutbeingtossed again after 11.5 (?!!!) years.

[heisbetterthanwaffles]

How else am I supposed to see what my hair looks like?

[home-archives]

241214 - ICN

ITZY ; Lia

Winter Smil3

[hazeism]

GRAAGHH WHO CARES ANYMORE