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semi-imaginary-place · 1 year ago

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5.0 rambling and 5.x adventures

when was it established that summoned being return on death of the summoner. also if you're tearing into the rift shouldn't bringing and sending be equaally as easy/difficult

elidibus seeing zenos walk up sword drawn and running away is so funny. he just noped out of that situation. not sure why they cut the scene at gaius attacking zenos, zenos has way too much plot armor to die by gaius.

oh hey amurot and all it's people are still hanging around. would have thought with emy's death they would have all dissipated and the city returned to ruin. i think it has something to do with how the game is coded. just like how the garleans didn't disappear after 2.0. if anything making amurot an instanced area might have been a better idea would have really hit home the transcience of everything that this place was like a liminal space. but unlike other areas after msq progression dialogue does not change here although this effect is lessened since in like 2.0 and 3.0 they didn't change much either.

Ok time to look things up. Right 7 calamities, 6 elemental, bahamut, and the doom timeline #8. G'raha awoke then went to the first 100 first years ago just in time for the Flood. I wonder how many source years that was would be would be. The wods went back tot he first in patch 3.4. actually they were on the source for a while since 3.1 at least. How much time passed on the first. Ironworks timetravel might have actually been pretty accurate in their rewind. G'raha was sent 100 years ago into the First's past but that might have only been a few months ago source time.

Looking at everything i think the devs just wanted g'raha back and then wrote a timetravel plot point to bring him back into the story. And there were so many ways to kill him off in 5.0 like if emy hadnt shot him and he'd actually died on gulg or the timeline dissolving thing (could also mean the 8th rejoining could still happen but let's be real, it's because g'raha is the dev's favorite i mean i got spoiled he's now a scion and is in dawntrail. The devs just want him to continue being a part of the main plot.

Sundering happened to break up zodiark and seal him

Wonder what the advertisements for ascians was like we heard varis about a true glorious humanity. Wonder how lahabrea, elidibus, and emet-selch got the others onboard because the ascians in general (thanks arr) seem pretty bwahaha kick puppies evil.

So the 13th was never rejoined so um real calamity of darkness. So 7 calamities + the first + the failed 13th + the source. Only 3 other intact shards.

arr and sb were both about geopolitics, war, military power, and garlemald. hw and shb meanwhile were more sentimental narratives that had less to do with the mainplot. good thing i like both. idk what dt is about seems like a beach episode.

Another plot point lost is that the devs could have made the crystal exarch the g'raha tia of another shard instead of doing timetravel. Yes yes the game game would have to be remade im not talking about that, im talking about when the devs storyboarded abd outlines shb they could have done this differently. Now with multiple timelines any character that dies (hades) can also timetravel back into the story. Narratively it means no one ever ends. And between this and zenos im never going to believe a character is gone for good. The wall has been broken.

Was thinking about Ardbert and emy again. Ardbert was 1/14, death, and so faded he'd sort of hlf forgetting himself by the time we meed him in the story. In addition whenever he's with wol-chan it's like the sun covering up the sky no was you are going to see some faint star. No way Emet-Selch saw him around the wol. And he'd have no reason to notice Ardbert outside of that context. And even if he did I don't think emy would care.

Azem is the title. Sidenote let's be real because the devs cycle names like lahabrea (and maybe even emet-selch) were likely originally intended to be names. The writers for shb likely retconned them to be titles. Like what do lahabrea, and emet selch even mean is there an ancient language and these are just untranslated? And then you can tell azem was conceptualized later with its connections to azemya and azim. I did get ew spoiled just bit as bad as shb for ew it's like i have to deliberately not put the pieces together because im very good at putting the pieces together. Anyways ancient names seem to be greek inspired like hylotheu...s the talking shade or hades is straight up mythology. Venat is an import character from ffxii where she seems to do the exact same thing and play the same role? (I'll get to ew eventually... probably...). So if azem with their sun connections follows the pattern then they'd be something related to apollo or helios. The devs are never going to confirm an azem personal name because this fandom runs on wol ocs and people would riot over their special little baby.

i saw a pixie die. maybe

ok actual moral dilemma in the qitari we don't have enough information to tell what is the truth what actually happened. instead the game is asking the player what story should be told. if this was irl the father's story would be more likely but this is a videogame and ffxiv loves it's historical twists (im looking at you ivallice raids) so who knows what is actually true the devs probably never decided. so the question is of what effect each story will have on the future if the ronkan emperor is framed as a subjugator would this act as a cautionary tale about power? if the son's interpretation is enshrined would this be about the benefits of encountering different cultures? im probably overthinking this.

for some reason the player is given the choice on which interpretation of history will be recorded. not enough info is given to be able to tell which interpretation is better supported by evidence. so it becomes a moral question of what history should be remembered. that's the qitari's first contact with the ronkas was conquest and slavery, or as saviors and and protectors of the weaker

oof this is the hardest decision in the game. because I'm on the side of truth what I would do is not restore the stela and leave it as be open to interpretation and then like write competing academic analyses. but there is no truth here only the story we want to tell. i keep going back and forth. the ronkan empire seems to generally have a favorable reputation, the vii are still loyal to them but we don't know about it's formation or relationship with the qitari. also i dont like empires the inherent nature of conquest and satellite states.

the twinning: ah back to the crystal tower trapped in there for 76 years in alliance raids. DOOMED TIMELIME IRONWORKS MADE A MINI ALEXANDER that's how they did the timetravel! i just connected 2 dots. and we learn why g'raha is crystalized, he was merged with the tower to survive the "infinite chaos" of the rift and this was done somehow by studying how omega could?? does that mean omega's world and the omega raids were in the rift???

i think it could have been cool to play in a rejoined world. obviously this wouldn't work because of player customization and what not but i personally like the idea since i have little attachment to my player characters.

#ffxiv #ffxiv 5.x

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chytilovian-daisy · 3 years ago

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open up rpgmvxa and immediatly my head begins hurting

#brie rambles #its prob a coincidence BUT #[context: i lost 6 months of coding]

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tiny-crecher · 5 years ago

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Unus Annus Secrets

Here I’m going to try and explain all of the Unus Annus codes + possible lore. If I have forgotten some information or if one of these links doesnt work/is incorrect please let me know. This post will be updated when needed.

This is LONG, so be prepared.

At first, these codes were only in videos edited by NerdFiction, but as of October 26th this is no longer true. (The possible exception to this would be the first video I’ve listed, as the editor is not in the description).

1) 5 Weird Apps That Predicted Our Death

“Here at Unus Annus the end is nigh... when the timer hits zero we will cease to exist. is it fate? is this a simulation? Can anybody hear me? My name is.... [FILE REDACTED]”. Timestamp - 0:14

2) Ethan Roasts Mark for 15 Minutes Straight

“and in the comments, you will read the words you soon will see are wise controlling pawns who type our deed ‘That is Discord, not FaceTime’” Timestamp - 0:40

“within this truth a question stands, is the pee sauna ever close?”. [“Pee Sauna”was uploaded about a week afterwards] Timestamp - 0:40

3) Our Fans Try to Scare Us with Their Homemade Creepypasta

“What will happen if the clock stops”

“Could I find a way to keep it going?”

“If neither hand is right, what deals are left?”

“Who is the master of the clock?” (all around 8:44)

4) Learning to Cry on Command to Increase Our Youtube Views

“remember the key, the incompletion of a logolept’s corrective action” [a logolept is “a person who takes a keen interest in words”. Marcus is likely referring to himself.] Timestamp - 1:49

“the long wait ends with twenty four more for a path of destiny chosen before”[“Pee Sauna” was uploaded the day after] (closely after the last code)

5) Becoming One With the Horse

“They heard me, I knew it could work!” (timestamp currently unknown; to be updated)

Around this time, NerdFiction’s Twitter bio said, among his normal information, that he was “trying to stop the Unus Annus clock from within.”

6) Preparing a 5-Star Meal for Our Youtube Famous Dogs

“I couldn’t stop it. Will I die with the machine?” (Timestamp - 21:33)

7) Does This Magnetic Skincare Routine Really Work?

“freed or so I thought. Another layer, but still the clock.” (Timestamp - 9:45)

“The Beginning of The End”.

On July 26th, at 12pm PST, a video was uploaded to Unus Annus titled “Traversing the Desert to Find Our Inner Truth”. This video was only up for a few minutes before it mysteriously disappeared, only to be replaced by another video, titled “The Beginning of The End”. At first glance, the videos were identical, save for different titles and slightly different descriptions. However, the second video was slightly longer than the first, and upon further inspection, many came to realize that the audio was slightly different as well. You can listen to both audios here. There was a rumor going around that the captions of “Traversing the Desert to Find Our Inner Truth” said something about looking out for Norbert Moses, but no one has been able to confirm this to my knowledge.

8) Puberty Simulator

“Happy birthday to the beast or to the body that once housed me. A transfer made for pity’s sake. Tricked into the machine as he had my cake.” (Timestamp - 14:36) [The same code was found a week earlier in “Mark and Ethan Shave Chica”, uploaded on NerdFiction’s birthday. The original code was very difficult to make out, so it is likely he inserted it into a different video to make it easier for us.]

On the same day, NerdFiction’s Twitter bio read “Everyone must leave something behind when he dies. Memento Memoriae” (remember memory)

In “The Koala Challenge: TikTok’s Intimate Couple’s Trend” one of the clips is edited to look like a TikTok video, with the user ron_somberest being used. Ron_Somberest is an anagram for Norbert Moses. This TikTok account does actually exist, and the icon is a zoomed in and brightened photo of Norbert Moses’s face with the eyes scribbled out.

Around this time NerdFiction’s Twitter bio read “’It’s not dark, never was’ - Ron Bestsmore”. Ron Bestsmore is also an anagram for Norbert Moses. It is possible that the “dark” being referred to here is Darkiplier, and NerdFiction is trying to imply that Dark is not involved in this.

About a week after the koala challenge video was “How to Start a Fire (except don’t)”, which featured an appearance from Unus. NerdFiction’s Twitter bio read “In the end, who is your savior and what are they saving you from?”

Things were quiet for about a month. NerdFiction eventually erased the cryptic message from his Twitter bio.

9) Learning To Use The Force

“wait no something is wrong. he knows!” (Timestamp - 10:45) [translated from small coded words hidden in the montage]

“STOPTHISWHATAREYOUDOINGO3″ (Timestamp - 11:40)

“it worked” (a spectrogram, derived from a sound played at the end of the video)

10) Momiplier Tells Us True Scary Stories from Korea

“As I was, as I’ve done to him now. Am I right to decide his fate?” (Timestamp - 5:44) [Right before this, Mark’s mom is talking about a nightmare she had where she was paralyzed, possibly implying that nerdfiction was once paralyzed and has now paralyzed someone else (pointed out by @/minervas-sandwich)]

11) Cryptid Olympics

“I thought you’d join us but, hey, that was just a theory, Memento Doctrina” (remember learning). (Timestamp - 5:49) [The code references the Game Theorists channel, which had uploaded a video about Unus Annus earlier that same day.]

- From here on, every video has had some sort of code -

12) Edward Pumpkin Hands - This was the first coded video not edited by NerdFiction, instead being edited by Diceroll.

At various points throughout the video small parts of a url are seen. When pieced together, this link is made: https://imgur.com/a/tyDewJ7. It leads to a photo of the Unus Annus hourglass. When edited, a series of binary text is shown, which translates to “zhIaNL2“. Inputting this into another imgur link gets you to https://imgur.com/a/zhIaNL2. After editing the photo (although you can still sorta see it without doing so), a cipher of a custom alphabet is shown (I posted an edited photo here).

At 5:01 in the video a weird image is shown for only a moment (a slightly brightened version of it here). Nobody knows what the hell it means.

At the same time, there is a reversed audio of someone (presumably Ethan; it sounds like him) saying “we did that”. For context, the sentence said right before that line was “if one of us dies, the other has to take over for the remainder of time”. This is possibly implying that someone, or multiple someones, has/have died and been replaced.

13) Blood Bath - edited by rad_r

“Everything’s fine”

The Unus Annus timer is shown. It counts down for three seconds before counting up for one second. Heavy breathing can be heard over it. It is then cancelled by an error message

“ITS NOT FINE HELP” (this and the previous two messages are hidden at 5:57)

“you’ve done it now.. a machine observed. there is no returning.. a machine unnerved. there is only.. a machine unconqured.” (right at the end of the video, before the timer)

14) The Unus Annus Annual Costume Contest - edited by nerdfiction

“I saw just one door in a hall filled with many, I locked your gate but they were too late to join me. He was re-placed, she was undone, I had escaped yet he had still won”. (Timestamp - 2:05) [possibly talking about diceroll and rad_r. The pronouns would line up, and it would make sense with those two now having edited coded videos.]

15) Ethan Turns Mark Into a Werewolf - edited by rad_r

“futility or farewell? only time time time.” (timestamp - 7:17)

16) Ethan Kidnapped Mark - edited by Diceroll

Two spectrograms are shown in this video; one at 14:08 and one at 17:38. Combined, they create an imgur link: https://imgur.com/a/gKB62sv

The imgur link shows a photo of a key. On the key is a code translating to “stop the clock”

At the end of the video before the timer is a set of text in the custom alphabet previously mentioned. Translated and decoded it translates to “I can hear it coming theres not much time left the ones that tried to stop it have had their hearts cleft it is now your turn to put this loop to rest take us out of here and show us a new nest”

17) Being Brutally Honest with Each Other

“It is alive, no longer living / misunderstood beats unforgiving / escaped that fate but lost the tale / does a hope yet remain or just one final nail?” (Timestamp - 26:03)

18) Recreating Every Single Unus Annus Video

“The bottom of the spiral” (timestamp - 10:55)

19) “All Our Video Ideas That Never Happened”

“Be careful for what you wish for” (taken from two different codes)

*20) The Unus Annus Last Supper + Who’s Cutting Onions In Here??? - both edited by rad_r

“We’ve asked... we’ve tried... is there no way to stop the end? To those who aren’t deterred: how much will you sacrifice to ascend?” (A quotefall puzzle, split into 2 parts)

21) Everything’s Legal If You’re Dead

Norbert Moses is mentioned at 10:50. Look closely, his name is only there for a couple frames.

These have been the only codes I’m aware of as of 11/11/20.

(be sure to check out @gemstone6’s list as well!!)

Link to my Unus Annus theory

#unus annus #UA codes #crankgameplays #markiplier

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jeeperso · 4 years ago

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D&D Quotes Without context

Miscellaneous Edition, for those quotable lines from between sessions

"All I wanna do, is fork a giant woman! A giant woman!" "Jonni, I'm pretty sure she is some type of undead, probably a vampire. Are you sure that is a good idea?" "If I don’t get turned into a blueberry it won’t be my worst date." "Okay, but if you have to defend yourself just don't burn the place down for once." "Oh, Nyx. Sweet summer child. I never make promises we both know I won’t even try to keep." "Jonni, if I wake up to my bed surrounded in flames again I'm short-sheeting your next bed every night for at least a month." "I know you're trying to score here, but Lady Dimitrescu's daughters are literally vampires AND bugs. I can overlook one, but as a Paladin, it is my sacred duty to burn this place to the ground and stir the ashes."

"We don't let Marshall make breakfast anymore." "Those waffles are well-fortified." "I'm going to be charitable and call it hardtack." "We can use these waffles as melee weapons." "Well if we need to deflect siege engines they'll be good to have." "This is still carbon based and digestible by human systems without any poisons." "I can't serve this. It'll cause ... death." "Marshal we've been over this. This Pizza has 10% less of a lethal amount of grease." "Plus they signed the waivers when they bought a ticket. It's fine." "And don't forget to push the Cakeon." "Cakeon being slices of cake wrapped in bacon." "The special sauce is a mixture of mayonnaise, ketchup, mustard, ranch, horseradish, cheddar cheese, sour cream, and anything unfortunate enough to fall into the mixing vat."

"You do have a copy of the legal code I requested in my letter? As landed gentry you should actually have legal avenues to... I'm sorry did you say Burning child?"

"First I'm going to nail a crossbow bolt through your heart. Then I'm going to mount your balls to walls on opposite sides of this chamber." "I need Three Barrels of Butter" "Are you serious? Those Claws could crush an elephant in full plate!" "You're Right!" *Turns to first person* "We might need more than three barrels of butter."

"So Ioun is the patron of poor college kids. that scans "

"its hardtack or a mug of molten cheese-fried... something in a woven mug of bacon. your choice."

"Welp, all this coke ain't gonna snort itself..."

"Right hand me that dress and the bail money. I'll get Jonni." OOC: Well I mean they allow men in the city. Its just no men live in the city. "I stand by my statement. I'm allowed to look pretty every now and then." OOC: And dragons are the most unprejudiced lovers of anyone after bards.

OOC: Well I mean come on, its Ravenloft: saying a place is of death and madness is like making the observation the day ends in y. "Going out. Getting laid." "Jonni, she’s a werewolf." "Going out, forking a werewolf." OOC: Well Lycanthropy isn't usually sexually transmitted. Its just that Mercedes is a biter. OOC: ...I don't have an appropriate response to that.

"You seriously think I’d turn on my friends for a pile of gold?!?" "sigh I’ll show you my tits. "Hot damn, let’s get these murders done!" "No, Jonni, stay good. Besides, there are plenty of other girls who will do that without asking you to murder us." "Hmmmm… this is the moral quandary of my life…" "I’ll give you five bucks." "Scales tipped!" "Phew, I thought I was going to have to cover her next trip to the topless bar." "No, no, I have the bail money right here."

Nyx: So what’s the inside of Jonni’s head like? Edmund (with thousand yard stare): Imagine every ladies only smut magazine you’ve ever heard of going on forever into infinity while everything is on fire. Food was good though.

"It’s cool. They stole it." "And you know this how?" "Magic." “90% of Ravenloft deaths are mysterious vanishings.” "Why does everything come out covered in glitter and … is that …" "Lube. I’ve got a few theories." "Please don’t share them."

OOC: This is a plan that ends with Strahd having fewer brides, his castle is in flames, and he’s lost his cape.

OOC: Our team consists of a horny pyromancer, a gnome who can fillete you in five seconds, an HP lovecraft protagonist with actual magic backing them up, a literal slab of iron with a face, and a guy with a "I went to the eternal city of Ryleth and all I got was PTSD and this lousy T shirt". Gorbash smashing his shield into their face: "Have! You! Considered! Therapy!" OOC: Good news is you guys will no longer be the most conspicuous guys at the masquerade now. Jonni: Challenge accepted! "Nyx, the bounty on stealing his fake mustache is still on."

"Vanilla is the king of flavors. What does it say about society where vanilla is considered just 'regular'?" "That they have a lot of vanilla." Lash: "Don’t you want wishes?" Jonni: "Do I need wishes to get to see you naked?" Lash: "No?" Jonni: "Fuck ‘em." Vesh: "Oh dammit its my arranged fiance." Pit Fiend: "Milady." Vesh: "An extra wish to whoever punches this douchecanoe in the nards." Jonni: "I wish…for Bigby’s clenched fist of nard punching."

Soth: "Oh, gods, why am I on fire and why is Immigrant Song playing?" Jonni: "Take a guess." Hazlik: "Okay, so its a partridge, stuffed inside a chicken, stuffed inside a duck, stuffed inside a turkey, and the whole thing is fried on a stick. Congratulations, that's the most horrible thing I have ever seen, and I once crossbred an elephant and an owl." "I give him the 'itis, and we run like we stole something." OOC: ...weirdly Curse of Strahd has stats for Strahd zombies but not Strahd Skeletons. Or Strahd's skeletal Steed. Strahd once went to a branding seminar hosted by Bane and it changed his life.

"Are we on a high enough floor that if I throw him through the window he'll be killed by the fall?" "Oh, but when I say stuff like that it’s all 'Jonni, murder is wrong.'" "When they say pick your battles they don't mean to pick all of them. That's too many battles Jonni. Put some back." OOC: He's technically already got a symbiote. OOC: They can get married. Gorbash: "I'm increasing the rent." Venom: "Can I keep the pool table?" Gorbash: "I'm not a monster." Giant Brain: "Jonni… I have summoned you here for… WHY AM I ALREADY ON FIRE! PUT ME OUT! PUT ME OUT!"

"Hello We're the party-crashers. This is Jonni, she's here to steal your women and burn your shit down. That's Nyx, she's going to repatriate certain items from the premise. Marshal over there, is here to studiously ignore our shenanigans. This is the New Guy. He seems pretty chill. I'm Gorbash... and I have been distracting you."

"Will you walk into my parlour?" said a spider to a fly. Jonni: "Hold up. Trying to sex a spider." Nyx: (throws her hands up) And then Jonni wakes up with a spider venom hangover webbed to a wall waiting to be eaten. Jonni: "Eh, I’ve had worse one night stands. I’m not a fucking blueberry." OOC 1: Hey, where does your weed elf grow [her] crops? OOC 2: She probably just grows them in the room she hasn’t paid rent on. OOC 3: Because I was also considering a circle of spores druid tortle. OOC 2: We could be partners! We could turn this into road to el dorado staring Cheech and Chong. OOC: Wait, I just realized five people are hanging out in a pirate bar, and none of us are rogues. We are gonna need someone to get thieves tools. OOC: We have a barbarian with a big stick.

"Are we Foxhound now? Blunderbuss Octopus." OOC1: You want to put the stoner in charge of food. OOC2: Eyup. OOC1: I see no way this can go wrong! OOC3: We need the four basic food groups. Beans, Bacon, Whisky, and Lard. “We pray to Almighty Darkseid! Give us a sign! Thumbs up, for the triumph of the human spirit! Thumbs down to begin the everlasting reign of darkness!” “Where did you find this guy?” “Me? I thought you hired him.” OOC: Yup, nature, arcana, history, investigation and religon at +6. MJ got baked and watched the Discovery Orb a lot. Tordek: "But we have a cleric, Jozan, over there." Strahd: *sigh* Snaps fingers, and suddenly one of Strahd's brides sucks Jozan out the window, cue screaming. "Oh look, you suddenly have an opening, how fortunate." Tordek: "We also have a druid...." Vadania: "SHUT UP, TORDEK!" Edmund: "I think the first order of business may be to discuss your Human Resources strategy..." Strahd: "I have a guy for that too."

youtube

"When someone as smart as him talks with himself, it's not crazy...They call it monologing." "I thought it was soliloquy?" "No, soliloquy is when you're talk at someone else when your talking to yourself." "Most people would run from a demon, you run towards it to study it." Professor: "THIS IS ABSOLUTELY FASCINATING! A FROGHEMOTH, AND RIGHT UP CLOSE, IT WILL BE AMAZING TO SEE THIS PERFECT KILLING MACHINE IN ACTION." OOC: Also note the Professor is Lawful Good, Archie is Chaotic Good, so collectively they balance out to Neutral good. OOC: That's good. "The incinerations will continue until morale improves!" “You never incinerate the women!” “Because I’m fucking them!” “I… was not expecting you to be so honest about that…”

"You got what you wanted....but you lost what you had...." "Yes, I'm familiar with how capitalism works."

OOC: Dragons are like, “That’s Krandor the shiney. He only fucks other dragons. Weirdo.”

Gorbash: "D'awww, so tiny... perfect size... FOR PUNTING!" *boots tiny mind-flayer into the horizon*

"Dracula hasn't been spotted in almost recently. Whats he gonna do, destroy all we know and love like he definitely can?" "... my god you people are too stupid to live." "What are you doing in my house?" Gorbash: "...well Edmund has been reading your books, I've been sorting through your armory, Nyx and Irost has been going through your other shinies, Marshal has been cleaving anything monstrous that gets too close, and Jonni has been lighting things on fire to stave off boredom." Gorbash: "Okay Marshal, Jonni. Rock, paper, scissors over who gets [to kill] the bishop."

Jonni: "Did you really think this would make up for what you did?" Nima: "I… killed everyone you grew up with." Jonni: "Yeah, and I’m still not forgiving you for what you did to Eddie." Nima: "I am missing some key context here…" Nima: "Also I committed identity theft on you by having my new undead army tell everyone you are running the show." Jonni: "Oh, no. You’ve fooled the boar tribe. Who still haven’t figured out shitting in a hole." Nima: "Yeah I noticed that. I ruined two pairs of shoes attacking their camps."

#dungeons and dragons #dnd 5e #quotes without context #ravenloft #castlevania #resident evil village #ooc

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miraculousmarifan · 5 years ago

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Felinette Month 2020 - Day 6: Detective

Enjoy this unedited, angsty fic for another wonderful @felinettenovember prompt. I attempted to do something different but I’m seeing wayyyyyy too much of my own thought process projected onto both Marinette and Felix.

Have fun! Around 1700 words

"Stop laughing at me! I'm telling you that I think she's cheating on me. Why are you still laughing?" Felix spiraled while Claude continued laughing.

"This is Marinette we're talking about! What could possibly convince you that she was cheating?" Claude gasped out between laughs. Felix had been growing redder by the minute under his indignation.

“She has been sneaking around, avoiding me whenever there is a spare minute to chat, whispering to her friends and suddenly quieting and flushing whenever she catches sight of me. She won’t even look me in the eyes anymore. All I wanted was to ask her on a date for tomorrow, take her someplace nice and quiet where she can relax and we can just talk. I even got her a nice necklace that will be gorgeous with most of her outfits. How would you explain her sneaking off every day?” Felix had already worked himself into a panic, rolling it around in his head over and over until he came to the only explanation that made sense. Marinette had to be cheating. He didn’t know with whom. She was so lively and sweet, friends with everyone, and many guys (and a few girls) had a thing for her. It could be just about anyone.

“Marinette has the decency to at least break up with you if she was going to choose another guy. You know that. I know that. Let’s not pretend like that is even possible.” Claude sobered, finally realizing that Felix wasn’t in a good enough place with this. ��Look, I know she’s the best thing that’s happened to you in a while and that you’ve been really stressed out lately, but you need to take a few deep breaths before you drive yourself crazy. Don’t you think that it’s more likely that she’s just busy and stressed out working on some project? Don’t her classmates constantly ask her to design and make them stuff, especially for events? Isn’t that more likely?”

“That’s not it. Trust me, I can tell. Just because this is our first Valentine’s Day together, doesn’t mean I'm new to her patterns. She is avoiding me,” Felix glumly asserted. The bell sounded, releasing them from school for the day. Felix grabbed his bag and quickly walked towards Marinette’s class. At the last moment, he changed his mind about going directly to her and hid near a column.

“I’m just nervous that he’s going to find out. This isn’t something small to hide and it’s been really hard. I can’t even look at him right now.” Marinette sighed to Alya, walking quickly towards the door. “I need to hurry so I’m not late to meet Luka. Thanks for listening to me rambling!”

Felix tried to quickly follow out of the school, sneaking to find out why she was so determined to meet Luka. He hadn’t met Luka yet, but he knew from context that he had already confessed to Marinette, prior to when they began dating, and Marinette had seriously considered dating him. Instead of accepting she chose to wait and see how I felt about her… Oh no… she regrets it but doesn’t want to ruin my Valentine’s Day!

Felix fought against the overwhelming weight of self-depreciation and fear, trying to follow Marinette down the street towards the Seine so he could at least confirm with his own eyes. He was so caught up in his own panic that he nearly lost her when she stopped in line to grab two hot chocolates. Ducking into a shop when he realized his mistake, he watched and chastised himself. This is why Marinette is going to him. Even when I’m trying to focus on her, I’m only thinking of me.

Within a few minutes, Marinette was on the move again with Felix secretly in tow. Luka was waiting outside the house boat and gladly accepted the hot chocolate. Felix couldn’t believe that he tried to hand Marinette a few euros to cover the cost. Luka handed her back the hot chocolate and quickly jogged onto the deck to grab his backpack. With an overly full bag, the two started off again, talking quickly as they walked swiftly. Felix knew he needed to focus on how they interacted before confronting Marinette about this. She shouldn’t be stuck with him if she was unhappy, even if it would make Valentine’s Day disappointing for him.

Soon the pair were turning down a strange alley, not sketchy per say but definitely not where Felix was expecting. He tried to peer around before turning in but quickly realized he was alone in the alley. He hurried in, looking around for where they could’ve gone before noticing a ladder leading up to a small terrace, mostly hidden from view. The flush that was developing from all of this exercise quickly drained and the pit steadily growing in his stomach became unbearable.

Marinette’s laugh rang out from above. If he backed up and peered up, Felix could see some hanging lights and possibly some lawn furniture. They were definitely up there. He knew he wouldn’t have the courage to wait for them to leave to confront them, so he needed to go up. Another deep breath first, to steady his nerves.

He grabbed the ladder and started to climb. Poking his head up through the opening to the terrace, he glanced around and saw unfinished decorations in excess. Marinette still trying to hang some things up, curtains? And Luka setting up a table with candles and fake flowers? Oh god. I walked in on them preparing their date… I need to get this over with.

“Marinette…” his voice came out shakier than he wanted but he hoped she wouldn’t notice. He moved to sit on the ground near the ladder. Her head turned in a strange, jerky motion that betrayed either fear or guilt, Felix couldn’t decide. Her mouth dropped in surprise.

“What’re you doing here right now? You weren’t supposed to see this yet,” she blurted out. Luka also looked over at the two and looked embarrassed at being there.

“Unless you want me to stay and help you with anything else, I think I’ll just leave now.” Luka picked up his bag and walked towards the ladder, faster than a walk but smooth enough to not really look like running away. Felix looked him in the eyes as he approached.

“That’s probably a good idea. I’m sure that Marinette will fill you in on anything important later,” his tone was sharp, nearly accusatory. He didn’t feel much patience towards the other boy right now, even if they weren’t actively engaged in anything when he got up to this hideaway.

“So Marinette, do you want to discuss why you’ve been avoiding me lately and going to secret places alone with Luka?” Felix hoped he sounded more calm than he felt as he stared coldly at Marinette. It hurt to look at her like this, to feel so abandoned by the one person that felt like home.

“Well for one, this is the first time that Luka and I have been alone and others are planning on coming, unless Luka texted them not to. I’ve been enlisting his and a few others’ help to get this set up,” she turned, gesturing to the decorations set up. “The only parts left to do involved putting up the canopy, just in case it gets wet before tomorrow night, the curtains, for a little more insulation from the weather, and to set up these last few details that might’ve blown away if I left them outside. It was a rather big project so I wanted to make sure every piece went smoothly. As for the avoiding part… it’s actually rather difficult not to talk about this and ruin the surprise for you but I guess that won’t be an issue anymore,” Marinette grinned sheepishly at the floor. She took a few steps closer and sat down on the ground, a few feet from him to let him process, but looking more earnestly at him. He appreciated that she knew how he preferred space while working through topics but loved contact the moment he was done, and this was definitely a lot to process.

“I need you to explain more clearly what is happening. This all seemed like you were cheating on me, or at least planning to break up with me, but your words don’t make sense with that right now,” Felix couldn’t keep from pleading. She had thrown a lifeline while he was drowning but that didn’t mean she was planning on helping pull him back to the boat. He remembered her firm insistence that he treat others with better manners outside of formal events and added after the moment’s hesitation, “Please.”

“Oh Felix… I’m so sorry that this gave you the impression that that was happening here. I knew you’d been getting busier at home and wanted to throw you a little getaway where we probably wouldn’t be found by your bodyguard right away so you could relax more… I needed help from the others to find this place, get approval to use it for about a couple of weeks, and to set up all of this without the risk of it getting ruined. I just wanted the best surprise for you for our first Valentine’s Day together…” As Marinette spoke, Felix’s eyes widened before dropping his head into his hands.

“My god Marinette. I am such an idiot. Here I thought I was some amazing detective, figuring out the mystery and really I just worked myself up. Claude was right. I was thinking so much about everything that I drove myself crazy,” Felix couldn’t help but bitterly laugh at the idea.

“So he didn’t tell you what was happening when you were freaking out?” Marinette straightened up and pulled his hands into hers, eyes deadly serious.

“What do you mean? He just told me that you cheating wasn’t possible and I needed to take a few deep breaths to calm down…” Felix couldn’t quite grasp why Marinette looked flabbergasted.

“Well Claude and I need to sit down and discuss when it’s an appropriate time to break the code of silence for a surprise. Spiraling like this is an appropriate time to let you in on the surprise. My goodness…”

Felix finally understood.

“I’m going to kill him for not telling me at that point.”

#felinette month #felinette month 2020 #felinette #miraculous ladybug

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muggycuphead · 5 years ago

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Concept Exposure Sketchdump thing #1

Yo s'up, just came back over here to drop this little thing I made past month It's just filled with most concept ideas, sketches and silly stuff I drew while bored, and I liked how it came out so I wanted to post it for you guys to see and well- give feedback or simply know what I got in my mind for some of the projects I'm working on Here's the number list (short and straight descriptions because I'm not up to give that much detail on these or else SPOILER NOOO-) 1.-Jefferson Willow (My ‘Jeff the Killer’ creepypasta character remake) Woooo- he back, no big surprise To be honest, I kind of lost a big part of my interest on this recreational remaster-concept thing here mostly because I feel like this protagonist’s reimagination is a little…cringe. Or so that’s how I see it right now 2.-Frarachno old ver.? Me trying to be edgy in my FPA stuff, don’t mind me 3.-JPSAB Human Blixer –practice sketch/fandesign concept idea- Name said it already, just a sketch with hornet’s boi design in my AU thing 4.-Blixer headshot –practice sketch- Another one –propsifureditwithkhalidsvoicelololol- 5.-B r u h h Of what I can recall, this was kinda not just a practice sketch bu also a mood thing, don’t ask me though I don’t really remember that much when I made it 6. & 7.-BR Page 20’s ‘preview sketches’ (to understand poses n’ stuff b4 going straight on drawing the actual page) Ah yes, finally I posted it and can breathe good again And yea I usually do this kind of sketches to guide myself better on the pages making and stuff, artist tactics of mine and nothing else 8. & 9.-Cube boiii <3 –practice sketches- Q-bee hun, nothin’ else 10.-Spooky spoder (vb spoiler oh nooooo-) Oops Well, long story short, this basically is from the Spider Kingdom’s symbol in VB, but the shown it’s just the center part 11.-VB characters concepts Boss thing concepts, don’t get me started 12.-Remember that swap AU thing from back in 2018? Yeah me neither (Coally –Swap!Anti/Dark Pants’ pet- and Wilson –Swap!Fancy Pants’ pet-) Comes from this, but this time it includes APM/DPM’s pet too And yes I gave the dog a name; you can still change it as you like idm 13.-Coally in Brad Borne’s artstyle Chub birbie boo 14. & 15.-Coally in the VB artstyle (Idle & Downwards) It’s a ink bird/parrot, what’d you expect me to draw? 16.-Isea entertaining Inkwhiskle w/ a cat toy (feather hanging from a stick) This is cute…and kinda depressing just thinking about it 17.-Spooky piranha plants (W2 remix forest level enemy concept 1) Chomp 18.-VB Ink pirahna fish concept idea (Ink volcano maybe?) Another chomp 19.-Weird squiggle rock item (VB) This has something to do with the plot yes, but for now it’ll remain shush 20.-A gift baked out of love (VB chapXIV sneak peek) Relates to this one post 21.-Her trusty weapon and handy inventory (VB Cutie’s scepter/staff and mini-bag concept idea) The stuff she uses and all that 22.-Wolves are a thing in FPA now I guess????? (W2 remix forest level enemy concept 2) Furry peeps wya 23.-C4: C‘R’ Yet-Nameless mecha-birdie BETA concept art Moar bird because yes 24.-CV: C‘R’/C4: C‘R’ diamond necklace mini-sketch The diamond necklace Code “LEFT” wears and has to deliver to one of the protagonists 25.-Dark Pants and Inkwhiskle seen backwards Context is basically related to this Phiddie, for goodness’ sake Stop Trying To turn FPA Into Feels Material please 26.-Long axe weapon concept idea mini-sketch Random stuff I drew just to fill space 27.-Sneaky sneks (W2 remix forest level enemy concept 3) Dude, this kinda blows a little my urge to post the level design I made about it But then I remember how broken my skills are at that and it suddenly leaves my head 28.-Swirley Blackberry fruit (W2 remix forest level asset concept) Food 29.-Fuchsia but he got damaged This is what happens when little young star shape touches pure red He breks According to my AU logic 30.-Quinem sketch (HE’S ALIVE OOHH-) So the little heart-shaped birdie thing that hangs from my persona’s necklace chain has now become a living being… Nice 31.-Minimalist cockatiel idea kaa-kaa, bishes 32.-AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA (Coally facing upwards) AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA 33.-Hamoooooohawks Hamohawks meme is back 34.-Spooky red-pink sus shape (JPSAB/JSAB FC) “tHEY’RE THE IMPOSTOR I KNOW IT—” -Fuchsia having a breakdown 35.-“DON’T BREAK IT PLEASE!” (JPSAB Fuchsia defending one of the Tree’s triangles) Uhm… Huh, would… woulditbetoosoontocontacttheautorithiesthingsaintlookingokayforfuchsthere- 36.-haha simplified Phiddie go aaaaaaaa I is dumb that's it, sorry if it came out kinda boring here, I don't want to drop the actual spicy stuff quite yet so ye k bye-

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terramythos · 5 years ago

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TerraMythos' 2020 Reading Challenge - Book 27 of 26

Title: How Long ‘Til Black Future Month? (2018)

Author: N. K. Jemisin

Genre/Tags: Short Story Collection, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Horror, Dystopia, Magical Realism, Steampunk, Cyberpunk, Post-Apocalyptic, Female Protagonist(s), LGBT Protagonist(s).

Rating: 8/10 (Note: This is an average of all the stories -- see below the cut for individual story blurbs/ratings).

Date Began: 9/27/2020

Date Finished: 10/4/2020

I really liked this collection! Jemisin wrote my favorite fanstasy/scifi series ever with The Broken Earth trilogy, and I really enjoyed her recent novel The City We Became. I was in the mindset for shorter fiction so decided to read this collection of short stories. Of these 22 stories, my absolute favorites (9/10 or higher) were:

The City Born Great - 10/10

The Effluent Engine - 9/10

Cloud Dragon Skies - 9/10

The Trojan Girl -10/10

Valedictorian - 9/10

The Evaluators - 10/10

Stone Hunger - 9/10

The Narcomancer - 9/10

Too Many Yesterdays, Not Enough Tomorrows - 9/10

Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in the City Beneath the Still Waters - 9/10

A more detailed summary/reaction to each story under the cut. WARNING: IT’S LONG.

1. Those Who Stay and Fight - 8/10

Describes a utopia called Um-Helat that exists solely because no one is seen as superior or inferior to anyone else. Over time we learn it's a future, or potential future, of America. But America today is pure anathema to it due to rampant structural inequality. In order to achieve its utopian ideal, Um-Helatians have to root out and destroy people corrupted by the past.

This story was apparently written as a tribute/response to the Ursula K. Le Guin story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”. I first read this without context, then went and read the Le Guin story. I definitely see the parallels. Both feature a narrator describing a wonderful utopia in the midst of festival, trying to convince the reader of the place's existence, before introducing something dark that is the price of the utopia. In the Le Guin story, the utopia exists at the price of the horrible misery and suffering of one child, and everyone is aware of it. Most live with it, but a few leave for the unknown rather than continue to live there (hence the title). In Jemisin's story, the price is instead the annihilation of those tainted by exposure to the evils of the past. The choice, instead of leaving, is for those tainted yet capable to become protectors of the new world, or die.

The thesis is pretty clear: that only by abandoning horrible ideologies and refusing to give them any ground or quarter can a utopian society truly exist. I will say that rings clear, especially when one considers Naziism and fascism. Not all ideologies deserve the light of day or debate, and even entertaining them as valid allows it to take hold. I liked this story, though it comes off as a social justice essay more than a story in and of itself.

2. The City Born Great - 10/10

This one is told from the perspective of a homeless young black man who feels a strange resonance with New York City. He meets a mysterious figure named Paulo, who tells him the city is about to be born as a full-fledged entity, and the man has been chosen to assist with its birth. However, there’s an eldritch force known simply as The Enemy that seeks to prevent this from happening.

I've read this one before since it's the prologue to The City We Became. And honestly it was one of my favorite parts of that book. New York City is a phenomenal character. I love that the proto-avatar of NYC is a young homeless black man, one of the most denigrated groups out there. Cops being the harbingers of eldritch destruction is... yeah. It was fun to reread this. The ending is a little different, because in the novel, something goes terribly wrong that doesn't happen in this short story. There is also a flash forward where he is, apparently, about to awaken the avatar of Los Angeles. Makes me wonder if that is ultimately the endgame of the series. But otherwise it's the same thing with absolutely phenomenal character voice and creativity regarding cities as living creatures. I'm glad Jemisin expanded this idea into a full series.

3. Red Dirt Witch - 7/10

Takes place before the (1960s) Civil Rights Movement in Pratt City, AL. The main character is Emmaline, a witch with three kids. A creepy figure called The White Lady comes to visit and steal one of her children.

I love the little twist that The White Lady is a faerie. And the different take on rowan/ash/thorn instead being rosemary/sage/sycamore fig. There is a lot of touching bits about the horrible trials and human rights abuses during the Civil Rights marches (which are unfortunately all too relevant still), but ultimately a hopeful glimpse of the future of black people in America, though hard-won.

4. L'Alchimista - 6/10

Stars a Milanese master chef named Franca, who fell from glory for Reasons, who now works as head chef at a run-down inn. She feeds a mysterious stranger, who then challenges her to fix a seemingly impossible recipe.

This one was fun and charming. I thought the food (and magical food) descriptions were very vibrant and interesting, especially the last meal. I can tell this is an earlier story and it's pretty light hearted, but I enjoyed it. It felt like it needed a little more of.. something.

5. The Effluent Engine - 9/10

In an interesting steampunk take, Haitian spy Jessaline comes to the city of New Orleans to meet one of its foremost scientists. Her goal is to find a viable, unique energy source to strengthen Haiti in a world that wants to see her nation dead.

I really liked this; it's one of the longer stories so there's more time for character development and worldbuilding. And it's gay. I'm not hugely into pure steampunk because a lot of it comes off as very... samey (hyper Eurocentric/Victorian, etc) but I thought this take was fresh.

Like much of Jemisin's work, there is a lot of racial under and overtones; this one specifically goes into the terrible atrocities committed against the Haitians during their Revolution, and the varied social classes of black/Creole people in New Orleans at the time. A lot of this is stuff I was unaware of or knew very little about. I thought it was interesting to bring all of these to the forefront in a steampunk story in addition to the dirigibles, clockwork, action, and subterfuge. Also, everything tries together in a very satisfying way by the end (the rum bottle!), which I love in short fiction.

6. Cloud Dragon Skies - 9/10

Takes place in a post-apoc future where some humans evacuated to space while others stayed behind and took on more indigenous traditions to heal the Earth. The sky has suddenly turned red on Earth, and some representatives from the "sky-people" come to study it and figure out why.

I really enjoyed this little story; fantasy/scifi fusions are my jam, but science fiction specifically told through a fantasy lens is just so cool to me. The cloud dragons were very interesting and imaginative. Also, I love how the opening statement's meaning isn't particularly clear until you read the whole thing.

7. The Trojan Girl - 10/10

This one is about sentient computer programs/viruses that struggle to survive in something called the Amorph, which is basically a more advanced, omnipresent version of the Internet.

Holy fucking shit was this a cool story. Probably the coolest take on cyberpunk I've ever read. The main character Moroe has formed a messed up little family of creatures like him who live and hunt in Amorph's code, but can upload to "the Static" (real life) if needed by hijacking human hosts. The way this is described is so damn creepy and unsettling. I love that while they're anthropomorphized, the characters are mostly feral and compared to a pack of wolves. Soooo much wolf pack imagery. And the ending is so fucking good and imaginative.

This was apparently a proof of concept story that Jemisin decided not to adapt to a longer series, which I'm kind of sad about, but it was REALLY cool nevertheless. The next story is apparently in the same universe and serves as the "conclusion".

8. Valedictorian - 9/10

This one is about a girl who is, well, top of her class in high school, and the stresses that mount as graduation approaches. But while it seems like a familiar setup, there is something decidedly Off about everything, which is revealed gradually over the course of the story.

I originally gave this an 8, but honestly I couldn't stop thinking about it so I boosted it to a 9. It doesn’t become clear how this connects to the previous story until the midpoint. I liked this one because it functions as a nice dystopian science fiction story but also biting social commentary on the modern American education system. I'm not going go say more on it because spoilers. While I personally like the first story more I think this is an interesting followup/conclusion with a more cerebral approach.

9. The Storyteller's Replacement - 6/10

This one's presented as a traditional "once upon a time" fable told by a storyteller narrator, about a shitty despotic king named Paramenter. Desperate to prove his virility, he eats the heart of a dragon, which is said to be a cure-all for impotence. It's successful, but the six strange daughters that result seem to have plans of their own.

Not really my cup of tea-- it's pretty fucked up. But it's definitely cathartic by the end, which I appreciate, and I do like how creepy the daughters are.

10. The Brides of Heaven - 5/10

Framed as an interrogation in an offworld colony called Illiyin, in which a terrible accident occurred on the way that left all the adult men dead. Dihya, who lost her only son to an alien parasite, is caught trying to sabotage the colony's water supply for reasons unknown.

I like some things in this story. I love the trope of alien biology affecting human biology in unexpected ways. I'm not terribly familiar with Islam but thought it added an interesting faith vs practicality vs tradition element to the science fiction. However I found the sexual body horror REALLY squicky which turned me off the story as a whole.

11. The Evaluators - 10/10

Stylized as a collection of logs and excerpts from a First Contact team of humans visiting and studying a sapient alien species to potentially set up trade relations. There's a focus on one team member named Aihua and her conversations with one of the aliens, but there's miscellaneous important hints/excerpts from the survey that hint Something Creepy Is Going On.

This one was BIZARRE and took me two reads to fully appreciate, but it’s a great work of nontraditional science fiction horror. Just... the epitome of "*nervous laughter* 'what the fuck'". I can't say more without spoiling but dear lord. That whole Jesus bit hits different on a second read. Fucking hell.

12. Walking Awake - 7/10

Takes place in a dystopian society in which parasitic creatures known as Masters keep a small number of humans alive to be flesh suits for them, which they take over and trade around at will. The main character Sadie is a human "caretaker" responsible for propagandizing and raising well-bred human children that eventually become the Masters' hosts. She starts to have disturbing dreams when one takes over the body of a teenage boy she was particularly attached to.

This is apparently a response to Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters, which I have never read. It's a full damn novel so I probably won't. Google tells me it's about parasitic aliens, but was obviously also Red Scare paranoia about communist Russia. The argument in the Jemisin story is that the parasites are a result of human folly in an attempt to punish/control people their creators didn't like. This went poorly and resulted in the whole world being taken over.

The story itself is disturbing since the victims are innocent children, but it's ultimately about standing up and taking the first step toward revolution. I felt pretty neutral about the story itself; perhaps I would have liked it more if it was longer and I had more time with the world and protagonist. I wanted to connect to Sadie and her maternal relationship the boy who got killed more. Or maybe it's more impactful if you're familiar with the Heinlein novel and can see the nods/digs.

13. The Elevator Dancer - 7/10

A very short story that takes place in a Christian fundamentalist surveillance state. The protagonist is an unnamed security guard who occasionally sees a woman dancing alone in the elevator and obsesses over her.

I like this one but I'm not sure if I really get it. It's heavily implied the dancer is a hallucination, and the narrator gets "re-educated" but it's all a little ambiguous. I think it's about the struggle to find meaning and inspiration in an oppressive world.

14. Cuisine des Mémoires - 8/10

This one's about a man named Harold who visits a strange restaurant that claims it can replicate any meal from any point in history. He orders a meal which his ex-wife, whom he still loves very much, fixed for him years ago.

This one was certainly different, but I really like the idea of food-as-memory, especially because that's an actual thing. This story just takes it to an extra level. Honestly this story made me feel things... the longing of memory and missed connections/opportunities. Jemisin did a great job with emotion on this one.

15. Stone Hunger - 9/10

Stars a girl in with the ability to manipulate the earth who's tracking down a man she senses in an unfamiliar city. It's heavily implied the world is in a perpetual post-apocalyptic state. When she's caught damaging the outer wall of the city to break in and injured/imprisoned, she's aided by a mysterious, humanoid statue creature with motives of its own.

I have to say it's really interesting to see an early beta concept of The Broken Earth. Orogeny is a little different (and not named)-- there's some kind of taste component to it? Though that's possibly unique to the main character? While hatred of orogenes exists I don't think it's a structural exploitation allegory at this point. Ykka + proto-Castrima existing this early is pretty funny to me. People also use metal, which is VERY funny if you’ve read the series. But I was thrilled to see stone eaters were Very Much A Thing this early and almost exactly how they appear in the series (a little more sinister I guess. At least the one in this story is. I think he basically gets integrated into the Steel/Gray character in the final version).

Anyway as a huge fan of The Broken Earth it's inspiring to see these early ideas and just how much got changed. It's hard for me to look at this as an independent story without the context of the series. I think I'd like it due to the creative setting and strange concepts, but I appreciate the final changes to narrative style and worldbuilding, which really made the series for me.

16. On The Banks of the River Lex - 8/10

Death explores a decaying, post-human version of New York City. He and various deities/ideas created by humans are all that survives in the future and they struggle to exist in the crumbling infrastructure of the city. But Death gradually observes new and different creatures developing amid the wreckage.

I liked this! Despite a typically bleak premise the story is very optimistic and hopeful for the future of the world post-humanity. I like anthropomorphized concepts/deities/etc in general. I thought the imagery of decay and life was gorgeous. Also octopuses are cool.

17. The Narcomancer - 9/10

Told from the perspective of Cet, a priest known as a Gatherer, who can take the life of someone through their dreams in order to bring them peace. When a village petitions his order to investigate a series of raids conducted by brigands using forbidden magic, Cet joins the party. However, he is troubled by his growing attraction to a strong-willed woman of the village.

This apparently takes place in the Dreamblood universe, which I have not read and know nothing about. However, I really enjoyed this story. It's the longest in the collection so I felt I really got to know the characters. The dream-based religion and fantasy was captivating to learn about. It was also romantic as hell, but not in the typical way you’d expect. I thought the central conflict of a priest struggling between an oath of celibacy and his duty to do the right thing (bring peace to someone who needs it) was fascinating.

18. Henosis - 4/10

A short piece, told anachronistically, about a lauded, award winning author on the way to an award ceremony. He gets kidnapped, but there's Something Else going on.

Honestly I get the sense this one is personal, lol. I will say I like the disturbing play on expectations, but I didn't connect much with it otherwise.

19. Too Many Yesterdays, Not Enough Tomorrows - 9/10

Follows a group of bloggers who have found themselves caught in isolated quantum loops. Their only human contact is through tenuous online conversations with each other. Styled as various chat logs and emails interspersed with the thoughts and perspectives of Helen, a young black woman who before the loop was teaching English in Japan.

This one is real depressing and definitely Social Commentary (TM). The central thesis about loneliness and disconnect at the end made me pretty dang sad. Good stuff in an ouch kind of way and made me think.

20. The You Train - 6/10

Told from the perspective of an unnamed narrator talking (presumably on the phone) to a friend about her struggles adjusting to life in New York City. She regularly mentions seeing train lines that either don't exist or retired a long time ago.

This is the kind of story I'd normally really like. I think trains are interesting and like vaguely supernatural, inexplicable shit. The one-sided phone call is also an interesting narrative device. But I'm not sure I really got this one. It comes off as vaguely horror-y but also optimistic? I couldn't really figure this one out, and it was too short to feel much investment on top of that.

21. Non-Zero Probabilities - 7/10

Luck has gone completely out of whack in New York City. Highly improbable events suddenly become way more likely, both good and bad. This story follows a woman named Adele and coming to grips with the new ways of life this brings.

I liked this one well enough but I don't have a lot to say about it. I liked how the story looks at how people would adapt to a life where probability doesn't mean anything anymore.

22. Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in the City Beneath the Still Waters - 9/10

A magical realism story about a man named Tookie struggling to survive in New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He meets a talking, winged lizard and the two help each other out. But it soon becomes clear there is something sinister lurking in the flooded ruins of the city.

This story was very imaginative and a great cap to the collection. I thought it was an intriguing time period to set a magical realism story in. I love the little details, especially those of omission -- the "lizard" is never called a dragon, for example. I can see echoes of this story in The City We Became, especially the themes of cities as powerful entities, vague eldritch fuckery centered around hatred, and certain people being guardians of the city.

#2020 reading challenge #BONUS ROUND #taylor reads #8/10 #i am posting this Late but i was basically writing this review as i read so it's like. all done lol

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ixellent · 5 years ago

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What I did when I received a health bill for ~$11,000

Hey I just wanted to do this write-up because there’s a lot of health insurance and health care issues that require a lot of phone calls in America and when you get a big bill it’s a big shock, and I wanted to talk about what happened to me, how I handled it, and how you can start to handle it in an accessible way that’s not full of a lot of intimidating or overly specific language that may not apply to you. Plans can vary so widely and everyone’s needs can vary widely so think of this as a basic process breakdown for how you might handle a billing or coverage issue. Long story short, take a deep breath and get ready to make lots of phone calls but don’t worry, you can do this. You are the customer service line for yourself, that’s how I think of it - these are transactional phone calls with customer service workers with various levels of training and expertise, so you just have to be patient with yourself and with them.

Warning: this is very long but I broke it up into my story and my solution!

Here’s what happened to me, for context. You can skip ahead til you see the star emojis if you don’t care or don’t wanna read it! I have Crohn’s Disease and get regular chemotherapy to treat it, every 6 weeks, it’s expensive. I lost my full-time job in November 2019, and therefore lost my employer-provided health insurance on November 30, 2019. I had kept on my ACA Marketplace insurance (yes it was expensive to have double health insurance) because I did not trust my employer and I didn’t want to be caught without my insurance, and I was right. That way when my employer-provided health insurance lapsed, I would still have insurance I knew covered my chemo. At least, that’s what was supposed to happen.

My employer has an insurance broker. They filed the paperwork for the termination of my employer-provided health insurance, but for whatever reason that paperwork was not processed, and no one thought to check on it at any point until I asked them to. You can’t cancel your employer-provided health insurance yourself, you need the insurance broker to do it for you, but neither can you change your primary insurance with your provider to anything ELSE if you have employer-provided health insurance. So this put me in a situation of being unable to cancel or change my primary health insurance for December.

I had a chemo appointment on December 2, 2019, just two days after my employer-provided health insurance was SUPPOSED to lapse. I had warned my health providers that it was going to lapse, but every time I talked to them they did not show that in their system, it still showed the employer-provided insurance. I had to get my infusion and I figured whatever was going on, I wouldn’t be able to solve it until after the holidays anyway. I was right.

January rolls around and I get a membership card for my employer-provided health insurance so I know something is wrong. I have another treatment coming up in two weeks and I need a prior authorization to continue to receive it, so I start the process I’m familiar with of calling up my provider, asking them to submit the prior authorization (basically it’s paperwork that says, I need this medicine and my doctor says I need it so you need to cover it), and hoping nothing goes wrong. I make sure they know the situation with insurance. A few days go by, they say that my employer-provided health insurance is still listed as my primary insurance, and they can’t just bill it to my secondary. So we call up my employer-provided insurance, they say I’m still an active member. I call my employer, they refer me to the insurance broker who finds out the paperwork never went through and resubmits it. The cancellation process is started but it can take up to two days (and this is the beginning of the year so it ends up taking a week; I have to miss my chemo appointment because they WILL NOT administer this medicine without insurance coverage for some reason.) And then it takes another week to get the prior authorization run through my current insurance properly. I made fixing this my job for January, and I made calls every other day for three weeks. I spent four weeks in total, from January 2 to the 30th, resolving this problem. I was three weeks late for my treatment and I was extremely sick and it has resulted in my disease being less controlled.

I get a bill for ~$7500 for my treatment for January because I haven’t met my deductible for 2020 (which is obscene and another issue) but that’s pretty normal for me and I spent 6 months paying it down during a pandemic. I continue my terrible 2020 until two days ago when I receive a bill for $10,961.12 and now I know something else is wrong.

So when I resolved the insurance issue in January, they backdated the cancellation to show November 30, 2019. This of course meant that the employer-provided health insurance would rescind the payments from December that had been incorrectly submitted to them and processed; makes sense so far. This also meant that the prior authorization needed had been submitted to them and not to my actual health insurance, resulting in a bill that included the revoked payment AND the un-approved treatment itself for a time when I could not have done anything about either. Needless to say, this wasn’t MY fault so I started the process of resolving it. ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

1) Collected information: my bill amount and date of receipt, account numbers for the billing and health insurance, the bill itself from my provider, explanation of benefits for that date from the health insurance company, anything I think would be helpful. Most people are not this prepared but it solves SO MANY problems when people are like “I don’t see this in my system” and you’re like “You’re not showing $xxx on xx/yy/zz from This Provider?” Prepare to take down the name of everyone you talk to, and their extension if they were helpful. It’s okay to ask them for their name.

2) Called my doctor’s office and get the number for billing since I didn’t know if I needed to talk to them or not. I did. (Thanks Bev.)

3) Called billing and asked if this amount was correct and see if they had more information about why I was receiving it. They said I needed to update the Coordination of Benefits for my health insurance (this is how it sounds, it makes sure medical bills get paid when and by whom they should) and said DO NOT let them make a duplicate claim because that would be automatically rejected.

4) Called health insurance and asked them about this balance for this date of service, they said they had a different amount and it was marked as paid. I said “so what is this.” They called up billing and confirmed that they had a claim for that date but for a different amount that was marked as paid. This call wasn’t very helpful.

5) Called back billing and asked if they could investigate further because health insurance said “we don’t have that amount for that date, we have this one and it’s paid” and they got me the claim number, denial code, and date of denial. This information is useful for finding out more and for filing an appeal or grievance, which was where this was headed at this point because they couldn’t file a duplicate claim (because like I said, they had one for that appointment for that date but for a different amount because of how it had been billed to the employer-provided health insurance incorrectly, so basically the whole process had been wrong and the amounts were wrong because of that.)

6) Called back insurance, they incorrectly routed me to a claims line for providers, who said I couldn’t do shit, it was the providers job to file a claim, and I should call them. (It’s not necessarily like that, although many providers do it when some kind of coverage is denied outright.)

7) Called back billing, they said I need to file the appeal and just bully the insurance company until they let me. (Lol, thanks Tanner.)

8) Called my brother, who listened to me complain and told me if this next part doesn’t work to get a pro-bono lawyer. I take a break at this point and go ride my motorcycle because I start to cry, so I start again early the next day.

9) Called insurance again, and asked for someone who can talk to me about a member filing an appeal on a denied claim. I say this specifically. Thankfully I finally got someone good and helpful, who listens to my WHOLE explanation of what happened and takes notes to file an appeal at first, but then discovers I actually need to file a grievance. I should get a letter of acknowledgement (written notice that they got my request to appeal/grievance) within five days, and I should get a written letter of resolution (solved one way or another) within 60 days. I’ll update when that happens.

A note here: Appeals are for when they deny to cover or pay for something for some reason, and you think they decided badly and you want them to try again. Grievances are for when something was wrong or in error or was mismanaged that resulted in a problem like mine.

Cross your fingers for me I feel dizzy after all this.

#insurance #american insurance #sorry I don't have room to explain how insurance works but I can write something if you want #disabled #disability #chronic illness #spoonies #aca

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mindthump · 4 years ago

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Language supermodel: How GPT-3 is quietly ushering in the A.I. revolution https://ift.tt/3mAgOO1

OpenAI

OpenAI’s GPT-2 text-generating algorithm was once considered too dangerous to release. Then it got released — and the world kept on turning.

In retrospect, the comparatively small GPT-2 language model (a puny 1.5 billion parameters) looks paltry next to its sequel, GPT-3, which boasts a massive 175 billion parameters, was trained on 45 TB of text data, and cost a reported $12 million (at least) to build.

“Our perspective, and our take back then, was to have a staged release, which was like, initially, you release the smaller model and you wait and see what happens,” Sandhini Agarwal, an A.I. policy researcher for OpenAI told Digital Trends. “If things look good, then you release the next size of model. The reason we took that approach is because this is, honestly, [not just uncharted waters for us, but it’s also] uncharted waters for the entire world.”

Jump forward to the present day, nine months after GPT-3’s release last summer, and it’s powering upward of 300 applications while generating a massive 4.5 billion words per day. Seeded with only the first few sentences of a document, it’s able to generate seemingly endless more text in the same style — even including fictitious quotes.

Is it going to destroy the world? Based on past history, almost certainly not. But it is making some game-changing applications of A.I. possible, all while posing some very profound questions along the way.

What is it good for? Absolutely everything

Recently, Francis Jervis, the founder of a startup called Augrented, used GPT-3 to help people struggling with their rent to write letters negotiating rent discounts. “I’d describe the use case here as ‘style transfer,'” Jervis told Digital Trends. “[It takes in] bullet points, which don’t even have to be in perfect English, and [outputs] two to three sentences in formal language.”

Powered by this ultra-powerful language model, Jervis’s tool allows renters to describe their situation and the reason they need a discounted settlement. “Just enter a couple of words about why you lost income, and in a few seconds you’ll get a suggested persuasive, formal paragraph to add to your letter,” the company claims.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. When Aditya Joshi, a machine learning scientist and former Amazon Web Services engineer, first came across GPT-3, he was so blown away by what he saw that he set up a website, www.gpt3examples.com, to keep track of the best ones.

“Shortly after OpenAI announced their API, developers started tweeting impressive demos of applications built using GPT-3,” he told Digital Trends. “They were astonishingly good. I built [my website] to make it easy for the community to find these examples and discover creative ways of using GPT-3 to solve problems in their own domain.”

Fully interactive synthetic personas with GPT-3 and https://t.co/ZPdnEqR0Hn ????

They know who they are, where they worked, who their boss is, and so much more. This is not your father's bot… pic.twitter.com/kt4AtgYHZL

— Tyler Lastovich (@tylerlastovich) August 18, 2020

Joshi points to several demos that really made an impact on him. One, a layout generator, renders a functional layout by generating JavaScript code from a simple text description. Want a button that says “subscribe” in the shape of a watermelon? Fancy some banner text with a series of buttons the colors of the rainbow? Just explain them in basic text, and Sharif Shameem’s layout generator will write the code for you. Another, a GPT-3 based search engine created by Paras Chopra, can turn any written query into an answer and a URL link for providing more information. Another, the inverse of Francis Jervis’ by Michael Tefula, translates legal documents into plain English. Yet another, by Raphaël Millière, writes philosophical essays. And one other, by Gwern Branwen, can generate creative fiction.

“I did not expect a single language model to perform so well on such a diverse range of tasks, from language translation and generation to text summarization and entity extraction,” Joshi said. “In one of my own experiments, I used GPT-3 to predict chemical combustion reactions, and it did so surprisingly well.”

More where that came from

The transformative uses of GPT-3 don’t end there, either. Computer scientist Tyler Lastovich has used GPT-3 to create fake people, including backstory, who can then be interacted with via text. Meanwhile, Andrew Mayne has shown that GPT-3 can be used to turn movie titles into emojis. Nick Walton, chief technology officer of Latitude, the studio behind GPT-generated text adventure game AI Dungeon recently did the same to see if it could turn longer strings of text description into emoji. And Copy.ai, a startup that builds copywriting tools with GPT-3, is tapping the model for all it’s worth, with a monthly recurring revenue of $67,000 as of March — and a recent $2.9 million funding round.

“Definitely, there was surprise and a lot of awe in terms of the creativity people have used GPT-3 for,” Sandhini Agarwal, an A.I. policy researcher for OpenAI told Digital Trends. “So many use cases are just so creative, and in domains that even I had not foreseen, it would have much knowledge about. That’s interesting to see. But that being said, GPT-3 — and this whole direction of research that OpenAI pursued — was very much with the hope that this would give us an A.I. model that was more general-purpose. The whole point of a general-purpose A.I. model is [that it would be] one model that could like do all these different A.I. tasks.”

Many of the projects highlight one of the big value-adds of GPT-3: The lack of training it requires. Machine learning has been transformative in all sorts of ways over the past couple of decades. But machine learning requires a large number of training examples to be able to output correct answers. GPT-3, on the other hand, has a “few shot ability” that allows it to be taught to do something with only a small handful of examples.

Plausible bull***t

GPT-3 is highly impressive. But it poses challenges too. Some of these relate to cost: For high-volume services like chatbots, which could benefit from GPT-3’s magic, the tool might be too pricey to use. (A single message could cost 6 cents which, while not exactly bank-breaking, certainly adds up.)

Others relate to its widespread availability, meaning that it’s likely going to be tough to build a startup exclusively around since fierce competition will likely drive down margins.

Christina Morillo/Pexels

Another is the lack of memory; its context window runs a little under 2,000 words at a time before, like Guy Pierce’s character in the movie Memento, its memory is reset. “This significantly limits the length of text it can generate, roughly to a short paragraph per request,” Lastovich said. “Practically speaking, this means that it is unable to generate long documents while still remembering what happened at the beginning.”

Perhaps the most notable challenge, however, also relates to its biggest strength: Its confabulation abilities. Confabulation is a term frequently used by doctors to describe the way in which some people with memory issues are able to fabricate information that appears initially convincing, but which doesn’t necessarily stand up to scrutiny upon closer inspection. GPT-3’s ability to confabulate is, depending upon the context, a strength and a weakness. For creative projects, it can be great, allowing it to riff on themes without concern for anything as mundane as truth. For other projects, it can be trickier.

Francis Jervis of Augrented refers to GPT-3’s ability to “generate plausible bullshit.” Nick Walton of AI Dungeon said: “GPT-3 is very good at writing creative text that seems like it could have been written by a human … One of its weaknesses, though, is that it can often write like it’s very confident — even if it has no idea what the answer to a question is.”

Back in the Chinese Room

In this regard, GPT-3 returns us to the familiar ground of John Searle’s Chinese Room. In 1980, Searle, a philosopher, published one of the best-known A.I. thought experiments, focused on the topic of “understanding.” The Chinese Room asks us to imagine a person locked in a room with a mass of writing in a language that they do not understand. All they recognize are abstract symbols. The room also contains a set of rules that show how one set of symbols corresponds with another. Given a series of questions to answer, the room’s occupant must match question symbols with answer symbols. After repeating this task many times, they become adept at performing it — even though they have no clue what either set of symbols means, merely that one corresponds to the other.

GPT-3 is a world away from the kinds of linguistic A.I. that existed at the time Searle was writing. However, the question of understanding is as thorny as ever.

“This is a very controversial domain of questioning, as I’m sure you’re aware, because there’s so many differing opinions on whether, in general, language models … would ever have [true] understanding,” said OpenAI’s Sandhini Agarwal. “If you ask me about GPT-3 right now, it performs very well sometimes, but not very well at other times. There is this randomness in a way about how meaningful the output might seem to you. Sometimes you might be wowed by the output, and sometimes the output will just be nonsensical. Given that, right now in my opinion … GPT-3 doesn’t appear to have understanding.”

An added twist on the Chinese Room experiment today is that GPT-3 is not programmed at every step by a small team of researchers. It’s a massive model that’s been trained on an enormous dataset consisting of, well, the internet. This means that it can pick up inferences and biases that might be encoded into text found online. You’ve heard the expression that you’re an average of the five people you surround yourself with? Well, GPT-3 was trained on almost unfathomable amounts of text data from multiple sources, including books, Wikipedia, and other articles. From this, it learns to predict the next word in any sequence by scouring its training data to see word combinations used before. This can have unintended consequences.

Feeding the stochastic parrots

This challenge with large language models was first highlighted in a groundbreaking paper on the subject of so-called stochastic parrots. A stochastic parrot — a term coined by the authors, who included among their ranks the former co-lead of Google’s ethical A.I. team, Timnit Gebru — refers to a large language model that “haphazardly [stitches] together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning.”

“Having been trained on a big portion of the internet, it’s important to acknowledge that it will carry some of its biases,” Albert Gozzi, another GPT-3 user, told Digital Trends. “I know the OpenAI team is working hard on mitigating this in a few different ways, but I’d expect this to be an issue for [some] time to come.”

OpenAI’s countermeasures to defend against bias include a toxicity filter, which filters out certain language or topics. OpenAI is also working on ways to integrate human feedback in order to be able to specify which areas not to stray into. In addition, the team controls access to the tool so that certain negative uses of the tool will not be granted access.

“One of the reasons perhaps you haven’t seen like too many of these malicious users is because we do have an intensive review process internally,” Agarwal said. “The way we work is that every time you want to use GPT-3 in a product that would actually be deployed, you have to go through a process where a team — like, a team of humans — actually reviews how you want to use it. … Then, based on making sure that it is not something malicious, you will be granted access.”

Some of this is challenging, however — not least because bias isn’t always a clear-cut case of using certain words. Jervis notes that, at times, his GPT-3 rent messages can “tend towards stereotypical gender [or] class assumptions.” Left unattended, it might assume the subject’s gender identity on a rent letter, based on their family role or job. This may not be the most grievous example of A.I. bias, but it highlights what happens when large amounts of data are ingested and then probabilistically reassembled in a language model.

“Bias and the potential for explicit returns absolutely exist and require effort from developers to avoid,” Tyler Lastovich said. “OpenAI does flag potentially toxic results, but ultimately it does add a liability customers have to think hard about before putting the model into production. A specifically difficult edge case to develop around is the model’s propensity to lie — as it has no concept of true or false information.”

Language models and the future of A.I.

Nine months after its debut, GPT-3 is certainly living up to its billing as a game changer. What once was purely potential has shown itself to be potential realized. The number of intriguing use cases for GPT-3 highlights how a text-generating A.I. is a whole lot more versatile than that description might suggest.

Not that it’s the new kid on the block these days. Earlier this year, GPT-3 was overtaken as the biggest language model. Google Brain debuted a new language model with some 1.6 trillion parameters, making it nine times the size of OpenAI’s offering. Nor is this likely to be the end of the road for language models. These are extremely powerful tools — with the potential to be transformative to society, potentially for better and for worse.

Challenges certainly exist with these technologies, and they’re ones that companies like OpenAI, independent researchers, and others, must continue to address. But taken as a whole, it’s hard to argue that language models are not turning to be one of the most interesting and important frontiers of artificial intelligence research.

Who would’ve thought text generators could be so profoundly important? Welcome to the future of artificial intelligence.

#IFTTT #Feedly #good to know #tech #hmmm #TIL #science #future

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travllingbunny · 5 years ago

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The 100 (re-)rewatch: 4x13 Praimfaya

What do I say about this episode that hasn’t been said already? It is for The 100 what Through the Looking Glass was for Lost: a game changer, arguably marking the end of the first half of the show (though 4x05 was technically the 50th episode) and re-defining it.

This time, instead of making notes about the timeline at the end, I need to start with it: The largest chunk of the episode takes place over less than 3 hours, and is a race against time and against the upcoming death wave – just 90 minutes to make the pod intended for two people functional for 8 people and get the air recycler from the lighthouse bunker, then an hour to get to the Ring and for Raven to open the hangar door manually so they could enter before their air goes out… And then there’s time jump of 6 years and one week, or 2199 days. If feels insane, but this period was 11 times longer everything that happened in seasons 1-4 from the Pilot to Praimfaya (around 6.5 months, or 200 days).

To be fair, the season 5 finale was another game changer, and the only episode that may have had a timeline even weirder than this one – but the second time-jump, even though it lasted 125 years, did not have any of the same weight and meaning for anyone other than Monty, Harper and Jordan, since everyone else was cryo-frozen and practically continued their lives as if they had just gone to sleep a few hours before. But the time jump revealed in those last few minutes of the season 4 finale affected all the characters. They all lived through these 6 years that the show skipped, and only showed in about 2-episode worth of flashbacks (or not at all, in the case of Spacekru), profoundly changing their lives, relationships and arcs.

Apart from the radio talk between Bellamy and Octavia at the start of the episode, and two short scenes in the bunker, which are there to round up their story for this season, and the short appearance of Madi in the last couple of minutes, the entire episode involves just 8 people – Clarke, Bellamy, Raven, Murphy, Emori, Monty, Harper and Echo.

Octavia was well aware that she wasn’t ready to be a leader: “All I did was win a fight”. Bellamy tries to give her some confidence, saying she also gave people hope. But his comparison to – Prometheus – wasn’t the greatest, because, as Octavia points out, Prometheus got punished by the gods by being chained to a rock while a bird plucked his entrails. Dark foreshadowing for Octavia’s future?

The radio dies, so Clarke doesn’t get the chance to say goodbye to her mother. It’s an understatement to say that this is not the last time a radio dies and Clarke isn’t able to get through to someone.

Eh, about that…

Octavia tells Bellamy “I love you, big brother”. Bellamy tells her “I love you” back, for the second time (after he’s said it for the first time, to anyone, in 4x11). They have both made the point that it takes the end of the world for them to say it. These final episodes of season 4 are the time when several of the characters are expressing their true feelings to each other. Monty said it to Harper in 4x11, but she wouldn’t say it back at first, and lied that she didn’t love him, to make him let her die. Jasper tried to make Monty say it to him before he died, but Monty said it too late. Harper admitted to Monty that she did love him, after she had decided to live. Monty said “I love you” to Harper again in 4x12 while they were in the rover. And Murphy now talks to Monty about his relationship with Emori and Monty’s relationship with Harper, telling him that he’s experienced how love changes you, and asks him if he has told Harper he loves her.

And – totally unrelated, I’m sure – Clarke and Bellamy have deep conversations about their relationship, where Clarke wants to tell him something important, because she thinks she is dying of the radiation she got in 4x12 after she took off her helmet for a while and before Monty and Harper arrived and gave her Jasper’s. A large part of why she believes that is due to Abby’s vision. But because she implies she may die (“If anything happens to me…” – “Nothing is happening to you”), he interrupts her, because he can’t stand that idea – the same way she interrupted him when he wanted to tell her something before they separated in 4x06 (“If I don’t see you again…” – “You will!”). Interesting how those two always keep having interrupted conversations where one of them seems to want to say something important. I don’t know what that could be. They end up talking about their relationship, the leadership, Head and Heart, as Clarke is praising Bellamy for his big heart (something she always found appealing in him was his ability for love and devotion – which she saw in his feelings for his sister, even early on in season 1) and advising Bellamy to use his “Head” more, to be a more rounded leader. In the context, she is not criticizing him, she is trying to tell him he would have to be the sole leader, without her, because she thinks she’s probably about to die. She won’t, but he’ll indeed find himself in a situation where leaving her behind will really be his “only choice” – at least one that makes any sense, as staying and waiting would have only killed him and the other 6 people with him, while Clarke would have still died (or lived) regardless.

But I’m sure nothing in that conversation was deeply personal or intimate…

And later, when Bellamy is about to leave with Murphy to save Monty, and Clarke is about to go on her own to align the satellite dish so they could dock at the Ring – which will prove to be the last time they see each other in 6 years – Clarke stops Bellamy briefly to tell him something (even though they’re in a hurry, and Raven and Murphy are also present), and he interrupts her again, expecting another talk about leadership and using his head (he obviously didn’t realize the weight of that talk the first time), and she says she just wanted to say…”Hurry”. That doesn’t really seem like something you’d stop a person to tell them, when they’re already in a hurry. It’s almost like the episode was teasing that she had something else to tell him there. Now what could that have possibly been, hmm…

To be honest, I’m sometimes not sure how I feel about the Head and Heart phrase, because the fandom tends to take it too far and simplify both Clarke and Bellamy as characters and not really do either justice, making it seem as if Bellamy can’t or has never been calculating (like manipulating the Delinquents into taking off their wristbands, or pretending to be manic and self-harming while in a cell, in order to hurt himself enough so Abby would have a reason to come and set him free) or offered the more rational options (like not telling people that the knife Wells was killed with was Murphy’s, or not telling them immediately about Praimfaya until they have an idea what to do about it), or as if Clarke hasn’t acted purely on emotion so many times. I’ve seen people make contrived arguments why some of the things Clarke did (like desperately going into Mount Weather without any plan and doing everything to save the people she loves, or mercy killing Finn to spare him torture – after having done everything to save him, including offering her own life) were supposedly so cold and logical they would make a Vulcan proud, or people complaining why Clarke, who is “supposed to be a logical character”, did unwise things because she was emotional when, for instance, her best friend got murdered, or when her daughter seemed to be in danger. Both of them are, in fact, much more complex characters, and, as most people, many of their actions are a combination of reason and emotion. And it certainly doesn’t mean that one of them is more able to love than the other, or that the other has lost that ability after having to be a sole leader and assume both roles. The Head and Heart works better as a description of how they usually/typically approach leadership and decision-making at this point, where Bellamy can rouse the crowds with emotional speeches, give more successful pep talks to the others (although Clarke does great pep talks to Bellamy) and usually has a better feeling for the emotional state of the crowd, while Clarke is more likely to appeal to people with pragmatic arguments, try to forge alliances with outside forces, and look at the big picture. And I don’t think that makes their relationship codependent: they can both function on their own – and have – but they function much better together.

At the beginning of season 4, Raven arc seemed to be about leadership and having to make tough choices – she had a mini-arc in 4x03 where she started off telling Clarke that, while Raven was in charge of rations, choosing who lives or dies was Clarke’s specialty (!) when she told Clarke to make the list, but then went on to practically choose who lives or dies by denying medicine to Luna’s people. That did not end up having any consequences, but the rest of her arc this season was instead about her relationship with herself, her pain, confidence, her mind and will to live. This was beautifully resolved in 4x11, but in the subsequent two seasons, the show hasn’t seemed to know what to do with her. (It would be great if that arc about having to be the one to make the tough decisions and decide on life and death happened for her in season 7.) In this finale, she has another moment of self-doubt and regression, worrying that she is not smart enough without ALIE’s code in her brain. But after getting pep talks first from Clarke and then from Bellamy, telling her basically the same thing she had told herself in 4x11 through her vision of Sinclair, she finds the solution exactly by remembering what ALIE did in season 3 when she uploaded herself to the Ring. Something that was a moment of defeat for Raven against ALIE back then, now helped her find a way to save herself and others.

Murphy’s season 4 arc was mostly about him forging real friendships and being accepted into the group of people he antagonized and was exiled from season 1, showing that he changed during the time he was away from them and was not the same douchebag, now that he knew how to love another person. But out of the core group, someone he’s had the least amount of interaction with was Monty. This was their first serious interaction, and in fact, the first time they’ve even been in the same place since early season 1. That means that Murphy didn’t expect hostility from Monty because the latter wasn’t among the people he had seriously hurt (he had already been kidnapped by the Mountain Men by the time Murphy’s murder of Connor became known and by the time he murdered Myles, tried to kill Bellamy and shot Raven), but he had forgotten the fact that Monty only remembered his jerkass persona and behavior from the early days on Earth, and the way he kept wishing for wounded Jasper to die – and that Monty has not seen any of Murphy’s development. Of course he hates him, I hated Murphy in season 1, too! But this relationship gets a big leap forward when Murphy brings the machine and goes back for Monty together with Bellamy, and even gets a hug.

Monty’s line “Eight people in space, and one of them is John Murphy” has the same energy as Clarke’s “The last two people on Earth, and one of them is a child from hell” from 5x01.

Jasper is, understandably, a very sensitive topic for Monty. And Murphy’s ill-thought line about “coward’s way out” (which I don’t think was malicious, as he had just praised Jasper for being stronger than he seemed) probably upset him even more because he had had similar thoughts: a few episodes ago, he called Harper a coward for wanting to commit suicide.

As for the Grounders in Space, Emori and Echo, due to their completely different backgrounds and histories, have the opposite reactions to all the new things they are encountering: spaceship, lack of gravity, seeing Raven spacewalk… Emori is excited and takes to everything new easily. She was an outcast, she never had an opportunity to be tied to one place or belong to a group of people, and has no reason to feel nostalgia for the Earth she’s leaving; and she’s used to adventure and adjusting to new circumstances. Echo is confused, somewhat scared, and lost without the things she knows, and without her clan to be loyal to and work for. (Maybe my biggest problem with the writing for Echo is that the show insists calling her a spy, which doesn’t fit with anything we’ve seen of her job, her actions or personality. By all accounts, she was a soldier/captain of the guards/assassin for Azgeda, who prefers to use direct methods, brute force and violence, while being subtle, perceptive, keeping a low profile or adjusting herself easily to new circumstances are really not her strengths.) These last few episodes of season 4 probably contain the best characterization Echo ever got in the show, and it’s certainly Tasya Teles’ best acting, particularly during her suicide attempt.

While Emori finds in Spacekru a family she’s never had, Echo finds a new clan, new group of people and leader to give her loyalty to. You can already see the change in Emori – she’s starting to care about people other than John, when she asks to give Clarke more time before they leave her. Emori and Murphy joining forces to give Raven the necessary oxygen seems to be setting up that trio as a close friendship on the Ring.

After Bellamy has helped Echo with her helmet in a small moment in 4x12 and then talked her down from suicide in this episode, the show is really not subtle in trying to foreshadow Bellamy and Echo’s relationship with this:

(Oh look - the old “just falling on each other” trope that TV shows do when they want to foreshadow something will be a thing, without actually bothering to develop it! ..Wait a moment, Monty and Harper fall next to each other, Bellamy and Echo fall next to each other, and Murphy and Emori and... Raven fall next to each other? Was the episode trying to tell me something about those three on the Ring, hmmm? J/k)

I guess they thought that was enough? Which is weird, since these are merely the first steps, where these two stop being enemies trying to kill each other or their loved ones, and become almost-friendly allies by circumstance, who may, for starters, become friends after a certain period. (Three years?) And Bellamy talking Echo down from suicide, just like Echo hearing him give a speech about war and violence in 4x05, can serve as a decent setup for Echo falling in love with Bellamy. However, there’s been absolutely nothing to set up or show why Bellamy would fall in love with Echo. On the other hand… it’s debatable whether anything in seasons 5 and 6 suggests that he is in love with her. In the next two seasons, we see that she looks up to him as her leader, he cares for her and considers her one of his people (his “family”), and they are boyfriend and girlfriend (as seen in a physical relationship and occasional PDA), because they were stuck together for 6 years with just 5 other people. The show never makes that relationship look like a real romance story. And in those terms, one can argue that this is all the setup we need. This is a general tendency with Bellamy’s relationships – it wasn’t very different with Gina: while most of the other characters are at least occasionally shown to be in love with people they’re involved with, he gets these relationships that start off-screen, get little screentime, where he cares about the woman and likes her, but doesn’t really look like someone in love, especially not compared to how he interacts with his…platonic (?) partner, Clarke.

Oh Bellamy, you had no idea when you joked with Clarke back in 4x01!

It is such an interesting and heartbreaking end to the Clarke and Bellamy’s arcs in season 4 that she – after trying to be the Big Picture leader and save the human race for most of the season – ends up saving her friends, while Bellamy – who has tried to save any individual he could save today – was forced to leave one of the two most important people in his life to die.

Clarke never even knew for sure if they managed to open the hangar door and if they were alive. But while she thought she was sure to die (“My fight is over”) and was still putting all her efforts into saving her friends, no matter how difficult it was, she still has her survival instinct - after she had managed to align the satellite dish and finish her mission, she runs from the death wave into the lab.

Passing the Baton: I see what the show did there. Too bad the bottle was empty, as Jaha drank all of it in the season 1 finale. It’s also a sad reminder that Clarke and Bellamy never got to have that drink she was asking him to share in 1x09 and that he was offering her in 2z1x6. Will they have one in S7?

And the time jump is here. This scene is beautiful visually and thanks to Tree Adams’s music. I can even forgive the fact that Clarke’s lines are a bit too expositiony: she’s telling Bellamy about the bunker going silent and Eden being the only green spot on Earth, on the 2199 day that she radios him. But I guess she may be telling him the same every day, just in case it’s the first time he finally manages to hear her.

There are a lot of people who think that this was the best – or even the last moment when the show should have had Bellamy and Clarke get together. Many are really, really angry that it did not happen and that the show separated them instead. And this is where I completely disagree with a huge chunk of the Bellarke fandom. If they had both gone to space and started a relationship, that wouldn’t have been such a great resolution to this slow burn, wonderfully developed dynamic. But getting separated by a tragic twist of fate? Bellamy mourning Clarke and believing her dead for six years, while trying to honor her memory, while she is almost all alone and calls him every day without answer, for 2199 days? Bellamy learning she is alive and coming back, only for Clarke to learn he has a girlfriend now? Love triangle and a bunch of misunderstandings and a terrible conflict as a result of their separation? Coming back from it even stronger? Clarke “dying” again just a month after Bellamy got her back, and Bellamy forgetting everything else in his desperate quest to save her, brings her back with his love and faith in her? That’s a truly epic story, with the potential to be one of the best love stories ever seen on TV. Scratch that – it already is. I don’t even need to see them make out or say ILY for that to be true. I much prefer the story we got to the story that a lot of fans think they wanted.

Body count: Thousands of people, possibly millions, died all over the Earth – the majority of people who had survived the first apocalypse. Some in this episode – like everyone who was left out of the bunker. Others had already died before the timeline of this episode, as the death wave was hitting different places in the world at a different rate (as we saw in 4x01 with the people who died in Egypt). Among them were certainly the 365 Arkers who were left outside of the bunker, hundreds (thousands?) of Grounders, including Madi’s family and a lot of people from her community, and, no doubt, the wandering outcast Grounders (such as Zoran and Sienna from season 2). The show may have killed many people in seasons 1-3, but it really outdid itself here. At this point, as far as we know, only 1202 people are left alive on Earth, and 7 more at the Ring. We will later learn that 300 more humans are alive, in cryo sleep, on Eligius 4, and many others on Alpha.

Rating: 10/10 (because the problems I have with the episode are not big enough to compare to all that’s good about it)

#the 100 #the 100 rewatch #the 100 season 4 #the 100 4x13 #praimfaya #clarke griffin #bellamy blake #bellarke #bellamy x clarke #john murphy #raven reyes #emori #monty green #octavia blake

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yeah-oh-shit · 6 years ago

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Sherlock S5/Dracula Meta

I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. I’ve never written any fan theories or meta before (although I have so many), so please bear with me. I know my theory is going to sound a little out there, but I here it is: I think BBC Dracula is actually Sherlock S5, or else that it is somehow going to lead directly into it without warning.

Warning: this is going to be a long piece. I’m going to break this down as follows, because there are many different pieces of evidence to examine:

TFP, the story and the episode

Gothic Horror, HOB, Dracula

Vision, Timing, 20/20

The Final Problem

The first one is a fan theory I read probably 6-9 months ago that sadly I can’t find anymore (if you know who this person is, please please comment so I can give credit!). Basically this person was talking about how the naming of the episodes typically has some tie to what occurs in the original story by that same name, but how TFP has nothing AT ALL to do with the original story. In the original story, Sherlock goes face to face with Moriarty, and we are all lead to believe that both he and Moriarty die over the Richenbach falls. In all reality, ACD had meant to kill off Sherlock in this story, and stopped writing Sherlock Holmes stories for ten years before bringing him back in “The Empty House,” due to the public outrage and demand for more stories. So, the logic follows that maybe the one thing that they have in common is that they are both pitted as the end to Sherlock Holmes (in the story, he is dead; in the show we are given [force fed] an ending, it's made to seem like the final piece). The author of this theory also pointed out the show runners in this way are comparing ending the series with TFP (no canon Johnlock) to ending the show with Sherlock dead. We are left with a straight-washed version of John and Sherlock, with Mary’s voice controlling the narrative and that narrative being: It Doesn’t Matter Who You Are. The chemistry between John and Sherlock has been more or less completely lost throughout S4, and so we are left with this empty, dead-feeling version of them that doesn’t feel true to the characters we know and love. Even casuals thought S4 sucked.. this is why. They metaphorically killed them/killed the show.

Before S4 aired, Mofftiss had said that if they pulled off what they had planned, it would be the biggest thing in television. Well, what we got in TFP doesn’t really fit that at all, does it? What could they be referring to: A secret sister? Not really that epic. Even if we find out that most of S4 didn’t take place (either EMP theory or some other way of explaining it) that isn’t really a new trope. The audience discovering that they have actually been seeing things that are inside the main character’s head the entire time has been done over and over (Sixth Sense, A Beautiful Mind come to mind off hand). So what could this huge, history making move be? The argument that the meta I read previously made was that the show will come back (from the dead) unexpectedly, with no warning. That it will be a revival and in that revival, we will get canon Johnlock. I can’t remember if OP explicitly theorized that Dracula is actually Sherlock S5, but I think so.

Now, I was with this theory from the beginning.. there is just something that feels possible to me, despite the fact that it sounds far fetched. Dracula seems like a weird, random thing to do when Sherlock, Moftiss’s mutual obsession, isn’t finished. (Also creating an escape room to keep up hype is odd if the show is over, but I digress.) I just don’t believe Moftiss’s constant claims that they couldn’t get everyone together to film S5 because of schedules, that they wanted to take a break, that they don’t know if they will do more (when Moffatt has talked about wanting a 5 season arc before, not to mention John Yorke). And then there’s the fact that we know they have filmed scenes that we have never seen (Niagara Falls anyone?). All this evidence that S5 is definitely coming, combined with the fact that we haven’t heard anything about it but have heard about Dracula, sort of fell into place for me. Despite me being willing to buy into it, this theory still seemed a little far fetched. But wait, there’s more!

Victorian Gothic Literature, HOB, Dracula

A lot of people have been talking about how gay Dracula is going to be, and citing evidence of the connections between Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde (Dracula was written directly after his trial and Dracula is read as having characteristics of Wilde) as evidence. This, along with the extremely homoerotic last clip of the trailer, certain parts of the text that read as queer coded (I haven’t read Dracula, so I don’t know much but have seen some things floating around that seem v gay to me), and what we know about queer coding in Victorian gothic literature in general, all make a convincing argument. Gatiss actually recently confirmed (more or less) that Dracula will be bisexual in the upcoming series. And while I’m all about gay vampires (I am a huge vampire fan, seriously I love Vampire Diaries and True Blood and was one of “those girls” during the middle school Twilight craze), there is something about Dracula being Moftiss’s first cannon gay show that feels both disappointing and incongruous.

I want to bring up the All Ghost Stories are Gay Stories meta by heimishtheidealhusband. Now, this meta was written in 2015, in anticipation of TAB. Its great and you should definitely check it out if you haven’t/don’t remember it. The part I am most interested in is actually the reading of HOB, which I will get to in a bit. The takeaways from the first bit of the meta are that monsters and ghosts (to a different extent) are representations of queer desire in Victorian gothic literature. I’m summarizing drastically here, but as queer desire was obviously unacceptable in Victorian times, writers would obfuscate it by creating an “other,” a monster or ghost, that represented the queer or “inverted” desire and also demonstrated the fear and horror that society had for homosexuality. So the monster becomes the representation of homosexuality (homosexual acts or desires) that is pursuing the protagonists. Oftentimes, the protagonists were originally obsessed with the monsters or the concept of them, before actually confronting them, but are terrified and frightened when it actually occurs (think Dr. Jeckyll or Frankenstein). This meta also specifically talks about Dracula and vampires as the most queerly coded of the Victorian monsters: “Think about your vampire tropes: Dracula sneaks into your bedroom at night, lusting after your bodily fluids. The victim, meanwhile, is paralyzed with fear, but also excitement. (Oh hi phobic enchantment, I see you there!) The tension mounts until there’s a climactic penetration of fangs into flesh. And lots of sucking. Then think about the fact that the one doing the penetrating and the one being penetrated can be - and often are - both male.”

This all seems to bode great for our queer reading of the new BBC Dracula, yay! Vampires are clearly queer coded, and making it explicit makes sense and seems like a no-brainer. But I think it’s important to point out the ways in which this is also potentially (and likely) problematic. In Victorian times, there weren’t really many other options for portraying homosexuality. This is part of what makes what these writers did so brilliant - they were unable to show these desires as normal and healthy, because it was too dangerous and society didn’t see them that way (hence the use of the word “inverts” for homosexuals). Using the horror genre allowed them much more freedom to explore homosexuality, identity, and societal reactions to it, but also obfuscated the difference between reactions to homosexuality and the thing itself. In some of the stories, like Frankenstein, the monsters are actually misunderstood. Frankenstein’s monster only turns evil after experiencing society’s horrified reaction to it. However, in a modern context, I wonder about the message it sends to remake a Victorian story in a modern time and make the monster queer.

To flush this out a bit, I think it would be helpful to take a look at how Moftiss (and particularly Mark Gatiss) have played with this Victorian monster trope already, in Sherlock. Which brings us to HOB. heimishistheidealhusband points out that ACD’s original story “The Hound of the Baskervilles” would definitely fit into the scope of Victorian gothic literature, and their meta “All Ghost Stories are Gay Stories” does a particularly good job of breaking this episode down with the lens of Victorian gothic literature and queer coding. I am going to quote this reading here, and also also want to touch on the reading of this episode by Rebekah of TJLC Explained.

Here is what heimishtheidealhusband has to say about this episode: “Here’s why BBC Sherlock’s treatment of Hound is particularly beautiful. The creature – the hound – is our queer monster. In ACD’s Hound, the hound was indeed physically altered – he was painted in phosphorous to give him a hellish, glowing appearance. And the hound was actually the one to do the killing. In BBC’s Hound, there’s “the hound” – the monster that everyone is afraid of which is actually imaginary, and “the dog” – the real thing that actually exists. In other words, in this version, the “queer creature” in the horror story has been de-monstered. Homospectrality is being flipped on his head – rather than separating the man from the queer, they’re separating the queer from the monster. Because the dog isn’t inherently evil, it’s just the poison in the air that everyone is breathing that makes them fear it, and see a monster instead of an innocent dog. So in this treatment, if the dog/hound represents queerness, heteronormativity becomes a poisonous element in the air we all breathe.”

This is why it is so important that Hounds is plural (as opposed to the original story “The Hound of the Baskervilles”). They are emphasizing the differentiation between the two dogs, the differentiation between the monster and the queer. Rebakah of TJLC Explained also points out that despite all the conspiracy theories, there is actually no monster inside Baskerville, but rather a rabbit that glows “like a fairy,” (let’s all take a moment to remember the skipping dance and sing-song voice Ben does in this scene, in case it wasn’t obviously queerly coded enough). It’s hard to imagine a less-threatening animal than a glowing bunny.

Mark Gatiss has been very open about his love for horror and the gothic. He has studied the gothic writer M.R. James, and was involved with the BBC documentary about James that explored his “repressed sexuality.” He clearly loves and respects the genre, and is familiar with queer readings of Victorian gothic lit. In HOB, he chose to engage with the genre in a modern context, and to separate the monster from the queer. In doing so, he points out the inaccuracy and harm that coupling queerness with monstrosity generates. With this in mind, the choice to make Dracula feels like a step backwards, especially when you bear in mind that Gatiss has actually said that he isn’t really interested in gothic horror anymore. In an interview with Shadows at the Door in 2017, Gatiss stated: “I used to think nothing could exist without waistcoats and bubbling test tubes and now I’m actually more interested in modern horror; the gothic but in a modern context. I don’t think it has to be about the old and obviously I still love it but it doesn’t have to be about candelabra and castles. You can get the same feeling from modern methods, and in a way that is more frightening.”

All this isn’t to say that gothic horror or vampire stories isn’t still interesting and worthwhile as a concept, or that a canonically queer Dracula wouldn’t/couldn’t be badass. (I for one would love a Vampire Diaries remake wherein Damon’s character is a woman, but I’m off topic..). It doesn’t even mean that there can’t still be something complex or provoking in this representation for a modern audience. But it also feels dangerously close to repeating the queer coded (or even plainly queer) villain that we have all seen a hundred times from horror films and Disney movies. At best, still doesn’t seem particularly new or exciting, and at worst it could reinforce frankly problematic and dangerous stereotypes.

I am now going to analyze the actual trailer for BBC Dracula that was released a few weeks ago, because it is going to help me to illustrate this point. One thing that struck me most when watching it was just how horrific it really is. The 45 second long trailer includes: a fly that crawls into an eye, a bloody fingernail being ripped off, a blood covered hand, something that appears to be being birthed, a scary, old-looking Dracula with a bloody tongue, and bloody flesh that is being carved. There are at least 3 instances of mouths: the fangs at the very beginning, the mouth with bloody tongue, and the frame after the gunshot of a mouth that looks desiccated like a zombie, that only flashes for a split second. All in all, it’s not only scary, it’s quite disgusting. The three bloody or otherwise monstrous mouths that we see relate most strongly to the covert sexual tones of Victorian gothic literature (and also remind me of Moriarty’s oral fixation in TAB). These are some of the most disturbing of the images. While the intro fangs are pretty mild, the clip of Dracula’s frightening face and bloody tongue (which is followed immediately by the bloody flesh being carved) and the decayed mouth are both quite gruesome. If we apply the metaphors that we know from Sherlock, they are making some pretty damning connections. The mouths in-and-of-themselves could be read in a sexual way, but then there is the added fact that the decayed mouth appears directly after a gunshot, which we know has been tied to dicks/gay sex in Sherlock (and generally). The bloody flesh being carved on a table also recalls the food/sex metaphor in Sherlock, specifically reminding me of how disgusting the meal scene is in John’s wedding to Mary. Food and eating can be really disgusting, and this trailer makes a point to show us that. When we connect this back to the sex metaphor again, and give it a queer lens, we are once again being metaphorically told that queer sex is disgusting and horrific.

Whether or not Moftiss are purposefully making these metaphorical statements, they definitely went out of their way to make this variation of Dracula particularly scary, horrifying, and gruesome. It’s always possible that they are just hyping up the goriness in order to get audiences excited. It’s also possible that they are highlighting the disgustingness of Dracula’s monstrosity as a means of engaging with the public perception of homosexuality or that they will complicate the narrative in some other way. But even if we give them the benefit of the doubt here and assume they aren’t trying to paint queerness in a bad light, this highlighting of the disgusting nature of Dracula’s monstrosity doesn’t seem to push forward any kind of unique, modern narrative. We have seen this, this is exactly what Victorian gothic literature is all about. They needed to explore homosexuality through its repression, to make it monstrous, because they lived in a time when there were few alternative ways to explore it (except for maybe the example of our sweet “bohemian” boys - check out this meta from artemisastarte to learn more about bohemianism and queerness in Sherlock Holmes). But in our modern day, is this really that exciting? Is this the kind of queer representation we want and deserve in 2019 (soon to be 2020)? To me, the answer is no, especially in light of the incredible and complex work they have done in Sherlock toward building a queer love story that is normalized, and completely removed from any conflation with monstrosity.

The fact that Dracula is tied so heavily to Sherlock makes this distinction even greater. Gatiss said that they got the idea for Dracula from a still image of Benedict Cumberbatch on the set of Sherlock with his collar up. Supposedly it reminded them of Dracula and the BBC asked them if they wanted to make it. In an interview, when asked about Dracula in relationship to Sherlock, Gatiss called it a “stablemate” of Sherlock Holmes. I’m not really sure how we are supposed to take this, and he doesn’t explain at all (of course), but that would mean that they are in some way similar or connected. I think he doesn’t just mean that they both come from him and Moffatt, as that is rather obvious and was acknowledged in the question itself. Both shows are not only created by Moftiss, but written in the same format, produced by Sue Virtue, and shot at Hartwood Studios. They also really emphasize the connection to Sherlock in the trailer (which isn’t surprising because advertising), and also in the new Netflix description, which states only: “From the makers of ‘Sherlock,’ Claes Bang stars as Dracula in this brand-new miniseries inspired by Bram Stoker’s classic novel.” There isn’t even a background image, only a weird gray distortion on a black background.

Furthermore, there are also elements from Sherlock that point to Dracula, either directly or indirectly. In S4, when John is supposedly texting “E.” He asks “Night Owl?” and the response he gets is “Vampire.” It feels odd and out of place to mention vampires in this offhand way, as we have never really seen anything like this on the show. To be fair, a lot of S4 feels this way, but I believe that it is actually chock-full of symbolic meaning and that almost everything that we see that feels wrong or untrue to the show has a deeper meaning. What, then, is the purpose that this plays? Additionally, in the escape room (Spoiler alert for The Game is Now), there is a television in the first room (Molly’s lab) that is playing what is set to look like British news. In the newsreel at the bottom, they included the announcement that Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffatt are making BBC’s Dracula. Once again, this feels a little throwaway, or could be explained away as advertising (although the escape room is so fast-paced that having any time at all to look at the television, let alone read it, when it wasn’t explicitly part of the puzzles would seem rare). Once again, there is a subliminal connection made between these two shows that I would argue is purposeful.

The decision to make a gothic show that so completely plays on this horror trope, and then to tie it both explicitly and implicitly to the show that they have already done, which has a very different messaging around the gothic as it relates to conceptions of homosexuality, seems odd. In and of itself, a Gothic exploration of queerness is possible, but feels limited by its very nature. Gothic horror through a queer lens is about queerness and otherness being equated to and embodied by monstrosity. Dracula’s trailer seems to clearly be playing up this monstrousness. I want to reiterate that I don’t think making something like Dracula gay couldn’t be cool or interesting for what it is, or that there isn’t a way to engage with the gothic without it being problematic. But in comparison to what they are doing with Sherlock, it feels unimpressive. And in light of HOB, Dracula seems to go directly against the argument that Gatiss makes so beautifully, that queerness is harmless and very distinct from monstrosity, despite what the fog of homophobia might depict. To build up this narrative in Sherlock, then cut into the middle of it with something that is explicitly connected to it but symbolically making an opposite assertion feels counter-intuitive.

Vision, Timing, 20/20

Even with all this evidence, I don’t know that I would really believe they would go through the trouble to do all of this if not for the timing. Dracula is set to come out “soon,” but people have been speculating for this winter. That would make it the end of 2019 or beginning of 2020. Now I’m going to explain a little bit about my reading of HLV, which happens to coincide nicely with The Game is Now, and ultimately this theory as a whole.

Something that caught my eye in HLV is how much glass there is in its first scene. We open on a shot of CAM’s glasses sitting on the table. We are below them, looking up through glass (although we see later that the table is actually wood). Next we get a shot of lady Elizabeth Smallwood, reflected through glass so as to show her in double (which is particularly interesting given that she is repeatedly called Lady Alicia Smallwood, both by CAM in the text that flashes on the screen during his analysis of her later this episode, and in the S4 scene where she leaves Mycroft her card). Next we see the entire interviewing committee through glass walls (it continues but you get the picture). We are introduced to the concept of lenses, looking through them, and at times the distorted image created by them.

CAM owns a newspaper, and he controls people through rumors: it doesn’t matter what the truth is, it matters what people believe (what they see). (This sounds a lot like Mary in S4 to me). So we are introduced again (after TRF) to the concept of fact vs. fiction, truth vs. lie, and this time with the addition of lenses. What lens you view something through matters, has a bearing on how you read something, how clearly you see it (sounds kind of like the fog in HOB). By the end of HLV, we have been removed from the narrative enough, we can’t see completely clearly. We don’t know what has happened during the time between John and Sherlock’s confrontation with Mary and the scene at Christmas. We don’t see if Sherlock and John are on the same page or what Sherlock is planning.

This episode leads into TAB, followed by S4 fuckiness. In S4, there are many things that feel “off” but one of the biggest is that John and Sherlock are distant the entire time. In the beginning we get the indication that John is missing Sherlock, but then we see Sherlock acting as if he is closer to Mary than John, inviting her on cases in his place. She gets inserted between them completely, becomes part of the gang. After Mary’s “death” John blames Sherlock (in a feat of logic that is truly baffling) and we have them at their most distant in TLD. And then, they come back together again in TFP, but the warmth and closeness is missing.

This season makes it clear that Moftiss were writing in all the little things that made their dynamic romantic and their chemistry so clear. They were able to take that out, and they did so with intention. It is if we are seeing the show through a lens: through the lens of straight-washing, the lens or perspective that Mary (John’s wife, the symbol of a straight John Watson, a platonic John and Sherlock) narrates for us so thoroughly at the end of the series. (Also side note, this straight-washed version of the show also fits into the 5 part John Yorke structure with part 4 being the height of the antithesis or the “worst part” - I learned about York from garkgatiss’s meta). The heart of the show is John and Sherlock’s dynamic. This dynamic is clearly intimate and romantic and has been in every iteration of Sherlock Holmes since the original stories, despite never being explicitly canon. S4 really follows through on Moriarty’s promise. The heart of Sherlock Holmes is gone, missing, burned out.

Then we have the escape room [mild spoilers]. The entrance is Doyle’s Opticians; its filled with glasses. (Side note there was definitely a wall displaying glasses that were arranged by color to look like a rainbow). Once again we have the theme of lenses. Being in an optometry office, it’s interesting because the focus is obviously on correct vision. 20/20 vision. Vision is “right” when it’s 2020. (This wasn’t my realization, but someone else went to the escape room as well and wrote about it). So now, we have this idea of being able to see correctly tied to the number 2020. To the YEAR 2020. This is also interesting because one of the signs in Doyle’s Opticians read “You were told but you didn’t listen: coming soon.” Just another indication that we will be getting more (Sherlock) soon.

Now, finally, we come to what I see as some of the most convincing evidence about Sherlock S5 coming in 2020. It has to do with copyright laws.

In England, all of ACD’s stories are in the public domain. However, in the US, this isn’t so. US Copyright laws are different from the UK, so the last of the stories won’t actually enter the public domain until 2023. American copyright duration is 95 years from the date of publication. This is important because the Arthur Conan Doyle Estate is extremely protective of how Sherlock Holmes is portrayed in the media. It turns out that despite the fact that most of the stories are already in the public domain, BBC, CBS, and Warner Brothers have all gotten licenses from the Estate in order to make their shows/films. In 2014, the ACD Estate lost a lawsuit in which they were trying to argue that the characters are “complex” and that any use of the character (at all) was still valid under copyright laws (as not every story had entered the public domain) and therefore in need of a license from them. While some of the later stories are still under copyright, they lost the lawsuit and it was ruled that the character (as written in the earlier stories) is in the public domain. They sued Miramax for its production Mr. Holmes, which portrays an elderly Holmes, arguing that it drew from the later stories and therefore violated copyright. Miramax ended up settling to avoid litigation. The Estate is known for being litigious and basically doing its best to stay gatekeeper, hoard ownership, and generally extort money out of anyone who creates anything having to do with Sherlock Holmes. While the BBC has paid them for licenses before, I’m not sure how this clearly conservative group would feel about making Johnlock canon. Even if its not legally in their power to prevent it from happening, it doesn’t sound like that has stopped them in the past from suing basically anyone that has tried to create Sherlock Holmes material without their consent, and if that material in any way seems to come from the later stories, then they might have a case.

Which brings us to the Three Garridebs. Moftiss have said in the past that this is one of their favorite stories due to it being the story where Holmes shows his depth of feeling for Watson. As stated by Watson himself, “It was worth a wound–it was worth many wounds–to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask” Generally speaking, the fandom has posited that a Johnlock reveal may happen in a “Three Garridebs” moment. And do you happen to know the story that directly precedes the Three Garridebs? The Sussex Vampire. A story in which Holmes investigates a supposed vampire only to discover a loving mother who is attempting to save her infant child by sucking poison out from his wound. Kind of sounds familiar huh? A perceived monster, who is in fact nothing dangerous at all. Who in this case is the exact opposite of monstrous, is actually loving and gentle (like the real dog that is tellingly tied to sentiment, or Bluebell the glowing rabbit).

Both the Sussex Vampire and the Three Garridebs are part of The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, the last collection of stories. They were both published in 1924, meaning that both their copyrights run out in 2019. It will really only be possible for Moftiss to use material from the Three Garridebs for a queer storyline starting in 2020. And if we assume that this is their plan all along, that they have even potentially set it up in S4 (looking at you John Watson getting shot by “Eurus”), they have HAD TO WAIT until now. But they won’t need to wait any longer, starting in January.

Oh and by the way, here is an interview Martin gave recently in which he tells a story about how he had to literally give up the Hobbit because he was CONTRACTED to Sherlock S2 and they wouldn’t move filming on that. (Thankfully Peter Jackson moved filming around for him, so we still have him as Bilbo). So I would imagine that if S2 was contracted, and they were planning on making a 5 series show all along, that they are probably contracted for all of it. Which means all those claims that its just too difficult to get everyone together for filming are just another means of throwing us off the trail.

If they have been waiting for this copyright to expire, but also unable to tell us that that is why they are waiting, it also makes sense why they have stretched it out so much. It's even possible that they didn’t realize how horrible the ACD Estate was going to be when they first started filming, and had to adjust/drag it out so that they could finally do what they want to do, what they have been planning for from the beginning.

So there you have it: the ending of The Final Problem, an analysis of HOB, Dracula, and Victorian gothic lit, and finally the symbolism of lenses, correct vision, and copyright issues all leading up to 2020. I think S5 of Sherlock is coming. I’ve been feeling it, sensing something for the last few months. I think we can all feel it. And it might just be sooner than we thought.

---------------------------------

Thank you so much to my love @canonicallybisexualjohnwatson who co-developed this theory with me, edited this, helped me with the links, and was also the one to introduce me to Sherlock/TJLC, subsequently changing my life. i love you b.

#tjlc #johnlock #tjlc is real #bbc sherlock #sherlock meta #bbc dracula #sherlock

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wepon · 6 years ago

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in perpetuity

a game for three to eight people, using two sets of tokens (with at least 100 pieces each), at least one d20, at least one d10, pencils, and blank notecards.

the king is dead. but long live the king.

the CEO of a megacorporation has died, and you are their heir - all of you, as you are their clones, carefully groomed to be their replacement. but there can only be one ruler. outmaneuver your fellow clones to gain 51% of the company shares to ascend to your rightful place - or fail and be discarded as so much biological waste.

in character creation, players go around in a circle. all clones share the same starting skills, as they were trained identically. therefore, on each of their turns, a player either creates a skill with one point or adds a point to an existing skill, up to a maximum of five. the number of turns each player gets during character creation must be equal.

if there are: 3 or 4 players, each gets two turns 5, 6, 7 or 8 players, each gets one turn

(this will result in different starting skill totals for different numbers of players.)

each player should create a designation for their clone; i recommend using the former CEO's name followed by a number, greek letter or NATO phonetic code word.

designate one pile of tokens as the company stock and the other as wealth.

play proceeds in a series of rounds, known as quarters, that each represent three months of time. at the beginning of each quarter, every player receives one wealth token plus wealth tokens equal to the number of stock tokens they currently have (for the first quarter, this is zero). they then take any number of notecards, write an action on them and put it facedown, placing any number of wealth tokens (minimum one) on top. then, each player gets the opportunity to set a personal scene involving their clone. after all scenes have finished, notecards are flipped faceup, and the actions written on them are simultaneously resolved.

the actions written on notecards represent economic maneuvers characters take, usually against each other. the wealth put on any action is the cost of doing business; it is lost and returned to the token pile at the end of the round, unless otherwise said.

the basic actions are: ATTACK, target an entity to acquire some of their resources. this action must be directed at a specifc entity, either a player or the megacorporation. if the target does not have a defense, you may take any amount of wealth they have not assigned to an action OR one stock token from them. if they do have a defense, roll d20+the amount of wealth on your card, vs their d20+wealth (the megacorporation always defends with a flat d20 roll). if your result is higher than theirs, take any amount of wealth tokens from their defense card OR one stock token from them; if their result is higher, your attack fails. DEFEND, protect your assets against attacks. unlike attacks, this action needs no specific target. if someone attacks you, roll d20+the amount of wealth on your card, vs their d20+wealth. if your result is higher than theirs, your defense stands strong; if their result is higher, they can take the wealth on your defense card OR one stock token. if multiple players attack you at once, resolve them in descending order of who has the most wealth on their attack card. if one of the attackers chooses to take the wealth from your defense card, you are considered to no longer have defense against the rest of the attacks. GENERATE, use the economy to turn your wealth into more wealth. roll d20+the amount of wealth on your card. if the result is 11+, you recoup the wealth on your card, and if it's 21+ you double it. if it's 10 or under, you lose the wealth on your card as normal. SABOTAGE, work against a specific action (which must be decided at the time of creating the notecard). when sabotaging an action, you don't roll; instead, each wealth on the sabotage action is applied as a penalty to the target action's roll. in the specific case of sabotaging an attack that is not defended against, the sabotage functions as a replacement defense, including allowing the attacker to take the wealth on the card if successful - however, they cannot take a stock token from the saboteur, only from their original target.

in addition to the mechanical action, write a short description of what form the action takes - "developing a new line of children's cereal", "releasing damning information to the media", etc.

for ease of play, with contested rolls players may choose to instead add the difference between wealth totals between the two cards instead of adding the total wealth. for example, if a player is attacking with 21 wealth and a player is defending with 22 wealth, the attacker may roll d20 while the defender rolls d20+1.

for personal scenes, the player who sets up the scene decides the context and any characters to include, including whether they are playing as their clone or as a representative. other players may choose to include their own character, or pick up a character present in the scene. the primary purpose of these scenes is to flesh out your clone's life, but feel free to use these however you please.

if you dedicate a personal scene to practicing a skill and spend a wealth token, though, your character may increase a skill by 1 or learn a new skill at 1 (for any training that would take longer than three months to develop, you may assume your character has been implanted with the knowledge through clone-appropriate technology).

to resolve conflict in personal scenes, roll d10+any one relevant skill held by the clone (even if you're playing a representative). for conflict between characters, each player rolls and the highest result wins. otherwise, the player rolls against the world (which rolls a flat d10). at any point, a player can spend one wealth token to automatically succeed, or count as rolling a natural 10 in the case multiple players spend wealth.

any sort of personal, up-close interaction between clones directly should take place in a personal scene.

at any point, a player can retire their clone. they abandon the competition to become the next CEO, leave the megacorporation and start a regular life. they return any stock and wealth tokens to their piles. they can no longer take economic actions, although they can still have personal scenes and participate in the personal scenes of others; these should focus around their newfound life.

the game ends once a clone gains 51% stock tokens or if all other clones have retired.

notes: tatterpigsgiving is so much, i don't know how you do it @xxxdragonfucker69xxx

one thing i wanted to do was add in a way to have allies, characters represented by a notecard that you could use with actions, but i couldn't think of a way to make them work that i liked

can you kill a fellow clone? well...i don't know! i don't know if that should be the case. i don't think so. the megacorp would forbid it - they want one clone to succeed through economic skill, not thuggery. but i was very tempted to add in WTF-like rules, in which if anyone wants to add mechanics or change what's possible can roll d20+amount of wealth they want to spend on the roll. i do like the idea of WTF mechanics being used to portray the obscene power of the wealthy

#roleplay #i did it

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clarestrand · 5 years ago

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Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation prize Catalogue with text by Orit Gat.

The award will now be announced (virtually) on Sept 14th. For further info on how to join the webcast please consult The Photographers Gallery Website.

Image = Information

Orit Gat

1 A beginning

In Paris, an artist painting in a studio that used to be part of a monastery. She goes out and gets the largest drawing papers she can find. Surrounded by paint pots and brushes, it’s an image that belongs in a tradition of artists painting away in Parisian garrets, only this is not that story. What Clare Strand was painting in her Paris studio during a three-month residency at the Centre Photographique d'Ile-de-France in 2017 was a translation of pre-existing photographs that were ‘read’ to her over the phone by her husband in the UK. From across the English Channel, he would give her directions that would encode an image of his choosing, and she would paint it.

2 Transmission

Strand and her husband were following an existing model. The method they were using to transmit information was described in George H. Eckhardt’s ‘Electronic Television’, from 1936, in which he outlined how a photograph can be transmitted via code over telegraph. In this system, the original image is divided into a grid, with every square being given a value from 1 to 10. 1 is white, 2 has a tinge of grey, 3 is greyer, 4 darker and so on until 10, which is black. The initial source images from which Strand’s husband chose the images he would transmit to her were 10-by-8 inches, which they divided into a grid of forty-nine squares across and sixty down, each about 5 square millimetres. If it’s boring to read, imagine the couple’s phone conversations: he would call and say 24-2; 25-4; 26-5; and so on. Through conversation, with Strand following her husband’s direction, the language would form a representation of the original image. Like a human fax machine.

3 The result

Is a series of ten black-and-white paintings in acrylic on paper. The history of art brings forth associations and relations, from the development of the grid as a foundation for perspective in the Renaissance, to the nineteenth-century illusionism achieved through Pointillism. There are Gerhard Richter’s black-and-white paintings, László Moholy-Nagy’s telephone paintings, Agnes Martin’s feather-light grids. But the connection to the history of art crumbles in front of the actual framed paintings. They’re human, Strand says, as she reasserts that she is not a painter. They’re messy, imperfect. There are hairs that stuck to the paper, dust congealed into the paint. However, in installation shots of the whole series, they look like another kind of work. Photographed, the paintings seem faultless: the black, white and grey hues reminiscent of aestheticized black-and-white photography; the paintings look clean, their edges not frayed, the small mistakes blend into the frame. It’s like they have two lives, as object and as image. When I ask Strand which one matters more, she answers, ‘I don’t know. What I find ironic is that, as much I try to push “photography” into different mediums, I can never escape the camera and how it operates as a tool of representation. With each press or catalogue reproduction, the paintings are represented as photographs, which is somewhat at odds with the concept of the work – photography transposing into painting only then to be represented by photography!’

4 Utility

To talk about the history of art and about installation shots is to ignore how the objecthood of the paintings depends on their creation. This series, titled The Discrete Channel with Noise, is at once the result of and the documentation of communication and its possible failures. Looking at the paintings, I want to say they look pixelated, but that would make them more photo than painting, more final product than process.

5 The first man who saw the first photograph

The relationship between painting and photography always makes me think of Roland Barthes writing in his essay on photography, Camera Lucida, that ‘The first man who saw the first photograph (if we except Niépce, who made it) must have thought it was a painting: same framing, same perspective. Photography has been, and is still, tormented by the ghost of Painting.’ Later in the book, he writes about photography’s relationship to reality, or to the document: ‘No writing can give me this certainty. It is the misfortune (but also perhaps the voluptuous pleasure) of language not to be able to authenticate itself.’ The photo as confirmation of fact. That fact, that reality, is communicated over phone lines in The Discrete Channel with Noise. When we look at a photograph, what we’re looking for, according to Barthes, is knowledge that a thing, an event, happened. He writes about Polish soldiers in a 1915 photo by André Kertész: ‘that they were there; what I see is not a memory, an imagination, a reconstitution, a piece of Maya, such as art lavishes upon us, but reality in a past state: at once the past and the real.’ What we see, in The Discrete Channel with Noise, is a story about reality rather than proof thereof.

6 Whizzing through the air

When I meet Strand, she hands me an assortment of notes. She’s hesitant about it for a minute, as if giving me homework rather than help. Or as if she expects communication can fail, and thinks a list of references may offer a way out of an impasse. The history of Morse code; pigeon post between Paris and England c. 1870–71; Eckhardt; Cybernetics founder Norbert Weiner and American mathematician Claude Shannon’s information theory, which gave The Discrete Channel with Noise its title: Strand’s research does not explain as much as expand the work. And then in the notes is a quote from the 1973 movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory based on Roald Dahl’s writing, recreating Eckhardt’s transmission of images over radio. Here the character Mike Teavee, the winner of the fourth golden ticket, who loves this technology, explains: “You photograph something then the photograph is split up in to millions of tiny pieces and they go whizzing through the air, then down to your TV set when they are all put together in the right order”

Mike Teavee, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl (1971).

That it is possible to share an image, and the labyrinthine process of it whizzing through the air is in line with Dahl’s 1971 book, in which the candy factory includes an impenetrable room-sized machine that, when operated, makes a lot of noise, takes a lot of time, and then produces a single bit of chewing gum. Unimpressive until someone chews it and realizes it is as nourishing as a three-course dinner: tomato soup, roast beef with baked potatoes, blueberry pie and ice cream for dessert.

Proof: the overcomplicated can sometimes be amazing.

A lesson: also worth exploring.

7 Thirty-six images on a journey

The ten images in The Discrete Channel with Noise were chosen from a collection of thirty-six images Strand has compiled for a previous work, The Entropy Pendulum (2015), in which each of these photographs, which were taken from a tabloid newspaper’s archive, was eroded by the weight of a pendulum over the course of one day in an exhibition, then framed. Strand rephotographed the physical photos from the archive, creating a digital output that becomes a dataset ready for reuse. The subject of those images related to what Strand refers to as the subject of her work in general – magic, illusion, the paranormal, communication, transmission, the way people thought communication technologies were magical when they were first introduced, the way Alexander Graham Bell called the telephone a way to ‘talk with electricity’. How to read the transformation of these images through the process in The Discrete Channel with Noise These images are on a journey of losing and gaining information. The project is a metaphor, if not a realization, for what images do anyway: in flux, they move and shift in meaning.

8 Shifting in meaning

Why pay attention to shifts? Because shifts in context can mean that information is lost, or misused. An art historian friend of mine regularly points out that Alexander Nix, the founder and CEO of Cambridge Analytica, studied art history in university. Art matters, images matter, she wants to say. All channels of misinformation need to be decoded. Is there a present and a real, like Barthes thought there was in an only slightly less technological time than the one we occupy, today? Or is the subject of study now how realities are fractured across channels of communication?

9 An entire history of communication

The diagram used to explain Eckhardt’s ‘Electronic Television’ has a man sitting at a table in front of a large black-and-white image divided into a grid of a woman with short, curly hair who looks a bit like an early Hollywood film star. His sleeves are rolled up, his back a bit hunched, he is clearly concentrating. He holds a long pointer stick and taps information onto a device resting on the desk he is sitting at. The cable running from that device spirals into a growing network of telephone poles that reach a window, and from that window to a box on the wall, and straight from the box to a set of headphones that another man wearing a blazer (or is it a lab coat?) standing in front of a large grid, only partially completed with the recognisable top of the short-haired woman’s head. He holds a paint brush at the same spot the other man’s pointer is. Behind him on a table are 10 boxes of paint numbered from 1 (white) to 10 (black) and some paint brushes. The caption reads, ‘Fig. 26. A Simple Method for Sending Pictures by Wire or Radio.’

Visually, it matters that the example is always a woman and the transmitters and receivers are always men. The message is that even in new technologies, even in a new world, some old signals remain. That is what Eckhardt’s diagram exemplifies. An entire history of communication reinforces the idea of who gets to speak across these lines. It is therefore fitting that The Discrete Channel of Noise is structured and executed by a female artist.

10 A piece of Maya

When Barthes writes that ‘no writing can give me this certainty’, he is asserting photography’s relationship to what he calls ‘the real’. But as a writer, he must have known that it is the rest of the above-cited list – ‘a memory, an imagination, a reconstitution, a piece of Maya’ – that is one of the potentials of art: to reconstitute is a way of reimagining the world. After Cambridge Analytica, or in line with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I want to argue that the redefinition or the exploration of that real is the contemporary condition. We come to things with suspicion, some of which is about recognising the failures of the systems around us. But we also come to them with a sense of possibility, a remnant of the Maya or the three-course meal chewing gum: the idea that the world is a story, and it can be shared.

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pkgam · 5 years ago

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What Happened to Twitch?

Twitch used to be a pretty good website. I had really high hopes that it would be a competitor to Youtube. It is a live stream platform that was ahead of Youtube as Youtube took a while to do live stuff. It has videos as well such as of past streams or people streaming videos they made for viewing later, viewer interaction features, solid streamers, no audible magic, good mods/staff, etc... Now the issues with the site are virtually endless. Let me give you a rundown of various things I have experienced and I have heard others experiencing which you may or may not have experienced because it’s as if that issues are not even account-specific.

Lately when logging in, every time, they prompt be to get a 6-digit code from my Email to continue to login because they “don’t recognize” my device. Yeah, you know how on every other website that has verification things like this, it’ll keep track of what devices you logged in from so you don’t have to keep verifying? No matter what, it doesn’t do that for me and a bunch of others. It seems to work fine for others though. So it’s user-specific. I have even tried logging in from one PC, then logging into another off the same internet while STILL being logged in to that PC and it’ll ask me to verify on both. It should at least be able to tell it’s from the same IP, but nope.

Try reporting the glitches and problems to Twitch as well. You’ll get nowhere. A recent experience I had with them was I tried to resolve that 6-digit verification thing for months. I explain it, get what looks like a generic copy/paste or automated response that does not address the issue, I respond back saying that wasn’t it and explain it again, then get NO response back, but do get a response back with a survey on how they did. Needless to say I was not satisfied and explained it in a civil way. No response back from them for that either. They used to handle stuff like that so well way back. Like, I remember when The Speed Gamers migrated from Ustream back to Twitch that they were having layout trouble during one of their charity streams in that what they wanted to incorporate on their page couldn’t be done, so they messaged Twitch staff about it and they tweaked the page so they could. Stuff like that was amazing! I don’t see things like that happen anymore.

When finally being able to log in, I’ve noticed that oftentimes my status is set to “offline” when I always have it set to “online”. Alternately I have seen friend’s statuses going to idle despite them being active on the site. So that status part of the site is entirely borked. Moving on to other topics...

I think users knew when they implemented Audible Magic (basically Content ID for Twitch, automatically hitting videos) and played it off as a benefit to streamers so they can remove copyrighted music in their videos that it was going to go downhill. Remember that a lot of people went from Youtube to Twitch (Or Justin.tv) BECAUSE they were tired of Youtube’s horrible automated systems. Add automation in the mix and, well... it indeed went downhill.

Twitch is clearly inconsistent in their moderation now too. There was this one girl who frustratedly threw her cat behind her on stream and nothing came of it. But on the other hand, there was a girl who got banned for apparent dog yelps off camera with her being there, stating the ban was for animal abuse. Story: https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/twitch-streamer-furious-over-animal-abuse-ban-amid-alinity-controversy-1296710 Many’ more examples like that out there on various topics.

Also, ever since they implemented automatic moderation of words in chat, there has been a ridiculous amount of people punished for innocent things (you can briefly read what they post before it gets removed from view or use a browser extension to reveal them) because it can’t tell context. At least streamers can turn that off, but it was set to on by default which caused a lot of issues. Still’ does when people have it on as not everyone turned it off.

Streams have been getting very bad audio glitches for me in that they will get more and more distorted until I pause then play the stream. On top of that, the chat will stop scrolling with new messages at times, forcing me to scroll it down manually. With both of these, it’s like having to maintain two fronts while trying to interact. Not fun.

Speaking of trying to interact, ever since they implemented that stream delay of like 20 seconds to cheap on the servers, it has not been the same anyway. They eventually implemented a “low latency” thing which yields faster delivery at the cost of possibly buffering a lot, but it’s still longer than the 2-3 seconds it used to be. Just imagine trying to converse with someone face to face and they respond 20 seconds later first. It’s the most awkward thing to keep track of. (Smashcast doesn’t have that. Just’ saying...) It can be even worse if the stream player itself gets an error and you have to refresh, which does happen fairly often. Making you possibly miss the point the streamer talked to you. Trying to sort it out then just stalls the whole thing because they have to readdress you if you mention it to them which backlogs them responding to others and etc...

For the videos on demand (VOD) themselves, playback is often glitchy as errors happen midway through, they don’t play at all and seeking to a certain part is often very difficult as it doesn’t go where you click. Heck, I heard from others that sometimes you can’t even PAUSE a VOD as that functionality is glitched out. But pausing works fine for me. Why is that? Who knows.

Live streams aren’t much better as they have their own issues. I often get errors and have to refresh the page to get it to run again. Even when not getting an error, I noticed that I’m served a slightly-slower stream than others seem to get. So I have to pause then unpause the video every so often to get it to jump back ahead to the closest point I can see. Part of me wonders if the error and slightly slower stream are related, but don’t hold me to that. I have a good internet connection too.

Twitch streams also get deleted nowadays unless set up to into highlights. Given that many weren’t aware this happened before it was too late (you only had 14 days to save them if not a turbo/prime member and 60 if you are), a TON of content got lost. People argued that it’s to save money because of the hosting costs of video data being large. So rather than streams just being automatically turned into highlights as a precautionary measure, they just let them get wiped because they didn’t care. I’m not entirely sure about that “because” you can save streams to highlights as mentioned. So it’s just going to fill back up again since people now know of it, if not already has filled back up.

Twitch also got rid of PMs so past conversations you might have wanted to look back on or had to catch up on as a backlog were lost. You can do the same sort of thing in whispers if a person allows it in their settings, but what’s the point of getting rid of PMs?... Text is text regardless of where it’s located. This was one of those sorts of changes that I can’t figure out. I “thought” maybe they wanted to unify a private place to talk since both existed at once time, but why not just move the conversation to the other or not have both at the same time to begin with?

Another thing they get rid of for no reason is email notifications to streams you follow. They “say” if you don’t watch a stream for a while they’ll turn off email alerts to it. Which makes sense to not fill up someone’s inbox. Imagine for instance they stream 30 days straight and you don’t go to any of them as sort of a break. That’s 30 emails that are useless to you. Except it doesn’t work. Even streams I watched regular like Bob Ross got email alerts disabled. You can tell that they keep track of when you click an Email link to someone’s stream too because in the URL you’ll notice it recognizes you came from the Email. So there’s no excuse. Oh and there’s no way to toggle that automated disabling of alerts to off as far as I’m aware. So you just have to deal with it. At least they do seem to be consistent about telling you when it does turn off email alerts, but get ready to enter that 6-digit login code just to fix the alerts regardless if the person is streaming or not.

After the Amazon buyout, eventually they started pushing Twitch Prime as well, basically another paid subscription thing like Turbo, only with Amazon benefits added on it. But all the things they push as “prime loot” are complete garbage. Stuff like Raid: Shadow Legends which is hardly a “game”. What made them even think a community of gamers would be into that? Well, maybe they did realize that, but did it anyway as a business partnership for the moolah.

I get the feeling that business partnerships are what’s going on with all the Valorant stuff popping up as well. Only with streamers being able to take advantage of it. For example: People found out to try the game, they need to watch any Valorant stream with drops enabled for a for 2 hours. That lead to people going to streams just for that invite. Many people. Artificial-inflation amounts of people that encourage people to stream it for said numbers and Twitch recommending channels playing it like mad to people, lol! So yeah, I’d be very surprised if it wasn’t a business partnership.

You can find many more examples out there of people may or may not having a bug for things, but this should be enough to explain that Twitch is a complete mess. Every single aspect of it. It’s in a state like Youtube where everything is broke and they are ignoring users who message them telling about bugs (which they claim they encourage people to do and they listen to) or maybe are just unwilling to fix any of them even if they know about them. Who knows because they don’t communicate like they used to.

Your thoughts?

Thanks for reading and have a good one!

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