#Cognitive Poetics

[marcogiovenale]

'buzdokuz', issue #22: "cognitive poetics"

“Buzdokuz”: release of the 22nd issue: Cognitive Poetics Updating the connections between poetry-criticism-theory with each new issue, Buzdokuz now explores “Cognitive Poetics” at the threshold of the digitalised age. Buzdokuz opens with Hayriye Ünal’s article “Introduction to Cyber-Cognitive Poetics”. Cognitive Poetics is put forward as a result of the information technologies and their…

[kenobihater]

the fact that sco's watching blake through the window when blake's standing in the yard in the very spot where sco watches him get stabbed to death. sco is unable to reach him in the yard (unable to help). all he can do is watch

[worktheraft]

thinking about how if Discovery is the equivalent of Hal's body then after the Pod Bay Doors incident, Dave's ejecting himself forcefully into the vessel (in a Floridian way) would be viewed as an involuntary violation of bodily autonomy and integrity, an act of violence and a breaching in the body's outer boundaries and This Could Mean Things

[papirouge]

I hope tate stays in prison and rots. He moved to romania, made a mockery of how the police can be bribed there so he could get away with anything, bounced around, then got beaten up in moldova with his brother for trying to pick up local girls there (remember when he converted to islam? And only talked about how only women were going to hell Lmao all haram what he was doing but whatever), then left for Dubai to brag about laws there being so perfect (hot bed for sex trafficking by men there too) only to come back to Romania, harass a teenager because shes focused on the environment on twitter and get his ass handed to him by not only her but the LOCAL POLICE OF ROMANIA FOR SEX TRAFFICKING God is good and his timing is perfect lmaooo

God is sooo good tbh. It was such a good year for Black women too since several media figures who publicly disrespected us got into serious trouble this year:

Kevin Samuel, a Black incel guru, who made his entire branding on dunking on Black women got found dead after having sex with a prostitute. What a tragic end for a man who mocked Black women for being ugly, masculine and fated to end alone. But ultimately dude is the one who died wasted, alone, found by a prostitute in a hotel room. Tragic🤍

Nikita Dragun, a transwoman who is known to say transwomen look better than real women and argued women stole their style from transwomen, and once made a "Imagine being Black? I could never" tweet, got jailed in a MALE prison after assaulting police officers (thank God such a menace wasn't allowed in a women's prison)

Tory Lanez found guilty for shooting Megan Thee Stalion💅🏾 As a reminder, Megan has been clowned for years over this, with incels and brainwashed women saying she lied, never got shot, etc.

2022 has been avenging Black women left and right and I'm really grateful for that🤍

Back to Tate.

I'm absolutely APPEALED by the amount of conservatives and antis obsessively using Epstein and Ghislaine as some sort of gotcha to deflect from whatever is coming for Tate. A few days ago I already called out Conservatives lack of consistency when it came to call out evil doers depending on whether they were favoring them or not. That's why then went off against Kim for the whole Balenciaga scandal, while not peeping a word about Kanye who was as much linked to this company since he ran catwalk for them a few months prior to this fiasco.

By frantically being like "b-but what about Ghislaine/Prince Andrew!!!" they show that they don't care about sexual trafficking/pedo networks, otherwise, they wouldn't downplay the fact that one (alleged) offender responsible over the fact that others are roaming free. Yes, other criminals have to be prosecuted, but people aren't allowed to celebrate one being down?? Should we, like, prosecute Everyone offender in the same time so yall finally stop deflecting on anothers to downplay such achievement?? "bUt wHat abOut EpSTeIn LiSt???" Tate is THE list. Those idiots are so hyperfocused on Epstein they can't remotely handle the fact that several networks can coexist🤦🏾‍♀️

Tate being jailed doesn't mean no other offender isn't going to get busted anyway but these people looooove acting like people couldn't care about more than one predator. "people rejoicing at Tate have been reaaal silent about Ghislaine/Epstein" is such a retarded strawman that is easily disproven by the fact that there are countless of people (and yes, even Liberals/Leftists) actually who exposed this scandal and have bee asking for names....

And let's not forget how these idiots don't seems to understand that the Romania police did it's job by arresting an offender on its own soil. Why do they feel the need to talk about Ghislaine or prince Andrew when they're not Romanian citizens or on this country soil... If they have a problem with the UK or US police system not investigating their own share of offenders, they should address their grievances to their own police system and stop trying to deflect from the achievement of the Romanian police or bothering twitter users for not doing enough when this is the police job to bust criminals, not random netizens....

Look how they're defending Tate saying he "allegedly" sex trafficked people, when they've been arguing for years some people were straight up pedophiles just based off their name being on Epstein travel logs..... Sorry but the math ain't mathing : if you have the energy to argue someone is a pedophile bc they ordered pizza and travelled along Epstein, than you shouldn't be wishy washy to call Tate a sex trafficker with all the evidence that is around, especially when dude is pretty open about what he's doing (migrating to Romania itself is indeed super sus).

Tbh this hypocrisy is what's angering me more than Tate and his antics. Tate is an idiot but seeing other idiots acting like they were soooo much smarter than everyone in the room because they refuse to see the obvious is absolutely infuriating. They are so far up their own b*tthole they can't even manage to see the light of reason SMH

[treesah]

FUCK it’s 中秋节 and I meant to go to Hmart and scope out their mooncake selection because I hate lotus seed paste and that’s the only filling Costco sells but it completely slipped my mind because I’ve been living in an ADHD brain fog fugue state unnecessarily for the past week (pharmacy was out of Adderall, I thought I was out too, but actually I had a full bottle secretly stashed in, of all places, the laundry room, which I discovered when I was consolidating all my Tide pods into one container)

Anyway there’s no point because the only good filling you can get in the US is 五仁 (every year I think of the barbecue pork ones I ate when I lived in Vietnam and cry because no one here, not even Chiu Quon Bakery in Chinatown, stuffs barbecue pork in their mooncakes) and everyone else likes that filling too so they’re gonna be all out at Hmart and I don’t have the motivation to trek all the way to Argyle or Chinatown for the good stuff

[yakourinka]

oh god no is it three houses discourse time again

[atticrissfinch]

Father's Day | (joel miller x reader) (18+)

A Meet Me in the Back Oneshot

pairing: sleazy gas station clerk!joel miller x fem!reader summary: Father's Day isn't your favorite day. Joel tries to make up for that. warnings/tags: [18+ MINORS DNI] age gap (no specifics), daddy!kink, praise!kink, ass-eating (f receiving), fingering, a lot of fucking angst and fluff, kind of hurt/comforty ig, reader wears joel's boxers, a lot of Complicated Father Feelings on both sides for these knuckleheads, idk where this came from word count: ~2.1K | ao3 a/n: this came out of NOWHERE but suddenly i really wanted to write a little something for Father's Day. This takes place on their first Father's Day together, so a few months post-part 6. Am I writing this to heal some of my own feelings about this holiday? who's to say, really. but i hope you enjoy this little surprise <3 Un-beta'd and barely proofread so I'm sorry if there are glaring mistakes. I just wanted to get this out on Father's Day :)

Series Masterlist | Masterlist | Kofi

“Bit of a weird day for you, I take it?”

You blink out of your zoned-out state, some guy with poofy hair waxing poetic about the Easter Island heads being planted by aliens on Joel’s television (“His name is Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, baby.” “You couldn’t spell that if your life fucking depended on it, Joel. Don’t act like it’s a crime that I don’t remember his name.”).

“Hmm?”

“Today. Father’s Day. Bit of a weird day?” He asks again, pulling one of your bent legs into his lap to stroke his thumb along your thigh.

“Oh,” you say, your mind still drifting back from elsewhere. “Yeah. A bit.”

Joel nods in your peripheral, bending down to place a kiss on the hinge of your knee.

“‘Bit’ might be an understatement, actually.”

Because it is. It’s very difficult to describe your feelings about your father. Even more difficult now that he’s dead, been dead for years. He provided a home for you, bought you the necessities to live, ensured that you never went hungry or thirsty or cold. But he gifted you little else, other than crippling emotional insecurity and an inability to recognize your own achievements as good enough. It’s a bizarre cognitive dissonance that you’ve yet to fully process in your years since he’s been gone.

So, yes. Father’s Day is a bit weird for you.

“You wanna talk about it?”

You worry your bottom lip and start to move your leg out of his lap. “Not particularly.”

“Hey,” he objects, clinging to the back of your knee and hauling it back, “that’s alright with me, little sugarplum. We don’t gotta talk about that fucker if you don’t want. Lord knows I don’t wanna talk about mine.”

And he doesn’t, as far as you’ve noticed. You know barely anything about Joel’s own father. Just that he never talks about him, and he gushes about his mother in contrast. You have some creeping suspicions about his father. The way he was. You have reason to believe that he was significantly worse than your own. But he’s refused to let that get in the way of how he behaves.

Joel has a lot of sides to him, you’ve come to discover. None of them terribly violent, but a very do no harm, but take no shit type of vibe follows him around. You’ve found that other men are not eager to fuck with him. He has this undercurrent of threatening energy when another man starts to act up around a woman. You remember how he was around Nate.

Don’t remember askin’ you a goddamn thing, son.

Those pieces put together lead you to believe that his father was not the most respectful of his mother. Or kind to her at all. He’s never said as much, but you’re pretty good with context clues. You don’t think you’d ever ask, not unless he offered. But you maintain your sensitivity about the subject. He can tell you in time if that’s what he wants.

There’s a sort of comfort in him clinging to your leg, clinging to you in the manner he just did. On any other day, you might not think anything of it. Just Joel, being horny, being himself, wanting to touch you.

But today…today it feels an awful lot like “I want you” and “You’re good enough” and “I’m not leaving”.

A lot like “I’ll be the daddy yours never was”.

You feel a tightness in your throat, a stinging behind your eyes as you study his grip on your leg, his thumb pressing into the flesh, stroking along your skin .

“I want you.”

Stroke.

“You’re good enough.”

Stroke.

“I’m not leaving.”

Stroke.

You mutter, your voice thick, “Daddy?”

A crease indents between his brows as his free hand comes to cup your cheek. “What, baby?”

“I’m…I’m good, right?”

Slight confusion crosses his face. “Baby, I don’t…what do you mean? Good?”

Tears prick at your waterline as you say, “Like I’m good. I’m a good girl.”

“Oh, sugarplum,” Joel breathes, shifting onto his knees to straddle your hips and hover over you as he takes your face, framing it in his hands. “You are the goodest fuckin’ girl I ever met. Beautiful-est, sexiest, most perfect girl.”

You blink and a tear breaches containment down your cheek. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. ‘Fact I think the worst thing you’ve ever done is shack up with this ol’ bag o’bones,” Joel jokes, the corner of his mouth quirking up slightly.

“I don’t,” you say quietly, lifting your fingers to drag through his beard, and Joel’s eyes flutter closed at the contact. “I think you’re one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. You make me feel so fucking good. All the time.”

Joel sighs, pivoting his head to the side to kiss your palm and mumble into it, “Man ain’t a man unless he’s makin’ a woman feel good. Don’t matter the kinda woman. If you’re hurtin’ her in a way that don’t feel good to her, you ain’t a man.”

You run your fingers through his hair and dip your fingers under the dangling hem of his shirt, sliding through the delicate wires adorning his rounded belly. “I like how you hurt me, daddy.”

You can see his cock stiffening in his pants, pressing against the seam, and you had already been wet since he positioned himself above you.

“I know you do, darlin’ girl. You like that daddy hurts you real good, huh?”

“Yeah,” you exhale as Joel’s hand creeps between your legs, rubbing circles into your clit through his boxer briefs you had stolen to lounge in.

“Do somethin’ for me, babygirl,” he requests, observing your face as your eyelids dance and your hips surge toward him.

“Anything,” you whisper, bucking into his hand.

He sinks down to press his lips to your ear, his hot breath sending a shiver down your spine. “I want you to forget all about that fucker who called himself your father and didn’t deserve it. You’ve got a new daddy now, don’t ya? And he knows exactly how to treat ya.”

You gasp as two of his fingers slip inside the fly of his boxers, touching your pussy skin-on-skin for the first time since this wretched day began. And it feels healing.

“Yes, daddy,” you pant, rolling your hips into his fingers as they deftly work your clit under them. You can already hear yourself sopping and wet beneath his movements, slipping between your lips and massaging you torturously as you whine.

“This day ain’t for him anymore, babygirl. Not today, not any year after. Who’s it for now?”

You breath hitches on a moan as a finger teases at your entrance, presses inside. “For you, daddy,” you reply, gasping as his thick finger glides inside your slick heat.

“That’s right,” he rasps, fitting his second finger in along with the first and rubbing at your clit with his thumb through the soaked material of his boxers. “Good girls like you who have daddies that care about them, you know what they get?”

You feel yourself barreling embarrassingly quick to your orgasm, but it’s really more of a testament to how well Joel knows your body and your pleasure at this point in your journey together. He tears you apart like wet tissue paper in his hands, like it takes a single brain cell to send you spiraling. And aren’t you blessed that he has at least one to spare.

“Wh-what do they get, daddy?” You manage to moan out, preparing yourself for whatever filth he has prepared to gift you with that will send you floating through space once it leaves his lips.

Joel captures your mouth with his in a sloppy kiss that has you gasping as you edge closer to your climax, then growls against your lips, “Good little girls with caring daddies on Father’s Day get their tiny, wet little slits fucked until they cry. Don’t they?”

Your mouth falls open in a loud, shameless moan as your hips jut forward, pressing into his hand as you feel your cunt pulse against him in powerful waves, your face flooding with heat as he fucks you through it with his fingers, groaning against your mouth as you come for him for what is likely the millionth time since the first. And yet it still rocks through your body like lightning, leaving you boneless and fried at your ends.

Your chest pounds as Joel pulls soaked fingers from your borrowed underwear and shoves them in his own mouth, sucking off the flavor of your pleasure at his hand with a passionate moan.

“Not fuckin’ enough,” Joel grunts, gripping the band of the boxers and jerking them down your hips, tossing them over the back of the couch and situating himself onto his stomach as he spreads your shaking legs wide in front of his eager mouth.

“Daddy, I’m—” you squeak out, your clit still throbbing and sensitive with your first orgasm as he breathes over it hotly.

“It’s Father’s Day, baby,” he admonishes, gazing up at you from between your thighs, “The least you can do is let me stick somethin’ in the pair of socks you got me. Come inside them like a horny teenager alone in his bedroom,” he teases, licking a long stripe from your asshole to your pussy, flicking at your clit.

“Jesus Christ,” you sigh, but you dig your fingers into his hair regardless. “You can come inside one sock. This sock,” you clarify, slipping two of your fingers inside your cunt.

Joel is quiet for a second, something clearly unusual for him, and you lift your head to glance down. And you see a man mesmerized by the motion of your own fingers fucking into yourself, his lips parted and eyes glazed over in lust.

“Fuck me. Keep doin’ that,” he mutters, settling his chin onto the cushion of the couch and spreading your asscheeks to mouth hungrily at your asshole.

“Fuck, daddy,” you whine, tugging at his hair as you fuck yourself with your fingers, thumb finding your clit in tandem.

Joel groans, face buried in your ass as you feel the sharpened tip of his tongue pushing past the tight ring. Heat burns in your stomach at the sensation, something that he doesn’t do often, and you think it’s because he knows it feels too fucking good to indulge all the time.

But he eats at you ravenously, plunging his tongue inside you in staggered tempo with your fingers in your cunt, and another orgasm is building just as swiftly as the first. The bite of his fingernails into the meat of your ass has you keening with overwhelm, so many parts of you being stimulated simultaneously, and it sends you crashing hard. Your clit beats wildly against the pads of your fingers, your cunt squeezing around your fingers, and your asshole contracting on Joel’s tongue as the rush of pleasure floods your body again. Joel’s moans vibrate against the delicate puckered skin, sending shockwaves pulsing through you as you attempt to come down.

Joel emerges from your other hole and bites kisses into the softness of your cheeks, sucking and dragging his tongue along the broken skin that nobody will see but him.

“Fuck,” you gasp, heart pounding in your chest and fingers still wound in his hair. You pull wet fingers from your pussy and brush them over his damp forehead, knowing full well that he doesn’t mind the mess.

“So fuckin’ good for me,” he rumbles against the back of your thigh, continuing a trail of kisses until he’s up your stomach, over your tits, and back at your mouth. And maybe you shouldn’t be kissing him when he just got done tongue-fucking your asshole, but you can’t bring yourself to give a shit when it comes to this man.

His hands glide up the backs of your thighs, reaffirming the spread of them as he tucks them into the hinges at the backs of your knees, his violently hard cock, newly freed of its confines, knocking and dragging at the tired seam of your cunt.

“You heard what daddy said about fucking your slit ‘til you cry?” Joel asks, snagging your bottom lip between his teeth and letting it fall back in place with a wet slap.

You gaze back up at him and nod with a whimper.

“That what you want me to do?”

You nod again. “Yes, please, daddy.”

“Alright then,” Joel says in a low rumble, taking his cock in his grip and lining himself up with your opening as he strokes your warm cheek with his other, “Then Father’s Day ain’t even close to finished yet. And seems like I got buncha shitty ones to make up for. So you better buckle in, my sweet little sugarplum. Daddy’s got a score to settle.”

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[chocochipjewel]

Yapping about Belos and his ending excessively while also analysing him to the best of my ability under the cut

So given how much art of him I've reblogged by now, it really shouldn't come as a surprise that Belos is my favourite character from the Owl House.

I could talk about him for HOURSS but I just want to talk about 2 of my favourite moments of him to highlight the parts of him I love the most.

This moment in Hollow Mind, when he gets the key in his hand and you can see the light in his eyes. It's the only time his eyes have the distinct shine in them like every other character has all the time, and it's cause of the key he's holding. The key to the human realm is the only thing that gives him that shine cause it's the only thing he genuinely cares about. Everything he's doing is to go back home and revel in glory, which, while selfish, adds so much to his character. He's not doing this JUST for power, he became an Emperor just to tear his own creations down. I just find something extremely poetic about that.

And the second moment -

THIS MOMENT. THIS MOMENT IN KING'S TIDE AJDHSJSHSJS

I'm still mad these flashbacks were never brought up in any big way cause THEY REALLY SHOULD HAVE BUT AHSKSJS I'M GETTING AHEAD OF MYSELF.

Belos reliving his worst memories was always a concept that was going to be interesting because it's an insight into what really gets into the head of our main antagonist. What does the guy who is everyone else's worst fear have to fear. And the answer is himself.

The 3 memories he sees are him approaching Caleb with the knife, the actual murder as pictured above, and the creation of the grimwalkers.

What really gets me is that his eyes are wide when he recalls the first memory, but they look smaller in the second memory (in the screenshot). Maybe it's just the angle but I always interpreted it as his expression shifting to be one of genuine sadness for this particular memory. Because the mere fact that his most personal crime is also his worst memory is such an interesting concept. How does he live with that sort of guilt and worse, keep doing those same crimes but WORSE?

All of Hollow Mind could just be here really and I wouldn't complain. It's THE episode for Belos fans that really allowed us to dig into him, and the mere fact that he's consciously scratched off Caleb from all the happy memories as if to justify his own fratricide is a level of desperate coping that I just find so very interesting ajdjhsjjs

Not to mention that his inner self is a child, which, while a pretence by him, could still say something about how in his head, he still has not grown up and is still playing pretend, still playing witch hunter with every version of Caleb he creates, still playing god to finally achieve a fantasy so very childish and so frankly basic that it makes anyone watching from the outside think "wait, that's it? That's all this is for?" AND THAT'S THE POINT

Cause none of this needed to happen. None of this has a greater value than Philip trying to chase after lost dreams. All the plans he made, all his great power and his great empire amounts to nothing because he himself plans to destroy all of it to chase that childhood dream. Just like Luz, he entered the Boiling Isles to find a home, only his home was Caleb and he was never willing to love new things in the Isles, while Luz loved so much she literally changed the lives of everyone she met by loving them. And unlike Luz, Philip never grew out of that mindset, only burying it in layers and layers of lies and half truths.

In general, his relationship with Caleb is for sure the most interesting part of his character to me. The fact that he both repeatedly murders and repeatedly creates new grimwalkers in an endless cycle and then hallucinates Caleb looking at him with disdain implies so much about his dependancy on Caleb and the deepest parts of himself that know what he's doing is wrong. The parts that have broken free from the layers and layers of cognitive dissonance and have accepted that he was wrong, without any more justifications.

And now, to 'briefly' rant about him in season 3

Thanks to Them was juicy for character exploration, but I wish we actually got to see him react to the human realm properly. It's everything he's wanted, it's the one thing that still brings light into his life but the world he returned to would absolutely hate him. He's done all this for nothing. I wanted so badly to see how he copes with his guilt then, but they were short on time so I get it.

For the Future's hallucination scene makes this even more interesting cause of the depiction of him actually seriously suffering from something like hallucinations. It was dark as hell, and it was really interesting.

And then... WaD. All in all, a great finale. The only real big problem I had with it was Belos' ending.

After so much buildup to his depth and his motivations and his guilt and all his lies slowly collapsing around him, after everything he did to so many people, he deserved a better death. I don't think he didn't deserve death, I just think it happened too quick. Where was the final cathartsis from all his victims shunning him (Luz staring was perfect don't get me wrong, but the whole Hexsquad deserved to be there). Where was the moment he would finally no longer be able to lie to himself and he would be forced to accept that he did EVERYTHING he did, made all those great sacrifices, tortured so many people, just to fail and be at his victims' mercy after accomplishing nothing?

I understand the finale was juggling many MANY characters and plotpoints, but that's not stopping me from wishing for a better ending.

I wish I had had the motivation to draw something for this like I'd hoped, but a brief description about what kind of ending I'd have wanted will have to do.

I wish Luz saw his memories in the place in between with Papa Titan. It would reinforce her arc of feeling like they come from the same place too, if she saw Caleb leaving Philip and Philip's original goal of just wanting to get his brother back. I wish Luz saw all his "sad" memories and really started to question herself.

And then I would have wanted Papa Titan to shoot that down regardless, and then explain that while Belos may have started out a victim of his circumstances as an orphaned child in a cult, the Isles gave him chances to change. Memories of Philip in the Isles seeing Caleb happy, being given chances by witches, being given so many chances to change, and rejecting them accompanying this scene would be ideal. Really hammer in that he aas responsible for his own suffering and that he has absolutely no excuse for what he did to all his victims.

And then, in the final death scene, as he claims that as humans they are better than witches one last time, I wish the ghosts of all his victims showed up to prove him wrong. Every witch and grimwalker who choose to be better than him before they fell. Every member of the Hexsquad who believed in him and his regime at one point. Every single one of them a reminder of how his lies can't even convince himself anymore.

And finally, his own brother, a fellow human, who appears before him. I imagine Caleb looking at him with pity, almost sympathy, before a quiet acceptance comes onto his face and he turns away from him. He walks towards the crowd and chooses their side, next to Evelyn. Neither Caleb nor Luz say a single word. There is nothing left to be said to him anymore. Every single person on the Isles, human or witch, has turned against him now.

If anything could break his will, I think this would be it. I imagine him phasing through his different forms, trying to find a way to justify himself in each one, gradually desolving into desparate screams, before the boiling rain melts him away like in canon (except without the stomping please).

Aaaand that's it, no more notes. Thanks so much to all the Wittebane fans in the community who have kept his fanbase fed when the show didn't meet our standards and who prompted the line of thought that led to this post.

There are so many of you all who inspired and made my fandom experience fun and created so much out of just Philip, Caleb, and Evelyn (and all your OCs of course!!) so I'm just going to shoutout the ones I remember off the top of my head -

@talisman975

@jess-the-vampire

@calebsrottingcorpse

@owlyhouse

@anona1-mous

@captainmera

@moonmeg

@azure-blaze92

@a-magpie-in-the-bi

@a-magpie-in-gravesfield

This is no particular order and I'm surely missing more so this is by no means exhaustive, but this is just a shoutout for those who kept this fandom going. Y'all are the real troopers for sure.

That's all I got, but I'm posting some old Belos art soon! Cheers all, and may the terrible awful no good goo babygirl keep inspiring us for all the great art <3

[transparencyboo]

For the last two weeks or so I've been playing the Mega Drive dungeon crawler Shining in the Darkness. I've recently been going through all the various action-RPGs the system had to offer and kinda found myself lusting for more, so I expanded the scope.

Shining in the Darkness had one of those cover arts I vividly remember seeing in game stores during the 90s, I understood already back then that whatever this was would be too complicated for my feeble preschool brain, but it had a shiny glossy allure that still beckoned to me with promises of daring adventures and grand battles. Questions lingered in my head: Who is that evil bastard zapping sparks at Cavin from the Gummi Bears? Why has the king entrusted the safety of his kingdom to a meagre boy and his two misfit friends?

Well, it turns out that big bad guy is called Dark Sol, the bane of all game difficulty discourse, and the reason the king has enlisted three poor kids is because there is no one else to rely on after your daddy went missing. Everyone else just sorta gives up along the way.

My initial conclusion of this game was to commend my young self for the striking assessment, my five year old self would never get anywhere in this game between the English text, abstracted navigation and number crunching battle mechanics. Shining in the Darkness is a bona fide classic dungeon gauntlet endurance simulator, where you traverse vanishing point block tunnels and encounter enemies. I've played one or two games like this before, like the original Phantasy Star, but this time a new desire struck me. I wanted to draw maps. Maybe I'm just getting older and more patient, leading me to wilfully ignore easily available resources online.

By my recollection, this is the first time I've dedicated myself to playing a game like this. Usually I just resort to my sense of direction, which I've gathered seems to at least be above average, since anytime I go anywhere with anyone I always end up playing shepherd so they don't get lost. Worst case scenario I'll just fall back to mapping efforts by online heroes from years past. For Shining in the Darkness I persisted blindly about halfway through until I admitted to myself charting a map of the labyrinthine caves would be a lot easier. Luckily, the game allows you to spend 1 MP to see a chunk of where you've walked, meaning I could get neatly organized segments to copy by hand.

Perhaps my biggest takeaway from this endeavour was how much of the game experience was expressed through this map project. I spent just as much time slaying beasts as I did counting tiles and filling them out with my pencil. It became a natural counterbalance that provided vital pacing to the game mechanics. Walking, fighting, charting. In turn, through the principle of learning by doing, I gained a more intimate familiarity with the environments by just replicating them out on a sheet of paper. I found that while the map helped, I actually didn't need it much for backtracking because my drawings had helped me remember the layouts of the corridors anyway.

I guess the lesson learned is that while old design sensibilities may appear to be arcane and cumbersome when easier solutions exists, the obfuscation is part of the fun. The game hands me an intentionally hard to navigate world, shows me that it's fully capable of displaying maps of it, but still asks me to provide that dimension myself. Through doing this, I discover that drawing maps is both surprisingly enjoyable and cognitively stimulating. I realize that had I downloaded some pre-packaged maps online and used as my bible, Shining in the Darkness would've been a vastly different experience, one of monotonous meandering through endless fights while confidently striding along the known path.

Perhaps that's why the game was called Shining and the Darkness in Japan, it doesn't flow as well as the western title, but at the same time it poetically reflects this act of discovery. I am Shining, the game provides the Darkness, we work together, we must unify to become whole.

As for Dark Sol, he turned into a big monster boy and was vanquished by a spunky cartographer child and her two cohorts. The unknown has been made known and the kingdom is once more saved.

/Kiki

[gigijenga]

simple (?) definitions of the functions

Edit: I made some changes (they are in italics)

Without a basic knowledge of the cognitive functions, it can be extremely hard to understand mbti. Here are the simplified definitions of the functions:

Ne (extroverted intuition): this function spreads intuition/ideas externally. The main thing Ne values is possibility. Ne wants to understand the dozens of ideas that stem from one event. It does not like to stick to one idea.

ex: when it sees a flower, it comes up with dozens of flower designs of its own. It thinks of all the possibility the flower can look like, thought Ne does not care if it is practical (or considered a “good” idea). 

Ni (introverted intuition): this function forges an intuitive idea internally. Ni takes information in and thinks of one idea, one insight, on possibility. Like Ne, Ni is focused on what might be possible, not on what is tangible. It wants to dive deeper into the “truth” to find a secret meaning/contradiction.

Ex: when it sees dozens of flowers, it comes up with its own design of a flower. Unlike Ne, Ni takes its time to analyze the depth of one specific idea. Ne does not care much about the accuracy and worth of its ideas (it values possibilities more), while Ni wants its idea to be valuable.

Se (extroverted sensing): this function is focused on the external physical world around it. Se is focused on the present and what is happening in the moment. Like Si, it is focused on the small tangible details. Se is a fairly direct and objective function. It does not like to meddle with hypotheticals and theories (this does not mean Se is unintellectual). This function is a kinesthetic learner and likes to meddle with its environment.

Ex: when it sees a flower, it simply, well, sees it. It's a concrete object that has no other poetic meaning to it. 

Si (introverted sensing): this function is focused on the real world in its head/internally. Si is oriented towards the past, towards repetition. It makes decisions based on how similar events in the past enrolled. Si values predictability (not necessarily tradition).

Ex: when it sees a flower, it remembers how the flower connects to past sensory details and it stores the details of the flower in its head for further use in the future.

Fi (introverted feeling): this function is focused on its own internal moral code/philosophy. It makes decisions based on how moral the situation is based on its own feelings and values. Fi is often seen as the function that wants to be authentic because it is concerned if the current situation/its decision aligns with its personal values.

Ex: when Fi gives gifts to other people, it contemplates on what gift it would like/value. Fi also analyzes how the gift would be valuable according to the person’s inner feelings and beliefs.

Fe (extroverted feeling): this function is focused on the external moral code. It is concerned if its actions align with external beliefs and ethnics. Fe makes decisions based on what the majority values. It is aware of how its actions will impact/meddle with the emotional state of other people*. Unlike Fi, Fe believes ethics are not decided by itself. Fe is objective, like Te. 

*Though other functions might have this ability, Fe knows how other people feel on a “deeper level” and it is confident in its ability to do so (just like how Fi is confident in its ability to analyze its own beliefs). For example, Te might be able to analyze emotions on a surface level, but it has trouble understanding the emotions of others on an in-depth level. Plus, Te is not concerned with the emotional environment.*

Ex: when Fe gives gifts to other people, it gives gifts based on what the majority believes is the best gift.

Ti (introverted thinking): this function is focused on the logical world internally. It forges its own logical claims, reasoning and conclusions. Ti is mainly concerned with the internal consistency and analysis of one thing, rather than external evidence that supports it. Inductive reasoning. “The ball will fall because I’ve seen the same ball fall down multiple times, therefore it will fall down this time.” Ti cannot understand how one thing can contradict its own “rule”.

Ex: when Ti gives gifts, it forms an analysis on what gift would be the most beneficial based on the patterns and observations it witnesses.

Te (extroverted thinking): this function is focused on the external world of logic. It is focused on data, evidence and facts from the outside world. It is focused on if something is practical/aligns with external rules and principles. It analyzes things based on how it relates to similar external logical principles. “This ball will fall because I’ve seen other rubber balls like this fall, so it is logical to assume that this one will fall.” Deductive reasoning. Te cannot understand how one thing can contradict the “universal rule”.

Ex: when Te gives gifts, it analyzes what is the most beneficial gift by evaluating the already the existing/assumed benefits each gift option has and picks the gift with the best benefits.

[siriuslysatorusimping]

Kiko’s Masterlist

This is a Master for the important links for my stories 😊

*We are not spoiler-free here, so please block the JJK Manga Spoilers tag if you don't want spoilers!*

Some of my posts contain mature content, and I try to mark them with proper community labels. If you're not seeing them, you'll need to make sure your settings are updated to display content marked as mature. Please consume mature/explicit content at your own discretion!

Please do not copy, imitate, or recreate any of my works. If my works inspired yours, please give proper credit.

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Another Level Masterlist

Status: Complete

“You’re a Zenin.”

More like an unwanted mistake. Which, funny enough, had actually been the first words she ever heard her father say to her. - Kurisaki Rinko was born an unwanted bastard child to the Zenin clan, having since grown into an unwanted bastard adult. Her stubborn refusal to be discarded resulted in a display of strength that many would call (they had, many times to her face, in fact) an unhinged lack of self-preservation. But lucky for her, that unhinged display caught the attention of a particular blue-eyed menace who happens to be more fun to rile up than anyone she’s ever met.

Read Another Level on AO3

Physical Paradox Masterlist

Status: In Progress

How they went from: “I’m kinda impressed,” Gojo stated, sliding his sunglasses onto his face. “Didn’t expect a psych major to know this much about philosophical theory.” Rinko blinked at him slowly, raising her eyebrows as she scoffed. “I’m sorry, mister unresolved childhood trauma,” she said, stepping closer and poking a finger in his chest. “But I don’t really give a fuck if you’re impressed.”

To: “Your professor is leading the world of cognitive and behavioral research,” Gojo told Rinko's students, chest swelling with pride. “And she’s really pretty-” “Oh, she’s fucking gorgeous!” he agreed. “She has it all. Smart, funny, beautiful. She’s honestly perfect. It’s incredible she-” “Married you?” Touma interjected. “I know. I thought the same thing when I first met you.”

Read Physical Paradox on AO3

Gokudō Masterlist

Status: On Hold (I will finish this eventually, though)

Gokudō (極道): the extreme path. A term used to refer to members of a Yakuza syndicate.

-

“Now, why is a pretty girl like you in an ugly place like this?” “Some might say the contrast is tragically poetic,” she replied easily. “Yeah, well,” he drawled, a smirk pulling at his lips as he stepped up to stand beside her. “Others would say it’s tragically idiotic. What’s your name, pretty girl?” “Shouldn’t you introduce yourself first?” she asked, her pulse jumping at his quiet chuckle. “You already know who I am.”

-

She never asked to be part of this world. A world filled with greed and violence and revenge. She never asked to be part of the world where life was as meaningless as dust. The world stained red by the blood that pooled beneath her mother’s body after she was forced to watch her die. She never asked to be part of the world driven by hatred and bloodlust, but she never asked to leave, either.

Read Gokudō on AO3

One-Shots

Before I Love You - (angsty Gojo/Rinko AU, hopeful ending) - Part 2: Broken Lens | Author's Discussion

Fight Me? - (Nurse!Gojo shoots his shot with a grumpy patient)

Blurbs

For Your Health - (College!Gojo just wants to help his girlfriend stay healthy)

Untitled Unfinished Angst (very angsty Goinko bc Kiko is not ok)

Random Asks and Kiko's Rants

Ask: Advice for AO3 writers and when you're in a creativity rut

Ask: How Do I plan the plot for stories?

Rant: The issue with meaningless angst

Kiko's Original Work

Sample: Summary and blurbs

Sample: Blurbs 2

Meet some characters

Another Life - Short Story

[creatingnikki]

I sit there across you in the café that we usually hang out at writing you a letter. You're leaving the city. Yes, that doesn't mean that you are leaving my life. But leaving is still leaving. And so I have to write you a letter, I want to. But life has been chaotic and heavy and I didn't get the time to do this before meeting you now. All I could do was grab my letter writing supplies and stuff them in my bag as I left home tonight to come see you. So once I reach, I ask 15 minutes of you to write the letter in real time. And once I am done putting it in the envelope I realize I don't have a sticker to seal it the way I usually do and you say, 'wait a minute' and reach for your wallet.

You are giggling and I begin to giggle too even though I don't know what it's going to be. But it's always been that way with you. It's light, it's laughter, and it's warmth. Always? Well, a big chunk anyway. I smile and giggle and laugh in anticipation of smiling and giggling and laughing.

You remove a band aid from your wallet and then we giggle some more. I take it. Of course, I do. With you, I'll let myself do such things that make me forget that I am 26. Or that perhaps let me be without having to be something else. I begin to unwrap the band aid and you start recording me. The whole thing becomes a funny little sweet moment and an analogy of this band aid signifying healing between us. After all, we have recently reconnected after months of trying to be strangers.

I say this is all so poetic. I've said it before. I say it all the time. I view my life and life in general through the lens of poetry and literature and books. Everything is a scene from a story. A few minutes later another such moment is shared and before I can say anything you say, 'this is so cinematic'. That's when you make the observation and say, everything you call poetic I call cinematic. And that very observation and the articulation of that observation as we begin to leave the café post midnight is poetic to me.

Poetic or cinematic, whatever we were, whatever we are, I'm glad we crossed paths and attempted healing. This is a goodbye, not the goodbye. From the minute we met, you have been helping me fight my cognitive distortions. Why? Because you are healthy and normal. All I have wanted this year are normal experiences and normal people. Normal does not mean all good and smooth sailing. To me, it only means things not blowing out of proportion or going bat shit crazy. Things not resembling the arc of a book or a movie.

I've been consciously realizing lately how seeing my life and myself from the lens of a story and being the mc is not helpful. It gives my life this fanciful flavour and adds whimsy but with that comes unnecessary plot twists and agony.

"Normal" can also be poetic/cinematic. I don't need to be an unreliable narrator for that or let wild, vicious people in my life. I don't have to take whacky decisions and put up with things for character development. My life can be normal — light, full of laughter, and warmth. Without it having to be blindingly bright, headache-inducing laughter, and scorching warmth.

Thank you. Thank you for helping me come to that realization. I'm glad you exist.

[fandom-zoomer]

I think I may have come up with the best worst tma time travel “fix-it” au (imho)

Inspired by Ketakoshka's 'dread spawn' idea in their dread child jon series, Dribbledscribbles' origin story for the dread powers and extinction entity interpretation in their extinction!jon fic (and some more of the latter in their post-eyepocalypse fic too), as well as my own love for making unholy (aka fun) fusions of things and sandboxing eldritch interactions with the 'mundane' . . .

. . . I have created a post-canon, Somewhere Else, time travel ""fix-it"" story that I think might be unique (at least I've never seen any fics like it– but if I'm wrong then please please share the link!! or dm me if it's your own work hehe but no pressure!!)

(mag 160+ spoilers after this point!)

(i'm about to wax poetics here (hopefully coherently)—so you can read the story-ramble OR you can scroll to the TL;DR at the bottom to skip it & spoilers to read the nutshell & see if you're interested :3)

so get this...

The big Change happens right? But this time the Extinction is a bigger player in the game than canon, and ultimately deeply marks Jon throughout the eyepocalypse.

So when the finale happens, since Jon is now connected to the epicenter of the whole show, his 'death' and the panopticon's destruction has the simultaneous effect of baiting the Dread Powers into the Hole (via his voice in the spools of tape)– and also killing everyone trapped by the Dread Powers in the world via Jon the walking detonator thanks to being entrenched in the Extinction's influence. —Combining both his best and worst plans and realizing his worst nightmare: killing everyone and spreading the Powers to an unknown number of worlds to wreak even more havoc.

How did this happen?

Simple—but first some backstory for context.

The Extinction was more of a 'lurker', much less "outgoing" than its 'siblings'. And when it was "grandiose", well. . . it tended to leave no survivors. Thus its unrecognition by those like Robert Smirke or Jürgen Leitner.

To go back even further, the Dread entities were originally one cohesive entity with many faces and limbs. Its faces reflected the same developmental complexity as the sources of their manifestation. So those with the most diverse species feeding them held the widest capacities. Namely: the Hunt, End, and Extinction. But being a singular entity, it didn't mean much.

But as human species' family lines develop and grow more complex cognitive ability, more esoteric Dreads developed, and more faces become more complex. And the Extinction was right there from the beginning as more species died out one by one. Quietly. (...maybe? 👀)

Over time humans discovered the Powers and bonded with them, then started to classify them. From here, the Dread entity fragmented into Dread entities.

They developed their own 'consciousnesses' distinct from the hive 'mind' they once were. And, eventually, sapience. Self-awareness. Desires. Personalities. But they were still connected, part of the 'system'.

The Extinction and the Web (newer, but always sapient) are a quirky pair, the Web seeking control over everything and the Extinction seeking ultimate entropy and change upon its catastrophe.

It's hard to distinguish the Extinction exactly, its work misidentified for others with few under its own unique umbrella. Things 'unique' to it get missed due to being a misnomer and not getting clocked. (But that is the nature of the Dread Powers after all.. being a fragmentation of their original singular mass.)

...

The Extinction represents the fear of disaster that will bring about the end of everything—everything you know, love, need to survive. Everything you built, worked for, hoped for. The destruction of stories and of life, of the very history written by your land—your home.

Your community. Your society. Your species.

You.

Annihilated in totality.

The Extinction represents the fear of those that come after you to replace you—worse than you, different from you. Leaving you and your history and stories (the driver of your continued existence) forgotten forever. The fear of life moving on after you, ignorant and apathetic. Your story meaningless, irrelevant.

Your community's story. Your society's story. Your species' story.

Your story.

Erased and written over.

The Web represents the fear of being controlled, fate being out of your hands—by malevolent authorities out of reach, by abusive companions or relatives, by invisible forces far beyond the human comprehension. Spinning, winding, twisting, pulling each decision in your life made for you. Until destruction of the self by your own hand.

Your struggle for change futile. Your feet following the same path. Your fate determined for you.

You forfeit control—your feet march you to your bitter demise.

The Web represents the fear of being conspired against. Scheming, plotting, planning your downfall. The loss of everything you hold dear, worked for, bled for. Spinning, twisting, scripting lies about you. Your credibility falls to pieces, your world shatters, and your story distorts.

You are kept alive by the spreading of your story. And the people have decided to trust the manufactured tale.

You are forgotten—twisted into an image of something wrong.

...

Sometimes they're at odds. Where one seeks to manipulate the threads of everything endlessly, the other seeks to destroy it all so thoroughly, with such finality, as to mutate it– the schemes, the pawns, the gameboard itself.

Sometimes they're complementary. Where you watch as you lose everyone you cared for one by one, spiraling down a path darker into entropy, the irreversible nightmare, and wondering if you ever really had free will in the first place– if anyone did.

What if the end for you really was just another game to them? What if this wasn't their first round? What if you're just the next step in the grand scheme, larger than even your own universe?

Alright, now with that out of the way, let's bring back the question.

How did the Extinction change Jon, and how did this cause the altered result of the finale?

The Web has been there since the near beginning, pulling Jon along and guiding him to his next milestone in the plot. She had known the world would come to an end one way or another, and wanted to bring it about on her own terms so that she—they all—could escape it.

So when the Web saw what the Eye was doing, she had an idea. So she aided their acolytes, seeing her sibling as the perfect way to bring all of them together for the final step. And the Web set her own card onto the board: Jon.

Jon had a natural disposition for the Eye; from stubborn curiosity to the reckless pursuit for answers to even the coldest cases. Whether he knows it or not, his mind is a gaping maw for horrible knowledge—chasing after experiences disguised as answers to his burning questions so dreadful they leave scars on him like sigils of a looming doom.

While he has no affinity for the Web's machinations, he is still hers. She has no issue with guiding agents from across the court, she knows how to share. Especially when it benefits her. Jon archives each event, every little detail, with such care and readiness that he makes the perfect vessel to pull them in—to guide them out. He'd flourish best as her tool in the Watcher's sphere.

After the Watcher's Crown and the Dread Powers came into the world, the Extinction started to make its presence known. It seeped into other Domains and fed on the people's dread for permanent catastrophic change, on their fear of ruin and total desctruction. And as Jon traversed them and lived through their fear, so was he marked by the Extinction.

It seeped into his skin like oil and burned through his veins like acid. It tainted his trails with the radioactivity of human hubris and greed, twisting and mutating both the mundane and Dreadful as he passed. It closed its grasp on him with the tightness plastic rings and infected his Perceived routes with the stench of mountainous landfill and the thickness of city smog.

The Web and the Extinction had a complex relationship, but in this moment they guided the Archivist in synchronous song like a soldier being led to his final mission: dropping the nuclear bomb.

Did Jon know?

...

No.

The twines of manipulation layer labyrinthine over everything, above and below and through every angle and dimension. Even the Nigh-Omniscient Antichrist and his All-Knowing God will never fathom its depths.

He might never know that he helped start the Extinction's ritual: Raze the Earth.

Or that both the Web and the Eye knew and did nothing. (honestly, the latter's only there for the show)

So when Martin stabbed Jon and Melanie lit the gas mainline, the threads around the world snapped and the glowing light of humanity's greatest sins exploded over everything—

—and they prayed—

—and they wept—

—and the Dreads rushed out torrentially. (pulling a few strays with them)

Now for the part you were all waiting for (well I was)—the Heart of this AU

The Dread Powers and the ones who were dragged with them were transported Somewhere Else– a parallel world in a parallel universe. But they were. . . Changed from their previous/original selves.

The tag-alongs—Martin & Jon of course, but also Annabelle Cane, Oliver Banks, Simon Fairchild, and Arthur Nolan—replaced their parallels at birth, and gained partial or full amnesia to their past lives. But their personalities are altered, reflecting some aspects of their pre-finale personalities.

Except for Jon. Jon, the Pupil of the Eye, the Warhead of the Extinction, the Spools of the Web, the Archive of the Dreads and linchpin to their escape. . . was significantly destroyed in the center of the storm. He got it and so much worse—a stick so short its existence was inverted.

While they did get reach the new universe, they had to reconstruct their linchpin/Archive that they're still connected to so that his total destruction doesn't tear them apart as well (being an Extinction avatar that's now deeply connected with them, he's capable of "taking them down with him").

When Jon was reborn, he was literally thrown into the world like a meteorite, landing with an explosive blast that rendered the surrounding area a lifeless wasteland in moments. High radioactivity and a deathly curse left few flora or fauna returning before wasting away soon after. Those that 'survived' did so by being infected by the Extinction or Corruption.

It would permanently remain uninhabitable, and it would take months before the withered stillborn spawn of the sapient eldritch Dread Entities would crawl out of the jagged crater on its own, none the wiser to its tragedies.

TL;DR

The Web manipulated Jon's attempt to put a stop to the Entities' reign, utilizing the Eye's easy influence to help the Dreads escape the world and into a fresh new one before they were also destroyed in the Extinction's "Raze the Earth" ritual (set up by using Jon to weave toxic-filled veins throughout the world he was traversing that'll explode at once 'grand finale' style).

Jon, now deeply binded to the Entities' purest forms and still an Extinction time-bomb, was mostly destroyed during the trip to Somewhere Else and the Entities had to reconstruct him so his death wouldn't destroy them too. This led to Jon being reborn a near completely different being (with some of him preserved) as functionally the direct spawn of the Dread Powers, replacing his parallel counterpart from the new world.

[clowningclownn]

thinking about akechi again.... a lot of people hc that akechi got shot in the chest or elsewhere in the engine room, but consider: he absolutely got shot in the head. futaba tells you she can't feel his presence right after you hear the gunshot, meaning his death was instantaneous.

which makes sense considering it was akechi that killed him- or more rather, shidos cognition of him. he would've executed akechi the same way akechi executed his victims, the same way he killed akira.

as a person who is insane, I feel this is a bit poetic for akeshu, ESPECIALLY if akechi actually lives afterwards. he led akira to believe he died from the same wound he believed killed akira.

[power-chords]

Malcolm’s epiphany constructs a narrative frame—an explanation of the condition or source of the narrative. But this is a frame or condition we only learn about at film’s end, and is thus a terminal frame, or a buried frame, a late embedding of one narrative level by another, or a narrative that takes the “form of a vision” from which the reader or viewer is “rudely ejected” at narrative’s end (Fludernik 29). In American Psycho, A Beautiful Mind, Cypher, eXistenZ, Fight Club, Hide and Seek, Identity, The Jacket, The Machinist, Mulholland Drive, The Number 23, The Others, Premonition, The Prestige, Secret Window, Shutter Island, The Spanish Prisoner, Third Person, Unknown, The Usual Suspects, Vanilla Sky, and so on, the central character at film’s end is revealed to be spectral, virtual, imagined, traumatized, conned, delusional, or in some other way compromised as a credible witness to, or participant in, the narrative’s events. In most of these films, what we thought to be objective narration turns out to have been thoroughly subjective, as a “deeper diegetic ground is inserted below the level we took for the baseline of reality” (Stewart 143). In several of these films we encounter the millennial trope I label retrospective revision: a montage sequence near the end of the movie in which we review earlier scenes, now recognizing the blind-spots, freshly cognizant of how we were deceived and how completely we should revise our understanding of the entire film. Like a transmedial franchise in which the narrative is just so much data to be used, reformatted, and reused, the ending of The Sixth Sense goes about repurposing the film itself, remixing and recontextualizing earlier scenes, a narrative parallel to the new fluidity of the moving image; it can go back and remix itself, even as it directs us forward to acquire and re-watch the movie in its post-theatrical life. This is a new formal logic within popular cinematic narrative: reconfiguration, revision, and remixing.

Audiences today have come to expect final plot twists to be thoroughly integrated into the structure of the film: “The ending can’t seem arbitrary, non sequitur, or tacked on; it should flow naturally and organically (if only in retrospect) from the rest of the story” (Susman). Twist movies today are often made to repay multiple viewings, to enter into a “culture of replay,” in which “the already seen and heard” becomes an “emblematic feature of the media business” (Klinger, “Becoming Cult” 4). This is a type of movie that viewers are encouraged to analyze, reflect back on, likely re-view, and perhaps even read about online in order to fully appreciate the intricacies of the story’s narration. This marks a stark departure from traditional expectations—as Charles Ramírez Berg writes, “For nearly a century now, the poetics of film narration was based on the need to be completely legible to one-time viewers” (31). Writers and producers of these films, in a “cognitive arms race” (Max) with audiences, begin to void long-held narrative contracts. They draft new arrangements with new rules that take into account the attainability and interactivity of contemporary cinema, or all of the digital means that encourage deep immersion in story worlds and negate the primacy of the theater. These movies are internet- and “DVD-enabled,” Thomas Elsaesser writes, their narrative structures determined in part by the technologies audiences use to consume them (“Mind-Game” 38).

—J Lavender-Smith, The New Reflexivity: Puzzle Films, Found Footage, and Cinematic Narration in the Digital Age, 2016. Emphasis mine.

[1yyyyyy1]

If you don’t mind me asking, how old are you? I get the sense that you’re older based on your posts, but going by your most recent post, you seem to imply that you’re still a teenager. If that’s true, I am very impressed by how knowledgeable you are at such a young age.

How did you get so articulate? What did you read? Did you take classes in high school? Did you have a mentor? did you have a life-changing conversation with somebody? I would love to know more about your process of getting to where you are now.

Hey :) I'm kind of surprised that people choose to compliment me at all since I'm calling people names on here and such, I think I'm a nasty person overall... I'm in my early twenties currently, so I'm certainly not a teenager, but I'm still at an age where my opinions get dismissed and it has taken me significant effort to start taking my concerns seriously. In the post you are referring to, I was talking about people who equate polarizing opinions to those of an immature teenager, which hints at the fact that people grow out of their rebellious phase and expect others to become just as compliant with age… I don't consider my opinions (especially on pregnancy) to be rebellious in the first place, to me they are common sense and I'm genuinely disgusted by the fact that many adult women continue to perpetuate the same rhetoric that has harmed me as a teenager.

I've never received any higher education, and I barely ever attended high school, so if you find my writing skill compelling it can be the proof that all you need is yourself and a willingness to learn. I'm not sure if I what I have is innate talent because I did read a lot as a child, which probably explains my vocabulary, and I'm not exactly a prodigy since my early writing is still as primitive as it gets for someone who is just starting out. My writing process is not effortless either and I go through a lot of drafts or even variations of the same sentence until I'm satisfied with it. What I know to be innate to myself is my overall interest in reading and writing, it is something I spend a lot of time doing and my proficiency makes sense to me that way. I suppose, I'm still not at my fullest potential because I limit myself to mentally taxing topics... Much of the difficulty I encounter comes down to the fact that the things I talk about are extremely personal and often require more reflection from me than I'm ready for; this is the reason I'm yet to post some of the questions I promised to answer. When it comes to my writing skill, I would be lying if I said that public education did nothing for it because it did lay down the foundation, just that I draw my understanding from other subjects and cannot recommend a reading list because I was taught them in person. My approach to writing is based on my knowledge of cognitive reframing and I would have to write a book myself to explain how I apply it. Weirdly enough, I attribute my eloquence to fanfiction since it's what I used to read the most of, and some of it is genuinely high quality — for example, I think this story is very poetic, especially the last paragraph. The same can be said about fantasy games where I would pay attention to the flowery language in quest text and dialogue; my learning experience has been unconventional at best.

I thought it would be helpful if I recited what I do directly... My writing process is as follows:

Receive a question or get interested in an idea, draft the first thing that comes to mind. Write until I don't feel like it anymore. Usually this is no longer than one sentence.

Come back to the draft when I feel like it and let my imagination run its course while I look at the prompt. At this point, the draft is a mixture of coherent ideas and incoherent sentence stumps I then proceed to flesh out within the confines of the main topic. This is the stage where I figure out the structure and the general theme of whatever I'm writing. I narrow down the essence of what I'm being asked about, write until I figure out the closing paragraph, break down the draft into connected sub-topics and come up with a title for each paragraph as well as the entire piece. For this answer, I titled the first paragraph "Why I wrote what I did and my attitude towards it", the second & third paragraph "My education and writing process" and the fourth paragraph "My advice and why I haven't given up yet". I titled the answer as a whole "My age and my writing process" which is kind of odd, it probably means there's something I have to reflect on in regards to my age... While drawing up a plan like that is common writing advice I would give regardless, grounding myself with a simplified idea is even more important to me because I do not write sentences consecutively. The first draft of the previous sentence quite literally was "is important to me because I do not write sentences consecutively." with the dot, meaning that I knew it would be the last part of the sentence and that there was something I was supposed to trace it back to before I could finish it. This goes for the entirety of my writing process and I will often start a sentence from the middle, write different paragraphs one sentence at a time or even write an entire paragraph backwards. It can be hard to keep track of the structure when you write the way I do, so having a grounded idea I can always refer back to is the solution for me.

Continue to refine the draft along the guidelines I established until I'm satisfied with it — this doesn't mean that it's perfect even by my own standards, I often leave awkward wording as is because I know when to move on from a creative block. What matters to me is that it communicates the ideas of the sub-topics and fully conveys my point.

The most important thing I've learned ever since I committed to writing is that I am at my best when I write for myself. I would go as far as to say that I'm at my best when I write about myself, that way I absolve myself of the responsibility that accompanies external topics. I no longer burden myself with articles and statistics which may or may not be inaccurate, I talk about my own improvement and I know what it has been well enough to not be bothered by people disputing it. Even as I'm answering this question, my focus is on my personal enjoyment so that it remains the motivation I can look back at; I don't believe it to be remotely unfair, it is reliable. People move on and people get disinterested, my audience could leave due to personal circumstances and it would be no one's fault. By being my own standard of quality, I get to be consistent with my work and both me and the reader benefit that way. Other than that, my straightforward advice is to trust the process and to not be afraid to take risks with your writing. Stylistically, the list I made has to be limited to impersonal descriptions to be consistent, but I went on a personal tangent in the second point anyway — so what? Taking this liberty was what inspired me to finish the list at all, which I'm not going to complain about. I take a risk every time I choose not to dilute my complicated speech, like right now, because it does come off as pretentious, although no one has complained so far. Generally speaking, there are no real social risks to be taken with writing because intelligence is already hard to come by, the people who value it will appreciate the effort regardless and the people who don't could never be catered to in the first place. The only "risk" I can imagine anyone taking is the risk of being disappointed in one's abilities and the fear of never amounting to one's aspirations, but even that is temporary because creative skills always improve so long as you practice. I'm personally well past the point of doubt because people have seen me at my worst too many times by now, that ship has sailed for me... My aspirations rely on my ability to articulate myself, so I don't lack motivation when it comes to improvement. The enjoyment I get from completing a piece allows me to persevere through the many challenges the writing process entails.