#In Which I Exist Elsewhere

[moonlit-tulip]

I have started an experimental writing-practice tumblr! @ten-thousand-clay-pots, for anyone interested in following it.

(Although be warned that, since it's for experimental practice writing, its content is likely to be of dubious coherence and quality; thus my keeping it contained in a sideblog rather than posting it here.)

Currently I'm attempting an experiment involving posting one short thing (of arbitrary length and quality) per day, there. Activity in the long run is likely to be a lot more intermittent, though, unless the current experiment goes substantially better than I'm expecting it to.

[cherry-bomb1985]

I feel like The Father and Hell both understand and experience love in all the worst ways.

The Father sought to create a life form that would follow and love him unconditionally. It wasn't enough that he had a great cosmic kingdom of angels who are unquestioningly loyal, no, he needed something that knew suffering and mortality and the threat of oblivion, and would still find love at the end; love for him above all else. But after numerous implied failures at that, in his desperation, he instead created the threat of eternal damnation to force them to love him in order avert that fate. Lucifer's words must have been like a splash of cold water, but by the time he realized sheer magnitude of suffering he had unintentionally set into motion, it was too late. He could not destroy Hell; he could not stop the cycle of violence.

That guilt drove him to seek a death that, from the looks of it, eluded him in spite of the hollowness consuming him. And now he is... somewhere, helpless to stop his experiments from consuming one another and themselves in a glorious show of blood and violence.

And then there's Hell itself, who seems to recognize love as an act of violence and cruelty. It is something that derives joy only from the suffering of other living creatures. God gave it so many toys to hurt and break and reform, and Mankind gave it new ones. Why would it understand love as anything but? It gave Minos a facsimile of the son he is most ashamed of, and delighted when he cast it, once more, into a labyrinth. Gabriel flattened all the souls within it's confines beneath his heel and gave those that did bend false hopes.

Now there's V1, tearing its way through the remaining layers and creating a spectacle of violence like nothing Hell has ever witnessed before. How could it not love them all for all the entertainment they've provided?

But deep within its recesses, hidden away from the eyes of Heaven, there was a Gutterman. A machine built for war, who eventually came to love that which it gave it life at the cost of their own. Enough to give the human welded within their coffin the mercy that both Heaven and Hell had denied them; enough to write a single love letter to them, even knowing that it would never be read by its intended recipient.

So, as things turn out, you /can/ teach a machine to love. And they will understand and experience it more sincerely than God or Hell ever could.

[sableprince]

assorted NMS oc doodles backlog that i guess i forgot to post? i'm really bad at putting stuff in tags, like this comparatively more serious lore compilation post thing. haha. this trio is stupid.

slightly more serious teluya backstory WIP comic under the cut because it's less goofy

[charminglyantiquated]

I wanted to ask this on anon but I've decided not to be a coward. I know you do like submissions on the elsewhere account, but would you mind if someone wrote like a longform fic on like AO3 written from like the perspective of an Elsewhere student?

Ik you're okay with like submissions on the account itself, but I just wanted to make sure. I would have submitted on the Elsewhere account itself, but I didn't want it to be ooc.

Go for it! I believe Elsewhere U has been established on AO3 already as a fandom, you'd be in good company.

[waveridden]

i've long held a fascination with blaseball gamma 1 (the test circuit that was revealed on the website after it had finished running) because there's a whole lot about it that doesn't add up. if you compare the rosters in the last available gamelogs for teams to the rosters on the websites they don't match up - and i don't just mean "oh the static charges" i mean there are new players and reverbs that have happened that aren't recorded. it is a weird, messy circuit that we didn't get to see, and i care for it quite dearly.

(personally i've long held the theory that there was a third season of this circuit that we didn't get to see that led to additional weather and another round of charges. this is beside the point but i think if they ever do another IAB y'all should help me flood the question box asking about this. i want to know.)

one thing you Can see when looking at gamma 1 teams is that several of them have four pitchers. this is, obviously, not how blaseball works; teams should have five pitchers. some of them were charged, and we know some of these from feed messages. some of them are just missing.

i found some of them tonight.

i've been working on recreating the election results from gamma 1, season 1, and through that i've found three pitchers that i'm not sure people know about. i don't have their stats info, i don't have their performance records. but i found three players who were missing. those players are:

pedro greatlakes, miami dale

jamaal hardison, baltimore crabs

manuela byron, new york millennials

there are, per my best count, three teams with pitchers that are still missing from the record (firefighters, sunbeams, lift) and because of the quality of pitcher feed events i'm not sure they'll ever be found. and maybe this is actually old news and i'm out of touch. and maybe (definitely) i'm a bit of a sap. but i wanted to publish those names. because blaseball is over and gone, and this was a dead circuit in a dead world in a dead game. but there are still new things to find.

[ottiliere]

oh my goodness your dios.. what a delight to see someone so fully invested in phantom blood dio wow. i am very happy. i love your 3D dios. really makes me want to sculpt him as well

Do it... clay is cheap bake it in the oven paint with 10 dollar set of acrylics your life will never be better. I adore phantom blood Dio so very much... years ago saw someone coin the term “phantom blood purist” and it's so funny I think about it literally every time I enter a Dio cycle. There are many aspects that go into this preference of course, and upon a great amount of time pondering i can say confidently that this is because mainly that:

1) I love history (especially the fin de siècle) and I love thinking about him in relation to Victorian values/etiquette/sociology in general... there's something so special about a society that enabled such a gross disparity of wealth&poverty while being so inherently pretentious that its asinine etiquette rules would completely elude you unless you were raised in an aristocratic family or had access to etiquette books. Dio absolutely read a great amount of these before going to the Joestar mansion btw, even before his father snuffed it I think. God help him he would not be doomed to look like a slovenly ill-bred gamin if and when he needed to manipulate the upper classes. I really can't think of a way for him to have developed these skills enough to outclass Jonathan otherwise. god and like thinking about him as a barrister too with his profligate fashion sense you just KNOW he gets drawn that way into all of the court sketches that go in all the newspapers since everyone loved to read about crime and there were a million papers for this in England alone... he'd get caricatured so bad sometimes and he is NOT happy about this.

2) You can probably tell from my indifference to the rest of the parts (except sbr; I call this the "diego rule") that I'm not the biggest fan of fantastical elements and I'm much more interested in interpersonal conflict/relationships in general... PB is extremely unique to the rest of the series because for five WHOLE chapters absolutely nothing abnormal happens and we just get to see Dio harassing Jonathan and his girlfriend until Jonathan snaps and humiliates him so bad in beating him up that he makes Dio cry. and then Dio kills his dog. Like it's literally just some impoverished child abuse victim bullying a spoiled rich kid who wanted to be his friend because lalala sunshine daisies only knows what "poverty" is from reading Oliver Twist and has no conceptual understanding of what the real-world implications of that are. That was the character development that needed multiple chapters to develop it's so fucking awesome. like yeah I'd read an entire novel of just this alone happening and how it impacts their relationship as adults no vampirism needed. I reread "dio the invader" so frequently I'm surprised the spine of my jojonium copy isn't cracked at the exact endpoint of it. I just adore him interacting with Jonathan so much it's hard to remove him from that… that's his FOIL... all the stories (some "AUs") I make with Dio involve the way he and Jonathan gravitate each other to some degree. we get the clearest view of who he is in the face of someone who is the polar opposite of himself. 🤯

2) This iteration of him is the closest degree of separation he has from his "humanity" (childhood), thus

3) I find him to be the most interesting, endearing, etc., version of him walking around, given that... well. behaviors stem from somewhere... the thematic & active severance of himself from a species he is fundamentally incapable of connecting with due to the way he adapted to help him tolerate his childhood... from his point of view I can't imagine that there is one convincing reason for him to continue being human after given the opportunity to deviate from it (despite likely still being inebriated when he vamped himself — very much an impulsive decision since he had, what, an hour or two to think that through? drunk?). If everyone's underneath him, yes, after the fact the choice seems extremely fitting. Maybe he'll cultivate a vast swathe of worshippers and disciples that obey his every command. Maybe he'll rule the world. And then, maybe, he will start to feel genuinely content for the first time in his life. But probably not. That's the drawback of having something fundamentally missing from within you.

4) He lacks a certain type of introspective awareness that 100 years alone in a box might enable him to develop... he's very animalistic to me and possesses a precarious/immature/nonexistent grasp on his emotions just given the fact that he exhibits enraged outbursts from perceived ego wounds (in both childhood and adulthood) + struggles with alcoholism due to an incapacity to self-soothe any sort of negative emotion that makes it past the self-aggrandizing filter he can't help but see life through; he really isn't in conscious control of anything happening inside of him despite needing control over everything and everyone so he can get exactly what he wants, and deserves, always. PB paints a very dim and pathetic view of his character by allowing us to see when he's most "vulnerable", which is the thing he likely hates being the most, so getting to see scenes where he's walking around publicly intoxicated and disparaging himself for acting like his father (implied: again), who he hates, and attacking men with a wine bottle for evoking the concept of his mother, who he also kind of hates but lacks the cognizant cogency to dissolve whatever cognitive dissonance is causing this mental incongruence, rules. he rules

tl;dr SDC dio is "iconic" but I feel like he misses a lot of the charm he had in part one, removed from the context of the society that had such rigid social boundaries and rules of decorum, in addition to his maladaptive approach to interpersonal relationships, his substance abuse issues, his humbling foil... he's too "cool" for me. In the end SDC dio is simply not my Dio... he is someone else's Dio. And that's okay.

[fleetsonourgecentral]

ugh all I can think of lately is Fleetway!Sonourge. good job on spreading that to me

also thinking about the Freedom Fighters protecting Scourge from Zonic when he shows up. like, him trying to arrest all of them for hiding and protecting a criminal and all. how do you think the FFs would overcome him?

:3 it's spreading as planned

It would take a while for the zone cops to even come to the conclusion Scourge is hiding in the fleetway dimension, tbh. He's good at running from the cops, and knows lots of places to hide. It's difficult to track him down when he's not actively causing trouble, and the fleetway universe is quite a ways away from the dimensions he normally hangs around in. The zone cops are expecting him to show up in Moebius, or try to take over the Prime dimension again. They aren't going to be looking in the dimension with the evil Super Sonic that's thousands of miles away, because why would he be there? Even once they do investigate there, they're probably initially be inclined to take Sonic's word for it when he says Scourge isn't there. Zonic knows this Sonic hates lookalikes, after all. It would take a while for them to genuinely suspect the fleetway universe

Usually when Zonic shows up, the first thing they do is hide Scourge, which can range from hiding him elsewhere in the dimension (special zone included) or finding a way to get him out altogether, and he'll find somewhere else to hide until they leave again. The zone cops can't actually arrest him if he isn't there, and they can't prove the freedom fighters have been hiding him, since, well, he doesn't legally exist in the fleetway universe. The best they can do is ask around to see if anyone has seen him, but Sonic is always quick to point out that anyone could be a green hedgehog in a leather jacket. Metamorphia did turn into a green hedgehog, once. Without seeing Scourge with their own two eyes, the zone cops have no way to prove the green hedgehog in a leather jacket is Scourge and not someone else.

"Everyone around here is an idiot," Sonic will sneer if Zonic tries to point out that he showed a picture of Scourge to some civilians and they said they recognised him. "They'll mix any hedgehog up. Someone mistook Amy for me, once."

Technically, the circumstantial evidence is enough to bring Sonic and the other freedom fighters in, but there's always the risk of him turning into Super, if we pick the part of the timeline where they're one person. He's harmless if they get the collar around him, it's just getting the collar around him without being vaporised that's the tricky part. Even if they're separate people, well, if Sonic is gone, who will stop Super if he goes out of control?

If the zone cops decide to bring them in anyway, well. The freedom fighters are freedom fighters. They're going to fight, and they're going to fight dirty. Sonic alone is a pain in the ass (and, again, a huge risk if he and Super are one person) but everyone else will make it even worse. The cops could subdue them eventually, but... ultimately, I think they find it more trouble than it's worth to bring them in, especially when they have no surefire way to prove Scourge has anything to do with them. And if the freedom fighters were arrested, Scourge would work his ass off to bust them out. It could be a good way to trap him, but Scourge has escaped from prison once before, they don't want it to happen again

Ultimately, I think they decide to bide their time. There are other criminals to take care of, and they can't really spare the resources to go hunting for Scourge when he isn't even causing any trouble aside from "already being a wanted criminal", so they decide it's better to periodically check in to see if they can catch him unaware or wait until he causes a big enough problem to give them justification to go knocking on the door and arrest the lot of them. Unfortunately for them, the freedom fighters are protective, and will make sure that never happens

[anotherpapercut]

literally so funny how internet leftists will be like "ummm actually using drugs is bad and evil and destroying society (I know bc the us govt and/or some random conspiracy theorist told me so 😌) and anyone who thinks we should end the stigma around drug use and try to make it safer for users is actually just trying to destroy America" but then they'll also turn right around and go "don't forget to take your meds!!! remember if you can't make your own dopamine store bought is fine ❤️. end the stigma around needing lifelong medication!!!"

like girl are you somehow laboring under the delusion that like xanax is safer and more effective at treating mental illness than LSD or ketamine or even like MDMA bc boy do I have some news for you

[infizero]

showing my growth by rejecting the “every ship gets happily married and becomes wonderful parents to lovely children” mindset and admitting that many pairings should just not be parents

[skeletalheartattack]

how do you feel about the new tf2 leaks?

Oh it big sucks!

listen, this leak honestly makes me so mad im not even joking. not because of like, leaks like this cause so much trouble for the developers who own them (in how to combat it), or for the source licencees who are affected by the leak, but WHO it affects in this community.

say you've been working a beta recreation of 2Fort from Trailer 2 (since it's the version with the most footage), you've been working on it in your spare time for the past... 6 years lets say. you know the ins and outs of this map, you've watched footage and studied screenshots from around August 2006, and you've made an intense list of all the eras of 2Fort to ensure you have a timeline of eras so you know which to avoid and such.

so your beta 2Fort recreation is as accurate it can be from all the public media you could find from it. you've even gotten the sewers to be as low as they were in the beta combined with the higher water. there's some things left to your interpretation of the map, since the sewers have never been shown for example, and you push it out for people to play around on. this was basically your hobby for the past 6 years, and it meant so much to you to be able to create something with a love you can't put to words.

suddenly. the worst thing imaginable. a month after you post it? an entire developer repo leaks. and lets pretend it's got that version of 2Fort intact. that's a serious gut punch BUT, then you get comments from folks like "oh the actual 2fort leaked" "this is obsolete now" "oh well a recreation couldn't ever top a leak". it's demoralizing. it breaks their spirit for something they worked so hard on. the one thing you loved working on? well seemingly it doesn't matter now to the community you painstakingly made it for.

that's what hurts for me, is the people who've created content based off of things from TF2 (like the Spellcasters Witch), whom have made it from scratch, added their own personal touches like different outfits and hairstyles, to the ability to allow the user to recolour every part of that outfit. then a leak comes along and it seems everyone's ferally knashing their teeth at this leak. no leak can ever come close to the kind of love community members put into stuff.

that's why i hate this leak. and even with the 60 gigabytes of stuff that's leaked? people are still like "oh well this doesn't have everything 🙄". like sorry 60GB wasn't enough for you?

i hope we never see a TF2 leak again. this shit sucks and i hate the community around it.

[fantasy-costco]

I just turned in my last assignment for my first semester of grad school and was it good? Absolutely not but good God at least I'm done

[waterfall-ambience]

is 'fit of divine madness that makes you do something horrible' (a la heracles murdering his wife and children) still an acceptable story beat or is that too much of the hand of the author showing? real question because i need to sort out how damien's banishment plays out

[roobylavender]

i missed that class what dont you like about starlins rendition of their relationship?

(and also like, DID you think he did something in particular well or was it all…meh

the crux of my issues in this regard stems from batman #416. in the post-crisis era you began to see this way more lopsided depiction of bruce and dick's relationship wherein the former was portrayed to be almost.. bitter that dick had moved on to establish his own life. and it stood in great, great contrast to the bruce of the pre-crisis era, who was certainly devastated at the realization that dick was growing up, but also very intent for him to find his own happiness and way in life. they would have their disagreements on occasion (e.g., bruce initially disapproving of dick dropping out of college, bruce immediately taking leadership of a situation where the titans were involved when dick was better equipped to handle it, etc.) but the outcome of those situations was never outright bad yknow. bruce was very much capable of recognizing where he might have overstepped and subsequently stepped back to let dick have his own space. and i think initially max allan collins expanded on that dynamic in the post-crisis era in interesting ways by juxtaposing bruce's desire to see dick flourish against his own constant fear for dick's life. so instead of mike w. barr's comedic and lighthearted backup stories in early 80s tec where bruce disguised himself to keep an eye on dick's shenanigans and assure himself everything was going alright, you got this more serious confrontation within bruce with regards to his position as a parent. i don't think a lot of people read it that deeply but i've always viewed batman #408 as one of the most sensible depictions of that dilemma. the general complaints tend to be that this issue robbed dick of his pre-crisis decision to retire robin on his own, and i'll concede that as a worthwhile concern. but i don't think it's esp damning what with the implication that bruce no longer wants to be the person indirectly making the decision for dick to continue to be in this line of work. their moment at dick's bedside is less about bruce robbing him of the decision and more about him saying, if i let you still be robin, that's a direct reflection on me, bc i'm the one who got you to do all of this originally. i'm the one who put you directly in harm's way. if you're going to do this from now on, you need to do it on your own terms. you need to decide for yourself that this is who you want to be, without your relationship with me even being a factor.

it's a moment contributive to that delicious dynamic between them wherein every decision bruce takes to service dick's agency is inevitably read the wrong way by the latter to imply that he's not valued or not worthy of being seen as bruce's equal (and before the hounds pounce on me this obv does not include the increasingly abusive depiction of their relationship as the 90s progressed). that is an unavoidable dilemma when you're simultaneously someone's ward/adopted son and also their partner-in-crime! dick wants to be bruce's son and to be entitled to all of the love and care and protection that that entails but he also wants to be bruce's brother, his equal, his confidante, the one person he trusts more than anyone else in the world, etc. it's a tough place to be! it is paradoxical! and i'm so, so open to seeing that explored and think the way collins attempted to approach it in #408 was marvelous. but the way starlin (and other writers as well) totally swerved right in #416 to create this sudden resentment in bruce that dick had grown out of needing him was.. so utterly bizarre. like completely out of left field in a way i don't understand why people don't question it anymore bc in light of everything in the immediate fifteen years prior to the crisis it makes so little sense. their relationship with each other was so valued, bruce was so anxious to see dick establish himself while nonetheless maintaining a protectiveness over him, but it was all very much in good will even if he could overstep on occasion. it had all of the potential to allow for a very nuanced, empathetic exploration into the dilemmas of parenthood and esp when you are someone like bruce who has to forever live and contend with the crime of taking kids with him out onto the streets. bc he has to feel guilty! there is no escaping it. this is history, done and dusted forever, can't go back in time, so on and so forth. whatever harm comes any robin's way he has to live with as in some part being traceable back to his own actions. and i frankly believe that would be far more likely to evoke grief and anxiousness and concern than it would be bitterness that his son is charting out his own life

[miraphoenix]

re: this post, discord isn't a social media, but fuckers keep treating it like one by migrating all of their communities and posts to discord in the wake of each social media fuckup, so it kind of is one by usage at this point?

Like. Nine times out of ten, if you're looking for information on something, whatever you're looking for is locked in some fucking discord server.

If you want help with a game or a mod? "Oh, come join the discord!" You want some support or have questions about a medical condition? "Hey there's a discord for that!" You want to talk to somebody about a hobby? "There's a great discord community!"

All of these things used to be on forums that were accessible without siloing yourself into an instant messaging box full of people all talking at once, to search for the one nugget of information you actually need in the moment. It would be like if you wanted to get eggs at the grocery store, but to get that one thing, you had to naturalize as a citizen of a foreign country first.

And don't get me wrong; I have a discord account, and I use it to talk with friends. But I would rather eat my own shoes than join a "community" just to get some answers to a question that used to be posted visibly on reddit, tumblr, or fuck forbid, a topic-specific forum.

(To top it off, this doesn't even touch on my thoughts that discord, being a social tech company in 2023, is going to implode like all the other social tech companies because of increased monetization pressure. It's just a matter of time before they make dumb decisions like reddit, or get bought out like skype.)

[mossymultiverse]

....so i may have passed out for a week,

[yu3s]

* getting a new notebook would fix me ← (this wizard has one million tomes and journals and notebooks and field guides scattered across its tower already)