#Scope of Billing System | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

serpentface · 1 year ago

Text

Four culturally significant aquatic birds in Imperial Wardin- the skimmer gull, the albatross, the reed duck, and the hespaean.

The skimmer gull is a small seabird, distinguished by bright red beaks and a single, trailing tail plume. These are sacred and beloved animals with a long history of symbiosis with local fishers. They will intentionally attract the attention of fishermen, bringing them to shoals of fish that are too deep below the surface for the birds to reach. They then will snatch fish fleeing or caught in the nets, and will often be directly fed by their human assistants in an act of gratitude. They benefit tremendously from their sacred status and a taboo against killing or harming them, and can become absolute food-stealing menaces in seaside towns and cities.

The albatross is a seasonal visitor to the region, with this population migrating to small rocky islands in the White Sea to breed. The specific species occurring in this region is on the smaller side, and has a pale pink beak and soft orange legs. Albatrosses are common characters in regional animal folktales (usually as foolish, romantic types), and sometimes appear in tales as shapeshifters, usually turning into young women who have tumultuous affairs with lonely sailors.

Skimmer gulls and albatross are the most sacred animals of Pelennaumache, the face of God which looks upon the ocean, the winds, storms, maritime trade, fisheries, and broader concepts of luck and the infliction and deflection of curses. Killing either of these birds is considered to bring about disastrous bad luck (unless in the context of a proper sacrifice, most commonly in rites to bless ships and/or sailors with good winds and against ill fortune). The eggs of skimmer-gulls are free game and considered delicacies, while the preciousness of the albatross' single egg clutch is recognized and their consumption is generally discouraged (this isn't to say it doesn't happen).

Feathers of rightly sacrificed albatross and skimmer gulls are minor holy relics (ESPECIALLY gull tail plumes), and considered to be the ultimate good luck charm. The fortuitous find of a shed feather can also impart good luck and can be very valuable (the birds are sometimes poached for their feathers, though fears of the consequences are enough that this poaching is limited in scope). You will often see wealthier people wearing the feathers in hats and headdress, and any seafaring vessel worth its salt should have at least one aboard.

Both birds are evoked in the apotropaic Skimmer-Woman motif (in practice it generally has albatross characteristics, though is sometimes depicted with the tail plume of the gull).

The hespaean is a very unusual bird with two distinct species native to the region, one found exclusively in the western Black river system and its estuaries, and one found in the eastern Brilla and Kannethod river systems. They have very small pointed teeth in their bills, a trait virtually unknown outside of the flightless, beakless classes of birds (most prominently qilik). Their wings are vestigial and virtually nonexistent (with only two bony spurs remaining). These birds are almost exclusively aquatic and do not normally emerge onto land (they cannot walk upright at all, and must push themselves on their bellies). The legs of the Black river hespean develop blue pigmentation from their diet (the brighter the blue, the better fed and healthier the bird), which are waved above the surface during elaborate courtship displays. Both species are known for their haunting, warbling cries (very much like a loon, but more of a howling noise that develops into a shrill warble).

Hespaean build their nests in dense beds of reeds or small, vegetation-heavy river islands that provide some protection from predators. They raise their young during the height of the dry season (when more nesting surfaces are available and they can feed their young with more concentrated fish populations), which is an image of hope and resiliency during harsh dry times and the promise of the river's eventual bounty.

It is known that hespaean used to be caught as chicks and raised to help people catch fish (with ropes around their necks to prevent them from swallowing their catch). This practice is now very rare in the Imperial Wardi cultural sphere (mostly still practiced by the Wogan people along the Kannethod river, to whom these birds are also venerated animals) and has been largely replaced with the import of domesticated cormorants from the Lowlands to the southeast (which are more easily trained and can Usually be trusted not to attempt to swallow their catch).

These birds require large rivers that flow year round and have healthy, dense fish stocks. The population is in decline and they are now relatively rare, largely due to development and overfishing around rivers (and on a much larger timescale, the region becoming drier and water levels more irregular, and their competition with more versatile freshwater tiviit).

The reed duck is a migratory freshwater duck whose coming heralds the beginning of spring growth. They come to mate along rivers and wetlands during the early stages of the wet season, timing their eggs to hatch with the rise in water levels and growth of the vegetation and insects they feed on. They have striking red-brown and gray plumage and very little sexual dimorphism (though the male is somewhat brighter in color and the flesh around the bill turns bright red during the breeding season).

Reed ducks are not domesticated, but some populations are semi-tamed and encouraged to return to certain sites to breed (the riverside temple to Anaemache in Ephennos attracts a massive flock of the ducks every year, continually blessing it with their presence and coating its grounds in droppings), and these stocks are the primary source of sacrificial ducks and coveted shed feathers.

Hespaean and reed ducks are the most sacred animals of Anaemache, the Face of God which looks upon freshwater (particularly rivers), rains, seasonal flooding, fertile earth/seasonal fertility, and wild plant life.

The hespaean is representative of Anaemache as the River Itself and the river as a provider of fish. This association comes down to their all-seasons presence in the rivers, and their population density being a signal of a healthy, well-flowing river with good fish stocks. Lands adjacent to hespaean territory is often the most reliable and bountiful for human subsistence.

The reed duck in particular is the most venerated sacred animal of Anaemache, as representatives of Anaemache as a Face of seasonal fertility. Its coming announces the rains that the region's agriculture relies on, and their cycle of fertility closely matches the cycles of the rivers and that of the earth itself (with their new life emerging with rains, flooding, and new vegetation). There is no prohibition on hunting reed ducks (though proper rites and respect are expected for a sacred animal), and their meat and eggs is said to support female fertility and a healthy pregnancy.

#Hespaean are what I've been repeatedly misspelling as hespiornis up until now (got kind of lazy with the 'hespaean' name but the -an root #is established and makes sense). They're derived hesperornithes that have survived up to the present day but near exclusively as #smaller freshwater birds (their larger marine counterparts have been mostly displaced by tiviit and uhrwal)#Hespaean species exist outside of this region and have a worldwide (but highly fragmented and isolated) distribution #creatures

214 notes · View notes

who-is-page · 8 months ago

Text

Greener Grasses and Fossilized Paw Prints: Where (and Why) the Greymuzzles Go

Author: Page Type: Essay Words: 1,229 Summary: Page's personal experience as an adult canine psychopomp, and how it applies to the dearth of older otherkin in general alterhuman community spaces. Answering the question of: where are all the older otherkin? And why do people always seem to eventually leave? Author's Note: The term "greymuzzle" is used within the scope of this essay's title to reference older otherkin who have been active in alterhuman spaces for extended periods of time (a nod to the word's original definition within furry spaces), and is not referring to greymuzzle's most frequent definition in alterhuman groups as a community-given term denoting an individual with noteworthy activity and contribution.

[Part of the Sol System’s Alterhuman Writing Project for 2024. If you don’t want to see these posts, block the tag #inkedclaws]

When I was a young otherkin, bright-eyed and bushy tailed, I found it difficult to conceptualize why there was such a dearth of older community members, especially those 30 and above. I could understand the theoretics behind the disparity, of course— social media platforms, as we all know, tend to skew towards younger audiences due to generational differences in technological proficiency/preference. Established adults with working lives and families don’t necessarily have the same amount of free-time that young adults or teenagers do, either. But even with all that taken into account, it seemed like the number of otherkin aged 13-21 in comparison to the number of otherkin aged 30+ was less a gradual decline and more an unfathomable chasm of difference. The community had been around for decades at that point, with plenty of ghost town groups and abandoned forums to demonstrate that fact… and unless the Veil was secretly age-restricted, those people hadn’t up and disappeared into thin air. So where were people going? And, more importantly, why?

It was a question I’d never been able to answer in a way that felt satisfactory as a teenager and later as a young adult. But now, feeling the call of the void myself, I finally do have an answer and an understanding that I never could have achieved five or ten years ago: why the fuck would I be online when I could be playing video games or having sex with my hot partners instead?

It’s a crude and simplistic way to put it, but just hear me out. As an established adult, I have access to funds, stability, and freedom that I never had as a teenager or even as a young adult who still felt at the mercy of an uncaring universe’s slightest whims. My support systems in high school and college suffered from the same sort of financial and social precariousness that come with the territory of navigating the world as a young adult, but my support systems now are made up of other established adults; while I’ll never say that everything is always perfect for all of us, it’s much easier to get on your feet and stay on your feet when your arms are linked with people who are more firmly rooted in one way or another. I have access to a type of freedom that I could never have imagined as a teenager, because it was literally outside of the range of what was possible for me and my peers.

And more than just that freedom is the fact that I, as an adult, have a family! “Having a family” has, in my experience, some shitty, heteronormative connotations. As a teen, I always took it at face value as juggling bills, kids, white picket fence, other boring responsibilities that eat up your time, etc. But as an adult, now I know that having a family can be anything you make of it, and I make it extremely, obnoxiously queer. In my case, it’s living with people who understand me on a deep, foundational level, and who love me not in spite of who I am but because of who (and what) I am. It’s not passively being around those people; it’s actively, enthusiastically spending time with them because it’s fun and because I love them too and because they’re my people and I picked them and they picked me. As a kid, I’d never consciously recognized the difference between people you’re passively around because you have to be versus people you intentionally choose to be around and who intentionally choose you right back. In part, this is because as a kid you often don’t get the option to make that choice, while as an adult you have more control over your environment. Too often online environments feel like the former, rather than the latter, even if being within them is, technically, a choice. But here, now, I have people in my household who will go out of their way to intersect their daily lives with mine and ask, “You wanna walk to the park?” “You wanna grab a coffee?” or “You HAVE to see this YouTube essay I’m watching and no I don’t care that it’s 4 hours long on a topic you know nothing about, just trust me!!!!!” and that’s such a radically different and wonderful experience.

As an adult, I live with a group of people who make being alive more fun than I could have ever imagined. I have the ability to make my own fun in ways I couldn’t as a kid, for a variety of reasons. I don’t have to feel like an anxious purse chihuahua 24/7, agonizing over my existence and every possible thing that is liable to go wrong if I frivolously spend money on so much of the thought of a hot coffee. And I finally, finally understand why older otherkin disappear off the face of the Earth. It’s because being an adult nonhuman-identifying person is amazing in a way almost no one ever talks about: the euphoric experience of being known and loved, and of knowing and loving yourself.

There are so many exciting and wonderful things I could be doing in the meatspace with people I have actively chosen to spend my life with, and who fully accept and understand me as someone who’s queer, plural, and nonhuman. There’s so many enriching ways I could be engaging with my hobbies, the environment around me, and my local community. With this all in mind, why the fuck would I ever be in public online spaces where people try to argue with me about whether or not I exist, or if my experiences are real, or if I’m using the right and latest lingo to describe my experiences? Why would I subject myself to that when I could just roll my eyes, close the laptop, and go be a beloved canine psychopomp in the comfort of my werehouse instead?

That’s the crux of it. As adults with families and support networks, we have the option to not subject ourselves to the morifying ordeal of being known by asshole strangers online if we don’t want to. We can stick to just our families and our friend groups, and we will still have people around us who understand and who acknowledge and interact with our alterhumanity. The alterhuman community isn’t the only or even most important place for being our authentic selves; rather, it takes a backseat in the day-to-day life. It’s still something that’s fulfilling and worthwhile to engage with, but only on our own terms (terms that are quickly becoming incompatible with the ways Internet culture is evolving). But more often than not, there’s just more fun things to do.

In some ways, it’s kind of a relief to have had this epiphany. People haven’t vanished from alterhuman community spaces because they collectively ‘grew out of it’ like some anti-otherkin insist, or because the various generations of otherkin are so extraordinarily different from one another as to be oil-and-water. People vanish from online alterhuman spaces because offline life as an adult alterhuman is awesome. As an archivist it’s frustrating, but as a nonhuman, I find it a specific type of happiness that’s worth celebrating in its existence and prevalence. It’s an assurance that life only gets better as you get older: isn’t that grand?

#inkedclaws #alterhuman #ahpi writing challenge #otherkin

108 notes · View notes

forthelorewick · 7 days ago

Text

All the Wrong Ways to Know You

Chapter 9: Linger

< prev ch | masterlist | next ch >

Joel Miller x f!reader

18+ MDI !

Chapter summary:

WC 4.6k - life carries on, and so must you. but did it have to be so soon, and right where he could see it? did he ever mean to you what you still mean to him… or was he always just that easy to forget?

chapter content/ warnings:

angst! jealous!joel, allusions to past intimacy, emotional repression, pining/yearning/longing, brief violent thoughts, moral dilemmas, use of nicknames (exclusively with friends), etc.

· · ──────── ꒰ঌ·✦·໒───────── · ·

Late September

| Joel

The heat hadn’t let up yet.

It clung to the corners of the day, thick and persistent even this far into September. The kind that made your shirt stick to your back and the air feel heavier than it had any right to be. The kind that made breathing, walking, and thinking just a little harder.

Joel Miller had always hated the heat, he’d tolerated it only because he had to. He’d worked beneath the Texas sun since he was barely old enough to lift a hammer, and it showed. In the weathered cut of his face, in the sun-roughened skin of his neck and forearms, in the way he carried himself like a man who knew heat didn’t care if you liked it or not.

Today, though, he welcomed it. Let it settle on his skin like penance. Let it cling to his back, soak into the fabric of his shirt, slick the hair at his nape. There was something grounding in the discomfort, keeping his thoughts and movements slowed and in check.

Campus buzzed softly around him as he walked, voices drifting from clusters of students stretched out across the lawns, backpacks spilled open like lazy declarations of effort. The heat made everything feel slower, looser, as if time had melted a little in the afternoon haze. He’d stepped off campus earlier for lunch with Tommy—just their usual start-of-semester transition, a loose tradition now.

Things settled easier than they used to. A few years back, the shift had been rockier. Going back to college in his thirties hadn’t been the plan, it hadn’t even seemed like a possibility. But life twisted sometimes, and when he and Tommy hit that merger at just the right moment, it bought them something rare: time. Security. A second shot. Joel had enough to put Sarah through school and finally chase down the things he’d buried beneath years of labor and responsibility… philosophy, literature, the pieces of himself he’d left behind somewhere when Sarah was born and he couldn’t afford to dream. Dreams didn’t pay bills.

But now he was here. Teaching what he loved, and finishing a goddamn thesis. He still wasn’t sure he believed it.

Summers though, those still belonged to the old life. He didn’t walk away from their company entirely. Couldn’t, even if he wanted to. He and Tommy were still co-presidents, but Joel preferred keeping his scope wide. Big-picture strategy, long-term investments, new hires. People and systems. All the shit that required instinct more than charm. Tommy handled the day-to-day with more grace than Joel could ever fake, but they made a good team.

He was damn proud of his little brother, growing into the man Joel always knew he could be. Tommy just needed someone to believe in him, and Joel did. As he always had. And it helped the morale of the company that Tommy knew Joel was only ever a phone call away, and on weekends when he wasn’t grading papers or submitting grades, he was on-site, making rounds, double-checking numbers if needed.

It didn’t pay quite the same anymore, not with Joel giving up year-round hours, but that wasn’t the point. Tommy was happy and Joel was steady. Their business partner respected the boundaries Joel needed, and every summer, it was a rhythm: back to the office and back in the grit of something he helped build from nothing. Then, just as the summer wound down, he returned here. To lecture halls, Socratic dialogue, red pens bleeding over margins. The slow, steady burn of academia. Shaping young minds, provoking thought, asking questions no one had answers for. He liked that part.

Which made having a good T.A. damn near essential. His lectures were demanding. His grading, even more so. He needed someone detail-oriented, hungry for the work, someone who wanted to earn his approval, not just check boxes. Most semesters, one was enough. But this year, his department had greenlit his request for a second. They knew how Joel ran his classroom. How invested he was in doing things right. He could do it without one, sure, but it’d mean a lot more late nights and fewer weekends for himself.

It wasn’t a bad way to live, not bad at all.

He nodded at a few familiar faces as he walked across the campus from the staff parking lot, Professor Hastings from Sociology, her arms full of binders; Dr. Moreno from Literature, sipping something too colorful for the morning and fanning herself with a syllabus.

“Morning, Miller,” Moreno called, her voice dry with humor.

He lifted two fingers in a quiet salute. “Morning, Doc.”

“Still refusing to teach in short sleeves?”

He smirked, “Not my style for work.”

“Shame. Might boost attendance.”

He chuckled under his breath and kept walking. He was used to her flirtations by now. The older woman, nearing seventy years old, had never outgrown her hopeless romanticisms. What could you expect from a literature professor? A doctor of love, practically.

The philosophy building loomed ahead, it was cooler as he stepped inside, and quiet. He let the automatic movements take over. Unlock the office, flip on the lights, drop the worn leather satchel on the desk.

He went through the motions, whiteboard cleaned, notes pulled from the folder, laptop opened though he hated the damn thing. All while his thoughts itched at the edge of discipline. That classroom would fill soon, seats taken by students he barely knew yet, voices blending together in that early semester haze.

And somewhere in that crowd, you’d be there.

He didn’t think about you the way he had that first week. Not all the time, hell he tried not to, at least. But sometimes, like now, in the silence before the chaos, it all crept in anyway. The smell of your skin after a shower, the way your laughter curved when you were pretending not to flirt. Your lips around a smile you didn’t want him to see. The way you’d sighed his name, breathless and bold, like it belonged to you. And maybe it did, maybe it still did.

He scrubbed a hand over his beard. Christ.

Students trickled in. The sound of shuffling bags, lazy greetings, the creak of chairs folding open, it was all familiar, all expected. Then the air shifted.

As it always does at some point every Wednesday and Friday.

He didn’t look up, and he didn't need to. Something in him tightened, his grip on the folder shifted just slightly. He could feel you. Like a change in the current, a warm pressure somewhere just outside reach. A flicker of heat that had nothing to do with the weather.

He didn’t look for you, or at least he told himself he didn’t.

But the moment his eyes skimmed past the fourth row where you and your friends had chosen as your own designated spots, there you were. Bent slightly over your notes, idly chewing your pen cap, like none of it ever happened. Like you hadn’t knelt between his thighs in a dim-lit shower or whimpered into his pillow with your fingernails in his back.

You weren’t not looking at him, you just hadn’t yet.

And that was worse, somehow. Because he knew how tightly your composure clung to you. He knew the tells of your body in a way he had no right to.

He cleared his throat, turned his body toward the board to hide the sharp inhale behind his teeth. He uncapped a marker, and started writing:

Moral Subjectivism and Meta-Ethical Theories

And the lecture rolled forward. It all came out smooth, practiced, mechanical, the rhythm of someone who had said these words too many times to let them falter now.

But every time he looked up, his eyes landed near you.

And every time, yours had just drifted away back to your notes.

It wasn’t cold, and it wasn’t necessarily avoidance. If anything, it looked too natural, like you wanted him to believe you’d forgotten about it, that you never thought about him, like you’d made yourself forget… just as he’d asked you to do.

You were pretending, he thinks… he’s pretty sure he could tell. And fuck, he was pretending too.

Joel felt it, the crackle under your stillness, the way your jaw tensed at the edges, the subtle curl of your fingers around your pen. The same way his palm curled around the marker until the plastic creaked, the way he felt his own jaw tense as his eyes betrayed him and traced the slope of your neck in a momentary lack of judgment.

He looked away and pushed on. Answered questions, scribbled important names and terms on the board. Called on students for answers, and paced the room like normal.

But he hated the way he just wanted to look.

To throw the whole performance away and let his eyes land where they always wanted to. To catch yours and see something, anything, that said you felt it too. That this was wrecking you as much as it was wrecking him. That you still wanted him the way he wanted you, even if neither of you could admit it or do anything about it.

But he couldn’t want that, he shouldn’t want that. He had to leave it alone, to let it fade out naturally, no matter how long that took, no matter how much he ached. He had to let you go.

He was who he was. And you… you were the one thing he could never touch again. You were forbidden fruit.

And now, after half a decade of teaching philosophy, parsing temptation in metaphor and myth… he finally understood it. The hunger, the ache, and the cost. The way the forbidden wasn’t just alluring because it was wrong, but because it made everything else feel alive.

You made him feel alive, and that was the problem.

When the bell rang, he capped the marker, cleared his throat, and said, “Chapters five and six. We’ll dive into moral conflict next class.” Ah, how fucking ironic.

The room rustled and exhaled as students gathered their things, then voices rose and scattered as everyone filed out.

He sat back against the edge of the desk, staring at the door you’d walked through. The faint ghost of your perfume still clung to the air, or maybe he was imagining it. Maybe he was going insane.

He dragged a hand over his face again and groaned. He was definitely going insane.

You were someone he couldn’t even hold a conversation with, couldn’t look at for too long without unraveling. He couldn’t reach for you like he craved, and most certainly couldn’t touch you. Hell, he couldn’t even act like he’d ever known what it was like to do just that.

But he wouldn’t have to see you until next Wednesday, he had his weekend to recompose himself again.

So imagine his surprise, walking back into his own goddamn classroom, late afternoon after the final classes had been let out for the day, sun slanting in through the blinds, only to find you perched casually on the edge of a desk, laughing.

With him.

Jamie. Or as you had called him, ‘Austin’.

The little TA who never shut up. The one who lived to test Joel’s patience, all charm and too-bright eyes and a tendency to linger wherever you were. And now he had you smiling like that… like it didn’t cost you a damned thing.

Joel didn’t falter, not visibly. He stepped through the doorway, quiet but not silent and made his way to his desk to grab whatever he’d come for.

Jamie glanced up with a grin, “Hey, Professor Miller! Just finishing up the notes you left… thought I’d rope in some help.”

Joel’s gaze shifted to you. Brief and pointed, like it didn’t matter. Like you weren’t the sharpest ache in his chest.

You gave him a polite nod. It was neutral and detached, like it didn’t wreck you to be this close to him again.

He forced a tight smile, “Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

Jamie waved it off, “You aren’t, she was just keepin’ me company, easier to get work done with some motivation.” Then he shoots you a goddamn wink and places his hand over yours where it rested on your leg.

Joel almost said something. Almost warned Jamie that this wasn’t a game he understood. That if he touched you the way Joel knew you could be touched, soft and slow or rough and raw, it’d be the last fucking thing he ever did.

But he didn’t, because he couldn’t. Because that wouldn’t be very professional of him, and he was pretty sure you’d never forgive him. On top of the list of reasons he morally shouldn’t do that.

Instead, he just gave a quiet hum, noncommittal, and walked to his desk. His jaw was locked, every breath through his nose tight and deliberate. The way a man does when he’s seconds away from breaking something.

He told himself he’d only stay a moment.

Only long enough to gather his notes, to appear casual, but not because it mattered. Not because seeing you here with someone else felt like the kind of hurt you couldn’t justify out loud. Not when it meant acknowledging that whatever it was had become more than what you’d let yourselves call it.

So now, here he was, watching you share pieces of yourself he’d never earned, because neither of you ever asked for them, never dared to.

Because it wasn’t supposed to be like this.

It was supposed to be purely physical. That’s how you kept it, that’s how he kept it. Just bodies, heat, need. The unspoken contract that whatever it was, ended when summer did. That it was just a temporary indulgence, something to want, but never keep. Surface level and nothing more. But you’d sunken deeper into his chest anyway, hollowed out a place for yourself between his ribs.

He could watch you now, eyes warm, lips parted in laughter as you and Jamie sat across the room from him just out of earshot, and know, know, that it wasn’t the sex that ruined him. It wasn’t your mouth or your skin or the sound you made when he touched you just right.

He should’ve looked away, but he didn’t.

He sat with it and let it carve into him.

Because you looked happy. Like someone who hadn’t unraveled in the aftermath.

Like someone who’d taken his silence and steadied yourself with it.

And maybe that was what stung the most. That you seemed to be doing exactly what he told you to.

That you were forgetting, or pretending like he had never been anything before being your professor.

While he… he was still haunted by every version of you that had ever curled into his arms and made him feel like maybe, just maybe, he was something worth being wanted for, worth being needed. He was still there in his head, in bed with you or on the couch, with you in his arms. Still full of you, still reeling from every goodbye you never said.

And what made it worse, what twisted in his chest every time he let himself think about it, was that it hadn’t been something he’d done. Not something you’d said. Not a fight, not a betrayal, just a choice you’d made that ended up being the right one. It was a cruel trick of circumstance that hardened into permanence before either of you could stop it.

And now, there was nothing left to do but pretend.

You weren’t his and you never were, but Christ, you’d felt like it.

And now, you were giving parts of yourself— soft, unguarded, everyday parts, to someone else. Someone who got to know your real, full name upon introduction, your routines by being a part of them, your tired smiles because he shared them. Your stories, and all the small, quiet details Joel never let himself ask for because it would’ve made it real.

Because if it was real, then maybe he could lose it. And if he lost it, what would that say?

That he wasn’t enough?

That all he had to offer was a good fuck and quiet devotion?

That even after baring the rawest parts of himself— his want, his gentleness, his damn soul, he still wasn’t enough?

He could still taste you in his mouth. Still hear your voice when he shut his eyes.

He knew you. Not just your body, but the tremble behind your laugh, the sting behind your silence. He’d learned you in a language that had no words.

And he loved you.

God fucking help him, he did.

For everything you were. For everything you didn’t tell him. For every unspoken truth that settled between your bodies like smoke. For every moment that lingered long after it ended.

And that, that, was what fucking gutted him. Because there had been moments when he thought you might’ve given that to him too, that closeness you gave to someone else so freely now. When he swore he saw it in your eyes, in the way you looked at him like you knew exactly how he’d fall apart without you. Like you wanted to stay.

Fleeting, sharp, dangerous moments… When he thought maybe, just maybe, you loved him too.

He couldn’t stay.

Not like this. Not when your laugh didn’t stutter, not when you wore a smile so easily. Not when Jamie leaned closer and you didn’t pull away.

It wasn’t fair to you, or to himself, to what you’d both agreed to try and forget. Because you had to. It wasn’t fair that he’d keep holding on despite knowing there wasn’t a goddamn thing he could do.

So he gathered his things slowly and let the sound of your voice follow him like an echo. Let the bitter warmth crawl up his throat like something unswallowed. Jamie asked a question, Joel didn’t hear it. Just nodded, muttered something half-passable, and walked out without looking back.

The hallway was cooler, quieter. But the silence didn’t help. It never did.

He reached the door to his office and paused, hand lingering on the knob. Your voice and your laugh still echoed behind his ribs. He closed his eyes and let the weight of it settle there, heavy and unforgiving.

Maybe this was what he wanted, what he needed. Maybe this was what moving on looked like, or how it started.

· · ──────── ꒰ঌ·✦·໒───────── · ·

| You

Joel left the classroom and you finally let out a breath you hadn’t realized you’d been holding. Your hands clammy around the pen you were using. You swallowed thickly, relieved that you could stop putting up your front.

He seemed angry at you being there, like he didn’t want anything to do with you. Only there because he had to be and then left as soon as he could.

You’d tried to show him, in the little ways you could, that it wasn’t intentional, that you hadn’t meant to end up here, near him, not like this. That you and Austin hadn’t expected him to be there at all. You were only sitting in that room on the quiet guarantee that you wouldn’t be in his way. So you laughed when Austin said something stupid. Smiled like you were fine. Because what else were you supposed to do? Acknowledge how close you were to falling apart with him so close, when he was so unreachable?

You kept your eyes on the notebook in front of you, tracing the margin with your thumb just to keep your hands busy.

“Well,” Austin’s voice was low and amused as he leaned back in his seat. “Someone’s grumpier than usual.” He nods towards the door Joel left through.

He stretched lazily, flipping through his planner, completely ignorant to the turmoil flowing through you. “Hey, what’s the date? I forgot to put it on the worksheet.”

You cleared your throat, “September twenty-sixth.”

Austin tapped his pencil against the desk. “Oh shit, that’s right… it’s his birthday.”

Your heart stuttered, “What?”

He didn’t even look up. “Professor Miller. It’s his birthday today.”

The silence that followed rang in your ears. You stared down at the page in front of you, but you couldn’t see it anymore.

Birthday. A piece of information so personal you weren’t sure you’d earned the right to know it.

Your stomach twisted.

Austin kept talking, but his voice blurred in your ears. You nodded vaguely, offered a smile you didn’t feel, and gathered your things with fingers that suddenly didn’t want to work.

“I’ll catch up with you in a sec,” you mumbled, already halfway to the door.

He didn’t question it, just waved you off and tossed his pencil into his bag.

You stepped out into the hallway, the air cooler than you remembered, your body moving before your mind could settle. You didn’t mean to end up there, outside his office, hand hovering near the door. You didn’t even know what you were going to say.

You just knew that the light was on, which meant he was right there on the other side of the door. And something inside you ached too sharply to ignore.

So before you could talk yourself out of it, you knocked, it was quiet and hesitant, barely there. Maybe you hoped he wouldn’t hear or acknowledge it, maybe you hoped he wasn’t actually in there and the knock was inconsequential.

But before you could get too hopeful—

“Come in.”

You freeze.

That voice, that low vibrato, rough around the edges, carved out of the same silence that had filled every corner of your mind for months now, echoed through you like it always did. Straight through your chest, your spine, your ribs. Wrapped its icy fingers around your throat.

You stepped in before you could stop yourself.

He looked up from his desk, eyes catching on yours, blinking a few times like he had to make sure you were real, he clearly hadn’t been expecting you.

You tried to smile, something small, but it didn’t land. “Hi, I just… I wanted to say happy birthday.”

There it was, your offering. A ribbon of sincerity wrapped around the guilt that had been clawing at your chest since the moment Austin said the words.

You were holding yourself together with trembling hands, and he could see it.

And still, you stood there, unsure how to end the moment, eyes locked onto his big, brown eyes, which were looking up at you.

For a long moment, he didn’t say anything. Just looked at you, like he was trying to figure out what this was, what you were doing here, standing in the doorway with that soft, sorry look on your face.

Then, finally, he nodded once, “Thanks.” He glanced down, like he couldn’t keep looking at you without something giving way, and closed the folder in front of him.

The silence stretched.

You shifted slightly in the doorway, unsure if you should leave or say something else. Maybe it was stupid to come. Maybe it only made things worse.

And then he looked up again, his eyes flashing with something you couldn’t identify, something new.

“When’s yours?” he asked quietly.

The question landed sharp and unexpected. It took you a second to process it, “My what?”

“Your birthday,” he said. Still soft, still steady, but there was something else there, something hungry underneath. “When is it?”

You blinked at him, stunned, “Why?”

He didn’t answer, he just watched you with that unreadable expression, as if he wouldn’t dare explain it. As if the asking alone had already taken too much.

You knew he could have found your birthday in the university’s database if he wanted to, but something about him asking you, carved the ache in your chest a little deeper. That and the softness of his brown eyes as he gazed into yours.

So you gave it to him anyway, “April fifth,” you said quietly.

He didn’t speak.

Didn’t nod. Didn’t blink. Just looked at you like the sound of it meant more than it should’ve. Like he’d been waiting to hear it from your lips and not some line in a faculty database.

The silence that followed was thick and trembling, stretched between two people stubbornly holding their composure for the other, each unaware the other was just as wrecked, just as desperate, just as quietly aching beneath it all.

You shifted your weight, heart pounding. “I should go,” you whispered, almost apologetically. “Austin’s probably waiting.”

Still, he didn’t say anything. Just kept looking at you, something unreadable sharpening at the mention of Jamie’s nickname. His jaw ticked.

You tried to shake it off.

It had only been a joke, something you’d tossed at Austin in passing, that Joel probably thought the two of you were together because at that point he had only interacted with Austin with you in tow.

But now, you wondered if there was some truth behind it, and the thought that Joel might’ve been jealous made something twist, not with guilt, but with something far more dangerous.

Something like exhilaration.

Because he was the one who told you to move on, to forget everything you two could’ve been, to not even talk about what had happened, to just pretend none of it ever happened.

Yet he had no way of knowing your complete inability to do so, no idea that the teasing between you and your friends was purely platonic, he wouldn’t know any difference. Wouldn’t know that Austin was the furthest thing from heterosexual, regardless of how much he teased it.

Wouldn’t know that your true flirting and heat had always been reserved for him, and him alone.

Because when it came to him, nothing about it had ever been casual. Not the looks, not the quiet moments of peace and safety you’d found in each other’s arms, and most certainly not the way you’d let him touch you like he owned you.

Couldn’t he tell how much you still belonged to him? Even now, especially now, when you couldn’t have him. When every morning was just another day you woke up aching to kiss him, to feel the weight of him pressed against you, to feel his warmth seep into your bones, to feel like you belonged somewhere again.

The thought hit too hard, too suddenly.

You blinked, breath catching, and tore your gaze away from his. The weight of it all… the silence, the memory of his hands, the impossibility of what you still wanted… It was all too much.

“Anyway…” you started, voice uneven, already stepping back toward the door. “Happy birthday, professor. Have a good weekend.”

If he said something, you couldn’t hear it past the pounding in your ears. You could barely register your hand gripping the doorknob, twisting, then pulling.

Somehow you were outside and the breeze caught your skin, cooled the flush in your cheeks, but nothing could touch the heat still burning in your chest.

Austin found you a few moments later as he stepped out of Carson Hall, oblivious to the wreckage you’d left behind you.

You smiled at him and walked with him to the parking lot like it was just another day, but your heart never stilled, your mind still raced with the possibilities of Joel Miller, your professor, being jealous of a gay man. Just for being close to you and a little touchy.

Hell, you could be wrong. You could have completely misread that look in his eyes.

But it didn’t matter, because it gave you a hell of a rush. Like a chaser after a shot, used to soothe that ever-present sting in your chest. The first, brief relief from the pain you’d had bleeding out of your heart.

An inkling of guilt settling somewhere in there, but not quite enough to overshadow the thought of Joel, your Joel… still thinking about you. Still affected by you.

· · ──────── ꒰ঌ·✦·໒───────── · ·

god, this story consumes my very being. thank you for any of you that are following these two with me.

I have a Spotify playlist that’s 31 hours long for this fic lol

Let the true pining begin.

xoxo,

wicker

taglist as requested: @magicxmiller @yslgreen

#joel miller angst #joel miller x f!reader #joel miller fanfiction #no outbreak au #no outbreak!joel miller #joel miller #the last of us #joel the last of us

33 notes · View notes

kohakhearts · 1 year ago

Note

goh parentified child syndrome. go(h)

my time is here at last. thank you for enabling me <3 apologies for taking months to finish writing this giant post!

welcome to my dissertation on this fucking Dynamic <3

ok! first thing, let's establish our criteria for Parentified Child Syndrome. this is obviously not like, an actual diagnostic Thing, but there are a million and one articles out there for us to look through. so i did the tough work of scouring those to find some Symptoms we can use as anchor points here. a lot of this is split into "emotional" (parents seeking comfort from their children, rather than comforting them) vs. "material" (parents assigning their children responsibilities that are not age-appropriate (e.g. grocery shopping, paying bills, etc.)) needs, but for simplicity i'll just merge them together - because realistically, they often go hand-in-hand. so the primary symptoms we'll work with here will be:

disruptive childhood behaviours (particularly at school)

stress and anxiety

reluctance to participate in play/age-appropriate activities with their peers

difficulty acknowledging and accepting one's feelings

insecure attachment styles

need to feel "in control"

distrustful of others/self-reliant to a fault

absenteeism and poor performance in school

passive communication style

the other obvious prerequesite here is the family dynamic. so let's dissect that one a bit!

goh's family situation isn't actually like...100% clear. but i have analyzed every episode where his family is even mentioned like it's my full-time job and i have no reason to believe his grandmother actually lives with him. so in the scope of this essay, i am assuming that she lives nearby, and most likely has a key to the apartment, but does not live with them.

otherwise, we are given enough context to assume that camille and walker have been busy with work goh's entire life (though i'd choose to believe for my own sanity that in his infancy his mother at least wasn't working...though given the type of job she has, that's actually...kinda hard to say for sure). we can also assume that they've at least been self-employed for the majority of his life. it's clear that they are fairly well-established in the city/in their field by jn, and since goh is supposed to be 10 at this point, it makes sense to me that they've been building that company up pretty much his whole life.

in terms of the work they do, goh tells ash, my dad is a system engineer and my mom is a programmer. they run a company together. granted, we don't see very much of their actual workplace, but what we do see is completely void of other people. as in, camille and walker do all this work BY THEMSELVES.

nothing in the anime otherwise disputes this! if anything, goh's explanations of his parents' lifestyle just reinforces it. he also suggests that during periods of harsh weather and heavy system use, his parents are busier than usual. this implies that they are most busy during holidays. this is actually further implied by the flashback in jn015 where they explicitly say to him that they're sorry for having to work through the holiday. his reaction, being completely unengaged, not even really even acknowledging it, tells us that this is the norm.

however!! he also shows off a special device to horace in jn032 that he says his parents made specifically for him, to help him learn more about mew. this suggests that they must have some amount of free time to dedicate to him...but they show their love for him through material gifts related to their line of work (his computer set-up, too; he tells scorbunny that his parents set it all up for him).

otherwise, we see camille and walker privately share their concerns about goh (a clear awareness that he doesn't have many friends, concern about him being lonely because of them, etc.) but never actually confront goh with their concerns or appear to go out of their ways to do anything about it. i wrote a bit about this and the symbolism of having him catch a cubone of all pokemon in the episode we're introduced to his family here but the tl;dr is that camille and walker demonstrate care for goh to each other but not to him - presumably to compensate for their physical absence, we get the impression he's given a lot of freedom and little to no discipline.

which brings me to the first criterion:

disruptive childhood behaviours (with a side of absenteeism, which presumably contributes to poor performance in school)

goh's school life is obviously inconvienent to the plot progression, so for narrative purposes the writers have him just not go to school. in jn049 we get the explanation that goh had made a promise to their teacher to show up to school for tests...but the weird thing about this scene is that chloe's surprised by it:

since in jn001 and jn002 we see that chloe is goh's only point of contact amongst his schoolmates and that she hand delivers schoolwork to him at her dad's lab, the only way this exchange really makes sense to me is if it's a new arrangement. even the fact that goh makes a point of saying "hey, i followed through, go me" to their teacher here gives that vibe.

so, we can extrapolate from that that...prior to whenever this agreement was made, goh just didn't go to school because he didn't want to. but given how schools operate, we can pretty safely assume his parents are aware of this. and i have strong reason to believe that they have at least been on the receiving end of phone calls from teachers or administrators, because of these lines from jn015:

all things considered, this is a weird assumption to make, especially about your hyper-independent introverted child...unless there's a history of disruptive or unfriendly behaviour to inform that assumption. and based on goh's behaviour in jn001 at professor oak's pokemon camp, i don't think it's so out there to say the pattern probably was there.

goh is actually a super sweet kid towards his parents and has a clear admiration for them both. even in flashbacks, his whole thing is kind of like...he doesn't want to bother them. they fall asleep on family vacation and don't spend time with him? well, that's fine! he'll just find something else to do! in that same episode in the flashback sequence, they pick him up on the side of the road alone in the pouring rain and he doesn't say a word to them. even though he was angry and upset before.

so, yeah. i think it would make a lot of sense if he were well-behaved at home and not so much so at school. but camille and walker, even when they learn about things that happen, don't seem to probe or discipline him. whether because of any combination of giving him leeway out of guilt or of not wanting to encourage him to act out at home, we don't know. but the disconnect obviously exists.

which then contributes to

stress and anxiety, difficulty acknowleding and accepting one's feelings, and passive communication style

goh is socially awkward, yes, and clearly very anxious socially especially early on in jn, but a lot of that seems to come from an inability to express his wants and needs. i think jn003 has some of the most succinct examples of this - ash having to realize he's struggling and to reach down to him when they're climbing the tower in order for him to even accept that he can get (and needs) help getting up, and then later one when he stumbles over his words trying to ask ash to be his friend.

i think another good example is in jn007, after he gets knocked out at the flute cup. passive communication relies a lot on shifts in body language and in, well, passive statements. when ash approaches him to tell him to cheer up, goh doesn't actually really...respond to that. he does this

and then runs off. which he does fairly often, actually, even as late as jn135. it's emotional avoidance 101. literally just run away from the thing that's bothering you. something else we see in jn135 is him backing out of admitting he wants to go on a journey - because he is concerned about ash's reaction (though i think it's a little more complex than that, but i'll circle back to that).

and of course there's jn062, which i wrote a lot about in this post. but the whole thesis of the episode is that goh has learned through his relationships up to this point that it's okay to not understand your feelings but you still have to feel them. and it's actually a really beautiful character development moment for him, but also reinforces the fact that he still doesn't know how to grapple with his own emotions. after finally finding drizzile and explaining how he knew he would find it there, he starts to cry and doesn't know why. but even aside from feeling vulnerable, it's kind of a culmination of this stress he's been carrying with him throughout the whole episode...and the sense of responsibility he feels for driving drizzile away. which is a great segue into

insecure attachment styles and need to feel "in control"

if there's one thing i feel like people sleep on regarding goh's character, it's how much of a mother hen he is. he's obviously very thorough and thoughtful when it comes to looking after his pokemon - as in jn062 where he spends all that time chasing down drizzile after it runs away, even to the point of telling ash and chloe that they should stay behind because it's getting late but that he's going to keep looking - but he's the same way with ash.

off the top of my head, things like buying extra scones because he knew ash would want them, making ash wash his hands after eating ice cream, chastising him about punctuality, you know...very parental kind of things. he actually does it with horace too, when they first meet, by bringing a lunch for them both when he goes back to the forest to meet him again.

anyway, being a Mom Friend is cute and all, but it also REEKS of parentified child. taking on responsibilities that aren't yours to fulfill? yeah. that's a need to feel in control. it's what he's used to! it offers him security!

the other side of this is...chloe. goh's first friend, who he refuses to consider a friend, or let consider him a friend. but, like, she obviously IS his friend. and yet our introduction to them gives us this exchange

goh and chloe have a pretty tense relationship at the beginning of jn, wherein she is clearly trying to help him (by you know. getting his homework for him and shit) and he blows her off in a text message, which she complains is a repeating behaviour. chloe is obviously very loyal to him, even though he doesn't seem to repay the favour. again, there's a big disconnect here.

insecure attachments generally stem from anxiety over potential rejection and/or poor self-esteem cultivated in childhood based on parents’ emotional availability (or lack thereof) to their children. by keeping chloe an arm's distance away, goh keeps himself safe from the dangers of vulnerability, taught to him through childhood encounters with emotionally unavailable parents.

i'm not here to armchair diagnose (ok, who am i kidding, yeah i am), but i think goh's attachment style is anxious-avoidant. his clear avoidance of making friends, the multiple times we see him break off his friendship with ash only to minutes later be like "me and the bestie"...yeah, that's avoidance. but he does crave intimacy, arguably even more than he fears it.

hence why even though he knows ash would want him to journey on his own...he still convinces himself that actually telling ash that would be, as he calls it, a "betrayal of [their] friendship." my theory is that he's not concerned that ash will be upset - he's concerned that ash won't be upset enough. which is why when then ash turns it around on him and says he's going on a journey, goh gets upset and pushes him away. he does the exact same thing with horace when they're younger. just a complete 180 - he wronged me once, so he's the worst and i can't forgive him, ever.

the difference with chloe is that she actually takes care of him more than he takes care of her - which changes the dynamic from "i have to do everything to keep this person in my life, including suppressing my emotions for their sake" to "i cannot express to this person that i have needs and desires because they'll think i'm too much and they won't stick around if i do." which is primarily avoidant, but insecure attachment nonetheless.

this is extrapolation, but i think his relationship with chloe is so different because we are supposed to get the sense that they have a more familial dynamic. so, she's the one person he can't push away from him - but as he learned in his actual family dynamic, he also can't be too close to her. he doesn't want to be smothered; he doesn't want her to feel smothered by him. so they maintain a degree of separation that only begins to go away after her father begins literally housing and feeding him, thus integrating him and ash into their family in some honorary way.

which brings me to the last point, i guess, which is

reluctance to participate in age-appropriate activities with peers and self-reliant to a fault

these are, i think, the traits that jn is most blatantly attempting to better in goh throughout his arc. so i won't spend too long hashing it out, because i think these are things we all know he struggled with!

in flashbacks, we see him alone at school; during the first episode, at professor oak's camp, he is always physically distanced from the other kids and chloe even points out that he's basically doing professor oak's job at one point! he's not on the same level as the other kids and it's clear he doesn't want to be. when he meets horace, we see that it takes him some time to get comfortable enough with him to go explore the forest together and become friends.

he doesn't go to school, but that doesn't mean he isn't learning things - he becomes a very self-directed learner early on, from what he see. he's not just like...rotting in his room playing video games. he's studying and researching. the only times aside from with horace that we see him in a flashback doing something that isn't solitary is with pokemon - and even then, he's like...reciting their pokedex entries. his abra story at the end of jn is precipitated by him saying he was going through his dad's old pokedex (which is a whole other thing - this implies walker used to be a trainer, but neither of goh's parents seem to have pokemon...perhaps they're too busy with work to look after them? a theory for another time, i suppose, but it has undeniably being gnawing at my brain since that episode aired lol).

and of course, there's the fact that in jn062 he tells drizzile he was never comfortable with confiding in his parents or his grandmother...suggesting that he never confided in anyone, because we don't really get the sense from the whole "i don't NEED friends" exchange in jn001 that he considers chloe a reliable confidant, either.

the other place we see his flawed sense of self-reliance, aside from like...everywhere in the first 10 or so episodes, lol (something that is reflected pretty beautifully and symbolically in scorbunny's story, too!), is in project mew. he has to learn how to work in a team - and he clearly hates it. at this point he's found one person to rely on, but that already feels like too much. the raid battle with articuno is the most obvious example of this. he isn't good at being a leader, but he also isn't good at being a follower. because he's only ever been responsible for himself, and he doesn't trust anyone else to know how to direct him, but he also has no clue how to work within the parameters of a team.

i also want to say, as a final note, that i actually think this is all extremely intentional writing. obviously in the west we have a strong capitalism culture too, but the work culture in japan is very toxic (just google "japan work culture" and you can see right away how intense it is lol) and i'm not actually surprised at all that pokemon would make such a direct commentary on that - a lot of japanese kids could probably relate to goh and his emotionally absent, work-obsessed parents! they are clearly pretty well-off, but their dedication to work supercedes matters of home and family, because that's how it's supposed to be. as a result, goh admires them a lot for this dedication - but his arc is primarily about letting go of the "work" part of interacting with pokemon and learning how to have fun and make the most of his experiences. and i think that's a really lovely message for modern pokemon to be sending to kids :')

#answered #*meta #mine #i wrote most of this in may but i came back to finish it tonight shjdfghj hi #goh #pokemon #anipoke #tangentially i actually noticed something similar with the way hz has the kids do like...distance learning and stuff LOL #even sv in itself as like. a school-based adventure. the current culture influence is SO glaring...of course they're emphasizing school as #part of this fantasy world for kids to escape in. i think a lot of adults didn't Get It...but sv were developed during covid. so...yeah #pokemon has always done a very good job of making cultural commentary like this imo!

104 notes · View notes

triridbilling · 8 months ago

Text

How to Increase Billing Efficiency

Readable Format

Business invoices should design in such a way that owners/consumers can directly face the most important data when accessing the financial transactions. This will definitely saves a precious time by avoiding the process of browsing multiple menus and folders in your systems. Today most of businesses are implementing effective billing features in their organization to provide an easy-to-understand service.

Cloud-Based

Most of the modern business transactions are accessible through the cloud. This means you can access the data for different users at the same time, from any location or any device. This allows consumers to work remotely as per convenience as result owners/consumers can access and use the data at the same time.

Less Paperwork

The main benefits of choosing TRIRID-Billing software are to manually manage the data in a spread sheet format. With TRIRID-Billing software you can store your invoices in the form of data files on any platform. Now you have rights to access to them without use of any paper. The TRIRID-Billing software is easy to use and take less time to generate receipt.

Reduce Time spent building Reports

Still you are spending too much time building custom reports from scratch. You can make generate report easily as your invoices can quickly and easily be organised by TRIRID-Billing software including date, type or any other fields you choose.

Regularly Updates

The foremost things about TRRID-Billing software are that regularly updates regarding client, consumer transactions. As you received updates, the software updates the information in the database which makes transactions process very easy and simple.

Less Human Error

The right billing software helps you to prevent the possibility of any wrong timesheet entry that may happen in a manual system. The most suitable feature of any billing software is the automation of transaction process as done by consumers, vendor and many more.

For More Information:

Call @ +91 8980010210

Visit @ https://tririd.com/tririd-biz-gst-billing-accounting-software

#Benefits of Billing Software #Scope of Billing System #Effective billing solutions #TRIRID-Billing in Bopal-Ambli road-ahmedabad #TRIRID-Billing in ISCON-Ambli road-ahmedabad

0 notes

sabrinahawthorne · 3 months ago

Text

Surgery Fundraising Update - March 13, 2025

At the beginning of this year, I began posting that I'm raising money so that I can get a necessary surgery done this summer. If you want to know the basics, check out my pinned post.

I've been pretty vague about some details of this, largely for reasons of privacy, but also because until now, it's been unclear how much money I'd actually need. As of today, however, I've been informed that my insurance will not be covering any part of the procedure, which means that I'll need to pay the entire bill of $24,000.

So far, I've done most of my talking about this fundraiser in the form of advertising my library of games, which I still intend to do - if you want to help me out, buying my work is still the best place for it. To better my odds, though, I think it's time to widen my scope.

Firstly - I have a ko-fi! It's extremely bare-bones, so I can't say anything about rewards or perks - but you can throw me some extra money if you're not otherwise interested in any of my games, or you can sign up for its $2/month tier to help me out if you like.

Secondly - I am now open for freelance RPG writing commissions! I can do design work, microfiction, or even copy for your own game. If you'd like to hire me, please contact me via [email protected].

Thirdly - I'm open for professional GM work! I've been running games since I was a teenager, and I'm proud to say that I have an extensive and growing number of games under my belt, and I specialize in introducing players to new systems, and to running games for new players. Please reach out via the above email address to inquire about playing at my table.

Fourthly - Several of my games include physical editions, and I'd like to put them on your store shelves! If you're a physical bookseller and would like to one of the below listed games, please email me.

Bring the Stars Home to Me

Broke Wizards

The Tale of Yon: A Tyrant's Throne

#indie ttrpg #ttrpg #itch sale #fundraiser #freelance #professional GM

26 notes · View notes

ratbastardz · 6 months ago

Text

MASC SCIENTIST – NPT / ID PACK — ★

System names: The Alchemist, The Rabbit Hole Of Science, The Wonders Of Discovery, The Answer Seekers, The Earth Travelers, The Learners Of Truth, The Periodic System Of Elements, The Researchers

Names: Arthur, Isaac, Atlas, Benjamin, Jonas, Dimitri, Christian, Andreas, Carson, Erwin, Jacques, Leo, James, Louis, Thomas, Vincent, Axon, Alan, Bill, Edward

Pronouns: he/him, hy/hym, hx/hxm, h?/h?m, DNA/DNAs, chem/chems, vial/vials, lab/labs, cell/cells, sci/science, tox/toxic, bio/bios , experi/experis, goggle/goggles, haz/hazard, test/tests, subject/subjects, electro/electros, mole/cule, atom/atoms, dis/cover, geni/genius, beaker/beakers, micro/scope, lab/coat, test/tube, petri/dish, clamp/clamps, burner/burners, carbon/dioxide, alka/line, tele/scope, study/studys, clean/cleans, 🧬/🧬s, 📋/📋s, 💉/💉s, 🧫/🧫s, 🧪/🧪s, 🔭/🔭s, 🥼/🥼s, 🥽/🥽s, 🔬/🔬s, ⚗️/⚗️s

Titles: He Who Has All The Answers, He Who Studies, He Who Works Relentlessly, He Who Experiments, He Who Balances Chemicals, He Who Craves Knowledge, He Who Seeks The Truth, He Who Creates Compounds, He Who Creates, He Who Destroys, He Who Creates And Destroys, He Who Creates But Never Destroys, He Who Holds Vials, He Who Is Intellectually Inclined, He Who Has Reached A Breakthrough, He Who Is Ever So Brilliant

(He/him is used for the purpose of the theme, it can be swapped for any pronoun :3!!)

Labels: scientist xenination, scientystian, lorciaen, abandonedlabmulviboard, sciencehubris, syrtubicien, scientistmagic, magicscientist,magiencetion, parasitelexic, scientist alterhuman, scientist nonhuman, scientist kin, scientist occuden, geniusscientist, weirdsciencegender, madscientistgender, chemigender, scientistkinic, madscihoppian, mukerix, madscientistaesic, acisciengender, vilegender, selfspersciic, experistudial, bloodvialic

Other: science lover userboxes, scientist alter blinkies

See also: Fem vers (has a lot of the same stuff but is more masc oriented.)

#🧵 ◞ ♢ put me back together #🧪 ◞ ♢ I can fix you #npt suggestions #npt pack #npts #npt set #liom #liommogai #mogailiom #id pack #liomogai #moqai #liomqai #moqailiom #mogai #qai #id packs

44 notes · View notes

justinspoliticalcorner · 8 months ago

Text

Paul Blumenthal at HuffPost:

Former President Donald Trump’s most significant policy plank in his third presidential campaign is to implement a system of mass deportation to remove up to 20 million noncitizens from the United States, a plan that apparently aims to not only remove people living here illegally but also to chase away ― or accidentally round up ― U.S. citizens as well.

He is promising to deploy the military and deputize local police officers to round up millions of people, detain them in makeshift camps and then ship them off to other countries ― whether or not the destination is the person’s country of origin. This plan is billed as targeting only those who have come to the country or reside in it illegally, with a special emphasis on supposed migrant gang members. It offers a story of those who deserve to be here and those who don’t. Those who are part of the national community and those who exist outside its bounds and, perhaps, its laws. But 79% of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. have been living and participating in American communities for more than 15 years. They have married U.S. citizens, hold jobs that prop up their local and national economies and have children and grandchildren who are citizens. Ripping these people out of the country and away from their families will ripple through every community in the country.

“Communities are like a fabric ― the way that the threads are interwoven,” said Heidi Altman, federal advocacy director for the National Immigration Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Fund, an immigrant rights nonprofit. “If you snip at one, eventually the whole of the fabric comes loose.” This plan to tear communities apart will also ensnare U.S. citizens, green card holders and others here legally, either by accident or with intent. Trump and his advisers are already saying that’s what they’ll do. Tom Homan, Trump’s former acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, was asked in a “60 Minutes” interview that aired Sunday whether there is a way that Trump’s mass deportation plan could remove undocumented people without separating them from their families. “Of course there is,” Homan said. “Families can be deported together.” What Homan is saying, without saying it directly, is that mixed-status families, with some family members who are U.S. citizens and others who lack legal status, can choose to self-deport if they wish to remain together.

There are currently 4.7 million mixed-status households in the U.S., according to the Center for Migration Studies. Among those households are 5.5 million U.S.-born children living with one undocumented household member and 1.8 million U.S.-born children living with two undocumented adults. In total, there are 9.7 million Americans who live in households with at least one undocumented resident. Trump and Homan propose an impossible choice: your citizenship and your home or your family. Similar mass deportations and detentions in the country’s history have done the same. The incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese-Americans during and after World War II ensnared citizens and noncitizens alike. So, too, did the imprisonment of Germans, Italians and people born under the Austro-Hungarian Empire during both world wars. Trump’s inspiration for his mass deportation program, President Dwight Eisenhower’s Operation Wetback, similarly resulted in the deportation of significant numbers of U.S. citizens to Mexico.

But none of those programs was of the scale or scope that Trump imagines. There are an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., according to the 2022 American Community Survey. Other surveys and estimates have found similar numbers. But Trump and his allies talk about deporting 20 million to 30 million people. There is no source for such a number. That would invariably mean targeting people with some kind of legal status, whether temporary or permanent. “They seem to be gleefully suggesting that they would include people here with some legal status in these roundups,” said Matthew Lisieki, a senior research and policy analyst at the Center for Migration Studies, a think tank that focuses on global migration. A deportation program that removes 11 million people or even more than 20 million would affect every single community in the country, invariably sweeping up even larger numbers of U.S. citizens and legal residents, taking them away from their families and putting them into jails, incarceration camps and, potentially, off to another country. As Homan’s answer on “60 Minutes” indicates, that’s a feature, not a bug. Trump has already proposed invoking laws that could be used to sweep up unnaturalized U.S. residents who have legal status.

The Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which Trump says he will use, allows the president to effectively suspend due process for anyone of a particular nationality or national origin when the U.S. is at war or is invaded by that nation. Invoking this law may prove challenging since the U.S. is not currently in a declared war, much less one against any of the Latin American countries that represent the point of origin for most undocumented immigrants in the U.S. And though Trump claims that the migration of people into the country amounts to an “invasion,” federal courts since the 1990s have largely rejected efforts by states claiming that the word “invasion” in the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted to include the voluntary migration of people across borders.

Still, it is possible that the courts today would take a different approach and declare that the president’s invocation of an invasion by immigrants is a “political question” that the judicial branch will not interfere with. That could give Trump a free hand to implement a brutal and sweeping deportation program. “There are no explicit limitations on what kinds of regulations the president can promulgate under the law,” said Katherine Yon Ebright, a counsel at the progressive Brennan Center for Justice and author of a paper on the Alien Enemies Act. The law has been invoked three times during conflicts with actual foreign nations: during the War of 1812 and both world wars. In each conflict, the president has not only directed deportations and detentions but also promulgated restrictions on noncitizens who had come from the foreign belligerents.

[...]

When Trump was in office, immigration officials ramped up the use of these inaccurate gang databases to identify and deport undocumented residents. Considering Trump has falsely claimed in his campaign speeches that “migrant gangs” have “conquered” entire cities, such an effort would likely be radically scaled up. This could lead to removal of people with legal status as well as those who don’t. Residents who have legal status under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program ― so-called Dreamers who were brought across the border by their parents as children ― have been incorrectly identified as gang members by local police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That would be one way to strip them of their legal status.

Trump’s top immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, has promised to “turbocharge” efforts at denaturalizing U.S. citizens. When in office, Trump ramped up denaturalization efforts with one Homeland Security budget document proposing up to 700,000 investigations into naturalized U.S. citizens. Civil denaturalization can be done to people who obtained their legal status illegally or are the child of someone who did so, who deliberately lied about a fact in their application for citizenship, obtained citizenship through military service but was then dishonorably discharged or by becoming a member of a subversive group. This last reason could implicate U.S. citizens incorrectly placed on gang databases or otherwise identified as gang-affiliated by law enforcement. Databases can only be used to identify the legal status of residents who have had interactions with law enforcement or certain government agencies. If Trump intends to ramp up deportations to the level he claims, his efforts would need to target workplaces and neighborhoods. This would, invariably, involve racial profiling by placing checkpoints or performing sweeps in heavily Latino neighborhoods or worksites. Such sweeps would undoubtedly ensnare U.S. citizens and inflict fear in everyone ― citizens and noncitizens alike ― within these communities.

Donald Trump’s diabolically fascistic plan of mass deportations is eerily reminiscent of the interning of Japanese-Americans in World II: a moral and economic calamity that would undo America.

Read the full story at HuffPost.

#Donald Trump #Economy #Deportation #Immigration #Thomas Homan #Undocumented Immigration #Mass Deportations #Operation Wetback #Alien Enemies Act #Stephen Miller #DACA

60 notes · View notes

captainjonnitkessler · 6 months ago

Text

You know it's true that many liberals/center-left people don't fully understand the scope of how badly fucked up our systems are, don't go far enough in their calls to action, and can be generally kind of cringe

But I follow a lot of them on bluesky and I gotta say, a constant barrage of "ugh look what the Orange Cheeto did now! We're gonna fight back and overcome it! #resist! Look at this great bill a Democrat politician introduced! We need to reach out and inspire the poeple to get involved!" is a hell of a lot more inspiring than the leftist version, which is usually something more like "everything is fucked, it will never get better, the fact that you're celebrating a small piece of good news makes you a bootlicker, if you aren't constantly posting about every atrocity in the world (at least the ones I currently care about) you're complicit, violent revolution is the ONLY path forward (which is why no civil rights movement has made any progress in the last 200 years), and everyone who disagrees with me is a fascist or worse, a liberal"

#benefits of not really celebrating christmas: i've got nothing better to do tonight than post discourse #us politics

32 notes · View notes

kangaracha · 2 months ago

Text

DAYBREAK; chapter 15

---

pairing lee know x reader

genre smau, dystopia AU, angst, hurt/comfort, slowburn romance, hope/hopelessness, life goes on, ordinary life during extraordinary times

summary independant entertainment doesn't make money, everyone knows that - not dancing, not boxing. not without a company's name attached to it and the soul ripped out of it so that it can only sit on the stage bleeding. you knew you never should have agreed to get involved in his studio, that the bills would pile up and the income would run dry, that the government would come knocking telling you to shut up and sit down...but it makes him so happy, to be able to dance. it gives him a reason to stay. you don't know what you'd do without that.

taglist OPEN

previous | masterlist | next

---

"I have to - I need-"

Your voice stammers from your chest without control or guidance, spilling out whatever words it can find in the wild turn of your thoughts - and you never quite get to the point, but Minho still nods and watches calmly as you walk towards the door, every step equal to four beats of your racing heart.

Once you are out the door, you run, as fast as your feet can carry you down the stairs. You don't stop until you are in the rain again, the pelt of the storm washing away the tears that start to flow freely down your face.

You sniff and wipe at your nose, but you do not step back under the shelter of the eaves. You just stand there, rooted to the sidewalk, and wait until the scope of the storm and the world it turns its rage upon makes you and all your problems feel small enough to deal with again.

Why did you do that?

Oh, because you love him.

An insidious little voice whispers the thought into your ear, barely audible over the rain and the wind and the sob that coughs itself out of your throat. Love, as if something as lonely and wretched as you could even know the meaning of the word; or be loved by something like him, who is always doing right even when you hate him for it.

No, you didn't love him. Couldn't love him, because there is no way he could ever lower himself far enough to love you. He would know better than to ever say such a thing to you, or to kiss you in a moment of weakness like that. Minho didn't crumble from inside out the way that you did; he is built on stone, and you on sand, and there is no reason for him to descend from that mountain just to see you standing on the shoreline.

I am myself because you gave up who you are for me-

-but it isn't true. You don't feel like you've given up anything - you are just yourself, and yourself is someone who manipulates the system to play god and watches the unfortunate be carried off to die, and he is good, beyond anything your blackened heart has ever tried to be. He has played rebel against the forces of the world, and he has saved his friend from death without a second thought, and you have only ever lived in fear and tried to ensure your own survival-

"What are you doing?" asks the rasping voice of a patrol officer as he walks down the street, black hood pulled up to cover his head from the rain. He reminds you of a snake, the way he appears without warning, his eyes gleaming with the reflection of the streetlight and each syllable he speaks slithering from his tongue.

You look up at him in surprise, a jittery and nervous hand pushing your hair out of your eyes. It plasters itself to your cheeks instead, dripping water down the back of your shirt as your head tips up to meet his eye. "Nothing," you answer. "I just needed a minute - outside-"

"In the rain?" he asks doubtfully. Suspiciously, by the way his eyes rake over you and then the buildings around you, the dark and empty street. "Do you live here?"

"I live here," you say, and point to your building. "I just came out for a minute-"

"Why would you be standing around in the rain outside your own apartment?"

You pause, staring at him warily. Trying to predict his next move; but his body is a statue, his face hidden where it can't give anything away. "I was crying," you say, trying to tread your way around the truth. "I just wanted somewhere quiet to think."

The man is unsympathetic. "Do you have any proof that you live here?"

"In my apartment I do-" you begin.

"It's suspicious to be standing around outside a building at this time of night," he cuts right across you as if he hadn't heard you. "And you should know that loitering is against the law."

"I know," you try to insist, and pull in a deep breath to fill your lungs before you take a step backwards, towards your door. "I'll go back inside now." Another step. Another.

He looks like he is weighing up his options, his hand drifting casually towards his belt like he might arrest you anyway; but you take another step and another and then you are on the doorstep, his gaze lacerating the skin of your back as you pull the door open and slide inside, letting its heavy weight slam shut behind you.

Even then, you can still feel him looking at you through the glass; the feeling crawls across your skin all the way up the stairs, in the very heart of the building where no one could see you unless you are able to see them. You want to pause before you enter the apartment again, pick up a breath and gather together your pieces and try to pretend you'd found the answer out there in the storm, but fear drives you onwards until the door is shut and your back is pressed to the other side, only the grey view of the city from on high to see you barricade it shut against an evil only you can perceive chasing you.

At least Minho is not there waiting for you; the bathroom door is shut tight, steam curling out from underneath it while the shower runs. The hot water must be working tonight; you think, for a moment, how nice it would be to soak under that weight until your bones melt, but you end up stripping away your cold, wet clothes at the door instead and fleeing to the bedroom, letting your damp hair soak the back of another sweatshirt and curling up under your cold covers to shiver away the ice instead.

A small sound in the room is the only thing that makes you lift your head again; the door, the faulty latch clicking as it opens. You expect Minho's face to appear in the crack as the door shifts inwards, but instead a small weight lands on the end of your bed, creeping along the length of your shins.

Cat, you tell yourself with the held breath that you let go of. In the darkness, you can just make out the small, familiar face of the grey cat as it stares at you and then turns away, nestling itself in between your stomach and your knees. Another thing that you don't deserve the love of, as your skin leeches its warm and your heart slows to the soothing rumble of its throat as it purrs.

You cannot fathom why it would be here when you are who you are and you've done what you've done, but it stays anyway, all throughout the night and even into the bright face of morning as the sun dawns and the storm disappears.

---

[EXCERPT FROM TRANSCRIPT: SECOND ELECTORAL DEBATE]

- What do you think the nation is in most desperate need of right now?

JEONG JUWON - In looking to the future, we are compelled to look at the achievements of the past, and to return to a way of living that is fruitful for our citizens as much as it is for the power and success of the nation at large. I feel that the rise of insurrection and labour camp occupancy are major topics that require immediate attention, and that resolving issues of poverty and wellbeing at the lowest levels of society are key to change.

CHOI DALSEOK - As leaders of this nation, we have always demonstrated how our eye is on the future, rather than looking back into the past as our competitors are so fixated on doing. All of our policies and law changes over the past ten years have been forward-thinking solutions to problems that haven't even had a chance to arise yet - our security policies slashed both current and predicted crime rates, our attention to investment has yielded the strongest profits in history, and our plan for the next ten years only sees our nation continue to thrive.

- There has been a lot of talk over the course of this electoral term of rebellion and civil war. How do you intend to solve this crisis?

CD - As an administration, we have already begun the work to mitigate rebellion, with our new task force aimed specifically at dismantling their operations and bringing the disconnected into the fold of our national security systems. The numbers related to our task force speak for themselves - in only a few weeks of operation, a tremendous amount of insurgents and malcontents have been brought in off our streets and the strike and protesting efforts of the lazy and unemployed have been completely curbed. We are an administration that can be trusted to deal with these issues quickly and completely, and have proven time and again that we are capable.

JJ - Rebellion used to be a thing of the past, something that you read about in a storybook. Now, in our modern times, it is a real threat with a movement behind it, borne of this administration and the tight fist they use to choke our nation. I think it is time that we looked back at our civilisations of the past and see where it is that we have gone wrong, and start to listen to the people that choose us to lead them.

- Records show that the cost of living for 80% of the population of our capital city alone is now above their earnings. What are your thoughts on economical issues and the path going forward for the bottom 10% of citizens?

CD - We are building a country on the backbone of hard work and honest effort, in a time where choosing high aspirations and devoting your life towards them will reward you with success. Complaints about the cost of rent and wages that are made by the laziest people in our society should not be taken as economical commentary.

JJ - There are many redundant policies on rent, wages, and the price of goods and services that we as an administration are devoted to tightening, should we be voted in. Looking at solutions for economic issues at the lowest levels of society are key to our strategies to deal with rebellion and malcontents, and so they are very high on our priorities.

- This administration has been accused of tampering with elections in the past. What steps have been taken to ensure the public can be confident in the results of this election being true and accurate to their opinion?

CD - This is a non-issue. There is a disease of fear and misinformation being spread throughout the nation by rebels and insurgents that I would urge voters to innoculate themselves against with information and common sense. The accusations of the past have been proven multiple times to have been false - as a party, we hold ourselves and our people to high ideals of pride and honesty, and would never dream of taking away the choice of the nation like that. And if there is still doubt, I would remind you that our systems of recounts and government accountability by law still rightfully stand to ensure that our elections are fair and just.

---

TAGLIST

@kokinu09 @rainfallingfromthesky @keepswingin @rylea08 @puppysmileseungmin

@thatonedemigodfromseoul @bokkiesplace @amyyscorner @dearly-somber @kayleefriedchicken

@realrintaro @estella-novella

15 notes · View notes

askagamedev · 9 months ago

Note

Is classic game porting/remastering becoming its own specialization? What I mean is, of course it's happening more these days, so/but is space growing to be someone who specializes in these projects? Or is it still niche enough that the small number of teams/staff who do it will continue to do it?

The answer here is "kind of". Here's the main issue - game development is expensive. AAA studios are expensive and cost a lot to run, assigning a AAA studio a remake/port project is not really worth it when compared to the estimated return on investment. Instead, what game publishers often do is contract out the remakes/port job to an independent third-party studio. This has two major benefits.

First, it costs notably less than the publisher putting their own internal AAA studios on it. When you're doing a remake/port, you often don't need super high fidelity assets or extremely large scope - the majority of the gameplay design and systems already exist. Contracting the project out to an external studio means the publisher can just pay a flat amount and doesn't have to worry about things hiring new people, handling benefits, setting up the studio, etc. The external studio gets to do that, and often has their own stuff in place already. This works very well for the independent studios too - they can take jobs like this in order to pay the bills and fund their own game development. Behaviour, independent developer of Dead by Daylight, also has a second team that does work like porting and remakes/ports for other studios. Their porting and remake team provides the income to keep the studio afloat during leaner times.

Second, it allows the publisher to give these external studios a chance to prove themselves - can they deliver a promised project in time, budget, and quality? If they can, this studio may be worth acquiring or working with again. The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom was developed by Japanese independent studio Grezzo, but this is far from their first game for Nintendo. They ported Ocarina of Time 3D, Majora's Mask 3D, and Luigi's Mansion for the 3DS, and they did the port for Link's Awakening to the Switch. The team that built Sonic Mania first proved themselves to Sega by doing iOS ports of Sonic CD, Sonic 1, and Sonic 2 before being given the Sonic Mania project.

With these two reasons in mind, doing remakes/ports do two things. First, they can earn money to pay the bills in a situation where it isn't worth it for the publishers to build them internally, allowing these studios to build their own projects or just have a more stable sustainable situation. Second, it provides a "minor league" situation where these external studios can prove their ability to the publisher in a lower-stakes situation in order to be entrusted with a higher and more interesting project later. As long as remakes and ports of games continue to do well, this kind of work will be in demand.

[Join us on Discord] and/or [Support us on Patreon]

Got a burning question you want answered?

Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on Twitter

Long questions: Ask a Game Dev on Tumblr

Frequent Questions: The FAQ

#porting games #game remakes #the business of video games #independent studios

34 notes · View notes

talenlee · 3 months ago

Text

Game Pile: Flocking Hell

Watch this video on YouTube

Thumbnail and transcript below the fold!

Be cruel with purpose, but be kind with energy.

This is an idea I wrote for myself first in 2019 and has informed the way I talk about media and games on the internet. I am someone who considers himself invested in the idea of including people in making games, someone who wants to encourage people to try to make things, even as I am someone who gets mad at things that I think are bad. If someone is doing a bad job, or if I think a work fails in a way that merits cruelty, then the question that follows needs to be is being mad about this worth it? Who can get anything out of this?

Similarly, if there’s a game that’s got good points that I like and is being made by a smaller group of people, then spending energy praising those points to draw attention to the good ideas, in the hopes of helping those ideas be part of the conversation about games seems to me a better use of energy than complaining about the interface of a game made by people who are struggling to pay the bills.

This is informed by an attempt to do what Marshall Rosenberg refers to as giraffe language, the idea that I can, somehow, while talking about games, try to ask the question how can I make your life more wonderful? There’s a place and a time in games for its counterpart, jackal language, but this game, today, is not a time or a place for jackals.

I want to tell you the story of Flocking Hell, a game I like, a game I want you to look at, and a game that I am looking at because I was asked to.

Flocking Hell is a turn-based strategy roguelike deck-builder game where you are the explorer of a tiny island of sheep people (sheeple) who are trying to go about their lives and build their towns and pursue their interests while waiting on someone (you) to do infrastructure projects like reinforcing walls and connecting trade routes, in the name of preparing the sheeple for an eventual demonic invasion. This invasion is something predictable and procedural, and that means your time spent on the island is about gathering the resources you can in the time you have. This timing is further complicated by a periodic timer, where every five turns, the things you’ve found will generate resources.

It’s a good example of a design I think of as five fires, four buckets. There are a lot of things you can do, and they will almost all improve your chances against the eventual demonic invasion, they can all deal with something like the problem, but they won’t all deal with the problem in the same scope or the same way. Then, complicating this set of priorities there are cards you get that let you change how your towns work, or how things like roads interact, and then each island can have different rules like wanting separate road networks or a curse you have to deal with or ways to make resources cheaper, and all those things mean that it’s a game with a lot of choices and a lot of ways to do okay.

The game is broken into chains of seven islands, then it resets.

Am I good at it?

Oh definitely not, I’m pretty poor at this game. Of course, this being a game in development – oh it’s in development, didn’t I say? – there’s always a moving target for balancing the game.

This is kind of the thing I want to talk about here, to an extent. I want to talk to you about giving good feedback on games you’ve played.

First things first, after you’ve played a game, try and write out the instructions for how to play the game, from memory, of what you played. Odds are going to be real good that you can’t get all of them from memory, and if you go back and check you’ll find something important you missed. This is not a bad thing at all, and it’s a practice to do to teach yourself what parts of rules systems stick in your head and how you remember things in games.

Second, remember that as a player, you cannot be wrong about how you feel, but you might be wrong about what you remember. For example, you might feel bad about how the game worked out, but you might not understand why it happened, and you might think you encountered a bug or a glitch, but instead what happened is you missed an important piece of information. This is not actually bad feedback: If you miss something you’re meant to know, and it’s important, and players should know it ahead of time, the designer should be able to hear you tell them ‘here’s what I think happened,’ and you need to accept it if they tell you about it as a mistake on your part. Mistakes and gameplay experiences are, in this case, morally neutral; you can think a choice is stupid or not like it, but that doesn’t mean you’re bad or a failure if someone disagrees with you.

Remember you are just one player, one person who may be of many or a few giving feedback. Most games with a degree of commercial success have player bases in the hundreds or thousands or even much more and to them, there’s a lot of information about how to perfectly deliver the experience and how to fine-tune that experience for a median group of players. When you’re one of a small number of playtesters, that information just doesn’t exist so you need to remember that you may be playing the game wrong, or the game may be broken, or, also, the game may not be yet teaching you how to play right, and so the confusion is somewhere that may not be rules or player but in motivations.

It’s hard to say when you’re one of a small number of players whether the game is doing something wrong or I haven’t learned the game right, and with all games, this is a negotiation between people who can’t actually be completely clear with one another.

After all, there always needs to be some flex.

Some play, as it were.

These lessons go in reverse, though and this is something I want to hold up as a specific virtue of Flocking Hell. Communicating with the developers at Sextant Studios, I was able to give my feedback honestly, and clearly, and when these questions of communication came up, it was never framed to me as ‘hey, are you sure you did things correctly.’ My feedback was treated as serious input from a player and its ramifications were considered. At the same time, there are some things that just have to be filed under the ‘yeah it’d be nice’ category, like making the cards prettier. Some things just have to be done with the budget you have and maybe improved layer.

This is by the way, why I want you to check this game out.

See, Flocking Hell is a rare and delightful genre of game that inspires in me the term microgrinder. It is a game much like Minesweeper where yes, there are ways to get better, but those ways of getting better are going to be built through long-term practice and steady development of techniques. Sure I can sit at each screen pausing and calculating odds on things to try and determine an optimal strategy, but I will also develop trends of play through just playing more, playing enough, and becoming familiar with how the game feels in different stages. And Minesweeper is a heck of a comparison, that game is really interesting and it’s hard to be really good at it!

Know what else it reminds me of? Okay, first of all, Desktop Dungeons, another microgrinder that treats black space on the map as a reusable resource, I liked a lot until I uninstalled it so I’d get other things done, but also, and I promise this isn’t a joke… you know that game you see ads for on tumblr or reddit? The walking down a hallway, making a path, passing through gates that multiply or divide your little squad? Those fake games that don’t exist?

When you finish a round in Flocking Hell, there is a surprisingly similar feeling of watching the moment at the near-end of that ad where the door bursts open and suddenly the protagonists of the game are running backwards and trying to survive while making decisions about getting attacked, and all you can really do is watch a large number whittle down and hope it’s whittling down fast enough, but also, the rate of change changes. It is, in a lot of ways, a very fun kind of nail-biter.

I played Flocking Hell a month ago, and this was written and recorded back then. I wanted to make sure I got my thoughts out about the version of the game I played. That’s why I’m not going hard into strategies or advice for how to play – chances are good, anything about the game as I play it is going to be different for you when the game launches in a few days.

I think the game is interesting and cool.

I’m not going to get into the talk about the incentives for reviewing games — that’s a whole video of its own, I’ll maybe go in on it somewhere. I was raised on PC Format, I don’t get review copies and trust me, look at what we’re doing here, look at the subscriber count – nobody’s here trying to chase my clout and currying me with free copies of games for my powerful financial incentives. I’m nobody who coincidentally is an academic with a keen interest in games.

No, I was asked to look at Flocking Hell by the designers at Sextant Studios as best I can tell because they saw me talking about games — Cobalt Core, another deck builder — and thought I might have something interesting to say.

Some of it, I’ve said to them. Hopefully it’s helped to make the game better. Hopefully you’ll get to say similar things and you get to make this game better too!

Some of it I’m saying to you.

I’ve said in the past that people make things because of spite or horny; either they want the thing to exists, or they’re mad that it doesn’t yet. This game feels like something made by people who had the idea, they played with the systems of the game, and they liked it so much they wanted to share it. This is a game that exists to be shared.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#Game Pile #Games

14 notes · View notes