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knowlessman · 1 year

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bnha s4e1-5

(recap) "even if I don't have a Quirk, can I become a hero?" well, yes and no

new OP, huh. I never figured out who it was in the beginning of the last one with the teeth and the goggles : | probably a character introduced last season I didn't recognize, I guess

"the editor doesn't look as pretty when she's mad" we interrupt your regularly-scheduled superhero show for a crossover with Aggretsuko, apparently

…that was a whole episode, huh. eh, whatever

I expect we'll be finding out who this tiefling-looking kid is this season

"organized crime? how's he different from us?" he's organized.

: | o-kay, that's one… questionably-portrayed genderqueer character totaled

Present Mic can be eradicated from the script as well, he's not much less annoying than Mineta. at least Endeavor is part of a story.

togata: "so, what kind of hero do you want to be?" deku: points across the table at all might (he didn't but tbh I'm slightly surprised they didn't do that) -- "the very best like no one ever was" is a weird answer, but I guess it's an answer

(nighteye's… tickle machine) …uh. nighteye for weewoo tier I'm thinking

…wait so deku can just… do that. scrunch his face up and look like all might. I thought the first time they did this, it was just to show that he was mimicking his voice

karate kid nonsense, then -- if he has future sight but no physical enhancement powers, idk if he should be able to keep up with midoriya to this extent. heck, there are cards in mtg that make your opponent play with their hand revealed, but they hardly ever see play because that only does so much

we've had an entire cast-recap episode and are four seasons in, subtitlers, idk why you keep putting people's names and quirks at the top of the screen. I'm having a hard enough time reading the ones at the bottom since they keep putting white backgrounds and stuff at the bottom of the screen and the borders on the white text are so damn thin

hm. I've very vaguely heard of this Hawks guy. : | nothing specific, just bad vibes

it's good that you're trying to practice talking to your peers, todoroki, but maybe you'll make better progress talking to someone other than bakugo. well, I guess at least you're not hanging out with mineta

they keep calling overhaul number two, but who does he work for? -- also why's he complain about places smelling when he's got that big honkin mask on? damn thing doesn't filter anything out? just an enormous, cumbersome-looking decoration?

ohey, it's the tiefling kid

togata sure wears a lot of costume for a guy with a nudist power. gotta be a pain in the ass getting that cape and that mask back on

"I only have to save a million people, not everybody" wtf does that mean. maybe it's supposed to be like a might guy kinda thing? pick an arbitrarily-high number that just means "more?"

hm. the plague doctor mask is a bit goofy, but I don't hate the coat. kind of a vulturish look

"your hood came off again. maybe the sizing's off?" and I swear you're gonna get a third nostril one day with that pointy mask thingy you never use, deku. -- …knowing when not to say things is a survival skill. in fairness, one that's hard to learn sometimes. really tho, deku cannot stop saying only the darnedest of things to only the darnedest of people -- "it looks like you won't let this go, so would you kindly follow me into this amb - I mean alley?"

"he showed his killing intent -" me: "IS IT SATSUI" listens "I KNOW TWO-ISH COOL JAPANESE WORDS"

why would all might owe it to deku to tell him about all of the candidates he'd considered? : / just seems kind of irrelevant to me; if anything, arrogant of deku to think he's entitled to that. like, maybe it could be useful to him now to know what's expected of him, but there's no reason all might needed to tell him beforehand, or at any specific time. also, I think all might could be forgiven for worrying that knowing what made him choose deku could lead to deku getting a big head about it. -- …unless it turned out to just be flat-out luck, I guess

"all might's going to die" y'all said that Foresight thingy can only see an hour into the future. -- "six or seven years" bullshit, he was just making an educated guess based on the obvious

ohey, kaiju fight -- oh, so a dude with kaijufication powers and no name can keep his pants on just fine, but when it's a named character who gets more than ten seconds of screentime, it's "unrealistic." or is it that some quirks are magically clothes-friendly, and it just so happens that none of them are on named characters? (actually wait, Mt Lady has that same power. guess kaiju powers are exempt)

Handface dint bring his handler. Can't see this business meeting going well.

hm. gorillaz boy is kinda-not-really Beast Boy. neat.

hm. it's that one x-men plot with the bald kid. from the way they're talking about it tho, it's temporary this time. "I perfected his methods…" science? maybe not even quirk-based?

…dang. I can't even think of what work's monster Kirishima looks like here.

post-credits scenes with plot in 'em. hate 'em. dangit, marvel.

#knowless watches bnha

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sometownie · 4 years

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When I started posting about Whitewave (back then known as Cherrygem Bay), I didn't post 10ish pictures at once. I'm slowly moving all those old posts to Dreamwidth, and in the process I'm gathering the pictures into 10ish pic batches per post. I like it better that way, and reposting everything in Dreamwidth gives me the chance to see everything this way. Also my rounds are a complete mess, so I'm trying to make sense of that as well. I'm even tagging rounds in DW actually!

So, like, if you're interested:

Here's my Dreamwidth ♥

#delete later probably :p #also what is this new text post editor thing wtf #im doing this partly because i just whipped it out of nowhere when i started numbering my rounds here #they are 100% not correct #i want to know how many rounds of Limestones I've actually done

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neverdoingmuch · 4 years

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now hear me out,,, an au where lan wangji is an editor who works for an erotica publisher and wei wuxian is essentially chuck tingle. (also lwj writes romance novels on the side)

wei wuxian didn’t plan to write erotica he wants to make that really clear, he was actually studying like biomed or something equally “oh wow my parents can brag to the other parents about this”

but, as frequently happens in wwx’s life, he got drunk with nhs, like really drunk and they woke up the next morning with a laptop on the floor beside them and loose paper strewn everywhere

they don’t really remember what they were doing or thinking last night but they’ve both drawn a bunch of really shitty and weird porn (the less said about the anthropomorphic version of wen chao’s pet turtle the better) and wei wuxian has like 20,000 words of an erotica story on his laptop

when he starts reading it, at first he’s like haha what the fuck this is so weird but then it turned out to be really good??? and nhs blushed at some of the ~sexy~ scenes so that’s how wwx knew he was writing the good stuff

anyway they’re sitting there, eating their hangover food and wei wuxian goes so uh my story was good right? and nhs is like yeah it was, top stuff i would buy it and wei wuxian goes what if i actually wrote it,,, haha just kidding,,,,, unless?

and in his defence he doesn’t actually write anything for the story for another like three months but then he finds himself in the middle of exam season and he’s like fuck it stress relief let’s write some erotica

he finishes the book and his exams (which he does well in but whatever) and then spends his summer holidays editing the book

when he comes back, he slaps down a paper copy on nhs’ desk and is like i finished it. nhs, thinking he meant his latest lab write up, opens it up to a random page and starts reading it out loud which was a Mistake

he trails off mid-sentence, and whips around to glare at wwx with all the wrath he can muster. it’s raunchy nhs says and just read it wwx tells him so nhs does

like 2 hours later nhs turns to him and says if it wasnt for you and the librarian staring at me the whole time i definitely would’ve felt something and wwx is like so it’s good? and nhs is like fuck yeah it is but i dont get what you want from me?

pretty much wwx passed out after exams, slept for like 20 hours and then woke up and went i should publish this and decided that nhs should draw the cover art.

nhs agrees of course and a month later wwx self-publishes bc there’s no way he can walk into a publishing house with his porn and not just combust on the spot and he decides to go by the name yiling patriarch

wwx clicks the final button to upload the fic and nhs just toasts him and goes yknow what,, this is the closest you’ve ever gotten to having sex and i’m proud of you

wei wuxian is the man who guarded his first kiss for the first twenty years of his life for someone special,,,, wwx definitely wants his first time to be special and there’s no way he’s putting out for someone he doesn’t think is important & despite having dated before, he��s never gotten close enough to someone to go yeah let’s do it so our boy is still a virgin

so wwx’s entire erotica writing inspiration comes from porn, nhs’ way too in-depth answers as to how his latest date went and uh more porn

wwx blusters about a bit bc how is he meant to respond to that and nhs is like maybe you’ll finally move on from reading those trashy romance novels and read something more exciting and wwx is like how dare you call them trashy!! hanguang-jun is a master of the romance novels!! he understands the heart in a way that no other person has ever!!

and nhs just chugs a bunch of wine and is like yeah hon okay, do you still blush when the main characters hold hands? and wwx is like no! of course not! (it’s a lie, he blushes a lot)

so nothing really happens with the book at first and wwx forgets about it for the most part but then he wakes up one morning and he’s got an extra like RMB 1000 (i dont actually know much about currency so it’s roughly $200 if my quick interneting is legit)

wwx is like wtf? and once he finds out it’s from his novel he’s doubly like wtf? but then he finds out that someone had purchased his book and did a dramatic reading on youtube bc wwx decided that regular erotica was boring and decided to make it satirical or whatever and people loved it??

he’s got nothing better to do so he just goes hm yeah remember that Author i dated who had an “incredible idea that would absolutely amaze The Critics and helped explore his own convoluted mind” let’s make something of that and he writes another book kinda mocking that idea in a very horny way.

he publishes it and someone writes a review of his two books on their blog and now he’s actually starting to get popular - he’s got more money from those two books than he did by working at the local cafe for the whole week

wwx is poor and broke and semi-disowned anyway by this point so he goes fuck it and spends every moment he’s not studying writing erotica.

he publishes another like five books by the time the year is out (i know the maths isnt working here but this is a book world where wwx can just do that via the power of loneliness and friends who egg you on)

also?? he varies his books. some of them are porn parody things a la chuck tingle and some of them are genuine porn and one book was just him writing a recipe book but making it sound as horny as possible

by the time he’s published his like 8th book or so he starts getting reviews that are critiquing his book and most of them boil down to the fact that he needs an editor or something

he ends up asking nhs for help and he’s like oh sweet my brother’s boyfriend works for a publisher who does that sort of thing

cloud recesses actually specialises in erotica and i hate the idea that lqr has spent years reading and editing erotica but sacrifices must be made

(side note that i know nothing about the writing or publishing process so pls don’t judge me too harshly)

wwx goes in with his latest manuscript and ends up arriving like ten minutes late, he rushes into the room sweaty and hot, takes one look at the guy sitting on the other side of the desk, flushes an even brighter red and runs back out of the room. he checks the plaque on the door and walks back in slowly and goes hm i didnt expect you to be so hot

cue lan wangji

lwj has always enjoyed being an editor. what do editor do specifically? idk? edit? regardless, he enjoys it.

while most of the time he’s happy working from this side of things he also likes writing

lwj fucks. he deserves it tbh. but, while he’s had a tonne of one night stands and fuckbuddies, he’s never actually dated someone. so the fact that he’s writing romance novels under the pseudonym hanguang-jun makes his friend jzx laugh a lot

he tried writing porn once and he just couldn’t do it. it was always too clinical or vague and lacked any actual passion bc he was always going oh okay mc sucks a dick but the guy i slept with last week was like a 6.4/10 when it came to sucking dick so maybe mc should also be bad at it or whatever and it just ends up falling apart,,,, but romance he can do

as an editor lwj has pretty high standards for good erotica but he’s really found himself enjoying yiling patriarch’s work even though he’s clearly just been editing himself so when the guy sent cloud recesses an email asking whether they’d be interested in his latest book lwj was ecstatic.

he also didnt expect wwx to be so hot

anyway,,, we now get to enjoy a week of lwj thinking that wwx is super hot but even more annoying and then him deciding that annoying is hot and now wwx is just absolutely amazing and wwx is just panicking the entire time

i want my publisher to rail me so hard wwx texts nhs and nhs just responds has he read the bdsm scene with the alien who has a tentacle dick and a knot yet? and wwx is like no??? nhs just goes shame, it will give him so ideas for if you ever grow a backbone and just ask him out

they publish one book together and nothing happened between them the entire time other than yearning and horniness,, of the heart and body.

when wwx realises this means that he won’t get to see lwj again he immediately writes a new book and like a month later he’s back in lwj’s office, lying on his couch while whining about the cafeteria prices at university

lwj is very enamoured by the fact that wwx is writing erotica and studying biomed bc wow

they do this for like another three books and wwx’s eroticas evolve from here’s a dinosaur man fucking a politician while a mary sue watches on to be like here’s a dinosaur man with black hair and golden eyes and a stern look to his face fucking a politician while a mary sue watches on

and hanguang-jun’s latest book?? i dont want to say that this au’s version of wangxian is hanguang-jun finally finding inspiration to write porn (his muse is wwx of course) and writing the most amazing porn with feelings and plot novel ever,, but it is.

wwx read it five times in the first week and when nhs finally tried to read it he was like uhhh wwx are you a narcissist, the love interest is exactly like you? and wwx is like ??? no???? he’s nothing like me??

anyway one day wwx gets called into lxc’s office and lxc is like so i’ve read your latest book (not the dinosaur man, a serious one with like normal people and not overly humorous thank fuck but still full of lwj yearning) and wwx is like okay? and lxc goes yes, see i was worried that you didn’t care very much for my brother but after reading your book i’m not so sure and wwx gets the weirdest shovel talk ever which is interspersed with like compliments for his porn writing skills

anyway lxc accidentally mentions that lwj writes books too and before he can take it back wwx is like who??? and lxc is like are you fucking stupid?? you told lwj to his face that you loved his books,,, he broke his theme of tender romance to write kinky sex with a character that’s a lot like you and wwx is like .,,,,,,,,, hanguang-jun??? HANGUANG-JUN???!!

lxc barely manages to confirm it before wwx is sprinting out of his office and across to find lwj.

regretfully for everyone else, lwj is in the lobby so thirty people get to hear it when wwx comes in and shouts LAN ZHAN!! back then, i really wanted write porn about you! ... i think i have actually? but i want to write porn about you and i want to be able to do the research to make it accurate! and i also want to go on dates and hold hands and feed each other food! and i love you a lot!

lwj is dying inside bc his brother’s bf is there, his uncle is currently waiting for the elevators and a whole bunch of staff are also there but also wwx likes him??? dinosaur man was lwj??

he goes over and they make out for a really long time right there in the middle of the lobby but no one wants to get between them when they’ve been pining for so long

after that they start dating and they do all the romantic stuff but also,, let’s just say that the next book wwx publishes is a lot more creative than all of his previous books

and they become some writing power couple with horniness of the heart and body and sometimes wwx will be like hey lwj i don’t really know how the logistics of this sex scene will work and lwj will be like we could try it out ourselves? and wwx just pats him on the head and is like im sorry but you dont have enough dicks for it to work ),: better luck next time

#mdzs #modao zushi #wangxian #wei wuxian #lan wangji #im so sorry everyone #i just got the idea and it wouldnt leave me alone #cql #the untamed #mo dao zu shi #have i read any erotica? no. have i read any chuck tingle? also no. am i an editor? no #so this is gonna be very shit #this is why people should be sending me prompts instead of me just writin shit myself #nsfw-ish?

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literaticat · 3 years

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I published a book snd I’m under contract with the publisher to show that all my other books before I send them out to other agents/editors. I sent them ten books. The editor picked one for an r and r. The rest she criticized my books very harshly in a broad stroke. “Thin plot. Didactic. Predictable. All of my books have been edited by s professionals editor prior to sending. It seemed mean and off-putting. Do you see this type of response after an Editor published a book?

Well first of all I don't see being obligated to "show them all your other books before you send them elsewhere" -- if that's really what your contract says, that is effed-up, frankly. Your "option" book should be to show them your NEXT book. IF they pass on it, you SHOULD be off the hook. So if your option clause is much more onerous than that -- yikes, what does that even mean? You have to show them all your other books FOR HOW LONG? Forever? WTF?

I feel like you might have either misunderstood your option clause, or you explained it to me wrong, or else this is not a good publisher.

Also -- and before you read this part -- don't get mad!!!!!! -- DON'T! GET !!! MAD!!!!! Take a deep breath! Calm ocean!

I know that it's hard to hear negative things about your work. And certainly she could have had a better "bedside manner" if that's all she said. But also... these are not "very harsh" criticisms? They are criticisms -- but they are perfectly normal criticisms. They aren't indictments of YOU or a referendum on your talent, they aren't actually personal insults. It just FEELS that way.

Thin plot? Predictable? Didactic? These are all exceptionally normal reactions to MOST picture books that come across the desk. And they all go hand-in-hand, actually.

(Didactic, by the way, SOUNDS like a very mean word. But it isn't. It is just a flat, normal, non-loaded descriptive term. It just means that the book is "teaching a lesson" -- which is something that most mainstream publishers don't want their fun picture books to overtly do.)

Much of the time, picture books don't work because they are treading ground that has been trodden a lot without adding anything "new" to the mix (predictable, thin plot), or because they are overtly trying to teach a lesson (didactic, predictable). Again -- we see this A LOT, because most picture book authors write one great picture book for every, oh, ten or so "so-so" ones. So I'm not saying that the editor was right -- how should I know? But... given the statistical probabilities here ... it would not surprise me if the editor was at least a little bit right.

Bear in mind that picture books are *extraordinarily* expensive to produce and a huge time commitment, and publishers, understandably, are just not going to throw that kind of money and time at every single thing that comes out of your brain. Maybe some of these texts really just aren't there yet.

For the ones you feel passionately about, well, now you are off the hook with that editor for these manuscripts, so you can feel free to send them elsewhere to your heart's content!

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digitalangels · 4 years

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Oh no

Well I decided to try it and first thing I notice is that if I put picture to my text post it absolutely refuses to go between the text. That "Oh no" was supposed to be ABOVE the image but nope, it forces image above it and no attempts at moving it do anything so we're off to a great start! Also every time you add a new image it goes as the first one so better get used to building your posts backwards since trying to move the pictures is nearly impossible.

Second picture is the controls, those seem to work the same as before. Except if you hit them to add something to the bottom of the post.... you guessed it, it goes up. So no pictures down in the post, it's literaly impossible to get any image to show down here in the text area, even the the gifs go, you guessed it! Up there!

And the third image is how text options show up, you can now change font size on desktop too, & fourth, at least they've removed the option for tiny text so that's nice.

Who the hell thought this was a good idea???? Oh yeah, tumblr of course! @staff Thanks, I fucking hate it, it's useless. If this becomes the default post editor I'm seriously logging off and never coming back. Aaand suddenLy I can't add smaLL L in my post anymore for some reason? Not sure What happened here, oh no noW it happened to W too Wtf is going on???

edit: well saving the post and editing it again seems to make shit work again but like, that's so backwards. And yes, seriously if I hit small (L) nothing happened, then it happened to W and then I noticed that also K stopped working. I guess it also applies to J but I didn't test that (those were used by tumblr to scroll on dash, guess they're conflicting somehow?) Conclusion is either way: don't opt to BETA editor, it's broken as hell and makes posting harder than it needs to be.

#tumblr update #report if something is Wonky they say #everything is Wonky #EVERYTHING #staff

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radramblog · 3 years

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Elder Dragon Highlander

Commander is a format of Magic the Gathering that has become almost completely detached from its original premise. Much of what the format is is built upon the concept of Elder Dragon Highlander- 21 Commander damage is lethal because that’s 3 hits from an Elder Dragon, the slow grindy format built to accommodate the original 5’s heavy mana investment and limited effects.

But that was a long time ago, and the designers at WoTC have opted to attach the moniker of Elder Dragon to a number of additional cards. 21 total cards hold the name, 4 cycles of 5 apiece with one straggler at the back.

What is considered “elder” is largely to do with lore, I think, but due to its association with such iconic cards, it’s interesting to see how and what the label is attached to.

I’ll, uh….do cube something next week? I dunno. But this is the Elder Dragons.

The original 5

The first elder dragon cycle is kind of iconic of Magic in general. Released in Legends, they were the first tricoloured cards in the entire game, were I believe the biggest and most expensive cards of the time, and all represented characters from the comics that I think just about everyone forgets existed.

They do not even remotely resemble modern design. Clunky is one thing, but the quintuplets are almost aberrant to what would be considered attractive Magic cards. A monstrous investment of mana in multiple colours that has a continuous upkeep of more mana, all for an arguably understatted flying creature with one extra ability. Chromium gets Rampage, a keyword that started in Legends, ended in Mirage, and doesn’t have reminder text despite being arguably confusing. Palladia-Mors gets Trample, making it arguably one of the best ones. Vaevictis Asmadi gets Firebreathing in all 3 of its colours, in case 8+3+3+3… wasn’t enough mana-shaped eggs in one basket for you. Arcades gets a bonus ability in toughness-breathing, to make up for it’s deliberately mediocre ability- the “oh cool I can use this with vigilance” eureka/fun brain moment quashed by its pointless limitation.

And then, of course, there’s Nicol Bolas. Somehow one of the game’s most iconic characters, in an art rendition that makes a powerful villain look like a gentle draconic geriatric. (EDITORS NOTE: still Rad here but I just now noticed this mf has a fucking dragon nipple, wtf?) I suppose Bolas becoming so well known was inevitable, if only because it was the only one of the most popular cycles with an actually cool and powerful ability. There are currently 210 more Bolas decks than any other member of this cycle, and that difference also happens to be twice what the other four have combined.

Bolas is arguably the only one that stood the test of time, the only one to ever show up independently of the other 4. I suppose we’ll see if any of the rest do the same, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up.

(Elder) Dragons of Tarkir

The titular Dragons of Tarkir’s third set (Dragons of Tarkir) were a set I was excited to see as the cards were being spoiled. The lore of the plane was interesting, with Magic stepping into a plot with time travel and finally showing us what Ugin looked like after almost 10 years of curiosity. The dragons that would become the Clan leaders had appeared previously in Fate Reforged, and the editions that we’d see as Elders- 10,000 years older and in some cases even wiser- presented a powerful and exciting cycle. Unlike with the Legends dragons, I’m pretty sure all of these saw play somewhere.

Ironically, though, I’m pretty sure these were deliberately tuned for Standard rather than the format named after their typeline. Even outside of Kolaghan’s line of text that….doesn’t do a whole lot in the format, Ojutai and Silumgar were pretty obviously built to be the finishers in the Esper Dragons deck that ran them, Atarka a clear top-end for Gruul Monsters (and, eventually, Eldrazi Ramp), and Dromoka a potential menace in Dromoka’s Command-backed Midrange lists. These cards are all quite powerful, but they’re built for a different kind of game.

That’s I suppose the biggest issue with the Dragons of Dragons of Tarkir, they were underwhelming. The set as a whole was fairly middling, though I did truly enjoy the draft format. I’m pretty sure the most played card in the set is fucking Collected Company, one I kind of despise, followed with Kolaghan’s Command which is just a traumatic experience for me. And while 3 of these 5 are seeing more play than their past counterparts, including Dragonlord Ojutai being literally 10 times more commonly seen than Soul of Winter, that difference is largely a matter of power (or lack thereof), the Mythic Dragonlords being obviously stronger than their Rare originals. The rare ones are arguably more fun, though, and that’s what matters to me.

Legends…2! (aka core set 2019)

Part of the theme of Core Set 2019 was the story (read: retcon so the ending of War of the Spark makes more sense) of Bolas and Ugin in their youth, which meant that we got to get updated, modern designs of the original Elder Dragons (not Ugin tho lmao). And by Modern, I kind of mean postmodern, because we’re at the point where Commander cards start getting absurd All The Time.

Each of the Elder Dragons of Core 2019 (copyright WoTC 2018) have the benefits of updated design practices with 24 extra years of experience, as well as not having to have a million words on them for silly reasons like extra mana sacrifice triggers. Even Palladia-Mors, probably the weakest of them (and still pretty threatening!), gets to have flavour text hinting at a potential return (which hasn’t happened yet).

When you’re designing cards like these, though, it’s inevitable that some are going to be overshadowed by others. Baby Bolas, of course, was one of the flagship cards for the set, being a transforming Planeswalker with lots of abilities that wins the game in just the most classy way I’ve seen in a minute. And Arcades took a fun niche deck people liked and blew it wide open, making Defenders into one of the most disgusting Offensive decks in a minute.

But then there’s Chromium, a fairly powerful Voltron/Control finisher but not one that leads you in any particular direction. Vaevictis does lead in fun directions, but would then be completely dwarfed by the absurdity that is Lord Windgrace the same year and Korvold the next one.

Outside of a few, this cycle feels like it got kind of lost in the shuffle, and I think that’s not really that much a reflection of the cards (except maybe Palladia, the Naya Problem rearing its ugly head again), and more the greater issue with Magic as a whole just shitting out cards constantly faster than most can catch up.

Welcome to Strixhaven School of Magecraft and Sideboardary

Our final cycle is the new kids on the block, the Strixhaven dragons. I suppose one way to make the definitely not Hogwarts Houses (they’re colleges, Clearly) seem important is attach a giant Fuckoff Dragon next to them.

A thing I like a lot about Strixhaven as a set is how it was introducing a new Thing for each of the enemy colour pairs to do- Golgari Lifegain, Boros Graveyard, Izzet Spells But Big Ones Instead Also Treasures?. The set came with loads and loads of cards supporting each of these themes, and having Commander 2021 alongside it and associated with it means they’re well supported by that as well. But, and this is the important part, the Elder Dragons aren’t as overshadowed because they too are doing something different, even if its rather slight in some cases, on their own- but each supporting or being supported by the Dragon in question.

Beledros is a Big Mana Golgari commander (normally seen in Mono-Green or Gruul) whose huge life cost is assisted by the Lifegain cards Witherbloom got. Galazeth helps ramp into the giant spells associated with Prismari while also making the alternate discard into treasure option some of those spells have a lot better. Tanazir doubles the power of Quandrix’s Fractal tokens, and makes them even more huge when attacking due to then natively being 0/0s. And I don’t really know what the idea in Silverquill is other than “Politics”, but Shadrix looks fucking cool and probably plays really nicely. It’s just a really fucking solid cycle.

It’s not really possible to tell how these 5 are going to play out- Strixhaven is still the latest Standard Set to release at time of writing. But I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the most successful Elder Dragon cycle as a whole assuming you’re looking at, like, mean Decks.

And then there’s The Other One

As part of Modern Horizons 2, cards for a set of characters from alllll the way back from those Legends stories were created- a new Dakkon, a Geyadrone Dihada, and the Elder Dragon that showed up in their story- Piru.

Piru is, obviously, a reference to the original cycle of Elder Dragons, but in a Wedge colour rather than a Shard. And with an extra keyword, which is something I missed, because it makes all the difference. I had written this card off, until I realised that Lifelink triggered from the death trigger, and when this thing dies it isn’t too hard to gain dozens of life points. That’s a lot and combined with clearing the board it’s not too hard to get virtually unkillable. I love leaning into the downside from the original dragons by adding a powerful death trigger like this.

Piru released very recently, and already has 112 decks to her name. I wouldn’t be surprised if that plateaus, but it’s still rather promising. 8 mana is a lot in non-green colours, but I like Piru, and I’d be happy to see her see lots and lots of play going forward.

While 2021 has so far had more Elder Dragons than any other year, they’ve been a very promising cadre with a lot of interesting ideas going on. With that said, I’m not sure that I want the trend to continue, because the more they make (the more Elders in general, really), the less special they get. But for now at least, it looks like we’re finally getting to a good place for Elder Dragons. Only took us 27 years.

#ramble #mtg #edh #commander #elder dragon highlander

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bettsfic · 5 years

Text

socknography: the importance of preserving fan creator biographical data

i wrote earlier on utilizing collections and bookmarks to boost the archival power of ao3, and in that post mentioned how i wish authors would fill out their bios so we can preserve fanauthor information as well as we preserve the fics themselves. so, here is my rant about WHY WE ARE SO IMPORTANT.

for my masters thesis i wrote about the layered pseudonymity of fanfiction authors, and after doing a ton of research, i find myself still thinking of the pseudonymous/anonymous divide as it pertains to fic. we have authors we consider “famous” and ones whose followings eclipse that of traditionally published authors, but unlike traditionally published authors, we don’t put a handy bio at the end of our fics. in fact, if you want to find out about the author, you have to hope they’ve linked somewhere to their tumblr or twitter or dreamwidth, or they have consistent pseuds across platforms. and from there, you have to hope they have an ‘about me.’ but most, myself included, don’t.

unlike traditional publication -- where amazon and goodreads and even the back of the book contains biographical info -- and even unlike the rest of fandom archival etiquette -- which, despite having virtually no committed rules still maintains its organizational structure -- there is no standard etiquette on fanauthor biographical data.

i speculate the reasons fanauthors are hesitant to write their own biographies is very complicated:

there is no “ask” for it or existing standard. when i publish stories under my real name, i’m required to provide my bio, which contains my accomplishments, where i got my degree, where else i’m published, and my website. all literary author bios follow this formula, so they’re pretty easy to write. other than this post, i have never seen a request for fanauthor bios. so without an editor demanding it, and without a standard formula or platform to draw from, a total lack of information becomes the norm, and almost any info other than the standard “name. age. pronouns. ao3 name. list of fandoms and/or pithy one-liner” of tumblr or occasional ask game is seen as a deviation from the norm. even ask games get a bad rep sometimes, and they’re transitory, a post you see as you’re scrolling through to somewhere else, not static, like a dedicated profile page.

pseudonymity veers too close to anonymity. an anonymous author cannot have a biography. a pseudonymous author can, but biographies may be seen as defeating the purpose of writing under a pseudonym, or multiple pseuds. a sock account is a sock for a reason -- you don’t want it associated with your main. moreover, i believe fandom creates an environment in which to acknowledge your accomplishments and promote your own content is seen as narcissistic. fanfiction can sometimes be seen as a genre of selflessness, donating time and energy into a community centered around a shared canon, not personal gain. to acknowledge the self publicly is to invite attention, and attention is contradictory to anonymity.

shame and humility. the more information you have on the internet, the easier you are to find. very few fanauthors use their real names, or feel comfortable connecting their fan identity to their real one. i hear pretty constantly how often fanauthors hide their fannishness from their coworkers and loved ones, how only the people closest to them know they write/read fanfic. moreover, you might think “my most popular fic only has 10 kudos and 1 comment, nobody wants to know about me” (which is so not true, but i’ll get to that in a minute).

fandom is constantly changing. with a central archive for fanfiction in place, it’s easier now to be in multiple fandoms at once than it ever has been. if you want to read all sugar daddy fics, there’s a tag for that, and if you’re not picky about canon, you have an entire buffet of fandoms to choose from. communities are growing and shifting and changing shape. i move fandoms, and i keep my friends and readers from previous fandoms. i get dragged to new fandoms frequently. my interests and inspirations change, but i don’t erase my history or identity every time i move, i only add to it. i am always betts whether i’m in star wars or the 100 or game of thrones. but if you only read my fic, you don’t know the stories behind it. many people don’t know i entered fandom in the brony convention community in 2012, or that i was sadrobots before i was betty days before i was betts, or how fandom changed my life and led me through a path of personal trauma recovery, or that i co-founded wayward daughters, or ran the fanauthor workshop, or all these other things about fanfic that is not fanfic itself.

if you are a fan creator, your fannish personal narrative matters. telling your story helps preserve the metatextual history of our genre.

i think constantly about what our genre will look like in 30 or 50 years, if it will be like other genres that began as subversions of the mainstream: comic books, beat literature, science fiction. genres that, at the time involved groups of friends creating stories for each other, bouncing ideas off of one another, experimenting with or distorting other genres, and which became, over time, well-regarded forms with rich histories.

maybe one day, like the MCU, we’ll have a dedicated production company that churns out adaptations of longform coffee shop aus written between 2009 and 2015. maybe “BNFs” will be read in high school literature curriculums. maybe our work will end up on the real or virtual shelves of our great grandchildren. and if that happens, if fanfic goes entirely mainstream, how will fanfic authorship be perceived? how will fanpeople in 2080, if humanity is still around by then, interact with the lexicon we’ve created and preserved? what would you do if you found out Jane Austen wrote under five different sock accounts across three platforms over the span of twenty years? how would you, a fan of Pride & Prejudice, even begin to find all of her work?

we have so many social constraints pushing against us. there’s purity culture, which encourages further division of identity -- fanauthors may write fluff on their main and have various sock accounts for underage/noncon fics. if you’re a scarecrow, you’re much harder for a mob to attack. there’s misogyny, which dictates women/queer ppl shouldn’t be writing about or indulging in or exploring their sexuality at all. there’s intellectual property and a history of DMCAs, which, although kept at bay by the OTW, may still have influence on the “illegal” mentality of our work. with social armies against us, it’s easier to exist in the shadows, on the fringe. we change URLs based on our moving interests, and split our identities a million different ways, and keep sarcastic “me” tags full of self-deprecating text posts. we are difficult beasts to catch, because we have not been allowed to exist.

i spent a lot of time today googling the word for “pseudonymous biography” and came up empty-handed (if someone knows of an existing word, pls let me know. “pseudography” is apparently a fancy word for a typo; “pseudobiography” is a fake biography), so for lack of anything better, i’ve come up with the term “socknography” because 1) it’s funny and doesn’t sound intimidating, and 2) it encapsulates the sensitive and complicated way fanauthor identifying conventions work. and also i think “fanauthor biography,” “bibliography,” and “profile” just doesn’t cut it for the actual work of these pieces. they don’t necessarily include IRL biographical data, they include more historical/community context than a bibliography, and the words “profile” and “about me” don’t really inspire interaction, or acknowledge the archival importance of this work.

astolat’s fanlore page is my go-to example. astolat writes under multiple pseuds and has major influence in the history of fandom. she’s also a traditionally published author, but you notice, her ofic novels are not mentioned, nor any other real-life identifying information. fanlore has a really good policy on this in place, for those concerned about doxxing.

(moreover, i am not suggesting you centralize your socks. they’re socks for a reason. but most everyone has a main, and that main identity has a story.)

there are 2 existing spaces to preserve socknographies.

fanlore, a wiki owned by the OTW, you can make an account and create a user page (which is different than a “person” page) using a user profile template

ao3′s “profile” page, which is a big blank box in which anything goes

(i’m not including tumblr on this list because i don’t think it’s a stable platform.)

fanlore’s template is straight to the point and minimal, which doesn’t really invite narrative the same way a literary bio would. ao3′s big blank box leaves us with the question -- wtf do i say about myself? how do i say it? how much is too much? and because of that, most profiles are either blank or only include a policy on translations/podfic/fanart, and maybe links to tumblr and twitter. but let me tell you, if i have read your fic and taken the time to move over to your profile, you better believe i am a fan. and as a fan, i want to Know Things.

here are the things i want to know, or

a potential template:

introduction (name/alias, age, location, pronouns, occupation)

accomplishments (degrees, personal history)

fan history (fandoms you’ve been in, timeline as a fan, how you were introduced to fandom/fanfiction, what does fandom mean to you -- this is where your fan narrative goes)

fandom participation (popular fics/posts, involvement in fan events/communities, side blogs, interviews, etc. 3 & 4 might be one and the same for you)

spotlight (which of your fics are most important to you/would you like others to read and why? what are the stories behind your favorite fics you’ve written?)

find me elsewhere* (links to tumblr, twitter, insta, etc.)

policies on fanart, fanfic of fic, podfics, and translations

*you cannot link to ko-fi, paypal, patreon, or amazon on ao3/fanlore per the non-commercial terms of service

i’ll be working on filling this out for my own profile as an example, but you can also see how my @fanauthorworkshop participants filled out their fanauthor spotlights, and the information they provided. obviously, you should only share that which you feel comfortable sharing, and as your fandom life changes, your narrative will change too. it’s not much different than updating a CV or resume.

tl;dr the goal is to provide a self-narrative of your fan life/identity for posterity. who are you and why are you a fanperson? why do you create fan content? what are you proud of and what do you want to highlight to others? who are you in this space?

#socknography #fanfiction #ao3 #otw

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tisfan · 4 years

Link

I’ve been doing a lot of reading recently; between the @bannedtogetherbingo2020 kerfluffle and the BLM protests

(one thing that I’ve been doing recently that seems to annoy the living SHIT out of my fellow White People is correcting “riots” to “protests.”

“Were you near the riots --” “I did not attend the protests, but I did donate to the medical fund for the man who was injured by removal of the statue on High Street.”

This seems to drive people absolutely batshit, and I will continue to do it. These are not riots and if they have similar characteristics with riots it’s because cops are treating everyone not even like criminals, but like hostile enemy forces.)

Mostly what I’ve been reading about is the difficulty that POC fans have in getting their voices heard in fandom. That the history of fandom is primarily the history of White Fandom.

(this is long, so there’s more under the cut - I also tell stories A LOT so brace for personal experience asides)

I’ve been thinking about comments I’ve seen by black and brown fans about trying to get away from racist stories on A03. And trying to figure out if there’s a way to give people what they want -- a way to tag posts/topics/writers/ships on a permanent block list. I know I’ve spoken with several fans who have extensive filter scripts when they go looking for a new read and that shit is EXHAUSTING and doesn’t work necessarily on mobile devices.

I, for instance, have QUITE A LOT of stuff blacklisted on tumblr because I find P*nnyW*se the Creepy Teeth Demon to be horrific and I do not want him on my screen. And the movie’s name is IT for fuck’s sake. I can’t blacklist the word “It” and still expect to see any content at all. So, thinking about how much trouble I had keeping PWCTD off my screen gives me some sympathy to how hard it’s got to be to filter out something that people aren’t even tagging!

I mean, honestly, most of the time that people tag a fic TW: racist, they already KNOW the character is acting in a racist manner and they’re condemning it. When people don’t realize the character is racist, or a word, or a trope is racist (mystical black character, for instance) they don’t tag it as racist because they either don’t know, are unconscious of their own bias, of they don’t care that it’s racist.

In the same manner, Person A who’s writing fic they know is dub-con will tag it, and Person B who thinks stalking someone and climbing in their window at night is romantic will NOT tag the same scenes as dub-con.

Which doesn’t make it any less jarring when I suddenly run into a fic that I would absolutely count as noncon/dubcon that’s not tagged for it. The intentions of the author don’t matter TO ME at that moment, what matters to me is that I’m trying to breathe while the romantic interest on my eReader is saying “aw, that’s so sweet.”

So, there’s multiple questions that come up for me -- I’m not a computer person, so while the A03 code is available for use, I wouldn’t know what to do with it if I tried.

Is there a way to tag something from the outside? An overlay or side program (like an Xkit for A03) that would allow people to permanently blacklist certain tags or authors, tropes, etc? I know there are some hosting sites (unfortunately with ads) that basically funnel stuff from A03 to a reader. There was a big kerfluffle about it at the beginning of the year because OMG, someone is making money off my fanfic! protip, no, they weren’t. they were making money off someone else’s desire for a custom skin. The material itself was never leaving A03, it wasn’t stored anywhere else. A03 does not currently have a phone app and they don’t plan to have a phone app.

So, would it be possible for someone to write a phone-app that did a custom filter for the material. Blacklists are certainly possible, right?

Because here’s the thing; a lot of people who are racist don’t know that they are. Or they don’t care that they are. I have personally had a couple of hard conversations about racism (I’m not even going to call it “unconscious racism” because I am a grown-ass adult capable of reading, so if I act in a racist manner, I’m going to fucking own it. And apologize for it. And try to do better.) in my own work -- whitewashing a character at one point, using a quote from a black woman as a title for a story about Wanda. I’m still not entirely convinced that a Jewish/Romani woman is “white” in any sort of traditional sense. That said, I’m not a POC and I’m going to listen to the person who’s upset because of my usage and not my own feeling of “I don’t really think Wanda counts as white.” This may be partially because WANDA is whitewashed as shit in the MCU and a lot of people in the fandom do not read comics.

That further said, I made the changes as requested and apologized for it in the work/notes. And felt very uncomfortable when some of my white friends said “I’m sorry you had to deal with that.” I’m not sorry I had to deal with it. I wish I hadn’t DONE it, but I am glad that people felt comfortable enough with me to call my on my bullshit and I was able to make corrections and amends.

Still-- All of this boils down to: People are not going to, in good faith, tag their own fic as “don’t read this, I am racist.”

Everything that gets done on A03 -- which is an Archive -- is voluntary by the author. A03′s policies are pretty much “tag to warn” or “tag that you’re NOT tagging to warn.” The only action A03 takes for inappropriate tagging is to ask the author to update the Warning to match, or choose not to warn. If there’s no compliance, A03 will assign the fic “choose not to warn.” But that’s the extend of their policies.

We all know this history; no censorship. Censorship is a slope that leads to fanwork disappearing. Because here’s another fact: it doesn’t matter what the intention is of censoring a story; that censorship is going to be applied badly.

So, if A03 was going to ban racist fic, how long do you think it would take before the reporting system was flooded? Even legit reports of racism are going to take a while to read through, judge, contact the author, wait for possibly updates or retractions, and then removal.

A03′s staff are volunteers, and I understand there aren’t very many of them. There are six MILLION works on A03. No one could hope to read them all with a careful enough eye to catch all instances of harmful texts.

And we all know what’s going to happen: it’s easier to delete all stories that get complaints, rather than read them.

So, Fan A gets Fan C’s fic taken down for racial stereotyping and Fan C tells all of her friends, who go on a crusade to report every single one of Fan Q’s fics in retaliation (not because Fan Q did anything “wrong” but because they happened to post a blog about racial stereotyping in fandom) And we’re right back to strikethru.

Yet, censorship is one of those things that makes me very, very nervous. Do I think a white boy who writes a self-insert rape fantasy novella about violating and murdering Zoe Quinn should be allowed a platform? No, I don’t. (And neither did Amazon, who took it down fairly quickly once it was brought to their attention. But that’s only one case, where there are probably thousands of books that are personal attacks and are left merrily alone.)

There are a lot of books on the banned book list. If people thought they could get away with it, those books would be unpublished, unpersoned, black bagged.

We all know that the rules get applied badly, by the people with the biggest mouths and the loudest complaints. So banning content on A03 does not seem to be the solution.

(Personal story time again, just skip this if you want.)

I came into fandom backward; I was a traditionally published erotica / romance writer first and moved into fandom after the collapse of several small publishing houses for various scandals that I won’t bore you with but you can look here if you want more information.

Several years ago, I was in an anthology that i was Very Proud of, and I really like the editor I worked with, wanted to work with her again. She sent me a premise for submission that left me cold. Which is to say, she wanted to publish cuckolding stories.

[x] <-- warning, that link is REALLY harsh and filled with some real WTF moments, from someone who’s pointing out the racism inherent in the system.

Especially when you consider the Mandingo aspects of the fantasy, it’s easy to see why just the existence of it is repulsive.

I declined the invitation to participate because I was deeply uncomfortable with the subject matter.

I’m not saying that to get praise for my behavior.

Because when the subject came up again about two or three years ago in some fandom discourse, I sided with my friends who were defending “no censorship, no matter what.”

(End of personal aside.)

Despite my personal feelings about the issue (ew, this is icky and racist and horrible and I would never write it) I still believe that I don’t have the right to say what someone else can write, read, or enjoy.

I’m trying to find the path between “this sort of reading material is harmful and I don’t think it should have a platform,” “this should be heavily tagged to avoid upsetting people,” and “there are people who feel that way about gay, non-christian stories as well.” And what’s more, I’m trying to find it in a way that doesn’t stifle authors’ voices.

Even with my idea of an overlay, that’s putting the burden on the people most affected-- someone would have to rate stories as “racist” or “not racist” (and even then, it’s seldom that clear cut. Microaggressions abound.) and the people best capable of doing that would be readers of color. Which hardly seems productive. Or fair.

“Don’t like; don’t read” is often the calling card of fandom writers. I’ve said it myself. That’s what the fucking back button is for. But when I say it, I mean “I don’t want to hear your wank about Tony Stark in my inbox” not “I don’t want to be called out for racism when I wrote a story.”

https://ggmadeit.com/blog/why-i-cant-just-knit-the-story-of-a-black-knitter-during-civil-unrest/ -- I’m including this link because this piece really made me think. I can’t ever put down being a woman. I can’t read or watch horribly misogynistic work without being upset, and I have trouble sitting in the room with my male friends who insist on watching it and want to say “it’s only a movie.”

Being black is part of someone’s life. It can’t be erased just because it’s not convenient. Just because it interrupts your good time. It shouldn’t be put aside because “it’s just a story.”

As fans, we have to do better.

We all know what it’s like to be pushed out, to be made second best, to be asked when we’re going to get a real hobby, when are you going to grow up, why did you spend money on that merch? So we need to reach further.

I don’t have answers. And even if I did, I’m not the one who needs to give them. What I need to do is listen to the people who have answers and HELP THEM get what they need.

We need to do better. We need to BE better.

#writing #fandom #racism in fandom

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celawrites · 4 years

Text

Day 37

It’s 12am and my phone is buzzing and I cannot sleep. What the fuck is going on.

You have 20 new notifications

I click open our class chat first, and to my surprise, it’s all birthday messages.

Clown: Did you guys actually have to type me a whole essay? Thank you tho <3

Pebble: A well written essay!

Sam: Time well spent

My phone vibrates and I’m invited to a call from a handful of friends.

Joining Your Neighborhood Pizza delivery service’s call…

“It’s 12am let me sleep”

“Are you not happy that we’re wishing you happy birthday at 12am?”

“I am, it’s just I’m also exhausted for no reason”

“You’re going out for a McDonalds run right?”

“Yeah. You guys woke me up halfway through”

“Sorry”

“I’m sorry it’s 12am and I really wanna know who’s in this call right now”

“Ah! It would be Estelle, Beanie, Min, “

“Your son”

“Mint”

“Sun”

“What the fuck are you guys doing awake?”

“Admiring the stars”

“Sure. Totally believe you”

“Cressie it’s your birthday.”

“One year closer to my demise I guess”

“You’re insane”

“So I’ve been told”

“Ah. Check your mailbox in the morning! There should be a couple things in there”

I yawn. 6 hours of sleep isn’t enough to run on.

“Alright get to bed. Sleep your last 3 hours and I’ll be waiting for you at 3am”

“Mint you’re the most punctual out of all of us why are you picking me up?”

“I’ve never had a McDonalds run with you. Besides, It’s Friday.”

“Alright I’m sleeping now good night”

“Good night birthday girl!”

“That’s so cheesy ksjdfalfa”

Sure enough, at 3am, I wake up and find Mint outside my door, vibing in his car. I shake my head and lock the door.

“Good morning Mint”

“Morning”

“You’re mean you know that?”

“Happy birthday Mint”

“Right back at you”

“HEY REMEMBER WHEN YOU JUST STRAIGHT UP LEFT ME ON READ WHEN I WISHED YOU HAPPY BIRTHDAY-”

“I THOUGHT WE WERE OVER THAT ALREAY”

“My salty ass could never”

“Alright what do you want for your birthday?”

“Neither of us give anything-”

“Our Asian ass could never”

“HOnestly”

“Ah. I do have a present for you though”

My hand reaches into my backpack and I pull out a scrapbook.

“In true Crescent fashion, I present to you our scrapbook”

“What?”

“A collection of all the photos we have together with little commentary along the way. This is now yours” I beam.

“You’re joking”

“Nope”

“I didn’t even get you anything like his I-”

“You don’t need to”

He snickers and hands me a small box.

“I found it while shopping online, and it reminded me of that one time A gave you a rainbow rose so I figured I would give you an eternal one”

I stare at the rose. It’s rainbow, and I was surprised he even remembered that his brother had given me one. I tear up slightly, maybe its because I wasn’t used to getting gifts from him, or the sudden change of heart but I mean-

“I’m crying”

“You’re always crying”

“SHUT UP KDFSKFSHDJF”

My hands clink at the glass softly, and Mint hums in appreciation as he flips through the scrapbook.

“Where’s this photo from?”

“Hm?” He points at a photo where both he and his brother are jumping on the trampoline while I’m sitting.

“Your mom sent it to my mom a few years back”

“Ah”

There’s a comfortable silence that passes over us, and I decide to answer all the texts that I had received about my birthday while he flipped through the book.

After about a dozen thank you!’s and 4 conversations, I finish. Mint snickers when he flips to the last page.

“You just had to put that one last huh?”

On the last page lies Mint and I at Junior prom last year. It was a tradition to go with eachother, and my friend had taken a photo where we were pretending to make out.

”Why? Don’t want your future wife seeing it?”

“No. It’s just you saved the best for last” he snorts.

“Of course” I hum.

“Alright what do you want from McDonalds?”

“Ice cream”

“You’re literally bleeding this week no”

“Uhhh. Fries?”

“Sure”

Mint starts his car and we head off. The sky is a calm blue. A dark shade that leaves you wondering if there’s more out there. It was ironic that I had met him so long ago. It was even more surprising when he moved here for junior and senior year. I was horribly confused, and the only explanation he could muster out was a job change for his parents. But I was pretty sure they just wanted to have A mature in a different environment.

“Lost in thought again?”

“Mhm. You never told me how and why you moved here in detail”

“Nothing really. It was a job change on my parents part, and a new path for A”

“What about you?”

“I wanted to chase the only person who never gave up on me”

“You’re disgusting”

“Better than confessing to my crush every day for a whole year”

“LEAVE ME ALONE”

“You’re the one who brought up how I chased you all the way to California”

“I still wonder how you can pin after someone like me”

“At some point I realized you saw me as a brother”

“I wish I could do that.”

“You’re a hopeless romantic. Have some fun every once in a while”

“Are you implying I should have a one night stand?”

“Once you’re a legal adult sure”

“Bad decision making except it’s Mint giving me bad advice as a joke”

“I hate you”

“Love you too~”

“You’re disgusting”

“Bleh”

HE pulls up at the McDonalds drive-through and I scream.

“dEAR ARE YOU ALIVE?”

“OMG HAPPY BIRTHDAY DARLING! EVERYTHING’S ON ME TODAY”

“WTF DEAR NO”

“NO OBJECTIONS. IS MINT WITH YOU?”

“I’m here”

“Happy birthday Mint darling anyways what do you guys want?”

“The usual”

“Nothing new?”

“Nope”

“Alright! See you at the second window!”

“Cressie darling I got you a gift!”

“I- what?”

“Gift.” He tosses something through the car window and it lands in my hands.

“What is it?”

“Check”

I click open the box and I find a small pendant with a moon.

“I thought you were a broke high school student?”

“But the boss gave me a raise and told me to get something nice for my lover and like I don’t have one so I mean-”

“I don’t deserve you” I sniff.

“Stop crying darling you’re scaring me”

I really hope you find yourself a lover this year or I will fight everyone around me I SWEAR”

“You’re being too loud again Cress”

“Sorry”

He hands us our food and waves us goodbye. It was funny to me. I had so many friends around me now that I had grown.

“Are you gonna make a birthday post?”

“Oh for Serenity!” I gasp.

I type away and Mint steals a couple fries from me. I hiss at him while typing.

“Too bad” he shrugs.

School rolls around and I ‘m met with 20 happy birthdays and a couple gifts fro my other friends. Surprise surprise I have other friends. Z and Sun’s gift surprises me the most.

“Cress” Sun calls for me after school.

“Hm?”

“Happy birthday” He hands a medium-sized box to me.

“You always make us scrapbooks for our birthdays so I thought I’d try to make one for you”

“Have I ever told you how much I love you-”

“You remind me pretty often but yeah”

I open the box and a seat little scrapbook sits inside. There’s a white pen, a silver one, and a gold pen rolling around next to it, and there’s a small letter. Z tackles me from behind and I crash into Sun’s chest.

“Z what the f-”

“Language” Sun glares.

“Your gift!” Z hands me a small photo sized box.

“Photos?”

“You made a whole batch with notes on the back for me so I decided to print a bunch for you!”

“Thank you Z” I sniff slightly.

“What’s wrong! Do you not like it?”

“No no! I’m emotional haha” I muster up a smile. My cursed birthday luck was gonna catch up with me soon. I just felt it.

“No worries! It was the least I could do” Z smiles.

I nod in response. The rest of the day carries out like normal, and I find myself tired by the end of the day. My classmates threw me a party, and at the end of the day, my friends threw me another one. I enjoyed it, but I was waiting for my cursed birthday luck to catch up to me, I could never be happy until it occurred.

“If you’re thinking about that birthday curse of yours again, I’d advise you to know that with me, there’s no chance of having bad birthday luck” Mint hums. His birthdays had no bad things. It was like the universe favored him.

“I know. But I can’t truly calm down until I get to bed”

There’s a comfortable silence that settles down before Mint speaks up again.

“I’m sorry”

“Why so?”

“You had always wished me happy birthday so consistently, and I never replied and I just feel really bad and all-”

“Don’t worry about it.” I tap at the red solo cup in my hand. “I probably deserved all that”

“You don’t and that’s why I kind of. Um”

“Mint you’re my editor what did you do-”

“Bought tickets back home?” I gape at him. My jaw is dropped, and he seems to panic. “My home’s open and all! I know your house is rented out and the renters for my place just moved out and we have thanksgiving in a month so I figured I would take you back for the break and I’m sorry! I probably should’ve asked first and all but-”

A choked sob escapes my lips. I’m shocked, I hadn’t gone home in so long. How did he know? A stream of incoherent words escapes my lips and Mint tries to soothe me.

“You know.” I managed to force it out. “Some days I question why I stopped crushing on you. You spoil me rotten, and I don’t even deserve someone who cares for me and knows me like you and you always seem to know how I’m feeling and-”

Mint rubs soft circles on my back, and I let out my emotions. My birthday curse wasn’t a curse. It was a tradition. A tradition to cry at least once on my birthday, and for the first time, I was crying tears of joy. A couple minutes pass, and I feel my emotions slowly draw back.

“Thank you” I mumbled weakly.

Serenity made a new post!

It’s my birthday! Thank you to all of you who sent in birthday wishes (and death threats)! Another year has passed and I truly wish that I could thank you all face to face for the support!

Once again, my lovely editor Leaf shares a birthday with me so go ahead and send in some birthday wishes to him as well. For today’s gift from me, you all get a blast of joy! Much love!

-Serenity

Previous : Masterlist : Next

#writing #people crying inadfs #first person #birthdays #fiction #365 days #365 days of writing #365 days of rejection #though not much rejection anymore #project #quarantine project #me being emotionally unstable again

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anniekoh · 5 years

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I just finished reading Doing Harm, I was already grouchy yesterday and correctly anticipated that I would be furious after reading the book. I can’t immediately locate my notes from Inferior, but recall similar sense of wtf.

All women, and all diseases suffered primarily by women have a “legitimacy deficit” (Dusenbery is citing Joanna Kempner’s Not Tonight: Migraine and the Politics of Gender and Health).

“A 1971 gynecology text warned that “many women, wittingly or unwittingly, exaggerate the severity of their complaints to gratify neurotic desires” (p 71).

I should dig up the article that discussed how alternative health gurus, like those charlatans promoted by GOOP, find traction because so many women have been dismissed and belittled and generally ill-served by the American health care system, even wealthy white women.

I’m immensely sympathetic to many scientists’ frustration with how blithely research data is dismissed (the rise of anti-vax sentiments), but I have rarely seen any willingness to acknowledge the immense harms that capital S Science has inflicted on women’s bodies, and the very gendered, misogynist flavor of many comments that mock people who are concerned about GMOs, chemical exposure, and yes, vaccines.

Dusenbery does a great job of synthesizing the studies of the medical/drug studies. There is a truly abysmal rate of actually including women as study participants, partly due obsession with excluding women of “childbearing age” lest they somehow risk their baby-making purpose in life (never mind if they shout to the heavens that they are happy lesbians or nuns or just have no risk of becoming pregnant). I

Dusenbery has a truly fantastic bibliography, bringing forth nuggets of wtf and OMG from articles and books published 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago.

My list of monographs I want to read has grown by at least 10 books,

As feminist disability scholar Susan Wendell, reviewing the epidemiological research on somatoform disorders, wrote in 1999, “It seems a remarkable coincidence that men of higher socioeconomic backgrounds from the developed Western countries are, in all the world, the people least likely to ‘somatize,’ given that they also happen to be the people who are accorded the most believability and authority in Western scientific settings.” (p 82)

Of course women of color, especially black women, and poor women are seen as the least reliable.

The sheer preponderance of studies showing how gender influences doctors’ perceptions is cause for reconsideration of how my own internalized biases are at work in my ill-informed sense that at least some auto-immune diseases must be psychogenic.

“Doctors think that men have heart attacks and women have stress.” A study of 230 doctors showed that a simple note in a patient’s file about a stressful event resulted in much different treatment for a hypothetical man and a woman (identical symptoms/risk factors):

Only 15 percent of the doctors diagnosed heart disease in the woman, compared to 56 percent for the man, and only 30 percent referred the woman to a cardiologist, compared to 62 percent for the man.... The presence of stress, the researchers explained, seemed to spark a “meaning shift” in which women’s physical symptoms were reinterpreted as psychological, while “men’s symptoms were perceived as organic whether or not stressors were present.” The male patient’s stress not only didn’t detract from a heart disease diagnosis but actually seemed to support it. (p 112)

Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick Maya Dusenbery (2018)

Editor of the award-winning site Feministing.com, Maya Dusenbery brings together scientific and sociological research, interviews with doctors and researchers, and personal stories from women across the country to provide the first comprehensive, accessible look at how sexism in medicine harms women today.

In Doing Harm, Dusenbery explores the deep, systemic problems that underlie women's experiences of feeling dismissed by the medical system. Women have been discharged from the emergency room mid-heart attack with a prescription for anti-anxiety meds, while others with autoimmune diseases have been labeled "chronic complainers" for years before being properly diagnosed. Women with endometriosis have been told they are just overreacting to "normal" menstrual cramps, while still others have "contested" illnesses like chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia that, dogged by psychosomatic suspicions, have yet to be fully accepted as "real" diseases by the whole of the profession.

Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong - and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story Angela Saini (2017)

For hundreds of years it was common sense: women were the inferior sex. Their bodies were weaker, their minds feebler, their role subservient. No less a scientist than Charles Darwin asserted that women were at a lower stage of evolution, and for decades, scientists—most of them male, of course—claimed to find evidence to support this. Whether looking at intelligence or emotion, cognition or behavior, science has continued to tell us that men and women are fundamentally different. Biologists claim that women are better suited to raising families or are, more gently, uniquely empathetic. Men, on the other hand, continue to be described as excelling at tasks that require logic, spatial reasoning, and motor skills. But a huge wave of research is now revealing an alternative version of what we thought we knew. The new woman revealed by this scientific data is as strong, strategic, and smart as anyone else.

In Inferior, acclaimed science writer Angela Saini weaves together a fascinating—and sorely necessary—new science of women. As Saini takes readers on a journey to uncover science’s failure to understand women, she finds that we’re still living with the legacy of an establishment that’s just beginning to recover from centuries of entrenched exclusion and prejudice. Sexist assumptions are stubbornly persistent: even in recent years, researchers have insisted that women are choosy and monogamous while men are naturally promiscuous, or that the way men’s and women’s brains are wired confirms long-discredited gender stereotypes. As Saini reveals, however, groundbreaking research is finally rediscovering women’s bodies and minds. Inferior investigates the gender wars in biology, psychology, and anthropology, and delves into cutting-edge scientific studies to uncover a fascinating new portrait of women’s brains, bodies, and role in human evolution. Angela Saini is an independent British science journalist and author of two acclaimed books. She presents science programmes on BBC Radio

#science #sexism #medicine #feminism #gender discrimination #to read

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sophoreads · 5 years

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Annotation notes for Wicked Saints

Attached under the cut are my word-for-word annotation notes pulled straight from my copy of Wicked Saints. Check out my previous post and goodreads review before reading the annotation notes.

I only decided to start annotating this book 115 pages in, because I realized that there were so many problems I was complaining about to my friend Sophie over text that I thought “Hey, I’d better write this shit down so I have receipts/can easily reference my thoughts.” I’d never really done annotations before, so I pulled out a new pack of sticky notes and color tabs that someone gave to me for free when I was in college and got to work. I ran out of sticky notes (started a new pad) and yellow tabs (borrowed last few from a weird tab/highlighter I found at the bottom of my college study stuff bin). I also got so frustrated I had to put the book down several times, because I’d paid eighteen dollars to pre-order this fucking garbage.

Pg 115 Pink tab – Character note --Bitch do you want to kill him or not? This is like bad Reylo fic— (Nadya being ~~inexplicably~~ held back from killing Mal, because she really wants to kill Mal, but just CANT for SOME REASON)

pg 123 Yellow tab – writing/literacy/grammar note --no note written— “He braced himself for the inevitable summons from his father. It arrived immediately by way of servant wearing a plain brown mask that left only his eyes visible. One of his father’s personal servants.”

Pg 137 Yellow tab – writing/literacy/grammar note --WTF is “it commanded attention”?! This whole throne bit is needlessly over-explanatory and could be fixed by adhering to golden rule “show, don’t tell”—

pg 139 Yellow tab --you don’t have to repeat the same thing twice!— “…Serefin paused, swallowing down the anxiety threatening to choke him. He was suddenly unspeakably nervous.”

Pg 140 Yellow tab --you just said they didn’t know who it was and now, not even a page later, you’re literally describing Mal and saying you DO know who it was?! WHO TF EDITED THIS SHIT— (Izak telling Serefin that they don’t know the vulture who escaped, then the vulture lurking behind him describing the backstory of the vulture who escaped)

pg 145 pink tab --what, is she Canadian now?— “You’ve realized your father isn’t so good a father to you, eh?” she [Pelayega] asked.

Pg 146 Yellow tab --For all that Duncan over-explains things in this story I still don’t fucking understand the High/Low prince thing??? Not once has she gone into it. And what the fuck is a slavhka?— (in reference to the first mention of there being “low princes”)

pg 148 Blue tab – Plot note --Why is the church still standing they LITERALLY TORE IT DOWN! THIS PART OF IT COLLAPSED!!!— (in reference to parijahan lying on top of pillows in the church Mal and Nadya just destroyed to get rid of the Vultures)

pg 153 Yellow tab --Are we really still saying “invalid” in the year of our unbridled insanity 2019?— “…Your mother, Estera, is an invalid…” (Mal making up a fake background for Nadya)

pg 153 Blue tab --SINCE WHEN DOES HE HAVE TATTOOS ON HIS HANDS— (in reference to the very first mention of Mal having tattoos on his hands, 153 pages into the story)

pg 155 Pink tab --Anna is so flat a character she could be removed from the whole book and not one thing would change— (in reference to Anna deciding to leave the group to re-join Kalyazi forces. I hold by this statement because Anna had no fucking role in the end of the book, and was therefore a useless character throughout)

pg 157 Pink tab --I’m sorry are we ETHNIC CLEANSING?! IS THIS WHAT WE ARE ENDORSING?! WTF?— “…then we can cleanse Kalyazin of the heretics entirely”

pg 163 Blue tab --this is the first we are hearing about any hierarchy in the vultures, which we should have read many chapters ago, not just when convenient for the author/plot— (in reference to first mention of Crimson Vulture)

pg 164 Yellow tab/Blue tab (overlapping domains) --Inches? FRACTIONS? IN THIS ECONOMY?!— (what is math in medieval Poland)

pg 167 Yellow tab --Still have not defined nobility and what makes a family “noble” or slavhka or whatever “low prince/royalty” or some shit— (In reference to yet another mention of low princes/royalty and somehow differentiating them from slavhka)

pg 168 Blue tab --I am more interested in gay Romeo/Juliet in a blood mage society than I am the entire plot of Wicked Saints— --Also this interaction feels cringey and thrown in for…no real reason?— “You’ve missed so much! Did you know that Nikodem Stachowicz was caught in the palace archives with the youngest Osadik boy?” (Zaneta)

pg 170 Yellow tab --FIRE YOUR COPY EDITOR— He shrugged, burying his tattooed hands in his pockets. “It binds over time, magic does. Especially blood magic. It’s so accessible. You don’t have to have a true affinity for it…” (Mostly I got furious over the fact that we’re only just getting Mal’s tattoo hands, which was obviously written in as an afterthought for his character partway through the writing process and not retconned into the story. I also just hate the sentence “it binds over time, magic does.”)

Pg 170 Yellow tab --Page 170: “walked on” Page 177: on horseback. WHAT IS THE TRUTH?— “Malachiasz stopped to wait for Nadya while the others walked on ahead” (this note coincides with a future note)

pg 173 Orange tab – blatant parallels to and lifts from Dragon Age franchise --you get a special shame-color for copying Dragon Age (also WHAT IS YOUR MAGIC STRUCTURE HOW IS THIS EVEN POSSIBLE) (it’s just bad writing)— “He was referring to witches—apostate magic users outside the gods’ approval—but there had been no witches in Kalyazin for decades. Their route of magic was considered just as heretical as blood magic…”

pg 176 yellow tab --Emily A Duncan focuses [more] on the little actions of Malacheezit than she does for any other character and it hurts the story— (specific reference to line “He fidgeted, fingers picking at a hang nail” interjected in dialogue. This action-dialogue tag does no service to the story at all.)

Pg 177 Pink tab --What the fuck? Is this about Holy War or is this a romance fantasy? (note the order: not “fantasy romance”)— “In a flash, his hand was underneath her chin, thumb brushing against her jaw…If Nadya hadn’t been sitting down she suspected her knees would have given out on her.”

Pg 177 Yellow tab --SINCE WHEN DO THEY HAVE FUCKING HORSES?! FIRE ALL YOUR EDITORS FIRE THE PUBLISHER— “Nadya let her horse wander instead of tying it up, sending a short prayer up to Vaclav to keep an eye on the animal so it didn’t stray too far.” (These horses were never mentioned before (note connects to a prev. note) and were never mentioned again after this. I literally cannot fathom how or why this book made it to final printing in this state.)

Pg 183 Pink tab --All this romance shit seems so forced for both Nadya and mal. I see no actual attraction on either party?— (I’m not recording the second note as it is a crude remark against the author, a remark of which I still stand by, but would be damaging to both her and myself. However, the emotion of the second note follows the concept of “anyone who knew what they were talking about wouldn’t write this kind of bullshit.”)

Pg 185 Yellow tab --“Per se”? I’m sorry is there LATIN in this world? (it’s bad writing)— “He wasn’t putting it off per se, he…”

pg 186 yellow tab --“It was fitting THAT assassins…” ugh— “It was fitting assassins chose to strike that same evening” (Doesn’t the author have a masters degree? And works in a library? How is her writing this chopped and sloppy, omitting crucial subject/action markers?)

Pg 198 Blue tab --Jesus, are prostitutes of war a NORMAL THING? WE SHOULD BE SAVING THESE POOR WOMEN— “The girl is…” He faltered, convincingly. “Well, you understand.” He winked at the soldier. (the soldier doesn’t even remark on Nadya’s sex slave status) (Also I realize that “prostitutes of war” is not the correct vernacular, however I’m committed to giving you my direct and exact notes. I know that they are slaves of war, sex slaves specifically, and do not receive true compensation or reparation for their suffering.)

Pg 201 Pink tab --HOW THE FUCK DO YOU KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT NOBLES? YOU LIVED YOUR WHOLE LIFE IN A MONASTERY!— “Nobles are nobles,” she [Nadya] said waving a hand. “Regardless of where they come from. The pettiness of court transcends all cultural boundaries.”

Pg 202 Blue tab --WHAT THE FUCK? EXPLAIN YOUR MAGIC/MYTHS— (referencing the blasé and brief mention of Wolf Changers, which we never hear about again)

pg 203 blue tab --WHAT NECKLACE? WHEN DID THIS HAPPEN?— --Oh, that necklace, that was mentioned in the first chapter, forgotten, reintroduced the following chapter, then COMPLETELY forgotten again! Bad writing. Bad props.— “Her prayer beads were safely in her pocket, so she clutched at the necklace Kostya had given her.”

Pg 205 Blue tab --Is her accent suddenly better?— (reference to previous statements of Nadya having a terrible travanian accent, hence the sex slave thing to the border guard so she doesn’t have to talk, but now she’s talking and there was no reference to her improving her accent at all or even working on it.)

pg 207 yellow tab --I can see Emily has a kink for masks + chin grabbing— “He [Serefin] reached out and took her chin in his hand, lifting her face up to his” (Mal has also done this to Nadya countless times and she orgasms almost every time.)

Pg 209 Orange tab --The veil, yet another stolen Dragon Age concept!— “…closed her eyes, letting herself feel the invisible wall separating gods from men. She felt it the moment they had stepped into Tranavia, the weight of the veil pressing down against her, choking off her only access to the divine.” (This is also the very first reference to any such veil being in place. It took 209 pages for this to be mentioned, in a book chock full of a girl talking to gods in her head. Also, they’ve been in Tranavia for awhile. Why wasn’t this mentioned when they first stepped foot inside? (because it’s bad writing))

Pg 209 Pink tab --Nadya’s powers seem almost limitless at this point— “Holy speech whispered through her head and she moved to disassemble the spells woven through the walls. She couldn’t take them apart completely— someone would notice, precautions in place—she was just making them fuzzy, bleeding them out. She dulled them so any information imparted back to the mages who set them would appear mundane.” (If Nadya’s powers (at this point in the book) are tied to the gods, there is no mention of which god provides these powers. If this is meant to foreshadow that Nadya has her own powers, it’s a lazy job. It’s simply overpowered and oversimplified. )

Pg 210 [no tab just a sticky] --oh FINALLY we hear how they met!— “I’ve known him [Rashid] my whole life. And we crashed into Malachiasz about six months ago after getting into trouble with some off-duty Kalyazi soldiers.”

Pg 214 [no tab just a sticky] --also can we acknowledge the whole “brown girl serves a white girl” thing because WOW— (in reference to Parijahan playing handmaiden to Nadya at the palace)

pg 215 Pink tab --“Couldn’t worry about the prince”? wasn’t HE the one she wanted to kill in revenge for Kostya? (IS THAT ALL FORGOTTEN NOW?)

pg 216 Pink tab --First Zaneta is Indian [coded] and now she’s black [coded]? WHAT?— “…a tall girl with luminous skin like onyx threaded with gold…her spiral curls fanned out around her head like a halo.”

Pg 217 Orange tab --The game? Court intrigue? Masks? This all reeks of Orlais and direct theft from Dragon Age— (in reference to basically the whole castle competition, masks, etc)

pg 217 Yellow tab --And now we’re switching perspectives mid-chapter? Just start a new chapter!— (in reference to the very first mid-chapter perspective switch, which will occur more from here on out)

pg 232 yellow tab --I am so sick of these italicized words without any translation or description— (in reference to szitelka which I still DON’T KNOW WHAT IT IS)

pg 233 pink tab --what the fuck is Nadya’s perspective? Does she want to kill all Tranavians or not? Emily make up your fucking mind— (in reference to Nadya getting pissed at Mal for killing the other blood mage girl in Nadya’s duel, so that Nadya wouldn’t die and the duel would end)

pg 234 pink tab --literally when has Nadya worried about his safety, esp. when she’s the one always threatening to kill him?— “She hadn’t forgotten, not even while she found herself worrying about his safety and wanting him by her side.”

Pg 235 Pink tab --oh FINALLY we get a description of his tattoos! 235 PAGES IN!!!! BULLSHIT YOU HACK WRITER!— “She found her eyes drawn to the tattoos on his long, elegant fingers. They were simple, straight lines: two on either side of each finger and one down the back that started at the bed of each fingernail and ended at his wrist in a single black bar.” (I literally vomited in my mouth when I read this)

Pg 238 Pink tab --Oh so Mal can’t murder to save you but you can murder Tranavians and its fucking justified? Nadya is such a bad Nazi char.— “It’s not an apology for murdering that girl, she noted. But it was a start. It was something from this boy who obviously had no morals and no regard for anything that didn’t serve his own interests.” (Nadya is the worst hypocrite and I want to punch her in the face)

Pg 239 Yellow tab --Hanged? Since when? Has hanging? Been a threat? Ever? In this world?— “…or else this whole mess of a plan will go up in smoke and we’ll all be hanged for it.”

Pg 240 Pink tab (this is another omitted note because it is a crude comment in part against the author, but the other half does say that Nadya is such a virgin and that I am second-hand embarrassed because this book and the “romance” scenes are so bad)

pg 242 blue tab --If Nadya used blood magic, why don’t the gods cut off her powers for her heresy? It would only make sense— (this is just a general comment on the chapter and how, after the duel and Nadya used blood magic, her gods were still talking to her. This is also before we find out that Nadya has her own powers)

pg 247 yellow tab --the way this is lazily written we’re supposed to assume it’s Ostiya at the door. Could be written much better (all of this could be written much better)— “Serefin hastily wrapped his still-bleeding hand with cloth while Kacper got the door. Ostiya blinked her single eye at the sight of both of them.”

Pg 248 Blue tab --“delicate gov[ernmen]t? we don’t even know how the gov’t is even structured!— “This was too far. It would crumble Travania’s already delicate government.”

Pg 259 Blue tab --Oh good, a love triangle. Good to know Nadya’s type is “blood mage tortured/charming boy” that grabs chin + kisses hands— “…and wasn’t sure what to do with this charmingly awkward boy. That he was one of the most powerful blood mages in Tranavia...She wavered too much already; she couldn’t allow herself to feel any more.”

Pg 260 Pink tab --Literally all that Parijahan does is be soft + comforting? That is literally all she does to Mal + Nadya + Rashid?— “Nadya usually didn’t see this side of Parijahan. It relieved her to see there was a warm softness to Parijahan’s flinty gaze.”

Pg 270 Blue tab --What do you mean? When did you mention that the gods had withdrawn their power from Nadya?— “She had no magic. She had nothing. She had no hope without her gods.”

Pg 275 Blue tab --But they would abandon her for using blood magic you dumbass— “The gods wouldn’t have abandoned her. Not for a few doubts, not for kissing a heretic—not even that.”

Pg 278 Blue tab --Okay this is actually a really cool scene— (when Nadya is first using blood with the pendant to see her way out of the room the rogue Vultures locked her in)

pg 280 blue tab --Calls her “little bird” is this Mal?— (referencing this unnamed god that Nadya is talking to via Kostya’s necklace)

pg 287 yellow tab --sloppy transition makes it seem as though a new person is talking— (Basically for the next two pages Emily incorrectly punctuates her paragraph breaks while Pelayega is talking.)

Pg 294 Orange tab --Velyos=Solas=Mal? Oh my god is this whole plot a regurgitation of DA:Inquisition/Trespasser?— “Have you heard of him? I suppose not. The veil went up, Velyos broke away. Your gods were probably relieved, but here he is once more...”

pg 298 blue tab --fucking called it (“acted like he was dead”? Literally said before that he was “sent to the country”)— (in reference to Serefin seeing Mal and discovering that his cousin is the Black Vulture. Previously, a not so subtle mention of a nameless male cousin of Serefin’s was “sent to the country” when he was young. I immediately pegged it as being Mal. But now it is written that Serefin was led to believe that his cousin died? The inconsistencies are rife.)

pg 308 pink tab --Does Nadya literally have no self control or sense of morality (for her own morals)? What the fuck is this?— “Then her traitorous, heretical hands betrayed her as she reached up and wove them into his hair, pulling his face down to hers and kissing him. Because she was angry with him, furious with his lies, but not even her anger was enough to cool the burning she felt when he was near; the heat that spread through her nerves when he touched her.”

Pg 308 Pink tab --ooh power shift, she’s doing the chin-grabbing now!— “She took his chin in her hand, directing his gaze down to hers.”

Pg 309 Blue tab --except for the vultures that kidnapped her? What about them?!— “Go to the cathedral when you’re finished here,” he said. “None of the Vultures will give you any trouble.”

Pg 313 Pink tab --Didn’t want the fate of nations? She LITERALLY came here to topple the monarchy and uproot Tranavia and start a mass ethinic cleansing— “She was only one girl; she didn’t want the fate of nations resting on her decisions.”

Pg 314 Pink tab --YOU CAN’T HAVE IT BOTH WAYS YOU DUMB BITCH— [the dumb bitch being Nadya] “The war took something important to me,” she said, fingering Kostya’s necklace unconsciously. She couldn’t think about how it had been Serefin who had led that attack. (Nadya literally forgets and completely forgives Serefin for what she believes is Kostya’s murder (we know that Kostya wasn’t killed by Serefin but his BABY BRO WAS). Like, wasn’t Kostya super important to her? And she tried to kill Serefin in revenge but Mal stopped her? And in literally less than a week she totally forgets about it?)

Pg 318 Pink tab --Honestly, Mal deserves better than Nadya. He’s clearly doing his best and she’s just being racist and unwavering.— He opened his mouth, at a loss for words. Finally, he asked, “Will it always be like this?” Would it? She couldn’t say. Would she ever be comfortable with what he was? Or would it always be this constant hot and cold, friends one second and enemies the next? “I don’t know.” (Nadya is so abusive in this whole relationship I feel bad for Mal)

pg 321 yellow tab --He literally said he only told her the truth?! Mal has literally not told one lie?— “He was a liar and she wanted his truths”

pg 322 yellow tab --The whole order of this scene description + the characters is clunky and wrong— (no further comment really, that pretty much explains it)

pg 326 pink tab --Did she literally forget about Kostya? Did Nadya literally just forgive Serefin b/c she thinks he’s cute and tortured? LITERALLY? WHY?— “Serefin. He’s good,” She nuzzled his chest. “I like him. He should live.”

Pg 327 Blue tab --Can Serefin suddenly write his own spells now?! I thought only Mal could do that— “As he sat down at his desk with spells sprawled out in front of him, blood still drying on the pages, he couldn’t shake the feeling…”

pg 335 pink tab --That’s right, bitch! You’re damn nigh abusive to him and for some reason he keeps coming back! I don’t know why since you have the personality of a Nazi but for some reason Mal just really wants to fuck you!— “How could she be the only good thing to happen to him? She had almost slit his throat, had hung him off a railing. She didn’t even trust him, not really.”

Pg 351 Blue tab --since when have we seen a fucking calendar system?— “…turned the tide of a battle in 625 when…” (this is a “Vasiliev’s Book of Saints” entry for chapter 33. There is one more reference to a year in an earlier codex entry (tsk another Dragon Age ripoff) for something like 15XX. We don’t know what year it is, nor do we know when/why they started counting. Maybe it’s not critical for the story but it IS critical if you’re bringing it up.)

pg 357 orange tab --Literally Solas’s plot in Trespasser— “She bit back a cry of pain and shoved her magic harder up at the veil. If this was when she died, then fine. Fine. She would tear this veil down first and bring the gods back to Tranavia with her dying breath.”

Pg 360 Blue tab --How did she get here? Already? These scenes are so lazy, show me Nadya scrambling up the dais to Mal’s waiting neck— “He idly spun a chalice on the armrest and Serefin watched as the cleric stood and darted for a dagger that reseted a few steps away. It was time to test just what he could do with this power. (now it’s Nadya’s POV) Malachiasz’s eyes closed. He tilted his head back, baring his throat to Nadya’s blade.”

Pg 363 Yellow tab --Did we just miss Serefin fighting his father for Nadya’s sexy threatening? Was that really a real choice the author made?— (Nadya looks over at Serefin) “Serefin was on his knees, hunched over in pain, blood oozing from his head, one hand white-knuckled on the ground holding him up. Dead moths littered the floor around him. The stars around his head began to flicker out.”

Pg 368 Yellow tab --you CANNOT call it an “Adam’s apple” when there is no “Adam” or Christianity in this fantasy world! Lazy writing indeed!— “His head tilted back, Adam’s apple bobbing, as he swallowed hard.”

Pg 376 Yellow tab --this line is so cliché and fucking bad why the fuck is it even in here?— “The king is dead, long live the king,” she said, handing it [the crown] to him [Serefin].

Pg 376 Yellow tab --And why didn’t you write that the other vultures disappeared? There is so much missing here— “Where are all the Vultures?” Ostiya asked “Most probably fled with their king,” Serefin said.

Pg 378 Yellow tab --Is what enough? Power? Crown? What the fuck? This is so sloppy— “Will this be enough?” she asked him [Serefin]. “To stop the war?” … [Serefin:] “It will”

pg 380 yellow tab --No clear description of where Mal is. Is this physical or ethereal? What the fuck is happening?— (Mal’s whole epilogue)

#review #wicked saints spoilers #spoilers

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pinkfairygsocdailylogs · 3 years

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GSoC logs (June 5 –July 11)

July 5

DS Exam - 9:30AM.

Alternatives - If build not fixed by 8:30AM.

Reclone and commit all changes to new branch.

Get preview component done

Send the demo to mentors and then touch proto file.

Recloned. In the new clone, I made new changes. Everything works.

Turns out any write operation in the proto file is wrecking stuff. I navigated to the proto file in vscode and simply saved. This causes all the errors again.

Some import errors even though proto syntax are perfectly fine. Hmmm. protoc-gen-go: program not found or is not executable

I tried making the proto file executable with chmod +x. Still same issue. Hmmm.

That was stupid. Proto files aren’t supposed to be executable! -_- Where do I get these stupid ideas.

The error is actually referring to protoc-gen-go file. Saying that protoc-gen-go is not found or not executable. Not the proto file

I’m moving on to completing the preview component to send the demo before 7pm.

Preview component

Ipynb html. Axios get and render the htmlstring from response data in the iframe. Nop, v-html.

Serve html file from the http server for now.Wait, that's not possible.

Okay, maybe I should just use hello api for now. Since both request and response objects have string type properties.

This is embarrassing.

Okay, whatever.

Just fix this and look into it,

Okay, so I can’t represent an html string just like that as in python. With `` ..

Okay `` will do.

I’m starting to like golang. It looks ridiculous but also easy to understand? What’s going on?

July 6

Leads & Tries.

Try Samuel’s suggestion -

“Do you have protoc on your path?

sometimes VScode installs its own version of some tools on a custom $PATH - it could as well be that some extension is not properly initialized “

Interesting - I tried git diff on the proto file and this happens just by vscode saving it.

old mode 100644 new mode 100755

https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/450488

Changed back to 0644 and still the same issue in vscode.

Stupid girl, you just made the protofile executable yesterday and forgot to change it back. -_-

Read about makefile. Do as said. Annotations.proto forward slash path. ?? wtf?

Set gopath right! Permanently. !!! Okay, done. No need to set it everytime now. Hopefully.

Desperate attempts -

Edit proto file in atom. (Prepare to reclone ;_;)

Trying the same in vim ()

Text editor.

Okay, so nothing editor or ide specific.

Trying to change paths

Gopath was /home/anaswaratrajan/go .. changed it to /usr/local/go/bin

New error.

GO111MODULE=off go get -v github.com/golang/protobuf/protoc-gen-go github.com/golang/protobuf (download) package github.com/golang/protobuf/protoc-gen-go: mkdir /usr/local/go/bin/src: permission denied make: *** [Makefile:164: /usr/local/go/bin/bin/protoc-gen-go] Error 1

https://github.com/golang/go/issues/27187

sudo chown -R $USER: $HOME

Doesn’t feel right. But I just want this to get done. ;_;

The problem could be that I have multiple go distributions. After this is done, I need to clean this shit this weekend.

Okay, done chown. I own this shit!!! AAAa

Still permission denied! Shit. /usr/local/go not /usr/local/go/bin

Okay, changed it, but go env GOPATH echoing giving warning that GOROOT and GOPATH are same.

So from what I’ve read, gopath is the workspace, and goroot is the place where go is installed. Our makefile is trying to install and use the modules in GOPATH. Ie go dir in home. Okay, so my GOPATH was right before.

Final tries

* Follow the error trails. * Find out what exactly is happening when I save this file. 1. Okay, incase they don’t work out. Try to send the html string instead of “Hello ” string without changing proto file. 2. Since all ipynb files can have same css, try and send only the html elements. And do the css separately in frontend. 3. Stop Ctrl+Saving for no reason! Great, now I have to reclone ;_; and start over. 4. Okay, I was able to send a sample html string with the response. Without changin the proto file. 5. Here’s what I’m gonna do. 6. Send sample html string from hello service and render in the preview component. Pass the json string as name. Hahaha. Please, explain why you had to do the same. 7. I did exactly as above. I feel like an imposter now. Screw it. 8. Alright, I have my bigbang hyungs to support me. 9. I’m gonna embed python scripts by tonight. Update: that was overoptimistic. 10. So I have the nbconvert python script to generate basic html strings. 11. I should also remove those comments in the html. 12. So we’re using the less performance option since we don’t need much memory in the first place. Using python c api.

July 7

Learned one or 2 things about embedding python. https://github.com/ardanlabs/python-go/tree/master/py-in-mem

So I need python3.7. Bc go-python3 only supports python3.7. But there’s a workaround given. So I should try that

Tries

Go-python3 , python 3.8, workaround go get github.com/christian-korneck/go-python3 But a bunch of errors occurred.

Python 3.7 install

C-like usage from golang - low level stuff

https://blog.filippo.io/building-python-modules-with-go-1-5/ goodread. But that’s not what I need.

Let’s look at Ardan’s lab way.

https://www.ardanlabs.com/blog/2020/09/using-python-memory.html

This is a bit more challenging but more understandable.

This is the way.

I should start with this right after fixing the make issue.

Back to build fixing

Do as samuel suggested. - no luck.

What I know so far. The issue is rooted with golang or protobuf or sth related. Since the issue is there for all the text editors including vim.

I found sth weird -Which go => /usr/local/go/bin/goWhen it gives /usr/local/bin/go to this dude https://stackoverflow.com/a/67419012/13580063

Okay, not so weird.

The interview went okay. They use photogenometry to generate those 3d maps out of their drone imagery. Their products sound interesting. They need frontend engineers to work on their platform. The interface currently looks almost like google maps. But 3d. Cool. I actually used the phrase.. “..I’m still in my 20s.. Don’t wanna die.. So can’t move to Bengalore anytime soon”

Not photogenometry. Photogrammetry. Also used by some old mars rovers. Wait, no it was sth else. I remember Shreyansh mentioning it. I wonder what all they’re planning for the dragonfly.

Focus. It’s been some days with this issue, you should get help.

Asked around a bunch of people on discord. No luck.

July 8

Let’s dig in.

Tries

1. Reinstall golang#2. https://stackoverflow.com/a/67419012/13580063 ? Nop.#3. See protoc installation details. Read more about protoc, protobugs

https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/reference/go-generated#4. Read more about golang ecosystem - 30m and see if **which go **path is weird. 3. Also found this https://github.com/owncloud/ocis-hello/issues/62 Nop. 4. Let’s go with the error trails. 5. Wait, did I just graduate today. Oh no. Just like that. 6. Okay, grind.

Make generate is giving this.

GO111MODULE=off go get -v github.com/golang/protobuf/protoc-gen-go GO111MODULE=on go get -v github.com/micro/protoc-gen-micro/v2 GO111MODULE=off go get -v github.com/webhippie/protoc-gen-microweb GO111MODULE=off go get -v github.com/grpc-ecosystem/grpc-gateway/protoc-gen-openapiv2 protoc \ -I=third_party/ \ -I=pkg/proto/v0/ \ --go_out=pkg/proto/v0 hello.proto protoc-gen-go: program not found or is not executable Please specify a program using absolute path or make sure the program is available in your PATH system variable --go_out: protoc-gen-go: Plugin failed with status code 1. make: *** [Makefile:176: pkg/proto/v0/hello.pb.go] Error 1

Then I try echo $GOPATH and It’s empty. go env GOPATH is right

So I set the GOPATH

export GOROOT=/usr/local/go export GOPATH=$HOME/go export GOBIN=$GOPATH/bin export PATH=$PATH:$GOROOT:$GOPATH:$GOBIN

Now, I get this

GO111MODULE=off go get -v github.com/grpc-ecosystem/grpc-gateway/protoc-gen-openapiv2 protoc \ -I=third_party/ \ -I=pkg/proto/v0/ \ --go_out=pkg/proto/v0 hello.proto protoc-gen-go: invalid Go import path "proto" for "hello.proto" The import path must contain at least one forward slash ('/') character. See https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/reference/go-generated#package for more information. --go_out: protoc-gen-go: Plugin failed with status code 1. make: *** [Makefile:176: pkg/proto/v0/hello.pb.go] Error 1

Did this https://github.com/techschool/pcbook-go/issues/3#issuecomment-821860413 and the one below and started getting this```

GO111MODULE=off go get -v github.com/grpc-ecosystem/grpc-gateway/protoc-gen-openapiv2 protoc \ -I=third_party/ \ -I=pkg/proto/v0/ \ --go_out=pkg/proto/v0 hello.proto protoc \ -I=third_party/ \ -I=pkg/proto/v0/ \ --micro_out=pkg/proto/v0 hello.proto protoc \ -I=third_party/ \ -I=pkg/proto/v0/ \ --microweb_out=pkg/proto/v0 hello.proto protoc \ -I=third_party/ \ -I=pkg/proto/v0/ \ --swagger_out=logtostderr=true:pkg/proto/v0 hello.proto protoc-gen-swagger: program not found or is not executable Please specify a program using absolute path or make sure the program is available in your PATH system variable --swagger_out: protoc-gen-swagger: Plugin failed with status code 1. make: *** [Makefile:194: pkg/proto/v0/hello.swagger.json] Error 1

July 9

Now trying to read this from the error https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/reference/go-generated#package

option go_package = "github.com/anaswaratrajan/ocis-jupyter/pkg/proto/v0;proto";

Tried this, new issue

GO111MODULE=off go get -v github.com/grpc-ecosystem/grpc-gateway/protoc-gen-openapiv2 protoc \ -I=third_party/ \ -I=pkg/proto/v0/ \ --go_out=pkg/proto/v0 hello.proto protoc \ -I=third_party/ \ -I=pkg/proto/v0/ \ --micro_out=pkg/proto/v0 hello.proto protoc \ -I=third_party/ \ -I=pkg/proto/v0/ \ --microweb_out=pkg/proto/v0 hello.proto protoc \ -I=third_party/ \ -I=pkg/proto/v0/ \ --swagger_out=logtostderr=true:pkg/proto/v0 hello.proto protoc-gen-swagger: program not found or is not executable Please specify a program using absolute path or make sure the program is available in your PATH system variable --swagger_out: protoc-gen-swagger: Plugin failed with status code 1. make: *** [Makefile:194: pkg/proto/v0/hello.swagger.json] Error 1

Okay, so proto-gen-swagger is not in gopath as expected. So this isn’t working.

$(GOPATH)/bin/protoc-gen-swagger: GO111MODULE=off go get -v github.com/grpc-ecosystem/grpc-gateway/protoc-gen-openapiv2

Instead of protoc-gen-swagger, there’s protoc-gen-openapiv2. So I replace protoc-gen-swagger from last line in the makefile to the executable in the path.https://grpc-ecosystem.github.io/grpc-gateway/docs/development/grpc-gateway_v2_migration_guide/

Turns out they rename protoc-gen-swagger to protoc-gen-openapiv2

Oooo.. I just found out, option go_package = "github.com/anaswaratrajan/ocis-jupyter/pkg/proto/v0;proto";

This just made things weird. New directory github.com/anaswa... inside proto/v0/

So go_package path is messed up.

Just replacing swagger binary names in makefile lets you generate the proto files at github.com/anas… dir

Let’s try fixing the go_package path and then try to generate the annotations.proto and the openapiv2 files (the grpc gateway files)

Wait, you don't generate them.

option go_package = "./;proto";

This is the right way.

So yea, I’m able to generate the go-code now. But make is still failing and I should sleep now.

July 11

Ownclouders already tried to work on it. But for some reason, they didn’t make the changes. Why?

Look into this. Why they didn’t continue doing this.

https://github.com/owncloud/ocis-hello/issues/91

So what exactly is micro-web service? This protoc-gen-microweb is a protoc generator for micro web services. And it's generating this hello.pb.web.go

What just happened? New error/ Make generate gives

`GO111MODULE=off go get -v github.com/grpc-ecosystem/grpc-gateway/protoc-gen-openapiv2 go generate github.com/anaswaratrajan/ocis-jupyter/pkg/assets panic: No files found goroutine 1 [running]: main.main() /home/anaswaratrajan/go/pkg/mod/github.com/!unno!ted/fileb0x[@v1](https://tmblr.co/mkYynE1Axr-EFCSIQIAtheA).1.4/main.go:101 +0x2765 exit status 2 pkg/assets/assets.go:12: running "go": exit status 1 make: *** [Makefile:83: generate] Error 1

Read more about the protoc generators used here.

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