#and its the only process i can really quantify

[saltycharacters]

What is your character design process, I’m curious.

Usually it involves something I like to call replacment design, which just means I like switching around similarly-shaped objecta and concepts to create a fun visual pun of sorts. For example, a sunny-side up egg looks kind of like a head with a lion mane, so that's how I came up with Birdy. Most of my character design boils down to that

[petrichormore]

The QSMP Dead 3 (Phil, BBH, Missa) & Their Differences

(BUCKLE UP ITS A HEADCANON POST WHERE I TRY TO SORT OUT THE REALLY CONFUSING DEATH LORE ON THE QSMP)

(I WATCH PHIL BUT NOT RELIGIOUSLY PLEASE ADD OR CORRECT INFO, CROWS)

(I’VE WATCHED SOME OF MISSA’S QSMP STREAMS BUT NOT ALL OF THEM, SO SAME THING APPLIES)

HERE WE GO

Philza:

- The Angel of Death (Not to be confused with Bad, who is a fallen Angel)

- Married to the Goddess of Death (Death in this case is referring to the Concept/Domain)

- NOT responsible for ferrying souls like a Reaper. His title is designated due to both his immortal status and deadly reputation, as well as his connection to the Goddess - similarly to how a queen might designate a knight.

- Immortal: He has higher survivability than Bad and seemingly puts a little more effort into his Days-Spent-Alive-In-A-Row streak (Past lives? Potentially a multi-dimensional being)

- Can commune well with most (if not all) gods and form semi-normal relationships with them as an equal.

- Cannot commune well with (or perhaps avoids talking to) the general dead. Despite not being able to see/hear dead people himself, he can pass the trait to his offspring as seen with Lullah. (It’s possible her power stems from both Phil and Bad. That’s what you call a whombo-combo. Sorry, Lullah.)

- Has no real connection to Bad as their duties do not usually overlap, but they are aware of each other. (AKA they are “coworkers” but Phil has no inherent authority over Bad. Their little office cubicles are on different floors.)

BadBoyHalo:

- The Grim Reaper (not to be confused with a regular Reaper - there is only one Grim Reaper working at a time) and a Fallen Angel, specifically (Thanatos?) one of the four biblical horsemen of the apocalypse/one of four angels trapped under the biblical Euphrates river.

- He is the “Death” horseman and can be referred to as “Death” but is not a death god. Rather his job led him to be associated with Death (the process/journey)

- Immortal: He can’t necessarily survive better but he will revive no matter what and cannot die the same way twice. (Past lives? Potentially a multi-dimensional being.) Despite not being as hardy as Phil, he may be older (although it’s difficult to quantify)

- Cannot commune well with gods and is seemingly not viewed as equal (although he has connections with the goddess Hecate - also a death goddess but not the death goddess. Hecate is more-so a goddess of crossroads - the transition between life and death. She may be his employer.)

- Can commune EXTREMELY well with the general dead (can potentially recognize and cultivate this ability in others - as seen with Dapper and Lullah)

- See the end for Grim Reaper/Reaper duties and differences

Missa:

- I don’t have much to go off here I’m gonna be honest. Him being a reaper isn’t even canon.

- That being said

- Missa is a Reaper, a normal one, of the Undead variety.

- NOT Immortal (at least not like Bad and Phil): As an Undead creature he cannot die of old age/sickness but can otherwise be slain so he has to be a bit more careful. He is not as unbothered by death/killing as Philza and BBH. He is also not nearly as old - the fact that they are so chill about each other is sometimes to his detriment.

- He cannot commune with any gods unless granted the ability by Phil or another power. He can communicate with the dead minimally but it’s kind of like if you tried to talk to a parrot (again, unless it’s being ‘translated’ by Bad or another power).

- Missa has necromantic magic, not enough inherent power to revive himself but enough to heal his own wounds and revive smaller things. (I know Bad ‘revived’ Missa’s mini-me for him but for the sake of Lore I’m gonna say Missa did that with his magic and Bad just kinda helped him focus it.)

- Missa and Bad, while both being Reapers, do not quite function with the same purpose and therefore Bad has no inherent authority over Missa. They are like two cats - even if one is bigger than the other they are still both cats. Also death doesn’t care about hierarchy.

- Missa actually does his job which is why he is frequently gone. Bad and Phil, on the other hand, are straight-up chilling. (Phil’s job doesn’t require him to go out collecting souls and Bad kinda doesn’t care. What are they gonna do, fire him?)

GRIM REAPER VS. REAPER DIFFERENCES

- Reapers are collectors and guides of souls in the afterlife - helping them make the journey from life to death. They cannot commune with souls they are not explicitly collecting, and do not choose who they do and don’t collect.

- Undead Reapers were mortals who were chosen in life and trained upon death to be Reapers. They are returned to life specifically for this purpose, and once dead cannot revive themselves - they can only come back if they are once again chosen and pulled back by an outside force.

- The Grim Reaper is also a collector and guide, however they can also foresee a living soul’s journey (as seen with Bad’s conversation with Pac) as well as alter it (Bad generally does this by Killing People). The Grim Reaper can commune with all souls regardless of circumstances and can also play favorites as long as balance is kept. Similarly, while the Grim Reaper cannot return souls that have already passed the crossroads, they can reach out to any soul they please, to talk to them or anchor them to a given realm.

- All Reapers frown upon upsetting the balance of death and life - however ‘balance’ can be left up to their discretion, for the most part. So sometimes emotions can cloud judgement.

- All Reapers are recruited as it is a job title and not a species. However, among undead reapers skulls are common adornments (as seen with Missa.) The Grim Reaper has a straight-up hood-and-scythe dress code. The employer of all Reapers is generally unknown although Hecates is a plausible suspect. The Grim Reaper still must train under the former Grim Reaper, just as a Reaper must train under another Reaper. Bad and Missa can train new Reapers, but Missa cannot choose who becomes a reaper, and Bad cannot choose who will be the next Grim. Bad can also help others if they are born with an affinity for the dead as he has plenty of souls on hand to practice with. Missa can do this as well, but he cannot summon souls to practice with, he can only use what he has available.

[sineala]

Hello~!!

I have a question that’s been burning in my mind for a bit now, so I just want to ask something. But first, let me preface: if Tony had a superpower, it would be his mind (and his heart of gold, but Steve is more associated with “heart” motif, I think, though they can be both its representative—it’s not an either/or situation I believe—but I digress, it’s not the point, so thank you for your patience as I struggle to get my point across😖🫣). Tony is smart, ingenious, resourceful, and other things basically describing him as a super genius. The matter is that there are multiple characters who are super geniuses too, like: reed, Bruce, t’challa (comics; doesn’t seem to have the same level of intellect (feets) in the movies), shuri (movies; I’m not familiar with the comics), etc.

My question is, what separates Tony’s “brain” superpower from these other characters? What is he better at than them? (Like, his brain processes information faster, can multitask and run “programs” in parallel, etc.—these kinds of things involving how his brain processes works compared others.)

A follow-up question would be, in terms of work (like engineering, biology, physics, chemistry, and so on), what is he better at than others? Cause from my last reading of comics (now I’m unfamiliar so I may be incorrect with my assumptions), it seems everyone is doing everything now. There’s no “division-of-labour according to skill set ” so to speak, I think. I understand that these characters have their own runs but they team up as well. So I’m just wondering, if they do team up, what kind of works/tasks will Tony spearhead as the authority even when compared against other super geniuses?

I’m a new user of tumblr so I’m not familiar with the etiquette (made the account finally, after reading many of your fics in ao3🫣😖😆). If your answer to each question is long, it’s fine to answer them as if they’re separate asks. Long answers doesn’t deter me. In fact, I’ll enjoy reading it. Otherwise, if you prefer to answer both in one go, that will be fine as well! ❤️❤️

Have a good day/night!!!

Hi! Sorry it took me so long to get back to you; I had to think about this a bit.

The way Marvel handles intelligence is, I think, peculiar to superhero comics. Because the fandom attracts and thrives on fans who practice curative fandom to a degree that is stereotypically pretty large, there are some quirks you don't get in other fandoms. Basically, comics caters to the kind of people who are like "who would win in a fight" and then like to argue about it. So a lot of elements that in most other fandoms would just be elements of characterization are ranked and measured. In most fandoms, if you had two smart characters, or two strong characters, it would just be enough to know that about them. But it's superhero fandom, so you can look up lists of the Ten Smartest Characters, as if there is only one kind of intelligence and one domain of intelligence and it can be measured accurately and quantified, which is not a thing that is true about the real world.

(Incidentally, last I checked, the smartest character was Lunella Lafayette (Moon Girl). I feel like this is a sign that these lists are maybe not all that useful, because even if she is the best at figuring things out, she's still, like, eight years old, and there are a lot of problems to solve where no matter how smart you are, it would really really help to have more life experience and emotional understanding than an eight year old. I also think this about Franklin and Valeria Richards.)

In actual stories, Tony and the various genius heroes tend to just show up and be there to serve the narrative. They are as smart as the story needs them to be, and they are there to do what the story needs them to do, and very little of this is real science anyway. So if Tony's better at something it's because he's the guy the author wants to be able to solve the problem; it's hard for me to treat this question as if they were real people, because they're fictional geniuses solving completely fictional problems with fictional science. It's not like deciding who should be on the competitive math team. They'd probably all be good at it.

In terms of canonical powers, Tony is no longer using Extremis, so his processing power is back to that of an unassisted human. I don't think any of the other genius characters are similarly augmented, so they're all even there.

If you put Reed and T'Challa and Tony in a room -- well, you've got like half of the original Illuminati, for starters. (I'm leaving Bruce out of this because Bruce as a character who interacts in any way with the Avengers is basically a MCU thing which occasionally now shows up in comics because of the MCU.)

Anyway, of those three guys, Reed is the theoretical scientist. If you need someone who will do all the math, that's Reed. He will calculate whatever needs calculating.

Tony is the engineer. He can figure out how to take the calculations and turn them into a physical thing that does the thing that needs to be done. And, sure, Reed builds stuff too, but certainly not to the degree that Tony builds stuff. He is dogged and persistent and willing to put things together and see what happens and fail and fail and fail until he gets it right. Tony is 100% the guy I would want on my team in Junkyard Wars. Is Junkyard Wars still a thing? It should be a thing again, and if he were real he should definitely compete on it.

T'Challa is kind of a combination of both of them -- theoretical and practical -- but what he really brings to the table is being the king of Wakanda. He can put the resources of an entire country -- the richest country in the Marvel world -- into building stuff. Tony builds things personally. Hands on. One at a time. Even though he often has companies that could presumably do this for him, he's not manufacturing anything at scale (exceptions made for things like getting into clean energy). He is building bespoke, one-off, world-saving solutions. T'Challa has the resources to take things like Tony's one-off builds and make lots more -- like how he designed the Quinjets and the Wakanda Design Group built them. Reed probably wouldn't have designed them -- although if they needed some new scientific theory to make them work, he could come up with that. Tony could probably design one and build you a working one in 48 hours without stopping to eat or sleep, but he probably wouldn't have built more than one of them. But T'Challa can make them and get you a small fleet of them. Because that's what he actually did. He's got the resources and the leadership.

I don't know that I would call any of these kinds of things better than the other -- I think they're all necessary parts of the process. Since most of the world-saving solutions are generally one-off builds, T'Challa's specific strengths don't usually come into play as much, at least in most of the events. But Tony usually gets to be a hero, unless he's evil or the writer hates him or something.

I would rec Empyre if you want a relatively recent event where the geniuses all have to work together -- and, to an extent, AXE Judgment Day -- as well as the Dark Ages miniseries, which is set in an AU where Apocalypse had mind-controlled geniuses working for him for eight years and somehow no one built the thing to solve the problem he had until Tony got there and did it in a few days. Which doesn't really make sense to me, but, uh, go, Tony, good job trying to destroy the world.

[not-terezi-pyrope]

Ok. It's pretty clear you are more welcoming of AI, and it does have enough merits to not be given a knee jerk reaction outright.

And how the current anti-ai stealing programs could be misused.

But isn't so much of the models built on stolen art? That is one of the big thing keeping me from freely enjoying it.

The stolen art is a thing that needs to be addressed.

Though i agree that the ways that such addressing are being done in are not ideal. Counterproductive even.

I could make a quip here and be like "stolen art??? But the art is all still there, and it looks fine to me!" And that would be a salient point about the silliness of digital theft as a concept, but I know that wouldn't actually address your point because what you're actually talking about is art appropriation by generative AI models.

But the thing is that generative AI models don't really do that, either. They train on publicly posted images and derive a sort of metadata - more specifically, they build a feature space mapping out different visual concepts together with text that refers to them. This is then used at the generative stage in order to produce new images based on the denoising predictions of that abstract feature model. No output is created that hasn't gone through that multi-stage level of abstraction from the training data, and none of the original training images are directly used at all.

Due to various flaws in the process, you can sometimes get a model to output images extremely similar to particular training images, and it is also possible to get a model to pastiche a particular artist's work or style, but this is something that humans can also do and is a problem with the individual image that has been created, rather than the process in general.

Training an AI model is pretty clearly fair use, because you're not even really re-using the training images - you're deriving metadata that describes them, and using them to build new images. This is far more comparable to the process by which human artists learn concepts than the weird sort of "theft collage" that people seem to be convinced is going on. In many cases, the much larger training corpus of generative AI models means that an output will be far more abstracted from any identifiable source data (source data in fact is usually not identifiable) than a human being drawing from a reference, something we all agree is perfectly fine!

The only difference is that the AI process is happening in a computer with tangible data, and is therefore quantifiable. This seems to convince people that it is in some way more ontologically derivative than any other artistic process, because computers are assumed to be copying whereas the human brain can impart its own mystical juju of originality.

I'm a materialist and think this is very silly. The valid concerns around AI are to do with how society is unprepared for increased automation, but that's an entirely different conversation from the art theft one, and the latter actively distracts from the former. The complete refusal from some people to even engage with AI's existence out of disgust also makes it harder to solve the real problem around its implementation.

This sucks, because for a lot of people it's not really about copyright or intellectual property anyway. It's about that automation threat, and a sort of human condition anxiety about being supplanted and replaced by automation. That's a whole mess of emotions and genuine labour concerns that we need to work through and break down and resolve, but reactionary egg-throwing at all things related to machine learning is counterproductive to that, as is reading out legal mantras paraphrasing megacorps looking to expand copyright law to over shit like "art style".

I've spoken about this more elsewhere if you look at my blog's AI tag.

[alicentsgf]

hi, i might just be a touch too young have other things keeping me from getting this - but i've never really understood how the baby becoming a sacrifice (despite already being a stillborn; like ive always seen what happened as best case for the baby so it just really confuses me) is on the same like level as what she had to do to javi. you just explain shaunas brain really well and i was curious if you would be able to go into that / explain it a little ?

yeah of course! i mean i can only say how i interpret it and i think its impossible to really quantify trauma but for shauna losing her child and everything that came with it was the most deeply traumatic experience she endured imo, especially with how closely connected it was to jackies fate. javi's death and shaunas role in it was more the straw that broke the camels back, in terms of changing her irrevocably.

having witnessed someone close to me experience it, its hard to describe how deeply traumatic losing a child is, even one you never really knew or wanted to begin with. just the act of holding a dead baby is an impossibly awful experience, and shauna did it for days. and im sure if she'd dared to think about it she would have known logically how bad the chances were for the baby, but that wouldnt have stopped her hoping. even when you actually know someones going to die, the loss doesnt truly hit you until afterwards. and then you have to consider all the additional stress as well. she had everyone piling their hopes on her, excited for the baby, assuming it would change things for the better. it must have felt like such a huge burden. this child is the result of a decision that led to her best friends death. led to shauna eating her to stay alive. if the baby dies... what the hell was that all for. what does she have left to show for it. not to mention she had lottie growing strangely attached, making shauna fear what she had planned. we see this represented in shaunas nightmare, where lottie inserts herself to the extent of breastfeeding. then shauna sees her friends covered in her childs blood - they'd ripped him apart and consumed him, and maybe that was what she'd feared all along, except not so literally; that her child would never truly be hers, because this strange hierarchy might give someone like lottie the power to rip him away. its a lot to process, as if a traumatic stillbirth without pain relief at 18 isnt enough to be getting on with.

and in the end that nightmare shauna had does kinda comes true. because lottie does steal her baby, and the others do consume him. they're cannibalising his memory, cannibalising shaunas grief. hes not a person, hes not hers, hes some kind of totem or diety for a religion shauna doesnt believe in. she cant even go to his grave and grieve peacefully, hes public property and so is she by association. its why akilah's headdress pissed her off so much, because yet again what she wants or needs isnt considered, when really in this scenario they should all be deferring to her. she doesnt even have anyone to lean on in her grief because to the others her son isnt a baby who would grown up to be someone someday, hes just a sacrifice. worst of all shes told he had to be sacrificed to keep HER alive. nobody even thinks about how guilty this must make shauna feel. how heartbreaking it must be to be told 'your child needed to die for you to live because we need you more'. its a callous, selfish thing to express, even if they didnt mean any harm by it and even if it makes logical sense. shauna doesnt believe in the wilderness, but she knows the others at least believe they chose for her. whether their ritual worked or not, it was not their place to do that. she didnt want to die, but any decision made should have been hers alone. so now it feels like shes surrounded every day by people who see her like a tool to be used. shes necessary, they needed her, so her baby had to die.

ultimately this means that in the end shaunas trauma isnt just centered on the event itself - the pain and loss of a stillbirth, but all the other circumstances surrounding it that make shaunas experience so desperately isolating and painful. trauma doesnt just happen in moments, and for shauna this is an ongoing traumatic experience thats lasted at least a year at this point, since the moment she realised she was pregnant. and its happening on top of the already extremely traumatic circumstances they're all enduring.

so whilst the night she butchered javi is of course deeply traumatic, its more of a transformative garnish on top of the mountain of other stuff shauna was already experiencing. i think its more that something clicked in her brain that night, carving him up, exposing herself to something so deeply harrowing, and then not getting chosen to lead. she feels that shes not respected, shes just a means to an end. that they all see the knife in her hand, even when shes not holding it. its why they needed her alive, and not her child. and so in feeling that fuel a rage in her, she became compelled to find some type of power in the role she has. and when all you have is a knife, theres really only one way to grasp at power.

[pokematlab]

So. Saw you talking human reproduction on your blog. Long story short:

There's a monthly menstrual cycle, not an estrus cycle, of those that produce egg cells

De facto "mating season" is the entire year

Those that produce sperm do not have a down period of doing that

A decent number don't actually track the periods ovulation is occurring and just use rules of thumb about how close to or far from the shedding of uterine lining that occurs in menstruation they currently are

There are no visible signs of ovulation externally, those that claim they can tell you them are hacks, frauds, or talking about something some minor and personalized you basically would only pick them up in the course of a scientific study

The default assumption is that pregnancy is possible unless informed otherwise

This is a good enough approximation because the cycle has no periods it's not either in the process of ovulation or shedding lining built up in ovulation. It immediately begins again once a cycle is finished

There is not a huge mental focus on desire to mate for the purposes of reproduction for most. It's just sort of "yeah, kids would be nice" abstract thought somewhere on the long term goals list for most of those that want kids that do not have them already

Many don't actually want kids or to reproduce, regardless of the rest of their sexuality

Don't say "sex only exists for reproduction" in the context of human sexuality FYI, that's a position associated with, and only really held by, extremist bigots looking for various justifications to persecute homosexuality

Talking is somewhat of an overstatement, more bewilderment and fear.

The first three sound familiar enough to how things work for my species, with some slight differences. I am aware that some Pokémon have seasonal mating, but mine is not one. That shouldn't expose too much information about what that species is, I don't believe seasonal mating is universal. At the least I don't think the species I've interacted closely with are seasonal.

The rest is interesting, to be polite. The "shedding" is certainly a difference… One that I will remember for the worse. The human reproductive cycle increasingly reads as a disease; there being pharmaceuticals specifically designed to counteract its symptoms, profuse bleeding, cryptic signs of progression. All on a period of (I assume from "monthly") 28-31 days (is it consistent with an "archaic" "lunar" calendar or a "modern" "solar" one?). I was intending to research the cycle outside of reading these helpful messages, but now I'm afraid to discover more in this vein. Even this much has changed how I see humans.

You quantify the focus as not being "for the purposes of reproduction," which is not entirely reassuring. I'll assume you overspecified. If so, it is nicer to think that humans only desire sex occasionally, albeit maybe a bit boring to imagine myself as a human. I will admit that in the past years I have been able to relate to that more than I believe is normal for my species. And of course sex isn't solely for reproduction. It is strange, at least to me, to think however that the desire for it is able to be completely and totally divorced from the reproductive cycle in humans. I can understand the desire during the period that would be estrus being less increased than other species, but for it to not change at all during the entire cycle is surprising. I wonder if there are Pokémon with a similar lack of, I'm not sure what to call it, "cycle of want," as humans.

Sincere apologies if my prior confusion came off as supporting extremists. I've only learned about the existence of extremist groups somewhat recently. I don't know what homosexuality is but I hope I have not harmed the people who follow it.

[consultingfujoshi]

can you please share a bit more of your thoughts on the spoilers? i haven't seen them anywhere and it would be nice to know them coming from you

hiii tumblr mobile does not give timestamps for asks so idk if this is in regard to the spoilers from the interviews or the screenings but all my thoughts are kinda connected to both so SPOILER WARNING FOR THE FIRST TWO EPISODES OF SEASON 2 UNDER THE CUT LALALALA

I don't even know where to start like. I have been in a state of shock all day because literally everything my friends and I speculated about is real. literally all of it. all of our wildest theories about aziraphale and crowley's first meeting were confirmed by the fans who saw the screening. I have never won this fucking hard and ive won AT GOOD OMENS OF ALL THINGS. 2022 me would be laughing. june 2023 me would be laughing. two days ago me would be LAUGHING. I genuinely think this may be one of the best seasons of tv ever guys

like. do you understand. how much this changes. how our understanding of crowley and aziraphale's dynamic throughout time has been totally flipped on its head. aziraphale approached crowley first. crowley was the one who sheltered aziraphale with his wing. so eden was aziraphale returning the favour. DO YOU UNDERSTAND. AZIRAPHALE FELL FIRST. HE DIDNT TAKE SIX THOUSAND YEARS TO CATCH UP. HE HASN'T BEEN CLUELESS THIS ENTIRE TIME. they've literally been connected this entire time, right from before sides or the concept of evil or hatred or enemies were even invented. of course they'd never buy into the whole "hereditary enemies" thing. AZIRAPHALE KNOWS HIM. HE KNOWS CROWLEY. HE'S ALWAYS KNOWN HIM.

and it doesn't even feel like a retcon. it doesn't feel like we need to ignore a bunch of stuff from season 1 to accept or enjoy the added content this season. it's literally just. more shit to help quantify the depth of their love for each other. their connection over countless millennia. I mean if you go back to the very first scene in season 1, aziraphale literally does a double take when crowley appears next to him. that's him realising who it is. he fucking recognised crowley and freaked out for a second. that's why he didn't hear what crowley said!!! he was processing!!!! AND DON'T GET ME STARTED ON HOW MUCH MORE SHIT FROM SEASON 1 HURTS NOW. AZIRAPHALE PLEADING WITH CROWLEY BECAUSE HE WAS AN ANGEL, ONCE. CROWLEY WANTING TO TAKE AZIRAPHALE AND RUN AWAY TO LIVE IN A GALAXY THEY HELPED BUILD TOGETHER. AZIRAPHALE ALWAYS TELLING CROWLEY NOT TO QUESTION GOD AND BEING SO AFRAID TO DO THE SAME BECAUSE HE KNOWS THAT'S EXACTLY WHY CROWLEY FELL IN THE FIRST PLACE. it's not retconning its just making everything worse!!! azcrow is canon and everything is worse now!!!!!!

the biblical minisode. well. I cannot think about that without having to pace around my house like a person going into labour. I literally stress cleaned my entire house earlier to distract myself from thinking about it. crowley has always always ALWAYS protected aziraphale. always. literally the only reason aziraphale has never killed anything is because crowley has protected him from ever having to do that. crowley's dedication to preserving aziraphale's goodness and allowing him to be his own definition of angelic/holy is the greatest act of service he could bestow upon him and it makes me SICK because him pushing aziraphale to kill adam in 1x06 after all that shows just how desperate he was. both of them realising and understanding at the exact same time that the only person in the universe who really understands them or knows what they're going through is the other, the only person they can rely upon is the other, its just. we've been so wrong. about aziraphale. about the extent to which he knows how important crowley is to him. he's always known. he's just been so afraid. him being prepared to fall to keep doing what he believes is right is so fucking heartbreaking and weve done him such a disservice all these years for calling him naive and mocking him for being slow on the uptake. HE'S ALWAYS KNOWN. HE JUST COULDN'T DO ANYTHING WITH THAT KNOWLEDGE. AND THAT'S SO MUCH WORSE

basically I have never been more scared in my entire life because if they packed this much into the first two episodes and it was deemed tame enough to show ahead of release then what the fuck is in the next four. what are we getting ourselves in for . it's really dawning on me the scope of what this experience is going to be and I simply dont think im going to survive it. again I never expected any of this. this was my definitive "high hopes low expectations" season of tv and it's now it's shaping up to be one the best things I've probably ever seen in my life and. it's cognitive dissonance in its crystallised form. how did we fucking get here.

AND GOOD OLD FASHIONED LOVER BOY??????? PLAYING IN CROWLEY'S CAR AS HE GOES TO MAKE UP WITH AZIRAPHALE?????? SAY SIKE RIGHT NOW THIS ISN'T FUNNY

in conclusion

[coraniaid]

I know that Halloween isn’t really one of the very best Buffy episodes.  (I mean, it’s not even the best Halloween-themed Buffy episode.)  I know that its discussion of gender roles is, at best, kind of questionable; I know that  Buffy’s idea of what a noblewoman would actually do all day is laughably shallow; I know that this is pretty clearly one of the early episodes when the show was mostly being written by men.  I even know that the special effects aren’t that good.  And I definitely know that Angel’s “you’re not like other girls (who by the way I find beneath contempt, so don’t necessarily take that as a compliment)” speech to Buffy at the end is almost certainly meant to be romantic and not the huge red flag it actually is.

But.  Unfortunately I also know that I love this episode.  As a certain recurring vampire would say, it’s just … neat.

A couple of interesting things have been happening over the past few episodes of this rewatch.

One is that the world of the show has been getting bigger, or rather more solid.  We’re starting to see characters outside the Core Four who actually seem to have lives of their own and don’t just vanish back into the void once their episode is over.  Spike and Dru are the big ones, of course (the Master is a fun enough villain but he isn’t by any stretch of the imagination a person you can imagine having a rich inner life), but in Inca Mummy Girl we also met Devon and Oz and Jonathan, all of whom will appear multiple times this season, and this episode introduces Ethan and Larry.

(Purely coincidentally, Larry and Ethan have more in common than just first appearing in this episode. They are both gay men – or at least a heavily queer-coded man, in Ethan’s case – who will recur only a few times before being written out of the show in ways that I’m actually still kind of mad about.  But I’ll save that rant for later in the rewatch, assuming I get far enough.)

One of my biggest criticisms of the first season is how many times the show will introduce a new student (or group of students), insist that they’ve always been there, then completely forget about them forty-five minutes later.  The only genuinely recurring minor character that season was Harmony, and she was only in two episodes and not even mentioned in any of the others. Amy will return later but so far she’s just another example of the show introducing a character, establishing that Willow’s known them for years, then insisting that they don’t exist the next episode.  But that’s starting to change now, even if we’re not quite there yet – the next episode’s Lie To Me will arguably pull a variant of the exact same trick with Billy Fordham – and even if it isn’t something the show ever really grows out of completely.

Speaking of Willow, that’s the other big change that’s been happening, and the one I want to talk about most: Willow’s been slowly becoming more central to the show.  This is another slow process which won’t really finish this season, but the signs are there already.

In the first season of Buffy, I’d argue that there’s a very clear hierarchy in terms of how much attention the show gives the Core Four: Buffy is, of course, the central character, but after that the writers clearly think Giles is more important than Xander who is more important than Willow.  

This shows up in a few ways.  Speaking time is the one that’s easiest to quantify (roughly speaking, over the whole of the first season for every four minutes Willow speaks Xander will speak for five minutes, Giles will speak for seven minutes and Buffy will speak for eleven minutes), but I think this claim is also true if we consider things like how often they get to directly impact the plot or how much attention the show gives to both their relationship to Buffy and their lives outside of Buffy.  (Outside of I Robot, You Jane S1!Willow mostly exists to pine over Xander, to be rescued from danger by Buffy and to provide the sort of high school level exposition that Giles can’t deliver.)

That’s still true to a large extent in early Season 2 – Willow definitely is still pining over Xander, Buffy did go to rescue her in When She Was Bad and Willow still does get to deliver a lot of exposition – but it will stop being true by the time the season is over.  From Season 3 onward, I think it’s very clear that Willow is the most important member of the Scooby Gang after Buffy herself.  (In fact, in Season 6 I think you could argue that they’re almost co-protagonists.  That season is Willow’s story almost as much as it is Buffy’s.)

This post-Season 2 change is reflected in all sorts of ways: Willow’s average speaking time suddenly overtakes both Xander and Giles; she starts having proper arcs of her own (learning magic, dating, coming out as a lesbian); and, of course, she starts to play increasingly active roles in the plot.  And there are signs of all of this happening already, even if we’re not quite there yet. 

Taking speaking time, for example.  In Season 1 Willow had the fourth most speaking time of any of the Core Four in eight episodes, the third most speaking time in three episodes, and the second most speaking time in just one episode (The Pack).  She only had more than 12.5% of total speaking time in two episodes (The Pack again and also I Robot, You Jane), something that Xander managed in three episodes and Giles managed in eleven.  (Buffy has more than 20% speaking time in every episode of the season, as is only proper and correct.)

But although she had fourth most speaking time again in When She Was Bad, Willow did get 13.16% speaking time.  And in Reptile Boy and Halloween she is second in speaking time for two episodes running for the very first time (with 14.29% and 19.61% of all speaking time respectively).

She manages that by becoming much more assertive (that is, because the writers decide to make her more assertive).  She has, by now, mostly accepted that her romantic interest in Xander is doomed.  In Reptile Boy, she gets to dress down both Giles and Angel for their poor treatment of Buffy before leading them to go and help her.  And Halloween, more than any episode prior, really does belong to Willow. 

Willow, as much as anybody else, is responsible for saving the day here.  Not Xander, for all his costume-inspired military training.  Not Buffy, who hides behind Willow when she sees a car and asks her fearfully “what does it want?”.  And not even Giles, who does confront Ethan and  break the spell but who was so busy sitting in the library pretending to enjoy cross-referencing that without Willow he wouldn’t even have known there was anything strange going on that night.

And, of course, Willow seems to be the only one of the people changed by their costumes to retain their memories of their real lives.  Partly this has to be for plot reasons – somebody has to remember who they are if we’re going to figure things out before the final ad break – but I suspect there’s a little more to it than that.

For the most part, Ethan’s spell shows us who the Scooby Gang aren’t.  Buffy isn’t really a helpless delicate princess who’d rather die than fight and who faints at the first sign of danger.  Xander isn’t really a heroic man of action who beats up pirates and rescues damsels in distress.  Giles, we’re told, isn't really the “sniveling, tweed-clad guardian of the Slayer” he’s been pretending to be.

But the increasingly self-confident and self-assured Willow we see at the very end of this episode, as Oz drives by in his van?  The Willow who’s not just smart and knowledgeable but also willing to take charge in a crisis?  The Willow who learns to embrace the idea of wearing different outfits and taking charge of how the world perceives her?  The Willow who had more speaking time this episode than Buffy herself managed last episode?

That isn’t who Willow Rosenberg is yet.  But it’s who she’s going to become.

[changeling-artchive]

Reposting this here as well to have all my (can i call this analysis? Its little more than disjointed thoughts) analysis and art under the same sideblog

Im constantly thinking about the like. Aclimatization period c!alan must have had over Second and the colour quartlet.

(and what being "raised" by/with an Animator (and one with c!alans past) would mean for the color quintlet behavior/life view wise)

Like. Second's existence, (specifically them talking to him (and as such, showing their sapience) in a way he really cant denie with plausurable ignorance (like with victim, Chosen and Dark)(and god there was so many signs, so many ways c!alan could have snapped out of it (the 'ignorance') but doing so would subconciously mean he would have to come to terms with what he has Done and he was never in a position that required him to do it so he didnt (plus he wasnt very. Mature? In the beguining i think. Teenage. Anyway)) (something something we quantify animal's inteligence with how well they showcase it in a way similar to us) really was c!alan's first case of having to actually comprehend that he brought a Person to life, and coexist with it (them. them not it)

Like. That shift, from thoughtless cruelty to (a big break in anything stickfigure related to) helper and friend? That would have not been easy or seamless, i think.

(and depending on if c!alan has taken the time to comprehend + processes what he Did to Real People in the past, he would be more or less bound to fall into familiar thought processes, if never actions)

He must take its (their) opinion into consideration now. Take its (their) time with the color quartlet into consideration, Its (their) enjoyment of the art process. Give it (them) breaks, regarde them with agency, be a friend to them

[it would be so easy. So tentalizing to tame him. He'd never do it, of course, Never Again. But the instinct is (barelly) there, to reach into that uper task bar section upon entering on the art program. an extention. Stop it. Stop It! Stop thinking like that theyre a person!]

Of course with the time + experience theyre truly friends, i think. Their bond is very equal and playfull in the shorts where he appears

And all of this in just c!alans side!

Ive not even talked about Second and the colour quartlet into all of this, how their perception of autority and self-expression and conflict resolution and how the world works and how relationships works and Everything would be all but Based on themselves and c!alan behaviour! Theyve only ever known the computer and its habitants (until the discovery of sentinent (probably sapient too) life forms with minecraft (the villagers, piglins..))

(Their actions and perception of the world must be so so diferent and weird to a born/outernet-raised stick)

(^ ooh snap i derailed a bit here back to the post)

How does bondary-setting works, with something with so much control over you?

(on that vain, how much control c!alan thinks he has over the colour quintlet/gang vs how much control the colour quintlet thinks c!alan has over them vs how much control a born/outernet-raised stick thinks c!alan has over the colour quintlet is Vastly Diferent on all sides (and the conflict(?) diferences in perspective(?) Of that is so so delicious why hasnt anyone done aything with that yet))

The colour quintlet had very specific/hard rules over their existance/place in the computer (rules that have been getting laxer and less important/respected as time goes on (the light saber, and the lava parkour are good examples of harm being done to the computer, Actually). But how? When did the rules started being trespassed and met with Not-Animator Consequences, was it just the development of their bond (c!alan and the colour gang), that led to the rules being discarded? (theyre tottaly relaxed around alan. They trust him and playfight with him. (he deleted/attempted to delete them! Their first interaction was with c!alan's total dismissal of their life, how did they colectivelly reached this point!?)) What (life) lessons did they (color gang) learn on the way to now that are not normal/shared with born sticks cause of their way way diferent uprising?! (Aahhhhhh this keeps me up at night)

(i am maybe giving Too much importance to their relationship with c!alan, they most probably have learnt/lived most things solely by/with themselves as a group)

[heartsbreaking-migrated]

i know i don't really owe anyone anything in terms of explanations for what's going on in my head, but i also i know that of the 545 people following me at least one of y'all has got to having similar experiences to me. idk if i want advice or reassurance or just someone to know so i don't feel like i'm just on an island alone. (btw if you don't like oversharing this is not the post for you)

so here's a lil update ig

i think i have bpd or at least something with similar symptoms. i can't get a diagnosis or even talk about it with a professional rn because my beloved therapist is on maternity leave. the same things i'm gonna talk about in regards to my rp experience i'v experienced with friends irl i just don't have friends at home (i do when i'm at school i'm just not there rn) so it's not really getting triggered.

emotions always feel like life or death to me like, if i'm happy i'm really happy and if i'm upset it's the end of the world. my parents lecturing me? they obviously hate me and are seething with rage. irl i can be very reactive or internalize everything but online i take all the things that would normally trigger a very outward response irl and turn it on myself. so the stuff that i'd internalize normally and the stuff that i wouldn't also gets internalized. basically it's not a very nice place in my head a lot of the time. and rp makes me really happy, i love writing, i swear i wouldn't be doing this if it didn't actually feel fulfilling to me.

but the intrapersonal part is really really hard for me. i don't ever feel really secure in my relationships with people here no matter how much they affirm them with or without me asking. sometimes it feels really hard for me to "share" my friends and then i spiral because i'm both upset i have to "share" them and upset that i feel like that because i don't WANT to feel like i just want my friends to be only my friends i want to be normal about them and about things. so i'm basically either really clingy or i don't let myself reach out to anyone because i feel like i'm going to annoy them or they're gonna know i want to be their friend and not want to reciprocate even tho we're mutuals.

the worst part about it at least to me is that i know what triggers me but there's absolutely no way to avoid it in rp. irl if i know i'm gonna be in a situation thats gonna set me off i can avoid it but its much easier to fully say 'i don't want to go out today' and still be friends with someone and not be in the situation. here the situation is everything. if someone gets more asks from one person and answers a bunch all at once, my brain starts acting up even tho it has nothing to do with me. if my friend posts about their ship regularly but doesn't post about ours as often, my brain acts up. i don't want it to because logically i know it doesn't mean anything but logic doesn't help me when my brain is cannibalizing itself and physically removing myself from the situation (going offline) doesn't help because its all in my head.

my reactions either range from panic attacks that last from like 30 minutes to hours, just going completely numb and the instinct to just cut off friendships in a kinda 'they don't want me so it doesn't matter' thought process but then i have the follow up thought of 'but i like them and i need them and i don't want to lose this friendship' so i just end up stuck. i spend a lot of time just stuck in my own head.

i think i end up coming off pretty antisocial here because a lot of the time i'd rather just write with people and not make that ooc friendship because its so much easier not to react like a crazy person when i don't feel like we're friends. but i think that also limits a lot of the interactions i get and THAT triggers me cause i feel like people don't want to have more developed dynamics.

all of this is so much easier to handle when i'm going to therapy regularly and i'm in school and i have something quantifiable that i'm good at (not to brag but i'm fucking amazing at school).

i guess the reason i'm saying all of this is to say rp is fucking hard for me and i try not to mention any of this to people because i don't want to seem nuts or like a burden but i don't think that strategy is working for me anymore. there's no world where i can keep writing and hide the fact that i just don't react to shit like i'm supposed to because i'm tired.

i'm not gonna bring it up actively but at the same time like i guess having this post written and out in the ether at least while i can't go to therapy makes it all feel less heavy ya know?

[theromanticrationalist]

Young Sheldon Series Finale: 7x13 Funeral

So, I was delayed in watching the finale because I actually wanted to watch it with my own Dad, but AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

😭

Damn, damn, damn, DAMN DAAAAAAAAMN!! So, that Funeral episode hit and it hit hard. (Did they really HAVE TO HAVE AN OPEN CASKET FOR THE LOVE OF GOD...ughughughughugh) The writing for that episode was the crème de la crème, and I think is the cathartic thematic climax of this series. The final episode was necessary for transitioning between YS and TBBT, which brings both stories together, but as far as the story YS was telling, Funeral was the show's end. It isn't a perfect ending and it wasn't a pretty ending, and in fact is quite devastating in so many ways, but it is truthful to Sheldon's journey, and to the human experience.

When Sheldon got up in front of the church to say a few words, playing out the scenario as he wished he had done it, that was the moment. The whole episode is Sheldon processing his grief - imperfect and messy as he has literally no tools or precedent to fall back on - as he replays his father leaving that fateful day over and over, tweaking it each time to make it "better". With a young man with an eidetic memory and a compulsive need for his reality to be orderly (and the fact that he believes in the Many-Worlds Interpretation), this would make sense. He begins be utilizing Star Trek (Spock's death) to filter it and provide context, but that no longer proves sufficient to the crushing and terrible emotions of what he is experiencing. That was a tool he used for when he was a boy, but now he has been thrust into the world of manhood in absolutely the worst way possible. What is it that will speak truest to what he is going through than the bare naked truth?

"I've been thinking a lot about the last moments I had with my Dad. It was morning and he was leaving for work. He said "See y'all later." And I said nothing. I regret that. I could have said bye. Or asked him for a ride. Or told him that I loved him, but I didn't. I barely noticed that he left. So many times that I didn't notice my father, I hope he knew how much I loved him."

From the audience's perspective we have been watching Sheldon play the scenario many times through his mind, and to have the rug pulled out from under us at this moment of all moments, to see that this too was only just a scenario (played out by Sheldon Prime), is exactly what it is like living in this world, enduring this life - not just for Sheldon but for all of us. In one of my previous posts I mentioned how I loved Sheldon Cooper's story because of what he could teach us. This episode encapsulates it in total. He can teach us that you cannot quantify life, you can't organize it so that everything makes sense and plays out in a well-structured narrative and format, where every feeling is named and every event categorized. Life is myriad, so much richer and so much fuller and so much wilder than anything we can imagine or think up on our own. It is what makes it utterly terrifying and wretched, but it is also part of its beauty and purpose. Sheldon Cooper comes to realize this, but he is only able to have this deeper understanding after first living it. Sheldon Prime's concluding narration at the end of Funeral is Sheldon Cooper's story taken as a whole - past, present, future - the life in movement. Of course young Sheldon would not experience his father's death in its completeness. He is the midst of it. He is trying to survive it. So I love the realness of Sheldon's "imperfect" response to his father's death in the fact that he didn't respond to it. He quite literally did not process it, and instead ran away from it. It is painful, brutal, but truthful. Yet that was not the end of Sheldon Cooper's story, as we know, and I think that leaves us with hope, but it is a kind of hope that must be waited for with profound patience.

Although I myself have not gone through the loss of a parent like Sheldon has, I still have gone through devastating and traumatic life events, so I am very familiar with the inexplicable and violating nature of grief and loss. I am still processing that grief and loss, so these thoughts I am sharing with you all right now are pretty recent revelations, and quite literally me living them out in real time, so it might be a little messy...hehe.

However, I will end this by saying that none of these truths mean that life is arbitrary. It doesn't mean it makes life meaningless. Just because human endeavors cannot place life within a context that he himself can first create and then comprehend, doesn't mean that life doesn't have a context and that that context can't be understood. It just means that that context comes from a different Source, an external and eternal one (and I will say, by necessity, a paternal one, but that is a thought for another day!)

Fitting then that the episode, and Young Sheldon, should end with the recitation of the Lord's prayer:

“Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." | Matthew 6:9-10

[kyliesnaked]

The Mommy Protocol

Chapter 6

Dr. Rothschild allowed me to sleep on a cot in one of the spare rooms while we finalized everything for the project. It was better than being homeless and I didn’t really want to shell out the money for a hotel room for the remainder of the week. I planned on at least booking a room for the extended holiday weekend, as the facility would be empty and the project was set to begin that following Tuesday. It would cost me a bit more, but if I was willing to accept lesser quality, then I could save a few bucks.

It was late Friday afternoon and a storm was brewing outside. I had spent the past few hours inputting what they called B.P.T.s or baseline personality traits. Essentially, my likes and dislikes, hobbies and aspirations, that sort of thing. It was difficult to quantify on paper who I was as a person but Emily coached me along.

“The more you add, the easier it will be for Alyssa to meet your needs.”

“Still sounds weird, I’m not gonna lie.”

“Three months in a closed testing environment sounds more daunting than it is, I assure you.” There was a loud crack followed by the rumble of thunder. “Once you settle in, time will fly by. It’s really about not thinking about the big picture and just focusing on the task at hand.”

“Yeah, I get that, but it’s hard separating what I know from the test parameters. I mean, do you think she knows what she is?”

“I don’t have to think about it. She identifies as a young woman in her mid twenties because that’s what we want her to be. Our technology hasn’t advanced enough for machine self awareness. She learns and can complete tasks using previously gained knowledge, even if faced with something new, but she doesn't know what she is.”

“What if she tries to solve that problem?”

“Her protocols were designed to reroute those queries back to her base programming. Essentially, her programming asks if that line of questioning helps her fulfill her directives. And the answer is always no, which prompts her to ignore the query and return to her directives.”

“Failsafes on top of failsafes?”

“Correct. First and foremost, Alyssa is not allowed to do harm, nor by action or inaction, allow you to come to harm. For instance, if you were to try to grab a knife by the blade, she’s programmed to notify you of the potential danger and prevent it without causing you injury. These failsafes are why a detailed B.P.T. is so essential. The more she knows about you, the more she can learn.

“But hey, it’s getting late and I have to wrap up a few emails in my office. You remember how to put her in diagnostic mode so that you can upload the files?”

“You mean from the terminal in her room?”

“Correct. That data needs to be uploaded to her central processing core. Once the testing phase begins, this area will only be used for recording. There won’t be anyone allowed in here to observe the test to ensure its authenticity.”

“The Hawthorne effect.”

“Very good! The Hawthorne effect postulates that human behavior changes when they are aware that they are being observed. To prepare for this, we have elected to not observe any of the proceedings until after the test has been completed. Now I really must get to those emails. Finish up here and if I don’t see you again tonight, I will see you bright and early on Tuesday!”

Dr. Rothschild smiled at me and left the room. I finished inputting the B.P.T.s that I thought were relevant and prepped the data for upload. When it was ready, I took the data disc, which looked like a small CD to Alyssa’s processing room. To get there, I had to go through a magnetically locked door that opened with a passcode. The door hissed open and stayed there, only shutting if the same code was entered a second time. Alyssa was sitting in her chair in a small observation room with her processing core in the room behind her. To my left was the door that led into the testing area, which I hadn’t yet seen. It was my understanding that when the test started, Alyssa and I would live in that area for the next three months. It still seemed so daunting but at the moment, it was still three days away which left me plenty of time to wrap my head around it.

I entered the code to get into the processing room. There stood banks and banks of computers, all running at once. The room was very cold and noisy from the cooling fans running nonstop. There was only one monitor and it was tied to a disc reader for data input. I inserted the disc and followed the prompts. Another crack and rumble, closer and louder this time, made me feel antsy. I was never a fan of thunderstorms. To me, they sounded as if God was having a temper tantrum like some sort of spoiled brat.

I clicked through the screens as fast as I could, making sure my entries were correct when a screen popped up that seemed benignly simple, yet out of place. It asked for my age.

Weird, I thought.

I typed 22 but noticed that there didn’t seem to be a second placeholder for the tens. The readout just said 2.

I hit backspace a few times to clear the input box and tried again, this time just hitting 1 twice.

11

Must be my eyes playing tricks on me. Hate staring at screens all day.

I hit backspace a few more times to clear the inputs before putting in my proper age.

22

I scrolled over to hit the Accept button when I noticed that one of the integers was blinking. Suddenly, a loud crack was heard and the building seemed to shake. My finger clicked the button as the room plunged into darkness. The cooling fans stopped running and the monitor dimmed. It provided the only light source and in the bottom left corner was a flashing message.

MAIN POWER FAILURE

Unable to see much, I fumbled around, feeling out in front of me to try to find the door. I managed to get out of the room to find that everything was pitch black in the observation area. Taking small steps, I continued forward, hoping that the power would come back on or I’d make it to the next room where the emergency exit markers were. As I bumbled along, my foot caught on something and I tripped, falling to my right side.

I heard a hissing click from behind me and the sound of something heavy swinging into place. Disoriented, I managed to get to my feet but couldn’t find whatever it was that I tripped on. I waved my arms around and walked slowly forward, trying to find the wall. I knew the room was small so I should be able to find the walls, and therefore the doors fairly easily. My right hand found a hard vertical surface and I slid my hand along it as I pushed forward. I couldn’t tell which direction I was going and when my hand slid into open space, I panicked and with a screech, I fell into even more darkness. Stumbling, I took several large steps before crashing into something. It felt alien, and didn’t budge to my weight falling into it. I steadied myself on it and rose to my feet.

“The hell was that?” I said to the darkness.

Something took hold of my hands and I yelled as I tried to pull back but the grip was far too strong.

“Let go of me!” I shouted and yanked my hands to no avail.

“Tsk. Tsk. This simply won’t do,” a calm, clinically cold feminine voice said, “Out of bed at this hour? Whatever am I going to do with you?”

I felt myself being pulled somewhere and I leaned back, digging my heels into the floor. When that didn’t work, I tried going limp, but all of my efforts were pointless.

“It’s back to bed for you, little miss. After you have been checked of course.”

Checked?! What the hell does that mean?!

From behind me, I heard another hissing click which I could only assume was another door closing. How they were moving without power was beyond me but I had bigger issues to concern myself with. I couldn’t tell how far I was dragged but when we stopped moving, I felt the closest thing to abject terror I had ever experienced.

My body was touched, by what I couldn’t tell, and it was completely undignified.

“Stop! Don’t touch me there! Stop! I said stop! I do not consent!”

“My, my. We are very fussy tonight.” There was a strange pause before the voice spoke again, “It seems that you need soothing, but given your current state of hysteria, there is but one solution.”

My hands were released and as I flailed around to strike my attacker, backing away, one of my hands was caught and something soft and kind of fuzzy was forced over my hand. I panicked and tried to pull it off but some sort of strap was tightened around my wrist. My other hand was caught and the same thing happened to it. Terrified, I started screaming for help.

“The volume of your voice is elevated. You ask for help and I am assisting you. There is little need for such shouting.”

“What are these things?! Who are you?! Why are you doing this to me?!”

“Those are safety devices so that you do not injure yourself in your current state. I am here to take care of you.” The voice seemed to be coming from everywhere. Something rubbery hit my lips, applied with force. I brought my hands up to protect my face but couldn’t and as I tried to scream for help, it was shoved into my mouth. Something hard and plastic like covered my lips and what felt like straps were pulled around my head and fastened together. I couldn’t talk anymore, and I started to hyperventilate. With no idea where my attacker was or what was going on, I began to cry. I was scooped up and laid on something with squishy padding. My arms were pulled above my head, one at a time and latched to something so that I couldn’t move them. Straps of some kind were tied around my ankles, held down by the weight of something incredibly heavy. Or I was exhausted, I can’t remember which.

Immobilized, I tugged and pulled at the bonds but was unable to free myself. I felt my clothes being cut away with scissors. First my shirt. The tops of the shoulders and then a slow cut up the middle. I never felt the scissors on my skin, but it was terrifying to say the least. My bra was cut away with a few quick snips, then they moved down to my pants. My legs had been separated enough to grant access and no matter how much I struggled, I couldn’t close them to protect myself. My pants were unbuttoned and the cuts started at my ankles near the inseam. They were expertly destroyed and two snips later and my panties were also removed. I was lifted up by the small of my back and the remains of my clothes were pulled out from under me.

Naked, mortified, and fearing for my safety, I lay there waiting for the worst thing imaginable. You know what I’m talking about. Every woman knows. I can’t even say the word and I prayed and begged and pleaded and strained against the thought that never happened. I was lifted up again and something soft and crinkly was slid under me. It was pulled between my legs and laid across my pelvis. I heard the pulling apart of velcro and felt the pressing of it on me. A sliding of wood on wood greeted my ears next and the sound of a metal lock clicking together.

“There. Your attire is more sufficient. I will return in the morning. Sweet dreams and goodnight.”

The last thing I heard before everything went silent was the steady rustling of fabric moving away. My assailant had gone. To where, I didn’t know, but there I lay, stripped down, strapped down, and subdued, trapped in existential dread and endless darkness.

[pochapal]

1. Congrats on the kinda blown up post!

2. This is a really weird, kinda stupid ask, but out of the Umineko characters u know, who seems like they’d be the most fun to play in a ttrpg? I ask because I know multiple people have done this one character and, for spoilery reasons, I have no clue how.

1: thank you i guess! feels weird to have a post gain traction among people beyond my usual follower circle lmao

2: now the first thing you need to know is that i don't do ttrpgs or understand anything about them in any meaningful way so this is very hard to consider. i do think the dice rolling factor of certain tabletops plays nicely with the whole "demon's roulette" angle of umineko except for the part where umineko only pretends like it's a series of random chance events and not a thoroughly premeditated script but maybe chance vs control could thematically translate into a good ttrpg character basis maybe? i guess the hard thing with umineko is that everything including its characters was not designed for a rng roll one outcome of millions scenario but instead deliberate consideration and understanding - idk much about ttrpgs but i feel like needing to take a 3000 word break to painstakingly sketch out a deeply biased account of a character's tragic backstory in order to explain the relevance of the morally questionable action they have just taken (the explaining of which being as plot-critical as the actions themselves) isn't the most friendly thing you could mix in with a ttrpg formula.

as character archetypes i think a great deal of umineko characters ire fun and engaging to explore on their own terms, but ttrpgs often have a growth/power fantasy element baked into them that isn't entirely congruent with the grounding theses of most of the cast. natsuhi is deeply fascinating as an individual but "powerless woman who is snared in the twin nets of pride and desperation and whose only agency is whether or not she can uphold a conspiracy to people who can leverage all kinds of abuse towards her" doesn't really work in any kind of rpg sense. if natsuhi were to get "stronger" and "advance" this would lay ruin to the underpinning tragic essence of what makes natsuhi *natsuhi*. same goes even for characters like battler who you'd think would click more with this formula - even a hypothetical mystery-solving based ttrpg could not accommodate battler as the inherent gamification of the narrative necessitates truths and evidence being revealed on a diegetic level in such a way that battler could actually figure out, and at that point what we're talking about is basically danganronpa instead of umineko.

i think in this way despite being a vn and thus a form of video game so much of umineko is heavily resistant to being "played" in the traditional game sense. there is a game going on in umineko between writer and reader, but this is a game of thinking and interpretation and understanding and not something that can be broken down into quantifiable Progression Units. the only "final boss" of umineko is your own lack of understanding and this fight is waged in your own head and not within the fabric of the story - even if in umineko proper battler "figures out" the mystery, it won't end up in a climactic final fantasy-esque showdown with beatrice on rokkenjima. gamification is kind of like "fantasy" within a narrative context (this is something i have/will talk about more in the writeup so forgive me if this isn't clearly defined yet) in that it's an embellished obfuscation of truth in the Romantic sense where you get lost in the process rather than the results - in theory, battler cornering beatrice during the denouement and saying definitively "this is the truth behind everything" is as a decisive an action as battler using the power of anime and friendship to energy blast beatrice into ash. the difference is the former keeps the mystery and tragedy front and center, while the latter out of necessity makes it specifically about battler as the center of the narrative universe.

this goes into the territory of mystery fiction and whether or not the designated Detective (capitalized in the stock archetype way and not the literary analysis dichotomy way) character must also occupy the traditional role of protagonist in the Hero sense. battler is the central character in umineko and the most crucial information is filtered through his lens, but battler is not the Hero of umineko - he is a passive witness to the tragedy who can only grow more desperate and powerless as the atrocities continue to pile up. the troubling thing about a lot of mystery is how you make a Detective that isn't basically just a cop - there is a certain power tension in mystery where through uncovering the truth the Detective takes the obfuscating "power" held by the Culprit and redirects into a clarifying force of their own. a denouement is when the Detective has, after a sort of hero's journey, acquired enough truth/power to unmask/dominate the Culprit, and as a "reward" is able to use the power structures of society (police, carceral punishment, "Just" murder) to get their way (return to a status quo) where the Culprit was previously able to use the power structures of mystery narratives (tricks, unreliable perspective, misdirection, "Unjust" murder) in order to get theirs (subversion of the status quo in accordance with their motive). all of this very easily feeds into copaganda-esque regurgitations of power dynamics and grows more prominent the more physical agency a Detective-Hero has in their given narrative situation.

bring those elements to a gamified stage and what you're left with is more a simulation of dominion through your character's power biases than a nuanced understanding of the social conditions that led to the formation of these events in the first place. you could of course perform a complete dissection of the Events and Circumstances of a ttrpg's setting, but is producing a diatribe on social structures and reinforcement of power akin to "playing"? i think maybe an umineko character might work in an undertale/deltarune-esque manner where there is an explicit conflict and tension inherent to the non-neutral action of "controlling" a character, but i don't see how that easily fits into the dna specifically of ttrpgs. there is an element of roleplay in ttrpgs where there is a meeting of the player's self and the character's self in order to produce the performance of the game-narrative in accordance with the structural rules. laying out like that i guess there's overlap between the premise of a roleplay-focused ttrpgs and the Witch Narrative, but both have different causes and different end goals. in a ttrpg no matter what in some form your goal is to "win", to attain something and move on to the next thing - everything in a ttrpg/game serves more as a vessel to enable the player to both achieve and experience a victory-state. there are ttrpg types that could interrogate these elements in a satisfying way, but nothing in umineko is directly about these things and thus a translation in this form would be to lose something in the process.

you don't come to umineko to "win" umineko. or if you do you'll quickly figure out that that is something not possible within the story's verbage. mystery and horror and tragedy do not produce victory in the conventional sense and any story in those genres that uncritically ends on a "victory" is dubious at best and incompetent at worst. in these worlds and fictions, how is it that something you could call victory can be attained? what sort of person would you need to be in order to strive for this victory? if any of the umineko characters were capable of this trajectory then they would never have ended up in the situation that they are in. to not only be concerned with powergaming but also to have the ability to do so fundamentally changes an individual's position within a narrative - for the premise to exist it implies a way out of any potential hardship, that if you're good enough at [power verb] then you can attain autonomy/power/dominion. nobody on rokkenjima ever had any of these things, which is why this is all happening in the first place. i don't think you can ever satisfactorily separate umineko characters from their disempowering material conditions like that.

the silly answer to this question, of course, has to be beatrice who has already been roleplayed by half of the cast of umineko at this point anyway. beatrice "exists" and beatrice is a vessel for power so in this way beatrice is already kind of a ttrpg character in that sense if the ttrpg's goal is desperate slaughter through at least two layers of metaphor and obfuscation. the important thing to take into account is that a playable ttrpg character "exists" and so maybe if more people on rokkenjima were into roleplaying none of these horrors would be happening lol.

[mitigatedchaos]

Chewing on a proto-idea.

The problem with exclusionary clubs or enterprises is not generally that they exclude people, but rather their size and influence.

Discrimination isn't really much of a problem if an organization is tiny and weak and has many competitors. On the other hand, it would be a huge problem if there were only two hospitals in a major city, and one of them only served men.

I considered a system where an organization's maximum allowed size is inversely proportional to its burden of imposed rules - but rule imposition can't be neatly quantified.

Then I considered one based on axes of discrimination - but then an attacker can arbitrarily penalize an organization by inventing new categories ("Actually, prohibiting men over 6' is 24 categories, 1 for each half-inch,"), or a different kind of attacker can exclude someone but refuse to categorize their exclusion in a way that loses them points in the system.

We could instead measure the percentage of society that is excluded.

A male-only bowling league thus gets a 50% rating, so maybe the allowed size of the meets is cut in half compared to a hypothetical 99.9% inclusive league, or maybe funding is more limited, etc. So far, so good.

But there are a lot smaller minorities, like male gays at maybe 1% of the population. Excluding them only takes down the rating from 50% to 49%, but it's a pretty big deal to the gays, since if it's so cheap to exclude them, perhaps lots of organizations will. To deal with this, we would have to also work from the opposite direction, monitoring how excluded a group is.

We could allow the discriminator to specify the categories to prevent the category explosion attack, but then we would need to maintain a table where each individual is mapped to each discriminator's category in order to determine the category's penalty.

But that's too centralized, too much surveillance, too much processing. Maybe some kind of price mechanism? Distributed bidding up of exclusion, upping the price as exclusion rises. But unclear how that would work.

[system-architect]

for the ask game, for Gunner; 3, 6, 9, 11?

putting under a cut since this one is long!

How and why did they join in the first place?

gunner is originally a rata novan who experienced a Massive Ordeal when he got flung into the mists via a damaged portal, and then lost his father in the mists in the process, and all of his research is sort of underpinned by the need to 1. make sense of it 2. find his dad. the inquest is the only force that really lets him get his hands on the tools to perform radical mists related experiments and then allow them to do it, so into the inquest he went

What would they be doing if they had never joined?

similar to plex, it's hard to imagine this character lacking the desperate motive & drive that spurred him on to join the inquest in the first place. i think he would've attempted to go at things from a purely synergetics angle potentially with a krewe of his own for a long while, but even then eventually become frustrated and potentially join the consortium. which isn't better tbh. in an AU where he's an absolute goodboy he might end up enlisting in the priory.

Former agents: Parts they miss.

📣 HE WANTS HIS EQUIPMENT BACK

What are/were their long-term goals in regards to being a part of the Inquest? Becoming an Overseer? Performing an otherwise banned experiment? Or just surviving?

the interior of the mists was the most incredible and horrifying thing he ever has and ever will witness, like being strapped into omadd's machine for 130 years and physically getting lost in the sort of eldritch chaos magic maze in there, and it spat him out as what i can only describe as a Mad Physicist.

he wants not just to Study the mists but to actively rip it apart, name, describe, measure, and quantify all of its' entrails. it drives him bonkers. he joined the inquest because churning through theory debates with other synergetics majors wasn't enough. he had to build that big super-collider they've got in spiderverse.

[4gravitons]

now that this Euclid telescope is on its way to L2 to to do some kind of survey of distant galaxies, want to explain what's up with these string theorists quantifying statistics of galaxy triangles or some shit? Do you know what I'm talking about? I never really got what that was about

I think you’re talking about this stuff, right?

So, the first thing to understand is that the whole “triangles” thing is a fanciful way to refer to three-point correlation functions. You’re measuring something (density of galaxies for galaxy surveys, temperature for the CMB) in three places, nothing more mysterious than that. The idea is that (if you subtract off backgrounds, yadda yadda), those three-point correlation functions should let you infer the three-point correlation functions of the quantum field theory that governed inflation (so, expectation values of three operators).

Currently, all of the data we have has only been good enough to get statistical significance for two-point functions (measure something at two places). Two-point functions can tell us some general things, but they don’t tell us a lot about the underlying physics. One way to think about why is that two-point functions are very constrained kinematically. If you’re looking at an isotropic patch of sky (which you’re always trying to do for stuff like this), then the two-point function can only depend on the distance between the two points. Fourier transform that and you’ve got a momentum, or a frequency, so really what two-point functions give you are a spectrum. That’s why you see a bunch of plots of the power spectrum of the CMB that look like this:

The three-point function tells you more, not just the spectrum but something about how whatever quantum fields that generated the data interact. (For certain theories, that’s actually all you need: for a scale-invariant (more properly, conformal) theory, the theory is uniquely determined by two-point and three-point functions.)

So what does this have to do with string theory?

Inflation is pretty much the only process we have evidence for that could probe anywhere close to the energy scale of string theory. As such, certain string theorists are quite interested in this stuff. There are a bunch of candidate quantum field theories of inflation, and some of them are “string theory inspired” in more or less direct ways, with stories about branes and curled up dimensions and so on. Evidence for any of those wouldn’t be a “smoking gun” for string theory because most of these things can be reproduced with a more normal quantum field theory, but it would at least be a validation of the model as inspirationally useful. (Plus, evidence for specific beyond-the-standard-model physics, which a lot of people would be quite happy to see anyway.)

The Quanta article I linked above suggests something more direct, though. This is based on a paper by Maldacena and Arkani-Hamed, Cosmological Collider Physics. Most of the paper is just filling out the math in the above argument: how different n-point functions can reveal different things about the quantum field theory that governed inflation, including finding evidence for particles with specific masses and spins. They do mention string theory in the introduction, where they briefly point out that, if we see a particle with spin greater than the graviton then we could interpret that as evidence for string theory, since having particles like that that are weakly interacting at such high scales seems to demand that a theory be string-theory-like in a broad sense. It wouldn’t refute string theory if we didn’t see those particles, though, since string theory doesn’t require that such things have a role in inflation specifically.

So anyway, yeah, missions like Euclid have the potential to tell us something about high-energy beyond-the-standard-model physics! There really is something meaningful to be excited about there. There’s nothing that’s “required to show up” though, and nothing that has the potential to “falsify string theory”.