#and with his job and then-recent origin story and the time period of the early 60s there was an emphasis on nuclear power and Russia

[daydreamerdrew]

Marvel Team-Up (1972) Annual #2

[goattypegirl]

During the peaceful period following the reformation of Spherus Magna (and the conclusion of the... tumultuous events shortly after) much previously obscured information about the Matoran universe came to light. The actions of the Makuta and Order of Mata Nui, the nature of the Red Star, the machinations of the Great Beings. But for certain scholars, one unanswered question continued to nag them in the back of their minds.

Why was Karzahni given the Olisi?

For much of the Matoran Universe's history, Artakha and Karzahni were mythical figures. The Smith and the Physician. Synthesis and Dissolution. A reward for good work and a punishment for poor. Brothers who competed for a legendary prize before the dawn of the world.

(For the record, said contest never actually happened. There was a minor debate between the Great Beings during the planning phase, and they were designed by two teams working in parallel, but by the time the twins were constructed their purpose was already decided. It's not the only instance of the Great Beings' actions being exaggerated into an epic myth by the GSR inhabitants.)

According to the former inhabitants of Karzahni's realm, the Olisi was used to torment the titan's subjects accoring to his capricious whims. Flaming chains to break the body, a rictus-grin mask to break the mind. But why? Karzahni wasn't cruel in the beginning, so why would the Great Beings grant him that mask? Was it meant to be anesthetic, granting Matoran sweet dreams as the titan operated on them? Perhaps it was a replacement mask, his original mask discarded alongside his Duty?

Recently, the answer was found in a laboratory near the site of the old iron tribe. The Osili was a diagnostic tool. Matoran commonly develop amnesia after severe stress or trauma, and it's not as though a turaga or other Matoran could accompany them to give patient history. By using the Osili to sort through alternate lives, Karzahni could learn who a Matoran was, where they were from, what injury befell them, and what they would do after being repaired and sent home. It's a pretty elegant solution.

...Except, that's not the whole story. It can't be. Using the Osili like that is like using a sword to chop vegetables. Surely there's a better tool for the job, a better job for the tool.

Though Matoran stopped being sent to Karzahni's realm relatively early in history, stories about the Osili spread across the world. Mask makers, of course, attempted to reverse engineer it. A true copy was never made, but there are two confirmed cases of new masks made from these experiments. The mask of Foresight allows the user to glimpse a few seconds into the future and see the actions of those nearby, and the mask of Augury allows the user to know the percentage chance of a specified event or action occuring. Though it's unconfirmed, it is theorized the Calix and Sanok were also inspired by the Osili. These masks all have hefty drawbacks or limitations, but they are all incredibly powerful and versatile in the right hands. And they are all methods to divine the future.

And they are all pale imitations of the Osili.

There's another mystery about Karzahni. See, construction on the GSR and the constructs within began while the Dreaming Plague was at its height. It's become clear that the Great Beings didn't fully understand what caused it, nonetheless, they gave psionic shielding to many of the original constructs. Tren Krom was excluded, obviously, but shielding was given to the Mata Nui intelligence, the first generation of Makuta, members of the Hand Artakha, as well as the titan himself. The Order of Mata Nui later instilled this same shielding into their own members.

But why wasn't Karzahni shielded?

It's debated how Karzahni's lack of shielding factors into the Osili's hypothetical capabilities, if at all. Scholars can talk about the troubling implications, but Karzahni is long dead, the Osili presumed destroyed. It feels like they're making shadows to be frightened by. To look on the bright side, progress has been made on restoring the former inhabitants of Karzahni's realm. Slow progress, but progress nonetheless. Reportedly many of them are finding it easier to sleep at night, no longer tormented by nightmares. Or dreams of any kind, for that matter.

[abbythewritor]

"Janitor." Fnaf sb x Fem Reader. *Prologue*

Description: What happens when Y/n L/n lands a cleaning Job at the mega pizza plex? How will she handle all the Animatronics falling for her?

Warnings: Slight drama and jealousy, but other than that, none.

Other things: Micheal and Phone Guy are in the story, and Bonnie and Foxie aren't dismantled, thanks to Gregory. Gregory is in High School along with his girlfriend, who saved him. Cassie works as a security guard at the pizza plex to keep Freddy and the others safe. There is a new Daycare attendant named Joker, who will be introduced later, and the attendants have better upgrades than their original selves.

Enjoy the prologue, everyone. :.

Master list. Next Chapter.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Y/n? Hello, nice to meet you, come on follow me to the back and I can show you around."

It was about early noon on a Monday, and this day you started your very new Job as a janitor.

Everything was happening all at once, you graduated Highschool, entered your first year at college, and now, you are already at your second Job, which was surprisingly easy to Nail.

The pizza plex mall has been through shit and opened recently under new management. And, of course, them struggling to find people to work for them, and the poor industry has been hard to be kept open for more extended periods.

But, you decided to work here, not because you were a massive fan of the Glamrocks, but because the pay here is excellent.

How can you pass the opportunity of getting paid almost 50 dollars an hour? That's just being a janitor; imagine what being a security guard or a mechanic pays?

Anyways, the guy you were following was probably your co-worker; he seemed to know everyone as you both headed to the cleaning area, himself having too much of a smile on his face.

Not that it bothered you, but you were nervous for some reason; you didn't expect this place to be so huge, as it felt like you were on a different planet. He could sense you were nervous as his hands grabbed a key card, swiping it into the holder as the door unlocked.

"Nervous?" He asked, facing you as his hand held the door open. Chuckling nervously, you scratched your neck. "Yeah, a little." "Well, don't be; it's ok to be nervous all the time at a new job; this place can be a little overwhelming, but once your first month flies by, it can feel a little better. Now some ground rules, put your stuff there first." Pointing to some sort of desk, you nodded before setting your bag down, putting your phone in a desk drawer, along with your car keys and personal information.

"The Janitor of the Pizza plex is one of the more critical jobs, which is why we get paid so much. Since there are multiple layers of dirt, grime, and germs from daycare, we must clean, and training employees for 90 or more days is very important. First things first, here is something that will come in handy." Giving you a folded-up piece of paper, you took it between your fingers before realizing it was a map, circles of red marking the main areas. "If you notice the numbers beside the circles, those are the areas in order we have to go by each day. First, the stage, since we are right by it, then we move over to Dj, then to Glamrock's central area, then their dressing rooms, then to the attractions, and then lastly, Daycare."

Your head tilted. "But why does Daycare last? Isn't that place supposed to be the dirtiest?" He smirked. "everyone asks that. We do it last because all the kids are there now, they'll just see us and try to play with us all the time, so it slows things down. Gotta keep those little rugrats down. Once all the main attractions are done, in between, we usually get the main area and hallways and other areas that need to be cleaned. I know it sounds a little overwhelming, but I promise once you get trained, it will be a breeze to remember because every room is the same routine over and over." Your head nodded. "Got it."

"Well, before I give you something, Hi, I'm Cyrus; I've been working here for at least....6 years now, I know, save the applause later." Snorting, your hand went into your mouth as he pointed. "See?! There's something I like to see; enough of the introductions here." He gave you some sort of Freddy-shaped watch that slipped from his hands to yours. Watching as your eyes sparkled with excitement, the male folded his arms. "This thing you drooling for is called a fazz watch; it will help with communication from farther places. It was upgraded thanks to my good friend, Greggory, so it can detect threats, your health, stress level, and even hunger level. Also, you can order from every restaurant here online, so you don't have to wait in those ungodly long lines. Now that I explained everything, you are, just for today and tomorrow, going to follow me and watch; I will let you try a couple of things to see if you were paying attention, but having the workers just shadow for the first few days is rather important, think you can handle it, newbie?"

Putting on the watch, you let out a nervous sigh before slightly smiling. "I-Uhm, yeah, I think I can handle it." He smiled while roughly patting your back. "Atta girl, come on, let's head to the stage Newbie."

Watching him walk passed, you took a final deep breath before looking back to your map, which slightly crumpled under your fingertips.

This Job is a once in a lifetime opportunity, and if Cybrus says you can get comfortable in just a month, then this job might not be so bad......

.......

.......

.......

Right?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Name: Cyrus.

Age: 26

Height: 6;3

Placement; Janitor and Part-time Daycare attendant.

Relationship: Aquaintences/ Co-Worker.

Family: Unknown.

Other Information: Unknown.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[acquired-stardust]

Anime Spotlight #1: Sonic the Hedgehog OVA (1996)

Acquired Stardust's spotlights expand into the realm of anime! Join Ash as she takes a look back at 1996's Sonic the Hedgehog OVA, a fitting first entry in our anime spotlight series, bridging the gap between video games and anime.

In many ways the story of Sonic the Hedgehog mirrors that of developer Sega's due to how indelibly linked the Blue Blur's meteoric rise into pop culture relevancy is to the company at large. Sonic the Hedgehog, much like Sega, went from the cool new contender rivaling Nintendo's dominance in the early 90s to an underdog by the turn of the century, to an example of just how harsh the shift from 2D to 3D games could be to video game developers that struggled to make the transition with as much acclaim as Nintendo had, back to a beloved alternative underdog in recent years that represented a very particular style and sound that you couldn't find just anywhere else.

It's easy to see why Sonic the Hedgehog had such an impact in its initial boom period (which lasted roughly 8 years, from 1991 to 1999) with the strength of the creatives involved and inspirations evoked. Brandishing a visual and auditory edge along with its gameplay and level design that many considered on par with Nintendo's Super Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog helped propelled Japanese video game developer Sega into unprecedented heights particularly in America. Hot on the heels of 1993's Sonic CD and 1994's Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (& Knuckles)released on the Sega CD platform, 1996 saw the release of a two-episode Sonic the Hedgehog original video animation in Japan (that's OVA for those unfamiliar with anime terms, meaning a popular release method that's a sort of direct-to-video release rather than airing on television or in movie theaters). It was also compiled into a single 53-minute video and dubbed by ADV Films when it arrived in America in 1999, coinciding with the release of Sonic Adventure.

Immediately apparent is the retention of many of the elements that made Sonic so popular in this era. First you have the art style of Sonic CD, recreated faithfully by Studio Pierrot (also responsible for animating shonen anime classics Naruto, Bleach and Yu Yu Hakusho), with the even higher animation quality than the animated sequences of the then-new video game afforded by the budget of OVA format. There's also the soundtrack composed by Mitsuhiro Tada sporting an incredible blend of synthesizer, drums, keys and horns that's still stunning to this day and tragically never released in any official capacity (though an early production reel of the soundtrack, including its clever and catchy main theme sung by Riyu Konaka, was leaked in 2020 thanks to a Russian Sonic fansite). There's also the story and cast, an unthinkable (in 1996) teamup between Sonic and friends with nemesis Dr. Eggman rounded out by a few original characters such as the charmingly feral brat Sara, notably being the first instance of oddly human (or at least in this case humanimal) love interests for Sonic.

As previously mentioned, Sonic OVA nails a lot of things about the series that made it so popular at the time including the portrayal of its lead characters. Sonic has his cocky coolness, Tails lovable kid genius with plenty of vulnerability and Knuckles has both all the toughness and silliness one would expect. Aspects of all three of these characters would come to be either lost of hyperfocused on in the years to come and it's pretty great to have a piece of media capture the protagonist trio in such robust detail, with each character getting several moments to shine and their own significance in the events of the OVA as opposed to being ultimately completely beholden to Sonic to save the day.

Another retention from the video games of the time is the action and sense of speed with Studio Pierrot having done a wonderful job animating not only several sequences of traversal straight out of the Sega Genesis games complete with cameos of enemies along with several impressive fight sequences, as well as a few small instances of impressively thought out interaction between both characters and environment. In terms of the story and animation it's clear that the people involved in the project really understood the assignment and never phoned it in or lost sight of what they were doing.

While a wonderful snapshot of the series at the time, Sonic OVA also features a few interesting elements that look to the future. Planet Freedom, the world in which the characters inhabit in this particular incarnation of the series, features a distinctly New York City in post-apocalypse locale that would later come up again in 1999's Sonic Adventure on the Dreamcast. Sonic OVA also positions Tails and Dr. Eggman as more direct rivals than previously seen, which would come to be a staple of the series starting again with 1999's Sonic Adventure. Sonic OVA is not entirely without its own quirks that would not be retained however, most notably referring to Knuckles as a mole and seemingly giving him the ability to outright fly as opposed to merely gliding.

Some may find the English cast to be annoying, but personally this is my favorite casting of the characters and the voices I always associate with them - they're teenage (and in the case of Tails, a child) cartoon animals after all. Regardless of which language you choose to watch in, Sonic OVA is a fantastic time and an interesting snapshot in time that effectively communicates why a lot people had so much fascination with Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog in its prime. It's also not everyday that this era of Sonic's music, largely featuring reworked compositions of Masato Nakamura's band Dreams Come True and later various songs by Michael Jackson (itself an interesting footnote of Sonic development lore), manages to feature tracks that stand up to the mainline games' quality, but Sonic OVA definitely includes a few songs that will stay with you and it's a shame that until recently the soundtrack has been almost completely ignored by Sega.

A gem hidden among the stones, Sonic the Hedgehog OVA is undoubtedly stardust.

-- Ash

[canonicallyanxious]

[huge disclaimer up top that I am incredibly lacking in knowledge as to queer/lgbtq+ history and culture in Thailand, especially outside the context of globalized queer identity, so this post should absolutely not be taken as any sort of authority or statement on the topic; i'm just in the very beginnings of doing my own research and wanted to sort through some thoughts as well as see if anyone else out there knew more or could point me toward other sources]

so one thing i was thinking about is that if Jim is in his mid-late thirties, this means he was probably born in the early-mid 80s, which means he came of age in the 90s. i must confess my ignorance of the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic [particularly social stigma against the lgbtq+ community] outside of a western context but even still i can't not find this timing significant. so i'm starting to do some research on the situation in Thailand during this time period and have come across some really interesting sources i wanted to share [under the cut, if you please!]

First is from Untold Stories originally published in 2002. The full video/transcript is super interesting and has a lot of information about Thailand's response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 90s. one thing i wanted to highlight [bolded emphasis is mine]:

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Viravaidya is confident Thailand’s infection rate can be contained once again. Awareness is high, as is literacy, as is the availability of condoms. The big problem is how to deal with the one million or so Thais already infected. Tens of thousands of previously symptom-free HIV patients are now in the visible, advanced, or terminal, stages of the disease. The campaigns may have raised awareness, curiosity, and even generous donations, but patients like Phra Choochart, one of about a dozen monks here, say that doesn’t translate to sympathy or compassion.

PRA CHOOCHART: I keep secret for many years. But finally, something happened in my skin. It beginning to appear. I cannot keep secret anymore. So, I come to be a monk because in society if you catch HIV, nobody want you; also your family.

Untold Stories also has a follow-up story from about 5 years later in 2007. again the full video/transcript is super interesting imo, but here are some personal highlights regarding the social stigma of hiv/aids in Thai society [bolded emphasis is mine]:

REV. MICHAEL BASSANO: He’s 50 years old, but his family just left him. They came over and dropped him off. And they left him here with us. [...]

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Many, like this man, are dropped off, their disease unattended, many with tuberculosis, a daunting infection they must survive before they are physically fit enough to go on the AIDS medicines.

[...]

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Thirty-two-year-old Nok Eng came to the temple when her skin showed rashes, a classic HIV symptom. She left when her health improved but came right back in a few months. Health care was hard to find for her and her HIV-positive husband. And it was especially tough at her factory job, where people knew she was HIV-positive.

NOK ENG (through translator): Every day at lunch, I could hear people whispering next to me, gossiping about me, being sarcastic. I just couldn’t take the criticism.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: The most painful, her parents, who live in a rural community, wanted little to do with her.

NOK ENG: I told my parents that I wanted to come and visit, and they said, “Just stay where you are.” They said that I would humiliate them.

still trying to find sources for what the attitude/stigma is like in more recent years, as well as information about social stigma regarding the gay/queer community outside of this specific context [also worth noticing these sources don't really focus on HIV/AIDS stigma in the context of the gay/queer community specifically], but even still, considering the huge impact the HIV/AIDS epidemic had on social stigma against the lgbtq+ community as well as the generational trauma of living as a community through such a thing in western society, i would be really interested to know if that context had a significant impact on Jim's coming of age as a gay man - i don't think it's something that they would ever explicitly get into on this show but still, that social/historical context could help put some things into perspective, particularly the emphasis on family relationships being the most painful part of the social stigma

i mean idk. i just think about jim running away from home with his sister, and referring to himself and Jam as "two great survivors", even in the context of the homophobia he had to face from his own sister. and i think about his flashbacks with Beam, how even at the peak of their relationship there was hesitance on his part [like when Beam loudly declared their love in the temple for example], and how quickly and easily he accepted that Beam couldn't tell his family about them, and how the tension between being open about yourself in your personal life versus your family/public life is already a lot to deal with even outside of the context of Beam living a whole separate life with a woman his family set him up with. and i can see how even as an older gay man who has been out for some time now there's still a lot of fear and pain Jim carries with him, as someone who seems to value family quite a lot. i really hope we can see him get to the point where he can begin to accept and understand that even after all that he's been through he has created a loving and supporting family of his own, and that's not in spite of the person that he is but because of it.

[michelleelizabethtanner]

Any new gg fics you can recc? looking for something different and I know you have great taste!

TIA!

How did you know I was just on AO3, Anon?? Haha! I haven’t been reading a whole ton lately, thank you for thinking I have taste. 😁 I try my best to keep up with new works that come out. Just happy to see people are still creating new fics and still keeping this world alive.

One of my favorites, Kingmaker, just had an update this week to Part 7 of her work. I always recommend this fic because I think it often gets slept on. And I get it, it isn’t a Brio shipper kind of fic so it gets overlooked. It’s probably one of our only fandom fics that doesn’t pair Beth and Rio. But Rio lovers should really enjoy it. I personally enjoy it as an original work. There’s an essence of the source material to it, but it’s its own story. And I loooooove the emotional depth the author developed to her characters. It’s one of the most thought-provoking fics I’ve read and I really enjoy it as a piece of art.

See You Next Lifetime by badgyalmimi is locked to be visible to AO3 account holders only, but if you have an account I’m really enjoying this one. It’s a soulmates AU, set across different periods of time. I like the way this author is able to vary her voice and keep “in character” despite the time period. And the latest chapter did a great job at giving Rio a believable background on his entry into crime. I have such a soft spot for baby Rio. 🥰

Have you already read @00gangfriend00 ‘s Savior Complex? Obviously, tried and true author so everything they make is wonderful. This was so cute though. So in character and such a great Brio dynamic. A callback to the early Brio feels. And the fic says 1/2 chapters so I’m hopeful!!!

I just got an email notification that emeraldcut has a new update to their AU posted. But I recently read the conclusion of Queen for a Day and it’s SO charming! It’s Annie and Rio road trip, but Brio isn’t far from mind. It gives this unique perspective on Brio through an interaction with a third party. Annie is light and fun. There’s a lot of humor even to serious moments. It really makes you love Brio in a whole new way.

I’m gonna wrap this by saying, I’ve been reading actual published novels lately and let me tell you… The amounts of truly horrible writing that gets famous is mind boggling. I feel like the GG fandom authors have spoiled me for a lifetime. I haven’t been able to find a similar level of care, world building, lovingly-created plot in any book I’ve tried. So listen, thank you to everyone for writing. It’s better than professional authorship.

[midnight-and-his-melodiverse]

From Midnight, With Love: A Writeblr Love Letter, that includes rambly divulging thoughts, a short story, and many thanks <3

Prelude

Good evening / timezone writeblr!! I know that this may come fifteen days too early, considering that December 31st, on the cusp of the new year, would be a more reasonable time to thank everyone on writeblr for this absolutely marvelous year of 2022, but I've decided "fuck it!" and banked on doing it now. So! Without further stalling... thus will begin this love letter, underneath a read more, for the sake of all those who don't delight in scrolling through walls of text.

But before that... the different sections of this love letter, will be opened by quotes that I find, from fellow writeblr mutual @lockejhaven.

Contents:

The Passion of Writing Stories (my past as a writer / my blog's origin story)

A Welcome to the Writeblr Corner (a fictional story that delves into my first steps in being a writeblr!)

From Midnight, with Love (some final thoughts, and many, many thanks.)

I. The Passion Of Writing Stories (aka: my blog's origin story)

"Worlds are burning, my child. Gods alone cannot suffocate the flames." - @lockejhaven

Ahh, how fitting. As almost everyone knows by now, the pandemic known as the Coronavirus has gone and affected the jobs and livelihoods of anyone, and everyone for two going on three years now, and my journey as a writeblr begins as a mere speck in the initial startling throes of the COVID rampage.

As many people know though, I did not have the luxury of taking a walk down the expansive, and seemingly endless library of writeblrs all contained within the care of a single blessed hellsite called Tumblr, when I was just about in my Grade 6 to 7 year. Despite that however, I wrote a lot of things, both good and not-so good throughout those years.

Of the many writing highlights I can think on, I will say with absolute certainty that it was my group-written Minecraft roleplay-style story, titled, "Beacon City: Herobrine's Apprentice" which had left me thinking recently: - "Why couldn't I have just called it 'Beacon City' and left it at that?" - "With the whole 'Herobrine's Apprentice' thing tacked onto the end of the title, like a kid who desperately clings to his mother to let him go to a party of great proportions, why did it seem like I was planning sequels when the main story was already being written?"

But moving from that, I cherished every moment of writing that Minecraft roleplay story with my friends, during blocks in class where we'd half-finish our work and sneakily call it a "free period" for us to work on that story.

Well, and I was definitely right to cherish those moments, because as the years passed and I slightly moved up the rungs of my personal ability scale as a writer I naively didn't look back to those previous times, and before I knew it... I had just entered Grade 10, and was four months into the academic grind, when my high school got the news that my amazing friend Gavin, who had been friends with me since middle school in band class and outside band class in my regular classes, had passed away due to complications from cancer.

This hit me, and still hits me hard. He was an amazing writer and helped out a lot on the Beacon City story, and on top of that was a great friend to hang out with. But it didn't take me long to immortalize him in my memory and keep him there in spirit.

Eventually though, I managed to move past that trauma of a loss, from a student's perspective, and get back into writing more things.

--- --- --- ---

In the present day, I have reflected many a time on my middle school writing era, so to say, and the many improvements I've made. Although like many others, I ridiculed how bad my writing style was back then and didn't bother to elaborate or reflect on it, but now I see the point in reflecting positively on your older writing.

I've realized that even if your writing is bad, just appreciate that it's yours and that you are making progress towards being a better writer, no matter how long that may take.

Now setting the scene for a bit here: I was 14, at the time I was in middle school, and I had just started taking writing seriously, to the point where I was writing small things every day. I had just started writing stories at the age of 10, and drawing upon the breadth of knowledge I had gained since then, had decided it was a great idea to improve on my passion that was telling stories.

This is where the first mentions of my main OC, Midnight, were born. He had started out WAY differently than how he is in the present day with all the development he's gone through. Two years after middle school though, in 2021 is when I decided to create a Tumblr account, starting off by making it a sort of askblog for Midnight, and just a smorgasbord for Melodiverse related stuff on top of that.

That cycle continued for a good long while with very infrequent posts and little traction... up until July 5th, of 2022, when I thought my blog was long overdue for a rebranding.

And I was only just about to discover the wonderful endless library of writers that lay behind an ornate door in Tumblr's expansive hub of small self-contained corners of the internet.

II. A Welcome to the Writeblr Corner (a fictional story that delves into my first steps in being a writeblr!)

"In a memory as old as mine, there is a truth worth seeking; a light worth following." - @lockejhaven

(A/N: And now for something completely different, that ISN'T a dive into my past as a writer, and more in my comfort zone hehe)

I found myself standing in the center of a very stimulating landscape. Almost too stimulating, in fact.

This landscape I could see around me was the darkest of blue for a solid ground, the wall was filled with reblogs and textposts, many of those that were from mutuals of mine and people that I follow. And even though this was a virtual world, that didn't stop very intrusive promotional ads from occasionally blocking my view of certain posts, as I had to physically keep my distance from them, instead of scrolling past them.

The landscape was filled with seas of people flocking to the constantly-updating walls to reblog the latest art piece, latest new fanfic and original work, or a very emotion-driven piece of poetry, penned by a user who's identity had ceased to exist, lost within this hellsite's annals of time and punctuated by an anonymous icon that acted as that blog's tombstone, with the epitaph reading whatever that user's last post before death was.

After mulling on that for awhile, and walking over to the wall to like that poetry post from that user who no longer exists, safely archived by reblogs, I liked the post to pay my respects and began walking towards my own personal room, of which was my blog's control panel and also a lounging space.

However, on my way there, I heard the faint chirping of birds and the rustling of trees, behind a cold white wall, repeating down the hallway seemingly endlessly, with noisy fluorescent lighting illuminating the way forward.

I turned around, and walked back out into the stimulating landscape of Tumblr's hub, before the ambiance of the birds and trees had become slightly louder and I faced the source of the sound. A large wooden door with a sun and open book painted on the front.

--- --- --- ---

Nervously, I continued forward, and after opening and shutting the door behind me, leaving me within the enclosure of a meadow, I admired how nice it was to no longer be inundated with notifications every second, and bathed myself in the serenity of nature. The tweeting of birds, and rustling of trees were more sonically noticeable by now.

I strolled through, and from outside yet another door, I perceived a very calming atmosphere, as I perked my ears up to the door, to hear the flipping of book pages, the typing of laptops, the sipping of coffee, and general soft conversation.

I had to psyche myself up for a bit, before I felt confident enough to go in. But my legs must have completely taken control, because before I knew it, I found myself facing the exact door I entered into. Only this time, there was a fluffy wreath on the front, followed by the words scrawled into a neat script: "Writeblr Corner: A comfort lounge for both the veteran wordsmiths and those who are new to the art of pen and page."

I closed my eyes before opening the door with a loud creak and stepping foot onto what seemed like a freshly cleaned carpet.

I opened my eyes soon after, and was greeted by the lovely aroma of coffee, and looked further around me to see endless walls of books, most of them penned by the people in this lounge, who were strangers to me at first.

I strolled around the isles as soft jazz music played over the speakers, until I found a table with a piece of lined paper sitting face up. "Introduce yourself to the patrons!" it read, almost as if it was beckoning me to introduce myself to the sea of wordsmiths who had no idea about me or what I did.

But I wrote down my name, my stories that I had in progress, and other things that people should know about me, before heading to a large corkboard, which held writer introductions from ages past to more recent ones, and I stuck mine under recent, and eagerly awaited to see what would happen.

I heard the pushing in of a chair as someone got up from their table of friends and was heading my way. We briefly made eye contact before they beelined for the corkboard, grabbed a pen and scrawled something down.

Before I could ask for their name, the person walked back to their table and sat back down. Which left me to go discover who out of the many patrons here, after all, this lounge was very full with the sound of lively conversation, had left something underneath my introduction.

It turns out, that multiple people had left something under my introduction. I walked up to the board, zoomed into my introduction paper and struggled to read the very ornate handwriting. "Hello Midnight!" read one of the comments, signed by someone named Natsume, which was written in purple ink. "Hi bud!" read another of the comments which was written off to the left side of the paper, but still visible and written in blue-pink ink. This one was signed by someone named Athena.

Many other comments were scrawled all along my introduction paper, and I was happy people were greeting me.

I eventually within a couple days found myself at home and a regular within the Writeblr Corner.

This was certainly the greatest of welcomes I could've expected.

--- --- --- ---

III. From Midnight, With Love (some final thoughts, and many, many thanks.)

"Surrender to yourself, dragonheart, and all will end as it should." - @lockejhaven

Now I'd like to leave y'all with some final thoughts.

Despite the pandemic making everyday life seem like a localized "hell on earth" scenario, the year 2022 was the greatest I could've ever hoped for.

Within this lovely writeblr community on this blessed hellsite, I made so many new friends, managed to accumulate 180 followers throughout that time, rambled a whole lot about many things, some of which were writing related, others not so much, managed to write small pieces but somehow didn't gain progress on most of my main WIPs (besides Stars, Bits, and Bytes), and just... had so much fun talking about writing and laying my eyes upon other's works of absolute word mastery. (ex. @athena-anna-rose's Terraclaw snippets, @careful-pyromancer's snippets, @lockejhaven's poetry, quotes, and snippets, and literally so many more works of wordsmithery that I would list here but it'd be too long <3)

I enjoyed playing so many writeblr-focused tag games, like Find the Word, Heads Up Seven Up, and a lot more. On top of that, I adored answering the many asks that people would send me, and I also enjoyed writing for Storyteller Saturday, Tiny Scene Sunday, and building more of my world with Worldbuilding Wednesday.

Looking forward, and behind the curtain, to the future of my blog, I'm excited to begin writing darker stuff, cute, fluffy romance, maybe some fanfiction, and definitely poetry as we near the end of my blog's first "arc".

--- --- --- ---

And we have come to the end of my love letter to writeblr! Whoever of my writeblr mutuals sees and comments on this, know that I appreciate y'all so much <3/p

THANKS TO:

@lockejhaven - for allowing use of their quotes as openers for each of the parts of this love letter, being such a lovely friend, and running the North Haven discord server. Thank you Locke.

@365runesofwriting - for being a "mother figure" for me in terms of writeblr. <3/p

@jadefyre - for being the one to create my most favorite of all writeblr events: Tiny Scene Sunday. <3/p

@scratched-fountains - Thank you Ame for being the OG, and sticking around long enough to see me improve. I hope you'll be one of the ones to leave a heartfelt review on Midnight and the Gift of the Melody Blade when I'm done with it in June of 2023. <3/p

@careful-pyromancer - for being the one with a "chosen one WIP" that unfolded to be greater than the sum of it's parts. I sincerely hope I'll see more from you with Chronicles of Avalon in the future. <3/p

@blue-kyber - for having the most captivating sci-fi fantasy series in all of Tumblr, in my humble opinion. Seriously. Out There: The 1K is the most amazing story I've seen weaved between intricate characters and emotional scenes. <3/p

@athena-anna-rose - for drawing my into checking out more of her work through Terraclaw and Wildlands content. Hope you're doin' well Athena. <3/p

And thanks to those who are anonymous, or are just too shy to personally interact with my blog. Know that I see you, and I adore your presence.

And finally, signing off: From Midnight, with Love, Thank you all so fuckin' much for a marvelous first five months on writeblr. Here's to many, many more.

[majingojira]

What are the most popular Paleo Documentaries?

This question recently hit me due to a talk on Twitter, so I thought I'd look through all the documentaries I've seen and reviewed/logged and try and determine what, roughly were the most popular documentaries for their time periods and what made them so popular.

First, let's go through the "Dark Ages" of Paleo Docs -- past the silent era, and into the talkies/early color stuff. Back when dinosaurs were thought of as evolutionary failures.

Before the Dinosaur Renaissance, there are very few documentaries (32 between 1919 and 1979, 1 of which is just lost, and 4 of which have no archived digital version), so being notable doesn't require as much.

There are documentaries from the silent era, and most of them are... not great. Or at least, rather dull or very short.

Two of them (Prehistoric Animals (1938) and A World is Born (1955)) just recycle footage from The Lost World (1925) and Fantasia (1940). Literally, A World Is Born is just "The Rite of Spring" sequence from Fantasia with narration.

This leaves the 'shorts' Monsters from the Past: The Story of the Great Dinosaurs (1922), Pathé Review: Monsters of the Past (1923), and Fifty Million Years Ago as the only black and white era films of note.

That all are silent films says something about how expensive making dinosaurs is.

Monsters from the Past (1922) is notable for being one of the first documentaries on dinosaurs, possibly the oldest surviving from the United States. Footage from it gets used in a LOT of documentaries to show 'old timey' dinosaur hunting.

Pathé Review is the first documentary to use original stop motion. It's not very good stop motion, but it's good to know how far we've come. Also, it's one of the earliest scenes of Tyrannosaurus rex battling a Triceratops. Only Along the Moonbeam Trail (1918) predates it.

Fifty Million Years Ago is a broader exercise in stop-motion animation showcasing dinosaurs. It also employs cut-out animation for ancient insects. It's the first real animated attempt at showcasing life.

And part of it is missing.

Being a first at something is worth noting in my book. The first actual 'journey through time' style documentary was Uit den Schoot der Aarde/From the Bosom of the Earth (1919) internationally (also, the oldest surviving paleo-doc I know of), and Evolution (1923) (the first American take on it, and one of the longest of its time).

Once things move more to Color in full, things get a little more interesting.

I'd say there are 2.5 of note.

The oldest of them is The Animal World (1956) by director Irwin Allen. This is notable because of 2 things. First, the opening of this documentary on animal life has a prehistoric sequence with special effects from Ray Harryhausen and Willis O'Brien. This sequence went on to be used in other films, including Trog, Americathon, and Odd Jobs. It is also in TV shows like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Married... with Children.

The spread of the dinosaurs in this documentary goes on from there, with close-ups and stills showing up in books, and even a view master slide show (which was featured in Jurassic World).

It's widespread, from a well-known genre creator, featuring the work of two special effects titans. That's read as 'popular' in my book (even if the sequence itself didn't see wider release until the DVD era as a bonus on The Black Scorpion DVD -- today, it's part of the Warner Archive).

The other 'popular' documentary from this time period is Wah Chang's Dinosaurs - The Terrible Lizards (1970). Special Effects technician best known for his work on The Time Machine, The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao, Dinosaurus!, Jack the Giant Killer, and the original Star Trek made this documentary short feature using some of the models used in Land of the Lost.

It also got WIDE redistribution in the 80s and 90s as part of public television broadcast filler and as part of educational VHS tapes.

The ".5" comes from the Horizons documentary episode "The Hot-Blooded Dinosaurs" (1977) for being the first documentary on the Dinosaur Renaissance, and the first appearance of Deinonychus.

That's a pretty important step, and leads us to: the Dinosaur Renaissance proper. This lasts from 1980 through to 1992.

In this time period, I'd suggest that the most popular documentaries were Dinosaur (1980), Dinosaur! (1985), the Gary Owens/Eric Boardman series (Dinosaurs (1985), Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs, Dinosaur (1985), More Dinosaurs (1985), Son of Dinosaurs (1988), Prehistoric World (1993), The Return of Dinosaurs (1993)), A&E's Dinosaur (1991), and The Dinosaurs! (1992).

Dinosaur (1980) is a Wil Vinton animated piece and was part of museum theater showings for several decades. The characters of "Herb" and "Rex" would go on to be recurring characters in other Wil Vinton claymation specials, including A Claymation Christmas (1987) and Festival of Claymation (1987).

Dinosaur! (1985) was hosted by Christopher Reeves (an avowed lover of Dinosaurs) and produced by CBS. It began as a short film from Phil Tippet called Prehistoric Beast which got a lot of talk going, leading first to this special, and then to his being hired for Jurassic Park. The effects shots from this special were used in dozens of documentaries, educational CD-roms, and more. It also won a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Special Visual Effects (beating out Ewoks: The Battle for Endor -- which Phil Tippet also worked on!). It had a VHS release in 1993 and even got re-aired on the Discovery Channel when Christopher Reeves passed in 2004. The Gary Owens/Eric Boardman series of Documentaries on Dinosaurs is so iconic that not only does it have DVD release, but also a soundtrack release. It's that iconic. They were part of the original run of Disney Channel 'we need programming' stuff, and they landed quite well. Of them, only the last, which skews younger, doesn't hold up.

A&E's Dinosaur! (1992) is hosted by Walter Cronkite. Do I really have to elaborate? The puppeteering was decent, but not spectacular. Still, it's a pretty decent documentary bolstered by the host. As many cable prestige pieces, it had a VHS release.

The Dinosaurs! (1992) from PBS was made by my local PBS affiliate (WHYY-TV), and was made available on both VHS and Laserdisc, and even got a reissue in 1998 and 1999. That's a solid run for a PBS documentary! The animated segments, which are immaculate, were all done in pencils and were featured in museums (like the Swedish Museum of Natural History), CD-Rom games, and more. The documentaries hold up very well bolstered by the animation.

In 1993 came Jurassic Park, upending pop culture's perceptions of Dinosaurs. This lead to TLC producing Paleoworld (known as Jurassica! in Europe). There were such a glut of Dinosaur Documentaries that people had to do a LOT to get one to stand out from the crowd.

And few did.

Part of this was due to man of the documentaries being part of documentary series. From Bill Nye the Science Guy to Henry's Amazing Animals to National Geographic Explorer, there were a LOT of Dinosaur Documentaries running around in this era. From 1993 through to 1999, there were (counting individual episodes) 124 Paleodocs.

Of these, I'd propose only the following having a lasting impact: The Ultimate Guide: T. rex, Muttaburrasaurus: Life in Gondwana, Nova "The Real Jurassic Park", Once Upon Australia.

The Ultimate Guide got a lot of re-runs, and stop motion effect re-uses throughout the 90s and 2000s. A VHS release was more standard for the time, but still notable.

Muttaburrasaurus and Once Upon Australia are Australian documentary/museum film shorts that have a lot of stop motion animation. They got some air internationally on TLC back in the day when they were actually educational, but that's the limit of their notoriety, beyond the novelty of their focus on Australian paleofauna.

I'm generally reluctant to include episodes of long-running documentary series in this analysis because they are part of long-running documentary series. Still, perhaps because it is such a direct tie-in to Jurassic Park, "The Real Jurassic Park" is a standout since it has actual scientists speculating on the possibility of bringing back dinosaurs AND how handling them in a Zoo-like environment would go. That latter part is still fascinating to listen to. It has a VHS and DVD release. I'm also reasonably certain it's included in some DVD/Blu-Ray releases of JP itself.

But not until Walking with Dinosaurs did the FX used in Jurassic Park become cheap enough for the BBC to use in a miniseries. And that was definitely a game changer, setting a standard going forward for future high budget documentaries.

And stock footage for BBC Horizons to exploit endlessly.

The entire Walking with series and its spinoffs are simply wonderful. Chased by Dinosaurs, Walking with Beasts, Walking with Monsters, Walking with Cavemen, and Sea Monsters. The latter, in particular, is one of the best overall. All of them have DVD releases and Nigel Marvin's work here managed to get him tapped for the video game Prehistoric Kingdom.

Of the hundreds of other documentaries, I'd say only a few standouts: T. Rex Autopsy, Dino Lab, Jurassic CSI, Titanoboa: Monster Snake, and Amazing Dino World.

T. Rex Autopsy has a unique gimmick that makes it memorable, as well as decent reruns.

Dinolab actually had a sequel made to it, and is decent for what it is, gimmick wise.

Jurassic CSI rides the coat tails of trends title-wise, but the host keeps it lively.

Titanoboa covers a unique animal and its ecosystem extremely well.

Amazing Dino World lives and dies by the quality of its FX, really, and those FX are very, very good. Colorful, standout, and FLUFFY! It's not perfect, but it was a good step forward compared to its earlier contemporaries.

Now, I'm being overall rather generous with this. I mean, people also remember Clash of Dinosaurs and Jurassic Fight Club for how annoyingly bad they were.

But those who think those were the worst has never sat through Dino Brained.

Or, for those who love "So Bad it's Good", there's always Dinosaur Quiz.

But this is all just my opinion, what are your thoughts?

Think I missed something? Do you think Dinosaurs: Fun, Facts, and Fantasy deserve a better rap? Or are your nostalgia goggles dipped in The Infinite Voyage's "The Great Dinosaur Hunt"?

[kylesvariouslistsandstuff]

So Far...

We're at the halfway point now.

The first half of 2023, box office-wise for the all-animated pictures, has been kind of more of the same... In that, Disney's animated feature releases - or one, in this case - are still struggling to get big crowds that are needed to cover the gargantuan budgets pumped into these things... Universal - for the most part - is still bringing home bacon. THE SUPER MARIO BROS. MOVIE landed among the highest grossing animated movies, period. Massive opening here in the states, incredible legs for a frontloaded picture, and especially for one that got a more mixed critical reception.

About the MARIO reviews... This makes me chuckle a bit. Very online people like to use the not-amazing critical reception of recent Disney-released animated movies to knock them and also use them to explain their not great box office ("well, if they had a made *good* movies), buuuut they either say the critics are "wrong" and "hate fun" for giving MARIO so-so marks or they just ignore them entirely. Tribalism stinks. MARIO does its job, yes, but it's also based on probably one of the most recognizable IPs in the whole damn world. Take that away, I wonder what kind of money that movie would've made...

But it wasn't entirely great for Universal this year, for they bungled the release of RUBY GILLMAN, TEENAGE KRAKEN. I understand that a lot of the Illumination and DreamWorks movies on Uni's slate all got domino'd, pushing the individual movies back a couple of paces... But June 30th was the wrong time to release this, and waiting till 3 1/2 months before release date to officially announce the movie to the world was also a big mistake (rumor-mills were leaking stuff about "MEET THE GILLMANS" instead of DreamWorks doing any talking... And we're but a little over a year out from the original movie opening theatrically after KUNG FU PANDA 4 in 2024.) if you ask me.

RUBY GILLMAN would've been a perfectly serviceable mid-July release, but Christopher Nolan has way too much power as a director, mandating that Universal not release *any* movie near his precious OPPENHEIMER. What a diva. I would've settled for early September. A good amount of weeks away from MUTANT MAYHEM, and having all of September, October, and early November to itself... I still wonder why Universal thinks releasing TROLLS BAND TOGETHER three days before Disney Animation's WISH is a great idea. October's wide open, it's like right there! In fact, BAND TOGETHER comes out in October in various international territories. Why not the same in the Yoo, Ess of Ay?

So, yeah... Universal had a high high with MARIO, and a low low with RUBY GILLMAN. That picture might make little more than SPIRIT UNTAMED. Maybe MIGRATION will be a SING-esque leggy Christmas hit for Illumination, and I'm sure TROLLS BAND TOGETHER will do pretty good.

Only one Disney animated release came about this year so far, Pixar's ELEMENTAL, which opened terribly (worst opening for a Pixar film, an opening on par with what TOY STORY collected in 1995 dollars)... But it's legging it up something fierce, it's sure to get the coveted 4x multiplier. Combine that with the "A" CinemaScore grade, and it's pretty clear that audiences quite dig the picture, despite what some weirdos are insisting. That Pixar has "lost its touch" or whatever, even though people have been saying that since the early 2010s. Disney's not going to send it straight to Disney+ just yet, they're gonna try to keep this thing spinning in theaters from the looks of it, hoping those classic Pixar legs keep it afloat while everything else comes and goes. It weathered INDIANA JONES and RUBY GILLMAN just fine, I'm sure it'll still hang on when BARBIE lands. Traditionally, Pixar gives their summer animated movies a Labor Day weekend bump, so I expect ELEMENTAL to be around till at least the end of September.

Disney botched this one, marketing-wise. The trailers were basically "Here's the premise, here's some gags, please clap." No hint of its actually solid and nuanced immigrant story, surprisingly light on the romance, too. Apparently that's cooties for the boy audience that they "should" be marketing to. Meanwhile, they're hyping up WISH as this story that's "a century in the making" and they seem to be pushing it as this definitive origin story of all Disney animated classics... Like, is it really that hard to tell audiences "hey, look at how cool our painterly fantasy musical is"? I guess it's a step up from how they just showed us STRANGE WORLD with no enthusiasm, and called it a day.

Sony is perhaps the real star here. SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE is their first fully theatrically-released animated movie since... THE ANGRY BIRDS MOVIE 2, all the way back in fall 2019... MITCHELLS VS. THE MACHINES, VIVO, WISH DRAGON... All went straight to streaming. HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 4 had a limited run in select theaters, but was largely a streaming-only release... So yeah, SPIDER-VERSE Deux marks their return to theaters after a four-year hiatus, and as expected, the sequel to the sleeper hit superhero movie is doing fantastically. Landed among the biggest openers for an animated movie, and legs-wise it's doing quite fine, passing $350m here. Looks to be the 2nd highest-earning animated movie of the post-outbreak era domestically, toppling MINIONS 2. Worldwide it did quite well for itself, too, as it inches towards $700m and is Sony Animation's highest-earning movie. Wowee! It's their only release this year.

The Top 10 highest-earning animated movies of the post-outbreak era, domestically, are largely Universal and Disney releases. One Sony release - again, SPIDER-VERSE Dos - and one Warner Bros. release, DC LEAGUE OF SUPER-PETS. So for all of Disney's financial woes, they're still up in the top slots with Universal. ENCANTO, LIGHTYEAR, and ELEMENTAL all landed above $90m domestically, so they're kinda doing something right, the idea of the movies being free on Disney+ be damned. They're now trying to un-train the audience of what Chapek/Kareem Daniels' Disney - and just the market in general - conditioned them into thinking, which is easier said than done.

So while box office has been back for the most part, we're in an era where the market itself and the amount of money being spent on these movies (near $300m for INDIANA JONES 5... Just... Why?) is creating a system that is just sooooo not conducive to the individual movies. The game should be rewritten, but you know how capitalism and Hollywood go... The collapse of a ton of different movies this summer just won't make the money people see sense, apparently...

Nestled in-between these biggies was Crunchyroll's release of SUZUME, which pulled in $10m, not the best for this kind of anime feature release, but still solid enough. A new DEMON SLAYER feature that was composed of a few episodes of the new season did its job, and a few other anime feature releases. Then you had THE AMAZING MAURICE and RALLY ROAD RACERS, released by Viva Kids (what is this company again?), the former only pulling in about $4m-ish here and the latter... I don't even know. At my theater, there was one seat - in the front row - purchased for every screening throughout the week. Can you say... Money laundering? One of these movies was a British picture, an adaptation of Terry Pratchett that went straight to streaming there... And the other was a Vanguard movie, who somehow keep making movies despite most of them not making back their budgets. That's SHREK producer John H. Williams' venture, they did VALIANT, HAPPILY N'EVER AFTER, SPACE CHIMPS, a pair of movies that almost went to theaters in the U.S. (GNOME ALONE and CHARMED) but ended up quietly debuting on streaming long after completion, and... I've lost track, GET SQUIRRELY I believe was another one?

What remains?

The highly-anticipated MUTANT MAYHEM, which could very well be a SPIDER-VERSE-esque box office sleeper for the ever-lasting world of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, bows next month. I'd imagine, because the picture was animated at Mikros, that it didn't cost too much to make. Paramount Animation has been in need of a real box office hit for a looooong while, something that isn't a SpongeBob movie, and this one might just be it.

I expect PAW PATROL 2 - also from Paramount - to play like the first one, something for the kiddies and the preschool crowd, and it makes enough to cover whatever it cost to make it.

TROLLS WORLD TOUR should open fine enough and leg it fine enough, despite WISH opening right next to it. Well, five days later, but still... It should move up a few weeks, I think. Above $80m domestically seems about right to me, $200m+ worldwide. It probably cost less than $100m to make.

WISH likely cost over $150m to make, typical of a Disney Animation film. If the marketing really gets audiences to want to shell out plenty of bucks to see it, then I expect it to perform similarly to other Thanksgiving-release Disney animated movies of the 2010s. TANGLED and MOANA being my references, because FROZEN was its own beast. Solid opening over the holiday frame, fantastic legs, and next to no competition for the rest of the season. No STAR WARS or Marvel movie opening at Christmastime, no AVATAR sequel, the only real competition being... I dunno, that Timothee Chalamet WONKA movie that Warner has coming out? I think it'll do fine. I can see it opening with around $40m for the three-day, Thanksgiving boosts it, then it goes past $150-180m domestically. Maybe even higher, if this musical - which seems engineered in every way to hit the beats of what audiences associate with a "Disney movie" - really resonates with audiences. Heck, Disney could put in the next trailer "In Theaters Only. On Disney+ in fall 2024!" Tell 'em, yeah, you're gonna have to wait to see it for free!

May they all do well...

[h-worksrambles]

One counter-argument I’ve always had when characters in popular franchises get labelled as ‘overpowered’ or a ‘Mary-Sue’,/‘Gary Stu’ is that a character being overpowered is not inherently a bad thing if you make that the point of the story.

Take One Punch Man for instance. Saitama is straight up too powerful to lose a fight. Every action scene with him is a curbstomp. He can’t be physically challenged. But that IS the conflict, that Saitama is bored with always winning and desperate for one good fight (plus this story is a comedy so him decimating villains in seconds is treated as joke). That crazy level of strength is the source of his ennui and dissatisfaction. And the fact that no one takes him seriously despite that level of power just further feeds into that. Likewise, Mob Psycho 100 is by the same mangeka as One Punch Man and does a great job with the idea of: ‘you can have all the power in the world and it won’t fix your emotional problems’. Mob is encouraged by Reigen not to treat his powers as a substitute for self improvement, a lesson even more pertinent during adolescence, that period of figuring out who you are. Shigeo learns that his powers, while he certainly needn’t be ashamed of them, also do not, and should not, define him.

Or, if I may indulge as a Classics grad, take Achilles in the Iliad, a character who is literally invincible to the point that weapons bounce off him. There, the conflict of the story isn’t a physical one, because it can’t be. It’s about how Achilles’ almost god like level of power (combined with the fact that he’s just generally kind of a shitty person) others him from the people around him. His stature as an invincible hero draws a line between him and the army. By the end of the poem, he establishes himself firmly as the most powerful warrior by killing Hector. But that power and glory won’t bring back Patroclus, the only person he ever really connected with.

This also why Sword Art Online Abridged works and the original doesn’t. What the original SAO was going for was having a main character who was incredibly skilled at the game, but had zero social skills, which naturally is only going to get you so far in an MMO. So the intent is clearly that, while he dispatches enemies with ease, his actual character arc is about learning to open up and work with others, with the romance with Asuna being the culmination of that. Problem is that the show forgets Kirito’s social issues very early on, and not in a way that feels like authentic development. By the fourth episode, he’s just hanging out with people, helping whichever new marketable anime girl he comes across, and we’re just left to assume he outgrew his flaws during the time skip. Without those flaws he just becomes boring OP harem fodder. Abridged doubled down on the poor social skills thing by making him in a complete asshole, which makes for good comedy and gives him plenty of room to grow. It puts power in the hands of someone utterly unworthy of it, which is peak comedy of errors. But it also commits to giving him a long, substantial journey to overcome that. And it makes the whole story, including the romance, feel so much more earned.

Basically the topic of ‘overpowered protagonists’ is one I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. Not every conflict needs to be physical. If you can write good enough emotional conflicts to make up for the lack of a physical one, then by all means make your character as absurdly powerful as you want. Demonstrate that those powers can be both a blessing and a curse, and that the ability to shoot lasers from your eyes is no substitute for proper self reflection.

[billconrad]

Entering The Metaverse

    There have been many popular entertainment themes over the years. In the early 50s, westerns wrangled the top, and science fiction mind-controlled the late 50s. Romance books loved the 70s and 80s took a circuit into cyberspace. Vampires sink their fangs into the 00s, and zombies slobbered the 10s.

    Now, the Metaverse has slid into first place. The concept is that an infinite number of parallel universes exist, and one can “jump” from one to the other using a scientific device or supernatural powers.

    Fiction writers invented this idea in the 50s, and I recall the episode of the original Star Trek where the crew jumped into the evil universe. “Mirror, Mirror” (TOS, Season 2, Episode 4)

    The Metaverse is a great plot tool because writers can explore every conceivable difference. Animals instead of people? Animated characters? Different genders? Those big differences are easy for the reader or viewer to grasp.

    Many recent movies have explored the Metaverse, and a great example is Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. In the movie (spoiler alert) the lead character (Spider-Man) travels to multiple dimensions to fight evil.

    The enormous advantage is that there are infinite possibilities, and it is fun to keep readers or the audience guessing. Another advantage is that the multi-universe theory explains the difference. For example, superpowers are impossible in our universe, so humans cannot lift a train like Superman. In the Multiverse, it is possible because that universe has different physics rules. Therefore, the writer does not have to spend excessive time explaining the differences. “In Multiverse 293, the people are farm animals.” “In Multiverse 293, there is no sound.” Big changes are both fun and easy to grasp.

    The Multiverse has endless possibilities, and I think it will be at the forefront of entertainment for at least two more years. What is the next big theme after people get bored of the Multiverse? Are Westerns returning? Telepathy? Artificial Intelligence? More comic book characters?

    I have two guesses about the next big plot device. Steam Punk is a Victorian era with advanced period correct (steam) technology. This setting has a lot of space to explore and is visually stunning.

    I think we are going to jump deep into Artificial Intelligence plots. The plots might include characters developed with AI, animated with AI, or written by AI. Perhaps this might be an average person who had their job replaced by AI or a child taught by an AI teacher instead of a human.

    Where are the werewolf stories? It’s only natural to go vampire, zombie, werewolf, and we are due for this change.

    There is still room to explore in the Metaverse; it will always be a great plot tool. I hope they do not overuse it like the gun duels in Western movies. But considering the infinite number of Metaverse possibilities, there are endless plot possibilities. Or we could go to a universe where there are no plots.

    You’re the best -Bill

    July 19, 2023

    Hey book lovers, I published four. Please check them out:

    Interviewing Immortality. A dramatic first-person psychological thriller that weaves a tale of intrigue, suspense, and self-confrontation.

    Pushed to the Edge of Survival. A drama, romance, and science fiction story about two unlikely people surviving a shipwreck and living with the consequences.

    Cable Ties. A slow-burn political thriller that reflects the realities of modern intelligence, law enforcement, department cooperation, and international politics.

    Saving Immortality. Continuing in the first-person psychological thriller genre, James Kimble searches for his former captor to answer his life’s questions.     These books are available in soft-cover on Amazon and eBook format everywhere.

[extreme-investor-network]

Disney stock soars after Bob Iger returns as CEO

Wall Street seems to love this comeback story. Disney (DIS) stock soared early Monday, rising as much as 9% in early trading, after the media giant announced that former CEO Bob Iger will return to lead the company as its chief executive officer, effective immediately. Iger replaces Bob Chapek, who has stepped down from his position after less than three years on the job. Wall Street analysts, at first glance, appear optimistic the decision will improve the fortunes for a stock that has lagged the market during Chapek's tenure. Wells Fargo's Steve Cahall wrote in a note to investors that "while Chapek's departure is not a surprise due to recent turmoil and the stock's decline, Iger's resurgence is a positive surprise." "Iger will be viewed as a catalyst to improve the content aspects of DIS, and we expect bigger potential strategic changes around the long-term shape of ," Cahall continued. "While the announcement doesn't solve all of Disney's problems, we think investors will embrace it as it puts perhaps the best leader in Media at the helm with a mandate to shake things up." Needham's Laura Martin added Iger's return aids shareholder value, noting his calming leadership style and ability to handle difficult external issues, such as Florida's "Don't Say Gay" fallout, will prove beneficial when it comes to maintaining and attracting talent. Furthermore, Martin argued Iger will reestablish profit accountability, moderate streaming losses at a faster pace, and aid Disney's ability to negotiate deals and partnerships. Iger spent more than four decades at Disney, including 15 years as CEO. According to the company, Iger will serve as CEO for two years, with a mandate from the Board to "set the strategic direction for renewed growth and to work closely with the Board in developing a successor to lead the Company at the completion of his term." "The Board has concluded that as Disney embarks on an increasingly complex period of industry transformation, Bob Iger is uniquely situated to lead the Company through this pivotal period," Susan Arnold, Disney's chairman of the board, said in a press release. The news comes just months after Disney's board of directors unanimously voted in June to extend Chapek's contract for another three years, through 2025. At the time, the board noted Chapek's leadership was essential in helping the company overcome pandemic headwinds. Nevertheless, his tenure has been riddled in controversy — from political battles and A-list talent problems to controversial reorganizations and the ever-looming shadow of Iger, who has spoken out against some of Chapek's decisions. Since Chapek took over as Disney CEO in late February 2020, Disney shares are down about 19%; the S&P 500 is up around 34% over that same period. Disney underperformed the S&P 500 by a wide margin during former CEO Bob Chapek's tenure. (Source: Yahoo Finance) "I am extremely optimistic for the future of this great company and thrilled to be asked by the Board to return as its CEO," Iger said in the release. "Disney and its incomparable brands and franchises hold a special place in the hearts of so many people around the globe—most especially in the hearts of our employees, whose dedication to this company and its mission is an inspiration," he added. "I am deeply honored to be asked to again lead this remarkable team, with a clear mission focused on creative excellence to inspire generations through unrivaled, bold storytelling." Original Article Here: Read the full article

[kitspindles]

Okay

The whole “Ingo has a receding hairline” thing has been, like, beaten to death by this point so I’m not gonna address that fullly. I for one don’t mind. However. Understandably, as a result of the hair reveal, people want to know when he got eeby-deebied into Hisui (immediately after the events of BW and BW2? A few years later?), and how long he’s actually been there (a few months? A year? Over a decade?). Everyone has been talking about it ever since the art book page was shown, and a lot of people have brought up really good points-- aaaand some people are just off the fucking tracks about it. So I’m just putting together what I’ve heard and what I’ve noticed myself. Here we go. Speculation for why Ingo has NOT been in Hisui for 10+ years:

1). Based on their appearances alone, we’re lead to believe that the player character is Dawn/Lucas from DPPt, but a couple years down the line. They’re not 10 like they were in Diamond and Pearl: Cyllene says right away that they’re “around 15 or so.” So right away we can assume that the events of Legends Arceus occur shortly after BW2 (which is set roughly 3 years after DPPt and 2 years after BW).

2). When characters like Irida mention Ingo and his origins, they talk about it as if it’s a more recent occurrence. If it had been 10+ years the dialogue would most likely come across differently to imply that he appeared in Hisui some time ago. Heck, they might even bring it up if that were the case-- yet we don’t see anyone saying “long ago” or “some number of years ago” in reference to Ingo spawning in. But again, see point one: if we’re to believe that the player character is Dawn/Lucas, who is said to only be 15, then the 10+ years timeline just doesn’t line up.

3). This one might be a toss away, but it’s been said before elsewhere so I’ll just throw it in: the art book states “XX years” or something like that which is ultimately what led people to believe that it’s been 10+ years since Ingo dropped in Hisui. Fair assumption. However, Xs are almost always used to state a vague and unspecified year (obviously) because people don’t want to date their concept in real world measurements, or they simply just don’t have an exact time period set. And given that this is a Pokémon game where the years and flow of time for the whole series is outside our own, we can assume that they’ve done the same here. Also, XX is arguably more visibly pleasing than just putting X. I mean, it just looks weird imo. I wouldn’t put much stock in any years or dates that Pokémon throws out.

4). Ingo’s memories. Yeah, we’re the main character and everything so it’s our job as the player character to go around helping people and progressing the story blah blah. But if Ingo had been in Hisui for 10+ years one would think he would’ve recovered some memories by now, right? I mean, all it took was him walking through the cave with us and having a Pokémon battle to jog some things loose-- surely he’s done both of those things numerous times before our arrival? It makes more sense that he’s only been in Hisui for maybe a year, maybe a couple months, and he’s only just now beginning to think about his past more since his memories obviously aren’t returning smoothly on their own.

5). The receding hairline from the book. I’ll just say it here: it’s not a bad thing if it’s canon-- men lose their hair, lol. That’s life. Even video game life. And Ingo has to be at least in his early to mid 30s (like in BW the Subway Bosses never came across to me as, like, super young or anything. Late 20s, early 30s for sure there). However, as some people have pointed out before, some of the things pictured in the artbook don’t exactly line up with what’s in the game. For instance, the picture of Ingo face down on the ground by the clan member doesn’t line up with what he and Irida say in the game (correct me if I’m wrong on this, though. I’ve seen it said by a lot of other posts). So it’s entirely possible the hairline is false (if you care about this. I don’t really. It adds character. And anyway, he always has his hat on so we never see it to know. Some people on Tumblr are just thirsty for twink men with a full head of hair or something like that). Anyway, it’s concept art. It’s job is to pan things out and plan, but not necessarily everything is set in stone. I think people are seeing the receding hairline and assuming this means Ingo is, like, old now. But who knows? I don’t think we’ve never seen his or Emmett’s hair before this. And I believe it’s the first time we’ve gotten a more detailed art page about one of them? Maybe it’s always been this way.

6). Again I make mention of point one. Because if we’re really to assume that the player character is the same one from DPPt but older (and I mean c’mon, with their appearances they just have to be), then there’s really just no feasible way for Ingo to have been in Hisui for more than 10 years. BW takes place about a year after DPPt at most. BW2 takes place, canonically, stated in game, two years after BW. And Ingo was still in BW2 (ignoring the fact that this game came out like 10 years ago and they had no notion of Arceus then, okay). So it’s safe to assume that Ingo fell sometime after the events of BW2. Say about a year or so after that. Two at most. Because that would land Dawn/Lucas at roughly 15, their given age in Arceus when they fall through the rift.

7). Grimsley. Remember him? He looked pretty young in BW, BW2. But then cut to Sun and Moon-- he was there on the beach right before Po Town, and boy did he look rough. Yet only about 2-3 years had passed since the events of BW, as stated in the game. So if we follow this logic, a lot can apparently happen to a person in two years. Ingo looks so disgruntled compared to his former art from BW and BW2, but so would we all if we had gone from living in modern day Unova to suddenly being dropped into a late 1800s era Sinnoh without any of our usual modern care products (probably why he has a cool little goatee now. Not enough opportunities to shave regularly) and constant stress and threats from a hostile world. This being said, he doesn’t look that much different from his og art, just really tired. He’s the epitome of “I don’t look older, I just look worse.”

8). Volo. Okay, so I’m sure we’re all aware by now that it’s Volo’s fault that Ingo is even in Hisui to begin with, not Arceus’s. As a direct result of him meddling with space-time and trying to get Girantina, the rift opened (and ultimately led to all of those smaller rifts/distortions that open up across Hisui from time to time where modern Pokémon and items are found). And this is all a recent development in the last year or so, as stated in game. As Laventon tells us, Jubilife Village has only existed for two years, and the big rift wasn’t there when they settled-- would you settle so close to a big disaster just waiting to happen? Probably not. especially not Komado, either. Like we learn in-game, he wants no issues-- he tells us about all his hardships in another land. The whole reason why they moved to Hisui and built a new village to begin with. In short, the rifts have only been cropping up in the last few months to a year in game, and we know that’s how Ingo got here. So it couldn’t be that he’s been around for 10+ years if the rifts are a fairly new development.

9). There’s just no way that Gamefreak would separate Ingo and Emmett like that, for so long, with no clear reason or wrap-up.

10). His shoes and dress pants from Unova are still intact. They for sure wouldn’t be after 10 years, especially walking around in Hisui. His coat and hat are actually more beat up than anything else, but still wearable and identifiable as his old uniform. Probably from his spin through time-space and just Pokémon battles and the climate in general. But also, they had to make him look disgruntled somehow but still be Ingo— and Ingo isn’t Ingo without his jacket and cap.

Did any of this make sense? Probably not. Did anyone read this far? Also no. I just really don’t believe that he’s been in Hisui for longer than a year based on a lot of in-game stuff and just based on what the games have done in the past with characters. In reality we just don’t know yet. I could be totally wrong! But until we get more DLC for Arceus, or until another Pokémon game comes out that makes mention of it, we just won’t have any clear answers about Ingo’s time in Hisui.

[inorganicone2230]

Halloween Special: The Whispering Darkness (Prologue) Yandere!Kai x Fem!Reader

Part 1

Summary: The year is 1799 and and you have just recently being hired by the prominent and well-to-do Kai Chisaki to serve as the governess for his young daughter, Eri, in the small town of Sleepy Hollow. All seems to be going well as you grow close to your newest charge, but as her father’s seemingly innocent curiosity in you begins to grow darker and darker; bordering on what seems to be a sick obsession, and rumors of ghostly hauntings and grisly murders plague the small town you now call home, you can’t help but feel a creeping sense of dread crawl up your spine as you wonder what secrets are being kept in the whispering darkness all around you.

Warnings: Not many for this chapter, but there are some points and actions that delve into Kai’s darker mindset and showcases his tendency for controlling others and his obsessive nature.

Side Note’s: Just a few quick things to help give you an idea as to how this AU’s world is set up. So first off, there are no quirks in this world and while I am aware that all the characters except for the Reader are canonically Japanese, This story will be getting based in the United States at the same time as the original Sleepy Hollow short story took place, so please be kind and try to remember that this is a fanfic and and don’t take any of the historical inaccuracies too seriously.

Dear Ms. (Y/N) (L/N), we would like to inform you that your application for the position of Governess to the Chisaki household has been carefully reviewed and your qualifications found to be of exceedingly high quality. As such, we would like you to come for a probationary period of three months that, if found sufficient, will be extended for up to a year or more.

Your duties will include, but are not limited to; the care and early education of our Lord’s young daughter Eri. She has albinism and therefore keeps to a strict evening schedule as per her father’s instruction, this will require you to come in the evenings rather than during the daytime hours.

You will of course be compensated with a small salary for your troubles and lodgings will be provided for you in the local inn. As the estate is a good distance outside of the town, transportation to and from the inn will be provided as well.

Please respond at your earliest convenience so that we may begin preparations for your arrival, any questions or concerns you may have will be taken into account upon that time. Should you find this offer and it’s conditions to your liking, we expect to see you in exactly one months time on the 1st of October.

Best regards, Hari Kurono, Head Steward of the Chisaki estate.

—————

The letter came early this morning in a pristine white envelope with a purple wax seal in the shape of an eight pointed flower that you instantly recognized as the family crest of the Chisaki household. An old and prominent family whose residence was located in the Hudson Highlands, on the outskirts of a small town called Sleepy Hollow.

As a young governess whose most current charge had recently been sent off to a private boarding school, you were now in need of a new job and source of income to provide for yourself. You had considered the possibility of trying for a position as a teacher at one of the local young ladies academy’s, but as it currently stood, none were looking for new blood to add to their rosters. So when the mother of the boy you had been teaching for the last few years told you of this position and encouraged you to send in your resume, you thought it the perfect opportunity. The list of qualifications needed to be considered were quite high, but you had been confident that whoever looked it over would not find you lacking in any way.

And as you were currently holding the letter of approval in your hands, it seemed your confidence in yourself was well placed.

Having grown up in New York your entire life, the thought of getting to spend some time out in the countryside, even if it was for work, was going to be a nice change of scenery. Your new nighttime routine would take some getting used to, but you were positive that a few late nights and early morning bedtimes would get you onto the right track in no time. The young girl who you would soon be teaching was another matter entirely though as you had no idea what to expect from her condition. You had once seen an albino lion while visiting a traveling animal menagerie as an adolescent and you remembered how it’s red eyes had been so striking against the pale of its fur, but beyond the knowledge of what her appearance may entail, you had no other knowledge as to what to expect.

You were certain that her parents and other members of the household could and would give you all the information you’d need to properly care for and look after her, but perhaps it would be prudent for you to take the initiative and find a medical text and read up on it. At least that would give you an idea as to what you were getting into once you did arrive, and it would have the second benefit of showing your new employer your dedication and willingness to adapt to your new role as they’re daughter’s instructor.

Pleased with your decision on where to begin, you stood and began reaching for your cloak, fully intent on leaving the house for a bit to go and look for such a book in one of the local shops. But a knock at your door stopped you in your tracks and upon hearing the voice of one of your employer’s, the lady of the house, you rushed to greet her.

She gave you a warm smile as you stepped aside to allow her entry into your small space and she immediately took note of the letter sitting at your writing desk. “I see they wasted no time in replying.” Here she sat demurely on the edge of your bed. “And based on the smile you’re wearing, am I to assume the answer was to your liking?”

“Yes, My Lady.” You said with a small curtsy. “They want me there by the first of next month.” You said, handing her the letter to inspect herself and you watched as she lifted an eyebrow up in surprise. “So you’ll be going there in the evenings and staying at the town's local inn instead of boarding in the home? That is rather odd.”

You nodded in agreement. It was rather peculiar, considering a governess was usually considered to be part of the household staff and was thus housed there like any other servant.

“The letter does state that the first three months is just a probationary period, so perhaps that will change if they find it suitable to extend my contract.” You suggested.

The Lady nodded in agreement. “That does make sense.” Then she set the letter down and looked at your perfectly made bed. “Knowing your tendency for planning ahead I assume you’ll be trying to get yourself on a new sleeping schedule right away, so I will make sure to tell the other servants to leave you be during the mornings and early afternoon hours so you can sleep in peace.”

You smiled and thanked her profusely. The kindness you had been shown in the three years since coming here was beyond anything you could have hoped for and you knew that you would be shedding more than a few tears when the time finally came for you to say goodbye. The Lord and Lady of the house had treated you like family once they saw how quickly their son had taken to you and though some may have seen it as improper, they didn’t seem to hold onto that same train of thought. They paid their household staff double what others would have, and as long as one did their job properly and faithfully, then they would be handsomely rewarded and looked after.

You could only hope that your time with the Chisaki household, no matter how short or long it may be, would be even half as pleasant as your time here.

—————

Making his way up to the third story of the house, Hari was intent on informing his Lord of the impending arrival of his daughter’s new governess.

When Kai had first tasked him with the responsibility of finding his exceedingly bright daughter a formal instructor, Hari had at first looked into possibilities from the local population of Sleepy Hollow, but soon found that he would need to look at hiring from elsewhere. None in the quiet town were qualified to teach and instruct such a fast learning child like Eri and Hari was determined to find the best for the young girl.

She was the apple of her father’s eye and anyone working in the household would be hard pressed not to admit that she had Kai and everyone else there wrapped around her finger. Sickly though she was, she almost always had a smile on her face, and while Kai had worried that she’d eventually grow resentful of the isolated life he made her lead, so far she seemed perfectly content and had yet to start asking questions about why there were no other children around the house or why she was never allowed to leave the estate. Despite only being eight years of age though, she seemed to grasp early on that these decisions Kai made for her were in her best interest and she sometimes understood the limitations her condition placed on her even better than the adults in her life.

So when the applications had started arriving, Hari was determined to go over them with a fine tooth comb to find the best possible candidate for the position, and while many of them had excellent qualifications, they just weren’t outstanding enough. Then, just as he was beginning to think that he might need to widen his search, your application had come to him along with a positively glowing letter of recommendation from one of Kai’s business associates. It was clear they thought very highly of you and after going over your resume and educational history, he could clearly see why. After that, it had taken him no time at all to come to his decision that, of everyone who had applied, you were the best and most qualified.

The only thing left to be determined is whether you could properly bond with Eri.

Eri may have been very energetic and comfortable around those in the household staff, but much of that was because she had grown up around them. She was still quite shy and painfully nervous around strangers, which was why Kai rarely ever had company over or hired new staff, so while you may have been qualified to teach her, your biggest test would be whether you could bond with her or not. Because no matter how good a teacher you may be, he and Kai would never keep someone around that was not a benefit to Eri’s emotional growth.

Having reached the large and ornately carved oak door of Kai’s study, Hari gave three solid knocks and waited to receive permission to enter.

The knob turned silently and upon entering the large space, Hari was greeted with the familiar sight of Kai seated at his desk going over paperwork and the like. Despite it being late in the afternoon, the thick and heavy curtains were drawn and a warm fire was lit in the large hearth with plenty of candles spaced around the room to help provide extra light. Not that this came as much of a shock when Hari looked over at the sofa near Kai’s desk and spotted a familiar head of white hair poking out from underneath a heavy quilt. Like any child, Eri had the occasional nightmare and was prone to seeking out her father for comfort and support, something that he was always more than happy to provide for his little girl.

“Was there something you needed Hari?” Kai quietly asked without ever looking up from his work so as not to wake his daughter.

Hari gave a slight bow at the waist. “Nothing of the utmost importance My Lord, I simply wished to inform you that I just received the letter of acceptance from Eri’s new governess. She should be here by the end of the month.”

Since this matter concerned the care and well-being of his most prized possession, Kai thought it prudent to set aside his paperwork for the moment and give his steward his full attention. “And you’re positive that this woman is the best choice for my Eri?” Kai asked, his rare golden eyes nearly glowing in the flickering flames as they softened while looking at his daughter, and though the ornately gilded plague mask covered the lower half of his face, Hari was certain that his young Lord was smiling as he always did when looking at her.

“I’m positive Sir. She has an excellent educational background and a perfectly unblemished social record based on everything I was able to find out. And based on what I read in her letter of recommendation from her current employer’s, she’s excellent with young children’s well.”

Kai nodded, pleased with Hari’s response as he felt like nothing was too good for his precious little girl. 

As an adopted son of the Chisaki family that had been taken in off the streets by the previous head of the family, Kai knew what it was like to go without even life’s most basic requirements and he wanted Eri never want for anything in her life. He wanted her to have the best of everything he could offer her.

When his adopted father, Pops, as he was so fond of being called, had made mentions of seeing him married to his only daughter before his death, Kai had agreed without a second thought. He owed the man his very life and if this would make him happy he would do it gladly. He passed away only a few months after the wedding and the announcement that his daughter was pregnant with his first grandchild, he died with a smile on his face and that was enough for Kai.

His marriage had been a loveless one born out of duty and family obligation, and the two rarely ever spoke or got along, but the one thing they had agreed on was keeping things civil for Pops’ sake and soon after, for their child as well. But as her pregnancy wore on and she grew weaker and weaker, it became plainly obvious that she likely would not survive the birth of their child. She came to terms with her impending death so easily that Kai often wondered if she was actually happy for it. She was always a melancholy individual and Kai suspected that the only things preventing her from taking her own life had been her love for her father, and her deep abiding faith in the church.

At first, Kai had been rather apathetic towards the idea of becoming a father and though he fully intended to be as good a parent as he could be, it was always more out of a feeling of obligation then it was a genuine desire to be one.

That all changed though the moment he held Eri in his arms for the first time. 

She had been so small, even for a newborn, and as she looked up at him with those pink little eyes full of trust and reached out her tiny hand to him, he knew that he would do anything for her. She became his whole world in that one moment and when the doctors had told him of her rare condition and how it would affect her health as she grew older, he vowed to learn everything he could about her albinism so as to provide her with the best quality of life that he could give her, he would allow nothing to take her from him, not even her own body’s weakness.

 So far, she had grown up happy and safe for all eight years of her life and Kai fully intended for her to live a great many more. Here recently though, Eri had started to ask about her mother. What she had been like, did she look like her, did he think that she would be proud of her and love her? Kai hated to admit it, but he honestly barely remembered his late wife and though he hated to lie to her, he couldn’t help but tell Eri the things he knew would make her the happiest. It was obvious that his daughter was beginning to crave the affections of a maternal figure and so he had set Hari with the task of finding an appropriate governess to not only aid Eri in her education, but to also provide her with the female companionship she was so in need of during these formative years of her life.

But bringing in an outsider came with it’s own set of risks and Kai and Hari both knew that they would have to make sure to be extra cautious over the next few months to make sure that nothing went wrong.

Sleepy Hollow was a town full of secrets that many saw fit to keep buried in the darkness of the past, even if those secrets sometimes had a mind of their own and refused to stay buried.

“We’ll need to make sure that no one in town will go around mentioning things they shouldn’t to our newest resident once she arrives.” Hari said, thinking out loud. “Shall I send a message to be delivered around the town, or would you prefer to do it yourself?”

Both their gazes shifted to the iron lock-box sitting to the side of Kai’s desk and both men knew that, while Hari’s way would be more subtle, Kai’s method would deliver a far more purposeful and tangible warning to the God-fearing peasantry of the little town.

It had been some time since Kai had reminded the villagers of who the real authority was in this little slice of the isolated countryside, and though they had done nothing to warrant it, he still felt it was best not to let things get out of hand. Someone was bound to let a rumor or two slip otherwise and Kai would rather avoid having to cover up any needless messes. Best to just nip the problem in the bud before it even had a chance to sprout, he thought.

“No.” Kai responded, a twisted smile forming on his lips behind his mask. “I think I shall have it handled my way this time.”

I hope you all enjoy my creepy little yandere take on this classic spooky tale, so please let me know what you thought of it in a message, comment or an ask.

And as always, I want to give a BIG thank you to my amazing friend @talpup  for all the brainstorming and encouragement on these stories! I’m sure I  would have given up on this blog a while ago if it wasn’t for all of  their help. I highly encourage anyone who takes the time to read this to  go over to their page or their AO3 account under the same name and  check out their works, especially Chaos and Erase The Shadow. They are  two of my favorite BNHA fics of ALL TIME!

[felassan]

Dragon Age development insights from David Gaider - PART 1

This information came from DG on a recent SummerfallStudios Twitch stream where he gave developer commentary while Liam Esler played DAO, specifically the mage Origin. I transcribed it in case there’s anyone who can’t watch the stream (for example due to connection/tech limitations, data, time constraints, or personal accessibility reasons). A lot of it is centered on DAO, but there’s also insights into DA2 and DAI. Some of it is info which is known having been out there already, some of it is new, and all of it imo was really interesting! It leaps from topic to topic as it’s a transcript of a conversational format. It’s under a cut due to length.

Note on how future streams in this series are going to work: The streams are going to be every Friday night. Most likely, every week, they’re going to play DAO. Every second week it will be Liam and DG and they’ll be doing more of this developer commentary style/way of doing things, talking about how the game was made as they play through, covering quirks and quibbles etc. Every other week, it will be Liam and a guest playing a different campaign in DAO, and Liam will be talking with them about how DA changed their lives or led them into game development, to get other peoples’ thoughts on the series (as it’s now been like 10 years). Some of these guests we may know, some we won’t. When other DA devs are brought on, it’ll be in the DG sessions. They hope to have PW and Karin Weekes on at some point. Sometime they hope to have an episode where they spend the whole time going through the lore.

(Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6)

[wording and opinions DG’s, occasionally LE’s; paraphrased]

DAO’s development actually finished up around April 2009. They then put it on ice for around six months before release. Human Noble is DG’s favorite Origin. It’s one of the ones he wrote. He also wrote the Dalish Origin as well (Tamlen is his doing ;__;). DAO’s temp name during development was Chronicles. DG has never played any of the DA games after they were released. He played them pre-release loads of times, when they were half-broken or incomplete etc. This stream is his first time seeing everything played after completion.

NWN: Hordes of the Underdark was the first game where DG was a/the lead writer, in charge of other writers, as opposed to a senior writer. It was pretty well-received. In the fall of 2003, BW were just finishing up HotU when James Ohlen came to DG to talk. BW had been having issues during the development of NWN with the IP holder for D&D Wizards of the Coast, so they were interested in starting their own IPs that they would have ownership over (and also for financial reasons). JO said to DG that one of these new IPs would be fantasy and one would be sci-fi. He knew that DG was more fantasy-oriented, and so asked DG if he wanted to take this on. DG was down, and the first thing to figure out was what that fantasy IP was going to be.

JO gave DG an atlas of European history, which he still has, and said that he wanted him to make a fantasy world that is reminiscent of medieval Europe and reminiscent of D&D - “make it like D&D but not, file off the serial numbers really well”. This worked for DG because he was pretty familiar with D&D and there were also lots of things that he didn’t like about it and wanted to change. So DG went off and for the next six months worked on creating a setting, beginning with documentation and the map. This was kinda strange because they had no idea at that time what their story would be. JO was very interested in having a “genetically evil” enemy in the setting (like an equivalent to orcs). DG wasn’t a big fan of this and his initial go at the setting omitted this (i.e. darkspawn were not a thing) and was a lot more realistic. JO insisted on adding them later on.

This period of development wasn’t actually a good process. There were other people who were working on the project who were designing the combat side. Looking back, DG feels that they should have put their heads together a lot sooner. The combat designers had various ideas for various prestige classes and subclasses, and DG would be like “these are nowhere in the setting [lore]”. He tried his best to add a few of them after the fact, which is why we see things like DA’s version of the bard archetype. The combat designers and artists originally had a vision in mind of a game that was much more along the lines of the type of fantasy you’d find in the Conan the Barbarian world - bare-chested barbarians, sorceresses that show a lot of skin, a grimdark world with barbarian hordes. They were just assuming that’s what it was going to be. At this point in time DG had never thought, “Oh, maybe I’m responsible for communicating my ideas to them” - he’d never done this role before and was just told to go create the world. He created world-building documentation and would send out emails saying “I’m making this documentation, please go ahead and take a look”, not learning until later on that nobody outside of the writing team really likes reading such documentation. He learned tricks later on like making the docs more accessible, less dense and wordy, and overall easier to peruse.

There was no real ‘vision holder’ for DA. Mass Effect did a much better job of that. Casey Hudson was the project director and the vision holder for ME, and he had the power to enforce a set vision of what was and was not ME. ME therefore ended up having a bit more of a coherent vision. DG was in essence the vision holder for DA, but he didn’t really have the authority to enforce it on the artists. The DA teams ended up spending a good 3.5 - 4 years of the ~6 years of DAO dev time going in circles, not exactly sure what they were going to make, the various people working on it having different ideas of what ‘kind’ of fantasy they were going to make. The writing team were leaning towards LoTR; the artists were leaning towards Conan; at one point one of the project directors was leaning towards a point-and-click Diablo-style action adventure; and nobody was overriding anybody else.

The fans who hang out on the forums and in similar places have a very different idea about what kind of game they like and want to play versus the telemetry BW get from the public in general. As an example, fans on the forums tend towards playing non-humans and feeling that playing as a human is boring. Forum-polls reflected that, but BW’s general public-telemetry shows that around 75-80% of the playerbase played a human in DAO. Elves were at 15% and dwarves 5%. In contrast, in the core/forum-based fanbase, the human figure dropped down to 30%.

DG originally wanted Zevran to be a gay romance (he has talked about this before). He asked JO if he could do that pretty early on, thinking of Jade Empire which had same-gender romance options which were really popular. BW were surprised about that, and DG had no idea that the JE team were going to do this. For DAO, he had an idea for an assassin character. He had been reading about how the CIA and KGB would often recruit gay men to be their assassins, as they didn’t tend to have family ties. DG thought this was really interesting. JO was cool with the idea on a conceptual level, but thought that the work that would end up going into it would be better served if those characters could be romanced by both male and female PCs. Zevran and Leliana weren’t intended to be bi, they were “bi out of convenience”, but at the time these sorts of things (representation and such) didn’t enter into the equation as much as it does today. DG wrote Zevran in his head as being romanceable by men.

DG would ask the hair artists, “Why all the mullets?”, because he never understood that, and he’d get “a sort of shrug response”, and an indication that “it’s easier to model, I guess?” Having hair which is loose, in the face, in locks, coming over the shoulders etc wasn’t really supported at this point by the tech or the engine. Hence, they ended up with like five different versions of mullets. On the subject of the engine, for the first half of development they were using an upgraded version of the Aurora engine from NWN, and it was not good. Several years in they decided to switch. Trent Oster was in charge at the time of making a new proprietary BW engine. At the time it wasn’t ready yet, but the DA team decided to grab it, use it and hammer it into the DA engine. That engine had “so many little weird quirks”, like lighting on skin not working properly and looking bad, and one of the issues was hair. It was supposed to be BW’s proprietary engine but it really wasn’t optimized for RPGs and didn’t include a dialogue system. They had to custom-build the conversation system. (At the time Trent didn’t think BW should be doing RPGs anymore, which is a whole other story of its own). DG recalls programmers complaining about things in the engine that weren’t ready for ‘prime-time’. Even compared to games released concurrently, DAO’s graphics were a bit dated.

For the worldbuilding, they had an internal wiki and they kept everything on there. They ended up with a lot of legacy documentation on there very quickly. Eventually they solved this by hiring an editor whose sole job it was to wrangle the documentation. DG started work on the setting in the same manner in which he’d embark on starting a homebrew - ‘so like, first, here’s a map, oh, I like this name, vague ideas, a paragraph on each major nation, a rough timeline of the history, expanding, and it just growing from there’. After about six months, they brought on other writers, and by then he had around 50 pages of documentation. This 50 pages was a minute amount compared to the amount they had generated at the time of release. Originally, they weren’t sure where in the world specifically the story would take place, so DG made sure to seed potential and brewing conflicts throughout Thedas. They settled quite quickly on the new Blight starting in Ferelden. Once they established that, the writers went to town on taking Ferelden specifically and blowing it up detail-wise. Jennifer Hepler was in charge of the dwarves and Orzammar. Mary Kirby was on Fereldan customs and traditions.

The first version of the setting was more grounded in realism, almost like a post-fantasy. The dragons and griffons were extinct and a lot of the things that were thought to be fantastical were thought to be over with. During development, they started clawing these things back. They brought back dragons because the game was named Dragon Age (lol). DG was approached like, “Hey, we named the game DA, can you bring back dragons and weave them into the story more powerfully?” Wynne’s writer Sheryl Chee had a bit of an obsession with griffons and was often like ‘omg, griffons :D’, and this is the origin of Wynne’s dialogue with the Warden about griffons.

KotOR was the first time BW had tried to do a game that was fully voiced-over. For KotOR, BW sent the work of casting, direction and so on down to another studio in California called Technicolor. BW had little say in the process then and when they got it back, “it was what it was”. By the time they got to DA and the first ME, BW had a good system down for recording and VO had become an important thing in games at the time. BW are really one of the premieres for this, a lot of actors really like acting on BW games as they get a lot of space to act where they wouldn’t normally be able to do so otherwise. DG has learned a lot from Caroline Livingstone on how to encourage the best performance out of an actor. For DAO, DG worked together with the various lead designers and Caroline to decide on the auditions, casting etc. This was one of DG’s favorite things to do.

Gideon Emery as Fenris, GDL as Solas and Eve Myles as Merrill were times where DG had written the character and then went to Caroline and said “I have an actor in mind for them, can you check it out?” These were specific times where he was able to secure the actor he wanted. This didn’t always work out, for example there are times when actors aren’t interested or have no time due to scheduling conflicts or were too expensive etc. Eve and GDL were DG’s roommate Cori’s idea. Cori was a big fan of Torchwood/the actors from Torchwood, and worked as an editor at BW for a long time. Gideon was DG’s idea after playing FF12. For DAO, DG didn’t have any specific ideas in terms of actors. Casting Morrigan was the longest, most drawn out process.

The Circle went through a whooole process during worldbuilding. Initially, mages in the game weren’t supposed to have any “fighting magic”. The restrictions were originally such that in the lore, they didn’t teach mages that. Mages weren’t taught any magic that could kill people, only ‘indirect’ forms of magic that could support others. However, [during what sounds like] playtesting it was asked “Why can’t I cast a fireball? I just want to cast a fireball”, so the writers had to go back and rework how magic in the lore worked completely.

Flemeth was originally going to be voiced by Shohreh Aghdashloo, and she was totally on-board, but unfortunately because of DAO’s development delays, she was unable to attend the new recording time as she had a conflict in her schedule (she was filming House of Sand and Fog). Shoreh was quite disappointed about this and her family had been so excited that she was going to be in a video game. When the movie was finished, Shoreh came back to BW and let them know that she was still available, and this is how she ended up in ME2. For a while they were trying to find an actress with an accent that authentically mirrored Shoreh’s. Out of the blue around this time, Claudia Black’s agent sent BW an audition tape of her. At the time Claudia hadn’t done any games but wanted to get into it. The tape was of Claudia doing a beat poet rendition of Baby Got Back. DG still has this tape. DG was a big fan of Farscape and on listening to the tape, it clicked right away in his head that Claudia would be perfect for Morrigan.

The Fade ended up being a big irritation for the writers. They wanted the PC to be able to assume different forms and such while in there. A lot of this stuff proved too difficult for the combat designers to work out, and so it ended up getting changed a lot. They had a hard time coming up with gameplay that could work in the Fade. The mage Origin is DG’s least favorite of the Origin stories, as he’s really dubious about the Fade section in it. It didn’t work out like how they had pictured it in their heads. By the time they got to DAI, that’s when the Fade really looks like how the writers first described/envisioned it. By this point the artists were more keen to give it a more specific feel. DAO was made at a time when ‘brown is realistic’ was a prevailing thing in games dev.

The experience of a mage in the world isn’t represented or conveyed very well to the player when the player is a mage. The experience of the player when they’re playing a mage or have a mage in their party doesn’t really match up with how the world lore tells them how dangerous mages can be - for example, how they can lose control and so on, we never really have an example of a PC mage struggling with being taken over by a demon. This was originally supposed to be a subplot in DA2 for mage Hawkes, in one of the last cuts. In Act 2, mage Hawke was originally slowly being tricked by a demon in their head that they thought was real, only to realize at the last minute. Mouse the Pride demon in the mage Origin is the only time in the entire series that they really ever properly demonstrated how demons can fuck with [PC] mages. Also, PC templars were originally supposed to have a permanent lyrium addiction that they needed to ‘feed’, but this was scrapped as the system designers weren’t keen on it and felt that it was essentially handicapping the player. 

Mages were originally also not supposed to be able to deal with pure lyrium (it would ‘overload’ them). There is a plot where mage PCs run around touching lyrium nodes to refill their mana bars. On this DG was like “Wtf is this?” The designers said that it works, and DG said “but it flies in the face of the lore”. This instance is an example of how the DA team was working where the various departments (writers, artists, designers etc) all had their own ideas about how the game and its world would work and never overrode each other (see above). DG feels that DAO is a little contradictory in that way. It’s only after the game came out that a lot of the people on the team really “bought into” what they’d put forward. This got easier as they went on, with people involved buying then into the things that make Dragon Age, Dragon Age. At one point, not everyone on the team was even aware of those things.

DG relates that originally, they would ask the artists, “Ok, can we get a village?” and said village once created would be quite generic and non-specific to DA. The writers would try to relate how things are in the DA world and list things that would be found in a village like this specific to the DA world, and the artists either didn’t read it or had their own ideas (DG isn’t sure which), and nobody was around to tell them not to do that and that they should do it differently. Everyone having their own ideas like this is why we ended up getting something that is this sort of “cobbled together half-Conan half-LotR mish-mash”, and after a while this sort of became DA’s “thing”.

Initially, BW had concepts drawn up for a lot more different creatures. After they went in circles for those years and consequently ran out of time to do all the models, they had to cut these concepts down more and more. Demons were among the ones that were the first to go (this is why we have situations like a bereskarn as the Sloth Demon in the mage Origin). The original concepts for things like spirits of Valor and Sloth demons were really good. Early on, JO made a list of D&D creatures that he liked. He picked the ones that they were thinking of doing, sent them to DG and said to make a “DA version of this”. For example, D&D succubi essentially became Desire Demons. Desire Demons were originally patterned off Sandman, neither male nor female yet really alluring, acting more like a genie and trying to ferret out mortals’ inner desires (which are not necessarily sexual in nature), without being overtly sexual. The artists’ version came back and that was basically the model seen in-game. The writers were like “What is this, this is nothing like the description?” and the artists responded that on the list from JO, it was included, in that you had to click on “succubus” to get to the Desire Demon description, so they had just read “succubus” and done their version of a succubus. The artists did loads of great work, but this was one of the instances were DG was like “???” By then, it was too late to change it. The writers were able to encourage them to make Desire Demons a little more fearsome, so that made it in at least.

The mage Origin was one of the more contentious Origin stories. It had like 4 different versions written of it over time. It was often the case that BW would hire someone, and writing an Origin story was their first test. Three different writers came in and wrote a version of the mage Origin and those versions just didn’t work. Finally they passed it to Sheryl Chee and she wrote it. The Origins were the parts of the game in general that were written/rewritten the most often. There were several others that got written that they discarded. 

Duncan was slated for death from Day 1. When DG writes a story, the thing he does first is pick out the big emotional beats that he wants, such as deaths. He decides these ahead of time and the stuff in-between comes later and is more often changed. Oghren was also originally supposed to die, but this ended up getting cut. DG related a story of how Oghren came to be: At the time, there was a phase JO went through when he thought everything had a formula that it could be done by. One of these ‘creative forumulas’ was that all such IPs had a two-word name that they’re known by, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Dragonlance (being Dragon-Lance). This is how ‘DA’ and ‘ME’ came to be. One of the formulas he wanted to implement was how to distill the ‘comedy character’, like Minsc or HK-47. These characters were very popular with the fans and JO was certain that there was a way to figure this out to create one for DA. At the time, DG argued with him a lot about this. JO insisted it could be done. DG was originally supposed to write this character but ended up not doing so. JO came up with a list of comedic archetypes and had DG write a blurb about what kind of character each could be. These were then sent out to the team who voted on which was their favorite. This process eventually resulted in an archetype basically called ‘The Buffoon’ (think Homer Simpson or Peter Griffin, the kind of guy people laugh at because he’s such an oaf).

At this point ‘The Buffoon’ wasn’t named or made a dwarf yet. JO came to DG to write him, but DG said there was a problem which is that he hates this archetype. Homer and Peter are characters that he despises. DG is a professional writer, but this was comedy (outside of his areas of strength), and he felt the best he would be able to do is write a character who makes fun of this archetype and lampshade that. Comedy is something that has to come from within the writer. Oghren was given to someone else, and he ended up getting rewritten again anyway. By the time they were working on Awakening, DAO had not yet come out, and the assumption prior to the game going out was that Oghren was still going to be the most popular character from among the followers. The comedic character that ended up being the most popular along these lines was Alistair, which was interesting as he wasn’t intended as a comedic character, “so shows what we know”. DG was dubious that Oghren was going to be popular, because “he was kind of pathetic, honestly”, but that was the thinking at the time. Thinking he would be well-loved is why he was in Awakening.

On Alistair, any character DG writes is going to be sarcastic. At the time DG had made it a sort of personal challenge to recreate Joss Whedon’s dialogue patterns in his characters. Alistair was a sort of mish-mash of Xander from Buffy and maybe Mal from Firefly. DG wanted to see if he could do it, so Alistair was kind of quippy and self-deprecating. DG never really considered this to be Alistair’s main personality feature, but when other writers wrote him, they often had him doing this, as they liked the trait so much, and so this is how Alistair ended up as he did.

On dwarves, the dwarves being cut off from the Fade is very much baked into who the dwarves are as a race. There’s a specific reason why. This has been hinted at so far and it’s likely to come up in the future. DG had various ideas for some things that he wanted to include with the races or the way the world works etc. Some of them ended up never happening or some are mentioned only as part of the lore (templar lyrium addiction never coming up in gameplay is an example of this). Dwarven history and the nature of the dwarves is one of the things that survived pretty well though. DG calls Jennifer Hepler “mistress of the dwarves” and says that she did a really detailed, amazing breakdown of their history. After Jennifer left it was Mary Kirby, and DG feels that they did a good job of maintaining how dwarves were, in terms of both how they’re often presented in fantasy and yet also quite different in DA. Orzammar is one of DG’s favorite plots all together. You can really tell that Jennifer Hepler really enjoyed the dwarves and brought a lot of love to that plot.

DG draws a distinction between DA fans and the unpleasant people who harassed Jennifer Hepler.

They managed to keep the Tranquil in. There was a while there where they were going to be cut. At the same time, DG regrets that they couldn’t solve the making of the player more aware of how mages are dangerous, thing. Players could make a cogent argument like “they’re not that dangerous, look at me [mage PC]” and the writers were like “well... yeah, that is fair”. It was a case of showing one thing and the player experience of it being another. DG feels that this made the templars come off worse than they are. DG feels that they are being massively unfair and too extreme in their approach to the problem, but the problem itself is a real thing. He feels that there’s some merit/truth in the argument that mages are oppressed, but he looks at it more like an issue like gun control rather than as treatment of oppressed people, saying that we don’t have an example in real life of oppressed people who can explode into demons and cast fireballs and so on.

There are some funny pronunciations that worked their way into DA, and the reason for a lot of them is as follows: the writers had to create a pronunciation guide for VO, because otherwise you end up with a lot of inconsistencies. (Some did still slip through). The guide was online, and if you clicked on a word, an audio file for it would play. Jennifer Hepler was in charge of this and did a great job, but has a really strong NY accent, and in some cases the ‘NY-ness’ of her pronunciation endearingly worked itself into things (the way Arlathan is sometimes said is an example of where this happened sometimes).

Sometimes the writers trying to communicate the “hotness” of a character to the artists didn’t go smoothly. The writers would sometimes say things like, ok, this character is a romance, they need to be hot, and the designs would come back looking “like Burt Reynolds”, and the writers would be like “???” And then a character that wasn’t particularly intended to be hot, as in that wasn’t mentioned at all in the descriptions of them, would come back “accidentally hot”, and the writers would be like “Why couldn’t you have done this when we were asking for a character that was meant to be hot”, and the artists would be like “What?? He’s not hot”. And this became a thing (lmao - this discussion was prompted by DG being asked “Was Duncan meant to be that hot?”, for context). Some of the artists were so paranoid about their [in]ability to judge actually-hot characters that when it was time to pick an appearance, like for Alistair, they gathered up all the women at BioWare, and DG (“resident gay”) into a room to show them an array of faces and bodies like “Is this hot? Is this hot?” DG and co would sit there like, “How can you not tell? Is this a straight man thing?!” Anyways, this is why oftentimes we ended up with characters who are accidentally hot.

Over time, the writers realized that the way they communicated to artists needed to be managed better. The words they would use would have different connotations to them the writers, than what they did to the artists. For example, for Anders’ design in DA2, he was supposed to be “a little haggard”. When DG thinks of haggard, he thinks ‘a little tired, mussed hair, looking like you’ve been through some shit’. But the artists based on that produced concepts with super sunken cheeks, looking like he’d been terribly starved. The writers needed to develop a specific vocabulary for communicating with the artists, as artists think in terms of how something looks, but writers are thinking in terms of what the character “is”. Anders’ description talked about his history a lot, and the one visual-type word that jumped out was “haggard” due to its visual connotations. “A lot it came down to the writers being up their/our own asses.”

When they got to DAI, they had figured out that the way to get best results on this front was /not/ to have the writer go off and develop a long description and pre-conceived notion of what the character looked like in their head. In such scenarios artists don’t feel that they have much to contribute to the process or an ability to put their own stamp on who this character is and make them interesting to them (the best, most interesting characters are when people at all stages of the pipeline properly get to feed into it). They learned that the better solution was to bring the artists in earlier, and to give them little blurbs, and not name the character but give them an ‘archetype’-sort of ‘name’. For example, Dorian was “the rockstar mage”, “cool”, “Freddie Mercury”. The writers wouldn’t be sure that a particular concept would ‘hit’, so at this stage they would offer an array of options and sit the artist down and walk them through the concepts. The artists would then provide a bunch of sketches and it would go back and forth, with both taking part in the character creation process together. For the first two games, the writers were “really hogging” this process to themselves. They got better at not doing this and better at communicating with the artists by DAI.

There were a lot of arguments about how mages in DAO had a lot of specific lore words like “Harrowing”, “phylactery”, “Rite of Tranquility” etc. There was concern that this would be too confusing for players to understand and that it was too complicated. DG says that thankfully he put his foot down and pushed for this stuff to be kept. A lot of fans assume that as lead writer DG had all this influence, way more influence than he could possibly exert on a team. He wasn’t even a lead, he was a sub-lead, under a lead designer. He only had so much say. If the lead designer or lead artist wanted to do something differently, often there was not much he could do. Hence he had to pick his battles carefully, choose the important ones to fight. The mage vocabulary thing was one of these.

Templar Greagoir’s name is pronounced “Gregor” and it comes from a place in Alberta near where DG lived.

Codex entries are usually one of the last things that get done in a project like this, and so all of that kind of textual lore comes in super late and is super punchy as by then the writers have written so much and are exhausted. They had to find a way to make this process cute or interesting or fun for themselves, which is why a lot of entries are quite fun to read. Sometimes a writer would make a joke for banter [irl], and it would end up making it into an entry.

Only Morrigan and Duncan got unique body models in DAO. The companions all have custom-morphed heads but not custom-morphed bodies (Morrigan not included here). This is why every model has a necklace or a collar right at the point where they had to be attached to be a body. These sometimes used assets that couldn’t be used by the PC but were not unique to that character. Duncan probably got a unique model because he was in a lot of marketing/promotional material. Qunari were originally conceived as having horns.

Most people didn’t even finish DAO once (public telemetry again here), only approximately 20-25% actually did. The devs try not to read too much into this kind of thing, but the telemetry does tell them where a lot of people stop playing the game permanently (they call these “drop-off points”). One of these points in DAO is the Fade during Broken Circle. Sometimes when people interpret this data they involve self-serving biases, but it was generally accepted that the Fade there was too long, too complex, not interesting enough, etc. [source]

[Part 2]

[Part 3]

[Part 4]

[Part 5]

[Part 6]

[‘Insights into DA dev from the Gamers For Groceries stream’ transcript]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid

It’s been just over a year since the death of activist, writer and anthropologist Gavid Graeber — a brilliant speaker, writer and thinker who helped give us Occupy, “we are the 99%” and “Bullshit Jobs.”

On the anniversary of David’s death, his widow Nika Dubrovsky convened the first “Art Project” discussion, a fascinating debate between Thomas Piketty and Michael Hudson, a pair of political economists whose work is neatly bridged by Graeber’s own.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWT0uvBLDbo

Piketty, of course, is the bestselling French economist whose 2013 Capital in the 21st Century was an unlikely, 700+ page viral hit, describing with rare lucidity the macroeconomics that drive capitalism towards cruel and destabilizing inequality

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/

Hudson, meanwhile, is the debt-historian and economist whose haunting phrase “Debts that can’t be paid, won’t be paid,” is a perfect and irrefutable summation of the inevitable downfall of any system that relies on household debt to drive consumption.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/24/grandparents-optional-party/#jubilee

Like Hudson, Graeber was obsessed with the history and politics of debt. His 2012 book “Debt: The First 5,000 years” influenced not just Piketty’s work, but the work of many non-economists, including a large group of science fiction writers.

https://www.tor.com/2012/04/16/the-best-science-fiction-ideas-in-any-non-fiction-ever-david-graebers-debt-the-first-five-thousand-years/

Like Piketty, Graeber was capable of writing extremely long books that were so engaging that people actually read them, absorbing complex and nuanced subjects. DEBT clocked in at 534 pages, and not a dud among them.

And like both Hudson and Piketty, Graeber was obsessed with long timescales and the ways that history is pressed into service to assert that various political situations are inevitable products of human nature, meaning that there’s no point in asking for a fairer system.

In Debt, Graeber reaches back 5,000 years to question (among other things), the “money story” that money was created by individuals who wanted to make barter more efficient, settling on coins as a way to make change for someone who wants a cow but only has chickens to trade.

Graeber shows the “confluence of needs” theory of money to be a fairy tale, something that orthodox economists literally made up as the “most likely” source of money, without ever asking historians about what the record tells us about the origins of money.

Which is a pity, because historians know a lot about this stuff! For example, they can tell you about the Babylonian use of ledgers to record the issuance and redemption of debt in the largely agricultural economy of the day.

This early money would be recognizable to farmers today: during planting season, a share of the eventual harvest is promised in exchange for the inputs needed to plant, nurture and reap the crops.

Like Graeber, Hudson also treats Babylonian policy as key to economics — specifically, the Babylonian understanding that “debts that can’t be paid, won’t be paid,” which is why the state would periodically declare a jubilee in which all debts were declared void.

Without these periodic jubilees, the entire productive economy is swallowed up by debt service — every poor harvest or other unforseeable circumstance drives producers (who are also debtors) further into debt, whose interest creates an inescapable gravity.

Without some way to escape debt’s gravity, all productive labor becomes oriented toward debt-service, and the economy grinds to a halt. If this sounds familiar, you’re probably paying attention to today’s political economy:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/19/zombie-debt/#damnation

Piketty also works in long timescales, though his historical analysis is an order of magnitude more recent that Hudston or Graeber’s. At Capital XXI’s core is a data-set, painstakingly assembled by Piketty and his grad students over more than a decade.

That data-set traces “capital flows” (the distribution of wealth and income) for 300+ years, rigorously traced and normalized, so that we can understand things like the relative degree of inequality in different societies over centuries.

Famously, Piketty concludes that no matter how fast an economy is growing — no matter how productive its makers are — that wealth grows faster, making the takers who financed growth even richer than the people whose work is propelling the economy.

This fundamental truth (expressed in economic notation as r > g, or “return on capital is greater than economic growth”) means that “meritocracy” is a lie: the richest people in a market economy aren’t the people who do the best work, it’s the people who started off rich.

Like Hudson, Piketty’s work looks at the relationship between inequality and instability: Piketty uses his data to show that inequality crises trigger political crises, and that high degrees of inequality precede upheavals like the French Revolution and the World Wars.

Given all that, a discussion between Piketty and Hudson, convened in Graeber’s memory, is bound to be fascinating, and they don’t disappoint (if you prefer text to video, check out Naked Capitalism’s transcript):

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/09/michael-hudson-and-thomas-piketty-debate-inequality-debt-and-reform.html

Here’s my highlight reel of the discussion, with commentary. Hudson opens with a skeptical take on Piketty’s conclusion to Capital XXI, in which he proposes a global wealth tax. Such a tax is nearly impossible to enforce, says Hudson — unlike a jubilee.

Hudson says the source of today’s global vast fortunes is not earnings or income — rather, it’s central banks’ subsidy of the value of stocks and bonds, through rock-bottom interest rates, bond guarantees, etc. These fuel speculative bear markets that run up asset prices.

These state-subsidized fortunes are pumped into the financial markets, becoming the loans that everyone else has to pay debt on, just to survive. As in ancient times, the finance sector eventually swallows the productive economy whole. Without jubilee, you get collapse.

This is true within rich economies, but it’s even more pronounced in the relations between poor debtor countries who were coerced into taking on massive debts by the IMF, who are going to pay an ever-larger share of their GDP to offshore creditors as the economy slows.

The only way for poor countries to service those debts is by imposing crushing austerity, which means starving domestic producers of investment, education and health services, reducing productivity, requiring more austerity — until the whole thing collapses.

Remember: debts that can’t be paid, won’t be paid. It’s an iron law, and cannot be repealed — not by austerity, not by “better management,” not by “living within your means.” Can’t be paid = won’t be paid.

Piketty doesn’t dispute any of this, saying that he’s reconsidered some of the solutions in Capital XXI in light of subsequent events, like the pathetically inadequate global minimum corporate tax of 15%, which only rich countries’ treasuries will get to participate in.

Piketty points to his followup to Capital XXI, the even weightier (and sadly less influential) Capital and Ideology for his more up-to-date thinking on the way to address inequality and instability.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/19/capital-and-ideology-by-thomas-piketty-review-if-inequality-is-illegitimate-why-not-reduce-it

He reiterates his thesis that inequality self-corrects, thanks to the instability it engenders. Left on their own, market economies collapse, torn apart by the bill for guards to defend lenders’ fortunes, the bill for interest payments that enrich lenders.

Impose sufficient austerity and brutality on a society and the cost of defending it exceeds the wealth its productive sector manages to produce, and boom — French Revolution, the World Wars, etc.

Piketty proposes that mounting “catastrophic climate change” might precipitate the next crisis, which is certainly a safe bet, though of course, the question is whether that crisis will come after the point of no return for a habitable planet.

Hudson has ideas about how we might hasten transformative change without risking civilizational collapse. He points out that Piketty’s work identifies inherited wealth as inequality’s wellspring and points out that estate taxes are much more enforceable than wealth taxes.

Certainly, inherited wealth is a live issue today. The latest installment of Propublica’s essential IRS Papers reporting shows how the richest Americans abuse a bizarre loophole to avoid ANY tax on indescribably vast estates:

https://www.propublica.org/article/more-than-half-of-americas-100-richest-people-exploit-special-trusts-to-avoid-estate-taxes

No one knows exactly how much tax avoidance grantor retained annuity trusts (GRATs) drive, because they are shrouded in secrecy. In 2013, the lawyer who created GRATs said they’d allowed the ultra-wealthy to evade $100b in taxes. Their use has increased since then.

Another lever for reducing inequality is political competition. Hudson points out that during the Cold War, capitalist states took steps to prevent runaway inequality in a bid to show that market economies were more stable than centralized, planned economies.

Hudson suggests that competition with China might serve that function today. Without forgiving China for its autocracy and human rights abuses, he gives favorable marks to its economic planners for reining in the finance sector.

It’s true that China intervened heavily in credit markets during the covid crisis, to prevent rentiers from destroying productive businesses that couldn’t service their debts during lockdown, preserving larges swathes of otherwise vulnerable productive firms.

He reminds us that the original meaning of “free market” was “a market free from rents,” where unproductive creditors were not allowed to lay a private tax on productive manufacturers.

https://locusmag.com/2021/03/cory-doctorow-free-markets/

Today, the meaning has been reversed — a market is “free” if creditors face no limits on rent-extraction.

But there’s good reason to be skeptical of claims that China’s economy is being well-managed, as Anne Stevenson-Yang writes.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/annestevenson-yang/2021/09/25/chairman-xi-chinas-looming-crisis-and-the-myth-of-infallibility/

Stevenson-Yang paints a picture of chaotic state management of the Chinese economy, hidden by state-owned media and its rosy outlook. Watchwords like “common prosperity” are empty buzzwords, used to paper over self-interested, corrupt business practices.

State initiatives measure progress through short-term, easily gamed KPIs, something she says is documented in Red Roulette: “a new book written by a disaffected property developer named Desmond Shum.”

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Red-Roulette/Desmond-Shum/9781982156152

Now, I’m willing to stipulate that for investors and property developers “corruption” or “incompetence” might be indistinguishable from what the rest of us would call good governance, but some of Stevenson-Yang’s charges seem factual and well-made.

42I found the discussion between Piketty and Hudson fascinating, and if there was anything more that I’d add, it would be a dose of technopolitics (unsurprisingly). After all, technology has a huge bearing on the timing and nature of the shifts that both economists study.

For Piketty, inequality-driven instability collapses when the cost of guard-labor rises too high to bear — other words, eventually, a society gets so unequal that it costs more to stave off guillotines than even the ultrarich can afford.

For Hudson, debt-driven instability collapses when debtors begin to default because they have no ability to service their debts.

Technology changes the nature of both of these collapses. Take guard labor: mass surveillance and technological controls make it cheaper than at any time in history to isolate and neutralize political threats to elite rule.

How much cheaper? Well, in 1989, the Stasi employed one in sixty East Germans to spy on the whole nation.

Today, the NSA spies on the whole world, at a spy:subject ratio that’s more like 1:10,000 — two orders of magnitude more efficient than the spies of a generation ago. That’s a huge productivity gain, and it’s all thanks to digital technology.

When it comes to debtor default, the tension is between coercion and ability to pay. Yes, “debts that can’t be paid, won’t be paid,” but “can’t be aid” is not a hard limit — it turns on how much the debtor is willing to hurt themselves and their loved ones to make payments.

Every mafia armbreaker knows this. When someone can’t pay their debts, you can break their arm and they’ll cash in their kids’ college fund and secretly remortgage their house to make the next payment.

When that runs out, if you threaten to break their legs, the debtor will start breaking into cars. Eventually, this comes to an end, when the debtor goes to prison for 25 years. But in the meantime, coercive force can wring a fair amount of blood from the stone.

Debtor coercion has been transformed by digital technology, from an artisanal, retail handicraft to a scaled up, industrial practice.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

We don’t need the threat of repo men to keep you paying your car note — miss a Tesla payment and your car will phone home and lock its doors. When the tow arrives, it will flash its lights, honk its horn and back out of its parking space for repossession.

The ability to digitally repossess, or partially repossess (as in India, where loan-shark cellphone companies disable your most-used apps if you miss a payment) the tools you rely on for life and livelihood makes it cost-effective to apply coercion at scale.

Cheap guard-labor and cheap coercion mean that crisis can be deferred for ever-longer timescales. Thus, societies up the only kind of debt that really matters: policy debt. Lives are ruined, productive capacity tanked, the planet poisoned.

Add tech to Piketty or Hudson’s analysis and things start to look a lot less self-correcting, and the odds tilt against our civilization, our species and our planet. If a correction only comes after the point of no return, we’re in very deep shit indeed.