#because you identified and described instead of explaining

[miodiodavinci]

good news!! i am 25% of the way done with the first draft of my portfolio!! (read: partway through like 50 pages of intensely jargon driven mini essays that are each evaluated by several arcane and strangely worded rubrics)

bad news!! the intense euphoria of nearly being at the point where i can Finally take a break and do what i want without the stress of deadlines hanging over me for the first time in nearly a year paired with the soul-crushing reality of needing to finish the remaining 75% of this project is giving me such intense waves of anxiety and nausea that it is actively preventing me from working on more of the project

[jessica-problems]

Seeing @thydungeongal constantly wrestling with people interpreting her posts about D&D in ways that seem completely alien to me has convinced me that there are actually multiple completely distinct activities both being referred to as "playing D&D" Before we begin, I want to stress that I'm not saying one of these groups is Playing The Game Wrong or anything, but there seems to be a lot of confusion and conflict caused by people not being aware of the distinction. In fact, either one works just fine if everyone's on the same page. So far, I think I've identified at least two main groups. And nobody seems to realize the distinction between these groups even exists. The first group of people think of "Playing D&D" as, well, more or less like any other board game. Players read the whole rulebook all the way through, all the players follow the instructions, and the gameplay experience is determined by what the rules tell each player to do. This group thinks of the mechanics as, not exactly the *whole* game, but certainly the fundamental skeleton that everything else is built on top of. People in the second group think of "Playing D&D" as referring to, hanging out with their friends, collaboratively telling a story inspired by some of the elements in the rulebooks, maybe rolling some dice to see what happens when they can't decide. This group thinks of the mechanics of the game as, like... a spice to sprinkle on top of the story to mix things up. (if you belong to this second group, and think I'm explaining it poorly, please let me know, because I'm kind of piecing things together from other people saying things I don't understand and trying to reverse engineer how they seem to be approaching things.) I think this confusion is exacerbated by the fact that Wizards of the Coast markets D&D as if these are the same thing. They emphatically are not. the specific rules laid out of the D&D rulebooks actually direct players to tell a very specific kind of story. You can tell other stories if you ignore those rules (which still counts as "playing D&D" under the second definition, but doesn't under the first)And I think people in both groups are getting mad because they assume that everyone is also using their definition. For example, there's a common argument that I've seen play out many times that goes something like this:

A: "How do I mod D&D to do [insert theme here]?" B: "D&D is really not built for that, you should play [other TTRPG] that's designed for it instead" A: "But I don't want to learn a whole new game system!" B: "It will be easier to just learn a whole new system than mod D&D to do that." A: "whatever, I'll just mod D&D on my own" And I think where this argument comes from is the two groups described above completely talking past each other. No one understands what the other person is trying to say. From A's perspective, as a person in the second group, it sounds like A: "Anyone have some fun inspirations for telling stories about [insert theme here]?" B: "You can't sit around a table with your friends and tell a story about that theme! That's illegal." A: "But we want to tell a story about this theme!" B: "It's literally impossible to do that and you're a dumb idiot baby for even thinking about it." A: "whatever, jerk, I'll figure it out on my own."

--- Whereas, from B's perspective, the conversation sounds like A: "How do I change the rules of poker to be chess, and not be poker?" B: "uhhh, just play chess?" A: "But I already know how to player poker! I want to play poker, but also have it be chess!" B: "what the hell are you talking about? What does that even mean. They're completely different games." A: "I'm going to frankenstein these rules together into some kind of unplayably complex monster and you can't stop me!" ---

So both people end up coming away from the conversation thinking the other person is an idiot. And really, depending on how you concieve of what it means to "play D&D" what is being asked changes considerably. If you're only planning to look through the books for cool story inspiration, maybe borrow a cool little self contained sub-system here or there, then yeah, it's very possible to steal inspiration for your collaborative story from basically anywhere. Maybe some genres are kind of an awkward fit together, but you can make anything work with a little creativity.

If, however, you are thinking of the question in terms of frankensteining two entire board games together, then it becomes a massively difficult or even outright nonsensical idea. For example, for skill checks, the game Shadowrun has players roll a pool of several d6 at once, then count up how many rolled above a target value to see how well a character succeeded at a task. The whole game is full of specific rules about adding or removing dice from the pool, effects happening if you roll doubles, rerolling only some of the dice, and all sorts of other things that simply do not translate to rolling a single d20 for skill checks. On a basic level, the rules of the games work very differently. Trying to make them compatible would be much harder than just learning a new game from scratch. Now, neither of these approaches is exactly *wrong*, I guess, but personally, I find the rules of TTRPGs to be fascinating and worth taking the time to engage with all the weird little nuances and seeing what shakes out. Also, the first group, "TTRPG as fancy board game" is definitely the older and more widespread one. I kind of get the impression that the second group largely got into D&D through actual play podcasts, but I don't have any actual data to back that up. So, if you're in the second group, who thinks of D&D as basically a context for collaborative storytelling first and a game second, please let me know if I'm wildly misunderstanding how you approach D&D. Because I'm pretty sure it would save us a whole lot of stupid misunderstandings.

[eamour]

"fulfillment…?"

i feel like many of you still feel so overwhelmed by the word "FULFILLMENT". i had the urge to clear this up, mainly because i saw comments of people saying things along the lines of "everything used to be better before we were told to fulfill ourselves!" or "what even is fulfilling? can’t i just affirm and persist?".

i thought this was actually pretty obvious but maybe it still confuses some people. manifestation terms, pretty much the very majority of them, all imply the SAME. they all refer to the same thing. it’s just that we like using and creating synonyms to re-define and re-describe words to make it more understandable, or to simplify manifesting.

to "fulfill self" could mean anything. it actually means so much. it means whatever you want it to mean. it means whatever FULFILLMENT means to you. i'll give you a list of what "fulfill yourself" could also stand for:

embody your desired version of self.

get into the state.

live in the end.

identify with your desire.

feel the wish fulfilled.

claim your desire to be yours.

shift your state.

accept your desires as true.

experience it in imagination.

be and have it in your mind.

think from your desire.

shift or redirect your focus.

change or flip your assumptions.

persist in acceptance.

believe you have or are it.

feel it real.

and more …

all of these things refer to the exact same thing — how to MANIFEST. we just happen to have a bunch of ways to explain it.

so, when somebody talks about "fulfillment" or "saturation", it always means what YOU think it does. if you read a post that’s asking you to fulfill yourself, it’s asking you to do whatever the hell you want to get into the state of mind in which you have or are what you desire to either have or be. this also includes methods like visualisation, affirmations, and so on.

to "fulfill self" isn’t something new. it’s not an extra step you need to take after (1) desiring something, (2) claiming it to be yours and (3) persisting. think of it as the last two steps combined.

manifesting will always be the same. it doesn’t change, and neither does the law just because we say "fulfill and continue to do so" instead of "affirm and persist". therefore, i think, if you feel overwhelmed by all of these terms, you may have not fully grasped the concept of manifestation or don’t understand that these definitions are all alike.

i hope this could help. 🙏 so please, let’s not demonise every new word trending on here which is supposed to make manifesting more comprehensible.

with fulfillment, ella.

[caligvlasaqvarivm]

was rereading the convo dirk has with dave and was captivated by the subtle work done to indicate how very much this was not actually a good or productive convo for dirk, and a capstone on the toxic mess that is him and hal

in the exact same conversation that dave is explaining, and dirk is seemingly accepting, that beta!dirk/bro should not have been allowed near a child, dirk chooses to bring up hal. and he does it to be really shitty.

DIRK: Creating him was an interesting exercise I guess, but over the years I came to see his development as one of my biggest mistakes. DIRK: He sort of turned into a monster. But I could never bring myself to get rid of him, or even really blame him for being an asshole, because he wasn't actually that different from me.

like... hal is dirk's younger brother/kid, right?

that's part of the reason that when hal starts using a different color, it's dave's red. in one part, the orange/red split is evocative of dave/davesprite, casting dirk/hal as foils, but... i don't think the lil bro/"kid i'm responsible for" vibe is unintentional, either. especially when paired with the fact that the brainscan is of 13-year-old dirk, and that the words "nascent" and "emergent" are used to describe hal's consciousness, all implying an element of youthfulness or childishness to him that isn't applied to dirk.

hal is fully sapient, has real feelings (by dirk's own admission, too), and is also, like, completely his own guy. he's not a dirk splinter, he's a computer housing a dirk splinter, and he and dirk only think they're the same guy because their individual issues happen to perfectly align in the worst possible way.

so if you look at their relationship through that lens instead - a frankenstein/frankenstein's monster scenario (which is also directly and intentionally an exploration on parenthood) at best and dirk Pretty Much Actually Just Making A Child at worst - doesn't it become really fucked up that Dirk tried to kill him?

Doesn't it become really fucked up that Dirk is outright calling him a "mistake" and a "monster"?

the other really interesting thing here is when he talks about Jake - specifically, the way he chooses to "make it up to" jake. which is to say, he doesn't.

DIRK: I wouldn't be surprised if he was trying to avoid me as much as possible. DIRK: I'm sure that's for the best. DIRK: I think I need to stay out of his business for a good while, so I don't risk poisoning another innocent kid's life.

This isn't a solution. Hell, this isn't even an apology. This is just self-isolation, self-punishment, more of Dirk's martyrdom complex and teen boy diva bullshit.

yes, dirk hates himself, but the actual toxic loop he's stuck in is one where he doesn't address any of his problems. he identifies what his issues are, he feels really bad about them, he can enunciate them very clearly to other people, but then, instead of fixing them, he inflicts punishment on himself and then calls it a day.

We know that this is a bullshit thing to do to Jake because we know the situation from jake's side of things.

GT: Do you think you could relay the same sentiments to dirk? GT: I was thinking about all the stuff he said to me while we were all telling him to dance. GT: And yeah i was really being a prick when i ran away to lomax. GT: He was right about everything. I should have come clean about wanting some space.

jake wants reconciliation! jake wants to address the fact that he failed and apologize! jake wants to be friends again!

self-punishment is not a solution, and while I don't think dirk is entirely cognizant that he's doing it, by venting to dave - who literally has no idea what's been going on in dirk's group - he's able to frame the story - ahem, control the narrative - to justify his own shitty choice to not actually improve as a person, but instead to wallow in his own self-inflicted misery. If he'd said what he did about Hal to Jake, Roxy, or Jane - all of whom recognized hal's personhood and emotional reality to some degree, and spoke with him extensively - how would they respond? If they knew he'd tried to kill Hal, how would they respond?

The answer to that is why he doesn't tell them, and has got to be ticking in the background to explain why Dirk chooses to isolate himself from them. Put simply, I think the reason why he seems to think his friends never know the worst of him is because he deliberately avoids showing them. If he showed them, they wouldn't stay quiet, and if they didn't stay quiet, he'd actually have to... do something about it, instead of just indulging in some self-punishment and walking away feeling like the problem was solved.

and i think part of why he's so terrible to hal is because, on some level, he recognizes that he does kind of owe it to hal to be better. because, you see.

Hal is his kid.

hal's existence, hal's circumstances, and hal's suffering are a direct result of dirk's decisions, and hal is taking him to task for them. the things dirk really resents about hal are less the ways that hal is a reflection of dirk, though that's in there too, but the fact that hal is asking dirk to take responsibility. actual responsibility. that hal keeps confronting him with the fact that he's the one who caused hal's plight, he's the one with the power to fix it, and he's the one choosing inaction and avoidance.

TT: I'm guessing she's touching base to remind me about the party tomorrow. TT: I don't know what to tell her yet. Or Jane, for that matter. TT: It could get pretty awkward. TT: I have no idea if Jake will be there, and I'm not about to write another cringe-inducing message of desperation for him to ignore. AR: Would you like me to calculate the probability of his attendance? TT: Fuck no. AR: Are you sure? AR: My probabilities are extremely precise. TT: Your probabilities don't mean dick. AR: I could hack his chats, and determine what his plans are. TT: No. Don't do that either. [...] TT: Just don't do anything. Seriously. TT: No hacking, no calculations. Do absolutely nothing.

That's why Dirk takes such exception to the AI thing, too.

AR: In any case, my use of the responder responder is ironic. TT: It's not ironic. TT: YOU were ironic when I made you. TT: Then you became self-aware, and ruined irony forever.

then you became self-aware - in other words, "then you became a free-thinking entity and those jokes became reminders that your situation is fucked up, and i'm the one who put you in it". in other words, "and then you were born, and i had to be responsible for that". because, after all, the AI jokes that dirk hates so much? those aren't a reflection of dirk. that's all hal, baby. dirk can't use his "i hate you because i hate myself" excuse on that.

now i don't want to make it sound like i'm saying that dirk is a monster or anything. he does care, very fucking deeply, about his friends. and i think this conversation was genuinely very cathartic and helpful for dave. and it is, genuinely, very tragic that he does actually hate himself to the point where he finds it difficult to believe that he can get better, or even that he deserves to get better.

but those feelings have transformed into a vastly more harmful attitude of wilful, obstinate refusal to change, and even outright resentment and fear towards those that would ask him to. it's subtler than some of the others, but his convo with dave really highlights that dirk has not finished developing as a character yet. and i think it's really neat.

[4dkellysworld]

After deciding 'it is done'

This is more of a manifestation themed post (it's a draft from March when I spontaneously felt like writing it but didn't post it) because I felt like it but I'd appreciate if I didn't get any asks about manifestation* (unless I change my mind later) cos I'll share what I can and there's a lot of material available already! You can see my past post on this topic here. For more posts on it, see @4dbarbie-archive and realisophie's posts here and here and there's also some over at @ndjournal in the experience sharing tag.

*Also because I don't want to send mixed messages to the readers of this blog. I see conscious manifestation as a way to challenge & break limitations and concepts from the mind, not to get things in the world (kinda like Neo learning to bend the spoon in the Matrix if you get me lol). The latter will only pull you deeper into ego and the world, which isn't conducive to self-realization (if that's your goal) if you're focused on satisfying ego and the worldly life. If that makes sense and you resonate and agree with that, then we are on the same page but not everyone is and that's okay too, just do what feels right to you. Just sharing my reasoning :)

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

I've been reading this book called Parallel Universes of Self because I read the author Frederick Dodson had an interesting reality shifting experience. I didn't expect to read info on manifestation but they are pretty much the same. I have a few books of his that I'm skimming through out of curiosity and there's some interesting stuff (I might share some other things later, he doesn't just talk about manifestation, but also consciousness, reality and even non-duality).

I thought I'd share the below excerpt because it's explained really well and might help some others. It's also a nice succinct summary of what Ada and Soph talked about for materialization/manifestation as well. I can remember pretty much 95% of the things I've ever "manifested" were from when I acted the way he described after I had decided "it is done". It's easier to do this for things you don't care about because you just end up forgetting about it entirely and then it shows up and you're like 'oh yeah!! nice'.

In the hours, days and weeks after simply rest in the new viewpoint, rest in the fulfilled reality. This means that you don’t try to “make it happen” because you have already claimed it as real. You don’t affirm, visualize, repeat or wait for it. You don’t hope for it to come in some future. Because you have claimed it as already real you don’t even think about it much either. You don’t ask when, how, where it will show up. Instead you simply do what offers itself to you throughout the day, and this will involve commonplace activities. Daily life continues in a natural manner without neediness or lack. Once in awhile you may want to re-feel the body sense of the chosen reality, and enjoy what you have claimed as true, but often not even that is necessary. Furthermore you needn’t be “acting as if” the desired reality is manifest, for that still implies separation. Simply cease to behave in a way that presupposes that it is not already so. You may refuse to ascribe relevance or importance to any events that seem to contradict your newly chosen reality. From the new viewpoint such events may still exist and come up but they are no longer relevant enough to be reacted to and interacted with. They may be the way things are at the moment, but they are no longer the way you are. The corresponding physical manifestation will appear when you stop needing it, chasing after it, looking for it but are instead willingly and lovingly identified with it…not for the sake of “making it manifest” *, but for the sake of experiencing its joy in the here, now and today. *Because trying to make it happen/manifest reinforces the idea/belief that it isn't

This is the same as what 4dbarbie said about getting ego out of the way or as Lester Levenson said, let go and let God. Just let it happen and stop trying to control the process because the more you try, the more you reinforce the fact that it isn't already so. Basically stop putting in effort once you know it is true, just continue knowing with calm and ease that it is the way you want it. Ada also said here:

If you have thoughts like "I need to say my affirmations", "I need to check my state", you're not living in the end but still desiring. When you're able to look at the thing you desire as being something that was once a dream, but now only a memory - you've entered the state of the wish fulfilled. When desire turns into identity, you know you've succeeded in fulfilling yourself.

Yes we're conditioned to think we need to work hard and put effort to earn things in the world but when it comes to manifesting, this sort of mentality will only sabotage and hinder your success. You can literally just decide you have it and then never look back. This sort of mindset can take a bit of time and practice to get used to because it is not something we're used to but the more you practice, the easier it gets.

Here is an excerpt from an astral projection book (I think it's from The Illusion of Method?) I thought was really apt at describing this too. He's talking about AP but you can apply it to manifesting or pretty much anything as well.

Unless you are masochistic, I ask you to reconsider the painful idea of obsessing about time. Bear in mind that results will come whenever they have to, and counting the minutes won't make the outcome arrive faster. It's best if you just forget about it, and accept that it is something that you can't control. You must be patient—most of the time the desired results arrive immediately after giving up control of time. If you are frustrated and/or are afraid of failure, then it means you believe you are in control—and this translates into the feeling that you are responsible for both positive and negative results. Well then, stop thinking that way! Exempting yourself from responsibility is the best course of action there is. As seen in the previous chapter, those who project on command are the ones who couldn’t care less about AP. But the more you obfuscate yourself, the lesser your chances of success —and trust me, you won’t want to get trapped in that vicious cycle. Astral projection works when you stop worrying about failure because you trust that it will happen, whether you “do” something or not.

It’s the same thing: just in the same way that being hasty for sleep to occur keeps us wakeful and alert, being expectant over the OBE will keep us caged in the physical body. If the mind is constantly thinking about the goal, it can easily enter a state of expectancy* and impatience. In such state, the mind is no longer relaxed because expectancy is a state of unrest. This form of tension is what hinders the outcome—thus, the key to being relaxed (i.e., essentially lacking mental tension) is to forget about the goal entirely. If you don’t have the goal in mind you don’t enter a state of expectancy, and therefore you are free from mental tension. *expectancy is the same energy as trying to make something happen.. reinforcing the idea/belief that it isn't so

So, exempt yourself from responsibility means there's nothing more to do because ego is not in control and can do nothing.

[erriga]

THE QUARANTINE QUERY

(tl dr I didn't vibe with the demo for some silly and not so silly reasons)

Welcome to my special post where I will try to explain my personal problems with Quarantine and the general creative and narrative direction the next game seems to be heading towards. I decided to write a longer text instead of a couple of bullet points, because one does not simply write a thesis about a game just to later complain about it in a sarcastically laconic tone.

Things this essay is going to be:

my opinion/critique

an analysis

a reflection upon my feelings about the series in general

Things this essay is not going to be:

an angry rant about the new game in the spirit of they changed it so now it sucks

an attempt to prove that old pathologic = smart and new pathologic = stupid

Ok, with the disclaimers out of the way, let's get into it, and by it I mean levels of pretentious nerdiness unknown to many.

I wrote down four statements that describe my general feelings about the demo. They will serve as a frame of reference for what my critique will fundamentally touch upon instead of trying to fit every possible complaint I might have in a disjointed fashion. Here they are:

I feel like Quarantine expects me to:

Consider Dankovsky to be a specific Character in a specific Story

Believe Dankovsky has an internal world that can be mechanically represented in the ludo-narrative

Find said internal world to be compelling enough to let it filter the whole experience of the game

(presumably) emotionally connect with Dankovsky due to all of the above

If all this sounds confusing - good! Keep reading, it's going to get even better.

So, is Daniil a character?

Yes, of course he is. But what does it mean in the context of the original game compared to Pathologic 2 and now Quarantine?

Over the years I've come across vastly different opinions about the quality of character writing in the original Pathologic. I am not including complaints about the English translations or other technical aspects, just the most basic tendency of how the game portrays its characters. Most people I've seen who have passionately engaged with the game (including me) tend to describe the original game's characterizations as nuanced, complex and strangely realistic despite their rather theatrical tendencies. But I've also heard others say the exact opposite. That the characters don't feel like real people at all, their personalities are incoherent and fall flat due to a lack of consistency, and that every single one of them, from an old man to a literal toddler, falls back on the same pseudo-philosophical cadence, which while attempting to make them seem deeper ends up dehumanizing them even further. And even though those two opinions seem to be contradictory, I think that they are both the exact same reason why the writing of the original game captivates me so much. Because it doesn't really matter.

I wrote my thesis about the brechtian influences in Classic. One of the most characteristic aspects of the Epic Theatre is the attempt to remove illusions typical to traditional theatre, among which is the illusion of a character's psychology. I believe that you can absolutely argue that the characters in patho 1 were designed to behave like Brecht's characters - lacking internal psychology, mainly serving as mouthpieces for political and philosophical arguments, more so types than individuals. But here's the catch - I believe it's actually impossible to create a character completely immune to identification, because we as humans love to project our silly little emotions on pretty much anything, including animals and inanimate objects. Compared to those cases, Gorkhon's gallery of strange individuals is a painfully human display. So it's no wonder that many of us did indeed relate to those weirdos, just like nothing can possibly stop an audience member from identifying with Mother Courage or Galileo in Brecht's play. But the fact still remains that none of those characters were designed with this kind of simple emotional identification in mind and thus the attachment we may feel to them is more of a byproduct than the main goal. Taking a character who was meant to be analytically pondered and instead adopting them as a breathing human being is in that case, almost an act of rebellion. It's like saying, this is mine now.

Coming back to Daniil, this lack of clarity of how much he was written with this sort of characterization in mind is the main reason why I found him so compelling, he always kept me asking: is this part of Daniil as a coherent whole or is it just a philosophical stance which I should ponder at this moment or is it the writer's attempt at predicting what the player (presumably a straight male player) may want to say through this character? Does Daniil say "wow" because that's how he speaks, or is it just an oversight? Am I supposed to treat optional dialogue as things he would say or just things that are sometimes said in his world? The point is I DON'T KNOW and I love that I don't know that! It gives me so many posibilities! To me Daniil's character isn't so much about what he exactly says or does, but rather the internal logic that guides him. And I am the one who can choose its exact mechanism. He is mine.

Meanwhile, I feel like Quarantine wants me to treat Dankovsky like I would treat most other characters in traditional/popular media. Here are his personality traits. He is intelligent, he says so himself, and that lady over there also said it and he knows science and formulas and speaks Latin. Here are his thoughts. He has a memory about this thing. He feels guilty about that. I suddenly have a whole army of simple sentences that are meant to help me umderstand Daniil in this new iteration. Not so much a puzzle but a construction manual. And I'm not saying that this way of storytelling is fundamentally bad just because I can parody it as simpler than it really is. I want to engage with the new game's writing on it's own terms but so far I haven't done that mostly due to the giant dankovsky shaped object blocking the view.

Speaking of-

THE BACHELOR-CENTRIC MODEL OF THE UNIVERSE

This demo is so much about Dankovsky that it almost makes me embarrassed in his name. And honestly, I'm surprised I feel that way, considering how much I usually enjoy stories where a character's perception shapes the narrative to a great extent. I love symbolic dream sequences, guilt-driven visions and unreliable narrators. But the way Daniil's perception of himself and his surroundings doesn't really feel like a service to him as a character, but rather a narrative shorthand to spoonfeed me, the player, the most relevant information. The way Daniil's thoughts appear around objects is realistic to the extent that yes, human thoughts can be often rather simple and disjointed but there are moments where I think this mental streamlining is detrimental to his characterization and rubs him of nuance. The worst culprits of that are (IN MY OPINION):

Him calling Eva a ray of sunshine

The part where he references the fact that he and Artemy always fight about whose methods are better

Any time Daniil or someone around him refers to him as especially intelligent

Mr Little's Special Tutorial Perspective or Please Daniil Explain This To Me Once Again

None of those ideas are fundamentally bad, not at all. I'm curious to see his relationship with Eva develop, I want to see him interact with Artemy more like they did in the original, I can see some great ironic potential in the constant hyping up of Daniil's intellect and yeah, I hope Yakov is revealed to be some secret government agent or something. But I'm annoyed that I feel like I can predict all of this from just a couple of lines in the demo. I want to be confused and unsure of my own judgement. I want to be proven wrong, surprised, and ashamed of my own surface level analysis. And that can still very much happen, perhaps even in the comments on this very post or once the full games comes out. But right now I feel rather pessimistic.

I don't have a good segue for this part so now let's talk mechanics.

PRESS B TO EAT A CIGARRETE

The new mechanics try to break away from the body-first focus of the original game and the way Pathologic 2 expanded on those ideas even further. This time it's all about the mind, baby. Which - again - on itself isn't a bad idea. If this game was just 2 with different dialogues it would be very hard to justify its existence as a stand-alone product that needed to somehow be funded over those last 6 years. But the result to me feels more like novelty for novelty's sake. Not everything of course - the diagnosis part of the gameplay is definitely its most well-designed aspect, and there is a consistent logic behind it. Where Artemy saw systems, Daniils sees individual parts, where Artemy had to rely on luck, Daniil controls all the variables etc etc. The same, however, cannot be said about some of the other new mechanics.

Managing Daniil's mental state doesn't feel that much different than making sure Artemy drinks enough water and I personally think it's a wasted opportunity. I'm not going to insert myself into the discussion about whether the game's use of terms associated with bipolar disorder is accurate/tasteful because other people with relevant experiences have already voiced their opinions about that and will hopefully continue to do so in the future. My point is - regardless of what exact mental condition or more general function of the human psyche the game is trying to convey, it does so in a manner so simplistic that it doesn't encourage me as a player to connect with it on a deeper level. Apathy is blue because it's sad, Mania means, well, mania so it's red. Once again, I have only experienced a small portion of the game's final system so I might be in for a surprise and perhaps I will get to see Daniil experience something... purple?

Also adding to my previous point about switching perspectives - I think this mechanic will be an absolute gut punch in the final game. I hope it's something akin to the original meeting with the Powers That Be, especially with the way multiple characters can "jump" into one conversation at any moment. This will surely be utilized for some mind-fuckery and I can't wait to see it. I think this is also the one aspect of the demo that gives me the most hope as far as my beloved emotional confusion is concerned. Because what is the switching of perspectives supposed to indicate really? Are we supposed to filter it once again through Daniil's perspective because of the framing device of him recollecting the events? So nothing we learn by getting the insight into other characters' thoughts can be taken at face value because that's just how Daniil sees them? Are those other/new characters even real or just exist in Daniil's psyche? Does it have something to do with the time travel blahblah? Or are we not playing as Daniil at all but some other entity entirely? That's the main question I hope I don't get a clear answer to but rather contradicting paths to follow. But despite that optimistic outlook I still need to get into the final aspect that made it difficult for me to engage with the new game on its own terms, and instead deciding to take its dead corpse apart.

I CARE TOO MUCH BUT NOT ENOUGH

I just can't get over the fact how much this game wants me to identify with Daniil or at the very least find him cool. Cool as in how modern characters are often cool. Wet cats, chaotic bastards, jerks with hearts of gold and vaguely homoerotic energy with other male characters. And I'm not saying this as an insult, narrative trends are a thing, I find many of those archetypes to be endearing more often than not, but my problem is that it still only serves Dankovsky as our center of the world. By flanderizing him and making him fit into a more recognizable character archetype we lose the feeling of him being always at odds with the world around him, the way he used to be conflicted over every single thing in the original game. This new world is too suited for him to be a hero of his story, a tragic hero but a hero nonetheless, while in my opinion what made him uniquely tragic in classic was precisely the fact that he wasn't anyone's hero.

I know this constant comparison to patho classic can get tiring, so let me use another point of reference which is also the reason why I am even writing this post in the first place - The Marble Nest. I love the marble nest. I find its narrative structure to be expertly crafted, emotional beats placed in just the right places and godd i still cry over the fact that they put his soul into a nutshell. And the funny thing is that TMN does share a lot of similarities with the new demo. It's a Daniil-centric story with a framing device that encourages us to look at the entire experience as Daniil's impression of the reality around him. It's a short and rather simple experience with a strong central theme. So why do I feel so emotional when Daniil talks to the death in that game but feel pretty much nothing when he talk about dying in Quarantine? Maybe because The Marble Nest is still steeped so deeply in the theatre influences which I hold dear to my heart while Quarantine moves away from them and maybe towards another medium entirely. Theatre never pretends to be reality and it's artificiality is always front and center. Film meanwhile often has the tendency to try to replicate reality or even try to be reality itself. In one of those cases I feel like an active audience member and in the other like a passive voyeur of some vision of reality. Or to put it simply, in one case I am afraid of Death and in the other, I am watching someone act out being afraid of death. That is a highly personal preference though and I'm genuinely happy to see that many people do indeed relate to this portrayal of Daniil, especially when it comes to how his mental problems are displayed front and center. And that's amazing! I want to see all the fan input that comes out of it and I hope the final game delivers on everything they hope for. But for me? I think I might need to take a back seat, at least for now. Watch the scene from afar, perhaps get a fuller picture. Because I want to care and understand and know and feel. I really do. But sometimes it's not possible and that's also good.

So, if you've read this overwritten mess to the end, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart and encourage you to voice your opinion. Art doesn't exist without discussion so let's discuss!

POST-SCRIPTUM - ON THE NATURE OF MAKING GOOD THINGS IN YOUR PAST

One last thing I wanted to add which feels highly relevant to the my critique is the question of what to do when someone says they liked your old work better? I like to think of myself as an artist and I think that many of us do, even without getting into how according to Beuys everyone is an artist. So you make a thing, some people like, perhaps many people do. So you keep making things, you grow with them, change, realize your old ideas were often childish or naive which you can only do through gaining experience. So you make new things, often drastically different from the ones you made before. And someone says "I liked the old stuff better". And they don't say it as an insult, even though it may sometimes feel like it. Because you cannot recreate whatever you did in your past. And you want to grow. Does that mean that you got worse instead? That you peaked in your past and it's all downhill from here? Of course not. You know that. I know that. I hope every artist knows that. And yet it still hurts. It hurts to be perceived as a line graph when in reality you are a recursive function.

----

all images made by me, the ones with yellow background are from a shitpost animatic, the white one was a joke I made after hearing the famous"sherlock mind palace fruit ninja" pitch, and the last one is me in my Daniil cosplay. Goodnight Bikini Bottom

[artist-issues]

Is Thunderbolts anything like the caliber of movies Marvel Phase 1 or even Phase 2 was coming out with? No

Like Yelena should not end her monologue to a hostage by explaining to that hostage that she needs his face to get through the scanner. Out loud. That feels like something pure-exposition, for the audience’s benefit. What Phase One Marvel would’ve probably done with that was cut to a close-up of Yelena’s face, it looks like she’s looking down, confessing something, and then it switches to a full-body shot and the person she’s talking to is the hostage, but she’s actively talking to him while she’s jamming his face into the scanner, and it’s not working, so she ends their little “conversation” and drops him on the floor. Marvel Phase One would’ve just shown us her quirky little casual-espionage expertise, dropped us into the scene and trusted us to figure it out, instead of having her say it out loud.

But! Here are some Good things I noticed.

Every part of the adventure that the Thunderbolts* are going on has something to do with the idea of “We’ll Fall into the Void Without Sticking Together.” Like when they’re Kuzcoing it up the elevator shaft, and have to rely on one another, and if they don’t they fall into a literal void (they can’t see the bottom.) Or when Yelena’s whole plan is to use light followed by teamwork to blind their attackers.

When they’re walking up that shaft, they’re focusing on The Bad. They identify with their sob stories. “Kidnapped child assassin. I win.” Like Alexi says later, when they look at themselves they see only the Bad.

Alexi’s all about his own glory, until Bucky says “this isn’t right” while Bob is pummeling the Void. Then Alexi literally works together with Yelena to lift the rubble and get her free, to have the Big Hero Moment, leaving himself trapped. He lets her do the cool backflips and rush to save the day, which means he both a) is giving her the spotlight and b) really does believe in her to fix it. Like he always said he did.

This one’s obvious but Yelena’s silhouette being framed by the only light in Bob’s Shame Attic while she holds his hand and sits with him, and everything else in the shot is in shadow.

Bucky being the one to describe to the Thunderbolts* how running doesn’t work, the things you’ve done always catch up to you.

In the Shame Shadow Network Yelena can only see Bob through each room’s mirrors or reflective surfaces, just like how thematically you can only reach someone lost in dark thoughts by proving to them that you know what they’re going through—relating to them. Reflections, mirror images, get it?

Another obvious one but the idea that Yelena only sees the bad which leads to the dark void inside of her—and Void, the supervillain’s, powers being a physical manifestation of that—he reduces people to the shadow they cast, when the whole idea is that that’s not the true them, it’s just their shadow. (That’s not a worldview that lines up with reality, I’m just saying the movie was thematically consistent.)

Bucky being the only one to laugh at Valentina’s villain monologue in the group-reaction shot, probably because Sebastian Stan knows that Bucky is thinking of Steve Rogers predicting this exact use of “superheroes” by a corrupt government power.

Bob being Alone consistently = Bad. First time I noticed it was when they put him in the back of the truck and she says “you going to be okay back here?” And he says “yeah,” but no. Because then he gets cagey and runs out and tries to save the day on his own and gets riddled with bullets. Alone Bob always = Bad Stuff.

The whole larger setup of the movie being that the world, all the innocent people, culture at large, is missing the Avengers. Thinking that there’s nobody coming to save the day. “We’re on Our Own.” And then on a smaller character-level that’s Bob’s problem, that’s Yelena’s problem, that’s Void’s mantra: “you’re alone.” So the movie set us up to remember how much we miss the Avengers so that it could fill the gap. And it fills it with characters like Alexi who are so happy to try and fill the gap, the audience can’t help but be happy for him even though we know they can’t be our Avengers.

All that was well-done. Not Avengers-caliber or even Guardians-caliber or geez, barely Agents-of-Shield-caliber well-done. But still, well done enough to have heart and be enjoyable

[name-one-doctor]

DR BRAND UPDATE

After answering this anon, I emailed Dr Brand asking for her opinion on the idea of multiple identity outside CDDs. She sent me this article, saying "This article will explain my opinion on this." The published revision was written so recently as October, after this blog was created, so this is fresh out of the oven!

Most of it is about self-diagnosed DID, some about the spread of self-diagnosis for other disorders. The general tone is skepticism but not dismissal.

While not the main focus, for the first time ever on this blog, multiple identity outside dissociative disorders is actually mentioned in the article! So what do they have to say about it?

Interview research with members of online plurality communities has found that they are typically young, female at birth, and include a mixture of people clinically diagnosed with DID and self-diagnosed, as well as those who identify as multiple or plural but claim to have no trauma history or dissociative symptoms. Within the broad umbrella of the online plural subculture, there is an elaborate vocabulary to describe systems of self-states, their origins, and associated psychological and relational dynamics.

Seems like a fairly neutral description. Right about now is when I would expect them to say something like, "there is no evidence that plural identity can exist without trauma or dissociative disorders, and it is concerning that this has become such a big part of..."

What actually comes next?

(The term “system” is used within online DID subcultures to refer to a collection of self-states within an individual, and sometimes to any individual with DID.)

Instead of dunking on the idea of non-traumagenic multiplicity, which it seems like they should do right after introducing it given the target audience (other scholars who aren't familiar with this topic), they make a point of defining “system” not as a medical term, but as internet slang. Weird.

There is sometimes a role-playing aspect as individuals incorporate their favorite fictional characters into their systems of self-states and engage in online interactions among these self-states and other “systems.”

Possible fakeclaiming of introjects aside, why is “systems” still in quotation marks? Why are these professionals treating it like foreign terminology?

Because despite what's often alleged here, “system” is seldom used to mean this (a collection of self-states within an individual) in scholarly publications. I double-checked all the previous daily readings and “system” has not been used this way even a single time among those hundreds of pages about DID.

Oh, this is about non-disordered multiple identity. Pardon the term war detour.

A small body of scholarship has emerged to argue that multiplicity is a valid identity category to describe the experience of multiple selves in a single body, and that the most appropriate therapeutic stance is to always accept, and even celebrate, the multiplicity of the individual.

Ok, now they're gonna say it's bs. Right?

No, that's all folks! That's the last mention of multiplicity as identity in this article. You can check for yourself, the authors just leave it there with no rebuttal. "Some credible people are saying that multiplicity as an identity is valid and we're not gonna argue with them."

So while I appreciate the attempt, anon, this confirms it: Dr Bethany Brand and all her co-authors are endo-neutral at best, and frankly they're probably leaning pro because their main issue is with people self-diagnosing with DID which a lot of endos don't do.

The search for an anti-endo doctor continues.

[hanasnx]

too bad i forget.

MINORS DNI 18+ NOTES: takes place during s2e2 where annie, abed, and troy break into a lawyers office | not sure how i feel about this bcos it was stuck in my head and i felt like i was trying to fit too many things in but whatevs

“You guys!” you exclaim, stamping your foot in frustration. “I’m the smartest one in the group and all I’ve been used for is bait and distraction.” With each angry bounce in place—conveying your mini temper tantrum as you complain—you hadn’t realized your chest rippled from the impacts of your stomps until their eyes drifted and remained there. Both Troy and ABED NADIR watch your curves move under the thin material of your form-fitting dress, and you scoff in offense. Your arms cross over, veiling your cleavage and breaking their trance. Finally, they meet your gaze as you frown at them. It’s humiliating enough to be looked at like a piece of meat, but you would’ve never expected that behavior from Abed.

A little later, it furthers still when you lift a box of files to prop open the door. Your little heels don’t stay under you when you crouch, sliding to a sit on the floor with your legs folded out on either side of you, and your ass jiggles from your firm landing. Embarrassed, you squeak, and whirl your head around to face the boys, checking if they caught your blunder. Troy has his back turned, but Abed’s unabashedly watching. His eyes follow the deep arch of your back, how your ass fans out sat against the floor, your smooth legs tucked in a most exquisite way. It shocks you enough to idle as he tilts his head. Only when you scramble up, face hot and deeply colored, does Abed return to his task of searching the computer for evidence. Hastily, you dust off your outfit, and make sure it’s not exposing more than it already was. Briefly, you remember the way he scanned you, and you feel a disappointment you didn’t let that linger a little longer.

You and Abed aren’t a thing, but you know how upset he sounded when he heard Jeff had kissed you that night, after the dance. The big reveal right in that study room had him practically storm out after verbalizing Jeff’s blatant disregard for human decency. It was mortifying to say the least, you’d never seen Abed so upset. His voice had a subtle edge that you may have never noticed if you didn’t spend so much time with him. Additionally, there was that one time that Pierce had described you and Britta as—what he believed to be—your most identifying features: one of you was “flat-ass” and the other was “the one Abed wants to nail.” One million questions had flooded your head all of them having to do with the latter. Another time was pottery class, and you hadn’t realized it in the moment, but sculpting a defined phallic shape accidentally had caught the eye of both Abed and Jeff. Running your wet hands up and down the shaft of the clay had brought them both to pensive silence as they observed your graceful movements. All this evidence kept piling up to explain Abed’s strange behavior tonight, but you keep denying it.

You keep denying it right up until you can’t take it anymore, right up until you’re back at his place, straddling him. Your lips against his, you find him oddly stiff. The kiss itself isn’t unpleasant, but you can feel his hesitance. Or maybe he’s just nervous, manifesting in rigid movements. Nevertheless, you find it appealing. A guy who gets worked up kissing strikes your fancy because you’ve always imagined yourself as the one to take it slow. It’s refreshing that he’s beating you to it. Your dress is cascaded over his pelvis, and his head is propped up on the armrest of his couch. Sweetly, he’s returning your kiss the best of his ability, even parting your lips with his when he slips you a glimpse of tongue.

You pull away to speak, but he interrupts your path. “Did I not do it right?” he asks, but his tone is characteristically devoid of concern. Instead, it’s calculative, as if he’s been measuring your enjoyment inside his head and is surprised to have been incorrect just now.

“Oh, you’re doing fine.” you reply with a relieved grin, clutching onto the front of his shirt. “I just wanted to say…” You lean down, pecking his willing lips. “you could… you know, touch me a little.” Those hands of his have been faithfully laying atop your thighs this entire exchange, and he glances warily down at them. So you help him. “Like this.” You palm the backs of his hands and gently glide them along your body, riding up your dress as they come to sit at the space right above your ass. Searching his eyes, you can see a glint of enthusiasm pass through them, and then those curious hands invite themselves to take a generous grope of your backside, incidentally rutting your core against the crotch of his jeans. You exhale, disbelief mixed with pleasure, and you could predict he was gonna say he saw this move in a movie once. Didn’t give him the chance though, pressing your chest against his to recapture his lips.

Strangely forward, Abed experimentally rocks you. Shallow jostles back and forth which is not at all what you expected from him. It’s unnerving until a twang slips from his lips, “Gonna ride me like a cowgirl tonight, huh?”

It becomes clear. You can tell he’s getting nervous treading into unknown territory, and falling back on a reference you don’t understand playing a character you don’t know is a way to diffuse that. “This is not a movie, Abed.” you chide.

“Sorry.”

[alien-girl-21]

The Käärijä Research Paper (tm)

aka: Error Analysis of the Use of English Articles in Jere Pöyhönen Interviews in 2023

(Before we start, a couple of clarifications: firstly, I am a linguistics student and this research was my final project for my psycholinguistics course, secondly, this was a group research and I have gotten permission from my friends to share these results with y'all so tysm to them, and lastly, the og work is LONG, 50 pages long, so I'm condensing it into the important bits)

Findings and explanations under the cut <3

Before sharing the actual research, i'm going to share some important terms for you guys to understand the overall layout of this work.

Error analysis: kind of self explanatory, it's the process of analyzing errors, specifically in one's speech, more on how we did this later.

Omission: The alienation of a linguistic form in speech (i.e. I go to (the) supermarket.).

Addition: The opposite of omission, putting an unnecessary linguistic form in a sentence (i.e. It's the maybe half and half.).

Substitution: Exchanging a linguistic form for another one (i.e. He admitted to have stolen a wallet. Instead of: He admitted to having stolen a wallet.).

Overgeneralization: Looking at a grammatical rule and thinking it applies to every case with no exceptions (i.e. finding out verbs conjugated in the past end in -ed and creating conjugations like writted instead of written). Also known as intralingual transfer.

Negative transfer: When your mother tongue (L1) seeps into your second/foreign language (L2) (in this case it's foreign language, but I'll still call it an L2 for simplicity's sake), if we're talking about Spanish negative transfer it can look like: the car red (Spanish adjectives go after the noun, unlike in English). Also known as interlingual transfer.

Local error: An error that does not affect the overall meaning of the sentence, making it still understandable.

Global error: An error that affects the overall meaning of the sentence, making it difficult to understand without clarifications.

Okay, with that out of the way, let me explain what we did:

We decided to make an error analysis on how Jere utilized articles (the, a/an) throughout 2023, for this we considered 2 interviews and 1 Instagram live, the interviews were: KÄÄRIJÄ TRIES LITHUANIAN FOOD (uploaded on 12/04/23) and Episode 3: Käärijä and friends (uploaded on 26/12/23), the ig live was the one he did to promote the release of Huhhahhei on 19/10/23, the dates are important for later.

Now, to do the error analysis in itself we followed Rod Ellis’ proposal for error analysis which follows four main steps:

Identifying errors: Self-explanatory, you see what errors one has committed.

Describing errors: Once you see the errors, you describe what exactly the error is, it can be with grammatical categories, or with omission, misinformation, addition, misordering, and substitution.

Explaining errors: After describing the error you need to explain why this error was committed, the two main ways are through overgeneralization and negative transfer.

Error evaluation: After all this, you identify how the error affected the overall message of the sentence being spoken, was it local or global?

We put these steps into a chart and listened to the interviews and identified the errors we found, it’s a really long chart, so if you want to see it fully you can find it here (hopefully). After identifying all the errors and doing our own error analysis we… well, analyzed the data, duh, according to the objectives we set up for the research.

Our first objective was to identify errors Jere has committed regarding articles in the three videos I mentioned. What we analyzed was more grammatical, so what grammatical structure he used the most. He usually omits an article before a noun and with adjectives, like in: “We go to bar with my producer…”, or “Käärijä goes to boat.”, or “I am fine, uh… little bit tired.”. Obviously, this is kind of expected because Finnish does not have articles, but he also adds articles when it is not necessary, like in: “I have the one festival.” Here are the charts of the grammatical trends:

Then we focused on the describing errors part of our analysis. In this part, we found out that he usually finds himself committing omission errors, with 67 in total across the three videos, like I said before, expected, however, the second most common error is addition, this means he adds an unnecessary article in a sentence, and what’s interesting is that he usually does it with the article “the”. Since this is not an actual academic article I will speculate with a full chest: I think he does this because people are usually taught that “the” is the only article in English (only definite one, but not the only one), and that nouns usually have an article accompanying them, so I think that he adds the when he is unsure if an article needs to go there or not. Finally, there was only one case of substitution: “This is the lovely story.”, not really sure why he did this, but it’s interesting that it only happened once. Have the charts and graphs:

We moved to the next step: explaining errors. When we started this research, we thought that we would only have negative transfers since, ya know, Finnish grammar and all, and we were kind of right? He has committed negative transfer errors the most, with 66 in total, but he also had 23 overgeneralization errors, which I didn’t really expect to happen with articles that much. Not much else to say here, have charts:

Lastly, error evaluation. He made mostly local errors, which is what mainly characterizes his speech, we know what he’s saying, he just usually lacks some grammatical form that doesn’t affect his overall meaning. He did have 15 global errors that unless you have the context, it can be a little confusing to understand what he’s trying to say (like in the ig live he said “here tour” when he wanted to say “here in the tour”). Charts!

Our final objective was to see the evolution of these errors, has he made more or less as time went on? Well, since we all can see and hear, he has made a great improvement! You already have the charts above to understand that, but I just have to explain it. In the first interview, in April, he made 50 mistakes in total, by the ig live he had cut those in half, and by the latest interview he gave in English he had cut the mistakes in half again! Have the graphs to accurately see this:

He has improved so much in such a short amount of time! Even more impressive when he hasn’t really taken any formal English classes, just by talking to Bojan and Alessandra. There’s a difference between language learning and language acquisition that was proposed by Stephen Krashen (cool dude, if you’re interested in language learning, go check him out). He says that people usually learn more by acquiring (unconscious) rather than learning (conscious), and you can see that Jere has learnt so much by acquiring English through his friends and his own experiences! And this is just looking at how he uses articles, there is also a distinctive change in how he uses other grammatical forms (but that was too much work for just 2 weeks, maybe I’ll do it later, no promises on anything, though). Even if we’re not talking about his grammatical and syntactical forms, his pronunciation has improved as well! My friends were fascinated by how his accent seemed to develop from video to video, which was very sweet because his accent is one of my favorite things about his speech, but that’s off topic.

The general takeaway from this research is: Jere still has a lot of Finnish tendencies in his English, he has developed his own grammatical structures to communicate in English, and how much he improved in an 8-month period is kind of insane, especially for an adult (who are the age group who have the most trouble learning languages). He’s the it-girl of blowing off a linguist’s mind (me, I’m the linguist)

That would be all!! If you have any other questions, feel free to ask! I'm more than glad to answer them

[beardedmrbean]

"The Young Turks" co-host Ana Kasparian explained what drove her to ditch the Democratic Party while on Jillian Michaels' "Keeping It Real" podcast on Monday.

The progressive media host described feeling "politically homeless" over the past few years, as she started seeing an intolerance to debate and the free exchange of ideas as well as an embrace of soft-on-crime policies by the left that she believed were detrimental to society.

She ripped efforts to "demonize and even dehumanize the other side" while admitting she used to be a person who believed you could not be friends with conservatives or someone who supported former President Trump. Both women said they identified with disaffected Democrats who now feel unwelcome in their former party.

Kasparian said a turning point for her was when she was scolded by liberals after confessing she was fearful to leave her house after being sexually assaulted by a homeless man while walking her dog in Los Angeles in 2022. "Before I knew it, I started getting these messages, and it's really, really harsh stuff, about how, ‘You are painting a picture of the homeless community. How could you be like this? These are your unhoused neighbors and they need help,'" she said of the negative messages she received. "A few people  accused me of being racist, even though I had never disclosed the race of the individuals who did this to me. And in fact, they were White," Kasparian continued. 

"That woke me up," Kasparian said. "Some of the people that I've associated myself with because I thought they were the good people….They definitely have stereotypes in their head and are totally blind to the fact that they have those stereotypes and go around accusing others of being bad actors when they themselves need to do the work."

Kasparian said she also disagreed with the "defeatist mentality" shown towards minorities.

"At some point last year, the other thing that really hit me was the difference between my upbringing and what the Democratic Party espouses," Kasparian said.

She described being raised by "very tough" parents who taught her to work hard to be self-sufficient and create her own opportunities. While she acknowledged there are obstacles today that some younger people are facing that older generations may not have had to face, she still sees America as a land of opportunity, which she said goes against messaging from the Democratic Party.

"However, we all get to wake up in the morning and make choices for ourselves. And when I hear the Democratic Party constantly disempower people of color, because that's what they're doing," she said.

"They keep using this messaging that infantilizes them and makes them seem as though, you know, if it weren't for us White saviors, messing around with these laws and policies, they would never be able to survive. And I find that so gross," she continued. Kasparian gave examples of how a Los Angeles school district scrapped its honor student program because there wasn't enough Hispanic students enrolled in the program.  "That p---d me off," Kasparian said. "It's doing away with an opportunity rather than seeing what the flaws are in our education system and then rising to the occasion to help these students, where we do see the disparity, to get to where we want them to be. That's the right way to approach it. But there's just this weird defeatist mentality. And I'm honestly also very sick of White people going around being offended on behalf of marginalized people."

"They're just virtue signaling. It's disgusting," Michaels agreed.

"We should celebrate people who want to better themselves and better their lives," Kasparian said later in a discussion about the "fat-acceptance" movement on the far-left.

"Instead, there's this effort to basically tell people, ‘you're fine the way you are, you don't need to change a thing,' even if that thing is slowly killing you. It doesn't make any sense," she continued.

The pair also said they've seen their home state of California become "crazy" over time from when they were growing up.

Michaels, who left California in 2021, has previously shared how the deep blue state's soft-on crime policies drove her and her family to leave and move to Miami.

"Nothing was crazy like this right?" Michaels told Kasparian. "Homelessness, crime, advocating for medicalization of children, advocating for late-term abortion?"

Gov. Gavin Newsom is leading the "madness" in the state, Michaels said. "The concern is that it goes from California to a federal problem."

"Unfortunately, some of the failed policies we've started here have been exported to other states," Kasparian agreed.

Fox News Digital reached out to Newsom's office for comment, but did not immediately hear back.  _____________________________

Gotta be real far gone for someone like Kasparian, to ditch you.

[rjalker]

it's so funny, and by funny I mean so blatantly bigoted, how when nonbinary people got upset about being shoved into the new binary boxes of "transmasculine" and "transfeminine" based solely on what we were assigned at birth, all the binary people rushed to insist that it wasn't actually about what we were assigned at birth, it was just how we *chose* to present ourselves.

Not wanting boobs makes you transmasculine. Wanting boobs makes you transfeminine. It was as simple as that, they said. And then they aggressively erased, and still continue to erase, anyone who refuses to be put into these new binary boxes.

But now that they've realized that people have been using these terms with the "it signals how you want to present" meaning, now suddenly they're pissed off that the terms aren't just a synonym for what you were assigned at birth anymore. Even when it's intersex people who explain themselves over and over again. Perisex people will just literally say that these intersex people have no idea what they're talking about and then harass intersex people who try to explain it.

Like it's just proving these people were all lying from the start. They did in fact mean that all AFAB trans people are transmasculine because transmasculine is just a synonym for AFAB, and vice versa. They were just insisting it ~totally wasn't~ to placate all the nonbinary people who got pissed off at being forced into a new binary.

But now suddenly they think AMAB transmasculine people and AFAB transfeminine people are suddenly using these terms wrong because the people who've been forcing everyone to pick one for years don't like that they're not synonymous with what you were assigned at birth anymore, and are actually being used to signal how you want to present.

They really just do not care how many people they have to misgender and erase as long as they get to sort everyone into neat binary boxes with no crossover or alternatives.

They literally decided you have to identify yourself as either transmasculine or transfeminine or else you don't exist at all and will be erased every step of the way until you pick one. And now they're mad that people are joyfully identifying with these terms as a matter of gender presentation and transition goals instead of being pressured into it to erase themselves.

Next time you all invent a brand new gender binary to force on people, at least do us all the favor of not blatantly lying about what it means only to get mad when you find out people have been using the terms in the way you thought wasn't actually true.

Either admit that you use transfeminine and transmasculine as synonyms for what someone was assigned at birth and that you don't care how many people you have to misgender to do so, including binary perisex trans butches and femmes and just literally any nonbinary person who doesn't identify as or with masculinity or femininity in any way, or deal with the fact that people are using these terms to describe their transition goals, path, and gender presentation in a genuine way that, unlike when you force the binary onto people, hurts no one except your bigoted, binarist feelings.

You literally don't get to tell intersex people that they have no idea what they're talking about when they tell you their experiences. You literally don't get to keep erasing and speaking over nonbinary and genderqueer and multigender people.

[lithopus]

Hi! I’m the anon who asked about ur thought process, sorry for making it such a broad question. I just wanted to know how you figure out how to write dialogue. Uhm if it’s too broad of a question it’s okay! I just personally have a hard time figuring out how to make some characters feel like they’re having a real conversation. The way you write characters talking flows so smoothly and I just can’t get it to feel right. ((I especially like the snarky quips kaveh and alhaitham share, it’s very old married couple like)) This might be more of a personal thing and since everyone thinks/writes differently I understand if it’s something you can’t really explain to me!

Also! When you write do you usually start with an outline and fill in the rest? Sometimes I just write what I feel like and I get stumped after a while. But thank you for taking the time to help me! Sorry if this just made everything more confusing.

No worries, and no need to apologize! Like I said, a lot of writers probably could’ve easily answered your initial question, but my brain sometimes struggles to articulate a response for things like that. And thank you for sending this follow-up—I understand now!

For both of your questions, I’ll separate my answers into two sections: 1) describing how I personally do those things, and 2) providing actual suggestions/recommendations for doing those things. That’s because I wouldn’t necessarily recommend my personal approach to writing, lol—my very loose “process” can be rather haphazard due to how my brain works, so I’m mostly just sharing examples of my notes in case anyone’s curious about what my drafts look like.

(Also, I think I’ll make a SFW version of this post at some point. Although there’s nothing too sexually explicit here, I do reference several examples from NSFW fics I’ve written, since this post is aimed at the asker and my followers—but because my writing suggestions themselves aren’t explicit in nature, I’d prefer to eventually make this advice accessible to all writers.)

Table of Contents

A. Dialogue 1. How I Plan Dialogue 2. My Actual Suggestions for Planning Dialogue 💡 Know the “arc” or “goal” of the conversation 💡 Listen to actual conversations (and transcribe them) 💡 Writing banter B. Outlining 1. How I Outline 2. My Actual Suggestions for Outlining 💡 Know the goal (or the “point”) of the scene you’re writing 💡 Identify the characters’ goals 💡 Identify the “key elements” of the scene or chapter 💡 Consider rewinding or backtracking a bit 💡 Take a short break from that project

A — DIALOGUE

1: How I Plan Dialogue

So, my answer to your first question actually overlaps with my answer to your second question. I don’t take a strict approach, but I do often outline the main “beats” in a conversation before I actually write a scene. Sometimes that looks like a bulleted list or summary—although, I couldn’t find a good example of that in my files, so I created this example based on some (very lengthy) notes for Chapter 6 of my fic “testing, testing”:

Kaveh is complimenting Alhaitham more in this chapter. For example, maybe he says he prefers coffee made by Alhaitham over the coffee made at Puspa Café.

Alhaitham doesn’t realize Kaveh is complimenting him, and responds in a way that unintentionally undermines Kaveh’s compliment.

Instead of getting upset, Kaveh clarifies what he was trying to say, and the two of them continue talking.

At one point Kaveh asks a genuine question and Alhaitham nearly responds indirectly/sarcastically like he usually does, but lately he’s noticed that things go more smoothly if he directly answers Kaveh’s questions, so he gives Kaveh a straightforward response

Kaveh is flustered by the honest response, and the two flirt a bit before the scene ends

Other times, it’s more of a “play-by-play” description. The notes I used to create the above example actually look more like this mess from my notes for the first scene in Chapter 5:

And Alhaitham kinda eyebrow raises like hm. Okay. You need to get in the mood, you mean? (Saunters over to him, backs him against the wall. Kaveh instantly turned on and starts/tempted to crumble.) Touching him and murmurs you know, it’s not [a den of sin there. People conduct themselves properly/it would be inappropriate to mess around there. Better get it out of your system now if it’s going to distract you etc. Etc.] And Kaveh’s like that’s not what I meant! Alhaitham smirks. Kaveh adds and you KNOW it, you know what I meant, this is just an excuse for you because you’re insatiably horny [maybe: says the man who nakedly accosted me on the couch and demanded that we suck each other off at 10 in the morning—] Kaveh’s face BURNS. I—I—I—that was—because— (He’d been confident enough for 10 seconds to request it & wanted to do it before he lost his nerve.) Alhaitham maybe softens ever so slightly and points out that if he’s confident enough to finally ask, maybe he should just maintain that confidence and go while he’s still in the mood. Kaveh sighs. Like, yeah. (Shit maybe he should have asked in the morning when the place wouldn’t be open.) Alhaitham maybe also reminds him that it’s not like they have to use whatever they buy as soon as they get back. Heh. Unless he wants to.

And other times the dialogue does play out naturally in my head, so I jot down a much “cleaner” play-by-play, like this dialogue from Chapter 2 of “hard-edged, hard-earned”:

Comes back. Asks to sit on couch. No. Can I sit on the floor? No. That would hurt your back. Can I sit on any piece of furniture in this room?! No.

I will say, whenever I end up with “clean” notes like that, it’s often because I spoke all the dialogue out loud (or mouthed it)—as in, I’ll literally be having conversations with myself as the characters. Sometimes I’m talking to myself in front of a mirror, and other times just turning my head back and forth as I jump between characters 😅 It’s not a technique I adopted intentionally, but my brain doesn’t really have much “internal” dialogue/narration in general, and that trait extends to creative stuff. I pretty much have to talk through everything out loud, or physically type out my stream-of-consciousness brainstorming.

So: I plan some of the dialogue ahead of time, and I also plan dialogue throughout the writing process. That is, I might start writing a chapter with a certain conversation already outlined (like the “clean” play-by-play I shared), but other parts of the chapter will be more like a brief summary—e.g., “Kaveh compliments Alhaitham during this scene, and Alhaitham responds positively.” Once I reach that part of the outline during the actual writing stage, I’ll usually pause to hammer out more specific conversation beats.

Not necessarily because that’s the best way to do things, but because my brain moves too fast for my fingers when I’m trying to write a scene. An unpolished “stream” of the scene allows me to follow the flow of the whole conversation as it happens. (Otherwise I’d forget where the dialogue was going once I was halfway through writing the scene 💀)

There are times where I don’t have to do the play-by-play, and can just figure out the dialogue as I write the actual scene…it just depends on the scene and how my brain is working that day, I guess.

**BONUS: For anyone who’s curious, please check the end of this post for a horrifying look at how my play-by-play brainstorming often looks 😂

2: My Actual Suggestions for Planning Dialogue

I’m not saying that these are things you must do, for the record—these are just some ideas you could try, if you think any of them sound useful.

💡 Know the “arc” or “goal” of the conversation

In other words: “Where will this conversation start, and where does it need to end?”

Traditionally—from a “story structure” perspective, or whatever—in every scene, the characters have a goal they’re trying to accomplish. (I say “traditionally” because of course there are some stories that don’t fit this rule—e.g., a story consisting of several vignettes where the character is reminiscing about things.)

This general rule is also true of the conversations in a scene. Even if the characters don’t consciously register it, they each want to accomplish something during their conversations with other characters. For instance, one character might be trying to convince another character to pursue a particular course of action, or they might feel upset and be seeking out a lighthearted conversation to lift their spirits. (Phrased differently: Characters generally want to get something out of talking to each other—but, to clarify, that “something” can be as simple as the characters wanting to enjoy each other’s company.)

I’ll use Chapter 5 of “testing, testing” as an example. In the first scene, Kaveh’s goal when talking to Alhaitham is to ask him about shopping for sex toys. Kaveh is communicating with the goal of making that request, so his dialogue is going to (in theory) move him toward that goal—although of course he might get distracted, or other goals might arise during the conversation, but that’s the starting point, at least.

Alhaitham—who knows that Kaveh was looking for him, but doesn’t initially know why—has a primary goal during the conversation, along with a secondary goal. Alhaitham’s main goal is to find out what Kaveh wanted to ask him, and here are some possible ways he might communicate in order to achieve this goal:

Calm Kaveh’s anxieties so that he feels comfortable enough to make his request

Avoid upsetting Kaveh, since that might cause him to storm off without telling Alhaitham what was on his mind

Remind Kaveh to stay on-topic if his mind starts wandering to something unrelated

But Alhaitham’s secondary goal is to flirt with Kaveh, of course, which guides his initial interactions with Kaveh during the beginning of that scene, and periodically resurfaces throughout the conversation.

Kaveh’s (temporary) goals during the conversation shift in reaction to what Alhaitham is doing. For example, if Alhaitham’s teasing starts to make him feel too flustered or awkward, Kaveh’s temporary goal will be to stop feeling flustered and awkward, which means that he’ll communicate with the goal of getting Alhaitham to stop his teasing. And if Alhaitham stops teasing but seems upset about it, Kaveh’s temporary goal will then be to figure out what’s wrong and find a way to reassure Alhaitham.

Put more concisely:

The “flow” of the conversation comes from the goals that the characters are trying to accomplish at any given point in their discussion

The characters communicate either to 1) respond/react to something another character has done, or 2) address their most “immediate” goal

The characters develop new “goals” in response to what the other speakers say, or how the conversation makes them feel—but they (typically) still maintain their primary goal, as well

I’m not sure whether that makes sense, but hopefully if you look at the first scene in Chapter 5 with this framework in mind, you can “see” how Kaveh’s and Alhaitham’s shifting goals determine the flow of the conversation.

And, at the risk of making my explanation even more confusing, here’s a break-down of the beginning of that scene:

Kaveh’s main goal is to ask Alhaitham to go shopping; Alhaitham’s main goal is to figure out what Kaveh wants, and his secondary goal is to get in Kaveh’s pants.

Kaveh seeks out Alhaitham in order to ask his question, but Alhaitham startles him.

Kaveh reacts to the surprise he’s feeling. His temporary goal is now to compose himself.

However, flustering Kaveh helps Alhaitham achieve his goal of fooling around with him, so Alhaitham starts flirting to prevent Kaveh from regaining his composure.

Kaveh realizes that Alhaitham is proposing sex—but having sex right now would prevent Kaveh from asking his question and accomplishing his goal, so he tells Alhaitham not to undress, with the goal of refocusing the conversation on his request.

With sex off the table, Alhaitham reverts to his main goal and asks Kaveh what his question was.

Kaveh still feels flustered, though, so now his (temporary) goal is to make sure that Alhaitham isn’t going to mock him and make him feel insecure; otherwise he won’t be able to accomplish his main goal of asking Alhaitham to go shopping, since he’ll feel too anxious to make the request. So, he tells Alhaitham not to laugh at him for his question.

Alhaitham’s main goal is to encourage communication, so he responds in a deadpan manner instead of teasing Kaveh more.

Basically, characters aren’t just talking for no reason—there’s a specific “direction” that they’re speaking in, though of course this direction can shift and change as the conversation progresses. If you listen to conversations in real life—on a phone call, or a podcast, or whatever—you’ll hopefully see a similar sort of “flow” in those discussions. People don’t speak merely for the sake of producing frequencies; anything they say, they’re saying for a reason (that is, a goal), and those “reasons” are naturally generated by the progression of the conversation.

Or, looking at it differently…I’m not sure if this is helpful, but when you’re trying to figure out the flow/direction of a conversation, maybe you could approach it as if you’re selecting dialogue options in a visual novel or RPG game. As in, whenever it’s Character A’s turn to speak, a few different options “pop up” depending on that character’s personality and current goals—and then different options are unlocked throughout the conversation depending on the choices made by Character A and the other character(s).

For instance, at the beginning of Chapter 5, Alhaitham’s speaking options would be:

◆ Question Kaveh ◆ Flirt with Kaveh

The conversation continues—but then Kaveh gets upset, so Alhaitham’s default options become unavailable, and these new options appear:

◆ Question Kaveh ◆ Flirt with Kaveh ◆ Comfort Kaveh ◆ Clarify misunderstanding ◆ Rile up Kaveh

Meanwhile, Kaveh’s “Ask Alhaitham to go shopping” option might become inaccessible whenever it’s overridden by other goals/concerns. For example, maybe when Kaveh is upset because Alhaitham teased him, his menu looks like this:

◆ Ask Alhaitham to go shopping ◆ Defend self against insult ◆ Warn Alhaitham to stop teasing ◆ Criticize Alhaitham

When a character’s emotional state changes, that might “unlock” certain dialogue options—e.g., maybe Alhaitham normally wouldn’t have the option to snap at Kaveh, unless Kaveh said something that really upset him, and then Alhaitham would be able to “access” a harsher dialogue option.

Or certain dialogue options might be connected to specific goals, meaning that a character needs to be actively pursuing that goal in order to “use” those dialogue options. For example, if Kaveh doesn’t feel comfortable enough to ask Alhaitham to go shopping, then he can’t access any dialogue choices that are connected to that goal; instead, his options will be limited to whatever his current concern is.

Of course, there’s a lot of room for interpretation with something like this. Going back to one of my examples in this section: I said that if Kaveh gets upset, then Alhaitham no longer has an option to flirt—but depending on the characterization/story, that might not necessarily be the case. For instance, if Alhaitham doesn’t realize that Kaveh is upset or mistakenly thinks that flirting will fix Kaveh’s bad mood, then that “dialogue option” might still be available to him, even though it’s probably not a good idea for him to choose it.

And if I wanted to write a scene where Alhaitham and Kaveh get into a fight, then I certainly might allow Alhaitham to pick that (inadvisable) dialogue option—which is basically what happens during one of the scenes in Chapter 4, where Alhaitham misreads the situation and Kaveh turns down his advances. But if that sort of dialogue choice would send the scene in the wrong direction or completely divert the characters from their conversational goals, it’s probably not the most effective option, writing-wise.

That’s why I like “prewriting” a play-by-play of conversations before I properly write a scene, because that allows me to figure out if certain dialogue choices will make the scene stray too far from its purpose. If I’m outlining the beats of a conversation and the characters start to get a bit distracted—for example, maybe they’ve started flirting instead of focusing on the main point of their discussion—then I can look at that and say, “Okay. Sometime in the next few lines, we need to find a good place for the characters to pivot back toward their main goal during this conversation.”

(And that won’t feel forced, because the characters themselves also want to return to the primary goal of their conversation; it’s perfectly natural for them to conclude their off-topic discussion and then refocus on the main point.)

Or, if the characters have strayed too far from the main topic of their conversation—as in, there’s no “natural” way for the discussion to transition back to where it needs to be—then I’m able to see during the prewriting stage that the dialogue needs to be reworked. I’ll either need to delete the section of dialogue that wandered away from the main point of the conversation, or I’ll need to find a different place in the conversation where I can insert that dialogue and maintain the flow of the discussion.

If you ever get stuck while writing a conversation between characters, that’s possibly happening because the characters have forgotten or abandoned their conversational “goal” and can no longer find their way back to it. Or, similarly, it could be because the mood/emotions of the conversation have evolved too drastically, to the point that any “dialogue options” advancing a character’s primary goals have become inaccessible or unavailable. By retracing your steps back to when things got off-track and picking new dialogue options that move the characters toward their main goal(s), you should be able to get the scene flowing again.

And, ah, if everything I just said makes zero sense, that’s fine. I’ve never approached dialogue-writing that way, so I don’t actually know if something like that could help—it’s just an idea that occurred to me while I was answering this question.

One final note: Knowing the characters’ goals can sometimes help me figure out when a scene should end, too. Once the characters achieve their goal during that scene—or hit a setback and are no longer able to achieve their goal for the time being—that’s potentially a sign that I should move on to the next scene. (Not necessarily a scene break—it could just be that the conversation ends, and then it’s time for the POV character’s internal reaction/reflection to begin.)

💡 Listen to actual conversations (and transcribe them)

I admit, I haven’t really done this, myself—dialogue has always been the easiest part of writing for me, and I’ve been practicing writing for…ah, a while. (Fifteen years, at least. I mean, I wrote little poems and short stories starting from a very young age, as many writers do, but in terms of intentionally studying and practicing long-form writing, it’s been about fifteen years.) So, I can’t recall a distinct “process” in terms of how I learned to write dialogue; all I know is that I’ve gotten better at it by practicing for so many years.

That said, I do remember that “try transcribing actual conversations” was one of the suggestions I encountered back when I first began seeking out writing advice.

Of course, fictional dialogue is different from real-life conversations in some ways, so those transcriptions aren’t necessarily going to work exactly the same way as a fictional conversation, but this is still a potentially useful tool for learning to “feel” the flow of how people speak to each other, in addition to helping a writer make the characters’ voices sound more natural. Real-life conversations typically don’t have the “stilted” feeling that unnatural fictional dialogue has—although of course there are exceptions—so studying human speech patterns might help you identify ways to make your dialogue flow more smoothly.

**As a side note: When I’m writing characters that aren’t mine—as in, writing fanfiction—I’ll often study their voice lines and takes notes on the ways they speak (e.g., tone, vocabulary, sentence structure) and the specific phrases they use.

For fanfiction, you can also analyze conversations between characters in the source material in order to get a feel for how their particular discussions flow. Like this moment from Alhaitham’s story quest:

Kaveh: Oh, so the pot’s calling the kettle black, is he? Hmph, well, having said all that, are you okay? Alhaitham: I’m doing quite well — much better than that painting you’re trying to hang on the wall. Kaveh: You…! You don’t understand anything! Stop criticizing my taste in decoration!

Reading that, we know that one potential “template” for an exchange between Kaveh and Alhaitham is: Kaveh snarks at Alhaitham, then softens and seriously asks if he’s alright; Alhaitham responds, but then immediately goes back to trying to rile Kaveh up again; Kaveh takes the bait and gets worked up, having now entirely forgotten his previous line of inquiry.

💡 Writing banter (???)

As for writing the “married couple” banter…I don’t have any advice for that, unfortunately. I’m a quippy person in general, so my brain generates wordplay and snappy/sarcastic comebacks easily. I assume there must be some method(s) that writers use to figure out those types of conversations more deliberately, but I don’t personally know how to manually do that sort of thing.

I guess my suggestion would be the same as my advice for other things: try analyzing any banter you enjoy, and identify what elements make that banter “work”. I’ve never really tried to do that sort of analysis, but I’ll attempt to provide some examples:

During Alhaitham’s story quest, Kaveh says “Alhaitham could have stayed home where it’s safe”, and then his brain immediately jumps to the thought that if Alhaitham stayed home, he could have cleaned up his books while he was there → Kaveh tends to snark at Alhaitham about the state of their shared living space and nag him about minor annoyances, so he looks for opportunities to bring up these things during their conversations. If there’s some vague word/concept that could connect a piece of dialogue to Kaveh’s latest grievance, then he might use that as a jumping-off point for a jab about Alhaitham needing to do chores.

Kaveh asks Alhaitham to help him with hanging a painting at the very beginning of the scene, and then way later on in the conversation, Alhaitham suddenly makes a dig at Kaveh’s attempts to hang that painting → Alhaitham likes to circle back to things that were mentioned earlier in the conversation in order to catch Kaveh off-guard and rile him up.

The two of them seem to have some preferred “topics” of bickering/teasing—for example, Kaveh likes to harp on Alhaitham for his lack of appreciation for aesthetics, and Alhaitham enjoys mentioning his “financial freedom” (i.e., the fact that he consistently spoils Kaveh).

Along the same lines, there are topics that they don’t tease each other about. Neither one of them makes jokes about the other person’s family situation, and there’s not much lighthearted teasing about their philosophical differences, either.

Again, I can’t really provide much help there, since the banter is just something that “happens” while I’m writing. If anyone has advice for this, feel free to chime in via the replies or by sending me an ask 😅

B — OUTLINING

1: How I Outline

So, yes, I do outline, sort of. It’s messy and haphazard, though, and I don’t end up with a coherent list of scenes and plot points until way later in the process—and even then, I still have to reference my chaotic notes when I’m writing the scenes on my “organized” outlined list.

Typically I start working on a story by jotting down all the random ideas I have for that fic concept. Maybe one day I think of the concept and a few lines of dialogue, and then a few days later I think of a scene that would take place at some point in the story, and so on. (Ideally, these notes end up in the same file on my phone or computer; in practice, they end up scattered across various devices and documents, lol.)

For instance, the other day I thought of a concept for an omegaverse fic with an omega/omega dynamic. (Sorry for anyone who doesn’t enjoy this AU—it’s the most recent “in progress” example in my files, and therefore the easiest to reference.) My initial note-taking more or less went like this:

I jotted down part of an opening scene, and when I ran out of steam (partly because I was typing on my phone lol)

I summarized how the rest of the scene would go

A few more ideas for dialogue occurred to me, so I made a note of those

I thought of some omegaverse “science” to explain things, so I wrote that down

Then I had an idea for a flashback scene, so I described how that would go and wrote a few lines of that

I started to get a really clear image of how that scene would go, so I sat down and started properly writing a potential iteration of that scene

For a fic like that—one that isn’t too complicated, I mean—I won’t necessarily take time to organize all of those notes before I officially start writing. There’s a short and simple “arc” in my head:

Beginning of story: Character A announces that an unexpected heat is starting; Character B says there’s a way he can help, but Character A refuses

Middle: Character A thinks back on a time years ago when the two of them tried to platonically help each other and then things went wrong, hence why he turned down Character B’s present-day offer

End: Character A reconsiders and accepts Character B’s help

In this case, I don’t need to know a lot of details before I start writing, and there’s no need for me to make a “formal” outline organizing the random notes I’ve jotted down; I can easily consult those notes once I reach the relevant scenes in the story. All I really need to know is the “arc” of the plot, and I won’t need to write that down if it’s simple/straightforward enough.

It’s kind of similar to how I might need to print out directions or use a GPS to navigate somewhere I haven’t been before, or somewhere I’ve only visited a few times—whereas for a short trip or a route I’ve taken often, I won’t necessarily need a visual guide.

Now, for a story that’s more complicated—like “testing, testing”—I definitely need to take a more structured approach. (Well, “structured” by my unorganized standards, anyway.) When I began writing that fic, I made a rough outline that sketched out the progression of both the sexual exploration and the romantic relationship. It wasn’t super detailed, but it essentially told me:

What kind of sex the characters are having in each chapter

What “domestic shit” happens in that chapter

How the two characters are feeling about each other at that point in time

Uh, actually, here. You can just look at the first page. (My handwriting is usually neater than this 😅)

The current fic doesn’t 100% match that outline—for instance, the whole “good boy” thing didn’t exist at that point, so the “praise kink” sex scene intended for Chapter 5 was actually a different scene, which I’ve tentatively moved to a later chapter. (And my current outline for the rest of the chapters has rather substantially deviated from that original outline, although the overall arc and most of the sex scenes are still the same.)

In general, I outline so that I’ll know “where” a story is going while I write, and which milestones I need to hit on my way toward the end of that story. I need to know the major ways Alhaitham and Kaveh’s relationship changes throughout the fic, and how those changes are reflected/affected by the sex scenes. I still have a good deal of flexibility—I can add or move scenes, alter plot points, add new story arcs—but I do need to follow a (loosely) predetermined trajectory, in order to make sure the story ends up being cohesive.

Of course, that initial outline for “testing, testing” isn’t what I’m currently using…but I don’t have an updated outline for the entire story, either. I just have a lot of notes for individual chapters, and I know the general direction of the plot—as in, I know that the story will eventually reach the fic’s “Getting Together” tag, and I know which major developments need to happen in order for Kaveh and Alhaitham to reach that point.

Those major developments are:

Alhaitham and Kaveh need to reach a point where they can communicate openly and honestly

They need to realize their feelings for each other

They need to decide to act on those feelings for each other

Notes and outlines for individual chapters help me figure out the smaller-scale developments for that arc, but even without those, I always know that by the end of the fic, Alhaitham and Kaveh will be in a position where they’ve done the three things on that list.

(Examples of “smaller-scale developments” for the arc: specific scenes that improve Alhaitham and Kaveh’s communication skills, the exact moments they realize their feelings for each other, their specific reactions to those realizations, the manner in which they discuss their feelings, et cetera. Basically, the major developments are “what” the plot requires, and these smaller-scale developments are “how” those parts of the plot happen.)

I think I would probably get stuck when I’m writing if I didn’t know where a story was going to end up; I need to have that clear “end point” in mind so that I can anticipate things like plot/character arcs. I basically want to know “what are things like at the beginning of the story?” and “how have those things changed by the end?” before I start writing. I can wait until after I start writing to figure out which specific developments happen in the middle, but I need to at least know the starting position that the characters/situation are changing from, and the ultimate position that they’re changing to.

2: My Actual Suggestions for Outlining

So, outlines can be helpful organizational tools, but they won’t instantly solve everything. That is, if you’re getting stuck when you write, the lack of an outline—or the way you’re currently outlining—isn’t the root cause of the problem. This means that simply making some sort of outline, with your sole intent being “to make an outline”, won’t solve the issue; you need to first determine why you’re getting stuck, in order to know what kind of outline will benefit you. (Like needing to identify a specific type of poison in order to know the correct antidote for it, or whatever.)

I’m probably being Captain Obvious here, lol, but I think it’s potentially useful to note: if I’m stuck and I don’t know what to write, then how am I supposed to make an outline that organizes the things I’m going to write?

In general, an outline is a way for you to see the structure/framework of a story. It allows you to keep track of different developments such as story arcs, character growth, and relationship progress—which is to say, the outline gives you a “structure” within which you can write, but it won’t generate the things that get organized inside that structure.

That said, once you do get around to making an outline: Every writer has their own preferred organizational methods and tools, so you’ll need to figure out which ones work best for you. (Heck, some people are just “seat-of-the-pants” writers who don’t make outlines at all!)

And, at the risk of being Mr. Obvious once again—the best outline is one that enables the writer to keep track of whatever information they personally need to reference while writing, which will depend on both the author and the story. For example, if I’m writing a silly crack one-shot, then I likely don’t need an outline that lays out character arcs. But if I’m writing a slowburn about two characters gradually falling for each other, then I probably want an outline that breaks down the progression of their relationship development, so that I can organize my thoughts and figure out which scenes need to happen in the story, and when.

That doesn’t mean you need to know everything when you make an outline, though. Outlining can also make it easier for you to figure out which “gaps” in the story need to be filled. For example, say I’ve just finished writing Chapter 4 of “testing, testing”, and I know from my outline that an internal conflict is going to occur in Chapter 8. This tells me that the next few chapters need to contain certain plot/character developments building up to the eventual conflict. I can figure out the specifics as I go, but already I can see (in a very general sense) what will fill that gap in the outline:

Chapter 5: Something happens that affects how Alhaitham feels/thinks about his relationship with Kaveh

Chapter 6: We see this reflection in Alhaitham’s POV; more developments occur that push him closer to the problem in Chapter 8

Chapter 7: Some sort of continuation of these developments

Chapter 8: The story arrives at the conflict

Having said all of that—if you get stumped when you’re writing, I can’t say for sure what the solution is, but here are some things you could potentially consider.

💡 Know the goal (or the “point”) of the scene you’re writing, as it relates to the story overall

As in, what does this scene accomplish, in terms of storytelling? Does it demonstrate an important aspect of a character’s personality? Does it progress the plot in a significant way? In general, why is this scene happening and being shown to the reader? (I should note that, especially with fanfiction, your answer doesn’t need to be elaborate—it could be something like “I wanted to show how domestic and disgustingly in love these two characters are” 😂 And you might also have multiple answers to that question, depending on the scene.)

For example, this line was in my preliminary notes for Chapter 5:

How is Kaveh feeling / what part of his emotional development do we want to explore here?

So, when I was planning (and writing) certain scenes in that chapter, I was focused on how I could use those scenes to depict important changes in Kaveh’s perspective and in his relationship with Alhaitham.

💡 Identify the characters’ goals during that scene, and the story as a whole

This is partly repeating what I said before about writing conversations—but, again, it’s often useful to know the direction/destination of what you’re writing, and one way of doing that is to identify the characters’ goals during each individual scene (and throughout the story as a whole).

For any scene you’re writing: What is the character trying to accomplish during this particular part of the story? In general, they will say and do things that move them closer to that goal. (Or closer to some other goal, if their priorities shift during the scene.) Characters are typically pursuing something, whether it’s a concrete goal or a more abstract one like an emotional need. And the goal might not necessarily be a conscious one—as in, the character may not specifically think to themself, “I am pursuing this goal”—but you as the writer will know it.

Knowing the characters’ goals will hopefully give you a direction and endpoint for both the scene and the story. The scenes you write—and the characters’ actions during those scenes—will (in theory) involve accomplishing their goals.

To clarify, I’m not saying that this always has to be the case; every writing “rule” can be broken, after all. And of course there will be scenes where a character encounters a setback or ends up being pushed farther away from their goal, instead of moving closer to it. But if you don’t at least have some idea of what the characters are trying to accomplish in a scene, then you might have more difficulty writing the story.

It’s akin to me offering to give someone a lift, but when I pick them up and they get into my car, they don’t tell me where they’re going. I’m sitting behind the wheel, the keys are in the ignition, and I know that I need to drive the car somewhere…but I can’t proceed or reach the destination without receiving some sort of directions, first.

Mind you, those directions don’t need to be perfectly accurate or 100% complete when the car first starts moving. There’s time during the trip for the person to change their mind about the destination, or to amend the directions they gave me, or to pull up more specific directions on a GPS, et cetera. I just need some sort of preliminary instruction, so that I can at least start driving the car. If the person I’m driving doesn’t give me even the slightest bit of information, though, I’m going to be stuck sitting in an idling vehicle with no way to progress.

(And, to extend the metaphor: Sure, sometimes you might pick up a friend and decide to just aimlessly walk/drive around town until something catches your eye. There’s nothing wrong with taking that approach to writing, so I’m not saying that you absolutely must identify the characters’ goals at the outset of a story. But if you’re specifically stumped while writing, then you might benefit from taking some time to consider that question.)

So, I’m sure there are some folks—like seat-of-the-pants writers—who truly write with no specific destination/direction in mind, and if that works for them, excellent! I am not one of those people, though 😂 And if you’re getting stuck while writing, then that approach isn’t going to be effective for you, at least not for that particular story.

(Also, many writers—like me—do fall somewhere in the middle, in terms of whether they plan nothing or plan everything before writing. I don’t meticulously plan every detail, and I pretty much always end up deviating from my outline somehow, with unexpected plot points and scenes cropping up while I’m writing…but I generally don’t start writing a story without doing some sort of note-taking or planning beforehand.)

💡 Identify the “key developments” that need to happen in the scene, chapter, or story

I probably made that sound fancier than it actually is—I just mean that you can try making a loose checklist, basically.

For instance, when writing Chapter 5 of “testing, testing”, I knew that certain plot points needed to happen in order to progress the kink exploration storyline, and that certain character/relationship developments needed to happen in order to progress the romance storyline. So, my list might look something like this:

Kaveh and Alhaitham go shopping; this scene needs to set up some of the experimentation they do in later chapters (kink exploration)

Kaveh finds out that Alhaitham wants to be called a good boy (kink exploration)

They have sex with Alhaitham submitting and Kaveh calling him a good boy (kink exploration)

Seeing Alhaitham so vulnerable/agreeable in this chapter makes Kaveh think about their friendship as students, and Kaveh tries to mentally sort out the differences between Past Alhaitham and Present Alhaitham (character/relationship development)

Kaveh realizes he’s been dehumanizing Alhaitham and overlooking his feelings/needs, and then Kaveh resolves to stop doing that (character/relationship development)

Once I see the most important elements listed out like that, I can then try to figure out how to include them in the chapter. For example, the shopping scene is fairly straightforward—but which items do Alhaitham and Kaveh need to purchase for future scenes? Can I work in mentions of Alhaitham being more vulnerable/agreeable during that part, or things that remind Kaveh of their friendship as students? Is there a moment during the shopping trip when Alhaitham feels particularly “human” to Kaveh? How might other necessary plot points, conversations, or exposition fit into this shopping trip? (E.g., the explanation for why Kaveh abruptly asked Alhaitham to grab his throat during sex in Chapter 4, or the existence of the commissioned outfit that Kaveh will be wearing in Chapter 6.)

If I really wanted to neatly organize my thoughts—which I rarely end up doing, lol—I could maybe make an outline with two main sections: 1) events in the chapter, and 2) developments in the chapter.

The first section (List 1) would consist of things that physically happen in the chapter. For Chapter 5, that would be:

Kaveh asks Alhaitham to go shopping so that they can buy a dildo

The two of them go shopping at an erotic marketplace

They have sex when they get home, and fall asleep together afterward

They have sex again the next day, during which Kaveh calls Alhaitham a “good boy”

Aftercare & end of chapter

The second section (List 2) would list out the internal/emotional developments that occur in the chapter. For Chapter 5, that would be:

Alhaitham is communicating more straightforwardly and being more outwardly supportive of Kaveh

Kaveh doesn’t misinterpret Alhaitham’s words as much as usual

Kaveh gets closer to realizing that he has romantic feelings for Alhaitham

Kaveh realizes that he’s been dehumanizing Alhaitham and disregarding his feelings and needs

Kaveh realizes that he was mistaken in thinking that Alhaitham is disdainful toward him

From there, I would figure out how the developments from List 2 can be shown during the events of List 1. That is, what “moments” could be included in these events to demonstrate the developments that occur during this chapter’s arc?

You could maybe think of it like playing a trading card game—or a deckbuilding game, or something like that—where:

The match you’re playing = the chapter you’re writing

Each “turn” in that match = a specific event or plot point from List 1

Each card in your hand = a specific development from List 2

During each “turn” in the “game” (during each scene in the chapter), you’re holding those List 2 cards in your hand, and you’re trying to figure out the best way to play those cards. If you can play multiple cards in one turn (one scene), great! Or if you want to focus on playing one card at a time, that works too. Your goal is just to make sure that you’re playing some sort of card each turn (scene), so that the emotional/internal arc of the chapter unfolds via the events of the chapter.

Since that analogy might be a bit confusing and difficult to visualize, below is an extremely unartistic representation made in MS Paint. (Please forgive me for these aesthetic crimes, Kaveh.)

**Also, I wasn’t sure where to mention this, but—the parts of Chapter 5 involving Kaveh’s crisis about sadomasochism actually weren’t in my original plan for the chapter; that storyline spontaneously came up while I was writing. With how I outline and approach writing, though, it was pretty easy to incorporate that new plot thread into the chapter.

Basically, the sadomasochism subplot just meant that Kaveh had a new emotional need and chapter goal, so I added the scene(s) that his new need/goal required. And because I knew the main developments that would occur during the chapter, I was also able to see how this plotline tied into those existing elements and arcs. For example:

The development where Kaveh relies more on Alhaitham for support/comfort was originally only demonstrated when Alhaitham calms Kaveh down during the beginning of their shopping trip; with the new plot point, Kaveh’s attempts to address his kink-related crisis became another event that demonstrated this relationship development

This plot point also fit the chapter development where Kaveh thinks about his feelings toward Alhaitham and realizes that he’s been dehumanizing him—for example, there’s a connection between that and Kaveh’s concern that his kink might mean he subconsciously wants to hurt Alhaitham as revenge for the emotional pain of their falling-out.

Which is to say, I think that outlining these concepts for myself makes it easier for me to integrate new plot points that pop up while I’m writing or brainstorming.

💡 Consider rewinding or backtracking a bit

I know, I know, it can be unpleasant to undo something that you just spent time and effort creating. And you shouldn’t necessarily delete that work, of course. You can always remove it from your draft and save it in a separate document. But if you’ve written in a direction that feels like a dead end—or like you’re hopelessly meandering with no hope of reaching the story’s endpoint within the next century—you might need to rewind to an earlier “character choice” and take the scene in a different direction.

So, I suppose the next question is “How do you know when the solution is to backtrack, versus when you just need to spend more time brainstorming for the story?”

I guess there isn’t a way to know for sure, but you could try asking yourself whether the scene you’re writing—with its current direction—is “accomplishing” your goal for that scene/story.

For example, maybe the scene I’m writing is meant to show how Kaveh and Alhaitham’s relationship is improving, and then Kaveh says something that leads to a huge argument and a tense mood. On its own, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe I’ll decide that Kaveh and Alhaitham resolving the argument is a more effective way to demonstrate their relationship development—or maybe I’ll decide that the scene is actually more interesting if it shows that the two of them are still struggling to keep things civil, and that their relationship “improvement” consists of taking two steps forward and one step back.

But I also might decide that, no, that’s not what I was trying to accomplish by writing this scene, and I’m not interested in exploring a different direction. In that case, I can backtrack to the beginning of the argument and try having Kaveh and Alhaitham make different choices. (E.g., I could still write the dialogue that starts the argument, but then Kaveh and Alhaitham’s initial responses are different this time—or I might rewind the scene even further, and have Kaveh choose to say something besides the thing that started the argument.) From there, hopefully the scene will start going in the direction I want, and I won’t feel stuck or lost while writing it.

**Note: I usually realize problems like this during the outlining/planning stage—so, that’s definitely one way you can use outlining to your advantage. It’s much easier to “backtrack” in notes or an outline than it is to rewind a scene you’ve already partially written.

💡 Take a short break from that project

I realize that this is Ye Olde Advice For Writer’s Block, lol—but like I said, sometimes the problem isn’t that the story is going in the wrong direction. You might just need to give yourself time to figure out a certain part of the story, or maybe you’re starting to get burned out and need to let your brain rest for a bit. It never hurts to take a few days off and see if waiting fixes the issue!

___ ___ ___ ___ ___

So, overall: Getting stuck during the writing process is common, but it’s the type of problem that could be caused by any number of things, so it needs to be tackled on a case-by-case basis.

I guess the good news (?) is that you can absolutely continue to write what you feel like; that’s a completely feasible way to approach a story, and it won’t inherently cause you to get stuck. That said, since you do feel like you’re ending up stumped sometimes, you’ll need to identify which elements of the story are impeding you, and then you’ll need to figure out what kind of planning (or rewriting) most effectively helps you orient your writing and get things moving again.

Anyway, ah, hopefully something in that very long answer was helpful or illuminating 🫡

✨ Bonus ✨

For anyone who for some reason wants to slog through the Chapter 6 notes I used, and see a horrifying glimpse into my attempts to type out a scene as it rapidly plays out in my brain—the gist of the original note I made to myself was something like this:

And here’s the nightmare that spewed forth from my fingers:

Yeah, so, uh…like I said at the beginning of this post, my personal methods of outlining/planning are definitely not the same as my recommendations for outlining/planning 😂

[idiotmf]

Ur world building is phenomenal ｡⁠.ﾟ⁠+(⁠｡⁠･⁠ω⁠･⁠)

Please tell me more abt xyon :3

Thank you so much! ( ◍＞◡＜◍)。✧♡

I am currently working on a story about Xyon (along with approximately fifty other things).

I usually write short scenarios with my characters for myself, sort of like different AUs, but they're in my native language, and I would like to make one that's Xyon x Reader specifically.

MDNI because my blog is 18+, the post itself shouldn't really be NSFW aside from biological aspects.

Uh, yeah... This is rather long for what I meant it to be (around 2.5k words excluding the notes at the beginning and end).

(Edit: Here is a link to the original lore dump for anyone wondering, since I reference it a lot.)

All that aside, here's a more in-depth look at my favorite biologist in the galaxy:

Appearance:

Since this is focused on just one Xenian, I can give a few more details about what he looks like. I really wish I was talented at drawing so I could give a visual representation of what I personally imagine, but I'll provide some images in case my words aren't clear enough (still working on that vocabulary, haha).

Let's start with his body!

As mentioned in the overall description, Xyon is around 2.5m (8'2), and if needed, he, like all other male Xenians, can stretch his torso up to 2.8m (roughly 9'2). If you're wondering which specific part gets stretched, it's the area just below the shoulders and above the stomach. (I'm using human anatomy here for convenience; if you're interested, I can definitely get into more in-depth Xenian anatomy, but I fear it might be boring.)

Whenever stretched, the skin gets damaged, sort of like horizontal stretch marks, but will shrink back to heal normally. Xenians don't do this often due to their high intelligence and lack of predators, causing it to be more of an evolutionary inconvenience these days.

While they still use it for mating displays, much like humans, they just prefer talking nowadays.

His overall body has a pretty slim, smooth look underneath the short fur. The muscles of Xenians are layered like thin sheets (muscle lasagna, anyone?) and don't bulge in the way human muscles would; instead, they just look broader and fuller.

Now, Xyon is considered skinny, even for his kind. I've mentioned it in the lore dump, but Xenians have moved past eating. They consume nutritional gel, which also explains why they are very lean, since they are literally only allowed to consume this gel, which covers their calculated daily needs.

If you know how nutrition works, though, you can probably see some holes forming in that logic. Xyon moves around a lot and therefore would technically require more, hence the skinny body.

His legs are long compared to his torso, especially below the knees (again, using human anatomy for convenience). His thighbones are rather short, the Xenian equivalent of Tibia and Fibula long (around 2/3rds of his legs; also, they don't have single bones but rather thousands of thin, long bones clustered together to form larger structures). It looks rather awkward when sitting or trying to crouch.

Fun fact: Xenians cannot kneel.

Well, technically, they can; once. And then not get back up without serious injuries. Their knees also cannot be fully bent back like a human's, but rather just enough to allow them to comfortably walk and sit. They actually also comfortably stand around in their strange crouching position whenever they are idle for long periods of time. Remember, they have a tail (sort of like this minus the scales) that they use for balance, resting in what I can only describe as a weird, tripod looking stance, sort of like they're leaning back and almost sitting on their tail.

I spent an hour trying to draw a representation of it, but it looked so goofy that I felt too embarrassed to share it. ( ´･ω･)

Anyway, his skull resembles that of an ocelot, complete with rows of sharp teeth, identifying his race as a once carnivorous one. (skull image) However, they don't have the typical cat whiskers, and their muzzle is less rounded.

Neat little tidbit, but technically, Xyon speaks with the Xenian equivalent of a lisp after sustaining an injury to his throat as a child (some of their sounds are formed in the throat, mainly the sheet metal-sounding one). However, since his words are translated into human speech for you to understand him, this doesn't carry over.

Xenian eyes also resemble those of cats; Xyon's are amber in color, but they can have various different ones. Of course he has a long, rough tongue due to their carnivorous roots.

Their entire body, except for their tails, genitalia, soles, and palms, is covered in a short, dark blue fur. (Imagine the fur of smooth, short coated dogs like a Doberman, Great Dane, Boxer, Beagle, etc. Just a bit softer.) If you want specifics on the color, I'd say the closest is #555C6C, ironically called Blue Planet. It looks sort of washed out due to their skin underneath being a dark gray.

His feet and hands are generally very similar in shape to those of a raccoon, except they have retractable claws and four fingers instead of five (a thumb and three fingers).

As mentioned in the species lore dump, they have retractable genitalia that are hidden underneath a layer of skin until they are exposed. It can actually harden while hidden, making their skin bulge. However, this can be quite painful since the space allowing for their phalluses isn't meant to support them in their full size.

If we're taking semen, it looks rather blueish in hue and the consistency is thicker and sort of slimy, designed to stick to a female's eggs.

Sources (cough cough) confirm it has a rather sweet-ish flavour, consuming too much of it does cause nausea in humans though.

Personality:

Xyon is an incredibly curious individual, especially later on (you'll see why in a second). He wants to know anything and everything about this planet and its inhabitants. He likes finding new plants, scanning them, and then observing for a while. He marvels at the strange animals that live on this planet (I should mention at this point that any story including Xyon is post-apocalyptic) and Earth's impressive landscapes.

Despite being very curious, he's still an extremely obedient follower of orders. For example, in one story I wrote, he was running out of his nutritional bio-gel and would simply refuse actual food, despite the scanner clearly telling him it was harmless for him to eat, choosing to starve rather than disobeying the directive to only consume the gel.

He does end up breaking one major rule, which ends up changing his entire life.

You see, while he is a biologist and was sent to earth to study and document flora and fauna for the intergalactic database, he is strictly forbidden from interacting with humans, whether positively or negatively, the only exception being for self-defense purposes. This is largely due to humans being known as primitive and extremely violent.

Xyon shares this narrative at first, since his research partner Xuan was murdered and subsequently eaten by humans after trying to peacefully interact with them.

That is, until he runs into, well, you. A lone human, injured, and on the brink of death. At first, he considers leaving you to die, then he considers observing you while you pass away, only to finally decide that even if you do attack him, he wants to help you.

Another bit of a flaw in his character is his naivety. Xenians don't have concepts like sarcasm; even lying isn't exactly something they do or consider, as it goes against their morals. This ends up with him believing everything you tell him, curiously inquiring about the most obvious of lies.

Not to mention, he speaks incredibly bluntly, which might come off as rude. This does actually improve after Xyon spends more time with you, since he learns to imitate the way you speak rather than sticking to the cold, scientific speech he uses at first.

I like to think this is a product of Xenian society, as scientists and research purpose tiers don't exactly experience individualism or even enough free will to build their own personalities to the point of even having distinguishing character traits.

I'm not sure how much I mentioned in the other lore dump (I tried to keep it short, so I kept cutting things out), but I do remember mentioning that Xenians practice culling unhatched eggs based on desirable base intelligence, health, etc. which is calculated based on your family tree, essentially. One's purpose is also determined by those stats.

Eggs far above the desired base intelligence usually become researchers and scientists, the highest "purpose" you can possibly have in their race. However, that also means that you not only get gaslit into thinking that's the only thing you're good at, you don't even get a chance to consider anything else.

Xyon is a biologist, and he cannot ever be anything but a biologist. He doesn't even have the mere choice of disliking his career, because it isn't just his job; it's his entire life.

Did I mention I love playing with such dystopian concepts?

Over the course of spending more time with you, he does eventually develop his own personality, or rather strengthen the few cracks that were present all along. But he can't help but look at you for guidance, despite being in the Xenian equivalent of his late twenties to early thirties. The concepts of being allowed to experience individualism and freely express himself are foreign to him.

I do want to mention that some Xenians do have their own personalities. This forced conformity is practiced in their general society, but only as bad as this on the higher purpose tiers, like the one he is in.

He does eventually turn into a gentle giant. I like to imagine him like a Disney princess, holding out one claw with a bird on it, like Snow White. Xyon does enjoy providing meat for you, which is a more primitive way to show that he is a suitable mate in his culture (though usually it goes both ways, or it used to, since they don't hunt anymore).

I like the concept of taking a step back from the highly intelligent life form and reverting to some more primitive practices as he develops individuality.

He never gets to the point of actively resenting his culture and planet, but rather accepts that this is one of its many differences from Earth and can be considered a flaw. In reality, he does find comfort in having a purpose, especially after you essentially tell him what life on earth was like. He finds the idea of having the freedom to try anything overwhelming, and not knowing what you're truly made for is terrifying in his eyes.

Beliefs and Values:

While a form of religion does still exist on his planet, due to the forced conformity and his purpose as a biologist, he was taught to disregard such matters for lack of logic.

Despite that, he does actually secretly believe in things like fate, especially in the context of finding one's mate.

Yet, mates are a pretty sore spot for him.

Due to their personalities, or rather lack thereof, and long absence from their planet in the name of science, higher-tier Xenians don't usually find a mate, often either living alone until death or dying during research.

Xyon does eventually express the belief that meeting you was fate and that you two were meant to end up as mates, despite being different in many ways.

He also believes that meeting you was meant to prove that humans weren't as destructive and savage as originally assumed.

(There is a whole other discussion of why earth became post-apocalyptic in the first place, and while the answer is a bit more convoluted than that, Xyon believes that the planetary representatives collectively decided that humans could not go on the way they were, and instead of risking a valuable planet that could host life being destroyed beyond repair, they would simply flatten major settlements and reset them to see whether they would grow from this experience or perish altogether.

Ironically, in reality, this was actually voted against in the end due to humans not having encountered extraterrestrial life yet and the promising scientific progression, but one race, fairly similar to humans themselves in nature (though not in looks), decided it would be for the better, carrying out the invasion on their own accord. While they weren't completely erased themselves, most of the higher-ranking beings from that planet were executed. This, however, is not common knowledge, as the representatives did cover it up in order to avoid other races being encouraged to disobey.)

While the race of Xenians does have values pertaining to open-mindedness and equality, they are fairly limited in nature. They do allow for sexual and romantic expression (on the lower tiers, mostly), but you can never, ever have the same standing as someone born with a higher tier purpose.

This means that even if you end up exceeding your calculated base intelligence by a lot, you will still be stuck in a purpose that isn't for you and have no chance of changing it.

Ironically, while a social hierarchy does exist, lower tiers are usually considered happier and have far more freedom than higher tiers. Because, again, they get stripped of all individuality to become mindless little researchers.

I purposely didn't specify Xyon's values in this case because, as you can imagine, being forced into a certain mindset does mean he has the same values as the collective, though it does change over time, with him expressing that while he does still support the tiers and purpose, he wishes it was less strict.

Family and Social Circle:

Xyon does actually have a family; he wasn't raised in a mating group. Unlike humans, Xenians don't have a close bond with their parents or siblings since they aren't fully raised by them but rather taken away early in life (around 4–7 in human years) to be trained for their purpose, which results in rather shallow bonds.

His father's purpose is to nurse and educate young Xenians that have either lost their parents or were abandoned, while his mother is the leader of their local tribe, which one can become regardless of tier, following an election process similar to that on earth.

Xyon does have irregular contact with them and even occasionally visits them while on Xen'jai, which is incredibly rare.

He had one older brother, who became a soldier and died very early on due to conflict between Xen'jai and their neighboring planet.

Xyon did have one friend, the female biologist Xuan, who was his assigned research partner.

Due to the nature of their work and purpose, social circles for their tier are small, if they exist at all.

This actually affects Xyon greatly. Now that his old partner is gone, he is alone on a foreign planet, and with Xenians being social creatures, it does make him feel lonely.

On several occasions, he has actually tried seeking out other research teams from his planet that were sent to Earth, and he briefly had contact with a male geologist named Xenon, who ended up being killed, or at least that's Xyon's assumption when his signal completely disappeared (hint hint nudge nudge, he is the other one I like writing about, and he is in fact not dead).

There is one more Xenian that Xyon is aware of on earth: a female meteorologist. He does not know her name; however, he has responded to several distress signals relating to her losing her bio-gel rations to humans.

Unfortunately, she was too far away for him to actually help (she is a character I want to write about in the future as well o(〃＾▽＾〃)o ).

Well, technically speaking, Xyon (and at some point Xuan), like any other research pair, does have a ship, but being the rule-following Xenian he is, he did not leave his assigned area (which is roughly central Europe in canon btw), though he briefly considered it until getting confirmation that the situation had sorted itself out.

It is likely due to this that he even considered helping you in the first place, because he was lonely and probably hoping deep down that a human could somehow keep him company.

Which... I mean... it worked out in his favor. Good for him.

•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•

Yeesh, this is quite a lot.

Can you believe I still left stuff out? I also ended up dumping more lore for the species itself. I promise one day I'll go back and rewrite both the Species info and probably this one as well. I kind of want to write another big info-dump for Xen'jai as a planet, because there's a lot I want to get into, like the hierarchy, religion, history and evolution of the planet, which felt too out of place here.

Anyway, thanks for reading. Feel free to always reach out for more info or suggestions, I am literally just waiting to write more lore no one really can do anything with. :3

[she-posts-nerdy-stuff]

"[...] she doesn’t have an attitude of ‘leaving her until last’ because she’s seen what that’s done to Kaz. She knows that Kaz will never have the satisfaction he’s searching for - I could write essays, he’s in many ways an addict - and so instead of finding the individuals who hurt her and taking them down one by one until only Heleen remains, as Kaz has done by murdering the boy who acted as the roper and by the implied murder of Saskia and Margit as well as many others, [...]"

Could you talk about this? Not just how Kaz is an addict, but him and revenge in general

Hi, thanks so much for your question!

I'm a little embarrassed to have to say that I (more recently than you asked, and if I'd put thought into it at the time/was more sober at the time I would've posted it as a response to your ask instead of it's own thing) I did make a post about this... whilst I was drunk and thinking about Six of Crows... erm...

So you can read that here

But also, possibly more coherently:

So I personally think that addiction is an important theme in the duology and there are 3 major presentations of it: Jesper’s gambling addiction, Nina’s jurda parem addiction, and Kaz’s addiction to revenge. I’m not going to focus too much on Nina and Jesper right now but I do just want to say that I think it’s really important to note how Inej responds to seeing addiction in the others. In the post you referenced here I was talking about how I think Inej would have a different attitude towards killing Heleen than Kaz did to Rollins because she’s seen what his obsession with Rollins did to him and how it's had a negative impact on him in many ways.

However, focusing on Kaz and addiction as a whole I think it's really important to acknowledge that Kaz openly admits to the reader that nothing he can do to Rollins is ever going to be enough for him. When he talks about Jesper's addiction he says (and I've not got my book on me so sorry if I've misremembered the exact quote, I'm paraphrasing from memory) "Someone like Jesper wins two hands and starts calling it a streak. Eventually he loses, and it only leaves him hungry for more" and it's always struck me how precisely this description can be applied to Kaz's own life: he chips away small pieces of Rollins' empire, such as having his steerers acting outside of Pekka's clubs to lead them away from the Dime Lions' businesses and to the Dregs' ones instead, and describes it as enough to keep him going, and then he steps up and 'wins' in Six of Crows when he succeeds at the Ice Court Heist job whilst Rollins fails, this triumph arguably is in part what leads to his downfall in failing to predict Rollins' alliance with Van Eck; he is subsequently tricked and victimised by him all over again, a situation that he describes as being "worse this time" because he is now "old enough to know better", and this experience leaves him desperate and furious to act against him again. He experiences a kind of high when he is able to gain any kind of victory against Rollins, but when that includes such small victories as chipping away at his business the low that comes upon losing is only made all the worse.

I think what's particularly interesting about this presentation, however, is that a) no-one except Inej seems to identify it this way and b) we as the reader aren't encouraged to want Kaz to stop seeking vengeance in the way we're encouraged to want Nina to overcome parem and Jesper to stop gambling. One of my favourite underrated quotes from really early on in Crooked Kingdom (I think it's ch2 but I might be wrong) is when Kaz explains the plan for the Smeet job, which revolves entirely around making Jesper gamble at the card tables for an entire night, and Nina sarcastically suggests that for 'phase two' of this plan maybe she should "masquerade as a jurda parem dealer" because "what could possibly go wrong?", and of course we have the GORGEOUS, beautifully written, famous lines from Inej to Jesper at the Geldrenner hotel later in the book when she tells him that "there's a wound in you" and that the games feel like medicine "but it's poison, Jes" (again paraphrasing from memory for the quotes, sorry). Addiction is very much in the foreground for Jepser throughout the duology and for Nina during Crooked Kingdom, but we never really get a discussion of it for Kaz except in the Bathroom Scene when Inej challenges him about what he would do next if he managed his revenge, and he ultimately had no answer for her (so he resorted to being as dramatic as possible and we love him for it).

But revenge is ultimately what kept Kaz alive. That he admits himself as well, saying that he would have laid down on the Reaper's Barge and died because nothing was waiting for him back on land until he came to the realisation that there was one thing he could strive for if he survived: vengeance. So not only is this arguably why he could give Inej no answer, because it is the only thing he has existed for since he was nine years old, but it also kind of creates this never ending cycle between him and revenge of the concept being both so destructive and so constructive (??that doesn't feel like the right word but I can't think of a better one??) simultaneously - it actually makes me think of a quote from one of Inej's chapters when they're on the roof at the Ice Court. She describes a mural she can see below with two animals, I think wolves but I can't remember off the top of my head I'm sorry, chasing each other and she describes them as being cursed to keep moving in the same circle "for as long as the Ice Court stood". I could talk for days, and probably will do in the future, about how much I freaking love that line as a metaphor for Kaz and Inej's relationship and how the breaking of that cycle comes with the symbolic fall of the Ice Court, but I also think that we can apply it to Kaz indivdually in his relationship with vengeance.

Anyway I hope that this was interesting and that it made some semblance of sense, and I am so sorry that I took an eternity to respond to your ask but thank you so much for sending it this was such an interesting topic to write about!! I love getting asks, please don't let my lateness in replying to them put you off sending one I will get through them all I promise, these things just tend to take a while for me to think about how to answer them first and then I like to write them in one sitting so that all my ideas are fresh so I have to find a good time to sit down and focus on them. But that aside thank you very much for the ask and I hope that this answer was an interesting read 😊

This has been another episode of DK Finally Gets It Together And Answers Her Asks Because It's About Damn Time (Working Title), thanks for joining me & you can check the tag for more <3

[undeadmagick]

How my Deities Appear to Me ♡

One of my very first posts was talking about how surreal it was to see my deities (or how they present themselves to me). You can find it here. So I decided to make a whole post to show what they look like to me with descriptions and some images to kinda explain what I mean. :)

Note: I haven’t meditated with Lucifer before so his appearance isn’t clear to me. Also Apollo had a blurred/unclear face to me when we met so in this post, I’ll be talking about my other deities. If this is an interesting post, I might make a pt. 2 with Apollo even though his face is somewhat unclear to me.

Extra Note: Again, these are how they appear to ME. Obviously, deities present themselves as they think is most identifiable/comfortable to each individual. :)

Deities Featured: Hades, Freyja, Jörmungandr

Hades

Hades has always been the most clear to me. I don’t know if it was because I hold onto the memory so tightly or if it’s because I feel the most connected to him. But for Hades, he presents himself as an older man (late 50s). Many lines on his face with incredibly strong features like a prominent nose. Characters like Snape or Death from Supernatural have that side profile that is similar to how he presents himself to me. Although, Death has the most accurate face to me since Hades has that prominent bump in his nose, sunken in cheeks and thin lips. He has long, sleek black hair and usually wears a black version of Ancient Greek robes that hang off of one shoulder. He also holds his bident, using it almost like a walking stick as he walks. Incredibly tall (Although that’s a feature for most of my deities. For some reason, they all appear to be like 9ft tall.)

Freyja

Freyja also appears to me as an older woman. She has lines on her face like a woman in her older 40-50s. She always keeps a stoic look on her face, cold eyes but warm demeanor in a way. Lagertha from Vikings has a similar vibe to Freyja in having an intimidating and fierce aura but I would say Michelle Pfeiffer when playing Janet van Dyne has a more accurate appearance. Michelle has those high cheeks with lines coming from her nose downward as well as a square-ish face that Freyja has. A mature, motherly appearance while having a femininity to her which perfectly encapsulates Freyja being the goddess of love & beauty but also goddess of war. Freyja also has long ash blonde hair with some small braids in it. Most notably, she wears furs over her shoulders and golden metal jewelry. Much like Hades, she is incredibly tall, towering over me.

Jörmungandr

Ohh, my only non-human deity, lol. Bit more complicated to explain but I’ll try my best. So, obviously, he doesn’t appear as large as he’s described in mythology (or else I’d be 10x smaller than his pupils). He is similar in size to his model in the GOW game, large enough to dwarf you but small enough to fit into a deep lake/ocean. Different to that game, his scales are a deep blue/black in color. But similar to that game is that his appearance is a mix of a snake and more draconic features. His head isn’t as flat as a snake’s but is more pronounced with spikes amongst his scales like a dragon would have. His nostrils aren’t as high up like the game but instead the usual snake placement of being lower and to the front. His eyes are golden sometimes but not incredibly bright. While he is incredibly intimidating, both in attitude and size—causing my heart to race, meditation sessions tend to me calm. (Funny how looking for images that resemble him are more heartracing/anxiety inducing than actually seeing him lol. He has chill vibes.) Since he doesn’t speak physically, it tends to be quiet with just the sounds of the waves of the ocean. Only his head and some of his body appears out of the water. I’ve never seen his entire being.