#but if the point was making a post with only folk/low classes art it probably wasn't the best addition for a medieval section

[nim-lock]

Art Career Tips, 2021 Edition

Here’s an edited version of my 2019 answered ask, because... this feels relevant. 

It is a problem of capitalism that folks equate their income as a judgement of their value as people; and let me preface. You are worth so much. You have inherent value in this world. Your income is not a judgement on who you are (plenty of billionaires are actively making the world worse). LARPing self-confidence will go a long way to helping you get paid more for your work, because clients will believe that you know what you are doing, and are a professional. 

& real quick—my own background is that I’ve been living off my art since 2018. I went to art school (Pratt Institute). I work in a publishing/educational materials sphere, and a quarter of my income is my shop. Not all of this information may apply to you, so it is up to you to look through everything with a critical eye, and spot pick what is relevant. 

So there are multiple ways of getting income as an artist; 

Working freelance or full-time on projects

Selling your stuff on a shop

Licensing (charging other companies to use your designs)

This post primarily covers the freelance part; if you’re interested in the other bits there is absolutely info out there on the internet. 

IF you are just starting (skip to next section if not applicable) dream big, draw often (practice helps you get better/more efficient), do your best to take "a bad piece” lightly. You’re gonna RNG this shit. At some point your rate of “good” works will get higher. Watch tutorial videos & read books. A base understanding of “the rules”; anatomy, perspective, composition, color helps you know what the rules are to break them. This adds sophistication to your work. One way you can learn this stuff is by doing “studies”—you’re picking apart things from life, or things other people have done, to see what works, and how it works. 

Trying to turn your interests into a viable career means that you are now a SMALL BUSINESS; it really helps to learn some basic marketing, graphic design, figure out how to write polite customer service emails; etc. You can learn some of this by looking it up, or taking skillshare (not sponsored) classes by qualified folks. Eventually some people may get agents to take care of this for them—however, I do recommend y’all get a basic understanding of what it takes to do it on your own, just so you can know if your agent is doing a good job. 

Making sure your portfolio fits the work you want to get

Here is a beginner portfolio post. 

Research the field you’d like to get into. The amount people work, the time commitment, the process of making the thing, the companies & people who work for them. 

Create work that could fit in to the industry you’re breaking into. For example, if you want to do book cover illustration, you draw a bunch of mockup book covers, that can either be stuff you make up, or redesigns of existing books. If you’re not 100% sure what sort of work is needed for the industry, loop back into the portfolios of artists in a similar line of work as whatever you’re interested in, and analyze the things they have in common. If something looks to be a common project (like a sequence of action images for storyboard artists), then it’s probably something useful for the job. 

CLIENTS HIRE BASED ON HOW WELL THEY THINK YOUR WORK FITS WHAT THEY WANT. If they’re hiring for picture books, they’re gonna want to see picture book art in your portfolio, otherwise they may not want to risk hiring you. Doesn’t have to be 100% the project, but stuff similar enough. If you aren’t hired, it doesn’t mean your work is bad, it just wasn’t the right fit for that specific client. 

If you have many interests, make a different section of your portfolio for each!

Making sure you’re relevant 

Have a social media that’s a little more public-facing, and follow people in the career field you’re interested in. Fellow artists, art directors, editors, social media managers; whoever. Post on your own schedule. 

Interact with their posts every so often, in a non-creepy way. 

If you’ve made any contacts, great! Email these artists, art directors, editors, former professors, etc occasional updates on your work to stay in touch AND make sure that they think about you every so often.

Show up to general art events every once in a while! If you keep showing up to ones in your area (when... not dying from a sneeze is a thing), folks will eventually start to remember you. 

Industry events & conferences can be pricey, so attend/save up for what makes sense for you. Industry meetups are important for networking in person! In addition to meeting people with hiring power, you also connect with your peers in the community. Always bring a portfolio & hand out business cards like candy. 

Active job hunting

Apply to job postings online.

If interested in working with specific people at specific companies, you could send an email “I’d love to work with you, here’s my portfolio/relevant experience”, even if they aren’t actively looking for new hires. Be concise, and include a link to your work AND attached images so the person reading the email can get a quick preview before clicking for more. 

Twitter job postings can be pretty underpaid! Get a copy of the Graphic Artists’ Guild Handbook Pricing & Ethical Guidelines to know your rate. I once had a twitter post job listing email me back saying that other illustrators were charging less, and I quote, “primarily because they’re less experienced and looking for their first commission”. This was not okay! For reference, this was a 64-illustration book. The industry rate of a children’s book (~36 pages) is $10k+, and this company’s budget was apparently $1k. For all of it. 

Congrats you got a job! Now what?

Ask for like, 10% more than they initially offer and see if they say yes. If they do, great! If not, and the price is still OK, great! Often company budgets are slightly higher than they first tell you, and if you get this extra secret money, all the better for you. 

Make sure you sign a contract and the terms aren’t terrible (re: GO GET THE  Graphic Artists’ Guild Handbook Pricing & Ethical Guidelines) 

Be pleasant and easy to work with (Think ‘do no harm but take no shit’)

Communicate with them as much as needed! If something’s going to be late, tell them as soon as you know so they aren’t left wondering or worse, reaching out to ask what’s up. 

And if all goes well, they’ll contact you about more jobs down the line, or refer you to other folks who may need an artist, etc. 

Quick note about online shops/licensing and why they’re so good

It’s work that you do once, that you continuously make money off of. Different products do well in different situations (conventions vs. online, and then further, based on how you market/the specific groups you are marketing to), so products that may not do well initially may get a surge later on. 

Start with things that have low minimum order quantity and are relatively cheap to produce, like prints and stickers. 

If you are not breaking even, go back to some of the earlier portions of this and think about how you could tweak things as a small business. Ease of access is also very important with this; for example, if you only take orders through direct messages, that immediately shuts off all customers who don’t like talking to strangers. 

Quick resource that you could look through; it’s the spreadsheet of project organizing that I made a while back 

Licensing is when people pay you for the right to use your work on stuff they need to make, like textbooks or greeting cards. This is generally work you’ve already made that they are paying the right to use for a specified time or limited run of products. This is great because you’ve already done the work. I am not the expert on this. Go find someone else’s info.

“I am not physically capable of working much”/ “I need to pay the bills”

Guess who got a hand injury Sept 2020 that messed me up that entire month! I had a couple jobs going at the time that I was terrified of losing, but they were quite understanding when I told them I needed to heal. So:  Express your needs as early as you know you need them. Also do lots of stretches and rest your hands whenever you feel anything off; this will save your health later. Like, the potential of a couple months of no income was preferable over losing use of my hands for the rest of my life.

This continues to apply if you have any other life situation. Ask for extra time. Ask for clarification. If you tell people ahead of time, folks are often quite understanding. Know how much you are capable of working and do your best not to overdo it. (I am.. bad at this)

Do what MAKES SENSE for your situation. If doing art currently earns you less money than organizing spreadsheets, then do that for now, and whenever you have the energy, break down some of the tips above into actionable tiny chunks, and slowly work at em. 

The original ask I got in 2019 mentioned ‘knowing you’re not good enough yet’. Most artists experience imposter syndrome & self-doubt—the important thing is to do your best, and if anything, attempt to channel the confidence of a mediocre white man. If he can apply to this job/charge hella money for Not Much, then so can you! 

Check out this Art Director tumblr for more advice!

Danichuatico’s Literary Agent guide

Kikidoodle’s Shop Shipping Tutorial

Best of luck!

–

Once again disclaimer this post is just the ramblings of a man procrastinating on other things that need to be done. I’ve Long Posted my own post so that it turns into mush in my brain if I try to read it, but I wrote this so I should know this content. If you got down here, congrats. Here’s a shrimp drawing.

Yee Ha. 

My reference post tag My tip jar

[popatochisssp]

Hello Poppy! I hope you slept well! Here is the reminder you requested to create a mob au hc post like the cowboy post. Have a wonderful day!

Thank you, it’s finally time! I’m gonna put it under a cut immediately because having twenty skeletons makes every post with all of them automatically a long one!

Full disclaimer-- none of the boys are bosses, that falls on the monarch(s) of their universes... but that doesn’t mean they don’t have their own roles to play~

(Warnings: mentions of crime, drugs, violence, sex, brief sexism [probably not the way you’d think] and ableism, plus all the usual mob-tropes I may have forgotten to mention)

Sans (Undertale): He’s a...humble purveyor of items, quality goods produced economically in order to pass those savings on to the crafty consumer who might not want to pay full, exorbitant price for ‘name-brand’ luxuries... Yeah, he’s the ‘you wanna buy a watch?’ guy and he spends most of his days (strategically) wandering around the city looking for customers to hock knockoff, lookalike watches, wallets and bags to. The fuzz know him by name but can never seem to find anything to hold him on, so he’s mostly just a harmless nuisance to be shooed along elsewhere if there’s been any complaints. (He’s real good at making friendly conversation with the law enforcement and keeping all eyes on him, and frankly, if there were any real shady business going on somewhere nearby... well, the cops certainly wouldn’t know about it, too busy hustling him along down the street, now would they?)

Papyrus (Undertale): An upstanding citizen, unlike his brother who’s always in some little trouble with the law or other. He is gainfully employed at a fitness center, and he commutes there by car, because paid for his license to operate one and practiced his driving skills and saved up until he could afford a very beautiful, shiny car of his own! It’s a very nice vehicle...so nice, even, that he doesn’t like to drive it for...recreational outings with friends, in case the paint might get scuffed. That’s why his friends let him borrow their cars when they go out, and let him drive very fast (but safely!) all over the city, even at strange hours or by ‘suspicious’ locations. He’s certainly never seen anything suspicious going on, he just waits outside, and if he happens to keep a First Aid kit in his glove-box, that’s just taking precautions, isn’t it? Accidents happen, you know! (He’s the best getaway driver in town and he knows it, but plausible deniability--the less he ‘knows,’ the better.)

Sky (Underswap Sans): Just your average, ordinary businessman, running a nice little bar for average, ordinary folks of all kinds. Well... he co-owns the place with a buddy of his, Grillby, but Grillbz is a free spirit and a real man about town, so really most of the ‘running’  is down to him. And he loves it! So many people (monsters and humans) to meet and chat with and serve... human food and alcohol, of course. Monster food and alcohol isn’t legalized yet to serve to humans, and a black mark like that against his little establishment would be just awful. He adheres fully to the rules and regulations set forth by human governmental agencies, no magic in anything he passes across the counter, skeleton’s honor! ...Total bullshit, obviously-- he’s running a speakeasy for humans who want to partake in a little monster food or booze, because it’s not harmful to humans and that makes it an even stupider regulation than prohibition was. Grillby taught him most of the menu and cooks on the rare occasions he’s in, while Sky handles the liquid menu and keeps an eye-socket out for snitches and inspectors trying to catch him in the act. He’s never missed a rat yet.

Paps (Underswap Papyrus): He works at his brother’s place. In the back. Only part-time, though, Sky’s got it mostly buttoned up there, so Paps has a lot of leisure time to wander around the city, hit up his favorite joints, chat with friends--and strangers that can become friends, he’s a friendly sorta guy. And if he’s ever seen sharing a cigarette or two with one of those friends, of course it’ll be a totally normal tobacco cigarette, and no exchange of money or anything else incriminating about the interaction. ...Doggo is the one that does the deals, he’s got the Dog Treat supply and a client base that’s steadily starting to include humans--but since Dog Treats are classed as Monster Consumables and illegal to distribute to humans, in spite of being non-addictive, only mildly affective, and non-irritant to lungs, things get a little more convoluted. Paps hits up Doggo at Muffet’s (a wholly monster establishment) for the Dog Treats and a client list, ‘refurbishes’ the Treats to resemble cigarettes, and then meets up with anybody who prepaid for their order real casual-like to fence ‘em. He gets a little cut of the profits, and a discount when he’s picking up for pleasure instead of business--like a (slightly) more illegal girl scout cookie racket.

Jasper (Underfell Sans): Him? He’s just an average joe in all respects. He’s got a little auto shop, spends his days tuning up cars and bikes and such as the like, and most evenings out having fun with anybody else who’s out looking to have a good time--food and drink and maybe a little gambling, but small games, low stakes, for charity, yanno? Nothing illegal, he’d freely assure anyone concerned about the law. Yep, he’s a perfectly normal, law-abiding citizen...as far as anyone can tell. If he does a little work on the side, when specifically requested to, by perhaps one of his monarchs or one of the parties they’d approved to ask for his...services... Well, he’s certainly too quick and clean about it to leave any hard evidence behind, and he’s always far away from...whatever may have happened...with too many witnesses all in agreement that he was there and couldn’t have been anywhere else, unless he could somehow make it across town in the blink of an eye. (His side-gig is as a hitman. He keeps his shortcut ability very tightly under wraps to make for perfect alibis, and takes his targets out with magic bullets which he can disappear afterwards. If he’s ever somehow implicated in anything, he’s happy to point out to the nice officers that he doesn’t even own a weapon. They’re free to look, but all they’ll find is a set of knuckledusters he keeps on his person, purely for protection--and look how shiny the brass is, never even been used, officers! Guess they’ve got nothing on him, after all...)

Pyre (Underfell Papyrus): A law-abiding citizen. He must be--surely one can’t get more law-abiding than a lawyer...right? He actually does keep his (lack of) nose clean, but studying the convoluted mess that is human law doesn’t leave time for much else--even when your studies are funded by royalty and you’re given everything you need to open up your own practice as soon as you’ve passed the bar. Still, his skill and knowledge in arguing the law is very valuable and his services are in high demand, so he’s well-compensated for his chosen career and lives his life outside of it both comfortably and legally. His clients...are innocent until proven guilty and it would be an extreme failing of his duty to give any of them anything less than his best in the courtroom, regardless of their character, their associations, and what they happen to have been accused of. (Yeah, he’s a mob lawyer, used almost exclusively by Asgore and Toriel to protect them and anyone they send to him and all of their collective...interests. He respects the law, but values justice above it, so in spite of having a lot of clients who are definitely criminals in one way or another, he has no trouble sleeping at night.)

Mal (Swapfell Sans): He’s an accountant, nothing more, nothing less. ...For Toriel, of course, so he’s paid well for his services. And he has quite a head for numbers and figures, so he plays the stock market and does quite well there, too, smart investments and reading the writing on the wall, and all that. It’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for his very healthy finances and his lavish lifestyle--fur coats, fine suits, fancy cars, shiny gold pocket-watches-- it’s all expensive and almost over the top, but hey, he is the money-man and all the numbers check out. It seems that he’s just very good at handling and investing his capital, it’s no wonder the monster-queen herself hired him on... (He is, of course, running several money laundering schemes at any given time, taking all the less-than-legally-obtained money earned by constituents of the [former] Empire and layering it through official channels to make it look legal in such a convoluted, complex web that it doesn’t raise any significant red flags. He’s got his claws in a lot of pies, and he takes what he needs off the top to live a little luxuriously, with Toriel’s knowledge and permission-- a perk for the necessary service he provides.) Whatever else may be true, it’s a simple fact that he’s very, very good at his job.

Rus (Swapfell Papyrus): With the lucrative career his brother has, the lucky SOB doesn’t have to work a day in his life if he doesn’t want to, but he’s using the safety net to pursue his passion in art. Subjective as it is, it’s hard to say if he’s really any good, but people seem to like what he produces well-enough--not a household name, but people passionate about the subject might recognize his work and his pieces sell with at least moderate success. For all that it’s probably not going to make him famous or rich(er than his brother), he’s dedicated to his craft and regularly makes bulk purchases of his supplies, canvas and reams of paper and paint and ink and the like, to keep up his steady work and art sales. He seems like an altogether normal and down-to-earth sort of guy, nothing suspicious about him at all. (He’s a counterfeiter and works in tandem with his brother--they even hit a Bureau together to lift a set of plates for the one and only active crime he was involved in--and his art is just a really good cover for why he needs so much ink and paper and other supplies on a regular basis. He does love and care about his art career, that part’s not fake, but he’s also got a good eye-socket for detail and steady hands to replicate it, and if fake human money that looks really real can help monsters, he doesn’t really see why he shouldn’t.)

Slate (Horrortale Sans): He’s...been through a lot. All monsters have, really, but he was hit kind of especially hard and... Whatever Gerson, or Undyne, or whoever’s running things now up on the Surface are getting involved in...he doesn’t really want any part of it. He gets regular stipends for some unspecified ‘service’ he performed for the Queen, Underground, and while no human (alive) knows what that was, it’s apparently enough to live off of relatively comfortably without being employed himself. He has a nice little place with his brother on the outskirts of the city and he lives there quietly, peacefully. He rarely goes into town, just the occasional walkabout, stopping at restaurants or scoping out the architecture. (Part of his one concession to being left out of whatever illegal, mob-type business may or may not be going on: he needs a good mental map of the city and at least a few landmarks that he’ll definitely remember, because he’s the emergency evac should...anything...go especially south. The house phone doesn’t ring too often in the middle of the night, but when it does, he needs to know where he needs to be, and quick.)

Papy (Horrortale Papyrus): He’s, ah... not involved in any ‘business’ either, but he does spend a little more time out of the house, at the local hospital. He was allowed to make a study of human medicine and become a nurse by Very Special Exception--mostly due to some friends (or at least one) in high places, and some very backwards human attitudes about parts that constitute a ‘man’ and how a skeleton without any parts could perhaps be allowed into nursing--and he’s proven himself a valuable member of staff and even made friends with all of his coworkers. He’s happy at his job, and with his life, and returns home to his quiet, peaceful house every night with a smile. (He has a go-bag ready by the phone for those late night calls, though, full of healing items and medical equipment he may have subtly nicked from the hospital, just so he has everything he needs to treat a monster or a friendly human that may have gotten hurt...somehow...and for reasons they have no need to specify, can’t risk going to a doctor.)

Ash (Undergloom Sans): Just a poor street musician...or at least, that’s what most people figure, ‘cause he doesn’t dress too well and the trombone he plays while sitting out on the sidewalk looks like it’s probably the nicest thing he owns. He gets a couple bucks from time to time, but rarely any second glances, and that... That works in his favor. You’d be surprised how much people talk about when they think nobody’s listening (or at least...nobody important) and he can pick up a lot of interesting information of what’s going on in the city just by setting up in the right spot and waiting for folks to talk business. He’s pretty quiet when he’s not tooting the ol’ horn and great at blending into the background, and that’s made him the guy to go to when you want to know something--like how much somebody else knows, or if there are any plans in place for say, a raid or a sting or some kind. (Law enforcement is the worst about keeping proprietary information ‘proprietary’ when they think their only audience is some nobody monster bum sleeping on a bench...) He’s also got something of a whole information network going on with the actual homeless people in the city, since he gives great tips about places who are hiring or somewhere to get a meal or a bed for the night and he always gives his earnings from busking to those who need it more than him. He’s paid for the service he provides and he’s got a home to go back to, it just seems right that the music-money goes to help somebody else.

Yrus (Undergloom Papyrus): He works as a nanny for the Queen! Not too long ago, she might’ve opted to just stay home and look after her newly adopted child herself, while Asgore handled business with the humans, but... They’re freshly split now, and Toriel wants to be just as involved in things as Asgore as much as she wants to s l o w l y ease into being a full-time mother again. Yrus is the solution, already fond of little Frisk and a very warm and trustworthy soul who stayed bright even in the gloom of the Underground. He happily takes the job when asked and splits his time between supervising and caring for Frisk, and tutoring them in all the important subjects (math, history, magic, et cetera). He finds he has a passion for teaching and thinks he might go into that someday, when Frisk is older and Toriel has a little more time and confidence to no longer need him as a buffer. (Whatever it is, specifically, that takes up so much of Toriel’s time and keeps her out so late that he sometimes has to wait around well past Frisk’s bedtime for her to come back and ask after them... Yrus couldn’t fathom a guess and isn’t going to ask any questions. That would definitely be out of his scope as a simple child-minder and even if he knew anything, it would be an extreme violation of the family’s privacy for him to tell tales, which he’s happy to point out to anyone with a lot of questions for somebody so close to two of the Dreemurrs.)

Brick (Horrorfell Sans): He’s on his brother’s payroll. It seemed like the best way to kill two birds with one stone: he’s a big, scary-looking wall of bone who isn’t well suited to a regular-joe sorta job, and his bro’s a very high-profile guy who needs somebody big and scary-looking to stand next to him and be a deterrent. Nepotism, maybe, but they’ve been looking after each other their whole lives already and it’s something Brick knows he can do--he’d do it for free, but if King thinks it’s better (and safer) to have it as his job description, he’s probably right, so Brick’ll take the paycheck for it. King’s also very likely the only one who could stop him if he...lost control...somewhere out and about, so sticking close to him makes Brick feel better and hey, maybe they’re actually killing three birds with this stone of an arrangement. Still, he mostly just goes about town with King, standing around and watching his back and staring people down when he needs to while his brother carries on with his conversations and business. He hardly ever has to do anymore than that...almost never. (One of his favorite places to go is a little hole-in-the-wall craft shop, where King always pretends to take longer than he needs so Brick can peruse the yarn and try to pick up a little sign language from the nice old deaf lady who owns the place.)

King (Horrorfell Papyrus): Yes, yes, he’s very high profile--he did lead monsterkind for a time, getting everyone up to the Surface and settled there--but he’s since stepped down. He’s retired, and anything his successor may be involved in... surely, he couldn’t say. He and Toriel are barely in contact and the money he receives from her on the regular is a gift of goodwill, mostly for medical expenses (his leg, and his brother’s...well). All he does these days is collect for a charity, a pet project of his, Monster Reparations. Lots of people give such generous donations when he goes around to ask for them, maybe impressed a little by his fame, but he can’t feel too terribly about using it for such a worthy cause... (It’s a thinly veiled protection racket and the people and businesses who buy into it tend not to fall victim to ‘mysterious’ criminal activity. Toriel may be officially calling the shots now, but King, as the monster who put her back there, is in a very unique position of power in having her ear, an unofficial underboss totally off the books. Some ‘donate’ more than necessary when he comes collecting, hoping to earn preferential treatment, and sometimes they get it and sometimes they don’t--it’s entirely down to King’s opinion of them personally. ...The old woman who runs the craft store pays about half the going rate, and the immigrant who imports the miniature trees he likes gets a heavy discount, too. The deli-owner he overheard hurling discriminatory epithets at a customer, however, pays triple. You get the idea.)

Merc (Horrorswap Sans): He’s a researcher. Highly confidential, he’s sworn to secrecy and even mentioning that he’s being funded by Elder King Shroomba is pushing the boundaries of what he’s allowed to talk about. Still, he has his own facility, and several assistants, monster volunteers and sometimes human ones--but they have to sign papers swearing not to talk about what goes on in the lab, too. From what they are allowed to say, the gist is just that it didn’t seem like anything sinister was going on; not even a blood-draw... Merc seems pretty happy to leave at the end of every day, though, and whenever it comes up, he talks very fondly about being able to finish the project. (He’s researching DT, specifically how it can be used to enhance monster physiology and make them more resistant to damage from intent. Merc’s misadventure with DT destabilized him, but from 1HP he’s now more durable than ever, and his second attempt with his brother had less dramatic but still noticeable and successful results. The king wants that safety net for more monsters, especially ones who are on the front lines of...potentially less than legal dealings...who could really be at risk. Merc is reluctant, but with the stipulation of informed, willing volunteers for DT extraction and infusion, he can’t bring himself to turn down the resources and funding to research his own condition and bring the possibility of being normal again ever closer. He still has a hard time with the idea of ‘enhancing’ monsters, but the fact that it’s at least being done safely, willingly, and with a whole team behind it this time helps a lot.)

Ell (Horrorswap Papyrus): He’s in a wheelchair but not letting it keep him down, and he’s running a modest little newspaper stand on the corner--papers and magazines and cheap books--nothing all that special but boy, what an inspiration, good for him that he’s got a job and can run the place by himself! All kinds come and go from his stand, and sometimes he closes it up for a little bit in the middle of the day to take a...er...roll, with some people who must be friends of his, but he’s never gone too long, so nobody says anything to the poor guy about the inconvenience. He’s a dedicated businessman, or trying to be; won’t even let people help him with those heavy-looking boxes of deliveries he gets, and for a fella with no legs, he seems to be doing his best! (...The whole thing is a low-key smuggling operation and he is making bank off it. There’s a system of code-words in place related to the publications he sells for a ‘customer’ to indicate whether they’re buying or selling, and what--magic consumables, stolen/hot items, imported goods, the works--and where and when they want things to go down. There’s even hidden compartments in his custom-built wheelchair for some of the riskier stuff, because he knows no cop in their right mind would force a guy with no legs out of his chair just to search it with witnesses around. And that’s presuming any law enforcement were to even catch wise to his set-up, which he kind of doubts: he’s sly and subtle and even if he weren’t, he knows people see the chair before they see him. Why not take advantage of that?)

Pitch (Horrorswapfell Sans): He makes his living as a boxer, and a subsequent minor celebrity. Pretty much any match he’s in is an exhibition match--not just a monster, not just a little guy (...relatively), but a short skeleton monster who’s blind, wow! You don’t see that every day, that’s a spectacle! Plenty of ‘ooh’s and ‘ahh’s in the packed stands every night the sightless skeleton scrapper is in the ring and nobody can figure out how he bobs and weaves so well that he hardly ever gets hit. He loses some matches, that’s to be expected, even for a ‘normal’ fighter, but hey, people love an underdog story, so when he wins, it’s an uproar every time. (For his part, Pitch hates most of his ‘fans’ who think of him the same way they probably think of a silly little dog who learned a funny trick, but the fame in general, and the thrill of the fight... Those are enough to keep him in the ring. Just... maybe not quite enough to keep him fighting clean. He’s as dirty as sportsmen come and he and a few other monsters regularly play his own odds with the bookies: he’ll subtly use magic to cheat and stay in longer, or go down when he could easily keep fighting, whatever’s more profitable with the over/under from match to match. If he’s going to be a circus act doing what he loves, he may as well get hazard pay for his dignity... and y’know, a couple of idiots who think being able to fight is a ‘trick’ because you’re blind aren’t nearly so annoying when you’re being driven away from them in a luxury car, to your expensive house in the hills decked out with all the amenities.)

Nemo (Horrorswapfell Papyrus): He’s got a place he looks after, keeps things running. Just a small joint, nothing fancy, a little cabaret variety show type place--singing, dancing, drinks on tap, that kinda thing. After dark, some of the...performances... might get a little more risqué, stuff that titillates like burlesque and striptease, but rest assured, his permits are all in order and everything’s on the up and up. Nothing illegal whatsoever going on here, just a bit of singing and dancing and everybody having a good time. (Most of the performers are sex workers--monsters, but some humans too--and patrons can negotiate private shows or off-the-clock ‘meetings’ at their discretion. Nemo opts to not know too much of the details of what his dancers do when he’s not looking, for legal reasons, but he makes sure they have a safe place to do it, are paid for their services, and don’t have repeat problem-patrons if any slip through. Being one of the gentlemen running such an establishment in the city that doesn’t happen to touch or steal from or mistreat the performers, his place is the place to get hired if that’s your line of work. He’s mostly just happy to be able to provide the job security and the job safety for a group that really seems to catch a lot of hell up here on the Surface just for how they make their money.)

Sunny (Gastertale Sans): He’s a busy guy, bouncing around from place to place, job to job... Being so scattered, you might think he’d be having money troubles by now, but while he may not be the type to stick with one thing and stay there for a good few years, nobody who knows him would say he’s unreliable--he’s the type of guy that you can give him a call anytime and if you need help, he’ll be right over, and he’ll get the job done well, too! Of course he lives with his fancypants brother, and the King and Queen probably spot him a loan or two now and then, since they’re friendly, so all in all, no one really wonders how he makes enough money to live so comfortably. The answer’s right there in their face...isn’t it? (Yes and no. He is the kind of guy you can call anytime to get a job done, and he will do it well, but the money he gets from Asgore and Toriel is less of a ‘loan’ and more of a ‘payment for services rendered.’ He’s a cleaner, the guy you call to make things go away, things that aren’t supposed to be there: stains, papers, weapons, evidence... He’ll get rid of it for you, and if you need a convincing coverup or an alibi for...whatever it is that you weren’t there doing, he’ll take care of that, too. If somebody’s calling him up for his special brand of help, they probably just want to put it all behind them and forget all about that nasty business. He’s happy to facilitate--after all, what are friends for?)

Aster (Gastertale Papyrus): Like his brother, he gets on well with the King and Queen. (They both feel like they’ve known the monarchs much longer than they actually have...somehow...) But in any case, unlike his brother, Aster is very well-organized and thoughtful, so he’s a natural choice as an...advisor, of sorts, when monsters surfaced and it was...decided that perhaps there would be some...activities and...ways of doing things that...should remain unknown to the humans. Not unknown to Aster: he keeps track of everything, reminding the monarchs of little details they may have forgotten, pointing out things they may not have noticed, making educated suggestions for courses of action with likely positive outcomes based on past experiences... He’s the linchpin between Asgore and Toriel that makes them terrifyingly more efficient than they would be without him, a consigliere-equivalent who certainly isn’t a boss himself, but he has the bosses’ trust and their ears and that makes him a person of great interest. But...no one can get anything useful out of him: he’s loyal, above all, and much as he values truth, he also realizes that perhaps not everyone deserves to know the full truth of everything, especially not those who might use that truth to bring some sort of harm or misfortune to his friends...or to monsterkind at large. ...And trying to directly seize his extensive notes on the private and personal business-doings of the Dreemurrs is an even more doomed endeavor--he writes them all in a strange jumble of symbols that no one’s ever seen, and the code-breakers never have it long enough to decipher anything useful before its back in his hands, reclaimed quite speedily after unlawful seizure of private property containing confidential information. Lots of well-meaning law enforcement have their sights set on him as some sort of criminal white whale, but the simile is all too accurate-- they’ll never catch him, and even if they do, there’ll be nothing to hold him on. He simply has too many friends (and family members) in very high, very useful places.

[probably-eating-poptarts]

New  Blood | Chapter 2

Tensions rise and plans are made

Universe: Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning

Pairing: Thomas Hewitt x OC

Word count: 1,980

| Chapter 1 |

A/N: This chapter was honestly so hard to write considering the fact that, like… nothing interesting happens 😂 But I felt it ended where it needed to end, and I have ideas already set for where I want this story to go, so stay tuned! (@tentacles-and-coffee, would you like sum tag? 👀)

Chapter song: Bad Moon Rising - Creedence Clearwater Revival

✧༝┉┉┉┉˚*❋ ❋ ❋*˚┉┉┉┉༝✧

That night was chaos at the Hewitt house.

“What the hell were you thinkin’, Ma? That bitch should be on Tommy’s choppin’ block, not off runnin’ your damn errands!”

“Now Charlie, you oughta know by now we can’t just kill off every single person that comes through; someone’s gonna catch on eventually–”

“It’s Hoyt, goddammit! Hoyt!”

A bony, long-fingered fist slammed into the worn butcher block table with enough force to topple one of the cloudy old mason jars spaced around at each place setting, and spittle flew from pooched, cracked lips. Luda Mae threw her hands up in exasperation before stomping into the kitchen, fed up with her son’s tantrums.

She returned a moment later, setting down a casserole dish fresh out of the stove. “That was a good girl, I just know it. She was just passin’ through and there wasn’t no reason at all to do away with her! Besides, her granddaddy is old John Elwood and you know he and his kin would come snoopin’ around if she up and disappeared!”

Hoyt spat carelessly onto the scuffed hardwood and curled his lip in a mockery of a smile. “You just jealous, Mama?” he wheedled. “Sad that you ain’t had no little bitch to gussy up, huh? Is that it?”

“That’s enough, now!” She snapped, her tone booking no room for further argument. “You won’t lay a single finger on that girl if I have anything to say about it, so just hush up and eat your supper.”

The old woman sat herself in her chair with a sense of finality, staring down her eldest child as if daring him to open his mouth again. Luda Mae had given her boy a lot of slack after his return from the war, and she loved him dearly despite the attitude he liked to give her these days, but at some point a mother just has to put her foot down.

The two locked eyes for several tense moments before Hoyt sucked sourly at his teeth and called over his shoulder, “C’mon in here, Tommy, and let’s eat.”

From the shadows of the hallway a looming shape moved; dim light from the dining room spilling over the burly, hulking form of the youngest Hewitt as he ducked under the doorway to enter the room. He had been patiently awaiting his adopted brother’s permission to join the rest of the family as always, but he found his thoughts distracted from his meal tonight with the topic of their discussion. Who was this girl, and why was Mama so taken up with her? Would she just end up like everyone else who found themselves on the receiving end of the infamous Hewitt hospitality?

He could tell that Mama was none at all happy with that prospect, and he found himself struggling with the uncomfortable possibility of having to choose between the wishes of his mother and the demands of his sibling. Cross as he could be sometimes, Charlie (Hoyt, Tommy reminded himself) had always been the one to give Thomas direction in his days following the collapse of the slaughterhouse; who to kill, who to detain, who to hobble for his… ‘personal enjoyment’.

But if his brother commanded him to kill this stranger, and then Mama told him not to… What would he do?

Shaking off the unanswerable conundrum for now, Thomas tucked into his meal with his usual gusto and decided he would just cross that bridge if or when he ever came to it. For now, supper was hot and the evening was still young yet…

*

“Thanks again, Bobby. I’ll tell Opa you said hello!”

Addie waved farewell to the bearded man and folded the small stack of paperwork he’d just finished filling out neatly as she made her way back towards her truck and now-empty trailer, hauling herself into the driver’s seat before cranking the engine and pulling out of the livestock pavilion.

Just a ways down the road - right where Luda Mae said it would be - a tiny little tea shop sat tucked away on the downtown strip between a record store and a newly refurbished post office. Addie had to drive almost half a mile more to find parking that accommodated the size of her rig, but she enjoyed the walk nonetheless as she made her way back past quaint storefronts and other folks out for a morning stroll.

The shop itself was cozy, if not slightly disorganized on the inside, but the rather eccentric older woman behind the desk knew exactly where everything was when Addie explained what she was after. When she finally left the store nearly a half hour later - the small silver bells above the door tinkling a merry goodbye over her head - she had two boxes of green tea and a little novelty tea strainer she’d been… somewhat coerced into buying all tucked away in a little paper bag under her arm.

From there it was just one quick stop by Luda Mae’s place, and then she’d be on her way home. The trek out always took much longer since she made extra stops at other farms to pick up livestock, but if she played her cards right, she’d probably make it back to Elwood Dairy by suppertime.

Someone at the pavilion had even managed to fix her radio, so with the windows cranked down and CCR blasting over the speakers, it was only just before noon when she found the little turnoff and rolled into the diner’s parking lot.

Roiling thunderclouds were gathering as Addie made her way across the asphalt towards the rickety front steps, and she paused for just a moment to study the looming darkness reaching out across the restless treetops in the distance.

“Looks like we’ll be in for a pretty nasty summer storm,” came Luda Mae’s voice from just behind the porch door. She pushed the screen open with her elbow and waved Addie inside, ushering her towards one of the antique tables where a porcelain teapot and mismatched teacups sat waiting.

The two women chatted amicably for a while as the tea Addie had acquired steeped; watching the broiling noon sun slowly and mercifully fade away beneath the creeping shadows of the oncoming storm cell.

“So do you stay with Old John up there at the dairy?” Luda inquired.

“Yes ma’am,” Addie replied, “Ever since I was a kid.”

“What about your folks? Do y’all all live on the property together?”

The younger girl pursed her lips and looked down into her cup, swirling the dark contents within.

“M’not really sure where my biological father is,” she finally confessed. “And my mom signed over custody to my grandparents when I was about six, so I’ve been with them almost my whole life. She comes around now and again, but we don’t really see her all that often.”

Her shoulders lifted and fell in a quick, nonchalant shrug. “Besides, growing up on the farm was really nice; and with Oma being sick lately, I came back from college to help out more.”

Luda Mae perked up. Sweet, well-spoken, and educated? “What were you schoolin’ for, then?”

“Well I finished my degree a couple years ago, actually.” The hint of pride in her tone was hard to hide. “I was really just taking extra courses during the fall before I left campus.”

Before she could elaborate the screen flew open with a sharp thwack, accompanied by a growling roll of thunder. Well-worn snakeskin boots thumped heavily against the dusty hardwood floor, announcing the arrival of the scowling sheriff Addie had seen briefly during her previous visit.

“Mama,” he nodded in greeting to the older woman, his sharp, beady gaze boring into Addie so coarsely that an instinctive shiver of apprehension tumbled down her spine.

“Hoyt! Come on in, honey; let me get you something to drink and introduce you to Miss Adeline Elwood, old John’s grandbaby.” As she spoke, Luda Mae tottered up from the table and pulled out a glass coke bottle from the old cooler by the register, popping the cap off on the attached bottle jack before passing it to her son.

The seemingly permanent frown he sported turned a fraction more sour, just for a moment, before breaking into a fractured grin - as if he had forgotten the art of smiling properly. “Pleasure’s all mine, ma’am.”

Both Hewitts joined Addie at the table, chair legs scraping as bodies settled into comfortable positions.

“So you mean to tell me ain’t nobody out here drivin’ that rig of yours?” Hoyt asked her with an air of haughty surprise. “We ain’t used to seein’ decent womenfolk around these parts all by themselves, y’know.”

Addie hid her clenched teeth behind a sociable smile. “Yep, it’s just me. Been hauling cattle by myself for a few years now since my Opa is staying home more often.”

The sheriff whistled low and reclined comfortably against the back of his chair. “Yeah, word spread fast when miz Rosie got sick. How’s she been holding up these days, hm?”

“About as well as can be expected,” Addie replied with a cock of her left shoulder. “We’re all just taking things one day at a time.”

He nodded sagely and took a swig of his drink, still watching her every move like a hawk zeroing in on an unsuspecting mouse.

“Now, you never got around to tellin’ me what you were upstate studying,” Luda Mae interjected with a gentle pat on the younger woman’s arm. “Such a bright young thing, aren’t ya dear?”

Clearing her throat, Addie fiddled with the excess of her ponytail before taking a brief sip of tea long since gone tepid. The wiry old coot was starting to make her rather tense. “I got my degree in animal science over at TAMU two years ago, and I’d been taking some agricultural classes right before I came back home to help around the farm.”

“Sciences, huh?” Hoyt sucked on the dip between his teeth. “Awful high aspirations for such, ah… lovely young lady such as yerself, dontcha think?”

Addie leveled him with a rather icy stare.

“Well that may be so, but since veterinary options tend to be rather limited around these parts, I figured I may as well learn how to do it myself.” She hit him then with her coyest, most femininely charming smile. “Sometimes a lady’s gotta help herself if there’s no man around to do it for her.”

With a sly wink to seal the deal, she pushed off from the table and tipped her head to both Hewitts in turn. “The tea was lovely Miss Mae, but I really ought to be headed on home, now.”

“Oh please, sweetheart, don’t go botherin’ with all that ‘Miss’ stuff.” The older woman began to gather their empty china. “Luda Mae will do just fine now.”

Nodding her understanding, Addie swapped final goodbyes and stepped back into the oppressive Texas heat, barely deterred by the flagging breeze pulling the surging storm cell ever closer.

“You drive careful now, y’hear?” Luda Mae called from beyond the screen. Hoyt stood at her shoulder - an ominous figure looming within his mother’s shadow - and he crooked his fingers at her in a little wave as he smiled that rusted out grin around the wad of tobacco always present within the rotting crease of his lips.

Ingrained southern manners had the young woman returning that broken-doll gesture with the barest tilt of her head in acknowledgment, and she clambered quickly into the confines of her truck cab where she felt a modicum of safety behind thick glass and sturdy American steel. She wasn’t going to outrun this beast of a downpour, but she was ready to get as much of a headstart as she could.

Things were looking to get nasty very quickly.

[blacksurvivalnostalgichanges]

My Take On What Kind Of Student Each Character Is

minus the ones that we fully know about and the ones i didn’t wanna write for

~

Adela: She’d be the student that’s very prodigious on a certain subject, but not be very good at most others. Like, she needs help in english, or P.E., but once science class hits she becomes coveted as a project partner. Of course, the moment that someone pulls out a game board she either gets in and demolished everyone else, or is actively let out to level the playing field.

Adriana: She’d be a big troublemaker, the type you see getting switched from classes or on detention at least once until the first half of the year’s done. Everyone knows her as THAT kid. She’s the student that shoves an eraser in the outlet to make the classroom lights go out. She’s the student that burns something, but no one knows what, just knows there’s a suspicious burning smell, flustering the teachers and supervisors. Those are both real stories I have from highschool, by the way. Neither were caused by me, though.

Alex: He’s the kid everyone forgets exists. Either because they’re never present in class and eventually become that one name everyone laughs at because “oh hah the teacher hasn’t realized courtney’s NEVER showing up”, or because they just don’t talk much and turn away or bore folks trying to socialize with him.

Arda: He’s the kid that’s really smart, but everyone gets kinda creeped out by him. Someone looks for him as a kid, and finds him looking at the ground far too close to an anthill. They ask him what he’s doing, and he gets on this weird rant on how ants live and how life is precious but fleeting. People often want him to be in their group on group assignments since it guarantees an A, but fully expect the assignment to not go pleasantly.

Aya: The narc. The tattletale. That kid that no one tells anything to. Beloved by teachers and supervisors, but others usually aren’t that fond of her. Probably gets bullied over it, and eventually gets a huge complex over how she can’t actually make them stop by talking to authority figures. 

Barbara: She’s the kid that knows a lot about how to use the computers when it gets to that. She’d be really good at arts and crafts projects, and get good grades, but be secretly utterly bored by literally everything that doesn’t have that sort of physical building-up and get really excited and happy when tech class starts, or the arts teacher makes an assignment where she can make things beyond drawing or writing about old artists she doesn’t care much for.

Bernice: He’s the really depressed, existencial kid. Bummer to be around. Makes a joke about death that makes everyone fall silent. One of his classmates became a psychologist and sent him their card.

Camilo: The one dude that folks either know as the guy that gets with lots of people, or as really self-absorbed. Passing grades but only that, probably.

Cathy: The kid that wants to be a doctor. Always has bandaids and antiseptics ready, gets called on whenever people get hurt pretty bad (presuming the nurse’s office isn’t available or her school doesn’t have one). 

Chiara: The jehovah’s kid that tries to get their friends to go to the church. Type to show up to a friend’s house on a Sunday, and try to get them to go with her to the church. People usually try to just quietly ignore it or try to just be a good influence on her, since they don’t know how they’d decode her from it.

Daniel: Him being the goth kid’s a given, but he’d also be that really artistic kid that folks admire (because dang his art’s so good) but also get kinda weirded out by. Voted Most Likely to Kill Someone.

Echion: He’s that dude that randomly fights people for no reason, actually winds up creating harm, gets suspended, then next day a teacher starts talking about how everyone should’ve been more patient with him despite the fact that he was hurting people. (hoping this isn’t relatable)

Eleven: She’d be that student that’s always letting others borrow their stuff, has a bunch of friends she helps with school stuff when they don’t get it, and is generally too nice for this world. I know her backstory involves her friends all being fake and only there for her dad’s influence but I’m going to willingly ignore that and say folks love her and are her friends without influence from her dad. Shhhhhh.

Eva: The student that makes jokes during classes, either whispering to friends or out loud when the teacher allows it. She probably doesn’t like science.

Emma: You know that kid that would bring a book about magic to school? And do magic tricks for people mid class? That. Except she’d actually commit to it for more than a week. Teachers hate her.

Fiora: Sword lesbian. She’d likely have average grades mostly, but excel in P.E. Probably in the student council, maybe as the president with Jenny being the vice president because Fiora would trust her with that sort of thing.

Hart: She’d be the type to go through school sort of in a “i gotta” type of motivation, then after graduation you find out she made a mixtape.

Hyejin:The kid that would be able to help deprogram Chiara because she’s also religious but knows the line. I feel like she’d be the arts and crafts kid too, maybe have her dream job be psychology.

Isol: The kid that’s causing mischief, but in a sort of quiet sneaky way. The kid that made the school administration make a huge fuss trying to figure out who the fuck made the classroom lights go out, or stole something. A week passes. No one even knows who the fuck did it because he’s that good.

Jackie: Openly wanted to be a doctor. Everyone silently suspects she’s the murder doctor type.

Jan: The kid that’s really nice and chill. Then he does pushups with no effort and everyone realized that he’s actually really strong and could probably break them in half if he wanted to. Someone asked him why he works out so much. He answered “to pick up big dogs easily”. Nadine nodded in understanding.

Jenny: The theater kid. Probably isn’t that interested in most classes until either english or art decides that making a play would be interesting. Fiora would be really supportive of her and show up every rehearsal, and record the plays every time.

JP: Okay, we kinda know how he was in school but i still wanna harp on it? Like, he hacked into the school system to get test answers. He definitely emasculated every other kid that wanted to cause mischief. And whenever someone got angry at him for it he probably just tricked them into a ligma joke. King. Legend. He probably got held back though. 

Lenox: She probably wouldn’t kick too much fuss in school, be kind of generically nice and fun, but nothing special. Until they meet her post graduation years later and find out the path she took and they now have a good ice breaker.

Leon: The only kid that got excited for swimming classes. Probably has stories about times he went to the beach. I think he’d also be the kid that feels REALLY pressured to get good grades and doesn’t feel happy enough with anything under a ten.

Li Dailin: Got caught doing drugs in the bathroom. Probably is the one who’s picked to organize events.

Luke: The kid that gets really annoyed when people touch their things because of cleanliness. Everyone asks him when they need hand sanitizer because he always has it. Also probably is the kid that makes jokes over what the teacher said.

Magnus: The guy that’s always smoking right outside school. Got caught doing drugs in the men’s bathroom.

Mai: The kid that’s known to be kind of snobby and annoying, that people kinda stay away from. Probably has plenty of material but never lets anyone borrow it. Not even the people that she knows won’t try to steal it. 

Nadine: The cause of the dog that keeps showing up into school. If the school had a mascot she’d likely be the one taking care of it. Also the kid that becomes coveted when teams are being made for sports.

Nathapon: Gets in detention because he won’t fucking put away his phone ever and filmed the classes.

Nicky: She’d probably actively look for fights, but only ones where the other person did something to deserve it. For example, she sees someone bullying the teacher, trying to steal their things, and she’d get into a fight with the person to make them stop. (That story was caused by me. ....oh god is that why i like hyunwoo)

Rosalio: Jock, but a jackass.

Rozzi: Voted Most Likely to Kill Someone. Everyone kinda stays away from her because she looks so threatening, but as the year goes on everyone finds out she’s actually kind of a dork and the facade winds up getting undone. She gave the teachers food as a goodbye gift before graduation.

Shoichi: Very first day, the teachers do the ‘what do you want to do when you grow up’ thing and he says he’ll become a business major. The kid that’s kind of annoying, but since they’re smart the teachers don’t care unless they become fully disruptive.

Silvia: She’d be the kid that gets bullied over not being very smart. She asks obvious questions, tends to not pull her weight on group projects, that sort of stuff. Though, I think she wouldn’t be the type to get low self esteem over it, I think she’d let it slide every time and keep her chin up. She’d likely have a lot of friends because of that carefree disposition.

Sissela: Often misses school, does it online, or leaves early because she’s always sick. May or may not take a depression leave at some point. While her getting bullied over her fragileness might be expected, it never happens because if anyone even tried to bully her, half the class would defend her because DUDE SHE’S JUST A SMALL BUT SWEET KID LEAVE HER ALONE

Sua: The kid that LIVES in the library. The moment a book report is needed she winds up having to help everyone get it. Incapable of being teased because she just takes everything as her sweet gentle self and never actually gets hurt from it.

William: Jock. That’s it.

Xiukai: He’s the kid that sneaks in food during class. The food equivalent of the kid that everyone gets candy from. He once ate soup in class and Nadine yelled “I SMELL MEAT! SOMEONE HAS SOUP!”. No one believed her.

Zahir: Another guy who’s pretty smart, but kind of weird. He never gets any meme reference. He rarely tries to reference any memes he does learn about, but when he does everyone thinks that it might be best that he doesn’t use them often.

[decolonizationxabolition]

Leftist politics, prison abolitionist politics, and some distinctions we really need to talk about

Hey folks, and thanks for coming back to my blog if you’re reading this! So the topic for this blog post is basically going to be pointing out some important contrasts between leftist politics and prison abolitionist politics. I am especially going to be roasting the radical left so just be ready for that. 

Anyways, the way I am going to unpack this is through criticizing the way that “revolutionary” leftists criticize the actions of one of my favorite politicians Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whom is a young Latina representing the Bronx in the House of Representatives. I will be referring to this article first specifically and point out some things, and then we will get right to it. I would also like to note, that I am going to be keeping my commentary specific to the context of the United States, so please keep that in mind. 

So, in regards to criticizing the actions of politicians through the lens of prison abolitionist politics, it is important to point out that the people/communities within the United States that support prison abolition do not support any type of politician that embraces the prison industrial complex for any reason at all. In the article that I linked above, it talks about how AOC and Bernie Sanders “supported” a coup in Venezuela. Well, I’ll have you know that the incumbent president at the time (Maduro) essentially embraced the prison industrial complex and arrested people that were criticizing him. Which is a big no no for prison abolitionist politics/principles. Maduro is essentially being a neofascist in doing that, so is it really a coup if Maduro is behaving that way? To prison abolitionists, it really doesn’t matter if he is left or not, the fact that he did that is enough for us to remain neutral on what was happening in Venezuela in that moment in time. The prison system is still capitalistic, and on top of that dehumanizing as fuck. So no, we don’t care about him, literally at all. His actions are not revolutionary. 

The thing that radical leftists need to realize (for folks that identify as radical left and are serious about police/prison abolition) is that prison abolitionist politics are not exactly the same as leftist politics, they do in fact intersect frequently within the spectrum of leftist politics (socialism, communism, anarchism, etc.) but they are not one and the same. The reason for this is because of the fact that prison abolitionists are mainly concerned with dismantling the prison system itself, that is the MAIN focus. And in order to do that, we must be open minded and not take hard stances on our political views, especially because prison abolition is a long term goal. This instagram post on @blackabolitionist’s profile explains how prison abolitionists are looking for “abolishing reforms” and views criminal justice reforms (ex. restoring the right to vote) as ways to move towards the abolition of prisons, which contradicts the stances that “change won’t come from the system” and that “all reforms are racist”. 

I would also like to point out that taking hard stances on leftist views is not helpful because this white colonizer government studies your political ideologies and “went to the books to read about how policies would affect black and brown folks” with reforms that appear to benefit low-income black and brown folks in an immediate sense, but ultimately strengthen the prison industrial complex. So, you’re lack of participation (not voting on reforms because you’re “anti-system” lmao) and educating yourself on the specific policies and reforms (that do not necessarily lean right or left per se and are nuanced in nature) has strengthened the PIC because all the folks that are left to vote are racist white folks that have little to no idea about how these policies are going to actually affect people  in the long run and on top of that the government suppresses the vote. Hence why so many racist reforms have passed and made the PIC powerful as fuck. Fortunately for those that desire to educate themselves, there is a book called The End of Policing by Alex Vitale that is not only a deeply researched book, but also extremely accessible to read if you’re not an avid academic reader (free pdf here), where he fully unpacks the reforms made to the prison system that have made the PIC so powerful, the impacts that they have had on people, and alternative policies that move away from the prison system all together. 

I also would like to point out to people on the radical left that hold the views of restorative justice (which has been criticized and has it’s limits) as a practice of abolition, that their views actually differ from some of the community art spaces within the United States that are active in not only as abolition as a practice, but are also some of the activists on the political front working towards the agenda of prison abolition through community organizing and the use of a transformative justice approach and community accountability rather than a restorative justice approach (these are also some of the folks building formal discourse on what TJ is and how it can aid towards the agenda of abolition, especially for survivors of sexual abuse/assault) [resources on TJ v. RJ: (1/2)]. And as someone that has had the privilege of being apart of an amazing community that uses transformative justice and community accountability as a practice for abolition and has friends that are prison abolitionist activists, it is very apparent to me how TJ and community accountability is playing out in the realm of politics with AOC, what is really shocking to me is that she appears to be running in the same circles/networks (it is surprising but also not surprising since she used to be a bartender in the Bronx hmmm, it appears that she is working with prison abolitionist activists, especially the formerly incarcerated and it appears that our community circles are quite close even though we are West Coast). 

Anyways, an example that is very apparent to me is when both leftists and conservatives questioned why AOC distanced herself from Bernie Sanders after Joe Rogan gave him an endorsement. But honestly, as someone that is relatively up to date with pop culture, lives in the United States, and knows who Joe Rogan is (and if you don’t, he is a comedian) and for those of you who do know who JR is, then you probably know that he runs a podcast where he has openly expressed his cop apologist views . So it appears that she distanced herself from him because of that, which honestly makes a lot of sense when you view it in those terms, it’s very apparent to me that she is likely apart of a prison abolitionist community that is holding her accountable, not the justice democrats. 

Leftists, AOC is not a communist, anarchist, or a socialist. She is a PRISON ABOLITIONIST first and foremost, whose politics intersects with some of yours, but is primarily relying on strategy, community accountability, and direct feedback as a way to move closer towards the objective of prison abolition. And no, she is not going to be perfect, which is why we need shared analysis and realistic expectations. It is actually very encouraging that someone like AOC is in office right now (along with the rest of the squad), and it is extremely obvious to activists on the frontlines that she will not save us. What we need is more people like her to go into office in huge numbers, which requires community organizing. And guess what, the prison industrial complex is powerful as fuck here in the United States (it’s insane, people are genuinely afraid to come against this system and it’s very understandable), and the reason why that is has a lot to do with politics and the complex network between corporate interests and our bureaucracy. Some leftist folks have unrealistic expectations that are actually extremely unhelpful. Especially since some of these folks read at an academic level, have class privilege, and express their views without educating themselves first. And as someone who has been personally affected by the PIC at a very young age (and no I am not going to elaborate on it), it is very frustrating.

Okay, so to end this blogpost I am going to leave you all to ponder the revolutionary act of direct feedback, transformative justice practices, and how necessary it is in community spaces, abolition, and building decolonial futures. 

And if any of you are interested in TJ practices a couple of books are: Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories From the Transformative Justice Movement and Decolonizing Non-Violent Communication. 

[sellyripley]

If The Robot Trains Characters were Teachers

Lesson plans done? Check. Grades put in? Check! Robot Trains? Not check! Ok, time for Robot Trains!

So I’m thinking...if the characters on Robot Trains were teachers, what subject would each teach? (Of course, why wouldn’t I be thinking about that? What else did you think I was thinking about, while making the lesson power points for the week? Poetry and figurative language!? Pshaw!) 

Alf: Math

Alright, this is going by temperament not necessarily area of expertise but I’m going to say that Alf would teach math. First of all, Math teachers are usually very practical, plus their grading is very easy because it’s all objective right or wrong answers. No essays to grade, so they have a lot of free time to volunteer for projects around the school so they’re very admired by everybody and kind of come off as overachievers. Math teachers in general also have a very low tolerance for B.S. and will object very bluntly if you are wrong about something. Probably has enough free time to coach a sport on the side. 

Selly: Science

For Selly, I’m going to go with science because science teachers get to plan fun, hands-on lessons that incorporate students’ interests. Though, be careful what you wish for, having your interests incorporated in a science lesson can give you a new perspective that suddenly makes them seem off putting. You’ve never seen a giant cake incorporated into a science lesson? Also, science teachers are the most likely to have a fun and adorable class pet.

Alternative position: school nurse. Injured in gym class, or perhaps fell out of your seat after the English teacher told you multiple times to stop tipping it backwards? Nurse Selly can fix you right up. Why is there a yorkie hiding under the school nurse’s desk?  Trust us, it’s a special yorkie that is trained to sniff out near-nearsightedness, hearing-deficits, head-lice, scoliosis, and pre-diabetes). 

Kay: P.E. Teacher and Track Team Coach

The coaches are gregarious, competitive, and beloved by all. Thinks his sport is way better than the one the math teacher coaches on the side. A little impatient and inattentive. Has a bit of memory loss from a head injury but it doesn’t affect his charisma any.   

Duke: I.T. Support

This is again, by temperament not necessarily area of expertise and I can say with authority from my four years as a teacher, Duke has the temperament of a tech guy. 

So, if the volume on your Smart Board isn’t working or your computer won’t power up, Duke will stop by your classroom and fix your problem but won't stick around for small talk.

 He spends most of his time in his office. ...Wait...why is his desk in the server room? Did H.R. forget to assign him an actual office?

He’s a little rough around the edges and I heard he skateboards to work. He's capable of a lot more though his job mostly consists of toggling switches and fixing problems that wouldn't have happened if people has just listened to him in the first place.

No one really trusts him since he returned from administrative leave after having a freak-out wherein he threw gym teacher’s P.C. at his head. H.R. assures us the incident was caused by a medical condition entirely out of his control and that the situation is resolved now. Anyhow, the gym teacher is buddy buddy with him again at least. 

But can you really trust a guy like that? Plus, I heard he gave the culinary arts teacher poisonous mushrooms...? 

Duck- Theater Arts 

Hear me out, I know Jeffrey has the clapperboard on his back and is all “Cut!” but Duck is clearly theater arts teacher material. Have you met a theater arts teacher? 

He laughs easily, cries easily, (and if the condition in which his Other World self left Other World Kay as vengeance for his betrayal is any indication, he most likely has a flair for the dramatic). 

He’s also got a close and seemingly unlikely friendship with the gym coach because: 

A) they’re both electives teachers so they wind up in all the same meetings

B) He’s probably the only one the P.E. coach doesn’t feel threatened by/ competitive towards

and 

C) The P.E. coach can help the theater arts teacher with classroom management. Teachers who come off as a bit silly may wind up with an unruly classroom but students will behave if they know the coach would be unhappy with them. 

Victor: Administration

As I’ve alluded to before, Victor is most like a dean or assistant principal in that, he’s the guy you call if shit’s about to go down. He’s well respected, powerful and authoritative. You want to stay on his good side. If someone’s acting a fool, page the office and they’ll send him right down. 

Jeffrey: History

I’m gonna go with history for Jeffrey because he has all those archive tapes saved and because he has the temperament of a history teacher. They’re usually pretty chill and can speak with authority on...matters of the past. And they’re usually the oldest teachers in the school. Did you see him, sitting there on a ledge drinking coffee(?) while Kay and Janne cavorted around fountain plaza? Genial and contemplative, serious when the situation calls for it, that’s how social studies teachers are, generally. 

Janne: English Language Arts

Did you nearly forget Janne even existed!? Of course you did! She’s the English language arts teacher! Not considered nearly as cool as the Robot Trains teachers. Most likely overloaded by administration with busywork that it is difficult to see the point of. Probably also forced to enforce rules and conventions that seem pointless.

Least likely to be away from her post. While everyone else is off in the library after school eating cake at Martha’s retirement party, Janne is still in her classroom filling out pointless data collection paperwork, completing overly complicated lesson plan forms, or grading essays in a way that allegedly prepares students for standardized tests but completely takes all fun out of writing. Most likely extremely board. Lowest job satisfaction, and cannot remember why she went into teaching this subject in the first place. 

Plus, from my experience on Language Arts teams, many language arts types are also somewhat petty and controlling towards their teammates as well, so from how she reacted to Kay visiting Selly too much I’d say she’s exactly the type.)

(Has this suddenly escalated quickly? Lol... I’m also certified to teach science and art. ...Looking for a new job for next year, lol >_<)

Alright folks, there you have it. The Faculty and Staff of Train World Secondary school I guess, lol. 

[tjkiahgb]

Episode Recap: 3.03, “It's a Dilemna”

First of all, love the title for this episode. It reminds me of the classic 2011 Vince Vaughn/Kevin James dramedy, The Dilemma, which always reminds me of this tweet:

So prepare yourself for this episode, in which one of the characters might find themselves presented with “a situation in which a difficult choice has to be made between two or more alternatives, especially equally undesirable ones.” Ooh. The possibilities are almost literally endless.

The episode starts with Bex and Andi playing off-brand scrabble.

I’m gonna guess... Word Trains? There’s clearly a heavy train influence here.

Bex takes a long time to play her word, but eventually settles on “dilemna” [sic]. Is this foreshadowing? Do you think Bex and/or Andi might have to make a difficult choice between two or more alternatives? And could it involve a jet?

Also, I can’t believe Bex went for dilemna when DEMJETIPRIZE was still on the table! That’s like a 200 point word!

Andi rips into Bex for spelling things wrong, but then Andi says superfluous as super-flew-us and everyone’s back on an even level.

If there’s one thing to learn from this whole ordeal, it’s simply this:

Words are stupid.

The next day, the GHC walks through school planning out their weekend. Andi says the Color Factory is in town, but I’m sorry, the only factory I’m interested in is of the cheesecake variety.

Anyway, the Color Factory is a bunch of colorful rooms that, as Buffy puts it, is “one those places that’s just for posting pictures on social media to make people feel left out.”

As Buffy’s describing that, I’m nodding my head like, Yeah, that’s so stupid. What kind of jerks would post dumb pictures like that to social media just to--

Never mind.

Anyway, Buffy and Cyrus are in.

Quick question: why does this girl assault Cyrus?

And why does Cyrus not do anything about it? Is his self-esteem so low he just lets people run into him and doesn’t even bother to say something? The poor child.

Buffy says you know who else might enjoy an artsy, interactive, colorful experience thing? Walker. And Andi’s like:

There’s definitely an unseen eye twitch going on here.

Andi slowly turns around and she and Buffy live in this long, awkward silence that gets mercifully ended by the school bell after a few seconds. They decide to talk about it later and scramble away.

Over at Cloud 10, Bex and Celia sort supplies in an empty salon.

I’m already starting to get worried about the business, you guys.

Celia asks Bex if she wants to go shopping on her lunch break. Bex sniffs out something suspicious, and Celia admits she wants to start a registry for Bex’s wedding. Bex doesn’t want to do that, though. Celia asks what Bowie thinks, but Bex says they really haven’t discussed the wedding, they’ve been too busy talking about bread. Celia loses all interest in shopping and goes back to her supplies.

Over at Red Rooster, Jonah strums a guitar when a dad and son come in. They are wildly over-impressed by Jonah’s guitar strumming.

Boy, wait till you guys hear actual music. You’re gonna flip.

Bowie comes to talk to the enthusiastic fans. Turns out, young Shaun (the boy) is turning nine, and his father, Victor (the man), would like to buy him his first guitar. Victor asks Bowie to teach his son, but Bowie’s like, eh, I’m not so much a guitar teacher.

But then Jonah’s like, yeah he is! He made me a music genius in two lessons! And he’s a rockstar! He traveled the world with the Renaissance Boys! You know the Renaissance Boys, don’t you? Bowie and... Rafe. And... Greg? And the cute one?

Bowie tries to play it all down, but it doesn’t seem to be working on Victor.

Victor says Shaun has a gift and he needs the right teacher, so Bowie accepts.

At The Spoon, Cyrus tells Andi he’s failing P.E., which seems almost impossible to me. All I had to do in school to pass P.E. was show up? Just like, stand around and keep breathing? There was a kid in my school who was in an iron lung and they got a B+. One student spent every period trying to attack the P.E. teacher with a big stick and didn’t fail the class. A boy in my school passed away in the 7th grade and still got a C in 8th grade P.E. because my P.E. teacher was convinced the gym was haunted by his spirit.

Anyway, Cyrus tries to figure out how to deal with this situation. Then he asks Andi how she’s going to deal with hers: Buffy and Walker. Andi wants to know if it really needs to be discussed. I mean, she said she was fine with it, sure, but then she was also quiet, so...

Cyrus says what Andi could do is, stay with me here, speak to Buffy. I feel like he’s tried giving this advice to Andi before, regarding Jonah. I forget if it worked that time. Probably. This time, though, Andi determines the best course of action is to not bring it up and hope Buffy doesn’t either.

Buffy arrives and immediately brings it up. You know what they say about the worst-laid plans...

Andi and Buffy decide to get it all out there. Andi feels weird around Walker and doesn’t want him to come to the Color Factory. Buffy understands and says she won’t invite him. Everything seems good.

Cyrus pulls out a chip he thinks looks like Obama.

Wow. Way to take care of a valuable piece of art. You wouldn’t just stuff a Van Gogh in a ziploc and hope for the best.

Bex comes by to see Celia and asks why she got a “Save the Date” for her wedding. Celia says it’s ok, because actually the I Ching chose the date. Bex reminds her she’s said over and over that she doesn’t want a big fancy wedding and Celia’s like, if I don’t do something, you’ll all be wearing shorts at the wedding like animals! Bex and Celia are sort of at an impasse here after it felt like they we’re doing so well in their fight together against Aunt Mei.

Cyrus talks with his P.E. teacher, looking for an out. He says he’s running a 17 minute mile. 17 minutes?! I had a kid in my P.E. class that did a 15 minute mile in an iron lung! Half my 8th grade class were in iron lungs, ok? I went to a weird middle school.

His P.E. teacher suggests taking a P.E. alternative, which leads to Cyrus joining the cast of Fame.

Is it just me or are the dancers performing a number based on a public domain version of the Rocky theme?

Also, aren’t we just barely into the school year? How are all the rest of these kids so good already?

Cyrus is exhausted and realizes he’s made a huge mistake. Not sure why he thought dancing wasn’t also a lot of cardio. Probably because he has a broken teenage brain.

At Red Rooster, Bowie tries to teach Shaun the guitar. He’s not very good. It appears that Bowie attempts to teach him for maybe an hour or so, realizes he isn’t the reincarnation of Jimi Hendrix, and then dies inside.

I mean, the kid is only nine. I’d assume there’s lots of room for improvement. Tons of room. But I’m not a member of the famed Renaissance Boys. (And if I was, I’d be the cute one. Believe it.)

Andi gets ready to head out to the Color Factory and walks right into Walker, who says they need to talk-er. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I did that.

Walker wants to know why if Andi said she was cool with them just being friends, then what’s the deal with her being all weird around him. Andi’s upset Buffy told Walker that, but Walker says Buffy needed to explain why he couldn’t be around her.

Walker wants to know if there’s anything they could do to fix this whole mess and Andi’s like, mangle your face so you’re gross to me. No, she doesn’t know if there’s anything to do, but she does know Walker should go to the Color Factory. Walker thanks her for being cool, which is... a generous reading of the situation. Andi admits as much.

At the Color Factory, Cyrus remains in pain from doing just a very light amount of uncoordinated dancing.

Cyrus says he can’t go back to regular P.E. until next semester, so strap in, folks: we’re going to be seeing some more dancing this year.

Walker shows up. Buffy is surprised to see him, but Walker explains everything was worked out and he has Andi’s permission to enjoy the Color Factory with the others.

And enjoy the Color Factory they do. They’re laughing and posting pictures to social media.

In fact, you may say they’re having the time of their lives.

God, I hope Andi can’t hear that music or read the closed captioning.

Buffy texts Andi asking where she is and why she didn’t come but Andi has a tough time answering.

Bex and Bowie prepare food. Bowie thinks it’s nice Celia is obsessing over their wedding. Bex thinks they should be the ones to plan the date of their wedding, and Bowie asks her when that should be, and Bex doesn’t actually know, and neither does Bowie, so Bowie suggests maybe they should just trust the I Ching.

Bowie says if neither of them really cares, give this to Celia. Pick your battles, which is a smart tactical move in both warfare and in dealing with overbearing mothers. Bowie’s reasonability (reasonableness? Words are stupid.) wins Bex over.

Also, Bowie spent the whole scene just absentmindedly chopping up hot dogs.

It’s not really important, but I kept watching him do it the whole time, wondering what those chopped up hot dogs were for. But that’s my problem, not yours.

Anyway, the two parents realize Andi’s been quiet, so they go to check on her.

Andi’s not feeling ok. She explains that her friends are having fun without her, and that Buffy would rather be with Walker than with her. Bex is like, wow, would Buffy really say that? And Andi’s like, she didn’t have to, I know it’s true because Buffy told Walker he couldn’t hang out with her because she wanted to spend time with Andi and it made Andi uncomfortable. And Bex asks Andi if Andi told Buffy not to tell Walker that, and Andi feels she shouldn’t have had to. And Andi says she texted Buffy that something came up, and that’s why she couldn’t go to the Color Factory, but Buffy never asked her what that something was. Further proof of malice. Followed by the gravest insult of all:

WHY NOT JUST THROW DIRT IN MY FACE, BUFFY?!

Andi says to top it all off, her friends posted all sorts of fun stuff on social media, knowing full well she has access to the internet. I guess it’s sort of interesting she’s giving Cyrus and Jonah a pass here, but whatever.

Bex and Bowie try to cheer Andi up, but she’s in an emotional hole right now.

Andi is being a bit unreasonable, but I also understand it’s fairly realistic emotional behavior for her age (broken teenage brains and all that).

Being an adult, however, the ones I sympathize the most with in this scene are Bex and Bowie...

...who share a little, “Oh right, we’re raising a teenager” look as the episode ends.

[timeclonemike]

Delta Rune Speculation

So it’s been two weeks, and there’s already 200 plus fics on AO3 and dozens of remixes and arrangements of the soundtrack on YouTube. That’s not even touching on the theories that are coming together. I recently saw one theory that double downed on the whole discarded classroom with toys thing, with the Darkners basically being a “Toy Story” scenario and the Spade King trying to pull a “Small Soldiers” scenario.

And while the parallels between the Darkners and assorted toys, and the layout of the Dark World and the Classroom, are all too much of an overlap to ignore, I suspect that there’s something more to the whole game than simply toys coming to life and wanting revenge for not being played with. I had some thoughts that I contributed in my reblog of that person’s theory, but this post is a little bit more meta, and concerns itself primarily with the tone of the final game, if and when it gets completed. But first, we need to talk a little bit about Undertale. I’ll make it quick, I promise.

Simply put, the big thing that made Undertale stand out was how your choices distinctly affected the world you were in, and the way people responded to you based on those choices. The sheer difference in tone and content between True Pacifist and Genocide is about as different and distinct as you can get in any game that features multiple endings, especially when many games opted to make the multiple endings contingent on last second choices (Deus Ex instantly comes to mind) rather than being something that you had to commit to. Not only that, but even the small choices in the sense of dialog, the order in which characters were spoken to, and even the use and contents of your inventory meant that the game had more “immersion” in the sense of responding dynamically to player choice than a lot of Triple A games with hyper-realistic graphics engines.

The way Undertale responded to different choices was a twist, then attraction, and finally a statement about how people saw the world and interacted with it. Especially those who thought that actions taken in this isolated digital environment had no consequences beyond that environment. It was a game about how people acted when they had tremendous power to influence the world.

Therefore, I think that the meaning of Delta Rune’s “your choices don’t matter” and “nobody can choose who they are in this world” is that the game will be about how people respond when confronted by circumstances they can’t control.

For more of my rambling, click the link below.

I’ll be addressing three main points: The nature of the Dark World and the Fountains of Darkness, the Dichotomy between how choice is handled in the Light and Dark Worlds, and the few clues that we have about W D Gaster and his influence.

1. The Nature of the Dark World.

The playing card themed enemies, the puzzle pieces, the chess board and the crowned checker piece, plus some of the hints about Ralsei’s nature and origin, all indicate that the Darkners have some connection with the toys in the unused classroom and probably the materials and objects in the supply closet as well. (I still do not know what those things were in the opening area of the Dark World that shot bullets at Kris, or the significance of all that black gooey dark stuff apparently coming out of the eye shaped structures.) Susie is not the type of person to let her guard down and just skip class with Kris while playing make believe all day... at least not at the start of the game... so the events of Chapter One had some foundation in reality.

This brings us to the fountains and the legend Ralsei shares. Everything hinges on a classic balance between opposing forces, in this case Light and Dark. Too much of one or the other will break the world in some way, and in this instance, there is an excess of Darkness. Under the direction of the mysterious Knight, and the Queen that only Jevil mentions if you kick his ass, the Spade King is seeking to upset the balance by increasing the Darkness. Assuming that Kris, Susie, and Ralsei don’t stop these fountains, then the same force at work in the Dark World that drew Susie and Kris into it will spread beyond the school, and into the rest of the town.

It is my position that Darkness in this case, represents Imagination, and its ability to create worlds symbolically. Keeping a balance between the physically real and the mentally real is important; too much of the physical and you end up in an All Work And No Play Makes Jack A Dull Boy scenario. The other way around, you spend too much time daydreaming - or consumed by anxiety - to deal with the actual problems in front of you. And just by talking to the people in Hometown after school, we can find all sorts of stuff that bothers people. Toriel and Asgore’s estrangement, Noelle’s father and her worries about him, Alphys being lonely, and so on. In a Dark World where people’s thoughts and ideas take on physical forms, these everyday worries become living nightmares. It is THAT scenario that the Fun Gang will have to prevent or reverse from Chapter Two onward.

2. In Which World Do Choices Not Matter?

No matter which way you play Delta Rune, you leave the Dark World at the end. In that sense, none of the choices you made matter. Only if you did a pacifist run, you have the chance to go back and say goodbye to a number of characters you encountered before. Sort of an Undertale Epilogue Lite. If you went to town on everybody, you get chased back to the Light World instead. So in a way, your choices DID matter.

On the other hand, no matter what you do in the Light World, you’re still Kris, the token human in a monster town, with estranged parents and an older brother that probably outshines the heck out of you if all those trophies and award certificates mean anything. You can’t help smooth things over between Toriel and Asgore, you can’t even hint at Undyne and Alphys getting together, and no matter what you tell Noelle, she’s still got a one track mind regarding Susie and is concerned that you are pranking her again. About all you can do is choose to be mean or nice to Onionsan; everyone else still thinks you’re some weird creepy human kid with a history of pranking, whose main redeeming feature as a person is apparently some skill at the piano. Nothing you do can change that, even if being more talkative than normal is out of character enough for folks to notice.

But then again, in the Light World, nobody can choose who they are. Choices don’t matter because so much of Kris’s life is defined by everyone else. And even those lives are more defined by primal fears like Toriel’s loneliness and deep seated resentment, Asgore’s pushover-ness, Mr. Holiday’s health, Alphys’ anxiety, and so on and so forth.

As the Dark World starts to influence the rest of town, and imagination and thought starts to overwrite physical reality, the Fun Gang’s choices will suddenly carry more weight. Maybe not enough to change everything once the Fountains are sealed, but enough to make a difference. Such as the difference between Noelle being totally inconsolable over the loss of her father, and Noelle having the opportunity for closure. Or Toriel at least agreeing to be civil towards Asgore, even if they still never get back together. Or Burgie being able to find a much better job. :P

Or Kris being seen not as “the human” or “Asriel’s brother” but as Kris, a person in town with more depth than just a history of pranks and a creepy disposition.

3. Oh Gaster, Where Art Thou?

The announcement for the Demo, the “character / vessel creation” process at the beginning, the music playing during the vessel creation sequence, the Man who gives Kris an Egg if he is found, the Entry 17 Sound FX from the cell phone in the Dark World, and the slowed down version of the same sound playing around that Mysterious Bunker south of town all point towards Gaster’s involvement in the events of Delta Rune, one way or another. Given the limited information available so far, it’s not entirely clear if he’s working towards increasing the amount of Darkness, towards stabilizing the imbalance, if he’s simply observing events with no regard for the outcome, or if for some reason he requires US as observers for the events of Delta Rune, whatever they are.

But using what little we know, we can make a few educated guesses.

First, the Egg Kris can get from the Man behind the tree, who cannot be seen and will vanish if the Egg is not accepted, is the ONLY item from the Dark World that stays the same back in the Light World. The swords become pencils, and all the other stuff accumulated in the Dark World becomes the Ball of Junk that Kris does not want to throw away, but the Egg is still an Egg. Sort of. It can be put into Asgore’s Fridge, but if this is done, somehow it turns the pickle jar into another Egg. Which raises a number of questions. Unless you hold onto it for later in the full game, or throw it away, this is the only thing you can do with the Egg as far as I know. Almost as if the only reason it exists in the world is so that Asgore can have something to eat besides pickles.

Second, Jevil’s misanthropy follows his interaction with a visitor to the kingdom, and I do not remember if this visitor was specifically stated to be the Knight mentioned by Jevil or the Spade King. The way he treats the entire world like a game fits the same meta as Flowey’s attitude after being stuck in a Determination fueled time loop for ages in Undertale, but it also aligns with the Darkner world’s toy theme. And of course Seam drops the “darker yet darker” line on us regarding his view of the world after dealing with Jevil... but at the same time, this is a literal Dark World. Kris and Susie noticed that the light was getting low in the school hallway before they even stepped inside the supply closet, so it’s not out of the question that Gaster’s experiment, whatever it was, involved discovering the Dark World.

And, while this is purely me stacking conjecture on top of conjecture here, keep in mind what I said earlier about the Dark World being a world where the power of Imagination can literally create a world. Then consider one of the lines of the Gaster Followers from Undertale: Gaster fell into his own creation. As Gaster was the Royal Scientist, it seemed logical to infer that his creation was some sort of machine or technology, such as the CORE or whatever is under the sheet in Sans’ workshop in Snowdin Town. But maybe what he fell into was a completely different reality... possibly one of his own design.

(Note to self: Undertale / Secret Of Evermore Crossover Fic. Add it to the list.)

Third, the vessel we are asked to create at the start of Delta Rune has the word Goner as part of the filenames of the assets. Its appearance also matches that of the other Gaster Followers in Undertale; greyscale, uncanny valley, and just different enough from the character we end up seeing in the game (Kris) to make the similarities stand out. Keeping in mind we still don’t know what the significance is of the Gaster Followers or Goners is in Undertale, or how exactly they relate to Gaster himself. In the completed game, though, we may have the opportunity to find out... behind the bunker doors south of town, where the slowed down Entry 17 sound is playing. (It’s also location 17, so there’s a definite number element going on here.) The thing about bunkers if that they are almost always made to protect something inside them. So unless this is a fallout or storm shelter for the folks in town (and we can’t read Gerson’s book in game so we have no idea what the political climate is between humans and monsters is in this world, though if they were really bad then somebody would probably mention it in dialog) then it’s probably intended to keep the people of the town from finding something. Like an experiment that went wrong. Or went right, for that matter.

Or, maybe the bunker is one of those less common cases where it protects everything outside it by locking something inside, for any of the reasons already stated. Either way, there might be a real True Lab situation down there.

Finally... has anyone else besides me noticed that the graphics in the background during the Vessel Creation Sequence look almost exactly the same as the background of the Fountain of Darkness that Kris and Susie use to go home, just without the playing card suites? Where exactly is that taking place?

One last thing that brings my whole post full circle; regarding the ending cutscene before the credits and Don’t Forget song, I wonder if the entire thing isn’t just Kris’s nightmare; the body rips out the Soul that used to be inside and locks it up, and is free to do who knows what after that. If Kris is aware that the player is influencing them in any way, that whole sequence could be brought on by their fears about losing autonomy, either partially or entirely.

Which brings us back to the whole “your choices don’t matter” thing.

[seaboundbysunrise]

Ok, I’ll throw my hands up and admit it – I really dropped the ball on the blog. A big increase in work, a tough break up and a general lack of motivation meant that I didn’t really think of updating this during phase three so… well, I didn’t. But I’ve just begun phase four and it seems like a shame to leave the blog ending such abruptly so I thought I’d do a post to sum up what to expect after your first sea phase.

First up, there will be stories – so many stories! You’ll be hard pressed to find a situation where someone won’t chip in with ‘well, when I was at sea…’. It sounds a bit obnoxious but honestly, it isn’t. Hearing how the classroom lessons relate to everyones sea time really helps to contextualise the theory.

However, the downside to this is that it can be hard going back to looking at ship life from an academic standpoint – I think we all struggled with frustration at one point or another after four or more months of hands on application. It reminded me of the differences between the driving theory test and, y’know… actually driving. Sure, it’s the same for the most part, but everyone has their nuances and no plan survives contact with humanity so sometimes you just have to suck it up.

In many ways Phase three felt like two semesters pushed into one. The first four-ish months was quite eclectic – Meteorolgy and Stability come to mind as the toughest of the units. There is a lot of information to take in for Met but the exams seem to follow a formula so if you can get hold of a few past papers then you should be able to refine your revision areas nicely. I have no problem admitting that maths is not my strong point so Stability is proving to be a bit of an pain but that’s a common one for people to struggle with.

The second half was much more law based – in fact, aside from the ship handling unit in the simulator (which was great) and the four week NAEST short course (which wasn’t quite so enjoyable), it was pretty much all law of one description or another! On one hand that means very few exams, but on the other there are a lot of essays. Different strokes for different folks but I prefer coursework to examinations so, aside from the subjects being quite dry, that wasn’t too bad.

You’ll also have to sit your Signals exam which is one hell of an expensive resit if you fail! To pass you’ll need to identify 18/20 for both flags and morse code as well as score 9/10 on general questions and convince your tutor that you know the meanings of the flags. There’s no easy way to learn ‘em – you just have to do it. I found that making revision cards and hitting them hard for half an hour every night helped, as well as group revision sessions with my coursemates. It isn’t fun but I’d recommend getting on that during your first sea phase so it isn’t such a commitment during phase three.

I’ll openly admit this though – I was pretty burnt out by the end of the second semester, as were most of my coursemates. There were a few bits that would have been useful to have known before our first sea phase and others which felt a little unnecessary, especially given that we don’t get our exceptions anymore when going for our Chief Mates ticket. Ah well, it was a struggle but we all got there in the end.

On a more general note, Warsash has properly moved into central Southampton now. As a whole, I prefer it – I like living in the centre with The Art House and Forbidden Planet within walking distance and having easy access to the facilities at Solent is a real bonus. The college building that is now Warsash Maritime Academy is a pretty standard college building, a bit clinical but perfectly practical. And that’s where it falls down a bit – the Warsash reputation is built on legacy and we left that behind at the old campus. There’s no real maritime vibes in the new place. It’s also led to a lack of community vibe – in the old campus you’d make friends with engineers and officers from different phases, drink with visiting Officers in the bar and have breakfast with your classmates. There’s none of that in the new place. It’s just…where you go to class. I’m glad I got to experience the classic Warsash as this isn’t it. Will that cause problems for Academy? Only time will tell. I feel like a lot of people will come to it with more of a ‘university student’ mindset which could be troublesome but I’d be lying if I said that the old Warsash site wasn’t a nightmare if you actually wanted to do anything. Swings and roundabouts I guess.

On the subject on the city centre, I’m sorry to say that you’ll have to get better at budgeting – accommodation is generally quite expensive and you’ll be surprised at how much you lose to food. I stayed in Emily Davies, the most basic of student accommodations available to us. On the plus side the location amazing – you’ll be two streets back from the high street. In terms of picking up supplies, going out and catching a coach/train it’s a dream. The downside is that it’s quite expensive for what you get – it is massively outdated and in need of a refurb. The bathrooms in particular feel like something from a low end holiday park. There’s also only four washing machines for the four blocks of flats (so, 16 flats x 4 rooms = 64 rooms, times four buildings… 256 people. Ouch!) and no real social area so that’s a big vibe killer. Honestly, if you can, talk to your sponsor companies and see if they’ll pay your accommodation allowance (if you get one, that is) direct to you and get a house or flat somewhere with your mates – you’ll be better off and probably make more memories that way as the set up, along with everything I mentioned about the new building, can make it quite a lonely experience.

So, yeah, sorry for the long post – I wanted to give an honest idea of what to expect during phase three at Warsash. It is long, it isn’t easy, and it’ll lead into the longest sea phase of the lot.

No one said it would be easy.

Until next time, stay lucky.

[study-lit]

how to edexcel a level lit: prose comparative essay

wow, back with another semi useful post! :) I’ll use my mock essay as an example of what I mean -- warning: this will be really wordy.

question: compare the ways in which the authors of your two chosen texts criticise human behaviour. you must relate your discussion to relevant contextual factors. (40 marks)

INTRODUCTION: In my view, the introduction is difficult to get right, but it pays off when done well. This is the first bit of your paper that the examiner will read; setting out your thesis well in your introduction lets them know what you’re about.

Human nature, according to Richard Dawkins, is dictated by an ‘unrivaled selfishness’, the internalised want which focuses humanity on its goal of personal success seeps into the functions of us, as humans.

In my opening sentence, I focus on the topic of the question. In this mock, I misinterpreted ‘human behaviour’ and replaced it with ‘human nature’, but really this didn’t impact my mark too badly. It’s good to show some sense of critical theory, but in terms of the assessment objectives, this isn’t imperative like it is in the drama exam.

This ‘selfishness’ is utilised in both Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ and Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ to, perhaps, demonstrate the innate failure of human nature in that its natural state, individualism, even when well meant, creates a catastrophic outcome for both the protagonist, and wider society.

Then, I relate the critical theory to the texts. How do the authors present human behaviour? As the topic title is ‘Science and Society’, I make sure to get in ‘wider society’ in order to demonstrate I am aware of what I was taught.

For an A/low A*, that’s all you need to do. I am going on my teacher’s marking, but for this essay I got 36/40, a low A* if an A* is 90%.

BODY:

I’m going to use one point from my essay, as I wrote two rather long points. I’d try for three or four points (a side and a half for each text per point), but three is probably the happy medium.

Thesis/Comparison:

I try to write a paragraph of direct comparison before I go into the individual texts and their relationship to my thesis. In this case, I break it into two parts:

Humanity’s selfishness directly contributes to the so-called ‘amity-enmity complex’, the social state which dictates individual societal positions.

My point is about the demonstration of the amity-enmity complex in both books, so I make this clear, and define what it means.

Both Shelley and Atwood commentate on the effect the utilisation of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ has on the individual, perhaps products of their respective contexts: the Religious Right of 1980s America dictated collaboration of White Christians in order to rule over homosexuals or people of colour, whilst Victorian Britain’s main entertainment was the ever-popular ‘freak show’, where those predisposed were taunted for their bosses to make money quickly.

Here, I compare the texts and relate it to the books’ contexts in order to get those AO3 and AO4 marks. Plus, it shows the examiner that I’m clearly considering the methods used in both texts, not just one or the other.

Text One - Frankenstein:

This is long, so I’ll try and break it up...

In ‘Frankenstein’, Shelley utilises Victor’s monster in order to demonstrate the roots of the eventual downfall Victor’s family succumbs to, creating a societal outsider whom Victor shuns. “His hair was a lustrous black [...] teeth of a pearly white [...] these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes” -- Shelley juxtaposes the traits deemed attractive by society with the ‘watery eyes’, a trait common found when crying. The appearance of the Monster -- by which everyone treats him (’wretched daemon’) -- invokes Victor’s amity-enmity complex, which itself, in shunning his newly born Creature, begins the events -- as mirrored in The Handmaid’s Tale -- of the oppressed rising against the oppressor.

So, here, I make my main point: the amity-enmity complex pushes the Creature to revolt against his ruling class (Victor), and in turn sets in motion the events of the rest of the text. Pretty standard stuff (or at least I think so)!

For instance, later in Shelley’s work, the Monster laments that “even Satan has accomplices; fellow demons [...] I am abhorred by all,” a personal outlook imposed by Victor’s human nature to shun those who are different. In his own self interest -- hiding his ‘damned’ creation -- Victor contributes to the creation of the ‘beast’ who leaves Elizabeth, William and Clerval ‘lifeless’, just like the Creature began his lifetime.

Here, I’ve linked my main point to an example further on the text, and rounded it off. Shelley criticises Victor’s human behaviour of abandoning his ‘son’, and punishes him through the tragedy his family (and Clerval, who is totally his gay lover and you can’t tell me otherwise) succumb to.

Text Two - The Handmaid’s Tale:

This point is like 2 and 1/2 sides... your points don’t need to be this long, I just got a bit carried away.

As aforementioned, the amity-enmity complex makes an appearance in ‘The Handmaid’s Take’ where it, too, leads to an outsider rising against the ruling class. Whilst Offred is not an as explicitly an ‘outsider’ like the Creature, her use as a Handmaid creates the divide between those who rule and conform (the Commanders and their Wives) and those who serve (the Handmaids and Marthas). The room Offred resides in, and its contents, demonstrates a ‘return to traditonal (New Right Christian) values’: works of ‘folk art, archaic made by women’ out of things ‘that have no further use [...] waste not, want not.’ The proverb ‘waste not, want not’ and design of things from materials no longer used under the Gileadian regime reflects the commodity of the women used as Handmaids: they’re all ‘sisters dripped in blood’, pairs that ‘mirror’ one another, a group of people who are, by the amity-enmity complex, pulled from the fringes of society (Janine was raped, Offred married a divorcee) and forced into a collective for abuse by their superiors, who joined Gilead when it was little more than a segment of the Moral Majority of Reagan’s day.

If I’m honest, I still don’t quite understand why I got marks for this point, as my language analysis is not quite as developed as I feel it should be. In some ways, this could cover the ao1: I talk about my point - the amity enmity complex’s means of splitting society into groups, and back it up with some loosely relating quotes. I don’t get to the meat of my point until this bit:

Offred, by name, is a possession. Thus, the blatant societal divisions present in Atwood’s text helps assist in creating ‘Mayday’, a rebellion against Gilead’s bourgeoisie. It is Offred, like Shelley’s Creature, whose ostracisation is a catalyst for the events which culminate in the Historial Notes: ‘the past is a great darkness’ which no longer exists. As such, the means of reproduction, and creating a social hierarchy through the view that Handmaids are a commodity, due to human nature’s amity-emnity complex, leads to the felling of a successful society.

This makes more sense: jumping to conclusions and treating people as ‘lesser’ will result in a communist-esque revolution. In referencing the whole text, I can gain provide the examiner with proof that I’m considering all of the text.

Thus, both authors’ texts reflect on the existence of humanity’s prejudices as a direct cause of societal failure and familial tragedy, criticising the human nature of having powerful ‘insiders’, and ostracised ‘outsiders’.

I always culminate my points in explaining the explicit point I’m making.

CONCLUSION:

Here, you’re not just summing up your essay. If your teacher has told you that’s the case, then by all means listen to them, but maybe try this format once. My conclusions come as ‘why should you care, then?’

Human behaviour is, ultimately, criticised in both Shelley and Atwood’s texts as detrimental to the surivival of the individual, but also creates change in the world around them. Both Victor and Offred succumb to the demise often ascribed to Machiavellian villains who practise self-preservation at all costs. Their fates do, arguably, come as a direct result of the actions they take due to their human nature.

I don’t actually mention Machiavelli elsewhere in the essay; I saw this opportunity to leave the examiner (in this case my teacher) with a potential reading. Are Victor and Offred Machiavellian due to their determination to survive over everyone else? Possibly.

I like to make the fact that the authors are telling us, the reader, why we should/shouldn’t be like their characters the final sentence of my conclusion.

As such, through a demonstration of key human attributes such as desrire and the amity-enmity complex, Shelley and Atwood criticise the actions of their own creations whilst giving their readers their own warning: we, too, are prediposed with these traits, and thus have the ability to destroy as well as create.

well, there you go! a breakdown of my essay with “helpful” tips. I hope this assists you guys in your a level or even gives you some new ideas!

[supernoondles]

2020

A lot happens in a year, even when nothing seems to happen at all.

There's nothing new my commentary about a global pandemic (and the particularly frustrating experience of living in America during it, even with all my privileges of continued employment, owning a car, rent stability, and living in the bay area) will bring to the reader, but I will underscore this: my feelings aren't that 2020 is any kind of exceptional year, but the point where, hopefully, we finally realize that economic/climate/racial injustice has been a terrible problem for a long time, and will continue to be unless we enact massive collective change. A vaccine is not going to make any of those issues disappear, and I worry the people in power (including myself) will return to their comfortable life styles as if the next decade won't be even worse.

Anyway, general DOOM aside (RIP man), here's my year in specific!

From looking through my photos: January was off to a great start. I celebrated the new year with dim sum with J/M/M, as per tradition, and went on a foggy hike through SF with my family that involved my dad and J getting hilariously lost. Soon after I went to Sonoma with J/M -- for all my years in the bay, I had never explored north of the Golden Gate that much -- which was a wonderful trip seeing J's hometown. I helped my lab demo research at the Exploratorium, started growing my own microgreens, and went on more (to become semi-regular and my only source of cardio through the pandemic) bike rides with my lab mates. I finally saw Hamilton (though feel a need to justify here how "cringey" I think LMM is). I went to Genesis, my first gaming-related convention, and it was a lot of fun despite seeing no women. I did so many things, was making progress on research (I think? I don't recall any breakdowns) and my mental health was generally good.

The doing of things continued in February. After not going last year, I went to the Tet Festival in SJ (which was kind of sad). I joined a Chinese learning club and a crafts club and had a delicious omakase. N visited again, I went ice skating and tried to rescue a giant rat from string lights, and saw the Sonic movie in theaters (which would have been my last movie in theaters, sigh). After having a drink at Wursthall with T, I felt terrible (to the unaccustomed reader, not only do I Asian glow, my hands/feet itch whenever I drink and I feel like I want to die), and decided that was the last drink I'd ever have -- thanks to the pandemic that's stayed true. I went on a ski retreat with the lab that felt particularly special (and not just because I didn't have to pay). We (I, in convincing my mostly Asian office) wanted to make 元宵 on the eve of E's birthday, but it turns out that a bunch of CS PhD students really love singing karaoke for like 4 hours straight into the night, and at some point I was like, okay y'all, time to go to bed. So I hosted 元宵 making at my apartment the next weekend, and we watched another Bong Joon-Ho movie (The Host) to celebrate his Oscar win. Typing this out, it seems wild that this was even in this year. I also did sh*** for the first time, hallucinated white woman in the edges of my vision like a GAN, ate a lot of shaved parmesan from TJ, and let go of any stress I had about the UIST deadline to the abundance of nature and the world.

I break from the month-per-paragraph format now because we all know what happens next. M and I biked around campus to film a virtual tour for the newly virtual admit weekend. Being in Gates that Friday (three days before the bay area wide shelter-in-place order) was the last time I'd be on campus for a while. The next day I adopted 3 wonderful baby rats (my biggest brain move this whole year) and the day after that I moved home. I was counting down the days until Animal Crossing and then J and I were duplicating royal crowns in ACNH. At some point my hair got really bad. The months blurred together. Adjusting to WFH was extremely challenging for me, someone who had structured their whole life around the "I only do work in the office and I leave the office when I get hungry for dinner" logic. I would stop working at 6pm but spent the entire afternoon mentally prepping myself to do maybe 30 menial minutes of it. I binged AtLA. I gave up submitting to UIST. In May I hung out in the park with J, who came home from Seattle, which was the first time I saw anyone outside my family. Sometime in there I decided to become a Twitch streamer and had a brief revival as DJ Noon before I felt bad for roping my friends into listening to my music and ran out of interesting songs I wanted to play. In June I, like many others, took to the streets. For two weeks I donated $50 a day to a different organization. I couldn't get any work done at all and spent an entire advisor meeting sobbing so intensely that they felt bad and canceled it after 10 minutes. I emailed the university and got my housing back for the summer and I moved back to start my internship.

The internship was the break I needed -- working with W was a godsend compared to the struggle of my advisors. After reaching new lows at the start of the summer, my mental health was sloping positively again -- working on a new research project helped clear the emotional baggage of the last one. I was also getting more outdoor social interaction -- I went to Ocean Beach with M/D, Half Moon Bay with my family, and going on weekly bike rides with M. At the end of June, M, my roommate, her boyfriend M the clown (there are now 3 different Ms) and I waited for negative COVID results before going on a 2 day camping trip to Mt. Lassen, which felt completely surreal, and, at that time, completely necessary.

The summer dragged on and my mental health, at some point, began to slip. If I were to graph it it would probably look like the inverse of COVID cases in the US -- gradually decreasing, but with high variance from the day to day. I got an embroidery machine, I attended a workshop on docu-poetics with CPH that was so ripe with information my brain physically ached, I saw my lab mates again for the first time as we sat in a very, very wide circle to say goodbye to a post-doc who got a faculty job in Israel. Most weekends I drove to my parents' house and would take J on various hikes around East Bay so he could better appreciate his roots before he went off to Boston for college. He was taking the Switch with him, so in August I bought myself a new one and planned out my entire second ACNH town, which kept me busy for a while -- but surprisingly not as long as I thought, as with planning (and money from my old account) the whole project took I think less than 50 hours. The camping itch came back and the day before my birthday, which was also the day before J would leave for Boston, we went camping at a small state park in San Jose where he got heat stroke and we slept on top of fire ants. The entire experience reminded me how much I disliked camping -- but what else was there to do? I had a wonderful (and long, bless the folks who stayed) Zoom birthday party where I wore a mesh shirt I made and covered with worms on a string. The day after my birthday someone backed into my car, which, following the demands of a racist letter from the HOA, was parked in guest parking. (Ultimately this would be a blessing of insurance money, as the damage was mainly cosmetic and the person kindly left their contact information.) At this time I was also unironically watching ASMR videos to fall asleep, so I painted a two Bob Ross style paintings, one in my virtual art club, to pay homage.

Fire season this year was worse than it's ever been. Being trapped inside the house combined with my roommate moving out at the start of fall quarter and now living alone marked the second downward spiral of my mental health. The bad days were more frequent. I TA'd a game design course, my first time teaching at this university, where many students messaged me to complain that their 95s were not 100s. In the end the lowest grade in the class was an A- and 20% of the class got an A+. At some point I submitted a summer-long project I did with J and S to CHI; it is so much easier to produce work when I do not have to wrangle with M. (This paper gets accepted, but my silly grad student excitement is tampered both by general "why are we still trying to publish when society is crumbling" pandemic feelings and the fact that CHI will not be physically in Japan next year.) Maybe once a month I go birding. I feel increasingly as if there is nothing novel in my life; I am tired of it all and my body feels fatigued even though I don't do anything with my days. Some days it feels like if I don't touch someone I will explode. My use of recreational marijuana skyrockets. I start doing exercise videos semi-regularly with A. I briefly consider moving to Seattle with E, who is about to defend, before it's clear we have, as always, different boundaries and expectations. I look for places in Sunset/Richmond with M to little success.

In October I somehow pull it together and organize student volunteers for a 3 day conference that requires waking up before 5am every day. I do nothing the rest of the week. After we get flu shots and I let someone into my apartment for the first time since the pandemic started, I help E move up to Seattle. The trip is comfortable and we get to take care of each other; this fulfills a need in me. On Halloween J and I dance in a soccer field next to a combination anarchist recruitment center and homeless encampment -- now cleared by the cops -- and eat a mud pie that is too sweet. On my last day in WA I ask E if he would like to have sex, as friends, and he politely declines. I am pleased with how easily I emotionally accept this answer, how through time and therapy I've finally come to cherish our friendship without always looking for what could have been. I am extremely nervous on the flight home, and it's the first and only flight I will take during the pandemic, and the N-95 squishes my face so my head looks like a balloon, but I have the privilege of free 5 minute weekly tests through the university and I collect another negative result.

In November I fully embrace the hyperfixation lifestyle. My brain, always looking for novel stimuli, has given up on doing work entirely and instead thinks of Thanzag constantly. There is one day where I play Hades for 8 hours and I feel gross, as if I've completed my regression to my high school self. It takes 90 hours until I achieve all my goals, and with no more runs necessary to roll for RNG-based conversational triggers, I finally feel a sense of freedom. (My Switch tells me I have used it for 580+ hours this year, which is more than double last year.) The second SwSh DLC is a struggle for me to complete as I do not find catching legendaries enticing. J comes back early from university at my urging to avoid the travel surge, a week before Thanksgiving, and starts living with me. This helps a lot. My next hyperfixations come overlapping and staggered: I write 25k words of a second iteration of my 2015 NaNoWriMo with the protagonist I had developed in high school before I get bored with the story and realize I need yet another iteration; I buy a combination air fryer pressure cooker and ask my parents for a functional vacuum and bidet as early Christmas gifts and become obsessed with immaculate inside living spaces. This carries on to re-decorating my room at my parents' house, after installing a shelf in the closet and a curtain to close it off from the living room, and spending roughly 30 hours over December break organizing and cleaning their entire garage--they have not thrown out a single piece of paper or article of clothing since they set foot in this country over 20 years ago. My therapist quits the practice and my relationship with my advisors improve. I watch a few housewife vlogs and make my own. I have the revelation that doing research in a pandemic is basically just like any other creative project -- no one really cares that much if I get it done, it's just harder to do than, say, putting together a vlog in a few hours. This shift in mindset feels life changing to me, having before thought of research more as work, a taboo thing to pursue in a pandemic, and when W compliments me for the progress I've made in both the system and managing our meeting with M I do not know how to respond because no one has ever done that before. In the last two weeks of the year I start tracking my time. In our last session (that I almost sleep through), my therapist tells me that I seem stable to her and she is not worried about me. I believe her.

In 2020 I made a marked point to let everyone know that I didn't have goals. It felt lofty to have personal ambitions in the face of everything at a global scale. With this said I will now revisit the 2020 resolutions I wrote last year: (1) Intentionally seek out love: absolutely not, (2) Do enough work such that I don't feel guilty: also no, (3) sew one thing a month: no, but in the end I sewed 11 things total this year so I was close, (4) improve my Chinese: this was actually the only thing that did happen, and now my mom and I have better conversations because of it and I'm so thankful.

In 2021, however, I feel like I finally have it in me to have goals again. They are simple. (1) Get laid. (2) Submit the two research projects I've been doing forever. (3) Commit to writing down my thoughts that make me think, "Oh, that's interesting, I should write it down." Ideas are unfortunately such currency in what I do.

Last year I wrapped up this post with some candid, but embarrassing, optimism. I will offer no such high hopes for 2021, but I do ask the reader if they have noticed that I switched tenses from past to present halfway through this post. And that's 2021: an incidentally unintentional, but then consciously controllable, shift to the present.

[iesika]

This is a companion post for my Hannibal fic What The Water Gave Me which is, as far as I know, the only fanfic ever to need a companion post about flood hydrology. On Saturday, May 14, 2011, while Hannibal was shopping in the French Market, the Corps of Engineers opened one quarter of the gates on the Morganza Spillway and flooded about 4,600 square miles of south Louisiana. In places the flooding reached 25 feet. This was in addition to the previous opening of the Bonnet Carré spillway Sgt. Germaine Grant mentioned in chapter 2, which flooded a stretch of land between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain near New Orleans. You might even remember Sgt. Grant telling Jack and Hannibal that they were in a record breaking drought at the time. How, you may be asking. Why? You should be asking. It's insane. The Why is such a big deal it might have actually started the Great Depression, reversed the main political parties of the US, reshaped the racial demographics of America's cities and created a musical genre.

This is the watershed of the Mississippi River. Every bit of water that flows from every bright spot on that map, from rain, drains, toilets, crop irrigation, whatever, eventually makes its way, like the world's grossest funnel, down, more or less, to a single point at Red River Landing, Louisiana, where the Red River meets the rest. Not too south from there, the Atchafalaya river splits away from the Mississippi. Over the last few hundred million years, the Atchafalaya and the Mississippi have wiggled all over the place, as rivers do, and at any given time, which one was the major outlet to the sea has changed. Rivers do a lot of predictable but unpredictable things, but the most predictable thing they do is seek the lowest ground and the easiest path. If there isn't an easy path the river will make one.

In 1927, due to heavy rains all over the watershed, the Mississippi River flooded 27,000 square miles up to 30 feet and displaced well over 600,000 people, mostly in Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana. Monetary damages were equivalent to about one third of the entire Federal Budget at the time, or, in modern dollars, over a trillion dollars. Crop failures were huge, driving up food prices nationwide. Let me repeat that. 630,000 internally displaced refugees within the US, within the last century. Did you learn about that in school? I took 2 Louisiana History at two different schools, then took three American History classes at a college in the flood zone, and I learned about this because I googled a Randy Newman song in 2005.

200,000 of the displaced people were poor black people from mostly rural areas, most of them one generation removed from slavery. Most of these folks had little to nothing to use to relocate or to live on, so they were herded into refugee camps where they were stuck with nowhere to go and minimal supplies until the water started to recede months later. Racial tensions were sky high, and the racial disparity in aid, rescue and support was extremely clear. As soon as the water was low enough, tens of thousands of displaced black families joined what we now call The Great Migration - they didn't have a home to go back to, so they went to the big cities, both in the south and, for the first time, up north. Anybody you can think of from the classic Chicago blues scene? Probably ended up there after being displaced by this one event. Mahalia Jackson, who I spotlit last chapter, moved to Chicago at this time as a victim of The Great Betrayal (man, the 1920s were Great, huh?)

President Coolidge put Herbert Hoover in charge of managing the camps, where he made a whole lot of promises and ended up president. When he didn’t fulfill any of his promises to the black refugees, the entire black voting block swung, more or less permanently, to the Democrats. Huey P. Long rose to power in Louisiana on a wave of socialist populism and probably would have been president a decade later if he hadn’t been assassinated in the middle of the capitol building. If you don’t know about the Kingfish, look him up, because holy fuck our country was almost really, really different. As for the Great Betrayal I mentioned?

Wealthy (white) businessmen in New Orleans arranged to dynamite a levee in Caernarvon, Louisiana, flooding areas of St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parish where tens of thousands of (poorer) people lived and worked. Reconstructions have shown this was pointless and New Orleans would have been fine, because so many levees had already breached in other locations. Basically no one was ever consulted or  compensated for loss of property and livelihood. So it's no wonder that, during and after Hurricane Katrina, there was widespread belief that the flood protections had actually been deliberately sabotaged to flood the lower 9th ward and save downtown. People remember when you fuck them over and they never trust you again. Every school I've ever attended would have been underwater during the 1927 flood, but I never  learned anything about this, or about how we've stopped that from ever happening again. Sit tight, it's nuts. Prior to 1927 levees were local projects and they were largely homemade by non-engineers. Surely one big pile of dirt is the same as another, right? But levee construction is an art and a science. Alluvial dirt wants to settle; the ground is wet and it wants to move. After the shitshow of the Great Floods, the federal government created the world's largest flood control project. This is what federal governments are for. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, those unsung superheroes, planned and built a carefully planned and, one hopes, carefully maintained series of interconnected levees, dams, floodgates, spillways, canals and wetlands stretching across that whole area in the top image, but mostly along the Missouri, Ohio, Red, and Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers. It's known as the Mississippi River and Tributaries Project (MR&T) The Lower Mississippi and the Atchafalaya Basin in particular got a complete makeover.

We'll start at the very bottom, because it's simplest. The Bonnet Carré spillway was built 12 miles west of New Orleans to divert the Mississippi around the city in case of very high water. This spillway controls what was a natural flood route for as long as we've been keeping records and is opened on a fairly regular basis - every decade or so. This was one of the first parts of the MR&T completed, just four years after the flood. It's a mile and a half long and runs alongside of the river. When it opens, a channel about six miles long is flooded, dumping the river directly into Lake Pontchartrain and the surrounding marshlands to save the more populated areas. Lake Pontchartrain is huge (home of the longest bridge in the world!) and it has a wide opening to the Gulf of Mexico, so it can basically absorb as much water as we could possibly throw at it.  Upriver a bit, things are a little more complicated. I'm not going to go super in-depth. There are numerous control structures connecting the Atchafalaya and Mississippi. The biggest and the one most relevant to our story is the Morganza Spillway, located in Pointe Coupee Parish, upriver from Baton Rouge. If the water gets too high, it will overtop and undermine levees, and the force of moving water becomes so great that it would just shred the other existing control structures, even if they are wide open to let the most possible water through. There needs to be another emergency safety valve to take pressure off the system. The Morganza Spillway is about a mile long, and when it's wide open it lets 600,000 cubic feet of water through per second. That's about half the flow of the entire Mississsippi river at moderate flood stage, passing through one man-made structure, under the control of a handful of human beings.

So in the worst possible flooding scenarios, as happened in 1927, in 1973, and in 2011, the ACoE opens a little gap in the weir. They've never opened it all the way - max capacity has never been tested. This is a projection map from 2011 for what the flooding would look like with the system running at one quarter of total capacity (which is the scenario that ended up happening). Because yeah, people live in those areas! The area's also farmed for timber and drilled for oil. There isn't much commercial fishing - that mostly happens in the Gulf - but there's fish farming, including crawfish ponds. Mostly it's protected or semi-protected wetlands occasionally dotted with camps. I'm not sure if that word is in common usage with the same meaning elsewhere, so just in case, a camp is a (usually but not always cheap or rustic) house or structure not intended for full-time residence, where one can stay for access to water or hunting. You actually have to get a lot of surveying and permissions to build anything anywhere on any body of water in south Louisiana, because the balance of flood control and wetland preservation is so important and precarious, so most of the places in this area will have been grandfathered in rather than freshly built. The Morganza Spillway has been opened twice, once in the 70s and once during this fic. There is a huge, eight parish long and wide river moving over land that's been dry or swampy and only sparsely inhabited for 45 years. Think of all the things it might pick up on the way to sea?

[super-queer-hannibal-obsession]

The M/M Shipping Thing: Misogyny, the Male Gaze, and Feminist and Queer Representation

Follow up post to this one, here. Read this to see my thoughts on the importance of allowing women to see men through a lens where male sexuality is something to be celebrated, not feared. Seems like a lot of people can relate to this, and I just love talking about it so have some more of my thoughts.

First of all, it’s a numbers game…

Going off of this point by @colt-kun which I’ve copied and pasted here. This gives a great overview of a purely statistical analysis of why m/m ships are more common.  

“There’s also the sheer numbers to take into account.

Take the first Avengers movie as an example (because frankly its one of the few recent blockbusters with two female speaking roles). Two females, Black Widow and Maria. Then eight males, Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, Hawkeye, Hulk, Loki, Fury, Coulson.

Not counting polyships/selfships for ease of math, and using the characters cisgender identities bc that is what they are largely seen as (no disrespect meant to any trans/nb interpretations)

Possible f/m ships: 16 (35.5%) Possible f/f ships: 1 (2.2%) Possible m/m ships: 28 (62.2%)

That’s not even accounting for screentime, character chemistry, interaction times, etc. thats just the NUMBERS.

When there’s a large disparity in character gender then yeah, you’re going to see a heavy inclination to m/m ships because that’s really ALL THATS POSSIBLE. The fans have a natural desire for more story and romances, they want to world build and AU. We’ve done that since stories were first told.

So of COURSE you’re going to see a lot of women - of all sexual orientations - leaning towards m/m pairings because when there’s only potatoes at the buffet… you eat the potatoes. Think of all the shows an movies with only one female character in a cast of men. Is it really difficult to see WHY there’s a lot of m/m ships there?”

Mainstream media is male-centered and male-dominated.

Going beyond just the numbers the fact is that in the majority of popular films and TV shows many of the female characters aren’t well-rounded or on screen as much as most of the men. There is a tendency for women to be the secondary characters or maybe to have one main female character. This makes it hard to really relate to and invest in a lot of the female characters out there. Not that people don’t, but it’s not going to attract a huge following.

Take Supernatural (low hanging fruit I know) where even if there are a large number of women that appear throughout the series, there aren’t many that stick around(and let’s not even go there with all of the deaths and how sexist that is right now ha)or interact with each other in a way that would lead to a lot of shipping. Even in my lovely Hannibal fandom, the Marlana ship which people love and people write for just isn’t going to have as much of a following just based on the fact that they aren’t the main characters. And Marlana is a good example of a w/w ship where they aren’t objectified, don’t die, and still it’s a secondary focus. There obviously are some exceptions, but they are few and far between.

The Male Gaze:

Also, women (and any gender that isn’t cismale) are trained to see film through the male perspective. Film and TV is usually shot with the male gaze, so women learn to see through this lens. We grow up learning to empathize and put ourselves in the shoes of male protagonists because otherwise we would have very little media to enjoy. I think this is part of why it’s natural for women to ship m/m ships. I also think that shipping men and sexualizing them can be a subversion of the male gaze and is an empowering way to flip that script for many women.

We could go into a whole other discussion on internalized misogyny and patriarchal culture and why there are some not so great reasons women might gravitate towards m/m ships, but I think it’s important to see all the reasons why this is and to not demonize women for doing something that makes sense both statistically, sociologically, and psychologically, etc.

Men rarely have to put themselves in the shoes of women in film. So, I do feel like there is a difference between straight dudes watching lesbian porn and women who thoughtfully engage in a m/m ship. You can’t ignore the gender politics at play and how these factors interact. In an ideal world, people of all genders and sexualities could enjoy bodies without all the baggage of sexism and homophobia, but sadly that’s not our world.

This famous, awesome thread really sums it up:

Disclaimer:

I do think there are women who fetishize and act awful when it comes to m/m ships. (I also realize there are lots of other intersections at work in film such as race and class that I’m not really addressing.) Especially those who don’t do any of the emotional or intellectual work around the history of the queer community and who don’t engage in activism of that sort. Plus, if you are a straight woman who loves and supports gay male ships but you’re grossed out by queer women or you’re objectifying actual queer men in your life, it’s time to check yourself and stop that.

Homoerotic Subtext:

Also, women, and queer people across the board, have been trained to read subtextual clues like pros. Women are especially adept at reading into stories since they are so rarely represented in positive ways. Queer people do this, too. It makes sense that women, especially queer women, would pick up on interactions that have homoerotic subtext easily. And, since film is male dominated, it is much more likely the subtext will be between two men. Also, let’s just face it, the history of film is male centered and homo eroticism is a big part of it, and it’s usually about good looking white dudes. The LGBT community itself still has a long way to go in portraying and magnifying people of all genders and sexualities more equally.

The weight of the male gaze on queer women.

There’s also the problem of objectification. I like to write, read, and see fan art about w/w ships, but there’s always that weight of feeling like you’re objectifying women all over again and feeling unsure about it. Honestly, I think that many of us in fandom should probably do what we can to write more femslash and write original queer female characters, but there are a lot of reasons why these ships aren’t as popular as m/m ships. There’s a lot of baggage around portraying women and female sexuality. And lesbian sex is so objectified that it can be a minefield to navigate even when(once in a blue moon) a good f/f ship opportunity comes along. But, even with that, there are some thriving ships such as Korrasami and Clexa(oh look another queer woman is dead. This is why we can’t have nice things). Queer women do celebrate and create fandom around good w/w ships when we get the chance. 

Misogyny and Mocking Fandom:

Lastly, and I’ve read lots on this before so this is just my take, people tend to demonize fandom and m/m shipping because it is something that is driven by women, mainly made by women, and made mostly for other women (and nonbinary folks, too).

Even in the LGBT+ community, there is a lot of misogyny. Cis gay white men are the face of that movement, and they often don’t realize the sexism that is still alive and well in the community. It’s easy for people to laugh at, mock, and critique shipping because it is very much a space not created by men. I also think it’s easy for some privileged gay men to point out perceived injustice but not realize the sexism inherent in what they are saying.

Fandom is very much a place where women explore their sexuality and can enjoy seeing men being acted upon, not just being the actors. It’s no surprise that women are intrigued by the sexual politics of queer men given the messages about being penetrated and being acted on that women get all the time. Analyzing sexual dynamics through a m/m relationship makes a lot of sense psychologically as it isn’t tied to a male/female gender dynamic in the same way. I think it’s a very natural way for women to see sexuality , and things like dominance and submission, as a personal preference and the beauty and excitement of different ways of expressing sexuality.

People like to enjoy women’s work while also mocking it.

Also, I know many queer men who enjoy m/m smut, fan art, etc. from fandoms where I’m sure that 90 percent of the work is being produced by people who aren’t cisgay men, and are very likely people who identify as women. So, while I know that some queer men are cool with it and some aren’t cool with it, I think it’s important to keep in mind that many of them are benefiting and enjoying from the work that female driven fandom is creating.

In conclusion:

Once again, it’s important to not be a homophobic, fetishizing, clueless person. I see instances of problematic behavior and thinking among women who ship men together often, and it’s a problem and needs to be called out when it happens. But, for all that is holy, stop acting like all of these women are gross, homophobic fetishizers and look at all the reasons why m/m shipping is such a phenomenon. I always think being self-critical and analytical is important. It’s also good to listen to different perspectives because these are intersectional issues with valid discussions to be had.

Sorry this was so long. I really could go on and on, and this is what happens when I miss writing feminist/queer theory papers. ;)

[smokescreen24]

50 DND Questions

1. What do you think your d&d race would be? Proabably human. If I get the choice, I’d like to be either an Elf or Dragonborn. I’d be cool with either of those. 

2. What class? Mostly likely a fighter? I’m not religious enough for a cleric, and not smart enough for a sorcerer or wizard. I like the idea of being able to throw hands. 

3. What two feats would you have? I’d want the Alert feat, and more than likely the Lucky feat. Alert means my initiative gets improved, and Lucky means that I can reroll a bad throw. Those would get used a lot. 

4. What has been your favorite d&d character you've played? (NPCs count for DMs) I’ve only got the two for now, but Liander’s been getting the most love. She’s probably my favorite. 

5. Which of your d&d characters has been the most like you? Oh, Liander, without a doubt. She’s pretty close to my baseline personality.

6. Which of your d&d characters has been the least like you? And that would be Cade. Cade is just this side of Chaotic Evil, so she’s a little harder for me to get into the right headspace for. Playing her takes a lot out of me, to be honest. 

7. How do you go about making a character or NPC? That’s hard to say - I give the session about an hour or so to feel it out, and let the personalities develop naturally over time. My playing style is reactive, so I let the situation dictate how said character would respond. 

8. What is the most memorable natural 20 you've ever experienced? That would be with Cade. I’d rolled to take out a stone giant, suplexed them (because she’s a barbarian and her strength stat is wild), then chopped his dick off with my battleaxe like I was swinging a golf club. It uh, made an impression on the rest of the party, and the rest of the enemies. 

9. Has one of your d&d characters ever died? How? Not yet, so don’t jinx me! I’m still attached to both of them, and would like to keep them around! 

10. What is your favorite class to play? So far, it’s been my ranger. She’s fun, and I’m digging the whole ‘animals as companions’ thing she’s got going. 

11. Have you ever fought a dragon? Yes. Between Cade and Paileous, we cut it’s head off. It’s currently a trophy back at home base. Got a lot of gold for our trouble, too. 

12. Have you ever fought a beholder? NO. Not entirely sure I wanna, either! 

13. Have you ever fought a mind flayer? No, but it’s coming up. My buddy is having us roll new characters for the Underdark campaign. I might try a cleric just for funsies. 

14. Have you ever had a romance with an NPC or another PC? Nope. I am here to tell you that neither of my characters is looking for any of that. Liander’s too busy, and Cade is a halfling barbarian surrounded by equally questionable Drow paladins and rouges. No thanks. 

15. Do you prefer to DM or play?  I have no desire to DM. I’ve only been playing for a little while, and I’m not creative enough to attempt it. I’ll stick to playing. I’m good at that. 

16. What is your favorite D&D pod/vodcast? I’ve been listening to Critical Role - I’m relistening to the Whitestone/Chroma Conclave arcs. I love No Mercy Percy so much. 

17. Who is your favorite "celebrity dm?" I only know the one - Matt Mercer. 

18. Do you use props/minis/terrain in your game? Very rarely. I think we’ve only had like, two sessions that actually had terrain and mini’s. 

19. How did you discover D&D? My friends. I sat in on one of their games, and just for the hell of it, they rolled me a character, and thus Cade was born. 

20. If you run a homebrew game, give an out of context spoiler. I’m not running it, but smuggling is a thing, and the dude we’re smuggling for is someone whose face is on a wanted poster in my pocket. 

21. Drop a picture of a mini you painted (if applicable) Sorry, I don’t have any minis. They’re all with my DM. 

22. Write a brief scene centered around one of your characters! Uh, hang on -  "That was nice. I didn't ask you to get it for me, and I distinctly remember telling you I can get my own. Not my fault you don't listen worth a damn." Liander says with a slight grin. She doesn't know why, but she likes poking at Chancel. Not many folks react the way he does, and the scowl he sends her just makes her grin wider. "Come on. I cannot possibly be the only one who's pointed that out to you." 

 "Yeah, me. Two minutes ago." Zulth mutters into his mug.

23. Do you have any art of your characters? Yeah, one of my more artistic friends drew a sketch of Liander for me, complete with her cat on her shoulder. It’s pretty cool. It’s also huge, which is why I’m not posting it here. 

24. Have you ever played any TTRPGs other than D&D? No, this is my first foray into TTRPGs. 

25. What is your favorite snack for d&d? I reach for Cheetos or Doritos usually. They’re good, crunchy snacks. 

26. If you could have one potion from d&d, which one would you choose? If I could just load up on superior healing potions for life, I’d be a happy woman. 

27. If you could cast one spell from d&d, which would you cast? Fireball. That’s a nice equalizer, I think. 

28. What is the most memorable natural 1 you've experienced? Oh man. That would be with Liander this time. She was trying to sneak into a well fortified part of the city, and tamper with the water supply for one family. Well, I had to roll to hop the fence to do so, rolled a natural one, my foot caught in the fence, and there was a dog right in front of me. Landed on my face, and got bitten for my trouble. Still got the mission done, though. 

29. Have you ever been drunk playing d&d? I’ve been buzzed. Does that count? 

30. Homebrew or prewritten? Both? Both. Both is good. 

31. Tell me about your current party! Which one? Well, for the Alagaesia campaign, there’s my character Liander, a dwarf named Thorin, a rouge(?) named Zulth, an herbalist named Liam, and the man who hired us, an NPC named Bjorn. We’re actually trying to accomplish something with this campaign, or so the DM says. 

For the Guardians of Gravenhollow campaign, I’m a halfling barbarian named Cade, there’s a drow Paladin named Varis, and another Drow rouge named Paileous. This particular campaign is just chaotic evil fuckery. 

32. Most memorable NPC you've encountered in a game you played in. Victor. He built a clock, I wanted his tinkering kit, and wound up buying both at a just criminally low price. I kinda feel like I ripped him off, tbh. 

33. Do you listen to music while playing? What kinds? Mostly the Skyrim soundtrack with a little Witcher soundtrack thrown in for funsies. Atmospheric stuff. 

34. Favorite accent to do for characters? I don’t really have one for either of my characters. Mostly because I’m bad at keeping it up. I forget. 

35. Favorite classic d&d trope Tragic Backstory(TM). Only one of my characters has it, but it’s damn fun to role-play.

36. What was your first d&d character you made? That would be Cade! She started out as kind of a throw-away, but she got mixed in with Paileous and Varis and she’s living her best chaotic life. 

37. What is the most recent PC or NPC you've created? That’d be Kahtri, actually! I haven’t played her a whole bunch, so I’m not really familiar with her yet, but it’ll be interesting to play a Drow cleric who doesn’t actually worship Lolth. (I don’t do spiders.)

38. Goblins or Kobolds? I actually haven’t dealt with either yet. I’m slightly more familiar with Goblins simply because of CritRole. 

39. Favorite villain you've defeated? Uh, I dunno if I’d classify her as a villian exactly, but Cade’s killed an NPC named Creed who was a servant to the god Grotz. Pretty sure he’s out for revenge now. 

40. What d&d deity would you be a cleric of? I am a cleric of the Drow deity Elistraee. (I had to double check the spelling on that) 

41. Give an out of context quote from one of your games! Liander - “I tried to stop him, but he fucking yote me across the room like I wasn’t even there. Is it weird I’m bitter about that?”

Thorin - *emerges from the wreckage of the crate we were smuggling holding dragon eggs* “I FOUND LIVING ROCKS!” 

Liander and Zulth in tandem - *knows exactly what he’s holding* “Oh for fuck’s sake!” 

42. Have you ever rolled turn into a potted plant on the wild magic table? No, I don’t think I know anyone who plays that particular class, so I’ve never seen it happen. 

43. Minis and terrain or theater of the mind? Theater of the mind, good sir/madam. 

44. Mulligan, Mercer, Murphy, or McElroy? Mercer! Mercer! Mercer! 

45. What is the longest session you've ever had? Oh, jeez. Like, fourteen hours, give or take?

46. What is the longest battle you've fought or run? Uh, that’d be the fight with Creed. It took us like two hours to beat her down with three of us. She was stupid powerful. The bounty was great, though. 

47. Have you ever played at level 20? No, my highest level character is a level 11. I’m working on it, though. 

48. Does your dm say "How do you want to do this?" Oh yes. The table just blows up when that happens, not gonna lie. It’s fun to hear, especially if it’s aimed at you. 

49. Have you ever played an edition other than 5th? No, I started playing last year, so 5th is all I know. 

50. Will you try to convince others to play? Already done so. I’ve added a couple people to the group - my husband, whose character is the best straight man to our fuckery, and one of our mutual friends whose lunacy works with our brand of crazy. 

[fezrus]

A dog person - Young!Sirius x Reader

Warnings : nope, maybe the GIF that personally makes me weak

Words : 2.8k

Request : yes

Note : it's the imagine that I wrote a few days ago and that was deleted somehow, I'm sharing it again now. I know some people had the same request but anywayyyyy (thank you to the ppl who told me to post it again btw❣️). I just imagined a Patronus for Pettigrew, don't mind it if it bothers you. I loved this request and got a bit carried away, it was just so damn cute.

Even at Hogwarts everybody hated monday mornings, as they symbolized the end of the weekend, the return in class and especially, implied a lot of exhaustion. In fact, everybody except the 6th years, because to them Monday morning meant Defense Against the Dark Arts. Here you were, at your usual seat next to the wall on the first row. The classroom 3C had probably the biggest windows out of all the Turris Magnus, unfortunately you were too short to observe the view -everybody was- but you still tried to take a look everytime. You were on tip-toes, taking advantage of the fact that your teacher had not yet arrived to make another attempt.

« You know Y/N, I really enjoy the view you're offering me when you stand up like this in front of me, but I think you should just sit down as our dear Professor is here. » whispered Sirius behind you. Your cheeks turner red as you did what he said, sighing in exasperation and trying to focus on the tall man standing in front of the class. Sirius knew his little seduction game made you feel a bit flustered and that was exactly why he liked doing it so much, he didn't want you to be uncomfortable, he was only joking and you knew it. Out of the four Marauders, you spent most of your time with him or Remus, who actually introduced you to the others after meeting you at the library.

« Today I will try, and please notice that I said try, to teach you something that I know most of you have been waiting for. » said your teacher solanemly, holding his hands together behind his back. « The majority of witches and wizards are not able to produce it for it requires patience, concentration and determination. You probably guessed it already, I am talking about the Patronus charm, one of the most powerful defensive charms that exist.»

Immediatly, everybody started to whisper enthousiasticly to their neighbors, and even Lily who usually was the definition of the model student seemed hysteric. You smiled when you saw her, her dazzling hair flying in the air while she turned around towards the boys, already beginning to discuss on the shape their patronus would take. James had already managed to produce one and it was a deer just like his animagus. He could be turbulent, sometimes even insolent, but nobody could deny that he was an incredibly talented wizard just like Remus who was sitting next to him. Strangely, he stayed away from the general euphoria which spread in the class, playing almost nervously with his hands. You frowned, ready to ask him what was going on when your teacher knocked two times on the desk with his fists. The noises stopped and everybody looked at him once again.

« To produce a Patronus, it is necessary to concentrate on your most beautiful memory, and only this one. Find the memory that warms your heart the most and say clearly, wand in hand : expecto patronum. » Suddenly, a silver eagle flew from his hand and in the classroom. It was both beautiful and captivating. « This requires training, today we shall satisfy us with approaching the theoretical side of it and in the next class, I hope that you will be ready. Just know that it is difficult to obtain a corporeal patronus, and that its purpose is not to be beautiful, but to protect you from Dementors. Whether it is a rat, cat or lion, its power will be the same : the partonus is a shield, a messenger and a protector. »

He kept speaking during the whole following hour, adding that even if the animal shape the Patronus took did not define its strenght, it could mean something important for the wizard. Leaving the class everybody had only an idea in head : discover what their patronus was. The four boys, Lily and you had mutually decided to train together by the lake this afternoon. But right now you were going to eat, Sirius and James led the group speaking loudly and walking way too fast. Behind and standing by your side, Lily seemed to explain to Peter the details he had not understood. You left them silently to join Remus who walked at the back, alone, head low and dragging his feet. He raised his head when he saw you were waiting for him and turned the gentle smile you were giving him back to you. Interlacing your arm in his, you jumped at the opportunity to be alone with him to ask him what was wrong. Remus sighed, he seemed embarrassed and you strated to worry. He looked around to be sure no one was listening and then he bent a little towards you.

« I'm afraid my corporeal Patronus gives too much away, if you know what I mean. I already tried with James and it almost worked, and I swear I saw a long hairy tail before the light went off. » He whispered, biting his lip « With you guys it doesn't matter, but if anyone else sees it... » He didn't finish his sentence but you knew what he meant. Remus had always suffered because of his lycantropia, his parents and him had a nomadic life before he came to Hogwarts thanks to Dumbledore. Everytime someone started to be suspicious, they left and the little Remus never got to make friends. Even now that he had friends, really good ones, he was still afraid someone would found out. Taking his hand in yours, you squeezed it gently so he knew he wasn't alone and you were here for him.

« We can practice alone another day if you want to be sure, you don't have to do it today if you don't want to. »

« I think that's a good idea, thank you Y/N. »

Around 4pm, you sat in the green grass which lined the lake, between Sirius and Peter who seemed strangely concentrated into tearing away the petals of a flower one by one. You turned around towards Sirius who was already looking at you. You felt your cheeks burn a little when he did not look away which made him laugh, revealing his white teeth and his dimples.  He was a handsome young man, really, and you never knew if you just found him attracive or if it was something more. Anyway, you came back to reality when James showed up, back from his Quidditch session. A proud smile could be seen on his face as per usual, and it grew even bigger when a bunch of Gryffindor girls passing by stared at him like he was a piece of art, or a piece of meat. It always made Sirius giggle but Lily just rolled her eyes every single time.

« Did you mess your hair up on purpose again just so you can look like some Quidditch rock star ? » suggested Remus, looking quite amused. 

« You'll be authorized to criticize my hair when your furry little problem will be solved, Moony chéri. » teased James, winking before he spoke again while turning around « Let's get started folks, why don't we let the Lilliputian try first. »

Eveybody laughed, James flirting with Lily was the funniest thing ever, especially when he came up with these strange nicknames but you had to admit that for once it wasn't so bad. She stood up, pointing her wand towards him which caused him to slightly move to the side.

« In fact I'm two months older than you Potter, show me some respect. » Remus, Peter and Sirius giggled while James seemed outraged, but before he could come back with anything Lily exclaimed, her wand pointing to the sky « Expecto patronum ! »

You held your breath just like the others while slowly but very clearly, from the tip of her wand, a bright silvery light started to burst before fading out. She tried again multiple times with James giving her advices and finally, a tall and gracious doe was running in the air, following the rythm of Lily's laugh. Her green eyes were wide opened, she seemed proud and happier than ever. You all applauded, Peter even took a bow.

« It's strange, isn't it ? Your patronus is a doe and Potter's one is a deer. If it isn't a sign, I don't know what it is. » teased Sirius, winking to Lily. Her cheeks turned bright red before she exlaimed « Simple coincidence, that won't make me go out with you any sooner Potter. »

Finally you formed little groups, James and Lily stayed together, Sirius was with Peter and Remus with you. This way, the others didn't pay attention to the fact that Moony wasn't really trying to practice and he was pleased about it. You tried to remember all the informations your teacher gave you this morning, and took a deep breath. You hoped it would work but as Lily said again and again, it was a difficult spell and it was normal if you didn't succeed on your first tries. For what felt like an hour you persisted, repeating the two little words again and again, sometimes managing to produce a little shiny light at the end of your wand. But no animal, nothing. Frustrated you sighed noisily, which caught the attention of Remus, Sirius and Peter. The two others seemed too busy arguing about who-knows-what, and anyway they did not really need to practice anymore. Seeing your disappointment, Sirius smiled softly before suggesting to the boys to train together and that he would help you. After all if that did not work so well that way, you could try.

« I can't do it either, you know. Maybe it's because you distract me. » he suggested, teasing you once more with a grin on his face.

« That's not funny Sirius. » you whined, a pout on your lips.

He looked at them for a bit too long before coming back at your eyes. Finally he stood behind you, his chest pressed against your back. You were thankful he was behind, at least he couldn't see your burning cheeks but it wasn't finished yet because you could now feel his strong hand taking yours, holding your wand with you while the other one was placed on your hip. Your heart was racing and you were probably shaking too because he laughed soflty, speaking soflty.

« Maybe you're not thinking about your happiest memory. Close you eyes, the first one to come to your mind is probably the good one, focus on it. »

Even if his body pressed against yours and his breath crashing on the thin skin of your neck did not help you at all, his soft and low voice was relaxing and you now thought of nothing else. You no longer heard the sound of the wind in the trees, nor the murmur of the water of the lake, you did not see your friends staring at you a little farther : it was his voice and his body near you that occupied all your mind. You closed your eyes as he had suggested, and with trembling lips you pronounced the two words « Expecto patronum. » You opened your eyes slowly, just in time to see a magnificent light spraying out, more powerful than what you had managed to do until then. It grew larger, Sirius's hand still held yours and guided the movements of your wand. After a few seconds, you saw it. In front of you stood a brilliant, tall and perfectly formed dog. But it was not a common dog, you had seen this one several times already and you recognized it immediately. You understood that Sirius did too when you felt his fingers release your hand smoothly and his body move back slowly. Your concentration broke and the big dog disappeared. You did not dare to turn around, both shocked and mute, because you finally knew what your patronus was. And it was him. It was Padfoot.

You stood there, sitting on your bed without knowing what to do or even what to think. After the events of the afternoon you quickly ran away, stammering that you did not feel well and that you were going to rest. But everyone had seen the same thing as you, and everyone knew that your patronus was none other than Sirius Black himself, or at least his animagus form. You tried to convince yourself that it was just a simple dog, but you knew what you saw. Maybe it didn't mean anything at all, maybe it did. It probably did. Sirius and you had been friends for years and even though he liked to tease you all day long, it had never been more than a platonic relationship. As you kept thinking about this, images started to come to your mind. The day you met, how funny you found him, yet annoying. The first time you sat together in class, and how you spent the hour drawing stupid things on each other's books. That time in 4th year when he punched a guy who insulted you, and definitely got a detention for it. When one of his pranks hurt you and he brought you chocolate and flowers to make it up. The time he hugged you so tight after Gryffindor won the house cup that you thought he was going to choke you. Maybe he wasn't just a friend after all, and it took you a couple of years and a patronus to realize it. A knock on your door made you lift your head up, the person did not let you any time to answer and entered the room.

« Can I come in ? » asked the black haired boy. « A bit too late to ask, isn't it ? »

Sirius did not answer, he just closed the door leaving you both alone in the dorm. He sat next to you, your knees barely touching, but not a word was said. You looked at the floor for a few seconds before you saw him turning his head to you from the corner of your eye. Slowly, you looked at him too, your heart skipping a beat when you met his dark grey eyes.

« Why did you leave earlier ? You missed something, we learnt that Peter's patronus is a mole. » « You know why I left. » you said, smiling slightly at the end. « You don't have to be embarassed about it. » he shrugged « But I have to admit that I thought it would be something else. » « Like what ? » « A penguin. »

You scoffed, clearly not especting that answer. Sirius looked at you curiously, he didn't seem to understand why you were chuckling but he still smiled when he heard your laugh.

« What ? They're cute and funny, everyone likes penguins. » he smirked. « Nope, you're probably the only person to fancy penguins that much. » « Well I don't try to hide it. You shouldn't either. »

His last words were whispered in your ear before he placed a soft kiss on your shoulder. You knew what he meant, and you couldn't act as if the butterflies flying in your stomach weren't here. He bent down to give you another kiss, on the cheek this time, but the weight of his body made you both fall back on the bed. You laughed as he found himself lying on top of you and for the first time since you met him, you saw a light shade of red on his cheeks. You stayed like this before he kissed your forehead, and then your nose. You smiled and he looked at your lips, and back at your eyes again. Your hands made their way to the back of his neck as he brushed your lips with his own, without ever pressing them together. Your heartbeating probably echoed throughout the entire room, or maybe it was his own. He smirked again when he saw the look full of frustration and desire you gave him, biting his lip and kissing the corner of your lips and then your cheek, before whispering in your ear again.

« I always knew you were a dog person. »

And after that he finally pressed his lips against yours, tenderly, as if you were the most precious thing in the world.

[ramrodd]

Where were you on May 4, 1970?

On 4 May 1970, I wanted to get out of the Georgia sun and into some air conditioning before the starch in my summer khaki uniform wilted completely.

COMMENTARY:

I assume that you mean, where were you when you heard about Kent State?

My first visual memory that comes up is walking just south of the Post PX/Commisary cluster at Ft. Benning with the packet of my orders to Vietnam in my hand as I was clearing off post going to some office I had to present a copy of the orders to. The US Army has always depended heavily on personal initiative from the Seven Years War, going forward. It is still pretty much the frontier society it was the day George Custer dropped a letter to his wife off at the Quartermaster and trotted cheerfully off to glory. As a result of MacNamara, the Army community was beginning to lose some of this capacity that showed up for me on C-SPAN in the run-up to Desert Storm: the community was very sluggish. The Army noticed and began to fix that in 1994 just in time for the continuing decades of high cycle deployment the applied stupidity of Richard “Dick” Cheney and the neo-cons created with their historic and totally unnecessary diplomatic blunder compounded by their cosmic incompetence when they got us into Iraq and realized that the planning for occupation based on chocolates and flowers suffered from the basic operational assumptions inherent in “The Art of the Deal” and Duck Ass Don’s government shut down and tarriff wars.

But on 4 May, 1970, I was done with spring training as a Boy Soldier and the next step was the Big Leagues. I mean, you don’t go to Ranger School to run a Wall Street bucket shop and Vietnam was where the series was being played that year.

Kent State was not a surprise to me: it was an accident waiting to happen. The Nation Guard had been gunning down black folks since 1963 in places like Watts, Detroit and DC: the only difference this time is that it was white kids getting shot down and the reaction of the mostly white anti-war mob was, from my perspective, virtually the same as Roger Stone’s complaints about being arrested like your average black male who happens to be in the room when the FBI breaks down the door with the right address on the warrant but the wrong address afor the perp. I mean, they let him pull on some pants and polo shirt for his perp walk and he got about the same kind of coverage the times George Clooney got arrested for DUI or something. I mean, come on. But I digress.

I was in ROTC at Indiana University from the beginning of the drafts in 1965 until I graduated in the lull between Nixon’s election and Kent State. On my way to report to Infantry Hall, I picked up a couple going to the Atlanta Pop Festival on the 4th of July and I took them there and stayed unti almost dark and listened to a lot of music I didn’t recognize and drove to Atlanta for a shower and a little clubbing. The Atlanta Pop Festival was the first in a series of concerts leading to Woodstock. I was going through the Patrolling Committee training of Officer’s Basic that weekend and I didn’t really get the scope of the gathering, but it was like a migration celebrating what they believed was the end of the war because the Selective Service was shutting down and the All Volunteer Military coming on line. And, all in all, I think Woodstock is probably the one thing that has prevented assholes like Steve Bannon and Newt Gingrich from finally blowing up America like John Galt in Atlas Shrugged. If you were there and you remember the underlying moral statement being made by everybody being there (I think first of Joan Baez’s cover of Joe Hill soaring across the crowd and, today, I can see AOC guiding a generation of Secular Humanists into the tabula rasa of the 19th Amendment), I went to Vietnam for exactly those values.

I know why I went to Vietnam and I haven’t changed my mind. AOC validates my expectations and, before her, Barack Hussein Obama. On 4 May 1970, I was on my way to do my bit to make sure Obama got elected President. I wasn’t surprised about Kent State except in the timing, because I was surprised by the sheer brilliance of the Cambodian Incursion, after the fact, and by the sheer chutzpah of Nixon launching the operation at all.

As I say, I am an Army brat and I was raised around major headquarters all my life until I actually reported for duty. I knew about the Tet Offensive Christmas before the Tet Offensive. Ft. Monroe knew about the godless commie cocksuckers were going to spring something and it was clear to everyone that the holiday of Tet was the first pitch. My Professor of Military Science at IU didn’t know it was coming during the last class of the semester. I may have asked the question, how did he, a Major with at least two tours at the company level behind him, measure progress in Vietnam and his answer was the party line coming out of Saigon at the time, but it wasn’t informed of Saigon’s expectations in the next three weeks.

I was surprised by Cambodia because I was no longer hooked into that command level except when I was home. It was now literally above my pay grade. At the time, my first response was that it was a very gutsy move on Nixon’s part because the memo the Woodstock Nation was circulating. This was before the Oliver Stone version of Vietnam solidified around the mythology Ken Burns presents in Vietnam because it was still happening, but the first complaint about the incursion was that Nixon was widening the war and that establishes the boundaries of the emerging mythology. The common wisdom of the Woodstock Nation is that we invaded Vietnam in 1961 and 1961 in order to prop up French Colonialism. Noam Chomsky riffs of several versions of what happened in Vietnam in 1962 and he’s full of shit, lingusitically speaking.

Anyway, Nixon stole the march on the NVA in Cambodia and Laos and on the expectaions of the MSM and the Woodstock Nation and landed the sucker punch on the godless commie cocksuckers that let Nixon keep his promise to turn the war over to Saigon and to pull the troops out of the country without reprising either Dien Bien Phu or Dunkirk. The NVA was a world class military and Hanoi fanatical about siezing Saigon as a property of the People, etc, but the US military kicked ass and took names and kicked what was left to the curb and, when I got there in July, just after everybody got back from their road trip, there were 525,000 American soldiers in Vietnam and when I left in May 1971, there was less than 165,000. The Army knew what it was doing and Nixon let them do it. The Cambodian Incursion probably avoided 30,000 US casualties as a low ball estimate and the only cost the Woodstock Nation tallys is 4 dead in Ohio. They don’t even count Jackson State, because, after all, it’s a black university and the National Guard had been gunning down black folks in places like Watts and Detroit and DC since 1963 and they weren’t white boys and girls.

Do you see how I could turn this into a sermon about #BlackLivesMatter and why it was important for me to to go Vietnam to make sure Obama got elected? I mean, if I was wrong in 2008, I’ve been wrong since 4 May 1970. And, if I was wrong in 1970, I might as well pony up for a MAGA hat and go kiss Nick Sandman’s ass at half-time in the Super Bowl for ever suggesting his MAGA hat was hate speech.

So, anyway, my first real response, walking across post in the sub-tropical George sun at high noon, was not surprise that it happened but that it took so long for it to happen if it happened at all. After all, the only thing about the Chicago Police Riots in 68 that prevented it becoming a lethal blood bath like something out of the Russian Revolution or Ghadi’s peaceful resistance movement. I’ve had a chance to review what happened and I think the troops just wanted to frighten the crowd by putting some live rounds over their heads: the sizzle of volley fire can discourage a heavy investment in a “fuck you” attitude facing troops with fixed bayonets. And a couple of them didn’t fire quite high enough.

And here’s why I believe it was an accident: I could put myself in the place of that company commander. I wouldn’t have issued live ammo in the first place. If even weekend warriors can’t handle a crowd, defensively, with fixed bayonets, they need to transfer to the Air Force. That’s the first thing. They had secured the public property and why anybody felt a need to clear the meadow is a bit hazy to me. It’s like a high-speed car chase: you don’t really want to catch him so much as pen him in: let time work for you.

I wasn’t there. I don’t know, but from what I do know, that’s what I would have planned to do. The Kent State protests were not really structure but spontaneous, kids on their way to class up for a little heckling of the National Guard. There were professors there, talking the crowd down and outrage was going to drain away, nation wide, as the military operation completed its mission and returned from the thrust, no harm, no foul. And then these kids get shot and it mobilizes everything, all over again.

But it was an accident. If I had been the CO and determined that lethal force was the necessary action, I would have killed everything going up that hill side and anybody trying to get away at the top. Not 4 dead. 400.

In the numerology of the Bible, 4 is what’s left after the Finger of God touches down. There were 67 rounds fired up that hill at Kent State and, in my application of the numerology of the Bible, 67 reduces, first, to 13 and 13 is an ideogram that symbolizes the triune crown of Yaweh, Queen of Battle, with a lightening bolt above Her crown, the Finger of God. And, then, 13 devolves to 4.

From a military point of view, Kent State was an accident waiting to happen, but, as a Secular Humanist and Christian heretic, I have come to see divine purpose in the event.

But on 4 May 1970, I really just wanted to get out of the sun and into some air conditioning before the starch in my summer khaki uniform wilted completely.

And that’s the truth.