#but its a good reference to have for the basics of how it could function

[ppenguinpperson]

tempalate by caninewhistles on devianart!! nothing in february:( little penguino so sad the ward take him away.. oh well! teehee.. thank you all for the good year!!! Mwah!!!

[tikhondownichi]

That post about Prorva and Lamarr (love the HL reference) has got me thinking. Like.

Sebastian is not a good parent in any sense of the word. But in the circumstances given he is the only reason Prorva is alive when he could have easily killed her for food (as shown in your first few posts about her. Normal fish behavior), out of “mercy” (Urbanshade has never and is especially currently not a safe space for children or offspring). But he kept her alive, gave her his old jacket (weather its because he wanted to give her something special to him, wanted to keep her clothed, or even just wanted to get rid of the jacket is up for debate). But there is at least some amount of caring. I get the whole joke is Sebastian is a terrible dad and isn’t afraid of that fact but like. There must be something.

Im a sucker for angst so just. Something happens to Prorva. Not sure if in her current age or sometime while she was growing. Bad encounter with an Angler/Pandemonium, set off a tripwire trap, bugged turret, or just something that has Prorva hurt bad. Would that be a chance for Sebastian to show a more caring side? Im sure he’d mock her and complain about waisted supplies but like. If he fears, even for a second that she is dead or might die, would it show? Would Prorva notice? Would it affect their relationship as father and daughter? Is or would Sebastian be protective of her, even just a little?

Sorry about the ramblings. Im just obsessed with angst sjfbejfbdk

In fact, we should give Sebastian credit: he was able to raise a little bro in this godforsaken place where anything could kill you, especially a small child. In a place where you're always wondering what you're gonna drink and eat tomorrow so you don't die of stomach ulcers. In the cold and total unsanitary conditions, where if you catch a cold, you are very likely to die. We can berate Seb endlessly for what a bad father he is, but on the other hand, the basic parenting functions he performed: Prorva is alive, healthy, fed, clothed. Objectively yes, Sebastian has made a lot of mistakes and screwed up (a lot), but on the other hand he was sent to Hadal Blacksite barely a young adult, barely knowing how to do anything alone in this world, and now he's a 32 year old adult and he's a fish that has to figure things out on his own. It's crazy. He's understandable.

Yeah. Even though Sebastian is an ass most of the time, but if a situation happens to a gremlin that puts her life in danger - he won't stand by. Yes, Seb will be passed, swear a lot, probably mock, but he'll help (even if he says he's not going to deal with that shit). He can be caring (though he expresses it in his own way) if the situation really demands it.

For the moment, Prorva's whole life revolves around Sebastian. He's the only person close to her. She senses any changes in his behavior and actions, but his complex emotions she will not understand due to her immaturity. After all Seb is an unstable and complicated person.

It's okay, I enjoy reading and writing this kind of musings (especially if it's about angst) ( ´∀｀ )b

[kujoestars]

The Mechanism of Kafka's Transformation and How It Affects Him

(Crossposting my analysis/theory from Reddit. Also, warning: this post contains both anime and manga spoilers so beware if you are anime-only)

So, something that drove me nuts about the manga's version of the X-ray scene was the fact that there was literally no difference from a normal human chest x-ray. The anime THANK GOODNESS fixed that:

We finally know exactly how Kafka's core looks while he's in human form. It appears to be primarily occupying where the chambers would be with a good amount of myocardium (the heart muscles) suspending it while also continuing to function as a heart.

Notably for me, there's actually a translucent hemicircle up top there where it's supposed to connect to the aorta. In fact, you can see the core is translucent on its left (our right) side while more opaque to its right (our left).

Let me highlight it for reference I hope y'all appreciate the fact I had to do it with a mouse on MSPaint because Reddit won't save images to drafts and I can't drop images from tablet like on desktop:

It appears that Kafka's heart was fully converted and the tissue there is just a facsimile since it appears to be forming a pouch for the core to nestle in.

The anime's expansion of the scene the Mysterious Larva/Young Yoju fused with Kafka ended up perfectly tying in to this. Something I noticed was that Kafka was not actually transforming for most of it. Initially he was clutching at his throat where it entered:

Then just before the transformation started (when his eyes started glowing), he was clawing desperately at his chest:

For reference to anyone who's never studied anatomy, the mid-esophagus is actually resting against the heart, which is why the best form of imaging for the heart is a transesophageal echocardiogram (i.e. stick an ultrasound down the esophagus), which works like in this diagram:

In other words, the Larva's target was his heart and it was burrowing into it from that point. Which is consistent with where Kafka was clawing at in the shot I posted before and why after the change completed, his hand was resting just above that area:

Basically, the theory I have been saving specifically for after this episode is: Everything about Kafka's body is tied to the core.

Yes, that was obvious since we saw him regenerate his entire body from just the core, but what I'm saying here is that that the heart was the only thing the Larva was trying to fuse with. The rest of the body followed instantaneously once the heart became a core. Kaiju cores appear to be storing a lot of energy, so it would fit in with why even the initial change could happen so rapidly. It was a large burst of energy that had Kafka's cells all convert and restructure, and we even see steam coming both off and out of him here in the anime.

All future changes seem to be purely a matter of him controlling every cell in his body like individual muscles or even like how cuttlefish and octopi are able to change their appearance in an instant from muscle contractions and chromatophores.

In other words, the evidence has stacked to full OVERKILL that Kafka is truly a kaiju that can shapeshift into a human rather than the reverse like he and everyone else prefers to think.

Which leads me to my big pet theory right now: the reason Kafka is losing his ability to revert to human form is because he's becoming malnourished. I won't stack the image evidence since I've already done enough and the focus is on the core and Kafka's real biological nature now (I'll save that for a future post, lol), but it only stands to reason that if Kafka is physiologically a kaiju regardless of form, that means he has the metabolic needs of a kaiju.

He was only fine before because he had a lot of extra body fat as reserves and didn't use his kaiju form much. But after entering the Defense Force, he's been in multiple situations where he had to push himself while transformed and consume much more energy. If you pay attention to his body type, you'll notice he's been having quite a bit of weight loss.

Sure, he's been training a lot too and eating better, but following the fight with Isao, he's becoming abnormally thin. Maybe not enough for people to immediately think he needs a sandwich, but as of the latest chapters, I've noticed he's actually pretty lanky now even in kaiju form when previously Kaiju No. 8 was built like a bear.

You could argue it's just art evolution EXCEPT literally no one else had such a drastic change in body type or AT ALL. I'm pretty convinced this is an intentional transition from Matsumoto.

Whatever Kafka is eating as a human, it's not enough to sustain him long term and so his body is going into power save mode. And since his default is kaiju (why else would he constantly slip up his first few months if it wasn't actually his default form?), his body is losing its ability to shapeshift because it doesn't have the energy to. Malnourishment tends to manifest in a similarly piecemeal fashion irl, so I'm not surprised its first sign is just one spot on his hand.

Such a deceptively simple reason for the kaijufication is precisely why I'm very certain that is the cause. Kafka has a lot of issues with loving and taking care of himself. And this series is all about subverting tropes in favor of common sense. It's not some "inner demon" trying to take over (the Larva actually only did that once because Kafka was both in danger and refusing to fight back what it perceived as another daikaiju); Kafka just isn't taking care of himself as usual!

And there you have it, folks. Finally, a clear breakdown of what exactly the Larva did, how the transformations work, and why the kaijufication may not be as scary as everyone thinks. Or rather....not in the way they think. Someone please feed that kaiju properly!

[cripplecharacters]

I’m working on a robot character, and I wanted to know if it’s at all inappropriate to have the character (named Blip, uses he/it pronouns) have the “robot equivalent” of a traumatic brain injury and acquired facial differences, if that makes sense?

As it’s planned right now, he has one broken “eye” (kind of a camera lens) that no longer processes visual input, a damaged antenna and internal processor that sometimes misreads incoming signals leading to confusion, and a staticky slur to his speech (its voice would otherwise sound like a generic Siri-type thing, but it occasionally breaks into static). It also has visible damage to the side of its face with the broken eye. (Not a dented-in head, though, because I have a feeling that would conjure up ableist caricatures of brain injuries and I want to avoid that).

I just want to check if any of that sounds offensive, or if you have input on how to represent these features better. Thank you!

Hey! I'll answer for the part related to the facial difference and leave the brain injury to other mods.

Honestly this sounds fine to me. Just on the basis of this being a robot character named Blip, which seems quite silly (positive) and I enjoy seeing characters with FDs who aren't dead-serious and joyless all the time. The fact that he's not human (or even too humanoid, from the description) also helps since a lot of the negative tropes specifically affect how real humans are seen, if you're portraying an anthropomorphized computer then that's just very different. I don't think anyone would see a real person without an eye and think of a robot which avoids the entire "ableds think it's normal to compare a burn survivor they saw in the grocery store to Freddy Krueger" problem, even if you do end up falling into a trope with this character.

Definitely a good call in avoiding the indented skull* since the way it's generally used is a caricature and a borderline dogwhistle at this point. If you want to show that there was some sort of injury on the side of Blip's head, you could give him a different colored-metal plate there (or whatever else it's made out of), or give it a shiny texture to contrast with the rest of him being matte, make the damaged part thicker, etc. If his eye was damaged and is camera-like, you could have the shutter not close, or not move, or otherwise work differently from the other one (that's how my own ptosis would translate into a robot character... I think).

*Craniotomy, craniectomy, congenital cranial conditions, these are all real things that real people have and live with, so this isn't to say that this is always a no-go, because it's not. However, one needs to be very careful and sensitive to represent it respectfully due to what I originally mentioned. I'd strongly advise going with a sensitivity reader if that's something anyone reading this would want to include in their writing or art, and this aspect should be taken under consideration from the starting concept of the character.

For last advice, I'd try to not describe him "broken" as a whole if you're trying to represent him as disabled, since the whole "disabled people are broken". Not that it's wrong to refer to a body part like a leg or an eye as broken if one wants to do that; I mean referring like that to the entire person (or robot). I mention it since it's a common thing when it comes to robot fiction etc. but might come off weird in the context of an obviously disabled one.

I hope this helps,

mod Sasza

Hello,

As the human brain is basically a computer and our brain injuries are basically damage to that computer that changes how to computer functions, having a robot character with a TBI is a fairly easy thing to do. Damage to a human's sensory cortex (part of the cerebrum, one of three main parts of the brain) can cause sensory symptoms like the ones you're describing. This damage would be in his equivalent of the parietal lobe, which uses the information provided by external senses to navigate and have spacial sense, the temporal lobe, which has the auditory cortex and also helps with processing visual input and doing things like speech and reading, or the optical lobe, which is responsible for visual processing. If you'd like your character to have a more human brain in structure, you can look into other abilities that might be affected. But you can also just design his brain however you want it to be designed and that works, too, since he has a reason for his brain not being accurate to a human's brain.

Slurred speech is definitely a symptom that can come of a traumatic brain injury, especially a brain injury to the temporal lobe, and what he has also kind of sounds like a stutter or maybe him trailing off, which can also be issues we get.

And yes, I agree with Sasza about the dented head, definitely a good thing to avoid. If you want, you could incorporate a metal plate implanted on his "skull," which is a medical treatment for certain types of skull injuries to prevent complications and also to give the skull a more normal shape, which is called a cranioplasty.

Everything sounds good on the traumatic brain injury front

Mod Aaron

[mmmmalo]

I'm reading one of the textbooks for my hip-hop media class, called "Prophet of the Hood." It analyzes the political and literary art form of hip-hop (It's extremely insightful, and I recommend it).

In the chapter, “B-boys, Players, and Preacher,” Imani (the author) breaks down black hyper-masculinity and white American's contemporary media “obsessions with the size of black male genitalia show us that an earlier era’s paranoid fixation on black male sexuality and the fear of black humanity” (Imani 120). It made me think back to how you explore Homestuck’s anti-black imagery in Slurquest.

Spectically, Gamzee serves as its manifestation (or at least Karkat's manifested envy for Blackness). Homestuck's BBC obsession can be applied to Gamzee’s Codpiece from reactions of ridicule, aggression, and sexual fixation.

Like one of the Myststuck with Jane; if you click on Gamzee’s codpiece, she becomes transfixed by it and expresses her inability to look away (4827). Karkat and Dave's conversation centers around it for a bit, to laugh at the sheer absurdity and joke about gamzee sexually defiling the Utopia.

KARKAT: I DON'T KNOW!

KARKAT: I DON'T THINK EVEN HE KNOWS.

KARKAT: MAYBE TO MAKE A "GOOD IMPRESSION" ON HIS FAKE ASS RELIGIOUS IDOL, AFTER HE THRUSTS HIS SACRED COD PIECE THROUGH THE GATES OF SHANGRI LA.

DAVE: ahahaha the best thing we ever do together is slam this assholes dumb religion (5937)

I apologize for the length and quality, and I'm wondering about your opinion on this? Or if you have made previous posts regarding the subject? I’m still new to exploring your blog.

This racialized reading of the cod piece def works in the Epilogues, where trolls face discrimination and Gamzee plays the stud to Jake's cuck under the cover of blackrom... But I needed some time to assess whether race is central to the codpiece's symbolic function in Homestuck proper. I think I basically agree, though I have some qualifiers

1 - To your point, the Myststuck appearance is sandwiched between two anxious fantasies of phallic inferiority: Hussie's empty wand/pistol losing to Lord English's staff/AK-47 (declaring magic fake is here a sour grapes expression of the loser's impotence) and Tavros remarking that he "attacked [Vriska] with [his] bogus self-esteem... and paid the ultimate price." No clear racial polarity in the latter encounter, but the first could pose Hussie's whiteness against the blackness of LE's pimp/pharaoh affectations. I also think that scene might reference Drop It Like It’s Hot lyrics? But anyway, these being on either side of the Gamzee's appearance could imply that the codpiece itself is rhetorically positioned as an object of envy (as with Karkat) -- most likely envied by Jane (a transmasculine sentiment like her mustaches), but perhaps also envied by the reader, who gets positioned as the cuck by dint of watching Jane express interest in the package.

2 - But before we get ahead of ourselves, we should also note that the codpiece itself could be the link between the "fake" phalluses on either side. The story later dwells on how Gamzee's godtier costume and his wings are fabricated -- this also calls his codpiece and its contents into question. This preturns us to the eternal question of whether Gamzee "is" (or represents) a black guy or if he "is" (or represents) a white guy affecting blackness... and I don't have an answer for that! Sometimes he seems to occupy both terminals of that binary at whim.

I had a similar problem apprehending Karkat post-Slurquest -- does he represent a trans dude with his Bloody gash aspect symbol and blood-covered planet insulting his efforts to conceal himself, or does he represent a white cis dude who is being ruthlessly feminized by the racist porn tropes that inform the story? I'm not sure that question can be resolved, but both perspectives are useful in apprehending the story around him. The story is engaged with the gendering of race, and narratives around race bleeds into the presentation of individuals' genders.

3 - Bonus: if we narrow our scope for "codpiece" parallels to Myststuck itself, the closest in form (and rhyme!) are probably the "seedpods" that litter Jane's planet. Karkat jokes about thrusting the codpiece into Shangri-La, while seedpods fly up into heavenly Skaia. The pods shoot out water/seeds to fertilize the ground as they fly. The name "seed pod" was earlier applied to Demon Mobster Kingpin's weakpoint, which was some sort of thorny baby/penis.

The potions Gamzee sells are ALSO shaped like the seed pods, but troll "genetic material" is linked to blood so the implicit sexualization of blood vials doesn't really surprise me at this point. And I have a whole other post dealing with the decapitation motifs that involves, but we don't need to get into terrorism theming here I think...

4 - More bonuser bonus: worth noting that the initial penis to haunt Jane was on the Dr. Manhattan poster that Jake gave her. One of Gamzee's functions was to sell love potions to Jane (to coerce Jake into returning her feelings), so his codpiece feels loosely connected to the GIANT MUTANT PENIS jokes that Jake gets from Manhattan and Hulk. If the ambiguities of attraction/identification seen with Gamzee apply, we might infer Jake gives Jane gender envy.

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

WIBTA if I send in screen shots to someone that made a callout post about a former friend?

Please read this entire thing before your decision. I understand the "blurb" may make me seem like a backstabber and someone you wouldn't trust, but I have my reasons I'll detail why this person is a former friend.

I'm a former friend of someone we'll call Marie. Marie, idk how to explain it, but she kind of didn't care about anyone but herself. Anytime someone would talk about something she'd make it about herself and it was very annoying. Marie also would make a lot of us uncomfortable at times. She said some racial slurs to us various times and claimed it wasn't racist. One was towards me and I asked her not to, basically I told her she can't call me a slur because she's white and made me feel uncomfortable. The other was some Irish thing I had to google because our friend who is Irish was uncomfortable and I'm still horrified with what I saw.

Marie would reblog my vent posts on tumblr a lot. None was ever to console me. One was where she reblogged and said "this would be a good ice breaker for a date." I did go off on her since at the time I had such a nasty break up and my vent had absolutely nothing to do with that. Now here's the issue, besides reblogging my vent posts, someone archived her reblog of my vent posts on the wayback. Multiple ones. I contacted wayback, but they said they only delete archives if the blog owner makes a statement on their blog. For reference, i have had multiple chronic stalkers and Marie was very well aware of it. So I already had wayback not allow archives of my blog because one stalker was using it to archive everything on me online. So a stalker found a loophole in the form of Marie. Now, this was before Tumblr had allowed us to disable reblogs. So no jumping to the comments saying it's my fault when this was years ago before that function was available. So, Marie refused and told me its whatever and if anything they were probably archiving her edits despite all of the archives on her blog had my vents she reblogged, like every single time she reblogged it got archived.

Now lastly, Marie was one of those people who would never celebrate anyone's victories. It was so weird, someone could say "oh, I got a new camera for my photography" and she'd say something like "in 3rd grade someone shat on my camera, so I never got a new camera". It would make stuff so awkward and make us not want to talk in our discord. I got a scholarship one year she decided to go to school (she was 12 years out of highschool) and she lost her financial aid in one semester because she didn't do any of her school work! Yet somehow "the government picks favorites and doesn't want to pay people that deserve it". Her words, I was very offended since she knew I worked full time, was a POC, and was not eligible for financial aid. Let me have the scholarship win without making it about you!

So one day I just blocked her everywhere after I deleted the friend discord we had. It wasn't right after, I waited over a year and became more and more distant. She did contact me again, but surprise surprise, she wanted me to help build her a website for her "oni-sona". I declined and we haven't spoken since.

Now the callout part. She has a callout under her new alias and it has her previous too. In this callout it's talking a lot about how she treats people like shit and uses them for her own gain. It details as well to not support her or any of her projects because she steals (idk about that, I've personally never witnessed it, but I'm believing OP because everything else is true.)

Now, would I be the AH if I submit stuff to add to the callout? I was just going to send in how she reblogged my vents and someone archived them on wayback and she refused to contact way back to delete them despite knowing I had stalkers. Maybe I'll submit more stuff, but not caring I had stalkers is my biggest gripe and something I think should be added since she allowed my stalkers to do that.

[imitationgame77]

ART's Walls

For any network system with capabilities to communicate, it is very important that it has walls (basically, firewalls) to protect it from potential attack from the outside.

It is interesting to note how the way ART is controlling its walls between itself and Murderbot seems to demonstrate the level of its trust and their intimacy.

[Artificial Condition]

Super machine-intelligence like ART obviously needs to protect itself carefully from a potentially dangerous threat like a rogue SecUnit. So, when Murderbot first meets ART in Artificial Condition, it cannot see what ART really is. It only drops its wall for .00001 of a second - just to show how powerful it is.

They become close so that Murderbot can interpret ART's reactions in its feed quite well, but the walls are still there.

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

But the presence in the feed was too big and diffuse for a human or augmented human, I could tell that much even through the feed walls protecting it.

[...]

It said, You’re a rogue SecUnit, a bot/human construct, with a scrambled governor module. It poked me through the feed and I flinched. It said, Do not attempt to hack my systems, and for .00001 of a second it dropped its wall.

It was enough time for me to get a vivid image of what I was dealing with. Part of its function was extragalactic astronomic analysis and now all that processing power sat idle while it hauled cargo, waiting for its next mission. It could have squashed me like a bug through the feed, pushed through my wall and other defenses and stripped my memory. Probably while also plotting its wormhole jump, estimating the nutrition needs of a full crew complement for the next 66,000 hours, performing multiple neural surgeries in the medical suite, and beating the captain at tavla. I had never directly interacted with anything this powerful before.

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

[Network Effect]

In Network Effect, it was not explicitly referred to as walls, but I got the feeling that when ART allowed Murderbot access to all its cameras, it was at least dropping a large portion of its walls. Hidden cameras are a very important part of its security system after all.

It was ART's way to show its trust to Murderbot, and Murderbot understands this.

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

I suddenly had views all over the ship. ART had given me access to its cameras. I snarled, “Stop being nice to me!”

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

[System Collapse]

By the end of Network Effect, when Murderbot (implicitly) accepts ART's proposal of marriage to join the next mission, they have reached the level of intimacy where ART does not seem to think it is necessary to have a wall between them.

So, in System Collapse, when Murderbot decides to accept communication request from AdaCol2, it is Murderbot who suggests having a wall between them, to protect ART.

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

ART-drone threw out an extra comm- and feed-block wall between us and the shuttle and I said, Let’s do full containment protocol. Which was the protocol we’d come up with (we being ART, Martyn, and Matteo and me, before my incident when I effectively became useless) for dealing with potential contamination situations.

Let’s, ART-drone said, which was its way of being nice and not letting me know that it didn’t need my advice about which containment protocol to use. Then it made it worse by adding, Be careful. The wall went up and I was alone in the dark except for my two drones, both on standby now, and the Pre-CR system.

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

And ART cannot drop the wall fast enough at the first chance of excuse.

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

ART-drone dropped the wall between us, though not the one protecting the shuttle’s systems. Is that a good idea? I asked it. Is containment protocol for everybody but you?

After it sees the file it will either attack us or ask for further contact, ART-drone said. The wall will have to go down either way.

Right, fine, whatever.

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

Not to mention that ART is practically constantly inside Murderbot's walls throughout System Collapse, (ostentatiously) to monitor its stats, because of [redacted].

And considering how private Murderbot is, it is very significant that it seems completely okay with that. Murderbot has become more vulnerable with self-doubt with [redacted], but it really does not show a least sign of discomfort in having ART there at all times.

[dcdreamblog]

How exactly did Supervillains in the 40s avoid being arrested as enemy agents or forced into some wartime version of Task Force X when the All Star Squadron was officially part of the US military structure

I know civilians and soldiers could get into fights and it's not like the civilian would "disappear" but that was for one off things. I can't imagine if some guy who wasn't in the military for some reason decided to go around beating up soldiers repeatedly and intentionally that the court cases would go well for him

Just a polite reminder to folks that I don't delete relevant asks, but I DO have a system in place to make sure everyone takes a turn before I do an ask from the same people. So if you've sent an ask, just be assured I saw it, I'm working on it and that I will post it when its your next turn. Just so no one gets anxious or thinks I'm ignoring anything.

Because I've already answered this in general I'm going to zero in on something I feel needs pointing out. This idea that a WWII version of the infamous "Suicide Squad" was somehow an inevitable idea SOMEONE must have thought of and therefore is an idea that must be explained away as not happening before it did. Let's get one thing straight: Task Force X's basic underpinnings, legal, moral and basically functional are fucking ridiculous and far from being an inevitable idea. The fact that the idea ever got off the ground at ALL is a mind boggling pile up of governmental corruption and incompetence.

(A "perp lineup" of the Squad's original membership, leaked when the team was first dragged into the light)

Firstly, legal. Like it or not criminals have rights. PRISONERS have rights. To conduct invasive surgery without their knowledge and hold their lives at stake so they can complete already illegal missions for an unaccountable black box of the US military is SO far beyond the line in so many different ways that the list of crimes brought up against Task Force X when it was originally sued out of existence is 47 items long. In reference to each 'member'. Individually. Without factoring the counts of each crime. That picture above, not counting their military handler represents 423 military crimes and rights violations by EXISTING.

99% of military men and women in history would have looked at this idea and thrown it out in the shredder because even BREATHING something like this was liable to get you court martialed in a sane world. The United States doesn't have any history or legal basis for penal battalions and even if they HAD it would have run smack dab into... Secondly, Moral. The All Star Squadron was TECHNICALLY made up of conscripts. And I truly cannot tell you how large I need that TECHNICALLY to be in your head. Every member of the Squadron wanted to be there, served at their own pleasure alongside men and women they trusted to fight the good fight. Had any attempt been made to introduce supervillains, much less supervillains UNDER DURESS into the Squadron's membership it would have kicked up the kind of shitstorm most politicians don't want to dream about. It, at minimum, would have meant the immediate end of the All Star Squadron as a functioning body in ANY worthwhile contact with the United States government or Allied military command. At maximum it would have created a high stakes legal crisis as the Squadron puts the coerced villains under their protection from the forces of the United States. Meaning you would be risking sparking a conflict between the Squadron and US Military Law Enforcement DURING THE MIDDLE OF THE WAR. The original Creatures Commandos were less than a half dozen otherwise unremarkable soldiers who had entire STABLES of intelligence personnel dedicated to making sure no word of their existence made it back to a single active mystery man lest they kick in the door and start demanding answers. Once you have supervillains start going missing in an era where there were only about 2 dozen notable supervillains you are going to trip the alarm bells before you get your pants on.

Thirdly, basic function. Let me make this clear. Task Force X doesn't work. Every single time the team has been reassembled under a new legal smokescreen it has lasted a couple of months MAX before something goes lethally wrong. One or more members goes violently rogue. The Squad is co-opted by a 3rd party with nefarious goals or some combination of all of the above.

Even if it did work as advertised, what it's advertised to do isn't good! It's taking thieves, murderers, assassins and maniacs. Slapping bombs in the back of their heads and putting them at the behest of the parts of the US Government everybody hates! At BEST it exists to prop up the interests of the American empire at its most cynical, toppling unfriendly governments and conducting assassinations on foreign soil. At worst it is an uncontrolled stew of the worst, controlled by the worst OF the worst for their own vision of what their military authority entails. The only other justification is using it as some kind of trump card in an undeclared cold war against the superhero community by parts of the government who hate superheroes because superheroes target them for being corrupt monsters who do shit like this! Conclusion: My point is. Supervillains were, and are, criminals. They are arrested, charged for the crimes they commit, convicted by a jury of their peers and then they go to prison for an allotted time period. This system sucks but boy oh boy is it better than whatever system Task Force X represents. You know the SECOND they thought they could get away with it they would be finding any reason to arrest young metahumans and then "drafting" them into the Squad, you KNOW they would. There was no WWII era version of Task Force X because Task Force X is a really dumb idea that no one besides the profoundly stupid would even entertain.

[swordfright]

Tell me about how the structure of the medium impacts the story 🔫

My brother in Christ, prepare yourself for the most boring essay you could possibly imagine. I'm going to over-simplify a few things here for the sake of Getting To The Point, so bear with me.

I think a good starting place is that DSMP is an example of New Media. The go-to definition most folks use is this one: that New Media are stories told via "communication technologies that enable or enhance interaction between users as well as interaction between users and content." In other words, NM is basically this category of stories made up of convergent elements, which satisfy a multimedia requirement, and are heavily reliant on both participatory fan culture and recent advances in technology that allow creators/audiences to communicate with one another instantly.

There's a couple ways you can understand DSMP as a New Media, but as far as I'm concerned, one of the most interesting is prosumption. The term "prosumption" describes a creative situation where a piece of art is being produced (at least in part) by the same people that consume it; they're both audience and creator. DSMP is a really great example of this phenomenon, because A) it's serial and therefore the CCs had ample opportunity to respond to and engage with the audience's reception of their story; and B) because the chat feature allows CCs to interact directly with their audience during roleplay rather than after the fact. These features, among others, kinda set the stage for DSMP to function as a highly prosumptive piece of media.

In particular, the stuff that interests me is the stuff to do with storytelling convention (genre, perspective, etc) and how prosumption turns all that on its head. There are a number of altercations in DSMP canon where the course of the story is altered because of real-time interactions between the CCs and their chat - particularly times when a CC's chat warns them about events happening at the same time elsewhere in the server. In this kind of scenario, the CCs are static, they can't really leave their own stream. Their viewers, on the other hand, are able to jump between streams and talk to each other to figure out what's happening in the overarching story. When this happens, viewers have choices to make: are they going to tell a CC what's going down on the other side of the server? If so, how are viewers going to communicate those events? Viewers are biased, they directly inform CCs, and the information they divulge (as well as how they divulge that info) goes on to influence CCs' actions and thus the events of the story, to some degree. In my opinion, this is a pretty new and exciting way to prosumptively construct a narrative! Media has always been interactive to some extent (especially serial works), but the interaction being live and in real-time is pretty significant in my view because it can exert unique pressures on a narrative.

Speaking of audience choice, that brings me to the next thing I want to yap about: ergodic storytelling, a term that refers to stories “negotiated by processes of choice, discernment, and decision-making.” For reference, a good non-MCYT example of this would be hypertext fiction, because it's generally characterized by the ability of the interactant (that's the reader, in this hypothetical example) to explore material provided by someone else, either as a kind of conceptual landscape (think setting in a video game), or as puzzle pieces that must be put together in order to give the interaction the "big picture" of the story. Basically, with hypertext fiction, there is a core text (the main document that forms the skeleton of the story) and there are multiple hypertexts branching off of the core text - and whether the reader ends up reading those branches, and in what order, inevitably shapes that reader's perception of the whole story.

So here's where it gets tricky. In the case of DSMP, where is the core text located? Is there any one identifiable core text at all? Or is it more appropriate to consider each individual stream or VOD as its own singular core text, with the related Twitch channels and Youtube recommended in the sidebar being "branches"? Alternatively, if the streams and recordings distributed on the server members’ official channels are the central text in the grand hypertext fiction that is DSMP, then can adjacent spaces where audiences do the work of creating and archiving lore be considered their own story branches? I don't have answers to these questions. No one does. That's part of what makes DSMP exciting.

To translate the above quote out of Academia Hellspeak: in an ergodic story, the audience has agency, but the agency enabled and allowed by the text varies in its intensity and mode. Yes, stories told ergodically necessitate choice — and therefore enable agency, turning the reader or viewer into interactant — but that element of choice doesn't always look the same. Some hypertexts are more choice-reliant than others, or are choice-reliant in different ways. So, rather than being a choose-your-own-adventure story, DSMP is more closely analogous to a story where the audience chooses the perspective through which they view plot developments, in addition to having some influence over how plot developments unfold.

(☝️From a 2021 Polygon article, if you think I sound crazy☝️)

The web of choices DSMP presents to viewers is very complex, even compared to other forms of choose-your-own-adventure game. Because each CC approaches the task of story-creation from their own angle (bringing their own narrative baggage to the writers’ room, so to speak), those shifts in perspective this Polygon article describes often also constitute shifts in genre. For instance, cc!Wilbur brought his music production experience and interest in musical theater to the server, cited operas and stage musicals as some of his main inspirations; and accordingly, much of c!Wilbur's most crucial arcs observably draw from those sources. When you watch a c!Wilbur stream, you’re watching a story about statecraft, about revolution, about the triumphs and tragedies of ego that play out during the process of nation-building. On the other hand, cc!Quackity has repeatedly identified Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul as his primary influences; accordingly, his RP character’s story is closer to a piece of gritty prestige television in some places (especially LN series). Unlike with c!Wilbur, a lot of c!Quackity's tension does not revolve around a romanticized fantasy of revolution but around more personal conflicts: securing your place in a new regime, navigating exploitation as both exploited and exploiter, etc. In terms of both plot beats and character arcs, Wilbur and Quackity’s respective storylines embody many of the genre conventions the content creators are working within.

Moreover, a shift in genre often entails a shift in style or mode. Because cc!Wilbur was heavily inspired by musical theater, the presentation style of his character’s storyline is correspondingly both theatrical (i.e. only loosely scripted, nearly always televised live, and improv-heavy) and musical (featuring multiple instances of Wilbur singing in-character ballads and anthems.) On the flipside, Quackity’s streams (especially the later ones, since I'm mostly focusing on Las Nevadas era here) demonstrably mimic the prestige TV shows the CC draws his inspiration from, with lore sessions being pre-recorded rather than televised live, featuring distinctive sonic and visual aesthetics popularized by neo-Western thriller dramas. So, where a piece of media like DSMP is concerned, shifts in perspective entail shifts in genre, which in turn entail pronounced shifts in style. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say it's an entirely new story depending on which character the viewer decides to follow. In that regard, what initially appears to be a single choice (whose perspective to watch a plot event through) has the power to determine a wide array of other elements, as viewers’ responses to the options presented to them will decide the overall tone of the section of the story they're about to watch.

While I think the genre-switching is genuinely super cool, lately I'm a lot more interested in perspective-switching and how it's related to viewer empathy. One side-effect of DSMP being televised live is that yes, you can watch a plot event from 30+ different POVs, but you can't watch every POV live. Typically, you either have to switch between multiple streams, or you need to pick one streamer to watch live and maybe later you'll watch other characters' POVs as you see fit. This has an impact on your perception of how that plot point went down because watching something live feels very different from watching something after-the-fact. I haven't done study on this, so what I'm about to say is mostly conjecture, but I wouldn't be surprised if viewers felt greater empathy for (and greater degrees of kinship with) characters whose POVs they watched live.

The choice of which character to follow also has observable impacts on other kinds of narrative conventions (who is the main character of DSMP? the boring answer is c!Dream because the server's named after him, but the real answer is the protagonist is whoever's POV you watched most of the major plot events through) but to be honest, those questions don't interest me as much.

So, going back to perspective and empathy. I think viewers' reactions to Exile are a really solid way of exemplifying the thing I'm trying to say, so this is the part of the yapping where we gotta bring up the dreaded Exile discourse.

Even though the Exile VODs are available and new viewers can go back and watch them, those viewers experience the Exile arc in a way that is fundamentally different from the experience had by viewers who had to wait in between updates as the videos were being streamed serially in real-time. I would argue that viewers who were “present” during the whole arc noticeably felt the brutality of c!Tommy’s treatment to a greater degree, because the audience was effectively forced to sit in exile alongside Tommy’s character - stewing in anxiety, looking forward to the possibility of appearances from other characters, and living in fear of Dream’s next visit, etc etc. Obviously you could also make this point using c!Dream's time in Pandora as an example, but I'm using Exile here because I've actually seen a lot of fans bring this up when discussing the arc: "people who didn't watch live Don't Get It," "the reason newer fans don't see Exile as scary is because they didn't have to watch it live," that sort of thing. And while I have certain qualms with some of the implications here, I do think these are really fascinating responses! These sorts of responses show that viewers consciously perceive their viewing experience as having been fundamentally different from others' based on a temporal element that's unique to serial fiction!

This instance of a divergence in collective fan experience is an example of choice being rendered unavailable to viewers by virtue of the story’s structure and means of distribution; audience members who happen to accidentally miss streams or who begin following the story after major events have occurred will never be able to engage with and witness those events as LIVE viewers, merely as retrospective ones. They don’t get to make that choice, but they do get to make choices about which perspective (and therefore genre) they get to experience the story through. So it follows that each aspect of DSMP, a semi-ergodic story, can be categorized as either ergodic or non-ergodic, and whether a particular storytelling element is ergodic can change depending on WHEN the viewer began tuning in to the story.

I have a lot more shit to say (shocker) but I'm gonna cap it here for now. Though I do want to add that this is kinda why I have a lot of patience for the crazy diversity of interpretation you tend to get in DSMP fandom. If you took a random sample of fans and asked them what they think of various arcs, characters, and plot events, chances are they would all have fairly different things to say. To me, that's a feature, not a bug. Obviously I have my own opinions, and obviously I do think it's possible for a given interpretation to be "bad," i.e. not grounded in the text - but I have a lot more patience for it here, in a fandom where agreeing on what "the text" EVEN IS presents a challenge. We can't all agree on who the main character is, so I don't ever expect us to agree on more nuanced questions of theme and conflict resolution in the narrative. Again, that's a feature, not a bug. I don't think it was ever possible to reach a consensus with a piece of media like DSMP because of how inextricable the audience is from the story.

[cozymochi]

Okay gen question, how are you so good at anatomy? like I know its a mix of years of practice and experience. Mayhaps you can spare some tips on how ppl can improve theirs? Always looking forward to your works btw! Even the scribbles you think aren't decent are always such a nice treat to see <3

It being drilled into my system years ago in a drawing class specifically for that 😭 Then a character design class the next semester that added on top of it. BUT FOR CARTOONSSSSS (I have not accomplished anything in my life to utilize any of this.)

My main point of knowledge reference is this book though (OMG FREE INTERNET ARCHIVE PDF? Yes. Though I personally have a physical copy.) We didn’t really read the walls of text so much as just practiced the proportion stuff in the early pages ad-nauseam and some skeletons (not hyper detailed ones just making sure bones were where they should be). Tho admittedly I’ve been neglecting any studying. (This book came out in 1943 brrgh) DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH I HAD TO DRAW THIS DIAGRAM? MORE THAN ANY PERSON SHOULD.

But hey, it works. I still sometimes end up referring back to it if I think I’m sucking (disclaimer: i think this often )

As far as I’ve come to know, how something looks visually doesn’t matter so much long as basic proportions are correct. Cuz even people without trained eyes for this sorta thing can recognize when something is proportionately wrong. Like, I guess on you know where everything is supposed to go, you can kinda do anything from there?? I think. It translated well when we were drawing real people who were not the “ideal” presented, and when moving to more stylized stuff with their own rules in a completely different course. So what if that leg doesnt look exactly like u think a leg looks anatomically— IS THE KNEE IN THE CORRECT SPOT? Yes? Then u did it.

Also that eyes are in the center of the face. Not the nose. JUMPSCARE!!!

Aaaa, this isn’t really an interesting answer. If I ever figured out better streaming outside if private discords I could probably make my points better rather than pulling a “here’s a textbook, figure it out” CUZ ITS LIKE. ITS OVERWHELMING WITHOUT A GUIDE AND 😭😭😭

I don’t know. I don’t think I have “anatomy” correct, just “proportions.” Cuz I wouldn’t be able to tell you what something is, just where something goes. Which… I think is a little more important and also a distinction I don’t really see anyone making in drawing.

Though, as much as I wanna be helpful in a more effective way, it’s really really really hard for me to articulate how anyone could improve theirs if I don’t know what the alleged problem areas are 😭 I find all this stuff to be case by case. I kind of do better if i can directly point things out and offer info from there instead of blank slate tips. If I ever figure out streaming outside of private discords it would probably be easier (literally doesnt own a functional up to date enough computer)

I guess focus less on “anatomy” and focus more on proportions since that does more of the heavy lifting? Unless ur a med student, then you probably should focus on anatomy

someone could die because you couldnt identify their coccyx

OKAY THATS IT THANKS AND SORRY

[strawberrystepmom]

kendall! i think this falls under a general question but i wanted to ask .. what zodiac sign do you think naoya is? i don’t think he has a canon birthday. i’ve always been curious but i know very little about astrology :’)

well let me do you one better then...let me give you what (imo) naoya's big five could be like. as far as sun placement goes, he has always solidly given me aquarius vibes believe it or not so for this exercise, we will give him a birthday of february 11th, 1991.

so just for reference, the function of the five signs is as follows:

sun - basic identity. who you are at your most base, instrumental in developing a person's morals, goals, and drive. moon - internal world. where you work through your emotions, the guardian of your most secret you. mercury - how you communicate, learn, and interact with the world around you. venus - how you love and wish to be loved. mars - how you present yourself to the outside world especially in professional situations and drive your passions forward.

okay sorry that it's huge but i saw this pop up and started giggling so hard. it's just as i suspected - a man who is very convinced of his own ability to change the world with that aquarius sun and is very motivated to do so and has spent years and years building and affirming himself that he's the only person capable of the job with that capricorn moon.

aquarius mercury is also a very future driven placement. aquarius in general just tends to be always forward thinking. "how can i reinvent the wheel?" is their mantra but it's pretty rarely turned inward. a big blind spot for aquarius placement holders can be shortsightedness when it comes to the self at best and total lack of self awareness at worst. i tend to think naoya (bless him) leans toward the uh less self aware aspects of that spectrum. everyone is wrong but him, it's only fueled by his capricorn moon insisting it's the truth.

i find gemini mars fascinating for naoya. as assured of his own brilliance as he is, gemini is really going to make him a person who loves to debate about it. he loves proving people wrong. he shares every idea he has, can really come up with creative solutions to problems that others may not even see, and he's just a really driven person overall. very driven by power and intelligence.

now that soggy, soggy pisces venus is the thing that really softens him out. pisces for all its flaws is deeply romantic although sometimes romance changes definitions depending on many things. their partner, their own ideals. loves tradition for traditions sake when it comes to love. a lot of pisces venus holders who are men tend to want to have a partner to come home to so to speak and knowing what we know about naoya in canon, the way he views potential partners speaks to this imo. he's just not soft in the way pisces can sometimes be, he's a little more forceful and can likely be sort of manipulative.

that being said there's a gooey center. once those ideals are met, he's putty in your hands and will not stray. ppl say pisces isn't a loyal placement, i disagree. it's loyal as long as its fantasy is being fulfilled whatever that may look like. they make good partners as long as their partner is willing to compromise.

i hope this helps a little and resonates a little too!!! feel free to ask questions if you have any!!!

liked what you read here? stop by my event and send in a request!

[hello-vampire-kitty]

Servamp Chapter 132 translation "To become gold"

The chapter is on Mangadex, however this post might not show up I used a link. After you read the chapter please check out the translation notes!

It's been a long time, but I finally managed to finish up this scanlation that I've started while I was still working...Now that I've quit I can translate the remaining chapters.

So, one line in this chapter made me go crazy for how long I had to contemplate on its meaning and maybe I still didn't understand it, but I try my best to explain.

TRANSLATION NOTES

On the first page, you can see that some words were written in parenthesis, to distinguish the furigana readings from the other ones. The translations are based on the furigana.

過去 (past), furigana 思い出 (memories)

未来 (future,) furigana これから (from now on)

It was weird to see that Shirayuki uses the honorific "san" for Yumikage, but I think it's because the traditional ways of the Tsukimitsu family. Maybe it's more common with historical settings, which I haven't seen much of.

About one of Shirayuki's lines, because it wouldn't have made sense in English, I wrote "goodness!" in order to express that she was shocked about what she heard Yumi say.

He used the pronoun 俺 "ore" which is the informal "I" and that's what Shirayuki repeated. Because English cannot express the degree of formality regarding "ore" and other pronouns, I couldn't have make her say "I" in the translation.

Shirayuki apparently had a problem with Yumi saying "ore", but Iori also uses ore. Maybe it's because she was more stricter with Yumi because he was the youngest and Iori was too old to be reprimanded for his language.

I also had some difficulty with Miyako's line and I used a direct translation because haven't found much alternatives, so I used "no substance", which was primarily how I found the Japanese phrase translated.

Some of you might have seen in dramas, anime/manga that teenagers who are delinquents would dye their hair blonde.

Because it's associated with being a teenager, I'm interpreting that Iori might have wished that he could enjoyed more of his adolescence like Yumi, because he was appointed the head of the family when he was eighteen.

Okay now, for the most difficult part I had with this chapter.

This is the page where I spent a few days trying to figure out what Hugh is saying because I can't tell precisely if he was speaking about Saint-Germaine or another subject in the panel before the last.

I've tried to break down what Hugh says :

奴はそういう機構だとしか解釈できぬ。

What gave me such a hard time was the word 機構 (kikou) which means system, mechanism, organization, structure.

It was tough to figure out how to apply these meanings, so when I was looking trough definitions and examples with this word, I wondered if maybe Hugh was saying "That is the only way he works/functions", regarding Saint-Germaine, when explaining to Yumi.

If you recall from previous chapters, the word "system" which was written in katakana to transliterate the English word, that used for the Servamps, referring to their structure basically, how they work.

Among synonyms for 機構 (kikou) I have found 制度 (seido) which was used by Tsubaki when I believe it was the first time that the word "システム" (system) was mentioned in chapter 87.

So, it could be that Hugh is implying that Saint-Germains's can only be understood (interpreted) [しか解釈できぬ means "interpreted only /no other way] only possessing that kind of system to him, in other words maybe something like mondus operandi, which involves the stuff Hugh mentioned (projecting and interfering with reality).

Basically, he's defined only in a single manner, he's described as being dangerous, that's what Hugh is telling Yumikage.

Or I could totally misunderstands Hugh's word, because omg like I said, it was the most complicated line in the whole chapter for me to adapt *cries*

I'm sorry if what I tried to explain doesn't make sense ;;

That's all for this chapter, still have a few more to work on and because I never got to look over most of the dialogue in those ones due to the fact that I didn't had the time when I still had my job, I hope that I won't have to deal with such difficult lines.

[butchlesbianmike]

Tower Tarot System Headcanons (Mike & his system)

Under the cut are my detailed headcanons for mike, his backstory, and details about his alters. Note that i've changed some 'canon' stuff and added a few new alters.

TW: There will be mentions of Parental Abuse such as neglect and implied physical and emotional violence. There will be mentions of Sexual Abuse relating to Mike & Vito.

Keeper

• System Aware • One of the main Gatekeepers. More of a state of consciousness than an alter. Not sure how to explain it even as a system myself but basically more of a concept and a fragment? It is not really an alter that another alter could just come up to or interact with. • Was created by the horrid neglect and abuse endured at the end of the system's mother which from a young age made clear they would not be able to function without amnesic barriers separating states of consciousness/ego states.

Lucia:

• 5 - she/her - System Unaware, became dormant until Mike went to therapy. She then became system aware. • Alter i created for their system. Sarah is a child alter and technically the first host the system had but quickly became a rarely fronting part due to varying traumatic events between the ages of 3 and 5. Her age got frozen around 5 years old. She also stopped being host at that age after a harshly traumatic event. • System is unsure if there are other parts younger than her, she is the youngest identifiable host.

Chester:

• 56 - He/Him - System Aware - One of the gatekeepers • Split off around 4. • Introject of their grandpa on their mom side. Very important to Sarah and was very kind and took good care of the system.Their mom was incredibly neglectful and their grandpa is basically who raised them. Their mom cut contact with their grandpa after a fight between them. • Losing their grandpa alongside the constant abuse now worsening from being around their mother more did lead to a split. • Chester appears very grumpy because they found it funny whenever he would go on rambles and complain about silly things to them but also because they were hardly ever allowed to express negative emotions or frustration around their mother and so Chester became a part that held a lot of those negative emotions they didnt feel safe expressing.

Svetlana (Went by Lucia) :

• She/They - Ages with body - not quite system aware, notices things but very much normalizes them. Becomes system aware once Mike gets a girlfriend and also starts exploring gender. • Split off around 7 when their mom started signing them up for competitive gymnastics. (They were already doing gymnastics before, but competitive only started at 7). • Main cohost for a long time. Helped Sarah and Lola with learning gymnastics and handled competitions due to their mother being incredibly abusive during tournaments and competitions. • She wasnt really aware she was cohost, she felt like this was her life but she kinda saw it as like.. "oh i just feel more like myself in my element! Gymnastics is just really important to me and its where i thrive everybody say they have masks depending on if theyre at school or at home or with friends!! I guess my mask just comes off when im doing gymnastics :D". • She thought that the Russian accent was just a bit she was very dedicated to and what helped her 'get in character' for competitions. That it was just her trying hard to be like those russian gymnasts they really like on TV to feel more confident. • She always felt uncomfortable with being infantilized and felt much older, but everyone around them would say they have an old soul so she assumed that must by why. • She discovers she's a lesbian around when the body's age is 14. • She is one of the alters alongside Vito who causes Mike to realize something isn't adding up and reach out to try and get therapy. • Did not like Mike's girlfriend and actually really disliked being referred to as a guy. This was actually a main source of conflict between her and Mike and another reason Mike started feeling something was wrong because he realized that the dysphoria he got seeming more masculine or being perceived as more masculine didn't feel like it was Actually Him. • She often would be very distant and even cold to their girlfriend because she realized that they were a system and that she wasn't Mike and that actually his girlfriend was hurting them. • After therapy and system work and being acknowledged as her own alter, her relationship with Mike got a lot better and they agreed on keeping some feminine stuff for her to wear whenever she's front. • Actually really likes Zoey and tries really hard to hint that she also likes her. She and Zoey actually start dating too.

Lola (Went by Lucia):

• She/her - 10 - system unaware until she stopped being host. She became system aware when the body was 12 and that she got yonked and became more of an internal alter and very very rarely ever fronted again. She was under the care of Manitoba and Chester in the headspace. • Another system kid and previous host, she handled life from 6 to 12. • She and Svetlana were really fronting together almost all the time and switching between eachother frequently, although rarely experiencing blackouts more than greyouts. • While she was a host from ages 6 to 12, she stopped aging in the headspace at 10. • A huge part of this was due to how rocky elementary school was. They were changing schools left and right and it was really hard to keep up with all the constant changes. Around 10 she lost one of the only friends she had managed to make and due to their already fragile state, this was distressing enough to halt her development as an alter in itself. Svetlana mostly started being the main host from 10 to 12 although Lola was still there and at least cofront a majority of the time. • Starts fronting a bit more after Mike starts doing system work (Body age around 17).

Mike:

• He/They - Ages with body - First Host to become system aware. • Split off around 12 due to stress bcuz the system moved in with their dad because their mom no longer wanted to be responsible for them nor pay for their highschool necessities. • He became host because he didnt carry much of the traumatic memories related to their mom, didn't have system awareness, and was fairly functional with school and with their dad. • At first he had it a lot better than previous hosts and was one of the most stable host for a short while which made it that switching didn't frequently occur except here and there or when triggered due to x y z. • That changed about 8 months after him being host. A month before turning 13 he started figuring out that he had a crush on a girl and might be a lesbian. • Not only that but also started getting a lot of gender dysphoria, even feeling uncomfortable with a lot of his clothes and even pictures of him in his gymnastic outfits and competitions. • Nothing much came out of the crush except heartbreak which did kind of shake things up for the system. Mike felt things very profoundly and the heartbreaks of feeling like he would never find love because he likes girls destabilized the system a bit which led to more frequent switches- especially at school to continue functioning with the classmate mike had a crush on. • Around 14 Mike finds out more about things identity wise and starts thinking he might be a transmasculine butch lesbian, but isn't sure of himself because he feels his identity is very shaky and constantly changing so he settles on being genderfluid. (This confusion is mostly caused by Svetlana who also is discovering she's a lesbian btw). • At 15 is when the big bad happens for Mike. He gets his first girlfriend who happens to be older and more experienced than him. She sees him as a trans guy, even though he tries to explain he isn't. She is very forward and sexual to him, which freaks him out. She is constantly trying to see his chest and fetishize him especially when he's binding. • At 17 after a long time seeing a therapist due to the previous events, he found out he was a system and has been doing system work with his therapist for a year now. This is the same year he signs up for total drama.

Manitoba 'Jones':

• He/Him - 21 - System Aware • Split off around 13. • Introject of Henry 'Indiana' Jones from specifically 'The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles'. • Chose the name Manitoba to distance himself from his source, although he finds high comfort in it. • System Historian / Internal Helper. He also frequently takes care of the syskids and takes them on adventures in the headspace. • Very rare for him to fully front but he likes to come sit around front whenever anyone watches action movies. • Is actually the one that handled breaking up with Mike & Vito's girlfriend because neither of them felt like they could and when he figured out what was going on he got very protective.

Vito:

• He/Him but later on uses any - 18 - System Aware • Split off around 15 because of Mike's girlfriend of the time. • Split off as a sexual protector and hypersexuality symptoms holder. • Sexualizes himself a lot because it makes him feel in control and desired. Feels like because 'hes a guy' it means he has to like and enjoy it bcuz thats what a real man would feel. • Gets triggered front everytime anyone in the system loses their shirt because of it creating dysphoria and PTSD. • Was actually the most heartbroken when they broke up with their shitty ex girlfriend. He loved her a lot and saw himself as her boyfriend more than Mike did, even if he knew deep down she wasn't good to them. • Is the alter that, alongside Svetlana, made Mike realize something wasn't adding up and start talking to a psychologist and getting therapy. • Started unpacking a lot of his relationship but still holds a lot of the system's hypersexuality symptoms and has a weird relationship to gender as he feels like his 'gender' as a 'guy' is affirmed through having withstood their ex' abuse and 'enjoying' it. • He is actually nonbinary but it takes him a while to figure that out and only really figures it out AFTER total drama.

Mal:

• He/She/It - Ages With Body - System Aware • Persecutor/Misguided Protector. Split off during total drama all stars. • Mal split off with the belief that to win the game you have to be selfish and self preserving and manipulative. • He feels that Mike is "Too soft" and "Too kind" to survive let alone win the game. So he decides to play it by 'their rules'. A rule that Mal perceives to be the only way to make it through. • Due to splitting off with the belief of needing to replace Mike, she actually looks very similar to him in the headspace and while she doesn't like it she finds it very easy to imitate him and sees it as a way to protect the system by imitating Mike to win the show and get everyone away. • She thinks Mike is too 'naive' and 'trusting' and Mal sees that as a weakness others in the show will exploit and abuse so he decides to distrust everyone including the people who the rest of the system feel are safe like Zoey and Cameron. • It doesn't come from a serious place of malice more than a maladaptive coping strategy where Mal is in constant survival mode and unwilling to let his guard down in case the system gets hurt and he KNOWS that its bound to happen being part of total drama. • This is reinforced by the fact that Mal split off with memories concerning their ex girlfriend and knows how deceiving people can be, especially seeing how some of the people on the show have tons of red flags that reminds her of Mike & Vito's ex. • He tries to protect the system by constantly trying to force herself front and by betraying people and playing 'the villain' so that no one will hurt them and that they have more chances to win if they're the one to strike first and he lashes out and gets angry when the system calls him out for it because he doesn't understand why they dont see what he sees. • After a lot of therapy and help from the system and Zoey and Cameron, Mal unpacks and unlearns a lot of the harmful ideas she split off with and also starts exploring herself outside of 'Total Drama'. A lot of her identity is tied as 'Mike's only hope to survive total drama' and its a lot for her to work through. • She gets on much better terms with Zoey later on, but it does take a very long time to build up that trust between them even if Zoey understands where Mal was coming from.

[fanaiceach]

I honestly think Geoffrey is a nerd by birth and is only a jock by circumstance:

The vampire panic room at the Pembroke. I know it's not canon that he had any involvement in its development but like... come on. He knows exactly how it works. Maybe you could argue that he beat the info out of Edgar in the time before Jonathan got to the hospital, but why would he have bothered asking about the technical specs and not just basic operation instructions? At the very least, at some point he had a very in depth conversation with Edgar about all the details -- but I maintain that the only way he could be so familiar with that room is if he helped design and build it

He says that the room functions via "ultraviolet curtains and Orichalum powder," the latter of which is either a fictitious metal referenced ancient stories or an ancient but real metal alloy, or is just a magical substance in a lot of fantasy / fiction. Either way its existence isn't exactly common knowledge, and considering Geoffrey has initial confidence that it'll work, I think that indicates that he's more than passingly familiar with it.

He does however immediately drop the "so much for modern technology" line the minute the room stops working and then resorts to 1v1ing Jonathan ("the tried and true") so again... he's a jock by necessity, but his first inclination is still to try the nerd way.

His interest in new technology and methodology is reflected in his writing too: "We can learn many things from the war in France: new strategy, new equipment, and new weaponry. Grenades, white phosphorus, ultraviolet light, bulletproof vests, and flamethrowers: it is time for the Guard to embrace the twentieth century."

Also in line with the first point: he's on friendly enough terms with Edgar to joke about giving him a head start if he ever turned, and clearly feels comfortable enough to show up in his office to talk about the current state of London. Even if their relationship and background is purely headcanon, that vaguely hinted alliance alone is a huge departure from how Geoffrey's predecessors talk about the Brotherhood. The schism between the groups is something both sides still reference with each thinking the other is stupid, and yet Geoffrey seeks Edgar out in a time of crisis -- in addition to whatever background the two of them might have. Geoffrey clearly sees value in the Brotherhood's knowledge and doesn't dismiss it as dangerous or useless like everyone else in Priwen seems to.

Again, much like with the anti vampire room, he does later shit on the Brotherhood and calls them cowards. Unfortunately life just keeps proving to him that knowledge can't compete with simply hitting things until they stop moving <3

The way he talks is also just very nerd coded to me. I don't necessarily think that language correlates with intelligence, but the game lets other working class characters speak in a way that Geoffrey really. Doesn't. "I've a good nose for machinations" and "you've set the table for a snake and wonder why there's venom in your food" and "it's within me to take your words as truth" are almost annoyingly verbose lines for a character that everyone else views as a brute force dumbass. I think it gives him a very guy who reads a lot and therefore has great vocabulary energy.

[idrellegames]

hi there! sorry if you've gotten a similar ask before. do you write wayfarer directly into twine or do you keep it in a separate doc? do you just have really clearly labeled sections in a word doc or something or is there a specific program you use to keep track of every story path? basically, with something as expansive and w/ as many routes as wayfarer, how do you keep all your writing organized?

I have answered this before, but I can't seem to find my posts on the subject (you may want to peruse my coding in twine tag, the masterpost has a bunch of different resources for this kind of thing!).

But in short, no, I do not write Wayfarer directly into Twine. This could functionally work for a very small game, but I would still advise against it as Twine doesn't really work as a word processor. You can't proof-read in it.

My process has three main steps:

Outlining

Writing

Coding

Compiling

Outside of my big beat chart (which spans the whole game), I break each episode down into their own outlines, and then break the routes of each episode down into their own outlines. Sometimes specific sections end up with their own outlines too. My system probably doesn't make much sense to anyone other than me, but as long as I know what the divisions are, then it's all good.

I write in MS Word. Each episode has its own folder (sometimes with subfolders) and every section of the game gets its own document.

Here's the main folders, each episode goes into its own thing.

This is an subfolder for Episode 1, specifically Route B.

Within my word documents themselves, I use a colour-coding system for separating out branches and sections. This is extremely useful for writing dialogue loops, like this:

I also add in any coding notes (variables, true/false states, stat checks) while I am writing so I know what I need to do when I sit down to code 4+ months later. I usually throw a X or XX on choices after I have written them as a note to myself that I have finished it (this is just personal shorthand - X means I've done the pass version of a check, XX means I've done the pass and fail states).

I use about 8-10 colours in my documents; I have a set of MS Word macros set up so I can easily switch between them.

I share my word documents with my editor via OneDrive, which makes it easy for her to got through and proofread.

I use MS Word because I've been using it to write since the 2000s and it's what I prefer to use. I have also been writing professionally for over a decade now, so I have systems and strategies in place that work for me that I've developed for myself over time. But if you're new to writing and you're looking for a word processor that can also help you with outlining and keeping your story straight, something like Scrivener may be helpful.

One the text is ready to be coded, it's a lot of copy/pasting from Word into Twine. When I'm coding I will typically be running multiple programs at once:

MS Word

MS Excel (for my variable sheets)

Twine

Notepad++ (which has some regularly used code stored in it; I also use it to edit CSS and Javascript, as well as any really code-heavy sections since it's easier to do that in Notepad++ than it is in the Twine editor)

Notepad (just the regular version - I use it for writing notes to myself while I'm coding)

a web browser to launch tests in as I code

Once I am done coding and I have tested things, it's time to compile. The Twine editor can only handle so many passages and text in one file (around 500-700 passages before you hit massive lag), so I break Wayfarer into multiple story files. Having multiple story files also makes it really easy for me to cross-reference events (if I need to grab a passage title to reference it later) because I don't have to look through one big file. If I know the event happens in Episode 2's first scene, then I know I need to open Chapter_2.1.

My Twine library looks like this at the moment:

I am using an old version of the editor (with an up-to-date version of SugarCube) since I didn't like the new one. I don't necessarily recommend using the Twine editor when you can easily make your game with Twee extensions in Visual Studio Code and have better support and functionality, but this is what I like and it really comes down to personal preference.

But because everything is in separate files, I have to merge them altogether. I have Tweego installed on my PC; it's run through the command prompt and outputs multiple story files into one HTML file. I've talked about this process here and here.

And that's basically it! I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all solution to keeping track of your IF. You need to figure out what works for you, based on your writing and outlining habits, how big your story is, and how much you intend to keep track of.

Hope this helps!

[britesparc]

Weekend Top Ten #680

Top Ten Fictional Companies

I love me a bit of good world-building. A sense of a real place, perhaps wildly different to our own, perhaps tweaked in a couple of interesting ways; but the feeling that you could go there, walk around, buy a sandwich, kick a chicken. And one of the things that really helps sell your fictional universe is a bunch of fictional names on the sides of buildings.

In our world, corporations are often really bad. They pollute the environment, they diddle people out of their time and money, they buy the President of the United States and enact a neo-fascist regime to destroy democracy. And I’ll be honest, very often fictional companies aren’t that much better either. Although it’s worth bearing in mind that when he became President, Lex Luthor divested himself of all his LexCorp holdings. He might be a supervillain but he ain’t that corrupt.

But fictional corporations are good for lots of things, and not just preventing you from having to pay McDonald’s if you want to stick a burger in your movie. Some fake brand names in a series can help tie disparate stories together – staying in the junk food sphere, Big Belly Burger appears to be the place to go in the DC Universe, cropping up repeatedly in their books, TV, and film. Similarly, Quentin Tarantino’s films often feature repeated use of the same fictional brands – Red Apple cigarettes, for instance. But these fakey factories also allow us to mock and mirror the real world. We’ll see some examples of that below; companies that hint at the dystopian excesses of current corporate culture.

Another thing fake companies do is show us how a really different world might function. It’s not quite the same, but think of the Fairy Godmother’s factory in Shrek 2, a comedy production line churning out spells to order. Transformers features shops that will change your body at will, or allow you to place your brain into another robot’s body to feel the experience of flight, for instance. We can understand the capitalistic undertones of the society even if the actual products are wildly alien.

And then there are just the weird ones. Like the first one on this list, for instance. And so I guess, with no further ado, we’d best get cracking. Here are some companies from films and TV and comics and games and that. Now, go eat the rich.

Acme Corporation (Looney Tunes cartoons, from 1935): it’s weird, it’s funny, it’s surreal, it’s satirical – it’s Acme. The perfect American company, it does everything, it ships everywhere, its reach is gargantuan and its product line never ending. And, of course, nothing it makes seems to work right. Its name literally means pinnacle, and nothing can get higher than this; no joke is funnier, no satire more biting than the everything company that actually delivers nothing. And on top of all that, it’s just a factory of utter batshit insanity. No wonder Wile E. Coyote kept on falling into canyons.

Wayne Enterprises (DC Comics, from 1974): there’s a common type of internet gotcha were people say “oh, but what if Bruce Wayne donated all his millions to charity instead of spending it beating up muggers and the mentally ill,” forgetting of course that the reason Bruce Wayne is rich is so they can make Batman stories where he has a jet and a UFO and an underground rocket-powered train. But also, he actually does do all that. Wayne Enterprises – sometimes referred to as the Wayne Foundation – is another company that seems to do everything, from defence contracts to medical supplies. Nowadays we do get the sense that Bruce uses it to further social reforms in the interests of driving down the crime rate – he employs ex-cons, funds homeless shelters, builds libraries, pays for Gotham’s redevelopment… and, of course, allows Batman to have shark-repellent and the Justice League to live in space.  

Omni Consumer Products (RoboCop, 1987): RoboCop’s satire is so on-point that in no longer feels like satire. OCP is a company that basically buys a police force so they can sell weapons. From their monolithic, macho, and incredibly eighties logo, through to their relentless advertising, and the fact they repeatedly indulge in horrific criminality to get what they want, they’re a picture-postcard representation of the corporate American dream. Considering we live in a age where a company has de facto bought a presidency, the thought of Amazon taking over the Chicago Fire Service to sell Alexa-branded extinguishers does not seem so far-fetched.

Aperture Science (Portal, 2007): on the one hand, it’s just a sterile research and development company; on the other, it’s a sublime use of emergent, satirical world-building, as everything around you is couched in supposedly-comforting terms, like a posh therapist’s office but made of white plastic. The apotheosis of company as parent, they want you to feel warm and relaxed whilst you undergo their tests, but the cracks – metaphorical and literal – show not only the grim-faced reality of their perverse death traps, but also the apocalyptic hellhole of a world you’ve woken up in. And, of course, this is all anchored by GLaDOS, a malevolent AI who keeps promising you cake.

Buy N Large (WALL-E, 2008): another one of those “they do everything” corporations, but this one also gets points because it appears to have ended humanity. A corporation that got so big, its CEO appears to be the leader of the entire human race; every single thing you can use is made by Buy N Large, who – despite apparently operating hundreds of years into the future – have retained the logo of a 1950s American supermarket. The casual, careless malevolence hidden behind the cheery façade is growing common in this list; but I guess they did also build WALL-E, who saves the human race, so they’re not all bad.

Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles (Dune, 1965): CHOAM is less of a company, more of a religion. In a future of incredibly prescribed order, all economic transactions are undertaken by this one phenomenal hyper-corp, who therefore holds ridiculous power as a galactic monopoly. Their power causes the great houses, and even the Padishah Emperor, a great deal of tension and unease, because they can cripple a planet’s finances and – potentially – disrupt the whole empire. The way these large powers in Dune intersect – CHOAM might control finance, but they can’t ship anything anywhere without the Spacing Guild – is fascinating. Also, “CHOAM” is just fun to say.

Weyland-Yutani (Alien, 1979): a company so callous that they repeatedly send squads of people into certain death just to get their hands on an alien species that they think they can use as a bio-weapon. Operating in secrecy, with the truth of their instructions known only to a tiny few, they’ll do anything, risk anything, to get their hands on an alien. Although their boss, Weyland, looks suspiciously like Bishop the android, they’re really given a face in the form of Burke, the snotty, cowardly arsehole from Aliens. Bonus points for the nice way their name reflects a merger between two big British and Japanese conglomerates, hinting at some kind of corporate melting pot down on Earth.

InGen (Jurassic Park, 1990): a company that, to a certain extent, is the will of one man – John Hammond, the visionary CEO whose past endeavours have included – depending on who you listen to – a genetically-engineered pygmy elephant and a flea circus. But InGen as a company was capable of actual scientific wonders – they literally cloned dinosaurs and tried to bring them back to life. True, they did then also try to set them up in a theme park where, even before someone shut the fence off in the rain workmen were being, well, eaten. And, even after all that, when you’d think they’d have learned their lesson, they kept trying to go back to get more dinosaur DNA. So: clever scientists, stupid executives.

Monsters, Incorporated (Monsters, Inc., 2001): it’s always fun to see a weird kind of business operating in a weird world. Here we have fantastic world-building because although the concept is really strange – monsters harvest screams from human children in order to power their civilisation – it’s presented in a way we can recognise: a blue-collar factory. The business feels like a large American corporation from the 70s, and there’s an almost propaganda-ish undertone to the way they earnestly talk of the benefits Monsters, Inc. brings. But they do have cool tech, though: however the door thing works, it’s an amazing visual treat to see them dangling from a suspended train track as they motor their way through the underbelly of the factory.

Quark’s (Star Trek franchise, from 1993): throughout Deep Space Nine, Quark’s is just one bar: as far as we can tell, it’s pretty popular on the station (although Quark’s own success seem to be as great or small as the plot requires), but also rather provincial. Yes, all the passing trade from both sides of the wormhole stop their for a raktajino, but Quark had loftier ambitions. So it’s nice to see, in Picard and Lower Decks, that he has been able to expand into an entire franchise; Quark’s can be seen across the quadrant, a popular and – presumably – profitable franchise. Maybe having your brother as Grand Nagus helps grease the wheels of commerce, somewhat. Anyway, who wouldn’t want to go there? Dabo tables, a dart board, drinks from across the galaxy, sexy holodecks, the possibility of some light illegal smuggling… let’s face it, it’s livelier than Ten Forward.

So there you go. Fictional companies definitely better than real companies. Even when they send you to get eaten by a xenomorph.