#call me the extrapolator the way i could extrapolate so much from the shreds of info we're given if my brain could form a coherent thought

[likopinina]

for a character that never appears in person in the game, dr Ash sure manages to make an impression. he's voiced by a voice actor with only this one listed role and he knocked it out of the park, truly ate and left no crumbs. the remedy writers for the notes we find scattered around had a field day sharing all that research. nearly every line that comes out of this character goes so hard it feels illegal. he made the fast travel system. went caveman. questioned legitimacy of powerful beings beyond our comprehension. based.

[bigbox141]

Bathroom Thoughts EP3: Memes Are Like Cheese

Hey fellas, I'm back from a much needed mental break! Speaking of breaks, I went for a bathroom break and some contemplation led to some confusion, and that confusion led to a thought. It was a thought about cheese.

Yesterday, I polled some friends and family to figure out what my grand returning post would be. I got two distinct answers that lingered in my head for a while and culminated in the ultimate bathroom thought. Cheese, and old people.

Well, not quite 'old people', more that I extrapolated 'old people' from my grandfather's birthday recently, but CLOSE ENOUGH. ANYWHOOO; Of course, since it was my family who suggested 'old people', I immediately thought of Facebook memes and how painful a number of them can be to view. It was then, that it hit me: memes... are like cheese.

I could say wine, but honestly, I'll say cheese.

government cheese rationing has begun please step in line

Pictured above is a stack of sliced, processed cheese. American cheese, government cheese, fake cheese, whatever you want to call it Idon'tcare; Plenty of the Western youth have already had at least a slice of this cheese. When you first have it, it's a wonderful, creamy goodness. It really sticks to the tongue, strings out with your grilled cheese, it fits with just about anything! It goes on your sandwich you take to school every morning, it gets served with your backyard burgers at the barbecue, it gets put in with the Kraft Dinner for some extra cheese- it- it... it gets plain. You start having it too often, and you begin to realise why it's so cheap.

As you grow up, you begin to diversify, see new frontiers of cheese. Bricks, shredded, new flavours... soon, the cheese of yore fades to obscurity. But that's not the last you'll see of that cheddar, since THAT BABY'S GONNA RESURFACE... IN THE FORM OF A RICH, DELECTABLE BRICK OF ORANGE GOODNESS BABYYYY!

Aged cheddar is a taste of the old, nostalgic cheeses of youth, in a rich, tasteful, flavourful new coat of sleEEEK edible paint. Who would've guessed that leaving cheese for years, would make it SO MUCH MORE POWERFUL? A mystery to perplex the frontier-men of the cheese industry for days to come.

But you might be asking: "what on Earth does this have to do with memes?" Well, I'll ask you something: have you seen ragefaces, or Vine memes resurface lately? If you haven't, holy SMOKES I want a feel for that rock you're under, it would probably be so cosy and miles less chaotic...

Let's rewind internet culture a bit, shall we? You're younger now. You see your first few memes, you see that raptor dude pondering with the impact font text, a couple rage comics, maybe even the start of Vine? It's a bit of a golden age for internet humour, it's certainly a hell of a lot more unique than the day to day standards of the traditional comedic conventions, right? Well, things only last so long.

Eventually, the rage comics become stale, Vine shuts down, and other formats are phased out in form of new, unique takes on comedy. Like trying out different slices of the same processed cheese, we go through one pack, get bored of it and try another, get bored again and try another in a vicious cycle of boredom and a search for that top-tier humour to satiate the brain. When we look back at the processed cheese we were eating a month or two ago? It reminds you of that plastic shell, and that boring semi-cheese flavour.

Fast-forward to the present day; Like a call to nostalgia, or a return to the simpler past, you start hearing the nearly decade old "bruh." And(/or) the distortions of the troll face that gave you har hars long ago begin to resurface and expand into these insane, ironic takes that span so far beyond the original scope that it can sometimes come off as actual horror. It's a rich taste of what you once loved.

It's beautiful, really: age bringing things back together again? A unity of nostalgia and silly times to warm your heart and remember what you used to chuckle at? No less, to see it evolve in a way that you'd never possibly foresee: you're meaning to tell me that processed cheddar can just kinda, not be processed, and become that rich, fine aged goodness? These thoughts, they're something to behold.

So go on, eat a brick of cheese. I, dare you.

Here's something btw

[botaniia]

Chapter 128 was packed with details, but the final two pages of the chapter are some of the most important in the whole series to me because they tie up a loose end that’s been there for quite some time in just two small pages.

The warriors’ morality has been a long-discussed topic, but out of RBA I think Bertholdt’s is the most interesting, simply because he’s been discussed so little and the reader actually has to extrapolate to explore him instead of getting it all spoonfed to them. There was no reason for the story to discuss him because Reiner was still alive and he was used to explore RBA’s reasoning and history. And because it was shown through Reiner so well, I’d long given up on the narrative ever revisiting Bertholdt again.

But even if it makes sense, that doesn’t leave me satisfied. I am all for seeing Reiner’s (and Annie’s) growth, but that’s only possible because they are still alive and active players in the story. Readers get constant new info on them and see how their actions and perspective have changed, and get the chance to recontextualise them. And for many people, that allows them to sympathise with them.

The same can’t be said about Bertholdt.

To plenty of people, he’s the previous holder of the colossal titan, Reiner’s shadow, and ultimately the guy who made peace with the fact that he’d kill lots and lots of former allies and Survey Corps alike before he was punished with a gruesome karmic death. He not only got what people believed was due, but readers were also never again challenged to rethink their position on him like they were with Reiner and Annie. It was easy to form an opinion on him in Return to Shiganshina and never have to adjust that opinion as new info came. 

There was no need to see how terrible his life was before he died, or how he was in the same boat as Reiner, or to speculate what he’d have done were he alive in the current arc because it simply wasn’t raised to the audience. So he remained despicable, and it was a good thing he was dead.

And that stance is understandable. Because no matter how good a motive someone has, murder is murder, and what happened to Shiganshina, Trost, Marco, the SC, and Armin was still murder no matter how terrible Marley was to these child soldiers. I reject the idea that their strong alleviating circumstances change nothing, but I understand why people are unable to find compassion for him after he said he was okay with killing them all on his own volition (which I still think was a coping mechanism to deal with how little he was in control of his life at that point and not a factual statement, but that’s a discussion for another day).

In short: a story that so powerfully made many people do a complete 180 on what they thought of Reiner, someone they previously wanted to see die a violent death, doesn’t at all invite the reader to consider the same for Bertholdt, and it felt missing.

That is until these two pages show up and change everything. 

See, the thing I said about murder applies to anyone. Bertholdt’s death was still murder, no matter how you spin it. A necessary murder where the SC had no other choice, but still murder. But emotionally, it was never framed that way. We don’t really see the 104th’s opinion on RBA, but I can’t imagine they felt all too much compassion for Bertholdt. 

Because he had it coming. 

Because he would’ve murdered them had they not murdered him. 

Because he betrayed them like the heartless bastard they learned he was.

Because he was all talk about no one wanting to do what he did, but in the end he still carried through with it.

Because it’s easier to feel no guilt over killing someone when you decide that he was never worthy of your compassion in the first place.

He died without a shred of humanity. The people who would mourn him didn’t know if he was truly dead and the people who knew he was dead didn’t want to mourn him.

That’s kinda it for him. Suddenly, radio silence. Reiner’s depression largely stems from losing him, but he’s never actually mentioned. Porco gets angry learning about his death at Liberio and charges into combat, and that’s about the only on-panel reaction we see to his death.

And then, four years later, the 104th suddenly land themselves in a situation where they are the traitors. Two of their comrades stand between them and their goal, and their lives are directly threatened by them unless they choose to act right now. 

“You betrayed us, didn’t you?”

“Weren’t we gonna reclaim the land and eat meat together?”

“You traitors! Why? Aren’t we comrades?”

Hey, aren’t those words Connie and Armin have heard somewhere before?

They are indeed their comrades. And Connie pulls the trigger twice.

It’s emotional. It’s painful. It doesn’t feel right, Connie doesn’t want to do it, and he knows he’ll have trouble looking himself in the mirror from the moment he shoots Daz. He’s the first one of the 104th to gain insight into how terrible it is to have to harm friends for a goal he truly believes is worth fighting for. 

But he did it anyway because he had to. And that’s the moment where he understands, crystal clear, something he has been struggling for four years to understand: how could Reiner, Bertholdt, and Annie do something so selfish, so gruesome to their comrades? How could they do this to him?

How could Connie and Armin do this to Daz and Samuel?

I don’t wish what Connie and Armin are currently feeling upon them in any way, just like I didn’t wish it upon RBA when they were experiencing it. But it’s undeniable that they currently have an understanding unlike any other of what a dreadful situation their enemies had been in when they infiltrated Paradis. This may even help them understand the position Eren is currently in.

Killing a former friend who turned enemy out of necessity is one thing. Learning his motives can change one’s perception of him, but doesn’t necessarily change the animosity still felt for him. But to live the exact experience he lived and gain an emotional understanding that wasn’t there before?

It’s hard not to relate to an experience you now understand.

So what’s that loose end I was talking about? 

Back in Clash of Titans, Bertholdt begged for someone to find them. I interpret this as being about understanding how hopeless their situation was from the start, seeing the good through the overwhelming abundance of terrible, wanting to be understood but knowing it wasn’t possible.

Ymir ended up being the person to respond to that call, leading to her going back to Marley with them to face certain death in order to spare them. Back then, she was the only one who could find them, but she never quite gave the type of understanding he was looking for. He wronged the Paradisian Eldians, it was them he needed to reach.

Even though it’s long after his death, Connie remembering his words in the situation he did is the first time that someone actually did see, did live his perspective while explicitly linking it back to him. Someone finally understands the pain they went through, and Isayama made a conscious effort to make readers think about that fact by showing that one panel of Bertholdt breaking down all those years ago. It’s no longer implied by extrapolation, it’s explicitly shown, the reader has to think about it.

It’s doesn’t look like much, but that is the exact type of closure I’ve wanted to cap off his story. 

Someone whom he didn’t want to harm but harmed anyway finally understands how human his situation was.

There wasn’t actually a heartless bastard, just a conflicted one who made his choice. Just like they did.

Someone finally found him.

[mosylufanfic]

*clasps hands together* rebelcaptain childhood friends au oh please??

Eeeeee, thank you for this prompt! I was really happy to have an excuse to buckle down and write some rebelcaptain.

Hmmm, I don’t know if friends is the right term here, but it’s close enough?

Tanith and Castor

Blasters weren’t her favorite weapon, but long ago, someone had told Jyn that she should be able to use any weapon she could get her hands on. Over the years, she’d extrapolated that to mean she should get her hands on any weapon she could. As advice, it had served her well.

So when she found a blaster in Cassian Andor’s things, she got her hands on it.

Of course, that snarky tattletale droid ratted her out, and of course Andor wanted it back. But she had it and she wasn’t letting it go.

“Give it to me,” he said.

She stared him down. “We’re going to Jedha. That’s a war zone.”

She watched him as they bickered over it, trying to categorize him, trying to work out where the soft spots were. If he had them.

He moved closer, blocking out the light from the windshield. Trying to intimidate her, maybe, with his greater size and their relative positions. But she had been small all her life and she wasn’t about to start being intimidated by that now.

His eyes flicked over her, to the blaster, to her hands, up to her face. He was trying to categorize her too.

She wondered if he was failing as much as she was.

“Trust goes both ways,” she told him, and while it had been a shot in the dark, it hit. She wondered how many people he trusted. She would bet it was a low number.

If he wanted her to trust him, he was going to have to extend her the same courtesy.

He gave a little huff, eyes sweeping over her one last time, and turned away.

Maybe it was the way the light struck across his eyes. Maybe it was the way he carried his shoulders. Whatever it was, Jyn found herself blurting, “Castor?”

He looked over his shoulder at her. “What?”

She stared at him, hard. “Castor,” she said again.

“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” he said, and turned away, clambering up into the cockpit.

She pressed her lips together, thinking, I didn’t say it was a who.

Ten years earlier

The boy came upon her silently, a ghost dissolving out of the shadows. She almost shot him, and told him so. “You arse, I almost shot you.”

“Believe me, you didn’t,” he said calmly. “You were telegraphing.”

She scowled at him. She’d seen him with the man who’d come to talk to Saw, standing a little behind him. Kid? Assistant? “What are you doing snooping around?”

He shrugged. “Bored.”

He was about five years older than her. Sixteen or seventeen. Tall and almost painfully thin, dressed in some drab grey-green-brown that helped him fade into the background. There was something strange about his voice. She couldn’t place it.

His dark eyes were sharp as spurs. He wasn’t bored. She didn’t know why he’d come here, but it wasn’t to find something to do.

She decided she would pretend to believe him. She didn’t care anyway.

“Telegraphing,” she said, taking aim at the rocks on the far side of the cavern. “What’s that?”

He nodded at the blaster in her hands. “You take so long to aim and fire that everyone knows you’re coming.”

“Well, good. They should.” She set her jaw and fired, missing her tin-can target by a mile. She swore under her breath.

His brows went up. “That’s pretty filthy language for a little kid.”

She shot him a look. “I’m not a little kid.”

“You’re what - nine?”

“Eleven,” she said, and looked down her nose at him. Not easy; he was a good foot and a half taller than she was. “You’re, what - thirteen?”

He smiled a little at her, not taking the bait. “You want to learn to shoot?”

“Not really,” she said. “But Saw says I have to. I like my truncheon better.”

“You need to be close for a truncheon,” he said.

“That’s what he says. I can get close. I’m sneaky.”

“You’ll get bigger,” he said. “Maybe.”

She scowled at him.

“And you should be able to use any weapon you can get your hands on, not just your favorite.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” she said, firing again, leaving a scorched black mark in the middle of a flat wall.

“What was that supposed to hit?”

“The next one will hit you.”

“Only if I’m standing behind you.”

She bared her teeth at him. “Go away.”

He settled himself on a rock. “Don’t think I will.”

“Why are you here, anyway?”

“Told you. Bored.”

“Not here here,” she said, firing again. It fried a patch of moss that began smoking gently. “Here in this camp.”

“Treyvas needed to consult with Saw.” He shrugged. “I didn’t want to stay on the ship.”

She finally put her finger on what it was about his voice. His accent meandered all over the place. Sometimes he sounded like someone from a holo. Sometimes everything was softer, more rounded. Pleasantly rough, like the rock walls of the cavern. Sometimes he even sounded like her.

Sometimes that all happened in the same sentence.

That couldn’t be his real accent.

She turned on him. “Are you imitating me?”

He jolted infinitesimally. “What. No.”

“You are. You making fun of me?” She knew she had a mostly Core accent, which she’d gotten crap from some others for. Sound like a damned Imp. Is that what you’re trying to be, little worm, an Imp?

It was just her voice, that was all.

“No!”

“Fuck you,” she said, throwing her blaster to the ground and storming away.

“Wait,” he called. “Stop. Please?”

It was the please that gave her pause. Please was not a word she heard much. She turned, glaring at him with all the force of her indignation.

He stared back, mouth tight, eyes uncertain.

She bared her teeth again and swung around to go.

“I am imitating you,” he said. “But it’s not to make fun. I promise.”

She went still.

His voice had changed utterly. The roundness, the roughness, the softness had welled up and spread itself across his words.

“I need a Core accent,” he said, still in that round/rough/soft voice. “I’m going … somewhere. And I need to sound like them.”

“Where are you going?”

He didn’t answer.

“So,” she said. “Watch a holo. Don’t creep around little girls.”

“Thought you weren’t a little girl. And I watched a lot of holos. Thought I had my accent down, but Treyvas says not. He says holo actors are all trained to sound like perfect Coruscanti nobility and nobody will believe me at - where I’m going. I need to sound like a real person, not someone who’s learned how to talk from a holo.”

She watched him.

“Just let me listen to you,” he said. “‘We’re here for two days. Let me talk and tell me when I don’t sound right.”

“Is that all?”

His hand moved toward his pocket, then dropped without slipping in. “Yes.”

“What’s in your pocket?”

His mouth worked a little. He reached in and pulled out a  recorder. “So I can listen later. Just to the accent. I’m not a spy.”

She hadn’t thought he was until he said that.

She crossed her arms. “What’ll you give me?”

He looked at the blaster on the rough, uneven ground. “I’ll teach you how to shoot.”

“I know how to shoot. You point and you fire.”

His mouth curled up on the left side. “I’ll teach you how to hit things when you shoot.”

She chewed her lip. Saw really was being very annoying about it, and nobody had the the time to teach her. “What’s your name?”

“Call me Castor,” he said, in a reasonable Core accent. His true voice was gone. Almost. It whispered at the edge of the consonants, the ghost of the real him.

“That’s not really your name,” she said. “Is it?”

“It will be. What’s yours?”

“Tanith,” she said.

He was good enough not to look outwardly skeptical.

“Right,” she said. “Show me what to do, then.”

He picked up the blaster. “First off,” he said, “don’t throw one on the ground. THat’s a good way to shoot yourself or someone else in the kneecap.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Tour 'r’s are wrong,” she said, and they settled into their concurrent lessons.

Now

Cassian dragged himself awake. The sour-milk taste of bacta coated his tongue and teeth, and he knew from experience that it wouldn’t go away for a couple of hours yet, no matter how much water he drank or times he brushed his teeth.

They’d done it.

Had they done it?

But he remembered Jyn pulling the lever to transmit the plans, the way she’d smiled at him, the way she’d fit under his arm to prop him up as they stumbled toward the elevator, pain rattling him from spine to fingertips with every step.

The way she’d looked at him on the way down.

The way they’d lurched out of the elevator, the plunge of his stomach at the sight of the Death Star, the way their arms had fit around each other on the beach. The way he’d thought, If I have to go now, at least I’m stealing all the time with her that I possibly could.

And then as the pain of his injuries began to devour consciousness, he thought he’d heard the sound of a ship.

Unless the afterlife was full of bacta, machines, and the distinctively humid air of a Mon Cal cruiser, there had been a ship. One that had picked him up and taken him back to base.

Had it picked Jyn up, too?

He managed to turn his head and got his answer. Knots of tension unwound from his stomach and between his shoulder blades and the small of his aching back.

She was scrunched in a chair next to his bed, deeply asleep, her cheek resting on her shoulder.

She was wearing ill-fitting, Rebel issue clothing and her hair looked frizzled in odd patches. Her exposed cheek was red and shiny and faintly discolored from bacta. Lines of pain etched the corners of her eyes and bracketed her mouth, but she was upright and any bandages or splints were hidden beneath her clothes. Her scowl, even in sleep, made him smile.

She was a very good shot these days.

The first time she’d glared at him, he’d known who she was. It had surprised him. He was good with faces, but they’d spent all of two days together, ten years ago, bickering the whole time. And she’d been a child then; as much of a child as she was allowed to be.

He’d thought of himself as a man then, an adult indulging an unruly infant. But from this distance, he could identify the shreds of youth that had still hung about him at the time, soon to be burned away.

Her accent had saved his life at the Academy. Treyvas had been right; if he’d sounded like a holo actor, his first spy mission probably would have ended in an execution. But he’d sounded like a boy from the edge of the Core, his occasional slip-ups easier to explain away when they were couched in dropped letters and elisions that the holo actors would have died before using.

It had also taught him a much longer-lasting lesson: teachers, and information, could be found anywhere.

He thought of Chirrut Imwe and wondered if he’d made it out too.

He’d made no sound when he woke - that was a bad habit that had been trained out of him years ago - but a med droid came whirring over anyway. “Captain Andor, do not move.”

Jyn shifted in her chair, grumbling under her breath, before opening her eyes. They found his. “Cassian,” she said.

His throat hurt as if he’d inhaled smoke, or burning air. He didn’t try to speak. But he didn’t have to.

“It’s over,” she said. “The Death Star. It’s gone.”

The last of the tension eased out of his body. There was more to the story, he could hear it in her voice, but that was what he’d really wanted to know.

“Sergeant Erso, you are not permitted in this ward,” the med droid said. Most droids didn’t have a tone - Kay, his heart mourned, Kay - so it was impossible to tell if they had said it before, but from Jyn’s glower, it didn’t look like her first time hearing it.

“I wasn’t bothering anyone.”

“You are still classified as recovering.”

“I’m fine,” she said. “I was asleep.”

“That chair is not conducive to productive rest. You must return to your own bunk.”

She let out a huff that turned into a deep, hacking cough. “Fine,” she gasped when the fit was done. “Fine, I’ll go.” She looked at Cassian. “I’ll be back.”

“Sergeant Erso, you are not permitted in this ward.”

“I heard you,” Jyn said, in a way that indicated she was going to ignore it anyway. She turned to go.

Cassian put out his hand and almost gasped with the spike of pain. The bacta had done well, but it wasn’t perfect, nor was it instantaneous.

Jyn stopped and turned back to him. “I will be back,” she promised in a low voice. “Try and keep me out.”

It made him smile again. But he wanted to say something else. “Ta- Tanith,” he managed, and the two syllables brought on a coughing fit that had the med droid pushing buttons, administering water, and making annoyed noises all at once.

When it subsided and the painkillers were doing their work on his aching chest and all the mending bones that the coughing fit had rattled, he looked back at her.

She looked down at him, and for a moment he thought she might deny it, the way he had. But that had been days ago, before … everything. Things were different now, with them.

Weren’t they?

Then her mouth curled up on the left side. “I knew you remembered me.”

FINIS

[sentientdevices]

💔 // eleven and talia 🤔 (mycompromise)

Who doesn’t love soul-crushing angst? Send me a 💔 and I’ll generate a number, 1-75, and post a starter based on what scenario I get. | ACCEPTING VERY HARD!

@mycompromise | 45. My muse commits murder to save yours.

     Talia has been traveling with her Thief for so long, she’s not quite sure what she would do without him. WELL, if he hadn’t STOLEN her ( and her him ), she’d be DEAD now. The Time Lords would have scrapped her, disposed of her, KILLED HER. He saved her from destruction, why should she not show that same kindness? The TARDIS has never been able to ACTUALLY return the favor, of course, she’s always simply been a MACHINE. He always leaves her, in the end. She transports him and his pets to their little adventures and then just SITS there, doing whatever it is she’s programmed to do in the situations that happen in her environment. TRAPPED BY A PROGRAM, that was her, unable to truly help the Doctor when he needed it. No, that was left to his companions. He’s always come back for her, though. And she, him. LEAPING at any chance to come when he calls. The one time that she was RIPPED FROM HER SHELL when House stole her box, she’d been so ALIVE. But dying, the body she was in was not MADE for her. This one is. With this, she can do ANYTHING.

     He’s TRAPPED, she knows it, she can SENSE it. There are people that are trying to hurt him, KILL HIM, and she can’t have that. His stupid SECOND CHANCES, he always has to put his own life in danger to keep his conscience clear, to save even the most WORTHLESS of creatures. She doesn’t see the POINT to it when he knows he could die. Then again, maybe he just wants to. But this threat is TOO MUCH, she has to stop it. She has whispers of the FUTURE flowing in her mind. He’s DEAD, she can see it. DEAD FOR GOOD. No REGENERATiON, just death. She wouldn’t be able to BEAR it, not so soon after she’s finally able to TALK to him for good. SHE CAN RETURN THE FAVOR. She can SAVE HIM. Time is in FLUX, his death is only one possible future, but she can’t give the nasty thing ( time ) a CHANCE to turn on her. This ship is USELESS, time won’t miss it. The Doctor is trying to bargain with them. Talia is blinded by the future.

     She makes her way to the control room, going unnoticed by the crew of the ship ( due to the perception filter ). THE DOCTOR HAS SOME TIME, she can see that, enough time for her to START THE SELF DESTRUCT SEQUENCE and get back to him to safely steal him away. The TARDIS whizzes away at the controls. Even if someone does notice her, the extrapolator shield, which is integrated into her, will protect her. She can put them to their deaths in peace, without worry! Talia hits the final key to start the sequence and LOCK ON, maximum deadlock. Escape pods are locked down. The ship is on MAXIMUM QUARANTINE until it can cleanse the “illness” or whatnot. There is no one that can stop it. The alarms start to sound, sirens BLARE, an automated voice over the intercom system reading out “мaхιмυм qυaranтιne. ѕelғ deѕтrυcт ιn т-мιnυѕ one мιnυтe.” Good, enough time for Talia to get back to her thief. The future shifts, now the Doctor dying is because of exploding with the ship, but it’s still in flux. She can also see herself making it to him and saving him as the ship blows up around them. She makes that her number one priority as she dashes through the halls back to her Doctor, a GRIN on her face because she’s DONE IT. The favor is returned, she’s SAVED HIM! The TARDIS sprints, LEAPS, wraps her arms around him as tight as she can.

          “DOCTOR! Doctor, I DID IT! You’re SAFE!” She cries, looking up at him with such JOY on her face. No remorse. No regret. Just RELIEF. And as the ship tears to shreds around them, Talia and the Doctor dematerialize. She’s taking him to Earth, PROUD OF HERSELF for saving him. She didn’t even think, there was never any other choice, not to her. Because they would have found him again, or he wouldn’t have left, she needed something to give results quickly and EFFICIENTLY. She needed to save her Doctor, at any cost. They rematerialize on Earth, somewhere in New Zealand, and she finally lets go of him. Hair is pushed out of her face, and she looks up at him with such a glimmer in her eyes. Standing in that grass, wearing such absurd clothing, she looks up at her Doctor and smiles.

          “I returned the favor, didn’t I? I did. I saved you.”

[dalekofchaos]

Why I always choose to Save Chloe and Sacrifice Arcadia Bay

Chloe Price died sad frustrated and alone on a cold bathroom floor feeling unloved and abandoned. Rachel is missing and she has no chance of finding her. David emotionally, mentally and physically abuses her and Joyce normalizes it and her house is under surveillance without her knowledge. She is in debt to Frank who would most likely kill her if Nathan didn’t do so.  Chloe had no knowledge that Max loves her or that she loves Max or what happened to Rachel and she had a really bad life and apparently it's destiny that she has to die in two universes.

Everything from Farewell, Before The Storm and Life Is Strange suggests saving Chloe is the right choice. Why all the build up if we choose to let Chloe die depressed, broken and alone with no memory of Max and no knowledge with what happens to Rachel. Chloe did not lose William and Rachel so she can die alone. A town can be rebuilt, but you can’t build another Chloe

Makes more sense from a story perspective anyway, since it becomes a story about accepting consequences rather than Learning A Lesson and undoing the growth that both characters went through

Stop Oh Me’s video

There are survivors in the Sacrifice Arcadia Bay ending.  Joyce, Warren, Frank, David and Kate. If you look closely, when Chloe and Max drive through the town, you can see, that the Diner still stands. It does not seem to be destroyed which means that all the people inside must have survived and should be safe and sound. David  stayed in the Bunker with Jefferson. Nothing destroys that bloody bunker, especially as it is said “seems like someone is preparing for the apocalypse”. Therefore, it is pretty obvious that David should also be alive.  Kate is in a hospital. Hospitals are heavily fortified, so there is a good chance that Kate is alive! Blackwell probably has some sort of cellar or spaces of electricity with thick walls, that cannot be destroyed easily. And I can totally imagine Samuel and Mrs. Grant doing their best to bring all the students into a save spot somewhere at school which would save all of them. But I assume Nathan died before the storm even happens, so sadly instead of getting the help he needed, Nathan is the last victim of Jefferson

Save Chloe and have her story be one of a girl who was abandoned by everyone she loved and had resigned to a life of pain and solitude, until the one person most precious to her returned and proved to her, again and again, that she is important, cherished, and worth the world. you can have her be a character who suffered and prevailed and survived until she was finally shown the greatest measure of love a human could possibly give, freed of the town that tormented her, and given a chance at a future with the person she loves.

We only got the endings we got because DONTNOD ran out of time and budget  The only reason why the storm stopped in save Arcadia Bay ending is because DONTNOD ran out of time and came up with the laziest excuse on why the storm is happening, like never mind all the shit the Prescott Foundation is doing to Arcadia Bay, nevermind that there was a huge spiritual presence which would explain why Max has rewind powers and there was a plan to make Sean a more important character in episode 5. The plan was The Prescotts knew about the storm, Nathan kept saying the storm was coming in cut audio and audio that suggests Sean was making him take the drugs to stop him from saying anything and guess what? Jefferson's drugs stop Max's powers. So the drugs stop the powers. But anyways the plan was this. The Prescotts wanted the storm to come, they had a lot of bomb shelters and the one we visit is called "stormbreaker" and Sean's motive would be for the storm to wipe out Arcadia Bay and move everyone into Pan Estates. The only reason that didn't happen is because they ran out of time and came of with the laziest excuse on why the storm happened.

This convo and post by @tangent101  Max retraces her steps and shreds the photo and the butterfly still appears. Which means that the photograph Max could potentially use to let Chloe be shot would be one in which she already saw her die and time traveled. The Storm Will Happen In The Chloe Dies Timeline. Jefferson revealed that shooting Chloe doesn’t stop the Storm. Arcadia Bay… is doomed. So save Chloe. It’s worth noting that every time Max gets a vision of the tornado (with the exception of the time at the art gallery), Chloe is somewhere nearby. We also know that Chloe is somehow connected with the nightmare dimension where Max gets lost in Episode 5. Even if we don’t consider Chloe’s multiple trips to that place in BTS, it clearly functions in a similar manner to the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks. From this, we can extrapolate that it has something to do with Max’s powers. Consider this: rather than triggering some unknown domino effect that somehow leads to snow, an eclipse, dead animals, and a tornado, Max’s powers are somehow draining energy from the prime reality of her world, and depositing it into this parallel dimension, which is invading her world using Chloe as its focal point for reasons unknown. This explains why Chloe’s fate is treated as such a lynchpin. It also explains why, as Max further uses her powers, reality starts breaking apart, like a video tape that’s been rewound too many times. Rachel fits into this too: she has a clear spiritual connection to Arcadia Bay, as evidenced by how her ghost lingers in the form of a doe that guides Max to the truth and to safety in the lighthouse. We also learn from the fisherman that the fish in the bay started dying well before Max got her powers, due to the negative influence of the Prescotts. Given her connection to nature, Rachel’s death may have triggered some sort of environmental decay. Even discounting her clear empathic connection with the forest fire from BTS, Chloe theorizes that the tornado might be “Rachel’s revenge” on a town that took everything from her. But she wanted Chloe to be safe, and so showed her and Max the way. So ultimately Max’s powers are kind of incidental to Chloe’s fate, if we look beyond the simple explanation given to us by the game and start examining the metaphysics. Sacrificing Arcadia Bay makes more sense from a story perspective anyway, since it becomes a story about accepting consequences rather than Learning A Lesson and undoing the growth that both characters went through. Max had the first nightmare sequence while in class. Chloe is not yet at the school and probably is driving there for her meeting with Nathan. After all, Chloe has a reason to avoid the school (her step-father) until the last possible moment to try and avoid being caught. And the nightmare is before the time travel happens unless you were to believe (as I do) that Life is Strange is in fact a time loop, and by not being with Chloe on the side of the cliff (or in LA) she is destined to nearly get killed and reloop to Monday. In fact, the second Tornado Dream Sequence has Max nearly killed by the ship slamming into the lighthouse, suggesting that being there on her own will get her killed. I’m not sure about Chloe’s connection with the nightmares though. As I’ve said before, I think Max is in a time loop. These “flashes” are brief memories of past times she went through this week. Also, as you pointed out, she has the nightmare glimpse of the Storm while in LA. Why would she have a nightmare of the Storm when a thousand miles away from Chloe? So I’m not quite sure if Chloe is associated with the nightmares so much as in helping Max get past them. Second, consider this: what happens if Max died in the Dark Room? If David Madsen slipped in the mud, then he could have been 5 seconds later getting into the Dark Room at which point Max is drugged (probably fatally so), Mark Jefferson knocks out and then kills Madsen, and the town is destroyed. Chloe is already dead by Jefferson’s hands. There would be no point as to the destruction of Arcadia Bay and yet it will happen anyway. If someone were to claim this is all predestination, that Max was supposed to survive so she could somehow end up getting to Warren’s picture… well, the choice at the end disproves Predestination because Max can choose to let Arcadia Bay be destroyed. the song “Spanish Sahara” used for what so many folk call “the good ending” is… well, here’s a line from his article: the whole song is like, getting over a trauma, but the trauma doesn’t go away and it multiplies from one into a bunch of furies…. The song is about trauma and things getting worse. And let’s pretend that there isn’t a tornado. If Nathan shoots Chloe, well, he’s a rich white boy, she’s a poor drug-user who tried to blackmail him. Nathan’s father is ruthless, has the police in his pocket, and lawyers up. Nathan walks. If there are problems with the warrant to check out the Dark Room then Jefferson walks. (If one of the cops who are in the Prescott pocket calls Nathan’s dad and he clears out the Dark Room of incriminating evidence before the cops get a warrant, then again: Jefferson walks, as does Nathan.) Add in funeral costs to the Madsen-Price household being over $4,000 behind in their mortgage (and that bill being over a month old) and the house gets foreclosed upon and Joyce and David thrown out. Joyce and David’s marriage likely falls apart. Kate’s video is already out in the wild and her mother has already contacted her, as has her aunt. She gets pulled out of school and is back under the repression of her mother and aunt… and probably takes her life quietly months later. Max is seeing nothing good happening from saving Arcadia Bay. She probably even hears people bad-talking Chloe as being a bad sort and trying to blackmail that poor Nathan Prescott lad… and has to cope with everything she went through (essentially rape) that she can’t tell anyone about. If she hears that Kate kills herself… what does she have left? It is my personal view that the Storm will happen anyway. The Storm is not about Chloe having to die at a specific point in space-time. If that was the case, then why does Max get time travel abilities to begin with? That’s the biggest question of all, and one that sadly has not been answered. It could be this. Rachel is reaching out from beyond the grave, using the one other person who truly loves Chloe to act as her sword and ensure Chloe Price at least escapes Arcadia Bay.

[sage-nebula]

survey thing

Rules: Tag 9 people you want to get to know.

Tagged by @yume-x-hanabi.

Relationship Status: 

Single.

Favorite Color: 

This shade of blue, and this shade of green.

Lipstick or Chapstick: 

Chapstick, for sure.

Last Song: 

"Stand By You” by Rachel Platten, which is an excellent song for Lizardon & Alan, from Lizardon’s point of view.

Last Movie: 

Uhhh, my family was watching some Christmas movie on Christmas, but although I was in the room I wasn’t paying very much attention to it. I think the last movie that I actually watched and paid attention to was . . . Wonder Woman, maybe? Or Spider-Man: Homecoming. I saw both in theaters, but I can’t remember which one came first. 

Top 3 Shows: 

Let’s see . . . pretty decisively:

The Office (U.S.)

Arrested Development 

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood

Top 3 Ships:

I’m like . . . especially in the mood, so I’m going to do top three romantic ships, top three familial ships, and top three human & animal companion (i.e. platonic soulmate) ships.

Top 3 Romantic Ships:

Yuugi/Jounouchi (Yu-Gi-Oh!) --- I’ve gone on at length about this before, so I don’t really need to again. You all know me well enough by now to know how I feel about these two.

Makoto/Haruka (Swimming anime/Free!) --- Same deal as the above, actually. I’ve talked enough about them at length, I don’t need to do so again, they just need to be made canon now (and if they are, they may take the #1 spot, because representation matters). Come on, season three.

Either Jude/Milla (Tales of Xillia) or Roy/Riza (Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood) --- I honestly can’t choose between these two at this point. They’re both honestly perfect in many of the same ways, and every time I feel myself starting to veer toward one, I get roped right back over to the other. It’s impossible to choose.

Top 3 Familial Ships:

Alan & Professor Sycamore (Pokémon) --- Once again, I feel like this is one that I’ve extrapolated on at length, haha. You all know how I feel about this father-son bond by now, however unofficial that adoption is in canon. I don’t have to go on about it now.

Guy & Luke (Tales of the Abyss) --- Okay, it says something that even though I have not played Tales of the Abyss in about five years, briefly re-discovering them recently and remembering some of the dialogue exchanges between them (particularly things Guy said to / about Luke) were enough to shatter my fucking heart. I haven’t produced any content for these two in years, but they can still completely devastate my heartstrings, leaving them shredded all over the floor. Guy is Luke’s surrogate big brother, but he also had a sort of “Promoted to Parent” status in that he was also the one responsible for raising him (as he himself admits to), which is even lampshaded by Luke’s actual father, who says that Guy was a, “brother, father, and irreplaceable friend” to Luke. Although Guy is only ever referred to as Luke’s best friend in-game (aside from that one piece of dialogue), to the point where he even has two titles that relate to this (Friend for Life, and I think one that’s just Best Friend), it’s still more than evident that they are brothers in bond though not in blood, and I love them. “Replica or whatever, you’re real to me.” “I . . . I want you to stay alive. No matter what anyone else says.” “Even if the whole world rejected you, I’d still be here, by your side.” With lines like that, how could I NOT love their relationship? Hoooonestly.

Jounouchi & Shizuka (Yu-Gi-Oh!) --- It was once again hard for me to decide on a third pick, but ultimately I have to give it to Jounouchi and Shizuka. They have the strongest and healthiest sibling bond in the entire series, and the way that Jounouchi continues to fight for Shizuka---not just physically, in the sense that he fought for the prize money to pay for her operation, but emotionally, in that he wants to inspire her to have courage---is beautiful, particularly when she turns around and inspires him right back. Never forget: “You can still win! I don’t know anyone stronger than you, and you inspire me every single day. If it hadn’t been for you, I wouldn’t have gotten my sight back. Not because you paid for my surgery, but because you gave me the courage to go through with it. Then, when it was over, you gave me the strength I needed to take off my bandages and face the world. When everything was dark, you gave me light. You gave me the light I needed to live! You’ve never given up before, and you shouldn’t start today.” Goddamn heartwarming, especially since it was exactly what he needed to hear. Their relationship is beautiful, and it’s criminal that there wasn’t much time spent on it in canon, though it makes sense since their parents’ divorce forces them to live in separate cities. Either way, Jounouchi is easily the best big brother in all of YGO, and Shizuka’s the best little sister he could have ever asked for. I love them.

Top 3 Human & Animal Companion (Platonic Soulmate) Ships:

Hiccup & Toothless (Dreamworks Dragons) --- This was extremely hard for me, because technically the next ones on this list also hold the number one spot, but I put Hiccup & Toothless here because not only were they canon confirmed platonic soulmates by Dreamworks themselves (who called Hiccup Toothless’ “viking soulmate”), but I also saw so, so much of my relationship with Shiloh in their relationship, to the point where I have, “I looked at her and saw myself” on the other side of Shiloh’s special tag. I’m going to be absolutely beyond devastated if Dreamworks permanently separates them in the third movie. @ Dreamworks, don’t you dare.

Alan & Lizardon (Pokémon) --- Again, I also really wanted to put these two in the #1 spot, but that’s not how lists work, so . . . here they are. Honestly, these two are the Pokémon equivalent of Hiccup & Toothless, to the point where Alan and Hiccup even share a voice actor in the Spanish dubs of their respective series. Their relationship is just as powerful and beautiful, even if it didn’t get as much attention.

Ash & Pikachu (Pokémon) --- Obviously. Does it need saying?

Tagging: @severalbakuras, @ryttu3k, @kcgane and, uh, anyone else who wants to! No pressure whatsoever either way.

[entergamingxp]

PUBG studio director talks bots, Sanhok remaster and staying competitive in the battle royale market • Eurogamer.net

It’s been over three years since PUBG first popped up on Steam, and while that’s a relatively short time on paper, it somehow feels much longer. Perhaps it’s because the wider gaming landscape around PUBG has changed so much: no longer the only battle royale on the block, PUBG now finds itself sharing that market space with several competitors, with a new contender appearing practically every few months.

Given the game is no longer sparkling new and the battle royale market is so crowded, it’s little wonder PUBG’s player numbers are not what they were in 2017. But that’s not to say the game has disappeared – it’s still able to pull in 500k Steam concurrents on a daily basis, and has now sold 70m units. With PUBG heading into its eighth season (on 22nd July for PC and 30th July for consoles and Stadia), it seems as good a time as any to catch up on the general state of the game. I asked PUBG Madison studio director Dave Curd about PUBG Corp’s long-term strategy, the Sanhok map remaster, and what sort of changes we’ll see in Season 8. And also what’s happening with those controversial bots.

We’ve seen a couple of map remasters from PUBG Corp already: starting with Erangel and then Vikendi, the latest to get the makeover treatment is Sanhok, with seemingly everything getting an overhaul in Season 8. I mean this quite literally. “Every building, wall, floor, rock, blade of grass and tree has been updated to have better, more accurate fidelity in terms of materials,” Curd said of the updated art style. “From a storytelling perspective we really want to show that it’s been some time since players have been to Sanhok, so more moss, algae, overgrowth… we really wanted the players to feel like they were exploring this overgrown jungle environment.” On top of revamping the old, there’s also a couple of new locations, including a tourist town called Getaway with a neon nightclub and pool cabanas, and an airfield at the north-eastern end of the map to replace the coconut farm.

“I would say with the Erangel visual update, perhaps 15 to 20 per cent of the design was changed, we were really conservative and wanted to make sure we kept all the fans happy,” Curd explained. “But with Sanhok it feels close to 30 to 35 per cent different. This should be a very fresh experience for our players.”

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The changes go beyond just looking pretty, as PUBG Corp has used player feedback and internal data to inform how the redesigned terrain will affect gameplay. The north-west mountain, which has traditionally been seen as strong and overpowered, has been “totally reworked” to have “more flanks and more switchbacks to allow more tactical gameplay”, also giving those in Bootcamp a chance to leave without being shredded. A number of changes target traversal, such as adding more bridges and sub-islands, drying up rivers to make them shallower, and removing sheer cliffs. Named locations have seen tweaks to make them more balanced, with Quarry altered to have “way more traversal and cover” and Pai Nan given “more parkour, more under the docks and sneaking around”.

As for those looking for lore tidbits, Curd recommended dropping in the central Bootcamp and going “deeper than you might expect” while checking out the various screens and data hidden around the map. “We’re trying to get a little bit more lore-forward… we want the players to be curious about the universe that this map and the PUBG games take place in,” Curd added.

Another area you can find PUBG lore, of all places, is in the descriptions for the four signature weapons found in the new Loot Truck. The Loot Truck is another Season 8 addition, offering weapons with pre-installed attachments with enough gear to kit out “two to three people” – making it a tempting alternative to regular Air Drops. “I’ve been working on first-person shooters for 12 years – not a lot of players look up,” Curd said. “The idea is there’s a mobile care package, this big, lumbering buffalo unit – kind of cruising through the map.” Curd hopes the truck will prompt players to debate risking their positions to grab valuable loot, or adopt tactics such as hunting down the players who hunted down the Loot Truck.

Season 8 brings a change to the way Ranked Mode works, with players now earning points for team placement rather than just individual placement. Curd believes this will help nurture team play.

Beyond the new additions in Season 8, I was curious to hear whether PUBG Corp had any plans to revamp how the game’s bots currently work. Added to the console and PC versions of PUBG earlier this year, the bots have been a hot topic in the community ever since, with complaints centred on AI behaviour and the number of bots in each lobby.

“Bots were added as support for new players and also further reinforced the difference between normal mode and ranked mode,” Curd said. “You’re absolutely right, they’ve been a little controversial for some players.

“Some of our new players – and myself too, because I can be bad at the game – have been enjoying the feature. I like when the dumb bot catches me on the shoulder and I’m like ‘ok, I’m going to kill you and get that little hit of dopamine’. We just hit 70m [units sold]… so that is a lot of people checking out PUBG and getting absolutely wrecked by our veterans. So now with the bots, we are seeing new users getting kills, understanding the headshot is much more valuable than the chest shot, and the meta is not always loot from the building but loot from a player – let them bring their gear to you. These are the lessons I think only bots can teach.

“But it’s an evolving system, and we still have a lot of work left to continue to balance the blend of PvP and PvE and make sure our bots provide the right level of challenge for players of all skill levels.”

Curd elaborated that changes to bot AI would aim to make them “more interesting and more fun to play with” rather than simply more deadly. “The easiest thing in the world is to have a bot see you and shoot you, but that doesn’t feel good,” Curd explained. “I’ve seen what some of the unreleased bot features look like, and it’s looking really cool. Expect the bots to keep getting better.”

And as for the suggestion bots are being used to fill out lobbies?

“That’s not my perspective, they’re not there to fill lobbies,” Curd said. “I would imagine we would just have fewer matches going if our only deal was to increase matchmaking. The bots are there to help with new users because they were just getting destroyed.”

Another frequently-discussed problem in the PUBG community is cheating, which has been an ongoing battle for the developer. PUBG Corp’s most recent efforts include the introduction of two-factor authentication, which Curd said has been “huge in reducing” numbers, but noted the battle against cheaters was essentially an arms race. “We’re constantly in a forever war with cheaters… if you watched a graph of our cheaters over time, we’re in a really good spot… [but] it’s always going back and forth.”

PUBG introduced Black Zones with Karakin, but is still considering whether to add them to other maps. ‘It’s not only a big gameplay change, it’s also a pretty large technical shift, because Karakin was explicitly designed to showcase the feature,’ Curd said. ‘We want to make sure the community is red hot on fire about seeing this in other maps before we begin that work.’

As for plans for the future, Curd said “everything’s on the table” – including that clue about possible new maps in Chile and Alaska – but he did seem to hint that Miramar could be in-line for a revamp. And if that were to happen, PUBG Corp would likely take a similar approach to the Sanhok remaster. “I don’t know when, but of course my eye is on Miramar because that was the very first map PUBG Madison worked on in collaboration with Seoul. That’s something interesting to think about for the future.

“I think we look at the same thing �� what have we done in Sanhok? We have our internal experiences and biases, we’re listening to the community, we’re working with esports professionals, being mindful of protecting fan favourites – we gave it all a new coat of paint. The map is now taking place in the present and we want it to be easier to loot, to be easier to see and identify targets. How do we protect its essence but streamline and make it more fun, more accessible? The lessons we are demonstrating in Sanhok… you can extrapolate, those are things we can consider for future map updates.

“This is a game I want players to join 20 years from now, we want to keep telling stories. We want to keep providing fresh experiences. I would say anything’s possible.”

With PUBG Corp’s current focus centred on map remasters, I was curious to find out about the developer’s strategy for remaining competitive in a now-crowded battle royale market. I asked Curd whether PUBG Corp’s long-term strategy emphasised improving the core experience, or continuing to innovate.

“It’s both. You certainly need new content: you need new maps, modes and experiences to find the edges of the wall. We debuted that blue circle, and now everyone’s doing blue circles, right? It’s important to discover what else is out there and what the players are going to be really excited about. At the same time, our goal is always looking at performance, with the Sanhok remaster the map looks way better – but it’s cheaper, we’re optimising materials. We are finding the new frontiers, but we’re constantly improving performance, improving quality of life.

“Finding a video of PUBG from 2017… it looks like a totally different game. It would have been so easy to ride this out, only sell costumes and not put so many resources into updating stability, updating how vehicles work, updating weapons not loading – these are all things we’ve been doing to ensure that the core game is healthier and healthier. We’re treading lightly with new content… when we developed Sanhok, our first mission statement is it’s got to perform better than old Sanhok. Players will reject new interesting content if it plays worse.

“The game is a lot different right now than it was when Sanhok first came out. So I would ask players that have maybe fallen out for maybe five or six months, or a year – not to just come back for Sanhok, but to see the gains we’ve made in the rest of the game as well.”

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/07/pubg-studio-director-talks-bots-sanhok-remaster-and-staying-competitive-in-the-battle-royale-market-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=pubg-studio-director-talks-bots-sanhok-remaster-and-staying-competitive-in-the-battle-royale-market-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net

[dawnajaynes32]

Typodermic’s Raymond Larabie Talks Type, Technology & Science Fiction

[Call for Entries: The International Design Awards]

Raymond Larabie, known for creating ubiquitous futuristic and sci-fi fonts, has been involved with type since he “was about five years old” and was using type at that early age as well. His experience with typography, especially when it came to the hands-on-use of Letraset, helped him understand how typefaces looked, and how typography worked. By the mid-1980s he edited fonts and made his own fonts on his first computer, doing everything on a TRS-80 in bitmap. He eventually graduated to the Commodore Amiga.

Neuropol was created in 1997 and was used for the logo for the Torino Olympics in 2006. It’s been updated and expanded a lot over the years and also comes in a more buttoned up X style. The truncated arms were inspired by a malfunctioning vectorbeam screen on an old Tempest arcade machine.

Larabie earned a Classical Animation Diploma at Sheridan College in Oakville, and went on to work as an art director in the video game business working on games for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and Super NES (SNES), as well as the Playstation and Playstation 2. During that time, he maintained his love for type and type design, and made free fonts, releasing them on the Ray Larabie Freeware Typeface of the Week website. This soon became Larabie Fonts. In 2001, he started a commercial font venture, and quit his job two years later to work on fonts full-time.

Influenced by Letraset at age five, Larabie says his own Letraset sheets got “used up decades ago,” in the mid-1980s. “I wonder if younger readers realize that fonts were once something that you’d buy and they would get used up. These are replacement copies of catalogs because I wore the originals to shreds. I don’t know why I was so obsessed with this stuff as a kid.” Photo by Raymond Larabie

Inspired by the Pinto Flare typeface, Larabie created his own groovy version called Pricedown. You might also recognize it from Grand Theft Auto‘s wordmark. “I worked for Rockstar at the time but they weren’t aware that they were using a font which was created by one of their employees before the company existed.”

Larabie moved to Japan in 2008, where he operates Typodermic Fonts. Larabie provided a behind the scenes look at his design process for HOW readers, and answered questions about his work and his influences.

How Raymond Works

Step 1

“When starting a new typeface, my first step is to draw a few heavy sample characters to establish dimensions and sidebearings.”

Step 2

“Once I’ve got a few sample characters for the heaviest weight, I add a weight axis and design a light version of those characters. This way I can test interpolation, alter the x-height, sidebearings and width, then note the scale percentages—afterwards, I delete the light test characters. I’m using a uniform line width since this will be an interpolation target which will be thrown away later. I usually use an interpolation of between 10 to 20% of the heaviest weight as my extra-light so it retains some of flavor of the heavy weight.”

Step 3

“One by one, I add completed heavy characters, making sure each one harmonizes with the existing characters. I don’t draw them in alphabetical order but I try not to leave the hard letters like a and e for last. The interplay between f,r,t,z is particularly difficult so they should be drawn all at the same time to make sure they work together. There’s no separate spacing phase—I’m adjusting and thoroughly testing the spacing for each character as I go.”

Step 4

“Next I create composite accented characters and finish the rest of the character set. I use a set of reduced height accents for the capital letters and more generous ones for the lowercase.”

Step 5

“After lots of testing and minor adjustments, I’ll create kerning classes and create all the kerning pairs. It’s important to spend a lot of time setting up the kerning classes. Not only does it make the kerning process much faster but it reduces the possibility of error and omission.”

Step 6

“Now it’s time to create the light interpolation weight. I’ll use the notes I made earlier to make everything narrower, decrease the x-height and pad the sidebearings. I’ll also create a quick, disposable outline version to use as a guide in the background.”

Step 7

“Next I’ll complete all the light characters. I need to adjust the sidebearings on thin characters like lowercase L, I, 1 etc. The accents no longer line up so they all need adjustment. The kerning will need to be done all over again. Some pairs won’t need adjusting but they’ll all need to be checked.”

Step 8

“Next, I experiment with the interpolation and make adjustments to refine the middle weights—it’s a bit like pulling strings. You can see how I need to cut away a piece of the Q so the tail goes through only on the lighter weights. This stage can involve a lot of manual cleanup and vector surgery. Now I decide which weights I’m going to export. Then I fill in the style names, do some autohinting, more testing, more adjustments and I’m done.”

Q&A with Raymond

Q. What inspired you to create your own type design foundry?

I like to call it a font company. Foundry makes it sound like I work with molten metal.

What’s behind the name? What does Typodermic mean, and why did you go with that name?

During the indie font gold rush near the turn of the millennium, font puns were in short supply so I jumped at that one as soon as I thought of it. I used it as a font name first and later a company name. “For font junkies” is my slogan but I thought of that much later.

What software do you use for finalizing, editing, and producing the font files, and why do you use it?

I use FontLab Studio because it’s been the dominant type design tool in Windows for almost two decades. On a Mac there are several other viable options but in Windows, if you want to create interpolated typefaces, it’s the only way to go.

What prior font software did you use, before the tools you currently use?

I used Fontographer but then stopped using it because it hadn’t been updated for close to a decade. I miss the vector drawing in that one but without interpolation, it’s a no-go.

When you started out as a type designer, who or what motivated you to get into type design, and why?

It was the emergence of type design tools. I was making fonts as soon as I got my first computer, a TRS-80 in the early 80s. But there was only so much you could do with those old bitmap editors. The urge was still there but dormant until I got my hands on Fontographer in 1996.

Larabie calls Conthrax “a techno typeface that’s designed to hide in the background” and he strived to make it look technological without being loud and flashy.

The average person who looks at your type catalog might see a strong science fiction influence. How has sci-fi shaped your typographic tastes, and the type designs you make?

When I started in the late 1990s that category was underserved. You’d see that style in logo designs but not much as typefaces. I think now, techno is considered a legitimate category but not long ago, that style of type was passed off as Microgramma or Bank Gothic clones. I do love sci-fi and video games and that’s definitely an influence. The choice of going square is often an attempt to make type that harmonizes with our environment. We live in a high-tech, rectilinear world. When I started seeing my techno fonts used on consumer electronics, it guided me more towards those sorts of projects.

Typography has a prominent place in many science fiction comic books, films, and cartoons. What movies or comic books get the typography right, in your opinion, and why?

Sci-fi type like in Robocop (1988), Star Trek the Next Generation (STNG), or Demolition Man were amped up versions of popular type styles in the times they were made. The STNG typeface feels like a late 1980s software company logo—perfect for the times. Sci-fi type often fails when it regurgitates old sci-fi ideas. We’ve seen decades of the Blade Runner line gap trick. It was a stark vision of the future in 1982 but maybe we should be extrapolating the visuals of today to develop new visions of the future.

Something that constantly annoys me is the use of Bank Gothic to imply “futuristic.” Bank Gothic was designed in 1930 and was based on a popular sign painting style from around 1900. It was the kind of thing you’d see on rail cars, gravestones, stock certificates etc. When I see it, it looks very old-fashioned to me so it’s a bit like seeing a Model-T Ford in a sci-fi future. Famous movie examples: Moon, Terra Nova, Edge of Tomorrow, Battlestar Galactica, Hunger Games, Falling Skies, Jumper and several Stargates. I think Bank Gothic is often chosen because it’s a square font that a lot of people already have on their computer. It’s not a bad font by any means but it’s very American, circa 1900 to me.

  When it comes to your process, do you begin working directly on paper during the initial design phases, or do you go right to the computer, and what benefit does that method of working provide?

I usually don’t use paper at all. I jot down notes as I’m working such as sidebearing numbers and accent offsets. I feel like the design of each glyph should be as open as possible so they can be formed by their neighbors. If I decide what glyphs are going to look like ahead of time, I can paint myself into a corner. A far more useful visual aid is to keep a reference photo on my desktop wallpaper or pinned to my cork board—usually not of anything typographical but more of a thematic image. For one job, I needed to create a tough, military looking typeface so I pinned a picture of a Humvee to my board. To me, that’s more useful than sketching out the alphabet. Even if I don’t use visual reference, there’s some kind of doctrine I can use to help me make decisions. Otherwise, I tend to smooth the edges down until the typeface has no character.

You offer a lot of free fonts, as well as fonts that cost money. Why so many fonts for free?

It’s promotional. Those free font sites get so much traffic. I’ve had over 60 million downloads from DaFont alone. The free fonts can lead to sales of web, app and eBook licenses or other weights like heavy or ultra-light.

What are your best-selling paid fonts?

Korataki is a techno font commissioned for the Mass Effect game series that’s always done really well. Meloriac is mixed case, extremely bold geometric sans which has been a steady seller. Conthrax is a more recent success. It’s a squarish, soft, ultramodern deliberately sedate.

What are your most frequently downloaded free fonts?

Coolvetica. It’s downloaded almost twice as much as the next one down the list. Then there’s Steelfish. That was a bit of a dud until I spruced it up a few years ago. I’ve been constantly going over the old ones and freshening them up or rebuilding from scratch. Then Budmo, Neuropol and Pricedown.

The Budmo typeface, influenced by marquee signs.

What type designers, foundries, or visual culture do you look at for inspiration these days, and why do you look at that work?

I spend a lot of time on Pinterest. I try to avoid looking at design blogs, or anything tagged as typography. I feel like it’s a bit like visual dieting. It’s not just what I look at, it’s what I don’t look at. And more than ever, as a species, we’re all feeding from the same visual trough. An example of a recent tangent was diving deep into the world of reel-to-reel tape decks and obsolete audio cassette formats, strange auto-reverse mechanisms. If you don’t swerve, you’ll end up making the same typeface someone else already made.

In addition to offering your fonts through your own site, they can be found at fonts.com as well as Fontspring and other sites. What advice would you have for the budding type designer, who wants to get their fonts picked up by those distributors?

When you’re developing your typeface, you should try to imagine the kind of customer that’s going to purchase it. Give it some kind of reason to exist. It’s not enough to make an attractive or interesting typeface. It’s fine if you want to get experimental but those sites aren’t the place for that sort of thing. They’re like department stores rather than galleries. For example, if you’re making a font that looks like neon lights, you can look at what’s available and think about the kind of customer who might need one. What kind of projects would they use it for? Is there something missing in the current selection of neon light fonts?

Korataki was commissioned by Bioware for the Mass Effect game series.

Some of your influences, such as the TRS-80 and 1980s pop culture, are also found in Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One, which Steven Spielberg has made into a feature film. You’ve got such a deep catalog of future-forward and sci-fi fonts. Leading up to Ready Player One’s release, if we see a 1980s renaissance—and especially one with sci-fi and gaming influences from that era—what new creations can we expect to see from Typodermic Fonts?

I think the console games of the 1980s and 1990s have been well fetishized—the aesthetic is well known. Younger generations have developed a visual style based on that type of look but it’s based on a relatively narrow view on games in the 1980s. There’s an aspect of gaming that’s been largely ignored and is in danger of being lost forever: microcomputers. While some people were playing Atari and Nintendo in the living room, the rest of us were at desks, patiently waiting for games to load from cassettes. Those types of games haven’t been popular with collectors and they’re often ignored. Cassettes and floppy disks fail—manuals and packaging get thrown in the trash. Some of the Japanese microcomputers like MSX, NEC PC Series, X-1, FM-7 had specific technical limitations that created their own unique visual style. A lot of the console game franchises we know and love started off on these systems before people played them on their living room game consoles. Many microcomputer games that were released in this era will never be recovered. A few years ago I made Rukyltronic which was a tribute to 1980s UK microcomputers like Beeb and the Speccy. That’s the kind of thing I’ve got my eye out for and it’ll inevitably make its way into my upcoming typeface releases.

Where do you see type design heading in the future?

Typography has a fashion cycle so you’ll see the same kinds of typefaces come and go. But when they cycle back each time, new ideas will be applied and they’ll required upgrading as user expectations keep getting higher. Things like optical scaling which will compensate for the environment. What makes a typeface perform better in small print on a smartwatch is different from what works best on a billboard and it’s not just the weight. In the 1990s, a basic character set with a few accents and stock mathematical symbols was the norm. Typefaces rarely came with more than regular, bold and italics. Now we expect a weight range, more language coverage, cohesive symbols and OpenType features galore. Also, new font technology will allow us to finally produce convincing handwriting. I think some of the innovations required to make Arabic writing work properly will provide us with some interesting tools. Once type designers have access to these tools, who knows what we’ll come up with?

Edited from a series of online and email interviews. Captions for Neuropol, as well as Toxigenesis type design process provided by Raymond Larabie. Check out Typodermic Fonts online and follow Larabie on Twitter and Instagram.

  The post Typodermic’s Raymond Larabie Talks Type, Technology & Science Fiction appeared first on HOW Design.

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Typodermic’s Raymond Larabie Talks Type, Technology & Science Fiction

[Call for Entries: The International Design Awards]

Raymond Larabie, known for creating ubiquitous futuristic and sci-fi fonts, has been involved with type since he “was about five years old” and was using type at that early age as well. His experience with typography, especially when it came to the hands-on-use of Letraset, helped him understand how typefaces looked, and how typography worked. By the mid-1980s he edited fonts and made his own fonts on his first computer, doing everything on a TRS-80 in bitmap. He eventually graduated to the Commodore Amiga.

Neuropol was created in 1997 and was used for the logo for the Torino Olympics in 2006. It’s been updated and expanded a lot over the years and also comes in a more buttoned up X style. The truncated arms were inspired by a malfunctioning vectorbeam screen on an old Tempest arcade machine.

Larabie earned a Classical Animation Diploma at Sheridan College in Oakville, and went on to work as an art director in the video game business working on games for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and Super NES (SNES), as well as the Playstation and Playstation 2. During that time, he maintained his love for type and type design, and made free fonts, releasing them on the Ray Larabie Freeware Typeface of the Week website. This soon became Larabie Fonts. In 2001, he started a commercial font venture, and quit his job two years later to work on fonts full-time.

Influenced by Letraset at age five, Larabie says his own Letraset sheets got “used up decades ago,” in the mid-1980s. “I wonder if younger readers realize that fonts were once something that you’d buy and they would get used up. These are replacement copies of catalogs because I wore the originals to shreds. I don’t know why I was so obsessed with this stuff as a kid.” Photo by Raymond Larabie

Inspired by the Pinto Flare typeface, Larabie created his own groovy version called Pricedown. You might also recognize it from Grand Theft Auto‘s wordmark. “I worked for Rockstar at the time but they weren’t aware that they were using a font which was created by one of their employees before the company existed.”

Larabie moved to Japan in 2008, where he operates Typodermic Fonts. Larabie provided a behind the scenes look at his design process for HOW readers, and answered questions about his work and his influences.

How Raymond Works

Step 1

“When starting a new typeface, my first step is to draw a few heavy sample characters to establish dimensions and sidebearings.”

Step 2

“Once I’ve got a few sample characters for the heaviest weight, I add a weight axis and design a light version of those characters. This way I can test interpolation, alter the x-height, sidebearings and width, then note the scale percentages—afterwards, I delete the light test characters. I’m using a uniform line width since this will be an interpolation target which will be thrown away later. I usually use an interpolation of between 10 to 20% of the heaviest weight as my extra-light so it retains some of flavor of the heavy weight.”

Step 3

“One by one, I add completed heavy characters, making sure each one harmonizes with the existing characters. I don’t draw them in alphabetical order but I try not to leave the hard letters like a and e for last. The interplay between f,r,t,z is particularly difficult so they should be drawn all at the same time to make sure they work together. There’s no separate spacing phase—I’m adjusting and thoroughly testing the spacing for each character as I go.”

Step 4

“Next I create composite accented characters and finish the rest of the character set. I use a set of reduced height accents for the capital letters and more generous ones for the lowercase.”

Step 5

“After lots of testing and minor adjustments, I’ll create kerning classes and create all the kerning pairs. It’s important to spend a lot of time setting up the kerning classes. Not only does it make the kerning process much faster but it reduces the possibility of error and omission.”

Step 6

“Now it’s time to create the light interpolation weight. I’ll use the notes I made earlier to make everything narrower, decrease the x-height and pad the sidebearings. I’ll also create a quick, disposable outline version to use as a guide in the background.”

Step 7

“Next I’ll complete all the light characters. I need to adjust the sidebearings on thin characters like lowercase L, I, 1 etc. The accents no longer line up so they all need adjustment. The kerning will need to be done all over again. Some pairs won’t need adjusting but they’ll all need to be checked.”

Step 8

“Next, I experiment with the interpolation and make adjustments to refine the middle weights—it’s a bit like pulling strings. You can see how I need to cut away a piece of the Q so the tail goes through only on the lighter weights. This stage can involve a lot of manual cleanup and vector surgery. Now I decide which weights I’m going to export. Then I fill in the style names, do some autohinting, more testing, more adjustments and I’m done.”

Q&A with Raymond

Q. What inspired you to create your own type design foundry?

I like to call it a font company. Foundry makes it sound like I work with molten metal.

What’s behind the name? What does Typodermic mean, and why did you go with that name?

During the indie font gold rush near the turn of the millennium, font puns were in short supply so I jumped at that one as soon as I thought of it. I used it as a font name first and later a company name. “For font junkies” is my slogan but I thought of that much later.

What software do you use for finalizing, editing, and producing the font files, and why do you use it?

I use FontLab Studio because it’s been the dominant type design tool in Windows for almost two decades. On a Mac there are several other viable options but in Windows, if you want to create interpolated typefaces, it’s the only way to go.

What prior font software did you use, before the tools you currently use?

I used Fontographer but then stopped using it because it hadn’t been updated for close to a decade. I miss the vector drawing in that one but without interpolation, it’s a no-go.

When you started out as a type designer, who or what motivated you to get into type design, and why?

It was the emergence of type design tools. I was making fonts as soon as I got my first computer, a TRS-80 in the early 80s. But there was only so much you could do with those old bitmap editors. The urge was still there but dormant until I got my hands on Fontographer in 1996.

Larabie calls Conthrax “a techno typeface that’s designed to hide in the background” and he strived to make it look technological without being loud and flashy.

The average person who looks at your type catalog might see a strong science fiction influence. How has sci-fi shaped your typographic tastes, and the type designs you make?

When I started in the late 1990s that category was underserved. You’d see that style in logo designs but not much as typefaces. I think now, techno is considered a legitimate category but not long ago, that style of type was passed off as Microgramma or Bank Gothic clones. I do love sci-fi and video games and that’s definitely an influence. The choice of going square is often an attempt to make type that harmonizes with our environment. We live in a high-tech, rectilinear world. When I started seeing my techno fonts used on consumer electronics, it guided me more towards those sorts of projects.

Typography has a prominent place in many science fiction comic books, films, and cartoons. What movies or comic books get the typography right, in your opinion, and why?

Sci-fi type like in Robocop (1988), Star Trek the Next Generation (STNG), or Demolition Man were amped up versions of popular type styles in the times they were made. The STNG typeface feels like a late 1980s software company logo—perfect for the times. Sci-fi type often fails when it regurgitates old sci-fi ideas. We’ve seen decades of the Blade Runner line gap trick. It was a stark vision of the future in 1982 but maybe we should be extrapolating the visuals of today to develop new visions of the future.

Something that constantly annoys me is the use of Bank Gothic to imply “futuristic.” Bank Gothic was designed in 1930 and was based on a popular sign painting style from around 1900. It was the kind of thing you’d see on rail cars, gravestones, stock certificates etc. When I see it, it looks very old-fashioned to me so it’s a bit like seeing a Model-T Ford in a sci-fi future. Famous movie examples: Moon, Terra Nova, Edge of Tomorrow, Battlestar Galactica, Hunger Games, Falling Skies, Jumper and several Stargates. I think Bank Gothic is often chosen because it’s a square font that a lot of people already have on their computer. It’s not a bad font by any means but it’s very American, circa 1900 to me.

  When it comes to your process, do you begin working directly on paper during the initial design phases, or do you go right to the computer, and what benefit does that method of working provide?

I usually don’t use paper at all. I jot down notes as I’m working such as sidebearing numbers and accent offsets. I feel like the design of each glyph should be as open as possible so they can be formed by their neighbors. If I decide what glyphs are going to look like ahead of time, I can paint myself into a corner. A far more useful visual aid is to keep a reference photo on my desktop wallpaper or pinned to my cork board—usually not of anything typographical but more of a thematic image. For one job, I needed to create a tough, military looking typeface so I pinned a picture of a Humvee to my board. To me, that’s more useful than sketching out the alphabet. Even if I don’t use visual reference, there’s some kind of doctrine I can use to help me make decisions. Otherwise, I tend to smooth the edges down until the typeface has no character.

You offer a lot of free fonts, as well as fonts that cost money. Why so many fonts for free?

It’s promotional. Those free font sites get so much traffic. I’ve had over 60 million downloads from DaFont alone. The free fonts can lead to sales of web, app and eBook licenses or other weights like heavy or ultra-light.

What are your best-selling paid fonts?

Korataki is a techno font commissioned for the Mass Effect game series that’s always done really well. Meloriac is mixed case, extremely bold geometric sans which has been a steady seller. Conthrax is a more recent success. It’s a squarish, soft, ultramodern deliberately sedate.

What are your most frequently downloaded free fonts?

Coolvetica. It’s downloaded almost twice as much as the next one down the list. Then there’s Steelfish. That was a bit of a dud until I spruced it up a few years ago. I’ve been constantly going over the old ones and freshening them up or rebuilding from scratch. Then Budmo, Neuropol and Pricedown.

The Budmo typeface, influenced by marquee signs.

What type designers, foundries, or visual culture do you look at for inspiration these days, and why do you look at that work?

I spend a lot of time on Pinterest. I try to avoid looking at design blogs, or anything tagged as typography. I feel like it’s a bit like visual dieting. It’s not just what I look at, it’s what I don’t look at. And more than ever, as a species, we’re all feeding from the same visual trough. An example of a recent tangent was diving deep into the world of reel-to-reel tape decks and obsolete audio cassette formats, strange auto-reverse mechanisms. If you don’t swerve, you’ll end up making the same typeface someone else already made.

In addition to offering your fonts through your own site, they can be found at fonts.com as well as Fontspring and other sites. What advice would you have for the budding type designer, who wants to get their fonts picked up by those distributors?

When you’re developing your typeface, you should try to imagine the kind of customer that’s going to purchase it. Give it some kind of reason to exist. It’s not enough to make an attractive or interesting typeface. It’s fine if you want to get experimental but those sites aren’t the place for that sort of thing. They’re like department stores rather than galleries. For example, if you’re making a font that looks like neon lights, you can look at what’s available and think about the kind of customer who might need one. What kind of projects would they use it for? Is there something missing in the current selection of neon light fonts?

Korataki was commissioned by Bioware for the Mass Effect game series.

Some of your influences, such as the TRS-80 and 1980s pop culture, are also found in Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One, which Steven Spielberg has made into a feature film. You’ve got such a deep catalog of future-forward and sci-fi fonts. Leading up to Ready Player One’s release, if we see a 1980s renaissance—and especially one with sci-fi and gaming influences from that era—what new creations can we expect to see from Typodermic Fonts?

I think the console games of the 1980s and 1990s have been well fetishized—the aesthetic is well known. Younger generations have developed a visual style based on that type of look but it’s based on a relatively narrow view on games in the 1980s. There’s an aspect of gaming that’s been largely ignored and is in danger of being lost forever: microcomputers. While some people were playing Atari and Nintendo in the living room, the rest of us were at desks, patiently waiting for games to load from cassettes. Those types of games haven’t been popular with collectors and they’re often ignored. Cassettes and floppy disks fail—manuals and packaging get thrown in the trash. Some of the Japanese microcomputers like MSX, NEC PC Series, X-1, FM-7 had specific technical limitations that created their own unique visual style. A lot of the console game franchises we know and love started off on these systems before people played them on their living room game consoles. Many microcomputer games that were released in this era will never be recovered. A few years ago I made Rukyltronic which was a tribute to 1980s UK microcomputers like Beeb and the Speccy. That’s the kind of thing I’ve got my eye out for and it’ll inevitably make its way into my upcoming typeface releases.

Where do you see type design heading in the future?

Typography has a fashion cycle so you’ll see the same kinds of typefaces come and go. But when they cycle back each time, new ideas will be applied and they’ll required upgrading as user expectations keep getting higher. Things like optical scaling which will compensate for the environment. What makes a typeface perform better in small print on a smartwatch is different from what works best on a billboard and it’s not just the weight. In the 1990s, a basic character set with a few accents and stock mathematical symbols was the norm. Typefaces rarely came with more than regular, bold and italics. Now we expect a weight range, more language coverage, cohesive symbols and OpenType features galore. Also, new font technology will allow us to finally produce convincing handwriting. I think some of the innovations required to make Arabic writing work properly will provide us with some interesting tools. Once type designers have access to these tools, who knows what we’ll come up with?

Edited from a series of online and email interviews. Captions for Neuropol, as well as Toxigenesis type design process provided by Raymond Larabie. Check out Typodermic Fonts online and follow Larabie on Twitter and Instagram.

  The post Typodermic’s Raymond Larabie Talks Type, Technology & Science Fiction appeared first on HOW Design.

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