#except for the people who have good corporate jobs how do they get those and why have I submit over a thousand apps within the last year

[clockworkbibliophile]

lord I am so exhausted of applying to dozens of jobs every week without getting a single response other than your application wasn’t selected. my current job is wrecking me and I am so burnt out and just want a job that pays well and doesn’t make me want to die 24/7. im at my wits end like who do I need to pay to make my resume/linkedin stand out because how do people hear back from jobs??? what am I doing wrong

[tanoraqui]

Dungeon Meshi Liveblog: Let's Eat!

(That is, let's live, want, connect... oh, you know what I mean by now)

I like how Yaad and the other living villagers can casually talk with the ghosts, because for all intents and purposes they were also ghosts... In fact, those who stayed and spent centuries going through the patterns of life even though all true meaning had been lost long ago were MORE "ghosts" than those who lost their corporeal forms because they wanted to escape so badly that they went wandering... That's so fuckin' good. I wanna eat this writing.

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Kabru just randomly walking out of the bushes the second Laios starts considering politics...love him. He was summoned. His PR spidey senses were going off.

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look at my boy, establishing his own authority.

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Lol this was me when we moved house last month, and my job was to just stand in the new living room and tell people where to put which box or piece of furniture. It's an important job in a task with a lot of people!

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FUCK YEAH, THAT'S MY MAN! HE LOOKS GREAT!

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fucking love the trope of "one savvy friend in the crowd who deliberately gets a supportive chant going." Of course it's Kabru.

Though it's important to note that the first thing someone called was, "The demon-eater's here!", and there was muttering while no one was entirely sure if that was a good thing or not... Kabru didn't start the rumble of the crowd; the rumble of the crowd is unavoidable, and you have to be aware of that. Laios has always been aware of that, he's just never known what to do about it, and so tried to avoid it. But he's not avoiding it anymore - so Kabru started the hype of the crowd.

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They're both right! In order to eat, you need to kill! A memento of a meal IS a spoil of war!

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They're unhappy bros... /laughing

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Shown: man desperately reassuring himself, and psyching himself up to eat this stupid dragon meat

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DADCHUCK. Istg my father has said the same thing to me.

p.s. oh thank god he's fully dressed again. it was indecent.

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Marcille is so resigned to this, and so...determined to see it as her own choice. "We all agreed", "I've got to go" - and I'm sure she does see it as her own choice, in a way, because this is how the world has always worked and she knows that. She knew that going in. Those who do ancient magic are arrested by the Elves of the West, that's just the "natural" consequence. She might've gotten away with it if she'd gone undiscovered, or if she'd stayed in the dungeon forever, but she didn't - she chose to pursue her craft, to save Falin, and to do everything after that, too, and so she implicitly chose the consequence with it. If it's unfair, well, thinking that changes nothing, so it's better not to think it.

Until Laios is like, "Actually, I might have political power now? And I'm SO goddamn tired of myself and people I love being punished just for being different, and interested in unconventional things. Let's try something."

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WELL-FUCKING-PLAYED! GET THEIR ASSES, LAIOS! It's especially great because I'm pretty sure he knows the answers to all of this by now? Power move!

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Is she sitting there completely nude except for jewelry and a short robe. Icons only, honestly. Though "we have the luxury of time" feels like so much of a threat from an elf.

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Hey, you did objectively defeat him! Okay arguably the Lion did but Laios did it first, he just also then talked to him, and got grabbed by friendly vine-tentacles. You didn't kill him, but that's not what Delgal asked for anyway!

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thinking about that post that observed that Thistle's driving madness was specifically getting Delgal home for dinner, to eat all together as a family again, and he wakes up to the sound of the people of the Golden Kingdom eagerly inviting the (new) king to eat, and him responding...crying... What is lost is lost, but life will go on.

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The moment when a character decides to lie to another character for their own good is always so compelling. The little moral quandary microcosm.

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So Yaad did know something of what passed between Delgal and Thistle, that drove Thistle down the path to dark magic. He know what it was his grandfather blamed himself for.

This is SUCH A GOOD AND QUIET-SAD DEATH SCENE, but as a consummate fan of 'actually, living is much much harder than dying, and much more interesting too', I do like to think Thistle lives and has to...figure out what to do with his life. And that 'what to do with his life' ends up including ancient magic mad science with Marcille.

...But honestly, even though that'd be fun for me, it seems almost cruel to Thistle. He's been alive for so long. Those he loved most are gone. He held the demon back from the surface, trapped in those books, for so long, even if it was in no way whatsoever with the good of the world in mind. If anyone deserves this peaceful death in (what he thinks are) his brother's forgiving arms, it's him.

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Unfortunately, my love, as has been ceaselessly proven in this story: that's life.

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Marcille has caught onto one of the major themes! However, this story still isn't in favor of afternoon special Moral of the Story - not of letting the characters wrap things up with a bow, at least. You just go on living and wanting and learning about and connecting with and killing new things, forever! That's how it goes! You never know everything and you're always a little bit starving!

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I really love this grumpy old man, and I want him to stick around and be one of Laios's advisors. He's an old gnome, he'll die as soon as an average tallman would anyway.

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This is a) very touching coming from Mithrun, who is only just regaining his own will to live, and b) almost tautalogical in this story EXCEPT that it is also clear that merely "wanting" doesn't mean you get to continue to live, it only means that you're alive in this moment - you also need to want to live MORE than whatever's trying to kill you wants to live.

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GREAT VISUALS!

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And then it's so small, so small that she could leave it behind entirely but Falin is still so kind that she picks it up anyway! Falin who looks at everyone and everything - ghosts and brothers and mad mages and dead dragons, the latter of whom were both violently oppressing her soul - and thinkgs "I gotta help." She's so good!

I'm really going to need to write a like 2k post-canon character study about how Falin has part of the spirit of a dragon in her chest which unfurls while she travels abroad and curls up again and hides when she's home with Marcille and especially with Laios, and how it's a metaphor for her own independence but also literally there is the spirit of a dragon. At the end of it she figures out how to nurture and commune with the dragon enough to have her own flight-capable wings.

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THIS IS SO FUCKING COOL-LOOKING. AUTOPHAGIC SELF-CREATION FOR THE FUCKING WIN!!

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YYEEEAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

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fuck it, have a collage, because this bitch-ass website is about to cut off my photos-per-post. It can't HANDLE the sheet joy of Falin resurrection reunion hugs!!

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so many people love her, or at least are really emotionally invested in this now!! /sobs

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Lmaoooo

Laios: wracked with food poisoning because he ate raw walking mushroom Falin: great distress! Marcille: trying very hard to help, also thinking sooo hard that He Is An Idiot. [btw I love how it looks like she takes up holding her hair back with a band] Kabru: having his weekly moment, as he has for the past many years and will continue to have until he dies, of wondering if he shouldn't really have just killed this guy rather than let him become king

Kabru definitely wrote this whole ending narration btw. This is his press release from like 40 years in the future. And those kids! An orc kid and a kobold kid, and zooming out to show kids of other races, all playing together and going to lunch together!!

And then they all lived, and hungered and ate and killed and wanted and sought understanding and connected with one another and were part of the great circle of life, as happily ever after as one can get.

This story truly was delicious...in dungeon!

[weebsinstash]

(bnha/mha spoilers) i've still got attachments to the characters and still think of certain concepts and stuff for them and all that but like, are any of you feeling like BNHA is just going the exact same route as Naruto did where they spent the entire series talking about how cool heroes/ninjas are, then started discussing "but wait, not everything is as it seems! There's evil afoot, and not just any evil, SOCIALLY SYSTEMIC evil!" and then just completely shelved those discussions so the Hero could punch the Bad Guy in the face and then the series ends with everything being fundamentally exactly the same if not in some ways objectively worse

Like im sorry but looking at things thematically, if you told me Endeavor got off completely scott-free and his family still talks to him and he never even went to prison and still gets to keep his job as hero, but Shigaraki who was failed by society and literally poached and groomed as a child to become a villain while still forming bonds with his found family of other abused people and minorities is just KILLED AND DIES SMILING, I would say something like "oh is Horikoshi trying to make satirical commentary on how the broken corrupt system will fight like hell to uphold itself and this is actually metaphorical?" but nah it's just legitimately presented as a good thing and a good outcome

Genuinely? The way the series is ending is making me agree with Overhaul. If you think of Heroes and Quirks as a service or product, then tools can be invented to serve those same purposes. The way that Quirks developed in the universe of MHA is that they became used almost exclusively for combat based purposes, and to even use your quirk, which is also a part of your body or identity, you need special permissions and a license which I bet you costs money to apply for, so now you have the government regulating integral parts of people's identities, and also Quirks that change people's appearances are discriminated against and there aren't really any laws protecting against that

In a way, Overhaul was and still is entirely justified for thinking Quirks should be disposed of because the series is literally ending showing that Quirks are just being used to uphold government and corporate interests rather than actually do what's right? Quirks are literally increasing the severity with which humans can harm each other to the point it completely overshadows the good? Oh yeah I'm really glad we have a hero with super speed to help stop robberies, meanwhile the government has like a secret agent who is creating like nuke strikes on foreign countries, like... the good that Heroes can do? Can be easily done by humanity with tools

Like the way BNHA is ending is in my opinion, extremely dark? Deku was kind of just a clueless foot soldier upholding the dark government of his country and now All Might has no powers, Deku is gonna be Quirkless again, and everything is exactly the same? You could argue the only "win" that's coming out of the ending is that AFO is dead, but like.... someone with AFOs exact same powers could just be born again? Except maybe this time he can be, like, a government employee or a cop or something to really fit in with the core themes of the series :)

[raisedbythetv89]

Anyone who says "Rory should have married Logan" or that Emily and Richard were a good influence on Rory or that they weren't "that bad" of parents to Lorelai just DO NOT GET IT and "it" being literally the entire messaging of the whole show.

Rory started at chilton when Lorelai left (literally Rory had her birthday party in ep 6 and her first day of chilton is ep 2)

They have the exact same name, look the same and it's said countless times that Rory is just like her mother. So, Rory is picking up in Lorelai's "correct life path" (according to Richard and Emily) exactly where Lorelai left off when she had her and left home, continuing at the "good schools" going to an ivy league college, has a coming out party, joins the D.A.R. etc. Rory has the life Lorelai's parents always wanted for Lorelai AND YET!!!

Rory still doesn't marry "her christopher" aka Logan, but is having his baby and is choosing to be a single mom while Jess is her endgame because Luke is Lorelai's endgame and Jess is Luke and Rory is Lorelai.

Literally the ENTIRE POINT of the show is that everything that Emily and Richard were so worked up about and prioritized all of Lorelai's life about her life choices and how she "threw her life away" because she got pregnant, moved out and became apart of the working class and didn't go to any ivy league college and marry Christopher do not matter and the idea that she "threw her life away" and wasted her potential is absolute bullshit. Because Rory does all the things Lorelai didn't get to do and the results were IDENTICAL except Rory wasn't a teen mom and she would likely continue to live at home with Lorelai and Luke when her baby is first born breaking the those specific Lorelai/Emily cycles because Lorelai did her best to meet her daughter's emotional needs and therefore was able to have a infinitely better relationship with her and Rory is always willing to accept her help and support because it doesn't come at the emotional cost that Lorelai getting help from her parents took because they are literally emotionally abusive and controlling parents - they aren't just bad parents they are abusive (that's a whole other post but there are people who are just human and make mistakes like most of the other characters in the show and then their are abusive ones and Emily especially but also Richard emotionally abuse their daughter even though they help with money and aren't completely horrible 100% of the time that doesn't make them not abusive and while that is never explicitly stated we see and hear how horrible all of the other chilton parents and Logan's circle of friends parents are to their kids demonstrating just how horrible parents in Emily and Richards social circle truly are and it has nothing to do with Lorelai "being difficult or stubborn" as Emily tries to claim but I digress...)

That point of, what Emily and Richard prioritized their entire lives is all bullshit, is literally driven home by Emily's speech at the end of AYITL that "all of this is bullshit!" Emily acknowledges - once Richard is gone and therefore no longer fits into her society like she used to as a wife and married woman - that playing along with all of the societal norms and her ultra-wealthy social circle is SOUL SUCKING and bullshit! She is SO HAPPY to have a home deed with HER NAME ON IT. She has an interested suitor but it's clear she never plans to marry him and she gets a job at a museum as a tour guide for crying out loud!! The old Emily would be horrified by that - she's literally making choices so similar to Lorelai's by the end showing Lorelai's choices WERE THE RIGHT ONES. Moving away from an environment that hurt you and misunderstood and abused you and fighting and working your ass off to build a life that's yours. Even building a loving community with her housekeepers family that moves in with her!!!

All of Luke's "rantings" about the wealthy and corporate greed, owning and operating a diner even though he's shown to have the cooking skills and know-how to do "more". Taking something he inherited from his father but making it his own by turning it into a diner instead of keeping it a hardware store. Whereas by the end of AYITL Christopher is working within his family's business, staying on the path his parents wanted for him and it's the same with Logan - marrying the woman his parents want him to marry and working for his father - The show tells and shows us over and over again, not just doing what society tells you you should do with your life but knowing yourself well enough to decide for yourself and taking the time to find out is what is best and you shouldn't let anyone else dictate that for you. The show is very pro "break out of the boxes society tries to shove you into"

There is a whole other convo to be had about privilege that comes with being white and thin and pretty and coming from money that more easily enables your ability to do so as well as Lorelai having a community in Stars Hollow that has always supported her which allowed her to leave home at 16 with a newborn and build a great life for herself because if she failed she wouldn't end up homeless because her support system and her parents provided a safety net so the message is very much only aimed at the characters within the show that have the ability to make your own way in life but that is what Rory and Lorelai do (Rory's really starts with rejecting Logan's marriage proposal when she graduates and taking a grueling, low paying campaign job instead of using any of her many connections to get her a more prestigious and stable position whereas before she was absolutely on the "conveyer belt" described by the "other daughter" of the wealthy family of Harvard alumni who helped Rory with all her college application questions, who chose not to go to college like her two other siblings) as well and Luke and Jess both make their own way and build a life that best suits their passions and skills. Which is why Luke/Lorelai and Jess/Rory are endgame because you can't have a relationship between someone who fits into their societal mold and one who broke out, it just doesn't work. Logan's affair with Rory shows he has the desire to break out of his mold but never has the strength to do so, just like Christopher which is why they could never truly keep up with the Gilmore Girls.

The show does have flaws in it's execution of this message because of internalized misogyny, white supremacy, and fatphobia that we are still struggling to get out of writers rooms to this day so don't think this post is me saying everything about the show or Rory and Lorelai is perfect because they absolutely are flawed characters who makes questionable decisions and mistakes but to me they are all very realistic of 2 pretty white women in the early 2000's dealing with all of the trauma that came from Richard and Emily's abuse and Rory being raised by a teen mom and a completely unreliable father for most of her childhood.

Anyway Team Jess, Team Luke and Team Rory receives entirely too much hate because of misogyny and her trauma is completely overlooked because she so rarely shows how much hurt she's endured in her young life and is carrying the weight of the world and her entire family's expectations and "legacy" on her young shoulders. Emily and Richard never being able to let go Lorelai getting pregnant and leaving home and SHOWING THAT/SAYING IT around Rory made her feel responsible for all the issues between Lorelai and her parents, her grandparents pain and disappointment and to "fix" all her mother's "mistakes" - her burn out/break down in AYITL makes COMPLETE sense and her choice to allow herself to be "just like her mom" by keeping her baby and being a single mom is the start of her shedding those burdens she's carried her entire life and letting her just be herself even if that looks a lot like her mother who her grandparents and everyone in their world has been telling her for decades is a failure and a disappointment. Rory has always tried to please her grandparents and having to tell her grandmother she's going to be a single mom is basically the worse thing she could do in Emily's eyes (at least the old Emily who knows how post AYITL might react because she's stopped caring and therefore stopped trying to be so controlling but her revelation might not be enough to counter news like that that hits a wound that she literally never even tried to heal). Radical self acceptance despite what society aka her grandparents and their world thinks is what is meant for both Lorelai and Rory and choosing Luke/Jess over Christopher/Logan is apart of that acceptance.

[littlemisstired]

something that has always fucked me up is the frankly terrifying exponential skill acceleration in the creative field. so many of the young artists I know now, even myself, are at a skill level that 25-30 years ago could have gotten them real jobs in animation or game design, even lauded as being top of their line of work, but are hardly even a blip on the radar in today’s industry where the skill ceiling is now miles above achievable for so many.

I look back at the kinds of art that was being made by the professional artists back in the 80s and 90s for comics and animation and some of it is downright amateurish compared to today’s work. It was roughshod, silly, scratchy, experimental. It wasn’t preoccupied with fitting into the bland Triple A standards or warping to fit what huge corporations expected, because those expectations simply didn’t exist yet in a world where video games and animated film and fantasy illustration were still in their infancy. The art in concept art felt so much more alive, more human. Nowadays I see people trying to get their feet in the door slaving for years trying to learn rendering techniques or portfolio tricks to even get their work in front of a recruiter, making stuff they don’t even care about just for the chance to be taken seriously. Strange how now more than even bigger studios are being ridiculed for their bland and uninteresting design/writing choices, where smaller studios with more creative control and more ready access to independent voices and visions are cranking out wildly popular, original titles left and right.

this sort of ended up longer than I expected, and rambling, but it’s something I’ve felt for so long as an artist who spent 15 years desperately trying to “get good enough” for a professional studio. The problem is that in the corporate capitalist hell we live in here in the US, “getting good enough” is almost never achievable, because those goalposts are always moving. You want to be a background artist? Well you need to learn how to do 3D modeling, texture mapping, physics simulation, how to use lighting in game engines. You want to be a character designer? You need to know rigging and clothing simulation and how to apply animation in X software. Also you need to do every style known to the world plus more, except in the end the studio will probably just ask you to photobash three dozen designs that all look the same anyway.

I understand there’s more to this than I’ve mentioned, that the world has changed in the 3 decades since the mid 90s, that there are millions of artists and only a few hundred thousand jobs in any creative field at any given time, that it’s reasonable to expect people to learn new things to better work as technology advances… but it seems so particularly crushing to artists, who oftentimes pour so much of their own heart and soul into what they do, and who are still expected to monetize, adapt, and distribute their skill like it’s some corporate tool and not a gift from evolution for us to record and express ourselves. Art and design are the building blocks for humans to understand and capture beauty and pain, joy and sorrow, and it’s disheartening to see that vulnerable creativity stripped away in favor of producing sterilized, corporate friendly “products”.

[t00nyah]

t00nyah explaining project moon without actually explaining project moon

after posting lcb trigger warning i wanted to do this

or

me explaining project moon in the shortest way possible except its goofy af bc im eepy and lazy but im in a desperately talkative mood (i post mostly about limbus company since it came out cmon)

what the fuck is projmoon:

project moon is the coolest ever indie game development team we love them; they've made three games so far, also have an unfinished novel, a...idk, just another novel that was initially a comic but im a hater (im sorry(not)), and another comic

they've been doing it for like 7 years almost and still have no idea what optimization is but its okay we love them

there's a lot of killing and just amoral guys in general who can and will kill thousands. its THE 'your meow meow killed thousands of people' 'and they looked good doing it!' universe. everyone is fucked up there guys. but UMMM thats kinda the appeal

so the games! we all here are gamerzzz!

LC

it all started 6 years ago, when lobotomy corporation released in early access and my gf was like hey look what i found

lobotomy corp is a game where you're a manager in a big company, L corp, and you have to get your guys, employees(lucky ones who got the job) to work with abnormalities(fucked up creatures) so they would generate enkephalin, a big energy resource

except your guys will probably die when you're already so attached to them so you just restart the day each time this happens

theres like a maaassive plot, it is the beginning of literally everything, like some stuff still haunts us in limbus company (looking at a particular individual) and there are more characters that you'll fucking love(sephirahs) and then learn their fucked up story (and then learn your fucked up story and not be happy about it)

ah yes while im on it theres no actual self incert in project moon games im sorry but every character IS a character

gameplay-wise you just have to organize your guys, give them equipment, assign them to a job, make them suffer and struggle to suppress abnormalities if they try to make a mess(kill everyone) and do hard tasks your besties make you do

LoR

later, in like 2018 i think, they almost immediately after full release of LC announced a sequel, library of ruina

library of ruina is a game that continues the story(duh) and i can't tell you much about it without spoiling lob corp too, but in this one you have to USE BRAIN like A LOT because its a STRATEGY CARD GAME

in this one you dont even have a character you play as, you just follow the characters' on their journey. but dw! you'll get your own customizable guys to adore here too!

basically in this game the characters from LC and your guys are called librarians and you have to greet guests of the library, that were specifically invited there and /tp-ed, basically fighting them. every battle has its own story and eventually it branches off into four arcs and oh gott i love library of ruina a'right you meet characters for like one story and then have to fight them knowing their issues and how life fucked them over enough to get there</3

gameplay-wise you build cool decks from cards of those you've killed for your guys, pick guys for fight and then pick cards. simple. i think. not so simple in game but i simplified it

there's also a lot of amazing lore drops, bc in LC we were kinda isolated and focused on the corporation, but in LoR? we get to see all kinda of people of The City, we learn about The City, we learn about factions and all, we get all the lore we missed by being stuck in that manager chair

LCB

okay and now we're here. limbus my fucking company.

limbus company was, again, announced almost immediately after LoR's full release(PM are CRAZY), and released february 27 of this year, and already has more story in word count than lor does or so i've heard...

limbus company is pm's first mobile game(but dw there is a steam release if you're more of a pc person or your phone will explode if you try to install it(and it will)) and their first...(behold) gacha game. yep. but no dont get scared it actually has the best gacha system ever known to men

they've also tried to make it enjoyable without getting into previous games but to me it doesnt feel right i dunno i feel like it's just not that cool without knowing the context and going insane screaming at carmen or connecting the dots, also like the events of LCB are all connected to LC and LoR, so ummm if you try to get into limbus without at least learning what the other games contain be ready i'll personally explode you

in this game you basically play as dante(they/them for the sake of mysteriousness of 'who TF they are') and you have 12 deranged guys named the sinners who are ALL BASED OFF FUCKING CLASSIC LITERATURE did you fucking know pm are fucking literacy nerds and cant have a game without book references without exploding??? well they are.

so the characters (IN CASE YOU'RE INTERESTED) are:

1. gregor (metamorphosis, franz kafka)

2. rodion (crime and punishment, fyodor dostoyevsky)

3. (emil) sinclair (demian, hermann hesse)

4. yi sang (the wings, yi sang (kim hae-gyeong))

5. ishmael (moby dick, herman melville)

6. heathcliff (wuthering heights, emily bronte)

7. don quixote (don quixote, miguel de cervantes)

8. hong lu (dream of the red chamber, cao xueqin)

9. ryoshu (hell screen, ryunosuke akutagawa)

10. meursault (the stranger, albert camus)

11. outis (the odyssey, homer)

12. faust (faust, johann wolfgang von goethe)

also don't forget dante is based on the divine comedy by dante alighieri!

also dante DOESNT FUCKING KNOW SHIT. faust seems to know all shit and never tell dante.

i mentioned it being a gacha game. so like. you dont pull characters. instead you pull the initial deranged guys' alternative versions where they end up on another job like cult leader or a terrorist idk

the best part? you dont necessarily have to get them from gacha in most cases, you can get special currency, ego shards, to get whatever you want separately. also pm added ideality that you get from unfortunate pulls that you can spend on the special identity from the banner. but tbh i think its way easier to get the shards needed than pull that much, not really worth it

gameplay-wise? well. you have to basically just choose your guys' identities(those alt versions, they use them in fights to be stronger), choose their skills, a little similar to ruina (except TBH lcb lets you fuck around and put it on auto until it doesnt really work out (please dont autoplay with r corp ishmael or at least check what they're doing you silly goop they might do friendly fire if you're stupid enough)). the game consists of cantos, chapters that tell you a separate story of a sinner(in the order i gave earlier, not everyone knows that), that have story-episodes(cool ones), story-and-fight-then-episodes(epic ones), and sometimes just-fight-episodes(who the fuck thought those are a good idea?). and in the end of a canto there's always a dungeon. honestly, first two cantos are easy enough to just learn basics yourself, im rambling at this point

there's also hellish grind options and paid stuff like battle pass with the coolest perks ever

also LoR and LCB have mili songs, which is fucking cool, they're such bangers. no no projmoon games' ost in general. just fuckign bangers my guys and i mean it.

well that was fun and games. like i mentioned theres also:

Distortion Detective

im such a fucking fan of this unfinished novel, im so upset they abandoned it </3 pm did say they're probably going to rework it as a game or smth later but in my opinion it just loses its charm if its not a novel

distortion detective ... i cant explain it without spoilers to the games but its basically about moses, the distortion detective, who solves distortions which are like uhhmmm... people turning into some funky shit(that expresses their feelings). and she has a parthner named ezra. they're both poor traumatized women. and stuff happens. thats all i can say without spoiling everything. you learn a lot about the distortion phenomenon from moses' perspective.

WonderLab

wonderlab is a comic made by artist mimi, that follows taii, rose and catt. its about another lobotomy corp branch that actually introduces us to the concept of abnormality aberrations (slightly similar but different abnormalities like we have a little red riding hooded mercenary's(do you remember me mentioning pm being literacy nerds?) team fortress blue team version or whatever) that is used in limbus quite a lot so we old people from LC can be like 'heehehehe this is like like snow white's apple's aberration, so funny, reminds me of good ol' days...'

Leviathan

my main enemy. initially it was a comic, but i think they had to stop working with the artist for some reason and continue it as a novel instead.

issue?

i didnt read it. im so sorry i failed you. but i cant. first vergilius, main character, is ugly AS FUCK and he's STUPID i hate his guts. BUT OH DEAR LORD HE APPEARS IN LIMBUS COMPANY AND I HATE HIM EVEN MORE. AND NOT JUST APPEARS, HE'S THE GUIDE OF THE BUS, HE'S KINDA ALWAYS THERE. I HATE HIS GUTS. oh hey lap-- charon, no, you're good, you're amazing, vroom-vroom, yes, right, you're so right.

i'm pretty sure it has A LOT of important context for some stuff in LCB but i just CAN'T MAKE MYSELF TOUCH IT. please read leviathan for me.

i'm sorry it turned into a looong ramble but here's t00nyah's awful brief guide to project moon. in case you want to know about world-building or the story in particular...i'm always here to dm me. please do. i really love telling people about project moon. there's just a lot to unpack.

edit. okay apparently it was easy to misinterpret my leviathan commentary so im putting this here for the sake of clearing the confusions for future!! tl;dr: i know it wasn't continued as a comic for REASONS, it's OBVIOUS!! and yes, leviathan is important, i just can't make myself read it therefore don't have enough knowledge to write about it(cool idea: write your own post about leviathan if you're seeing this and are enthusiastic about it! i just won't.), i still don't like vergilius, it's just a me-thing. DO read leviathan if you're interested</3

edit2. after thinking for a while, decided to add this just in case: i was given a summary of leviathan! well. it IS something. (opinion on vergilius hasn't changed much sorry not sorry, still a me-thing.) but yeah 👍 all good 👍 still not liking it much, mayhaps because i couldn't read it myself, but. it can be found here in the comment section.

[a-b-riddle]

Pen Pals Chapter One: Welcome to the Internet

I feel like most girls who claimed they loved world history either had a hot history teacher or a Percy Jackson obsession. Well, I'm not like most girls. I had both. I may have been failing math, but when I tell you I was passing history with flying colors...

It was 2009: I was a freshman in high school and at 14 years old, I was very impressionable. Full disclosure: I was not groomed. Well, by my teacher at least. My history teacher wasn't like that weird, over-friendly coach with the students. He was just hot. Very incredibly boring, but hot by my standards as a 14-year-old who up until that point had only kissed two boys, but read some very questionable fan-fiction. 

Our semester closed on the unit about World War II. It was the week of Christmas, we just finished our finals and we watched a movie I highly recommend called 'Pearl Harbor'.

That movie just kind of fueled my obsession with World War II. It's like those little kids who had a really nice nurse when they were sick and they grew up wanting to be nurses. I saw Ben Affleck in a WW 2 uniform and was fucking SET. 

Now don't get me wrong, I actually enjoyed it besides the hot actors. I loved the stories. I loved the heroes. Second Lieutenant Audie L. Murphy: The most decorated soldier of the war. He was credited for killing over 200 Germans. Corporal Desmond Doss was a medic, never picked up a weapon and saved 75 men by lowering them down from a freaking cliff. I cry every time I watch his interviews and if you want to know his full story watch Hacksaw Ridge. Then there was Private Steven Grant Rogers. Started out as an E-1 and then promoted to a O-3 (or a Captain) and was renamed  Captain America.

Just like how people think of Tom Brady when they think of the Super Bowl, I did the same thing when it came to Captain America and the war. Now, I don't want to say I idolized the man, but I did admire the hero.

My obsession made me major in History and later get a Master's in Conflict Management. Now, I was applying to one of the biggest companies in the nation: Stark Industries. Now, that was partly because I could not find a job anywhere and someone that I went to college with started working in HR and was able to get me an interview. It didn't have to do with anything pertaining to my degree, but it had been a while before I was able to find a job that paid this well. 

I felt like I was running my sponsor dry with his support and I had applied several times to multiple colleges in the city. I mean I had a freaking Master's degree with intentions of pursuing my Doctorate for crying out loud and the best I could do was be a personal assistant.

I was going to be a secretary. Nothing important, but the pay was more than exceptional. 

Stark Tower was intimidating to say the least. Over 90 floors and reflective glass windows. It hurt my neck to look directly up at it. 

When I walked into the building, security instructed me what floor to go to. When I got there, I was greeted with an empty desk. I waited several minutes downstairs before a strawberry blonde woman with cute freckles came down to greet me. "Hi, you must be the secretary applicant." She smiled. "I'm Pepper Potts. So you're resume here is quite impressive and Harrison in HR highly recommended you."

"Yes, I was so excited when he told me you had a position available."

"Usually, I would be doing the interview, but I'm afraid I have to head out on some other business, so if you want to take the elevator to floor 82, Mr. Stark will be waiting."

"Of course." I said holding a folder that contained all the documents he requested I brought in.

"Hello, Mr. Stark." I greeted.

"You must be Pepper's replacement."

"Oh," I said. "Is she not-"

"She's been made COO." He clarified. "She can't leave that easily."

"Oh, good." I said. "She seemed really sweet."

"To you, yes. To me, I can't do anything. Don't put your life in danger, don't challenge terrorists." He mocked. "She's no fun." He walked further into what I assumed was a common room of sorts. It gave no indication that he lived on that floor. There was a full bar and it looked more of a place he hosted parties. "So tell me a bit about yourself." He began to pour himself a drink. "Something that isn't on your resume."

"Um, well, I'm taking a course in French and Greek right now. Just online classes, nothing too time consuming. I prefer dogs over cats because I think that its important if you die, for your pet to at least be sad and I am the first one in my family to live in New York, that I know of. I'm the first girl to graduate with their Master's. I plan on eventually getting my Doctorate, but not for a while. I don't like hot coffee and I'm terrified of snakes."

"Who would actually prefer cats over dogs?"

"Pepper?" I asked to which he laughed, even though it wasn't that funny.

"I like you." He took a sip of his drink. "It's not liquor. Pepper has this rule that alcohol should only be consumed during certain times of the day."

"I think 9:30 on a Monday is acceptable. I was debating on getting Mimosas after the interview if it went well."

"And if it didn't?" He asked.

"I would say tequila, but I got food poisoning from the limes once."

"Really?" He asked.

"Yeah," I said. "I had about 15 limes and felt terrible the next day."

"I prefer a good scotch myself."

"I like anything that doesn't taste like alcohol. I'm really impressed that a bottle of wine can cost thousands of dollar, but I guarantee it can't be as delicious as a Moscow mule."

"I haven't had a Moscow mule in forever." He said. "They were my go-to in college."

"Where did you go to school?" His response was to point at a wall that was covered in awards and accomplishments. "You went to Andover?" I asked looking at his degree.

"Seven years." He said. "I really liked the science department."

"I've given a few guest lectures there. It's a lovely school."

"What was the topic of discussion?"

"The North African campaign during World War 2, but specifically the Battle of Ramree Island."

"History nerd. Nice." Mr. Stark replied sarcastically when the elevator door dinged. "Speaking of historical nerds."

If my legs could have physically turned into jelly at that moment they would. None other than Steve Rogers walked in with a blonde following dutifully behind. "Tony."

"Capscicle and the ice queen." He whispered too low for them to hear.

"Rogers, meet our new secretary." Tony introduced and started to head toward the elevator.

"It is such an honor, Captain Rogers." I said taking his outstretched hand.

"Please, call me Steve." He insisted. The blonde beside him remained quiet and eyed me up and down with a stoic expression.

"Not that I'm trying to cut you off, but I'll let you two old ladies reminisce on the glory days." Tony clicked the elevator door and waited until it dinged opened. "I have somewhere to be. Congratulations. You got the job. Blah. Blah. Blah. Monday at 9, don't be late." He pressed a button I couldn't see and the doors began to close. "Or do. I really don't care, but if you're late, bring coffee."

"He's..." I began, but couldn't quite pick the right word.

"Arrogant." Steve finished.

"I was going to say interesting." I said.

"So what 'glory days' was Stark referring to?"

"Oh. I gave a few lectures about a few battles at the University he went to. Nothing exciting."

"Well Mrs.-"

"It's just Miss." I said. That was stupid. Why did I say that? That was rude to cut him off like that. "Sorry." I apologized. Why was I apologizing?

"Well, Ma'am. It looks like we'll be seeing you Monday morning. If you're late Tony gets a triple shot of espresso and a disgusting amount of sugar in it."

"Being late isn't really my style. My mother always said if you're not early, you're late." Why was a quoting my zealot mother right now. Jesus, stop it.  Not like Jesus Jesus. You know what, never mind. "I think I can find my way out." I said.

The walk back home I felt my cheeks burn the entire time. I haven't even started and I'm already flustered. Jesus, get a grip.

Suddenly my phone vibrated in my pocket. It was him.

*So how did it go?*

*I got the job* I replied back.

*That's wonderful. I'm so proud of you* I couldn't deny the pride that swelled inside of me at his praise.

*Thank you, although I did make a complete ass out of myself*

*How so?*

*Well, my new boss introduced me to one of his partners and I felt like I made a fool of myself.* I typed. *Not partner in the sexual way, but someone he works with. He called Mrs. and I corrected him and said 'no it's just MIss' like it didn't even matter, he was just being polite. Then I quoted my mother. I was just flustered, but I start Monday.*

C didn't reply after that. We were supposed to have a date tonight so I'm sure he would just finish the conversation later. I had a caprese salad, but ate mostly the mozzarella. I showered, shaved and waited until I got a notification.

 *Sorry. Something came up. Regardless, I think you'll do great.* I smiled at his message, but was disappointment that he was cancelling our date tonight. Well the closest thing we came to date nights which usually ended in me being in an unsavory position.

Initially, C and I met on a chat forum in 2016. I was working on my senior seminar and had sort of an open ended question regarding the war. It was something along the lines of taking the notion that if a war on that scale were to happen in today's world in what ways would American citizens contribute to the war effort at home? Back in the 40s most companies like Ford made strictly military equipment. It was an honor to have a government contract whereas now it's more like any other business deal.

I received a lot of interesting responses, but a user named CR0876 replied that shifting the current American ideal of self-preservation to what we had before which was sacrificing for your country was the only way in which today's America could possibly aid in a war. I messaged CR0876 to further discuss the topic. 

He wrote me: All I am saying is we now live in a day and age where you have people who won't vaccinate their children simply because they choose not to. They don't have an issue with you vaccinating your kids, but not theirs. We eradicated some of the deadliest diseases that are still present in some third-world nations and you have entitled people who don't trust science to preserve the health and well-being of not only their children, but everyone they come in contact with. The reason that our life expectancy has shot up isn't because of ground breaking medical break throughs like chemotherapy, it is for preventative measures. Getting vaccinated. Getting checkups. Wearing sunscreen. Washing your hands after wiping your ass. 

A few minutes later he sent an apology for getting so riled up in his rant and I told him that no apology was needed and I completely agreed with him. From then on our friendship started to blossom. 

Most of our conversations had something to do involving the war, but then it got more personal. I felt comfortable with him. I talked about my time at college and what I was studying. We went from a few messages a week to communicating everyday. Eventually when graduation came around, I offered him a graduation ticket. I was a little disappointed to find out it was too far for him to travel. He asked for my mailing address. That he felt guilty for missing such a big event and he wanted to make it up to me. I was a little apprehensive. I mean, we were taught to never give your stranger your address, but I was an RA in a college dorm. I would be out into the real world soon and he wouldn't know my room number or what I looked like.

So I sent it.

A few weeks passed and I got a pair of beautiful pearl earrings with a card that read. A beautiful girl always needs a set of beautiful pearls. Congratulations on all of your hard work. -C

Four and a half years later and I still have that card. We still talk about the war. I recommend him movies, while he recommends books then we both point on the inconsistencies. It was stupid, but it was fun. Now, I just sort of tell him about my day to day life and he tells me small tidbits about his. It was earlier in 2020 when the pandemic hit that things started to get... well things just changed.

I had just moved to New York in early February to start teaching at a local college. I was going to start with May-mester classes, but then Covid hit and the world stopped. 

I had moved in with little to nothing. I had a few pieces of stuff for the kitchen and a bed. It wasn't much, but it was mine and I was damn proud of it.

My pride was short lived when I got the e-mail. In a panic, I sent him a message.

Hey can you talk?

Sure. What's up?

Is there anyway you can call me? I'm kind of in a bad place right now and I really don't have anyone else to talk to. I felt guilty as soon as I hit the send button. I'm not like going to hurt myself or anything I am just super stressed and if you have the time and energy, I just need to unload some stuff.

Seconds later my phone began to ring.

"What's wrong?" He asked. I took a deep breath. I can't believe this was the first time hearing his voice. It wasn't what I was expecting. I expected almost a pompous scholarly tone in his voice. But instead he was borderline on being batman. His voice was deep.

"They rescinded my offer." I took a deep breath. "I just spent all of my savings literally to move to this stupid freaking city and they told me over an e-mail 'we are sorry to inform you that your offer for employment has been rescinded until further notice due to the impending pandemic and the unforeseeable circumstances it holds. We deeply apologize for the inconvenience and wish you the best in your future endeavors.' They said sorry and good luck." 

There was a pause and I heard him sigh. "Sweetheart, I am so sorry." 

"Thanks." I rubbed the back of my neck. "Looks like that chapter closed before it got any good. I guess I can see if maybe I can do virtual learning for a high school, but I don't know if my degree is enough. I think you need an education degree to teach."

"But you always wanted to teach college..." His disappointment matched mine.

"I know..." I looked down at nearly clear streets of New York. "But I need a job, C." I sighed. "It's either that or call my parents and I would literally rather be homeless than ask them for help."

"How much?"

"What do you mean?"

"How much was your job going to pay you?"

"80k a year starting." I said and felt another wave of nausea wash over me. 80k wasn't much to some, but it was a lot for me and it would be doing something I loved.

"Tell you what, that is about 6 and a half grand a month. I will pay you 7 grand a month if you promise me not to give up."

"What?" I couldn't believe this. "There is absolutely no way I could ever accept that kind of money."

"It's not like I don't have it, Princess." He can't be serious. That's crazy. He never mentioned having money or being well off. 

"And what do you want in return?" The butterflies in my stomach began to churn. God I hope he wasn't wanting to do anything... unethical. "Surely you wouldn't do that just because you want me to be a college professor."

"Nothing." He said. "Absolutely nothing. I just want you to be taken care of and pursue your dream."

"I really can't let you do that."

"It's only temporary." He tried to assure me, but I still felt guilty. 

"C-" He was always so argumentative and authoritative over messaging and he matched it over the phone.

"I promise." He interrupted. "It won't put a dent in my wallet."

"Only until I have a full-time job." I tried to say.

"Until you become a professor."

"No," I said. "As soon as I get a job and can support myself."

"Sweetheart, it's not polite to argue."

"I appreciate it." I said. "I really do."

"So does that make your day a little bit better?" He asked.

"It does."

"Anything else gone wrong you need help fixing?"

"No." I responded and felt like a child and and adult came up to fix the mess I had made.

"Good." I heard him sigh. "I'm glad that was easy to fix and now, that I got you on the phone... it's nice to finally hear your voice."

Chapter Two: Confessions

[daveythefool]

something about verity doesn't make sense to me. why would they love morris if he's so devoted to the company they hate?

{This is fixing to be a long answer, I am SO SORRY, you have indulged the hyperfixation fr, I could talk for hours about this man! }

Mostly, Verity's reasoning is based around how I'm setting up the story for them, and how I head canon Morris would be as a multifaceted character. There's a few mods out there that do this already- add in more personality and reason behind him & his actions in-game than the vanilla game allows him- such as Morris Redeemed and Marry Morris. {Great mods, even if it's for the bit, I'd recommend trying them out and seeing the awesome work the people who made them put in!}

Anyway, Morris absolutely feels like a cartoonish, over-the-top bad guy. He's meant to be the overall "villain" of Stardew, a personification of Joja itself as the big scummy company, so it makes sense. Surface level personality of "he's just evil to be evil", not meant to be taken seriously at all, he's written exactly as he's intended to be for vanilla game. He's great as just that!

So, of course, it's not necessary to ask the questions "What if he's not actually just a big ol' greedy scumbag? What if there's more to it?", but it's so FUN to.

Therefore, for Verity's story, the answer is a resounding: yes, there's more to it. I'm definitely going to end up leaning into the fact that he DOES feel like the personification of Joja, not because he likes it, but because {like Verity at one point in time} he felt like Joja would bring him the life he wanted/wants.

Being over-the-top for his job just seemed like the right way to go about that for him, so he's constantly pushing for membership cards, hounding his employees to put in 100% of their effort just like he is. He's the manager of the whole store; his job rides on their performance in Joja's eyes just as much as THEIR jobs ride on his & their own performances. So, he performs. And he presses those who work with and under him to perform, too. It's a constant, monotonous, day-to-day show in order to keep the one Joja store in this small, barely-make-a-profit town floating. Those above him press him about how they'll tear the store down if that store doesn't meet the quota Joja wants- that if he doesn't get another membership to build that warehouse and please Joja corp., he's screwed, and on top of that, the employees who rely on the paycheck that Joja provides them are ALSO screwed.

Poor Shane is obviously crumbling apart at the seams as is, and the last thing Morris wants to do is fail these employees of his.

He cares about the people in the Valley, it's just that he's been made to believe that allowing a corporation like Joja to treat himself and others as less-than-human, forcing them to consistently and constantly mask any "undesirable" traits/behaviors in order to continue making the company the highest profit they can, please the company as a whole, put the store on some kind of corporate radar, will bring himself and others a good and happy existence. That the Joja brand suffering is normal, and worth it. Please the system, and the system will be good to you.

Except, it isn't, and it won't. Joja is a company that will use you up, and spit you out without care the moment you disappoint their already too-high expectations. The opening scene, after all, is of the office space Verity came from- constant surveillance to make sure every second is spent working, high turnover, and a significant lack of warmth and life in the building. It is cold, imposing, and highly stress-inducing. It's not a stretch to imagine that {playing off of some things in the Marry Morris mod} Morris had been unable to attend his father's funeral, and isn't able to visit his mother very often. That's something Verity can relate to him on. They didn't get much, if any, off-time from Joja, and their interpersonal relationships {not to mention their relationship with themself} suffered for it. Just because Verity hates the company, doesn't mean they hate or should/would be hateful to those that are still stuck working for it; they aren't the kind of person to take somebody's actions/behavior purely at face value, even if they aren't happy with what they did. It doesn't take hating a person to ask them if they're really happy with the conditions they're living under, if their job is really worth the cost it brings them- it takes actually caring enough to bother asking. That's what Verity brought to the metaphorical table for Morris; someone who could understand where he's coming from, even if they refused to fit in his static worldview. Someone willing to hold a conversation about whys and hows and what fors, instead of "you're just another shitty boss, and underneath that, you're just another shitty person; I'll do everything I can to make sure you never have your way." Verity didn't work on the community center out of spite and/or hatred. They did it because they fully felt it was the right thing to do in order to aid and uplift the community they, also, care about, instead of forcing them to submit to whatever Joja wants. That included Morris, as a member of the community. It's a whole thing, that Morris in the end doesn't actually want what Joja wants; he wants what he, as an individual, wants, and what he wants is for everyone he cares about to be happy, healthy... thriving. TL;DR Verity went a route he didn't/couldn't bring himself to take, and when the Center was refurbished, he suffered a Character Arch:tm: and frienemies to lovers shenanigans ensued.

[kadytimberfox]

Kady's Expanse (Re)Watch Blog

Episode 1.01 - "Dulcinea" (Pilot)

And here we go for my...fourth time I've watched this episode I think? It's a really wonderful pilot that does so much work with introducing you to the world, our cast of characters, and setting up the threads of the main plot and does it all perfectly in a very tight 45 minutes. It reminds me a lot of Deep Space Nine's pilot "The Emissary" which is similarly a masterclass in tight storytelling and how to properly kick off a new series.

And speaking of kicking off a new series, hey! I'm watching this show that I absolutely adore again and I'm going to take the time to spout my thoughts about it on the internet because that seems like a fun idea! I really enjoy thinking about media critically but I've never taken the time to write down my thoughts before. It's a style of writing I've always wanted to try so where better to do that than a Tumblr blog? I'll try to keep these Brief and Not Boring but no guarantees on either. Especially on this one. It's the pilot, after all.

I also want to keep this as light on spoilers as possible; again though, no guarantees. Also if you haven't seen this show yet just go fucking watch it it's so good.

Later in this post is a description of torture that happens in the episode. I marked it with a TW and formatted the text to make it distinct from the rest of the post.

With that out of the way, there's nothing left to do except pick apart this pilot!

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

Summary

We kick off with a bang (and then some more banging) as we see a young woman named "Julie" fight her way out of a locked compartment, explore the darkened hallways of her Completely Fucked Spaceship, and watch her friends get eaten alive by some evil blue space goop. Surely none of that will be important later.

Cut to the adventures of hard-boiled Belter detective Joe Miller and his new Earthling partner Dimitri Havelock. They're private cops for an Earth corporation who theoretically maintain order on Ceres Station in the Asteroid Belt, the biggest shithole this side of pretty much anywhere. They go to a murder scene and do basically nothing, antagonize and then arrest people minding their own business at a bar, and take a bribe to half-ass a health inspection. Y'know, classic cop stuff.

Back at the precinct, Miller gets an off-the-books job from his boss to find one Juliette Andromeda Mao, daughter of megacorp magnate Jules-Pierre Mao and coincidentally the spitting image of "Julie" from our opening scene. Apparently, her pro-Belter activism is starting to piss off dear old dad and they want her to come home before she embarrasses the family any further.

In the middle of his investigation, he finds out that those air filters he "inspected" earlier crapped out and poisoned some children. Instead of taking accountability for not doing his job, he decides to throw the sleazy air filter guy into an airlock and only lets him out after he promises not to fuck it up next time. And also to pay Miller double. I'll let it slide though because Sleazy Air Filter Guy is an asshole.

Back on Earth, United Nations Undersecretary Chrisjen Avasarala shows up for about five minutes in this episode. The only thing she does is torture a guy. End scene.

Meanwhile, the good ship Canterbury is on its way to Ceres with a big haul of space ice that the station needs to turn into water. Second Officer James Holden gets immediately promoted, much to his dismay, because his previous boss Mike Ehrmantraut went insane from being out in space too long.

Mystery strikes when the gang gets a weird distress signal from a ship called the Scopuli. Captain McDowell, probably having watched enough Star Trek episodes to know that this can't be anything good, decides to ignore it. Holden just can't stop himself from doing a good thing, though, and secretly reports the signal, officially making the Canterbury Legally Obligated™ to investigate.

He picks his away team (unknowingly also picking the people he's going to spend the rest of this show with) and takes a shuttle to investigate the drifting Scopuli, where they find everything shut down except for the beacon that brought them here. "Pirate bait", or so it seems.

Suddenly, McDowell advises the away team that a very scary ship has appeared out of nowhere and that they need to get the hell out of there. The gang gets back on the shuttle just in time for the mystery ship to fire not just regular torpedoes, but nuclear torpedoes at them. The torpedoes close to zero...and then continue streaking towards the Canterbury.

Holden tells McDowell to eject the space ice to form a protective barrier, but he refuses, apparently willing to die rather than lose his payday. The payday (and everything else aboard) is lost anyway, however, as the Canterbury erupts into the most beautiful supernova I've ever seen.

"She's gone. They nuked her. She's gone."

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

My thoughts

So this is where I actually have to do the analysis thing. Since the beginning of this show is split into three primary subplots that all deal with a different piece of the Julie puzzle (a narrative device that I fucking love, by the way), I'll divide things up by talking about each one individually because that just makes sense.

Before I do that though, I just want to briefly say that that opening scene with Julie on the Scopuli is just the perfect opening to this show. It immediately gives us a very brief glimpse inside the puzzle box that our main cast is going to spend all of this season (and most of this show) trying to open. It's quick, it's tense, it's completely terrifying, and it's unforgettable if you've seen it.

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

Miller on Ceres:

And we follow up that perfect opening scene with a perfect choice for which of these three main threads to start with. The thing that's great about dividing up the characters like this is that each of them only has a piece of what's going on with Julie and the Scopuli, but no one has the full picture. Miller, though, gets the most information off the bat and is the only person in the main cast who's looking for Julie specifically, so it's only natural that we should start with him.

His story is also the inspiration for the title of this episode, "Dulcinea". For those of you who aren't big Don Quixote fans, it's a reference to Quixote's fantasy lover that he invents because he styles himself as a knight and, of course, every knight needs his damsel. He describes her in excruciating detail; she's royalty in a far-off land who is the epitome of feminine beauty, the ideal of Womanhood Incarnate--or his vision of it at least.

And the deeper Miller goes in his investigation, the more quixotic he gets with his idea of who Julie is. He's never met or spoken to Julie, but as he unravels her activities prior to departing on the Scopuli, he becomes increasingly obsessed with her, imagining what kind of a person she must be, picking apart every little detail and transposing it onto his vision of what her life must be like. I'm sure he would call it "being a good detective", but it's much more than that to him.

Throughout Miller's jaunt around town with Havelock, they banter back and forth, and through their conversations, we get a great sense of their personalities. Whereas Miller is the grizzled veteran who's had his morality thoroughly beaten out of him, Havelock is a by-the-book rookie cop who seems genuinely interested in learning about Belters, if only so that he can police them more effectively.

It's a very tried-and-true buddy cop pairing, but it works really well here. Havelock gets to be our audience surrogate for this story as we learn more about how Ceres and Belters operate.

This thread has the biggest worldbuilding burden out of the three and it pulls it off so well. We get so much about life in the Belt, the politics of the Solar System, the Outer Planets Alliance, or OPA (who will definitely be showing up later), and the logistics of maintaining a huge population of humans on a space station. And none of it feels clunky or awkward in the slightest. It's exactly the style of worldbuilding I loved in "The Emissary" from Deep Space Nine.

Ceres itself also has huge DS9 vibes, and not in a good way. The set design team did such a good job making this place look old, weathered, and completely falling apart. Except, of course, for the nice apartment buildings where the cops, off-worlders, and everyone else rich enough to ignore the seedy underbelly get to live.

There are a ton of fantastic, evocative lines in this arc, but I think my favorite is Miller's deadpan proclamation that "There are no laws on Ceres, just cops." A perfect summary of everything we see on screen about how power is wielded in this place.

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

Chrisjen on Earth:

This is the shortest thread where the least happens, but it will grow into one of my favorites. We don't get too much additional insight into what's going on, but we do get two important things: 1) Chrisjen Avasarala is a stone-cold bitch who thinks the OPA are terrorists, and 2) the OPA are apparently trying to get their hands on illegal stealth technology, which doesn't help with the whole "terrorism" thing.

This links up to both Miller's and Holden's subplots: we know about the OPA from Miller, and the ship that eventually blows up the Cant was using Martian stealth tech. Of course, since Holden and crew have no idea about the OPA, they immediately start thinking that Mars is out to get them, which will continue to play into the story going forward.

!-- TW: DESCRIPTION OF TORTURE --!

Also important to note is that Chrisjen is getting this information through the most brutal torture I've seen on TV in a long time: forcing a Belter whose body can't handle Earth's gravity to stand for hours on end by holding him up with hooks under his arms. After Chrisjen goes on and on about his "weak Belter lungs and brittle Belter bones", she coldly turns around and tells them to hold him up for another 10 hours. "If he survives, call me."

!-- TW ENDS --!

Fucking ghoulish, and definitely not a good look for Madam Undersecretary's first appearance. You're gonna have to trust me now when I say that she becomes one of my favorite characters in the main cast. This is about as bad as she gets, but she continues being manipulative and cold-blooded for most of this show. That's just who she is. To me, it's part of what makes this subplot of scheming at the UN so engaging.

We'll be seeing a lot more of Chrisjen going forward, and she'll get much better. At the very least, she will stop torturing this guy. But only because someone will tell her not to.

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

Holden on the Canterbury:

If Miller's story shows us life in the Belt and Chrisjen's shows us the politics of the Solar System, Holden's thread is all about life onboard a spaceship, which is important because we're going to be spending a lot of time on spaceships. This is also the part of the episode that has the most CG and honestly it holds up really really well. I know it's less than a decade old and they probably got a lot of money for the pilot but still! It looks great!

I'll drop a brief shoutout here as well for the ship designs in this show. They knocked it out of the goddamn park with the Cant's design: it's a big, boxy, dull gray, ugly thing that looks designed to haul ice and do literally nothing else. Everything is so practical and, above all else, plausible. They look like humans from the near future built them and that's the highest compliment I can give them.

There are shades of the first act of "Alien" here as we are essentially dropped into the Cant in the middle of its mission and get to see the camaraderie and hierarchy between all the members of the crew. We also get to know more about Holden, and immediately he begins showing us his defining character trait: he wields a lot of authority and respect, but he hates being in charge.

We see this in the very first scene onboard the Cant when one of the ice haulers, Paj, gets his arm severed while working outside the ship. He seems completely unfazed by this, though, since the company will send him a prosthetic and he's been working for them long enough to get a really good one.

Not only does this happen often enough that the company just buys prosthetics as a cost of doing business, there are literally tiers of coverage depending on years of service. What an optimistic future this is turning out to be.

Paj pleads with Holden to make sure the company doesn't send him a "used" arm (a frightening thought), to which Holden replies with something that he will continue to say, in so many words, over and over: "I'm just another clock-puncher like you." Holden knows he has authority on the Cant, but all he wants to be is a clock-puncher, which he makes very clear to pretty much everyone he talks to, including Captain McDowell when he essentially forces the XO job onto him.

Later on, we get our first glimpse at Holden's other primary personality trait, that being that he is The Main Character and therefore the most kind-hearted soul that can exist in this cold, selfish world. He logs the distress signal they received from the Scopuli, thereby ensuring that they'll have to divert from Ceres (and lose their on-time bonus) in order to investigate.

He shares this privately with Chief Engineer Naomi Nagata before the shuttle mission, to which her only reply is to tell him to keep that to himself. Fair play, considering she was just talking about how she wanted to strangle the little fucking do-gooder before she realized it was her new XO. Excuse me, Acting XO.

Before the shuttle launch, we're briefly introduced to the rest of the away team: the aforementioned Naomi; her mechanic Amos Burton, whose defining character trait is doing whatever Naomi tells him to do; ship's pilot Alex Kamal, who we previously saw being an annoying blabbermouth on the Cant; and Med-Tech Shed Garvey, who sewed up Paj's arm and wants everyone to know that he does not want to be here. Yes, his first name really is Shed.

Most of this part of the episode is setting up what'll happen next so we don't get a lot of time with any of these guys, but we'll have time for some great character work in the coming episodes.

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

And that said, what a great setup for what comes next! Nearly all of the people we just got to know on the Cant are vaporized by a mysterious ship, there's a cloud of space debris hurtling toward Holden's little shuttle, and we have a hell of a puzzle box to dig into. Did Mars blow up the Cant? Did the OPA? Why would either of them want to? What does it all have to do with Julie and the Scopuli? And what the hell was that fucking space goo??

Despite covering so much ground in this pilot, The Expanse makes it very clear that we've barely scratched the surface. And even though I've already seen this whole show and know where it's going, it took everything I had to not hit the "next episode" button.

I will be doing that very soon though because I had a blast writing this up and I definitely want to keep doing it! Apologies that this one ran so long -- I assumed I was going to write a lot with this being the first episode and everything but I had so many thoughts that didn't make it into this post. I'm sure I'll be refining the format as we go along as well.

If you read all the way to here, I'm genuinely flattered and I hope you have a wonderful day.

~ Kady <3

[neoatlantiscodex]

High School / ATLAS

A lot of people think about High School, blame it on Rockefeller, trying to create a pliable labour-class to work in the factories.

To be honest, he 100% did do this, but he based it off of British Grammar schools.

Grammar School, which the British Grammar schools are still considered the best schools in the world. Just like Oxbridge (Oxford + Cambridge) are considered the best universities. Grammar Cchool was designed to create the nobility. Literally. As in, not too long ago, you were literally born into a caste, or to say you were born into a family with inheritable privileges.

The nobility were both a martial class, and a managerial class. This is because that one of the only legitimate jobs of the government is to protect you militarily, and Feudalism is essential a military government writ large. It really wasn't until modernity that we had viable alternatives.

They had inheritable land, that they owned because of pledges of military service to the king. They were allowed to keep all of the money they could get out of their fife. This meant that the survival of their workers, and managerial skills, directly benefited them. Compare this to modern corporations, that gain no benefit to your continued existence.

To create this martial, managerial class, they were sent to Grammar School, where they were taught important things, like accounting, Latin, military strategy, the rough equivalent of an MBA, and unimportant things, like how to speak in the secret Frog language. Rugby doesn't just teach you military strategy, but Games are important to keeping your body active.

If you look at standard High Schools, they teach the same thing, but a pale imitation of this. We've even tried to turn Games into Physical Education, and bent backwards in the attempt to add education into the simple act of keeping your body physically fit, (along with the social and psychological benefits). You learn a second language, but in English-speaking countries, this is not to do anything productive, (non-English countries learn English, because it's so useful). We used to learn banking, and now learn abstract mathematics. Which, as someone who was good at, and studied them much further, you aren't going to use it unless you become an engineer or mathematician. Because of the purposelessness, High School doesn't have any way to evaluate it's success. As such, it's basically become a holding pen.

People are going to High School, nowadays, and coming out less prepared for life than when they went in. Same thing with University. Because the most important thing you can do in High School and University is sit still, and not do anything productive.

For some reason, teenagers are feeling a bit unfulfilled by this, and our solution is to shoot them full of drugs.

Historically, once you had elementary school, Elementary Cchool taught you the three R's. Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic.

Catchy, but inaccurate to call them R's.

Anyways.

After Primary School, if you weren't going to Grammar School or University, you... worked. You got an apprenticeship. By the time you are 21, you are a journeyman, whom is marriageable.

Now, we send everyone to University. Which adds another 8 years of education. They come out of University with $50-60,000 in debt. About 10% of the people who come out of University actually work a single day in the field they studied. They come out, never having done anything productive in their life, other than the most basic of service jobs.

And if they had worked those service jobs for those years, would be financially better off, and have more work experience.

So, we're creating Utopia, so, what do we do with schools?

I mean, we can't have teenagers working. Except we can. And in my experience as someone who has to teach teenagers at work, and who is a former teenager himself, the teenagers with jobs are typically better in almost every way than the teenagers without jobs.

Well, what about Trade Schools?! That's the usual alternative.

Well, Trade Schools don't really exist. Most trades have a 3 semester rotation of 2 work and 1 study, or something similar. Trade schools are often literally just university-colleges, or technical universities, that partner with firms to pair students with appropriate jobs in their field. Engineering literally works the same way, and and both engineering nursing requires a practicum after graduation.

But we're running into the ATLAS principle, which comes from Bioshock. In Bioshock, an Objectivist created an Objectivist paradise. The big problem he didn't account for is that he promised that everyone could become captains of industry. "But, in the end, someone has to scrub the toilets."

Every, single, discussion about High School acts as if every - single - person is going to have a storied career, either in academia, or the trades. The unfortunate answer is that most people have jobs, not careers. Your job is to lift heavy thing, or push buttons. The nature of unskilled jobs, i.e. jobs without skills that are rare enough to command a better wage, is a different issue. And it really doesn't matter HOW we accomplish this, we need account for the people who have to scrub the toilets. They need to have housing, and enough money to support a family. On one wage, or as is most common, one-and-a-half. People who don't go into some form of secondary education should not be shamed as failures. They are instead the backbone of the economy. Or, the muscles of the economy? You have a lot more muscle than you do bones. The basement of the economy is fitting, but people might take that the wrong way.

As Forrest Gump says, stupid is as stupid does. Most people think this is an insult, but stupid people can lead productive lives, and brilliant people have lead disastrous lives. You don't need grade 12 to scrub the toilets. Literally, as many janitorial jobs require grade 12, because it was the line in the sand we choose.

And, by the way, this is literally Utopian, as in, it's in Thomas Moore's Utopia. People with free time, and a culture of interest in reading, will create a culture of reading.

If we get a four-day work week, either 4x8, or 4x10, we can have days off, and people can attend secondary education of their choice. Especially with the advent of the internet, you can have masters in their field teaching courses that you need to pay $20/month to view. If a teenager is still living with their parents, a couple days of work a week would be sufficient to cover their expenses, and give them plenty of time for education.

Well, what about people who want to go into a field that actually requires a university degree.

Then they can go to High School. Or have the local university-college offer the equivalent courses. If we cut out the bullshit, and focus only on those who are academically skilled, we could easily cut the time in half.

[marnz]

I watched tsn last year because my memory suddenly remember that i used to see photos and gifs of it in 2016 and i read someone blog analyzing the relationship of mark and eduardo (in 2016) but didn't know it was a fb film, so i decided to watch it, to be honest my brain is pretty damage from working corporate job and seeing how nasty capitalism is, so my first thought watching it wasn't really wow gay, eduardo was in love!!! but was more like wow mark is such a jerk, i didn't see anything gay that people were screaming about 🙃 and being reminded that this is zuckerberg and his old friend irl did not help, and i also read the story of what actually happened irl and understand how eduardo was also a jerk too so i just jumped into ao3 to read fanfic, i actually wish i watched it during highschool or college time more because i truly can't consume queerbait series or films that aren't obvious anymore, normal queer film/tv series is fine tho. This is just my own experience i'm sure there are many tsn new fans who watched it and also enjoy how "gay" it is like you guys in 2010 too :) i just have damaged brain i think

oh no friend I’m so sorry about your job! Let’s get you a better one. I don’t think your reaction is wrong at all, like I said, it was a different time and you had to be there. I got into it in college and exited the fandom in the mid 2010s; I would never in my life get into it now. I think you are right…it’s 2024.

However I have been thinking about this since I got your message and I also think the constant analysis and the fanfic contributed pretty heavily to the atmosphere, plus like I said the Andrew Garfield of it all. Honestly I think the fandom boils down to a couple things:

1) the film has homoerotic subtext mostly evidenced by Eduardo. There’s a lot of time spent on Eduardo’s feelings about Mark, like even during the bathroom blowjob scene the camera takes a moment to remind us that Eduardo is thinking about Mark in the next stall. There is almost no time spent on Mark’s feelings about Eduardo. So this subtext is like, there are feelings and they are unreciprocated. Isn’t this so tragic when 0.03% happens? Mark certainly talks a lot about his feelings for Eduardo, but words do not matter. Action matters. Contrast this with a more classic queerbait like Sterek where 1) there was queerbaiting market and 2) there was reciprocal homoerotic subtext that could never be acted upon.

2) I don’t think fandom is super good at dealing with an unlikeable or unsympathetic yet compelling protagonist! Which means this protagonist is rendered much more sympathetically in fic and people watch or read the media source with rose colored glasses. “He would not fucking say that” x1000.

3) I’m not that much older than you I think but…there was this period in tv where there were canon gays who were as interesting and dynamic as a pool noodle and, meanwhile, in subtext and/or queerbait land, there were relationships that consistently got a lot of time and attention and so were sooooooo compelling. And those are the relationships that I, and fandom, tend to gravitate towards. Plus growing up there weren’t a ton of happy gay stories so instead it was like, you have Brokeback Mountain, you have Dead Poets Society, you have What Happened to Lani Granger? You have, for some reason, Glee (boring except for faberry and Santana). Thank god we are not there anymore.

4) I have bad taste <3

Anyway sorry for rambling here, your asks got me thinking because it very much was like hmm well yeah it IS completely inexplicable huh but I think a lot of fandom is like that.

[lol-jackles]

https://www.tumblr.com/teamfreewill2pointo/721298053918801920

Will really will go to any lengths to keep Jensen's hands and image clean huh? You can put makeup on a pig all you want... doesn't make it a supermodel, it's still a pig. The fact that he really doesn't even answer the question, just talks around it and then ends with "well, it doesn't really matter who ended it" but yea, it kinda really does...

I mean, I agree with him on the fact that we'll never know all the details, but that's about the end of it. I don't know why Will (and AA's) think that WBD would just "let him go"?? Do they think large networks and corporations do things in the best interest of the "little guy"? Do they think they just willingly let people out of contracts if those contracts are beneficial to them? No. If CMP and Jensen were making them money then you bet that they would still be stuck in that contract until Oct 2024. And if Jensen broke the contract he would be paying them a bunch of money. I guess they could argue his clear desperation for income over the past few months/years is an indication but I feel like no matter how many $1,000 FBBC "memberships" they sell, it still wouldn't come close. CMP and Jensen failed at WBD, simple as that.

I know AA's (and apparently Will) refuse to admit that Jensen is anything less than perfect but there really is no way to dress this up to make him or CMP look good. If he was fired (most logical and likely) then that's not a great look for Jensen. If they "let him out of his contract" that might sound better, but it still doesn't look good for CMP or Jensen because the only reason they would do that is if it was beneficial to them - aka CMP was losing them money and it was cheaper to let them go.

"plus he wanted a deal that would get him into projects he would be passionate about. He also wanted to do projects that would put him on camera and WBD failed to help him in that process." - I mean, the one project he claims to want is Batman and that's at WBD... where he just left. But I do love the addition of "he just wants to be on camera" which is the more accurate statement of the two. I haven't seen Jensen be "passionate" about a project in a while.. I guess TB but he didn't seem to put much into the role so I think he was more passionate about the publicity and exposure he was getting from it because he thought it was push him up a tier.

Link. Will makes Jensen sound like one of those employees who deliberately are bad at their jobs so that they get fired and collect unemployment benefits. Except he left out the part #SaveTheWinchesters campaigns, one of them during Walker, by Jensen as well as giving interviews.

Studios are getting rid of unproductive overall deals left and right, more so during the Writer Strike. Will seriously thought WBD/Zaslav wouldn't get rid of CPM who only produced one stinker?

It's not just that producing is not Jensen's passion, he's not good at it! Plenty of people are passionate about their hobbies but suck at the execution and output.

Jensen prefers acting to EP-ing? Gasp, you don't say! That's 99% of the actors. The main reason why actors have production companies in the first place is so they can continue to act by creating projects to star in.

Then Will says Amazon is a "step up". No not really in terms of brand and calibre. After Zaslav leaves, WB will still be the WB and Amazon will still be struggling to figure out its brand.

"[Jensen] found a better opportunity." We shall see if Kripke will handhold or let him coattail.

While my opinions on Solider Boy is well know, I wonder how his Big Sky role went. Was it good? Did he captivate the audience with his interactions? Was it a version of Dean Winchester that was just as compelling?

You're right that Will sidesteps the question, though I'm guilty of that as well lol, I just hope I'm entertaining at least, and my goal wasn't to make anybody look good or even bad per se.

Sure the WBD is currently a car crash that you can't look away, but every legacy studio and streaming services are going through the same bubble burst.

[hurpdurpburps]

私、何のためにこんな必死に頑張ってるんだろう

Mostly writing this here as there are a lot of prying eyes on my IRL blog and I'm not very keen on the idea of any of those people poking their nose into my business.

The kneejerk instinct to run away from everything in my life has never been harder to suppress. At this point you could say I'm punching down on those thoughts like a twisted game of whack-a-mole.

Whatever mental capacity I have leftover that isn't already consumed by work is dominated by a longing of the past.

Running away to Canada was one of the best decisions I ever made in my life and every cell in my body yearns for another escapade.

Watching all my friends make progress with their personal lives - finding new jobs they love, getting married, buying homes, rediscovering new passions - makes feel me left behind.

And the greatest irony is that I don't even want any of those things, I have no interest in settling down or being a property owner. I take a lot of pride in being the best at my job and I don't hate the nature of it (just all the other parts that come with being part of a massive team coupled with serving one of the biggest clients from hell).

Everyone seems to be just doing what they want, and so am I, but somehow I find myself deeply unhappy and frustrated most days.

At the various injustices in our world - big and small. At how people often get what they don't deserve, and vice versa. At how trying to do the right thing the right way has hardly ever paid off. At how my parents go out of their way to point out that I am seeing next to nothing for my efforts, and how I have absolutely no words to rebuke them with.

I have exactly zero delusions of grandeur about how I could effect change in the grand scheme of things, but I feel like an utterly maimed and declawed tiger at how inconsequential my actions seem to be in changing my immediate environment.

Lately it just seems like life is hellbent on proving me wrong about all my decisions. I knew very early on that I would not, ever, be part of civil service - because I despise the hypocrisy and chronic incompetence that make up our establishment. But what do I get for sticking out in corporate? Being managed by ex-government imbeciles who have made it clear they're intent on stifling me, while being invited by a (very much trusted) ex-coworker to join them at a "rare team of empowered go-getters" at a Ministry for a 20% raise with 30% less work.

I have no intention of taking up that offer, because I know for a fact that teams get broken up and rotated every couple of years, and given my record of shit luck it would happen right as I joined.

And you know what really rubs it in? That my 'work-to-live' sister has somehow ended up a good many steps ahead of me on the career track, while 'live-to-work' me has been treading water in the same spot for eternity.

It would be a hell lot easier if I could just not care about certain issues, but it's that one part of my brain that I can't switch off. I have enough trouble sleeping as it is, I don't need more things to keep me up at night.

I spend my days cruising on autopilot: wake up > go to work > go home > eat then go to bed > rinse and repeat. On my days off, sometimes I manage to squeeze in a walk at the park, a meal out with friends, an afternoon of tea and reading, or working a bit on community projects that I enjoy, but lately there hasn't been much energy I could muster up enough of to do except sleep - and even that I'm not having much success with.

I love this world for all the sensory experiences it gives me: the sharp smell of ozone and violent flashes of white thunderbolts cutting through the clouds during a thunderstorm, the cool velvety sensation of silk sheets, the gradients in the sky at dawn or dusk that blend into a single shade as time passes, the deep caramel of a good cognac, the comforting and slightly coarse texture of a novel's rice-white pages crisply shuffling beneath my fingertips, the satisfyingly greasy crunch and juicy tenderness of my favourite tonkatsu at my usual lunch spot.

But recently even all these have failed to distract me from the lingering unease and inexplicable anxiety that has set up camp at back of my mind.

The sky seems a little more dull these days, and so are my taste buds. Games are now more tedious than fun. I have barely any interest in reading outside of what I have to for work, which is exclusively of the maybe-the-world-is-gonna-end-today variety. Tonight a coworker told me my sighs at work sounded stressed, while my mother helpfully emphasised last weekend how my eyes "look like you're going to die at your desk", whatever that means.

Some would say I'm experiencing symptoms of burnout, but I wish I was truly, completely burnt out, because right now I'm still going and I don't know how to stop.

I have a getaway planned for January - but that seems so far away, and some days I'm not sure if I even have the willpower to open my eyes again the next morning.

I wish time capsules were real, so I could stay in 2019 forever. Fooling around English Bay with my best friends, snapping shots of the most beautiful sunset I've ever seen, and only worrying about how much cheesecake we could fit into our stomachs after a 4-hour hotpot session.

Ending this rant with lyrics from a song that always reminds me of all the Canadian sunsets I spent by the water - hopefully I'll be able to live this life again someday.

Listen to me Cleave your way again, again 誓いの日々が最後に放つ未来 歪んだ空に描いた手のひら達が　頬を濡らす You’re not alone 今　灯火を抱け その闇にむけ

Listen to me Sail away again, again 未開の海に　海路を照らす願い 繋いだ声は 答えのない世界へと　帆を揺らす You’re not alone ただ 荒波を行け その闇を��け

またいつかみんながこんなに会えるかな。

[erikahammerschmidt]

Angry rant about  - progressive discourse and infighting - evil people and corporations with too much power - how aforesaid discourse keeps blaming powerless ordinary people for what the evil giants do - and the various double and triple standards in how this blame gets handed around - (With extra anger toward Disney.)

Read at your own risk, or to be safe just don't. I'm venting.

I am baffled sometimes at how the dialogue around here is still keeping Disney in this separate ethical bubble from everyone else, not beholden to any of the same rules.

The same people who will say you are 100% irredeemable if you even read fanfiction of Harry Potter-- and who are even aware how much more money Disney contributes to homophobic and transphobic causes than JKR does-- won't bat an eyelash at people who have whole season passes to a Disney park.

Is it because Disney says the right words in public, makes some highly visible gestures of support, and does most of the harm behind the scenes without fanfare?

Is it because Disney is a corporation and not an individual -- the people aren't all bad-- and when you support Disney you're also supporting all those good marginalized people who just happen to work for Disney? ...who don't really have a choice, because Disney is the only gig with good enough jobs in their field, or the only one who'll hire them, because the diversity and accessibility of Disney's hiring practices contains some of their highly visible gestures of support (even though their overall practices screw the same people over big time)?

...and all that is also true of Raytheon and Lockheed, and the same progressive discourse around here says that working for them makes you irredeemable and worthy of immediate doxxing...

(...do Disney employees get away with what Raytheon and Lockheed employees don't because Disney's line of work doesn't do harm as bad as theirs? ...but then, why does Disney also get away with worse harm than JKR in the bigoted-corporate-lobbying department?)

I don't even fuckin know.

I mean, I personally try to have as little as possible interaction with ANY of the above entities. Including Disney equally.

I even somewhat hate myself for developing an interest in TRON, the past couple years-- even though I've come to accept that I only really like the 1982 movie, which I bought secondhand on DVD, and will not be paying Disney one cent for anything new they barf up in that franchise. (It'll suck anyway. Jared Leto? Ugh.)

It still puts me, ethically, on the same level as a Harry Potter fanfic reader or worse. 

And if that level is one of the deepest circles of hell, as discourse on here would have it... then I'm damned forever, aren't I?

Except I'm not, because Disney lives in its own ethical world, and stuff that's evil for anyone else to do is fine for Disney. 

I wrote a theology paper about that once. Except instead of Disney it was God. Says something about what we worship, I guess.

I don't even know what my own ethical beliefs are anymore. 

Closest I can come is despair. Sure, we mere mortals can do some tiny little things to minimize how much we support the big evil gods and devils. But anything we can do, or not do, is a drop in the bucket. Insignificant. As useless to demonize as it is to praise.

Voting all down the ballot in every election is also a drop in the bucket, individually. But, since it actually does something toward choosing people who just might have more power than a drop in the bucket.... it just might be the thing we can do that makes the most difference. 

Maybe just a little bit bigger drop in that bucket than how we scrape up a living, or what we buy or read or watch to make that living bearable.

I hope, anyway. Because I'll hope for whatever I can, in this fucked up world.

[kadavernagh]

TIMING: Current LOCATION: The Apple Store PARTIES: Meredith and Regan SUMMARY: When Meredith comes in to get her iPad fixed, she meets an employee, Regan, going by "Apple" and who definitely can't fix anything. Suspicions of betrayal are proven right.

“What are you talking about- hold on, your manager’s name is Pubic?”

Regan expected there would be a promotion in her future. The blue shirt matched her eyes (complaint to file: collar could be higher) and she frequently impressed management with her independence. It was good practice to test their employees in such a way, she thought – seeing if they bowed to orders like lowly humans. Except, right. Regan was a human. But she did not have to be lowly. She had been asked and was willing to just wander around the store looking for people who walked in so she could accost them with eager assistance. Jade would have been much better at this, but wasn’t growth the whole point?

She had been standing pin straight for ten minutes, fussing with her necklace, when the next human walked in. Regan decided she liked the serious cut of her expression; a far superior human than John Pubik had been (he had requested a store transfer, actually, but it was denied). Summoning an eighth of Jade’s easy extraversion. she approached cautiously, like the customer was liable to sprint away into the woods, a frightened deer. She did look like she was relatively durable, but Regan was not going to risk losing her.

Her eyes brightened at the opportunity to get a new signature on her liver emoji petition. “Hello. I’m Apple. I mean, not usually, but while I’m in this store, I am Apple. Do you need phones? Computers? One of those flat–” Actually, she seemed to be holding one of the flat computers. “Oh, did it break? Is it the screen? I am an expert in this field.” Regan gestured for the girl to follow her, leading her to one of the long tables housing different models. Many of them had cracked screens. Regan couldn’t feel too badly about it when someone came in and replaced them each morning. There was a staff meeting yesterday about vandalism but nothing had been captured on camera. Also, the camera broke. Maybe the girl would think all of these cracked screens were examples of how many people trusted her to fix them, left behind by other customers.

“Let’s see what you have,” Regan gestured to the broken machine. How hard could fixing it be? She pieced things back together all the time, then sutured them to perfection, and sent them to the funeral home. She had this.

—

Going to the Apple store was not exactly an ideal place for Meredith to spend her day off.  However, when her iPad screen had abruptly started glitching the night before, she had suddenly never been more eager to hop on her bike and ride the few miles to the Genius bar.  There was a rational explanation for it, right?  The screen had never flickered before, but surely it was just wear and tear.  She'd been spending too much time on it lately, the battery was fried.  There was an explanation that made sense.  She felt ridiculous, acting like she was in some cheesy horror flick where ghosts mess with electronics to taunt you before going in for the kill.  And yet, here she was, waiting in line outside the glass doors of the Apple store, glitchy iPad in hand desperate for someone to tell her it just needed a hard reset.

Eventually, someone approached her.  Her eyes were wide and she spoke faster than Meredith could follow but she tried to keep up with it all nonetheless.  “Apple?  Do they really make people call you that?” She asked, a bit confused as to whether this was some weird new corporate gimmick or she’d ended up with someone a little too obsessed with their job.  Either way, it didn’t matter.  As long as “Apple” could fix her iPad or exorcize it or whatever needed to be done, she didn’t care what she went by.  She followed the girl to a desk, her eyes not leaving the tablet as it rested in the stranger’s hands.  “I don’t know…maybe?  It’s not like, cracked.  It just started freaking out last night.  It would turn on and off by itself, and sometimes apps would open and close at random,” she tried to explain.  “Is that…normal?  I mean, does that happen a lot?  Is that like, a glitch with the new update?”  Do I sound crazy?, she almost added, but kept herself from saying anything further.  Meredith finally gave herself a moment to look around at the mess on the table.  Was this store always like this, or did they get robbed last night?  “Busy day?”

—

Well, they didn’t make people call her Apple, but the scant training Regan received made it clear she represented Apple. And it wasn’t like she felt particularly like Dr. Kavanagh right now, or even Regan (who was she, even?). So why not Apple? “Yes.” Regan unclipped her nametag with her actual name on it and tossed it in the trash as they walked by. She listened to the woman’s explanation, nodding every once in a while, because that meant she was paying attention (mostly, she was thinking about that ever-so-slight tug she felt toward the rafters, where there might have been a dead raccoon). “Normal, mhm. Everything is normal here. You, me. Especially me. What did you say the– oh, your applications? Have you attempted to get rid of them all? They won’t open if they’re gone. When did this start? Did you get water on it? That’s bad.” The woman seemed fairly distressed, and Regan could at least feel good about being able to help her find a solution, even if it wasn’t the same kind of or quality of help she offered next of kin in her old profession.

Regan pressed a button on the tablet which she had learned – right now, this very second – made it turn on. The screen flickered several colors and then changed, opening and closing several windows. “Busy? Oh, yes. Many live people.” She held the machine up to her ear and then shook it, mostly to make it look like she knew what she was doing. “I can completely solve your problem,” Regan said confidently, as cheerful as could be within the constraints of her flat monotone. She had no idea how to fix this computer but she knew where they kept hundreds of others in the back. She would just send this woman home with a new one. 

There didn’t seem to be anyone else entering the store, so Regan waved the woman toward the back so she could follow her over toward a slightly ominous door – the kind that literally said ‘employees only’ on it. She was told not to bring anyone back there, but Regan picked and chose what she was going to listen to. A few months ago, she would have scoffed at the idea of a human giving her orders in the first place, but she had since turned over a new leg. If she was going to fit in (which she was so far excelling at) there would have to be compromise. “I’ll show you where we keep the other ones, and you can choose the color you’d like. Humans enjoy a selection of those, yes? The illusion of choice, like it matters. I have come to find it endearing.” Though Regan was pleased she’d gone with the silver phone herself, even if it broke after a day and she traded it in for a green one. Her most recent was silver again. Oh, have I mentioned I’m giving you a new tablet? That will fix this.” The cement ground of the dark storage room made Regan’s footsteps echo as she led the woman in. The door closing behind them was a loud slap. “Did you close that?” She looked back over her shoulder, squinting at the girl, a slow chill rolling up along her vertebrae, jumping between them one at a time.

—

“Oh uh- no I hadn’t thought of- no I don’t think I have.  I try to be careful,” Meredith’s answers came quickly, trying to keep up with the employee’s questions.  She watched as she turned it on and the screen repeated the same strange pattern it had at home.  That was good, at least, that she hadn’t imagined it, that the glitch wasn’t exclusive to the confines of her apartment.  There would’ve been nothing more embarrassing than coming all the way here only for it to work fine as soon as someone else took a look.  “As opposed to dead ones?” She said with a small chuckle, as if to try and break the ice.  Though it was becoming more and more clear that the other woman may not be joking.  Her cadence and comments were odd, but Meredith found her somewhat amusing, if not a bit confusing.  Nevertheless, none of it mattered if she could walk out of here with a non-cursed iPad and go back to business as usual.  Mere watched again with curiosity as she held the tablet up to her face and shook it like a rattle.  She started to lose hope, she’d always been a bit more analog than some of her peers but this didn’t seem right.  However, soon she was on the move and, albeit a bit nervous, Meredith followed on her heels.  Her head whipped from left to right before slipping past the employee door, sure she wasn’t supposed to be back here but not wanting to protest.  She never minded much about breaking the rules, but she’d been on edge more than normal lately. 

“You say that like you’re not one,” Mere said, her voice back to its usual sarcastic tone.  She was trying to be herself again, she wasn’t sure how.  “Wait, really?  Brand new?  I mean, thank you,” she stuttered, her eyes tracking the pale blonde hair that moved in front of her.  She was pretty certain she hadn’t gotten the warranty, but now she was hoping she could slink out of here with a brand new tablet without anyone being the wiser.  “I have a lot of drawings on there though, do you think I can transfer those over or will the uh- glitch come with it?”  It was a stupid question, she knew that was a stupid question.  She was almost positive all her works-in-progress were saved to the cloud anyway.  But she was terrified, terrified of this actually being a curse, and she felt completely ridiculous admitting that to herself. 

Meredith couldn’t help but jump at the sound of the door slamming behind them.  She turned around, rapidly scanning the door for any sign of why it closed.  “No- does that not happen every time?”  This wasn’t happening, this couldn’t be happening, right?  She was not about to die at the fucking Apple store.  She looked back at the employee.  “You have a key to get out of here, right?  It’s not locked?”  Sparks of anxiety radiated through her fingertips as they tapped against her leg.  She took a step towards the door and attempted to twist the handle but it didn’t budge, she shook the door harder to no avail.  “You’re fucking kidding me,” she muttered under her breath.  “Okay, so you can like, call your boss like?  Or, there is some high tech code that opens this door?  And there’s definitely a totally rational reason it closed behind us, right?”

—

“Brand new, yes.” The thank you made Regan freeze, for just a moment. She had to remind herself where she was not. Still, humans in Wicked’s Rest should know better, too. “You’re welcome. How long have you lived here?” It was seemingly a non-sequitur but one Regan was curious about now. It was also better than admitting that no, the door did not typically do this, and no, Regan did not have a key on her, because she was – for the first time in her life – bad at her job. What she could do was be a calm presence as the customer proceeded to panic. She was excellent at being calm (and especially since returning from Ireland). This was nothing compared to working in the ED or navigating a grisly homicide scene.

“There is no need. I am not going to ask Pubik to let us out.” If he even would. Regan could practically see him standing tall on the other side of the door, gloating. He would let both of them die in here if he could. He would stand there and do nothing as they were sentenced to live in the storage room for one hundred years. Some of her neurons made a complete circuit for the first time. Pubik. Pubic. Pubis. Oh. She might have had some preconceived notions about the man… but she was right, wasn’t she? The woman did not know or care about Regan’s realization, though – she rushed to the door, frantically pushing and pulling it. That was not going to work. Did she see the slot for a key?

“That is a waste of your energy. I will fix this. In the meantime, how about…you, um, can pick your new tablet.” Regan pointed to a cluster of several huge boxes. “They’re all yours. I don’t know how you can move your things over, and I do not know if the pathology your computer has will be transmitted to the new one. I… don’t know anything about Apple products. Or any phones.” Her eyes fell in shame. “That is probably surprising. Anyway, you select your product, and I will see if there is another way out of here, because that door will not open without a key. Which I do not have.” Regan gave the woman a reassuring nod that was not at all reassuring. This was all fine. She still would not call Pubik. 

Regan paced a lap around the storage room; she was fairly sure she’d spotted another door in here at some point, an evacuation exit that emptied into the parking lot. Pubik would have known. But she reminded herself, again, that she would not call Pubik. She could never rely on him. Never place her trust there. She could never… Regan eyed each hard wall, and they seemed to shift, caving inward like air being squeezed out of a pair of lungs. The cold floor darkened and shined. The echo of her footsteps became cries of let me die. Her legs wobbled then seemed to sink; she couldn’t move. “Are you still–” Here? She wanted to say. Except Regan’s lungs emptied with enough force to shatter the lights above, casting the entire storage room into true darkness.

—

“My whole life,” Meredith answered, her eyes darting around the back room and taking in the shelves packed with white boxes.  She felt the panic start to rise up her spine.  

“What?  You’re not?” Mere’s voice raised a little.  She looked at the other with confusion and a bit of anger.  “What are you talking about- hold on, your manager’s name is Pubic?”  Her hands ran through her hair and she tried to take in her surroundings more carefully.  “God, what the fuck is going on?”  She asked quietly to herself.  She felt like she was losing her mind lately but this took the cake.  She was locked in a storeroom at a store apparently run by two people named Pubic and Apple.  Her palms began to sweat.  “Of course not,” Meredith began to laugh. “Of course you don’t know anything about it.  Do you even work here?”  She couldn’t help herself, the laughter began to bubble up beyond a soft chuckle.  She couldn’t believe what she’d gotten herself into- trapped in the backroom of an Apple store with a stranger who was quite possibly masquerading as an employee, all because she thought her iPad was haunted.  It was absolutely ridiculous.  “Yeah, I’ll uh- I’ll pick one out.”  Her fit calmed as she tried to straighten herself out and began moving through the shelves instead.  Her fingers tapped incessantly against her thigh, an unsteady rhythm.  She tried to focus on the stacks and stacks of boxes in front of her but as usual her head was elsewhere.  She was locked in, trapped.  Meredith couldn’t push away the thought.  Someone would come, right?  Surely, someone would come.  Someone would need a new device eventually, or just need to escape the floor.  It was fine, it would all be fine.

But it wasn’t fine, that was evident by the eruption of sound that flooded the space around her causing Meredith to double over, her hands braced over her ears.  Glass shattered and rained down over her.  There was a moment of silence.  Meredith opened her eyes but there was nothing to be seen- it was completely dark; she could barely see a few inches in front of her.  She tried to take stock of her surroundings, her head whipped all around her- looking and listening for something familiar.  Her breath was heavy and rapid.  A hand reached forward to grab hold of the metal shelf in front of her, she lifted herself upright.  “Are you okay?”  She asked the darkness.  She’d done it, she realized, the very thing she feared.  She’d brought her danger or demon or curse- whatever plagued her, whatever hunted her that night- she’d brought it to someone else; she’d put someone else at risk.  “Are you hurt?”  Meredith used the shelf to guide herself back down the aisle and toward where she parted from the employee.  “Be careful, there may be glass around you.” She could hear a few small pieces crunching under her sneakers and silently thanked herself for not wearing flip flops today.  Her mother always detested when she wore them anyplace other than the beach, maybe she should text her.

She felt the shelf end and tried now to find the wall, if her hand could settle against the door she could anchor herself in the room.  There seemed to be a faint red glow emanating from somewhere, she used that to guide herself.  “What happened, did you see something?”

—

Regan was trying to learn from those around her, she really was, but sometimes humans were truly confusing. Banshees did not ask such foolish questions, and they had no need for comfort or reassurance. What was going on? What was going on was exactly what was going on; there was no great complexity. “You saw my shirt. You know that I work here. As for what is going on, I took you back here to select a new tablet because your current one is malfunctioning. The door closed behind us. We have since been stuck. Do you have short-term memory issues?” More likely, the girl was struggling with some kind of disbelief, as though this were even breaking the top 100 of unusual occurrences in this town. And Regan probably could have been a little kinder and more compassionate, but bad things tended to happen when she was stuck in an enclosed space with someone. That obviously continued to be the case.

She grimaced at the sound of glass crunching as she stepped closer to the direction of the woman’s voice. “I saw… something, yes.” Regan’s voice sounded small to her own ears, and that pushed disgust up her mouth. What had happened to her? Rhetorical. She knew exactly what had happened. Maybe she really should be trying harder to be nice, considering they were not in dissimilar boats. The difference was that when Regan panicked, things broke. “Nothing that concerns – I mean, should concern you. The glass didn’t hurt me.” Or if it did, she couldn’t feel it. Sometimes it was hard to tell. There had been several times she’d found shards embedded in her hands hours later. “Yourself? Are you wearing close-toed footwear” Apple stores were not like wet labs and autopsy suites; there were no de facto safety requirements. 

The woman’s shaky breaths made Regan spike with concern. She could recognize panic by sound alone. Her decedents were above such a pathetic display of emotion, but live humans were not. No– not pathetic. Not for humans. Humans could panic. Regan would be supportive. Jade would have been. “If your panic becomes unsustainable, tell me, and I will…” What was it humans did again, when someone they cared for was panicking? “...uh, describe something comforting. Like flies on a body.” That seemed right. “What are you concerned about? We are in the Apple store. In the time I have lived here, no one has died in this place. Well, no human. There is presently a raccoon somewhere above us.”

When Regan squinted, she could see a faint glow from the direction of the emergency exit – one Regan had never used, and she could see the woman inching closer to it, palm bracing against the wall. It was a door that spilled out into a parking lot. Would it work? Would it need a key? That wouldn’t be great for an emergency exit. “I think there’s… there should be a door over here. I believe.” 

Except, Pubik’s scratchy voice shouted from behind the heavy door on the other end of the storage room, the one that had locked behind them. He was here? 

“What is it, Kavanagh? Stuck in the storage room? I could let you out.” 

Regan saw red (figuratively; it remained pitch black). Had he locked them in here? That thought from earlier had been right. She did not need to ask herself why Pubik wasn’t letting them out. Betrayal was in his blood. Regan should never have turned her back to Pubik. He would have taken her wings had they still been there. Did he not care that she had a customer with her? No, why would he? Pubik was never satisfied until Regan was going to lose everything; someone else standing nearby was only collateral damage. 

—

“What?  What did you see?”  Meredith’s voice was a bit frantic.  She was sure she sounded crazy.  Somehow, despite the chaos that had occurred since Meredith had entered the store, Apple had managed to stay calm, cool, and collected.  It made Mere feel even more out of her mind.  She was almost scared of the answer- of what possibly lurked in the shadows here.  Her eyes moved all around in the dark but she couldn’t see a thing.  She listened intently, but the only sounds she heard were shards of glass shuffling around the tile floor as she walked and the fabric of her top sliding against the rough wall behind her.  There were no mysterious sounds, nothing that reminded her of the woods.  Maybe that was a good sign, maybe this was all just a coincidence.  But Meredith knew that wishful thinking would get her nowhere.  In fact, it would get her killed. 

“Good.  Yes, yes I’m fine.”  She kept her back pressed against the wall and continued to move towards the only light she could see.  “Oh, uh, thank you.  I think I will hold off on the fly conversation for now if that’s okay.”  Images of the cabin, of her friends’ bodies flashed through her mind.  She tried to shake it all away and focus on what was in front of her, which was darkness.  “Well, that’s good to know.  Good track record you guys have here.  Sorry I don’t mean to be…jumpy.  I just- I’ve had a weird few months.  Let’s just get out of here.”  She had accepted at this point that Apple was…odd, to say the least.  She had expected to enter the store, be greeted by some bored underpaid employee who assured her that her iPad was just fine but maybe did a quick reset or something to fix the problem and be on her way.  Instead, she’d met one of the strangest people she’d ever encountered and no problems were fixed at all.  Now she had new ones.  But even though Apple was a somewhat strange stranger, she didn’t want anything to happen to her.  She would feel incredibly guilty if anyone else got hurt because of her presence.  She was determined to get both of them out in one piece.

“Good, okay, okay.  Can you follow my voice?  I think I can see the exit sign.  I think, maybe, if we follow this wall we can get there without running into anything.  Hopefully.”  Her plan was interrupted by the sound of a man yelling from the other side of the door.  For a moment, relief washed over her.  Surely, he would realize they were in here and open the door to free them.  She was quickly corrected.  “God, is that your manager?  I’m starting to understand why you call him Pubic.”  Unless of course, that was his given name.  “Screw that guy.  Now I kind a want to take two iPads just to fuck with him.  I won’t.”  She looked back at Apple, at least where she thought Apple was, with a small joking smile as if to assure her she wasn’t actually going to steal from the store.  She didn’t want to get her in trouble.  Of course, Apple couldn’t see any expression Mere was making.  “Maybe I’ll leave him a bad review.  I don’t think I’ve ever left a review for any place ever, that guy makes me want to start.”

Meredith kept shuffling along the wall, one arm outstretched to make sure she wouldn’t run into anything.  The faint red glow slowly became brighter.  Soon she could make out the word “EXIT” lit up in front of her.  “Okay, I got it.  God, some alarm isn’t going to start if I open this will it?  Nevermind, I don’t care.”  She pushed forcefully against the metal bar and swung the heavy door forward.  Sunlight spilled into the storeroom and Mere had to raise her arm to shield her eyes from the harsh change in light.  She could feel the heat mixing with the cool conditioned air behind her.  “I have to say, I’ve never been so excited to see a parking lot.”

—

“His name is Pubik. Well, his last name. His first name is John. And he does not manage me,” Regan said, barely keeping the fact she was offended from her tone. “I am autonomous. I decide everything now. No Pubik is going to tell me what to do. I wear this uniform and listen to their rules because I want to. At least… I think I do. I am still a little unclear on what dictates wanting.” That bit of honesty made her stomach feel hollow. “I only tolerate him because I choose to. He believes himself important, but death will have him, the same as anyone else.” Regan thought she did an exceptional job explaining all of this in the most normal way possible. The mention of leaving a review did turn the dial on her mood a little bit, in a good way. “I leave reviews all the time, and can help you, if you would like.”

They converged by the red EXIT sign, and out of the two of them, the other woman seemed more antsy to escape this place. She had said she had a strange few months, so maybe it wasn’t even the first time something like this had happened to her. Regan stood aside and let her push out the door. Besides, she had grabbed a few tablets and a laptop on the way over, so her arms were full. 

She squinted as the sun flooded her vision. After a few blinks, she straightened herself out like none of this had been a big deal, and looked over at the woman. “I believe I should ask you for your name now. The social convention is to exchange those after being stuck in a storage room together. I read that in the Apple handbook.” She seemed worse for the wear, and again, Regan had to wonder just what she’d been through recently. She pressed her lips into a thin line, then offered the woman a couple of the brand new, packaged tablets she brought out. “These are for you. I am sorry I can’t fix your old one.” She also wasn’t completely sure the ones in her arms didn’t crack from her voice, but that was a problem the woman could discover later. 

“This lot is fine. It could be better. There is no roadkill.” Regan glanced around disapprovingly. She should have snatched that dead raccoon from in there when she had the chance. Now she wasn’t sure if she would even be going back, because Pubik had exhausted her good will (yes, that was good will she displayed in the past) and Regan couldn’t guarantee her lungs wouldn’t rattle with a scream next time she saw that man. And– oh, the woman had sounded frantic in there, hadn’t she? Not to mention, though Regan wouldn’t admit it, the fresh air massaged her remaining tension. As long as she didn’t look at the asphalt too long, it would not grow slick and bubble. “Hey, um, are you… you are alright, yes? Physically.” She tilted her head back and forth, debating for a moment. “And mentally, emotionally, whatever you would like to call it. Are you functional?”

—

Once in the fresh air, Meredith doubled over and attempted to regulate her breathing.  You’re safe, it’s fine, you’re fine, she repeated to herself in her head, deep breaths pulled from the depths of her lungs.  Her eyes scanned the lot in front of her.  It was bright, sunny.  There were no woods, no murky lake.  There were no monsters lurking.  All was well.  “I’m Meredith,” she said, standing back up tall.  “I suppose this is one way to break the ice,” she tried to smile, the breaths coming easier now.  She tried to shake it off, feeling a bit feeble next to the confident employee across from her.  “Oh- my goodness.  Thank you,” Meredith accepted the boxes, looking up at Apple with wide eyes.  She wanted to ask if she was sure, if she could really take them both, but at this point she felt it maybe better not to ask questions.  It was better to cut her losses and run than spend any more time at this Apple store.  “No, I appreciate it.”  She hoped these ones weren’t also…glitchy.  She feared the truth she would have to accept if they were.  “Maybe I’ll take you up on that review help, if not just to get that guy off your back,” she offered.  “I’ve had shitty bosses before, they’re the worst.”  Mere slid her backpack off one shoulder and tried to stuff both tablet boxes inside and zip it back up.

“Oh yeah, I’m alright.  Is there any glass in my hair?”  Meredith leaned over to the side slightly and brought a hand up to shake out her curls, hoping any small shards would sprinkle on to the concrete below instead of lingering in her scalp.  “Yes I uh- I’m functional,” she smiled, though she wasn’t sure if it would sell it.  “Are you okay?  That was quite a scream.”  It was a misdirection, perhaps.  But Meredith had been genuinely worried about the other girl, she still wasn’t sure what had caused such a reaction.  “I thought maybe there was somethi- someone in there with us.  I don’t know, it sounds silly now,” a meager laugh escaped her.  She was scared of the entity from the cabin, but she was also scared of everyone thinking she was crazy.  She felt alone enough now as it is.  She was worried about isolating herself even more.  “Just freaked me out.  But I’m okay.  Thank you for all your help.”  She dusted herself off and adjusted her pack.  “My bike is just out front.  I guess I’ll head out unless there is anything else you need from me for the iPads,” she said, hoping the answer was a simple no and that she could get out of here.  Even if the lights and the scream and the locked door had been nothing but flukes, she couldn’t shake the weird feeling that was stuck to her spine.  She wanted to go home, she wanted a drink.  She hoped home was safe.  “It was uh- nice to meet you.  Sorry about, well, all of that.  I hope the rest of your day is less eventful,” Meredith smiled and gave a small wave before heading to the front of the store to retrieve her bike and head back to her apartment.

—

So the woman had a name, and now Regan had it (not like that). Meredith. Who still seemed quite frightened, fidgeting with her bag, glancing around like she itched to leave. She was a victim, wasn’t she? Another one. This was all Pubik’s fault. All of it. But something annoying fluttered against Regan’s ribcage anyway: guilt. Pubik wouldn’t have locked a customer in the storage room; it was Regan’s presence that elicited that behavior. And maybe, just maybe, it was also Regan’s fault that Meredith went back there… where she could have died away from her friends and family, in Irel– in a storage room. 

If the tablets were not enough, Regan would make this up to Meredith in some other way later. The streak of paranoia in Meredith’s voice sealed the deal. An idea struck her, and when were those ever poor? “I don’t know about inside, but Pubik was out there.” Regan’s eyes narrowed as the name passed through her lips. “Wear a helmet on that bike, and if you decide you are interested in… justice, you may find me here. The next time, we will be the ones making it eventful.”

[fridge-reviews]

Shadowrun Combo Review

Developer: Harebrained Schemes Publisher: Paradox Interactive Rrp: £10.79 (Gog.com), £10.99 (Humblebundle, Steam) and £11.39 (Epic) Released: 25th July 2013 Available on: Gog.com, Humblebundle, Steam and Epic Played Using: Mouse and Keyboard Approximate game length: 12 Hours (for the base campaign)

Shadowrunners are the ones who do the dirty jobs that the Corporations need doing but also don't want their names attached. As far as the System is concerned, they don't exist, they're a ghost. So who better to break into a rival Corps officies and steal some secrets or perform a hit or simply deliver a package you don't trust your colleauges to handle. They're a nessecary evil in the modern world of 2054.

The Shadowrun games are is based off of the tabletop RPG Shadowrun, which was created by Jordan Weisman. I mention this because Jordan Weisman is also the lead designer of Shadowrun Returns. The world of Shadowrun is a cyperpunk dystopia where corporations run the world... sounds like every cyberpunk dystopia right? Well the key difference with Shadowrun is that magic has returned and now the world has elves, dwarfs, trolls and orks along with a number of other creatures. Since these games came from a tabletop RPG it makes sense that they would be CRPG's (Computer Role Playing Games) with turn based tactical combat that is similar to the likes of Xcom, and yes that does include the chance to hit ratio stat that I swear lies to you sometimes.

With all three of these titles you get to select which campaign to play when you choose to start a new game. By default there's only one in each title (with exception of Dragonfall which includes the campaign from Shadowrun Returns) but more can be added through Nexus mods and the Steam Workshop (assuming you're playing the Steam version). What makes this work so well is that there is no voiceacting anywhere within these games, so as long as the writing is good any user generated campaign can be as good as the one that comes as standard.

As is the case with most RPG's you start on the character creation screen where you get to choose your gender, race, archetype (think class) and etiquette. When you pick your race you get to choose between humans, elves, dwarves, orks and trolls. The race you pick will dictate your starting stats, for example a troll is stronger and tougher than an elf but is also stupider and less charismatic. Your choice of race can also have an influence on conversation options though this isn't seen often. All the races, apart from humans, are thought of as 'metahuman' which is part of the lore of the Shadowrun universe lore so I won't go into it. Once you have your race chosen you can pick your archetype, you have the choices of; street samurai, mage, decker, shaman, rigger and physical adept. There's also an option to pick none for those who wish to completely customise an archetype. The last thing you do (with exception of naming the character) is choose two etiquettes. These represent your character knowing how to speak and carry themselves while dealing with people from certain backgrounds. You won't talk to an aristocrate the same way that you speak to a common street thug, for example and visa versa.

In all three games your character will gain 'karma' which is used to increase attributes and skills. However, unlike most RPGs you won't gain karma simply by killing creatures. Instead karma comes from completing quests such as the sidequests that can be found. The amount of these side quests (at least in the base campaigns) is very much dependant on which campaign you're playing. In Dead Man's Switch, which is the Shadowrun Returns campaign there aren't that many but in Dragonfall there are quite a few to find. Of course, what I've said only relates to those campaigns another user made campaign might be absolutely chock full of them.

Along with the karma you are often rewarded with money for the tasks you perform, the currency in this case being Nuyen. You'll be needing the money as well in order to buy better equipment (there is no raiding of bodies), spells and hiring in other Shadowrunners.

The Shadowrun universe has its own vernacular that you'll grow to understand as you play, although if you want a quick guide there's a glossary within the help menu. The help menu is also where you can find information on the various actions you can perform in the game, just in case you forgot.

I can only really speak on the campaign that was provided by the developers but from what I experienced I'd say this game is well worth a look, especially for those who like RPG's and fancy something outside of the usual fantasy fare. And if you like what you play of the game, perhaps try your hand with the editor that comes packaged with the game to create your own story.

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Shadowrun: Dragonfall – Directors Cut

Developer: Harebrained Schemes Publisher: Paradox Interactive Rrp: £10.99 (Humblebundle, Steam),£11.09 (Gog.com) and £11.39 (Epic) Released: 18th September 2014 Available on: Humblebundle, Steam, Gog.com and Epic Played Using: Mouse and Keyboard Approximate game length: 20 Hours (for the base campaign) The first thing I want to say about Shadowrun: Dragonfall is that this isn't a sequel to Shadowrun Returns, nor is it a side story. No, this is its own game set in the same world but in a different location. If I were to make a comparison to another franchise I would say that these two are linked together in the same way that Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas are (ignoring the fact those are made by different developers). One acknowledges the existance of the other but the events of either game has no impact on the other.

Most of the things I would say about Shadowrun: Dragonfall (which henceforth shall be refered to as Dragonfall and Returns respectively) are the same as with Returns, which makes sense since they share the same engine. However, there are two main differences between Dragonfall and Returns the first of which is the change in UI. To me, Dragonfall's UI just looks a lot cleaner and easier to parse, while I understand that that is mostly cosmetic I really did find the change to be an improvement. The second difference, and its a huge one, are your companions... In Returns built in campaign you had to hire in help or were occassionally given an NPC to accompany you. But in Dragonfall your given a team who will remain with you throughout the campaign. They will comment on your decisions and will even change their attitude toward you, for good or ill. They'll also level up and you get a hand in influencing that by picking between two skills when they do. Eventually you'll even get the chance to perform loyalty missions for them that will have an effect later in the game.

I also found that the story within the campaign of Dragonfall was much more indepth, I can say for certain it was longer than the one included in Returns. There were more characters to interact with and eventually form a bond with. I grew to know the reasonably sized hub area and went out of my way to explore it all. ----

Shadowrun: Hong King – Extended Edition

Developer: Harebrained Schemes Publisher: Paradox Interactive Rrp: £14.69 (Gog.com), £14.99 (Humblebundle, Steam) and £15.49 (Epic) Released: 20th August 2015 Available on: Gog.com, Humblebundle, Steam and Epic Played Using: Mouse and Keyboard Approximate game length: 20 Hours (for the base campaign)

Seeing that so far I've covered the previous two of the Shadowrun games and had to handwave the similarities already I think it's best to focus on what Shadowrun: Hong Kong does differently to the other two. Firstly, when creating your character a new skill has appeared attached to the 'Body' attribute called 'Cyber Affinity'. This new skill unlocks more potent cyberware and grants bonuses relating to it. You also finish up the creation process by giving your character not only a street name but also a first and last name.

Secondly, hacking has been changed. In the previous games performing a hack within cyberspace was a skill check. For those not in the know, a skill check is when a game system compares your characters numerical skill against the challenge of the task; ie the check requires your characters strength to be 6 or more and your character has a strength of 8, that means they've passed the check. But the way hacking works in Shadowrun: Hong Kong is with an actual mini-game, or rather two mini games. The first is a simple case of simon says, you don't actually need to do this part but the more successful inputs you make the more time you will get with the hack. The second mini-game requires you to match seven symbols that fade in and out and select the correct one from a list.

Third, and lastly, this iteration of the game has a few voiced and illustrated cutscenes. This might seem a bit strange to comment on but when combined with the actual content of the story within the game they really help sell some of the horrific imagery involved.

One of the things I really love about the Shadowrun universe is that the choices you make are rarely black and white. There is almost always a downside that you'll have to contend with at some point, even if its relatively minor.

All three of these games are great, if you like a story heavy RPG, which I do. However, you need to be willing to actually read and I know many people have something of an aversion to that. If you get the chance to get a hold of these games I really do recommend it!

If these games appealed to you perhaps try;

Xcom: Enemy Unknown Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden Divinity Original Sin 2: Definitive Edition

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