#i liked bechdels style and that's about it because jesus

[olipeaksforever]

tumblr when alison bechdel praised the transphobic book adam:

tumblr when alison bechdel spoke highly of michfest:

tumblr when dykes to watch out for is losing against homestuck in the queer media tourney:

[amrv-5]

T R H for ask prompt :))) happy holiday <3

HELLO LIVV and HAPPY HOLIDAY!! wishing you continuing safe travels...!!!! Also this is so fucking long I'm so sorry. It was the writers question. It got me................

T: Any fandom tropes you can't stand?

Heh. I have a distaste for anything that -- this isn't a wildly common trope, notably, just one I see on occasion -- anything that portrays Hawk as helpless / passive. I think he gets fandom-ified sometimes into somebody who Needs Saving (and given some canon events, like, I Get It), but part of why I love him as a character so terribly much is his ridiculous scrappiness. He really doesn't take mistreatment / his situation / even his own negative emotions lying down. Guy's a fighter, even when he wishes he wasn't, and I don't really gel with fanon takes that leave him without some degree of agency in action (with the notable exception of him being literally drafted).

R: Are there any writers (fanfic or otherwise) you consider an influence?

[sickos voice] YES!!!! HAHAHA!!! YES!!!! I'm sure I've said some of these before, so sorry for repeats, but addition of fanwriters makes this particularly exciting yaaaay okay.

Non-fanfic: Well. God. Sorry for the particularly cancellable white-male-loquaciousness double-whammy of Thomas Wolfe and David Foster Wallace. Always chasing Wolfe's sort of deeply poetic, emotional, very sensitive way of writing--how reflective he is, his insane force / presence on the page, and some other intangible quality that just makes me go "jesus fucking christ I have felt exactly this, how did he put it into words" every other page. Makes me insane. As for DFW, well, sorry again -- get a lot out of that sort of grounded intellectualism-feel in his writing (we can argue about its value / veracity forever, but push to shove it really works for me as a reader).

Uhhh Vonnegut obviously, so much so that I almost feel like I don't need to say it 'cause I'm always transparently in writing trying to be even 1/100 as funny, sensitive, and useful in my cynicism as him.

Virginia Woolf!!! Man to render somebody's internal state of being so so vividly. I think I clearly ripped her off in S2G2 ch4, but my god how can you Not she's brilliant. Following from that Alison Bechdel because, talk about your intellectual prose. Man. Can I say fucking Voltaire without anybody getting mad at me. Sorry. Candide novella ever and probably the only thing that will get me through learning French.

Now. Fanfic authors --

First and foremost, cleanwhiteroom, wherever they are. I got into Pacific Rim late, but Designations Congruent with Things is genuinely one of the most meaningful texts I have in my life, fanfic or no. Insane. Brilliant, intellectual, warm, approachable, funny, wildly original. Also, Parker lore, 80% of the reason I was a physicist until I wasn't.

Uhh I can't possibly list everyone in MASH right now, but a quick skim -- Granspn (brilliantly written and beautifully imagined), yukiawison for skillful inventiveness and tackling exactly the themes I always want to see, yaroantheo for the just. MAN!!! the so-well-rendered warmth and depth of feeling and kindness in Homecoming, Remyfire's grasp of physicality and vivid tangibility, gayfranzkafka for really effective formatting play, raven/singlecrow for a Hawk I'll never forget. I am CERTAIN there are others, these are just top of the head.

And, maybe a surprise contender given that I don't talk a ton about BCS -- jimmymcgools does things with landscape and light that make me fucking nuts. I've gone back and just stared at their descriptions of place, light shape and quality, land, etc. -- master at work fr.

H: How would you describe your style?

I do not think there is a single question I could possibly be less objective or accurate on LMAO. My first thoughts in order were: Bad (nonspecific and too mean to Parkers Past), Sprawling (this seems accurate), Concerned With Realism (not actively ATTEMPTING it, notably, but -- concerned. I am Concerned with Realism. Feels true). Melodramatic but maybe not with as much pejorative sentiment as the word usually carries. Verbose. I try to gesture in the direction of comedy? In general summary: Freakin' weird, dude.

[clouds-of-wings]

Drinking spiced cherry wine from the discounter and actually reading the lyrics of Beloved Antichrist for once - Part 2 (Act 1)

Narrator: At this point, Seth is still with his parish and has no idea he’s the Antichrist Seth, speaking for the first time: WOE TO YOU, EARTH AND SEA!

PArish not pErish! Learn English! The mistake comes twice in a row, so I know it’s not just a typo.

“Lift from me infant smiles”, wut? Does that mean that he’s being reborn into maturity? Huh... alright.

Actually if I’m going to comment every time they use an expression that’s like a square peg in a round hole I’ll be typing until 4am, so let’s just say WUT really loudly ONCE and let it cover the whole opera.

I’m gonna stop commenting on the bad English too. I say this with all the affection available to me (like 9 affections) but bad English is a job requirement if you’re gonna write lyrics for Therion. This is how it has always been. If you can reliably create a present tense verb form and remember the s behind the third person singular - don’t apply. And the singers always go along with it. I’ll drink some more wine and say it adds to the charm.

The opera passes the Bechdel test in the second song.

Cmon, “United States of Europe”? Is that the best name you guys could come up with? How bout Eurotopia? Eurotzania? Jesus Christ Superstate? Greater Berlin Area? European Union Rules Oll People Everywhere?

There’s actually a lot going on here story-wise. I wouldn’t have thought it since all the songs kiiinda sound very similar to me. I mean I like the opera very much, musically, but the songs kinda merge into one another. They could have been one 3 hour long song. Land of Canaan has more different styles in it to my ear, and that’s “only” 10 minutes. Actually it has more styles to my eyes. My synaesthesia sees all of BA very similarly. Same colours, same textures, same sense of space. How much so? Enough that I kept abbreviating the name of the opera to “BC” instead of “BA” because the colours of the letters fit better and I didn’t even realize my mistake for a while.

I REALLY have questions about the logistics. In a steampunk post-apocalyptic world they have a continent-wide election..? Just, how long does that take? How do they communicate the results? Did they lay new phone lines? Are the old ones still functional? Do they send letters or send a messenger to inform of the regional results? What are the ballots made of? Did they build new paper processing plants? How did they get mass production back on its feet anyway? Whom did they force into the mines?

More problems that the anime adaptation will sort out, I guess.

Johanna does her duty as big sister in warning Helena not to believe every random man who acts like he’s the second coming of Christ & God’s gift to the world, a touch of realism

Seth needs only the barest of friendly pokes to fall from faith, This is Most Concerning. And understandable if you read the notes to the piece in question, but in the actual text of the opera it isn’t even mentioned before that he can’t hear God anymore. A bit rushed. Maybe they cut out a song? IIRC the original version of the opera was half an hour longer.

Also I love how meta “The Solid Black Beyond” is. “Hey WHY do you worship Jesus, I made you, you’re my son, do what I want you to do instead and, uhhh trust me it will TOTALLY work out fine!” - spoken by Satan, who is voiced by - the composer.

The president of Europe reads a brilliant insightful book and immediately realizes how misguided he has been. Hahaha. Ohh bless your hearts, guys. If only.

Garden of Peace needs to be much MUCH longer. None of the stuff mentioned in the summary actually happens in the text. Helena tells Seth her life story? BITCH WHERE!

It really bothers me that the text - not just here - focuses almost exclusively on the emotional content of the scenes and doesn’t tell us much about the story, which is explained only in the summaries. This might work for an album, but watching an opera like this would be very confusing. If you don’t read along with the notes (which afaik the non-limited edition of the CD release doesn’t even have), you’ll be ??? the whole time. I tried to read the lyrics once on some lyrics site, without these summaries, and they made no sense to me without context. A lot goes on in the story summaries. Very little goes on in what the characters actually say. And with many of these things I can’t think of a nonverbal way to communicate them.

I remember Christofer saying in an interview that he can’t write recitatives. Maybe that’s the problem. It’s like reading a text with many nouns but too few verbs. I don’t know though. I’m not too much of an opera buff. I did try to get into them but I find them boring. The only ones I watched the whole way through were Mefistofele (largely a waste of time but with one VERY good scene), and Orlando, thanks to Marijana Mijanovic playing the main character. It made me question my sexuality when she had murder in her eyes and an axe in her hands, but I do remember the story making sense.

I feel like I need to listen to the entire opera WHILE reading the text WHILE high enough that I can hallucinate the stage production in order to really judge the quality of the writing tbh.

I like the amount of characterization the characters get (mostly in the summaries). Helena has a special star she always sees, that’s sweet. Also foreshadowing. She has always loved the morning star, and then she marries the Antichrist.

Also, do Johanna and Helena symbolize the duality of humankind? QUESTIONS! The Two Daughters of Wisdom.

“Lots of stylish guests are strolling around” 8)

The mortal enemies DANCE AT A PALACE BALL. Oh this is SO anime material!

Okay this one line in “The Palace Ball” pisses me off every time I listen to BA. It’s such a small detail but it irritates me to no end. “May I have the pleasure to offer you a dance.” An Old-fashioned Gentleman(TM) would never say this to an Old-fashioned Lady(TM). It implies that he’s doing her a favour. He should ASK her for a dance, not OFFER her one, because (the polite fiction is that) she’s doing him a favour by accepting. This is just basic etiquette! You penguins!

Narrator: Seth finds himself politely rebuffed by Johanna. Johanna: Your powers ain’t shit, plus you’re evil, now fuck off.

I do want to know Seth’s brilliant philosophy that makes the world a perfect place, but it was definitely smart of the people behind this work not to try to come up with one.

Wow this takes a lot longer than I thought. I have acid reflux from the alcohol, which I’m not used to, and it’s late. I’ll do the rest some other time.

[fipindustries]

All the novels i (tried) to write in my life.

abecause why not?

K-404 (unfinished): written at 15.

a sci-fi thriller mainly inspired by me watching an out of context scene from alien 3. Set in a larger shared universe that i had been building out of short stories back then. The story is about a space prison where they would sent people who couldnt be sent to regular prison because their crimes were too ambiguous. The main idea was that this was a prison of intellectuals, rather than of violent criminals, and through the characters i would wax about my philosophical and political views, views that i had gotten as a teenager who read existentialism for begginers and watchmen and v from vendetta, you can imagine the quality of the text. At one point a nanite container would go haywire inside the prison and then a grey goo event would start consuming the station so the four main characters would have to find the way to escape the prison before it was consumed by the nanomachines. The main characters would be a robot who pretended to kill his creator so everyone would be afraid of him , a female serial killer with aids who killed by sleeping around with people, a guy who tried to kill himself by jumping off a building and just so happened to fall on the guy who bullied him in high school, and just some random douchebag with nothing interesting to him besides being the POV character.

Kratae (unfinished): written at 16.

imagine X-men mixed with avatar the last airbender. An ancient fantasy world where some people are born with superpowers and chased away because of it, the people with superpowers get together and fund their own nation, called Kratae. Hilariously this story was inspired by me reading eclipse, from the twilight saga. In this world if someone with powers uses their power on you then you also get powers, so there is this couple and the guy gets powers and then the girl rejects him so he decides to get revenge by using his teleportation power on her and she develops her own powers and becomes a pariah and looses her entire life. The story starts with her trying to find the guy so she can kill him but when she does find him it turns out someone already killed him before her and then the story turns into this crime mystery where she will try to find the person that killed the guy she wanted to kill. It had this huge ensemble cast that included a lesbian time traveling history teacher and her street urchin aprentice (AKA the next season of doctor who) , two gay war veterans who met each other fighting in opposite sides of the same war, a creep with a crush on the protagonist and many others. There was also on top of all this a giant conspiracy trying to stifle research into free energy, the history of the world and the political dynamics between the faction of the people with powers and the people without.

The Demiurge (semi-unfinished): written at age 17.

basically a huge rip off of sandman.

imagine if god was one of us. If god instead of living above us in a cloud decided to live as a human and to grow old and die as one and the get reincarnated and then start all over again all throughout history, and jesus christ was the one time he tried to tell the truth to anyone. And THEN in modern times something goes wrong with the reincarnation process and he only realizes he is god once he becomes 16, and he is a white, straight, cisgender male, and he just happens to share all of my opinions on life and the universe and religion?????

a lot of this book is just me having fun while creating a whole cosmology that fits my view of the world out of pop-christianity, there are things like yawhe being imprisioned in hell in a cage made out of logic next to calvin, there is a part when adam and eve turn out to be also death and mother earth, and also Time and Space AND ALSO cain and abel are lucifer and Yaweh, there is a part where we see the antropomorphic representation of the fine arts giving birth to a ninth brother: comics. At some point the story makes a 180 and changes focus from god, who dissapeared for mysteryous reasons, to his best friend, some teenage girl who dies in the middle of the story and then we see her ghost searching across the universe to find him and bring her back to life.

i say its semi unfinished because at the last moment i got bored of it and simply slapped together a sudden ending for it out of nowhere.

Eigen (finished): written at age 19.

Eigen is one of my proudest achivements in a way. Written right after gorging myself on Portal and QUBE and the cube, and particularly inspired by the bathroom in the cyber at the corner of my street, i decided to write my own story about a guy trapped inside a grid-like onthological maze with a robot voice as a companion and a weird old guy chasing him trying to kill him.

thing is, i was studying advanced algebra back then, you know, matrices, subspaces, eigenvalues, etc. and it was the second time i was doing that class because i had failed at it the year before. So in order for me to learn the subject better i would take everything i learned in class and use it as inspiration for the story i was writting, ortogonalization, matix multiplication, transposition, etc.

i actually passed the course at the end of the year and i was fucking stoked about that.

at the end of the story there is a bunch of epic twists where it turns out the maze had been built by the main character who suffers amnesia, the old man was the main character from the future and the robot voice was actually the MC’s partner who also suffered from amnesia and was convinced she was a robot, and was trapped in the surveillance room for the maze. they never escape the maze.

Bigender (unfinished): written at age 21.

now this i think was my shortest attempt at wrtting a novel which i was really dissapointed about at the time since i had spent most of 2013 working the story in my head but when it came the time to actually put it all on paper i could barely get to the end of the second chapter.

the story is about a young girl who one day wakes up and discovers she turned into a boy. She is ovbiously distraught about this but it quickly reverts. Afterwards she decides to investigate if she’s the only one who can do this and it turns out not, there is a documentary about a person that also had the ability to genderbend, so she seeks this person and ask their advice as to how to manage a life with this condition. The teacher turns out to be some antisocial jerk who’d rather not have any kind of human interaction with anyone so it’s up to our spunky protagonist to break this ol’ scrooge out of their shell.

thing is i had no real plot here, it was going to be mostly a slow burn character study about the relationship between these two people and how they deal with their genderbending each in their own ways. this didnt work out because back then i felt really inadequate when it came to writing the life of other people with different experiences from my own, the teacher was supposed to have a boyfriend, the girl was supposed to have a bunch of lady friends, etc. so that’s why i never went to far with it.

F.I.P. Industries (finished): written at age 21.

ah, my magnum opus. the first novel i ever wrote. my crowning achivement.

and all it took was for me to abandon my career and read the entirety of wildbow’s ouvre for me to complete it. and this is not a joke. I doubt that i would have ever written this had i not lifted wildbow’s style and structure wholesale. The basic premise of, ok, we have this largely inadequate MC, let’s drop them in an impossible situation and see how they manage, was what fueled the writting of this book.

The story is about a college student who cant finish his thesis and is desperatly looking for a job (fucking prophetic, goddamn) and so he unwittingly gets hired by a company that works as a front for a cabal of mad scientist who are using the power of synergy and networking to take over the world, working on a dozen different projects at the same time and trying to see what happenes when you combine them into bigger more complex projects.

what is so important to me about this story is that i came up with it when i was 11 years old and i promised my self that some day i would make that story real. You guys have no idea how many false starts i had with this story. there was a time this was supposed to be a webcomic but it never went beyond a couple of strips. again, very much like wildbow with worm.

Multiple story arcs, a sprawling ensemble cast, a bittersweet ending, this story has it all and is one of my proudest works.

The empire of tomorrow (finished): written at age 22.

oh shit, we’re leaving behind the one word titles, i must be finally growing up as a writer!

The empire of tomorrow was a source of guilt and anxiety for me on some level because i remember reading fun home and are you my mommy from allison bechdel and afterwards finiding a lot of “incredibly problematic” themes in the story and being really upset at this.

the story is about a dystopian world where there was some sort of apocalypse and there is this feudal lord that controls one of the last remaining cities with an iron fist, so ofcourse the plucky rebellion comes up with the following plan:

to steal some of his super advanced technology and hack together a device very similar to the one in eternal sunshine of a spotless mind and use it on the feudal lord to project themselves into the lord’s mind when he was a teen and try and guide him into becoming a better person. Throughout the story is made ambiguous if they are rewritting his memories or actually going into the past, there is a lot of wild speculation about how the time travel works in this universe.

the main focus of the story is the relationship between the woman sent to do the mission and the feudal lord, which is the classical “she is a tough, no nonsense, paladin/ he is the snarky, slimy douchebag with a heart of gold/ will they, wont they” dynamic (spoiler alert: they kind of do).

thing is, mid-way through the story i throw this weird tangent towards reproductive rights and abortion and transexuality and i get the distinct feeling that the conclussions to where the story goes on these topics are not exactly kosher, but im not sure, i’ve never really shown this story to anyone besides my grandma who aparently loved it.

fun fact, for those who read disregarding reality, this story was the first time i used the character of erik, i reworked him fro the comic of course but not as much as you’d think.

Fan.Tastic (unfinished): written at age 22.

this was the point where i started to actually write my works entirely in english and upload them to the internet.

the story is set inside the internet, where the internet would be a physical place, following the rise and fall of a blogger who recently became tumblr famous.

again, im sure if someone who really cares about social justice issues took a look at this work they��d probably find a lot of things to be upset about, suffice to say in arc two of this story i show my own take on gamer gate and end up the story with the main character using every single slur i could think of towards her once friend and fucking off to 4chan.

the story was supposed to have 4 arcs, each one based on a website or piece of internet culture that i was involved in. The first arc was Deviant art, the second arc was Tumblr, the third arc was going to be 4chan and the fourth arc was going to be LessWrong.

thing is i found i only had things to say about the first two, the third one i had already said all i had to say on my /co/nrad comic and the fourth one i was still experiencing and thus i couldnt properly make a retrospective about.

it kind of boggles the mind how much work i put into this, i wanted to make it a true multimedia experience so i would invent all of this fandoms about things that dont actually exists and photshop tumblr posts and fanart and rotten tomato scores about these things to make it feel all a little more real. i dont think i ever went that far for any other story i made.

WE ARE MAKING A GAME (unfinished): written at age 23.

this, more than an actual novel is more like a series of scripts about this hypothetical webseries i’d like to do some day filmed in the style of the fourth panel from penny arcade, or the office, or the thick of it, or nirvanna the band the show, or, you know what? i think enough people have done that style now i dont feel like doing it so much.

Any way the story is about this popular girl in high school who one day decides she wants to make a videogame and thus she teams up with the nerd kid to do it, as time goes on we find out there is actually a lot more behind the popular girls than we thought at first.

the whole plot is just the dialogs between these two (and evetually three) as they come up with the game, right there, in real time, in front of your very eyes. What’s fun about this is that the game (called Maxplosive) actually shows up in the story of Fan.Tastic, except there it is this cult classic children’s movie.

i managed to finish what would basically be “season 1″ of the story but then i just lost interest since i was busy making my own actual game for college and i hadnt progressed much beyond what the characters in the story had and so i felt i couldnt properly write from experience.

i wrote the first chapter from season 2 recently in what was an extravagant moment of nostalgia from my part. I swear i NEVER go back to work on a story that i abandoned and i truly dont know how that happened.

The harpsichord crew (unfinished): written at age 23.

a new first, first time i actually have my main character be black women, yes, i know, im the wokest, now bring all the pussy towards me please.

but joking aside, the harpsichord crew was supposed to be the sequel to F.I.P. industries and the logic was sound, i would grab all these disparate ideas that i had been acumulating for years and mesh them all together. My main inspiration behind it was Gurren Lagann, where we would have these people with no power come across this incredible device which would slowly allow them to grow bigger and stronger with time until they became the greatest super villains the world had ever seen.

The story is focused on patricia, an overworkd lawyer and Lilly, a pole dancer. one day lilly decides to become a supervillain after being inspired by the fallout that came from FIP industries technology going public and ends up draggin patricia long for the ride. As the went, in true anime fashion, the would acumulate this quirky supporting cast, each one with a fun and weird origin story.

i think the biggest downfall of this story is that, much like all of the unfinished stories on this list, it didnt have a particularly strong ending that i felt i HAD to get to and so i managed to get 3 chapters in and then i forgot about it.

There is a crack in the world (finished): written at age 24.

i think i wrote more than enough about this story.

suffice to say that a lot of horrible things happened to me during 2016 and it took me until may of 2017 to finally feel like i could process all of that and work through it in my art. There is a crack in the world is a miseable story filled with horror and despair and the feelings in the words are raw and bared straight from my heart.

this is something a never do by the way, to really use my emotions as direct fuel for the art that i make. ususally i use my art as a form of escapism but in here, well, i guess there were things that i was trying to escape from too, like the horrible reality of being unenployed in a city you just moved to, a different, more mundane kind of horror when compared to the one i went through the last year but a horror i wanted to escape from all the same.

point being, there is a crack in the world is weird in a lot of ways when compared to the other stories in this list and curiously the only one that resembles it in any way i’d say is Fan.Tastic for the cynicism and bitterness that fueled both stories inceptions.

Final conclussion.

well, there it is, i of course didnt include the myriad of short stories and comics that i made or tried to make, these stories hold a special place because i put some extra bit of effort in them, because every single one was a universe that i dedicated several weeks or months to craft and i’d like to think they say something about me. My therapist once said that the common thread between all of them is that on some level or another, they are all about someone feeling trapped and trying to escape from a situation. this was before WE ARE MAKING A GAME.

i wonder if the theme changed or evolved in some way.