#i think i just wanted to write characters names above them in big weird font JBWB 😭

[kirkhammr]

Normal people compilation

[serinemolecule]

Text in Chinese computers

In the beginning [1], text in computers was made of a mix of 95 characters, called ASCII, including 10 digits, 26 uppercase letters, 26 lowercase letters, and some punctuation. They came from typewriters (a lot of the weirdness in the US computer keyboard layout, like `, comes from typewriters), and they were good enough for the Americans who invented computers. [2]

But then people speaking other languages wanted to use computers! And ASCII wasn’t enough for their language. How ungrateful! The original solution to this problem was that different computers used different codes for different languages, and files from one computer just couldn’t be opened on other computers with different languages.

This was fine for a while, until people started wanting to do that. So then computers had to support multiple languages, and if you opened a file and it wasn’t in English, your computer would ask you which language it was in so it would know how to open it.

At some point, the internet started taking off, and having to ask your friend what language this file is in because you tried to open it with English and it didn’t work got annoying; and not being able to talk about words in one language when typing in another language got annoying; and not being able to copy/paste because your languages were wrong got annoying; and everyone decided to just get together in one huge committee and make one single Universal Code for all languages.

They called it Unicode, for short.

That’s what we use now, that’s why you don’t have to deal with any of that. You can just copy/paste text from anywhere to anywhere now. It’s wonderful and everyone loves it. [3]

...except Chinese and Japanese users.

You see, Unicode decided that Chinese hanzi, Japanese kanji, Korean hanja, and Vietnamese Chữ Nôm should use the same characters. (Korea and Vietnam don’t care much because they switched to using hangul and Latin letters, so these days it’s mostly China and Japan getting frustrated by it.)

This is sort of like deciding b (English B) and β (Greek Beta) should be the same letter, and it should just look like b if you were using an American font and β if you were using a Greek font.

By which I mean, it would seem like no big deal, until you were writing text somewhere you couldn’t choose the font, like... most social media including Tumblr, and then suddenly if you tried to write or copy/paste Greek, it would show up with a mix of English and Greek letters.

Unicode has its excuses for this. There are around 10,000 Chinese characters, and it would have been hard to make room for four lists of them, one for each language using slightly different characters. And most of the characters look similar enough that people can still recognize them.

But this is a real problem! You can go on the Internet and find people who learned the wrong 直 because they were trying to learn Japanese but their computer defaulted to Chinese fonts.

If you’re wondering which font yours defaults to:

This is mitigated by the characters usually not looking that different. 直 above is the worst offender. The differences are usually pretty minor:

In practice, the effects are:

 • Native speakers have their default font set to that language, and only rarely get annoyed by the wrong character appearing.

 • Language learners sometimes accidentally learn words wrong, if they didn’t think to set up their computer language ahead of time, or if they try to simultaneously learn Chinese and Japanese.

 • People’s names are often a specific variant, and spelling their name correctly is often a big deal to them, which Unicode often prevents.

 • Linguistics bloggers get massively frustrated. Grr!

Unicode did later add special codes called variant selectors which are intended to alleviate this problem, but unfortunately they have basically no support. :(

[1] Not actually the beginning.

[2] So clearly “inventing computers” is kind of a vague concept and a lot of people instrumental in the long road towards modern computers, like Archimedes and Charles Babbage, were clearly not American, but you know what I mean.

[3] Also except people who design systems that need it to be possible to tell letters apart. Those people also hate it, because now people can do things like replace o (lowercase English O) with ο (lowercase Greek Omicron) to get past bad-word filters. But we already had that problem with l (lowercase L) and I (uppercase I).

[sineala]

The Old Guard

This post comes to you courtesy of the generous support of one of my Patreon patrons, who wanted to know what I thought of The Old Guard. This post contains some spoilers for both the movie and the comics.

So, a few days after it came out, my wife and I watched The Old Guard on Netflix. Tumblr had said a bunch of good things about it, and both of us basically cut our fannish teeth on Highlander fandom so we already had an automatic buy-in for a story about immortals. I knew it was based on a comic by Greg Rucka, but I had not, at the time, read the comic, although I am now reading it in order to write this post.

The premise of the film is as follows: a four-person team of immortals (Andy, Joe, Nicky, and Booker) makes a living hiring themselves out as mercenaries, fighting for causes that they believe are right. They are successful at this basically because their grasp of tactics appears to be (1) die, followed by (2) come back to life and (3) murder your attackers who are no longer paying attention to you because they think you're dead. Honestly, at this point, you wouldn't really need to be very good at the actual fighting part, I would think, but the film establishes that all of them are -- especially Charlize Theron as Andy -- because presumably it wants you to watch action sequences of everyone being badass, which they are. So, yeah. They take all the good-guy mercenary jobs that no one else can do because it would kill them, which is not a problem for them!

Anyway! The group's routine is interrupted by two major events: the discovery of Nile Freeman, a new immortal, who is a Marine serving in Afghanistan who survives getting murdered; and also the fact that one of their employers, Copley (played by Chiwetel Eijofor, whom you may remember as Mordo in Doctor Strange) has sold them out to the movie's Actual Villain, a Big Pharma CEO named Merrick (played by the guy who played Dudley in the Harry Potter series), who has (as far as I can tell) been given instructions to play this role just like he's Martin Shkreli, who is interested in finding the secret of their immortality, and whom you can tell is evil because he has his name in giant letters on the side of his building.

ME: Look, it's the villain! I've found the villain! MY WIFE: Other than Tony Stark, who actually puts their names on buildings like that except villains? It's just villains, right? ME: Uh. The president? The president definitely does that. (We make horrified faces at each other.)

Because we are Extremely Pedantic, we also spent a lot of time picking at how the characters' names and language abilities match up to their stated background. They all know a lot of languages, as you might expect, and the movie was determined to get through them without subtitles, which is an interesting choice but also kind of left some linguistic plot holes.

For example, Joe and Nicky claim to have met each other in the Crusades, with Nicky as (presumably) a Crusader and Joe as (presumably) a Muslim occupant of the area, although the movie doesn't specify this; Wikipedia gives Joe's name as Yusuf Al-Kaysani, which would at least fit that. Nicky is clearly Italian (as is Luca Marinelli, the actor who portrays him) and when he speaks Italian to the rest of the group we see that he definitely speaks modern Italian as spoken in Rome... which is absolutely, definitely not the language he grew up speaking, given that, among other things, Wiki lists the character's full name as Nicolò di Genova. I don't know if the writer of the screenplay (who I see now is also Greg Rucka) didn't know how much Italian dialects had changed in the last thousand years, if he thought that was good enough to be a nod to the character, or if there's some kind of backstory that didn't make it in where every so often Nicky decides to learn a modern dialect and keep his hand in, and also decides that that's the language he wants to use among his friends who would presumably understand several different dialects.

Also, the reveal that Andy's real name was in fact "Andromache of Scythia" was indeed badass but was slightly undercut by my wife yelling BUT THE SCYTHIANS DIDN'T SPEAK GREEK at the television.

Additionally, I feel like the movie could perhaps have been aware of the ways it chose to label on-screen locations, in which the countries were spelled out in large fonts with the cities above them. Places like LONDON, ENGLAND got their entire names spelled out, as did small French villages whose names I can no longer remember, but I guess AFGHANISTAN and MOROCCO and SOUTH SUDAN have zero cities, huh? However, the end of the movie did take place in PARIS which I guess unlike London is its own country now.

So the actual plot features the group of immortals trying to explain this whole immortality thing to Nile while being on the run from the people who are trying to turn them into Big Pharma, who wants to capture them and exploit the secret of their immortality. This is where it falls down a little for me, because the worldbuilding... gets a little shaky. They dream about each other when they're apart. Okay. Why? Sometimes they just stop being immortal and lose the capacity to heal and are dead in their next battle. Why? Why do they even exist? I just... wanted more answers than the movie gave me, and the pacing where I kept expecting there to be explanations wasn't there. There were a couple of scenes where Nile sat there in silence contemplating the fact that she would outlive her loved ones and my brain kept trying to insert Queen's "Who Wants to Live Forever?" Granted, the Highlander canon explanation for immortality is deeply, deeply weird, but at least it tried. No, I can't believe I'm defending Highlander II either.

The characters, too, could have been more fleshed out. The bulk of the character development is given to Andy and Nile, and I'm not complaining about that -- they were great -- but Joe and Nicky and Booker only got maybe a few lines each. They would have felt so much more real if they'd just had a little bit more to them. Also I didn't understand Copley's arc at all, but saying more about that would be spoilery. I do like that they have definitely set themselves up for a sequel.

But even with what we got, there's a lot to love about the characters. If you're here for canonically queer characters, you will enjoy Nicky and Joe, who have been in a relationship for probably about a thousand years. They are minor characters as far as the overall plot goes, but what they do have is lovely, and there is a romantic declaration between them at one point that is absolutely beautiful and possibly the most fervent love declaration I can remember seeing in a movie since maybe... ever. If you also like your queerness more subtextual, though Andy is never portrayed as explicitly queer, her past friendship with a fellow immortal Quynh was shown as very intense, as is the role she takes here mentoring Nile into the world of immortality. Also she has a double-bladed axe (yes, we kept yelling BRING ME MY MAN-KILLING AXE at the television) and as we all know, the double-bladed labrys has in modern times become a symbol for lesbians. So there's that.

In addition to the characters of color who play important roles here -- Nile was my personal favorite, but there's also Joe and Copley and (in flashback) Quynh -- there's a lot of diversity behind the cameras as well, or so the internet informs me. The director (Gina Prince-Bythewood) is the first Black woman to direct a superhero movie, and the same is true of her editor (Terilyn Shropshire). And, furthermore, apparently 85% of the post-production crew were women. They didn't have to do that, and yet they did. It was nice.

I don't watch a whole lot of action movies these days because I usually find R-rated violence too... violent, but I found myself really liking almost all of the action sequences here. None of them felt gratuitous, and a lot of them really focused on the physicality of the immortals fighting in a way I liked, because I feel like people are probably going to fight differently if they know they can survive every single hit, and I think the movie portrayed that in a way that a lot of superhero comics and movies don't. My favorite fight scene is definitely the one between Nile and Andy at the beginning, when Andy has trapped her on a plane and it's extremely close-quarters fighting and also extremely brutal. They don't stop basically until Nile breaks enough bones that she can't get up anymore, because until then she's going to keep trying, which is both kind of horrifying and a great character note. And they didn't film it like it was a Sexy Catfight! It was so good.

Also, the soundtrack is really good, and I've found myself streaming it on Spotify all week. I didn't know any of the songs in the movie, but there's a lot of hip-hop and -- okay, I don't even know if this is a genre? -- specifically a lot of hip-hop with an electronic/industrial sort of beat, which I thought was really great and livened up the fight scenes even more; "Going Down Fighting" did a really good job getting me in the mood for the final confrontation with the villain, and... yeah, it's all good. Someone made a playlist on Spotify that will come up if you search for it.

So, yeah. It's on Netflix. It's not without flaws (mostly, explaining how the hell immortality works, and a couple of pacing issues), but it's a really satisfying superhero movie.

That's the movie. Onto the comic, which I am just now starting to read as I write these words. Whee!

So The Old Guard: Opening Fire is a 2017 five-issue Image Comics series written by Greg Rucka, with art by Leandro Fernández, and there's also a 2019 sequel, The Old Guard: Force Multiplied, by the same creative team, also with five issues. I have not actually read any of Rucka's work before now because he is mostly famous for his DC work, but I have heard good things about it, especially his Wonder Woman run.

Anyway. The art is very stylized, with a minimal color palette, and it's very pretty but I honestly found it hard to parse sometimes. Many of the characters have very weird noses. Yes, noses. It's basically mostly in Andy's and Nile's POVs, like the movie, and as far I can tell Andy is explicitly queer, because unless I am entirely misreading this panel in issue #1, here she is in bed with a woman in one panel. Whee. Also there are some nice epigraphs at the beginning of each issue.

Okay, so, the plot here is basically the plot of the movie. There is still no explanation of why immortality exists. But even so, there are some fun character moments that didn't make it into the movie -- for example, Andy saying smartphones are too hard to use and she liked the old ones better, only for the rest of her team to say that she couldn't use those either. I think you get a better sense of Andy's world-weariness in the comic. There are also other, now-dead Immortals mentioned, like Noriko, who "went overboard off the Horn." Quynh is not one of them; Quynh basically is Noriko, which is because they cast a Vietnamese actress who asked if her character could be Vietnamese too, which seems perfectly reasonable to me. But anyway, in the comics, she's Noriko. Weirdly, Andy's full name, as she tells Nile when they meet, is Andronika ("man-victory") rather than Andromache ("man-battle," in case you were wondering); I think the movie made a better choice because Ἀνδρονίκα has exactly two attestations in the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, whereas Ἀνδρομάχη has all that shiny name recognition of being shared by the wife of Hector and also the queen of the Amazons and will ping viewers as a Greek name, and therefore ancient, even if it can't be the name she was born with. (There are five for "Andronike" and four more for "Andromacha" so they actually have about the same number of total attestations, as far as I can tell, when you consider the alpha/eta alternation in how various Greek dialects mark feminine nouns.)

(Yes, you totally wanted a review by someone who looks up character names in the LGPN. Don't lie.)

Plotwise, Andy gets all of the initial exposition in for Nile before they get to the safehouse, which Copley has already gotten to before they get back, so Booker is bleeding on the floor and Nile doesn't get to meet Joe or Nicky at this time, and I am also glad they changed that for the movie. But, don't worry, Joe and Nicky's romantic declaration is still in here. We also get Andy pondering the last time she was in love, with a human who grew old.

Oh, and we get Andy's age: 6,732. And by issue #5 her name has changed to Andromache, because what even is continuity? I guess Andromache is her name now.

So Nile finally meets Joe and Nicky when she rescues them and also, uh, that plot point where Andy might die? Totally not a thing here. Nope. And no "surprise! even more immortals!" end-credits moments either.

Basically, I feel like every change they made to the script for the movie really strengthened the story, and even though I thought the movie could have used more character moments, it's way better than how the characters are separated for even longer in the comic. Nile rescuing the team means a lot more when she has met them before, you know?

So Force Multiplied starts us off with Andy, Joe, Nicky, and Nile, because Booker is still on time-out. They are in the middle of a car chase, and Booker's off getting himself kidnapped by someone who wants to know where the others are. The villain of the piece turns out to be Noriko, who is still alive, whom Booker had never had a chance to meet and apparently had never heard of. So, basically, a lot like the Quynh plot that the movie is teasing.

Overall it's a little less action-filled than the first one, which had multiple splash pages of nothing but violence; this one is a little more character-driven and explores the relationship, such as it is, between Andy and Noriko, as well as Nile coming to terms with her immortality, as well as with what everyone else has done over the years. It does have a bunch of violence at the end, though.

I don't want to spoil the ending, but I definitely wasn't expecting where that was heading. There's apparently going to be a third volume, and I am looking forward to it, whenever it exists.

(Although, now that I think about it, the ending is a lot like a fan-favorite moment of Highlander: The Series, but I think if I said which episode you would know exactly what the ending was.)

So, yeah! The Old Guard! I can't say as I feel particularly fannish about it -- there's nothing that makes me yearn to fill in the gaps in canon -- but the movie was really good and you should see it. And you should read the comics if you're into that.

[doodlebugsandbumblebees]

You are straight-up a very sweet Hufflepuff whom I would be delighted to know any and everything about, so is it alright if I go ahead and ask EVERY question for the question meme?

Awww, wow!!  That really means a lot, thank you so much!

Alright here we go then!  We’re going to get to know me a whole lot better lol because these questions are pretty fun.  Obviously this will be a pretty long post so I’m putting it all under the read more

weird asks that say a lot

1. coffee mugs, teacups, wine glasses, water bottles, or soda cans?

Coffee mugs I think.  I have a pretty big collection of those.

2. chocolate bars or lollipops?

This one is hard!  Probably chocolate bars though.

3. bubblegum or cotton candy?

Cotton candy 100%.

4. how did your elementary school teachers describe you?

Hmmmm, I think hardworking and sweet came up a lot?  I was very much a teacher’s pet and the perfectionist anxiety set in early lol so I was a busy, over-achieving bee.

5. do you prefer to drink soda from soda cans, soda bottles, plastic cups or glass cups?

I prefer soda bottles.  Glass bottles especially.

6. pastel, boho, tomboy, preppy, goth, grunge, formal or sportswear?

It really depends?  But I guess I’m more tomboy style than anything else.

7. earbuds or headphones?

Earbuds because I like to have one in and one out so I can still hear what’s going around me.

8. movies or tv shows?

TV shows because I like having more time to get to know the characters (and domestic/casual situations for overpowered or zany characters are way more likely to happen in a show than a movie and I live for those lol).

9. favorite smell in the summer?

Rain on pavement because it just storms and storms in the summer and it’s so nice.

10. game you were best at in p.e.?

Hmmm I was good at anything that involved running?  And games that involved those wheely board things you sat on and scooted around on were always fun.

11. what you have for breakfast on an average day?

It varies?  Bagels or toast most often I guess.

12. name of your favorite playlist?

Sick beats.

13. lanyard or key ring?

Key ring with a little stuffed animal on it.  Right now mine has a bee on it and I love it.

14. favorite non-chocolate candy?

Jolly ranchers.

15. favorite book you read as a school assignment?

Tuesdays with Morrie was pretty good.

16. most comfortable position to sit in?

Criss-cross.

17. most frequently worn pair of shoes?

My plain white sneakers.  They’re not real pretty or anything but they’re very comfy and I don’t have to think about whether they match things.

18. ideal weather?

Partially cloudy all day, storm in the afternoon, cool in the evening.

19. sleeping position?

Always on one of my sides.

20. preferred place to write (i.e., in a note book, on your laptop, sketchpad, post-it notes, etc.)?

Notes on my phone or on my laptop with my typewriter keyboard.

21. obsession from childhood?

The Lion King and anything related to it.

22. role model?

Jane Goodall has been at least one of my role models since I was ten, but my mom is a big one too.

23. strange habits?

I’m still getting over periodically chewing my fingers?  Does that count?  I also have a quirk when it comes to touching certain metal things but especially coins so when someone hands me change I do everything I can to avoid touching it and hold it in the bills if I can.

24. favorite crystal?

Kinds of crystals I presume?  I’ve always liked rose quartzes and amethysts (especially amethyst geodes since I have a couple of those).

25. first song you remember hearing?

Probably something from Tarzan or Mary Poppins since those were my childhood movies.  So Stepping Time from Mary Poppins would be a good guess.

26. favorite activity to do in warm weather?

Swimming.

27. favorite activity to do in cold weather?

Walking around in it because it’s hardly ever truly cold here and I like to savor it.

28. five songs to describe you?

I change music taste every five minutes so I’m going to say songs that describe me right now are brand new by ben rector, just a quail by louie zong, turning out by ajr, everything stays by olivia olson, and hooked on a feeling by blue swede.

29. best way to bond with you?

It’s all in the time.  I get attached to people pretty easy as long as they’re nice and we can goof around, have fun, and talk about whatever.  So putting time in to hang out means a lot to me.

30. places that you find sacred?

Hmmm, being deep in forests feels sacred to me so there are certain waterfall hikes in the smokey mountains and along the blue ridge parkway and in Hawaii that seem very special to me.  And then disney world and disneyland will always have a sacredness to them for me because they’ve meant so much to me and the happiness it brings people is pretty magical.

31. what outfit do you wear to kick ass and take names?

My comfy jean shorts and either my yellowish flannel or my guardians of the galaxy shirt with my rebel jacket. 

32. top five favorite vines?

Caterpillar Rave

I Smell Like Beef

I Could’ve Dropped My Croissant

Michael with a B

This Is The Comedy Police

Honorable Mention: FR E S H A VOCA DO

33. most used phrase in your phone?

Probably “okay cool” because I say that a lot.

34. advertisements you have stuck in your head?

We are farmers, bum bud um bum bum bum bum.

35. average time you fall asleep?

1 AM.

36. what is the first meme you remember ever seeing?

Oh gosh the first one… probably one of those vines up there.  It might have been fre shavocado.  This was a long time ago though.

37. suitcase or duffel bag?

Suitcase.

38. lemonade or tea?

Tea because I can’t drink citrus without it setting my mouth on fire lol.

39. lemon cake or lemon meringue pie?

Lemon cake but I don’t have it often for the reason listed above.

40. weirdest thing to ever happen at your school?

Some kids in elementary did something weird in the trees behind our school because the teachers weren’t watching them (I never knew exactly what it was but it was Bad tm) but the teachers didn’t know exactly who it was so they punished the whole grade and we were forced to only play kickball during recess for like 7 months and it was the worst.  It’s not exactly weird per say but I always found it wild that the only conceivable thing they could think to do to solve this problem was force a bunch of scrawny, socially awkward, miserable children to play ground baseball with a permanently half-deflated rubber ball.

41. last person you texted?

My brother.

42. jacket pockets or pants pockets?

Pants pockets but only because I don’t get to use jacket pockets as often as I would like to.

43. hoodie, leather jacket, cardigan, jean jacket or bomber jacket?

I’m completely tied between hoodies and bomber jackets.

44. favorite scent for soap?

Ocean.

45. which genre: sci-fi, fantasy or superhero?

These are my three faves, not fair!!  Sigh, probably superhero because even with sci-fi and fantasy my faves tend to be my faves because they have superhero elements.  The colors, the Drama, the angst, the powers??  What’s not to love.

46. most comfortable outfit to sleep in?

Baggy t-shirt and athletic shorts.

47. favorite type of cheese?

Smoked gouda.

48. if you were a fruit, what kind would you be?

Watermelon.

49. what saying or quote do you live by?

“Keep moving forward.” from Meet the Robinsons most, but I also like “The bottom line is if you take a chance in life sometimes good things happen, sometimes bad things happen but, honey, if you don’t take a chance nothing happens.” from Dorothy in Golden Girls.

50. what made you laugh the hardest you ever have?

I don’t know about the hardest I ever have (because I am very lucky and have a very funny family so I laugh a lot) but watching vine compilations for the very first time with my siblings made me laugh really hard.

51. current stresses?

Fitting everything in.  Days just don’t feel long enough and social situations plus school stuff always get to me but I’m doing okay.

52. favorite font?

I do like times new roman even if it’s used a lot but I’ve been using the font yananeska for calligraphy stuff lately and it’s a cool one.

53. what is the current state of your hands?

They’re always a bit dry and on the warmish side but they’re pretty good.

54. what did you learn from your first job?

Have never had a job job but I volunteered in a library for like three years and it taught me to enjoy the details, slow down and enjoy the quiet, simple tasks, appreciate really excited kids, and try to help people whenever I can.

55. favorite fairy tale?

Aladdin or beauty and the beast I suppose?  I like that there’s multiple ways to interpret those stories and that they can be played with in some fun ways because they’re such interesting concepts by themselves.

56. favorite tradition?

How cities all over the world string up lights on things in the winter.  It means something different to everyone and some do it and some don’t which is totally fine, but this idea of lighting up the world during the bleakest month, and how some people go all out with colors and patterns and synced to music, and how everyone does it a bit different, and how entire cities are just smothered in lights means a lot to me.  I think it’s a very cool and very human thing to do.

57. the three biggest struggles you’ve overcome?

The tough year before my family moved, getting through my really intense anxiety years where I couldn’t travel in cars for more than fifteen minutes without throwing up, and my month away at art school.

58. four talents you’re proud of having?

Hmmm, I guess I’m pretty proud of my writing ability, my singing voice, my art skills, and my ability to talk to anyone.

59. if you were a video game character, what would your catchphrase be?

Probably something goofy like “YEET” or some variation of “That’s bonkers” because I do say those a lot.

60. if you were a character in an anime, what kind of anime would you want it to be?

Superhero.

61. favorite line you heard from a book/movie/tv show/etc.?

“That’s all it is, a leap of faith.” from Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse is still pretty special to me.  As is “I never thought I could do any of this stuff, but I can.” same movie.

62. seven characters you relate to?

Aaaaaaaa another hard one.  Whoo boy, right now my gut instinct is probably: Judy Hopps (Zootopia), Miles Morales (Into the Spiderverse), Raph (Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), Spiderham (Into the Spiderverse), Hagrid (Harry Potter), the firbolg (the adventure zone), and Sam-I-Am (Green Eggs and Ham).

63. five songs that would play in your club?

At the moment I would want you make my dreams by hall & oates, cantina band by John Williams, the bones by maren morris and hozier, hooked on a feeling by blue swede, and backflip by rivers cuomo to play.

64. favorite website from your childhood?

Coolmathgames.

65. any permanent scars?

I have a round scar on my elbow from when I skidded across the ground after crashing my bicycle.

66. favorite flower(s)?

I like lotus flowers, gardenias, and plumerias.

67. good luck charms?

My DnD dice, rocks (like my obsidian, sodalites, and amethysts), and my ten little lucky owl statues in different colors.

68. worst flavor of any food or drink you’ve ever tried?

Beverly soda is the worst but a specific flavor I really don’t like is pickles.

69. a fun fact that you don’t know how you learned?

Mantis shrimps punch so fast that the water around their punch boils.  Also they have seventeen color receptors compared to our 3.

70. left or right handed?

Right handed.

71. least favorite pattern?

I’m not quite sure?  I’m not crazy about optical illusions that look sort of smeared and are all black and white because they hurt my eyes so probably those.

72. worst subject?

I’m not great with math or sports, but I’ve gotten a handle on math as of late.

73. favorite weird flavor combo?

I’m not sure if they’re weird but I’m willing to try a lot so ketchup and mayonnaise is great, barbecue sauce and cheez-its is very good, and apples dipped in nacho cheese or salsa is not bad.

74. at what pain level out of ten (1 through 10) do you have to be at before you take an advil or ibuprofen?

I think 4.

75. when did you lose your first tooth?

I think I was five?  Not sure.

76. what’s your favorite potato food (i.e. tater tots, baked potatoes, fries, chips, etc.)?

Baked potatoes but fries are very close.

77. best plant to grow on a windowsill?

Aloe plants.

78. coffee from a gas station or sushi from a grocery store?

I don’t eat sushi so coffee from a gas station.

79. which looks better, your school id photo or your driver’s license photo?

School id photo.

80. earth tones or jewel tones?

Jewel tones.

81. fireflies or lightning bugs?

Lightning bugs.

82. pc or console?

Console.

83. writing or drawing?

Probably writing because it’s more straightforward to me but it depends.

84. podcasts or talk radio?

Podcasts.

84. barbie or polly pocket?

Barbie.

85. fairy tales or mythology?

Mythology because it gets wild so fast and cracks me up sometimes.

86. cookies or cupcakes?

Cupcakes.

87. your greatest fear?

Being annoying or mean without realizing it and driving people away.  I’m constantly scared I’m going to mess everything up which I need to work on because it’s hard to live that way.

88. your greatest wish?

Going to get a bit cheesy but to someday be a zoologist with some fun hobbies, travel often, feel satisfied with my life, and spend my days with someone I truly love and have a lot of fun with.

89. who would you put before everyone else?

Anyone in my family because we’re really close and they would do that for me.

90. luckiest mistake?

Probably going to an up-ity art school for a month a few years ago because while I was extremely depressed, homesick, and felt like a big failure the whole time, if I hadn’t done that and had my dreams crushed by some mean professors I might have gone there for a whole semester and spent a bajillion dollars to learn the same thing.  And it inevitably put me at the school I’m at now which I’m very very happy with and suits me so much better.

91. boxes or bags?

I like boxes.

92. lamps, overhead lights, sunlight or fairy lights?

Fairy lights because I’m a sucker for colors.

93. nicknames?

Doodlebug is the biggest one.

94. favorite season?

Fall.  Colors, halloween, thanksgiving, cooler weather, I love it ALL.

95. favorite app on your phone?

Spotify.

96. desktop background?

A painting of a whale shark from the Georgia aquarium because going there was a big deal for me and it’s very pretty.

97. how many phone numbers do you have memorized?

Maybe 3?  I don’t have to memorize them much anymore lol.

98. favorite historical era?

I kind of like the 1920s aesthetic these days but I love very scattered things about history so picking one era is tough.

[steve0discusses]

Yugioh S3 Ep 12: Seto Discovers Hostile Takeover Tactics

For April Fools, I’m actually going to update this blog. I know, right? It’s been a little while.

I’ll have you know that, if I had more time, you were *this close* to getting a recap of this hot mess movie.

Buuuut it turns out that movie is a lot longer than I thought. Soooo many bad wigs. Maybe another April Fools.

Anyway, back to Yugioh, are you ready for MORE BUSINESS?

Cuz if you wanted to watch a kid’s show with stocks in it well, I had no idea it would be the one about the playing cards. Really didn’t see that one coming. Stocks are going to be traded in a little bit, but currently, all we have to worry about is that Tristan is a monkey and Kaiba’s about to die.

He seems cool with it, both with being “dead” (still unsure if Tristan can be human ever again) and watching Kaiba become dead.

This is some high level freaky sci fi thing just stuffed into a side plot? Like...what purpose is the weird monkey robot?

(read more under the cut)

Joey has completely run out of his thimble full of patience, and he’s taken over the part of Den Mother in lieu of Tristan being too horny/monkey to manage it himself. Watching Joey slowly become more and more too frustrated to Even Deal With This Right Now has been his character growth this entire arc.

And the team’s somewhat amusement and concern that one of their best friends--who they saw...pretty much die--and is now a very horny monkey is like how you would notice that your engine light is on. Like they just have so many other problems right now. They’ve decided they will get around to deciding what to do about this...later.

They’re definitely going to deal with the monkey later. Eventually. So they just tied him to the truck and continue driving.

Like that’s what they actually did, they actually just tied him to the truck and kept driving.

Eventually, they do make it to the scene of the Kaiba card crime in their 3 wheel pickup truck, but unfortunately, so does the weird satellite laser, so once again our team does not make it in time to really make any difference. The Yugi team is consistently like...3 minutes too late. Should be their team motto.

So Noah’s big plan is to make Mokuba watch Leichter--the hard to spell Big 5 with the very Dixie accent--explain in great detail all the ways Seto screwed Mokuba. And it was...something that I don’t think most kids would get. Last week it was a .com analogy, this week we’re straight up jumping into hostile takeovers. Seto decided to use the Big 5 to buy up a majority of the stock and fire his Father, but realized that Gozaburo would absolutely not let that happen.

So, Seto set up a whole plan to make it appear like he was losing the stock race, by leaking the whole plan that they were secretly buying allll the stock straight to Gozaburo but while pretending to be Mokuba (I assume by pinching his nose while shouting through a telephone) and then driving Mokuba to Gozaburo by attacking him point blank.

Did any children watching this show understand this? Did any of you?

Anyway, for some reason Mokuba is shocked that this happened.

And then we get a flashback to remind us that yes, Mokuba was here when this happened. Maybe didn’t understand it at the time, but overall, should know by now that like...this happened. Noah revealing this to him really shouldn’t have been such a shocker, right?

Mokuba describes it as “the worst day in his life” which is kind of a lot since two seasons ago Mokuba was chained in a castle cell for several days (possibly weeks), turned into a playing card while his body was a zombie that did dishes for Pegasus, died in a VR game because his brother couldn’t play nice, then last season, got abducted and then was suspended from the bottom of a flying helicopter by one single rope tied around his waist, was imprisoned in a box warehouse where he barely escaped, found out one of his good friends is pretty sure he’s an Egyptian Pharaoh dont-think-about-it, only to find all of his other friends were now attached to torture devices and about to be drowned in the bottom of the sea or squashed by a couple tons of cargo container. And then the next day, 3 people got sent to the hospital during the tourney he’s the manager of and only one of those people isn’t still in a coma, and now there’s at least one serial murderer on board his blimp and there’s nothing he can do about it.

But sure Moki, this is your worst day.

Convinced that Gozaburo (I will never spell his name right, PS, my apologies) thinks Moki is on his side, Kaiba decides to do the deed. In his school clothes. Not entirely positive that baby Kaiba has any other outfit than his school clothes and that purple coat.

Like did Seto get off school early to go and do this, or did he honestly clock in at 8 AM, harass Joey and Yugi for a bit, maybe take a test, turn in his diorama of mitochondria that he made out of twizzlers or whatever, eat lunch while making fun of the skater kids who botch it on the stairs, scribble some art in art class until 3 PM, and then take the bus back home to do THIS?

And so although the Big 5 were still majority shareholders, they couldn’t really control Seto Kaiba--which leads me to think that at some point he managed to get their stocks away from them...somehlow...probably more insider trading, he seems really into that.

Anyways, long story short the Big 5 really screwed it on this one. I mean the company has to be run by a Kaiba per the Kaiba rule that we learned in S1 (kind of a weird rule this family enforces, when all of the Kaibas are SO BAD at romantic relationships that they can only date trading cards, or can’t stop getting abducted long enough to even go on a date with a real human ((Reminder that Mokuba and Serenity are the same age, but he’s 1/millionth as horny as any of these High School Juniors that are into Serenity)))

Leichter (who is the light purple font here, I uh...forgot to cap Leichter’s face so it’s somewhat confusing) decided to just continue explaining, mostly for Mokuba, I assume, because...everyone here already knows what’s happening.

And at this point he reveals that he does have a Blue Eyes.

Again, very surprised Noah gave him that card but youknow...the power of...whatever the hell is going on there between Kaiba and that paper card.

Anyways, the Blue Eyes gives him a win, so I guess he’s figured out somewhat how to use this card? Like it’s significantly less bad than it was in the previous seasons. Maybe that separation between him and the paper card in S2 was good for him. Got his relationship back on track.

So like, something that is kind of vogue right now in more adult TV is this tendency to try and make all your characters relatable by making them realize and obsess over how they messed up to the point that they can no longer make any moral choices.

And that was the thing I was worried about in this arc, I was worried that the one guy on the writing staff who SUPER stans Seto Kaiba would make Seto into some sort of Bojack Horseman, who becomes so obsessed with his guilt that he kind of becomes a victim of what society did to him rather than a guy who ever made a choice. And Bojack’s not a bad show or anything, I did watch all of it, and it’s supposed to be more about society than the characters. But, as his problems from his youth compounded, he loses all of his agency as a character. If you are forced to be an ass then...well you can’t be one, by nature of what it means to be an ass.

Does that make sense? I see that more and more in shows these days, just a constantly apology fest whenever writers do a villain background episode.

But yes, Seto was trained to be a shark, but he was already a shark from day 1. He was always like this from the moment he was put in that orphanage. No apologies on behalf of the writing staff are needed and I’m glad they didn’t make any. It was somewhat refreshing that Seto never once apologized during this entire episode. He is awful, and he is completely fine with that.

And like, Bro hates it when you do this type of parallel comparisons between characters, but I freakin love it because he might be an English major but he majored in technical writing, and I was minoring in film for a hot minute so I love analyzing stuff and he can just deal. So lets dive in. We just came off of a whole arc talking about Marik’s tragic backstory and it’s really interesting that Seto’s tragic backstory mirrors Marik’s a great deal (especially since Kaiba was the one who was supposed to inherit the magic rod) but the two of them have a very different response to it.

Marik’s background gave him absolutely no agency. Even when he did lash out against his father--that was the rod rather than Marik himself. He lost his nut because he got tortured by his Father and lived a very shelted life underground, there was no choice there. He even has a brother that he threw into the coals (well, stroke of lightning) for his own ambitions.

Seto, on the other hand, was also tortured by his Father, but lived a shelted life so far above everyone else, that he never really left that lifestyle. But, unlike Marik, when he got the chance to make a choice, instead of getting out of the Kaiba house to save his Brother, he decided to freakin destroy it, even if it involved torturing Mokuba (momentarily) in the process.

Both are destroying their Father’s legacy while also trying to rule the world at the same time, two different villains, two different ways, one isn’t necessarily better written than the other, but it does feel like Seto has a lot more control of his own life than Marik, who is currently bumming around in Tea’s brain.

But I dunno, maybe Seto will have a big moment where he will feel an ounce of guilt and we’ll find out that everything he did was secretly a good thing or The Only Way something. I might eat my words later and be somewhat disappointed. We’ll see.

If you just got here, this is a link to read these recaps from S1 Ep1, in case you felt like reading a novel’s worth of Yugioh, since we are on S3.

[thisbibliomaniac]

All the asks! ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

hnnnng okay. just for you ( ͡~ ͜ʖ ͡°)1. coffee mugs, teacups, wine glasses, water bottles, or soda cans?Teacups and wine glasses 👌 but they have to be big tea cups and pretty wine glasses. My house will be full of wine glasses and no wine 😂 2. chocolate bars or lollipops?Chocolate 3. bubblegum or cotton candy?Cotton candy 4. how did your elementary school teachers describe you?It was my mom, so probably nothing flattering XD 5. do you prefer to drink soda from soda cans, soda bottles, plastic cups or glass cups?I prefer to drink pop because I'm not an animal. 6. pastel, boho, tomboy, preppy, goth, grunge, formal or sportswear?Boho7. earbuds or headphones?Neither :/ 8. movies or tv shows?Both!! 9. favorite smell in the summer?Fresh air 10. game you were best at in p.e.?Dodgeball 11. what you have for breakfast on an average day?Nothing 12. name of your favorite playlist?👍 13. lanyard or key ring?Key ring14. favorite non-chocolate candy?Reese's pieces 15. favorite book you read as a school assignment?Madman 16. most comfortable position to sit in?None :///17. most frequently worn pair of shoes?My work shoes. They're also my most expensive shoes by a lot, but I can actually walk at the end of the week now 😂 18. ideal weather?Fall weather 19. sleeping position?Side 20. preferred place to write (i.e., in a note book, on your laptop, sketchpad, post-it notes, etc.)?Notebook with lines, but I also love typing 21. obsession from childhood?General and specific history 22. role model?None 23. strange habits?I was moderately obsessive compulsive as a kid, and our kitchen and basement stairs are black and white tiles like a checkerboard. For years upon years I only ever stepped on the black tiles, which meant for years upon years I always walked up and down the stairs the same way. A few years ago the kitchen floor was replaced, but not the basement stairs. Last week there was a basket on the landing so I started off on the wrong foot and almost fell three times on four stairs 😂 muscle memory, man. 24. favorite crystal??25. first song you remember hearing?Oh goodness i dont know26. favorite activity to do in warm weather?Drive with the windows down and Needtobreathe playing 27. favorite activity to do in cold weather?Stay inside and read 28. five songs to describe you?D: also no idea! 29. best way to bond with you?Literally just talk. I hate feeling like I'm being interrogated and tend to shut down if all you do is ask more and more probing questions. Talk about yourself. 30. places that you find sacred?My car. 31. what outfit do you wear to kick ass and take names?None :///32. top five favorite vines?Somehow I missed out on all of vine culture lol 33. most used phrase in your phone?lol 34. advertisements you have stuck in your head?I only use Netflix and mp3 so I rarely hear ads anymore 35. average time you fall asleep?236. what is the first meme you remember ever seeing?Probably grumpy cat?37. suitcase or duffel bag?Bag 38. lemonade or tea?Tea!39. lemon cake or lemon meringue pie?Bothhh40. weirdest thing to ever happen at your school?I'm sure there are lots of things, but I can't think of them 41. last person you texted?Probably Stell 42. jacket pockets or pants pockets?Pants pocket if they'd ever make them big enough for my phone 43. hoodie, leather jacket, cardigan, jean jacket or bomber jacket?All of the above. Except maybe jean jacket 44. favorite scent for soap?Pumpkin spice! 45. which genre: sci-fi, fantasy or superhero?All! 46. most comfortable outfit to sleep in?Yoga pants and tank top 47. favorite type of cheese?Feta48. if you were a fruit, what kind would you be?Cherry 49. what saying or quote do you live by?"More isn't always better, sometimes it's just more." 50. what made you laugh the hardest you ever have?Interesting lettuce 51. current stresses?Everything ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 52. favorite font?Webdings 53. what is the current state of your hands?Typing? 54. what did you learn from your first job?Everything I would ever need for life 😂 55. favorite fairy tale?Cinderella! 56. favorite tradition?Don't really have any 57. the three biggest struggles you’ve overcome?Nope 58. four talents you’re proud of having?¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 59. if you were a video game character, what would your catchphrase be?I'm right and I should say it 60. if you were a character in an anime, what kind of anime would you want it to be?I don't know anything about anime, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 61. favorite line you heard from a book/movie/tv show/etc.?Too many to choose from 62. seven characters you relate to?63. five songs that would play in your club?Anything from Needtobreathe or Taylor Swift 64. favorite website from your childhood?That veggietales gaming one 65. any permanent scars?Yes 66. favorite flower(s)?Roses and Plumerias 67. good luck charms?None 68. worst flavor of any food or drink you’ve ever tried?Stevia 69. a fun fact that you don’t know how you learned???70. left or right handed?Right 71. least favorite pattern?Paisley 72. worst subject?Science 73. favorite weird flavor combo?Veggie chips and hot sauce 74. at what pain level out of ten (1 through 10) do you have to be at before you take an advil or ibuprofen?Depends on what type of pain. I can handle everything except a migraine, which I only cant handle because I know it won't go away on its own. 75. when did you lose your first tooth?No idea 76. what’s your favorite potato food (i.e. tater tots, baked potatoes, fries, chips, etc.)?Curly fries 77. best plant to grow on a windowsill?All I've ever grown was told 78. coffee from a gas station or sushi from a grocery store?Hummus from a gas station 79. which looks better, your school id photo or your driver’s license photo?No photos of me look good 80. earth tones or jewel tones?Jewel tones 81. fireflies or lightning bugs?Fireflies 82. pc or console?Depends on if I'm playing Mario kart or roller coaster tycoon 83. writing or drawing?I can't do either :////84. podcasts or talk radio?¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 84. barbie or polly pocket?Polly pocket!! 85. fairy tales or mythology?Fairy tales 86. cookies or cupcakes?Cookies87. your greatest fear?Too late 88. your greatest wish?I want a kitten 89. who would you put before everyone else?Obi 90. luckiest mistake?My first job. My boss didn't realize I wasn't technically old enough to run the grill for another two months, so it was harder on her for a while, but that was my favorite job. 91. boxes or bags?Bag 92. lamps, overhead lights, sunlight or fairy lights?a l l 93. nicknames?Not big on them. I'm good with Bibi though 94. favorite season?Fall! 95. favorite app on your phone?The calculator 96. desktop background?I've been meaning to change it. It's been Tim drake for like six years 97. how many phone numbers do you have memorized?Oh gosh so many. Lots of family numbers, and tons of local dealerships. A handful of coworkers. Every place I've ever worked. The Chevy dealers fax number. I'm good with numbers. 98. favorite historical era?Tudor England (just the drama, not the politics) and the Salem witch trials Thanks dear 💖💖💖

[secondscratch17]

weird asks that say a lot

1. coffee mugs, teacups, wine glasses, water bottles, or soda cans? All of them. I drink tea in coffee mugs and teacups. I love drinking wine. I like that I can recycle soda cans

2. chocolate bars or lollipops? chocolate

3. bubblegum or cotton candy? bubblegum if the flavor lasts long

4. how did your elementary school teachers describe you? the stereotypical quiet, obedient, smart, goody-two-shoes kid

5. do you prefer to drink soda from soda cans, soda bottles, plastic cups or glass cups? somehow I like the aesthetic from soda bottles

6. pastel, boho, tomboy, preppy, goth, grunge, formal or sportswear? hONESTLY I can dO ALL OF THE ABOVE in the span of days. Went to work one day wearing beach-y clothes for spirit day. Returned to pick up a friend to go see a metal concert in VERY metal concert attire. I own short, sweet summery floral dresses and gothic dresses, too

7. earbuds or headphones? Earbuds, they allow me to be more mobile

8. movies or tv shows? movies

9. favorite smell in the summer? Fresh cut grass. The smell of the ocean. Churros at the fair

10. game you were best at in p.e.? Soccer, obvs. Somehow would always last until the end of the game in dodgeball tho because I was small and no one could hit me

11. what you have for breakfast on an average day? Cereal

12. name of your favorite playlist? Don’t have one. 

13. lanyard or key ring?  Key ring

14. favorite non-chocolate candy? Smarties!

15. favorite book you read as a school assignment? I remember re-reading Holes over and over just to make my book reports easier since I knew the boo so well. The Kite Runner was phenomenal and unforgettable

16. most comfortable position to sit in? idk?? I really can’t sit still in one position for too long

17. most frequently worn pair of shoes? Currently my hiking/outdoorsy shoes. Also my black Nikes that I play pickup in and wear to the gym

18. ideal weather? Sunny and 65. Maybe one or two clouds. The tiniest of faint breezes to cool me down. 

19. sleeping position? Any I can get into and fall asleep in quickly

20. preferred place to write (i.e., in a note book, on your laptop, sketchpad, post-it notes, etc.)? Laptop. I can edit easier.

21. obsession from childhood? Probably any cheesy show on Animal Planet. The Most Extreme, Meerkat Manor, Big Cat Diary, etc

22. role model? I have a lot of different ones. Role models for athletics, role models for career and ambition choices, artistic role models...can’t pick just one

23. strange habits? Spelling words with the tips of my fingers

24. favorite crystal? Aquamarine

25. first song you remember hearing? how in the FUCK am I supposed to remember that. I do remember my parents playing The Beatles for me when I was a toddler

26. favorite activity to do in warm weather? Soccer! (futbol) 

27. favorite activity to do in cold weather? Sledding, making hot chocolate, or playing indoor soccer haha

28. five songs to describe you? Who I am Hates Who I’ve Been by Relient K, Proud by the Icarus Account, Land of the Dead by Voltaire, Always Leaving by Mayday Parade, Wavin’ Flag by K’naan

29. best way to bond with you? Listening to my favorite music with me or watching the US Women’s national soccer team with me

30. places that you find sacred? Belfast, Maine. Gold Camp Road. Newport Beach

31. what outfit do you wear to kick ass and take names? Tight jeans with holes in them, fishnets, and a crop top

32. top five favorite vines? Vines still exist?

33. most used phrase in your phone? “tbh”

34. advertisements you have stuck in your head? O O O O REILLYYYYYY’S autoparts

35. average time you fall asleep? around 9

36. what is the first meme you remember ever seeing? I don’t remember

37. suitcase or duffel bag? suitcase

38. lemonade or tea? Is it warm outside? Lemonade. Is it cold outside? tea

39. lemon cake or lemon meringue pie? PIE!

40. weirdest thing to ever happen at your school? Zombie hunting or my professor cutting lab a half an hour short to go look at some Cedar waxwings

41. last person you texted? I think it was Robert

42. jacket pockets or pants pockets? Pants pockets

43. hoodie, leather jacket, cardigan, jean jacket or bomber jacket? Jean jacket

44. favorite scent for soap? Anything fruity

45. which genre: sci-fi, fantasy or superhero? Fantasy. It depends on how good the sci-fi movie is

46. most comfortable outfit to sleep in? as little as possible lmao

47. favorite type of cheese? Parmesan

48. if you were a fruit, what kind would you be? A raspberry

49. what saying or quote do you live by? A great amount of good is always evened out by a great amount of bad

50. what made you laugh the hardest you ever have? Honestly Daniel knew how to make me laugh better than anyone. There are a couple of memories with him that I don’t remember entirely but I know that I ended up cry-laughing so hard that my head hurt. There was a time during my orientation camping trip when a bunch of us were playing ultimate Frisbee, and Jesse went to catch the frisbee in the most perfectly lateral horizontal position and the expression of focus just frozen on his face had me laughing so hard that I couldn’t see

51. current stresses? Sam. Jobs that I can apply for starting in May of 2020. Sam. STUDENT LOANS. Bills. Car payments. Wondering how fucked up my car has gotten since I’ve lived here on this ranch. Sam. 

52. favorite font? Anything that looks fancy and sarcastic

53. what is the current state of your hands? Need to be washed. 

54. what did you learn from your first job? The world is cruel and bad things happen without warning

55. favorite fairy tale? Uh....the Pied Piper?

56. favorite tradition? when my family visits for Christmas, eating lots of traditional Chinese food with them

57. the three biggest struggles you’ve overcome? Heartbreak. Staggering rejection from the field I majored in. Probably a lot of body image struggles in there as well

58. four talents you’re proud of having? Writing, futbol, adaptability, flexibility. I think the last two are just traits but I don’t have a lot of talents I can invest in

59. if you were a video game character, what would your catchphrase be? Let’s make like a baby and head out

60. if you were a character in an anime, what kind of anime would you want it to be? No idea

61. favorite line you heard from a book/movie/tv show/etc.? Though we are far apart, our spirits share the same earth and the same sky

62. seven characters you relate to? Bilbo Baggins from The Hobbit, Data from The Goonies, Luna Lovegood from Harry Potter, Eliza Thornberry from The Wild Thornberries, Raven from Teen Titans, Isaac from Teen Wolf

63. five songs that would play in your club? ANYTHING by Within Temptation. I wouldn’t be a good club owner. The catchy and pump-up songs from Hamilton.

64. favorite website from your childhood? Wasn’t allowed much computer time. I was allowed to visit educational sites and occasionally the Disney site

65. any permanent scars? some self-harm scars. Probably the one on my right leg that I got from CO parks and wildlife. I stepped on a barbed wire fence that had been plastered to the ground, but the metal sprang up when I stepped on it and ripped through my skin

66. favorite flower(s)? Plumerias

67. good luck charms? I’m not sure if I have any. 

68. worst flavor of any food or drink you’ve ever tried? earthworm flavor from Bertie Bott’s every flavor beans

69. a fun fact that you don’t know how you learned? uh...Something about not being able to spray silly string on Halloween in Hollywood

70. left or right handed? Right handed

71. least favorite pattern? wtf

72. worst subject? anything math related, I really struggled in GIS.

73. favorite weird flavor combo? I...have no idea

74. at what pain level out of ten (1 through 10) do you have to be at before you take an advil or ibuprofen? 2. I’m a baby

75. when did you lose your first tooth? I was 6

76. what’s your favorite potato food (i.e. tater tots, baked potatoes, fries, chips, etc.)? chips and fries

77. best plant to grow on a windowsill? a succulent

78. coffee from a gas station or sushi from a grocery store? sushi from a grocery store, the quality can surprise you

79. which looks better, your school id photo or your driver’s license photo? Both are terrible

80. earth tones or jewel tones? Jewel tones

81. fireflies or lightning bugs? I hate bugs

82. pc or console? PC

83. writing or drawing? Writing, I’m terrible at drawing

84. podcasts or talk radio? Not into either

84. barbie or polly pocket? I had both

85. fairy tales or mythology? God!!!! Like hearing about both but mythology I guess

86. cookies or cupcakes? Cookies

87. your greatest fear? Being forgotten. I also have a terrible, horrible fear of drowning

88. your greatest wish? In the times I’ve struggled I often find myself wishing for peace. Not only for myself, but for others to easily feel peace with everyone else

89. who would you put before everyone else? Sierra

90. luckiest mistake? Mistake? There’s been lucky accidents but I don’t think any of my mistakes have been lucky

91. boxes or bags? It depends on what I’m packing and where I’m going

92. lamps, overhead lights, sunlight or fairy lights? Sunlight

93. nicknames? T, Tear, Tear-tear, T-Dog, Miss T..a few of my recent favorites from soccer: Ronaldinha and Thierry Chun

94. favorite season? Fall! Shit, especially in New England

95. favorite app on your phone? I don’t know

96. desktop background? A picture of a simple dock leading out to sea

97. how many phone numbers do you have memorized? My parents’ and brother’s

98. favorite historical era? Victorian era, for sure

[wardencommanderrodimiss]

Dying @ the Borderlands AU post to be honest. (At work. 8') ) GIVE US THE BORDERLANDS ACE ATTORNEY CONTENT WE DESERVE. (Did you ever actually post that fic with the train push-off though??) ... I should look into playing that game. (Those games? Heck if I know. I like the artstyle though.)

I posted the first chapter of the fic, though at some point as I massaged out details, I did start trying to rewrite that chapter. So plot-location-wise, that’s a bit of a mess, but the general vibe of it is the same.

I think I had some other completed excerpts I never posted, and so if I get to writing up a huge big summary of the thing, which I want to do now, I can intersperse it with a few written bits. There was a thing with Ema, and then later with Kay.

(Those games, yeah, there’s three shooters and then one….idk how to describe Tales from, I own it and haven’t played it. But yeah, there’s Borderlands, Borderlands 2, and Borderlands the Pre-Sequel for the shoot-em-up main entries of the series that I’ve played. I love all of them, but I love the Pre-Sequel a little less because low-grav combat made me want to die.)

To summarize the AU, or the start of it, for everyone who doesn’t remember/wasn’t here, the main cast, and what their class names would tentatively be in-game, include:

APOLLO, the Sharpshooter, a sniper with an eyepatch who never misses a shot

(The eye patch is significant, I’ll come back to Apollo’s powers in another post.) He lived on Elpis for most of his life – Elpis is the moon of Pandora, which is the planet that most of the games take place on – and until the start of the story, works for the corporation Hyperion with his best friend Clay, an engineer. They’ve both come to be pretty important in Hyperion’s ranks, pretty quick – Apollo for his sniping skills is the personal bodyguard/assistant to Hyperion’s CEO, Kristoph, while Clay is one of the top engineers and most valuable people except for periodically when they’re forced to pay out the ass to run some antivirus/debug software on his brain, because Clay has a USB port in his head and sometimes he tries to download every cat video ever and gets a virus. Kristoph puts up with this, barely. (It is not the worst financial crime being committed in Hyperion’s ranks. Klavier is embezzling millions into pointless endeavors and Kristoph can’t lock him out of the system no matter what he tries. But that is, again, something to come back to later.)

Apollo and Clay start to suspect that there is a lot amiss about Hyperion and the kinds of experiments they do and what they want from Pandora, and together they start investigating into what, exactly, Kristoph is doing. In the midst of this, Clay is (apparently) killed, and Apollo not allowed to investigate anything about his death. This is the final straw, so Apollo takes what he knows, destroys what he can on the way out, and flees the Hyperion moonbase and Elpis, stowing away on a freighter shipment down to Pandora, intending to disappear into the wilds of Pandora. 

CLAY, however, isn’t dead – just in a coma, with his brain wired into Hyperion’s mainframe. He hacks the ECHOnet to get into Apollo’s communicator and serves as a “voice from above” font of “advice” and “wisdom”. (He’s taking the role of, to quickly spoiler-free summarize from the games, the Guardian AI called Angel, who throughout Borderlands and 2 offers advice and points you in the direction you need to go on your quest. Clay is an infinitely shittier at his job version.) Because of some limitations hacked into his brain, he can’t tell Apollo that he’s Clay, that he’s alive, and that he’s sort of being forced into trying to manipulate Apollo and friends into doing Hyperion’s bidding, but he can be very inefficient at it and sabotage from within as best he can. Also, sometimes he accidentally sabotages, like when he’s like “I’ve made the calculations and your vehicle can definitely make this jump” and they try it and crash because he was using the gravitational constant of Elpis, which has much less gravity than Pandora. 

On landing on Pandora, Apollo is waiting for one of the Hyperion trains that still runs to take him west and get as far away from this landing site as he can. There, he meets three other travelers and apparent fugitives:

ATHENA, the Berserker, who takes on robots with her fists and a sword and maybe sometimes she’ll use a shotgun;

KLAVIER, the Doppelganger, the spitting image of Hyperion’s CEO;

and TRUCY, the Siren, one of six women throughout the galaxy marked with strong magical powers and glowing tattoos that make her a target for everyone who knows the legend.

Hyperion robots stop the train and begin a search for the fugitive Apollo – the four of them take down the robots and jump off the train, and that’s where their adventures really begin.

ATHENA and TRUCY have a mind to go to the city of Sanctuary, the only free city on Pandora that isn’t corporate-owned or a bandit shithole. Trucy’s father and all her friends live in Sanctuary; Athena, too, lived there for a few years. Before that, they both lived in the city of New Haven, which was razed by Hyperion in their search for the man who screwed Kristoph out of getting his hands on a piece of the Vault Key and a Siren.

-inhales- quick more Borderlands plot context. Vaults are ancient alien caches of powerful weapons, treasure, or monsters scattered throughout the galaxy. These can only be opened by special keys, which are ancient artifacts that tend to be broken and scattered in pieces. In Borderlands, a corporation called Atlas and their military arm, the Crimson Lance, are trying to acquire all the pieces of the key scattered across Pandora to open a Vault to get the loot inside of it. You play as a Vault Hunter, who are not-quite-bandits who for whatever reason are interested in the lore of the Vault, or just kinda ended up on Pandora and fell into it accidentally. In Borderlands 2, about five years later, Hyperion is going after a different Vault, also on Pandora, also with the key in pieces, but the opening of the first Vault in the first game has done some funky stuff to the planet in the form of a mineral called Eridium. Both times, you are trying to stop the corporations from getting to the Vault, with help from some allies, such as the AI Angel and an independent resistance group, based first in New Haven, then in Sanctuary and called the Crimson Raiders, headed up by some of the player characters from the first game. In 2, the Vault Key can only be used naturally once every 100 years; otherwise, it has to be artificially charged with an Eridium-powered Siren. Thus, Hyperion needs a Siren. 

phew okay back to the AU, context thus set for Trucy.

TRUCY has spent a few years traveling Pandora on her own, trying to learn more about Eridium and its connection to her Siren-powers. At this point, however, she’s had enough being on her own, and wants to go back home to Sanctuary. She knows she’s a Hyperion target, and that’s partially why she’s been out on her own. She wanted to protect her friends and family. But she’s been reasonably undetected thus far, so she thinks she’s safe. Safe enough as anyone can be on Pandora. She wasn’t born on Pandora, actually, though her mother was from here. She spent the first years of her life living with the Troupe Gramarye, a gang of notorious con-artists who traveled the galaxy scamming people and looking for Vaults. How’d she fall in with Phoenix? Maybe that’s for next time.

ATHENA was not actually born on Pandora, either. She was born with strange, non-Siren powers, probably from her mother’s exposure to weird alien elements; Metis tried to keep this secret and devise ways to help Athena, but eventually people found out, wanted to turn Athena into a lab rat, and so Metis fled to Pandora, knowing its reputation for lawlessness because one of her former coworkers, a woman named Aura, fled there after she vaporized three people for stealing and copyrighting her own personal work. Aura’s brother followed her, after stabbing the people who showed up on his door looking for Aura. Metis knows she can rely on them, and so she takes Athena and goes.

Athena just acclimated really, really well to Pandora. In the course of fighting against Hyperion, however, some time after the attack on New Haven, Metis is murdered by an unknown infiltrator. Simon and Aura agree that they can’t raise and protect Athena the way she deserves, not when they are both dead-set on avenging Metis, and so Simon takes Athena off-world and settles her down somewhere safe. She has a normal teenager-hood in a normal part of the galaxy, goes to college, gets a degree in psychology – all the while chafing at the normalcy of it all. When she’s confronted with her massive amount of college debt, she says her final “fuck it” and abandons her responsibilities to run home to Pandora and find Simon again.

She hilariously has zero secrets that she’s keeping from the others. 

And KLAVIER was born and lived most of his life on Elpis – not that he says it, or much of anything, about himself to the others. He has obvious affiliation with Hyperion, but since Hyperion’s ‘bots are out to kill him as much as they are Athena and Trucy, they both accept that he’s on their side. Apollo isn’t quite so sure, because Apollo knew Kristoph and knows that Klavier looks just like him, thus knowing that Klavier was probably someone very important in Hyperion. 

Except Apollo can’t say that, because Kristoph (unlike Handsome Jack, Hyperion’s egomaniacal CEO in the games) doesn’t plaster his face everywhere and make himself well-known, so the fact that Apollo recognizes Klavier’s face to be shocked at him means that Apollo was also someone important in Hyperion to know Kristoph and so Apollo and Klavier are just the Spider-Man Pointing meme at each other over their Hyperion involvement. Except Hyperion has bounties on both their heads, so they’re like, okay, okay, cool, I guess I will tolerate you.

After some horrible misadventures involving Pandoran wildlife, which Klavier and Apollo are not prepared for even though Elpis also has horrible wildlife, they reach Sanctuary. Sanctuary is home to the resistance against Hyperion, called the Crimson Raiders, made up of random people and some of the remains of Atlas Corporation’s Crimson Lance who were hunting the Vault years earlier. There in Sanctuary, they catch up with former colonel EDGEWORTH formerly of the Lance, and former commandant VON KARMA also formerly of the Lance. They were once sent to Pandora to acquire the key and quash the Vault Hunters who were chasing it; however, a certain persistent Vault Hunter and his Vault-researcher friends won them over to his side, and so they turned on Atlas and the Lance. The two of them run Sanctuary and the Raiders, Von Karma handling a little more of the military matters, and Edgeworth with the mayoral matters, but mostly, they’re an apparently seamless team. 

Aaaand….I think that’s enough for one post. I could probably do, like, four more posts? One for the rest of the people of Sanctuary, one for Apollo and Klavier’s various fucked-up backstory secrets, one for Gramarye Bullshit, and one mapping out the very loose plot points moving forward.

But I’ve spent like all day writing this, so I guess I’ll do this in installments if I’m reminded. 

[muggle-writes]

do I have that book challenge

tagged by @elizabethsyson and while photos were absolutely helpful (for example, in explaining the first question) I did this mostly from memory in downtime at work so I couldn't exactly take pictures as I went, and tbh I don't trust tumblr not to eat my post if I upload a bunch of pictures at once

Do you have a book with deckled edges?

thank you so much for the picture because if that's the thing with the pages not exactly matching up, (but within a small deviation from perfectly square) yes, my copy of the first three Dragonriders of Pern books in one volume has deckled edges. also probably some other books, but I've been reading that one recently so I'm sure about it

Do you have a book with 3 or more people on the cover?.

yeah: Inverloch (Volume 1)

it's the printed version of (the first portion of) a webcomic, which I didn't know when I picked it up at a garage sale or something. I hadn't even heard of webcomics yet

and. hm. don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed the premise of the story and it was never really bad... I was thrilled when I realized it was a webcomic and still online and i could read the whole thing.

but

the major plot twist, one the author had apparently planned from the very beginning, honestly had some very unfortunate implications that would haunt me if I ever attempted a reread.

Like, it was set up well enough to be a surprise but not a shock. and it enabled the happy ending. but I probably would have preferred almost any other happy or vaguely positive ending, or even a meaningful depressing ending, I was that disappointed

on the other hand the rest of it was written well enough that I cared so.... eh. it is what it is

I'm just not sure I still love it enough to recommend, but I also wouldn't stop someone from picking it up off my shelf to read, you know what I mean? Especially just that first part, which was plenty good.

Do you have a book based on another fictional story?

D&D guidebooks are totally based on Lord of the Rings, right?

lol in reality uh

the copy of Scandinavian folk tales including my favorite fairy tale ever was always my dad's, not mine, no matter how many times I read it before moving out

uh

my wife has several Halo books? like the video game. I'm not actually sure which came first and I haven't read any of those, but they are on "my" (our) shelf

I also have a lot of Harry Potter meta/derivatives, including that themed Haggadah I think I posted a picture of recently. But the phrasing of this question makes me think the intent is "fiction based on other fiction" so none of those quite count.

so yeah, Halo's the closest I've got. also there's a Star Trek book on that shelf that I didn't even know we had until I went looking for clocks on covers

Do you have a book with a title 10 letters long?

Sadly I don't have my own copy of Dragon's Kin, which kicks off an excellent subseries of Pern books, (nor Dragonsong but I didn't expect to have that one) but what I did find was

The Visitor (which is animorphs#2)

Do you have a book with a title that starts and ends with the same letter?

Erec Rex: The Dragon's Eye

Do you have a Mass Market Paperback book?

does my solid half of the animorphs series all on one shelf count or is this looking for specific branding?

Do you have a book written by an author using a pen name?

(immediately thinks of Lewis Carrol) um Edwin Abbot was also a mathematician but sadly not a penname, but I do I have a copy of Flatland

Oh, but I'm pretty sure I have some of the ghostwritten animorphs books, do those count? Specifically someone mentioned recently that animorphs 25 was the first of the ghostwritten books and I definitely have that one

Do you have a book with a character’s name in the title?

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and Ender's Shadow on my shelf, the rest I mostly have as ebooks. also the first Erec Rex book (mentioned above) and the entire Kirsten (American Girl) series plus the first Kit book.

Do you have a book with 2 maps in it?

the first one I found was The Malloreon Volume 1 (also has 3 characters on the cover). it's got a map of the western kingdoms before the first book and a map of Mallorea in the middle of the third book

Do you have a book that was turned into a TV show

Animorphs again

Do you have a book written by someone who is originally famous for something else?(celebrity/athlete/politician/tv personality…)

I definitely had a phase of buying books by famous people, so I have the worst bulkiest copy of Origin of Species which is printed in a terrible font (it also has deckled edges for that matter), and The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, that I could find at a quick glance. Probably something by Steven Hawking hiding somewhere

my phenomenal copy of The Elements (Euclid) doesn't quite count because he's most famous, now, for writing those so...

(Einstein's Relativity - in translation obviously because I know very little German - is deceptively short but that was my parents' book that I tried and failed to read, not my own)

Do you have a book with a clock on the cover?

Disappointingly, An Uncommon History of Common Things does not. I do have a Doctor Who coloring book with a clocklike gear pattern on the cover which is the closest I'm finding

Do you have a poetry book?

yeah someone once gave me a book of Japanese death poems, translated of course. I've been meaning to read them. for that I have to find it, and I can't right now :/ now that I remember the book I want to go read it

Do you have a book with an award stamp on it?

not that I can find? apparently Dragonflight or Dragonquest won "a Hugo or Nebula award" (bc McCaffrey was the first woman to win one of those) but wikipedia isn't telling me which award or which book, and I don't have the dust jacket for the original-trilogy-in-one-volume copy that I have so there's no telling if it "should" have an award printed on the front

Do you have a book written by an author with the same initials as you?

ooh wouldn't that be fun. I don't seem to :/

what I do have is a book written by an author with what my initials would be if I had taken my wife's last name instead of the other way around which I guess is close enough

Do you have a book of short stories?

yes, surprisingly. The Girl Who Heard Dragons and I haven't read any of them, not even the story I got it for

oh, and First Meetings, which is a bunch of short stories in the Ender universe

Do you have a book that is between 500-510 pages long?

That's... really specific. Closest I could find was 483 pages and 513 pages (Volume 2 of The Belgariad and The Malloreon, respectively) In general I have a lot of books around 300-350 pages and a fair few over 700 pages, but not many close to 500

Do you have a book that was turned into a movie?

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, for sure. I think Flatland was also made into a movie and it was as phenomenally terrible as you would expect of a story about 2d shapes. not even shapes with faces, just shapes, and one sphere.

Do you have a graphic novel?

I was going to make all sorts of qualifications of "well... if something originally published as a webcomic is now in physical book form.... (Inverloch again) but actually I have volumed 1 and 3-7 of Tomo (manga-style "preteen protag moves in with Christian family members and has both fantasy adventures and learns the benefits of being Christian" no-subtlety series that I picked up at Family Christian Stores when they were still everywhere. also I probably still have the first six Serenity "books" but I can't find them (not fantasy: rebellious "sinful" teen moves to new school and hangs out with the Christians because she wants to sleep with one of them, eventually sees the errors of all her ways, un-dyes her hair, and converts. Also no subtlety)

I had a phase when I was "too old" for veggie tales but still thought FCS was the best place ever but if that really was the best of their "teen" content it really wasn't great

Do you have a book written by 2 or more authors?

are we limiting this to novels? I have The Great Snape Debate (meta published before Deathly Hallows, with short chapters by two alternating authors, plus they got Orson Scott Card to write a chapter to draw reader attention with the big name and hey it worked, I bought it, arguing (between all of them) both sides of "will Snape turn out to be on Harry's side after all" and also The Dragonlover's Guide to Pern which as the title implies, is more of a guide than a real story.

Oh, but I do have a copy of Invasive Procedures (Card & Johnson).

Did I miss any questions? tumblr's being particularly weird today.

anyway I suppose I should tag some fellow bookworms. @knightbusofdoom @copperscales and if anyone else wants me to edit to in so you're "really" tagged, just may me know, and if you just want to do it please do and tag me back

[dedalvs]

Övüsi: The Elvish Language from Bright

The Elves in Bright run the world. They’re literally in charge of everything, and they look down on everyone else. They’ve always been around (which is another way of saying I’ve now forgotten where geographically they were supposed to have originated), and though their language has changed, the Elves have prevented borrowings from other languages from “tainting” the “purity” of theirs.

The language itself has changed over the centuries, but older words have been preserved in their original forms for use in magic. Both modern Elvish and a couple of words of older Elvish appear in the film. The name of the language is Övüsi Kieru, which literally means “Elvish Tongue”, and despite having 9 vowel qualities, it does not have vowel harmony. The language is SOV and strongly head-final with thirteen cases and a verb system which is weird (I honestly still don’t get it).

Remember previously when I said I designed the Castithan language from Defiance to be spoken quickly—and how I failed? This time I tried to do it right—and I think I succeeded. You can really pick up some speed speaking this language, and the tongue twisters are minimal.

The orthography is a bit of a story. I created it to be excessively indulgent, and I think I succeed in that. When I showed the art department, though, they said it wasn’t excessively indulgent enough. They wanted more stuff about. So I had to take what, to my mind, was already a ridiculously gaudy writing system and make it gaudier. The result is, in my opinion, just silly in places. I suppose it’s in keeping with the Elves’ style of dress, but some of its excesses really tax credulity. You’ll see.

Below is the phonology and orthography of Övüsi:

Couple things here. First, you’ll notice long vowels for everything but mid vowels. This is my “Don’t make actors pronounce ee as anything other than [i]” sound change. Old long mid vowels broke, becoming a high vowel followed by a mid vowel, as in Finnish (so ie, üö, ïë, and uo).

You’ll also notice some unrounded back vowels. I was nervous about trying to do unrounded back vowels, but I figured since I was going to have constant access to the actors, I’d give it a shot. Turns out I had nothing to worry about. Those unrounded vowels are super easy for English speakers to pronounce. Basically I just said, “These are pronounced like this”, and then they said, “Oh”, and did them right every time. The front rounded vowels still caused problems, but the back unrounded vowels did not. I used diereses to indicate the unrounded back vowels for parallelism. It seems to have worked.

As a final note, the long opposite-rounding vowels have no separate form. This is because though the long vowels are phonemic (in that there are places where you must pronounce, e.g., üü as opposed to ü), there’s actually no way to write them in the orthography. Everything else that has a distinguishable form (as you’ll see) is either a form that was a licit long vowel at one time, or was (or currently is) a licit diphthong. That left nothing for the long opposite rounding vowels.

Here are the aforementioned diphthongs:

If you look at the forms for ie and uo, they should look rather familiar. That’s because these used to be the forms for *ee and *oo, and they’re simply read differently now. You’ll also notice that the forms for üö and ïë are identical to the forms for ö and ë, respectively. That’s because there’s no way to indicate the long form for these vowels, and those are the readings of the long forms of those vowels.

As you look at these, by the way, most of the extra lines and weird swooshes you see were added by request.

The consonantal base forms are as follows:

You can ignore the blue box; that was my bad there (screen cap). So like...stuff happened here. Basically, the short forms of stops became fricatives, but then there already was a *th, so all those words just got respelled. So the form with the three asterisks is usually pronounced [s] before [i], and elsewhere it’s [θ], but it’s not used word-initially, unless it’s before [i]. The form with four asterisks is an old consonant that’s no longer pronounced (it’s just regular [h] now), and so there are two [h]’s in this thing.

I added those ridiculous half moons because most stuff was wanted. Also, I thought r was fine on its own, but they wanted the bottom part to extend, so I extended it, along with l. Same extension happened with the word-initial flourish on f and v and like forms. I’m just looking at this now, and I’m like...seems unnecessary...

Anyway, the system is an abugida, which means there’s an inherent vowel, and modifications are added for other vowels. The inherent vowel in this system is short e. This is a fully executed consonant that’s hopefully large enough that you can see it:

You can also see the “capital” versions that occur for some consonant/vowel combinations above. Basically, when one of these occurs as the first character of a word, there’s an extra flourish. Where there are two glyphs above, the first has the flourish, and so is an initial form, and the other would appear elsewhere in the word. I had a lot of fun coming up with these, but now looking at the extra half moons, the extra loops, the extra double lines on bö... It’s just all too extra for me. But I know what it originally looked like, so I always have something to compare it to in my mind.

Now for the sake of completeness, though it’s going to make this really long, here is the fully executed version of every glyph split into two tables. Here’s table one:

And here’s table two:

Huh. Weird error in the rei cell... Included one two many r’s it appears... The character’s still there, though. (By the way, the keystrokes are written on the left there. This is for the font. What’s “z” there is the weird old *t sound that’s become [θ] and [s].)

There’s also a geminate marker that, when you see it, you’ll be able to recognize as a reference to Castithan. I’ll show it to you in an example later.

Nouns in Övüsi have a bunch of different declensions. It’s all based on whether the original form ended in a vowel of some kind or a consonant. At this stage of the language, no word can end in a consonant, and the only codas are reserved for the first member of a geminate, so lots of different things happened to these consonant-final forms. There’s no room to show every declension, but I can at least give you one, and give you a sense of the cases themselves. Here they are (singular/plural):

NOMINATIVE:  thuoke/thuoki “bird(s)”

ACCUSATIVE: thuokie/thuokii “bird(s) (direct object)”

GENITIVE: thuoka/thuokai “bird’s/birds’”

INSTRUMENTAL: thuoku/thuokï “with the bird(s)”

LOCATIVE: thuokö/thuokü “near the bird(s)”

ABLATIVE: thuokau/thuokavi “away from the bird(s)”

ALLATIVE: thuokaalou/thuokaalli “towards the bird(s)”

INESSIVE: thuokannö/thuokannü “inside the bird(s)”

ILLATIVE: thuokou/thuokoli “into the bird(s)”

ELATIVE: thuokannau/thuokannavi “out of the bird(s)”

PERLATIVE: thuokausu/thuokausï “by way of the bird(s)”

AVERSIVE: thuokasshu/thuokasshï “avoiding the bird(s)”

VOCATIVE: thuokuo/thuokorii “O, bird(s)!”

If you look at these cases, you can probably recognize some of my favorite sound changes, and guess how some of them evolved (and in what order). The nice thing about having a nice big case system like that is it’s just there for you, like your best friend. You don’t really need to fuss about how to say stuff. Your best friend just says, “Shh, shh... Let me show you my cases.” And you take one and you’re good. Like hot cocoa in winter.

Now the verbs...

On a macro level, verbs agree with their subjects in person and number in the first person and sometimes the imperative, and just in person otherwise. Each verb has three stems: the imperfect, the perfect, and the future. Then, depending on whether the verb is dynamic or stative, there are three modes: the indicative, the passive, and the potential (statives lack the passive mode). A copula is used for emphasis, negation, and equation.

It’s best to see an example, and with verbs, the easiest to tease apart are the vowel-final ones. Here’s a table to consider:

This is the verb mikaa, which means “to say” (most of the time the infinitive ends in -ie; it’s just non-e V-final stems that are different). As you can see, the stem part here is probably -i for imperfect; -has for perfect; and, of all things, bare for future. Then there are some more or less predictable suffixes added in the three modes. To those can be added agreement affixes, but they can also be left off. Depending on whether or not they’re added the end of the form changes. The first items in each pair are how the form ends if nothing is added. I’ll show you each in a sec here. First, here’s the agreement paradigm:

Now that you’ve got that, here are two examples (and I’ll show you the orthographic forms, too):

That’s Kenie mikaithorï super large, apparently. Kenie is the third person pronoun in the accusative. Mikaithorï has a third person subject, and is in the potential indicative. Now if you use the emphatic copula instead...

That’s Kenie mikaithou shï! which is “I must say it!” Now, of course there’s nothing in here anywhere that corresponds to “must”: It’s simply the interpretation. These examples show how you use the form with the agreement suffix and without.

(Also, see the geminate thingy in there? The spelling in this one is weird.)

That’s a basic intro to this thing. It was actually a pain in the butt to use, but fun to speak. All in all pretty good. Though weird.

This is a piece the art department put together for Édgar Ramírez’s Kandomere to wear. I thought it looked pretty boss:

Looks pretty cool, until you realize it says the following...

And he’s one of the good Elves! lol This was one of my favorite pieces. That art department was amazing.

So that was what I was up to this time last year. Again, if you get a chance to see the movie, I hope you enjoy it! Süvorii!

[eroshiyda]

Wild Theory

Today is Undertale's second anniversary. I love Undertale so much that it has been my hyperfixation ever since I played it at the beginning of 2016. I joined tumblr in May of 2016 because I saw that a lot of people were talking about Undertale on here. This is the origin of this particular blog. And now, I have planned a Special Post(TM) for this occasion.

(Warning: this post is extraordinarily long - as in, over five thousand words long - and contains many spoilers for the game. I have hidden it under a "Read More" so that it doesn't clog up people's dashboards.)

I. Preface and Special Thanks

First, though, I must tell you a story. It all started when I made my husband play Undertale, because it was so great when I played it, and I wanted to see how he would play the game. Which route would he take? (He ended up doing True Pacifist after killing the first Froggit and feeling so guilty about it that he reset). Once he finished, I asked him who his favorite character was.

His answer? Papyrus.

"Papyrus?" I thought. "But why?" I felt like he was probably the most forgettable character in the entire game, perhaps apart from Sans (note: I have never done a Bad Time route). What was it about this goofy skeleton that made my husband like him so much? Was it his malapropisms? Was it the fact that he can somehow shout in whispers? Was it his Ghost costume... er, "battle body?"

So, I decided to do some research. I started searching "Papyrus from Undertale" on Google, and most of the results I found came from the wonderful, well-functioning website which we all know and love as tumblr. He was buzzing, and it seemed a lot of people felt about Papyrus the same way my husband did.

I made an account, and the first thing I posted was a Very Profound Theory(TM) which was met with some disagreement. That "theory" is that Papyrus is Sans' older brother, and not the other way around. (Keep in mind that, at this point, I had not seen Toby Fox's tweet about Papyrus calling Sans the common word for "older brother" in Japanese, which was actually an allusion to the fact that he was translating Undertale into Japanese, but I digress.)

The reasons I posted were simple enough, and if you really want to, you can even go back and read it for yourself. I'll link to it here for you also:

https://eroshiyda.tumblr.com/post/144298607667/papyrus-is-the-older-brother [link to my first tumblr post, "Papyrus is the older brother."]

This just came from my personal experience as an older sibling, and a closer analysis of Papyrus' character during my second True Pacifist playthrough.

Through this "theory" post (and I really am hesitant to call it a "theory" now, because it's so mundane), I met a lot of friends who were also theorizing about Papyrus. However, this is not the theory that I wanted to talk about.

As I gained more and more tumblr friends who were also very interested in Undertale (mostly Papyrus in particular), I started seeing more posts about all of the weird things he does and says. Not "weird" in a derogatory way, I just mean weird as in "odd," "unusual," "eccentric," and sometimes "nonsensical" or "unpredictable."

@undertale-encyclopedia did a really good job of compiling each of the canon strings of text, so I will mainly be using that blog as a resource for my canon information (since I never played anything but True Pacifist, and therefore do not have my own screenshots of certain bits of dialogue from other routes).

https://undertale-encyclopedia.tumblr.com/ [link to undertale-encyclopedia's tumblr blog]

@jewels336 (now deactivated) also provided a masterpost for which I am eternally grateful, as even though I had seen all of the posts (and even participated in a lot of them) compiled within that master list, they were now in a very neat and accessible place. I will be referencing those posts as well, as they were a springboard for many parts of this theory, and utilize canon information. Here it is:

https://eroshiyda.tumblr.com/post/151713943787/compilation-of-mysterious-papyrus-things [link to jewels336's tumblr post, "Papyrus Masterpost!"]

@uselessundertalefacts (formerly @uselessshoelacefacts), @lefthanded-sans, and @papyrus-knows also indulged a lot of questions I originally had about Papyrus. They all made some really good analysis posts about the skelebros in general as well, so you should definitely go and check out their blogs, too.

I would also like to thank each and every one of my followers/mutuals/friends, who let me talk about Papyrus with them at some point or another. I am very much aware of how wild my theories are, so thank you for putting up with me.

Right. *deep breath* Now onto the theory.

 II. Introduction

If you have not yet read @napstamuse's "Goner Theory Part III: Skeletons in the Closet," I very strongly urge you to do so right now. Here it is, for your convenience:

http://napstamuse.tumblr.com/post/139568679252/goner-theory-part-3-skeletons-in-the-closet [link to napstamuse's tumblr post, "Goner Theory Part III"]

This is the actual post which made me join tumblr, and ultimately it led me to make up this theory. In summary, it points out how little we know about Papyrus, despite his talking incessantly. In fact, it even mentions at the very end that there's only one other character in Undertale of whom we know about as little: Mystery Man.

[picture of Mystery Man sprite]

With a name like "Mystery Man," one would expect at least some intrigue surrounding such a character. We know what Mystery Man looks like:

[picture of Mystery Man, surprised]

We know what font he speaks in:

[picture of Entry 17 in capitalized Wing Dings font with no asterisks]

And are therefore able to conclude that he was a Royal Scientist, as the only other person to write "entries" is Doctor Alphys, the current Royal Scientist of the Underground:

[picture of Doctor Alphys' entries in normal font, with standard asterisks at the beginning]

and that his name was probably Wing Dings, or W. D. for short:

[picture of one of Gaster’s followers referring to him as “Doctor W. D. Gaster”]

But what does this have to do with Papyrus? Well, let's start with what we know about Papyrus.

We know that he looks like this:

[picture of Papyrus wearing a cape, battle body, and hotpants]

sometimes this:

[picture of Date Papyrus with MTT-brand Basketball Shoulder Pads, a shirt which says "Cool Dude" in all caps, shorts, and sneakers]

or even this:

[picture of Papyrus wearing a sweatband over his head and a shirt which says, "Jog Boy" on it]

We know that he likes puzzles:

[picture of Papyrus standing next to and talking about one of his puzzles]

We know that he's a good artist:

[picture of Papyrus talking about how he painted the Snowdin bridge over a rock formation]

We know that his name is Papyrus (obviously) because he is referred to as such, and talks in this font:

[picture of Papyrus saying "Nyeh heh heh!" in capitalized Papyrus font, also without the standard asterisks]

And... that's it.

The rest of this theory involves putting these clues together. Ready?

 III. Appearance

Let's start with Papyrus' appearance. He's pretty tall, compared to his brother Sans. According to this chart by @kitty4915, he's approximately 6 feet and 8 inches tall:

https://kitty4915.tumblr.com/post/138141358237/yo-undertale-heights-go [link to kitty4915's tumblr post, "YO UNDERTALE HEIGHTS GO!!"]

[picture of Papyrus next to a door]

A bit strange for brothers, don't you think? One of them definitely got the short end of the stick. *badum-tss*

[picture of Sans Height Chart, 4'8"]

Anyway, I've seen it speculated that Papyrus and Sans are not "brothers" in a literal sense, but they are very close friends who sometimes call each other "brother." However, I do not think this is quite the case.

Sometimes I forget that half-siblings are a thing that exist. Half-siblings are siblings who share only one parent. How is this relevant to the skelebros? Well, @zarla-s has come up with an AU called Handplates which has one possible explanation for this: the skelebros technically share one parent, because they are both cloned from the same person. That person is, you guessed it: Royal Scientist Wing Dings Gaster.

http://zarla-s.tumblr.com/post/139516306171/okay-i-get-a-lot-of-questions-about-what-order-the [link to @zarla-s' "Handplates" AU Index post on tumblr]

Speaking of Mystery Man, we haven't analyzed his appearance next to Papyrus':

[pictures of Mystery Man sprite and Papyrus sprite next to each other]

It is said that the eyes are windows into the soul. Something people notice right away about Gaster's eyes are that they are extremely asymmetrical. His left eye is much bigger than his right.

Papyrus, on the other hand... well, both of his eyes are small, but if you look closely, you'll see that his left eye is smaller than his right, even when it is facing slightly away from view, like in his battle and date sprites. And it's more noticeable from the front, like in his overworld sprite, pictured above.

Ok, so they're kinda-sorta mirror images of each other, nothing too special. Could be a coincidence. Right? Well, sure, if this was the only thing they had in common, it could definitely be a coincidence. Never mind the fact that Papyrus seems to be raising his right eyebrow and squinting his left eye, almost as if he's compensating for them naturally being the other way around...

But why stop there? The other thing to note is that both of these skeletons are tall. Very, very tall. We already know how tall Papyrus is, but how big is Mystery Man?

[picture of Gaster Height Chart]

Wow, 7 feet and 6 inches! That is really tall. Even taller than Papyrus (by ten inches). Cool. So, if Papyrus somehow came from Gaster, then Papyrus' extreme height would make a little more sense. But again, where does that leave Sans?

[picture of Sans shrugging]

One could argue that Sans has inherited Gaster's, shall we say, roundness. That makes a little less sense, as we are not even sure exactly how "round" Gaster even is. His black "cloak" (not even sure if it's really a cloak canonically) does not necessarily represent Gaster's bodily shape - as it could be flowy, melted, or otherwise augmented by some magical law of physics. And besides, this theory doesn't really have anything to do with Sans.

 IV. But Something's Missing...

However, even I must admit that something isn't quite right about the height discrepancy between Gaster and Papyrus, either. With Gaster being nearly a whole foot taller, it seems as though there's something... missing.

And, even if you take away that extra ten inches from Gaster's height, there's something else which Gaster has which Papyrus, at first glance, seems to not have.

Refer back to the pictures of Gaster and Papyrus next to each other. See the holes in Gaster's hands? And Papyrus'... well, they're covered in gloves, so I guess we'll never know. Darn.

[pictures of Papyrus saying “I know it like the back of my hand… which, since I’m always wearing gloves… I don’t know anything about!!”]

Thanks, Papyrus.

But, there is still something else missing, and this thing has nothing to do with appearances. Of course, I am referring to Wing Dings' experience as the Royal Scientist of the Underground.

Gaster even has "followers" who consider him to be important in the Underground's history long after he is gone. You can find them with certain Fun values:

[pictures of Gaster's three followers]

In contrast, Papyrus holds no important status in the Underground (unless all of the other boss monsters are killed, leaving Papyrus to take King Asgore's place in the end). But he *does* want to join the Royal Guard.

[pictures of Papyrus saying that his “lifelong dream” is joining the Royal Guard]

Why? Well, for starters, he is friends with the Royal Guard Dogs in Snowdin (which is his place of residence), as well as the Captain of the Royal Guard herself, Undyne.

[picture of Undyne]

Undyne got her job because she asked King Asgore "Fluffybuns" Dreemurr to train her in combat. They subsequently became close, and she was so well-trained that she was basically a shoo-in. (This is all canon information which you can obtain by going on the "friendship date" with Undyne in True Pacifist.) But this theory isn't about her, either.

So again, what is Papyrus' motivation for wanting to join the Royal Guard? He's not close with the King. In fact, Papyrus is never mentioned by anyone other than Flowey (who knows everything, but we'll get to that later), Undyne (arguably his only friend), and Sans (his own brother); and, at the very end of True Pacifist route, by both Toriel (who had only heard his name because of Sans) and Monster Kid. No one really knows who he is, so the reason for his wanting to join couldn't possibly be his connections.

Could it be that he wants to FIGHT? Considering that he can't even bring himself to hit Frisk in any run (regardless of how many monsters they have killed in the Underground upon meeting Papyrus), I would say that this is also rather unlikely.

Luckily for us, Papyrus hints at what it is he is really after:

[picture of Papyrus saying "Powerful, Popular, Prestigious!"]

He wants to be powerful, popular, and prestigious. Sounds fair enough, right?

Not so fast. Who in the Royal Guard is powerful, popular, and prestigious? Certainly the Royal Guard Dogs are not. And, while Undyne is undoubtedly powerful, I wouldn't really call her "popular," except with Monster Kid (and Doctor Alphys, but that is a whole other story). But Monster Kid is exactly that: a kid. A child.

[picture of Monster Kid]

Papyrus wants a child to look up to him. Part of the reason he dresses up and acts like a super hero is to appeal to children and give them a role model to emulate. This is also evident in the way he treats Frisk, who is also a child: with open, accepting arms, ready to embrace them and be their friend.

[picture of Papyrus saying "I, Papyrus, welcome you with open arms!"]

But let's tie this back into Mystery Man, shall we? The previous Royal Scientist definitely had a connection with the monarchy as well (which, as we've already established, Papyrus did not have). How else would he have gotten such an esteemed position? He may have also been extraordinarily intelligent, much like the current Royal Scientist, Doctor Alphys:

[picture of Papyrus explaining to Frisk that Doctor Alphys made an advanced puzzle]

[picture of Bratty & Catty telling Frisk that Doctor Alphys made Mettaton's robot body]

but, ultimately, W. D. Gaster met with an untimely death after having an accident of sorts:

[picture of one of Gaster's followers saying that "he fell into his creation"]

which implies that he was a savant, or someone who could be considered "book smart," but also absent-minded and accident prone. That sort of reminds me of someone else...

[pictures of Papyrus explaining Alphys' puzzle]

[picture of Papyrus getting shocked]

Anyway, there appears to be something *else* missing, on top of everything we've just covered.

 V. Memories

Papyrus seems to have a... sketchy memory, to say the very least. At first glance, he appears to retain nothing:

[picture of Papyrus saying "Really though!!! That human!!! Do I know that person?” Hint: the answer is "yes."]

but, upon closer inspection, we learn that he retains quite a lot (as evidenced by his telling Frisk seemingly random trivia about nearly each and every room in the Underground over the phone):

[picture of Papyrus saying, "I have a photographic memory for phone calls!"]

and, upon even closer inspection, we see that he actually can't even remember commonly-used idioms:

[picture of Papyrus using the malapropism "smells like the moon" instead of "odor the moon," which comes from the idiom "over the moon," as pointed out by @eheufeles]

then, upon microscopic inspection, we see that there's something definitely off with Papyrus' memory. He literally remembers and even references things which do not exist (or have yet to happen) in current timelines:

[pictures of Papyrus alluding to Mettaton's EX forme – specifically, his “bishonen eyes” – while Mettaton is still in Box forme, and Undyne inadvertently confirming that his EX forme has not yet been revealed, by replying “He doesn’t even HAVE eyes!!!”]

[picture of Papyrus talking about a "Laborador... y?" which is a reference to both Endogeny and the True Lab, yet to be discovered]

[pictures of Papyrus telling Frisk that he will talk to them again, even though this has not yet been confirmed at this point in the True Pacifist route]

[picture of Papyrus telling Frisk that they "can do a little better!" even after killing every monster they have encountered up until this point]

So... what gives? How can he remember things that have not yet happened, unless he is, say, perhaps, a time traveler?

 VI. Time-Space Shenanigans

Now, I know what you're thinking: "But, eroshiyda, Sans already told us that Flowey gives Papyrus predictions, so this discussion is all meaningless!"

Ok, but we also know that Sans has the ability to travel across time-space in strange ways; namely, he teleports. It's not exactly an easter egg or anything, as it's too extraordinary a phenomenon to ignore.

[pictures of Sans appearing in two places in the same room at the same time]

[picture of Papyrus asking Sans if he is, in fact, in two places at once; walking into the next room will prove that this conjecture is correct]

But the implication is that Papyrus has the same ability (because they are brothers), or at least a very similar one, as Sans' ability comes as no surprise to Papyrus.

[pictures of Papyrus asking Frisk, "Is Sans pranking you across time and space? I hate it when he does that!"]

And, in fact, there is alternate evidence of their similar abilities:

[picture of Papyrus battle in Pacifist or Neutral routes, showing blue-colored, bone-shaped magic]

[picture of Sans battle, exclusive to Bad Time route, also showing blue-colored, bone-shaped magic]

[picture of the narrator saying, “Papyrus prepares a non-bone attack, then spending a minute fixing his mistake"]

[picture of Papyrus telling Frisk "Had I only used my Special Attack, you surely would have been blasted to..." with a forlorn look on his face. This only happens when you abandon a Bad Time route by sparing Papyrus.]

[picture of Sans using Gaster Blasters during his battle with Frisk. This is only available during a Bad Time route, killing everyone else – Papyrus included.]

Of course, you cannot possibly see them both in action during the same route (Toby Fox, you clever dog), so it is difficult to compare the two without going back to play Undertale in an entirely different way than before. So, this may count as an easter egg.

What is, perhaps, a bit more of an easter egg (at least, according to my Papyrus-fixated tumblr friends), is the fact that Papyrus can - and does - manipulate time-space in his own ways:

[gif of Papyrus literally walking on air over Frisk]

[gif of Papyrus quickly transposing off of the screen without moving his body otherwise]

So, who's to say that he doesn't travel across time as well?

[picture of Gaster's first follower saying that "he shattered across time and space"]

 VII. Memories, Revisited

Remember that "memory" thing I pointed out? Well, I'd like to come back to that for a bit.

There are two things which I have noticed, and I get why they've been met with resistance in the past when I brought them up. But, keep in mind all of the evidence listed above and the things we've talked about thus far. As I said, I know that these are wild theories, but please bear with me for just a little bit longer.

Ok, here's the first thing I've noticed:

[picture of Papyrus leaving Frisk with 1 HP so that he can capture them after battle; this happens no matter what, if you lose to him]

[pictures of Papyrus referring to the battle as “a terrible memory" over the phone]

[pictures describing the Bad Memory item, found in the True Lab; it depletes exactly 1 HP when consumed by Frisk]

And the second thing is this:

[pictures of Papyrus immediately recognizing Frisk as a human during a Bad Time route]

[picture of Papyrus not immediately recognizing Frisk as a human during a Pacifist route; he asks Sans if Frisk is human]

Something about HP, bad memories, and a human... Now, how could this possibly be connected?

Well, I'm afraid that I have no more canon evidence to support my theory, so now we are plunging deep into headcanon territory from here on out. If this upsets you, please just stop reading now. I'd rather you form your own headcanon, given the canon evidence so far. Perhaps yours will be more satisfying than mine is, because it's about to get kind of dark. In fact, I would hide it under another "Read More" if I could. But I can't, so I'll give you a break.

Last chance to turn back now.

By continuing to read this, you are submitting yourself to probably the most wild and ridiculous theory that has ever been made in the Undertale fandom.

 VIII. Conclusion

If you're still reading this, I must confess that I do have one, tiny piece of canon information to support this theory, which has seemingly nothing to do with anything I just talked about. Here it is:

[picture of a silhouette of Toriel standing next to a human in the introduction to Undertale, with the caption "Long ago, humans and monsters lived in peace."]

[picture of a silhouette of Asgore fighting with a human in the introduction to Undertale, with the caption "They were at war."]

The king and queen were on the surface during the Monster and Human War. This implies that they knew humans at some point before they were sealed away Underground when the humans won.

So... what if Gaster, their Royal Scientist before Doctor Alphys, was a human?

A stretch, I know. But here is another tiny piece of evidence to consider:

[picture of Gaster's second follower saying, "I'm holding a piece of him right here." In their hand is what looks like a human face]

Our Mystery Man once had a face which looks strikingly human. Of course, by the time we see him, he looks more like a skeleton with two large fractures on either side of his skull. So, it makes sense that his face went missing.

Which reminds me of this:

[picture of Papyrus realizing that he doesn't have ears]

[pictures of Papyrus referencing his “hair” and “skin,” neither of which he has, since he is a skeleton]

The only reason that Papyrus could possibly "realize" that he has neither ears nor hair is if he had had them before, and only now realizes that they are gone. Remember: Papyrus has a sketchy memory. Something definitely messed with it at somewhere along the way. But what?

Well, remember the aforementioned "accident" which Royal Scientist W. D. Gaster had? I would think that being spread across time-space would be... disorienting, if you will. Parts could go missing. Pieces. Memories, physicalities, any of it.

"Wait," I hear you thinking. "Surely you're not trying to suggest that Papyrus is Gaster! That would be ludicrous!"

Wouldn't it?

"They have such different personalities!"

Don't they?

"Papyrus could never be the Royal Scientist!"

Are you sure about that?

Let me explain to you how I think it happened.

(This is the dark part. I decided not to dive right into it because I wanted to give you time to adjust to my wild theory. Once you are comfortable with the headcanon of Papyrus being Gaster, please proceed. If this is against your sensibilities, I won't hold it against you at all. You are free to stop reading this post at any time.)

Gaster was a human who lived on the surface like everyone else. He was a friend to monsters before the war. He even knew Asgore and Toriel, although Toriel took to him a bit better. Once the war broke out, everyone had to choose a side. The line was drawn between monsters and humans. Only W. D. Gaster decided to cross that line.

When the monsters were sealed Underground by a magical barrier after the humans won the war, Gaster ended up being sealed with them. Asgore and Toriel were elected the King and Queen of the Underground, and they elected Gaster to be Royal Scientist.

The magical barrier transformed Gaster as time passed. He became immortal, like a monster. He started to adopt their mannerisms, and even started to look like a monster. As his body aged, soon all that was left of him was his skeleton. Without vocal cords, he could only speak in a strange font: Wing Dings. This earned him his nickname.

Then, "The Accident" happened. I don't know exactly how, or when, but we all know that it happened. Gaster "fell into his creation," and "was shattered across time and space," according to his followers. A new Royal Scientist was needed.

In the meantime, two skeleton brothers randomly showed up in Snowdin. We get this information from an NPC in Snowdin:

[pictures of the Snowdin Shopkeeper telling Frisk that Sans and Papyrus "just showed up one day"]

Interesting.

 IX. Supporting Evidence/More Headcanons

But how did the Royal Scientist Wing Dings Gaster become the Papyrus we all know and love?

(trigger warnings: mentions of violence and child death)

Let's go back to canon evidence, shall we? We are far enough into the headcanon realm that I do think it's time for some canon reminders:

[Papyrus, looking slightly worried as he says "LOVE." in all capital letters, which holds a very different meaning than lowercase "love" in the game of Undertale]

I know that Papyrus speaks in all caps all of the time, but notice how the word is separated from the rest of the sentence (even though there was definitely room to fit it in with the rest), as if to draw your attention to the word. Also, look at the expression on his face. Doesn't that look like someone who knows what LOVE stands for "Level Of ViolencE," as Sans points out to us in Judgment Hall? Because it sure does to me. Also, remember how Papyrus definitely knows that Frisk is a human during the Bad Time route, but not during a Pacifist route? Why would Papyrus make the connection between humans and violence?

There are two explanations for this.

The first is that a few sub-conscious memories of his time as Gaster were somehow retained; that is, he remembers the war between humans and monsters, much like how he remembers having hair and ears. So that is one possible explanation.

The second is perhaps the wildest headcanon you will ever hear about Papyrus.

Ready?

Ok.

*sighs*

Papyrus... has killed before.

"WHO? WHAT? WHERE? WHEN? WHY? HOW?" you ask. Well, here's my theory.

Papyrus, being newly incarnated from Gaster (alongside his brother, Sans), doesn't really know much about the world around him. He has memories missing. Which ones, we're not sure of, but he's definitely... not all there, if you get me.

Now is a good time for to mention Papyrus' stats versus Sans' before I continue with this story. Have you ever noticed how Papyrus is up to twenty times stronger than Sans?

[picture of Papyrus' Pacifist stats: 20 Attack, 20 Defense]

[picture of Sans' stats: 1 Attack, 1 Defense, with the caption "*The easiest enemy."]

But Papyrus and Sans are brothers, so we would expect that they would have the same stats, which clearly isn't so.

Tying this back into what we know about LOVE, we know that with every increase of LOVE, one receives an increase in stats as well:

[pictures showing LV 1 stats, and then saying, "Your LOVE increased!” to LV 2, and the HP stat going up.]

So, the only logical explanation is that Papyrus received an increase in stats because he received an increase in LOVE. And how did this happen?

Think about the Items which Frisk finds in Snowdin: the Tough Glove and the Manly Bandanna.

[pictures of Frisk acquiring Tough Glove and Manly Bandanna in Snowdin]

To which child did they belong? The Orange SOUL.

[picture of the Photoshop Flowey battle, depicting the Orange SOUL in the box and the Tough Glove being used as a weapon against Frisk]

Which trait is attributed with Orange? Bravery.

[picture of the Ball Game in Snowdin showing the word "bravery" in orange]

What happens when an attack is Orange? You have to keep moving.

[picture of Doctor Alphys explaining how orange lasers work in Hotland]

From this canon evidence, what can we infer the Orange SOUL kid's gimmick was, if they were "brave?"

I'll tell you: they kept moving forward, no matter what.

Now, what color magic does Papyrus have?

[picture of Papyrus using blue-colored bones in battle]

What does Blue magic do? It requires you to *stand still,* or else you will get hurt.

[picture of Doggo using blue magic on Frisk's motionless, red SOUL and doing no damage]

Tell me, how is a kid who is incapable of standing still going to survive Blue magic? Simple: they won't.

I even wrote a short ficlet about it here:

https://eroshiyda.tumblr.com/post/152526581522/orange-soul-headcanon [link to my tumblr post, "Orange SOUL headcanon"]

Of course, I'd like to think that it was just an accident. But, accident or not, Papyrus killed a human child, which was enough to raise his stats to twenty times higher than what they were originally. (Remember that humans are far more powerful than monsters, so they would be worth a lot of EXecution Points.)

This is why Papyrus knows exactly how much to lower his stats during the Bad Time route. He's not trying to kill Frisk, and he knows how much force is needed for that.

[picture of Papyrus lowering his stats to 5 ATK, 5 DEF in a Bad Time route]

That's also how he knows that Frisk is going down the "wrong path" by moving closer to Papyrus in a threatening way.

[pictures of Papyrus lecturing Frisk to stop moving before battling them during a Bad Time route]

Papyrus has experience battling at least one human child. And Papyrus didn't lose, either; otherwise, he wouldn't be around anymore by the time Frisk arrives, right?

But this is why his character development is so important to the story of Undertale. This is why he's (arguably) Flowey's favorite monster in the whole Underground, long after Flowey grew tired of torturing everyone else:

[picture of Flowey at the end of a Neutral route saying, "Took me a long time to get bored of that one." Yes, he is referring to Papyrus.]

Because even after Papyrus committed the most heinous atrocity any monster could ever think of, he changed. He resolved to never FIGHT again. He solemnly swore to only use MERCY, no matter how dire the circumstances got. Even after all he had been through, he proved that people can change their ways.

[picture of Papyrus saying, "Everyone can be a great person if they try!"]

It's all about the choices you make. Because accidents happen, everyone makes mistakes, but ultimately you have a choice; do you keep going down the path of least resistance, or do you learn and grow from it enough to do the right thing, no matter how hard it gets?

 X. Afterword

Thanks for reading this theory all the way through! You're a real trooper!

I know that this is a topic that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, and I probably left out a lot of discrepancies, but I really did have fun working on this for the past year and a half. I hope you had fun reading it, too.

As I was finishing up this project, the Japanese version of Undertale came out. Some of the information gathered from gleaning nuances in the Japanese text conflicts with this theory, while some supports it; but I just didn’t get a chance to include any of it, to my dismay.

By the time you see this post, I most likely will have left tumblr. So, I cannot accept any of your thoughts about it, unfortunately.

However, if you would like to do even further research of your own, I have left behind this blog as an archive, along with another, super-secret blog I used to reblog my sources. The url is @papyrus-is-gaster. Here’s the link to it:

https://papyrus-is-gaster.tumblr.com/ [link to one of my sideblogs, called papyrus-is-gaster]

I'd like to think of this as my sort of "tumblr dissertation," and I've officially graduated and am ready to move on to other things. Undertale was a fun phase in my life, but all phases come to an end.

And, with that, this post has also (finally) come to an end as well.

Just remember,

[picture of Papyrus saying "Still! I believe in you!"]

The Great Papyrus believes in you, and so do I.

[papyrus-is-gaster-blog]

wild theory

(Note: this version is cross-posted from my main blog, @eroshiyda [link: https://eroshiyda.tumblr.com], so please reblog it from there, if you can.]

Today is Undertale's second anniversary. I love Undertale so much that it has been my hyperfixation ever since I played it at the beginning of 2016. I joined tumblr in May of 2016 because I saw that a lot of people were talking about Undertale on here. This is the origin of this particular blog. And now, I have planned a Special Post(TM) for this occasion.

(Warning: this post is extraordinarily long - as in, over five thousand words long - and contains many spoilers for the game. I have hidden it under a "Read More" so that it doesn't clog up people's dashboards.)

I. Preface and Special Thanks

First, though, I must tell you a story. It all started when I made my husband play Undertale, because it was so great when I played it, and I wanted to see how he would play the game. Which route would he take? (He ended up doing True Pacifist after killing the first Froggit and feeling so guilty about it that he reset). Once he finished, I asked him who his favorite character was.

His answer? Papyrus.

"Papyrus?" I thought. "But why?" I felt like he was probably the most forgettable character in the entire game, perhaps apart from Sans (note: I have never done a Bad Time route). What was it about this goofy skeleton that made my husband like him so much? Was it his malapropisms? Was it the fact that he can somehow shout in whispers? Was it his Ghost costume... er, "battle body?"

So, I decided to do some research. I started searching "Papyrus from Undertale" on Google, and most of the results I found came from the wonderful, well-functioning website which we all know and love as tumblr. He was buzzing, and it seemed a lot of people felt about Papyrus the same way my husband did.

I made an account, and the first thing I posted was a Very Profound Theory(TM) which was met with some disagreement. That "theory" is that Papyrus is Sans' older brother, and not the other way around. (Keep in mind that, at this point, I had not seen Toby Fox's tweet about Papyrus calling Sans the common word for "older brother" in Japanese, which was actually an allusion to the fact that he was translating Undertale into Japanese, but I digress.)

The reasons I posted were simple enough, and if you really want to, you can even go back and read it for yourself. I'll link to it here for you also:

https://eroshiyda.tumblr.com/post/144298607667/papyrus-is-the-older-brother [link to my first tumblr post, "Papyrus is the older brother."]

This just came from my personal experience as an older sibling, and a closer analysis of Papyrus' character during my second True Pacifist playthrough.

Through this "theory" post (and I really am hesitant to call it a "theory" now, because it's so mundane), I met a lot of friends who were also theorizing about Papyrus. However, this is not the theory that I wanted to talk about.

As I gained more and more tumblr friends who were also very interested in Undertale (mostly Papyrus in particular), I started seeing more posts about all of the weird things he does and says. Not "weird" in a derogatory way, I just mean weird as in "odd," "unusual," "eccentric," and sometimes "nonsensical" or "unpredictable."

@undertale-encyclopedia did a really good job of compiling each of the canon strings of text, so I will mainly be using that blog as a resource for my canon information (since I never played anything but True Pacifist, and therefore do not have my own screenshots of certain bits of dialogue from other routes).

https://undertale-encyclopedia.tumblr.com/ [link to undertale-encyclopedia's tumblr blog]

@jewels336 (now deactivated) also provided a masterpost for which I am eternally grateful, as even though I had seen all of the posts (and even participated in a lot of them) compiled within that master list, they were now in a very neat and accessible place. I will be referencing those posts as well, as they were a springboard for many parts of this theory, and utilize canon information. Here it is:

https://eroshiyda.tumblr.com/post/151713943787/compilation-of-mysterious-papyrus-things [link to @jewels336's tumblr post, "Papyrus Masterpost!"]

@uselessundertalefacts (formerly @uselessshoelacefacts), @lefthanded-sans, and @papyrus-knows also indulged a lot of questions I originally had about Papyrus. They all made some really good analysis posts about the skelebros in general as well, so you should definitely go and check out their blogs, too.

I would also like to thank each and every one of my followers/mutuals/friends, who let me talk about Papyrus with them at some point or another. I am very much aware of how wild my theories are, so thank you for putting up with me.

Right. *deep breath* Now onto the theory.

 II. Introduction

If you have not yet read @napstamuse's "Goner Theory Part III: Skeletons in the Closet," I very strongly urge you to do so right now. Here it is, for your convenience:

http://napstamuse.tumblr.com/post/139568679252/goner-theory-part-3-skeletons-in-the-closet [link to @napstamuse's tumblr post, "Goner Theory Part III"]

This is the actual post which made me join tumblr, and ultimately it led me to make up this theory. In summary, it points out how little we know about Papyrus, despite his talking incessantly. In fact, it even mentions at the very end that there's only one other character in Undertale of whom we know about as little: Mystery Man.

With a name like "Mystery Man," one would expect at least some intrigue surrounding such a character. We know what Mystery Man looks like:

[picture of Mystery Man, surprised]

We know what font he speaks in:

[picture of Entry 17 in capitalized Wing Dings font with no asterisks]

And are therefore able to conclude that he was a Royal Scientist, as the only other person to write "entries" is Doctor Alphys, the current Royal Scientist of the Underground:

[picture of one of Doctor Alphys' entries in normal font, with standard asterisk at the beginning]

and that his name was probably Wing Dings, or W. D. for short:

[picture of one of Gaster’s followers referring to him as “Doctor W. D. Gaster”]

But what does this have to do with Papyrus? Well, let's start with what we know about Papyrus.

We know that he looks like this:

[picture of Papyrus wearing a cape, battle body, and hotpants]

sometimes this:

[picture of Date Papyrus with MTT-brand Basketball Shoulder Pads, a shirt which says "Cool Dude" in all caps, shorts, and sneakers]

or even this:

[picture of Papyrus wearing a sweatband over his head and a shirt which says, "Jog Boy" on it]

We know that he likes puzzles:

[picture of Papyrus standing next to and talking about one of his puzzles]

We know that he's a good artist:

[picture of Papyrus talking about how he painted Snowdin’s bridge over a rock formation]

We know that his name is Papyrus (obviously) because he is referred to as such, and talks in this font:

[picture of Papyrus saying "Nyeh heh heh!" in capitalized Papyrus font, also without the standard asterisks]

And... that's it.

The rest of this theory involves putting these clues together. Ready?

 III. Appearance

Let's start with Papyrus' appearance. He's pretty tall, compared to his brother Sans. According to this chart by @kitty4915, he's approximately 6 feet and 8 inches tall:

https://kitty4915.tumblr.com/post/138141358237/yo-undertale-heights-go [link to @kitty4915's tumblr post, "YO UNDERTALE HEIGHTS GO!!"]

[picture of Papyrus next to a door]

A bit strange for brothers, don't you think? One of them definitely got the short end of the stick. *badum-tss*

[picture of Sans Height Chart, 4'8"]

Anyway, I've seen it speculated that Papyrus and Sans are not "brothers" in a literal sense, but they are very close friends who sometimes call each other "brother." However, I do not think this is quite the case.

Sometimes I forget that half-siblings are a thing that exist. Half-siblings are siblings who share only one parent. How is this relevant to the skelebros? Well, @zarla-s has come up with an AU called Handplates which has one possible explanation for this: the skelebros technically share one parent, because they are both cloned from the same person. That person is, you guessed it: Royal Scientist Wing Dings Gaster.

http://zarla-s.tumblr.com/post/139516306171/okay-i-get-a-lot-of-questions-about-what-order-the [link to @zarla-s' "Handplates" AU Index post on tumblr]

Speaking of Mystery Man, we haven't analyzed his appearance next to Papyrus':

[pictures of Mystery Man sprite and Papyrus sprite next to each other]

It is said that the eyes are windows into the soul. Something people notice right away about Gaster's eyes are that they are extremely asymmetrical. His left eye is much bigger than his right.

Papyrus, on the other hand... well, both of his eyes are small, but if you look closely, you'll see that his left eye is smaller than his right, even when it is facing slightly away from view, like in his battle and date sprites. And it's more noticeable from the front, like in his overworld sprite, pictured above.

Ok, so they're kinda-sorta mirror images of each other, nothing too special. Could be a coincidence. Right? Well, sure, if this was the only thing they had in common, it could definitely be a coincidence. Never mind the fact that Papyrus seems to be raising his right eyebrow and squinting his left eye, almost as if he's compensating for them naturally being the other way around...

But why stop there? The other thing to note is that both of these skeletons are tall. Very, very tall. We already know how tall Papyrus is, but how big is Mystery Man?

[picture of Gaster Height Chart]

 Wow, 7 feet and 6 inches! That is really tall. Even taller than Papyrus (by ten inches). Cool. So, if Papyrus somehow came from Gaster, then Papyrus' extreme height would make a little more sense. But again, where does that leave Sans?

[picture of Sans shrugging]

One could argue that Sans has inherited Gaster's, shall we say, roundness. That makes a little less sense, as we are not even sure exactly how "round" Gaster even is. His black "cloak" (not even sure if it's really a cloak canonically) does not necessarily represent Gaster's bodily shape - as it could be flowy, melted, or otherwise augmented by some magical law of physics. And besides, this theory doesn't really have anything to do with Sans.

 IV. But Something's Missing...

However, even I must admit that something isn't quite right about the height discrepancy between Gaster and Papyrus, either. With Gaster being nearly a whole foot taller, it seems as though there's something... missing.

And, even if you take away that extra ten inches from Gaster's height, there's something else which Gaster has which Papyrus, at first glance, seems to not have.

Refer back to the pictures of Gaster and Papyrus next to each other. See the holes in Gaster's hands? And Papyrus'... well, they're covered in gloves, so I guess we'll never know. Darn.

[pictures of Papyrus saying “I know it like the back of my hand… which, since I’m always wearing gloves… I don’t know anything about!!”]

Thanks, Papyrus.

But, there is still something else missing, and this thing has nothing to do with appearances. Of course, I am referring to Wing Dings' experience as the Royal Scientist of the Underground.

Gaster even has "followers" who consider him to be important in the Underground's history long after he is gone. You can find them with certain Fun values:

[pictures of Gaster's three followers]

In contrast, Papyrus holds no important status in the Underground (unless all of the other boss monsters are killed, leaving Papyrus to take King Asgore's place in the end). But he *does* want to join the Royal Guard.

[pictures of Papyrus saying that his “lifelong dream” is joining the Royal Guard]

Why? Well, for starters, he is friends with the Royal Guard Dogs in Snowdin (which is his place of residence), as well as the Captain of the Royal Guard herself, Undyne.

[picture of Undyne]

Undyne got her job because she asked King Asgore "Fluffybuns" Dreemurr to train her in combat. They subsequently became close, and she was so well-trained that she was basically a shoo-in. (This is all canon information which you can obtain by going on the "friendship date" with Undyne in True Pacifist.) But this theory isn't about her, either.

So again, what is Papyrus' motivation for wanting to join the Royal Guard? He's not close with the King. In fact, Papyrus is never mentioned by anyone other than Flowey (who knows everything, but we'll get to that later), Undyne (arguably his only friend), and Sans (his own brother); and, at the very end of True Pacifist route, by both Toriel (who had only heard his name because of Sans) and Monster Kid. No one really knows who he is, so the reason for his wanting to join couldn't possibly be his connections.

Could it be that he wants to FIGHT? Considering that he can't even bring himself to hit Frisk in any run (regardless of how many monsters they have killed in the Underground upon meeting Papyrus), I would say that this is also rather unlikely.

Luckily for us, Papyrus hints at what it is he is really after:

[picture of Papyrus saying "Powerful, Popular, Prestigious!"]

He wants to be powerful, popular, and prestigious. Sounds fair enough, right?

Not so fast. Who in the Royal Guard is powerful, popular, and prestigious? Certainly the Royal Guard Dogs are not. And, while Undyne is undoubtedly powerful, I wouldn't really call her "popular," except with Monster Kid (and Doctor Alphys, but that is a whole other story). But Monster Kid is exactly that: a kid. A child.

[picture of Monster Kid]

Papyrus wants a child to look up to him. Part of the reason he dresses up and acts like a super hero is to appeal to children and give them a role model to emulate. This is also evident in the way he treats Frisk, who is also a child: with open, accepting arms, ready to embrace them and be their friend.

[picture of Papyrus saying "I, Papyrus, welcome you with open arms!"]

But let's tie this back into Mystery Man, shall we? The previous Royal Scientist definitely had a connection with the monarchy as well (which, as we've already established, Papyrus did not have). How else would he have gotten such an esteemed position? He may have also been extraordinarily intelligent, much like the current Royal Scientist, Doctor Alphys:

[picture of Papyrus explaining to Frisk that Doctor Alphys made an advanced puzzle]

[picture of Bratty & Catty telling Frisk that Doctor Alphys made Mettaton's robot body]

but, ultimately, W. D. Gaster met with an untimely death after having an accident of sorts:

[picture of one of Gaster's followers saying that "he fell into his creation"]

which implies that he was a savant, or someone who could be considered "book smart," but also absent-minded and accident prone. That sort of reminds me of someone else...

[pictures of Papyrus explaining Alphys' puzzle]

[picture of Papyrus getting shocked]

Anyway, there appears to be something *else* missing, on top of everything we've just covered.

 V. Memories

Papyrus seems to have a... sketchy memory, to say the very least. At first glance, he appears to retain nothing:

[picture of Papyrus saying "Really though!!! That human!!! Do I know that person?” Hint: the answer is "yes."]

but, upon closer inspection, we learn that he retains quite a lot (as evidenced by his telling Frisk seemingly random trivia about nearly each and every room in the Underground over the phone):

[picture of Papyrus saying, "I have a photographic memory for phone calls!"]

and, upon even closer inspection, we see that he actually can't even remember commonly-used idioms:

[picture of Papyrus using the malapropism "smells like the moon" instead of "odor the moon," which comes from the idiom "over the moon"]

then, upon microscopic inspection, we see that there's something definitely off with Papyrus' memory. He literally remembers and even references things which do not exist (or have yet to happen) in current timelines:

[pictures of Papyrus alluding to Mettaton's EX forme – specifically, his “bishonen eyes” – while Mettaton is still in Box forme, and Undyne inadvertently confirming that his EX forme has not yet been revealed, by replying “He doesn’t even HAVE eyes!!!”]

[picture of Papyrus talking about a "Laborador... y?" which is a reference to both Endogeny and the True Lab, yet to be discovered]

[picture of Papyrus telling Frisk that he will talk to them again, even though this has not yet been confirmed at this point in the True Pacifist route]

[picture of Papyrus telling Frisk that they "can do a little better!" even after killing every monster they have encountered up until this point]

So... what gives? How can he remember things that have not yet happened, unless he is, say, perhaps, a time traveler?

 VI. Time-Space Shenanigans

Now, I know what you're thinking: "But, eroshiyda, Sans already told us that Flowey gives Papyrus predictions, so this discussion is all meaningless!"

Ok, but we also know that Sans has the ability to travel across time-space in strange ways; namely, he teleports. It's not exactly an easter egg or anything, as it's too extraordinary a phenomenon to ignore.

[pictures of Sans appearing in two places in the same room at the same time]

[picture of Papyrus asking Sans if he is, in fact, in two places at once; walking into the next room will prove that this conjecture is correct]

But the implication is that Papyrus has the same ability (because they are brothers), or at least a very similar one, as Sans' ability comes as no surprise to Papyrus.

[pictures of Papyrus asking Frisk, "Is Sans pranking you across time and space? I hate it when he does that!"]

And, in fact, there is alternate evidence of their similar abilities:

[picture of Papyrus battle in Pacifist or Neutral routes, showing blue-colored, bone-shaped magic]

[picture of Sans battle, exclusive to Bad Time route, also showing blue-colored, bone-shaped magic]

[picture of Papyrus "preparing a non-bone attack, then spending a minute fixing his mistake"]

[picture of Papyrus telling Frisk "Had I only used my Special Attack, you surely would have been blasted to..." with a forlorn look on his face. This only happens when you abandon a Bad Time route by sparing Papyrus.]

[picture of Sans using Gaster Blasters during his battle with Frisk. This is only available during a Bad Time route, killing everyone else – Papyrus included.]

Of course, you cannot possibly see them both in action during the same route (Toby Fox, you clever dog), so it is difficult to compare the two without going back to play Undertale in an entirely different way than before. So, this may count as an easter egg.

What is, perhaps, a bit more of an easter egg (at least, according to my Papyrus-fixated tumblr friends), is the fact that Papyrus can - and does - manipulate time-space in his own ways:

[gif of Papyrus literally walking on air over Frisk]

[gif of Papyrus quickly transposing across the screen without moving his body otherwise]

So, who's to say that he doesn't travel across time as well?

[picture of Gaster's first follower saying that "he was shattered across time and space"]

 VII. Memories, Revisited

Remember that "memory" thing I pointed out? Well, I'd like to come back to that for a bit.

There are two things which I have noticed, and I get why they've been met with resistance in the past when I brought them up. But, keep in mind all of the evidence listed above and the things we've talked about thus far. As I said, I know that these are wild theories, but please bear with me for just a little bit longer.

Ok, here's the first thing I've noticed:

[picture of Papyrus leaving Frisk with 1 HP so that he can capture them after battle; this happens no matter what, if you lose to him]

[pictures of Papyrus referring to the battle as “a terrible memory" over the phone]

[pictures describing the Bad Memory item, found in the True Lab; it depletes exactly 1 HP when consumed by Frisk]

And the second thing is this:

[pictures of Papyrus immediately recognizing Frisk as a human during a Bad Time route]

[pictures of Papyrus not recognizing Frisk as a human during a Pacifist route]

Something about HP, bad memories, and a human... Now, how could this possibly be connected?

Well, I'm afraid that I have no more canon evidence to support my theory, so now we are plunging deep into headcanon territory from here on out. If this upsets you, please just stop reading now. I'd rather you form your own headcanon, given the canon evidence so far. Perhaps yours will be more satisfying than mine is, because it's about to get kind of dark. In fact, I would hide it under another "Read More" if I could. But I can't, so I'll give you a break.

Last chance to turn back now.

By continuing to read this, you are submitting yourself to probably the most wild and ridiculous theory that has ever been made in the Undertale fandom.

 VIII. Conclusion

If you're still reading this, I must confess that I do have one, tiny piece of canon information to support this theory, which has seemingly nothing to do with anything I just talked about. Here it is:

[picture of a sillhouette of Toriel standing next to a human in the introduction to Undertale, with the caption "Long ago, humans and monsters lived in peace."]

[picture of a sillhouette of Asgore fighting with a human in the introduction to Undertale, with the caption "They were at war."]

The king and queen were on the surface during the Monster and Human War. This implies that they knew humans at some point before they were sealed away Underground when the humans won.

So... what if Gaster, their Royal Scientist before Doctor Alphys, was a human?

A stretch, I know. But here is another tiny piece of evidence to consider:

[picture of Gaster's second follower saying, "I'm holding a piece of him right here." In their hand is what looks like a human face]

Our Mystery Man once had a face which looks strikingly human. Of course, by the time we see him, he looks more like a skeleton with two large fractures on either side of his skull. So, it makes sense that his face went missing.

Which reminds me of this:

[picture of Papyrus realizing that he doesn't have ears]

[pictures of Papyrus referencing his “hair” and “skin,” neither of which he has, since he is a skeleton]

The only reason that Papyrus could possibly "realize" that he has neither ears nor hair is if he had had them before, and only now realizes that they are gone. Remember: Papyrus has a sketchy memory. Something definitely messed with it at somewhere along the way. But what?

Well, remember the aforementioned "accident" which Royal Scientist W. D. Gaster had? I would think that being spread across time-space would be... disorienting, if you will. Parts could go missing. Pieces. Memories, physicalities, any of it.

"Wait," I hear you thinking. "Surely you're not trying to suggest that Papyrus is Gaster! That would be ludicrous!"

Wouldn't it?

"They have such different personalities!"

Don't they?

"Papyrus could never be the Royal Scientist!"

Are you sure about that?

Let me explain to you how I think it happened.

(This is the dark part. I decided not to dive right into it because I wanted to give you time to adjust to my wild theory. Once you are comfortable with the headcanon of Papyrus being Gaster, please proceed. If this is against your sensibilities, I won't hold it against you at all. You are free to stop reading this post at any time.)

Gaster was a human who lived on the surface like everyone else. He was a friend to monsters before the war. He even knew Asgore and Toriel, although Toriel took to him a bit better. Once the war broke out, everyone had to choose a side. The line was drawn between monsters and humans. Only W. D. Gaster decided to cross that line.

When the monsters were sealed Underground by a magical barrier after the humans won the war, Gaster ended up being sealed with them. Asgore and Toriel were elected the King and Queen of the Underground, and they elected Gaster to be Royal Scientist.

The magical barrier transformed Gaster as time passed. He became immortal, like a monster. He started to adopt their mannerisms, and even started to look like a monster. As his body aged, soon all that was left of him was his skeleton. Without vocal cords, he could only speak in a strange font: Wing Dings. This earned him his nickname.

Then, "The Accident" happened. I don't know exactly how, or when, but we all know that it happened. Gaster "fell into his creation," and "was shattered across time and space," according to his followers. A new Royal Scientist was needed.

In the meantime, two skeleton brothers randomly showed up in Snowdin. We get this information from an NPC in Snowdin:

[pictures of the Snowdin Shopkeeper telling Frisk that Sans and Papyrus "just showed up one day"]

Interesting.

 IX. Supporting Evidence/More Headcanons

But how did the Royal Scientist Wing Dings Gaster become the Papyrus we all know and love?

(trigger warnings: mentions of violence and child death)

Let's go back to canon evidence, shall we? We are far enough into the headcanon realm that I do think it's time for some canon reminders:

[Papyrus, looking slightly worried as he says "LOVE." in all capital letters, which holds a very different meaning than lowercase "love" in the game of Undertale]

I know that Papyrus speaks in all caps all of the time, but look at the expression on his face. Doesn't that look like someone who knows what LOVE stands for "Level Of ViolencE," as Sans points out to us in Judgment Hall? Because it sure does to me. Also, remember how Papyrus definitely knows that Frisk is a human during the Bad Time route, but not during a Pacifist route? Why would Papyrus make the connection between humans and violence?

There are two explanations for this.

The first is that a few sub-conscious memories of his time as Gaster were somehow retained; that is, he remembers the war between humans and monsters, much like how he remembers having hair and ears. So that is one possible explanation.

The second is perhaps the wildest headcanon you will ever hear about Papyrus.

Ready?

Ok.

*sighs*

Papyrus... has killed before.

"WHO? WHAT? WHERE? WHEN? WHY? HOW?" you ask. Well, here's my theory.

Papyrus, being newly incarnated from Gaster (alongside his brother, Sans), doesn't really know much about the world around him. He has memories missing. Which ones, we're not sure of, but he's definitely... not all there, if you get me.

Now is a good time for to mention Papyrus' stats versus Sans' before I continue with this story. Have you ever noticed how Papyrus is up to twenty times stronger than Sans?

[picture of Papyrus' Pacifist stats: 20 Attack, 20 Defense]

[picture of Sans' stats: 1 Attack, 1 Defense, with the caption "*The easiest enemy."]

But Papyrus and Sans are brothers, so we would expect that they would have the same stats, which clearly isn't so.

Tying this back into what we know about LOVE, we know that with every increase of LOVE, one receives an increase in stats as well:

[pictures showing LV 1 stats, and then saying, "Your LOVE increased!” and the HP stat going up.]

So, the only logical explanation is that Papyrus received an increase in stats because he received an increase in LOVE. And how did this happen?

Think about the Items which Frisk finds in Snowdin: the Tough Glove and the Manly Bandanna.

[pictures of Frisk acquiring Tough Glove and Manly Bandanna in Snowdin]

To which child did they belong? The Orange SOUL.

[picture of the Photoshop Flowey battle, depicting the Orange SOUL in the box and the Tough Glove being used as a weapon against Frisk]

Which trait is attributed with Orange? Bravery.

[picture of the Ball Game in Snowdin showing the word "bravery" in orange]

What happens when an attack is Orange? You have to keep moving.

[pictures of Doctor Alphys explaining how orange lasers work in Hotland]

From this canon evidence, what can we infer the Orange SOUL kid's gimmick was, if they were "brave?"

I'll tell you: they kept moving forward, no matter what.

Now, what color magic does Papyrus have?

[picture of Papyrus using blue-colored bones in battle]

What does Blue magic do? It requires you to *stand still,* or else you will get hurt.

[picture of Doggo using blue magic on Frisk's motionless, red SOUL and doing no damage]

Tell me, how is a kid who is incapable of standing still going to survive Blue magic? Simple: they won't.

I even wrote a short ficlet about it here:

https://eroshiyda.tumblr.com/post/152526581522/orange-soul-headcanon [link to my tumblr post, "Orange SOUL headcanon"]

Of course, I'd like to think that it was just an accident. But, accident or not, Papyrus killed a human child, which was enough to raise his stats to twenty times higher than what they were originally. (Remember that humans are far more powerful than monsters, so they would be worth a lot of EXecution Points.)

This is why Papyrus knows exactly how much to lower his stats during the Bad Time route. He's not trying to kill Frisk, and he knows how much force is needed for that.

[picture of Papyrus lowering his stats to 5 ATK, 5 DEF in a Bad Time route]

That's also how he knows that Frisk is going down the "wrong path" by moving closer to Papyrus in a threatening way.

[pictures of Papyrus lecturing Frisk to stop moving before battling them during a Bad Time route]

Papyrus has experience battling at least one human child. And Papyrus didn't lose, either; otherwise, he wouldn't be around anymore by the time Frisk arrives, right?

But this is why his character development is so important to the story of Undertale. This is why he's (arguably) Flowey's favorite monster in the whole Underground, long after Flowey grew tired of torturing everyone else:

[picture of Flowey at the end of a Neutral route saying, "Took me a long time to get bored of that one."]

Because even after Papyrus committed the most heinous atrocity any monster could ever think of, he changed. He resolved to never FIGHT again. He solemnly swore to only use MERCY, no matter how dire the circumstances got. Even after all he had been through, he proved that people can change their ways.

[picture of Papyrus saying, "Everyone can be a great person if they try!"]

It's all about the choices you make. Because accidents happen, everyone makes mistakes, but ultimately you have a choice; do you keep going down the path of least resistance, or do you learn and grow from it enough to do the right thing, no matter how hard it gets?

 X. Afterword

Thanks for reading this theory all the way through! You're a real trooper!

I know that this is a topic that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, and I probably left out a lot of discrepancies, but I really did have fun working on this for the past year and a half. I hope you had fun reading it, too.

As I was finishing up this project, the Japanese version of Undertale came out. Some of the information gathered from gleaning nuances in the Japanese text conflicts with this theory, while some supports it; but I just didn’t get a chance to include any of it, to my dismay.

By the time you see this post, I most likely will have left tumblr. So, I cannot accept any of your thoughts about it, unfortunately.

However, if you would like to do even further research of your own, I have left behind this blog as an archive, along with another, super-secret blog I used to reblog my sources. The url is @papyrus-is-gaster. Here’s the link to it: https://papyrus-is-gaster.tumblr.com/ [link to one of my sideblogs, called papyrus-is-gaster]

I'd like to think of this as my sort of "tumblr dissertation," and I've officially graduated and am ready to move on to other things. Undertale was a fun phase in my life, but all phases come to an end.

And, with that, this post has also (finally) come to an end as well.

Just remember,

[picture of Papyrus saying "Still! I believe in you!"]

The Great Papyrus believes in you, and so do I.

[3amigonauts-blog]

Composer Profile - Kid Koala, 3 Amigonauts

Did you know that the opening and closing theme music for 3 Amigonauts was composed by world-renowned scratch DJ and music producer Kid Koala! We interviewed Eric San, aka Kid Koala to get the lowdown on what goes into creating a super catchy theme song for outer space, and his answers were out of this world! Read the full story below!

What are three words you would use to describe the 3 Amigonauts theme song?

Nostalgic, Future, Funk!

What is the story behind the creating of the 3 Amigonauts theme song?

To start, I was given the series bible and some of the initial designs the Amigonauts crew were working on for Herby, Kirbie and Burt. I also got to see a couple early stage animatics, (they weren’t coloured at that point), but they showed me how everything would move in terms of the style of animation, like how stretchy and squashy it could get. So I kind of had all that swimming around in my head, while I was trying to make a track that could harmonize with the whole vibe of the show.

It was also really helpful to see the characters and the colour palettes the team were using, and their test animation, so I could see how stuff would move. It was very snappy but also very bouncy and stretchy. I knew the music would have to fit that type of animation. If it had been more vectored and cold feeling, I think I would have made something quite different. It seemed like such a joyous world that the 3 Amigonauts lived in, so I just wanted to see if I could match that.

Did the show’s space setting play into the piece?

Of course, the show being set in space always helps! It is funny, they say every musician at some point has to do a space phase, and I think I started mine 8 years ago and I haven’t left. So a space themed show was one of those things that I was actually kind of comfortable with – My last album was called Music to Draw To: Satellite and was set on Mars. And musically I was pretty equipped for the job, because a lot of the equipment I had accumulated and searched for to make said space records, and music, was designed to create spacey sounds. For instance, the most obvious one being the Roland Space Echo.

What instruments, gear and or samples did you use to create the song?

Drums, bass, several synthesizers, the Roland Space Echo – a synth with a tape based delay, so it records sounds that go into and then plays it back slightly later, so you can create spaceship-y sounds. A lot of guitar effects, the record cutter, and turntables. And there were some horns and a baritone sax in there as well.

And just FYI there were no samples used in the track.  For the “three” scream you hear throughout the piece, I just recorded my daughters yelling ‘THREE’. And if something sounds like a sample it’s because I recorded instruments with 1950s microphones and sometimes cut stuff to vinyl on my record cutter and then scratched it back into the track on a turntable.

Even the counterpoint melody line is just me singing though a bunch of robot vocoders.

Above you mention “nostalgia” as one of the words to describe the song… can you expand on how you achieved this “feeling?”

When I was speaking to Kyle, he wanted it to have this kind of dusty sample feel and aesthetic in the music.

So what I would do, would be to play instruments and synthesizers, and then I would cut them to vinyl records – as I mentioned above I have a record cutter in my studio –  I would then use that record and scratch it back in. What ended up happening is you kind of get the feeling like “Oh these samples came from some old record”, when really they are original-made tunes, which were just treated to sound that way.

That’s fun for me, because I’m mostly known for my turntable work, and once a sound is cut to a piece of vinyl, then I’m in my safe place so to speak. I like all the combinations of things you can do, once a sound is on vinyl. So, to have the ability to do that is pretty cool, at least in my recording process, it’s kind of a fun little revolution that I’m enjoying.

How does the process for writing a theme song for a show, differ from writing an original song for an album?

With a theme song you want it to kick off the show and signal, “Hey, this is it, we are heading into Amigonauts land!” A theme song is pretty much the tag of the show, so you need to create a welcoming piece, where the palette of sounds and the vibe of the song reflect the world you are about to go into.

After seeing what the Amigos team had created, and speaking to Kyle about the vibe and the tone of the show, it was pretty clear that the best thing would be for the theme to be joyous and inviting, something that would elicit a smile, and of course, something that was a bit squashy and stretchy in sound as well.

I tried to create sounds that suits the mechanics of the show. For example, Herby, Kirbie and Burt have skeletons that can stretch, so it would make sense that the instruments should be able to have a similar elasticity too! So imagine you hear what you think is a traditional instrument being played, and then you realize “Oh no wait, that is really just someone playing that sound on a record and now they’ve bent it out of the human range!”  

Anything else to add about what makes a themes song different from writing your own music?

Yes! The time limit is a huge factor in writing a theme song. On my own albums I can do an 8 minute song, but here I had to think like “It’s the Amigonauts, we’re going in, we’ve landed and we only have a relatively short period of time to open the doors to their universe and pull the audience in with this piece!”

Is the short time limit challenging?

Well, I have a short attention span for the most part, so I felt kind of at home with the time limit!

Which Amigonaut are you most like:

a) Herby - Heroic, fidgety and blindly confident, Herby is the Amigos’ front-man.

b) Kirbie - A consummate over-sharer with zero filter, Kirbie can come off as kinda gross.

c) Burt - Joyfully mischievous yet supremely polite, Burt is a walking pyrotechnic fun-machine.

Yeah, I’d have to go with Burt. Mainly because of the pyro-mania, also “fun-machine” is a good title. If I ever have an office with big glass walls, with my name and title etched across the door in a big font, I want it to say “Eric Fun-Machine San”. But yes, I did have a minor pyro-mania phase, when I was maybe ten or eleven. I was into lighting off bottle rockets and firecrackers, but I grew out of it.

What was your favourite class in school?

Hmm… to be honest in high school it was physics. They do always say music is physics.

But, my fondest memories are from a course I remember taking, which spanned an entire year, where we had to do woodshop, metal work, electronic, soldering and cooking! That year, in the once class alone, I learned how to solder a circuit board and cook an egg. I don’t remember what it was called, but I think, as far as life skills are concerned, that class taught me the most profound amount of information I’ve actually held with me my entire life! In fact, just this morning I cooked an egg!

Any advice for the next generation of Amigonauts, who also want to become world class DJ’s, Musicians and Turntablists?

Dabble! Dabble in the stuff that you are interested in!

And if you have an idea for a project, if you have an idea for a song, don’t wait, just start. You don’t need a book contract to start writing, you don’t need a record contract to start making music, and you don’t need to have a gig offer to start creating a live show. If that’s what you want to do just start doing it and you’ll always find your audience.

I’m kind of like living proof of the fact that you can do the most weird, left field music and projects, and you’re still going to find an audience that are in your same boat creatively! You have to trust that even if you feel like you are a bit of an outsider with your artistic ideas, you are not alone, and there are other people, that are equally excited about the same ideas as you. In my experience, that is how it has worked! If you put your stuff out there on any level, eventually you being to attract people into your working sphere, who have that same mentality and same enthusiasm for stuff, and then when you start collaborating, that is when really wonderful things start happening too.

People just have to trust in their hearts that they know why they are here, and do what makes them happy!

For more Amigonauts:

Watch on YTV!

See more content on the Amigonauts YTV Website!

Play The Amigonauts Game!

Note: Hyperlapse drawing of Kid Koala done by 9 Story designer, Francis Yeh.

[thisislizheather]

May Musings

I have officially done a year’s worth of these monthly roundup posts.

Is it clear how much I love to write them? I guess I’ll keep doing them until they become a bother. Here’s what went down in May!

I’m still screaming from the rooftops about how great Booksmart was, can’t get over it.

Losing my mind over how good these Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Almond Butter Cups are.

And look, I tried to try more of the collagen powder but Nathan finished it all (and his hair has been looking pretty good lately now that I think about it) and I’m waiting to get more. I promise to finally take this regularly next month.

One of the regulars in my snack rotation has been these zucchini pizza bites that are surprisingly delightful, especially if you’re adding sopressata and/or jalapeños as part of the toppings.

I saw Jason Mantzoukas walking in Soho and he was so handsome I was afraid to say anything. Like alarmingly handsome. I knew he was good looking, but in real life? Whoa.

I am in love with this font. Someone tell me if it has a name.

I attempted to start season two of Barry, but it’s been so long since I saw the first season that I forgot most of what has happened. Could I have just rewatched the finale of season one and then moved on to number two? Sure. Will I? Now that’s another question.

Someone was singing this on the subway and I’d never heard it before, but Jesus Christ. So lovely.

This was a pretty heavy podcast month for me (kill me for that sentence), I did three of them! The first one is with Nathan talking about the new apartment, the second one is with Irene talking advice and the third one is with Nathan again talking abortion.

I just bought a pair of these heavenly, high-waisted, button-fly Gap jeans and I think everyone should go buy them ($42 right now with the sale), they fit like a dream. I might go back and get another pair in a different colour. Actually, yeah. I’m definitely doing that.

Ate at La Contenta and it was absolutely nothing special. Everything was too salty, overpriced and crowded.

I’ve already made three batches of these banana walnut muffins, they’re so perfect for the morning or for a snack. Ignore that they’re paleo, I promise you they’re good. Definitely not a party muffin, but a good-for-you muffin.

So excited that people will finally stop talking about Game of Thrones. Usually I don’t mind when other people love something that I don’t care about, but with this show it’s just been overkill. We get it. It was a show. Let’s move on?

So excited to hear that there’s going to be a new Mindy Kaling book next summer!

Nobody told me about how smokey it gets when you attempt to make burgers in your kitchen at home? Or was everyone aware of this already but me?

I just bought pink sunglasses (at Nathan’s encouragement) and I just became cool. May 2019. That’s when it happened. (I’d post of photo of them but I’ll be wearing them until I’m cold and dead in the ground, so believe me, you’ll see them on me soon.)

I can’t believe how good this looks. I love it when fall movies just say fuck it and come out in late summer.

I can’t say that I 100% relate to everything in this piece, but some parts of it are so on the money: “Men Have No Friends and Women Bear The Burden.“

I tried the mozzarella sticks at Big Mozz in Chelsea Market and whoa. They’re pretty serious. The tomato sauce that comes with them is insanity, too.

My niece Tianna came to visit New York for the first time! Some highlights: I finally ate a cronut and they’re waaaaay too sweet, and coming from me that should mean something because I love all things dessert. Maybe it’s because we ate it so early in the morning? I don’t know. I really don’t understand the big deal about them, though. We also walked through Chinatown and down to the financial district to get lunch at Manhatta, which was lovely. I forced her to eat my favourite pad thai at Lovely Day in Soho. We shared a cheese plate at The Cellar at Beecher’s, walked around the west village to see the Friends building and the stoop from The Cosby Show, we had dinner at L’Artusi where she had her first steak tartare. We walked through Grand Central Terminal to get to the dog museum (which is cute as hell), we saw and went backstage at the musical Waitress, had dinner at Shake Shack, saw the 9/11 memorial, shopped at Century 21, walked the Brooklyn Bridge, got pizza at Juliana’s (which wasn’t as good as I remembered?), walked with Baby Dog in Central Park to see the Balto statue, perused Chelsea Market and walked along The High Line, went to the galleries on Thursday night where we met Luis Guzman (!), and ate gelato at Grom. This was all within four days. No idea how we did that much stuff, but I slept for 13 straight hours the day after she left, so maybe I’m not as young as I once was.

Above Photo: Tianna, backstage at Waitress in NYC

Above Photo: Tianna on The Brooklyn Bridge

Above Photo: Tianna & Baby Dog in Central Park

I started watching the new version of The Twilight Zone with the assumption that I’d dislike it since the original is so great, however I’ve only seen one episode so far (the blue scorpion one) and I think I really like it. Obviously the classic series is untouchable, but this one is done really well.

I learned about the existence of Book Off in midtown, it’s a store “for the people who don’t want to waste.” They buy your old CDs, DVDs, books, action figures, electronics. It’s amazing.

Season three of Riverdale is over! This is the only show that I watch every week, so it was a big deal for me. And honestly, it was a fun season, despite everyone on earth’s opinions of it. Favourite tweet from the finale?

Strawberries are about to be in season, so I got a huge carton of them from a farmer’s market and made these strawberry oatmeal bars. Pretty good! They also work well crumbled up in greek yogurt.

Another good snack idea? These baked sweet potato fries.

I have made this chicken marsala so many times that I’m taking a break from them. But for the first few times I made it, it was so, so satisfying.

All right, look. I fully expected to love Wine Country on Netflix, but maaaaaan. It is not good. It isn’t funny or sweet or anything. I think I also hate it when Tina Fey tries to be a character actor, it’s always just the worst. Do not watch.

Here’s your semi-annual reminder that Bath & Body Works is having their huge twice-a-year sale starting on June 1st, I think. It’s never advertised in advance, but I’m almost positive that it’s the first week of June. Apologies that this sounds like an ad, I just really like their foaming hand soaps and I’m cheap as hell.

Made the roasted cauliflower, feta, orzo salad from Chrissy Teigen’s cookbook and yes it was really, really good. The only issue is that the portion size is way too big. We had leftovers for days and got pretty sick of eating it, so if you’re doing this for two people, definitely size it down. Also, I had no idea there were different types of feta. French feta is creamier than traditional Greek and maaaan is it good.

Loving this kale salad lemon dressing.

This shall be my June mantra.

And this is just great.

What am I looking forward to next month? I’m planning on seeing Mindy’s new movie Late Night, watching some more of the new Twilight Zone episodes, polishing off my spring list, preparing my summer list, thinking about if I’ll ignore or celebrate National Best Friend Day on June 8th, figuring out a Father’s Day gift for the 16th, I do want to see Toy Story 4 but it feels weird to not see it with a niece/nephew, and I’ll definitely take photos of the new apartment and my favourite items that I bought for the apartment post I promised last month.

If you’ve enjoyed this post, here’s a years worth of other ones like it: April 2019, March 2019, February 2019, January 2019, December 2018, November 2018, October 2018, September 2018, August 2018, July 2018, June 2018 & May 2018.

[pamelahetrick]

Epic design fails: laughing and learning from the best worst graphic designs

Nobody’s perfect. We all make mistakes. And design is full of tiny pitfalls that are easy to miss. Thankfully, designers usually learn from their early failures and ultimately become better for it. In that sense, design fails aren’t all that bad—for the most part.

But every now and then, you get something like this poor racoon stranded at sea …

…or this…

…or this…

… or even this.

Below, we look at eight laughable design fails and the valuable lessons those designers could have learned to keep their jobs.

1. Location, location, location —

Via Where Magazine.

Via Where Magazine.

This copy of Where magazine—that’s “Where” with two Es—shows us just how important layout and composition are in graphic design. The photographer did his or her job, but what about the cover designer? That poor woman looks so happy after a fruitful shopping trip, it’s a shame she has to be slandered by a design fail.

For starters, this problem could have been avoided by positioning the photo lower so that the E doesn’t look like an O. That seems like an easy cropping choice to make and it’s not like the reader would miss seeing the bottom of the third box. On top of that, the title could be superimposed over the model’s head, as long as it didn’t cover too much of her face.

As if this weren’t bad enough, the magazine made the same exact mistake a few months later! Perhaps they should consider a name change.

2. The importance of kerning —

Do you know what “kerning” is? Neither did the package designers behind this box of holiday lights.

Kerning is the design term for using the spacing between letters to make text more readable. The application of kerning can get pretty technical, with precise measurements, variations for different letters and sometimes even exact pixel guidelines. That’s why it’s a field that designers need to understand to avoid these kinds of mistakes.

Via The Wig and Pen Truro.

However, most non-designers don’t even know such a field exists. And that’s why they run into problems like those faced by England’s famed Wig & Pen.

3. Brea king words —

Via H&H Reeds Printers.

App rentals? Ice ships? Rent ice?

Breaking up words that shouldn’t be broken up is a classic design fail, but breaking up one big word four times into pieces that are incidentally their own words, that’s epic. What makes this ad even worse (and kind of sad) is not only that they’re trying to entice people to work with them, but they’re also a company that specializes in graphic design.

Yet we don’t want to dissuade designers against the technique entirely—when done well, it’s actually quite effective:

How to do it right. Logo design by Milos Zdrale.

How to do it right. Logo design by Bella” for Safari Partners.

But when using it, exercise caution. Whenever possible avoid creating real words with kerning and keep your message simple. The shorter the sentiment, the easier it will be for the viewer to piece it together—literally.

4. The “art” of communication —

A large part of graphic design is about communicating visually: it’s the designer’s job to make a message easy to understand. But that goes both ways and poor design choices can complicate an otherwise straightforward message.

You buy 3 and get 2 free or you buy 2 and get 1 free. It shouldn’t take the reader five or six read throughs to arrive at this conclusion. But the poor layout of the message—not to mention the confusing asterisks—makes this ad repel customers rather than draw them into the store.

For one thing, the setup looks like an equation, and no one wants to do math when they don’t have to. But shrinking down the second part makes it seem like it’s a clarification of the first message, not a separate sales concept. While this is an honest mistake, these little nuances are something experienced designers instinctively know to sidestep.

5. Say what you mean —

Via Zebra Publishing.

I mean, this may not be her best work, but wishing death upon her is a bit much.

Via Zebra Publishing.

Designers aren’t only in charge of how things look, they also need to watch out for contextual mistakes. When it comes to book cover design, that means combining the title and author name in a way that doesn’t have an unintended meaning. The way this book cover is set up, with the title and author name in the same color and font—and the name above the title—was an easily avoidable mistake.

In this case, the publishers eventually caught on and fixed the design fail in the subsequent editions using different colors and typefaces.

6. Cursive: the designer’s natural predator —

Via Belle Chic.

The ambiguity behind cursive writing has long been the nemesis of well-meaning designers, but few have suffered from its evil snares quite like designer Belle Chic, whose girly-cute handbag accidentally transformed into a piece of neo-nazi propaganda.

Given that (1.) the cursive G is a bit too high, plus (2.) a bit too close to the L, and that (3.) the cross of the second T is overshadowed by the bold white letters above, “glitter” is not the obvious interpretation of this sparkling lettering. It’s surprising that no one noticed this mistake until after its release; any one of those typographical errors would have signaled red flags to a seasoned designer.

Luckily, Belle Chic apologized profusely for their design fail and corrected all three typography errors without throwing out the design.

Via Belle Chic.

7. Catch secondary meanings —

Via Thomson Reuters.

Graphic designers need to be part proofreader. They have to double-check to ensure their designs don’t have any problematic secondary meanings.

That was the case with mass media conglomerate Thomson Reuters. Inadvertently, their design looks like a Venn diagram showing just how little they value trust, partnership, innovation and performance.

In all likelihood, the design was never meant to look like a Venn diagram—rather, just a playful graphic using shapes and colors. However, one tiny move and now a huge, expensive advertising campaign leaves them with egg on their face. Better to go with a designer that can catch these mistakes in the early design stages.

8. Even when you’re right, you’re wrong —

This one’s pretty tricky. When the Ready Player One poster first came out, it was criticized for the character’s freakishly long leg. And rightfully so—just look at it.

At first people thought the image was doctored, but it turns out that it’s actually accurate! Twitter fan Captain Disillusion dissected the image and proved that the leg is completely proportional to the rest of his body; it just looks long because of the awkward angle and the pose. The image is perfectly normal—it’s the human eye that’s weird.

Via Captain Disillusion.

Which brings up a good point about graphic design: a designer’s job is to make sure everything looks fine more than actually being fine. In a field based on perception, how people perceive the work is more important than factual accuracy, which comes into conflict more than you’d think with the visual arts.

The difference between applause and faux pas —

Not to use scare tactics, but one silly design fail could ruin your entire brand reputation. And we’d wager all of the design mistakes above were made by folks who overestimated their design skills. That’s why these things are best left to the professionals.

True design talent lies in understanding the risks well enough to tiptoe around them. The skillset of a good designer includes all the basics like kerning, color theory, typography dos and don’ts, an encyclopedic knowledge of fonts and an eye for avoiding common pitfalls. Now that you’ve seen some epic design fails, you’ll know what to look out for—and hiring a great designer is your ticket to ensuring everyone talks about your next campaign for the right reasons.

There's a surefire way to never be mentioned in a list of design fails...

Find yourself a great designer!

They're right here

The post Epic design fails: laughing and learning from the best worst graphic designs appeared first on 99designs.

via 99designs https://99designs.co.uk/blog/tips-en-gb/graphic-design-fails/

[myongfisher]

Epic design fails: laughing and learning from the best worst graphic designs

Nobody’s perfect. We all make mistakes. And design is full of tiny pitfalls that are easy to miss. Thankfully, designers usually learn from their early failures and ultimately become better for it. In that sense, design fails aren’t all that bad—for the most part.

But every now and then, you get something like this poor racoon stranded at sea …

…or this…

…or this…

… or even this.

Below, we look at eight laughable design fails and the valuable lessons those designers could have learned to keep their jobs.

1. Location, location, location —

Via Where Magazine.

Via Where Magazine.

This copy of Where magazine—that’s “Where” with two Es—shows us just how important layout and composition are in graphic design. The photographer did his or her job, but what about the cover designer? That poor woman looks so happy after a fruitful shopping trip, it’s a shame she has to be slandered by a design fail.

For starters, this problem could have been avoided by positioning the photo lower so that the E doesn’t look like an O. That seems like an easy cropping choice to make and it’s not like the reader would miss seeing the bottom of the third box. On top of that, the title could be superimposed over the model’s head, as long as it didn’t cover too much of her face.

As if this weren’t bad enough, the magazine made the same exact mistake a few months later! Perhaps they should consider a name change.

2. The importance of kerning —

Do you know what “kerning” is? Neither did the package designers behind this box of holiday lights.

Kerning is the design term for using the spacing between letters to make text more readable. The application of kerning can get pretty technical, with precise measurements, variations for different letters and sometimes even exact pixel guidelines. That’s why it’s a field that designers need to understand to avoid these kinds of mistakes.

Via The Wig and Pen Truro.

However, most non-designers don’t even know such a field exists. And that’s why they run into problems like those faced by England’s famed Wig & Pen.

3. Brea king words —

Via H&H Reeds Printers.

App rentals? Ice ships? Rent ice?

Breaking up words that shouldn’t be broken up is a classic design fail, but breaking up one big word four times into pieces that are incidentally their own words, that’s epic. What makes this ad even worse (and kind of sad) is not only that they’re trying to entice people to work with them, but they’re also a company that specializes in graphic design.

Yet we don’t want to dissuade designers against the technique entirely—when done well, it’s actually quite effective:

How to do it right. Logo design by Milos Zdrale.

How to do it right. Logo design by Bella” for Safari Partners.

But when using it, exercise caution. Whenever possible avoid creating real words with kerning and keep your message simple. The shorter the sentiment, the easier it will be for the viewer to piece it together—literally.

4. The “art” of communication —

A large part of graphic design is about communicating visually: it’s the designer’s job to make a message easy to understand. But that goes both ways and poor design choices can complicate an otherwise straightforward message.

You buy 3 and get 2 free or you buy 2 and get 1 free. It shouldn’t take the reader five or six read throughs to arrive at this conclusion. But the poor layout of the message—not to mention the confusing asterisks—makes this ad repel customers rather than draw them into the store.

For one thing, the setup looks like an equation, and no one wants to do math when they don’t have to. But shrinking down the second part makes it seem like it’s a clarification of the first message, not a separate sales concept. While this is an honest mistake, these little nuances are something experienced designers instinctively know to sidestep.

5. Say what you mean —

Via Zebra Publishing.

I mean, this may not be her best work, but wishing death upon her is a bit much.

Via Zebra Publishing.

Designers aren’t only in charge of how things look, they also need to watch out for contextual mistakes. When it comes to book cover design, that means combining the title and author name in a way that doesn’t have an unintended meaning. The way this book cover is set up, with the title and author name in the same color and font—and the name above the title—was an easily avoidable mistake.

In this case, the publishers eventually caught on and fixed the design fail in the subsequent editions using different colors and typefaces.

6. Cursive: the designer’s natural predator —

Via Belle Chic.

The ambiguity behind cursive writing has long been the nemesis of well-meaning designers, but few have suffered from its evil snares quite like designer Belle Chic, whose girly-cute handbag accidentally transformed into a piece of neo-nazi propaganda.

Given that (1.) the cursive G is a bit too high, plus (2.) a bit too close to the L, and that (3.) the cross of the second T is overshadowed by the bold white letters above, “glitter” is not the obvious interpretation of this sparkling lettering. It’s surprising that no one noticed this mistake until after its release; any one of those typographical errors would have signaled red flags to a seasoned designer.

Luckily, Belle Chic apologized profusely for their design fail and corrected all three typography errors without throwing out the design.

Via Belle Chic.

7. Catch secondary meanings —

Via Thomson Reuters.

Graphic designers need to be part proofreader. They have to double-check to ensure their designs don’t have any problematic secondary meanings.

That was the case with mass media conglomerate Thomson Reuters. Inadvertently, their design looks like a Venn diagram showing just how little they value trust, partnership, innovation and performance.

In all likelihood, the design was never meant to look like a Venn diagram—rather, just a playful graphic using shapes and colors. However, one tiny move and now a huge, expensive advertising campaign leaves them with egg on their face. Better to go with a designer that can catch these mistakes in the early design stages.

8. Even when you’re right, you’re wrong —

This one’s pretty tricky. When the Ready Player One poster first came out, it was criticized for the character’s freakishly long leg. And rightfully so—just look at it.

At first people thought the image was doctored, but it turns out that it’s actually accurate! Twitter fan Captain Disillusion dissected the image and proved that the leg is completely proportional to the rest of his body; it just looks long because of the awkward angle and the pose. The image is perfectly normal—it’s the human eye that’s weird.

Via Captain Disillusion.

Which brings up a good point about graphic design: a designer’s job is to make sure everything looks fine more than actually being fine. In a field based on perception, how people perceive the work is more important than factual accuracy, which comes into conflict more than you’d think with the visual arts.

The difference between applause and faux pas —

Not to use scare tactics, but one silly design fail could ruin your entire brand reputation. And we’d wager all of the design mistakes above were made by folks who overestimated their design skills. That’s why these things are best left to the professionals.

True design talent lies in understanding the risks well enough to tiptoe around them. The skillset of a good designer includes all the basics like kerning, color theory, typography dos and don’ts, an encyclopedic knowledge of fonts and an eye for avoiding common pitfalls. Now that you’ve seen some epic design fails, you’ll know what to look out for—and hiring a great designer is your ticket to ensuring everyone talks about your next campaign for the right reasons.

There’s a surefire way to never be mentioned in a list of design fails…

Find yourself a great designer!

They’re right here

The post Epic design fails: laughing and learning from the best worst graphic designs appeared first on 99designs.

Epic design fails: laughing and learning from the best worst graphic designs published first on https://www.lilpackaging.com/