#in the sort of context where it's being used to inform people rather than something that's more flashy like a blinkie that might be seen

[scungledfiles]

Would you be willing to do a blinkie/userbox for a user who's special interest is socially unconventional? Like "this users special interest's are paraphilia's and types of abuse."?

I understand if not though- figured I'd ask before asking

blinkies might be a bit more difficult bc there is a text limit and also i don't wanna make stuff related to paraphillias/abuse that is like prideful or promotive of it, but this userbox is fine bc it's expressing the special interest in it.

[meraki-yao]

RWRB Movie Analysis: The Placement of Alex's Speech

Alright I’m really fucking sick of people complaining about the placement of the speech. (I swear, I write half of these essays out of irritation. But I’m happy while doing it so it all checks out)

Two things.

Regarding Henry’s consent

Use context clues people. Henry says, “Your speech was beautiful. Made me very proud to be your boyfriend.” It’s clear that Henry approves of the speech.

Again, what can be shown explicitly is restricted by the format. The point of Henry’s montages during the speech is to show how trapped and helpless he is in the situation. (for more, I wrote about it here.) The scenes need to keep that atmosphere/feeling of isolation and pain. If let’s say, we have a scene where the prime minister asks Henry about admitting and coming out, it would take away the consistent feeling of Henry’s pain. Cinematically, it won’t work. But that doesn’t mean in universe, it didn’t happen.

Also, Alex fucking loves Henry with every inch of his soul. He’s willing to fight for them, but he’s also willing to be patient for him. After getting his feelings sorted out and knowing with 100% clarity that he’s in love with Henry, he is never, ever going to do something that so obviously would hurt Henry. He would rather get hurt himself than hurt Henry. (Corresponding Book Quote: “Alex wants to go to war for this man, wants to get his hands on everything and everyone that ever hurt him.”) He wouldn’t make the speech without knowing Henry is okay with it. He just wouldn’t, that would straight up be out of character. So the fact that he did, means one way or another, he has Henry’s consent. And Henry later approving the speech in the piano scene, proves that. (It’s completely possible that the script itself meant to explain it this way, but if at any point they might have explicitly discussed coming out, my guess would be the Kensington breakfast scene, Prime, I’m coming for your hard drives—)

Regarding the placement of speech

There are two reasons for this.

One irl reason, is again, the format of the medium, and movie story telling. You want the tension to continuously build, increase and move upwards, then get a big but concrete resolution, and then this part is over. Having the speech as a conclusion after the balcony wave will not feel as well resolved as directly having the speech, then ending this part of the story with the big, big protest and balcony wave.  

But there’s a diegetic/ in universe reason as well.  

A lot of people, especially those who complain that Movie Alex is a himbo (also spite writing an essay on that, WIP, stay tuned), forget that Alex is a budding politician, and in fact, is a damn good one.

He, despite being kind of confused about his sexuality (read this essay for more), figures out Miguel’s flirting is mostly trying to get his statements for his articles, and in a fairly polite and classy way, Alex declines. (The state dinner slip was because he was way too entranced by Henry) He was a speaker at the DNC. His Texas campaign ultimately won Ellen the election.

When is comes to these things, he knows what he’s doing, and he’s good at what he does.

Making the speech before the crown can make a statement, was a strategic move.

Henry told Alex about his grandfather’s stance on this during the Paris date. He also told, well, yelled at Alex about the pressures he has from the crown during the Kensington confrontation. Alex knows the King will disapprove of their relationship and attempt to shove Henry into the closet.

So he has to be the one to control the narrative. He needs people to listen to, and believe in his, or rather, their side of the story.

And here’s a bit about human psychology. When receiving a new piece of information, our first impression and subsequent judgement of said information tends to be persistent. If we are provided with a second piece of contradicting information, we will tend to treat the second piece with much more criticism and suspicion. The mindset would be “prove to me the first one is wrong” instead of “Which one of these is right”.

Therefore, for Alex to get more people on his side, he must speak first.

(I almost imagine this is the reason the White House blocked communication with the palace. That bugged me for a while, until I thought, if the White House doesn’t block communication and receive a demand from the palace, they aren’t really on grounds to refuse it without a diplomatic mess. It’s the equivalent of avoiding talking to someone you don’t want to approach with the excuse “Oh my phone was off sorry”)

Imagine it. If the crown does what the King originally proposed and claims all the emails are fabrications and denies that Henry is gay and in a relationship with Alex, then Alex’s speech will be viewed through tinted glasses of “this is a fabrication, this is a lie” and it will take much more persuading for people to believe in Alex, because their first judgement of the issue, would be the crown’s lie of a narrative.

But by making the speech first, people’s first judgement of the issue, would be Alex’s explanation, of it being an invasion of privacy, and of it being true. Even if the crown denies it, with the first judgement being Alex’s narrative, it would make it much easier to see through the lie, because in people’s head, they already assumed that Alex is telling the truth.

By making the speech first, Alex has won both himself and Henry, the pen to write history.

Making the speech first is in no way Alex disrespecting Henry.

By playing politics and strategy, Alex is protecting Henry in the most familiar way he knows.

[autisticaradiamegido]

day 86

do any of yall ever have like. an Evil infodump? where instead of endlessly word vomiting about a thing you love and are very informed about, there is a thing you are equally well-informed about but hate with a passion that you cannot hold back in conversation?

i do :')

(I'll put it under the cut for the curious because I think it's important and i cannot be stopped but also i'm not kidding the facts are infuriating)

SO. "Homeopathic" is often interpreted as sort of a vague synonym for "natural," or "organic," but it's actually related to a system of alternative medicine that means something Very Specific.

There are two main principles behind the practice of Homeopathy.

"Like cures like." This is the idea that, for example, if you have a headache, taking a veeeery small amount of a substance that is known to CAUSE headaches will cure that symptom. I understand where people fall into this flawed idea, as it sounds very similar to the principles behind, say, vaccines, or antivenom. But it isn't universally applicable in this way. An herb isn't a virus. But even if it was, a Homeopathic preparation of that herb would not have any effect on the body because of the second principle.

"Water has memory." This is the idea that water is able to "remember" any substance that it has had contact with. This is also not true. Molecules don't really have any way to store information like that, and even if they did, well... What would that information do inside our bodies? Would our cells have any way to interpret and process that information? What would they do with it? It's all rather nebulous and it seems like more of a spiritual claim than a scientific one. Which is fine, but is not medicine.

So, with these principles in mind, the process of creating a "Homeopathic Preparation of [insert substance here]" goes a little something like this: You take a dropper and put one drop of your active substance in a container with a hundred drops of water. You then take a drop of that mixture, and put it in another container with another hundred drops of water. You continue this dilution process until there is, quite literally, a near-zero percent chance that your mixture contains even a single molecule of your original active substance (depending on the level of dilution believed to be best for the substance in question. Typically, a higher dilution is considered more potent.) So it is, by this point, literally just a vial of water.

This vial of water is what is then sold as a "Homeopathic preparation of [substance]." OR that water is used to compound a batch of sugar pills, or gel capsules, or tablets, whatever format is being offered. Regardless, the composition of the tincture is literally just water and ~*vibes*~.

And they sell these vials of expensive vibe water! At!!!

THE PHARMACY!!! WITH LIKE THE IBUPROFEN AND ALL THE OTHER REAL MEDICINES!!! AND NO BIG WARNING LABELS THAT SAY, "THIS CONTAINS NO ACTIVE INGREDIENTS AND IS BASED ON VIBES ALONE," OR ANYTHING LIKE THAT!!

In fact! In the US they are able to advertise that they have been FDA approved! (FDA approval of dietary supplements is not the same as FDA approval of actual medications. In the context of supplements, approval just means they've proved it won't just kill you straight up, and thus you're allowed to sell it.) And, well. It certainly won't kill you! In fact they often also advertise things like, "It's natural!" and "No harmful side effects!" and "No risk of overdose!" and it's all technically true! BECAUSE IT'S JUST WATER! LIKE I CAN'T STRESS ENOUGH HOW IT'S LITERALLY JUST WATER!!!

Anyway. Please keep this in mind the next time you are offered a homeopathic remedy, or see one advertised in the store, or hear your antivaxxer auntie bragging about the fact that her kids all got a "homeopathic" alternative to their MMR shots.

IT'S! JUST! VIBE WATER!!!!

[sqwilliam]

Four Out Of Five:

A Basis for Self Discovery

Okay so on twt people were talking about the line “hockey cokey with the opposite sex/the things you try to forget” and why it represents queer themes thus it sent me down a rabbit hole where I took a look at the song (and touches of others from the album) as a whole through this lense and I was told to share it here lol so below is my analysis of the songs queer coding I came up withon the fly.

The information action ratio is a term from the book Amusing Ourselves to Death (which TBHC is written around). It is this idea that information and action are in a ratio setting, it’s the parallel between what you’re being told via information verses your actions that contradict the information. Putting into the context to the song its this idea that the information being told isn’t factual to the actions that alex has experienced which is contradicting the information being told (information and social media = misleading)

In the song he talks a lot about clubs/going to clubs/ the “hokey cokey with the opposite sex the things you try and forget” these analogy’s of trying to forget ones queerness etc. the information action ratio is recalling information he has seen and heard online about gay culture, people, homophobia being the charge of it all verse him going to these clubs/gay club which we ALL know he has been to many times and being more involved in that culture and realising the ACTION of being apart of that is different to what he has learned and been told (the information).

The line “four stars out of five that’s unheard of” is this idea that the media’s outlet is now changing, four out of five for anything related to this topic is really unheard of as lgbtq+ is only now becoming more accepted in the media, getting four stars out of five in a context like this is rare.

“it’s all getting gentrified cute new places keep on popping up” its this idea that the media is blasting these places and things that were supposed to be safe spaces because you know “take it easy for a little while come and stay with us” and in this case tranquillity base is supposed to be one of these safe places.

You could even take “Mr bridge and tunnel on the starlight express” as an analogy for queerness, in Mr bridge and tunnel is a phrase used towards new Yorkers as they tend to walk everywhere compared to other cities in America which are car oriented. Associated with tunnels and bridges in this phrase you think of more gangster looking men, masculine men dangerous hanging out in tunnels/ under bridges, (Mr bridge and tunnel) and this idea that they’re going on the starlight express is contradictory to the INFORMATION that you have been told about these people. They are travelling to find themselves on the starlight express, it’s a juxtaposition between these masculine gruff men travelling via the starlight express to go to a place that is a tranquil base for them, they’re going from what the information that has been stated to the ACTION that is going and expressing themselves.

It goes from talking about the information action ratio being something you can rely on to being a place you used to go (“the information action ratio is the place to go!”, this idea that “Alex” is a guy who used to go to the media outlet to get information and then learns his actions have a better more face value and realistic outlook on what the world is really like rather than what the media says its like.

The media associates queer people with horrible events as well “you could meet someone you like during a meteor strike its THAT easy.” The information the media persues is this horrible sort of like “if you do this, look at the consequences” the start of the song he projects it in that way making this seem like a bad thing and by the end of the song its twisted that way to be like “you shouldn’t rely on the information you should rely on the action of the ratio” you should be action based not information based. The whole lunar expressed and the taqueria at the start is seen as a negative but by the end its seen as a positive, hes flipping the information from a negative to a positive through his action.

When looking at the music video there are two different versions of “Alex” in them, theres bearded alex (him), and clean cut Bronx new York style look dressed stereotype “alex,”(mark) like with mr bridge and tunnel theres two versions the real alex and the stereotype alex which is the information AND the action, the two versions of him have physically made himself the information action ratio. Theres mark and theres alex, hes the personification of the information action ratio, the INFORMATION = clean shaven clean cut new yorker stereotype Mark, versus ACTION = beard alex (surrounded by information but doesn’t believe in it)

This has personified the information action ratio through versions of himself throughout his life, Mark, which resembles 2014 self, taken two legitimate versions of himself one that listens to the information and one that listens to the action.

“the old grey whistle test” is a phrase used in the early forms of pressing records/vinyl, a thing used in new York in record studios where they would bring older men in suits in to deem if music was successful or not. If these old men were whistling the tune after they left it was deemed a success. In the context of the song they are putting the reliance of success and what is good, moral and correct in the hands of old white males.

It was also a tv show in the 80s where artists would come on and perform music, but they didn’t have the technology to broadcast the live footage of the actual artists playing o they would have people edit footage over the top of it to portray a certain feeling and mood over the top of songs that weren’t really played, they would edit the songs in a way to be what they wanted, the songs are edited to be completely different so that it would fit the media and people’s ideas of what it should be on TV. (This is something Alex has faced during AM, editing of the truth and/or the music to fit American television). They brought this show back for an anniversary special in 2018 (when TBHC was written and released). The show was literally a placed used for artists that didn’t chart for them to get seen, but they were seen in a way that wasn’t how the artists wanted, losing integrity and the original vision.

Putting that into a context with Alex, when they broke through in America they were portrayed in a different way than he always had been in the UK, everything was different in the peak of his career which made him into the version of what the media and producers wanted rather than he wanted and intended with the album. This lyric is him projecting where he had been seen through the old grey whistle test which turned him and the album into something it never intended to be, which he then conformed to, pushing this persona forced upon him, but then going back to himself after realising the ACTION is better than the INFORMATION.

AM = Information, TBHC is the action. He’s saying he’s no longer the information of what people expect and being the action of what he wants to be. These albums are the information action ratio, which is also seen through the album sales where TBHC tanks as the information always overtakes the action in the ratio, there is always more information than action.

If you look at the song Tranquillity Base, this is the action whilst four out of five is the information. The song is so different from what 4/5 was, it’s more open and expressive than five out of five which is more melancholic, it talks about people getting dressed up in colourful clothing and jesus is in a day spa it’s a completely different vibe, in the track list TBHC comes BEFORE four out of five, in alexs mind the action overtakes the information, so in alexs mind in his life NOW the action is OVERTAKING the information which had not happened previously. He is now believing the action over the information.

He literally says in the song that he “ponders all of the questions” hes pondering the information being told in the media yada yada yada, they all interconnect and hes heavily said that the album as a whole needs to be analysed TOGETHER as a whole, its this idea that he is slowly morphing himself into believing and taking his actions and life as a whole to create his own view on information rather believing all information that’s given to him from a third party and adhering to what they expect.

“Tranquility base mark speaking may I take your call,” it comes into place right after talking about how he’s questioning things, hes beginning to question what hes being told only for the mark character to enter making himself known saying “let me direct your call to where *I* want it to be” the information part still taking over which he is now fighting against.

He says that he “spent a whole generation trying to figure things out” and immediately Mark comes back again to DIRECT the call away from that line of thinking, each time alex goes to realise that the actions should be over the information mark enters to redirect that line of thinking. He is fighting off himself in a sense. The idea that “technological advances getting him in the mood” is both good and bad, It’s opened his eyes to things he previously wouldn’t have considered but also made him REGRESS his ideas as well.

He goes in to talk about “pull me in on a crisp eve” going more into this hot and heavy intimate section of this song only to then be INTERRUPTED by Mark again, redirecting this call. He’s opening himself up to a more realistic view of what he wants only to be snapped back again by media outlets and internalized hatred for things, he’s trying to get past it but still fighting with what is publicly known to be wrong

The entire album as a whole, again he wants you to collectively analyse it as a whole which hes said. If you look at TBHC (album) as a whole it starts information heavy with Star Treatment and being given the star treatment by conforming to the media and what they want him to be and how he is now this person he is not only to then be more contemplative of his existence (Batphone, The Ultracheese) is a complete contrast in information from star treatment versus ultracheese… its this idea that hes searching for himself and trying to outbalance the information action ratio within himself, hes found himself and lost a lot on the way.

If you go One Point Perspective it’s this idea that everyone’s looking at him and has an idea of what he should be, and then u go into Science Fiction where he says in the opening line that “religious iconography gives him the creeps” its opened his eyes and this religious outlet of how things are dominated in the media from religion scares him in a sense and then you get into She Looks Like Fun, this internalized him of that he has this nagging voice in the background telling him to do things as hes living his life, theres still this nagging voice telling him to fall back into line and conform to what people expect of him.

Monster truck front flip as well, “you push the button we’ll do the rest” = you make the music, we’ll (the media) present it into the world in the version that we want to show to make you successful. He says lines of how theres “things I cant explain and hope I never have to” because of how things are he cant express the way he wants to be due to the overseeing force (the media) controlling him in a way.

“I’ve got a laser guiding my love that I can not unjust” in the sense that someone is controlling him, unable to express his love as hes got a target on his back (higher ups), he loved making these albums but the vision wasn’t a heared to and he was forced into performing these characters for the media.

“Do you celebrate your dark side then wish you never left the house” is also him expressing himself and then regretting it.

This is the craziest one yet but Alex likes to be detailed with album organization so this was likely also intentional, there’s 11 tracks on the album, a number often associated with trusting your intuition, embarking on a new path and a new way of living and trusting your own guidance, seeking a divine path within yourself. This is the biggest stretch but it’s a funny thing to add

Please don’t take this as me trying to say “aha Alex was clearly speaking about this” I just found it interesting how you can interpret it’s themes in this way that coherently tell a story that many LGBT people can relate to.

[umbrvx]

i like ur art. its great and interesting!! i really like your artstyle and i really like the way u draw hsy, yjh, and kdj. you captured them so well in terms of vibes/character. also i was wondering do u have any advice to improve on drawing anatomy/poses/faces?

wahh thank you so much...!! i feel like im still trying to figure them out in a lot of ways but i do really like ironing out my visual interpretations of them so im really happy to hear if people like what im coming up with

also anon you super activated the part of my brain that cant help but yap about art theory... i spent some time writing as many tips as i could think of. unfortunately i dont think i have the time currently to do a fully illustrated guide, but ill still try to include some visual examples:

[incoming wall of text lol]

ANATOMY:

to preface i think that like 100% of the time you should reference a real life photo for anatomy rather than other artwork or drawn references. the best way to learn the body is by… well, actually looking at the body! but also artwork is informed by a person's own artistic ability/stylization choices/sense of idealism, so while looking at art can help give you an idea on how to break down forms, i think you would be best served observing real life references. i labor on this point because i do think that having over relied on drawn reference material and avoiding photographic references on the basis of not being interested on realism hindered me as a largely self-taught artist as a kid, so i want to encourage live or photographic reference since anatomy is one of the foundations from which everything else is built on. that being the case, all of my doodles i'm doing for this are going to be for the sake of example rather than to strictly say how you should or should not be drawing something

-> when you are doing a study of a photo, just try copying it as best as you can. pay close attention to the natural lines and shapes of the body -- the S-curve shape of the leg, the triangular shape of the forearm, the trapezoid shape of hips/thighs when they sit, and so on. note where the body folds or squishes or pulls; how mass will shift to accommodate a certain position. if a form is hard to visualize, focus on the negative space and carve that out, rather than strictly drawing the positive space.

don't expect to get it perfect the first time. in fact, iterate on it multiple times to build understanding. try doing it to a timer of 15, then 10, then 5 minutes. doing this will force you to have to prioritize the most important shapes. you can help reinforce this by using a thicker brush or a brush with no pen pressure (no joke ms paint works great for this) to force you to be loose and not become preoccupied with details.

-> pinterest is a great resource for finding and compiling photo reference material

-> organic shapes are curved, so embracing/emphasizing that (particularly for the extremities) can help make your drawings look more natural or fluid

POSES: -> it all begins & ends with contrapposto… you've probably heard of the line of action, which is related. if you're offsetting the shoulders & hips, it: makes poses more natural, more dynamic, and helps the pose sort of "draw itself" -- the legs will follow the direction of the hips, and you can use the arms to reinforce the angles

-> context is key. don't ask: what pose should i draw? instead ask: what do i want this character to convey? what does happiness, anger, sadness, and so forth look on this particular character? how do they express that? consider these drawings: these are both ostensibly the same pose, but look at how changing just the shape of the spine recontextualizes it.

for more on pose design i recommend watching Tracer & Pose Design 101 - The Animation of Overwatch by New Frame Plus (i promise this is a genuinely super informative video).

to expand on this, in general, all of the components of a piece (background, composition, pose, etc.) are best considered in conjunction rather than separately. it is difficult to choose a pose and then choose a background because they are missing the context that would make a piece cohesive. when you are planning a drawing, try to begin with your general concept/idea/prompt and then do several thumbnails -- small and quick doodles that should take no longer than 5 minutes each -- developing it: you may find that the pose and bg will naturally fall into place.

-> silhouette: the degree to which you need to push this varies by style but generally speaking the pose needs to be readable; i.e. instantly recognizable. try to keep important elements of the gesture outside of the silhouette. for example, if the character is pointing, keep that arm out of the interior of the body. the same pose can be more or less readable or dynamic depending on where the character is pointed in relation to the viewer

-> exaggeration!! goes along with the previous point. push the pose as much as you can (and what makes sense for your style) to communicate your pose as clearly and as intensely as possible.

FACES: -> i highly recommend the app Handy Art Reference Tool by Belief Engine for all things related to drawing hands/heads/feet. its on both android and ios. it isn't free -- it costs around $3 -- but that is seriously such a small price to pay for the amount of utility you get out of it: the hands models are fully poseable (there's also pose presets), you can rotate the head models however you want, and there is 3-point customizable lighting. it is really helpful for getting those super tricky and hyperspecific head angles that you just can't find a real life reference for. that being said given that there's only a few different head model variants, bear in mind how differences in features can affect what exactly a face will look like in those angles.

-> i still recommend doing studies of real people. as with anything else, learning generalized proportions is important, even if you are going to later on bend or break this depending on style

-> as for my own approach... it kind of depends on the style i'm doing at that particular time. for my paintings (what id consider my main style) i approach a character with a few real-world features in mind and then apply them to the best of my ability. it usually will take a few iterations to land on an interpretation i really like as i try out different things. a lot of the face also gets developed during rendering rather than through my initial sketch too, as i adjust for lighting and correct proportions on the fly

(look how much this image changes between sketch and render lol)

if i were to recommend anything, i think it would be to nail down your most distinct features first -- the ones that will make your character's face recognizable, and could apply regardless of art style. in my case with kim dokja, i knew when i first started drawing him that i wanted to give him a longer face and down-turned eyes. when i decided to do the disco elysium inspired set, in which i was breaking out of my comfort zone by letting go of any idealizations focusing on conveying characterization/making them feel "real", i landed on some more specific traits (defined lower lids/perpetually tired eyes/eyebags(?) the crease there idk how to describe it) which i continue to try to evoke even if im drawing something much more cartoony

(pictured are my first kdj -> disco elysium style -> my post de-style kdj)

as a side note, this very same process changed yjh much more dramatically

(^ that first guy is mad someone else)

those handful of key features will be the thing that you can then take into a simpler style and simplify or exaggerate to whatever degree suits you. you can also play with shape theory (square = sturdy/solid, circle = natural/smooth/welcoming, triangle = energetic/dangerous). shape theory doesn't necessarily need to be so rigid -- you can combine shapes as you please to convey whatever vibe you're going for -- so please think of it as a tool that may help rather than a rigid law you must abide by.

-> expressions: exaggerate them. thats kind of it!! make it big!!! you wanna be able to really feel those emotions. the principles of squash & stretch help here: think of how the muscles move when you, say, open the eyes or mouth really big. as one side of the face stretches open, the other side squashes to accommodate it

even without changing the position of the jaw here, moving the nose and scrunching the eyes will sell the expression

you can also play with squash/stretch to break proportions to sell a feeling more

since expressions are just, well, poses for the face, everything else for poses applies here (and facial expressions & pose should also be considered in tandem). while the term contrapposto itself just refers to the offset of the shoulders & hips, the similar principle of asymmetry also carries here as that will help make the expression a bit more dynamic.

and i think... that's it!! all i can think of at least. i hope it helps anon!!!

[bestworstcase]

Okay- Salem throwing in during the Great War especially with Grimm would belatedly justify that card game from Volume 2 because of how it was over control of Remnant besides as an in show ad. Especially with the whole bit of the Nevermore card.

Salem as supporter of revolutionaries fighting for their freedom... One that fits extremely well. Two it puts additional layers to Cinder approaching the White Fang and also just ... Cinder being taken in.

I also would find such a reveal in show to likely be extremely hilarious as the implications hit the audience and cast.

my god i wrote that entire fucking post without remembering the great war Board Game existed

you’re right though, it would be a sly piece of foreshadowing if that’s the intention, esp bc the nevermore bit is between ruby (playing atlas) and yang (playing mistral) and a dice roll which of their forces it attacks.

in terms of the worldbuilding that game has always kind of interested me for what it says about how grimm are viewed in military contexts by the general public; qrow in WOR suggests that grimm on the battlefield was an automatic ceasefire until they were driven off again, but also that “grimm came in droves” while ozma laid waste to his enemies with the sword. and then there’s this grimm card in a war game where the mechanic is “flip a coin to see whose soldiers get mauled”—implying that opportunistic “let the grimm attack your enemies” tactics are not unheard of.

and… then. there’s arrowfell. the grimm lures the antagonists use were developed by the atlesian military, and… the only practical use case for a device that summons swarms of grimm is to weaponize grimm against human targets, ideally a safe distance away from your own forces. like, they’re grimm bombs. and these were developed post-war! in a time of peace! the great powers during the tense period before the great war must have been thinking about how to point the grimm at their enemies, too.

but unless you’re salem, or have salem on your side, weaponizing the grimm will always be a double-edged sword—as yang says, that’s just a risk you have to be willing to take.

anyway yeah if i’m right, the reveal would be so punchy. and i do for sure think were due for some sort of revelation about the great war—it’s been set up and referenced over and over, and they made a deliberate choice to convey this information through a heavily biased perspective, and the great war ended in vacuo, and everything the narrative is building up to the last stand in vacuo. something about history coming due, and the truth coming out.

it’s also be a neat counterpoint to the Team Oz narrative, which is very black-and-white (mantle and mistral were the bad guys, vale and vacuo were the good guys, don’t ask too many questions about valean expansion into the likeliest origin point for those desperate crazy founders of mantle or vale’s involvement in the complete destruction of its next-door neighbor centuries ago or the part where ozma magic nuked everyone so hard that allies and enemies alike bent the knee.) whereas the truth seems to be more complicated with vale also having imperial ambitions prior to ozma assuming the throne, and then at best prioritizing the status quo.

an interesting possibility that i think about sometimes is that ozma may have been the one to withdraw vale from vacuo; less out of anti-imperialist principle than because the vacuan people were increasingly unhappy with valean rule and he recognized that the only way to avoid a war for independence in the long term would be to give vacuo independence first. and then mistral swooped in like a vulture because ozma neglected to do anything but formally recognize vacuan sovereignty, rather than make reparations and provide support needed to allow vacuo to emerge from centuries of valean occupation as a functional country—the same conflict-avoidant, shortsighted approach on display in his choice to “share the land” with mistrali colonists in eastern vale.

[dominicdelagol2]

Planning to try out Auctober again this October! Feel free to join in and draw for each prompt! List of prompts and their context below:

1: Red Instead - Instead of the blue puzzle piece as displayed by Autism $peaks, we light it up red instead!

2: Special Interests - Anything you love the most in your life!

3: Music - Music is always nice to listen to, especially video game music!

4: Comfort Food - Food is yummy. Fast food is even yummier because why wouldn't it be?

5: Stim / Verbal Stims - Stims include making mouth noises and waving your arms back and forth for comfort!

6: Stim Toys - Fidget cubes, spinners, squeezable toys, etc. -- they can be fun to use!

7: Sensory Euphoria - Some things can make you most happy, whether it's eating chicken with queso dip, seeing a light-filed city during night time, store candles with a good food-like smell, you name it!

8: Hyperfixation - One particular thing you're focused on so much! It can be the periodic table, a video game series, painting, anything you can think of!

9: Info Dumping - Wanna know what one thing is? Then you'll wanna be ready for a detailed explanation going at least 200-pages long!

10: Neurotypical Expectations - Neurotypicals expect an awful lot from autistic people. For all we know, some random guy might expect you to know how to build an aircraft carrier! Of course, that's just me haha

11: Jobs...? Where? - Obviously, there are TONS of open jobs available, but whatever jobs ARE open, workers and its managers expect you to work, and work, and work, and work, and work, and work...without considering your overall health at all, nor giving you a long-enough break to help you catch your breath physically and mentally.

12: The Outside World - Outside is scary. No matter how safe you are, there's a tiny chance something bad or worse will happen. Society can even expect you to be "normal".

13: Social Anxiety - It's hard enough making friends, let alone be an extrovert. Chances are, one could have sociophobia!

14: Self-Advocacy - Nothing about us without us! Seriously, neurotypical adults have talked about autism and didn't include autistics in the conversation. (got that from one of my Auctober 2023 drawings)

15: Self-Care - Self-care is important! Make sure to brush your teeth, eat and drink healthy, exercise and whatnot!

16: LGBTQIA+ - Autistic people are more likely to be LGBTQIA+!

17: Rainbow Infinity - Rainbows are a whole spectrum of colors! Same with the autistic spectrum--all sorts of different experiences!

18: Au-DHD - ADHD, but "A" is replaced with "Au" as in aurum, which is Gold in Latin. ADHD can mean one is hyperactive!

19: Too Much Energy - The energy builds up too fast and you just have to exercise to tone it down! Of course, the energy could vary, sometimes being suddenly energetic when you just need to sleep.

20: Out-of-Nowhere Info/Fact - Say you're doing a simple job like vacuuming. All you have to do is move the vacuum on the floor as you hold the handle, thus cleaning the floor. Simple, yes? Well, surprise -- some guy sucker punches you with random information such as "Hey buddy! Vacuums use more electricity when you turn the vacuum on and off rather than letting it stay on!" (I've actually been told that one time, and the info sounding unconfirmed to me, it just left me in a long mental stasis of confusion) Like, when did anyone ask for a detailed fact about something that's SUPPOSED TO BE SIMPLE? I don't have time to comprehend an entire page of info, I just like to keep things SIMPLE as you neurotypicals tell me to my face.

21: School Experience - Experience can include elementary school, middle school, high school, college -- You can explain a particular event or two during any of these time periods!

22: Routine - A little something every day or now and then to stay consistent! Daily tasks can included 3 meals a day, staying productive or such!

23: Unmasking - Unmasking is not easy. Defending yourself from the unpredictable world, trying to blend in with society -- it's exhausting! Let the autistic community just be what they wish to be already.

24: Autistic Viewpoint - How do you view the world as an autistic?

25: America (Derogatory) - This one might not need an introduction -- America, the "Land of the Free" and the "Land of Opportunities", sure likes to screw us all over! Police are too paranoid, justice is a load of baloney, daily gun violence anywhere and everywhere, dangerous bigots normalizing the R-slur, then you have big and popular figures here smearing the autistic community into a negative light...and the list of bad things never stops growing! A very cruel country, like not even cartoon villains are this mean-spirited! How is the autistic community supposed to exist in peace when the USA is basically nothing but trouble? Happy 4th of July, I guess...

26: Comfort Media/Games - A TV show or video game is always nice to play and keep calm when times get tough out there!

27: Fancy Wording - A series of five-dollar words can arrive rather than a simple "yes" or "not" to suffice. Sometimes, fancy words such as Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis can be fun to learn about!

28: Gold - Gold is part of the periodic table, atomic number 79! Light it up gold instead of blue for Autism Acceptance! 'Au' as in Aurum, and autism!

29: Neurodivergent Community - There's all sorts of Neurodivergent people worth seeing! They all have different experiences!

30: Autistic Pride - Autistic and proud!

31: FREE SPACE -- Explain any topic you wish!

[idontwanttospoiltheparty]

Hot take : this fandom is extremely fixated on Paul and not just in the fannish adulation sense. Certain George and even John fans have this extreme negative fixation on Paul to the extent that they seemingly cannot appreciate their fave without tearing Paul down. To a certain extent, I can understand George fans' protectiveness on behalf of George but it's a bit weird that Paul is always the sole subject of mockery and derision for overlooking George when John was claiming in interviews that George and Ringo could have never made it without him and Paul even in the 1980s. Also, since prev anon mentioned the nme hug discourse, I've got this sense that certain parts of the j/p fandom consider it Paul's responsibility to 'fix' John mainly through whatever level of commitment John may or may not have asked/expected of him and so it's Paul's fault for pushing away John. Lastly, I'm kind of bored of every word in Paul interviews being picked apart to establish him as Uniquely Weird or something. At the risk of looking at things through a nostalgic lens, I feel like we used to have more interesting and engaging discussions about aspects of beatles history that have simply died down.

I agree with a lot of this so hard lmao 🫣🫣🫣🫣🫣🫣🫣🫣

Paul kind of lives in people's minds rent-free, whether you love him or hate him (yet ANOTHER Taylor parallel lmaooooo)

Also, I'll say it is less conflicting to direct anger at someone who's alive rather than someone who's dead, so I both get George's post-1980 attitude, and fans who focus more on Paul (partially because of George's attitude, which was very much informed by Paul being alive while John was not)

Re: Paul's responsibility: the thing is, I feel like the presupposition of all of that rhetoric is that obviously Paul wanted the same thing John wanted, so it's fine to expect Paul to fight for what he wants. This is where I feel people sort of treat real people like fiction, because being "disappointed" in Paul as a character makes more sense than being disappointed in him as a real human being.

But. Your last point…………… you're so right, there's so many much better conversations to be had than "look at this thing Paul said that is INSANE if you take it out of context, pretend to be surprised he words things awkwardly, and forget the time period this quote is from"… Half the time I find what he's actually expressing in those quotes a lot more interesting than the way they come across when approached incuriously. And it's fine to laugh at the wording sometimes! But yeah, it just kinda gets old when that's all there is.

[papayanna]

I just wrote an essay in someone else's tags about this but honestly it deserves its own post. I'm such a fan of how the writers have reframed Lestat and Louis' romance.

In the IWTV film and the original book, their entire romance is framed through the lens of Louis' bitterness and resentment towards Lestat. Though it is undeniable in both that there is underlying affection and dependency between the two, Louis seems so blinded by his own retrospective remorse about the way things ended with Lestat - plus Claudia's death of course. Plus, I got the distinct impression in both the film and book that Louis is embarrassed about his love for Lestat - I think largely because in hindsight he understands wholly what an asshole Lestat really was, and is ashamed that his younger self fell in love with him so easily. As a consequence, many of the good things about their relationship - especially Louis actually falling in love with Lestat - sort of get glossed over.

I kind of love this framing device and the use of the Obviously Biased Narrator, and I sort of hope we'll see some of that bitterness seep through in Louis' retelling in later episodes, but I think the changes to the story they made in episode one work so wonderfully!

In the TV show, we get to see Louis fall for Lestat in slow motion, every tiny event which pushes him over the edge. The writers go to careful lengths to demonstrate that the love between them was real, liberating, and incredibly significant to Louis. What's more, because Lestat is there right from the beginning, Louis falls in love with Lestat before being turned, rather than after, giving them the chance to actually know each other (and for Louis to have at least a modicum more of informed consent about being turned). In the end, Louis seeks out vampirism to escape being a societal outcast and find acceptance and empathy from someone who promises he is just like him. He seeks understanding, he chooses life and love beyond the constraints of the racist homophobic society he lives in. What a contrast to the suicidal and apathetic Louis of the books! I'm going to be honest, I love this change. It clearly puts WAY more emphasis on the love story between Louis and Lestat rather than just focusing on the themes of grief so present in the original. It also changes the idea of vampirism as something horrible foisted on Louis without his consent, to something he chooses out of love, out of desperation, yes, but also out of hope for a better future. (Though of course we've yet to see just how much Lestat was influencing events!)

In my opinion, IWTV the series and IWTV the book tell two very different stories, and Louis is two very different men in each of them. Aside from the more obvious changes to characters' backstories and appearances, the themes are different as is Louis' driving motivation. (Though I would argue that some of the more obvious changes - like Louis being a Black man - very clearly contribute to thematic changes and the difference in the way his love with Lestat is portrayed. Him constantly fighting for respect from white society and having to prove himself to people he is more than equal to definitely contributes to the thought that he can escape to a 'better' reality through vampirism.)

Anyway, I just love how the writers have changed this story! I think that although it's very different to the source material it definitely offers an equally compelling and beautiful - if thematically different - plot. I'm so excited to see where the series goes from here - for example, will Louis still struggle with Catholic guilt after rejecting Christianity so openly at the end of EP1? Since Louis actively chose vampirism/to be with Lestat, how will that impact their relationship? How will it impact the turning of Claudia? Especially in the context of Lestat's whiteness, has Louis really found the understanding kindred spirit he thinks he has? So many questions. Hopefully the remaining episodes will be just as brilliant as the first!

[blazehedgehog]

You hear about what's going on with Sam Procrastinates? What do you think of that?

I caught a whiff of it today, yeah. I'm sort of glad I'm mostly outside of that circle of influence. I know of a lot of those people, but I do not know them personally. I probably run my mouth on here too much and too freely for some of those types.

Especially seeing Sam get out there in front and be like "whoa whoa whoa whoa I'm trying to protect my business by distancing myself from leakers and bad actors" -- like, maybe I don't have the full context here, but trying to divorce yourself from leakers is a bit weird to me?

Keep in mind I'm coming at this from the perspective of being on Sonic Retro during the massive Sonic 4 leak, which lead Sega to partner with Sonic Retro. Some of the inroads paved during that partnership almost certainly lead to us getting Sonic Mania, given there are future Sonic Mania staff thanked in the credits for Sonic 4 Episode 2.

Like, I get trying to keep your nose clean. I try to do that, too. People get on my case for being spooked by emulation in my "Definitive Way to Play" videos, but people who really, actually know me, know that I've never had a problem with emulation ever in my entire life. Up until Tristan started buying me games to review for TSSZ, emulation was literally all I had. I could not afford games on my own, and I basically still can't. (I'm counting on next month's Twitch payout to cover my pre-order for Shadow Generations)

All of that is me trying to keep my nose clean. I've seen channels get shut down for talking too openly about emulation (particularly with setup tutorials), and even Discord servers are not as private as people think they are. The hammer can and will drop, and I'd rather my financial livelihood not be under it.

So I will never tell people to "just emulate it" in my videos and I have a rule against linking piracy material in my Discord. If you like me, and like my work, that's the way it's gotta be to protect that kind of stuff.

But that's on video. What I do in my personal life has no baring on that. I endeavor to capture all my footage from real consoles but I'm also living in a cramped little bedroom with maybe ten square feet of floor space right now, so I'm not digging out my Wii or my Saturn or my PS2 every time I have to capture footage of something. I emulate it.

I'm getting off topic. Shutting people out of your life because they don't align with your business is a bit extreme, to me. But again, I don't know the relationship there. At least in the clips Sam uses, he never seems very happy to have Shanny around, even though it's clear Shanny can and continued to join Sam's discord calls. I guess I just don't have any friends like that -- I either have personal friends, or... well, I just don't have very many "business friends." (Which depending on your view point, is or isn't a problem and one of the reasons my channel growth can be so sluggish)

So, like, whatever. Again, I dunno how a lot of that stuff goes. Ultimately, I guess I don't blame Sam for protecting his business, because again, I protect my business too, and it's clear Sam is more successful than I am.

I will say this, though, and I am about to step neck deep in the shit: I have never liked that Jaden Sonic Show dude. There was a time...

...Let's see... I had to dig around in Discord because I was so put off by this guy's videos I straight up erased them from my Youtube History, so this is the only way I even know I watched them:

I watched two or three of his videos around this time and this dude's tendency to just make stuff up, believe in bad sources, and push the worst rumors was infuriating. I would say it's not a stretch to claim he is eroding the overall intelligence of the Sonic fandom with his sensationalist, reactionary, straight up false information. He reminds me of the way I used to think about the game industry when I was 13, which is to say: deeply, deeply, deeply incorrect.

This is where I was going to pivot and say, "and he makes more money than Sam and I combined," because he has 150k+ subscribers. But according to SocialBlade, that doesn't seem to be true. Despite having 3x as many subs as Sam, SocialBlade claims The Sonic Show seems to make less than Sam Procrastinates.

I guess there are benefits to keeping your nose clean.

(And given I have a Youtube channel of my own, I have a vague idea how accurate these numbers are -- which is to say: I am not making $122 a month from Youtube, but I wish I was. I also understand why Sam is so protective of his channel's earnings, too)

Anyway, all of this to say, Sam seems in the right here. I do get a whiff of, like, the puritan Japanese Idol culture from some of this, where if you're a J-Idol you can't be caught drinking, or smoking, or even swearing. You have to maintain total purity or else you fall victim to a witch hunt, and there's a weird amount of finger pointing going on here that I don't know if it was deserved. Sam shouldn't have even needed to make a video like this, but like I said, that Sonic Show guy kind of seems like a vulture.

I would not put stock in what that dude has to say.

[cloudmonarch43]

[ID in alt text, repeated below the cut]

My to-watch list is pretty short now and it's not especially satisfying to write about movies while trying not to say too much about what happens in them, plus I barely like Instagram anymore (where these posts are focused), so it'll probably at least be a while before there's another post like this. But never you think that I don't want to talk about movies!! (Oops, I never noticed I wrote the wrong year for Alien. It's right in the alt text because I typed it all first and then copied it down!)

Image 1:

Saw (2004) is a very silly movie that manages to stay enjoyable the whole way through. Aside from a few good bits, I didn't like Saw II (2005). There were too many characters, underdeveloped, so that even in context it just felt cruel to kill them off. I like engaging with the mechanisms of the games, and yeah the point of the games is violence, but the second movie felt like it didn't care about the game part. It made some good moves as a sequel, but the first one was a lot more fun.

Rather than telling me a story, Dirty Dancing (1987) felt like it was telling me about a story. I liked watching the dancing, and I liked the story that was being summarized, so I liked the movie, but it was strange how much of it just felt like information. Even though the plot was a bit convenient, the great variety of relationships made it feel like a genuine world.

The first time I watched I Saw the TV Glow (2024), I didn't know what I was in for; I kind of stumbled home in a daze of delight and sadness. Movies are such a capacious medium and I love it when that potential is actually used. It also feels good to watch something where the queer interpretation is not just a side effect yet it's still abstract and metaphorical.

We're All Going to the World's Fair (2021) is a super effective movie about watching other people's videos. In reviews I saw, I thought people credited it with a lot that wasn't actually there—only a place was set, which the viewer automatically filled. It didn't resonate with me as much, but I think it's cool to be put through the same sort of process as the characters.

[pencil sketch for Dirty Dancing of Johnny and Baby dancing]

Image 2:

Pretty much everything I wrote in my journal about The Sixth Sense (1999) is using it as a comparison to clarify other things, so I don't know what to say about it on its own. I enjoyed watching it.

After that I rewatched some stuff.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is great. It really lets you sink in, and there's a lot to sink into, both visually and conceptually.

Blade Runner (1982) seemed more self-contained and a lot easier to follow this time through. I liked it overall but it's so bleak. I guess it's supposed to make me think about what it means to be human but "either you're a cop or a little guy" is the undisputed thesis statement I heard.

The Thing (1982) remains one of my top favorite movies (which is a list I haven't written, but "I Saw the TV Glow" is on it too). I hadn't even remembered a solid half of the great special effects moments because there's just so many.

Alien (1979) didn't work out as well. I still think it's a good movie, but it turns out a lot of what I liked about it was the suspense that doesn't hold up when I know what's going to happen. I know people love to analyze this movie but it's just not catching me that way.

Challengers (2024) is all about three random people I don't have any reason to care about... plus I don't care about tennis. It's not really my kind of movie. That said, it's just about as satisfying as it could possibly be.

[pencil sketch for 2001: A Space Odyssey of an EVA pod]

Image 3:

Pulse (2001) is really sad. What if the loneliness was never ending! It's a high quality, coherent representation, and then it just exists and there's nothing you can do about it. (Also it definitely should have been called Circuit.)

I watched Happy Death Day (2017) because I love time loops a lot. It didn't give me more than that, but it was easy enough to sit through. I think it could've pushed its concepts further but at least it didn't fall apart.

Of course then I had to rewatch Groundhog Day (1993), which I'd mostly forgotten, and I was delighted to discover that this movie rocks. It's efficient, covering a lot of ground without feeling distant or dense, and it really felt convincing.

Nightcrawler (2014) is brutal, unforgiving, and a great movie. Lou isn't a defeatable villain; he's a concentration. This movie refuses to lie, and that feels good even though the things it's saying don't.

[pencil sketch for Pulse of Ryosuke kneeling next to Harue, who is hugging herself]

[sophieinwonderland]

what do you and ghost and other alters each like? as in hobbies and interests :o)

Can I tell you a secret? I'm actually the most boring tulpa ever. My primary interest is plural stuff. 🤫

Okay, maybe that's only partially true. See, I've always been fascinated with human psychology since before I became self-aware. I liked knowing what made people tick. I liked understanding the human brain.

And I feel like people don't fully appreciate how incredible it is that such an advanced piece of computing hardware came about through countless permutations of life beginning billions of years ago. Everything about our ability to think and feel emotions and perceive the world is incredible!

And we still don't understand it! We've learned to send people to the moon, we've seen 13 billions year into the past. We've discovered the building blocks of all matter, and found particles even smaller than those.

But we don't know how our brains work or what makes us tick.

So when I became self-aware and learned what I was, it was something new to marvel at. Because no one... really knew. Like, "multiple personalities" had been studied for about a hundred years exclusively in the context of trauma. But there hasn't been much effort to connect that to other similar phenomena like spiritual possession or other forms of voice hearing. And what research does exist is hard to track down.

So there are times when, as I joke above, I feel kind of bad because my primary interest is in plural psychology...

But at the same time, I feel like... how could it not be? How could I not discover my existence and then want to unravel its mysteries so I can understand myself and those like me better? When I realized that I had been thinking for myself for months even as I had been convinced I was imaginary... How could I not be amazed at this incredible potential of the human mind I discovered?

And it feels like we're on the cutting edge of understanding things most actual psychologists haven't really pieced together yet.

One of my favorite posts that I've written is the Manifestations post. And I mean, I think most of the information there was already in the community, albeit scattered. I think most systems knew headmates could exist in the inner world, they could switch, and they could be in a state where they're in the head but without any form. And the tulpamancy community at least knew imposition was a thing, and a lot of other plurals have described similar experiences. I don't think headmates being able to manifest in objects through Inhabitation is quite common knowledge yet. (And I had to coin Inhabitation myself.)

But even for those who knew of these experiences separately, I've never seen anyone put it together in a model like this, saying "here are these five distinct states headmates can be in while conscious."

And so that's a post I feel really proud of, for trying to codify experiences in ways that I think can make them easier to understand.

And I love expanding my understanding of plural psychology and developing new ways to think about it.

...

Anyway, Ghost likes superheroes, Star Wars, card games and stuff. Also Brandon Sanderson books.🤷‍♀️

(Abby is our local artist. But we're not that good at art so she doesn't do it very much, and the others don't really front all that much to develop their own hobbies.)

We have other interests too, but they tend to be more fleeting and on rotation rather being consistent.

...

Oh, and we're not alters. We don't use that word. And I don't really like it because of the association with "alternate personality." (Although nobody seems to be able to agree what alter actually means or where it came from.) It feels to me like it just sort of boils headmates down to what we look like to singlets. Personalities that takeover the body. And it erases the rich diversity of plural experiences.

[gothicprep]

I’m camping and this is a queued post.

I watched big joel’s “conservative comedy ruined my life” in bits and pieces last weekend. or the weekend before? I don’t remember. part of me just thinks I’m getting old and running out of patience for, like, elevated react content. another part of me is thinking, “no! it’s laziness you can’t stand!” i know joel is a capable guy – I think “twitter and empathy” is an excellent video essay. i more or less know how YouTube sponsors work in a way that disincentivizes being thorough – “get it out by may 10th, or you’re not getting $200”. all that. maybe this was best practiced as a labor of love rather than a professional career, but I won’t digress

I think what my issues with it are stem from two questions that weren’t engaged with at all:

what makes comedy work?

what is a conservative? it’s a regionally variant thing in how it presents, after all.

If you’d like to hear me ramble, it’s under the cut. if not, i hope everything goes well for you today, and we’ll leave it at that.

alright. now the true reader time has kicked in. im getting dirty.

a lot of the framework I think joel is using here is from this out of context george carlin clip that’s shared en-masse whenever a comedian is in hot water for a tasteless joke. but I honestly think he and most people are interpreting it wrong – it’s somewhat backhanded advice from one professional to another. even if andrew dice clay meant his diceman character as a parody, he’s risking an audience who may not get that, and probably won’t think particularly high of him when they find out his surname by birth is silverman.

the work people remember of carlin’s is anti-establishment and anti-consumerism, yes. but the shtick in that era of his career is mostly about being curmudgeonly. he wasn’t trying to establish an over-arching theory of comedy via one larry king interview. and I guess, while we’re thinking about carlin, we ought to remember that he was arrested for cursing in public at his shows, like, multiple times in the 70s. his attitude towards political correctness (& supposedly what we’d call “wokeness” now) is deeply informed by this. he’d probably call a lot of the posts you’ve endorsed newfangled yuppie shit. don’t invoke the dead unless you know what they were about.

sorry for that digression, but I do think it matters. specifically in the case of joel, who I think leaned into the out of context clip and… developed a nonsense theory of comedy because of that. he says something to the effect of “comedy enforces social norms” when he isn’t talking about comedians. he’s talking about bullies. bullies and their patchwork of social allies aren’t funny. everyone thinks they’re trying too hard in a meaningless and pathetic race.

comedy is often predicated on surprise. if you pay attention, you’ll be a more intelligent person for it. and a more surprising one. funny how that works. I don’t personally believe this neo-breadtube space is inhabited by smart people. I don’t care how many masters degrees they’ll try to break my nose with pointing this out.

okay, getting to the point – the daily wire is not anywhere near the go-to source of conservative bile. their traffic has taken a massive hit since facebook de-emphasized viral news. Imagine making something criticizing “conservative comedy” and not mentioning greg gutfeld at all. fox’s viewership dwarfs that of the daily wire, but the daily wire gets undue legitimacy by way of being terminally online. if I said “Ben Shapiro” to my parents, they’d assume this is the name of some guy that worked with me rather than a pundit. 

he also does some idiot magic here where he calls matt stone and trey parker conservatives. they aren’t, they’re libertarians. these sorts of distinctions matter to people who care about gay shit like accuracy. he mostly looks at “team america: world police” as reference and says something to the effect of “they accepted the war on terror as it is”. like are you honestly kidding dude. have you seen the south park movie? they not only characterized the army as incompetent, but actively racist on top of that.

you have to wonder if he has a selective memory about the “team america” movie as well, because he frames it so strangely. because the version of the song where they’re shouting out the names of corporations as a joke is in the end credits only and…

oh. alright. you didn’t watch it. damn. that’s sad. couldn’t even ask you to sit for two hours without picking up your phone like a fidgety little rat.

and… like. as much as I do not like to pull the “I’m bipolar!! I find this gross!!” card, I’m doing it. at the end of this video, joel shows a video of a Roseanne Barr routine where she’s very blatantly wrote while having a manic episode. He calls it interesting, I personally don’t find this all that interesting. I’ve been there. It’s dumb. It’s needlessly scaremongering and dramatic. It isn’t interesting. It makes me feel uncomfortable while I watch it. I was never a conspiracy theorist type but the requisite nonsensical yapping is all too clear to me.

Uhh. That’s what I have to say. Don’t think I got my whole rant out, but this will do for now

[kaiyves-backup]

I don’t want to bag on traveling exhibitions too much, because they don’t play the same way in every space and they can’t be designed with every possible exhibit space in mind, but Apollo: When We Went to the Moon at the Intrepid Museum felt like it could have been better.

It’s set up in the space shuttle pavilion, replacing most of the normal displays there, but Enterprise is still visible overhead and their Soyuz capsule is still in its usual spot, so we have two very post-Space-Race vehicles unavoidably in the middle of an exhibit about the Space Race.

Enterprise, I love you, but I’m trying to look at Explorer I right now.

The exhibit was put together by the US Space and Rocket Center, where I attended Space Camp in 2008 and 2009, and it is accordingly heavy on rocket-related material, as most US launch vehicles of the Space Race were designed and built there, in Huntsville, Alabama.

Unfortunately, the exhibit text here is as uncomfortably worshipful about Wernher von Braun as in the exhibits I saw at the USSRC fifteen years ago, even as other museums like the Smithsonian do now discuss his Nazi past.

There was information about Operation Paperclip and the Nazis accessible via QR code, one of several cases in the exhibit where this is done. This is a trend I really dislike, because I don’t come to a museum to just stare at my phone.

Or how about you actually tell me something about the Artemis Program on this sign? You know, since I’m looking at it already?

The limitations of display space mean the exhibits come off as a bit of a temporal mishmash, with the full-sized Mercury capsule coming after the newspapers about JFK’s assassination. Several major events, including the Apollo 1 fire and the entire Gemini Program, are only included in timeline videos rather than being represented by displays, despite the USS Intrepid’s role as a Gemini recovery ship— and Gus Grissom having been aboard! (The Intrepid actually had an Apollo 1 temporary exhibit, 27 Seconds, in 2010-11.)

You’ll find Grissom and Gemini 3 elsewhere on the Intrepid, but not in Apollo: WWttM.

A section presenting artifacts from the Vietnam War and the anti-war and Civil Rights Movements (complimenting the Intrepid’s own “On the Line” Vietnam War exhibit on the deck below) tries to offer something of the social context in which the Space Race took place. This atmosphere of “a moon landing program in a time of major national and global turmoil” of course feels very timely.

The actual Apollo 11 section similarly opens with us watching the landing on TVs in a mock-up 1969 storefront with images of people all around the world also watching.

These two sections together suggest an interesting interpretation of the title as being about “when we went to the moon”, the whole era of Apollo— what was the spirit of the age, what else was happening, and how did people experience and react to it? Unfortunately, while this sort of theme could have made for a stronger exhibit if woven into the other displays, it’s only really present in these two sections, with the rest being a straightforward technical presentation.

(For example, with how much Vietnam-War-era material from the Intrepid’s own collection is on display elsewhere, it seems like a missed opportunity that we don’t have the Intrepid’s own onboard newsletters and photos from July 1969 on display to learn where in the world the ship was—presumably the Gulf of Tonkin?— and how its sailors and aviators watched the landing.)

These artifacts were still amazing to see, though!

(That’s the Mstislav Keldysh, the namesake of the research ship!)

One thing I will absolutely praise here is that the later Apollo missions are all given their due, and there’s a LOT about Apollo 15, which as everyone knows, I have a soft spot for.

The subsequent shuttle, space station, and SLS models at the end do a good job of connecting Apollo to Artemis, but as the exhibit was put together before Artemis 1, it doesn’t have a display, just a QR code.

A fun day out, definitely, but I kept thinking about how much more it could have included with more space to work with.

[theseventhoffrostfall]

Back to Through Struggle, the Stars, and the second half of the book (yeah, all that prior was the first half) opens with a chapter that's such a marked improvement over all that came prior I was briefly convinced that the author wrote the first half years ago and just kept it as-is when he went on to finish it, or brought on some other military-adjacent friend to ghostwrite it or something. That is to say it rose to the dizzying heights of okay for the most part.

We switch to an Acadamy buddy of our guy Niel, who goes by Rand. Again, accurate, as military personnel are known for using first names exclusively. Regardless, Rand is in the Army as an artillery officer (don't ask why he went to the same academy as some space force navy guy). We get a brief mention that surface-to-orbit laser artillery has a secondary sighting laser for analyzing atmospheric disturbance and adjusting the focus of the main laser. I'm almost 100% certain that wouldn't solve the problem, but hey, it's proof that the author is aware the problem exists.

The war which was declared at the end of the first half has finally broken out proper, and Rand is stationed on a world consisting of one American continent with the rest under Chinese control, which some of you may recall is the sort of arrangement that's common in my primary Sci fi setting specifically for making more sense than every planet being under unilateral control. Randward is forced to ditch his guns as most of his battalion is wiped out. The order comes to surrender, because it turns out it's hard to argue with 70% of a planet plus an enormous invasion fleet that's claimed near-total aerospace superiority so his surviving platoon members link up with the remnants of the local police department to Red Dawn it. I'm as shocked as you are they didn't outright call it Yellow Dawn.

It's even mentioned that the Chinese plan to round up the American colonists and ship them off to an American holding to be repatriated, rather than putting them in death camps or making them into wet market soup or something, so there's even some actual restraint being shown here. Unfortunately, that moment is also what shook me out of that illusion of "Hey, this is so not-bad it might be a different author entirely." The perspective switching abruptly, jarring and completely unmarked and undifferentiated between third person limited and third person omniscient (like, perhaps, a news article switching from an interview to an editorial section providing information and context on the situation around that interview) has been present thus far, but it's just always been the smallest of the vast problems in play. The information about the Chinese plan for the planet comes jammed right in the middle of the narrative of Rand fighting the initial invasion.

Overall, I rate this chapter a GWOT/Y2K. It really is a 2011 time capsule if you know what to look for, to perhaps a greater degree than the rest of the book. Most notably because they're starting a Red Dawn gang and this was not long after they made that terrible Red Dawn remake, but more generally conventional invasions are shown as a swift, brutal, all-or-nothing blitzkrieg that would make sense to someone whose idea of such is Desert Storm, OIF, operations like Panama or even the conventional aspects of Vietnam (yeah people like to forget that basically every conventional engagement in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam were quick and decisive US victories) but makes much less sense in the context of actual peer conflict as we've seen it play out historically, where from Normandy to Korea we see a burst of violence to establish a foothold and opportunistic rushes through breached lines but otherwise a steady, grinding back-and-forth advance. Again, Red Dawn was probably an influence, but it's perhaps interesting to think that we find a guerilla campaign in completely occupied territory to be a borderline romantic notion, as opposed to a strategically besieged, desperate holding action of conventional warfare, which we see as the grim nightmare it is.

Which is the other half of its datedness, in that everyone is shocked and appalled by the notion of the US forces on the planet surrendering, because that's just Not A Thing That's Done. Again, GWOT-era notion where the notion of going back to the negotiating table after a truce was called in a war was largely dead in favor of the idea that every war ends in a regime change and surrender of any kind is tantamount to absolute defeat forever. Everyone in this largely peacetime army that really has no living combat vets is just 100% willing to go to the absolute extremes to fight on for no particular reason (the civilians, everyone apparently knows because this information was once again between two paragraphs of in-character narration, will just be shipped off to American territory unharmed, and "help will arrive" is the sort of notion you get when you know you're in a story and the cavalry will show up grandly at the end, not when you're waging a losing war and just lost a planet) and this is despite the fact that America as the monopolar hegemon hasn't been the case for like a century at this point.

Hell, this dates it to both early in 2011, before America's de facto withdrawal from Iraq, and from I believe a few years later when that US naval vessel accidentally trespassed in IIRC Chinese waters and the crew was detained before being sent along. While this was a bit excessive (typically such incidents warrant the response of just escorting the intruding ship out of your territory, though detention is indeed within the rights of the encroached-upon party) I remember there being some intense backlash and anger at the crew "shaming the entire country" for, I dunno, not dying gloriously at their guns and defying all possible notions of obeying international law and justice just for the vague notion of not surrendering for any reason no matter how valid. This also dates it to before 2022 to present day, when half the country would respond to the notion of a war with China by espousing that China has traditional Christian values and opposing their conquest is a demonic money laundering scheme.

Overall, a standout chapter for being mediocre but interesting to analyze rather than just blandly fascinating but interesting to venomously critique. I don't wanna give anyone the wrong impression, though. This book is not The Devil Calls the Tune. This book is not Guard at The Gates of Hell. This book isn't even Dark Operator. On the seismograph of bad military science fiction this book has yet to shake the needle. It's just bad in a way that makes it interesting to break down rather than bad in a way that makes me want to kill the author with my bare hands. Believe it or not, I still haven't wanted to kill the author once.

Well, there's time for that to change, because the next chapter goes back to Neil. Back to the grind for me.

[glazeliights]

Danganronpa in toki pona, part 2: talents

if you havent read the first part go do that

toki!

the first post only focused on transliterating, but now were getting into actual translation territory. that means I get to explain toki pona words and grammar. the main two words Ill be using here are ken (ability, skill (but also possibility)) and wawa (power). then there is of course jan (person) to talk about the actual students. for convenience, and to keep with the toki pona spirit, I will try my best to keep phrases short and only use up to one pi.

speaking of which

what the hell is pi?

this is one of the aspects of the language that is most difficult for new learners to grasp because theres really nothing like this in english. so, in toki pona you cant really combine multiple words into one (a process called agglutination, something you might know from jokes about how long german words can get) instead, you have one main word that you attach modifiers to (names, by the way, are always modifiers in toki pona, which is why they need a head noun). so a phrase X Y can be interpreted as "X exhibiting qualities of Y, Y-ish X, X of Y, Y's X", stuff like that.

but things get ambiguous when you have three words. "mute" means many, a lot, etc, but its also used to mean "very". so if you read something like jan pona mute, how are you supposed to know whether its "many good people" or a "very good person"? this is where pi comes in. pi regroups modifiers, and its easiest to show this with brackets. if you do not use pi, modifiers apply to all the words before them. so jan pona mute is ((jan pona) mute), many good people. jan pi pona mute, however, is (jan (pona mute)), a very good person. this is a very important concept to understand in toki pona.

a note about translation & interpretation

words in toki pona dont really correspond 1:1 to any specific word. rather, they cover a range of meaning that can be intepreted in various ways depending on context. akesi Lipamanka calls these ranges "semantic spaces" and has started writing a dictionary based on them. this is sort of like calling something a building and not specifying whether you mean a house, a school, a church, a shopping mall, etc. if its obvious from context, then you dont need to specify. the only difference is that toki pona words generally have broader ranges than english words. just know that for any translation and backtranslation I give, theres a lot of other ways someone could read them.

also, ideally all of the talents would actually be translated into full introductory sentences, both because its more pona and because, again, itd provide some neat opportunities for distinction between characters, especially ones who share a talent. but whenever I need to refer to their talents in a short-form way, these phrases will have to do.

so, aside from individual pieces of vocab, theres not much else to know. I will explain everything else as I go along.

- - -

talentless - jan ken ala (not skilled-person, non-ultimate) or jan pi ken ala (unskilled person, someone with no skills) Im sure theres something fun to be done with the subtle difference between these

ultimate ??? - jan pi ken ???

- - -

ultimate lucky student - jan wawa pi ken pona ("powerful good-possibilites person", luck is.. difficult to translate, but I feel like ken pona is alright at being both concise and clear enough in meaning. its also a wawa cause yknow. luck isnt really a skill)

ultimate detective - jan ken pi kama sona ("skilled knowledge-aquiring person", yeah, no notes here. after all what is a detective if not one who figures out information?)

ultimate affluent progeny - jan wawa pi mani mute ("powerful rich person", I didnt really lean into the heir aspect here sorry. I also do not really care about this guy so eh)

ultimate writer - jan ken pi toki musi ("skilled entertaining-words person", musi is a rather broad category so I think it fits for stories)

ultimate murderous fiend - jan moli ken ("skilled death-person", pretty self explanatory)

ultimate pop sensation - jan ken pi kalama musi ("skilled fun-sounds person", so I really wanted to make sure I distinguished the music-based talents cause technically you could just reduce all of them to kalama. kalama musi is a pretty widely used and generic phrase for music, which imo fits well for pop)

ultimate baseball player - jan ken pi tawa sike ("skilled ball-movement/circular movement person", okay so. I was originally going to talk about how I wouldnt be able to disambiguate the two ball sport related talents bc like. theyre both about moving balls, sike tawa. but then I had the absolute genius idea to use tawa sike instead since it can refer to both the movement of the baseball itself and the circular movement of running around the bases)

ultimate programmer - jan ken pi ilo nanpa ("skilled computer person", ilo nanpa is a fairly common way of referring to electronic devices so. yeah)

ultimate biker gang leader - jan wawa pi lawa kulupu ("powerful group-leadership person" uhhgh sorry I dont really know how to put the kon of "biker gang" into an short phrase. this is an example of why full sentences to describe talents would probably be more apt)

ultimate moral compass - jan wawa pi nasin pona ("powerful good-rules person" nasin can be interpreted as a lot of things, but fundamentally it is some sort of way one might follow, either physical like a path or metaphorical like rules (fun fact: in the context of languages, its often used to mean grammar. people who speak toki pona in a way that deviates from common usage generally call this their personal nasin)

ultimate fanfic creator - jan ken pi sitelen musi ("skilled entertaining-pictures person", I think thats a reasonable translation of comics? plus sitelen can also refer to writing so it works in two ways)

ultimate gambler - jan wawa pi musi mani ("powerful money-games person", also a luck-based talent, therefore a wawa. I dont think this one needs much explanation)

ultimate martial artist - jan wawa ken ("skilled strong person", wawa can also mean physical strength so. I really wanted her to be a jan wawa and a jan ken, to emphasize her strength and add to her initial intimidation factor)

ultimate swimmer - jan ken pi tawa telo/kala ("skilled water-movement/fishlike movement person" both of those are fairly uncontroversial ways to describe swimmimg. no notes here)

ultimate clairvoyant - jan wawa pi sona kama/jan sona pi tenpo kama ("powerful incoming-knowledge person/"future knowledge-person", uouuugh. this is one of the ones that gave me the most trouble. clairvoyance is something thats real fucking difficult to put into a quick and snappy phrase. moreover, I think the second phrase is more accurate but it doesnt include wawa which would set him apart from other ultimates for basically no reason? like mayybe I could say jan wawa pi tenpo kama but "future powers" is a bit too vague imo :/)

ultimate soldier - jan utala ken ("skilled battle person", no notes here)

ultimate fashionista - jan ken pi len pona ("skilled good-clothes person", theres a lot of ways you could go about translating fashion, but I think this one suffices. do not even ask me to try and translate ultimate analyst into a simple phrase I will literally die)

- - -

ultimate everything - jan pi ken ale ("all-abilities person", fitting + contrasts nicely with jan pi ken ala)

ultimate gamer - jan musi ken ("skilled games person", musi refers to anything related to entertainment, and its often used on its own to say game so. yeah)

ultimate imposter - jan ken pi jan ante ("skilled other-people person", again, I think this one especially suffers from not being in full sentences, but I think its still accurate. their talent is (being) other people)

ultimate animator - jan ken pi sitelen tawa ("skilled moving-pictures person", sitelen tawa is a fairly common & uncontroversial translation of movies/videos/animations so yeah)

ultimate chef - jan moku ken ("skilled food person", I really really dont think toki pona is built to get across the tiny little nuance cook vs chef so I guess thats staying out of the tp translation? then again I dont think Ill translate anything with teruteru in it because I dont really like him at all)

ultimate photographer - jan ken pi ilo sitelen ("skilled picture-tool person", no notes)

ultimate swordswoman - jan ken pi ilo utala ("skilled fighting-tool person", no notes)

ultimate yakuza - jan wawa pi kulupu Jakusa ("powerful Yakuza-group person", Im gonna say it outright, any attempts to describe the yakuza in this tiny little phrase turned out reductive and Bad. you really cant put the intricacies of organized crime into a two word toki pona phrase. it does feel kind of like cheating to simply tokiponize the word but the other options all suck ass. the actual description will simply have to be contained in fuyuhikos introduction, where I can use full sentences)

ultimate musician - jan ken pi kalama wawa ("skilled loud-sound person", like I said, I wanted to differentiate the kalama-based talents, and if theres one thing ibukis music is, its loud)

ultimate traditional dancer - jan ken pi tawa musi ("skilled entertaining-movement person", yeah, fairly normal way to say dancing. thats it)

ultimate nurse - jan ken pi pona sijelo ("skilled body-wellness person", if youre partial to nimi ku suli, you could also replace pona sijelo with misikeke ("medicine"), though due to the changed modifier amount the whole thing would then be jan misikeke ken)

ultimate gymnast - jan ken pi tawa mute ("skilled lots-of-movement person", no notes)

ultimate team manager - jan ken pi pona kulupu ("skilled group-wellness person", no notes)

ultimate breeder - jan ken pi soweli mute ("skilled many-animals person", while calling his talent unpa soweli might be more accurate to him being a breeder, I really really didnt want to call him the animal sex guy)

ultimate princess - jan lawa ken ("skilled leader", so, I generally consider leadership to be a wawa rather than a ken, however, I also wanted a way to contrast her talent w kokichis, and I think wawa is more capable of having sinister undertones than ken. I mean think about it, between "skilled leader" and "powerful leader", who sounds more menacing?)

ultimate mechanic - jan ken pi pona ilo ("skilled machine-wellness person", no notes)

- - -

ultimate pianist - jan ken pi ilo kalama ("skilled instrument (sound-tool) person", since theres no other talent that specifically mentions an instrument theres no need to specifically describe a piano)

ultimate child caregiver - jan awen ken pi jan sin ("skilled child (new/young-person) protection person, so I wasnt quite sure how to convey taking care of someone without using too many words, but I think awen comes close enough? because youre keeping them safe and happy? I dunno. though I do like that awen doesnt necessarily imply that maki would be nice to them, which I think could work in her favor?)

ultimate assassin - jan ken pi moli len ("skilled hidden-death person", no notes)

ultimate astronaut - jan ken pi tawa mun ("skilled star-travel person", no notes)

ultimate.. leader - jan lawa wawa ("powerful leader", like I said earlier, I think this makes him sound kind of ominous which fits the way he presents himself over the course of the game)

ultimate adventurer - jan ken pi tawa musi ("skilled? entertaining-travel person", because what is an adventure if not an exciting journey. also Im not sure how going on adventures is necessarily a skill but its even less of a wawa, so)

ultimate tennis player - jan ken pi sike tawa ("skilled moving-ball person", having tawa sike vs sike tawa as disambiguation between this and baseball is like, really flimsy but its better than nothing so Im keeping it)

ultimate maid - jan ken pi pali mute ("skilled many-jobs person", yeah, I think this pretty much gets across her Mädchen für Alles (lit. "girl for everything", a person whos there to help with anything and everything when someone needs them) energy)

ultimate magician - jan ken pi wawa musi (calls herself jan usawi wawa) ("skilled entertaining-powers person/powerful magic person", so. usawi is one of them newfangled words that barely anyone uses but its special to me bc jan Usawi makes some damn good music. also I read somewhere that in the japanese version himiko actually speaks in a distinct dialect? therefore I think itd be kind of cool for her to use nimisin that no one else does)

ultimate neo-aikido master - jan ken pi tawa wawa/tawa Akito ("skilled powerful-movement/Aikido-movement person", uhh this one could go either way. tawa wawa is more descriptive but tawa Akito is clearer abt the fact that its aikido specifically? then again it always feels a bit like cheating to just tokiponize. what ever)

ultimate artist - jan ken pi kiwen sitelen ("skilled artful-stone(or other hard material) person", shes a sculptor. thats her talent. why did they just translate it as generic artist SHES A SCULPTOR. shaking the localization by the neck)

ultimate anthropologist - jan ken pi sona jan ("skilled people-knowledge person", no notes on the talent itself but I heard this guy talks in a sort of archaic way. therefore Id like to propose that he uses majuna bc its a pre-pu (therefore old) word and the word itself means ancient. I think it would be funny if that was a word he used, and perhaps also limited to no usage of ku words? much to think about)

ultimate inventor - jan ken pi ilo sin ("skilled new-tools/machines person", no notes)

ultimate entomologist - jan ken pi sona pipi ("skilled bug-knowledge person", no notes)

ultimate robot - jan ilo wawa ("powerful machine-person", as mentioned in the names post I think theres some interesting stuff to be done with people referring to him differently, especially kokichi)

ultimate cosplayer - jan ken pi len ante ("skilled different-clothes person", so obviously cosplaying is more than just clothes, however it works well enough here  + len can also mean cover in a metaphorical sense, like hidden things and secrets. which works rather well I think)