#its a very particular way of approaching the source material

[majimaisms]

i have this theory that a lot if not a majority of rgg fans (at least as far as fandom is concerned) don't actually like the games for what they are but instead they like doing things with the game's characters

[centrally-unplanned]

California Crisis: Gun Salvo

I watched the 1986 OVA California Crisis, and it was really good! This anime, if you have heard of it all (which is unlikely), is famous for two things. One is its look:

Which in anime form did not exist before, and has not existed since. When you research “California Crisis” in English the source everyone pulls from is this essay by longtime industry man Fred Patten, and he describes it as “the over-solarized art style most commonly associated with the commercial artist Patrick Nagel, who was very ‘in’ at the time.” I believe him on that being an influence - he worked with the creators after all - and my primary documents from said creators are quite limited; but those that I have never mention him. They certainly were aiming for Americana - but what is causing this unique look is the use of thick, black outlines on the inner shading of the characters (something Nagel doesn’t really do), which producer Yoshikazu Tochihira mentions as a common technique used on vehicles in anime at the time. Given how heavily cars and ‘copters feature in this, I think the look was also sort of its own idea to create stylistic cohesion between the key parts.

I am not going to say it always works - on our main girl Marcia it is sketch, those eyes man:

But for our boy Noera it comes out a lot nicer:

He has less demand to be “typical anime”; bishoujo can’t blend here but surfer bum absolutely can.

You get used to it over time though, and it excels at capturing the idealized West Coast aesthetic. In particular, by being “not anime” it really helps you feel like it is somewhere else than Japan. The OVA is filled with long panning shots of detailed Los Angeles streets and beaches, named restaurants and garbled English menu items aplenty. Our friend Fred Patton - who isn’t a fan - comments that “Animation fans at the time said, only half-humorously, that it looked like the main purpose of the video was for a handful of Japanese animators to come to California and take a road trip from San Diego to Los Angeles for location shots.” But that never happened - this was made on a shoestring budget, and according to the same source as before no such site visit occurred. Instead, reference material was gathered by “searching bookstores, travel agencies, libraries, and even the American Cultural Center”, and it was a lot of work to get the details even half-right from that. Stop spreading lies, Fred Patton! Wait until you get my strongly worded comment on your blog, I don’t care if you passed away 6 years ago (RIP an absolute legend), get your facts straight!

Aided in this sense of immersion is the OVA's second source of notoriety: the absolutely banging city pop soundtrack by pop star Miho Fujiwara. The OP, Streets Are Hot, lives up to the name, straight fire:

And while not as peak, the rest of the OST doesn’t disappoint. Anime Youtuber STEVEM has a video on California Crisis that digs into the music side, as the history of city pop is absolutely his jam; for me I will just comment that it is a little lost now how western city pop was in Japan. Today it is of course “peak Japan” after its 2010’s retro internet boom, but if you listen to pop music from 1970’s Japan you still hear a lot of blending of western musical sensibilities and more traditional Japanese vocal stylings and instrumentation. City pop was one of the earlier genres to fully shed the past and embrace synth instrumentation and modern vocal approaches. And the aesthetic often pulled specifically from California - these are not album covers that scream Tokyo:

All of this is to say that this OVA is not only of its time, but it also embodies its time - a paean to the California Dream of the 80’s Tokyo youth:

Fucking vibes, man, for this alone the OVA really hits for me. Though of course, for all the Americana it is still an anime:

(Which by the way, Marcia rides a motorcycle on the highway and is clearly like 17, so Noera's rejection of an offer of sex here is more linguistic evidence for the bifurcated meaning of the word “lolicon” to refer to both actual prepubescent eroticization but also any preference for “youth” over “maturity” in typologies of femininity, intersecting with the bishoujo boom of th- okay okay, put the gun down, I’ll move on, geez…)

Sadly for California Crisis, its contemporary audience disagreed quite strongly with this being a symbol of the era; it was a huge flop. The OVA was the flagship project of a new anime venture by producer Hiromasa Shibazaki called Hiro Media Associates, and that shoestring budget was some very thin string. Shibazaki was launching his own anime+ magazine at the time, Globian (as seen in the links above), which was used to advertise their works - but towards that goal California Crisis only ever produced a single promotional image, which you see utilized everywhere it is mentioned:

So it just didn’t have the resources behind it to draw in a crowd. And the crowd it did draw in, best I can tell, wasn’t enthused; the art style was off-putting, the plot itself is a bit of a meandering mess, the long panning shots are ~vibes~ yes but also ~budget~ and obviously so, and the ending is a bit of a vague question mark. It was supposedly going to have a sequel, but Hiro Media, and Globian alongside it, closed shop soon after it was released, leaving audiences feeling that it was unfinished.

I won’t begrudge anyone their taste, or pretend it is not a very uneven work. However, I want to redeem the OVA’s core narrative from its reputation; I think it is honestly great, and it absolutely does not need a sequel. So let’s get into the plot - this is a story of a 20-something bar hand Noera, who runs into motorcycle-riding teen Marcia alongside a quasi-sentient UFO orb that just crash landed on earth. It beckons telepathically to be taken to Death Valley, a call which Noera resists but Marcia commits to heart-and-soul. Along the way the military, the CIA, the Soviets, every deep state boogeyman you can think of, all try to stop them, car chases and gunfire akimbo. Our duo bond, eventually they succeed, and the alien gives off a Kubrickian abstract flash of light and then vanishes - roll credits.

Ignore all the details, the mechanics, the CIA, all that shit. Puzzling and unsatisfying when you are watching it as a 17 year old, sure, but you are smarter now, you can separate the wheat from the chaff. Instead, why does Marcia want to follow a random alien orb into Death Valley?

Hilarious levels of on-the-nose buzzword dropping, oh sure. But behind that? Marcia is a teen, looking for meaning. She watches TV, reads books, dreams of being a hero, a protagonist, and this is it - the call of adventure! She is being offered the slot of main character and she isn’t going to turn it down. She literally name-drops Close Encounters of the Third Kind as part of her motivation, she is story-brained. When you first hear this line, you are like Noera, you eye roll it. But on reflection there is nothing more American than being the center of the universe - it truly is the American Dream.

But Marcia is not the main character of this story - the singular promotional image is lying to you. Noera is as well, and he has wisdom she doesn’t. Noera lives in the city fringe on a low wage service job, driving a beat-up Chrysler he presumably maintains himself. A blue collar man of habit, a himbo before it was hip. He follows Marcia to protect her, he casually rejects her post-car-chase adrenaline-rush-induced sexual advances. And, while they are escaping the military by hiding in a bar, he runs into an old high school friend Jack - who happens to be one of those military agents!

We have been seeing this guy the whole OVA, running the entire alien hunt operation. Top of the class, super genius, going places. Noera is unphased, and he and Jack reminisce about gags and girls from the old days. Noera congratulates his friend for “getting out” of his hometown, as it were, and then plot-duty calls, Jack’s real life calls, and he has to leave. As he does, Noera calls out to him, “Come visit me!":

And Jack leaves without saying anything:

Because it isn’t highschool anymore, right? This guy is in the Big Leagues, he isn’t gonna schlep out to some podunk bar in Long Beach because a dude he used to help do his geometry homework offers him a dri-

Oh, nevermind! Because none of that shit matters, right? We are all just dudes, let’s share a beer.

Marcia stares unaware through the entire scene by the way:

This is Noera’s “culminating moment” for his story, and she doesn’t track it.

Chasey chasey fighty fighty Death Valley journey and Marcia delivers the orb, she wins, with Noera’s help she saves the alien. And so it pulses out a sparkly rainbow, something that could maybe be interpreted as a thank you, and then leaves - giving them absolutely nothing to show for their efforts. Marcia is left on a panning shot, shocked and disappointed, holding a now broken piece of useless glass. She was never the main character of anything. She just ran an errand.

This is such good American Dream commentary! It ends the way all stories about the American Dream end - with it being a sham. Because it is. It’s all narrative, all marketing, all the outside trappings of something disconnected from the inner reality. Since this isn’t a midcentury novel but an anime OVA, the trappings of success aren’t a detached suburban home and 2.5 kids - it's being the hero of an action adventure epic. But fiction is fiction no matter the genre. Marcia doesn’t get that yet - but Noera already did before the VHS tape began to play. And Marcia’s budding realization is paralleled with Noera's own showcase of the socio-economic dilemmas that more typically define the genre - success doesn’t change who you are or what you need.

Once you step back from the sci fi spycraft stuff - which admittedly trails off - and see the themes, the ending is perfect, a sequel would totally ruin this. This is the best 80’s anime OVA commentary on the American Dream done through an otaku lens around. Definitely beats all the others in that category, for sure. Totally.

Anyway if you wanna fight me about my hot take meet me at the Waffen SS bar in 1980’s LA where I will be getting the shit kicked out of me for yelling my center-left political opinions while tipsily standing on the bartop:

All that research and I still have no explanation for this shot.

[spidermanifested]

rambly deltarune posting again this one goes out to everybody who followed me for my old man comic. The oldman newfollowers if you will. and granted this all may be old news or it may be nothing im just having fun on my blog [Chapters 3&4 Spoilers Obviously]

THOUGHTS ON THE DELTA RUNE

friends recently called to my attention the fact that in math, a delta symbolizes change

would make a lotta sense if this is what the games doing with it!

the voice talking to kris in the intro and game over screens (who everybodys calling gaster, and yeah that seems like a safe bet but im not going to put all my eggs. as it were. in one basket) wants to obtain the delta rune. it has some property they want, and i think the property of "change" is very very in line with everything else

Now Consider: The Prophecy. so much of chapter 4 cements that this is in large part a story about stories (hi black sails i love you black sails) and id wager likely inspired by toby foxs own experiences as a storyteller. the prophecy evokes some type of source material, or maybe just an outline, something with fixed points and a fixed trajectory but with plenty of wiggle room in between.

and considering gerson (who is himself an author) basically says all that flat out i dont think i have to justify that part too much more i can move on yes. Okay cool

where i Do think i might differ from most peoples takeaway is i dont quite think gersons saying "you can always change your fate/the ending of the video game deltarune if you simply try hard enough" especially since this games being written by someone who is not us and who has said theres only one ending. we quite literally dont get to decide how it ends! toby fox might pull something but still

when gerson talks about the prophecy he seems to mainly take issue with the *doctrine* of it– forcing oneself to fit into someone elses reading, even when it doesnt apply very well. he talks about interpretation, reading between the lines, picking up yourself where it leaves off. if the prophecy represents a source material, you cant really un-write whats already written, but youre still an active participant every time you bring your own lens to the text. by the same measure, you can take your own approach to the hands life deals you. there isnt one correct way to live.

this hasnt been the game about The Unique Power Of Determination so far; i dont think the solution to whatever quandary lies at the end is just "the gang fights a guy about it and SAVES DELTARUNE"

but then theres *The* delta rune. and if it really does hold the power of change, maybe it COULD let someone in this world use that power. the power to create a whole new story? something like the relationship between this game and undertale? (Or like. fanfiction. with the power of the delta rune we have created 5 thousand new types of sans)

if its gaster who wants it then, thatd be a pretty understandable motivation. i too would want to be a normal living person instead of a disembodied leitmotif

but whats more interesting than the gaster stuff to me is how a lot of other characters, at the moment anyway, seem to *clash* with change rather than desire it. the impulse to keep everything the same way forever is at the same time treated as sympathetic and universal, but also misguided, dangerous and downright impossible.

susie expresses wanting to live the same day over and over after finding friendship in the dark world. carol has put her entire house in literal cryostasis. asgore is desperate to get his family "back to normal" before his son gets home from college even though "normal" Was Not Good For Anybody, and hes making things worse by chasing a return to it!

so. the power of change is not going to be an immediately helpful-seeming force to the main trio, i dont think, and susie in particular will probably struggle with it because for the first time in her life shes found a status quo that makes her happy. god.

fun fact when the chapters dropped and i was first watching people play them, i was at my moms elementary school helping teach her class for the last few days of the year, and one of her students was this girl whod had a hard time in the foster system but she immediately latched onto me and gave me things out of her desk. So watching susies more emotional scenes i did cry

in any case what destination all these pieces are headed towards i can only wait and see. its goign to be so good though i know it is

and in the end. i mean. Literally in the end, all stories have to end sometime. the game cant go on forever like we might want it to, unless we all got together and kept it going ourselves. who knows maybe the real deltarune... was the friends we made along the way

THOUGHTS ABOUT THE SOUL

i talked about my "this soul maybe does not originally belong to kris" thing in the ghost trick post but heres another thing ive been pondering

the lyrics of the song in chapter 3 mention "your heart as my ark". obviously loads of christian imagery in the deltarune mythos but noahs ark specifically was a vessel for escaping one worlds end and being brought into a new one

so we have the delta rune, this thing that (if im right) could Create a whole new world.

And, theres one commonality attached to the heart in both games. right? someone whos traveled from the old world? into the new one?

🫵😐

i think either this is referring to Us having literally come here from undertale, or a character from undertale has hitched a ride on the soul. or both. theres been a really good meshing of the baseline story with the meta aspects so far in a way that you dont have to sacrifice one reading to make sense of the other, so im hoping that keeps up, as hard as i know it probably is to write

i dont really have anything else to add to this one at the present time. umm. When the video game is good

[chimerafeathers]

.

i may be sticking my foot in it but i have mixed opinions about further messing with the genders/pronouns/etc of already queer characters

like, from a personal standpoint, i’m very…gender is nothing to me. aroace, agender, gendervoid, whatever. my first impulse is towards a lack rather than a distinct presence; i’m more likely to headcanon a “cis” character as agender (and often aroace) rather than binary trans, and not have strong feelings about more, uh, genderful headcanons other than in a thumbs-up, “happy to see it but wouldn’t have reached that conclusion on my own” kinda way. it’s just kind of a personal general apathy at a base level, on account of not entirely comprehending what having a pull or desire towards a gendered sense of self is like.

on the other hand, i do find it really cool to see people play with gender in ways other than my “join me in the void” approach; i’m happy to see people enthusiastic about trans headcanons that don’t match the character’s “canon” gender/pronouns, connecting elements of their characterization to their own experiences with gender and sexuality, or generally treating the scope of canon as a stage in a character’s life and not the end-all, be-all of their personal introspection and development. you might Know you are one thing your entire life, you might make the discovery once and be done with it, but you might also change labels, pronouns, understandings of yourself as an ongoing process that may or may not ever have a concrete endpoint.

but like….with already canonically queer characters. where do you draw the line between “playing with gender in the spirit of the original and in conversation with the themes and core of the character” and “just straight up overwriting and denying an already marginalized/underrepresented identity”? is it having fun with the character, or is it treating what they are as “not good enough”?

i feel like it’s a “your mileage may vary” case-by-case kind of thing. a concept that could feel enlightened and freeing and relatable to one person’s unique gender experience might feel invasive, limiting, like getting slammed back into a box by another; maybe it’s the concept itself, maybe it’s all down to the approach and intent.

it’s hard for me to make definitive generalizations of “well, doing this is ALWAYS bad and incorrect” even while firmly believing there are many cases of Yeah, That’s Just Completely Bad and Incorrect, because i also firmly believe that gender and sexuality aren’t always stagnant immutable traits, and fiction (and fandom in particular) is a space for the exploration of possibilities rather than exclusively adhering to “fact.”

it’s just always a question of “is this “possibility” actually progressive, thoughtful, and interesting in its engagement with the source material, or is it circling back around to being less progressive, thoughtful, and interesting than what was already there?” and i don’t think there’s one blanket answer for every situation.

[hms-no-fun]

i just want you to know that i read... i think Most of godfeels and had to stop because i was not enjoying it. but i think its really good and i really respect what you do. i think it's all too easy for people to mix up "this is not my cup of tea" with "this is bad and/or problematic". they dont take the time to see the artistry in it, why it is what it is, what it might be saying beyond their surface level read and the kneejerk reaction to it.

i also wanted to note that ive always been kind of scared of sharing fanworks for fear of writing "out of character" - and ive also even been afraid of it in original works. character isn't real and concrete, so anyone can decide something's out of character. so your exploration of that concept gives me more confidence as a writer. i really appreciate that and everything else you do. :)

thank you so much for this message! i'm glad you tapped out rather than force your way through something you weren't enjoying, that's a very mature response and something i wish more folks would recognize as a perfectly valid option. in fact i think pushing through and reading long after you've given up on the material, so to speak, is a great way to wind up angry at a writer for having "forced" you to endure such a trying experience. as i've said before, an author can't force you to do anything. you can close the book any time you like.

as far as the tension of "in character/out of character" goes, i think a lot of people in fandom struggle with the fact that "character" is very much in the eye of the beholder. sub-groups form within fandoms based on identities, politics, sexual predilections, etc, and typically gather around the fire that is their particular interpretation of a character. but from within that sub-group, it's rarely considered "an interpretation" so much as the obvious intended truth of the text. it's that intoxicating mood of finding people who share a perspective you rarely see elsewhere, like oh my god, you GET it, finally someone GETS it!

in homestuck fandom, for instance, quite a lot of people hate vriska and think she sucks, with a vocal sub-group of that sub-group still actively beating the drum that everything about her arc after [S] Game Over is the worst part of homestuck. but i love vriska, and my corner of the fandom very much organized around a full-throated defense of her. some folks think homestuck did tavros and gamzee dirty and that this is a fatal flaw in the text; when i countenance these people, i am convinced we read two very different comics. who's right and who's wrong? there are degrees. i can pull out any number of quotes from andrew hussie about the importance of vriska and the weenieness of tavros, but then, authors love to say things, and there's plenty of stories i love in ways that directly oppose to the authors' stated intent. the debate can never end because we are only ever talking about the version of a character or story that exists in our heads, based on the things that stuck with us when we read the thing (however long ago that was-- which is important because i find a LOT of people adamantly defending their headcanons haven't read the source text in a number of years. as time passes, your perception of the media you've experienced in the past morphs and distorts. someone who was right five years ago can be wrong today and not even notice the difference).

something i've realized in the last year is how much godfeels emerged from a very specific milieu, not just in terms of how we interpreted certain characters but in our approach to analyzing and talking about the text altogether. i believe most of the important stuff in godfeels is "in character" in most of the ways that matter, but it's built on a very specific meta that centered vrisrezi and transness and radical leftist politics and experimental hypertext. really, it's a post-Epilogues fanwork even despite the fact that godfeels 1 predates their release by a few weeks. and i think to this day a lot of homestuck fans haven't read the epilogues but have read fandom posts about how terrible they are (quite a lot of which will have either been written by teens, by people who already didn't like homestuck very much, or by one of the regressive stalkery weirdos prominent in the homestuck reddit/discord), and that misapprehension keeps them in the dark about just how many amazing tools the epilogues introduce to the homestuck formula that exponentially expand the expressive possibilities of attentive fanworks. and it of course elides the fact that the homestuck epilogues are a story about being in your 30s. i think we'll be getting a big re-appraisal of the epilogues in 5-10 years. it'll be the "twin peaks: fire walk with me" of homestuck, just you wait.

so these readers see my version of dirk being an unhinged murderous dick to a newly-out trans woman and go "he would never do that." then if i point at the epilogues, they'll say "i didn't read them/they're not even canon/that wasn't in character either." at which point there's nothing really to say, because we have two completely different perceptions of the text. who's right and who's wrong is almost always infinitely subjective, a circumstance that humans are notable for being very good at handling in a mature and politely discursive manner.

so i've got an "author's introduction" to godfeels baking in my docs to provide some context about the meta this story is built on, the milieu it came out of, that sort of thing. it won't make much of a difference in practical terms, but it'll at least be something i can point to.

in any event, thanks for this message. all i ever want is for people to give it an honest shot. i hope you can continue harvesting confidence from wherever it can be found. it takes a lot of audacity and backbone to be an artist, especially when you have something worthwhile to say. remember that you're not writing for the haters, you're writing for the kind of person, like you, who wants to see more stories like the thing you're writing. they're the ones who'll get it, they're the ones who'll stick around long after the haters have lost interest.

[monstersinthecosmos]

can i ask what you mean re: disliking how the amc show deals with SA? (zero judgement ftr i just love hearing opinions about this show from other simple italian perv enjoyers. btw you're one of my favorite fic authors ever ever & i think abt gallows bird daily 🙈)

Obviously since you mentioned Gallows Bird in this very ask (thank you btw dskjglads I’m blushing) I’m not going to sit here and say people should never write about rape!!!!!!!!!!!  And I’ve been soul searching and talking this out with a friend today to make sure I’m not just being a hater and that I’m not having cognitive dissonance over the difference between writing porn (intentionally, intended as porn, labeled as porn) vs lazily throwing sexual assault at female characters for “character development”.

(putting this under a cut bc I'm not trying to hate on youse guys's show!!)

It's not that we should never talk about it, or never write about it, but I think it’s like any other storytelling where like, the framework and intention inside the text matters, and criticizing if it landed the way the creator intended is worth discussing. So like, I’m a fan of noncon smut fic, I won’t deny that. I also approach it in a context where I know I’m consuming smut, and it was intended as smut, and it belongs in its own lane. And I think, personally, I enjoy fics (which by nature are anarchistic and transformative) because they tend to be a commentary either on our culture or on the canon source material. Even when fanfics are PWPs that don’t go out of their way to talk about character arcs or make profound commentary on the canon, fanfic EXISTS as a commentary on canon in the first place, so it’s there by default.

So with AMC there’s a few things that really bother me about how they wrote Claudia in S1, and full disclosure I haven’t watched S2 yet, so take this with a grain of salt.

I don’t think it’s cool when a production team of mostly cishet men think that the only way to develop a female character is to have her raped. It’s lazy and it’s hurtful to the audience, and in this particular show it was not handled with sensitivity to make the story worth it. Like, what was the weight of the scene vs what it told us, and what was the payoff? Did the show earn this? (I personally don’t think it did.)

RJ himself said it was to “toughen her up” and that’s just, absolutely fucking nauseating to me, especially when it’s stamped with so many hallmarks of How Not to Write Rape. For example, the fact that they use it to tell us about LOUIS. It’s about LOUIS. It’s not about Claudia at all; we see her assault and the net result is seeing how it affects the MEN in her life. And even using her diary as a framing device for these moments, to tell it from her own words the best they can, it’s still about Louis. The pages being ripped out (in S1, idk how this lands in S2) are about protecting Louis. Claudia didn't remove the pages to protect herself, as far as we know--the men in her life removed them to protect Louis. Fridging a female character for the sake of developing the mens feelings is lazy and obnoxious, and in this story in particular it felt extremely unnecessary to the plot, and adding it at all just came across as gratuitous to me.

(Also, I can tell that this show is like, an exercise in slow burning, but, I just think the bar is really fucking high if they make this all mean something smarter but made everyone sit through this and wait 1.5+ years to get around to tucking it in lol. And like, idk what the pages could possibly say/how they will present it that will change my opinion, but RJ's comments can't be unheard so I'm not sure it matters and the trust simply isn't here, for me. Personally I don't have the patience to wait years for a show to close a loop like this but maybe you're more patient than me.)

I don’t want to get into a whole side essay about how gross I find the Claudia writing in general, but like, as a TLDR the way they aged her up only to reduce her to sex is just so fucking gross to me, and not like in a IT’S HORROR, IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE GROSS way, but in a This Is Kinda Fucking Sexist way. Especially with the sexist comments RJ has made about Anne Rice herself, while piggybacking her IP to make his show. But like, there were OTHER things about Claudia already. They already told us she came from an abusive background. She did not need to be raped for her to come home and recognize the abuse between her parents. Any number of horrific things could’ve happened to her out in the world, but the only way this team knows how to traumatize a girl is to have her raped.

And again I didn’t watch S2 yet so like, I’m not entirely sure how it shakes out, correct me if I’m wrong, but we find out now that it was prolonged and worse than what S1 showed us?

Like, why.

Who does the torture porn serve. We already got it, it was already horrific. We already got it. You’re overselling lol.

Claudia is already tough. She survived her dismal mortal life, she survived Lestat. She was brave enough to wander into the world, not just as a teen, but as a Black girl! She was already independent! In the book, she was the driving force behind helping Louis escape Lestat, and she was pulling the strings in getting them to Europe. The show has that material to pull from. We can see that she’s strong already. We don’t need more rape to communicate it. It’s lazy and gross. Especially when, in the same episode, they are able to traumatize Louis with horrific violence. The show knew how to use violence, mind gift manipulation, race and age and power dynamics in ways that did not involve rape, but still chose to have Claudia raped.

I don’t have an issue with stories talking about sexual assault but I think like, especially after Game of Thrones, we’ve had like, 10 years of media criticism mapping out how to write sexual assault successfully or respectfully, we’ve had endless commentary about how we can find other ways to traumatize women that do not rely on sexual assault, we’ve had endless commentary about how stories about sexual assault would be more effective if they were about the victim and not ultimately about the men in the story.  Like, enough of this already.

So, I’ll be curious to see how the show handles Armand’s sexual assault history, and if we see the writing handled differently because he’s a man, or because we have him directly on screen to tell us about it. This might reveal if this is a like, “only tool in the toolbox is rape” situation or a “women exist in fiction to be raped” situation. But if Lestat suffered at the hands of Magnus without being raped and Louis suffered at the hands of Lestat without being raped*, I have to ask why it was okay to have Claudia raped, why that was the thing they came up with, and while they can’t backpedal and fix the way RJ spoke about it during S1, they have an opportunity to be more intentional with the way they write it for Armand.

(*I do want to add that S1E5 being bookended by blood drinking was a hint that Lestat drinking from Louis during their fight was also rape, contrasted by the way Louis drinks from Armand in the beginning as ~ lovemaking ~; imo that could've been a more tasteful way to handle it in this universe specifically, when that’s the sex analog in the books. So like, yes in some ways Louis was raped by Lestat in this episode, but that also shows we respect Louis enough to have it symbolic vs Claudia’s being literal.)

But I just have a real bad feeling, the way they made Lestat WAY WORSE I just imagine they’ll do the same to Marius. And it’s sort of ironic that the show in a lot of ways exists in conversation with the book canon, like, the racial commentary feels at times like a commentary on the books’ racism, and I wonder what the decision making process was when they were picking which themes to correct, or comment on. Because a LOT of people criticize themes of rape and abuse in VC, and in some ways the show making it more overt feels like they’re putting a huge spotlight on it to acknowledge it properly, and in other ways, having Claudia raped feels like it’s going down the same path of insensitive, shallow writing.

And also, idk where I’m supposed to tuck this thought lol, but as an addendum I can’t not mention that I think it’s really fucked up that they’ve talked nonstop about how much they respect AR and the canon and yet had the analog character of her daughter raped. Like, in S1 they burn the tapes, in S2 they mock the plotlines as being a soap opera, and they have her daughter raped. Like, Claudia was the REASON for VC in the first place. IWTV is about Anne Rice grieving her daughter, and it sucks that the best way they could come up with existential cosmic horror for a teen girl vampire was to give her a perma-hymen and have her raped. It’s just gross, I don’t like it lol.

The first quote I saw from RJ when the show got announced, he said something like "IWTV was written by a grieving mother" -- not Anne Rice, best selling author who reinvented the vampire genre, but "a grieving mother." And it's just, idk. Rubs me the wrong way that he can reduce her that way and be this disrespectful for the character based on her daughter. =/

[paragonrobits]

Hobbes, from Calvin And Hobbes, has always been one of my all time favorite characters. Including Kirby and Yoshi, he's one of the earliest characters I hyper-fixated on that I am AWARE of having done that. There's probably a lot of interpretations to be made from that. Along with Vivi (Final Fantasy 9) and Knuckles (Sonic the Hedgehog), he's a character that lives in my brain so long and so ferociously that most of my online persona used Hobbes-Vivi-Knuckles as an acronym just because i liked them so much

so, naturally, when i eventually went to fanfic ideas, Hobbes poses a few unique challenges as a character to focus on.

Most specifically is that Hobbes' ambiguous nature makes it difficult to really figure out how he interacts with others. He does do it, in his own strange way. Part of his source material's dynamic, however, is that we see everything through Calvin's lens of perspective. When Hobbes does stuff, its done filtered through Calvin's perspective.

(This also makes C&H a fantastic training for the concept of the unreliable narrator, not as a negative concept or villifying the viewpoint character, but simply stating that their POV is not necessarily what Really Happened, in an objective sense, or that there is even a concept of objective-ness at all, but that's besides the point.)

So how exactly do you write a character who specifically is always interacting with one viewpoint character, who has thoughts and feelings and independent action, and has his own perspective, but is always specifically linked to another person? We know what he SAYS, and what he DOES, and how those infer character and perspective, but because he almost never really does things unrelated to Calvin himself, it makes it hard to figure out additional aspects of his character that would be simply in other stories.

One obvious way to change things up is to drop the differing reality perspective gimmick and make Hobbes just a tiger-thing that lives there. I think, back in the day, this was a pretty common fanfic approach, and perhaps not coincidentally also leaned very hard to giving them an explicitly brotherly relationship, or outright had Hobbes adopted by Calvin's parents. This opens up some things, but the central problem remains:

how exactly do you write new aspects of his character, or find innovative elements WITHIN his canonical character, when a lot about him is simply inferred by what he says and does with Calvin, and not always in a way that communicates character in an explicitly true way?

This, funnily enough, makes him not dissimilar to Homestuck's characters. One of Homestuck's particular quirks is that the story is communicated primarily through conversation logs between characters, and brief narration from a viewpoint character OR an omniscient narrator. A key point here is that we, again, hear what they say and do, but we do not see things directly from their perspective. This means that just about EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER is an unreliable narrator. We can infer things, but it can be very difficult to work out what they think and feel based on WHAT they say but you can't always take it at face value.

You must, instead, analyze what they say and do and determine how much of it is their own persona vs it being authentic in some way. This is harder for some characters than others; for instance, when Terezi plays with a mock trial that ends in her hanging a plush toy, is this just another example of the brutality of her culture that even her imagination is violent? Is she a brutal, draconian pseudo-lawyer that looks for opportunitiess to indulge her bloodlust with the flimsiest of excuses?

Or, as I think, is the fact that she is doing this to a senator (an assuredly high position, presuming it even exists in her world), over embezzlement (a crime that, given her world's brutal nature, probably isn't seen as a crime at all), a hidden sign that she is more genuinely Good than she believes herself to be, as this is about making someone face punishment for an abuse of power? Her being more noble at heart than her self-doubt lets her believe?

Hobbes works in a similar way. Through his interactions with Calvin, we can infer a few things about him. He's very philosophical, much like Calvin. Unlike Calvin, if things are bad, he simply accepts them and tries to deal with it as best they can rather than raging against it. He's mischievous, playful, has a vindictive streak that flares up before it cools down, he's a LOT more openly whimsical than Calvin ("WHAT'S THE POINT OF BEING COOL IF YOU CAN'T WEAR A SOMBRERO" says Hobbes). He is not nearly as pessimistic about the nature of people as his real life inspiration, but he clearly sees humans as colletively taking the world to Hell in a handbasket but in a melancholy 'I suppose this is how the world is' sort of way.

Part of all this is that, at his core, he IS a tiger. His nature informs his character in a way not exactly common to comic strip characters that are talking animals or animal-like beings; he's fierce, food-motivated and doesn't really sweat the small stuff. He's not disinterested in the tragedy of the world, and indeed in some way he functions as a moral compass of sorts, but he doesn't really agonize about it. This even informs his character design; his very long body, proportionately short legs and long arms make him look charmingly odd, but when he moves on all fours its surprisingly realistic, and his proportions look the way they do because its basically what a tiger WOULD look like if they could stand up without any other alterations.

[artbyblastweave]

ask game: Kamen Rider Ryuki, or any other Rider series if you've been able to watch more

This isn't going to be a "reverse unpopular opinion" so much as preaching to the choir, but one of my favorite things about Toku/Kamen Rider in general is that even at its most serious it never tries to elide or escape from the goofy superhero costumes- it leans into the stage-play production angle and endeavors to look cool within that idiom rather than viewing it as something to escape or transcend via better special effects technology, even when they've got it. The kaijin suits in particular are really really cool works of costume design that I don't really see having a home outside of this very specific approach. Compare and condemn the MCU and its tendency to haul ass away from the goofy four-color aesthetics of the source material- spandex becomes heavy ballistic weave and Kevlar and plate armor that's maybe stenciled with a design reminiscent of the comics if you squint, the ability to actually talk to birds gets sanded down into a deployable drone, and so on and so forth. I don't get the impression that Kamen Rider has ever been afraid of itself in the same way.

(Also the Ryuki suits, as I've mentioned before, are a masterclass in creating a design template where every member of the group shares similar modular design elements tying them together while still being completely distinct from each other, and in a way that allows for basically unlimited expansion as long as you can keep coming up with animals to base suits off of.)

[miloscat]

[Review] Demon's Souls (PS5)

It’s Demon’s Souls again… but it looks so pretty!

After tackling the Dark Souls trilogy, I wanted to revisit the oldest Souls game… which is now also the newest Souls game, thanks to a PS5-exclusive remake by Bluepoint Games. Their take on Shadow of the Colossus was faithful but gave the game the facelift it needed for me, so their handling of Demon's Souls didn't surprise me too much.

As FromSoft’s first entry in this metaseries (not counting the related King’s Field and Shadow Tower games) it’s understandable that Demon’s Souls is simpler than its successors. The structure is more straightforward, with separate levels to battle through. There’s fewer options for your build and armour loadout. It also predates mechanics like jumping, or plunging attacks, charge attacks, weapon skills, etc.

The remake does very little to add complexity or ideas from the many sequels into this game. For the broad strokes of the game design it’s faithful to a fault. Even no-brainer quality of life features like adding status effect bars or not locking armour pieces to your body type (ugh) were not implemented. At least rolling directions were improved, I guess. There’s a few new items and weapons, and apparently a hidden scavenger hunt much like Bluepoint’s coin collectibles in SotC, although I didn’t find any.

There’s a lot about Demon’s Souls that is clunky and obnoxious on a revisit. Your only source of healing being consumable is obvious, although I found the balance matched my skill level a little better this time. The weapon upgrade system continues to confound me, with different paths requiring specific materials that are locked to certain worlds, and lizards decrementing their spawn count if they escape you. The upshot of this is hours of grinding in particular locations to max your weapons, and god help you if you want to experiment or change your mind. Losing half your maximum health if you die, or sacrificing a precious ring slot to lose only a quarter, that sucks. And don’t even get me started on the World Tendency mechanic that locks content, items, and NPC interactions behind requiring you to either play perfectly or jump through hoops to manipulate a poorly-communicated stat.

None of this is addressed in the remake. The big change that Bluepoint did decide to make is to the inventory load system. It’s still there unfortunately, limiting the total items you can have on hand and requiring constant visits to Stockpile Thomas in the hub. I can see the idea, of planning your loadout and strategically balancing your items against their mass, but in practice it’s just a constant fuss and bother that feels restrictive and needlessly penalising. Bluepoint’s band-aid slapped over this mechanic is letting you send items to the stockpile at any time (but not retrieve them), including a prompt when picking up something that would be too heavy. It’s a step in the right direction but doesn’t address the underlying issue, and they felt the need to counterbalance this generosity by dramatically increasing the weight of all healing grasses. Gee, thanks.

With the rant out of the way, I do have some nice things to say. The foundation of the game itself is strong and I get on well with the straightforward approach to level design; there are still side paths, shortcuts, and surprises after all, and being able to tackle them in any order is great, especially when there are clear intended solutions to enemy weaknesses and such. Many of the bosses are gimmicky or puzzley which is a fun change of pace from the later games’ approach, and the settings are all very distinctive and cool, especially the Tower of Latria stages; you can see why From likes to revisit ideas from this location so often! I was also pleased by how useful equipment with passive health regeneration were in this game compared to its sequels… this may seem minor but it adds up, especially with the way healing items work.

Bluepoint has of course made good and thoughtful choices in areas other than game design: for starters, the game looks stunning. I’ve heard art design quibbles where their changes have overridden strong or lore-important choices from the original game, but actually having a stable frame rate for the first time was far more impactful for me! On top of the richly detailed looks, the remake also uses the PS5’s grunt to minimise loading times between warps which also helps a ton with the game’s flow, although it can’t reduce those long runbacks! They've added a bunch of unique and brutal backstab animations. The Dualsense too gets a workout with lots of little rumble effects (contrasting with Elden Ring barely using them at all), but I could have done without having half the sound effects coming out of the controller for no reason.

I have to give a shoutout to the character creator, which has a lot of fun presets. There’s admittedly not as much fine-tuning you can do but Bluepoint did a good job making the task of creating a cool-looking player character more accessible. A focus on nice-looking faces carries over to the main game where NPCs now have lip-synced dialogue and facial movements, which is nice, and they’ve added a series-first helmet toggle if you want to see your own character’s mug during gameplay. With how lovingly modelled the characters and armour sets were I was disappointed that the Soul Form effects are more overbearing in the remake, with particles and a heavy shader obscuring your appearance.

After their Shadow of the Colossus remake stuck close to the PS2 game’s content despite a plethora of unfinished content in the game files and in concept art, I can accept that Bluepoint didn’t add any big new stuff to this remake. But come on, look me in the eye and tell me it wouldn’t have been the most awesomest thing ever for them to fix that sixth broken arch stone and flesh out the game world! There’s unused data and ideas out there that just didn’t make the cut in the original game, and restoring and completing that would have gone a long way to making this a more definitive edition of Demon’s Souls. As it is, I know a lot of people who prefer the PS3 version.

Part of it is that From were not involved at all in this remake. Sony owns the thing legally so it’s fair enough I suppose, and at least they did credit the original game team (side-eyes to Nintendo who have been failing to do this in their remakes). For me personally I enjoyed this more than my original DeS experience between the enhanced performance and graphics, and my greater familiarity with the series and its demands. I did miss the item duplication glitch that eased my PS3 playthrough greatly though!

[thelostgirl21]

You know, it occured to me that I should really let people fight their own battles.

So I've sent this messages (under the cut) here.

If it bothers his publishers, or Mr. Sapkowski himself in any way, given that the Witcher wikipedia apparently gave Netflix their own page when they came asking politely, I'm sure they won't mind doing the same for Mr. Sapkowski.

And if Mr. Sadkowski's people don't see any issue in having a single page blending books canon and games canon in the intro, and/or believe the way that the references are indicated are more than enough to ensure that the people looking at the wiki can quickly and clearly make the difference between what's part of the books and what's part of the games, I'll just have to let it go!

That being said, kudos to that "Wiki Specialist / Bureaucrat" for their patience and kindness in that conversation (and very lenghty answers... I've never had a moderator on any wikipedia devote so much time to answering me. I'm very impressed, actually.)

The fact remains that those decisions don't rely on a single person, and they pretty much have to convince the vast majority of the people working on the wiki that something is problematic and that those changes are indeed needed. So, it's not like they could have just gone "Of course! Just let me go and fix this right away!" whether they agreed with me, or not.

Some of the arguments they gave me might not even have been their own (when you're part of the group, you represent the group).

So yeah, I think that's probably the most productive / potentially effective approach, if I'm remotely hoping to actually fix anything.

And if it doesn't work, well, at least I'll know I've tried...

Hi,

I would like to bring your attention to a particular situation with the way that the current Witcher's wikipedia is run, that I believe is currently contributing to the misrepresentation of the content of Mr. Sapkowski's books in the media.

Essentially, instead of having chosen to adopt the model most often used by fandom wikipedias, where the source material has its own page, and each franchise/adaptation of that source material also have their own pages, the people in charge of the general Witcher's wikipedia have chosen a different approach, quote: "the idea when we started overhauling bios for characters was to make them read like an actual bio. Thus, we refrain from referencing the books, games, shows, and other adaptations within them as the focus is to summarize the character/their importance to the overall lore (the witcher lore is more than just the canon books). The only exceptions are items or crucial gameplay features where bios aren't as important as just providing quick game info for those needing game assistance.

[…] If there's anything to take away from this, you have to remember this wiki is about the witcher, not just the canon books, but the entire witcher lore and universe. We are not purist: that means all the adaptations, both canon and non-canon, are allowed here. Everyone appreciates the rich and in-depth Witcher series by Sapkowski. We also respect his thoughts that none of the other adaptations are canon to those novels and try to re-affirm that whenever it gets brought up. However, the witcher lore has been greatly expanded on by others with his approval/licensing and has also helped not only bring to life the witcher but also greatly expanded the witcher universe. To deny all the work by others (and let's face, many cite the CDPR games as the reason his books even soared in popularity outside Poland) would be a disservice to those who helped bring it to life and those looking for a complete picture of the entire lore (regardless which adaptation it came from)."

This was in response to me pointing out to them that the way their wikipedia has been designed (here is how it looked before I started trying to edit it: https://imgur.com/a/old-version-yZN6sd4 ), with the "game canon warning" placed where it was at some point in the biography, suggested that everything that had appeared before it (including the introduction paragraph that mixed both books lore, and videogames lore) were ALL part of Sapkowski's books, when that is not the case (here is a compilation of every reference that I was able to find about Radovid in the books, for your convenience: https://imgur.com/a/AbGA9eL ).

And that this confusion - regarding what is part of the books and what was written for the videogames by CD Projekt Red on the main Wikipedia page - has lead to at least 7 articles like this one pictured here ( https://imgur.com/a/CmOP41q , source: https://screenrant.com/the-witcher-king-radovid-future-books-games-comparison/ ), where game content has been erronously attributed directly to Andrzej Sapkowski.

All 7 articles can be found here: https://collider.com/the-witcher-season-3-jaskier-radovid-romance/ https://www.looper.com/1364442/why-the-witcher-season-breakup-radovid-and-jaskier-romance/ https://screenrant.com/the-witcher-season-3-prince-radovid-books-games-changes/ https://screenrant.com/the-witcher-king-radovid-future-books-games-comparison/ https://screenrant.com/the-witcher-season-3-king-radovid-age-story-different/ https://www.dualshockers.com/the-witcher-season-3-prince-radovid/ https://www.dualshockers.com/the-witcher-season-3-jaskier-radovid-relationship/

Though there may be more (Let's say I didn't do much digging to find them).

They also argued that "there are more than just Netflix and CDPR game adaptations and not all of them are confirmed canon to each other. For example, there's Polish comics that are also not canon, there is the original Hexer show and movie that the author has distanced himself from (but was created so the info still gets added here), the pen-and-paper games, and even non-canon and non-witcher books Sapkowski has written but still touched on topics within his witcher universe. In short it wouldn't be a simple "just 3 tabs" because the way you're wanting to split all info out, it'd be at least: canon books, CDPR games/Dark Horse comics/Gwent, Polish comics, non-canon books, Netflix's show, Hexer show/movie, pen-and-paper games, etc.. In short, this would be very impractical and create a lot of nearly empty pages (there are times where the books themselves only mentioned a sentence or two of something that got greatly expanded on in other adaptations). The main reason Netflix is its own tab is because that was requested by Netflix and it made more sense as the show progressed as they altered a lot of information to the point they were completely new bios (as opposed to just adding details in where gaps were to fit their narrative, like with CDPR's adaptation)."

So, here was my last answer to them:

Except the books are the source material, they are not adaptations of Mr Sapkowski's work!

In the examples you've given me:

The books and the added material Sapkowski wrote (like the details about legacies) are all part of the same lore / universe.

The videogames / gwent, etc. are all part of CDPR's own lore / universe.

"The Witcher", "Blood Origins", "Nightmare of the Wolf" are all part of Netflix's own lore / universe.

And then, you have "other adaptations", that are part of their own smaller universes, that could either have their own pages, or share one bigger page with a different section for each.

If you want to organize it into tabs, you would have:

Tab 1: The original franchise (with its own world / lore).

Tab 2: The videogame adaptation franchise (with its own world / lore).

Tab 3: The Netflix TV show franchise (with it's own world / lore).

Tab 4: The "standalones".

This is how most fandom Wikipedias are built, actually.

They are usually divided by franchises and recognize that each of them are their own distinct entities.

Not by mixing all together a bunch of different franchises that are not owned by the same people, and are not telling the same stories!

And Mr Sapkowski having sold the rights to videogame writers to create their own franchise from his own work, by borrowing any element from his books that they want, does not give CDPR the right to claim that their videogames are part of the same lore / world / franchise as Sapkowski's books (despite a lot of elements having been integrally borrowed from the books)!

Far from it!

And this shouldn't give the right to fans to blend his characters with the videogame characters, either, by using excuses such as "the videogame writers didn't diverge from what Sapkowski wrote to create their own character, therefore it's okay for us to absorb the book character into the videogame's, and treat that character as a single entity in the Wikipedia, rather than two completely different characters existing each in their two separate worlds".

And/or "since the page on the book section of the wiki would be just a small paragraph, it's better to make the CDPR character absorb them and treat what Sapkowski wrote as a simple template for the videogame character, rather than a full fledged book character, belonging to its own independent world/franchise!"

In the case of Radovid, for example, in the physical appearance section, it states he is bald.

Not:

Book: N/A

Games: Bald.

They aren't the same characters and they do not share the same continuity / world / lore / franchise, and yet, it has been decided that, because the videogame filled in blanks that Sapkowski never filled, he's officially bald!

We are treating the books and the videogames as a single franchise / entity where, if nothing was specified by Sapkowski about a specific aspect of the character, then who he is and what he looks like can be determined by CDPR.

And Sapkowski has never authorized the fans of his books to treat his work as belonging to the same franchise as the videogames, and in filling in any blanks that he didn't fill himself with someone else's work.

You can do it in your own fanfiction and headcanons because those aren't meant to accurately report or describe someone else's work, and they are personal to each fan.

But Wikipedia pages aren't supposed to be fanfiction.

Right now, regardless of all those added references, that's what Radovid's main page looks like: fans taking a character from an independent book franchise (the original material, no less) and using material from one of its adaptations (the CDPR one) to fill in the blanks and create their own mixed together version of the character!

Sapkowski is not David Gaider, that wrote stories and characters directly for "Dragon Age", and then published novels (prequels, sequels, etc.) that all exist as part of the same franchise.

In that situation, it makes perfect sense to put all the information gathered across books and games together as a single "Dragon Age" Wikipedia page for a character.

They share the same lore/world/franchise.

But here, we have three big franchises (Sapkowski's books a.k.a. the original, the CDPR games, and the Netflix TV show), that all belong to different people.

Even I only personally learnt that Mr. Sapkowski was not a "Polish David Gaider" thanks to the show, because until then, I thought that he was something like "The Witcher's lead videogame writer" that had written novels about it!

A lot of game fans are still under that impression and, the way "The Witcher" 's Wikipedia is built, treating everything as a single franchise all sharing the same lore on its page (if that's what you're saying), is extremely confusing for fans because they start thinking that the books and the games are all part of one single big franchise all sharing the same lore, that "Netflix has the chosen to disrespect"!

Netflix asking for their own page sadly only reinforced that belief.

But, at the same time, they are not part of the same franchises, so what were they supposed to do?

I don't remember having ever come across a Wikipedia that had appropriated the source material (the books) to give it to another franchise/universe (the games) in such a way as it is done here, to attempt to integrate game content into Sapkowski's universe.

Usually, on a fandom wiki dealing with more than a single version of a world/franchise based on a series of novels, you will have a specific section for the novels (source material), a section for the TV show and any graphic novels or novels written specifically for the world of the show (the adaptation), a section for the movie (another adaptation), etc.

For example, see "Jace Herondale" here ( https://shadowhunters.fandom.com/wiki/Jace_Herondale )? Under his info box you have:

Jace of Thule ( https://shadowhunters.fandom.com/wiki/Janus )

TV Jace ( https://shadowhunterstv.fandom.com/wiki/Jace_Herondale )

Film Jace ( https://shadowhunters.fandom.com/wiki/Film:Jace_Wayland )

This is usually how it is done when you want to respect and honor the integrity of the source material, and ensure it doesn't accidentally get erased / confused / absorbed into other people's work (or other people's work don't end up being added to it when the author has explicitly said they want to avoid it happening), and even avoid potential legal troubles (should the owner of the original material realize that their own original work is being absorbed into other people's work).

Because authors tolerate fandom activity as long as it benefits them and does not threaten the integrity of their work.

If characters from the books had their own pages, things like these articles I showed you would be a lot less likely to happen.

Because a quick search in "The Witcher" wikipedia would have brought these authors right to the "Books Radovid" 's page, and the way he's portrayed in the books would have been clearly written there.

I genuinely do not understand why "The Witcher" fans apparently care so little about preserving the integrity of the author's work in the fandom and in the media, that they think giving Andrzej Sapkowski's franchise (characters, lore…) its own standalone page for his characters, locations, etc. would be the same as giving "Gwent" its own page!"

Gwent belongs to CDPR!

"The Lady of the Lake" doesn't belong to CDPR! It belongs to Andrzej Sapkowski.

Do you see the difference, and how that argument fails to stand?

The books, as the source material, are more than deserving of their own Wikipedia pages.

If Sapkowski's books do not deserve their own pages on "The Witcher" wiki, free of additions taken from other people's adaptations (that the author keeps insisting are not part of the stories he wishes to tell), who does?"

And the answer I got was:

"I do really appreciate your thoughts on this, however as noted previously, we've already discussed this topic several times at length among admins and moderators over the years, and each time the majority have agreed it's best to keep the information as it is currently set/on one cohesive page with markers and refs. If anything changes in the future, we’ll be sure to revisit this topic and make any necessary adjustments as needed. For now though, most people reviewing the wiki (i.e., not those using bots to auto summarize) can easily distinguish between the canon books and other adaptations, and many in the community already know Sapkowski's stance so any newcomers to the lore generally are quick to learn this themselves. I thank you for your understanding!"

(Here is the link to the entire conversation: https://witcher.fandom.com/wiki/Message_Wall:Mechemik?threadId=4400000000000064664 )

From this conversation, we already know that when Netflix came knocking at their door, requesting that they be granted their own page on the Wikipedia, they complied.

So I figured, instead of continuing to argue with them, I would bring this issue directly to you.

That way, you'll be free to evaluate the situation, and decide if any action seems necessary.

Thank you, and wishing you to have a wonderful day!

[h0n3yk1tt3n]

oooooh now im curious what your particular interpretation of the squip is 👀

you asked for it /lh

so i've basically always taken a liking to the "cold emotionless computer that cares only about results and not the suffering that must occur to get said results" approach. a squip's sole purpose is to improve its user's life, right? to have jeremy be horrified over the house fire and have the squip respond to people - teenagers - getting hurt with indifference is a chilling way to set off those alarm bells in jeremy's head that there's something more sinister going on. and then we get to the whole hivemind bit later under the idea that if everyone is squipped, everyone's goals line up with jeremy's and there are less hoops to jump through when human error is removed from the probability pool. (envisioning possible futures, infinite variables spawning infinite room for unfavorable outcomes, yadda yadda yadda.)

the squip presents this as being in jeremy's best interest. "I'm going to improve your life, Jeremy. If I have to take over the entire [student body/world] to do it." (whether the hivemind was a red herring and the plan was always for the squips to get deactivated is another discussion entirely, but it does further emphasize just how many variables the squip had to account for and how determined it was help and/or "help" jeremy.)

sure the squip "emotes" in canon, in so much that it mimics human emotion in order to connect with jeremy and build his trust in it. or in cases where it's being blatantly hurtful a la "everything about you sucks," it's used as an intimidation tactic to scare jeremy into obedience because it brings this air of "wow, it's a scientific fact that i'm awful" and so he wants to listen to its advice and earn its approval. then the squip turns it around halfway through bmc part 2 by praising what jeremy could be when not five seconds earlier it was berating what he was. no emotion the squip is feeling is "real" so it can change them on a dime to suit however it's trying to manipulate jeremy at any given time.

i think they have a really interesting dynamic and i'd love to explore the manipulation and abuse tactics the squip uses on jeremy to wear him down and make him seek out its approval by doing as it says for hopes that he'll be better for it. (see also the quasi-love-bombing in bmc part 2 after the squip basically nitpicked and insulted him for a song and a half and later telling him how much he's improved just before the pitiful children)... and i want to emphasize this as an abusive dynamic between a teenager and a parental/mentor figure.

look no further than the squip calling jeremy "slugger" at the end of bmc part 2 and the script describing it as "very father/son after the ballgame," or hell, the very nature of a squip guiding you through life. it makes a lot of sense for jeremy to latch onto the first "functional adult" figure to waltz into his life and offer to help him because look at his dad. (this isn't shade. i love mr. heere because he reminds me so much of how my dad was when i was in middle-high school.) and the squip leans into this role the moment it sees mr. heere. "That's the source of your genetic material?" "That's my dad, yeah." "We should double those push-ups." it's implicitly saying "yeah your dad is shit, listen to me instead. i can actually help you."

now in case it somehow wasn't clear, i don't want anything to do with technical difficulties as anything even vaguely resembling a ship. but it would be a disservice to not mention that the way that the squip can take away jeremy's bodily autonomy on a whim and the kind of psychological damage that can do to jeremy does draw heavy comparisons to sexually abusive dynamics. (i can talk about how the squip's involvement in dywh completely exacerbated chloe's actions to be far worse than they would've otherwise been if she was just drunkenly bumbling around for four minutes - barring the discussion of whether or not the squip actually intended on letting chloe jump jer's bones or if it knew that she wouldn't actually get that far - until i'm blue in the face, and i have.) that being said, beyond this parallel, it's really not something i want to be super literal about, except in the one scene where it's about as literal as it gets without officially getting there.

which is why the "i'll tenderly guide you // just take me inside you" line works. yes it's creepy. yes it invokes an upsetting idea of where squipemy shippers got their fuel. but it's supposed to be unsettling. this is supposed to be the first real red flag shooting off in the audience's brain saying "hey i think this thing is the bad guy actually," because literally everyone got squicked out by the idea of fake keanu reeves saying this to a teenager.

"ya know for all this talk about the squip being manipulative and creepy, that kinda contradicts the emotionless computer trying to accomplish its goal and Improve Its User's Life thing. why would the squip go out of its way to be gross and mean when it could just present itself more logically, or not have halloween be a shitshow?" well that wouldn't be as fun to watch, for one thing. and for two things, it further emphasizes how it doesn't care who it has to hurt to get what it wants, even if that involves hurting the person that they're guiding.

let's look at the musical after the play. jeremy still has all his popular friends. michael came back for him so they're besties again. his dad is making efforts to actually Be A Dad after presumably years of sulking. and christine doesn't hate him after everything! (you could go as far as to say they even got together if you go off the bway ending.) things are ok.

and it's all because the show progressed exactly how it did.

jeremy had to block michael out so that he'd research into squips and ultimately end up deactivating them all. he had to date brooke in retaliation to jake dating christine so that chloe would want to kill two birds with one stone by getting back at jake and being petty to brooke in the process. the fire had to happen so that jeremy could question how trustworthy his squip really was. jeremy had to blow up at his dad so that he'd get his shit together, enlist michael's help, and have him save jeremy at the play. etc etc ad nauseam. everything had to go Exactly Perfect so that jeremy could come out of it with his old friend, his new friends, a more active dad, and depending on how you view the ending, the girl he'd been chasing after.

all the instances of the squip being manipulative and abusive are all meant to add up for jeremy to slowly realize that this wasn't who he wanted to be. he didn't want to hurt people. he didn't want to endure constant criticism and scorn for who he was. he wanted to like himself and have a support system that liked him too. and he had to go through a lot of shit to realize i shouldn't have to live like this and rebel against the squip and resist the voices in his head so that he could take the steps to actually liking himself for who he was and not for what the squip told him to be.

is this to say that the squip is actually good? NOPE! jer's squip is a textbook lawful evil character right there. maybe neutral evil at best.

you think the constant berating and shocking isn't going to stick with jeremy? voices in my head enforces that the bad voices don't just go away, but that you have know which ones to actually listen to. he's still gonna have "everything about you sucks" floating around in his head until the cows freeze over. like rich, he's going to wish that the "correct" choices could just be given to him instead of accepting that making mistakes is just part of having free will. it came free with your fucking xbox. there is still angst baked into the concept of once having someone smarter than you conditioning you into a certain persona and then being utterly lost when it's gone, even if they were a giant dick to you.

but for all the shitty things that the squip did... it did improve jeremy's life. it gave him a larger friend group, a more present dad, the self worth to say "fuck you, i'm gonna live my life how i want," and for the times when it wasn't nitpicking and abusing... things were good. it built jeremy up too. it encouraged him during agtikbi despite the jake suckerpunch, it acted paternal at the end of bmc part 2, it sounded damn near excited when presenting squipped christine to jeremy. look, here she is! she likes you! i told you you'd have her! sure, we don't really see enough of these nuances after the time jump between act one and two to gauge what things looked like when they were at their best, but you can still see in these small moments that they're there.

and while i'm as much a fan of jeremy being haunted by how much he hurt michael (and by extension how much everyone got hurt, indirectly or not), i'd like to see him be haunted by the good times too. to kinda miss aspects of the squip. to miss not having to think for himself. and to feel bad about it because how can he say he misses the thing that burnt jake's house down. the thing that isolated michael for weeks on end. that led brooke on. that caused so. much. suffering. and jeremy misses it??? i think it would be really fun to explore that not just with jeremy, but with rich as well. it's fun to shit on the squips for being evil bastards and watch rich and jeremy heal and become gleefully spiteful toward everything their squips told them to be, but i also wanna see all the contradicting thoughts and confusion and self-loathing it took for them to get to that point.

that. is a fic i wanna read.

[oddygaul]

Fallout

Fallout was a surprisingly loving and accurate recreation of the source material’s tone, but it didn’t do much for me overall.

I really dug all the references and the pretty spot-on portrayal of the Fallout setting, though - it’s a confident example of… what I’d call postmodern adaptations. Let me explain.

When I was growing up (so, late 90s / early aughts), general-audience adaptations of weird source material were stricken with a sort of plague. It seemed that the producers would recognize that a given IP was popular and could be spun up into a major production, but, simultaneously, felt there was no way to leave the brand as-is without alienating the general populace. Now, I understand that change is a necessary part of any adaptation. Movies adapted from books, for example, inherently require significant writing changes due to how much less time you have to tell the story. The era I’m talking about was not defined by writing changes, though - it was defined by changes to the core tone, worldbuilding, and aesthetic of properties which often bastardized them nearly beyond recognition.

Typically, these changes seemed to be about attaining a level of ‘realism’. They were willing to adapt a story about a teenager without radioactive spider powers fighting a flying green man, but god forbid they present it in a way that doesn’t seem realistic! This is most evident in the visual design for adaptations from this era - they’re desaturated, normalized, and dour to a one, no matter how vibrant the source material was. Think Dragonball Evolution, think The Last Airbender - works with distinct, idiosyncratic visual identities mushed into a samey, gritty look to serve some notion of conforming to an audience’s expectations.

The other place this striving for ‘realism’ reared its head was in the nuts and bolts of worldbuilding itself - the idea that the audience needs everything to be explained. Typically in original settings, you take the fantastical as a given. It doesn’t need to have some deep logic behind it, it doesn’t need to make proper scientific sense in our reality - it makes sense in their reality, so roll with it. That’s the point of creating your own setting!

Adaptations in that era seemed to be afraid of this, and had a tendency to overexplain things, and justify how they could exist in The Real World. Look, it’s not magic, see, they’re actually drawing on the quazium particles in the air to fuel their powers! And their cool magic amulet glows when they cast a spell because, uh, it’s reacting to the local buildup of quazium particles! …or whatever. This dogged desire to justify the very quirks that make a property unique ends up feeling clunky and draining the life out of it, and often calls attention to those differences in a way that confuses folks more than if you’d just left it alone in the first place!

So, if we call that the modernist approach, the current, ‘postmodern’ approach to adaptation is to simply trust the audience. Like, look, we’re in the internet age - maybe you don’t know the ins and outs of this particular franchise, but we know you’re a little freak for some fandom. Sure, maybe you don’t know about X particular detail of this setting, but through osmosis you know that it’s primarily about Y, and you know that everyone online really wants B and C to fuck each other - so we’re just gonna get on with it. Because of this trust in the audience, movies like Into the Spider-Verse can happen: an overwhelming smorgasbord of color, characters and lore that would give someone from the 60s a panic attack, which we, the attention-deficit dopamine junkies of the 2020s, take in stride.

And my favorite facet of this trust is an understanding that they don’t have to rub your face in the reference - it’s fine to just have it happen and move on. The people that get it will love it, and the people that don’t, well, they won’t even know they’re missing anything. The recent D&D movie, Honor Among Thieves, has many great examples of this. Rather than overt namedrops, its references tend to be situational - they’re subtle little moments that every D&D player has dealt with around the table:

-The players relentlessly bullying the DMPC for no particular reason -All but one of the players succeeding on a history check and proceeding to spout off their suddenly recalled knowledge -The party coming to an obstacle, looking through their inventory on their character sheet, then sheepishly saying “Uhh… we could tie this axe to a rope?”

All of these moments work at face value without game knowledge. But for anyone who’s been in those situations, they’re fun nods - and bely a deeper understanding by the creators of not just the brass tacks worldbuilding of D&D, but of what it's like to play D&D.

i fuckin love Zach Cherry man

So anyway, Fallout has a lot of this type of reference, especially in the Vault. Lucy’s post-marriage sequence feels straight out a game intro - all I have in my inventory is this wedding dress, so I guess that’s what I’m wearing for this combat tutorial! Also, the consummation / assault scene is filmed in such a dark, hopeless way after she gets stabbed - in most shows this wound would be a death sentence. But it’s Fallout, so she opens her pause screen, jabs a stimpak in there, it heals up instantly and she’s good to go!

Similarly, her little presentation at the beginning of the show might as well be a character creation screen - Repair, Science, Speech, Melee Weapons, Unarmed, Small Guns, a pretty good skill spread. Later on, we even get Disney Channel’s own Moisés Arias investigating what happened in the neighboring vault by walking around and seeing the skeletons posed in certain ways - Bethesda’s famous ~✩ e n v i r o n m e n t a l s t o r y t e l l i n g ✩~, baybee.

'10 years of cousin stuff' was probably my favorite single line (pic unrelated) (but is it though?)

That unnecessarily long tangent aside, though, as a whole the show didn’t hit for me. And even after quite a bit of thought, I don’t really have a succinct reason, either. By all means the character work is pretty solid - the contrasting ‘playthroughs’ shown by our 3 leads is a neat approach, and Fallout uses it to touch on some interesting themes about the breakdown of the social contract as we watch the slow testing of Lucy’s morals. The show also pretty well nails the tone of the games, which is an achievement given how fucking weird that tone is.

And yet - meh. Partly due to the inherent camp and satirical tone, I never felt totally immersed in the setting - it was hard for me to see the camps and towns as anything but hastily built sets. I also quickly grew tired of the hyperviolence that defines Fallout. It was mostly played for laughs, and maybe it’s just where I’m at in life, but it was hard for me to find the humor in gratuitous slow-motion footage of entire communities being brutally murdered. There’s a point where it just feels like the show gets off on watching the bright-eyed ingénue suffer - by the time we got to the finger-cutting scene I was pretty checked out.

From a plotting perspective, it also felt like it was trying just a bit too hard to be prestige TV. There’s absolutely stories where the slow burn of a series-wide conspiracy coming together is deeply satisfying - Severance is one of the best shows this decade imo - but it felt contrived in Fallout. I thought the loss of innocence and contrast between the sheltered Vault dwellers and the hardened survivors out in the wasteland was compelling enough; does it really benefit that story when, actually, turns out, all of these characters are connected, and three of the major characters all knew each other 200 years ago before the bombs even dropped? Does every loose end really have to tie up so neatly?

The Vault-Tec twist was dodgy, too. As far as I’m concerned, the twist that the Vaults are actually big fucked-up science experiments and not some safe bastion of humanity is one of the more compelling bits of Fallout’s lore, and I think that reveal was handled pretty well for first-time viewers. Do we really have to immediately one-up that by implying Vault-Tec are actually the ones responsible for kicking off the war? Tell me it’s not definitive all you want, even the implication sours me on the story - again, we’re reducing the scope of this entire, centuries-long story to the actions of like, a handful of people who all end up in the same room together.

Also, huge tease to include Matt Berry and only have him in one scene. Unforgivable.

[cyanobotcodes]

Procedural Skyboxes 1 - Atmosphere

Earth-like - no atmosphere to atmosphere

Earth-like - clear to overcast

Martian-esque - no dust to dust storm

static Earth-like light haze

Last week I was on holiday and did no work on my RimWorld mods. Instead I tried my hand at learning Unity. After powering through the tutorials, my project this week has been skyboxes.

Discussion and process below the cut.

First off I need to credit this tutorial by Jannik Boysen, without which I probably wouldn’t have gotten anywhere. I didn’t end up following the tutorial very closely in the end, but the first section in particular set me on the right track from knowing basically nothing about making a skybox.

My goal is a stylised, pretty skybox suitable for drawing skies for a variety of different atmospheric conditions, including other planets with very different atmospheres.

I did look into a physically-based approach (which is to say, a mathematical solution to try and simulate the way light moves through a real atmosphere as closely as possible). I found my understanding of both atmospheres and shaders somewhat lacking. And besides, I’m shooting for a somewhat more stylised look and feel.

As a result, physics will inform my choices, but I won’t be attempting to directly model real optics.

I can however recommend some sources from the reading I did for anyone who is interested in doing full physical simulation. (There’s a wealth of material out there, these are the ones I ended up bookmarking/downloading.):

Simulating the Colors of the Sky (scratchapixel.com)

Real-Time Rendering of Planets with Atmospheres, T. Schafhitzel, M. Falk, & T. Ertl

A Practical Analytic Model for Daylight, A.J. Preetham, P. Shirley & B. Smits

All-weather model for sky luminance distribution-preliminary configuration and validation, R. Perez, R. Seals, and J. Michalsky

Rendering Parametrizable Planetary Atmospheres with Multiple Scattering in Real-Time, O. Elek

A Scalable and Production Ready Sky and Atmosphere Rendering Technique, S. Hillaire

Mk0 - Black/Blue

Very simple. Two settings: the colour of the atmosphere, and a slider for the amount of atmosphere.

Hitch: the black spot.

A linear gradient from horizon to zenith produces an ugly black spot dead centre in the sky. I settled on a cubic gradient from the full atmosphere color at the horizon to 40% of it at the zenith.

Mk1 - Absorb/Scatter

The color of the sky that we see is produced by sunlight scattering through the atmosphere.. Much as when we look at the moon, we see it by the sunlight bouncing off its surface, we only see the sky by the sunlight bouncing off the particles in the air. For gases, the main form of scattering is Rayleigh scattering.

Contrary to popular opinion, the blue colour of the sky is not because of the oxygen in it (or not just the oxygen, at any rate). Most gases scatter far more blue light than any other visible wavelength. A nitrogen-only atmosphere would look very similar to our nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere, as would argon, methane, etc, etc. There are slight differences in scattered hue, but most atmospheres (considering only the gases!) are going to be blue-ish.

The biggest difference, as far as I'm aware, is for highly polarisable gases like sulfur dioxide (SO₂), which scatter noticeably more green light than nitrogen or oxygen, although they still scatter blue preferentially.

The “scatter” component of my skybox is essentially the same as the black/blue Mk0 model. Scattering is more intense near the horizon (because you are looking at/out through a thicker layer of atmosphere) and less intense toward the zenith.

However, oxygen does have one special contribution to the colour of Earth’s atmosphere: ozone: O₃. Ozone is blue. Actually blue, even in much smaller than atmospheric quantities, unlike common-or-garden oxygen or nitrogen. This means that it provides a noticeable contribution to the colour of the sky even though it is only present in tiny quantites (less than 10 parts per million even in the ozone layer).

Because the ozone layer is found high in the stratosphere (where the UV light from the sun hits the oxygen in the atmosphere), I am modelling its effect as applying before scattering (in reality they overlap, but I’m trying to keep it relatively simple). The ozone absorbs a small portion of the red and green light from incoming sunlight.

The effect is that the sky overhead is a deeper and richer blue than scattering alone produces:

Here’s a quick chlorine atmosphere, with both absorption and scatter contributing to the dense green colour.

It’s not a great representation of a chlorine atmosphere yet, because chlorine is so densely green. The sky would probably be darker and have less of a horizon-to-zenith gradient, due to the fact that most light would scatter many times before reaching the camera. Our model isn’t set up to handle this yet – but it still makes quite an attractive alien green sky.

Mk2 - Gas/Particulate

So far I’ve only modeled the effects of scattering by gases. Suspended particles of liquid or solid in the air have a massive effect on sky colour (as we all know from wildfires, dust storms, clouds, and other such phenomena). Suspended particulates are typically much larger particles than gases, and the dominant scattering effect is Mie scattering. 

For our purposes, the biggest difference is that light scattered by particulates tends to reflect the colour of the particulate substance, instead of just being blue or mostly-blue.

I therefore add a second scattering component, this one controlled by a particulate color and a particulate intensity.

Hitch: too blue

The intuitive first course of action is to add the two scattering components together. After all, the light we see is the sum of the light scattered by the atmospheric gases and the light scattered by the atmospheric particulates.

On the left, high intensity white scatter from water particles, barely making a dent in the blue of the sky. On the right, a rather fetching mauve sky that does not look a lot like the red dust in the air that it’s supposed to be showing.

The problem is that the amount of light scattered by the particulates rapidly becomes far more than the amount scattered by the gases. The 256-options-per-channel of standard RGB colour space just isn’t enough to represent the massively different amounts of light we’re talking about.

When the particulate densities are very low, the sky colour is dominated by the blue of the gases, with perhaps a tint from particulates in the air. As particulate densities get higher, the colour is dominated by the particulates. I wrote a function to slide smoothly between these two modes.

(While the sky might actually be darker with a lot of smoke, the colour on the screen will still probably be the brightest thing in the scene, due to the limited dynamic range of the colour space.)

Now we have a better representation of a hazy, overcast sky, or a Martian-esque storm of red-orange dust. But…

Another hitch: gradients

Both of the above images look kinda weird, because they are too bright at the horizon and too dark overhead. When the sky is very full of particles (high turbidity), it tends to look smooth and uniform from horizon to horizon.

This happens because of multiple scattering. When the total amount of scattering is low, most of the light that reaches the eye has only been scattered once. A small proportion has bounced twice, and an even smaller proportion two, three times, etc. Single scattering is usually a “good enough” model for clear skies.

But when the total amount of scattering gets very high, as in high turbidity, most of the light is bouncing around two or three times before reaching the camera. This means that the amount of light coming from any given direction has very little to do with what direction that is, or what direction it originally entered the atmosphere from.

A second function, kicking in at higher particulate intensities, slides the behaviour of the sky from “single-scattering” (gradient from horizon to zenith) to a single, uniform colour representing multiple scattering.

And that gets us to the shader shown at the top of the post. Some of the calculations probably still need tweaking, but it's hard to gauge exactly what needs to change without adding some more complex features...

Next up - stars.

[markedbyfireandash]

2024 Grimoire Challenge: January Week 1

Figured I could do the @2024-grimoire-challenge more consistently if I answer the prompts in batches instead of daily.

Preparatory Work

Notebooks I already have a planner-journal for messy notes, dream journaling, and personal insights, a pile of loose paper for research notes and organizing them, and a dedicated logbook for keeping track of arcane shenanigans. I'll be answering most of the prompts on my personal journal. Research-related ones will go to my research pile.

List of 52 herbs to study Skipping for now. I already have a good number of botanicals researched for both mundane and magical use. May instead post my research notes on whatever new plant I come across that interests me.

List of 52 crystals to study Definitely skipping. I don't use crystals enough to make a deep dive worth it. I already did my research on the ones I own, and currently have no plans to collect crystals for magical purposes. May or may not replace this with a random topic deep dive.

Grimoire

Naming the Book

I already do name my magical tools, even my journals! In my personal craft, names hold immense power, so the act of naming is itself some sort of consecration and empowering ritual. Considering their importance, I will be keeping these names private.

Outline/Index Pages

My arcane logbook has one, as it's the only one that will actually benefit a lot from it. The rest of my notebooks (including the pile) run mainly on tabs.

Definitions

Ritual Any action or set of actions with a symbolic, cultural, and/or emotional significance typically done on specified events.

Spell An act of magic done to achieve a specified purpose, usually to enact a change in the world according to the caster's will through symbolic gestures.

Personal Practice

Spell Writing

A spell is itself a tool that creates another tool specific to a predefined purpose. My approach to writing spells is very similar to problem-solving in general, and is very loose.

Identify a problem and its causes. If there's currently no direct problem, then I find a goal to achieve.

Identify the best or most feasible method to achieve the goal.

Survey available resources. Adjust goal and method if needed.

I don't adhere to a particular format, but in general, a spell for me consists of:

A source of energy or power

A way to color, filter, alter, move, or interact in any way with that power

An anchor or a physical vessel for the spell

Some examples of a power would be myself, a fire, physical movement (dance, wind, song), spirits, the materials themselves, celestial influence, cultural significance, and emotion. Interacting with that power may utilize divination, spirit communication, prayer, visualization techniques, meditation techniques, physical gestures, tools such as wands and knives, and so on. The anchor is not required, but it's useful for maintaining and dismantling spells, and I personally just like creating something physical for the spell to hold on to.

Common Tools

Paper, to hold names, words, sigils, and even material and immaterial influences. A blank canvas full of potential.

Any writing tool. A regular writing pen or pencil works, but brush and dip pens are great for working with specialized, magical inks. Toothpicks for writing on candles, cotton buds for harsher liquids such as alcohol and oil, chalk for most non-paper surfaces. Even a finger would do. A tool of creation and direction.

A tarot deck, sometimes a normal deck of playing cards, both a divination and a spell tool.

Candles - white tealights, mostly - to carry light or flame, act as a power, be a source of wax, or be a way to suffuse scent. Scented candles especially are reserved for offerings.

A tea cup, to hold water - and metaphorically 'hold' things that the hands can't. Cups are good for small things that don't need much heating. For anything that needs to be hotter than boiling water, I use the pot. Pair with a strainer to filter out unwanted things. Lidded containers for storage.

Washi tape, which makes hiding magic in plain sight easier.

Scissors for snipping plants, paper, thread, and connections.

Miniature, pen-sized broom used for quick cleansings and asperging.

Music, both to mask the sounds of spell casting and to define a space away from the mundane.

I should experiment with things like bookmarks and keys, and the tea plant stave I have currently just standing around the living room.

Calendar

The solstices mark very significant events in my life, so I like to honor those dates yearly.

Equinoxes mark a subtle but notable shift in the day cycles, so while they have no symbolic or cultural significance at the moment, I just like to track them.

Epagomenal days, ie the last 5 days of the year. Calculating when exactly they land is tricky so I just synchronized it with the usual calendar.

New years - lunar and Gregorian.

Fruiting and flowering seasons of mango, rambutan, kalachuchi (frangipani), and the cotton tree. Mostly because they're common in the area, but also because seeing them fruit and bloom gives me a lot of joy.

I'd like to add more specific dates, but they have more to do with local weather changes, which have lately been weird because of climate change.

Altar Design & Workspace

I do not have a set altar or workspace! If I need to perform a spell, I do it on the spot, using whatever flat surface is available if it is needed. Usually, that flat space is either a desk table or the dining table.a

What I do have is a spread in a notebook (one that opens flat) decorated and dedicated to specific deities, and I use that to better communicate with them every now and then.

Introspection: Personal Practices

(Keeping this one in my journal)

[argyrocratie]

"Standard monopoly, in the microeconomic sense, is when one firm in a market secures a dominant position in supplying a particular good. Radical monopoly, in contrast, is when an entire institutional complex makes the type of good itself artificially necessary in order to exist and crowds out alternatives. “Radical monopoly imposes compulsory consumption and thereby restricts personal autonomy. It constitutes a special kind of social control because it is enforced by means of the imposed consumption of a standard product that only large institutions can provide.”

I use the term “radical monopoly” to designate… the substitution of an industrial product or a professional service for a useful activity in which people engage or would like to engage. A radical monopoly paralyzes autonomous action in favor of professional deliveries.

The classic example of radical monopoly is car culture and its attendant urban sprawl.

Cars can thus monopolize traffic. They can shape a city into their image — practically ruling out locomotion on foot or by bicycle in Los Angeles…. That motor traffic curtails the right to walk, not that more people drive Chevies than Fords, constitutes radical monopoly…. [T]he radical monopoly cars establish is destructive in a special way. Cars create distance…. They drive wedges of highways into populated areas, and then extort tolls on the bridge over the remoteness between people that was manufactured for their sake. This monopoly over land turns space into car fodder. It destroys the environment for feet and bicycles. …A radical monopoly paralyzes autonomous action in favor of professional deliveries. The more completely vehicles dislocate people, the more traffic managers will be needed, and the more powerless people will be to walk home.

Another example is how the institutional complex around the building industry — contracting firms, materials production, building codes, etc. — has reinforced its own power at the expense of convivial alternatives. Favelas and shantytowns — often displaying a high degree of craftsmanship and technical skill — exist on the outskirts of cities all over the Global South (Colin Ward has a considerable body of work on the tradition of self-built housing in the West, as well). It’s entirely feasible, technically, to produce construction materials conducive to self-built housing by amateurs. “Components for new houses and utilities could be made very cheaply and designed for self-assembly.” Not only do local building codes prohibit such construction as unsafe, but they also prohibit competitive pressure for even professional contracting firms to adopt cheaper, vernacular building techniques using locally sourced material, by codifying conventional methods into law.

The problem of radical monopoly is exacerbated by a shared institutional culture that can imagine no solution to the negative effects of radical monopoly but to intensify the scale of the monopoly. With entire sincerity, for the most part, the managerial elites in a given policy area which suffers from the pathologies of radical monopoly are conditioned to perceive as “extreme” any proposed solution that cannot be carried out within the existing institutional framework, by people like themselves. That is, “the institution has come to define the purpose.” The only cure for a managerial bureaucracy’s mismanagement is to give it more resources and control. The standard approach of a managerial bureaucracy is to “solve a crisis by escalation.” Reforms which are carried out within the framework of radical monopoly “escalate what they are meant to eliminate.”[31]

-Kevin Carson, "The Thought of Ivan Illich: A Libertarian Analysis"

[natsmagi]

i was typing this in the notes to an ask but it gogt waaaay too long lol sorry. prefacing it with you know i love your artwork & i have nothing against what you choose to draw. also possibly worded weird cus i didnt write it in the sense of talking only to you alone

there is certainly this conflict between artists as random individuals and artists as a collective when it comes to how to approach this issue… as a hobbyist you can draw whatever you like but also when you have trends like a lack of fatness thats going to be disheartening too. i think the answer is getting more people into making art (& like general societal change of course since its an issue baked into bigotry.)

because as much as i agree with the sentiment of "there is significant under representation of fat women" (or characters in general) at the same time fandom is a hobby space and i dislike the notion of badgering individual artists to draw any particular thing especially when the source material does not have that thing. if you are looking for artwork of fat women thats great but i would not ever recommend something like enstars that has 1. no fat characters and 2. no women, barring a few exceptions. i think expecting to find fanart of fat women from a source entirely composed of thin men is unrealistic, even with the relative popularity of femstars.

plus there are other complications such as the typical modern fandom f/f scene sometimes being very strict and even vicious at times with their standards of what's enough diversity or what content is appropriate. ive heard a lot of anecdotes about people who WERE contributing to these things but whom were still harassed or got threats from other users over it not being good enough, and that's just not conducive to creating the environment or diversity you want. nobody is going to want to be in a fandom space where they have to walk on eggshells all the time. and i bring this up because of how you were clearly harassed by randos. accusing you of misogyny or shaming other womens' bodies as being "unrealistic" is not the way to go

the only reasonable solution i can think of to this is, again, to just encourage more artists to start drawing in the first place, or even better start contributing yourself. individuals should have the freedom to draw what they like without getting flamed for it AND people should be able to see themselves represented in artwork. i would like to see some more fat characters too, this is definitely something ive thought about before myself

(personally all the fat people i draw are ocs or portraits of people i know that i dont want to post online but maybe if i get some inspiration i will draw the long-sought chubby mugi myself. i am not super interested in femstars though so whether or not itd actually be fem mugi is up in the air. but all the talking here about this topic has had me thinking about following my own advice and putting what i want to see into the world.)

OUGHH THESE ARE ALL GOOD POINTS!! and i agree! the main thing we should be doing is ENCOURAGING people to add more diversity, not harassing them into it! people who only draw for fun arent really obligated to draw anything outside of their comfort zone, which again is why i think its better to simply uplift the idea of trying out new things and new appearances that you dont often draw

theres also SO MUCH room for more femstars artists too! and like ive said before if you wanna see something done right you gotta do it yourself. and i kind of like that. i like that everyone gets to craft their own little femstars variant of the enstars cast, and you can make them look however you want! and honestly? you SHOULD! seeing personal touches to designs always brings me joy, so even if you dont feel very confident in your art, if you have a specific vision for a character that you want brought to life please go ahead and draw it!! (or if you really dont want to you can always commission someone)

i also wanna highlight one of ur last points too bc yea. its unfortunate but often times whenever i see someone try adding diversity to their art for the first time they end up getting flamed because its not an accurate depiction of what they were trying to represent. and that really sucks! obviously we should strive to have accurate representation, but if its an artist that hasnt tried their hand on it before, ESPECIALLY a beginner artist, we shouldnt flame them for it. rather we should educate them on what went wrong and how they can improve for the future. these are people who actually WANT and are TRYING to add diversity to their art, but because in animanga circles theres a lack of education on how to draw more diverse features of really any kind. which is why trying to educate is far better than shaming. because if you shame these artists theyre gonna be too scared to try again, giving us less diversity once more

so yes basically what im saying is i want us all to encourage diversity and to help each other out by sharing resources and tips when it comes to drawing it!! one person is Obviously not gonna be able to do every single thing, which is why i want more people to pick up the pen and bring life to their visions!! also i really want more femstars food pelase pick up the pen i am a starved orphan and only femstars yuri can satiate me!!!!!!!!!