#manapools

[animalsandanimals]

Marlon du Toit (Instagram: marlondutoit)

Elephant bull named Boswell, Mana Pools National Park, Zimbabwe.

[zimbabweevisa456]

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[time-was-over]

i can assign every cookie run character a dnb or a breakcore artist. for example. white lily is very manapool core.

[azzie-beastbinder]

Alive Despite

He stood in the Jukai Forest again. Once more, there were two of him.

The human was dropped to its hands and knees, tears streaming down its face. “Why do we keep fighting? We can’t do this anymore!”

“We can,” the oni said, kneeling beside the human. “And we will.”

“Why? What’s the point?” the human howled, echoing the pain of their whole.

“Because we are not fighting for us. We are fighting for so many more.”

The Dokuchi Reckoners and the family. The Order of Jukai. The Warren of Dragons. Satoru and Greasefang, Arturo and Lazaro, Vasro, Shregresha, Turrak, Gesserith, Leta, the Roxies, Kilik, Biilziebub, Eishi, Lady Hana and Steel-Ear, Headhunter and Hush...the list went on and on now.

“We can’t help them all,” the human whimpered.

“No,” the oni agreed, “but we can try.”

Koda slowly cracked his eyes open. He was laying on his back in some very comfortable moss, and he could hear Satoru’s voice. These were two things that did not go together. As he stirred more fully, more details came to him. The smell of tea. What seemed to be breakfast sitting nearby. Leta and Vasro and Turrak’s voices joining Satoru’s. A soft blanket covering him. A manapool filled with Black and Green, though it was not his. A feeling of feral rage from somewhere in his bond with Haruko.

He licked his dry lips. “Satoru...?”

He barely had time to blink before Satoru knelt down beside him. “Koda...” That was also new. Satoru didn’t let concern into his voice this much.

Koda braced himself. Though every movement hurt, he managed to prop himself up on his elbows just before Satoru pulled him into a surprisingly gentle hug. His limbs ached, but Koda returned the hug. All he could think to say was, “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologizes unless you’re going to do better,” Satoru whispered. Koda felt tears staining the shoulder of his armor. “Let me comfort you after your heart attack, you little jerk.”

Koda didn’t deserve the comfort. Especially not when he felt his stomach drop – metaphorically speaking, of course. Arturo and Lazaro would think that they did something to cause this. “Arturo and Lazaro-”

“-Were told about what happened,” Satoru finished. “Kid, what did you do that finally pushed you into a full near-death heart attack?”

Koda’s exhale shook. It hurt, like everything else. “I needed to fix things,” he whispered. The wards to protect Kilik in the communicators drained him quickly. But he still needed to help – help Torrezon against Aclazotz any way he could, help protect Kilik from the archangel hunting them, help get Biilziebub to listen. “I’m a weapon, I need to-”

“No you aren’t.”

Koda blinked a few times.

Satoru pulled back a little, keeping Koda upright by the shoulders. “You’re not a weapon, Koda. You’re a person. You’re worth protecting too. I see it, Arturo and Lazaro see it, Lethaltooth and Silentsign see it, Ghostmark and Goldenscar see it, I can go on and on. We love you, Koda. You pushing yourself like this – into a grave, regardless of how late you think it is – is going to hurt more than just you.”

Koda’s mouth felt dry again. “I...” He trailed off.

Satoru eased him back down so he was laying properly. “No arguing, little bro. You’re going to accept help, non-negotiable. And we’re probably going to talk to Vasro about getting you blood pressure medication.”

Blind panic, more rage from the other side of the bond. Koda’s nails dug into Satoru’s prosthetic hands. “No! No medication, please, not that, I can’t do that, not after Sakai-”

Satoru gently took and squeezed Koda’s hands, grounding him again with both touch and voice. “Okay, okay. No medication. But we need to do something about this.” He paused for a moment to pull the blanket back over Koda. “I need you to swear to me that you don’t use magic for a while. Please. Not until we reunite you properly with Haruko and calm you both down. And then bare minimum – and I do mean minimum – when we do.”

“No magic,” Koda promised. “On my life.”

“You’re suicidal, that doesn’t mean what you think it does.”

“Fine. On Mom’s memory, then.”

“Deal. Now, you focus on recovering, because as it stands, everyone else is trapped in Torrezon until you can stand up and reunite with Haruko.”

Fuck. Haruko in her current frenzy wouldn’t recognize any of them as friends. Not until she was reunited with Koda. Koda gently reached towards his bond with her and found her still rabid and furious. He recoiled mentally, not from Haruko, but from her fury. “Understood,” he whispered.

“And kid?”

“Yeah?”

“Please ask for our help more. Don’t think that just because you’re a Reckoner boss that you had to do everything yourself.”

Koda fixed Satoru with a glare. “That’s what you do.”

Satoru paused. His gaze flit back and forth a few times. “It really isn’t. It just looks like it from the outside. I have Nari, Thistlefur, and several lieutenants. I genuinely permit them to handle things on my behalf, which you’re still learning.”

Koda clenched his fists under the blanket now. “But if I don’t-”

“-Then you’re disrespecting the competence of those around you.” Satoru crossed his arms. “I don’t know what it is about having a spark that makes you think you need to become a superhero or the sole protector of a plane or whatever, but I promise that we don’t all need rescuing. Let us carry you too, little brother. We want to help you. We want to know what happened to you so we can help you like you help all of us. In order to do that, we need you to talk to us, not just bottle it all up until you die.” Satoru’s voice cracked, another thing Koda had never heard before. “Don’t make me outlive you, kid. Please.”

“...I won’t. I’m sorry, Satoru.” Koda took a deep breath. “I...I don’t want to...to relive what he did to me...”

Satoru’s voice grew a little firm again. “Avoiding it isn’t helping. Please, Hayashi. I need to know what he did to you. I need to know how to help.”

Koda took another deep breath and began to speak.

He had lost track of what they injected him with after the first week. He could feel his body changing, even when Sakai would cut him open. The gills were the first thing to appear outwardly, but he had swiftly discovered how to hide them. The second notable thing was the minute temporal blinking, which he could only rarely do and never long enough to be safe. The third thing was his teeth growing into fangs, though he didn’t know what the true cause of it was. So many poisons and venoms and drugs had been injected into him during those three months of hell that he had singlehandedly catalogued most of them for the Dokuchi Reckoners upon his escape. Any unauthorized sound was punished by his throat being slit, over and over and over. Frankly, Koda didn’t even remember everything they did to him, every chip they tried to put in his brain before each one failed, every memory they tore into and tried to take from him. It was only through their own technological failures that the last one failed. Though Koda physically survived, a lot of him died in the grasp of Sakai and his Saiba Futurists.

Satoru took Koda’s left hand in both of his. “I’m sorry, little brother,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry. I should have done something.”

“You would have just gotten caught too,” was Koda’s pragmatic answer. “At least while he was torturing me, he wasn’t paying attention to anyone else.” A tear ran down the side of his face.

“You shouldn’t have had to be a martyr. Not you, not Benkei, not any other Reckoner suffering by his hand.”

He shouldn’t have had to be a martyr. But he had been.

The Koda that was captured was nothing like the Koda that had escaped.

[tsbs-shipfessions]

Hear me out - Rez x Sun

Rez who capitalizes on negative emotions for power and spreading negative star power

Sun whose method of coping with an ongoing list of negative and Traumatic events being "fake it til you make it!" Sun who learned Star Power from KC and near immediately was able to turn around and teach it to Nexus. Sun who never managed to learn magic with a manapool but is being taught ELECTIVELY BY AN ALIEN to use what is basically wild magic. That Sun.

The same Sun who has, on numerous occasions, implied or near outright said he was on the edge.

If Sun breaks, if the sun sets, then darkness will truly reign.

((And the darkness can give him an evil lil smooch while it's at it.))

[trancetales]

On naming and language in creative writing

I've been thinking recently about writing and specifically, coming up with names and terms within the setting. It can be easy to think to yourself about your own, or indeed of someone else's, choices of terms and names when you're creating a world and setting. "This name is so uninspired", or "This term sounds stupid." You might think it stands out like a sore thumb because it isn't an overly flowery term. That is fine.

Have you ever thought that about real world things? If, like myself, you've found yourself thinking that way about such things, maybe looking at some real world examples with a little more scrutiny can help put some of those thoughts at ease.

Lets start by looking at a few real world terms, first of all. Lets say you have a magic system, and it depends on something that you've called "manapools". Its a simple name, and its to the point. Its not the most out there name, but why should it be?

Have you ever thought about that time at the end of the week? You know, when the week ends, and it becomes the "weekend"? Its what we really called it in English. Its not very creative, but its what we call it, and nobody bats an eyelid. Why should they? That's what its called. Nobody thinks "the weekend should be called something more imaginative.

Another example is the word "waterfall". It couldn't possibly be more straightforward. It is where water falls. Water is falling, so, waterfall. Simple enough, and even someone who doesn't know what a waterfall is could probably piece together that a waterfall is that bit where the water is falling.

This is especially the case when you're talking about a fantasy or scifi term that will be completely new to someone. You actually want someone to recognise the term at a glance and have an idea what's going on. Not just because it makes it easier for the reader to recognise it easily, but because its more convincing from a storytelling perspective - even if there's a more scientific word in the world, are people really going to be using it? Have you ever heard anyone talk about Trochilidae? Probably not. Because when people see a bird that's making a humming sound, they're going to call it as they see it. A hummingbird.

Next, I'm going to touch on place names. Maybe your big city is called "King's Court". Maybe you're thinking that its not very inspired, in a world of Arendelles and Coruscants. If so, you might want to think about two things - real world place names, and the origin of the place names in media.

So we'll start with those two examples. Firstly, Arendelle, the setting for the film Frozen. Yes, it sounds like a fanciful name, but in actuality, its just a regular name but in the language. One source suggests that Aren would translate as eagle, and Delle is derived from the word for Valley. So if it were a name in English, it would just be Eagle Valley. The other example, Coruscant, is a planet from Star Wars. It sounds fancy, sure. But its actually just, a word. An unusual one, yes, but its just a word. Star War also features a city called Cloud City.

It's actually even less creative in real life. Here in the UK for instance, we have 25 places named "Kingston". This is literally just a contracted version of "King's Town", and when they had to distinguish them, they just stuck a bit on. Kingston upon Thames and Kingston upon Hull just put the river they were next to. And then there's Kingston near Lewes. The town is literally just called, "King's Town. The one near that other town." And don't get me started on how many places were just named after Alexander the Great.

The final thing I want to touch on is days and months of the calendar. If you choose to deviate away from the real world calendar, it can feel tricky to get a month that sounds like a month, and days can be even harder. That is, like before, less glaring if you think hard about the real ones.

Starting with days of the week, the simplest point I can make is this. In German, the word for Wednesday is Mittwoch, which literally just means, midweek. They didn't even bother giving it an actual name.

For months, again, its easy to overlook it because of how used to it we are, but not only are half of them really unimaginative, but they're also wrong. Everything up to June is based on parts of the pantheon and such, but when we hit July and August, these are literally just because Julius and Augustus wanted months named after them. So these two are just slight alterations of their names. After those two, we have September, October, November, and December. These ones are just names after the number of the month. Dec, meaning 10, is famously the 10th month, of course... So, not only is it basically just called "month number 10", about as unimaginative as it gets, it is also wrong.

On thinking these points over, I've personally found myself thinking less critically of my naming in all areas. If the UK can have 25 King's Towns, why can you not have a King's Court. If we have Hummingbirds, why the heck wouldn't your people call that fire-breathing dragon a Fire Dragon? And nothing could be worse than the months we have in our real calendar. So don't sell your naming prowess short, because you can't do much worse than the Romans did.

[karmasystem]

Karma and Perks

I believe this should be be the first mentioned thing; Karma.

As you progress through the game, instead of XP or Milestone leveling, you will get Karma.

Karma is gained after completing tasks or encounters, and can be spent at any time to get perks from a perk tree. This removes the traditional class system normally seen in TTRPG's like D&D, and allows for more customization.

These perks range in cost depending on how powerful it is. Though the maximum amount of karma (to start) is 10.

Ascension perks are the only kinds of perks which have no listed cost. The reason is because every ascension perk costs your current karma maximum, and naturally increases your karma maximum by 2.

Ascension perks are powerful, not only granting several abilities and bonuses, but also unlocking access to several other perk trees locked behind the ascension perks.

Im still making the perk trees, so I'll post the main details of these perks later when i make them.

When getting a perk, sometimes it will either increase your maximum health, or your manapool.

A character's health increase value is gonna be equal to their constitution modifier + species bonus (described next post) • 2.

The same goes for a characters manapool increase value, though instead of constitution, its their willpower modifier

So far this seems to work well for me. I'll post an update if i change anything

[emma-invega]

I only have one of my old clothing items left. My black manapool t-shirt. Evrythng else iz from the donation pile or the hospital, so my style iz so weird rn. I'm out n the backyard n sum olive green shorts w/ a shitload of zippers on em, a grey muscle tee w/ my white ass shoulders exposed n getting burnt, bright blue psych ward grippy socks, and sum brown grandpa lookin shoes w/ ciggie burn holes n em.

Steal her look: $0

[paradoxkinspace]

Tesseract - A Breakcore Jade Harley Playlist

20th century toad - toadmilk

Phase Alpha - Machine Girl

.hackmod - Golden Boy

fly me 2 the moon - Casper Mcfadden

Puppy Dog Soul - CubeNatural

Space Trippin' 214f - Lil Kevo 303

Infinite Transcendence - MANAPOOL, 99jakes

Young Girl A (Breakcore) - Scammacist

Dreamer - Goreshit

Dog Bus - Metaroom, Telemist

[northwest-cryptid]

A. Thank you for your kind words on this, it's always cool to see people be normal about music instead of insisting I listen to bad stuff.

B. I see that you were unaware of Vaporwave as a music genre so I'm gonna overshare for a moment because I'm autistic about this and I hope that's okay.

Basically as I understand it, and I won't be doing a fully history deep dive but; Vaporwave popped up around 12 years ago with THIS video:

It's arguably a remix, but it was made via a sample of Chris Deburgh's Lady in Red, you can actually hear the exact sample here at 2:40:

The song was essentially slowed down and given a sort of reverby-ethereal vibe to the whole thing. Something I overall enjoyed but found a bit too repetitive for me in the original Nobody Here video.

This sort of "Reverbed Ethereal Vibe" carries through a lot of Vaporwave music such as this:

This one lacks any lyrics at all focusing heavily on melody and I honestly think it's a lot better for it in my opinion because I'm less likely to recognize the repeating than I am with literally two words lol.

Of course, it would be wrong not to mention MACINTOSH PLUS, who basically popularized Vaporwave with FLORAL SHOPPE - 02 リサフランク420 - 現代のコンピュー which you've likely heard before even if you don't recognize the name:

And now is where it branches off into a ton of different micro sub-genres, you have a ton popping up but the one that caught my eye specifically was Future Funk. A sort of focus on the capitalistic boom of the 80's where new tech was all the rage, and brands meant everything. Except with a sort of fun and lively vibe rather than dystopian capitalistic hell. Future Funk also makes use of a lot of anime aesthetics and city pop / J-pop influences.

The big Future Funk influence of the era was SAINT PEPSI, Pepsi was sort of the artist that people looked to in order to say "sure I like Future Funk, at least the GOOD STUFF that isn't like all that cringe shit, I only listen to SAINT PEPSI because he makes GOOD music." Which is :| but the music slaps. Like if Vaporwave is too slow for you, or you're in the mood for something a little more upbeat, here ya go!

Right out the gate we can hear so much more energy here. This was sort of set as the norm for Future Funk, but for a lot of artists it strayed too far from it's Vaporwave roots and some took to making music somewhere in the middle, still upbeat and lively but with more of that classic ethereal feel to it.

To this day I will use this hour long beautiful mix of upbeat future funk classics whenever I'm cleaning the house or driving anywhere or doing anything that really requires me to just have energy.

This SLAPS and I know it by heart because I'm dumb and I've listened to it significantly too much. I think what really makes it for me is that it's not just a playlist video, it's a proper DJ mix seamlessly moving from one song to the next.

ANYWAYS, yea Vaporwave has a ton of sub genres and stuff to look into if anyone has any interest in it. I admittedly got hardcore into Future Funk but there's almost always something for everyone when it comes to Vaporwave.

You've got artists like Blank Banshee, Manapool, VAPERROR, MACINTOSH PLUS, SAINT PEPSI, ΛDRIΛNWΛVE, Vantage, Future Girlfriend 音楽 , 悲しい Android - Apartment , ミカヅキBIGWAVE

There's a ton, including indie artists like Strawberry Station (who's actually a really nice guy, we've spoken on occasion and it was nice to learn he's a chill dude.)

[time-was-over]

manapool released an ep and i didn’t even know. i’m ashamed. a fake fan.

[drowning-inmysleep]

Product Review: Fixed Persona

“Well… How do you think you know that person you were a second ago is the same person you are now? A continuous stream of memories. Given only that, we all create illusions within ourselves, saying that we each have only one fixed persona.”

Ever since I was child my main aspiration was to become a musician. I would be lying if I said I didn't also dream of fame - having my name on flyers, posters, billboards, whatever.

At this point of my life I can confidently say that I have achieved said aspiration. I've spoke on this in my previous writings so I will do my best not to repeat myself. I'm currently in a new relationship, we met eachother not longer than a month ago. Before we go to sleep we take turns asking questions about one another. One night, she asked me

"Would you ever want to be famous?"

I replied, "No, I lowkey already am and I hate it."

I said this because it's true. I meant it. It's a strange and invasive feeling to have people think they know you without ever having any meaningful conversation with them. Everyone knows me, knows my name, MANAPOOL.

Though they don't know me, they don't know my name, Alexandra.

It's hard for me to talk about, I fear I'll sound full of myself - like a rich person complaining about how sad they are regardless of the convenience of their life. I fear people will hear me talk about it and roll their eyes, it's practically my job to be full of myself and to sell that to people. I don't like it.

Everywhere I go people will stop me to talk to me about myself or the shows I put on, it's not always a negative thing. As it continues I start to feel myself losing grip of my persona. The perception of me that others hold is starting to taint me.

I suffer from severe - dissociative disorder. I have since I was 15, it came back to me after a therapist reawakened childhood trauma of mine. I'll tell you that story now.

[/] I was 8 years old and at a friends house, his sister was watching us though she was only 12. Their parents were at work. She called us into the parents room, which had a big window facing the intersection in front of the house. "Look! That cars been stopped there for SO long!" The car was indeed stopped in the middle of the intersection, to then have the driver get out, come around and open the passenger door. He pulled a drunk man out of the car and started beating him with a bottle. We were too young to process what was going on but we didn't stop watching. After minutes of the beating, the man stopped moving. The assailant got back in the car and drove off, leaving the mans body in the street. I called my mom and went home after that, I told my friends I felt sick. I didn't tell my mom what happened. The next day my mom was watching the news and as I walked past I saw a news story about the man from yesterday, he died from head trauma. [/]

I forgot about this until as I said above, I was 15. Once I remembered I didn't really think about it that much, but when I did I could feel myself losing grip of whatever was happening around me. I went into a 4 year long period that I barely remember now because it's a dissociative haze.

A friend of mine told me that sometimes when they look in my eyes they can see that i'm not really there, like I'm within myself. No longer present. I didn't think it was noticeable.

I mention all of this here to bring it back to where we started. Fame and the concept of others creating your persona. I used to love when people would celebrate me, but more often than not now whenever it happens I feel myself doing what my friend clocked me on. I repeat the phrase "Thank you so much".

A lot of the time they're not really talking with me, but at me, and their intention is not to get to know me but to acquire me as a person on their team. To be continued.