#might call em out in endnotes

[sunnysaystuff]

My stance on the Jegulus-Jily-"All Death Eaters suck because canon says so" dispute (or whatever):

TLDR AT THE BOTTOM!!!!!!!!!!!

After receiving MULTIPLE hate asks (wtf I'm literally nobody why do you care so much) guess I have to put this out here!!

first up - stuff I think is important:

Wolfstar isn't canon and it's the backbone of the fandom, so why do we suddenly decide canon is the shit when people write Jegulus/Jegulily fics? "James would've never liked a Death Eater" fanfiction means you can make stuff up, regardless of what canon James would've liked or wanted.

"Canon-compliant Jegulus fics don't make sense" did James explicitly tell you to your face that he would never date Regulus :0 canon-compliant is a very loose term. a lot of the time it just means that canonical deaths and plot-related events occurred, moreso than relationship-related events.

Jegulus haters often say that Jegulus fans constantly villainize Lily, but the fact of the matter is that they don't. You see more Jily fans villainizing Regulus for originally being a Death Eater than you see Jegulus fans villainizing Lily. "Regulus deserves the villainization and Lily hasn't done anything wrong" - reminder that you can hate on canon Regulus all you want (despite the fact that he eventually changed) but you should know that fanfiction might present him differently. Random fanfic Regulus is not the canon Regulus you despise.

Jegulus fans who despise Snape for his actions in canon aren't being very fair. He joined the Death Eaters and then he ended up working against the Dark Lord, just as Regulus did. Yes, he spent years bullying Harry, but do you honestly think Regulus wouldn't have behaved similarly if he had been in a similar position? If Regulus had been in love with Lily, and James and his brother and their friends were constantly making fun of him, and then Lily died after marrying someone he hated, do you think Regulus would have treated the godson of his estranged brother who betrayed Lily, the identical-to-James son of his enemy, with fairness or kindness? Regulus was canonically also not a nice person at all - was literally a Voldemort fanboy, and Snape wasn't even confirmed to be that much - and in fanon he's often characterized as this petty little shit. So do you think Regulus wouldn't have been awful to Harry as well?

Adding on to that, people call Snape toxic and creepy for being "obsessed with Lily" (he loved her because she was a bright spot in his awful life, platonic or romantic. Obsessed? Maybe <- My hot take), but when Regulus does it with James, it's sexy?

"Stop romanticizing Death Eaters" if it's not your cup of tea, don't read. I think these characters are just that, characters, and fanon stuff means you can do whatever you want with them! You can rewrite someone's entire story and personality if you want (ex: THOSE Dark Harry fics, a number of Dramione fics).

my personal opinions:

Jily and Jegulus are both super fun ships. Love 'em equally, though I'd say currently I'm leaning toward Jily.

I love Jegulily. I think it's really fun and has a lot of potential :0

I'm alr with Snape bashing and no Snape bashing (it's not that deep gang, same for Peter 'cause honestly it's kinda silly how people try to sub-in other characters as the 4th Marauder. Peter existed y'all.)

I think the Black sisters deserve more attention :0

Yes sometimes the characters are ooc in fics!! What to do when you see this and don't like it is click the back button!!

I don't have a problem with Remadora, but I prefer Wolfstar :)

I don't believe in canon casanova of gryffindor tower; I think it's cute in fanon though<3

endnotes/tldr since I wrote a whole essay:

ship and let ship. every (non-proship) ship is valid. this is what fanon's for.

let people hc and do what they want omg pls stop throwing hands over little things

have your opinions they're valid! just don't try to force them on others!!

feel free to argue with me in notes if you want; just be respectful please! I'm down to hear others' opinions; you might change my mind on stuff!!

might add more if I missed anything! I just thought it was lowkey important to put my opinion out here.

[sunlitmcgee]

and what if I DON’T care about a character’s nuance? What if I see them being awful to a child and think they’re just awful because that’s the way they decided to be? What then?

[harrydracobang]

Harry/Draco Big Bang Fic & Art: A Sense of Scale (Mature)

Title: A Sense of Scale Author: @fantalf Artist(s): @dragontamerdame Pairing(s): Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter, background original pairing Other Key Characters: Original Male & Female Characters, brief Neville Longbottom and Narcissa Malfoy appearances, mentions to other canon characters Rating: Mature Word Count: ~70,000 Era: Post-Hogwarts, EWE Content/Warnings: POV Draco Malfoy, POV Third Person, Potions Master Draco Malfoy, Flying Instructor Harry Potter, Powerful Harry Potter, Castelobruxo, Magical Theory, ayahuasca, Misunderstandings, Housemates, Recovery, Mutual Pining, Possession, Dark Magic, Brazilian Folklore, Brazilian Folkloric magical creatures, Past Relationship(s), Getting Back Together, Draco Malfoy is a bit of a liar, POC Harry Potter, a bit of angst, wildfire, villainous character, Manipulation, Implied/Referenced Animal Violence, Animal Death, but it's brief, latin america, Indigenous Culture Magic and Gods, a lot of bonding, but not between humans, Tattooed Harry Potter, Implied Sexual Content, Neville Longbottom & Draco Malfoy Friendship, Supportive Narcissa Black Malfoy, seriously though I don't claim this story makes a whole lot deal of sense, Draco has an obscene amount of nicknames for Harry, he's also so oblivious, but get mad at him not me, a very stubborn sentient school, and a temperamental parrot, don't kill me for this, Domestic Fluff, Drinking, Self-Worth Issues, Minor Character Death, Non-Consensual Entheogenic/psychedelic substance use (brief), Parselmouths & Parseltongue (Harry Potter), Familiars, Draco Malfoy Has Long Hair Summary: Potter merely shrugged, as if it was nothing. After all, it wasn’t his life’s work. “You can try to win it over.”

Draco snapped, “What?!”

“The school. Win it over.”

“How the fuck do I win a school over, Potter?! It’s a bloody school, not a person!” And he didn’t win people over that easily, overall.

“I don’t know. Use your charms. I know you to be very inventive.”

——

In which Draco spends an obscene amount of time thinking of new nicknames for The Living Git, lying to himself and using his charms to seduce an extremely uncooperative sentient school.

Author’s Notes: Somehow, when I joined the fandom back in January, my brain decided that BB was a great(!) fest to start writing fanfic. Boy, was I crazy. I clearly didn’t know better. I still don’t know what I’m doing half of the time, but I regret nothing.

So, let’s do it!

The name of the story and the quotes on the beginning of each part are from a poem called Detail of the Woods, by Richard Siken.

This is a crazy story that has no business making sense 100% of the time. That being said, there are some sentences in Portuguese throughout the fic. It’s totally understandable from the context and not knowing them won’t jeopardise your experience. But, if you’re really eager to know a bit of Portuguese, I left the translations on the endnotes of each chapter. There’s also I really long ending note—you’re free to ignore—about some history JK ignored when building Castelobruxo.

For this story, I researched a lot, and among my resources are the books Geografia dos Mitos Brasileiros by Luis da Camara Cascudo (Brazilian Myths’ Geography), and Lendas Indígenas (Indigenous Tales) by Iray Galrão; the YouTube channels of Felippe Barbosa and Ler Até Amanhecer (Read Until Dawn). The Moriaetem Potion is inspired by a real potion. I don’t intend to offend anyone, and I won’t claim to try to bring awareness about the question, because this story is purely for fun, but this is a genuine issue that has repercussions to this day.

SoS (pun intended) is totally self-indulgent and was born of my indignation with JK for what she’s done to this school. I wanted to make it right by writing something both fun and respectful about my culture, and though it might sound too insane at times, I love it and I hope you’ll also enjoy it.

BIG, incredible, enormous thank you to the following people: Chay, you’re one of the best best friends I could’ve wished for, thank you for putting up with my crazy ideas and encouraging me not to give them up. Tai, you’ve become a dear friend and your excitement and encouragement about this story kept me going (not only one of the OCs is named after you, but the story is also a gift for you). Crazybutgood… What can I say beyond thank you for being such an angel and such an important part of my life? You’re the best. Em and Spaceboundwitch, your eagerness and enthusiasm about SoS was contagious and made me cry. Thank you so much for all your work, guys.

Last, but not least, how can I not mention how perfect Ash’s been throughout this process? You’re the best artist I could’ve hoped for and I’m confident this was the perfect match. You captured so well the essence of my story and its characters and their differences, and I can’t thank you enough for that. Also, thank you mods for your work and for making this match happening. You can find their brilliant illustrations on chapters 11 and 15.

Disclaimer that the only characters I own here are Francisca, Fernanda, José, Berê, Lua, Tainara, Rudá, some school staff I don't remember the names and the animals. Unfortunately.

There's a playlist with the song on Chapter 8 and other songs I think fits the story's mood. You can find it HERE

No beings were harmed in the making of this story.

Without further ado… Enjoy.

Artist’s Notes: It’s been such a delight getting to have access to and illustrate Lory’s (wonderful, magical, brilliant, imaginative, fascinating) story. And for that, I have to give a big shout-out to the mods for being lovely and pairing me with the fic summary of my dreams. The scenes that I have illustrated sparked my imagination and creativity so much, although I felt the urge to sketch practically every scene as I went on to read the whole story. I hope my illustrations bring to life the tenderness and intimacy between Harry and Draco in the first scene, and the intensity and power of the magic in second scene. Please enjoy this wonderful fic!

READ AND VIEW ON AO3

[mallowstep]

holy days. holidays. games kits play.

THUNDERCLAN has no holy days. there is no day more worth celebrating than any other. each day has chance for tragedy and happiness. informally, the dark days of leafbare are something of a holy, hallowed time, when even kits know the severity their clan could face.

neither do they have holidays. ceremonies celebrate individuals, and after a hard leaf-bare, a leader might congratulate the clan, but there is no such thing as a holiday. there’s a reason cats leave thunderclan more than they join, but  there’s also a reason outside cats are attracted to thunderclan.

but kits in thunderclan are joyous. they play moss ball, practice hunting, and act out scenes from battles elders told them about. for thunderclan, there is no such thing as a kit acting too immature, because the joy of kits playing is why they need to defend camp.

RIVERCLAN has holy days like the river has fish. new moons and the end of seasons and the beginning of seasons. the first morning where ice on the lake has broken and every time it rains. **other clans call them frivolous, but it is how they honor their fortune, how they commune with those who have passed, and this is why riverclan believes they, above any other, are most spiritual. [1]

a holy day is a holiday as far as riverclan is concerned. there is no event not worth celebrating, each stage of life moving them onward. they honor the river and the way the water moves but the river keeps its course. feasts are common, as are flower decorations, and swimming competition.

maybe this is why riverclan kits are so calm. they grow up sheltered by reeds and water, water dangerous if they fall in too soon. kits play in the nursery as much as possible, never leaving without a careful eye on them until they are capable of swimming. they can be patient, because once they are older, there will be plenty of time for play. [2]

SHADOWCLAN has holy days like the sky has stars. they are serious, though. half moons are a sanctified time, with the medicine cats away, and the first frost is a warning day, filled with prayer, that they won’t starve for loss of the frogs and lizards that make up much of their new-leaf and green-leaf diet.

holidays are minor, the days before and after holy days surrounded in preparations and feasts, fasts being prepared for and broken, and kits, who sense the coming changes even if they’re not explicitly told, exploiting the minimized supervision, running around camp like they’re half-loner.

kits are a playful bunch. they play out their wars across camp, claiming swaths of land as shadowclan and thunderclan and windclan. they play battle, mock fights, hunt leaves. after brokenstar, queens are cautious, trying to keep their kits in, fearing them appearing too old once again. but they can't keep them in the nursery forever.

WINDCLAN has few holy days, but they have fasting days and hymn days, new moons and quarter moons and rain. they have winds of change and stability, winds from south and north. they don't need a day to venerate the stars, they say. it's something a good warrior is always thinking of. each day has something holy in it, whether it is a lucky catch, a new birth, or an apprentice's first trip to the moonstone.

their holidays are singing days, part prayer and part celebration. the medicine cat will choose the section, or start from the wind and go all the way through, but apprentices revel in a day off from training and mates choose duets to sing together. kits mostly listen, and sit with their parents, but sometimes a group will petition for a chance to sing, and sometimes, that request will be granted.

kits race around camp, playing in flat areas left for their amusement. there's little structure to their days, and they exhaust themselves chasing and pouncing. windclan has no dens; warriors often becoming unintentional obstacles as kits duck under them and weave between their legs. but there is still join in this; windclan has long been troubled and having enough kits to play is a relief.

SKYCLAN was reborn by the paws of thunderclan. firestar left them no holy days, and yet, they found their own with time. full moons and half moons, hallowed time of gathering, when the spirits were close enough they could reach them. the days the river flooded became mourning days, the day they found the cave of shining moss became a day of prayer.

holidays and holy days are one and the same. loners and rogues have neither, and kittypets could only bring word of twolegs acting strangely at somewhat regular intervals. they celebrate the dead of winter, doing the best they can to feast with everything they could. skyclan has no time to waste; each day is to be utilized to its fullest.

kits play the games of their parents, chasing moss balls or collecting sticks. loners come with their own traditions, and skyclan's nursery is a mixture of them. clovertail had the biggest influence, raising kits on her games of hiding and catching. their nursery now has never seen her, but with each season of kits, the games morph, hiding leaping for feathers and telling the story of reassembling the clan.

YELLOWFANG joins thunderclan and growls at kits playing and really, who can blame her? she knew to fear kits seeming older than they were; she knew kithood was a fragile time. and if she was irritable, maybe it was in part because the rhythm of her life had been shattered, with no days of quiet reflection to break up the chaos.

GREYSTRIPE enjoys the lighter moments, when he is with riverclan. crookedstar took him into his family, introducing him to the traditions. he watched featherkit and stormkit play, told them stories of their mother when it rained, and for some amount of time, felt like he belonged.

IN STARCLAN, the seasons often merge together. there is no need to honor the ancestors you are a part of. the youngest members of starclan are the most energetic, running across the fields and forests. they never learned about differences between clans, not properly, but they bring the smallest traditions they were taught.

obviously the ice is a new one. cultures change. ↩︎

of course, this logic is the product of raising kits in a dangerous environment. kits are kits, and they will play. they’re just basically never left unsupervised. riverclan kits would never get up to the hyjinks we see in thunderclan. ↩︎

[tikkisaram]

St Brigid of Kildare — The Feminist Muse

1

From their home on the summit of the snow-capped Mount Helicon, the Nine Greek Muses whispered ideas into the ears of artists everywhere, inspiring their work and infusing them with creativity. But nearer sea level, in the modest fields of Kildare, lived another great Muse — a nun who went by the name Bríd, or Brigid; and if the Nine Muses were all archetypical independent women, none could have claimed to have fought for the rights of women with the vehemence of St Brigid. This is why her influence stays strong to this day.

St Brigid has been inspiring artists to create great works for over a millennium and a half, and nowhere is her influence more noticeable than in poetry. Poets around the world have written about this feminist saint, whose achievements included building a monastery for women, freeing young girls from sexual slavery, and even performing a God-granted abortion on one of her students. She is present in the works of children's poets and Nobel laureates alike, and she invariably shows up in a context supportive of women's rights and feminist activism.

Perhaps the most famous poet to include St Brigid in their writings is Seamus Heaney, who features the abbess in two of his poems. One of these, A Brigid's Girdle, he dedicated to his friend Prof. Adele Dalsimer, who was fighting a fatal illness. In it, he decides to weave a Brigid's girdle for Adele in order to give her the strength she needs and, symbolically, to empower women everywhere to fight against oppression — be it disease or society. He invokes St Brigid for her ability to overcome any obstacle and oppose restrictive authority:

Now it's St Brigid's Day and the first snowdrop

In County Wicklow, and this a Brigid's Girdle

I'm plaiting for you, an airy fairy hoop

(Like one of those old crinolines they'd trindle)

But Heaney is hardly the only one to appreciate St Brigid's independence. Another famous Irish poet, Brendan Kennelly, offers us a provocative picture of her in his translation of a 10th century poem, Saint Brigid's Prayer. This humble nun from Kildare is actually the patron saint of beer, and in Kennelly's poem we see her — in complete disregard of society's constructed constraints — drink, dance and sing with "the men, the women and God" by a "lake of beer", giving "a special welcome to the women". Kennelly — and the anonymous 1000-year-old poet, of course — subversively shows a female saint (whose religious status entails even greater societal pressure than most women have to put up with) acting with a traditionally male rowdiness, breaking out of the confines of conservative gender roles.

2

St Brigid's inspirational influence reaches far beyond the coasts of Éirinn, of course. American poet Phyllis McGinley wrote the ode The Giveaway to her, in which she calls her "a problem child" who infuriated her parents because "She would give everything away" to those in need. She shifted the established balance of power and ignored the orders of (literally) patriarchal authorities in favour of those less fortunate:

Her father's gold,

Her grandsire's dinner,

She'd hand to cold

And hungry sinner;

The Australian hymn O Holy St. Brigid written and composed by Sr Clare Keady C. S. B., on the other hand, points out that St Brigid's love of the world came not from a submissive nature, as patriarchal elements might be wont to believe, but rather from her bravery and independence — asking her to "Kindle in us an unquenchable fire/Teach us to love with your courage and confidence". St Brigid's 5th-century feminism really has conquered the world — an impressive feat for an unprivileged nun from the countryside.

While famous internationally, St Brigid's rural origin has also made her a particularly important influence on local poets. Over a century ago, Kildare writer and poet Teresa Brayton wrote the poem St. Brigid which consists largely of praise for the nun's feminism and identifies humanity — or at the very least, womanhood — with 'her race':

O Brigid, so high and holy!

So strong in womanly grace,

Look down from the sills of Heaven

Today on your olden race.

Another poet from Kildare, Patrick McCormack, published the poem Feast of St. Brigid in the newspaper Leinster Leader (during World War II, no less) in which he makes her the defender of the entire country, elevating her above the national army in a symbolic triumph of Woman over patriarchy:

Oh dear St. Brigid hear our call,

And guard our native isle,

In olden days you spread the light

Of love o’er the soil,

He also points out her superior importance relative to that of St Patrick, contrary to the common but completely unjustified inflation of his significance which can only be explained by misogyny and sexism:

The Irish race O faithful Queen,

Shall ever breathe thy name,

With Patrick’s aid Apostle true,

Our land shall rise to fame.

3

The feminist Muse from Kildare lives on, inspiring poetry to this very day. Only in 2017 a children's book about St Brigid, Legendary, was published by emerging writer and poet Michael Sheils, featuring multiple poems from her perspective. One of them she addresses to the king, and in it she dismisses his masculine authority entirely, demonstrating her bravery and asserting her independence:

But you can't change my opinion,

No matter what you do,

'Cause I believe in miracles,

I believe them to be true.

The Nine Muses may have enjoyed their mountaintop vantage point, but St Brigid of Kildare has been elevated to an even holier height by her unrelenting devotion to the feminist cause, womanly strength of spirit and all-encompassing love. From her abode high in Heaven's spheres, she whispers into the ears of artists around the world. And she is not going to stop anytime soon.

Sauber, Wolfgang. Our Lady and Saint Non's chapel (St Davids, Wales); stained glass window (1934) showing Saint Bride (Brigid of Kildare). CC-BY-SA. Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Saint_Non%27s_Chapel_-_Fenster_3_St.Bride.jpg ↩︎

Culnacreann. Saint Brigid's cross, made from rushes from County Down. CC-BY. Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Saint_Brigid%27s_cross.jpg ↩︎

Sheils, Michael. Cover page of Legendary showing St Brigid with poet Dubthach maccu Lugair. CC-BY-NC-SA. http://michaelsheils.com/legendary.html ↩︎

[voidstarzero]

Parsing ISBD. Interlude : Parser Combinators

I was going to pick up from the end of my previous post on ISBD, but I thought I should take a minute to talk about parser combinators first. There's lots on the internet already about what these are, so I’ll keep this specific to how they are used in the ISBD parsing library I mentioned last time.

Simply put, this approach to writing a parser consists of first writing smaller parsers focused on specific parts of the input, then combining them using higher-order “combinators” which encapsulate parsing logic like repetition, choosing between alternatives, etc. For example, isbd-parser defines several simple parsers that match exact sequences in the grammar, like " = ", " ; ", etc. Given the equalSign parser which matches " = " and a parser called data that matches any string not containing special grammar symbols, we could define a parser that matches parallel data as follows:

val parallelData: rule = seq(equalSign, data)

Here, seq is a combinator that produces a parser which runs the parsers given as input in sequence. (The rule type is a wrapper class around parsers in Autumn.) So, parallelData matches any input that begins with " = " followed by a string of data.

In a similar way, we can build up a parser for parsing a full parallel title statement given smaller parsers for each of the components of the statement; simplfiying a little, these would be the title proper, other title information, and statement of responsibility:

val otherInfo: rule = seq(colon, data) val sor: rule = seq(slash, data) val parallelTitleFull: rule = seq( parallelData, otherInfo.maybe(), sor.maybe() )

Notice the .maybe() on the otherInfo and sor parsers; this is another combinator which produces a parser that matches zero or one occurrences of the input matched by the original parser, similar to ? in regular expressions. So parallelTitleFull matches an equal sign followed by a title proper, and optionally other title info and/or a SOR.

I mentioned last time the ambiguity with " = " in ISBD statements; one possible context in which you might find an equal sign is after a statement of responsibility, where it can either be just a parallel SOR1:

Bibliotheca Celtica : a register of publications relating to Wales and the Celtic peoples and languages / Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru = The National Library of Wales

...or the start of a parallel version of the entire title statement:

Xiao xiao xiao xiao de huo / [Mei] Wu Qishi zhu = Little fires everywhere / Celeste Ng.

This is a case where the type of the data after the " = " depends on both what has already been parsed and what remains to be parsed. How do we handle this? Well, we've already got a parser for the full parallel title statement and here's a simple one for the parallel SOR:

val parallelSOR: rule = seq(equalSign, data)

In a statement of responsibility context, we want to apply exactly one of these parsers, depending on which one best matches the remaining input after the " = ". To do that, we can use the longest combinator:

val parallelSOROrTitle: rule = longest(parallelSOR, parallelTitleFull)

longest tries each parser in turn, and chooses the one that consumes the most input. Thus, if there is only a SOR, the parallel data will be parsed as a statement of responsibility; otherwise, it will be parsed as a parallel title statement. (Note that the SOR is technically a little more complicated, in an uninteresting way; the grammar has been simplified here for the sake of illustration.)

Since a title statement doesn't need to contain anything but a title proper, how do we know the string "The National Library of Wales" is actually a SOR and not a title? Mercifully, ISBD specifies that if there is only parallel title proper information, it must be recorded after the title proper itself, not after the entire title statement, so we can safely rule out that possibility here. ↩︎

[argentdandelion]

No Soul Necessary: Flowey’s Happy Ending (Part 3)

“We’ve got more beef than a prizewinning cow, but I want to forgive you so hard right now.”

If Flowey can’t feel love and compassion, it’s possible he can’t feel love and compassion for himself. Under his guilt and self-loathing, he may be unable to understand his life is valuable, and that he deserves happiness.

If he genuinely can never feel self-compassion, and so let himself pursue happiness again, then he might never really be happy. He might be haunted forever; he might forever disbelieve Frisk if Frisk claims he deserves happiness. More compellingly, he himself (as Asriel, temporarily) tries to separate his existence as a soulless flower from his brief return as a Boss Monster/Boss Monster-looking being, and has no compassion for Flowey.

Yet, Flowey’s happiness may not be impossible: his True Reset speech could be motivated just as easily by a little bit of compassion as by guilt. Perhaps absorbing the souls of so many monsters had some after-effects, however small. It’s unlikely everyone he’s ever killed would forgive him, as they don’t remember, but Frisk could, and maybe that would be enough.

To get his happy ending, Flowey must, to some extent, value himself for himself. As one could call this “selfishness” or “arrogance”, this might seem contradictory. Yet, it makes sense: kind, compassionate Asriel was too selfless, too altruistic, too self-sacrificing. He didn’t care enough about himself, or his worries. His love or loyalty to Chara got him killed, and guilt-ridden for who knows how long.1

So far as can be inferred from his story in the Genocide Route, when he woke up as a flower and couldn't feel love for or from his parents, he turned his turmoil inward. There's no evidence he lashed out at first. He might have instead suffered in silence, until his despair grew too great and he killed himself. He reloaded and used his power for good, but when it didn't make him happy, he turned to violence to fill his life with fun, with some sort of meaning.

Later on, Asriel accepts if Frisk neither forgives nor comforts him, apparently believing he doesn’t deserve it for all his bad deeds. At the flowerbed, he says he can’t go up the surface “like this” (resembling Asriel), because it would only break his parents’ hearts. He doesn’t think well of Flowey; in fact, in the flowerbed speech, he talks about Flowey as if he’s a separate being, and an object rather than a person.2

In the True Reset speech, Flowey still focuses on others: others’ lives and happiness, not his own. He talks about everyone’s happiness and letting Frisk “live their life”, but doesn’t mention himself. His persuasion seems half-hearted, and he doesn’t object much to the idea his memories will be erased: perhaps he’s resigned to his fate as a tool for the True Pacifist ending.

That caring for oneself is 'selfish' is often drilled into humans' heads by society. People are often taught to sacrifice for others, but not how to appreciate and care for themselves.

It is possible monster society takes caring for others, including self-sacrifice, to greater lengths than human society. Asgore himself suffered so much to give his people hope (though that's entwined with his responsibility as king). Monsters also believe their very souls are made of love, hope, and compassion; before breaking the barrier, Asriel notes how strange it is that many monsters love Frisk despite barely knowing them.

If Flowey indeed stays in the Underground, as many works assume, it could be from the belief he doesn’t deserve happiness, that his happiness means misery to others, or both. To SAVE Flowey, he must balance his guilt with his altruism. Given the sheer scope of his crimes (despite the fact time travel erased it all) and indisputably selfish motives in doing so, convincing him he deserves to live a good life may be the most difficult battle of all.

Part 1 → Part 2 → Part 3

Related Reading

Kill 'em With Kindness (spun off from Part 2 of this series)

Flowey and PTSD

More specifically, if his playtime of 9999:99 is true, he's been "playing" and likely suffering as a flower for a minimum of ~13.6 months. ↩︎

Calling Flowey just “a flower” and “it” rather than “he”. Some caveats: the whole idea of 'it' being dehumanizing doesn't work so well when nearly a third of monsters apparently go by 'it'. Some monsters also casually refer to each other by breed, such as Undyne being referred to as "a fish/a fish lady". At the very least, Asriel is misgendering Flowey. ↩︎

[fangirlfiction]

Out of Time [3]

iii. the grim reaper

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x reader

Word Count: 1.5k

Summary: 550 days after Bucky Barnes shipped out from Brooklyn, he gets reunited with his girl on a battlefield in Azzano.

Warnings: Lots of blood, death, injuries, and explosions. Very battle heavy. Also there’s some language in there.

 A/N: Part 3 has arrived, and it’s an angsty one! Thank you to my angel Attie for correcting my grammar (@barnesrogersvstheworld) and for being the legit best bff in the world. Please let me know what you think about this chapter! I did a lot of battle related research to try and write a realistic depiction of WWII. Hopefully I did it some justice. Check my endnote for more information.

eta: the masterlist for the series will be in the comments until tumblr fixes the link issues.

October 8, 1943

You reach into the truck and grab a bag of supplies before turning and tossing it to Attie, who turns and tosses it down the line. You repeat the process, unloading the truck as quickly as possible, under orders to get the medical tent up before the wounded arrive. You are closing the back doors of the truck when a runner for one of the officers comes running your way, yelling. “Chief nurse, I need the chief nurse!”

You turn and yell out, “I’m here!”

He salutes you, and launches into his message, still breathless from the run. “The 107th is nearby and in need of medical supplies. Captain Taylor asked you to prepare a truck to be taken out.”

“The 107th?”

“Yes ma’am.”

Your breath stutters and you ask, “Who’s taking the supplies?”

“One of the ambulance drivers, ma’am.”

You shake your head. “I’ll do it.”

The runner looks at you in confusion. “Ma’am? Are you sure?”

“Yes. Tell Captain Taylor I’ll personally deliver the supplies.”

“Yes ma’am.” He salutes you before running off to deliver your message.

-

The sound of explosions grows louder as you near the drop off point for the medical supplies, and you can hear the cries of injured men as they become victims of the war. You pull the jeep to a stop at the designated drop off zone, eyes searching the trees for the soldier who was supposed to meet you. You hear a rustling in the trees in front of you, and you pull out your sidearm, aiming at the sound. Just as you’re about to shoot, a soldier bursts through the tree line, frantically whispering, “Reaper, reaper, reaper.”

Recognizing the code, you sigh in relief and reply, “Grim.”

He lowers his weapon and you lower yours before hopping out of the jeep and nodding at him in greeting. He eyes your uniform and asks, “You a nurse?”

You nod your head as you pull the packs of supplies from the back, “I’m the chief nurse.”

“We’ve been under heavy fire for a week, and our medic got killed two days ago, leaving us with untreated wounded. No one will evac them out. Do you think you could take a look at a few of them?”

You toss him a bag of supplies and reply, “Of course.” You gesture towards the path he took to get here. “Lead the way.”

You follow behind the soldier quietly, weapon drawn and on alert. As the sounds of the front grows closer, you ask, “Do you know Sergeant James Barnes?”

The soldier turns to look at you. “Bucky? Yeah, I know him.” He glances at you again, scrutinizing your features. “You’re not Red, are you?”

You smile. “I am.”

The soldier laughs in disbelief. “No way, He’s gonna be happy to see you.”

“So, he’s alive? He’s okay?”

The soldier laughs again. “Yeah, he’s okay. Never shuts up about you though.”

You smile and the soldier adds, “I’m Gabriel Jones, but everyone calls me Gabe.”

“Nice to meet you, Gabe.”

More explosions ring out in front of you, so close that you can feel it in the ground beneath your feet. Gabe stops walking and explains, “I’m gonna take you to the fox hole where we left most the wounded, see what you can do there. I’ll go find Barnes and the others and bring them to you.”

You nod and follow Gabe through the trees and onto the battlefield, bobbing and weaving between fox holes and missing chunks of blown up land. He finally stops by a fox hole and you slide into it, immediately busying yourself with the wounded. Gabe runs off with an “I’ll be back.”

You bandage the wounds of the men, giving morphine to the most severe cases, saving the rest for any others you might come across. You just finished bandaging a bullet hole on a soldier’s calf when you hear an explosion and an immediate cry for a medic. You peek over the edge of the fox hole, locating the source of the cry not far from where you are. The man’s screams are broken, loud. You know he is suffering.

You turn to the soldier next to you. “If Gabe Jones or Sergeant Barnes comes looking for me, tell him that I’m going to the foxhole right there.” You gesture to it and he nods.

Taking a deep breath, you climb out of the foxhole and onto the surface, immediately jumping to your feet and running to the sound of the soldier’s cries. Just as you reach the edge of the hole, a grenade lands inside, killing the soldier instantly. The force of the explosion sends you flying through the air and onto the ground, ears ringing loudly as you gaze up at the twilight sky.

You feel, rather than see, someone dragging you backwards and into a foxhole. You close your eyes and squeeze them tight, trying to bring your vision back into focus. When you open them, Bucky’s face appears in your view, and you watch his mouth move as you wait to hear sound. His words finally break through the ringing in your ears and you hear him yelling, “Talk to me! Are you okay?”

You smile and pull him into a hug, squeezing him tightly. You pull back and answer, “Yes, I’m okay!”

He looks at you in shock. “You scared the shit outta me! What are you doing here? Where’s your helmet?”

“I was delivering supplies. Didn’t know I’d need it.”

Bucky pulls the helmet off his head and drops it onto your own, fastening the straps beneath your chin. He mutters, “I gotta get you out of here. We gotta get out of here.”

He turns to Gabe and a man you don’t know, discussing strategy. They seem to decide on something because Bucky turns back to you. “Stay here. Do not move from this hole, even if someone calls for a medic.”

“But Bucky, I-“

“Promise me!”

Your face softens at the panic in his voice. “I promise.”

He grabs the front of your uniform and pulls you in for a desperate kiss. “I’ll be back.”

And before you can even protest, all 3 men are gone.

-

You lean back in the foxhole, watching the bright white flare twist up in the sky, passing over the moon. The soundtrack of passing time consisted of explosions and bullets whizzing through the air, accented by the screams of the wounded. Suddenly, 3 figures leap over your head and into the foxhole with you, each landing with a quiet thud. Bucky flings himself against the edge of the shelter, turning his body to face you. “Are you okay?”

You nod and one of the men yells, “There’s gotta be at least 5 mortar companies out there!”

Bucky yells back, “Radio B company, tell em we need cover!”

Gabe pulls the radio from off his back, smoke rising from the device. “That might be tough!”

The unknown man yells, “Bucky, behind you!”

Bucky and the man both shoot over the edge of the foxhole, before Bucky turns and yells, “Here they come!”

You grab a forgotten gun from the ground near your feet and situate yourself next to Bucky, firing alongside him and taking out the enemy. You all pause when you see blue rays of lights shooting across the battlefield, disintegrating the men that once stood there. You all rise from the foxhole slowly, eyes fixed on the horizon in shock as a tank rolls over the hill and slowly levels its weapon with your location, Bucky grabs you and yanks you down as he yells, “Duck!”

There’s a loud explosion and dirt rains down on you and the other men, before there is only silence. Bucky pulls your gun from your hand and tosses it to the side, urging the others to do the same. You all hold your hands up in surrender as a group of soldiers in all black outfits appear at the edge of the foxhole, weapons leveled at you.

The enemy soldier closest to you gestures with his gun, “Move.”

You all stand slowly and crawl from the shelter and onto the battle scarred surface. The soldiers keep you there, as a uniformed man emerges from the tank and strides over to you. Bucky pulls you behind him, placing himself between you and the new arrival, an action that doesn’t go unnoticed. The man in uniform gestures to you, “Bring her with us, but separate her from the others.”

Bucky plants himself in front of you and yells over his shoulder, “Run, go!”

“No! I’m not leaving you!”

Bucky pushes you away and urges, “Go get help! Go!”

Two of the enemy soldiers descend upon you, and you start to scramble backwards, tears streaming down your face. They each grab one of your arms and you start to flail and kick in protest, trying to get away from them. You can hear Bucky yelling your name, desperation heavy in his voice. You both fight against your captors, trying to reach each other, when the sound of a gun cocking freezes you both in place.

You look over at the man in uniform, his gun in his hand, aimed at Bucky. “One more move, and he’s dead.”

You whimper but stay frozen. He turns to the guards, “Shock them.”

White hot electricity courses through you before everything goes black.

-

endnote: The Battle of Azzano, youtube

-

taglist:  @slender--spirit ⋆ @amoonagedaydreamer ⋆ @kppopolym ⋆ @kypriot ⋆ @stiles-is-my-only-defense ⋆ @misplacedorphan ⋆ @thetimidsarcasticcat ⋆ @kaylaphantomhive ⋆ @mcu-owns-my-ass ⋆ @americasmarauders ⋆ @supernaturallover2002 ⋆ @thequirkypeach ⋆ @ilovethewayyourheartbeats ⋆ @ailynalonso15 ⋆ @littlelunaticfringe ⋆ @pandabearisaunicorn ⋆ @lokilvrr ⋆ @maddie-laufeyson ⋆ @gloriousbanananana ⋆ @zoayyy ⋆ @mrsdeanwinchester19 ⋆ @aesthetic-avaline ⋆ @grimmlytimelord ⋆ @kat-lives ⋆ @scarlettsoldier ⋆ @slytherinqueenie ⋆ @annielovebug22  ⋆ @sergeantliz⋆ @vampklauslover  ⋆ @sweetlydecaf​ ⋆ @thewaythewildthingslive ⋆ @mxgicmoonz ⋆ @softthanos ⋆ @sthorkronstrangy ⋆ @kiss-the-baguette  ⋆ @learning-howto-be-myselfx3

wouldnt let me tag

[tariqk]

re: this whole recent ballyhoo about the Parti Keadilan Rakyat election fiasco

Like I wouldn't give a shit except that noted bullying creep and so-called Grand Strategist™ Rafizi Ramli decided to call out anti-theft software Prey as fucking malware. It's gotten to the point where Prey literally had to come out and officially say, in a statement that clearly implies that the claims are so stupid that it's not worth pursuing legally, that 1) no, they're not malware 2) they take security and privacy seriously, and 3) you literally can't do what Rafizi claimed the PKR headquarters can do.

I'd actually make the proviso that, in theory, you could, but as Prey makes clear in their statement, that Remote Wipe functionality is actually part of Prey's paid plan, and if you're using Prey to nefariously wipe the tablets used in the election, you're an idiot, especially since that functionality is literally available, for free, at both Android and iOS1.

I mean, honestly: can you imagine this? Like... you take the time to install Prey, all so that you can log in, use payment information that will definitely tie your involvement in this arse-brained scheme, all so that you could do this with far less detectability and accountability, and for free with built-in OS tools, using an account that you could create for the entire organization, passing the password around through WhatsApp, which is terrible OPSEC, but a great way to create plausible deniability?

All for an election, not for an office with actual power, but for a party position for what is definitely Pakatan Harapan's most junior2 member? Are you for real?

We haven't even gotten to the bit where the election was carried out digitally, which is and remains a terrible idea.

“But Tariq,” you might say, “What if they used Microsoft Surface Tablets?” and my response would be that PKR head office are stupid and literally don't know how to spend money effectively. ↩︎

You might bristle at the characterization, in which case, 1) fuck you, and 2) while PKR is the oldest member of what began as Barisan Alternatif, it has remained the least competent and least organized party within the coalition. Even PPBM, who were formed literally two years ago, is better run, simply because they were made up of UMNO's capitalist wing and their fellow cronies, and as evil as they are, they know how to work together. PKR was always and still remains a party consisting of NGO chancers who were trying their hand in politics, diehard Anwar Fan Club members, and the petit-bourgeois remnants of PRM, who are very good at infighting but were never very good with socialism, all at cross-purposes with each other, even when the party was going to go off a cliff because of their stupidity. You want to wreck PKR? Arrest the loudest members, or worse, appoint them to government positions where they'd be too swamped with work to actually pay attention to party politics. Without the petty tyrants and divas that run the party on a daily basis, PKR couldn't get themselves out of a wet paper bag in a hurricane if they were trying. Even with the petty tyrants and divas the chance of getting out of that paper bag would be 50-50. ↩︎

[browndragon]

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Liquid Tiles and State Machines

Hello again! I got stuck in a rabbit hole, but I had fun.

One of the things I built is strictly less fun than the other, so I'll lead with it even though it's not what you wanted. The other is the pretty video above.

State Machines

TL;DR: See https://www.npmjs.com/package/@browndragon/sm .

I got annoyed that the big state machines in javascript were too verbose for what I wanted, so I wrote my own. I think I've already written this post, but this time it's even better.

Each "state" (inconsistently called a node) is a function that returns another node. You load some initial node up in a state machine (here called Cursor). The Cursor invokes its current node whenever you call next (and whatever it returns is the next node). However! It's invoked in the context of the Cursor itself, so you get some interesting bells and whistles automatically: this.here is the current node, for instance -- normally it's hard to get access to that in javascript, but not so here. Since they're each function objects, they're less prone to object equality stupidity of certain sorts, and more prone to it of other sorts. There is no method to predeclare the set of states that exist, so your states can create states (by returning inner functions for instance). These are all features I thought I'd need ;).

You can write nodes that assume they're useful for their side effects, or nodes that assume you'll examine the state machine's here. Cursors implement the iterable & iterator interfaces, so you can use them in loops and such also.

However, for more power you need the full Machine (which extends Cursor). This does things like track state for every node (which is why the nodes are not called states...), with advanced features like history, traps (so that if a node returns undefined it can be rebound to actually go to handleUndefined()), and similar. This makes them O(n) in the number of nodes (and indeed, O(n) in the number of calls to next), but sometimes that's the featureset you need!

Give it a try. Or don't!

Liquid Tiles

TL;DR: The demo above, but the code isn't published anywhere [yet].

I kept playing with dough connected by springs, but I think I'd need to do tile deformation or shader tricks to make the dough look good. As written, the arbitrary offsets allowed glue tiles to shift, leaving gaps. Ensuring coverage would require stretching the tiles or having additional backing color. Or: a change in scheme.

Dough is just a really thick liquid, right? (Over a long enough timescale, aren't all solids?) So how would I model a liquid? I might do it with freely chosen blocks connected by links (the current dough system), but that would likely be too chaotic. Instead, I'd probably split the liquid up into regular domains and analyze each domain. So I did that! Liquid tiles are the result, a system similar-to but different-from phaser Tilemaps, but providing a similar grid-based interface to the world.

First, the data structure

I'm continuously at a loss for high quality datastructures, so instead I write my own low-quality ones. I needed a store of tile information -- unindexed integer 2-tuple keys, arbitrary1 values. Easy enough; I wrote a dense one which uses an allocated array of fixed size (so that array[y*width+x] is the value for (x,y)) and a sparse one which uses fully arbitrary (x,y) pairs and stores points under their stringification. As I write this, I realize that these data structures are not so very different in javascript, where arrays can arbitrarily allocate keys, but what's done is done.

I called the keys in this datastructure x,y tuples, but that's not entirely true: they're really u,v tuples; I wrote a little tilemath class to hold the geometry for mapping between an XY space (like phaser) into the UV space of the tiles (like the tilemap indices) and vice-versa. I am pretty sure it still has some ugly edge effects (tiles do nothing to fix the default anchor(0.5, 0.5), potentially favoring the top/left sides! etc), but it's functional by visual test. The naming scheme (xy space vs uv space) provides very sensible method names -- u(x) is pretty unambiguous. There's no obvious uv analogue to width and height, so I settled for uCount and vCount, which is what it is.

Second, a dip in the Pool

Obviously, we need a Pool of tiles (where tiles are just managed instances of Image, Sprite, or subclasses). A Pool is obviously a Group2, providing mechanisms to manipulate its managed contents -- putTileAt and removeTileAt for instance. But then the next question: what are you putting in these tiles; how are you passing the grid-based information which you need to pass to them into them? I say that Tilemap got this right, you're passing them a tileId (whatever your arbitrary first parameter to putTileAt is); I say that Tilemap got this wrong in that it knew that tileIds were lookups into arrays which were preregistered along with spritesheet geometry etc.

Everything else: mappings and shadows

Anyway: I created Conformers to address the problem of how to map tileId onto actual asset. Conformers are functions which take a tile entry (a gameObject, uv coordinates, tileId, maybe other stuff) and makes the game object conform with the other parameters. A simple one can setFrame(someTexture, someFrame) by just looking the tileId up in a big array; a more complex one might play(someAnimation) or do wangId calculations or whatever. This is also a great place to put state transition logic, since you can detect whether this conformation is a change from a previous state, or a put for a state that the tile was already in.

Okay! Now we're ready: since I know I want this to follow dough blobs around, and the doughblobs are acted upon by the rest of the physics system, I needed some ability to have a sprite "cast" an effect into the dough tile system. I called this a ShadowPool (which extends Pool extends AutoGroup extends Group). Every element of the shadow pool's WatchGroup casts a shadow into the pool made of tileIds; each tile's tileId the bitwise or of its place within the element's boundary (so for instance the upper left corner of an element's boundary is 0b0010, the bit for the lower right corner set.) That, at long last, is what the video above is showing, with fancy transition effects.

Next?

The animation of specific dough elements remains tricky; doughjiggle is still going to look bad under this new quantized regime, even as the interior of the dough looks better. But now I can emulate slugs, and spilled paint, and footprints, and other mass nouns without feeling like I've got to pay the cost of a full tilemap. Indeed, since tilemap layers render in one pass, using a pool even for walls might let me do the fabled "figure in front of bush & behind tree" 3/4 view I've been after this whole time. Certainly the ability to "layer" collisions by material type is very valuable to me, and missing from the current tilemap classes.

I'm now imagining a hybrid scheme: dough is drawn as nodules (free moving spheres of dough with weakly drawn borders) on top of a ShadowPool which draws the base of the nodule, thus the outline of the dough group (wang tiles with strongly drawn borders). Dough regions which quiesce could remove the nodule and mark the tiles from the shadow pool as "permanent", so that they can take over the nodule's mass. Animating the movement of the base can add more detail to this, since it can theoretically hide the quantization by masking portions of the tile and sliding it out in the (known!) direction of change. For instance, if the tile had been undefined and now has the bottom right set, it is clearly sliding in from the bottom right. This will cause slightly strange initial effects (of course), but edge effects are to be expected.

Fast moving dough would be represented as nodules (large borders). Slow speed dough would be thin-border nodules on top of a ShadowPool, sticking-and-unsticking the dough and an unstable equilibrium. Stopped dough would be pure ShadowPool entries. Dough spring would be provided via interaction with the shadowpool.

I mean, arbitrary at first. Obviously they're gonna be tiles. ↩︎

As an implementation note, each Pool is actually a singleton group; that's just more convenient to my way of thinking about these things. ↩︎

[avanneman]

Who’s dumber, Elizabeth Warren or Max Boot?

To my mind, Elizabeth Warren is basically a Hillary Clinton who doesn’t summer in the Hamptons. That is, a well-meaning know it all who wants to run your life for you. So when disillusioned conservative Max Boot took aim at her in the Washington Post—“Elizabeth Warren has lots of ideas. Bad ideas.”—I was (largely) content to nod along, until I came to this:

Warren’s foreign policy may be even worse. Like Trump, she favors tariffs and wants to reduce overseas commitments.1 Unlike Trump, she wants to cut the defense budget, even though the Rand Corp. warned that, already, “U.S. forces could, under plausible assumptions, lose the next war they are called upon to fight.”

Well, the words “cut the defense budget” would cause any card-carrying neocon, anti-Trumper or pro, to defecate heavily in his breeches, as Max so clearly did, so much so that his link to the Rand Corporation’s dire warnings is out of date and has been “superseded” by Rand Corp.’s current study, circa 2017, “U.S. Military Capabilities and Forces for a Dangerous World’, though it contains the same dramatic language. I could, and will, point out that Rand was set up to advise the Defense Department, and continues to get substantial funding from Defense, so that expecting Rand to suggest anything other than, in effect, “Danger, Will Robinson!” is pretty moot, and one can, after all, program a robot to do that.2

Furthermore, what’s really funny is that if Max had actually found the “correct” study, he would have learned that Rand’s high-end recommendation, allowing us to supposedly fight two major wars at once, was $628 billion. The 2019 U.S. defense budget is somewhere between $685 and $716 billion, depending on who’s counting the beans, thanks to massive increases larded on by the Trump Administration over the past two years, lard on top of lard, one might say. So, according to Rand, we can afford a cut in military spending of some $60-$90 billion! Sweet! Guess Lizzie won that one!

Afterwords I have kvetched, most mightily, on the subject of military waste now 27 times. Idiots like Max, and Rand, never notice that, among other things, Europe alone vastly outspends Russia, that China’s less than friendly neighbors’ spending is substantial—perhaps 50% of China’s total—and, most of all, that a “major war” between major nations would involve nuclear weapons, and no one wants to fight a war with nuclear weapons!

Afterwords II One could also point out, for the benefit of both Mr. Boot and Rand, that the U.S. has never lost a war because of lack of money, but frequently—all too frequently—loses wars because it insists on initiating wars that are irrelevant to its national security.

I agree that all tariffs are terrible. Overseas commitments? We could lose a few. ↩︎

There was back in the day, a TV show, Lost In Space, which as I understand it (I never watched), featured a robot that would exclaim “Danger, Will Robinson!” at opportune times. ↩︎

[bexical]

Player fantasy: A look at Niantic

A while back, I wrote a post on something important to me in game design, player fantasy. And I'm back to discuss the same topic, but this time, in the context of Niantic and their two franchise-based games, Pokemon Go and Wizards Unite1. (Note: I no longer play Pokemon Go, and never downloaded Wizards Unite, so my descriptions may occasionally be inaccurate.)

In the spirit of my last post, let me start off with some numbers: According to this article, Wizards Unite had about 400,000 installs in the first 24 hours, while Pokemon Go had about 7.6 million installs in its first 24 hours (unfortunately, I was unable to find numbers regarding current usage). Why the stark contrast? There is a wide variety of reasons, some with more explanatory power than others: its paywall is too high, or it simply wasn't different enough from Pokemon Go, or the Wizarding World brand isn't as big as Pokemon (#7 here).

This wasn’t a surprise though: I would claim that this was actually easily predictable, even as early as 2017 when we first heard rumors of a Harry Potter AR game being made by Niantic. I think it's only fair to note though that I have an immense bias against Niantic: I feel the company has a disturbing disinterest in the desires of their players (among other issues). Or, to rephrase in terms of the central topic: they have no understanding of the player fantasy and no interest in such.

It might be hard to accept that claim without hesitation. After all, Pokemon Go was immensely successful that first summer, and it still has a decent playerbase (based entirely on anecdotal evidence). Fundamentally, it does deliver on the main aspects of the Pokemon trainer fantasy: you can go out into the world and find Pokemon in the 'wild' (kind of), and you can battle your friends and train to be the very best.

But the game doesn't feel designed to deliver on that fantasy. Battling friends wasn't introduced until Dec 2018, two and a half years after the game was first launched. As for going out and finding Pokemon… the app directs players towards a Pokestop, where they can then find the Pokemon they are looking for. The experience is so disconnected from the imagined experience of going out into the world and finding Pokemon, and I would claim this is because they never intended to deliver on that experience. In fact, the game's first iteration of Pokemon tracking was much closer to that imagined experience (in which a tracker indicated the distance to nearby Pokemon), and they actually removed it in favor of the current system, which is explicitly designed to encourage exploring Pokestops.

And I get why. The CEO of Niantic, John Hanke, gave an interview to BusinessInsider back when the game was released in 2016, in which he describes the three goals of Pokemon Go: "to promote exercise, to allow people to see the world with new eyes, and to help break the ice" (alternate source, since the original interview is now behind a paywall). Their goals are evident in the design of Pokemon Go: egg-hatching correlates with exercise, Pokestops (and by correlation, the experience of catching Pokemon) promote exploring the world, and gyms and raids promote a social experience. But… there is very little overlap with the player fantasy of a Pokemon trainer.

What is that player fantasy though? To answer that, let me cite the first few lines of the Pokemon theme song:

I want to be the very best, Like no one ever was. To catch them is my real test, To train them is my cause!

How well does Niantic deliver on this? Let's see:

"I want to be the very best/ Like no one ever was." - Meanwhile, as mentioned earlier, battling went unimplemented for more than two years. How do you prove you’re the best when you can’t even compete?

“To catch them is my real test”2 - Acceptably implemented, but barely, as the experience is designed with ulterior motives. Do see the footnote though.

"To train them is my cause"3 - Training a given Pokemon involves… catching Pokemon of the same type?? It is such a nonsensical concept, and it is hard to imagine anything less related to the idea of Pokemon training.

I think I’ve reasonably established by now that Niantic has no understanding of player fantasy. They ignore the fundamental fantasy of being a Pokemon trainer and instead manipulate us into what they want - and yet Pokemon Go still succeeds because the player fantasy of walking around and catching Pokemon is so natural with AR that any failure would be impressive (not that Niantic hasn’t done their absolute best at failing).

And so Wizards Unite fails because the linking with AR just isn’t as inherent for the Wizarding World. Others have noted that the game fails to deliver on the fantasy the way that Pokemon Go does, and that really is the main reason for its failure, far beyond market timing or anything else. There might be a good WW AR game - after all, the Wizarding World is essentially an augmented reality - but Wizards Unite is not that game. The fundamental mechanic, dealing with the Foundables, is a nonsensical reskin of catching Pokemon without the appeal - no one is excited about handling Foundables (is it really anyone’s idea of a fun social activity to go out with friends and hide things from Muggles...?). Furthermore, the existence of these Foundables is new to the canon, and thus our interactions with them do not satisfy any previously existing desires for Harry Potter fans.

As strong as my disdain for Niantic is, I do want them to succeed - largely because both the Pokemon franchise and the Wizarding World are relatively dear to me, and I would be swept away in bliss if their respective games actually delivered on the fantasies of being a Pokemon trainer and being a wizard. As for whether or not it’s possible… I think it is, but it will be difficult. Pokemon Go is close, but it will still take a surprising amount of work - to fully deliver on the fantasy, I think Pokemon training needs to be entirely revamped. Catching other Pokemon to train a given one is absolutely nonsensical, and a good system would make it viable to train a Pokemon without catching hundreds just like it. And since catching Pokemon is the main gameplay, they need to move on from that in favor of other interactions.

I think exploring more interactions is actually key to improving both games, largely because one of the most important fantasies of augmented reality games in general is being immersed in that new reality. There are so many ways we can interact with the Pokemon world besides catching every wild Pokemon we see: battling these wild Pokemon is an obvious thought, but imagine an encounter like stumbling into a Kakuna nest and needing to carefully extricate yourself for fear of a swarm of Beedrill, or being confronted by an angry Rhyhorn and needing to calm it down with a berry. The Team Rocket encounters are a step in this direction, and with more of these interactions, we can be really immersed in a new world.

As I said earlier - I’d like Niantic to succeed. I want to see them pivot and start thinking about what their players want, as opposed to focusing singularly on what they want their players to do. Unfortunately, I have little hope that this will happen - they certainly won’t change because some individual wrote an angry essay. But, that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from their mistakes. As game developers, work to understand the player fantasy, and deliver on it. As artists, understand what your audience wants and, again, deliver on it - or don’t! Subvert their expectations and deliver on a different experience, one they didn’t know they wanted - but this can only be done well if you do have that fundamental understanding of your audience.

It makes me really sad that they chose to go with the gendered term of ‘wizards’, though the decision goes back to the naming of the Wizarding World. Why couldn’t they call it the Magicking World or something? On a tangent, this is something I think about on occasion with my own work - what will fans call the setting? I’m not sure there is anything quite as charming as Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, for example. Alas. ↩︎

I would argue though that the experience of catching Pokemon is actually significantly tainted by the experience of training them. Any given Pokemon I catch is unlikely to be one that I actually keep - it is simply a source of candy for the actual Pokemon that I am training, and it is thus insignificant. When it comes to catching rare Pokemon, the experience is somehow actually unexciting because well, what am I supposed to do with it? I cannot train it precisely because it is rare, given the absurd design of the training system. ↩︎

I touched upon this in the other footnote, largely because this is actually the aspect of Pokemon Go that bothers me the most. The biggest part of the Pokemon trainer fantasy for me personally is having this partner, like Pikachu to Ash - but the system heavily disincentivizes using one’s starter Pokemon. The best way to train my Bulbasaur is by catching other Bulbasaur, nearly all of which will have higher CP simply by being higher level - and after a relatively short while, one of these Bulbasaur will have better IVs than my 10/10/10 starter. It is thus nonsensical from a gameplay point of view to waste the stardust and candy on my starter, as well as immensely more difficult to do so. Furthermore, any Bulbasaur candy I obtain can inherently be saved for that high IV Bulbasaur I eventually catch, which further incentivizes finding new, strong Pokemon instead of becoming partners with any Pokemon I catch. And so, despite the introduction of battling and cosmetics and newer generations of Pokemon and despite all the excitement that these new features may bring, I will never forgive them for designing a system that relegates my starter Bulbasaur to uselessness. ↩︎

[shadyacres]

Limits

Is it possible to hold a full-time job, take on freelance work, while maintaining a respectable semblance of family life?

Yes. With a little planning.

The problem that tends to creeps up can be called the "just five more minutes" problem. A programming problem will take "just a few more minutes," until it's been an hour and a half and whoops, didn't see the wife tonight. Hanging out with family and friends is awesome and everyone's having a great time until whoops, it's 11:30 PM and you have to get to bed so you can get up tomorrow and catch the bus; no work tonight.

The flip side of this coin is trying to block off "work time". For some, this will work; if you're a member of this group, you can stop here. For me, though, this just doesn't work; when you're "in the zone" programming, you don't want to interrupt yourself. Conversely, if you're with family and friends, when the time rolls around to start working you're likely to be in the middle of something, or something new may have just come up, or any of the daily unexpected events might take precedence, ruining your schedule. Some people can get by defining working hours while at home in a more rigid "Mon, Tues, Wed from 8:30 to 10 is Work Time", but I found that each activity always leaks into the next, and it's too easy to have the allotted timeslots merge into each other.

I've found that, for freelancing as a side job to work, there needs to be a perfect storm of at least three ingredients:

Know your familial limits. No matter how little time you plan on dedicating to freelance work, it will still take time, and that time will be resented if not "cleared" by all those it will affect. (For those of you who think this is obvious, good for you.)

Know your personal limits. I'm not a "rockstar programmer". It can take me a while to put my code together. By recognizing my own limits, I can set realistic expectations, and I can make realistic time estimates.

Know your time limits. After mapping out my own schedule, I realized that at most I have about three hours available in the evening.1 After accounting for things like housework, occasional recreation (reading a book, going out), exercising, and other stuff, I figured down to an hour and a half a night. That's not a lot of time, but if I commit any more time than that, I know ahead of time that I'll regret it; time debt has a way of catching up to you after a while. Knowing your limits ahead of time allow you to plan accordingly when taking on new clients.

In the end, it's all about acknowledging and respecting limits. Instead of fighting them, simply recognizing and working within them can make your "free time" much more productive.

I strongly recommend actually mapping out your evenings across the week. I guarantee that you have less "free time" than you realize. ↩︎

[takunomistudio-blog]

Playful Space

I've been reading a book called Personal, Portable, Pedestrian on how Japanese youth adopted the cellphone, or keitai as the book prefers to call it, since feature phones in Japan worked a bit differently there than other places (email instead of texting, use of internet through i-mode, which was like a better wap internet1).

Even though the book is of course, in some ways, obsolete (it came out before smartphones were a thing), it's still really good at showing how cellphones created a new, or altered, technologically augmented social sphere. It's really interesting, and encouraging study into how technology has a different effect once it takes a place in the everydays, and how technology can be cozy. It's even a reminder to not get too scared of how much we might be using our smartphones and tablets, as intimacy is different, but still a real thing, when it happens in virtual space.

Playfulness has changed with technology as well. The games I like, often aren't really meant to be social experiences, and yet shared experiences naturally become common ground and leads to friendship. Game technology in and of itself too, has changed how social space and friendship might be. TVs with video game consoles and controllers plugged in create the couch experience (The ultimate of which I've already discussed) and as far back as Phantasy Star Online, consoles have been an even easier way of staying connected and play with friends virtually.

This last example seems to be the default way of playing socially for many people today. Built-in systems to easily connect, chat and play with friends. With the Switch, Nintendo of course wants to do things differently (as usual), but it will be interesting to see how it works out:

The unpluggable controllers for to create an instant multiplayer device anywhere is a great idea. There's no discussion, it's just great.

Trailers suggest that Switch consoles can sense each other, so two switches means instant four-player multiplayer. Again, this is great.

Online chat is done on a separate smartphone app. What? This seems so counter-intuitive. Why, Nintendo? What's the point? Is the software a resource thief on the Switch?

The last item on that list made me go as far as to think Nintendo might be planning a full-on android phone. It seems weird to need a non-Nintendo device to get the full experience on a Nintendo console/tablet, and it seems weird that there are Nintendo games that can't be played on Nintendo devices. Finally, whether or not Nintendo will keep supporting the 3DS, eventually the 3DS will be over, and a 3DS-2 doesn't make sense when there is a Switch. Phones and tablets aren't the completely same market though, and if the famicom/nes were the Nintendo answer to the PC, and the Switch is first gaming tablet, why couldn't there be a Nintendo Phone as an answer to the smartphone?

What I don't have an idea about, but am really curious to see, would be, what kind of social playful space, could a Nintendo Phone create? What feeling does a more playful device create in such a cozy and personal space?

Which was shitty internet, if anyone doesn't know. ↩︎

[argentdandelion]

Juni Cortez is a Callous Little Fool

Author Patreon - Author Ko-Fi

In Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, Juni Cortez, retired kid superspy, learns his sister Carmen is held captive by the Toymaker, an evil ex-operative banished to cyberspace. To save Carmen and stop the Toymaker’s schemes, he enters the Toymaker’s game, the mega-popular virtual-reality video game Game Over.

When Juni enters the game, he meets three beta testers: cool guy Rez, smart guy Francis, and tough, strong guy Arnold, who eventually choose to help him upon believing he’s “The Guy”, a figure who can help them reach the supposedly unwinnable final level of the game. Later on, the OSS, a superspy agency, offers to send in one person to help him. Juni chooses his grandpa (Valentin), once a superspy himself who had been paraplegic and wheelchair-bound for 30 years. The recurring opponent Demetra later joins their group, evasively offering her “intuition” along with the others’ brains, coolness, and strength.

But when he meets Rez, Francis, and Arnold in the “real world” near the end of the film, they don’t look as they do in the game. To this, Juni looks at them scornfully and says, "Reality check.”

Juni Cortez is a callous little fool.

Evidence

Very soon after Valentin enters the game, he gets a power-up, “Mega Legs”, which not only restores his long-lost ability to walk, but gives him incredible jumping ability and a shiny, armor-covered superheroic physique. Valentin’s great strength and mobility prove very handy for Juni and the group, and Juni turns to him for advice multiple times.

Near the end of the game, Valentin is reluctant to leave for the real world. In Game Over, he can walk and run, and Juni looks at him like he's "some kind of super hero", but in the real world, he'll be confined to a wheelchair. He agrees to go back in Juni promises him he'll look at Valentin no differently than in the game, for, even though he'll be in a wheelchair, on the inside Valentin feels like "this" (presumably a superheroic figure).

Section 2: Programmers

One level, the group knows some programmers are around; Francis describes them as "the braniacs who wrote the book for the game". As they’ll bounce them back to Level 1 to catch them as a consequence of earlier cheating, the group scatters to avoid them. However, they find Juni after he and Demetra consult a forbidden map of the whole game. The programmers menacingly taunt Juni, instantly making him lose one of his lives as they taunt him. Scared, Juni calls out for his grandpa:

Programmers: "Listen to that, E-Dawg. 'The Guy' is calling his grandpa.[Sarcastically] I'm so scared." "What's he gonna do? Drool on us?" (Valentin dramatically steps in from behind and picks them up by the scruffs of their necks) Valentin: "You are programmers? Let's see what you really look like."

Francis scans them to reveal their real appearances, showing 1980s-Microsoft-employee-style dorks. Valentin deems them "very unimpressive" and Rez snarkily calls them "computer nerds".1

Section 3: Demetra

Demetra was Juni’s opponent in a robot arena, and later tried to stop him, twice, in the Mega Race. (i.e., the world’s most intense game of Virtual Reality Mario Kart) Later, she joins the group, offering her “intuition”. When one of the game’s challenges pit Juni and Arnold against each other for the group to progress, with the loser being removed from the game, Juni fares poorly. Demetra swaps herself with Juni, sacrificing herself so Juni can go rescue his sister.

The beta testers try to “kill” (make him lose all his game lives) Juni and his sister, out of the belief Juni is “The Deceiver”, a figure in the game who tricks players and keeps them from getting to Level 5 and its “untold riches”. When they change their minds and enter Level 5, Demetra soon re-appears. Carmen confidently states Demetra isn’t real, slicing through her to expose her as just a hologram. She’s the Deceiver, an AI whose purpose was to hinder them. Juni doesn’t share Carmen’s scorn. It turns out Demetra had developed a crush on Juni, and helps them all to escape as the Toymaker tries to trap them in the game.

Juni Cortez Neglecting the Evidence

In the real world, the spy agency tracks down Rez, Francis, and Arnold from their email addresses and brings them in front of Juni. Juni still looks pretty cool as pudgy-faced preteens go, but, shockingly, the beta testers look nothing like they do in real life. Francis has no glasses and has a biker jacket, Rez looks like a 1980s Microsoft-employee-style dork, and Arnold has glasses.

Juni: “What happened to Francis the Brain, Arnold the Strong, and Mr. Cool?” Francis: “Well, in the real world, I'm not that smart.” Arnold: “I'm not strong." Rez: “I’m not cool.”

To this, Juni just looks at them with an expression that morphs from shock, to bafflement, and then scorn, and dissmissively says: "Reality check." (When his grandpa is within earshot, no less)

One might want to cut Juni some slack; he's 12, at most. Yet, Juni Cortez says this even though he’s seen Francis being smart (reading through the tech manual and reporting on it), Arnold being strong (catapulting another player out of a car, attacking him, being acknowledged as the “strongest player”) and Rez being cool. (being unflappable and leading the other two) Worse, he says this despite knowing Demetra was more than her programming...and despite just having promised his grandpa he would look at him no differently in the real world even when confined to a wheelchair.

Admittedly, they did try to “kill” (in a video game sense) him and Carmen before reaching Level 5, out of the belief Juni was The Deceiver. They were also initially unfriendly to him, telling him to get to the next level in a way that was effective but made him lose a life, and only agreed to follow him and help him upon proving he was “The Guy” in the very dangerous Mega Race. On the other hand, the previous film shows he already holds his grandpa in high regard, and though Demetra was twice his opponent, her actions weren’t any worse than someone showing off skill in a competitive video game. (e.g., Mario Kart or Street Fighter)

Valentin’s reluctance to leave Game Over parallels that of a real person: Ibelin Redmoore. (or, rather, Mats Steen).2 Mats Steen had Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a fatal genetic disorder that rendered him slumping, atrophied, and wheelchair-bound, a la the physicist Stephen Hawking. He found solace in the massively multi-player game World of Warcraft, where everyone saw him as his avatar/alter-ego, the handsome detective nobleman Ibelin Redmoore.

A friend of his in World of Warcraft, Kai Simon, said at his funeral:

"I met Mats in a world where it doesn't matter a bit who you are, what kind of body you have, or how you look in reality, behind the keyboard.”

Had Juni known Ibelin Redmoore...what would he have said?

(Trivia: Originally, I was going to write something about Spy Kids 3D, appropos of nothing, as an April Fool's Day joke earlier this year. This is just the rewritten version of the nearly-complete joke update.)

Which, in retrospect, is a ridiculous thing to say. He and the others love video games so much they're beta testers for a new virtual-reality video game in 2003, before video games were as "mainstream" and respected as they are now. Indeed, one could call Francis a nerd for his brainy mannerisms and glasses. Though...knowing Rez looks similar to one of the programmers in real life, perhaps he says this out of self-hating insecurity? ↩︎

Source: The BBC. ↩︎

[argentdandelion]

Flowey and PTSD (Part 1)

Part 1: Introduction and Symptoms     Part 2: Treatment and Conclusions

Introduction and Thesis

Above: Something not necessary.

Warning: This post necessarily covers Flowey’s dark, traumatic, and sad backstory. For simplicity’s sake, this article will refer to the first fallen human as "Chara".

In many works, Flowey receives a SOUL or SOULs or regains his original SOUL, gets an Asriel-like body, and acts largely as Asriel. The implicit understanding of these works is that gaining a SOUl and become Asriel-like/Asriel again is the only way Flowey can be happy.

As Devichonee pointed out in a tragically missing post, some of Flowey's symptoms, such as unhappiness, disassociation from reality (i.e. "This is all just a GAME."), and inability to connect with others parallel symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), especially child cases.1 His backstory, after all, is traumatic enough to cause PTSD. By Undertale logic, humans would still have SOULs even after developing PTSD, so Flowey's soullessness isn't necessarily the cause of his symptoms.2 If he does indeed have PTSD, treating it would help him get a happy ending too.

Strong/Best-Supported Symptoms

While Flowey has several symptoms which seem to match a PTSD diagnosis, some symptoms are more consistent or intense than others.

The symptoms which match best are:

“Loss of interest in things they used to enjoy: detachment; general lack of responsiveness; feeling numb”/“Lack of Positive Emotions”

Kind, compassionate Asriel likely enjoyed helping others. He and Chara baked a pie for Asgore, and he initially helped Chara with the buttercup plan with only a little coaxing/manipulation. Note that Flowey first used his power for good: he became “friends” with everyone and “solved all their problems flawlessly”. However, helping others did not make him happy, and he eventually grew bored.

Flowey characterizes himself as "empty inside", and is disconnected (or detached) from others. His soullessness means he cannot feel or understand love and compassion. However, he is not actually emotionless: he can feel a wide variety of emotions. He's even capable of positive ones: he's amused or delighted at the prospect of killing Frisk over and over. Thus, his numbness and "lack of positive emotions" is relative.

“Trouble feeling affectionate”

As a flower, Flowey couldn’t feel love for his parents, no matter how much he tried or how much time he spent with them. While he cannot feel love nor compassion, he nonetheless seems fond of who he thinks is Chara, and arguably even acts affectionate. (“Chara...I think if you're around...just living in the surface world doesn't seem so bad.”) Yet, he probably doesn’t feel affectionate:

“There’s only one person [Chara] I could care about anymore. And even then, I couldn’t TRULY care about them. I just like to think there’s someone out there… Someone that I won’t get tired of.”

“Irritability, more aggressive than before, or even violent” While Flowey is certainly more aggressive and violent than Asriel, it’s unclear whether his irritability is reasonable under the circumstances or related to his PTSD.

“Reenactment of an event for a period of seconds or hours or, very rarely, days/Relieving [sic] the event over and over in thought or in play”

As Devichonee pointed out, when Flowey woke up as a flower he called out for help: his mom, his dad, or anybody. But nobody came. Similarly, when Frisk is trapped in an inescapable ring of bullets in the Omega Flowey fight, he dares them to call for help. When they do, he changes his face to an Asriel/Toriel-like one and says: “Mommy! Daddy! Somebody help!”

The lines "Don't you get it? This is all just a GAME." suggests Flowey thinks his life is just a game. (He's only coincidentally right.) This idea might be a coping mechanism helping him feel better, something that excuses his depravity, or both: coping mechanisms can hurt others.

Weaker/Less-Supported Symptoms

These are less consistent and intense symptoms. Some, arguably, are not PTSD symptoms at all, but are better explained by other factors.

“Becoming very upset when something causes memories of the event”

Flowey may have been so distressed at Frisk repeatedly sparing him at the end of the Omega Flowey fight because it paralleled Asriel's own behavior: kind, compassionate Asriel refused to fight the humans attacking him.

“Intense ongoing fear or sadness” Flowey was sad at Chara’s death, but since the time span of events in the Flowey Runs is unclear, it’s not clear whether his sadness or fear is “intense” or “ongoing”.

“Acting helpless, hopeless or withdrawn”.

Flowey is certainly not helpless; he has powers over time. Yet, his Flowey Runs may suggest feeling hopeless and withdrawn. Before he discovered his power of SAVE, he was despondent. He spent weeks trying to feel some love for his father, but eventually concluded he couldn't love others. He explains that even killing people has grown tiring, and says: "I've done everything this world has to offer" with a somewhat dejected expression.

“Lasting worries and beliefs and people and the world being unsafe” Having absorbed Chara’s SOUL, Asriel brought Chara’s lifeless body to a flower patch in the nearby human village. The humans then attacked him, but he did not fight back. He picked up Chara’s body, went back to the Underground, and died shortly after from his injuries.

Asriel: "This whole time, I've blamed myself for that decision. [to not kill the humans attacking him] "That's why I adopted that horrible view of the world. "Kill or be killed."

Flowey believed being kind and compassionate as Asriel only got him killed, and that if had killed the humans then, he wouldn’t be stuck as a flower and things would be better. Only by the flowerbed speech (see link above) does he stop regretting that decision.

Part 1: Introduction and Symptoms     Part 2: Treatment and Conclusions

Child PTSD is diagnosed only if “symptoms persist for more than 1 month and are adversely affecting the child’s life and level of functioning”. Flowey surely spent more than a month in countless Flowey Runs: if the 9999:99 play time recorded before the Omega Flowey fight is true and not a sign of tampering, Flowey has lived through time loops for at least ~416.69 days (or 13.699 months). ↩︎

Does the Snowman, which doesn't turn to dust when "killed", have a SOUL? (Who knows?) While the character Jerry is a jerk, he surely has a SOUL. ↩︎