#not just anime but in general; though i prefer animation by a VAST margin & i typically need at least a little supernatural in a premise

[feralphoenix]

BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN YOU’RE NOT PREPARED TO TRY

if you’re following my blog or if you read my fanfiction, you may have seen me talking in tags or comments about how the radiance hollowknight was a pacifist. “feral, wtf?” you may have thought. “she’s the freaking final boss and tries really, really hard to kill you and all her attacks do 2 entire masks damage. where on earth do you get pacifism out of that???”

to you specifically i say, that’s an understandable reaction! the short version of how i got here was that i started thinking about the story implications of radi not inflicting contact damage and took a deep dive into game mechanics and lore. when i came up for air i had made myself Very Sad.

if this intrigues you and you would like to know more, come along with me, i am happy to point out the things i noticed and share the Big Sad around.

this essay is also available on dreamwidth for accessibility purposes, since my layout’s text may be too small for folks on pc with high-res screens.

CONTENT WARNING: This essay discusses pseudo-zombie plagues and associated body horror, colonialism and genocide, horrible things that happened in real life Australian history... you know, the usual topics that come up when I’m talking about Hollow Knight.

ADDITIONAL NOTICE: TPK fans of the “TPK meant well/was working for the greater good”/“TPK and Radi are equally bad”/“TPK is bad but Radi is worse” variety please give this one a pass, it ain’t for you.

finally if youre from a christian cultural upbringing (whether currently practicing, agnostic/secular, or atheist now), understand that some of what i’m discussing here may challenge you. if thinking thru the implications of this particular part of hollow knight worldbuilding/lore is distressing for you, PLEASE only approach this essay when youre in a safe mindset & open to listening, and ask the help of a therapist or anti-racism teacher/mentor to help you process your thoughts & feelings. just like keep in mind that youre listening to an ethnoreligiously marginalized person and please be respectful here or wherever else youre discussing this dang essay

BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN YOU’RE NOT PREPARED TO TRY: The Radiance Doesn’t Deal Contact Damage And That’s Kind Of Fucked Up And Sad

The vast majority of hostile creatures in Hollow Knight deal contact damage: This is to say, if the Wandering Knight (who I’ll probably spend most of this essay calling by their affectionate fan name Ghost) touches a hostile creature, this harms them.

There are exceptions to this rule. The most notable and most oft-memed example is the game’s literal actual true final boss, the Radiance. Not only will Ghost not be harmed by running into any part of her body, but during her stagger animation, where she drops to the boss arena floor on her front with her whole body splayed out, Ghost still isn’t harmed if she lands on top of them! What’s more, this holds true for her full-power form Absolute Radiance, the secret final boss of the Godmaster quest/endings.

A lot of people find this amusing, because it’s a little absurd that a game’s final boss is an exception to such a consistent element of gameplay! Hence all the “haha moth too soft and fluffy for contact damage” jokes. It is objective facts that Radi is very soft and very fluffy, so it’s very easy to understand why people don’t overthink this too much.

Thinking about things I like in gross detail is unfortunately my hobby. When it comes to Hollow Knight this usually leads to me making myself really sad. I’d like to share the fruits of my theorizing with the class, so other people can be sad with me.

Now, from a game design perspective I can think of a lot of reasons why Team Cherry chose for Radiance not to inflict contact damage. Her hitbox only covers the central part of her body. Her limbs are large, so because of the way she floats, if she did contact damage she would be protected from nail strikes from below and to either side. This would give a player who prefers nail combat a punishingly small margin through which they could inflict damage without also taking a hit, potentially forcing them to adapt to a new and unfamiliar play style at the very end of the game. That’s not fun for anybody and tends to make players feel very frustrated.

In addition to this, Radiance’s attacks are all bullet hell-style spells. All of them except the floor hazards inflict two masks of damage, meaning if you want to stay alive and identify points where it’s possible to heal, you need to learn the spell patterns and dodge a lot. Radi is a large boss. If running into her hurt you this would make the bullet hell elements of her fight extra punishing.

So, I think the purely game mechanics reason for Moth Too Soft And Fluffy is in interest of keeping her boss fight fair, and helping players feel like they have a chance of actually defeating her.

Part of why we all love Hollow Knight, though, is that there’s not much in the game that only exists for purely mechanical reasons. There’s always some form of story or lore integration.

So what on earth is the story reason behind why Radiance doesn’t deal contact damage?

OTHER ENEMIES THAT DON’T DEAL CONTACT DAMAGE

Radi isn’t the only enemy (here defined as fightable/killable creature) in Hollow Knight who doesn't inflict contact damage, so let’s take a look at her fellow exceptions to the rule to see what we can learn.

Broadly speaking there are two categories of Enemies That Don’t Deal Contact Damage. The first is enemies or bosses who used to be hostile, but have become friendly to the player. For instance, when characters like Ogrim and Hornet are not being fought in boss battles, touching them won’t cause damage to Ghost. These story characters who Ghost has more or less reconciled with can’t be damaged by the player out of combat either.

In terms of generic enemies who used to be hostile but have become friendly to the player, we have the mantises of the Fungal Wastes and the Siblings/Ghost’s Shade. We learn from the game’s lore that the mantises Did Not Like The Pale King and were hostile to Hallownest, but that they established a ceasefire conditional on their keeping the people of Deepnest (who were also hostile to Hallownest) from leaving through the area’s main entrance/exit in the Fungal Wastes - essentially the two native kingdoms were pitted against one another by the Pale King.

Now, just because there was a ceasefire, that doesn’t mean the mantises take kindly to Hallownest bugs brazenly trespassing into their dang house; they will get in your face and try to kill you unless you have permission to be there. But once you’ve defeated the Mantis Lords in combat and proven yourself worthy of the mantises’ respect, they’ll let you pass through their turf unmolested. They are no longer actively hostile and don't deal contact damage.

(You're still able to attack them, though - maybe because you’d be locked out of receiving the Hunter’s Mark if you complete the Respect quest/achievement before you’ve successfully killed enough mantises? - and if you attack them, or if your pet charm familiars attack them, any mantises you aggroed will fight back and deal contact damage again.)

The Siblings, as well as Ghost’s Shade, are initially indiscriminately hostile. Our window into Shade psychology is limited, but we know that the Shade died violently and the Siblings probably did too; they may be lashing out. They’re also Void creatures, and Ghost looks a lot like the Pale King, whom we can guess from context clues pissed the Void off significantly by using it as his personal play-doh to make tools and toys with and also using its house as his personal garbage dump for baby corpses.

However, once Ghost recalls their past and breaks the mask of the Kingsoul charm to reveal the Void Heart at its core, the Void recognizes them as a part of it, and Ghost becomes able to direct/lead the Void to some extent. As an extension of this, the Siblings and Ghost’s shade become docile and can now be killed by any weapon in one hit instead of just the Dream Nail (which is made of Radiance’s Light and is the Void’s natural weakness). They don’t deal contact damage anymore either.

That’s it for “enemies that inflict contact damage at one point, but stop inflicting it after becoming friendly or neutral to Ghost”.

The generic enemies which don't inflict contact damage include shrumelings, maggots, maskflies, and lightseeds/lifeseeds. These enemies are incapable of inflicting any damage on Ghost whatsoever, because by themselves they are completely helpless entities with no natural defenses.

Shrumelings are infant members of the mushroom clan who are usually protected by adult fungi like shrumal warriors and ogres. Lightseeds and lifeseeds are harmless single-celled organisms. Maskflies are similarly harmless. Maggots, we glean from the Hunter’s Journal and dialogue from False Knight/Failed Champion, are the bottom rung of Hallownest’s society because they are weak and helpless, and are forced into menial and slave labor by other Hallownest bugs because they cannot defend themselves. The maggots’ plight is the whole reason why False Knight/Failed Champion stole Hegemol's armor in the first place, as he wanted to protect his people.

All of these enemies flee when Ghost approaches them. (Some maskfly groups’ flight triggers are set to specific areas on a map and won’t flee if you can avoid stepping on/passing through those areas, but this is clearly due to a programming oversight because their whole Thing is running away.)

But, there’s something interesting to be observed in the case of lightseeds and maggots: They can fight back against and harm Ghost if they use tools. The little flock of lightseeds you chase around the Ancient Basin eventually get sick of Ghost’s shit and take over Broken Vessel/Lost Kin’s corpse, which they puppet around to try to murder you. By doing so they gain access to Broken Vessel/Lost Kin’s considerable combat prowess and become very dangerous, contact damage included in the bargain. (The lightseeds’ doing this seems to evoke the vessel’s spirit, since they reach for Ghost when defeated. That’s not a gesture the lightseeds have any reason to make. The Lost Kin fight, by which the spirit seems to gain some form of closure, becomes available here too.)

False Knight/Failed Champion’s fights work on the same general principle. Now that he has a weapon he can attack Ghost, and his armor deals contact damage. The maggot inside the armor does not inflict contact damage; essentially both his boss fights consist of your whacking the armor until he’s stunned and pops out of the armor for a moment so you can hit his vulnerable real body, which is the only part of him that yields Soul when you smack him. In fact, his boss fights will last forever if you let him recover from being stunned on his own.

Between these two groups, Radiance very obviously doesn’t fit in the first, as she’s the final boss and is very vigorously trying to kill Ghost with various magic spells. You can tell from her Dream Nail dialogue that she’s furious about what the Pale King did to her and her people, and is afraid for her life. She is willing to use everything at her disposal to try to destroy Ghost so she can survive, go free, and get revenge for the Pale King’s crimes. If she could do contact damage to Ghost she would.

So, the only logical conclusion to make is that Radi falls into the second group of enemies that don’t inflict contact damage. She is physically incapable of causing any harm to anyone with only her body. Her magic is deadly as all get out and the 2 masks damage explosion noise probably haunts the nightmares of anyone who’s struggled fighting her, but without it she is helpless.

WHY CAN’T RADIANCE DO CONTACT DAMAGE?

It might be pretty hard to reconcile the fact that a character with Audre Lorde energy as potent as Radi Hollowknight’s is has a whopping 0 ATK. The biggest clues we get in terms of story context for her inability to inflict physical harm of any kind can be found within the culture of the moth tribe, who were her people.

Thistlewind, the backer-designed moth ghost who can be found in the Resting Grounds, tells you that the majority of moths were pacifists, and that individuals like them and like Markoth who learned to wield a nail were in the minority. Thistlewind appears to have learned to fight as a means of self-defense while they explored the crater area, and describes Markoth as having done so in order to “[brave] the edges of this world, hoping to uncover a truth long forgotten”. It sounds to me like Markoth was trying to recover parts of moth culture that were lost when their tribe was assimilated into Hallownest, or maybe even searching for Radiance or trying to learn what happened to her. (Judging that his corpse is hidden behind one of the Pale King’s shade gates it seems this didn’t go well. Thanks TPK.)

As far as fighting moths go there’s Marmu too, but she seems to be a special case, possibly raised in Hallownest's culture instead of with her tribe. We don’t actually get any sort of canon explanation for how a baby moth wound up as a child soldier who died defending the Queen’s Gardens, but given the overall tone of Hollow Knight as a game and all the colonization/Australian history parallel subtext, some horrifying possibilities come to mind.

So, if Thistlewind, Markoth, and Marmu are Outliers Lepidoptera and should not be counted, how did the majority of moths spend their time? According to Seer, who knows more about the tribe’s history than most (and to Quirrel, who points you to her if you defeat Uumuu before picking up the Dream Nail), the moths’ main prerogative was cultivating and developing dream magic. From the way the Seer describes dreams as a living history as you collect Essence, dream magic seems to be a parallel to the Dreaming (or Dreamtime), a spiritual concept in Indigenous Australian religion related to both history and myth.

To translate this into simple terms, the moths were by and large pacifists whose culture celebrated art, history, and spirituality.

Team Cherry tends to adapt at least some aspects of real-life bug behavior and biology into their sad cartoon bugs, so moths-as-pacifists tracks: Real moths do not really have any way to fight. They defend themselves from predators via their mobility and their markings, which tend towards either camouflage that helps them hide or bright markings intended to scare predators off by indicating they’re poisonous (therefore not good to eat) or look like the face of something much bigger and more dangerous than they are.

There's not that much we can glean about the moths in pre-Hallownest society aside from Seer’s dialogue, because Hallownest destroyed their civilization so thoroughly: Except in the Dream Realm (which is filled with Essence spirographs and the wisteria charms that decorate Seer’s room), their architecture can only be found anymore in hidden parts of the Resting Grounds and at the very top of the Crystal Peak where Radi’s statue and a fuckton of lore tablets Ghost doesn’t know how to read are located.

But, we know that the crater pre-Hallownest was home to a ton of diverse bug nations - the mosskin, the mushroom tribe, the mantises, Deepnest, the Hive, the flukes - and every SINGLE one of those had some kind of warrior tradition, as well as their own unique cultures. In the midst of all that it was only the moths who were pacifists, so from there we can tentatively assume that they were on good enough terms with their neighbors for there not to be any fighting. The mosskin in particular also had and still have a Higher Being on their side, though in the modern day Unn seems to be rather conflict avoidant to say the least.

And we know from Hallownest’s past dealings with the mantises and Deepnest that even having Two (2) Higher Beings isn’t enough to keep rival civilizations off your nuts if they hate you, so it’s improbable that Radiance just did all the moths’ fighting for them.

The only hint that the moths ever had beef with anyone at all is one of Radiance’s Dream Nail lines, “ancient enemy” - this is popularly theorized to refer to the Void and might be corroborated by the Void’s willingness to follow Ghost into Radi’s boss fights and fight alongside them. As the Void seems to be some sort of Higher Being/god of darkness and nothingness, and the Dream Nail’s only offensive ability is to kill Void creatures, the Void and creatures of Light appear to be in a position of mutual vulnerability. Some of the Pale King’s writings in his workshop, which identify the Void as a power in direct opposition to his, support this too.

It’s unclear whether the Void civilization and Radiance ever directly came to blows or whether they were just giving each other the stink eye over being natural enemies - personally I think the latter is more likely because the two civilizations existed on opposite sides of the crater*, and again, the moths were pacifists; plus when Ghost brings the Void along to Radi’s boss fight she is quickly and gruesomely overwhelmed by it.

What I am saying here is that if pacifism was such an integral aspect of moth culture, and Radiance epitomized her people’s culture, and she is 100% incapable of inflicting physical harm, she was probably a pacifist too.

DEEP DOWN YOU KNOW YOU WEREN'T BUILT FOR FIGHTING

Hallownest flourished for a long, long time between the Pale King and White Lady first establishing it and the initial outbreak of the Infection.

There’s no conclusive information in-game as to why this is. We can only guess: Maybe Radiance was so badly hurt or weakened by the moths’ assimilation that it simply took her That Long to become capable of the mass dream broadcast to Literally Everyone In Hallownest that would eventually become the Infection when Hallownest’s people tried to suppress it. Or, maybe it just took a long time for her to come up with a way to fight back. It’s possible that it took her a while to find the resolve to actually fight back, too, with her principles of pacifism in conflict with the necessity of defending herself and taking her people back. Maybe there was a change in the moths’ situation in Hallownest somewhere down the line that compelled her to step in - all the moths are super extremely dead at the time Hollow Knight starts, after all. Even Seer is eventually revealed to be a revenant like Ze’mer the Grey Mourner, only lingering in the world to pass on the Dream Nail and tell Radiance’s story. Maybe it was a combination of all those factors. Barring Team Cherry dropping in to explain this bit of Sekret Deep Lore, we are never going to know.

All we DO know for sure is that when we mosey into Hollow’s brain (and/or Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny our way to the top of Hallownest’s Pantheon) and challenge the literal actual sun to a fight, Radi takes the challenge with extreme prejudice and comes in swinging.

Something interesting I noticed while comparing the Radiance boss fights with the Pure Vessel fight is that some of their attacks are vaguely similar. Where warrior-mage characters like Xero and Markoth have physical weapons that they summon and manipulate with magic, Radiance and Pure Vessel both create nails and daggers out of Essence and Soul respectively. Both characters’ magical weapon attacks are similar in nature too: Some are used to create hazards that must be dodged or avoided, and some are fired directly at Ghost in radial patterns.

This begs a very sad chicken-and-egg question. Did Radi and Hollow develop these battle techniques independently of each other, has Hollow in their prime form somehow absorbed similar techniques to Radi through osmosis since they’re currently chained together by the brain... or is Radi mimicking and innovating on these attacks she knows Hollow can do?

All her other attacks seem very obvious for a light-themed character, after all: Beam attacks and blobs of light. A flash of bright light is also how she shakes off the Void the first time it tries to grab her, too, making for a strong argument that that’s the original natural defense she possessed, and that’s what she based most of her attack magic off of.

Making sword’s and knive’s from Essence when most of her people didn’t even handle these sorts of tools even at the height of her power and influence, though... that seems less like something that would come naturally to her. i don’t really know i don’t have a definitive answer or theory for this one it just Seems Possible and it’s fucking me up guys

Even the Infection - which began life as Radiance’s attempt to communicate, let’s remember, before it progressed to “The End Of Eva Disease Will Continue Until Someone Actually Listens To Me” and then finally Radi screaming “FUCK U LET ME OUT, GET THAT NEW SUNNY D BOTTLE THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME, HALLOWNEST EAT SHIT” during canon - does not appear to be fatal to living bugs until the tumorous growths grow so large they impede bodily functions, like real cancer. We can observe this phenomenon via a number of NPCs and enemies that are rediscovered as tumorous corpses after the whole Crossroads area becomes infected.

At least to me, all of this points to Radiance being a character to whom violence and causing harm doesn't come naturally, and who has resorted to these methods in desperation.

It actually reminds me a lot of False Knight/Failed Champion. It’s a very common theory among fans that when he stole Hegemol’s armor he killed Hegemol - this is a reasonable thing to believe, since Hegemol is the only one of the Five Great Knights of Hallownest who never appears at all in-game, not even as a corpse like Dryya and Isma. Like Radi, False Knight/Failed Champion is a character who rose up and turned to violence in order to protect his people, despite the maggots not being a belligerent species.

False Knight is one of the game’s first major bosses, sometimes the first boss that players encounter at all. And so Hollow Knight’s story bookends with two separate victims of a predatory system, one who lived within and was cannibalized by it, one outside of it who was deliberately targeted by the Pale King. Neither of them started out as a fighter, but both of them still adopted violence as a tool to protect themselves and their people. Radiance is as doomed as False Knight by the Pale King’s genocide, but just like False Knight, she has no intention of going quietly, and will rage against the dying of the light as only the literal actual sun can.

Cue Deedee Magno Hall voice clip. You all know the one.

*A footnote: There’s no conclusive evidence to tell us whether the Void civilization was contemporaneous with the other pre-Hallownest indigenous bug nations or whether it predated them. Mask Maker has a line suggesting that the Void civilization tried to expand throughout the crater in its heyday and that maybe this was linked to its collapse, but in general the Void lore is just too darn thin to draw firm conclusions - it’s like trying to speculate on the ancient stone age cultures of the Americas that came before pre-settler Indigenous countries when the only sources you can easily access are elementary school level US history textbooks. (To non-Americans: We mostly teach kids propaganda until they hit college-level courses and it sucks so much ass.) This is very realistic worldbuilding, but also please Team Cherry I want to know more about these ancient bugs who apparently got lost in the sauce

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

DECOLONIZE EARTH

I was born belonging to a field and a forest edge until civilization stole my being and ‘developed’ my home. Years later I was still a teenager when I stole back some summertime alone in noncivilization, a juniper knoll over a lake. Each dawn a mourning dove perched on the branch above greeted morning cooOO-woo-woo-woooo. For years after, work-consume city culture swallowed my life. One day I opened my city door shocked to find a lame mourning dove on the deck. My mind wondered on which human construct caused the collision. My inner self, original self, truest self, arose from artificial hibernation. My animal being compassionately watched over this other animal being through days and nights as her body healed. When she found strength to fly away, I mused mystical meaning of this visit from my past converting this deck artifice into wild refuge. Too quickly I distracted back into illusory life.

I moved to another urban area, this one with sloped landslide-prone ‘parks’ astonishingly let be as withered wildlife habitat. They were dumped, fragmented and encroached into by domesticated humans and their invading tag-along plants and animals. These wild lands civilization rejected for ‘development’, however degraded, became my authentic life. In forests dominated by conifers, much taller and widespread than junipers, in swaths along saline shores, my animal being reawakened. This time I heard nature’s cries and responded wholly, learning ways of tending the wild. Indigenous plants are the locus of thriving wild, so I observed their characters, their pleasures and aversions, movements and constraints, givings and takings, shape-shifting communities and ranges, and what assists them in their struggles with invading colonizers.

My assists aligned with the science of restoring ecology, but my emphasis on caring observations of everything wild awakened a connection deeper than anything science. I didn’t see my change coming, or plan it, though I was ready for it and accepted it fully. Despite reports as increasing in population, the only time I saw a mourning dove since moving to the land of towering conifers was on a walk through a human altered environment. Crows harangued with raptor-warning caws from electric lines above her lifeless body on roadside lawn. Blood dripped from her beak as a hawk held her still with a talon to rip open her breast. My mind wondered if humans’ ‘development’ vastness created space too open, stealing cover that serves hawk the advantage. After years of lying dormant inside me, mourning dove’s call intuitively sounded, not entering through my ears but emanating through my voice. cooOO-woo-woo-woooo

Mourning doves are so uncommon in the forests that I began using the call to communicate with habitat restoration friends working within sound range, drawing selective attention of others familiar with expected bird calls of the place. I varied the emotionality of the call to signal meaning, from “I’m here now” to “Come check this out!” Now that my project focuses on inviting return of extirpated indigenous plants, each time I cast seeds, bury rhizomes or stake stems into a habitat in which the species once thrived, I sound the mourning dove’s call selectively to all others who live in this home to announce the plant’s presence. Then I leave the wild alone to reacquaint.

During a recent training on how nonNatives can ally with Native Americans I learned a lesson not taught: restoring wild ecology is the deepest way colonized humans can decolonize. Returning a place toward its pre-colonized state is rewilding both the place and the rewilder’s self. This training however centered on identity politics, which I see as correlational to and part of the birth of human colonization: civilization. Humans’ domestication and domesticating is colonization’s core, which is wild life’s core problem. As this training revealed, civilized humans wage futile fights paradoxically against civilization’s hierarchies. Further, they see the heinous power they hold over nonhuman animals as worth the price of civilizations’ ‘progress’, from world takeovers much farther back than humans’ most recent post-stone age globalization.

Post-stone age colonization removes us from wild ways of knowing, for example, replacing childhoods in connection with nature to childhoods enclosed behind walls studying ways of controlling nature. Humans’ stone age colonization enculturated humans away from primal ways of living by unnaturally positioned themselves as Earth’s top predator as they expanded. This most noticeably manifests in the shifting human foodway from biological herbivores to advantageous omnivores. From foraging to dominating by organized hunting.

Past shifting human lifeways of a place creates a curious predicament in restoration ecology. The restoration reference point of a place resembles the most recent phase diversity of life was thriving there. In most cases that phase was a settled period after the habitat was markedly altered by human colonizing actions impacting the environment. If nature restorers’ reference point for a place was shaped by actions such as old growth forest burns set by some to open gaps for hunting opportunities, how do they account for these missing human interactions that shaped the ecology?

For thousands of years humans have decided how all life live, further which life and entire species live and which die. Imagine a pre-human colonization wildlife map. Imagine wildlife timelines fluctuating at points of first human contacts, how interconnections transitioned from wild dynamics to hierarchies under human control. Species deemed appealing to human usefulness or preference moved to the top, while any species unwanted was marginalized and risked extermination. Imagine nonhuman animals hosting a training for humans on the history of their oppression and exploitation, complete with stories of their slaughters and species extinctions, as well as their resistance stories and strategies, with an invitation for you to support them.

An invitation to ally with nature, to liberate Earth from human colonization, would center on rekindling primal relations with others we now oppress. A training to ally with wild life would confront humans’ colonizing propaganda, stereotypes and defenses with countering truths. Not all past humans hunted, many remained foragers, just as many humans today as young as toddlers instinctively choose to refrain from animal exploitation. Humans’ reign over others is not natural, nor is humans’ consuming animals part of the ‘circle of life’, no matter how much ‘thanks’ is expressed. The heart of wild interactions and relations is not using others as resources, but thriving community wild life. Other animals do not mystically ‘offer’ themselves for consumption, whether or not ‘every part’ of their body is used. They are not ‘food’ animals brought into existence for us to live, but wild animals often bred into unnatural form by imprisoning civilized hands.

Truth is, humans are an incredibly adaptive species with great abilities to change toward sustainable lifeways, if they would take steps in overcoming their speciesism. In a training to ally with nature, they would get a checklist to test their speciesism, akin to Dr. Raible’s checklist for antiracist white allies. *I demonstrate knowledge and awareness of the issues of speciesism. *I continually educate myself about speciesism. *I raise issues about speciesism over and over, both in public and in private. *I identify speciesism as it is happening. *I take risks in… Like civilization, speciesism is so rampant, so ingrained in all of everywhere, the chasm feels unbridgeable. But going hand in hand with civilization, not facing the daunting task of bringing down speciesism means humans’ own demise.

Like all oppressions, the dominant group benefits leave tracks of misery seeming so unnecessary in retrospect. Bringing down the old ways gives space for the new. Humans can identify and breach the cracks in the cycle of systematic oppression of nature at each step. The generated misinformation and propaganda. The justification for further mistreatment. The institutions perpetuating and enforcing speciesism birthed in civilization. The internalized dominance and feelings of superiority. The internalized oppression via subscribing to the narrative. The cultural acceptance, approval, legitimization, normalization. The systemic mistreatment of nature. Whether targets are specific or broad, planting seeds in the hearts and minds or immediately effective actions, opportunities abound.

While the path of the new way does not and cannot have an overarching plan, some potential actions of the new way can be envisioned. Collectively reduce human population. Give back land for indigenous rewilding. Restore habitat toward times of last thriving ecosystems, that is pre-European colonization. Invite the return of extirpated species. Where possible, reintroduce human-removed indigenous top predators. Sanctuaries for liberated animals bred into domesticated forms who cannot go feral or co-adapt into habitat community. Shrink animal agriculture first, plant agriculture second. If possible, skip over architecting food forests & permaculture with humans at the center and return straight to foraging. Draw from sciences without bias barriers to wildlife’s innate right to live on their own terms

Humans will either soon drive themselves to extinction with many others, or they will decolonize themselves by mutualizing their alliance with Earth’s living communities. Hope lies in releasing mass delusion, in bringing down speciesism and civilization that dragged it in, in assisting Earth’s transition into a rewilded state that includes the compassionate feral folio-frugivore human living in symbiosis with others. Not utopia, but liberating Earth from human domestication. The transition has already begun, and all humans are invited to join. cooOO-woo-woo-woooo

[comicteaparty]

January 29th-February 4th, 2020 Reader Favorites Archive

The archive for the Reader Favorites chat that occurred from January 29th, 2020 to February 4th, 2020.  The chat focused on the following question:

Which genre is your favorite for webcomics and which is your least favorite? Why is that?

carcarchu

Romance is without a doubt my favourite genre although i do have a particular soft spot for historical series too (and if it combines the 2 that's a dream come true ). as for my least favourite i guess sci-fi, i'm really not a fan of having to remember a ton of world building details and the backstories of some sci-fi series feel like reading a textbook sometimes. also comedy can be really hit or miss for me if the sense of humour used in the comic doesn't do it for me

Capitania do Azar

Honestly I'll read petty much anything if I'm having fun, not necessarily a genre-related issue. I think nice, interesting stories can be crafted in any genres. That being said, fantasy is usually not my jam and I really like Sci-fi

Kabocha

When it comes to webcomics, I'll read a lot of stuff! But I think Fantasy and Drama have a soft spot in my heart for some reason! I really enjoy it when a creator seems to be having fun (or is aware) of how hammy their drama can be -- and fantasy can be chock full of it! (And as an aside, I love the heck outta romance when done well! A lot of webcomics that classify themselves as romances tend to be more Drama than Romance, mostly bc they don't follow the genre conventions of romance, and instead stick to a more dramatic-oriented plot structure... it's intriguing.) Anyway! I think my least favorite these days is slice of life and gaming comics. A lot of it gets really weird and overwrought and I just... I dunno, there's gotta be a draw. Gaming comics just aren't very fun to read, esp as I've gotten older. A lot of it feels like "hey here's this pop culture reference this small-ish in group gets! how funny! hahaha" or punching down, and... I dunno, I don't have a lot of time to keep on top of memes for games I don't/can't play.

Cronaj (Whispers of the Past)

I love fantasy and sci-fi, mostly because I'm a world-building nut. I want to get lost in a new place when I read. This also extends towards historical comics, but those are pretty rare. I won't lie though, I definitely fact-check historical comics when I read them, because I want to know how much I can trust the accuracy of the setting. I also tend to enjoy romance if done well, and especially when blended with other genres. IMO, romances can be kinda samey by themselves, so there needs to be some other plot outside of the characters' relationship for me to stay invested. As for least favorite genres... Definitely comedy and slice-of-life. As someone who regularly watches stand-up, I don't typically find comedy comics very funny most of the time, especially relatable gag-a-day types. As for slice-of-life, it often seems... boring to me. I mean, I might just be mentally unable to process the nuances or something, but what actually happens in slice-of-lifes? That being said, there are always exceptions to these preferences, because I have been completely turned off from certain fantasy comics, for example, and there are definitely comedies that I have enjoyed thoroughly. In the end, all that really matters is if a specific comic suits my tastes/quality expectations, genre tossed aside

Ash🦀

When it comes to webcomics, animal stories and fantasy are definitely my favorites. I like getting lost in a world, I don’t want to stay in my own if I’m trying to escape. Oh, also, and actually being able to read emotions. On animals, because the style and emotion often have to be pushed so much, it’s way easier on me to be able to parse expressions on an animal than a human. Might just be my autistic brain tho /shrug Also, sci fi, heavy dose of “sci” in there. If I feel like I’m learning something it makes it so much more fun. My least favorite genres are romance and historical. To be honest, I find historical pieces rely so much on the politics and the talking and the human nuance I don’t much understand in the first place that I end up getting bored or confused or both. And romance is... well, my mom constantly had hallmark movies on, so I’ve kind of grown to hate the romance genre as a whole tbh. If it’s a side piece in a fantasy, fine, okay. Too often they’re unbelievable and the couple just doesn’t have any chemistry, and I just end up not buying it, so I’d like to yeet it to the side as much as possible in most cases. Now, there are some that are exceptions, here, but they are few and far between. Somehow, LGBTA+ romance just blows past this hangup, however. I dunno, it’s easier for me to care then, it feels newer, and... well, frankly, a good deal of the time they’re written better, I dunno. So, they’re the exception to the rule.

Kabocha

Hard agree on the LGBTA+ romance -- but also other marginalized groups tend to be more thoughtful in romance and tropes they use! While there's a general sort of... uh, set of expectations as far as plot and the happily-ever-after/happy-for-now ending, it's honestly really just sort of nice to see creators be mindful about what they're making, and write stuff that isn't just the same sort of nonsense that gets marketed in the mainstream. ...Now this is making me think about how much I would love to see Courtney Milan or Alyssa Cole's works translated into comics... If they could do Pride and Prejudice, someone pls give me A Princess in Theory (Sorry, I'm... a little bit of an aficionado for the genre, particularly in romance novels)

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I was never able to get into ANY romance until I started reading some LGBTQ+ ones. I never liked the genre before then, but I think it was just because I couldn’t identify with / care about all the cishet couple represented. Once I was reading a romance I actually could connect with, it was completely different. It’s still not a genre I like to read very often because it’s so trope-heavy, though.

keii4ii

I feel like romance gets pigeonholed into a specific (and admittedly prevalent/highly visible) type, kinda like how "fantasy" was pigeonholed as Tolkienish fantasy for years and years until recently.

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

As for what genres I do like, definitely fantasy. I especially like dark stories with lots of nuance, twisty plots, and some surreality. I like both high and urban fantasy, though as I get older, I lean more towards the latter. There’s someone really fascinating to me about mixing modern tech with magic and the supernatural. My least favourite (apart from most romance) is probably newspaper-style webcomics. I’m just not into that into punchline-a-strip or art art that has a Saturday-morning-cartoon feel. Not that it’s bad in any way, and I actually do have a few exceptions of comics in that style that I DO like, but it’s just not really my thing. I also can’t really get into political comics or war stories.

@keii4ii Yeah, it definitely does! And it becomes frustrating to try and find Something Different within the genre when the vast majority of it is using the same tropes and set up. I think that’s also why I’ve started leaning more towards urban fantasy as I’ve aged because a lot of high fantasy was becoming ‘more of the same’.

(says someone who creates a Tolkein-esque high fantasy comic )

keii4ii

You can still tell great stories within those prevalent types. Just gotta be mindful about choosing tropes/archetypes because they work for the story, as opposed to just going with them mindlessly. But that's not really extra work; that mindfulness is important no matter what kind of a story you're writing, IMO!

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I also say I don’t get into punchline-a-strip comedy and yet have TWO comics in that genre, so I’m kind of a hypocrite.

Oh yes, definitely! I do try to avoid or even subvert some of those very common tropes, though I’m sure I don’t always succeed! Some tropes can be very effective, just not when every story feels like you’ve read this a hundred times before with minor variation.

Kabocha

Honestly, that's one of the great things about self pub and webcomics -- you can get SO many more unique voices without the gatekeepers that traditionally held genres and markets back. Like, y'all might not have heard, but back years and years ago, Borders had someone working there at the corporate level that helped stock genre fiction -- but basically segregated POC authors from the genres that they were actually writing in. Which was a load of crap. (And that's not even getting into issues with queer media and fiction being stocked in stores or even published.) So basically in stores you'd see for a while, kind of the samey sort of stuff that you find in genre fiction -- and I think webcomics helps kind of... break out of those same sorts of expectations for various genres? It's kind of nice on the whole.

FeatheryJustice

Favourite genre of comics: Comedy and Action. If I could find Jackie Chan action and humour combo in a comic I would love the hell out of it. Least favourite: Slice of Life of the drama variety and romance variety. I dont mind if it is slice of life with action or slice of life informative because I am reading for more. If it is a romance between just two high schoolers doing nothing then I get bored. If it is two high schoolers in a slice of life but it focuses on them working on an animation together giving us animation information I would be okay with that.

Cronaj (Whispers of the Past)

Lol, as someone who makes a fantasy series that plays with the amnesia trope like it went out of style (spoilers, it did), I totally agree that fantasy and romance can be very tropey.

kzuich

I like comedy and slice-of-life. Occasionally I like drama, but only if it's mixed with comedy. Or black comedy. (Seeing a recurring theme here? xD)

Or drama. With comedy sprinkled in.

I don't know why but I've always felt webcomics were really great for comedy. Some of the funniest stuff I've read was a webcomic. Dunno why. Least favorite genre? I don't really have one. I'll read anything but those are the genres I actually -like-.

DanitheCarutor

I'll read just about anything. I love stuff with some kind of surrealistic or abstract quality to it, like Weaker Sides (https://www.weakersides.com/), Seluda (https://tapas.io/series/seluda) and Hookteeth (https://hookteethcomic.com/). I also really enjoy stuff that is sad, or deals with heavy themes due to the feeling of catharsis they give me. Sun Rising (https://tapas.io/series/Sun-Rising), Rescue Me (https://tapas.io/series/Rescue-Me) and The Dogs on the Railroad (https://tapas.io/series/The-Dogs-on-the-Railroad) come to mind. It's nice to experience difficult emotions in a controlled environment. If I had to be genre specific I would have to say my favorite is the very elusive horror genre. Love me some spoopy shit and pretty much everything else that comes with it, no matter how cheesy it gets! It sucks that horror is so hard to find in webcomics, at least for me.

Least favorite genres? Gag-a-day, slice of life and romance. I have a lot of trouble getting into comedy comics that aren't story driven, so I don't usually read gag-a-days or autobios. I will read the latter two since most of the time they're good things to read when you don't want to turn your brain off for a bit, but all three genres are honestly really boring for me. When it comes to character centric stuff I really want something like a deep character study, although I haven't had luck finding stuff like that. Romance specifically, I have a hate/I don't mind relationship with. Romantic intimacy has always been super gross to me, I hate seeing people kissing on each other in movies due to an issue with how nasty the human mouth is, and the sound makes me sick to my stomach. With comics it's easier to digest, the characters are just drawings so I don't mind seeing them get all buckwild, but it's still not my most favorite. There are occasions where I can't even read a comic due to genre vs. setting. For example (and I'm am not saying this comic is bad, I mean it has over 100k subs) A Matter of Life and Death (https://tapas.io/series/A-Matter-of-Life-and-Death). I really love the art in this comic, the setting, some of the characters and the little bits of lore I saw. But it's a slice of life-esque romantic type of comic, so the world building for this extremely creative looking setting is kinda put on the back burner for intimate scenes between the MCs. Again, this doesn't make it bad. I personally turned out not to be the target demographic because I wanted 'A' and the creator wanted 'B'. Maybe I'll give this one another glance someday to see where the story has gone, I admittedly haven't read it in a couple years so the story might have developed.

FeatherNotes(Krispy)

My fave is anything that deals in heavy lore-- most that fit the bill are usually fictional like fantasy and sci-fi, but there are always exceptions that play with some good world building outside those genres! I love to read comics that i can get lost in and want to almost research the world created-- as long as that element is balanced in a story, im usually up for anything! That being said however, my least favourite is the gag strips and strictly comedy. I haven't yet found any that have really made me read page after page since my first looksee with comedy comics (sassy creed and that super smash bros one come to mind so quite a while ago) but I'm sure if i was more diligent in searching through the genre I could find something for myself!

sssfrs (JOE IS DEAD)

I love history and sci-fi. I have a hard time getting into fiction and I like stories with a firm connection to something real in the world

kayotics

I’m a fan of fantasy stories, and I like romance sometimes as well. I don’t mind gag-a-day strips but I don’t really follow any, mostly since I’m looking for a little more meat in my story. Despite how much crossover sci-fi and fantasy have, I’m not big into sci-fi. If a story engages me in that genre, I’ll still read it, but it’s not a genre I search through. I also don’t read war comics. I have a hard no on superheroes as well, I’m just tired of them.

renieplayerone

I love anything thats a mix of SciFi and history or some other genre (its why i love blade runner, scifi film noir). Weaving history into scifi is a challenge but man does it make for really cool aesthetics and moral questions

RebelVampire

My favorite genre for webcomics is probably a tie between fantasy and sci-fi. Not only do I just personally love world-building heavy material, but I also just think webcomics is a medium well-suited to them. I kind of don't feel things like live action do those genres justice. However, webcomics have a lot of artistic freedom so art style, differing art effects, etc. can all come into play to create awe, whimsy, and a bunch of other emotions that just capture a feeling of wonder that I expect from those generes. As for least favorite genre, definitely serialized comedy - which by this I mean comics that have a story along with the comedy. For me I just...don't find a lot of them funny. A lot of the humor is a bit too trope-y for my liking or imitating comedy without really understanding why the comedy worked in the original source. So for me the jokes just rarely land even if I can appreciate the effort that went into the comics. That being said, there's always exceptions. Like http://sgkdr.webcomic.ws/ is a comic I would've initially passed just based on genre, but when i read it the humor was/is actually really smart and really creative. Just the same, there's plenty of fantasy and sci-fi comics I don't like, though this usually comes down to story execution even if I think the art is pretty to look at.

BadSprite

My favorite genres for comics are action, comedy, drama and slice of life. I'm particularly a fan of slice of life stories that take place in some fantastical world, because the nuances of the setting makes the mundane so much more interesting. Also action comedies are my jam. One of my faves being: http://paranatural.net/. I personally love how comedy is integrated into action scenes to capture the frantic nature of the situations. My least favorite genre are probably romance, it's not that I have anything against it. I just feel like there's an oversaturation of them and there's very few that brings something new to the table. Most of them feel too same-y for me.

eli [a winged tale]

It really depends on my mood~ my bookmarks are all over the place. If I really enjoy the art and the characters, I usually stay for the story. My usual go-to is fantasy, sci-fi or slice of life! I recently got into romance but I’m a bit choosey about it. I definitely echo @Kabocha ‘s statement about exploring different voices and subversion of tropes. Always eager to read tighter storylines and those that take risks in diversity. Least favourite same as @FeatherNotes(Krispy) really! Sometimes it’s funny (love strange planet) but I won’t be binging it

MJ Massey

My favorite genres of comics are fantasy, action/adventure, and romance. Especially if all three are together in one delicious package. I'll read pretty much anything but it's gotta be well paced and well written to keep me coming back

Javi

My favorite genres are action, comedy, fantasy, sci-fi, slice of life and adventure. Also anything with animal characters in it I'm already invested in it but that's just my furry brain talking (edited)

AntiBunny

I would say a broad term of adventure. Be it scifi, fantasy, road trip, or superntural I love a good adventure comic full of interesting characters and locations.

[tinydemonwriter-blog]

10 Tips for Private Investigators to Conduct More Successful Surveillance

Observation is a work of art, not a science. Shockingly a considerable lot of its best exercises are found out through experimentation. Regardless of whether you direct protection safeguard or household examinations, reconnaissance is a vast piece of your day as a private specialist. The accompanying 10 proposals will enable you to lead a more practical and effective reconnaissance.

 1. A Detailed Intake Sheet Start by social occasion as much data as you can from the customer in advance. This sounds really evident yet youd be shocked. Numerous customers essentially need to give you the subjects name, age and address and abandon it at that. A nitty gritty admission sheet draws together data well beyond the business standard: data, for example, regular checkups, treatment arrangements, conjugal status, number of youngsters, pastimes, and so forth. This takes into consideration a clearer image of the subjects routine and encourages you keep away from re-concocting the wheel out in the field. This data, together with a hunt of open and restrictive databases, will spare you time and enable you to give your customer a more practical examination.

 2. Is Your Surveillance Vehicle Completely Forgettable? If not, it ought to be. White, dark, silver and dim are the most mainstream hues for vehicles. Beige and darker vehicles will in general be the minimum discernible and, unexpectedly, get the least tickets. Red, yellow and custom paint occupations make your vehicle excessively observable. While youre at it, investigate your reconnaissance vehicle and ensure it mixes in to your condition. No guard stickers, no window stickers, no vanity plates, no crippled plates, nothing connected to the reception apparatus, no custom edges, no secondary selling adornments and no body harm. Your vehicle ought not be excessively spotless or excessively messy. The less detectable your vehicle is the more fruitful you will be on observation. With regards to tint dont simply get limousine tent on your windows and forget about it. Limousine tint is frequently unreasonably dull for reconnaissance promptly toward the beginning of the day and late during the evening. A mix of dim tint, a windshield cover and dark observation window ornaments is sufficient to veil your essence. Ensure you agree to your states tint laws.

 3. A Pre-Surveillance Check Very couple of organizations lead a pre-reconnaissance check since they're more worried about their budgetary main concern than giving quality work. With a pre-reconnaissance check the specialist drives by the subjects living arrangement in the daytime the day preceding what might ordinarily be an early morning observation. This enables the specialist to watch the right location in sunlight hours, see what vehicles are available, find a reasonable region to set up and leave, search for potential issues and scout ahead for likely exits. Its the initial phase in a progressively effective reconnaissance.

 4. What Time Do I Start? Commonly it's best to be set up for a laborers comp or obligation observation by 6:00 a.m. Any later and you chance the possibility of losing the subject or thinking about whether they are even home.

 5. Moving into Position Move your observation vehicle into position rapidly, especially in a local location, and get set up. In the event that you played out a pre-reconnaissance check you won't sit idle circumnavigating the square twice or pondering where you'll set up observation. You'll just move directly into your pre-decided position. Search for spots that will in general make you less discernible, for example, stopping between two living arrangements, by substantial trees, dividers or overwhelming vegetation.

 6. Noting the Call of Nature One of the greatest missteps made by new kids on the block as well as prepared specialists is supposing they can briefly sever observation and get lunch at a drive-through or take a fast bathroom break. It's for all intents and purposes an axiom that the one time you do it, is the one time the subject chooses to leave. Be set up for a long reconnaissance by keeping a little cooler in your vehicle. Fill it with water, vitality bars, natural product, anything that is speedy, simple and will give you vitality. Obviously that implies when nature calls youre must remain right where youre at. Old water containers or half-gallon juice containers are useful for putting away pee. Whatever you use ensure it has a strong cover. In case you're a female specialist a water bottle wont do. You can buy a little convenient RV latrine which can be utilized over and over. Lamentably, it'll must be cleaned over and over.

 7. Do You Possess Superhero Powers of Observation? It's anything but difficult to pull up on observation and air out a soft cover book. In any case, you wont get much of anywhere in the reconnaissance world. Utilize your forces of perception and remain centered. Watchfulness is its own reward. Is everybody's grass cut aside from the subjects? Is it junk pickup day and his jars are still in favor of his home? Are there sacks of compost before the subjects carport entryway? Utilize your forces of thinking. Keep in mind: individuals are animals of propensity. Men start shaving on a similar side of their face inevitably. Hope to build up examples in your subjects conduct.

 8. Keep That Camera Steady Do your customers require Dramamine when they watch your recordings? Innovation, as Sonys Steady Shot, has helped picture adjustment. Go above and beyond and use either a monopod or a tripod.

 9. Simply the Facts, Ma'am Just the Facts. Your reconnaissance notes ought to contain clear and succinct realities, not supposition. Compose your notes as though you anticipate that them should be subpoenaed. Any censorious, fiery or prejudicial remarks with respect to the subject are amateurish and could hurt your customer in court.

 10. Pursue That Car! Tragically, tailing somebody is best learned by experimentation. Its greater part appears glaringly evident. For instance, its generally preferable to lose somebody rather over be scorched. It's tied in with observing marginally in front of the subjects vehicle and guessing what they will do. Will they make the light? Assuming this is the case, you would be wise to accelerate. The separation you keep between your observation vehicle and the subjects vehicle is directed by the sort of traffic you're in. Overwhelming traffic: remain close. Parkway or rustic traffic: you can permit some separation between you. When you start following a subject attempt to search for anything on their vehicle that makes it special, e.g., guard stickers, window stickers, body harm, and so on. Notwithstanding what sort of vehicle theyre driving, when you start tailing them in rush hour gridlock you'll see only that specific model of vehicle. If you are looking for more information about Investigations visit DiscreetInvestigations right away.

[cupidmarwani-archive]

Accommodation (Pacific Part 3)

During breakfast, the whole crew is reminded of Sonny being inhuman because of the way his teeth sink into the fish, tearing it savagely like the predator he must be beneath the waves. Mike can’t help watching him- not with horror, of course, but rather with interest and curiosity. It can be hard to observe the way predators eat up close, but now he can see the way the design of Sonny’s teeth lend well to raw meat like the fish. He eats like a land animal, however, or perhaps a shark. As opposed to swallowing his fish whole, he takes bites as large as his jaw will allow. Olivia quietly points out that his jaw appears to unhinge for bigger bites, something to examine later on.

Once the meal is over, Sonny is happy to wash his face of the blood in one of the sinks for the comfort of the crew. Not without complaining about the freshwater, of course. He clearly prefers the salinity of the ocean over what normal people can hydrate themselves with. But Sonny is still a gentle addition to the crew, and seems to adore answering any questions the researchers have about his body and his home. More than once, Mike finds himself running gentle fingertips up and down a strip of Sonny’s iridescent scales. Unlike a fish’s, they’re smooth, but unlike a snake’s, they’re perpetually cool. Mike isn’t sure if he’s cold blooded. Most marine life is, but Sonny’s different. He’s special.

“Are there others like you?” Olivia asks at one point, pen poised over her notepad with Alex’s doodles in the margins.

At her question, Sonny ducks his head. “I don’t know. I haven’t- I haven’t met any like me. But my friends are all over, and they’re probably wondering why I didn’t come home. Peter especially. They’re um, I don’t know the human word, they have human bodies on top. But on the bottom, they’re like- they’re not squid. But they’re…”

“Octopus?” Mike fills in, already flipping through his sketches. “Eight tentacles, very smart.”

He finds a drawing of one they encountered off the Australian coast months ago and shows it to Sonny, who nods and strokes the drawing with his fingertips.

“Peter found me when I was a hatchling. I was alone. But he took care of me, and my friends helped. They’re a family, all of them.”

A wistful expression overtakes Sonny’s features, as if remembering the way it felt to be cared for and loved and part of a real family. Mike has never really had that. He doesn’t think about it, though, it’s much easier to just pretend none of it ever happened and everything is just as it should be. Out here, on the vast sea, the problems back home can’t come close to touching him. Here, it’s just himself, his friends, and an entire world of underwater creatures who have yet to be discovered by mankind.

“He’s looking for me, I’ll bet. He gets worried. Like in New York, he was scared, and he’s the one who helped- he found me. And we came home. Then everything was okay, and I didn’t have to be scared because he was there.”

“Do you want to go home?” Mike asks.

“No. Home always finds me,” Sonny replies sagely, and begins playing with the spool of fishing line attached to the deck. It looks wrong, wrapping around his webbed fingers, but he makes a point of shredding into little pieces too short to cause any harm. It must be part of his hatred for fishing gear, which gives Mike the idea that the men in New York who hurt him were probably fishermen. “Probably soon. I wanna stay here.”

“You’re always welcome to,” Olivia says, “just know that when we dock, you’ll probably have to stay in the water.”

Sonny nods and entertains himself further with the spool, entertaining himself with it between questions and gentle examinations until it gets too dark to see well. They could go inside, but it’s late anyhow. Mike and the crew have their dinner while Sonny catches and eats his in the water before asking to be brought back up.

He has a scrape along the side of the side of one arm, looking deep and jagged as it drips blood gone liquidy from the water. Melinda rushes to get a bandage while Nick starts trying to wipe up the mess with his shirt, only to hiss and jump back. His skin is already starting to blister from the contact. No one knows quite what to do, and they’re all worried, but Sonny is just standing there as Melinda carefully winds the bandage around his wound, careful not to touch it.

“Didn’t you draw blood?” Nick asks incredulously, cradling his hand close to his chest. “How did this not happen?”

“Mike and I didn’t come into direct contact with it, and my analysis has only been studying the cells, so far. It was a small sample. I can try to learn what I can about the chemical composition. But from now on, as a general rule, don’t touch his blood until we know more.”

Sonny shifts back uneasily, watching them all with a mixture of confusion and fright.

“And be careful of his spit, too, he’s venomous,” Mike adds in a soft tone.

“We didn’t collect a saliva sample.”

He shrugs. “I know, but he brought his fish on board this morning, and when he dropped it at first, the bite on that thing was not normal. I’m willing to bet he has venom.”

While the researchers all ponder this, Sonny runs his tongue over his sharp teeth self-consciously and seems to wilt as he avoids looking at them now. Mike feels bad, but he knows he had to say it. There are no words to provide comfort; at least, not ones he can think of off the top of his head right now. But Nick is still gritting his teeth in clear pain as Olivia guides him back to the cabins to run the chemical burn under cool water in hopes of soothing him.

“Would it be okay to take a sample, Sonny?”

For a moment, Sonny just stares at Melinda and nods. He’s very clearly unhappy with all of this. Mike tries to approach him, but Sonny turns away and watches the ocean. When Mike looks too, he sees a flash of something large beneath the water, moving too fast for him to identify.

[hippoland]

The #1 thing successful founders think about for their next startups

At Hustle Fund, we back both first time founders as well as repeat founders.  One thing I've noticed is that almost every repeat, previously-successful-founder focuses on the same thing for their respective startups: customer acquisition.  These founders not only think about customer acquisition first, but in many cases, they will even:

Abandon a startup idea altogether if the customer acquisition strategy isn't strong

Pre-sell / generate leads well before building a product to try to validate demand

Some thoughts on customer acquisition from my own learnings over the years both as a startup operator and talking with a lot of startups:

1) Unit economics matter A LOT.  

Unit economics are something I've found most entrepreneurs (and investors!) don't think about at all.  Forget about traction and hockey stick growth.  It's hard to get there without ideal unit economics.  Very simply, your cost to acquire a customer needs to be lower than the value of that customer (lifetime value).  

This is obvious.  Diving in a bit more into some thoughts here:

1b) Ad-based revenue streams generally have terrible unit economics.  

A typical ad-based revenue stream on a media website is around $5 per 1000 eyeballs ($5m CPM and give or take $1-$20ish CPMs).  In other words, if you can get 1000 people to come to your website consistently for under $5, then this business model works for you.  But this is incredibly hard to do, and most sites cannot do this at scale.  As always, there are exceptions: if you build a viral consumer product (such as an Instagram) where people are just coming to your site / app in droves at no cost to you, then you've got a great business.  But, if they are not, it's very hard to use paid acquisition to generate that type of traffic for under $5.  

As a result, second time founders very often shy away from ad-based consumer ideas, but when they do, they think about what viral mechanisms you can implement *first* and engineer the product around that mechanism.  Marketing first.  Product second.  Here is a good case study on LinkedIn (scroll down to see how they grew).  Or second time founders focus on lucrative verticals that pay more per eyeball or focus on ad formats that pay more (such as email newsletter sponsorships). 

Ads can also be cost-per-click or cost-per-action ads.  Although you can make more money by running per-click or per-action ads on a per conversion basis, it's also a lot harder to bring about these actions.  In particular, one thing to consider if you're trying to make money off affiliate ads is to think about how unique the product/service is in the ads you're running.  For example, if you are running affiliate ads for hotels, you might get 3-5% on a sale.  So if someone books a hotel at say $100, then that means you make say $5 on that transaction.  But if this is a generic hotel, then there are likely other affiliates who are doing paid marketing to try to get users to their sites / apps to convert users as well.  Moreover, the hotel itself may be running ads to drive traffic to their site / app, and for them, a conversion is worth far more than $5.  So you will likely get outspent on any paid marketing channel you may use to drive traffic to you at scale if there are other people trying to drive traffic to the same property.  

Even if you are not scaling with ads, partnerships and SEO also cost money, and your competitors or even complementary companies are all spending money on partnerships and SEO in order to drive as much traffic as they can.  One way to make an affiliate-ad based revenue stream work is to have access to unique products that no one else online is trying to sell.  This could mean partnering exclusively with someone who makes products offline (and who is not tech savvy to compete online with you).  

Another way is to have unique promotion channels, but these must be scalable.  Honey, for example, is a browser extension that is always in your browser and helps find coupons for you for any site you browse.  This allows them to retain users for a long time and make some affiliate revenue by directing you to particular offers that they get paid for.  Or, there are some hardware companies, for example, that make money based on affiliate revenue. They sell their hardware at cost -- say a new refrigerator.  And, when you buy food on a recurring basis, then they make recurring revenue by your buying food through their affiliate channel.  You will use your fridge for a decade or more so the retention here is high.  

There are clearly many companies making money on ads of some sort, so this is not to say that you cannot build a big company with ads.  You definitely can and there are many who do.  But, remember, the key insight is you need your revenue stream to be much more lucrative than the cost to acquire your customers who generate that revenue.  

2) B2B startups have high margins.  Sales cycles matter though.

Many serial entrepreneurs tend to gravitate towards building B2B startups.  I can't tell you how many founders I know whose first company was a consumer company and then built only B2B companies after that.  B2B companies can have great unit economics.  Business customers, depending on the problem, are less price sensitive than consumers.

HOWEVER, the length of a sales cycle is a strong consideration for most repeat successful founders.  For repeat founders, this can actually work BOTH WAYS.  

On one hand, I know some really successful founders actually opt for a *longer sales cycle*.  (I use "sales cycle" loosely -- by this I mean the time it takes to get a product paid for, and so this involves both product development and time to get a check from a customer). Some successful founders would prefer to go after a REALLY lucrative revenue opportunity that has a "longer sales cycle", because they can capitalize their company long enough with their own money + friends' money to gain the sale.  In some sense, their moat is capital, because most people will not be able to access enough capital (either by raising or by bootstrapping) to go after a similar opportunity.  Examples of this include startups that are building a new airplane or a new car or a rocketship or a new power plant, etc...  Most first time founders cannot just start bootstrapping a new rocketship startup.  

Sales cycle, as a consideration, also works the opposite way.  Many repeat successful founders would also actually prefer to go after opportunities with a much shorter sales cycle.  So if we use Christoph Janz' animal framework for building a big business for types of customers you can be going after, these founders won't be hunting elephants.  But they might go after rabbits or deer business customers.

And, because these companies are often able to move a lot more quickly than elephants, founders can often pre-sell before a product is ready.  Or at a minimum, generate a lot of leads before building to generate momentum and start to validate a business opportunity with real people and real money.  This pre-sales strategy, of course, can also be used for consumer businesses that sell things.  

As a side note: many companies in our portfolio at Hustle Fund, regardless of what they're building, have pre-sold their products before building anything.  

3) Does your business have naturally short retention?  

Repeat successful founders also think a lot about retention.  Some ideas seem like a good ideas but actually are not because of the retention component.  (or lack of). Here is an example:

I used to run some wedding-related sites; there's obviously a real need for products and services in the wedding space.  And, engaged couples pay a lot for weddings!  On the surface, this seems like a good space to be in.  But, the retention is terrible / non-existent.  Once someone gets married, in many cases, this person won't ever come back and generate revenue (or at least not for a decade later).  (Although I did once have a customer who bought from me, then called off the wedding, and then a few months later came back to my site to buy more, because she was now engaged to someone else.  But the vast majority of my customers were not in this camp.). This is not to say that you shouldn't do a wedding-related startup, but it's important to think about how to retain a customer to convert him/her towards other things.  

The Knot is a great example of a site in the wedding category that tries to retain people.  The Knot would not consider themselves a "wedding company".  They would consider themselves a "lifestyle company" -- they retain their users by moving their users to "The Nest" and later "The Bump" as you start settling down into married life and then have children.  This allows them to make money on their users for a much longer timespan.  

Retention applies to B2B companies as well.  For example, there are a lot of startups who offer products/services to startups.  When their customers outgrow them and become big companies, can they grow with them and offer products that make sense for larger companies?  Hubspot is a good example of this.  Initially, they focused on SMBs, but today, a lot of enterprise businesses use them.  But they still do partnerships with startup organizations/accelerators so that startups can start using their platform and grow up in the Hubspot ecosystem.  

So if you are starting a company around a person or a business' stage of life, think about how you can retain your customers / users over time.  

4) It's nice when someone else pays for a customer.

This is a very rare customer acquisition situation, but in some cases, a company can jump on an opportunity where a consumer benefits but someone else pays on behalf of the consumer.  This is nice, because the consumer gets something for free and is your user/customer.  So, the customer acquisition is easy, because this person doesn't need to pay money.  And, someone else is footing the bill and must do so.  This is a fantastic customer acquisition situation.  

This type of scenario often happens in weirdly regulated situations.  In health, for example, almost all online pharma startups are in this category.  A startup gets a consumer to sign up for service to get his/her medication for free.  His/her insurance must pay for it.  

This type of inefficiency happens in other industries as well and is something that I personally look for.  So, we've backed a couple of companies that fall into this category (they are not all health).  The customer acquisition is incredibly fast and high growth (i.e. easy to convert users when something is free to them and that something is awesome).  

In summary, when I evaluate startups, a big initial criteria for me is around evaluating how deeply the founders have thought about customer acquisition (and retention) and whether they are customer acquisition-centric founders.  This does not mean the founders need to have marketing and sales backgrounds; in fact, most of our founders do not have this background.  But, thinking about the unit economics as a business owner BEFORE building your product is incredibly important regardless of your background.  

Fundraising is a nebulous process that I aim to make more transparent.  To learn more secrets and tips, subscribe to my newsletter.

[estrellamientos]

Damnum Ferre ch.1

So I mentioned on @canon-typical-violence that the first chapter of this fic exists.

Their first civil conversation afterward is held at blaster- and sword-point, respectively. The second one goes worse.

Hux passed through conscious shakiness or disorientation some hours ago; he has long been worn down to what feels like two-dimensional nothingness but lacks the smoothness to be glass. Glassy calm he knows well, and fury like the flat of a good blade (his own, for instance), and this is neither. He’s something depthless and empty and abraded, lacking the wherewithal to find itself repulsive.

There are marginal advantages to this. For example, while he would normally take a running inventory of pain before moving on to not allowing it to affect him, Hux currently can’t manage to keep a listing of the damage in his head. This applies to all of the damage at hand, admittedly, but tabulations of what matters can be written down just as this is disregarded. He works easily through the due diligence of sacking the erstwhile Resistance base for all the nothing it has to provide, at any rate, and through their own forces’ withdrawal. He does not think about pursuit at this time, the way he does not think about the common features between one breath and the next.

It is not that he has ever forgotten the taste of blood, particularly his own, but that it is staying in his mouth beyond all reason, currently. This is odd. Psychosomatic, he presumes, unless he’s managed enough reverting to old bad habits to tear the lining of his throat. Irrelevant, at any rate, as in he will not permit it to become relevant. He does not stop.

By the time Hux can in good conscience return to the *Finalizer* he feels like Crait’s sanded off the surface of his skin the way it seems to have grated the contours of his mind. Not that anything hurts, save when he breathes. Merely that he seems to be lacking things he shouldn’t need to lack: edges, definition, grip; the ability to meaningfully distinguish stimuli that are himself from those that are not.

It does not notably impair his functioning, at least not to a degree that is intolerable; however, that is given the fact that the scale for said range of tolerance is currently a quietly horrible study in adaptation all its own.

Hux watches over the buzz of busy misery that surrounds him, not least because it wouldn’t do for him not to be tracking it, but he does not issue reprimands for individual acts of incompetence. None are irreparable—in fact (he may feel toward this later, should he remember to) people recover remarkably well, it’s merely the density of casual mistakes to recover from—and the apparent widespread agitated despair is too universal to selectively punish. Selection of particular actors would be unproductive even as examples to the rest. The solution, whatever it is, lies beyond mere individuals.

Beyond most individuals, anyway.

He knows better than to keep his distance from Kylo Ren now but Hux finds himself doing so anyway, at least for the duration before there’s a ship solid under his feet again. It is a somewhat pathetically short span of time, he realizes later, for all that it seems to stretch infinitely while he’s within it.

Ren allows the search and the withdrawal (Hux sternly does not call it a retreat; therefore neither does anyone else) to happen without any incident significant enough for people to bring to Hux’s attention. This is an acceptable state of affairs, though perhaps only in the way that inevitable things must be.

He waits, then, until he can corner Ren, and does not delude himself that Ren doesn’t know he is being cornered, in the particular manner that passes with little effort for drawing him aside into an unremarkable and vacant mid-level meeting room Hux knows the template for better than his own bare hand. There is a casually risible normalcy to it, of table and chairs and blank walls lacking sufficient importance to merit a viewport. If the lights were on it could be anywhere in spacetime after the first _Resurgent_ launched.

Hux does have his blaster ready, this time.

(Armitage Hux’s gift is preparation in advance; likewise his curse. He is, however, not in the habit of making the same mistake twice.)

“I don’t know if you can stop a shot from this distance,” Hux says. His teeth still taste like blood, so mildly there’s the impression of it being just the natural state of things at this point. It feels almost more like a faculty of the air, especially given how dry his mouth is. “I don’t know if you do either. I *do* know—” Know what? Not what Ren’s willing to risk on the subject, beyond that it’s enough to have walked in front of Hux without complaint. For all Hux knows Ren wants to die outright. It’s as close to a working theory of what he’s been witnessing as any. “You killed Snoke.”

Ren turns to face him, slow, easy. This is in no way outside what Hux went in expecting, when Ren let himself be steered to leave his back open so easily as to be outright consent, when the door reformed behind them. Ren is an egotistical, hubristic idiot, but he is not dead.

Neither of them bother with light, and the ship is running on her mildest level of power conservation. It’s a preventative measure, while they determine how much damage there is for the unscathed and the functional to make up for, for how long. The trace available illumination is sufficient, both for this conversation and for operations throughout. What light there is collects in Ren’s eyes and, when he speaks, shows on his teeth.

“Do you now,” he says, his voice rough as well; from salt, presumably, and from screaming. Ren fumbles some of the emotional coordination he’d need to achieve a noteworthy level of cruelty, but Hux notes the symbolic effort of it as a matter of record.

The problem with standing close enough to Ren to not be backed against door or wall while promising a shot in the spine—or, now, the gut—is that Hux can’t evaluate him as a whole threat. He simply doesn’t have the needed width in terms of viewing angles. As such he has to choose: he can watch Ren’s face, like a man who is having a conversation.

Or he can watch Ren’s hands, like a frightened animal, and feel it in his neck.

Hux has considered before, generally in the context of early childhood education (and, more prosaically, particularly while illuminating others on why they have forfeited any right to tell him their opinions on early childhood education), how much of the distinction between sentients and subsentients can be demonstrated by way of death. A subsentient animal has no meaningful understanding, fear, or anticipation of its own demise. It cannot develop a conception of its inevitability in general, nor a particular preference between facing an oncoming death and looking away before the moment of impact. Nor can it act on such a preference—or against it—were it to somehow internalize one anyway.

Confrontation, cowardice, and the rest of that family of emotions are a sentient prerogative. This is naturally relevant at even the lowest levels of human acculturation, for reasons that should be patently obvious and yet still forced Hux into *years* of mere parodies of would-be academic debate.

He’s sure Ren would have an opinion on the subject, if prompted, for Hux to be irritated by, were he to be given the opportunity. If he hasn’t developed it, Hux is resigned to confidence in Ren’s ability to determine one on the spot. Ren, as a murderer and a telepath, is uniquely disposed to potential usefulness with regards to analysis by the living of the experience of death in general; it is Ren *himself* who would make the effort useless at best. He is an unreliable witness consistently more interested in finding ways to make himself an obstacle than in relevance or truth. That Hux has never had that *particular* debate with Ren does not change the fact that he knows this.

When Ren’s arm moves too fast and fluid to bother with, when his lightsaber hums to life at the corner of Hux’s eye, Hux does not particularly react. He flinches on some level, and he feels it on his face, but it’s doubtlessly both unimpressive and unimpressed: more a microexpression with delusions of grandeur than anything else. His blaster stays perpetually steady.

“Of course I know, Ren.” Hux couldn’t keep the tiredness from his voice to save his life; as such he doesn’t try. “I know everything.”

Ren does something like laugh, like he thinks the lie is for his benefit: short, barking, not quite wild. His features don’t reach wildness either, merely managing to reach *for* it, even with the advantage of drinking in flickering red plasma light as an intensifier. There is remarkably little of him left, all told, if only the excisions were relevant or permanent. In both of their cases the net effect is not dissimilar to the feeling invoked by surveying the wreck of the *Supremacy*: the vast majority still usable, patently alive, objectively a unique threat and enduring achievement, yet stripped of menace despite largely retaining its function. “No you don’t,” Ren says. Staring at him, and not swinging, like he thinks he’s managing to say something else.

“I know you’re hopelessly outmatched,” Hux answers, dry in both form and function. His own tongue slows him down, sticking to the roof of his mouth.

“By *what*?” Ren snaps, but the rage makes no travel down his sword arm; Hux only realizes belatedly that it could’ve. The matter didn’t cross his mind for—many reasons, but not least among them is the fact that neither of them are looking at their weapons at all. The hum of Ren’s saber this nearby sounds positively faulty, though Hux lacks enough experience with simple uses of kyber to know from that how much of it is due to flaws of the crystal or of the housing, or of the character of lightsabers more generally. “Organa has *nothing*,” Ren’s going on, making a solid effort at passion, his voice snagging roughly on itself, “and the girl is—”

“Irrelevant,” Hux says. Ren lets him. (Hux, for his part, lets that carry him away; it doesn’t occur to him not to.) “They are currently irrelevant. You’re outmatched by yourself. You are on track to burn down everything of value in this galaxy and, presumably, should you continue to—to miraculously survive your mistakes otherwise, in the next.”

“I should kill you for that,” Ren halfway growls, making no effort to do so. Something of the ambient loss gives the ludicrous impression that the idea is new to him.

Hux holds his gaze accordingly. “You should,” he says. His own voice runs more placid about it than he’d expected. “And you won’t.”

“Really.” Ren is trying; this is noticeable; it’s why he fails. He’s never been able to be the threat he ought to be in mere conversation, Hux has found. It’s not surprising that what serves him in power and menace on the battlefield isn’t recaptured into a static exchange merely by the presence of the sword that represents it.

If it were just Ren’s lethality in question, that aspect of him would never go missing; he is self-evidently a weapon more obviously than he is a man. But Ren doesn’t work as a sustained, present ultimatum any more than a lightning strike could, and his lightsaber is fixing to give Hux a headache.

“So why not just shoot me, General? You remembered a gun this time.”

It’s surprising that Ren’s aware, even that much, of what went through Hux’s mind in the throne room. Barely less so, come to think, that he didn’t contest being assigned Snoke’s death at all. Hux says, “I’ve no great interest in dying, Ren.” Pointedly.

“Then what’s this *about*?” Ren’s lip pulls back from his teeth; Hux can’t tell if the line of brutal light at his side shifts with a tremor of the blade or just with Hux’s own blinking, gaze too fixed on the fire that paints Ren’s face. “You’re right, I should j—”

“I am invested in my continued survival and that of the Order,” Hux cuts in. He does not have to try hard at all *to* make it cutting, an accusation of a contrast worth noting out loud. This is the only reason he manages to do it, the same way he manages this conversation’s fixed tableau largely through the kind of even immobile calm that can only come from holding a blaster steady. “And my assessment of your inevitable, *contagious*, and self-inflicted ruin—” It awes him to see Ren take even that with merely a twitch, which is why Hux keeps going. He’ll rationalize it into a test later. It is not a test now. “—was dependent on you taking up the mantle that would destroy you *alone*.”

“So you should—“ Ren shakes himself for a second, from the neck up only. It completely ruins any authority or composure acquired by rephrasing. The central problem being, of course, that he doesn’t need it. “No. You *will* help me.”

Hux will deny, later, to himself, that he then spends a second imagining saying no. It rips through him anyway; it is unexpected; it is wholly unmanageable. Left to his own devices Ren is in fact sure to drive the Order into the ground. It will splinter faster and with less hope of salvage than any Republican dream. And, curiously—given Hux doesn’t think he would’ve made this assessment a week ago—he thinks Ren really would even know it was his own fault. Maybe even entirely.

For a second he imagines that: Saying no. (Leaning into the saber blade he won’t deign to look at, even, before Ren thought to do something more elaborate. There’s something seductive about the furious plasma at the corner of his eye, a manner of drawing him in of a vertigo-like genre with the kind of hubris at which Hux succeeds as much as with flight at which the human body fails.) Turning the entire conversation into one last spiteful feint. Letting Ren, for the first time in his life, experience the consequences of his actions.

He imagines the consequences themselves by the end of the beat, though. What it actually means—anathema—for the Order to fall. (And for Hux, were he to do otherwise and survive to see it, a neo-Republican execution; even if they end the war with enough collaborators to form a jury he can’t imagine anyone would waste the time.)

Hux thinks of Rae Sloane wearing the blood on her uniform like rank insignia; of the first flash of certainty of knowing that his father was not the Empire, that his father was a disgrace.

Snoke was not the First Order. Hux is not the First Order. Even the millions dead today were not the First Order. And Ren *certainly* isn’t.

He’ll give Ren nothing else aside from this pause: let the man know Hux still had to think if he has to, if he’s even equipped to notice, but Hux offers no change of expression, no resigned or irritated breath. He wouldn't be standing here if in the end he didn't know already exactly how this story goes.

Clipped and atemporal, the words as at home in his mouth now as they would have been five days or months or years ago, he says, “Of course, Supreme Leader. What do you need?”

At that Ren still stares at him, oddly slow to adapt. “I’d be more convinced you mean that,” he says, “if you weren’t still pointing a blaster at me.”

The corner of Hux’s mouth twitches quickly, to an extent that may or may not be visible. “Naturally,” he says, already thumbing the safety back on. Shifting his gaze isn’t necessary for that, nor for holstering it, although he knows immediately that keeping the conversation up to standards is about to get vastly more uncomfortable. He expects mistakes, as such, like breathing. “Sir?”

“Incredible.” Ren’s voice is flat in a way that makes the Republican in him positively blare with it.

It’s harder to read his face once his saber retracts, but the last relatively detailed look Hux gets gives him the odd impression Ren reciprocating on the armistice has happened without his conscious assent. The surprise seems too deep and fundamental to merely be a (honestly unmerited) reaction to Hux himself.

Ren takes a step back as he returns his saber to his belt, spending the rest of the distance between himself and the room’s normalcy to the point that he almost walks into the table, the motions far less polished. “So this is a truce?”

“Truces are for enemies, Ren,” Hux says. Ren looks at him for long enough that Hux’s eyes readjust in the interim, so perhaps it was the wrong thing to say. Certainly Hux has pushed further and in more directions than he’d at any point intended, egged on by every time Ren let him. Presuming Ren’s not about to change his mind about that and snap Hux’s neck, he’ll have to reassess. For now, in order to watch Ren blink at it more than anything else, Hux pitches his voice away to add, “Lights to fifty percent.”

Fifty percent lighting on even slight ship-wide energy austerity is entirely forgiving; he catches Ren’s face on the end of the reflexive blink that lets him, too, school himself accordingly. “Right,” Ren says. “Enemies.” He sounds not sarcastic as much as like he was recently made aware of the idea of sarcasm and is still forming a conclusion on it. “So what do *we* need, General?”

Hux shifts into parade rest; he even allows his spine to have an opinion on doing so, briefly, before he dismisses it. “We need to know where we stand,” he says, wonders idly if Ren finds a double meaning in it. Then he immediately gets carried away again. “The majority of the dedicated fleet is intact but a full survey of the damage will take time. A full survey of the death toll will take longer. The rest of our forces are largely dispatched on the frontlines of invasions of what had been selected as vulnerable targets prior t—” Prior to Starkiller. Hux swallows the mourning viciously and clears his throat after. “We can expect them to begin reporting back soon if they haven’t already, and that will give us a better picture of what we have to work with for recovery. For now I r—”

Ren raises his hand and Hux stills. He stills *immediately*, giving the lie to his own performance, stopping so fast he feels his pharynx click. All Ren does with this, though, is to scrub his hand over his face; the other finds the small conference table he’d not quite backed himself against and leans slightly on it. Hux understands the impulse on both counts, but it does Ren no favors. He doesn’t need them; this continues to be the problem.

(He will. Will he know?)

“Better question,” Ren says after a moment, his tone an oddly fragile tangle of resignation and embarrassment. “Now that you’re committed to not shooting me if I do, does anyone need *me*, or can I—can I get some sleep.”

The tiredness in Ren’s voice scrapes along Hux’s own bones, which is overall unsurprising. Beyond the obvious of their recent exertions, even Hux’s rudimentary understanding of the Force indicates it must require some manner of energy tax from its practitioners. He blinks, though, waylaid enough in thought to answer on a slide further into autopilot prompted by the obvious mistake of it, like Ren’s an errant subadult or some uppity commander. “Even under crisis a significant disruption of sleep/wake cycles is a choice of last resort,” he says on blank didactic reflex. “And even for essential crew. The alleged gain in having *any* given person present can only be weighted against the cost of their absence after considering that loss of function from sleep deprivation is immediate, punishing, and progressive, as well as compounding on itself. The idea carries the same wretched cost-benefit ratio as returning injured soldiers to the field when others are available. A—”

Ren is staring at him. Differently, this time, the emotion gap produced by the drop-off in threat filled with Hux’s own belated humiliation.

Hux bites his lips savagely, resigned to the certainty that his face is coloring with embarrassment. Those debates had taken *ages*, immediate practical relevance making them worse and more protracted than the issue of death, back when Order command had been laboring under an even worse infection of old Imperials spoiled by upbringings where they’d had lives to underexploit—even to waste—than it currently is. So much of Hux’s life takes place in contexts where he can better things by explaining them that the reflex endures long after he’s lost his grasp on common sense.

(The only thing that curtails it is certainty of lack of *understanding*—that is, a guarantee of failure—and Ren is not Snoke. Of course that has disarmed him.)

“My apologies,” he chokes out. “Habit. There were—arguments. For a long time. About establishing priorities, by people who didn’t *recognize*—” Hux strangles his own voice again before Ren can, though at this point he’d probably welcome it as help, before realizing at last why he’s actually doing this.

Because Ren just blithely handed Hux permission to tell Ren to hurt himself and all but promised he would do it in the asking, and Hux still needs to tell him no. The good thing is Hux knew to talk himself out of doing otherwise before he even recognized the option. The bad thing is that the managing of it is so hard Hux has to spend his own dignity on necessity and do so out loud.

“We don’t,” Hux says, still drawn inexorably to take the long way of it, more so knowing now he’s hit on something Ren is crushingly, subhumanly inept with, to an extent Hux can’t yet so much as model. The realization that both the down payment on Hux’s continued survival and the delayed cost of him making it this far will have to be fixing Ren to at least manage to fake it, and the prospect of in *any* way *fixing Kylo Ren* is—”We don’t hurt our own unless it is necessary for the advancement of the First Order. And recovery efforts are already in motion. Yes.”

“An actual answer, Hux.” Ren is still staring: nakedly, some kind of upset Hux isn’t going to further disambiguate for as long as he can afford to read Ren as not planning on lashing out with it. For now Ren looks merely like an impending implosion, and Hux can not care. Any extent to which this manages to penetrate far enough to be refreshing is annulled when Ren remembers his own rank, though, even slightly. “And then you’re dismissed.”

Shifting to an actually pertinent routine distracts Hux from the knowledge of his off-script failures as much as anything could. Ren may not appear disposed to push on any of those fault lines currently, all the fight gone out of him with the decision that Hux doesn’t merit fighting, but Hux’s mind will surely pick up the slack. He nods sharply. “Sir.” Thinks before he speaks, this time. *Not* about the open wounds of the present, or about the other questions Ren has opened, unintentionally and in great density, thus far. “It’s… in everyone’s interest that you rest, frankly. We can reconvene when—”

*When we’ve both recovered somewhat,* he almost says. Hux himself isn’t sure quite why he opts to kill the sentence so viciously instead. It’s not too gentle on Ren; aggravating him further now has ceased to be useful. It’s not irrelevant; it is the strict description of his concern at hand. It’s not impossible; Hux can’t afford not to recover.

What, then?

“Right,” Ren says, into that emptiness, after a moment. “All right.”

The way his eyes fall shut seems more than anything like the action of gravity on a great and inert weight (seems like Hux has ceased to exist), not like the function of a mere human body, such that Hux can’t find him pathetic quickly enough to be affected. Instead he’s seized with the nonsensical urge to ask if Ren plans on falling asleep here, on his feet, in a mid-level conference room. Strictly speaking, as far as Ren’s poor decisions go, something that *human* is unlikely to be beyond him.

Hux leaves, instead, exactly as requested and without another word. Quickly, as well; it is somehow even more uncomfortable than being watched by Ren *not* to be. He is aware of no gaze on his turning back, not even of the air-pressure shift he has gathered is the Force as metaphor made real actor.

It’s not that Hux’s sense of such things has ever been inerrant, or even reliable; it is, instead, exactly enough to make him wonder, and nothing more.

He does hope that Ren has the sense to drag himself off and actually rest. It happens almost in spite of himself. Hux can recognize, regardless of the quickly-ignored opinions of his individual bones, that this has been brutal for Ren as well, because it has been brutal for everyone, to varying degrees.

Ren will be more bearable when he is more effective. At worst, when he inevitably gets in Hux’s way, that will enable Hux to act with the confidence that Ren meant to and proceed accordingly. At best…

Who knows? Hux thinks, so suddenly that for a moment it drags him almost to a stop. Who would know? Who has *seen* it? At Ren’s best—

Maybe he’ll even be useful.

[crit1rael]

Uncommon Questions for OCs and their creators

QUESTIONS FOR YOUR OCs What’s the maximum amount of time your character can sit still with nothing to do? -About 10 minutes if they really really have to, usually they're always moving unless they're "sleeping". If it's a sit-still-and-wait situation there will be fidgeting, if it's a don't-move-or-you'll-die an-agonizing-death situation then there will be straining noises and sweating at the 2 minute mark. How easy is it for your character to laugh? -with strangers or acquaintances they're pretty straight-faced, with friends they're prone to cracking a smirk, generally it's just a small upwards quirk of the mouth tho. A smile is pretty rare, and outright bursts of laughter only really ever happen when drunk. How do they put themselves to bed at night (reading, singing, thinking?) -Petting Sai is their go-to method, but generally they prefer to stay on watch, or they'll scout ahead. They'll let someone take first watch, then stay up the rest of the night and let everyone else do whatever it is they do in their resting time. How easy is it to earn their trust? -Not very easy at all, they keep things close to their chest and only open up slowly, if at all. If their trust is earned though, then you've got an ally for life. How easy is it to earn their mistrust? -they're generally wary of people at first meeting, trust is reserved for those few who earn it. If you had their trust and betrayed it then, depending on the severity, it's either a wary second chance or it's broken for good. Do they consider laws flexible, or immovable? -Flexible as hell, as long as others aren't being harmed. What triggers nostalgia for them, most often? Do they enjoy that feeling? -The smell of maple syrup, the color of golden sunlight filtering thru trees. They don't like it very much no. What were they told to stop/start doing most often as a child -Stop wandering off was the most frequent. Do they swear? Do they remember their first swear word? -They'll curse under their breath, but they do most things under their breath tho so. As for first it was probably something crass they repeated from their father after he hurt himself. What lie do they most frequently remember telling? Does it haunt them? -"I'll be back soon." Said frequently and with heartfelt meaning, but never really fulfilled. The last time they said it was when they returned to find their home village completely gone. They never say it anymore. So yes, it haunts them. How do they cope with confusion (seek clarification, pretend they understand, etc)? -A weird mix of both of those, they'll pretend for a second out of habit and then just go wait what? How do they deal with an itch found in a place they can’t quite reach? -Find a good ol tree to scratch against, of find a stick to scratch with, or use an arrow to reach it if push comes to shove. What color do they think they look best in? Do they actually look best in that color? -They -think- they look best in blues but they don't. They look best in dark greens. Luckily they always wear reddish earth tones and shit so it's a moot point. What animal do they fear most? -Dragons of course. How do they speak? Is what they say usually thought of on the spot, or do they rehearse it in their mind first? -Quietly and under their breath in the thick of things, clear and confident when they actually know what's going on and what they're talking about. Either way they don't usually rehearse their words. What makes their stomach turn? -Not a whole lot tbh, at least not physical things like smells or blood/death. Or at least, not normal amounts of blood and death. Wanton and vast destruction would hit them badly though. Are they easily embarrassed? -Not in most situations no. What embarrasses them? -They think pretty highly of their skills, being that they spent their entire life honing and surviving off of them, so when they fail at something around others that they're normally very adept at, they get a bit embarrassed. What I'm saying is that they're nervous doing things in front of people so they suck at their skill checks. What is their favorite number? -14 If they were asked to explain the difference between romantic and platonic or familial love, how would they do so? -They wouldn't really have any clue what you're going on about, emotions tend to confuse them. Like, of course they know that their parents loved them, and Ed'Hel loved them but in a different way, and they loved Ed'hel in an even more different way and specific way. But they couldn't tell you what those differences were. Why do they get up in the morning? -To...survive? How does jealousy manifest itself in them (they become possessive, they become aloof, etc)? -As with most emotions they'll just kinda...walk away. How does envy manifest itself in them (they take what they want, they become resentful, etc)? -If it's something they can attain for themselves with a bit of effort then they'll go for it, they're not the type to be envious of material things tho. Is sex something that they’re comfortable speaking about? To whom? -No What are their thoughts on marriage? -No What is their preferred mode of transportation? -On foot, out of convenience. Ideally it would be on the back of a giant bear though of course. What causes them to feel dread? -Having to rely on others to survive. Like say they're tied up and have to wait for someone to rescue them. They'd have a really shitty subconscious moment of 'there's no way that person is capable enough' and deep down feel really bad about that but still feel dread that they're right. Would they prefer a lie over an unpleasant truth? -Pretty much always prefer the truth. Do they usually live up to their own ideals? -No of course not, does anyone ever? Who do they most regret meeting? -horribly, Ed'hel. Second place goes, equally horribly, to Kjelle. Who are they the most glad to have met? -They're pretty positive about the group they've found themselves with at the moment, Naveen is their favorite by a good margin tho. Do they have a go-to story in conversation? Or a joke? -Not really no, socializing is by far their weakest point. They'll gladly listen and nod, but story time isn't something they do. Could they be considered lazy? -it's a knife edge of having no set goals but to survive every day as it comes. So physically they're far from lazy, they hunt and fight and travel every day, but motivationally? Very lazy. How hard is it for them to shake a sense of guilt? -If it's an abstract sense of guilt then they can quell it fairly easily. If they're truly guilty of something then they don't handle it well at all, they'll apologize and try to amend as soon as they realize how and why they fucked up. How do they treat the things their friends come to them excited about? Are they supportive? -Yes very, nod in all the right places, do the whole mhm go on thing, tell me to go for it. Yeah. Do they actively seek romance, or do they wait for it to fall into their lap? -they're not actively looking at all, as with most things if it falls in their path they'll deal with it as it comes. Do they have a system for remembering names, long lists of numbers, things that need to go in a certain order (like anagrams, putting things to melodies, etc)? -long years of practice in the art of if-you-forget-to-do-this-you'll-starve/die. But other than that they're shit at remembering names and there's nothing I can do to help them. What memory do they revisit the most often? -painfully, the time they saw Ed'hel before they left that final time. How easy is it for them to ignore flaws in other people? -depends on the flaw really, if it's not something that is actively endangering their life or making it unpleasant then it's not their problem and they don't care. How sensitive are they to their own flaws? -they know what they're good at and they know what they're not good at and so they stick to things they can do and leave the other shit to other people to handle. How do they feel about children? -they're people, don't hurt them. Just like all other people. How badly do they want to reach their end goal? -at this moment of their life they're taking every day as it comes, one day at a time. The trail to finding out what happened to their home and loved ones has long since dried up and they live a quasi-life of just getting up every day and not dying, rinse and repeat. This adventure is the first time in a long long time they've been curious about anything other than immediate survival, they find themselves going into their rest periods thinking of what else could possibly happen tomorrow. If someone asked them to explain their sexuality, how would they do so? -very vague confused shrug QUESTIONS FOR CREATORS A) Why are you excited about this character?
-pretty excited, they're my first new child in a long time. B) What inspired you to create them? -they're a dnd character so I kinda had to make them. I had no choice. C) Did you have trouble figuring out where they fit in their own story? -I still don't know where the hell they fit in all this 
D) Have they always had the same physical appearance, or have you had to edit how they look? -I've edited them recently based on details others have drawn them with that I like and feel fit them better 
E) Are they someone you would get along with? Would they get along with you? -nah they'd very much dislike me, we have similar negative attributes that don't mesh well F) What do you feel when you think of your OC (pride, excitement, frustration, etc)? -frustration mostly, character creating has been getting harder and harder for me in recent years 
G) What trait of theirs bothers you the most?
-no end goal, I relate too much H) What trait do you admire most? -tenacity 
I) Do you prefer to keep them in their canon universe?
-nowhere else to put em really, AUs are always great tho J) Did you have to manipulate or exclude canon factors to allow them to create their character? -I have no idea what that means...

[alamante]

Democrats need a net gain of 23 seats to wrest control of the House away from Republicans. And they need a net gain of two seats to take a Senate majority, although the path to get to that number is difficult.

Trump got some welcome news on Friday, with the announcement that the economy grew at a 4.1% in the second quarter, the best number since 2014. Trump will surely make that growth part of his midterms pitch to voters.

But despite a strong economy, the GOP’s woes are evident in Trump’s sagging approval rating and Democrats’ edge in the generic congressional ballot. They’re even more stark with Democratic candidates outraising Republicans in the vast majority of competitive races.

But the biggest problem for the GOP — which has played out consistently in special elections over the last year — is that Democratic voters are much more enthusiastic, and therefore more likely to vote in November.

It has left Republicans split: Some are banking on Trump’s appeal to turn out their base, while others are seeking ways to distance themselves from a President who is unpopular with moderate and independent voters and has sparked a ferocious backlash on the left.

Trump has urged Republicans to focus on base issues, like immigration, which the President has hammered Democrats on for much of the year, accusing them of wanting open borders and encouraging gang violence. Democrats are laser focused on attacking the Republican health care bill and attempts to repeal Obamacare, two positions unpopular with moderate voters.

Here are five key themes to watch over the next 100 days:

Democratic performance in special elections

Democrats are fired up.

A recent study from Pew Research found turnout — particularly on the Democratic side — has been up considerably in primaries. According to Pew, the total number of votes cast in Democratic primaries is up 84% from this point in 2014.

Yes, some of that is because there have been more contested primaries, which increases turnout. But that excitement has also extended to a series of special elections. Democrat Conor Lamb won earlier this year in suburban Pittsburgh in a district Trump won by 20 points.

Democrat Hiral Tipirneni came within a few points of turning blue a reliably red district in suburban Phoenix, Arizona.

The result, coupled with Lamb’s win and other strong Democratic special election performances, worried Republicans.

“This was not supposed to be this close,” a senior Republican said when the results came in. “We really can’t blame anything. We got killed among independents. It shouldn’t have been this close.”

Democrats have also won on the local level, too, using special elections to flip 43 seats in different state legislatures since Trump stepped into the White House.

The next test will come in suburban Columbus, where Democrat Danny O’Connor is looking for a Lamb-like performance next month over Republican Troy Balderson to flip the reliably red district.

The year of the woman

Women are the most dominant force in Democratic politics — one that crosses age, ethnic and ideological lines.

The fury of the Women’s March the day after Trump’s inauguration has led to record numbers of female candidates. And in competitive primaries, women are winning.

Among the stunners: Progressive Kara Eastman beat former Rep. Brad Ashford in a House primary in Nebraska; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ousted the No. 4 House Democrat, Rep. Joe Crowley, in New York; and Amy McGrath, a fighter pilot who bested Lexington Mayor Jim Gray, a top Democratic recruit, in a House primary in Kentucky.

Many of the winners have been backed by EMILY’s List, which trains and funds female Democratic candidates for office.

But the trend goes much farther than who’s on the ballot.

Women favor Democratic candidates for the House by a 25-point margin — helping Democrats to a 12-point edge in the generic ballot, where those surveyed are asked whether they’d prefer a Democratic or Republican member of Congress to represent them, a Quinnipiac University poll out last week found.

The shift, most drastic in suburban areas, could be insurmountable for Republicans in some districts, much like the rise of rural voters helped catapult Trump to the White House two years ago.

Trump’s tariffs beget Republican fears

That brings up another issue for Republicans: Those rural voters, though, may not be as rock solid in 2018.

Trump’s plan to impose tariffs on countries he believes have treated the United States unfairly on trade has caused China, the European Union, Canada and Mexico to raise trade war fears and, in some cases, impose retaliatory tariffs. Those moves have shaken farms in Trump country, spreading fears that markets once seen as critical to soybean growers, pork producers and apple farmers — to name a few — are about to dry up.

The President and his supporters have looked to tamp down on concerns, arguing that short-term pain is worth the long-term gain.

But Republicans tasked with holding the House in 2018 have grown increasingly worried that trade fears could dampen otherwise good economic news.

The Republican Party still dominates rural America, and there is little on the Democratic horizon to break the hold, but the fear among Republican operatives is that voters who were once animated to stand with the President will stay home in November.

Eying a shot at Trump, Democratic presidential hopefuls test road message

Ask any Democrat considering a run at Trump in 2020 about their prospects and they will say they are focused on the midterms.

And that, to a degree, is true. The nearly two dozen Democrats rumored to be considering a presidential run have blanketed the country with endorsements, fundraisers and events, hoping their work impresses Democratic activists and wins favors from lawmakers they help elect.

But these Democrats, like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Vice President Joe Biden, to name just three, are also honing their messaging ahead of a possible run, using the midterms to road test their vision of the party they hope to lead.

“I don’t talk about Clinton voters or Trump voters. I don’t talk about white workers and black workers and Latino workers. I talk about workers and I talk about voters,” Sen. Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, said of his party earlier this year.

Sanders, for example, has used his star power to endorse liberal candidates, some of whom are not backed by the Democratic establishment. California Sen. Kamala Harris, likewise, has focused on Democrats of color, and Biden has used his claim to the Obama mantle to back Democratic heavyweights and call more in his party to reach out to Trump voters.

“The 2018 election will be a massive uphill climb,” Warren said earlier this year. “And while we’d rather talk about great ideas, we can’t climb that hill by ignoring the millions of Americans who are angry and scared about the damage this president and this Republican Party have done to our democracy. We can’t ignore it, and we shouldn’t want to ignore it.”

There are post-2020 factors in November’s midterms, too: 36 governor’s offices are on the ballot this year, including 26 for states with Republican governors. Democrats hope to pick off several of those seats, which would in many states give them the power to veto gerrymandered congressional maps. It’s a technical concern, but one with ramifications for control of Congress for the next decade.

Unsettled Senate map

The most uncertainty 100 days out from the midterms is over the Senate landscape — where many of the most competitive states are largely rural and voted for Trump in 2016.

There are at least nine major battlegrounds — with six pick-up opportunities for Republicans and three for Democrats.

The most vulnerable Democrats appear to be Sens. Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota, Joe Donnelly in Indiana, Claire McCaskill in Missouri and Bill Nelson in Florida. Montana Sen. Jon Tester and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin also have tough races on their hands.

One thing most of those states have in common: They’re rural, which means the fallout from Trump’s trade wars is likely to hit farmers, who are largely-pro-Trump, first.

Another factor looming large in Senate races is the battle over the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Republicans see a court fight as a way to energize a turned-off base — but with the timing of a vote uncertain, it’s not clear how potent an electoral issue it will be.

Democrats, meanwhile, are focused on ousting Republican Sen. Dean Heller in Nevada — the only competitive Senate seat in a state Hillary Clinton won in 2016 — and winning open-seat races in Arizona and Tennessee, where former Gov. Phil Bredesen’s moderate message has so far helped him appeal to Republicans and independents.

One to watch: Texas, where Republican Sen. Ted Cruz faces a fundraising juggernaut in Rep. Beto O’Rourke. Polls have shown Cruz with a consistent lead, but O’Rourke raised more than $10 million largely through online, small-dollar donors in 2018’s second quarter and will be able to afford what’s sure to be a nasty campaign.

Source link

   The post There are 100 days to the midterm election. Here’s what to watch appeared first on MySourceSpot.