#or some new feature is really complex but turns out we already have one of the tougher bits accidentally solved pre-emptively

[thehardkandy]

gave my boss a progress update today and his response was "WOW" which i just found very funny and also hell yeah i am appearing competent at my job

[ahgasegotarmy116]

He Doesn't Deserve You | A Jeon Jungkook Series | Chapter Two

Summary: You decide to finally do something for yourself and ease your mind Pairing: f!reader x Jeon Jungkook Word Count: 3.5k Warnings: Not too much for this chapter in particular besides mentions of domestic violence BUT yändere, manipulation, self harm, cheating, explicit language, smut, angst throughout the rest of the story a/n: Since you guys seem to be really liking this story I worked hard to get chapter two out quickly! Let me know what you think! p.s. Fuck me y'all I literally deleted chapter 2 but luckily I write on wattpad and I was able to restore it. I was literally about to cry Requested by the lovely: @kkusadmirer 💜

We had another fight. 

Honestly I don't even remember what it was about, something stupid like I left the door open after I came in with the groceries and forgot to lock it. Or maybe it was the fact that I actually left the house and got them instead of just ordering them to get dropped off on the doorstep. 

He always tells me it's too dangerous out there or that I should just wait for him to go with me instead. If I did that though we would never have any food here and I'm not about to order takeout for every meal. 

I don't understand why leaving the door open would be such an issue. We live in a relatively nice complex and our neighbors always make sure to look out for me so I don't understand why something as simple as that could set him off. 

But then again it doesn't take much to set him off these days, I guess it was something I should've expected. 

He hasn't been home for two days and at this point I've decided that maybe it's time I went out for the night. Nothing crazy or anything but just, out. 

Putting on yet another turtleneck I make sure that the old and new marks are covered. I've taken it a step further and put some makeup on to make sure that no one will notice. Although I doubt anyone would notice me anyways since I usually fade into the background. 

But tonight isn't about feeling insecure in myself. Tonight is the night where I finally do something on my own and get out of the house. 

Taking out my phone I look up the address for the local pub I've decided to go to, making sure to wear comfortable boots since it's a little ways away. I'm luck that it's winter right now so bundling up is normal, making my outfit even less suspicious. 

Taking a couple of deep breaths I reach for the handle, unlock the door and step outside. 

'Should I really be doing this?' I question but before I'm able to second guess myself I hear our next door neighbor unlock her door as well and step outside her door.

"Oh, y/n. What a pleasant surprise! It's been a while since I've seen your pretty face" she says scanning my features, clearly having heard the fight we had had the other day and making sure that I look okay. 

"Hi Mrs. Mitchell. How have you and Mr. Mitchell been?" I ask, returning her warm greeting but feeling awkward talking to someone that isn't Taehyung or my editor. 

"As well as we could be I suppose. Harry just turned 73 last month so he's been complaining about how old he his and how his knees don't work the way they used to. What can you expect when you get to our age?" she says, chuckling at her husband who is a few years younger than her.

"Seems like no matter how old men get, they still whine and complain whenever they get sick or injured" she continues, clearly trying to lighten my spirits. "I guess so" I say, not daring to bad mouth Taehyung since he's probably already gotten a pretty bad reputation around here with everything we've been through over the past few years. 

Sometimes I'm surprised by the fact that we haven't gotten evicted with all of the noise complaints we've gotten. 

He always makes me answer each and every call from our building even though he's the one responsible for a majority of the noise but he always makes sure to stand close by to make sure I don't ask them to send help no matter how severe things have gotten. 

"Where are you off to?" she asks taking note of the fact that it's getting late in the evening. "I figured I might just head over to the pub a few streets down and see if I can clear my head for a while" I say, not bothering to give more information than necessary. Not that there would be any more information to give. 

"Good for you dear! It's always good to go out and get a new perspective on life. Let me know anytime if you need any help alright? Oh and I'm so excited to read your next book!" she says and with that last part catching me off guard. "You've read my books?" I question, taken aback and almost embarrassed at the fact that a woman of her age would be reading the type of genre I write, let alone my own. 

"Of course dear! As soon as I found out that you were a writer I went straight to the bookstore and bought all of them! You really are very talented" she finishes, with a glimmer of admiration in her eye. 

"Thank you so much, your support means the world to me, truly" I finish and she quickly shoo me off, apologizing for holding me hostage. 

"Next time I see you I'll sign your copies if you'd like" I offer and the look on her face is absolutely priceless. 

"I'll make sure to have them sitting by the front door with a pen in hand!" she beams and I wave one last goodbye before I make my way to my destination. 

~~~~

Walking in the doors of The Blue Pearl I'm greeted by the sound of soft rock being played in the background and a low murmur of the small amount of people spread through out. This pub seems to be a little old fashioned so I guess it's not a big draw for the younger rowdier crowds. Which was exactly what I was looking for. 

Just a slow night to clear my head and a strong drink to drown my sorrows. Knowing me though I'll probably stop after one or two drinks. 

I decide to sit at the bar on the stool closest to the wall and wave the bartender over. 

"Surprise me, something sweet but something strong" I say trying to sound as confident as I can. "You got it" she says and comes back soon with a pink drink of some sort a few moments later. "What is this?" I ask after taking a sip, already dying for another one at the fruity but subtly sweet drink. 

"I like to call it The Slut Puppy" she says with a proud smile. I tilt my head when I look at her, confused as to how she came up with the name. "I'm still workshopping it to be honest but your reaction to the name definitely played true to the puppy part. I laugh realizing that I subconsciously played into her game and she laughs right along with me. 

"Long night?" she asks after I've settled in, using her bartender powers to see right through my act while walking away a bit to clean up the shaker she had used to make my drink. 

"Try long life" I say, rolling my eyes before taking a sip of my drink again, sighing in contentment. "That bad huh?" she laughs bitterly, knowing one way or another that what I'm dealing with is beyond fucked. "Let's just say the best part of my week so far has been this drink" I and steal a quick glance at her, embarrassed that my words are flowing so easily to a complete stranger. 

"But it's Saturday night" she say with her brows pinched together. "Exactly" I say and before I can even ask she decides to grab another shaker and makes me another drink which I accept with a somber smile. "I put some extra ice in this one so don't worry it's not gonna go straight to your head" she says, looking out for me as if she were someone I had known for my whole life. 

"I'm y/n by the way" I say, hoping to move from strangers to acquaintances at the very least. "Rae" she answers before tending to another patron. 

"So y/n" she starts as she makes her way back over to me "what do you do?" she asks, maintaining conversation but not trying to pry when it comes to what I'm clearly upset about. 

"I'm a writer" I answer and her interest is immediately peaked. "A writer? Really? What do you write about?" she asks, leaning up against the counter so she can hear me a bit better. 

"To be honest my stories are pretty fucked up romance novels" I say scratching the top of my head feeling a bit awkward at the confession. 

"Sounds like my type of book" she laughs. I let out a breath, thankful that I won't have to explain myself to her since this genre isn't everyone's cup of tea. "So what are some books that you've written? Maybe I've read one before" she says going back to cleaning up a few things, making sure to use her time wisely. 

"Well 'Trials of the Broken' is one of them. It's my best seller at the moment. I'm actually working on writing the sequel right now" I respond, embarrassed but proud of my achievements all the same. 

"I think I've heard of that one! My friends have been trying to get me to read it but I never got around to it" she says, surprised at her chances of meeting me. 

"If you ever get around to it then let me know what you think" I say, now kicking myself for putting on the pressure for her to read it. "I definitely will" she says and makes her way over to the other side of the bar to serve some more patrons that just made their way inside. 

Glancing over at them I notice one that is a few steps behind the crowd, making me question if he's come here alone but I go back to looking at my drink, trying my best not to stare. 

My eyes somehow manage to drag themselves over toward him as he places his order and waits for Rae to make it. 

He takes off his hood and I'm met with first, the sight of his sharp jaw, then his shaggy hair he ruffled as soon as the hood dropped and finally his lips, the bottom one pierced twice rested in a soft smile. I realize though that the only way I would be seeing his full on smile would be if he was looking back at me and I make somewhat panicked eye contact with him before quickly turning my head in the other direction. 

'Great job y/n, drooling over the first hot guy you see. He's probably going to think I'm some sort of creep now' my thoughts thought are interrupted with the sound of what I believe to be is a drink set down on the counter a few seats away from me. 

"Is it alright if I sit here?" a smooth baritone voice says, making butterflies fill my stomach. 

"Um yeah sure" I say, taking a sip of my drink before glancing at him, quickly looking away again before I start to stare again. 

"So how's your night going?" he asks, clearly in an effort to make small talk. 

"It's going. How about yours?" I question back and see that he's no longer looking at me, instead watching as he swirls his mystery drink around in his cup. "About the same" he chuckles, clearly amused with both of our lack of effort to divulge any details. 

We sit there for a second or two in silence before Rae walks over and gives me another drink. I watched her make it and I can tell she she went even easier on the alcohol this time and makes sure to question nonverbally if I'm alright to which I nod. 

"What are you drinking?" he asks, smiling at the visual of the bright pink drink with two cherries placed on top. "You're gonna laugh" I say, brushing a piece of hair behind my ear, feeling a little apprehensive saying words like this to a complete stranger (a hot one at that).

"It's-" "It's called a Slut Puppy" Rae interrupts from the other side of the bar, not even bothering to hide the fact that she was clearly listening. "Um yeah, that" I chuckle, taking a big sip of it to hopefully calm my nerves. 

"A slut puppy?" he asks, flashing an amused smile at me, sending my heart beat into overload. "Her name, not mine" I laugh awkwardly. Trying, but failing at sounding normal but from the looks of it he doesn't seem to mind. "Right" he says dragging out the first syllable before taking a sip of his drink. 

"Do you guys know each other?" he asks, curious as to who our not so secret eavesdropper is. "Kinda. We just met. Although it almost seems like I've known her my whole life" I say smiling at her, thankful for the fact that she was able to lift my spirits so easily. 

"It's nice when you meet people like that" he says and when I bring my attention back over to him I can tell that he's been looking at me for a while, making me shy all over again. 

"Oh, I'm Jungkook by the way" he says holding out his hand, and I turn my stool towards him and shake it, fixing what would've been an awkward angle if I had stayed in place. He after seeing what I had done decides to turn as well, angling his body towards me and I notice now that there's only one seat between us. A respectful distance, making me feel a bit more comfortable talking to him. 

"I'm y/n" I say and he gives me a soft smile, whispering my name under his breath, almost as if he were trying to keep it as a secret all for himself. "So y/n, what's your story?" he asks, withdrawing his hand at almost the same time I do and goes back to taking another sip of his drink, making sure to keep his sparkly eyes trained on me. 

'Sparkly? Y/n you are a married woman. You shouldn't even be talking to this guy'.

"My story? Well to be honest there's not much to tell. I grew up and went to school in the city and now I'm a writer. There's not much else to my life if I'm being honest" I say, doing my best to maintain conversation but also not give away too much. 

"That ring on your finger says otherwise" he says, nodding towards it and playing around with his straw. Not in an abrasive way but more as if to remind me of something else that I might've forgotten.

"Oh, um yeah" I say, showing him the ring up for a second to confirm his suspicions but pull my sweater down to cover it up a second later, hoping he won't ask anything else about that aspect but unfortunately luck is not on my side in that department tonight. 

"Is that why you're here? Needed to get away for a while?" he asks, curious but not insinuating anything that I would expect a guy of his age would be asking me. "I guess you could say that" I say taking a deep breath deciding that if he's asking I might as well get the male perspective while I can. 

"With being a writer and everything I'm pretty much cooped up in the house all day. Which for me is fine and it's been like that for a few years" I say, taking a second to try and figure out how to formulate my next words carefully, not wanting his to worry or judge the situation too much.

"I'm sensing there's a 'but' here" he chuckles and takes another sip of his drink and waves at Rae in an effort to get both of us both another drink without me noticing to avoid protest. "But" I start out, confirming his suspicions. "with my husband being used to me doing that all the time he tends to get a bit, how should I say this..." I trial off, still not sure how to phrase it. 

"Controlling?" he offers, a bit more blunt than his other responses. "Worried" I counter, although his word is more accurate than mine. He nods a bit, clearly not believing my words but doesn't press in hopes that I will continue. "He's worried that something might happen to me if I go out alone. That someone might recognize me because of my books and try to do something like kidnap me" I say, fully confident in my words.

I hear Jungkook snort beside me a second later, leaving me looking over at him with my brows scrunched up. "What's so funny?" I ask, confused and almost annoyed by his reaction. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry continue" he says doing his best to calm down. "No, what about that is so funny?" I press as I can clearly see that he's still trying to hold his laughter in. 

"I'm sorry y/n it's just, well isn't kidnapping a little bit of a stretch?" he says, clearing his throat and breathing through what he thought was a ridiculous excuse. "Woman and children get kidnapped everyday! Look up the statistics!" I retort, trying to convince him that there's truth to Taehyung's argument. 

"Yes, I know that it happens a lot, but you can't let that keep you from going outside and living life. It's a horrible thing and I don't understand why anyone would do such a thing but you can't use it as a way to cripple yourself from ever leaving your house" he says, this time being completely serious and trying his best to convince me that I shouldn't be living like this. 

"I'm out now aren't I?" I argue, and to that he nods his head but presses further. "How long has it been since you've been out like this though?" he asks and I just let my head droop a bit in response before taking a sip of my new drink. 

"Well I'm proud of you for coming out tonight and doing this for yourself. And look, you're completely safe. Plus seems like you've already made two new friends tonight" he laughs motioning to himself and Rae and when I look over at her all I can see is her bright smile, happy to see me getting more comfortable. 

"Who knows though, you might just be acting nice to me just so I'll let my guard down so you can kidnap me" I tease and at that he acts like he's offended, throwing his hand over his heart as if I had shot him. 

"You hurt me with your words. It's a shame though, I was just in the market for a new best friend" he says, wiping away a fake tear. "Or in the market for some fresh meat" I continue laughing at his act. "Twist the knife why don't you" he says, now resorting to pouting. 

"Aw, it's okay I didn't mean it" I say patting his shoulder in an effort to apologize. "You better not" he says looking at me, still pouting. "Come on, let's turn that frown upside down. Why don't I buy you a drink?" I ask as a way to make amends. 

"No that's alright, I've actually gotta get going" he says, pulling out his wallet and placing some cash on the counter to more than cover his drinks. "Let me get you some change" Rae steps in, quick to help since she is otherwise unoccupied. "No it's okay, use it to cover us both and then keep the change" he says as he straightens out his jacket a bit. 

"No you don't have to do that" I argue and go to take some cash out of my purse as well. "It's okay I got it. But if you want to make it up to me I'll always take your number as payment" he says with a cheeky smile. 

"Just as friends of course! I would never want to seduce a married woman" he says, jumping over himself, making me sure I know his intensions are pure. 

"Can we do email? I spend most of my time on my computer so it's easier for me" I say, making excuses as to not giving it to him. "As long as you promise not to mark my messages as spam" he jokes and hands me his phone so I can add it in. "I promise. It was really nice to meet you Jungkook" I say handing it back to him, our hands touching a few moments longer for it to be seen as something with the promise of being platonic. 

"Take care" he says giving me a soft smile and then waves at Rae, clearly seeing her not even bothering to hide that she's staring at us. 

"Bye" I say under my breath, not knowing how to feel about anything now that he's gone. 

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[dailyadventureprompts]

Drafting the Adventure: Dungeons Without Walls

I love the idea of dungeons, but there was a significant portion of my life as a DM where they didn’t feature in my games. While Pathfinder and 5e provided a great framework for character building and tactical skirmishes that I could build story on top of, neither was really great when it came time to detour into a  dungeon. My players tended to get confused when we headed out to plunder the local ruin or cave system, spending a lot more time figuring out where they were and what they should be doing than actually doing anything. 

The problem as it turned out was limited information.  I had a picture of the dungeon in my head/notes but I couldn’t telepathically infer that to the party, and the back and forth questions where they tried to orient themselves within my mental labyrinth ate up a lot of session time prevented us from attaining that snappy pace that every table needs to keep the players invested.

Recently though I had an epiphany about overhauling exploration in d&d, and wrote up a whole post detailing how you could build and run wilderness adventures the same way you could a heist or a murder mystery. Because I was already writing a series about dungeon design it didn’t take long for me to realize that this exploration overhaul was 100% applicable, and could solve a lot of the delay and confusion my players usually faced on their next trip underground.  Spoilers: it worked amazingly.

 The key to this overhaul was giving my players enough information to see the dungeon as a sort of abstract checklist, and then giving them the power to investigate and check things off that list in whatever order they wished, when they enter a new level of the dungeon they get a new checklist to fill out which still keeps that sense of exploration. Folk love checking things off lists, and I as a dungeonmaster love it when players engage with the content I’ve spent so much energy creating even if it’s only poking their head in the door to realize they want to run away as fast as possible. Likewise, designing the dungeon this way let me tackle much larger concepts without having to sweat the details of filling up every little room as I would have to in map-centric design.

To summarize my exploration mechanic as It applies to dungeons:

During Design: After you’ve got the dungeons’ major concept, you divide it into unique “zones” (essentially what might be levels in a regular dungeon) with an interconnected theme, mechanic, or threat.

Each zone has a number of points of interest, which can be anything from trails to follow, odd sights they might investigate, to full complexes of rooms that you’ve mapped out. You don’t need to map out the points of interest otherwise, they sort of float abstractly within the zone 

When players enter a zone, they become aware of its name and general descriptor, as well as how many total points of interest are in that zone. They also become aware of some points of interest immediately to serve as landmarks and give them a direction for their exploration, but most remain undiscovered until they venture off the path and start checking out their surroundings. Hidden among these points of interest are the doors that lead to zones deeper within the dungeon, encouraging the party to explore in order to progress.

During Play: When the players enter the dungeon, one player is appointed as the surveyor, who’s job it is to keep track of the zones, fill out that checklist, and check things off when the DM tells them that they’ve fully explored a point of interest.

Rather than needing to be aware of the exact room layout, the party just need to know what zone they’re in and what options are available to them, Because this information is delivered in the form of a checklist with empty spaces, the party know exactly how much of the dungeon they’ve explored, what’s left to explore, and when they’ve cleared out an area.

Lets take the image above as inspiration. Say the party is trying to make it up to the tower, you can easily see a progression of zones and maybe imagine a few to go alongside them:

Ruins & Foothills: The first area, filled with the remnants of an ancient civilization. Picked over by looters and now a home to all sorts of wildlife,

Mountainside: The obvious next goal, but locked off behind a challenging climb, Filled with hazards that threaten to knock the party back down to the foothills if they’re not careful

Caverns: Secret area accessible only if the party explore a cave on the mountainside, or make a beeline towards the old aqueduct landmark in the foothills, realizing it might be easier than the climb. 

Spire Foundations: The door connecting to the foothills is guarded by a complex puzzle and arcane ward, but the party might be able to sneak in through the caves where erosion has caused a breakthrough into the cellars.

Spire Peak: High among the clouds, the party’s prize is somewhere here.  Access to the upper sections of the tower are guarded by a territorial sphinx under arcane compulsion, though the party might just be able to skip that fight if they figure out the riddle to make the portal mirrors work in the foundations.

Trying to design all this by pencilling it in on a gridmap would take weeks, to say nothing of the headache it’d cause you trying to make things fit together and fill up empty space with content. Designing it first as a sequence of zones and then filling those out with interesting fights, puzzles, and encounters is the work of an afternoon or two. Likewise, its easy on your players: five zones with six to ten points of interest is far easier to tackle when you can make a checklist and see how much progress you’ve made, despite the fact that the area they’re exploring is quite vast. 

I hope you find this as useful as I have, and if you need a more concrete example of how it might work, don’t worry, I’ll have one of those for you in the coming days.

[meimi-haneoka]

Cardcaptor Sakura Clear Card Chapter 79: Comments + JP-ENG translation differences

Welcome back to our monthly appointment, CCS fans! This chapter comes right after this month's full moon, the Hunter Moon! (lol yes I will feature the name of the relative full moon till the end of the story). And speaking of the end of the story, I will start this analysis and translation post from the end of the chapter, where I found the confirmation to the rumour that had been going on for hours before the official release on Comic Days:

yes, dear readers, this is not a drill, Cardcaptor Sakura Clear Card Arc will end with chapter 80, after 7 years of serialization! 🎉✨ When *the last chapter* is announced, there's no turning back! No more sudden announcements of extensions! 🥹 But at the moment of writing this post, no mentions have been given about any "epilogue" or extra chapters that might be serialized in the upcoming months leading to the big release of volume 16 on April 1st!

On the translation side, I have to sigh in relief because no major misunderstandings happened in the ENG version, just some minor inaccuracies! I was kinda scared because this chapter is pretty important and complex in itself.

And let me say that what happened in this chapter 79 definitely marks the end of the climax, so I can totally see it ending in next chapter. The chapter tackled some very important thematics regarding the presence of "evil" in this series, that I will talk about extensively in my analysis.

The announcement today made me already a bit nostalgic and sad, but I want to strive hard to accompany myself and all of you towards the end of this arc with excitement and a smile, therefore I won't let myself be prey of the sadness yet and introduce you immediately to the gif of this month, because there's a lot we need to talk about and analyze and we can't waste time!!

This is entirely dedicated to our protagonist and heroine Sakura-chan, because damn, she really slayed this chapter!!! Under the cut to see what miracles she made happen!

The Color Page

My dear readers, after years of countless pleas on my social media, after being let down month after month, CLAMP FINALLY GRANTED ME A COLOR PAGE SOLELY DEDICATED TO KAITO AND AKIHO TOGETHER ON THE SECOND-TO-LAST CHAPTER!! Yaaaay!! Excuse me while I celebrate this event here in my little corner, especially after having a rough month! 🎉🎉🎉 I hope my followers thought of me when they saw it? Like "finally she'll stop asking for it" (breaking news, I'll keep asking for more even after the series is over) 😂 It took them 79 chapters to do so and honestly I'm laughing because....yes, I admit it, I expected another vibe for such an important color page coming after such an important emotional scene in chapter 78, but honestly the first thing I thought when I saw it was "....they had to wait 79 chapters for this? 😧" 😂because it's very very "regular", I think it would've been ok for this to come out long ago. LOL I'm being brutally honest here, I hope no one gets offended, especially because that pet peeve aside, OF COURSE I love this precious color page to bits, and I know under its "normalcy", its got a very important meaning to the both of them.

Akiho and Kaito are depicted together clearly during one of their travels....but the question is, is this from the past? Or the near future? I'd daresay they look the same age they are now, so this might probably be a foreshadowing for the future...? They'll keep travelling the world? But seeing the content of the chapter, this might also be just a call-back to their memories together and everything that they experienced during those travels, tightening their bond. Travelling the world is, after all, really their thing, their element. I really like Kaito's expression, with his usual smile that almost turns into a smirk, he gives off a vibe of being finally free to express his emotions. He looks carefree, and that's really something for him. Akiho, on the other hand, is always so much more expressive than him and you can literally feel the joy and excitement emanating from her delighted expression. Travelling with him makes her happy, so yes, should this be what awaits them in the finale, it's fine by me as long as they're happy (I'm rooting for the other option though, the "stay in Tomoeda with your newfound support network" route).

But as you know, I always have to analyze the color pages a bit deeper, especially when they're about these two. And since I had to keep myself distracted, I made a bit of research. Other than the "travelling" vibe, this illustration gives off also kind of a "vintage" vibe (which is another strong element to Akiho and Kaito). It seems Akiho is dressed in a sleeveless coat with cape and wearing a bonnet fully inspired by those worn by children in the second half of the 1800s, in the Victorian era.

(pic courtesy of Etsy) This is a model from 1896, for example. When I pinpointed the period, I immediately thought "uh, the Victorian era is also the period when Alice in Wonderland came out", although that was more towards the 1860s. I found it really interesting and a nice touch for this illustration with a retro flavor (the suitcase and purse also look kinda vintage).

But another thing that immediately caught my eyes were those cute birds landing on Kaito's shoulder and Akiho's bonnet. I immediately tried to look what kind of birds they are, and it seems like they could really be eastern bluebirds, typical of North America. Searching further, I found out that in several cultures bluebirds are harbinger of happiness and symbols of hope. I couldn't honestly have thought for a more fitting symbolism, for these two. Especially cause birds often are associated with an imagery of freedom, and this is something else that these two need, after being hunted by evil people for so long. They really do look free, in this color page. Also, the presence of the birds in this color page immediately brought me back to the color page of chapter 62, where we can see baby Kaito in a wintery setting, sitting on a lamppost, extending his little hand to a swallow coming to him. Swallows are a symbol of hope and bring a message of "spring is coming", and continuing from that message of hope, of "spring is coming for you too", we can finally see here in chapter 79 our Kaito with his true happiness, symbolized literally by the birds most associated with happiness. Another thing that caught my eyes is of course the lily depicted on the cover of the book Akiho is holding, a nice callback to Akiho's mother and Kaito's torment, Lilie. She's always going to be with them ❤️

The Japanese editorial text over the picture is an excerpt of what Momo was musing to herself in chapter 39, while imagining to talk to Kaito: "You traveled with her, and spent time together with her". I think CLAMP chose to feature this line to indicate an important thing that will be restored at the end of this chapter.

Everyone Is Doing Their Best

The chapter starts with a panel showing some light coming off Yukito's house, and we find out that even Touya fainted, exhausted by the effort to keep time stopped as much as possible. Ruby Moon is cradling his head on her lap trying to assist him and "recharge" his magical power, in hope to be able to maintain time "stopped" a bit more. In fact, if you notice, the "black covering" that symbolizes the time-stopping spell isn't completely destroyed yet, but only riddled with "holes", an indication that the spell is still somehow active, even if feebly. I imagine this might "slow down" the attacks, which are still coming but probably not at full speed like they would if the spell came undone completely. I have to point out immediately a mild inaccuracy in the ENG version, that I want to specify in order to dispel extreme theories before they're born: no, Ruby Moon didn't give up all of her powers to Touya, the verb used here is simply 補える, "can replenish (your magic)", not "give all".

Touya doesn't lose his sense of humor even in a dire situation like this, and comments sarcastically "What are you, a battery?", a clear recall to the whole "batteries" matter that came out in the un-rewritten world. Touya isn't supposed to remember about that, and he probably doesn't, but this is just a way from CLAMP to show that even in a situation where memories have been rewritten, some things will be unconsciously said again, because they're just meant to happen.

Ruby Moon calls for assistance from her "brother" Spinel Sun (love how even in these true forms, she still calls him "Suppy"), whom rejects the appellative of "battery" but agrees to give her a hand with "recharging" Touya to keep the spell up a bit longer. Everyone looks outside, only one thought in their minds, which is voiced clearly by a serious Tomoyo: "Sakura and everyone else are fighting with all they've got". I have to point out a typo here in the Japanese version (nothing serious, it can happen and will be surely fixed in the tankobon version): Tomoyo calls Sakura "Sakura-san". I loved the "sparkles" around Tomoyo's eyes, as if indicating that her extraordinary intuition is "at work" and just telling her that, even if they can't see them because they're quite far away, Sakura and the others are doing whatever they can to stop these attacks. And the fact they can see the attacks, but not their friends and their condition, must be really hard to witness, for all of them. But no worries, there's Touya nii-chan who's always ready to lighten the mood even in this challenging situation, joking that "If they don't get back before the curfew, they won't be getting their snacks tomorrow!". Here the ENG adds "squirt" to make Touya refer specifically to Sakura, but truth to be told, in the JP there's no subject, so he might be referring to everyone. It's amazing how he's able to keep his spirit up and be sarcastic even in this situation....he really believes in his little sister so much!

I'll Make Them Forget About You

Back where our heroes are, the attacks keep coming relentlessly, countered by Syaoran, Yue and Kero in tandem. Sakura reflects on the fact that the only transparent Cards she's got left are these two she's holding in her hands (Time and Rewind) and Flight. This statement leads me to believe that when Record transformed into that crystal that entered her, that meant that the Card completed its duty and disappeared inside of her. But Sakura isn't worried at all, because she knows that she can create more Cards. Yessss, this development that I've been anticipating since quite some time is finally here! ✨🎉 Sakura seems to finally have a concrete plan, but before proceeding, she needs to ascertain something. She asks directly to Kaito: "The people who are using these spells were trying to hurt you, right?". Kaito, with a pensive face, answers affirmatively.

But it's when Sakura asks again "Were they trying to hurt Akiho too?" that his expression turns really painful, the background after him portraying well his raging emotions and, while Mokona-sensei chose to leave Akiho hidden by Kaito's black wings in the previous panels, now she finally shows how both she and Kaito are holding onto eachother, while our boy answers with a "...Yes" dripping with sorrow. It really squeezed my heart with pain, this scene. Because as long as Sakura was asking about him, his expression was pensive but almost as if it's something he's used to, that didn't shake him too much. But when Sakura mentions Akiho, god, that wrecked him. Any mention, any reminescence of what those bastards did to her and how they were chasing after her to put their filthy hands on her again wrecks him even now, and it's like Mokona with her visual skills is showing how Kaito seems to be holding Akiho a little bit tighter, while he answers Sakura's question. I also have to point out something that I had noticed already from last chapter, but a panel tricked me into believing I was just seeing things: CLAMP here use a dark screentone for Kaito's eyes, that he never had before (actually, no other character in CCS got this effect in their eyes). This effect will be used on him for the entire chapter.

And it seems like it's the very same screentone that was used for the dragon. I think this might be an indication that the wings aren't the only reminescence of his dragon appearance!

Sakura shows once again an incredible empathy that allows her to go right to the heart of the issue without investigating much. If Kaito rewrote an entire world, and if it's true that Akiho in the previous world didn't have all the love and familiar support she's got now, it means that she was probably in danger too. And seeing as these people are attacking them now because they freed Kaito from his "punishment", Sakura doesn't really need much to make 2+2 and understand the situation. Sakura believes in Akiho, therefore she believes in Kaito too, and knows that if he came to this point it's because they were in a desperate and dangerous situation.

Showing an incredible insight, Sakura shocks both Kaito and Akiho by asking:

Sakura, JP: "In that case, can I make those people forget about you both?"

Because our girl needs to make sure that the plan she came up with won't have any undesired consequences. But most importantly, she needs to have their consent. She reiterates this once again, actually she will make sure to ask Kaito and Akiho's consent 3 times in total. She says: JP, lit. "If going back to before the world was rewritten will put you through hardships once again, then, can I just make them forget?" Kaito is even more shocked, because he finally understands Sakura's intent. A generous, selfless intent born from a loving heart. Our girl wants to make sure that these two will be safe and sound once she fixes this situation. She can't take risks, because their happiness is all she's really caring for right now. And in his shocked expression, I can also see some kind of "omg YES, PLEASE" vibe. Because probably, having those terrible people forgetting all about them is everything he ever wished, but couldn't achieve. And I think it's really funny how we berated Kaito so much in the past chapters for making Akiho and the others forget facts that happened before and forgetting about him, but here Sakura just takes "inspiration" from him and actually decides to use that same "trick" in the right way. Because it's not fair that it should be them, the abused people, to forget about their most important person, in order to achieve a happy life for at least one of them. It isn't fair and it isn't right that Kaito was driven into making all the mess that he made, pushed by desperation. The abusers, that clan and Association of magicians, should be the ones forgetting.

But this is Cardcaptor Sakura Clear Card's finale, and Sakura definitely hasn't finished with being amazing yet, she actually just started. Her very strong power at this point allows her not only to see things that were difficult before, but also to connect the dots more easily thanks to that renowned instinct that I've always talked to you about, and that she learned to finally listen to.

As if she were seeing through him with X-rays, she confidently affirms that there's a book inside of him, a white book where you can inscribe magic on. And she also knows that that same book was inside Akiho, once. I guess this might be even coming from past memories of the unrewritten world (do you remember when, before the play started, Sakura said that she could feel something inside Akiho?). Akiho of course is shocked to hear that, and from her expression you can almost feel the chill that went down her spine in that moment. Sakura affirms that this book knows both Akiho and Kaito (thanks to the fact that it was inside both of them - something that I've always found painfully heartbreaking but also quite moving, for my ship), and it's got a very strong power inside of it. These will be two crucial things for Sakura's plan. In fact, our heroine is hellbent in attempting something pretty arduous: utilizing that artifact's power to create a new Card. For impartiality, I have to point out that the ENG added (completely on their whim) a "you, her special person" that isn't there in the JP version! Of course it's all the better for me, since they repeat (finally with the right adjective) that Kaito is Akiho's special person, but it's kinda funny that they messed it up so much in the previous chapters, and now they're adding it where there isn't any mention of it!

Sakura will be using a tool that knows the both of them, therefore she is sure that her plan will succeed, because the Card will know what it will need to erase. Sakura asks for Kaito and Akiho's agreement one last time. After hearing how those people wanted to hurt them both and even implanted the same magical artifact inside of her, Akiho is quite resolute and doesn't have any doubt: on with the wiping off! It doesn't matter who those people are, they've tried to harm her most important person and her too, so she doesn't really seem to give a damn about proceeding with this plan. Kaito, on the other hand, seems to be giving a more lackluster affirmative reply, but it's not that he's uncertain: he's just still riddled with guilt for all the mess that he's done, and he's probably realizing that now Sakura will need to put herself on the line in order to fix this and protect both of them, hence his sad face.

Still surfing the confidence wave, Sakura guesses that once those people have forgotten about Akiho and Kaito, then the magic arrows will stop too, and Kaito confirms that: forgetting about the person who had the Seal of D enforced on him will be equal to "undo" both the activation of the Seal itself (when Kaito removed the book from Akiho) and also the rescission of it (what Sakura did when she freed Kaito from the cage). This will therefore stop the arrows too, because the Seal wouldn't have been triggered in the first place. However, Kaito warns her that, although time is still barely "stopped" (because the time-stopping spell is still weakly on), it's necessary an enormous amount of power in order to do what Sakura wants to do. I have to point out another inaccuracy in the ENG translation in this part, which makes Kaito say "before things could get worse" and I have the feeling they misunderstood the word 辛うじて, "barely" or "narrowly", which is also written with the kanji of 辛い, "hard" or "tough". So Kaito isn't saying "before things could get worse" but actually meaning "although time is barely stopped".

Sakura doesn't seem to be scared by Kaito's warning, and activates her wand without a second thought, and immediately we can see that her task wil NOT be easy, as she can feel the strain almost right away.

Here we go with another inaccuracy of the ENG translation:

Sakura, ENG: "Great book, please show yourself! My power alone won't be enough...!" Sakura, JP: "The book....doesn't want to come out. (it's too difficult to pull it out) with just my power..."

Basically, Sakura isn't begging the book to "show itself", she's actually actively trying to pull it out of Kaito, and she's aware that it's opposing a lot of resistance, and her power alone isn't enough to take this damn book out. Sakura refuses to give up, because everyone else is doing their best too. Yes, everyone else.

And that's when CLAMP decided to bring us a big surprise for this finale.

A pair of hands seem to be appearing next to Sakura's, as if a spirit is hugging her from behind. We can see the famous fan that we learned to recognize so well ever since her first appearance in Movie 1. Sakura feels immediately the same magical power of Syaoran surrounding her, and with her instinct she finally recognizes her: it's Syaoran's mother, YELAN!!! We can see her, sweating and all, in her sacred chinese pavilion, lending her power to help in this difficult task.

What a great, welcome surprise for this finale!! You might have heard me saying on Twitter that Clear Card is really a celebration of motherhood, with this constant presence of mothers and mother figures who try to help these kids growing up without removing their right to choose for themselves. And since Yelan is the only mother figure who can concretely help Sakura in this moment, with her immense power, I really loved to see how this woman didn't hesitate to assist her future daugher in law. For any SyaoSaku fan, this scene here is a huge thing. We have seen in the anime how Yelan doted on Sakura ever since she met her in Movie 1, even before her own son realized his feelings for this girl. Yelan and Sakura haven't met in the manga yet (and hello, CLAMP, now this is a good chance for letting that happen, after the madness is over), but the woman didn't hesitate a moment to lend her power. I can really imagine how along these two will get, in the future. ❤️

Sakura thanks her aloud, while her eyes show that she's really really tired. Yelan's assistance is finally effective in summoning the artifact book out of Kaito, and we see again those countless book pages that we saw both when Akiho used to go "berserk", and also in the most heartbreaking scene of chapter 70. Kaito, still holding onto a worried Akiho, seems to suffer physically from this removal, and I can't understand if it's because removing something magical from inside is naturally painful (we've been shown something like that before, Syaoran crouching to the ground in pain while the Sakura Cards were being removed from inside of him) OR if the removal of the artifact also triggered his poor health conditions in which we left him, before he disappeared in chapter 70.

Sakura tries with all she's got and finally manages to turn the artifact into its "true form": a book filled with countless of spells written in strange magic runes.

You have spotted it, right? ☝️ I haven't seen many fandom reactions yet, but I guess this "cameo" made more than one person scream: it's Fay D. Fluorite's tattoo, yes! This page of the "book" is probably describing the procedure to cast that tattoo (which was also a kind of "seal", if I remember correctly). So that spells exists in this CCS world too! 😅 The magic Sakura is weaving starts "working" on the book, literally removing the spells from its pages and turning them back to their original form of magical books (remember that the Squids used to say that they would inscribe "magic books" and their power onto Akiho?).

Then, solemnly, we hear probably for the last time ever the magical incantation that accompanied us in the beginning of the story, used by Sakura to secure the strange manifestations of power into a transparent Card:

ENG: "Force without master, heed the call of my Staff of Dreams and become my power! SECURE!"

The countless of books and all this tremendous amount of power get secured into the birth of a new Card: BLANK!!!

Blank got the human appearance of Akiho, but also the protective wings of Kaito. The girl is holding a book (of course, how perfect for her) which is the representation of the artifact that was inside both Kaito and Akiho. This card is really so meaningful for someone like me who loves Akiho and Kaito. It's representing them united in their suffering (the artifact) but also in the hope for a better future (Akiho is smiling and the Card will be used to grant them safety, away from their abusers). I've always imagined that one of the last Cards Sakura might have produced would have Akiho and Kaito's elements, and here it is.

Also, how AWESOME is that Sakura managed to dispose of that damn artifact and succeeded to use it for Kaito and Akiho's sake, and turned it against the monsters who created it??? HOW. AWESOME. IS. THAT!!!!

Producing the very first consciously created transparent Card sucked almost all of Sakura's power and strength, and she's close to fainting, under the terrified eyes of Akiho, who lets go of Kaito for a moment in a gesture of going towards her "sister". But Sakura isn't done yet, no. She can't give up yet because her job isn't done.

And I Will Make Them Remember About You

Sakura wants for Akiho and the people who care about her (the ENG decided to translate this with "the people SHE holds dear") to remember who Akiho really is. She wants basically to "undo" what the rewriting of the world caused on the people who know Akiho, making them believe that she was born into the Kinomoto family and that she was Sakura and Touya's sister.

After pondering for a while and discussing with my friends over at my Discord server, I decided I'm not gonna go out on a limb and assume things from this decision, because I definitely NEED to read the next chapter to see how much Sakura intends people to remember, with this move. It's really not clear at all, as of now.

Anyway, other translation inaccuracy incoming!

Sakura, ENG: "I'm going to make another new card for that...and I might not have the power to do it alone" Sakura, JP: "It might probably be really difficult to create one more new card with my power, right now..."

As you can see, the nuance is different, because Sakura in the JP addresses how it's almost impossible for her to create another new card in the situation she is in right now, exhausted and all.

That's why, very cleverly, she's going to do something different. (My gosh how proud I am of this girl!!)

Saying "But these two Cards will surely help me", Sakura skillfully manages to merge Time and Rewind to create a new Card, not from scratch (which requires more power) but using what she's already got: and that's how the REMIND Card is born!!! The name of the Card originated by just replacing the "W" of Rewind with the "M" of Time. Ingenious, isn't it???

And as the two Cards merge, they give us lots of flashbacks, like the "effect" used here resembles a lot the one that used to happen when Sakura was changing the Clow Cards into the Sakura Cards back in the old arcs, or how the merging of two Cards seems to also be a callback to how the "card without name" and the "Nothing" merged to create HOPE in the very last minutes of Movie 2! What a nostalgic trip down the memories lane!

And the appearance of this Card is even more touching, because it features Syaoran (with his current age) holding Nadeshiko's pendant watch. I found that so sweet, especially coupled with Yelan's assistance to Sakura in this chapter. Yelan associated with Sakura, and Syaoran associated with Nadeshiko. How sweet. And when you think that even Lilie, Akiho's mother, was associated with Kaito, you really can realize that this is some kind of "theme" that CLAMP seemed to be wanting to portray in this story.

I Can't Be On Everyone's Side

And now, the scene that I think is worth the whole chapter, but probably the whole Clear Card Arc in its entirety. As usual, with important scenes, I'll use the literal translation from Japanese:

Sakura, JP: "It might not be right that there'll be people who will forget things (after this), but....I can't be everyone's friend/ally/can't be on everyone's side. So I won't go back...but actually, along with the people important to me... I WANT TO GO ON"

Wow. Let that sink in.

Sakura, of Cardcaptor Sakura, just came to the realization and spelled out clearly that she cannot be on everyone's side. That she cannot be "everyone's friend", like in a cheesy fairytale.

And I really, really, want to thank CLAMP-sensei for this scene and this line because for a period, long time ago, I was worried that this story would go down the "let's be friends" or "let's show sympathy to them" route. But as the chapters continued and the things CLAMP told us about the Association and the Squids were more and more cruel, and they made me more and more sick, I started to realize that there was simply no way CLAMP could've had Sakura try to justify or compromise with them. Because when cruelty is real, there's no compromise to be made.

This scene also shows how Sakura realizes for the first time ever that in her world, contrary to what we all believed previously, evil exists. It might not touch her or her "entourage" directly (and she's really blessed for that), but it exists out there and it's hurting people, people who can also become really important to her. And she decides to not stand idly by, blessed as she is with the luck of not experiencing that evilness, but actually using whatever it is in her power to bring those suffering people to safety.

Sakura cannot fight those people on equal terms. She's just 13, and although her power is very strong, she's still inexperienced. Moreover, she cannot really bring herself to deny her current nature and use violence on other human beings. That's not Sakura. I want you guys to reflect on this because I know that one of the favorite things expected for this finale was to have a direct magical confrontation with the true villains of this arc, defeating them and restablishing the peace. And I am sincere when I say that I would've wished for the same too, because you know how much I love Kaito and Akiho, and how much I was disgusted to read about what they did to them. I've spread my "burn the squids" gifs all over the fandom. I wanted someone to vindicate them. But not here. Not in this manga. I realized that after the initial satisfaction, I would've probably felt like the series would've been "defiled". And that's exactly what happens when you answer to violence with more violence.

Sakura just could not go hunting those bastards down and defeat them in a magical battle. Because, powerful and corrupted in their greed as they are, the only way to "fix" this situation would've been to exterminate them. I just could not picture this story to cross that boundary, no matter how much the bar had already been raised well over what we initially thought.

So, if someone out there is disappointed by this outcome, I'm sorry for you, but it was just not meant to be and I'm actually really glad that this series kept true to its fundamental values. Of course it would, CLAMP really do care about this series and they know very well how far to push the plot, and when to actually stop.

So what is the role of Akiho's clan and the Magic Association in this story, especially considering that we never saw their faces at all? Talking with lots of fans in these years, especially Japanese, I've come to the conclusion that they are not in this story to fill the "villain that needs to be deafeated" role, but actually they're a representation of abusive families that smother and suffocate their children with expectations, completely disregarding those children's natural inclinations, and abuse them when they do not meet such expectations, but also the society as a whole, that looks at you only basing on how it can take advantage of you. Which is exactly what happened to Akiho and Kaito, driving them to very dark places. The absence of faces for those characters makes it possible for the readers to see the Squids and the Association as the representation of whatever environment they relate the most to. It can be family, society, school, workplace etc... It also helps us focusing on their actions, rather than their faces, and not attribute any prejudice to them (because of religion, race, skin color, or whatever other attribute they could have).

Seeing as the story treats them more like a concept, than an actual entity, it's basically impossible for Sakura to defeat them (and their great power is an indication of that impossibility). Just like in real life, darkness will always exist, along with light. Good and evil will always be side by side. It's bigger than any of us. Then, what can we do, in a situation like this? What Sakura is choosing to do, here, is not to confront directly with violence these people who are way out of her league, and not even to sit back and look, but actually finding a way to make them forget about her friends and keeping her friends safe, granting them the possibility of living a happy life, finally away from the darkness of the past, healing the wounds on their souls together with the people they love and who love them back. Because even if you've been abused in the past, you can still hope for a happy life.

The focus here is all on helping the abused people. And Sakura, in order to do that, is okay with coming to terms with the fact that she can't be on everyone's side, and she needs to choose. In the end, the thing that really matters the most is to GO ON with your most important people. Not going back to what is lost, but going forward. And I know that this is such a CLAMP theme, and I'm glad that they reiterated it in this arc. When I say that Clear Card brought Sakura so much more closer to what's usual for CLAMP, I mean this.

The panel with Sakura raising her staff and shouting she wants to go on is absolutely beautiful, with those wings growing so big and unleashing Sakura's power in a storm of cherry blossom petals.

Sakura is exhausted, she finally reached her limit by using her ultimate magic. As she faints, her eyes just make it in time to catch a glimpse of her prince, the love of her life grabbing tightly his girlfriend's hand, to not let her fall, while the watch of Remind and the book of Blank do their job in the background. And I really loved this spread too, because even if it's not a conventional romantic scene made of physical display of love, this in my opinion is even more powerful. Many were reminded of Tsubasa, but I was also reminded of the long time those two spent unable to touch one another, and this scene here seems like a catharsis for that hardship they went through. Syaoran will always catch Sakura everytime she falls, he will always be there to grab her hand, no matter if he can really touch her or not. Cause his love is stronger than any kind of impediment. He will always be by her side, no matter what. When she's exhausted by her heroine's duties, she knows that she can always count on him to support her.

And speaking of "always be by her side", I just can't avoid mentioning how Akiho and Kaito stayed "glued" to eachother for the entire duration of this chapter, protecting and supporting one another. Kaito, in particular, kept holding Akiho even as Sakura's magic was hurting him like hell, because it was extracting the book from him. Even in excruciating pain, he did not let go of Akiho, intent in protecting her and keeping her safe in his hold. Akiho let go of him just for a moment when she was scared out of her mind for Sakura, but went back to him when she saw that her "sister" was hellbent in completing her task no matter what. Kaito, as the good "moon boy" he is, is someone who shows his feelings through his actions rather than words, just like Syaoran. And his constant grip on Akiho in this chapter, such an opposite act compared to how he used to stop his hand everytime it started reaching out to her, told me all that I needed to know about him: she's his most important person, and he will never let go of her, ever again.

Sakura wakes up in her bed. The scene is a direct parallel with an almost identical scene in chapter 3, as you can see here:

Kero is next to her and is relieved to see her awake, so he goes to shout in the hallway, directed to Touya, that Sakura is finally awake. Sakura seems a bit surprised to see Kero talking so nonchalantly with her brother, and he tells her that he chatted with him back at Yukito's house, together with Suppy, so I guess now he finds it "natural" to talk to her brother too! 😂 I'm kinda glad to know that, I like this "change of relationship", compared to the old series (and it was also kinda long overdue).

Sakura opens the palm of her hands and she finds the Dream Key, still intact and all. She also asks about Remind and Blank, and Kero confirms to her that she was able to use them successfully! Sakura is absolutely delighted to hear that, and says "We were able to go on!"

And thaaaaaaat's how the second-to-last chapter of Cardcaptor Sakura Clear Card ends! Solving a lot of the pending situations, but still leaving some secondary questions that will surely find a (more or less) detailed explanation in the final, next chapter. And well, we also have to prepare to not have ALL the answers to ALL the questions we might have. This is usual for CLAMP, and especially in their Spaces they never made it a secret that they love for their fans to wreck their brains over theories and imagining the characters' future after a series is over. They love for the fans to give their interpretations to things, they encourage that a lot (also because it creates more long-lasting engagement with their series).

Alas, I expect they'll leave something in particular to everyone's interpretation, but we'll see. 😅

Overall, I really loved this chapter and it was really emotional for me. I think it's fitting for a "climax". Sakura was ABSOLUTELY running the show and after this I dare anyone to say that she isn't the main character of her story. She pushed her limits, and even questioned her own morality in doing so. What a wonderful thing. She reminded me so much of Sakura-hime when she shooted all those monsters in order to take the precious egg, back in the Acid Tokyo arc of Tsubasa. She knew she was doing something bad, but her wish to do everything needed in order to "have him back" was stronger than anything else. And she made her own choice. Here, Sakura, on a smaller scale, made her own choice too.

Now, I hope in the last chapter we'll be granted the possibility to delve a bit more into Kaito and his thoughts, I need to see his character development, I need to see that he learned something from this. That he -at least- started to interrogate himself over the nature of his feelings for Akiho. I know it's reasonable to think that with him, things will take looooong time, but as least show me the signs. Because I need to know that Akiho will be truly happy with him (I know she will!), and she can only be if he's learned to be honest with himself. And learned what Lilie meant with the last conversation we saw between them.

Also, WHERE'S MOMO, I NEED TO SEE MOMO BEFORE THIS ENDS!!

Okay, this is probably the longest post I ever did but I think as the second-to-last chapter it deserved to have some big thematics explored in depth, because they're very important. I'm still pondering if I should divide the post of the final chapter in two because, in addition to even more pages, I expect there'll be soooooooooo much to talk about (cross your fingers with me that there won't be any translation mistake).

I also hope there'll be room for an epilogue or a couple of extra chapters, to help us coping with the separation in a more gradual way, cause after 7 years it's quite hard. I was curious to see the end, of course, but also not entirely ready to let this wonderful story go. I really, really enjoyed it and I say this from the bottom of my heart. I don't care what everyone else thinks, I can only be grateful to CLAMP for Clear Card Arc. 🙏

Chapter 80, along with all the tears that will come with it, is expected to be uploaded on November 29th on CLAMP's Youtube channel. Yes, it's less than a month away! I also expect some news about the anime (BLESS THE ANIME!! Something to cling onto when the manga is over 😭).

Well, see you at the end of November (please come to hold my hand cause I cannot do this alone, lol) !!!

[artsyunderstudy]

Wild, wild Wednesday folks.

Thanks to everyone who continues to tag me, even tho I’ve been a bit out of pocket.  

I don’t have anything new, I already posted all the words I wrote last week and I lost my apple pencil and still haven’t replaced it because its like, expensive, and also I’m holding out hope my pencil will just show up.  Magically.  In the meantime I figure I’ll just do whatever the heck I want.  Here are some of my favorite lines from recently published fics, and then a couple recent recs.

What We Crave  

 “Is this what you want?” [...]  “You have to tell me, Baz.”

“Yes, you nightmare.  Just touch me.”

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You won’t,” he lies.  Into my fucking mouth.  All I do is hurt him.

Sixty Seconds

Like clockwork, his body relaxes into mine, his head turned so I can feel the press of his nose against my neck.  He's so cold.  I want to warm him.  I comb my fingers through his hair as his arms wind around my waist, clutching, pulling me closer.  He exhales shakily.

“You’re my best friend,” I say quietly.  It feels inadequate.  It doesn’t feel anywhere close to enough, not for what he means to me.

We Still Bloom

“Sometimes I feel like I’ve already crossed over.

“I don’t feel like that around him, though.”  I pause.  Take a breath.  The fire breathes with me.  “He makes me furious.  And he breaks my heart.  And he shines so big and bright I can’t help but let it warm me.

“I love it,” I say quietly.  “And I hate it.  And I’m sorry for it.”

I close my eyes.  The heat licks at the tips of my fingers.  One bare inch between me and destruction.

“I don’t think I’d give it up for anything.”

And now for a few recs.

Jelly Babies and other signs that your roommate probably isn't a demon by @chen-chen-chen-again-chen (WIP, Teen)- This fic has bewitched me body and soul.  It’s a rare pair fic with Swithin and OC Gregory Petty.  It’s so good, so pure, it literally made me cry with happiness.  Move over Snowbaz, Swegory now holds my heart.

Depth of Reason by @you-remind-me-of-the-babe (WIP, Mature) - This is such a good, smart canon divergent fic.  Simon is now social worker in the Department of Magical Creature Management tasked with monitoring the recently-outed-as-a-vampire Baz.   The relationship between Baz and Simon is so good so far, and the politics are really complex and well written.  We get to see Simon’s innate goodness shine through as his views on magical/dark creatures shift.

Don't Forget to Write by roobadly (Complete, Teen) (omg I don’t know Roo’s tumblr, someone help) - This is such a good, sweet, fun, canon divergent fic taking place in 7th year.  Baz is planning to torment Simon with a bit of spell paper, but his soft heart gets the best of him and they start up a magical correspondence.  It’s a magical texting fic, full of amazing banter and a punch you in the heart sort of climax.

Stress Management by @whogaveyoupermission (WIP, Mature)- This UST filled AU is just such a treat, and also really emotionally impactful, especially the most recent chapter DAMN.  Simon is a stressed social worker and Baz is his former roommate/enemy/crush and current crush/barre instructor.  This fic features a load of pining, amazing outfits, and tons of FEELINGS. 

Tags below the cut!

@forabeatofadrum @johnwgrey @takitalks @bazzybelle  @ileadacharmedlife @aristocratic-otter  @urban-sith @basiltonbutliketheherb @letraspal  @tea-brigade @stardustasincocaine @palimpsessed @cutestkilla @whatevertheweather  @nightimedreamersworld  @orange-peony  @carryonsimoncarryonbaz  @ionlydrinkhotwater @raenestee @fatalfangirl @captain-aralias @erzbethluna @stitchyqueer @larkral @whogaveyoupermission @you-remind-me-of-the-babe  @chen-chen-chen-again-chen  @ivelovedhimthroughworse @confused-bi-queer @moodandmist @martsonmars @sailorblossoms @aroace-genderfluid-sheep @yeonjunenby  @bookish-bogwitch @facewithoutheart @hushed-chorus @shrek-gogurt @thewholelemon 

[wildmendergame]

How we created the ideal water system for Wildmender

Over the last 4 years of work, we've created a gardening survival game in a desert world that let people create massive and complex oasis where each plant is alive. At the heart of a system-driven, procedurally generated ecology is a water simulation and terraforming system, and this post is to share a bit of how we built it.



We knew early on that the game would include some level of soil and water simulation, just as an outgrowth of wanting to simulate an ecosystem. The early builds used a simple set of flags for soil, which plants could respond to or modify, and had water present only as static objects. Each tile of soil (a 1x1 “meter” square of the game world) could be rock or sand, and have a certain level of fertility or toxicity. Establishing this early put limits on how much we could scale the world, since we knew we needed to store a certain amount of data for each tile.



Since the terrain was already being procedurally generated, letting players shape it to customize their garden was a pretty natural thing to add. The water simulation was added at first in response to this - flat, static bodies of water could easily create very strange results if we let the player dig terrain out from under them. Another neat benefit of this simulation was that it made water a fixed-sum resource - anything the player took out of the ground for their own use wasn’t available for plants, and vice versa. This really resonated well with the whole concept of desert survival and water as a critical resource.



The water simulation at its core is a grid-based solution. Tiles with a higher water level spread it to adjacent tiles in discrete steps. We broke the world up into “simulation cells” (of 32 by 32 tiles each) which let us break things like the water simulation into smaller chunks that we could compute in the background without interrupting the player. The amount of water in each tile is then combined with the height of the underlying terrain to create a water mesh for each simulation cell. Later on, this same simulation cell concept helped us with various optimizations - we could turn off all the water calculations and extra data on cells that didn’t have any water, which is most of the world.



Early on, we were mostly concerned with just communicating what was happening with simple blocks of color - but once the basic simulation worked, we needed to decide how the water should look for the final game. Given the stylized look we were building for the rest of the game, we decided the water should be similarly stylized - the blue-and-white colors made this critical resource stand out to the player more than a more muted, natural, transparent appearance did. White “foam” was added to create clear edges for any body of water (through a combination of screen depth, height above the terrain, and noise.)

We tweaked the water rendering repeatedly over the rest of the project, adding features to the simulation and a custom water shader that relied on data the simulation provided. Flowing water was indicated with animated textures based on the height difference, using a texturing technique called flowmaps. Different colors would indicate clean or toxic water. Purely aesthetic touches like cleaning up the edges of bodies of water, smooth animation of the water mesh, and GPU tessellation on high-end machines got added over time, as well.

The “simulation cell” concept also came into play as we built up the idea of biome transformations. Under the hood, living plants contribute “biomass” to nearby cells, while other factors like wind erosion remove biomass - but if enough accumulates, the cell changes to a new biome, which typically makes survival easier for both plants and players. This system provided a good, organic feel, and it fulfilled one of our main goals of making the player’s home garden an inherently safe and sheltered place - but the way it worked was pretty opaque to players. Various tricks of terrain texturing helped address this, showing changes around plants that were creating a biome transition before that transition actually happened.



As we fleshed out the rest of the game, we started adding new ways to interact with the system we already had. The spade and its upgrades had existed from fairly early, but playtesting revealed a big demand for tools that would help shape the garden at a larger scale. The Earthwright’s Chisel, which allowed the players to manipulate terrain on a larger scale such as digging an entire trench at once, attempted to do this in a way that was both powerful and imprecise, so it didn’t completely overshadow the spade.

We also extended the original biome system with the concept of Mothers and distinct habitats. Mothers gave players more direct control over how their garden developed, in a way that was visibly transformative and rewarding. Giving the ability to create Mothers as a reward for each temple tied back into our basic exploration and growth loops. And while the “advanced” biomes are still generally all better than the base desert, specializing plants to prefer their specific habitats made choosing which biome to create a more meaningful choice.



Water feeds plants, which produce biomass, which changes the biome to something more habitable that loses less water. Plants create shade and block wind-borne threats, which lets other plants thrive more easily. But if those plants become unhealthy or are killed, biomass drops and the whole biome can regress back to desert - and since desert is less habitable for plants, it tends to stay that way unless the player acts to fix it somehow. The whole simulation is “sticky” in important ways - it reinforces its own state, positive or negative. This both makes the garden a source of safety to the player, and allows us to threaten it - with storms, wraiths, or other disasters - in a way that demands players take action.

[fourseasonsfigs]

Chulian on Lake

For today's fig post we have this amazing set - that lights up!

This complex and beautiful set features Zhang Zhehan's lotus spirit Qing Lian (aka Xiao-Zhe) from his advertisement for Jade Dynasty: New Fantasy, together with Gong Jun's Dong Fang Yuechu from the upcoming drama Fox Spirit Matchmaker: Yue Hong.

First, just a few pictures of our ethereal lotus fairy:

And a few pictures of our stunning Daoist priest:

That last one in particular is the inspiration for this fig here.

This set arrived in an enormous, fairly heavy box. I had to ship this air mail because of the electronics involved in it.

I was a little worried about how big and delicate this set was, but it arrived in perfect shape. Full credit to the fig maker and the factory for cushioning it so well.

Here's all the pieces. I still think it's incredible all the fragile flowers and stems make it through.

You can see here the little tiny holes (up at the top by the edges) where you can insert the lotus leaves and flowers. They went in quite easily and were very stable.

Here's a close up of the electronics. The set came with both batteries and a USB cord. The button there turns on the lake light.

Here's the lake by itself, before the figs go in. As you can see, Yuechu stands in the boat via peg legs. Very seaworthy of him! Qing Lian just lays down however you like inside the lotus.

Before we put the figs into their respective conveyances, here's a closeup of them. Qing Lian is all curled up and sleepy eyed, and Yuechu is casting a magical fireball of some sorts.

I could only really get two angles of the figs before they went into the lake, since neither of them stand by themselves.

This was a very difficult set to get good pictures of. One, because I lack any real photography skills, and my phone kept hyperfocusing on certain parts and blurring out the rest. But, as we go around the fig, you do end up seeing the whole thing. So please bear with me!

Beautiful, isn't it? I love how detailed these figures are - their hair is amazing.

Here's a top-down view. Yuechu fits in the boat beautifully - the pegs went right in, and he's pretty secure in there. No glue needed. Xiao Zhe is resting peacefully and easily in his lotus.

We'll do a couple closeups here. He's quite tiny all curled up like that!

Huh. Is Yuechu conjuring up Qing Lian? It looks like we have a lotus in the middle of that magic. I'm not sure!

Our lotus lake at midnight! It does in fact light up like a dream. I just went ahead and plugged the USB cord in the wall, so it's a little less beautiful than it would be cordless with the batteries. Still, it's very lovely.

The fig maker included a double-sided postcard, a matching keychain with the art, the batteries, and the USB cord (that I had already plugged in).

I really appreciate how she included both. This is her first set, and I hope she makes more!

Material: Resin

Fig Count: 513

Scene Count: 36

Rating: Luminous!

[link to the Master Post Index]

[skinandscales-if]

"it takes me seven days to stop being in love with you" + puck?

Atlas | Skye | Reese

⎯

That day was sunny, so you and Puck visited the sea.

It was a little windy, but not enough to deter either of you, as you both found an isolated slice of the boardwalk and decided to walk down it for the day. Having this much free time was a rarity, and one you were determined to experience at its fullest. Puck wasn’t as busy anymore either, so the break was a breath of fresh air between the two of you. As the wind whips by, you swear you can see dark clouds out on the horizon.

“Looks like we got here just in time. Might rain.” You muse, pulling your jacket tighter to yourself. Puck hums in acknowledgment and peers skyward, catching the same view as they adjust their glasses. 

“Hm. Looks likely.” Their features slowly turn mischievous, a glint in their eyes that you know well by now. You smile even before they speak. “If we have to take shelter, I’m not letting you under if there’s not enough room.”

You laugh, a surprised noise that is gutted in your throat. You elbow into their side a bit and stare at them in astonishment as they grin back at you.

“Where’d that come from? You’re already planning on abandoning me after all I did to plan today?” You chuckle, shaking your head at them dramatically as you heave out a loud sigh. “Wow. I see how it is.”

“Aw come on. You love me.” They snipe back, leaning in a little closer in just a way that makes their presence a bit overwhelming. They block most of the breeze this way, until you can really only focus on them and keeping one foot in front of the other. They don’t seem to notice your plight. Or maybe they do. Instead, they just give you a stunning smile, wrapping one arm around your middle. It’s hard to feel the contact through all the layers but you are still very aware of it. It’s warm and unbroken by your steps.

“Nah… I think I could break up with you easy, actually.” You deflect, rolling your eyes as you scoff at the quick return of their charm. Always the one to dial it up when they’re in trouble. And it’s difficult to ever really find them in trouble, so this attention is all the more appreciated. The bastard.

“Hm? Really? That easily?” They ask, straightening up a bit. You tense a bit as their arm moves away from your back a bit though they don’t remove it entirely. Puck is considering something, a look you know better than any of their others as they wrinkle their nose a bit and their head tilts just slightly enough to not be purposeful.

“It would take me seven days to stop being in love with you.”

“Huh?”

Puck looks back to you, now a bit more serious. Have they really considered this? Your chest tightens a bit before they clear it up.

“The seven stages of grief. I’d go through one each day.” They correct, giving you a slight nod. Your own mood has grown a bit more serious, a bit more solemn. They’re also very good at that. Keeping you grounded when you need to be. This seems like a strange time, though. The waves crash a little harder on the rocks to your side. 

“Isn’t it five? Five stages of grief?” You add, now determined to get to the bottom of this sudden change in mood. Puck doesn’t look very plussed, instead focused on this new topic, eyes wandering somewhere out there beyond the end of the boardwalk.

“Mm… well, yes, for the most part. But the seven stages are for a more complex understanding of grief. They add in shock before everything and one for reconstruction. It allows for a more comprehensive view of things.” 

You stare at them for another moment, incredulous. They continue.

“I think not allowing me those two extra days would be a disservice. Whiskey for shock. Tea for reconstruction.” They glance over to you now, smile slowly overcoming their features once again and the nerves flood out of your system. That shine that catches the edge of their glasses, the same light that reflects so perfectly in the brown pools of their eyes. You lean a bit closer unconsciously, like some sort of magnetic pull keeps you tethered to them. To the here and now. It’s the strangest and most comforting thing in the world, their gravity. It’s all-consuming, warm, and constant. You think if you ever confessed it to Puck they’d have some kind of explanation for it but you don’t want that. Some things are best left unexplained.

“That’d be concise, don’t you think?” Puck finishes. You blink at them, returning to yourself as you register their words and a familiar smile works it’s way onto your face.

“You’re such a nerd.” You chuckle, shaking your head again. You pull from them a bit but don’t let their hand fall away, instead moving to grip it. You can’t even feel the sea breeze anymore. They laugh back and it pulls at your heart until it aches. Damn. “You’re lucky I’m in love with you.”

“Oh so you won’t break up with me now?”

“Oh my god Puck.”

[canmom]

Animation Night 128: Beep Boop

Hi friends, it’s Animation Night.

Tonight we have the exciting occasion of: finally hitting another power of 2! A phenomenon not seen since Animation Night 64, when we watched Macross. Who knows if we’ll ever see another! I’m going to have to fill another 128 nights, and while we’re still not out of material, that’s a lot of nights...

Since powers of 2 are especially computer-y, it only seems fitting that we focus on the subject of computers. So let’s roll back the clock and have a look at some representations of ~the digital world~ in animation!

So, computers. I’ve already done the early history of 3D CGI animation back on Animation Night 75, which means we’re gonna take a slightly different tack on this one.

In less than a century, computers have been introduced to the world and integrated themselves so universally it’s hard to imagine life without them. Even as recently as the 80s, when they got small enough to have one in your house, these computers were still pretty novel.

And how do humans deal with a strange new technology that defies comprehension in terms of the familiar? Well, we anthropomorphise it! So that has led to the curious little genre of stories set ‘inside’ a computer system, imagining as comprising a little world where programs are little people...

TRON (1982)

Let’s start with the film Tron (1982). No, just one ‘o’, not the weird pejorative for a trans somethingawful user.

Tron is... well, really the main reason it’s remembered is the technical side so let’s dive right in. Primarily a composite of live action and extremely complex rotoscoped backlight animation, this film also features some of the earliest CGI sequences in film. But it’s also a narrative about computers, imagining a computer program hero fighting in the world implied by the vector-display games of the era. But I’m mostly going to talk about how it’s made because it’s one of those ‘once in film history’ type of productions, similar to A Scanner Darkly (Animation Night 120), which proved so ludicrously labour-intensive that nobody felt like doing it again. Let’s dig in...

The impetus came when a guy called Steven Lisberger saw video of Pong (the game) in 1976, which led him down a path to take an interest in this new-fangled computer animation being toyed with at MIT. Lisberger was a big tech enthusiast, and hoped to bring the idea of computers to a wider audience beyond its ‘clique-like’ users at the time. The concept of a hero throwing discs was one of the earliest elements, used by Lisberger to promote his studio; the rest of the script built around it.

The film was originally planned to just use traditional animation. News of the project caught the attention of computer scientist Alan Kay, who became technical advisor for a set of CG sequences - not to mention the inspiration for the film’s scientist character. Gradually, the concept evolved from animation, to animation bracketed by live action, to finally live action composited into animated scenes.

Lisberger’s growing gang shopped around for a studio willing to take on such a complex project; eventually they found Disney, who funded a test reel to try out the new techniques - mixing live action, backlight and CG. Despite funding the film, Disney’s insular animation department were unwilling to get involved in animation on behalf of an outsider, so the 2D animation went to Taiwanese studio Wang Film Productions, an outsourcing oriented studio that took on vast amounts of work from Western companies like Disney and Hanna-Barbera. The CG, meanwhile, went to the tiny CG graphics industry; Wikipedia writes:

Disney turned to the four leading computer graphics firms of the day: Information International, Inc. of Culver City, California, who owned the Super Foonly F-1 (the fastest PDP-10 ever made and the only one of its kind); MAGI of Elmsford, New York; Robert Abel and Associates of California; and Digital Effects of New York City.[7]Bill Kovacs worked on the film while working for Robert Abel before going on to found Wavefront Technologies. The work was not a collaboration, resulting in very different styles used by the firms. 

This was a time when a production computer in the film industry might have as little as 2MB RAM. To handle this, they’d use some of the same techniques as PS2 era games, such as aggressive fog effects. And there was no digital compositing or even just printing onto film: to get CG onto film, they would render a frame, point a camera at it, and take a photo as in stop motion animation. Crazy shit.

Alongside this was an equally elaborate effort to produce all the backlight effects for all the glowing lines. This involved an absolute ton of manually-painted traveling mattes, with a dozen or more passes to expose each coloured glowing element photographed in sequence onto the film. There’s very little traditional animation so much as very elaborate rotoscoping, but it was an astonishing work of compositing. Here, I’ll let Wikipedia explain what they did...

In this process, live-action scenes inside the computer world were filmed in black-and-white on an entirely black set, placed in an enlarger for blow-ups and transferred to large format Kodalith high-contrast film. These negatives were then used to make Kodalith sheets with a reverse (positive) image. Clear cels were laid over each sheet and all portions of the figure except the areas that were exposed for the later camera passes were manually blacked out. Next the Kodalith sheets and cel overlays were placed over a light box while a VistaVision camera mounted above it made separate passes and different color filters. A typical shot normally required 12 passes, but some sequences, like the interior of the electronic tank, could need as many as 50 passes. About 300 matte paintings were made for the film, each photographed onto a large piece of Ektachrome film before colors were added by gelatin filters in a similar procedure as in the Kodaliths. The mattes, rotoscopic and CGI were then combined and composed together to give them a "technological" appearance.[16][24]

The result is honestly... kind of weird looking; the actors are all very monochrome, and the CG shots lack the grain and atmospheric glows of the intercut live action shots. As animation, it’s kind of stop-start and since every shot was so expensive, they tend to go by very fast. But that only makes it more interesting, to see a time before we had invented all the techniques we take for granted in modern animation tools and compositing....

Then of course there’s a soundtrack by none other than legendary trans synth composer Wendy Carlos. Because computers, you see. It’s interesting to think actually - just like the elaborate backlight animation, this is portraying a ‘digital world’ via analogue electronic means.

OK, so that’s how it’s made, what’s Tron actually about? It all revolves around a computer company called ENCOM, basically IBM I guess? It follows the Manichaeist struggle between two programmers: the good hacker Kevin Flynn, and the evil Ed Dillinger who plagiarised his arcade games and booted him from the company. Flynn gets uploaded into the computer world, where he meets his security program Tron, who’s battling Dillinger’s evil AI, the ‘Master Control Program’.

As little as this has to do with how computers work, there are some fun little touches; e.g. the reason the programs take on the likenesses of real humans is justified by the amounts of information already being stored by computer companies. But yeah, mostly it’s a pretty generic good guy vs bad guy sort of script. This was very much a tech demo sort of film, although its imagery has been subsequently enshrined as part of the ~80s~ canon; in fact, it was one of the first films to have a modern nostalgiacore sequel with Tron Legacy in 2010. The lightcycle game devised for the film is quite fun actually - there’s an open source version called Armagetron Advanced which was still in development as recently as Dec 2020. But mostly it’s historically important. And I haven’t seen it, so I’d like to remedy that.

ReBoot (1994)

The next major entry in the ‘what if the programs were like, little people’ genre was ReBoot, the first full CG tv series evar, created by the Canadian Mainframe Entertainment. The idea dates back to 1984 - not long after Tron - originating with a group of British guys called John Grace, Ian Pearson, Gavin Blair and Phil Mitchell. They started experimenting with CG characters pretty soon, in this music video whose animation was done by Pearson and Blair...

...which was one of the first music videos to be ever shown on MTV in 1987, consisting of footage of the band texture mapped into a big rectangle in a CG scene, plus a bunch of digitally matted colour effects. (big shoutouts to @shimakaze-revivalism​ who was first to show me this!)

For a TV series, though, they needed mooorrrreee poooowweeerrr...... more complex rigs with more polygons and better shading models, which came in the form of Softimage|3D, and work began in 1990, with episodes in 1991. In this world, the computer world is entirely sealed off from any humans outside - in fact, they live in fear of the user, who will slaughter the denizens of the computer any time they play a game. The story mainly follows an action hero called Bob who fights to preserve the city of Mainframe against various villains, all named random computer words like Hexadecimal and Megabyte.

From the outset it faced a censorious Board of Standards & Practices for the US’s ABC network, which seems to have caused a great deal of resentment for the creators; nevertheless the show was a success and gradually started to introduce longer-form stories as the target age group shifted up. The later seasons sound like they went the sort of wild places a long-running cartoon does, with characters aged up by video game time acceleration and an ever-growing cast; as such it earned a pretty devoted fandom who eagerly await the day the creator might decide to resolve the final cliffhanger.

There’s so much of it I could never possibly show more than a sampling, but I would at least like to take a look in to see what the deal is.

Serial Experiments Lain (1998)

There is no possible way I could cover a theme like this without a mention of Lain. The main character of this iconic experimental anime, designed by Yoshitoshi ABe (known as well for Haibane Renmei [Animation Night 106]) has become something of the mascot of a certain species of alienated internet dork. We all love lain.

Lain is... a little complicated to explain, though. The plot summary on Wikipedia throws out a lot of names and concepts which make it hard to get the gist, and the show itself is slow, oblique and requires you to pay attention. But basically it is about an autistic plural girl who becomes God via the internet.

So we have Lain Iwakura. She’s a student at junior high, with little interest in technology, despite her high tech dad. This is the 90s: personal computers are increasingly widespread, but Usenet has only just begun to give way to the Web, and it’s still very novel. Nobody could really imagine what this sort of complex connection would do to the world; it is this context that forms the basis for the original cyberpunk, such as Ghost in the Shell a few years earlier.

Lain herself comprises three different alters, something never spelled out fully explicitly: the shy ‘real world’ Lain “玲音” (reiin), the ambitious and determined internet delver Lain “レイン” (rein), and the aggressively ‘evil’ Lain (Ｌａｉｎ) who harms herself those around her.

Not that what’s around her is necessarily ‘real’ in any truly objective sense; the world of the digitally connected Wired starts to bleed into the real world through some psychic somethingorother involving the Earth’s magnetic field, and the show is always very partial in its viewpoint, preferring to hint rather than really explain anything outright. Lain gradually comes to realise she is not just some random schoolgirl but a kind of omnipotent being that dwells within the Wired all according the complicated plan of an engineer Masami Eiri who uploaded himself into the wired; she finds she can rewrite memories and shape the world as she pleases but this power just isolates her even more.

Along the way we take all sorts of turns, throwing out a plethora of allusions to scientific, occult and UFO conspiracy ideas. Hell, rather than the web, which was in its infancy, the writers looked to a now-obscure hypertext experiment called Project Xanadu. But they’re as likely to throw out a reference to an injoke among LISP programmers. You just have to kind of let it wash over you.

This experimental attitude infects the whole style of the series, making it unique even within anime of the time: its visuals rely on stark compositions of blown-out white highlights and muted greys; its animation is generally very reserved, which does not lessen the impact of striking images like Lain’s room becoming an increasingly alien nest of computers, or the strange partial manifestations of users in the Wired, or indeed the impressive body horror animated by Takahiro Kishida at the finale. Lain’s round face, accentuated by a tiny hairclip, lidded eyes and muted affect captured a certain something that makes her instantly recognisable.

And for that matter the music and sound design is iconic, whether the voice reciting “PRESENT DAY/PRESENT TIME hahahahaha”, the distorted synthesised voice giving the name of the episode, or the fascinating and inspired choice of a song by obscure British Band Bôa for the intro...

Its creators were certainly full of some fascinating ambitions. Notably producer Yasuyuki Ueda declared it a ‘cultural war against American culture and the American sense of values Japan adopted after WWII’ and later said he found himself disappointed that the Americans didn’t come to a different interpretation of the story.

As for director Ryūtarō Nakamura, he worked his way up through the industry since the 70s, notably working under Osamu Dezaki on works like Ashita no Joe 2 and Space Adventure Cobra - perhaps it’s no wonder then that Lain features creative layouts and puts a lot of its narrative in the storyboard. He would go on to direct an episode of GitS:SAC, as well as a well-loved adaptation of the light novel Kino’s Journey, a gentle story which follows a girl on a talking motorbike passing through a series of societies - and working to adapt a Masamune Shirow work with another surreal supernatural story, Ghost Hound, in 2007-8.

And most of the main figures behind Lain - ABe, Ueda and writer Chiaki J. Konaka - would come together again in a cyberpunk dystopian work, Texhnolyze, in 2003, this time at Madhouse. I don’t know a great deal about it, but I’d like to look into it at some point (if not on Animation Night, since it’s a full two cours).

You could easily write dissertations on Lain (I’m sure people have!), but also the chance that anyone in my audience has not seen it is probably pretty much zero lol. But, you know, it’s Lain! I can’t not talk about Lain!

Moving on, here’s another curiosity from the same era which @mogsk​ sent my way - a 3D animation that attempts to explain how the internet protocol works with physical metaphors, casting various parts of the IP stack as little robot guys. This was animated by Ericsson Medialab, which seems to be... a Swedish telecoms company? It’s cute.

Now, let’s roll the clock forward a few decades. Nowadays, the internet is completely ubiquitous. If you’re anything like me you are almost never not using it for something in every waking moment. But that doesn’t mean technology isn’t making something new and scary; in fact it’s making a lot that’s new and scary, whether environmentally devastating ponzi scheme cancers like cryptocurrency, or the current push by big tech companies to reach the apotheosis of the logic of the social media feed by eliminating human artists from CONTENT CREATION.

So, I thought I’d throw in a look at a largely unacknowledged show that I’ve found kind of interesting from the current year.

Pantheon adapts a collection of Ken Liu stories about a near-future world where uploading has been achieved by a big tech company; it’s similar in some respects to Lain in that it sees students drawn into a world of computer conspiracy. What struck me when I started watching it is how surprisingly well observed the computer stuff is; whether it’s a recognisable 4chan /x/ or a discussion of parallel programming, it’s plugged into the tech world, including its current transhumanist imaginary, in a surprisingly solid way.

The story of the first episode follows a socially isolated and bullied girl at a swanky high tech college who discovers evidence that her deceased dad is actually somehow alive, but only able to communicate in emoji... and a depressed, highly mathematically adept boy whose parents are pushing him very hard to pursue tech who catches wind of the conspiracy. Clearly something big is afoot, and whatever it is, it involves human uploads. I’ve heard a lot of good things, and this seems like the night to introduce it to you guys before I watch more...

Visually, it’s a curiosity: heavily influenced by anime in both visual design and low framerate animation style, and with plenty of solid technical drawing from unusual perspectives, but somehow not quite hitting the notes of timing and motion that give that ‘anime character’. So another note in the general trend of studios around the world turning to anime for inspiration, following in the footsteps of shows like Castlevania.

The main studio credited is Titmouse, although looking at the credits of the first episode, it looks like a great deal of animation was carried out at the Korean studio DR Movie - the same studio that’s currently holding up half the anime industry judging by how often it’s credited. I’d really like to find out more about the exact production process, just for how it fits in to the general debate over how anime’s production process influences the resulting animation.

It clearly owes a lot to Lain, although its approach so far isn’t quite so wildly experimental. And it achieves a strong level of tension already, capturing that uniquely hostile and demanding vibe of the tech world very precisely.

I think that should be plenty. So to summarise, the plan is to watch Tron, and then excerpts from ReBoot, Lain and Pantheon, hopefully enough to get a sense of the vibe and whet your appetite for more. (It’s always tough to know how to handle long pieces of TV animation!)

Animation Night is back to its old timeslot of 7pm UK time, about 30 minutes from this post! I hope you’ll come join me for a dive into visions of the information superhighway, past and present~

[alltimefail-sims]

OKAY SO LITTLE UPDATE AND SCATTERED THOUGHTS ON THE NEW EP

It turns out that removing 95% of your mods will improve the game's overall ability to run. Not shocking, but it's definitely a thing lol. I've also learned that some mods, while amazing conceptually, will probably not be added back into my game. This isn't on the modders: some mods are just so complex that I honestly can't keep up with them and therefore can't enjoy their features to the full extent. I do miss my custom recipes, wonderful whims, and a few lumpinou mods though (but that's really it so far).

I also removed all my custom sliders because I have no idea what is broken and what isn't at this point. Shocked to say I don't miss most of them, so I think it might be time I clean that folder out. I did, however, miss my presets!!! Especially body and mouth presets! Likely gonna tidy up those folders and then add those back in.

Kijiko eyelash remover seems to be working perfectly fine in my game, so if you use that one you are probably good to go.

The new pack's CAS items are good! I don't think I'm going to use a lot of it outside of sims in Tomarang, but that's okay. As of right now I am not planning to do an in-depth review of the CAS items because I pretty much just feel "fine" about all of it across the board: I don't hate anything but I'm not absolutely in love with anything either. Idk if I'm just feeling this way or if others are as well, but it seems like a lot of the items (especially the hairs) aren't really new and they're just modifications of things we already have... but that could be just me. I will say the cute dress with the slit up the side... chef's kiss. Needed more swatches though!

One unexpected item that I did love was the tea kettle!! I'm never buying a tea magic brewer or tea pot ever again. I never realized how badly I needed the ability to only make one cup of a tea/hot chocolate/coffee at time but it has been a game changer. I don't have much to say about the build/buy... it's all really nice. 🤷‍♀️ Wish there were more items that really stood out, but for the most part it's all just good, simple pieces with a few beautiful wall hangings (nice posters, a few good plants, love the baskets, standing toilet is a nice addition, adore the plastic garden chairs, etc.). Functional radiators, water tanks, etc. were fantastic additions with this pack and I would have been happy if they were just decor tbh (and was expecting them to be) but the fact that they aren't makes me very happy. Compatibility across packs is done far too rarely, so I'll let the sims team have this one crumb of a win.

I'm still testing this pack out so gameplay features are being dicovered bit by bit. Haven't ran into some of the big bugs people have been having, but I'm still early in the save and playing as a tenant (I stand by the fact that I have 0 interest being a property owner). The tester sim I made (Riley, she/they) vibed so hard with Vanesha Cahyaputri. Like the two of them have "amazing compatibility" and had full bar friendship almost instantly and I did not make Riley with any partner in mind... I didn't even know Vanesha was a canon lesbian! But they haven't had a single negative interaction soooo brb I'm on my way to make her over ASAP because I loooooovee a good sapphic friends to lovers arc. 😂

Lastly: I have some asks in my inbox. I swear I'm not ignoring you if you've messaged me, it's just been a chaotic few days as December is always so busy. I will answer them as soon as I can! Until the holidays are over I'll probably be posting sporadically! I'm still going to be here, but I'm enjoying just playing the game without any pressure to post about it.

Also, with updates breaking cc and sliders like crazy, it's unlikely I'll be sharing any sims outside of sim requests for a while. I'll still crank out builds, happily chat about my OCs, and reblog other people's content on here. For now I plan to just enjoy my time with my family and play the game stress free! ❤

Okay bye now!

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

Two meteorites are providing a detailed look into outer space If you’ve ever seen a shooting star, you might have actually seen a meteor on its way to Earth. Those that land here are called meteorites and can be used to peek back in time, into the far corners of outer space or at the earliest building blocks of life. Today, scientists report some of the most detailed analyses yet of the organic material of two meteorites. They’ve identified tens of thousands of molecular “puzzle pieces,” including a larger amount of oxygen atoms than they had expected. The researchers will present their results at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). ACS Spring 2023 is a hybrid meeting being held virtually and in-person March 26–30, and features more than 10,000 presentations on a wide range of science topics. Previously, the team led by Alan Marshall, Ph.D., investigated complex mixtures of organic materials found on Earth, including petroleum. But now, they are turning their attention toward the skies — or the things that have fallen from them. Their ultra-high resolution mass spectrometry (MS) technique is starting to reveal new information about the universe and could ultimately provide a window into the origin of life itself. “This analysis gives us an idea of what’s out there, what we’re going to run into as we move forward as a ‘spacefaring’ species,” says Joseph Frye-Jones, a graduate student who is presenting the work at the meeting. Both Marshall and Frye-Jones are at Florida State University and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. Thousands of meteorites fall to Earth every year, but only a rare few are “carbonaceous chondrites,” the category of space rock that contains the most organic, or carbon-containing, material. One of the most famous is the “Murchison” meteorite, which fell in Australia in 1969 and has been studied extensively since. A newer entry is the relatively unexplored “Aguas Zarcas,” which fell in Costa Rica in 2019, bursting through back porches and even a doghouse as its pieces fell to the ground. By understanding the organic makeup of these meteorites, researchers can obtain information about where and when the rocks formed, and what they ran into on their journey through space. To make sense of the complicated jumble of molecules on the meteorites, the scientists turned to MS. This technique blasts a sample apart into tiny particles, then basically reports the mass of each one, represented as a peak. By analyzing the collection of peaks, or the spectrum, scientists can learn what was in the original sample. But in many cases, the resolution of the spectrum is only good enough to confirm the presence of a compound that was already presumed to be there, rather than providing information about unknown components. This is where Fourier-transform ion cyclotron resonance (FT-ICR) MS comes in, which is also known as “ultra-high resolution” MS. It can analyze incredibly complex mixtures with very high levels of resolution and accuracy. It’s especially well suited for analyzing mixtures, like petroleum, or the complex organic material extracted from a meteorite. “With this instrument, we really have the resolution to look at everything in many kinds of samples,” says Frye-Jones. The researchers extracted the organic material from samples of both the Murchison and Aguas Zarcas meteorites, then analyzed it with ultra-high resolution MS. Rather than analyzing only one specific class of molecules at a time, such as amino acids, they chose to look at all soluble organic material at once. This provided the team with more than 30,000 peaks for each meteorite to analyze, and over 60% of them could be given a unique molecular formula. Frye-Jones says these results represent the first analysis of this type on the Aguas Zarcas meteorite, and the highest-resolution analysis on the Murchison one. In fact, this team identified nearly twice as many molecular formulas as previously reported for the older meteorite. Once determined, the data were sorted into unique groups based on various characteristics, such as whether they included oxygen or sulfur, or whether they potentially contained a ring structure or double bonds. They were surprised to find a large amount of oxygen content among the compounds. “You don’t think of oxygen-containing organics as being a big part of meteorites,” explained Marshall. The researchers will next turn their attention to two far more precious samples: a few grams of lunar dust from the Apollo 12 and 14 missions of 1969 and 1971, respectively. These samples predate Marshall’s invention of FT-ICR MS in the early 1970s. Instrumentation has come a long way in the decades since and is now perfectly poised to analyze these powders. The team will soon compare their results from the meteorite analyses to the data they obtain from the lunar samples, hoping to learn more information about where the moon’s surface came from. “Was it from meteorites? Solar radiation? We should be able to soon shed some light on that,” says Marshall.

[according-to-the-laura]

StackedNatural Day 174: 3x15, 8x22

StackedNatural Masterpost: [x]

May 8, 2022

3x15: Time Is on My Side

Written by: Sera Gamble

Directed by: Charles Beeson

Original air date: May 8, 2008

Plot Synopsis:

Sam and Dean discover a doctor who, back in 1816, became obsessed with finding the secret of eternal life by taking people's vital organs. Meanwhile, Bobby finds Bela and Dean leaves Sam to confront her.

Features:

Organ theft, some pre-season 4 demon torture, Doc Benton, chasing immortality, Rufus’ introduction, Sam hunting alone, Bela’s backstory, the maintenance of eternal life, Sam’s eyes almost getting scooped out, the Ma’lak box precursor, Bela's deal coming due.

My Thoughts:

I forgot about the monster plot of this episode and I was initially so annoyed that they were doing a monster of the week episode right before Dean’s deal came due. Honestly having the A-plot be an immoral immortality plot is perfect and really showcases the differences between Sam and Dean’s ethics in an interesting way. Dean is very black and white when it comes to what makes a monster, whereas Sam lives more in the grey and is able to see nuance. Dean’s problem with letting Doc Benton teach him the formula isn’t that it would be letting the Doc get away with it - it’s that it would turn him into a monster, whereas we know that Sam has felt unclean and monstrous his entire life anyways. 

Watching Dean’s scene with Rufus is kind of depressing post-series-finale. All of Rufus’ pessimism comes true. 

The thing I’m most salty about right now is that Bela never came back as a demon. They’ve already set up that that’s what’s going to happen to Dean, so we know it will happen to her, and Dean literally said “I’ll see you in hell” to her. What a missed opportunity. 

Notable Lines:

“Even if you manage to scrape out of this one, there's just gonna be something else down the road. Folks like us...there ain't no happy ending. We all got it coming.”

Laura’s (completely subjective) Episode Rating: 8.6

IMdB Rating: 8.5

8x22: Clip Show

Written by: Andrew Dabb

Directed by: Thomas J. Wright

Original air date: May 8, 2013

Plot Synopsis:

Sam and Dean try to figure out how to cure a demon. Crowley starts killing victims that Sam and Dean have saved from previous jobs. Castiel and Metatron begin the trials to close the gates to Heaven.

Features:

Tommy from Wendigo, Dean giving Cas the silent treatment, the discovery of the Bunker’s dungeon, weird with three exclamation points, Cas’ shopping trip, how to kill a demon, a Nephilim I completely forgot about, Handy Annie, Jenny from Shut Up Dr Phil,  Sarah Blake from Provenance, Sam’s martyr complex getting the fuel it needs.

My Thoughts:

I didn’t remember much about this episode except for Sarah Blake (I really thought I remembered her living though), but this is a great episode! Crowley is really an excellent villain in this, he makes everything so personal and that makes the stakes way higher. In contrast, Abaddon has a great aesthetic, but her motives are too generically evil to make her a good villain. The only real qualm I have with this episode is that it makes no sense as an excuse to bring her back. Cutting her up and burying her in separate pieces was such a cool way to deal with a monster that they couldn’t kill that it’s a shame to bring her back to be unceremoniously stabbed by a new, stronger knife. Also, they should have summoned a weaker demon to cure. They already know that Abaddon is way stronger than the average demon, it’s way too big a swing for their first demon cure. Society if Meg or Ruby had been alive to be cured. 

The pacing is kind of weird with the Heaven trials, although I’m not sure there’s a way around that - if we met Metatron earlier it would mess up the timing of the Hell trials. It’s so weird to remember that there was briefly a Nephilim. I wish the moral dilemma of killing her had been explored more - as foreshadowing that the Heaven trials are not as straightforwardly righteous as they seem at first glance. 

Cas and Dean’s argument in this episode is honestly so understandable and human, something I feel like we can’t say 90% of the time that they’re fighting. Dean is hurt after having been vulnerable and it blowing up in his face. The last time they spoke he told Cas he needed him, and now he’s telling Cas he doesn’t, so Cas feels like he’s worthless because he can’t help. Also insanely brutal to watch this fight where Dean says Cas always thinks he’s doing the right thing immediately after watching The Man Who Would Be King.

Notable Lines:

“Dean, I thought I was doing the right thing.” “Yeah, you always do.”

“If anybody else – I mean anybody – pulled that kind of crap, I would stab them in their neck on principle. Why should I give him a free pass?” “Because it’s Cas.”

“You don’t understand. I NEED pie.”

“There was a time when I thought I could lead our people, but I was mistaken. I spilled so much blood. And I've tried to atone for my sins and I did penance. And I betrayed my friends to protect our secrets, but I've just failed.”

“I think the people you save, they're how you justify your pathetic little lives. The alcoholism, the collateral damage, the pain you've caused – the one thing that allows you to sleep at night, the one thing is knowing that these folks are out there, still out there happy and healthy because of you, you great, big, bloody heroes!”

Laura’s (completely subjective) Episode Rating: 9.2

IMdB Rating: 8.6

In Conclusion: Today’s theme is the clock hitting midnight.

<< Previous Day  |  Next Day >>

[ilikereadingactually]

Omelas double feature!

"The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin and "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole" by Isabel J. Kim

freeze frame on me, falling down a rabbit hole. you're probably wondering how i got here. *rewind noise* see, two fandoms ago i followed a mutual of a mutual on a different account and now she writes things that i get to read in real life magazines! in fact she wrote a thing that was published in the latest issue of Clarkesworld referencing a short story i have known of by reputation but had never read, and this presented a fun thematic opportunity. and by "fun" i mean i have been turning both these stories over and over in my mind, trying to sort out what i might say about them other than "wow" (affectionate).

so. "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" is, to me, a story about guilt in a hypothetical utopia where almost no one suffers. Le Guin offers, in lush and ringing prose, a place where the abject misery of one child who is locked up, starving and alone, is the stated price for the prosperity and peace of everyone else. the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few here, apparently; the people of Omelas wrestle with this injustice and rationalize until they can accept the terms, and the ones who can't--the ones who walk away--never come back.

i think because it's framed as a hypothetical that lives alongside the reader's reality, an improbable but possible real place, there are a lot of different possible readings. it's just a story, or it's a social commentary, or it's an allegory, or it's already literally happening. it's been on the back burner of my brain for a few weeks, and i'm sure it will continue to simmer there.

AND THEN! Kim fucking sharpens and modernizes all the questions and problems and stakes of this story in her own response, which i read partly aloud to myself because it's beautifully punchy in rhythm. she forces Omelas into closer proximity to the real world we know, invoking social media and moral panic. she pokes at and literalises the terms of Omelas' whole deal, identifying multiple classes of "they" and elaborating random catastrophic consequences of killing the imprisoned child. this story is incisively blunt, raising as many moral and intellectual questions as the original but with new angles and more direct body blows to me, personally, as i go about living in a fucked up world.

so...thanks for all that. i want to print both these stories and paper my walls with them.

the deets

how i read them: as an ebook on Libby and on the Clarkesworld website, respectively! the ebook of "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" has a great introduction and also later reflections by Le Guin which i enjoyed almost as much as the story.

try these if you: are into fiction about moral and social tangles, want to be haunted by ideas, or feel a lot of anger.

some bits i really liked: some good fucking food

from "The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas"

They were not less complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

---

from "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole"

Omelas now has a really long Wikipedia entry, with a whole subarticle about the load-bearing suffering child, and a second subarticle about the children who died. They tell you about the children now, after they die. What their names are. They promise that the children are ethically sourced. But there aren’t any citations. And some people say that there isn’t a kid in the hole anymore. They’ve moved the hole a bunch of times, and they don’t let people know the location anymore. They have extra soundproofing.

[ecsundance]

A Different Man: A Journey Into Exploitation

A Different Man, directed by Aaron Schimberg, was the first narrative feature film I was able to watch at Sundance and I was absolutely buzzing after the screening. It tells the story of Edward (Sebastian Stan), a man that has a facial disfigurement yet undergoes an almost miracle-like transformation that ultimately turns his world upside down. It is a film jam packed with so much symbolism, part of me wished the film was already released so that I could look into what other viewers think certain elements mean.

However, one of the most prominent themes I was really taken aback by is the subject of  exploitativeness. I won’t give away any of the details in the film, but there is a character named Oswald (Adam Pearson) who is played by an actual individual with neurofibromatosis. He was actually able to make it to the panel alongside Schimberg and he responded to some of the questions asked by the crowd, which instigated my curiosity on what it means to be exploited and how it unfolds within film. Schimberg brought up the complexity of hiring actors that have some type of disability because Hollywood is notorious for employing them to be seen as some sort of spectacle and nothing else. He explained how difficult it is to find a way to introduce actors with disabilities to Hollywood without making it about their disability or without it being exploitative and how it definitely has to do with the way that society views those who are not able-bodied. It’s really interesting to think about because I feel that at some point the same applied to actors that happened to be queer or of color, they were simply included in films to have diversity points or to be a spectacle for entertainment. However, I feel as though we have slowly but surely moved past that group of minorities when it comes to Hollywood, but we still seem to be stumped when it comes to those with disabilities and I cannot wrap my head around it. The film does a great job at exploring this, especially after Edward goes through the transformative surgery, but I won’t give away anything else. 

I stumbled upon an awesome interview by Variety in which Pearson brings up such an interesting point when it comes to Hollywood hiring actors that are able-bodied to play a character with a disability. The extract says, “...Pearson discussed how he was able to find common ground with Stan, who wears extensive makeup for part of the film in order to achieve a similar look. "This was the hook that we gave to Sebastian,” he said. “‘You don’t know what it’s like to have a disfigurement, but you do know what it’s like to not have privacy and to have your life constantly invaded. You become public property”. Although I would not consider Sebastian Stan to be a household name on a wide scale, he does have an enormous following and Pearson’s argument still stands. An actor might not ever be able to truly understand what it is like to have a disability, or in this case a facial disfigurement, but to be looked at as a spectacle every time they step out into society and be constantly talked about is a way in which they can relate to somebody that might have a disability. It is such an intricate angle to look at the subject matter, but I think Aaron Schimberg did an excellent job at telling this story in a way that was respectful and considerate of his viewers.

References: https://variety.com/2024/film/news/a-different-man-premiere-sebastian-stan-sundance-1235880973/amp/

-Manu Delgado

[denimbex1986]

'Swept along by the societal pressures that forced cinemagoers in their droves to break record box office figures, I too was forced to complete the Barbenheimer challenge. Full disclosure: I did not see them back-to-back as the rules of the challenge dictate. For sanity’s sake, I left a night’s sleep between them.

I’ve never seen cinemas so brutally busy; it was uplifting to see people consuming culture collectively in a rejection of the lonely atomisation of streaming sites. But looking at everyone in their costumes and Barbenheimer t-shirts made me wonder: surely this has to be the first time an internet meme has ever altered real-life behaviour on such a scale?

Before Oppenheimer at the IMAX on Leicester Square, I had time for a quick pint of Harvey’s Sussex Best in The Harp; a resplendent moment of quiet before being blasted with the mighty boom of the H-Bomb climbing into the New Mexican sky.

As might be suspected, Christopher Nolan’s twelfth feature film was seriously impressive and Cillian Murphy carried the contradictions of Julius Robert Oppenheimer resolutely in those shattering blue eyes. Oppenheimer is a licentious boffin, at once timid and arrogant. We see him as a skittish student in the haven of academe, from Harvard to Gottingen via Cambridge, before he graduates into an adulterous commie-adjacent genius. Murphy looks skeletal in a series of beautifully cut woolen three-piece suits with high-waisted, wide slacks that hang off him. His already-protruding cheekbones which jut out from under the Philip Marlowe-style fedora have even less fat around them than normal, making him look as morose as the man who led the Manhattan Project should.

The film’s success rests on a couple of near misses. Thankfully for Nolan, very few people know Robert Oppenheimer’s face. Neither is his antagonist Lewis L. Strauss’s visage wrought deeply into the cultural psyche. As a result, we believe Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jnr in their respective roles. The same cannot be said for Albert Einstein or JFK. It’s a relief that no excruciating cameo was made by JFK although he is clumsily namedropped as a young Massachusetts senator who blocks Lewis Strauss’s appointment as the Secretary of Commerce. Nolan is, however, brave enough to give some lines to Einstein (Tom Conti). Against all reason, it does not completely fall on its face or ruin the illusion of the film. Given that the memory of Einstein has been so sullied that a CGI version of him appeared in a Smart Energy advert recently, there was plenty of potential for it to go wrong.

What does go wrong, however, is the irregular signposting – some things are forced down your throat while others are poorly revealed. One cannot escape the running theme of the limitations of theory. Oppenheimer says, “Theory will take you only so far,” so he goes into the desert to blow things up in practice – riding mares over the planes, swaggering with bravado after cooling tensions between his bickering researchers and having the occasional emotional breakdown under a rock.

What I would have liked forced down my throat instead was the complexities of the Chevalier Incident and why Strauss turned on Oppenheimer so vehemently. These are briskly explicated if not actually assumed as common knowledge. I suppose the irrational paranoia of McCarthyism is, by its nature, murky.

J. Robert Oppenheimer’s most famous quote is reduced to a postcoital “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” in what is the strangest scene in the film. Curiously enough, these words could have come from the golden perfection of Margot Robbie’s Barbie. Things start to go wrong in Barbieland for the world’s favourite doll when she receives the negative energy of her real-world owner. Barbie thinks about her mortality for the first time, her permanently raised heels fall flat and she develops cellulite. Now that she has become death, she goes on a quest to the real world to restore order and in doing so, becomes the destroyer of worlds.

Barbieland – a neon-pastel pleasuredome of ubiquitous girlbossness – morphs into Kendom after Ken becomes so inspired by the LA-tinged patriarchy. Ryan Gosling’s patriarchal montage is, admittedly, very funny. He turns Barbie’s house into his “Mojo Dojo Casa House” replete with pictures of galloping stallions, guns, beer-packed minifridges, guitars, punchbags – you get the drill. After escaping the clutches of the perenially endearing Will Ferrell as the CEO of Mattel, Barbie returns home to find her fellow Barbies under the yoke of a patriarchal spell where they do nothing but dish out brews and foot rubs to the Kens. All is solved by exploiting masculine hubris, pitting the Kens against each other and taking back control. Balance is restored to the plastic Eden but Barbie chooses a life in the real world, despite its dangers and flaws.

“Barbenheimer” grew out of the fact that these films were polar opposites. One severe, the other trivial. One sober, the other intoxicated. One masculine, one feminine. One real, the other fake. By now, there are more hot takes on the deeper import of each film than anyone could care about. Grand schematic conspiracies about how the twain are different sides of the same profound coin of modernity abound on Reddit. But all the combination really shows is how utterly obsessed the world still is with American culture. There is no rival. I can’t see a Chinese or a Saudi Barbie charming the world any time soon. At least culturally, the American century continues full steam ahead.'

[maxchallis]

Week 3 - Penguin Drawing Task

Today we learnt how to use a range of new tools in Illustrator such as how to use layers properly in Illustrator, Connecting shapes with the join command, Flipping shapes, Add / remove anchor points on a shape, Stroke Properties, Filled shapes, Compound Paths, The pathfinder tool, Gradients, Colour swatches, Global colours, Group and Ungroup, The colour tool and shape opacity and Adding points to paths. (List of tools copied from moodle).

We did some more in depth shape drawing by all drawing ourselves a penguin starting drawing the body of the penguin. We here learnt how to add or delete an anchor point and put it into use by adding anchor points on his tail piece to give to a more real look as well as a wee bit of hair sticking out of its head. You can add anchor points by selecting the pen tool and hovering over a already created path and clicking where you want the anchor point.

We then started to give the penguin some features such as a beak, an arm and some eyes. The wing is a good example of a broken point. The part where the beak connects to the face was originally square but this was adjusted by turning the point into a slightly curved point and can be done by dragging the little white circle on the inside of the corner inwards to how curved you want it to be.

When doing the eyes of the penguin we were introduced to the stroke menu where we could adjust the weight of the stroke of the eyes to give it a somewhat cute look with big eyes. We also got introduced to a gradient and how to do one in Illustrator by changing the way the gradient goes and what colours it is to create a real look to the eye. To do so in Illustrator you go to the gradient menu and drag the white line in it in the direction that you want the gradient to look like.

We then went on to start creating the feet for the penguin, this was originally done by drawing half the foot on a path from the apex at the back of the foot to the apex of the middle toe and then reflecting this path which I have written steps on how to do so at the bottom of the screenshot of my notes at the bottom of this post. We then joined them together using the join function by selecting all the end anchor points with direct select and pushing 'Ctrl + J'. Then we duplicated this foot and put two of them on top of each other as shown in the left photo below. We then used the intersect, minus front and unite pathfinder tools in Illustrator to give the foot a 3D sort of look. These pathfinder tools are very useful to create and manipulate complex shapes and were new to me. Finally we used the stroke tool to make the stroke go on the outside of the path instead of on the path to outline the foot without covering up some of the edges.

This is a screenshot of my layer menu as we learnt the many different functions of the layer menu such as converting things between layers and being able to lock certain layers so that they are affected when editing on different layers.

This screenshot below shows my finished penguin constructed out of shapes in Illustrator. We have given the penguin multiple colours by duplicating the body layers and making different cutouts of it, then adjusting the layer opacity and adding a color of my choice to each of these layers to give the penguin a multi-colored look.

Notes - Black drawing in middle explaining how handles work, Below steps to how to use the reflect tool.

This screenshot shows what a bit of my folder looks like in terms of file management and saving versions as you go on to ensure that you do not lose all your work at once as well as the fact that it keeps things neat and tidy and easy to find.

Today was a very useful class, personally especially when learning about the pathfinder tools functions as I had not really used these in the past and they are actually very helpful and interesting to use.