#the only good things ive written are my history essays??

[rayvven]

i kinda want to write a chuuya fic. i have never written anything in my life that wasnt for school and i hated every second of it.

[spookfished]

media roundup jan 2024

hey whats up!!! its me again!!! happy valentines day :3 finally caught up to patch. and by patch i mean "talking about things that i remember reading." finally got around to reading/playing a bunch of things that were really hyped up!! that ive been really looking forward to :3 yippee also, one of my new years resolutions was to play all of umineko? which according to most people ive seen, does in fact take An Entire Year due to being 1. fully voice acted 2. a little over 1 million words. so uh, please look forward to that.

books:

camp damascus by chuck tingle: horror ya. a girl on the cusp of adulthood belongs to a strict and isolated christian sect, living in the town with the us' most famous conversion camp. things get weird quickly.um ok i was really hyped about this! its the first chuck tingle thing that ive actually read (lol) but ive been following his stuff for a while. its an interesting look into what its like to be uh, really christian and also (SPOILERS) gay, but the whole time i was like man i wish i was playing [we know the devil]. which is a really good game please play wktd :3 there were some really cool and chilling body horror parts!! which i liked a lot!! but overall it was more inspiring (?) than scary, which wasnt really what i was looking for personally

the way spring arrives and other stories: translated chinese scifi/fantasy anthology, written and translated by a team of women + nb writers. really solid!!! took me a while to get through, but theres such a wonderful variety of stories here--some are creepy, some are heartwarming, some are silly, some are elegant. i particularly enjoyed some of the essays about translation itself, as well as the titular stories and A Brief History of Beinakan Disasters as Told in a Sinitic Language. definitely check it out!!

spark joy by marie kondo: an appendix of sorts to marie kondos super big book the life changing magic of tidying up, with a couple more practical tips and some anecdotes. ok to get kinda personal, konmari stuff appeals to me bc i grew up surrounded by detritus. from where i sit in my childhood bedroom, i can see a stack of floppy disks, old checkbooks, and a copy of The Lost Treasures of Infocom--a game from 1991. almost none of it is ever touched. so the idea of having a space full of only joyful things is really appealing.. honestly i think the best bit of advice from the book was that if you have things that are necessary but dont necessarily elicit joy (eg screwdrivers, coffee makers, whatever) that you try and take a bit to appreciate/praise those items and what they do for you? and they may become more beloved :3 anyways probably not worth reading unless youre already into the whole konmari thing

ninefox gambit by yoon ha lee: space opera. kel cheris, a freshly promoted general, has been sent to suppress a rebellion lodged in a fortress. but her greatest enemy is also her greatest asset: the implanted consciousness of the prodigy traitor-general, shuos jedao. famous for winning impossible battles--and infamous for killing his entire fleet. its kind of in a trio of "lesbian sff about empires and stuff" with machineries of empire and traitor baru cormorant. well for one i really liked it. i do have a lot of hours in um games like civ 5 and starcraft but i usually dont like Reading books about military stuff. this is obstacle number 1. obstacle number 2 is that ninefox gambit has some really intricate worldbuilding, and unlike some other lesbian bodysharing scifi novels out there, our protagonist is not a newcomer. you dont get the assist of getting to learn about the world as the same time as her. but the thing is that ninefox gambit makes you Want to pick apart everything thats going on and get into it, and once you have a good idea of all the factions and stereotypes and tensions, etc it feels really rewarding :3 and the world is grounded in how you get to see what feels like every single level of this one infiltration/siege, from the general at the top to the infantry at the bottom even to the servant robots who clean! yay robots :3 when youre jumping to someone completely different, doing something totally unrelated, its pretty easy for that to be… super jarring? (hi sanderson) but it was not that <3 although it took a bit for me to get it, i also liked the intermittent correspondence that we get to see from the enemy side as well. how humanizing! it also balances a large cast of characters very well. characters with bit parts still feel memorable to the extent they need to be? idk how to say that correctly. obviously between cheris and jedao, jedao has the upper hand conversationally pretty much always but they have a good dynamic and its cool to see her strengths come through in other ways i think one of its strengths/weaknesses is that its very focused on this One siege in One point in time. i would love to hear about the anden in the sequels for example. also like does everyone have to be in a section or are there real (non conquered) civilians. how do yall grow food. also yeah sorry democracy beign the ultimate heresy made me laugh ninefox gambit is kind of a tricky read; its probably not a good idea to try reading without a stretch of uninterrupted time + brain energy but i liked it 👍 i thought it was good 👍

raven strategem by yoon ha lee: sequel to ninefox gambit! yoon ha lees ability to balance lots of different povs works really well for this book :3 it really ratchets up the tension! i also really liked seeing all of the exotics lol (magic wepaons that do crazy stuff). unfortunately the tension didnt pay off in a way that was really satisfying to me personally, however.. it didnt really help that i didnt like one of the main pov characters (brezan.) the first book is still worth reading though as a standalone!

comics/manga:

mitsuya sensei no keikakuteiki na edzuke: m/m series about a cooking writer (older man) and his editor. ok i talked about this last time but im a big fan of romance with older people in it. the baggage comes preattached!! also the protag in this kinda looks really similar to shinji from kamen rider ryuki?? has some Extremely Delicious looking food art, as well as some really nice like. food + desire + eroticism type thing going on. (i started reading it bc tumblr user stella obstinaterixatrix was talking about it as an example of non explicit eroticism!) yay i love food manga :]

sonna me de mitekure: aka look at me with those eyes. m/m romcom that parodies a lot of common BL tropes (overbearing prince of the school falls in love with some rando!) but also has a lot of heart :3 definitely only worth reading if youre like. already sort of in the soup of romance manga though lol

ouji-chan no sukina hito: suuuper cute f/f oneshot about baby prince idolization

catch you catch me: another cute f/f oneshot :3

botticelli drawings exhibit: ok i just thought this was neat. it was an exhibit about some of the preliminary sketches that were made for some of botticellis famous pieces (he was a famous painter during the florentine renaissance in italy) i like how you got to learn more about how the Workshop Style worked like how a lot of paintings were actually made by lots and lots of apprentices.. also how botticelli apparently got really into this one super duper intense monk type guy and started making some kinda weird shit

movies/tv shows:

pokemon concierge: lighthearted family show about a stressed office lady who quits her job to work at a pokemon hotel. super cute!! very short!! you can watch it with your parents or kids or whatever its really not that deep but the stop motion was just soooo cute. slightly concerning in like idk the level of 'escapism from office culture' but you know how it is

dear ex: slice of life/drama? taiwanese movie. after his father's sudden death, song chengxi and his mother meet his fathers hidden male lover. dudee this movie is so fucking pretty and so sad. i almost cried and blew up and died. all 3 main parts of the cast are such good actors and the way it does grief and like the seamless sliding between memory and the present AUGH. so good

sousou no frieren anime: also known as frieren of the funerals! a slice of life/fantasy anime about what happens after you save the world. frieren is a long-lived elf who saved the world with her companions--but many decades afterwards, she still wanders the world the same as ever. bro this show is so freaking gorgeous and well made. it really makes me wish going outside was real. has a really nice sense of melancholy too.. its just a really solid adaptation :3

dungeon meshi/delicious in dungeon anime: cooking/slice of life/adventure anime set in a dnd-like setting that digs into a lot of fantasy worldbuilding. mainly about: can you eat the monsters!!!! i finished the manga a couple months ago so i was really hyped (and a little bit nervous) about this anime but studio trigger is doing a really good job!! its just a really good show ok please watch it

marry my dead body: straight police guy gets ghost-married to a dead man, and then is tasked with solving his murder. um ok so i watched this bc i misread neils text and thought it was by the same director as dear ex. spoilers this is very much not true lmfao its more lighthearted with a side of feelings about death and stuff. very silly! i think the gulf of expectation was so wide that i couldnt enjoy it that much.. also cops. why. some of the jokes didnt really hit for me esp the whole like ahhhh slag straight guy doesnt understand anything type thing? but its like not a bad light movie

percy jackson and the olympians: remake of the first percy jackson book. yeah this was fine i watched it with my mom while playing solitaire the whole time. the actors are very charming and the show is solid, but i think it really deserved to be like. a 20-episode series with 20 minute episodes, or something like that. like its oestensibly for kids but its Really trying to make that nostalgia cash grab so it exists in a slightly uncomfortable middle (writing is very basic and friendship-y which isnt necessarily bad but its not like That Deep, but also who is making a kids show 40 MINUTES LONG). anyways i think a longer pacing like that would have given more time for filler and replicating the road-trippy vibe that the original books had. its still solid though!

games:

umineko episode 1: its the classic murder mystery setup: a wealthy man on his deathbed still hasnt resolved the issue of his inheritance. he, his hateful children, and their own children are cut off from the world on a remote island. but the man still has unsettled debts….and something is deeply wrong on the island of rokkenjima 🤯ok umineko is infamous for 1. having fans who wont shut up about it 2. something something metatextual? 3. a very high bar for entry, featuring near-required modding, several hours of expository setup, and the fact that. well. its a visual novel. that aside, i enjoyed the first episode way more than i thought i would :3 the uroshimiya family is so rich and alive and shitty it felt like i was watching succession again lmfao. battler is a very endearing (if slightly stupid) main character, and there are some really strong characters laid down that make you excited to get into All That in the future. plus, once i got to the murder part it was genuinely so hair-raising? theres some phenomenal voice acting.. the scene with maria was so memorable i thought i was going to dream about it. also i loooove beatrice <3 anyways i would recommend but its not for the faint of heart. 99% of umineko-ers stop reading right before the love lets them see it, and so on.

off game: wow im so happy to have finally beat off. i mean. hey whats up. off is a weird, abstract game about a 4th-wall breaking "Batter" whos self proclaimed goal is to purify the world. its often viewed as a spiritual predecessor to games like undertale :3 …actually, i played off a long time ago and then got stuck/intimidated by the very last set of puzzles so i Just Now gave up on actually finishing and just watched a letsplay lol. honestly one thing that ive figured out over time is that actually?? im really not that much of a fan of pokemon-style rpgs like this 0_0 i mean, the gameplay is just. not that fun? and the typical random encounter type thing is just not that nice. i think this is something that a lot of jrpgs/rpgs have figured out recently, but off is an older game without those QOL improvements lol. (also random encounter is easier to code probably) anyways!! the writing in off is so compelling…its so weird in a way that invites you to pick apart that weirdness, but also makes you feel like some mysteries might remain unresolved forever. its a video game that actually Has Writing In It. its one of those (free!) indie classics thats definitely worth checking out. also i love drawing the judge and valerie. weird cats for the win ok now im just going to talk about my theories about the game. so we know that the only real humans in the world are sugar, zacharie and the baby. however, the queen and the batter are parental figures for the baby. the wardens of each of the levels were created for the baby as it (in the absence of its parents?) longed for companionship, but they warped over time. whats healthy becomes sick and whats sickening becomes necessary etc. possibly mimicking how the baby, sick and alone in the hospital, also warped over time? becoming warped caricaturizes the babys creations and makes them cruel and so the batter becomes the ultimate heroic figure, who purges whats evil and rotten. but if it lives where i live then i guess the whole world has to go?? well idk

music:

take my hand by zerobaseone: ok whenever i listen to this imlike this is one of gods perfect songs. the production is like chefs kiss and theres just some really beautiful sounds in here? its so warmly dreamy and delicate feeling.. just like first loves… or whatever lmfao the fluttering hook-y thing at the beginning is just too good i ended up looking up a bunch of the producers. also big pop is nice bc you can tell they mixed it so it sounds good in a car OR in headphones lmfao

1,000,000 by nine inch nails: i forgot what genre nin is supposed to be ok this song came up when i was playing hifi rush (rhythm based action game!! so cool so stylish) and me and neil were like NINE INCH NAILS?! it was like that one comic you know. anyways i like this song its very adrenaline feeling. i looked up the real lyrics recently but to ME its about trying to escape emptiness thru adrenaline and danger and sex and stuff :P not that i do that but its still a fun song!! yippee

dark red by steve lacy: ok i found this song bc of a tumblr post i did not know he was the "i wish i knew" guy lmfao. honestly if people only knew like a 5 second songbite from my works id be so mad. but anyways its progressive rnb apparently? i just like this song :3 when you are kind of pathetic but basically chill with it but what if.

anyways if youre reading this: hi!!! ive been spending a lot of time recently doing the hard fisher quests in final fantasy 14. guys never do beast of brewers beacon ok the school year is just starting up but having to wake up early is kind of doing a number on me…… other than that i actually totally have my shit together! yay :3 if you read to the end (or even skimmed) thanks <3

[compacflt]

pre-publishing notes for slider (actually i meant to poast this yesterday i just forgor 💀), just to put them out there

as per usual i peddle an extreme amount of mis- and straight up disinformation about the aerospace & defense industries in this one. as a general rule of thumb if it sounds like i researched it poorly and/or made it up, that’s because i researched it poorly and/or made it up. like every scene i was like ‘that wouldn’t happen :D’ and wrote it anyway

this one-shot renders my third one-shot (about ice & hangman) entirely obsolete, as if the rooster one-shot didn’t already do that. so just ignore the hangman one. (i only wrote that one cause i felt bad about tagging my fics hangster when they’re barely in it.) Also, this one-shot kind of directly contradicts the end scene of “debriefing” in pretty much every way. i don’t really care, because this is a much stronger ending, but just throwing that out there—this one-shot doesn’t really jive with my other writing for plot/character arc reasons & im too lazy/sick and tired of my other writing to go back and retcon any of it

i only research things i am mandated to by school/a job/journalistic code of ethics, or that i think are interesting, or that i know will not depress me. divorce depresses me so i did not research divorce. Also im pretty sure marriage doesn’t work the way i described it “sign the papers & that’s it” but idgaf . shrug. im having fun

something i Didn’t make up, though: the thesis that iraq/afghanistan went so poorly in the long term partly because our armed services & especially that generation of commanding officers were prepared for total warfare with a near-peer (like the ussr) instead of counterinsurgency tactics against mountain-based guerrilla warfare-stratted forces (like Al-q*eda etc). that’s a very real thesis that ive read in multiple mil history books (“the generals,” ricks; “mil history for the modern strategist,” ohanlon) & co-opted because it’s kind of, in a fucked up way, a good metaphor for ice’s whole deal—he’d been expecting a traditional officer’s life with a woman etc (aka traditional warfare against the ussr, the us’ sworn enemy) and instead found happiness in the weirdest of places, another dude (aka guerrilla warfare) and no one taught him the right strategy for dealing with that; so, pigheadedly, like some US commands in the Middle East for a decade, he just dug in his heels & refused to budge/change his "total traditional war/heteronormative"-based strategy even if it obviously wasn’t working.

In a similar vein just so i can beat the allegations that im strategically dumb, the “strategies” against the ussr the boys are playing with in the usna section are intentionally the most dogshit strategies on earth. do not invade russia in a land war. especially not when nukes are on the table. the point is they’re ALL bad at strategy (strat as a metaphor for interpersonal communication).

i get the words “moderate” and “modulate” confused a lot. there’s a couple times in this one when I use moderate and mean modulate. Now it’s too late to edit it. by which i mean i am too lazy. editing anything on ao3 is a Sisyphean task. not worth it.

there's a lot to be said about my ice & maverick's respectability, which is to say, as slider points out, their life together is incredibly normie and boring and regular, except that they're two guys. like there's nothing super subversive going on here. "in the grand scheme of things is this really so bad?" is the question. politically this is a little funky. for metatextual character-arc reasons ice has to agree to an official marriage to prove that by the end he's not afraid to legally legitimize their relationship, but the heteroflexible/straight-passing/socially conservative ice & mav that I have written also probably aren't the kind of guys to acknowledge the struggle & strife & subversiveness of the queer community before them that fought for them to have that right. to quote from an essay by Lauren berlant & Michael Warner ("Sex in public"): "Respectable gays [ice & mav, distancing themselves from other gays] like to think that they owe nothing to the sexual subculture they think of as sleazy. But their success, their way of living, their political rights, and their very identities would never have been possible but for the existence of the public [visibly queer] sexual culture they now despise." just throwing that out there as something that is weighing on my mind having now finished writing this. I think that issue (ice & mav's relationship with/debt to the lgbt community) could be explored with a character like rooster, who might be much more a part of that struggle (especially pre-dadt-repeal)...but idk where or how I would write about it. just something to chew on. I keep finding different ways to politically interpret what I myself have already written which then keeps leading to more fucking one-shots. This slider one for instance was a reinterpretation from the 1980s Cold War politics lens of nuclear doomsday & how that affected a generation of men making shitty/suicidal decisions about their lives. an endless cycle for me. "just one more interpretation...i swear just one more..."

[self-loving-vampire]

While I strongly recommend that those who have an interest in the history of games (with my own focus being RPGs in particular) try to play older games for at least long enough to understand them, I realize that not everyone has the motivation to do this, especially if there’s any kind of technical or financial obstacle in the way.

So in this post I will recommend one of the next best things: Reading about this history. Here are some books that might be of interest.

1- The CRPG Book: A Guide to Computer Role-Playing Games - Expanded Edition

This is one of my top recommendations, starting with the fact that the whole thing is freely available online and extremely complete. It was written with contributions from a variety of veterans and serves primarily as a collection of mini reviews of various RPGs throughout history, starting with the very start of the genre in things like tabletop wargaming.

This book helped me discover several games that I ended up loving and recommending to my friends, and it does a pretty good job of explaining what makes each of the games filling its 681 pages unique, interesting, or historically significant.

It is also divided by time period and includes small sections on:

The history of MMOs.

The history of RPGMaker games.

Notable games from outside the standard English and Japanese canon, such as French, Chinese, and Korean RPGs with a few other notable mentions from around the world.

Its “further reading” section also brings up not only several of the recommendations below but also many more that I have had less exposure to.

2- Video Games Around the World

I have admittedly not been able to access this one myself yet, but it is described as “Thirty-nine essays explore the vast diversity of video game history and culture across all the world's continents.“

These essays are, of course, written by game designers and other such figures from a diverse array of countries. They should provide insight on how video games are seen and made in a variety of cultural contexts.

In a similar vein...

3- Video Games and the Global South

This freely-available book brings attention to gaming culture (and related subcultures) in various parts of the world that are under-represented in most examinations of video games.

This includes essay on everything from mods to include the indigenous people of Oceania to Europa Universalis IV to Latin American communities in popular MMOs and how their experience of these games might differ from those of anglophones.

It even offers a bit of an academic look into those lonely guys who go on MMOs to try to “buy gf”:

And it also roasts MOBAs and their notorious toxicity.

The language may be very dry and academic but the topics are often fun or at least interesting.

4- A Guide to Japanese Role-Playing Games

The JRPG version of The CRPG Book, focusing on the massive collection of RPGs produced in Japan. It seems to feature a similarly impressive catalogue that includes not only the big names like Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Chrono Trigger but also many smaller yet still significant games.

Unfortunately, it is a very difficult book to find right now so I can’t comment on it in more detail.

5- Dungeons & Desktops: The History of Computer Role-Playing Games

A historical exploration of RPGs divided into several eras defined by particularly popular and influential games, like Ultima and Wizardry.

While it covers many of the same games as the CRPG book, it goes into a bit more detail about the history involved and the stuff going on behind the scenes as well as giving more focus to the state of the industry when these games were coming out.

6- Computer Gaming World Museum

A free collection of all issues of the Computer Gaming World magazine, which ran from 1981 to 2006. 

It offers a priceless view into how people discussed several video games back when they were current or had yet to be released. 

Just for fun, you could try to look at the covers from your year of birth (if possible) and take note of what was considered a hot or significant game at that time.

Here’s how it looks for 1993.

7- Old game manuals

Reading the manuals for older games is an exciting way to learn about them. Really, it is. Back in the day, manuals did much more than explaining how the game is played, they went into a good deal of depth about the settings they took place in and included several interesting things.

For example, the Fallout 1 manual is styled as a “Vault Dweller’s Survival Guide” and includes things like a scientific explanation of the effects of a nuclear blast and a couple of “survival recipes”.

The documentations for several of the Ultima games include such things as a history of the world, bestiaries, maps of the world, runic alphabets, and even spellbooks explaining the setting’s magic system, with lists of magical reagents and words of power that can be combined into spells.

The massive manual for Darklands includes a history lesson on the Holy Roman Empire, what life was like there, the politics involved, a list of medieval saints, the basics of medieval alchemy, and even things like medieval timekeeping systems:

Many such manuals are can be easily found at ReplacementDocs. If you find an interesting game in any of the resources above, it might be worth giving the manual a look even if you don’t really plan to play it.

[sheepisreading]

Books I finished in Febuary 2023

The first three I grabbed at the same time at the boostore because I was bored and needed cheering up!

Naked, David Sedaris, 1997

This is an essay collection! I’d previously read Calypso by the same author and loved it. It’s a fun read, not hard to read or get into and doesn’t require too much concentration to read while still being very entertaining. I chose it as my next book for that reason, because I’ve been pretty fucking stressed recently and thought I could read it without spiralling. It worked! I loved it, it was funny and earnest, recounting amusing anecdotes and real learning moments. I love these kinds of essay collections heartfelt but self aware and comedic.

(Also, because I’ll probably never review it since I read it like six years ago: in the same vein I can only recommend Watsky’s essay collection “How to ruin everything”, probably even more than Naked! It’s I think less emotional or about emotions but I honestly loved it, it made me very happy, Watsky is awesome.)

Assembly, Natasha Brown, 2020

Fully picked this one up in the bookshop because the cover is pretty but after reading the blurb I immediately bought it. It’s fiction but clearly inspired by the authors life. The main character muses on her life so far and the decisions she’s made. It says clearly some shit that’s obvious but for some reason still an issue! The author clearly writes about the differences in class and upbringing between rich old money white people (her colleages) and hardworking new money black people (her). It’s about stuff we take for granted and casual racism. Very good ! It packs a punch in only a hundred pages.

Bluets, Maggie Nelson, 2009

Maggie Nelson writes “propositions” meaning short prose-poetry rambling-things about blue. I’m very into blue and gave a school presentation two years ago on the history of blue in art inspired by the vsauce video about it (which is amazing by the way, I rewatch it often), so I’ve been wanting to read it for a while. It’s good! Maggie Nelson writes beautifully about artists who have used the colour in the past (which is good inspiration) and her own relationship with blue, as well as with two people she cares about at the moment of writing. Her writing is absolutely beautiful! There is a lot of mention of romantic and physical longing which I cannot relate to, but that’s an issue I run into often and her way of discussing it remains interesting. It’s a beautiful book and its atmosphere stays with you.

The Nice House on the Lake vol. 1, James Tynion IV, 2021

Okay apparently the author is well known but I’ve never heard of him as I don’t really read comics and read like one graphic novel a year. As I understand it what I read (volume 1) spans the first six issues of the comic (out of 12). I grabbed it while browsing and loved the colours and was intrigued by the premise (having watched and thoroughly enjoyed Glass Onion not long before, I kinda thought it was a hardcore version of that, turns out: way more sci-fi shit in Nice House). I got home after my first day of internship, spent an hour doing jack shit and then picked this book up and read the whole thing straight. It’s amazing, there are fleshed out characters (some of them are queer yay), suspense, tension, emotion, it’s just really good! I will warn for like apocalypse, discussions of suicide and body horror though if that’s a thing you can’t go near! But if you can and are into weird sci-fi horror I recommend it! (I actually kind of like Walter I have to say, he just loves his friends !)

Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse, 1927

!!! My mum is a big Hermann Hesse fan and always advocated for me reading one of his books. I happened upon this one at the used book market and immediately bought it because I noticed someone had anotated parts of it which. Yeah. Anyways, a bit of a slow start with the introduction written from an outside perspective from the narrator of the remainder of the book but absolutely hang in there! It's absolutely amazing; reflections on selfhood and the way we choose to live or not live our lives, connections with others, finding joy and excitement. It really did exceed my expectations. I thought there would be too much romance talk for my taste but it's so beautifully written that it's not an issue at all. It left a mark on me, that's for sure, it's a really powerful book.

[souryogurt64]

i’m rlly curious abt any paid writing jobs u have. how did u get into it?? i’m looking to maybe sell some of the stuff i’ve written (mostly essay type shit abt feminism and media) and i’m wondering if u have any tips

ok to be brutally honest i do not think the vast majority of people are able to do that ever but heres an extremely detailed list of every decent job ive had and how i got each one and some pros/cons as well as advice because we love transparency and real peer to peer advice

i graduated in 2021 and went to a small liberal arts college and majored in english and communications. i have adhd/neurodivergency and do not want to wake up before 11 or wear real clothes or leave my house everyday so this is what i do instead

past

writing center consultant, 4yrs, few hours a week- autoselected via gpa and college admission essay, helped students write papers. this was fine and gave me a bit of spending money

seo blogger article writing, few projects a month, few months- a coworkers friend started a small business. after that random people started occasionally hitting me up to write articles. this is the kind of thing youre probably thinking about but this writing is very soul sucking with things like keyword density and writing just to rank on google etc and is also poorly paid. it kinda sucked and i did this when i was between jobs or needed $ in college but didnt want a service job because of focusing on studies/transit off campus being difficult

editor, 1.5 years, occasional projects- i got special permission to take an upper-level history class to fulfill a gen ed credit. truthfully because i didnt want to take the intro classes that were only offered at 9am. the prof was impressed with this and my writing ability and asked me to help her edit her books/academia she was translating into english. i fucking loved doing this, it was amazing and felt so cool and i learned so much about another culture during a specific time period; other people i told about the job however thought it sounded terrible and dry. 

non-jobs

i volunteered at a small local animal sanctuary on and off for 5 years in high school/college starting when i was 15. this gave me a solid reference forever and i think is why i got approved to foster cats which i love doing and is a way to kind of volunteer a tiny bit with an extremely irregular schedule

i also volunteered tutoring refugees in english for a few months in college and i really loved this and it was really rewarding and sounds impressive even though it was really just talking with someone and trying to read together for an hour a week. i loved doing this so much it made me cry happy tears a lot lol. i got this because my consultant job had a partnership with a local org and we were all expected to do it but i stayed on until i moved to chicago because i enjoyed it 

i took an unpaid remote internship at a small local arts magazine the summer of covid. i cold emailed them but i also had professors that knew people and put in a good word because iowa is small. this wasnt anything impressive but was one of those little local free magazines you sometimes see in those plastic things on street corners or in grocery stores. it was honestly terrible, they initially told me no but i think with staff layoffs after covid they were looking for free help. i pretty much was copy and pasting hundreds of phone numbers and email addresses of businesses from facebook into an excel spreadsheet for hours a day and received zero mentorship and learned nothing. i dont blame them as covid hit stuff like that really hard and they had bigger things to do. i did it because the circumstances made it hard to find something better and i needed the credit to graduate and it does look somewhat good on a resume even though i did jack shit

i run a music zine with my friend for fun, and was a dj on college radio where i aired the interviews too. the dj thing was an absolute joke compared to most college radio programs. i feel like i learned a lot about working with people via the zine as weve worked with almost 200 bands. its given me a lot of confidence and people skills, and its given me a bit of insight into the industry side of the music business. i also forged connections with cool people including someone that manages a real celebrity i can put down as a reference. its a talking point in interviews because it requires major responsibility and organizational skills. this is also the kind of place you can post your feminism and media writing

current jobs

brewery hostess- the service industry can be extremely well paid for a side gig when youre young but you can get sucked into it and run into issues down the line like no insurance, cash addiction, sexual harassment, sudden layoffs, and it being hard on your body. i love this job because it makes ends more than meet, pays well, i get free food and beer which helps cut down on grocery bill and cooking stress. my coworkers and manager are all amazing and there are never early hours and the job is zero stress. i would be struggling to pay my own bills without it. it also gets me social interaction with people my own age. 

i worked in an italian restaurant before this where i cried a lot and got sexually harassed every day and didnt even get food but i honestly liked that one too. i was a cashier for 5 years and it was awful and i stayed bc i thought every entry level job was like that. anyone who is a cashier probably should consider quitting and doing food service because the money/job itself is astronomically better. i got the italian restaurant job via a friend but this one absolutely rules and i got it by emailing every restaurant within a half mile of my apartment

marketing/booking-- i was supposed to move to one city and then living plans fell through and i had to move back in with my parents. someone my dad went to school with needed someone to work the till at their family business and do stuff like post on ig and make copies. ive been there for a year and when i moved to chicago they let me go remote for like 10 flexible hours a week. my responsibilities expanded to booking all their live music (super fun and cool) but the cons to working for a family business are pretty well known

music reviewing (another one youre probably looking for) - this is only like 10-15 remote flexible hours a month and i applied on indeed with the zine as experience. its definitely poorly paid and can be mind numbing but im doing it to learn about the industry and gain experience and its kinda fun tbh. this is for a click farming type blog and the reviews i do can feel formulaic and hollow and i kind of have to say good things about everything. i do actually like most of the songs i hear at least somewhat because theres quality control and tell the truth in my reviews but since i think the goal of the publication is to mass produce content and meet monthly minimums everyone just kind of says milquetoast positive things. im also still finding my footing in that 

social media management freelance- someone on craigslist was looking for someone to manage his bands instagram page and some other stuff for a few remote flexible hours a week. this is probably overpaid for what i do and its really convenient and easy to manage but having to post on social media constantly for 3 different jobs/pages has definitely made me want to drill a hole in my head even though its pretty basic and the person i work for is great

personal assistant to an author- i just got this job this morning!!!! i found it on craigslist so well see how it goes!! its 15 hours a week remote flexible for someone who seems lovely. i wanted to be an author really bad as a kid so im excited to learn about that industry

what i wish i knew

i wish i had minored in graphic design or at least taken a few classes. i am considering taking online classes at a community college to strengthen my skillset, i feel this would be extremely valuable for what i actually do in real life

i did get kind of scammed on craigslist with a dogwalking job when i was between jobs due to covid and in an utter panic. these jobs and other jobs like instacart/doordash definitely prey on desperate people who dont really pay attention to their paychecks and how little theyre actually getting paid for the hours and minus what they spend on gas/parking/vehicle wear and tear/etc. these jobs should be illegal and dont do them

you can find really good opportunities on craigslist if you are smart and patient, though, and use caution and be safe and trust your gut. its so much less competitive than indeed and linkedin its almost unbelievable and you can feel super lucky. the people are also a lot more understanding and willing to work with you because its not like they have 500 applicants for a position thats only been up for a few hours like on linkedin. these opportunities are never corporate which i like

i spent so much time in college trying temp agencies and applying to corporate jobs i didnt actually want that were on linkedin and i was competing with hundreds of other applicants. i got pretty much nothing to show for it and the hundreds of applications were all going into a void. i got much further by just following what i enjoyed and working connections. i think if i did get some of the jobs i applied to i would be absolutely crushed and have a much poorer quality of life

pros and cons of my hashtag lifestyle

i can wake up/go to bed basically whenever i want and never have to put on clothes and work from bed if i want to. i dont need to follow a dress code and i hardly ever leave my house except for the brewery and the kitties and i dont need to own a car (living in the city helps that).

my income can be unstable and fluctuate so i just make sure i live below my means and have savings and view the extra money as a treat/for savings-- which isnt feasible for everyone depending on life circumstances. it can be nice because i know i can leave any job and its not like im suddenly totally fucked without income/reference if something happens. 

my taxes are a nightmare but my dad helps me

a con is i work at least a little bit pretty much every day and sometimes have to work late unless i plan for it. i could easily avoid this with better time management, planning and focusing skills though. i also dont ever work 8-hour stretches, i usually work on and off all day every day which i know would kill some people. but thats kind of my own fault. i think i am going to have to build those skills more with the new job.

a con is i have pretty much no routine whatsoever, i could build one but with the days i work at the brewery changing each week i find that more difficult

a pro is its easy to schedule appointments or visit my parents without having to take time off but a con is that its hard to date/have a social life/go to a concert since my life is kind of irregular and i often work weekend nights and its also hard for me to remember other people have set work hours/bedtimes/holidays lol

a pro is that no one micromanages me and i can use headphones and work when i feel like it and wear what i want and take breaks without anyone questioning it but a con is that i have to actually manage myself

im happy to share information about budgeting or anything too im kind of an open book 

[thewebcomicsreview]

ive been a fan of yours since the very beginning of shittywebcomics. back when it was good and uh... not the echo chamber it became. what caused the rest of the crew to ape out and go insane? was it all the trying to impress cloutful edgy artists? ive been genuinely curious about this for years. if this is a touchy subject you can reply in dm.

So, for as much as I sometimes play up my history with SWC as part of my Dark Mysterious Tragic Problematic Fave Backstory, I was only associated with them for like six weeks; I never knew any of them personally, and I'm not really equipped to pyscho-analyze them.

And yet, the answer is also super simple and probably unsatisfying: There were three mods at SWC. Cool Mod made his own comics and tended to make personal attacks at the creators of other comics. I was "Essay Mod" or "Nice Mod" because I wrote long essays and tried to be a bit more fair. The third guy, Mod 1, didn't make comics or think about comics or know anything about comics, he was just a right-wing asshole who owned the blog and what actually changed with SWC is just that Mod 1 started posting more. I made TWR and reblogged it to SWC a few times to try and poach readership and spin off because even back then it was obvious that I shouldn't be hanging out with them, and then Mod 1 posted about killing all Muslims and I called him a racist and that was the end of me being there, and then when I was gone that was like 90% of the worthwhile content gone because Cool Mod barely posted (and, frankly, I'm a better writer than he was), and Mod 1 was a neo-nazi dipshit who only posted lukewarm /pol/ takes. I realize it sounds self-aggrandizing to say SWC was nothing without me and quickly failed, but that reflects less on how good I am and more on how boring and smoothbrain Mod 1 was. Every good thing that every appeared on SWC was written by me in a six-week period when I was unemployed and had nothing better to do.

[yeo-rims]

thanks!!! @melonatures for tagging me in 5 books i want to read this year, omg that’s hard

1. jonathan strange & mr norrell, basically piranesi was the most! amazing thing I've read last year, it made me think about my own loneliness, it helped me get thru a very difficult moment and i was so charmed by clarke’s writing i convinced myself to read her first novel, which is about wizards??? idk. i’m not much of a fantasy gal, but the pandemic made me read hp so anything can happen at this point. also, the book is almost 1k pages so it would be good if i did this before my semester at uni starts and my last year eats me alive or something.

2. the city we became, so i’m trying to be someone who reads more than just adults being sad (which is my go-to genre in everything tbh), and i bought this book last year after everyone said it was amazing. it’s urban fantasy??? there’s a character that is Paulo (São Paulo!! amazing) and idk it sounds fun and just different. Apparently, the cities are alive and they’re people and shit happens? Well. I’ll know once i read it.

3. ghosts, i can't possibly go thru my sally rooney era and not read about a sad 30yo woman dealing with her breakup, right? idk, it just feels like the type of book that is pretty much about nothing but sad white girl, which is honestly something i like to read when i want to think about my life and feel a bit better about >myself< lol. (the only reason i haven't read it so far is that i can't find a legal copy of it on scribd, and the kindle version is way too expensive and there’s a pt-pt kindle version but also... reading in pt-pt is weird).

4. before the coffee gets cold, it’s about sad people but they’re japanese and there’s a time-traveling element to it and it has like jdrama healing vibes, you know? i have it on scribd and i look at it every other day but the truth is i never know what i’m going to read. but this one i have friends that enjoyed and i should read any other japanese author that isn't murakami (nothing against him is just that ive only read his books so far lmao).

5. babel, it’s from poppy war’s author (a book i wont ever read but everyone loves) and it’s like dark academia but with diversity but it feels like it actually has something to say and i’m very intrigued by the plot. i’ll probably buy the eng. version once the book is out, and i’m very excited to read it. i confess i dont like the dark academia aesthetics (i dont like the concept of devoting ones life to an aesthetic, especially an elitist one... and also how like it seems those people failed to *get* what the secret history is all about) but ive read if we were villains past november and it wrecked me and i’m a sucker for stories about a group of deranged friends and crimes. and in this case it feels like the author has a lot to say, so, excited!

also cheating but i should read anything by a brazilian author just bc i dont think ive read anything written prior to 2000s last year and I love br literature, so i must read something. probably guimarães rosa. and i need to finish this book im reading about gays in the xix century. and i want to read more essays too, i’m reading some didion this week and i like it a lot. other than that i know i’ll be reading a lot of psychology-related stuff so in my free time i tend to read for fun, so fiction and poetry is what i love the most.

well, i talk too much but this was fun!! thank you <3i’m tagging: @rughydrangea @rain-hat @damn-salvatore @tinytrashqueen

[notedchampagne]

let it be known that if you ever were or are a fan of gravity falls / otgw / svtfoe / the owl house / infinity train / and ill even say it here homestuck please please please watch kipo and the age of wonderbeasts i just bingewatched all of it and its absolutely AMAZING and heres my bullet point essay why

1) the CHARACTERS are PHENOMENALLY written trust me when i say ive consumed a lot of content and right from the start the show already established such strong and striking personalities between all of the characters in giving them strengths, weaknesses, moments of vulnerability and everything in between. the reason why i placed homestuck as one of the links above bc it harbors the exact same energy that gets you to love the characters sm in how they not only have history and jokes that they frequently reference to, but also how they seem so human with their range of mundane and silly hobbies and tastes not to mention that every and i mean?? every?? holy shit every human character introduced so far is a poc ive never been that happy in my entire life

2) the music here absolutely SLAPS every episode has a moment where the music rises and youre going to gasp because the animation is so in tune with the beats and it all flows so well (idk a lot of music terminology lmao) but yes its absolutely wonderful and definitely worthwhile just to listen to the soundtrack

3) the art style is so unique and gorgeous im loving the lines and angles and how they fit in so well with the detailed backgrounds i gasped so many times and the colors!!! the colors are bright yet harmonious and the character designs are breathtaking the animals look fantastic and by that i mean like you know those furry designs where the boys are all animals and the girls are humans with animal ears? yeah this show does the opposite of that its really amazing and absolutely beautiful

4) i already touched on like all of the main characters being poc but also one of them is gay and HAS said so in the show, in the big air, and his coming out scene was handled amazingly and its not just a passing thing btw like theres a scene where hes visibly attracted to the guy and its so so good it makes me really happy to see rep like that

5) the worldbuilding and premise is FANTASTIC i adore all of the different animal groups and their motifs/aesthetics it blows me away with the amount of thought and heart that went into this worldbuilding and the plot and its ONLY just started i cant wait to see where this will go and you should definitely like yeah definitely give it a chance

[mary-tudor]

~HENRY TUDOR: A SOCIOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION.~

Today, I'll be discussing a character who left his mark in History, fathering a dynasty whose most proeminent members were his (second) son Henry VIII and his granddaughter Elizabeth I. Often overshadowed by his descendants, Henry's own deeds as a king and as an individual of his own days have been neglected until recently, when efforts from British historians have been working hard to change that. 

The reason why I decided to bring him here was not only due to personal affections, though they certainly helped it, but because there are aspects overlapped in social structures that shaped him. In other words: what's Henry Tudor as a sociological individual? Can we point him out as a constant foreigner or someone whose socialization process were strongly marked by the addition of two different societies? 

Henry Tudor was born in Pembroke, located in Wales, in January 28th 1457. His mother was Margaret Beaufort, a proeminent lady whose grandfather John Beaufort was the son of John of Gaunt, son in turn of King Edward III of England. The duke of Lancaster fathered four ilegitimated children (who were legitimated in posterity) by his (third marriage to his then) lover Katheryn Swynford, amongst whom John Beaufort was the oldest. Therefore, Henry was  3x grandson. to the duke and, despite what some might argue when Henry IV became king, in great deal to inherite the throne. Well, it's not my intention to deepen the discussion as to Henry's legitimacy or the Beauforts. 

Though his father's ancestry, Henry's blood led him to the royal house of Valois. His paternal grandmother, Katherine de Valois, was the sister of Isabella, who had been the second wife of the ill-fated king Richard II. She was also descended of Louis IX and his spanish wife, Blanche de Castille. Henry was also a royal man from the Welsh lands, as Owain Tudor, his grandfather, was related to several princes of Wales. By all these I said, the first thing one might think (considering 15th century and it’s nobility) Henry would receive a proper education due to his status. However, this would not happen in the strict sense of the word. Let us not forget that England was collapsing by the time of Henry Tudor's birth and his childhood. Why am I using the word 'collapse' to qualify the civil war we know named as wars of the roses?

Émile Durkheim, a french sociologist, would write several centuries later, about how a society is formed: he compared it to the working of a human body. If the head, the brain of our body does not work well, what happens? The body will not work well, certainly. Neither would the head work well if other parts hurt somehow. Although if you did break a leg, you could still make use of your brain, but as a whole how limited wouldn't you be? He'd also say that when the human body, or as he called, the society was sick, it was because of the social structures which imposed the human being to the point where there would be no individuality, no matter of choice. 

Such created social facts that were completely external (althoug well internalized through means of a process we call socialization) but coercitive. If they are not working, what does this mean? That soon another social facts will be replacing the former one. But between one and another, we have a "very sickly" society. Taking this understanding back to England's 15th century, it is not difficult to see what Durkheim was talking about. 

The king was the head of the English body. If we have here two kings fighting over one crown, fighting over the rule of an entire body... Well, then? We have the collapse, a civil war that lasted for the next 30 years. Here, it's less about discussing who started what but why they did what they did, and the explanation for it. Power is power. It's crystal clear, and a statement that, however simple might it sound, points to the obvious. Factions that fought for power intended to dominate others, using the concept very well developed by sociologists as Pierre Bourdieu and Norbert Elias. This domination is a large field, a concept that embrace all sorts of it. Looking back to England's latter half of the century, domination was peril. The head was about to explode. The society was ill... and dominated by it.

What were the values? What was the racionalization proccess of social action led by individuals that were not only individuals but a group? How would all of this affect Henry Tudor? It was not about merely blaming the capitalism, because such coercitive system wasn't present yet. But Henry was, directly or not, linked to the royal house of Plantagenets, whose eagerness for dominating one another and by extension the rest of the country would include him in the game. 

"Game." For Durkheim, this would imply an agitation, like a wave of sea, from which no one could escape from. Let's not forget that Institutions created ideas, renewed them, shaped them to the practice whether to dominate the weaker or to defeat the stronger. Whatever the purpose, we here have the Church, not the religiosity, but the precursor of ideas would subdue individuals to share (or manipulate to their own goals anyways) values in order to keep determined mentality to it. But also, monarchy was too an institution which held control over the lives and deaths of thousands of people. A monarch, as we know, is never alone regardless of how "absolut" they could be in different times and contexts. They were not above the law, either. At least where the socialization process is concerned. For the monarch embodied the content which was the law back then. He was literally the law. 

Furthermore, Henry's education would foresee this fighting, which I'm not merely referring to custody going from his mother to another, before finally staying under his uncle's responsibilities, as well as the civil war itself. (Anyone remembers Warwick executing Herbert before the boy?) 

See, we all know and comprehend today what trauma are capable of doing to someone. Such experience is the main responsible for shaping ideas, values and even costumes. Now, a society which is very much sick by it's own values and moral costumes (a point here must be made: the public consciousness always preached for a warrior, strong king, but has no one thought how this "common sense", validated by a general expectation towards the head of society, was what led it to... well, for the lack of better word, suicide itself? 

For it's widely accepted that weak kings do not last long. But that is when we deal with a good deal of expectations that, when turned to frustrations, bring awful results. If England's society was ill in it's very extreme sense of the word, was because the values they created turned against themselves and that would leave it's mark in a boy as Henry. And until the age of 14, he was still absorbing these concepts, these morals, values, costumes from institutions (let's not forget that a monarch shares such with the nobility that surrounds him, as was the case of House Lancaster,f.e) before he was casted out to Bretagne and, in posteriority, to France. Now, I believe you all know what was done whether in England or with our king during these 14 years spent outside his own country before he became king upon the victory settled on the battle of Bosworth field.

I am not interested in discussing historical facts. At least not now, as we are finally dealing with Henry Tudor as a social actor

----/-HENRY TUDOR: A FOREIGNER? AN EXILED? OR AN OUTCAST?--

These questions mobilized me as I came to read a text written by 19th century sociologist named Georg Simmel. He wrote an essay (pardon by any mistakes in translations done from here on) entitled "The Foreigner", in which he brings a sociological question at why  foreigners are seen as strangers who are never entirely immersed in the society they attempt to be part in. 

Here's an excerpt translated by me in which he explains it:

"Fixed within a determined social space, where it's constancy cross-border could be considered similar to the space, their position [the foreigner's] in it is largely determined by the fact of not belonging entirely to it, and their qualities cannot originate from it or come from it, nor even going in it." (SIMMEL, 2005: 1.)    

Furthermore, he adds:

“The foreigner, however, is also an element of the group, no more different than the others and, at the same time, distincted from what we consider as the 'internal enemy'. They are an element in whose position imanent and of member comprehend, at the same time, one outsider and the other insider." (SIMMEL, 2005: 1).

Here's why Henry, as Earl of Richmond, was not well seen by the Britons and the French, in spite of being "accepted" by them. Never forget that he would still be seen as an outsider by his own fellows. As Richard III would call Henry a bastard, one could understand this accusation with sociological  implications. English back then detested these foreigners and by the concept brought here by me from Simmel we can understand why. But we could also see being called a bastard as a way to point out Henry's localization. Where can the Earl of Richmond & soon-to-be king be located?

I have pointed this far the structures which were raised and caused a collapsed society to live broken in many, many ways and how this affected Henry this far. Seeing how foreigner he was, nonetheless, he did not belong neither to England (at first) nor to the Continent.

On that sense of word, says Simmel (2005: 3): 

"A foreigner is seen and felt, then, from one side, as someone absolutely mobiled, a wanderer. As a subject who comes up every now and then through specific contacts and yet, singularly, does not find vinculated organically to  anything or anyone, nominally, in regards to the established family, locals and profissionals”

Even though we find a dominant group of foreigners in France, as we are talking about of nobles displeased with the Yorkist cause and supporters of the Lancastrian House, they were not majority. Where can we locate Henry, then? We don't, because he was not a French and however well he could speak the language, it was not his birth language. The French culture was not passed nor naturalized by him through the teachings of a family or the church by the institutions: monarchy, church, family, parliament, etc; he would have been defeated a long time. But that he did manage to, using this popular expression, put things together and become the first king to die peacefully since Henry V, it tells us a lot. Not rarely an immigrant is accepted by a society whose demands are forced upon him, most of the times in aggressive ways. But it's not often either that we see a king occupying such place in society. 

Indeed, one might say that kings as Henry II and the conquerors before him were too foreigners, but not in the sociological way I'm explaining. Because the social structures were different. Henry's government were settled in a more centralized ruling, far more just and peaceful, more economic and less concerned with waging wars than his antecessors. The need to migrate was not 'forced', neither 'imposed' and even back to the 11th and 12th centuries were motivated by different reasons. That's to accentuate how English society evolved throughout the centuries. And I used again and again Georg Simmel to prove my point about casting a sociological light towards Henry VII not as a historical character so distant of us and who remains an object of controversial discussions, but a man of his times who was forced to deal with expectations that placed him in social positions nearly opposed to one another to fulfill each role whether as king or as a man. For some reason, the broken society shaped Henry as an immigrant, but as history shows us, it was this immigrant who helped shape medieval society, directing it towards the age of Renaissance and in posteriority to Modern Age.

Finally, to close this thread I leave here another quote (translated to English by me) found in the text written by Simmel: 

"The foreigner, strange to the group [he is in], is considered and seen as a non-belonging being, even if this individual is an organic member of the group whose uniform life comprehends every particular conditioning of this social [mean]. (...) [the foreigner] earns in certain groups of masses a proximity and distance that distinguishes quantities in each relationship, even in smaller portions. Where each marked relationship nduced to a mutual tension in specific relationships, strenghtening more formal relations out of respect to what's considered 'foreigner' of which are resulted." (SIMMEL, p 7). 

Bibliography: 

AMIN, Nathen. https://henrytudorsociety.com/

DURKHEIM, Émile. "The Division of Labor in Society”.

KANTOROWICZ, Ernst H.”The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieavel Political Theology.”

PENN, Thomas. Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England.

SIMMEL, Georg. The Foreigner. In: Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung. Berlin. 1908.

[xyxyz1112]

Hi! Not American but I did go to middle and high school in the US, so I thought perhaps I could answer some of the questions in your post.

I would like to clarify that both schools I went to were traditionally private schools, and things tend to work differently in the public schools that are more commonly featured in movies. I think each American school is different and has its own social and academic environment. My answers are based on my experience only.

-do american schools really have the extreme social hierarchies you see in movies?

Ehh, I think social hierarchies do exist in schools, but not as extreme as in the movies. Some kids are definitely considered more popular due to involvement in certain sports and student organizations. As far as I know public schools usually have a more prominent social hierarchy, and I know one or two people who had to switch from public to private school due to bullying.

At the schools I went to, you don't have to involve yourself in the social hierarchy if you don't want to. I myself belong on the bottom rung of the social ladder according to most movies, but during all my years in American schools I experienced no serious bullying or ostracization. There are definitely some kids who are obsessed with social standing and give labels to other students, but these people are in minority and usually stick to their own group at school.

-is it true that most exams are just multiple choice questions? That seems insane to me.

That is not true in my experience. Almost all exams I took had multiple choices, true-or-false, fill in the blank, short answer, and multiple part solution questions. Science exams tend to have the most MCs, while history and language exams are almost entirely short/long answers. I can't imagine how pure multiple choice exams would work for disciplines like philosophy lol. But if you are talking about standardized tests like SSAT/SAT/ACT yes they do have a shit ton of MCs.

-do football players really get paid by the school?

Not that I know of at my school, but I heard it does happen at other schools. This practice is much more common in colleges. I am not very familiar with this, so someone will need to fill in for me.

-is a b really considered a bad grade? Does a c really mean you basically failed the class?

B is an ok grade that many students are comfortable with, even at the very academically rigorous school I went to. It means you have done everything expected and has a consistently fine performance in class. B itself is sometimes separated into B+, B, and B-. B+ is considered a pretty good grade especially with hard teachers.

C, on the other hand, is not an ideal grade. Even though you technically still pass the class (D is usually the failing grade) you can kiss the honor roll goodbye once you get a C. However, many teachers I know are willing to offer extra credits and exam retakes to round up a C to a B.

-do you really need a note written by a teacher to be allowed to walk in the halls?

Not at the schools I went to. In the school building: if you need to go to the bathroom just leave, no explanations needed. If you need to go to your locker/dorm to get something and may take more time, just tell the teacher and they will usually allow it. If you skip a class/sports practice due to being in the school clinic you will need a written note by the nurse/doctor you saw to give to the teacher later. In the dorms: my middle school dorms all had curfews, and proctors will patrol the dorm to make sure all lights are out and nobody is out in the halls. High school didn't have such regulations.

thanks for answering my questions!

ok so i guess when it comes to social hierarchy its not that different from the schools where i live. i guess high school bullying and all that gets exaggerated in movies.

honestly, having multiple choice questions at all is so weird to me because where i live its extremly rare to get a multiple choice, true or false or fill in the blanks part in an exam. for us its mostly questions that you have to answer using your knowledge about the topic, but it has to be a very detailed answer, which usually means for one exam you'll end up filling 5-8 pages of writing. so basically a bunch of small "mini essays".

but the grade thing must be tough. at schools ive been to we used the grading system from 1 to 6 where a 1 is an a, 2 is a b, 3 is a c etc. 1-3 are considered good/ok grades, a 4 doesnt mean you failed but its a sign that you really need to study more and 5 and 6 are considered bad.

and the thing with the notes is pretty much the same here. i thought students had to get their teachers to give them a written permission to even go to the bathroom, cause i think ive heard people talking about "hall passes" or something like that. i guess i either misunderstood what they are or its something that isnt done at every school

[scottspack]

my wife @got2ghost tagged me to talk about my 10 favorite ships and why!

yall know i LOVE to talk so lessgo!!!!

KIRK/SPOCK - Star Trek: I know this is a very unpopular opinion with some of my mutuals (I apologize Phoenix and Amy) but as someone who grew up watching TOS with my grandma and next gen with my parents, AOS, which came out when I was 13, was MY Star Trek. It was cool and sleek and pine/quinto were hot and at 13 years old I was like This Is Mine Now and have loved it ever since even though I fully recognize what makes it hard to love for classic trekkies! THAT BEING SAID, the reason i love spirk so much (besides the TOS version and the history and love they have) is because AOS spirk was the first pairing that i ever read fic for that was BEAUTIFUL and MOVING and GUT WRENCHING! this was the pairing that made me realize that fic could even be good! that it could not only be good but be AMAZING! even though the AOS movies fumble the spirk bag over and over and over, the things that fic writers have done with these characters and the stories they’ve created around the differences in AOS made a huge impact on me as a young teen and they still have a huge space in my heart!!!!!!!

Sterek- Teen Wolf: there is absolutely a reason that this pairing got so popular so fast and it’s because their dynamic is genuinely so GOOD and funny and there’s so much to work with!!!! Jeff Davis If Not For The Laws Of This Land I Would Have Slaughtered you, etc, etc, BUT regardless of what was done to them in canon, shipping sterek in 2012-2014 was the most fun ive had online in my entire life and i’ll love sterek forever! on this i swear!!!!!! no homo deserves a nobel peace prize!!!!!!!!!

Ruth/Idgie - Fried Green Tomatoes: i think it was phoenix who reblogged something recently about how so much historical gay rep is tragic and sad and doesn’t focus on the reality that gay people have always existed and not every single one of them lived tragic and sad lives. THAT’S WHAT MAKES RUTH/IDGIE SO IMPORTANT TO ME!!!! the importance of historical gay love that was happy! and accepted by their community! and beautiful! and romantic! they fall in love and start a business and raise a child and live in a happy home together! in 1930s alabama! their dynamic in both the book and the movie is unbelievably sweet and hot and i want to cry just thinking about the TENDER LOVE AND CARE!!!!!!!!!!!

Mulder/Scully - The X Files: they’re my parents and i love them! the skeptic/believer dynamic at it’s absolute fucking best! you want to talk about blueprints? mulder/scully is the fucking blueprint. “scully, is this demonstration of boyish agility turning you on?”

Jack/Bitty - omgcp: everyone on tumblr had already moved on by the time i got into omgcp last november, so it feels like im the only one who cares about them anymore but AHHHHHHHHHH i love jack/bitty so much and jack zimmermann in particular (not surprising since spock and lan wangji are two of my other favorite characters, you can see a pattern here) ANYWAYS i think that they are such a fucking good pairing. bitty unconsciously bringing jack out of his shell and making him want to open up and be receptive to love and to be a braver person just by virtue of being apologetically bitty is SO SWEET!! I THINK ABOUT THEM ALL THE TIME!!!!!! read Something Like This by emmagrant01 on ao3!!!!

Destiel - Supernatural: i mean what the fuck do you want me to say. its a man in gay love with an angel. if you’ve followed me for any length of time you’ll know two things: im gay and i love the abstract idea of christian mythology. destiel ticks all of my stupid boxes! one of my fave pastimes is going on ao3 and sorting destiel fics oldest to newest and reading all the really good super early fics when no one knew where the show was going with their angel mythology so fic writers relied on the actual bible and took angels seriously and it was GREAT!

Nick/Jess - New Girl: they’re soulmates from SEASON. ONE. EPISODE. ONE. baybee!!!!!!!! aint nothing else to say! 

Flint/Thomas - Black Sails: this is a ship i dont talk about THAT often but is extremely important to me for what it represents. ive written about 500 tag essays about how black sails is important for many reasons, one of which is that it’s a show that believes in gay joy and happy endings for gay people. the fact that flint spent a decade in mourning for thomas, burning down as much of the english empire as he could in retribution for how thomas was treated, killed all of the people who called him a monster for being in love, and then at the end of it all STILL got his happy ending? absolute catharsis. extremely close to my heart.

Larry - One Direction: [explanation redacted]

Wei Wuxian/Lan Wangji - The Untamed: new comers and heavy fucking hitters WANGXIAN!!!!!!!! there was no way in hell that i was ever NOT going to be fully in love with them once i started this show. not only are they ancient chinese kirk/spock, but everything else about their dynamic is just so fucking good!!!! childhood enemies to reluctant friends to shy crushes to soulmates in pursuit of justice and Doing The Right Thing to them against the world to one of them dies and the other wears white in mourning for 16 years to one of them is resurrected and the other knows its him immediately to a stronger connection than ever to once again them! against! the! world! to LOVERS to MARRIED to DOMESTIC BLISS AND RAISING THEIR CHILD TOGETHER. its..............a lot! and its so good! 

this was super fun and im going to tag @wolfbuddy, @significationary, @curlytemple, and @nicolegendary (nicole i want to hear your essay on the gay alien cw show very badly) if you guys are interested in doing this!!!

[chronotopes]

creative writing roundup 2020

all of the completed personal/creative writing i did in 2020! spoiler alert: not much, but also quite a lot. here's last year's.

poetry:

working for a literary journal has made me fully realize that most of my poetry is very much a personal negotiation of topics nobody but me wants to read about – i say this not in the sense of dunking on myself but in a way of re-evaluating my own relationship with harsh self-criticism 

air returning to air - emo bullshit, continuation of a sequence from the previous year

unbecoming - emo bullshit in the context of analyzing life as if it's fiction

love letters - processing the pandemic poetry i

by the james - processing the pandemic poetry ii

on the summer that will come in an unknown year - processing the pandemic poetry iv extra twee edition

aubade over distance - poem i sent to my girlfriend in the mail

villanelle for gene - poem i sent to my best friend in the mail

may 25, 2020 - processing the pandemic poetry v extra EXTRA twee edition

two rewrites of extremely personal poems from 2016

strawberry moon - summer-era revelations

mid-september downtown - a Sad Poem about being Sad in the Fall

why am i crying in class like the world's ending or something? - well damn what do you think it's about, trying out new stylistic stuff

sonnet sequence for the end of women and modernism - final project for a class! made my academic advisor cry.

13 completed pieces in total.

nonfiction:

leah on the offbeat - first attempt at a hermit crabs essay (good reads review)

relevant accomplishments first - second attempt (resumé). falls into the category of "i can't believe i let my creative nonfiction professor read All Of That"

immovable objects - flash essay about my fucked up relationship with relationships

annotated receipt for one free chai latte - experimental hermit crab essay after we turned in the assignment!

306,024 - essay written the night of super tuesday about, of all things, bernie sanders

four russias - my big boy project spring semester, revamping the immigrant identity theme. pretty proud of it

a stranger comes to town - an essay about my hometown + processing its shitty history

the last piece i loved: we lived happily during the war - school assignment, unremarkable, did it in a night

eight completed pieces in total

fanfiction:

in each small grief - coda to homestuck two that i can now officially say is written better than any hs2 update published from september onwards

and now my heart stumbles on things i don't know - novel-length meteorstuck fanfiction, everyone knows the drill on this one. How I Kept Myself From Having Emotional Breakdowns From July To October.

smile all night at somebody new - jaderezi fic i wrote in the 24 hour study center. don't read this one too closely!

it’s only a canvas sky - first-ever dirkjake fic, mostly completed but unpublished – it’s for dj week next month! 

four completed pieces in total

other:

an instagram account containing 53 clickhole-style, 300-500 word parody articles about my college.

birthday present for gene consisting of a bunch of articles about the same made up tv show last year's episodes were from

a bunch of creative writing-adjacent journal entries, including one called "is it dialogic if you're not talking to anyone but yourself: a town-hall style meeting about my brain"

significant progress on incomplete pieces like a Forbidden Essay, a completed chapter of a novel For Myself Only, and the first two chapters of a homestuck fanadventure

_

weird year for my writing overall. it's frontloaded with nonfiction and backloaded with fics. i definitely started depending more on feedback from readers, but i also started writing things that were explicitly FOR FUN rather than purely literary which is its own kind of progress!

[cawfulopinions]

Persona 4 Golden and the Problem of Appealing to a Wider Audience

I’ve been questioning how to go about writing this essay ever since I first finished Persona 4 Golden back in 2013. When I first finished the game, I came out of it not liking it very much – mechanically, it felt unbalanced; and writing-wise, I found it poorer than its original. My opinions on the game have shifted somewhat since then, helped along by the release of Persona 5 and the realization that many of the game’s mechanics were testbeds for that game. However, with time, I’ve found that I can articulate a lot of the problems Golden has with its writing a lot better. What I’ve ultimately settled on is looking at the Persona 4 we were originally given, then looking at its rerelease, and seeing what changed there and why I didn’t like it. Let’s jump in, shall we?

(Note: There will be complaining about Marie. My opinions on that subject sure as hell haven’t changed in the past seven years. Also, there will obviously be spoilers.)

I. A Brief History of Persona 4 as a Franchise

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 (later spinoffs would drop the subtitle) released in the west in 2008 as a follow-up to the very strange (at the time) and very niche Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3. Persona 3 was notable for deciding to go for an urban setting, an avant-garde aesthetic, and heavy philosophical themes, something that was rare for RPGs before 2010 (though not for its own franchise). While Persona 4 kept the philosophical focus of Persona 3, it decided to dial back some of the artsier aspects in favor of a more down-to-earth, focused story. Where P3 told a story about the inevitability of death and took place in a very modern Japanese setting, P4 decides to tell a story about the lies we tell ourselves and takes place in a rustic, rural setting.

Some of the first things that Persona 4 tells you after getting to its setting, Inaba, are that the town really only has one tourist attraction, it’s far from anywhere of real note, and its local businesses are all being driven out of business by the construction of a corporate superstore. It’s relatable, particularly to anyone who’s watched their local mom-and-pops go out of business after a Wal-Mart decided to move in.

The tone of this setting permeates through Persona 4 – all of its characters are pretty down-to-earth, and though there’s some cartoonish exaggeration in their writing, they feel more like real people than your average RPG character. Yosuke is the new kid in town who struggles with feelings of inferiority, something that’s not helped by his dad running the superstore that’s driving everyone out of business. Naoto is a girl with aspirations of becoming a detective, but hides her gender out of a belief that if she does so, she’ll be taken more seriously by the male-dominated police force. Even the game’s idol character, Rise, is someone who quit the business because the pressures of the idol industry became too much for her. Most games would take the opportunity to have an idol character written into the cast as an excuse for a pandering song and dance sequence and to play up her “waifu” aspects. Persona 4 spends the first hour after Rise’s introduced having her in and apron and slacks, serving tofu, and dodging paparazzi.

Persona 4 is not perfect in how it approaches its characters – in particular, Kanji and Naoto’s storylines have gotten a deserved level of flack for having essentially written coming-out stories for a gay man and a transman, and then immediately backing off and “no homo”-ing them. There’s a number of Social Links that end with the character deciding to go do the socially acceptable thing for them to do instead of following their own hearts, too – Yukiko’s comes to mind. But the character conflicts and stories told in the game’s Social Links are grounded and relatable.

The grounded-ness of Persona 4 was what really made it stand out in 2009, a time where RPGs and games as a whole were mostly concerned with showing off the cool things they could do with their engines (keep in mind, this was the early era of the PS3, and Persona 4 was a PS2 game). Looking back, it’s easy to realize that Persona 4 was made as grounded and rustic as it was because of budgetary concerns, but what was done with its limited budget was incredible. It looked at its setting and tone and embraced them, and that helped to make the game stronger.

And it worked! Persona 4 was easily Atlus’s biggest success in the PS2 era. Though the game was hard to find in the United States due to its short print run, it was inescapable online, and the early Let’s Play era helped keep it in the public eye. There’s a large number of people in the English fandom who only knew Persona 4 existed back in the day because of the hiimdaisy comic and the Giant Bomb Endurance Run. Meanwhile, the game was huge in Japan and topped sales charts for weeks.

Source: Gamasutra

And then Atlus almost went out of business! Oops!

Here’s what we know about Atlus at the time that Persona 4 came out: it wasn’t doing good. The PS2 Shin Megami Tensei games were all desperate attempts to try and find success, something that Persona director Katsura Hashino has been fairly public about in interviews. Dataminers examining the PS2 SMT games have found evidence that suggests every game was built on top of the previous, with every game using SMT: Nocturne’s models and basic gameplay system until after Persona 4’s release. Persona 3 and Persona 4 are so similar under the hood that model swap mods are everywhere for the two, with literally the only adjustments necessary being a reordering of animations to account for Persona 4 having a guard animation and Persona 3 not.

Persona 4 was a huge hit, but it wasn’t enough to save Atlus. The last games released under an independent Atlus were Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor (one of my personal favorites) and Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey (a massive failure for the company). Following Strange Journey’s release, long-time franchise artist (and, more importantly, producer and creative designer for Strange Journey) Kazuma Kaneko near entirely disappeared from future SMT titles, only credited for writing the scenario concept for SMTIV and as a demon design supervisor for later SMT titles.

Soon after Strange Journey’s failure, Atlus was snatched up by Index Corporation. Very little is known about the internal culture during the Index era, but evidence suggests that it wasn’t great. The first few games Atlus produced after this point were all remakes, save for the strange, marriage-drama focused Catherine, a game that was assuredly in development before Atlus was bought out.

It was the original games and spinoffs that Atlus produced after they were bought by Index that started to show a shift in tone. Devil Survivor 2 is a notably different game than its predecessor (which was made while Atlus was independent). While I won’t get into that too much here (that game’s worth an essay on its own), it decided to trade it’s classical SMT-style aesthetic for something more bombastic and widely-appealing. Many of the characters in that game are better summed up by what anime tropes they appeal to than by their own character arcs, and the game’s plot is an unsubtle ripoff of Neon Genesis Evangelion. And it worked. Devil Survivor 2 very notably sold better than its predecessor despite being a DS game in the 3DS era.

At around the same time as Devil Survivor 2 was released, Atlus was preparing to release the first anime adaptation of Persona 4. Persona 4: The Animation was released in October of 2011, directed by Seiji Kishi (of Angel Beats! fame) and animated by AIC. I’ll leave my thoughts on Seiji Kishi as a director out of this and focus on the content of Persona 4: The Animation instead.

Let’s get one thing out of the way. Persona 4: The Animation is a comedy anime.

The anime is a fairly faithful adaptation of the game in terms of plotline. It follows the game’s story to the letter, hitting every plot beat. When it needs to get serious, it gets serious, and when it nails its emotional beats, it nails them well. While I’ll go on record in saying that I flat out dislike the anime, I won’t deny that certain episodes, like the Nanako arc, are done very well. However, when it doesn’t need to be serious, the anime decides to look at Persona 4’s subtlety in its character arcs, and says, “Subtlety is for cowards.”

There’s an argument to be made that there isn’t time for subtlety in a 24-episode anime, which is why everyone’s character arcs needed to be compressed and character traits shaved down to only the most exaggerated bits. I disagree. You can easily show character without exaggeration in short-form media – the entire short story genre is built off of that exact concept. The decision to shave everyone down to their most basic traits was a decision made to make Persona 4 more accessible to a general anime-watching audience, who likely came in expecting a more action-packed, high energy deal.

And it worked.

For many people, Persona 4: The Animation was their first experience with Persona, period.  The anime was incredibly popular, and it’s clear that at this point, Atlus (or, more likely, Index) realized they’d struck gold. Persona 4: The Animation was the start of a large spate of Persona 4 spinoffs, all of which adopting the character exaggerations of the anime in some form or fashion. Any time you see a scene in a P4 spinoff where Chie’s reduced to her love of meat and kung-fu? Blame the anime. Further original games after this point seemed to take a more mainstream shift as well – Shin Megami Tensei IV and its sequel, Apocalypse, are both very different games than their predecessors, with characters and plotlines seemingly written to appeal to Persona 4’s audience.

Atlus eventually managed to claw their way out from under the hand of Index, mostly because Index got caught up in a huge fraud investigation! Oops! Sega bought a whole bunch of Index at this point, and Atlus has more or less kept on trucking under Sega since. However, the shift in internal priorities hasn’t changed much – Persona 5, while still a good game, is much closer tonally to the games that came out under Index, Shin Megami Tensei V has been AWOL ever since its first preview, and the less said about Catherine Redux, the better.

II. Less is More, and Maybe Inaba Doesn’t Need A Nightclub

Which, after a long detour, brings us back to Persona 4 Golden.

Golden is a remake of Persona 4 with additional content, released for the Playstation Vita (RIP) during the height of its popularity in Japan. Like Persona 3 FES, a previous patch/remake for Persona 3, Golden primarily exists as a gameplay patch to Persona 4 with additional story content in places throughout the game. While most of FES’s additional story was segmented off into the controversial “The Answer” section, Golden’s additional content is peppered haphazardly throughout the game. Because of this integration into the main story, Golden’s issues are more pronounced than FES’s were – in FES, you could just not play “The Answer”. Golden isn’t letting you go home without at least pushing you toward Marie’s dungeon.

Golden feels like it was developed with an understanding that anyone who’s playing it has watched the anime, and decides to lean into chasing that mainstream appeal while also throwing out the intrigue of its plot and setting. This is first evidenced when you boot up the game and watch the opening. While it hits all of the same beats as Persona 4’s opening, Golden’s opening has a much cheerier tune to it, focusing on a dance sequence and colorful visuals instead of the larger tone of the game. It’s not like the Persona 4 opening is completely absent from the game, but you have to go out of your way to watch it, and first impressions are very important.

This change in opening tone is only one example of the general tone of the changes that Golden takes. While there are big issues with the game’s writing (specifically one big one, which, whooo boy, we’ll get to her), most of the issues are in the little things – the new gameplay elements, the new areas you can visit, and the new scenes that were added to the game.

I talked a lot about how important P4’s setting is to its game for a reason: most of Golden’s changes are ones that disrupt the carefully crafted tone and setting of the original game. From things like slice of life scenes about the party buying scooters for themselves, to a winter trip to a ski resort, to a goddamn idol concert on the roof of the supercenter driving everyone out of business, it feels like the game is trying to pull away from its rural setting and down-to-earth tone to appeal to the lowest common denominator: teenage boys who live in Japanese cities.

A big sticking point for me personally has always been that you can visit Okina City in Golden. In Persona 4, you visited the nearby city occasionally in social link events, but never explored it on the whole. It gave a sense that Okina City was somewhere inconvenient to go to – someplace worth going to for a day trip with your friends, but too out of the way to visit on the regular. In Golden, the city and all of its trappings are just a loading screen away. Having a larger setting change like this so easily accessible detracts from Inaba’s setting – it makes the anxieties that several characters have about being trapped by the town feel fake. It detracts from a feeling that’s so integral to the game’s tone.

Also, the first time you go there outside of a Social Link is because Yosuke wants to pick up chicks with his cool new motorcycle.

The first trip to Okina City is ultimately indicative of a larger problem with most of the added scenes in P4G have: because they were written after the anime, they’re written to appeal to anime watchers. You can immediately tell when you’ve entered a scene that is original to P4G because the writing almost immediately drops in quality – characters become less complex, scenes have nothing to do with the plot or character development, and, to be quite honest, the jokes get worse. The Okina City sequence ultimately just ends with a fat joke and another “no homo” moment with Kanji. It’s… really bad.

There’s four more of these additional sequences throughout the game, and they’re all similar slice of life sequences that rely on anime tropes to propel them. The next after this is a beach episode with the rest of your party. After that is the idol concert on the Junes roof, which gets a hastily written tie-in to the plot when an antagonist says that the concert was how he found the party. After that is the entire winter sequence of the game, which caps off with a ski resort trip that leads into the game’s extra dungeon (which we’ll get to), which THEN leads into the game’s second hot springs cutscene, which has even less purpose than the first one.

None of these scenes have any real substance – it feels like they were just included because they actually had the budget to include them this time around. It’s possible that Okina City and the nighttime areas in Inaba were originally intended for the original version of P4, and I’d believe it – the way nighttime jobs are implemented in the original version of the game is particularly awkward, and you visit Okina City enough times in Social Links that I fully believe it was intended for the full game. As for the idol concert sequence, it 100% only exists because they got Rie Kugimiya as Rise’s VA, but couldn’t fit a sequence where she sang into the original version of the game.

The problem is that these inclusions ultimately detract from the original story. They take a game with a pretty firm idea of what kind of tone it wanted to have and muddle it because, fuck that, we have a budget this time and we need more anime tropes, idols, and tsunderes for those kids who came in after watching the anime.

Which brings us to Persona 4 Golden’s biggest issues: its additional Social Links, the winter semester, and its new ending sequence.

III. We have to talk about Marie.

Like Persona 3 FES before it, Persona 4 Golden adds new Social Links to the game. The first of which is the Jester Social Link, which deals with Tohru Adachi, a local police officer and a major character. While I’ve never been a huge fan of this Social Link (I’ve always felt like it made the identity of the culprit too obvious), it’s fairly well received by the fanbase and I can see the argument for its inclusion, so I’m not going to spend time discussing it here.

The other is Golden’s new Aeon Social Link, who manages to encompass most of Golden’s issues in a single character.

Marie is a completely original character to Golden, the first of a long chain of Atlus “remake waifus” – characters who are added to a remake of a game that are intended to appeal to the otaku crowd, rarely fit in with the rest of the game, and introduce large changes to the game’s plot. These characters rarely work because the narrative wasn’t built around them, and the retcons these characters introduce are often detrimental to their games’ original plots or themes.

Marie has all of these problems. She feels like she was written by committee – designed to appeal to an otaku crowd with a fancy design and tsundere personality. On top of that, she’s voiced by a big name seiyuu (Kana Hanazawa), and her plotline is used to fill in gaps with the game’s ending sequence, since the original game struggled with setting it up and the anime barely even bothered to touch it (Persona 4’s True Ending was shuffled off into an OVA in the anime adaptation).

From the moment you first see Marie, it’s obvious that she doesn’t belong. It’s not that her character design is bad, but it doesn’t match with the rest of the game’s tone. This is something of a pattern for her. The first time you meet Marie, it’s in the middle of a scene that was originally dedicated to the protagonist meeting his new family in Inaba. It’s jarring, disrupts a scene that was about setting up the protagonist’s larger family dynamic, and interrupts the flow of the game’s opening sequence.

Personality-wise, Marie is probably the most tropey of Golden’s characters – she’s a tsundere with amnesia, has a mysterious past, writes bad poetry as a hobby, and has a very obvious crush on the protagonist. Romancing her is almost mandated – you’re required to complete her Social Link to access the winter semester of the game, and during the game’s new ending, she calls out the protagonist on television to talk about how much she loves him. You can choose not to romance her if you want, but the game does its best to push you into wanting to do so.

Marie ultimately becomes one of the Velvet Room’s new attendants, though a lot of the evidence suggests that she was intended to become one of your party members originally. This is partially because she has a unique Persona related to her, and partially because the game takes every effort to emphasize how much of a buddy she is to the party. Marie’s Social Link ranks are time gated, usually becoming available after a new party member joins your team. All of these early scenes are dedicated to the protagonist going on dates with Marie, and then a random party member will show up and immediately become friends with her. Probably the most egregious case is during any mid-game hangouts where you don’t rank up, because the entirety of your party will just show up at Junes at the same time as you and Marie. It’s so obviously artificially constructed and honestly feels insulting to the player.

This artificiality feels like it was a writer’s saving throw to justify why the team would go into Marie’s dungeon to save her. The problem is that it’s also an unnecessary move to take. The majority of Persona 4’s plot is about the party entering dungeons to save people that they don’t really know from a serial killer; it stands to reason that the party would decide to help Marie without that extra motivation. But no, it was important to the writers that Marie is also big friends with the party, so we got what we got instead.

Marie’s dungeon comes after the skiing trip that caps off the winter semester, a portion of the game that is only available if you’ve finished her Social Link. The skiing trip is mostly more slice of life/comedy scenes, right up until you get thrust into the TV World to help Marie. The dungeon itself is… notoriously bad. You’re stripped of your equipment and items, and can only use items found within the dungeon to fight back. On top of that, the dungeon constantly drains your HP and MP, and the boss of it can only be damaged by using items that give her elemental weaknesses, because she starts off immune to everything. Here’s hoping you didn’t bring Chie for that fight like I did!

As you go through the dungeon, it’s revealed that Marie was secretly Kusumi-no-Okami, a minor Shinto god in service to Ameno-Sagiri (the game’s first final boss). Kusumi-no-Okami’s purpose is that she’s supposed to observe humanity and suck up all of Ameno-Sagiri’s fog after the conclusion of the game’s plot, which will inevitably kill her. The dungeon ends with the party trying to appeal to Marie to convince her that she doesn’t need to die, and then beating her up to save her. It’s… not particularly well written, but if that was all to Marie’s character after that, it would be fine. Unfortunately, it’s not.

The game proceeds as normal after that point as you approach the actual final boss, Izanami-no-Okami. During the fight with her, there is a sequence where the protagonist is encouraged to keep going by all of his social links. In the original version of the game (assuming that you’ve done their Social Links), this sequence ends with Dojima and Nanako, the family he’s been staying with the whole game, encouraging him to keep going. In Golden, Nanako’s line is immediately followed by Marie showing up, once again taking a sequence about familial love to make it about Marie. It’s… kind of gross!

Then you beat Izanami, and in the scene immediately afterwards, it’s revealed that, just kidding, Marie wasn’t Kusumi-no-Okami after all! She was actually Izanami-no-Mikoto, the good part of Izanami that was shaved off so that she could do her whole evil plot. Once you beat Izanami-no-Okami, she absorbs that evil part back into her and everything is all hunky dory! Conflict resolved completely, no need to worry about it anymore!

The “Marie was actually Izanami all along” reveal undercuts the finale of the game significantly. It comes immediately after what was the final scene before the ending scene, where Izanami pledged to leave humanity’s direction to humans in recognition of your feats. It’s an unnecessary doubling down on a finale that was already pretty definitive, if somewhat bittersweet, by making it unambiguously happy. This remains a theme for Golden’s ending sequence.

Persona 4 ends with the protagonist leaving his friends behind at the end of the year. Though the killer is in jail and the mastermind defeated, Inaba is still in the same melancholy state as it was when the protagonist came to it, and ultimately, he has to leave his friends behind. There’s a bittersweet-ness to its happy ending – no matter what, you have to move on and trust that things will be okay without you. Obviously, the protagonist comes back – there wouldn’t be so many spinoffs if he couldn’t – but it’s important that Persona 4 ends the way it does at that point. It puts a definitive close on the game.

Golden, however, adds an extended epilogue sequence where the protagonist comes back a year later. In this sequence, you find out that Inaba’s businesses are recovering, Namatame (the false antagonist) is running for office with a lot of support from the town, Adachi (the actual antagonist) has been on good behavior in jail, and your party members are all making tracks toward happiness for themselves.

A theme of esoteric happiness runs through this entire sequence – it feels like it entirely exists just to tell the player not to worry, everything is fine now, don’t worry about any other points of conflict. If it was just one of these things, it would have been fine, but the gatling gun of happy endings makes every one of those little victories feel lesser for it. Marie, of course, is inserted into the ending sequence of the epilogue to cap off her involvement. The esoteric happiness started with Marie, and it ends with Marie.

Golden’s epilogue ties every conflict in the game up into a neat little bow, in a way that’s almost entirely at odds with Persona 4’s down-to-home nature. It’s a fantasy that doesn’t acknowledge the uglier parts of life that Persona 4 was all about confronting. It’s the same kind of lie that Izanami accused humanity of wanting to nestle itself into. Marie’s involvement in Golden sums up a lot of that game’s problems, but the epilogue brings them into sharp relief.

IV. So now what?

I wouldn’t call Golden a bad game – I’ve heard a lot of people call it the superior version gameplay-wise, and while I disagree with that (it’s got some balance issues thanks to its new mechanics), it’s definitely the most accessible version. But when it comes to how it relates to its original, Golden throws a lot of what makes it good out the window in favor of appealing to a more general audience with slice of life sequences, more familiar tropes, and a character who mostly exists to sell merchandise and tie up Persona 4’s ending in an unambiguously happy manner.

I realize I’m in the minority here when I talk about what I dislike about Golden – you’ll find a lot of people who dislike Marie, but not a lot who dislike the rest of the package. And if you have a Vita and haven’t played Persona 4 already, then you might as well use it as your entry point into the franchise. However, I can’t help but feel like Golden is the exact point where Persona as a franchise shifted from trying to tell philosophical stories with more grounded characters to chasing mainstream appeal. Even Persona 5, a game that tries to tell a story about very real societal problems, has a lot of the same problems as Golden does, and from what I understand, these problems only got worse with Persona 5 Royal.

At the end of the day, Persona is going nowhere anytime soon – Persona 5 is the best-selling game in the franchise period, and the influence Persona has had on JRPGs in general cannot be understated. But I wouldn’t mind if some of the things I disliked about Persona 4 Golden didn’t come back.

[thehardkandy]

starting to write was the best decision i ever made not because i dream of it ever being a career choice for me, just because... it’s therapeutic man. there’s a HUGE ramble below the cut

the same way im always writing text posts with no real function other than to put the words of my brain down and make them feel real, that’s what writing is all about for me.

like my brain has always prepared my thoughts narratively, or at least in the form of essays, sorta. very little of what i type or say out loud has not already been formed into coherent thoughts in my head at some point. ordered. made modular so that i can pick and choose the parts of my prepared essays for presentation for the world. and frequently i go back, revise, update the narratives of how i understand what’s happened to me, and what yet happen

the other night i spent approximately 50 minutes walking in a circle not because i was having a meltdown, but because of the opposite--ive been feeling so good! And it felt like the right time to fully re-conceptualize the last few years of my life.

it took 50 minutes! and actually I think i only covered since the beginning of 2019! i think my head my intended audience was some vague dr person to whom i was explaining the context of my mental health, since i almost always have an intended  audience whenever i have an internal dialogue. i anticipate questions, tangents. it very rarely covers everything that could be said, but for the time it covers as much as i can possibly imagine.

and then so writing is the flip side of that. it lets be re-conceptualize myself, but if i pluck myself out of this world and out of my history.

i put my virtues and my flaws into people who otherwise are not me. they are cis. they are non-human. they are train wrecks. they are heroes.

the more different lives i live and understand, the easier it gets for me to live this one.

i remember so vividly reading hunger games for the first time in grade 11. you know, katniss is deeply traumatized and in the centre of something impossible. and i just..... couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t just choose to die--why the thought would barely even cross her mind! and i ran into that feeling for a hundred different books ive read

why do these people keep going. it’s not that i think any one of them in particular are examples of inhuman valour. they are just... people. people also written by people where that sort of thinking isn’t an option in their life.

i think that’s why ive always vibed with Lirael so hard man. like!!! holy shit!!! that’s a ya book but within the first few chapters, you see her suicidal. literally stand on the edge of the cliff, thinking about how there’s something wrong with her. it’s not the generic “UwU i’m not like other girls” it felt so deeply relatable to me.

that felt so lived and real, and so somehow me growing up felt like joining her growing up, eventually.

i remember being almost.... upset when i read Goldenhand not because I didn’t like the book, but because it felt like she grew past me. I was still stuck feeling alone at every level on my life, and her she was forming ever deeper relationships with people

it was so hard to deal with for me! i almost resented her. but then i eventually was like.... okay. there’s soemthing locked inside here. something in me... something in me that i still need to work on

that book came out when i was in 3rd year, so it had been 3 years since my last suicide attempt, but that year was also the one i tried dating for the first time since also 3 years prior. and it didnt go well. i felt hollow and at arms length from the person i was dating, despite genuinely liking them a lot and having an incredible time together

i think that all counts as sort of... tickles of the gender. at the end of Abhorsen, Lirael has done great things. Made new friends. but then we sorta fade to place. i didnt have to feel this weird... displacement of seeing her actually settle into having a place in the world, i simply saw her first step into it

and that was where i was at in third year. i was learning to truly love what i was doing at school, but i was still extremely dissociated, didnt feel close with any of my friends, and frankly did not hang out with anyone ever.

it showed me that a bit better. and it was hardly something i remedied then. i just sat there and knew i shoudlnt be mad or upset with her--or the writing, haha.

but now we’ve finally come out the other end. im actually settling into my place in the world. im actually staying in touch with the people i care about. im loving the things i love. im loving who i am

and i think this all got really far from what i was saying about why i like writing................ who’s to say what the point is

i think at the end of the day im just trying to make myself feel seen in the things that i write, in the ways ive felt seen in the books that ive read

and so sometimes im even scrabbling to see the things in myself ive barely even GLIMPSED

i scratch at the periphery of my understanding--like when you know there’s an itch, but if you look in the mirror you can’t point to where it is? you can only feel it. you can only rake your fingers over the area and hope one touches on it

thats what me trying to write sometimes is. raking my fingers over an area, trying to find where it is. trying to find why it is--is it a reaction, an infection? is it growth? is it all in my head?

im in love with writing and i never want to stop it, because ive now written so many words over so many years that i see myself written across page after page after page after page and it feels so good. even with none of these ever seeing the light of day

I remember my first ever book, Silhouettes in the Shadows (bad title, was kinda joke), where i had, of course, a dude who was selfish, suicidal, and yet placed his entire identity on this child he adopts after accidentally getting her parents killed. he would rather die, if he didnt feel responsible for her. i could psychoanalyze the SHIT out of that, from 2013

there’s another woman who shows up in the book. she’s kind of an ass to him, but she grows a little kinder. a little more understanding. a little more willing to meet her halfway. and then he kills her. and then he gets killed himself

it’s, uh, not a good book. just me putting all my fucked up self-hate onto the page.

but then after that... after that i think i write Two Halves Make a Whole, another shitty placeholder, which is set in a world in which magic can only be done in pairs. There’s a Conduit (I think?) and a Savant. The Conduit is the source of power, the Savant is the user of the power.

that book i was like... lets do some #gayrepresentation because im an english student now. its about a girl who goes to this magic school, and falls in love with this other girl. i remember distinctly trying not to think about the point when i cried in 2014 because i wrote this scene where she and this other girl just............ hold hands. nothing more intimate happens.

and so my main character is the Conduit, her love (which again is EXTREMELY guarded) is the Savant.

but.

some big war is brewing, and our mc decides she has to be involved. forces herself into a position where she cannot be denied. so the general is like, “okay, if you bond to my son.” and so she bonds to his son. and they get close, but not close like with the girl.

he’s a sweet little boy! which, naturally, means i kill him. halfway into the book my mc gets the first real taste of fighting, and when the boy is killed... it shatters their bond. unless one willing dissolves a bond--which takes over a week--it shattering leaves a part of the person stuck inside you forever, only allowing a Shallow bond with anyone after that

so she is... reunited with her love. they go on an adventure together but... they can never be as close as they once hoped together. they can spend a life together. but they can never actually be together, by the standards of this world because of the damage done to her by the previous bond

and again, i sure bet you could fuckin’ psychoanalyze that

i guess i wont go through all my books since this has gotten insanely long and im not getting more coherent--but this is why i said i walked for 50 minutes to create a cohesive narrative of my 2019-2020 life.

this is nonsense. and boy howdy, i should’ve just written instead of ramble all this LOL

[somnilogical]

reactionpost to Emma Goldman (and politics, always politics these days) | [Anarchism and Other Essays] [Living My Life]

it doesnt make sense why the increasingly ill-named bay area ""rationalists"" would be so horrible.

just let the scene die please. its so painful seeing it lurching around as a half-dead simulacrafied thing.

which was probably what it was since i got here, but like i guess i had some image, a strong prior, of what things were going to be like that replaced my sight and was slowly eroded away. which before introspection probably gave the impression of more erosion witnessed than actually happened.

the transsexual oracle contrapoints mentioned that the current political fractionation is getting more like that of the early 1900s. which means ill protest shirtwaist factory fires soon?

like i actually said to my friend that looking at the claims of humans it was amazing how many friends i suddenly acquired that i didnt even know! i must have some sort of psychic link with anyone who agrees with me on some philosophical points! and then lo and behold i read emma goldman saying:

<<Now, to a recent instance of police-manufactured Anarchist plots. In that bloodstained city Chicago, the life of Chief of Police Shippy was attempted by a young man named Averbuch. Immediately the cry was sent to the four corners of the world that Averbuch was an Anarchist, and that Anarchists were responsible for the act. Everyone who was at all known to entertain Anarchist ideas was closely watched, a number of people arrested, the library of an Anarchist group confiscated, and all meetings made impossible. It goes without saying that, as on various previous occasions, I must needs be held responsible for the act. Evidently the American police credit me with occult powers. I did not know Averbuch; in fact, had never before heard his name, and the only way I could have possibly “conspired” with him was in my astral body. But, then, the police are not concerned with logic or justice. What they seek is a target, to mask their absolute ignorance of the cause, of the psychology of a political act. Was Averbuch an Anarchist? There is no positive proof of it. He had been but three months in the country, did not know the language, and, as far as I could ascertain, was quite unknown to the Anarchists of Chicago.>>

& i laughed aloud. its the same thing! i think im actually positioned in the natural cluster of "anarchist" right now. so reading historical instances of how people treated them and updating on this info to read peoples minds and clip around them is useful. pretending to believe that people who hold some similar tenets are your "friends" as a convergent statist strategy is probably because statists want to think that anarchism is some sort of communicable disease and not independently derivable via observations of reality. (like how both emma goldman and somni could work out a large number of similar conclusions independently.)

and they dont want to interface with it on the object level so will say its mad gibberish and a danger to public welfare and all we need is for all anarchists to doxx their network and then get everyone who is "friends" put in prison. they dont think in terms of philosophy they think in terms of anarchism being a confusing infohazardous illness contagious between social groups and it needs to be eliminated.

except they are wrong and this doesnt work cuz i was able to reconstitute anarchist conclusions on my own before even reading about emma goldman and work out that eg clothes dont make sense.

<<The entire history of asceticism proves this to be only too true. The Church, as well as Puritanism, has fought the flesh as something evil; it had to be subdued and hidden at all cost. The result of this vicious attitude is only now beginning to be recognized by modern thinkers and educators. They realize that “nakedness has a hygienic value as well as a spiritual significance, far beyond its influences in allaying the natural inquisitiveness of the young or acting as a preventative of morbid emotion. It is an inspiration to adults who have long outgrown any youthful curiosities. The vision of the essential and eternal human form, the nearest thing to us in all the world, with its vigor and its beauty and its grace, is one of the prime tonics of life.” [17] But the spirit of purism has so perverted the human mind that it has lost the power to appreciate the beauty of nudity, forcing us to hide the natural form under the plea of chastity. Yet chastity itself is but an artificial imposition upon nature, expressive of a false shame of the human form. The modern idea of chastity, especially in reference to woman, its greatest victim, is but the sensuous exaggeration of our natural impulses. “Chastity varies with the amount of clothing,” and hence Christians and purists forever hasten to cover the “heathen” with tatters, and thus convert him to goodness and chastity.>>

(in 2020 the humans of the hazda tribe seem to be quite fine with their particular fashion, society has entirely failed to collapse.

and if you look at the covers of sci-fi books that spend some thoughtcycles extrapolating out the future of fashion they often agree with this. ive read a lot of accounts from naturalists some of them expressed that wearing clothes was like being starved of oxygen. i hate clothes and my sister (who is cis) also hates clothes and wrote a poem about how she hates clothes (to antitransfem ppl: its not a sex thing!!!) and maybe its a genetic thing or a shared early childhood environment thing (to antitransfem ppl: i wasnt sexually abused as a child!!!).

assuming it is a genetic thing that locates this issue in the first place, like having issues with english orthography might have been for feynman or nash or somni, the thing where english orthography is wrong & the fact there are such things as "spelling bees" for your language is independent of a genetic disinclination to memorize a series of ad-hoc patches instead of having things generated by simple principles. (capitalization also doesnt make sense.)

clothes dont make sense. & this might be a small matter on the scale of things but its so unjust that in 2020 you can be arrested by the cops for being naked outside!!!) similarly with jeremy bentham.

i am not actually planning on being emma goldman or jeremy bentham or any historical figure. because i dont think simply rerunning strats of historical figures is particularly useful. but im peers with them.

<<An old vice of mine came to my rescue: veritable mountains of letters I had written. Often I had been chided by my pal Sasha, otherwise known as Alexander Berkman, and by my other friends, for my proclivity to spread myself in letters. Far from virtue bringing reward, it was my iniquity that gave me what I needed most — the true atmosphere of past days.>>

i dont think this is a vice emma!!!