#which seems an inefficient way to go about things but there might be a point to it?

[thetarttfuldickhead]

Just so you're aware, it's spelled Cockburn, not Cowburn. Usually said more like Coh-burn, Jamie is just... Jamie. NEVER said Cock Burn, it's one of those British names that doesn't use all its letters.

https://ted-lasso.fandom.com/wiki/Declan_Cockburnhttps://ted-lasso.fandom.com/wiki/Declan_Cockburn

Huh! I was very much not aware of that. :o (And also feel like Apple might have made more of an effort to get the name right in their own subtitles, because this just isn't fair on us poor ESL:ers.)

However, Cockburn - odd namn that it is - makes so much more sense than Cowburn because ever since I saw it spelled out in the last episode it's been driving me a little insane with how weird it is. Totally bought it, though, because they also have, like, Bumbercatch...

Thanks for pointing it out, nonny! I have learned a new thing!

[rawliverandgoronspice]

Hello!! I'm back for: more whining about TotK Quest Design Philosophy

I can't reblog a really great post I just saw for some reason (tumblrrrr *shakes my fist*), but hmmmm yeah not only do I completely agree, but I think I might expand on why I feel so much annoyance towards TotK's quest design philosophy at some point, because it does extend past the fundamentally broken setup of trying to punch a pseudo-mystery game on top of BotW's bones, where the core objective was always explicit and centered and stapled the entire world together; or the convoluted and inefficient way it tells its story through the Tears, the somehow single linear exploration-driven quest in the entire game.

Basically: I'm talking about the pointless back-and-forths. There were a lot of them, a lot that acted against the open world philosophy, and almost none of them ever recontextualized the environment through neither gameplay abilities nor worldbuilding nor character work.

I'll take two examples: the initial run to Hyrule Castle (before you get your paraglider), and then the billion back-and-forths in the Zora questline.

I think?? the goal of that initial quest to Hyrule Castle is to familiarize you with the landmark, introduce the notion that weapons rot, tell you about the gloom pits, and also tell you that Zelda sightings are a thing? But to force any of these ideas on you before giving you a paraglider is, in my opinion, pretty unnecessary. I think the reason it happens in that order is to prevent Link from simply pummeling down to the gloom pit under Hyrule Castle and fight Ganondorf immediately while still introducing ideas surrounding the location; but genuinely, the Zelda sighting makes the next events even more confusing? Why wouldn't you focus all your priorities in reaching the castle if you just saw her there? Why lose time investigating anything else? Genuinely: what is stopping you from getting your paraglider and immediately getting yourself back there, plunging into the depths to try and get to the literal bottom of this? (beyond player literacy assuming this is where the final boss would be, and so not to immediately spoil yourself --which, in an open world game, you should never be able to spoil yourself by engaging with the mechanics normally, and if you can that's a genuine failure of design)

I think, personally, that you should not have been pointed to go there at all. That anything it brings to the table, you could have learned more organically by investigating yourself, or by exploring in that direction on your own accord --or, maybe you think Zelda is up there in the castle, and then the region objectives become explicitely about helping you reaching that castle (maybe by building up troops to help you in a big assault, or through the Sages granting you abilities to move past level-design oriented hurdles in your way, etc). Either way: no need to actually make you walk the distance and back, because the tediousness doesn't teach you anything you haven't already learned about traversal in the (extremely long, btw, needlessly so I would say) tutorial area.

But to take another example, I'll nitpick at a very specific moment in the Zora Questline, that is honestly full of these back-and-forth paddings that recontextualize absolutely nothing and teach you nothing you didn't already know. The most egregious example, in my opinion, is the moment where you are trying to find the king, and you have to learn by listening in to the zora children who do not let you listening in.

So okay. I think Zelda is great when it does whimsy, and children doing children things guiding you is a staple of the series, and a great one at that. But here? It does not work for me on any level. Any tension that could arise from the situation flattens because nobody seems to care enough about their king disappearing in the middle of a major ecological crisis, except for children who are conveniently dumb enough not to graps the severity of the situation, but not stressed out enough that it could be construed as a way for them to cope about it and make anything feel more serious or pressing. It feels like a completely arbitrary blocker that isn't informed by the state of the world, doesn't do anything interesting gameplay-wise with this idea, doesn't build up the mood, and genuinely feels like busywork for its own sake.

This is especially tragic when the inherent concept of "the zora king has been wounded by what most zoras would believe to be Zelda and is hiding from his own people so the two factions do not go to war over it" has such tension and interest and spark that the game absolutely refuse to explore --instead having you collect carved stones who do not tell you anything new, splatter water in a floating island, thrud through mud who feel more like an inconvenience than a threat or, hey, listen to children playing about their missing king less than a couple of years after being freed from Calamity Ganon's menace. It feels like level designers/system designers having vague technical systems that are hard-coded in the game now, and we need to put them to use even if it's not that interesting, not that fun or not that compelling. It's the sort of attitude that a lot of western RPGs get eviscerated for; but here, for some reason, it's just a case of "gameplay before story", instead of, quite simply, a case of poorly thought-out gameplay.

Not every quest in the game is like this! I think the tone worked much better in the sidequests overall, that are self-contained and disconnected from the extremely messy main storyline, and so can tell a compelling little tale from start to finish without the budget to make you waddle in a puddle of nothing for hours at a time. It's the only place where you actually get character arcs that are allowed to feel anything that isn't a variation on "very determined" or "curious about the zonai/ruins", and where you get to feel life as it tries to blossom back into a new tomorrow for Hyrule.

But if I'm this harsh about the main storyline, it really is because I find it hard to accept that we do not criticize a structure that is at times so half-assed that you can almost taste employees' burnout seeping through the cracks --the lack of thematic ambition and self-reflection and ingeniosity outside of system design and, arguably at times, level design-- simply because it's Hyrule and we're happy to be there.

There's something in the industry that is called the "wow effect", which is their way to say "cool" without saying "cool". It's basically the money shots, but for games: it's what makes you go "ohhhh" when you play. And it's great! The ascension to the top of the Ark was one of them --breathtaking, just an absolute high point of systems working together to weave an epic tale. You plummeting from the skies to the absolute depths of hell is another one; most of the dungeons rely on that factor to keep your attention; the entire Zelda is a dragon storyline is nothing but "wow effect" (and yeah, the moment where you do remove the Master Sword did give me shivers, I'll admit to this willingly) and so is Ganondorf's presence and presentation in the game --he's here to be cool, non-specifically mean, hateable in a non-threatening way and to give us a good sexy time, do not think about it too hard. What bothers me is that TotK's world has basically nothing to offer but "wow effect"; that if you bother to dig at anything it presents you for more than a second, everything crumbles into incoherence --not only in story, but in mood, in themes, in identity. This is a wonderfully fun game with absolutely nothing to say, relying on the cultural osmosis and aura of excellency surrounding Zelda to pass itself off as meatier than it really is. This is what I say when I criticize it as self-referential to a fault; half of the story makes no sense if this is your first Zelda game, and what little of that world there is tends to be deeply unconcerned and uncurious about itself.

And no, Breath of the Wild wasn't like this. Breath of the Wild was deeply curious about itself; the entire game was built off curiosity and discovery, experimentation and challenge (and I say this while fully admitting I had more fun with the loop of TotK, which I found more forgiving overall). The traversal in Tears of the Kingdom is centered around: how do I skip those large expanses of land in the most efficient and fun way possible. How do I automate these fights. How do I find resources to automate both traversal and fights better. It's a game that asks questions (who are the zonais, who is Rauru and what is his deal, what is the Imprisoning War about, where is Zelda), and then kind of doesn't really care about the answers (yeah the zonais are like... guys, they did a cool kingdom, Rauru used to run it, the Imprisoning War is literally whatever all you have to care about is who to feel sad for and who to kill about it and you don't get a choice and certainly cannot feel any ambiguous feelings about any of that, and Zelda is a dragon but we will never expand on how it felt for her to make such a drastic and violent choice and also nobody cares that's a plot point you could *remove* from the game without changing the golden path at all).

I'm so aggravated by the argument "in Zelda, it's gameplay before story" because gameplay is story. That's the literal point of my work as a narrative designer: trying to breach the impossibly large gap between what the game designers want to do, and what the writers are thinking the game will be about (it's never the same game). And in TotK, the game systems are all about automation and fusion. It's about practicality and efficiency. It's also about disconnecting stuff from their original purpose as you optimize yourself out of danger, fear, or curiosity --except for the way you can become even more efficient. And sure, BotW was about this too; but you were rewarded because you had explored the world in the first place, experimented enough, put yourself in danger, went to find out the story of who you used to be and why you should care about Hyrule. I'm not here to argue BotW was a well-written game; I think it was pretty tropey at large to be honest, safe for a couple of moments of brilliance, but it had a coherent design vision that rewarded your curiosity while never getting in the way of the clarity of your objective. There is a convolutedness to TotK that, to me, reveals some extremely deep-seated issues with the direction the series is heading towards; one that, at its core, cares more about looking the part of a Zelda game than having any deeper conversation about what a Zelda game should be.

[sophieinwonderland]

A More Comprehensive Look At Proxy Bypassing...

One of my posts recently talked about Proxying and Proxy Bypassing. This seems to have created some confusion about how Proxying and Proxy Bypassing actually work. And I'll confess, I'm not always the best at explaining things.

So before going on, I want to establish what these terms actually mean.

Proxying: This is the act of typing or writing for another headmate who isn't fronting.

Proxy Bypassing: Bypassing occurs when, while proxying, the nonfronter's words start flowing directly into the fingers faster than the fronter can process them.

To eliminate some of the confusion, I edited the title of the diagram from before to make it clear that this is mostly about the bypassing itself, not just proxying in general.

It is possible for systems to proxy without bypassing happening, which I don't think I was clear enough on when I made the diagram.

But it does USUALLY happen. Especially when writing long paragraphs.

Some have also asked how this is different from possession. And the difference, to me, lies in the fact that possession is more voluntary movement whereas proxy bypassing is largely involuntary and happens unconsciously. People don't choose to Bypass and often may not even realize it happened until after the fact.

So... what's actually going on here?

Because the above is an explanation for what it is, but not actually why it happens.

Well for that, we need to talk about some basic psychology and neurology.

The Cerebrum and Cerebellum

To start, let's take this very basic diagram of the brain from the Cleveland Clinic. Later, we're going to draw all over it in a way definitely not approved by the Cleveland Clinic.

The Cerebrum is the biggest part of your brain. This is the part of your brain that deals with higher thinking, consciousness, emotions, autobiographical memories, etc. There is a lot going on here. But as plurals, just know that if your headmates are anywhere in the brain, it's going to be in the Cerebrum.

Meanwhile the Cerebellum is more for carrying out more automatic processes, balance, motor control etc.

Do you ever notice how when you walk, you aren't consciously thinking about putting one foot in front of the other? How you aren't consciously thinking about how to maintain balance and not fall over? You just sort of point the body in the direction you want it to go, decide the speed you want to walk, and then it kind of just handles all those other details on its own without you having to think about it.

One way to imagine this might be that the Cerebrum contains more conscious programs like headmates... while the Cerebellum contains nonconscious ones. Commands of where to walk and how fast are sent from headmates in the Cerebrum to the Cerebellum which then actually dictates the movement.

(Note: This is a huge, HUGE oversimplification about these brain structures. But it's a necessary one for what I'm trying to explain here.)

We might conceptualize this relationship like this:

Headmate 1 sends what they want to happen to the Walking Program which then sends it to the through your nerves to have the actions carried out.

As you might guess, typing similarly is ran by processes in the Cerebellum, as are basically all motor skills. That's why it often feels a little automatic when you're typing, and why you don't need to think of where every individual letter is on the keyboard as you type.

So just as there's a walking program, there's also a typing program.

Now, when Proxying without Bypassing, Headmate 2 sends information to Headmate 1 who sends it to the Typing Program in the Cerebellum.

But as you can see, this is inefficient. It's an incredibly inefficient way for the brain to work.

So what does it do instead?

Well, my theory is that the Typing program essentially starts listening to Headmate 2 directly, if it already knows that it's going to be typing what Headmate 2 is saying. There's no logical reason to keep Headmate 1 involved in the process with Headmate 1 just acting as a middleman.

Hence, the signal bypasses the fronter and goes straight into the typing program.

Headmate 1 has not actually left front even if they may be a bit dissociated. But this automatic program is now taking instructions from a different headmate.

And unless Headmate 2 can already possess limbs, they may still not be able to do anything else with the hands except type. Because they're still not actually possessing. They're just sending information to the typing program which is what's actually sending it to the fingers.

Conclusion

I hope this explains a bit better how proxying and proxy bypassing work.

Thanks everyone who asked about proxying and proxy bypassing, because I tend to forget that just because something is making sense in my head, it won't to everyone else's and I need to get better at explaining these concepts in ways people can understand. Hopefully this was a bit more successful.

And thanks to the Cleveland Clinic for giving me such a nice brain to draw all over! 😜

[scoobydoodean]

I've noticed people often point to Donatello as the model soulless person and then argue the sharp contrast between him and Sam as proof that deep down, Sam is just a really shitty guy who has terrible thoughts that he manages to keep under wraps only with a soul. I don't think this is that fair of a take.

I think using Donatello as the contrasting character is cherry-picking and that Donatello is a very poor comparison for Sam. Donatello is more of an exceptional soulless person than a rule. We see multiple examples in season 11 of other people losing their souls. Several go crazy and murder people like feral animals. None of them have the ability to feel right vs wrong—they just understanding the existence of the societal rules they've grown up with, and either accept those rules or don't based on what they believe is in their best interest. Previous traumas also seem to play a role.

Someone like Donatello has never been through anything traumatic that we know of, and he's just a professor. He has no need or incentive to kill anyone and no previous traumas that might induce him to want to harm anybody. Intellectually, he likely understands rules as a good way of maintaining societal order. He also understands that if he breaks the rules, he's going to get in trouble and lose his job, go to jail, etc. He isn't a fighter. He's just a professor and all he wants to be is a professor. The biggest moral quandary he deals with on a daily basis is whether to bump a student's course total up half a point to get them to the next letter grade. His goal is simply to continue being a professor. The rational option for him is to be a model citizen whether he can feel what the right thing is or only understands rules on an intellectual level.

The core thing soulless Sam tells you about Sam is that being a hunter is the occupation he finds most interesting (or else he'd go do something else that he found more intellectually fulfilling). All he cares about is killing monsters and capturing alphas and the intellectual fulfillment he feels when he clocks a witnesses lies (6.06) or solves the latest case puzzle. Fulfillment isn't nearly so cut and dry for Sam with a soul, because he has to deal with emotions which create more conflicting goals and desires than simple intellectual stimulation.

Hunters live lives where they are constantly faced with moral dilemmas that normal people will never face, and they know how to escape legal consequences. This is what makes soulless Sam such a dangerous hunter and why the outcome is so different from someone like Donatello. Soulless Sam's most rational option is not necessarily the societally acceptable one. Sometimes there is no societally acceptable option or any written rule that encompasses the complexity of the actual situation. Normally, hunters will "feel" out what's right and what's wrong in these situations. Soulless Sam identifies this ability as something he lacks. Sam recognizes this as a hindrance at first and wants Dean to fill that role for him (6.01, 6.06, 6.08). However, he also slowly begins to think that maybe other hunters are the problem and are hindered by their emotions and that he is better because he's capable of pure efficiency-based rationality. This is why he lies to Samuel, lies to Dean, and keeps secrets from Dean for Samuel (6.06, 6.07). He wants their help to reach his own goals, but increasingly sees their potential emotional reactions to his actions and each others actions as an inefficient hindrance that will impede the mission.

Letting a vamp turn Dean isn't something Sam with a soul would do or likely even think to do. This is the guy who went on two multi month revenge quests after his brother was killed (3.11, 4.01/4.09). With a soul, he cares about Dean's safety—even when he pretends he doesn't. He's hurt and killed people for hurting Dean or to keep Dean safe and he's been willing to hurt and kill more (example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4, example 5, example 6). Soulless Sam also has no reason to want Dean harmed unless it benefits him. There is nothing in him to love Dean, but there's also nothing in him to hate Dean. When he sees Dean being turned, and stops in his tracks, and smiles, it isn't actually because he's taking pleasure in seeing Dean being humiliated. There's nothing in him to feel hate toward Dean like that. Even hate like that would require a soul. Why Sam is smiling—what he's taking pleasure in—is seeing his plan come together—a solution to the issue of "find the alpha vampire". He immediately realizes he has an "in", and because Dean is merely a tool who can benefit him, his suffering that occurs in the process doesn't matter to the equation—just what Soulless Sam can get out of him. Using Dean, he's solved the latest intellectual puzzle. The same thing happens in 6.10 when Meg is on Dean's lap with a knife, making sexually suggestive commentary. Sam laughs—and Dean at first thinks it's because soulless Sam enjoys seeing him being treated that way, but Sam tells us he's laughing because he's figured Meg out—because he realizes she's desperate and scared of Crowley. Laughing at her takes also takes away her sense that she has the upper hand.

[allwormdiet]

Agitation 3.1

Got waylaid by work and brain weather, but we're back to it. Let's see how Taylor's life is going

Her routine has come up before, but it bears saying that I think Taylor's actual superpower might just be that she's a morning person who can hold herself to accomplish daily goals, like goddamn girl

The constant, casual cruelty that makes up so much of Taylor's history is equal parts saddening and infuriating. I'm sure we'll get an explanation for why the bullies do this to her, I think I've said as much in previous posts, but also as mentioned in previous posts I find it aggravating to endure.

...I don't know if this is quite the right place in my reading to speculate on it, but I'm not sure if Taylor even has a shot at university at this point, even setting aside the cape thing. The bullies are all in her year, which means they'd never be separated from her by graduation. Their constant sabotage and harassment would mean her grades are low, so even if she gets into a college with whatever GPA she can bodge together (and no extracurriculars to pad her application out), she's probably not going to earn any scholarships and money's already pretty tight for the Heberts. That means student loans, and probably shit rates considering the world they're in.

Maybe this is my bitter ass reflecting on how the greatest benefits I got out of going to college were completely incidental to the courses I took or the degree I earned, but... Taylor, I know college meant a lot to your mom, I just don't think that path is nearly as open to you as it used to be. I think it's fine to just learn a trade, and I think it's fine if the trade is armed robbery.

So you're telling me Taylor's self-image used to be worse? Jeeesus

I like that Brian knows how to blend into an environment as the situation calls for it. That speaks to a pretty keen observational ability, and also is maybe tied to his need to act more grown-up than he is. And now I'm sad again.

"I want" is cute, embarrassment is for suckers (I say, easily embarrassed)

I don't even like coffee, but a fifteen dollar coffee had better be the best coffee you've ever had, oh my god

And honestly that must have been weird for every member of the team, just suddenly having money not be a problem anymore. Taylor's holding out for now, although I suspect it won't be that way forever, and everyone else either wants or needs it bad enough for their own ends that I don't think they're gonna think about it too hard (except for Lisa, who has the full context and whose power is thinking too hard)

Taylor please don't undersell your injuries to your teammates, I don't like you doing it with your dad but I understand it. Here though? Come onnnnn

Yeah there we go

Violence is an easy language to understand. Cruel, obviously, and painful, but if Rachel is already struggling with other people's words and feelings (five bucks says she's autistic tbh) then getting the shit kicked out of her is probably a better sell on the new recruit than any pretty speech

...Ideally they move past that pretty quick so words can be used again

Also poor Rachel, for real. Ten years in the system and then whatever it was that triggered her powers, which is obviously never good. No wonder she came out the other end more willing to trust dogs than people.

Ugh, my heart

Is she showing off for the guy she's crushing on? That's adorable

Curious that the limits of her power seem to be based on complexity of the brain. I assume there has to be a brain at all or else she could just shoot germs at people, although that'd also be a little bit inefficient as a power unless she started getting into disease warfare and holy shit this would be a very different story if Taylor could give people smallpox

Gotta be a weird day for the crab though

Couple things here

Brian you're not even eighteen yet as far as I know, what the hell

Of course Lisa cheated, she's built to cheat, at that point I'm not sure it even counts as cheating

Knowing what I know about Alec, somehow I doubt he was ever in school to drop out in the first place

...on the flipside I'm a little surprised that Rachel never went during her time in the system, you'd figure that'd be a condition of her fostering but either the guardians didn't give a shit or she fought her way out of ever actually attending

Also, I know it's a matter of course that she'd have a key to the base, but it's sweet all the same

It's nice of Brian to make this offer, although I'm willing to bet it's because he's the only Undersider who would get up before 6 AM. It's also a pretty smart call to keep her up to date this way

Also very funny that Taylor is like "Oh I like Lisa just fine but she scares the shit out of me"

...Also also, for real, Lisa has to already know what's going on with Taylor right? There's no way Taylor's good enough at lying to bury that one.

Girl I'm dreading it and I'm just reading about it

This is just. So goddamn sad. And maddening, to boot.

Gee Taylor you sure to seem to spend a fair amount of time thinking about the comparative attractiveness of other women

Agonizing, though, for real. Wildbow has knocked every school scene out of the park and I hate it.

I wonder if Taylor's gonna even bother coming back to school at this point. First day she left mid lunch, second day she left right after lunch started, here she's splitting before first period. As much as she clings to this side of her life... I don't know if it's any healthier than full-time villainy.

Go blow off steam with your new friends Taylor

Current Thoughts

I actually don't have any real expectations for this arc going into it. Obviously Arc 1 is the start of... I mean kind of everything, and Arc 2 is made up of the immediate aftermath from those events. This one? I dunno. I was a little worried I'd have to deal with another chapter of Winslow, but it looks like Taylor decided she was sick of that shit

I like Brian, but I think mostly I'm worried for him? This is a lot of effort so far made to seem mature and normal, and I don't know if that's possible for a teenager who goes out to be a supervillain. It's admirable in a sense, but I'm worried about how fragile it leaves him.

I don't love that Rachel seems satisfied by an exchange of violence but that's more bc I don't want these kids beating the shit out of each other, not any kind of "this is bad actually" sense.

Other than that I'm mostly just curious what the rest of this arc looks like. Thank fuck it's not more high school.

Oh, yeah, I'm gonna try and read more at work today, I might take my screenshots then and see if they drive me up a wall, but even if so I'll just retake them when I get home. Fingers crossed work is slow enough for it.

[ach-sss-no]

Things I do if i'm stuck on a WIP

I keep seeing memes about people fighting with their WIPs so maybe you could use some handy weapons?

Some of these are passed around pretty often, but they're in here again because I personally found them useful, as opposed to the common advice I see passed around that has never helped me whatsoever, also, you never know when it's someone's first time seeing something or when it might be worded in a way that makes it more understandable.

Some of these are more useful when you have some options for how to proceed with your story but can't decide on one, and won't be as helpful if you can see no way to proceed.

These are intended primarily for writing and many don't really have other applications I can think of, but some of these strategies should also work for any creative thing you're trying to do that is not progressing in the way you want it to.

Disclaimer: Sometimes none of these work. Good luck!

CRIPES, I'm Stuck

Complain

Tell someone (or pretend to tell someone) who does not know the inner workings of your story all about your story problem in as much detail as you can articulate. The more detail the better, including what events led up to this point and what you want to achieve going forward. Go all the way back to what the main premise is, even. When I do this I often end up figuring out the problem while I am describing it and never even send the message, which is why this can be an imaginary conversation if input from another human is not desired and/or available for whatever reason. You can also tell your problems to your cat, dog, tarantula, or Pokémon team! BONUS: Those things are all cheaper than a therapist!

Randomize

If you have multiple ideas for how to go forward and are paralyzed because you can see no greater or lesser value in any of them, great news! The machine can be trusted! (Disclaimer: The machine cannot be trusted) Go to random.org and use the list randomizer to scramble your potential plot options. Pick the one on top. If you realize you're unhappy with it, examine why. Whatever reason why you've decided you don't like that option after all will help guide you towards what you should be doing instead.

Got any kind of two option yes/no, pass/fail, success/disaster question? Flip a coin! This can be done digitally if you don't have coins lying around (I usually don't myself).

There is also the tried and true method of dice-rolling, which can also be done via app if you don't have dice of the desired type or you've lost yours.

Really stuck? Showrunner's challenge.

Iterate

This is both the least efficient one and the thing I do the most often. Writing a scene? Not sure how it should go? Just write different versions of it until something sticks.

Every time you feel unhappy with the scene, back up to the point that led to whatever you're not jiving with, cut it, and start over from there. I recommend saving all of your different versions so you can reconsider or do some horrific Frankenstein cut-and-paste later.

Like I said: horrendously inefficient. it doesn't have to be pretty... it just has to exist.

Play

Go do something else totally unrelated to writing. Just go do something else you enjoy. Just take a break. Your brain may actually fix your story problem when you ignore it and let it run in the background, and if it doesn't, you get a break. No downside! Chances are, you've heard that before. I'm telling you again because I so often fall prey to the 'but my break will be more satisfying if I fix the problem first' well, it's not getting fixed and I am not equipped to fix it right now or it would be fixed already, so it's break time now.

Work on another project that seems more fun to you at the moment. Battering your head against your current WIP because you think you "should" work on it instead of whatever shinier idea is in your head is probably not helping you progress on that project. Working on something else as a treat may jog your brain to unstuck you from your main idea, and if not, it will lead to a new creative product existing, and even if it never gets finished, you've tricked yourself into thinking art is fun again. No downside!

There's nothing wrong with adding [placeholderlmao] and going on to a part of the story you like better. In fact, knowing what happens later may help you fix the problem point (assuming you don't already know because you either don't work from an outline, or your story has diverged so wildly from the outline that it's not helpful anymore)

Edit

Depending on the length of your project and whether you have already declared parts of it off-limits this may not apply; but if you don't want to go forward right now, it may be a good time to go back and edit what you already have written. Sometimes when I do this I will see a stray idea I mentioned earlier that I can follow up on now, and that gives me a new path forward. I'll also sometimes discover that, while my current story problem is manifesting at my sticking point, the cause of it happened much earlier and needs to be addressed farther back in the story (and once that's done I'm not stuck anymore!) Just like pulling crabgrass out by the roots.

Did you have an outline that has stopped tracking with your story? Maybe you should go look at that outline and revise it to the new version, or at least remind yourself of what you thought was important to put in it. If nothing else, doing this should help you think differently about your story.

Steal

That's right! There are millions on billions of stories out there. Just like infinitely variable humans are built upon skeletons that look very similar, your story is uniquely yours, but its underlying structure probably follows a pattern that other stories with similar goals have used since human communication began. So go look up a story you enjoy that includes a similar scene to the one you're struggling with, and look at what it did to fix the problem you're having. Chances are, there's a way to map that onto your story while keeping your version unique, or at least you can get some helpful hints. Do expand beyond the medium you're working in. There's a lot that novels/movies/games/etc do differently, but basic story beats and interactions between characters are pretty consistent things across anything that's telling a story. If I'm looking for a model for a scene, I always look for something with a similar plot, theme or character dynamic that I thought was done well.

Alternately, do you know of a story that tried to do what you're doing and failed spectacularly? Go look closely at that and see why it's not working. Then ask yourself how those problems could have been avoided. The solution you arrive at may apply to your story as well, or at least lead in the right direction. Alternately-alternately: Do it wrong on purpose for the fun of it and fix it later (or don't fix it later)

Just have no ideas? Hang out with stories with the vibes you want until something clicks. When I was doing this fancomic, I watched The Emperor's New Groove a lot.

Well, there you go. If you think I missed something- which I absolutely did, because the creative process is very individual and there are some highly successful things I never, ever do and can't speak on because I am restricting myself to things I have personally done and found helpful-

-please add it on to this post, and make it longer and longer until no one is ever stuck on a WIP ever again (✿◡‿◡) because they are all too busy reading this infinitely long post to start any projects!

[bismuthburnsblue]

Help me design a dress!

this is our fabric! (left is the product image, right is my actual piece of fabric- ruler on the left is cm, on the right is inches, to give you an idea of print scale) its the black version of the break up robe print, in a lightweight & crisp cotton. i have 4.5m (5y) so it should be enough to make most designs, though some will require consideration in the cutting- we will get to that later though. (the fabric is also narrow, i think its only 110cm wide. (its still folded in the picture))

my goal here is to make a comfy wearable dress, something pretty casual & everyday in silhouette, but i would also like if it was possible to style up for a more formal look. most of my inspiration for this project has come from 1950s dresses, because thats a style i lean towards for myself, though im not aiming for anything "true vintage" or anything. im also fond of lolita dresses, so im more than down to draw inspiration from those also!

also, the print is pretty bold compared to my usual style, so ive considered doing some kind of translucent (chiffon, tulle, mesh) overlay to tone it down so its more wearable in my wardrobe. this will entirely depend on it working with out final design, and even then, ill offer you the decision at the end! ultimately, i still want to be able to appreciate the fabric. (for sewing people: id intend to do it as a flat lining, so it sits right up against the fabric underneath, not as a complete separate layer. i find this makes it block out the design slightly less) doing this could also help with adding structure to the dress, which i already think some designs might need, considering how thin the fabric is.

ok now the brief is out of the way, onto the first decision for the dress: the shape of the skirt. if you want to vote based entirely on vibes, feel free to click away, but i have included some more writing about each option & its ups and downs in this particular project under the cut (also pictures of each style if youre not so familar with what they are!)

& the propaganda for the options:

Circle skirt: you can never go wrong with a circle skirt- theyre probably my favourite to wear overall & i especially like the low bulk join to the waist as i sometimes find things with gathers dont sit as nicely on me. the way circle skirts are cut also gives them a movement that the other two methods simply cannot compete with in my eyes.

The main downside is working a circle skirt with this particular fabric. the fabric is not wide enough to cut the entire front as one, so i would either need a centre front seam or to make it a 3/4 circle skirt- something im 100% ok with, i honestly find at midi length a full circle to be too much sometimes. (there is technically the option to have full circle but rotate it so the seams are at side, but that might then mean i have to do some shenanigans with where the fastenings go). also, because the design is directional, each quarter will need to be cut so the seams end up on the bias, which makes for an Incredibly inefficient cutting layout. (again, if theres a CF seam, thatll be on the diagonal of the design, which really defeats the point of putting in the effort in the first place, to me.) i think i would be able to get all the panels i need out of the piece of fabric i have, but i think i would be a bit more limited with top options as i try to make sure to use as many of the small pieces left over as possible.

Gathered skirt: these are by far the easiest to do in terms of sewing. in my research into casual 50's dresses about 90% of all pictures i saw featured a dress with a gathered skirt (or actually, a lot seemed to have tiny pleats that give the effect of gathers, like the coral one. if we vote this way, i would be tempted to go try them as i think it might solve my bothers with gathered skirts in general)

i generally find gathered skirts less flattering on me- they add bulk at the waist and then hang straight down off the hips (when not puffed up with a petticoat) and thats generally not something i like on myself. i could improve that though by bringing more fabric in to increase the hem, and adding horsehair braid to the hem to help it swoop without additional support (again, my goal for this project is causal day dress)

this pattern uses the least fabric i think, depending on how much you put in the skirt- i think i should get a perfectly satisfactorily full skirt from this with less than 2m of fabric used. (honestly might end up too efficient- id like to use up all the fabric i have in this, and i really dont need that much for a bodice. i can see myself adding 4, even 5 widths into the skirt to use up yardage. i dont particularly see that as a problem though)

despite my reservations because of gathered skirts ive made before, for this project it does have one massive point in its favour: the fact that its still a full piece of fabric. all other styles here all cut quite significantly into the design to create their shape, while this be one panel of the fabric from edge to edge. preserving the design of this fabric is pretty high on my priority list, after all, i bought this fabric specifically because it was the OFMD break up robe print. i want whatever design i make to work with that.

Tiered skirt: for me, tiered skirts are the best of both worlds in terms of the effect they give. the fact each layer doubles means they keep some of the swish a circle skirt gives (and, i find, they tend to have more of the A-Line shape of a circle skirt too) while not being quite so consuming of fabric as you cut. i couldnt find many examples of 50's dresses with them (though i did find some) so i do feel like this style pulls more towards the style of lolita dresses & that might be reflected in the options i offer in subsequent rounds.

if you know anything about petticoats, then youll notice that this style of skirt is essentially the same construction as them (though petticoats often introduce extra layers and ruffles and.....) when ive made this style of skirt in the past i have found that it holds volume much like a petticoat does, without the need for an extra undergarment- something thats great for a casual dress!

I was thinking three tiers is the ideal number for this dress, though i could make it only two. i dont think i would make it more as, if i keep them even (which was my intention, though i am also fond of the styles that increase with each tier like my example images) then each tier will probably be 20cm wide, which is already looking like itll cut into the features of the design. i think that is the single biggest downside for this style- i wont reasonably be able to do much 'fussy cutting' either to work with the print, its simply not practical to do on this scale.

At a rough estimate, i think this is gonna use 3m of fabric in the skirt, which puts it slap bang in the middle in terms of fabric efficiency. i should have plenty enough to do it, maybe even to increase it if i want to, while still being pretty unlimited about what i do with the rest of the design.

one last thing- trim! one unique feature of this design is the opportunity to play with trim on the skirt itself. i do have some bodice ideas that play around with trim, and it would be really nice to introduce it into the skirt too, if we go that way. it could even be a fun nod to the piping on the original break up robe!!!!

Something else (comment): while doing my research i came across SO MANY design ideas that i could play around with. for this poll i picked the three i thought would probably work the best for this project, but i wanted an opportunity for you to yell at me if you want something different entirely. feel free to suggest anything you like, but ive included a couple images as examples of styles i saw a lot. i especially saw a lot like on the left, with gathering or ruffles off to the side, but the front panel being pretty flat. this might be real fun for some designs like shirtdresses, but im not super confident on how itd look on me. either way, feel free to form a coalition in the replies to tell me how i totally should have offered you this one particular option.

(if you vote for this but dont comment, im discounting it from the overall stats as i have no idea what design you mean! your welcome to send it in on anon if that bothers you, but either way, ill need a description :P )

[brucenorris007]

(Dis)Closure

Summary: A great part of Shadow's identity stems from the past and people who have already long since departed. Knowing and accepting the fact are two separate things, and he's already lost no small amount of sleep over it. In the midst of a mission and entirely on accident, he comes across someone who might be able to understand.

6242 words

“Decommission?”

Shadow’s throat closed up; even if he could bring himself to speak, he wouldn’t trust himself.

“Fifty years and change it’s been up there,” Rouge said, ever willing to cover for him. “Why now?”

“It’s being discussed.” The Commander said. He shared a look with Shadow; the understanding they’d reached years ago may have been lukewarm at best, but they had the ARK in common, even if their memories didn’t overlap.

Though he, at least, could rely on his memories of the place.

“It’s been discussed several times, but there’s been more of a push for action the past few months. Hardly a guarantee that anything will go through, of course.”

Rouge huffed; Shadow blinked. A rare dry remark about the glacial pace of decisions in government from the Commander; he must’ve had severely conflicting feelings on the subject.

“In any case,” he said, pressing on. “Renewed discussion means there’s precedent for a reassessment of the state of the ARK.”

“And that’s why you called me in.” Shadow said, trying to seem more present than he felt.

“Agents Shadow and Rouge will accompany unit E-123 and a small G.U.N. team to collect data and compile a comprehensive report on the ARK, it’s functions and general status. Prioritize thoroughness and accuracy over efficiency; we don’t want to find the report lacking in any way.”

Shadow blinked; something about that last point felt off. He glanced sidelong at Rouge; she stared at the Commander through narrowed eyes, tapping a finger on the table.

“Dismissed.”

The Commander, naturally, gave nothing else away.

—————

“It’s all bogus.”

Rouge waited until they were back at the house–away from prying ears–making their respective preparations before she weighed in on the mission.

Or ‘pile of excrement wrapped in shiny foil’ as she colorfully called it at one point.

“There’s no way G.U.N. doesn’t have a comprehensive file already,” she said. “They don’t need a separate squad dedicated to finding out which switches and levers still work.”

“IT IS ILLOGICAL,” Omega agreed. “DEACTIVATION IS INEFFICIENT AND WASTEFUL.”

“They’ll never go through with it,” Rouge said. “Setting aside the less savory aspects of its history, the ARK is still cutting edge even after fifty years. Decommissioning means lost money and releasing control of it; that’s not the government’s style. I smell a PR stunt.”

Shadow experienced the conversation as something happening around him rather than anything that involved him; owing far more to his headspace than either Rouge or Omega’s intentions.

He’d been having trouble sleeping again; despite being designed by one of history’s most brilliant minds, fatigue still accumulated and affected him.

“A DEFECT SHARED BY ALL MEATBAGS.”

Omega had once said.

Shadow wasn’t sure whether his friend had been teasing him or making an awkward attempt at consolation.

Possibly both.

“Hey.”

Shadow blinked and looked up at Rouge. She raised an upturned fist, threw a middle finger at him.

Shadow responded in kind, almost mechanically.

Rouge narrowed her eyes by a millimeter and hummed.

He looked around his gun closet again; having already spent fifteen minutes staring at his arsenal, he ultimately walked back out empty-handed.

—————

Space colony ARK.

Space station, research facility, military installation, and superweapon all in one.

Rouge wore her professional face well in front of the other soldiers, but she seemed less than enthused to have returned. Though that might have had more to do with annoyance regarding aspects of the mission rather than the ARK itself.

“The three of us could cover this facility in half a day; instead, they’ve bogged us down with a squad and all but told us not to rush. We’re just stalling so a bunch of suits and politicians down there can argue for another few weeks. If G.U.N. needs us to waste time somewhere, it should’ve been Venice.”

On the other hand, Omega had significantly more interest in the assignment; if only as an excuse to peruse and explore something that once took out a chunk of the moon.

“DIBS ON THE CONTROL ROOM.”

For his part, Shadow had spent a decent stretch of the last few years actively trying to avoid thinking too much about the ARK; a decidedly counterproductive strategy. Resistance to a strain of thought only led to a greater frequency of the same. Recently, he’d learned to accept thoughts of the space station passing through his mind without fighting them or affording them undue attention.

So, in theory, he would have been fine with the assignment.

Would have been, if it didn’t also require the company of a small G.U.N. unit; a ratio of two soldiers to one tech or engineer. His general relationship with the organization was at best professional; in more realistic terms, tenuous. He and Omega were employed largely by proxy to Rouge. Not for lack of qualifications, but the government was never going to wholly trust a bioweapon that once nearly broke the planet or a walking armory built by the world’s foremost terrorist.

And on their end, Omega loathed the idea of answering to any master save himself.

The source of Shadow’s misgivings didn’t warrant mention.

“All right, folks, let’s go over this one more time.”

The one silver lining, if one could be found, was that agent Roque had been included among those assigned to the mission. Team Dark would be hard-pressed to say they actively liked any of the other soldiers or agents employed by G.U.N., but a handful were certainly preferable to the rest. The deciding factors usually boiled down to: how they spoke to Rouge–and where their eyes went when doing so; whether they referred to Omega by name or series number; and what they said about Shadow, either to his face or behind his back.

Those who fell short were the most frequent victims of Omega’s pranks.

Roque earned a passing grade on all counts.

“We’re going to work our way through the colony quadrant by quadrant; we’re going to at least double-check every room and chamber,” he said, pinching his mouth for a split-second like he’d eaten something sour. Apparently, Roque and Rouge were of a similar mind on the mission being a waste of time. “But that’s no excuse to slack off on your reports.”

Roque folded his arms.

“This isn’t a tour, but it is a long-term assignment. Once the ship docks, you unload and find quarters first; do your routines, your business, I don’t care. But unless your name is Shadow, Rouge or Omega, do not wander off, do not split from your teams, and do not get lost.”

“Why are they the exceptions?”

“Because we’ll be in Shadow’s backyard, because Rouge is Rouge, and because Omega isn’t going to listen to anything anyone except those two tell him anyway.”

“AFFIRMATIVE.”

The clicking tongues and resentful looks aimed at Omega just reaffirmed that no one could pick up on when he was joking or being serious. Roque, for his part, smirked.

All right, maybe Team Dark liked him a little bit.

—————

Monotony descended quickly and mercilessly after boarding the ARK.

The tedium–and more specifically, the lack of any action or problem to occupy his mind–was wearing Shadow down further. The long halls and passages were bleeding together, even for him.

Team Dark was trudging back to their quarters at the end of another shift; Rouge was plumbing Omega’s CPU for synonyms for functional or operable to put in her reports of the spaces they’d checked so far. Omega’s utterly rote responses said that he felt about as invested in the process as she did.

Shadow kept pace between them, gaze trailing along the floor; trying, fruitlessly, to empty his mind.

His ear twitched.

Footfalls rang off the metallic walls.

Heavy tread. Boots.

From somewhere behind him. Approaching fast.

His hands sweat.

Raised voices.

His vision tunneled.

Military uniform.

Loaded guns.

He needed to go.

“. . . hell are you. . .?!”

“. . . CREATURE.”

Bang.

He needed to be–

“Shadow!”

not here.

Kvhroon.

—————

Kvhroon.

Shadow fumbled his landing; still gripping the chaos emerald, he reached for the nearest support his free hand could find to steady himself. Breathed. Fought to breathe slower.

Sunlight, grass, tree bark against his palm, the smell of naturally flowing and clean–not sterile, but clean–water.

Everything the ARK was not.

“Haaaa. . .”

Eventually, the next breath came out easier; less harried and clearer. The sudden shift between locations, away from the scene of… from the scene helped him grasp an equilibrium.

He squeezed his eyes shut. Took another deep breath. Exhaled.

Opened his eyes.

Daylight filtered gently through a canopy of trees and massive mushrooms in a forest jarringly absent the scent of anything like modern civilization. Save a nearby creek, the area was silent; but as he stood there taking in the scenery and letting the adrenalin ebb, birds perched in the branches overhead, chirping curiously.

His appearance must have startled them.

“Shadow?”

His quills jumped and he spun on his heel, fists clenched.

Knuckles’ shoulders hitched and his raised his own fists.

An awkward standoff lasted until Shadow’s next exhale; he dropped his hands. He wondered, in the back of his mind, how the echidna had managed to get as close as he did without being noticed. At least his appearance told Shadow where he’d teleported to, and it made sense that he’d subconsciously choose this place.

Angel Island was as near the antithesis of the ARK as one could get.

“What’s going on?” Knuckles asked, relaxing his stance more readily than Shadow had.

Shadow didn’t know why–whether due to the episode or the fact that he’d only slept around five of the past forty-eight hours–but what came out of his mouth was

“I needed somewhere to rest.”

Knuckles blinked. Shadow broke eye contact. It was more truth than he’d usually afford, but not too much for him to bear.

Knuckles squinted at him for a second. Scratched his head. Then made a sharp 120 degree right turn and walked off, disappearing between the trees and mushroom stalks.

Shadow sighed. Taking the echidna’s behavior for a dismissal, he was about to call on his emerald’s energy to return to the ARK when Knuckles poked his head back into view with a cocked eyebrow.

“You coming?”

He blinked. Opened his mouth. Closed it.

Nodded, for lack of anything better coming to mind. Knuckles walked off again and Shadow followed.

“You’re not going to ask?” Shadow said after a beat of silence save their footstepsin the grass.

Knuckles shrugged.

“If you came here with trouble,” he said, throwing a glance over his shoulder. “Or for a fight, you would have opened with that.”

Shadow didn’t have anything to say to that assessment. It was true, after all.

Conversation fell into a lull until they reached a small clearing; one of the forest creeks fed into a pond with a smattering of lily-pads. Chao sleepily crawled and ambled around the water’s edge, a few curled up together atop the lily-pads.

“A lot of them come here when they’re worn out.” Knuckles said; his normally projecting voice pitched low and quiet.

Shadow tilted his head back. More mushrooms growing out of the hills provided shade and protection from inclement weather; enough ambient light peeking through to see the space without disturbing anyone’s rest. Leaves on branches yet higher softly shshshing in the breeze provided a soothing white noise.

Perhaps Maria would have–

“It’s peaceful.” He said finally, cutting short that thought before it could take form.

Knuckles dropped himself into the grass and cushioned his head on his hands. Shadow noticed one chao rolling down an incline toward the pond. Moving fast and silent, he caught the hapless creature before it reached the water.

Cradling it in his palm, he sat down at the base of a tree; the chao nuzzled into his fur.

Shadow leaned against the tree’s trunk. His eyelids grew heavy and…

.

.

.

.

.

Shadow woke with a start. Blinking bleariness from his eyes and shaking the dregs of slumber out of his quills, he looked around.

It took him a moment longer than he’d admit to remember he was on Angel Island.

‘How long did I. . .?’

He stood up, mindful that he didn’t disturb any of the chao; the one who’d been on his chest had wandered off at some point.

He grabbed his chaos emerald, glanced at Knuckles; found the echidna watching him through one eye.

“Uh.” Shadow said eloquently.

“. . .”

“. . .”

Kvhroon.

—————

“HE HAS RETURNED.”

On making it back to the ARK, Shadow put in a bit of effort pretending he knew where his friends were in front of the other soldiers despite having no idea. The benefit of knowing the space so well; no one questioned where he was meant to be.

He found Omega and Rouge in the room the three of them had claimed as their quarters.

“You okay?” Rouge asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “I just needed space.”

“Two and a half hours of?”

“Yes.” Shadow said immediately; the better to hide his surprise that it’d been that long.

Neither of them questioned him on it, at least.

“Where’d you go?”

“I,” he said, hesitating. He broke eye contact. “Does it matter?”

“Not really,” Rouge admitted with a shrug. “But you don’t usually teleport when you need space.”

“IS THE CAUSE OF YOUR INSOMNIA RELEVANT?”

Shadow winced. He thought he’d disguised his sleeplessness fairly well. Then again, they’d been living together for more than four years. Omega suddenly leaned in, unblinking eyes staring.

Shadow’s quills bristled at the assessment.

“What?”

“RESPONSE TIME AND OCULAR REACTION SPEED NEARER TO BASELINE: YOU HAVE RESTED.”

Omega sounded satisfied by that conclusion. Shadow blinked and folded his arms, reaching for something to divert attention off him.

“What was the commotion about before?”

—————

The commotion, as it turned out, had been the result of a few soldiers encountering a stray displaying erratic behavior.

(“You know those blobby liquid things roaming around in and out of the colony?”

“Artificial Chaos.”

“Apparently one lashed out; they’re supposed to guard this place and should recognize G.U.N. as something like an ally. They said it escaped just in the middle of a chase.”)

In any case, the idea of a malicious stray proved infinitely more interesting to the unit than ticking off a list of rooms in the colony. Roque hadn’t been especially moved by the enthusiasm.

(“Look, this place has been around a long time; a lot’s happened up here. Keep your eyes open, but we’re not organizing a manhunt for a single stray.”)

Thus, while the parameters for the mission hadn’t changed, the soldiers and techs were marginally more alert with the potential of encountering the anomalous experiment; the latter out of a sense of self-preservation, the former due to a desire to shoot something.

For Shadow, business carried on as usual. Assess the state of various chambers, make note of what was in working order and what wasn’t, keep his mind on a leash to prevent wandering.

“This place creeps me out.”

And occasionally endure commentary when Team Dark and one of the tech/soldier teams happened to be moving in the same direction.

“I hope they shut all this down for keeps; I woke up in a cold sweat and I got chills every hour on the hour since then.”

“Sounds like a sickness to me.” Rouge muttered quietly as they trailed a few paces behind the other team.

“What do you expect from a place run by a Robotnik?”

Unlike Rouge, the G.U.N. soldiers were whispering a little too loud for anyone to believe they didn’t want to be heard. Shadow could have backtracked or stopped until the other team split off down a different path, but that somehow felt too much like giving up.

“Crazy like Eggman doesn’t occur naturally; hell, it’s probably hereditary.”

The whirring in Omega’s chassis briefly shifted into a faint, agitated hum. Rouge put a hand in Shadow’s quills and gave a single, gentle tug. Shadow clenched his fist, trying to ground himself.

“Might’ve been for the best that”

Motion at the end of the passage caught his eye; the liquid movement and turquoise coloration prompted him to race past the soldiers.

“Wha–?”

“I see it.”

Giving nothing else in the way of context, he rounded the corner; briefly jumping to kick off the adjacent wall and maintain as much momentum as he could. The stray slithered and swam, moving fast considering its composition.

Still not as fast as Shadow.

Inside of a minute, he had it cornered, volatile and jagged chaos energy ready to fly from his hand. The cyborg flared its liquid body into a larger, more substantive shape, yet didn’t attack. Part of the apparatus on its head was damaged, partially immersed within the viscous fluid of its body. Somehow, it managed to maintain a shape despite that.

Shadow stared the creature down for a full beat. Two.

He heard footsteps approaching.

The spear of energy in his palm dissipated.

The stray flew into a ventilation shaft just as he turned his back to meet the others.

“Did you get it?”

“No,” he said, walking past them. “I was mistaken.”

Hours later, unknown to all but him, one of the station’s airlocks disengaged; an odd combination of ancient deity and cybernetic technology disappeared into the depths of space.

—————

Shadow found himself returning to Angel Island more than once. Not so long as to be missed–at least not by anyone save Omega and Rouge–but even brief periods away made his assignment on the ARK more tolerable.

Something about the tranquility and absence of industry made his head feel less claustrophobic. His thoughts had more room to breathe off the ARK than on, even if he never really aired those thoughts aloud.

He didn’t always fall asleep; when he did, Knuckles would be there when he awoke, ever the conscientious guardian of the island. Sometimes he just sat in silence; Knuckles wouldn't disturb him either way. He’d invariably arrive and plant himself within a mutual line of sight but removed enough so as not to be an obtrusive presence.

Occasionally they talked a little. They’d reached a point where Knuckles knew where Shadow was meant to be and a bit about the goings-on.

“Now a lot of them are saying it’s haunted,” Shadow said. “I suspect they’re just entertaining themselves, but it’s still a leap from seeing one oddity to suspecting vengeful spirits.”

Knuckles hummed.

“Yeah,” he said. “All the ghosts I’ve seen were planet bound. They probably don’t like how empty space is.”

A beat.

Shadow turned his head to stare at the echidna.

“. . . all the what?”

Regardless of the reason, the dichotomy between Angel Island and the ARK helped Shadow maintain some inward balance.

—————

He ran into the stray again.

“Why are you here?” Shadow asked quietly.

The creature, having been chanced upon rather than chased, didn’t react defensively as it had before. Its shape shifted and collapsed; bipedal, quadrupedal, limbed, or aerodynamic, as though testing to find a form it preferred.

“You’ve escaped this place at least once,” Shadow said, almost thinking aloud more than speaking to the cyborg; it failed to give him much attention once it realized he wasn’t hostile. “Possibly more than that.”

One strain of thought that’d contributed to Shadow’s insomnia was that of assimilation and transference. His memories of the ARK were at once so viscerally integral to him that they caused him physical pain at times; and yet, knowing that a few had been manipulated or altered, he couldn’t help simultaneously regarding them as something foreign. He’d read somewhere about the phenomenal capacity for adaptability the body possessed. There, it’d been in the context of transplants–limbs, organs and the like–but did the same apply to memories?

What, then, did he actually know? What should he trust?

“You’re anomalous,” he said. “Free from the constraints of definitions of what you should be. You could exist anywhere, yet return to this place.”

The creature momentarily turned to stare at him.

“Is that your choice?”

It shifted again and vanished.

“Or can’t you help it?”

—————

Not every part of Angel Island consisted of forest or even greenery. The floating landmass housed several different biomes that somehow coexisted harmoniously without encroaching on or negatively influencing each other.

“This is the sanctuary.” Knuckles said with some reverence in his tone.

Some locations defied explanation; Shadow had teleported to the island with, as usual the past week and change, little precision as to where he landed. He’d been immediately dumbstruck by the expansive ruins stretching out and reaching yet higher before him, all obscured from view below by a blanket of clouds.

“How do you always know where I am?” Shadow asked after they’d been walking for a minute.

The longest duration between his arrival and the echidna finding him that he could recall had been twenty minutes. For as fantastic and removed as the sanctuary appeared to be, today it’d been less then fifteen.

Knuckles, having sat down to recline against a winding pillar, breathed a short chuckle.

“I’m not telling you that.”

Shadow blinked. Knuckles smirked.

“It’s a foolish warrior who gives away his advantages.”

Shadow huffed. Silently conceded the point. Found a perch near one of the sanctuary’s many ledges and dangled his legs over the side.

“What do you do?” Knuckles asked after a while.

“Hm?” Shadow hummed, glancing back at the echidna over his shoulder.

“All that time you’re not sleeping,” he clarified. Knuckles turned his head to look at him. “What do you do?”

Shadow half-turned away. Looked off into the distance.

“Ask questions, mostly.”

A beat.

“Yeah.”

Another short silence. Then

“Get any answers?”

Shadow sighed.

“Rarely.”

“. . . yeah.”

—————

Kvhroon.

“I return with gifts.”

“You’re my favorite,” Rouge said, immediately grabbing the bag of to-go boxes from Dancing Ganesha. She ripped open one container and almost moaned biting into a samosa. “Shit, that’s good.”

Shadow slipped a portable Bluetooth speaker to Omega from the house. His friend eagerly stashed the device within some central chamber, singing at his quietest volume

“CARNAGE.”

A half-smile crept across Shadow’s face. Neither had begrudged him the intermittent need for space and time away from the ARK, but he’d felt a little guilty leaving them behind to tedium so often. Hence his offerings.

“Is that tandoori?”

Roque, having glimpsed the proceedings in their quarters in passing, paused to make a face.

“For breakfast?”

Rouge, having already taken another mouthful with zero shame, wagged a finger at him.

“Hon, we’re in space,” she said. “Up here, our ‘daily’ solar cycle is just over an hour. There’s no breakfast, lunch or dinner; just a meal.”

“TIME IS A CONSTRUCT.”

Roque blinked. Twice. Opened his mouth. Closed it again.

Walked up to Shadow and held out a ten.

“Do you know the Great Wall restaurant by chance?” He asked.

Shadow raised an eyebrow at the proffered note.

“For twenty, I do.”

Roque challenged Shadow’s eyebrow with his own.

“Service charge.” Shadow said.

Roque shook his head and handed over another ten.

“I’m not getting change back, am I?”

Shadow smirked in lieu of an answer.

Kvhroon.

—————

“Ready when you are, Omega.”

Shadow murmured into his comm on the channel Team Dark had chosen for themselves separate the rest of the unit.

Being the loudest and most extroverted of the trio, the monotony of their assignment had worn on Omega more than Rouge or even Shadow. The highlight for him had been seeing the ARK’s central chamber and, more specifically, the controls and schematics for the eclipse cannon.

(“IMPRESSIVE FOR AN ANCIENT AND INFERIOR MACHINE. I APPLAUD THE ATTENTION TO POTENTIAL FOR MAYHEM AND EXPLOSIONS.”

“It certainly caused enough damage last time.”

“I thought you’d appreciate it.”

“. . . CAN WE–?”

“No.”

“A SYSTEM TEST WILL NOT HARM ANYONE.”

“. . .”

“AMENDMENT: WILL NOT HARM ANYONE IMPORTANT.”

“Still no.”

“I don’t think it works on wishes, Omega. You need at least one or more chaos emeralds before it’ll wake up.”

“. . .”

“Stop looking at me like that, my answer’s the same.”

“I wouldn’t be opposed to a little. . . reorganization. Maybe cutting off a certain dangling state?”

“. . .”

“REPEAT: NO. ONE. IMPORTANT.”

“Tempting. But I don’t think it’s capable of that sort of surgical precision.”

“PHOOEY.”)

Honestly, it’d been the highlight of the assignment for Shadow, too. After which, though, Omega had clearly been more than ready to go home. Unfortunately, they were only halfway through the comprehensive report on the ARK.

Equipped with a Bluetooth speaker, though, Omega’s penchant for pranks came out and his mood drastically improved. Particularly with the ambience that murmurs of hauntings provided, just waiting to be exploited.

“ENGAGE.”

The next five minutes saw no fewer than a dozen G.U.N. staff getting the pants scared off them. Compressed shrieks and wails reverberating through vents, sudden creaks and blaring static from monitors being passed by, and random lyrics of Holy Diver interspersed in more than one team’s quarters.

Kvhroon.

All incidents taking place over too large an area for the victims to draw any logical conclusions. It wouldn’t be helped by the inexplicable fact that some later encountered Omega trudging around wearing a garlic necklace.

Shadow kept his expression stoic as another screaming tech sprinted past him, even with Omega chanting CHAOS through his comm. He teleported one last time; having been seen acting innocuously enough by a few, he’d secured an alibi.

Maria might have. . .

The scene he stumbled across killed whatever mirth he’d felt for his part in the prank.

A slowly dissolving mess on the floor, a chrome component shattered to pieces. Whether through accident, bullet or otherwise. . .

The stray was dead.

Shadow’s pulse thundered between his ears.

The sound of his blood rushing through his veins drowned out anything Rouge, Omega, or anyone else might have been saying to him.

Kvhroon.

—————

Whatever the source of Angel Island’s calming effect on him, it didn’t soothe him now. He paced up and down in the grass, hands in his quills, clenching and unclenching into fists. Every stimulus–the blinding sun, the chafing breeze, even the sound of his own breathing–just agitated him further, until, inevitably

“What’s going on?”

Knuckles appeared.

Shadow rounded on him.

“Why?” He demanded.

Knuckles’ brow pinched.

“Wh–?”

“Why do the dead insist on trying to control us?”

He frowned.

Shadow spun around, pacing again.

“What right do they have to influence reality once they’ve departed? To affect our lives?”

“Shadow”

Shadow turned on the echidna; his voice rose to a shout.

“And who are you to let them?! What does that make you?”

Knuckles’ expression shuttered.

Shadow stepped in.

“You owe them nothing, yet you let their ghosts tie you down, define you! They haunt you and you let them, despite having all the power in the world you allow some strain of guilt or shame or obligation lay out and decide who you are! Why do you keep catering and conforming your life to those who are fucking gone?!”

Knuckles shoved Shadow so hard he flew backward several feet and landed on his back.

“Get. Lost.” He growled.

Shadow, gasping for having the wind knocked out him, glared at the echidna. The guardian glared back; teeth bared in a snarl.

Kvhroon.

—————

‘Dammit.’

He’d lost his mind. And taken out his frustration on someone who’d helped him, despite having nothing to do with any of his self-made issues. He didn’t want his temper to turn volatile on anyone else, so he sequestered himself in the corner of the colony farthest from any of the rest of the unit or his team and muted his comm.

Shadow wandered the colony for the better part of two days, heedless of direction or what his instincts said about how each new chamber might affect his emotional state. He could handle whatever the consequences might turn out to be; after all, no one would see him react.

And so of course, he ended up near the ward.

As emotionally charged as his memories of the ARK were, they were also incomplete; many tantalizingly vague and blurry. Five-foot high glass casings called to mind phantoms of echoes of experimentation and tests. Long and wide spaces with old scorch marks littering the walls had him fingering his inhibitors.

And the one room with a bookshelf, a bed with five pillows and a chess set left him momentarily paralyzed in the doorway; the space somehow seemed frozen in time, near to preserved. His chest faintly ached beneath his fur.

This was her room. The knowledge slotted into place as a fact, albeit one among many he didn’t wholly trust.

Shadow ran a finger along the spines of the books on the shelf on his way to the table and picked up the chess set; a wooden finish board that folded in half and held the pieces inside. He sat on the bed, propped his head on the arrangement of pillows.

 He resolved himself.

—————

Kvhroon.

Shadow, still holding the chess set, teleported into what Knuckles referred to as the garden and waited. As ever, the guardian made an appearance within minutes of his arrival.

“I”

Knuckles raised a hand, palm open, before Shadow could get a word in. He stared at him for a minute, then waved him forward.

“Follow me.” He said tersely.

The echidna raced off across the marble ruins. Shadow fell into step in his wake, trailing Knuckles over obstacles, chasms and occasionally lava until they came to what looked like a nondescript wall. Knuckles punched a specific spot in the marble and a rumbling preceded a section of the stonework sliding downward to reveal a doorway.

Knuckles gestured on with a tilt of his head before entering. Shadow followed again.

At the end of a brief trek underground, they came out inside a magnificent hall; carved by hand yet by no means inferior to anything a machine could do. Knuckles stopped in front of one of many murals; despite the hour of the day and the absence of discernible windows or views to the outside, some almost ethereal light source let Shadow see perfectly.

A tribe of echidnas.

“I’m not just guarding the Master Emerald,” Knuckles said. He passed a hand over the mural, making only the slightest contact with the wall. “I’m preserving something. Something a lot harder to define than a gem too powerful to be carelessly wielded.”

Knuckles let his hand linger on the mural, turning to regard the rest of the chamber.

“I’ve only poked around a fraction of this part of the island; read only a few of what texts are still legible. Not all of it is pleasant.”

Shadow’s grip on the chess set tightened.

“But this isn’t about obligation for me, it’s about my history,” he said. “It’s about protecting something that would otherwise be lost forever.”

Knuckles looked at Shadow.

“Dying isn’t final,” he said. “Being forgotten is. Whatever else happens in my life, I can’t just kill them off.”

Shadow swallowed. Knuckles turned back to the mural. Shadow looked down at his shoes, letting the echidna’s solemn tone fill the space and settle in his mind.

He exhaled.

“I brought something,” he said finally, holding up the chess set. “It’s a game; though I haven’t played chess in years.”

“I’ve heard of it,” Knuckles said. “Haven’t played it.”

“Learning could take a while.”

Knuckles shrugged.

“Patience is one of the first skills you need to survive up here,” he said. “Sonic’s the only one who makes me forget that.” He paused, considering. “Well, him and the bat.”

Shadow conceded the point. With some silent understanding, they sat before the mural and unfolded the board.

Neither of them was especially skilled; once Knuckles had committed to memory how each piece moved, the difference in their playing became apparent. Shadow could more quickly pick out all viable moves available to him on any given turn whereas Knuckles could consistently see a move or two ahead; although the echidna tended to be stubborn once he’d decided on a plan he liked.

Eventually, they were comfortable enough with the game and Shadow broke the silence.

“You asked me before,” he said. “What I do when I’m not sleeping.”

“You said you ask questions.”

“Yes. But they’re usually angled toward the same topic: who I am.”

“. . .”

“I was created,” Shadow said. “To fulfill multiple purposes. Some contradictory. Ultimately, it seems I was made for someone.”

“Who?” Knuckles asked evenly.

“Maria,” Shadow whispered. “Everything ties back to her. My creator agreed to make me a weapon so that he’d have the funds and technology necessary to create me for his granddaughter. I was made to be her protector, her brother, her cure–I was even programmed to have a soul that resembled hers.”

Knuckles didn’t respond. He moved his knight.

“Or so I’ve been led to believe.” Shadow muttered, advancing a bishop.

“It’s not true?”

“I don’t know,” Shadow grunted, frustrated. “At least some of my memories have been altered at least once before. Who’s to say whether the memories I have now, as I recall them, are any more real than those that were suggested to me?”

Knuckles moved his knight again.

“There are moments when I resent the whole of what I know about the ARK,” Shadow confessed. “But Maria is so much a part of me that I can’t separate an identity of my own apart from her influence. I’d cease to be Shadow then.”

Shadow balled his fists.

“But I don’t even know anything about who Maria was.” He hissed through clenched teeth.

Knuckles didn’t say anything for a full minute.

“. . . It’s your turn.”

“Hn.”

Shadow advanced a pawn.

“You don’t know because you don’t trust yourself?”

“I don’t trust what’s there,” Shadow muttered. “Or the handful of people that remain who knew her. I’ve got nothing to go on.”

“I seem to recall you plummeting through the atmosphere because of a promise,” Knuckles said; not a hint of derision or sarcasm in his tone, just earnest curiosity. “Did I get that wrong?”

Shadow froze.

His hand, holding his queen, hovered over the chess board, one move shy of checkmate.

“Her dying words were a plea for me to protect the planet,” Shadow said, glancing up at Knuckles. “That’s the only thing I’m certain of.”

Shadow knew he sounded a little too certain of Maria’s last words; bordering on desperate for a thread of truth in his memories to cling to, especially after how he’d already said he knew nothing about her.

He suspected, after the last couple weeks, that Knuckles understood that near-desperation. Perhaps that was why he didn’t call attention to it.

“A dying wish sounds like a whole lot more than nothing,” Knuckles said. “You can tell plenty about someone from that.”

“Can you?” Shadow asked.

“Besides,” Knuckles said, ignoring the question. “Do you really need to know someone for them to be important?”

Shadow opened his mouth; paused, remembered who he was talking to, where he was. He dipped his head, turning the echidna’s question over in his mind.

“. . . I should get back,” he said in lieu of an answer. He stood up, waved his hand when Knuckles moved to pack up the chess set. “You hang onto it. You’re in the practice of keeping things, right?”

Knuckles brow jumped, and he gave him an assessing look. He smirked.

“It’s what I was born to do,” he said. “I’ll have figured out how to beat you next time.”

Shadow huffed, turning away from the mural. Paused.

“Knuckles,” he said, pairing the words with a backward glance over his shoulder. “Do you really think a wish is enough to know someone?”

A reply was slow in coming. The echidna’s eyes briefly turned elsewhere.

“No one wastes their last words on nonsense,” he said. “Children least of all.”

“. . . !”

Shadow’s mind, lost and adrift at sea for weeks, finally, finally settled. He sighed.

“Thank you.”

He weighed his emerald in his hand. Called on its power.

“Chaos energy.”

He turned around again.

“Huh?”

“I can tell whenever you’re on the island,” Knuckles said. “Because you bleed chaos energy. That’s how I know where you are.”

Shadow blinked.

“I thought only fools give away their advantages.”

Not that giving Shadow that information made it any less of an advantage. Knuckles smirked and shrugged.

“I can handle it,” he said. “Besides. Some of my favorite people in the world are fools.”

—————

G.U.N. called a premature end to their mission a couple days afterward. A few people groaned that the call back to terra firma only came once they’d finished upwards of eighty percent of their report, but most were just relieved.

Shadow personally all but collapsed on their couch as soon as he made it into the house. He shifted just enough to situate his quills and then lay motionless.

“I need check on the club,” Rouge said, only swapping out a change of clothes before standing at the door again. “Don’t wait up.”

Shadow managed some unintelligible noise that might’ve been distantly related to a grunt.

“Hey.”

Begrudgingly, he cracked his eyes open. He got Rouge’s middle finger for the effort.

He responded in kind and lazily stuck out his tongue. Rouge laughed and slammed the door shut behind her.

That was the last thing Shadow knew before falling into the deepest sleep he’d had in nearly a month.

@generic-sonic-fan

[thrown-away-opinions]

Glanced into the abyss again and saw a bunch of people wailing and sobbing over states proposing laws that would prohibit any gender transition for people under 18. I know I harp on this often, but it bares repeating: What happened to “no one is trying to transition your kids”?! Because so much of the hysterics seem to be based on the idea that parents are going to be punished for trying to groom their barely self-aware toddler so they can start puberty blockers as early as possible and permanently fuck up their kid for life.

“But they’ll be sad and miserable and MAYBE EVEN KILL THEMSELVES if you stop them from getting double mastectomies at 13! They might feel UGLY AND WEIRD if they are forced to go through normal puberty!”

Anyone alive today can tell you that high school, puberty, and growing up fucking sucks and is full of unnecessary stress and anxiety... Which is why it’s so fucking telling that the solution to trying keep them from suffering involves zero attempts to reform the public education system. Not a single consideration for the way teachers are trained and how badly underqualified they are to teach, let alone look after other people’s kids. The archaic factory worker education model based on rote memorization and standardized testing. The utterly psychotic things kids learn to do to each other entirely because being forced into standardized public education from age 3 to 18 fucks up their brains.

And this is kind of a running problem with the whole trans rights movement. People with severe mental illness that is going untreated and unacknowledged are being told that it’s their vague, poorly understood feelings about their gender identity and sexuality that are the root cause of all misery and discomfort in their lives. 

It’s like those idiots who insist that the planet is dying so the only way to save it is by mindlessly supporting “Green” organizations that push environmentally devastating electric cars or massively wasteful, inefficient wind turbines. They don’t actually care about the planet. They care about making sure their team wins and gets to claim some imaginary moral high ground victory points. If they actually cared, they’d support nuclear energy, but they fucking don’t. They throw all their weight behind the people who are getting the few nuclear power plants shut down.

Likewise with this trans shit. They don’t care about the mental wellbeing and happiness of children. They don’t actually care about making meaningful, overwhelming changes to the school system or the developing any kind of substantial way of improving mental health. Even just getting rid of homework and cutting an hour off the school day in the morning so kids can sleep in, (BECAUSE KIDS NEED SOME GODDAMNED SLEEP) would do wonders for the overall well-being and sanity of school kids... But they don’t want that. They want to transition kids as early and often as possible, because that’s the agenda. Mental well-being and “protection” and the ever-looming threat of suicide are just convenient deflections that are supposed to make it impossible to question why anyone is allowing this shit to continue.

[lemonhemlock]

I'm the prev anon, I'm glad you like the theory! It also just hit me like lightning when I was thinking about Maegor and if he was motivated by prophecy, and then suddenly it dawned on me, "what if Maegor is why the prophecy is only told to heirs?" Because I did see a lot of people talking about the HotD prophecy thinking it didn't make sense for only kings and heirs to know about it, because of both how Maegor messed up the line of succession and the question of what if something happened to the king before they managed to tell their heir? It seemed like an inefficient and flimsy system for something that seems so important, but idea that Maegor's usurping the throne was what caused that system in the first place makes a lot of sense to me!

You also brought up a good point about how it's probable that whole Targaryen family might have known prior to Maegor. Beforehand, people were asking how Jaehaerys I was able to know the prophecy when only the heirs were told, despite Jaehaerys never having been officially named heir, I thought it was either his mother Alyssa Velaryon or his sister Rhaena who told him, because they were told by their husbands who were both named heirs. But honestly? Maybe Aegon I just told them all lmao. Maybe Jaehaerys and Alysanne knew all along, because at that point in time the whole family was close enough that they thought they could just keep the secret. And it was only afterwards when they started having children that they established the tradition to only tell the heirs. It explains a lot, I think.

It also adds something to Viserys and Daemon's relationship in the show, and the fact that Viserys didn't tell Daemon about it. It shows that Viserys never really saw him as worthy enough to be his heir, but is it because maybe Viserys was a little afraid? Did he fear that Daemon knowing would cause him to try and usurp him? They do have some similarities to the brotherly pairing of Aenys and Maegor, so did Viserys fear the same thing? (Which is ironic, considering that I do genuinely think that Daemon would never overthrow his brother, even if he did know)

Finally, a tiny question I've also been pondering: do you think Aemma Arryn knew? Obviously very few people being told was supposed to keep the secret secure, but I feel like maaaaybe Viserys would have trusted her enough to tell her about it. Maybe her knowing could have been intended to be a back-up in case something happened to him. Could also add something to their relationship as well.

Hello again! I also think it's probable that Aenys just told all of his children and his wife. Makes more sense if everyone knew, as opposed to Aenys only telling Prince Aegon. Then Aegon must have broken the system for some reason, went rogue and told Rhaena. So far in the dynastic history, I don't see any reason why Egg 1 would decide to gatekeep this information within his own family. Succession was supposed to happen in accordance with normal Andal customs: Conqueror -> eldest son Aenys -> his eldest son, Aegon. Maegor was the one who upset this balance, since he was way down the line, behind Prince Aegon's children Aerea and Rhaella and, after that, behind all of Aenys' other children. The audacity, right?

RE: Daemon - perhaps it's true that Viserys never really saw Daemon as his heir. But I think that was borne more from this genuine, stalwart, blind belief he had that he was going to get sons eventually. Like that dream visited him at one point and he became 100% convinced by its validity - though it's debatable whether it was an actual dragon dream (he has had none other than that one - seems suspicious) or just a regular dream he put too much credence in, because he wanted so, so much to be a dragon dreamer himself. So, in that sense, maybe it explains more how he wasn't really bothered about Daemon's shenanigans and was so indulgent with him. He can misbehave all he wants, he's never going to be King, so what does it matter? Let him have his fun, right?

RE: Aemma. Hmm. Honestly, this could go both ways. Viserys would be the only way for her to find out - Daella dies in childbed and no way would Alysanne have a reason to tell her, I don't think. I could see Viserys both keeping to "the system" (lol) - if Jaehaerys told him on his deathbed, after the Great Council of 101, and impressed upon him the necessity of the king-to-heir pipeline. I can also see him confiding in Aemma, since he did love her, and this making her more resolute towards "doing her duty" and producing a son for Viserys - to echo her words to Rhaenyra about how the birthing bed is their battlefield.

It's interesting to think that Rhaenys could have known, too! Aemon was the heir for years and she was his only child - 18 when he died, married and pregnant. On the one hand, if she knew, she must have not told her children for some reason, because Laena would have told Daemon if she knew. Anyway, this is just show-only. Textually, Daemon could have very well found out via the Laena/Rhaenys pipeline.

There is also the question of how Aegon III found out so as to pass it on - Rhaenyra must have told him after Joffrey died and they fled King's Landing, just before she met her death on Dragonstone. What a roller coaster!

Of course, in the books, GRRM can decide to make the secret less gatekeep-y according to the needs of each generation, so as to make sure the prophecy does somehow pass on to Rhaegar - who was nothing if not prophecy-obsessed. But Prince Viserys never gets told and, thus, he can't tell Daenerys in turn. We don't know what Lyanna knew and what she told Ned, since Ned never specifies in his POV and, most importantly, never tells Jon. BUT. Perhaps he told Howland Reed?

It would make sense that the history books haven't recorded this, since the maesters writing the histories wouldn't have been in on it.

[idontknowenglishplzhelpme]

My brain has the consistency of jelly, runs on less energy than light bulb, it's full of error's and it's so easy to manipulate and control that even cats and baby's can do it

My lungs like oxigen which causes oxidation and it's one of the 3 things necessary to burn shit up

My bones are weird as a concept and are also constantly wet and depending on the medicine I took throughout my life they might not even be white anymore

My muscles are basically masoquists and are pretty dammed inefficient in holding something for long periods of time

Our extremities are weirdly long for our size and I don't like that

Our blood is red,that's pretty fucking weird, and it's a liquid made to transport gases which sounds dumb and inefficient, like, why not send them as a gas directly?

Organs are also weird, weird and incredible specialized lumps of meat not properly attached to the rest of the body and some of them almost look like they are sentient in the way they regenerate if cut and we can also live without most of them

The function of a heart could be replaced with a hand constantly squishing it and I don't like that

Fingers are weird in a similar way to limbs but multiple times worse and they have too many bones and muscles

Tongues. I don't think I need to go into detail with this one

Hair and nails are basically dead/inanimate matter that grows out of holes on our skin and that creeps me out a lot

Skin is kinda alright but it has pores ( I won't talk about pores) and it's not properly attached either which is weird.

Belly button. It scares me and creeps me out because it feels like it will open up at any moment. No more will be said

Feets look weird. Thats it, they are fine

Eyes are balls of extremely specialized meat that can detect light of all things but only some of it and ours are pretty bad in the animal kingdom

Butts: humans have the biggest butts of the animal kingdom thanks to our bipedal way of walking. I like them 👍

Boobs are Okey and I like them but the nipples (especially male nipples) make me uncomfortable

Ears look funny but that's it. Being able to detect the vibrations of the air sounds useless but it's pretty neat

Thigh's. I like them. Wanna bite them.

Teeth. I don't like them but they let me bite stuff so they get a pass

Neck's are weird, why do we need to separe our heads from our torso? Its feels like a weak point (and It is one). Wanna bite them too

Hormone's and shit like that is weird, I don't want some inanimate molecule to have any sort of control over me whatsoever and it feels like someone needs to teach them about consent

Puberty is also a wild concept and I don't know about any other species that has one as pronounced as humans. Why aren't we born as adults directly? Seems more effective (and it's still less weird than marsupials)

Saliva is technically an acid I think and that's pretty neat because I can also spit it out of my body if needed. I want you to take that as a warning and a threat

Cells are weird. I don't like that I can be divided into parts that small. I want infinite density so that I can't be divided into components, because that's weird

That's it I think. Those are my thoughts about the human body.

Now go drink water, because even if our bodies are weird we still need them and should appreciate these weird, meat, carbon-based, maquines that house our consciousness

[pointparadox]

My Issues With Blind (In No Particular Order)

Now I am not above admitting I was wrong so if these questions are answered in the drama and I just missed it then please do tell but so far here are all my qualms: 

1. How did Yoon-Jae and Sung-Hoon actually get Sung-Joon to believe he was Yoon-Jae? 

I understand the whole story about Yoon-Jae pushing Sung-Joon off of the playground set and everything, but `1) amnesia would definitely not happen from such a minor fall like that, especially when he did not fall headfirst and 2) How did they get Sung-Joon to remember the fact that he is Yoon-Jae from the Hope Center but not the fact that the information is coming from Sung-Joon? It just seemed like tacky plot armor. I literally rolled my eyes when Sung-Joon conveniently remembered that after Yoon-Jae pushed him down a flight of stairs (another thing that would not cause someone to regain memory). I know Yoon-Jae made some off-hand comment about “the shock therapy working” but there is no way in hell that LITTLE BOY got his hands on a torture device. 

2. Why did the parents adopt Sung-Hoon? 

I don’t understand what part of the story explained the reasoning for this. Sung-Hoon delivers the personal account of the atrocities of the Hope Center, Judge Ryu ignores them, and then somehow time skips to the judge adopting him? Like it would be one thing if they adopted him out of shame for what happened at the center but it seemed like he didn't care when he dismissed Sung-Hoon’s petition so what really changed? 

3. Why did Sung-Hoon admit he was an accomplice -- better yet, how did he even get sentenced? 

This one irks me the most because, unlike Yoon-Jae, all of the evidence against Sung-Hoon was circumstantial. Yes, Sung-Hoon saw him leave the wedding banquet but the cameras did not--even if Yoon-Jae testified against him there was not a single time in which it was implied that there was anything that connected him so why the hell did he confess? It makes me feel like there must have been some scenes that I was missing because one second he is fighting with Sung-Joon out in the rain and the other he is in jail; I don’t think we even saw anyone read him his rights. 

4. How were the police so inefficient? 

Now I understand that they were working under a corrupt chief but it is not like anyone listened to that dude--they were essentially working on their own. How does the police not have software that can show them what Yoon-Jae would realistically look like 20 years later--I know it’s a thing that exists also faces do not really change *that* much so upon seeing Yoon-Jae and Sung-Hoon the police chief and Crazy Dog should have realized it was them way sooner. 

5. What is the point of making Yoon-Jae and Crazy Dog fight to the death? 

I guess there's no technical issue with this It just seemed like such a big fuck you to victims of abuse that might have resonated with the character kind of. Like did he really have to lose his life just to avenge the other children? I am in no way saying Yoon-Jae is a saint (though I firmly believe he is also not a psychopath) but c'mon why couldn’t he get this one win against someone who was a lot worse than him

6. What is the random switch-up between Sung-Hoon, Sung-Joon, and Yoon-Jae? 

I saved my biggest issue for last but I feel like these characters all acted in such a contradictory way to how they have been written since the beginning of the drama. To start with Sung-Hoon; I think his switching up on Sung-Joon out of nowhere in the last few episodes and completely dropping the facade is so tacky. It’s not like Sung-Hoon was ever an emotional character, to begin with so I feel like they didn’t have to try and make him comically evil with the whole “Ooo guess what I'm going to do next Sung-Joon ooo I never liked you I just wanted to use you Sung-Joon oooo I don’t care about you at all Yoon-Jae” bullshit. I find it hard to believe he didn’t care about Yoon-Jae at all, and while I think it’s fair for him to say that maybe he never thought of Sung-Joon as a brother (since it’s probably hard to think of the man who raped your sister and his wife as parents) I don’t think it’s fair to say that he never cared about Sung-Joon. I wish they dug into that concept of Sung-Hoon maybe not feeling any brotherly connection to Sung-Joon but still looking out for him because he feels bad for him. We know Sung-Hoon can feel emotions towards people: he felt genuine hurt and rage when Yu-Na was killed so I find it hard to believe that he didn’t have any sort of connection to Sung-Joon (especially when he also told Yoon-Jae to spare Eun-Ki and made sure her only punishment would be finding out about who her father really was) since he is essentially the same as Eun-Ki in the sense of being born to people who did bad things. 

On the topic of brotherly connection, I also find it unrealistic that Sung-Joon can switch to hating his brother so quickly. I don’t expect him to condone Sung-Hoon’s action’s in any way, but the scene where Sung-Hoon tried to take his life and then Sung-Joon came and called him a coward and said that he hoped he would live in pain for the rest of his life or whatever was so random? I was expecting an emotional outburst, yes, but I feel like something that would be more in character for him would be the continuation of the whole “How could you do this to me when I did all this for you” thing they have going on (which is how the interaction did start but alas). I just thought it was weird. 

Finally, for Yoon-Jae, why did they make him so comically evil after the reveal? Every interrogation scene made me roll my eyes because they just made him act like the Joker in all of them and it was just so overdone. Sung-Joon calling him a “psycho who is obsessed with murder” was annoying too because it’s like--you’re missing the whole point he’s not doing this cause he enjoys killing people he’s doing this cause he was backed into a corner by his abusers. It’s one thing to not condone his actions but to completely ignore what got him to that point just seemed foolish (which is also what I have to say about Eun-Ki). 

I personally think that the show should have gone more into the brotherly relationship between Yoon-Jae and Sung-Hoon because it’s like yeah we see that Yoon-Jae feels betrayed by Sung-Hoon but why should he be? They did no development on that and honestly hindsight 20/20 the whole “Sung-Joon on the run” arc should have been a lot shorter to allow more time to develop this relationship. 

7. Why is everyone except Sung-Hoon allowed to be corrupt?

The whole basis of this show is how corrupt bad people can be (the police chief, the guy trying to bribe Sung-Hoon in episode 1, the producer, the taxi driver, Crazy Dog) so I don’t see why Sung-Hoon, Yoon-Jae, and Charles couldn’t have gotten off under the same basis of corruption. Like you cannot tell me this man is gonna work his ass off and become a judge, orchestrate a whole string of murders with literally nothing technically connecting him to them, and then go to jail because of his OWN CONFESSION when he could have just used his status as a well-known judge (and one that refuses to do anything that isn't by the books) to just deny (hell, he wouldn't even look guilty so he doesn't even need to do that) and then stack the jury so Yoon-Jae could get a not guilty charge. Call it tacky, but them doing that would make so much more sense than them just putting their hands in the air and going to jail/committing suicide. 

That’s all I got for now but if I think of anything I guess I’ll add it. The ending of this show just seems so drab and dull; I don’t really understand what the theme or point is supposed to be. Sung-Joon’s monologue about “oh if they had someone like Eun-Ki things would have probably been different...what a shame :/” like no shit sherlock if Eun-Ki was there they probably also wouldn’t be used for slave labor like...it was just so random. The acting was great, but the writing and plotting just took a nosedive I am afraid. 

Also. the bury your gays (or idk homosexual leaning) thing that happened with Charles and Yoon-Jae was so tacky I’m sorry. 

[angelthefandomobsessed]

Where Kingdom Hearts III Went 'Wrong'

I should probably open this by saying that I love Kingdom Hearts III. I love KH for what it is, and the usual "Omg it's so weird, the plot doesn't make sense, eVeRyOnE iS sOrA" thing doesn't strike me as the best form of criticism for the series.

Instead, I wanted to highlight why things got so convoluted (in my opinion, anyway, it's not like I was in the writer's room or anything). I think the direction KH has gone (and is going) serves as a good lesson for any aspiring writers out there - we can learn from these shortcomings and love a series. Wild, right?

So... where did KH3 go 'wrong'?

The writers wrote themselves into a corner in DDD. That's it. It doesn't seem like a lack of planning that came back to bite them, but rather, that they went about planning in an inefficient way.

Let's look at the conflict of KH3.

(Warning: There will be a few spoilers for KH3 ahead!)

Xehanort has put together the 'real organisation' so that he can do a keyblade war reenactment, forge the χ-blade and summon Kingdom Hearts. His main goal (as I understand it, which might be very, very incorrect) is to create a new world where darkness and light can be equal, quashing the imbalance of power that is skewed towards light.

It's not a bad conflict to have. KH has very strong motifs of 'light vs dark', and having a villain fight the inequality between these sides is interesting.

The big problem is the setup behind it. The complicated, hard-to-grasp, tedious setup.

Thirteen darknesses have to fight seven lights. Cool, okay, we can see the imbalance between the sides, we have slots for our characters to fill, roles for them to play... Except, there's not enough room in the plot for them all. By sectioning off each side with neat, numerical values, the bloatedness of the cast becomes obvious.

There are seven lights:

Sora has to be one of them. He's the main character, not to mention the poster child for the light.

Riku's been there since the start, plus he's had the most fleshed-out arc by far, having overcome his own darkness. He's a worthy guardian of light and a true keyblade master.

Kairi is a princess of heart and has been there from the start. This ties a bow on our three main-est characters.

Mickey Mouse. He kind of has to be there, it's a Disney game, right?

Axel/Lea. Roxas and Xion are out of the picture, and he's a fan favourite, so sure, why not?

Aqua. A keyblade master who's suffered for ten years, torn apart from her best friends... Sure, maybe a war isn't great for her right now, but she's a lost master, so she should be.

Ventus. Pure cinnamon roll Ven, newly awakened and ready to beat up some Xehanorts.

Okay, but... what about Donald and Goofy? Oh, okay, they can just... hang out with the seven lights. As moral support, I guess? At that point, why not make it nine lights?

Double but - what about Terra? He's going to be saved at some point, so he can just... join the herd. And Roxas? And Xion? Eh, they can act as sub-ins in case anyone accidentally dies.

Oh, what's that? Kairi's dead? Wow, sucks for her, call in the reserves. Wait... If the 'Guardians of Light' can be swapped out, then what's the point in having a set number of them?

It's almost like it's entirely arbitrary.

Right. So our seven lights are more like ten-ish lights + friends. It happens, maths is hard! How do our darknesses fare?

The thirteen darknesses are (in no particular order):

Xehanort

Xemnas

Ansem

Young Xehanort

Terra Xehanort

Riku Replica

Saix

Vanitas

Marluxia

Larxene

Luxord

Xigbar

Xion

Somewhat hilariously, the dark side also has a team of reserves.

Demyx

Vexen

The wiki lists 'Replica Xehanorts' as reserves, but I'm not about to unpack that one

Imagine being Vexen, the guy responsible for dealing with replicas, the invention sustaining this organisation, and being benched in favour of teenage angst incarnate Replica Riku. Ouch.

By this point, you might be wondering how this use of arbitrary numbers actually impacted the storytelling. Organisation XIII only had thirteen members for like, a week, so clearly counting isn't a strong suit of Xehanort's.

It all falls apart when the writers say (in DDD):

"KH3 will be about this, where this happens, with this many people, at this specific place, so get your popcorn and buckle in!"

On its own, that's not a problem. But when there's a giant pile of other plot points to worry about (Aqua's in Disney hell, Ventus is napping, Terra is somehow, kinda sorta, three different people whilst also being trapped in heartless thingy (whilst also being a suit of armour, but not quite), Roxas is stuck in Sora's heart, Xion has been wiped off the face of the earth via memory nuke, Naminé is in Kairi's heart, Sora needs to discover the mystical (and vague) 'power of waking' to deal with half these problems, Lea and Kairi need to train, and Riku needs to go to the 'Heartless Barbershop in Disney Hell' (the most relevant plot point of all)).

What we get is a tangle of 'this can happen when this happens, but first we need to do this one thing, and to do that we need this other thing' (i.e. "To find Ven we need to find Aqua, who is evil and needs to be good again, and Sora needs the power of waking to deal with this... probably, let's put a pin in it and hang out with Buzz Lightyear").

The plot is murky. The plot is confusing.

This entire plot raises the question of 'Why don't Sora and co. just... not go?' That's a good question, which should have a simple answer (if they don't, the org will do baaaaad things, wooOOOoooOOO), but instead what we get is "If they don't, Xehanort will use the new seven hearts (because there are new ones now for some reason, but Kairi's still one of them, dw about it) instead, guaranteeing bad things... probably?"

Xehanort's a bad guy who needs to be stopped. That's it, that's all we needed. But that avenue was closed off once they said 'nah, it's more complex because of prophecies, I guess'.

So, what's the moral of this long, drawn-out post?

Sometimes, it might seem like a super cool idea to have a group of characters band together to defeat evil. Sometimes mashing them into a prophecy can seem appealing (the five great owls will do the unholy hoot, defeating the nine-and-a-half orange rats at sundown in Mississippi). But sometimes, this kind of self-restriction won't work for you.

KH3 could have just had 'the bad guys' and 'the good guys', and nobody would have to worry about the arbitrary parameters set by the writers.

Keep your options open and don't overcomplicate things just for the sake of it! It'll only give you and your consumer a headache.

.

.

.

All that being said, KH3 really delivered on the emotional payoffs so like, forget the randomly numbered groups, let's appreciate the joy that (most of) these characters are allowed to feel now.

[vincent-sinclair-deserved-better]

Little Talks

Characters: Cylas, Clay

Words: 1942

Content warnings: talk about murder, death, and being buried alive

“So, you still like me?” Cylas asked, only half serious. He had taken her back to his cabin after all, and invited her to stay. 

Clay chuckled, “It was a little more extreme than I had expected, but... to each their own, I suppose? Your looks certainly don’t give any of your ‘potential’ away.” 

“You feeling better now? Started looking a little pale earlier.” 

“Ah, well,” he shrugged, “Guess I wasn’t quite prepared for all the blood and stuff.” 

She shook her head, “I tried to warn you.” 

For a while, everything went silent, apart from the crackling of the firewood.  

“No offense, but this,” Cylas gestured towards the fire, “Seems kind of... inefficient? Like, don’t you literally burn through tons of clothing this way?” 

“I guess,” Clay replied, “But not all of us have the privilege of looking like the personification of innocence and can just keep evidence around.” 

“Says the guy with a bunch of IDs under his floorboards,” Cylas snorted, “Plus, getting a little bit of dirt out of your clothing is probably easier than blood.” 

He huffed, “Haven’t really thought about it. It’s just habit, and it works. Has become something like a ritual by now.” 

“Fair enough.” 

They went back to just staring into the fire for a while, before Cylas spoke up again, “You wanna know a fun – or, well, not-so-fun fact?” 

“Sure, go for it.” 

But instead of continuing to speak right away, she sat silent, twirling a strand if her hair and picking at her face, “You know, when we first met and you told me about the whole grave thing? I was intrigued, like, genuinely. And still love the idea, not only dangling the fact that they are gonna die in front of people’s face but proving the inevitability by making them work. And the whole symbolism of them physically digging their own grave, which they technically already did before with their actions.” 

Clay watched her patiently, not interjecting. It was obvious that Cylas was somewhat uncomfortable or anxious, but still willing to say whatever was on her mind. 

“Still, despite knowing beforehand- you know how sometimes you can’t really predict your own reactions to things? Like, you have a vague idea of the situation you’re going into, and you think that it’s all good and not that of a big deal, but then it turns out that actually you’re not that fine with the amount of blood and wounds and you start feeling a little lightheaded?” she said, looking towards him. 

He nodded. The reference was clear, pointing out his earlier reaction to the sight of Cylas work. 

“Well,” she took a shaky breath, looking straight ahead again, “I’ve got some... experience with... graves, I suppose? I mean, on the one hand two funerals, though those weren’t really ‘traumatic’. And I haven’t had to dig any graves so far, so the actual situation is pretty foreign to me. I’ve been trying to figure out what part exactly got to me, and... I suppose that maybe it’s just being so close to what’s basically a gravesite, without the context of a funeral?” 

“Not like I’ve been around any open graves – or potential graves – before. Not really, at least. Not in the way that I was standing next to one and looking down at a clean, tidy hole,” she paused again, “I swear to every possible god, this is one of those times I wish I could get drunk and stuff. People always say it makes things easier. Though, then again, it might just make me emotional and cry.” 

She let out a bitter laugh. 

“You know you don’t have to tell me or continue on now if it’s too much, right?” he finally decided to say. 

“No no, it’s fine,” she brushed him off, “Unless it’s making you uncomfortable?” 

He shook his head, “Nah, I’m alright.” 

“Nice. Then let’s continue our tale, shall we?” she said, exaggerating the excitement in her voice, and gave him a half-hearted smile, “So, graves. Once upon a time, there was a girl with hair the colour of dull, old gold that had completely lost its shine. She lived in a house that was built underground, and every day, a man would visit her. The man was not a good or kind person, even though he claimed to be. And then, one day – a day like any other, really, she started to feel oddly sleepy after dinner. Of course, it isn’t unusual to be tired in the evening, but this seemed strange. 

The bad man encouraged her to go to sleep early, that it was fine to break the schedule for today, which was even stranger and concerning, since she was never allowed to stray from the schedule. But she was too tired to care. She didn’t even change into her pyjamas. 

What the girl didn’t know, however, was that the bad man had poisoned her dinner, wanting to kill her. In his opinion, she wasn’t innocent and pure anymore, and he only wanted pure girls. The problem was, that he hadn’t planned ahead well enough and ended up with a smaller dose than he would have otherwise used. He figured that it would all be well anyway, as he was going to bury her, and if the poison did not still her heart, she would suffocate. 

So, he got to work. He had already dug the hole – not quite as deep as planned because he miscalculated the placement and happened to hit one of the other coffins, old enough that he could even make out bone, but since the girl was most likely going to die before having a chance to wake up, he decided that it wouldn’t be a problem. 

He went through the usual motions, dressing her up in a beautiful white dress, fixing her hair, placing her in her coffin, her dainty body resting on soft pillows and framed by flowers. He had to make sure his girls were pretty, even once he had to say farewell. He took a picture and closed the lid, before manoeuvring the box into the crudely dug hole.” 

Cylas paused for a moment to take a breath, a sad smile on her lips. 

“Please don’t tell me that girl was you,” Clay managed to say through gritted teeth, clenching his jaw so hard it hurt. 

“You know, it’s kinda funny,” she responded in a tone that indicated that whatever she was about to say would be far from humorous, “You’d think that after having successfully done something six times before, one would have their method basically fool-proof, right? And yet, he failed. His plan B in case plan A failed relied on plan B succeeding. The back-up plan for plan B failing, was the success of plan A. But both failed. The poison wasn’t enough to kill me, the wood of that so-called ‘coffin’ old and rotting and almost soft, and the hole not deep enough. For the first – and so far only – time I felt an actual urge to live. Maybe I was possessed or driven by the ghosts of the other girls, I don’t know. What I do know is that I got out. I survived his attempt to kill me with poison and then literally dug myself out of a grave. And all that got me was even more pain and suffering.” 

He stared at her in open shock, before his expression was taken over by anger. It was basically radiating off him, and even though she wasn’t sure if he was still listening, she continued her rambling, “You know, sometimes, when I’m in a bad headspace, I feel like... like I wasn’t even worth the effort to ensure I’d actually die. Like he couldn’t even bother to make sure I was dead because I matter so little. It’s kind of stupid. But, well. It’s just this thought of being so... worthless that not even the lowest of the low even really care about me.” 

With a sigh, she looked back over at him. He was clearly spaced out, somewhere caught in his own head. 

“Clay? Clay!” she called, lightly shaking him. He looked up at her with a start, body tensing for a moment before he remembered the situation, “Hmm?” 

She shook her head and chuckled, “Did you hear anything I just said?” 

He nodded, and Cylas raised an eyebrow, clearly not convinced. Another silence followed, both of them having to take a moment to gather their thoughts and get a hold of their emotions. 

“So, this man,” Clay said, voice level and with a certain edge to it that Cylas, at this point, knew very well, “Is he already dead, or do we have our next target?” 

She flashed him a smile, but not a kind one, it was more of a conspiratorial one, with an edge of cruelness to it, “I’m currently keeping him in a safe place, locked up and highly unlikely to escape, or be found. Also got surveillance cameras. I check in on him every once in a while, to make sure he’s still alive. And to remind him who’s in charge. Or if I gotta get rid of some frustration. I can show you.” 

“Why not just kill him? In one of your more... creative ways?” Clay asked, brows furrowed in confusion. 

Cylas’ face went blank, her eyes cold and piercing. She said only four words before returning to stare into the flames. 

“Death is a mercy.” 

If he was completely honest, Clay would not have found the trap door on his own. It was hidden somewhere in the underbrush in the middle of the woods, with no indicators or signs that anything was unusual. Hell, he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to find the place again even now that he knew of it. 

“Close your mouth, you’ll catch flies,” came Cylas’ teasing comment, and he looked down at where she knelt, “You coming or what?” 

He huffed, “Give a guy a minute, will you? This is... a lot to take in.” 

She snorted at this, “If this is a lot, maybe you aren’t ready for this excursion after all.” 

He glared at her, not really angry but disapproving, “Come on, let’s go.” 

“Well, follow me then pretty boy,” she said, opening the door and beginning her descent, “And don’t step on my fingers.” 

Despite her casual and playful voice, she was tense and anxious inside. She always was. This place didn’t hold good memories, and even though things were different now, she couldn’t completely shake the feeling.  

Starting from the ladder, a small tunnel led a few dozen metre deeper into the earth. She’d never noticed how low the ceiling actually was until she looked back at Clay and saw how he had to duck a little. 

“You comfortable back there?” she said, not even trying to hide her amusement. 

“You didn’t say that this shit was built by dwarves,” he grumbled. 

She chuckled, “Well, don’t worry your pretty little head, the ceiling inside is higher. Might even fit your giant ass.” 

He rolled his eyes but returned her grin. 

The entrance door was plain wood, fitting the dark and natural environment. However knowing what expected them on the other side, Cylas shot Clay an expectant look. “Ready?” 

“As ready as I can be for something I know nothing about because you won’t even give me hints.” 

She pushed open the door and stepped inside, motioning for Clay to enter as well with an exaggerated flourish. “So, what do you think?” 

He looked around with an unreadable expression, somewhere between surprise, shock, and confusion. “It’s... very... pink?” 

@rottent33th @solmints-messyocdiary @bluecoolr @myers-meadow @immortal-velociraptor @the-pinstriped-hood @slaasherslut @damien-mlm @kalid-raven (please tell me if you don't want to be tagged, I won't feel offended and I know not everyone cares about every character <3)

[talenlee]

4e: Group Flirts

4e: Group Flirts

Sure, let’s call it that, why not. That’s not going to be completely incomprehensible.

The skill challenge represents one of the many pieces of 4th Edition D&D technology that was underappreciated in its time and misunderstood in hindsight. The Skill Challenge was a tool that let the DM run a non-combat encounter with the same kind of group engagement that the game’s combat system normally demanded; it has a failure state represented by eventual failures, but it also serves to let players platform their own choices and express how they do things. Skill Challenges in the simplest form are ‘the group needs to succeed on X possible checks before they fail N possible checks.’ The system isn’t necessarily all that groundbreaking, but the Dungeon Master’s Guide bothered to explicate a bunch of useful, good ideas about their execution.

There are ideas you might realise are fiction first and fail forward in the 4th edition D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide, but they’re not called that, and people don’t seem to remember what these books were like. What skill challenges let you do was explicitly call for a moment when many people are trying things at the same time, and get to negotiate the fiction of what that means, what kinds of things people are doing, and how their skillsets are expressed. It’s a great system, and I wish more people were familiar with skill challenges, especially in how they do something D&D does well (induce and encourage all players to engage with simple rules tools) and patches something it doesn’t tend to do well (encourage spaces of free creative expression).

Particularly, one thing that skill challenges let you do is bring the moment of the skill into a group scenario, so it’s much less likely to be ‘the skills-focused character goes off on their own for twenty minutes to work out some malarkey and then decides whether or not they tell the rest of the party what they did when they get back.’ Which isn’t a condemnation of those players who liked slinking off like that, but if it was the primary thing that ‘skilled characters’ did it could use up time at the table in an inefficient way; one player takes focus for a distinct period of time and nothing else proceeds while they’re doing it.

Skill challenges address this by adding a dimension of collaboration to all these solitary experiences, just by dint of making sure that there’s a reason to go around the table and ask ‘hey, how are you involved’ in turns, and to encourage players to volunteer stuff. You get to tell how your skills apply, and your skills are all written with a descriptor like ‘use this skill to do this kind of thing,’ so you are invited to imagine ways in which the skills you have could be applied. The skills in 4e are pleasantly broad, too, which meant that a lot of times things like magical locks could be overcome by lockpicking skills under ‘streetwise’ but also could be addressed by thoughtful skills under ‘arcana.’

It’s to this end that this system helped with one of the hardest things to do engagingly in a group environment, which is, bards seducing their ways into fancy locations. Oh, you may be thinking of another more specific type of character, maybe they’re a sorcerer or a rogue or you had an ardent who was inclined to use this as their solution to any problem, but when I said ‘bards seducing their ways into,’ you were already conjuring to mind an example. It’s classic.

It’s also, on the face of it, isolating.

Flirting isn’t really a group activity. Well, okay, it kinda is,

good girl,

but it’s not meant to be a group activity where you, the subject you’re flirting with (or subjects), and two of your other unrelated and uninvolved friends are all hanging out doing the thing at once. It’s got some intimacy, it’s got some playfulness to it, and that play means that you kind of don’t want to be distracted from it.

On the other hand it is a big point where skills become important, nae, vital to the story progressing, and if you want to use this as a focus, there’s an impulse to make it so it happens briskly and is a yes-no solution, or to say no, don’t worry about it, we’ll find some other solution so I don’t have to sit here and make everyone else engaged with one player flirting with an NPC.

What I’d suggest is to involve the skill challenge here, but also detach it from time. The moment of the skill challenge is in the flirting; up front, head to head, in the conversation with the count or duke or swan-person or whatever it is the flirter has their designs set on. But that moment can be stretched out with a series of references to events that happened in the past that can be treated as important to this moment. Make them into a sequence of flashbacks of other characters in the party building up the flirter, or gathering info on what kind of flirting would work, or even training with the flirter and giving them tools for considering the world from their perspective.

This idea may look a lot like flashbacks from Blades in the Dark and I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t a big influence on how I run skill challenges now. It’s way less interesting to me for players to have to plan ahead of time what they may want to do than let players play characters who are the types who would have done that planning ahead of time, especially since they exist in that universe and the players don’t. This use of skill challenges to stretch out a moment of conversation and then turning that into a collaborative sequence of storytelling across multiple other characters is a great example of the ways you can improve one game by just playing other games as well.

It’s the TTRPG equivalent of ‘read another book’ I guess.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#DungeonsDragons #Games #DnD4E

[random-thought-depository]

Are these comments the revealing glimpse into far-right brain rot I think they are?

"Newsom's reparations committee will recommend handing out $223,200 per person to all descendants of slaves in California for 'housing discrimination' at cost of $559BN"

Can't tell much about this proposal, because we're learning about it from a screenshot of a tweet. If this were a real thing, I would indeed have some issues with it. A wealth transfer that massive should really be done on the basis of class/wealth/income, not race, and it would probably be better to give smaller payments to more people ($223,000 per person instantly makes the recipients upper middle class). But this pales in comparison to the most important and obvious fact about this proposal: it's never going to happen.

Sanity check: the U.S. political class hates giving poor people nice things and does so only in stingy and grudging ways. This is a country where a public option for Obamacare was considered unacceptably radical. This is a country where Yangbucks ($1000 per person per month, basically a poverty income UBI) is something between radical and utopian. This is a country where the closest thing to UBI accessible to people who aren't elderly or disabled is a few hundred dollars per month per person that can only be spent on cold food (this is in "blue" California). This is a country where one of the great leftist policy triumphs is old age Social Security payments, which for my mom is... a little more than $1000 per month (at that rate it would take more than 16 years of SS payments to add up to one of those hypothetical $223,000 checks). This is a country where we have a massive housing affordability crises but the obvious Keynesian center-left solution of having the government build lots housing (that isn't a sort guaranteed to instantly turn into wretched crime-ridden hovels) and sell or rent it at or near cost is so pie in the sky you almost might as well ask for full communism. This is a country where the government's eagerness to stop paying people to stay home in the face of a plague was palpable. I've been talking about class, cause slavery reparations would probably structurally resemble a welfare program (it's the government mailing checks to people, probably after some eligibility testing) and one of its main selling points is that it would functionally be an inefficient welfare program for the black poor, but if we want to talk about race, this is a country where affirmative action, which is basically a right to work program that doesn't involve any direct subsidies, is massively controversial.

The government of California is never going to write every black Californian a $223,000 check. No serious politician will have "write every black Californian a $223,000 check" as part of their platform. If Newsom runs for President, "slavery reparations of $223,000 per person" will not be part of his platform. At least, none of these things will happen in the foreseeable future. I make these predictions with great confidence because these scenarios are totally inconsistent with the rest of how the US government and US politics works. The accusation of virtue signaling is the closest these right-wingers get to the truth of the matter: an uncharitable diagnosis of a totally politically unrealistic "proposal" like this is it exists to lend centrist liberal politicians and political institutions an appearance of radicalism while imposing no substantial commitments on them; it's a relatively safe thing for establishment centrist liberal politicians to make non-committal approval noises toward precisely because it's politically impossible and will never happen.

But these right-wingers (pretty sure that's what most of them are) seem to think this is a serious proposal that might actually happen. They seem to believe this is a thing that might happen, or at least a thing that might be seriously advocated by a major politician and plausible Presidential candidate. They seem to believe they live in a country where "the government writes every black person a $223,000 check" is a thing that might actually happen, or at least a thing a major politician might actually advocate for.

Like, damn, are their intuitions about what is and isn't politically plausible actually that badly calibrated? I know a lot of right-wingers are firmly embedded in a fictional alternate universe of misinformation, but I didn't think it was that bad.