#which would mostly be minutiae from my day

[gillianthecat]

Apparently it's Ben Franklin's fault* that electrons are negative. I can't really blame him, he had to make a random guess which side to call positive and which negative, but I'm still a little mad. It would make physics and chemistry significantly easier for my poor confused brain if he'd guessed the way that made electrons have the positive charge.

*based on an answer on quora. they seemed knowledgeable, but i didn't actually fact check anywhere else.

[plague-of-insomnia]

I'm sorry if this is a silly question but I'm just curious. Do you know how much time Ciel and Sebastian spend in Weston? I haven't read the manga in a while but while watching the anime I just feel like everything is happening too fast??? Luke the whole are was done in 2 weeks max

Hi, anon, I am not someone who pays super close attention to the chronology of canon (as in, exactly what day/date things happen) partly bc I care more about the overall story and themes and the characters than minutiae like that. Not bc I think people who do are dumb but bc I’m more of an AU creator than canon so knowing the details like that to extreme doesn’t really benefit me much so it doesn’t interest me to spend the time doing it. (Though I know at least one person did come up with a timeline through a certain point in the manga years ago, which you may find if you do a google search.)

But what I can tell you is Ciel comes home from the Campania before Easter and arrives at Weston presumably after that holiday, so likely in March or April. (I could probably find out exactly when Easter happened in 1889 but I honestly could care less lol.) We also know from McMillian that he is joining mid-term. It’s actually a clever way for Yana to have the school “begin” in Spring (which is familiar/nostalgic for Japanese audiences, where school years begin in April, usually) while still reconciling with the Western tradition of beginning in the fall.

We also know the cricket tournament takes place on the 4th of June—probably a day Yana picked since it plays with the theme of four (four houses, four prefects) in the arc but also because the number has an association with death in Japanese.

This means that Ciel is not a student at Weston for very long at all—only 2-3 months at most—since the midnight tea party happens after the cricket completes and presumably marks the end (or close to it) of the school year/term.

Honestly, until the last episode I think the anime has been perfectly paced with the manga. They’ve really made only minor shifts and mostly expanded things, so they’re following Yana’s vision fairly closely.

The one major thing is that this episode shoves most of two chapters into one, when it really could have been done in two. But that would mean 12 episodes. and I suspect the team was worried if they didn’t get the cricket part over fast, they might risk losing/boring their core audience.

One huge change they did was take out the explanation of the game itself and its basic rules, which Bard explains in the manga. This was likely done for time/space reasons but also because they may have figured most viewers don’t care and they can communicate enough for people to understand and follow along even if they don’t understand the rules of the game itself.

This is partly perhaps because the cricket part of the arc was not well received in Japan and was one of the least popular chapters, supposedly. It’s why I was shocked they turned it into a musical a couple years ago.

I was a bit disappointed to lose all that not only bc we lost a nice scene with Bard and the servants (they cut a scene with them where they have lunch, though it’s possible that could make it into next episode, but I won’t hold my breath), but also bc I’m like the ONE person who genuinely enjoyed the cricket part of the arc, and it’s one reason this arc is my second favorite in many ways.

I LOVE seeing Ciel and Seb working together in devious ways to get their mission accomplished, and how far Ciel is willing to go to win. Ofc we can still appreciate it anyway, but the fact that he so carefully works within the limits of the rules— and in fact, I learned in commentary on the arc that some of the rules Ciel takes advantage of were actually changed not long after this period of time, which is a fun detail.

So it could be things feel like they’re moving fast because in a sense they are, but it also could be you’re sensing that urgency from how rushed this last episode was. But I suspect when all is said and done, and you watch the entire thing, it probably won’t feel as off. Book of Murder took place over only 3 days, and Seb and Ciel were not at the circus long at all. I can’t be sure but maybe only a week or two? And ofc the campania adventure was also only a few days. In fact, this may actually be the longest mission in the series to this point. So it seems like most missions don’t take too long.

Hope that answers your question! I’ve been looking through the chapters in this arc before every episode to get a sense for the pacing and they’ve generally fallen exactly where I expect. This episode being one exception since they really did condense a lot.

[viiioca]

day 24 - family

Edmont, I have received your latest letter with your especially vexing request, and so it is with all my affection that I have to ask: Must we? Surely your readers would not be so interested in the minutiae of my upbringing, as I can promise you that it was mostly dragon-free, save for one unfortunately critical moment, and there was very little in the way of vengeful vows sworn, strengthening the body for the day my spear might pierce the hide of my enemy, etcetera, etcetera. Surely Estinien would be a much better subject for this study, assuming you could find him. Moreover, was this not meant to be your own memoires?

In the interest of brevity, if we must do this: It was a good upbringing. My parents did what they could with what they had been given; they were loving and I was loved. My Echo made me a particularly troublesome child (you understand the climate at the time), so they saw to my education themselves, which was no light burden given their dedication to their work. My mother oversaw House Lausienne's mercantile activities (largely importing and logistics, if memory serves). My father was a traveling chirurgeon, formerly of the Hospitaliers, who found he preferred rural medicine over the medic tent. I spent the majority of my time with him -- it was easier, as my Echo did not misbehave so much in the quiet stretches between towns, and he was quite happy to have a little apprentice. By all accounts, they were wonderfully in love. There was little in the way of discord, except, perhaps, for my father's habit of ducking out of attending Mass (mother thought it was a poor look for our family, when we needed all the goodwill we could get). They did fight that day. I do remember that. It was coincidence that we had all been with the same caravan; Mother rarely had to travel further than Ishgard or its nearest towns, but sometimes there would be some issue with a shipment far afield that required her personal touch. We were headed the same way, towards a Dravanian border town. Father wanted to separate from the group -- a detour to a homestead for a check-up on a patient -- but Mother wasn't having it. It was dangerous, she said. She was right about that, of course, though I think she would have preferred otherwise. I think I would have lost someone regardless that day. Sometimes, it is only bad luck in all directions. Anyroad -- it's a very plain story. You could easily pluck any child out of an Ishgardian orphanage and get some similar approximation for your book, should you be dissatisfied with mine. Are you sure you even need this aside? Surely your editor will have something to say about it. Kindest, exasperated regards, Estelle

[roevember 2023 prompt by wintertitania]

[goombasa]

Unicorn Overlord and Tactical Minutiae

So, back in august, I got sick enough to be laid out for several days. Not covid, thankfully, but equally as debilitating, and when I'm sick, I tend to hyperfixate on video games, and my girlfriend and I had just gotten a great, big pile of new games for our birthdays (which fall around two weeks apart from one another). One of those games, the one that I played the most while in a haze of cough medicine and snot, was Unicorn Overlord, a brand new tactical RPG from developer Vanillaware.

I was already a big fan of this developer for their past hack and slash games like Odin Sphere and Muramasa: The Demon Blade. So to hear that one of my favorite developers was making a game in one of my favorite genres, I was really looking forward to this. And lo and behold, it's really good, a very nice fusion of ideas and systems from series like Ogre Battle and Fire Emblem, both series that I really, really like.

At first, however, I was worried that the game was going to be a bit on the boring or more automated side; the overhead view of the battle sees you summoning your units to the field and then commanding them to move to a place to either capture strategic locations or engage enemy fighters. In combat, you have no control over how the battle plays out when it's happening, you're just watching your units and the enemies spend passive and active points to attack each other until both sides exhaust everything they can do, and whoever's left standing, or has the most percentage of HP left, wins. Repeat until victory.

Yes, you do have control over who is put into each unit, so I thought that the primary strategy was just going to be figuring out how best to build balanced, reliable units that could stand against most enemy combinations. Build cavalry units to take out basic infantry, focus on high accuracy units against flying or scout types, that sort of stuff. And for a few hours, that was as deep as it got, and it worked fine for those few hours, but I was worried that my interest was going to wane the longer the game went on.

But just as I was starting to have that worry, the game introduced a new mechanic now that I had enough characters to create a decently sized army: the tactical menu. Every character has a number of active and passive abilities in combat, and they learn more as they level up. These can be fitted with a bunch of stipulations on how and when they use certain skills. Like, when I say a bunch, I mean a BUNCH.

You can make it so they will prioritize using certain moves against or on specific unit types. You can make it so that they ONLY use that move on certain unit types. You can make it so they will only use an ability when an enemy or ally is above or below a certain HP threshold; when they have a certain amount of AP or PP; when other characters perform certain actions; Whether it's daytime or night time, it's ridiculous how much control they give you over how a unit will act in combat when you have no control over them. You can assign up to two stipulations per move and those stipulations can also override how the move generally works, i.e. only triggering at the end of combat, or when an ally is attacked, etc.

It's amazing how specific you can get with it, and yes, that does run the risk of making a unit a bit too specific to be generally useful, so I mostly kept to just using the broader, more basic stipulations, and I generally didn't even have to do that. After that point, the game started to auto-assign specific tactics based on a unit's class and what they were best at. The most I would have to do would be to tell my healers not to just start healing the moment that a unit dropped below 100% health because that wasted a lot of the healing potential. But the option to fine tune was always there, and I did do a lot of experimenting and fine tuning as the game went on.

The good news is, at least for the difficulty I played on (normal), the minutae of doling out various tactics to every single unit isn't entirely necessary. Your opponents, for the most part, won't use any tactics beyond the basic ‘hit whatever’s directly in front of me' strategy, so you have the advantage there, and while, yes, not using the tactics menu at all will put you at a disadvantage, the combination of the game automatically assigning certain things to new recruits, and a helpful ‘optimize’ option in the menu if you don't want to deal with it yourself, means that you can largely ignore the more intricate parts of the tactics system of this game if you really want to, or slowly push yourself into it more and more as the game goes on. It's not strictly optional, but you can downplay it if you don't want to get too deep in the weeds.

Really, what blows me away the most about it is just how many options it gives you to control your troops in battle without actually controlling them. None of the other systems in the game attempt to be this deep, not that they have to; the overworld pathfinding works fine, but I do wish I could make micro adjustments here and there without having to completely redirect my units, the rapport system is very easily exploited when you get access to taverns, and the deliveries and town rebuilding system is very simple and basic. That isn't to say that they're bad systems at all, they serve their function well and help to add upon what is a very nice, intricate battle system, but you compare all of that to what you can do with your unit's various behaviors, the synergies you can put together between specific attacks and buffs, and it all comes together amazingly well. 

While I don't plan on replaying the game too soon (it's a long game after all), I do want to see how higher difficulties push me to use the tactics in more in depth ways, but the fact that it isn't all encompassing on lower difficulties keeps the game accessible to even those who aren't very familiar with this genre of game. I hope to see more games that give you the option to tinker and fine tune how things work like this in the future, I think it's a really fun feature that a lot of strategy games could use to add some intereting depth and replay value to their tactics, especially if interacting directly with your character's actions is somewhat limited.

Nice work, Vanillaware, it's another hit!

[queenofbaws]

Hi!! I hope you are feeling better Queenie!! For the writers ask may I ask numbers 7,8,17 and 39? Thank you!!

ahhh, thank you!!! 🥰 i'm hangin' in there, haha! i hope you don't mind i shifted the order of these juuust a little, for reasons that will probably be obvious, hehe.

weird writing asks for weird writers!

7. What is your deepest joy about writing?

honestly, for all i complain about it when the words aren't coming out right (or, more often, fast enough for my liking, lmfao), my deepest joy about writing is.........most of it, actually. for me, writing is like......a puzzle. you have to put the right words together, the right sentences together, the right ideas and concepts and images together, and if you can do that, you can make something gorgeous, or terrifying, or hilarious, or tearjerking, or any combination therein!

i love getting to sit down to a project and think "huh, how am i going to tackle this one?" and i love imagining how people will respond to it, and i love lying in bed at night or standing in the shower and suddenly screaming because something makes sense where it didn't before!!! writing is just my happy place, and whenever you guys see me bemoaning it, i hope you know it's (mostly) me being a dramatic clown ;P

39. What keeps you writing when you feel like giving up?

god, time for cliché hour again, but...you guys 🥹 hahaha, seriously, whenever i get super stuck on a project or i just start hating my own writing - something that happens more often than i'd like to admit, lmao - knowing that out there, there are people who have taken time out of their day to sit down and read the words i put down just...idk man, it does something to the ol' heart. whenever i start feeling really down on myself, i pop over to ao3 and poke through my saved inbox messages, and without fail, that always puts a little fire back under my butt ;)

8. If you had to write an entire story without either action or dialogue, which would you choose and how would it go?

oh, without action, no question. dialogue is my JAM, and while i'm sure it'd be hard to get around my impulse to always have people shrugging and smirking, shrugging and smirking, that's all anyone ever does, shrug and smirk, i think i could PROBABLY make something work...lights get knocked out and it's two characters trying to escape a room in the dark? laura and max stuck in their itty bitty cells trying to scheme their way out? a long-distance phone call being spied on by a third party??? oh the possibilities are endless, and, i'm sure, full of ellipses!

17. Talk to me about the minutiae of your current WIP. Tell me about the lore, the history, the detail, the things that won’t make it in the text.

i'm lying down on the ground right now you don't even know. ooooooooooooh if you want some additional info about like wringing blood from a stone (i'm gonna be trying real hard not to spoil anything), it's under the cut akldsjfaklsdjf

so. as is the case with every longfic i endeavor upon, i've. i've gotten in too deep with my personal headcanons for the hackett fam lmfao. some of this is going to end up in the fic itself, some of it won't, but god. help me. i didn't intend to go THIS deep into the summer camp family aklsdjfklasjdkfjdf

i keep telling myself that one of these days i'm going to try and sit down to make a big, nice edit of the whole family, but then i chicken out and don't do it, but playing off the character intro cards/descriptions from the quarry, here are the descriptors i've personally been using for the whole racket:

KAYLEE: Athletic, considerate, lonely, defiant CALEB: Brooding, responsible, sensitive, creative BOBBY: Absent-minded, impulsive, obedient, excitable CHRIS: Charismatic, people-pleasing, emotional, paternal TRAVIS: High-strung, suspicious, insecure, defensive JACK: Superstitious, reclusive, sentimental, cunning CONSTANCE: Assertive, capable, obstinate, manipulative JEDEDIAH: Old-fashioned, stern, proud, aloof

they make such a pretty (and well-adjusted) picture when they're all together like that, huh? ;P

when i do character studies like this, usually i end up falling into rabbit hole after rabbit hole of backstories, and this is...this is absolutely no different - i don't think i'll ever sit down and write the whole thing out, but i do, for example, have the story of jed and constance's whole deal figured out in my head. i'm going to touch on it SO briefly in the fic itself, but god it's. it's all there. i have rough backgrounds for jed's siblings (that we don't see in the hackett family tree in-game, no, but boy howdy i have reasons for THAT too asdklfjlsdf), i just sort of.............as with any family, there's a whole story that obviously comes BEFORE the story we're seeing right now, the story that explains how everyone got to be The Way They Are, but there aren't werewolves in that one, it's just like. bad parenting. and child negligence. and alcohol. so it's staying in my brainbox where it belongs, but rest assured IT EXISTS.

i cannot for the life of me think of a way to present any of this clearly and in an organized manner, so...here are just some pieces-parts about the worldstate the fic takes place in, which may appear in the story itself aaaaaaand which might not!

the events of until dawn are canon - except, of course, jack and josh dying, lmao

the events of house of ashes are canon - sole survivor jason

the events of the devil in me are/will be canon - the shoeshine killer is a known entity

the fiddlers' visits to hackett's quarry always took place in the early spring/late fall and usually coincided with, let's say, parties going missing in the general area of the pines

...except the one time they visited at the height of summer in 1993 ;)c

amelia hackett (aka that grant girl) died from complications giving birth to kaylee

all twelve of the harbinger motel's guest rooms are color-coded according to the series of totems jack has placed inside for "protection:" fortune - white, guidance - yellow, loss - brown, danger - red; there's only one "death" or "black" room, and it's jack's personal quarters in back of the check-in area

none of the hunting trophies hanging in the harbinger are actual hunting trophies...except the jackalope. all the other skulls are wood carvings jack has made himself, finished to look like bone

growing up, chris only ever worked at the camp and bobby only ever worked at the scrapyard, but travis bounced around, working at the warrens' farm and the one (1) video rental place north kill had before winding up with the police, meaning, ironically, he's the sibling who worked the least for the family

all three hackett brothers played football in high school - to varying degrees of success

as used to be common, there is a family burial plot out in hackett woods somewhere, where many - but not all - of jed's relatives have been laid to rest

...kaylee and caleb still have not found it, but they TRY

jed says none of them will find it until it's time to bury him back there

travis has explained at least 47 times in the past two years that people don't get buried in their backyards anymore, that's not how it works, dad

jed insists that's exactly how it works, so help him god

bobby is so fucking good at shadow puppets. he's just. he's really, really fucking good at shadow puppets you guys

at the risk of continuing to ramble for five business days, i'll leave it there for now but aklsdjfldsjaf thank you for giving me the opportunity to barf behind the scenes stuff out onto a page XD

[calowlmitygoddess]

Ill fill the writing meme because i love talking about myself lmao

1. What font do you write in? Do you actually care or is that just the default setting? Standart arial, and don't care, tought i tried the comic sans trick a few times

2. If you had to give up your keyboard and write your stories exclusively by hand, could you do it? If you already write everything by hand, a) are you a wizard and b) pen or pencil? Probably not, my handwriting is terrible, actually unreadable to anyone but myself. Ive used to write on papper back in highschool when i had to write basicly everyday, now i havent touched a pen in ages.

3. What is your writing ritual and why is it cursed? No standart ritual aside from needing music, anything else distracts me. The two songs i listened the most while writing is Respite on the Spitafields by ghost and Sacred Worlds by Blind Guardian

4. What’s a word that makes you go absolutely feral? Can't think of any rn :^

5. Do you have any writing superstitions? What are they and why are they 100% true? I dont think i have any

6. What is your darkest fear about writing? That it all will be meaningless/no one will read what i do

7. What is your deepest joy about writing? Doing Something TM the whole, creation aspect

8. If you had to write an entire story without either action or dialogue, which would you choose and how would it go? No dialogue, just write a piece of someone going trought their day, ive wrote a small exercise a while back that fit this.

9. Do you believe in ghosts? This isn’t about writing I just wanna know No. Unless i hear a Noise TM then they are very real

10. Has a piece of writing ever “haunted” you? Has your own writing haunted you? What does that mean to you? All my unfinished things haunt me daily. So much promise and so far nothing real. I had to write a thing to help let go of their ghosts

11. Do you believe in the old advice to “kill your darlings?” Are you a ruthless darling assassin? What happens to the darlings you murder? Do you have a darling graveyard? Do you grieve? Only when it fits the narrative. I dont like killing characters whitout a major reason, usually thematic, otherwise it feels cheap.

12. If a genie offered you three writing wishes, what would they be? Btw if you wish for more wishes the genie turns all your current WIPs into Lorem Ipsum, I don’t make the rules. Have the skill needed to make my Big Project reality, Have it reach some form of Good greater recognition/popularity, the last one i would keep for later.

13. What is a subject matter that is incredibly difficult for you write about? What is easy? Hard topics in general, big issues, relationships in any realistic way.

Literally just characters vibing, introspection, Over the top stuff.

14. Do you lend your books to people? Are people scared to borrow books from you? Do you know exactly where all your “lost” books are and which specific friend from school you haven’t seen in twelve years still possesses them? Will you ever get them back? No one ever asked for a book to me but id have no problem doing so. Im the one people shouldnt ever lend any books because i am very careless and would likely end up dropping coffee or something accidentally on it

15. Do you write in the margins of your books? Dog-ear your pages? Read in the bath? Why or why not? Do you judge people who do these things? Can we still be friends? I dont write in margins, but i did dog eared books in the past, and i use the jacket(?) of the book to mark my pages.

16. What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever used as a bookmark? fuckenn... i dont remember tbh, again i use the jacket.

17. Talk to me about the minutiae of your current WIP. Tell me about the lore, the history, the detail, the things that won’t make it in the text. I have a post with a bunch of lore about the dragon species, i cant find it tought. But they are mammals that lay eggs, have no gender, their society mostly resemble that of bees, they have no currency, and the watsonian reason the main character goes by gendered terms despite not having one is because she thinks the words sound nice

18. Choose a passage from your writing. Tell me about the backstory of this moment. How you came up with it, how it changed from start to end. Spicy addition: Questioner provides the passage. I dont think theres any passages that have interesting enough backstories.

19. Tell me a story about your writing journey. When did you start? Why did you start? Were there bumps along the way? Where are you now and where are you going? My dream since childhood was to write a book, ive always liked to tell stories, read and such, i would dictate stories that my mom would write down before i learnt how to do so. But then i got really into drawing and started to foucus more on that, and ended up shifting the foucus from writing text to comic making since every artist with ocs does that. I also changed foucus on projects faster than light, so i would write 2 chapters and give up the next day, or change the entire story the next week and such.

I stuck with comics as my goal for like the past 6 years, and only early this year i came to the conclusion that i really hate the comic making part of making comics, and that i like writting much better. Im very rusty+ the fact im not as avid reader as i used to, and the quality is not really good, but im having fun.

20. If a witch offered you the choice between eternal happiness with your one true love and the ability to finally finish, perfect, and publish your dearest, darlingest, most precious WIP in exactly the way you've always imagined it — which would you choose? You can’t have both sorry, life’s a bitch

Wip, finish the wip, thats all i wanted since i was 10, what even is the point of this question.

21. Could you ever quit writing? Do you ever wish you could? Why or why not? I just started writting 'seriously' so i dont want to quit just yet. Also i have a massive undeserved ego, i dont think even the most discouraging,awful negative review could make me quit doing it.

22. How organized are you with your writing? Describe to me your organization method, if it exists. What tools do you use? Notebooks? Binders? Apps? The Cloud? I have one google doc, with outline+ chapters as i write them, i used to have different docs for lore/outline/chapters but its easier this wau

23. Describe the physical environment in which you write. Be as detailed as possible. Tell me what’s around you as you work. Paint me a picture.

In the inn i stay during the week and my actual room in my house are essentially the same place, Is my room, its messy and damp but its confy enough. My table is turned to the small window and during the morning the sun hist right in my face. The table is equally messy, with cups and glasses over it, pappers stained with coffee and tea cover its surface. My one company, a small succulent that rests near the window, and a carved small owl that i need to constantly clean because its constantly molding due to the dampness.

24. How much prep work do you put into your stories? What does that look like for you? Do you enjoy this part or do you just want to get on with it? Idk what kind of prep work you would do. I just sit and write mate.

25. What is a weird, hyper-specific detail you know about one of your characters that is completely irrelevant to the story? Godamn i cant think of any rn. Most of my Extremely well developed characters are from my BIg Story, but it literally doesnt exist anywhere outside my head yet, so idk what is and isnt relevant to it. For my current wip is a little harder since the characters are like less than a year old. idk...Orick looks like a cat person, i think he would like to own a cat.

26. How do you get into your character’s head? How do you get out? Do you ever regret going in there in the first place? I go "what would a person in this situation with this background do" and try my best to guess.

27. Who is the most stressful character you’ve ever written? Why? Any character thats like a stategist or planner, because its hard to make them look smart without making it look like bullshit or predicting the future

28. Who is the most delightful character you’ve ever written? Why? Meira. Her narration came very easy to me, guilt ridden but still professional and calm, also Big Gay.

29. Where do you draw your inspiration? What do you do when the inspiration well runs dry? I was never a very original kid, im a vampire that sucks the soul out of other things to fuel my own. My current Wip main characters are based out of HK characters they resemble nothing of. Im always on the prowl for new media to steal from be inspired by

30. Talk to me about the role dreams play in your writing life. Have you ever used material from your dreams in your writing? Have you ever written in a dream? Did you remember it when you woke up?

Sort of. I've dreamed with plots before, and i usually do my best to remember, but while at the moment i wake up feeling like that was the best idea in the world, after a while when i think about it again, its just sort of nonsense

31. Write a short love letter to your readers.

Literally Thank you to anyone who ever gave me the time of day. Im still a little haunted by those i dissapointed by never fininishing stuff but the fact that yall liked enough to make me feel guilty for giving up is also good in a way <3

32. What is a line from a poem/novel/fanfic etc that you return to from time and time again? How did you find it? What does it mean to you?

'sometimes a dream is enough' - the last line from one of my favourite books. In context it drives me insane, it makes me rabid. But out of context its just neat

33. Do you practice any other art besides writing? Does that art ever tie into your writing, or is it entirely separate? Im a Drawer! also tried sculpting in the past. And YES, my current dream is to have an illustrated novel.

34. Thoughts on the Oxford comma, Go: No idea what an oxford comma is and at this point im too afraid to ask

35. What’s your favorite writing rule to smash into smithereens? POV character being the protagonist, i just found it such a neat concept. Also the protagonist needing to be a Good Moral Character.

36. They say to Write What You Know. Setting aside for a moment the fact that this is terrible advice...what do you Know? Dinossaurs, i wanna write a story about dinossaurs one day...

37. If you were to be remembered only by the words you’ve put on the page, what would future historians think of you? Gay. Also very into dragons

38. What is something about your writing process YOU think is Really Weird? If you are comfortable, please share. If you’re not comfortable, what do you think cats say about us? I dont have any Weird habits i think? I can only imagine some kind of complain about how their current food sucks.

39. What keeps you writing when you feel like giving up? Not to be dark in the funny meme but giving up would literally remove one of the things that give my life some form of meaning

40. Please share a poem with me, I need it.

idk how to write poems sorry

[norcal4g]

“Hi I would like to talk to you about Thorium”

I am passionate- I want to fight global climate change and stop the in situ destruction of our planet, break the dependence on foreign oil which dictates policy in Europe and the world in favor of despot dictators and religious fanatics. I want to work on something meaningful, physical and real that will further mankind to greater heights- heights such as leaving this rock and expanding to the edges of the universe. All of these can be addressed by nuclear power, specifically thorium molten salt reactors.

Talking with friends over the past few weeks, I have found both hope and struggle. Universally all the things I have talked about are equally desirable- only those motivated by other agendas such as power would even try to argue the opposite. However, the way forward in communicating vision and generating support for real courses of action is the current battle field. Everyone is informed one way or another, and have each their own proposed solution of varying thoroughness and efficacy. But at heart, these are ideas and when people come together for dinner or anime conventions- these things are not the top thing on their mind, not even remotely the top 20 things they want to talk about.

My background is from the military. The foundation of military thought is “decisiveness” ie making critical and broad reaching decisions in a timely matter- a good plan now is better than the perfect plan never. So having researched and committed to this nuclear track I feel a sort of “militancy”- it is at its core a revolution. We are upending the world order dominated by petroleum politics. But the opposition we are fighting are not the “anti nuclear” rabble who are mostly ignorant and fear mongerers. By psychological functions, despite having common aims we sometimes create walls between us that fracture the movement and it’s important to realize that we are all in this together and we all desire the same thing.

In two separate instances, I am talking to new and old friends and we have reached this part of the conversation- how to go forward. One friend insisted that solar was the way ahead, and the other was not convinced that specifically molten salt reactors were worth the effort. In the context of the social setting, the temptation is to throw down and begin tearing down their argument’s. But it’s important to note that the original sources are not handy even in this digital age, the time amount and setting are not appropriate or conducive to even review it if they were, and that the more ardent and militant you hold a position the more repulsive you come across. I bite my tongue and just nod and propose to “agree to disagree” which while not bad in itself denies me some of the chains of ideas and discussions that I wanted to reach. There must be a balance, there is a world order to overthrow but to do so requires arriving at knowledge sometimes controversially.

My focus at this time is not the technological side of nuclear engineering but rather formulating the social and messaging side. There are different messages and themes that have to be tailored for each audience- be it friends, family, academics, professionals, and political personalities all hear different things in different ways and have to be tailored for the message to resonate just right. Some of the ideas that help me shape this messaging is having a BLUF- the bottom line up front. This is the elevator pitch that what you want and what you need from the person you are telling it to. The temptation for me is to go into the minutiae that’s where I feel comfortable and passionate but that’s not where others are at. At the end of the day, 99% of people either don’t care [as much as you do] or don’t have any power or sway to affect the outcome anyways. As for navigating some of these conversational pitfalls, there are some techniques I have pondered on.

When a point comes to a conflict, know that a decision will not be created there.

Look and talk about the problem, not the other person, talk about it as if it were chess- poking from different angles, entertaining possibilities and different paths and at the end resolving “we will see”.

Read up on different discussions and be generally read on the different arguments.

Anti nuclear- this is generally shooting down arguments. WHO report demonstrated that More people die every [day]from cancer and other diseases from fossil fuels than all the people who have ever died in nuclear accidents. Radiation is not magic or evil spell.

Costs and nuclear waste. There is no nuclear waste problem, it’s a policy problem declaring it as nuclear waste and restricting its use. Only 4% of the energy potential of fuel is used in a reactor before it becomes “waste” which is a label to prevent it from being refined into plutonium bomb material.

Solar/“renewable energy”- nuclear is renewable energy. Thorium is so abundant we wouldn’t even need to open a new mine to extract it- it’s a byproduct of other mining processes. Solar has 3 problems- heat efficiency (30% lost to heat), real estate competition and maintenance costs, and lack of storage options for the limited window. The problem with solar is that there’s not enough to meet the demand required, it does have a place.

The movement for nuclear energy is still growing, the conditions are ripe and the public is willing to entertain. It’s all about offering the good news as informatively and as engaging as possible so that one day, if it ever came to a ballot or something they could actually influence, they remember your face and your smart and kind words. The view point to push are the good talking points that I want to discuss, but at the end of the day for this conversation, we are all on the same team with the same goal in mind. Let the chains up and let the technology be built at scale, and they will all speak for themselves.

[golden-----hour]

144

8/5/24

I think I need to have better boundaries between what is poetry and what is journal so that I can freely write without the impending sense that I will gut this for any sort of wisdom or enlightenment. I really haven't. Sometimes I'll go back through them and stumble onto past realizations and feel like they are usable. So I am announcing nothing comes from this except the end of a night ticked on oblivion's wall.

Observations

-Bright car lights behind me making it impossible to drive

-how I am bored with that and bored with that with that

-how this spacing is uneven so I will stop. I notice how I left my German tote bag in Vic's dirty basement- it has my douche and lube. Whenever I am in the basement I try to notice a few new things. This time I saw a new piece of workout equipment, TV remote, clothes on bathroom floor. I asked him if he knew what language was spoken in Austria because I am an asshole. I liked that.

I did a lot of poppers. I mostly am attached to the pleasure of sex and not the love of it. With Lorenz, the poppers didn't do that much because I loved him and love is the most boring intensity I think but it lasts the longest and requires the most maintenance when done correctly. He asked if I wanted the poppers and I said no. I wish the drug had a more serious name so that it could maybe feel different. I know at least not to take it. I just need sex like that once a week forever and I'll be fine. I wonder what I could focus on without it, or my phone too. So what?

I almost killed a small rabbit and a possum. I didn't. (I can or literally I am capable.) I like the Saw Mill River Parkway and I like the Taconic and the Sprain. They are dark rivers in my head. I hear calling in the night.

I am resisting Grindr. I left the douche and the lube in the basement and now I am thinking- what if when I try to have sex every other day of the week? Then I can't try until Wednesday when I maybe pick the bag up, or Friday. I will not try to have sex until Thursday then because I had some today. Which means I will be more conscious on Grindr. Friday.

Konner starts to sing because he hears me sing and is envious of me wholly. He doesn't know what I've survived or what plagues me. I will never share music with him because he would nitpick each minutia in order to feel big, which would hamper the whole effort to share. I do feel curious about it. He is curious about me and slightly bothered that I don't engage with him more. All the teachers here bother me. Also reminder do not think tomorrow, just do until 5:20. Don't think.

I talked to Ashley on the phone. I didn't really care that much. She wants to "make art" but hasn't asked herself why. She wants to do it to feel important and not because she has something to say. She says superficial things about motion, for example, and is senselessly encouraged by Professors. She needs a more stable job and idea about how to materialize artistry of any sort. I like talking to her I guess. My pursuit of art of any sort feels bland when I talk to her which isnt a good sign. I could tell she was bored when I shared a poem. She was looking for the next thing to say about herself instead of listening. Or the poem isn't very good, which is fine, because it was hitting the wrong audience. I explained how the teachers her make me feel like I am going to become them: 30 and without any discernible profession or story. But this isn't true, this is the hubris of 23. I know which dreams to dream. Don't think tomorrow.

Writers sicken me right now but I am too afraid of being bored. Which is good. Goodnight.

[mousetourmaline]

Expecting to teleport

When I've been around the Internet for a while and haven't come across anybody discussing some particular phenomenon, it's often difficult to tell the difference between "This is such a mundane and common experience that nobody even bothers discussing it. What would be next, commentary on blinking?" and "This is something that mostly doesn't happen to people."

Today I'm thinking about how my brain believes I can teleport.

Every now and then, apparently at random, for a split second I experience a strong expectation of being somewhere else. It's not a hallucination, in that I don't actually see anything; instead, I feel a slight startlement because the very specific environment I expected to see in the next moment isn't there. As though a video game engine had tried to pre-load the area it thought I was about to step into and mysteriously pulled the wrong one from a list.

The environments don't seem to be triggered by any external stimuli; there's nothing I can blame on music or scent. They're mostly public spaces, but not uncommonly they're ones I haven't thought about in years, let alone seen -- specific undergraduate classrooms, a Pizza Hut restaurant I must have been into maybe twice in a town I used to live in, a shopping street in a foreign city. I never consciously tried to memorise the layouts of these places when I visited them in real life, and most of them never had any particular emotional significance that would impress the details on my mind, yet my brain seems to be prepared for them. There's never any imaginary reasoning involved even for a moment, no explanation of why I, thirty-something and years into a day-job, would suddenly be walking into a university classroom, or how I could have got to a different country in defiance of my anxiety about public transport. I just visually expect it, against all reason. The fact that I might be lying in bed with my eyes closed or curled on the sofa reading doesn't at all affect the expectation of what I'll see, which is invariably as-if-from-upright and requiring no eyelid-moving effort on my part.

And maybe this is something that happens to everyone! It's a momentary experience with no real-world effects. Maybe for everybody else it's just too boring to discuss. But on an Internet where we all have unlimited space to express the minutiae of our lives I would have expected, in all these years, to have seen it come up somewhere. People sensitive to their subconscious feelings wondering if there's any significance to the places that their brains prepare to teleport to, and the ones that never seem to come up. Stupid jokes about how "my brain always seems to send me back to your mom's place". Fanfic about characters whose memories are magically sealed anticipating places they believe they've never seen. People who identify with non-human creatures asking if anyone ever expected a view as seen from all fours or with animal-like eyes. "My girlfriend told me she still mind-flashes to her ex's bedroom. I told her I expected her to be more serious about being committed to me; AITA?" Something. But asking Google about "momentary flashbacks" brings up resources about PTSD; "feeling like you're somewhere else" gets ones about derealisation. Maybe I'm alone, or maybe I'm just forever the right keyword away.

[rancim]

7-16

I had spent a lot of time trying to figure out a new novel to read before going to sleep, because these days I’m trying to be better about consuming things that at the least I think will actively contribute to my development as a writer, rather than simply soaking in the pockets of internet ephemera that do nothing for me but present strange little tidbits of trivia to present to friends when I have nothing to talk about (did you know there’s a whole subreddit of pictures devoted to cars fucking dragons, I will say to a friend when I feel we are on the verge of emotional vulnerability).

I tried my best to follow my writing professor’s advice post-grad, and instead of trying to be published, simply thought about writing and formalism and what my writing meant and what my writing could be. This ended up with me reading a lot and saving the recommendations of books anthologized in the canon of small presses, big presses and everything in between. A random blogger I thought was pretty. A friend who mostly read things circumstantial to their own experience. Again, anything and everything.

And then I started to ask myself do I really like reading and writing or do I simply like the things that adhere to my particular personality? I would read critically lauded things and think ah, what a bore, but I’d read a thing with no press, no accolades, panned on goodreads or whatever and think ah, how interesting! How interesting! Read enough and everything starts to blur. I only delved then into the writers who appealed to me, be it because of emotional resonance or interesting story concepts or stylistic flair or more recently, what I’ve come upon, is the idea of compression. Just an ear towards rhythm, a story without a wasted word, where no single sentence felt redundant.

Now in my thirties I find myself less interested in the new and more invested in reading more and more of the writers that I’ve managed to vibe with during that wild, undisciplined time in my twenties, when I amassed books from used bookstores that sounded even vaguely interesting, whose first pages were read, set aside, now a drop in an ocean of a closet of which I do not open because all of those books tend to bum me out. Rather than venture into that closet for new things to read, I spent 2 hours googling what books the people I read like reading, because now again, to reiterate in my thirties, I guess I just want to see the people that affected the people that affected my life. I’m more interested in just my inner workings, my small circle of influences.

So in conclusion, rather than start anything new, I just ended up drifting in and out of the online sphere before downloading some novellas that George Saunders was into and then feeling sleepy, deciding to sleep without getting any real reading done. But then I had realized, oh no, did you do your writing quota? I’m trying to be better about writing too. Even boring things, even minutiae, I need to try to write something when I can’t get the lead out on the fiction front I’ve been trying to commit to, so yes, even the dumb act of trying to pick a book before bed, let’s write about that shall we?

I’m always worried about whether I’ve improved upon the self that I was a decade ago or whatever. Without a successful track record to cite, books published or awards won or what have you, it’s easy to think that maybe you’re just going in circles and you’ve plateaued skill-wise. I went onto my old blog that I ran in college, its prose feeling as if written by a completely different person, a Haruki Murakami wannabe without an ear for rhythm and intonation. I feel assured that for my lack of accomplishment, at the least I can say I approved. Here’s hoping that’s good enough to take to the grave.

[cornelius-of-lykia]

Events I Attended In Fall 2022

I’ve done a surprising amount during my first semester at the University of Connecticut. I’m being careful to not overburden my schedule with too many events, but at least I’ve struck a temporary balance between work, relaxation, and a social life. I didn’t attend as many talks as I would’ve liked, but I do take pride in attending those I did check out, such as seeing all three general body meetings of the Grad Student Union so far. Here’s a rough summary of what I saw and what I attended during my time at UConn during the Fall of 2022.

1.) The Grad Student Union, General Body Meetings, Sept 21, Oct 19, Nov 16th

Going into these meetings, I was looking to network with fellow graduates as much as I wanted to see what a union meeting looked like. I didn’t have a whole lot of expectations, besides that I was hoping there would be more time for freeform networking and socializing. There was *some* of that before the meeting began, but things were otherwise structured, as each meeting had an agenda and talking points to run through. That said, I met a handful of lovely people at each of these meetings.I even got to meet two CT state senators, Mae Flexer and Greg Haddad, as they came to speak at the Oct. 19th meeting. It was nice to hear how they were at least trying to push for a more progressive state senate, especially as this was right before the most recent elections.

Having attended three of these things, I can attest that it can take some time to get used to the nitty gritty details of the agendas, which concern past and upcoming events along with the minutiae of logistics. The biggest things I walked away with were hearing how international students fared compared to domestic grad students, and seeing how the Union votes on measures, from approving statements to budgetary decisions. As far as I know, there are three other committees that handle specific points. The two I can name off the top of my head are the social justice committee and the organizing committee. For the SJ committee, I attended 3 meetings at the beginning of the term but haven’t had the energy to attend more lately. As for the Organizing committee, there was a schedule conflict this term. I’m interested in attending at least one or two meetings in the future, just cautious about overextending myself.

2.) As Ukraine Goes, So Goes the World - Thoughts on Propaganda, Violence and Democracy, Oct 12

I was very lucky to attend this event, though I’ll be darned if I can remember most of the finer points of the lecture. I barely got in - I emailed the day before, asking if there would be any chance I could get in if there was a cancellation, as you needed to register ahead of time. Thankfully, within an hour or two, someone emailed back saying they received a cancellation and automatically booked me into the schedule. I was ecstatic. 

Having followed the Russian Invasion of Ukraine fairly closely, I was curious to see what would get discussed. I was actually expecting there to be a greater focus on Ukraine itself, but the lecturer, Timothy Snyder, was primarily focused on explaining Russian fascism. In oversimplified terms, he explained it as something that expected everything else to conform to a specific purpose, niche, or expectation, and punished anything that deviated from that norm. Which, admittedly, describes most of society at this point - not good!

I feel bad for not remembering the finer points of what he reviewed, but there are definitely components of both Russian fascism and the current government that warrant heavy scrutiny … which I think he mostly glossed over. One thing he did mention, that I’m grateful for, is explaining how Russia relies heavily on sending people from its ethnic minorities to fight the war, both because they are seen as expendable and because sending waves of Russian men from the developed parts of the country would warrant intense pushback. There’s a lot to unpack there alone; for the purposes of this essay, all I will say is that he did a decent job explaining it to people who were curious about the subject, but it wasn’t anything *new* to anyone who had already been following this conflict.

That said, one thing that was hilarious to me was how I knew *of* the speaker, Timothy Snyder, without realizing who he was until I read an info pamphlet at the event. He’s the author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which I was vaguely aware about, and which I’ve heard some good and bad things about. I’ll have to read it for myself one day - I actually saw a student with that book in hand hoping to get it autographed. That same student was actually Ukrainian, and she thanked Mr. Snyder for speaking about the War. I even helped another student find Mr. Snyder as he was leaving, so that he could ask another question. All things considered, Mr. Snyder was incredibly polite and willing to talk at length about anything when asked. He’s certainly someone I’ll have to keep an eye on in the future.

3.) The Windham Hospital Workers’ Strike

This was definitely the least conventional of the events I attended, for it was an actual strike by the nurses at Windham hospital. There were two 48-hour strikes, taking place September 23rd to 25th, and then October 24th to 26th. As far as I understand, the strike on September 23rd had the highest turnout during the day, with more modest turnouts each of the other days. I learned about the hospital strike from the Grad Student Union, and attended on the 24th because I wanted to bring the strikers some food - in the form of some nice oreo cookies. As it turns out, the strikers were absolutely replete with snacks, so my humble tribute was only one parcel of an outpouring of resources.

I got to speak with a handful of individuals in attendance - nurses, labor organizers, and sympathetic UConn students. The nurses and organizers inform me that this is a legally protected strike, because they gave appropriate notification and filled out all the proper paperwork, and it fell to Hartford Healthcare to find suitable replacements for the duration of the strikes. They also let me know that Hartford Healthcare is horrible. All this said, once the strike concludes by 7:00am on the last day, they all return to work. I found it a remarkable setup.

The saddest part of it, that most likely has not gone addressed as I write this, is the fact that Hartford Healthcare has been constantly stonewalling the nurses and the union. The fact they had to go on strike a second time in October shows that their demands were not met, and it seems very likely they STILL have not been met. Nursing has been hard as is, and the pandemic has only made it so much worse. As one of the nurses explained to me, they’re being worked to the bone, and that makes everyone’s lives more difficult. If the nurses do not have adequate supplies or decent time off, they invariably give worse treatment, and can’t perform life-saving care to the best of their ability. I feel for the nurses, and I hope a third strike will not be necessary. Overall, at least I learned plenty about what it’s like to actually conduct a strike.

Also, security guards hired by Hartford Healthcare to supervise the strike told me the strike was illegal, and that I was trespassing on private property by taking part and parking my vehicle at the hospital. Which is patently absurd. Thankfully, I parked elsewhere at the hospital, and they didn’t catch me. Was it risky? A little. But screw ‘em, I say.

Conclusion

It’s worth clarifying that none of these events actually tied into my research with games or 3D art, but for the Union meetings and the Nurse’s Strike, they were critical for getting a sense of what goes into union organization, which is critical for me as I prepare to enter the games industry, as rotten a place it is. Overall, I am glad I was able to attend these events, and look forward to attending more during my stay at the University of Connecticut.

[mdhwrites]

“I Could Have Written This Better” And Why I Don’t Say That

It would be exceptionally reasonable for someone to expect me to say that ALL THE TIME. I mean, I am A: A white dude yelling on the internet, B: highly analytical and prone to hyperbole when I speak, C: an independently published author who has every reason to try to convince you that I am better than writers you already like because you have more reason to read my books then and D: a weird outlier amongst content creators in that I genuinely think I am good at my craft. I could always get better but I believe works are good and worth what I charge for them. BUT... No. I hate the phrase “I could written this better” and have only invoked it twice. Why? Because here’s the thing: It’s way easier to look at something and see its flaws than to see them when you have to create it from scratch. That’s why people have teams, prereaders, beta testers, etc. like that because what sounds reasonable and good to you may be utter horseshit, especially since you as the creator have the grand arc in mind and so may miss the minutia that is important in a specific chapter or episode. Content creation is a nightmare and it’s why I wish I didn’t struggle so much to even find pre-readers for my content, let alone sensitivity readers or editors. It’s... *sigh* I don’t want to lament about my craft though. Instead, I want to actually talk about why I’ve ever been willing to invoke this phrase if I’m willing to be kind to the fact that the creators will stumble and trip at times. Because there are moments where someone may be able to claim this. Moments where it’s fair. And that’s mostly when the concept is botched from go. When the writer shows literally no understanding of the potential that they have in front of them. A failure to understand the basic premise and what needs to be done in an episode that someone may have a better grip on it. It’d be like if someone fucked “A Christmas Carol” by making greed and isolation seem good. That is inherently not what the structure is good and you fucked up SOMEWHERE in the creation process if that’s what you have in the end. That is when someone could reasonably say they could write it better. So what are my two? I won’t go in deep but the first was back in my My Little Pony days. There was an episode that had the structure of the stages of grief because someone’s pet turtle was going to hibernate for Winter. A clever way to talk about death... In which they spend 80+% of the episode in anger and denial. The two stages that are the most infuriating and tedious from an audience perspective. They almost don’t touch on depression and have a very brief acceptance phase. So in other words, the character does some real heinous shit, doesn’t do the introspection needed to pull sympathy back to them, or to really explore their pain in a meaninful way, and the audience is robbed of the catharsis they should get out of the acceptance phase. If you just shift a bit of that time where we’re just waiting for the character to get over themselves already and to the really juicy stuff, you have a GREAT episode. Instead, most people hated it and for good reason because the writer didn’t understand what makes that sort of episode worth it for an audience. The other, unsurprisingly, is The Owl House. But it’s a beloved episode. I think Reaching Out is a trashfire though and the minutia is awful but the grand concept... Character A has a father who ignores her and discounts her potential and worth. This drives her to do something rash and dangerous when normally she is the one to pull others back and be reasonable. She is pushed to act out of character in a way that may get her in trouble or in mortal peril but for incredibly easy to follow reasons. Character B is being reminded of the death of their father and the potential of never seeing their mother again. They are normally the more brash and daring character and Character A normally has to pull them back or watch out for what could get them hurt. She is now given reasonable motivation to act out of character in a way that’s overly cautious and scared. And... None of this happens. Character A  still has to be convinced to do anything that would actually get their fathers attention by Character B. Character B shows a SHOCKING disregard for character A’s well being (they’re dating mind you) and complete disconcern for any amount of danger anyone may be in and it just wastes a setup that is a fucking gold mine. A new relationship being tested by sides of the other they’ve never seen before? Contrasting but complementary problems with their father figures? Conflict that causes both out of their comfort zone until they finally have to actually talk about their feelings? Nah. Why would we want any of that when we can retread ground literally walked less than a handful of episodes ago, in the same half a season, and not have any real character growth or development out of it? That would just be silly, wouldn’t it? Sorry. Reaching Out is so bad imo that it makes me want to break my normal rule against simply doing episode reviews. But yeah, that is how much it takes for me to say that I could have done something better. Otherwise, how the hell would I know? It’s not like any episode I praise I would have done just as well on so why couldn’t I do worse? It’s just an act of hubris, that so requires, if you say it sincerely, confidence in your abilities, that I just don’t believe when I hear it come out of someone’s mouth. I just can’t.

[hellenhighwater]

These days, my older brother Jake is a calm, competent professional. He’s skilled at his job, and so laid-back and reserved that it actually used to intimidate his students when he TA’d classes. That’s now. Back when he was a little kid, he was scared of everything. 

Bugs. Balloons. The vacuum cleaner. Basically any loud noise. The dark. Dogs. The basement. 

As I child, I feared neither god nor death, and so it was my job to protect my big brother from all the minutiae of life that he found terrifying. 

Being afraid of the basement was a real problem, because his bedroom was in the basement. I used to have to go downstairs every night and turn on all the lights before he would come downstairs. Once I’d done that he was fine.

At least he was fine up until he thought it would be fun to spend an afternoon building a spooky fort in his walk-in closet and tell scary stories in it. The four of us huddled in the dark closet-fort with a flashlight and Jake cooked up the scariest story he could: that our house was actually built on top of an old burial ground, and there were horrible undead monsters under the floors, trying to claw their way up. This was a very scary story indeed, and my younger brother and sister were terrified. I was old enough to remember when the house had been built, however, and therefore knew for a fact that the story was untrue. 

Jake, despite also having been there when the house was built, and having made up the story himself, was terrified. 

He spent the next week insisting that I not only turn on all the lights for him before bed, but also check all the closets and make sure that there were no sounds coming from the floor under his bed. Which I did, dutifully, every night.

And then came the day that he punched me in the face and broke the lens out of my glasses. 

Now, we roughoused a lot. Scraped knees and elbows were absolutely the norm, and mostly that was fine. But an outright punch to the face? Heinous. Unforgivable. Deserving of the direst revenge my seven-year-old brain could concoct. 

“Mom and Dad are gonna kill you when they find out you broke my glasses,” I told him, and quietly slid my foot over the fallen lens where it rested in the front lawn. “You better find that lens or you’re gonna be in trouble until you die.” 

Jake, who already knew that he’d crossed a line, went pale and immediately began scrabbling through the grass for the lost lens. I waited long enough for him to turn away before lifted my foot, pocketed the lens, and went inside to sit on the couch and watch him freak out. 

He spent a good hour looking for the lens before he went inside and realized I’d already fixed my glasses. 

I had spent that hour in my most natural state: scheming.

So when night fell, I did my usual basement sweep. I turned on all the lights, loudly opened and closed the closet doors, and then returned upstairs to give Jake the all-clear. “It’s fine,” I told him, “Only....”

“WHAT,” Jake demanded, thoroughly terrified of monsters entirely of his own making, and not at all afraid of the only thing in the house worth fearing, which was, of course, me.  (Our ancient and malevolent demoncat, Kitten Little, was also worth fearing, but that is a story for another time.) At age seven, I had never heard of  the concept of ‘excessive force.’ I had also never heard of the concept of ‘psychological warfare,’ but that was hardly going to stop me from using it. Jake demanded, “What was down there?? What did you see?”

“Oh, nothing. But maybe...I thought I saw eyes? Glowing eyes? Under your bed.”

“GLOWING EYES UNDER MY BED??”

“Probably it was just Kitten Little. Goodnight!”

I bounced upstairs to my room in the attic of the house. The ceiling was plastered with glowy stars, and I flopped down in my bunkbed and watched them idly while I waited for the rest of the house to settle down to sleep. One by one, lights turned off across the house, and soon the only noise was the creaking of the old oak tree outside my window.

I reached up and removed one of the jumbo-sized stars from my ceiling. There was a wad of sticky tack on the back. Quietly, I slipped into the bathroom, turned on the lights, and carefully drew two eye-shapes on the star, as large as would fit. Using the pair of scissors I’d stashed in a drawer earlier, I cut the shapes out of the heavy plastic star. Then I used the sticky tack to attach one to each of the lenses of my freshly-repaired glasses. 

And then I snuck down to the basement, and army-crawled under Jake’s bed.

Now, I’d been patient. It was well after midnight; everyone else was deeply asleep. That was about to change.

I set my nails against the underside of Jake’s bed and dragged them loudly. I pushed up with my legs just enough to shift the bed a little. I could hear him starting to wake up, so quietly, using a deep, grating growl I’d spent all afternoon practicing, (and which, later in life, would scare our class bully so badly he fell backwards out of a hay wagon) I moaned, “JAAAAAAAAAAAKE.” 

Slowly, visibly terrified, Jake lowered his head over the edge of the of the bed.

I whipped my head sideways and shoved my legs against the wall as hard as I could, launching my glowing-eyed face towards him like a snake. 

Jake shrieked. 

Something thumped overhead as everyone in the bedrooms upstairs woke up all at once. I knew I had about sixty seconds of getaway time while Jake cowered under his blankets. I crawled out the door, making sure to move as oddly as possible in case he could see me, and darted into one of the unfinished storage rooms down the hall. I waited until I had heard both parents go into Jake’s room before I sipped out and quietly returned to my room.

Jake insisted on sleeping in my parent’s bedroom for the next month. 

At the opposite end of the house, I slept peacefully every night. 

On the ceiling over my head, carefully attached with sticky-tack, were two glowing eyes. 

[pudding-parade]

I lied again. (The Australia one's coming soon, I promise! I have the data compiled, but I've just been more interested in playing an actual save than messing around in a test one.) This one is one I'm using in an actual save, so I decided to revamp it using actual data, and...Here we are.

Savannah is the capital of the US state of Georgia, which is in the southeastern part of the country, on the Atlantic seaboard. It's a port city on a large river and also near the ocean (so it's affected by the Gulf Stream), and its climate is humid subtropical. Basically, it's warm-to-hot and often stiflingly humid from mid-spring to mid-autumn, while the other five(ish) months of the year are mild and, on the whole, quite pleasant. However, it can experience freezing temperatures and even snow sometimes. It's also vulnerable to Atlantic hurricanes/tropical storms, and even without such storms, it gets a good amount of rain, especially in the summer.

All that said, I call this one only loosely based on Savannah. This is because it has a wider temperature range than the real city experiences on average as well as a higher (but still unlikely) chance of seeing snow in the winter than the real city has. Basically, I wanted something seasonal and mostly on the warm/hot side, but with a break of cooler and occasionally cold temperatures and a possibility (but not a likelihood) of a bit of snow in the winter. That's what this is.

Also, like the Aruba preset I shared, this one is NOT a default setting, meaning that it won't pick up whatever length you set your seasons to have. To use this one, you MUST use 12-day seasons. You don't have to use all four seasons if you don't want to, but the seasons you have in play must be 12 days long each or else things will be weird. (Technically, you could use less than 12 days, but if you use longer than 12-day seasons, the game will have nothing to go by for the extra days, so I suspect you'd get "EA standard" for those days, and that'd be weird.) Similar to the Aruba preset, I have broken out each 12-day season into three 4-day-long "months," each of which has different settings in terms of temperature ranges and weather pattern likelihood, more or less loosely based on real data from the real Savannah. I make (and prefer) such non-defaults for my own playing because they allow for finer control.

While I usually share only default settings so that anyone can use a preset without worrying about setting the right season lengths, I thought I would share this one because it might be useful to people who want four seasons and a realistic(ish) warm-temperate climate but who don't want a lot of snow because, for instance, snow causes the world they're playing to lag. It can snow using this preset, but it isn't likely, and the temperature range in the one "month" where it's possible make any snow that happens unlikely to accumulate or persist long past daybreak.

Details of this preset:

Highest summer temperature: 100F/38C Lowest winter temperature: 30F/-1C

Overall Climate: Basically, it's warm-to-hot all year long. The only "month" that can get below freezing is "January" (or "July," if you're on the underbelly of the planet; whatever you call it, it's the middle four-day stretch of winter), and it will only get that cold at night. Summery temperatures last from the middle "month" of spring to the middle "month" of autumn. It gets cooler and occasionally cold at night (but still warm during the day) from the last "month" of autumn through the first "month" of spring. Precipitation is abundant, especially throughout summer and the first "month" of fall, the latter of which I have decided is "hurricane season."

Download link is here, and I'm cutting the rest of the details, for those heathens who don't care about weather minutiae. ;)

Snow: Only possible in "January" when the temperature is below 40F/4C, which is pretty much only going to happen overnight into morning. However, rain and fog are both more likely than snow, so you're still not likely to see snow. During the time that snow is possible, the min/max noon temperature is 50/60F or 10/15C, so if it does snow, it's not going to be hanging around if it accumulates at all. So, like I said, this preset is good for people who want four seasons and who might want to see some snow in their game, but who have a game/world where lots of snow creates lag.

Hail: Nope. Not because the real Savannah doesn't get hail, because it certainly does, but because I didn't want it for this preset. So there.

Fog: Yep. Savannah is (very) humid in general and it sits on a large river and it's close to the Atlantic Ocean. When the temperature is right, it'll fog a good amount there, especially in winter but also in the cooler parts of autumn and into the earliest bit of spring. In the preset, fog is possible in the latter two "months" of autumn and throughout the winter, regardless of temperature. In the autumn, the possibility of fog is outweighed by rain, and in the winter it is weighted evenly with rain, so winter ought to be foggier than autumn. Duration is set short(ish), 3 hours max, so unless the game chooses it more than once in a row, it won't be around too long.

Precipitation & Intensity: NGL, this preset will give you lots of rain in the summer, and the month of "September" (or, "hurricane season") can possibly be downright brutal in that regard. Rain is about twice as likely as sun (or, rather, "no precipitation") in all three summer "months," and it can be intense, but the individual durations are set to be short, 2 hours max. (Which isn't to say that the game won't give you multiple 2-hour-long storms in a row, because it certainly can...and probably will.) When the game does choose sun, the durations are set long in summer (average of about 9 hours), so this should give you a mix of rain and sun, but with rain generally prevailing. In the "hurricane season," rain and sun are weighted equally, and sun duration is still long (average of 7 hours), but the possibility exists for very long storms, up to eight hours long. (Though they can also be shorter, of course; zero to eight hours is the allowed range.) Since the only weather patterns available for "hurricane season" (and for summer) is rain or sun, the game can potentially give you multiple 8-hour-long storms in a row during that time. It'll still rain a decent amount in the other seasons, too, but at those times the chance of no precipitation outweighs the chance of rain, and there's also sometimes the chance of fog that the game can choose in addition to rain or no precip. So, the stretches of rain you get outside of summer and the "hurricane season" ought to be shorter. This is all partly by design (because reasons) on my part, but it is actually based on Savannah's rainfall stats, which on average show a marked increase in summer and early fall over the other months of the year, likely because of hurricanes/tropical storms.

Additional settings:

Fireplaces that are upgraded to auto-light will do so on active lots if the temperature falls below 50F/10C.

Any fallen leaves will be removed at the start of winter.

Insect spawners will spawn in winter.

[feanorianethicsdepartment]

So obviously the entire Feanorian Host as a whole is a bit intense about the cause, but I feel like there’s different levels of devotion between their individual followers.

So my question to you is, from least to most intense, which Feanorions followers are the most cult-like and why?

the cultishness absolutely varies by region! i'm being a little facetious when i call them an out-and-out cult, but fëanorian minion culture certainly has... tendencies. the isolationism, the way loyalty to the group supersedes absolutely everything, what they do to those who 'betray the cause,' not to mention how absolutely psyched they get at the opportunity to do murder. still, the precise way that manifests, as well as how intense they are about, does change a lot depending on where you are in east beleriand. surprisingly it doesn't track that much with how tolerant of outsiders each subdivision is, which is most evidenced by:

the gap: maglor and his cronies are easily the most xenophobic part of the host, which is both a cause and a consequence of them having probably the least regular contact with non-fëanorians out of all the armies of east beleriand. paradoxically, this gives them very little incentive to go full cultist; much of the deliberately off-putting stuff the rest of the host does is partially to distinguish them from the outgroup, which isn't something you need to do when everyone you deal with is either part of the gang or an obvious enemy. they still do the elaborate facial deformations, they still have a bit of a Thing about fire, but the thing that's holding them together is much less utter devotion to the cause and much more the organic friendships and kinship bonds between riders

there's a few other reasons why the folk of the gap are relatively less culty. the gap is sparsely populated to begin with, and most of its population is at least semi-nomadic; it's a lot harder to cultivate that kind of obsession when everyone's off doing their own thing most of the time. while the gap doesn't have the highest headcount of mithrim sindar - as stated above, its population is tiny even by east beleriand's low standards - it has more mithrim sindar as a proportion of the population than anywhere else in east beleriand, and the culture of the gap has this big mithrim sindarin focus on community and clan to counteract the noldorin tendency to sacrifice everything for grand ideals. the general lack of new recruits from outside the host only serves to intensify all of this; the riders of the gap fight together because of the spiderweb of social and personal obligations that link them all together, not necessarily because of the cause (though that is still a factor, i want to be clear.) this fairly isolated society held together by individual and familial bonds stands in stark contrast to:

himlad: the thing about celegorm and curufin's people is that they're up against the fuzzy border between east and west beleriand, between maedhros' definitely-not-a-kingdom and the finarfinians' section of fingolfin's defensive line. as such, they're more or less constantly in contact with the outside world, coordinating troop movements, sharing information and resources, recruiting from the same sindarin populations. there's still a clear delineation between the fëanorians and the fingolfinians, partially because there's a lot of mountains between their major centres and partially because this lot actually do have an other to define themselves against and thus a reason to emphasise their own identity, but there's a lot of chatter and petty squabbling and philosophical discussion and a steady regular connection to the outside world counteracting the worst of the cultishness. unlike pretty much any other part of the host, the himlad minions never really lose the sense that they belong to a greater community of elves

which explains what they do in nargothrond. i don't believe that literally every single one of their followers abandoned celegorm and curufin, but i'd buy it was a lot of them, maybe even most of them. it helps that it's specifically the finarfinians their lords are betraying, the people they've - perhaps not fought side by side with, but who definitely always had their backs. even without that, though, the very existence of that relationship means they're used to working with people from outside the host, getting to know them, empathising with them, which is a pretty hefty counterbalance to the specific the-whole-world's-out-to-get-us undercurrent of internal propaganda. by no means was it an instant switch, or an easy one; after finrod got ousted there was a ton of interhost politicking and debate and the occasional brawl as everyone tried to figure out what to do. but the fact that the question was even open says a lot, i think. that probably wouldn't have been the case even in:

thargelion: caranthir’s domain is the most heavily populated part of east beleriand, and the settlement at lake helevorn is the closest thing it has to a city. a significant portion of that population aren’t fëanorians by even the loosest definition; they’re dwarven traders or miscellaneous humans or sindar far enough from the front line of the siege they can just keep on with their lives the way they always have. the fëanorians (and here, more than anywhere else, that’s a fuzzy category; this is the easiest part of the host to join, and the easiest to leave) are mixed in with all these groups, negotiating supplies, managing tribal levies, patrolling the roads, state stuff. out of all the subdivisions of the host, the thargelion minions are the hardest to distinguish from outsiders.

to keep their ingroup coherent, then, they actively mark themselves out. the minions in thargelion are probably the loudest about their collective identity and the cause and the joy of bathing in your enemies’ blood and all that. they have weird midnight rituals and purpose-built meeting halls and elaborate coded language, and while being overly tyrannical about it would be bad for business there’s definitely a sense that they form a tightly knit core which looks after its own above all else. that image is somewhat complicated by the aforementioned blurry edges of the thargelion host - is the sindarin bureaucrat who’s never touched a weapon in her life but plays a vital role in the military administration a fëanorian? is the noldorin freeholder who pays very little attention to the day-to-day minutia of the war but keeps his sword sharp for the hour it is needed? - but the alliance of old soldiers at its heart is a clear and palpable thing, especially when you can feel its eyes. when their hackles aren’t up the minions are perfectly happy to mingle socially with the other peoples of thargelion, though, which sets them apart from:

himring: on the frontlines of the siege of angband, with all the nightmares of the north pressing directly on their spirits, maedhros’ followers stoke the flames of their devotion high. the warriors of the cold fortress are less showy about their fervor than their counterparts in thargelion or even himlad, but the ardour underlying it is markedly more intense; they don’t have much in the way of over-the-top rituals, but they have vast amounts of ironclad unspoken rules they follow unwaveringly. they’re polite to outsiders, sometimes even welcoming, but you never forget that you are, in fact, an outsider, and that himring and its satellite forts form an internal world others can never quite see. even to other fëanorians, they come across as aloof

their fervour also tends to manifest as a deep personal loyalty that borders on reverence towards maedhros himself. all the brothers command respect, of course, they’re all magnetic personalities who draw people in and bind them together, but maedhros’ minions are on a whole other level. they mythologise him, tell stories of his deeds like he personally holds the line against morgoth, treasure the slightest contact with him, hold being called to his direct service as the highest honour of all. most of the new recruits to the himring host are brought in by the vast pull of maedhros’ reputation, from all across beleriand and even from the north. but no matter where they came from, they all understand that they will fight and live and die together beneath the banner of their lord. which is a bit weird, even by fëanorian standards, but they’re nowhere near as bad as:

ossiriand: amrod and amras’ henchelves are considered by the rest of the host to be notably psychotic, which is saying a lot. the minions of ossiriand are utterly terrifying, absolutely fanatical about the cause, the most bloodthirsty murder cult in east beleriand. you’d think the green-elves they share their territory with would act as a calming influence, but in practice the two groups mostly avoid each other, because the green-elves naturally prefer to stay away from these nutbags. you’d think being away from the front lines would lessen the need to solidify their identity through cult nonsense, but in practice it gives them the free time to go full gonzo. most of the horrible rumours you hear about the fëanorians in the rest of beleriand are either specific quirks of the ossiriand minions, or most egregrious in the ossiriand minions. they have an orc pit

or so they’d have you believe. the fëanorians in ossiriand effectively serve as the host’s intelligence division, scouts and spies and saboteurs. a lot of their work is clandestine by its very nature, and they tend to be pretty secretive about what they actually do. half the things you hear about them are probably disinformation, lies they’re deliberately spreading to make themselves sound scarier. hopefully, at least. as anyone who’s chatted with an ossiriand minion knows, they are both eagerly awaiting the fulfilment of the oath, and already preparing for what will come after

(this paradigm does break down after the siege is broken and the union of maedhros fails and the dregs of the armies of east beleriand wind up stuck in the same ever-shrinking territory. still, i think the origins of the survivors are... interesting. the people of the gap were almost completely wiped out in the bragollach, the people of himlad mostly jumped ship with celebrimbor, even the people of thargelion took heavy losses in the nirnaeth. but the people of himring stood firm around their lord, and the people of ossiriand were never really frontline fighters in the first place. minions from the more cultish parts of the host tend to survive longer, and in greater numbers. i feel this could have... consequences)

[theoriginalcarnivorousmuffin]

One thing that has always bothered me about the magical system in HP is how much it... doesn’t exist? No one questions anything, there’s almost no theoretical exploration, and Hermione Granger (someone I’ve always found to be of average intelligence at best) is the brightest witch of her age.

Some characters seem to be inexplicably more powerful, but I wonder if it isn’t simply a matter of discipline and will-power.

What are your thoughts on magic? We never really see what light vs. dark entails, so fanfic authors tend to make it up as they go along, but do you have any head-canons about how magic works in HP?

I mean, to be fair, it wasn’t really the point of JKR’s series. She just wanted to write about a kid going to a magic boarding school in Scotland with this quirky witch aesthetic. 

No need for her to placate us uber nerds who demand a sensible explanation to the minutia of her magical system. 

Right, but yes, it clearly bothers me too. No one questions anything, there’s no understanding of why wands and spells even work, or why it has to be in this weird pseudo-Latin. No one even bothers to learn Latin, for that matter, and you think they would given the damn spells. 

Hermione Granger is the brightest witch of her age given that “her age” is either around 30 people (the amount of people in her year) or else around 300 (the population of Hogwarts at a given time) which is a pitiful amount. She also is an extremely hard worker and actually reads her textbooks, sadly I think this gets you ahead of 95% of the population.

Part of the reason I think the Wizarding World thinks like this is that they’re this incredibly tiny, cut off, insular society. Generally, when you have a small society cut off like that you tend to lose innovation or even understanding of technology you have.

But that’s not what you asked. Right.

Personally, I think there is no light and dark magic. Magic is just this part of the natural universe that muggles, for whatever reason, are not able to directly access. It’s neither good nor bad, it just is. For that matter, I don’t think spells themselves really exist, or rather, they’re not what magic really is in its purest form but instead a way that humans can easily access and control magic to perform a certain task. Kind of a glorified API if you will. 

So, dark magic and light magic are instead arbitrary labels that wizards apply to their own tool box based on the functions of that tool. If you have a tool that is only designed for/can be used for the murder and torture of sentient beings: well, that’s bad, we’ll call that dark. That said, do I think the spells themselves are inherently evil? No. It’s like if you open up your tool box, pick out a sledgehammer, and go, “This, my child, is an instrument of pure evil and you must never touch it.” Well, that’s a bad comparison, it’d be like taking a handgun out of your tool box and saying “this is a dark weapon”. Now, this gets into a debate I don’t want to get into, but to me dark spells are a lot like handguns (they’re designed for only one purpose and there’s no squirming your way out of what that purpose is).

Now, I think wizards have forgotten this (mostly because they don’t understand what spells or magic is), and so they get very hung up on the labels of spells or even just your odd genetic trait (i.e. parseltongue). So, we have these weird moments where someone uses, say, the severing charm to cut somebody open in the middle of the street. And it’s less bad than if they had used the killing curse to kill them painlessly and easily, because the severing charm’s not dark magic. 

It’s like... If someone were to walk out and bash someone over the head with a sledgehammer until it kills them it’s less evil than if they shot them in the head with a handgun.

Wizards seem to miss the point of this. 

As for what magic is, I believe it’s... direct energy that wizards are able to access in a way that muggles (thus far) cannot. What do I mean by thus far? Well, look at electricity. In ye olden days, I’m sure that if you asked a wizard they would say that making artificial light without flame is a property solely done by magic and muggles are not capable of it. Well, muggles then did it, and suddenly the definition and parameters of magic change. Wizards are kind of like chess grand masters who suddenly lose to your AI du jour, who say that it doesn’t count because the AI didn’t really do it like a human would. It’s not real intelligence.

I don’t believe people have magic in and of themselves, any more than anyone else does at any rate, because we see too little differences between powerful and mediocre wizards. You’re either a squib or you’re not, there doesn’t really seem to be a spectrum, and those who struggle with spells appear to do so for other reasons (Neville has severe confidence issues and is traumatized, Harry’s an idiot, etc.) 

I think what separates the great wizards from the rest is hard work, the ability to read books and learn from them, even an inkling of understanding of how spells really work and how to create them (and this makes you Voldemort level right here), and a good ear to be able to pronounce your ridiculous pseudo Latin.

The wand is a tool specifically designed so that, with repeatable easy to understand steps, you can perform a whole array of tasks and even use them as building blocks to develop a new spell (combine swishes, flicks, and various garbled sentences together in such a way and BAM new spell).

Your wand, in other words, is your API to direct and access untold amounts of energy from the universe.

But people have forgotten that so instead what you memorize are very specific function calls that will prove useful in your daily life.

As for the wand and spells themselves, well, here’s my hokey ridiculous theory on how that came about. A long time ago, a brilliant foreigner enters the Roman Empire with a revolutionary idea that puts him on the level of Einstein/Newton/Feynman Name Your Stupidly Brilliant Physicist. He says, hey, how about instead of doing these time consuming magical rituals we develop a tool that, in a matter of seconds, allows us to perform truly complicated and powerful magic any time we want. No more relying on having the right ingredients about, virgin sacrifices, the full moon, etc.

Everyone probably laughs at him, but then he goes off and designs a rudimentary wand, and through probably some uber ritual that was dangerous as hell implements this system by which by flicking your wand a certain way and saying basic commands like “levitate”, “repair”, etc. you can perform these tasks.

Only, the guy’s foreign and Good Will Hunting (no formal education in the empire), so he doesn’t actually speak Latin. So what you have instead is this weird half-Latin like, “Leviupwards Fly”, “Repair-o”, etc. 

It sounds dumb as hell, but goddammit it works, and more it gives Roman wizards an unheard of advantage against their enemy wizards who are all stuck doing these stupid rituals. They suddenly have a vast military might, so long as they use these wands and spells this guy came up with.

Everybody who’s anybody, who wants to win a fight, is now using wands. Wandcraft becomes a huge deal and people specialize in fine tuning these things exactly so as to get the maximum efficiency for a particular user.

And they probably go up to our guy and say, “Hey, buddy, can you make this in actual Latin? I can barely remember what it is I’m supposed to say to get this to work” and after the hours, and hours, and hours he spent making this thing that nobody helped him with he goes, “DO IT YOURSELF, BITCH”. And they never do because they’re too damn lazy/have no idea how he actually did it and any attempt to recreate it ends up with something that’s pitiful and doesn’t work. 

So, they’re all stuck with it, and thousands of years later they forget this guy even existed and while there’s a recognition that not all magic has to be performed by wands there’s just this feeling that the wand is the magic. And so no one will ever come up with an English/French/Whatever version where when you say “Up” the thing goes up. 

And that’s “The History of Magic” as brought to you by The Carnivorous Muffin.