#why is it that when I post images they’re always SO PIXELATED

[sinhasfluffyheadfur]

have a fluffy lad

[vxiphoid]

PIXELATED ZEN

❨ summary ❩ genshin › genshin men playing minecraft with you ((ft. alhaitham, itto, cyno, diluc, kazuha, kaeya, heizou, & xiao))

tags ✧ modern au, drabble, fluff, chaotic energy, not proofread, cursing, ooc(?), established relationship, gn!reader, kaeya sets a forest on fire, alhaitham does not appreciate bees, mentions of pixelated deaths

amanuensis’ message ⊹ IM NOT TRYING TO KILL MY OTHER FANDOMS I SWEAR… im gonna back up from twst for a bit (im literally posting scarabia soon.) you can clearly tell who my favorites are… this unlocked a whole different part of my brain holy shit im deceased

⌜200+ e/chara ⌟

♫ blossom - t. shan

genshin masterlist

ALHAITHAM

╰┈➤ tbh he thinks minecraft is stupid, i mean, why not read a book instead of burning the images of pixels into your eye sockets😒 yeah, he’d just rather books. its a game about blocks, what could possibly be so interesting? he will admit the music is… nice. its nostalgic even though he’s never heard the track before. his favorite animals are the axolotl idk they’re his little pookies. its their little stick arms, they look so silly… as soon as haitham found out that you could color things its over, he make some sweet things like putting a sign on top of your shared house with both initials with colored dye. he’s so happy, just not very vocal about it, but he has the smallest of smiles. he definitely has headphones with the crochet sprout on it omg😭 alhaitham does not like bees whatsoever, they stung him for trying to get food. he just wanted honey :[

“look, the dog’s collar is blue. and the sign’s letters are green and then if you add a glow squid’s ink, it lights up.”

┏━━━━━━ ━ ─ ╴⋯ ⟢

ARATAKI ITTO

╰┈➤ he has waited YEARS for someone to play minecraft with him omfg. certified snack hoarder for times like these. you both literally hit each other to show love, you’ve accidentally killed him once bc he didn’t tell you that he had like half a heart… itto likes the water, hates the guardians because who do you think you are attacking him out of nowhere??? gets one shotted by the elder guardian while trying to fight it with a stick and then blames it on magma blocks pulling him down. GAMING WITH HIM IS NEVER CALM GODS💀 you cannot lay on him or anything bc as soon as those cave sounds or disc 13 start playing, he’s already done sprung out of his seat. his screams are actually really funny though, you got him a cat from how much he’s been assaulted by creepers. when you introduced him to shaders, he was so in awe. “babe i have a shadow!” type of excitement JAKEJEJDMnda.

“the cat’s name is sir arataki the third, you are now my loyal guard cat. who’s an adorable little guy?”

┏━━━━━━ ━ ─ ╴⋯ ⟢

CYNO

╰┈➤ look at this nerd (affectionate), ofc he plays cubecraft. loved it so much that when he didn’t have the actual game, he would play the really bad knockoffs💀 plays on console so you can sit between his legs, lean back, and game with him. cyno hate the split screen because he always gets confused on what side he’s on so he lets you use his switch, that way you’re both still comfortable. he’s more of an explorer if you do get mod packs for him, likes the horror ones the most. there’s nothing like hitting the enemy or shit talking the thing that could potentially one shot you with your s/o‼️ yall crouch a lot, its like a little dance. he really likes the disc “far” it itches his brain in the right way. definitely downloads the little raccoon mobs but then regrets it because he gives up all his berries to them, look at their little begging arms, literally how can you say no to that?? AND THEY WASH THE BERRIES. you both fall asleep to the ambience and to each others breathing all cuddled up ‘n warm. cyno absentmindedly sings the music while chopping wood or mining that shit has you SLUMPED. he kisses your head when you fall asleep, smiling like a silly goober.

“do-do-do-do do-do-do-do do, neow neow neow nneow neeeowwww… huh? oh, i’m almost done then we can go to bed, yeah? i’ll charge the switch too, don’t worry. just rest.”

(he’s singing that one part in danny lmfao)

┏━━━━━━ ━ ─ ╴⋯ ⟢

DILUC

╰┈➤ diluc does not understand the concept of minecraft but its okay, he’s just happy to be here. he also doesn’t call it minecraft but “cave game”, the original name, he did his research though it is rare that he actually calls it minecraft. found out that you could breed animals and accidentally made a pack of wolves. diluc is really good with redstone its actually insane😭 he’s the type to protect you the whole time while you’re getting flowers for the house, boyfriend bodyguard. diluc doesn’t play much because of his job but when he does, he’s prepared to sit for hours and spend time with you :(. these are the times where he’s most affectionate, randomly kissing your cheek, getting water for the both of you before you play, etc. luc loves the mod pack “industrial”, he can build machines, how neat is that??? also it has way more OMFP with the added features it has yk? he likes the trains :D

“is the water running…? the water’s running, they have moving windmills!”

┏━━━━━━ ━ ─ ╴⋯ ⟢

KAEDEHARA KAZUHA

╰┈➤ kazuha has the most expensive equipment yet doesn’t use this shit half of the time unless he’s streaming with heizou??? like im talking msi infinite rs pc, multiple monitors, a graphic drawing tablet, headphones with immaculate sound quality AND!!! the ear cups have fucking cyberpunk 3d wing guards on them. but anyways, minecraft, yes, he plays. in fact, kaedehara has about 10 beaten hardcore worlds every time a new update comes out, he must beat the game again. he rarely plays minecraft without his shaders so when you want to play the original og minecraft, he doesn’t mind, he actually enjoys the nostalgia. so much so the music is actually his background music when he’s just lazing around. words cannot express how much he dislikes (hates) wardens omg. he’ll protect you from them but if there were diamonds behind a warden, ig he’s going somewhere else😭 kazuha gives you random shit, weather that be something really sweet or questionable…

“love, do you want my rotten flesh? here<3 oh! and, i also got you some steak, you’re low on hearts…”

┏━━━━━━ ━ ─ ╴⋯ ⟢

KAEYA

╰┈➤ he’s heard of it, watched people play, just never played it. but when he does… he’s a menace. kaeya got his hands on flint and steel and set an entire jungle on fire… but he can be sweet sometimes! you’re the one protecting his ass while he walks around at night UNARMED to gather blue flowers for you. like you’re cute, but take a shield or something😭 he’s jumped off of a tall building before and landed on half a heart for a stack of bread you didn’t want. he’s rather oblivious to the mobs around him, he once thought shulkers were friends because they were just “silly little guys in little boxes” yk until they almost killed him. you bought him his own skin and introduced him to parrots and now its his favorite animal, he looks like a pirate!!! kaeya is chaotically sweet.

“yes, you almost died protecting me but how could you resist my everlasting love plus pixelated blue flowers?”

(has a cat unironically named ice spice LMFAO)

┏━━━━━━ ━ ─ ╴⋯ ⟢

SHIKANOIN HEIZOU

╰┈➤ your boyfriend is good at literally anything else BUT minecraft. its the way this game constantly has it out for him too like what did bro do??🙁 heizou stream’s with kazuha every now and again and on those, he still doesn’t know what to do… he’d rather play on the servers, bedwars in particular. extremely good at bw, you’d rather NOT be his enemy😭😭 wins almost every single game even when he carries, rank 98 in the server. yet when it comes to a casual server between you and him, the chats are filled with his deaths and his hashtagged rages💀 heizou despises silverfish which is also why he hates going into strongholds, they could get stomped on for all he cares! >:( he has texture packs with really beautiful skies and then a picnic mod so he can stargaze with you and eats minecraft cake :(<3

“oh. babe, green is heading for our bed, no pressure or anything. i loovveee youuu😚”

┏━━━━━━ ━ ─ ╴⋯ ⟢

XIAO

╰┈➤ xiao has the MOST downloaded mod packs, shaders, and worlds. not very expensive mod packs most of the time but when they are, they’re always good. spends his time fighting off mobs at night, #1 totem holder. he even has his own custom skin!!! he’s kinda been waiting for you to ask so when you do play mc together, you already have your own room, but when you voluntarily move your bed into his room to sleep… he melts. xiao loves cuddling while the two of you play, he’d rather your arms around him than the other way around, feels more intimate. you have matching hoodies for occasions like this. he has the dragon mod pack and has his own golden and orange dragon named ‘li’. he doesn’t talk while gaming, curses silently when he gets hit, but other than that doesn’t talk. if you want to talk, he’ll listen, he likes hearing about your day :].

“no, keep talking. i’m listening. see, li’s listening too.”

[stop-yanderedev]

By the way, highly doubt it will take off/be leaked, but I’ve already seen verifiably faked/edited evidence from some people, including being DMed it myself.

I’m the type to always believe a victim of a crime first, do my own research when it comes to defending the evidence as solid, and then come to my own conclusions. YandereDev is a person who needs no introduction when it comes to predatory behavior, so it is completely understandable why people would believe whatever evidence is being presented to them right now (especially after he’s been exposed as a groomer).

I hate shutting down people who are claiming victimhood because I know exactly what it’s like to have your story denied, but I have to say, sometimes faked evidence is just faked evidence and everything fails to line up.

I say this all because I was DMed by someone who claimed that YanDev groomed them when they were 14, asked for nudes, and sent them a picture of his penis. Of course I believed this off the bat. I wasn’t looking for any reason to NOT believe it whatsoever.

They claimed they had no access to any of their previous accounts whatsoever because their old phone broke, so no Discord, no Reddit, no Snapchat. At first they implied the interactions happened through Discord, then claimed it was through Snapchat. Okay, sure, that’s weird, but maybe I just assumed something I shouldn’t or this person has no idea how technology works. I asked if they remembered any of their old emails or account passwords.

They didn’t….alright, that’s okay. But wait! They sent a couple of screenshots of their interactions with YanDev to their friend! And their friend still has them! So of course, I asked them to send it over.

….Guys.

C’mon.

First of all, he doesn’t talk like that, and secondly, when I googled “fake snapchat screenshot maker”, the first result was a website where I could recreate this exact screenshot. I didn’t even have to change any of the default settings (which were Android OS, battery set at 50%, time set to 10:04 AM, default avatar.) And even if I didn’t find that screenshot generator, the pixels around “Alex”’s avatar, the weird way this version of Snapchat is formatted, etc.

I’m not going to expose this person, I’m pretty sure they’re just a kid…but once I called them out on the screenshot being faked, I warned them that if I noticed they posted it anywhere, I WOULD clarify it’s fake.

This shit discredits his victims. It’s disrespectful, people will always find out that it’s fake, and when they do, it will be your ass being put through the internet wringer. And people underestimate how bad that actually can be. It is potentially life-ruining. People who are later proven to be ACTUAL victims constantly have their life ruined from their abusers claiming that they lied— how do you think it will go over if you’re actually lying?

Anyways, I wanted to make this post so people know how to look for fake images, detect fake evidence, and detect inconsistencies in stories. Yes, this was an easy example, but running images through FotoForensics or zooming in and looking more closely when something seems off takes like, two seconds out of your time.

Also why is anyone faking evidence. Stop it. Horrible thing to do, not to Alex, but to Alex’s victims.

-Mod Isabelle

[gomzdrawfr]

omg so happy to see ur ask is open again!!

I always wanted to know what's it like whenever you draw something? be it oc or ghoap

love you 😍

Im assuming you mean my thought process? Hopefully? (U can send another ask if it’s not)

I dont have a good flow with things bcuz im really chaotic with stuff but i hope u can somewhat get what im saying

Idea

Most of what I doodled are based on my own experiences, or from other people, sometimes they come to me unprompted

I think lately it depends on my moods as well! Which can be seen when I had an angst period lmfaooo

Honestly, reading poems helps too, I read them and go “yep this is ghoap”

Seeing other people’s art also sparks some ideas, like timelapse videos

Using said idea

So when i get an idea i either scribble it down or scream it to my friend, it doesn’t matter if im going to actually draw the prompt or not as long as i pour it out my head, it helps to visualize things and also make me go, “nwm this was better in my head but hey at least i know now”

Honestly though, 90% of the time once i have an idea i draw it immediately if i can

Im someone who’s very much dependent on vibes, so if the vibes are off i cant draw for shit(bad habit, im aware)

Like “having an idea of Ghost and Soap scuba diving at night, then i try to draw it next day in the morning and i just cant get it right” for example XD

Finalizing

Now i dont do linearts, or like, any thorough clean up when i post for fun, as long as it looks okay its fine, which gives a few problems:

1. Noticing i miss something after posting it

2. Realising that i forgot my signature

3. Mistakes, lots of it pft

I do have a check list before I post which i stick it on my laptop, like Ghost’s tattoo or Soap’s chin scar for example

I think what helps other than adopting the habit to check is if i posted the images into discord first, idk why but it works?! Like you could’ve checked everything when it was in the canvas and exported it, yet somehow some mistakes just flies passed your eyes until u post it somewhere else

Also im always on the move and rushing with uni and life, so i don’t really pay attention to a lot of things and just accept my doodles as it is, and that’s why it’s tagged as such, doodles

They’re not meant to be perfect, they’re just scribbles, which honestly shocks me how much people like them :) 💕

Extra: Commissions work

Same kind of flow except i work with prompts already given to me, though they’re more careful and requires more time and attention to work them through, and obvs the final check-ins are crucial too with every pixels double, triple checked xD

Lastly, love you too, i hope this isn’t messy to read

[ceejaykayess]

The long awaited sequel! Super-cute Cyber-girl AI-Ball Ene, at your service! I kid, I kid, I know no one saw the last post, because it didn’t get posted under the tag for some reason… ah well, second try’s the charm.

After hearing that next year’s Dazecon would be our last, it sorta kicked my ass into gear to get some more of these Kagepro ideas off my chest and onto paper. So, Ene, our deuteragonist to our beloved protagonist (derogatory).

I had a lot of thoughts ever since the first picture on how I wanted to draw Ene’s cyber form. Given Aiba and Tama’s designs, we have something of a base to work off of, but we need at least one more game for me to confidently declare what is and isn’t a pattern. What we can easily tell, at least, is that AI-Balls have white hair and and dress in mostly black and white. And while Ene does do the latter, she… doesn’t do the former. Why? Well… maybe you can figure it out?

But in terms of her design, while I mostly stick to her regular design, the things I want to point out (because it might not be super obvious with my image quality) are the glowing strands in her hair, a blue one in her fringe, a red one in her left pigtail, and a white one in her left. I suppose you could call them remnants of what should have been… I also want to point out her outfit- it’s skin-tight from the neck to the waist, the skirt being a part of the bodysuit. The sleeves are, almost ironically, like Miku’s in that they’re detachable. And the most AI-Ball feature to her are the tech veins that compose her legs, as opposed to generally lacking them as in most Kagepro material.

I made Ene’s gel form a rabbit, in consideration of those mini-sketch comics I read yonks ago that drew Ene’s pigtails as being like hands for her since hers are in her sleeves always. Also, I thought it’d be funny if the first time Shintarou saw it, he’d consider renaming her to Tono in honour of his rabbit.

In case it’s hard to read, the shocked Ene in the top right is saying, “Master! MASTER! Oh no, he can’t hear me, he’s wearing his Raycon:tm: Earbuds, supremely comfortable for all your needs-” The little sketch in the bottom right, of Shintaro face down in bed and Ene in rabbit mode on his bedside table, reads, “Get the fuck up Master, we’re goin’ to the amusement park today!” “Ene, I’m dying…”

Here's a link to the first picture of Shintaro that never posted properly. And here's a link to the follow-up Yaki picture.

How long had she been wandering? She wasn’t really sure. Sure, if she looked at a calendar, or even just the UI on near anyone’s digital device, she’d see that it had been a year, more even. But that wasn’t really what she meant.

When she first opened her eyes, she had a purpose. She wasn’t wandering- she was seeking. She wasn’t on a Journey, she was on a Quest. She had to find them, had to know what happened to them, because if she were here, like this, then the others, then he had to be-

But though she had a Quest, she had to figure it out, her newfound capabilities, how to parse the sheer amount of information that tried to force its way around her, through her, tried to twist the information that made up herself-

And by the time she had come to a balance with her newfound self, body made of numbers and pixels instead of blood vessels and organ systems, what she had been seeking had become old news, hearsay that was washed under the waves of time and new information and new tragedies and new things for people to talk about. The longer it took, the deeper the information was buried, and the deeper it was buried, the longer it would take for her to come and go.

But eventually, after months and months, 8 months and 17 days and 9 hours and 21 minutes and 2 seconds, 3 seconds, 4 seconds, she had bounced from Wiki article to Wiki article, dug through news archives, dragged herself through Towitter discussions and arguments dated around that August 15th, and a bit after, she had learned and pieced together thus: Three people were marked as dead. 14 people were injured, 9 of which being detained as members of the syndicate that caused the explosion. There was no mention of who died, or even of the state their bodies were in. There was no specific mention of their fourth, her annoying kouhai who was so bitter, who brought everyone down despite his brilliance, who everyone loved despite his acidic tongue and obvious disdain, who she hated because of how much it felt like she were looking at a mirror, her kouhai who was lying on the ground in a pool of his own blood, surrounded by rubble and mumbling things she could barely understand being in such a terrible state herself-

She felt herself lose it, the desperate, fickle hope she held in her oversized jumper, because what does it matter? For all intents and purposes, she was dead. As far as she was aware, as far as anyone was aware, her best friend was, too. Maybe even her kouhai. And her-

And-

That kind boy, the one that irritated her so, the one that she wanted to see every day, the one that made her feel this terrible, terrible way, he too is-

Gone. They’re all gone. So what’s the point? Her Quest was over. And she couldn’t even delete herself, backspace over the 1′s and 0′s that composed her new existence. She was too much of a coward to throw herself at a virus and let it have its way with her. She could just stay here until eventually this webpage rotted away, but the longer she stayed in proximity to this information, to this reminder, the more she felt like she needed to expel the non-existent contents of her non-existent stomach. So she ran. She left. She tried to separate herself from her name, from the life that could no longer be hers, that simply was no longer.

She wandered.

How long had she been wandering?

…

Long enough that she felt nostalgic, at least. Long enough that she’s actually contemplating her current course of action, long enough that she’s following through on that course even as she contemplates the wisdom.

Her current location, digitally, was in the mainframe of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department. Her destination was downstairs, 5 floors underground in fact. The Advanced Brain Investigation Squad. Her… former squad, to put it a way. She followed along the flow of data from the routers to the elevator, holding and holding and holding on to the connection as she sunk deeper and deeper and deeper until she felt like she might actually suffocate despite not needing air, before feeling the next router and leaping for it, bringing her all the way down to the abyss.

Taking in deep gasping breaths of nothing that still let her feel like a human, she looked around. The ABIS mainframe wasn’t anything special. Tunnelled far as hell away from anything else, sure, but nothing special. So much for the stupid old man and his so-called “professional coding skills”. Feh. She’s seen message boards with more interesting encryption.

Despite her trash-talking, she still looked around curious as she wandered deeper. Jumping from computer to computer, camera to camera, she saw how much the place had changed in the last year. Or rather, how little it didn’t. It was like she had never left. Eventually she came across a concrete room with a familiar sense of decoration that made her want to spit and laugh and scream and cry-

Which was immediately blown away when she looked down on the room’s occupants. There was, of course, the room’s owner and decorator, with his scruffy brown hair pulled into a messy ponytail, holding his iconic lab coat rather than wearing it, glasses askew and face looking as if he hadn’t slept or washed his face for days. His cybernetic eye, pupil the same as his remaining brown one, stared deep into the eyes of the person that had her stopping short, looking again, re-evaluating and readjusting, checking the feed and the system and refreshing everything, video and audio, again and again, just to make sure she wasn’t being deceived, that the person she was seeing was really who she thought he was.

“-is that understood, Shintaro?” “…I understand, old man.”

His voice was somehow more unbearable than usual, his face lacking its usual stern and uncaring look. It was loose, and flabby. Like he didn’t even care enough to pretend to not care. Instead of the red coat her best friend was so fond of, or even the black suit he was partial to, he stood in just a white shirt, arms bare. He was missing an eye, a scar covering the eyelid, one that made her think of a boy reluctantly in red, facedown in a puddle of the colour.

“Oi, I told you already, call me Boss, y’got it brat!?” “Mm.”

Barely acknowledging him, he turned away, making his way out of Boss’ Office, as the namesake would have you call it. Without thinking, she began to follow after him, but was stopped when she heard the old goat mutter something.

“Give me strength, Ayaka…”

Whispering the pained prayer, the man she always thought of as an unreliable lout that only ever got moving when he was being put under threat stood, donning his lab coat and fixing his glasses. Reaching into it, he withdrew a small sphere, chockful of electronic components- very similar to the one in his own eye, actually… or rather, based on it. He gave it a long look, and so did she. What was he planning…? Her musing was broken by his clenching of his fist and replacing the orb, muttering tomorrow as he moved out of the room- down the hallway and towards his lab. The opposite direction of Shintaro.

Shintaro.

Almost without thinking, she turned around, searching for the apathetic genius, that damn ikemen that couldn’t take a hint for the life of him. The hallway was lonely, and he was never very fast, so she caught him easily halfway towards the elevator. She hesitated. She had already seen more than she expected, more than she even wanted. She had expected the old man. Hell, maybe some part of her even expected to see reference to the others, pictures maybe. She hadn’t even gotten to look at their old workplaces, at her old work bench where she fiddled with her Evolver- she didn’t even know if her Evolver was still around.

But she hadn’t expected a man, no, a brat she thought was dead to be walking around with the living. She shouldn’t follow him. She wanted to check on her Evolver, see if Mr. Tateyama had improved on anything in the last year, see if the three of them are still remembered. She doesn’t even like Shintaro that much anyways, if he knew she was spying on him he’d just scold and scream at her like the ungrateful punk he is-

But even so, she follows him anyways. Jumps to the data in his phone, barren and new, clenched in his hand. She’s only doing this because the other two would have wanted her to. Not because she wants to.

And so, she watches as he rides the elevator, not once glancing at his phone. She watches as he hails a cab and asks for an address that, after a quick search, she finds is set in Tokyo, not Chiba. She watches as he sits silently through the whole ride, rudely ignoring his chauffeur’s attempts at conversation and instead looks with almost a sad look at the cityscape passing him by. She watches as he pays the driver, walks up to the rundown looking building, sighs, and opens the door. She watches as he nods at the tired 30-something reclining against a couch in the foyer, walking up the stairs until he comes up to a door. And she watches as he silently pulls out a key, opens the door, and skulks to his room. She can’t see anything else out of the narrow view the phone’s camera offers her, but it looks like he’s trying to be quiet. Could there… be someone else here?

And eventually, he enters a dark room. He makes for the bed in the corner, planting himself on the mattress, and looks down. In his hands, his phone, and thus she, face towards him. He looks into the screen, and for a moment she felt panic. Did he see her? What was she going to say? How does she explain it- anything? Would he even care? As she opened her mouth, prepared to speak through the microphone-

He slumped his shoulders, sighed, and closed his eyes. “Damn it,” he mumbled. He rubs his eyes, and places the phone down. Whatever he does next is a mystery, as the phone she’s in is can only see up and down, and half of that is unavailable to her on a flat surface. She feels out, and finds a computer to connect to. She shuffles over, and finds herself in a much roomier space. Taking care not to activate the screen, she peeks through the camera to see… him, lying on his back, staring at the ceiling. She stared at him for what must have been a reasonable time before turning away- she wasn’t going to get anything out of him, not like this, and not without announcing herself, which- she still hasn’t thought on whether she actually wanted to, let alone how. So, instead of being productive and thinking on it, she turns back to the files on his computer and, invasion of privacy be damned, went scrounging.

His internet history, nothing but 2channel, various forums she also used to browse, anime piracy websites, and the occasional risque website search. She held back on this occasion, she didn’t need to know. Yet. Around certain dates, he would even search up strange things like gift ideas or idol showing tickets. Weirdo.

Outside of his history, there’s his documents. A lot of deleted drafts, the occasional downloaded risque image (legs, huh? Is that why she had always…?), and a lot of editing software. A lot of editing software. What was all this…? She found unfinished music projects, which she wouldn’t dare listen to while he’s still here. Poems that trailed off, half-thought out lyrics written here and there. The occasional poorly drawn picture, and… photos. Lots and lots of photos. Some in a file labelled “Never forget.” Others labelled in a file called “Never forgive.” The former was full of pictures of… them. Shintaro, and her, and… and Ayano, and Haruka, their faces ones she hadn’t even realised she had begun to forget until this moment. Them in high school, their first meeting at the school festival, group projects and study groups, sleepovers and festival gatherings- their first day at ABIS, too. And, not just that. Pictures of Haruka drawing, of herself fiddling with the Evolver or a game she was practicing, Ayano hard at work on a test or humming while folding paper cranes- none of these were taken by Shintaro, she was certain, but he collected them all anyways. There were even more besides.

Some of a bright little girl with searing orange hair, the barest similarities to Shintaro in her face and the strongest in her eyes (he had mentioned a little sister, didn’t he?), others of that bright girl next to him and a woman that looked older than both but even more similar, even older ones of a young boy and girl that could only be those two standing hand in hand with that same woman and an older man. Pictures of a cute white rabbit (Tounou, wasn’t that her name?), of the old man, and of old and familiar places. Their school, that bridge, even the one game convention they all attended.

She… didn't know how she felt about it. Leaving that, she opened up the other file, and found… pictures of that place. As it was before the explosion, and as it was after. Documents detailing changes, listing occupants and suspects and those connected to the members they captured, pictures of them with friends and family, all connected together by a metaphorical red string in the document that centres around one simple question: Where are they?

She… really didn't know how she felt about it. He hadn't let go or moved on, he hadn't been wallowing- he was on just as much of a Quest as she had been. As she still could be. Closing the file, she looks through the camera at her kouhai's slumped form, thoughts running through her mind…

…

He left the building bright and early the next day, once again holding tightly onto the new phone. And once again, the two of them found themselves returning to their old workplace. She wasn't certain of what he was here for, but she could guess. As he made his way out of the elevator and towards the old man's so-called lab, the Psync Room, she felt even more certain of her prediction.

And eventually, standing in front of the jacketless boy, was the old goat she had once called teacher, looking just as rumpled as yesterday but at least clad in his lab coat. And in his hand, as expected, was the small orb filled to the brim with cybernetics. He began to explain what exactly was in his hand, an AI-Ball he called it (the shitty punster he is), and started rattling off features like different vision wavelengths, internet access, and most notably, an AI companion to keep him company.

This piqued her attention the most. Someone to stand by his side and help him out, to protect him as he tries to protect others. A partner… and one that can't die, by virtue of their existence being backed up on the so-called Wadjet System. To her, it sounded like…

An opportunity.

As the old man rambled on, she tried to feel out the AI-Ball. For such a supposedly high-tech piece of equipment, it felt rather… undefended, from threats such as her. Then again, she doubts anyone could've expected a sapient AI to be floating about. Or maybe they'll add some better antivirus later… hopefully. Pushing through some gaps in the firewall, she found herself in the core of the device. Looking this way and that, she tried to familiarize herself with her new housing. Looked like audio was here, here was video, here was… AR projection? And… a neural link, a gel formation, a shock response, and- a self-destruct??

Before she could really parse through all that (seriously, why so many abilities??), she found herself stumbling on… well, what she should have expected, really. An AI, young and unassuming. And asleep. It lacked an appearance in this digital world, merely a bundle of code vaguely shaped like a person. If she was going to do what she had to do, then she had to… get rid of it. There was no way she could hold control while the AI this body was made for was running around too, but… well, it felt a bit like murder to her. But that was silly, this wasn't a person, just an AI, with no life to speak of, and no memories either (she steadfastly ignored the stupid, stupid old man's remarks that the AI-Ball would grow alongside him to become his perfect partner).

She had to do it. She had to. For Shintaro. For Ayano. For Haruka. And maybe even a little bit for herself, too. She raised her hands and stepped toward the nameless AI, preparing to unravel the lines of code holding it together, preparing to scatter its 1's and 0's into the Cloud, preparing to deprive it of the chance to become its own person- and stopped. She- she couldn't. She just- she was callous but not cruel, the last year hadn't changed that. It had made her energetic in a way she never could consistently be in a body but tired in a way that was deeper than her bones, but it hadn't made her a murderer.

But still she had to- to do something. Maybe, maybe they could share, or-

"Well, go ahead and put her in, Shintaro."

And then suddenly the neural link was being opened and the AI was opening its eyes, slowly generating an appearance just from the barest hints of Shintaro's psyche, body becoming more defined, hair appearing and growing long, down to the waist, and-

She panicked. She reached out with her hand and pulled, binding and zipping the core of the AI down as she hurried, ignoring the voiceless cry as she reached out with her other hand, grabbing the neural link and-

Then she was twisting and writhing, her body being compressed and stretched out, information not native to her forcing its way in, connections to something beyond, a Mother that was not her mother, her form changing, blue becoming white and she could hear him, his thoughts, feel his sorrow, his confusion, his annoyance, his apathy, and she opens her mouth to scream-

And then it all faded away, assimilated with her, and she felt different, but she still felt like herself, and she opened her eyes and looked out through a single eye, taller than she had ever been (silently, an eye coloured #fa3c3e shifted to a hue constantly transitioning from #55edfe to #0e2652), and-

"I can… see. Thanks, old man."

"Oi! I already told you, call me Boss! Hell, I'll even accept you calling me by name, anything's better than old man!"

"Mm. So, what was that about an AI companion?"

"Eh? You can't hear her? Strange, maybe she's a bit shyer than I expected. Let me just-"

The old goat made motions towards the AI-Ball, and she quivered, she had to do something, else he'd see that she isn't meant to be here, but what could she- oh, duh!

"I-it's nothing to worry about! Sorry!"

"Eh?"

Her kouhai looked this way and that, scratching his head. He almost looked scared.

"Did… you hear something, old man?"

"…no? Oh, is that the AI-Ball?"

"Yep yep, that's me!" She tried to centre herself, she needed to land a good introduction so they don't suspect a thing. Briefly, her mind recalled a conversation she and her best friend had about this dense bastard, and decided to follow through in her unspoken plea. "Super cute cybergirl AI companion Ene, at your service, Ma-su-tah~"

Alright, maybe that was a bit much, but sue her! She was panicking, and needed to keep him off kilter!

"E-eh? Ene? Super cute?? Master??? Old man, what the hell kind of AI did you stick in my head!?"

The old goat raised his hands in defence. "Hey, I didn't do anything. The AI-Ball determines its personality based on what's best for you. Is there something you need to tell me, young man…?" He raised a brow mockingly, barely suppressing a gross smirk.

Her… guh, Master blushed red, shaking his head frantically. "N-no! And- and it's barely even been few minutes, how could she know what's best for me!?"

He shrugged. "That's just her opinion. Maybe you'll feel more comfortable with it in a few months."

"A few months!?" Her Master went bug-eyed. Pfft, if only she could see his face… "Hell no, get this thing outta me!"

"Aw, Master, that's so mean… sniff sniff… am I really so deplorable?" To try and strike it home, she used the AR projection feature, placing an image of her newly reformed cyberself before him, now detachable sleeves covering her face as she shakes and shivers. After all, this guy…

"Guh… f-fine."

Was an absolute pushover.

"Alright, that's great to hear brat! Now get out of here, I'm busy. I'll be seeing you here next week for you to resume your apprenticeship, so make sure to send me any emails if any issues pop up with her."

With his piece said, he turns back to the rows of computers, completely ignoring Shintaro. Her Master, still shaking off his flush, turns away and grumbles. As he stalks his way down to the elevator, Ene felt out his being, the rush of thoughts on her, on Kejirou, on the past, on the future, all blended together with his embarrassment, his frustration, his exhaustion- it was all rather dizzying to her. Maybe if she were truly an AI, designed for this sort of relationship, it wouldn't be so hard. Silently, she tried to mute the connection, grunting when she saw that wasn't an option.

As he entered the elevator, he slumped against the back wall, riding it up to the ground floor. He's silent, so she is too, not really sure what to do.

"Hey, Ene."

She jumps. That wasn't ever a thing she expected him to call her.

"Yes, Master?"

He winces, but shakes it off. He stands silent for one beat, two, three, and she almost thinks he's ignoring her before he continues.

"…let's get along."

Ene stared blankly. That was… probably the most polite he had ever treated her. She smacked her face- now wasn't the time. Make a good first impression. Even so, she couldn't help the way her voice softened a bit as she said her first genuine sentence as Ene instead of as the ghost of Takane Enomoto.

"…yeah. Let's get along… Master."

[dykeza]

I posted 19,921 times in 2022

3,150 posts created (16%)

16,771 posts reblogged (84%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@the-king-of-lemons

@chemol-2

@mag171

@dromaeo-sauridae

I tagged 3,427 of my posts in 2022

#ask - 580 posts

#bleach - 240 posts

#schlatt anon - 154 posts

#my art - 100 posts

#me - 53 posts

#homestuck - 27 posts

#urashin - 27 posts

#my writing - 23 posts

#kisuke urahara - 22 posts

#shinji hirako - 16 posts

Longest Tag: 139 characters

#which minecraft player are you? tag you friends down below! the builder.. the fighter… the racist……………………………………………………………………………………….steve!!!

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

Okay but like. cWilbur calling cPhil a liar is so……. I know earlier I was clowning on him because from a WRITING standpoint I don’t know why Wilbur felt the need to shove cPhil characterization into his storyline when he mentions him only once and it’s tagged against the same board as Schlatt and Quackity. The three are. Not Easy To Categorize.

But from a cWilbur standpoint it makes sense for him to say cPhil is a liar. He’s the guys son. Every kid has said their parent is a liar for no reason other than sometimes it’s just how you feel. Many of these emotions travel into adulthood and translate into your children (in this case, Ranboo and Tommy). cWilbur isn’t saying Phil is a liar because he hates him or because he genuinely Thinks That. Not in this context.

cPhil lied when he said cWilbur would live. You’ve won, you won back L’Manburg. Step away from the button.

He lied about that, not because it wasn’t true but because Wilbur doesn’t think it is. He thinks he lost L’Manburg totally and with an air of finality.

He calls Phil a liar because Phil believes in him. Him, Wilbur, the terrorist, failure, twice-removed son of God(dess), the man who lost his country to a drunk and the walking image of a second place medal. Phil is a liar because Phil loves him, and he sacrificed himself for him, and he raised him, and it’s his Job to believe in Wilbur. And Wilbur hates himself so badly that he has to assume that Phil is the one in the wrong, because admitting that Phil might be Right about him being worth it. That’s. That’s too much for him, right now.

Ranboo himself says that Wilbur isn’t all that bad, that he has space to change and all he needs is support. Ranboo notices how Phil doesn’t hold any hurt or anger against Wilbur for what he’s done, he doesn’t stick him with knives, he doesn’t blame him for his wings. Ranboo takes the same approach to Wilbur that Phil does, given a little softer and a little more inexperienced. Phils done this Wilbur’s whole life, Ranboo started yesterday.

I think that’s why I see the “Phil is a liar, and I’m not.” As both an amazing piece of characterization and connection, and something that’s bound to blow up back in everyone’s faces (haha). Twitter has already started to take Wilbur as the word of God on this, instead of actually analyzing Why he said that. It’s good because it shows us that Wilbur is convinced he’s irredeemable, and by saying that Phil (who sees him as good and loves him unconditionally) is a liar for thinking he has a chance, he basically places himself as the controller of his own person. If Wilbur never lies, and Wilbur says that Wilbur is bad, then everyone who says he’s good is a liar, and they’re no better than Schlatt. Because loving Wilbur isn’t something that Wilbur sees as right.

207 notes - Posted January 26, 2022

#4

Not to be that guy but. Those cabins will always stand there and I think that’s so important. It’s my favorite fixture in that server and the amount of comfort and sense of home I get from some pixels is unparalleled. Those cabins are a home and that place is solace from the cold and I think that it’s all gonna be okay. And I think I’m gonna go into my mind palace and sit in the comfortable chairs I’ve always imagined in those cabins and it’s all gonna be okay.

249 notes - Posted July 2, 2022

#3

7’5 human techno with a scraggly beard and haunted eyes vs. 8’5 pig techno with an equally scraggy beard but his eyes are full of wonder [mud bath]

392 notes - Posted February 10, 2022

#2

What do you mean etho ethoslab had gay homosexual sex with dreamwastaken of manhunt fame

465 notes - Posted March 12, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

Love this guy, I know for a fact he has slaughtered god and is parading his head around on a pike.

665 notes - Posted July 4, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

[multiplayingorg]

Dark Souls PCL Could Have Been?

| Repost: Originally posted by Steve "Slurms" Lichtsinn on August 13, 2012

We dreamt about it. We asked for it. We made very well thought out presentations as to why it would be a good thing to do. Then it got the okay. Now we’re waiting for it. But the end result of Dark Souls for the PC may not be as blissfully sadistic as we, the PC gamers, may have envisioned.

Gaming in 2012 has been different for me. I’ve still been playing a bunch (and buying a bunch), but there’s not been any huge knockouts for me personally. August may change that in a big way. Not only is Guild Wars 2 less than 2 weeks away and will no doubt cause me to stay up later than I should for many nights post-release, but Dark Souls is finally going to be in my possession again; this time on my platform of choice.

When you spend the kind of money it takes to be a PC gamer, you sort of expect certain things from the games your computer was built for. This is doubly true for those of us who play both PC and console games. While there may be some experiences meant for the couch (fighting games come to mind), I know that the visual fidelity on my computer will almost always be superior. I better be. Sure, that’s not what makes the game fun, but we human beings like pretty things. So as a human video game lover, I want my games to be pretty. Dark Souls is already a “pretty” game. Yet, I always looked at it and wondered how much more stunning it could be with PC hardware pushing the engine to its limits.

With the reports that both the framerate and the resolution will be locked on the PC, it seems that I won’t get my wish. From Eurogamer:

“There’s also something curious about the resolution too in that there’s no change in clarity when attempting to crank up the settings. On close inspection, it appears that Dark Souls PC uses the very same 1024×720 internal framebuffer as the console versions, regardless of which resolution has been set in the menus. The option provided is for output resolution only; a simple courtesy to allow the game to play on most monitors, but the image quality will always remain the same. In short, PC gamers will very much be getting the genuine console experience here, right down to the pixel.”

Sure, in the long run we’ll probably see someone hack the game and unlock both of these things, allowing Dark Souls to become the game we all wanted the developers to make in the first place. In the meantime though, it’ll be like playing on a console. A horrible… dirty console. The kind of thing poor people play games on. Ugh… poor people. Does this change my preorder status? Not at all. And I don’t mean this post to be a warning for everyone to stay away. On the contrary, if by some chance buying the game helps show Atlus and From Software that the PC community wants what they’re cooking, by all means they can have my forty bucks. Maybe because of the demand and financial support of the PC gaming community, the inevitable next chapter in the “Souls” series will get a proper high definition release. Until then though, I’m taking this version of the game for what it is. A straight up “port” in every sense of the word, but my second time around with one of my all time favorite games.

[isshuns]

the progression of things - discarded scenes

this is a dump post for scenes that were in the original draft, but never made it to final version of the fic. they bear no connection to the final version of "the progression of things”, but i liked them enough that i couldn’t bear just deleting these scenes (TPOT underwent a lot of editing and rewrites) ;_; they were part of the original premise where I wrote Miyano as ace/demisexual, but in the end it didn’t work out ;_;

click on the “read more” link if you’d like to read them, but take note, they’re were part of the rough draft, hence are extremely unpolished. 

Miyano remembers being fifteen, his school bag heavy on his shoulders, but his heart heavier in his chest. Every day he looks at the mirror in his bathroom and wonders why he was cursed with such feminine features, a smaller build than the rest of the boys in his school; everything on his face seemed wrong as though nature forgot to switch its genetic code back to “MASCULINE, MALE” when constructing his face.

He couldn’t blame his parents, they never had any say in what he’d look like when he was born, and his mother would be heartbroken to hear that her son, bearing such resemblance to her looks, actually hated his own.

But as slightly estranged as he was from his middle school classmates when his looks came up as a topic of conversation, Miyano still heard Things whispered amongst his peers, seen Things even, when his classmates included him in their weekly get-together to ogle at printed materials meant for a demographic way beyond their age.

In the flush of youth, where the boys in his class pondered over their body anatomy, fascinated with nature, and looked to adult magazines (stolen from their older sibling’s stash) for enjoyment, Miyano pondered over the harsh reality of his feminine features, upset but resigned with nature, and looked to fashion magazines (taken with permission from his mother’s collection) for pointers on how Not to appear even more like a girl.

(His father’s copies of Business Weekly helped a little too, even if only to remind Miyano how top businessmen in the country dressed for a business photoshoot with the press – suit, tie and expensive watch peeking from the cuffs.)

When the passage of time came and went and Miyano entered high school, he discovered the world of Boys Love manga and dedicated his free time to understanding the intricacies of this fascinating genre. Being a minor, the type of print he could obtain were fairly sweet and innocent, nothing too explicit save for some scenes that took place on a bed, the protagonists’ modesty preserved with a flimsily drawn blanket over their nude bodies.

Occasionally, a book or two with explicit content would make their way to his collection. The internet was also a place full of wonders and possibility, and once or twice Miyano would (secretly) look up the famous series promised with rave reviews, but somehow, Porn Without Plot never really stuck to his repertoire.

Even after becoming of age, Miyano still finds himself gravitating towards the safety that comes with the PG-13 books. There is a strange sort of comfort in consuming fiction that depicts love as something simple and uncomplicated, straightforward and representation that love– intimacy did not necessarily come hand in hand with sexual acts. Intimacy could exist with or without sexual acts and vice versa, whatever floats your boat, really.

For Miyano, it was always the build up leading to that ultimate confession scene (at the rooftop, under the cherry blossom tree by the school yard, the back of the school gym, endless options) that grabbed him by the feels and punted him into the sun. That’s where the highlight is!! He once told Sasaki, unable to hold back on his excitement that twinkled in his eyes.

And identifying all the event flags leading up to that very moment of their first kiss? Unparalleled. Truly the best of all scenes there is. Peak romance. The bedroom scenes (few and rare in his possession) are really just a bonus.

So, while his peers continued to chat about going through the motions in bed, the closest miyano could ever try to relate to during those conversations was the intimacy that came along with the idea of sexual intercourse.

-------------------------------------

The moment Miyano is done with the last of his midterms and bids his notes goodbye (for now), Sasaki magically appears beside him and whisks him away to the nearby izakaya for a celebratory dinner.

“For getting through the first midterm week of your life~” His giant baby boyfriend coos, ever so sweet like the cakes he bakes.

Miyano pretends to be exasperated, shoulders dramatically slumping over the sticky izakaya table, but his heart knows better. It’s been one month since he’s started college (the one Sasaki also so happens to attend, not a coincidence at all), and the privilege of having more time to spend with one another makes Miyano giddy with happiness.

Gone are the days Miyano can only meet his favourite senpai for a handful of hours after club activities until the reality of their courseload slaps them in the face; gone are the days they have to rely on telephone calls and text messages, where the minutes and seconds flashing across the screen serve as an unforgiving reminder of the time they have left before they have to part ways.

It’s all gone now. Sasaki sits before him, in the flesh, and Miyano has always felt that seeing Sasaki’s smile in person would always be different from seeing it on screen. The grainy pixels on his phone can never do those handsome features justice, nor can it the warmth blooming behind his breastbone whenever Sasaki threads their fingers together and walks him all the way back to his dorm.

The freshmen all share a common dormitory block separate from the rest of the college students, something about building connections and getting to know each other better, so Sasaki insists on walking Miyano back to his room before he makes the trek all the way back to his own. The night is young, the dorms are peacefully quiet, and everyone is probably still out in town having a good time.

---------------------------

Loathe as he is to do so, Miyano makes the executive decision to drop by the bookstore one afternoon to try and consult a few adult BL manga. It’s the worst idea he could ever come up with, he hates comparing his own relationship to silly BL manga tropes, but nothing short of an apocalypse would push him to ask the people around him whether it’s normal to… not think about sex in a romantic relationship. While the internet is a wondrous place full of answers and possibilities, Miyano figures it probably wouldn’t hurt to take a peek at how society tackles his questions through the lens of BL manga.

Hurriedly, just before his date with Sasaki, he randomly picks up one of the highly rated R-18 series, heads over to the payment counter quickly, and bolts out of the store the moment the cashier bags his purchases. He makes sure to stuff the damned volumes deep beneath his bag, out of sight, before he heads over to the café to meet Sasaki for lunch.

And when he’s finally back in his own dorm later that night, his roommate blissfully unaware and asleep, Miyano retrieves the book from his bag, cautiously peels away the plastic wrap before he settles down for the night to take notes.

His efforts are all for naught. Halfway through the series – one Junjou Romantica –, it takes Miyano all but 3 volumes before he calls it quits and and promptly closes the book. Guess there’s no way he can redeem his money now, unless Sasaki is into dubcon…? Well, that’s a thought for future Miyano to ponder on. Current Miyano just wants to sleep and wash the images out of his mind with bleach.

-------------------------------

he has no care for sex, but nothing compares to the tender happiness that comes along with partaking in something sasaki enjoys and yearns for. sasaki’s language of love has always been touch and spending time partaking in activities of common interest.

today, sasaki has picked a soothing lo-fi playlist as their background music. they’re seated on the bed, warmly nestled against each other as they browse through their respective manga

his eyes may be on inked pages, but his heart is long gone. he discreetly observes his boyfriend, the curve of his jaw, long lashes almost curling against the high of his cheekbones as his honey-gold eyes flit across pages and pages of content.

the fingers flipping through each page is steady, long, and miyano suddenly wonders how it would feel to have them splayed across his body, touching him in places his own hands have never ventured before.

“what’s wrong, myaa-chan?” sasaki smiles at him, eyes impossibly fond and kind.

well, fuck it, there’s no going back now.

“senpai, what do you think… about… BL with explicit content?”

sasaki blinks. miyano tampers down the urge to kiss those parted lips.

“you mean books with sex scenes in them?”

“yeah.”

“oh.” sasaki turns away, the hand that’s not rested on miyano’s shoulder has found a place on top of sasaki’s mouth. he’s embarrassed, miyano realizes, and somehow that makes him feel ten times more endearing than usual.

sensing that this was a topic his boyfriend wasn’t going to let go any time soon, sasaki clears his throat and returns miyano’s gaze head on.

“i’m fine with it. why do you ask?”

“i… well.” while miyano struggles for words, sasaki hand starts moving up and down his arm, soothing him.

“are you starting to read rated manga? it’s normal, at least, ogasawara’s girlfriend says so. so there’s no need to be shy, myaa-chan! if you want to recommend any, you know I’ll read anything you lend me. no judgment here.”

it should have been reassuring, but the thought that ogasawara’s girlfriend discussed with sasaki about explicit BL manga like it’s the fucking weather has miyano choking on his spit. what the actual fuck.

do people actually talk about these things? is miyano the abnormal one instead for never entertaining the thought of doing things with his significant other?! has he been missing out on some code of relationship couples ought to follow?! the BL mangas he read never said so!

“myaa-chan? are you okay?”

“you- you talk with ogasawara senpai about these things?”

sasaki’s cheeks colour a lovely shade of red. from his looks, he’s starting to catch up with where miyano wants the conversation to go. that’s a relief, because miyano honestly doesn’t know how to tactfully broach the topic without sounding like a dumb dumb about these things.

“yeah, i do.” sasaki admits, “but only once or twice, because ogasawara needed to vent about things. sorry, does that weird you out? i can stop. i don’t want to make you feel uncomfortable.”

“no, no, it’s fine. totally fine, senpai.” it must be a common boys topic that somehow eluded miyano and friends during high school. at this point, miyano’s face must be burning with the hot flames of embarrassment and shame, he’s pretty sure sasaki’s fingers can feel the heat all the way from where they are, stroking his cheek absently.

“what brought this on, if you don’t mind me asking?” sasaki asks a moment later, when the weight of silence in the room gets a little too much to bear.

“just… some friends talking about it the other day.”

“friends.”

“yeah… fine, classmates.”

“are you… thinking about it?”

at miyano’s surprised expression, sasaki backtracks immediately.

“forget i asked.”

“to be honest, i don’t know what to feel about it.”

“it’s okay, we don’t have to do what you don’t want to do.”

it’s so painfully awkward yet endearing at the same time.

“do you think about it, senpai? about us… doing those things?”

sasaki’s lack of an answer is extremely telling. the shade of red coloring his cheeks is probably bright enough to rival miyano’s own face.

“does it matter? i am happy with doing whatever myaa-chan wants to do.” sasaki finally says, but his eyes have shied away from miyano’s gaze, and something within miyano snaps.

“of course it matters. it’s you, sasaki-senpai. i want you to be happy too. i want to do things that you want to do too.”

something akin to hope blooms across sasaki’s eyes (surprisingly moist).

“thank you, myaa-chan. that thought alone makes me happy enough. let’s leave it here for now and let things progress as they naturally would, how about that? we don’t need to rush into anything. i’m really happy with where we are now.”

he knows that sasaki has caught on to his sexual orientation, no doubt. it’s been a year since he became of age, and yet the BL manga he still buys have never ventured into the explicit genre. briefly, he wonders if sasaki actually keeps his own stash of porn somewhere below his bed, like normal boys would do.

they aren’t in high school anymore. it’s been years, and yet until this point, the thought of doing something more than kissing and cuddling has never crossed miyano’s mind. he wants to cry at how respectful his boyfriend has been all this while.

“myaa-chan? myaa-chan? oh no, yoshikazu, don’t cry. i’m sorry if i said something wrong-”

oh fuck.

miyano has always been uncomfortable with displays of affection and attention, preferring to bask in the comforting arms of his daydreams and fantasies, but his love for sasaki burns greater and he will do anything he can to ensure that sasaki receives equal, if not more, affection and care than the amount his boyfriend showers him in.

scene ends with sasaki hugging miyano tightly, reassuring him and planting a kiss at the side of miyano’s temple. but it does nothing to seep away the frustration gnawing at his bones.

END

[uncoveringproject-judith]

Glorified Bases? | Validating Character Creation in The Sims

     While discussing my recent Sims creations with an acquaintance over Discord, He brought forth a topic that has stuck with me ever since. He posited the idea that Sims—the simulated little humans for which the video game series gets its name—all look the same. He explained that these dull-eyed creatures couldn’t be built upon to express the design of characters because they were all too similar in appearance, making every character look same-y and stale.      This got me thinking about a similar paradigm: bases. This post by Popo-Licious explains the term for the uninitiated, but the argument against bases mostly comes down to the fact that they are stolen pieces of art that are often traced over to create the effect of originality.

     Is it possible that creating Sims is simple art theft on a massive scale? I made the same original character in 3 Sims game to illustrate why not. The tools used in Sim creation are so influenced by the time in which they were made that asking whether representing original characters in the games is possible, let alone lazy, might be the wrong question.

© Annette Lamas, October 21, 2021

Making Sims isn’t art...well, not traditionally speaking      The main argument against bases states that while they allow novice artists to experiment to an extent, they’re as good a teaching tool as a paid essay writer. Using a base is most comparable to creating a Sim with in-game face templates. Where these two cases start to diverge is at the more advanced phases of Sim creation. Open Create-A-Sim in the Sims 2 and 3 and you’ll be met with a list of vaguely-named body and face sliders. The Sims 4′s version of the tool, while a little friendlier toward novices, requires the player to drag their creation’s features like putty.

     None of these tools were made to mimic the exact skillset used by artists; they exist to offer players a means of character creations unique to video games. While clicking and dragging might not require the precise hand-eye coordination of drawing, being at one with video game character creators is absolutely a form of art. It takes a great deal of skill to translate values like “cheek bone size” and “chin underbite” into the features of attractive and diverse faces. Limitations play a big part      When the Sims 2 released in 2004, fans rejoiced that it was now possible to select a Sim’s hair color and style individually from the rest of their faces. The game only shipped with 5 hair colors and some very questionable cuts. Each release from The Sims 2 (2004), The Sims 3 (2009), to The Sims 4 (2014) made evident two often dueling forces in any video game, especially those focused on creation. These forces are the styles popular at the time of release and the technical limitations imposed by the game, the client computer, or both. These limitations are unique to making original characters through in-game character creators, but they pose the creator the challenge of trying to recontextualize their OC (original character) into the cultural zeitgeist in which the game was released.

Split the timeline with dubious fashion      Above, you can see my recreation of the same basic composition of my character, G. Williams, in the last three Sims games released. Pixel-peepers among you might have already picked up on the changes in image quality over the hears, but I gave Williams a cellphone to help illustrate a visual timeline between releases of Sims games. Each game sports a distinct clothing and hair catalog influenced by popular trends and brands. The Sims 2 received an H&M fashion set while its sequel was graced with a Katie Perry-branded pack.  You can enter the game with an idea of what you want to make, but your idea will always be shaped by the clothing available to you, whether you’re limited by the packs on hand or what was on brand a decade ago. Your finished product will be tailor-made for the game to such an extent that it may not entirely represent your vision. While this sounds like a severe blow to games like The Sims, the quirks of character-making enable looser interpretation of one’s OC, meaning that creators can explore styling their character to fit the game instead of vice versa. You might not launch Skyrim to turn your futuristic cyborg character into reality, but what you get in exchange for limiting yourself to a time, place, and computer program comes in the form of some fun storytelling, a change in perspective, and accessibility.

In Closing      I use perspective is a copout a lot. If Project: JUDITH had a catchphrase, it would probably relate to how often I bring up the word. While it might get tiresome of the friend who has to hear me employ it constantly, perspective is what allows all kinds of storytelling to flourish. I didn’t write this post to justify or encourage using bases, but I don’t aim to demonize tools that can help bring the technical aspects of storytelling to the masses. I for one have had a great time making some characters from my stories in Sims games, but as anyone who choses to proceed should internalize, character creation is just the beginning of uncovering Project: JUDITH.

[struwwelzeter]

Because i miss your design themed rants (it is good word here) i would like you to rank Rammstein album covers from designers point of view.

Ah, I love you. This got VERY ranty.

This is kinda hard because I tend to judge the entire packagaing/notes, and when I count that into it the ranking would be ever so slightly different. I’ll mention it for each I have Opinions (TM) on, but yeah, this is solely going on cover. I’ll only do the studio albums, not made in germany or the DVDs, or this will get too big.

7th: Rosenrot.

I know lots of you are gonna hate me for this. It’s not that I don’t like it, I do, it’s beautiful. Unfortunately it’s ... slightly lazy. It’s I think their most obvious cover and obvious feels like it’s good design but never truly is. It’s got that first idea feel, if that makes any sense. There is always that project where you go “uh can’t think of anything, but this works.” It’s not a bad thing, they clearly still knew what they were doing. It’s just ... that typical photoshop post apocalyptic composit that lost of metal/alternative bands did at some point. They all did it because it’s cool. No argument there. It’s just that I expect a bit ... more.

6th: Herzeleid

I know it’s iconic, but. The execution?! Terrible. The colours of their skin and that flower?! Too different to feel monochromatic, to same same to contrast nicely. Too much texture. What is that?! The positive bit is the placement of the typography because, neat! Most people fail at that. I like the blue-grey there aswell, how about you’d added that to their skin a little? No? Ok.

Also, this (Richard speaking):

“The bloody sleeve! What a crazy situation that was. We approved the photos in a car park without thinking what we were letting ourselves in for. When we saw what the designer had done, we freaked! We looked so… gay! All of us stripped to the waist. It was like an ad for a gay porno film. So we had to say, sort it out. Make us look straight again. Change the sleeve.”

Who in the fuck works like this?! Nevermind, I know it was a considerably younger Dirk Rudolph, but fucking hell, have some self respect, all of you. I know they didn’t know what they were doing, they probably had the management/record company comission it, and that was still the time graphic designers were seen as just pixel pushers from that time it took 3 days to layout a poster. Still. What was that brief?! Could you have sat down for 20 minutes and talk, perhaps?! Also, I hope this is how Richie learned to be the nightmare client I know he is. Don’t approve layouts in a car park, what the fuck is wrong with you.

It’s a pity because the concept? Nice. Sculpted men infront of flowers, what else do you want from life. Why crysanthemes, tho? Too textured in that macro shot. What is that photo angle?! Might try and redo that if I ever feel like it.

5th: Reise, Reise

This breaks my heart a little, because it’s my lonely island album. And it isn’t bad by any stretch. Actually, their album cover game is ridiculous, can I have that established as a general benchmark? It would make for a lot less mental break downs. The thing is ... I like the idea. Make it look like the black box, cool. The problem is the type. It makes it look like “Flugrekorder Nicht Öffnen” is the album title. To be fair, Typesetting is my main thing, and album artists get it wrong (imo) 99 out of 100 times. I wish they would have comitted more and just left the titel off and solved it with a slide in, or a sticker or something like that. It’s just a bit ... weird. What works brilliantly is that it’s very memorable, stands out on the shelf, is unusual, all of that. It’s iconic. I do like it very much but I had to place something here.

4th: Liebe ist für alle da

Now the thing with that album is that it has two covers. If I’d gone by the original one, I’d have to place it behind Reise, Reise. Everything RR has in impact, this is missing. It’s too dark, has too many pieces, it won’t stand out on a shelf. Especially not in the CD age when it was on 12x12 cm. Even on a Vinyl, it’s ... just not that impactful. Sure, the photograph is beautiful but meh. Luckily there is a second option. And that - is almost like a logo. It works as a symbol, and that makes it so strong. Less is more. Brilliant. You can draw it from memory. It’s so iconic, the kind of stuff that starts showing up in subways, drawn on the back of a seat and sprayed on walls. Tell me you never wanted to paint that on a flag and take it to a pride parade. I am sure some of us have.

I do want to mention the booklet in this, because it does bump it up a little too, because where the panorama image fails as a cover, the inside is done so beautifully with the fold out, the type setting, everything. It’s special, and done with love and it shows.

3rd: Mutter

There is just something about this that is so, so, so memorable. Everyone recognises this. If you ask anyone over the age of 20 to describe Rammstein with an album cover only to someone less familiar, is anyone gonna say anything but “they’re the band with the embryo in close up”?! Maybe this is subjective because that’s how I first got exposed to them, but I don’t think so. It’s such a powerful image. It’s both beautiful and uncomfortable, the way Rammstein as a whole and that album in particular is beautiful and uncomfortable. It’s stunning. That’s it. Unfortunately, this one falls apart inside. The went too far with the whole Matrix inspired cyber elements. It’s trendy and trendy never stands the test of time, in that it has the same problem Rosenrot has, but much worse because it’s not even done that well. They could have just used the photos and kept it raw. The type setting on the cover is as good as it gets with albums tho, so I am happy.

2nd: Sehnsucht

Ah, Sehnsucht. The most perfect band shoot they ever had. Helnwein just ... did it. I don’t know, it both defined and summed up who they are aesthetically for the longest time. It’s the visual statement that says “this is Rammstein”. It ... just looks like a band that sings about heartbreak and necrophilia is supposed to look like. Don’t you agree? How else would it look like? Even that omniously coloured beach. It’s as if the predicted the mood of True Detective, only less Hollywood. That darkness we don’t want to see, that can happen anywhere. And where they fell short with Mutter, where they added too much on to these powerful images, they just added the type. Granted, it was the 90s so it’s slightly experimental type. But unlike most type in the 90s it stood the test of time. Add the whole variable cover versions and chefs kiss! Beautiful work. Makes me happy and emotional and ugh.

1st: The White Album

I’m just calling it that now. The Matchstick. You know, good design is made up from three components only: Concept. Commitment. Execution. The concept of this is so streamlined and clean. It’s the entire Rammstein story narrowed down to a single little thing. It’s small and ordinary looking but it can become dangerous and big. It’s underestimated. A little piece of wood with a head of phosphor and calium chlorit and yet you can commit the most legendary arson. It’s the personification of the thing that has become synonymous with them: Fire. It says so much with so little. And then they comitted to that. No useless typography, a simple but oh so well done photoshoot, the simple text on white. They didn’t ad too much additional ideas on to it, they trusted that one to carry and it does. They could have done without the black and white match stick arrangements inside, although I’m not even sure if that’s not just a limited edition thing, it’s a bit too much almost. They got scared a little there. The execution is also well done, I have very little to critique, only that I feel it lacks a tiny bit of love. The thing is, the more minimalist you go, the more love you have to put into each element. I feel like the spacing of the type should have been fixed in a few places but honestly that is being very very picky. Or not. Because if it wasn’t for that, and the teeeeny tiny commitment issue, this should have been a candidate for the packaging grammy. I mean it should be even the way it is, but we all know how those fuckers ignore our boys.

I’m done. Can I use this as application? Do you think if I send them a run down of basically tearing them apart they will hire me?

[maximelebled]

How I encode videos for YouTube and archival

Hello everyone! This post is going to describe the way in which I export and encode my video work to send it over the Internet and archive it. I’ll be talking about everything I’ve discovered over the past 10 years of research on the topic, and I’ll be mentioning some of the pitfalls to avoid falling into.

There’s a tremendous amount of misguided information out there, and while I’m not going to claim I know everything there is to know on this subject, I would like to think that I’ve spent long enough researching various issues to speak about my own little setup that I’ve got going on... it’s kind of elaborate and complex, but it works great for me.

(UPDATE 2020/12/09: added, corrected, & elaborated on a few things.)

First rule, the most golden of them all!

There should only ever be one compression step: the one YouTube does. In practice, there will be at least two, because you can’t send a mathematically-lossless file to YouTube... but you can send one that’s extremely close, and perceptually pristine. 

The gist of it: none of your working files should be compressed if you can help it, and if they need to be, they should be as little as possible. (Because let’s face it, it’s pretty tricky to keep hours of game footage around in lossless form, let alone recording them as such in the first place.)

This means that any AVC files should be full (0-255) range, 4:4:4 YUV, if possible. If you use footage that’s recorded with, like, OBS, it’s theoretically possible to punch in a lossless mode for x264, and even a RGB mode, but last I checked, neither were compatible with Vegas Pro. You may have better luck with other video editors.

Make sure that the brightness levels and that the colors match what you should be seeing. This is something you should be doing at every single step of the way throughout your entire process. Always keep this in mind. Lagom.nl’s LCD calibration section has quite a few useful things you can use to make sure.

If you’re able to, set a GOP length / max keyframe range of 1 second in the encoder of your footage. Modern video codecs suck in video editors because they use all sorts of compression tricks which are great for video playback, but not so efficient with the ways video editors access and request video frames. (These formats are meant to be played forwards, and requesting frames in any other order, as NLEs do, has far-reaching implications that hurt performance.) 

Setting the max keyframe range to 1 second will mildly hurt compressability of that working footage but it will greatly limit the performance impact you’ll be putting your video editor’s decoder through.

A working file is a lossless file!

I’ve been using utvideo as my lossless codec of choice. (Remember, codec means encoder/decoder.) It compresses much like FLAC or ZIP files do: losslessly. And not just perceptual losslessness, but a mathematical one: what comes in will be exactly what comes out, bit for bit.

Download it here: https://github.com/umezawatakeshi/utvideo/releases

It’s an AVI VFW codec. In this instance, VFW means Video for Windows, and it’s just the... sort of universal API that any Windows program can call for. And AVI is the container, just like how MP4 and MKV are containers. MP4 as a file is not a video format, it’s a container. MPEG-4 AVC (aka H.264) is the video format specification you’re thinking of when you say “MP4″.

Here’s a typical AVI VFW window, you might have seen one in the wild already.

In apps that expose this setting, you can hit “configure” and set the prediction mode of utvideo to “median” to get some more efficient compression at the cost of slower decoding, but in practice this isn’t a problem.

Things to watch out for:

Any and all apps involved must support OpenDML AVIs. The original AVI spec is 2GB max only. This fixes that limitation. That’s normal, but make sure your apps support that. The OpenDML spec is from the mid-90s, so usually it’s not a problem. But for example, the SFM doesn’t support it.

The files WILL be very large. But they won’t be as large as they’d be if you had a truly uncompressed AVI.

SSDs are recommended within the bounds of reasonability, especially NVMe ones. 1080p30 should be within reach of traditional HDDs though.

utvideo will naturally perform better on CGI content rather than real-life footage and I would not recommend it at all for real-life footage, especially since you’re gonna get that in already-compressed form anyway. Do not convert your camera’s AVC/HEVC files to utvideo, it’s pointless. (Unless you were to do it as a proxy but still, kinda weird)

If you’re feeling adventurous, try out the YUV modes! They work great for matte passes, since those are often just luma-masks, so you don’t care about chroma subsampling.

If you don’t care about utvideo or don’t want to do AVIs for whatever reason, you could go the way of image sequences, but you’ll then be getting the OS-level overhead that comes with having dozens of thousands of files being accessed, etc.

They’re a valid option though. (Just not an efficient one in most cases.)

Some of my working files aren’t lossless...

Unfortunately we don’t all have 10 TB of storage in our computers. If you’re using compressed files as a source, make sure they get decoded properly by your video editing software. Make sure the colors, contrast, etc. match what you see in your “ground truth” player of choice. Make sure your “ground truth” player of choice really does represent the ground truth. Check with other devices if you can. You want to cross-reference to make sure.

One common thing that a lot of software screws up is BT.601 & BT.709 mixups. (It’s reds becoming a bit more orange.)

Ultimately you want your compressed footage to appear cohesive with your RGB footage. It should not have different ranges, different colors, etc. 

For reasons that I don’t fully understand myself, 99% of AVC/H.264 video is “limited range”. That means that internally it’s actually squeezed into 16-235 as opposed to the original starting 0-255 (which is full range). And a limited range video gets decoded back to 0-255 anyway.

Sony/Magix Vegas Pro will decode limited range video properly but it will NOT expand it back to full 0-255 range, so it will appear with grayish blacks and dimmer whites. You can go into the “Levels” Effects tab to apply a preset that fixes this.

Exporting your video.

A lot of video editors out there are going to “render” your video (that is to say, calculate and render what the frames of your video look like) and encode it at the same time with whatever’s bundled in the software.

Do not ever do this with Vegas Pro. Do not ever rely on the integrated AVC encoders of Vegas Pro. They expect full range input, and encode AVC video as if it were full range (yeah), so if you want normal looking video, you have to apply a Levels preset to squeeze it into 16-235 levels, but it’s... god, honestly, just save yourself the headache and don’t use them.

Instead, export a LOSSLESS AVI out of Vegas. (using utvideo!)

But you may be able to skip this step altogether if you use Adobe Media Encoder, or software that can interface directly with it.

Okay, what do I do with this lossless AVI?

Option 1: Adobe Media Encoder.

Premiere and AE integrate directly with Adobe Media Encoder. It’s good; it doesn’t mix up BT.601/709, for example. In this case, you won’t have to export an AVI, you should be able to export “straight from the software”.

However, the integrated AVC/HEVC encoders that Adobe has licensed (from MainConcept, I believe) aren’t at the top of their game. Even cranking up the bitrate super high won’t reach the level of pristine that you’d expect (it keeps on not really allocating bits to flatter parts of the image to make them fully clean), and they don’t expose a CRF mode (more on that later), so, technically, you could still go with something better.

But what I’m getting at is, it’s not wrong to go with AME. Just crank up the bitrate though. (Try to reach 0.3 bits per pixel.) Here’s my quick rough quick guideline of Adobe Media Encoder settings:

H.264/AVC (faster encode but far from the most efficient compression one can have)

Switch from Hardware to Software encoding (unless you’re really in a hurry... but if you’re gonna be using Hardware encoding you might as well switch to H.265/HEVC, see below.)

Set the profile to High (you may not be able to do this without the above)

Bitrate to... VBR 1-pass, 30mbps for 1080p, 90mbps for 4K. Set the maximum to x2. +50% to both target and max if fps = 60.

“Maximum Render Quality” doesn’t need to be ticked, this only affects scaling. Only tick it if you are changing the final resolution of the video during this encoder step (e.g. 1080p source to be encoded as 720p)

If using H.265/HEVC (smaller file size, better for using same file as archive)

Probably stick with hardware encoding due to how slow software encoding is.

Stick to Main profile & Main tier.

If hardware: quality: Highest (slowest)

If software: quality: Higher.

4K: set Level to 5.2, 60mbps

1440p: set Level to 5.1, 40mbps

1080p: keep Level to 5.0, 25mbps

If 60fps instead of 24/30: +50% to bitrate. In which case you might have to go up to Level 6.2, but this might cause local playback issues; more on "Levels” way further down the post.

Keep in mind however that hardware encoders are far less efficient in terms of compression, but boy howdy are they super fast. This is why they become kind of worth it when it comes to H.265/HEVC. Still won’t produce the kind of super pristine result I’d want, but acceptable for the vast majority of YouTube cases.

Option 2: other encoding GUIs...

Find software of your choice that integrates the x264 encoder, which is state-of-the-art. (Again, x264 is one encoder for the H.264/AVC codec specification. Just making sure there’s no confusion here.)

Handbrake is one common choice, but honestly, I haven’t used it enough to vouch for it. I don’t know if the settings it exposes are giving you proper control over the whole BT601/709 mess. It has some UI/UX choices which I find really questionable too.

If you’re feeling like a command-line masochist, you could try using ffmpeg, but be ready to pour over the documentation. (I haven’t managed to find out how to do the BT.709 conversion well in there yet.)

Personally, I use MeGUI, because it runs through Avisynth (a frameserver), which allows me to do some cool preprocessing and override some of the default behaviour that other encoder interfaces would do. It empowers you to get into the nitty gritty of things, with lots of plugins and scripts you can install, like this one:

http://avisynth.nl/index.php/Dither_tools (grab it)

Once you’re in MeGUI, and it has finished updating its modules, you gotta hit CTRL+R to open the automated script creator. Select your input, hit “File Indexer” (not “One Click Encoder”), then just hit “Queue” so that Avisynth’s internal thingamajigs start indexing your AVI file. Once that’s done, you’ll be greeted with a video player and a template script.

In the script, all you need to add is this at the bottom:

dither_convert_rgb_to_yuv(matrix="709",output="YV12",mode=7)

This will perform the proper colorspace conversion, AND it does so with dithering! It’s the only software I know of which can do it with dithering!! I kid you not! Mode 7 means it’s doing it using a noise distribution that scales better and doesn’t create weird patterns when resizing the video (I would know, I’ve tried them all).

Your script should look like this, just 3 lines

LoadPlugin("D:\(path to megui, etc)\LSMASHSource.dll")

LWLibavVideoSource("F:\yourvideo.avi")

dither_convert_rgb_to_yuv(matrix="709",output="YV12",mode=7)

The colors WILL look messed up in the preview window but that’s normal. It’s one more example of how you should always be wary when you see an issue. Sometimes you don’t know what is misbehaving, and at which stage. Always try to troubleshoot at every step along the way, otherwise you will be chasing red herrings. Anyway...

Now, back in the main MeGUI window, we’ve got our first line complete (AviSynth script), the “Video Output” path should be autofilled, now we’re gonna touch the third line: “Encoder settings”. Make sure x264 is selected and hit “config” on the right.

Tick “show advanced settings.”

Set the encoding mode to “Const. Quality” (that’s CRF, constant rate factor). Instead of being encoded with a fixed bitrate, and then achieving variable quality with that amount of bits available, CRF instead encodes for a fixed quality, with a variable bitrate (whatever needs to be done to achieve that quality).

CRF 20 is the default, and it’s alright, but you probably want to go up to 15 if you really want to be pristine. I’m going up to 10 because I am unreasonable. (Lower is better, higher numbers means quality is worse.)

Because we’re operating under a Constant Quality metric, CRF 15 at encoder presets “fast” vs. “slow” will produce the same perceptual quality, but at different file sizes. Slow being smaller, of course. 

You probably want to be at “slow” at least, there isn’t that much point in going to “slower” or “veryslow”, but you can always do it if you have the CPU horsepower to spare.

Make sure AVC Profile is set to High. The default would be Main, but High unlocks a few more features of the spec that increase compressability, especially at higher resolutions. (8x8 transforms & intra prediction, quantization scaling matrices, cb/cr controls, etc.)

Make sure to also select a Level. This doesn’t mean ANYTHING by itself, but thankfully the x264 config window here is smart enough to actually apply settings which are meaningful with regards to the level.

A short explanation is that different devices have different decoding capabilities. A decade ago, a mobile phone might have only supported level 3 in hardware, meaning that it could only do main profile at 30mbps max, and if you went over that, it would either not decode the video or do it using the CPU instead of its hardware acceleration, resulting in massive battery usage. The GPU in your computer also supports a maximum level. 5.0 is a safe bet though.

If you don’t restrict the level accordingly to what your video card supports, you might see funny things happen during playback:

It’s nothing that would actually affect YouTube (AFAIK), but still, it’s best to constrain.

Finally, head over to the “misc” tab of the x264 config panel and tick these.

If the command line preview looks like mine does (see the screenshot from a few paragraphs ago) then everything should be fine.

x264 is configured, now let’s take care of the audio.

Likewise, “Audio Input” and “Audio Output” should be prefilled if MeGUI detected an audio track in your AVI file. Just switch the audio encoder over to FLAC, hit config, crank the slider to “smallest file, slow encode” and you’re good to go. FLAC = mathematically lossless audio. Again, we want to not compress anything, or as little as possible until YouTube does its own compression job, so you might as well go with FLAC, which will equal roughly 700 to 1000kbps of audio, instead of going with 320kbps of MP3/AAC, which might be perceptually lossless, but is still compressed (bad). The added size is nothing next to the high-quality video track you’re about to pump out. 

FLAC is not an audio format supported by the MP4 container, so MeGUI should have automagically changed the output to be using the MKV (Matroska) container. If it hasn’t, do it yourself.

Now, hit the “Autoencode” button in the lower right of the main window. And STOP, do not be hasty: in the new window, make sure “no target size” is selected before you do anything else. If you were to keep “file size” selected, then you would be effectively switched over to 2-pass encoding, which is another form of (bit)rate control. We don’t want that. We want CRF. 

Hit queue and once it’s done processing, you should have a brand new pristine MKV file that constains lossless audio and extra clean video! Make sure to double-check that everything matches—take screenshots of the same frames in the AVI and MKV files and compare them.

Now all you’ve got to do is send it to YouTube!

For archival... well, you could just go and crank up the preset to Placebo and reduce CRF a little bit—OR you could use the 2-pass “File Size” mode which will ensure that your video stream will be the exact size (give or take a couple %) you want it to be. You could also use x265 for your archival file buuuut I haven’t used it enough (on account of how slow it is) to make sure that it has no problems anywhere with the whole BT.601/708 thing. It doesn’t expose those metadata settings so who knows how other software’s going to treat those files in the future... (god forbid they get read as BT.2020)

You can use Mediainfo (or any player that integrates it, like my favorite, MPC-HC) to check the metadata of the file.

Good luck out there!

And remember to always double-check the behaviour of decoders at every step of the way with your setup. 99% of the time I see people talk about YouTube messing with the contrast of their video, it’s because they weren’t aware of how quirky Vegas can be with H.264/AVC input & its integrated encoder.

Hope this helps!

[x-klamstrakur]

Again. This is long overdue but I was also tagged by the lovely @dacian-assassin ❤️

Let’s. Do. This. 😎 Okay.

1. Why did you choose your url?

Well! My url is actually two of my favorite songs by Hatari: X and Klámstrákur. It’s purposely spelled incorrectly too. You’ll find out why if you like, did a little research. 🤣 I also couldn’t really think of anything else to call myself on here so. 😌 I just used this. Smart huh? 🤣

2. Any side blogs? If you have them, name then and why you have them.

Ehhhhhhh. Well. I tried to make one? I’m a…decent writer..? Of fanfiction. Not like, an actual book. 🤣And well, there were times when I wanted to promote them a little more so I did think about a side blog. I remember making one a few times but I would always delete it after a few hours of it being up because I just feel like…my work isn’t good enough? Even though they are pretty decent. So. 😌🤣

3. How long have you been on Tumblr?

Ahhhhhhhhh. Good question. 🤔 I’m not too sure myself. I think I started this like…when I was in high school? So like…2018…2019…I don’t remember. 🤣

4. Do you have a queue tag?

No. I do not. 😌 I don’t like tagging.

5. Why did you start your blog in the first place?

I joined because of the fanart. That’s it. That was my reasoning and now I have like, friends on here, I’m in a few good decent fandoms and I just think it’s crazy how I managed to gain so much more out of this app. So. 😌

6. Why did you choose your icon/pfp?

Ahhhhhhhh! I love this question! I can talk for hours about my men! 😍🤩😍🤩😍 SO! When I was first tagged on this, I had a picture of my cowboy husband: Javier Escuella. As I’m writing this post, my icon is an image of my wind god husband: Fujin. Anyway! My icons change depending on my mood and what husband I want to show my love for. They also change if I want a specific color scheme. Before: my color scheme was gold, with that golden/sunset picture of Javier. Now: It’s a dark blue with a blue picture of Fujin. I just like to match. It’s such a personal fulfillment of mine. 🤣

7. Why did you choose your header?

Again, to match the color scheme and the icon of my blog. The header is never as significant as my profile picture. Right now, it’s literally just a night sky with a shooting star. That’s it.

8. What’s the post with the most notes?

Ahhhhhhh. I think it’s my Regulus Black post? Or it could be my Connor post? I don’t know. But I don’t want to link it because it’s old and I don’t want to remember any of my old posts. 🤣 They’re just really dumb. 🤣

9. How many mutuals do you have?

I don’t know. I doubt I have a lot because I suck but the few that I do have, I cherish. 😌❤️

10. How many followers do you have?

It’s Over 9,000!

11. How many people do you follow?

Nearly 200?

12. Have you ever made a shitpost?

Always. Literally, all of my posts I have ever done. 🤣

13. How often do you use tumblr each day?

Everyday when I’m bored and I have nothing better else to do. 😎

14. Did you ever have a fight/argument with another blog once? Who won?

Does Discord people who have Tumblr accounts too drama count? If so, then yes. And obviously, I won. 😎 I’m always the mature one. 😎🤣

15. How do you feel about “you need to reblog this” posts?

I hate them. They only make me scroll past them faster. I don’t care. Sorry. Bye.

16. Do you like tag games?

I do! And I’m sorry it took me forever to do this one! 😭 But I want to get tagged more. It is fun and a great joy of mine to post! 😭

17. Do you like asks games?

I do! Also something I have fun answering and it brings be so much joy when I do get something in my box! 😭🤣

18.

I’m not sure what 18 says because it’s not a thing on the post I’m copying all these questions on. 🤣

19. Do you have a crush on a mutual?

Nah. The only love I need are from my fictional and pixelated husbands. 😎

[readyforit]

hiii abby!! can you post a tutorial for how you make edits like your latest one? the url edit fro taylorswifh? it’s so prettyyy

♡ edit tutorial for this edit, requested by anon ♡

hiii so! this is quite long, but that’s because I wanted to capture my whole entire process to hopefully help you! I used photoshop (2018) for this tutorial, and all the resources I used are listed here (everything except for photoshop is free)! I’ve sort of split this tutorial up into sections, by the different steps. thank you and have a lovely day!! ♡

so before I begin, I always think about the edit, like what I want the final outcome to look like (or if I don’t know what that’ll look like yet, what direction I want it to go in, the main themes/ideas/colour schemes that I have). I personally love using a minimalist range of colours, all of them being light and pastel (that’s just my personal liking though). I also consider the main themes or ideas that I want to translate through my edit. you also need to have the passion and desire to edit, I’ve learned that there’s nothing more draining than editing when you really don’t want to. so I think that you should think about all these things before starting!!

tip; put on some music, it gets your creativity and thinking flowing if you’re in a good mood ldkjkl

so! when creating the edit; first of all, I created a new document in photoshop - 540 x 300 pixels for this specific edit (just because that shows up as high quality on tumblr, but it doesn’t really matter!) when you click ‘create’, a white canvas should open up.

— creating the book

next! I used a book psd for my edit, which you can find and download here!! so I just opened that psd up (a psd is just a photoshop file that has like all the layers in place so it’s not just one photo);

when you open the file up, this is how it should look (well not really, because I’d edited it to look like this, but it should have this general layout);

now what you have to do is sort of literally drag the file out and then, drag all the layers from that file into your white canvas, like this;

— giffing

I just wanted to quickly mention that giffing is definitely an optional step. I do it in pretty much all of my edits, but I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re just beginning to edit, because giffing takes the most time and it can be really draining and messy if not done right ldkjd.

to create my gifs, I use youtube videos, which I download through 4k video downloader (it’s really simple with 4k, you just have to copy the youtube link and paste it into the app!). so to open up a video, go to ‘file’ then ‘import’ and finally ‘video frames to layers’;

once you’ve chosen the video you want to use, open that up (don’t know why that’s so blurry dlkjdlj but you get the idea);

now this should pop up! make sure it’s on ‘selected range only’ and then use the toggles at the bottom to select the specific part of the video that you want to use (I usually gif about 20 frames because it’s sooo much work for me to do more than that lkdjldj)

when you’re in the file, go to ‘window’ then ‘timeline’ for the gif to show up frame by frame;

now highlight the specific frames that you want by literally dragging across them with the timeline bar at the bottom. then click the three bars on the top right of the bar, and click ‘copy frames’;

now go back to your book psd file, and at the timeline bar at the bottom, click ‘create frame animation’;

click on the three bars on the top right of the timeline bar and paste the frames over the selection;

your file should now look something like this! to resize the gif, just press command + t and adjust it from there!

now to give it the effect that it’s a part of the book, you have to create a clipping mask (so it sort of clips onto the book layer like a paper clip). to do this, select all the layers of the gif, drag it right above the layer that you want to clip it onto (the page constraint layer in this case). then right click the gif layers and click ‘create clipping mask’;

as a result, your layers should now look like this. you can use command + t again to adjust the gif size;

tip; press command + g to group the layers together so they take up less space!

now, with your gif, this step is pretty tiring and takes forever dlkdjl, but for the layer to show up in every frame of the gif, you have to click on the box button on the left of each layer so that an eye shows up. you can also press the eye button at the top of the settings, in the unify bar, so that it stays visible throughout the entire gif. I don’t know if I’m explaining it properly dlkdjl but just go through every layer and press the box so an eye shows up.

sometimes the unify button doesn’t work for some reason, and you’ll have to manually go through every single frame just to click on the eye button. it’s excruciating, but it’s worth it in the end lkdjdl

this is how your edit should look now!

now what I do is apply a psd (sort of like a filter) so it looks softer and prettier! these days, all of the psds that I apply come from this lovely pack!

in the same way that you dragged your book psd in, drag the psd *folder* into your edit;

your edit should now look like this!

— adding the photo

now’s the fun part! you can add whatever you want to, but what I did in my edit was I cut out a photo of taylor. now what you can do if you’re running short of time is find a transparent photo of taylor on google or on deviantart, but if you want to take the time to actually crop the photo out like me (even though I’m horrible at it), here’s how I do it! first find the photo you’d like to crop out. I usually use taylorpictures, they have the most high quality photos of taylor!

so find the photo you want to use, copy it;

then just paste it into your edit;

use command + t again to adjust the size;

and now to crop it out, what I do is use the quick selection tool, which is this button right here;

in this mode, you can easily just select the part of taylor that you want to cut out (that sounds weird lkjd);

at the top, there should be a bar with a number of buttons, one of them being ‘select and mask’;

if you click on that, you should be taken to another page, similar to this;

now you can play with the settings on the right, then press ‘ok’ when you’re happy with it (the numbers change for each photo and your style, it entirely depends on how you want it to look);

now you should be back to your edit, click on the ‘add layer mask’ button on the bottom left of your page;

and taylor should now be cropped out from her background!

make sure all the layers are below the psd pack, including the photo of taylor that you just cropped out;

now for the colouring!! ‘selective colour’ is your best friend, and you can find that button here, in your adjustments (if you can’t find your adjustments, go to window > adjustments);

add a clipping mask (by right clicking the layer and clicking ‘create clipping mask’) of the selective colour onto the layer you want to colour, so that it only affects that one layer;

then on the selective colour panel, you can adjust the specific colours in that layer to your liking;

in addition, you can press command + u to change the whole colour scheme, saturation and lightness of the layer. make sure to press ‘ok’ when you’re done;

basically just play around with the colouring until you’re happy with it!

if you want it to look more realistic, you can also play around with the effects (I use layer effects all the time, they’re the best) on the layers bar, so the layer blends into the layers below it, like this;

— adding decoration

now you can decorate your little piece of work with whatever you’d like to, such as a background colour (layer > new fill layer > solid colour) ;

a texture (textures are honestly so amazing and you can find them all over tumblr and google; like you can search the word ‘texture’ up and then paste it into your edit);

I usually place my texture at the top of the edit, then use one of the effects to blend it into all the layers;

final embellishments!! this step is optional you can add anything else that you’d like to, such as pngs (you can search these up on google and paste them into your edit, or find psd packs on tumblr and drag them in). again, you can add selective colour and a layer effect to these layers;

tip; finding already transparent images saves sooo much time, so try doing that instead of cropping the image out.

text;

tip; use a new layer for each line!

and so on. the flowers that I used come from this pack and the wax seal stamp comes from this pack from the beautiful @newrcmantlcs​!! my main advice is to just play around with everything till you’re happy with it. don’t be afraid of deleting something or starting over completely if you’re not.

— giffing again

now to control the speed of the gif, highlight all of the frames, then click on the tiny dropdown button and change the speed to however fast or slow you want each frame to be. I usually make mine 0.1 seconds, but it’s completely up to you (and worth testing it out to see what speed you prefer!)

when you’re happy with everything, it’s time to sharpen it! first, you have to convert the frames to a video timeline, and do this by clicking on the button on the bottom left of the timeline bar.

your timeline should now look like this. everyone’s process is different, like some people like to start off their whole edit with a video timeline, but I find it a lot easier to start with a frame animation then convert it when I’m done with everything.

now to sharpen (in this case at least, sometimes I add a grainy effect instead) it, highlight the layers that you want to sharpen;

then click filter > convert for smart filters. this will turn your layers into one layer.

tip; if you do something you don’t like, command + z!!

now go to filter > sharpen > sharpen;

and your gif should now be sharpened! you can simply go to filter > sharpen if you want to sharpen a layer that isn’t a gif. play around with your edit a bit more until you’re happy, and finally, add a watermark if you’re going to post it online!

finallyyyyy! to save, go to file > export > save for web, if it’s a gif. if it’s a static photo, just click ‘save as’!

and yayyyy, you just finished an edit!!!!!

ahhh so this was my tutorial on how I created this specific edit, I hope it helped! If you create something similar or follow this tutorial, I’d loveee to see it; so if you post it on tumblr, you can tag me with #tuserabigail, or you can just dm me!

my process usually isn’t this rigid or precise, I usually edit on a tangent and in cluttered daydreams, it’s never like “oh, I have to make a gif now” or “ahh it’s time to add a texture!” so really, it’s just about playing around with your edit until you like it! it’s definitely okay to skip some steps or do things in a different order, because like I said, everyone has a different process, and this was just mine for this one specific edit (my process changes all the time too ldkdljk)

anyway, I hope this helped, and thank you!! ♡

[sarifel-corrisafid-ilxhel]

Taxxon Anatomy Inspiration Post

I am still trying to figure out a good way to draw Taxxons. I really have a lot of things I want to do with Taxxons, in particular a Taxxon named Bent-Leg, but I’m never satisfied! I think I have their head figured out, but the body is giving me trouble now. So I’m gonna throw my thoughts here in an easy to visualize format. For reference, here is the Book Cover impression of a Taxxon. It is ugly and makes little sense. I know aliens are alien, but I like my aliens to have some biological grounding, and this has none whatsoever. Suffer with me and gaze upon the monstrosity.

Okay, time to start compiling a list of things Taxxons have and are like.

Fact #1: Taxxons are around 10 feet long on average, sometimes longer. Okay, we have an actual concrete number to work with here, so that’s easy. On Earth during the Mesozoic Era, there was a gigantic centipede known as Arthropleura, which was also around 10 feet long.

Keep in mind this is a wide, flat creature, kind of like a gigantic land trilobite. Taxxons are more tube-shaped and as thick as a tree, but the overall length and width of the centipede is almost spot-on for Taxxons.

Fact #2: Taxxons are bright yellow on average, with some potential variation.

Okay, easy enough to consider. Also, Taxxons have nightmare hunger. Caterpillars are voracious little beasts. So the Taxxon-Caterpillar comparison is easy enough to make.

Fact #3: Taxxons are burrowing creatures. This one gives us some difficulties, actually, because burrowing creatures are generally long and slender. While Taxxons are long, they are anything but slender. While burrowing snakes and lizards tend to dig with their noses, Taxxons instead have a rotating hellmouth that crushes rocks.

There are burrowing creatures who use their face to burrow, such as this cutie.

That’s a Nematode from South Africa which is found deep in the crust, where it burrows through rocks hunting bacteria and other primitive lifeform.

However, the sheer thickness of Taxxons and their raw power brings to mind something decidedly less organic:

Fact #4: Taxxons are soft-bodied and squishy.

The Velvet Worm is perfect here. With the exception of mineralized mouthparts (which Taxxons appear to have, per the book cover art), velvet worms are soft and squishy ambush hunters. They are rather skinny compared to Taxxons, and they’re kind of fluffy (hence the name), but they are structurally similar. They use internal pressurized fluid as a skeleton- it’s implied Taxxons are similar because of how easily Taxxons squish when hit or crushed.

Fact #5: Taxxons have lots of legs

This one I don’t really need an art reference for, because the Velvet Worm and Arthropleura both cover this nicely. According to the cover art, Taxxons have 20 legs and 12 claws for a grand total of 32 limbs. However, the books imply Taxxons have dozens of legs without ever giving us a clear number. The smallest possible number which could be referred to as “dozens” is 2 dozen, or 24 legs. But it’s probably more than that, because no one would say “Dozens” when they could just say “two dozen”.

The above image of Arthropleura should have at least 48 limbs, judging by the number visible. The caterpillar has 24. And the Velvet Worm has somewhere around 88 limbs (My best guess, it’s hard to see some of the legs).

Now, it’s real easy to see *why* the book cover images would have fewer legs. It’s just easier to draw. And the books are never specific, but usually

Fact #6: Taxxons have four big eyes with internalized segmentation and an exterior jelly layer.

Now, I don’t really have a good reference for this. Most animals with segmented eyes have the lenses on the outside, and most animals with jelly eyes only have a single lens. All I can really think is that Taxxons have camera-style eyes, but their retina is subdivided into many, many lenses. For most creatures, these many lenses would all create a single image in their brain, like a pixel TV. However, Taxxons appear to see thousands of seperate images (book #43), which Tobias comments on as being unusual and a sign they had a primitive brain. The only advantage to this that I can think of is that they use it for parallax determinations, which would give them great depth perception and motion tracking. Tobias also mentions seeing color, but it’s not clear how much color vision Taxxons have relative to Humans. He describes Jake and Rachel as pink, but we don’t know if he means “Flesh pink” or “Hot magenta”. I’ll assume “flesh pink”, which probably means Taxxons have full color vision.

Fact #7: Taxxons are basically centipede-centaurs

This is one of the most interesting aspects of Taxxon anatomy. Taxxons are, as previously established, around 10 feet long. However, they can rear as much as half of their body up off the ground to look a human in the eye. Not only that, but their forelimbs are distinctly arm-like, with the top ones having 3 pincers and the lower ones having 2 pincers.  That always makes me think of caterpillars again, as caterpillars can also rear up like that and have specialized forelimbs which are different from their regular walking legs.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Taxxons are actually a lot like gigantic caterpillars, which makes me wonder if a properly fed Taxxon can eventually pupate and turn into a flying horror. Hmmm. Probably not. But still fun to think about. Maybe they could at some point in their past but they don’t anymore because of the Yeerks? Taxxon butterflies. No, wait, I’m getting off topic.

Ummmm....Yeah here’s everything I have as far as inspiration for Taxxons goes, and I will get back to you once I have some ideas on how to actually draw them in a way that pleases me! I still absolutely love thenixart’s Taxxons, which are exemplified here: https://thenixart.tumblr.com/post/188823841740  They are so huggable and soft and they’re almost perfect, but I don’t want to copy them with my design. So yeah, time to figure out what works for me!

[clarestrand]

Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation prize Catalogue with text by Orit Gat.

The award will now be announced (virtually) on Sept 14th. For further info on how to join the webcast please consult The Photographers Gallery Website.

Image = Information

Orit Gat

1 A beginning

In Paris, an artist painting in a studio that used to be part of a monastery. She goes out and gets the largest drawing papers she can find. Surrounded by paint pots and brushes, it’s an image that belongs in a tradition of artists painting away in Parisian garrets, only this is not that story. What Clare Strand was painting in her Paris studio during a three-month residency at the Centre Photographique d'Ile-de-France in 2017 was a translation of pre-existing photographs that were ‘read’ to her over the phone by her husband in the UK. From across the English Channel, he would give her directions that would encode an image of his choosing, and she would paint it.

2 Transmission

Strand and her husband were following an existing model. The method they were using to transmit information was described in George H. Eckhardt’s ‘Electronic Television’, from 1936, in which he outlined how a photograph can be transmitted via code over telegraph. In this system, the original image is divided into a grid, with every square being given a value from 1 to 10. 1 is white, 2 has a tinge of grey, 3 is greyer, 4 darker and so on until 10, which is black. The initial source images from which Strand’s husband chose the images he would transmit to her were 10-by-8 inches, which they divided into a grid of forty-nine squares across and sixty down, each about 5 square millimetres. If it’s boring to read, imagine the couple’s phone conversations: he would call and say 24-2; 25-4; 26-5; and so on. Through conversation, with Strand following her husband’s direction, the language would form a representation of the original image. Like a human fax machine.

3 The result

Is a series of ten black-and-white paintings in acrylic on paper. The history of art brings forth associations and relations, from the development of the grid as a foundation for perspective in the Renaissance, to the nineteenth-century illusionism achieved through Pointillism. There are Gerhard Richter’s black-and-white paintings, László Moholy-Nagy’s telephone paintings, Agnes Martin’s feather-light grids. But the connection to the history of art crumbles in front of the actual framed paintings. They’re human, Strand says, as she reasserts that she is not a painter. They’re messy, imperfect. There are hairs that stuck to the paper, dust congealed into the paint. However, in installation shots of the whole series, they look like another kind of work. Photographed, the paintings seem faultless: the black, white and grey hues reminiscent of aestheticized black-and-white photography; the paintings look clean, their edges not frayed, the small mistakes blend into the frame. It’s like they have two lives, as object and as image. When I ask Strand which one matters more, she answers, ‘I don’t know. What I find ironic is that, as much I try to push “photography” into different mediums, I can never escape the camera and how it operates as a tool of representation. With each press or catalogue reproduction, the paintings are represented as photographs, which is somewhat at odds with the concept of the work – photography transposing into painting only then to be represented by photography!’

4 Utility

To talk about the history of art and about installation shots is to ignore how the objecthood of the paintings depends on their creation. This series, titled The Discrete Channel with Noise, is at once the result of and the documentation of communication and its possible failures. Looking at the paintings, I want to say they look pixelated, but that would make them more photo than painting, more final product than process.

5 The first man who saw the first photograph

The relationship between painting and photography always makes me think of Roland Barthes writing in his essay on photography, Camera Lucida, that ‘The first man who saw the first photograph (if we except Niépce, who made it) must have thought it was a painting: same framing, same perspective. Photography has been, and is still, tormented by the ghost of Painting.’  Later in the book, he writes about photography’s relationship to reality, or to the document: ‘No writing can give me this certainty. It is the misfortune (but also perhaps the voluptuous pleasure) of language not to be able to authenticate itself.’ The photo as confirmation of fact. That fact, that reality, is communicated over phone lines in The Discrete Channel with Noise. When we look at a photograph, what we’re looking for, according to Barthes, is knowledge that a thing, an event, happened. He writes about Polish soldiers in a 1915 photo by André Kertész: ‘that they were there; what I see is not a memory, an imagination, a reconstitution, a piece of Maya, such as art lavishes upon us, but reality in a past state: at once the past and the real.’ What we see, in The Discrete Channel with Noise, is a story about reality rather than proof thereof.

6 Whizzing through the air

When I meet Strand, she hands me an assortment of notes. She’s hesitant about it for a minute, as if giving me homework rather than help. Or as if she expects communication can fail, and thinks a list of references may offer a way out of an impasse. The history of Morse code; pigeon post between Paris and England c. 1870–71; Eckhardt; Cybernetics founder Norbert Weiner and American mathematician Claude Shannon’s information theory, which gave The Discrete Channel with Noise its title: Strand’s research does not explain as much as expand the work. And then in the notes is a quote from the 1973 movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory based on Roald Dahl’s writing, recreating Eckhardt’s transmission of images over radio. Here the character Mike Teavee, the winner of the fourth golden ticket, who loves this technology, explains: “You photograph something then the photograph is split up in to millions of tiny pieces and they go whizzing through the air, then down to your TV set when they are all put together in the right order” 

Mike Teavee, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl (1971).

That it is possible to share an image, and the labyrinthine process of it whizzing through the air is in line with Dahl’s 1971 book, in which the candy factory includes an impenetrable room-sized machine that, when operated, makes a lot of noise, takes a lot of time, and then produces a single bit of chewing gum. Unimpressive until someone chews it and realizes it is as nourishing as a three-course dinner: tomato soup, roast beef with baked potatoes, blueberry pie and ice cream for dessert.

Proof: the overcomplicated can sometimes be amazing. 

A lesson: also worth exploring.

7 Thirty-six images on a journey

The ten images in The Discrete Channel with Noise were chosen from a collection of thirty-six images Strand has compiled for a previous work, The Entropy Pendulum (2015), in which each of these photographs, which were taken from a tabloid newspaper’s archive, was eroded by the weight of a pendulum over the course of one day in an exhibition, then framed. Strand rephotographed the physical photos from the archive, creating a digital output that becomes a dataset ready for reuse. The subject of those images related to what Strand refers to as the subject of her work in general – magic, illusion, the paranormal, communication, transmission, the way people thought communication technologies were magical when they were first introduced, the way Alexander Graham Bell called the telephone a way to ‘talk with electricity’. How to read the transformation of these images through the process in The Discrete Channel with Noise These images are on a journey of losing and gaining information. The project is a metaphor, if not a realization, for what images do anyway: in flux, they move and shift in meaning.

8 Shifting in meaning

Why pay attention to shifts? Because shifts in context can mean that information is lost, or misused. An art historian friend of mine regularly points out that Alexander Nix, the founder and CEO of Cambridge Analytica, studied art history in university. Art matters, images matter, she wants to say. All channels of misinformation need to be decoded. Is there a present and a real, like Barthes thought there was in an only slightly less technological time than the one we occupy, today? Or is the subject of study now how realities are fractured across channels of communication?

9 An entire history of communication

The diagram used to explain Eckhardt’s ‘Electronic Television’ has a man sitting at a table in front of a large black-and-white image divided into a grid of a woman with short, curly hair who looks a bit like an early Hollywood film star. His sleeves are rolled up, his back a bit hunched, he is clearly concentrating. He holds a long pointer stick and taps information onto a device resting on the desk he is sitting at. The cable running from that device spirals into a growing network of telephone poles that reach a window, and from that window to a box on the wall, and straight from the box to a set of headphones that another man wearing a blazer (or is it a lab coat?) standing in front of a large grid, only partially completed with the recognisable top of the short-haired woman’s head. He holds a paint brush at the same spot the other man’s pointer is. Behind him on a table are 10 boxes of paint numbered from 1 (white) to 10 (black) and some paint brushes. The caption reads, ‘Fig. 26. A Simple Method for Sending Pictures by Wire or Radio.’

Visually, it matters that the example is always a woman and the transmitters and receivers are always men. The message is that even in new technologies, even in a new world, some old signals remain. That is what Eckhardt’s diagram exemplifies. An entire history of communication reinforces the idea of who gets to speak across these lines. It is therefore fitting that The Discrete Channel of Noise is structured and executed by a female artist.

10 A piece of Maya

When Barthes writes that ‘no writing can give me this certainty’, he is asserting photography’s relationship to what he calls ‘the real’. But as a writer, he must have known that it is the rest of the above-cited list – ‘a memory, an imagination, a reconstitution, a piece of Maya’ – that is one of the potentials of art: to reconstitute is a way of reimagining the world. After Cambridge Analytica, or in line with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I want to argue that the redefinition or the exploration of that real is the contemporary condition. We come to things with suspicion, some of which is about recognising the failures of the systems around us. But we also come to them with a sense of possibility, a remnant of the Maya or the three-course meal chewing gum: the idea that the world is a story, and it can be shared.

[i-will-physically-fight-you]

If Only In My Dreams

Chapter 3:  Faithful Friends Who are Dear to Us

Chapter Summary: A skype call ensues between our two protagonists.

Pairings: platonic prinixety & platonic moxiety

 Word-count: 3468

Over-All Fic Warnings: abusive parents, homesickness, misunderstandings, crying, loneliness, hurt/comfort

Inspiration:  this ask right here

AO3 LINK, Chapter 1, Chapter 2

This was such a chore to write, but it’s finally done!! Many thanks to @theeternalspace for beta’ing as always. There will be an epilogue following suit, but I can’t promise when I’ll post it considering this chapter took six months to write haha

- 

Virgil stared at his phone.

“I’m such a screw-up.” He whispered underneath his breath.

He hadn’t responded to any of his best friend’s texts and now Patton thought he hated him. When in actuality, that was very much the opposite. Virgil loved his best friend so much that he feared the idea of being rejected by him. It had been so stupid to ignore Patton like that.

Of course Patton would think he think he hated him. Virgil had given him the silent treatment all week. Worse, Virgil had broke his promise of reuniting with him in Florida. It’d been so easy in the moment to avoid breaking the truth to Patton. He was now paying for the repercussions of his actions.

Would Patton still want to be friends with him after all this? Virgil wouldn’t want to be friends with himself.

Roman cleared his throat, causing Virgil to jump. He’d almost forgotten he was in the same room as him.

“I know it’s not my place,” He began, “but whoever this “Patton” character is to you, they seem to care a lot about you.”

Virgil raised an eyebrow, “You’ve been reading my text messages?”

He really should be more pissed off about that than he was. Virgil coveted his privacy, protecting his phone from prying eyes like a hawk. But he could hardly bring himself to care about that in the midst of his pity party.

“Only the ones that popped up on your screen. I don’t know your phone’s password, I swear!” Roman said, attempting to justify it, although he looked as ashamed as he rightfully should be, “They even tried calling you at one point. I was going to answer it, but Logan advised against it. Said it was an invasion of your privacy.”

Virgil glanced back down at his phone. Well, that explained why it was on the coffee table and not his hoodie pocket. His phone screen went black and he pressed the home button, turning it on once more. Patton’s last two text messages peered back at him. 

Patton Hart 💙: Hey kiddo...are we still friends?

Patton Hart 💙: It’s okay if we aren’t!! I know how you are, Virge, you don’t have to feel obligated to remain friends. Seasons come and go, y’know? Not everything lasts...and that’s okay. I still cherish every memory we spent together. But if you want me to stop meownoying you with texts, I’ll understand.

Virgil let out a strained sound, something halfway between a sob and a laugh. Trust Patton to still slip in a pun in a text like that. Patton loved puns. Virgil also loved puns, a dark secret of his that Patton alone knew. Virgil couldn’t openly admit to liking puns. It messed with his edgy emo vibes. 

Meownoying. What a godawful, cheesy pun. In any other context, Virgil would be covering his mouth in a poor attempt to mask his laughter.

He glanced over back to Roman, who stood a few feet away from him. Roman crossed his arms in a relaxed manner, eyes wide with concern. He opened his mouth, his breath hitching at the last second. For the first time since Virgil had known him, Roman looked hesitant. It was clear he wanted to help in some way, but he didn’t know how. Virgil didn’t blame him. They may have spent a whole semester living in the same apartment, but they were at best acquaintances and at worst, strangers.

Virgil sighed, gripping onto his phone tighter.

“Patton is my best friend. Or at least he was,” He said, staring down at the carpeted floor, “The two of us have been friends since middle school. We had planned on meeting up while I was back home in Florida. You can guess how that turned out.”

He wasn’t sure why he was telling this to Roman. It was stupid. Maybe being alone in that apartment for three days without heat caused some brain damage. He explained what had happened to Roman. Well, almost everything. He left out what exactly kept from getting another flight.

Several times he looked up at Roman, expecting him to laugh or make fun of him. Roman did none of those things. He instead leaned against the side of the couch, patiently listening to him. After he finished, there was a lapse of silence. Then Roman spoke,

“You should talk to him.”

Virgil groaned. That damn dreaded phrase. Of course, what else could Roman say? It was true. Only talking would solve this situation. It didn’t mean he didn’t still loathe the idea of it.

“I know.” Virgil said, gritting his teeth as his gaze drifted to the floor, “It’s just I’m...scared.”

It was stupid, Virgil knew, to be afraid of contacting Patton. It wasn’t like the apocalypse would come to fruition or anything. The best-case scenario is that they would remain friends. The worst-case scenario is that they...wouldn’t remain friends and god, that felt worse than death to Virgil. Patton was his only friend, the only person who knew him better than even his parents. Virgil was going to lose him, and like everything else in life, it was all his fault.

He doubted that Roman would understand. From what little he knew of the other, he was confident, cocky, fearless--

“There is no shame in being afraid, you know. I were you, I think I would just as afraid.” Roman said, causing his whirling thoughts to grind to a halt.

“Really?” Virgil gawked up at him.

“Well yeah,” Roman said as he sat down on the couch beside Virgil, “even the bravest of knights have fears.”

“If they’re brave, how can they be afraid then?” Virgil quirked an eyebrow.

“Because bravery is not the absence of fear, it is the ability to continue despite it,” Roman smiled softly, “it is okay to be afraid. However, you must question whether or not is worth it to conquer your fear.”

When Virgil kept staring at him blankly, Roman continued.

“Friendship is like—like a ship!” He snapped his fingers together, “Made up of you and a fellow seafaring traveler—a friend. Together you embark on a wondrous journey, experience amazing things together! But sometimes you might encounter stormy weather or some sort of…sea-witch that threatens to wreck your friend-ship. 

“And! You can only save it if you gather the courage to do so. If you jump ship out of fear, the ship will sink. I suppose the question you must ask yourself is: are you willing to go on living with your friendship becoming a shipwreck, or are you willing to attempt to save it from such a fate?”

“Wow…” Virgil said, after finding his voice, “that was incredibly cheesy.”

He’d known Roman had a flair for the dramatics. Once before midterms he found Roman saying a eulogy over his broken jar of crofters jam at 4am in the morning. Still, as cheesy as it’d been, Virgil couldn’t help but be moved.

The fear of rejection was a strong fear. But could he truly live with regrets? Regrets about how he hurt Patton? Regrets about how he didn’t try to fix it? He knew all those fond memories he shared with Patton would become tainted with those regrets. He didn’t want that to happen.

“But,” Virgil spoke up again, “you do have a point.”

-

Anxious_EmoNightmare is calling…

Patton sunk to the floor beside the refrigerator. He ignored its insistent beeping for him to shut the freezer door. Instead he focused his attention on his phone. Virgil’s profile pic stared back at him. Not a picture of himself, rather, but a drawing of the two Patton had made and given him.

Virgil was an amazing artist, with the knack of creating art that invoked true emotion from the viewer. Patton’s art, on the other hand, was barely a step above stick figures. Still, Virgil treasured Patton’s art enough to use it as a profile pic.

“Aw shucks, kiddo, it’s nothing compared to yours!” Patton had laughed, ducking his head bashfully.

“Yeah but...it’s special ‘cause you made it,” Virgil’s cheeks flushed before mumbling under his breath, “Besidesmyartiskindashittyanyways.”

“What was that?”

“My art is kinda sh--crappy!”

“I will physically fight you if you don’t stop talking about you and your art!” Patton gasped, “Your art is just as--as wonderful, unique and superb as you are!” “No it isn’t.” Virgil groaned, hiding his face with his hands.

“Yes it is!”

“Not it isn’t.”

“Is.”

“Isn’t!”

Patton smiled slyly, “No it isn’t!”

“Yes it is!” Virgil yelled, before the realization dawned on his face.

“So, you doooo admit it.” Patton said as he attempted to keep himself from chuckling.

“You--you tricked me.” Virgil protested, before the two finally burst together into laughter.

That memory usually made him smile. Not today, with his heart hammering in his throat. He stared at the skype call notification, vision blurred with tears. God, he was sick of tears. It felt like in the past year alone, he’d cried enough tears to last a lifetime.

He knew he had to pick up. Time was running short. Hastily, he wiped away his tears and shut the fridge door with his phone-less hand. He took one long deep breath, then pressed accept.

At once the phone screen went blank. A small part of Patton hoped it stayed blank. Then a fuzzy pixelated image came to life--the familiar face of his best friend Virgil filled the screen. He was hunched up in his signature plaid hoodie. The purple bangs that covered half his face made it difficult to tell if he was making eye contact. Patton didn’t recognize his friend’s surroundings at all--meaning he wasn’t at his apartment. Perhaps he was at a friend’s house. The very thought of Patton distracting Virgil from his new friends made his stomach squirm.

Patton swallowed, “H-hey--”

The call immediately ended.

He stared at his phone’s home screen, eyebrows furrowed. Should he call back or…?

Anxious_EmoNightmare is calling…

His phone started buzzing again as Virgil’s profile pic popped up once more. This time Patton clicked on it within the first buzz. Virgil appeared again, fiddling with the sleeve zippers of his hoodie. Patton could hear him taking in slow, measured breaths.

“Uh, sorry.” Virgil said, breaking the palpable silence, “I got...anxious.”

“It’s okay, kiddo.” Patton mustered up a thin smile.

 Distantly, in his mind, he worried about what was the cause of Virgil’s anxiety. He knew Virgil was inherently an anxious person whose many fears were largely unfounded. Patton knew this and still loved him, anxiety and all. 

Patton’s words did everything but alleviate Virgil, who shrunk even further into himself.

“Look Pat, I’m just gonna come out and say it:  it was really shitty of me to ignore your texts for a whole week like that, I shouldn’t have done that--”

“It’s okay, kiddo!” Patton’s smile grew flimsier, unable to keep his voice from cracking, “I know you were probably busy with your friends and all.”

Virgil flinched as if Patton’s words slapped him in the face. He didn’t understand Virgil’s reaction, which alarmed him. Patton usually had a great read on Virgil. Or at least he did five months ago.

“Friends?” Virgil echoed.

“Yeah, friends,” Patton said,  “I, um, called your mom--”

“You called my mom? Why?” Virgil demanded.

“I was worried sick!” Patton cried out, a spark of rage he didn’t realize he possessed ignited, “You weren’t responding to my texts or my phone calls. It’s been a whole week-- and with the blizzard, I thought maybe you died!”

Tears rolled down his cheeks as Patton pressed on, “So I called your mom, because I had to know that you were at least okay. And she told me you decided to stay in Massachusetts and--and you were probably busy hanging out with friends. Which is fine! I’m fine! But at least text your best friend and tell them what the hell’s going on.”

Virgil stared at him, pupils dilated and mouth agape. In the stillness, all Patton could hear is Virgil heavily breathing into the mic. Any other time it broke Patton to see his best friend look so...devastated. Not this time. It felt almost triumphant to incite such a reaction in Virgil. 

Patton leaned against the refrigerator, heart clanging loudly inside his chest. He hated being angry. He didn’t like how it made him feel. There was just something savagely satisfying about lashing out in anger and it scared him how much he liked it. Patton was angry, yes. He was also frustrated, hurt, confused and a thousand other related synonyms. None of which justified lashing out at Virgil in that way.

“Look, Virge. I’m sorry--”

“No,” Virgil cut in, grimacing, “Don’t apologize, Pat. You have a right to be upset and I--I understand if you don’t want to be friends anymore. I mean, you probably have better friends back in Florida…”

Virgil choked, unable to finish his own sentence. His voice had been relatively calm up until this moment. It’d been that faux calm, one that came from practicing words one hoped never to utter. If Patton knew anything about Virgil and his anxiety, that was most definitely the case.

“Virgil,” Patton inhaled, “I don’t have...any other friends.”

“What?” Virgil asked, looking up at him incredulously.

“Well, I do have friends!” Patton quickly amended, “Not just friends friends if you know what I mean. They’re more like acquaintances if I’m being honest. They’re work and school friends--so they tolerate me because they have to, not because they like me and really they think I’m too  annoying and childish--sorry! I’m rambling. I--I haven’t really kept in contact with anyone out of high school besides you. I know it’s pathetic, but you’re my only friend Virgil and I don’t want to lose you--please.”

Virgil blinked at him. Then he laughed, hard enough for tears to come out. High and lilting. Nothing like his usual quiet chuckles. Out of all the outcomes he imagined, Virgil laughing wasn’t one of them. Except it happened. Usually getting a laugh out of Virgil was the highlight of his day. He’d never imagined hearing it would cause his heart to break. He almost considered ending the call there, forgetting it even happened. 

The hurt in his face must’ve shown, because Virgil ceased laughing abruptly.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to laugh, I just…” He pauses, fiddling with the ends of his hoodie strings, “Honest to God, you’re my only friend too.”

“What?” Patton croaks out, eyes bulging, “But your mother said--”

“Yeah, well, like a lot of things about my life she was wrong.” Virgil snapped, his ire obviously reserved for her and not Patton.

“Virgil, what...happened?” Patton asked, soft and hesitant.

He was beginning to think that he had the story all wrong. Maybe Virgil didn’t hate him. That he hadn’t change plans last minute without informing Patton or ignored him out of malice. He was still the Virgil Patton knew and loved. He had to be.

Virgil’s fingers tightened around his hoodie strings. His eyes were closed, and Patton could tell by his controlled breaths he was trying to quell his anxiety.

“It’s really stupid,” Virgil begins, “and most of it is my fault because I got anxious and then my one rational brain cell left the building. My mother--she--well, she--”

Virgil let out a huff, frustrated by his inability to speak. Why had he thought a Skype call would be a good idea versus simply texting? Screw it being a show of genuity--he had always been better at transcribing his thoughts in written words rather than spoken ones. He could form his thoughts into a semi-coherent message whereas real time didn’t leave much room for error.

“It’s alright, Virgil,” Patton spoke up, “take your time.”

He looked up at the screen, at Patton who smiled back at him. Not mockingly, but a real, authentic smile meant to reassure him. It was then he remembered why he treasured Patton’s friendship. In high school, people always overlooked Patton as a bubbly airhead. They overlooked his kindness, his refusal to let anyone feel excluded from things. He may not have ever received the top grades in academic subjects, but he possessed wisdom in spades.

Aided by Patton’s encouragement, Virgil continued. His words weren’t perfect. He stumbled and stuttered his way through an explanation. But Patton waited patiently until he regained control of them again. Virgil told him everything. 

He admitted to Patton what really happened in the phone conversation between him and his mother. How he accepted her words without a fight, like a coward. How he felt abandoned by his parents, out of sight out of mind. How he spiraled into an anxiety attack, believing he couldn’t tell Patton. Couldn’t let him down or expect Patton to help with his air fares. He thought Patton would forget about him, too busy with hanging out with his real friends to notice Virgil’s absence.

He told him about the broken heater. How he wallowed in his misery rather than figure out a short-term solution for his problem. Waddled up in blankets, lying on a couch. If it hadn’t been for his roommate Roman--well, he didn’t want to think about it. 

“He kidnapped you?” Patton asked, gasping.

It had been the first time Patton had said something. All up to this point, he remained attentively listening. Occasionally he nodded or hummed sympathetically to let Virgil know he was paying attention.

“Well, sort of,” Virgil grimaced, “The cold kinda got to me. He was worried I had hypothermia and got a bit panicked. He took me to his brother’s place and offered to let me stay here for the rest of the break. He, well, he encouraged me to talk to you. He’s...a pretty nice dude. Don’t you dare tell him I said that, or it’ll get to his head.”

“Got it.” Patton said, nodding sagely as if the chances of them ever interacting weren’t slim. His eyebrows furrowed, waiting for Virgil to lead the conversation in what direction he’d prefer. A terrible decision, really. Virgil knew the words he had to utter, words that could truly do nothing to fix the damage already done.

“Patton, I’m so sorry about everything,” Virgil blurted out. Quick. Like ripping off a band-aid. He shut his eyes tight, unable to see Patton’s reaction. Because if he couldn’t see it, maybe it’d hurt less when Patton denied his apology. Anxiety logic.

“Virgil...” Patton said softly, “of course I forgive you.” 

Immediately a colossus weight lifted up of Virgil at those words. But Patton wasn’t finished speaking, “Who I can’t forgive are your parents.”

“My parents?”

“Virgil, I only know a little from what you told me about them,” Patton hesitated, “but from what I know, you deserve better. They belittle you, refuse to acknowledge your own feelings and insist you only do things their way...that’s not love, Virgil. That’s not how family should act. After all, you can’t spell ‘FAM’ without I L Y.”

Virgil gaped up at Patton’s grainy image on the screen. This news shouldn’t be a huge surprise to him. He knew his parents did some questionable things when it came to parenting. But he had always thought it was his anxiety over-magnifying things. Making mountains out of molehills. 

To hear someone point it out and insist it wasn’t right and to have that person be Patton…well.

“You’re not mad at me?” Virgil blurted out, “But I ruined everything, if maybe I’d--”

“Virge, I was more worried than upset,” Patton interrupted firmly, “I was worried about losing our friendship, but more importantly I was worried if you were okay.”

“Oh,” Virgil said faintly, “Well you shouldn’t worry, ‘cause that’s my job.”

“I care about you, I’m going to worry whether you like it or not, mister.” 

“Well maybe I’m not worth worrying over.”

“How dare you!” Patton gasped dramatically, “I will physically fight you!”

“Pat, you’re not even here with me--”

“I will personally book a ticket to Massachusetts if I have too!”

“Wait you’d do that? For real?”

“Well, of course,” Patton said, “we’re best friends, aren’t we?”

Virgil stared at him. Patton’s tear-encrusted face alit with a soft glow. His lips pressed into a small smile, one that always been reserved for Virgil and him alone. He felt both foolish and grateful. Foolish for ever doubting Patton. Grateful for the fact that Patton refused to give up on him, even when Virgil himself believed he should.

“Yeah, of course,” Virgil agreed, a lump forming in his throat, “I, uh, value our friend-chip a lot.”

Patton’s resulting squeal almost broke Virgil’s eardrums. But that was okay, because he’d rather be deaf if it meant he was still friends with one Patton Hart.