#working title: faf

[djinnandtea]

okay I started my writing group today and wrote 763 words of the novel I'm aiming to draft.

it's not much but.....it's something!

[bluishfrog]

Your picks for Fic Art Friday!

For the fifth FAF (June 7), I wanna switch it up a bit and let you decide what fic you want to see art for. Note: this isn't an official new rule or anything, I just personally wanna learn more about your favorite fics and that seems like a good way to do so :D Now how does that work?

Submit your chosen fic in my ask box until the end of this weekend (June 2). Include:

Title of the fic, author name(s), link

Why you specifically love this fic

If you want your name included in the final art post (you absolutely can stay anonymous for the whole thing)

Optional: favorite scene if you have a specific one that you want to see as art

Yes, you can submit your friends' fics. Yes, you can submit your own fics (I love seeing people love their own creations). Yes, you can submit more than one fic but please make separate asks for that.

If you have more questions, let me know! Looking forward to your picks :D

[bonefall]

Hey! I've been translating some of my cat's names into Clanmew and Idk if you still want to see these things BUT:

Fifkarkoss = Firefang (I used the word "burn" even though her name is Firefang but it's more of an honor title meant to mean something like "bite that burns like fire" so I thought it would fit better! Technically it'd be Kafyarkoss)

Awlharchiki = Sunfrost

Pbumpyrripyrra = Rabbitdash (pyrripyrra was what I think is closest? if i missed a word that would better mean like, to sprint then pls lmk!)

(As a note, while I was trying to name one character I remember there being a Clanmew word for Weasel? I think it was used as a prefix w the post abt Paw Soup but it's not on the lexicon.)

(Also! Fang is the only word for tooth. Would there be a word for tooth that means less fang and more like one of the smaller eyeteeth?) But my thought was I'd use Gaorki for Tigertooth (because I already used the other fang)

Roegchoop = Frognose

I also had Peachfeather but I got distracted translating the peach part and realized if the quality of a peach she was being named after is the soft fuzz then Fuffr for down feathers would work and Fuffrbufr is just fun to say.

AND FINALLY

Wagamshemi = Willowshine (tho I may have gotten the exact tense wrong)

Great job!! Coming in with some clarification, and also giving you some more words to work with!

TEETH

There are now three words for teeth, Groq, Ki, and Koss.

Groq = Back teeth, molars, usually used as the 'tooth' suffix

Ki = Canine teeth, most often used for the fang suffix

Koss = Front teeth, used for grooming and scraping

So for Tigertooth, if you're looking for a very small tooth, I'd use Gaorkoss!

WEASELS

I'm gonna bang out all of the lanky weasel-types in one go for you. Here's everything that they encounter, both invasive and native, in this area;

"STOAT" = Morfaf (Contraction of Long-fur, Kasmor + Faf) Generic term for any long, wiggly, furry carnivore. Clan cats do not know that otters are not mustelids, nor that badgers are mustelids. *shrek voice* they dont even have cladistics.

Least Weasel (Mustela nivalis) = Byrrir The smallest animal on this list, but able to kill things many times its size. Mostly distinguished from ermines by the lack of a black tail tip.

Ermine (Mustela erminea) = Rikkik Also called a stoat in English, but you can translate it however you'd like. Named for a more aggressive call they make, as ermines are the size of Morfaf that starts to get dangerous in groups.

Ferret (Mustela putorius) = Haakeke A ferret has more of a warm-up in its angered noises just before attacking, which is the most noteworthy to Clan cats because a ferret is the largest land 'stoat' they have to deal with.

Mink (Neogale vison) = Nhee Actually an introduced species! They are not native to this area, but they would be huge fans of the clean water of Sanctuary Lake. They hang out mostly in RiverClan and ShadowClan. Name for their horrible, piteous cry.

Otter (Lutra lutra) = Syiu This is not a mustelid, but Clan cats don't know this. LONGFUR IS LONGFUR.

[notmuchtoconceal]

Red Dragon was adapted to film three times. No cinematic portrayal has yet captured the particular majesty of its literary source, nor its subtle metaphysical quality, though each is interesting in its own right.

William Petersen remains my favorite Will Graham, and Manhunter the most sublime of the film versions, mainly for what it leaves unsaid. For how it draws you into a trance state through its hyper-modern design, full of minimalist white and chrome furnishings which emphasize empty space. It remains first and foremost a Michael Mann film, capturing the professionalism of being a G-man and Petersen's Will is allowed to return to domestic bliss upon its conclusion, cementing a kind of 80's optimism complete with cheesy synth music over the closing credits.

Ralph Fiennes remains my favorite on-screen Dolarhyde, mostly for he's the only actor who embodies the character's brutish physicality, though I don't particularly like the film he's in. The 2002 Red Dragon comes off like a cash-grab, capitalizing off the success of Silence of the Lambs, and its aesthetics -- while capturing more of the decaying contemporary gothic of its literary source -- are diminished by the film attempting to please too many masters. It reminds me of the similarly inferior late 90's film of The Talented Mr. Ripley, being both more loyal to what's on the page, as if to please legions of disappointed book readers, though also -- bloating the run-time with extraneous new subplots which flatter a general audience's pre-conceived biases. It frustrates you by giving you what you think you want, then doing its own thing anyway, though not very well, and you're left wishing it had just trimmed the fat and done something new instead of faffing about and having nothing new to say.

Edward Norton is by far my least favorite Will Graham, mostly for he comes across as a total charisma vacuum. Think the logic of casting him as Will was he was also a Hulk and the Narrator in Fight Club, so he's got cred struggling with latent psychopathy. Except in this he doesn't turn into a CGI monster or have Brad Pitt to play off him. Will is a complete entity in his own right and Edward Norton seems like a mask or shell.

NBC's Hannibal is the best adaptation of Red Dragon until it comes time to adapt Red Dragon, at which point it feels largely perfunctory.

As an adaptation, Hannibal is endlessly fascinating. Bryan Fuller compared himself to a remix artist, and that assessment is spot on.

When I watched the series for the first (and thus far only) time, I had just re-read the original trilogy, so I could see with fresh eyes and hear with open ears, the ways he turned bits of interior monologue into dialogue, fleshed-out the backstory, moved things around, changed the pace and flow through subtle re-framings. The closest point of comparison really is Mary Harron's excellent film of American Psycho (which distills to a sleek 102 minutes a work of four-dimensional Dostoevyskian tragedy masquerading as brand-name gore shlock), not only for how it juxtaposes primal violence with gourmet cooking, but narratively, structurally, in how it remixes and reinvents; turning Patrick Bateman's book-end revelation of his void state from a late-onset cry of despair to a stoic thesis statement simply part of his morning routine.

Bryan Fuller reinvents so much, draws out the queer subtext so totally, and ultimately has to -- the story he's telling is fundamentally about a man facing himself, being repulsed, but ultimately liking what he sees. The literary Will spurns Hannibal's one-side affections forever, which come across simply as sardonic taunts from a predator; yearning to take shelter in a woman's arms, but ending up deformed, for his primary opposite is the wounded Dolarhyde, not the Dark Prince Hannibal.

Hugh Dancy's Will is an entirely different beast. Every episode begins with based on Red Dragon, but the emphasis is right there in the title.

I suspect Bryan Fuller felt like he had to introduce Clarice at some point and kept putting it off because she had no place in the world he created. It's not only that his Will and his Hannibal are in love, and he'd be introducing a primordial tension into his own dark fantasy. The literary Will Graham may as well become Clarice. They share the same descent into the underworld to speak to the Devil Behind Bars. They speak to the same agent of unconscious revelation to get into the mind of a killer.

They are of the same mind, being both of Thomas Harris.

The Silence of the Lambs onward is a transgender narrative, not an androphilic one. The literary Clarice, prideful, self-assured, totally lacking in bullshit other than what's been trained into her, is an immediate delight. She's the one who ends up under Hannibal's control -- consent gradually surrendered -- as her true wants are revealed through drugs, hypnosis, childhood regression, the exhumation of her father's corpse. As Dolarhyde is the literary Will's shadow, so is Buffalo Bill Clarice's. She yearns to become a lawman like her father the sheriff, he yearns to become a beauty queen like the implied memory of his absent mother.

Will sees himself as a deformed monster. Clarice sees herself as a manufactured Other. Hannibal is inside both their heads.

The Devil Likes Him Some Cornpone Country Pussy.

The third book is titled Hannibal because Hannibal is its protagonist, even if for the bulk of it we follow Clarice. I had read an Amazon review back in 2008 or so, where someone accused it of being "clearly ghostwritten" because of its shift in narrative voice, yet this is wishful thinking. Its told from the detached, birds-eye view of a hyper-lucid Luciferian madman who is accounting for and manipulating all variables, luring all the extant players into his web of associations to claim his final prize.

I enjoy Ridley Scott's film version, for it's a Ridley Scott film. He has a well-studied classicism, but also a very down-to-earth ruggedness which fits the material perfectly. Most of his excisions are sensible, considering the running time. (Margot being even more politically volatile in the early 2000's when the backlash to Buffalo Bill seemed to be the trans representation issue... none, it would seem, being better than something easy to caricature by the heterosexual masses.) I recall a comment Scott made about thinking Hannibal was "turned-on" by Clarice's sense of Justice, and it being immediately clear this was his own fetish, not necessarily something implied by the text. (Picture now, Scott and James Cameron Bro-ing out about how he leveled up Ellen Ripley.)

Julianne Moore is a great replacement for Foster, being now an older, more jaded woman. The film is so deliberate, I appreciate how it inverts its literary counterpart's Satanic ending moreso than say -- the earlier un-alluded to Purple Noon, where Tom Ripley is brought to justice as if entangled in the umbilical thread of fate. Rather than Clarice being seduced by Hannibal, Hannibal is seduced by Clarice, chopping off his own hand much like a chastised young Tyr to a She-wolf Fenrir.

Bryan Fuller's treatment of the novelistic material here is close to about the only point in the series I'd call vacuous and self-indulgent.

It feels like he's subverting the pacing for the sake of being contrarian rather than giving his story room to breathe. Maybe it's because I like Scott's Hannibal so much, Fuller's treatment of the same scenes and characters feels like a pale imitation, of both its literary source and its filmic predecessor, yet I feel intuitively I may have been overwhelmed or alienated by the void of heartbreak, my rational faculties rebelling against what seems to be implications of a telepathic reality. I suspect those episodes will always be a mixed bag, being both too slow and too fast, largely for how behind-the-scenes tensions introduced conflicts into the pacing. Now understanding that his Will is replacing Clarice, and Clarice can only become the Bride of Satan by mutual recognition, I find Will's need to dive into Hannibal's past necessary, though by this point, the characters had largely outgrown whatever sources may have inspired them, and even if the second half of season 3 is more even, it feels constrained by the skeleton of its intended adaptation.

The Silence of the Lambs has been adapted to film precisely once, and it captures the essence of the novel almost well-enough to render it redundant. There's near nothing missing. What's cut is stitched back together with a surgical elegance befitting a master cosmetician.

The film is so sleek and streamlined, its makes corresponding sections of the novel seem clunky and bloated. When I remember the events of the story, I confess, I tend to remember the film better than the book, the way William Faulkner remembered his own evolving private daydreams of Candace Compson moreso than whatever it was he'd published in The Sound and the Fury -- "If you'll excuse me, I'm having an old friend for dinner." (Lecter's chemistry-based shit joke about Chilton is an absolute riot, though. Terrible it couldn't make it in.)

Anthony Hopkin's Lecter would never have become as iconic as he is without Jodi Foster's Clarice. As an adaptation, it's a masterpiece precisely because its a collaboration. Everyone on-screen is embodying a particular flavor of unspoken obsession, and everyone behind the camera is capturing it with an almost documentary realism, the same way Harris's prose has a journalistic objectivity, even when he's touring the fetid landscapes of his own inner hell. It works so well because there's no sole author to be burdened by the weight of the material. Its dispersed throughout the entire cast and crew and everyone is there for each other.

Furthermore, the story is inherently cinematic in a way Red Dragon simply isn't. Clarice is a plucky young professional woman looking to make it in a man's world, while Will Graham is retreating into early retirement for the duress the work is inflicting upon his tattered mind.

Will's isolation is chosen. Clarice's is imposed from without. We see her running the obstacle course alone. We see how male law enforcement officers look at her on the job. We see how even her own superiors need to play mindgames and switcheroos and put her at a disadvantage.

She has to play quid-pro-quo with Hannibal. She has to open up. She has to share. Will knows what Hannibal is because he's like him in a way she isn't. He can't be seduced by him. His pain is too constant, the threat too real. The literary Will lacks a certain feminine charm, which Mads's Hannibal is well-acquainted with, already seeming to have found some part of Mischa again in his friend and protégé, the gender-swapped Alana Bloom, who is also surrogate sister to Will, making them brothers.

In contrast, the novel Red Dragon is about highly introspective men being alone with themselves and thinking intense thoughts. The portraits of Will and Dolarhyde's psyches are two interlocked soliloquies which brutally clash like gongs by the conclusion. The literary Will, Dolarhyde and Hannibal are all playing the same game of cat and mouse from a distance, each alone with themselves. Hugh Dancy's Will is not only made more cinematic, but also incidentally charmingly feminine by having his monologues cut up into dialogue, as he's forced to physically converse with Hannibal, who in this version he's meeting for the first time.

The visual emphasis is also why it's so easy to reduce the filmic Buffalo Bill to a gay monster. The ways in which they function as a dark mirror to Clarice are not as obvious when you lose their interiority. When you simply present their sensual butterfly dance while the fat girl (Hollywood fat, of course) screams for help in the pain well, they become a blank screen for the audience to project their own fears of seeing or being an Other, but in a public place -- surrounded by people similarly disgusted, each a participant in the ultimate pretension of normality.

What makes the novel of The Silence of the Lambs unique is how its unmistakably a sequel to Red Dragon. The film version of Silence of the Lambs exists in relation to nothing but itself. Thomas Harris is repeating his previous work's structure, now with different characters.

It's much easier to get Clarice's interiority on-screen when you have Jodi Foster's eyes and voice to work with, and in the book she retains Will's quality of brooding intensity, but with an awareness of how what she says aloud supports and contradicts her interior monologue, which is naturally contrasted with Bill's. You can see the Clarice/Bill entanglement as a logical repeat of the Will/Dolarhyde one, and with this absent, the filmic emphasis shifts to Clarice's darkly subdued romance with Hannibal, which similarly becomes the emphasis in Bryan Fuller's television version, but with the focus of his meet-cute being Will.

That Silence of the Lambs should be such a crowd-pleaser is no surprise. It's the only entry in the original trilogy which has a happy ending which falls within the dictates of the common tribal morality. The killer is caught. The woman is saved. Clarice is redeemed and graduates on-time. Her professional surrogate father is proud of her. Hannibal escapes. An element of danger remains. A sequel promised. It doesn't ask us to dramatically re-shift our focus or reconsider all we know.

A rare act two high note.

The Devil is in the Details, and details are the domain of long-term prose.

Reading is itself a solitary and introspective activity. That is, unless one is reading scripture. That a man should realize the degree to which he is like a Devil Himself, or how that same Devil He Is could be the sole True Want of just and upright professional woman, for the so-called "Good Men" who uphold the law fear and revile her, isn't the type of thing you'd want to share communally with loved ones, unless you're willing to take on the responsibility of hurting them in the way they need to be hurt.

[superfriction]

A little bit of As You Wish this Friday! Chapter 21 has been uploaded!

Pairing: Draco/Ginny Title: As You Wish Rating: E for language and eventual smut Summary: A 20-year-old Ginny decides she needs a change of pace the night of Hermione's hen party. Almost 8 years later, Blaise gifts Draco a magic lamp, and Draco finds the last person he would ever expect inside his gift. Chapter Snippet: She moved to flop back down onto the hammock, Astoria shortly joining her. She then shook her body about as though she were having a tantrum. “Ugh! Do you know how frustrating it is to literally be across the hall from someone you’re attracted to and not be able to do anything about it?”

This caused Astoria to laugh as loudly as she did the first time she met Crystal. “Oh my god, you two are going to shag like bunnies once you’re finally able to. But you know what they say, darling: absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

“I’m already fond enough!” Ginny cried out, which only made the brunette laugh harder. She turned her head to face Astoria again. “Please don’t tell your sister about this. I’m pretty sure she already thinks I have feelings for him, even though I told her I didn’t.”

The other woman waved away her friend’s concerns again. “Don’t worry, babes. My lips are sealed. Besides, I know Daph; she always has some kind of contingency plan in place. I can guarantee she already has the press release ready for her break-up with Draco.”

“Daphne should really start her own business, or something. She’s too smart to not capitalize on her connections.”

“She honestly should, but I think she likes the faffing about and the attention. If she really considered it her job, she might end up hating it in the long run.”

“I never thought I’d hear you compliment your sister.”

“Yes, well, I’m sure hell is enjoying its lovely change in temperature, but you didn’t hear it from me.” Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/54468913/chapters/145837753

Story Playlist on Apple Music

[hazard-and-friends]

6/2 NW3

Trial reflection pt 1 of 2: The trial itself

6 searches, two each interior and container, one each exterior and vehicle. the day's flow struggled a bit because they wildly underestimated how long ext and vehic were going to take, but we were dog #2, so we got through 4 searches before lunch.

exterior. this was, fascinatingly, the exact same area as our NW1 exterior, and the single hide was in a similar location. he came out ready to work and found it reasonably fast; I then kept him moving around the search area until the timer called 30 seconds. he gave me a complete heart attack by sniffing a clump of grass and ALMOST hiking a leg. spent the rest of the day convinced we'd left a hide there because I refused to let him check the area again. but no, just the one. 1/1 hides.

vehicles. I am seeing a trend where in 4 of 4 vehicle searches at trials he takes fucking forever to decide to search the cars and instead wants to check out literally anything else. he did eventually tune in and did correctly find the hide. on the other hand, we've passed 4 of 4 vehicle searches so you know. 1/1 hides.

containers 1. 16 sterilite shoeboxes, two hides on opposite ends of the same row, no distractions. he got one hide but not the other; I want to see the video from this search because I think he expressed interest in the correct box, just failed to commit to it. on the other hand no falses. 1/2 hides.

interiors 1. BIGASS ROOM. half of a cafeteria, chair rack on one wall, long wall with some shelving, a single table & chairs, a garbage can. lots and lots of open space. 3 hides, one on the chair rack, one a few feet away on the shelving--he nailed both of these. nice and confident. then faffed about until the 30 second warning. 3rd hide was on the garbage can, 0 interest in it. 2/3 hides.

at this point we had a longass break, partially for lunch and partially to let everyone else finish ext/vehic. we had apparently already missed out on a leg but i didn't know this.

5. containers 2. absolute mindfuck. 8 toolboxes, 1 hide, no distractors, AND the hide was in the very first box. he alerted, i called it, i experienced a 3 year extension to my life when the judge said "yes" because i was SURE it was a false, he checked the other boxes, i made him check them again to be sure, finish. 1/1 hides.

6. interiors 2. another BIGASS SPACE. one half of a livestock barn (fuck u, says everyone running spaniels). hazard demonstrated again that distractors come second to odor (amazing, phenomenal, perfect, 10/10 no notes). he found the hide, then went to check out the manure. I recognized this and called finish. 1/1 hides.

overall: 7 of 9 hides, 2 missed, 0 falses. my goal was 0 falses, so success there, and 1 fewer error than last NW3.

have we fixed his containers problem? maybe. I don't know. I think we now also have a vehicles problem, but he's passed every vehicles search he's done, just while giving me an anxiety attack, so idk.

no shiny ribbons but we're now only one clean search away from our elements titles in int, cont, and vehic. (need two more in ext.) so.....progress.

[pb-dot]

The Sisypheanism of Self Care

I don't know if the title is strictly accurate or uses words that are actual words, and neither do I care. Today's been a rough one and I'm granting myself license to be a little extra.

In the last year or so I've become acutely aware that the various mental health care I've been receiving hasn't really been hitting the mark. The talk therapy fails to function as much more than a pressure valve, although it in fairness has been a great pressure valve when I could get it. The problem is that we, that is to say, I and my doctor, former therapist, and social services caseworker haven't really made any inroads into making my life any better or breaking me out of my depression, or this spiral of unemployment, taking a job that doesn't fit my strengths, working until I have burnout and quit - repeat that I have been caught in for most of my adult life.

I was hoping there was an end coming to this time of faffing about with common sense cures for depression, my doctor currently suggests I lose some weight (I know, you're shocked) and take cold showers. In fairness, treatment-resistant depression probably isn't her field of expertise being a GP and all. Anyway, the reason why I hoped this was because I've recently been referred to the public psychiatric center that I know takes a somewhat more clinical approach to treatment, so although I wasn't holding out hope of being "cured" anytime soon, I was kind of hoping this would land me with a treatment plan of some sort. Maybe some different meds? A supplementary diagnosis of some sort? Who's to say, but a fella can dream, can't he?

So far I've talked to two separate mental health professionals who both seem deeply unsure about what to do about me. Out-fucking-standing. Oh, there were also some blood tests as I expressed I was a bit uncertain whether my antidepressants were, in fact, doing anything. I suppose that is the first thing you do in that instance, but I'm just expecting to hear that my body is treating the meds right, and the question if it does do something remains kind of floating in the air. That is, if it doesn't turn out I'm secretly immune to these as well.

Anyway, it's impatience on my end, and I'm fully aware of it. Diagnosing mental health conditions and neurodivergence is tricky and the consequences for making the wrong call can be pretty bad. That said, I'm just tired of getting mh treatment that I can't actually tell if does anything at the same time as I'm getting help getting back to work that I can't tell if does anything, and every time I talk to anyone in my life about this I can't but shrug and go "it'll pay off eventually... I hope."

It's all just such a waste. I was such a bright child in school, and although I wasn't quite as much of a standout during university, I did ok considering I was heavily depressed at the time. Hell, I'm still smart, pretty darn smart in certain fields, I would suggest, and my last formal test of my mental capabilities would agree. And yet, here I sit. Unemployed, frustrated, depressed, a walking pile of anxiety and dark thoughts so robust they almost, but thankfully not quite, should count as a philosophy by now.

Where did I go wrong? There are probably a bunch of things I could have done differently, but frankly, I also feel like Society, that old villain, has failed me in some rather profound ways. It's not just how difficult it has been getting mental health help that actually does something, or how absolutely debilitating being unemployed can be, although these certainly do contribute. My problem isn't just that my life is being made measurably worse by our old foe Late Stage Capitalism, although most of these are just made worse by that cancerous corpse of an ideology. The world seemingly has no place for me it feels like. Loneliness pushes in around me from every conceivable angle, dating is a nightmare, every job requires multi-year experience or specialized education I hadn't even heard about before reading about them, there seems to be no thought put into how exactly anyone not fitting into this cripplingly overspecialized work market is supposed to live their godfuckingdamned life, and that's not even getting into the climate shit.

I honestly hate how easy it is for me to pivot from talking about depression to unemployment. I hate how employment has to be a factor in my mental health. I hate how approximately nobody I've talked to about it, on the professional side, seems to get that I wasn't less depressed back when I was working. I hate how I can't get a job because it feels fucking impossible to be enough of a "go-getter with can-do attitude" to even make it to the interview stage when nothing feels good or worth it. I hate the fucking catch-22 of it all, and I hate that neither psychiatrist nor doctor nor case worker can even begin to unravel this Gordian knot for me, or even tell me where in the good grace of fuck I might begin pulling.

It's like they're saying "Sorry, your depression is untreatable and although we won't say it to your face, the labor market's general indifference to you should tell you that you have no place in it which in the current order of things means you have no value. Shame about that, someone probably should've told you all this before you did your best in school and endured the social ostracization that followed with being a kinda weird kid that loved books, all fueled by the fucking lie that it'd get better once you were done with school."

So yeah. I'm not having a fantastic day today, but I think getting some bile out of my system might have helped me feel a little less terrible? Better days than this will come, I'm sure. I'll try doing nice things for myself the rest of the day, although I'm not quite sure what they were. If I shitpost or rb more saucy art than usual today, that's probably what I ended up with

[merryfortune]

Ask Me an Interview Question

Written for Femslash February 2024 and the Sweetheart Bingo from @sweetspicybingo

Day 6. Ask Me

Title: Ask Me an Interview Question

Ship: Cameraphoneshipping | Nico/Romin

Word Count: 2,351

Universe: Sevens - Canon Compliant

Rating: T

Tags: Crushes, Confessions, Getting Together, Humour

   If there was one thing which got butts on seats and eyes on the headline, it was news stories about RoaRomin! 

   There was no doubt about it. The Newspaper Club knew this best of all, they were super in tune with their audience, after all, and could state definitively that Goha 7th Elementary School loved to read news stories about their local celebrities. Whether it was gossip raggy drivel about what Kirishima Roa had for lunch or actual hard hitting journalism about the chord progression in their new song, nothing got the general student populace attention quite like RoaRomin.

   However, popularity was a double edged blade.

   As much as the Newspaper club would love to write excessively and obsessively on the most minute of RoaRomin trivia and on-goings, people would eventually get bored. The attraction would fade and the lustre would tire. Not to mention, their group of golden geese would eventually stop taking their calls to bother them so some level of detachment was required.

   Happy muses, happy readers, happy life. Or something like that.

   Hence, it had to be big news - really big news! - to justify the Newspaper Club getting involved in the endless press loop RoaRomin were often involved in. News like, say, the release of a new album. Now that was news and naturally, the Newspaper Club were going to be all over it like black and white on a penguin.

   “Er bad news Nico,” Shinjitsu said to her over the phone, “but I need you to do all the leg work today. Masaru is down for the count with a bad cold so you’re in charge of today’s interview, capiche?”

   Apparently not.

   For all their faffing that they really truly were actually the best journalists in all the school, they really truly were actually not.

   They’d tried.

   They’d done everything right ahead of time. They contacted RoaRomin’s manager for a time slot and managed to work something out. They wrote up the interview ahead of time and even prepped a layout template to put the actual news story content into.

   But now things had gone thumbs up at the last minute.

   “Why can’t you help out?” Nico asked, panicky. She could have dropped her phone because of this bombshell.

   “You’ve seen what I’m like in an interview!” Shinjitsu snapped back over the phone. Then in a smaller voice, he hissed to remind her, “I’m shy.”

   Nico grumbled.

   Gah! Big, dumb, stupid Masaru immune system! Why did it have to go and fail literally the night before a big interview?! It's not like they could simply reschedule it, either. Nico could have literally pulled her hair out of over this but as she finished up her squealing and groaning, she sighed heavily. Fine. She’ll take one for the team and do everything tomorrow.

   “Fine.” she snipped. “I’ll conduct the interview tomorrow, boss.”

   “Thanks, Nico, this is why you’re the best.” Shinjitsu said and he hung up on her quite promptly after that. He sounded way too chipper to push this job onto Nico.

   Nico sighed as she stared at her phone.

   Her lips quivered as she sat up against her wall, she curled up and put her knees under her chin, tucked in against her pillow. This shouldn’t be a problem. Maybe it wouldn’t have been if this wasn’t going to be a big issue of their newspaper or if it had been literally any other topic but Nico just squirmed. She had butterflies in the bottom of her stomach.

   See, here’s the thing… She kind of maybe had a teeny tiny gigantic crush on one very specific member of RoaRomin. Romin. It was Romin. She had a crush on Romin.

   It was somewhere between a normal celebrity crush and a normal schoolgirl crush. After all, they were classmates - insofar as going to the same school - and Romin was famous but there was something a little bit more to it. Nico laughed in hindsight at the duel between Shinjitsu and yuga, with how Romin teased her afterwards.

   That incident had been a good wake-up call for the integrity that they strove for. There was a marked difference in there content pre and post that duel. Like yeah, sure, they spun a tall tale every so often and enjoyed a bit of Photoshop every so often but they were doing much, much better and so Nico had kind of a fondness for it. That moment everything changed.

   Romin was so funny, too. A rockstar who couldn’t sing, who had more sass in her little pinkie finger than most people had in their whole bodies. Her sense of humour was totally on-point. As a result, Nico was totally head over heels. With or without RoaRomin’s legendary, and intimidating, popularity behind them.

   So Nico could only cross all her fingers and toes. Tomorrow would not be a disaster. She would will it into existence. They’d already taken one blow in the form of Masaru’s cold, surely there wouldn’t be another, right?

   “Thanks for waiting, Nico,” Romin said, flashing her a smile as she set down her guitar in the school’s auditorium, neutral ground for them both, “totally unprofessional us but you’ll never believe it! Roa, Ushiro, and Getta are all down with colds. So crazy.”

   Oh, okay. Wrong.

   “Y-Yeah, so crazy.” Nico replied through gritted teeth. “Masaru has a cold, too. Must be, uh, something in the water.”

   “The air probably.” Romin corrected her thoughtfully.

   Nico could have snorted, “Yeah, you're right. The air probably.”

   Romin politely sat down in front of Nico and they had bit of a staring contest for a minute. Nico had everything read. In theory. The papers, the notetaking, the questions but she found her gab unable to open in front of Romin alone. Both of them alone. Except for each other. Sitting on the gymnasium chairs and a sign on the door which said do not disturb.

   “Everything okay?” Romin asked as she uncomfortably changed how she sat, she switched which leg would be tucked under the other.

   “Y-Yes, just, um, gathering my thoughts!” Nico chirped. “Okay, let’s just get right in.”

   “Yeah, nice.” Romin smiled encouragingly.

   It was good to know that there were no harsh feelings because of their last encounter as press and subject.

   Nico shuffled her notes and cleared her throat, “Seven questions for what the students of Goha Sevens Elementary want to know, all good?”

   “All good.” Romin confirmed, excited to get started.

   “Good.” Nico said. “Now, I promise you. They’ll be quick: bang, bang, bang, done.”

   “Awesome.” Romin replied. “Whenever you're ready.”

   Nico nodded decisively, “Itadakimasu, thank you for your time. Question one. Album name?”

   “Go Rush with two exclamation marks.” Romin said.

   Nico took her notes without looking down, keeping unflinching eye contact with Romin from behind her glasses.

   “Question two. Will you be releasing any singles from this album ahead of time as promotional material?” Nico said.

   “Yes. We’ll be releasing two singles.” Romin said. 

   “Names and where they can be streamed?” Nico said. “That’ll be questions three and four. Not a twofer.”

   “Got it.” Romin nodded. “Mirage and One Way. both can be streamed on all good streaming services.” She flashed a smile.

   “Great work. We’re speeding through them.” Nico said. She was scribbling hard, writing down Romin’s answers. “Okay, onto question five. How is everyone feeling about the album? If you can give us a good soundbyte, that’d be appreciated.”

   “No promises.” Romin laughed. “But we’re really proud of the hard work he put in. We’ve really evolved as a band in the past few months and this album reflects that growth. It’ll have a little bit for everyone: rock, pop, grunge, punk, metal, and more. Staying true to ourselves but letting us grow up, too.” Romin ended her spiel with a sheepish laugh.

   Nico cackled as she wrote Romin’s response down verbatim, “And you said you couldn’t promise a good soundbyte.” Her voice dripped with sarcasm. “What do you call that last bit?”

   “I do some of my best work on the fly.” Romin said and as though on cue, her stomach rumbled.

   She reached down to her school backpack and grabbed a snack. Nico, meanwhile, finished writing up that last bit of her notes.

   “We are doing fantastic, Romin.” Nico said.

   “My pleasure.” Romin said.

   “So here’s question six: any music videos planned?” Nico asked.

   “Yes, at least two but if there’s a dark horse sleeper hit, we’d love to do more.” Romin said. “So, uh, everyone, make sure you buy and stream the heck out of it so we make lots of money to make lots of music videos!”

   “I see, I see,” Nico murmured, with a hint of a snicker to her voice, “and I imagine the two locked in are the same as the singles you intend to release?”

   “Yup.” Romin nodded.

   “Got it, got it, and last one…” Nico said and she took a big, deep breath. This was it. Lucky last. They were tearing through it and were now up to the most important question, “Number seven: did you guys have fun making and recording the album? Any inside jokes and stories?”

   “We had tons of fun and, um, not really? The whole creative process is honestly so dry after a while. Get in, get out. Do a silly song and dance. Literally, Getta has taken up a “lucky dance” as a ritual. It so does not work. He looks like a fool but he swears by it but any time he does it, it makes him so don’t knock it til you rock it? But seriously, he’s only ever come up with a bad idea after doing it.”

   Nico laughed quietly to herself. She could just imagine it, honestly, with no description needed. Something dorky and dweeby. Just perfect. And with that, she could pretty much wrap up the interview.

   “Any closing remarks?” Nico asked, offering Romin the metaphorical microphone.

   Romin hummed thoughtfully. She mulled things over in her mind - this and that, those, too - and Nico could practically see the cogs turning behind her mind. Until those wheels finally went sproing! And broke as she cheerfully replied.

   “Nope, can’t think of anything. I’ve said all my pieces I’ve been coached through.” Romin replied light-heartedly. “You did great, Nico, especially since you just handle the photography side of things normally. Honestly, it’s so much easier talking to another girl than a guy.” She laughed a little bit.

   Nico began to blush furiously. Her teeth chattered. Her knees knocked.

   All throughout the interview process, she had been short and snappy. Any longer and this feeling of torment would have taken over because she could not disagree more. It was not easier talking to another girl than a guy. Or maybe it was because Romin wasn’t just any girl. 

   Nico’s mouth dried. She needed to be done with it. This crush! It was crushing her.

   “Um, actually, Romin, I have one more question. I just thought of it.” Nico said.

   “Go ahead, ask me anything.” Romin said.

   “Will you go out with me?!” Nico squealed as she bowed forward.

   She practically bent at a seventy degree angle in her seat as she thrust forth her confession to Romin. She blushed, she sweated, her whole body went stiff. Nico had never felt more intense about anything in her life and Romin…

   Her jaw dropped, “Eh?!” she exclaimed. "I said ask me an interview question! Not ask me out!"

   That interview question had not been one she had been expecting. Let alone prepped for.

   Nico could feel her blood rush to her head as she waited what felt like an eternity and then some for Romin to reply. And when she didn’t? She did what Nico did best: blabbed her mouth off.

   “I’ve had a crush on you for the past couple months and have been dying to ask you. I think you’re really cute and funny and it would be an honour to take photographs of you any time I like and want to get to know you better and take you on a date!”

   Nico was breathless by the time she finished her elaboration of her confession. Her lungs ached as they emptied of breath. She had pushed out all her thoughts in one big blurting out of everything. There had not been a single comma in there, she could feel it. Shinjitsu would kill her if she ever wrote like that, let alone speak like that but don’t worry. She felt like she was dying even more so than before just contending with her crush. Let alone speaking it out loud to said crush.

   Nico continued to pant as she waited for Romin’s reply. Her fringe flopped in front of her eyes, her glasses slid down her nose and all Nico could hear was the sound of her own blood droning in her ear. She saw a slight movement, however, in front of her.

   Romin adjusted herself again. Crossed and uncrossed her legs, this time behind her ankles rather than over her thighs. She looked away demurely.

   “I-I’ve never been asked out before,” she confessed slightly, “so, um, what the hey? Let’s try it. Let’s hang out sometime, grab a bite to eat somewhere.”

   Nico couldn’t believe her ears. If they ran that in the papers, they would be accused of fanfiction! The gall! But here it was. In real life. She unstuck herself from her head over knees position and drew her hand up in front of her chest, trying to calm her rapidly beating heart.

  “Thank you very much!” Nico exclaimed with a grin. “Can I put that in the paper?”

   “No!” Romin yelled. “Stick to your actual interview!” She blushed but looked adorable to be embarrassed. 

   “A-ah, of course.” Nico said. “And now a picture, for the papers and, um, to commemorate this moment? If you don’t mind.”

   Romin exhaled and her cheeks began to pale, “Yes, Nico, you can take your photos.” She smiled a small smile.

   “Yippee, thank you, Romin!” Nico said as she excitedly snapped her photographs of her now girlfriend.

[lexcellence]

I have seen some shit from customers in this line of work. Seen plenty from the USPS, too. But never in all my years have I seen this sort of tag-teamed, synchronized, by-your-powers-combined fuckery as this.

The customer was supposed to send in his title and signed paperwork to get the rest of his money three months ago, and has been faffing around.

I finally get an envelope from him today.

Just an envelope.

Stamped.

Processed Friday.

With the EZ™️-Seal™️ Strip©️ unpeeled and intact.

Did he send the envelope but forget to put anything in it? Did he put stuff in it that (naturally) got lost in the mail thanks to the envelope being open? Did the post office not notice? Did they notice and not say anything, because dude is, frankly, a bit of a dick?

I sure as shit don't know, because he won't answer his phone.

[joanofarc]

jim jiminee performing ‘never’ and ‘man in a tracksuit’ on ITV in 1988.

it seems kind of unfair in retrospect that jim jiminee didn’t get their time in the sun. these two tracks were eventually released in the japanese market in 2000, a full 12 years after this performance.

while ‘man is a tracksuit’ is weaker than some of their more upbeat hits like ‘do it on thursday’ or ‘i wanna work’, ‘never’ (also titled ‘never let her go’) is an absolute gem. the unspoken promises of young love sung atop banjo, tambourine, and double bass -- what could be better, right? the acoustic fare pairs nicely with kevin jamieson’s cuckoo birdcall at the end of the song, backed up by his brother lindsay.

i’d compare them with the ‘piffle’ group fat and frantic, whose share all the same instrumentation and playfulness/satire of british life. and much like faf, they have an absolute bombshell of an indiepop love song here.

[limecordial]

List of music associated with the fic I'm writing ‘How Music Heals an Aching Soul’ (working title) 

(feature in the first part)

Downriver- Pyre original soundtrack

Downside Ballad- Pyre original sountrack

(associated but not yet used, or might not be used )

The Cage(Ratika’s Song) - Omensight

Omen- Guilhem Desq

Aequilibrium - Andrey Vinegradov

Russian folk- troika

Bonus round stuff, song I was listen too while writing

Sum of all our sirens -nelward

Lament of orpheus -Hades

Good Riddance Eurodice solo- Hades

[prokopetz]

Do you know any hidden gem game from the last couple of years that you think deserve more attention?

You didn't really think I was going to pick just one, did you?

(Courtesy cut, because this post’s a big one.)

On the tabletop RPG side:

Minerva McJanda's Voidheart Symphony is very unapologetically an Apocalypse Engine hack of Persona 5, right down to assigning each of your character's relationships its own tarot-themed mechanical playbook with ranked special abilities and such. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it does a better job of following Persona 5's thematic through-line to its logical conclusion than the actual Persona 5 does. Technically not "from the last couple of years", because it's been in early access since 2018, but it just went 1.0 in March of last year, so I'm counting it.

Caro Asercion's cyberpunk science-fantasy game Dwindle is really more of a proof of concept than a full-featured game engine, but it's got a fascinating core mechanic, one that I was inspired to lift for one of my own projects. (With full credit, of course!) You'll need to do some hacking to get a full campaign out of it; as written, it's a perfectly serviceable rules-light oneshot.

Heather Flowers' Extreme Meatpunks Forever, based on the independently published episodic video game of the same name, isn't actually out yet due to pandemic-related delays, but is slated to hit the shelves this summer. Short version: found family meets extreme body horror in a game about gay mecha pilots punching Nazis. Both the pilots and the mecha are made of meat. (Presumably the Nazis are made of meat, too, but one can never be sure!) Full disclosure: I backed this one on Kickstarter, so this is definitely not a disinterested recommendation.

Keeping the body horror theme going, Elizabeth Chaipraditkul and Steffie de Vaan’s City of Flesh is a particularly grisly example of an old-school sword and sorcery dungeon crawler, set within the womb of a colossal, dying beast. It’s a zine-format game that self-describes with terms like “splatterpunk” and ”femmecore”, and if you know what both of those words mean you’re almost certainly part of this one’s target audience. This is the second game on this list with tarot-based mechanics, though in a different way from Voidheart Symphony.

Its title notwithstanding, Erika Chappell’s Flying Circus has nothing to do with Monty Python. Like the Extreme Meatpunks Forever, this one is about beating up Fascists, this time in a vaguely fantastical pastiche of post-WWI Germany. You play as a private company of ace pilots taking on a combination of charity missions and mercenary work for the highest bidder, with extensive downtime mechanics and a strong focus on community-building. As you might have suspected from that pitch, it takes a lot of cues from Blades in the Dark, right down the mechanics enforcing the fact that player characters are extraordinarily dysfunctional people, so be prepared for that. It’s also got one of the most intense non-map-based tactical combat systems I’ve ever seen, so maybe not the best choice if keeping track of G forces and engine RPM isn’t your idea of a fun time. If it is your idea of a fun time, though, highly recommended.

(If you’d prefer something a little more lightweight, the same author’s Dirty Pair inspired Double or Nothing is also great fun. It’s juuuuust slightly outside the two-year window, being a December 2019 release, but my post, my rules.)

Shifting gears to something a little less intense than those previous few entries, The Quiet Life – whose author is not credited in the text, but elsewhere goes by Duck – is a semi-competitive tabletop dating sim about gay nuns at a pastoral convent. Its framework resembles that of a board game as much as a tabletop RPG, so it's a good one to play if you're looking for something highly structured and don't want to do a lot of faffing about to figure out a scenario.

Rose Bailey’s Bright and Terrible is an older game, but a second edition (linked) came out just last year. The players are cast as wandering exiles of lost Atlantis, each wielding a terrible power and bearing the guilt of an equally terrible crime. It’s basically one of those “everybody is [insert media character here]” games where [insert media character here] is Moorcock’s Elric of Melnibone and his various imitators, so if playing as an angsty, mostly-unsympathetic loser with far more power than is good for you (or anyone in your general vicinity) sounds like your cup of tea, maybe give this one a look. Note: a big part of this rec is because Rose Bailey shares my love of big stupid random tables, and this title’s got them in spades.

P H Lee and Aura Belle’s Four Ways to Die in the Future is in a similar boat as the preceding entry, being an anthology collection of older games that squeaks into the appropriate time window because the anthology itself is only recently published. As the title suggests, it’s a set of four sci-fi games revolving around death and mortality: Amid Endless Quiet, Island in a Sea of Solitude, Alone on Silver Wings, and The Tragedy of GJ 237b, being for three or more, two, one, and zero players, respectively. (If you’re dying – ha! – to know what a game for zero players is, well, the whole collection is only six bucks, so I invite you to find out.)

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Dr. Jenna Moran’s Glitch. This one might not seem like a “hidden” gem to many of this blog’s readers, but remember that Dr. Moran’ work is virtually unheard-of outside of a very particular circle, so I’m counting it here. Elevator pitch: diceless post-modern god game where you play as a pack of dysfunctional weirdoes for whom divinity is a terminal illness. This one also has a found family focus, except this time you’re playing as the bad guys. Well, the nominal bad guys; by default, the player characters are assumed to be drawn from the ranks of those who’ve realised that being an all-consuming eidolon of the Outer Void leading a crusade to destroy reality itself is bullshit, actually, even if you do get to wear a cool crown. Like Flying Circus, above, the learning curve and mechanical overhead are considerable, albeit for different reasons.

On the video game side:

(Note: the entries in the previous section are selected with no particular criteria beyond my own gut feel; nearly all independently published tabletop RPGs are underexposed, so it’s not like I have to be terribly rigorous! For video games, I’m adopting a somewhat arbitrary cutoff of “has fewer than 200 user reviews on Steam at the time of this posting”.)

Aeon Drive is a cyberpunk-themed pixel-art precision puzzle platformer with a strong focus on speedrunning and the obligatory cute red-haired girl protagonist. Basically, any time I say the phrase “precision puzzle platformer”, just assume I’m talking about a game that you’ll love if you enjoyed Celeste and won’t be able to stand otherwise. Beyond that, I’m not going to belabour the point – you know what you’re getting here!

The original Kathy Rain is both too widely reviewed and too old – being a 2016 release – to make this list, but the late 2021 remake seems to have flown a bit under the radar. It’s a pixel-art point and click puzzler about a jouranlism student investigating her grandfather’s mysterious death. Apart from improved graphics and audio, the remake features extra puzzles, an extended story, and an ending that actually makes some damn sense; the lack of the last one is something the original was rightly criticised for.

Open Sorcery: Sea++ is the sequel to Abigail Corfman’s 2017 Open Sorcery, and expands on it in nearly every way. It’s a piece of hypertext interactive fiction where you play as an amnesiac seer who’s been forced out of her body and cast into the Deep Web; the game takes place in a magical-realist universe where the Internet and humanity’s collective unconscious are the same thing, so that preceding sentence has several implications. As is typical for games of the type, you definitely won’t get the golden ending without either a guide or several careful playthroughs. Content warnings for some very frank discussions of disability and ableism, particularly with respect to forms of abuse experienced by physically disabled folks; much of it’s handled in a fairly lighthearted fashion – like the protagonist’s efforts to fight through a fairy court’s incomprehensible bureaucracy in order to get them to install a ramp for her wheelchair – but much of it is not.

Red Ronin is part of a highly specialised genre known as the “ice-physics puzzler”, which means that your character can only move in straight lines and can’t stop until they hit an obstacle. This one casts the player as a disgraced samurai on a mission of revenge, with the ice-physics movement representing the impossibly fast run-by attacks that samurai media is known for. Features an interesting dynamic difficult mechanic where the puzzles adapt to whether or not you’ve carried over resources from previous puzzles, which creates some fascinating routing challenges if you’re trying to speedrun it.

Star Apprentice: Magical Murder Mystery is literally Touhou meets Phoenix Wright, and I mean that not just in terms of its gameplay, but also in terms of its obvious inspirations. Kinda janky in most game-mechanical respects, but it’s a free student project, so it’s not like you’re going to feel ripped off for the price. If you’re a fan of either of the two franchises it takes its cues from, there’s a good chance you’ll love it anyway.

Sunblaze is, well, just copy-and-paste the description of Aeon Drive, above. This one differs in that where Aeon Drive is mostly about routing across large levels, this one focuses on single-screen execution challenges. It’s one of the few examples of the type that manages to strike the same balance of difficulty versus well-paced introduction of new gimmicks that Celeste does; perhaps not quite as expertly, but then, what game does?

Sunshine Heavy Industries is about building spaceships. You have all the usual concerns about fuel versus thrust ratio versus heat generation versus energy demands and so forth, but rather than being a hardcore engineering sim like most games of the type, this is essentially a complicated jigsaw puzzle, challenging the player to slap puzzle-piece components together in a way that satisfies all of each project’s engineering requirements while remaining under budget. The story is surprisingly good, though not even slightly serious. The game kind of falls off a cliff once you run out of storyline missions, since the randomly generated postgame tasks currently aren’t able to make use of any of the really interesting mechanics, but the developer is reportedly working on that.

Transiruby is a goofy casual metroidvania about a robot girl who can turn into a motorcycle. You can probably shoot through it in 4–6 hours unless you’re a completionist, and the difficulty curve isn’t too high. Free demo available. (Note: according to the publisher, the title is a reference to the fact that the protagonist transforms, and has nothing to do with gender. However, I have also been informed by certain mutuals that she’s definitely transition goals, so take it as you will!)

Treasures of the Aegean is a pseudohistorical adventure game that isn’t really a metroidvania, in spite of being tagged that way on Steam, as the ability upgrades are very few and don’t really affect your ability to move about the world – in fact, 100% of the game world is accessible right from the start. It’s a time-loop 2D puzzle-platformer where the world will be destroyed in 15 real-time minutes, and you have to explore a mysterious island to figure out how to stop it. The plot heavily involves the Minoan civilisation of Crete, though the historical particulars range from speculative to outright fabricated.

Like Voidheart Symphony from the tabletop game section, Viola: The Heroine’s Melody is a an entry that squeaks into the correct time frame by virtue of being a long-in-early-access title that got a 1.0 release during 2021. It’ a cute, music themed platformer RPG with rhythm-based combat. I’m going to put a disclaimer on this one: there are a number of conspicuous user interface bugs that may never get patched because the dev experienced a serious health crisis more or less immediately after the game’s 1.0 release, so you’ll need a fair tolerance for UI jank to get through this one.

[businessbois]

“you’re the most orphan child i’ve ever met” an attempt at analysis of c!phil and c!tommy’s relationship

this is entirely an analysis of c!phil and c!tommy’s relationship. im not gonna be talking about morals or terrorism or really even wilbur or fundy because those are whole other points. just these two and the convoluted abyss of “canon”

title quote from technoblade here

manburg war- november 16th

doomsday- january 6th

butchers army day- december 16th

i mean phil’s first day, the manburg war, itself implies a lot of history and relationships with these characters. tommy shouts “philza minecraft” in joy and recognition when he sees him. phil says these two lines that confuse the hell out of me. “whatever tommy and tubbo do, i’ll follow them” and “i gotta take care of my kids.” again, “my kids” doesn’t have to mean biologically, he can just be a father figure, see them as his kids, but i suppose we retcon these? because of the relationship they imply that doesn’t really line up? “i’ll follow them” is a statement of devotion, loyalty. i’m not saying his goals couldn’t have changed from these, i’m saying that in order to have this goal of “following tommy and tubbo through whatever” in the first place, he’d have to really love and care about these kids. that doesn’t line up with how people are claiming he doesn’t know them or owe them anything. im okay with retconning these because this was when i think cc!phil still believed the family dynamic was canon.

but the thing about decanonizing something big like that, is that, okay, maybe we can get rid of the conversations and lines, but then we have physical things like friendship emeralds and tommy slippers. he visits tommy in exile and gifts him these things. a friendship emerald isn’t something you give to a random kid, it’s something gifted to ghostbur—his son—and techno—his best friend. i guess you could say he was just being nice to this strange kid? but then like, he could’ve stopped at the slippers? why the emerald? the emerald is a Big Thing, no? and we can’t decanonize or retcon, like, all of phil and tommy’s interactions, especially something with physical items involved because that’s beyond spoken lines and can’t be dismissed as easily. but then it also leaves us with this utterly confusing narrative. there’s the line from the butcher army day, “carls okay. technos okay. tommys okay. thats all i wanted to know.” do we decanonize that too?? it’s a statement of deep care “that’s all i wanted to know” and he includes tommy in it. (tommyinnit haha) with interactions and lines like this, you can’t just say “they’re not biologically related, so they don’t know each other and phil doesn’t have to care about this kid.” because he did at some point. a lot. and these lines prove it. you can’t decanonize every moment like this. (i mean, i guess you can, i cant stop you) not when tommy and phil’s interactions are littered with it. not when tommy keeps a friendship emerald in his special chest right next to phukkit (a prized gift from tubbo) to this day. 

moving on to tommy.

cc!tommy is very smart and very good at what he does. he’s studying film in college, he got a 9 on his english gcse, he’s got every cc he’s come into contact with singing about how clever he is. he makes character choices deliberately. i don’t wanna write off too much of this as him just doing bits and faffing around because tommy’s literally always in character. i am down to decanonize the supposed mishap of shouting phil’s name when getting locked in prison, though honestly, it doesn’t necessarily seem like an out of character action for tommy who has a history of calling for phil when he feels upset. see: “where’s dadza?” (this instance is strange too because “dadza” is a strange slip up to make. it feels purposeful. i don’t think cc!tommyinnit calls his friend “dadza” outside of roleplay. and honestly the whole delivery and head shaking is very much in-a-character) and @/my-stupid-fandoms said some smart stuff about it here. but anyways, sorry, i’ll take what’s surely canon. in the manburg war we have “AND PHIL’S HERE,” incredibly excited from him and tubbo. familiarity. they know him. look up to him. we have the heartbroken "philza minecraft?"s from doomsday, indications that he trusted phil and feels hurt and betrayed. then, we have some lines that are very interesting coming from Big Man “i raised myself” TommyInnit which are as follows “I want to go ‘Philza Minecraft, I built that hotel.’ Even though it’s a lie, it will feel true.” “And then I get to go ‘Philza Minecraft, I made this house, I made this house. Are you impressed?’ And he’ll go ‘Yes.’ And then he’ll pat me on the back and then he’ll teach me how to ride a bike.” “TELL PHILZA” “AREN’T YOU PROUD?” tommy loves phil. wants phil to be impressed with him. wants phil to be proud of him. during his encounter with the egg, he says “it didn’t hurt any of the other boys. it didn’t hurt phil.” he wants phil to be safe. cares about his well being even if this is not reciprocated by phil. he follows his “it didn’t hurt techno” with an “not that i care about techno” but there is no such denial for philza. and now, immediately after being dead and pieced back together, tommy asks after five of his friends. phil is third after tubbo and jack who are tommy’s Boys™. phil is also called for the most, four times to tubbo’s three and everyone else’s one. it does seem like everyone got the memo about phil not being tommys father except tommy. 

there’s a theory around that like, wilbur found tommy and brought him home and so tommy grows up looking up to phil but phil doesn’t reciprocate. this gets to keep the kind of found family on tommy’s end but maintains the “loosely connected strangers” thing for phil. i think maybe this holds more credence than anything else, but also, “loosely connected strangers” just doesn’t add up with the stuff i’ve mentioned before: friendship emeralds, “tommys okay,” there had to be some reciprocity to their familial-ish (or at least caring) relationship. he visited him in exile. he gave him the emerald. he said all those lines. there was a relationship there. of care. of trust. where tommy saw him as someone to look up to, to protect him. at any rate, i like the theory and since we simply have No Backstory for canon sbi at all, it works just fine even if it still just doesn’t fit.

closing

honestly i don’t know what this is. this is all the evidence, all the information i have. there’s no way they were strangers. tommy obviously definitively looks up to and cares about phil. this was reciprocated to some degree beyond “i kind of know you.” i’m a big defender of c!tommyinnit and that surely comes across here. i mostly just did this to get everything i have about c!phil and c!tommy’s out and to figure out what i actually make of it and all the confusion about it. this is here and the clips are linked, draw your own conclusions that are smarter and more concise than mine.

[sharpestasp]

I was asked what I'd do with Birds of Prey

From my friend on DW:

DC: You have carte blanche to launch a new series for Birds of Prey. You are explicitly allowed to cherrypick bits of extant canon or yeet them all. What would you most want your new series to have and do?

You know, I first took this as for the TELEVISION show, and was like -- keep Shemar Moore, find new cast to be Oracle and Huntress and Black Canary. (Proviso - Carolyn Lance, please, as ... it was just fucking weird to have O and H raising Baby Canary.)

Ahem, moving on the the COMIC BOOK.

What to keep:

~ Oracle. I want my Barbara Gordon who told the Joker 'you took nothing from me'. I want the bad ass that took over the internet and made it work for her.

~ Black Canary. I want her out of the men's shadows, I want her standing tall, I want her globe-trotting and reminding people she is five foot four of kickass, take names, and do it with style.

~ Huntress and Lady Blackhawk as teammates. One for keeping tabs on Gotham, one for back up and travel.

~ A rotating cast of Spoiler, Batgirl, Onyx, Batwoman, Flamebird (if you take her back to her Kane roots), Leslie Thompkins, Sarah Essen (hmm, did I get that right?), Renee Montoya...

~ Genderfluid / nonbinary characters

Yes, you read that right. I want the Birds of Gotham to be a heroine spotlight book.

~ Bring in the ladies for the villains too. Dixon played his cards too hard with Cheshire and the Vixens, but they could be revamped. Have Shiva be the ambiguous will she-won't she kill this time. Bring in Talia. Elaine can come play. Let me have a femtastic comic!

What to dump:

~ Gratuitous cheesecake art. Draw the women with spines, with muscular thighs that touch. Make the porn about competence, please.

~ Story lines to support Batman, Nightwing, Robin, et al instead of focusing on the Birds.

~ Canon. Strip it down, make it book-only continuity. As in all the cast can be off faffing around in other titles but those other titles DO NOT IMPACT the Birds title. (can all of comics do this? I like it better that way)

~ Het-Shipping on panel. I don't want to hear about Oliver or Dick or Tim as romantic partners.

What to find:

~ Writers that are women, nonbinary, or genderfluid.

~ Artists that are the same.

~ Creators of both stripes that are not confined to the WASP dynamic.

Take it back to the concept of Oracle finds a problem that, if handled NOW, will be a small problem, not a League problem. Canary is the field lead, and she takes on teammates as needed to fit the scenarios. But she leads. Even if it is Diana of fucking Themyscira. The cues she takes come from Oracle, and yes, you can go back to them sometimes disagreeing on Dinah's field methods versus what Babs thinks she should have done.

Think of how many copyrights DC could renew by going through their rolodex of lady characters to toss in there?

And that, my friends, is what I would do with a Birds of Prey book.

[yavieriel]

@forerussake tagged me in a first lines meme, but I'm terrible at actually fucking finishing things and publishing them, so I'm doing a WIP-inclusive variant.

Rules: List the first lines of the last ten (10) stories you published worked on. Look to see any patterns you notice yourself, and see if anyone else notices any. Then tag some friends. A first-lines meme!

1. He flees the ruins of his body, and darkness encompasses him. Here, actually written and posted in about an hour yesterday.

2. The wind that pushed Melkor’s poisonous fumes back from the battlefield carried an achingly familiar scent of power, shimmering blue in the edges of his vision. Bind, which I have started desultorily prodding at again. There's a much longer but very piecemeal version still unpublished.

3. Olorin had appeared at the gates to Ingwe’s garden that morning, quiet and grave, and Ingwe had known at once that something was deeply wrong, the worry he’d felt since Melkor’s release coalescing into certainty. Manwe/Ingwe with a somewhat different take on their dynamic that my usual. A sequel of sorts to this fic by @gloriousmonsters, though I feel like the premise stands reasonably well on its own.

4. Varda has always loved teasing Ulmo, coaxing him out of his frigid solitude with her warmth and brightness. OT3: The Water Cycle, aka the Varda/Manwe/Ulmo fic. I mentioned this concept to @fireflypersona years ago and I still want to write it, but for now I have exactly three sentences.

5. The destination of the caravan was the court of a petty king who made his wealth selling slaves to Mordor, and so could afford its cargo of rare wines, polished gems, furs and fine linen from Gondor and points further north. I've always been a sucker for the classic premise of "Legolas is captured and enslaved and meets a stranger (Aragorn) who rescues him and they fall in love". I've read a lot of takes on it and always been unsatisfied one way or another; maybe someday I'll actually flesh this out. Very importantly, involves Legolas consensually acting as Aragorn's sex-slave to avoid blowing Aragorn's cover before they can escape, so like... fake dating turned up to eleven+fuck-or-die.

6. There was something different in the forest, something strange. The very long, largely canon-compliant Manwe/Ingwe fic I've been working on off and on for years now, spanning from Ingwe's first meeting with Orome to the War of Wrath.

7. When the evening meal is finished, Fingolfin retreats to his rooms. The practicalities of ruling are done for the day, set aside for rest and, sometimes, the more tender responsibilities of a lord to his people. I have a lot of nebulous feelings about nonsexual elven D/s relationships and fealty kink and occasionally try to work out what I think that would look like by writing about it.

8. It had been an absolutely miserable day at court so far. An Edrahil/Finrod/Barahir fic that I've been cowriting with @absynthe--minded, although it's been a bit neglected for awhile since iirc we hit a sticking point where neither of us were really happy with it.

9. Yavanna speaks to him a soft murmur of concern, the uncertain rustle of branches directing his gaze to the roots of Laurelin spreading across the crown of the Ezellohar, where a mote of gold is cupped within the high ridge of one curving root near the trunk. Another Manwe/Ingwe thing, meant to be a one-shot-ish thing set in the same universe as Pantie by the inestimable and much-missed Emily en Rose. Ingwe visits Valinor for the first time and much to his dismay, discovers that he's an omega by going into heat. Working title: "I'm so sorry Ingwe".

10. Valinor had always had a surfeit of exotic creatures - things that had long since vanished from Middle-earth, or lived far to the south or east of Beleriand, and some that he suspected were merely charming but not-quite-successful creations of the Valar that couldn’t survive without a little assistance. The thing where I've been faffing around with the idea of Finrod/Namo and/or Amarie/Finrod/Namo.

Feel free to ask questions about these if you want more of them, and/or to DM me for the googledocs link if you want to read whatever draft I have and comment on it there.

[goldleaf-art]

Fic Writer Interview

(I’ve been focusing more on writing than art lately so why not struggle to answer these questions instead of struggling to write fic!)

Tagged by: @avi17

Name: goldleaf/gold

Fandoms: LotR (like a zillion years ago, from 2010 -2014 I wrote a lot of Aragon/Faramir and no I will not be linking to them due to cringe-factor, ha! They are 100% still publicly viewable though), Hannibal, Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, also currently in the middle of like 4 Stargate Atlantis wips so stay tuned for those

Two-shot: I don’t really ever write continuations or series, but I did do a 3-part thing for LotR once with three different POVs of the same situation, and I’ve written a short coda for a long SGA wip I’m still working on because who said I had to do anything in a logical order. 

Most popular multi-chapter: I’ve only written one multi-chapter thing like 8 years ago for LotR, so I guess it’s the most popular by default! Not sure if drabble collections count, but if so my Hannigram flash-fic collection (and my Hannibal stuff in general actually) was my most popular.

Actual worst part of writing: It’s not even like, the ideas part, or dialogue, or like, any of the content per se, because even when I’m stuck there it normally comes back if I do something else for a bit. It’s just SITTING DOWN AND TYPING. I have the most monumental mental block over just, GETTING STARTED. And I mean, not just starting a fic from the blank page stage - starting any work on anything I’m working on, every single day. Picking up my train of thought from where I left off is so huge a thing I psych myself out every time (even though every time I do sit down I get into a flow at some point anyway so the faffing is usually needless.) I’m procrastinating working on fic by writing this post right now! 

How you choose your titles: okay this is the second worst part of writing. I either take a line from the fic or just make up something that sounds clever but is ultimately meaningless honestly, by the time I’m getting around to the title I’m exhausted so it’s never that deep, ha. 

Do you outline: like, vaguely? I'm historically a pantser though and through, but I have started noting down stuff I know needs to happen later on and in what order, if it’s a longer thing, whether I stick to that or even remember what the story is about is another matter. I fell into this trap with my current wip - had a vague plan, got to like, 20k and started having a crisis because none of it made sense and it took a lot of rewriting and throwing stuff out and editing forever to sort it into coherence, and it’s finally turning into a story? I hope?! 

Ideas I probably won’t get around to but wouldn’t it be nice: I literally can’t think of anything because I've been so out of the fic game for so long generally speaking. I guess at the moment I'd love to write the perfect post-series longform SGA fic because god, free-rein on plot and canon and the potential for just going wild is infinite (and also I really secretly enjoy the IOA/Earth bureaucracy stuff) but Written By The Victors already exists so

Callouts @ me: step away from the comma key, gold. also stop shitting on yourself; you’re not that terrible a writer and all the crap you worry about is stuff no-one else notices. unrelenting perfectionism benefits no-one.

Best writing traits: uhhhh, haha. I think I've a decent eye for metaphor and descriptive language.

Spicy tangential opinion: not really that spicy but if you don’t like something you’re reading you are allowed to stop reading it.

Tagging: I’m not sure who’s not already been tagged out of folks I know who write so if you want to fill this out consider yourself tagged! :)