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wait hang on do you have rules for how you write your ocs’ dialogue/perspective

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Bro, my unyielding loyalty towards you is totally normal and healthy, I swear. It's just that it's definitely my duty to rip out your enemies throats with my bare teeth. You are the love of my life and I am your most valuable tool. Each night, I fantasize about dying in your arms, covered in blood, and then I close my eyes one final time, satisfied because I can feel your fingers on my face as I take my last breath. Haha anyways

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💌 Commission for @merge-conflict featuring their dearest heart-thief Valentine and Suzan Abernathy - thank you for your support 💌

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wip wednesday

tagged by @meggannn @slayerdurge and @wanderingaldecaldo and I'm tagging all y'all back and also @postmortemvp :3

I've been kinda slacking lately since I've been focused on work but I finally picked up some stuff again and am juggling three different kinds of cyberpunk projects:

writing

still picking at the next chapter of tdto and decided to scrap my previous start and try again while moving around some of the scenes I had planned in the fic. slow going but I think a stronger start:

Johnny knew he had to do something. It had been twenty minutes since V had sat down to scrub her interface of anything that might be used to track her, and in all that time she hadn’t done a damn thing except lean back on the ratty old couch and stare at the yellowed stains in the cracked and sagging ceiling. She was in danger of slipping into the tar pit, and if she did it was going to be a real bitch to drag her out. He’d hoped the moment earlier with the gun had just been a fluke– last thing she knew had been Smasher coming to crash the party. Better a bullet in the skull than getting caught in his grip. But V had been rushing from one hopeless disaster to another since she’d gotten back to her feet, and Johnny recognized all too well the heavy blankness that paralyzed her. She needed some sense knocked into her, but the trouble was that she was dangerously close to bursting into tears.

documence

since I was really enjoying getting into obsidian again for work I finally started writing down a lot of the worldbuilding I've been doing for tech in my cyberpunk fics:

visual art

on my quest to get better at drawing so I can portray valentine properly I've been working through some old b&w references and found one that is 100% valentine/abernathy. still learning a lot about angles and posing and it's slow going but lately I've been chuffed that at least I'm getting better at seeing what's wrong so I can fix it, even if I can't do it right the first or second or third time without using the lasso tool to rotate things

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okay where are the henchwomen

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White tumblr racism is far more insidious than like out and proud racism cause why are you using your autism as an excuse to not view black people as equal to you

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wip whenever

tagged by @elf-trash. was gonna wait until sunday to turn this into a sunday six post instead, but i feel a little bad this next haecceity framework chapter is taking so long, so i decided to share a meatier snippet

Johnny had come to feel like he had finally escaped from a small, cramped house with no windows or doors and moved to a place just across the street, only to find himself constantly checking up on the old house anyway. His new place was clean, well furnished, hell, ready-fuckin’-made just for him, but now that he had a better view of the old digs, he could see some things he hadn’t noticed before that made him ache to return: the strong foundation, or the warm, attractive homeliness when the light hit a certain way. Now that the old tenant had returned and the deed was back in her name, he was fighting an urge to walk over for a quick visit just to check if she was doin’ fine over there. But of course that was fuckin’ impossible. Together, they discovered several things over the following week. Johnny had assumed the things he had inherited from V—her habits, her mannerisms—had worked the same way across the road. “I remember all the notes,” V said when he suggested she noodle around on the guitar to help with her motor control exercises. “Remember writin’ ‘Chippin’ In’ with Kerry. Could tell you all the things you argued about and your acceptance speech at the VMAs. But wouldn't know how to begin playin’ it.” Which was interesting, because he was the exact opposite. Lotta V’s physical habits and ingrained muscle memory had stayed with him, like detritus that had collected at the bottom of his moving boxes: a disinclination toward dairy products, the handling of her guns and cyberware, the instinct to shuck off shoes at the front of the house. But he couldn’t recall a single instance of V doing these things before the Relic, at least not without an active trigger, which seemed to happen less and less as time passed; he just knew them about her instinctively, like he knew he was left-handed. “Weird,” she said simply when he relayed this, and went back to slowly and carefully upgrading her cyberdeck.

tagging @merge-conflict @luvwich @kesla

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on usefulness. on becoming both the blade and the lamb

tumblr user @/divorcefemme // Anaïs Nin // tumblr user @/willowcrowned // Mitski, “I Don’t Smoke” // Lilith Kerr, "bite back" (from unloving the knife)

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💌 Commission for @merge-conflict featuring their dearest heart-thief Valentine and Suzan Abernathy - thank you for your support 💌

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Resurrection

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We need to invent a fandom term for the thing where fandoms build their fanon up and up over hiatus or in between movies only for the thing to come back and for them to get a brutal dash of reality that their fanon was wildly inaccurate to the canon material.

It happens with everything these days and it'd be helpful to have a word for it.

And on a slightly related note, another reason to miss network TV being the norm is that the longest hiatus being like two/three months long Really kept the fandoms from getting Too comfortable with their takes so they weren't massively entrenched when the thing came back. People just used to say that their headcanons got jossed and they got on with it.

Now the TV shows and movies are in the Wrong. And like, there Have been a few actual crimes committed that's true, but they are few and far between and not as common as the casual fandom observer would be led to believe.

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these 3 are some kinda take me back to the night we met and it feels like an eternity i wish i knew you when i was young HELL

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it is honestly amazing how much of writing and editing is just. logistics. like... do i use a name here or a pronoun? if i move this dialogue tag to the middle of this line and break it in half, does the end of the line hit harder that way? what if i move the tag to the front? what if i remove it entirely? ...wait, whose point of view am i in; can i reasonably say this character is appalled, or must i say they look or seem or sound appalled? is this a deliberate action or a step-removed one; is her hand closing on his shoulder, or is she closing her hand on his shoulder? environment environment environment, we need to break all this dialogue up with some narration, the scene is coming untethered. what! are! they doing! with! the rest of their bodies that are not hands! fuck fuck fuck FUCK i forgot we covered this two chapters ago and now i either need to cut this whole chunk or find a reason to reprise the conversation from earlier. name or pronoun? name or pronoun? name or pronoun? move this clause around in this sentence? oh i'll add this phrase-- nope, never mind, past!me added the same phrase two lines down. okay, if i add too much environmental narration it's going to take away from this bit, but not enough and it won't feel grounded. what if i move this to its own line? where the FUCK are their hands?

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Question for my mutuals and anyone that wants to join in and answer.

How do you feel when you see another person using the same name you use, or have used for your character on their character? This can be from Cyberpunk or any game you play.

I bring this up because I came across a post with the name Valaria as the tag for their character. Putting this out here now that I am not at all upset about this. I don't own the name and I'm pretty sure this name was used by many others before me in Cyberpunk and/or in other games/stories.

I'm generally curious how you all feel about names.

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man it's been so nice learning to draw my own character, like after being dissatisfied with how valentine looks in game, the power of being able to put her in situations is incredible. only now I have twice as many planned projects to do skjdjsj

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"He takes the hint" - apparently this new update does what no friend, lover, Samurai member or ripper doc in this universe has previously managed. Quite a feat. (Will never tell him to go away, though, he's my passenger princess for life.)

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the elephant in the room is actually really important for the feng shui of the place so i’d appreciate it if you left it alone