#((I will probably need to limit these sorts of questions because they're a lot and are usually the ones that take me the longest))

[wvba-ringside-gossip]

"Greetings sirs and madam! I am William Dubois, humble servant by day and boxer by night. Us gentleman heard about your opinion of the ladies and were curious about what your thoughts were on us!

Thank you kindly and, please, if there is anything I may do for you, do not hesitate to ask! Farewell"

- William Jean Dubois

"Mr Dubois! Wonderful to see you! I remember you from our meeting at the house!" "Jazzy, the question, remember?" "Oh! Yes, apologies! AHEM!"

"So, Of course, I have to mention yourself! I love your attitude and your commitment! It's admirable my good lad! And Kitty, gosh I don't know what it is, but I love his devotion to his pets! Now THAT is a good friend. If I had to pick a least favourite...Oh jeez, I am sorry but I just do NOT like Claude, the way he acts just so...well anyways, yes, those are my picks." "Hooey! I didn't have to think about this one too much! My beautiful boy, Gear! I just love him so, so much! He's a sweetheart! A real charmer! And always knows how to cheer me up! Similarly, I love Peach for almost the same reasons! He's just such a goofball! Me and him love to gab about all the boys from time to time! It's always a hoot!"

"привет! Soda Popinsky here. I am here to translate for Sonya so there is no confusion! Sonya has told Popinsky that her favourite boxer is...wait really??...O-okay, okay. She like Grimm and Seo...she says that she likes Grimm's eerieness...I find that hard to believe...Oh! And apparently, she admires Seo's efforts to change outside of the ring...да After experience with Robin I imagine it set him on right path...or something. Mhm, I see. Apparently she doesn't like Honey, because his smell actually irritates her skin and she can't work on him like that...so that's why he doesn't come in...hm!" "Ours is obvious! Ey, El?" "Oh absolutely!"

"RAHI!!"

"We love him! He's a true bro that's for true! Great fun for Rugby! And he's just a really fun fella!" "Uh-huh! Super cool guy, who really knows how to make everyone feel like...uh what's the word? Whah-no?" "...." "Did I botch that?" "Yes, but it's okay! We can work on it! As for our least fave-" "That BIRDMAN, FUEGO! The way he flirts with all the ladies, no matter where 'e goes I swear he just gets me all angry all over, and for what!? HE'S A BIRD! I COULD KICK 'IS ARSE WELL AND PROPER!" "...Could you?" "...No, but that's beside the point" "I just think he's a little...too playful with the ladies...but hey, we have our fun, messing with the lights alongside Cody!" "He does well with 'em birds though...I guess? So I suppose 'at puts 'im in good taste...only jus' though, I'mma still mess with 'im when I can, Haha!"

[alexanderwales]

Alright, here's my dream Stardew Valley style game, designed for my own tastes.

You come to a small town with the usual twenty to thirty people. It's in the middle of nowhere. It's a fantasy town, and no one actually farms anymore, partly because it's only questionably profitable, partly because a lot of the knowledge has been lost. Instead, everyone uses these magic doodads which are very powerful but also very limited. The tavernkeeper has a doodad that makes him a single kind of weak ale and a single variety of off-tasting wine. The clothier has basically a square mile of linen to work with, and everyone wears her drab clothes. Tools are made from a doodad that the blacksmith owns, not even made of any actual metal, just a material that wears away after a month and needs to be replaced by a new copy from the blacksmith's doodad. People get their meals from the doodads. They get their medical checkups. It's all a bit shit.

Because I'm a worldbuilder at heart, I would have this all exist in the wake of a large-scale war that depleted the town of its fighting-age population, with the doodads being a sort of government program to ensure that more of the lifeblood of the town could be drained away. And for there to be some reason for the town to continue existing, perhaps the government is harvesting some resources necessary in the creation of doodads. That's enough for a pro-doodad faction and maybe some minor drama with them, though I do like the idea that the only reason things are Like This is because there was a war and things got bad. It's not necessarily a bleak town, but there's definitely a listlessness to it, a "what's the point".

So you're a farmer, but no one is really a farmer anymore. Maybe there are a few books, but you don't learn farming from books, you learn it from practical experience; that's a lot of what this game is about. When you start, there's no one to buy seeds from, there's just a bunch of wilderness where farms once stood, now all long overgrown.

So you go out and forage, for a start, and you clear the land, and you pay attention to the plants and how they can be used, and you start in on making recipes with them, maybe with the help of your grandfather's old, partially incomplete books. You find some wild corn that's a descendant of the old times. You find some tomato seeds in an urn. You discover potatoes because you see them dug up by a wild boar, which itself was once a domesticated animal.

In my ideal game, you need to pay attention to the soil quality, to how far apart things are planted, to what crops work well together. Farming is a matter of companion planting and polycultures. You get some chickens by giving them consistent feed, and you keep them around because they're natural pest control. Your climbing beans climb the stalks of your maize. You're attracting pollinators. (From a gameplay perspective, yeah, we probably put this all into a grid, and you have crop bonuses from adjacencies, and emergent gameplay that comes from all that, some plants providing shade, others providing nitrogen fixing.) You're a scientist making observations about the plants, maybe with your incomplete book giving you confirmation on the nature of all your crops once you hit certain production goals or a perfect specimen or whatever.

Cooking is the same. There has got to be a system that I like better than just "combine tomato with bread to get tomato bread". I'm pretty sure that it's some variant of the actual process I use when cooking, which is making sure that things are properly cooked, balancing flavors against each other, adding in a little salt or acidity or umami or whatever. Time in the kitchen, in this game, is often about making meals, ensuring that if you have a fatty piece of meat you have some asparagus that's coated with lemon to go with it. (From a gameplay perspective, I think building the dish once is probably sufficient and it can be automated after that, and building the meal is the same. I don't want to play this minigame every time I'm cooking a dish, I just want to play it a single time until I have good knowledge of the best way to grill a BBQ chicken breast with a homemade sauce.)

But if we're having a little minigame here where we pay attention to how long we're cooking the kale to make sure that it's the right texture, and we're paying attention to abstractified mouthfeel and palette, then we can get something else for free: variation. See, you're not just cooking to get an S grade, you're cooking for people with different tastes. The cobbler has a sweet tooth, the librarian loves fruity things, the mayor cannot stand fish, that sort of thing. From a gameplay perspective, maybe we represent this with a radar graph with some specific favorite and least favorite individual flavors, and maybe it's visible to the player, but the important thing is that player gets feedback and have a reason to strive for both "good" and "perfection" and some of this is going to depend on the quality of the ingredients.

And this is, gradually, how the town is brought back into the fullness of life. You're not just cooking for these people, you're also selling them food, and they're making their own recipes, and all the stuff that's not food is making their businesses not suck anymore. After the first test keg of ale goes swimmingly, the tavernkeeper wants more, a lot more, and puts in an order for hops, wheat, grapes, anything he can use to make things that will improve nights at the tavern. The clothier will skeptically take in wool and spin her own yarn, and then eagerly want more, because how awesome is it to have a new textile? There's a chemist who is extremely interested in dyes and paints, and wants you to bring him all kinds of things to see what might be viable for going beyond the ~3 colors that the doodads can provide.

So by year two, if you're doing things right, you're the lynchpin of the revivalist movement. People are now moving to the town, for the first time in decades, because they hear that you're there and doing interesting things with the wilderness. Maybe there are other farmers following in your wake, but maybe it's just new characters who are specifically coming because a crate of wine was shipped to the capital city. Maybe some of them bring new techniques for you, or a handful of plants from a botanical garden, and there are new elements for the minigames, or maybe some automation for the stuff that's old hat.

I think something that's important to me is that there's a reason for the crops you plant and the things you do. I always like these games best when it feels like I'm doing something for someone, when I can look at a plot of cabbages and think "ah, those are the cabbages I owe to Leon". Where these games are at their worst, everything is entirely fungible and I've planted eight million blueberries because they have the highest ROI.

And yeah, in most of these games, there are other minigames like fishing and mining and logging and crafting, and since this is just a blog post and not a game, I definitely could massively expand an already sizeable scope.

I think for mining the player would use doodads of their own, and maybe you could make a mining minigame out of that, using the same planting tile system to instead create an automated ore harvesting machine that plumbs the depths of the earth (possibly dealing with rocks of different hardness, the water table, and other challenges along the way).

Fishing is a question of understanding the different fish species, what they eat, where they congregate, and then setting nets or lines, since I have never met a fishing minigame I really enjoyed. Again, there's some idea that the player is gaining information over time, building up a profile of these fish, noticing that some of them go nuts when it rains, understanding the spawning season, that they go to deeper water when it's cold, etc.

Crafting really depends on what you're crafting, but if you're reintroducing traditional artisan processes to this town, then people are going to need tools and machines and things. I'm not sure I know what a proper crafting game looks like. The only experience I have to draw on is wood shop, where I made wooden boxes, cutting boards, and picture frames. Since this is an engineering-lite puzzle-lite game, you could maybe do something in that vein, e.g. defining a number of steps that get you the correct thing you're trying to make, but ... eh. I love the idea of designing a chicken coop, for example, or building a trellis if I want my climbing beans to not need maize, or whatever, but I don't know how you actually implement that. There are definitely voxel-based and snap-to-grid games where you build bases, and I tend to find that fun ... but it's mostly cosmetic, for the obvious reason that doing it any other way than cosmetic requires programmatic evaluation, which is difficult and maybe unintuitive. The closest I think I've seen is ... maybe Tears of the Kingdom? Contraption building? But I don't know how you translate that to a farming game. Maybe I should ask my wife about this, because she's always doing little projects around the house (an outdoor enclosure for our cats, a 3D-printed holder for our living room keyboard, a mounting for our TV).

Making an interesting crafting system is difficult, which is why pretty much no one has done it.

And if I'm talking pie in the sky, without concern for budget or scope, I want the villagers to all have a mammoth amount of writing for them. I want petty little dramas and weird obsessions, lives that evolve with or without my input, rudimentary dialog trees that let me nudge things in different directions. This is just an unbelievable amount of work on its own, it would be crazy, but I would love having a tiny little town game where sometimes other people would fall in love. I would like to be invited to a wedding, maybe one that happened because I encouraged the chemist to hang out with the clothier, and in the course of working together on dyes, they fell in love. With twenty people in town and another ten that come in over the course of the game if you hit the right triggers, I do think this is just a matter of having a ton of time/budget. You write tons and tons of dialogue so there's not much that's repeated, you have some lines of conversation between characters that are progressed through, you have others that trigger off of events, and then you have personal relationships between NPCs that can be progressed through time or with player intervention. Give single characters a pool of love interests, have their affections depend on their routine which depends on what's changed in town ... very difficult to do without spending loads and loads of time on it though.

Anyway, that's one of my dream games. No one is ever going to make it, it would be a niche of a niche, and as scoped here, is too much for a small team to ever actually finish, let alone polish. But it's the sort of thing I'm imagining in my head when I think about playing Stardew Valley and its successors.

[stevelieber]

Thoughts on giving critiques to comics artists.

Seeing lots of discussion from students about sour experiences with an unhelpful art teacher, so here's a long, long post about giving critiques.

NB: I have no formal training as a teacher, but I was a student, and I've spent decades giving artists feedback on their work.

When someone brings me a portfolio, I like to establish my limitations & clarify my perspective. My work is firmly rooted in traditional US comics storytelling (i.e., not manga or art-comics.) I can give feedback on other approaches but they should know where I’m coming from.

“We've only got a little time for this, so I'm going to spend that time focusing on things to correct. That doesn't mean you're doing everything wrong, or that there’s nothing good here, but it’ll be more helpful if I identify some problems and show you how to fix them.”

Why? Because for many young artists their entire sense of self worth is wrapped up in being good at what they do. (It was for me!) In school they were probably the best artist in their peer group. But now if they're hoping to turn pro, they’re at the bottom.

Sometimes you know what’s up when you see page 1, but try to keep an open mind. Some build their portfolios by sticking new pages at the back & don’t weed out the old stuff up front, so the work gets better as you go. When it’s like that I ask: “Show me your best 8 pages.”

I ask questions: "What's the goal? Do you want to be hired to work on someone else's project, or to get the story you're showing me here published?"

If 1, I steer towards a portfolio that'll showcase hirable skills. If 2, I look for what tweaks will make that particular story more effective.

"Do you have teachers giving you regular feedback? What are they telling you?" Sometimes a student is getting bad advice. In cases like that, I'll do my best to be extra clear WHY I'm giving them advice that's 180 degrees from what they've been hearing.

“What artists are you looking at? Is there someone you admire or try to emulate?” This often helps me understand choices they're making, and I can sometimes incorporate things those artists do into my suggestions.

I ask myself questions about what I’m seeing. First: Is there a narrative? If not, I make it 100% clear I'm not speaking as any sort of expert. I'm good at critiquing storytelling, but don't have anywhere near as much to offer illustrators or designers.

Can I follow the story? Or am I confused about what's going on? Are the characters and settings drawn consistently? If not, is the artist at least making use of tags (distinctive clothing, hair etc.) to keep the characters recognizable?

Does the artist demonstrate a good command of basic academic drawing? If not, Do I think they need it? Do I focus on "how to draw" or on "what to do when you can't draw?" Is the artist putting the viewer’s eye where it needs to be to tell the story effectively?

(At this point I’m usually doing little doodles to go with my instructions. I scribble out ugly little 5 second diagrams that I hope will clarify what I’m talking about. Or they might make me seem demented. Hard to say!)

Is the artist making choices that are creating more work than necessary? Is there a particular weakness? I once spoke to an artist with a portfolio full of great work when he was drawing animals and monsters, but his humans were amateurish in comparison. I spent that critique talking about drawing people.

A crit can be a grab bag. In addition to big-picture advice, I'll point out tangencies, violations of the 180-degree rule, wonky anatomy, weird perspective, places where the artist neglected to do important research, odd choices in how they spotted black, whatever catches my eye.

I also try to make a point of defining the terms, so that jargon like “tangency,” “180-degree rule,” and “spotting black” don't go over their heads. Find simple, concrete ways to talk about these things, & clarify why it's a problem when they aren't done correctly. Draw diagrams!

Recognize that even a perfectly phrased explanation might not sink in. Some lessons can only be learned when a student is ready, and it might take a year or two of work before they can understand what you were saying. It's good to plant seeds.

Are there other artists who are particularly good at solving the problems the student is trying to solve? I steer them towards that artist's work. And I always recommend life drawing & the use of reference to give work specificity, variety, and authority.

Despite what I said earlier about focusing on what's wrong, I try at the end to find something encouraging to say. And if I’ve really piled on the criticism, I emphasize that I only spent the time and energy to do so because I take their efforts seriously.

If I've done my job right, they'll leave my table with tools to make their work better. And maybe in a few years they'll be looking at some younger artist's work, surprised to discover just how much you can learn when you're asked to teach.

[sciderman]

Quick Question, does Wade need to eat, as in is eating necessary for his survival need to eat? Forgive me if I'm wrong but in my head the way his powers work is all of his cells dying and regrowing all at once, so he wouldn't really need to eat because of that, the newly alive cells already have the energy/nutrients/etc etc. that food provides. Not sure if I'm reading him wrong but I imagine eating might actually make him sick? If they're all regrowing and dying I don't imagine they're actually working to digest the food he's eating, so it would stay there for a lot longer than is probably healthy. It would probably cause all sorts of digestive problems? Please correct if I'm wrong but in my head that's a cause of why he has a low metabolism and that lovely extra cushion, just very curious. <3

i think you might be putting a little too much thought into it,, the comics certainly don't put that much thought into it. wade eats, like any normal guy. in fact, i think it's been mentioned a few times that the reason wade is so high-appetite a lot of the time is because he needs it to heal. just like normal humans. i don't think his body, in the way it's described, works all too differently than ordinary humans do. except that his skin and brain are in constant flux. i know that on paper, they say his entire body is in flux, whatever that means, but, functionally, it's just his brain and his skin. if we thought about all the ramifications of his entire body being in flux, well, that's just about as good of a time as thinking about how ben grimm's organs work now that he's made out of rock. how does he digest food? he still eats! generally, when posed the question, it's shown that, actually, it's just his skin that's rock and his organs are still fleshy and pink underneath. (i don't like to think about it, so we don't think about it.)

i think the way i approach wade - which, you know, definitely isn't how most people approach him - is that, on terms of abilities he's basically normal. he isn't low metabolism, he's pretty normal. pretty average. he's getting soft in places the same way any man his age with his diet would. it's just that in typical circumstances, his body would be healing from injuries and he'd be, you know, fighting, doing backflips. doing whatever this is.

his metabolism works in overtime when he's pushing his body to the limit. when he's healing from injuries. since he's not doing deadpool stuff, his body is getting all soft. in the way any normal human who is not doing backflips and healing from injuries might.

in a same vein, i know his wiki says "super strength, stamina" yadda yadda, but i don't think so. i think, sure, he's definitely capable of feats of strength and stamina that no normal human would be capable of, but not because he physically is that strong but - that he can push his body beyond what normal humans can, because a normal human worries that if they push themselves beyond their limits they'll suffer injury. but wade doesn't care how many muscles he pulls or bones he breaks. so a normal human couldn't stop a helicopter with sheer strength without sustaining irreparable damage. but wade can. not because he's, like, as strong as spider-man, but because he can take the damage.

i think that's why i kind of write peter as being kind of wary whenever wade says something is "n.b.d" because he knows wade isn't super-strong, and things aren't actually "n.b.d", and that it costs wade just as much as it would cost any normal human, it's just that wade's convinced that he'll heal. ergo, no big deal.

peter knows wade tries to diminish the strain that he's under, and doesn't like peter to know just how much harm or pain he's feeling - whether it be physical or emotional. but peter knows that wade suffers. just as much, or more than any normal, frail, not-blessed-by-spider-bite human being. and so peter tries to protect wade, just as much as he would any normal, frail, not-blessed-by-spider-bite human being. healing factor or non.

i do think the thing that keeps wade's healing factor fighting so hard is that it constantly has something to fight. i think, in my head - in a way that some might think is tragic, but others might think is bittersweet, that if wade doesn't keep exerting himself to his limits and having to heal from physical injuries and, say, decides to retire and live a normal, docile life where he's not putting himself into the line of fire all the time then - well, his healing factor, not having to work so hard, eventually starts to slow down in the same way his metabolism does. his body doesn't have to fight so hard anymore. it gets lazy. he puts on weight, he ages. like any normal human guy. he grows old. the cancer does, eventually, beat out his healing factor. he dies. like any normal human man.

BUT! if he DOES have to put the suit back on, and get back into form for any reason, to say, i don't know, protect eleanor from her inevitable stupid future superhero shenanigans, then i'm sure his drive to be an unbearable dad for his daughter for the rest of all time will keep him from dying a slow, humble death.

RIP to peter, though, eventually. (though i do think, with his spider-longevity, peter could live well into his 100s. I think he'd look amazing, even in his 70s. like cher. (if he doesn't get his stupid ass killed prematurely.)

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

idk if this is something you would answer but how do you unlearn shame of being horny 😵‍💫

hi anon,

this is a complex question. unlearning shame of any kind can take a long time to sort out, and will be driven more by internal work you do to challenge and shift your own thinking than by anything else.

a good place to start may be by doing some reflection as to what you find shameful about being horny in the first place and working back from there to recognize sexuality and desire as morally neutral things.

for instance, I get a fair number of people asking if it's okay to think about real people that they know when they're horny, or masturbate to fantasies about those people. they feel a lot of shame about this, as if they're causing harm to these people by imagining them in sexual scenarios. but making up funny little scenarios in your head to nut to is a harmless act that only you will ever know about. it's not like whipping out your dick (gender neutral) and masturbating at strangers on public transit; what you do to get off in your private time only impacts you.

a problem would only arise if you decided to start treating your real, actual acquaintance, not the imaginary sexy version of them, differently, for instance by making untoward comments about their body, treating them as if they are obligated to be interested in spending time together or having sex with you, or, god forbid, telling them in detail about your sexual fantasies. now you're doing sexual harassment, which is inappropriate because of the hurt and discomfort is causes the recipient. being horny isn't the problem here, it's how you're treating another person.

people also feel a lot of shame around many other types of fantasies, especially if they involve dynamics that are off-limits or illegal in real life. often, the worry seems to be that being aroused by these imagined scenarios is akin to expressing support for these things to happen in real life.

listen: sexual fantasies about rape are some of the most commonly reported among cis women, and that's not because tons and tons of cis women secretly think that rape is a cool thing that should happen more. the people playing Baldur's Gate 3 and fucking Halsin while he's wildshaped into a bear aren't all chomping at the bit to commit a sex crime against a real animal. noticing that "teenage" characters on TV played by actors in their 20s and 30s are hot does not make anyone a pedophile. fiction is a safe realm to explore and enjoy things that we would never in a million years want to see happen in real life. I love Batman, but I can assure you I would not be a happy camper if a real-life billionaire started running around doing vigilantism in a fursuit while endangering a gaggle of teenage sidekicks.

and if you want to explore some of the stuff you're into in real life, awesome! great! there are ways to go about negotiating a lot of different kinks safely and responsibly (although probably not the bear thing, sorry about that). the world is full of people who want the experience of being stalked, beat up, kidnapped, and sexually assaulted - all mediated through pre-negotiated arrangements with people that they have chosen to enact these fantasies with them. so what is there to be ashamed of in that situation? sure, the situation you're engaging in might sound scary without proper context, but so do a lot of things. a stranger cutting open my skin, very likely causing bleeding, and leaving me with a mark that I'll have for the rest of my life sounds scary, and it definitely would be if it wasn't a situation that I agreed to! but that's also what getting a tattoo is, and that's an experience that I love so much that I pay for the pleasure. nothing to feel bad about there as long as you're playing safely!

listen: there's nothing wrong with being horny. the human sex drive is a completely natural one born from biological need that makes getting off feel good. there's no more sense in feeling shame about being horny than there is in feeling shame about being hungry or needing rest, although people do of course manage to feel bad about those as well. regardless of what causes it, when you feel the shame well up you have to push back on it and ask yourself who actually directly benefits from you feeling badly about yourself in that moment, and who is actually tangibly hurt by the actions you're shaming. and if the answer is "no one," move it along!

[petit-papillion]

2023 Qatar GP Post-Race Interviews

18 drivers (not counting SAI and HAM). 1 so ill he could not finish the race (SAR), 1 taken to medical center and excused from media duties (ALB), another to medical center after almost passing out after getting out of the car (STR). 3 to podium ceremony/cooldown room. The remaining 12 drivers all had to lay down on the floor and seriously cool down, before finally making it to the media pen (although 1 had to leave to cool off more after answering only 2 questions (HUL)).

Here are some of the comments made by the drivers:

"By far the most physical race I've ever experienced. I felt close to fainting in that race. I've never experienced anything like it before. I had to ask my engineer to give me encouragement just to try to take my mind away from it. I do a lot of heat training in the sauna and so you push your body to the limit and sometimes you just need to get out of that sauna. And that's sort of how I felt from about lap 20. I opened my visor for the whole race and it was hot air, but it was better than no air. It was brutal. I was so sick in the car. I wasn't physically, I wasn't sick, but I felt ill."

- George Russell

"I was feeling ill, lap 15, 16, I was throwing up for two laps inside the cockpit. And then I was like, ‘Shit, that’s going to be a long race.' (...) It was just like 80C inside the cockpit this race. I don’t think we probably do the best job in terms of not keeping the heat in the back, but dissipating it inside the cockpit where the driver drives, and I think that was probably the reason today why we felt so bad."

- Esteban Ocon

"Especially with the g-forces, when you have a lot of dehydration, you can drink but the drink is more of a tea than anything else because it’s at 60C-plus, so it’s extremely difficult to hydrate yourself and again with the g-forces, you don’t see as well. The track limits we’re speaking about are [the difference between just] centimetres at 280km/h; in qualifying when we’re fresh it’s difficult to respect them, but then at the end of the race it’s a nightmare."

- Charles Leclerc

"You don't want to be passing out when you're driving at 200mph down the straight. And that's how I felt at times. Any hotter, I think I'd have retired because my body was going to give up."

- George Russell

"Extremely hot. Even from the beginning, I put my helmet on before the start of the race and I was sweating. It definitely didn't get any better once I was driving! Very hot."

- Oscar Piastri

"I asked my team on the radio if they would tip water over me in a pit-stop, but it was not allowed. My seat was burning hot and felt my right side was burnt by this heat. We have to think for the future -- maximum temperatures or maximum humidity... In football, they have water breaks, but we can’t have that, can we?"

- Fernando Alonso

"It's ridiculous. These temperatures -- everything goes blurry. The last 25-30 laps it's just blurry in the high-speed corners. Blood pressure dropping, just passing out, basically, in the high-speed corners with high loaded G-forces. The kerbs are now painted because they're worried about punctures. I couldn't see where I was going because I was passing out. I was fading in and out. The temperature was too much."

- Lance Stroll

"The feeling is like torture. I would say it was harder than Singapore. Just because the temperature in the cockpit started to be almost too much, I think it's getting to the limit and someone is going to have a heat stroke."

- Valtteri Bottas

"It was crazy. I had to consistently open the visor to breathe, actually. It's just too, too hot. Obviously, I don't want to open the visor because sand also comes through the visor and I could feel that sand inside my eyes, but if I close it's insane the amount of heat I felt. I don't know if other helmet manufacturers are the same, but for myself, it was tough, and if you drive behind another car, it's even worse."

- Yuki Tsunoda

"I think some of the guys who are struggling today, they are extremely fit or even fitter than me. Just the whole day, it's like you walk around in a sauna and in the night, the humidity goes up. The races are quite long. But it's not the only place...a few places are like that. Singapore is almost like a two-hour race and it's very, very warm. I think it's also quite on the limit of what should be allowed. So there are a few things to look at, but this was definitely way too hot."

- Max Verstappen

"We're in a closed car that gets extremely hot in a very physical race and it's frustrating.. I guess on TV, it probably doesn't look very physical at all. But clearly, when you have people who end up retiring, or are in such a bad state, it's too much. For the speeds we are doing is it is too dangerous. I know this race is later on in the season [in 2024], it will be a lot cooler a few months later but it’s something that needs to be talked about and I’m sure we’ll speak about it as it shouldn’t have happened in the first place."

- Lando Norris

The 2023 Qatar Grand Prix, everybody.

Sources: The Race, Sky Sports, Fox Sports, ESPN, Sports Illustrated

[elumish]

keeping in mind the strategic/operational/tactical failures discussed in your earlier post, what would be the major failure point of the worldbuilding in iron flame? feel free to spoiler tag. is it the nature of the enemy and the common public narrative about that?

Okay so even though I finished Iron Flame fairly recently, I have also read a lot of books in the interim, so this may be a little general and may not get every detail totally correct. I'll stick all of my thoughts under a Read More, so if you don't want Fourth Wing/Iron Flame spoilers, just skip this post.

Strategic: To be totally honest, I didn't have a huge issue with the strategic-level worldbuilding of the Empyrean. I think the question of why dragons take part in this whole thing and also why dragons vs. griffins are totally neatly divided by country borders that are relatively new is not clear and sort of a problem, but I could mostly suspend disbelief there.

It definitely is not the most well built out/robust strategic worldbuilding, but I was basically fine with it. My feeling basically boiled down to "it didn't make me actively annoyed so I lived with it and can't currently think of a major issue." Also I like dragons.

Operational: Okay! So!

I found the entire organizational structure/setup of this entire world absolutely baffling to the point of being incomprehensible.

This probably doesn't need to be said, but I will anyway: a major goal of a military is to have as many trained fighters as you can. Attrition is one of the biggest issues faced by militaries (other than logistics) and the more people you are starting with, 1) the more you can do in general and 2) the more people you can afford to lose.

This means that you really want as close to 100% of your potential fighting force to survive training. Even if you only view people as cannon fodder, literally the point of cannon fodder is to put them in front of the cannons, not kill them in training.

I know the argument presented in the series by Violet is that it inures them to death so they can keep going when their teammates die, but that is terrible for a military. Yes, people need to be able to keep going when their teammate dies, but the training system has them killing each other. They are incentivized to kill each other! And so this school is literally training them to commit friendly fire incidents. Do you know what happens in a military that trains its soldiers to commit friendly fire incidents? They all kill each other and can't work effectively as a team. And being inured to that? That's just PTSD! You are just fucked up!

So having this military school system where they need to kill each other to win makes for a dramatic story but is an absolutely awful military training setup.

But also these are (or should be, if they had a non-awful system) highly trained members of the military, which makes them extremely valuable and also extremely expensive. People who fail out should just get stuck in a different part of the military instead of basically being killed.

And actually to that point, this whole setup would make much more sense if they had the equivalent of basic training and then had people specialize, the way they do in the real military. You absolutely want your military forces to be interoperable, and they are not even a little bit in this world.

Also why the hell don't these people use more ground forces? The number of dragon riders is limited to the number of dragons, but you can just have as many infantry as you can logistically sustain. Set up an effective border defense.

If you look at the traitor people (I can't remember what they're called right now), sticking them in the elite fighting force school also doesn't make any sense. I know they gave some in-universe reason for it, but especially because of the incomprehensible "if more than three of them are near each other then we can't magically surveil them" system if they were actually viewed as a security risk, they shouldn't have been allowed anywhere near the military, much less in the dragon forces.

They're a literal flight risk! There is absolutely nothing keeping them from defecting en masse. They can't be surveilled when they're together! Also they could commit friendly fire attacks! None of it makes any sense!

I also never really understood why they were keeping the real enemy a secret and why there was such a concerted effort. It didn't seem like the military leadership/king got any real benefit from maintaining a massive conspiracy to...kneecap their own military force.

The funny thing is that since finishing Iron Flame I've read basically all of Rebecca Yarros's other books, which are basically all contemporary romance, and she writes a lot of military-adjacent books, and they generally don't have this problem. Her husband was (is?) in the military, and she seems to have a decent understanding of it, so I'm not sure why she threw that all away for this.

Tactical: Okay so this is a lot related to the issue of "why are the trainees incentivized to kill each other" but Violet's ability to poison her way through her sparring didn't make any real sense if they was any point to the sparring. She should have just been made to spar with some instructors. And also they should have had some real fighting training. Though again that's more an operational issue.

Violet definitely had a lot of Plot Strings (the plot "coincidentally" moving her to the right place at the right time to do something only she could do): especially, that she (the person who happened to have the father who knew all of the plot-relevant things for some reason) happened to get magically soul-bonded to Xaden (the person leading the group that happens to know the truth about everything). I understand the whole situation with her mother, but her mother didn't control the soul bonding.

Overall the issue on a character level was more of a "wow this person just happens to have/be exactly what we need at this time" (the prince! who was just there! until he was extremely plot relevant coincidentally just when we needed him!) but each character was mostly believable taken in isolation.

[kooki914]

What do you think will Toriel's relationship with Mrs. Holiday be like? A foil situation maybe? It's kind of strange that for a family so closely tied to the Dreemurr Toriel never has talked about any of them. Wonder what she actually thinks about Noelle?

All good questions, honestly! I believe Toriel isn't really the type to seek out super close friendships with people to begin with (her friendship with Sans seems to almost be an accident in both worlds), and Rudy mentions how their families have drifted apart over the years. I feel like part of this can be attributed to her and Asgore's divorce (as him and Rudy are close, breaking up with Asgore probably made stuff awkward between Toriel and Rudy), but another part is also Dess' disappearance I think (her and Asriel were close, and it's been hinted that after she disappeared, Kris stopped hanging out with Noelle too, and it might've given the parents less incentive to stay in touch with each other overall).

On the question on mayor Holiday and Toriel specifically, I DO kind of see them as foils already? Toriel is a smothering and loving parent while mayor Holiday is strict and cold. The one thing they have in common is they're both reactionary (Noelle being afraid her mother would take away her console if she saw her crying over a game, contrasted to Toriel taking Asriel to church every day for a week because of a first kiss), and they both seem to have a need for control over nearly everything. With mayor Holiday it's not even subtle, while with Toriel it's less overtly "control freak" vibes and more specifically someone who's so used to having all responsibility on her shoulders alone, that she doesn't even notice she's doing it to herself most of the time.

If they were to be proper foils, I'd like if it were an extension of the themes around freedom and control, honestly, and not even in the parental sense. Deltarune seems like it has a lot to say on free will vs predeterminism, and I think marriage - holy matrimony - is an interesting vessel to explore that through. Toriel as someone who ended her marriage for personal reasons, which can be misconstrued as selfish if you don't take into account her feelings and needs as a person, contrasted to mayor Holiday who seems to have an iron grip on her family's dynamic, which can be misconstrued as people-oriented if we fail to take into account the effects that has on Noelle and Rudy (and possibly even Dess when she was around). The Holiday household seems pretty toxic, with Rudy constantly in the role of mediator, Noelle in the (psychological) role of "adaptive child" (see The Entire Snowgrave Route for why that's horrendous), and mayor Holiday seemingly in the role of judge, jury and executioner.

Basically, Toriel as someone who liberated herself and mayor Holiday as someone who refuses to let others be liberated, sort of. A hint of it can even be seen in how they treat someone like Asgore. Toriel privately shittalks him but isn't really cruel to him to his face (which gives him the wrong idea, sadly), while mayor Holiday is "lenient" with his rent payment while being clearly cold and cruel about his personal plights. Toriel is someone who wants to move on and make as little of a mess as she does so, while mayor Holiday could be someone who prioritises a "safe" stasis over any kind of change to the detriment of everyone around her. Toriel is "mean" but empathetic, mayor Holiday is "giving" but cruel - possibly another commentary about how being "nice" isn't always a good thing, how some people do it out of necessity (Toriel) while others do it as a manipulative tactic (mayor Holiday), and how overall issues are always more complicated than they seem. More complicated than someone who, say, just tells you to "sell more flowers" would think they are, based on her limited willingness to see from anyone else's point of view.

(This is offtopic but this is really interesting symbolism to me: if we look at Asgore giving people flowers as a metaphor for giving people love and attention, *selling* more flowers wouldn't even directly help him, in a narrative sense. He's giving Toriel flowers and she keeps throwing them away, EVERYONE does, because they fundamentally don't need or want them. Asgore is someone the community doesn't need anymore, and the mayor's solution to that is "put a price on it", because to her (I speculate) ALL relationships are transactional. She thinks his problem is that he's TOO loving, that he's TOO giving, rather than that hes throwing his love into an endless black hole that will never return the gesture. Anyway, that's enough rambling about Asgore on a Toriel post, sorry!)

Oh, and I nearly forgot to answer: I don't think Toriel would have particularly strong feelings towards Noelle? Toriel's nice to every kid she knows, but I think the inverse, what Noelle thinks of Toriel, is a more interesting question. Knowing Noelle's issues with mother figures, does she see Toriel as aspirational, or does she think Toriel is faking it and using kindness as manipulation (like mayor Holiday may be prone to doing)? Is Noelle weary of Kris' mom, hence not coming over to their house often, or is she nostalgic about the bond their families had and remembers Toriel more like an aunt than a mother? Since we know she's scared of her mom, is she vaguely hoping her own parents will separate, or did Toriel set a "bad precedent" in her eyes and she dreads her family being pulled apart further? All very very interesting questions, in my opinion, and I hope we see more of the Holiday/Dreemurr dynamics as the story goes on.

[kouyou-arc-when]

Hey, this is a great ask and I am so sorry for not replying earlier. I am responding like this because I actually broke the character limit since I'm dumb -_- I've written a lot of posts about this on reddit, and many people came up to me and asked me something similar. Your line of thinking is good. Regarding Dazai:

So, the thing is - to properly diagnose any personality disorder, you need to talk to that very person to understand their inner mechanisms. There are certain behavioral traits we can observe from the outside and make some guesses based on that: for example, Dazai's broadly dented empathy and why that's often found in people with ASPD.

However, for many other personality disorders it is very difficult to conclude much without the person saying ~I feel x because of y. I do c because of b.

Why? Personality disorders are internal structures that cause a person's behavior to be challenging to either them or others. To understand these mental processes is much more demanding than seeing a person just feels sad or anxious, to explain it simplistic terms.

The key behind many disorders is to know WHY a person is doing what they're doing. This one thing changes whether a person has x,z,y,t,n or whatever condition.

An example: BPD and CPTSD are often mistaken for one another. Same as with BPD, CPTSD, Autism and ADD in women, but BPD and CPTSD tend to have the largest "overgap", you can even have both at the same time. That's because many of the outside observable symptoms are the same.

An example: unstable relationships are a symptom of ALL of the above, but BPD is sort of...an outdated PD according to many specialists due to the fact that it was used as an "everything" disorder, where people with socially unconventional emotions were dumped. That's why you'll find two people with BPD that are almost nothing alike.

However, even if we hold to classic diagnostic criteria, let me show how the same symptom can be a product of entirely different circumstances.

For example: Someone with BPD will have unstable relationships due to an extreme fear of abandonment. Someone with Autism may have unstable relationships due to differences in communication styles Someone with ADHD will have unstable relationships due to various circumstances: emotional regulation, executive functioning etc.

So really, the outward result may be the same, but the cause is different.

However, now, typically the main reason someone could have BPD is either due to extreme splitting, favorite person behavior, numbness and/or abandonment issues.

Dazai 100% has "favorite person" syndrome going on with Oda - the way he idealized Odasaku and then devalues everyone around him in comparison is pretty clinical - doesn't mean their relationship isn't lovely, but it's certainly something a therapist would take note of.

It's no shocker Dazai has unstable relationships, but we don't 100% know why he does what he does.

That's the whole thing Asagiri said - the character is meant to be like a donnut, where you don't really know what's in the middle - so it's extremely difficult to say which PD fits him for sure, probably even more difficult than the average neurodivergent character. In my opinion, several interpretations of Dazai are simultaneously valid due to the fact that you could assume multiple personal struggles within him, and come to a reasonable conclusion.

Does Dazai have abandonment issues? He says he always loses everything he wants, is EXTREMELY bitter over Ango, and definitely shows some levels of "splitting", especially in how he treats Oda vs Ango, Akutagawa vs Atsushi etc etc.

I'm pretty confident he has PTSD, and everything that comes with that. He certainly has a personality disorder too, due to the fact that a lot of his difficulties stem from his personality, and not just brain chemistry.

Kunikida says that most of his emotions "seem" like an act, which raises a lot of questions to what is even happening on the inside. Asagiri said Dazai is really only himself in front of people like Oda and Fyodor. That version of Dazai is...much less cheerful than with everyone else.

I don't personally think Dazai is autistic since he has a good hang on social cues and overall communication. Mamoru Miyano said PM Dazai was still learning to communicate with others back in his Dark Era days, but it wasn't that he couldn't do it - he was just not interested in learning it.

I feel like Asagiri gave Dazai this "unrealistic" trait of being primarily isolated because he's extraordinarily intelligent (which is not how geniuses tend to feel irl, most of the time) but I always feel like there is something more to it.

There is definitely some /disconnect/ between Dazai and "normal" people, where he doesn't fully seem to understand certain things, he falls short there. As someone who has CPTSD diagnosed, I get the impression he maybe has a similar thing going on as many of us: A extremely traumatic experience disrupted a lot of normal emotional and cognitive processes, and now he's both extremely hypervigilant and unable to snap out of that "shellshocked" state. He needs to "perform" conventionality, and being a normal person.

In one wan chapter, he "made a joke" that you start doing one bad thing after another, and suddenly you feel nothing at all. That's the trademark numbness in both CPTSD and BPD.

There was this TDIPUD moment where he talks about how a personality is just a bunch of unstable premises that survive to uphold the basic instincts of the human mind - but how it's easily destroyed for that reason. This is a scene where he tortures the guy, and I was like "wow, I really get it". Severe trauma can just destroy the very structure of your personality, because extreme pain just numbs everything within you. "You" as a person can't survive.

BPD is also related to an unstable sense of self - which could be connected to the former paragraph. Sometimes lowered empathy is also a byproduct of BPD, in fact, the thing is that both BPD and CPTSD come from trauma 99% of the time. They're shockingly similar disorders.

So, does Dazai have BPD? No idea. He could also be schizoid to some extent, which is funny, because Franz Kafka had this disorder, the author that inspired Asagiri's nickname.

For now, I'd just leave at he has CPTSD for sure

Most of these disorders are very broad descriptors, and it's difficult to label most humans in a way that will genuinely encompass what their experiences are. Most of the time, these diagnostics are used to match a person with the best treatment available, or to explain what they're going through - so I don't think there is a perfect diagnosis for Dazai aside from PTSD, but he's definitely extremely neurodivergent. Thanks for reading <3

[bimboficationblues]

what are the differences between marxism and anarchism?

one is based on the writings of Karl Marx and the other is based on the writings of Jean-Luc Anarquis

the respective ways in which they annoy me

it's difficult to get precise because anarchism is notably more expansive, which is sort of inherent to its nature. Marxism is thoroughly modern and often emphasizes its breakage with the previous radicalisms and socialisms that influenced it (while also being explicitly based on the models and preoccupations of a specific guy or set of guys). and although a lot of anarchism is to some extent also modern and similarly birthed out of 18th-century radicalism, it has a claim - much like communism outside of Marxism - to a longer, more extensive intellectual and political history. not to mention these two are, both being forms of socialism, kind of on a gradient (communization theory is a good contemporary example of a synthesis of the two). any attempt to kind of boil down either, and framing it as a binary in the first place, is going to miss a lot.

to bang my metapolitics drum: goals should be derived from values, and strategy and tactics are derived from both. I feel like you're probably familiar with the strategic/tactical disagreements among Marxists and anarchists (parties, cooperatives, state power, etc.) because they're...fairly obvious, so I'm more interested in emphasizing that first process.

there are (or at least can be) a number of overlapping values between Marxism and anarchism, even if the substantive content can vary. I think a notable breaking point is the central object of their ire. Marxism is interested in the rule of capital and its representatives, how this distorts and deranges social life, and more broadly how class conflict emerges from different methods of organizing social needs in ways that are destructive/irrational/restrictive on flourishing. I think anarchism's attention is towards processes of obedience and submission, how is it that people come to be positioned in hierarchical and coercive dynamics and either lose or surrender their personal and collective liberty, and how the state/political organization act as the chief source of this repression. I think there's obvious linkage here, and I wouldn't say they're mutually exclusive, but where you place your emphases matters and is going to lead you to different assessments of goals.

they primarily split on the question of what to do about political power, which I would suggest is related but non-identical to the break over what to do about political economy. assuming a revolutionary scenario (which not all anarchists do, see the individualist strain derived from thinkers like Stirner which I am somewhat influenced by, but this is the conventional tale of the Bakunin/Marx split): should political power, conceived as a weapon of class rule, be seized in some capacity before we seek its full abolition, or should this mode or conception of politics be abolished through the act of making revolution?

again, there's kind of a spectrum of answers here. I think how you flesh out the substantive content of specific values will inform where you land on this question, of exactly how to get to statelessness. fwiw, I think nobody has really cracked the problem of the state as a force with its own inertia and limitations for forming a desirable society vs. the demands of a defensive revolutionary position, but I think recognizing that it is a dilemma is more fruitful than just pretending it doesn't exist or like a clean answer has been handed down from on high by our predecessors.

and, to some extent, there's also a disparity (though not universal between the camps) on the matter of whether a post-capitalist society should have things like markets - not all anarchists are necessarily communists. not all Marxists are either but they usually at least pretend to be.

anyway, I think there's obviously a lot of other historical and ideological differences and tensions for a variety of reasons, but I think these are some of the most interesting threads right now. in conclusion,

[goodluckclove]

CRIMEEEEEE

TELL ME THE CRIMEEEE

So I think this is from when Sleep Deprived Hangover Man invited the internet to ask them about the crimes they committed as a youth. I will be honest, this is not a super great thing I did. But because the statue of limitation is up and honestly none of the crimes are really - significant? They're just weird. I was an angsty, turbulent, manic youth.

And it turns out, I'm an equally turbulent adult. I tried to list the weird semi-crimes I've done in my childhood, and it sort of turned into a guide on how other young people can kind of break the law and get away with it. Maybe not law. Policy? Yeah, so it's not great and I'm putting it under a read more.

Disclaimer, since this is still technically my author page: I do not think any minor should do most crimes without just cause. Like within the legal system the trouble it could get you in sounds like it could really set you back for a long time. I actually don't even think you should immediately implement my advice across the board without practice and introspection and observation. It's actually a way harder skill to cultivate than people might expect, but if you can it will help you for a long time for things other than crimes.

Ideally you don't do it. If you want to, learn how to tell when the right time to do it would be. Don't make a point to inconvenience people more than you have to, both because that's a nice thing to do, and because it improves the odds of you getting away with it. I need to stop telling young people how to do crimes. Or do I? I don't know. If anyone has questions about my philosophy and experience you can ask and I'll say more.

I am a professional weirdo. Let's do this.

Let's go in a vague order!

I was suspended for terrorist death threats in the third grade. I do not believe this is fully my fault but it is a thing that happened.

I shoplifted a pretty decent amount, but not in a way I think any other youth would find cool. I stole candy and pens. But like GOOD pens.

I used to carry glitter glue on me for the sake of writing poetic phrases on various surfaces

Once I walked into an empty business lobby and moved around some plants and furniture, and then I left. If there was a camera there I probably created a strange story.

I generally trespassed a bunch of places all the time. All the time, straight up. If there was an open door or unattended hall that I wasn't supposed to explore I'm absolutely exploring it and taking whoever I'm with with me. I learned pretty quickly that I was charming enough to pull off being caught and getting myself out of it without any consequence. Literally, if you aren't actively causing trouble and just wandering around someplace you know you're not supposed to be, just tell someone who finds you and asks questions that you're lost and you aren't sure where to go. Like maybe you thought this was a way to the parking garage or the bathroom. Assuming I wasn't stealing, causing damage, or shouting slurs, this has worked for me 100% of the time.

Literally, if you do crimes that aren't crimes, you should practice being genuinely nice

Not fake snarky nice, like actually polite and respectful

You didn't realize you weren't supposed to be hanging out in that lot or in that parking garage. You were just trying to find a place to sit and chill. But yeah, you'll leave.

Yes, in retrospect walking down the lightrail tracks wasn't a safe or practical idea. But you took the wrong train and you genuinely didn't know how to get back and this was the only idea you had. You're just trying to get home. Look, you're even buying a ticket (I like never did that as a youth holy shit)!

a teenager is not going to win a fight with an adult who perceives themselves an authority. I don't think you should do whatever adult authority figures say. I do think that you should learn how to navigate your way out of conflicts within spaces in a way that means you can still use that space

if you break a rule and, instead of fighting, take the honest stance that you didn't mean to do that and, in fact, you actually need help from an Adult Authority Figure for a slightly unrelated thing that doesn't actually matter to you (directions to a place, maybe).

I genuinely just wandered around wherever I wanted and this always, always worked for me. I'm really good at looking confused and like I need help, because most of the time I am actually confused and need help

You are not in a sitcom and being sarcastic and snarky to a person that catches you trespassing will not not to anything but make you think you're cool. They'll still make you leave, and now you can't go back to the place you explored because you're the person that started shit instead of the person who got confused and made a mistake and apologized and left.

Adults in authority positions automatically assume a young person in a place/doing a thing they aren't supposed to do will turn it into a conflict. If you genuinely, honestly respond with respect and curiosity, I almost guarantee you'll get away with it. Fucking say you've never tagged before and you weren't really sure if it was still a crime in a place like this, but you get why the person is upset.

Offer to clean your own tag. Like not ironically. Ask if they have some supplies or if you can come back. Be entirely serious, say you're realizing it wasn't a good idea and you kind of regret it. This doesn't have to be true, but it will rattle a security guard or manager far more than if you call them a fascist.

They might yell still, but if you give them nothing they can justify as a reason to keep yelling at you they're actually going to look like the weirdo to themselves and everyone around them

thesis: misdemeanors are a lot easier to get away with if you are unafraid to look like you're naive and willing to learn and adapt. You might feel like it's a blow to your pride, but in the long run you will be able to do way more questionable shit. i came to this conclusion when I was 14 years old and decided I'd rather do weird shit than have the adult minor authority figures think i'm a peer or a worthy adversary, because neither of those things would happen anyway.

Okay so this just turned into a guide on how to do a misdemeanor. I should say now that there are crimes that are bad. Even tagging, something I truly enjoy, does create more work for employees and sanitation workers. That's frankly why I like ways that are easier to remove than spray paint and postage stickers if it's something you want to do.

And I'm not necessarily pro-shoplifting as, like, a hobby? I don't think it's great, mainly because if you are caught it'll probably lead to you being banned from the store you stole from. Which, if you're young, can be pretty hard to hide from the adults in your life. And the shaming that results from doesn't seem worth whatever you took. I still have a mug I shoplifted from Target, and I am not thrilled that I stole it, because it reminds me of a time in my life when I felt so shitty I decided to steal something to feel in control of a situation. And that sucks.

Compare that to moving furniture in some random office and then walking way. That's so fucking funny and I do not regret doing that at all. Imagine you're looking at security footage and you see that. That's some cryptid shit.

Young people - if you are weirder and nicer about it, the amount of stuff you can do widens extensively and you can potentially confuse adults who work otherwise boring and stressful jobs for a long time to come. Case closed.

[pepperf]

Sending this ask to a few tua accounts!

Diegolila is probably my favorite ship in the show, but I've been thinking about this a lot lately. What would you change about their relationship in season 4? Obviously they're not in the honeymoon phase anymore, and they have three kids, so I feel like naturally they would go through a rough patch. But what made me sad in season 4 was that none of it got fixed. The five/lila relationship aside, it was weird to see Lila be just completely disconnected from Diego and not come to any realizations about her relationship with him, especially because she IS a deep character and she really does love him. Plus, I don't completely agree with her being a housewife either. It hurts to see them fight and stuff because I feel like they're 2 characters who are really in sync with each other and who make each other better people, but it hurt a lot more when their arcs ended in them basically not really loving each other anymore.

TLDR how would you rewrite their relationship in season 4? Would Lila still be a housewife/Diego a delivery driver? Who would try to fix the relationship first? Why would the relationship go through the rough patch in the first place? Is it because they're both just tired of each other/suburban life/kids? Or is it something else? Would they try to fix it in the first place?

Sorry this is a really long ask, but I love all your tua takes and I feel like they ripped off Diego and Lila in the worst way this season. Would love to know your thoughts.

Extremely belated reply to this, because @lochrannn answered it so well and I couldn't think of what else to add at the time - but I've been thinking about this recently, and now I do have some thoughts!

Honestly, I'd like to rewind the show back a bit further, to the start of s3. I wouldn't have had the pregnancy plot for Lila, I am not a fan. Love it in fanfic! Have written it myself! Came around to it for those two because they were just that chaotic! But as a canon plot, I think it both limited them, and also cemented their relationship too soon. I wanted them to have a lot more uncertainty for longer, more back and forth. I would have had Lila gone for longer - Diego hadn't even changed his clothes by the time she came back! He needed more time to fret/pine/let all those stupid emotions come to a nice simmer, and then Lila returns (her time apart from him was excellent, on the other hand, no notes). Then - conflict, sex, reconciliation, surprises, reconciliation v2, etc.

And then in s4, I would still have had the time jump, for practical (Aiden) reasons, and still have had the D/L kids - but giving them a little while to just live their lives together, child-free. And I would have kept the fact that their first kid was totally unexpected, lol. And all of that could happen off-camera, it doesn't need to be filmed, just there as backstory. Then I would have started s4 in a sort of similar position, in that they would be having some problems (these two are MEANT for conflict lbr), but they would both be sneaking out to do vigilante/spy type stuff. I'm neutral on whether they both have shitty jobs, but I wouldn't have Lila as a full-time stay-at-home mum. And then, plot stuff happens, and they learn lessons, and reconcile by the end of the season - although preferably in a more interesting way than just "talking to some guy" or "being stuck somewhere", something more in keeping with their chaotic natures and weird priorities. And they would adore their kids, this wouldn't even be a question.

Anyhow, that's my take. I don't think it needs to majorly alter the overall story (although I also hate the ending - but that's a separate issue!), but they could've done so much more exciting and unexpected stuff with those two characters, and the actors were wasted on the duff material they were given in s4 especially.

Thank you for the question!

[nitewrighter]

Hey Nite! Just wanted to say that your various librarian posts you've made over the past year-ish that I've been following you on here inspired me to go take out a book from my local public library for the first time in like 15 years! Honestly forgot how good the ~vibes~ of reading in a library were, and I'll probably make it a semi-regular habit for whenever I need a new book.

As a related question, I saw a post on Twitter this morning about how being a librarian (at least in the US) requires a master's degree? I'll admit my knowledge of the day-to-day work of a librarian is fairly limited, but the fact it needs a masters degree feels like a rather high barrier for the position to me.

Ah the "it doesn't look *that* hard, why do you need a master's degree?" question.

Well the thing is, not all of the staff you see around a public library (at least a larger library like the one I work at) are actually librarians. A lot of them are Aides or library assistants--even those working at the desk! And those jobs don't actually require a degree in library sciences because they're more limited in function--circulation, shelving, assisting patrons with library cards... I was a library assistant for a long time before I made librarian, even with my master's!

Being an actual librarian means having the training to run a library both on administrative and a services level. There's collection development, program development, budgeting, but there's also managing, training aides and assistants, professional development, and general advocacy. In Library school, you also tend to kind of get sorted into different specializations--there isn't just public librarianship, there's academic librarianship, school librarians, special collections, archiving--the information sciences really are their own body of sciences. I chose public librarianship because I felt it basically put me on the ground level--it's a public utility, so as far as I figured, it was a means to help the most people in the most direct way. Also in my time at library school, there were people who did have the job title of "librarian" but they were also in way more rural areas or smaller libraries, so they were basically thrust with the title of "librarian" as a kind of probational thing, I think? I think what I mean to say is, it also varies according to the available resources of the community a library serves.

But, TL;DR: There actually is a lot more to librarianship than what you see at the front desk! And honestly the title of master's sounds intimidating and a high barrier, but it's actually a very straightforward course--you do definitely need a bachelor's just to kind of keep up with the academic requirements, but it's honestly compatible with a bachelor's of virtually any background. I completed mine online as an asynchronous course, so it was very flexible with my schedule.

[xiaq]

It sounds like you're good with kids of all ages and I was hoping for advice. I'm going to meet my partner's nephews and niece next month for the first time (all under the age of 5) and I'm anxious about it because I was an only child and I've spent very very little times around kids. Do you have advice on how to make small people like you?

Friend, I have excellent news for you: small people are big people with no filter and less practice in modulating their voices. It is usually very easy to sort out what they like/dislike and then just do the things they like. So my basic advice is as follows:

1. Treat them like drunk adults. A. Talk to them like they're adults--ask them questions about their interests/toys etc. and seriously respond to their answers. None of that baby talk shit. B. Give them autonomy--ask if it's ok before picking them up or hugging them or helping them put on shoes (unless they're going to hurt themselves and you need to intervene of course). C. Don't be demeaning. Try not to laugh if they say or do something embarrassing. If they're hurt, validate that they're hurt and scared, and don't try to tell them they're fine. You have a whole lot of context they do not. Try to meet them where they are. 2. Find a thing they like and do it. Over and over again. Until they get bored/tell you to stop. A good way to start this process is to ask them to give you a tour of their room or ask them to show you their favorite toys. Example from last week: 3 yr old immediately showed me his car collection and laughed uproariously when I drove a toy car up his back, over his head, and then booped his nose with it (while making the appropriate sounds). After the first time he said "AGAIN" so I did this...probably 50 times over the next 10 minutes (and mixed it up by occasionally saying it was my turn--we gotta encourage sharing, you feel--and having him drive the car on me) (We also go to work on using gentle hands for nose boops. The first few were a bit rough, lol). But the point is, he laughed SO HARD every time. And then decided I was good people and took things from there, telling me he wanted to play "fix the plane" in which a plane needs fixing, I bring it into him, and then he fixes it. This lasted another 20 minutes. Small kids are very much about the thing they're about. If they're having fun doing a thing, just keep doing it, until they indicate they're done. A lot of adults will try to hurry kids along when the adult gets bored. Give the kid the space to set the time limits on things they enjoy for once and they'll adore you for it. 3. Thank them for their time. Like adults, kids love being appreciated and getting good feedback. I say "thanks for letting me play with X toy, I really like it." I say "thanks for showing me how X thing works, that's really cool." I say, "thanks for holding my hand while we walked through X place, that made me feel safe." And always at the end of the day/night I say "thanks so much for playing with me, I had a lot of fun spending time with you." Kids eat that shit up.

Also PS. Don't do that bend over with your hands on your knees thing. I don't know a single kid who likes that. To get on their level, kneel, crouch, sit or lay down. Don't loom.

Anyway. Hope this little run-through was helpful. Good luck!!

[krirebr]

Kris!! I have a vamp!Steve question for you, dear friend. (I know, surprise, surprise. This is what happens every time he steps out of the shadows for 0.5 seconds)

Just a little question about where he draws the line with intimacy. I don’t think promiscuous is the right word, but Steve seems to be a pretty open lover. I’m just wondering where his limit is in these types of situations. Like, obviously he was romantic (as much as he can be?) with Ransom and Bucky, and probably several other lovers, but has anything ever happened with Cole or Cutter? Or does he have some sort of boundary when it comes to trusted workers/friends? Is Steve even capable of having friends?🫣

No pressure to answer, I’m just wondering how much weight he puts on actions like that and whether or not it’s something he ties to romance, or he just views it as something that can make him feel good without tying any emotions to it.

Ok lub ya, bye💗

Ohhh, Essie, babe, I love this question! And I've honestly thought a lot about it.

Steve is very much a "if it feels good, do it," type of guy. I don't think he's interested in limiting himself in any capacity. And sex is very much about power for him (just like everything else). So if he can use physical intimacy to gain power in any way, he's going to do it. It's a vital tool in his toolbox. But don't forget, when it comes down to it, his primary concern in any and all situations is himself and making himself feel good. Sex makes him feel good. Power makes him feel great.

Bucky is a bit of an exception to this rule. I don't think Steve would ever say he's in love with Bucky. Love is a ridiculous human notion that he is well above. But I do think he feels like they're two halves of one whole. Human or vampire or whatever else, in whatever world, they will always belong to each other. No matter how far or how often Bucky runs, that will always be true. Just don't you dare ever call it love.

Ok, so now your actual question. Steve and Cutter have never slept together. She is one of the only people or vampires on the entire planet that Steve actually respects. And she respects him back. So it's just not a tool he's ever felt the need to use with her.

Cole on the other hand... now, that is the question, isn't it? Or as Cutter has said many, many times to others in the inner circle "The fuck is going on with those two???" 🤣 Ok, honestly? I'm really not sure. I want to say no. I'm pretty sure the answer is no. Partly because I just can't picture Steve ever being attracted to someone that pathetic (😬 Sorry, Cole). But their dynamic is just so weird that I can't say for sure. It wouldn't surprise me if they had slept together once or twice (or more) at some point in all this. I don't know! One of the reasons I enjoy writing the two of them so much is because every time I do I discover more about their relationship. So, who knows???? 😅 Hopefully, me, one day.

I hope this at least partly answered your question, Essie! You know I'm always thrilled to get to talk about vampire Steve!

[mera-k1]

Mira's 'Commissions' Info!

these are writing commissions for your selfship (yume) or oc x canon ships! they are free of charge. yes, free! there's no catch, i just like writing for fun!

there are a few rules and guidelines i'd like to set for these 'comms' though. they're listed below so if you are interested, please take the time to read them all~

i do reserve the right to decline the commission request with or without telling you the reason for declining. i may tell you my reasoning for declining but if i decline, do not ask me why if i don't already tell you the reason.

-> you must be comfortable with dm-ing me.

this feels like a given because i need a way to communicate with you about your fic! i won't accept if you are only comfortable with communicating with me through the anon feature on tumblr, you have to dm me! the dms between us will stay private!

-> anything is on the table!

this goes for fluff, angst, comfort, nsfw, etc. if i'm not comfy with smth, i'll let you know! nsfw stuff is only reserved for characters or yumeships that are of age. i will not write underage characters in smut! this also goes for genders. i'll write any gender!! poly stuff? sure! just no character x character stuff!

-> this is not solely for paralive or hypmic!

i will write for most any fandom. please ask me first if i know the fandom because it'll be an extreme struggle if i don't know anything about the media you're asking for...

-> do not ask for multiple fics at once.

i need time to write your first one so please be patient!! they will take time for me to write because i have a life outside of writing unfortunately... please allow me time to write!

-> don't post it anywhere. (without crediting me)

i understand if you'd like to share with your friends but please do not post it anywhere and pass it off as your own! please credit me for my hard work. if you are simply just sharing with a few friends, tell them not to post it anywhere without credit.

-> there are only limited amount of slots

i will only have a few (3-4) slots for these comms. this is so i don't get too stressed out! still, be patient as they will be done when i am able to work on them. if i respond to your dm about a 'comm', then that means you've earned yourself a spot in the few slots that i have! if i don't respond, don't worry! you'll be priority when i open the slots back up!

so.. what stuff should you have ready if you're interested in asking for a specialized fic? well...

-> a description of your sona or oc. which would include: personality, their dynamic with their s/o(s) or f/o(s), how your oc or sona looks (can be a description or art!), and any other details that might be important for the fic.

-> optionally, a plot. it'll make my job a lot easier but be warned, the longer the plot is, the longer it will take for me to write!

-> an idea this goes with above but have some sort of idea when you come to me. whether that be like "a fluffy morning" or something simple, it's much easier if you have an idea you want written!

-> answers i'll probably ask you few questions when i start writing the fic. stuff like the pov you'd prefer (if you don't specify) or any other troubles i run into while writing! i might ask about your oc or the character if i'm unfamiliar with them.

-> patience just like art comms, have patience with me! it takes time to write just as it does to draw. please do not dm me asking about it more than a few times. if you ask, i can send you a sneak peek if i have anything written for it but do not pester me to ask if it's done! i will send it to you when it's done.

for simplicity, here's a list of other fandoms that i can write for...

-> a whole lot of popular mangas including... blue lock, bsd, demon slayer, jjk, tbhk, tokyo revengers, black clover, blue period, kaiju no 8, bleach, csm, and plenty more!

-> quite a few games such as... genshin, hsr, zenless zone zero, league of legends, stardew valley, monster prom (1, 2, or 3), and plenty others!

please just ask if you're wondering about a series. i might not have listed it to avoid the list getting too long but i have read a lot of obscure series so it's likely that i might know of it! the series highlighted in orange are only selective characters so be warned! and of course, hypmic & paralive are welcome as always♡♡