#(ALSO also- you wanted to turn that ask on Delta into a thread (same person lol);;; I didn't see it - did I miss that?)

[perpetualxfire]

« In a way it's reassuring to see that I'm not completely alone here. » (From the fear and hunger sentence starter ask meme, if you are still accepting stuff from it

(Genuinely don't even remember that meme but I'll go for it)

"It's just a delayed pickup; we're trained for this." Pessimism didn't really fit the mission mindset; practically speaking, Carolina tended to funnel fear into frustration, even anger; it gave her the energy to push through it, but also tended to give her tunnel vision. Pros and cons. Seeing the odds stacking up against them while their extraction was delayed again and again... Well. Their odds weren't good, but she wasn't about to bemoan the fact; it's not how her mother would have wanted her to face the end, she liked to think - or, at least, the version of the woman in her mind. "Keep pressure on it. Our closest trackers are still clear."

[be-events]

on monday, november 27th, trainees in the studio delta building are gathered up first thing in the morning, coaches checking in with each of their students before designating them to a shuttle bus. they’re quiet about what they’re planning, just telling each trainee who asks that they’ll explain everything when they get to the destination and that it has something to do with december evaluations.

likewise, sr media trainees are rounded up in a similar fashion, though one particularly chipper coach sing-songs that there’s already less than a month until christmas. some of the trainees murmur among themselves that this might be a hint.

the busses stop in front of the lime entertainment training building, where all trainees are told to enter the building and follow guides to the gymnasium. there, they’re met with a large group of lime entertainment trainees who have also been gathered up this morning. the three groups of trainees keep to themselves for the most part, each staying in their separate groups, while they wait for their instructors to tell them what’s going on. they know that the three companies are on friendly terms, but it’s certainly unusual for all of the trainees to mingle together in one building like this.

“do i have your attention?” han sangmi, the same dance instructor who announced the last special evaluation at lime entertainment, speaks into a microphone, making sure that all of the trainees can hear her before she continues. “there’s only twenty-eight days until christmas! i’m sure that all of you can’t wait to know if you’re on the naughty or nice list. to help make that decision a little easier for santa this year, the training staff at lime entertainment, studio delta, and sr media have agreed to combine forces for a special christmastime charity event— and your december evaluation.”

“that’s right,” yoo daewon of studio delta takes over the microphone, “this month, trainees from all three companies are working together to support the seoul national university children’s hospital toy drive. throughout the month of december, we’ll be running a toy drive. drop-off boxes will be available in the front lobby of every company building, as well as at special events around town. we’ll be assigning groups of trainees to help hand out flyers, monitor the donation bins, and wrap the donated gifts in between your regular lessons.”

finally, sr media’s kim minjun takes his turn with the mic. “you may be wondering how your monthly evaluations factor into this. well, clear any plans you have on christmas eve. on that saturday, all trainees will be dressing up as santa’s helpers and personally delivering gifts to the children in the hospital. as part of our gift, we’ll also be going around in small caroling groups to spread a little christmas cheer to the kids and their families. we expect everyone to maintain their character and to represent your companies—and santa himself—well with this experience.”

sangmi speaks again, “for this month only, all trainees will be sharing lime entertainment’s practice areas to prepare for caroling and acting as santa’s elves. don’t worry, shuttles from sr media and studio delta will be provided to you. all of your usual lessons will still take place at your regular companies, but we want everyone to mix and mingle and get into the jingle bell spirit together here!”

daewon and minjun look somewhere between amused and annoyed at the lime entertainment instructor. however, they open the floor to questions soon after, and soon enough are shuttling their students back to their respective companies.

OOC:

this event is for trainees only and will run until january 4 at 11:59pm. any threads or solos posted after the deadline will not count toward points. please send in your points submission before this deadline.

please use the hashtag #BE:XMASCHARITY for all posts relating to this event.

FOR +5 SKILLS POINTS please write a 4-post thread with another trainee about your muses preparing for the charity caroling event at the children’s hospital.

FOR +5 ANCILLARY POINTS please write a 4-post thread with any other muse that they meet or work with at the donation bins (can be combined with the holiday market event for wannabes).

FOR +3 ACTING POINTS, +3 LIVE SINGING POINTS, & +3 REPUTATION, please write a 300+ word solo about your muse caroling and giving gifts to the children at the hospital.

when you’ve completed all options that you’d like to participate in, please send the following form to our points submission blog:

SUBMISSION TITLE: MUSE NAME - COMPANY - CHRISTMAS CHARITY 2022

preparation: +5 points to distribute to any performance skills (sing, dance, or rap) [ link to thread ]

donation bins: +5 points to distribute to any ancillary skills (presence, aesthetic, choreo, composition) [ link to thread ]

caroling: +3 acting, +3 live singing, +3 reputation [ link to solo ]

[handweavers]

why do u like bioshock 2 more? genuinely curious, i do think the game gets shit on 2 much but imo didnt expand upon the original in a way i (personally) enjoyed, would luv 2 hear ur thoughts

tbh i don't like the idea that games have to "reinvent the wheel" to be considered good, bc its just resulted in games constantly trying to outdo each other and focus on whatever Brand New Thing they can add to a game whether it's graphics or some new button you can press or whatever, rather than focusing on how to tell a good story and ensure a player experience that is impactful or enjoyable. like how a major draw with anthem was the jetpacks and being able to fly everywhere, which was "groundbreaking", except the actual game sucked ass and less than a year after release very few people actually play it. so i don't find it really helpful to measure a game by how original it is but by how well it was executed and the ways in which it impacted those who played it.

& from that perspective bioshock 2 is one of my favourite games, because it took the most striking parts of the original (like the setting) and created a story out of it that i found a lot more emotionally meaningful and asked philosophical questions that weren't 1) easy to answer and 2) felt more relevant and applicable to my own human experience. it ties into my central storytelling philosophy that if it doesn't center love or passion in some capacity i don't really care about it. it took bioshock's setting and elaborated more on the dehumanizing aspects of capitalism and the ways in which people will harm others for their own gain, whether financial or social or otherwise, and the abuse parents inflict on their children and call it love.

subject delta's story has stayed with me since i first played it 6? 7? years ago. bioshock 2's story of a man who was captured and violated and stuffed into this metal suit he's now completely reliant on for survival and brainwashed by some libertarian capitalist dystopia under the sea and put in charge of caring for a little girl who would be violated in similar ways by her own mother, who then murders him when she realises that her daughter and this "monster" love each other as parent and child more than her daughter loves her, who is then resurrected by the daughter when she escapes from her mother as an adult so you can help save her and other little girls from being brainwashed and abused and violated is a 100000x more impactful for me than than the story in the original bioshock, which i would argue is not a story centered around passion or love, at least not in a way that is as meaningful. it's a good story and a good game, but it hasn't stayed with me like delta's story in bioshock 2.

the entire game you're trying to find eleanor, your daughter in every way that counts, and you can choose to become the monster the capitalists tried to brainwash you into being or you can save as many people as possible. subject delta is traumatised but wholly motivated by love for his daughter. through the game you examine the ways in which capitalism dehumanizes all of us, but especially the most vulnerable in society by denying them agency, self determination, an identity. subject delta broke his programming by loving eleanor, he broke his programming to find her and he breaks his programming by defying his "creator" over and over again to do what is right. in the "good" ending, you've saved every little sister, every Actual Tiny Child, from being brainwashed and experimented on and turned into a resource harvesting machine for profit, and you've saved eleanor, and for the first time all of them have the right to self determination. you die, yes, but you sacrifice yourself for them, and you live on forever as part of eleanor and she carries what you taught her with her for the rest of her life and chooses to do good and break her own capitalist programming. she defies her mother and the years of abuse she suffered at her hands to carve her own story and do the right thing by preventing her mother from hurting other children the way she was hurt.

i love subject delta. he physically cannot speak the entire game because capitalism has literally taken away his voice, but hes still able to use his "voice" by impacting the lives of others and making the deliberate choice to do the right thing. throughout the story you begin to understand what they did to this man, who he was before, what they made him do, what they took from him, and it's so tragic and heartbreaking and painfully relevant to our current society. while the game is science fiction, everything i've mentioned is applicable to any capitalist society especially our own. capitalism doesn't want us to be motivated by love or passion, it doesn't want us to do the right thing no matter the cost, it doesn't want us take back our agency from those who oppress us, it wants us to be quiet and subservient and do as we're told because it lines the pockets of the powerful. it's an incredibly powerful story from that angle, but also to approach it as an abuse survivor. your parent might love you, but not in the way you deserve to be loved, not in the right way, and you are allowed to carve your own destiny without them.

to me, bioshock 2 is about saying "no, you do not get to decide who i am, you do not get to erase my humanity" and emphasizes something core to me: loving people and being loved by people is the greatest honour, and it makes everything else we suffer through in this life worthwhile. loving people in the right way, in a selfless way, is a holy thing, and in a world that wants us broken and yielding to stand up and fight for the people you love and do the right thing is worth it at any cost. that entire concept is central to who i am as a person, its fundamental to my perspective and the way i live my life, which is why that same narrative thread in bioshock 2 hits me like a brick, for better or for worse.

[zombutt]

Your military based OCs inspire me to want to make one, but I'm nervous about that kind of stuff being inaccurate about facts D: How do you do it?

Hello!!Oh man, thank yoU ❤️. And YES, join the heist!I will put it under read more; since I wanna answer your question best to my ability, a.k.a extensively.

OKAY, SO, to answer your question: I’d gone through the same ordeal and it can be a struggle. I didn’t know much about the military except for the scarce tidbits you can find online, but, there are few ways you can educate yourself in that aspect:First of all, the very basics. What nationality your OC is, where will they serve, what were they like growing up and what made them join, etc; it might seem trivial at first, but trust me, it’s important.What I suggest doing is, if your OC happens to be, say, British, you can search up reputable British authors (preferably former soldiers or SoO) and pick books specifically describing combat maneuvers. Keep in mind, however, that those are largely made up scenarios inspired by real events; still, they provide valuable insight as to how specific groups operate (a bit of a hit or miss that one, but it’s better than nothing).Then there are authors, who, given their broad knowledge and experience, pile it all up and provide you a guide of sorts. Usually, there’s a thorough description of the inner structure, chain of command, the history behind the unit and the reason for its formation, preferred weapons and equipment, the selection process, and so on. I find these to be immeasurably valuable, especially once you are satisfied with your initial draft.Therefore; if you have an idea already in mind, go with it and then search up the bits and pieces of information online before you supplement it with additional literature.If you want to come up with a soldier from the eastern part of Europe, books detailing the Russian army will do for the most part (the post-soviet countries that is; the military structure’s been largely untouched since that period). The writers/titles I can suggest on top of my mind are:Supervivencia - “CCCP Red Army Special Forces Spetsnaz”Viktor Suvorov - “Spetsnaz”Mark Galeotti - “Spetsnaz - Russia’s Special Forces”William H. Burgess - “Inside Spetsnaz: Soviet Special Operations”For British SAS, I’ve found John Wiseman’s “The SAS Survival Handbook” to be of great use (he has a really extensive bibliography for that very purpose tbf)If we’re talking about hired guns, a.k.a Soldiers of Fortune and all corporate manners of mercs, my two hot takes:Peter W. Singer - “The Private Military Industry and Iraq: What have we learned and where to next?”Christop Kinsey - “Corporate Soldiers and International Security, The Rise of Private Military Companies (2006)”The third option, which can be either a very frustrating experience or a goldmine; join forums where retired soldiers and vets offer their fair share of experience.If you do, keep in mind that people who join these are folks aspiring to become recruits one day; so having me prep a thread in there and explain as to why I did was met with various reactions at the time. Few members seemed weirded out, while others were delighted to see I wanted to be precise in my fiction and were very eager to help. I have compiled a massive doc for personal use thanks to’em, and the experience altogether was very satisfying; everyone was super kind and pleasant to deal with. Lastly; I can offer a bit of a small trivia that might help get you started:- There is a cultural gap between East and West, and that, too, affects the military structure and people’s view on it. I find West to be extremely formal, as they treat the army as a separate way of life. It’s a completely different take in the East; the army is actually viewed favorably upon (same applies to Poland, though we’re right in the center we used to be part of the Soviet Union. You could say we have this weird mixture of both mindsets intertwined together). 

Oddly enough, this also seems to affect how the soldiers themselves tend to behave? It’s a weird statement, I know, but I happen to see Russian/Ukrainian/Polish soldiers much more easy-going and open to discuss the cons and pros behind their job. Westerners usually skip the subject altogether or give very vague answers (especially if they’re part SoF)- Not every special force soldier is a black belt.CQC (Close Quarter Combat) adds up to around 25-36 hours per the whole training course, therefore it boils down to pure essentials and bare grind. Soldiers are taught how to tackle down their opponent quickly and efficiently; it’s all about speed. There’s no such thing as self-defense techniques; that’s the kind of unrealistic horseshit you get from Hollywood movies. Additionally, there are no secret techniques regarding hand-to-hand combat. Krav Maga, despite the popular opinion, is not that special. It’s neither good nor bad, but nothing sets it apart. If you happen to get a hold of a SoF, they will admit that the best techniques stem from… MMA.

I’m dead serious; hear me out.MMA, in all fairness, is a system that compiles the best moves of all available techniques out there. A combination of MMA and BJJ (especially the latter) seems to be favored by a wide variety of Western forces due to its effectiveness. As far as you are concerned, you want to tackle your opponent down the moment you see them (speaking strictly of unarmed combat) - render them vulnerable. For some cool trivia; look up the involvement of Gracie Brothers and Delta Force (and the logos for both; Delta Operators and Gracie Jiu-Jitsu School )Keeping that in mind, it’s worth noting that CQC can be referred to combat that takes place at 100 meters or less; so gunfights are in!- Special Operation Forces are very, VERY quirky people! I noticed everyone has this belief that operators tend to be serious, no-nonsense people that fear nothing and no one.Let me tell you, that’s an exaggerated statement. During my time at the forums, I’ve met a handful of people that claimed to be SoF and few even provided actual proof. Regardless, some of them asked me very throughout questions about the nature of my fic (good morning I want to RP a realistic soldier, huge fan thanx) and apologized in advance in case I found all the attention overwhelming. I asked whether or not a trait like that is common amongst their colleagues, to which they replied that it depends on the person more or less, but it’s not an isolated occurrence! Normally you want to figure out your surroundings and adjust well enough, adapt so to speak; if you can learn something new, they’re all in for it - it may come in handy sooner or later. And they really do grasp stuff quick, fuck me.In general, they are polite, quiet and laid back people. There were one or two cases of somewhat “arrogant” fellows I’ve had to deal with, but it was nothing too drastic IMO.- Soldiers who claim to fear nothing and no one. Doesn’t happen; unrealistic af. In fact, there was this one interview, where a Blackwater executive admitted to having turned down so many potential employees exactly because of that. A man who thinks himself fearless is not only delusional but becomes a liability to himself and his own unit. In fact, most recruitment officers are in favor of hiring already married soldiers; these men will always take fewer risks and make for a more compelling fighting force in the end.- Whether an ordinary ground troop or all-out skilled SoF, no man can singlehandedly cause havoc or prevent it. Another Hollywood trope so to speak; one-man army. It simply doesn’t happen. 

-RPing/writing about soldiers includes, besides occasional gunfights, figuring out basic medical terminology and educating yourself about respective procedures for each sustained injury.- SoF soldiers usually excel at two roles; a single special forces operator can be both a remarkable marksman and a field medic.- Humor is essential - it helps elevate pressure in between skirmishes.

- PTSD doesn’t always boil down to sheer anxiety and sleep insomnia. A PTSD can well enough turn into an OCD of sorts; looking out of a window for hours on end despite having no reason to do so, counting your possessions, hoarding objects of no importance. It can be very personal or right at your face- Some individuals find themselves unable to retire early; the bond between them and their unit, the belief of doing something good (or of putting themselves to better use out there) and constant adrenaline rush are too appealing of an option to refuse. IMO it’s completely normal if you consider the following: those people had worked together for a couple of months and under extremely hazardous circumstances. 

Danger brings people together, it’s only natural; all of you want to survive and help one another while doing so, having formed a prior bond.

All in all, everyone’s different and everything can influence your OC’s choices and decisions, hence why I feel having come up with their backstory, such as nationality and alike, shortens the process significantly; you know where to look at and for what.

Hope you’ve found my lil wall of text useful! In case you’re in need of literature for that exact purpose, feel free to shoot me a message!

[marypsue]

@blogg-saron Just remember: you asked for it.

Reincarnation Blues (95,096 words, published April 2, 2015, completed September 26, 2015)

This fic was the product of an idea that absolutely would not leave me alone. I’ve mentioned before that originally Rosa was the centre of the piece, with Ian as a supporting player and partner in crime in her bid to take over the world by being adorable and popular. Rosa Darling, Taylor Swift’s Evil Twin, crawled fully-formed out of the first time I heard Delta Rae’s ‘I Will Never Die’, at least two months before I ever wrote a word of Reincarnation Blues. 

Ian didn’t actually have a name until I decided to write a short fic based on these characters who just wouldn’t get out of my head; he was a generic, grinning-evil Devil Went Down To Georgia reference with a fiddle but no name playing backup in Rosa’s band and lending her supernatural firepower when necessary. As originally conceived, he knew exactly who he’d been and used it to his full advantage. I decided on 'Ian’ after considering ‘Liam’ as a name that referenced ‘William’, but not as obviously as a ‘Bill’ or ‘Will’, and then deciding that would give the game away too soon. I also just plain didn’t like the name ‘Liam’ as much. It was only later that I found out that the man responsible for the absolutely stunning art direction on Gravity Falls is named Ian. And I just found out now, looking up Delta Rae to see when ‘I Will Never Die’ was released, that one of the band members is named Ian. This is...typical of the experience of writing this fic.

Mira came into the picture after I gave up on finishing the fic I was working on at the time before giving the RB characters free rein on my imagination, and decided to write just a short one-shot, just to introduce them. (Hah.) I’m not sure, exactly, when or why I ended up deciding that Ian shouldn’t have any knowledge of his previous incarnation (I think it was somewhere between Brown Bird’s ‘Blood of Angels’ and the short burst of Alex!Bill popularity), but it ended up being a good decision. It would’ve been around that time that I decided I needed to put him into Alcor’s path in order for his previous incarnation to come out, and that the best way to do that was to put him into the orbit of a Mizar. Deciding to have them date was purely a ‘hey, wouldn’t it be funny if...’, with an added touch of ‘oh man, Dipper would hate that’. Mira basically started out as an amalgamation of Mabel traits and fashion that I like, and a lot of her arguments with Dipper came out of my trying to figure out just what the heck was going on in her head. (Also, her social media presence is a little bit based on Manzi, who Alex was dating at the time, because I followed her on here for a short while before realising we had practically no interests in common and she posted a LOT of stuff that wasn’t cosplay. )

And now that the stage is set:

Chapter One

This began life as a one-shot that was meant to exorcise these characters from my head. Ninety-six thousand words later, we can all see how that turned out.

I wrote a good chunk of this chapter from Mira’s perspective, but it just wasn’t working, and I realised around the point where Dipper flips out that if I wanted to keep it as a short, I needed the readers to know whether Ian was really evil and scheming like Dipper suspected, or if he was just as clueless as Mira was. Now, I think I might have stuck with my original plan and left that ambiguous, because that would be a nice, tight little horror story. On the other hand, ninety-six thousand words later...

Given the opportunity to do a complete rewrite, though, I would adjust Mira and Ian’s introduction as a couple. Their first interactions seem really, really stilted and forced to me now. 

Chapter Two

I actually wrote a short fic for the TAU blog based on a prompt about Ian and Dipper learning to tolerate each other and Ian pitching a show based on Dipper and Mabel’s experiences in Gravity Falls before I decided I was going to expand the, at the time, one-shot into a full multichapter fanfiction novel. It actually was part of what convinced me that I still had a lot of stories to tell about these characters, and that it should be expanded. That short fic also introduced Ian’s prosthetic eye, which he didn’t, at that point in Reincarnation Blues, have. I got to answer a couple of asks with axolotl gifs and feel like a real creative mastermind.

There were a couple times while I was writing the climax that I actually considered killing Ian off, because it seemed more likely with the state of each of the characters and also just so that the Toby plot could still work, but because I had made this short fic of events taking place after the events of RB and Ian was still alive in it, I decided that meant I’d made a tacit promise that he’d survive. I didn’t really want to kill him off anyway, so it made a good excuse when I was weighing my narrative options and they all seemed to be sliding towards Death.

A lot of this chapter was influenced by the surge of human!Bills in the fandom at the time, and especially of human!Bills (and human-shaped!Bills) who had flashy, obvious, fire-based powersets. I felt like Bill Cipher’s real power lay in misdirection - the flash and the fire, in canon, always only distracted the main characters from Bill’s real objectives, and, arguably, what he was really getting out of their interactions. To my way of thinking, it was far more likely that a human Bill Cipher would have some kind of mentally-based powerset, if they had a ‘powerset’ at all, and weren’t merely very quick cogitators who could think big and put themselves one step ahead of everyone around them. At the time, there were precious few authors and illustrators who seemed to have come to the same conclusion - none that I ran across, anyway. (There still aren’t, but the flood of billdip-based Cool Human Bills With Fire Powers seems to have slowed to a trickle.)

It also came in response to Toby, who was invented by the Transcendence AU’s very own Mod Z and exploded in popularity almost instantly. He was a sweetheart, a genuinely good, kind, little kid, who was facing enormous cosmic retribution for a millennia-long previous lifetime as a liar, monster, and snappy dresser. Toby is great, his creator manages to milk all the hilarious irony out of the situation, and there are some authors who’ve done really good and clever things with him. I’ve just never been all that interested in purely Good characters who just keep getting kicked in the teeth by a cruel world, and it struck me that Toby was the perfect setup for Bill to sneak in close to Dipper and do...something vicious. (I don’t think, at this point, that I knew exactly what Bill was planning to use Ian for, but I definitely knew that Bill was planning something, and it was going to blow up spectacularly in everyone’s faces.)

With those things in mind, I tried to imagine some realistic flaws or weaknesses that a near-omniscient, immortal demon forcibly bound to a decaying, imperceptive meatsack might potentially develop. Ian’s anxiety and nihilism(-lite?) and self-destructive tendencies all come from there. I settled on the feelings of insignificance and impermanence as the two major issues Ian had to face mostly because those were two things that Bill had never had to consider, would never have had to consider if he hadn’t ended up human himself, and would never have been able to satisfactorily reconcile with his own omniscience and indelible influence on human history/trail of destruction across several dimensions. It was not long after I settled on this and really committed to it (I believe it was a few chapters later than this, though) that Alex did a twitter Q&A where he talked to a fan with anxiety and...basically laid out that he suffered from very similar fears, and had developed very similar coping mechanisms to the ones I’d decided to give Ian. I initially only made Ian look like Alex for the sake of the joke, but as the fic progressed it became more and more clear to me that, by writing a version of a character who Alex Hirsch had once gotten in a ‘which character are you’ online personality quiz, I had inadvertently tapped a vein of similarity that was only gonna get wider. 

If you’re reading this, Mr. Hirsch: I am so sorry, and I swear that I did not and do not stalk you. I know my icon of cartoon Dana Terrace kinda makes this harder to believe, but still.

Chapter Three

The first Mira-POV scene! Also the first appearance of Rosa!

I think this was the chapter that really cemented for me that I was doing this, that this 'short one-shot' was now a fully-fledged multichaptered fic and I was in it for the long haul. This is the first chapter that starts to set the plot in motion, and the first chapter where I really knew that there WAS an overarching plot thread and where, in a more specific sense, it was going. I believe this is also the chapter where the fic got its title (the previous two oneshots had been posted without titles). 

...her punk-bluegrass act, the Savage Peace...

Oh yeah! I never mentioned these guys again. This was the duo that Ian and Rosa played together in, before Ian left to go into animation and Rosa went solo. The name is a riff on the Civil Wars, another excellent bluegrass duo who split up due to differences of opinion on their future direction. I love the Civil Wars.

I searched last.fm for 'punk bluegrass' after this chapter, because I had a very specific idea about what Rosa's music sounded like (like Delta Rae but with more electric guitar and bass, pretty much) and I wanted to see if anyone else had made it a reality. I did not find what I was looking for, but I did find Wood Spider, a band that plays bluegrass music with screamo vocals. I recommend 'Is It Strange?' because it is a very, very Ian song.

In case you hadn't noticed yet, a lot of the making of this fic was heavily influenced by music. I really need to make another playlist for it at some point.

Also, there's been some confusion amongst TAU peeps regarding Rosa's hair. I intended it to look like P!nk's blonde fauxhawk. Word Of God has spoken.

"He knows what I like and don't like, what matters to me, even things I don't tell him. He pays attention to what I say and do, and he remembers. He just does nice things for me sometimes when I'm least expecting it, and it's always exactly what I didn't even know I wanted."

This line was meant to show how Bill's 'ALWAYS WATCHING!' shtick might, under a very different set of circumstances and put to a different use, actually be a good thing. Post-Escape From Reality and Mabeland, it also takes on a vicious irony which I really appreciate. Successfully predicting what'll be ironic in the most painfully angsty way before canon even gets there: The Mary P. Sue Advantage!

I think this scene is where Mira actually coalesces into her own character for me, rather than 'a Mizar who is dating an r!Bill'. This is where she gets to show some of her own strengths and values, and to oppose and conflict with Dipper on her own terms, rather than because of Ian. I made a conscious effort to make sure this fic passed the Bechdel test, but I feel like even though this was a conversation with a dude, it was equally important in giving Mira a voice and an interior life separate from the men (well, okay, man and demon) in it. It also shows off the two sides of her - she's picked up a lot from Dipper, as evidenced by her nonchalance about cult-busting, but she's also still empathetic and compassionate, as shown by how she handles the kids. She's stuck between Dipper and humanity, and this is the first place where that's really shown, rather than talked about. It's one of my favourite scenes in the fic for exactly those reasons.

The last scene in this chapter is also where Mira and Ian start really feeling real to me as a couple, too. I really think this is just the chapter where I found my stride and all the pieces started to come together.

Chapter Four

I don’t have a whole lot to say about this chapter. It mostly exists to set the scene for what comes later, to get the reader more familiar with the characters, to set the cogs in motion. I am very pleased with Ian and Rosa’s friendship in the first couple scenes, though - I think it’s pretty natural.

Rosa looked up at him, her expression completely neutral. “Beale, I am goin’ to steal your girl.”

At the time I was writing this, there had been - I remember it as several, but it really must’ve been like, three - Gideon reincarnations (and preincarnations) in TAU who had gotten weirdly possessive about Mizars and had caused All Of The Plot in their respective fics by trying to make her their own. We’d also - if I recall correctly - received an ask basically proposing that Gideon’s soul would always do that, any time it came into contact with a Mizar’s, no matter what else might be going on. I...wasn’t a fan of that idea. I believe I’ve mentioned in a previous thing-where-I-talked-too-much-about-RB that Reincarnation Blues’ major theme is determinism versus individual identity. That was why I felt like this was the perfect place to kind of deconstruct that idea that there could be no r!Gideon who wasn’t an epic jerk. Right from the beginning, I intended for Rosa to get fixated on Mira, to set events in motion by doing a bunch of stuff that was beyond the pale to try to ‘steal’ her from Ian, and then to have to face the consequences of her actions. The goal was to see if she could grab a clue, if knowing what was going on and what she had done would give her a chance to look at her life, look at her choices, and make better ones the next time.

That’s right. I was redeeming Gideon before it was canon cool.

(There’s a whole lot I could get into about what I’m meaning when I say ‘redemption’ versus ‘apologism’, but...I won’t, here. Suffice it to say that I wouldn’t have wanted any kind of redemption plot for Gideon - or, indeed, any character, anywhere - that didn’t acknowledge that they started out in the wrong, and, though I usually disagree, I completely understand people not wanting to see certain villainous characters get a second chance.)

“... So - noose joke. Think that can ride, or are the censors gonna flip?"

I made a Mistake here. I was referencing the cut storyboards from Scary-oke where Dipper finds Ford’s ‘Zombie Survival Kit’ and all that’s in it is a noose. It was a suicide joke. (Well, I mean, suicide wasn’t the joke, but - well, whatever.) I should have referred to it as a suicide joke, or chosen a different deadly weapon. Instead, I referred to it as a ‘noose joke’ and it became a meme on the TAU blog, that Ian would be hiding nooses in the backgrounds of scenes all the time.

It was only, like, a month into this that I realised what the noose has historically, in the States, been a symbol for, and that without the context of a cut storyboard presented at a con (which might not necessarily be widely known) and then taken out of the context of a scene where the character is making storyboards (thereby removing the storyboard reference link)...yeah. I have to apologise for this one. Nobody has said anything to me about it, but in hindsight and with some consideration, I would word this differently if I were to rewrite the fic today.

I had a loooot of fun writing sleep-deprived Bill-like Ian here, and I hope to do more of it at some point.

Chapter Five

The introduction of Sun-mi! Sun-mi was a last-minute addition because I realised Mira had no female friends and panicked, and also because NWHS came out and I fell even harder in love with the character of the Author, and figured that tossing an r!Author (we didn’t at the time know that he was named Ford) into the mix with an r!Bill would be fun. This...is why Sun-mi’s role is small (though, I think, still important enough to justify her inclusion) - it was added to the plot post-outlining.

While I was writing Sun-mi, I was thinking of her with a voice much like April on Parks & Rec. This is not particularly relevant information to anything, I just see her as being very deadpan in that same way.

“So, not that one. How about Tam Lin?”

The mention of Tam Lin - one of the Child Ballads, in which a girl rescues her fairy lover on the night his soul is to be sent to hell as a tithe, and restores him to humanity, by holding him fast, and fearing him not - was a blatant nod to how the fic was going to end, and nobody picked up on it. It is also just a great, classic fiddle tune, though, and apparently it's not widely known that it's in the same time and key as St. Anne's Reel and so the two can be played together?

(I also answered a question about what each of the characters would have on their iPods, and said that Mira would have the Kerli song ‘Chemical’ on hers. If anyone had looked it up, they would have found out that it’s got a refrain that goes ‘This love is more than chemical’, which also directly references how the fic ends. I took every opportunity to hide spoilers for this fic in plain sight. It was so much fun.)

Stamped into the starry void around them like an artificial horizon was a massive ring, parallel lines glowing red like gashes cut into the dream to reveal an inferno on the other side. And between those lines, all around the horizon, burned familiar symbols.

Most of Ian’s nightmare is based on what I thought Bill’s experience of the Mystery Shack, from the mindscape, must have been like. This bit, though, is based entirely on a nightmare I had which involved Bill Cipher. I was practically contractually obligated to include it here.

Chapter Six

I have to preface any comments I make about this chapter with a disclaimer. Normally, I loathe miscommunication plots, especially ones where characters who ostensibly love and trust each other just flat-out refuse to listen to the other's explanation of a situation that looks bad. However, that's...exactly what I've written here.

I feel like the saving grace of this first scene is that, one, it doesn't constitute the entire plot, and two, it's more of a symptom of larger, deeper problems that they're having, rather than manufactured drama so that there can be some conflict and a tearful reunion in the third act. Sure, things end up hinging on Mira and Dipper trusting one another, but things are already strained between them, and this one miscommunication isn't the only problem they face, it's just the straw that broke the camel's back. Clearing up this one particular misunderstanding also doesn't magically solve all of their problems. I could, of course, be totally wrong and this miscommunication plot could be exactly as painful as every one I've ever seen on a made-for-TV romcom.

Had this whole thing been a colossal waste of time?

And here we see the product of Rosa's machinations! My thinking behind her slightly-absurd recruiting of Sun-mi to investigate Ian's past lives in an earlier chapter was that she thought that, any negative information Sun-mi turned up, she would share with Mira, and it wouldn't look like Rosa herself had deliberately sabotaged Ian and Mira's relationship, so she'd still have a shot with Mira. Devious.

(It occurs to me that both of the two characters who were the initial inspiration for RB started out as evil masterminds in concept, but ended up being sympathetic characters who got redemption arcs in the actual fic. There's some kind of irony about this.)

Trying to work out how the historical record might represent the Shack so far in the future was also a lot of fun. I know that the worldbuilding on this fic isn't sufficient for something that's meant to take place a full thousand years in the future, that the rate of change is so rapid that the society - and even the landscape - of the world Ian and Mira live in ought to be near-completely unrecognisable. On the other hand, I just wanted to write a fun story about character interactions, and I couldn't really set it any earlier or I'd risk 1) Dipper still having a clear thread of niblings around to anchor him, 2) things not having progressed far enough to actually have something like preincarnation testing, and 3) it being too early for Bill to have recovered from his 'defeat'.

(Also, I'm pretty sure that this, here, is the first use of the word 'preincarnation' in the TAU.)

He was still himself, more or less, he wasn't like Bill - !

Dipper is a little (or a lot) less human in this fic than in some of my others, but the thing is, he isn't really aware of that. This is the scene where it gets hammered home. It was a lot of fun constructing the scene where he eats Ian's nightmare so that it could be deconstructed here, to put all of the pieces of his real motivation and plans on display and show just how much like Bill's his modus operandi has become. (It also explains how he's able to get into Ian's head to offer the deal he does right at the end of the fic.)

Chapter Seven

aka "Shit, Meet Fan".

If you asked Dipper what seeing the future was like, he'd probably say it was like a beach.

I lifted this metaphor from Terry Pratchett's The Carpet People, a book which I strongly suggest for anyone who is interested in high fantasy, slightly deconstructed, and set among a race of teeny-tiny people living in the hairs of a carpet. He wrote it at seventeen and then came back and edited it as an adult. The result is...not quite A Terry Pratchett Book, but also not your average Extruded Fantasy Product Tolkien knockoff. He deploys the metaphor a little differently, and I can't remember how exactly he phrased things, but the concept of seeing possible futures as grains of sand on a beach came from him initially.

"I'm Alcor and I was wrong

I'm singing the Alcor Wrong Song..."

Dipper's apology is, of course, based on the Stan Wrong Song, which I thought was a nice touch to show that he was still thinking of Mira in terms of his life with Mabel in Gravity Falls. You gotta give the boy credit, though, he's trying.

I also think that Dipper will never be over his fear of puppets, partly because of Sock Opera, but also partly because we never got the Labyrinth episode. Until Dipper and Mabel have a siblinghood-affirming adventure in a giant, glittery maze with a mess of Muppets and a David Bowie guy, Dipper Pines will forever fear all puppetry.

"Well, we're all going to die."

Ian is really, really, profoundly bad at being comforting. (Unless you're worried about having embarrassed yourself or messed up your future, in which case, your ultimate insignificance in an eternal and uncaring universe and the inevitable certainty of your eventual complete eradication can sometimes be comforting.)

Ian hummed along as he turned on the faucet. "Dream a little dream of me..."

Annnnd here we go.

I decided that Ian would like folk and bluegrass music, partly because of the initial character concept and the Rosa connection, partly because I thought it was a genre that would remain resistant to introducing synthesised music even in the hypothetical future, partly because then I could make 'The Devil Went Down To Georgia' jokes. I decided he should also be into jazz music mostly because of the incredible His Name Was Billy Mischief, which is probably one of my favourite GF fics of all time and also highly recommended for anybody who liked RB. The author's inclusion of 'Someone To Watch Over Me' was both inspired and led to me looking up more jazz music, which led to finding a surprising number of songs that could be easily read as referring to Bill. It's not jazz, but Alex's inclusion of 'We'll Meet Again' in the finale still made me kick my feet in vindicated glee.

This scene was in the works from chapter 2 onwards, and it's another of my favourites - I think with good reason. I've had a lot of feedback from people that this was the most viscerally effective scene in the whole fic, and somebody drew me fanart for it! It was a little challenging to get into initially, because I was so excited to write it and I had to restrain myself somewhat to keep it taut and tense and simmering, instead of just explosive from word one. I think - I hope - that it succeeded.

Chapter Eight

“I’ll be looking at the moon,

but I’ll be seeing...you!”

I found Billie Holiday's version of 'I'll Be Seeing You' somewhere around chapter three or four and I instantly knew I had to write this scene and use it as a backdrop. I'd love to see this on film; Mira looking through the empty apartment, the slight and subtle wrongnesses adding up as a sinister bass note slowly builds from under the song to nearly drown it out, only to vanish on the final line as the camera overlooks the sink abandoned in the middle of a task and the phone left docked on the wall, letting Billie's voice echo, alone, over the unnatural stillness, before the song ends and all is left in perfect, fragile, ominous silence -

Anyway. Sometimes my mind is unnecessarily cinematic, and sometimes I profoundly regret not being able to score and soundtrack my fics.

“Do y’all mind?” Rosa asked, holding her phone away from her head. “Can’t hear a word my friend’s sayin’.”

This scene was originally even longer and more obnoxious. I really wanted to give people a reason to like and root for Rosa. Okay, so I also thought it would be badass. Thankfully, I have long trained myself to sacrifice cool awesome character stuff when it needs to be sacrificed for the sake of the story.

Are you done laughing yet? No? Okay, I’ll give you a couple more minutes.

Please ignore literally everything I had to say about the wards, because it is all bullshit. I think I said that anything less than an SS-class demon would be bounced back from Mira's wards, and that Ian, once 'active', shattered one of them completely on his way out, but that Dipper could go past them without having any effect on them at all? Which would require him to, like, probably use his powers to recreate them after he passed through...? I don't know how any of that was supposed to work.

I am, however, very, very pleased about opening a scene with Dipper missing Mabel's absolute faith in him, and immediately taking it into Mira accusing Dipper of murdering her boyfriend because Dipper's just such a demon. Juxtaposition!

The 'highlight reel' is equally if not more bullshit than the wards. I think this chapter is where I just gave up on trying to give Dipper a balanced powerset and decided to just go with whatever best served the emotional, character-arc thread. Sometimes you just have to play to your strengths.

Dipper didn't like other people knowing things he didn't. ... If he wasn't that guy, then - well, what was he?

A good brother! A real scrapper with a heart of gold and a will of adamantium! A sarcastic little shit! Dipper's focus on being The Smart Guy getting deconstructed and his realising that that isn't the be-all end-all of who he is was a wonderful good awesome character arc, even if it ended up being kind of understated in comparison with some of the more in-your-face character development that, say, the Stans got. TAU kind of does a similar thing with Dipper's arc, giving him All The Knowledge but making it come at the price of his family, which makes him reconsider its value...but it doesn't address that particular thing in the same way as canon, so I can see Dipper still getting hung up on this even thousands of years later. (Also, there are a lot of interpretations that indicate he may be kind of mentally frozen at the age he 'died', which I kind of love and subscribe to.) Hence, this line!

(I bet Dipper haaaaaaates when, like, The Slang and memes change. He has all kinds of arcane knowledge, but just what exactly the kids are talking about when they say something that looks like a random combination of syllables is beyond even his eldritch comprehension, and he can't figure out the nuances of how the new words are used, and - argh.)

"I tried to set things up so you'd find out something awful about Ian and break up with him so I could date you instead!"

There was a beat.

"That's it?" Mira asked, carefully.

One, I personally still think this is hilarious. 

Two, this is the thing about Gideon - in a world of supernatural, outsized threats, he's really quite mundane! His whole shtick is something that can and does happen in real life! And he's the second-worst antagonist in the whole show! I front-loaded the redemption arc in this fic and gave Rosa a little more self-awareness and a quicker leap to recognising that what she was doing was shitty, so how funny the mundanity of 'I want you to be my girlfriend and I don't care what you think' as compared to 'a literal demon is going to try to blow up the whole of reality' is can really shine, but, like...it's still terrible, and giving it outsized supernatural consequences doesn't make it worse or better than it is when it happens in reality. Do any of these words make sense? Who knows.

My one explicitly lesbian character in this fic being manipulative and predatory in her affections? Mmmmmmaybe not a choice I'd make again. But I do like how this storyline played out.

Chapter Nine

I'm still not entirely sure who knows what about Bill and why. That was another thing that I'd change, given a chance to do a rewrite - I'd solidly establish Bill's position in history, myth, and public consciousness in this particular future right up front. That way, it might actually make a lick of sense when the characters react to hearing his name when there's not...like...any evidence that they have any idea who the fuck he even is.

Don't set your stories in a future where magic has been real for a thousand years if you don't have a lot of experience or interest in worldbuilding, guys.

This is the chapter where Mira is just completely fucking done with absolutely everyone's shit, and I love it.

"...They used to have to take my pulse manually every time. ..."

I decided that Ian wreaks havoc with medical technology because his Ooo Weird Demon Soul Energy is, like, an actual electromagnetic weirdness that hangs around him. This is also why the viewscreen for the peephole goes all fuzzy on him in chapter seven and why, in some extracanonical material, he can't get his storyboard files from his tablet to talk to literally any other piece of technology. It's also why Rosa can tell his energy's 'weird' and why Mira's mom thinks his aura's like a hole.

"... Remember Paloma Heart?"

... "I don't."

I should have mentioned Paloma earlier. That's all.

Brown really did think that he had Ian figured out, that he knew Ian back to front, just because he knew Bill Cipher. ... He wasn't expecting Ian Thomas Beale.

Ian, here, is thinking he's making Brown nervous, making Brown think that he's up against some semi-omniscient, potentially-omnipotent extradimensional being who knows more than he does and can do more than he can, in hopes that Brown will get scared and angry and slip up, give away information that Ian doesn't actually have yet (like how Bill sent Ford that nightmare in the beginning of TLM that really had no purpose except to send Ford running scared for his defenses against Bill, and which also led to the brainwave-encryption machine being destroyed and Ford taking Dipper into his confidences and growing closer to him and ultimately seeding the rift between Dipper and Mabel that ends with Bill getting the rift...). Just how in control is Ian of his own actions here? Debatable, since what he ends up actually doing is getting Brown scared and angry enough and believing enough in Ian's 'powers' to, eventually, let Bill out. Oh, the irony.

Area 51! For someone who's never been big into aliens, I sure have put this dang place into a lot of fics.

(I also wanted to give Mira a chance to one-up Dipper in the Smart Guy department. And do something nice for Dipper. He deserves a bone thrown his way.)

Chapter Ten

Mira is one of the only people - if not THE only person - in this entire fic who has exactly zero ulterior motives. She does exactly what she means to, goes for exactly what she wants to, directly and without hesitation. I kind of love that about her, it's a breath of fresh air.

Here, however, it does probably make her immediate job a little harder.

"It just kills you, doesn't it?" he said ... "Not knowing?"

#getrektIan

I am unreasonably proud of the jet-skate Ladies of English Lit roller derby team as a method of mass destruction.

This scene originally had Dipper taunting Mira about killing mooks lead into the 'mooks' turning out to be magically mind-controlled people, which Mira found out very graphically and horribly when she wrenched the helmet off the guy who tried to choke her out to jam her fingers in his eyes and saw the sigil on his forehead - but that dragged me down a rabbit hole of Is Mira Actually A Good Person etc, and it was both too late to introduce this thread and would have muddled the plot. I might revisit the idea sometime, but then again, I might not.

Chapter Eleven

Janice!!! Janice is one of my favourite backgrounders and I almost wish I hadn't killed her off so quickly. Almost.

I have a boatload of headcanons about how the Society of the Blind Eye worked, how it was originally a secret society designed to stop Bill but Bill used Fiddleford to co-opt and disable it and then used Dipper to destroy it, most of which ended up finding a home in Raising Stakes. This is one of them. There's just no way, in-universe, that the Blind Eye is so deliberately similar to Bill's in design just by chance. (Out of universe, of course, it makes perfect sense for the gravi-team to maintain a consistent aesthetic, but still. My convoluted headcanons can still be supported by textual evidence!)

There was a circle in the middle of the room.

Goodbye, Ian. It was nice knowing you.

He squeezed his eyes shut, and his outstretched wings flickered with stars, surveillance footage, images of the fight that had just happened, an apple tree in a forest of pines, a blueprint, a wide-eyed alien-looking creature...

Dipper's wings flickering is meant to parallel Bill's face flickering in Dreamscaperers, and, like Bill's face flickering in Dreamscaperers, it contains spoilers! The surveillance footage refers to how he and Mira eventually find Ian (through the central control room, on a security tape), the apple tree in a forest of pines is a reference to Henry's antlers and his tree over his grave in Gravity Falls and also a metaphor for him being part of the Pines family, the blueprints refer to the wards on the structural components of the facility, and the alien's just a reference to the fact that it's Area Fifty-freakin'-one.

"For the love of - are you actually twelve?"

Nyahahaha.

I love the bounce castle. I love Mira and Dipper's dialogue immediately post-bounce-castle. I think I have Dipper rip the doors to the soul tree room off their hinges and then later have Mira say she should've closed them, whoops.

I have nothing particular to say about the last scene except that I'm very proud of how it turned out.

Chapter Twelve

The summer Ian had turned fourteen, one of the artists his mother represented had gone triple platinum, a record-breaking heatwave had hit the West Coast, and Ian had tried to kill himself.

I like this scene too. I like montages, bullshit experimental purpley prose, and expressing emotion through place. I also like that this nods to what they're trying to do to Ian - they can't bring Bill back proper, but they can dredge up all his memories, theoretically creating a powerless, more controllable human with all of Bill's borderline-infinite knowledge and no requirement of making a deal or dealing with demonic senses of humour to get at it. All of Ian's own memories bubbling to the surface is part flashback, part the spell dragging up something old and dead and long-buried and dislodging Ian's memories as it rises.

I also should've established Ian's father's death earlier, I think, though now that I'm staring it in the face again I don't dislike it as much as I did just considering it as a concept. I could've mentioned it more concretely earlier on, but bringing its full impact on Ian out here, where everything he's tried to forget is being dragged out of him and everything he is is being stripped bare, is not the worst narrative decision I've ever made.

The soul tree (or ‘tree of knowledge’, as Janice calls it, because haha, it bears apples and it’s a research project) is a product of me looking at what they’re doing to Ian and trying to work backwards, to see what kind of other things they might be doing to research souls, if this is how they decide to deal with Ian. It was also a nice opportunity for a great big hunk of angst, and a good excuse to give Dipper the powerup necessary for all the heavy magical lifting he’s going to have to do. Three for the price of one cool-looking plot device!

“We’re not going anywhere,” Brown said, taking his hand away from his earpiece. “We’ve still got -”

Janice gave him a pitying look. “It’s Alcor,” she said.

Janice is...probably a little bit of an Alcor fangirl. (Not the Twin Souls kind. The watches-doumentaries-about-serial-killers-on-her-days-off kind.) She is perfectly aware of, and starstruck by, the fact that he can kill her with barely a thought. She would just love to get him under a scalpel or energy blade of some description, but she’s also not a complete idiot. No one who’s ever tried to summon Alcor for anything like the kind of research she does has ever lived to tell the tale. She probably just has a wall of newspaper clippings all about Cool Shit Alcor Has Done.

“Wanna know what your future has in it?” ...  He blinked, once, slowly, deliberately, and said, “Exactly three minutes!”

This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It also probably wouldn’t have worked if Ian hadn’t already played at being Bill for Brown earlier. BAM. PLOT. 

Ian glanced over at the timer as Brown brandished the tablet. The last few seconds drained away just as Brown pressed a finger down on the screen.

The house from Ian’s nightmares crashed down around him.

This is another one that I can see as a scene, animated or filmed; the room beyond, the ‘real world’ with the circle and the magitech and the terrified people suddenly vanishing from Ian’s viewpoint when a wall drops in front of it, no, slams down in front of it, shaking snowglobes and pine-tree trucker hats off the shelves and putting huge cracks between the boards, settling slowly into place like it was just dropped by a tornado even as blue light starts to spill up through the floorboards and the cracks start to widen as gravity fights for every board and nail...

Man, I wish I could make the moving pictures. (Though I guess if I’d put my time and energy into learning to make the moving pictures, maybe I would know less about making the words go. And, like, I’ve managed to just blither some seven thousand words about Making The Words Go. So I might actually have some modicum of skill at that by now.)

Chapter Thirteen

Mira hadn’t said anything since they’d left the room where Henry’s soul had been imprisoned, and Dipper was starting to worry.

TAU’s creator and Mod Z mentioned to me after this chapter was posted that I could’ve held off naming Henry as the owner of the soul until Dipper is forced to admit it, out loud, to Mira, and I’m still kicking myself that I didn’t think of that before posting the chapter because it’s a great suggestion and would have been very effective.

“See, at least we just kill people.”

Yeah, I’m glad I didn’t get into the ‘moral dilemma of Mizar’ aspect in this one any more than I did.

“You’re my best friend, you know? And I don’t want to lose that.” She glanced down the hall, back the way they’d come. “But if this is going to work, then sooner or later, you’re going to have to trust me.”

WHOOOOA THESIS STATEMENT

Everything from Mira and Dipper breaking into the control room straight through to Mira landing in the hospital was pretty much written in one straight shot, without stopping. This was the part I'd been itching to write since, like, chapter two, and it was GREAT to finally have it all fall together. The reactions I got to Bill's appearance - even though I think everybody was kind of expecting it by the time we got to this part - were all awesome and priceless.

I do want to make sure it's clear - the whole Bit in Area 51 was set up to approximate the circumstances under which Dipper became demonized. We had 1) an enormous, elaborate spell being worked, 2) ancient spells in the foundation of the building which had been in place for more than a thousand years, 3) all of which were destroyed, releasing all that pent-up power while 4) demonic energy and knowledge was being forced through and into a fragile puny human with an intrinsic tie to the physical plane.

It seemed like it made sense at the time, okay.

"AND PUBERTY! REMIND ME TO GIVE THE EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS THAT DREAMED THAT ONE UP A SWIFT KICK IN THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST!"

I love writing dialogue for Bill. That is all. Most of my favourite lines did actually make their way into the fic, but I still ended up having to scrap some that I really liked, just because I couldn't make the dialogue work with the plot and the other characters. A shame.

I honestly don't think I could be happier with how the scene with Bill in the centre of the circles with Mira turned out. Choreographing it was a bitch, though.

"Give Ian back, you son of a -"

"AH AH AH, LANGUAGE!" Bill interrupted, with a wink. "TRYING TO PRESERVE THAT Y-7 RATING HERE!"

this is my favourite fucking joke in the entire fic

can you imagine how much funnier it would've been if I actually had kept the entire fic Y-7 rated

"Why does everyone keep forgetting I'm Mizar?"

#getrektbill

Chapter Fourteen

I really don't have anything more to say about the rest of the scene in Area 51. I think the writing actually says exactly what I want it to say, how I want to say it. It all flowed easily and beautifully, and I barely had to edit it at all. I was and still am pleased as punch about how it came out.

Everything was floating.

This fucking scene, on the other hand.

I rewrote this entire scene from scratch no less than three times (and it was probably actually four). This scene was a righteous pain in my ass. I had one goal with it - I had to get Dipper to offer Ian the deal that would remove all outsiders' memories of Ian being an r!Bill, in exchange for eating all of the Bill-memories left in Ian's head. Usually, that's a good thing. Usually, knowing the purpose of a scene makes it pretty easy and straightforward to write. 

This motherfucker, though. This scene was like pulling teeth. I'd get about halfway through Dipper explaining the deal to Ian and why it was important, and then I would just stop. I couldn't go any farther. It was like I was on the end of an imaginary rubber band of Actual Ability To Make The Words Go that I could stretch only so far, but no farther, and only with a great amount of struggle, before I'd be snapped back to the beginning and have to try to start again from there in a direction where maybe I could make it to the next scene before I ran to the end of my rubber band again. I tried over and over and over with no luck, no success, and no small amount of frustration.

I don't know what tipped me off to the fact that, one, I had to actually deal with the demons I'd pulled out of Ian's head, and two, there was so much more I could do with the mindscape than the literary equivalent of talking head panels, but once it clicked into place, it was like that imaginary rubber band just vanished and I wrote the whole thing all the way through in forty-five minutes without stopping. It also required minimal editing, and it is now one of my favourite scenes in the entire fic.

A little while after I finished this chapter, I saw a quote (from Clickhole, so obviously fake, but) attributed to Haruki Murakami, which basically said, "If you can set a scene in the basket of a hot-air balloon, do." It was a joke, of course, but I also, since writing this, think it's genuinely excellent advice.

Also, I managed to sneak in references to used-car-salesman!human!Bill, stylised-skinny-smirky-pretty-boy!human!Bill and how I felt he was kind of a caricature and a lot of versions of him that looked like that also flattened out the depth of the character, and to the apocalypse tapestry, which I actually don't think I've seen mentioned anywhere in the fandom since Escape From Reality aired! Huh. Too bad, it was cool.

Chapter Fifteen

...and the forest outside with all of its eyes is burning, burning - 

I just really like this line, I don't know.

The news story about the Nordwext group that's playing when Ian wakes up for the first time is, one, yes, a reference to the Northwest family, and two, a callback to the girls in the factory who Dipper hadn't been able to help back in chapter five. This is him trying to do something that will actually help them and make a difference in their lives, instead of just lighting people on fire from inside out and getting them in trouble for summoning demons.

"... another such facility located under the former Ellens Air Force Base in Idaho."

Ellens Air Force Base is entirely fictional. It was invented for an episode of the X-Files, Deep Throat, where Mulder actually sees a UFO up close and personal (before having it wiped from his mind by the government). I couldn't resist.

I actually researched eye removal for this chapter. It took a lot of psyching up and then realising I could probably start with Wikipedia and click though to their sources without ever having to brave the minefield of Google Suggested Images.

He'd never seen this ring of trees (aspen? Birch?) in his life...

When I wrote this, I had the clearing where Gideon first summons Bill in mind. I also deliberately used descriptors, when Ian looks over and sees he's holding hands with himself, that could apply to either Ian or Bill.

"Oh, demons ... We can deal with demons."

I love Mira's parents.

Guess whooo put in a Twin Peaks reference without knowing basically anything about Twin Peaks!...okay, I could not pass up the opportunity. Besides, you know Ian watched Twin Pines at a formative age, and nearly flipped when he found out they were resurrecting it as Twin Pines: The Returnening.

He’s also a big fan (and friend) of Lauren Mephistopheles, but there is absolutely nothing that will make him actually watch more than ten minutes of Friendship is Prestidigitation. Sorry, Lauren. Some things are too terrifying even for an ex-demon in human skin.

And here we have the culmination of the Rosa Darling Redemption Arc! Ian telling her that Bill played all of them is, as she correctly deduces, a test - if she took the out as offered, played off her own responsibility, he’d know that he really couldn’t trust her to recognise what she’d done wrong and try to fix it. At that point, he probably would’ve had to ask Dipper to remove her memories, too. It’s a lucky thing for both of them that she got a clue!

“State-of-the-art prosthetic.” Rosa clasped her hands behind her back. “This model’s so new it’s not even on the market yet. Which, uh, would mean that technically you’d be part of a clinical trial -”

“A guinea pig,” Ian said, softly.

Just like Bill made Dipper into! I’m a genius.

“You’re not my father,” Ian says at last.

Ian’s father shrugs. “Does it matter, if I’m right?” He puts his glasses back on, light hitting the lenses just so that Ian can’t see his eyes. “Does any of this matter?”

Ian thinks.

“Yes,” he says.

Hi, my name is Mary, and I love Terry Pratchett’s writing.

“You know what,” Ian said, still looking up at the ceiling, at the hoist that dangled over the bed and the dark bulb in the reading lamp, “it’s been - three days? Four days? A couple days since we narrowly escaped death and you haven’t kissed me even once.”

“You haven’t kissed me either,” Mira said, with an affronted look, but there was a hint of laughter in her voice.

Remember how I said they started out forced and stilted? Yeah. I think that was just inexperience and a lack of familiarity with the characters. Let this be a lesson unto me: write the whole damn thing, then go back and rewrite the first, like, until it starts sounding natural again.

“Mira, don’t call me nerdface,” Alcor grumbled, coalescing out of the dark and fussing with his cufflinks.

“Okay, dorkbreath,” Mira agreed, just to hear Alcor’s long-suffering sigh.

Case in point.

Epilogue

Toby!

Everybody loves Toby. I guess I’m no exception. I am a sucker. Also I really wanted to show how the whole Ian thing affected Dipper’s relationship with Toby, while not actually causing it to deviate at all from what had already been established as TAU canon.

“Fragile neurological attachment, huh?” Dipper said, under his breath, and then, loud enough to hear, “Well, now you’ve got me.”

That’s all, folks!

Some more RB-related song recs, before I go: 

- The Garden, by July Talk (This ain’t Johnny Carson/I got thoughts that ain’t my own/I’m talkin’ black souls dressed in red and things that I shoulda never known)

- I Run Roulette, by Boots (I’ve been tricked into a thousand different ways/to slide myself away right down the drain)

- Better Not Wake The Baby, by the Decemberists (make your moan of your lot in life, split your mind half-crazy/gouge your eyes with a butter knife)

- Tic Toc, by Mother Mother (the Sandman told me, there’s no use in listening)

and because shush, it’s a great song and I had it on repeat for writing a decent chunk of the middle bits

- Out Of The Woods, by Taylor Swift (but the monsters turned out to be just trees/when the sun came up you were lookin’ at me)

[psychedelicartwank-blog]

Boarding House Reach: A Modern Record and a chance for something - anything - to happen moving forward.

I has having an argument a few months ago where my opponents where spouting that Jack White has done the same thing over his entire career, that all his music essentially sounds the same, or at least from their perspective felt the same.

I thought their argument was a bit ridiculous, but I could resonate with their central point, and maybe the one they didn’t know how to articulate, that when you put on a Jack White album, you have a sense of what it will sound like.

You know the sorts of sounds you’ll be hearing. Even though there may be new sounds that are a surprise. Most of the structure and feel is a bluesy or garage feel. Although with Lazaretto I thought that Jack White started to break away a little more creatively into some different eras, and it came across like “I’m a big rockstar and I can do whatever I want, here’s what I’ve made.”

White’s new album Boarding House Reach is truly something brand new from the artist and one no one saw coming. It’s something we haven’t seen from a major rock artist in a long time, a stark departure from the old to try and invigorate a new sound, and that poses a significant challenge to his longtime fans, and the critics who could crucify or adulate him.  

This record is a challenge; it poses questions about who Jack White is, what he’s capable of, what you think of his music. It has the highest potential to divide fans and turn people off from his music. It is a break from any sort of niche market where he’s the biggest rockstar around, with his own record press, the nostalgia fetishist, and lover of old-timey Robert Johnson blues or Mississippi Delta… that is betrayed by this electronic and modern album.

This album is a challenge because all of those self-imposed rules with instruments that he plays because they are difficult to play, the technology like Pro Tools which allows for the sound that you no longer have to slave to find, the fellow musicians he didn’t know before playing with, all are reversed. Jack White is challenging himself on this album in the same ways those rules used to challenge him. Now, who is Jack White?  He has gone to the underworld.

The fans reaction to this departure is always where your eyes should look, because this sort of rockstar worship, to a much smaller degree today than say 1975, poses the question whether or not they love Jack White for his songs, or for him and his persona and his artistic sense. Do they love the music, or the man behind the music just as much?

This sounds like Jack White challenging himself, asking: What am I after? It sounds nothing like anything he’s worked on before. He’s incorporating many other genres and sound elements to these songs. Most important though, Boarding House Reach sounds modern. It sounds like it came out in 2018.

That is what is most exciting about this record – we’ve not heard this album before. This is not Icky Thump II, nor is it a throw to lo-fi garage; this is a mysterious, strange, surprising, ambitious, challenge and ultimate judge of Jack White and his music. It sounds like a combination of the most popular genres of today, blended together to find some sort of musical synergy, a common thread to unite each of these exotic flavours.

And with songs that border rap – White is truly entering the underworld, turning all expectations of his persona on its ear. If before Jack White the Holy Ghost was just “makin’ the old sound new again” blues with those obvious influences and mentors of his, today he is trying to look into the future and take tools that are around today to make something for today.

Maybe Jack White looks around and sees everyone trying to recapture something, twist it another way that’s passable enough, instead of doing what gets everyone excited about music in the first place and do what the great bands have always done - challenged the listener. That’s what a new sound does – it swipes the slate clean and allows something to come out of it for a whole new generation of artists and musicians who are obviously still listening to the old blues, and The Beatles, and the standards of popular music, to try and create something truly original.

White knows where he comes from. He’s defined himself many different ways, but now, twenty years in the music world, to say: “I’m going to go completely outside of myself, to the great beyond. I have the rules and now I will break them,” is a stunning bit of artistic courage and flair. Conversely it creates a lot less freedom in the moment, for the chance for renewed freedom for many.

White has said that with The White Stripes, him and Meg, thought of each song has three elements. And that intention created a lot of freedom. But without those conditions it can be very difficult to try and create, because limitlessness is very difficult to create out of.

The risk he took was not one he had to take. The altar he stood was comfortable indeed, and people would have no problems continuing to bow to it, they would’ve been happy and content to hear another Blunderbuss or Lazaretto, and would’ve longed perhaps for Elephant II deep down, but would still be pleased with this new, classic Jack White record. No one would criticize him if that’s what happened, he is just doing what Jack White has always done – right?

Someone new could’ve came along and made this sound, and let’s say would’ve been indebted to Jack White, with those classic minimalistic riffs that are absolute ragers, and then combine that with these modern elements – but that’s the artist of the future. Maybe that person isn’t coming. Maybe Jack White sees that this sound will not come unless he does it himself. Why make this album otherwise? He must crave the idea that there is still work to be done.

That thought process is and has been lost of the major artists of the past 20-25 years. The evolution of artists now is much different. They sign these ridiculous record contracts, with looming obligations, and produce similar material to sell albums, and “give the fans what they want,” (an empty phrase if ever there was one). Over time, whatever genre, it starts to become more accessible, and cookie-cutter, and more of your own style, a self-awareness to the point where it could be parody. Metallica and Megadeth were great instances where they turned thrash to rock, hard 70s rock. It’s just rock.

There are few artists today trying to do this. Compare Jack White to Josh Homme. Homme does very creative projects in his own right, but has never foisted an album like this on his fans. Them Crooked Vultures, an album weird enough that I think will get some influence over the years, was not the shock to the system that Boarding House Reach is, nor quite the re-invention. His album with Iggy Pop and Matt Helders of Arctic Monkeys, was sufficiently strange, but didn’t break any new ground at the end of the day. They were just songs. Of course, that is not to condemn Homme for trying. The “Desert Sessions” are highly sought after bootleg releases of creative material, and would probably constitute Homme and his musical cronies most experimental and “out-there”. But never has Homme asked such a question as White has just done.

White’s reinvention and Nietzsche-esque revaluation of all values, tossing away those ideals that he so highly thought of, creates the superior artist. And the artist is someone Nietzsche took very seriously.  They strike deeper to his character for what he wants to create with sound. You get the senses now that it’s now just about the sound, but about what sound(s). It’s about the marriage and complexity, or lack thereof, and finding the truth from combining these styles. It’s an unabashed, spitting vocal style, with more production and tracks then usual - an array of originality.

I argue that there could be nothing more exciting. An artist of his caliber challenging you musically: what else would you want? Radiohead, is a comparable artist, that usually presents a challenge to the listener.  The progression of their music has evolved to the point where they are difficult to get to know, and are almost their own genre. But it doesn’t feel like White landed here so much as gone off the deep-end.

White is hitting reset on his public life as rocker to put forth a question to his listeners: where is this going? Me as a songwriter and performer, where is this destination that I will land accidentally? And will I want to land there. And also, here’s something I’ve just made.

He’s pushing the puck in a new direction, one where he is merely an accent to the 2018, experimental, looping sound blend.

Rock music is not in a great state right now, especially the commercial end of rock. What is the identity of rock today? Coldplay? Muse? What a sorry state of affairs. The bands I find most interesting are already lumped into their genre and don’t have the oeiginality needed to take the whole music world by storm. These bands are much more like: If you like punk – you’ll like these guys. Psych rock from the 60’s? I’ve got the group.

These opportunities are taken less and less, and that risk is exciting for both artist and listener. People who like rock music should feed off of this energy, and not cling to those morose clothes its worn for the last 15-20 years.  If you’re playing rock nowadays, and playing the guitar, it seems you have to act like Kurt Cobain without the great rock songs. You have to be introspective and quiet, self-conscious, instead of bombastic and like a kick in the face. And that’s rock music at its core.  

Something like this could open the door to new artists who could try something sounding like this. That’s what makes this an opportunity as much as a statement.

Who knows, though. This is all speculation and could amount to little to the corpse called rock. It’s way too soon to know. But this style of record historically has the potential to influence. Maybe more people will listen to Jack White now, who have typically only listened to experimental or electronic. They might like the blend of rock that’s infused in their domain as well.

Even if you don’t like this album, you should be happy he’s made this record. He’s already made those White Stripes albums; if you enjoy them, put them on whenever you like. We’ve reached a time where there is little that is shocking and surprising in music, that the possibilities have been somewhat exhausted, and any major festival will be short on rock and roll.

So, you can take this, take Greta van Fleet, or take your favourite Aussie band at the moment. Maybe by fiat and force something will come around that will strike it on the head, and all the meaningful stuff will pore out again. But without this album that might be impossible.  

The array of possibilities moving forward has more depth than just a few months ago. 

-Michael Menzies

[writesandramblings]

The Captain’s Secret - p.29

“Toil and Trouble”

Full Chapter List Part 1 - Objects in Motion << 28 - As Far as Goodbyes Go 30 - Exit Strategy >>

Despite the great success of the mission, there was no call for an old ship like the Triton to do anything besides what it had done before they encountered Lalana, and the crew of the Triton soon found themselves tasked with their usual assignment: transport and patrol. They dropped off the mysterious lului brick (Lorca was starting to think Umale had gifted them with a fancy paperweight as a joke) and Lorca counted the days until the Triton's decommission.

Three months shrank to two and a half. At Spacedock, construction on the new ship was nearing completion. Lorca began to get reports and manuals on its systems. He devoured this reading material with gusto. Seeing the ship's name on the files was always a thrill. The USS Buran. The ship's schematics were beautiful.

As he paced the bridge, he paused at Carver's station to show her the layout of her future console. "What do you think?"

"Is that a tactile response system!?" She looked up at him, wide-eyed.

He grinned. "Schematics are in the computer. Have Hamid come by and relieve you early and you can review them at the end of your shift."

"Thank you, sir!"

The turbolift doors opened, which Lorca look no notice of (this happened roughly a hundred times a day) until there was a nervous, grating cough.

It was Dr. Ek'Ez.

It was rare for Ek'Ez to appear on the bridge. Kakravite eyes did not deal well with the speed at which stars passed by, experiencing a form of motion sickness, so Ek'Ez tended to avoid any locations with windows. Kakravite ships had no windows or viewports, instead navigating solely by ship sensors. Most people tended to find being on them a very claustrophobic experience. There was some real irony in the fact a four-eyed species flew through the cosmos blindly. It also meant Ek'Ez was happy to be assigned quarters on the ship interior, normally seen as undesirable.

"Captain, if I may have a word?"

They went into the ready room and Lorca directed Ek'Ez to stand on the opposite side of the desk where he himself normally stood, expressly so Ek'Ez's back would be facing the window.

"Thank you," said Ek'Ez. "Where should I begin..."

At the end, thought Lorca, since that would probably cut out all the unnecessary preface of whatever Ek'Ez had come to tell him.

"I have noticed a disturbing pattern in the past two weeks. I have done what I can to determine the nature of this pattern myself, but Dr. Li has been... somewhat less than forthcoming."

"Oh?" Since he had no particular affection for Dr. Li, he already didn't like where this was going.

"It began when I noticed several pieces of equipment had gone missing. Not essential things, mostly backup equipment. I, of course, run a very efficient sickbay. When there are no emergencies or sick crew members, I double check my supplies and backups daily." More information than Lorca needed. "I was able to track down the missing supplies to Dr. Li's quarters. When I attempted to retrieve them, she informed me she was working on a private epidemiology project and apologized for taking the supplies, but her research was in a critical stage and she was unable to return them at present."

Lorca had long suspected Li was secretly going to engineer a supervirus and kill them all. It sounded like she had finally started. He folded his arms and wondered how many hours they had left to live.

"I asked her to share with me the details of her project, and offered my assistance, but she declined. This in and of itself isn't unusual. Dr. Li often has her own experiments running and requires little oversight, but..." Ek'Ez templed his hands together. "She typically performs these experiments within the confines of sickbay, where there are adequate safety precautions in the event of an outbreak, not in her personal quarters."

Two hours, Lorca guessed. They were probably all already infected.

"Then there is also the issue of the nature of the equipment which she took. While most of it does line up with her usual areas of research, some of it... some the equipment she has taken today is equipment designed to treat patients, which is entirely outside the confines of what would be required for research. I fear she may have infected herself with something."

Lorca arms unfolded. That wasn't it. "Shit," he said, and turned and walked back onto the bridge. "Morita! Get... get Larsson and come with me." He turned back and saw Ek'Ez had not moved. "Come on, doctor!"

Morita, Lorca, and Ek'Ez entered the turbolift. "What level are Li's quarters on?"

"Eight."

Larsson met them outside Li's quarters, brandishing a phaser rifle and carrying one for Morita. "What are we walking into?" the Swede asked.

"I hope I'm wrong," was all Lorca said, buzzing the door.

To her credit, Li answered, but the minute she saw who it was, she knew she was screwed. Her face turned white. Lorca advanced on her, driving her into the nearest corner. "Where is she," said Lorca flatly. When Li did not answer, he repeated it much more forcefully, to the point of spraying spittle in Li's face. "Where is she!"

Li collapsed like a jenga tower, knees buckling.

"Sir!" Morita was standing in the entrance to the bathroom. Lorca pushed past her and jerked back with an audible gasp. Moving into a position where he could keep an eye on Li and see into the bathroom, Larsson was equally struck and swore in his native Swedish.

Something was curled up in the bottom of the shower.

Lorca almost tore the shower door off, because while the dusky dark grey-brown shade of the fur was entirely unfamiliar, there was no question that it was Lalana. When he put his hands on her, he felt something else unfamiliar. She was wet. He quickly drew his hand back.

There was no panic, only anger. "Ek'Ez, get in here!" The doctor hastened to Lorca's side and looked at Lalana.

The good news was, Dr. Ek'Ez Ak'vek'mov was the galaxy's foremost expert on lului biology. "Oh my," he said. Ek'Ez's eyes blinked and he pondered. He seemed not to find any reason for haste.

"Well don't just stand there, do something!"

"I will prepare a quantity of biomimetic gel," said Ek'Ez, turning to leave. He had devised an entire set of medical procedures based on lelulallen and everything he knew about lului biology, but he had not expected to be able to test his theories so soon.

Lorca's mind raced. "Wait!" Ek'Ez turned back. "Absolutely no one outside of this room finds out about this."

"Captain?"

"No one!" If Cornwell discovered the missing lului had been aboard his ship this whole time, he was never going to get the Buran.

"Yes, captain," said Ek'Ez, sufficiently cowed.

"Morita, find some space somewhere we can put her where no one will check."

"My quarters," she immediately said. "If you're fine with Daisy."

"Good. Larsson, bring her there, don't let anyone see you. And wrap her in something. God help us if she accidentally fuses to your skin."

Larsson looked confused. He had not been privy to that element of the Luluan adventure, largely because Morita and Lorca had omitted it from their reports. Even if lelulallen was perfectly possible with a human, putting any member of the crew out of commission for an unknown length of time would expose the situation.

Lorca was left alone with Li in her quarters.

Li had recovered from her initial collapse and was brushing herself off, seemingly calm now. Lorca stood on the far side of the room from her with his jaw clenched and arms crossed.

She addressed him. "What you have to understand is—"

"No," he said. "You don't get to try and explain this. You are confined to quarters until further notice. No comms, no computer, no anything. Your door does not open unless I say it does. You will sit here and you will think about what you have done and if I decide I want to hear from you, then and only then do you get to talk. Computer, revoke all access for Dr. Samaritan Li. Authorization Lorca-Gamma-Delta-2-5-8."

"Access revoked."

Lorca left and issued a command lock on the door from the hall, even going so far as to override the safety protocols. Even if her quarters were decompressing, Li would now be unable to get out. It felt fair.

In Morita's quarters, Yoon was predictably distraught, Morita wrapping her arms around her wife while Larsson hovered in the room like a fifth leg on a dog. Larsson stiffened to alert when Lorca entered.

They had wrapped Lalana in towels from Li's quarters and laid her on the bed. This was one of those moments Lorca wished Lalana breathed, had a temperature, had a heartbeat, anything to confirm she was alive. He then realized that the simple fact she had not melted into goo was proof enough of her status. That explained why Ek'Ez had not seen the situation as urgent.

He checked on Ek'Ez's ETA. Twenty-five minutes. "Daisy, don't worry," said Lorca. "I promise you she's fine." He explained the nature of lului cell degradation, and while initially the details of cells that fell apart within minutes horrified her, she accepted his assertion that so long as Lalana's form was largely intact, there was no imminent danger.

They could be wrong, of course. It could be Lalana really was hanging on by a thread and on the verge of cellular collapse. Lorca didn't think so. Her pupils were wide and dark. He suspected Li had given her something.

Ek'Ez seemed to have reach the same conclusion, calling to request an exemption from the total comms lockout on Li's quarters. Lorca granted it. Five minutes later, Ek'Ez had an update. "Captain, I have determined that Dr. Li has applied a depressant combination in an attempt to place Lalana's cells in a state of suspension which would retard their awareness of separation from the main biomatrix, enabling her to study the lului genetic code more thoroughly."

It was good Ek'Ez had that information, but Lorca was more interested in results. "Can you counteract it?"

"I do not think it wise to attempt to solve this problem with the addition of more chemical or synthetic compounds. They may have unintended results. I believe it would be best for me to continue along my present course of action. If you can please clear an area which is one-point-two meters square..."

The easiest solution turned out to be moving the dinner table, punting it over to the wall and turning it sideways. Then they waited.

Ek'Ez arrived and began to call in a transport. Lorca stopped him. "What part of 'no one outside this room?'" Lorca said.

"Do not be concerned," said Ek'Ez. "I have told my staff and the transporter room that I am assisting Lieutenant Commander Morita and Lieutenant Yoon with a food project. You are not the only crewmember capable of deception, captain. The benefit of a reputation for honesty is that when I am required to lie, it is taken as the truth." It was a mildly frightening revelation because a reputation for genuine honesty was exactly what Ek'Ez had and no one had ever questioned it until now.

A large heated vat appeared. Something about it did not look medical. Lorca realized it had come from the kitchen. "Is that a pot for cooking?"

"Clever, is it not?" said Ek'Ez, completely failing to detect the tone of derision. "Please place Lalana in the pot."

Larsson was the obvious choice again. He hefted Lalana well over the lip of the pot and lowered her inside. She sank into the greenish gel inside. Lorca assisted by tucking her tail in with her.

"Now we simply set to simmer, and we wait!" proclaimed Ek'Ez.

There was a shifting uncertainty in the room. "Exactly how hot are you setting it?" asked Lorca.

"Oh, no, that was... that was an attempt at a joke. It is only set to thirty-five degrees Celsius."

"Stick to medicine," said Lorca. "That’s an order."

Ek'Ez seemed to think that was a good opportunity for him to explain what precisely this process of his was. "As you may be aware, lului heal one another using a process known as lelulallen. This is a compound word formed from lallen, which means two lului sitting in such proximity that their fur touches, and lelu, meaning internal. The process uses the living tissues of another creature as a support mechanism to the lului's outer surface so that their inner cells can temporarily disconnect from the internal layer. Not a complete disconnect—more like if you lay a sheet on the ground and lifted it from the middle. The sides remain touching the floor. Because the disconnect is not total, the cells maintain their overall connection to the signal of the biomatrix and do not begin to degrade. Meanwhile, the internal cells liquify and reform in a repaired state."

Lorca went from annoyed at hearing the definition of lelulallen, which he already knew, to fascinated at the realization of what it actually was. (While he had read the entirety of the medical report, that particular section had been awash in medical jargon he had not managed to fully parse.) Finally he understood why Lualen had said it was possible to lelulallen with a human, and why Lualen had said more surface area was required. Lorca stood beside the vat of gel, staring at the dim, dark shape inside. inside.

"It is in fact a variation on the process that lului use to breed; essentially the same mechanism without the totality of reformation which occurs during the mating cycle. What I am attempting to do is trick the outer cells into believing they are in contact with a living creature by submerging them in a gel with properties which mimic living cells. Furthermore, heat provides a more conducive environment for lului, as it is their natural element—after all, cold will kill them."

"Do you need to stir it or something?" was all Larsson asked.

"Of course not, this isn't actually food," said Ek'Ez.

Lorca had not forgotten Lalana's stance on cannibalism. "Actually it is," he said, drawing stares of confusion and judgment.

"Yes, well, this protocol has never been used before, but I am hopeful it will work. I would hate to accidentally turn Lalana into soup." Though apropos, the pun was entirely unintentional. Ek'Ez was simply returning to his chosen analogy for the details of the Great Merge process.

"How long?"

"That is the question," said Ek'Ez. "It could be twelve hours, it could be twelve days. Absent scanners, we have no way of knowing if this is even effective."

Lorca really hoped the time needed was on the lower side of that estimate.

Nine weeks left until decommission.

Part 30

[furilia]

Hangzhou, Surrounded By Green Tea Fields, Is Also China's Silicon Valley

New Post has been published on https://www.furilia.com/hangzhou-surrounded-by-green-tea-fields-is-also-chinas-silicon-valley/

Hangzhou, Surrounded By Green Tea Fields, Is Also China's Silicon Valley

Hangzhou, a two-hour drive southwest of Shanghai, is one of the main destinations in the Yangtze River Delta, a historically fertile region. Here, communities have built their entire livelihoods upon the ebb and the flow of the waterway. The city’s crown jewel is the West Lake, a glassy body of water that has been the inspiration of poets and scholars for centuries. It was once surrounded by idyllic family farms, sleepy pagodas, and rickety fishing boats. Bo Juyi, a Tang Dynasty poet and government official, once wrote of the area:

Now spring is here the lake seems a painted picture unruly peaks all round the edge, the water spread out flat Pines in ranks on the face of the hills, a thousand layers of green The moon centred on the heart of the waves, just one pearl. Thread ends of an emerald-green rug, the extruding paddy-shoots Sash of a blue damask skirt, the expanse of new reeds. If I cannot bring myself yet to put Hangzhou behind me, Half of what holds me here is on this lake.

A view of West Lake Photo by Clarissa Wei

Surrounded by fields of green tea, it was once the capital of the former Song Dynasty, a golden age of tea in China, where the beverage was such a cornerstone of society that nobles and scholars would hold tea parties in the hills. In these parties, tea sets would be packed in wooden baskets, brought up to a vantage point, and folks would draw water from the nearby streams and heat it up for their infusions. And then there were tea battles, where people would put powdered tea in a bowl, agitate it with a bamboo whisk until fine froth emerged in the cup, and judge each other on the results. This became a wide source of entertainment and debate. A good cup was one where the color was kept fresh, the foam was white, and the surface was even. This, after all, is where the Japanese got matcha from.

With all this in mind, when I visited Hangzhou, I expected to be greeted by towering pagodas on a quiet lake and rows of green tea bushes, flanked by idyllic tea houses and spring water bursting from the mountains. I expected tea to be on nearly every block. I expected tranquility and poetry, trickling down freely on the streets.

The tea fields of Longjing Photo by Clarissa Wei

Instead, I was met with a bustling cluster of skyscrapers and roaring traffic. There was a brand new subway system and I found myself oddly captivated with the underground vending machine that squeezed out fresh orange juice from real oranges. I also spent many hours perusing and testing out the food delivery apps available in the city. There wasn’t a single tea bush in sight.

Turns out I was just looking at the wrong spots. Tea plantations exist, just tucked away in the hills of the West Lake, and in Longjing, a village on the southeast side of the city, I visited the Hangzhou National Tea Museum, the only museum in the country dedicated to the beverage; it has its own tea plantation and a research center. Longjing is also home to 18 tea trees planted by a Qianlong Emperor who visited the area in the 18th century and fell in love with the tea. These nearly 300-year-old imperial tributes are icons, well-protected by a stone fence and surrounded by a park.

Longjing green tea retails as high as $145. Photo by Clarissa Wei

Today, Longjing produces some of the most expensive green teas in the country. Five hundred grams of tea picked in the early spring, when the leaves are most tender, can retail for as much as $145 USD. Longjing, which translates to “dragon well,” is named after an actual well in the village where, according to legend, lives a subterranean dragon that can access the sea. The water within is said to contain magical properties. You can take a sip or rub it on your face; locals say it can cure nearly any ailment. Green tea from Longjing is made exclusively from young buds harvested in early spring and gently pan-roasted by tea farmers, which gives it its signature nutty aroma.

“Longjing tea has always been a part of my life,” Amy Duan, a Hangzhou native who is behind TheChihuo.com, Los Angeles’ biggest Chinese food blog, says. “I never gave much thought to it when I lived there because it was such a normal part of our day-to-day life and because we always had it at our house.”

“[It] is a microcosm for China, a place that’s growing so quickly it barely has time to acknowledge its history. ”  Share

The truth of the matter: While Hangzhou was historically the stuff of poetry, teeming with gorgeous waterways and wildlife, today, it’s home to new wave of romantics. But instead of writing verse, they’re composing code (hence the spectacular number of delivery apps in the city). It is the Silicon Valley of China. It is the home of Alibaba, China’s answer to eBay, and in recent years, a bevy of startups have opened up around the e-commerce giant, all vying to be the next big concept.

I had met up with an acquaintance there who works in the startup industry. He took me to his co-working space in the city, similar to the ones in the States, where different companies and freelancers can rent out space in a building. The biggest difference was that the lobby had a Chinese tea bar, where a server would pour out drinks for employees in traditional Chinese tea cups. Longjing green tea, of course, was on the menu.

Left: Dong po pork; Right: river shrimp Photos by Clarissa Wei

While energy of the city may lie in modernity, the taste buds of the city are still deeply rooted in tradition. Nearly all the restaurants in Hangzhou offer Longjing green tea, and many feature a dish called longjing xia, which is tiny river shrimp doused in tea water and decorated with bright green tea leaves.

Others have gone so far as to dedicate entire restaurants to the local tea. There’s a restaurant chain called Green Tea that has a massive menu of all things tea. They do a marvelous duck and pork smoked with tea, as well as bread and beer flavored with the tea leaf. Broadly speaking, the cuisine of Hangzhou reflects the seasons and what is available in the land. In the spring, tender bamboo shoots are a mainstay. Lotus, which grows on water, is harvested often for its starchy roots.

Duck and pork smoked with tea Photo by Clarissa Wei

Many dishes come with backstories. Dong po pork, Duan says, is one of her personal favorites. It’s a cubed piece of pork belly slow-cooked in a soy-based sauce until it turns a crimson red. It is named after a Chinese poet and scholar by the name of Dongpo. “Hangzhou has a lot of rivers and creeks and alongside these waterways, they will grow a lot of special vegetables. A lot of our fish comes from these rivers as well, where they are cooked gently in order to let their individual flavors shine,” she says.

The most emblematic dish of the city is a river carp called xi hu cu yu, or West Lake vinegar fish, which is gently steamed with vinegar and ginger. A notable rendition is served at a famous restaurant by the lake called Lou Wai Lou, one of the most celebrated dining spots in Hangzhou, with a history of over 150 years. There, a little girl had approached me and my friend as we were eating. It was towards the end of dinner service, and we were one of the few people left in the restaurant.

West Lake vinegar fish Photo by Clarissa Wei

“Hello. Are you zhongguoren?” she said, verbatim, smiling up at us. Zhongguoren means Chinese person in Mandarin. Her hands were in her pocket, and she stared up at us, wide-eyed. The waitresses, visibly amused, all stopped what they were doing to watch the scene unfold.

“Hi! Yes and no. I’m from America, but I am also from here, kind of,” I responded back in Mandarin.

She told me she had heard my friend and I speaking English and wanted to converse with us with the little English that she knew. We asked her how old she was; she was just 11.

“I love America!” she concluded, at the end of our conversation. “One day I want to visit.”

Inside a chain restaurant called Green Tea Photo by Clarissa Wei

That interaction summed up the polarity of city: It’s entirely Chinese, but with the deep aspiration to become a city with Western characteristics. And as my friend and I left the restaurant to hail a taxi, I couldn’t help but notice a Starbucks on the same street. Hangzhou is but a microcosm for China, a place where growth means more concrete and taller buildings, a place that’s growing so quickly it barely has time to acknowledge its history.

Food and tea are one of the few mediums left where the city’s romantic past is diligently and consistently acknowledged.

Playing a guzheng Photo by Clarissa Wei

One snowy day, I was invited to a private gathering on the top floor of a hotel that overlooked the edges of the West Lake. There, my friends plucked the strings of a guzheng (a Chinese piano) and tried our hands at calligraphy. There was a tea table at the center of the room and as we dabbled in the arts and chatted, the staff taught us how to pour a proper cup of Longjing tea. Every tea, they told me, has its own specific ritual to match it.

The directions for Longjing tea were simple: Add the dried tea leaves into a long, tall glass and pour hot water in.

See the tea leaves dance! Photo by Clarissa Wei

“That’s it?” I asked. I was expecting a more complicated ceremony, like that of oolong tea and pu-erh, which uses small teapots and teacups.

“Yes,” a staff member responded, smiling. “The clear glass allows you to fully appreciate the visuals of the leaves as they unfurl. And this way, they’ll have the space to dance.”

This article originally ran in July. We’re running it again because Hangzhou looks so beautiful in the snow.

Tags: green tea, hangzhou, china

💬 View Comments () Share this Article Tweet this Article

// note: sdk init now in f52.fb.js

(function(d, s, id) var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); (document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));

(function() (window._fbq = []); if (!_fbq.loaded)

var fbds = document.createElement('script'); fbds.async = true; fbds.src = "http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbds.js"; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(fbds, s); _fbq.loaded = true; _fbq.push(['addPixelId', '237676769763423']); )(); window._fbq = window._fbq || []; window._fbq.push(['track', 'PixelInitialized', ]); Source link

[hindbodes]

(New Weak Developer Post)

Ugh... Jesus. OK, so it’s been like 8 months. 8 months since I made one of these posts. It’s such a long time containing so many teacher-to-student fuckups that not only am I not working on Proto-Square anymore, but I’m not working on the game development project that replaced it anymore. That game was Quad, now I’m working on something else.

It’s a simpler game, and for that to last I’m making it an endless one, but that also means I have to teach the engine how to execute functions that can make the small amount of features last. Obviously I want collision, and obviously there’s going to be enemies and stuff to do and achieve which dynamically expands off of its base components to achieve more than a small amount of code in a linear has-ending game normally would.

Right now I’m struggling with collision.

What you see here is a debug screen which is made almost entirely of my own coding efforts. The green square is controlled by ↑←↓→ and it can’t go through the permanent dark grey ground. I wrote the code to stop it from falling through myself, and technically it barricades entry from the bottom, left, and right sides as well. The physics there works almost flawlessly. So what’s the problem??

I’ll tell you the fucking problem. That’s a single rectangular object defined by one large, somewhat clunky array, that I basically don’t want to rewrite all over again. And the game is going to have dozens of collidable tiles on screen at a time. And they’re randomly generated by a specific seed. This brings us to the blue blocks near the vertical middle. Those are all part of an array that goes in one direction, left to right, with randomly generated number values. Theoretically all I would need to do is make a modified copy of the original greyground code and for loop it into every correct value of the array’s result, right? Haha, fuck no, time to go back to Qcode.

Ugh... I hadn’t realized how ineffective this tutorial could be. I mean, yeah, it sent me on my way (much more than Goature did, at any rate) and basically enabled me to start work on Proto-Square, but there’s such a crazy amount of things that are told, but never explained. Now that I think of it, I can’t remember a single time he explained the meaning of for i, v in pairs (I just checked the FLs episode. It’s not apt), or the importance of delta time, or even the thing about some graphics cards not being able to handle non-powers of two graphical dimension figures for image files. Goature brought those up, probably. In this instance, we’re looking at a very large, convoluted spread of code here, that isn’t just put into effect here, but in three or four other places total within the same project, using wacky four loops and functions that I don’t really understand. I don’t understand. That’s the fucking problem. I’ve watched the tutorial start to finish twice, and even tried to reconstruct the damn thing in my own fashion, piece by piece, and it’s still an enigma. That’s not right. It’s a fucking tutorial. If he wanted to make a tutorial for people who were really good at Lua already, he should have disclaimered that at the beginning, or even just not made a tutorial at all because those people look like fucking Mary Sues from where I’m standing and can probably pull elite programming knowledge out of their asses whenever they want. And Qcode did not have that intention, because episode 5 was about functions. An episode which is after the one covering the more complicated concept of For Loops, for some reason.

In Qcode’s last episode, the physics episode, (which is also the end because it is an orphaned series) Qcode straight up recommends you not use his code, and that you use a library instead. I’ll tell you AAAALLLL ABOOUT libraries soon, but first a few other things.

My most obvious and straightforward complaint with Qcode’s physics engine is that the layout of the code, ESPECIALLY in the screenshot above, is really that it’s non-user friendly, cluttered, and confusing. It’s ultimately a mess of v1′s and v2′s and greater than symbols. This segment would be OK if there were better comments and longer variable names or something, but there’s another problem with this code. It sucks. It’s buggier than flying backwards into water because you jumped on a slope in Worms Armageddon. The solutions he puts to (some of) them in the episode feel like bugs of their own kind.

As I said, he mentioned libraries before he even typed it all. Libraries being the free to use code that other people make and share that cover topics like graphical displays, procedural generation, AI, and physics. For some reason, I did not know where to find these. For some fucked up, abominable reason, that I swear created a bad present after altering the fucking timeline, instead of finding the Libraries page button on the LOVE Wiki I Google searched for a library that made tiles collide.

Tile Collision.

I ended up finding this, and nothing else anywhere, on a page that seemed to have fucked the search algorithms, dedicated to a library that a creator (named Minh Ngo, go prank him) had named just a bit too literally. For a while I was calling it “Tile Collision Master” as though that was its full name, as that’s what I had read on the website, basically. I blindly rushed into adding this thing to the Proto-Square project, turning it into a bugged out mess that I could have fixed, probably, but I just didn’t care anymore.

I left Proto-Square behind, having finally let go of any attachment I had to the concept and assets of the game.

About a month later, I came up with something else, and put together a testing directory for figuring out how to make my plans work out before risking the integrity of a fully-dedicated game folder. It was called Tiles Test, and I was to work on it, using the same Tile Collision library, until I had a decent, functional codebase for Quad, but that didn’t work out because I needed concave and convex curves for the map to look how I thought was good, or at least a bunch of varied slopes. The readme was confusing as hell, with no tangible, useful information about heightmaps and whether it was possible to change them and make my own or not (I had assumed it was). I took the discussion to the Love2D forums, and in the ensuing feedback I thought about Minh Ngo, and quite quickly developed a grudge. His library was either misleading or broken, and neither are things I want to tolerate. Tiles Test was left behind.

Hardly more than a week later, I started a new set of experiments: Super Tiles Test. It essentially started when somebody in that same thread suggested I use Box2D instead.

Okay, here’s an addendum, or something. Fuck your advice for two reasons. 1: I have no idea what Box2D is or that it’s part of LOVE already under a different name, so why the fuck are you title dropping it with that? I had to go back to the thread and ask them how I was supposed to “convert” Box2D’s thick C++ exoskeleton into LOVE Lua terms before it was cleared up that all I had to do was read the articles for love.physics. 2: You saw the diagram I posted, fuckwit. I needed concave curves as well. LOVE.PHYSICS CAN’T PRODUCE SMOOTH CONCAVE CURVES.

Super Tiles Test was successful, and after starting Quad I settled for many varieties of slopes. It still looked reasonably smooth.

Quad was a “birds-eye-view” simplistic WASD movement project, one with personally-prized writing and something that I’ve grown quite attached to. As you know, it’s shelved. I want to finish it, but right now I can’t. It is struggling with collision. For those who want their sharp-sight rewarded: yes, congratulations, this is the second out of three fucking times that a project has been just about capsized because the road to collider physics is for some batshit crazy reason impossible to walk down unless you’re someone else. I’ll explain the rest of that soon, but first, here’s why the Quad “cavern” failed. I find love.physics actually quite easy to use. It’s already “installed” unlike everything else one typically uses, and the documentation is all right there on the wiki, with me ultimately being able to read the answer to every baseline question I had. Love2D’s own wiki says it’s “not even remotely simple to use” and “a ten-ton hammer designed for heavy-lifting”. But I don’t think it’s terribly hard. I think it’s way easier than EVERY other confusing fucking library-implementing process I’ve tried, and like I said, this point will come up later.

The problem with building Quad’s environments came up when I got into defining the shape and properties of each slope. Of every slope, 1 through 20, not counting the four rectangular half blocks. This proved to be a very slow, tedious drudge of a job, involving copying, changing an adjusting the same unsightly number values over and over until each triangle worked. That sucked, but after what’s happened recently I think I could stand to go back.

I went to the L2D Discord and sent a query. I just wanted to know if there was a simpler, less terrible way of filling in the forms for all my slopes to exist. It was confusing, as usual. In part because in a lot of places there was no possible way of me understanding exactly what they meant, much like how an ant doesn’t understand a Sega Saturn, but mostly because they didn’t understand what I was saying. Oh, of course. I just love it when I ask questions about how to improve my coding and that happens.

Ultimately, we talked about the logistics of the project, and despite this being a solo effort of mine, and these people having no idea who I really was or how capable, they “encouraged” me to make a really simple game for my first game, and I listened. Oh how stupid I was. I think I want to go back to Quad right now. I think it’s twice that I’ve had advice about what kind of development difficulty level I should make my first game at from a north-western straw-optimist on The Internet, and I’m never taking it to heart again. Basically that was me looking at the huge towering task ahead of me and talking myself into trying a much easier something else. That happens a lot, not within strictly the realm of Love2D or standalone game creation. It’s burned out a whole bunch of fineliner artworks and custom Minecraft maps as well. This time, the thing that came next was a randomly generated gem collector. RGGC. This game has been in development since early last month. It seemed to be going well. I grew my attachments, and really thought I could win this time. Unfortunately, I’m in the situation from this post’s first act. RGGC is fucked in the physics department. I tried using the free libraries, I tried re-learning what is taught by Qcode, it doesn’t work. What especially fucking sucks, though, is feeling retarded by use of paranoia manipulation by what everybody says are “simple” collision physics libraries. I downloaded two of these things, two good looking ones, (without any of the silly and hilarious and unacceptable innuendo names) and tried to put their modules in the game. Oh fuck this ordeal. Do you have any idea how annoying the directories and documentation for Fizz X and Bump.lua are? There are numerous, complex arrays of files of .lua and .png in places, which I don’t understand now but would be perfectly reasonable if there was a text document explaining the fucking mess. “But just look at the readme!” Thanks genius, I didn’t know I was 4 years old. Of course I read the fucking readme. I look at the readme, I iterate over it with Ctrl F inputting strings like “install” “use” “how to”, I try to read through, I find NOTHING, and then I fucking give up. Want me to demonstrate? Well despite these files appearing to have all the information you need and appearing to be well presented and organized, reading them feels exactly like this:

That’s not me trying to exaggerate or make comedy, that is legitimately how inconclusive, red-herring-mapped, and confusing those things are to read. This is exactly why I gave up on libraries and spent the last week writing my own physics code. But it’s fucking hard to, I don’t know much about Lua for loops in relation to getting information from an array and using it, and I just don’t understand the relationship between Qcode’s AABB function, calculate_collision function, and the for i, n in pairs loop that’s apparently meant to tie it all together. I did it once, but that was basically copy-pasting in Proto-Square and not a good collision system, hands down. The people who make libraries seem to think their target audience is simultaneously people who are just starting up with game creation, and people who are way more experienced, enough so to just pull the knowledge of how to use the non-descript library out of nowhere. It’s like, jesus, these are probably amazing tools that work just fine, but you’re straight up not letting me use them. I can’t be expected to look at a large, complex machine and knows what buttons to press when I’m just beginning to build my first ball machine out of K’nex.

At this point I actually can’t tell. I can’t tell if me ever making a game is real or not, that there’s no giant conspiracy or universe simulation bullshit with a hard-coded rule in it saying I can’t succeed. Sure, you can tell me it might eventually happen, but I feel like that’s comparable to a pitch made to a sperm cell about what it will be like to climb trees, when he hasn’t been born yet. Until you’ve really reached that tree and seen it for yourself, how can you really know you’re not the only one who will never climb it?

My outlook on game development has changed. It now is an angry, resentful one, vaguely aimed at everybody else who works with LOVE games. An outlook that sounds like blatant paranoia. I want to succeed but right now it’s like the universe itself is opposing me. It’s bad enough that I already live in a country with a negligence of games industry that’s actually opposing me. It’s been 7 years. I’m trying my hardest. I know how to code. I’m not a stupid person. I feel like even game development support figures are actively trying to disrupt my progress.

[stompsite]

indie bundle cruft death match volume two: the revenge of the revenge

this is how it works: I install a bunch of bundle games on my computer, and then I play them until I decide whether they stay or whether they go. Hopefully you get some entertainment out of the process.

Let’s get started.

BRIDGE IT (Plus): This is a game where you make bridges. It follows the same mechanics as the last bridge building game I tested. Like... basically, just a different art style, otherwise apparently the same game. I couldn’t even finish the tutorial because every time I clicked the “simulate” button that you need to click to continue the game, the program switched to my desktop as if I had clicked my clock instead. No thanks. GOODBYE.

BRIDGE PROJECT: Virtually the same game, based on the tutorial, as this and the other bridge game. Same fundamental “make a bridge by snapping things on a grid and then running cars across it” gameplay. Not funny like those gifs I see of other, funnier bridge building games. Weird how this is the only game made by this dev, and the other game was the only game made by that dev. My working theory is that there is a small industry of devs who make a bridge game, die, and then try to remake the bridge game, thinking they’ll get it right this time.

They never do, because it’s a game about building bridges.

I didn’t take a screenshot of this one because it looked just like the other one. PASS.

AGENT AWESOME: This game’s sense of humor is “let’s be as referential as humanly possible.” Like, maybe it gets really good later, but the poor initial showing combined with a weird “sort of real time, sort of turn-based, there’s not a lot to it” gameplay isn’t really interesting to me. It’s got a 70% positive rating on Steam, though. If it’s your thing, it’s your thing. It’s not mine. ADIOS.

A FISTFUL OF GUN: I’m a sucker for Westerns, and I’m intrigued by twin-stick shooters, though I don’t like many of them. Turns out I like A Fistful of Gun. A lot. Super cool aesthetic, neat weapons. Biggest issue I had was that I didn’t really understand the controls; the game kinda explains them, but its super minimal UI doesn’t do a great job making things clear.

My Big Game Design Belief is that a game’s controls should be invisible. The barrier between thought and action should be as minimal as possible. I like this game, but I definitely wish I understood how things worked early on. There are a ton of little tweaks that, I think, would have made this game a lot better.

But you know what? I had so much fun I played it for like 30 minutes, and I’m gonna keep playing more. IT LIVES.

A GAME OF DWARVES: Alphabetically, this game was sorted under G, but it was installed in the folder, and I saw it, staring at me, brightly, against a sea of uninstalled titles. I couldn’t resist installing it. Then I ran the game, and I was told “fatal error! this application must exit immediately.” I couldn’t use a mouse to click “okay.” I had to jam “enter.”

I looked on the Steam community discussions for answers, and found this thread, which indicates that the developers went out of business and would not continue supporting the game.

I did eventually get the game to work. What I played was pretty interesting, as management sims go, but I mean... look at that screenshot. The colors don’t blend well, the repeated tiles are a bit too much, the dwarf faces look... not great. That and the fiddly controls made me question if I really wanted to play it. I almost said yes. We PARTED WAYS.

RELIC HUNTERS ZERO: It’s a fun little twin-stick. Free. Not sure why, they probably could’ve made money on this. There’s nothing making me go “wow, this is special,” but it does seem, from what I played, like an exemplary example of the form. BACKLOG.

TUMBLESTONE: Okay, I’m breaking from the norm. I jumped on my Xbox while I was cleaning the apartment in preparation for a move, and I played a couple games there to see if I’d keep them around, or download something else. Tumblestone is a puzzle game. You have to ‘shoot’ three cubes from the bottom of the puzzle space, but you can only eliminate the cubes if they are of the same color. It was fun, but I didn’t see myself sticking with it. I forgot to take a screenshot. BEGONE.

KILLER INSTINCT KOLLECTION: This Xbox title is a fighting game. I still don’t find myself enjoying fighting games. I MOVED ON.

NO TIME TO EXPLAIN: Another Xbox game, this is a platformer that did not feel particularly great to play, but that’s true of all platformers and me. I’m just not that into the genre. IT’S NOT YOU. IT’S ME.

SUPER MEGA BASEBALL: EXTRA INNINGS is an Xbox game about baseball, but it kept throwing menus like this at me, and I don’t swing that way. Get it? A baseball pun. I didn’t play very long because I just wasn’t having a lot of fun, and I get the impression this is best played with friends. None of my friends like baseball. We’re strictly curler fans where I come from. STEE-RIKE.

Right. Back to the PC.

AI: RAMPAGE might be a good game, but I’m a very picky person when it comes to controls. This is a top-down game where forward movement is wherever your cursor is aiming. Also, the main menu is literally just every option available--settings, levels, you name it. One single massive screen. I tried to take a screenshot, but it came out black. NOT MY THING.

AIRSTRIKE HD appears to be a phone game (imagine how big that pause button in the lower right of the screenshot is on a 27″ monitor) made in unity where you fly back and forth dropping bombs on a civilian populace. You might drop them on more deserving folks than civilians later in the game, but I was so busy not having fun that I didn’t stick around to try out. There aren’t enough steam reviews to give the game a proper score, but most of them are negative. CRASH AND BURN. 

ARMORED FIST 3 is presumably a sequel to Armored Fist 2 and its maximum resolution is 640x480. I picked this one up because it was cheaper to buy the Novalogic complete bundle on sale with the money I’d earned from selling trading cards than it was to buy all the Delta Force games that I wanted. The controls are strange; I’m suspicious of games that tell you to use the arrow keys, but when it asked me to switch to F9 to change my camera, then didn’t tell me how to switch back, I knew we wouldn’t be getting along. Why this tank simulator from 1999 doesn’t use more modern controls or resolutions, I’m not sure. The reviews are “mostly positive” right now on Steam, but I don’t think I can enjoy this. TANKS FOR THE MEMORIES.

AVENCAST, according to Wikipedia, was made by a developer that “had little or no formal education in game development field.” It took them four years to make, and they initially set out to create a Diablo clone. This game does not really control like Diablo at all. It also spends a great deal of time in menus like the above. Too many words, not enough “go do stuff.”

It’s not a bad game, though. Like, there’s nothing here that makes me go “ugh, wow, this is terrible.” It just doesn’t pique my curiosity. It doesn’t make me want more. The controls aren’t terrible, but they aren’t great either. The premise isn’t that interesting--it literally starts out by telling you that this is the story of the greatest mage ever, or something like that, effectively killing the stakes--it just kind of feels old and uninteresting to me.

This is coming from someone who likes the Gothic games. What I’m saying is, your mileage may vary, and I almost kept Avencast around, until I decided that, quite frankly, I probably won’t be spending much time with it. Besides, mages are so much less interesting than rogues.

AX:EL’s menus make no sense. No, really, look at this. What does it mean? What does any of it mean? There is a ship, but what kind of game is it? I have no idea. The tooltips aren’t that helpful. One button says something like “patrol,” and if you hover over it, the tooltip says “patrol mode.”

Anyways, turns out there’s a campaign in here, if you dig long enough. Briefly, I suspected this was some kind of multiplayer only game. It is not. There is a campaign. It involves dogfighting. Turns out this is basically an Ace Combat style game, which is neat, but it is easy, there’s no tutorial, and the assets look like something I could make, and I’m not an artist at all.

AX:EL wasn’t unfun from what I played, but it puts up so many barriers to the gameplay that it can be needlessly frustrating. SEE YOU, SPACE COWBOY.

BLOODSPORTS.TV sounded cool until it asked me if I had ever played in the “top down hero game” category or somethin like that. I tentatively clicked yes. IT’S A MOBA.

BLOOP RELOADED is just Bloop with nicer graphics. And writing like the above. You drag lines between things and make liquids go down those lines into the things. The end. Quoth the raven, NEVERMORE.

CALIFORNIUM: Imagine PKD’s walking simulator. Mysterious enough to keep me going. Has people to interact with, to a small degree. Would I like a game that actually has mechanical depth and complexity? Sure. But... I’m gonna finish Californium. THIS IS GOOD STUFF.

CHRONICLES OF MYSTERY: THE SCORPIO RITUAL has nothing to do with the Xbox One X. It is a point and click game. I’ve never seen the appeal of these games. You just click on stuff until people do what you want them to, or you do weird things to solve puzzles. Old Man Murray explained this at length so I don’t have to.

I love when Steam’s game description character limit gets overrun. INTO THE FLAMES.

DEFENDERS OF ARDANIA gave me a black screen and wouldn’t quit when I tried to alt tab or anything. I tried lookin for solutions, but found none. I CAST YOU OUT.

20 games. 3 survived. 17 were condemned to purgatory.

[hottytoddynews]

Thomas Getman has spent his entire life working tirelessly to provide aid and relief for those in need, both domestically and internationally. As the son of a Quaker humanist, he grew up being instilled with the values that he has carried with him during a career dedicated to service. This week he has spoken with classes in the Meek School of Journalism at Ole Miss about the threats that he feels face the country and the world. 

Getman has led faith-based groups, served as the director of World Vision (a group designed to encourage the government to provide aid for the needy overseas) while being guided by his faith. 

“My dad was the salvation army commissioner in our town growing; I grew up with that same attitude,” Getman said. “One day, my high school football coach talked to me about faith and commitment to the divine order of things. I began to explore Christianity more deeply, and it’s very clear that were supposed to care for the poor, the oppressed and the marginalized.”

While he moved around a bit, Getman ensured he would become a change agent in each community in which he resided. In both Boston and Philadelphia, Getman worked with high school students and inner-city residents to help provide them with a quality education that they had once been denied. 

Getman eventually moved to Washington D.C. and became the Congressional legislative director for Senator Mark Hatfield. There he drafted up legislation that led to international change and relief for many under the threat of Idi Amin’s leadership in Uganda. His position in the Senate led to a life changing meeting. 

“I led the campaign to put sanctions on Idi Amin, which led to the anti-apartheid legislation in South Africa because Desmond Tutu walked in and asked for a briefing on African issues,” Getman said. “Ever since he walked into our office, my life was changed forever. Hearing of how he put his life on the line day after day to help people.” 

Getman’s involvement with World Vision took him to the Middle East as he attempted to build positive relationships between Israel and Palestine. He was able to find success in a program titled “Grieving Parents” which brings together parents who have lost children in terrorist attacks. 

“Parents from both sides who lost children in terror attacks grew close to one another for not only comfort, but they spoke out against the idiocy of violence,” Getman said. 

The debate will rage on about the refugee crisis facing the world today, but Getman keeps politics aside as he continues his effort to create opportunities for those who are in search of aid. When prompted about the “light on the hill” that is the United States, Getman spoke of how that may be changing. 

“Those of us who have been to middle east know and love Syrian people. They’re wonderful people who want to provide for their families. There people just like us and millions of them have been displaced, so how do we help these people? We turn them away at the airport..that will just make more people mad,” Getman said. ““The light on the hill is dimming, people overseas are losing respect for the US because of our lack of attention to the needs of the marginalized, the orphans and the strangers.”

While Getman was able to work with the Clinton and Bush administrations to steer members of the government to send aid to those in need, he doesn’t plan to reach out to the politicians in Washington. Instead, he looks to a book titled “Thank You For Being Late” by Tom Friedman, which speaks of where he believes true governing originates. 

“Governing doesn’t come from presidents, prime ministers, senators or members of parliament,” Getman said. “Real government comes from families, communities, core groups and Good Neighbor programs (a program which houses refugees). Those kind of acts start to filter up. People must band together to take care of one another. I’m going to beat down the doors of the white house; I’m going to keep fanning the flames in my community and loving the people that we’re given from other places.”

He has practiced what he preaches, over the last 2 months Getman and his wife have opened their home to three different afghan families who he believes are “bright and vibrant people who will make great contributes to our society.”

Getman knows that true change will come as long as both sides can have an open discussion, and concerned citizens voice their opinions in the appropriate ways. 

He said, “When anarchist type people weigh in, they burn cars, smash cars. It undermines the efforts to solve problems, but when millions of people march respectfully as we saw with the women’s march, then think people get the difference.”

With many across the country on edge about the threat of foreign terrorism, Getman weighed in on the war being waged across the world. He is worried that there is a war we may not be fighting hard enough. 

“One of my concerns is that there are two wars going on. The war against terror that seems to have captivated everybody,” Getman said. “Then there’s the much larger war against hunger. We’ve had 190,000 people killed in terror attacks around the world since 9/11, which is a tragedy. But at the same time we have 40,000 people a day die from hunger and water-related illnesses. There’s enough food to feed everyone in the world; we just don’t pay attention to it. We may be fighting the wrong war.”

Citing facts from the EPA, Getman fears that over 14 million houses will be without water by 2020 if something doesn’t change. 

“There’s 144,000 water purification plants around the US and there old. There not cleaning the water anymore,” he said. “The pipes are rusty and broken. People are getting sick from the led because these pipes are part of the old infrastructure. Section 8 housing is particularly bad, and poor children are forced to drink water that is posting them.” 

The poorest people are traditionally the most neglected by politically motivated decision, according to Getman whether it’s because of re-election concerns, funding issues or any other issues that may arise. He wants against making decisions for those reasons and using the power to help the most people possible. 

“You have to set your priorities from the lowest common denominator, not from on-high. Often the decisions made at the highest level are affected by politics that they don’t really hear the poorest of the poor,” Getman said. “One of the reasons we had the outcome we did in this last election is because only 60 percent of the electorate voted. We’ve become one of the lowest voting democracy’s in the world.”

Getman now travels across the country to speak to students about the need for action to help people across the world. In his travels, he’s seen the willingness to help people and urges more to get involved. 

I hope to inspire young people that are coming up especially in journalism to take on the role of advocacy for those who are really suffering, and to raise up issues like the water and the hunger issues,” Getman said. “There have been very poignant, multi-layered questions from students about how they can get involved, that’s very exciting. If just a few people take fire that’s worth a trip. You never know where the seeds you sew, come to fruition but I’m confident that it does because I’ve seen it.”

After a trip down to the Mississippi Delta, Getman saw many of the issues he speaks of represented in the area. When he returned to Oxford, he reflected on his trip and realized that something has to change.

“After pondering what I saw in the devastated towns, with the empty main streets and vacant factories I came to a realization. We are at a pivot point in our society about how to deal with the undercurrent of issues that improvised people deal with in places where thriving communities once existed.” Getman said, “If we spent less on fighting terrorism, we could redirect those funds to our infrastructure we’d be a lot better off.”

When he’s not speaking to students, Getman also coordinates efforts in both the U.S. and South Africa at the Liliesleaf Farm to bring together members of government, liberation fighters and citizens to ensure history doesn’t repeat itself. This is done through countless individuals drawing on their memories to recreate the most factual recounting of what took place in some of the world’s most difficult times. 

“Memories are a fragile thread to hang on one person’s recollection. We do these in Washington as well as South Africa. My dream is to one day do the same in the Middle East,” Getman said. “History is so palpable that it’s instructive to future generations.

While there are threats that must be dealt with, Gettman believes that people have the power to bring about true change just as he saw in South Africa during one of the darkest periods in history. 

“We live with great hope because we’ve seen the miracles before. We thought there would never be liberation in South Africa, but then leaders gathered, and after 21 meetings, Nelson Mandela was released, and the rest is history.” Getman said. “If people set their shoulders to the wheel I know, assuredly, there will be bright spots that will encourage people in the world like Mandela did. The power of one and the power of community will always be there.” 

Getman’s faith has driven him to make a difference, and he believes that action in the name of helping others is the most important part of any faith. 

“Faith in action is critical if one understands that faith is not just to save ourselves. It’s unbiblical to have a faith that stops with our own salvation,” Getman said. “Faith is only real if it’s fleshed out in the hardest situations, when people mobilize to show what faith is about not just to talk about it.” 

Steven Gagliano is a writer for HottyToddy.com. He can be reached at steven.gagliano@hottytoddy.com. 

Follow HottyToddy.com on Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat @hottytoddynews. Like its Facebook page: If You Love Oxford and Ole Miss…

The post Thomas Getman Puts Faith Into Action, Helping Those In Need Around The World appeared first on HottyToddy.com.