#I HAD AN ANALOG HORROR SERIES PLANNED OUT

[schnuffel-danny]

I hate being lazy when it comes to creating original stuff, because I'm always several years early to trends, but I never have anything to show for it!!! And then when I finally thing "Ok, maybe I could make that thing now" SUDDENLY the genre of idea I had BLOWS UP and nothing I make will ever live up to the hype xD maybe it's good tbh.... I love being lazy <3 I hope my uncanny ability to predict online trends keeps me unmotivated to create anything forever till the end of time, because I honestly am totally incapable to sticking to a single project :,D and I'd get bored so fast.....

[kaz-oooo]

I’ve already done music recommendations so, you can check out these posts (playlists and list of artists) if you’re looking for that specifically. But Wilbur made a lot of content over the years and idk, i figured I’d make a a list of recommendations for similar content to fill that void as well :)

Minecraft SMP’s (specifically DSMP)

The same SMP’s but other POV’s — I’ll just start with this cos it’s the most iffy. There’s plenty of enjoyment to be had with these fandoms still, and I personally don’t think we need to let the actions of a couple shitty guys ruin the silly Minecraft roleplay we all enjoy. That said, if you aren’t comfy watching these anymore that’s perfectly valid as well, especially since Wilbur’s character will be lurking around in the background of plenty of these. But yeah, we can also uplift other creators by watching the fun stories they made, especially those who got buried by bigger creators at the time. So Dream SMP, QSMP, Origins SMP, SMP earth, SMPlive all have content you can enjoy.

Different, completely unrelated SMP’s — hermitcraft, the life series, empires SMP (shubble was involved in this one, I’m planning on watching her POV when I find some time) etc. I’ve had plenty of people recommend these to me before, from what I’ve seen they’re very enjoyable :)

Hamilton — not even joking, if you enjoyed the L’manberg era of DSMP and you didn’t watch Hamilton, I’d heartily recommend it. Great music, lots of politics but all in a fun and silly way, also tragic endings!

Editor Wilbur ARG (I’m a massive ARG fan so I have tonnes of recommendations here)

Generation Loss — Ranboo’s very awesome Horror project that they’ve been working very hard on!!! Ranboo’s been teasing new content lately as well so that’s exciting

Analog horror series — Local 58, Gemini Home Entertainment, Mandela Catalog, Kane Pixel’s Backrooms videos, etc. All very good and spooky videos, definetely an inspiration for Gen Loss, and I know Wilbur enjoyed this content as well (though the editor Wilbur arg predates a lot of this genre) those are some of the biggest on YouTube atm, and some of my personal favourites, but there’s plenty more to find (I recommend channels like Nightmind and Nexpo who do analysis videos for all this horror and ARG stuff if you wanna find more)

Marble Hornets — gets its own category! One of the original analog horror genres (predated the genre actually) it’s basically one of the biggest and most comprehensive Slenderman series out there. There’s a LOT of content here and lots of lore and mystery (though a lot of the game clues have been lost to time) (Jack Manifold also reacted to this on stream, it was very chill and good fun)

Horror podcasts — Magnus Archives and Magnus Protocol, Malevolent and Archive 81 are some of my favourites, but there’s plenty more out there to find and enjoy :). Also very spooky with lots of mystery to involved, the Magnus Protocol is very new as well so great time to get into that!

Just Chatting / Geoguessr / other chill content

Geoguessr streamers / YouTubers — honestly I genuinely didn’t watch much geoguessr content outside of Wilbur’s streams so, I don’t have many recommendations here. I know Eret has been doing geoguessr streams lately and their content is very good and chill. Jacksuckatlife plays as well and last I watched he was fairly good at it (like similar skill level to Wilbur), otherwise Rainbolt is a geoguessr legend, he terrifies me a little ngl.

Other streamers — I think the thing with the just chatting streams is that we watch for *that specific streamer’s* personality. It’s hard to really make recommendations other than just saying go watch more of the streamers you enjoy. Personally I enjoy Phil’s hardcore streams, and Sneegsnag’s Crime Time the most, but there’s plenty of other people both in this MCYT space and outside of it that you’ll probably enjoy :)

Sorry boys (unlike horror I don’t watch much comedy so, sorry, this’ll be lacking)

Just Roll With It — Charlie Slimecicle’s DND podcast. I’ve only listened to a little bit of this but it’s really good and REALLY silly (oh, and emotional sometimes, gotta have a bit of angst y’know) Wilbur was a guest on a couple of episodes, but you can always skip past those if you want.

Tommy’s videos — so Wilbur features in a lot of the early vlogs and *minecraft but* videos, but Tommy’s content has always been good fun, his recent stuff is excellent as well! He’s been doing a lot of comedy content lately, specifically a live show so definitely check that out if you want :)

Smosh pit — not something I’ve watched a lot of, but I’ve seen clips of their try not to laugh videos and they’re definitely on par with the bat shit improv you get from Sorry Boys.

Game changer — again, not something I’ve watched much, mostly consumed through osmosis, but the show is funny, the cast is always silly and it’s a lot of fun all round

Whatever else Sorry Boys make after this — judging by some of the responses to Wilbur’s “statement” I think it’s fair to assume if Sorry Boys do continue making content Wilbur will be cut from the group. Of course don’t feel obligated to stick around if you don’t want to, but Wilbur won’t be compensated if he’s kicked and the rest of the guys are still fun :)

YLYL and similar goofy stuff

Just… other streamers again — Jack Manifold does YLYL streams with his friends. James Marriott does a lot of reaction videos as well, sometimes YLYL, sometimes reacting to content his viewers send in (like TikTok’s and break up texts), those are my favourites atm.

YouTubers — that niche between video essay and reaction content, people like Danny Gonzales, Drew Gooden, Kurtis Conner, Pinely, all good fun YouTube channels that make good, silly, and easy to consume content.

Other gaming streamers and YouTubers — Slimecicle, Ranboo, Games Grumps, RT games, and SneegSnag all play a wide variety of games, they’re all relatively chill but none of them take the games all that seriously either so it’s fun and goofy as well :)

And of course Fanfiction!!!

I might be a little bias here cos I write myself but fic is created by and for fans and it exists to give you even *more* content about the stories you love, whether it be reimagining canon events or just dumping your favourite characters into a silly au.

I know a lot of authors (myself included) are feeling super conflicted and weird about writing Wilbur in the future. Plenty of authors have been moving onto new fandoms so if you find something you enjoy make sure you check out the author’s other work and who knows, maybe you’ll find some cool new fandoms that way!

And do the same for artists and other creators, or even go check out some of your mutuals fandoms, you guys might have more in common than you originally thought!

[jimmy-johns-was-taken]

An obscure Interest of the Creeps

I’m trying to post on here a little more, but I’m redoing some plot stuff for my fanfic so I haven’t posted anywhere or anything recently. Very sorry, however I plan to post a few things today!

Jeff the Killer : It way to into the SAW franchise. Like horror movies are a big interest of a lot of people right? Nah, this guy takes this series way to far, knows all the lore and understands all the flashbacks

BEN Drowned : I know I’ve said this before but BEN is really into analog horror. Not sure where I saw it, I’ll give credits if I can find it, but someone said BEN would be really into Petscop and I agree with it so much.

Eyeless Jack : Cryptids, mainly the ones that live in the forest/pass through the forest often. Not only does he need to know them so he can fend them off if needed, but he just finds them really interesting.

Ticci Toby : BUGS. They loves bugs, change my mind. They totally got an ant-farm and whenever they see’s a bug on the ground they have to inspect it.

Tim / Masky : Cold cases for murders. Whenever he has spare time (which is rare), he loves to look at them, figure out what he can, and try and solve them. I would be willing to bet he’s solved a few.

Brian / Hoodie : Lord of the Flies. You know the book you had to read in like 10th grade??? This man fucking loves it. From beginning to end, he’s read it like 15 times now.

Jane the Killer : Jane really likes the Breakfast club, dirty dancing, footloose, and other movies like that. She knows all the words and every scene to those movies. Don’t ask why, she just strikes me as the person to like them.

Nina the Killer : Fucking Mothman. No, I will not explain.

[toastofthetrashfire]

Shadow Meta Series Post#3: Anurak and Old vs New Technology 

This is my third post in my Shadow meta series on technology, time, and horror. You can check out my introduction and plan for that in this post!

When watching through the first seven episodes of Shadow for the first time, Josh’s technology usage was fairly obvious. But when I watched through the episodes again with an eye on technology, I was surprised by a few characters who were also heavily surrounded by tech. One of these is brother Anurak.

In his office alone he has two clocks, three landline phones, a tape recorder, a Newton’s cradle, a lamp, a portable TV radio cassette player (thanks @raypakorn for helping to confirm this one), another radio or older music player (my best guess is an FM radio stereo but I can’t find a closer shot of this one), and candles. 

My goal here is to do a reading of Anurak’s relationship with technology and put forth a few potential theories as to what Shadow might be trying to communicate through this. Unlike other posts in the series so far, the conclusions on this one remain much more speculation as I feel we have a lot more to learn about Anurak in order to get to a deeper reading. I’ll be relying on some other theories about Anurak, particularly @wen-kexing-apologist 's theory that Anurak is the one-armed man. 

Old vs New Technology

What struck me most about Anurak in going over his technology, was the fact that he was pretty even with Josh in terms of how many different types of tech they had. However, Anurak’s tech gives the impression of being more dated. If we go with the theory that Anurak is the one-armed man, then we know his execution happened 20 years before the present day, so 1979.

My theory is that most of his technology predates 1979. It’s hard to track everything down, and we have to consider whether it’s more appropriate to go with the year a technology was invented or with the precise model. Still here’s some of what I was able to track down.

Anurak’s Tech

Three landline phones

While two of these look like the phones found elsewhere in the show, one of these is a rotary which were invented back in 1892. These models seem to have been common up through the 50s with the corded landlines used elsewhere in the show coming on the market in the 60s and 70s.

 TV Radio Cassette Player

This one was surprisingly tricky to track down. You can find models being resold online but actually figuring out when they first went on the market was a dead end. Most of the ones I found were from the 80s when they seemed to be most popular. The earliest I found was a model from Japan from 1978. This is cutting it very close but it does technically make the cut. 

Tape recorder

The model used here looks to be a Sony TC-150 portable tape recorder and player from 1977–it also makes the cut

The Newton’s Cradle

Invented in 1967

The clocks

Both are analog so safely in our window

Music player

If we go with my guess (FM radio stereo), the first FM multiplex stereo tuner came out in the US in 1961

Candles

Obviously these are pre-1979. But they’re of extra note because we also see the one-armed man associated with candles

Some of Josh’s tech

Walkman

I’m not sure the exact model, but it looks like a 90s era walkman. The 80s versions were much blockier and come the 2000s walkmans were getting into digital players and CD players. Regardless, walkmans were invented in 1979 which makes the year stand out as a split in technology in the show. 

Handheld video game console

I’m sure I could be a bit off here, but it looks like a Game Boy, which was released in 1989. The first handheld console with interchangeable cartridges was released in 1979. 

Cell phone

It's hard to tell much about Josh's phone. But given the size, it looks at home in the late 90s. We can safely say it's post 1979.

Digital camcorder

Again, not sure of the model, but the first digital camera with recording came out in 1995

Camera

I haven’t tracked down the model yet, but looking at the history of most of the big camera companies, this looks at home in the 90s, definitely post-1979 though  

Some Take-A-Ways and A Theory

I won’t pretend my methodology here is foolproof, and it’s hard to know when these were available in Thailand since tech comes to places at different paces. But I think it paints an interesting picture overall. If Josh is surrounded by more contemporary, often cutting edge tech for the time, Anurak is surrounded by the past.

This old vs new dynamic is right at home with the themes of late 90s horror, which I’ll explore in a later post to come. But here I want to think about what it might mean for Anurak to be stuck in the past. 

Throughout the first seven episodes, Anurak is consistently opposing and denying change and the supernatural. This comes to the forefront in episode 3, as Anurak is discussing the bible with Dan’s class. He tells them if they follow God, then they’ll know ghost stories are lies.

On the one hand, this could be Anurak denying the supernatural in order to stop Dan and others from finding out some hidden truth. On the other hand, this Christian framework offers a safe black and white logic between safety and risk, reality and fantasy, the abject and the normative. 

In any case, Dan jumps in to challenge Anurak. He tells him “If old beliefs don’t work, there's no harm in trying new things.” He then tells Anurak that “closing ourselves off from the world is more horrifying.” These comments show the audience the growing tension between Dan and Anurak. Anurak repeatedly denies the shadow’s reality and asks Dan to perform that same denial. Yet the scene here feels so specific in how it frames Anurak as stuck in the past and tradition. 

This is emphasized further as the scene cuts to the video of Trin performing outside of the theater. A sharp reminder of modern technology, queerness, and the supernatural mystery surrounding Trin’s death.

Now there could be a number of reasons why Anurak is stuck in the past and the one taking on this thematic role. 

Let’s assume that Anurak is the one-armed man. Then we know that he is likely queer and has gone through a number of traumatic experiences because of this. I’d argue that we could read him as someone who has come to conform and act for those with power due to trauma and a fear of change. Not dissimilar to Chadok from The Eclipse.

I recognize we only have half of his story at this point, and I may need to make another post addressing this once the second half airs. As it stands, I view this as speculation rather than a full reading of Anurak’s role viz a viz technology. Still, the pattern of him being stuck in the past is there, regardless of what the show will ultimately do with these connections. 

If Anurak is the one-armed man, has he closed himself off from the world? Is he trying to protect Dan by metaphorically making him hide his queerness by suppressing and denying the supernatural? He continually emphasizes reality, telling Dan that if he doesn’t believe in the shadow it can’t hurt him. 

A similar exchange to the one discussed above plays out at the start of episode 5, when Dan confronts Anurak about his sense that the shadow is linked to Trin. Anurak tells Dan that "We're talking about reality here, not feelings," something he also tells Dan’s mother. Denying one’s feelings and over-reliance on rationalism (see my post on surrealism vs realism here) could be interpreted as a coping mechanism, a way to survive by pushing your feelings down and conforming to violent systems. 

Perhaps this is a reason why Anurak reacts with fear over the idea that Dan might not forgive his father (and might even want to let him suffer). Of course this is also tied into cultural values around filial piety and we could read it as a fear of Dan straying from the correct path. But perhaps Anurak’s anxiety is also heightened by the fear of seeing Dan choose a path where he refuses to hide his anger and his pain.  

In the hospital Anurak tells Dan that he can’t change the way people think. In his office, Dan tells Anurak that he "should let go of [his] fixation on the teachings" since they might be blinding him from the truth. Conform or push for change. Bury your emotions to not get hurt more or use them to fuel you.  

This dynamic between Anurak and Dan is also paralleled in what we see of Anurak and Trin in the past. Trin is pushing for change, and, while kinder than the headmaster, Anurak resists, telling Trin, “But you’re trying to change a long-standing tradition.” He acknowledges Trin’s opinion in a sense but really just resists change in a nicer way. He’s not angry or using punishment, but change is still a nonstarter.

Trin pushes back asking “If the tradition was good, then why would people want to change it?” Interestingly, Anurak unlike the headmaster doesn’t defend the goodness or value of tradition. Instead he uses “logic” to point out the difficulty of making changes. Interestingly, Anurak tells the headmaster that “these things can’t be easily changed but we must respect reality,” but then turns to use such “reality” to debate Trin and make him back down.  

Reality and reason are safe to Anurak. Much more than the uncertainty of resistance or change. He may not like the status quo, it likely has done him much harm, but to resist and be hurt is far scarier to him. So he conforms, stuck in time like the butterflies on display in his office.

One final piece of technology

I talk about narrative prosthesis in this post, but lets talk real prosthetics. If we continue to assume Anurak is the one-armed man, this means that his left arm is a prosthetic. As @wen-kexing-apologist has noted here, he rarely moves it, and in certain scenes if you watch it closely you can see it reflect light or hang in a way that isn’t quite like his right arm. 

Prosthetics are technology, but they fall into a couple different categories. Some are functional  while others are cosmetic. Given that we never see Anurak use his arm and it typically remains immobile, it’s likely that the prosthetic is largely cosmetic. Meaning it’s used to make Anurak look like he has an arm, to hide his difference and help him conform. Once again connecting Anurak to both the idea of alterity and difference but also conformity. 

I want to mention one other allusion to prosthetics that comes up in Shadow. The bust in episode 7 is a replica of Lacoon and His Sons. The statue famously was missing the right arm for around 400 years before it was found in 1906. A year after it was unearthed in 1509, the pope’s architect held a contest to see who could best figure out what the arm looked like. An arm was added in 1532 that remained until the real arm was unearthed in the early 1900s. It is interesting to think about how the statue was given a prosthetic for 400 years, reflecting values about bodily wholeness. 

In one version of the Lacoon myth, he and his sons were punished by the gods after trying to warn people about the Trojan horse. Both the myth and the story of the statue’s prosthetic touch on themes of punishment and conformity tied together with technology. 

If my reading of Anurak is accurate, this ties not just to the fact that he is missing his left arm, but to his relationship with trauma and conformity which is expressed in part through his relationship with technology.   

Alright! Next time we’ll jump into cameras and horror!

[bendy-analog-horror-au]

Sorry if this is lengthy but I have a few questions actually I really wanna ask regarding this Bendy series [feel free to answer this privately btw since I know its mostly discord-related talk n long]

Do you ever think you'll maybe make tutorials on how to create 3D models and animations the way you do? I would kill to learn how you do it or get a closer look at them. Your ability to put rubberhose n cartoony flair into 3D is amazing and so inspiring to me, it's exactly what I strive to learn how to do right now as I learn Blender n such. Particularly those amazing ink demon walk cycles you showed off are the exact kind of animations I would love to learn more about. Such a beautiful blend of cartoony and creepy honestly.

Would you ever allow downloads of ur assets/models? I understand if not, just wondering because like I said I'd love to examine them to learn more on how you build such an amazing style in 3D. Esp with like rigging n such being such a mystery to me right now.

You have mentioned I believe that you wanted to one day make a fan-game based off this series. Are you looking for people to help with that or discuss that with yet? I am currently making my own super ambitious Bendy Fan-Game right now and am learning Unity to do so. So I'd be excited at the chance to help with that since I'm such a fan of ur work. I understand if that's more of a future thing though KJDHFGKJHDFGKJHSD

Are you working on any other Bendy-related projects right now? If not are u interested in that sort of thing? Or are you more focused on ur own projects which I totally understand. It's just like I mentioned I'd love any tutorials or tips on how you create such lovely animations but esp bc they are the style of animations I would love to be able to create for my game. I'd take any chance to learn more. Apologies for this being so long, probably should've been a discord dm but I felt like sending this on Discord out of the blue would've been really intimidating KJHDFKGJHDFKGJHSD. Sorry if this is hard to answer I've really wanted to ask these sorts of things for a while ever since I saw a lot of ur stuff over Discord but I overthink everything n felt nervous asking without knowing if u actually wanted questions over this series or not. [This is cobaltcreations btw we've talked a few times on the JDS Server, love love love ur stuff!!]

I’ve wanted to do tutorials for a long time now, probably a few years at this point. Unfortunately, I’ve been kinda stuck on where to start with something like that. Thanks for the compliments, though! I have a thing for rubberhose monsters. =)

I don’t really plan to put anything up for release until the series is done (that is if I don’t put it in a fan game first). I do end up doing a lot of model analysis to see how some models are done, though. It really helps me to optimize them for animation.

Speaking of fan-games, I at the very least HOPE that I can make a Bendy Analog Horror game in the near future, but I’ve no idea what it would focus on (I had wanted to do a remake of Chapter 1, but we all know what happened to Moving Pictures: Redrawn. =\).

I am working on a couple of one-off smaller projects—mostly music projects and song covers and have nothing to do with the analog horror series. I’d love to work with more people on their own projects though, but unfortunately, my schedule hasn’t been very reliable as of lately. XP

Lastly, you’re free to DM me any questions you have on Discord. I love talking about these sorts of things! ^^

- Roux

[caddeter]

A few months, I made a post talking about how the ‘planned from the beginning’ excuse the RWBY FNDM loves to use makes no sense.  I got into a very brief argument with @crimsonxe before deleting the post and apologizing for writing it out of anger.

I am now taking that apology back, because the RWBY FNDM has repeatedly proven it deserves no form of respect no matter how small or basic.

I was hoping to rewrite the post using the other user’s replies, but unfortunately I couldn’t find them in my email trash bin.  So I’m going to be rewriting it based on memory.

One of the points I made was that, in Volume 3, there was a short scene where Penny expressed a desire to stay at Beacon, specifically saying that she ‘had an idea.’ The person who responded to me said that this idea didn’t ‘go nowhere’ because Penny dies at the end of the Volume

...  Bitch, that’s why it goes nowhere.

It’s like saying the ending of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom where dinosaurs are now loose on the mainland wasn’t completely ignored by the next film because Dominion was all about an evil corporation trying to kill competitor crops with a swarm of prehistoric locus.  It doesn’t change the fact that Fallen Kingdom’s ending was very clearly setting up a different story.

Or that the Pokemon anime didn’t drop the golden Pokeball plotline because it was delivered to Professor Oak and we never learn what it was about.

They also said that all that really mattered to Silver Eyes was that the Grimm are afraid of them, and it’s perfectly okay that CRWBY didn’t figure out why until Volume 3

That’s like saying it would have been perfectly fine if Avatar The Last Airbender took three seasons to figure out what an Avatar is.

Ruby’s Silver Eyes are strongly implied to be the reason Ozpin let her into Beacon.  If I’m expected to believe they’re important, why the fuck wouldn’t you figure out what they do first thing.

A plothole is when there is a hole in your plot’s internal logic.  How are you supposed to avoid plotholes if not even you know what’s going on?

Another point they made was that the writers figuring out their worldbuilding before they start the story or where they want the plot to go is them ‘doing me a favor’

As I said in the original post:  No, that is the writers doing their JOBS!

Let me put it to you this way:  Imagine you go into a restaurant and order a cheeseburger:

Do you expect that burger to be cooked?

Do you expect it to have a bun?

Do you expect a plate or a tray to carry it with?

Do you expect the restaurant to have tables you can sit at?

Do you expect the floors to be clean with a wet floor sign warning you of when it’s slippery?

Saying that the writers are ‘doing me a favor’ when they figure out where they want their story to go or how their magic systems work or what their world is like is like saying that one manager I had was ‘doing me a favor’ every time he came in half an hour late rather than miss have his shift like that one time.  That’s not doing a favor, that’s doing the least they could.

Doing me a favor is when Ben 10 throws in nods to fan opinions and responses in their show as quick little gags without mocking the people who hold those thoughts.

It’s when William Hartnell, the actor who played the First Doctor, kept track of what every button and switch on the TARDIS console did because he wanted to make sure he never used the wrong one because he feared viewers would notice.

It’s when Arkhane Studios defines the world of Dishonored down to the calendar.

It’s when the Ink Tank makes And Beyond, a series dedicated the the culture and societies of each of Ben’s aliens.

It’s when Linkara, GOAT he is, makes an entire, full length analog-horror movie as an April Fools joke.

Doing the audience a favor is going the extra mile.  It is not figuring out your plot points the moment they become relevant.  If that’s what you define as good writer, than please, do tell me, what’s bad writing?  If your standards are this low, then what would you consider a bad story?

They also claimed that I was wrong to make such criticisms of RWBY because Miles Luna is just a human being

I could make an entire post detailing how ‘people make mistakes’ is a terrible way to counter criticism (and in fact, I did), but instead, I’ll just leave you with a choice quote that describes one of the biggest problems with it:

There are writers and directors out there who put painstaking efforts into their stories to make sure everything is as concise and logical as possible. There are also writers and directors who don't put in those efforts at all. If inconsistencies in plot and character action "don't matter at all", then how can you even appreciate those efforts made by filmmakers who legitimately care? You're not just delegitimizing those who discuss their films. You're delegitimizing the filmmakers themselves. You're saying there's no difference between a lazy script littered with inconsistencies versus a thoroughly researched, laid-out, thoughtful script that made every effort they possibly could to make the story, characters, and universe as consistent and believable as possible. That's just nonsense and it's upsetting that you refuse to see any value whatsoever in filmmakers who put those extra efforts into their work.

Adam from YourMovieSucks.org, a professional movie critic.

They also said that they, as a writer, have reworked entire timelines because they came up with one new character

First of all, what you describing here is the planning process.  It’s revise then release, not the other way around.

Second of all, real nice anecdotal evidence you have there.  Wanna hear some of mine?  I wrote up history and culture for vampires and werewolves, notes detailing my own soft magic system, and worldbuilt an entire underwater society down to the clock for fun.  At that point, it shouldn’t feel like I’m asking the writers to reverse the Earth’s rotation when I expect them to figure out why Ruby’s Silver Eyes are special or how Magic works.

Another one of their ridiculous claims was that foreshadowing could ruin a show’s mysteries

Dumbass, mysteries are where you need foreshadowing the most.  Ask any established mystery writer, they’ll all tell you the same thing:  The best practice is to figure out the ending first and work your way backwards.  It requires thought and care to make sure the ending is satisfying and the journey to it is enjoyable and engaging.

Even if the audience figures out where the story is going, that just means their paying attention and are invested enough to think about the story.  And last I checked, the audience being invested in your story is a good thing.  Take it from me, I have a very strong idea for where Slime Rancher 2′s story is going, and I would be elated when it turns out I’m right.

If the only quality your story has is that it’s ending is ‘a surprising twist,’ then that just shows how shallow the rest of the story is.

Edit:  Linkara has a quote that perfectly explains why this idea is stupid:  “Of course we can’t [solve the mysteries].  It’s not really a mystery.  It’s you guys making up random contrivances to resolve each new cliffhanger.”

The last thing they user did was perpetuate the conspiracy theory that the RWDE tag was created to somehow destroy RWBY and Rooster Teeth while also saying the show doesn’t need defending from us as they defended it.

Ah, yes, because criticizing something is such a threat to it and the people who make it.  Just look at what happened with Twilight.  That series became the laughing stock of the internet, and then it...  Kept going.

Or what about Sword Art Online.  Mocking it became ingrained in the anime community, and then it...  Kept going.

Or Sonic The Hedgehog.  That series has a bad game every other release, and then it...  Kept going.  And each time it actually listens to the feedback it gets and tries to fix the problems people had.

Criticism is not a threat to a piece of media or the people who made it.  If anything, we’re doing RT a favor by criticizing RWBY.

But even then, let’s pretend, for just a moment, that there somehow was a conspiracy to destroy RWBY and Rooster Teeth for whatever reason.  Do you know what our EEVIIIILLL plan would be?  It’d be a simple two steps:

Step 1: Sit back

Step 2: Watch

Anything we could say or do to Rooster Teeth wouldn’t be nearly as bad as what they do to themselves.  Or do you think all those ex-employees reporting workplace discrimination and crunch culture so terrible it caused PTSD are in on it too?  We aren’t the ones trying to destroy Rooster Teeth.  Rooster Teeth is the one trying to destroy Rooster Teeth.

And even if that wasn’t true, why would an easily blockable tumblr tag be any threat to them?  We say this about a hundred times a day, but the entire point of the tag is for the FNDM to blacklist it so that they don’t see criticism.

And just to articulate how easy it is to blacklist a tag on this website:  I figured out how to do that all on my own and I can’t find my blocklist.  If that’s not good enough for you people, then what do you want us to do, go to an entirely different website?  Yeah, like that would stop you from complaining about us.

Furthermore, out of all the series in all the media in all the world to try and destroy, why do you think we would target a low profile web animation from a company that’s only really popular in machinima?  Don’t you think a more high-profile franchise would get this treatment?  Like Star Wars?

They probably said some more dumbass claims, but these are all I can remember.

[arcticdementor]

TLDR: I wouldn’t recommend it, except for it’s maybe being amongst the most important films of the Century, and 100% necessary pre-watching if you plan to visit India. NSFW, NSFL, Warnings for everything humanly possible, refused rating, beyond NC-17, contender for scariest/most disturbing film ever made, IRL Infohazard, IRL Lovecraftian Horror, IRL Spiritual danger, might be a crime to view/own/recommend in Europe, probably read the review first.

…

It is said by the wise anons of 4Chan and Twitter that one can never be truly Fascist until they watch the first season of the anime series K-On. 

…

Only by immersing oneself in Japanese sentimentality can one see an approximation of what Victorian and Edwardian sentimentality was, and why Fascists were willing to fight so hard against the sudden imposition of Weimar’s Proto-21st-century culture and conditions.

…

In that case then, the “Nature Doc” India: The Worst Country on Earth, also known simply by the Anti-Indian Racial slur Pajeets (Akin to Cunts, Kikes, or Niggers), is a film much more unique than simply being the first AI Feature Film and the first proof of concept that an Amatuer with AI can now compete with Hollywood… or atleast with the BBC and Michael Moore. Made by the mysterious creator known only as “Thames”, It is the immediate opposite and ideological complement of K-On.  If the light of K-On’s innocence does not permanently kill your egalitarian universalist values and sense of human brotherhood, convincing you that some people and ways of life are uniquely worth fighting for, then, for the purposes of analogy, Pajeets’ pitch black horror would almost certainly convince you there are certainly some uniquely worth fighting against.

…

It is a testament to the writer’s extraordinarily refined sense of racist 4Chan humor that the film remains as watchable as it, indeed the raw quantity of racist humour and ironic references required to stomach any of these realities is almost certainly why so much of this is vaguely felt but almost entirely unknown and certainly unexpressed in the West.  Even then, by the time we reach the title card, precisely at minute 3, I wouldn’t be shocked if a great number of viewers had already turned off the film in sheer physical revulsion. Many who make it that far report turning it off by minute 16.  I’ve watched it in its entirety multiple times now. And still I find myself intuitively bracing for cuts and edits… not specific cuts and edits, but in general. Any shot that lasts too long creates a brief window of comfortable familiarity, and resultant nervous anticipation… knowing that safety will end any second. However those who bear through to reach the title and hear the inspired musical choice of Open Your Eyes by Guano Ape soon see the sight of men touching live high-voltage wires, dead bodies floating in the Ganges, dozens of deaths of stupidity, multiple rapes, scatalogical and hygenic horrors straining comprehenision, and even worse things I cannot bring myself to describe.

…

And, oh yes, it is all real. Artificial intelligence has only been used to digitally draw David Attenborough from his aged retirement, and add a few humorous cartoon-ish stills. Thames has assembled presumably hours of viral videos, internet memes, 4chan gross-out clips, liveleak clips, documentary footage, TikTok videos, and news stories to make this film. I recognize many of the clips, stories, and “cultural curiosities” having seen them make the rounds on Twitter and 4Chan to memery and disgust.

…

Thames has just assembled it all into a feature film length package so violently racist it is doubtful the likes of Goebels, Bull Connor, or the racist terrorist factions of Revisionist Ultra-Zionism such as Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira or Moche Orbach, have ever produced its approximation. The humor and conceit of the BBC nature documentary format, as well as his technical and literary mastery of the 2000s-2010s environmentalist polemic, merely serve as the artistic structure for perhaps the most uninterruptedly hateful film ever produced.

…

And this is why I think the film is artistically significant. Setting aside Thames’ Attenboroughian auditory appeal to abhorrence and animosity, as a connoisseur of horror films and shock productions I can't really think of anything so unbroken in its aesthetic hatefulness, its visual vitriol and verisimilitude of valueless violence. The pestilence of it! I’ve never seen such gross gangrenous gutter gore portrayed so unflinchingly and unbrokenly.

…

However aside from the depressing damage to the environment, epidemiology, world cuisine, animal welfare, and the gag reflexes of the poor viewer… the most disturbing part of the documentary is the Sexual violence: against woman, child, man, and beast.  I have never seen a documentary with so much real footage of real rape and sexual assault. I’ve seen footage of sexual assaults, one cannot peruse Twitter or 4Chan without the seeing the newest outrages, likewise the presentation of real criminal sexual assaults in documentaries is not unheard of, but on top of everything else you see in the documentary, if the cruel and unhygienic horrors imposed on animals and wallowed in by men did not tempt you to shut off the film, the sexual horrors certainly might.

…

Why make this the first film reviewed on Anarchonomicon if we don’t count Macbeth 2015 and Blackberry (neither of which anyone read). Am I just scoring points in my unending quest to become the great curator of Forbidden Knowledge, to gain clout amongst extremiscists and connoisseur of the callous?  Maybe… but I think there’s something more here. The Shocking is necessarily the surprising, and the disturbing is necessarily the confusing.

…

Meanwhile surgeons and anatomists do not find gore disgusting, they might find violence or jump scares difficult… but they’re used to bodies coming apart. Seeing it happen vividly on film doesn’t violate their intuitive subconscious expectations and models of the world the way it does for most people. Likewise veterans of major wars (notably several of Napoleon’s Marshals) have been noted to seemingly ignore gunshots or grievous wounds even to themselves the second they find they’re non-fatal. They’ve seen it countless times before and it’s merely a nuisance for it to have afflicted them as opposed to others. Likewise farmers, butchers, paramedics, and horror fans are often shockingly calm in comparable medical emergencies even when it’s themselves. So if even gunshot wounds and maimed limbs can be ignorable discomforts to those already familiar with their like, in the immediate second and even first person… How is it so much visceral shock, horror, and lasting disturbance can be attained through a screen… depicting archival and documentary footage!

…

This isn’t some great violation of all expectations and norms. When Samara crawls out of the TV Screen at the end of The Ring after an hour and half of built up tension and filmic and narrative tricks to get your mind feeling threatened and expecting a violation of all laws of physics, whilst employing every editing and pacing technique to subtly trick your mind into fleetingly thinking that she’s crawled out of your TV and she’s coming for you! That provokes a lesser reaction in most people.

…

Whereas India: TWCoE has people shutting off the video before the Title and opening song at minute 3. For archival and cellphone footage! Nothing fictional, no jump scares, no ghosts coming out of the TV itself, no tricks or spooky artificial atmosphere. The only filmic conceit: an AI voice changer meant to make the subject matter funnier, more tolerable, more intellectually distant. “It’s disgusting” Do you react to footage of farm animals in manure covered barns this way? What about photos of roadkill or decaying animals carcasses? I see both all the time on long bicycles rides through the country. I showed this to a family member who immediately wanted to turn it off… she regularly watches horror movies of the most disgusting violence, the film Ready or Not which she considered a fun horror/comedy, had a scene in which a woman shot in the hand falls into a “gore pit” of animal carcasses, and must crawl over the decaying flesh using her mangled bleeding hand to escape (it is a genuinely fun/funny movie). Yet she could endure that laughing and wincing, but not this.

…

This has been the state of a country of 1.4 billion, comprising 1 in 6 human beings on earth, for the entirety of your life. Why is this shocking? Why is this surprising?  What overwhelmingly massive truth has been purposefully concealed from you, such that this experience is maybe amongst the most violently unpleasant and soulshaking experiences a western can endure without leaving their living room?

…

But whereas most countries and societies are improving… India is one of the few countries in which such metrics are getting worse. Indian height and penis sizes are shrinking, both proxies for nutrition as well as exposure to pollution and parasites. Indian civilization is quite literally “degenerate”, they are physically deteriorating before our very eyes. And while I cannot bring myself to describe the hygenic horrors, one need not watch much of the documentary to more than sufficiently understand why.

…

Egalitarian minded Westerners, even after accepting that IQ stats measure meaningful differences within national and ethnic groups, or who accept many of the tests and proxies for intelligence, protest that if the average IQ was so low as the international scores suggest, then low IQ societies would not be able to function at all, that they’d go about in a violent, horrifying, screaming, shit-covered madness…  Such Egalitarian minded westerners react less than happily when you point out that they in fact do so go about.

…

The dark truth is that morality, cleanliness, and almost all ordinary exercises of will and judgement necessary for any human functionality, are all IQ tests. Very simple and easy IQ tests… but ones which billions of people are incapable of. Indeed according to many classical western definitions of “person” the bottom 1-2 billion are not “people”. If you define “man” as the moral or rational animal then these are not men. Many dissident linguists have noted many sub-Saharan languages do not have any functional way to express abstractions and indeed the concept of promises or other moral commitments are alien to the tribes who speak them, or only are expressed through elaborate metaphors taught to them by white missionaries.

…

But Whilst Africa has countless slums equally as horrifying, as of yet the population density is such that the Africans are not universally forced into the urban and sprawling horrors we see in india. Whilst they pollute at comparable rates, one may still see large areas that are tribal, post-tribal, and suitably primitive such that the median African settlement is not sickly and decaying as what is witnessed in India, primevally wild Africans still go in states of relatively noble health, analogous to the beautiful wildlife of Africa, they are not yet past the population density event horizon of becoming the sort of decaying hive societies beset by cults of Nurgle, which we witness in India. Median Height, intelligence and Penis size is not yet shrinking. Indeed the much maligned African Warlord, acting as apex predator, serves to keep various regions and populations thinned to a less than truly horrifying state of health. In India, and as Egyptian and other commentators have noted, in an expanding suite of countries, we see the true nightmare scenario of the modern state just barely existing in an anarcho-tyrannical form able to sustain and regulate the human organism well past the point of degeneration, and able to prevent the wars and violence so desperately needed to restore the slow march of IQ and other markers of genetic and physical fitness.

…

The violent discomfort and horror felt by the Western egalitarian at India: The Worst Country on Earth which is not felt upon viewing Pigs wallowing in manure or seeing roadkill or animals dead in equally bizarre, miserable or stupid manners, The reason we recoil at the sexual horrors of India but feel relatively little for the incest sexual assault and worse that occurs in the animal kingdom… is because the Western Egalitarian is trained to identify with the brown foreigner, in many instances even beyond their identification with their own ethnicity or race. In their religious and now post-religious ecstasies, purity spirals, and consciousness raising, in their more than decade of moral instruction under the priesthood of the public school teachers, and the legacy priesthood of the lamb of God; in their daily prayers and religious contemplations of diverse television, film, and media, the modern westerners are taught the belief in the universal moral merit, intelligence, worthiness, and nobility of man irrespective of race, religion, sexuality, and creed… it is not simply A moral good, but THE moral good. The Axiom upon which all civilization, moral worthiness, and hope of salvation rests. At the moment of death their passing or failing the final judgement of God or “History” depends on how sincerely they earnestly believed, in spite of the constant knawing of evidence, in this universal equality and brotherhood. India: The Worst Country on Earth inflicts violence of a spiritual and metaphysical variety upon the westerner. If only Samara was crawling out of their TV to kill their physical body, they might die cursing a white girl and their salvation would be assured. Instead India: TWCoE attacks their very soul. The Westerner MUST identity with the foreigner. MUST empathize. MUST psychically place themselves in the Indian’s shoes. MUST Imagine themselves one and the same.

…

They MUST empathize, and their gag reflexes must activate and they must feel their skin crawl as if beset by parasites and sexual diseases welcomed in through a million disgusting wallowing practices. They cannot do what Hundreds of millions of high caste indians and upper class third worlders do every day: Stop Empathizing. Stop looking on them as your fellow man, and instead look upon them as revolting stupid bottom feeding animals, akin to diseased racoons or possums…or various mamilians who wallow in their own filth, or seek their missing nutrition in the droppings of more noble creatures such as the bovine. For to stop empathizing, so the western thinks, to stop believing “there is only one race the human race” or “that all men are created equal” would be to abandon all that is good and true and transcendent in this world. Except for the what is obvious to plainly see: it is neither good, nor true, nor transcendent.

…

Of course if one disagrees, and still believes in the universal egalitarian brotherhood… they can just Watch the Movie. 

…

In the end I can guarantee you the most offended by this film or this review will be a white westerner. Intelligent and upper-class people from the third world are very aware of the decayed state of their lower-classes and keenly aware of the Caste, ethnic, class, and genealogical differences that separate them from those horrific masses. Amongst the intelligent aristocratic upper-classes of more decayed countries they develop very specific exclusionist identities to describe their separateness from the masses about them (mostly accurately, some are delusional… but none who read this blog). Ironically the people who suffer the most racial panic upon accepting HBD ideas are intelligent mixed race westerners who, in the egalitarian doublespeak of the west, never have anyone to tell them that they actually are exceptional or actually can achieve great things, or actually should feel empowered and confident… as opposed to all the fake empowerment, fake expectations, and fake encouragement we pour upon the 75 IQ illiterate urban criminal classes.  One need only speak to people in commonwealth countries to see many of the most opposed to mass immigration are earlier waves of Immigrants who had to pass a higher standard and were of that aristocratic upper class, and now don’t want the people they’ve escaped following them to the west.

…

But the most significant impact of the film, which is already showing a surprisingly viral interest, is going to be on Western political discussions around diversity and Immigration. “This is what we’re importing” as the warning goes.  But beyond that the wider politics of disgust, and its relation to conservative, fascist, ethno-exclusionist and other right wing politics is a long established phenomenon. A film this vomitously moving, cannot but become a modern staple of the online right. Like K-On it too immediately sums up the worldview of far-right politics to be ignored I may have been the first to write a review of this film, and I am almost certainly the best. But I will not be the last.

[noteverystarisasun]

ANNOUNCEMENT

This is a very important yet short announcement !

NESIAS is now it's own thing ! Meaning it will no longer have elements from the web series VITA CARNIS or THE MONUMENT MYTHOS, it will still have elements of analog horror, but it will only be inspired by these web-series for now on. (The Links will stay on the Disclaimer and Understanding for those who want to check out what I'm inspired by ! ) And I updated the info on the Disclaimer itself, changing the summary and other things I wasn't so keen on explaining,, [What's NESIAS about,,]

I only had elements of them until I figured out what exactly I was planning to do, and I finally pulled together and figured it out, what I'm doing will make the story a bit more interesting,,, hopefully

I might post/design some of the critters soon that will be seen,,

and to those who are asking, no I'm not abandoning the comic, I'm currently busy with life, I don't have that much free time like other comic artists on here. Which is why I'm working on small projects, other aus, more worldbuilding to what I'm trying to achieve with this story, so please stop asking, it's getting annoying, NESIAS will be back when it will be back. in the meantime, enjoy the side-projects, collabs, art-trades, etc. Ask about the side-projects, I'll answer them more freely than those related to NESIAS as they are not a comic and are for fun.

Mostly just asking ya'll to chill really, this stuff takes time that i really don't have for currently, so embrace the side-projects of aus and ships ! You'll get a lot more out of them than this one currently ! Thanks for reading

-ASW

[tinyozlion]

Addressing the Troubles: Part 2 / 3

A Brief History of Gundam in Japan and the USA:

Here is my go-to analogy: The Gundam franchise is to Japan what Star Trek is to America. And Gundam Wing is to the Gundam franchise what Deep Space 9 is to the rest of Star Trek.

Wing was part of an experimental phase in the franchise’s history; when they were intentionally trying to break away from the usual modus operandi. Wing, along with the earlier G Gundam, was intended to boost flagging viewership and sell model kits– like, expressly, openly, just to sell model kits. The plan was to start from a blank slate that would allow new viewers to hop on board, without having to be caught up on the sprawling canon of the UC timeline (Universal Century).

In Japan, audiences were already familiar with the general premise of A Gundam Show; rather than spend any extra time re-establishing details that an already Gundam-savvy audience would know, it skipped right to explaining on how this particular series was departing from the established material. In this case, the noteworthy information was that Wing takes place in the After Colony timeline, and is set wholly in its own universe– we have a different sinister organization with a ‘Z’ in its name, a different mysterious blond man who wears a mask, a different conflict between Earth and Space, and no mention of Newtypes. 

Perhaps the most significant difference between Wing and its predecessor was its tonal shift. In the original Mobile Suit Gundam (if seasoned fans will pardon my oversimplification), the good guys are a relatively wholesome bunch or reluctant civilian heroes coming together to survive, a found-family supporting each other and trying their best to protect the vulnerable. It’s just ONE Gundam, and a crew of overworked, under-supplied misfits. It’s still very much a complex narrative about the horrors of war, but like, there’s a goofy side-kick robot! Kids run around White Base causing shenanigans! The more the UC timeline progresses, the more complicated it gets, but the point is, it’s a different style of complicated. There's a relatable and familiar flavor to its protagonists and their struggles. 

Pan over to Wing, where we are served right away with the spiciest plate of the spiciest feral murder boys, possibly the LEAST reluctant people ever to get in a mecha and cause harm.

The protagonist pilots are remorseless teenagers who were robbed of their adolescence before the show even began, and thrown into the meatgrinder of revolutionary violence– not the most relatable bunch, and not one audience surrogate amongst them (that honor goes to Relena). None of them work together, everyone is morally ambiguous, and they’re all hyper-competent elite soldiers from the get-go. In MS Gundam, Amuro spends his first fight in the Gundam trying to learn to walk and shoot using a manual. 

Some Gundam fans were quite put off by this change, but in the USA, we had no basis for comparison. Gundam Wing was the only Gundam show we had, and furthermore, it was one of the first “serious” “cartoons” introduced to mainstream television. And it blew. Our. Fucking. Minds.

--I cannot stress enough how influential that early 2000’s Toonami programming block was in introducing anime to American audiences, and by extension, American television producers and toy companies. I recommend checking out this IGN article about the history of GW’s debut on Cartoon Network, and the effect it had on the industry at large: How Gundam Wing Found Its Home On Toonami 20 Years Ago Today . For another take on the phenomenon check out: Found in Translation: How Gundam Wing Became A Global Phenomenon (Opinions are those of the article writer, not mine.) 

For those of you who are of that Toonami-block generation who never encountered the original series: MS Gundam is truly gripping and powerful, and if you’re not already a Gundam fan but found that Wing tickled your fancy, the original line up of shows will probably be right up your alley too. Be prepared for a very different overall experience from Wing though– for one thing, you may be surprised to discover that the original series, with its earlier animation style and dated anime tropes, is absolutely fucking brutal.

Fundamentally, the original Gundam is a series that is steeped to its core in a very somber, distinctly post-war Japanese melancholy that Wing, for all its lofty philosophizing, lacks. I don’t mean to make that a criticism of Wing– it had a much, much shorter run to make its point, and it was intentionally trying to do something different from its parent series.

Gundam Wing may at one point had a reputation for being Gundam’s dark, broody, edgy cousin, but Wing is also as chaste as a Victorian romance novel, and obscures most of its violence in clean, bloodless explosions. In the first episode of MS Gundam you will be treated to first-hand mass civilian death. In the movie and at various points of the shows there are scenes deliberately and uncomfortably reminiscent of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Zeta Gundam, you'll get to explore a wide selection of Horrible Ways To Die In Space that I suspect would have the same effect on a child as accidentally watching Watership Down (1978) thinking it was a Disney movie. (That's right: It makes you a more interesting person with good taste!) There's also like, nudity. And adults, with messy, adult relationship problems.

The U.C. timeline is just a lot more, I want to say, earthy as a rule. The characters are normal people and they have a wide range of interests and relationships to each other. Even when it’s reaching those philosophical high-notes, the focus is closer to the ground level; you see the day to day struggles of the crew, of civilians, of couples, you see their private lives, watch them evolve over the course of many years, how they fall in love, eat burgers, hook up, make friends, and make bad decisions. It’s a rich, diverse world filled with believable, complex people; the world building has more time to fill out, with its roots firmly in the soil of classic science fiction writing and space exploration; and it does what it sets out to do, which is deliver a gut-punch of an anti-war story.

If you take anything away from this, it’s that developing a tolerance for older mediums and long-term relationships with particular stories will give you access to some of the most rewarding experiences possible. And that’s true of many things, but especially of stories that have had lasting cultural impact and serve as time capsules for the struggles of their era. It’s true of The Iliad, it’s true of Lord of the Rings, it’s true of Akira, it’s true of Gundam. 

“Just Make Us Five Gundams” – Wing’s Famously Troubled Production & Why You Should Read Episode Zero

Gundam Wing was created flying by the seat of its pants from start to finish. 

Hideyuki Tomioka, executive producer on Wing, was still early in his career when he was cut loose on a new Gundam series with minimal oversight.

“Just make us a show with FIVE new Gundams”, Bandai said. “It’ll sell model kits!”, they said. “It’ll be fun!”, they said. And they laughed, and laughed. 

But Tomioka agreed, and set out to assemble his creative team– notably, Masashi Ikeda (series director), Katsuyuki Sumisawa (series composition / head scriptwriter), and Shuko Murase (character designer). Many of his chosen production crew had never worked on a Gundam show before, but everyone knew their stuff, and had been selected for their outstanding work or for showing promise in their respective fields. 

--Please, pour one out for them now.

The production schedule for Wing was apparently one of the roughest in Sunrise’s history. In a 2017 interview, producer Tomioka explains: “With Wing, we delivered the episodes to the TV network a week early. All of them. I was told by the producers at the network that there would be hell to pay if this next Gundam wasn’t delivered a week early like clockwork, and I said sure. I also told Mr. Ikeda and the company that we would maintain a one-week-before-air delivery schedule, and we delivered every single episode a week before air.” 

Head scriptwriter Sumisawa recalls camping in the Sunrise studio and working all night without sleeping in order to turn in scripts on time (something I vividly recall doing with my senior thesis). 

Despite the entire staff being burnt out from the continuous workflow, the team apparently met every single deadline, and still consider Gundam Wing to be some of their best work. 

However, Wing’s trouble didn’t end with just the frantic schedule.

Significant, under-the-table leadership changes at the studio level made a bad situation worse. Just before the production of Wing, parent company Sunrise had sold the Gundam franchise to Bandai, apparently in secret, leaving their creatives and producers like Tomioka in a lurch. The sudden change in sponsors led to an attitude change that would filter through the company, causing significant friction and splintering within the organization.

In fact, creative control of the series was tossed in the air at multiple levels:

 When series director Masashi Ikeda was hired for Wing, he was coming off a few rocky dismissals / resignations from earlier projects due to his disagreements with sponsors. He was new to Gundam, but was known for being a talented, if contentious, storyboard artist / director. Right away he took Wing in an unexpected direction, apparently derailing the series from its original trajectory after only 10 episodes. Signing off on these provocative decisions may have painted a target on his back, but it certainly made Wing stand out from its predecessors! Perhaps predictably, Ikeda either “abruptly resigned” or was fired from the project after Episode 29, and was substituted by Gundam franchise veteran, Shinji Takamatsu. Takamatsu would ultimately finish directing the remaining half of the series, though he was left uncredited.

Sumisawa too withdrew as a the lead scenario writer. He reports having to cope with curve balls thrown in the script by different writers who hadn’t run their decisions by him first, leaving him to struggle with reworking episodes at the last minute in order to accommodate the unsupervised changes. 

All the crunch and chaos, the impossibly tight schedules, the directorial and creative control changing hands mid-series, led to many of the important plot points and connective tissue that had been slated for reveal at the midpoint of the series being severely truncated, or scrapped entirely.

--And this, friends, is why there are so many instances in the early episodes of Wing where characters make reference to events and concepts that simply never show up in the series– the material got cut for time, and the unexplained anecdotes were left to dangle. 

This includes by far the most unfortunate omission in the series: the pilot backstories. In the postscript of “Gundam Wing: Episode Zero”, the manga prequel released seven years after the series first aired– scriptwriter Sumisawa makes this plea:

“[...] I would like to make a request of those who have read this book. I would like you to watch the entire TV series and Endless Waltz again. By so doing, I think you will be able to fully appreciate the work, Gundam Wing. This series of stories of the past was requested of me by Director Ikeda, and it was supposed to appear in the to the p20the TV series after episode 27. However, it was pigeonholed roduction schedule being the worst ever, and the fact that I withdrew ws scenarist. When I returned to the show, there was no chance to fit in the past, and we had no choice but to table it indefinitely (though we did try in episode 31, The Glass Kingdom). It was able to become a graphic novel through the kindness of the editors at Anime V Magazine and Mr. Kanbe's (artist) cooperation. As one of the co-creators, I am extremely grateful, and this has become a very emotional work.”

In one interview, Sumisawa laments: “Nobody wants to write recap episodes. Episodes 27 and 28 were recap episodes.” Producer Tomioka notes that “Everybody worked some serious miracles for part two. We never would have been able to do part two [of the series] if we hadn’t put in those recap episodes. It really was rough.” 

--This Is why I recommend that people read Episode Zero around the time they get to the mid-series point in the anime, where the backstories were always meant to go. Many, MANY questions and frustrations that I hear from first-time watchers will be cleared up.

It’s a damn good collection of stories, too! As you can see, my own copy is nearing a level of decrepitude that ought to make it Nursery Real at this point. I took it everywhere with me in my school bag as a comfort item.

–A link to the manga can be found in the Bookshelf section!

[owlseeingchaos]

Welcome to the blog!

I'm Owlkhemy (she/they preferred, but no real issues with anything else)!

As I've stated back on my main @owlkhemy, I don't like to get too fandomy on main. So here's a non-main blog for me to fangirl in! Yay!

As with my other blogs, general warning here for the bucketloads of swearing I tend to do. Also a warning that some of my interests get a little... dark or heavy on occasion, so I'll do my best to tag them accordingly. If there's something I've forgotten, please let me know! I love tagging stuff properly.

A long, loooong list of all the stuff I'm a fan of is below the cut. I'll be updating it as I go along and inevitably add things I've forgotten. I'm willing to talk about any of these, so feel free to pop into my askbox!

(Anything with a blue asterisk is something I haven't actually read/played/watched all of, so please be patient with me if I get something wrong. In most of these cases, I've done a thing I like to call "consuming by proxy" - I've read a wiki extensively or watched a Let's Play or something.)

The "current fandom nonsense" indicator in my blog description is which one you're probably going to incessantly see for a while.

Queue is set to 4 posts a day. Initially I was going to say "hopefully it's enough", but more and more I've come to find that I actually don't do enough browsing on here to keep up with much more than that...

You will very quickly find out which characters are my favourite in everything. For the sake of your sanity, don't question why that might be too much in most cases...

The Long-Ass List of All My Interests!

Video Games:

Super Mario Bros. and its various subseries

Sonic the Hedgehog (I've only played the Genesis games, Heroes, Colors, Unleashed, and the "Storybook Series")

Crash Bandicoot, particularly the Radical games and Nitro-Fueled

Namco arcade games (my top four are Mappy, Sky Kid, Phozon, and Bosconian, so I'll probably focus on those)

Petz, especially Petz 5. I have a sideblog for my Petz nonsense, @hydrargyrykennelz .

I also like Petz Dogz/Catz 2. I had Petz Dogz 2, but they're literally identical except for dogs or cats.

Pac-Man, especially Pac-Man World (mostly PMW2, PMW3, and World Rally, which I've played more of than the first PMW)

Undertale* and Deltarune (and Undertale Yellow*)

Minecraft

Spyro the Dragon (I've played the demo of Ripto's Rage, most of Enter the Dragonfly, and quite a bit of A Hero's Tail)

Star Fox, probably mostly 64* (it's on the list! I Will be playing it at some point! I practically have to or else I'll die at this point /j)

Yume Nikki* (also on the list; done extensive wiki reading and watched the occasional gameplay clip)

Bejeweled, especially Bejeweled 3.

Kirby* (I've played a bit of 64)

The Legend of Zelda (I put 5-10 hours into my roomie's copy of Tears of the Kingdom and have plans to play Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask)

No Straight Roads* (also on the list; I've done a good amount of wiki reading)

Team Fortress 2* (also on the list, but not an urgent one; wiki reading)

Speedy Blupi/Eggbert, which I played constantly as a kid

Bendy and the Ink Machine* (did extensive wiki reading)

Cuphead* (wiki reading, plus i was really into Casino Cups)

Cult of the Lamb* (watched a playthrough)

Dislyte (I've long stopped playing but it's very interesting still)

Web Series:

ENA

Happy Tree Friends* (I've only seen a few episodes, but I did read the entire wiki at one point)

I have passing interest in analog horror, even though I'm both an absolute scaredy-cat and dysprosophobic

Webcomics:

Awful Hospital

I also used to be a pretty avid reader of Handplates

Other internet stuff:

I also have a passing interest in lost media

Other stuff in general:

I spend a lot of time on TV Tropes (unfortunately), mostly to absorb random facts

I am a furry (and, if you want to get more specific, also a scaly and a feathery)

Gravity Falls remains the only show I watched as a child that still has a bit of a grip on me, so the occasion content from that will pop up here.

Real life:

Science. I'm literally about to get my bachelor's. Emphasis on biology and chemistry, because physics and I have a mutual respectful hatred of each other.

Birds, especially owls (as my various usernames would suggest)

Insects and arachnids

Opossums

Really, just wildlife in general, actually?

Space.

Photography

Art

Music

Writing

I haven't read any books in a hot minute, but I like fantasy and sci-fi

[daddyd0nt]

why did you quit that job if it gave you joy?

I only worked 2 days a week, and was recently approved for disability so it was only about $200 difference between what id be given in disability and what I made in a month, so on that level it just wasn't worth it to keep working for such little reward. I also need to get a lot in order with a meds change (I may be changing my antidepressant after almost a decade), and with getting services in place and finding a new therapist and possibly spending some time away for PTSD and substance abuse treatment. Traditional work just wasn't sustainable for me, every day i had off i was either recovering from or preparing for a workday. My house fell into disrepair, I started to let my hygiene go, working was putting me in a really hard place mentally. There was also some stuff going on at work where I reported this family 3x to CPS because their 2 year old came in absolutely battered saying his moms boyfriend hit him and nothing was done. The autistic kids were neglected and not included and just left to pace the carpet and we weren't even allowed to suggest to the parents to get their kids evaluated so most of them were in complete denial and the program was not appropriate for their child and t was really frustrating, Id spend my whole day trying to help the one autistic kid in the room which meant the other teacher was watching 9-14 kids on her own because the kids i was working with were so behavioral (one of my favorite little boys gave me a concussion with a wooden block) . If I decide to go back to childcare I think I will look more into nannying/babysitting for a single family because the classroom environment was overwhelming and I felt like I couldn't help the kids who needed help the most. I was told to allow a 2 year old autistic girl to smash her head on a tile floor and smack herself during meltdowns because if I tried to intervene and she was injured I could be held responsible (which I said fuck that, when shed have meltdowns id bring her into my lap so her head was hitting my thigh instead of the floor and hold/rub her hands to keep her from hitting or scratching herself) There were a lot of upsetting incidents, including children bringing porn in on iphones or using the classroom ipad to look up zoosadism websites (they confused the analog horror "dog nightmare" with the zoosadism site "animals nightmare" and were discovered watching a crush video which like WHY THE FUCK WERE THERE NO FILTERS ON THE IPADS) and children commenting on home situations that sounded abusive (to the point where there were certain kids who I wouldn't write up because I knew they got spanked at home). It got to be really heavy and upsetting and I just started to burn out really badly. The final straw though was when I realized I hadn't written ANYTHING since I started working there. Since I have the disability benefits to fall back on, I kind of saw that as God giving me a sign to take some time away to work on my writing, so thats what Im doing now. I have a series Im working on, and I also have a book coming out hopefully by summer that Im going to need the time to do promotions for so Im still "working" in that my job is writing right now and editing/eventually promoting my novel.

TLDR: there were a lot of small reasons but my main reason was to focus on my writing, which is what I actually went to school for and plan to make a career out of

[harleyacoincidence]

Just realized that I never did an actual writeblr introduction. Whoops. Anyway!

No idea how to format this, but we're here now and there's no time like the present.

Hello writeblr, I've been with you for almost a year now (I think). You can call me Harley, and I've been writing as long as I can remember. While the stories I wrote back in elementary school aren't the best, I am still proud of how much I've improved since starting out. I've kept a few WIPs I worked on in high school (those are being finished and edited), as well as a few others I started in the past few years.

Speaking of which, here are some original WIPs you might find featured on here (whether as part of tag games, asks, or random snippets):

Tales of the Unfortunate Summoner - Demons, humans, and trauma galore! Yes, I finally named the WIP with the niece-uncle relationship between a human (Henriette) and demon (Hadeon), featuring nobody's favourite former Shakespeare demon, Blaise. If you enjoy more modern fantasy, this might be the one for you. Once I finish writing and editing it so it's up to standard, of course.

Love Corrupts Fresh Lilies (often shortened to LCFL, due to laziness) - Ah yes, another instance of "idiot protagonist messes up and now everything's destroyed"! Meet Rafflesia, the poor mistreated girl who finds herself lost in some bizarre world after escaping her cousin, Jacob. She soon becomes corrupted and ends up a machine of mass destruction. Well, that's the plan, if I ever finish it. If you enjoy dark fantasy and dark romance, you might enjoy this.

The Devoted Musician - Wow! An analog horror series based on other horror media, how original! Well, it's been seven years in the making and I'm hoping it turns out alright. If you enjoy graphic horror media, ghosts, curses, and comic relief brought to you by deceased teenagers, this is something you might be interested in. It will be available on YouTube (with the next episode coming out VERY soon), and I will post the links to the videos on here as well.

Undying Service - I've barely outlined this WIP, due to focusing on my larger projects (see items 2 and 3 on this list), but here's the gist: altar server dies and is buried in a church, which they haunt to annoy members of the clergy as well as other religious folk. They might fix the occasional thing, but this is a mystery/satire, so we can't have too much of that.

Organized Obsession - This WIP has a better outline than Undying Service (at this point, literally anything does), as well as some characters. If you saw the poll that involved "fandom discourse but turned up to 11", that's this one. This WIP has some dystopian elements to it, but is also a satire (taken more seriously, unfortunately). I don't want to spoil too much, but in this world, taking sides is a must if you want to survive.

I'm going to be releasing a WIP crash course soon (along with the next episode of The Devoted Musician, which will have a bit more substance), so stay tuned!

I hope to meet more mutuals and people to follow, and the ones that I have are the best writers I've ever had the pleasure of interacting with. If you have questions about any of my WIPs, feel free to send me an ask or tag me in a game! I try my best to respond to those as soon as I can.

(Also, obviously I have more things planned, such as smaller WIPs, possibly sharing completed works, ARGs, and even a game...but those are stories for another time.)

[pennycat83]

I keep seeing this debate about analog horror and I wanna real quick add one final dunk on Slug whilst I talk about this.

(saw this post on the analog horror subreddit so take it with a lump of rock salt)

(also I find it fucking hillarious Slug's the poster child for all of these)

I don't fully blame Urban Slug for this. I think in general a reason why a lot of people are starting to dislike analog/ digital horror is simple.

It's becoming repetitive. I keep seeing indie shorts/ series that take inspo from stuff like Lacy, TWF, GHE (etc.) that are good, but the same. Hell I don't even get scared by some of them at times, either the artstyle's too cutsie for it or they don't do that spooky of imagery. Like neither the concepts do much, like they could be interesting if they added that bit more thought or depth. People more or less jump in without much depth or planning into something and make good but not memorable stuff.

As for Urbanslug, he did it for fun. According to Wendigoon's vid about the series, he allegedly made the series to show off his art and make merch. Problem is, unlike most shitpost series, this wasn't made clear at the beginning, so people took it at face value. Don't get me wrong I fucking hate the series, every part of it makes my braincells drop. But it kinda also proves the slight fault in a lot of analog horror.

It isn't just dying because it's repetitive, it's dying because no one's putting that extra time and care into their projects. Like the same person who made this also praised Shipwreck, a project that was 2 years in the making complete with functioning websites inside the game, layers to the story and an underlining horror to it that isn't obvious.

Don't get me wrong it's still got familiar beats like the body horror of the Shipliners, but it isn't too much, it knows when to stop.

Hell even Slug put work into his drawings. It's not about the actual analog. It's the effort. How much work you put into something equals the amount of adimration you get. It's that simple, horror is as much of an art piece as any other, and should be treated as such.

Like the reason my series hasn't come out yet (outside of my dogshit ADHD and work anxiety) is because I had to plan out the series in full before hand. I deleted my old FNAF ARG because I wasn't pleased with it.

TLDR: Don't just shit out a horror vid on the spot, but some back bone into it.

Also please reblog this is if you want I need to start prodding people into reblogging my shit more.

[simpingwriter]

Cameron Monaghan

x

Bailey Baumbach

___________________

'Method Acting

and

Intrusive Thoughts'

___________________

It being my Impulsive thoughts that led to this being written. Depending on how it gets taken by you, my precious audience, I might write more oneshots for them. But not a whole book, I don't have creative capacity to hold up two books at once-

Enjoy! :)

Word Count: approx. 3.630 Words

___________________

You were nothing but a middle tier – but rapidly growing – streamer and YouTuber when he was made aware of you via a clip from a fan that had watched your stream, tagging him on a Retweet after he jokingly wondered if there was just about any fucking talent left in his Generation – knowing very well that there was, enjoying the chaotic waves of people that had the joke fly higher over their head than an airplane.

In the Twitch Clip you were talking about your own "small" Video Project, and how – now that the last episode had come out – you wanted to try yourself with something bigger after the project was received very well by the YouTube Community, specifically the Analog Horror Community, but even by some horror movie critic Content Creators. Your series has incorporated the same style of an all-time classic under the Webseries genre, Marble Hornets, while back then also becoming the stepping stone of the modern ideas of the now newest, most hyped content trends on the site, like the Mandela Catalog or the Backrooms.

It was a well planned Q & A with something very special to you included at the end, your very first official video audition for movie studios to send to…

After all, you didn't have an agent like a real, established actor that helped you find your first opportunity. You had to do everything yourself.

The first thing Cameron absolutely fixated on with you, even before the Audition Video, was your uncanny talent for controlling your facial expressions, you could talk about the most gruesome things that inspired your series with a near constantly straight face – only deviating when reading chat and cracking a equally gorey joke, catching some first time viewers off guard – while boredly fiddling with a burned, ripped Bible. It was a original prop, a real Bible you bought on Ebay and "messed up" yourself to be used for the series, it turns out.

From the audio of a child crying that he was hungry and that nobody loved him to stomach twisting snuff, you went through the darkest corners the legal web could spit out to constantly stay at that right level of depravity only known to be done by humans, needed for not just writing the plot but also for staying in your very own character, who slowly was written to lose more and more of her sanity and humanity.

Method acting, he had noted, at her explanation of how she figured out her character's personality and her quirks. She started out as the victim and slowly the story turned the tables as her character began to act just as twisted, the events of her life, past and happening on camera, slowly turning her brain into 'Hot Fudge Brownie Batter', in Bailey's own words.

"Once, while practicing my lines during breakfast, obviously having to stay in character the whole time, I actually threw a bowl of perfectly well porridge against my newly painted walls…fucking hell, it was such a mess and i just...went about my day, leaving it lying on the ground..." and your Chat quickly went to ask basically 'Why the FUCK would you do THAT?!', mourning the bowl and the food she wasted as she chuckled before also chugging the burned prop somewhere to the side, a deep thump from the impact on the carpet of your floor.

"Why? Easy enough…Do any of you ever just…let your intrusive thoughts win, like taking said cereal bowl and instead of chugging it at the wall, you just throw it out the window full fuckin' force, perhaps hitting a pedestrian?! No, most, about 99%, of us fucking don't, a huge amount of people had or has these thoughts blip into their everyday thoughts once at least, sure, but most of the time they are absolutely the worst or at least most stupid shit our gray cells can produce! NOW…make all that into a character and you got half a Hannah already, near the end she's almost solely controlled by these abominable thoughts." 

The description of your Character made him check out your web series, wanting to see just how well you actually put those thoughts and ideas into action, already intrigued after your Video Audition. You were absolutely brilliant at portraying a mentally…unwell…character, and that put Hannah's Personality and general acts lightly. 

After that, he ended up watching your streams almost always after work or studying his lines for the next scenes for his own role. It was obvious that you didn't always talk about your career dreams, but it was brought up regularly while you played various games for almost hours sometimes. Even after your normal 8 hour shifts, sometimes even longer ones, you still managed to keep the chat entertained with your incredibly out-of-pocket comments – the clips of the best moments on your Youtube channel – for certain moments on stream.

He found out that way that you were a massive fucking nerd, not a nerd for Maths though, you say you're horrible at that. Horror Movies, anything with the Words 'Star Wars' and Horror Games. You couldn't stand scary shit, in reality, you had confessed multiple times by now, but it never stopped your morbid and natural curiosity. And absolutely a good chunk of all this was Masochistic, you hated and loved getting scared.

Then one day, a viewer of yours called him out. Cameron wasn't very well versed in Twitch, since he never really had time to get into watching streams, and just simply made an account with basically his name...nothing else. So when he once finally decided to make an incredibly humble donation of 300$, you know, the usual for a total normal, not even a simp, viewer that was probably between 13 and 25 years of age-

'Yo wtf, Cameron Monaghan??? Ian Gallagher???'

And you, the absolutely brightest crayon in the box, at first had brushed it off as either, a) just someone ALSO called Cameron or b) also, just like you, a fan of him and his small roles AND his role as Ian. After all, isn't he busy with the new Season of Shameless? Or maybe a Movie you don't know of yet? 

No normal person that busy would waste their time on Tw-

'I think someone shared your recent Q&A on Twitter and tagged him in a Retweet??' 

'Ya, was me.'

'Just a coinky dink trust me that's NOT the real Cam lol!'

'yeah...but what if…???'

'SUS MUCH…'

'Wait, I am getting major Inception vibes'

'Yeah wtf a celeb watching one of their fans…acting like a simp himself lol'

CamrMonaghan donated 10$:

'What the hell is a simp lol'

Yeah, this couldn't fucking be Cameron, you both are literally two years apart, you 18 and him 20, how can a Millennial NOT know what a Simp is in these times of the Internet. This is probably some poor itty bitty grandpa getting lost on some foreign App after their grandkid left their phone on the table to take a shit-

'BITCH LOOK AT HIS FUCKI TWITTER WTHA HELL??'

And you did.

Would you believe it, the same question but on Cameron Monaghan's Twitter…w-weird coinky dink indeed, JogaLungoFTW…

At that point you incredible hesitantly did something you always held yourself off from doing because you knew how weird it was to receive them from some fucking stranger. You tried sliding into his DMs.

You remembered all the times you thought about telling him privately that you were a huge fan of his current work in Shameless, Prom and – despite them being just one-off stunts, his roles in your favorite crime shows, The Mentalist and Law & Order. But unlike your Character, you didn't let your own regular not intrusive but instead impulsive thoughts win...not always at least, you yourself always felt absurdly uncomfortable at some fans with their walls of text of weird confessions. You really didn't want to stoop to their level of weirdness, your methods to get into Character sometimes already had gotten you to question your sanity more than once on their own alone.

So it all started very simple as you gave one last glance towards the Webcam on your main monitor and the chat before looking back down to your phone, beginning to type, only the classic typing sound of your Android heard.

Bailey: I don't want to sound weird, trust me I know the feeling, but…are you watching my Stream right now?

Not even a minute later...

Cameron: Yes :) Didn't think they would realize that soon tbh…

Bailey: The Chat has more keen eyes than us, unwritten streaming rule.

And you hit it off quite well after the short introduction, soon having switched from the unconventional and difficult way to write in the DMs of each other to an actual Messenger service – which took a while to find one, you using Android and him Apple.

But in all that time, you not once let it slip that you were such a big fan of his, hoping he didn't catch the one viewer's message in Chat those days before.

You wanted a friendship that didn't build on each other's work and success, knowing the risk of the other thinking they might be getting used for a career lift. Especially after he mentioned having seen your Video Audition. After that, you watched your words even better, trying to talk about your dream as few times as possible without it looking odd.

How hard it was to not squeal like your little past self getting the main role in theater class when he, Cameron Monaghan himself, told you on your very first actual Phone Call together how natural your type of acting was to him and that he really believed in you for hopefully getting cast for an actual show or movie in the near future.

Oh it was the hardest challenge by now, using every inch of self control you had in you.

And months passed. You had actually become really good friends with the ginger, to a point you Video called regularly and you made it your job to teach him how some internet things he somehow never learned worked, including getting him a Discord Profile and how Twitch actually fucking worked – for example, a more unique Username that didn't blow his cover the moment he was getting active in a chat. Everything had been going on like always even with his sudden addition to your small, very small, rooster of close friends. Unfortunately you never heard back from any of the studios you send your Audition to.

But it was nothing to lose hope over, he told you. And he should know best of course, as he is literally right in the middle of the acting business…

Until one day he made a completely new request.

"Hey, you think I can join you during your next stream?"

While it was odd at that point of time, he had been very much alright with staying a regular spectator in the chat, usually communicating with you via the messenger or Discord DMs, laughing at your growing and very entertaining misery of getting jumpscared or killed in the games you played, you agreed without a second thought needing to be wasted on it.

That Friday morning, it was a normal stream you planned, playing some chill Lego Star Wars instead of the next potential candidate for a heart attack, Cameron listening with the patience of an angel as you ranted and vented about probably your favorite fucking franchise. Especially about the various news getting leaked about 'The Force Awakens' , how excited and through the roof you were that the Story was finally getting continued, how you wished other older Star Wars Fans weren't literally gatekeeping Star Wars from fucking Star Wars itself…

And he just sat through everything, worrying you that he was probably bored beyond belief until he suddenly began asking his own question regarding the franchise with deep, serious interest. He was just listening to get a grasp on your overall opinion...

But then the door bell had rung, a stupid habit of your local mail service, forcing a very annoyed eye roll and sigh from you as it interrupted your by then very intense discussion about the Jedi and their views. Could've almost made that into a Star Wars Podcast, to be fair.

The useless advertising papers were thrown aside and onto your bed the moment you came back through your single room apartment's front door, kicking the door behind you back shut as you shuffled through the various other letters. Sitting back down, you just came to the last one, stopping quite confused at the address it came from. It wasn't a German Address…

"Is everything alright, Bailey?" You didn't hear the suspension in his question, like he knew what it might be as you silently yet very urgently ripped the suspicious letter open. The other letters and the now empty envelope had been haphazardly thrown behind you on the floor as you unfolded the small stack of papers.

It was from a studio, they received your audition and you had left a positive impression with your range of uniqueness and your talent for adapting in highly emotional scenes.

But it was a studio you never even wrote to. Because they seemed so far from your league – it can't even be called one, you're that low – that you didn't even dare thinking about sending it to them…mother fucking Warner Bros and DC Entertainment.

How…how had they gotten their hands on your lowly Video Audition?!

"I...I hope you like your gift?"

Your reaction wasn't the best at first, wide eyes snapping up to the camera he and everyone else watched you through, even the chat silent as they awaited your answer. You ended the stream abruptly, didn't answer the worried wave of questions on Twitter from your fans and viewers that had witnessed everything while Cameron desperately tried to get you to respond to his calls and even more worried texts, but with no result.

This had been exactly what you tried to avoid like the plague with this unlikely friendship! You never wanted this kind of help, it wasn't your own success…you would've never gotten this chance if you hadn't become friends with him, this felt so...wrong. 

Two weeks after that stream, you sat at your Desk, so close to finishing writing back to the one responsible for contacting future Talents at the Studio, that you unfortunately wouldn't be able to accept their offer due to..."personal reasons"…when once again your doorbell rang. But it was the middle of the night.

Being as always again the brightest crayon in the box, you went to press the button to open the front door two floors down, equipped with your painted aluminum bat – also a past, and well beloved prop from your web series – as you cautiously opened the door when you heard them knock against your own actual front door.

Who it was…you would've never expected in a million years.

"C-cameron...?" And you nearly passed out, only his quick reaction stopping you from hitting your head against the hard wooden door frame before he helped you back inside, holding you by your shoulders. No matter how close you got as friends via chat or phone calls by now…seeing your literal celeb crush – that felt like so much more once you got to know him – in your shabby apartment's hallway???

"Careful, can't have you falling for me a second time, can we now?"

Turns out he did know about your at first innocent crush all along, which was only kept at bay due to you knowing from terrifying personal experiences how toxic parasocial thoughts can become if you're not careful with how you interact with fans, two actually psychotic stalkers later very stern about that subject with your own fans.

But Cam and you knew each other more than that now…he was no longer just an unreachable Celebrity on a screen. So with that line crossed by both of you, your crush grew to more as well, something you made 100% sure to hide from everyone that knew you, personally and not. 

"Why…why are you here?! Don't you have to shoot more scenes for Shameless?" You had asked, initial shock keeping your questions surprisingly grounded as your heart began to hammer against your chest…he was sitting directly next to you…on your squeaky old bed! 

And he answered with a small frown, "I was way too worried for you to concentrate on them, even the director and Noel noticed…you became such a staple to my breaks – if i couldn't watch at least a recap of what i missed with my usual sandwich, i would've been grumpy all day – evenings and sleepless nights, not hearing your voice complain about your boring day job at this warehouse, your horrible grandmother…I needed to know that you're alright.". Something that caused you to almost shut down fully then…he worried so badly for you that he couldn't sleep right. You fucking made your friend worry with your stupid, egoistic behavior, you really did everything wrong.

You really ruin everything, just like she always tells you…

"I'm sorry, Cam. I just, I…I never wanted to start my career this way, by the help of someone else. What…what would others think if they–" "You're already an actor, you're not just a "content creator", as they call it, you should know yourself that you only really lost once you let their criticism get into your head and poison your thoughts. Don't let such a once in a life time opportunity get ruined because of what potentially could get said."

And he was right...painfully right. You couldn't let them win before they even started. Before you were able to get started. You didn't show your full potential yet, so why should they all try to bash your head in...

*

You apologized profusely him that night, for your incredible stubbornness and stupidity, for him ending up all they way in some stupid suburb of Munich just because you refused to act your fucking age for at least once in your life.

That he ended up with someone as useless like you as a sad excuse of a frien-

Your list of apologies were cut very short that night, the unfinished email forgotten on your desktop as it went into sleep mode and he shut you up with his lips on yours.

"Fuck, don't friendzone me again, please, Bailey…"

The night went past you like a blur, you only remembered the articles of clothes that suddenly began reducing themselves onto your beige carpet floor – joining other objects you threw onto it over the course of the day – hasty and needy hands grabbing, scratching and latching onto pale skin, thin layers of sweat on you and obscene noises – much louder than allowed in Germany after 10PM – in the entire apartment, a sure guarantee to wake some people up.

It had built up in both of you with every chat you shared, every call he or you initiated and especially the video calls he always wanted so badly. He said he really liked watching your expressions change, sometimes abruptly and sometimes so subtly and smooth when you were truly passionate about a subject…you could've caught onto him so much sooner if had just once watched HIM closer, how his own expressions changed. You were good at reading them, ever since you were a child, but it set out entirely with him.

Because of that you never had, too concentrated and busy with hiding your own infatuation at those times. Keeping yourself from falling asleep to his warm, calming voice when the timezones ended up with you calling him in the middle of the night while he just got back from his lunch break and he had finished a clip from your latest stream, dying to ask questions…

After that…very special night…it didn't take long for him to convince you to take probably the biggest step in your life yet.

Moving to America, permanently.

He had told you about everything, there would be no stones left in your path by the time you're really ready after he talked to the Studio and his own Agents. They would even be ready to sponsor your Green Card application if you really had been ready to accept their offer, one you didn't know for what show or movie it was until you had stood on the set with your script. Thankfully Warner Bros. doesn't produce Porn...

"They could with you as their model– owww, dammit Bailey…" he had mumbled with a cheeky grin next to you on the plane – cursing and whining out under his breath as you lightly smacked him upside the head for the comment – having come back down to Germany just to help with your few things once the date was set in stone, just two months later. The application had been sent already a day after he convinced you, helping you to pull through with it.

"Did you tell your parents by the way?" Oops.

At least you finally gave your grandmother a real good reason to despise you. But your mum didn't deserve your sudden decisions…so you had called her as soon as you reached New York's airport. And boy did she yell your ear off – you could almost call yourself Van Gogh – but not without telling you over and over again to please be careful with whatever your plans were, you were an adult with her own mind and thoughts, but she would never stop worrying for you. In the end, she always wanted the best for you and in her eyes that was you following your dreams. She had started to support you and your web series dreams when no one else in your family had your back – they didn't budge even when the first views brought in the real good bread – she said she would now as well. 

She believed in you and was happy for your incredible opportunity, that had been the main points she tried to bring across in her motherly almost 10 minute long rant.

"I need…to meet her…someday, she sounds really nice..." Cameron had only left for a breathless response when he heard you finally finish your call, coming to help him as he fought with the luggage cases you two had to drag all the way from Germany to the US. The important and much bigger stuff was getting collected together by a full-service international moving company, the time it took to ship them to the LA Address Cameron provided you with while placing the "order", so you would be separated from your Main Computer and Desktop.

But you still had your Gaming Laptop, constantly with you with the rest of your stuff in your scary big backpack, keeping yourself mobile even in the first weeks or so.

On your way to his own currently rented apartment, something he sheepishly told you mid-flight – that he forgot to talk to the Housing Agents like planned and gave you his own main Address for the Moving Company – he grew more anxious with every silent minute that passed. While you weren't a fan of now also having to occupy his own home after he already got you this job opportunity and everything else, you wanted to freak out on the inside, most preferably have a secluded, isolated five minute temper tantrum on the plane's toilet stall, but he gave you the window seat, boxing you in...

You would be living under the same roof as the Cameron Monaghan! The dream of any fan…but you had to play it cool. You two are not strangers, you have been friends for months now! This is not just a celebrity and a stupid fan that somehow found themselves in this situation, it's two friends that…kinda have been pining for each other without the other knowing and ended up fucking bare back for three whole hours from their equally high frustration.

Not really just friends anymore, right? This was slowly becoming much more and neither of you knew how or wanted to stop that development of your relationship. Something made obvious when you both fell asleep and woke up, somehow, on his lap, snuggling into his chest and him about to start drooling onto your head, only bothered by a flight attendant when she woke you two up, since the plane was about to land.

Now you're in the present, two months later…

"Cammmm, sooner or later your phone is going to fall off the dinning table! They don't seem to be giving up, just take the call!" You shout upstairs, cupping your hands around your mouth to try and be louder so he couldn't say he didn't hear you again. A few moments later the ginger popped his head over the railing, leaning onto it with his arms. He was sweaty all over from his workout routine, a sight to behold and it took all the willpower a girl your minuscule size could conjure up to not beg him to fuck you silly right where you stood, so the bottom of the stairs.

"I don't wanna talk to that asshole, I already told him what I thought about their stupid idea, I wouldn’t even watch that in the theater." His – and now your – agent was currently trying to talk Cameron into a new movie deal, filming planned for next year, but from the things he told you, it apparently had so many requests that were against his – not even that outrageous – morals as an actor that he immediately refused when he first heard of it, not doing it unless the writers changed at least some of the details that deterred him. And of course the writers of the script were not exactly happy to hear that, which you sorta understand from their perspective. 

Writing a good, smooth script that didn't sound like it could be used as toilet paper when it was tried to be brought to camera was hard enough…but having to possibly rewrite the whole thing because changing multiple scenes would fuck over the whole flow and plot? You went through that with your web series' script TWICE because of YouTube's disgusting Demonetization Kink and your Patreon had not yet given the needed monthly revenue to depend on that alone.

"Can you at least throw me my headphones from the Bedroom? I need to tone that shit out while cooking or we got a pasta-disaster at hand…" He quickly nods, disappearing for a minute before returning and letting your mint green headphones drop over the railing and into your waiting hands. "Thanks! And don't overdo yourself again today, please. Last time was bad enough."

Two weeks ago Cam for whatever reason didn't feel tired as quickly as usual and kept going and suddenly for much longer, from his memory, exhaustion caught up with him in not even a minute and he just barely got caught by you as you heard his shout when he collapsed. 

"I won't, I promise. Just half an hour anymore anyways, then I'll take a quick shower and help with cooking!" 

'I'm long done with cooking when you finally get out of the shower, you joker…literally.'

If anything, you would probably be quick enough to still jump under the shower along with him…and then get to help with washing his sore, fit body, hmmmm~

Fuck, what exactly did you do to deserve this amazing life? You were nothing special and yet…you're probably one of the few people that actually had all their wildest dreams fulfilled.

An actual, official acting career, your first role under one of the most famous studios there is and in a big budget show at that.

A beautiful and caring roommate that turned more and more into your boyfriend with every kiss, sensual touch and of course sharing a bed, never ending without one on top of the other…

A nice house shared with said "roommate"

Money far beyond your average-Joe needs, just for SIGNING the contract for the first season…

Now you just had to find some local friends to hang out with, your others all scattered across the globe, most of them left back in Germany.

Well, two of them did live in the States…you should ask if they want to meet up, for the very first time too. You had always talked about it, but never had the time, especially since you were busy with your series so you had to stay in Germany for filming everything.

When you had them as well, knowing you wouldn't be almost alone in this country, next to Cam and his own friends that would hopefully eventually become yours as well, everything would REALLY have become perfect…

___________________

* (because that's how the internet works with people in the entertainment trade, despite them being nothing but people as well...)

[the-firebird69]

Watch "Tommy Boy (1995) Official Trailer #1 - Chris Farley, David Spade Comedy HD" on YouTube

This movie is starting soon and her son smells a little bit of doo doo and it might be from the seat he says but we're not sure and he says you can miss a little piece and it stinks it says you need like a bidet with a camera and so like a car wash and it has to go a certain way if you don't watch everything onto your privates and they started thinking about it and they said it's a good idea and you came up with a name it was Jon bidet and a few other names so they decided on a couple names two different versions and you put soap in there that you can wash off and sanitizes you it can wipe in between people will actually like it and it's an analogy they can use so they're in business. And when people when they tell people they start laughing so loud that they decide not to do it yeah son said it's covered right there and it's motivation cuz they don't know it's a good idea and it really is cuz they use it in Europe all the time I tell you those people don't stink at all like all of Europe. So it's like the Japanese motorcycle kind of ruined you the first time but so he goes I'm going to do it right this time and the motorcycle so he picked up that weight and you start getting crushed. And that's how we roll and it's funny because they're the John that washes the s*** out and it's with a soap that works hands-free almost

This is going on right now at this very moment that suiting up to go into the ACT and I believe it's two nights of this stuff and The sopranos begins Goodfellas begins and The godfather actually has some pre-work going on and a lot of other mob movies start the one the Copperhead road song and the monster movies in the mountains and they're closing Tommy f by squatting they're trying for Intel and they're going after ships by calling other fleets and they're kind of doing the job it's a tough time right now for them and they need special and they need a ton of it so they're doing that and they're guys and Jason is going to get set off by it hasn't started yet but it will start today slowly and we'll speed up I think our son and daughter for their work and will help them further today is some massive amount of work and we did a lot at work it's just way past with anyone thinks and We know It and we are stuck doing it because of that but really it's a labor of love for our friends our family a loved ones and our people and it always will be. And he helped me say that and I do believe it all the time. But we usually don't say it. And many others and we are listening it right now. And we're moving on to another topic the morlock areas are coming to a grinding halt and it is a serious problem it is going to crush them. And they had five this morning and now their areas are pretty much gone the upper Midwest is one of them that is left so really you have to count that in the upper areas and they're five left and they're embroiled and they have about 20 islands and those are embroiled and those are getting overrun my clothes including Australian New Zealand it will be War there soon and they'll be crushed. And it's going to be a horror show paid. They're moving in position to start War of the worlds which starts the series which gets them outlawed from the United States as terrorists and they're fighting up north and they are going in there very rapidly and today they're planning on three attacks there's a gigantic and they still want the special as a supplement in the starting it and they probably will lose all those troops and will need the special for real and they'll start doing it much much harder up north and they'll get some they'll arm several units that are about 10 octillion and they go in at five of those at a time and they do some serious damage to the clones but then the clones without special and the mollock have to whip out more special turns into a very heated War and they suck tons of troops into it from all over the world and it starts today

Thor Freya

That is great work and we hearing it from all over our people are saying it our masses it is a joy and pleasure to watch you guys do it no it's a heartache and it's stressful and they do sign up to help when I see it

Nuada Arrianna

We said part of the above and helped but it was really the the two and they are greatness it's been an extremely long haul and this is the end of it and we hardly believe it but we see it happening now and those diamonds are getting harvested pretty soon they'll have 100% on the rivers and they will drop and all their stuff and houses and buildings will drop in the salvaging what we can and we're doing what our father and mother suggested is to ask people and then they can form teams and have their sign on if they haven't to try and retrieve it for history and also knows that even a small part of history and so in life is important and something to be cherished and held on to so it doesn't repeat and they are grabbing things like that that will help remind them I didn't want the whole house it's kind of huge and it takes a lot of time and that's the nature of our people if it's not going to help us that much we don't want to do it and that pictures and that's good enough the building stinks and you can't go in it and won't be able to go near it we thought about his ideas and he's thinking about too and he doesn't want to have reenactments cuz you're saying negative things and it's not necessary it would like things up and we'd see but we're going to think about it and we are moving a lot of stuff but we are going to think about it but he says is a lot of Massachusetts is a total loss and it's a very historic area and we were there for a long time and we don't care about their buildings only the key buildings and a lot of people say it I was in that house forever and I don't want to go back to it for any reason so we do hear what you're saying but it's part of the past and see what's going on you need to see it now more or less and he's letting go of these buildings does it make people angry and go to and be nutty it doesn't want chaos and stupid thoughts so we're going ahead and getting rid of it. And it's not buried soon we can have a huge network of museums and they will be per area

I was trying the day off right we're going after them and we're going through their stuff Trump's on diminishing the mob movies have started their launching final attacks before they go into a small form and they'll be checking out of Florida forever

Olympus

[wardenmages]

I never actually posted any thoughts and opinions about Worst Laid Plans so, while I still have access for another ~12 hours through my virtual festival pass: hyperfixation machine go, as spoiler-free as possible since it's not available outside of festivals currently!

I could write full essays about both queer horror and analog horror but I want to wait until more people are able to watch it. I think the film will be at more festivals, so check their socials to find out when/where and if the festivals have a virtual option like NYCHFF did! It was very affordable and I was able to watch 4 films in my block for about $20, and had 48 hours to watch, which made rewatching for details & audio processing very convenient. I don't know how many festivals are offering that option, but aside from being able to watch the films while unable to travel, it was very helpful from a disability accessibility perspective.

Reviews of each part of the anthology below the cut. Any specifics I mention are only as deep as the summary on the festival's website, I'm trying very hard to make this spoiler-free because it's always better to go in fresh.

"Deep in the Heart" is the one I knew the most about going in, so I do have a specific fondness for it. It's very soft in a lot of moments, but there's a very uncomfortable tension of knowing what was probably going to happen but it just kept not happening until it suddenly Did. There's also a scene I'm very jealous of everyone who saw it in a theater for because it must have been so cool. And, of course, I always enjoy watching Chris and Maximilian work. I've known about the whole project for a while specifically through them and director John Hale, so this was an easy favorite.

"You've Been Saved" actually wrecked my brain because I had several guesses as to what was going to happen but the climax happened and I Was Not Ready because every single thought I had was wrong. Very clever play on Christian phrases and iconography, a solid emotional core, and really cool visuals.

"Taylor Family Vacation '93" was heartbreaking. It reminds me a lot of the analog horror that's been growing on youtube without falling into the common pitfalls that longer-form series tend to fall into. I love the look of the sections with the camcorder. It's really well-balanced between styles but I want more of the film-style just because it looked so cool.