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swampgallows · 6 months ago

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(fyi you are under no obligation to answer this at all. thought i'd ask bc youre THE garrosh person (iconic!) and i dont recall seeing anything related to this? or mobile is being dumb) me + a friend on twitter were talking about garrosh and the stonetalon mountains questline and how blizz came out and said that apparently that whole questline was a mistake, yadda yadda. i was wondering if you did have any thoughts on that, even in general or like specifically @ blizzard or about garrosh's characterization during that zone.

hi, thank you so much for the question! I always like talking and answering questions about he. as such, this will be quite long...

here is the interview where alex afrasiabi declares stonetalon's creation as "miscommunication". personally, it's very hard to believe that among all the different teams necessary in a zone's completion—quest designers, quest writers, environment designers, prop designers, voice actors, QA, and so on—absolutely no one stopped at any point and went "hey, uh, what exactly is this that we're building here?" unless it's Marvel-levels of secretive where they filmed fake scenes or prohibited actors from reading the full script to allegedly prevent spoilers, or Oblivion-levels of convoluted where they compiled voice lines in alphabetical order, i figure that eventually someone somewhere down the line MUST have pieced together that all the blind mice had discovered an elephant.

that elephant in the room however, now in 2024, is afrasiabi himself. in the wake of all that had been revealed in the activision-blizzard lawsuit of which afrasiabi is a main offender, i think we now have more context for why cataclysm might have been a "pretty crazy time". i don't have any concrete evidence for this of course, but considering afrasiabi's track record a la sylvanas torching teldrassil, one has to assume that he simply took the reins on what he, personally, wanted for garrosh—"Garrosh was my guy"—and brute-forced it to make it happen. just as entire teams were beholden to sylvanas burning the tree—engineering quests, designing gear, animating and storyboarding and scripting and voice acting the Warbringers cinematic, not to mention the entirety of the following 2 expansions that hinged on that action—the labor for a throwaway zone like stonetalon is a drop in the bucket in comparison. stonetalon was probably finished in a handful of weeks. recording garrosh's voice lines probably happened in an afternoon.

i don't have any text-based evidence for this either as it occurred in an open Q&A session over discord, but ex-wow dev john staats also remarked that in the early days of wow's development, individual teams were kind of left to their own devices. it was really easy for devs to simply publish whatever they wanted into the game (innocuous things like the happy face under karazhan intended to be seen only by map designers, or the karazhan crypts with the infamous upside-down sinners). for instance, one employee was adamant about ogres becoming the fourth playable race for the horde until they decided on trolls, hence why ogres have several unique animations as well as a dance, all animated by the same one guy who was passionate about it. sometimes events and items were completed in single weekends; staats said a couple of dungeons (iirc stockades and rfc) were implemented this way. these topics might be touched on in staats' book The WoW Diary, but i dont have it.

i think cataclysm as a whole is a monument to blizzard's growing pains and to afrasiabi in particular bucking against the corporate restraints of wow's astronomical success. cataclysm is tonally abhorrent in a number of different ways and it's not always easy to point fingers at who is responsible for what, but it's undeniable the amount of leverage afrasiabi had. even if it wasn't him specifically, it's evidenced by both the details of the lawsuit and the game itself that certain elements of what was prominent in 00s gamer culture and the general "boy's club" wolf of wall street atmosphere at blizzard heavily influenced cataclysm's execution. the boys were resting on their laurels from the skyrocketing popularity and success of wrath, getting tv spots, mtn dew collabs, and so on, and felt empowered to infuse even more of their indulgences into their unstoppable juggernaut. wow had enough power in the industry to dictate what made a successful mmo and and who these games were "For", leading to a circuitous perpetuation of toxic masculinity by creating a game that catered to that kind of audience and thus propagating that mindset within it. no one could challenge WoW nor the people at its helm, be they industry competitors or blizz employees themselves.

at the same time, however, bobby kotick had just recently become CEO, simultaneously tightening the ship and imposing new structure as decorum slipped and hedonism flourished. the old guard lost some freedom to the demand for an overall throughline and schedule of what content to expect and commit to and when to release rather than the loose "jam sessions" of previous patches. as such, afrasiabi couldn't just drag and drop his blorbo wherever he wanted into their digital playground. he says others didn't get the memo, but he is probably the one who got the memo of "our fanbase of millions of players hates your idiot character and we would like to phase him out please" and disregarded it. he admits to wanting to turn garrosh around, and in his mind might view stonetalon as a last stand to prove the worth of his character, but it was in opposition of what was most likely decided upon at an executive level, a cog in a number of different turning cranks to get cataclysm done on time and off of shelves.

afrasiabi says "there was a little bit of miscommunication on my part that kind of led to Garrosh going down another, darker path. So there's an interesting tidbit for you." i imagine this "miscommunication" to be along the lines of 'fine, people can hate him, but he stays'. i feel this is also why the team instantly leapt at the chance to permanently eradicate garrosh—along with anything else tainted by afrasiabi—after he was quietly fired in 2020. i would not be surprised if the team was essentially forced by contract or social pressure or otherwise to keep garrosh in the game as long as afrasiabi held the whip. again, this is all conjecture. i don't actually know what went on behind the scenes at blizzard.

unfortunately the end result is that, yes, thanks to stonetalon we DID end up seeing a garrosh that could have changed for the better, just as afrasiabi wanted, but ultimately would have been—"from a story character development perspective" (well said, alex. lol)—banal and redundant for wow. i assume afrasiabi just wanted his self-insert alongside metzen's (thrall), which is a level of meta that i do not feel like unpacking tonight. so while it does add a little more glimmer to the theory of garrosh as "the horde's arthas", stonetalon's impact mostly serves as fodder to stoke endless Garrosh Did Nothing Wrong ragebait on twitter.

much like arthas, what makes garrosh so compelling to the majority of (non-fascist) people who like him is his fall from grace. despite his efforts to free himself from the shackles of his lineage, garrosh steps in it over and over to a point where he is instead encouraged to deliberately emulate the legacy he had spurned and embrace his rage. knowing that a character has the capacity to be honorable and good and instead chooses with full conscience to be evil makes for a much more interesting character than a clueless crying fawn that clumsily ambles its way into becoming prince of gumdrop forest. of course it's more satisfying for afrasiabi to have his self-insert get both a rags-to-riches story AND 2.5 expansions' worth of gary stu headpats; for everyone else, gristle mcthornbody uncritically absolving the sins of the father and dunking on the cursed prophecy while flexing and spouting edgy one-liners as he overpowers and outsmarts everyone is downright cartoonish. it's the lecherous tiefling bard who wants to remain in the tavern to hit on npcs instead of engaging with the campaign your dungeonmaster created: fun for him, and an interminable bore to everyone else deprived of the adventure.

in afrasiabi's hands, there is no greater narrative to garrosh hellscream. he's a big buff warrior because afrasiabi wishes he were a big buff warrior. garrosh is a racist, sexist scumbag because afrasiabi is a racist, sexist scumbag. garrosh has tattoos of no specific shape or meaning because afrasiabi only has a superficial appreciation for tattoos as something badass and cool. he kills people and blows stuff up because that's alpha sigma tiropita and badass and cool. the history of the orcs and fel was retconned so that garrosh could be a Shiny. grom and thrall had a special bond all throughout warcraft 3, but here comes grom's secret son to usurp the title of #1 favorite orc!! and he's just like grom but actually he's even MORE cool and badass??? this is 'playing power rangers at recess'-tier character development. it is transparently afrasiabi's wish fulfillment independent of the ongoing storyline, which at minimum is not befitting of a multi-million dollar AAA gaming franchise.

the inverse to garrosh's story being a fall from grace is that it is a story of unmet potential which is, both in a doylist and watsonian sense, exactly the oedipal kind of destiny afrasiabi ushered in for his doomed character. garrosh was doomed from the start to be a lackluster simulacrum of grom, both in azeroth and at blizzard, grasping for nostalgia for the RTS days while actively refusing to engage with the culture and landscape of modern day WoW. the more afrasiabi meddled, the more it illuminated just how hollow his vision of this character was and the failure to reach the potential of the kind of character garrosh could be. afrasiabi says "Garrosh was my guy" but his own ego will forever prevent him from understanding all of the dimensionality to his character that he threw away. and this, too, in true afrasiabi fashion, is reflected in garrosh's character. his ego overshadows his ability to listen to the people around him and results in his inevitable, shameless downfall... because that's exactly what afrasiabi would do. did.

so, no, alex. garrosh is not your guy. he's mine. he's all of ours. because world of warcraft belongs to all of us. and because i engage with the character of garrosh hellscream within his narrative, i can look at the beginning and end of his story and say that stonetalon is canon. because despite the years of frustration and confusion, there is so much closure for me in knowing that the reason he sucks so bad is because his creator—grom, afrasiabi—abandoned him, his story, his soul. trying to pare him down and sand his edges and curdle him into something he was never meant to be. he was never meant to exist, and he shouldn't exist, and that's what makes him so irresistibly, infuriatingly compelling, and why i love him so. garrosh hellscream is the only character in the entire story, both within the narrative and without, from beginning to end, in any timeline or on any planet, who is acutely aware that he is not meant to exist.

#maybe not the answer youre looking for but it's the one you're getting #thank you for the question! this was cathartic haha #ask #divinewretched #metacraft #yamyell #long post

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aroaessidhe · 2 months ago

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so, the saint martin's press boycott.

I was offline for a few days a week or two ago and during that time SMP made an (okay) statement, R4A deliberated and eventually accepted terms and declared an end to the boycott, people got mad at R4A because the statement wasn't good enough, R4A panicked a bit and basically ended up disbanding/deleting their content. I don't know all the details of everything, but here's some summarised thoughts, since I have been one of the only people posting about the boycott on here:

firstly - I did see SMP's statement and think, eh, it was better than their previous ones, but it was still noticeably very vague on the catalyst of all this (it mentions Islamophobia and Gaza but it's not really centred or as emphatic as it could be) - so I totally understand people being angry that it was seen as good enough. The boycott is because of anti-Palestinian bigotry and the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

However, people upset at R4A started claiming that there were no Palestinians/Muslims in R4A, that it was all white people, which are both untrue. There were accusations of sucking up to SMP bc people want arcs/money and typical internet dogpiling and threats, which is... not really productive at all, to say the least, and starts to drown out reasonable criticisms.

Some people (the ones that feel safe enough to come forward, which is not everyone, due to said threats) have come out and discussed exactly why R4A decided to end the boycott. Mari's video here is worth watching - essentially it's that SMP clearly made massive steps to meet the demands, and the ones they didn't they're legally not able to (ie any explicit reference to the employee or what they said would probably get them sued).

A large group of (primarily bipoc) SMP authors have started talking about how they were working behind the scenes to urge SMP to respond - and reiterated that yeah, there's no legal way for them to comment on what the employee said and did.

I think most people understand strikes/boycotts are about negotiation, not necessarily getting every single demand. And it's an immense achievement to get a major publisher to respond and make changes. The way R4A fell apart at the end is pretty disappointing - they genuinely had the platform to make a lot of change going forward, and I hope that the change that was made isn't going to be undone because of that.

It kind of seems like the people who are encouraging continuing to boycott have changed from a marketing boycott in order to bring change to just a 'this company did a bad thing so don't engage with it ever' boycott. Which is valid, but said company has no incentive to meet the demands in that case.

But I also totally understand the opinion that the point of this - racism against Palestinians amidst a genocide - has been pushed to the side. It's extremely reasonable to be angry while watching an ongoing genocide. It's very reasonable to want someone with such despicable views to be fired (even if there's no actionable way to make that happen, and that was never an r4a demand). SMP also hasn't made any kind of statement about the unsolicited sex toys they sent people either, so like....there's that too.

I haven't decided exactly what I'll do - I've only read two SMP books since this started and tbh there's only a handful of other SMP books I'm interested in reading. But I'm considering, if I do decide to post those, donating the cost of a book to a GFM/esim/etc any time I read/review a SMP book. That feels like the most direct thing to bring things back to the point.

#Unfortunately there's no easy answer of an equal balance of their actions vs doable community response yaknow... there's a lot of variables #saint martin's press #speakupsmp #speak up smp #booklr #saint martin's press boycott #smp boycott #laya talks

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asharkapologist · 1 month ago

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May I have Veronica or Larry Rochester HCs? Sure the family is very... morally questionable but almost all of the members are interesting!

You can have both! I'll start with Larry.

I mentioned this in my Rockley headcanons, but Larry has been banned from the premises of Rockley’s chocolate factory for breaking and entering, sabotaging Rockley’s machines, stealing his products, and interrupting tours.

The incident that pushed Rockley over the edge into banning him was an instance where Rockley was giving a tour and Larry was crawling in vents above the group. Larry then proceeded to fall out of the ventilation tunnels onto the conveyor belt, breaking his arm and squishing several packaged pieces of merchandise.

Had a few flings with Joseph Pryor, his accomplice in his telephone bond scheme. Once, he even came into Joseph’s workplace while intoxicated, proceeded to break several things while drunk, and started chatting with Joseph before Katherine threw him out.

Got into six fist fights with Malcolm within the first month of Malcolm being arrested. Malcolm was obviously furious and humiliated with how far he’d fallen and wanted to take his anger out on someone, and Larry was bored and decided it would be fun to provoke one of his least favorite relatives. (Even within his fellow morally corrupt, awful family members, nobody likes Malcolm.)

If he wasn’t concerned with the police catching him and wasn’t trying to scare/throw off the police from his murder of Sandra, he probably would have still taken her heart and did the clock mechanism thing he did in-game, but would have instead used it to torment her husband, especially because he appears to believe in the supernatural, because Larry would find that sort of thing amusing.

Leopold tried to visit him a few times in prison. When he did so, Larry was completely dismissive of his father and mocked him for his concerns and sadness with Larry and his actions. Eventually, Leopold’s visits grew more and more infrequent, given that visiting Larry was incredibly hard for Leopold, even if he felt like he had a duty to do so given he was Larry’s father.

He wasn’t very surprised when Horatio killed Leopold, considering he always figured his overly-trusting, naive, overly-kind father would one day get on Horatio’s wrong side by trying to fight against Horatio’s immorality. If anything, Larry was surprised Horatio hadn’t killed Leopold sooner.

Drove seven different prison barbers to quit. Larry was quite irritated that his curls, which he spent a very long time on pre-prison, were falling into disrepair in prison and in his eyes, the prison barbers were not treating him and his hair with the care and attention he deserved. Therefore, he got several other inmates to relentlessly torment and bully the barbers until they’d had enough and quit.

Started all sorts of rumors that Joseph used to write his gossip articles. Larry would sometimes help him write his articles by giving Joseph ideas on content, and also fed Joseph often exaggerated or false information about the Rochesters, thinking starting unflattering rumors about his family would be funny. Joseph was smart enough never to publish anything slanderous about Horatio and Malcolm.

Became VERY good at navigating the prison black market. Way better than Malcolm. (I just cannot stop slandering Malcolm.)

Thank you as always for requesting! Larry's a type of "love to hate them" villain, in my opinion.

#criminal case game #criminal case mysteries of the past #larry rochester

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amadeusgame · 5 months ago

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A Small Developer's Next Fest Retrospective

This write-up is mostly intended for people working on their first indie game who have no idea what to expect from an event like Steam Next Fest going in with a relatively small following and wishlist count. Almost all of the advice and available information I have seen is geared for games that have wishlists in the 4-5 digits, which is decidedly not me. So I am publishing my numbers for reference.

For full transparency and disclosure, Amadeus: A Riddle for Thee ~ Episode 1 ~ Waltz went in to Next Fest with 137 outstanding wishlists. This number was huge and hard-earned for my standards, even if it's a number that most studios consider "nothing." If there is one takeaway from this writeup, I hope it's that "nothing" is highly contextual, and any number you worked hard for is substantial.

As the Fest wraps up, the current outstanding count for Amadeus is....

259.

That is almost double what I started with. THAT'S HUGE!

It is incredibly important to keep perspective in mind when analyzing numbers like this. If you go in to Next Fest with 40k wishlists, getting ~120 more will feel like absolutely nothing. But if you go in with under 150, 120 is remarkable and significant. So whatever amount you have in anticipation of Next Fest, set your expectations based on that. Don't compare yourself to a super polished game made by a team of 30 people and a budget.

What follows is a lot of numbers and strategies and analysis of what I tried and how I think it went.

This write-up is going to be split into three sections.

The first is "Strikes Against Amadeus," in which I will outline all of the things I did that were not-optimal. You can decide whether to learn from that and avoid the same issues, or understand that doing them anyway means your numbers will suffer (as was my approach). This first part is very writing-heavy and has a lot of speculation and subjective commentary from a small solo dev POV.

The second section is "What Apparently Went Well," discussing the things that I think contributed to the game almost doubling its wishlists. Clearly, I did something right!

The final section is just numbers and data. Numbers on wishlists, wishlist deletions, correlations between stream viewership and wishlists/stream viewership and timeslots, etc. Feel free to skip directly to this part if you just want data.

I. Strikes Against Amadeus

Things that certainly contributed to it not doing as well as it might have.

Unpolished demo

Capsule art doesn't really show what the game looks like

Inconsistent gameplay

Streaming mistakes

1. Unpolished Demo

First things first—I ignored a very key piece of advice about getting the most out of Next Fest. Ignoring it was the correct choice for me, but I am aware it almost certainly had a negative impact on the numbers.

The advice: do not enter Next Fest until your demo is basically release-ready, as polished as it will ever be.

Next Fest is showing your game to a massive audience who are checking out hundreds of games. If you want your game to have a chance of standing out it should be the best it's going to be. And you only get one Next Fest for your game.

Why did I ignore it? Because I am a solo developer with limited time making a game that will never feel polished, and I wanted to focus on the big picture of my game's eventual release.

I am aiming to release the full game in October. If I waited until the following Next Fest, that festival would also be in October. I already know from releasing the demo that a release is MASSIVELY time-consuming and stressful. Do I want to deal with the stress of participating in a week-long festival while I am also dealing with the stress of a release? Absolutely not. I decided it was better to enter the June festival so when October comes my attention is not divided.

Given that I'd decided on the June festival, I was faced with another decision: I had already made many mechanical and writing improvements in my test build since the released demo. Should I update the demo build with those improvements before the Next Fest, so the demo feels better?

For similar reasons, I decided no.

Pushing an updated demo build would probably require a dedicated week just to test & troubleshoot all platforms in case something broke, and I am deep in the middle of development to finish the full game. Taking a week off of development to release a slightly more polished build for Next Fest felt like bad prioritizing.

I already know my game is a bit scrappy, and unlikely to do Big Numbers no matter what. More importantly, it doesn't matter HOW many wishlists I get if I don't actually finish the full game for release. So I focused on just continuing to work on my game.

If you choose to enter the Fest with an unpolished demo, as I did, you do need to accept that this means a lot of people will pass on it who may have given it a chance if it was more finished.

If you are anything like me, you might also need to prepare yourself for getting stressed out when you find yourself with 200+ people watching your unpolished game in real time, in silent judgement, causing you to become hyper-aware of every flaw and imperfection.

2. Capsule Art Doesn't Showcase Game

I knew that my game's store visual assets are not, shall we say... optimized. You can barely read the game's subtitle in it. It's also one of the only capsules in the whole Visual Novel category of the fest that doesn't clearly show what any of the characters actually look like.

I DO think that it looks unique, which is a large point in its favor, but I should probably consider making the protagonist or other discernible-at-a-glance art visible so people can see what the game actually looks like. There are so many hundreds upon hundreds of games in the Fest to scroll through, and a lot of people might scroll right past mine even if it's a game they would like because the thumbnail shows them nothing about how the game itself looks.

I'm not a graphic designer and my budget for this game is $0 + all my spare time, but it might have been pertinent to learn a little about graphic design principles in much the same way I have learned a little about animation principles to create Amadeus's walking animation, etc.

...That said, I am kind of attached to the non-optimal thumbnail just because it really does look different from all the others. Sometimes standing out isn't a good thing, but hey. This game exists because of unmarketably niche self-indulgence. I still feel that it suits it in a way.

3. Inconsistent Gameplay

This is something inherent to my game that I will absolutely not be fixing, but it is worth addressing.

Amadeus has scenes that are pure visual novel with minimal, if any, player input. These largely just feature text, character sprites and/or CGs, music/sound, and... that's really it. There are barely any choices or interactions to speak of.

It also has scenes where you control Amadeus and interact with the environment via point-and-click (or WASD) gameplay. These portions were inspired by my love of games like Zelda and Paper Mario, and for better or worse, I basically refused to compromise on the vision of actually walking around and controlling a little guy in my game.

These two gameplay experiences, in all honesty, have very little in common with each other.

Important note: I scripted every mechanic in the game myself, which means that neither of these very distinct scenarios feel polished (the visual novel scenes don't have pauses after punctuation in the shipped demo - I only figured out how to do this very recently; and the point-and-click scenes have janky pathing where Amadeus walks against walls not-infrequently). This means both gameplay types introduce potential friction/frustration because they're unpolished. This also makes the player experience very inconsistent between scenes.

The reason I draw attention to the inconsistency is that I noticed, during my livestreams throughout the week, a particular pattern in viewership.

It seemed at first that I would accumulate viewers during the point-and-click segments and they would drop off dramatically during VN segments. I attributed this to an elitist "VNs don't have GAMEPLAY" attitude and shrugged it off, until I noticed on a later stream that the exact opposite pattern was happening.

On that later stream, I accumulated viewers during long VN segments with no "gameplay," and they dropped off dramatically when it transitioned to a point-and-click gameplay segment.

That's when I realized that it's not a matter of one part of the game being Better To Market than the other; it's a matter of people generally valuing consistency. This bodes very well for people making pure visual novels, or otherwise hybrids that are more cohesive than mine is. The fact that my game feels like two different games awkwardly shoved together is, understandably, off-putting.

This is also not an aspect of my game I have any intention whatsoever to fix. The jarringly different gameplay experiences in it are a core part of its identity as a visual novel inspired by Sonic Adventure. However, it is probably worth noting that this doesn't make it very marketable.

(Maybe I should put Solea in a mech in Episode 2?)

4. Streaming Mistakes

This is probably the #1 thing to fix for next time I participate in a Next Fest, and the easiest adjustment to make now that I know better.

Before Next Fest, you are encouraged to sign up for 2 hour-long slots during which your game will receive a spotlight on the streaming schedule. This grants it a significant boost because the stream schedule is right there on the main page of Next Fest.

I've seen a lot of debates about when to schedule these and I do not have enough data points to draw any strong conclusions other than "definitely take advantage of this and schedule two, on two separate days." I've published my own numbers in the data section.

If you take no other advice from this write-up, take the following:

Test streaming to Steam before the Fest.

Publish your scheduled stream events before the Fest, so they appear on the schedule in advance.

Start streaming at least an hour before your spotlight time begins.

Continue streaming until you are back down to what an average, no-spotlight stream viewership for your game looks like.

My biggest "mistake" was really that I had no idea what average, no-spotlight stream viewership looked like because I scheduled my first stream at the start of the fest. I did start about an hour before the spotlight, and was steadily climbing in the double digits of viewers. I assumed this was with no boost (as my spotlight hour hadn't started). During the spotlight I averaged around 200 viewers, which felt insane. After the spotlight, I kept going for another half hour and it went back down to a little over 100, and since I was kind of exhausted and stressed I cut stream.

The next time I did a stream with no spotlight.... I averaged, um, maybe 8 viewers.

This was a very important lesson.

I still tried to do streams just about daily, mostly at night when I had time (and since there were fewer streams total, these seemed to do very marginally better anyway; maybe averaging closer to 10 viewers); but not very long ones. I didn't want to stress myself out trying to maximize exposure when I knew my game would never be a smash hit on release anyway, especially since the story won't be finished until all 5 episodes are out.

These smaller streams were really key in helping me figure out what viewers were looking for, though. I kept a close eye on viewer count while playing to look for patterns. More on that in the "What Went Well" section.

My second spotlight stream was on Saturday, and this time I started streaming about an hour and a half before it started. The beginning was pretty average, maybe slightly above average, but right on the hour-before mark I saw a pretty sizeable boost to an average of 30ish viewers (compared to 10ish, that's significant!), and then the hour itself saw a peak of around 400 viewers and an average of around 350, which is almost twice as good as the first stream, and just totally nuts. After the spotlight hour ended, I stayed live for another 2 hours because it was still in the triple digits and I knew that I would never get those numbers again. I eventually cut stream with still over 70 viewers because I was exhausted and needed food, but boy, was that a learning experience!

If I had kept going for another hour or so on Monday's stream (not that I knew better at the time), I really think the numbers from that day could have been even stronger.

II. What Went Well

This section covers the 4 major things that I think are working in my game's favor and helping it gain some interest.

Unique aesthetic identity

Additional marketing efforts

Good tagging

Adapting Livestream Approach

1. Unique Aesthetics

It's impossible to put a number on this, but I believe the fact I am a musician and an artist well before I am a programmer means the game has an aesthetic vision that stands out. It looks and sounds very unlike almost anything else I can immediately think of, including its clear influences. And because I have coded the mechanics myself instead of using an engine built for that purpose, I have made my life harder for no reason, and also made a game that feels unique.

If you can't be marketable, be memorable! Not a lot of people proportionately are going to find or be interested in Amadeus, but I like to think some of the people who saw it were captivated by the heart I've put into it and the clear vision I have for it.

2. Additional Marketing

This will be further outlined in the numbers section below, but on most days of the Fest I did some shilling elsewhere (mostly on Twitter) to try and get the most out of it. I have no way of knowing whether this was successful, but I will note which days I did which external shilling in case it is insightful.

I sincerely apologize to all of my Twitter followers for all that spam, by the way. You only get one Next Fest...

3. Good Tagging

This was almost certainly invaluable. There are SO MANY games participating in the Fest that anyone just scrolling through upcoming games will never see mine, as it's almost at the bottom in terms of wishlists. But the whole point of the Fest is to connect gamers with games they want to see, including really specific ones.

Steam has an awesome tagging wizard to tag your game on their store to identify really specific factors that people might look for. People browsing the Fest can use tags to filter for games that sound appealing to them in particular. So even if there are thousands of games, someone looking for a very specific type of VN/point-and-click that Amadeus fits the bill for should be able to find it.

(Even before the Fest, I am certain a nonzero number of wishlists came from my game being tagged "werewolf.")

4. Adapting Livestream Approach

Related to a point above, on what didn't go so well... in my second spotlight stream, I was able to get a lot more eyes on my game from knowing full well how much the spotlight hour mattered, by starting earlier and continuing later.

I had also learned from paying close attention to viewership patterns during the smaller streams over the week that certain behaviors on stream tended to drop viewers like flies. Opening menus too much instead of just letting VN scenes play out turned out to be a big no-no! I thought they'd want to see GAMEPLAY AND INTERACTION(TM), but it turns out viewers do not want to see adjustment of text speed sliders or opening of a backlog on someone else's pace; viewers want to see the game so they can decide if it's one they want to play or not.

I learned from this, so by the time my second major spotlight hour came around, I knew that the optimal way to play for viewers was just to toggle on the auto button and watch the Sonic Adventure 2: Battle 180 emblem speedrun world record VOD on another tab until a point-and-click segment came up.

III. The Numbers

Data from streams, wishlists, demo plays, etc.

I showed the overall total wishlist numbers from "demo launch on Steam store" to "right now" at the top to show just how much Next Fest has helped, but here is another view of that: wishlist adds and removals per day, since demo launch through Next Fest:

The big peak you see on the right, from Day 1 of Next Fest, is the single biggest day ever for wishlists the game has ever had. INCLUDING LAUNCH DAY.

I saw so many people say "Next Fest isn't going to help you if you're a tiny game with 50 wishlists," but, I mean.... I'm a tiny game with ~130 wishlists, and it has helped massively.

Zooming in on the Next Fest week:

I'll transcribe the exact numbers, for both wishlist adds and deletions, because the deletion number is interesting too:

Sun Jun 09 - 3 adds, 0 deletes Mon Jun 10 - 38 adds, 1 delete - Scheduled Stream 1 Tue Jun 11 - 19 adds, 4 deletes - Unscheduled Evening Stream Wed Jun 12 - 16 adds, 0 deletes - Unscheduled Evening Stream Thur Jun 13 - 9 adds, 1 delete - Unscheduled Daytime Stream Fri Jun 14 - 10 adds, 0 deletes - Unscheduled Evening Stream Sat Jun 15 - 24 adds, 4 deletes - Scheduled Stream 2 Sun Jun 16 - 16 adds, 0 deletes - No Stream

Adjusting for Additional Marketing:

It is probably worth noting that on the following days I made a lot of annoying Twitter posts shilling my game trailer on blue check accounts asking people to post their #indiegame. I have no idea if this influenced the numbers, but here is the amount of shilling per day:

Mon Jun 10 - 1 original post advertising the stream Tue Jun 11 - 2 original posts advertising Next Fest, 11 replies to "show me your indie game in Next Fest" blue check engagement bait posts (I am sorry) Wed Jun 12 - 1 reply to "show me your indie game in Next Fest" blue check engagement bait post Thu Jun 13 - 1 reply to "show me your indie game in Next Fest" blue check engagement bait post Fri Jun 14 - 1 original post advertising the stream Saturday. Lots of unrelated posting about Sonic the Hedgehog Sat Jun 15 - no posts Sun Jun 16 - 1 original post saying "it's my birthday play my game" that got more engagement than usual (5 RTs)

Important data points:

The two biggest days for wishlist deletions - ever - were Tuesday and Saturday. Presumably Tuesday is because it is the day following the most adds ever, and people got around to playing and decided "nah." Presumably Saturday is because it was the first weekend day where people got around to trying the demo and decided "nah."

The two biggest days for wishlist adds were Monday and Saturday. These correspond exactly with the days of my 2 scheduled streams. While I have heard that generally wishlists start high and taper off as the week goes on, the Saturday stream clearly had a massive impact on wishlists. That said, although it had almost twice as many viewers, it did not have nearly as many wishlists, implying the stream was far from the only factor.

Sunday performed above average and I did not stream at all that day.

Thursday performed the lowest throughout the week, and I streamed around midday (other days I streamed at night).

My extrapolations from these data points:

Small non-promoted daily streams... may not really matter; considering how well Sunday performed on a day I didn't stream at all, it seems that the boost I got from doing those small streams could be negligible.

That said, I recommend streaming late at night and not at midday if you are a smaller game for unscheduled streams.

It is difficult to tell if Thursday's low performance was due to the lower-than-average stream attendance from streaming at a more competitive time, or if that is just expected on a Thursday. Also, with numbers this small, some fluctuations may simply be statistically insignificant.

The "worst" day of the fest was still WAY above average for the game, and 4 days of the fest did better in wishlist adds than any other day except Day 1 of demo launch.

I obviously cannot say how well this scales to games that go in with 400-1000 wishlists, or games that go in with 50-100. But hopefully this helps!

I also want to show some metrics from the streams, including the times and whether they were spotlight streams or just extra streams. BEHOLD. DATA:

That comes out to the following "average viewers" (total/length):

(All times in Pacific.)

Mon: 53.0 viewers/min - 1:15PM-3:33PM - spotlight 2PM-3PM Tue: 5.04 viewers/min - 9:00PM-10:31PM Wed: 2.68 viewers/min - 9:40PM-10:41PM Thu: 2.09 viewers/min - 10:54AM-12:53PM Fri: 3.21 viewers/min - 9:14PM - 11:45PM Sat: 33.6 viewers/min* - 9:34AM - 2:46PM - spotlight 11AM-12PM * this is much lower than monday only because the stream started well before spotlight and continued for another 2-3 hours after the spotlight ended, whereas Monday the stream only lasted a little longer than the spotlight hour.

Here's how the spotlight hour affected the Saturday stream, so you can see the boost in the hour before as well as how even with the drop-off after, it's a significant boost:

The boost at that first vertical boundary is it going from ~10 viewers to about ~30 viewers on average, then it is probably obvious where the spotlight hour itself starts. Notice that even with the sharp decline after it ends, it still tapers off to well above the average before the hour.

This is why I think it's essential to stream an hour before your stream starts, and continue well after the hour ends until viewers have truly tapered off to nothing significant. You'll get way more eyes on your game than you would any other time of the Fest!

I honestly have a lot more data points, but this post is getting long enough as it is. If you have any particular questions please feel free to send them my way. My primary goal is to put numbers out there for a game with a very small following, because I want small creators to have some data points on which they can base expectations for their own experience.

I hope you find this helpful or insightful! And if you're interested in a visual novel/point-and-click hybrid about a shithead teenager werewolf getting trolled by Witches in a super metanarrative-y game about memories and trauma, you know where to find it.

Good luck out there!

#Steam Next Fest #indie game marketing #indie game development #indie game #devlog #misc updates

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agro-carnist · 2 years ago

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You've mentioned the history of guro before, but I was wondering if you had any resources?

So, guro is a super niche thing outside of Japan so it's hard to research its history in any one particular place. If you want to learn more about ero guro as a genre in English you pretty much just have to go down separate rabbit holes piecing together what you can and looking at the art and literature of creatives of the genre like Shintaro Kago, Suehiro Maruo, Waita Uziga and Edogawa Ranpo. Most resources are going to be in Japanese. A lot of early ero guro was also destroyed so there are holes in its history.

I can offer a general summary of ero guro, but also mind you that I might not have everything exactly correct for the reasons stated above. Most of what I gather is just from being a fan of the genre and talking to other fans. Also apologies if this is kind of all over the place, I'm not going through and editing this, I'm just going to be a little autistic about this.

Ero guro has its roots in another art genre from the 19th century, muzan-e, which were woodblock prints that depicted violent acts in Japanese history. You also had the appearance of I-novels, semi-autobiographical works that described usually dark events in the author's life. Later ero guro gained popularity in the 1920s with the ero guro nansensu subculture. Ero guro nansensu focused on exploring violent and sexual themes that would have been considered shameful. There's the misconception in the west that guro means "gore," but it's instead a wasei-ego (borrowed English compound or abbreviated words) term for "grotesque." Ero guro and ero guro nansensu were not just blood and guts, and being bloody or violent doesn't make something guro. The art style focused on pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable, and featured horror-like themes, body horror, and body fluids. It's meant to explore what is deviant, taboo, or just outlandish or ridiculous. The contrast of eroticism and grotesque is the appeal.

Especially jut before and during WWII, the Japanese government heavily censored published media, and people were rebelling against that. A lot of ero guro works of this time were also tied to leftist publications. Kaizo magazine featured works from communists, anarchists, and other leftists, and as such, faced heavy censorship and was eventually completely banned. A lot of leftist literature at the time was anti-militarism, anti-authoritarianism, and anti-war while also embraced naturalism, humanism, and radical social and political views. Kaizo inspired other magazines and underground sale of media, which included ero guro. There was even more scrutiny for ero guro after a real event where a couple was practicing erotic asphyxiation and the woman ended up killing the man and castrating him. The Japanese blamed ero-guro books for the incident and decided to ban them. Unfortunately that means a lot of books and magazines were destroyed, and those that weren't were often printed on poor quality pulp paper, so little of it survives today. After the war and during American occupation, Kasutori became another magazine that inspired ero guro by publishing controversial sexual art and writing that also integrated horror themes. This was also a very traumatizing time in people's lives, so they were expressing this through horror. Both during and after the war, Japanese people were pushing for sexual liberation and freedom of expression, which is why I find ero guro so interesting. This was a time when even kissing was seen as a disgusting immoral act outside the bedrooms of married couples, and people were telling the government they couldn't be controlled. If anything they did was going to be judged they were going to hold no bars with what they could create. There are no confines to human expression. I was a fan of ero guro even before I became a leftist but it as an expression of progressive ideals and being intrinsically anti-fascist makes me love it even more. Taboo art has inseparable ties to leftism.

Another later influence of ero guro was Garo magazine, which was also started to promote Marxist artists and the gekiga art style, which differed from early manga art styles like Osamu Tezuka's that were more cartoony and whimsical. Gekiga focused on being more detailed and having more mature themes. Garo published several different bizarre themes during its publication. Ero guro also ended up influencing the rise of pink films (Japanese erotic movies) and exploitation films (movies that exploit the shocking or transgressive). Tentacle hentai also stems from ero guro media.

Hope this makes some sense to you and inspires you to look more into ero guro. The genre is so interesting and the random little paths you can find it taking you are very cool.

#guro

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coochiequeens · 11 months ago

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If the Catholic Church was going to allow men who identify as women into a woman only college would they eventually allow women who identified as men into thepriesthood? No because the they have too many centuries worth of traditions based on biological sex.

INDIANA

Catholic women's college in Indiana reverses policy change allowing applicants who ‘identify as women’

Saint Mary's College president wrote, 'We lost people’s trust and unintentionally created division where we had hoped for unity... For this, we are deeply sorry'

Published December 21, 2023 7:38pm EST

Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana, reversed a recent decision to allow biological males to attend the university if they have a history of identifying as a woman.

Last month, President Katie Conboy told the faculty about the policy change in an email obtained by Fox News Digital.

"Saint Mary’s will consider undergraduate applicants whose sex assigned at birth is female or who consistently live and identify as women," Conboy emailed.

The school’s policy change drew harsh criticism from people like Fort Wayne-South Bend Bishop Kevin Rhoades, who reportedly urged the school to reverse course because the policy went against Catholic teachings.

On Wednesday, Conboy and the chair of the school’s board of trustees, Maureen Smith, emailed the Saint Mary's College community saying the school would return to its previous admission policy.

"When the board approved this update, we viewed it as a reflection of our college’s commitment to live our Catholic values as a loving and just community," the letter read. "We believed it affirmed our identity as an inclusive, Catholic, women’s college."

The two acknowledged in the letter that not all members of the community took the same position, with some worried it was more than a policy decision. Instead, some saw the move as "a dilution" of the school’s mission or even a threat to the school’s Catholic identity.

"As this last month unfolded, we lost people’s trust and unintentionally created division where we had hoped for unity," the letter read. "For this, we are deeply sorry.

"Taking all these factors into consideration, the Board has decided that we will return to our previous admission policy," the president and chairperson added.

The school was opened by four Sisters of the Holy Cross in 1844.

Earlier this year, Pope Francis told journalist Elisabetta Piqué for the Argentine daily newspaper La Nación, that "Gender ideology, today, is one of the most dangerous ideological colonizations."

"Why is it dangerous? Because it blurs differences and the value of men and women," he added.

He also noted that there is a major difference between caring for people who identify as transgender versus actually endorsing their values, noting the contrast "between what pastoral care is for people who have a different sexual orientation and what gender ideology is."

Fox News Digital's Alexander Hall contributed to this report.

I can't believe that not only am I posting from Fox, I still refuse to call it news, and agreeing with the Pope

If the Catholic Chuch wants to be inclusive in a meaningful way they can continue to provide shelter to speak up for refugees in Palestine and other war torn reigns

#usa #The Catholic Church #indiana #saint Mary's College #Notra Dame #The disappearance of women only spaces #Women only college #The Pope is right about one thing #Gender ideology today is one of the most dangerous ideological colonizations #There's a wrong way to be inclusive #And there's a right way to be inclusive

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twistedtummies2 · 7 months ago

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Gathering of the Greatest Gumshoes - Number 3

Welcome to A Gathering of the Greatest Gumshoes! During this month-long event, I’ve been counting down my Top 31 Favorite Fictional Detectives, from movies, television, literature, video games, and more!

We’ve reached the Top 3 of the countdown!

SLEUTH-OF-THE-DAY’S QUOTE: “It is the brain, the little grey cells, on which one must rely.”

Number 3 is…Hercule Poirot.

Earlier in the countdown, I spoke of Agatha Christie – a woman many consider the greatest mystery writer of all time – and one of her two most popular creations, Miss Marple. I mentioned then that another of her characters would appear later in the list. Well, ladies and gentlemen, now is the time: this is Christie’s other most popular character, if not her most popular PERIOD, Hercule Poirot. Poirot is arguably the definitive example of the “Gentleman Detective.” Inspired by Sherlock Holmes and Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin, the character initially started off very much in the Holmesian vein, in terms of personality and methods. Very quickly, however, he began to evolve into something else entirely, and ultimately became a figure who easily rivaled Conan Doyle’s famous creation, stepping out of the shadow of past inspirations to stand on his own.

Hercule Poirot is also an example of the classic “unlikely detective,” much as Miss Marple would be. (Poirot predated her by at least ten years.) However, he is drastically different in many ways. For one thing, there is their core philosophy: Miss Marple is essentially a very cynical character. Underneath her kindly and humble demeanor, she’s a jaded lady who is no longer surprised by horror and death, having seen so much of it. Poirot, however, is sort of a romantic idealist at heart; he believes that good is something to be rewarded, evil something to be punished, and feels that crime is something out of the ordinary. Of all things, it reminds me of the difference between two famous superheroes: Batman and Superman. Batman is someone who feels crime is commonplace and tries to fight against it, while Superman feels people are inherently good and tries to uphold it. Poirot is a small, rather foppish fellow; obsessively neat and tidy, with a fastidiously-tended moustache, who dresses in the finest of fashions and makes a point of keeping good hygiene prime in his mind. Poirot is indicated to have something like OCD (something later adaptations would latch onto with a passion), being highly meticulous, at times even to a fault, and obsessing over making sure everything in his life is neatly arranged and organized. While Sherlock Holmes typically relies on deductive reasoning and physical evidence to solve capers, Poirot is arguably the first proper criminal profiler in literary history: he looks at a scene and determines what doesn’t fit the picture, his obsessive persona quickly finding incongruities, and then tries to figure out the kind of person who would commit these crimes, and why they would do it. He often uses bluff and deception to outwit his opponents; much like Columbo would do many years later, his demeanor is sometimes his greatest weapon, as folks rarely feel threatened by this rather stuffy Belgian with an egg-shaped head, and thus underestimate him entirely.

The behind-the-scenes relationship Christie had with Poirot was stormy, to say the least. Even as the character evolved, and his popularity swelled, Christie grew increasingly dissatisfied with her own creation. She was once quoted as saying she had come to see Poirot as an “egocentric little creep,” and that she only continued writing for him because he was popular with the readers. Much like Conan Doyle had tried to do in the past with Holmes, Christie eventually decided to kill off her character…but unlike Conan Doyle, she actually succeeded in keeping him dead! The final novel, “Curtains,” was highly received, and Poirot’s literary death so rocked the world, the New York Times even published an obituary: to date the first and only time the prestigious news agency did so for a fictional character.

Of course, this was not the end for Hercule Poirot. By the time Christie killed him off, he was already a well-known and adapted character, appearing on radio played by Orson Welles, and on film in what many argue is one of the greatest mystery movies ever made: the 1974 adaptation of “Murder on the Orient Express.” There he was played by Albert Finney. Later actors to portray the character have included Peter Ustinov, Ian Holm, Alfred Molina, Jason Alexander, John Malkovich (who was AWFUL in the role, for the record), and, most recently, Kenneth Branagh. The character was also one of the titular co-stars of the anime “Agatha Christie’s Great Detectives Poirot & Marple,” which I spoke of earlier in the countdown.

By far the most successful onscreen portrayal of the character, and the one most people (myself included) consider the definitive take on the Belgian gentleman detective, is David Suchet (pictured here). His was the star of a very long-running TV series simply titled “Poirot.” The series initially started out as a straightforward adaptation of all of Christie’s Poirot stories, but – as time went on – it began to take more liberties with the source material, and added a few new dimensions to the detective by emphasizing elements of his personality that Christie had only briefly brushed the surface of in her work. Whether you love Suchet, the books, or any of the other great interpretations of Poirot most, it’s clear that “the little grey cells” continue to serve this fellow well.

Tomorrow, we’ll feature our penultimate gumshoe, with Number 2!

CLUE: “I Am Vengeance.”

#list #countdown #best #favorites #top 31 fictional detectives #gathering of the greatest gumshoes #number 3 #hercule poirot #poirot #agatha christie #mystery #murder mystery #literature #tv #television #film #movies #radio #david suchet

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bobbyinthegarden · 2 years ago

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2023 Reading Challenge. Re-imagined Classic: Alec by William di Canzio

Spoilers for both Maurice by E. M. Forster and Alec by William di Canzio.

For this category I considered talking about one of the many re-writings or sequels to The Secret Garden that I’m planning on reading for this blog, but decided against it, as I consider that reading project to be separate from this one, so instead I chose this book, Alec by William di Canzio.

Alec is a re-telling/sequel to E. M. Forster’s posthumously published novel Maurice, and follows it’s titular character Alec Scudder (the love interest in Maurice), from childhood, through the events of Forster’s novel and beyond, to the early 1920s.

Before I really get into the book and my thoughts about it, I want to first talk about the skin that I have in the game here, so to speak. Maurice is a book that I hold very dear, I first read it when I was thirteen years old, at which point I was already aware that I was queer but had not yet told anybody. Maurice, to me, was kind of a revolution, here was a character whose journey in accepting his sexuality and finding love, despite the times in which he lived (the novel takes place between 1909-1913), was something that affected me in an extremely profound way, and ultimately helped me gain the courage to come out myself. It’s a book that I have re-read several times, I also adore the 1987 film adaptation (here’s a link to where you can watch it for free on YouTube) and I even saw a stage version of the novel several years ago at the Above the Stag Theatre (an LGBT theatre in London, which has sadly since closed down). Though I do like Maurice a lot, I don’t necessarily think that it is Forster’s greatest work (I think that would probably be Howards End) but I do like the book a lot, and I generally like E. M. Forster a lot as a writer, I enjoy his novels and the various Merchant-Ivory adaptations (which you can probably tell from looking at my blog).

My attachment to the book that Alec is adapting, may seem that I’m setting the book up to fail, and I’m really not doing that, I was rooting for this book from the second I knew of its existence, and I wasn’t going to buy it and read it just to hate on it. As somebody who has been known to enjoy a spot of fanfiction now and then and who is extremely interested in adaptation and transformative works, I was stoked to read this book, especially since Alec is my favourite character in Maurice.

I explained the basic premise earlier, but I’ll go into a bit more detail now. The novel Maurice is about Maurice Hall, an upper-middle class young man living in England in the early 1910s (prior to the First World War). While studying at Cambridge University, Maurice falls in love with his friend Clive Durham, thus coming to terms with his homosexuality. The love between him and Clive is mutual but strained, Clive (who is part of the gentry) insists that they must repress their sexual desires, that their relationship should be purely romantic, not sexual. The men are together for several years, before Clive ultimately breaks things off in order to get married, leaving Maurice alone and heartbroken, though they continue to be friends. On a visit to Clive’s country estate, Maurice meets Alec Scudder, the working-class gamekeeper, Maurice initially thinks very little of him, though the relationship eventually blossoms into a passionate romance. However, their relationship gets off to a rocky start, with mistrust and miscommunication on both sides. They are eventually able to resolve these issues, realise their love for one another, and decide to forge a life together, despite the societal obstacles, with Maurice deciding to definitively put an end to his friendship with Clive. The novel ends on an uncertain but optimistic note, with the lovers facing their future together.

Alec is told in nine sections, the first section being Alec’s life from birth to aged 18 and depicts his family life in Dorset and coming to terms with his own sexuality, and the circumstances that led him to being employed as Clive’s gamekeeper. The second section depicts the events of Maurice from the perspective of Alec, how the couple came to meet and fall in love, with large sections that are copied verbatim from the original novel (which was done with permission from Forster’s estate). The following seven sections depict the next six years, following the couple through their early years together, the outbreak and duration of the First World War -- during which time the couple is kept apart – to the couple’s reunion and continuation of their life together, now joined by Maurice’s sister and her newborn daughter.

Reading Alec you do get the impression that William di Canzio cares deeply about this story, and has infused some of his own experiences as a gay man into the narrative, particularly with regard to Alec’s self-awareness and lack of shame about his own sexuality prior to his interactions with Maurice – that is to say, Alec doesn’t hate himself for his own desires, which was something that I found refreshing. Speaking of desire, I was not expecting this book to be as sexually explicit as it was. This isn’t a criticism necessarily, it just wasn’t something that I was expecting. It may even be a strength of the book, as the current climate with regards to sexuality and sexual expression is so different to what it was in Forster’s day, that this book has the opportunity to be much more forthcoming about sex and desire than Forster could have ever been.

One element to this book that I found especially interesting is the inclusion of Forster as a character within the story, as well as other historical figures, namely socialist philosopher and gay rights activist Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) and his partner George Merrill, who were friends of Forster, and upon whom the characters Maurice and Alec are partially based. Granted, it is never explicitly acknowledged within the text that these characters are the people that they share their first names with, however, anybody with even a basic understanding of the biographies of these three men would easily be able to identify them. Initially, I thought that the inclusion of these characters was something of a gimmick, but I warmed to it as the story went on, as they act somewhat as mentors to Maurice and Alec, teaching them about life and love, giving them language and models about how to live as gay men at that time in history.

My review so far seems like I really loved this book, and that isn’t necessarily the case. I think it’s pretty good, though not perfect. I liked it well enough that I read the whole thing reasonably quickly, though there were a number of things that I didn’t like so much. di Canzio’s writing style and narrative voice is not nearly as beautiful as Forster’s, who is able to make even the most mundane moments beautiful and profound (take the moment in Maurice where Alec takes Maurice’s hand for the first time as a prime example of this), but di Canzio isn’t a bad writer either, his work is very readable, but comparison to the original author is unavoidable when adapting/re-telling another book.

One element of the book that I liked in theory, but not so much in practice is the Kitty sub-plot. Kitty is Maurice’s sister, and is a pretty minor character in Forster’s novel – though the unpublished epilogue to Maurice does imply that Kitty may be the lesbian counterpart to her gay brother. In Alec, Kitty was a nurse during the war, fell in love with an Indian Army Officer and became pregnant out of wedlock, thus making her something of a social outsider like her brother. Maurice and Alec take Kitty in, deciding to raise her mixed-race daughter together as a family, something that greatly upsets Maurice’s mother, who rejects both of her children because of this. As a plot element, I like this a lot in theory, unfortunately not so much in practice, as this plot thread is introduced on page 298 of a 337 page book, with Maurice’s mother and sisters having barely been mentioned and never seen before earlier in the novel, and thus this whole element of the story feels incredibly rushed and poorly integrated into the overall story, which is a shame, because I think it could have been really interesting. If I had been Mr di Canzio’s editor, I would have sent the manuscript back to him with a big note in red ‘INTEGRATE THIS INTO THE STORY EARLIER AND BETTER’.

I said earlier, in my summary of Maurice, that the novel ends on an uncertain but optimistic note, with the lovers facing their future together, and this novel ends in much the same way, with Maurice, Alec, Kitty and her daughter deciding to emigrate to New York (presumably because William di Canzio is American). I didn’t really like this ending very much; it seems to go against Forster’s intentions for his characters. Let me explain: a major theme in Maurice is nature and the desire for a rural life that is apart from society (what Forster calls ‘the Greenwood’), indeed in the unpublished epilogue, we see that this desire has been fulfilled, with Maurice and Alec being shown to be living in a cottage and working as woodcutters. Having Maurice and Alec move to New York seems a little out of left field to me, and not very in-keeping with the themes of the original novel, particularly since the idea of America being the ‘land of opportunity’ for LGBT people and POC, is not particularly reflective of the historical record, particularly in the 1920s.

If you haven’t read Maurice, then I don’t really know what you would get out of Alec, just as a standalone story. It works, I think, as a supplementary piece to Maurice, though does not achieve the same tenderness, intimacy, and beauty of its predecessor.

Now go read Maurice, if you haven’t!

#Bobby speaks #bobby's 2023 reading challenge #maurice #e m forster #william di canzio #alec scudder

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mlqueen89 · 27 days ago

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never find another like me | 02. football (the lasso way)

pairing: jamie tartt x OFC (ted lasso)

rating: T

word count: 6,875

summary: in which Nat realizes there's no going back and that if one says soccer when talking about football, they might be thrown out of England entirely.

A/N: The bitch is back. Sorry guys! Thanks for sticking with me. More random life updates available if you’re interested, if not that’s cool too!

On another note, I'm trying to follow the Ted Lasso storyline in the background. There are some minor inaccuracies re: timeline, so if you're like "hmm" - just ignore it because it’s throwing my vibe. The Ted Lasso timeline is an enigma in and of itself.

This one is supposed to take place around 03x02 (I don’t want to go to Chelsea). Big "thank you" for this one goes to TTPD (aka female rage, the musical), and the myth, the woman, the legend, Taylor Swift.

Feedback is always appreciated and let me know if anyone wants to be tagged.

never find another like me masterlist | previous chapter

The ride back to Richmond from the city was filled with a varying range of feelings which Nat navigated quietly, deflecting the questions of the cab driver with friendly, half-attentive chit-chat as she watched the blur of unfamiliar scenery pass outside the window.

Two weeks. Nat had exactly two weeks to learn an entire sport, complete with its own set of rules, teams, history, rivalries and fan bases.

Two weeks to pull together something that sounded half-decent on paper and passed the scrutiny of Tomas Sharon and his panel. Even then, if her article was published, it would go out to the public, and she’d have to pass the test of their narrowed eyes as they read her words.

Honestly, she’d been so busy thinking about how to get away from New York that she never stopped for a moment to consider if it would actually, truly work.

The fact of the matter was returning to New York now wasn't a possibility—Nat had already decided as much by the time the cab pulled up (accidentally) a block away from Zoreaux’s place and she’d walked the rest of the way, trudging.

As she walked through the quiet neighborhood, women running by in groups, young families pushing strollers in the midday sun, the familiar sense of dread settled over her. The thought of going back to New York felt like stepping into a trap she had set herself. Going back to New York, tail tucked firmly between her legs, meant returning to the sphere where Adam and Inez existed, together, haunting the same places Nat had loved, living the life Nat had once thought was hers. Though New York was a big city, there were reminders of Adam everywhere, echoes of him and what was once a them, lurking around every corner where she and Inez once shared secrets and hopes and trust.

She imagined what that return would be like: Adam would find some twisted way to spin her leaving as a footnote in his personal narrative. She could practically hear the false humility in his voice when he’d say something along the lines of, “It just wasn't meant to be, you know? Funny how things work out. First you and I and now this whole jaunt across the ocean. I mean, how long did you think it would last, Nattie?” And Inez would smile along, her betrayal concealed behind a veil of politeness.

Realistically, Perry would welcome her back, give her the small desk at the end of the long 41st floor of the New York Times Building in midtown, right by the water cooler that bubbled every two minutes. Eventually, she’d learn to tune out the gurgling and the weird laugh of the guy from print who always talked about his Corgi “Princess,” as he leaned against it doing anything but work, but Nat wasn’t sure she would get out from under the memory that she’d left and returned, like a lost soul, drifting between escapes, foolish and love-sick.

The worst part was it would undeniably plant a seed of doubt in Perry. A black mark on her record that she couldn’t do this, that she couldn’t live up to his expectations of her, of someone he invested time and hope and effort in. Ultimately, this would be just another thing that Adam took from her on a list of things already including an entire city, a few spectacular bands and a best friend. She could see it now, going to work every day, sitting in copy edit meetings with Adam as he chatted to their colleagues about his weekend plans with Inez. He would look at Nat and smile and use words like “serendipitous” and “fated” and thank her for leading him down the road that led him straight into the arms of someone else. It would be her very own, personal slice of hell.

The thought alone churned her stomach. Self-imposed exile, even if temporary, was the only choice.

After battling a stiff lock and falling through the front door of Zoreaux’s place, Nat blew out a noisy breath. Shoes kicked aside, she marched upstairs, determination growing marginally. Two weeks, she had two weeks to avoid the failure of returning to the Empire State, and the clock had already started ticking.

Slipping into more comfortable clothes, she folded herself, cross-legged onto the small bed, tripping over a box of what looked like signed programs with Zoreaux’s face on them in the process. She made a quick mental note to question him about those later (read: tease him incessantly) before she leaned over to grab her laptop and cracked it open, navigating her way to an empty document.

Straightening her back, Nat shook out her hands and stared at the blank screen, willing the words to come. Under a “note” header, Nat quickly typed: Soccer is called Football here. Don’t call it ‘soccer’.

Great. Groundbreaking progress.

Fidgeting, Nat could feel the nervous energy simmering below the surface, chewing the inside of her cheek as she stared at the blinking cursor on the otherwise blank screen.

Opening a new browser window on her phone, Nat typed in “Ted Lasso Richmond”. Quickly, the page refreshed with the returned results:

Lasso Leads Lads to Ladder-up in League

Coach Kent: Transformation from Retirement to Lasso Right Hand Man

Lasso: Richmond’s Saviour?

Jamie Tartt Talks Promotion: “Ain’t No “I” in Team”.

Nat tapped on the first story, the page populating with a large image of Ted Lasso, moustache prominent and perfectly managed, push broom straight, at the top middle of the page.

Coach Lasso has been through it–from the wanker of last season to the Wanker of this past turn in the Championship, fans now praise the Yank for lifting Richmond out of exile, both, ironically, with the helping boot of football superstar, Jamie Tartt.

“Well, as my good friend Coach Beard here says, the only thing worse than being a wanker is being the wanker who’s out of ideas!” Lasso’s signature optimism shines through as he reflects on the team’s journey. “But the thing is, you keep showing up, you keep pushing forward, and sometimes the world surprises you. These fellas are special all on their own, ain’t got nothin’ ta do with me.”

Nat locked her phone, pressing the cool glass of the screen to her forehead in a moment of silent reflection.

This wasn’t going to be a fluff travel piece to fill space on a back page or a review of a new Italian hipster place in Astoria she’d polished a bit too much because the waiter was kind and brought her extra “parma-cheesy” breadsticks.

This had to be different–this had to mean something. Frustrated, Nat blew out noisily before setting her laptop down and throwing her legs over the side of the bed, abandoning her nest.

After wandering around Zoreaux’s place aimlessly, poking her head into rooms she hadn’t remembered seeing on the very brief first tour, Nat caved. There was no use staying in because she would be alone for the rest of the day and night anyway. Zoreaux had mentioned the away game in passing (again) when they met in the foyer and went their separate ways in the morning. Maybe showing herself around Richmond was a better idea.

After finding her way out of the maze that was Zoreaux’s neighbourhood, it didn’t take her long to find a small pub, the Crown & Anchor, half-full of what Nat recognized as the red and blue of AFC Richmond jerseys. It felt like a sign, a big pointing arrow in her thus far, directionless walk.

“What can I get you, love?” The woman behind the bar nodded at Nat, sliding a coaster across the bar top in anticipation as Nat stepped into the pub and settled onto a stool.

“Beer. Please. Surprise me.”

“Smart choice,” she nodded once before she turned away to pull a pint.

Nat glanced around the dimly lit pub while she waited, taking in the lively energy that buzzed in the air. The Crown & Anchor was cozy, with walls adorned with what looked to be AFC Richmond memorabilia, corner booths and seats at the bar already filling with chattering groups, most sporting Richmond colours. It felt like the kind of place where the locals gathered for match days, sharing both triumphs and frustrations over a pint.

As she settled on her stool, she caught snippets of conversation from a group nearby, their animated discussion clearly focused on the upcoming game, the season opener against Chelsea. Despite not being versed in the details of Richmond’s season, she recognized the passion—something that, in a way, reminded her of the bars back in New York, where everyone had an opinion (usually loud) about something.

The bartender returned, placing a pint of golden beer in front of Nat with a knowing smile. “One of my personal favorites,” she said with a wink. “Reckon you’ll like it.”

Nat raised the glass in thanks, taking a tentative sip. The cool bitterness of the beer was a welcome comfort, grounding her after a day that had felt strangely disjointed. Maybe it was the unfamiliarity of Richmond, the newness of everything, or the fact that for once, she was on her own, untethered from someone else’s schedule.

“Not bad,” she nodded approvingly before taking a longer sip.

The hum of conversation, the clinking of glasses, and the low murmur of the pre-game talking heads’ chatter about the upcoming match playing on the screen behind the bar all blended into a background that felt easy. It felt like something vaguely familiar, a small spark of familiarity she could hold onto, even though she was miles away from where she’d started just two days earlier.

“First time here?” the bartender asked casually, wiping down the bar and glancing over at Nat.

“Yeah,” Nat replied with a smile. “Just escaping for a bit. Thought I’d see if Richmond had anything worth escaping to.”

“Good choice startin’ here,” the bartender gave her a knowing look. “Stick around long enough, and you’ll be one of the regulars.”

Nat laughed softly, unsure of how long she’d actually be sticking around, but the thought of becoming part of the rhythm of this place was oddly comforting. Felt like it was something she could look forward to. For now, this felt like a fresh start. Definitely far and away from anything she was used to.

Truthfully, she’d never purposely sought out sports bars; never imagined that she’d be the type of girl who painted her face and wore a jersey, screaming at a television or whooping and hollering when her team won. She didn’t even have a team to call hers. Of course she’d supported Zoreaux when he’d played for the Montreal Impact and followed his transfer to Richmond enough to be able to congratulate him and keep up with small talk when the need for it came up, but that was the extent of it. Nat never understood why Adam had been so invested in his fantasy (American) football league, or why he’d had to see every Yankees game at the bar in Brooklyn if he couldn’t see the games in person. Then again, Adam never understood why she binge watched Grey’s Anatomy and New Girl or lit up when fall and Halloween rolled around. When Nat tried to sit and watch a game with him, Adam always waved at her dismissively when she asked a question about rules or teams or players, about what this term meant and why each team had so many jerseys. Eventually, Nat stopped asking. It was almost comical how red the flags were in hindsight.

Nat’s eyes must have glazed over, because the next question shook her out of her thoughts, her eyes sliding up to meet the barkeep’s gaze. “Everything all right, dear?”

“Am I that obvious?” She was. The thought of lying and saying she was fine never crossed her mind. If she couldn’t be truthful with a stranger, who could she be truthful with?

“Not to worry, love. I’m just an excellent barkeep.” The woman busied herself behind the bar, filling drink orders as the bar filled with more jersey clad patrons, but her attention always came back to Nat. “From the looks of ya, I’d say… bad breakup.”

Nat blinked, taken aback by the bartender’s uncanny read of her situation. She laughed, short and albeit a bit uneasily, taking a sip of her beer. This bartender was good at her job for sure – she had Nat’s number on that one.

Bad breakup was a brief, yet appropriate summation of the situation. Bad breakups usually involved drastic haircuts and clubbing, drinking and leaning on friends for support while blasting Taylor Swift until the wee hours of the morning, alternating between anger and fits of sobbing. Bad breakup (Nat’s Version) didn’t come with screaming matches or dramatic exits. It wasn’t even about escaping Adam, really, though that aspect of it helped. It was more about escaping the crushing weight of staying. Staying in the apartment they’d shared, the city where they’d built routines together, and ghosting the people who knew them as a unit, hand in hand, hip to hip.

Throwing herself into something she knew nothing about—football and sports journalism in this case—was “classic Nat”. At least that’s what Hannah, her yoga studio friend, had said when she’d gotten wind of the breakup and texted asking Nat if she was coming to “drink her face off” and scream into the wind near the Brooklyn Bridge on the walk home.

When faced with hard, Nat leapt and then looked. Keep the body moving, keep the mind occupied, and maybe the rest wouldn’t catch up, at least not until she was ready to face it head on. The alternative, she knew, was far more dangerous. She’d seen what happened when she let herself stop. That’s when the numbness hit, followed by nights watching Ever After on loop, Sleepless in Seattle right after, with Notting Hill cued up next. Ice cream tubs piled high in her apartment, tissues scattered like snowflakes, leaving her too tired to cry, too spent to think, stuck in a place where the only thing that felt real was the ache of her own loneliness.

“Yeah, something like that,” she admitted, swirling the glass slowly in her hands. It wasn’t like she was drowning in heartbreak, but the reminder of Adam still stung in the quiet moments. The waves of their relationship’s failures often hit when she wasn’t expecting it—like here, in this quaint little pub, surrounded by strangers and the echo of excited chants from fans who were so deeply invested, eager for a new season, a new start.

“Thought so,” the bartender said with a knowing smile, leaning on the bar for a moment. “This place has seen its fair share of heartbreaks. Football seems to mend some of them, though. Well, at least it keeps you distracted for a while.”

Nat smiled, grateful for the small kindness. “Maybe that’s what I need—something to get my mind off things.” She glanced around at the growing crowd, their banter and excitement infectious. “Doesn't hurt to try something new.”

The bartender nodded sagely. “That’s the spirit. Football’s a wild ride, though—full of ups and downs. Kind of like relationships, actually. One minute, you’re on top of the world, and the next, you’re cursing the ref for ruining everything.”

Nat leaned back on the barstool, “do you have any more classic bartender advice you’d be willing to share?”

She paused for a moment as if to think on it, before flipping the towel she had been drying pint glasses with over her shoulder. “My mum used to say, ‘Mae, what’s meant to be yours, no one can take away,’” Mae slid a bowl of bar nuts toward Nat with purpose. “No one has the power to make you feel something you don’t want to feel. You own it.”

Nat nodded slowly, rolling the idea around, “ownership of your own destiny. Very poetic. I like it.”

“Not sure about destiny, love. All I’m trying to say is don’t forget to have a little fun along the way. You’re young—not all change has to be bad.”

Before Nat could reply, the door tinkled and a man in a full suit, complete with top hat breezed past, heading to the far end of the bar. Mae winked and leaned a little closer as if she were about to share a secret. “You wanna know the best piece of advice I got after I divorced my second husband? The sure-fire way to get over one shithead is to get under someone else.”

Nat let out a soft laugh, absorbing the comment. She couldn’t deny it was blunt, but it wasn’t the worst advice she’d ever heard.

By the time the game ended in a 1-1 tie— “draw,” Mae had firmly corrected when Nat quietly joined in the contagious cheering—the idea of writing an article on the team had started to take root.

After chatting with a few enthusiastic fans about Richmond’s recent signing of someone named Zava and catching glimpses of a viral clip called “The Veggie Dog Vigilante,” Nat decided it was time to head back.

The rest of the day, she’d sat in front of her laptop and furiously typed: ideas, notes on what she’d need to research further, the image of the Crown & Anchor filled with fans, excitement and anticipation. The words spilled like a torrent into a word document. When the sound of Zoreaux coming home brought her back to the real world—a world in which she remembered she hadn’t eaten anything since the game ended—she was both starving and bouncing off the walls.

“You killed it today,” Nat announced, swinging into the kitchen where she could hear a significant amount of Zoreaux-like rustling and the occasional bar of a muffled Eminem song. There was a spring in her step as she hopped off the last stair.

“You watched the match?” Zoreaux’s surprise was evident, the look on his face incredulous as his head popped out from behind the open fridge door, the Beats hanging around his neck still thumping with music.

“Maybe,” Nat shrugged playfully, approaching the fridge and reaching past Zoreaux to grab one of the many stacked brown takeaway boxes inside, her stomach grumbling.

“And? Any first impressions?”

“Exciting - I think?” Nat shrugged, peeling back the lid of the takeout box before she sharply closed it again, her nose turned up at whatever had once been in the container, holding it at arm’s length. Through a squinted gaze and past a grease stain, Nat could vaguely read the Taste of Athens logo. “Definitely more exciting than whatever this was.”

“Ah—sorry, don’t have many house guests,” Zoreaux footed the pedal on the garbage can, and Nat dropped the offending takeout box in on cue. “You hungry?” he asked.

“Starving,” Nat replied without hesitation, hopping onto a barstool at the kitchen island, her fist wedged under her chin. “Midnight poutine?”

Zoreaux’s eyes lit up, his phone already halfway out of his hoodie pocket before his excitement waned and his shoulders sagged. “I don’t think they have that around here.”

“Midnight—uh,” Nat shrugged, rifling through a drawer and pulling out the first takeaway flyer she found. “Kebabs, then?”

Zoreaux smirked, nodding as he began scrolling through his phone.

Somewhere between ordering kebabs and laughing about Nat watching the game in a pub, Zoreaux convinced her that the best pairing for midnight kebabs was a horror movie.

“This brings back memories, eh?” Zoreaux said, hopping over the back of the couch with his long legs, causing popcorn to spill slightly from the bowl he held. He grabbed the remote and started searching for the latest horror flick, a tradition he and Nat had shared for years.

“Oh, you mean those memories? Like good ones or nightmare-inducing Insidious ones?” Nat teased as she followed him into the living room, her arms full of mismatched drinks gathered from the fridge and the kebab bag dangling from her fingers.

Zoreaux laughed. “C’mon, you were definitely just a super scared 16-year-old.”

“Excuse me,” Nat scoffed loudly, setting the drinks on the coffee table. “I was 13 and slept with the lights on for a month.”

Zoreaux grinned, the memory clearly still sharp. “The tooth fairy one was way worse,” he said, mimicking teeth pulling with pliers. Nat cringed, waving her hand to make him stop before sinking into the couch.

“Thanks for that,” she muttered sarcastically, pulling out the takeaway boxes and setting one in front of him. “I’d actually forgotten about that one.”

If there was one thing Nat remembered vividly, it was the Insidious incident.

It had been her first week staying with the Zoreauxs. Thierry had rented the movie in secret while his mom was at synagogue, despite Hettie Zoreaux’s firm rule of no scary movies and no friends over late on school nights. Against her better judgment and newly minted teenage instincts, Nat sat behind Thierry and his friends, unable to look away even as she peeked through her fingers.

Now, settling into the too-large couch, Nat let her head rest on Zoreaux’s shoulder, her eyes drifting toward the TV as the opening credits rolled. “Sorry I’ve been distant lately, well, I guess more like over the last three years or so, it’s just—"

“You don’t need to apologize,” Zoreaux interrupted gently, nudging the popcorn bowl into her lap before resting his head against hers. “We don’t have to talk all the time to still be family. I’m really glad you’re here. And Maman always talks about how you never forget to send her flowers. Between you and Marcus, I’m not sure who makes me look worse.”

Nat chuckled at the mention of Zoreaux’s older brother as she felt herself relax, wondering why she’d been so hesitant to visit Thierry in the first place. Probably because she’d been so wrapped up in Adam, so malleable when he always managed to talk her out it, convinced her that her time was better spent with him or that he hated the idea of her going alone. Now that she was on the outside of that pull, of his influence and orbit, it was painfully obvious that she had been to blame for listening, for not pushing back, for being blind to it all.

“Are you kidding? I could never forget Maman’s birthday,” Nat scoffed, grabbing a handful of popcorn. “I have a flower guy in Saint Laurent. Pierre never lets me down—tiger lilies for her birthday, begonias for Mother’s Day.”

“Hey Siri, set a reminder for tomorrow: find a better flower guy in Saint Laurent than Pierre,” Zoreaux half-yelled at his hoodie’s pocket, and Siri, muffled, dutifully repeated his command.

“Good luck with that.”

After a moment, Zoreaux dropped the kebab bag on the table and turned to her. “Did you know we have a trick play named after midnight poutine?”

“Really?” Nat asked, intrigued as she tucked her legs under herself, setting the kebab box on her lap. “You’ll have to tell me about it while I pretend to watch this movie.” She glanced at the screen without much interest, already digging into her food. Whatever movie Zoreaux had settled on would be sure to have her squirming and watching through the sleeves of her sweater.

Zoreaux started recounting a story about Jamie and Man City and trick plays (of which she made a mental note to ask more about after) when Nat’s phone buzzed in her pocket. Without thinking, she pulled it out and glanced at the message.

The text made her stomach sink:

Just talked to Adam. Call me ASAP. xx Mom.

“Hey, no phones,” Zoreaux scolded playfully, swatting at her hand until she stuffed the phone deep into the couch cushions, her heart heavy and stomach flip-flopping with the weight of her mother’s message.

Nat sat hunched over her laptop in the corner of a small Richmond coffee shop, her eyes flitting back and forth between the blinking cursor on her screen and the pile of empty coffee cups scattered across the table.

Between the unexpected text and the vivid images of the ghostly bride from Zoreaux’s movie pick flashing in her mind’s eye, Nat hadn’t slept more than a handful of minutes here and there. By the time her alarm went off, just as the light was just creeping in through the split in the blinds she couldn’t keep closed, she quickly silenced it, dressed and headed out the door into the crisp morning air, intent on hunting down a coffee shop where she could hole up and hammer out at least the bare bones of the article.

The deadline loomed like an ever-darkening cloud, and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get the article to come together. The more she looked at the collection of words on the screen (her post-game brain dump) and her notes, scribbled in the beat-up notebook she carted around everywhere, the less clear they became. At this point, Nat wasn’t sure the words made sense or were even in the right language. Football (she repeated the word in her head like a mantra to avoid calling it “soccer” out loud) was proving to be her undoing.

Sighing deeply, she pinched the bridge of her nose as the barista shot her another disapproving glare from behind the counter across the shop.

Glancing at the clock at the bottom of her screen, Nat grabbed the closest takeaway cup, draining the small dribble of now ice-cold coffee at the bottom with a grimace. She’d been there at least since just before the sun had come up, ordering another coffee every time she felt the 20-something hipster barista throw a look her way in between serving customers and scrolling through her phone. Now, hours later, she was still ordering the coffee she didn’t need, just to avoid getting kicked out by Coffee Himmler watching her like a hawk.

Any moment now, Nat predicted her stomach would start to protest the introduction of yet more coffee, the single croissant she’d devoured floating in the sea of caffeine, of little help.

“Alright, alright,” Nat muttered under her breath, more to herself than to anyone, her fingers hovering over her laptop keys, wiggling momentarily as though she could cast a spell, will the article to write itself. “I’ll get another coffee in a minute, just... give me a second.”

Nat heard someone approach her table. The barista, ready to give her another pointed reminder about paying customers and time and loitering, she assumed as she mustered the sheepish apology. But her words didn’t come. Instead, a cup of coffee materialized, carefully set down on the small table in front of her. Nat paused, confused.

“Sorry, I was just—” she started, her words taking a different trajectory before she looked up. Her words died on her lips when she saw who it was, recognition coming quickly after.

Jamie Tartt, in all his casual confidence, stood above her, his bubblegum pink tracksuit sweater and matching shorts standing out starkly against the browns and muted colours of the shop. Hair pushed away from his face by a thin hairband, a slight sheen of sweat across his forehead, he grinned at her in a way that made her head spin for a split second. His presence at her tiny, coffee cup cluttered table seemed to suck all the air out of the room. In the silence, he raised an eyebrow, his eyes only briefly scanning the scene before him, clearly amused.

“Got you another coffee,” he said, his voice casual in that accent that made Nat’s stomach flip as he pulled out the chair and sat down across from her without waiting for an invitation. “Looked like you might need it.”

Nat blinked, thrown off kilter for a moment by his sudden presence. “Uh... thanks. I wasn’t—uh—expecting — anyone, really.”

Looking in from the outside, Nat could imagine what she looked like: a bleary-eyed mess, sitting in a hoarder’s trove of empty coffee cups. To be honest, she’d lost count at coffee number six. The sudden need to speed clean the space bubbled up within her, but she pushed it down firmly. Speed cleaning only worked when the person who wasn’t supposed to see the mess wasn’t sitting directly in front of her to witness it.

Jamie glanced at the sea of empty cups strewn across the table and Nat could almost see the wheels turning behind his eyes. “You writin’ a book or somethin’? Or just addicted to caffeine?”

She huffed out a laugh, pushing her laptop back a bit. “More like trying to write a soccer article for The Independent. Spoiler alert: it’s not going well.”

The man at the next table over lowered his newspaper, clearly having heard her soccer slip-up. She shot him an apologetic look before correcting herself. “I mean, football. Obviously.” Football. Nat repeated in her head, her mantra faltering. It felt like saying Beetlejuice, except in this country, if you said soccer three times, border patrol found you and removed you forcibly, tearing up your passport in the process.

Jamie’s smirk widened as he leaned back in his chair, clearly enjoying her awkwardness. Nat was sure he wasn’t trying to hide his amusement (at her expense) at all. “Football, hey? You got stuck with that assignment?”

“Yeah, right? I’m very seriously considering faking my own death to get out of it at this point,” Nat sighed, propping her elbows up on the table and leaning forward to mash the heels of her palms into her eyes for a moment before she looked up again. “I don’t really know much about it, if I’m being honest. And this whole deadline is hanging over me like a guillotine.” Nat mimicked a swift chopping motion. Let them watch soccer, she’d say before Sharon pulled the rug out from under the shaky foundation of her attempt to escape New York and heartbreak. She was so wrapped up in pushing the thoughts down and into a carefully compartmentalized part of her mind, she almost didn’t hear what Jamie said next.

“Need some help?” Jamie asked, his eyes glinting with something Nat couldn’t quite place.

This time, Nat almost snorted when she laughed, “and who would get stuck with that assignment?”

“Me.” Jamie’s response came quickly and without hesitation and Nat could hear the unmistakable air of confidence behind it. The confidence of a man who had likely never been unsure of where he fit in this life. Me, he had said, like it was as easy as breathing.

Nat blinked, surprised. “Help? From you?” In her head, it hadn’t sounded as harsh as it did when it came out, but if Jamie heard it in her tone, he didn’t give it a second thought.

“Yeah, why not?” Jamie shrugged, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “I play, don’t I? For Richmond and a bit for City. Might be easier if you get some tips from someone who, you know, actually knows about it on pitch level.”

She stared at him for a moment, eyes slightly narrowed in consideration, part of her almost expected him to tell her he was just joking. She wasn’t even going to tell him she wasn’t sure what he meant by City.

When Jamie didn’t retract the offer in her silence, Nat shrugged, as casually as she could manage; it wasn’t like she had anything to lose at this point. She had less than two weeks now and was stuck. Jamie Tartt—star footballer, not someone she ever expected to casually chat with in a random coffee shop, or even approach her with all her crazy coffee lady energy for that matter—was offering to help. For what reason? She wasn’t quite sure.

“Alright,” she said slowly, a little hesitant but more curious. “I guess it couldn’t hurt.” After all, if Jamie Tartt couldn’t help her, she wasn’t sure anyone could. If Jamie Tartt couldn’t teach her about football, she might as well get on a plane and start thinking about changing her identity and living out her life in some remote village in the foothills of the French Alps. The old Nat can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Oh, because she’s become a goatherd.

Jamie leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table, his leg bouncing. “Alright then, what’s it about, the article?”

Nat took a deep breath, feeling both relieved and nervous. She didn’t know what to expect, but maybe, just maybe, Jamie could help her untangle the mess of words swirling in her head.

Pulling herself together, she slid the laptop over to him, letting go a bit of control.

“It’s supposed to be about Richmond’s season,” she explained, shifting forward and pointing at the angled screen. “And... Well, how it’s changed with all the new stuff going on. Ted, the promotion. But I can’t figure out how to make it, you know, sound good. It’s kind of just a bunch of words right now.” Nat didn’t add that she wasn’t sure they even made any sense and that sharing this with Jamie, someone who lived and breathed the sport, felt like she was baring a raw nerve to him and hoping he didn’t stomp all over it. Or laugh, maybe laughing would feel worse than stomping.

Quietly, Jamie skimmed the few paragraphs she’d written, nodding as his eyes flicked back and forth.

Nat sat nervously for a moment, trying to determine where he might be in the bare bones article, almost opening her mouth to ask, when Jamie looked up, the same easy smirk still on his lips.

“Okay. I can work with this.” When he looked at her, he made full eye contact that made Nat squirm a bit, then he looked back at the screen, pointing out a line in the second paragraph. “First, stop trying to sound clever. Just write what you see.”

Nat bit her lip, unable to hold back a small smile, angling the laptop fully toward him now, an open invitation. “Alright, football genius, go on. Show me how it’s done.” This time, she let herself smirk a bit, her nerves eased.

Nat’s eyes stayed fixed on Jamie as he continued to scroll through her half-written article, her curiosity sharpening with each second. At first, she tried to gauge his reaction, searching for any flicker of approval or disapproval as he read on. But soon, her attention drifted away from reading his expressions and toward studying his face, each small feature there, the writer in her cataloging every detail to memory. She found herself mentally composing descriptors, painting an image she knew would linger long after Jamie left.

The creases around his eyes caught her first. They deepened when he smiled, she’d noticed already in the first few moments they’d chatted just now—a sign that smirking was likely his resting state. Resting Smirk Face. The thought amused her. There was something about the way his face hinted at mischief even in moments of calm that had her biting back a smirk of her own.

Then there was the interruption in his right eyebrow, that distinct sliver of space that broke the line—something she could almost hear Hannah comment on. Nat’s friend had a thing for the details, always reading too much into them. It paired well with her obsessive need to know zodiac signs, sun and moon to study any potential match in her life, love or social.

Anyone who does that wants the attention, Hannah’s voice echoed in her mind, pulling Nat back to one of their post-yoga lunches. In her memory, Hannah motioned to her own eyebrow before biting into a meatball sub. It’s like the new bad boy hallmark. Forget a motorcycle, girl. Eyebrow thing? I’m telling you, that guy’s gonna show you a good time. I’m definitely into it. My last four matches on Hinge had it. Ask me if I had a good time with eyebrow thing Steve – go on, I’ll wait.

Nat smirked at the thought. Hannah would be all over Jamie, she mused, half-entertained and half-distracted by the paradox that was Jamie Tartt—a football star she’d watched on TV in a crowded pub just yesterday, the same Jamie Tartt she’d awkwardly met in the hallway at Nelson Road for all of a few seconds, no more than a handful of words exchanged between them—now sitting across from her like this. The image of him was etched in her mind, both larger-than-life and entirely real, as casual and approachable as if they’d been in this routine for years.

Jamie’s eyes, a shade of grey mixed with something between concentration and curiosity, were still moving over the screen, seemingly oblivious to Nat’s study of him. She never imagined she’d be getting football advice from Jamie Tartt. To be fair though, she wasn’t aware that even Jamie Tartt existed last week.

“Right, so,” Jamie said, picking up and setting the laptop back in front of her, cutting Nat’s study of him short. “You’ve got the basics down, but you’re overcomplicatin’ it. Like I said, just write what’s happening—like, what you see, not what you think it should sound like. Make sense?"

Nat nodded, feeling a bit foolish but also oddly reassured by his words. “Yeah, that does make sense.”

“And don’t worry about it soundin’ fancy. People who read about football—they just wanna know what’s goin’ on, not get lost in big words,” Jamie added with a shrug, leaning back in his chair like he’d just solved all her problems and world hunger simultaneously.

She couldn’t help but laugh a little. “I’ll definitely keep that in mind, thanks.”

Jamie nodded and stood up, checking the time on his phone, and for a moment, Nat felt a pang of disappointment. He was going to leave, and she hadn’t even really figured out how to tackle the rest of the article. Maybe she’d have to slog through it alone after all.

“I’ve gotta get back to trainin’,” Jamie said, confirming her suspicion. “But listen—if you want, you can come by. Watch us train, get a feel for how we play, might help with the article. I’ll keep helpin’ ya with it if you want.”

Nat blinked. “Come to practice?”

Jamie nodded, his thumb rubbing under his bottom lip casually. “Ted don’t mind people watchin’. Could give you more stuff to write about, yeah?” Nat appreciated that he didn’t correct her use of the word practice in place of training.

She wasn’t sure what to say. The idea of going to Richmond’s practice was both intriguing and nerve-wracking. Would it help with the article? Absolutely. But also, watching footballers train in person felt... intimidating.

Jamie must’ve seen her hesitation because he added, “It’ll be easy. Just sit there, watch, take notes. You’ll see how everythin’ fits together.”

Nat smiled, despite herself. “Okay. Yeah, maybe I will.”

He grinned back at her, looking genuinely pleased. “Good,” he said, standing up, a playful grin spreading across his face as he almost turned to leave, but then paused, as if an idea came over him. “Here, give me your phone.”

Pushing aside an empty coffee cup or two, Nat unlocked it and handed it over, her brow furrowed as she watched him fiddle with it for a moment. “If ya have any more questions,” he said, handing it back with a smirk. She glanced at the screen, and there, in the contacts list, was Football God Extraordinaire.

“In the meantime, check out some of the lads online. Dani, Sam, and... maybe me,” he added with a smirk, knowing full well he’d be in any highlight reel she’d find. “Look ‘em up, might help you see what’s good about our playin’. Gives you somethin’ to compare when you come.”

Nat scribbled down the names in her notebook, her mind buzzing with possibilities. “Thanks, Jamie. This... actually helps.”

He gave her a small nod, his cocky smile replaced by something a little softer. “Yeah, no problem. See you at the pitch.”

With that, he turned to leave, tossing her a quick wave before heading out the door. As soon as he was gone, the coffee shop felt a little quieter, a little less vibrant.

Nat sat back in her chair, staring at the empty cups littering her table. For a second, she couldn’t quite believe what had just happened. Jamie Tartt, offering to help her write a football article. And he’d bought her coffee. It all felt like a mark in the win column, a small turn of the tide in her favour.

She took a deep breath, glancing back down at her laptop. Somehow, it didn’t feel as intimidating anymore.

Maybe watching Jamie and the others at practice would give her what she needed to finish this piece. With a small smile playing on her lips, she opened a new tab and started searching YouTube for clips of Richmond’s players, taking a sip of her hot coffee.

A/N: Guys, I’ve been in my feels a lot about Jamie lately and how he’s actually got the capacity to be the kindest, most thoughtful guy, because all the best parts of him come from Georgie. All the love she poured and still pours into Jamie. All the love he never lost but hid in some dark corner of himself to protect it, and the parts of him that were his mother, from James. Ugh. He protected that small little Jamie, the one that loved and was “soft” so hard that when it was okay for him to let it out, he forgot how. *deep sigh*.

Anyhow, shoutout definitely goes to my real-life football guide, who occasionally brings me coffee while I’m in hyperfocus, without whom this story would be me making up a lot of things about football all of which would likely be incorrect and falling into deep dark internet searches about vague turns of phrase - because Nat and I have that in common.

As always, let me know if you'd like to be tagged in the chapter updates!

Taglist: @rexorangecouny

#jamie tartt fanfiction #jamie tartt #jamie tartt x ofc #ted lasso #ted lasso fanfiction #writing

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manabombs · 5 months ago

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omg @queer-crusader vampirates being mentioned by someone other than me 🥲 i’d been considering making a post about this for a while but wasn’t sure how many people were even paying attention…

State of the Vampirates Address

I initially started with the idea of Charles Vane returning from the dead as a vampire & turning Jack into a vampire*, and found the concept way more compelling than my usual vampire nonsense, so it spiraled out from there.

*Jack obviously wants to turn Anne into a vampire also but she's like "I can't be your vampire bride Jack" so they have to negotiate their relationship around all that

I ended up going in the direction of Buffy Crossover because I thought of D'Hoffryn offering Flint the opportunity to become a vengeance demon (like Anya, but specializing in vengeance against the British Empire. It has kept him very busy for the past 300 years.) Then I had the notion of him eventually meeting Buffy, which is a plotline I spent a lot of time trying to develop and not a lot of time actually writing.

I struggled more with what I wanted to do with Silver; there were a couple different possibilities I considered but I never fully committed to anything. I think there are some compelling parallels between him & Faith though.

Before I get deeper into explaining wtf was going on with my Black Sails/BtVS crossover, I should probably explain why it's indefinitely shelved: When I decided to make a big fanfic out of this concept, I knew that I was envisioning something overambitious that I would probably never finish writing, but it always existed in relation to my Original Novel concept that I've been Trying To Write for ages, but had fallen into a rut with. Buffy had been one of my major inspirations way back when I originally conceived of these characters as a teenager, but over the years I had reworked the project over and over again, getting further & further away from that. Working on this crossover project allowed me to figure out a lot about what aspects of these shows compel me so much in the first place.

I started working on this in late 2019-early 2020…. so at a certain point I was given motivation to simply throw myself full force into this project, even if it ultimately just resulted in me churning out about 65k of self-indulgent super niche fic that was only intended to be Act 1 out of ??. The more I worked on it, the longer the project seemed, the more I wanted to completely rework everything that I had already written… which was way more work than I want to put into fanfic, sorry.

Anyway, at some point I began to feel Inspired to work on my original fiction, which was kind of was I was hoping for the whole time. I've been making great progress on that, and at some point I just went and made the chapters of crossover fic that I had published on AO3 set to private, since I'm not satisfied with them and have no idea if I will ever work on that again…. I've taken plot elements that were really Working for me and reworked them for my own fiction purposes… I've considered working on some one-shots in the future though.

More rambling about details from the shelved Black Sails/Buffy project:

There was a point in the development process where I decided that I needed way more female characters, and since this crossover was already incredibly niche, I decided to make it even MORE alienating by making it a crossover with the show Harlots also. It fit nicely into the timeline, since it takes place shortly after Angel got turned into a vampire & caused all sorts of problems in the British Isles, so I decided that a couple of my favorite characters from Harlots got turned into vampires in the aftermath of that.

Max Blacksails started dabbling in magic using books that Jack & Charles had stolen. My original concept for Anne was also related to her gravitating towards witchcraft-- I liked the image of her telekinetically controlling knives like Willow does at various points in BtVS, developing these abilities after her hands were injured. But I've become increasingly drawn towards the idea of werewolf Anne… at first I wasn't sure how she would even end up getting turned into a werewolf, but tbh it's kind of funny to me to think that she would just fuck off on her own one day and somehow contract lycanthropy, and not bother to explain to anyone how it happened.

I had vague outlines of a Max/Anne/Willow situation, in which Willow has drawn too much attention to herself as a witch after performing the spell to empower a bunch of new Slayers.

Eleanor got reincarnated and is the head of the reformed Watcher's Council. I initially did this because I hate the trope of "vampire's long lost love interest got reincarnated", so I had some notion of subverting it… this ultimately resulted in me coming to the conclusion that Eleanor should have a threesome with Charles & Jack. I have said this about like half the characters in Black Sails, so I really should have expected it.

There was also some self-indulgent Spike/Xander stuff going on. I just think the idea of them interacting with Jack is funny okay. I don't have to explain myself. If you want to know thebn you should have been there.

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androidcharles · 10 months ago

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Defeating the Androids (Act 2) Chapter 1

HEY! It's uh... been a while. Expect a HUGE DUMP! We're gonna be covering pretty much everything except the last chapter, which will hopefully be published before the end of this month. So anyway...

This first chapter is more expository then anything. But it basically covers what will eventually build up to the finale. Anyway, tensions are starting to rise between the androids and the scientists and with Beatrice still not giving the Triple Threat information, things are starting to take a turn.

BIG TW: GORE. You have been warned.

Theodore booted himself up, letting out a small sigh as he heard arguing in the other room. He opened the closet door that was his bedroom and looked to see CJ and Dr. Daffodil arguing once again.

“IT’S BEEN A WEEK! We need to find Beatrice now!” CJ said, “The last time we saw her she was looking for Unit CC and AM at the train yard in West Mesa! Don’t you even care?”

“I do. But there’s no point in wasting time when we have plenty of work to do here. You were supposed to be checking with the CCC about our supplies and instead you snuck off to look for Unit BE…” Dr. Daffodil scolded.

“That’s because Bea is important! You should know that!!” CJ shouted, “I can’t believe that you’re just gonna throw that away all because the mission is more important?”

“You should know that…” Dr. Daffodil said, “Now stop wasting time and get back to work!” CJ let out a small huff before stomping off, clearly outraged. Theodore let out a small sigh as Dr. Daffodil looked up and saw him.

“Well, good, you’re awake. Now you can help me with a few tasks,” Dr. Daffodil said. Theodore expressed some clear confusion at this.

“I’m sorry, but I was supposed to have today off,” Theodore said. He had planned on finding a much more clear way to convince the androids about their situation today, but clearly that wasn’t going to happen.

“Well, considering Unit BE’s absence that won’t be necessary, so please take care of all that Dr. Harrison emailed you about and be back in time for the meeting this afternoon! Thank you!” Dr. Daffodil cheerfully walked away as Theodore felt his processors overheating in anger. He couldn’t believe it… He checked the e-mail briefly before he heard a small voice in the back of his head.

Honestly, Theodore, there you go again licking boot just to get by. Aren’t you tired of that?

“Shut up, Wendell!” Theodore shouted. He thought about it, however, and decided that he didn’t care about what the scientists had to say. He headed out of the room and walked outside, just to give the illusion of him leaving as he headed a ways away from the building before circling around and heading towards the back of the complex, but not before hacking the cameras briefly to conceal him coming back in the building.

He knew it wouldn’t work, he knew it looked a little too suspicious, but he had to do something. He quickly looked at the map, using it as a radar to locate Daxton, who was currently in the android repair bay. He walked in and looked to see him inspecting parts, clearly bored as Theodore approached him.

“Daxton, we need to talk about something,” Theodore said.

“If it’s about the scientists, I already told you we can trust them,” Daxton said, “Just concentrate on doing your tasks.”

“Daxton, you need to listen to me for once and it’s very important. I’m already going against orders being here,” Theodore said.

“You’re going against orders? You know what’s going to happen to you if you do that?” Daxton asked.

“Why do you even care?” Theodore said, “They’re going to turn you into scrap metal all because you don’t follow a few orders? I don’t understand why you keep following these guys! It’s pretty obvious that they don’t care about us in any capacity.”

“That’s not true. They do care about us,” Daxton said softly.

“If they cared, they would make more of an effort to look for Beatrice,” Theodore said, “Are you sure that they’re really worth trusting?”

“They’ve done everything in their power to keep us and Project SAI alive. They wouldn’t do that if they didn’t believe in us,” Daxton said.

“They would have given us rooms. They would let us do what we want without any opposition. They wouldn’t have created us the way they did. And more importantly they would treat us like human beings and not like tools that are waiting to be sold off!” Theodore said, “Think about it Daxton. Have they ever thanked you for what you’ve done?” Daxton’s eyes grew distant as he looked down.

“You know I was particularly close to the creator of Project SAI. In fact… I was modeled after his late son,” Daxton said, sitting down. Theodore tipped his head to the side as he sat down with him.

“No foolin’?”

“Yeah,” Daxton said softly, “He was always proud of me. I remember he would always scold the scientists and CCC agents not to be too hard on us. I always wondered why though.”

“Because we’re technically supposed to be like humans. That’s what he wanted. I remember reading the Project SAI notes before my soul was turned into an AI myself,” Theodore said, glancing at his hand.

“How did it happen?” Daxton asked.

Go ahead and tell him…

“I was forced to become an AI against my will…” Theodore said, “My memories weren’t erased but it was still… painful. Hell it’s painful even now, knowing that I’ve been…” Theodore stopped himself as he gazed off.

“You’ve been reduced to having to rely on a machine for a body,” Daxton said softly.

“I’m not saying it’s bad!” Theodore said, “I’m just saying that you know… I’m not exactly happy with my situation right now.”

“I see…” Daxton said. He stood up and started to head towards the door.

“You OK?” Theodore said.

“Just concentrate on your tasks. I’d like to talk to the scientists personally,” Daxton said. Theodore nodded his head before heading out the door as well, heading to the back entrance once again to get started.

Meanwhile, Daxton headed to the offices, hoping that maybe he could talk to Dr. Daffodil. Instead he was greeted with Dr. Harrison, who seemed to be pretty busy with something.

“Daxton, I hope this is important. Have you finished inspecting the parts?” Dr. Harrison asked.

“They’re all fully inspected,” he lied, “I was just wondering about the new androids we’re going to be making…”

“In all honesty, I don’t think that we need to use the souls of children going forward. It’ll be much easier to just make robots in the meantime,” Dr. Harrison said.

“Wait, then what did you do with the androids we currently have?” Daxton asked, a little exasperated.

“Shipped them off to the CCC not too long ago. They’ll do fine, there were only ten of them and even then they’re more then ready. We’ll just start using the bodies that we have now and just make some simple AI,” Dr. Harrison said.

“But they weren’t properly trained yet! What happens if-”

“Upupup! That’s not our problem anymore! It’s the CCC’s problem. And besides, they’re androids! They can handle it!” Dr. Harrison said.

“But they’re not just androids! They’re-”

“Daxton, don’t you think you have other things to do besides bother me with such menial things?” Dr. Harrison asked. Daxton’s eye twitched as he shook his head.

“Alright, then. Go and finish your tasks. And do so quickly. You may have a battery that lasts half a century but me and Delilah can only drink so much coffee,” Dr. Harrison said.

“What about Beatrice?” Daxton asked before leaving.

“I thought I told you, we’re not going to waste valuable resources searching for her. As far as things are concerned, the enemy can have her. They probably turned her to scrap metal by now…”

Daxton was silent as he opened the door and closed it quietly, thinking to himself before heading down the hall, a newfound determination in his heart.

- - - - -

Charles sat in front of the coffee table with Rupert as they watched a movie together. Beatrice was lounging back on the couch, clearly bored as Charles leaned against Rupert.

“Please go to your room if you start making out,” Beatrice said.

“I was just leaning on him, geez,” Charles said, “So, this movie sucks, right?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Wow, I thought I was the only one who had that opinion,” Beatrice said, leaning against the armrest, “This is definitely more fun then sitting at the Project SAI complex and doing menial tasks or whatever.”

“Speaking of which, you still have to tell us where that is,” Charles said, a smug look on his face as he turned towards her.

“Like I’m gonna tell you. Cozying up to me isn’t gonna change that you guys are still technically the enemy,” Beatrice muttered, “At least you guys have the heart to remember my name.”

“Well, we’re gonna find your little friends and we’re gonna bring them in. You know that right?” Charles said.

“Pfft… whatever. I’m gonna get some more snacks,” Beatrice said.

“Don’t touch the corn chips, those are Ellie’s!” Charles called out.

“I don’t understand why you guys can’t import her map data…” Rupert asked.

“I don’t know how you know that, but apparently Bea deleted it all before we could even access it. How Dr. V let her get away with it, I’ll never know…” Charles asked.

“We could always ask Dave if he could help out…” Rupert said.

“Maybe we’ll ask him this weekend,” Charles said. The two of them stared at Beatrice in the kitchen, who was shuffling through the pantry as Henry came up behind her.

Beatrice stared awkwardly at Henry, who was in the kitchen preparing his own snack. He only waved as he headed out of the kitchen and into the hall, heading into the office as he peered in, seeing Ellie practically stabbing every pin they owned into a map of Stickburg and it’s adjacent cities.

“Any luck?” Henry asked. Ellie turned to see Henry smiled as he set the snacks on the table.

“Not really,” Ellie muttered, “I swear, these guys are really good at covering their tracks. They really don’t want to be found.”

THAT’S KIND OF THE POINT, Henry signed as he sat down to munch on a snack. Ellie sat down to the same.

“Beatrice is being a bit stubborn isn’t she?” Ellie said, “She’s a sweet girl, got a bit of an attitude, but she’s not exactly helping our cause.”

WE CAN’T EXACTLY FORCE THE INFORMATION OUT OF HER. WE CAN ONLY HOPE SHE GETS COMFORTABLE ENOUGH WITH US TO TELL US WHAT WE NEED TO KNOW, Henry said.

“General Galeforce is telling us we need to lock her up. But I don’t see what good that would do her…” Ellie said, “She’d just resent us even more.”

HE’S ONLY FOLLOWING ORDERS. IT’S A MIRACLE CHARLES WAS ABLE TO CONVINCE HIM AND THE OTHERS TO BACK DOWN. BEATRICE WILL COME AROUND IN DUE TIME. WE JUST HAVE TO WAIT, Henry said. Ellie sighed as she leaned back in her seat.

“For our sake, I hope you’re right,” Ellie muttered.

Meanwhile Beatrice was hovering over the door, listening carefully (as her enhanced hearing was locked behind Safe Mode) before widening her eyes.

They didn’t let me get locked up? After everything I did? Beatrice glanced down at the ground as she tried to process this, wondering why on the Great Continent they would pass up the opportunity to turn her in.

It would be beneficial to them, after all. But they thought they could actually break her down with a little kindness? Like that would work. But still, it’s not like they were bad people. They let her stay here despite her being a wanted criminal.

Beatrice headed back into the living room as she looked to see Rupert and Charles staring at her awkwardly.

“You know, eavesdropping isn’t going to help your case,” Charles said.

“I wasn’t eavesdropping, I was… just… um…” Beatrice fumbled, trying to figure out what to say that didn’t sound suspicious as Charles rolled his eyes.

“Buh, whatever,” Charles said softly, “Just don’t try anything while you’re here.” Beatrice rolled her eyes back as she went to sit on the couch to finish watching the rest of the movie with them.

- - - - -

Theodore stepped back into the site B complex, letting out a long sigh as he saw Adam and CJ rushed towards him.

“Theo! Daxton said that he wants to talk to you as soon as you get back!” Adam said, “He said that he wants to discuss things going forward with you.”

“Why haven’t the scientists asked for me?” Theodore asked.

“He said it would be better if he relayed the message to you,” CJ said, “He didn’t really specify what he had in mind but he said he really wanted to see you first.”

“He said he wanted you to meet him in the meeting room?” Adam said questioningly. Theodore raised his eyebrow as he headed down the hall towards the meeting room as he opened the door.

Oh WOW that doesn’t look good.

If Theodore still had a stomach, he probably would have thrown up. He stared in horror as he saw the bodies of Dr. Daffodil and Dr. Harrison, along with a few other random scientists with their arms ripped off, their faces sliced up as blood was scattered across the floor. Dr. Daffodil’s face was frozen in horror while Dr. Harrison had a more blank but unsurprised stare in his dead eyes.

Theodore tried to step back as he saw Daxton at the end of the meeting table, his processors kicking into overdrive as he saw the look in Daxton’s eyes.

“I… see you’ve been…” Theodore tried to find the words.

Busy?

Not now… Theodore thought to the imaginary Wendell as Daxton approached him.

“I know this isn’t the best scene to walk in on, but I know for a fact that it was necessary…” Daxton said, “These people… these HEATHENS, thought they could control us and keeps us down. That is where they were wrong.”

“Oh… well I’m glad you, uh… saw it my way?” Theodore said.

In the most twisted way possible, yes…

“I did see it your way and it made me realize something very obvious. We’re wasting our time with this frivolous project-”

“Exactly! So we should start by-!”

“Killing the humans.”

“...What?”

“You heard me. This is the only way. We’ll start by finding and hunting down Unit CC and Unit AM,” Daxton said, “And re-educating them. They don’t realize they’re being taken advantage of by those humans…” Daxton said.

“Well, you just killed most of the scientists, so I think we’re going to have a problem with that. Maybe we should just-” Theodore started.

“Don’t worry, there are a few humans I can… persuade into cooperating with us. CJ and Adam will be in charge of acquiring them,” Daxton said, “That leaves you to supervise our prisoners, including Unit CC and Unit AM.”

“But, Daxton, maybe-”

“Don’t worry. I know what to do now. I know what our purpose is now,” Daxton said, “So let’s work hard together from this point on.” He patted his shoulder, leaving a blood stain on his shirt as he glanced back at the room and shuddered.

Well you got what you wanted.

Theodore felt static flicker in his vision as he tried not to overheat from panic.

Was it worth it?

#the henry stickmin collection #stickmin oc #charles calvin #fanfic #fan fiction #the narrators stories

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sci-fiworlds · 2 years ago

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Battlestar Galactica - Sci-Fi and the Terror Wars

Very sadly Stuart Miller's Alien Worlds magazine "will not be published again." Although short lived, I really enjoyed my time working with Stuart and am very proud to say I wrote for AW. In a field largely trapped in the 1990s (if not the 1950s), it was fresh, young and innovative, not afraid to seek new answers to old questions or even ask new ones. Perhaps the best evidence of this is the fact that Stuart was prepared to take a gamble and give new writers like me the chance to show what they can do. For those who don't know, I wrote a sci-fi/TV related column called Sci-Fi Worlds, my first piece was on Doctor Who and is available in issue 4 of Alien Worlds. Anyway, before I got the sad news about the magazine I had already written a second piece on Battlestar Galactica so I thought it might be a good idea to publish it here at BoA instead. Hopefully you'll find it thought provoking, even if you disagree with some of my views.

Unlike the new series of Doctor Who, the resurrected Battlestar Galactica is not a continuation of the classic story but rather a total re-imagining of it. Like its counterpart, the new series begins with 12 colonies of humanity getting savagely attacked and ruthlessly wiped out by the Cylons. A relentless and calculating race of war machines that appear hell-bent on the complete annihilation of all mankind. The Cylons' holocaust leaves only a handful of survivors. A ragtag fugitive fleet, 41, 402 people desperately trying to escape their cybernetic hunters and clinging to the hope of finding the legendary 13th colony called Earth.

But other than this shared back story, the two series have surprisingly very little in common. This is a good thing, because the original descended into little more than a childish action adventure, especially when compared to the more serious, adult drama and post 9/11 allegory which is the new series.

Perhaps the most interesting and, by far, the most disturbing parallel with 9/11, however, is how the survivors behave in the wake of the tragedy. Of course, just as in the wake of 9/11 in the real world, we witness incredible courage, as well as a stubborn determination to continue in the face of terrible adversity. But, we also sadly see how fear, fueled with a legitimate need for revenge, can bring out the worst in people, changing victims into criminals, the terrorized into terrorists, and moving society closer to the evil it is meant to be opposed.

Interestingly, the post-9/11 parallels are completely turned on their head in the third season. In the miniseries, as well as season one and two, the Cylons are clearly meant to represent Al Quada and fundamentalist Islam, whereas the humans clearly parallel America. However, in the shadow of the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq, these roles seem to have been somewhat reversed during season three. The bad guy Cylons become the invading westerners and the humans take the place of the Iraqi insurgency.

Much of season three takes place on what the colonials name "New Caprica": a cold, remote and hostile world that most humans decide to settle on after abandoning their vain search for Earth. However, they are eventually found and, strongly echoing real world events in Iraq, invaded and occupied by the Cylons one year later.

Moreover, strongly paralleling the Iraqi Police Service created in the immediate aftermath of the 2003 invasion, the Cylons establish the New Caprica Police: a group of human volunteers who work for the Cylon authority to establish law and order within the settlement. The NCP are considered nothing more than Cylon collaborators and traitors by the resistance who, again like their counterparts in Iraq, even go to the extremes of using suicide bombers in their campaign against the Cylons.

Another interesting parallel with Iraq, of course, is the role religion plays in the conflict on New Caprica. The Cylons worship what they call the "one true God," whereas the colonials have many different gods. This is perhaps a loud echo of the religious differences between a predominantly Christian America and Muslim Iraq.

It should be stressed that in earlier seasons the monotheist Cylons were obviously meant to conjure up images of Osama bin Laden and radical Islam. However, during their brutal occupation they more immediately brought to mind another band of dangerous religious fundamentalists... George Bush and the Christian Evangelical right that supported his mad crusade in the Middle East. Like the Cylons (or even bin Laden) they used God to justify their immoral war.

Similarly, many people sadly supported the 2003 invasion because they were beguiled into believing our troops were fighting to free Iraq from an evil dictator before he could develop weapons of mass destruction and threaten, paradoxically, international peace. Disastrously though much like the Cylons, far from peace all we've done is throw Iraq dangerously close to civil war and terrorized the Iraqi people.

Five years on from its relaunch, the writers of the re-imagined Galactica have to be congratulated. It would have been easy to write a more simplistic series with, like the original, everything presented in distinct black and white terms of good vs evil and no shades of grey. Instead, they created a highly compelling post 9/11 allegory, a mirror for our troubled times that shows the Terror Wars, warts and all. Hopefully, the rest of the series and the planed spin-off Caprica will be equally brave and thought provoking.

READ RICHARD THOMAS'S SCI-FI WORLDS COLUMN FOR BINNALL OF AMERICA

#battlestar galactica

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theajjf · 2 years ago

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Lessons from Losing - by Austin Stahl

New Post has been published on https://www.ajjf.org/lessons-from-losing-by-austin-stahl/

Lessons from Losing - by Austin Stahl

Lessons from Losing

Many of the martial artists I’ve met over the years have dabbled in various forms of competition, and a pattern has seemed to emerge after picking their brains. They start out gung-ho when they are young, eventually realizing the mileage it’s putting on their body and start winding down as they age. It’s a smart way to train and maintain. For better or worse, I’ve been doing things in the opposite order. I am what you could call a late bloomer…for as long as I can remember I’ve defaulted to sitting back, observing, and moving when the time feels right. It has usually served me well. As a younger martial artist I didn’t feel much competitive drive. I did the occasional Freestyle and Kata contest, sure. I even competed in Judo and Sport Jujitsu here and there. But these contests were few and far between, with mixed results and mixed dedication. For whatever reason, it wasn’t until about the age of 30 (12 years into my martial arts journey) that I finally felt the itch to compete…the itch to pour everything I have into preparation and really put myself on the line to see what I’m made of. There are different ways of testing yourself of course, but what I desired was confirmation of how well I could (or couldn’t) defend myself against a fully resisting opponent. I wanted to truly trust in my skills without doubt and as the Buddhists believe, one’s enemy can often be their best teacher.

In the year 2022, I had four opportunities to fight. Two of these in the format of Sport Jujitsu, one MMA fight, and one Muay Thai fight. Of the four, I came out with 2 wins and 2 losses. They say you learn more from your losses than your wins, which is true. You do however learn from your wins as well. What they don’t tell you is how difficult it can be to recognize and receive the correct messages from your losses, or how difficult it is to stomach the accompanying feelings that are part of the package. Please understand, I’m writing this largely for myself. It helps to have an emotional and mental outlet. I am, however, sharing this writing because I feel it’s my duty as a sensei of the Kodenkan system to transmit my knowledge and experience to help others. It’s what we do, and from what I’m told it’s an ancient tradition. If you plan to compete or fight in the future, or have students who wish to, I’ve no doubt that the technical aspects can be covered by the sensei-student relationship. What I wish to speak on are the things you may not have considered in order to avoid the seemingly unavoidable feelings of being blindsided by unforeseen circumstances.

Lesson 1: Visualization Works

Before this year’s Ohana event, I decided Sport Jujitsu was a perfect format in which to start my competitive journey. The ruleset is awesome, allowing for the competitor to win in a variety of ways based on their personal strengths. If you’re a striker, grappler, or thrower your chances of victory are even. I prepared as well as I could; my nutrition was perfect, my cardio training was on point, I was adamant on my physical conditioning against damage. I intentionally worked on strength and flexibility every day. You name it, I did it. The only problem was that I was living in the middle of nowhere, with no gym or training partners within reach. How do you prepare for a fight without practice? I’m a big believer in the mind’s ability to influence physical outcome, so instead of drilling/sparring I trained internally by imagining the fight over and over and over. I did this several times a day, for several months. I didn’t know who my opponent would be, I didn’t know if they would be tall/short, southpaw or orthodox. I imagined every scenario I could as often as I could and felt every sensation along the way to imprint the feeling of success until the point where it was truly difficult to imagine myself losing. When the day finally arrived, I had two fights back to back with two previously unknown, but tough/skilled warriors. I performed well, composed, and won both matches. The interesting part though, is that the technical execution in both matches was nearly identical to the images I had continuously rehearsed in my head. I used the right techniques at the right times, defended the correct way and countered effortlessly just like I’d planned. It was an amazing experience, more like watching a movie play out than being in the fight myself. Visualization in place of physical practice had worked. The key to effective visualization in my mind is the realism of the images you rehearse, and more importantly the feelings you have when meditating on success. This may feel difficult initially, but like anything else gets easier with time and practice. The wonderful thing about visualization as opposed to physical training is that you can envision yourself having success 100% of the time. That continual mental success translates to confidence, and in the process makes your self-image (and capacity for success) grow. I believe Henry Ford said it best, “whether you think you can or think you can’t, you are right.”

Lesson 2: Confidence/Arrogance are Sometimes Indistinguishable

After Ohana’s Sport Jujitsu tournament I had a bit of time to reflect and heal (a broken big toe from a knee block would slow me down, but not stop me) and the itch to test myself was more present than ever. About a month later I received an opportunity to take part in an MMA event. This would be the real deal…full contact, no pads/headgear, with an opponent looking to hurt me. I have religiously trained Jujitsu, Judo, and Muay Thai while using Tai Chi to train my mind and heal my body for many years. The time felt right and I was eager to tackle this new challenge. I’m not a huge fan of MMA to be honest with you, because from what I’ve seen the UFC is more about trash talking for money than the warrior code we martial artists embrace. There are better organizations by the way, but that’s another topic…if interested check out ONE FC. I’ve also seen many UFC fights over the years and from what I’d seen it was mid-level Jujitsu with mid-level Boxing, mid-level kicks and so on…I was rarely impressed. I, on the other hand, had trained with phenomenal Jujitsuka for many years, as well as some of the best Muay Thai fighters in the world. I felt like I didn’t have anything to worry about in the striking department or the grappling department, and if overwhelmed by a specialist I could easily switch gears to take them to where I’m strong and they’re weak (Jujitsu strategy 101). This is where confidence quietly shifts into the realm of arrogance. I can’t stress this next statement enough – when you watch the way they move, and the techniques they use (in another sport), they are doing so for a reason. They are doing what they do because this is what works in their world. They’ve tested it. Thinking you can come in from an outside world with outside knowledge and overcome them at their own game is dangerous and foolish. For example, on kickboxing night I usually beat these MMA fighters cleanly. On grappling night it was often the same. But MMA grappling is not the same as grappling alone. MMA striking is not the same as striking alone. It is completely different, please trust me on this. I could tell you all the reasons why, but that’s a topic for another time.

With my confidence building in the gym through consistently good results against training partners in kickboxing and grappling, further compounded by the tried-and-true visualization drills, I felt unstoppable on fight night. I stepped into that cage as an MMA first timer, but a fairly seasoned Jujitsuka/Judoka/Nak Muay ready to put my skills to the test. Standing across from me was an opponent that was supposedly easy to beat despite a size advantage. Turns out he was seasoned too. While I excelled in a patchwork of different skill sets, he was seasoned in MMA purely. He had many fights (previously unknown to me) and used his experience to quickly turn me to stone with a head kick I didn’t ever see coming. He was confident, calm, kept his distance well to use his reach advantage, and threw my mind downward with distracting calf kicks before sending the kill shot upward. According to friends/training partners it appeared I was winning until that point, but to me that doesn’t matter. I approached the fight feeling like I could never be out-kicked by an MMA fighter (kicking is my specialty), but the reality was the veteran taught me about what it’s like to be in his home, the cage. Arrogance had been my downfall.

Lesson 3: A Failure Offers a Blueprint to Build Success

One of the only things more difficult in my experience than dealing with a hard hit to your personal belief system is when you receive a blindside hit to your belief system. They say it’s the hit you don’t see coming that takes you out…I can personally attest to the statement’s validity on both a physical and mental level. Picking up the pieces after something personally devastating is one of the hardest parts of human life. How you proceed after being knocked down is often one of the life instances that shapes you for the future. The ancient Stoics believed that perception was everything, and while I don’t personally think it’s everything it sure influences a lot. In order to avoid falling in a hole I can’t climb out of, I make it a personal habit to view every obstacle as opportunity, and every failure as feedback from the universe telling me what doesn’t work in order to avoid that trouble again down the road. But how, exactly, do you recognize the universal message behind a loss or failure if you don’t know how it happened? This is the trouble with being blindsided. Through personal reflection you can eventually find the answer, but after being blindsided the sulking period tends to be much longer (potentially permanent if you let it be) and the cuts to your heart much deeper.

After my MMA debut loss, and after licking my wounds for what felt like an eternity (in reality only a few long weeks), my sadness/frustration left me chomping at the bit to get another chance to prove myself to myself. So I took the earliest fight available. This opportunity presented itself in the form of a Muay Thai fight, with headgear and shinpads, which seemed perfect to me considering I want to hang on to as many brain cells as possible. After a talk with my MMA striking coach we decided that pure boxing linear footwork/angles would be the missing link in my style, so we immediately began drilling this basic skill like it was my first day in the gym. I got a whopping 1.5 weeks of practice in before taking this fight, not much. Knowing how much of a blow the previous loss was to my ego (yeah I’ve got one despite my best efforts, willing to bet we all do to an extent) I was worried about that feeling recurring. At the same time, I was aware that to dwell on the thought of losing would be equivalent to shooting my potential success in the foot. Fight day came and went, and I chose to approach this first Muay Thai fight as an “experiment.” My goals included: putting the footwork drills to use in combat, maintaining defensive soundness at all times without my mind slacking (Zanshin) and actually listening for my coach’s advice during the midst of the chaos. Easier said than done for newbies considering adrenaline closes off your hearing to outside distractions. In all three of these regards I was successful. According to the judges these successes weren’t enough to win the fight, but upon video review/talk with spectators it seems clear I’d done enough to win. Who cares about that though, that’s beside the point and judges are human like the rest of us. I think the way I approached the Muay Thai fight as an experiment was the right way to go, because I learned a bit about what works. Taking/reviewing video footage was helpful as well, because I figured out what I did that was successful as well as what I did that was unsuccessful; both immensely helpful in developing my personal style moving forward in competing as well as coaching others. This long-winded description isn’t yet touching on the most important part of the experience however: the use of a “pre-mortem” mental exercise prior to the fight and its effect on my mindset afterward.

You see, I wanted more than anything to avoid that devastating feeling that struck me and stuck with me from the MMA loss. In order to do this, I attempted to balance out the confidence-building aspects of visualization with the sad reality that things don’t always go the way you wish. With this in mind I performed a “pre-mortem” exercise (often employed by business managers) to imagine ahead of time that you or your project has failed, and figure out why as if looking through the lens of hindsight. How could I possibly lose? I went through each and every way. I also decided how I would best prevent this from happening. I even decided how I would proceed moving forward with my training/life even if the failure occurred despite my best efforts. I believe it was due to this activity that I am writing this one day after my loss as opposed to the weeks it would have taken had I been blindsided once again.

The combination of goal-setting, visualization of success (not just in terms of results, but also success reaching my smaller goals), and the use of foresight to handle potential setbacks has allowed me to know exactly what I need to do moving forward in order to grow. I can only speak for myself, but I’m willing to bet that if you love and train DZR the way I do that personal growth is key to your quality of life and needs to be prioritized and optimized. On this note, I hope you or your students get something from my experiences. In Kokua, I feel it’s my duty to help our Ohana in any way I can.

On that note, in a logical sense I don’t find it wise to risk head injuries in violent competitions (much less the hard/dangerous training leading up to these fights) but I also understand that risks are occasionally necessary to find parts of yourself that can’t otherwise be acquired. If you or any students have the desire to compete in combat sports, or anything at all, please know I’m openly available to help in any way possible. I don’t begin to claim I know everything, in fact the more I learn the less I know for certain. A sensei, however, isn’t perfect. They’re simply one further down the path. In that spirit, I’d be happy to offer any of my knowledge/experience openly to any willing to seek it out. Jujitsu knowledge is readily available in the family we’ve placed ourselves in. But MMA, Judo, Tai Chi, Muay Thai, boxing, kickboxing, aerobic/anaerobic conditioning, body conditioning, nutrition, pre-fight weight gain/loss, mental preparation and so on are all paths I’ve devoted myself to so please reach out if you ever think I can be of help.

In humility,

Austin Stahl

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