#OF WHICH I ACTUALLY DOCUMENTED COHERENTLY

[inc0mple]

Alright chat, the flip flop is free now, I CAN SHARE MY THEORY.

This started as a vague crack theory but it spiralled and now I have tangible evidence and a thought process and have spent the last week going INSANE but most of the theory rests on one stupid detail---namely, the brand of this mysterious keyholder's flip-flop---that I couldn't share until now.

This theory is---and hear me out---

Before he was a key, Buddy was actually a fictional storybook character turned real.

WARNING: Long, only vaguely coherent rambling and Inco going insane.

Okay I know you're like "wtf are you on about" so just. just. just hear me out pls

To understand this theory we need a little bit of context, which means talking about:

The Elephant Book

"The Elephant Book" is an unfinished comic that Punko worked on before Cinderella Boy or Stagtown. It is a story about two characters who learn the secrets of a hidden organization, called Artifax... secrets that have to do with beloved fictional characters who become real because of readers' love for them. I don't want to spoil too much of it, but I highly recommend giving it a read if you like theorizing about Cinderella Boy. You can get it on her store here as an eBook. It got cancelled before the plot could be fully realized, but here's the thing---Punko has said that The Elephant Book informs Cinderella Boy.

This in itself is intruiging, but what is most fascinating to me---and here is where the flip-flop comes in, LMAO---is one particular plot point.

Again, I don't want to give away too much of the Elephant Book because it's a fantastic story. However, it does feature one part about one book character in particular---Alice, from Alice in Wonderland.

A book character who attempted to enter the "real world" through a looking glass---through a mirror.

And if you take a look at this mysterious keyholder's flip-flop...

IT SAYS ALIC[E].

here me out im not insane here me out

This looks like just a normal brand to me, nothing that has any plot significance. So it's important to ask, why then was it included? Why would Punko include a fictional brand as detailing on a random item of clothing... unless maybe, it was a reference? A jaded, non-diegetic callback to another "Alice" from a different, dropped story...

This leads me to believe that this mystery keyholder was once a storybook character, and has since been greeted into the real world.

I don't know how, but one theory I have is that maybe, to avoid a hassle, Ex Libris may take book characters and turn them real with magic to use as henchmen.

HEAR ME OUT

These people would be untracable; they would have no documents or papers, and nobody from the real world would miss them.

Their memories could be erased or modified so that they do not realize this is their history. They could be amnesic, or remember a false previous life before working for Ex Libris.

They would be easier to control because of this. Ex Libris could manipulate them because they would have qualities that would stop them from fitting into normal life; Ex Libris would feel like the only place they "belonged".

If the keys and their magic exists---and we've seen Violet and Buddy have a spell page---why couldn't this magic be plausible?

Now hear me out even more: Buddy used to be one of them.

I HAVE REASONS.

1. Words n stuff

Weird that Buddy only has one name, or that it doesn't seem to match the other keys.

That's---an underwhelming first point. Uh. That's all. Food for thought.

OH AND ALSO, "Ex Libris" means "from the library of". Could be referring to people who work with them being LITERALLY from books.

2. Dialogue

Perhaps this statement is more literal than we thought. Perhaps in Buddy's "home book", he was a villainous character.

Almost like all three of those phrases apply to him.

3. THE MIRRORS GUYS THE MIRRORS OH MY GOD

Buddy has been seen with plenty of mirror symbolism. Particularly in Dreams by Night:

Reflections show story characters, we know this.

But also, when Buddy escapes through the mirror (like Alice through the looking glass, in The Elephant Book)...

THE GLASS IS CURVED.

But we saw the mirror, the mirror is flat. We know the dreams are supposed to be extremely symbollic...

So what if the mirror is meant to symbolize more of a portal, from one world---a fictional world---to a real one?

...okay thats all i have for now that was kinda underwhelming.

I PROMISE IM NOT INSANE I PROMISE IM MORE COHERENT WHEN IM NOT EXHAUSTED LIKE I AM RIGHT NOW

[vellichorom]

Fuck- I forgot to add the following question to the last one SLWNWKWBS

But uhm,,, I was just wondering how you do your sketch progress if I may ask?

I always find it interesting To see how artists do their sketches and put down the shapes to archive their wonderful artworks! (And I feel one can learn a lot from seeing the progress :0)

-💜🐈

OHH WELL, WHAT A QUESTION... 💕

i don't think i do it much differently than any other artist really... especially in more RECENT years when i've leaned more into more of a " traditional artist process " rather than just being the most insane person & drawing from nothing,

because i used to do that. no sketch, no skeleton, no regard for anatomy, no pillow, no NOTHING & let me tell you. i'm better mentally for changing that

( no nothing on the left vs used a presketch / skeleton / structure on the right )

okay maybe you can't tell because these were drawn years apart anyway BUT BELIEVE ME ONE OF THESE TOOK MORE PRE SETUP THAN THE OTHER & IT'S NOT THE ONE ON THE LEFT

hi everyone who's been with me since 2018

ANYWAY. THE CURRENT DAY PROCESS;

STEP 1 ) the " beta sketch "

my clients will Especially recognize this term & these shapes;

SEE HOW THIS LOOKS LIKE A LOT OF BULLSHIT NOTHINGNESS? i usually start with This Nonsense to get a good feel of the pose / situation i'm working with / to give a poor client working with me some idea of where i want to go with their request;

this is the starting phase to put an idea in everyone's heads but everything is plenty subject to change;

NOW, STEP 2 ) uhhhhh beta sketch part 2. thumbnailing maybe

NOW i start shaping the ball of clay i've birthed a little more, NOW i start taking anatomy, structure, the final positions & expressions into account according to how i or a client may want them;

this is the stage JUST before linework so the majority of changes are usually done Here. this is still obviously way messy but Much more coherent ( at least to people who are me ) & what i imagine professionals deliver to their clients first as to save time. i however have plenty of that & will harass you with every passing second

STEP 3 ) linework !!!

HOWEVER clean or messy it may be, this is the lineart stage! the second to last course! this is where the BIG SHIT goes down & everything falls into place; everything's WAY cleaned up, the picture is Almost done, & well- you get the idea,

STEP 4 ) heueheuhsijhruigrjhdihirednguerhgiudf DONE

this is where the final colors & details & SHADING & WHATEVER needs to be incorporated comes into play, OF WHICH INVOLVES LIKE 3 ADDITIONAL PROCESSES but i consider this just One Big Step considering it's all relative to me & i don't even stop to BREATHE once i hit this stage

& THEN WE END UP WITH THE FINISHED PRODUCT! just like that!

of course, it maybe takes a bit LESS depending on the seriousness / level of detail necessary for each piece, maybe i feel more than confident to skip right to the lineart & cook, BUT THIS is USUALLY how the process goes!

& i'm sure there's someone out there who probably laughs at me & thinks they can do better or quicker or sexier & TO THAT I SAY

ok cool

MAY THIS HAVE BEEN AN ENTERTAINING & / OR INTERESTING READ FOR YOU! because god knows i have as much trouble explaining this as any marvelous thing i do

THANK YOU FOR YOUR CURIOSITY!

[hpowellsmith]

These haphazard ideas for blogposts keep rotating in my brain:

writing interactive sex scenes in ways that I personally think are appealing and characterful

how characterisation can interweave with dom/sub dynamics in interactive sex scenes and how to make those dynamics feel well-rounded (I feel like this could be its own thing in addition to the above)

my specific feelings about the kinds of cute/adorable characters that are often called golden-retriever

various ways to write nonbinary MCs and NPCs without being weird about it

various ways to write gender-selectable characters in a way that I personally enjoy

[prokopetz]

don't answer that last ask I sent you actually. a) because I've since realized you rightfully don't give a shit about wizards of the coast, and would be justified in deleting the info I wanted from your brain as soon as you learned it, b) because I realized you aren't Google, and c) because I Googled it and found out myself.

on a related note, did you know wizards copyrighted the term "d20 system??" wtf. that was the last place I expected to have problems. I thought it'd be, like, "armor class" or "difficulty class" or something else similarly oppressive and cruel to copyright that would force me to change my whole rules document, and mess with my player's ability to remember which mechanics have had their name changed.

Somehow copyrighting the term "d20 system" feels even wronger than that.

Wizards of the Coast is the outfit that popularised the idea of categorising game systems according to the shape of the dice you roll in the first place. There are a few prior examples of games with similar naming conventions, including West End Games' D6 System – which is where WotC probably got the idea – but the idea of "dX systems", where X is the shape of the dice you roll, as coherent categories of games is very much a post-d20 System phenomenon.

That is, it's not that WotC trademarked (note: not "copyrighted") an existing piece of in-use terminology when they trademarked the term "d20 System"; it's that the idea of lumping all game systems which make use of twenty-sided dice together under the category of "d20 systems" was popularised by WotC's trademark.

(Indeed, if one were feeling conspiratorial, one might observe that the idea that all systems which roll the same-shaped dice are basically interchangeable with one another is a notion whose popularisation has proven very convenient for WotC's post-3E marketing strategy!)

[nostalgebraist]

In other uncanny-valley AI voice news...

Google has this new thing called "NotebookLM," which allows you to upload any document, click a button, and then a few minutes later receive an entire AI-generated podcast episode (!) about the document. The generation seems to occur somewhat faster than real-time.

(This is currently offered for free as a demo, all you need is a Google account.)

These podcast episodes are... they're not, uh, good. In fact, they're terrible – so cringe-y and inane that I find them painful to listen to.

But – unlike with the "AI-generated content" of even the very recent past – the problem with this stuff isn't that it's unrealistic. It's perfectly realistic. The podcasters sound like real people! Everything they say is perfectly coherent! It's just coherently ... bad.

It's a perfect imitation of superficial, formulaic, cringe-y media commentary podcasts. The content isn't good, but it's a type of bad content that exists, and the AI mimics it expertly.

The badness is authentic. The dumb shit they say is exactly the sort of dumb shit that humans would say on this sort of podcast, and they say it with the exact sorts of inflections that people would use when saying that dumb shit on that sort of podcast, and... and everything.

(Advanced Voice Mode feels a lot like this too. And – much as with Advanced Voice Mode – if Google can do this, then they can presumably do lots of things that are more interesting and artistically impressive.

But even if no one especially likes this kind of slop, it's highly inoffensive – palatable to everyone, not likely to confuse anyone or piss anyone off – and so it's what we get, for now, while these companies are still cautiously testing the waters.)

----

Anyway.

The first thing I tried was my novel Almost Nowhere, as a PDF file.

This seemed to throw the whole "NotebookLM" system for a loop, to some extent because it's a confusing book (even to humans), but also to some extent because it's very long.

I saw several different "NotebookLM" features spit out different attempts to summarize/describe it that seemed to be working off of different subsets of the text.

In the case of the generated podcast, the podcasters appear to have only "seen" the first 8 (?) chapters.

And their discussion of those early chapters is... like I said, pretty bad. They get some basic things wrong, and the commentary is painfully basic even when it's not actually inaccurate. But it's still uncanny that something like this is possible.

(Spoilers for the first ~8 chapters of Almost Nowhere)

The second thing I tried was my previous novel, The Northern Caves.

The Northern Caves is a much shorter book, and there were no length-related issues this time.

It's also a book that uses a found-media format and includes a fictitious podcast transcript.

And, possibly because of this, NotebookLM "decided" to generate a podcast that treated the story and characters as though they existed in the real world – effectively, creating fanfiction as opposed to commentary!

(Spoilers for The Northern Caves.)

----

Related links:

I tried OpenAI's Advanced Voice Mode ChatGPT feature and wrote a post about my experiences

I asked NotebookLM to make a podcast about my Advanced Voice Mode post, with surreal results

Tumblr user ralfmaximus takes this to the limit, creating NotebookLM podcast about the very post you're reading now

[tallerthantale]

Neil and Amanda's Fake Therapist

I originally gathered information relating to Neil's fake therapist in a bit of a messy hyperfocus flurry that included some initial errors, followed by various erratic updates, so I wanted to put the main points together into one coherent place. Some of what I'm putting together here was found by others on the subreddit post.

I once again find myself skirting the edges of my typical rules for myself about analyzing public figures, so disclaimer: this is personal opinion, I'm not scientifically or clinically evaluating anyone based off public appearances / statements, I am commenting on what personal impression I am getting off things, and leaving most speculation about internal states out.

Man does this guy make it hard to stick to that though.

The person I'm talking about here is the supposed 'therapist' that Scarlett interacted with while Neil was (allegedly) pressuring her to say the allegations weren't true. His behavior there (with a paper trail according to Tortoise), and what I was able to gather from Amanda Palmer's podcast made it clear to me that he was not operating within the acceptable behaviour of a therapist, so I decided to see if I could prompt a review of his license. All indications at this time are that he does not have one. But it gets worse.

He claims to be a minister, but like the therapist claim cites no qualifications or organizations in his website's bio. This combination of therapist who isn't a therapist and minister who isn't a minister potentially creates a legal nightmare scenario. I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, but I'm going to give you my best estimate of the situation, which has involved looking up the law and reading some cases.

As long as he isn't claiming to be a mental health professional, he may be protected in calling himself a nonspecific 'therapist.' He can probably argue it as some kind of spiritual therapy. But because he isn't actually a mental health care provider, he is not subject to mandatory reporting. Generally therapists have a legal obligation to proactively report when someone is a danger to themselves or others. He does not have that requirement. He isn't bound by professional ethics, since he is not a member of any organizations and has no licenses. Moreover, it seems to be the case in New Mexico that if a person reasonably believes you to be a minister, that kicks in clergy-penitent privilege whether or not you actually are a minister.

The origin concept of clergy-penitent privilege is that the law cannot force a priest to reveal what was said to them in confession. The First Amendment means all religions get it equally and it doesn't have to be part of a specific Catholic ritual. In New Mexico, it covers anything that was not said publicly or intended to be passed on regardless of the surrounding context. That means anything said to or by this guy that is not said in public or explicitly intended to be forwarded cannot be used by the legal system for any purpose, no matter how documented or incriminating it is to the client or to him personally. There is no mechanism to remove that privilege form him for being misused because it is derived from his representation of himself as a minister, not his actual status.

According to his linkdin he received a Bachelors degree in creative writing from the University of Rochester, in New York. He then got a Masters degree in Divinity in Organizations from Harvard Divinity School, 1982-1985. These are the only points of education claimed anywhere we have seen. He lists no psychology or mental health qualification anywhere, and is most known as an author. His bookselling success might be due to a claimed promotional appearance on Oprah.

His personal webpage has a long 'client list' or list of 'collaborators' who have hosted speaking engagements. This list was last updated in 2012. The events on his calendar page have no year. I think I recall seeing a section of his website that was only accessible to those who were 'fully committed,' or something like that, but it doesn't seem to be there now. It's possible I'm misremembering, it's possible it got taken down when the reddit thread got popular, I don't have the right skillset to check. He won an award from the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which looks to be engaging in pseudo scientific spirituality in a manner similar to Scientology.

From what I can gather from the video's I've watched, the advice he 'preaches' is a mish mash of bits and pieces of metaphors and perspectives from a variety of religions and philosophies that he probably didn't fully understand. (My speculation.) There are pieces of genuine insight that are lifted from others and that can give the impression he knows what he is talking about to vulnerable people even if he doesn't really understand them himself. He doesn't seem to have any genuine religious beliefs or connections to any religious congregation or organizations. It is unclear if he is or is not technically ordained, but that is something anyone can just do online, and he doesn't even claim it.

Particularly noticeable in his talks are traces of Jungian psychoanalysis (which is the nonsense Jordan Peterson seems to have got caught up in, and it has antisemitic and fascist origins) some Buddhist resilience concepts that have been misused by westerners a lot, and Christian (I think) concepts about universal love and togetherness. They end up mashed together into a message that I believe will influence most victims who hear it to blame themselves and remain in toxic situations, while making perpetrators feel better about continuing to perpetrate. Not saying that was the goal, but if a person had that goal, this patchwork philosophy is what you would put together to achieve it. I'm not going to be specific because I don't want to be like, putting out a guide for people on how to do this.

Amanda says she met the guy before she had a child, but after she was married. That is somewhere between 2011 and 2015. Amanda says she met him at something resembling a TED conference, where all sorts of people got together to do various (rich people nonsense.) She had a mental breakdown in a horse paddock, and the fake therapist was the guy with the horse, teaching about horse whispering.

"And since then, he’s been my therapist, and he’s also become a true friend, to me, and to my family, and to many other people in my life that he’s taken on, and helped out, in some of their darkest hours of need, and he is my emergency phone call. And in a way, he sort of picked up where Anthony, my old mentor, left off, and I don’t find it a coincidence that Wayne walked into my life right around the time Anthony walked out. "

This is not what a therapist does, this is cult leader behaviour. This is pure speculation on my part, but I wonder if Neil might have known him first and orchestrated their meeting. He is an author with connections to an organization similar to Scientology. It might actually not be a coincidence. Again, pure speculation.

Amanda describes seeking advice from him whenever she was having trouble with Neil, and that talking to him would make her feel like everything was fine again. "Even just to have someone to talk to, to remind me what I’m struggling with, what’s going on, what is home, why does this feel so disorienting, what am I doing? And I can say right now, when I shifted my internal feeling within myself, within my relationship with Neil, around where I was, my feeling in my own house transformed. Because I went, oh, right, none of this fucking matters."

In June 2019 Amanda Palmer has the Portland, OR incident where she tells her fans they need to forgive their r@#ists.

In 2019 the fake therapist did a series of webcasts with The Santa Fe Center for Spiritual Healing over a few months. At times he is titled "Rvrd", and at times he is titled "Dr." there is no reason to believe he is either. In the first one, the host reads a bio she found online, that she says he asked her not to read (she appears to think he was being humble.) This version of the bio claims that he was a Senior Scholar at the Fetzer Institute. When he comes on after she read it, he makes odd comments about whoever might be watching the video online and appears very shaken. The Fetzer Institute has no mention of him on their website. That connection is not listed in his current bio.

In his last video for the Santa Fe Center he claims to be working on an upcoming project in D.C. with a co-facilitator who was famous for brokering a truce between the crips and bloods. He also comes across like he has been asked to stop working with the center and is being super passive aggressive about it. (My speculation.)

His appearance on Amanda Palmer's podcast is recorded in July 2019, about a month after the last Santa Fe Center webcast, in upstate New York. In the descriptor she says it was recorded after a week long retreat with him she set up for 60 of her Patrion supporters. There is a nearly two year gap between the recording and posting, which is not explained. She describes him as a minister, therapist, leadership mentor, and her personal therapist. In the episode itself, she also describes him as her and Neil's relationship therapist. In the description she promotes his books and his website, and says he is still readily contactable there, but to be patient right now because he is mid move. (The description was posted when the podcast was posted, in 2021. As mentioned earlier, there are features of his website that have not been updated since 2012.)

The fake therapist tweeted about Neil being a 'dear friend' in late 2020. He has under 100 followers, not really what you would expect for a best selling author / therapist / minister / community leader / mentor / horse whisper. While I make references to cult leader behaviour, a genuine cult leader would probably have a larger following. But somehow I don't think he lacks for money. I expect there is a market for pseudo-therapists you can freely talk to about the crimes you are actively committing. You can even involve him in the crime, and it still privileged.

The events of Scarlett's allegations date to 2022, about a year after Amanda posted the podcast episode. Sometime in March is when Neil manipulates Scarlett into saying the allegations are false with what is essentially a su!c!de threat, then asks her to repeat her assurances that it was consensual to the fake therapist. Amanda had recently received a scorching message from one of Scarlett's friends about what was done to her. It seems like Neil is doing this to win a fight with Amanda in their "relationship therapy." Scarlett gets a message from the fake therapist.

Tortoise describes it as him "saying he'd be happy to speak to her in complete confidence because he had heard that she found herself in his words 'in the midst of relationships, stories and narratives, not alas necessarily of your own making. Sadly, this is not a surprise. Two creative dynamic people can easily draw others into their orbit unaware of how powerfully the magnetic pull of their influences can have on others.'"

My perception of this message is that it plants the suggestion to Scarlett that her friends are brainwashing her to think she was r@ped by pulling her into 'narratives not of her own making.' I could see how people might interpret the later lines regarding magnetic pull as being about accidental power dynamics abuse, but I read it more as him saying Scarlett's friends are opportunistic manipulators looking to make a name for themselves by taking down a famous person.

Either way, there are a considerable number of things happening there that an actual therapist would not ever do, for a variety of very good reasons. Tortoise's attempt to call him to ask for comment was thwarted by the fact that his phone has been specifically programed not to accept voicemails. Not like, the voicemail box was full or something, he went out of his way to do that. Which means Tortoise can't quite claim that he didn't respond to requests to comment, because they couldn't leave a message. Other organizations probably run into similar difficulties establishing evidence that they have contacted him. It's not a smoking gun, but I don't like it.

A year later Amanda Palmer makes her post on the Russel Brand allegations, where she argues the solution to serial predatory behaviour is to try to get them to stop doing "stupid shit" by trying to heal their lacking and fear with love and compassion and forgiveness, because that the ONLY cause / motivation for abusive behavior. And some unarticulated hope for non-specific accountability vibes.

This post looks to me like the perspective of a person who has been continuously exploited, and manipulated into thinking it is their personal responsibility to heal people who have no interest in being healed. It reads to me like a person who has been justifying staying in a toxic situation to themself so long it has warped their entire worldview. It reads to me like the inevitable end result of this fake therapists preaching.

I don't think that absolves her of what ever her role has been in facilitating access to victims, or actively promoting these views to her audience, but it is something to keep in mind.

There is a broad rage of possibilities for what is going on with this guy. The spectrum runs from deeply misguided fool to deliberately exploitative criminal. Either way it looks like he is charging people money for the service of turning them into the "this is fine" dog. This is not fine. This is not ok. Unfortunately it probably is legal.

[drdemonprince]

I was writing this when I saw your most recent substack post on sexuality, so please forgive if I'm not super coherent.

As someone who has been living in a country without much, if any, real legal protections for most of my time as an out trans person, that while I understand the fear right now is high it was not until a few years ago that we did not exist at all in the public consciousness. That terrible prison show was the first time a trans woman appeared in a not "haha look at the gross tranny" way, and that was maybe 10 years ago. Non-binary people existence is even more recent. While I get having a bunch of religious fanatics hate you sucks, from what I gathered despite some claiming otherwise, the rest of the people don't really care that much. It's an issue that gets blown up by the media because it's nice and controversial which gets ratings (or these days, clicks/views), and, as a made-up problem, allows politicians to appear strong and decisive. (Also, there being lots of local differences and court stuff I can't even begin to understand influencing this because your country is very confusing.) It's hard for me to properly measure what people claim and what is actually true.

Come what comes, but there's a difference between preparing for the worst and assuming it already happens. This is going to sound callous, but people need to remember that as much as it sucks to stuck in survival mode and not being able to get government documents corrected, they probably have the grit deep-down to get through this. Maybe it's easy for me to talk, I used to work in building when I was on hormones, didn't tell anyone in that setting, and just shrugged it off and cherished the time I spent with friends & supportive people who knew me as *me*, and lied through my teeth whenever it was necessary and off from being assaulted a few times (not work related, school days) without major injuries because I was good at getting the fuck out. Then again, I've had a therapist tell me I'm scary good at compartmentalizing, so take that as you will.

Now we finally get to why that post about sexuality prompted all this. The bit about the trans woman finally being able to relax when dommed... That struck a nerve, which is strange because I don't really have much sex-drive, but that kind of softness is not something I've had in my life much. Always in the role of taking care and looking after others, never being on the receiving end, not just emotionally, but sexually also because oh dear is it an ordeal when people project the trans dommy mommy shit on you. Especially as now, 8 years after the first go around I find myself being the calm and collected one supporting others again and it's not even a conscious act on my or their behalf, despite setting boundaries (and having them respected mainly) I somehow got the invisible label of "mom who got her shit together" (as if) when I too would sometimes like to unwind and get fucked properly into the next timezone.

thank you for your message. I hope that a lot of younger or less seasoned American trans people who are freaking the fuck out right now are able to put some of their own understandable stress activation aside to read it and really take it in. also, it's a real bummer when people lean on you to always be the strong and capable one. and it is miserable how this role gets voiced upon us simply by virtue of having endured a great deal, or having grown a little bit older than some other people. obviously in your case this dynamic is far more deeply entrenched because of misogyny and transmisogyny and how that shapes people's expectations of the labor that women provide to them, especially trans women, but I do understand a little bit of how miserable it feels to be shunted into that kind of role. and I hope that somebody really just pounds you into the mattress or gives you whatever kind of sexual attention and care-taking helps you feel weak and needy and okay and like somebody else has it all together for a while sometime soon.

[redux-iterum]

how do i outline coherently. i am struggling

I'm going to assume you have an idea of how the story goes already, you just need to actually write it down. Which is the most difficult part of this whole thing, for me, so I feel your pain.

If this is the case: My game plan is to first outline in a way that will be most helpful for me, in order to get it written out at all. Iterum is written more coherently for Lynx's sake, but my original content is an organized mess, which is perfect for me. It doesn't matter if it's scatterbrained - the important thing is that I know what's going on and it makes it easier to outline to completion. You can refine it later. Just get it done.

You know that phrase, "Write drunk, edit sober"? Take that metaphorically. Write like a damn maniac with as little cohesion as is needed, and then come back to it and organize it into something anyone can read, if you care to.

My tactics:

Use bullets like this to write down each story beat and minor event. This makes it easier to rearrange things if I have to in the future.

--------You can also add additional, smaller bullets to each big bullet with as many details as you need to add on for context.

Color code words and characters, especially in big, bulky paragraphs. This makes it easier than just a Ctrl+F on a Google doc - you can scroll down quickly and catch wherever a character is without having to click "next" a bunch.

If blocks of text automatically overwhelm your brain, cut down paragraphs into two or three sentences. (Thank you to @thunder-the-ranger-wolf for helping me with this one recently.)

As you're writing the events, make notes with -dashes- or (parenthesis) or even bullets that will tell you something important that you don't want to forget. Things like "this weapon will be used by Jack later on when he's rushed into the room for safety", or "note that Howard should look tense and anxious in reaction to this conversation", or even just "add a flashback here once the first arc is outlined and I know what details I need to hint at". You'd be amazed at how much shit people (especially me) will forget about that's small but crucial to the story, because they're writing the big events for extended periods.

If you get intimidated by a loooong synopsis that you've been working on for a while and still isn't done, just catch up on the last few paragraphs or single page that you've written and then continue from there. You may repeat events or contradict a previous plotpoint, though, just as a warning. I handle that issue when the outline is done and it's time to refine it; I also like to reread everything frequently on an off day without writing anything new to catch those mistakes.

In the event that the above happens and a plot point is written twice, be aware that whatever choice you make on where to actually place it could drastically change the rest of the plot going forward. If you hate rewriting stuff, that'll be annoying.

Stuck on where to go next? Make a new paragraph with a single sentence that reads, "something happens here", and then move on to the stuff you can more easily write down. My preference is to be a little detailed about it: "something happens here that gets Joy from the cafe to the wrong neighborhood", and then writing about what happens in the wrong neighborhood. It's surprisingly a lot easier to figure out the transitional events like this once you have a specific A and B point to connect.

Have multiple docs to write and rewrite on. You don't have to write in one and then fix it over and over. Just write down what you have and are confident in so far, and move to the next document if ideas change or you're getting frustrated and need to start over. You'd be surprised at how helpful this is. It's like sketching something poorly and then redrawing it in a better and better state with new pages of paper. Hell, you can even trace stuff you liked from the first page and add it into the next version.

In the case of my first webcomic, when I didn't know what the fuck I was doing and events had to be rearranged all the time due to the nature of the storytelling, I resorted to using an art program (in my case, MS Paint) to write very short summaries of story beats and outright organize them in a visual format. I am not kidding about this. I straight up just used my mouse to put plot points here and there, and then change them around if something sounded better over at the beginning instead of the middle. It was shockingly helpful. It looks silly, but if you're an image person instead of a word person (as I am), it's a very easy way to visualize exactly what the fuck's going on in the outline.

Now let's say you complete the outline and it is a cobweb of chaos. Excellent. All you have to do now is write everything down in an outline similar to a Wikipedia summary. Translating "Stan says this -> everyone hears a gunshot" into "Stan angrily declares that he's sick of his mistreatment. Before anyone can respond, a gunshot goes off outside" is surprisingly easy. Is this a bit tedious? Yes. Is it optional? Absolutely. Do I recommend it? Very much so.

I personally like to do it because it's a cleaner, more organized version of the mess I made earlier. It's especially helpful if you're going to have someone go over the outline and critique or question things. My version of a completed outline will have chapters as full paragraphs detailing what happens, like so:

Chapter EIGHT: The morning sun rises and Kel pulls himself out of bed with a hangover. He stumbles to the bathroom and tries to wash up before the headache gets to be too much and he lays down on the floor. Meanwhile, the front door opens and the burglar from the night before (this will be revealed to be Sarah in chapter 19) sneaks into the house. They decide to try and grab more stuff, even with the sound of footsteps and retching in the upstairs rooms being audible. Just as the burglar finds Kel's mother's necklace, Kel comes downstairs and, seeing a stranger in his house, immediately confronts them.

Then on to chapter nine, and so on.

That's all I got for now. Hope this helps!

[talenlee]

Making Art In Jod's Own Country

There’s this joke, in The Locked Tomb. Well, it’s kind of a joke. It’s a character’s name, and when it shows up it’s definitely funny but it’s also while a slightly mentally unwell woman is talking angrily about the human she made with her uterus to try and kill god. I guess this is veering pretty fast into spoiler territory, so let’s do the warning:

Spoiler Warning: I’m going to talk about the world and setting of The Locked Tomb in a way that explicates some things that are unclear in Gideon the Ninth and largely are explained in the main of Harrow the Ninth. If you don’t want to know about it, bounce, go have a chocky milk or send me a message about how ‘that’s not how chocci is spelled.’ We can have a fun conversation around the unspellable phonemes of Australian English.

Alright, so let’s get Wake’s name out there. It’s Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead Kia Hua Ko Te Pai Snap Back to Reality Oops There Goes Gravity. It’s a three-part name, composed of Awake Remembrance Of These Valiant Dead, then Kia Hua Ko Te Pai, then Snap Back To Reality Oops There Goes Gravity. It is obviously a name that’s meant to do a particular kind of joke, it’s meant to be funny to you, the reader, even as it’s presented in the story in two different contrasting ways. The woman who wears it sees it as an oath, a pledge, a demand. It is a complex thing to say, it is long, it makes you focus on her and it is a name composed of three great and immense feelings told through ancient, ancient art. From Wake’s perspective, the Aotearea national anthem, Henry the Vth and Marshall Mathers are all, roughly, about the same age as one another. She is ten thousand years removed from that, and even if we assume there’s some kinds of cultural-preserving wait time in all that — vast ships moving silently through space in cryogenic slumber, for example — there’s still some remarkable cultural fluency required to appreciate a name like that.

It makes sense, of course. Everyone you know named David is probably part of a communal space that values, collectively, the character of King David, from the Bible. There may be other Davids named based on other Davids named based on etcetera and so on, but fundamentally, David is a name that we trace back to a common mythic narrative, and that narrative is foundational, classical literature to our shared culture. Consider that when people refer to something big as ‘a goliath’ – that’s a reference to the story of David.

The components of Wake’s name are references of an even greater vintage. It is truly ludicrously deep aged names, and we know the preservation of art and language are not automatic. Within the lifespan of America, there are phrases and ideas within heavily documented texts like The Book of Mormon that have changed in their meaning and in so doing changed the understanding of those books to the modern audience, even the heavily invested modern audience. That’s one language and two centuries and Wake’s name includes a translation from an older English to our current English (we presume) and Te Reo, which is a language that probably dates back to 1350 AD, more or less (there’s subtleties with this stuff but I’m trying to be simple here), and her name is reaching across a gap of time five hundred times longer than the Book of Mormon’s gap.

The thing is, all three parts of her name are pieces of art.

The Aotearea National Anthem is not a work of religious media, it’s meant to be a unifying song that helps to cohere a cultural identity. Lose Yourself is not there to tell the story of a unifying social control system in the way of a religious system. Shakespeare’s plays do not exist to structure power (though I am sure we can have a fun conversation about how close they actually are to that). These are all, instead, especially in a world without Aotearea to reference, works of historical art, about cultures that are gone and people who are no more.

You don’t reference art so nobody recognises it.

The Blood of Eden choose these names for a reason. She no doubt has a meaning behind each part of her name that she can explain (well, she can’t now, she’s dead, and really, she’s been dead a while, so she’s double dead). But the point is that the Blood of Eden, for some reason, and we’re not sure on what that means, maintain a relationship to history and art and poetry and loving these things in a way that means that love can be held in the fist and clenched tight. It is fascinating to imagine what she thinks Whoops There Goes Gravity means, to imagine what ten thousand years of the telephone game and values drift does to a people. But also, these are people who have been maintaining a war for five. thousand. years. Five thousand years. Imagine the continuity, imagine the things that let you cohere to an ideology and a principled stance, even if that stance is as simple as ‘maybe the people air-dropping skeleton zombies onto other planets so they can kill the whole planet at a time are bad.’

The Locked Tomb is a world where we’re looking through keyholes. We see signs of art around, and we see that characters do not think it is inherently weird. Well, some of the bums on them are weird. Art is a thing that happens, and people care about it and even in the face of apocalyptic nothingness, even in the maw of the great necromantic empire, the people will make art.

I feel there is a deep, boiling climate anxiety in the pit of The Locked Tomb and I think part of that anxiety can be the concern of: Hey, what good is making art in this time? When there are scientists and billionaires and politicians and people with bombs and people with swords and people doing rather than telling?

And I dunno.

I feel like in these trying times there’s definitely comfort to be held in art. Certainly the idea that art can change minds and soothe souls and steel grips. Will we make art in the apocalypse?

I dunno, I can’t imagine us being human and not doing it.

Oh yeah the other side of the whole thing is that the name is something Jod thinks is cringe, but Jod’s cringe, so fuck him.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[aetiologies]

01:15 / NANAMI KENTO

the typing came in whispers. a wave, a chorus of thumping rhythms of clicking plastic keys. strings of coherent thoughts formed into patterns of text upon a word document. occasionally the sounds would stop. a pause, a lilt in the air as your brain attempted to catch up with itself again.

it was another late night at the office. overhead fluorescent lights dimmed with only the faint glow of your computer screen shining upon your face. the shadows of which made the bags under your eyes to appear heavier.

bodies of salarymen no longer filled the cubicles as the only semblance of life was you and nanami—the only helpful member of your project group—and his awfully bright desk lamp.

you skipped dinner in order to catch the trailing workload your other colleagues failed to carry and you were not sure how much longer your aching stomach could bear the thought of another missed meal.

you scratched at the nape of your neck, eyes flickering to the blond whose visage seemed worse for wear as well.

“where are you going?” he asked through the clamor of your packing.

“getting something to eat.” you explain, “i’m thinking pancakes. care to join?”

“pancakes?” he repeated.

you nod.

“this late?”

“time is a concept and we are victims of capitalism and to those who run it.” you shrugged and by the time you lifted your gaze to meet his, it seemed as if nanami had already met you halfway.

nanami was a competent man. it did not take much struggle for him to complete tasks nor was he easily annoyed. everything came rather easy to him and most days you wondered if he was actually human under that damn khaki suit. you figured he was not much of a happy-go-lucky that would entertain such spontaneity but here you two were, striding down the empty hallways of your office building on your way to get pancakes at one in the morning.

“and where would you get said pancakes this late into the evening?” he questioned, one that should have been a blatant answer, though he wished to be entertained by your thought process.

“the convenient store.”

nanami hums, “figured. though, i believe pancakes are much better homemade.”

“you have any better options?” you asked.

“i have a mix at home.”

“oh…” you trail off, somewhat disappointed. your initial plan was to fetch food by yourself anyway, though nanami caught the way your mood shifted.

you aimed to look away, to evade his curious gaze as the elevator door opened. he sighed, having to spell it out for you, monotonous and indiscreet to hide his red-tipped ears. “i’m asking for you to come over. i’d rather you not walk home alone this late…”

[ernmark]

I just stumbled across somebody saying how editing their own novel was too exhausting, and next time they'll run it through Grammerly instead.

For the love of writing, please do not trust AI to edit your work.

Listen. I get it. I am a writer, and I have worked as a professional editor. Writing is hard and editing is harder. There's a reason I did it for pay. Consequently, I also get that professional editors can be dearly expensive, and things like dyslexia can make it difficult to edit your own stuff.

Algorithms are not the solution to that.

Pay a newbie human editor. Trade favors with a friend. Beg an early birthday present from a sibling. I cannot stress enough how important it is that one of the editors be yourself, and at least one be somebody else.

Yourself, because you know what you intended to put on the page, and what is obviously counter to your intention.

The other person, because they're going to see the things that you can't notice. When you're reading your own writing, it's colored by what you expect to be on the page, and so your brain will frequently fill in missing words or make sense of things that don't actually parse well. They're also more likely to point out things that are outside your scope of knowledge.

Trust me, human editors are absolutely necessary for publishing.

If you convince yourself that you positively must run your work through an algorithm before submitting to an agent/publisher/self-pub site, do yourself and your readers a massive favor: get at least two sets of human eyeballs on your writing after the algorithm has done its work.

Because here's the thing:

AI draws from whatever data sets it's trained on, and those data sets famously aren't curated.

You cannot trust it to know whether that's an actual word or just a really common misspelling.

People break conventions of grammar to create a certain effect in the reader all the time. AI cannot be relied upon to know the difference between James Joyce and a bredlik and an actual coherent sentence, or which one is appropriate at any given part of the book.

AI picks up on patterns in its training data sets and imitates and magnifies those patterns-- especially bigotry, and particularly racism.

AI has also been known to lift entire passages wholesale. Listen to me: Plagiarism will end your career. And here's the awful thing-- if it's plagiarizing a source you aren't familiar with, there's a very good chance you wouldn't even know it's been done. This is another reason for other humans than yourself-- more people means a broader pool of knowledge and experience to draw from.

I know a writer who used this kind of software to help them find spelling mistakes, didn't realize that a setting had been turned on during an update, and had their entire work be turned into word salad-- and only found out when the editor at their publishing house called them on the phone and asked what the hell had happened to their latest book. And when I say 'their entire work', I'm not talking about their novel-- I'm talking about every single draft and document that the software had access to.

[artbyblastweave]

An aesthetic decision I really like about the Mad Max setting- focusing on Fury Road in particular here- is that the timeline and the setting deliberately defy coherence. Countless elements of our world have carried over- the guns, the vehicles, the musical instruments, the religious concepts, and nominally some of the actual people- but the world is geographically impossible, you don't see much contemporary architecture even in a ruined state, and there's no version of the timeline where this can be the same Max Rockatansky as the original films. But it is. The incongruities are deliberate. The setting is mythic, these are campfire tales told about Max, the King Arthur or the Omnipresent Jack figure of the new age. The world that was is swallowed in myth, the world that exists is borrowing some of the old world toys, and being up-front and bombastic with signifiers of the mythic and abstracted nature of the setting absolves you of the need to make the worldbuilding make sense- or rather, to make it make sense in the way you'd have to take a stab at if you had a year-by-year internal worldbuilding timeline of How Everything Went Down.

Fallout 1 is not exactly like this. It can't be, because you could kill a man with an overhead swing of the setting bible. But it's tapping into a similar impulse. People in the first game are using old world tech, but they don't really live in the old world; they live in settlements using materials scavenged from the old world, or in old world towns that were unimportant enough back then that their current identity totally overwrites whatever came before. They don't live in LA: They live in the Boneyard, which gives you a pretty good idea of how much of what we think of as "LA" would be recognizable as such if we were exploring the space in first-person perspective. When you encounter an area that has a direct, well-documented, and unambiguous connection to the old world, it's a Big Deal, and they're hard places to get to- places that the average person living their life in the wastes would die trying to access. Of particular note in this dynamic is The Brotherhood of Steel- for all their technical understanding of the knowledge they hoard, they've clearly seems to have undergone a few rounds of Canticle-style cultural telephone, mutating from Recognizably The American Military into a knightly order. Fallout 2 does this to a lesser extent- it has more settlements directly named after their pre-war counterparts- but it's also a game about a society that's starting to pull back together and form into something resembling the old world, for better or for worse. And it reproduces the trend of stuff with a direct, legible connection to the old world being inscrutable and dangerous to outsiders- specifically with the reveal that the Enclave consider themselves to be the direct continuation of the pre-war government, that they've just kept electing presidents out on that stupid little oil rig. I haven't really made up my mind on whether the timeframes of the games- 84 years followed by 164 years- actually work for the vibe they're going for, in particular it doesn't work with Arroyo- but on the whole, the vibe coheres.

You get into the 3d games, and it becomes much harder to continue to pull this off. One major tool that Fallouts 1 and 2 used to maintain that sense of abstraction was the overland travel map; you were visiting island of society in a vast sea of Nothing. You had encounter cells that consisted of burnt-out, looted shells of cities, maybe good for a camp site but not as anything else. Another important tool towards this end was the isometric camera angle. In a topdown worldspace you can scrub out a lot of environmental details that would be immediately recognizable to the player as artifacts of our present society if you were exploring the space in 1st person. The examine button can feed you vague, uncertain descriptions that convey enough detail to make the item recognizable while also conveying that there's been a level of information decay. Once you move into a 3d worldspace you lose both of these elements- the worldspace is what it is, I can walk across it in eleven minutes stripping it for loot as I go. I can read every sign on every still-standing building, and I've got eyeballs on every old-world bit-and-bobble with a handy interface description of what I'm looking at. And you hit random encounters in the 3d games at basically the same rate, in real-world time, that you did in the isometrics- but the isometrics could successfully abstract it out to represent that you were hitting something noteworthy every couple of weeks, while in the 3d games it's kinda inescapable that you keep getting jumped every single day walking back and forth up the same stretch of road. Not only is it recognizable, it's cramped.

I think that Fallout 3, to its credit, did a decent job of navigating this and trying to maintain the islands-in-a-sea-of-nothing vibe from the isometrics- most of the settlements are built slapdash in places that were obviously never intended for long-term human habitation (bomb craters, overpasses, suburbs), the landmark-heavy city proper is textually a difficult-to-navigate deathtrap, and the poison-sky green filter, memeworthy as it is, does help shore up the impression that you're inviting death by trying to move through the space. Fallout: New Vegas I think addresses this by going in the total opposite direction; It's set in an area of the country where the infrastructure was abnormally well preserved, and the pre-war culture was revived artificially, and from a thematic standpoint it's really interested in digging into the implications of those two things. The fact that the lonely-empty-decontextualized-void aesthetic isn't long for this world dovetails well with the cowboy themes. They have a fair number of future-imperfect context-collapse gags but they don't overdo it by any stretch of the imagination.

Fallout 4, from many directions, is sort of catching the worst of the heat here. The world is recognizable, aggressively so. In fairly-authentically recreating the suburban sprawl of the Northeast, Bethesda simply surrounded the inhabitants of the commonwealth with too much Boston for a sense of true distance from our world to be possible. Everyone still has the accents. They still know the names of all the old neighborhoods. They're still doing the "Park your car" bit. It's still Boston. And it's a busy Boston, too- you can't throw a rock without hitting a farming settlement that's doing well enough to attract tribute-seeking bandits. It's densely packed with points of interest, and those points of interest are packed to the brim with salvageable materials that, going off of the new crafting system, should be in enormous demand to the people who've been living in this area for 210 years. The game doesn't really advance a satisfying explanation, even an aesthetic explanation like fallout 3's poison sky, for why everything around you hasn't been stripped clean before you even came off the ice, why all these environmental storytelling tableaus are just waiting for you to find. It doesn't spend nearly enough time hammering out what the 200-year chronology of the most-livable area seen in a Fallout game looks like- Why don't you see something comparable to the NCR emerging? Something something CPG massacre (which is mentioned twice in the whole game, AFAICT.) And what's being lost here, right, is the ability to use the sands of time to smooth over rough spots in the worldbuilding, in the chronology. You can't hide behind the idea that the world you're experiencing is mythologized. It's presented as real, and it doesn't make much sense if it's real!

And to top it off- Fallout 4 probably has the highest density of characters who were actually there, by some means or another. The Vault Tec rep, Daisy, The Triggermen, Nick Valentine, Eddie Winter, the vault 118 inhabitants, Arlen Glass, Oswald, Kent Connolly, The whole of Cabot House, Captain Zao, The kid in the goddamn fridge and his goddamn parents, and uh. The big one. You. You, the player. Which is such a goddamn splinter under my skin, from a storytelling perspective. You were present in the before-times- but only nominally, only to the exact degree necessary to establish that that was the case. The ugly shit is alluded to, but not incorporated into the character's day-to-day in a way that's obvious to the player, you're there for like six minutes and it's pretty nifty if you overlook that bit at the end where everyone got nuked. Your ability to talk about the world before is always vague, vacuous, superficial. The dirty laundry you dig up on terminals around Boston never seems to meaningfully impact your character's worldview, their impressions of the then and the now. All of which combine to make this the simultaneously the most specific but also the most frustratingly vague game in the series. At its best, Fallout's love of juxtaposing the then and the now would make it a great setting for the Rip Van Winkle routine. But it requires a strong, strong understanding of what the world was like before and after, a willingness to use the protagonist to constantly grind the jagged edges of those things against each other, a protagonist with a better-defined outlook than Bethesda's open-ended-past approach allowed for- and it has to be in service of a greater point. And for Fallout 4 to do anything with any of that, the game would have to be about something instead of being something for you to do. Maddening. Maddening.

[joupiter]

━━━━SERIOUS PAPER

. higuruma hiromi x gn! reader (familial)

*⁠･⁠゜ﾟa rip-off of that one gilmore girls scene in which your father takes you out for stationery shopping !

cw: mention of lsd

word count: 386

Higuruma's face suits his disposition, and that is of a peculiar, stressed workaholic. Every line in his face, the heavy bags under his eyes, and even the occasional strand of silver in his hair (as much he hates to admit its existence) is a testament to the late nights spent poring over legal documents with words that seem to blur into each other, yet form perfectly coherent statements in his mind. However, the role of an adoptive single father (or, rather, benefactor) to a bubbly teenager is another Hell in itself.

Nothing has quite deepened his frown more than the sight that presents itself before him: you, in an attempt to help, holding out a pad of paper, which was an item you had seen on his list.

"That's purple," he states, his eyes roving over the sheets.

"And the sky is blue," you retort, outstretching your paper-bearing hand even further.

His countenance morphs into a familiar expression: the admonishing, exasperated one you seem to draw out of him on a daily basis. "Why is it purple?"

"Why is it purple?" you parrot, your head tilting in what he assumes is feigned ignorance. "I don't know, maybe they dye it before selling it or something."

"No, I mean-" he sighs, his index finger and thumb drawing together to pinch the bridge of his nose as he heaves out a heavy sigh. "I have a serious job. I need serious paper."

You blink, further perpetuating the ignorant act. "Purple's on sale."

"Serious paper," your father echoes.

Mimicking his signature sigh, you place the pad of paper back on the shelf with a soft thud. "Okay, duly noted. Serious paper."

Perusing the shelves, your hand reaches for other items you had mentally noted. "Your grim pens, sire, and your refined sticky notes, and your morose folders, your stoic paper-clips, your distinguished staples, and, ah!"

Skidding to a halt, you snatch a pack of highlighters and hold it up in front of his bewildered visage. "Your sombre highlighters. See, they may seem vibrant and jovial, but those are actually the effects of the LSD they took after losing custody of their six children after a very solemn court trial--really gives you clarity as to why they aren't allowed to co-parent. Definitely puts the 'high' in 'highlighter,' don't you think?"

[copperbadge]

I am now home, fed, rested, and festooned in cats. 

I had a lot of opinions about the case I was jury on, but I don’t know how much of it I’ll write up; I kept a kind of disjointed journal, but it’s not super coherent. Turns out if I don’t document my thoughts in real time I get bored of my own mind very quickly. 

We were jury for a complicated medical civil case; we heard testimony from six doctors and two nurses and saw so much imaging. I’m sure the plaintiff suing the medical center had bigger concerns, and it’s not like you get detail with the internal imaging we had to examine, but it must have been rough on him that in the course of learning about his injuries, which were on his lower body, we also had to look at multiple images of his dick. It certainly startled me when I realized what we were seeing for the first time.  

Most of the trial I was kind of okay with just keeping things to myself, writing and thinking about it privately, but I was dying inside that I couldn’t talk to you guys until now about the asshole juror I mentioned earlier. I had intended to use writing about him as a safety valve -- a sort of “Hey I can’t talk about the trial but wait till you hear what That Guy did today�� -- but uh. 

So I didn’t actually bully anyone off a jury, but for the rest of my life I am definitely going to claim I did. 

The second day of trial, the bailiff grabbed me before trial and said the judge wanted to talk to me; I thought I was in trouble but it turns out that he wanted to know about my interactions with the other juror. Apparently the bailiff had seen me step in when he was pestering a fellow (female) juror the previous day. Later he got super aggressive with the bailiff herself, and I guess she saw me watching and gauging whether to step in then, too. (I didn’t end up getting involved because she handled him just fine and also she has a gun.) 

The judge questioned me about what I’d seen and done and why I’d done it, and then informed me he was removing the juror from the case based on what I’d told him about the man’s behavior. I’m given to understand there may be a charge of contempt of court and a fine, but I’m not clear on the details and it appears I won’t have to get involved further.

But yeah, that’s why you didn’t hear any more about him. Realistically he was removed for harassment, but I like to think a small part of it is that I fucked with him so visibly and thoroughly that they knew “this jury box isn’t big enough for the both of us.” 

Anyway, I’m glad it’s over. I would have liked to have spoken to the plaintiff and his wife after the verdict and expressed my sympathy for what they’d gone through, but I think perhaps understandably they didn’t want to linger. Besides, we found in his favor; he seemed pleased with the outcome and his wife was happy-crying as we left, so I expect the message was understood. 

My job is not exactly mindless, but it also doesn’t usually involve paying hardcore attention to complex medical testimony for six hours a day. I am exhausted. Fortunately this weekend is relatively laid back -- my only commitment is to a Pride beach party tomorrow, and I’ve used some of my jury pay to purchase one of those pop-up shade tents, so the plan is to sit in the shade with snacks and beverages and be the Beach Dad. 

[aliceisaperson]

hey what is going on in the starkid fandom? who’s lily and vez. what’s the jane’s a care situation. What is happening.

Ok I’ll try to keep this short because again I AM TIRED.

Vez/Jay is a somewhat infamous member of the Starkid fandom. Last year Vez made claims calling Lily/Ash, another member of the Starkid fandom a pedophile over doing suggestive character roleplay with them when they were 17 and Lily was 18-19. Lily making some kind of dirty jokes with them was also part of the claims of pedophilia, Lily left the Starkid fandom after these accusations.

Recently an account was made calling out Vez for the situation last year as well as documenting new claims, most notably that on their discord server Vez did a read through of Jane’s a Car with the other members of the server and allowed two minors to play Jane and Tom, who have a sex scene in that episode. This scene was not cut and Vez records all the read throughs and uploads them unlisted on YouTube I believe for other members of the server to see them. People were reasonably grossed out that not only did Vez allow two minors to act something like that out in front of several people, but also kept a recording of it and allowed people to view it (the ages of the people on the sever range from 13-late twenties, which I think is notable in this situation considering the wide age of people allowed to view what happened.

The other day Vez came forward with information that Lily tried to coheres a 15 year old into NSFW role play when they were 18. This roleplay never actually happened from what I can tell and the interaction in the screenshots just boiled down to Lily saying that they could engage in “erotic roleplay” if they wanted to, which seemingly they did not. Vez is claiming this is what the call out of Lily has always been about (it wasn’t we’re only finding out about this now). Vez has also bragged about finding personal information on the person who played Tom in the Jane’s a Car readthrough’s family.

I think that’s all the info. I definitely did not keep this short sorry

[halucygeno]

[I RETRACT THIS OPINION. WHILE I STILL BELIEVE SOME OF MY POINTS, THE CORE ARGUMENT WAS BASED ON A MISUNDERSTANDING. I HAVE SINCE SEEN MUCH BETTER INTERPRETATIONS OF THE FINAL 2 EPISODES WHICH EXPLAIN ALL THE CONFUSING DETAILS QUITE COHERENTLY. SORRY FOR MY HASTY JUDGEMENT.]

Ok, so, I've been seeing discussions about what the return of Rafał means in terms of the story taking place in multiple worlds or parallel timelines or whatever. If that's true, if that's what was actually intended, then I have to say that, personally, I hate it.

The biggest piece of evidence in support of this idea is, obviously, Rafał not being dead, but also the change of setting from "Kingdom P." to "Poland" and the protagonist, Albert Brudzewski, being the first real-life historical figure to be depicted in the show.

Evidence to the contrary is the fact that several very specific details and events from the "first universe/timeline" are still present: Rafał's backstory of being an orphan adopted by a priest, Lev's (he's the priest in the confessional - same voice actor, same locks of hair at the front of his tonsure) regrets over allowing Simon to be killed, and the letter delivered to Potocki's residence, which is clearly implied to be the one Draka sent in her dying moments.

This confusion has led some to speculate that the events presented in eps. 1-23 are a "fictional", fantastical story that "could have happened", while eps. 24-25 are supposed to be "real" historical fiction because of the real-life Albert Brudzewski taking center stage and eventually inspiring Copernicus.

I hate this, because it's just dumb.

Firstly, it is a wild change of tone and narrative structure that is not justified or explained by anything in the story itself. E.g. we don't zoom out and reveal that eps. 1-23 were all a fiction made up by Oczy for his book, or had Draka wake up and realize it was all a dream, etc. Im not saying it needs to be either of those, but you know: any kind of framing device to indicate that we've shifted narrative levels would be nice. Something as simple as the narration saying "everything you've seen so far is a story, what you're about to see is history" would do.

Secondly, the distinction people are drawing between the "fictional" story and the "real" story makes no sense. Both stories are equally fictional! Rafał is not a real person! Uoto did not uncover some hitherto unseen documents about Brudzewski's childhood, about how he had a tutor that killed his father. Albert's backstory is completely made up. So how exactly is this a switch from "fiction" to "real history"? It's still fiction!

Thirdly, the thematic framing of the story still treats all the previous characters as if they were real. We have all these shots with parallels between Rafał, Oczy, Draka and Albert, (and the necklace ending up in Albert's hand in the OP) highlighting their common philosophy and how the idea of heliocentrism was passed on between them:

Now wouldn't this be really weird — making this montage of the main characters, lined up in chronological order — if those first three... didn't even exist, right? (In the world of the story, I mean. Of course, in real life, only Albert existed.)

Honestly, this huge kerfuffle over Rafał being back and changing "Kingdom P." to "Poland" strikes me as pretentious obscurantism. The story was a bit too simple and straight-forward, so Uoto had to complicate it with this bizarre move and blindside us with the shocking reveal of Rafał. You know, give fans something to speculate about (while detracting focus from the actual story).

I guess the most defensible interpretation of this is that we're being asked to question "how much of the story was real". By mixing details that are obviously incompatible with the narrative of eps. 1-23 (Rafał being alive) and ones that match that narrative (Rafał's backstory, Lev's confession, Jolenta's letter), we're being directly told that the story has an unreliable narrator, and that these are only things that "may have happened".

To which I say... uh, no shit! It's "historical fiction", that comes with the genre! Of course these super dramatic events with satisfying character arcs, dramatic irony, set ups and pay-offs, aren't real. It's a bloody story! Did that really need to be emphasized and reiterated?

Also, it's a hell of a move to imply that the narrator (or in this case, the cameraman), who is omniscient and transcends time and space, following multiple protagonists and antagonists, is "unreliable". What causes this unreliability — a dream? A hallucination? The narrator's personal biases affecting their perception? No — at this point, it's just the writer deliberately choosing to be inconsistent.

Honestly, I think Orb would have been significantly better if it never tied itself to real life history. The story could exist neatly as this little "what if" scenario, where heliocentrism was popularized by Oczy's book rather than Copernicus. All its themes about the pursuit of truth and how this mission is passed down from person to person would still be true and poignant, but it wouldn't have the baggage of trying to slot its clearly fictional story into a real-life context that doesn't accommodate it.

If anything, I think this confusion about "what's real" at the end might be Uoto's cowardly way of washing their hands of any historical inaccuracies they might have included. They can write about Albert Brudzewski and 15th century Poland, and if someone notices an eggregious error, they can just throw their hands up and say "well, look, I contradict myself! Who knows what parts of the story are real"? So they can use the aesthetic of historicity while not having to respect actual history. Clever.

I'll be frank - I find this ending disappointing and lame. No offence to anyone who liked it, but to me, it feels like a half-baked afterthought. "Oh, yeah, I still need to tie this into real life history somehow - uh, ok, Brudzewski overheard someone reading Jolenta's letter and it inspired him. Done!"

(To be honest, it's kind of fitting, given how often the show's plot is advanced by extremely contrived coincidences. Having Brudzewski randomly overhear one of his most famous ideas is completely on-brand for Orb)