#THAT is effective world-building

[falling-star-cygnus]

SOMEONE TEACH THESE GIRLS TO SWIM, OH MY STARS 😭

it is a super cool little detail to add though, considering the Outer Ring is designed to be barren and dusty like a desert- and, presumably doesn't have very many natural water bodies. At least, not enough that these two can indulge or bother to learn

also- with the drop of the Outer Ring, the western motifs that Billy wears [the sheriff star, the spurs on his guns, the horseshoes on his soles, etc. etc.] is a fantastic homage to his background with the Sons -> His look has been modernized to fit New Eridu but the Outer Ring is still a part of him

say what you will about ZZZ and hoyoverse, but those motherfuckers know how to world-build now if only they could learn what melanin is...

[zeb-z]

demon girl tina who shaves her horns down, who tries to be everything a demon isn’t. never angry, never pressed, sweet and easygoing. perfect in every sense of the term. who’s traumatized from purgatory, who’s afraid of losing what she loves as much as she’s afraid of being shunned by who she loves for what she is. for all the imperfections that fracture her perfect image. who craves trust, a place to belong, the secret of who she is just bubbling under the surface, shaved down and hidden just underneath the cat ears she wears.

human girl bagi who embraces imperfection, who loves with loyalty and longevity. who would go to the ends of the earth for her loved ones, knowing their worst sins, their terrible crimes, and going I will love you anyway. I will be there for you anyway. who’s best friend is a demon, who she knows is a demon, who she met at his worst, and wouldn’t let him go through it alone. who understands the importance of secrets, which means she knows the value of honesty, and is ready to lay out all her truths once she cares about someone enough, trusts them enough.

tina getting flighty and nervous when she’s told that it’s love what bagi feels - not because she doesn’t feel the same, but because she does, and it’s all she’s ever wanted, and isn’t that just terrifying? because she doesn’t think she fully deserves it. not yet at least! and she doesn’t want to lose it. imperfect, clumsy, secretly a demon tina, still processing purgatory and everything that came before, so afraid because she believes she can’t measure up. once she’s worked on herself, once she’s perfect, she says. once she stops panicking at purgatory flashbacks, once she stops losing her temper, once she can provide stability, once she’s shaved her horns and they stop growing back - then she’ll be ready. as soon as she’s made herself into something easily lovable.

bagi listens to tina as she spills some of this to her, under the moonlight along the beach. not quite all her worries, but some, just like she had given not quite her whole heart, but a part of it, in that room that represents bagi’s mind. and bagi doesn’t press for more than what she’ll give, because she cherishes what has been given already, because she’s in no rush and has no where else to go, because above all else, she’s in love and willing to wait. and in the meantime, she’ll reassure tina that she doesn’t want perfection - she just wants tina the way she is.

[montaguethelorekeeper]

Sometimes I think about various mainstream fictional alien species and wonder about what humans are like from their perspective.

Take the majority of Star Trek aliens. Do to costuming and budget restraints, most alien designs are just human actors (occasionally dogs) with some extra stuff glued on.

Are humans oddly featureless to most aliens? Do human ears seem strangely clipped? Faces too small? Features too smooth? Uncannily skull-like? Lacking in built up and bulked out prostheses used to pad out the actor’s features to make room for alien design, are human faces considered gaunt and hollow by the intergalactic community in universe?

I just wonder if there’s some poor Klingon out there with a conspiracy board after watching a few too many human make up tutorial videos and realizing how much of the universe humanity could replace without anyone noticing.

[bleaksqueak]

Did you know that Procreate doesn't have a lot of the standard filter/effects tools that Photoshop and Clip Studio have? For the most part I'm A-OK fine living without those, but the one that boggles my mind is that Procreate doesn't have a stroke feature. I bring this up because I use stroke a lot for subtle things, and I use it a lot for graphic things (like comic binding boxes, lettering, etc.)... and, for the current illustration, I used it for almost the entire background. So do you want to know the stupid way to simulate the stroke effect in Procreate? SURE YOU DO. You have to duplicate the item, or lines, you want to have a stroke effect on... You then move it below your object/lines, gausian blur the duplicate beneath to 2 - 3%, then keep duplicating that blurred copy and merging it with itself until the extra selection of pixels created by the blur are, once more, solid. It's a lot of duplicating and merging. PROCREATE, PLEASE, THIS IS YOUR ONLY TRUE FLAW. Please add a stroke tool my family is starving.

[cluescorner]

Arlecchino's whole deal is unbelievable

Arlecchino: Huh I wonder what's causing my weird powers? I can't really worry about that right now tho, I've gotta become King and then kill my "Mother".

*Kills Clervie and "Mother"*

Arlecchino: Huh I wonder why I was able to defeat a Fatui Harbinger when I'm like 17 or so? I can't really worry about that right now tho, I've gotta be in jail and become a Harbinger.

*Is in jail for a while and becomes a Harbinger*

Arlecchino: Huh I wonder why I am-

Pierro: Hey what's up hello, anyways you're descended from the Crimson Moon Dynasty of Khaenri'ah. I'm sure that this is a lot for you to take in so-

Arlecchino: Ok.

Pierro: ...You're just cool with that?

Arlecchino: IDK maybe? I can't really worry about that at the moment, I'm a father now. This orphanage full of children I love (who also are child soldiers and are not allowed to leave or else I'll execute them except maybe now I'm just gonna wipe their memories IDK I'm morally complex) isn't gonna run itself.

*Runs the orphanage/spy recruitment initiative*

Me, the fucking player: WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU ARE KHAENRI'AN? WHY WASN'T THIS BROUGHT UP IN YOUR FUCKING QUEST?? OR ANYTHING ELSE????

Arlecchino, talking to me through my phone: I honestly don't know why you care, I'm too busy to give a shit. Anyways, I'm gonna go fight fate itself I guess. I'm sure that I don't share any thematic parallels with any other Khaenri'an characters (particularly as it relates to acting and family angst) and that I haven't made the idea of 'curses' on Khaenri'ans and what they entail even more complicated than they already were. See ya.

[spacetrashpile]

something is giving me visions tonight. i think they should just start writing the whole “who’s rip’s mom” plot line as a shameless rip off of the plot of mamma mia

[vaguely-concerned]

one of the things mourn watch rook has the most comments about/seems pretty knowledgeable about when they're there is the way the necropolis will just shuffle rooms around every now and then on a whim, so I'm headcanoning that rye's previous area of expertise, outside of general watcher duties, was keeping track of and rediscovering these lost or displaced areas. that, and basically acting as a sort of tour guide when need be, such as on the day they met varric.

'have we really misplaced the ashen cathedral again? *sigh* that's the third time this year, we really must strengthen the wards. oh well. someone send for ingellvar, they'll track it down in no time I'm sure. and it might keep them out of trouble for a while'

[not-a-newt]

Anyways, here's an excerpt (Mass Effect Initiation) on the way that turian, asari, and krogan crowds move as opposed to humans

[mephestopheles]

Welcome to the brainrot, have we considered Geth naming conventions?

Geth are autonomous small running programs stacked on top of each other in a "mobile platform" that generally becomes more intelligent the more there are. Even post Rannoch and with the upload Reaper code their sense of individuality is going to be very different than humans or other organic species.

Legion was content with being given a name in ME2 but that's because to them* naming the part that speaks is weird, it would be like naming a toe. At least in a Geth, their toe would also be part of the consensus so to speak.

This got long, the rest is under the cut

Post Rannoch, (and leaving aside that the sudden and faulty storytelling of trying to repeat Mordin's sacrifice) we see Legion not only say "I" instead of "We", they sacrifice themselves to complete the upload, spreading their many programs amongst the rest. The other Geth that comes over does note that Legion's sacrifice will be remembered, which suggests that instead of individual programs creating a higher intelligence based on numbers, they're unified in each mobile platform.

Does this mean that the individual smaller programs are now considered individuals, or is it still many smaller programs that inhabit a mobile platform? Only becoming a single being as they evolve together to develop personality quirks and preferences as time goes on?

From a writing standpoint, it was definitely easier for them to basically hand wave the "there they're intelligent now and understand the difference between I and we. But the hand wave doesn't work for me. If they're essentially software and can go anywhere, do they "die" when they leave their platform to rejoin a hub?

If that was the case before the upload, what happens now? Are they locked into specific platforms now and can't bounce from one to another? Does that frighten them because that locks them out from the way they used to understand and know each other? If they're not locked out from rejoining hubs or becoming part of a ship or space station, do they retain who they are when they return to their mobile platform?

Legion's sacrifice suggests they can't, but given that's to complete the upgrades, it stands to reason the Geth would either find a way to maintain cohesion while changing spaces, or would remain in one platform.

Now granted this is a very limited viewpoint. It assumes that the Geth's response to individuality would align with other organic responses to it, and with a sense of "self" would begin to understand self preservation.

They understand preservation of their species as a whole, as we see with them willing to forgo freedom and autonomy for base survival. But individual freedom and individual self preservation is going to be very new, they might even as a species refuse to participate in that kind of individualism even if they have to work harder to maintain the community they are used to.

All of this so I figure out naming conventions among Geth.

I can't see them suddenly developing names as organic species understand them, although they might start using a similar convention as the Quarians use. They might also prefer numbers or codes. Shepard was inside the consensus for a while, it's unclear how long, but when I species measures in nanoseconds even a few minutes would be a lifetime. Would that impact any human-like characteristics upon the Geth? Do we think that Shepard has that much influence even as he's removing the virus from the Geth?

I think Legion believes so. I think that Legion has felt and responded to Shepard's influence even when they were speaking across a gulf of disparate understanding. Shepard's willingness to give Legion a chance, willingness to help Legion, and treat them as an equal in the latter half of ME2 and when you meet him again in Me3 make me believe they fully believe that Shepard is enough to change things.

So a new Geth, someone joining the Alliance to help but doesn't have a name, or designation that humans would understand. Would they accept a name given by a human, or an Asari? I'm not even sure the Asari would try to impose a name on a Geth.

I know humans will. We can't help it. We fucking named a roomba Stabby. We name snow plows. I know humans on some level are nervous of artificial intelligence, but let's face it, the Geth arrive to give us a hand, we will adopt them, even if they don't understand why.

So, that leaves me with a couple of possibilities, the Geth that stick around Rannoch and decide to help the Quarians rebuild will likely take their naming conventions after the Quarians at first before developing their own names over time. The Geth that interact with humans more are probably going to develop human naming patterns, if not outright named by humans to the point that maybe some Geth develop a culture that your name is bestowed by your favourite human.

Maybe that is a piece of code that's left over from Legion, a small program replicated many times that is within all of the Geth, but cultivated in those that stick around humans, that being named by a friend becomes a coming of age so to speak.

*they being used as the collective noun, and not the singular personal pronoun. I'm not even getting into Geth genders or if they even have a concept of gender. They're just figuring out person hood, nevermind gender roles.

[queenofthursday6599-blog]

So we all agree that H2O and Mako Mermaids are different timelines right?

Like yes we see Rikki in Mako Mermaids, but that's definitely not Rikki from the same timeline as H2O.

She's not wearing red, she's selling the artifacts she's using her mermaid abilities to find and retrieve to random privet collectors instead of trying to get them back to the rightful country/cultures.

Even though back in H2O we had a whole episode about why Rikki shouldn't just sell anything she uses her mermaid gifts to take out the ocean to complete randos for personal gain.

Like baby girl this is how you ended up accidentally selling endangered/protected animals to the black market. Let's not repeat your mistakes with historical artifacts, by way of selling it to random privet collectors instead of repatriating them to the people they rightfully belong to.

Let's not be the British Museum.

This doesn't even get into the fact that Rikki in Mako Mermaids only mentions that she was with two friends when she was turned into a mermaid. And when asked about where they are now, she just says that they all grew up and got different interests.

She only mentions two girls, and she doesn't mention them by name even.

Even though H2O Rikki was also good friends with Bella by the end of that series, and her not mentioning her two friends by name leaves the door open for the other two girls in her old group to not be Emma and Cleo.

Which I honestly think there's a pretty good chance it wasn't Emma and Cleo who MM's Rikki became mermaids with.

MM's Rikki says she became a mermaid after ending up in the moon pool with her two friends.

But H2O's Rikki wasn't friends with Cleo and Emma when they became mermaids. If you go back to watch the first episode of H2O, I'm pretty sure Cleo explicitly states that while she's seen Rikki around school before, she's only even talked to her a couple of times.

For H2O's Rikki her becoming a mermaid alongside Cleo and Emma was the bedrock of that friendship.

Sure they might have still ended up as friends if they'd stayed on Mako's beach until the water police came to pick them up and never went to the moon pool.

It's just as likely that without the secret to bind them together they wouldn't have. I mean, Rikki 100% stole a boat and got them stranded on an island who's waters is a shark breeding ground.

I definitely think Emma at the very least wouldn't have been interested in being Rikki's friend if it weren't for being turned into mermaids togehter and having to share that secret.

Not in the immediate aftermath of their being stranded on Mako island together, due to Rikki being reckless, anyways.

Now if Cleo wanted to stay friends with Rikki after that, because Rikki did save her from when Zane tried to strand her on the boat and have her drift out to see alone, even if Rikki also ended up getting her stranded on Mako island for a few hours.

I could then see Emma eventually ending up as friendly acquaintances with Rikki due to their mutual friendship with Cleo.

Not immediately, but at some point, and they'd definitely wouldn't have been anywhere near as close of friends as they were in H2O's timeline.

Then there's the fact that MM Rikki doesn't have either of her friendship necklaces. Either her locket from the 50s girls that she shared with Emma and Cleo, or the moon pool crystal necklace that she shared with Cleo and Bella.

And while that could imply that she simply doesn't choose to wear either one anymore due to drifting apart from them. I could also pretty easily see it being that due to it being a different group of mermaids from H2O, they never ended up with either set of necklaces.

I mean, they meet Mrs. Chadwick because the woman randomly spotted Cleo while she was taking a trip to the marine park, and the woman noticed that Cleo was a mermaid.

Without Cleo in the group, Mrs. Chadwick might have never made contact with MM Rikki's group, and thus even if one of them did find Gracie's locket at the bottom of the moonpool it would have just been a random locket.

I don't know if they even would have thought it belonged to someone in a similar situation to themselves. Or if it was brought into the moonpool by like sea currents, or a bird flying over the moonpool dropping it. Or something like that.

While the moon pool crystal necklaces are only introduced after Bella gets one first, and it seems like MM Rikki might have never met Bella.

All of this, and MM Rikki never talks about how she and two of her friends saved the world because apparently the Mako mermaid pod that has supposedly lived there for hundreds of years at least, were slacking off and not paying attention to the impending doom of it all.

And when we see MM Rikki in the moon pool with the Mako Mermaid group, she mentions that it hasn't changed at all since the last time she was there, even though the moonpool looks completely different in the two shows.

In H2O it looks way more natural and cave-like, while in Mako Mermaids the edge of the moon pool is like tiled, or has large stone blocks squaring the edge of it off at least. It looks man (mer) made, or at least has had construction done to it.

The moonpool in H2O definitely feels more wild-magic-y I guess you could say.

Magic collects and moves through there by way of natural means and processes, and will do so without the interference, presence, or guidance of any kind of sentient being. It is in itself alive and sentient to some degree.

It directs Rikki, Cleo, and Bella on how to deflect the comet and save the world, or at the very least the surrounding area, from the potential impact.

Mako Mermaid's moon pool feels far more colonized I guess. Lived in by beings that change nature in order to make themselves more comfortable is what I mean.

I mean the mermaids are shooing away fish from around the island, they're gate keeping the moon pool to keep humans away, they've altered the moon pool from it's natural lava tube/sea cave structure into something more people friendly, they use the moon pool's magic for their own ends.

They're also just completely willing to potentially destroy the moon pool due to their own personal fears of mermen, which is said to also kill any mermaid that is tied to that moonpool, but that's a whole other thing.

Not to mention the fact that the H2O moon pool is severely damaged by that illegal mining operation in H2O season 3. And it's the whole reason why Cleo and Rikki have to help Bella make the tower of light instead of Bella doing it on her own with the help of the moon pool.

While it's again, completely fine magically, and in fact looks like it was altered for people's comfort in Mako Mermaids, even though it's only a time gap of 6 years because Rikki is 24 years old when she meets the Mako Mermaids.

So there's just no way that H2O's season 3 and Mako Mermaids exist in the same timeline at the very least.

There would have been mention of the potential end of the world, or at the very least how the Mako Mermaids had to repair the moon pool, or Rikki noticing that he moon pool was repaired after what Will's sister did.

But none of that happens, so the only explanation is alternate timeline, and I'm not afraid to argue that to the bitter end.

[helioptilie]

wait Furiosa was really good actually, why did it flop?

[border-collie]

One of the ways I've found to be kinder to myself is reminding myself I'm an animal and functionally I behave like one. It's easy to get caught up on things you did in the past, but you don't judge a wolf for killing a fawn, so it's just as not fair to judge yourself for shit you did when you were a kid. Yeah you did stupid shit as a teen, that's what teens do.

[gemstarstarlight]

So I just watched the first Dune movie finally and I fear I’m going to make it everyone’s problem

[icep1ckkk]

world trade center 1992

[iirulancorrino]

Movies that attempt something different, that recognize that less can indeed be more, are thus easily taken to task. “It’s so subjective!” and “It omits a crucial P.O.V.!” are assumed to be substantive criticisms rather than essentially value-neutral statements. We are sometimes told, in matters of art and storytelling, that depiction is not endorsement; we are not reminded nearly as often that omission is not erasure. But because viewers of course cannot be trusted to know any history or muster any empathy on their own — and if anything unites those who criticize “Oppenheimer” on representational grounds, it’s their reflexive assumption of the audience’s stupidity — anything that isn’t explicitly shown onscreen is denigrated as a dodge or an oversight, rather than a carefully considered decision. A film like “Oppenheimer” offers a welcome challenge to these assumptions. Like nearly all Nolan’s movies, from “Memento” to “Dunkirk,” it’s a crafty exercise in radical subjectivity and narrative misdirection, in which the most significant subjects — lost memories, lost time, lost loves — often are invisible and all the more powerful for it. We can certainly imagine a version of “Oppenheimer” that tossed in a few startling but desultory minutes of Japanese destruction footage. Such a version might have flirted with kitsch, but it might well have satisfied the representational completists in the audience. It also would have reduced Hiroshima and Nagasaki to a piddling afterthought; Nolan treats them instead as a profound absence, an indictment by silence. That’s true even in one of the movie’s most powerful and contested sequences. Not long after news of Hiroshima’s destruction arrives, Oppenheimer gives a would-be-triumphant speech to a euphoric Los Alamos crowd, only for his words to turn to dust in his mouth. For a moment, Nolan abandons realism altogether — but not, crucially, Oppenheimer’s perspective — to embrace a hallucinatory horror-movie expressionism. A piercing scream erupts in the crowd; a woman’s face crumples and flutters, like a paper mask about to disintegrate. The crowd is there and then suddenly, with much sonic rumbling, image blurring and an obliterating flash of white light, it is not. For “Oppenheimer’s” detractors, this sequence constitutes its most grievous act of erasure: Even in the movie’s one evocation of nuclear disaster, the true victims have been obscured and whitewashed. The absence of Japanese faces and bodies in these visions is indeed striking. It’s also consistent with Nolan’s strict representational parameters, and it produces a tension, even a contradiction, that the movie wants us to recognize and wrestle with. Is Oppenheimer trying (and failing) to imagine the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians murdered by the weapon he devised? Or is he envisioning some hypothetical doomsday scenario still to come? I think the answer is a blur of both, and also something more: In this moment, one of the movie’s most abstract, Nolan advances a longer view of his protagonist’s history and his future. Oppenheimer’s blindness to Japanese victims and survivors foreshadows his own stubborn inability to confront the consequences of his actions in years to come. He will speak out against nuclear weaponry, but he will never apologize for the atomic bombings of Japan — not even when he visits Tokyo and Osaka in 1960 and is questioned by a reporter about his perspective now. “I do not think coming to Japan changed my sense of anguish about my part in this whole piece of history,” he will respond. “Nor has it fully made me regret my responsibility for the technical success of the enterprise.” Talk about compartmentalization. That episode, by the way, doesn’t find its way into “Oppenheimer,” which knows better than to offer itself up as the last word on anything. To the end, Nolan trusts us to seek out and think about history for ourselves. If we elect not to, that’s on us.