#Vector Architects

[arc-hus]

Wulingshan Eye Stone Spring, Chengde, China - Vector Architects

[timelessarchitecture]

VECTOR ARCHITECTS - WULINGSHAN EYE STONE SPRING

[noconcessions]

[fall23iksection]

VECTOR ARCHITECTS, COMMUNITY CENTER, CHONGQUING / CHINA

the relationship of indoor and outdoor architecture spaces is an important aspect in the design. a continuous roof connects three independent buildings - cultural center, athletic center, public health center - in one unified volume and frames two courtyards - a garden, and a green plaza.

_ik

[ichsany]

Logo Design: OS Architectes

https://ichsanypro.blogspot.com/2019/03/os-architectes.html

[formlab]

Seashore Library, Vector Architects

[fabforgottennobility]

VECTOR ARCHITECTS

WULINGSHAN EYE STONE SPRING

PHOTOS BY LIU GUOWEI, TIAN FANGFANG

[brookriver]

some silly robot designs

their silly lore:

Judicator is a Predacon who survived the Cataclysm with amnesia and a damaged T-Cog; he's vaguely aware that he used to have a different altmode, and also feels a bit...out of place among others, but he sets that aside in favor of focusing on his work. Hardly anyone knows his actual name; Judicator is his title.

Vent's just a normal musician, don't worry about it! The fact that he keeps singing songs about things he couldn't possibly know about or events that have yet to occur is just happenstance; he's a very good storyteller, you know.

Leafnode is a walking, talking terminal for Vector Sigma. This drew some unwanted attention from the High Council, who upon discovering her unique traits, quickly squirreled her away for "protection".

Tayef and Ahangar are, respectively, a clerk for the High Council and an architect. Both before and after the war, actually! Ahangar's not super happy that the planet had to get the scrap kicked out of it for him to get as much work as he does now; Tayef's just happy he managed to get his old job back.

[physalian]

Segway Characters (Or when your protagonist knows jack about the story)

This is the protagonist of a sci-fi or fantasy world, generally a nobody who gets dragged in either by circumstance or by being the long-lost-something prophesied to save the realm. They know absolutely nothing about the plot, the other characters, the magic system, or the new world, the audience proxy that asks all the questions on the audience���s behalf.

I call them Segways (read; not segue) because they look dumb and you ride their ass through the narrative.

This is a very, very broad concept for a protagonist, everybody from a superhero origin story to Harry Potter, as opposed to a character like James Bond, an expert in their craft and a *seasoned protagonist*.

Segways usually aren’t a problem… until it becomes rather painfully obvious that they only exist to be the audience proxy to ask those questions, when another character could and should be the protagonist because they’re far more interesting, usually because the protagonist is way less cool and active in the plot than their constituents. Or, they’re a perfectly fine character, but the exposition dumping to them is sloppy and unrefined.

The difference between just a protagonist and a Segway is how smoothly they integrate into that story.

So.

—

Inception

I love this movie. It has inspired so much of my writing.

Ariadne is a poster child of Segway characters. Aside from the villain, Mal, she’s the only woman in the cast, and though Dom (DiCaprio) is the hero, Ariadne is his protege, the audience vector through which all the world mechanics and important backstory stuff is told. Every other character already knows how dream heists work and who Mal is, so explaining redundant information between experts would look weird—enter the Segway, Ariadne.

For what it’s worth, she’s not useless otherwise. She’s the new ‘architect,’ she builds the mazes the rest of the team runs through and is the innocent cinnamon roll dragged into problems that Dom created. Her name could not be a more heavy-handed symbol.

She’s active in the story and her perspective foils against Dom’s well enough, but Inception is a movie with layers and an infamous amount of necessary exposition to understand the story. Someone has to be there to ask all the questions the audience has. Ariadne unfortunately gets the lion’s share, instead of the script figuring out how to weave more of it into the interactions of the other characters. They spent so much time on the complex narrative it’s like they forgot about a layman audience and threw her in too late for a seamless integration.

—

Netflix’s The Old Guard is better than it should be, given its budget. I didn’t read the comic it was based on and have no idea if Nile’s character is the same in the original, but she’s another Segway with only one reason for existing in the plot otherwise: Andy’s got to pass the torch to someone.

Yes she comes to save them in the end and yes, her advantage in the story is being unknown to the villains, but she’s there, in this version of the story, so the other four heroes can info-dump to her about all manner of things from how immortality works to their backstories to the setup for the sequel the movie never got.

I just rewatched it recently and if the script just had two or three passes to tackle the exposition problem, it could have off-loaded some of the burden onto other characters, or better told it through action, and not just info-dumpy monologues. When the movie came out I remember a critic I like commenting that it could have been a more interesting story if it had been told from the sympathetic villain’s perspective (Not Dudley’s). As in, if he was on a mission with all his conspiracy-level research and dedication to track these people down, throwing out his own theories for them to then correct or something.

Like this, the story is just waiting for Nile to ask the right questions. Nothing is volunteered freely without Nile directly asking for it, because it runs into the same problem as Inception: Every other character already knows everything, and they wouldn’t exposit to each other.

—

A lot of isekai anime also do this. I’ve tried getting into older, tentpole shows like Sailor Moon and Bleach and Yu Yu Hakusho and I don’t know what it is about anime pilot episodes, even modern ones but particularly the old ones, the exposition dumping is atrocious. To the point where it feels like they all know it and are like “listen just bear with us and we’ll get this done fast and sloppy and get to the good stuff later”.

I just can’t. I think I made it 15 minutes into Bleach before noping out of there years ago.

—

Obviously all these movies and shows have their fans, but if you’re a writer struggling with exposition or noticed this trend like me, here’s some suggestions to avoid the need to info-dump, assuming you do want to keep your Segway.

Try not to give all the exposition questions to one character, and don’t wait for that character to ask, out-of-character on behalf of the audience, what’s going on in the story. Instead, let it flow more naturally in conversation and let the more experienced characters brainstorm with each other, or let the protagonist uncover some of this information actively on their own through other means, for variety’s sake.

Figure out a reason why these questions are necessary to the story in this moment. Why is the hero asking now, as opposed to any other time? You can also let the hero draw their own conclusions and have the other characters correct their misassumptions, feeding that information in a more natural way.

Give the hero more to do in the story beyond being the exposition vehicle right from the start. I don’t care if they’re the chosen one and the plot just falls into their lap, why are they the chosen one?

Spread out the exposition to come only when it’s necessary. Front-loading it can tarnish the immersion and overwhelm the audience, especially if it’s complex, or if there’s a lot of it. You can pepper it all the way through the story if you want.

If you really want to front-load it, you can go to the extremes and slap in a prologue or meta-narrative dump that’s fun and entertaining from a third person omniscient perspective. First thing that comes to mind is the opening 2D scene from Kung Fu Panda that covers a lot of ground. Go ham.

None of these characters are bad, I just think with a few more rounds of revisions and forethought, they could have been integrated better into their stories.

[assaultmystic]

I’m kinda confused still, how can media reify something that already does concretely exist? Like sure, the stereotypes around family are socially constructed, but being related to people is very real and has been a huge biological driver for like, all of evolution. It feels the same as being asked to question hunger or sleeping. They’ll exist and the biological necessities to do so will exist whether or not media says to

I completely agree with you on the violence fantasies half btw this is about the other part, as sure you can remove the structure of family or question it but that’s not going to deprogram humans away from it. Do you mean the nuclear family or just the concept of humans caring about their kin?

(Also yes some people don’t feel a desire for children or reproduction but that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that if they did have a family, the default IS caring about it. Not under all circumstances, but default)

alright, i think youre asking in good faith, so lets try another tack. when i spoke about reification before i was being imprecise in the service of being clear. so. one way of explaining reification a hair more accurately, is as taking contingent human social relations and transforming them into independent, assumedly already existent, necessary facts about the social world.

the family, however you conceive it (nuclear or otherwise), is one of these contingent social relations. we should be careful about invoking nature, or biology, always. we are social animals and our reality is normative. there are facts about our world that cannot be explained by recourse to biology, physics, what have you (all of which are discourses which have no special or ultimate claim to a primary truth). there is, for instance, no arrangement of atoms, or biological fact that instantiates a familial relation (motherhood, siblinghood, etc). for a trivial case consider adoption. the family is a social construct. we analyse it on these terms. it is no more (or less) real than money. what youre saying is in itself a product of that reification.

when we look at the work that the family does, materially it self perpetuates by way of the exchange of offspring in order to reproduce itself (and so is crucial to the construction and perpetuation of gender (which is to say gendered violence)). it instantiates a set of values “family values” if you want, and punishes deviance from this pattern of behaviour. these values are those that serve, naturally to reproduce the family. the family is also the primary transmission vector for private property (by way of inheritance), and is therefore crucial to maintaining the power of the bourgeoisie (who are the architects of family values) by way of capital. all of this is what is meant when we talk about the family, and none of it is biological.

human beings have been living together in social forms that involve bonds that are weighted in ways far different from this. some of those may be between people we might, for instance, consider parent and child. that does not make those relationships what we refer to when we discuss family.

[absoluteocellibehavior]

The Eye's Great Chain of Being

Welcome to Part 2 of me and my friends have completely shaken up the TMA universe and other podcasts in the process. This system was created by my lovely friend Nightshade who is not on Tumblr but who has given me full permission to post this and answer any questions about it! Here is how she describes it: "The Eye is an entity of roles, of expectations, and that means a hierarchy. You have a place and you will know it. This system does not necessarily indicate how much power an avatar has (it can give a boost, but your strength can grow with age and experience), but it does indicate how favorable the avatar is to the Eye. The hierarchy is traditionally based on three vectors: Complete/Incomplete: How detailed is the information you've collected? Infinite/Finite: What subjects can you gather? Record/Recollection: What is the nature of the information you've gathered, how factual? The different combinations of which determine your rank along the hierarchy. For example: Archivists are among the highest roles, being complete (all details) infinite (any subject) records (entirely factual). The Jeweler ranks lower, being a complete finite record (focused on a specialized task). Of similar level is the Philosopher, being of complete infinite recollections (knows a Lot, but the knowledge is more about thinking and exploring than the facts discovered). The Storyteller is fairly low, being of incomplete infinite recollection (can collect a wide range of stories, but they focus on specific things and aren't always accurate to the event). Now. The Pupil is a unique role, in that it is the lowest, existing merely as a servant to the Eye and those of higher ranks. It doesn't actually have a particular task, not like the Archivist or Jeweler or Philosopher, it just knows things in order to organize or assist. How you go about this servitude though is... up to you." The Chain so far is as follows (and I am more than happy to talk about any of these placements or the lore contained within the chain itself!): The Entropy - Kayne :] The Archivist - Jonathan Sims The Ambassador - Arthur Lester The Broadcast - Cecil Gershwin Palmer The Jeweler - Emer The Luminary - Dr. Aria "Ria" Lynn Bell The Expanse - Dr. Axel M. Wimpren The Doctor - Dr. Jonathan Callaghan Fanshawe The Philosopher - Elliott Meléti The Wanderer Ocelli - Barnabas Lukas-Bennett The Keeper - Cillian Fanshawe Callaghan The Architect - Robert Smirke The Tower - Manphy Lukas-Bennett The Antiquary - Albrecht Von Closen The Storyteller - Thea Brooks (Pupil) The Analyst - Phoebe (Nix) (Pupil) The Manor - Mordechai Lukas-Bennett (Pupil) The Martian - Juno Steel (Pupil) The Doctor - Jonathan Callaghan Fanshawe (Pupil) The Siren Host - Jonah Magnus

If you want to check out any of the other things we've added to this universe as they all feed on each other, check out the tag #ocelli expansion pack !

[timelessarchitecture]

VECTOR ARCHITECTS - RESTAURANT Y SEA

[noconcessions]

[wellofdean]

I think holding onto anger, being driven by it, harms a soul, even when anger is justified and righteous. I think love has to be stronger than anger, and that love is oblique (neither parallel, nor intersecting, but on another plane) to justice or righteousness.

Of course I'm thinking about Dean. To me, it goes like this:

The mark of Cain supercharged Dean's anger and darkness; gave it power over his love. He fought against it, but he also thought he could use it as a weapon. Use it to win a battle, but he couldn't, and it subsumed him. Darkened him. Led him to abandon himself.

Love, as embodied by his brother and his angel, brought him back to himself. Family is the source of both the unimaginable pain that becomes anger, but also of the even deeper mystery of faith and grace, which, by it's nature is unearned, and comes to seek him when he cannot seek it (or) himself.

Awake again inside his own skin, having recovered agency over his anger, Dean knows he has to fight it, and reject it, but more pain comes, more loss, and it gives his anger renewed and lethal strength. Dean is tested to the limits of his rage, and finds that its strength is bounded. The boundary of Dean's anger is love. For Cas. For Sam. Dean's love stays his hand with Cas, and won't let him kill Sam. Dean's love is stronger than his darkness, and it defeats death for the first time.

The darkness Dean rejects is reborn of him as Amara/anima, and she is beautiful and alluring. She draws him in, threatens to suffocate him. To consume him. He wants her, and doesn't. He is drawn and repulsed. He can't harm her. He learns to see her. Learns to see that anger is pain in disguise. He empathizes with her, helps her see this. He empathizes with the justifiably angry manifestation of his own darkness. Caged thing to caged thing, he sees her. He sees himself. She raged for justice, but injured love so often masquerades as rage. She wanted nothing more than to be freed and healed. To be reconciled.

Empathy, then, is what gives him the gift of his deepest wound: his mother. But not as he dreamed her, but as she was/is. The architect of so much of his pain and his father's pain. A woman who can't look at what she made of her sons through her decisions and her absence. The culpability is hers, and not hers. Dean goes inside her mind, speaks directly to her mind and heart; speaks directly to her wound. Sees her. Begs her to see him. Loves her and tells her the truth. Draws her to him, and lets her go. He learns to see her as a thing he did not, and could not possess. Sees himself as separate from her.

Dean wishes for his father. Sees himself as his father sees him. Realizes that his father's sight is limited. Realizes that he has begun to accept himself, that he no longer lives in John's shadow. He has begun to see his own life as worthy of being lived. As his. Sees his own family, one built of love and choice, not blood and obligation. He is the patriarch who draws them all together with his love. They are his, he is theirs. He can't do it like it was done to him.

Chuck, though, is the thing Dean still can't defeat. The horror of being Chuck's toy. The nihilism of that. It's the last and deepest paroxysm of doubt that he has any identity at all, and Chuck wants him angry. Wants to force Dean to externalize his pain as righteous fury, pushes him towards it. Love is what gives Dean the strength to refuse.

When we think of Dean's story from the vector of unjust things happening to Dean, it's easy to lose sight of the real story, which is an alchemical process that is happening inside of Dean. In that process, holding onto grievance doesn't serve Dean, it just festers. It cannot give him what he needs. Revenge doesn't remove the pain of loss; righteous anger doesn't remove the sting of injustice. That's why he has to let it go, no matter who is to blame, and that obligation is not because of his responsibility to others, it's his responsibility to himself. To his own soul.

Blame, grievance, and outwardly focused anger externalize pain, but in the end, externalizing it cannot avail him. The pain is in him. Everything that was taken from him, everything he's lost? No one who is to blame for any of it can metabolize or transform it for him, or take it from him, because it is his. Only Dean can transform it.

Culpability is irrelevant to the journey of Dean's soul.

Cas tells Dean: I love you. I know your heart. I see you. Dean can't respond. It's not because he doesn't love Cas and I don't even think it's because he didn't know. It's because he isn't there. Cas's grace can't cure Dean's anger or take away his pain. It can't give him justice, but it can give him more time. Love can stave off death one more time.

(and this is why Dean's end hurts so much. He was not finished! He was on a threshold!)

I think it's interesting how much we want to absolve Dean by assigning blame for his predicament to sources external to him: John, Sam, Cas, Mary, Jack, God himself! How much we want to give Dean his justice! He deserves it! Surely in all of this, Dean is, if not entirely blameless, then certainly relatable. His heart was in the right place and he was thoroughly traumatized and under great pressure, and despite all that, surely no one ever went to the mat for love harder, or was more selfless than Dean! What soul could do more?

And yet, he must do more. Dean's soul is his, and it can only be healed from the inside, by his process. The responsibility to himself is absolute, and Dean's absolution, his justice, the grace that will heal his soul can only come from inside the house.

[k00297230]

Final Brief 7

Today we did a Zine Workshop with the Print students and a few others. The purpose of this workshop would be to create a zine to aid our presentations and help sell our pitch to Yvonne and Paul.

A zine is a self published, low cost booklet that can help display ideas, poems or short stories. We went through ideas of what to include in it including; a concept art book, newspaper to help sell the story and or a mission document explaining the details of the story, background information and worldbuilding.

We decided to keep it simple and decided on just including concept art but we haven't ruled out the other ideas perhaps in a different format. We just started printing the work we'd done and collaging it on the page and Paul suggested we mess around with the shape of the actual zine and composition.

This is some of the work we'd done and the process.

Here are some of the pages we came up with at the moment.

Ryan worked on their own idea of a comic based zine, using paper only and some scissors.

We then spent the afternoon continuing on our concept art.

Ryan worked on developing the undiscovered civilization and playing with colour and vector shading with Akira influence. They had also done the complicated space suits for the astronauts and simplified them to suit better in an animated medium.

The architecture for the city was inspired partly by the Spanish Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi, who plays with natural motifs and shapes.

Liberty spent more time doing character work and continuing on making the storyboard look cleaner and better visually. The character work will be shown next post.

Mikayla worked on the cave interiors more, playing with colour, composition and dimension.

James went on to develop the moon landscape more and played with colour while briefly looking at the lunar module exterior and playing with its' composition in the landscape.

[supersimetria]

(vía Vector Architects, Arch-Exist, Chen Hao · Luxelakes Floating Headquarters · Divisare)