#also no hate to the fan artists obviously lol. i love that art too i just have to make everything abt my rarepair cause im ill. anyway

[orphiclovers]

not to sound actually unhinged but people who draw ship art with dkos saving astronaut!yjh when it was SP who did that Clearly Detected the spyjh vibes in that scene and are too afraid to admit it to themselves. im only half joking when i say this btw you have to admit i have a little bit of a point. if theres no romantic tension there why are we putting kdj in sp's spot huh. checkmate nonbelievers /lh

[suika-suigetsu]

Quick question what are your fav Yaoi and Yuri Ships in The Narutoverse? Just curious lol

Sorry to answer your quick question with a long text, but I'm just like this... 🥹

So, since I was a kid, I never watched Naruto thinking about couples, I was never a "stan", as they say. I just loved the story and the characters.

It was only very recently, when I started to like the character Suigetsu and researched everything about him, that I saw how perfect I think his relationship with Karin is.

I say this because, as much as I like the cannon couples and defend the story of some of them, I do it more because I respect Kishimoto's decision of the ending and because I think it's cute, but I didn't research it in depth to ship it faithfully like I do with SuiKa. But I like to respect what is cannon, even if some have destroyed other ships that I liked more (but I'll never say... 😭)

I ship when I think that, based on the character's story and the context, they make a good couple.

So, here are some same-sex couples I ship (using information that I think makes them perfect for each other):

Itachi x Kisame

I never really thought about it because I'm not a fan of Itachi, but I like Kisame, so I never saw them together romantically. But I've been thinking and researching about it for a few months now, and after seeing some cute art of them, I'm even more convinced.

I think Kisame fell in love first, and like Sasuke, I don't think Itachi was emotionally mature enough to reciprocate, but as an artist, I plan on pretending that they had a lot of loving moments together and I'll draw them as soon as I have time (I already have some sketches). 🩷

Gaara x Rock Lee

I don't like shipping characters that I feel have a more "innocent" aura. Rock Lee, Jugo, Mitsuki... I see them as babies. But I like to hear everyone's opinion and, sometimes, they convince me.

I like GaaLee nowadays, even though I don't have much information for it, but I just like the idea that the two of them are single parents who share a mutual love for each other and their children, and I also think that Rock Lee's energy would make Gaara's life happy, since he has such a sad past...

Izumo x Kotetsu

I don't need to say anything, right? They've been cannon since the first chapters they appeared, that's just a fact. They're stuck together like nails and flesh, nowadays they must be living together and traveling the world on a never-ending honeymoon. 💖💖💖

A little steal on the list: Sakura x Karin

This one doesn't make any sense, I only shipped them when I was younger, I didn't care about Suigetsu and I hated Sasuke. I just wanted them to use their love for Sasuke to get closer and form a couple, and they were my favorite female characters 🥹🥹 Obviously I don't think that way anymore nowadays, but I'll still draw them together a lot just because I really like it lol.

Another little steal: SuiKarin

Haha, I know it doesn't fit here, but I just think they love each other too much and have enough experience to have tried a lot of things together. After Naruto invented the Sexy jutsu, anything is possible, right? I still want to draw SuiKarin yaoi and SuiKarin yuri... I'm looking forward to it 🫣🫣

Now, other couples that I find cute when I see them, but I don't have enough information to ship them:

Kakuzu x Hidan (I think Hidan would be easy with Kakuzu, but Kakuzu seems too shallow to be with anyone...? Although Hidan seems to be very convincing when he wants to be...), Sasori x Deidara (I'm not just talking about sexuality here, but also about feelings. If Sasori still loves his parents, he can love someone romantically, and I think it's cute to think of him with Deidara. But that said, I didn't feel any chemistry between them in the scenes where they appear together. I'm rewatching Naruto now, maybe my opinion will change, and I hope it does, because I think the art of them together is really cute...), Jiraya x Orochimaru and Tsunade (This is another steal from the list, I shipped them when I was younger, haha. I just think they're a trio that only works if the three of them are together, and if it's just two of them, it doesn't work, you know? It's a hc I've had for a long time. Unfortunately, it didn't come to fruition... In fact, I have another ship with 3 people that I think would close the anime with a flourish, but I'll never be able to say which one it is publicly... 🥹)

Just about Kiri and the Swordsmen of the Mist

I think that just like in Akatsuki, they (the Seven) must have had romances between them too. And unlike Konoha, Kirigakure doesn't seem to care so much about marriage, starting a family and things like that... In fact, I don't know if it's cannon (I don't think so), but it really struck me when I saw in the anime that one of the call girls that Jiraya went out with was married to one of the men that Jiraya captured to get information about Pain. I still think to this day "wow, the people of Kiri are so bold..." .

Anyway, thinking about Kisame's story, they even avoided that (love someone). So I think there had a lot of "quick romances", maybe with more than one person at the same time. They weren't very emotional, you know? Life was hard, just killing and missions... So relationships were just a way to de-stress. That's one of the things that made me ship ItaKisame, because I think that even though he thought that way just because he grew up among the cold population of Kiri, Kisame ended up falling in love with Itachi after knowing him more than he knew anyone else.

Spending time with companions ends up breaking the coldness, even of assassins, so I think there must have been couples who loved each other within the Seven, but I just don't have enough information to know who would end up with who. Give me information, Kishi... 😭

I'm sorry for being so annoying about ships 🥹 But I really like having evidence that makes me like the couple. There are cannon couples that I don't like at all, even though I drew them...... And there are others that I love, but like with SuiKarin, we'll never have confirmation... But since things are complicated on the internet, I prefer to keep my opinion about them to myself.

Thanks for reading. 🩷

[bitethedevil]

What are you thoughts on fanfiction vs real literature?

My dear Anon, you are going to make me yap for forever with this question. I find that such an interesting question as someone who is both an English major and a fanfiction writer.

What is literature?

Literature is often defined as “written works”, often with the addition of “especially those considered of superior or lasting artistic merit” or something to that effect, though the keyword here is “considered”. The idea that there is ‘good’ literature and ‘bad’ literature is utter bullshit.

We are force-fed the idea that there is such a thing from we start in the school system, and it is true that some old hat somewhere has decided that Shakespeare is the epitome of what is considered ‘good literature’ (I love Shakespeare by the way, but this is just a classic example).

It’s the same with any kind of art:

If I draw a stick figure and go hand it in to a museum, they might be like “what the fuck?”. However, maybe more people look at my stick figure. Maybe they have deemed that I am actually pretty good at drawing stick figures, and that it seems like I’ve had some kind of intent behind them. They might decide that my stick figure is actually a great metaphor for whatever current world problem there is, or that it resonates with them in some way. Boom. It’s modern art. It’s ‘good’ art because a lot of people have pointed at it and said “oh that’s awesome. I like it and I get it”.

A lot of people have pointed at Shakespeare’s works and said “I like that. He seems good at that. That’s the best”.  So, we can conclude that what is considered ‘good’ literature has more to do with the reader-response than it actually does with the writer. That’s not to say that’s the writer is not important though, because the skill of the writer obviously plays a role as well.

Humans are social animals above all, so we are also easily influenced by what others deem good and bad. You personally might have read a lot of literature that your former teachers have said was the greatest pieces of literature of our time, and personally thought that it was a bit shit. Though you might still bring up the author’s name if someone asked you to name some of the greatest authors of all time.

What is fanfiction?

There’s a couple of different definitions:

“stories written about TV, film, or book characters by their fans” (Cambridge Dictionary)

or even simpler:

“a story written by a fan” (Merriam-Webster)

Some also claim that it has to be published by an amateur author, or that it has to be published on the internet, but we’ll keep it simple here and just use the two definitions above.

So many people have pointed at fanfiction and went “lol cringe” so it is considered ‘bad’ literature. If it is even considered literature at all. Though we know they are written works, so they are, by definition, ‘literature’.

It is quite unfair to think this way about fanfiction. YA and children’s lit has gotten the same treatment in the past, and it’s only pretty recently that academics have started treating those with the respect and regard they deserve.

YA and children’s literature are obviously written for a particular audience: young adults and children. For that reason, it means that they can’t have the same timeless and universal messages as those classics that your old English teacher loved to harp on about (which is complete BS) and for that reason they are seen as unimportant and uninteresting.

Let’s be honest here as well: when a lot of people think about the concept of fanfiction, they think about media such as Twilight, Harry Potter, One Direction, and so on. What do these have in common? They are usually targeted towards a younger audience, and it is the same weird discrimination against YA and children’s lit that causes the hate for fanfiction, I am completely sure of it.

However, we know that fanfiction does not have to be based on YA or children’s lit. There’s a whole variety of adult media that has fanfiction too. Though there still is that weird narrowminded idea of what it actually is, because we have all heard about the ‘My Immortal’ Harry Potter fic and the ones where all the One Direction boys have one big sexy orgy with each other (or whatever, I was never a Directioner).

Literally all the art ever made has been based off something else. We make what we consume. Ever read or seen media that is heavily influenced by the Bible? Fanfiction. It’s media that uses the same characters and plots from another popular work. Even Shakespeare yoinked most of his stories from ones that already existed. Even the classic ‘Romeo and Juliet’ was taken from a story called ‘The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet’ by Arthur Brooke. Our boy barely even bothered to change their names. That’s Fanfiction™ babey.

“But, but, but, those stories were real stories. They weren’t just smut.” Come here, my fictive question-asker. Take my hand and listen: the presence of sexual themes and smut should not make you devalue any piece of media, you weird little puritan.

If that was the case, is Shakespeare’s works of less value because the guy loved his dirty jokes? Is Bram Stoker’s Dracula then shit? Because my god…any piece of vampire and werewolf media, is inherently horny as fuck. That stuff was the AO3 smut tag for Victorian housewives. Lots of classics are horny as hell, we just sort of ignore it because “oh well, they’re classics”.

In conclusion of this long-ass rant

Fanfiction is real literature in my opinion. It gets discredited because it is often written for a very specific audience, just like some other unfortunate genres, and it really isn’t fair. It also gets discredited because most people have a very narrow idea of what it actually is.

I’ll even go as far and to say that fanfiction in some ways is a more beautiful concept than what is widely considered as “real literature”. Fanfiction is often not written for a monetary gain. It is not made to be publishable. There are probably thousands of beautiful, genre-breaking, amazing books that will never see the light of day because some publishers have looked at it and thought “this won’t sell”.  

That’s not the case with fanfiction. It’s a genre that is written because people really felt like they wanted to share something, and I honestly think that is an incredibly beautiful concept in this hopeless world where literally everything is about money. Thank you, as always, for coming to my TedTalk.

(Thank you so much for this simple and yet insanely interesting question <3)

[rose-reads-visualnovels]

Jojos ranked from most to least favorite?

1. Jonathan. I don’t care that people think he’s boring. His manga portrayal is extremely charming, realistic in a boyish way and I love his relationships with everyone around him. Also the chocolate scene made me laugh. Baby 🥺

2. Jolyne. Despite how they may appear on the surface, Jolyne is the closest Joestar to match Jonathan’s energy and I 100% believe that was intentional. She’s both the Madonna and the Whore and I love her immensely. She’s my mother and my sister and my girlfriend. Don’t ask.

3. Giorno. I also like him because of his ties to Jonathan and how - unlike what many seem to believe - his inner sense of retributive Justice came from that side of the family and not DIO’s. I love how he’s obviously 15 years old despite how anime fans love to joke about how he’s too old and sexy to be a minor. Sorry he had an artistic nip slip but that was High Art and not a sign that he’s older than he looks. He looks his age, so shut up.

4. Jotaro. I like how he’s a total try hard. The fact that he wants to look cool and is always thinking about cool finishing phrases for after he defeats his opponents is an adorable character trait. He gets a lower rank because of his raging gay induced misogyny, but his innate goodness tells me that’d be easily fixed if anyone gave themselves the trouble.

5. Josuke. I know he’s number 5, but I have nothing against him! Every time he’s on screen it’s a delight. I just love other characters more so he gets sidelined? But part 4 itself is in my top 3, so he gets to ride high on that ranking.

6. Johnny. Sure, his character development was well written but that doesn’t mean I have to like the guy. So I don’t. I think I seriously hate his personality. (I like Diego and it hurts me when Johnny is mean at him for no reason. He’s literally just jealous lol)

7. Joseph. Racist. Friends with Nazis. A serial cheater. Misogynist but not in a gay way. Annoying. People think he’s funny and all his jokes are “dressing like a woman”, “sex with my mom”, “gay joke”, “no you”. I don’t get the hype.

Now you guys can send me anon hate about my Jojo opinions.

— Rose, the Revolutionary Witch

[goat-and-coat]

UT Yellow Spoilers Ahead.

So. Here’s some buffer text so this shouldn’t show up in your notifications. The spoilery parts. The spoiliest. Consider this your spoiler warning.

Yeah, this is probably long enough. I’m just gonna shotgun this lol.

We’re going to start with the good.

So the good!

Yeah. There’s a LOT. Way too much to mention, so here’s some highlights.

Toriel showing up is obviously a necessity. But it was such a cool little moment to have the rescue ending (:

Nice callback to UT’s little “wait for something to happen” moments that happen in the Core and Ruins.

The music, of course, is amazing. Whether it’s the original music or the remix (I dig that Hopes and Memes remix), they did a phenomenal job.

On the front of artistic expression, the art. Sprites are amazing. The flashback art is amazing. The videos are super cool. The animations are really good.

Gameplay is pretty in line with Undertale. You’ll find yourself holding X a lot more to slow yourself down than you did in UT.

I like how the game makes callouts to beloved characters we don’t see directly, like Alphys and Undyne. It was nice to see more of the same side characters, too. The expansion on monsters is good- like Dalv. And we finally see farms.

I love Clover, Martlet, and the Feisty Five. Cerboro… well, we’ll talk about her later. Their dialogue is always great. I don’t think there was even a single bad line.

The hugs at the end! And the hand holding! And how much everyone just loves Clover aaaaah

Also Flowey (:

Good cowboy representation!!!

Snowdin expansion (:

More of the Ruins we never got to see (:

We got to see the city up close wooo!!

The map is just good. My favorite part was the Dunes. I liked seeing the UG Apartment Complex. The Royal statue specifically. Nice smaller detail that I’m glad didn’t go forgotten.

Also! UT Yellow successfully retains the writing and goofiness of UT. While the drama doesn’t hit AS hard, it’s still definitely a tearjerker! It really makes you see the six kids as more than just a number. Helps to put gravity and weight on that.

But most importantly, the creators very clearly have such love and respect for UT. It shows in their creation. A lot of hard work and effort went into it. UT Yellow is what all fan games should look to do in my opinion. I want you to keep this in mind for what I’m going to say about the dislikes.

Here’s what I didn’t like:

Do you wish every fight was as bad as Sans? Do you hate everyone and yourself? Do you wish to inflict pain on your mental well-being? Do you straight up suck at dodging, but love seeing game over screens?

Congratulations. This game is for you. It’s a mix bag for me. Extra challenge is good, but this was extreme.

The boss fights don’t hold back. So this could easily be in the “good” category if you’re a masch… maschochist? Masc… enjoy pain. I can’t spell it, okay??? And I ain’t gonna Google it.

Axis took me close to two and a half hours to beat (in comparison, the dance boss took only about an hour and a half).

That’s my only real complaint about the pacifist run as far as combat goes. No way monsters would’ve been locked away without a single soul during the war if they were this strong.

I will say the world makes the Underground seem TOO big, which contradicts the whole “the underground is too small” narrative Undertale pushed. I think Yellow mentions it once or twice, too? HOWEVER!! I am totally and completely willing to ignore this because cowboy hehe (:

Plus, it explains some food source. Little curious how they’re growing crops underground, but I’ll just go with “it’s magic so it doesn’t need sunlight” as my excuse.

Flowey. I know I said I liked him, too. So here’s what’s going on.

This is gonna be weird to people because Asriel and Frisk are my favorite UT characters. And I don’t even dislike Flowey in Yellow! He’s super funny.

But he should not be there.

His presence opens up a whole can of worms.

1- He can save and load while Clover can’t (he is Clover’s save point). This isn’t an issue in itself, but it is an issue at the same time because Flowey’s goal to take human souls would be ten billion times easier if he just bodied Clover at the very first opportunity like he tried to do with Frisk. This is a kid who throws a temper tantrum after about five seconds of you not dying to his bullets. I don’t think he would have the patience to play the long con.

2- Flowey doesn’t seem to have met a human other than Chara and Frisk… and the ones who killed him, I guess. The True Lab implies that before him, LemonBread had the SAVE/LOAD ability for a short time.

3- Flowey’s presence also stuffs the timeline in a box. We’re to assume Flowey in UT woke up relatively recently, because he’s been screwing with timelines. But Toriel tells us a human hasn’t been underground in “a long time” in both games. I can picture this being 7-10 years minimum.

Are we really going to believe Alphys had people locked in her basement for ten years? Because I couldn’t see that lasting more than 3 months tbh. 6 months would be a MASSIVE stretch before people stormed the gates. I feel like Alphys’s mention should’ve been left at “the new Royal scientist made a robot.”

Leave out the subplot of Cerbora’s blatant disregard for child safety. You wouldn’t even need to do away with the (frankly busted) fight she had (I did most of it with the silver scarf btw).

My final thing that is a total complaint is the genocide ending. Clover gains the LOAD/SAVE, one shots Asgore, murks Flowey, and frees the souls. But they’d still be trapped down there lol.

I feel like Asgore should’ve just skewered Clover and that should’ve been the genocide ending. Flowey being left out would’ve nullified my dislike of him dying (for realsies).

Though I will say, the art made exclusively for it is disturbing as heck and belongs in a horror game. So they definitely did a great job on that part of it.

Speaking of Asgore… he seems really out of character to just fire someone like he does. I can disregard this as him wanting kids to NOT die. Axis is very clearly a way bigger threat than MTT could ever dream to be.

So really, my complaints boil down to:

1- Game too hard ):

2- Biiiig place but cool so it’s worth it (but how the heck is there a desert down here? Who cares!? Worth it!)

3- Genocide ending sad and dumb and I hate it because sad and weird):

4- Flowey’s presence

5- Timeline confuzzlement.

The first is a skill issue (even if I know I haven’t had nearly as many issues as some other people).

The second is really just a mix bag. It makes sense in most places (Snowdin, Hotland, New Home, Home/the Ruins) but less so in other places (the Dunes, aka my favorite spot in Yellow. Damn, I’m willing to compromise just to keep this tho.)

The third is just personal preference I guess… I don’t like how it’s contradictory to UT. As a stand-alone thing, it’s perfectly fine. Just too depressing for me.

The fourth… well… okay, this is the only complaint I don’t see myself budging on.

The fifth just needs some minor corrections.

How is Yellow overall?

If Undertale is a 9, which frankly it is, I’d give UT Yellow a solid 8.75. It should be impossible to make a fan game that’s almost as good as the content it was based on, but the absolute madlads did it. They really did it.

Jury’s still out on DeltaRune, but I rate it around an 8.25 so far.

For context, out of all of my favorite games, I’ve never once thought of a game as a ten. Not even the fantastic Fallout: New Vegas or the reliable (Halo) Reach.

[melishade]

🌻?

I'll talk about some of the other shows and movies that I like to watch and music I listen to.

I know I focus a lot on the Transformers fandom and Attack on Titan, but obviously they are not the only shows I watch.

Sometimes I'll watch mindless humor like American Dad, Family Guy, and Ridiculousness. Because when you're doing full time work and full time school, sometimes it's just better to turn your brain off after grueling hours of work.

Shows that I love to watch are Craig of the Creek, The Amazing World of Gumball, Bluey, Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, ROTTMNT, B99, Arcane, Lego Monkie Kid, ATLA. I'm certain that I'm missing some, but that's what's usually on my radar.

Movies I like: Snowpiercer, Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, Black Panther 1 and 2, Coraline, The Woman King, Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse, that Santa Claus movie where Santa just beats the shit out of everyone, Jordan Peele Movies like Us and Nope.

I've also watched a lot of anime in my years since 2009. Sonic X was how I got into it and the list just kept growing. I watched and read every anime/manga I could get my hands on. I don't do it at the same frequency that I do now, and as you get older, you realize how problematic anime is Lol. So, I've watched Sonic X, Dragon Ball Z and Hellsing Ultimate (Both original and abridged: Go TeamFourStar), Xenoglossa, High School of the Dead (Too much fan service but interesting take on the zombie genre), Death Note, Cowboy Bebop, +Anima (I did some drawings for that when I was on Deviantart and I still have them), Something about a Dark Angel that steals a bunch of art work, Tokyo Mew Mew (with some toxic ass love interests), There was a manga about a train, Aventura (Never continued, disappointed), Spy X Family, Clock Striker, Full Metal Alchemist (Kind of. Never watched it in full but I've come across the major plot points), Naruto (simply because my cousins were into it. The Kayuga plot line was bullshit), started Bleach (Never really got past the Aizen reveal), A lot of knock out mecha anime shows ironically excluding Guren Lagan, My Hero Academia I only keep track of because I like the Todoroki family drama, Future Diary (Toxic as hell), Akame ga Kill (Kind of like Attack on Titan: everyone is a red shirt), Maid-Dragon Kobayashi (used to like it, looking back hate the wizard kid and the dragon and whatever the fuck is going on with the red hair dragon and the big tits), King of Thorn, the Pokemon Movies only, and I'm blanking on the rest since a lot of them were obscure manga I found at my local library. I'm surprised I remembered this much.

Games I play: Pokemon Go and Sky Children of the Light (If you want to play with me, PM me.

Music I listen to: Imagine Dragons, Les Friction, Hadestown, Cody Fry, Tobe Nwigwe, Soundtrack Music like Samuel Kim (ADHD brain. It scratches an itch), AJR, the rest is kind of obscure. It might be an album of collaborating artist for a movie, like the Lion King: the Gift or the Arcane Album.

Shows I don't like/won't watch: Reality TV like the Bachelor, cheesy long-winded high school romance dramas that clear do the whole back stabbing/will they won't they. My sister watched it a lot and I always hated how it dragged on. Degrassi was way too much. One Piece is too long. I'll sometimes check in the fandom to see what's going on. Last time I check, Amalee was the Uta chick. Game of Thrones. Not a fan of the back stabbing and *nc*st. The Walking Dead seems like a show that just dragged on for too long.

I am certain I'm blanking on some shit right now but that's all I have to say.

[lukael]

For the artist asks: 2,3, 7?

Thank you for asking! See 2 in my previous post~

3. Least favourite things to draw?

DEFINITELY everything lower body. Feet, legs, all of that stuff I just really hate (obviously because I'm bad at it, and because I'm bad, I don't want to draw it, and because I don't draw it, I stay bad at it lol) Hands aren't great either, but tbf most people struggle with them. Long hair is pretty hard for me too. Also very frustrated with doing shading lately

7. Favorite works of all time excluding your own?

Oooh, interesting, there's way too many to count because I consume a ton of art and have many favorite artists. I have to think about that for a moment mmmmh...

Well here's one great piece by Juanmao, they're definitely one of my biggest inspirations when it comes to colors and stylization:

Another great one by MLarty, they have amazing composition and colors as well:

This piece by Jourdan Tuffan is one I fell in love with recently too:

and finally I'm a huge fan of simpler styles that focus on colors and lights in busy environments, like the works of Canalbooks:

These are just a few examples, there is sooo much amazing art out there and every day that I'm not on their level kills me inside lol but it's something to strive for!

[fitgothgirl]

Hiii here have an update :]

Things are decent, not much going on lately. Still making it to the gym about 3 times a week for lifting, but just recently starting to try to get more cardio and steps haha. Lifting is awesome but I would also like to be losing some fat here and there too lol, can’t forget about that. I at least just want to get enough steps a day but I know cardio is good for your heart and lungs and whatever (grumble grumble) so I want to get some times of higher heart rate once or twice a week to start with.

A couple days ago I also started a bullet journal. I’ve always liked these but never thought I could do one since they always look like works of art and I’m not artistic, don’t have pretty writing, etc. I didn’t want to try it and mess it up or end up not using it because I hated my artwork. But I recently saw a tumblr post about how making bujos like that is great for people who can/like to do that, but originally bujos were made by a guy (Ryder Carroll) who wanted it to be super simple and straightforward. In his Youtube intro video his handwriting is even messy enough that I almost can’t read it at times lol. But I guess a lot of people are like me and get overwhelmed at how we normally see bujos and so we avoid them, but he actually invented the method specifically as a neurodivergent-accessible way to stay organized, apparently in particular for people with ADHD. So that made me feel way better about starting my own. I did watch some other videos of people’s minimalistic spreads which I took from that added to Carroll’s original method, like a habit tracker and a gratitude page, etc. But otherwise it’s really straightforward and all I use is just a graph notebook (I like graph paper over dots hehe), a black pen, and a ruler (not even necessary technically) and that’s it!

This is good for a lot of reasons but I especially want to use it to help me with what I think is going to be a New Year’s resolution - get out of debt! Or at least close to out of it - not sure if I could completely get out if it in just a year. My financial situation is horrendous and embarrassing. Since I started my bujo in December, this month’s financial goals included just not using my credit card anymore, and starting in 2023 I want to plan specifics for paying off my cards and saving a little. With Christmas shopping this month, I couldn’t really start with that stuff yet (even though I’m keeping the shopping minimal this year).

I’d also like to start incorporating a way to meal plan/meal prep with it, but I’ll do that down the line a bit. One thing at a time.

Otherwise things are pretty chill. Concerts petered out after October - had just one at the end of November and we have NONE scheduled for the next THREE MONTHS. This is crazy for us lol. I bet at least one will come up before then though. It’s funny though cuz if not, the last concert I went to was AFI, and the next concert I go to will also be AFI haha. The one that just happened was a regular album tour show; the one that will be in March is a special one-off concert where they will be playing an entire album through “for the first and last time” (Sing the Sorrow, since it’ll be its 20th anniversary). We have to travel down to SoCal for that one too. So unbelievable we even got tickets, I’m so stoked. It’s going to be a special night with the most diehard fans.

Anyway, December is surprisingly an almost plan-less month. Just Christmas and New Years obviously, and we’re having a late combo friendsgiving/secret Santa dinner party at the end of the month too. Enjoying the lull in things before the schedule gets packed again in spring - besides that concert in March, there are already plans coming up around then and onward. I love doing stuff and I also love staying home, so I got a good balance right now lol.

[viperwhispered]

hellow oomf!! throwing in: 5, 11, 17 for the fandom ask meme (and maybe 24 if you wanna get all sentimental and sappy 👀aheh)

-diodellet

Thank you for the asks @diodellet!

5. Something you see in fics a lot and love

Guess I’m just going for the first thing that came to mind: that 

“Oh.

Oh.” 

moment you see sometimes? It can be just so wonderfully juicy. I'm pretty sure there's a tumblr post circulating around for appreciating that and yeah I eat that up every time.

11. If you're a writer or artist, what fic or piece of art are you proud of making?

I mean, I would say I’m proud of most of my fics (and even the rest, not like I hate them or anything). I’ve mentioned Of Cows and Curses and Consequences before for a similar ask, since that’s still my biggest foray into longform fic. (I’ve still got so many planned yet unwritten chapters for that. Maybe one day.) Plus it was one of the first fics I really wrote, too, at least in English - kinda a go big or go home start, lol.

But also Fixation and Indulgence. They both were such labors of love.

I really should write some non-smut sometimes that would get me similarly delighted.

Tho How Not to be Swept Under was great fun, too.

17. The thing in canon that everyone loves and that you also love

My brain is so empty now when I’m sure there’s plenty of things I could put here.

I mean, I guess Malleus kinda counts, lol.

I mean, I’d like to think we all appreciate the multidimensionality of every twst cast member, how there’s more to all of them than first meets the eye. Also the fun dynamics you get putting them all together in all the various configurations.

24. How has fandom positively impacted your life?

I mean, I’ve certainly made some lovely friends here ❤️

Also uh pretty sure a fair portion of my sex ed came from fic, lol (we do get decent sex ed at school, but for like sex / body positivity and stuff I have a feeling fan works and fannish works definitely had an impact). Like yeah smut generally is obviously fantastical and sometimes formulaic but also the focus on mutual pleasure and enjoyment that tends to be prevalent is pretty great, even if it can get one's expectations / assumptions a bit high.

Also just all the feels I’ve gotten from fabulous pieces of fanworks, and all the analysis and alternative points of view that have helped me have more nuanced views of things I like. Lovely.

(you can find the ask game in question here)

[mo0n-water]

hey!

i agree, maths is useless if you don’t want to be in that field and i certainly don’t so i’ve always hated it. also i love the fact that you actually respond with good long answers, it makes my day every time :))

quite simple questions today because i’m feeling lazy:

- what is something you’ve never told anyone before?

- where do you like to go when you’re feeling overwhelmed?

- what time do you wake up/go to sleep? are you a morning or night person?

- do you have a favourite fic/fic writer/fan artist? i want to branch out more. any ships are good (but no snape or anything crazy lmao)

- what can i call you?? i want to give you a nickname but i think you should suggest it ;)

also, who do you think i am?? i’m very intrigued, i think you should guess ;)

i hope your day is brilliant and you also make my brain go brrr, i love it (and you)

this is going in direction i did not expect

no such thing as a simple question if you ask me, only simple answers! or maybe you really do just ask good questions lol

it’s hard to think of something that i’ve never told anyone before. i’m a chatty person & i talk to a lot of people, so i feel like i just end up telling people different things about me? i don’t know how to explain that. one thought that’s been in my head lately that i’ve been too embarrassed to share with anyone is that i think i’d like to put my music on spotify. feels like a lofty dream, but well… we are planning to record it, & people like it at shows, so who knows.

when i’m overwhelmed, i tend to seek out people rather than places. usually one of my best friends. if not, though, i like to go on walks. walking is a safe haven to me. sometimes i hike down to my favorite spring or cliffside, sometimes just to a church i live near. if it’s night i’ll sit in the empty bathtub though haha rather classic

my sleep schedule is incredibly inconsistent. last night i went to bed at around 6 am & then woke up at 3:30 pm. but there are some days where instead i wake up at 6 am lol. i’m the queen of all-nighters honestly, & sometimes i feel like I work better when i haven’t slept. i get the most done between 2 & 9 am. i don’t know if that makes me a night owl or an early bird - i literally just don’t sleep!

oooh, i love this question. idk what ships you’re into, but i’ll tell you some of my faves.

some medium sized fics & wips i’m following: i like starvin darlin, which is a rosekiller roadtrip au in which evan has cancer & barty is a cannibal. then i really like stay in your lane, which is a jegulus olympics au that has every background pairing you could dream of. & i also must recommend a violent kind of spin which is jegulus enemies to lovers during the war. whatever she wants is an AMAZING pandalily coffee shop au.

for longfics my favorite is black mass, as well as probably pink lemonade. i read a lot of longfic but if i had to narrow it down to two, it would be those. black mass is a wolfstar road trip au, & it’s pretty dark but i really love the way the characters are written. lots of classic music. pink lemonade is a jegulus band au (background rosekiller, established wolfstar & dorlene iirc) where the marauders are a band in emergency need of a concert photographer… regulus just so happens to BE a photographer. gasp.

& in the realm of one shots, i really like heaven has a curb perfect for smoking on which is a canon-compliant wolfstar fic where remus & sirius have a angsty chat in the afterlife. also!! slow endings where harry is cleaning out grimmauld place & finds a strange photo of james & a man who looks an awful lot like sirius. that one’s jegulus obviously.

you should also read my jegulus band au… definitely not biased in that recommendation, no way. click here for that one.

as far as fan artists go, i have a lot? you should check my art tag. i tag pretty meticulously haha. but my absolute favorite is theinvisiblemuseum for the genius rarepair content & beautifully dark ideas.

whoops sorry that was a LOT but i hope you find something you like within all that xx

as for what you should call me - my name is whatever you decide, as the taylor song goes. up to you; what do you think of when you think of me? (i’d love to have something to call you as well, though - i’ve gone with question anon in my head & when sharing theories with my bestie lol.)

& speaking of theories, i’ve gone through so many! i feel like you’ve got to be someone i know, but i feel like i’ve pretty much ruled out everyone i know? you don’t talk like any of my irls, or rhea, so i have ruled those three out. my only guess that i think would make sense is @saturninebutalive, but i genuinely have no clue. (sorry for the tag betty, hope you’re having a nice day <3)

anyway, have a lovely rest of your monday, question anon! let me know what you think of the fics if you read them. it’s so nice to hear from you

[pixiemage]

Widely accepted Hermitcraft Headcanons I’ve discovered since joining the fanbase last winter:

[ADD MORE IF I MISSED SOME!]

(DISCLOSURE: I’m currently 80% of the way through S7 and I’ve seen Grian’s POV of S6 (and his Evo series) but other that than I haven’t watched other HC seasons. All my knowledge of these comes from what I’ve seen, and Tumblr.)

- Grian has wings. This is an indisputable fact. Sometimes they’re white/gray like elytra, sometimes they’re like parrot wings (S7 Pesky Bird~), but they’re always there somehow. Often he’s also portrayed as a bird hybrid, since the concept of Mob Hybrid Hermits is an exceedingly popular one.

- (Less common addition: Grian is/was a Watcher, something that carried over from his Evo SMP series, though this headcanon is hit or miss depending on who’s drawing/writing him.)

- Mumbo is one of the few totally human people on the server, and half the art I see draws him with redstone dust stains on his clothes. (Also, the occasional headcanon of radiation burns accompanies this.)

- (I’ve also seen Mumbo portrayed as an enderman hybrid due to his height.)

- Stress is technically human, but she’s also a witch. Seen this one a lot, perhaps in relation to her potion shop in S7? Like I said that’s the only season I’ve seen in depth (beyond Grian’s S6) so that’s my only connection lol. But I love it! You need a healer? Go to Stress.

- Doc - of course - is half creeper, which may or may not have a hand in why he’s often morally gray in most HC plots. I often see him drawn as a centaur of sorts as well, with four legs like a creeper has. (Not sure if I love or hate this concept lmao)

- Doc is also part goat, a la S7. Hence the horns we see in like every drawing of him. Amazing.

- Tango is often portrayed as a blaze hybrid, though I’ve also seen him drawn as a kind of demon. The red eyes and fiery color palette work well for both options, though I’m partial to the blaze theory.

- Impulse - though usually drawn as a normal dude - is also sometimes seen as a sort of friendly demon. Not sure if that’s to do with the nickname Tango uses for him - “Impy” - or just the fact that the fans seem to like the idea of Hermits with wings. Though the fact that his first appearance on Hermitcraft involved the other members summoning him in with a summoning circle most definitely adds to this headcanon.

- Zed is a sheep hybrid. I’ve got no friggin’ clue where this one’s from but I’m here for it anyway. (EDIT: I’ve been told it probably has a lot to do with a game show he made during Season 5 called “Is That Sheep Looking At Me?” which sound hysterical and I can’t wait to see what that’s about)

- Scar is a vex hybrid, which is also part of why he was able to use “magic” at the start of Season 7. As far as I know this comes from ConVex, which was a S5 thing, but that’s all I know on the subject.

- (Cub, too, is sometimes a vex hybrid, due to being the other half of ConVex. Though this depends on the artist.)

- Xisuma is a Voidwalker, though I’m not entirely sure what that is. Apparently this is different than a Watcher and (obviously) has something to do with the void, but while I’ve seen this concept in passing in fics, I don’t have a basis for where this came from outside of Xisuma’s username, Xisumavoid. (If anyone can explain this to me I’d appreciate it! It sounds cool even if I don’t fully understand it!)

- I’ve ALSO seen the “Xisuma is a shapeshifter” or “Xisuma is a bee/axolotl/strider hybrid” because of how many different mob-based skins he’s used over the past few seasons.

- Ren is a werewolf or a canine-based shapeshifter. Friggin’ love this idea actually, and I’m never sure if this is solely based on Ren’s name or on something he did in a season I haven’t seen yet, because knowing him he’d totally have a wolfman character somewhere in his repertoire.

- Bdubs - and this is a headcanon I discovered more recently and it makes sense - is a phantom hybrid. He’s so finicky about sleep, and if he’s kept awake during the night he gets in a pissy mood because of it. I don’t see him drawn with any features from phantoms often, but behavioral habits show up in fics a lot. (Though a part of me finds this one funny because it also feels a bit backwards - phantoms are AWAKE at night and Bdubs abhors night time - but hey, maybe phantoms are just trying to kill you because you’re keeping them awake with your late night thoughts lol.)

- xB is often some kind of water creature hybrid, like a guardian or (occasionally, more recently) a glow squid. Super cool concept in my opinion.

- Joe may look human, but he is decidedly not normal. Either he’s some sort of humanoid cryptid, he has undefined psychic abilities, or he’s just in tune with the universe in a way most people aren’t.

[kiisaes]

ah, i meant bakudeku just as bakugou and deku in that exactly bakudeku moment, so, i know that your art is of them but they feel a little different from how the canon characters feel to me so... hm, idk. obviously it is all personal interpretations, and i totally agree that that‘s like the point :D or one of them lol? it‘s at least super fun, and i think it‘s cool that people branch out like they do as well, watching the same source material but taking away different things from it and idealizing it in different ways for how they‘d want things to be. saying bakudeku really didn‘t make sense in that moment; that refers to the ship. sorry for the confusion!

(also just to clarify, i‘m rly sorry cause i feel like that‘s weird now too (me going i‘m reconsidering and then going no i‘m good, that doesn‘t rly make sense), what i meant with that is that looking at your art it‘s so clear that they‘re in love so when i look at it i‘m like ah no i see it!, which is kinda dumb ig cause it is ship art like duh. anyway. god that rly doesn‘t make sense at all, cause i just thought yeah i see it in that moment bc i recognize them in the art but then they‘re also in love and that‘s true. but i just said that i don‘t see them as i see the canon characters. i‘m really sorry, i‘ll think it through next time before starting conversations to make sure i don‘t just find out actually i contradict exactly what i said before in the middle of it, i‘m so sorry and so glad the anon feature is a thing lmao. sorry for dumping this messiness in your ask box! and more canon kirishima & bakugou content that i could watch and interpret my ideal kiribaku into would be great hehe, i‘m happy to hear you like an idea of them together too :D and i keep looking at the mangas whenever i‘m in my local bookshop but i feel like it would just be so much money lol, so i haven‘t bought any yet. but yeah, the art style is definitely super super cool :D (not that it would be any less so if i didn‘t agree, tis all obvs also subjective))

again, sorry for the length and sorry for the absolute mess, and thank you for sharing your art :,)🤍

ohh ok! so basically what i'm hearing is that u like bkdk but in the context of mostly fan art (with all of its fan interpretations), not in the actual series? bc if so that's understandable too — fan content will always dramatize a relationship more than what's present in canon and might make it seem more appealing LOL

haha i have no problem with ppl not liking bkdk as a ship or choosing not to ship it for any particular reason, so no worries! i know lots of bkdks can get pretty territorial over their ship tho, so for ur best interest, i'd recommend not going up to random bkdk artists and talking about krbk out of nowhere ^^' i've met a staggering amount of bkdks who don't like krbk at all (the same way i've met lots of krbks who hate bkdk) so probably best to make sure the bkdk is ok with other ships including bkg and deku. it's smart to play it safe — this fandom is already barely keeping it together with ship discourses and i wouldn't want u caught in the crossfire ( ；´Д｀)

despite the severe amount of bkdk i draw, i am a multishipper, so i don't particularly take much offense to these anon asks. as long as u don't come in slandering what i like then u're good lol. i have few notps so it'd always be nice to see more interactions between characters in the manga :') canon krbk has been pretty dry for ... maybe around 2 years now? oh god. which sucks, but hopefully they'll get some stuff soon !!! rooting for u and ur fellow krbks !!!

and u can read the manga online! i used to use bokunoheromanga.com, but it seems to have trouble with showing older chapter pages — or maybe it's just me. now i just use VIZ for every new update but there are definitely sites dedicated to posting the mha manga chapters whenever they come out! (i only buy certain volumes if they have specific arcs or scenes i like lol)

[felassan]

Mass Effect development insights and highlights from Bioware: Stories and Secrets from 25 Years of Game Development

This is the Mass Effect version of this post.

[In case you can’t read it the subtitle in the bottom left logo above is “Guardians of the Citadel”]

Note: Drug use is mentioned.

Cut for length.

Mass Effect 1

ME began its life in a vision document in fall 2003

Codenamed “SFX”

Conceived of by Casey Hudson and a core team from KotOR. Its genesis was the intention to create an epic sci-fi RPG in an original setting that BioWare owned (so they could have full creative control), and in a setting that was conceived of first and foremost as a video game

Initially players could control any squadmate, but they wanted it to be about Shep and for players to be focused on Shep being a battlefield commander, rather than on switching bodies

By the start of 2004 its story was shaping up. Initially humans landed on Mars in 2250 and discovered evidence of an ancient alien race and a powerful substance, Black Sand, which rapidly advanced tech to the point that FTL travel was possible. (My note: obviously now the Prothean artifacts on Mars & associated mass effect force tech enabled this in the final canon, but I wonder if aspects of the ‘Black Sand’ naming-type & powerful substance stuff was rolled into red sand from final canon) Humans were suddenly capable of travel to multiple star systems and made contact with a multitude of other species. At the start of the first game, these species together with humans had a fragile peace, with focus placed on the political center of the galaxy, a hub known as Star City, later renamed the Citadel

Multiplayer was a vision for the series as far back as 2003. The plan was for ME1, an Xbox exclusive at launch, to take advantage of the platform’s online components. Early designs saw players meeting in one of the central hubs to interact and trade items in their otherwise SP adventures

By 2006 it had the name ME and the story was more specific, with the theme of conflict between organic and synthetic lifeforms. The story’s scope now stretched across 3 games and included scope for full co-op MP

They tried to do MP in every game, discussing it from the get-go, but it always just fell by the wayside. “When you’re trying to build something that is a new IP, on a new platform, with a new engine, you’ve got to really focus on the core elements of the game.” 

The conversation system prototype was made in Jade Empire, and some of ME’s earliest writing was done in an old JE build. At first there was no conversation wheel. Paragon was “Friendly” and Renegade “Hostile”. In the prototype Shep was a silent unnamed Spectre. Many conversations in the prototype about the player’s choice in smuggling a weapon through Noveria made it into the game

In said prototype a merchant referred to themselves as “this one”, though the word hanar never appeared. The PC in it also had the option to end a conversation with “I should go”. In the prototype also, Harkin was voiced by Mark Meer

An early version of the Mako got used as the krogan truck in ME2

Early concepts of the Citadel were drawn in pencil by CH. A piece of concept art of its final design was painted based on a photo of a sculpture near Aswan, Egypt

As with any new IP naming it was a struggle. They put out a call to all staff for ideas, did polls, made a name generator that combined words that they liked in random ways and made pretend logos of ones they liked in Photoshop to see if they could make themselves love the name or find visual potential in it. (Some of these names are in the pic at the top of this post.) CH liked “Unearthed” as it was a reference to Prothean ruins dug up on Mars and humanity’s ascendance going away from Earth. They knew the game would have a central space station featuring prominently so some of the ideas were based on that - “The Citadel”, “The Optigon”, “The Oculon”. “Element” was another one they had in mind due to the rare substance in the game 

CH: “I was a big fan of John Harris’ book Mass, which had epic-scaled sci-fi ideas, so that was a word that came up often. Many of the names came from the idea that the IP featured a fifth fundamental physical force (in addition to the known four of gravitational, electromagnetic, strong nuclear and weak nuclear) so the word ‘effect’ came up pretty often.” Ultimately none of the ideas really felt right. One Monday morning they were going over the names and Greg Zeschuk said he had an idea on the weekend: “Mass Effect!” CH: “I said, ‘I don’t hate it’, which in the naming process is a high compliment. And it stuck!”

CH on Shep’s Prothean vision from the beacon: “It was hard to imagine how we would do this. CG was - and is - really expensive. Instead I wanted to try doing it through photography and video editing. So I went to a local grocery store and bought a few packages of the weirdest looking meat that I could find. Then I set up a little photoshoot in my basement, complete with some electronics parts and some red wine for juicyness.” He used these props to create a video sequence where the photos were rapidly cycled and blurred, along with production paintings, to create the scary vision an organic/machine experiment on the Protheans. These mashups were also used as inspiration for concept artists and level designers who were working on these themes

Tali used to be called Talsi

On the licensing side they often joke that they’re licensing N7 not “Mass Effect” due to N7′s popularity

There was a confidential internal guide to the IP in 2007 to help devs along and summarize/synthesize the vision etc. Some excerpts from it are shown in the book and this is the first time the public have ever seen them

Early versions of Asari had hair

Asari were designed as a nod to classic TV sci-fi (with human actors wearing obvious makeup and prosthetics to play aliens)

The turian design guideline was “we want them to be birds of prey”. They also wanted a range of alien types, some close to human like Asari, while others were to be a lot further away, like turians

BioWare patented the conversation wheel, which was a first for them. CH had been frustrated with reviews of Jade Empire that said that the actioncentric game was too wordy [with its list dialogue]. “I’m like, story is words. [...] What is it about our games that is making people feel like they’re wordy?” Then he thought “In a game you kind of need to feel like you’re continuing to play it. Maybe you should continue feeling like you’re playing it actively into the dialogue.” “[The wheel] kind of gave a new experience with dialogue when you did start to react based on emotion, and that’s ultimately what we’re trying to bring out in our games”

The original krogan concept was based on a bat “with a really wide squidgy face. We just used its face on top of this weird body and it kinda worked”

Geth musculature was based on fiber-optic cables, with flexible plates of armor attached

The vision for the IP was 80s sci-fi inspired space opera

The concept art of Saren lifting Shep by the throat inspired a similar scene in-game. The staging wasn’t planned til designers saw that art

A squadmate with Shepard on the way to meet Ash in an old storyboard was called Carter. Early name of Kaidan or Jenkins?

Bono from U2 was kinda instrumental in bringing us ME lol

Finding the right cover art for ME1 was notably tricky

Matt Rhodes got his start drawing helmets for ME1, including one which would become Shep’s “second face”. He estimates he drew between 250-270 different ones

Some of the sounds in-game were people smashing watermelons with sledgehammers and sticking fists into various goos

The audio team had fun trying to slip the iconic main theme into unexpected places throughout the MET. “We were very aware of how powerful that track was for the fans and it was tempting to overuse it for any moment we wanted to make really emotional”.

The theme was creatively repurposed in ME3: slowed down and reworked as the ambient sound for the SR-2. “If you listen to it for a really long time, just stand in the Normandy and listen, you’ll actually hear the notes change slowly. It doesn’t sound like music, it sounds like a background ambiance, but it’s there.” (My note: Well no wonder the Normandy feels so much like home?? 😭 sneaky..)

Bug report: “Mako Tornado”. There wasn’t enough friction between the tires and the ground, causing testers to lose control of the vehicle and send it spinning into the air like a tornado. “As it turns, the front end comes up, and then it starts spinning and spinning and spinning and spinning faster and faster and faster until it just flies up in the sky” (My note: Sounds like a regular day in the Mako to me)

Cerberus originally had a bigger role in this game. It was cut but they had a whole explorable outpost. “I called it Misery,” says Mac Walters, “It was this planet with a little outpost that said ‘Welcome to Misery’”. Everything on the outpost was shit - dirty worn stuff, no windows, no kitchen, the vehicle bay was open to the elements etc

The Reaper sound is literal garbage. Some audio designers went on a recording trip to a national park. One of them got fixated on a garbage can, “a metal bear-proof receptacle with a heavy lid that creaked horribly when opened”. “It was like, ominous, spooky, tonal and almost musical. I decided to throw a mic into the garbage and record it moving. I didn’t know what it was going to be until later”

They were making lots of noises to record like throwing logs and rocks around. An old couple peered at them through the window of their camper van in the woods and must have called the cops because then the cops showed up, pulled them over and told them to stop. The cops towed their car (the driver’s plates were Cali plates and expired), drove them to Edmonton outskirts and then the audio producer Shauna got a call and had to go pick them up “like three little boys”. “We got a stern talking to”. Once back they were playing around with the garbage sound, editing it etc. Casey heard it and proclaimed “That’s the sound of the Reapers”

Preston Watamaniuk: “There are things I could have done to Mass 1 to make it an infinitely better game with better UIs” and some simple cuts and changes. “But when you’re living with it, it’s very hard to see those things”

BioWare Labs

As social media and smartphone games exploded, BioWare dedicated a small team dedicated to exploring opportunities here - BioWare Labs

Mass Effect: Galaxy used a unique graphic art style and static visual presentation common in visual novels. It has the distinction of being the only iOS game BW have made during their first 25 years

Scrapped ideas were a 3rd person space shooter called Mass Effect: Corsair and 2 DA titles - a strategy game and a top-down dungeon crawler starring young Wynne. (My note: Maybe the corsairs stuff was rolled into Jacob’s backstory in 2, the Alliance Corsairs)

Corsair was a very short-lived project that never got its feet under it. It was a spin-off on Nintendo DS featuring a behind-the-ship perspective and branching dialogue. At one point it had MP. The idea behind it was basically “ME: Freelancer” - fly your ship around, do missions, get credits. It had a limited branching story but was a gameplay-centered experience intended to fill the gap between ME1 and 2. That gap ended up being filled by Galaxy

Galaxy and Corsair’s smaller screen allowed concept artists to use bold colors and a simplistic character design style to help those games stand out from Shep’s story

Nick Thornborrow did some art for Corsair but was worried his art style didn’t fit ME. He moved to DA where he feels his art style fits better

Lots of BioWare VAs and even a lead writer and the VO director are drawn from Edmonton’s local community theater scene, which is vibrant. Think this is how Mark Meer got involved

Mass Effect 2

Player choices carrying over was a first for BW

Dirty Dozen-inspired plot

Its plot is a web of conditionals (see Suicide Mission)

Was more of a shooter than anything BW had made since Shattered Steel

There was 2 camps on the team, those who wanted to push combat and systems forward and redefine the ME experience and those who wanted to make a true sequel, with the same gameplay and systems but a new story. Karin Weekes: “I think it ended up being a good push-pull. It felt like a pretty healthy creative conflict”

“ME2 was a game you could hold up to someone who argues that games aren’t a serious medium and go ‘Oh yeah, then why is Martin Sheen in this?’” Sheen was their first pick for TIM

The idea for TIM came from a mash-up of concepts CH had collected over the years. The name “Illusive” originally came from his pitch for naming DAO’s Eclipse engine, a word inspired by Obi-Wan’s line “It’s not about the mission, Master. It’s something... elsewhere. Elusive”. “I thought, what if we called our next engine 'Elusive', but used an ‘I’, and then it’s like ‘Illusion’. [...] I still really like the word with an ‘I’ and what it conjures”

When ME1 DLC was in production, CH had been watching a lot of CNN, specifically Anderson Cooper. “How is one guy travelling to all these places and never looking tired and always being able to speak with clarity?” CH says it seemed almost superhuman. “What if there was someone who is the absolute maximum of the things you would aspire to be, but also the worst of humanity?” Cooper, though not evil, became an inspiration for TIM down to the gray hair and piercing blue eyes

Inspiration for TIM’s behind-the-scenes role pulling political strings came from Jack Bauer’s brother Graem in 24. Graem “can call up the president and tell him what to do and hang up, because he’s so connected and so influential”. Sheen had played a president and his performance brought gravitas and wisdom to the role. He had quit smoking, but the character smokes. He didn’t want to fake it, but he also didn’t want to smoke, “so he actually asked for a cigarette” to hold so he could stop his words to take drags with natural cadence

Writing was still pushing to write and revise lines hours before VO started. A series of problems like injury and some writers leaving for other opportunities left it so that Karin, Lukas Kristjanson and editor Cookie Everman hand to land the story safely, with PW helping where they could. Lukas: “We took over the writing bug and task list, and I can’t stress enough how much [Karin and Cookie] did to get ME2 out the door. There’s no part of that thing we didn’t touch”. Karin: “That was the most dramatic 2 weeks of my life”

Initial fan reaction when they started promo-ing ME2 was very negative because people didn’t want to know about new chars like Jack and Mordin. “[fans were like] ‘Get them out of here. We want our characters from the first game’. But then when they played them, those became some of the most popular chars [of the series]”

Concept art of Thane has an idea annotation saying “Face can shapeshift?”

At one point when designing Thane concept artists sent multiple variations of him to the team asking them to vote on which was the most attractive

Most of the Normandy crew was written by lead level designer Dusty Everman. Lukas gave him advice in the evenings between bugs

BioWare Montreal made ME2 and 3 cinematics

CC for Shep was based on tools used by char designers to create in-game chars. Under the hood similar tools existed to create aliens

Aliens were much easier to animate than humans. When something is human it’s very difficult to make it look realistic and you can see all the mistakes and everything

Over the holiday period in 2007 CH worked out a diagram on a single piece of paper that would define the entire scope and structure of the game. The diagram is included in the book

Bug report: “I shot a krogan so hard that his textures fell off”. At one point shotgun blast damage was applied to each of the pellets fired, and shot enemies ended up with just the default checkerboard Unreal texture on them after their textures got blown off

Blasto was meant to be 1 step above an Easter egg but his fan popularity prompted them to bring him back in ME3

They rewrote chunks of Jack 2 days before she went to VO. She was the only one they could change because all the other NPCs were recorded. They redesigned her mission by juggling locked NPC lines and changing Shep’s reactions by rewriting text paraphrases to change the context of the already-recorded VO

Lukas snuck obscure nods ito ME2′s distress calls. In the general distress call for the Hugo Gernsback, there’s BW’s initial’s and Edmonton’s phone number backwards. In a fault in a beacon protocol there’s the initials and backward phone number from Tommy Tutone’s “Jenny”. In 2 other general distress calls there’s initials and numbers from Glenn Miller Orchestra’s “Pennsylvania 6-5000″ and initials and numbers from Geddy Lee and Rush’s “2112″ respectively 

Mass Effect 3

“The end of an era marks the beginning of another”

ME3 “marked the end of Shep’s story”

Saying bye to Shep was as difficult for devs as it was for players

JHale’s final VO session included Anderson’s death and romanced Garrus’ goodbye. “We were in the session and we both just started crying”, Caroline says. “I couldn’t come on the line to give her notes because I was crying, and she was crying. And so there was just this minute-long pause of like, nothing, nothing, nothing - just silence through the airwaves. And then I came on and just told her that I was crying and she said ‘I’m crying!’” They talked about these anecdotes also here on the N7 Day reunion panel

The Microsoft Kinect voice support required devs to teach Kinect hundreds of commands in a variety of accents across multiple languages. The result was useful but made for some awkward moments. Numerous players accidentally said “geth” or “quarian” while making a particular decision and accidentally killed Tali

MP chars were voiced by cops and military people

The helmet on one of the MP chars was originally designed for cancelled project Revolver

The payload device at the end needed to attach to the Citadel while essentially serving as a giant trigger. “It ended up becoming quite the engineering feet just to visualize how this thing would move and connect to the Citadel”

Concept artists explored creating an anti-team, where Kai Leng was almost an anti-Shepard essentially, with an elite squad to counteract your team. This idea never went beyond concept phase

ME3 Special Edition was released on Nintendo Wii U exclusively. This exclusive version of the game includes Genesis 2 (a sequel to the original Genesis comic) and unique gameplay features that took advantage of the touchscreen GamePad. For years Sonic Chronicles: Dark Brotherhood had had the honor of being BW’s only game made for a Nintendo console

FemShep regrettably didn’t feature in major ME marketing til ME3. Later releases like DAI, MEA and Anthem have taken increasing care not to gender their protagonists in cover art

To capture combat sounds they took a trip to CFB Wainwright, a military base southeast of Edmonton. They got a big tour of it and were allowed to record anything they could find. The tour ended with them getting to drive and shoot tanks (real shells). The force of doing that sent waves through Joel Green, he felt his whole chest compress when it went off; the perfect sound for the Black Widow! After the trip the soldiers let him keep the shell he fired and it’s been passed on like a torch to various devs since

Kakliosaurs began life as a joke in the writers’ room after John Dombrow placed a Grunt figure on a t-rex toy he had on his desk. Lore was brainstormed to justify the mash-up before someone asked, “Why don’t we put this in the game?” They loved it so much Karin had custom coffee mugs made

Bug report: For a while Tali’s final romance scene would fire when she was supposed to be dead

“Balancing combat: how designers in ME3 entered an ‘arms race’” - the solution to players feeling OP vs players feeling frustrated by really strong enemies is to find a good middle ground, but for designers Corey Gaspur and Brenon Holmes, it was war. Brenon designed enemies, Corey designed guns. Corey “was obsessed with bigger, heavier guns. We had this sort of informal competition where he’d make this crazy overturned gun that would just murder all the enemies, and then I tuned some stuff up to compensate”

Brenon had to invent new ways to “stop Corey” and this led to the Phantoms. Corey had in turn designed consumable rockets that could wipe out entire waves of enemies. He must’ve figured this would make short work of Brenon’s space ninjas, but Brenon had other plans: “I had just added the ability for her to cut rockets [when Corey was playing MP and he was watching]. She cut the rocket in half... Corey just turns and looks at me and is like: ‘Really dude? I just shot a rocket at this Phantom and she’s fine? Not even damaged? Zero damage?’” 

This friendly rivalry helped elevate ME3′s gameplay. Corey had a knack for making a gun feel so good to fire it had his fellow designers scrambling to keep up. It was his version of balancing. Before Corey sadly passed away he mentored Boldwin Li in all things weapon design and the arms race continued

Corey designed the Arc Pistol. It was causing problems for enemies because it was too powerful. It seemed hell bent on staying that way, Boldwin would tune down all its stats and it was still doing 3x the damage it should have been doing. “I was like ‘What the hell?’, and then I looked closer. It secretly fired 3 bullets for every pull of the trigger! Corey, you sneaky jerk”

The day it launched there were midnight launch parties across North America including one near the BW building. Numerous devs sat at long tables greeting fans and signing autographs as the fans picked up preorders. When midnight struck the line was long enough that it took several hours for some fans to get their game. One particular fan is remembered: “It was 3am. Some guy drove up from Calgary with his friends. He was like one of the last people in line. I think he was sort of tired-drunk. He threw himself across the tables, pulled up his shirt and shouted ‘Guys, sign my abs!’ And like I did, because he waited so long. It felt impolite not to. So I hope he enjoyed his copy of ME3″

For designing Protheans concept artists had free reign to design something that read as ancient

Before the concept art team had the story of the game to work toward, they explored wild ideas of their own including an image of the crew stealing back the Normandy to go after the Reapers

Jen Cheverie was testing scenes and was initially excited to be testing Mordin scenes, til she saw she was testing the Renegade version of his death. “This is even before like all of the audio and everything was in, so you didn’t even have the sad music. I remember sitting at my desk and my hands just went to my face when I saw that the gun Shep pulls on Mordin is the gun he gives Shep in ME2. I burst into tears and was crying for the rest of the day. People are waving to me as they walk by and I’m like, ‘It’s ok, I’m just killing my best friend’” 

There’s a segment called “Shepard’s story ends”. Casey on the ending: “There’s a whole bunch of things that come together to make it incredibly tense and emotional for players. I think the biggest one was the sense of finality, that whatever it was that happened in that very last moment... was it.” 

Wrapping up the story was a massive feat. In a way all of ME3 is an ending. Its final moments were the players’ last with a char they’d been with all the way from Eden Prime

“And while the critical reception of the game was extremely positive, many fans were unsatisfied with the ending, which became one of the most controversial in the history of games.” CH: “We were, on one hand, at the end of a marathon trying to finish the game and the series. But as devs we also knew that there would be more. We knew that we would continue to tell the story. In retrospect, we didn’t fully appreciate the tremendous sense of finality that it would have for people”. He envisioned an ending that posed new questions, something in the tradition of high sci-fi that left players dreaming about what that particular galaxy’s future could hold. “Frankly, there’s a lot more that we could have and should have done to honor the work players put in, to give them a stronger sense of reward and closure”

AAA games are massive undertakings with a million moving parts. Somehow they come together but even the best-planned projects don’t turn out quite like devs hope. From start to end video game production is a series of compromises. It’s rare if not impossible for devs to ship a game they’re entirely happy with. “I think that people imagine that when you finish a game, it’s exactly the way you wanted it to be. But whether people end up loving or hating the final result, we work hard to finish it the best we can, knowing that there’s a lot we would have wanted to do better. I think that’s true of any creative work”

As the dust settled after the initial reaction to the ending and later its epilogue, meant to show the wide-reaching ripple effects of Shep’s final choice, “players emerged mostly asking for one thing”. CH: “Now, most of what we hear, after both ME3 and MEA, is ‘Hey, just go make more Mass Effect’. And that to me is the most important thing. Knowing that players want to return to the ME universe is what inspires us to press on and imagine what comes next”

Mass Effect: Andromeda

By creating a new ME in a new galaxy the team was challenged to put their own visual stamp on the game while keeping it true to the franchise

Being the first ME game on a new gen of consoles meant for more detail

“Massive transport ships called arks populated with salarians, turians, humans, asari and quarians” made the risky jump to the Cluster

MEA was the first time BW had truly codeveloped across 3 studios: Edmonton, Montreal and Austin. The bulk of the work especially early on was done in Montreal, which was composed of a handful of Edmonton expats and heaps of experienced devs who joined from elsewhere specifically to bring a new ME experience to life. Series vets in Edmonton then came on to contribute writing, cinematics, design and QA, along with leadership from creative director Mac Walters and the core Production team. Austin writers and level designers also joined the fray

“It took a new team to take ME beyond the Milky Way”

Mac: “A lot of people in Montreal joined BW as fans of the franchise, so they just had this passion, and it felt like it was more like the days of Jade Empire, where a smaller younger team gets to do something for the first time. Even though it wasn’t necessarily a new IP for me, it felt fresh and new because of that. The team was just super excited to be working on it”

Early plans had the player exploring hundreds of worlds, procedurally generated, allowing for a nearly infinite variety of experiences. But as development wore on, it became clear that the game narrative required more specific, hand-touched level design on each world to keep the story focused and the experience engaging. “The plan was to give players numerous uncharted worlds to explore. Designers worked hard to come up with procedural elements that would make such planets special. Eventually the team made the difficult decision to abandon procedural planets in favor of more memorable hand-touched alien worlds, each with a specific story to tell”

One challenge was defining what ME meant without Shep. Care was given to include many of the MET’s key species. “Ryder recruited turian, asari, krogan and salarian followers”. Like Shep Ryder represents humanity’s hope for a peaceful coexistence among aliens who had long operated without human contact

Beginning with MEA the team decided that with few exceptions vehicles in ME have 6 wheels. Early Nomad concepts were bulkier. Later ones focused on its ability to move over its ability to protect itself from hostile fire, underlining the themes of exploration

German concept designer and auto-motive futurist Daniel Simon was contracted to create the Nomad and Tempest. The Tempest’s final design took inspo from the Concorde 

Concepts for angaran fighter ships have the following notes: “Two doors swing open, wings rotate down to function as landing struts, the landing struts split open. It has a spinning turbine engine 

Despite being set a galaxy away and some 600 years after Mordin’s death, there was a time when he had a cameo. It wasn’t cut due to running out of time however, it was cut due to drug references. John Dombrow explains: “One day I had to write a small quest for Kadara. I thought it’d be amusing if these 2 guys living way out on the fringes in a shack were growing plants for uh, medicinal purposes, and needed Ryder’s help with it. It occurred to me, wouldn’t it be amusing if Ryder had the option of actually trying ‘the medicine’ to see what would happen? And I thought, what if it turned into some hallucination that somehow involved SAM - like maybe SAM would sing? But why? How could I motivate that? Then it hit me. Who else in the ME game sings unexpectedly? MORDIN. As a nod to him I wrote SAM singing Modern Major-General. It got even better when our cine designer John Ebenger wanted to take it even further. Bless him, he came in on a Saturday to do a special hallucination showing Mordin himself. It was great. Til the fateful day we were told MEA had already been submitted to the ratings board. That’s when you declare things like drug references in your game. Mordin fell under that category which meant it was a no-go. We were too late”

Ryder’s white AI armor contrasts Shep’s iconic dark armor (intentional design)

Concept art for Ryder involved experiments with cloth (cloaks, ponchos, capes - “Pull here to release cloak”) and asymmetrical design elements

For alien design, there’s a few exceptions but humanoid figures are the ME standard and this persisted into MEA

Kett and angara concepts explored striking lines and textures 

– From Bioware: Stories and Secrets from 25 Years of Game Development

[ssa-dg]

Undercover Part 1

part 1, part 2

Overview: the BAU has gone undercover to find a potential unsub who has been drugging, raping and murdering women. It own becomes a potential victim. Having to play her part to catch the bad guy, you go to the party all dressed up and dance with a potential murderer all while pretending he is someone else, Spencer Reid.

TW: drugs, rape (it is mentioned how the unsub rapes his victims. the reader is drugged and the unsub takes advantage of her being drugged and begins to take off her dress), murder, sex, adult themes. if these types of things are triggering for you please don’t read. I’m just a average person who tried their best to not cause people to be upset. If this is problematic I’m sorry I didn’t mean for it to be and will take it down.

Relationship: Spencer Reid x (female)reader

word count: 3,384

Author’s note: so this is my first ever Criminal Minds story. If it garners enough attention I will do more parts (honestly even if it doesn’t I probably will lol) PSA: I have never been under the influence of MDMA and honestly I don’t judge if people who do it consensually and safely (which is harder said then done). this is how I imagine it to be like to be on it. Also I like writing and I like sharing my writing because all of the great fan fics that cause me happiness, if I can cause that reaction just to one person that’s enough for me

You would do anything to save the world. Maybe it was a hero complex, maybe it was some form of glory seeking, or maybe it was the only way you knew how to fill the dark abyss you felt when you did nothing of importance. Being a part of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, helped with that. Being on the team gave you everything you needed, a family and a way to save others. Maybe saying you love your job isn’t the correct way to explain your emotions but you knew no better way. Although you wish a job like this wasn’t necessary and didn’t even exist, it did.

Your team meant the world to you and you would contribute almost in any way to help find an unknown subject. So when Penelope Garcia was able to connect the killings in New York City to some private “rich people” clubs, her and the team created a plan to infiltrate.

The victimology was specific. It was all rich young women ranging from the ages 19-30 who just moved into the city to find themselves.

The profile was an easy one to figure out. He was obviously a troubled young white male who was probably an heir of some sort. He was richer than what most people think is rich. He usually meets the victim at a high society social event. Then he’d take them to a more exclusive social event. After that he would drug them with MDMA, rape and kill them.

It was hard for the BAU to get much out of the enclosed and tight group of New York’s most elite families. So going undercover at an event where the unsub could potentially hunt for prey was what made most sense. Your jobs was to observe the women and men there and try to see if any of you could fish out the unsub. 

They had done it in the past but usually they did their best work by watching and observing. So here the team was, their second night in a row all dolled up in fancy cocktail dresses at some art gallery. Tara Lewis and Luke Alves stood around a table pretending to talk to each other as they observed potential victims. Jennifer Jareau, Spencer Reid, and Matt Simmons stood at another end of the room checking for the potential unsub, while your unit chief, Emily Prentiss, and you were pretending to be alone at the event eavesdropping on rich families. You listened to those around you while also scanning the room looking for potential young white men talking to lone young women. “Ten o’clock to the creepy face painting,” you heard Alvez say in your small earpiece. You calmly turned pretending to look at the other art pieces and saw a white male in his mid-thirties walking up to a female. He placed his hand on her low back as he leaned in to talk to her. Emily being the closest nearby out of you two, moved closer acting like she was going for some hors d’oeuvres. “That’s not him. He’s too drunk. I can smell all the alcohol he has consumed. He would need to be smoother than that,” Emily whispered as she took a sip of her glass. That’s how most of the night went. We followed and stared at people who might be the unsub and then filed them out. You felt yourself losing hope. You hated this part of the job. The one that made you feel like the profile was wrong and you all would have to start over, which there was never time to start over. Someone could die. That’s when you felt a hand touch the small of your back, your body tensed up immediately. “Relax,” he whispered in your ear. But you didn’t need to force it, because when you turned to look at the person who touched you, you were met with the face of beauty and your body instantly relaxed. You knew this was a dangerous reaction, as would probably many of Ted Bundy’s victims.

The man before you had slicked back short dark hair, bright blue eyes, strong symmetry in his facial features, and strong cheek and jaw bones. He smiled wickedly at you, causing you to intake a sharp breath. It was so sinister but also so beautiful. It wasn’t the most beautiful smile you’d ever seen, no that was reserved for your teammate, best friend, and love of your life (even if he didn’t know it) Spencer Reid. Now, Spencer’s smile was one you could get lost in. You refocused yourself to the beautiful man in front of you. “They say the artist intended for this particular piece to show trauma while he was drinking. His other pieces are other emotions on different drugs,” his deep voice rattled through your ears. You wanted to unwrap yourself from this man’s embrace. How dare he touch you like that without your permission. “Play along,” Luke spoke as he saw a scowl beginning to form on your lips, “he could be the unsub.” You smoothed the scowl into a smile. “It doesn’t look like it depicts trauma,” you responded dumbly. The man before you cocked his head to the side giving you a lopsided smile. “I guess it all depends on how someone experiences trauma,” the smile now wicked, and scarier. A shiver went up your spine. “Are you cold?” He asked, noticing it, while looking you up and down like he could devour you. “No,” your voice came out scratchy as your throat went dry. You cleared it politely. “Just thinking-” “About your own trauma?” He asked. You could hear the fake tone of concern. That snapped you out of your fear. The pictures of all the murdered women that brought the BAU to this case flashed before your eyes. “Maybe,” the smile you plastered on your face was a one you knew he wanted, a sad smile. You were going to play this role like it’s no one's business because you were here to catch a bad guy and if flirting with a creep got you there then so be it. He leaned in closer to your ear, “my name is Alistair Constantine,” you immediately recognized the name. It was on the list of potential unsubs for the profile. His family’s money was old, going back to the revolutionary war. The family seemed to always be updating with the times and never losing that money. You leaned into his other ear and introduced yourself.

Spencer’s hands were clutched at his side as he watched you interact with the Constantine boy. He felt in his gut at this moment, Alastair was the unsub. The way he was looking at you, it was like you were a quest to conquer. Spencer knew he couldn’t just come up, break you two apart and blow the whole investigation but boy did he want to.

Alastair paraded you around the room.  Every now and then he would talk to fellow members of the society. It took everything in you to pretend that you didn’t want to beat his ass right then and there. You were always an imaginative kid growing up so you blocked out the gruesome pictures of the crime scenes and instead pretended this was your life a young New York woman getting special treatment from a handsome man. It was easier to fit the rom-com role then what was actually happening. Alistair stopped in front of a painting that was particularly psychedelic looking with bright pastel colors. “This is my favorite piece by the artist. This was when he was on Ecstasy. Look at the happiness and distorted-ness to the art. It’s amazing,” he gushed. It would have been odd that he picked this particular painting to attach too, but it was a strong tie to the method of his killings. “Humankind cannot bear very much of reality,” you spoke out, breaking Spencer from his thoughts about if they had enough information to convict Alistair for the murders. Alistair looked at you funny, not understanding why you would say that. “T. S. Eliot” you told Alistair while Spencer whispered it at the same time. a ghost of a smile playing on your lips when you heard Spencer’s voice. “It’s what I think of when I look at this art. T. S. Eliot is one of my favorite poets,” you blushed at your admission. It felt like for a second, with having just heard Spencer’s voice, that you were talking to him instead of Alistair. Spencer was now looking straight at you two. His eyes held bewilderment, he has known you for years and you never once mentioned this, and he knew you knew this was something he cared about. 

“Indeed,” Alistair yawned. 

The next 30 minutes was you telling him how you’d grown up in Boston, Massachusetts, that you had no close relatives anymore, and how when your parents died their life savings all went to you (all of it true), the lie came when it was to talk about why you moved to New York City, what you wanted to do with your life etc. And he ate it up every second. You played the roll of being the lonely damsel in a big city trying to find the answer to life. You were his ideal victim and you knew that he didn’t even question how perfect you were. 

The night ended with an invite to the society’s ball tomorrow night, and Prentiss fed your ear a fake address for Alistair to send a car to tomorrow. You ordered an Uber to the address where Emily said they’ll pick you up to not seem suspicious in case Alistair sent someone to follow you. Once at the address the FBI’s SUV pulled up and you got in. It was Spencer who picked you up, which was unusual, as he never liked driving. You climbed onto the passenger seat and saw his knuckles were white from the strength of his grip on the steering wheel. It didn’t take a profiler to know Spencer was mad. “Spencer, are you alright?” You approached with a soft whisper. There was a pause of silence, Spencer calculating if he should be honest. He eventually gave into the truth as he knew that he couldn’t hide it from you. “No,” he growled, the anger in his voice causing you to jump in surprise. “No, I am not okay. That man is a murderer and he was holding you in his arm! You two were practically dancing around the room in there. We have put you in danger and now, now you are his next target, his next victim!” he hit the wheel in anger. You had never seen Spencer this angry before. Most times when Spencer got angry, he got smart and he used his logic to fight but now he sounded emotional. “Spencer,” you raised your voice, “I am not a victim, I’m an agent. I will do what it takes to protect others. Just like you.” In anger Spencer swerved the car to the side and put it in park. “Dammit, You don’t get it,” he yelled and turned towards you. “If he is our unsub, which we both know he is, I’ve run the calculations and the risk is too high for you,” his hands flying everywhere in gestures, “There are too many dependent variables. There isn’t enough for us to control. The probability of you getting hurt or,” he stopped to collect himself, and in a quieter voice said, “or worse, it’s too high. I’ve run the math.” Now that sounded more like the Spencer you knew. A soft smile crept onto your lips, then you quickly neutralized your face, in hopes he wouldn’t see the way his concern for you made you feel. And You couldn’t do that to yourself. You couldn’t let yourself feel happiness when Spencer showed you affection, because it eventually just leads to heart break. Subconsciously, you turned more towards him in your seat, “In your math is there probability that we get this guy and he never gets the opportunity to hurt another woman again?” You asked. Spencer gave you a pained look like he knew where you were going. You countered that look with one that told him to answer the question. He let out a heavy sigh, “yes. There is that possibility.” You smiled at him knowing you won the argument, “That settles it then.”

With everyone back in the small conference room at the police station, the conversation began about what to do tomorrow. No one was pleased that one of their own is now the target but there was truth that the situation was now more in the BAU’s control than before. Everyone also believed in you. They knew the risk and that scared them but also you are a Special Advisory Agent for a reason. Relief did not fill you but neither did dread, when you thought of the plan. You were doing the right thing. It didn’t matter if you were going to put yourself in danger.

Spencer kept pressing the heel of his hands into his eyes. Something that happened when he started to get headaches and you could guess this headache was caused by stress. As the rest of the team started packing up, you stared at your best friend hurting over the stress you were causing. You took a seat next to Spencer. He was still wearing his suit from the party. “We are going to be okay tomorrow,” you comforted him. He looked up at you, “I’m not worried about all of us, I’m worried about you,” he confessed. Once again, you knew these words shouldn’t have an effect on you like they did, but it did and this time there was something that felt hidden behind those words, something more. “I trust you not to let anything happen to me,” You countered and placed your hand on his forearm to comfort him. You looked in his eyes and tried to let him know that there is more than just trust there. 

The day of the ball, you got ready in the police station bathroom. It wasn’t exactly how you imagined to be getting ready for your first ball in New York City. You’d rather be wearing this gown for other reasons than going undercover to catch a murderer rapist. The Givenchy dress Garcia picked out was gorgeous (as you instructed her to get a designer to fit in the crowd and you would float the bill). It was a long evening dress in blue and green with a gradient-effect. The top had long puffed sleeves, deep V-neckline, and waist accentuated with smooth lamé and long flared skirt. You put your hair up in a loose low bun. The makeup you did was a smooth eye with long flair eyeliner. You put a heavy amount of glow highlighter on your cheek bones and collar bones to accentuate the deep v cut the dress. 

You felt ridiculous walking out of the bathroom into the police station wearing your dress. But the way Spencer looked at you was something powerful and intoxicating, making you forget your embarrassment. You strode up to him. A small smile played on your lips looking up at him. You saw him also smiling at you “You’re almost as tall as me,” he blurted out. You let out a small laugh, “‘I guess that’s what heels will do,” you smiled looking down at your feet. Spencer felt ridiculous that’s what he said. He should have told you how amazing you looked or how your beauty felt like the sun- always pulling him in and having his thoughts orbit around you. But he wasn’t good with voicing his feelings (especially in a room with his colleagues). 

“We are going to have Officer Melinda Jackson drive you over to the apartment, And stake out the car. She’ll be on the radio the whole time till you are in range with us. We will be at the Capitale when you get there.” Emily disclosed as she strapped on a microphone and earpiece.

You stepped out of the car with your head held high even though your anxiety was on another level. “i’m here,” you whispered. “We are here too,” Tara responded. Everyone disclosed where each one was to you. The venue was massive and beautiful. The ceiling was tall with ornate decorations. The lighting was a bright orangish glow. As you examined the room, checking each point of your team, you also saw Alistair. He was at the bar with what looked like to be a group of his friends. Spencer not too far behind them. You walked towards Alistair but kept your eyes on Spencer. He took your breath away dressed in a tux and his hair slicked back like he used to when he was younger. It felt like your heart was lit on fire just by looking at him all dressed up. He was staring at you intensely. It wasn’t that the world stopped the moment your eyes met his, but it was more like everything else just didn’t matter. You knew you’d have to look away soon to not give away anything but you took him in for just one more second. “You look amazing,” you heard a voice next to you say. You turned to see the ever good looking Alistair. He wore a navy 3 piece suite with a large Gucci tag on the sleeve, and a large Gucci flower pinned on his chest. You gave him a soft smile and returned his compliment. “I want to introduce you to my family. Their approval means everything,” he offered you his arm. You took it tentatively,  Spencer watched him lead you away, and he pondered on Alistair’s odd statement about family approval. 

Alistair’s family was everything you’d expect. They were proper and pompous. However they liked you, a lot. You fell right into the role you had to play. You stood there laughing and engaged in the conversation with his mom and cousin. 

“Shall we dance?” Alistair asked, giving you his hand, as your conversation with his sister came to an end. You nodded and let him take you to the dance floor. 

He spun you out and brought you back in close to start the dancing. You gave him a bright smile at his eccentric action. You closed your eyes and let your mind pretend it was Spencer holding you. You followed his lead as he twirled you both around the dance floor. “Stop dancing, we can’t see you,” Spencer frantically said into your ear piece. You snapped your eyes open. Taking in that you were on a secluded corner of the dance floor by an exit door. “You are special. My family, They like you” Alistair said with a sense of manic to it. “you aren’t like the others,” he admitted. His voice sounded different. It was sinister with a tinge of adoration. He pulled you close, so close that his fingers dug into your hand and back. You felt like your brain was freezing up in fear. How many times had you been in fear inducing situations and why did your brain pick now to not work. “you’re hurting me,” you groaned trying to pull yourself away. “Where are you” JJ yelled but then you felt mist hit you, and your mind begin to make things fuzzy, “the left corner, the spray…in the flower,” you breathed out, hoping the team could hear you. You heard a rattle of commands to your co-workers from Emily. Then it went black.

Spencer rushed through the crowd to find you but by the time he got to the corner you told him you were at, you were gone. “She’s not here,” Spencer panicked into the ear piece. “I just saw a black Tesla leave, license plate delta, alpha, hotel nine, one, two ” Luke informed them. “Call and ask them to run it”, Rossi said urgently. “on it,” Luke replied. “JJ and Reid, go talk to the mom and sister, Tara and Matt split up and talk to his friends and the other family members. They have to know where they are,” Emily demanded

[kiw-ii]

I love you're art and you're very talented, do you have any art advice?

thank you

but sadly no, I don't rlly have any good advice right now.. my head is hurting from thinking (yes I'm serious) so I honestly don't know what to tell you

However, I can tell you what others might tell you, which is this: "Just keep drawing in order to improve"

Or this:"study other people's art and see how they do things/watch their tutorials if they have any"

What follows next is my, probably very harsh and very strict, opinion on this.

I must say I'm really not a fan of the second advice, the "copy other people's work" advice. I actually hate it.

Observe and do something on your own then? Okay. Observe and just heavily reference other people's work or style of drawing? No.

I have never and will never use other people's art as reference or help. I just wanna do things on my own. I'm just rlly strict to myself and I want to always work honest and without any lazy shortcuts like copying or referencing other people's work. It's just a shit thing to do to others and it doesn't help you to improve. I'm not talking about studies of aninals, humans or fruit here tho 💀 Obviously, you aren't copying anyone if you simply find a picture of a cat you wanna draw. I mean,I had to reference Parker Simmon's Mao Mao in a way too, otherwise I wouldn't have learnt how to draw him. What I also mean by that is that I give him full credit for Mao Mao etc, obviously it would be a lie and theft if I said that I created Mao Mao 😂 However, I have also developped an own art style over the years, which, unfortunately, has been plagiarized a lot up to the point I stopped drawing for about a year.

So, if you wanna do yourself and the artists who you look up to a favor: Don't copy others. Don't copy their style (especially not if it's actually unique) or heavily reference their drawings in general . You are just gonna end up being unoriginal and dependent on others that way. OF COURSE you can do so if you give credit. Like, If I wanted to copy Parker's style, it would be obvious and I would definitely credit him. But am I being original that way? Hell no. Am I gonna inprove if I simply reference his art without trying to draw something on my own? Again, no.

you also shouldn't be like this and just say "Oh wowie I rlly love this style my favorite artist has, I'm gonna try replicate it without crediting them and I'll just act like I didn't reference their style and work at all lol". That's a terrible thing to do. So, instead do this: Ever afraid you might be stealing from someone? Simply give them proper credit when you know you have used their work as help in any way.

But other than that? Just do things on your own and honestly, just practice I guess. It depends on WHAT kind of artist you wanna become. Cartoonist? Realism? Portrait artist? Fan art? Original art? No matter what, I think you should always start off with some studies about still objects. Just try drawing an orange or your hand for example. Maybe only the outline. Not happy with the outcome? Draw again. Do this until you're happy with the simple outline. Then you can start with the details, like your knuckles, or those wrinkles on your fingers and palm. You can obviously draw other things as well. Idk how good you are at drawing already but I think there's nothing wrong with daily practise. That might also help you to get a steadier hand.

Another thing that you could train is drawing long and slow lines. That's also linked to steady hands.. I think? 😅 Aaanyway, short and fast lines might make your drawings look messy and just bad. Long will make your drawings look smooth and better in general.

I guess that's all I can tell you right now :< I'm rlly sorry I couldn't give you proper advice.. And that my reply is extremly long ;--; it's rlly late here so it might also be confusing to you.. I'm rlly sorry

[greaterlandscapes]

My Dean Blunt Rotation aka High Fidelity Left A Bad Taste in My Mouth

For the past 2 to 3 months, my listening habits were teetering to an end; mostly via burnout by spontaneously listening to local artists daily and less likely of a musical discovery drought, whereas my interests of a certain artist or genre hasn't found its, sort of, "eureka", moment per se. I've been feeling less enthusiastic over the things i listen to since my friends have gradually lost their flare when it comes to discovering/exploring untapped parts of the music realm. Thus, in return, my enthusiasm not being reciprocated. It leaves an empty feeling from someone who has been yearning social interaction, may it be media being latched on the topic - it's a feeling that's been guilt-tripping me ever since I was stranded in the other end of the metro. I feel closed off, exposed to the crippling loneliness the lockdown has punished us: a defacto solitary confinement in a national level. Our act of staying online is also an act of staying alive outside.

To be fair though, it's a valid move to not boomerang compliments/gripes over an art you haven't consumed due to someone's autonomy. Your able body being to consume the art you wish to finish with free time is a luxury in of itself. The art is then failed to serve its purpose to reach its goal: You have squiggly lines heading straight to oblivion rather than swirling in the earlobes of a wandering cyber nomad. We, eventually, need to find something that could help us exit, rather than escape, from capital. We, in return, do not shut ourselves from the outside. Instead, we then tend to avoid the stress of protocols and outdoor fascism; Not avoid the indoor liberalism that is eating us alive and online. It's a capital punishment we never knew we signed up for ever since the onslaught of the virus and the state. Art for art's sake is nonexistent now, always has been, it seizes to ever since we went inside. Feeding off of a holographic meatloaf coming from a glowing screen. We have a real-life Karen acting as a nightlight in our rooms.

The COVID lockdown made us listen to music — both for better, for worse. For one, it made us pass most days. You could say the same for any sort of media: film, mixed media art, or whatever pre-Covid activity that sprung up during our time in isolation. For music, however, there was an uptick of new listeners that made others Wheel-of-Fortune the fuck out of their music discoveries in sites like RateYourMusic, Bandcamp, or even Sophie's Floorboard. We've continued to expand and became more open change of opinions and be less of a jackass towards someone else's opinions. On second thought, our opinions have been catalogued, leaving more notes than actual footprints of our previous listens. Our new discoveries made new bands and re-emerging bands, bands who faded to obscurity, crawl back in the surface with newfound interest from younger listeners (ie Panchiko, Jai Paul, and Dean Blunt) and this glowing, previously unseen and unexpected overwhelming support from fans of departed artists (ie SOPHIE, MF DOOM)

For the other, we've hogged gratuitous amounts of media, resulting into losing our primary direction as to how we want to consume our media based on the preconceived notions of what we want in our art. There is goodness in becoming directionless when you think about it, but there comes a cost to our identity as music listeners. Instead, we end up widening our tangents, falling in endless rabbit holes, having zero chances to emerge from the surface. In fact, i refuse to call it a "rabbit hole" instead i'd rather call it a "pipeline" of sorts — transitioning casual music fans into a full on, different, unique versions of themselves that would define them when laws and protocols have eased in the outside world. Our act of staying online has either made most of us break our character or enliven our past selves. The music pipeline is now more apparent, stretching the norms of what was once alienated by a silent majority, but now accepted as an acceptable form of expression. The more music we are exposed to has made casual listeners stranged out or react in ways that our personality have betrayed us or deemed not as acceptable to them. Still, not changing anything that was prominent pre-pandemic. Liberal cop behavior is stronger, now more dangerous than it ever was once perceived by the outside world.

HIGH FIDELITY? NO, THANK YOU.

Imagine a situation inside of a record, pre-pandemic of course, where you do not feel like lifting a record out from the shelf, instead, you window shop just for the sake of windowshopping. Capital and media made us think that going to record shops is a semi-productive activity. The age of discovery has died ever since High Fidelity romanticized and normalized the incelage of horny record diggers. Does this movie age well, yeah sure it does, for old 90s nerds at least. But did it translate well over in the past 20 or more years of events and tragedies that unfolded in pre-9/11 America? No it didn't. It was an age of free expression, only liberals would dream of whenever they take a sip of Guinness beer in their favorite dive bar.

Mind you, over a couple of months ago, it was my only chance in seeing why this movie was the talk of the town back when it was released. There's music, yeah, and attractive leading leadies, yeah, it has everything a 90s kid would love to salivate and drop their gonads over while they watch this movie. I obviously did not live to see the movie on opening day but i could imagine the scent that came out of that movie theater with attendees donning windbreakers and The Who shirts with popcorn dressing stains on their plastic cups. If there was a Filipino counterpart to this movie, i'd bet corporate champions Eraserheads and Rivermaya would soundtrack their music over and have either Tado or have Boy 2 Quizon, but i sense it to age like milk more than it could age like fine wine due to the senseless jokes one can execute in a Cubao or Cartimar record store.

John Cusack is obviously the incel in question here: a damaged, vengeful ex who constantly fails to live his partner's expectations and weaponizes his personality over the situations that has nothing to do with his interests. I spent the entire time being absolutely disgusted over the spineless responses of John Cusack's leading character. The movie then treads on flashbacks with John Cusack's failed relationships and what he could do to move on from each and one of them. If i could stand a SONA for 3 hours then I can't stand John Cusack being the dull entry point to incel, making more reasons why you should hate record store clerks who don't give an iota of shits to someone's inviting rapport. High Fidelity is opium for massive music circle jerks who can't take a single breathe of fresh air or a single quota of touching grass. There's more targeting weak and inferior guys and hot women who dump dumb overconfident dudebros more than the actual "music recs" in the entire movie. The more I think about this movie, the more I realize how our personality is in line towards Dick, the record store being unmercifully dunked on by the movie's two leading characters. He's an angel in the world of cynical bastards, witnessing both demons pitchforking record store customers in the ass while they're purchasing the latest Sonic Youth album.

I believe that Jack Black, the dark horse of High Fidelity, has a pleasing personality more than an irritating demeanor due to this behavior in the record store. In fact, outside of the record store, Jack Black doesn't seem to take the business is your pleasure act pretty seriously. Unlike John Cusack's character he brought his obsession over involving a record in an important memory/point of his life. There is so much stuff that has happened outside of the record store, so much for Rolling Stone and NME being the bible of music at the time, endlessly christening and shilling artists that believe to become the second coming of the Beatles. The music references here however are treated as fluff than it is a mechanism that would drive the senseless plot forward. If anything, there are events pointed out in the event that doesn't have anything to do with the life of the characters.

If anything, this movie did a great job at capturing the feeling of music bros being dumped on the wayside by a mature set of characters and how their current conditions aren't perfumed by the studios' liking of having to Cinderella story the shit out of a bunch of normal record store owners. The reality is in the reaction of one's social capital being invaded and we're here to witness how those reactions panned out in 2021. This is a villainous depiction of music nerds being the salt of the earth, the bane of all media discussion, still reflective of the insufferable salt of cyberspace found in music forums like 4chan and RYM. High Fidelity is a pipeline of 90s musicology, a dreaded fever dream of an owner waiting for the decade to end, trends ossifying and re-emerged by the hands of nostalgia-savvy individuals. It was, at its time, every music-movie nerd's excuse equivalent of Scott Pilgrim VS. The World. There are memories worth remembering and cherishing, and this movie isn't one of them.

DEAN BLUNT, WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK

In the past two weeks I've been fancying myself into sitting down and listening to different projects from the ever elusive, UK-based sound artist Dean Blunt. The first time i chanced upon his music wasn't too long ago - albeit a recent one in the time of COVID - was when I randomly stumbled upon his records at a Spotify recommendations section under John Maus (yeah lol i know the implications whenever his name is mentioned) - but then i was enamored by his online presence so quickly I put everything down and dedicated an hour or two researching about this man's music.

Other than the fact that his album "The Redeemer" wasn't the best record to start off in journeying through his discography: ending up disgusted and borderline bored even and I was more likely to lambast this record's aimless, pretentious art-pop inflections. By the end of the day, it was a preference long solidified by his undying fanbase. According to his hardcore fans, the music isn't really music, evaluating it as a free form of sound art, rather than sticking to a structured and conventional cues; the genre is nullified by most analysts of the arts. The growing interest of the general public towards Dean Blunt's pranks and antics have long appealed to my tastes as a chaotic neutral individual. Pranks that are well executed to piss off UK gallery connoisseurs and entertain ironic attendees who'd shit on the art piece rather than participate in it.

More of the resources I've found about Dean Blunt online: numerous aliases and collaborations that lasted around almost 2 decades. The most notable of all them, at least for my money, are either Hype Williams, a duo consisting of Dean and frequent collaborator Inga Copeland, and Babyfather, an art performance parodizing the pirate radio culture in the UK. I have not delved enough in Blunt's body of work to evaluate everything and what i could synthesize from it. For now, I enjoyed it as a form of entertainment. Well, color me impressed because Dean Blunt isn't clowning around, he, in fact, makes blissful and transcendental music from left to right.

Dean Blunt was the only few artists that made me want to binge on their discography. His movements in his music has attracted this pesky listener who thinks that being mysterious is a plus. I mean, look at me who thinks The Paul Institute, Panchiko, and Burial are the greatest artists that have walked the face of the earth.

The most I've enjoyed from Dean Blunt's discography are his mixtapes and collaborations: preferably his Soul Fire and ZUSHI, both of which were packaged as B-sides or supplemental releases rather than major releases such as the Babyfather project or the Black Metal releases. His knack for blurring the lines between genres still fascinate me as of this writing, and it continues to amaze me how he doesn't seize to compromise his art, he's here to prove a point and it sells quite well despite the lack of direction in his music. Blunt's music has more aggressive and hazy texture than the hollow, wide, soulless structure of art-pop/hypnagogic pop released today. He creates terrains from the rubble of his country's current shortcomings. The music overlaps the actual intentions with abstract concepts, becoming deconstructed down the line. In Babyfather, noise music coincides with Blunt's amateurish rapping. In Black Metal, Blunt isolates himself along with the assisted skeletal guitar playing. Both projects throwing all tropes in a vaccum alongside Blunt, who he himself would sought to become a personification of a musical void.

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(Excerpt from the Babyfather album review in TinyMixtapes)

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Dean Blunt is an entity that wishes to become one person, but no, this isn't a figure in a specific art form; this isn't Banksy, this isn't Bob Ong, this is made by one person, clearly it is if you listen closely, and it's been entrancing me ever since his presence was felt on the horizons of the internet. Dean Blunt, what the actual fuck.