#and like. what i had to say about this wasn't the point of the original post so I'm making my own

[meanbossart]

im so curious-- how well does DUDrow get on with the other companions? I've only seen your art and going off that I feel like: he gets along with Shadowheart, Gale I think he borderline cant stand, and Wyll/Lae'zel/Karlach I have no idea how he'd feel about them but id love to know!

So, funfact, because I was not familiar with these kinds of games at the time I played BG3, I practically stuck with the same exact party the entire playthrough. I distinctly remember swapping Wyll in for Astarion once at the end of act 2 because I thought he NEEDED to be there to find Mizora, and I replaced Gale with Karlach when I went to kill Gortash. Otherwise... It was pretty much always just DU drow, Shadowheart, Astarion and Gale. I did this because they were the characters I liked most, so I wanted to see all they had to offer.

Anyways, I mention this because it reflects how DU drow related to everyone - which is to say that he didn't. He picked his favorites (two because he liked them, one because he has fireball) and didn't get particularly close to anyone else.

BUT, there were definitely notable dynamics!

Lae'zel: She's dead. He killed her night 3 or something. Before that he thought her annoyingly demanding and over the top. I don't think DU drow even remembers her by the end of the game.

Gale: Just to add to your original observation, Gale and DU drow have a little bit of history. Gale tries, for about half of the campaign, to pursue him romantically. DU drow keeps turning him down and is either misinterpreted or ignored, and by the time Gale does give up on him their relationship has completely soured to the point where they are constantly shooting daggers at each other. (this reflects a romance bug I got in my first run, except I didn't realize it was a bug. Either way I think its more interesting storytelling than the intended experience.)

Wyll: DU drow was profoundly frustrated by Wyll every step of the way. He found him to be incredibly naive and a bit delusional in his pursuit for heroism, and could never relate to Wyll's perspective or choices - the few he made for himself, at least. They definitely had the least in common and DU drow avoided interacting with him most of the time.

Halsin: He didn't care for Halsin much. He was vaguely helpful but by the time they got to the shadow-cursed lands DU drow had the impression he'd only been dragged here to help him clear his conscience, which he didn't appreciate. Also, he couldn't bear to have someone in camp be taller than himself. Halsin was left behind in Act 2.

Jaheira: DU drow fucking loves Jaheira. They bickered and borderline insulted each other and had a great time doing it. He can respect anyone who will call him a monster, threaten to murder him in his sleep, and make light fun at him the next day. It helps that she's hot, also.

Minsc: Weird hamster man. Ocasionally rendered him speechless. Puzzling human being.

Karlach: He didn't get Karlach, but he was often amused by her and curious enough to want to hear what she had to say. There was a similar issue here as Wyll's where he just couldn't relate to her enough to have much to discuss, but Karlach at least had an edge to her that made her far better company. They got along pretty well when the topic wasn't serious, but when it came to the problems she actually faced their perspectives shifted significantly. DU drow thought everything could be fixed, that accepting her own demise was a cowardly thing to do - and as they approached the end, and she asked him if he would stay with her when she died, he thought she was weak. I don't know if he ever discusses it with anyone, but he feels guilty about her death to this day and sees it as personal failure.

[felassan]

David Gaider on Morrigan, under a cut for length:

"Morrigan began, waaaay back, as a bit of Morgan le Fey (hence the Dark Ritual) mixed with Delirium from Sandman. The Delirium elements subsided into more of a weird cadence of speech as my idea of Morrigan solidified - more cynical, wanting to connect but unable to. Originally, we were looking for a Middle Eastern actress to play her, as Shoreh Aghdashloo was slated to play Flemeth and we wanted a similar sounding voice -- but it was a real struggle, and then Shoreh unfortunately had to drop out to do a movie. So suddenly we had nobody for either character! Then, one day, Caroline (our VO Director) comes in with a recording sent by a rep for Claudia Black - who hadn't done game VO back then but wanted to get into it. And it was Claudia doing a slow *beat poet* rendition of Baby Got Back. I kid you not. I was already a fan, so I lost my goddamn mind. (Yes, I still have the recording. No, you cannot have it.) Naturally, we jumped on that immediately. As I recall, this was met with resistance from higher up - they had this image of Morrigan as young, like 18 years old (no idea where this came from) and complained that Claudia sounded "too old". Them: "She sounds like she smokes three packs a day!" Me: "That's what I like about her!" Caroline and I were determined, so we pushed ahead. We had to agree to get Claudia to sound "younger", which I was dubious about. The first two sessions we asked her to pitch her voice up and it was AWFUL. Claudia had to focus on sounding "right" instead of acting. So Caroline and I did the sneaky thing, and on the third session we asked her to just... act. Use her natural voice. We loved her performance so much we had the feeling that the team would love it too and forget their nonsense. They did. My best memory of Claudia was when we first met. I'd been flown down to LA for the initial sessions to help the major DAO actors find the character "voice" and, boy, was I nervous. It didn't help that I was a huge fanboy of Claudia's and she was going to be the *first* of all the actors I'd talk to. Caroline gave me a list of rules for "how to talk to a celebrity" - top of the list: DO NOT COMPARE THEM TO OTHER ACTORS. So I meet Claudia, and I'm sweating. I think: I'll start from the beginning, right? "Well, when I started writing Morrigan, the voice in my head was Helena Bonham Carter..." Claudia gives me a look and tilts her head. "So what you're saying is... I'm a very cheap version of Helena Bonham Carter." I'm mortified. I melt. I gasp and stutter and she lets me implode for maybe 30 seconds before she throws her head back and LAUGHS. So wicked. I love her instantly and forever. For the next several days, whenever she's in the booth and I make a comment to Caroline - which she can't hear, because the booth is sound-proof - she'd say "Oh, does he want it more like Helena?" And I'd melt into the desk in renewed mortification and she'd LAUGH. This is Claudia in a nutshell. Morrigan became a real touchstone for me, the heart of DAO. Way beyond her initial inspirations. Some said "she's just an ice queen" like some I'd written (Viconia, Bastila, etc.) but such categories are very reductive, I find. She had a voice I could instantly slip into, every time, without fail. The problem, after DAO was said and done, was with how we were going to honour the Dark Ritual going forward... or, more to the point, how we *weren't* going to honour it. I wasn't willing to let her go, however, so I had to figure it out. BUT... that's a story for another day. CORRECTION: A friend reminds me that the beat poet recording Claudia did was "Smack That" and NOT "Baby Got Back", and now I need to go give it another listen just because I can."

[source thread]

David Gaider: "Actually, when Shoreh's movie wrapped she came back and asked if the role was still available - her grandkids were VERY excited for her to be in a game. It wasn't, but as I recall Caroline was all "well, we have this role in ANOTHER game we're making..." Hence why she ended up in ME2." [source]

David Gaider: "Tali's accent was purely created by the actress - which made it a bit of an Issue when the time came to have more Quarians in ME2. "Do we get the actors to all try and mimic... whatever she's doing?" I'm certain Caroline could write a book about how THAT all went down." [source]

User: "I also never knew that Delerium was part of the inspiration for her (atleast in the beginning)." David Gaider: "It'd be difficult to see that now. The very first drafts were a lot more eccentric - more like Flemeth, I'd say, but times ten. The feedback I got was that she's a bit too LALALULU and I had to agree (and my idea of her was changing anyhow). So that slowly got weeded out." [source]

User: "What had you seen Claudia in that made you such a big fan already? (was it pitch black?)" David Gaider: "Originally? Farscape. Then Pitch Black, yes. I tried watching Stargate just for her, but coming in so late I kinda bounced off it." [source]

User: "My only complaint is, and has always been, why is she the straight romance when everything about her screams lesbian?" David Gaider: "I would have written it, if it’d been allowed (remember this was VERY new back then), but after all was said and done I’m kind of glad I didn’t. The friendship path I wrote for Morrigan with a female Warden is perhaps my favourite but of writing I did from back then." [source]

User: "Morrigant to me was such a fantastic character because of the way she sounded! Her introduction in DAO is iconic to me "Well, Well, what have we here?"" David Gaider: "You have NO IDEA how many takes that took. 😳" [source]

User: "Claudia Black did an amazing job with every line in every game." David Gaider: "She absolutely did. It took some time for her to get her bearings, but by the end of our first few sessions I actually went back and re-wrote a bunch of lines to match Claudia's voice. She informed so much of who Morrigan became." [source]

User: "are YOU the reason we see so much morrigan after dao? (positively, she is one of my all time favourite characters)" David Gaider: "Yes and no. She was always considered, by both me and the team, to be a "face" of Dragon Age. I'd have put her in DA2 if there'd been room, but thankfully that limitation is what allowed Flemeth to grow into her own." [source]

User: "were Morrigan and Flemeth always supposed to be Chasind, and/or did the Chasind have any ties to northern Thedas in earlier drafts of the character? The Chasind are universally depicted with dark skin except for Morrigan and Flemeth." David Gaider: "I don't think we had a very clear idea of the Chasind in general back then - they kind of got abandoned as a concept once we cut the Human Barbarian origin for DAO, and were only picked up again later." [source]

[0alix0]

Overusage of Lore

a lot of people tend to say that bioware put little to no lore into Veilguard, and i might be on a minority on this to me it's way too much and way too shallow

The entire game feels like writers just scream at you "Look at all the magical thing we have!! So we have Titans! And Evanuris! And Illuminati Those Across the See! And-- are you listening? You better listen cuz there are more! We have Shadow Dragons! We have Griffons! We--"

OMG calm down it's not a fucking Warcraft

the best thing in DA was the way it beautifully showed real life issues through the lens of medieval fantasy world.

The dalish weren't so fascinating because they had an entire language made for them and pretty tattoos. They were fascinating because they were enslaved, fought for freedom, then got their land taken away YET STILL continued to fight for survival, for their cultural identity, their children and their children's children, for freedom. Literally combination of native american's and jewish history. Because despite having one goal they all had different approach and opinion about other of their kin: city elves (those disconnected from their culture) and half-elves ("can they be considered elves?" "should they be allowed to be a part of dalish?").

The city elf origin wasn't so memorable because every npc had a backstory with a length of bible. It was memorable because it was the most obvious analogy on racial oppression, segregation, colonialism and fetishism in the entire franchise. Because it had the guts to actually show in details the horrors of these things.

Broodmothers weren't so horrifying because it's a female mixture of jubba hutt and a fucking pudge from dota with a detailed explanation their anatomy. They were horrifying because they were paralleling a very real misogyny, mistreatment, the way how women in some countries are seen as nothing but a walking uteruses, where the only thing they're good for is to give birth

AND bioware doubled it while doing the same thing with Orzammar, cast system & Rica!

The Circles weren't so interesting because we've got dozens of pages in WoT explaining their hierarchy/fraternities. No, they were interesting because it was literally a bunch of medieval GULAGs with a function of a mental hospital, it showed what mistreatments happen there, the abuse, child abduction and enforcement of religion.... And from the side of templars it was a discussion about professional deformation, addictions and the way high ranking people abuse those to control their underlings.

..... And you know, if we were back in origins, griffons, for example, would've probably been used as a parallel on irl eco terrorism. it might've been about how Wardens despite their good nature unintentionally bonded the general association of the entire animal species to their order and abused this connection to the point when the species was beyond preservation!

and btw, then that decision in davrin's quest would actually had any meaning, instead of throwing wardens into mud (again) and turning isseya into a villain for no fkn reason.

lore is only good as long as it's used for purpose, when it has things to discuss, not just exist

i don't fucking care about titans/evanuris/and other shit because they're just a 30 pages long article in codex and WoT trying to explain magic and write DA timeline almost to a fucking mesozoic era. it's BORING. Get me emotionally invested, then i'll care

[farenmaddox]

@wormieapple I don't want to reblog all your tags, but I do want to respond a little bit because you made some great points!

You kind of summarized it as "free will is ugly, has consequences, and is constantly in competition with the free will of others." I think that's true, but only up to the certain point of the original run of the show. I would tentatively say that I think this point has been eroding ever since season 6.

In the beginning, it was just about Sam and Dean having autonomy for their own bodies and souls and being allowed to make their own choices about who they can share those things with and/or give them away to. They spend a lot of seasons 4 and 5 finding out that a lot of their lives were "predestined" and they are left questioning how much of it was really up to them. But the story is about them fighting back against this idea, and Castiel comes in to provide this additional perspective that it's not just because they're the Winchesters and they're special, that this type of freedom should belong to anyone. At the end of season 5, they have thrown off the preselected narrative and saved the world. It did have consequences and it did hurt and not everybody survived, but the message is still that free will is a good thing and the world is better for it.

Everything from that point on has been very "free will's consequences are devastating, actually." They get so many people killed, and they have no victories that are not pyrrhic and directly leading to even worse problems. Every attempt they made to have a personality outside of their assigned role was brutally punished.

In my original post I was talking about Cas embodies this a lot, and how specifically every time he tries to grapple with or defend free will, it goes wrong. He wants so much for angels to have this, to make heaven a better place, but all it ever does is get them killed in droves. It literally never works even a little bit. Introducing free will to angels was unequivocally bad and this is never rectified or redeemed. The ending message is that angels can't handle free will and it's bad for them and for the world. But I'm also thinking about how they will never ever let Sam process his trauma meaningfully. Thinking about that scene in the apocalypse world (season 13, I think???) where they killed him and had Lucifer be the one to bring him back and hold him hostage to get to Jack. Sam is yet again helpless against Lucifer's wishes, as if nothing has changed in the last 10 years, directly contradicting what they wanted to say when they had him say "no" to Lucifer in season 11. When he wanted to use his trauma to display how resilient it had made him at the beginning of season 12, he wasn't allowed to have that either, they just drugged him and took what they wanted anyway. Sam is never allowed to be anything but a victim, EVER. All this before season 15 even happened.

Season 15 was where they should have drawn those threads back together and found a way to say, actually, you CAN escape these narrow definitions and things CAN change and your choices DO matter and the world IS a better place for having you and the way that you care in it. But they either didn't want to leave us with that message, or they fumbled the ball so badly that we're still talking about it on fandom ESPN these four years later. Like, no arguments that season 15 was terrible and spitting in the face of the story they were trying to tell before. But my main point is that I think the warning signs were there much earlier than season 15 and they were undermining themselves well before then.

... is it just me, or was Supernatural's ultimate thesis statement on the character of Cas that angels cannot and never will be any good at independent thinking and all efforts at expressing free will shall have unexpected and terrible consequences? He thought he was digging a tunnel out and he was proud of himself but actually all he dug was his own grave. The message being that you actually cannot escape the role you are assigned no matter what?

This is the message of Cas, as a way of underscoring the arc of the actual main two characters, in which the thesis statement is that you cannot escape the trap of toxic masculinity and patriarchal hegemony, you will never deal with your trauma in a way that matters, and you will die and spend eternity caught in its endless cycle. The maze has no exit.

the son becomes the father and becomes absent. this happens to all four members of TFW 2.0 in one way or another. god is dead, long live god. long live broken promises.

[sage-nebula]

There are two wolves inside me. One wolf wants to just let people have their fun, believing what they want. The other is feral and wants to tear apart the internet to source and direct link to every interview where Alex Hirsch says that Dipper is him as a child (with traits exaggerated), Mabel is his twin sister Ariel as a child (with traits exaggerated), Stan is their grandpa Stan (with traits exaggerated), and the show's premise is both a love letter to the childhood he spent with his sister and also, more specifically, the summers they would spend at their great-aunt's cabin, where they would be bored but required to keep daily journals and his would be stories he made up about encountering creatures and oddities in the woods around them. And this is all because the feral wolf is going to go from feral to savage if it sees one more post suggesting the actual core pillar of the show is Bill/Ford, rather than the found family (Alex Hirsch's own words!) the show is actually about, and the three based-on-real-people-including-Alex-himself characters in the middle of it.

[mofsblog]

I apologise if I wasn't very eloquent in my original post (I intended it to be a light-hearted shitpost and I did not expect this much attention). I will say I do still stand by what I said even if I feel like I did not communicate it in the best way. I know objectively that Vander is what brought them back together and I do think that if it had to be anything, it being him makes sense. However, my main issue is just that it feels very rushed and I wish it was given more time to be fully fleshed out and I wish we got more internal conflict from both of them before they reached this point. This feels like it needed a season to develop to feel organic for me

The reason why I made this post very watered down was mostly for comedic purposes but also in an attempt to convey how much development their relationships downfall had and how I felt their reunion felt underwhelming in comparison. Season one just put so much effort into making sure we understood every characters motivations intimately and I just personally found that lacking in Act 2. Like I could make a bunch of assumptions about the characters which I don't mind but it still feels a bit unclear which made the family reunion fall flat form me, personally. That being said, if you found it beautiful then more power to you. I'm glad someone got something out of it that I didn't

They really used all of season 1 and season 2 act 1 to hammer in the inherent tragedy of Vi and Jinx's relationship and how, despite the love they had and still partially hold for eachother, several factors out of their control (the majority of which can be seen as the direct and indirect consequences of them and other lower class being actively oppressed and treated like second class citizens by their own government and larger richer society at large) have lead to them both being traumatised repeatedly at an early age and drastically changing as a result and now they're past the breaking point and they've hurt eachother too much to probably ever be sisters again and theres nothing that can be done about it and youre left wondering what could've been.

and then two episodes and a nebulous timeskip after they try to kill eachother again, they reunite and have two scenes of arguing before being like. super chill and a family now. okay 👍

[cranberrymoons]

.

[jewishcissiekj]

I do like Ahsoka in the TCW Movie a lot and I think Dave Filoni himself should rewatch that movie to get a feel of Ahoka again and submit an essay explaining how she got to where she is now from there by next week. might just be me tho

[queer-omens-in-the-archives]

.

[duskdog]

The big defenses that I see from Jason Todd stans for this are these: 1. He didn't try to kill her by blowing up the school. I agree, actually -- I don't think he tried to kill her, I think he was sure she'd get clear (Mia herself suspects this and says as much)... but he still blew up a school for absolutely no good reason. 2. You guys are exaggerating the details. I don't believe we are, because it's a lot more nuanced than just "hero vs hero" -- if you're familiar with Mia's character, it should be obvious about why this attack was potentially more damaging to her than it might be to some other random hero. Regardless, the facts of what he did, without "exaggeration" or introspection into what any of this could have meant for Mia personally are bad enough to stand on their own merits: He kidnapped someone he has never even met before. It is a fact that he did this.

He took the time to research her origin -- which no reasonable person can deny includes some very sensitive topics such as sexual abuse, child trafficking, underage drug use, and HIV infection -- and then deliberately flaunted this information in her face. It is a fact that he did this. He attempted to convince her that her guardian wasn't like her and would never understand her. It is a fact that he did this. He fought her, including shooting at her, despite the fact that they didn't even know each other and she had never committed any wrong against him. It is a fact that he did this. He blew up her school, which not only disrupted her schooling, but the schooling of many other students, and caused a large amount of property damage. It is a fact that he did this. Mia was later shown to be troubled by this encounter, beyond anything she had previously shown for other "normal" fights. This is a fact that is expressed by Green Arrow, as well as shown on-panel where she lies alone and thoughtful, cuddling a soft toy. My point being, nobody has to "exaggerate" in order for any reasonable person to conclude that Jason was an unprovoked aggressor here, and that what he did was bad. "Oh he did that stuff, but it wasn't as bad as you say it was" isn't the winning argument that people seem to think it is. What, exactly, is the threshold for "bad enough" for a character to be held responsible for what they do? If you want to argue that Jason has changed since then? Sure, that's fair. But that has absolutely zero bearing on the things he did when he was like this. Taking responsibility for this attack would go a long way towards showing character growth, but we're unlikely to ever see that. Let your fave own his flaws and mistakes.

i really can’t get over the fact that at one point jason blew up a school because a teenage girl said no to being his partner

[goldentigerfestival]

i will never not find it hilarious that they completely forgot to animate patty at the very end of the final cutscene in the last three frames of the whole group

and the dub didn't even give her voiced lines when everyone was shouting they so the localization forgot about her too

[eats-the-stars]

I feel like there are roughly two kinds of "painfully weird kid" that you can be during your K-12 school years. the first is your "I am trying so hard to be normal but I just cannot seem to hit the mark. there's just something wrong with me and I don't know how to fix it" and the second is the category I was in, which is your "everyone around me is so incredibly weird but they obviously can't help it so I will just have to accept this."

[cat-madhouse]

I think

I think that me thinking I'm a compulsive manipulator for most of my "aware life" has something to do with the tism

[casual-praxis]

Update!

I let my roommate borrow the manga and she just got done reading it yesterday. I pestered her with questions for a bit to get her general vibe on the story, and she said she liked it.

She took a few pictures of her favorite moments and most of them were just silly zoomed-out shots like when the Colors were all in the boat (and not colored in) and the scene where all of them almost fall into lava (she thought it was funny that Green and Vio had X's in their eyes, "I like that Green and Vio are just dead." <- things the Dunkin employees probably weren't expecting to hear from the only customers in the store at the time).

Vio is her favorite of the Colors since he seems to move the plot forward the most (debatable). She mentioned being surprised that Vio wasn't the one to tell Shadow he could be a hero too (with it instead being Zelda who tells him that), but afterward we got into a discussion over if Vio even saw Shadow as a person during his betrayal arc, or if Shadow would have even believed Vio had he been the one to say that. It culminated in us agreeing that Vio has some wonky morals lmao. Did not even try to stop Shadow from burning down a mountainside.

I thought she might like Green most honestly (besides being her favorite color, Green also gets shit done), but her consensus on him was that he was "just Link". To which I mentioned he seemed anxious a lot, and that just spiraled into a running joke for the rest of the conversation. She was excited about a potential Green-Vio team up during the Tower of Winds, but we got sidetracked so I don't actually know why beyond "they seem to get the most stuff done". That may have just been the reason.

She didn't really state an opinion on either Blue or Red, but she did point out to me that Red's "lesson" he learned while separated from the others was legit the opposite of what they were supposed to be learning. Or at the very least the phrasing was lmao. Teamwork was the goal, but Red's takeaway was "I need to be more self-reliant and not depend on others." Which I get means "I have to carry my own weight" and not "I won't rely on teamwork", but it's still kind of funny.

I want to look further into Red's comment, but this isn't the place for that haha.

When I asked how she felt about Shadow she said she liked him but wasn't actually clear on if he died. I explained that it's kinda up in the air, since he seems to be in the original Links shadow by the end, but apparently the thing that confused her was the bouns non-canon comics at the end. Shadow liking the internet was something she enjoyed.

She also noticed the mixup between Green and Vio in one of the bonus comics, which tells me she was able to identify who was who by the end of it. I gave her some pointers early on, but it was while she was still in the first chapter, and not all the differences had been established yet (ie sleeve colors, eye designs, etc).

Final notes:

She did pick up the Vidow vibes. She's not a shippy type of person, but she did notice the cues lol.

She also messaged me when she got to the Vaati fight just to say "no peeking".

She was flabbergasted when Red lost his sword so early. "Yea, it's actually just the Three Swords," - me, trying to avoid spoiling shit.

Despite not being mentioned much, Blue was appreciated for being the only one with visible character growth and in general being a powerhouse.

"Look at him, he's got anxiety," - us, every time Green popped up in conversation.

I'm happy I have someone irl I can ramble about this series to now. Usually I just yap into the void until the topic changes lmao. No one ever has any context. Now I just have to drag the rest of my friends into the Four Sword fixation and we'll be golden.

I’m attempting to get my roommates into the Four Sword fandom.

One of them already thinks Zelda as a series is pretty cool, though she doesn’t know much about it. The other one is uninterested.

Will be sharing my manga with the first roommate. I’ll let y’all know how that goes.

[giantkillerjack]

Happy to report I'm no longer responding to the religious people on my posts! Apologies to anyone who may have taken the psychic damage of seeing that unexpectedly!

It had been a while since I had purposely kicked a metaphorical wasp nest so I guess I was overdue. I am simply a sexy fool. 🙄 I do it a lot less nowadays tho, which is good!

I did genuinely set out at first to get information about how Catholics reconcile certain paradoxes within their faith, and then I was like oh right oh no I just remembered why I stopped doing this

On the upside I DID actually learn a lot; even if part of what I learned was don't tag Catholic tumblr in your posts about Catholicism, Jack. (Listen. I'm a work in progress! ��)

And now I am very dedicated to putting a priest in my graphic novel who fucks a demon. Which I was going to draw anyway, so I might as well make it work with the story. For art. And penises.

Anyway, I hear the song "Godsend" by Trebuchet and I go a little bit insane in a good way. It's like if Supernatural was good and also a song. I'd really like to capture that energy in my work. There's also this song called "the queer gospel" that I love very much, which is about the inherent holiness of queerness and queer community regardless of if there's a god. (I actually made a burlesque routine for that song once, and more than one person said it made them cry happy tears! Which is a hell of a point of pride for me! AND a hell of a point of Pride!)

*okay if someone sends me an anonymous message that makes me laugh out loud and not feel rancid, then I will answer it if it brings me joy and I have a funny response. I will tag it accordingly and then block that person as soon as they stop being funny. But I'm good on debate and philosophy now. I got my answer. I had forgotten what those answers looked like. But I am grateful for (and moderately horrified by) the reminder. Please see the tags for an explanation of my new favorite phrase involving a man, heliocentrism, and one very hot piece of wood~

[sirfrogsworth]

How do you take a photo of time?

I've been watching the track events at the Olympics since I was a wee lad. It was a tradition in our family. We'd gather around our ancient low-definition 19 inch CRT television and watch tiny blobs compete against other tiny blobs and root for our country.

It was a bit like watching YouTube on your phone in 144p.

Several heroes emerged.

Jackie Joyner-Kersee was amazing.

You can't forget about Flo-Jo.

And then the Olympics decided NBA players were allowed in the competition.

Which formed... The Dream Team.

Was this fair?

Well... they won each game by an average of 44 points.

So... no. It was not fair.

Though it became more fair as time went on.

But, umm... yeah. The other teams looked like the Washington Generals and the US looked like the Harlem Globetrotters if they stopped screwing around half of the game.

But my absolute favorite Olympian was a runner named Michael Johnson.

He was cool as heck.

For one thing... gold shoes.

But he also had this crazy, upright, Tom Cruise-ish sprinting style that just made him look like a running robot on the track.

And in the 1996 Atlanta games he just trounced EVERYONE. I mean, it wasn't even close.

Yikes. Those losing blobs are probably really embarrassed.

Last night I decided to invigorate my nostalgia and watch the track events again. And I got to see one of the wildest races in history.

It didn't even last 10 seconds but it was one of the most exciting sporting events I've ever witnessed. Almost every runner won the race.

After I saw that initially, I was like... who the heck won???

Even in slow motion I wasn't sure.

This was one of the closest finishes in history. There has never been a race where all 8 runners were within this margin.

The arena was silent as the winner was being confirmed. The runners just kind of paced around waiting for official word. My best guess was the Jamaican runner, Kishane Thompson. But then the loudspeaker announced Noah Lyles.

The last tiny morsel of American pride burst out of me with a big "Wooooo!"

I forgot what it was like to be proud of my country. I wish it happened more often. But this young man, despite being last place in the first 3rd of the race, turned on the afterburners and won in a photo finish.

And that's when my inner nerd took over.

Because when they showed the photo finish image, it looked super weird.

Why is the track white?

Why do all of the runners look all warpy like that QWOP game?

So I went down a research rabbit hole to figure this out.

Photo finishes are actually fascinating. The first photo finish captured the end of a horse race in 1890. But that was mostly luck and timing. The actual photo finish mechanisms weren't used until 1937.

Originally they would film the finish line through a physical slit.

And the first horsie head that appeared in that slit would be the winner. This technology ended a huge aspect of corruption in horse race fixing almost overnight.

But we have come a long way since then. And I'd like to introduce you to the Omega Scan 'O' Vision Ultimate.

This slow motion camera sits fixed on the finish line of every race. The concept of the photo finish has remained remarkably similar to the 1930s approach. The camera sensor is specially designed to only record a vertical slit.

Only the finish line itself is actually captured.

And because it limits what it records to only that slit, it can capture 40,000 frames per second to get amazing temporal resolution.

So why don't the photo finishes just look like, well... this?

That is because the camera takes a picture of time more-so than dimensional space. I guess it would be more accurate to say it *assembles* a picture of time.

As the runners cross the finish line, the camera combines all of the little strips of pictures into a single image.

It's almost like if you tried to reassemble a piece of paper after it had been shredded.

Imagine each strip of paper is a picture of ONLY the finish line, just at a slightly different point in time.

What if someone stopped on the finish line and didn't move... what would that look like?

Once they got there, the same part of their body would just be repeated.

So the right side of the photo finish picture represents earlier in time and it just assembles the image strip by strip as time passes and you literally get a picture of time itself.

NEAT!

Okay, but how do they determine the winner from the photo finish?

I mean, that shoe looks like it is ahead of Noah Lyles!

Clavicles!

The IAFF rules state the foremost part of the torso must cross the finish line first. And the endpoint of the torso is the outer end of the clavicle.

So if you get this bone across the finish line first, you win the race.

Two more fun facts!

The start of the race is actually just as carefully timed as the end of the race. There are sensors in the starting blocks of each runner.

The starting gun also has an electronic sensor.

They have determined the fastest a human can react to the sound of a gun is roughly 100 milliseconds. So if you start running before 100 milliseconds they know you didn't actually hear the gun, you just got antsy and started running too early.

And the final fun fact...

Did you notice the Omega logo at the top of the photo finish?

That isn't superimposed or added after the fact. That is captured by the camera.

But if this image is composed only of tiny little slivers, how did they get the Omega logo to show up?

That is a little display. And it is synchronized with the Scan 'O' Vision Ultimate to show a little sliver of the Omega logo for each frame captured.

So when the final image is stitched together, it looks like a cohesive logo at the top of the photo.

Pretty clever, Omega!