#anyway. finished the main trilogy today. very good

[art-soboro]

these freakin guyssssss

[sleepy-vix]

book review of what i read today because i'm a nerd with nothing better to do!

today i just borrowed 'caraval' by stephanie garber from the library and finished it all within 4-5 hours. here are my brief thoughts:

(btw this is pretty spoiler free bc i dont talk abt any specific things abt the book)

for the first 100 pages, i hated the book. the romance was gross to me and i couldn't care less about the main character (actually i still couldn't care less about the main character tbh).

also i saw a review video after reading the book and the reviewer said that YA is a genre with a spectrum where on one end, it can be mature so adults can enjoy it but on the other hand, it can also be for readers that are quite young (eg preteens? im guessing??) and caraval falls under the latter category and that is VERY TRUE AND IT IRRITATED ME SO BAD but oh well that's just a me thing prolly

thankfully, half way through the book, things started to build up and everything was mysterious and intriguing which was what i wanted from the book

it didnt really get good until near the end though, around the last 150 pages. things kept piling up on eachother and i had no idea who to trust or what to expect, which i loved.

by the end, (as i said before) i couldn't care less about the main character, but i found that i was relieved by her "happy" ending (i used quotation marks because i'm not sure what will happen to her in the next book). i guess the romance was good because i did wish for julian to have a good ending, but ehh they don't make me sob or blush or whatever i'm supposed to (actually most of their "tension scenes" made me physically scowl and i had to skim over them. that's probably just me tho T-T)

anyways i was pretty conflicted over whether i wanted to read the next book in the trilogy, but after a bit of research i decided that i will!

I'm looking forward to that. caraval was a fun read i got to admit, even though it was really only 3/5 stars at most for me.

i hope i enjoy the rest of the trilogy alot more (i have hopes, since the next book will have a diff mc) because i want to read stephanie garber's other series, 'once upon a broken heart'- they aren't books that i usually read but i'm forcing myself to expand ny tastes and familiaries myself with popular books (for convo material- hopefully)

that concludes my book rant for now :)

[alinaandalion]

Top 10 Books of 2022

this was actually a pretty great reading year even if I fell short of some of my goals but these were the top 10 books I’ve read in 2022. 

1. Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica - it might be because it was something I picked up very late in the year, but this book has been burned into my brain since I read it.  it’s deeply disturbing, since the plot revolves around legalized cannibalism and the main character works at a processing plant, but it takes an unflinching look at what that reality would like without absolutely reveling it.  every time I said “this can’t get worse,” it did and there was another awful layer to peel back. but even beyond the general horror, what this book has to say about how systems swallow us all up but also the justifications we feed ourselves to continue to live in the world as it is was an absolute gut punch and an uncomfortable confrontation.  I remain absolutely obsessed.

2. The Liar’s Knot by M.A. Carrick - complete tone change from the previous book.  this one is fun.  what I find most enjoyable about this trilogy is that it loves fantasy and telling stories and leans into the setting.  so much of the conflict is based solely in decisions characters make, the secrets they keep, the ones they reveal.  anyway, if you like con artists, tarot readings mixed with magic, swashbuckling romance, sword fights with mysterious masked heroes, this is worth checking out.

3. The Justice of Kings by Richard Swan - this book was the surprise of the year for me.  I added it to my to-read list as something to try out but based on the cover, it felt like it might be trying to copy A Song of Ice and Fire (not a diss to G.R.R Martin, I love those books; not the pale imitators).  and while the book is grim, it’s definitely not trying to be a copy.  it’s written from the perspective of the main female character but from the POV of her telling her own history.  Also, Sir Konrad is amazing and a dad-shaped character.

4. Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence:  An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R.F. Kuang - I mean, this one isn’t a surprise.  I love Kuang’s writing, especially how keenly she understands the nature of violence.  if anything, I wish this book had been longer and more self-indulgent.  still, a really great book and I continue to think about it today.

5. Wrath Goddess Sing by Maya Deane - if you have gotten a little bored with all the Greek myth retellings out there, read this.  even if you haven’t, read this.  I’ve never read any retelling that is this bold and fascinating.  it did fall apart for me a little at the end, but the ride there was beyond worth it and it blew my mind. 

6. The Mothers by Brit Bennett - definitely a new favorite author.  it stayed with me long after I finished the actual book.  it grapples with a lot of difficult topics and definitely had an impact beyond just reading it and has made me think about how to tackle some things in my own writing.  and I’ll always love a book that is able to do that.

7. The Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker - what can I say, I watched the first two Hellraiser movies for the first time this year, lost my mind a bit over them, then checked this out from the library and read it in almost one sitting.  new favorite horror author, I remain obsessed and think about this book on a regular basis.

8. Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar - I still don’t know what to say about this book of poetry but I regularly find myself turning over pieces of the poems within it in my head.  it talks a lot about addiction but it doesn’t skate over the surface.  it’s amazing.  please read it.

9. A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine - so many books about empire are weirdly uncomplicated in the main character’s mind.  the empire is bad, their side is good, the end.  so I really loved how complicated this book made it, where the main character genuinely loves so much about the empire even as it threatens to destroy her home and consume her in the process.  very much looking forward to reading the next book in 2023.

10. Please by Jericho Brown - Jericho Brown is one of my favorite poets writing today.  The language is astounding and you have to sit with his work to fully take it in.  if you’re going to read a poet currently writing, definitely pick up one of his books of poetry.  it’s absolutely worth it.

[sauvechouris]

Tagged by @demoiselledefortune, thank you ^^ I... may have started this last monday and procrastinated to the point i had to edit some of the answers, oops.

-

fave colour: green, blue, and purple

currently reading: Si nous étions adultes / Even though we’re adults / Otona ni natte mo by Takako Shimura. I’ve just finished volume 4 (as of today-today not last monday), in time for volume 5 this month. It’s maybe not for everyone since the premise is about adultery, but i’m enjoying the way it shows many sides of a messy situation. (One of the protagonists got married pretty much just to not be unmarried anymore because christmas cake, she’s been ignoring/repressing her attraction to women since at least high school, and when suddenly, one evening where her husband isn’t there, a pretty lady chats her up at a bar, it unlocks some stuff for her. That’s valid, it’s sympathetic, but it’s also completely unfair to her husband and the lady who’s got it bad for her, and they all know it - including all her in-laws.) Plus, as the title says, the main characters are adults (35), which is not the most common thing in yuri, so i appreciate it.

Technically i’m also 3/4th of the way into a book about H.PI and hy.persensibility (that curiously makes very little mention of a.dh.d despite titling itself with and overusing the word “hyper”) but i paused it and now can’t make myself get back to it.

 ...and at the same time, i’ve slowly (because it’s mostly very short chapters, so it’s easy to pick up and put down) been reading S€x Education 120%, which sounds like a po/rn title (and being published by Taifu (/Ototo) doesn’t help), but is, in fact, about sex ed for girls, and pretty modern about it? constantly amused by that :D (wlw-inclusive too, + no chapter about it yet but they’ve namedropped asexuality, so i’m hoping for something in volume 3.) And i’ve been slowly getting Les c@rnets de l’apothicaire after reading a friend’s copies, so i’m rereading these as i buy them (and having a lot of fun with them, love the protag’s mix of being observant but mostly uninterested and unimpressed with her courtly environment, very down to earth, but a bit of a gremlin for poisonous stuff - even the slow setting up of the eventual m/f romance is fun, it’d been a while since that happened for me!), and i randomly picked up the last Fitz trilogy again, by the middle to reread specific bits of it, but i’ve reread them now and i keep going back to it anyway. j’arrête quand je veux etc

So, a bit all over the place. Plus some fic. Meanwhile, my actual to-read pile is staring in judgement from its undisturbed corner.

last song: (last monday:) Shin jidai wa kono mirai da sekaijuu zenbu kaeteshimaebaaaa 🎶 (thanks to @soveryanon who shared Ado’s songs in the latest OP movie, i’ve been stuck on them since because w o w (even though i know pretty much nothing about OP, it’s not even a “real” proxy fandom that i watch pass by and wave at when it does, stop making it sound appealing when i can’t stand the artstyle...))

As of today : the Keiko and Am@Lee covers of Synchronicity, thanks to this art yesterday.

last series: ...I’m. not very good at watching series. at all. But if the question means the last one i watched in its entirety, that’s the first cour of Spy family, if it means one i’m following it’s the current Pokémon anime (loosely), and if it means the last i watched an episode of, that’s Pokémon too but a different era of it. (I do want to watch the Man me a sand show, it’s just a matter of making myself believe there are enough hours in a day to watch one (1) episode and then executing the function.)

last movie: a rewatch of PMMM Rebellion story, i think? if rewatches don’t count, that’d be... the red panda movie...? i’m not a big movie watcher either

currently working on: making a character from a friend’s rp. I’ve never done that and have spent a good few days overthinking, even though, from what i understand, what we have to do is not complex by rp standards. ^^”” Finally found a name (last monday), now i need some more setting info from her, and to decide if i want to be practical or Mustang-on-a-rainy-day level of comically inefficient when it comes to abilities. (Still the case today.)

Also trying to see if i can trick google into letting me buy the FEH sparks, which is very frustrating both because i don’t like wanting to give money to the gacha, even if at least it’s for something guaranteed, and because it’s not working. (which is for the better, but ugh, unfair practices.)

-

share 10 different favorite characters from ten different pieces of media in no particular order, then tag 10 people 🎥🎬📺

1. Fitz 😔 (L’Assassin royal) - disaster, life ruiner, still the best example i’ve seen so far of how real first-person pov can feel and how saying that Literature is differencied from genre fiction by ‘having something to say about human nature’ is bullshit

2. Tohru (Fruba) - I can’t not pick her, and i can’t be objective about it. But in my heart i’m also picking Yuki and an armful of others (and nodding at you for Shigure).

3. Soren (FE) - He’s a very empathetic young man a bitch, he’s gay, he has a Fruba-level backstory that ripped my heart out even though i still don’t have the confirmation that what’s going on is going on, he’s a tactician who thought that spitting racist slurs at a giant (and very sweet) tiger unprovoked was a sound idea, I love him and want to read all the fic about him but first i have to actually finish his games

4. NHS (MDZS) - a bitch too, very pretty, and characters being more clever or capable than they appear works well on me. Plus i read mdzs fresh off of Berseria and he did a brother revenge, who else was i supposed to fixate on.

5. Homura (PMMM) - /*lies down* Rebellion... episode 10 too of course but Rebellion...........

6. Velvet (Tales.of Berseria) - /*points at the mess that is her handling of her grief, trauma and revenge* she has so many problems, and the story slaps her in the face with all of them (and sometimes it makes for the best moments /*puts on True will*). single-handedly responsible for my pick of mdzs fave because she’d given me many emotions about characters out for revenge for their family, while doing character work about it that mdzs didn’t have the space (or interest) to do with a last-chapter twist reveal. also i’m gay

7. Haruko Daichi (Shimanami Tasogare / Eclat(s) d’âmes) - many emotions: happy&wlw edition. One of the emotions is that time she punched a wall hard enough that it left a mark in it and her wife framed it. Also everything else with walls, walls are good for metaphors in this manga ;v;

8. Tomoyo (CCS) - I forget who called her the cutest little lesbian who ever did lesbian, but they were right, + positive unrequited crushes are a direct ticket to my heart. May we all have it together like she does when dealing with that and may we all have a fraction of her productivity, holy shit

9. i refuse to choose between members of the original (= pre-Tokyo) TRC family

10. not going to choose between Gilbert (blorbo, direct call-out for me) and Oz (very good character writing) either (Pandora Hearts)

-

I never know who to tag either, but since this one mainly has questions where the answer must have changed even if one has done it before, it’s fine maybe : @autheane, @potahun, @sazandorable, @ezzoh, @runawaycarouselhorse, @littleragondin, and i already tagged Cass earlier - only if you want to, of course.

[teecupangel]

Anon from last night:

Nah, I was not the anon who asked about a kink with Basim*.

I would send in a fic prompt about top!Desmond and bottom!Ezio but I have no actual ideas atm, it’s just a concept in my brain, but if I think of something I’ll send it.

If I could send a gif to convey how I felt about your smutty!headcanons it would be a gif of the end of the Actual Cannibal Shia Labeouf Music video, when Shia give the one person standing ovation. *chefs kiss*. (I forgot to mention that altdes is also my ac otp last night). Everything that you put down I picked it up and was like ‘yes yes good’ and put it in my pocket like a shiny rock.

*ok, so like, to be honest (and adhd over shared mood activated), I haven’t played very many ac games. I’ve only completed ac1, and I played half of ac4 and then watched my brother beat it. I have watched other people play bits and pieces of other games, but I honestly know nothing about the newer games. That being said, I did in fact read your Desmond #destroys Basim fic and it was very very good, #goodsoup (why am I in an old memes mood today oof). I really liked how you did the whole Desmond (clone? Half?) and his Ancestors thing that was really good, and kinky and nice.

Mmm, one more thing before I go! Thanks for letting me know about the whole won’t post an ask if you ask thing, it’s really good to know! (I don’t….. need that for this ask, unless you just don’t feel like answering it🤣🤣🤣🤣).

Take your time with your prompt, nonny :)

Hahahaha, I'm glad you enjoy my headcanons. I had fun writing them.

Yeah, I can understand why some people don't play all the AC games. Honestly, AC wiki is a good site for summary (and TVTropes too).

Since we're sharing our AC games experience (long rant ahead), the first time I played Assassin's Creed was at my best friend's place and she just gave me the controller and told me to whack people with a broom as Ezio while... I think we were waiting for her printer to finish printing our report or something? I don't remember anymore, all I remember was my main idea of Assassin's Creed before was that I can whack guards with a broom that sounds like a freaking hammer. We were in college then and I was a pure 'JRPG' purist back then so I was really confused by what this game was supposed to be. I know it was related to Prince of Persia in some way and the only reason why I know about Prince of Persia back then was because I watched my brother play all the games on the PS2. How times have changed, hahaha. Anyway, it would be a couple of years before I even actually play AC1 and AC2, then half of AC Brotherhood before dropping it, only coming back like maybe 3 years ago to play the entirety of Syndicate and its DLCs because my childhood friend suggested I would love the Victorian-era setting (I did) and I've been buying AC games either 2nd hand or when it goes super cheap in PSN as they've been part of my backlog since my best friend was a huge fan (she stopped playing after AC3 though XD) so I have all of them just gathering (digital) dust. The truth is, I finished AC Brotherhood to Valhalla only like... last year. From September last year to January this year, in fact. While it's never too late to play the other games, I'm not going to tell you to play them if you don't have the time or if there are any games that you want to play more. I do believe that if you can't play a game, watching let's play (with or without commentary) is an okay alternative and sometimes you can let it play while maybe grinding on the game you're currently playing. (just, FYI, all of the AC games except AC1 are available for free if you are subscribed to PS+... I think the 2nd tier at least? Ezio's Trilogy to Valhalla is free in PS+ as far as I know.)

Anyway, back to the Basim fic. Thank you! I really enjoyed writing about Desmond (considering the narration calls the ancestors 'shades', I think it's okay to call him Desmond's shade as well) and his questionable relationship with the other shades.

No problem! And I like answering asks so, yeah, I'm posting this hahahaha

[grim-on-the-darkside]

The Latest Information on Lucas’s Sequel Trilogy he wrote in 2011. Also some information from  Star Wars Archives: Episodes I-III: 1999–2005, author Paul Duncan interviewed George Lucas his ideas of a Sequel Trilogy.

Firstly, some of the things Pablo Hidalgo has stated about Lucas’s sequel trilogy that he has access to and spoke to Lucas directly about.

We know Lucas never considered the EU canon or a part of his Star Wars universe so it is not surprising his Sequel Trilogy was of his own creation.

........

"Fast forward to 2012, when we hear George is looking to make SW movies again, I though I thought 'I wonder what next Mon Calamari's gonna be. And it turns out, the Mon Calamari this time was huge swaths of the EU. There was no Jacen, no Jaina. No new Jedi Order. Chewie lived. Not surprising, but there it was."

~ Pablo Hidalgo, 2016               

https://ibb.co/nmjWcBM

..

[Regarding Lucas Sequel Trilogy Treatments he wrote in 2011 and sold to Disney]

Comment - "What are you talking about? J.J. threw out His story treatments and he [George Lucas] has no imput at all anymore."

Pablo Hidalgo Response - "Not entirely true. But the treatments as they were pretty much disregarded the EU, which was to be expected.”

~ 2018

https://ibb.co/Dz7qhTB

........

Commentor - 'Thank You for the clarification, might I ask if you ever recieved any direction that George Lucas with the number of children the Solos had as depicted in the EU?'

Pablo Hidalgo - "All I meant is his starting point for this Trilogy didn't have Jacen, Jaina, and/or Anakin."

Commentor - 'Was there Ben Skywalker?'

Pablo Hidalgo - "There was not."

https://ibb.co/JH2Y8tg

.................

Question -  "My question is, *what did George's treatments for 7 look like? I would love to see if they fit the EU."

Answer [Pablo Hidalgo]- "They did not. For instance, there was no Jaina, Jacen, or Anakin."  ~ 2017                                                                       

https://ibb.co/N7HKCsF

................

Pablo Hidalgo - "Jacen and Jaina never existed in George's storytelling, even in treatment form."

Comment Response - "And about Mara Jade?"

Pablo Hidalgo - "No. George never thought of Mara as being part of his universe either."

~ 2016 https://ibb.co/YLHk6Ft

.......

From Star Wars Insider

..

"There was no Ben Skywalker in George's Universe. He came from the NJO team." ~ Pablo Hidalgo 2016

https://ibb.co/HDtXh6D

................

"Question from Today, but I thought this was pretty well known. George Lucas never considered Jacen, Jaina, or Mara Jade as part of his universe."

~ Pablo Hidalgo May 2016 https://ibb.co/VDX2qvY

....

"But anyway Luke in exile predates TLJ by a long time and came from someone who can very happily and rightly supersede anyone's feedback :)"

~ Pablo Hidalgo https://ibb.co/sKZnWKk

[Luke was in something of a self imposed exile on an Island in Lucas Sequel Trilogy which is something that Disney ripped off from Lucas’s Sequel Trilogy. Pablo is referring to Lucas in this quote.]

..

"Luke was training a new generation of Jedi, it all went wrong because of 1 boy, and he's the 'Jedi killer' - that's the source.”

~ Pablo Hidalgo, 2016 https://ibb.co/JjYtGtf

[The source being George Lucas sequel trilogy treatments he made in 2011 and ended up selling to Disney later. Something else Disney ripped off from Lucas’s Sequel trilogy.] ..

Pablo Hidalgo -   "George's starting point for 7 had no Jaina, Jacen, Anakin and Chewie never died. So yeah."

[Reply] - "Could we please send this to every EU purist we know?"

[Other replyer] "They wont care."

[First Replyer] "They will after what Hidalgo just said after this."

[Pablo Hidalgo] - "No, they won't. You can't correct the internet.The info's out there. They've made up their minds."

https://ibb.co/mXGX0Qn

..

Pablo Hidalgo - "But there was no sequel trilogy at that time."

Commenter 1 -

'Also, Lucas' Treatment of EP VII did not have the twins born in the Thrawn Trilogy'.

Pablo Hidalgo - "It didn't have twins."

Commenter 2 -

'You're referring to the treatment Lucas sold Disney in 2012. I guess plans changed.'

Pablo Hidalgo - "Or were defined. Jacen and Jaina were never part of George's story. They were Tim's [Zahn] invention."

~ Pablo Hidalgo Q&A

https://ibb.co/VQ5Zrr0

..

Here’s what George said about them during an interview with James Cameron for his The Story of Science Fiction project.

“Back in the day, I used to say ultimately what this means is we’re just cars, vehicles, for the Whills to travel around in…. We’re vessels for them. And the conduit is the midi-chlorians. The midi-chlorians are the ones that communicate with the Whills. The Whills, in a general sense, they are the Force.

All the way back to — with the Jedi and the Force and everything — the whole concept of how things happen was laid out completely from [the beginning] to the end. But I never got to finish. I never got to tell people about it.

If I’d held onto the company I could have done it, and then it would have been done. Of course, a lot of the fans would have hated it, just like they did Phantom Menace and everything, but at least the whole story from beginning to end would be told.”

~ George Lucas

https://www.indiewire.com/2018/06/george-lucas-episode-vii-episode-ix-1201974276/

..

As part of the book Star Wars Archives: Episodes I-III: 1999–2005, author Paul Duncan interviewed George Lucas. During this interview, George talked more about his plans for the sequel trilogy.

Paul Duncan: What about the stormtroopers? They look robotic, but they’re not.

George Lucas: How do you know what they are?

Paul Duncan: Did you have a different idea of what they were?

George Lucas: Yeah, they started out as clones. Once all the clones were killed, the Empire picked up recruits, like militia. They fought, but they weren’t very good at what they did.

Paul Duncan: That’s why they kept missing.

George Lucas: That’s why they kept missing. Then after the Rebels won, there were no more stormtroopers in my version of the third trilogy.

I had planned for the first trilogy to be about the father, the second trilogy to be about the son, and the third trilogy to be about the daughter and the grandchildren. [There was only one, Ben Solo, another Disney rip off.]

Episode VII, VIII, and IX would take ideas from what happened after the Iraq War. “Okay, you fought the war, you killed everybody, now what are you going to do?” Rebuilding afterwards is harder than starting a rebellion or fighting the war. When you win the war and you disband the opposing army, what do they do? The stormtroopers would be like Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist fighters that joined ISIS and kept on fighting. The stormtroopers refuse to give up when the Republic win.

They want to be stormtroopers forever, so they go to a far corner of the galaxy, start their own country and their own rebellion.

There’s a power vacuum so gangsters, like the Hutts, are taking advantage of the situation, and there is chaos. The key person is Darth Maul, who had been resurrected in The Clone Wars cartoons — he brings all the gangs together.

Paul Duncan: Was Darth Maul the main villain?

George Lucas: Yeah, but he’s very old, and we have two versions of him. One is with a set of cybernetic legs like a spider, and then later on he has metal legs and he was a little bit bigger, more of a superhero. We did all this in the animated series, he was in a bunch of episodes.

Darth Maul trained a girl, Darth Talon [The only thing from the EU in Lucas’s Trilogy, but it wasn’t even really her, just had the same look and name, completely different background. She wasn’t even born yet at that time frame in the comics]., who was in the comic books as his apprentice. She was the new Darth Vader, and most of the action was with her. So these were the two main villains of the trilogy. Maul eventually becomes the godfather of crime in the universe because, as the Empire falls, he takes over.

The movies are about how Leia — I mean, who else is going to be the leader? — is trying to build the Republic. They still have the apparatus of the Republic but they have to get it under control from the gangsters. That was the main story.

It starts out a few years after Return of the Jedi and we establish pretty quickly that there’s this underworld, there are these offshoot stormtroopers who started their own planets, and that Luke is trying to restart the Jedi. He puts the word out, so out of 100,000 Jedi, maybe 50 or 100 are left. The Jedi have to grow again from scratch, so Luke has to find two- and three-year-olds, and train them. It’ll be 20 years before you have a new generation of Jedi.

By the end of the trilogy Luke would have rebuilt much of the Jedi, and we would have the renewal of the New Republic, with Leia, Senator Organa, becoming the Supreme Chancellor in charge of everything. So she ended up being the Chosen One.”

George also expanded on Midi-chlorians:

“This is the cosmology. The Force is the energy, the fuel, and without it everything would fall apart. The Force is a metaphor for God, and God is essentially unknowable. But behind it is another metaphor, which fits so well into the movie that I couldn’t resist it.

Midi-chlorians are the equivalent of mitochondria in living organisms and photosynthesis in plants — I simply combined them for easier consumption by the viewer. Mitochondria create the chemical energy that turns one cell into two cells.

I like to think that there is a unified reality to life and that it exists everywhere in the universe and that it controls things, but you can also control it. That’s why I split it into the Personal Force and the Cosmic Force. The Personal Force is the energy field created by our cells interacting and doing things while we are alive. When we die, we lose our persona and our energy is assimilated into the Cosmic Force.

If we have enough Midi-chlorians in our body, we can have a certain amount of control over our Personal Force and learn how to use it, like the Buddhist practive of being able to walk on hot coals.”

And the Whills:

“The Whills are a microscopic, single-celled lifeform like amoeba, fungi, and bacteria. There’s something like 100,000 times more Whills than there are Midi-chlorians, and there are about 10,000 times more Midi-chlorians than there are human cells.

The only microscopic entities that can go into the human cells are the Midi-chlorians. They are born in the cells. The Midi-chlorians provide the energy for human cells to split and create life. The Whills are single-celled animals that feed on the Force. The more of the Force there is, the better off they are. So they have a very intense symbiotic relationship with the Midi-chlorians and the Midi-chlorians effectively work for the Whills.

It is estimated that we have 100 trillion microbes in our body and we are made up of about 90% bacteria and 10% human cells. So who is in service to whom? I know this is the kind of thing that fans just go berserk over because they say, “We want it to be mysterious and magical”, and “You’re just doing science.” Well, this isn’t science.

This is just as mythological as anything else in Star Wars. It sounds more scientific, but it’s a fiction.

It’s saying there is a big symbiotic relationship to create life, and to create the Force, but if you look at all the life-forms in the universe, most of them are one-celled organisms. I think of one-celled organisms as an advanced form of life because they’ve been able to travel through the universe. They have their own spaceships — those meteorites that we get every once in a while. They’ve been living on those things for thousands of years, they’ve been frozen, unfrozen, and can survive almost anything.

The one-celled organisms have to have a balance. You have to have good ones and bad ones otherwise it would extinguish life. And if they go out of balance, the dark side takes over.”

..................................................................................................................

Obviously there is the older information that’s already been out there, I just wanted to share some of the newer information that has come to light. I’m sure in time we will learn more.

[lizziestudieshistory]

Books of 2021 - April

I have to say I had a lovely reading month - even if there is a part of my brain screaming 'you could have read more'... (I'm working on this) As always, here are my unplanned, gushy, and not proofread thoughts!

Six of Crows - Leigh Bardugo (Six of Crows #1)

I still have mixed opinions about this book - it was a reread and I definitely enjoyed it more this time around. However, I still don't love it as much as I thought I would... I can't connect to the characters and I don't know why?! Okay, I do adore Nina. But the rest of the Crows aren't doing it for me, possibly because of the disconnect between their ages and how they act... I don't know though.

It's a decent YA novel, and it is technically a huge step up from Grisha, but I prefer Grisha trilogy for both plot and characters. Maybe I should just give up on heist stories for good? I just found the whole plot a little bit too convenient and lacking stakes - and this is coming off the back of Grisha! I will be returning to Crooked Kingdom at some point though. Hopefully I'll be more on board then!

Lady Windermere's Fan - Oscar Wilde

This was the only 'bad' book of the month, tragically. I adore Wilde, especially his plays but this one didn't do it for me... I disliked the silliness of the resolution, I HATE the way Lord Windermere treats Lady Windermere (if he called her "child" one more time Inwas ready to riot), and I thought it was badly paced. The writing was stunning, as usual, but I didn't find it funny. This could be a case of it ageing poorly or that I haven't seen a production of this one, so I'm willing to.give it the benefit of the doubt for now.

Small Gods - Terry Pratchett (Discworld #? Honestly I've lost track)

I ADORED Small Gods! I thought I would, given that it's Pratchett's take on religion, but it astounded me. So the plot isn't particularly strong, but that's not the point. The point of this book was to explore the relationship between gods and their believers, organised religion and true faith, religious belief vs practice, and how religion can be manipulated and abused. It was Pratchett's exploration on religion, especially monotheistic religion (aka Christianity in this case), and it was handled so well. It was a nuanced and sensitive discussion, which showed both the positives and negatives of religion. Stunning!

Also, I do have to give a shout out to Brutha, our main protagonist, I didn't love him to start with but by the end he was up there with Moist, Vimes, and Granny Weatherwax as a favourite Discworld character! I loved his subtle strength, convictions, and how he changed while remaining fundamentally himself. Also the final scene was perfection. Would highly recommend to everyone, even if you don't read fantasy!

What Matters in Jane Austen? - John Mullan

So, the fact I actually finished this book speaks volumes. I rarely read non-fiction cover to cover, especially this quickly. I just read what interests me and then move on. But I loved this book, probably because I was also rereading Emma.

It was so well written (literally laughed in places?!), very well researched, and covered a broad selection of topics you wouldn't necessarily think of when reading Austen yourself. I particularly enjoyed the chapters on the weather, blunders, and reading. However, I enjoyed the vast majority, expect the chapter on games which was a little bit dull for me. Would highly recommend if you like Austen or the regency.

Emma - Jane Austen

Okay, technically I finished this today (1st May) but I've been rereading Emma for ALL of April so I'm counting it! I also feel like I should say more about this, so I'll probably do a separate lengthy review at some point, especially as I annotated the hell out of this book, there isn't a single page without my scribbling all over it!

But safe to say I ADORE Emma, book and character. It's my favourite Austen! I will fight you on this book being both technically the best and most enjoyable of her novels. The writing and narrative voice alone is perfection, nevermind the character exploration and romance (before anyone mentions the age gap, I know! I don't care!)

Emma Woodhouse is the best realised of Austen's heroines, her character is both real and realistic. All her flaws are on display and she has to deal with them. They can't just be brushed under the rug in the name of a happy romance (*cough* Elizabeth Bennet *cough*) and she has to change for herself before she can be happy and get married. I know Emma, I understand her flaws and strengths, and I know she's not perfect. But, like Mr Knightley, I love her in spite of, and because of, her flaws. I am also a bit too much like Emma to be flattering, but let'snot go down that path for now...!

Anyway, read Emma, and then watch the 2020 film!

[theastrophilearchitect]

Just keep swimming, just keep swimming...

Writing journey #4.

15/05/2021 07.22 My break has officially been over for five days, and i have done some writing, but it’s been incredibly inconsistent, so I decided to start this blog post over. Bay Tree has been archived, and though FSB isn’t done, I’ve realised I need to take a step back. It’s why writers leave weeks at a time between drafts--so when they return, they’re in a different mindset, and can improve their work.

For this same reason, I need to take a step back before I finish my outline. My thought process is becoming monotonous, which means I’m losing my excitement. When you start a project, you have the idea in your head as perfect, and when those ‘vibes’ become tangible, it is less exciting. That’s unavoidable. But I just need to take a step back, so when I return, I have fresh ideas, and the plot becomes more exciting to me.

So today, I’m going to start brainstorming a new idea I had, which I don’t have an alias for yet, and I have an idea to essentially bind every project I have together, but not in Grishaverse- or Shadowhunters-style where you need to read ten books just to read the one you want. Just a nod to anyone who does read multiple, like when Aelin falls through worlds and sees Rhys and Feyre for a split second.

So. Let’s brainstorm.

My plan, I think, is to alternate weekly. This week, I’ll work on the new one, next week I’ll do FSB. I could just take this new idea and apply it to FSB, except I just don’t see how that would work. I have different worlds in mind, and this new one is a fantasy where FSB is sci-fi(/fantasy. It’s kinda both).

16/05/2021 07.07 I really wish I was a pantser. Even though I haven’t got to the editing stage, my favourite part of writing is implementing new ideas and making changes, but I’m just not a pantser. I need to know where each part is going. Instead, I have to sit here, brainstorming, for days, to figure everything out.

18/05/2021 07.06 I did a lot of work on the 16th, but I was busy yesterday, and didn’t get any writing done, because, when I was free, I was just reading. So, I’ve decided I’m going to at least write before I leave the house, which gives me about 45 minutes this morning. 

23/05/2021 18.30 Based on the fact it has been five days, I think you can tell how good I’ve been about keeping writing. The problem is that I don’t actually have much past a concept for my new project, so I’m trying to figure out how, precisely, I could merge the two projects. FSB is interesting, but doesn’t have a huge amount of depth, which adding the characters from the new project would absolutely do, while the new project is lacking plot, which FSB (at least the first book I’ve planned) does. So, I’m going to start a new Scrivener project, and consider how I can merge the two concepts while implementing both plots.

Is it too much? I have only two main characters in FSB, but five in the newer one, which gives me seven main characters, divided into three groups. And do I want to write a book with so many separate storylines? I know readers (myself included) always end up favouring one storyline over another, getting annoyed when certain POVs come up. I don’t know what to do.

I could keep the new project, but implement FSB? Hold up. New Project (NP) has two protagonists who could undergo a similar development to the protagonists of FSB... I had a plan for the male protagonist of FSB, his arc, which wouldn’t work for NP’s male protagonist, but would work perfectly for its female protagonist...

Tumblr’s glitching. It wouldn’t let me reblog a post earlier, and now it won’t let me save this draft. Please, no.

Okay, so I had to copy what I’d written for today, disconnect and reconnect to the Wi-Fi, then wait for my drafts to load to paste it. Going great!

21.00 So I didn’t get a huge amount done, because I caught up doing ~evening things~, but I at least have a plan going forward, which is an accomplishment

30/05/2021 09.29 I’ve spent the last couple weeks doing everything I can to avoid writing, but i now have an insane amount of free time, so I have no excuse. I want to use this time in a productive way, and, for me, that means writing.

03/06/2021 10.31 I swear to god, I’ve had ‘writing’ on my to-do list every single day, except not doing it is probably my own fault, because it’s been so far down on the list. Also, I’m doing a buddy read, but am also unfortunately descending into a reading slump, so even reading 50 pages takes me about 90 minutes--they’re not even long pages.

I actually went back onto my old Wattpad account earlier, where I found a load of old, unfinished stuff, but none of it was as bad as I thought it would be, and the ideas weren’t bad. I just really have no idea what it is I’m writing right now, and I hate trying to figure it out.

11.30 There are so many Ss in the word ‘assassin’ this is not okay.

This is actually going so well. I have two storylines in my head, a complex cast of characters, and I’m so looking forward to plotting this.

04/06/2021 08.04 Look at me, two days in a row. Anyways, I’m thinking I ought to name these characters ASAP, because it’ll be easier to shape them to their names than it will be to find a name which fits them once they’ve been shaped.

14.41 Here’s what I’m realising: I like to pants plots, but I can’t do that while I’m actually drafting, so I think my plan is actually to bullet point everything that happens, then revise that, then start drafting, so the story is basically set in the first draft.

I’ve actually gone through a lot of stuff--I have workable plot material!

17.16 So, me being me, I’ve semi-outlined (I say semi-, it’s more like a tenth) a trilogy, meaning I have ideas for three books following this storyline, and it... makes sense. It’s the kind of story where I can follow multiple arcs, a few at a time, instead of several overarching ones, or maybe it’s just that I’m letting myself.

07/06/2021 16.44 I don’t have a damn clue what I’ve spent the day doing. I haven’t done anything in a couple days because it was the weekend and I was busy, but I’m back now. The thing is, I haven’t spent the day reading, watching, drawing, or doing anything, really--it’s escaped me. But, at the very least, I’ve relaxed, so who cares?

I’m not applying story structure to the ideas I’m having quite yet--rather, I’m just developing them to see how they bloom on their own, then I’ll fit it in; it just seems like a more natural and effective way to develop.

Yeah, no. It’s too late in the day for this. I have zero motivation.

08/06/2021 09.49 Maybe I’ll accomplish something today; who knows? Certainly not me.

I’m now applying the 3-act structure, but I’m realising I have way too many details worked out for this--switching to more acts.

22.20 Why am I doing this to myself? I wish I could say I’m not entirely sure, but it’s because I can’t sleep, because this project, and my character Lihan, are the only things I can think about, so here I am. I don’t want to be a night writer, but que sera sera (I wish I could type accents on an English keyboard).

23.22 I accomplished more in the last hour on this project than I have in the last four days.

09/06/2021 - 1,115 words 09.29 I really hope I don’t prove today that night-writing is my sweet spot--I don’t want it to be. Can the world just let me have a functional sleep schedule??

Anyways, so, as I’ve mentioned before, I use Scrivener, which enables me to sort which documents are part of the manuscript from the ones that aren’t. I’ve been working outside of the manuscript, but I think I’m going to move them into it--I have a plan I believe will be more effective for my own drafting. I think I very much need the events to be set in stone before I begin writing in actual prose, so how can I do that? Especially when I also enjoy pantsing, but not in prose?

Here’s the plan: I plot out the main events, then bullet point everything in very high detail, similar to what many people call a zero draft, in which they draft a book in short form. I’ll sort the bullet points into chapters (but not scenes, because as I discovered with Bay Tree, I find scene-blocking makes the narrative less natural), leave it alone a while, then revise, so I can have my plot more-or-less set in stone before I work on prose.

As a result, I’m going to shift my plotting into the manuscript section, because it is, essentially, an early draft, and also I want a word count as a progress metre.

13/06/2021 - 1,611 words 8.18 Alas, I have been busy the last few days, but I’m here now.

9.20 The amount of secrets and who-knows-what in this story is genuinely absurd, but I’m sure I’ll clean it up eventually.

14.01 A few days ago, I came across a post about balancing large casts, which is exactly what I have, and the first thing it mentioned was the two-trait rule, in which every character has two traits completely unique to them, to help both reader and writer differentiate. Which I’m now going to implement.

14.42 I have these two characters, and I know exactly what I want their dynamic to be, except I can’t decide who should be which part of it.

I have made my decision. It probably works better now, but it does alter their roles, so I need to fix that.

I literally swapped them round solely because I decided one was taller than the other and thought it would be more interesting if the short one was the sadist. Why do I make my own life so difficult?

14/06/2021 - 1,574 words 11.08 I didn’t make an enormous amount of progress yesterday, but I did make some, and made notes of ideas for relationship arcs last night, so I count that a victory (forced optimism--surprisingly effective). I’m currently just working through bullet-pointing book one, while making notes of events I want in the rest of the series (I’m projecting three books, and telling myself I will finish them). I’m currently fiddling with one of my storylines to see how I can mould it to FSB’s and OH MY GOODNESS I JUST HAD A GREAT IDEA must take notes, one moment pleaseeee.

Okay, so I have four bullet points for relationship arcs and an idea to adjust one of the storylines--I’d say I have six main characters, two of whom are really the protagonists, two of which are my favourites, and the other two are fun, but in need of development. They’re split into a group of four and a pair, and I’m definitely more into the storyline of the four, mostly because the four contains my two favourites, and it’s more developed than that of the pair.

I’ve been keeping a list of things to add: motivations, loose plot threads, plot points I want to include--I really need to re-organise it.

On another note, I am so glad I named the characters as early as I did. I’m debating having two of the characters swap names, but I don’t think I will, because I will absolutely mix them up, and one of them is part of the perfect ship name.

My mouse isn’t working. I changed the batteries, but it’s not working, so now I get the joy of trying to figure out if the batteries I put in are just old or if the mouse no longer works, which would suck.

Yes, I’m going to describe this. Mostly because when I changed the batteries the first time, it took a minute to stop working, and this will waste a minute. So, first set of batteries, which we’ll call set 1, don’t work. I don’t know if it’s both or just one, but if it’s one, I don’t want to throw away both. I take out set 1, I put in set 2. Set 2 works perfectly. So it’s not the mouse. Now I take out battery 2B, and replace it with 1A, so I have 1A and 2A in here. I know 2A works, but I’m not sure about 1A, but the mouse works, so 1A is fine. Let’s replace 1A with 1B.

Yep. 1B is the problem child. 1A works fine, but 1B doesn’t. Lovely. Crisis averted. It would’ve really sucked it I had to get a new mouse. And back to writing!

12.13 I’m bouncing between documents as I organise, which means my word count is actually decreasing, so I feel like I’m making significantly less progress than I am.

I just realised my two protagonists are cousins. I’ve had it in my head that one’s father was the brother of the other’s father, but somehow I didn’t realise that makes them cousins.

I’m about to delete a list because I’ve reformatted it--my word count is currently at 1,958, but is really about to drop.

AND NOW WE’RE AT 1,572. My session word count is -32. Minus thirty-two. I hate it here, but it’s fine, because we’re ~developing~.

15/06/2021 - 2,113 words 09.39 It’s not even technically summer yet, but it’s too hot, and I hate it here. All the windows are open, so everything’s cool, there’s a nice breeze, and lots of light, but the birds are so loud, and I have to keep all the doors closed because the open windows send them swaying and slamming. You know when you close a door when all the windows are open and it slams? Yep. Not into it. 

I feel like every day I try a new way to organise my plotting. I’m unsure as to whether that’s helping me or holding me back, because it forces me to review what I have, which usually sparks new ideas, but I’m not convinced I’ll ever get to the end as long as I keep doing this.

21/06/2021 13.40 I spent the latter half of last week with zero motivation, then I was busy at the weekend, but I’m here now. I’ve been trying to make myself write basically all day--I have a plan, and a list of things I’ve come up with the last few days, but I just couldn’t make myself do it. I’m not in a good mood, but maybe this will help.

I have, however, just reminded myself that I need to prepare this week’s post, because I sincerely doubt either this or my ongoing Recent reads will be ready for Friday. Actually, if I do quite a bit of writing this week, this post might be, but I’m not willing to bet on it.

And oh, crap, now I just want to write a blog post.

No. No I don’t. I started looking at the list of ideas I had, and now I’m just not feeling it. I’m pretty sure when I open my document for this project I’ll lose all motivation too, but it’s worth a shot.

There’s a specific relationship in an anime I recently watched that I want to pull apart--there’s this ship, and the author of the manga has called the two characters ‘soulmates’. There’s just this huge amount of tension between the two, and I want to re-watch the show because I love it, but also so I can take notes to figure out what was so effective about it.

13.53 I’ve been doing this for 13 minutes, but I do think I need to leave this project/outline alone for a bit, give it an opportunity to ruminate, to evolve. In truth, I may not even come back to it until I’ve re-watched the anime I was talking about so I can tear that ship to pieces.

17.33 So I just learned brainstorming is apparently significantly easier on paper. Hm. I’ve just worked out so damn much, stuff I’ve been struggling with.

18.00 I have successfully tied up so many plot threads, simply by working with pen and paper. This is revolutionary. (I know, not really, but it is for me, someone adamant about working with a keyboard and monitor)

22/06/2021 09.42 Seriously, why did I never try actually working on paper before? Something about holding a pen to paper and scribbling and drawing a mindmap--it just works. I’ve been obstinate about avoiding working on paper because I hate physically writing, yet here we are.

25/06/2021 11.09 I’m really not managing much reading at the moment--since I started reading manga, my attention span has just gone down the drain. I’m currently reading Mister Impossible by Maggie Stiefvater, and I don’t think it helped that I had to stop less than a third of the way in to do a buddy read, but I just don’t have much motivation to read it, though I do so want to. I haven’t been listening much to audiobooks lately either, because when I’d usually listen--when I’m getting dressed, waking up, going to bed etc.--I just want to listen to music, because I also recently fell down the well of k-pop, and the group whose discography I’m getting to know at the moment is BTS. Basic, but they’re the fifth group I’m doing, and they have so many songs. Which would happen after eight years, but still.

I want to read so, so badly, but I just don’t feel like reading Mister Impossible. But I do want to finish it before reading anything else. I think I’ll finish my current audiobook, then if I’m still feeling stagnated in Mister Impossible, I’ll switch to the audiobook of that, then just take a break from reading until I’m ready to actually read. 

But this post is for writing, not reading. I did write on the 23rd, but I just didn’t update this post. The 24th I was busy, but my wall is now covered in post-it notes of world-building, characters, gods, plot points, and a whole load of other stuff.

Also, I had an idea for a book title this morning--not for this one, just in general--and when I went to add it to my list, I found a title that would so suit this project. I don’t want to say it, but let’s just say this project will be called ItLotG--or not. That’s a hideous combination of letters. I promise it is actually a good title.

11.52 I’m having another crisis over these two characters. I’m thinking it would make more sense to have L’s betrayal ‘arc’ initiated before the catalyst, or rather have it be the catalyst, except the problem there is that they’re not in the city they need to be in to receive that offer.

UNLESS,,,, what if this point happens just while they’re in the capital.... I’ve got it. 

17.16 I’ve been taking notes this whole time of everything I want to happen in books 2 and 3, and I have so much now i think they’ll be so much easier to plot than this one.

The downside of working mostly on paper is that my plans on Scrivener have been refined to one document, which is now only 878 words.

Right now, there’s a glaring hole between the midpoint and the ending, but my climax is one of those where the climax itself is a very small part of a bigger event, so if I figure out what I want to happen in this big event which is essentially the whole of the third act, I should be able to fill in the rest of Act Two with the setup for that.

So I’m leaving it there for both today and this post. In the last month or so, I decided to start over and mash two projects together, which created a whole new storyline I love, and now I’m mostly done with the first outline. I want to treat outlines as more than just preparation for drafts, because I find notes so much easier to edit than actual prose, and I hate writing without a clear idea of where I’m going. 

I think I’m going to call these ‘runs’--an outline is a run through, a draft a run through, so I’m nearly done with my first run, and I’m very proud of that, so go, go write the idea you have, drink some water, take a nap if you need one, eat if you haven’t eaten in a few hours, and I’ll be back with another writing update innnnnnn probably august, honestly.

Go write that idea!

[ackb]

I decided in February to take up the Free Black Women’s Library Reading Challenge: to read 25 books by Black women or Black non-binary authors by Dec. 31. I decided to participate after I had read this small memoir by Jamaica Kincaid, but I’m going to count it in my total anyway.

What happened, in all honesty, is that once I finished listening to The Great Influenza, I wanted something to flush it out of my ears, so I went looking for anything read by my favorite audiobook narrator, Robin Miles. I first fell in love with Miles’ voice while listening to N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, along with the rest of that trilogy, and loved her all over again in the truly magnificent Warmth of Other Suns, and the very, very good Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. I came across this book, one I had never read, by Jamaica Kincaid and remembered liking her work in college. Perfect. 

The book itself is lovely. Its style is inventive and curious, making plain Kincaid’s critique of colonialism, while maintaining the tone of a tourism brochure. Definitely recommended. 

But also it reminded me of all the books I had read in college that I really should revisit. My main topic of study was African-American Women’s Literature (how strange to know we’d say that differently today) and I read dozens of life-changing novels in those years. Having lived a whole life of my own since then, I know I would meet them on a different field on a re-read. So here we go... First up, Women of Brewster Place. 

[nonatowers]

ladies and gents, this is the moment you’ve waited for

a shy “hi” and welcome to my first blog post on this side blog!  my name is rosie, its a pleasure to meet you all and i will be honest, i dreaded my first post into this community for quite some time, but I just saw this answer-reply by psycho-sybil that made me pull out my literary resources and decide, it’s time to throw in my dime (please ignore this stupid joke). i’m sorry by the way, this is terribly random but i never really managed a blog before so…trial-by-error? (please be kind, i have a glass heart under my analysts hat)

anyways, my first idea was to unravel the character that is Arata Shindo (since many people seem to kind of misunderstand this fella), but that post is, uh, gonna be very very very long and i’m kinda trying to figure out if i should put it elsewhere? Or how to post it? if you guys got any ideas, let me know. 

for today’s dish, i will humbly offer a very watered down and shortened take on psycho pass’ possible ending(s) from a more literary theory-point of view, and hopefully inspire some fella writer out here. for this, i could go on a rant of literary theory and criticism but our medium does not fully fit in there as well as too little people would know what I’m going on about, and likely have life’s to care about unlike me. but if you guys wanna know what books i read to get a grasp of the theories and criticism for like, your own free time, i can link you the uni books i got. with so much blubber done beforehand, lets get to this under the cut, since this will contain some spoilers from season 3. 

the full circle idea is a very classic and satisfying theory in both film and literature. i suppose it circles back to the human brain’s need for completion, and to bring something full circle is the easiest and most ideal way to mentally rest a case and finish things. its can be possible for psycho pass to finish that way. however, i believe there are some different aspects that don’t get emphasised as much as they should when trying to imagine the future of the world in psycho pass. for once, its a so-so chance for a piece of work from the genre of cyberpunk to end on a simple type of full circle. if we take the “father of cyberpunk”, william gibson’s neuromancer trilogy, as an example we will see something that is quite similar and that came up within season 3: the introduction of AI’s, and specifically, sybil’s interest in them. i don’t know if it was just me who was confused at the end of the season why the AI aspect was suddenly so important, literally obliterating interest in an entire character that seemed kind of important to some extent at least (r.i.p. karina komiya at this point) but looking in retrospect and after rewatching it, there is a whole lot of sense to it. the story of psycho pass more or less started with us meeting the world and its limitations, heavily focusing on the bad sides as we follow akane’s point of view for most of the story to the point where figures like mika shimotsuki feel outright wrong to us (disclaimer: i am personally not a big fan of her, but i have to say that 70% of the slander on her are missing some pretty important points regarding her, but that’s for another day). akane stated that one day, sybil will not be needed anymore, which is - let’s say it as it is - a very romantic and ideal way of thinking. but we’re all very morally correct idealists, this idea just speaks most to us. however, over the course of the three seasons (i shall exclude the movies for this) i think it became pretty clear that society with the established politics and functions cannot really return i.e. function without a system like sybil anymore. think of this as an evolutionary type of thing: people are so used to buy food that practically nobody will just willingly agree to stop all that and go hunting like in the “good” ol’ days. mental evolution has finally let us come to understand that for example, gender is nothing but a social construct and we all are just humans. we could not imagine going back to times like 1600s, where race and gender were categorised by some b*llshit f*cking idea like “god-given privilege” (pardon my language at this point). hence it lays rather logically close for people to just give up the comforts of a society which we see in psycho pass is very unlikely. the comforts of that world goes as far as pulling in immigrants from all over there world, which does underline this statement- even if we strictly assume that the entire world is in chaos and war, that just makes japan with its sybil system as something desirable. naturally, we could flip this coin in different ways for various argumentations, but it will all boil down to people should reject living like that but they likely won’t. and I think i do not point out something outrageous or illogical when i say that humans are willing to silently accept a lot of things, even when they really shouldn’t. and that is not just some theory, in episode 4 ma-karina’s existence is shown on broadcast, and yet still karina komiya ends up voted as the new governor. the society knows that she herself has an holographic AI doing work for her, yet they still accepted her, and subsequently, sybil accepted ma-karina as a “citizen” with voting right and hence, right to be nominated (which, if you remember, was this thing that unraveled at the end of first inspector). now, sybil’s motives in accepting an AI likely could be different, namely because it could bring the acceptance of society about the system’s true facade closer, but that is a mini-theory for another day if i’m honest. taking these points in consideration, the first likely option that might occur in psycho pass’ future could be similar to real world situations: more people will start to reject the idea (of AI ruling, especially if the truth about the system ever gets publicised) which then results in bringing forth change and evolution through humans, a very classic scenario. hence it would not finish with our main cast, (which mainly serve as our story teller’s) as triumphant in this battle of man vs machine, but rather with their testimonies of society, and how the begin of change can look like. 

here i shall will finish my already long post here, but i will hint that i personally do a have another theory about how this series could go towards the end. but i will save that up for when the community actually wants to hear it. 

thanks for reading, i hope it wasn’t too messy? i'd appreciate some feedback c:

[you-are-my-neverland]

so. it’s finally time to talk about [my] nano.

i’ve kept my nano project pretty under wraps so far, mostly because it’s been out of my hands. i wasn’t actually planning on doing a for real for real nano; instead, i thought i would dedicate some time to my fanfic (spoiler alert, but i haven’t yet) or work on finishing up revising fairbone (spoiler alert: i did revise one chapter, but i still have like half of it left to go and a nov 30 deadline...rip). if that didn’t work, i thought i would pick a wip i started over the summer or one i had half developed (let’s just say the ideas note i have really boomed over the summer and like...yeah). in conclusion, there were many wips ready for me to work on them, including ash heart, which i really want to write but haven’t figured out how to.

instead i started a new wip.

well, it’s not necessarily new, persay. it’s an idea i’ve had stewing since like late september/early october and planned out a good portion of. however, deciding to start it was a last minute decision - and by last decision, i mean that on october 31st i finished developing the barebones of character development and basic plot lol and then gave it a go. it’s honestly been going crazy well. as of today (november 9th), i just hit 21.2k words. i’m hopeful about this year, while also not wanting to jinx stuff, but like...wow. but writing is has made me realize that, wow, this book is going to be crazy long probably...like i’m 21k words in and we’re still like in the exposition idk what’s going on. but hey, i finished planning out the rest of the basic plot for it today!!!

right. onto the wip details.

honestly, the only reason i haven’t introduced this wip is because a) i want actual stuff done on it and like a proven commitment, because i feel like too often i introduce wips i don’t actually go anywhere with and i hate it, b) i don’t have a set title and c) i actually have no idea how to summarize this.

the novel i’m working on right now is the first of a projected trilogy. i say projected because i have a vague idea that it belongs to a trilogy, but like not a lot of plot except some vaguely connected ideas that should happen in the future. in it, i used a lot of characters from these violent ends, which i tried to write for camp april 2020, but like just their basic barebones; i changed a lot to fit the story, of course. 

not to sound nerdy, but it is like....harry potter inspired, but ONLY in the magical boarding school sense. of course, right now all i have is magical boarding school shenanigans, which i don’t really like because i feel like it unfairly sets the book up as like fun magical stuff when it’s really about murder & politics & student activism (+ a lot of other things ending in -ism). the whole activism part came from watching the trial of the chicago 7 and i was like, bingo, this is what this story needs. 

kay but ANYWAYS. onto the story. like i said, i can’t really summarize it, but there are lots of themes of classism, feminism, the affect on youth and youth’s effect, manipulative adults, revolution, terrorism, sibling dynamics and found family vibes, like all that stuff...packaged into a magical boarding school off the coast of maine setting...recipe for disaster!

mainly i’ve been writing in ophelia’s pov, because she’s my main girl and she’s problematic, but also she’s trying her best and just having a little difficulty fitting in. some other main characters are her twin brother, sebastian, and two other boys, asriel and vincent, who have an initially animistic relationship with ophelia (& kind of each other?) but it’s like enemies to friends (to lovers?).

anyways. here are some carefully curated excerpts below the cut:

i. vincent and asriel meet on a train (ch. 1)

The boy pursed his lips together. “It’s unusual,” he said, finally. “That’s all.” But he was looking at Vincent as if he was noticing him, which meant he was lying, or at least withholding the truth about something. He added, “You’re not from around here, are you?”

“Do you mean geographically?” Vincent replied, raising an eyebrow. “Because I’m from New York.”

A small glimmer of a smile appeared on the boy’s lips, though it vanished as quickly as it had come. “From the Magical World,” he clarified. 

“What gives it away?” Vincent asked sarcastically, waving a hand across his body. “My impeccable taste?”

“Among other things,” the boy said.

ii. sebastian and ophelia discuss grief on a ferry (ch.2 )

“You and mom talked?” Ophelia asked, surprised. She hadn’t exactly been keeping track of them, but she was sure she and Sebastian had spent much of the day together, as they were wont to do.

Sebastian looked at the floor. “Yeah,” he answered, hoarsely. “At least she wants to talk about Des. Dad doesn’t, and neither do you.”

Ophelia sighed, wondering why, today of all days, her sister was haunting them. Maybe it was because there should have been three people heading to Rijevduct, instead of two. Maybe Mother Magic was reminded of the loss of one of her own. 

“I’ve let her go,” she said. “You should too. We have too much of our lives ahead of us to mourn Desdemona forever.”

“I don’t mourn,” Sebastian said, words uncharacteristically sharp. “But I do grieve.”

“Isn’t that basically the same thing,” Ophelia mumbled, closing her eyes and feeling the press of a headache behind them. 

“Sorrow,” Sebastian said, the word a soft shudder. “And sad endings.”

“What?” 

“That’s what makes a good tragedy,” Sebastian answered. “I read it in a book.”

iii. headmistress alexeyev gives a speech (ch. 2)

“Eight years ago, seventy two students were slaughtered here. Some died on the very spot where you now stand today.” Ophelia glanced down at the floor, seeing the motion repeated instinctively around her as well. She looked over at Sebastian, who had closed his eyes instead, a pale flush meeting the faint color in his cheeks. His throat bobbed as he swallowed, tennis shoes scraping against stone as he toed them against the floor, as if he was shaking something only visible to him off.

“It was a tragedy,” Headmistress Alexeyev continued. “I say this because it is the truth. It was a tragedy, and not one that should never have happened.” She inhaled; Ophelia saw her chest rise, shoulders with it, in a sharp motion before she exhaled, body rearranging itself into poise once more. “I speak of this to tell you to assure you that Rijevduct is safe. I know there have been continuous doubts over the security of this school since that day eight years ago. I cannot, of course, guarantee that you will not come to any harm here. I cannot tell you that Rijevduct is the safe haven you were taught it was growing up; events have already proved that it is, in fact, not as impenetrable as one might think.”

Ophelia frowned, confused as to the line of reasoning. She had thought the whole point of the year of transition was to make sure that Rijevduct was infinitely more safer than it had been—and they had all been under the assumption that Rijevduct was virtually impenetrable until the massacre, which had led to the heightened security measures they saw today.

“I can, however, promise you that I, and everyone here today, will do anything in their power to keep you safe,” the Headmistress said. Next to Ophelia, Briar bowed her head, lowering her eyes and swallowing, the action almost a convulsion of her throat and mouth. Ophelia brushed her hand, lightly, in question, and the other girl just shook her head, looking away purposefully, so that Ophelia lost sight of her face and her sad eyes.

“These next three years will be far from easy. Gone are the sheltered lives where your parents could kiss your injuries goodbye, or sing you to sleep at night. Rijevduct is far from the cold, real world, but it is close enough when it comes to not asking you what you want first. This is an adjustment period. This is learning how to survive—and I will tell you this; surviving means many different things to many different people. You will have to decide on your own what this will mean for you, and how you will apply what you are taught here to your futures. Be wise. Be proud. Be humble. Cry. Laugh. Live. As your Headmistress, I, along with your professors, will be here throughout your time.” She raised her glass, “To the worthy,” and then drank, turning and walking back to her seat, which she lowered herself into gracefully.

iv. sebastian pov! (ch. 3)

There was a dead girl in Sebastian’s first period Magical Theory class. She was sitting diagonal from him, on the Glass side of the classroom, in an empty chair, staring straight ahead at the chalkboard. Sebastian tried not to look at her too obviously, his eyes straying from the open book in front of him to her cautiously, beneath the sleeve of his sweater.

She was sitting blankly in the chair, scraping her shoes against the ground, though they could not leave any scuff marks. Though she was the same faded shades most girls were, Sebastian could make out her pleated pale blue plaid skirt, which brushed around her knees, and the stained white blouse that might have once been spotless, but had been marred forever by the circumstances surrounding her death—objectively, that was to say, with blood. Her dark brown hair fell into loose curls around her shoulders, little silver studs glinting dimly, unable to catch the light. Her knee high socks now pooled around her calves and ankles, revealing a rotting bandaid on one of her knees. One of her tennis shoes was peeling at the toes, looking as if it had been ripped apart. 

Her fingernails had all been pulled off. Sebastian was good at analyzing ghosts by this point; he recognized the bloody flesh and bone of the nail bed. There was also blood matted across her head, trickling down her temple, with bruises covering her body; they peeked out from beneath the collar of her shirt, blackened across her cheekbones with a sunken quality in particular to one of her cheeks, as if the bone had begun to cave.

Subjectively, she was far from one of the worst that Sebastian had seen.

[wickymicky]

my top ten favorite kpop singles of 2021 so far: first quarter edition (january-march)

10. Pixy - Wings: I’m not as into this song as other people, but it’s grown on me, and I think they have a lot of potential. I did not expect a group called “Pixy” to have this dark of a concept haha, I like that. I like the choreo and overall performance of it too, I think that’s the highlight for me

9. G Idle - Hwaa: Not my favorite G Idle title track, but I do think it’s in the top half. It’s interesting to me that they did this song, since it is pretty much all in Korean, there’s no English whatsoever (the only English is a “yeah” at the beginning haha), which for a group like G Idle who has used a lot of English in the past and is very popular internationally is kind of a bold choice, and I’m into it

8. Ateez - Fireworks (I’m The One): I’m still not fully sold on Ateez’s direction post-Wonderland/Answer, with the “end” of their pirate concept (possibly, it seems complicated lol, idk, but you know what I mean anyway), but I do kinda like this song! It sounds kinda like... European lmao. Like I keep thinking I hear accordion in the drop, but idk maybe I’m just imagining things. I mean all that in a good way, btw. Like a good kind of European (if you can imagine such a thing)

7. Shinee - Don’t Call Me: As someone who only got into kpop in 2019, and didn’t even get into a single boy group for like 6 or 7 months (and even then, for a while I just had one single token boy group lol), Shinee isn’t a group that I had checked out much from until fairly recently. I’m still new here, I suppose lol. But yeah idk, this song is good! I love the production and their obvious charisma and talent. Like, I can tell even just from this song that their reputation is earned. It’s just a solid release

6. Purple Kiss - Ponzona: I do prefer Skip Skip, but I decided to limit this to singles and title tracks. I also prefer My Heart Skip a Beat (by a lot, actually), but that came out last year lol. This song has really been growing on me a lot though! Like, a lot actually. I like the violin, I think that’s a really interesting touch haha, I feel like that adds so much to the way the song sounds overall. Yuki’s rapping is impressive too, I like her flow in every song I’ve heard her in so far, especially since she writes her raps herself and Korean isn’t her native language. Honestly that’s one of the most impressive things about Purple Kiss... they seem to be involved in writing all of the things they do! That’s SO RARE for a group to do right from debut, especially for a girl group! I think that’s a great sign that things are changing, and girl groups are being taken more seriously and being allowed more creative freedom than ever before. Ponzona was literally a song written for a monthly evaluation when they were trainees. That’s really impressive. Skip Skip was too, but yeah lol. 

5. Pentagon - Do or Not: I mentioned that for a while I just had one token boy group that I liked, and that was Pentagon haha, they were my first. I like that this is a return to their fun sound, but in a different way... like, this song doesn’t sound anything like Shine or Naughty Boy lol. Pentagon are just really good at conveying passion in their songs and I think that shines through here too! I like the way the bass and percussion sound, that’s just quality mixing lol. I also love that even though it’s this kinda pop-punk-ish-doo-wop-ish kpop song, it still has a bit of sadness underneath the fun, which is something I think is a trademark of Pentagon’s style haha. But mostly, it’s fun

4. Tri.Be - Doom Doom Ta: The main reason I checked this out was because it was written and produced by LE from EXID, and you can really tell haha. In fact, her voice is in the song at certain points, and like... she has a really distinctive voice lol. Anyway this song is like a pretty hard commitment to this Latin/moombahton kind of sound, and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that trend in kpop, but either way, I do think this song is a bop. I’ve had it on repeat way more than everything below this point, in fact all the songs in this top 4 I’ve had on repeat like an order of magnitude more than the songs from 5-10 lol. it’s been a slow beginning to the year. I don’t have a lot of specifics to mention here about Doom Doom Ta, I just think it’s an earworm 

3. Weeekly - After School: This was really highly anticipated for me, because I love their previous title tracks. Tag Me especially is a song I consider to be almost perfect, which is not something I say about very many songs at all haha. I personally don’t think After School is quite as good as Tag Me or Zig Zag, but I do really like it! It’s always good to get more fun, exciting, unashamedly catchy songs haha, it’s a breath of fresh air. I love this concept for them too, I think it fits them really well! They’re just a lot of fun. This mini-album, We Play, is my favorite of theirs so far too, though that doesn’t necessarily affect my placement of this song in particular

2. Cherry Bullet - Love So Sweet: God damn, this song is really good. It’s really simple, but that works to it’s advantage imo. I love that the background melody of the instrumental during the verse is the same as the vocal melody in the chorus (or at least very close), that���s just super satisfying. Ending the song with an extended “da da dadada da da” segment was a big risk too lol, that could have been annoying, but idk I think that really is one of the highlights of the song. This song feels like the kind of song where the songwriter came up with that melody and went “YES! this is IT! YESSSSS” and they knew they had come up with something really, really catchy, and they built the rest of the song around showcasing it. And it works!

1. Dreamcatcher - Odd Eye: This probably isn’t much of a surprise lol. But similar to After School... This isn’t my favorite Dreamcatcher comeback, and tbh I think it’s my least favorite of the Dystopia trilogy. But like... that’s still enough to make it my favorite song of the first quarter of 2021. It’s great, I love the way they do the cyberpunk concept and sound without going into the synthwave direction like Everglow La Di Da did. I love La Di Da a ridiculous amount, but I just mean that it’s nice to see variety even within a similar overall concept. Also! Handong is back! And she crushed it! In previous title tracks she and Gahyeon often got the least amount of lines by far, and the least amount of screentime and such, and Gahyeon definitely got times to shine during Scream and Boca and made it clear that she’s leveled up a lot, and I was really hoping that Odd Eye would be able to do the same for Handong (without sacrificing Gahyeon’s screentime and lines)... and yeah, it really was, lol. Handong was all over this song, and her voice reaaaaaally complements this sound. This group has no weak links, and obviously all of us already knew that, but now even the people who only casually listen to them know that without a doubt too.

idk... i’m not totally sure about this list but that feels mostly right to me i guess. I feel like Odd Eye is definitely my favorite so far, but to be honest I don’t feel like it’s the Song of the Year. like, if it had been released in 2020, I don’t think it would have made my top 10. If nothing better than Odd Eye comes out for the rest of the year then sure, it will be my SOTY haha, but idk, I just think that there hasn’t been anything *truly* great so far yet. And that’s okay... I’m very picky about this kind of thing. I don’t give high scores to things that don’t deserve it lol... and like in my opinion there were only 4 songs in 2020 that are the kind of near-perfect instant-soty song I’m talking about, and three of those four came out in the second half of the year. So the fact that I don’t think anything so far has been at that top level isn’t a bad thing, and isn’t really something I’m worried about. I think we definitely have not gotten the best songs of the year yet (unless everything else ends up sucking lol, but idk i hope thats not what happens...)

oh also there was an WJSN comeback today, and that would probably have been on this list, but I havent heard it yet because i was waiting until I finished writing this haha. like, since it came out on March 31st, tbh I’m just gonna count it as an April comeback, so i’m sure it’ll be in my list for the second quarter that i’ll post at the end of June lol. i mean, unless i dont like it. but i’ll probably like it haha.

[professorspork]

today in the Andromeda Galaxy, GLITCHES TRIED TO KILL ME BUT I MADE IT WORK. or, well. Helen made it work, actually, and I was very grateful. (Elaaden, what do you have against my triangle button working? and wtf was that Nomad bug where suddenly I could see through time and the world contracted and my hair turned white????)

anyway.

this morning I joked to Helen that I was feeling very “I love all of my crew equally”/“I don’t care for Cora” so today I made a concerted effort to get to know her better--and tried a few Nomad combos where she wouldn’t sound like the fun police. (turns out, she and Vetra get along great! and also when I put her with Peebee she gets very self-conscious about how she’s totes not appropriating asari culture and it’s v embarrassing. on the OTHER hand, she makes fun of Peebee for peeping on Jaal and like, again, wtf, let me have my ot3.)

I started out finishing up that Morda drive core mission that glitched, and of course I gave the krogan the drive core in exchange for the outpost because I LOVE KROGAN and also RYDER LOVES OUTPOSTS. win/win tbh. but honestly the best part was getting to pick the dialogue option talking to Addison “fuck Tann” and Ryder actually getting to say fuck! it’s the little things.

after closing out Elaaden I decided to try and finish up a few errand-y missions like scanning plants, etc. in doing so, I got to play soccer with my very best friend Liam which was a heartwarming lot of fun, and fought TWO architects because just one was not enough. Peebee’s ex stole our beloved Proof Of Concept (I know the bot is called Poc, but honestly I think full-naming it is much cuter) and I was all “of course I’m gonna help you we’re in this together” which threw Peebee off her game because she’s still thrown every time someone cares about her. I AM, AGAIN, CANNOT EMPHASIZE THIS ENOUGH, GENUINELY SAD I’M GOING TO HAVE TO CHOOSE AMONG ROMANCE OPTIONS. this experience could not be more different from the main trilogy, where I romanced Liara out of a sense of obligation/curiosity faaaaaar more than any genuine interest or investment, and wasn’t tempted* to deviate from that by anyone else along the way. there are a thousand mechanical reasons why I think romance works much, much better in Andromeda than it ever did in the main series--among them the very pointed focus on found family throughout, the more nuanced ability to craft a unique Ryder by doing away with paragon/renegade and instead having the more robust conversation trees, and the overworld chatting on the Nomad giving EVERYONE the amount of personality off the bat that my OG crew had to like bite and claw for for two and a half games-- but like. I’m not gonna lie a big part of it is just that I just think more of these people are more interesting as potential partners. I THINK I AM AN ANDROMEDA GIRL. 

* well that’s a lie I would have romanced Tali in a heartbeat if I weren’t playing fem!Shep and that was illegal. and I’ll probably romance Sam Traynor after that. so. it’s not a total bust.

but I digress. 

saved that scientist’s baby on Voeld, and afterwards had my first ACTUAL, HUMAN conversation with Addison about--shockingly--the nature of friendship. I was genuinely surprised and pleased! look at us go! I also did some spying for that STG agent, and got the world’s most badly delivered “gee, are you really going to believe that old coot?” speech out of my main suspect, which was hilariously insulting.

and then, partly due to Helen’s advice and partly because, again, today was Learn To Appreciate Cora Day, I finished out her loyalty mission! I was shocked to find Sarissa alive after all the build-up-- I was certain that after that long a drum roll for how key she’d be in the Initiative’s growth that we’d find her mega-dead-- but as Helen pointed out to me, the trope is Don’t Meet Your Heroes, not Your Hero Is Probably Dead, Actually. her whole “be calm, soldier” routine @ Vedaria was kind of grating in the moment but is very cute after the fact, so fine. the whole muted sounds and gravity tricks of that final fight were super fun, even though I did accidentally jump into space once or twice. the big biotics lightshow was v impressive, but after I took a pretty hardline stance on Sarissa: come clean and shut up, and you’re fired. I did get a little offended when the asari captain was like “you could have killed us all, it was only dumb luck that Ryder found us” bc EXCUSE ME, SOME OF IT WAS DUMB SKILL, but still. it was good to get that all settled, and very good to hear Cora say what was immediately obvious to everyone but her, which is that her compulsion towards mentors and plans would have made her a poor Pathfinder but makes her a perfect XO. 

then I hit level 50 and spent a lot of time upgrading my gear, and like-- a kind god would have put the loadout console next to R&D and the buy/sell screen so I wouldn’t have to run up and down the Tempest corridor like an idiot. but whatever. Baby’s Fourth Beam Gun TM (an Avenger with a beam emitter) is working out splendidly, I’m slicing and dicing with my asari sword, and I’ve just put seeking plasma bolts on my Eagle which delights me. still shopping around for my ideal sniper before I commit but we’re getting there! 

then I went to start the new planet, but then realized Ark Natanus was right there, and ended up backtracking twice. First I ran back to the Nexus thinking there’d be another fun homecoming cut scene for the asari like there’d been for the salarians that I didn’t want to muddy with adding turians, too, only that didn’t happen. boo! I did remember to check on my mom, tho, so that was nice and emotional. then I went back to Netanus to start that up, only to realize I was wearing a very ugly and entirely face-obscuring helmet-- and once it was clear the entirety of the mission was going to be me emoting at Rix, I restarted the mission with a different armor loudout. yes, I am that vain, but only because opportunities for mlm/wlw solidarity are rare in this game (Gil’s been quiet lately, lol) and Rix deserved my best. though after doing all this, I am wondering: why do all the SAMs have different voices? surely making even one AI as smart and unique as SAM is difficult; then making each Ark’s SAM unique feels like an unnecessary burden? but whatever.

H-whateverthefuck is by far my favorite planet to Nomad around on. I’ve been complaining about the lack of low gravity mechanics since the Mako in ME1 (WE WENT TO THE MOON, THE LITERAL MOON, OUR MOON, AND NOT EVEN THAT HAD LOW GRAVITY?) and so this felt like pure vindication. (also, in general but very aggressively NOT for this planet because of the radiation, shout out to the Nomad for letting me get out no matter how poorly or vertically it’s parked, because lord knows I glitched the Mako many times trying to pause and get out in ‘impossible’ places the Nomad handles with ease.) anyway. the concept of a broken-up planet is terrifying, and the reality of it was eerie as all get-out. what neat execution!

and speaking of a neat execution, I’m so relieved going with the interrupt and firing at Meriwether while she held Sid worked, because I was again legit scared I might get Sid killed. as you’ll recall re: my Jaal loyalty mission, that’s the second time I was genuinely quite nervous there would be real consequences to screwing this up! I give the game a lot of credit for building a world where it feels like I really could screw up that badly. I’m very proud/fond of Sid, and the whole security camera mechanic was delightful-- a more fun version of the kind of stuff KOTOR always made me do. back on the Tempest, I decided to flirt with Vetra while the flirting’s still good, but tbh her flirt option (“I care about Sid bc I care about you”) wasn’t even all that romantically valanced, if you ask me! but also I love that Sid’s idea of justice is fast-tracking having cats in Heleus. 

phew! with so many big things now out of the way, I’m not sure how much dithering I can/should do before continuing with the main mission. but that’s a decision for future me.

[the-last-airbadger]

My 2020

Hey y’all. So 2020 happened. That was a thing. Apparently. I know for a lot of people this year was uhm… pretty shit… but it was still a year that happened so it’s time for my annual reflection post (probably the only time I still post about myself on tumblr lol) and maybe we might even find some good things that happened this year!

 The Beginning of 2020 vs Now

So, a lot has changed since the start of the year. A pandemic happened, for one. I can’t believe that a year ago I could still go to class every day and see my friends and now I’m pretty much stuck at home every day. The year started out pretty normal and then march happened and well, you all know what happened next. The worst part about the pandemic for me personally was probably the fact that I barely see my friends anymore and I can’t go to class every day. Some people may not think that not going to class is that bad, but I really enjoyed university more than I ever enjoyed school and I was really happy going there every day, and I was already sad I’d only have 4 to 5 years to spend there, so when that period got even shorter it made me kinda sad.

On the other hand, I do think that mentally I’m in a much better place than I was last year around this time. Being home this much really gave me time to reflect and work on my issues, and because my sister was stuck in our house for a couple of weeks I got to talk to her a lot which really helped me feel better. I think in general my entire family (my brother, sister and mom) have become a lot more open with each other which I think is great! I guess quarantine can have some benefits.

 The Best Things about 2020

Okay, here’s is where we’re going to get even more positive and go over all the good things that happened (to me) this year! To be honest, most of the year was a bit of a blur so I probably will forget quite a bit, but I’m going to give this a try anyway. At the start of the year (when things were still normal) I was super excited to get into the next semester, as the one before had,,, kinda sucked, and those 6 weeks of class I had at the start of the year were really great. I remember me and my friends having a competition of who could get mentioned the most in our teacher’s powerpoint presentation so those classes were always interesting. I also finally got to dye my hair for the first time with the help of my friends. I’ve been wanting to do that for so long, and I’m so happy I finally got to do it! I even know how to do it myself now, and my hair hasn’t been brown since the start of march! Then, at the start of march, my dad and stepmother moved away and I permanently moved in with my mom. Before, I used to live with both my mom and my dad and I got really really sick of switching houses every week, so to finally live in one house and have all my stuff in one place was a bit of a relief to me, and I’m still really happy with it. After that, things become a bit blurry. I remember that at the start of quarantine in … April? I watched Sex Education or the first time, which is now not only one of my favourite shows ever, but also taught me a lot and helped me with some of the issues I was dealing with. We’ll skip over the subsequent sexuality crisis I had (I think I might actually be straight??), and skip straight to the summer, when I started watching I-Land. I watched every episode as it aired live, and because of this show my Fridays really became the highlight of the week. I don’t think I’ve ever been so invested in a survival show XD. The rest of the year was mostly just me spending time with myself. It got a bit lonely sometimes, but I also don’t think I’ve ever written as much as I have this year, and my drawing has significantly improved (if I may say so myself)! Especially towards the end of the year, when I started making a planning every day to prevent myself from wasting away all my time on youtube, I got super productive, and I wrote a lot, and made a lot of art, and I really felt good. I even started (gasp) working out. Yeah I know. Shocking right.

There was also a lot of good music that was released this year, and, to close this section on a great note, through one of my classes I finally found a group of friends to play D&D with! We haven’t actually played yet, but we will, and I’m so excited to play the game and get to know these people more! They all seem really kind!

 My Resolutions for 2020?

Now, here’s the part where we check whether I actually reached all the goals I set myself for 2020. As usual, I have no idea what my resolutions were, so I honestly have no idea how I did. Let’s see, shall we?

Express my feelings more (as in I get really awkward in any sappy or mushy situation but I would like to be able to tell people I appreciate them without cringing) – UHM way to attack me on the very first resolution jeez. I did get more open with my family but I still can’t tell people I care about them without cringing so this is a fail lol

Again, learn to depend less on other people’s opinion and trust my own – I’ve been working on it, I think I’ve gotten a bit better? So win?

Get my sleeping schedule back on track – did that! It’s a bit whacky again now because of the holidays, but October and November were a big success regarding this resolution

WRITE MORE. This time I’ll make some concrete goals: Either I’ll get my story’s first draft done, or I’ll write 100 pages on a single project – okay, so here’s the thing. I don’t think I did any of these particular things, however this time I am 100% sure I wrote a lot more than the past years. I cannot count all the files and pages and notes I have now, but I wrote a lot, so I’m counting this as a win

I want to try NaNoWriMo (not necessarily in November, but at some point) – yeah, didn’t do that oops

I want to read a lot again but maybe not as much as this year because I want to focus on writing too. 40 books? – 49 books babey

Read all my current unread books (Aru Shah 2, Skullduggery Pleasant 9, Gemina, The Mistborn Trilogy and Call Down The Hawk) and finish my reread of Heroes of Olympus and the Raven Cycle) – Did all of these except Skullduggery Pleasant 9 (the start was so boring I decided not to read it all) and The Mistborn Trilogy (I am about halfway through the first book I think?) so I’m counting this as half a win

Finally read a book by V.E. Schwab (I’ve been wanting to try one of her books for ages) – Did that! Read a whole trilogy. It was good but not as great as I expected them to be. I think my expectations were too high though

Finish Playing Twilight Princess (I promised my brother) – Did that! I’m really proud of myself and so is my brother

Go. Swimming. Seriously. It’s scandalous that I still haven’t done that after waiting so long to be able to – IT’S BEEN 5 YEARS SINCE I LAST WENT SWIMMING WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME. I did buy new swimshorts but I still haven’t actually used them… shame on me

Try to worry less about school and not overwork myself – kinda?

Maybe try another drawing challenge somewhere this summer? I haven’t done any of those in a while and I feel like my art needs more attention – okay, so I didn’t do that, but I did at the start of the year make the resolution to make portrait/photoshoot-like drawings for my 8 main oc’s, and I did actually manage to finish that, and they are some of the best drawings I’ve ever made, so though I haven’t actually done a challenge specifically, I did do something

I want to try a 24 hour readathon – Yeah, didn’t do that oops

I kinda want to learn a piano piece as well, but I already have so many hobbies I want to focus on so I don’t know if I’ll have the time ☹ – yeah my dad sold our piano so… fail XD

 Expectations for 2021

Now, after last year I think it’s safe to say we can never really know what to expect. But! I’m going to guess anyway because it’ll be really fun to see next year whether I got anything right.

The first thing that I think will probably happen this year (if I don’t majorly mess anything up) is I’ll be writing my thesis next semester, and then in the summer I’ll get my bachelor’s degree. Honestly I can’t believe how fricking fast those 3 years went, but I guess I’ll just have to roll with it lol. Corona vaccinations will also probably start happening next year, and hopefully this will mean that going outside and seeing my friends will be possible again next year – at least a lot more than it was this year. I hope 2021 will be the year of hanging out with friends and getting to live a little again. Maybe even get to go to class. That would be great.

On to more minor – but no less exciting – things, 2021 will probably bring us a new season of Sex Education! I’m sooo excited for that holy shit. And, in a similar vein, I have high hopes for kpop releases now that SHINee is finally back, and it looks like Haseul is also returning to LOONA! 2021 will also be the year in which ENHYPEN makes their first comeback, and some of the other I-LAND contestants will also make their debut, and there might even be a new season of I-LAND as well in the summer? So there’s a lot of things to look forward to. Oh, and I almost forgot, Dan Howell’s book will be released in May, and there will be a new Grishaverse book, and the Shadow and Bone show will start airing, which I am really curious about. Again, lots of things to look forward to!

 2021 Resolutions

I’m not feeling as ambitious as I was last year, but there are a couple of things I want to try and do, so let’s jump into the resolutions!

I just came up with this today, but I think I want to try and build a bit of a skincare routine? The skin on my nose is kinda flakey, and I think it couldn’t hurt to try and take better care of my skin

Keep up with my daily workouts. I want to work out every day, except when I’m at my dad’s or when it’s a special day, like Christmas or something.

Be able to do either 50 push-ups on my knees, 25 normal push-ups, or both

GO SWIMMING

Keep up with planning daily! It’s a really good way to balance all of my 3195 hobbies and it helps me to not get stressed about school

Write (almost) every day. I need to make it a habit

Draw at least once a week, every other day if possible

Go outside at least once a week. That doesn’t seem very hard but with corona I did not realise how little I go outside if I am not forced to. Sometimes I spend 3 weeks without going out and I don’t even notice it. That can’t be good for me lol

Try to make healthier food choices. Maybe follow the lunch meal plan of the guy whose workout videos I follow.

Get my bachelor’s degree

Grow a beard. I’m getting closer… I know I’m getting closer…

Meet with my frIENDS and give them the alBUMS I have for them

Be more careful with my money, maybe even save a bit of money

Spend less time on social media

Read more educational books

I think that’s it! I can’t think of anything else right now so these will have to do. I wish that 2021 will treat all of you much better than whatever mess 2020 was! Happy 2021!

Last year’s post: (x)

@the-official-pentacorn @asiandutchgirl

[buildarocketboys]

Books read 2020: Reviews (1-20)

Decided to write a little review/overview for all the books I’ve read this year. Mostly just for personal record but please feel free to message me about any of these books!

1. Amberlough by Lara Elena Donnelly (Jan 6th – Jan 13th) 8 days 400 pages

I loved this whole trilogy, but this might have been my favourite of all three. I loved the setting (the main reason, apart from the queer characters, why I wanted to read this book) which is a fantasy setting based on the dying days of Berlin during the Weimar Republic. Loved this setting (especially the cabaret/music hall part) and it’s the only book that really features it. I also enjoy (or…find compelling, enjoy might not quite be right since there’s some very ‘yowch’ descriptions regarding torture/being beaten up) the story/plot most in this one, I was on the edge of my seat wanting to know what happened next…

2. Maurice by E.M. Forster (Nov 17th – Jan 21st) 256 pages

This is the only kind of cheat I have in here, because yes I did start reading it in November 2019, but I read the vast majority of it in 2020. I’d wanted to read it for ages because it’s such a gay classic and there were many sections (sentences, paragraphs) that I related to heavily, not even always as a queer person, but in that way that the best books get at the heart of something about the human experience in a way that’s intensely relatable to the reader. I think I found the romance elements kind of anticlimactic overall but maybe that’s kind of the point? It’s a happy ending, but in a very quiet way. (I think, it has been nearly a year since I read it!)

3. East, West by Salman Rushdie (Jan 17th – Jan 24th) 8 days 224 pages

I started reading this to compare it with its Spanish translation for my Postcolonialism in Translation essay lol. Some pretty interesting stories in here, also pretty sure this is the only collection of short stories I read this year, so it has that distinction. Not super my thing but acted as an enjoyable reading break in the local park while I was slogging my way through essays (and God do I miss that life now).

4. Affinity by Sarah Waters (Jan 24th – Jan 31st) 8 days 352 pages

This was the first of three Sarah Waters books I read this year. I have now read all of her work, and I enjoyed this one a lot – very much a ghost story. It wasn’t my favourite, but definitely sits nicely in the middle.

5. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (Jan 31st – Feb 5th) REREAD 6 days 500 pages

Reread this while on a trip to York, when stuff like that was still possible. As good as ever. I love Time Traveler’s Wife not for the romance (which is…interesting, but personally I don’t find it exactly enjoyable and the characters aren’t particularly likable or relatable for me) but for the prose and the structure. The back-and-forth structure of the book (travelling through time, Henry – and Clare – at different points in their life) makes for a breathtakingly constructed plot and I love it more every time. Some of the prose and stuff the characters talk about are kind of pretentious but I’m kind of pretentious myself (I discovered  Rilke through TTW) and a lot of it has stuck in my brain, to the point that 10 months later I keep thinking about it and kind of want to read it yet again.

6. Armistice by Lara Elena Donnelly (Feb 5th – Feb 9th) 5 days 400 pages

I really enjoyed this sequel, I loved exploring the rest of the world, I loved the interaction between characters who either hadn’t met before, hadn’t seen each other in years (there’s a time jump between Amberlough and Armistice) and brand new characters (who were mostly equally as compelling/lovable). A worthy sequel.

7. Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson (Feb 13th – Feb 24th) 12 days 327 pages

My thing (at least non-fiction-wise) this year has been books about food and food history, and this is the first of those on this list. It was pretty good, very interesting. I have trouble retaining information from non-fiction books so I only remember it in the broadest strokes (and remember reading it in the Hygge café in Sheffield which was really cool and I hope it’s survived the pandemic) but it was a really eye-opening look into different appliances/tools/processes/spaces used throughout history and in different parts of the world when it comes to food and cooking.

8. Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution by Shiri Eisner (Feb 25th – Mar 11th) 16 days 352 pages

I read this in the period just before everything started shutting down and the day I finished it (incidentally my girlfriend’s birthday) was more or less the start of the lockdown for us, so that’s my prevailing memory of this book. It was a very good, enlightening look into bi politics and what we (I, as a white gentile especially) could do better. But again, I don’t remember it in great detail because I was more preoccupied with what was happening around it.

9. Solitaire by Alice Oseman (Mar 14th – Mar 16th) 3 days 392 pages

This was pretty good but I definitely read most YA (well, reality-based YA) as an easy, quick read that doesn’t challenge me too much, so I don’t have too much to say about it. It was nice to read about the Heartstopper characters

10. What If It’s Us by Becky Albertalli and Adam Silvera (Mar 17th – Mar 20th) 4 days 437 pages

Again, early lockdown YA so basically brain popcorn for me. That’s not a bad thing though.

11. The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (Mar 20th – Mar 30th) 11 days 512 pages

This was my least favourite of the Sarah Waters books I read this year, and probably not coincidentally, the only book of hers without explicit queer characters. But still a pretty good scary story.

12. Amnesty by Lara Elena Donnelly (Apr 1st – April 6th) 6 days 384 pages

The last in the trilogy. I still liked it very much, but not as much as the first two books. I think endings to a trilogy are hard to get right. I feel like there was too much focus on one character and his predicament (and while I enjoyed his ending and happily ever after with probably m favourite character of the series), I wasn’t as compelled by this one as I was by the other two.

13. Lisey’s Story by Stephen King (Apr 6th – Apr 15th)  10 days 513 pages

My first Stephen King! I actually really enjoyed this, especially the scary fantasy dream world thing. It wasn’t too scary for me (I am a big scaredy cat who’s just dipping my toe into horror novels since I figure reading horror is moderately less scary than watching it) and just overall pretty good.

14. This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (Apr 16th – Apr 20th) 5 days 209 pages

Loved this! The meandering almost poetry of it, the epic enemies to lovers, the weird admixture of sci fi and larger than life fantasy concepts (and beings!). Will definitely return to this one again.

15. Five Hundred Mile Walkies by Mark Wallington (Apr 21st – Apr 25th) REREAD 5 days 224 pages

I read this as a young teenager and found it hilarious. It was one of my dad’s books (he might even have recommended it to me, although I did have a habit of reading anything and everything that was in the bookcase – Memoirs of a Geisha at about 13, anyone?) and I laughed out loud practically every page. The gist of it is that Mark takes his sister’s (or sister’s ex??) dog, Boogie and goes to walk the entire 500 miles of the South West coast path. I loved this anyway because I loved the South West (especially Cornwall) and love seeing it through someone else’s eyes. So I reread it and I still enjoyed it, but didn’t find it as rip roaringly hilarious as I used to. Guess your sense of humour changes as you grow up, who knew?

16. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café by Fannie Flagg (Apr 27th – May 10th) 14 days 416 pages

I’ll be honest, I struggled with this one. I’m not sure if it was the setting (historically, geographically, linguistically) that put me off or the way it was written or what. I enjoyed the story but it just wasn’t really my thing.

17. The Night Watch by Sarah Waters (May 11th – May 17th) 7 days 528 pages

My final Sarah Waters book (until she writes more! *fingers crossed*) and definitely my favourite of the ones I read this year. Set during the Blitz in London, it’s pretty much straight up historical fiction, and I enjoyed it very much. I think part of it was I related heavily to the characters going through this dramatic time in history, because, you know, pandemic! There were certain passages that really connected with me/felt like an echo of today in a way that was sort of comforting, I guess.

18. Doctor Who: The Maze of Doom by David Solomons (May 18th – May 19th) 2 days 272 pages

A fun, quick and easy Doctor Who romp. Not much to say about this one.

19. Room by Emma Donoghue (May 19th – May 20th) 2 days 321 pages

Possibly the opposite of the previous. If you know anything about Room (the book or the film, which I actually watched years ago) then you know the subject matter is pretty dark and harrowing. Because it’s told through the eyes of a child however, I found it pretty easy (in terms of speed rather than subject matter) to get through and read it in about 24 hours. It’s super compelling too.

20. The Psychology of Time Travel by Kate Mascarenhas (June 6th – June 11th) 6 days 372 pages

This, as far as I remember, was just a random one that I managed to pick up (metaphorically since I read this as an ebook) but it was pretty good. Possibly my favourite random discovery of the year, an interesting look on time travel and its consequences, based around the discovery/invention of time travel by four women scientists in the 1960s (I think) and how it affects the rest of their lives.

[maydaymemer]

Reviewing every Hitman level - Part 2: World of Assassination

Part 1 here: https://maydaymemer.tumblr.com/post/635416983034380288/reviewing-every-hitman-level-part-1-the-ps2

WoA1 (2016):

ICA Facility - 3/5

Both Freeform Training and The Final Test are okay. There’s just enough there to be enjoyable, but I wish Freeform had Contracts mode since I think that would bolster replayability. As infamous as Final Test is for newbie Contracts some of them provide more interesting gameplay scenarios than Jasper’s basic route.

The Showstopper/Paris - 4/5

In most of these reviews for WoA levels I’m judging both the mission and location at the same time. As for Paris there’s level design when it comes to the geometry itself but I think the targets leave a lot to be desired. I’m a little harsher on Blood Money and WoA because their rating systems are a lot less flexible than previous games, so they have to make up for that with highly manipulatable targets. Sure I can kill either target anywhere I want but due to Victor standing in a lot of crowds that’s not going to get my SA unless I use accidents, which even then can backfire if a non-target gets caught under them. Victor and Dalia are likeable assholes but I couldn’t find many good ways to manipulate them and break their scripting. There’s still ways sure, the coin is a godsend, but not as many as say Robert Knox in Miami. If IO brought back the escalations this could be bumped up to a perfect score based on level design alone, but right now it’s way too simple and reliant on doing what the devs want. It was their first true attempt at this new style so it’s understandable they were a little squeamish at giving total freedom.

Holiday Hoarders - 3/5

This is a fun little distraction. Unfortunately Harry and Marv don’t react to distractions but their routes are long and they’re alone most of the one which makes up for it. It’s easier to get SA with these guys without using opportunities than it is with the main mission targets. The challenges are also fun, requiring you to stop the targets from stealing from the palace then becoming Santa to kill them.

World of Tomorrow/Sapienza - 5/5

The first masterpiece of the new style. Highly manipulatable targets, great level design and great potential for Contracts. I’m still finding new things about this level, from kills I’ve never done before two areas I didn’t know I could go to. It took a while to grow on me but it’s definitely one of the best maps IO has ever made.

The Icon - 3/5

This bonus mission relies a little too much on scripted kills. There’s still ways to break that scripting but the level is really pushing them as something you need to try. Not a bad thing, they are fun kills, but it’s not a level that holds up and gets better on replays like the main mission. You’ll still find ways to kill Bosco without the Rube Goldberg routine, but not as many as the near limitless possibilities of Francesca and Silvio have.

Landslide - 4/5

This is much better, less of a reliance on the mission stories/opportunities and the scripted moments themselves have lots of variants. You can snipe Marco in the graveyard from afar rather than setting up the electrocution kill, you can drop a chandelier on him as a bodyguard while he meets the lawyer rather than becoming him yourself. You can also just hit him with the Sieker and plant an explosive on the toilet and book it. Great bonus mission.

The Author - 3/5

Getting the targets to meet is a good way of creating your own kills, either partaking in the meeting, watching from afar or letting Craig Black flee. But the routes themselves around up to snuff. Akram stays in his tiny apartment until you ring the bell and Black spends way too much time reading.

A Gilded Cage/Marrakesh - 5/5

This level has really grown on me. I used to say “it’s okay but it is a bit of a disappointment compared to Sapienza”, then “it’s a pretty good level it’s a little unfairly maligned” to “this is one of the best maps in the series and I don’t understand why people don’t like it.” The map does have the big problem of its middle section being pointless but the routes of the targets themselves, their synergy, how manipulatable they are and how easy it is to kill them in all kinds of different ways suit only is an absolute treat. You can snipe Zaydan in his office and no one will find him, you can lure him into the room next to the prisoner and strangle him and you can lure him into the toilet and push him to his death. With Strandberg you can electrocute him sure, but that’s intended, instead you can follow him into his office (keep in mind, in the suit) and when he’s in that area no one goes in you can strangle him, or you can toss a coin into the toilet and if he hears you can drown him. The mission is criminally underrated and I think it’s on par with Sapienza.

A House Built On Sand - 3/5

It’s alright but it suffers from a lack of suit only options for manipulating targets via Mission Stories. The rooftop meeting is actually good for getting non-story related kills like dropping the cafe sign on Kwang, or you can just strangle him when he gets there. It’s neat. You can do something similar with getting rid of the guy the fortune teller is talking to, enabling a suit only kill by distracting the fortune teller when he talks to Mendola. That’s what I like about the scripted kills, when you can do shit with them the devs might’ve not directly intended, or are just secret ways to do them. I love missions that give me a lot of either that or ways to create my own kills, which you can do with AHBOS but since it’s a bonus mission and one set around the crowd it’s a lot more difficult with the rating system we have currently, so having more ways to use mission stories/opportunities for the purpose of getting different kills they weren’t meant for would’ve improved this level.

Club 27/Bangkok - 4/5

This level is really poorly designed but I like it anyway. I think it’s the atmosphere but also Jordan Cross as both a character and a target. He’s really interesting but he’s also fun to manipulate and try to take out suit only, of which there are multiple ways to do so without using stories. Even then I do like using the USB story occasionally for suit only runs because it’s so cool. Ken Morgan is a pretty terrible target, not that manipulatable, personality wise he’s really generic and his short route is out in public a lot so it’s a bitch to get him. I’ve gotten an SA kill on him in that little table he phones at but it wasn’t easy. Jordan makes up for it, however, even if getting to him is overly linear due to a lack of climbing in this very vertical location the options you have for actually killing him are numerous and you can really make a suit only run your own with him.

The Source - 2/5

This mission, on the other hand, is just bad. Every time you start you have to jog up flights of stairs to get to the targets, and while they have decent routes good luck intercepting them before they do that ritual that takes ages to finish and come back down. The targets also suffer from being too close to eachother, it’s almost pointless. At least there’s some cool challenges, I’m pretty sure you can use a sniper rifle on a gas canister from the other side of the hotel and get SA but don’t quote me on that.

Freedom Fighters/Colorado - 1/5

The entire location is garbage, I’ve played some pretty neat contracts but overall it’s a boring place whether you’re in the main mission or not. Rose and Graves have decent routes but Berg and Parvati are terrible targets. Sure you can manipulate them if you’re doing suit only but that requires a lot of movement and stealthing via an area that’s hostile to you without a disguise. Almost everything interesting is given to either Rose or Graves, which makes me think this would probably be a lot more fun as a mission if Berg and Parvati were just used as people for those two to interact with as part of their route or mission stories. It’s a very flat map with lots of walking, WoA 2’s maps have a large amount of movement too but they have shortcuts and verticality to remain engaging. Easily the worst map of the trilogy.

The Vector - 3/5

The map lost a lot of its flow with the WoA 2 changes to explosions, but it’s still a pretty fun, frantic mission with random targets to spice things up. It’s also go bushes and accidents everywhere leading to a lot of flexibility, even if you use up a kill there’s always more nearby since the targets can be pretty much anywhere - even clumped together - which is randomness done right considering the short long of the mission.

Situs Inversus/Hokkaido - 4/5

Pretty good mission and a great location. Erich has tons of ways to kill him despite not even being an NPC and more of an objective according to the logic of the engine, and Yuki has a pretty good route with lots of variance, my favourite kill method being sniping her in her private area of the restaurant. I discovered it recently, usually no one sees her. I would say the level design is better than the target design, which is good because Hokkaido is a great jumping off point for secondary content.

Patient Zero - 4/5

This is a great experimental mission. Like Vector but on a larger scale this mission could go different every time. The Virus means anyone in the mission could become an additional target and your playstyle can vary from subtle and sneaky to panicked to mass murderer depending on how much you fuck up or don’t handle the virus effectively. I’d say that WoA 1’s version was a little bit better, I think WoA 2 changed something about like guard placement or just general glitchyness which can make it a pain sometimes. Hopefully H3 fixes it.

Hokkaido Snow Festival - 2/5

This was a free mission made for WoA2 so I’m not going to shit on it too hard, but it’s not very good. It’s overall way too easy to finish this level in under a minute by starting as the ninja, going to the helicopter, shooting an icicle over the target and leaving immediately. That creativity I love about Hitman isn’t really encouraged here, which is a problem with bonus missions in general but it’s at its most pronounced here.

2 God-tier Levels 2 Missions

3 Good-to-Great Levels 5 Missions

1 Average-to-Good Level 6 Missions

0 Bad-to-Mediocre Level 2 Missions

1 Really Bad Level 1 Mission

0 Horrible Missions

For the WoA games I’ve split up levels and missions in the totals. I think it gives a better indication of the quality of each game. WoA part 1 is a good start for this new style but I feel it suffers from inconsistent level design. While Part 2 can feel like they played it safe by basing the design philosophy off of Sapienza for almost every location, WoA 1 has some levels with outright sloppy design like Bangkok, wasted space or locations that are just plain bad. Something the sequel fixes and more.

WoA2 (2018):

Nightcall/Hawke’s Bay - 3/5

Hawke’s Bay really suffers from one exit and a mandatory objective. If you could exit via a car or if some guards were posted at the house before you got in it’d make the rest of the mission up to par with the actual assassination of Alma, which is great but unfortunately a small part of the mission. It’s a neat little puzzle box location ruined by some forced tutorialisation and sloppy story integration.

The Finish Line/Miami - 5/5

The perfect Hitman level. Everything from the geometry to the target routes is perfect. Hitman levels have a problem where sometimes one target is better than the other, this is one of those rare exceptions where both targets are equally fantastic with a balance between scripted kills and having a route that���s ripe for manipulation and creating your own kills even without doing so.

A Silver Tongue - 2/5

As good as Miami is it can’t save this boring target. His route is a small triangle which is a giant missed opportunity when he’s right next to bar area which is mostly unused in the main mission.

3-Headed Serpent/Colombia - 4/5

I’ve made an effort recently to play this level a whole bunch because it used to be my least favourite. I think after really getting familiar with it this is one of the times the rating system used in Blood Money and the new games really lets down a great location. There are cool ways to snipe the Rico and Jorge, poison Jorge with a cocaine brick, blow Andrea up and kill Jorge in the bushes that make this level so much more fun to play, but the rating system discourages bodies found or collateral accident which instead force you to do a lot of walking to each target to get up close and personal. I like how interconnected and intricate everything is, but I don’t like being forced to use that every time I play. It should be a rare luxury rather than a require part of dealing with the level.

Embrace of the Serpent - 1/5

Terrible terrible terrible. A target with a shit route in a small area that’s “repurposed” by just covering it in guards. Not to mention the missed opportunity of making the target a poacher but not giving us a way to make an animal kill him, when there’s an animal in the main mission that can kill a target. For shame, IO.

Chasing a Ghost/Mumbai - 5/5

Another God-tier level and an atmospheric masterpiece. The Maelstrom has one of the best routes in the series and the other two aren’t so shabby either, with ways to get them out of their fortresses for manual kills like the smoke and the laundry foreman. Having a target not locatable via instinct is so cool, and the Maelstrom goes places I don’t expect him to sometimes. It fits his character that his behaviour is as mysterious and varied as he is, leading to lots of ways to kill him. The only problems level design wise I have other than the rating system is the fact that there’s no big area you can climb up to survey and snipe the whole area due to its weird horizontal layout, and there’s lots of disguise swapping that doesn’t make sense. Why can’t I go into the Crows’ hideout as Vanya’s guard? They’re on the same side. The mission also has mission stories with lots of variance and experimentation, which wouldn’t save the mission if it did have bad routes and experimentation without that but it’s the cherry on top to have scripted kills that can feel unscripted with how you do them. Like suit only Kashmirian strategies, poisoning Dawood’s glass as the actor or using the script opportunity to blow him up in the bathroom. And not to mention that Dawood Rangan is one of the best targets in the series personality wise. He’s so awesome.

Illusions of Grandeur - 2/5

Basil Carnaby’s route is actually not bad, making the chawed a hostile area is kinda neat but all that is thrown out the window when the dude offers to hypnotise you. He takes you upstairs alone, you jab a poison syringe in his back then you leave the level. I don’t know what IO was thinking. What a waste of a pretty reskin of Mumbai.

Another Life/Whittleton Creek - 5/5

A brilliant sequel to A New Life. The clues thing can get old but I won’t let that get in the way of two fantastic targets. Nolan’s route is filled with accidents whilst Janus can be lured out of his home with a couple of coin throws, even then I would say Janus’ house in general I would single out as being one of the best single areas of gameplay in the trilogy. Guard placement, security cameras and enforcer choice is perfect.

A Bitter Pill - 3/5

This mission’s okay. It’s basically just a full level version of Janus’ house but security is way too easy to get past. If they just locked the basement door this mission would be so much better.

The Ark Society/Isle of Sgail - 4/5

Mediocre targets let down some fantastic vertical level design. Sgail is very fun to stealth through and explore but the Washington twins are kind of boring compared to Janus from the previous mission. They’re not outright bad, there’s lots of non-story kills you can do since they’re highly manipulatable, but their routes are usually taken through crowds and take to long to get to those areas. It’s great for Contracts mode however, with the most markable NPCs of any level, in fact the Constant has a pretty good route which is unfortunate since the whole point of the level is NOT to kill him.

Golden Handshake/New York - 3/5

Great level geometry that’s fun to sneak around, this level is also great for Contracts mode, but I feel the actual objective while fun is mostly there to make up for a mediocre target route. You can kill Athena anywhere anyway with some knock outs or items so manipulating her to go someplace else to try new kills isn’t that attractive an option. Plus her route is very short.

The Last Resort/Haven Island - 4/5

This is one of my favourites level design wise, all three targets have enjoyable routes with even Tyson being manipulatable via coins to get him out to his balcony. However what kills the levels for me is the viewcones. To give some context IOI decided to change sightlines for NPCs just for this level in order to accommodate the wide beaches of the map. As it wouldn’t make sense for a guy not to see you jogging on an empty beach you’re not supposed to be if he’s looking into the distance. This was a terrible idea and means you’re never sure when you’re going to be seen doing something or not. I understand the reasoning but some areas like the villa were clearly designed for smaller viewcones, and I think consistency of mechanics trumps realism any day.

The Last Yardbird/Austria - 3/5

The first of WoA 2’s three sniper missions. It’s decent but due to it being the first they made it’s a bit too simple and becomes very repetitive on replays. Most target manipulations are cryptic and slow, and a larger problem with Sniper Assassin is due to it being a shooting gallery you tend to just pick one strategy that works and stick with it, you don’t tend to experiment like you do the main game.

Pen & the Sword/Hantu Port - 3/5

This one is my least favourite of the sniper maps. While manipulations this time are faster and simpler the map being so wide and open means you’re going to get caught when you don’t think you should’ve. I played all three sniper maps again recently and this was the one I gave up getting silent assassin with. The strat I usually used for grinding just didn’t work consistently like the ones for Himmelstein and Siberia

Crime & Punishment/Siberia - 4/5

This is the one where they finally go it right. Crime and Punishment is a legitimately great mission, sniper or otherwise. The riot mechanic gives way to a lot of variance and experimentation that actually consistently works, there’s lots of ways to change target routes in subtle ways that make sense (like killing a guard that was meant to get someone for the target, so the target walks over there himself) and the design isn’t so wide bodies are getting found left and right. Whether you’re starting a riot or playing it quiet it’s an excellent Hitman-style shooting gallery.

3 God-tier Levels 3 Missions

4 Good-to-Great Levels 4 Missions

4 Average-to-Good Level 5 Mission

0 Bad-to-Mediocre Level 2 Missions

0 Really Bad Levels 1 Mission

0 Horrible Missions

As you can see where Hitman 2 excels in pure level design it flops hard when it comes to the bonus missions. Hitman 2 is still my favourite game in the series, I’m very biased towards it and its specific levels, but I’m not close minded and I hope IO can take the little failures and huge successes of Hitman 2 and deliver the magnum opus of the series with upcoming third part of WoA.

And that means the totals for the whole franchise are (and if you want to correspond this to a tier list it basically means S, A, B, D, E, and F, respectively):

12 God-Tier Missions

29 Good-to-Great Missions

21 Average-to-Good Missions

8 Bad-to-Mediocre Missions

5 Really Bad Missions

1 Horrible Mission