#at least back in my day of mid-late 2010s it was like this

[mihai-florescu]

Morally im opposed to international fast food chains taking over and pushing out local ones, but as a fan of advertising and human behavior im obsessed with how mcdonalds has inserted itself in local pop culture internationally and how every country seems to have a nickname for it (mcdo in france, mec in romania, maccas in australia etcetc. Im actually curious to hear more if you want to share what your country calls it)

[blindseer0]

Echo General Timeline

(Another repost from Twitter from back in February)

I was watching Keith Ballard's Echo playthrough, and at one point they wonder what the ages of the characters are. People responded with a bunch of contradictory answers, so I decided to find out myself. A few disclaimers:

Echo was made over 7+ years with multiple writers. We don’t know how much of the timeline was planned out, what ambiguity is because it’s a horror mystery, and what are errors. Chase also canonly has a shitty memory for dates and ages (he’s just like me, fr).

I’m definitely putting more thought into this than anyone should, and probably more thought than the writers did (or should be expected to). This is largely for fun (and because my brain is “Just Like that” ™) and should not be taken too seriously.

I’ll try to address contradictions, but I hope to go deeper in another thread. I will cover my guesses there as well. If I can’t back it up with a screenshot, it’s not here. If anyone has screenshots of the writers confirming or denying these ages, let me know. Now onto the show:

When Do The Games Take Place?

Echo takes place in 2015, in mid to late March.

Route 65 takes place on November 1, 2008. (This was a Saturday in real life and I was recovering from a Halloween costume wedding at a strip club the night before.)

Chase

Echo: 21

Route 65: 15

Comments: Chase, being the MC, is pretty straightforward. His age is stated in both games, though we never get a birthdate. He’s in the same grade level as Carl, graduated High School in May 2012 and started college in Fall of 2012.

Carl Echo: 20

Route 65: 14

Born: April 1994

Comments: Carl is my favorite because his birthday is a plot point. His 8th birthday party was on April 19th, 2002. That was a Friday (yes, I checked), so it’s possible that was the actual day and not just the party.

TJ

Echo: 19

Route 65: 13

Comments: TJ is also pretty easy, since they state his age in the prologue and Route 65. Chase forgets his age during Leo’s route, but there are enough other scenes (not pictured) that confirm he’d be 19 at this point in the year.

Flynn

Echo: 25

Route 65: 18

Comments: Flynn is established multiple times as the oldest of the group, and his age is stated pretty clearly during his route. Plenty to say about the character (and I will), but not much about his age.

Jenna

Echo: 21-22 (The wiki is wrong and I will fight it)

Route 65: ???

Comments: This is where it gets tricky. Jenna’s age is never stated in either game. However, we get her age during the “Runaway” side story. We also know she’s at least one grade level above Chase and Carl, since she’s graduating college in 2015. Since she was 17 in May 2010, the oldest she can be in March 2015 is 22 (17+5). If her birthday was right before she ran away it’s possible she’s 21, but we know no one has a birthday in March or April, so it’s more likely that she ran away right before she turned 18.

Leo

Echo: Fuck if I Know

Route 65: *Deep Beleaguered Sigh*

Comments: You’d think for someone whose age is a plot point this would be easy, but nope. Leo’s exact age is never actually said during either game. We get clues, which I’ll cover, but nothing as specific as everyone else. The most exact thing we get is a throwaway line in Flynn’s Route that his birthday is probably in February. He’s likely two grades above Chase, since we know he played Football during the 2009 season (which ends in November/December), which would mean he graduated in May 2010.

We do get his age in relation to other people. He’s roughly one year younger than Flynn, and three years older than Micha. Flynn is 25, and Micha is “nearly 21 now!” (which is the type of thing a 19-year-old would say). If we assume Micha is telling the truth and is 20, Leo is 23-24.

If Micha is 20 going on 21 in March 2015, then he was probably 14 in November 2008. If Leo’s birthday is really in February, then he’d have been 17 in Route 65, and 24 in Echo, which are solid answers, but technically guesses because they rely on so much shaky information.

There you go, (mostly) solid ages for all the main characters in Echo. If you have any screenshots from the games or the creators that prove or disprove this thread, please send them my way. Let me know what you think, and if there is anything else you’d want to see.

I’m hoping to do more threads covering the contradictions, when Sydney actually died (and his age), speculation about birthdates, and when Chase was conceived, because I’m a monster.

[batsplat]

kind of recently clocked that marc took caseys honda seat coming into 2013 (not saying he didn’t deserve a factory seat immediately bc he obviously did, kid went and podiumed his first and won his second ever race on that bike but it somehow never crossed my mind and it’s kind of insane to imagine now that a rookie would get it) and i was wondering if there was something To Know about that mid to end 2012 season, about vale back to yamaha and casey retiring and casey and danis teammateship and how dani reacted to marc getting that seat etc i love love love your rambles so if you got thoughts please share?

y'know what. let's do this one with bullet points

at the start of 2012, retirement rumours were swirling around two riders. one was casey stoner.... the other was valentino rossi

valentino was entering year two of a miserable stint at ducati, trapped on a bike that was *checks notes* shit and that was still several years away from making the kinds of improvements that could make it championship-winning machinery in anyone's hands (remember, even casey wasn't anywhere close to fighting for the title in 2010). it had also been a rough couple of years injury-wise for valentino, with 2010 bringing the shoulder injury courtesy of a motocross accident, followed by him breaking the leg at mugello. the painful shoulder problems persisted even upon his return from the leg injury, not exactly helped by his decision to delay shoulder surgery until the end of the year, and he remained hampered in 2011 while he was trying to adapt to the new bike

probably the main reason for the retirement rumours, however, was the death of simoncelli in an accident valentino had been involved in. the rumours basically started the day after the accident, and did not stop even when he showed up at valencia and raced (for about one corner until he was caught up in an ugly multi-rider pile up... kinda set off by dovi but anyways)

the rumours persisted in 2012. valentino became increasingly irritable about them.... meant that both valentino and casey were going into round three at estoril having to address the retirement talk. casey denied that he was planning to retire in the estoril pre-event presser (and he'd already kinda hinted to honda he was ready to sign a new contract)

this all led to some pretty silly drama, where the journalists were less than impressed when casey did announce his retirement two weeks later at le mans and casey went 'well I hadn't decided to retire yet back then!'

anyway, more important is the retirement announcement itself. casey made a statement at the very start of the le mans presser. here's the text:

he was the championship leader at this point, and the favourite to defend his title. of course he took a bunch of questions at the presser about the announcement, and cited several other reasons for his decision to retire, like people's reactions to his mystery illness in 2009, or too many people criticising the current racing being boring, or how they let CRT riders into parc fermé (let's not get into that)

now it's important to note that this was round four. which meant that the entire rider market was about to be spiced up... so let's backtrack a bit and talk silly season: historical edition!

okay, so marc could have feasibly moved up to motogp a year earlier, and for a large chunk of 2011 there was pretty frenzied speculation he was going to do exactly that. in october, between the phillip island and sepang rounds (where he had the crash that gave him diplopia and prematurely ended both his season and his championship bid), he finally announced he was going to stay in moto2

so, in late 2011, speculation was already of course starting for what the grid would look like in 2013, with a lot of big name contracts expiring at the end of 2012. both factory yamahas, hondas, ducatis, amongst others... you know how it goes. the expectation was broadly that casey would stick with honda and dani would be protected for at least another year by the rookie rule (more on that in a second), that jorge would stick with yamaha and... well. at this point, it was plausible valentino might sign at least a one year contract extension with ducati, with just enough glimmers of progress and signs that things might be headed in the right direction for him to want to continue building that project up

early 2012, around the time of the first race, and actually it's looking plausible that none of the six big factory seats are going to be changing hands. jorge and casey seemed the most certain ones, valentino too committed to ducati, and dani likely to sign a one year deal until marc swoops in at the end of 2013 to take his place

then casey announces his retirement, and silly season properly kicks off

first order of priority is of course the vacant repsol honda seat. now, the main thing stopping marc from getting that repsol honda seat was never actually going to be a lack of space - it was the 'rookie rule'. in 2010, a rule was introduced to stop rookies from joining the factory team. the idea was basically to help out satellite teams by giving them the chance to house a young star rider, give them publicity and results and so on (face it, how much would any of us be talking about tech3 this year without the pedro acosta factor?)

this was likely never to really work like it was supposed to, because if you're one of the factories, you can basically set up... teams that are only very theoretically 'independent'. another factory team in all but name. remember how valentino technically won his first title at a satellite team? well, that was essentially a shell team set up as a way to have somewhere to put valentino for two years while repsol honda was full. not the same team (and indeed, valentino and jb did sometimes look over at the chaos at repsol and go. good lord. what's going on there) but full factory support

in spring 2012, dorna was still adamant this rule would remain in place:

should also help explain why the general reaction to suzuki suddenly pulling out in 2022 was 'shocked but not that shocked' lol

but of course by mid-2012 this rule was facing another serious test: where do you put marc marquez, especially with this vacant repsol honda seat just sitting there? now, the valentino model did seem like a reasonable one in this situation, where you put him into an existing satellite team with heavy factory backing or even just create a new one to house him. which is something valentino himself talked about:

except, it wasn't quite that straightforward, because from 2013 onward manufacturers were limited to supplying bikes for four riders, two in a factory team and two in satellites - so you'd have to take away one of the bikes from the existing two honda satellite teams, gresini or lcr

one of the reasons why putting him in one of the existing satellite teams was a bit of an issue was that he was already backed by repsol, which could have caused sponsorship conflicts if he'd been housed with one of those other teams. but also, by this point ezpeleta was sounding rather less committed to the whole thing. from june 2012:

which.

my man

if you KNOW that the most prominent rookies can be put into shell satellites anyway and you are openly joking about it then WHAT was the POINT of any of this

by the end of the month, they gave up on the whole thing. as it happens, it wasn't even repsol honda who asked for the rule to be dropped - it was the satellite honda teams who were like 'yeah we don't actually want this kid for our team, way too stressful to make this all work for a single year before losing him anyway'

not a universally popular decision, it has to be said

it's quite likely that if casey had stayed and the rookie rule had still been dropped that hrc would have immediately taken in marc and not renewed dani's contract, which would have been a wee bit awkward given dani's late season form, but. you know. so it goes. anyway honda didn't end up having to make any tough calls

about two weeks after the rookie rule is dropped, hrc announces the two year contract with marc

by this point, valentino has had another miserable start to the season with ducati, save for a fun little wet podium at le mans - you know, the race where casey announced his retirement... they had their last ever duel there, with valentino snatching second place from casey on the last lap

photo abbove not representative of the general tone they used to discuss each other in that time period

anyhow, these rare bright spots weren't going to be enough for valentino

"There was a lot of expectation from me and from Ducati to win, but unfortunately I didn't have a good feeling with the bike, especially with the front," he said some years later. "When you are in that situation it's very difficult because you lose motivation and you lose the joy of going racing. When you start the weekend you are already in a negative way, so it's difficult, because if you don't have fun on the bike everything becomes heavier: leaving your home, all the travelling, speaking with journalists, everything. Also it becomes difficult to sleep. You are in a tunnel. When I was with Ducati I thought about stopping many times, but in the end it was a very good decision not to give up. Because if you stop and you don't have a bike then it's very easy to find yourself out of the business." - from Oxley's 'Valentino Rossi: All His Races'

he began openly talking about a return to yamaha in 2012 to replace the underperforming ben spies (though as late as july, publicly he was still talking up the chances of him sticking with ducati)... which was not a prospect welcomed by all in the factory - who saw his initial move to ducati as displaying a lack of loyalty. there was also of course the issue of yamaha wanting to avoid a repeat in the dramatics with jorge, which was certainly a topic in the negotiations. valentino's new deal with yamaha was eventually announced in august

so yes, obviously pretty qualified enthusiasm from jorge's side. it helped that it was made clear that, at the start of 2013, this was very much jorge's team, something which valentino had to work to change as a result of his level of performance (after 2013)

which left dovi to take the ducati factory seat. though he too maybe had to do a little bit of... smoothing over past comments in the negotiation process:

and that's that! there was a brief period in which honda and valentino rumours were a thing... always unlikely, given the long-standing mutual animosity there, and valentino claims he was never in contact with them. dani's contract was signed when marc's was, so that put an end to that. there was also serious speculation jorge would take casey's seat at honda, which was ended by him signing for another two years at yamaha in june. everyone sorted

dani and casey had a pretty cordial teammate relationship - though of course by this point it was already no longer really a team organised around dani as it had been in the late noughties. from late 2011 (shortly before simoncelli's passing):

and from the mind games post:

he also says the following in that passage: "some days [dani] beat us but to be honest I always felt like I had the measure of him over the course of a season"

more to be said about that relationship, of course, but it was basically harmonious on both sides, and they parted on good terms. as for dani's response to marc's signing, it wasn't like he was in a place within the team to complain too much - though his position was strengthened by his late 2012 form, where he won six of the last eight races. both of them mostly just stick to saying the standard respectful pr stuff about each other

though this is pretty funny in retrospect:

"I know nothing about pedrosa's goals" my man I think you can probably guess

[seaofreverie]

Sparkstember Day 24: FFS (Things I Won't Get)

I have something terrible to confess, which is that at first I was not much of an FFS fan, at all. I actually actively DISLIKED most of what I've know from them at that point, which was what the Spotify algorithm seemed very content to throw at me whenever possible until it eventually forgot about it. Well, nothing wrong with that I guess, but I also want to think that most of my initial aversion to this project came from how I was still pretty, uh, close-minded in a sense when it comes to music at the time (and I'm saying all this as though FFS is even THAT much of a departure from Sparks, which it's really not? But maybe I just I saw it differently back then, which I guess is also fair).

But yeah anyway, I had a huge change of heart a couple months later, decided that all these songs are incredibly cool actually and I'm a huge fan now. This is a very solid collaboration and album and I'm so glad this happened. Like, it really is among my very favourite things from Sparks that I barely ever think about in such terms for some reason. Because I've noticed that I treat FFS more like a compliation than an album maybe? Cause yeah I'm pretty sure this is the only album where I have 30-40+ plays on several songs and only around 5 or so on a couple others. And I'm not super attached to the order of the tracklist either, and I'm mostly saying this because I've been a 100% albums over playlists type of person for the longest time. I will listen to the whole album start to end even if I don't like everything on it. It's like, well, if I like the whole thing enough to revisit it, then too bad, I'm sitting through it all until I can enjoy everything on it to at least some extent.

Overall, to me this album embodies that mid-2010s electro pop / indie rock energy that I love very deeply, in the sense that it feels appropriate to think, had I known about it back in the day, I feel like I would have LOVED it and it would have been my personal soundtrack of those early middle-school years of my life (or even earlier, I have this one note of me saying that "FFS is so primary school-core it hurts", so. While it didn't exist in the world yet at that time it still FEELS like that time, and I absolutely love it when music reminds me of a period in my life from around its release even if I was absolutely not aware of it yet at that point. It's like this source of free nostalgia that you didn't know would be attainable from this particular place.)

Also I will just say that it's ENTIRELY because of FFS that I eventually decided to give FF a go as well, and now I'd consider them one of my favourite bands, so, well, heck yeah to that!!

Favourite songs (and other highlights):

Johnny Delusional: oh yeah, I think it's important to note that it was especially THIS song that I found annoying as heck in the beginning. I thought it got very schematic and predictable at points (the long pause after the bridge especially I found to be so.... ahhhh come on, I could see this coming from a mile away!!) All of, which... well, maybe that was still a valid point in a way, but who cares since I love this song now, absolutely and completely and it's just soooo replayable. Every day is a good day to listen to Johnny Delusional a dozen of times

Call Girl: huge huge fan of the intro on this one and that whole wobbly synth sound it has

Dictator's Son: I really like that little guitar riff moment during the bridge

Police Encounters: notably the only FFS song among those early ones for me that I really liked from the start. And it's the ultimate jam, it's incredible how instantly happy and energized this song always makes me feel even after so many listens

Save Me From Myself

So Desu Ne: maybe the biggest offender (positively) when it comes to that "primary school-core" sound. Those cutesy synths are so important to me personally

The Man Without A Tan: realized quite regrettably late how much of a banger this is

Things I Won't Get: you know how it is with me and Russell's falsetto

So Many Bridges

[zanarkandfayth]

Would love to read your answers to questions 3, 9, 13, 17, 18, 26, 29, 31, 32, 50, and, if there's another number (or several) you really wanna answer, please add those too ✨

thank you for the ask!! <33 I wrote you novels in return gjdskglj

3. In your opinion, what’s your best fic?

oooh this one is so hard because I love most of my fics for different reasons, even my older ones (at least the ones on ao3. we ignore the ones left behind on ffnet lmao). hhhh, of completed ones that are posted, imma have to say monsters honestly, because damn did I put some heart into that. but the one I'd probably consider absolute best is the still ongoing, not yet posted 600K+ beast of a fic I usually refer to as "nanofic" that I've been working on since 2019. it won't be everyone's cup of tea, but it just gets so deep into noct's trauma that I inflict on him and his slow recovery from it, more than I've done for any other fic, and I've poured so much blood sweat and tears into that thing, it's kinda everything to me.

9. Have you ever written for a fandom without watching/reading/playing the source material?

written, no. been tempted to in the past, but it was too much effort and I already had too many fics for my main fandoms. I have read fandom blind for both harry potter and supernatural in the past though, like lates 2000s into mid 2010s. both were kinda on accident. supernatural in particular is because it kept getting crossed over with MULTIPLE of my fandoms. psych, house md, and criminal minds. so I started reading non-crossover supernatural fics in self-defense gsdklgjdks

13. What’s the biggest change between your style when you started in fandom and today?

I mean… this is the first paragraph of one of my fics from my first fandom when I was fifteen. you tell me 😂

"Relena smiled as she sipped her tea and mentally reviewed the day's schedule. 8:00 am- peace talk to the world. 10:00 am- conference with Romefeller. 1:00 pm- try to convince Dorothy to become a pacifist because she was to stupid to understand that Dorothy loved war. Rest of the day- annoy the HELL out of Heero Yuy. Smiling happily again (PLEASE! Her smile is SO annoying), she stood up and was just about to take a step when …. suddenly a freak falling cow killed her!!! =^.^= The gundam boys all burst out of closets around the room and rejoiced."

the biggest change is probably that I actually write well now lmao. and don't character bash. and don't throw author's notes and emoticons in the middle of fics, and have learned to format better, and, and…

17. In your opinion, what’s your most overrated fic?

oh god. let me hide before I answer this. hands down, it's shadows growing. like let me be clear, it's not bad by any means. I'm still fond of it. but I did not have a clear plan when I started writing it, and I really feel like that shows. it was not meant to be a fix-it fic. it was not meant to be a longer fic. it was not meant to be much of anything, tbh. I saw the prompt on the kink meme and the prologue literally started writing itself in my head and I was like "nah idk what I'd do with that" and I scrolled past, but I couldn't focus on reading other prompts and so I went back and just started typing the fic in a reply to the prompt. honestly I figured I'd write whatever I could and then when I left it unfinished, no one would know because I was anon and I had like one fic posted on ao3 for ffxv at the time and I was used to being a complete fandom nobody. the fact that shadows growing got me even somewhat noticed was unexpected and I was not prepared gdjskgjdskl

it definitely affected the fic because once the readers started picking up it made me feel suuuuper stressed and I was so afraid to stray too far from canon because I thought people would hate that??? for some reason??? no there's logic there. I was just overwhelmed. and I do get why people love it, because the whump and the friendship between the boys is really good. but I cannot help but look at it and remember how out of my depth I felt at the time and wish that I had been brave enough to diverge more from canon and smart enough to come up with a better ending. I still suspect there were quite a few people who felt let down by the ending and that's fair honestly. anyways, yeah, it's a good fic and I'm fond of it and most of the attention and the recs it got were in the first couple years of the game being out and I don't begrudge it being my most popular fic, I just. have better ones now I feel like gjsdgjskgsj but maybe not ones as many people would want to read. which is fine with me tbh.

18. What’s your most underrated fic?

the gladio oneshot in my "fayth's daddy issues week" series! (I wrote all those fics so back to back that I can't remember the titles for any of them whoops.) I adore that fic and it got so little attention compared to most of the other fics in that week, or my fics overall tbh. the only one that got even less was the one about iris 🤣 but I don't care much for the iris one either, even though I think it has some stellar banter between the boys and cute/funny prompto/gladio moments. I really love the gladio one though, because it was fun to revisit gladio's pov in a fic and I got to develop a bit of backstory for him that's been evolving into headcanon and there's a good chunk of ignis and gladio friendship that was the precursor to all their friendship in monsters, plus I got to make gladio cry, so. I love it <3

26. What aspect of your writing do you most enjoy to see praised?

characterisation, for sure. it's the one thing I agonise over and actually worry about what readers might think at times, especially as I get further away from having played the game to keep it fresh in my mind. so anyone commenting that it feels right makes me roll around on my bed in glee. the other aspect I equally enjoy is people commenting on the emotions. like, that the ones I wrote the characters having feel real/deep, that it made the reader feel them too, etc. stuff like that. cos the emotions are literally why I write fic lol.

29. Does the division of your writing across fandoms line up with your reading? What’s the biggest discrepancy?

I am dumb and am struggling to understand what this question is asking, tbh. is it like, do I write for as many fandoms as I read, or something? because fuck no in that case, haha. the only fandoms I've done major writing for (more than one or two fics) are gundam wing, digimon adventure, final fantasy x, and final fantasy xv. and I've read for something like 100 fandoms, idk. at one point I had a list but I stopped keeping track eventually.

31. Who’s the one character you’ve just never managed to get perfectly right?

well… I didn't really understand the concept of characterisation for fanfic until a little before I started writing for ffx. so uh, it's kinda non-existent in my gdw and digimon fics. but once I actively started trying for it… honestly maybe just yuna from final fantsy x. I had some things featuring her meant to be longer fics that were set during the game (most of my posted stuff is set pre-canon, with no yuna in sight) but I never finished and/or posted them because I always felt shaky on yuna's characterisation. I don't think I've majorly struggled with anyone in ffxv to the point that I've felt too dissatisfied with characterisation to post. but at the same time I'm sure none of them are actually perfectly right xD but they FEEL more or less right to me, which is all I care about.

32. Who’s the one character who shines without you even trying?

noct. I mean. he's my blorbo for a reason xD my beloved, I relate to him so much and the rest of it I just project lololol. I make a point to not actually just write myself as noct, cos I personally ain't about that, but it feels very easy to write him without needing to think too deeply about his thoughts/feelings/reactions most of the time. they feel instinctual to me, even when it's something that would differ from my own thoughts/feelings/reactions if I was in a similar situation.

50. Has writing fanfic had a significant impact on your life? Would you say it’s entirely positive?

YES and the answer to this question is one of the reasons antis/purity culture upsets me so fucking much. it's a personal/sensitive answer though so skip if you don't want to read that xD but. reading rape/sexual abuse & aftermath fics as a teenager is what helped me to understand that, even though there was no outright rape happening, I was still being abused. seeing my favourite characters have the courage to tell someone about their abuse and get help is what encouraged me to tell one of my friends during an AIM conversation late one night when I was sixteen, and she convinced me to tell my therapist at my next appointment, who then told my mom, and yeah let's just say that was a very significant and eventually positive impact (it was a rocky road) on my life. if none of that had happened I genuinely think the CSA would have continued escalating into eventual rape. so thank FUCK for fanfic and I seethe with rage every time some shitfuck anti tries to claim there's no good to be found in such fics. plus in general it just helps with my mental health and I've made plenty of friends through fic over the years, even if they come and go I'm still grateful to have known them for that time, and writing fic is the one thing that gives life any meaning for me, etc. so yeah I'd say at least 99% positive.

and now, I will add a few to answer, because you said I could lmao

7. What’s the fic you most want to continue (unfinished or no)?

it is a toss-up between horizon road, an ffx fic featuring a toxic, fucked up relationship between tidus and auron that I still really love, or endless skies, a really self-indulgent digimon fic. they're both old at this point, horizon road I started in 2005, and endless skies was in 2016. horizon road suffers from me having no solid ideas for it beyond the three chapters I wrote, and endless skies is painfully fully outlined, but it was such a hard, research-intensive fic to write for a number of reasons, and now looking at it also just reminds me of an ex-friend who I feel very negative towards (because I talked to them a lot while plotting/writing and they even wrote some of the smut scenes for me, though I've since removed those) and even if I wasn't still deeply entrenched in ffxv, I don't think I could bring myself to ever work on it again :/ which sucks because I did adore it very much.

35. Have you ever written a ship into a fic without meaning to?

…okay, I think anyone who has read shadows growing and then has also read or even looked at my ignoct fics knows that the ignoct is very much present in shadows growing gjdskgjsk as much as I will swear up and down it's platonic, and people certainly can take it that way if they want, like. come on. it's there. at a point, it very much was intentional. BUT. it did start out accidental. the og prompt asked for either gen or OT4 and I don't ship OT4 so I was gonna do gen but noct and ignis kept blurring the lines when I started writing scenes with them gdsjkgdjkl aaaaand actually I didn't start monsters with the intention of it being ignoct either. (the ignoct bits in the first chapter I actually added in a rewrite of that chapter lmao.) nor the tiny little epilogue in heavy is the burden that nudges into hinting at ignoct territory. fuck, even the ignoct in my very first ffxv wasn't meant to be so overt as it was gjdsklgjks there's also tiny hints of it in some of my fayth's daddy issues week fics (not counting the one that's deliberately and stated to be ignoct).

…actually now that I'm writing this I'm realising very little of my ignoct has been deliberately planned at the start 😂 the sequel to shadows growing, grey skies, was planned, at least xD the promptio that shows up towards the end of the fic was an accident though gjsdkgljslk it just. happened??? I didn't even LIKE promptio when I started writing that fic. huh. maybe accidental shipping is just my thing in writing ffxv fics.

40. Do you feel like you put out enough content?

wanted to answer this one, because, I'm NOT talking in terms of other people here. I don't mean to sound dismissive or ungrateful, because I do appreciate the people who read my fics, it makes me happy, but like. it's not why I write OR post. I'm not "producing content" for people; if someone is unhappy with me for not posting more fics, that's their problem. but in terms of myself… yeah, I do wish I had more to post. not because I feel like I've got some kind of arbitrary quota to meet. like, quite frankly, I have over a million words of fic posted on ao3, and given that I have a single unposted fic that's over 600K alone, I'm positive I have at least 2mil total words written. it's just that I wish I could write more consistently/frequently? I feel like I never write as much as I want to, and I know a lot of it is because of my worsening health, so maybe that's why I just feel so frustrated and dissatisfied with my output, but man, sometimes I look at my number of posted works on ao3 and feel like it's such a low number for how long I've been writing ): both for ffxv specifically and for all my fics total. I know it's silly, but the feeling persists nonetheless.

thank you again for the ask!! I feel happy getting to answer questions and ramble about my fics :D and it was really fun to think about my answers and realise a thing or two haha.

[alloveydovey]

Hellooooo, dramas from this past month :) I had a lot of fun watching most of these, which hadn't been happening lately.

The Story of Park’s Marriage Contract, 2023 (kdrama) 7.5/8

A woman from the past travels to the future where she meets a man who resembles her deceased husband. In need of a wife, he strikes a contract with her, and blah blah blah, you know what happens next.

The chemistry was there 100%, the comedy too, but overall, I think it was just a mid watch for me. I was three episodes away from finishing but was struggling big time because I was getting bored.

The Romance of Tiger and Rose, 2020 (cdrama) 8

A scriptwriter ends up inside her own creation as a side character who dies early on in the drama and has a really bad reputation.

This was hilarious. Laughing out loud alone type of hilarious. It didn't make any sense at all, and it was extremely silly and sometimes even frustrating, but both actors were so great with the comedy (Zhao Lusi the actress that you are), so everything was just fun and romantic and cute... and weird enough, emotional af as well. I love these types of dramas where, after watching, you kinda feel empty inside lol. Comfort drama material? 100%

My Demon, 2023/24 (kdrama) 8

A demon becomes powerless after crossing paths with a cold heiress (who he obviously knew in their, guess what? Yes, past lives)

Kim Yoo Jung and Song Kang (his character is everything) were so cute in this! Their chemistry was definitely chemistring. I loved the concept and all, but for some reason, I couldn’t put my whole heart into this drama, which resulted in me being a bit disappointed. I’d get bored sometimes. I still don’t know if it’s my problem though. Maybe it wasn't the right time to watch it since I had been watching so many dramas with similar storylines. I’ll give them this, though, these two were truly a comedic duo™️

My Man is Cupid, 2023/24 (kdrama) 8

A love fairy accidentally shoots himself with an arrow and ends up in love with a human, condemning him and his group of cupids to 500 years on Earth. In modern day, he gets entangled with a veterinarian who might be connected to what happened in the past. Also! Murder mystery.

This one just goes to prove that liking a drama is all about vibes for me. Is this different from what I’ve been watching? Nope. It’s not better than the other ones above with similar premises. Yet somehow, unlike the others, it got my attention way more, and I totally binged it. Even when this particular one had some very confusing, probably so-so writing, moments. Granted, it has Nana in it. Nana makes everything worth it (Jang Dong Yoon was cute as well lol).

My Girlfriend is a Gumiho, 2010 (kdrama) (rewatch!) 7.5 ⭐️

A cute gumiho saves an irresponsible rich kid who wants to become an action star by giving him her bead. Both of them gotta stick together while he heals.

Like I said back when I first saw this, COMFORT!! And I was in the mood for something silly and sweet after the same themes over and over again. I can't get over how cute Shin Min A and Lee Seung Gi are in this.

Falling Into You, 2022 (cdrama) 9

A student-athlete wants to do high jump but doesn't have the required height for the sport, so a postgraduate student-coach decides to take him under her wing and train him. Noona love story ensues.

So... I have a lot of mixed feelings about it because, all in all, I think this is one of the best cdramas I've watched. It's beautifully shot, the music is incredible, and the pacing, story, characters, and acting are all impeccable. Aside from Meet Yourself (fav ever) it's truly one of the most naturally acted cdramas I've seen so far as well. Even outside the romance part, everything was really good.

Now, was it inappropriate? For me, at least, I think it was. This young student is supposed to be 20, and his coach is said to be about to turn 28. They are both consenting adults (let's put it that way), but the power dynamics thing is still there. Overall, it was a nice surprise, and I completely binged it.

Welcome to Samdal-ri, 2023/24 (kdrama) 9

After a scandal, a famous photographer runs back to her hometown. Her ex, with whom she had an intense fallout (childhood friends to lovers), is there, and it seems like neither of them has moved on. (Also about family, and grief)

From the moment I saw Shin Hye Sun and Ji Chang Wook's pictures next to one another on a tweet saying they were going to be in a new drama together, I knew this was going to be a 10/10 in my books. Maximized joint slay. Add the hometown cha cha cha vibes, and you have an amazing tear-jerker drama. The rest of the cast is a great complement as well; their acting and their stories just make everything really emotional (I cried a lot lol), but it is 100% worth the watch. I'll be honest about one thing, though. As much as I loved it, it took me a while to finish the last two episodes cause I feel like they dragged the story a bit.

Princess Hours/Goong, 2006 (kdrama) 8

In a reimagined modern SK, a girl from an ordinary family gets hitched to the crown prince because of a promise both of their grandparents made in the past. A Diana x Charles x Camilla drama ensues (but like, with a happy ending).

This is what I like to call DRAMA™️. The type you hate everyone's behaviors, and you laugh, and you hate the ML, but you also want him to get with the FL, and you start hate watching, and then you giggle when they share moments and completely forget ML is a really shitty person lol. I started this cause I got sick, and I got way into it. ML being a major asshole and the FL having no self-respect (like the good old dramas and telenovelas) aside, I enjoyed binging this, and I can see why it was so popular. Their romance, though deeply flawed and a product of the time the drama was made, had some great moments, slow burn and natural as well. I was lowkey hoping for a happier ending, tho, but it was cute enough. Also, music bro, that main song is never getting out of my head. Comfort drama material: 100%

Playful Kiss, 2010 (kdrama) 5

FL confesses to ML, and he rejects her harshly. When her house collapses, her father moves them in with an old friend, who ends up being ML's father.

So after Goong, I thought I'd probably be able to watch this. Wrong. Shin's got nothing wrong in comparison so Seung Jo. Seung Jo is probably my most disliked ML ever lol. I binged this, hoping it'd get better, or just like Shin in Goong, he'd change a bit after getting together with FL. But nope, he remained an asshole throughout the whole thing. Gotta love that consistency. Comfort drama material: 1% (I saw the comments on Viki, and I don't know how people rewatched this, lol.)

[lowpolynpixelated]

Let's talk about handhelds!

Specifically the Steam Deck and what (at least I think) is a decent part of its success as a handheld in today’s rather stagnant landscape as far as competition and innovation goes in the gaming space. For those who don’t know, the Steam Deck is a device first released in February 2022 by game development/publishing company Valve. Valve is mostly known nowadays for being the owners and operators of Steam, the largest and most widely used online marketplace for PC gaming, but rose to fame in the late 90s for their smash hit game Half-Life as well as its sequels and expansions. During the mid-late 2010s Valve had taken a pretty big step back from game development and focussed more on running steam and supporting some of their games (Dota 2, Artifact, Team Fortress 2 just to name a few) though the support varied from game to game. But that aside, let's get into it! PART 1: The Steam Machines

During this time Valve had ALSO begun to dip their proverbial toes into the waters of gaming hardware in the form of both the “Steam Machines” as well as the “Steam Controller”. So what were the Steam Machines? Why are they important to this article about the Steam Deck and other modern handhelds? Well everything has to start somewhere, and I’m of the opinion that the Steam Deck accomplishes the original mission of the Steam Machines better than they ever did, but I’m getting ahead of myself. First announced on September 23rd, 2013, the Steam Machines were touted as a new pillar of console gaming. The aim was to provide a console-like user experience on a device with the horsepower and game variety of your average gaming PC. Runnin on a Linux based operating system called “SteamOS” valve wanted the the consoles to be an open source experience in the living room to compete with the likes of Microsoft’s Xbox consoles. So what went wrong? Well let's start with the big one: variety. I first want to preface this part with: I am looking at these pieces of hardware through the lens of someone with little technical knowledge, the average consumer if you will. I myself have a decent bit of tech know-how, but I wasn't always like that, and I’ve certainly been poor enough my whole life that knowing the biggest and best PC stuff on the market didn’t really mean I could afford it. So, why was variety a bad thing? To your usual console gamer, consistency is key. It's usually assumed by whoever is getting whatever Xbox or PlayStation what-have-you that the box you’re paying money for will play the games you put in it. And to that credit, this is usually the case! Back in the day if you bought a PS2 or a Wii, bought a game for either and slotted it in, your game box would play it no problem. This isn’t always the case for PCs however. PC games vary way more wildly when it comes to the sorts of specifications the game is made to run on, or even what hardware the PC has that can be considered reasonable for said game. The fact of the matter is that PCs are modular, which means optimal configurations and what is considered “a baseline” are changing far more frequently than in the console landscape. The Steam Machines still wanted to offer some of this variety, but in the end it backfired more than anything. 

Steam Machine models ranged in price anywhere from $400 to $2000 in 2015 money when they finally released (November 10th, 2015) depending on the parts they used. And the difference between a $400 model and a $2000 model could mean not being able to play a good chunk of games on the market at the time. To your average console fan, this was perhaps too much choice when it came to finding which box to get to play all the shiny PC games they were being told they’d be able to play. Now this isn’t a matter of being disingenuous, more of an oversight. Valve wasn’t specifically trying to just target average consumers, but they did end up somewhat alienating those who didn’t have the technical know-how to figure out what model best suited the games they wanted to play. What reason would I have to buy a Steam Machine for $650 that might play all the games I want when I could just wait until November 15th, 2013 when the PS4 launched for $400 and would play all the games that came out for it? It was a perfect storm of releasing a brand new (and honestly decent) idea into an already pretty stagnant and established market and not being able to sell to people who weren’t already buying gaming computers. Steam Machines were decently popular with the PC gaming crowd. Being able to buy a pre-assembled computer with decent parts is appealing to a pretty decent chunk of people who primarily play on PC. Maybe you don’t know much about building computers and have always bought pre-built, maybe you like the specs of one of the Steam Machines and don’t mind the price tag too much. This big issue with all this though, was that almost no one was buying the Steam Machines to be a Steam Machine. To quote an article by Tyler Wilde for PC Gamer back in 2018, “Nobody was buying it with SteamOS,” Digital Storm marketing manager Rajeev Kuruppu tells me over the phone. The manufacturer had already been building the Eclipse—which is still available with Windows—when Valve pitched SteamOS, and added a Steam Machine build mid-project. That version has since been axed, and Digital Storm no longer has an active relationship with Valve. 

“I think over time as the demand from customers wasn’t there we basically had no reason to speak with Valve,” says Kuruppu. Digital Storm is still open to working with Valve, so long as its customers want what Valve is putting out. Right now, they don’t.” - Rajeev Kuruppu in a 2018 phone interview with PC Gamer Executive Editor Tyler Wilde for his article “What happened to Steam Machines?” (link in sources section)

This highlights the issue beautifully. SteamOS just couldn’t make the waves Valve wanted it to with the PC manufacturers they partnered with, leading to people simply not buying the pre-built machines as what they were intended to be. So what happens now? Well, after the failure of both the Steam Machines and the Steam Controller (a topic for a different time), Valve wouldn’t try again in the hardware space until 2019 with their admittedly very impressive VR gear, the Valve Index. With the Index making positive waves in the burgeoning VR space, Valve would then go on to release another successful piece of hardware. The real topic if this article, the Steam Deck. 

Part 2: The Steam Deck (part 1: Launch)

Revealed on July 15th, 2021, the Steam Deck was Valve's answer to their failed hardware attempt of the past. A handheld computer with a brand new version of SteamOS capable of playing most of your favourite PC games with a set of specs that only changed depending on internal storage (and eventually small differences in battery life.) So what changed between the times that the Steam Machine and Steam Deck released? Well, the PC and console markets (at least at the time of writing this article, 12/21/2023) are a bit more stable in how new and better parts are being pushed. Make no mistake, the PC community’s search for new and more powerful machines will always be a constant, but it's at the very least a little easier to keep up with right now. On top of that, the Nintendo Switch made MASSIVE waves in the console landscape being a near instant success story of merging handheld and home console markets into one harmonious group. Handhelds were all the rage, with many companies throwing in their lot with the mobile console idea such as the LYRA for playing classic games, and Google’s STADIA (which hilariously imploded shortly after launching to poor reception). Valve’s new device was right at home in the new invigorated market of gaming-on-the-go, a boom of innovative and experimental handhelds to rival the Gameboy’s release all the way back in 1989 (but more on that later.) The Steam Deck launched to a generally positive reception. Lots of PC gamers were more than happy to add the device to their repertoire of ways to play their favourite games, with higher ups in the gaming space like Tim Sweeny of Epic Games and Phil Spencer of Microsoft calling it “An amazing move by Valve!” (- Quoted from a PC Gamer article by Andy Chalk written in 2021 titled “Tim Sweeney: Steam Deck is 'an amazing move by Valve”, link in sources section) The things the Steam Deck was offering on launch were more in line with what some key parts of the overall gaming space wanted at the time, and so the device was more positively received by people already in those spaces. Now let’s talk about what I said before about consoles being able to play their games off the bat and why the Steam Deck stood out despite being essentially a handheld PC. The Steam Deck stripped away the modularity that the Steam Machines boasted by having a set table of Specs to offer across all 3 of its launch models, with the price and model really only determining how much storage you got. At launch the Steam Deck models on offer were the following:

-$400 for 64gb of internal eMMC storage(embedded multi media card, think a thumb drive) (and a bonus carrying case!) -$530 for 256gb of internal SSD storage (SSD or Solid State Drive being a decent bit faster than eMMC but also more pricey) (exclusive steam profile goodies and a bonus carrying case still! wow!)

-$650 for 512gb of internal SSD storage AND a more premium anti-glare etched glass screen (along with the profile goodies, a steam virtual keyboard theme and the bonus carrying case! wowsers!!!)

These models were more on-par with consoles of the time. Maybe not as powerful, but comparatively so in performance and price in such a way that the Steam Deck was a genuinely appealing offer to not only someone who already knew their stuff about PC gaming, but someone who played on PC and maybe didn’t know too much but wanted a good mobile option other than a laptop. Now those are both still parts of the same niche, PC gamers, and we’re here to talk about your average console Jane, as it were. And we will! But first let’s compare Valve’s previous attempt with the Steam Machines to their modern success. One of the most powerful (at the time) Steam Machines on offer was the Alienware Machine. Alienware is a popular manufacturer of gaming PCs and laptops for those not in-the-know. Here’s what anywhere from $550-$900 could get you in 2014:

Alienware Steam Machine basic specifications:

Processor

Haswell Intel Based CPU

RAM

4GB - 8GB

GPU

Nvidia GPUX

HDD

500GB - 2 TB

(specifications sourced from IGN’s “Steam Machine Guide” from 2014, link in sources section) Now at the time these were decently impressive specs, but I would like to point out both the price tag and the fact that some of these parts vary! If you don’t know, the GPU (graphics processing unit) being listed as “Nvidia GPUX” could be any one of SEVERAL parts which would most likely change your price point wildly. In fact, everything on this list is a variable component! Having anywhere between 4gb-8gb of RAM, what size HDD you have, and what CPU you put in, could end up boosting you all the way to that $900 point mentioned above. As stated before, this wasn’t going to win over anyone who was already going to pay $500 less for a PS4 that could just play PS4 games with no research on components needed. Let’s compare these general specs to those of the Steam Deck, which haven’t changed much since its launch in 2022. No matter what model you pick (aside from the storage and screen in the case of the 512gb model) here’s what you get in a Steam Deck:

Steam Deck basic specifications:

APU

6 nm AMD APU

CPU: Zen 2 4c/8t, 2.4-3.5GHz (up to 448 GFlops FP32)

GPU: 8 RDNA 2 CUs, 1.6GHz (1.6 TFlops FP32)

APU power: 4-15W

RAM

16 GB LPDDR5 on-board RAM (6400 MT/s quad 32-bit channels) Storage Steam Deck 64GB eMMC

Steam Deck 256GB NVMe SSD

Steam Deck 512GB NVMe SSD

(specs sourced from the Valve official website for the Steam Deck, link in sources section)

Granted there’s almost 10 years of technology between these specs and those of the Alienware, the point here is consistency. All 3 models of the Steam Deck use the exact same internal components for things like GPU, CPU, RAM, and almost everything else! To someone looking for something with more oomph than the Switch and maybe even wanting to get into PC gaming alongside it, it’s a pretty good deal! And it’s only gotten MORE appealing with more recent developments in the Steam Deck’s models and pricing, but we’ll talk about that after a short jaunt through gaming history.

Part 3: Handheld market factor history and why I think the Steam Deck is a pretty cool example of them (intermission from the Steam Deck)

As I said we’re gonna take a short break to talk about what I would consider the core of this article. You may have noticed me using terms like “handheld boom” and “market”. I’m gonna throw out some more of those so bare with me, but we’re gonna talk about the Gameboy. What’s so special about the Gameboy? Lots of people know it for being the most popular handheld console of the 4th generation beating out the likes of the Atari Lynx and more importantly, the Sega Game Gear. Why is that important? We’ll get there in a second I promise. The bigger question is “why was the gameboy successful?” to which the answer is usually “brand recognition”. Which isn’t incorrect in its own right, but is only one piece of a larger whole. The Gameboy entered a market that was predominantly occupied by two things, home consoles and arcade games. Handheld games DID exist, but not in the cartridge based console form the Gameboy popularized. This “wild west” era of console development was the second resurgence of video games after a market crash from 1983 to 1985. Spearheaded by the 3rd generation consisting of heavy hitters like the NES and Sega Master System, it gave way to an era of constant development and innovation attempts. The Gameboy specifically hit a couple of key factors when it comes to your average person. No remember, this was during a time when large portions of people still didn’t really understand what a video game was, and a lot of them were even marketed as toys to help them sell. The Gameboy’s success lies in a few points that went a long way towards selling it specifically to people without a ton of video game experience. These were: price point, and usability. 

Let’s get into it! First off: price point! In 1989 the Gameboy launched with an introductory price of $90 in the US. Compare this to the Sega Game Gear releasing the following year for $150, and the Atari Lynx at $180. Retailing for HALF the price of a (at the time) big name competitor is kind of a big deal! Price point ties directly into something like accessibility for something being sold as a product, and needless to say paying less than $100 for something with Nintendo’s (again at the time) pedigree behind it put the Gameboy in the hands of a LOT of people. Next off: Usability! What does this mean? Well, this one is a bit rocky. To put it bluntly: the Gameboy was incredibly underpowered for its generation. (A Nintendo console underpowered? Never!) Why was this a good thing? From the perspective of someone trying to get the most “bang for their buck” so to speak, the Gameboy’s underwhelming specs gave it a bit of an edge. How you may ask? Battery life and cost! Let’s get the bad out of the way first by directly comparing the Gameboy and the Sega Game Gear. The old SGG was rocking not only a full colour backlit display in 1990, but also had a good bit more horsepower as far as its specifications go. Able to run full colour games at nearly 60fps on a handheld in the 90s is nothing to sneeze at! But the cost of that is 6 whole AA batteries that would die out in anywhere between 3-5 hours depending on the games you play. The Gameboy in comparison, had a simple dot matrix display that only showed in black and white. (or various shades of off-green if you’ve ever seen one in person.) 

The Gameboy as well couldn’t handle beefier games, with notable examples like Mario Land 2: The six golden coins having a good amount of slowdown due to its large chunky sprites and level assets. So its battery life must’ve been something special then? Compared to the Game Gear, absolutely. Clocking in at 15+ hours of battery life on just 4 of the same AAs the Game Gear uses, the Gameboy’s game time and price were unbeatable. 

This is why I think it's important to look at more than just a piece of hardware’s specifications when it comes to measuring success. And I can hear you. “Clair, why are we talking about the Gameboy and how it sold a bajillion units because it was more affordable and had Tetris on it? How does this relate to the Steam Deck?” Well my dear reader, let’s finally answer that and talk about the new Handheld Boom.

Part 4: The Steam Deck (part 2: OLED and new pricing)

So here we are! The year is 2023, the Nintendo Switch is 6 years old, the Steam Deck has been selling decently well, and I need to wrap this whole thing up. In November 2023, Valve announced the Steam Deck was getting some pricing adjustments, as well as a brand new model that included better battery life and a slightly larger OLED screen for better picture quality. The Introduction of the new OLED model not only introduced 2 new tiers of Steam Decks to choose from (the new OLED 512gb model for $550 and the OLED 1tb model for $650), but also locked in ONE of the previous Steam Deck LCD models as the only LCD model available, for a price cut! If you go back and look at the old pricing, the 256gb LCD model used to cost $530. Due to the OLED models knocking out the lower tier LCD models entirely, the price has now been locked at just $400. Why does this matter? Well, just like with the Gameboy, you’re making some sacrifices for the lower cost. The higher tier OLED models have nicer screens and better batteries, but also cost a good bit more. Just as well, the Steam Deck is in NO way one of the beefiest PC gaming devices on the market. 

In recent years more and more PC handhelds have been coming out to try and cash in on what the Steam Deck has set up. My personal favourite example is the ROG Ally, and AMD powered handheld that for all intents and purposes, outpaces the Steam Deck in raw power. So why aren’t people flocking to the Ally? Well the basic model clocks in at around $600, and can be upgraded with a better processor for another $100. Looking at just the basic models for both, the Steam Deck wins out on being just the right amount of a powerhouse it needs to be for just over half the price of the Ally. This matters because that’s going to appeal to different parts of the market and landscape as a whole. 

I hold the opinion that the Steam Deck serves as an EXCELLENT initial entry point into PC gaming for someone who has only ever played on console. It offers that console experience the Steam Machines tried so hard to at a price point that most people interested in game consoles are paying nowadays anyway. A PS5 cost $500, and a PS4 (the console the deck is most likely to be on par with) launched for $400. I find it a much easier sell to get someone who wants to get into PC to play with friends, or have a Switch-like experience for games not available on it, than trying to tell them the $700 one gets more FPS and has a better processor. It all comes down to those factors of price point and usability. It's been so interesting to see the Steam Deck rise into popularity in so many corners of the internet that I hang around in. I haven’t even talked about how emulating on the Steam Deck is one of the most seamless and easy to set up processes I’ve ever seen! With arguably the best LCD model option now locked at the introductory price for most modern game consoles, it’s so neat to see what could genuinely be considered a truly NEW game console enter the fray. And a handheld at that! Part 5: I am just one woman (conclusion and thanks)

Hey there! If you read through all this garbled nonsense I’d like to extend a small thank you. I also want to take a second to say that I’m not presenting any of this as objective facts. Yes I have listed facts in this article, but as the title of this section says, I am just one woman. These are my overly excited thoughts on a phenomenon I’ve observed in my own time and wanted to share with anyone who would read it. Thanks a ton for reading! I’ll be back with more ramblings at some point, but for now let's part with this: The Steam Deck is an awesome piece of tech that I feel really shakes up the gaming space. I’m not sponsored by anyone, I’ve only been paid in the satisfaction of writing. If you’re someone who doesn’t dabble much in PC gaming, and are planning to buy a new console, maybe give the Steam Deck a try! I definitely plan on getting one after watching some stuff on the EmuDeck frontend for emulation and being thoroughly impressed. That’s all for now, see ya around! -Clair (FembotY2K) (sources below the cut!)

[yellowjacketslesbian]

hi jo! i saw someone shit on the idea of van as a nonbinary butch today and as one myself it made me upset. I love your fics and how you write van so I was wondering if you had any headcanons about van being gnc / nonbinary?

hey! first off, I'm really sorry you saw someone reacting negatively to the idea of nonbinary butch Van. I know it can be really frustrating and upsetting to see someone getting offended at the idea of a fictional character possibly having a similar identity as you. it's like "what's wrong with my identity that makes you deny this character I love and relate to could also be a nonbinary butch lesbian?" (spoiler alert: nothing is wrong with being a nonbinary butch lesbian, some people are just very loud and very wrong)

THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! it truly means a lot to know that people like what I write. I'm especially glad that the fics I've written dealing with Van's gender have been well received, and that people could feel seen by them!

I could write multiple essays on Van's gender and why I personally believe they're nonbinary (and why they're already canonically butch), but I'll confine this to just my top nonbinary Van hcs lol

if they had lost states and never gotten on the plane, Van would've gotten a scholarship to NYU and double majored in film and women's & gender studies. They would've become aware of Gender Trouble and Stone Butch Blues through their major, and they also would've met more gnc people in NYC. This would've led to their realization that there are other people like them who share similar experiences. I personally think it would've taken them a year or two to talk to Taissa about it because they didn't want to "burden her with it" (typical Van), but Tai would've been really accepting and went out of her way to read about gender identity and try really hard to understand Van's experiences once they told her. I don't think Van would've been out as nonbinary to anyone besides Tai and close friends until like the early 00s though.

in "canon" where the crash happens, I think it would've taken Van a lot longer to realize they even could be nonbinary. like they had so much trauma to work through, and just surviving was probably a struggle for them. I can really see them spending at least a decade just ignoring any dysphoria they had. they probably also didn't have the same exposure to information about being nonbinary back in the late 90s / early 00s, especially if they weren't living in a very queer area or around academia. I think one of the queer college kids who helped out around their store eventually came out to them as nonbinary in the late 00s. then Van researched being nonbinary so they could be there for them, and that's how Van finally realized they're actually nonbinary.

I think Van would've spent some time exploring what pronouns felt right for them after realizing they're nonbinary, but they would eventually use they/them or they/she by the present day.

I think Van had top surgery in the late 00s in the no crash universe and in the mid-2010s in the "canon" universe

I think that Van's dysphoria is mostly social dysphoria, but I do think they have top dysphoria. I personally read Van's boob jokes in S1 as using humor to deflect from some dysphoria they may have been experiencing at the time. (as a nonbinary lesbian, it reminded me a lot of how I personally dealt with my own dysphoria when I was about Van's age and hadn't yet realized it was dysphoria)

Lastly

important note: all of this is purely my own hcs and opinions, and I am not claiming to know what they will or won't explore canonically on the show. that being said, I am a nonbinary butch lesbian and personally see a lot of myself and my own experiences in Van, and many other nonbinary lesbians also see themselves in Van. we all have every right to hc Van as nonbinary. if you don't like it, you can politely fuck off

[bomb343]

R.I.P Rooster Teeth

Just to get this out of the way, I know I haven't been on here in a long time. I was actually planning on coming back, but then this news dropped and I felt like I had to get my thoughts in.

Let's face facts here, this should surprise absolutely no one. Unless you've been living under a rock (or you're just don't care about Rooster Teeth), we've all witnessed the decline this company has had over the past few years. From all the controversies starting to pile up, their audience leaving in droves, the content they were putting out just not being entertaining anymore, the multiple cancellations (RvB, Achievement Hunter, RTX, etc.), to just the company not being the same company we all fell in love with in the beginning. It all spelled the end of Rooster Teeth. I'm not gonna lie, after Achievement Hunter shut down, I felt like the company had at least one more year left in it. I was slightly wrong (by several months) but in the end, this was inevitable.

I started watching Rooster Teeth either in the late 2000's or the early 2010's ( I can't remember exactly when I started watching). Well, I say Rooster Teeth, but in reality it was less Rooster Teeth and more Achievement Hunter and the Let's Play channel. There were other things I liked to watch (The Know and Annual Pass to name a couple) but it was mostly AH content. The only thing I watched on the main RT channel were the RTAA's and RTLife. I did watch a little RvB, but while the stuff I watched I did enjoy, it never really stuck with me. Nope, I was there for the let's plays, the thing to dos, the AHWUs and the fails of the weeks. I've mentioned before that I was the victim of bullying for 13 years. For those latter years, RT and AH definitely brought me some joy during those tough years.

I stopped watching around mid 2023. The reason I stopped watching wasn't because of the controversies (despite how horrible they got, it felt to me like they were addressing them in an appropriate manner (except the Kdin Jenzen stuff, that was corporate bs)) nor was it the roster changes (I like to think I gave everyone there a decent shot to entertain me and for the most part they succeeded). No, the thing that made me stop watching was the content itself; simply put they stopped putting things out that I wanted to watch and the stuff I did want to watch wasn't funny. AHs humor did get old and the games they were playing over on the Let's Play channel I didn't much care for. I think the last series I watched of theirs was their last 7 Days to Die series and even that I didn't finish because it stopped being entertaining. Despite what I said before, it was the Kdin Jenzen stuff that was the final straw for me. After hearing all the crap their employee's went through, I knew I couldn't support this company anymore. That being said, I still wanted to watch their Extra Life stream last year. The Extra Life streams had become less about the charity work (unfortunately) and more a litmus test to see how the company was doing. With that in mind, they failed spectacularly. After that stream I knew the company wasn't gonna survive much longer.

As much as I want to rip into RT for all the crap that lead us here, I have to remember that they did put out content that brought joy in my life. Hopefully, that content will remain up. That being said, RT is owned by the same company who owned Machinima and considering what happened to their content library.....Yeah, I have reason to be nervous. But the memories will remain and I'll try to do my best to remember Rooster Teeth for the better. I do wish the employee's nothing but the best and hope that they land on their feet somewhere where they are paid better and there's less crunch time. However, in the end, as I said before this shouldn't come as any surprise.

Still, thank you Rooster Teeth for everything. Despite everything, you will be missed.

[rush-the-stars]

i very distantly remember you asking for Idiosyncratic Ship-names for Trigun (not in those words, but thats what TV Tropes calls them. the ships where theyre labeled after words, instead of blending their names together (which the name-blending kind of ship-names TV Tropes says is called Portmanteau Ship-names)). im PRETTY SURE that Ask came from you but i cant find the Ask anymore, but, again, im?? pretty sure???? it was you?

anyway, if i recall correctly, you wanted an idea for Meryl × Vash × Wolfwood ship-name (that was idiosyncratic; as opposed to the Mashwood ship-name that is Portmanteau), and ive been wrestling with sharing mine for a while bc its a ship-name ive been using for my un-posted OC × those three, but it can be repurposed for your needs too. i should add that, for poly ships, i personally like to incorporate the number of people involved in the name. but the number 3 (as opposed to the original: 4) works in the ship-name i have. you can also ditch the number, if you want, im not your boss. or you can ditch this whole ship-name if you dont like it

but for Meryl × Vash × Wolfwood (× my OC) ive been using (DE4LOWERED) D3FLOWERED, or i guess just DEFLOWERED if you prefer no numbers

i guess you could keep the original number if you wanted to use Reader inside it tho

but yeah. that Ask has been on my brain for months now, re-popping up as i go "nah" and re-popping up again until i decided i could at least share what ive been using in private. again, you certainly dont have to use it. im not even wholly sure it was you since i cant find the Ask (but tumblr's search feature has always been garbage so im unsurprised i cannot find it)

if you were curious about some of my other idiosyncratic ship names for Trigun (to use or not use, im good either way) (tho, please note i dont use numbers for two-person ship names. so taking a triad (with my OC) into a duo (no OC) will not have a number like the above example of a quartet to trio does. you can feel free to incorporate Reader or your own OC to give the ship its triad-poly status again, i dont mind. regardless, im babbling)

My OC × Vashwood : BULL3T BOUQUET, or BULLET BOUQUET

My OC × Knives × Wolfwood: RINGING B3LL-FLOWER, or RINGING BELL-FLOWER (it's a pun on the media property, Ringing Bell, most famous for its 1978 movie by the same name)

i have a ship-name for every combo, but the duo ones (of OC × Canon) i dont feel like sharing at this moment because half the ship *is* my OC lol but my plot-notes feature my OC having a rose motif very often (for reasons that have plot relevance about her interests, i swear lol), which i leaned into heavily for the idiosyncratic ship-names overall theme since Trigun has that whole Plant element and whatnot anyway lmao rip (subtly is dead) but i hope (ASSUMING I AM REMEMBERING ACCURATELY THAT IT WAS YOU WHO ASKED FOR THIS LOL) this satiated your months-ago craving for Trigun Idiosyncratic Ship-names?? yeah. ill go excuse my multi-shipper ass now, have a lovely day lmao rip

-- Demx's 💗 Anon, or Heartfelt Anon, from way back (you dont gotta reserve the emoji for me here; id be shocked if you did, i just wanted to confirm i was me this time before someone potentially recognized me.. again lol)

first i want to say i am sorry for getting back to this so late! i have been very busy recently!!

it absolutely was me who was looking for idiosyncratic ship names!! i was from the age of fandom (or maybe the particular fandom??) that had quite a lot of them! specifically young justice in the mid 2010s? we had spitfire, museum heist, chalant, i think red cat? we had a ton! and i feel like i saw it in other fandoms for a bit too but it slowly died off!

i just loved how clever they were! i think i also remember at one point people also were rather poetic about ot3 names? i think i remember someone who used to tag their rey, finn, and poe ot3 content with “ot3: mosaics are just broken pieces” and that stuck with me too.

but i LOVE that you’ve shared your own poly ship names with your OC and so generously offered them up for what we know as mashwood right now!! i love the inclusion of the number too!! i feel like back in the day, id tag it like this “ot3: d3flowered” WHICH IS FUN!

i tried thinking of one for them along the same lines of the “museum heist” ot3 which was robin x wally x artemis from young justice…..which if you shortened their names would get robwallart…which then became museum heist! because of the play on the words their name formed, which looked and sounded like “robbing wall art”

so i was kinda trying to play with mashwood like that because their names together currently invoke like….a forest? marshy forest? couldn’t figure out something i liked but i did like the forest imagery, since their planet no longer has them and in ways, they represent a beacon of hope for the planet.

d3flowered is lovely though!!

also obsessed with your oc and other ship names too….thats SO fun. ringing bell-flower is really evocative. i love the thought you’ve put into this.

makes me want to come up with ship names for my reader ocs and these characters…..i feel like with wolfwood i at least have this reoccurring “hellcat” reader….

i do have one more closely tied to nai too…i so badly want to find the time to finish that fic.

but anyways thank you so much for all of this 💗 anon!!! it’s given me much to think about and honestly is so creative and fun!

i hope you’re doing well!! again, sorry for the late response to this!!

[samueldays]

AI Winter is coming

mostly @northshorewave who has been worried about this

The other day a friend wanted to show off his positive interactions with ChatGPT. He’d used it to write a 20 questions quiz for the party we were at. I asked if I could proofread the questions and promised not to look up the answers. It contained stuff like:

“Which one of these countries does not have a square flag? a) Switzerland b) China c) Britain d) Egypt”

Switzerland is the only one of them that does have a square flag. ChatGPT is an overgrown autocomplete that “knows” to associate the concepts “square flag” and “Switzerland” and the general shape of a quiz question, and mashes words into this template. When I pointed this out, my friend was rather disappointed and quickly set to reviewing the quiz.

Then I asked to use his laptop for a moment, and showed off ChatGPT’s propensity to hallucinate by asking it for a summary of a nonexistent Wikipedia article whose title I made up on the spot.

ChatGPT happily summarized the article as describing a Danish children’s TV series involving two boys who go to Mars in their home-built spaceship to look for their dad who disappeared on a research expedition there. The series had 12 episodes that ran from 2005 to 2006. It was produced by (Danish studio name I don’t remember) for a cost of fourteen million dollars.

My friend spent the next several minutes on Google checking whether this series had at any point existed, and rushing through the five stages of grief. :^D

This looks like to me like a miniature of the current hype cycle (”AI Summer”), which will die in a year or two, and there will be another “AI Winter” of disappointment. I say another because there’s been at least three and possibly more minor ones. Experts dispute the count, there’s no objective number, but this is my impression:

In the 60s, there was an AI hype cycle. It produced a lot of obscure tech and the moderately famous ELIZA, an early chatbot-psychotherapist. ELIZA arguably passed the Turing test in the very narrow sense of “some people talking to it thought it was human”. AI researchers were sure that full humanlike AI was probably just a decade away.

Enter the 70s, humanlike AI is nowhere close, ELIZA is clearly just a trivial grammar engine, AI winter sets in, people and funding leave the field.

A second hype cycle around “expert systems” AI packed full of knowledge and rules and heuristics started in the early 80s. Surely this time AI is close, now that it knows stuff. Nope - AI winter 2 around late 80s-1990. My pet nerd example here is Eurisko winning a tournament of Traveller TCS - a very very large wide-open sandbox game with custom-designed ships in space battles, which has too many possibilities and too much rock-paper-scissors to solve. Eurisko exploited enough edge cases and loopholes and cheese tactics that the judges changed the rules for next year. Eurisko won the next year again with new cheese, and the judges said “please don’t come back”.

Expert systems did spread into businesses and automation, but nobody thinks “AI” anymore about the automatic crop-picking robot that can tell green crops from green leaves.

In the late 90s, another AI hype cycle starts. A focus for this one is Deep Blue defeating world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. Chess was a proverbial smart people game; is the AI finally smart enough to be humanlike now that it can beat the smartest person in the world?

No. Instead, chess stopped being a proverbial smart people game, now that it could be brute-forced, and Deep Blue looked less smart and more fast, having enough computing power to examine 200 million moves per second by mostly brute force. Well, I’d play a lot better too if I got enough subjective time to examine possible moves on 200 million virtual boards.

AI winter 3 in the 2000s.

Now it’s machine learning that is in another hype cycle around neural networks and machine learning from the mid-2010s (maybe from AlphaGo v Lee Sedol?) and into present-day ChatGPT. Maybe now it’s finally going to be a real boy...

...but history suggests not. It seems likely to me that ChatGPT’s failures will become more blatant, chatbot detection will become more common, and massive disappointment will set in within a few years now that the hype is so high. A few years after AI winter 4, we’ll be accustomed to the rather more limited things that GPT makes a good tool for.

A lot of people are saying that ChatGPT or Bing Sydney passes such-and-such test. Consider: is this a test for which answer material is available on the internet? Because a lot of ChatGPT behavior involves, basically, searching for answers to copypaste in internet-derived training data. This is a great technique for sounding moderately intelligent on any sort of test or in any field; and a terrible technique for advancing the state of the art, or saying anything I couldn’t find with my own search, or showing one’s skill at anything but copypaste.

ChatGPT is like a cheating D student, and its likely applications are on the order of “What if you had infinite D students as unpaid interns?”

(spamming publishing houses with D-grade schlock being one such)

[azure-daybreak]

I don’t know how but it seems like Tumblr’s bot problem is even worse nowadays. Like every day I seem to get like 3 new bot followers on both this blog and my main personal blog.

I don’t remember it being this bad back in the mid to late 2010s, If I recall correctly, all they would do is fill your fan mail (remember that? lol) and send you dumb messages when that came out- but now they have to be jackasses and make you go through your notifs, then go into their blog, flag and block them. At least have the decency to make it a process with less steps!

[brothersgrim]

FRUIT HEADCANON ASKS

@asteraex​ asked:

🍐- Taker

🍐  :    how intelligent is my muse overall?  are they smarter than the average person,  or less than?  are they primarily self-taught,  or did they acquire most of their knowledge in school?  are they more street smart or book smart?  

Oh, he’s a smart guy. He's had to be. He was fourteen when he stopped receiving any kind of formal education, mostly because he was dead. Also because he was a slave. That didn’t help. 

But he’s smart. 

Like, let’s just look at all the things he, canonically, knows how to do. First off, he’s a carpenter. Yes, he makes coffins and caskets, but there were other projects in the workshop WWE gave him, including wagon wheels and furniture. Given that that’s HIS workshop, those are also HIS projects, so it stands to reason he just makes all sorts of things. I like to think he handles most of the carpentry/repair jobs in the Valley. (This actually has historical basis, too. Most carpenters were also undertakers back in the day, and vice versa. That was the case in my home town, anyway.) He’s also a blacksmith. A lot of people forget this one, but he is - he works a forge in some of the late 90s promos. He makes most of the hardware for the caskets and his other projects himself. He also repairs his own tools. 

Speaking of repairs, he fixes bikes. He has a wide collection of them, and he’ll repair them, or even sometimes build them from scratch, on his own. It’s his favourite hobby, outside of working out and fighting, and he considers it almost a form of meditation. His bikes are his babies. 

He can also draw, and, from the brief glimpses of his work we see, he’s a pretty talented artist. We mostly just see the blueprints he makes, but the anatomy is clean, the lines are crisp, and it seems to have a slightly cartoon-y style, which is oddly cute to me. I dunno. 

Anyway, he's also a practising mortician. He does the whole embalming, dressing, and clean up process on his own, especially when Paul's not around. That requires a lot of knowledge of human anatomy, chemistry, and colour theory, among a lot of other things. It takes a LOT.

He’s canonically at least bilingual, speaking both English and Ancient Gaelige. (The second is mostly in his Ministry Era, but he does speak it on multiple occasions - including the chants in the Ministry theme song.) 

He’s a great fighter, which requires strategy, problem-solving, and a knack for quick thinking. If you can’t make plans, you can’t fight, simple as. If your opponent can outthink you, you’re going to lose. And he’s a damn good fighter. 

He’s also pretty people-smart, which surprises a lot of those who know him. There are a few examples of this. First off, again, he’s a funeral director. He has to know how to talk to grieving families, and if he does a bad job of that, the home goes under. Second, he’s really good at handling Kane. Yes, he loves his brother, but there’s more to it than just that. The way he talks to Kane - and I know I’ve said this before - is actually exactly how therapists recommend talking to people in abusive relationships. It’s not your fault, it’s okay, you’re safe, I’ll be here for you no matter what, you don’t have to choose between us, so on and so forth. When Kane messes up the Last Ride in their match against Kai and Tai, instead of getting mad at him, Taker pauses the match, shows him how to do it properly, and makes a point of expressing pride and approval when Kane gets it right, because he knows that’s what his little brother needs. Even outside of Kane, the other guys in the locker room have a tendency to listen to and respect Taker, and even go to him for advice. This is most obvious during the American Badass era, and even more so during the Invasion era. Vince, Chris Jericho, and a bunch of other guys say that they need Taker in meetings for anyone to take them seriously. This even extends to other eras - in the mid 2010s, Team Smackdown can’t agree to work together, so, after Edge and Jerry Lawler fail to get them to play nice, they call in Taker to make people behave. 

It works. 

Yes, he threatens to murder them, but it works. He deals with different people different ways. 

The last example I can give of this is how he deals with Shawn during the feud with Triple H that lead up to the infamous cage match. This is a brutal thing that mostly involves Hunter gaslighting the fuck out of Shawn to pit him against Taker. Interestingly, Taker in this feud mostly retaliates by trying to build Shawn back up. Hunter convinces Shawn that Taker is shit-talking Shawn behind his back. This drives Shawn to yell at Taker, retaliate to how he thinks Taker is talking about him, and Taker doesn’t yell back. You can tell he’s annoyed by the whole thing, but he keeps it pretty reeled in, all things considered, and tells Shawn that Shawn should know him well enough by now to know he would never talk behind anyone’s back - but Hunter would. This culminates later in a face-off between Hunter and Taker, with Shawn standing by. Hunter was trying to get in Shawn’s head again, Taker comes out, and gives one of my favourite lines of his  - “Remember when I said that Shawn was better than you? … He is.” And leaves at that. It’s great on both ends, because he knows that’s what Hunter hates most, he knows Hunter’s insecure as hell behind the front he puts on, and more than that, he also knows it’s what Shawn needs to hear - and saying it in front of Shawn means Hunter can’t say it didn’t happen. 

He’s a manipulative bastard when he wants to be, that deadman. 

But, yeah. All this to say, he’s clearly demonstrated high intelligence in a number of different areas. As for where he learned it all, in most fields, he’s largely self-taught. Mortuary sciences, carpentry, smithing, he started to learn that from his parents, yeah, but he was twelve when they died. He got a lot of hands-on experience, he watched them his entire life, but again, he was twelve. He only had so much time, and there was only so much his parents would let him do at that age. Motorcycle repair, that’s self-taught. The Gaelige, he started learning that from his mother, picked it up later from some residents of the Yard (and the Morrigan, who is only there sometimes and doesn’t fully count). The fight smarts, that’s self-taught. It had to be. You either learn to fight, or you wake up in the crypt again. And his people smarts, I think it’s a mix of self-taught and learned. Some of what he’s working with, you can’t be taught, you have to just be the right person for it. Some of the kinder aspects, again, he learned from watching his parents. He learned from watching them with each other, with him and Kane, with the grieving families the home served before the fire. Some of it is, again, just who he is under all the emotional armour. The mean stuff… Well, that’s the same way. Except he learned it from Paul. He learned it from Paul, and Ted, and even Vince to some degree, and the people they dealt with. 

He learned a lot from them. 

[kylesvariouslistsandstuff]

Further FOX AND THE HOUND Observations

I watch THE FOX AND THE HOUND... Like, a lot...

Not too long ago, while scoping around Goodwill... Even though I have largely halted collecting Disney VHS tapes (something I regularly did from the early 2000s up until the late 2010s, with some additions every now and then afterwards), I couldn't help but pick up some Disney VHS tapes that I saw there...

One of them was the 2000 release of THE FOX AND THE HOUND, which was in the Gold Classic Collection. This release came in both VHS and DVD formats, but I scooped up the tape, largely for the front artwork. I never really collected the Gold Classic Collection editions, even though they were the newest releases of several Disney films when I was in my late single-digits. I had gotten a couple of them, too, back in the day, as previous editions were no longer available. I had FUN & FANCY FREE, ALICE IN WONDERLAND, and THE RESCUERS DOWN UNDER circa 2000-2002. I had also gotten the GCC DVDs of THE SWORD IN THE STONE and THE BLACK CAULDRON. Many years later, when I started collecting Disney VHS tapes, I did eventually throw in at least one more GCC release. I remember being given the 2000 release of TOY STORY from a relative, and... I didn't really pick up any after that, until I got the FOX AND THE HOUND VHS the other day.

I tend to watch the movie a lot, and I wanted an excuse to the other day, so I popped in the VHS. I had never seen what this transfer of the movie looked like, I was only familiar with how it looked on the original 1994 VHS release (from "The Classics" line) and the 2011 Blu-ray... But, THE FOX AND THE HOUND fascinates me, even if it's not among my personal favorite Disney animated features...

There was a period in my life where I watched it frequently, too. Circa early 2002, I want to say? And another time around mid-to-late 2005-ish, when I was nonstop watching many of the animated classics. Studying them like the obsessed 12 3/4-year old that I was at the time! These films are like my sun and moon, even the ones that aren't regarded as the greatest, or even considered below par.

Anyways... Where was I? Yeah, THE FOX AND THE HOUND. Well-known amongst the average animation (and/or Disney) historian as the smack-dab-in-the-middle of the transitional era picture of the Disney animated feature library. The film whose production was fraught by Don Bluth's mass exodus from the studio, resulting in a half-year delay and the enterprise scrambling to hire many new animators to work on the picture, getting it to its summer 1981 release date. A film worked on by many future giants in the animation and cinema landscape, from John Musker to Chris Buck to Glen Keane to Brad Bird to Tim Burton!

Wow-wee!

THE FOX AND THE HOUND wasn't quite a beloved picture upon release in 1981, with some brushing it off as yet another Disney cartoon in the age of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. In fact, this dog picture shared the same summer with RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. It is a very compromised picture, as it is well-known that the young artists and the veterans were both at odds- not so much with each other, but with a very strict management that feared the wrath of angry letters from parents and the Bible Belt. This middle-management wouldn't allow the animated features in the works at the time (THE RESCUERS, this film) to be more in line with the films overseen by Walt Disney, films that weren't afraid to frighten young children and commit to their visual drama. Thus, you had Chief surviving a fall from a railroad bridge that was *supposed* to result in his death (thus fueling Copper with vengeance and hate for his best friend), and a general lack of oomph in other scenes. Jerry Rees, one of the animators of the film, recently revealed in an interview that the directors and executives didn't want the death of Tod's mother in the opening sequence to be explicit! They had to fight, tooth and nail, to get that gunshot sound effect in the movie!

That tells you everything you need to know...

THE FOX AND THE HOUND was in full production by the end of 1978. An inked and painted image of Tod and Copper meeting each other in the fallen log appeared in a November issue of LIFE Magazine that year, in celebration of Mickey Mouse's 50th birthday. In this issue was also some concept art done up by Mel Shaw for THE BLACK CAULDRON, which ended up being the feature film to be completed after FOX/HOUND. Not too long ago, I had read that one of the remaining bits of Don Bluth's work on the film was in the scene where Tod causes trouble in the barn while Widow Tweed is tending to Abigail the cow... and yeah, it does look like a Bluth scene!

There's a particular way Bluth does eyes, and I feel like you can see that with both Tod and the cow. Also, Tod doesn't keep his tongue in his mouth (before he takes a drink), another Bluth staple. You can see where his work is, using the tongues as your guide, in THE RESCUERS and WINNIE THE POOH AND TIGGER TOO. He has a thing for characters' tongues flopping out of their mouths.

But I definitely think that Bluth-ness can be felt in other scenes during the film's first 10 or so minutes, such as Big Mama comforting Tod after losing his mother, and Widow Tweed feeding Tod milk. And then about 20 minutes or so into the picture, once Amos, Copper, and Chief go on their lengthy hunting trip, you can see where things resumed following Bluth's September 1979 exit from the animation wing. You can see the work of the Cal-Art animators, and the vibe of the picture is slightly different. The first 10-20min of the movie have that '70s slow quietness to it, the veterans and the animators who already had ROBIN HOOD, TIGGER TOO, and THE RESCUERS under their collective belts... And then the rest of the picture, the new animators. There's a looseness to the animation and structuring of that half of the film, I feel.

I find that very, very fascinating. We have roughly a quarter of the movie that was made in 1978-79, and then the rest resumed in - presumably - early 1980. Of course, the story itself was probably locked by the end of 1978 with few major changes made afterwards (for example, the earliest iterations of THE FOX AND THE HOUND had some crow characters instead of woodpecker Boomer and the Brooklyn-accented sparrow Dinky), it's the execution of what was laid down. One team handling the first 10-20min, the other handling the rest. There's at least two schools of thought at play here, maybe a third, because Glen Keane's bear sequence feels - from a visual and staging standpoint - like it's from a completely different movie. The powerhouse sequence showcases a kind of intensity and raw pencil-drawn power that did the early Walt-era films proud, that the rest of the movie could've lived up to if the filmmakers had been allowed to just make a great family movie without the fear of upsetting someone.

Then you look at MICKEY'S CHRISTMAS CAROL (1983) and THE BLACK CAULDRON (1985), it's the new team's work through and through... THE FOX AND THE HOUND is the full bridge from the end of the Nine Old Men's lengthy careers to the "Young Turks" who would eventually be at the forefront of Disney Animation's "Renaissance"... You have a little bit of everything in it, really... Nine Old Men stuff that feels like it's from the late 1970s, Don Bluth stuff that's in line with his work on THE RESCUERS and his first feature THE SECRET OF NIMH (and also his part-time short BANJO THE WOODPILE CAT), the new animators' work that rings more CAROL and CAULDRON, and Glen Keane just absolutely going off with a scene that looks like it could've come right out of one of the '90s movies.

Kind of an eclectic collection of filmmaking choices, if you think about it, all rolled into this often-overlooked 83-minute movie.

[wanderingmind867]

My Rant against SNL: Part 2

Seasons 7-10 seem like some of the best years SNL had. Their cast was great. Eddie Murphy, Joe Piscopo, Christine Ebersole (who has a beautiful singing voice and starred as White Diamond in Steven Universe), Tim Kazurinsky, Billy Crystal and Martin Short (who seems very funny, from what I've seen of him). I've seen a best of Eddie Murphy compilation, and it made me realize just how funny he's always been. I also saw one episode of season 10, and I loved it. Harry Shearer, Martin Short, Billy Crystal, etc. It was truly an all star cast. Makes me all the more angry when Lorne Michaels comes back and fires them.

Once Lorne comes back, It seems like he at least stayed semi-okay in the beginning. Sure, Terry Sweeney and Danitra Vance seem to have only played stereotypes, but at least some of the others were fun. I've liked Jon Lovitz in some other stuff, and Randy Quaid is funny sometimes (I like him in those vacation films).

Seasons 12-15 or so seem okay too. At least they seem to be one of the most sober casts. I don't think any of them did drugs, but it's hard for me to say definitively. But at least they sound more sober, and that's good for me. Phil Hartman, Jon Lovitz, Jan Hooks, Mike Myers, etc. They all at least seem entertaining. I like Jon Lovitz and Phil Hartman from their roles on The Simpsons, and Mike Myers was in Shrek (and I liked most of those). Not much to say since I haven't seen these seasons, but they sound okay.

The 1990s sound like a return to the drug added mess of the 70s, however. And that's not a good thing. I read a whole New Yorker magazine article on it once, and it's really tainted my view of the era. Comedians like Adam Sandler, Chris Farley, and the others can be funny, but in moderation. Also, I hate Rob Schneider. Stupid vaccine denialist. Shows you just how lax Lorne Michaels was when it came to hiring people. There was still some good from this era (as said, their performers could be good in moderation), but it seems like a return to the hit or miss days of the 1970s.

I'm going to save my views on Mid to Late 90s SNL for Part Two, however. This is mostly so that I can cut Part One off before it stretches into the long and unreadable territory that I fear we're fast approaching.

Part 2: SNL of the 2000s I've not seen much of SNL in the Late 90s. But it seems like their cast was at least okay. Will Ferrell has had a bunch of funny films, and Molly Shannon is good in her guest role on Bob's Burgers. I don't have too much experience with a lot of the other cast members, however. Still, they seem okay. My Dad liked Norm Macdonald, but I don't have much of an opinion on him. Point is, at least a good chunk of the people here went on to do bigger and better things later in life.

I can't speak much about the 2000s as I know so little about them when it comes to SNL. Still, at least some cast members from back then seem funny. Not all of them, but some of them.

Now, let's talk about the 2010s. Let's discuss the cast members, and how some of them were funny and some just don't seem super entertaining. Kenan Thompson has always seemed pretty funny, and Bill Hader has done some decent stuff outside of SNL (like his guest part in Bob's Burgers, for one example). Jason Sudeikis is good in some things, although I never watched Ted Lasso or nothing.

[friskykittyunleashed]

May as well do version two of the musical challenge that @lets-dance-to-joy-division kindly tagged me on. Last night I did five (six really) fairly new to me songs that could evolve into obsessions (pretty sure I'm well on the way with at least three of them). Tonight it's going to be five acts that I've been playing a lot as of late, so I'm kindof obsessed with the band if not necessarily a single song. Again, I don't like to tag people on these things, but if you want to play, you really don't need my permission or anyone else's; just do it.

Five musical acts that Kitty's listening to a lot lately:

Aesthetic Perfection

This will come as no surprise to anyone who has payed attention to my musical posts. I have been absolutely obsessed with Aesthetic Perfection for a good year anyway, and this song has probably been my most obsessively played. I damn near died when I got to be within I can smell your sweat distance of Daniel Graves twice on their recent North American tour. His music has evolved over the years from harsher, angrier stuff with a more electro-industrial edge to what he now calls industrial pop. He does lots of interesting things musically and in his videos. He has the freedom to do so as he told his label to piss off some years ago and he's forging his way independently. He's very fan friendly, and having met him in Baltimore last October, he seems like a nice guy who'd be fun to talk to at length.

Papa Roach

Wait, what? This is nowhere near that synthy dark dancey stuff I posted before. Yep. I didn't like Papa Roach when I heard their first big single, Last Resort, back in the day and I still didn't like it about a year and a half ago when a good friend said that he liked PRoach. But for the last year or so I have LOVED much of their music, including Last Resort. I do actually like rock, but the thing with these guys as opposed to the cock rock and glam rock I grew up with is that Jacoby Shaddix writes and sings about emotions and feelings, not just sex, drugs, and rock and roll. And his lyrics are very catchy and singable in the privacy of my own car. The songs are musically interesting with good use of bass and drumplay that is often more complex than a simple beat. They've also added some synth and electronic elements in their more recent work. It was hard to pick just one song for them, I love so much of their work now. Papa Roach was my big band obsession before Aesthetic Perfection.

Linkin Park

Yes, another rock group, but to me they've always been so much more interesting than that. Mixing rap and singing, two vocalists, Joe Hahn's turntable work, and again with the personal, deeply emotional songs. Their first album Hybrid Theory might be my all-time favorite album, and if not, it's definitely in the top fucking three. Back in the day, at work we called Linkin Park our "angry music." I left them behind for awhile after their second effort Meteora but started to get back into them when I discovered Burn It Down in the mid-2010s (definitely my biggest LP obsession song). It wrecked me when Chester Bennington took his own life. If anyone bothers to throw a funeral for me when I die, I humbly request that two Linkin Park songs be played--One More Light (still cannot make it through that song without choking up) and Leave Out All the Rest.

Ashbury Heights

The first three obsession acts were obvious to me, the last two not so much, but going by my Last.fm stats, Ashbury Heights is my fourth most listened to act in the last year and a half or so. I had never heard of this Swedish duo until they came up for me on Last.fm. Their sound is varied and they've had at least three female singers during their run (I believe they are currently back with their original). I don't like everything, I tend to prefer their older stuff, but what I do like is fun, basically synthpop like this song Spiders. My most obsessive song though has been Spectres from the Black Moss, a catchy tune about a person with mental health issues and an unsupportive partner. The repeated use of the line "no sympathy" is the musical equivalent of fuck you and it is glorious.

God Module

God Module is a bit of a surprise for fifth place as I've only really started listening to more than a couple songs of theirs relatively recently. Their song Plastic was one of the ones I was considering for the final slot on last night's obsession list (and it definitely will become an obsession as I listen to it more). Again with them I don't love everything, but what I do love has a very different and interesting sound with a good beat and something funky going on with the synths. Something stompy I could dance to at the club. Lunacy was definitely an obsession song for me and inspired one of my mixes. Looking forward to digging in to more of their work.

Josie Pace

Bonus artist! I have to add Josie Pace as while my online stats don't reflect an obsession, I listen to her CD a lot in my car. She was one of the openers on Aesthetic Perfection's fall tour. I had never heard of her before and was impressed enough to buy the CD at the show (not typical for me). I swear she is better live than on the recordings. She brings such energy to her performances. Her best stuff isn't even on the CD. The song I wanted to put here hasn't been released yet. Also check out her cover of Pure Morning. She is also extremely sweet and is very happy to talk to you, give autographs, and do selfies. I hope she gets some new music out soon! (Oh and @lets-dance-to-joy-division, she's from the Detroit area.)