#but all roads lead to f1 like there is so much lore. there are so many connections.

[dreamlandbarnes]

getting into f1 rpf was definitely not on my 2024 bingo card

[missyourflight]

Directors commentary on the opening scene of tender is my heart please!! ❤️

ty keypad! ❤️

Max drives into town with some people from the cottages, squashed into the back middle seat; Helen thinks she saw a possible for Laura B. in one of the shops. A bit of clone worldbuilding stuff right up top - I do worry sometimes in AUs about just throwing people in the deep end and not explaining stuff enough but in this case my excuse is that the NLMG book does basically the same thing (apologies 2 kazuo for the happy ending etc). Anyway the cottages! Just initials bc clones don't get last names 😭

He doesn’t care much one way or the other about finding someone’s model, ah, the joys of Max POV, and also more clone lore but there’s nothing to do at the cottages besides walk in the woods, peel the vegetables for dinner, scratch at the personal essays they’re all supposed to be writing. The town is by the sea, and Max has never seen the sea. 🌊🌊🌊 5/12 of my f1 fics on AO3 end with them near water/running away to sea etc... what you might call a Tell

They pile out of the car, Alex carefully feeding coins into the parking box. I like "parking box" bc the phrasing is just off enough Max takes a deep breath in, catching something salty on the air. There are birds overhead, their squawking sounds different to the ones in the woods near the cottages.

They make their way into the town, and the deeper they go, the less Max wants to find the possible. He hates the idea of it, suddenly, the group of them pressed up against some shop window, scanning faces trying to find a version of Laura’s.

“I’ll come and meet you later,” he says, catching Alex by the elbow, not wanting to be there for the scene. The others are already marching ahead and Alex doesn’t make a big deal about it, just tells him, “Back at the car at four, okay.”

Max retraces his steps, following the salt smell past where they parked the car until finally he can see the sea in front of him, rolling grey into the distance, spindly-looking pier stretching out. It’s not like the pictures he’s seen: when Em @powerful-owl read this she called it pattern matching, which I hadn't thought about but hurts my feelings 😭 I love clone Max 😭 less blue; the water less clear. Still, he likes it, the way he can’t see the end of it. Horizon feeling stuff comes back later in the first sex scene but like: the endlessness of the water/the immensity of his feelings for Daniel etc

He follows the road curving along the seafront, past the little shops. They’re mostly boring-looking bookshops, stalls selling sticks of rock and candy floss classic seaside items. There’s one with a jumble of things in the window that remind him of the Sales at Hailsham – a model car painted red, pencils with little animal-shaped rubbers on the end, a tub of marbles. Max stops to look, just for a minute, putting his hood up as it starts to rain.

The pavement turns into the planks of the pier, leading Max from the land out over the water, the sound of his steps suddenly different, the noise of the cars falling away behind him. I love piers; my hometown has a pier. I like the world literally changing underfoot here for him bc something big's about to happen; threshold stuff etc

The cafe sits at the end of the pier. I did just picture the NLMG pier from the film throughout - I cheated a bit bc the cafe from the film is not on the pier but I love piers It’s made of glass, like a greenhouse. Max startles at the jangling sound of the bell as he pushes the door open. At Hailsham they’d just practised in a classroom with a few desks moved about; there hadn’t been the smells, or other people sitting at the tables, or music playing. Like the NLMG clone worldbuilding stuff is So sad and I think the roleplay stuff is from the film rather than the book? But it breaks my heart. He's never been in a cafe! In many ways a story about firsts and being in the world for the first time etc

He stands there for a moment, blank. Does he just sit down?

“Be with you in a sec,” says the man behind the counter, looking over at Max with an easy smile. “Go ahead and grab a seat.” I hate the part of the story where we all have to pretend we don't know who Daniel is lol

The glass walls make it seem like the whole cafe is made of windows. Max sits where he can see the water, far beneath him, the little white peaks of the waves. He cranes his neck trying to see in the other direction, the sea stretching away. I do like the image of the glass box of the cafe glittering away at the end of the pier - it's kind of magical and this little box for them to fall in love inside but also it's made of windows - ultimately they can't hide there forever

“What can I get you?”

“Oh,” Max says, hurriedly unfolding the menu. “Sorry, I haven’t –”

“No worries,” the waiter says, using his pen to poke his hair back behind his ear. Max notices his little hoop earring on that side. He has the longest hair of any man Max has seen in person, messy-looking curls around his face. At least half the reason I wrote this story was to write Daniel as a 90s dreamboat lol - like part Home and Away boyfriend part AJ's cardigans from Empire Records At Hailsham they were never allowed to grow it out like that; Max still keeps his short, like most of them at the cottages, out of habit and because it’s easier. More Hailsham stuff which just sort of drip-feeds through the story until the ~clone reveal, but like, you get that it was like controlling, isolated - and it's not really pushed in these early scenes but it is also the only place Max has known and like part of his identity. It's sort of similar to the Roman Holiday AU or the Below Deck AU bc I can only write one story - like royalty and the yacht and being a donor are all things that the story ultimately wants to break him out of and also basically a horribly obvious stand-in for like the relationship with the team/his d*d. It means he doesn’t have anything to do with his hands now, though; he wipes them on the corduroy of his trousers. I picture clone Max exclusively in Andrew Garfield's little outfits from the film

“Something to drink, maybe?”

The waiter’s voice is strange, too; he doesn’t sound like anyone Max has met before. He sounds like the people on the soaps they watch in the cottages before supper, people arguing on sandy beaches, wearing shorts and t-shirts like they never get cold. Everyone on the soaps is beautiful and the waiter is too, very handsome. The little thread of Max constantly comparing Daniel to Home and Away/Australian soaps... idk if it's too much or I leaned too hard on the nineties nostalgia stuff, oh well

He’s still standing there, waiting for Max to stop staring and order. Max blinks down at the menu, picks the first thing he recognises.

“A coke?” he says. “And, a plate of chips, please.”

“Coming right up,” the waiter says with a smile, and wanders off.

There’s hardly anyone in the cafe, just Max and a couple of older women together at another table, metal pot of tea between them. Metal teapots classic cafe item... I did enjoy giving Max some of my most stereotypical caff items... later he has a toasted teacake 😭

Max looks out of the window again, watching the clouds blow across the sky until the waiter comes back with his plate of chips.

“Thanks,” Max says, and picks up his fork, but the waiter puts a hand out to stop him.

“Whoa, let me grab –” He lifts a little basket off the next table and sets it in front of Max. “Condiments,” he says with a flourish. “You can’t eat naked chips, mate.” Daniel kind of harmlessly flirts with everyone because otherwise he would be so bored, he is intrigued by Max wandering in in his little outfit and staring at the clouds and having no idea what to do with himself tho

Max feels his face get hot, and he sprinkles salt and vinegar all over his chips even though he isn’t supposed to have so much salt bc of his organs 😭. The smell of the vinegar is strong and delicious, rising in a warm cloud. When he looks up, the waiter is still standing there, watching.

He raises his eyebrows. Max shrugs. “I like vinegar.” This is Soph-coded bc I put So much vinegar on my own chips

“Yeah, clearly,” the waiter says, smiling like Max said something funny.

Max gestures at the rest of the condiments. “What do you recommend?” he says, a line straight out of the class role play the only way he knows how to behave lol, and this time the waiter laughs. He leans over and picks the ketchup out of the basket, shakes the sauce straight onto Max’s plate instead of handing him the bottle. Flirty! Also very weird behaviour honestly but if I like anything I like when people are weird about each other 🤷‍♀️

“Got to go with the classic,” he says.

Max swipes one of his chips through the sauce. “It’s good,” he says. Then, looking up at the waiter, feeling bold: “Do you want some?” He's going off-script

“It’s cool, they actually pay me in chips,” the waiter says, but he takes one anyway. “Vinegar’s good,” he says with a grin.

He isn’t treating Max like a donor at all. Maybe it’s because Max is by himself; if there’s a group of them out together people always seem to be able to tell. Sometimes someone will come over and thank them, squeeze their hands; more often they just stare. It’s easier at the cottages, not having to deal with any of that. Maybe the biggest stretch in the story is that Daniel doesn't know what's up with the donor stuff but I handwave it thusly: it's not a thing in Australia, maybe it's not polite to talk about in the UK bc people would rather not acknowledge the horrible things they are doing to the clones, he's not the most politically engaged lol, also the reason he is in this tiny seaside town at the end of the pier is bc he has essentially retreated from the world

“You can sit down,” Max says. “Or, you don’t have to, if it is too busy.”

The waiter looks around the nearly-empty cafe. “Yeah, Mavis and Joan have me run off my feet.”

He sits down, and Max asks, “Aren’t you supposed to wear an apron?” Pattern matching. In the roleplay the waiter would have been wearing an apron!

“Is this like, an inspection? Are we finally getting our five stars?”

“Five stars out of five,” Max says, “for sure.” Max's love language is gift giving but it's also going along with the bit

The waiter’s still smiling at him, warm and crooked; suddenly Max can’t remember any other lines. He casts his mind over small talk, trying to find another question to ask him, make the moment stretch a little longer.

At last, the obvious: “What’s your name?”

“Daniel,” he says, and Max sticks his hand out. “Max V.”

“Max V.?” Daniel laughs at Max’s nod, and shakes his hand. “Just the initial, like Gina G? What are you, a DJ?” Oh god there's just so many nineties references 🙃

“No,” Max says. He takes his hand back, wipes it again on his trousers under the table. “What’s a DJ?”

“Oh my god. Where are you from? Is this a Third Rock From the Sun situation?” He leans across the table and peers at Max, brown eyes twinkling. “Be straight with me: are you, like, a Jehovah’s witness?”

Max reaches for the line they gave them at Hailsham, for people asking too many questions: “I’m doing a residential,” he says, adding, “We’re staying out at this old farm, we just drove in for the afternoon.”

“Oh, nice,” Daniel says, and then, “watch your chips, they’re getting cold.”

Max pushes the plate towards the middle of the table, and Daniel takes another.

Daniel sits with him for ages. Sometimes he has to get up and fetch a pot of hot water for another table, take an order, but he comes back to sit with Max again. He doesn’t seem to mind Max’s questions, about the cafe, the town, anything he can think of.

“What do you call this kind of shirt?”

It’s soft-looking, with a faded check pattern. Daniel hasn’t even done up the buttons, leaving it open over his t-shirt hot 2 me and also Max. Max wills his fingers still on the table top; he doesn’t reach out and touch.

“A flannel, I guess. It’s my lumberjack look.” Daniel shrugs modestly. I'm so bad at describing Daniel's cute lil movements but it's a very specific cute shrug I'm thinking of and also he does it in the car later before they make out “I’m a woodsman.”

“I have not seen so many trees in town,” Max says.

“Uh, yeah, because I got them already.” He mimes swinging an axe.

Max’s face hurts from smiling. “This is called a jumper,” he says, nodding down at himself, feeling warm inside when Daniel laughs. A constant etc

“Hold on,” Daniel says. “A jum– how do you spell that?” He flips to a new page on his pad, clicking his pen, and Max has to bury his head in his arms to stop his laugh bouncing off the glass. They're very silly and they like each other very much!!

When Max looks up at the clock on the wall, there’s barely five minutes before he has to meet the others.

“I have to go,” he says, standing up in a rush. He turns back at the door, remembering himself, the role play, his questions. “Can I give you some money?”

“You better,” Daniel says. “It’s kinda part of the deal, you’ll get me in trouble if you eat and run.” He is So fond already

“Sorry,” Max says, and unzips his pouch to start counting out money. Daniel shakes his head when he sees, stretching his hand out to take the coins from Max. Picturing Max with a money pouch/bumbag situation that he wears under his jumper, for Security

“Absolute Mormon. Go on, get out of here.” He flaps his hand goodbye as he leans on the counter, smiling creases at Max. The Mormon thing... idk how well it works but it's like Daniel's excuse to not ask questions about Max's very obviously weird situation. Also "smiling creases" is weird but it's So hard to find different ways to describe smiling and grinning 🙃

“Thanks for the chips,” Max says, even though he should be turning to leave now, not still standing here smiling back at Daniel, watching the lines on his face deepen.

“Any time, Max V.,” Daniel says. “Come back soon.”

He has to jog back to the car to make it in time, his feet thudding against the wooden boards of the pier, slapping the seafront pavement as he passes the shops. The sea’s rolled in while Max has been eating chips; everything looks different. Stuff changed!! He's changed!! The clouds have parted, too, the sky clearing just in time for dusk, wet pebbles shining on the shore. The glass of the cafe is catching the sun, pulling Max’s eye back towards the end of the pier.

When he catches up with the others the mood is subdued. It hadn’t been Laura’s original after all; it never is. It’s never nice people in shops or offices, who they’re modelled on. Keira Knightley is actually so good in the NLMG film and I always think about her saying "We're modelled on trash." Clone stuff very bleak!! Probably all their originals are already dead. Max could have told them that and saved them all the trip, but then he would never have found the cafe.

Max looks out of the window all the way back to the cottages. He still feels warm, from the chips, from talking to Daniel; the glass is cool where he leans his head against it. Eddie C. takes a wrong turn somewhere and it’s dark by the time they get back, so late they’ve missed the soaps.

Max watches with everyone the next night, sitting with Charles on the floor in front of one of the couches. He thinks about saying casually, I met someone from Australia. He was so good-looking, he could be on Home and Away. Nineties dreamboat!!

If he tells them about Daniel, half the cottages will want to come back to the cafe with him, just to hear his voice and ask him questions about surfing. Carloads of them trailing down the pier, crowding in and filling up the tables. In the end Max doesn’t say anything, but he does pull Pierre aside to ask him what a DJ is. I got so carried away with the music/mixtape stuff in this story but I do think this beat is funny

On their run the next morning Alex asks him, “Where did you get to the other day, then?”

“Nowhere much. There was a cafe, I had some chips.”

“Chips!”

Alex makes a betrayed sound, and they run on through the woods, autumn leaves crunching beneath Max’s feet as he concentrates on his breaths, the steady pump of his heart. Sorry this was so long but I wanted to talk about the little running scene in the woods! There's three of these: this one where Max is just thinking about his body as something functional, his heart and his breathing; the one after they start hooking up where he's moving so easily and like leaping over logs; the one after they've broken up where he trips on a root and sits there trying not to cry. And then running together on the beach in Perth at the end 😭 One of the very limited tools in my toolbox to show the same thing a bunch of times to illustrate change lol - but also one of the main things I wanted to do with the story was show how Max's relationship to his own body changes, how sex changes the way he thinks about his body and its uses, how love changes the way he thinks about donations etc 🫀

[mechanicsden-blog]

The Risky Business of Skirting Trademarks (re-publish)

Due to shutdown of Pretend Race Cars blog (since the admin, under the pen name “James”, although the sim racing community knows who’s him), where I originally submitted this, I’ve archived one of my reader submissions here. This post was originally published on April 6, 2016, at the height of Automobilista F1 livery controversy that led the game being delisted from Steam for a while. Unfortunately, I am unable to restore any of the pictures, although every pictures there are just taken from the interwebs.

James’ thoughts are in italics. (except for italicizing of game titles) My commentary/fixes are in [italics in brackets]. 

A snapshot of the original is here.

As the debacle surrounding Reiza Studios and their battle with Formula One Management continues into its second week – with Automobilista still failing to appear on the Steam marketplace – avid PRC.net reader FMecha has sent in a beautiful Reader Submission chronicling the long list of copyright claims across various driving games. A great entry that is well worth your time to read on this otherwise quiet Friday afternoon, the piece goes to show that Reiza Studios weren’t the first developer team to run afoul of copyright technicalities, and they certainly won’t be the last.

Hello PRC! I would like to discuss the issue and examples of skirting trademarks in racing games, in light of a recent controversy – what allegedly forced Steam to de-list Automobilista.

Dodging, evading, or skirting trademarks – whatever you want to call it – just like the alleged reason behind the de-listing of Reiza Studios’ Automobilista is nothing new. Other racing game developers, just like Reiza, when they are unable to afford license(s) for something they want to represent in their racing games, may chose to take shortcut and attempt to thinly disguise it. There are three types of skirting trademarks I have witnessed in racing games:

The first kind involved deliberate misspelling of trademarks, like it was a counterfeit brand or something. This was prevalent in Japanese racing games around the 80’s and the 90’s. [Supposedly because Japan at the time do not really protect trademarks.] Examples of games using this technique include Video System’s (best known for the Aero Fighters arcade shmup series) Tail to Nose (based on the 1988 F1 season and also known as Super Formula in Japan), and Visco’s Drift Out. Of note, both games had sequels with licensed vehicles – Video System would later create licensed F1 games based on early and late 90s seasons, while Visco’s Drift Out was followed with Drift Out ’94: The Hard Order, that had licenses for all manufacturers (except Ford) and Neo Drift Out, the best known of all three due to the fact it was one of few racing games for the Neo-Geo platform and had licenses for all three Japanese WRC racers featured in the game.

This method was not free of repercussions. Tobacco giant Phillip Morris sued Sega because of the “Marlbobo” logos in early revisions of the arcade version of Super Monaco GP, primarily on grounds it was seen as marketing cigarettes to the youth. Sega was forced to issue a revised version of the game with many of the fake “sponsors” edited out; the title screen, which featured a Marlboro-sponsored McLaren car and a partially visible Marlboro ad, had to be edited as well.

The second method involved changing everything that belongs to the original cars (usually race car sponsors) with something original, and invented by the developer, while keeping the livery intact – this is usually done only on the race cars. This tactic was probably as closest I can to describe what Reiza did; apart from that, a small, obscure developer, Prism Arts, released two arcade rally racers, Rally de Africa and Rally de Europe, both for PlayStation and only in Japan. Both games featured various rally cars that have the body and the livery of the original cars, but all sponsor decals have been changed to those invented by the developer. (For example, the Diac logos on the Renault Megane Maxi were changed to Juno, etc). A similar act was done in Grand Prix Legends, after Sierra/Papyrus’ inability to secure Honda and Cooper licenses forced them to thinly disguise both teams as Murasama and Conventry, respectively.

I don’t know if this belongs to the first or the second method I described, but BATracer did something similar after the debacle with Ferrari that lead to the birth of Team Wales; every other manufacturer and team names were changed, most of them were play of the name of the originals. For instance, McLaren became McLewis, Red Bull became Red Bell, Toro Rosso became Roro Torso, Lotus became Sotul, etc.

Japanese racing games that deal with JDM cars, such as Shutokou Battle (Tokyo Xtreme Racer) series, play it differently. Most of them opt to just put the chassis codes of the car directly in their games, since every car nerd – their target audience – practically knew them and under assumption that those are not trademarked. AE86, BNR34, NA1, CE9A, GC8, FD3S, JZA80, EK9, S14, you name it. The risks were displayed when Crave, the company that localized the PS2 Shutokou Battle/Tokyo Xtreme Racer series (Genki developed them), was asked by Honda – a manufacturer that [at the time] has a flip-flopping stance against street racing (they were absent in Tokyo Xtreme Racer 3/Shutokou Battle 01, the first game in the series with licensed cars – as well in the Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune series, yet appearing in Need for Speed Underground games, as well as the latest NFS title [NFS 2015], albeit late in the development) to rename their cars’ chassis codes to something unrecognizable, as well as redrawing the front box art of the game (recycled from TXR2 for Dreamcast; fitting since TXR0 is retelling of TXR2’s story) so that one of cover cars’ front fascia resembled the NSX less. (Unfortunately, not only the disc art went unchanged, they left a Honda chassis code unchanged: RF2, for Honda Stepwgn, a Japan-only MPV. Yes, you can play as an MPV in TXR0).

Yes, I mentioned lots of obscure racing games and yes, thinly disguising things when a developer doesn’t have the license is nothing new, and a carries a high legal risk.

A great write-up, and I can’t say I have much more to add. Any time a developer tries to interpret copyright laws in their own way, it turns into a giant game of roulette. Either they get away with it and it becomes a part of the game’s lore – as seen with Tokyo Xtreme Racer – or it gets a developer in deep shit, which is what most likely happened to Reiza Studios.

Retrospective Commentary

I forgot to mention one method of trademark skirting (or actually, one variation of the method) when road cars are involved: developers would take a car exactly it is and slap a made-up name on it. That’s what happened when the Honda chassis codes got renamed in TXR0, actually. Many cheaply developed racing games on Steam and mobile platforms go this route (as well as many Chinese developed arcade racing games). Look at the incident where the Mercedes Vision GT sneaks into to Dubai Drift.

Something to note, several months/years after I wrote this, Honda officially joined Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune’s car list in 5DX+ along with Lamborghini, although their appearance is currently restricted to NSX old and new.

Also in the end, Automobilista ended up recoloring some of the F1 cars (the not-McLarens now wear the Madonna colors from Super Monaco GP, probably since Brazilians love that game, for instance). And it’s actually easy to go back to old liveries... provided you keep backup of old liveries, or knew someone who uploads it.

Maybe next I can make a rogue’s gallery of those trademark skirtings...