#but those were very much outliers

[edennill]

When Finrod is reembodied at the beginning of the War of Wrath he holds the record for "Shortest time spent in Mandos for an Exile" (81 years of time as it passes outside)

He holds it, perhaps, until one Noldorin woman slain in the Last Alliance is reembodied after 70 years. It is much debated whether this counts or not, given that she died after the Doom was lifted.

Neither of the parties concerned will comment on the matter.

[dandyshucks]

also I got rly scared abt this last night or the night before because I suddenly realized sometimes people interpret it this way,,

so i just wanted to say that the reason i dont interact w people very much is NOT bc i think im better than ppl or anything - i am just very genuinely Petrified of messing up in social situations, to the point that I end up isolating and avoiding rather than risk making mistakes ^^;; WHICH ISN'T HEALTHY but . i havent figured out how to work through this yet dhdjdkl

BUT YEAH i just wanted to try to make sure nobody is thinking I'm some hoity-toity goober, I am literally just Extremely Terrified fjdjdkdl

[briochebread]

(rolls up several weeks late to the meme) ok here's mine link if you want to spend way too much time making your own: https://cajunavenger.github.io/

[always-a-slut-4-ghouls]

Damn, my history of taste in irl men is questionable at best, but at least the girls seem pretty normal???

[avelera]

I am literally so baffled by how so many people think the Viktor/Jayce separation in Arcane S2 was:

1. Rushed

2. Deserved, because Jayce ignored Viktor’s wishes and that’s what Viktor was reacting to

3. A choice Viktor was making, literally at all

Let’s go through these one at a time but they’re all related.

1. Yes it’s rushed. That’s because of time constraints per episode, sure, but forget that for a second. Viktor getting out of his goo cocoon and immediately leaving while still STARK NAKED is weird. It’s very weird. It’s meant to be a five alarm fire, red klaxons blaring, levels of really fucking WEIRD. The guy is LITERALLY NAKED he just walks out, barefoot, into the Undercity.

It’s weird and it’s meant to seem weird and indeed, inhuman, because that is not Viktor. Those are not Viktor’s choices. That is not who Viktor is. And the fact it is so rushed is part of the warnings, and meant to show us just how much something is very very wrong.

2. Tying into Point 1, if this was a real disagreement between Jayce and Viktor as we knew them through S1, Viktor would have stopped to get some damn trousers and shoes. I know it sounds like I’m joking but legitimately, there is no (or very little) conscious human thought going through Viktor’s head in that scene because a human being choosing to leave their partner of years over legitimate disagreements would have stopped to get fucking dressed before they left. That is not Viktor.

And to briefly launch into a defense of Jayce, he has spent literal years with Viktor doing science to address Viktor’s failing health. He knew about Viktor’s fear of dying. They’d both dedicated themselves to hextech in the hopes it would better people’s lives but the more selfish goal at the heart of that research for both of them was that it would save Viktor’s life.

Viktor only told Jayce one (1) time to destroy the hexcore and he didn’t explain why at all. Jayce didn’t know about the self experimentation. He didn’t know about Skye’s death because Viktor never told him.

Jayce spent years working on a cure for Viktor and in a moment of blind panic used their research to save his loved one’s life based on what 99% of his interactions with Viktor with one (1) outlier would have told him that this is what Viktor would have wanted, which was to live, and using their research to make sure he lives has always not only been on the table, it’s literally been the main focus of their overarching research goals minus one weird and unexplained thing Viktor said once while a zillion other things were going on in Jayce’s life.

Jayce using their research to save Viktor wasn’t a conscious defiance of Viktor’s wishes, it’s literally what 99.99% of Viktor’s wishes that Jayce knew about would have pointed towards. He was as far as he knew enacting Viktor’s wishes, the wishes Viktor had for years upon years. Without knowing about Sky, Viktor’s one request to destroy the hexcore was a weird and out of character request that had no explanation. It didn’t hold up when compared to everything else Jayce has ever known and experienced with Viktor.

3. Whew, anyway, the bigger point is that Viktor is a Hexcore puppet at this point so it doesn’t even matter if he had legitimate grievance against Jayce. He’s not leaving because of grievances, legitimate or otherwise. Viktor would never leave Jayce like that (or while STARK NAKED).

Literally in one of the last scenes we got that gave us a glimpse of Viktor’s inner life and motivations, he told Singed that Jayce would understand and stay by his side no matter his choices or transformations.

Singed is skeptical. But Viktor WAS RIGHT. Jayce didn’t even blink, didn’t hesitate at all to hug him after he was transformed so drastically. But my point is: real Viktor was actively worried about losing Jayce. Real Viktor would not take off like that.

And in one last defense of Jayce, I think the reason he just lets Viktor go there is that he has always respected Viktor’s autonomy.

Jayce notes in S1 that Viktor would often disappear without warning. He never tried to control Viktor’s movements. That’s what makes Jayce yelling at him for going to the Undercity so shocking to both of them in S1.

Jayce is also traumatized and shell shocked himself when Viktor leaves. He’s not prepared and he doesn’t argue. He doesn’t do what he probably should which is prevent Viktor from leaving (literally naked and barefoot!) because it doesn’t occur to him to control Viktor’s movements but also because he’s in shock.

But he really should because again, that’s not Viktor. That’s not Viktor making a conscious choice, that is another power and impulse puppeting what is left of Viktor, using his tenuous connections to his identity like his guilt over Sky and his/his + Sky’s overarching desire to help people in the Undercity.

It has nothing to do with Jayce. Jayce’s choices are not why Viktor is leaving. And the real Viktor would never leave Jayce under such abrupt and INHUMAN circumstances.

We are meant to be as alarmed and confused as Jayce was. It is a part of a pile of evidence that something is very wrong with Viktor and indeed, the Viktor we knew is not the one in charge of his actions right now. How much of him is even left in there is what remains to be seen, and if who he was can ever come back.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Antiusurpation and the road to disenshittification

THIS WEEKEND (November 8-10), I'll be in TUCSON, AZ: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

Nineties kids had a good reason to be excited about the internet's promise of disintermediation: the gatekeepers who controlled our access to culture, politics, and opportunity were crooked as hell, and besides, they sucked.

For a second there, we really did get a lot of disintermediation, which created a big, weird, diverse pluralistic space for all kinds of voices, ideas, identities, hobbies, businesses and movements. Lots of these were either deeply objectionable or really stupid, or both, but there was also so much cool stuff on the old, good internet.

Then, after about ten seconds of sheer joy, we got all-new gatekeepers, who were at least as bad, and even more powerful, than the old ones. The net became Tom Eastman's "Five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four." Culture, politics, finance, news, and especially power have been gathered into the hands of unaccountable, greedy, and often cruel intermediaries.

Oh, also, we had an election.

This isn't an election post. I have many thoughts about the election, but they're still these big, unformed blobs of anger, fear and sorrow. Experience teaches me that the only way to get past this is to just let all that bad stuff sit for a while and offgas its most noxious compounds, so that I can handle it safely and figure out what to do with it.

While I wait that out, I'm just getting the job done. Chop wood, carry water. I've got a book to write, Enshittification, for Farar, Straus, Giroux's MCD Books, and it's very nearly done:

https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Adoctorow+%23dailywords&src=typed_query&f=live

Compartmentalizing my anxieties and plowing that energy into productive work isn't necessarily the healthiest coping strategy, but it's not the worst, either. It's how I wrote nine books during the covid lockdowns.

And sometimes, when you're not staring directly at something, you get past the tunnel vision that makes it impossible to see its edges, fracture lines, and weak points.

So I'm working on the book. It's a book about platforms, because enshittification is a phenomenon that is most visible and toxic on platforms. Platforms are intermediaries, who connect buyers and sellers, creators and audiences, workers and employers, politicians and voters, activists and crowds, as well as families, communities, and would-be romantic partners.

There's a reason we keep reinventing these intermediaries: they're useful. Like, it's technically possible for a writer to also be their own editor, printer, distributor, promoter and sales-force:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/19/crad-kilodney-was-an-outlier/#intermediation

But without middlemen, those are the only writers we'll get. The set of all writers who have something to say that I want to read is much larger than the set of all writers who are capable of running their own publishing operation.

The problem isn't middlemen: the problem is powerful middlemen. When an intermediary gets powerful enough to usurp the relationship between the parties on either side of the transaction, everything turns to shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/direct-the-problem-of-middlemen/

A dating service that faces pressure from competition, regulation, interoperability and a committed workforce will try as hard as it can to help you find Your Person. A dating service that buys up all its competitors, cows its workforce, captures its regulators and harnesses IP law to block interoperators will redesign its service so that you keep paying forever, and never find love:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2024/02/13/1228749143/the-dating-app-paradox-why-dating-apps-may-be-worse-than-ever

Multiply this a millionfold, in every sector of our complex, high-tech world where we necessarily rely on skilled intermediaries to handle technical aspects of our lives that we can't – or shouldn't – manage ourselves. That world is beholden to predators who screw us and screw us and screw us, jacking up our rents:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/yes-there-are-antitrust-voters-in

Cranking up the price of food:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

And everything else:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

(Maybe this is a post about the election after all?)

The difference between a helpmeet and a parasite is power. If we want to enjoy the benefits of intermediaries without the risks, we need policies that keep middlemen weak. That's the opposite of the system we have now.

Take interoperability and IP law. Interoperability (basically, plugging new things into existing things) is a really powerful check against powerful middlemen. If you rely on an ad-exchange to fund your newsgathering and they start ripping you off, then an interoperable system that lets you use a different exchange will not only end the rip off – it'll make it less likely to happen in the first place because the ad-tech platform will be afraid of losing your business:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shatter-ad-tech

Interoperability means that when a printer company gouges you on ink, you can buy cheap third party ink cartridges and escape their grasp forever:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Interoperability means that when Amazon rips off audiobook authors to the tune of $100m, those authors can pull their books from Amazon and sell them elsewhere and know that their listeners can move their libraries over to a different app:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/07/audible-exclusive/#audiblegate

But interoperability has been in retreat for 40 years, as IP law has expanded to criminalize otherwise normal activities, so that middlemen can use IP rights to protect themselves from their end-users and business customers:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

That's what I mean when I say that "IP" is "any law that lets a business reach beyond its own walls and control the actions of its customers, competitors and critics."

For example, there's a pernicious law 1998 US law that I write about all the time, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the "anticircumvention law." This is a law that felonizes tampering with copyright locks, even if you are the creator of the undelying work.

So Amazon – the owner of the monopoly audiobook platform Audible – puts a mandatory copyright lock around every audiobook they sell. I, as an author who writes, finances and narrates the audiobook, can't provide you, my customer, with a tool to remove that lock. If I do so, I face criminal sanctions: a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

In other words: if I let you take my own copyrighted work out of Amazon's app, I commit a felony, with penalties that are far stiffer than the penalties you would face if you were to simply pirate that audiobook. The penalties for you shoplifting the audiobook on CD at a truck-stop are lower than the penalties the author and publisher of the book would face if they simply gave you a tool to de-Amazon the file. Indeed, even if you hijacked the truck that delivered the CDs, you'd probably be looking at a shorter sentence.

This is a law that is purpose-built to encourage intermediaries to usurp the relationship between buyers and sellers, creators and audiences. It's a charter for parasitism and predation.

But as bad as that is, there's another aspect of DMCA 1201 that's even worse: the exemptions process.

You might have read recently about the Copyright Office "freeing the McFlurry" by granting a DMCA 1201 exemption for companies that want to reverse-engineer the error-codes from McDonald's finicky, unreliable frozen custard machines:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/28/mcbroken/#my-milkshake-brings-all-the-lawyers-to-the-yard

Under DMCA 1201, the Copyright Office hears petitions for these exemptions every three years. If they judge that anticircumvention law is interfering with some legitimate activity, the statute empowers them to grant an exemption.

When the DMCA passed in 1998 (and when the US Trade Rep pressured other world governments into passing nearly identical laws in the decades that followed), this exemptions process was billed as a "pressure valve" that would prevent abuses of anticircumvention law.

But this was a cynical trick. The way the law is structured, the Copyright Office can only grant "use" exemptions, but not "tools" exemptions. So if you are granted the right to move Audible audiobooks into a third-party app, you are personally required to figure out how to do that. You have to dump the machine code of the Audible app, decompile it, scan it for vulnerabilities, and bootstrap your own jailbreaking program to take Audible wrapper off the file.

No one is allowed to help you with this. You aren't allowed to discuss any of this publicly, or share a tool that you make with anyone else. Doing any of this is a potential felony.

In other words, DMCA 1201 gives intermediaries power over you, but bans you from asking an intermediary to help you escape another abusive middleman.

This is the exact opposite of how intermediary law should work. We should have rules that ban intermediaries from exercising undue power over the parties they serve, and we should have rules empowering intermediaries to erode the advantage of powerful intermediaries.

The fact that the Copyright Office grants you an exemption to anticircumvention law means nothing unless you can delegate that right to an intermediary who can exercise it on your behalf.

A world without publishing intermediaries is one in which the only writers who thrive are the ones capable of being publishers, too, and that's a tiny fraction of all the writers with something to say.

A world without interoperability intermediaries is one in which the only platform users who thrive are also skilled reverse-engineering ninja hackers – and that's an infinitesimal fraction of the platform users who would benefit from interoperabilty.

Let this be your north star in evaluating platform regulation proposals. Platform regulation should weaken intermediaries' powers over their users, and strengthen their power over other middlemen.

Put in this light, it's easy to see why the ill-informed calls to abolish Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (which makes platform users, not platforms, responsible for most unlawful speech) are so misguided:

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/

If we require platforms to surveil all user speech and block anything that might violate any law, we give the largest, most powerful platforms a permanent advantage over smaller, better platforms, run by co-ops, hobbyists, nonprofits local governments, and startups. The big platforms have the capital to rig up massive, automated surveillance and censorship systems, and the only alternatives that can spring up have to be just as big and powerful as the Big Tech platforms we're so desperate to escape:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/23/evacuate-the-platforms/#let-the-platforms-burn

This is especially grave given the current political current, where fascist politicians are threatening platforms with brutal punishments for failing to censor disfavored political views.

Anyone who tells you that "it's only censorship when the government does it" is badly confused. It's only a First Amendment violation when the government does it, sure – but censorship has always relied on intermediaries. From the Inquisition to the Comics Code, government censors were only able to do their jobs because powerful middlemen, fearing state punishments, blocked anything that might cross the line, censoring far beyond the material actually prohibited by the law:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/22/self-censorship/#hugos

We live in a world of powerful, corrupt middlemen. From payments to real-estate, from job-search to romance, there's a legion of parasites masquerading as helpmeets, burying their greedy mouthparts into our tender flesh:

https://www.capitalisnt.com/episodes/visas-hidden-tax-on-americans

But intermediaries aren't the problem. You shouldn't have to stand up your own payment processor, or learn the ins and outs of real-estate law, or start your own single's bar. The problem is power, not intermediation.

As we set out to build a new, good internet (with a lot less help from the US government than seemed likely as recently as last week), let's remember that lesson: the point isn't disintermediation, it's weak intermediation.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/07/usurpers-helpmeets/#disreintermediation

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

[inkskinned]

we heard that you were very disappointed in us both as a generation and specifically as a generation of women (emphasis yours), how we had let ourselves go and now we were slutty and ill-tempered and holding onto notions of feminism like "having a savings account" and "equality."

we were very sorry about it, we didn't realize. it is very hard for you, in your life, because your entire definition was centered around the word providing, and that's a really vague and undulating word. it is hard to be a provider. for your purposes, the word provider here can be defined as "having a job", although it sometimes also extends to "doing yard work", "grilling on occasion," and "knowing basic car anatomy."

we had to do some reading but we divided it out. do not worry. high-value women will fill in the rest of the gaps of your life - all those silly feminine things like doing the dishes. we didn't realize we had asked too much when we asked you to pick up after yourself. we did not realize you were rendered small and scared and crying about the possibility of doing the laundry. here is a joke to lighten the sentiment: a man that listens when you talk to him.

we heard about how we had fallen from glory and it sickened us and made us very, very sad. lindsey had to cut all her hair off and tara threw up. we lit one million candles and we are going to have a vigil about it tonight. all of the people in this world that you do not approve of are going to be there and we will all be in mourning colors because we have lost your respect which is of course the only thing that any of us were looking for.

we searched around our bedrooms and our closets and for some of us it took a while but we all found the pricetag that we were originally born with, the one that gave our listing offer, the one that smells like rot and pine needles. we were horrified because many of us had taken deductions and hadn't realized it. i had scraped my knees and decided to be a lesbian so they had to take my voicebox out so i could never call home again. janice had been with too many people overall so we had to put her into the big squisher that will hopefully collapse her walls so that when you're with her, you'll feel so big and powerful. it will be like you're conquering something instead of being close with someone.

we are all going to the funeral of feminism and we will tear at our bodies and fall over ourselves. we will invite you onstage for a live recording of your podcast about the occasional minor inconvenience of self-reflection. you will talk about how we have targeted you and made you feel the sweat slick down your back, and we will teach you basic self-defense out of solidarity.

do not worry, we are seeing to all the outliers. taylor asked to be taken seriously so we have shipped her off to prison. laura asked you to accept her femininity regardless of her presentation. you will be happy to hear all women are now and forever going to have to be small and thin and pretty and white and ablebodied and quiet and unassuming and ladylike, which is different than how society has previously told us to act.

i am going to have to shave off my jawline, which is a little masculine, and they are going to have to reshape my hands, which are very square and thick - all the work i've done with them has made their veins stand out, so we're just going to have to exsanguinate me. i am horrified to have been out in public like this.

we are going to sit around the campfire and we will talk about being weird little girls that made potions in pink teacups. we will talk about the first time we made a difference. we will talk about the private lives of crickets, and then, at the stroke of three in the morning (the witching hour, obviously) - we will all promptly shut up.

and this will be your beautiful world. this silence that spans every corner of every street and every zoom meeting and every alley. i do not think you'll notice at first - it will be the same as every television show and movie and book. we will all just simply sit there in our doll dresses and smile blithely at your advances and none of us will do you the dishonor of answering and none of us will appear to be in distress and none of us will nag you or make a fuss or get hysterical about it. it will just be quiet, and you will say finally, some peace for once! and we will smell of smoke and our teeth will be white and the next day will come.

tonight we are going to bury the last little bits of our humanity. you are not invited. it is going to be ugly.

[impactrueno]

i keep getting amazed by how starkly different betelgeuse and lydia’s dynamic is in the movie versus the cartoon. what do you mean one was based on the other? how did we get “that WAS you stalking me!” from the same source material as “you���re one of a kind, beetlejuice. don’t ever change.”

yeah it happens

it seems like they decided on making a beetlejuice animated series first, and then they tried to figure out how to make it kid friendly. there's this interview that says stephen ouimette's first beetlejuice voices were very close to keaton's in the movie, but that they felt there was something very off about having an "evil creepy guy with a goth girl in the attic" and that was when they decided to soften the character. ouimette did a lighter and funnier voice and that alone was enough for them to feel like he wasn't a threat and the goth girl was safe around him. and i guess things just took off from there as they figured out the characters. it IS a children's cartoon, and being ran by abc at the time they had to keep things cute and wholesome. tim burton was very involved in the creation process (as much as he could while working on batman) so having bj and lydia be friends instead of enemies was pretty much his choice. but again, kids cartoon ran by abc. and that's why we have sugary sweet quotes like the one you said.

seems like even back then tim has always preferred a more amicable dynamic for those two. we already know him, michael, winona, everyone in the cast wants them to be together to some degree thanks to recent interviews. and i think that is why beetlejuice's character was slightly changed in the sequel, from an evil creepy guy to just....a creepy guy with a crush i guess. point is, they don't want him to be The Bad Guy anymore and that's why the sequel is the way it is.

BUT they can't just make him "not evil" and expect it to work, that would make no sense, he still needs to have this creepy and wrong edge to him, and lydia's not gonna just forgive and forget what happened in the first movie. so, combining allllll these elements, we get this brand new dynamic between them: creepy guy in love with the woman he's been stalking for 30 years (pure insanity but not exactly evil) and woman who's like "ugh not this fucking guy again" but still goes to him for help, begrudgingly. she can't quite get rid of him. they're obviously not enemies anymore and they're not friends either. but now it's a bit more believable for them to reach some sort of amicability, eventually.....perhaps in the third one.....we shall see

AND THAT.......is how we got from this concept

to this concept

and finally this concept.

three entirely different dynamics. three three three. rule of thirds, you know i love it. it's a crazy journey but i think it makes more sense when broken down like this.

musical stuff isn't really part of this journey BUT the musical did help soften people's perception of beetlejuice even MORE, so now pretty much everyone can buy into the idea that he can be more than just an "evil creepy guy," to the point where soooo many people were actually dying to see the two team up and be friends in the sequel.

and now the original movie feels like the outlier. oh the IRON-E ok sorry im not using that pun again

[sinkableruby]

luffy doesn't have a tumblr but there's a 500k note post about him from one of the crew that does (going with robin)

YEAAHHHH YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH THATS PERFECT THATS EXACTLY TRUE

ahem

📚 devilish-archeologist79 Follow

Today officially marks the day my friend has been permanently banned from one thousand restaurants. He's very unhappy about it, but I couldn't be more proud of him. It takes dedication to achieve something like that.

🐬 nauticalradical Follow

There's no way he got banned from 1000 separate restaurants come on at least make it believable

📚 devilish-archeologist79 Follow

No, it really was a thousand, if I'm counting properly. He's always hungry, so he's always looking for new places to eat at, but whenever he finds one he orders so much food that they usually run out of ingredients and the chefs and other customers get upset. Then he tries to pay the bill with his "treasure tab," which is basically money he doesn't have yet but plans on getting in the future.

🍐 eating-all-your-pears Follow

UHH I THINK THAT'S JUST CALLED STEALING???

📚 devilish-archeologist79 Follow

Normally I would agree, but to him it's not. He still intends to pay all of them back, and he thinks all the restaurant owners are being stingy for not letting him back in.

👹 houseoftwigs Follow

OP I'd like to study your friend in a lab

📚 devilish-archeologist79 Follow

I'm already studying him, so you can't.

⚓ marine-triologist789 Follow

Wait, hold on, something doesn't add up here. If he really didn't pay for any of those meals, wouldn't he have been arrested by now??? Like, you can't just go to a bunch of restaurants, eat all their food, not pay, and then not get arrested for it, right?? Am I crazy???

📚 devilish-archeologist79 Follow

The police have been after him for a long time now, but he's really good at evading them. He actually broke into prison once to bust his brother out and they still couldn't catch him, which is honestly embarrassing, in my opinion.

🐸 froghopper47 Follow

WHAT

🧊 tumdruh Follow

✌ be-free-drink-piss Follow

WHAT A FUCKING LEGEND

📚 devilish-archeologist79 Follow

He had to go into hiding after that, though, or they really might have caught him. When he saw me again for the first time in 2 years, the first words he spoke directly to me were "do you have any meat?"

🌵 spicegirl Follow

SOMEONE FEED THIS MAN

👗 superdress Follow

this dude isa fucking alien who the fuck walks up to someone and asks them for meat straight up

📚 devilish-archeologist79 Follow

He really likes meat.

🌪 the-windsmeth Follow

"average person has a carbon footprint of 4 tons per year" factoid is actually just a statistical error. Meat Menace, who eats 10,000 pounds of meat each day, is an outlier and should not have been counted

📚 devilish-archeologist79 Follow

He might actually eat that much in a day. I wouldn't be surprised. His stomach is probably bottomless. Maybe it's for the best that he can't go to restaurants anymore.

🐩 yaarrrrp Follow

🏴‍☠️ piratelover69 Follow

op is there anything else we should know about this guy????

📚 devilish-archeologist79 Follow

Not really. He did grow up in the woods, though.

🏴‍☠️ piratelover69 Follow

HELLO?? IS HE OKAY???

📚 devilish-archeologist79 Follow

He's fine. Also, he doesn't know what sex is.

🏴‍☠️ piratelover69 Follow

DID HE NOT GET AN EDUCATION???? WHERE DOES HE THINK BABIES COME FROM THEN???????

📚 devilish-archeologist79 Follow

Good question. Hold on, I'm going to ask him.

📚 devilish-archeologist79 Follow

He said it's one of life's greatest mysteries.

😊 delicate-tempest Follow

OP you told him where they come from right???? OP??????????

🌃 felldownthestairslol Follow

op please get this man on tumblr we have to talk to the meat menace

📚 devilish-archeologist79 Follow

No.

503k notes

[prettycottonmouthlamia]

Actually this is a bug bear but I find the complaints about the Kal'tsit yapping to be missing the point extremely. When I see those I think about hbomberguy's Dark Souls 2 video and the brief tangent where he talks about the expectation for "efficient storytelling", and how it doesn't really matter if Kal'tsit's style of speech is meant to convey anything, she takes too long and says too many hard words.

But that's the point. Kal'tsit, especially when she is introduced, is a very mysterious figure who is clearly really important at Rhodes Island despite her nominal position as a member of the Medical Department. She plans strategies for Rhodes Island operations, she's been all over the world and has seen events you'd only find in the history books, and for a very long time there was only speculation that Kal'tsit was really old.

Talking to Kal'tsit is supposed to feel weird. She could make the effort to be more direct and approach where the Doctor needs to be at, but she doesn't! She hates us! She's still struggling with the fact that we killed Theresa and she now has to deal with us having no memories of much of anything. She can't kill us off because she knows that Rhodes Island would benefit from the Doctor's knowledge of Originium and tactical ability, and because she grows to learn that the Doctor is moving forward with being a new person.

So she makes it hard on us. She makes it clear as she talks to us that she is looking down on us. She is talking about concepts that are difficult to understand to parse, that maybe wouldn't be if we still had all of our memories back. She talks with the wisdom of someone who has been alive for over two thousand years, but also with the expectation that we need to just immediately get on her level. Giving us the information directly is going to help us and she's still kind of pissed. If you listen to her conversation with W in Chapter 13, she's a lot more direct with her intention and her word choice. She needs W to understand what the fuck she is talking about as quickly as possible. But the Doctor can struggle a little bit.

And, obviously, it's not just for this reason. The point of how Kal'tsit talks is to make her seem very odd compared to the rest of the cast. Dobermann speaks very harshly because the writers wanted her to sound like she came from the military, for a similar example. Kal'tsit talks at length, uses difficult to understand language, and often is quite indirect because its meant to enhance that mystery. People for years were dying to know what exactly was going on with Kal'tsit, and the way she speaks is absolutely part of that. She's an outlier in the cast for many reasons, and how she speaks is one of those.

So I find the criticism to be, frankly, awfully juvenile. It's not a bug, it's not the result of poor impulse control on the part of the writers. It serves a very obvious use.

[strawberrystepmom]

sanemi x f!reader. isekai au. lots of pining, emotional exploration, struggles of being isekai'ed. | divider thanks to @cafekitsune, wc 2.2k

Stranger in a strange land adopts a new meaning when you’re quite literally dropped into a world beyond your comprehension. Tonight, though, you are grateful for the infinite blanket of stars above your head. No light pollution, no city noise to interrupt the serenity of a moonlit night.

A breeze tickles your nose and you scrunch it in response, reminded of the reason you stepped outside in the first place. 

A futile attempt to outrun your thoughts of Sanemi. 

The wind always makes you think of him, something that would surprise no one if you were to be sincere with them about it. You sigh, kicking your legs out in front of you while they dangle off of the edge of your porch. You’re currently sharing a living space with the other single women who tend to the Ubuyashiki household, mostly maids who have taught you the best ways to stay cool in the oppressive summer heat and how to dab blood stains from the sleeves of your robes. Thankfully, they’re all tucked in their beds. There will be no witnesses to your self inflicted angst tonight.

Your friends have all moved along with their lives since being transported to this era, finding happiness and futures. More often than not, you feel like the odd man out, the only one still remaining poorly adjusted to a world that has welcomed you with open arms. The Hashira and Ubuyashiki family have been wonderful and gracious hosts. You’d even dare say that you’ve become friends with most of the people you have met since arriving no matter the cultural and linguistic differences of being a modern woman transported unexpectedly to 19th century Japan.

The outlier for you is a man. No matter where you are in history, what rabbit hole you’ve stumbled down, this will always be your issue. Your emotions feel heavier when you’re forced to lay down with them in the quiet dark of your room so you’ve decided to work them out within yourself outside and blissfully alone.

You wonder what he’s doing tonight, silently judging yourself for not sticking to your own commitment to being alone in body and mind.

One of the maids, Ritsu, teased you about him being off on a mission while you shot her a lok out of the corner of your eye before heading off to bed earlier. It’s unlikely that he will return here even if the mission has already been completed. It’s miles away from his estate, out of the way and impractical. 

It would probably be a stretch to call any Shinazugawa particularly practical. You know his brother very well, his relationship with one of your friends has been something you’ve taken great pride in being able to watch and support. They adore one another. They’re safe and peaceful and happy and Genya smiles so often you wonder if his cheeks ever ache.

His brother on the other hand. Harder to read. Even harder to shake. He doesn’t glower in your direction anymore, not now. Unfortunately this means you are now always searching for deeper meaning in every glance he tosses your way. Was that a glimmer of something softer? One of those God forsaken rabbit holes you’d like to travel down to meet him beneath the surface and understand him better?

It’s hard to imagine a world where you’ll ever know. You gently push the heels of your palms against your eyes, exhaling loudly through your mouth. If this were your time you’d simply go out. Shake your ass. Scroll your phone. Do anything to distract you from the fear of falling in love with someone you doubt can ever possibly care as much about you in return.

“What are you doing out here?”

Assuming you’ve imagined his voice in your misguided lovesickness, you keep your hands pressed to your eyes and giggle, giving yourself a piteous little head shake. So delusional. You don’t hear footsteps or movement at all, just the same little breeze that tinkles the ornate wind chime above your head. 

“Well?”

The wooden slats of the porch creak and whine slightly, finally encouraging you to drop your hands and look around you, only to be met with Sanemi sinking down to sit beside you, legs dangling in the same way yours are. A surprised smile crosses your face. He fights a twitch of his own lips, resting his elbows on his thighs and leaning forward to create an illusion of some kind of distance between the two of you. 

“The better question is what are you doing here? Weren’t you off on a mission?”

He chuckles. It fills you with warmth even though you wrap your arms around yourself, gently rubbing your hands along your forearms. 

“Keepin’ track of me?” 

You scoff playfully, looking toward your lap to hide a smile but deciding last minute to just let him see it. To show him how happy he makes you by just being himself. Crass and rough and, in his own words, hard. You like him just the way he is, especially when the wind ruffles his messy hair and the moonlight illuminates his silhouette.

“Me?” You raise your eyebrows and point to yourself, still smiling at him, cheeks warm. “You wish. Word just travels fast when you hang out with the local gossips.”

You tilt your head backward, nodding toward the home you share with a dozen other women. They are not merely information peddlers although, admittedly, the thirteen of you have had more than one session of giggling and tittering over the happenings in the Hashira and Demon Slayer Corps as a whole. Dreamily wishing to find someone who loves each of you as much as Tanjiro loves the partner he has found in the second of your friends who was transported here alongside you. Theorizing about weddings and babies and spring breezes and the winter snows yet to come. 

There is some gentle ribbing about the shine you’ve taken to the Wind Hashira and the way you literally light up when he approaches you but you are good at playing it off as nothing, tossing away the talk with an easy smile while insisting that this is just how you are. The teasing happens often enough that you wonder if they know about his late night visits; if they’ve overheard despite the pains you’ve taken to keep your enjoyment of his company quiet and your encouragement of him to do the same. 

Did Ritsu mention him tonight knowing he’d eventually show up, leaving in a flash before you can even come down from the high of experiencing the things his body does for you?

“I wrapped things up early and figured I’d stop by before heading home.” Sanemi’s posture straightens out when he sits up to look at you fully, face turned. Wisteria colored eyes pour over your face, the fullness of your lips and your undone hair. “Wanted to see ya.” You wear a yukata that you purchased during a trip into the city with him a few months ago, loosely tied with one shoulder hanging lower than the other. His eyes land on your exposed collarbone and travel up the side of your neck, lingering on your lips while he scoots an inch closer.

“I might have missed you.” He mutters so quietly you know that it’s meant just for you and the heat in your cheeks makes its way down your neck, your chest and throat warming in response to the innuendo and weight of his gaze. 

Scrunching your nose again, you look away from him and shift where you sit, the sleeve of your yukata working further down your upper arm while keeping you barely covered. “You shouldn’t say things like that if you don’t mean them considering how often you complain about others doing it.” 

It’s easier for you to pretend he’s playing a game then it is to indulge that there may be truth to his words. He chuckles again from beside you, the tone as warm as the first time this evening despite your slippery attempts to pare down his words into tricky half lies.

“What makes you think I’m just saying it? When have I ever said shit to you senselessly?”

Answering a question with another question. The two of you probably know each other too well by this point if this keeps happening. You don’t have to answer one if you create another. Then another. You don’t ever have to take off the mask, another one perpetually beneath it even when your brows are knit together in pleasure and you softly mumble his name against his neck while he’s inside of you.

You have a feeling it’s sort of the same way for him even if he insists he hates pretense. For a quiet moment, you ponder exactly how to respond to him. You can’t outright say he isn’t being honest with no proof but you can play it off.

“You’ve said a lot of shit to me, Sanemi.” you joke. He tosses you a glance from the corner of his eye, not quite annoyed but enough that you understand that the poking isn’t going to work tonight. 

He slides his hand across the porch to gently grab yours, scarred thumb running along the length of each of your fingers as though he’s counting them, ensuring they’re still in place and precious. There’s no doubt he’s rough around the edges, amongst other things, but he values you enough to stop by after a mission to check on you. To talk to you. To not just fall into your bed like he did the first time, adrenaline pumping and still smeared with streaks of blood across his forearms and neck.

You received a few glances for the state of your futon after that one yet you managed to explain it away like you do everything else. It was an accident! You cut yourself while sharpening the small dagger you keep in your room! You started your period! Always explaining away instead of embracing conveniently placed truths in your lap. Sanemi Shinazugawa’s home with you isn’t solely made in your bed. It’s why the fear he will never feel the same terrifies you enough it keeps you up at night counting stars like petals on daisies and asking them if he loves you or loves you not.

“Why is it so hard for you to believe that I like being around you?”

An honest question draws you out of your own mind. You feel one of your masks drop and don’t rush to replace it with another, simply shrugging. His hand slides up your arm to adjust your robe enough to keep you decent, a crooked finger pulling airy cotton over your upper arm and upper breast. Sanemi’s eyes remain locked on your face, his hands familiar enough with your body that he can adjust you without looking.

“I don’t know. I guess I’m afraid that if I let you stay you may not like what you find and will eventually leave.” He raises his brows, fighting off a smile. Perhaps you aren’t the only one letting a mask or two fall tonight. “I’ve been in you and sure fucking liked it,” he jokes and you giggle, gently patting the outside of his thigh. 

Things could be like this always, you consider. The two of you joking beneath the moon who laughs along with you, his hands on your body. Waking up next to him instead of ushering him out of the door as soon as your legs stop shaking for fear of being tied to him in people’s minds.

What if you just let it happen naturally instead of standing in your own way? 

Without taking the time to consider your movement, you lean toward him and gently kiss the exposed skin of his chest, above the scars that crisscross his torso. He wraps one arm around your hips and pulls you closer to him, bodies touching as close as they can without it being obscene.

“Do you wanna come in?” You ask him, lips halfway pressed against his chest.  He glances down at you and nods once, that same glimmer of fondness you have previously thought you imagined reflecting back at you when you meet his eyes. 

“Will you stay tonight?”

Sanemi’s face further softens and he nods again, not bothering to hide his smile this time. 

He lifts the sleeve of your robe over your shoulder, covering you entirely, and holds your hand as you stand up. Rising above him and planting your feet to help him up, the pair of you walk quietly into your adjoining room, careful not to alert anyone who may be looking on. You slide the door shut behind you, the wood gently snapping against the frame that cradles it, and pretend you don’t hear a giggle from the other side of the wall that indicates to you that one of your friends in the house knows what’s going on in your room.

But you’ll worry about that tomorrow. You reach to untie the knot at the waist of your robe while Sanemi closes in on you, cupping your chin and neck between scarred palms and kissing you with enough force you’re helpless to do a thing but kiss back.

Not that you’d want to do anything else.

[olderthannetfic]

https://www.tumblr.com/olderthannetfic/746553097204203521/the-fandom-hates-women-response-to-lack-of-ff

The "fandom hates women" part of it comes from the fact that fandom as an entity just doesn't watch the kind of media that draws femslash, even if it ticks all of the boxes of things those very same people say they like. There are so many times I've watched a show that I've seen mega-popular Tumblr posts wishing existed, and then the fandom is so, so small comparatively and often in general. There have been superheroes, vampire/supernatural shows, fantasy shows, movies, books, the list goes on, that feel like they were generated out of Tumblr's desires for ideal fandom media, and everyone knows they're never going to attract anywhere near the same attention for fandom and fanworks because the common denominator just tends to be that if there isn't a full ensemble of attractive men to ship either with each other or with the women, fandom's not interested.

So it's not about prioritizing women in that sense, it's about people witnessing hypocrisy over and over again the second a show doesn't have a mostly-male ensemble. The people who are in these fandoms are frustrated that good faith attempts to get people interested are met with every excuse in the book that all eventually boils down to "I don't like watching stuff with women in it as much as I like watching stuff with men in it." And if that's how people feel about it... sometimes the conclusions are going to turn into the more uncharitable take of "fandom hates women."

--

Maybe, but whenever I see a "fandom hates women" reblog of my stuff, one or two reblogs further down the chain I get an overt TERF. I just had to go block several people today, in fact.

The first person to reblog with a comment like that is usually subtle, but their friends and friends of friends are not. The rhetoric that very quickly starts is the fandom equivalent of that "All the butches are becoming trans men! We're losing lesbians!" stuff.

Here's the thing: I've been in ten billion fandoms that were so awesome and fit fandom's supposed tastes to a T and yet no amount of promoting them could get anyone to try the canon. This goes for canons that are all men or all white men or all majority ethnicity men or whatever else.

The default state of media is to not engender a big fic fandom.

I agree that the rare outliers mostly follow certain patterns, but we extrapolate too far when we say that a lack of those patterns is why a fandom is small.

A fandom is small because that's the near-universal default.

--

Yes, a small slice of fandom consists of guilt-ridden queer fujoshi who say they want more f/f but don't make much of a move to make that happen. I tend to run into that a lot because of my own tastes and having friends who share those tastes.

Far more of fandom is people talking generally about how representation matters without saying they would personally join these fandoms if they existed.

Neither group is large enough to be the real reason some woman-heavy canon fails to take off to HP levels.

The real reason is not hypocrisy but the fact that most things don't take off like that. Most things without massive, massive audiences especially don't take off like that. And the very few things that do are flukes and don't actually predict that another similar thing will take off in the future.

--

Go to AO3's tag search. Search for all canonical fandom tags. Sort by uses and descending order.

Right now, I get 64,390 tags.

The first page, 50 tags, goes from HP with 497,845 works to the Thor movies with 59,266 works. By page 6, we're below 10 thousand works.

By the end of page 10, we're down to Labyrinth with 3,906.

Somewhere in the top 500 AO3 fandom tags (many of which are just franchise metatags for each other), we go all the way from megafandoms to medium size and down to relatively modest ones.

That's not a lot of room for a big f/f-heavy fandom given the trends in mainstream media and that mainstream media is where most really big fandoms come from.

--

I also notice that you're conflating a lack of desire to watch something that's primarily about women with a lack of desire to watch something that includes women.

There are tons of fans who want something more like The Mummy with a leading man and leading woman they love.

Granted, that's not me and that's not a lot of my fujoshi/slasher audience, but it's extraordinarily common. I know plenty of people who don't like canons that are only dudes, but since they also don't like canons that are only ladies and they don't ship f/f, this gets spun into "fandom hates women".

--

Let me be clear:

Conflating "lesbians" and "women" is a radfem position.

[mythicalviper-fr]

FR Skin Contests and You (and Me)

Let’s talk about festival skin contests.

This post will be 1) about win conditions 2) my breakdown on my wins/losses. Before we start, please know a lot of this is guesswork, and based on my own perspective. Still, I hope this will be useful for some people ^^

***August/888 and I (but August mostly as it’s his idea) will be hosting an event encouraging new artists to join festival contests on 8/8. It will have a lot of tips and references to help get you started, so please keep an eye out! 

-

When it comes to skin contests, people generally enter for one of three reasons: 1) for fun 2) because it’s seen as a milestone of skinmaking, or 3) out of a desire to push yourself to the limit knowing you’ll regret it like a Sunday hangover– but I hope that’s just me.

In my two years of participating in skin contests, I’ve seen a lot of artists join with a lot of excitement, only to give up or drop out because they aren’t winning. Some blame it on skill, others blame it on the staff, and some blame it on fellow competitors. 

Here’s what I will say: like any contest, winning the festival skin contest is based on a combination of luck, knowledge, and skill. Just like any contest, there is a strategy to it and there are win conditions that you have to fulfill if you want a chance at winning. Some artists find these win conditions quickly and are able to adapt and cultivate the skill needed to pull off a win. Some are aware of these win conditions but do not yet have the skill to pull off a win. And some aren’t aware at all. A loss is usually (but not always) a result of not fulfilling those win conditions, or not fulfilling them as much as another artist. 

So, let’s talk about these win conditions.

The Biggest Win Condition: Breed Variety

In my opinion, the biggest factor that makes or breaks an entry is breed variety. Over the past ten years, there's been a consistent trend of staff picking one winner per breed/pose, though there are occasional outliers (most recently, two Aether M for Brightshine, but previously also Undertide M and Spiral M). This means whenever you submit a skin, you’re competing against artists that also submitted the same breed/pose. 

For those who aren’t aware, breed variety has been dropping in contests, along with the number of submissions. The result is that there are very few submissions for less popular breeds. Take a look at Brightshine 2023 - the majority of the submissions were Aethers. But even if there ended up being three Aether wins, that meant none of the other Aether skins made it in. 

I want to explain this with numbers. Say Aethers (M&F) made up 60% of the Brightshine 2023 submissions but could only make it into 2 or 3/16 of the winning slots. That’s 60% of the submissions eliminated from making it into the remaining 13/16 slots. Where would the other 13/16 skins come from, if staff were to stick to their trend of 1 breed/pose skin per festival? The flight breeds - Imp and PC might take up 4 more slots. But that’s still 9/16 slots that need winners and only 30% of the submissions to pick from. Additionally, ancients will generally make up at least 40% of the winning submissions, if not 50%. That’s why having 100 submissions might mean there aren’t a lot of winners the staff could pick, and why there weren’t any Fae skins for Starfall 2022 or Spiral M skins for Mistral 2023. 

I tested this theory with F Ridgeback submissions. I mainly focused on three breed/poses that I saw as the least submitted - F Noc, F Bog, and F Ridgeback. I went with Ridgeback because it was the base I liked the most. The result? Out of the 22 contests I’ve entered, I won 5 with F Ridgeback. That’s a 25% win rate with one breed/pose alone. If we factor in wins I’ve had with these three poses combined, that’s 8 wins or a 36% win rate.

Drawing on an unpopular breed/pose is a good way to make sure you don’t have too many competitors (and also show some of the more unpopular breeds some love). This is particularly true if you’re a newer artist like I was. I started doing art in June 2021, so I knew there was no chance I could outcompete better artists on the same breed/pose. 

Of course, choosing the right breed will not always net you a win - you still need good skin composition and skills to catch the staff’s attention, which is what we’re going to talk about next.

Statutory Win Conditions: Flight Themes & Colors

When it comes to making a skin for a festival contest, I always recommend people look at the apparel, lore, and familiars for that flight, because these items are usually the closest to what’s canonically considered a flight’s aesthetic. A lot of the entries I’ve seen win are based off of the fest fams or match a fest apparel.

There are exceptions. The game aspect of the Lightning Flight isn’t canon, but we’ve had hivemind and gaming skins win. Why? Maybe that contest only had a total of 12-15 breed/poses submitted, maybe it was just the best executed skin for that breed/pose, maybe a staff member just really liked it. However, generally winners will match the flight’s canon aesthetic.

The trend of skin contest winners also suggest a favoring of elements that are placed on the dragon’s wings and head (leaves, vines, fairy/insect wings, gears), or accent/tattoo-like effects that involve gradient, sparkles, or abstract smoke (see 888’s 2023 brightshine win). Skin compositions that are balanced (elements throughout the body, as opposed to just one part of the body) see a higher win rate. Skins that have lower accent coverage tend to see higher win rates when they’re gradients/accents (linings on the dragon, runic/circuit effects) or when they’re concentrated on an easily noticeable/central part of the body (like the wings, or the dragon’s back).

In the end, knowing what to draw really comes down to research and knowledge. Before each contest I would review all the past winning entries and try to glean what staff did or didn’t pick. I noticed that staff didn’t tend to pick whiteout or body morph skins, and they tend to pick skins with higher coverage. I also checked past festival winners to see the color theme for each contest. There are some contests during which colors that aren’t necessarily the flight’s colors are still picked, and there are contests that haven’t seen a festival skin which didn’t match the flight’s colors. Like any contest, there’s always going to be a small bit of luck involved.

Ultimately, while I can’t speak for the staff, I do think there are win conditions that need to be fulfilled. You need to have a basic level of art skill. You need knowledge on skin composition and colors. Then, of course, you need to know which breed/pose to choose.

-

I hope my analysis helps a little when you’re entering your next contest, or that it made for an interesting read. If you just came here for general tips and tricks, that’s all I have for you - you can also scroll all the way down to see my final thoughts on contests. But generally, just keep trying different things, doing your research, and making sure you’re sticking to the flight theme.

For people who want it, here’s my breakdown on each series of contests that I’ve entered, and reasons why I think I won or lost. 

-

Personal Analysis - Brightshine 2021-Brightshine 2023

I’m a very competitive person and more importantly, I love to compete. So the moment I found myself capable of making skins, festivals were on my radar. I studied what previous artists did, what techniques and designs seem to win the most. What skills did I need and what skins caught the judges' eyes? More importantly, what bases did I feel confident with and could perform the best on? As soon as I felt like I understood the contest, I entered Brightshine 2021 with about 2 weeks’ worth of art experience.

Then I proceeded to lose four contests in a row.

So, what happened?

Brightshine 2021 (loss)

Sometimes unearthing your old art is like watching an old video of yourself in your cringey teenager phase. But knowing why you lost is important in understanding how you can win (and what to absolutely not do again).

For Brightshine 2021, I submitted a Guard F design with two recolors. At the time I only had the skill to draw lanterns and filigree, so I went “that’s Light enough” and did exactly that. Although I would say my theme was (kind of) on point, it was my execution that was lacking:

Issue No. 1: Colors. In review of previous Light winners there’s a umber/gold palette or gold/sunlight palette that appears to be the meta. There have also been cases of red or purple winning even though they aren’t used in official Light items, and some rainbow entries. While one of my recolors followed this scheme, it fell short because–

Issue No. 2: Composition. Skin composition is the balance of elements and how well each element pulls their weight in a piece of art. In my Brightshine 2021 entry, most of the base was left bare. Artists like August are really good at skin comp where their entire piece looks tied together; mine was far from that.

Issue No. 3: Quality. If you compare my Brightshine 2021 submission to my 2023 one, you’ll see what I mean. My art style relies on rendering, or applying lighting and shadows, to bring out each element. Basically I need rendering in order to win. This isn’t necessarily a requirement for you; some artists do lineless, others do painterly, and others don’t render at all, but overall the art style should have a specific level of quality that rendering brought out in my art.

In short: wrong colors, bad lineart, skill issue, no skin comp - overall it was a piece of art not even its creator could love. (I tossed the psd in the recycling bin and hit delete. Except looking in the database now apparently I printed it, so now I have to live with the shame of its existence.)

There is one takeaway that I got. By the time the contest ended there were no other Guard F entries. I realized then that had my art been better, with the breed/pose’s lack of competition, I could’ve had a shot at winning the contest. 

Thundercrack 2021 (loss)

Alright, 2021 Myth thinks, I’ve learned my lesson from Brightshine. The skin composition was not good. That means I should put more stuff on the base and I’m sure to win!

Have you ever just looked in the mirror and realized you, yes you, are the most punchable thing in the world?

In all fairness, the skin comp of my TCC entry did improve. Like Brightshine, I did a single design with two recolors on an unpopular breed. Improvements I made: additional elements to the skin aside from the one big element on the wing, and a color palette that matched the flight. Of course, I wished my theme of hivemind/code also matched the flight aesthetic, but just like my love life, the only thing my submission matched with was loss and disappointment.  

Issue No. 1: Design. Upon reviewing past winners, very few featured fake apparel or clothing. As mentioned previously, staff do not appear to favor whiteout or body morph skins, and prefer elements that adhere to the dragon (like wings) or add to the dragon (like bones/feathers).

Issue No 2: Technology. For my entry, the circuit patterning on the wings did not take resizing well. I drew this on a 750x750 canvas and the resizing blended the many circuit lines into a single line. This isn’t a program issue. It was a lack of understanding of how resizing works.

Issue No 3: And we’re still here with my biggest problem: skill issue. Art is not a skill you learn in two months. I did learn to render, but not well enough. I wasn���t good enough. Yet. 

Starfall 2021 (loss)

So… fun fact! During all of this I was writing my thesis. As in, I was writing my thesis after not writing my thesis for a year. It was stressful. I don’t have much to say about this contest because I did this skin as a meme for the sole reason that somewhere in my 3 am sleep deprived brain I thought “Emergency Portal-col” was hilarious.

I did not expect to win and I didn’t. Still, I did notice more and more that certain breeds just weren’t submitted for contests. Ridgeback F, I noticed, had anywhere from 0 to 1 submission for each contest while M pose generally had 0. Same for Nocturnes. 

Riot of Rot 2021 (loss)

By this time, 2021 Myth had given up on the “one big element + some other accessories” idea. It hadn’t worked for Light or Lightning and it wasn’t going to work. So I thought, what if I just went for the accessory elements? My ROR skin featured the spider lily, smoke, and sparkles. I also started experimenting with dark gradients on the limbs of the dragon, which I’d noticed in winning fest entries.

Gradients and sparkles help with skin composition. Especially if you’re a newer artist who can’t pull off more complicated effects. Oftentimes a skin looks empty in certain parts, but adding elements to those parts would make things look messier. That’s where gradients/sparkles come in. However, I lost because:

Issue No 1: Composition again. While my elements tied together well, I had no main attraction other than the empty void that was the center of the Ridgeback wing. I essentially did a background scene and didn’t add a main character for it. This made me think that maybe my “one big element” skin comp idea was still worth a shot, but I needed a different take.

Issue No 2: Aaaand skill issue again.I was still bad at rendering, and sometimes skill is just why you lose. Not because you don’t have good ideas or because your execution was bad, but because you do not yet have the skills to defeat your competitors. You can do a really good looking skin, but if someone else in the contest did an even better looking skin on the breed/pose, then you’re not going to win.

Gala 2021 (win)

Losing four times in a row was pretty discouraging. But here’s another important element to skin contests: consistency. The frequency of your submissions should result in a win so long as you fulfill all of the other win conditions such as good composition, understanding of the theme, and the basic level of art skill required to win. 

For the Gala, I realized that wings would be the best big element to put on a base while tying in all of the other elements. This is probably the most complicated skin I’d worked on at that time. But because I’d learned minimal rendering, because my skin composition was actually good, and there was no competition for Ridgeback F, I won. For the very first time.

Trickmurk 2021 - Starfall 2022 (6 wins 2 losses - 12 skin designs submitted total)

Here, I’d found my strategy. As long as I kept to the theme and made sure my skin comp and rendering was good, I would win. Especially because I had no competition. Again, breed variety is a huge issue in skin contests, because people - particularly the really skilled artists - are more likely to go for a breed that they like or is popular. As a newer artist, I was well aware that there was a 100% chance I’d lose if I tried to fight anyone for the same breed/pose. (And part of knowing the win conditions is also knowing artists you definitely are not winning against.) 

3/6 of my wins during this time was F Ridgeback. The others were: F Coatl, which had no competition during Trickmurk, and F Nocturne, which had no competition during Wind and Arcane’s fests (but competed against my will to live because this is a terrible base to work on).

But relying on unpopular breed advantage was about as reliable as internet connection in a college dorm. 3/6 of my wins were ridgeback but that meant all of my losses were also ridgeback. On top of that, the number of Ridgeback submissions peaked at one point to 5-6. I was still winning, because I had the skill to beat my competitors. But I had to up my game. My skins had to be more elaborate, closer to the theme. I began submitting two designs per competition, which was… going to be a problem for me later.

The idea behind submitting two designs per competition is simple. Instead of just relying on one unpopular breed/pose to net you the win, now you have two shots at winning. 

My goal that I’d made during this time was to either win 11 in a row or to win once for each holiday. This was to keep my motivation. Keep in mind I was also writing my thesis, so I really needed a goal to go towards, especially when I committed to doing two designs per contest. 

(I defended my thesis successfully in May 2022 and graduated with high honors!)

ROR 2022 - Brightshine 2023 (7 wins 1 loss - 16 skin designs submitted total)

Here’s where I found another niche in the skin contests. Flight-breeds. These are breeds that belong to each element and surprisingly - they don’t actually get that many submissions. Seeing Starfall 2022’s skin turnout as an Arcanite was tough. When it came to reviewing Starfall 2022, anyone would’ve won as long as they submitted a good quality Fae skin that didn’t break the rules or stray too far from the theme and had a skin composition that the staff liked. 

I decided to put my theory to the test with Earth, Ice, Wind, Water, and Nature. Are you surprised there were only three Snap F submissions for Earth, one Tun M for Ice, two SDM for Wind, and something like two Undertide F entries for Water? I was. Especially with Undertides because the breed had been released only five months ago. By noticing the flight-breed meta, and having the time, skill, and experience to make skins for those breeds that fit the criteria, I was able to win.

At this time I started straying away from my “one big element + smaller accessories” composition. My art had gotten better so I was able to expand my designs. Wavecrest 2023 was the biggest show of that, and I’m really proud of my entries for that contest. It was essentially a turning point in my art style… but it did take a lot more time and effort. From that point on, my skins were hitting 90+ layers and taking me at least two weeks to draw.

The last skin contest I entered with that art style was Brightshine 2023. By the time the contest ended, I was pretty sure winning would take a miracle or a relationship with god that I did not have. The competition for Imp M was difficult, and I was pitting my submission against artists who had far more experience and skill. I had some hope for my Ridge F entry, but again, relying on unpopular breed advantage is, well. Not reliable. 

I lost. It was crushing, because not only did that mean I lost Brightshine three years in a row, Brightshine was the last contest I needed to win to fulfill either one of my goals: winning 11 in a row or win once for each elemental holiday. However, losses happen and it sucks, but it’s not the end of the world. I simply lost to a much better artist, and I am okay with that. 

Final Thoughts

Heart-to-heart time. 

I know some people become discouraged because they don’t think they have the skill, or they compare themselves to other artists. I felt discouraged for the same reason. After losing so many contests in 2021, I thought I would never improve. I would never be as good as artists that started long before me, or even some that started after me but learned so much faster. 

I still think that’s true. I have a long way to go and I may never catch up to these other artists. But here’s the thing about art: it’s a skill that constantly evolves and you cannot see that evolution unless you keep trying. And you need to keep trying if you want to win, because you aren’t going to without reaching the right skill level. 

The hardest truth about competitions is that you can’t expect to win just because you tried. If everyone could win just by participating – that contest isn’t worth winning. There are no stakes so there is no value. But when you put in a lot of effort and time, and you win? That win is something that will stay with you. That is a worthwhile win - because it was hard and because you lost so many times.

Sure, the staff could let everyone who enters win. Maybe winners should be judged solely on participation. Maybe that would make more people happy. But would you really be happy to win, knowing there’s no chance of losing? At that point, would being a festival contest winner mean anything?

In the end, a contest is supposed to be fun. Throw everything I’ve said out the window if that’s made contests un-fun for you. Most, MOST importantly, you should join the competition because you enjoy it. If you’re joining just to win, and you take losses very hard, and participation becomes a chore - then that is never going to be worth the toll on your mental health.

Take it from someone who took it too seriously. Drawing two skin designs monthly was taxing (remember it was taking me at least 2 weeks per design), and by Nature 2023 I had severe burnout. When Brightshine rolled around, I sat down for 11 hours to finish my Imp entry, because I knew I wouldn’t have time for art later. By the time I finished, I was running on about five hours of sleep and a very unhealthy attachment to caffeine. 

Then, three days before Brightshine, I was diagnosed with tendonitis. 

I started feeling discomfort in my arms/wrist since March, hence why I stopped releasing public skins. But this is effectively the worst arm related injury I’ve had, and while drawing is not the main cause, doing so for 11 hours straight didn’t help. My left arm has minor pain. My right arm is swollen and in a brace. This could’ve been avoided by taking breaks and doing exercises. But the lack of proper precaution led to injury. (And yes, I drew my Bogsneak TCC 2023 entry with a mouse for this reason. I could not use my tablet pen so… circle and line tool it was. But I had fun ^^)

I hope my analysis of the contests will be of some use to you. But please do not hurt yourself, mentally or physically, in competing. UMA artists make around 3kg per run of skin, so if you are entering contests for the prize, that’s not the best use of your time and energy. When it comes down to it, you are going to be doing free art for the site, and that is never worth injuring yourself for.

As a final note, thank you to the FR staff for allowing artists to participate in the site. My art experience is purely derived from skins and contests have encouraged me to improve myself. Thank you also to my friends who cheered me on along the way, the many wonderful artists who gave me tips on line weight, coloring, and rendering. And of course, many thanks to August for being the best cheerleader I could have. I would not have made it to Brightshine without him as a competitor and fellow artist. 

(However nothing you do will make me like Gaolers and that is a hill I will die on.)

Happy almost-Flameforger’s everyone! Here’s to the next fest cycle.

[in1-nutshell]

Heya! I want to try Rescue Bots request. The Rescue Bots encountered a lazy Decepticon scout Buddy sleeping in the middle of the street that is causing traffic. This version of Decepticon Buddy is very chill and relaxed than they should have to their surroundings, even when their life is in danger. When they try arrested the lazy Decepticon Buddy, Buddy just teleported somewhere else to nap. (This Buddy is an outlier. This Buddy can teleport.) A few days later, another Decepticon (Not Buddy) kidnapped the kids. Lazy Decepticon Buddy asked the other Decepticon what are they going to do with those kids, the other Decepticon responds he is going to torture the kids to force them to reveal where the Rescue Bots are, which Buddy did not like that at all. Buddy asked the other Decepticon to hold the kids for them. Once Buddy gently holds the kids, Buddy shielded the kids views so they don't see Buddy shot the other Decepticon dead in cold blood unexpectedly because they will never condone to harming or killing any kids in any way. Buddy contacted the Rescue Bots to come get the kids while Buddy gently comfort the kids. (Bonus: when the Rescue Bots asked Buddy why they joined the Cons, Buddy responds "The Decepticons gave me an energon cookie.") Characters: Heatwave, Chase, Boulder, and Blades. Please and thank you!

Haven't done a Buddy like this, I welcome the challenge!

Hope you enjoy!

Bot Buddy the Con who can teleport protecting Cody and Frankie

SFW, Platonic, Cybertronain reader

RB

Buddy is a con.

Well, more like Ex-con.

They used to be in the spy unit thanks to their Outlier ability to teleport.

They could have gotten far in the ranks if it weren’t for their laid-back nature and them not wanting to do much fighting.

So, they left the moment they could and kept a low profile on Earth.

They did find their own safe haven on the Island of Griffin Rock.

It was a nice place to be.

They didn’t show themselves to the public, instead opting to watch them in their everyday lives.

Buddy watching the Burns family playing basketball from the wooded area.

“C’mon Cody… a little to the left and…”--Buddy

Kade blocks the ball which bounces off Cody’s head.

“Ow!”—Cody

Buddy gasps.

Kade puffs his chest.

“Sorry Squirt, but when you mess with the champ—”--Kade

BONK!

“OW!”--Kade

Kade looks down at the large stick that had hit him in the head.

“Who threw that?! Dani! It was you wasn’t it!”--Kade

Buddy had a satisfied grin on their faceplate.

“That was for Cody.”--Buddy

They had been considering showing their identity to the community, but ultimately decided against it in fear of the Autobots or any Decepticon finding them.

Or worse, the community not accepting them and then having to find a new home.

They were extremely surprised to see some Rescue Bots at the unveiling ceremony.

Buddy figured that most if not all those bots were no longer operational.

This was just another reason to keep hiding.

They continued their observation of the community and of the Burns family, leading them to find out about the bots working with the small family as well as their location.

Not that they would ever do anything with it anyways.

Their first encounter with the Rescue Bots certainly was one to remember.

They knew that teleporting for long periods of time and long distances made them sleepy…

And they knew their tendency of taking naps anywhere they could…

Yet here they were taking a nap in the middle of a small street in their alt mode.

This eventually caused traffic and that led to some of the bots to come see what the commotion was about.

Chief Burns and Chase are coming on the scene.

The Chief steps out and goes to knock on one of the windows.

“Hello? Is there anyone inside? This is not a parking—”--Chief

Chase spots the Decepticon symbol and feels his energon run cold.

He quickly comms in Boulder and Heatwave.

“Get the citizens out of the area immediately!”--Chase

“Wow, Chase what’s—”--Boulder

“The subject causing the traffic is a Decepticon!”--Chase

“What’s a—”--Graham

“Never mind that! Boulder! You and Blades get the humans! I’m backup for Chase!”--Heatwave

“On it!”—Boulder and Blades

Boulder and Blades make it record time get the civilians out of there.

“Guys what’s going on?”--Dani

Chase transforms and holds his servos out to Chief.

“Chief Burns, step away from the vehicle slowly. That is a Decepticon and of unknown origin.”--Chase

“A Decepticon?”--Chief

The vehicle suddenly starts transforming as Heatwave and the other bots come.

Chase quickly snatches Chief holding him close.

The Con finishes transforming and stretches.

“Primus, I have got to stop taking naps on this street. There’re too many potholes that I know the Mayor wont…”--Buddy

Buddy looks at the bots.

They slowly raise their servos.

“Hey, I mean no harm and all. Just minding my own business here. Just taking a nap…”--Buddy

Heatwave pulls out some stasis cuffs out.

“Yeah, not happening. Tell Cody I said hi!”--Buddy

POP!

“WHERE DID THEY GO?!”—Rescue bots

“How do they know who I am?!”--Cody

Buddy watching from the wooded area behind them.

“So much for good introductions…”--Buddy

The Rescue Team would be on high alert for the next few days after the encounter.

Meanwhile Buddy just watched from afar everything goes down.

It would be one evening that they would receive a ping in their com.

It was from another Decepticon asking for any nearby Cons to come to their coordinates.

Curious, and bored, they answered the call and went to the location.

To their surprise, the location was underneath one of the many caverns under Griffin Rock.

They walked in and was in shocked what they saw.

It was some drone on a data pad on one side of the cavern. On the other side was Cody Burns and Frankie Greene tied up against the wall.

The kids looked okay, a little roughed up, but nothing else.

Buddy walks over to the other Con as calm as they could.

The other Con looks over and smiles maliciously.

“Finally, another fellow Decepticon.”—Random Con

Buddy just waves, watching the other Con go over to the children and grabs them.

Buddy’s servos clench a bit when they see the kids flinch.

“So, what’s with the humans?”--Buddy

“I’m going to do some good fashion torture session to find where those pesky Rescue Bots are. Then send a message to Lord Megatron—”—Random Con

“Hold on, hold on Pal. First, can I hold them? Never held humans before.”--Buddy

The other Con shrugs and tosses the kids to Buddy, who quickly catches them.

“Fine, but no torture. I’m going to be in charge of that.”—Random Con

Buddy readjusts their hold on the kids and smiles gently at them before whispering.

“Close your eyes and cover your ears. Don’t open them until I saw so.”--Buddy

They snag the ropes from the kids and toss them inside their subspace.

Buddy could just hope that the kids had followed their instructions.

“Hey what are you—”—Random Con

Buddy blasts the Con in the chassis.

They make sure the Con was offline before teleporting outside.

POP!

They open their subspace and gently get the kids out.

“You can open those eyes now kids.”--Buddy

Both kids open their eyes surprised seeing the outside of the cave.

Frankie looks at them accusingly.

“What do you want? And where’s your friend?”--Frankie

“Firstly, not my friend. Secondly, no one will have to worry about that guy ever again.”--Buddy

“How can we trust you?”--Frankie

Buddy just shrugs.

“You don’t have to trust me, Frankie.”--Buddy

Her eyes widened.

“How do you know her name?”--Cody

“I know everyone’s name on Griffin Rock, Cody.”--Buddy

“How?”—Cody

That led to a slightly awkward conversation of how long Buddy had been spying on the people of Griffin Rock.

The kids ended up warming up to the Ex-Con who had saved them after another hour of talking before the three realizing that the others were probably worried sick.

Buddy quickly teleported to the back of the Firehouse after that realization, scaring the bots and humans in the process.

It was an even worse impression than before.

Especially when Heatwave nearly tore down the doors and nearly dropkicked Buddy after seeing Cody and Frankie in their servos.

It took another hour of explaining, reassuring, to get everything out.

And some wielding patches for Buddy’s chassis and helm.

The humans were grateful for Buddy getting the kids out of that situation.

Blades and Boulder were more on the forgiving side than Chase and Heatwave.

Heatwave and Chase were much more on edge with this Ex-Con, but after a bit they realized that they really weren’t a threat.

“One thing I still do not understand. How long have you been here and never alerted anyone?”--Chase

“Yeah, how long have you been here?”--Blade

Buddy stops to think.

They look at Cody.

“When Cody was in those white thingys.”--Buddy

“Diapers?!”—Burns Family

“You’ve been here that long!?”--Heatwave

“And you never did any harm?”--Chase

“Why would I? I like this community and the humans.”--Buddy

“It doesn’t seem like the Decepticon thing to do.”--Heatwave

“Yeah, I’ve been to odd ball out forever. Even my recruitment was ‘unorthodox’ to say the least.”--Buddy

“What do you mean?”--Heatwave

“They had energon cookies and offered them if I joined. I left as soon as they ran out.”--Buddy

“…”—Rescue Team

[cozzzynook]

TFA idea

Bumblebee returns to base holding one large sparkling of course he quickly explains to both Ratchet and Optimus that it's not his but he found them abandoned in a old building while on patrol. After a quick check up the bittie is given a clean bit of health and Bee decides since he found them he has to take care of them, much to Optimus being worried that Bee might not be ready for the responsibility.

However a couple of weeks later the large sparkling is thriving as they let out cheerful giggles when ever Bumblebee pulls a silly face or tickles their pedes and tanks, it makes everyone smile and Optimus can't be anymore proud.

:>

Bee making everyone proud by being able to take care of a sparkling he found and he’s happy to do this since it feels so natural and familiar to him. But not for the reasons the others might guess.

I like to headcanon tfa bee with angst and make him older. It adds ✨ flavor✨ to his character.

- Bee is so good with sparkling’s because he used to live in a sparkling center on the ruined sides of cybertron.

- bee came from the low class of bots who roamed the wreckage of Cybertron because they were not allowed among the populated cities due to being a mix of sub cybertronians.

- autobots do not take kindly to decepticons, seekers, jets, those with outliers, insecticons and beastformers.

- bee is half insecticon but he keeps his wings hidden. He’s able to keep Ratchet from going anywhere near them during private medical exams since the doc bot is not an expert on insecticon cna and therefore would cause more damage than good should he take a look at them.

- really, its just against insecticon culture to have a non-flying mech take a look at ones wings so closely, even if they were a medic.

- Bee is so good with sparklings because he helped raise so many during his sparklinghood to the days he became a young mech and left the sparkling center.

- bee’s creators were long offline and he couldn’t remember what they looked or sounded like. All he knew was that he inherited his carriers wings and insecticon traits and his sires ability to transform into a car.

- bee lets his wings free during this very patrol and thats how he was able to find the little sparkling.

- they were left in the high tops in hopes of a flier spotting them.

- he flew towards the bitty and the sound of his wings humming was able to lull them to recharge after calming them down.

- he knows what its like to have no creators and he knows what its like to take care of a bitty and focus all his attention on their needs instead of his own.

- he acted childish because he wanted to enjoy the childhood he never had. He just didn’t tell the others any of this since he’s actually very private. The only one who knows is Bulkhead and Bee knows his best friend won’t say anything.

- bee is excellent at taking care of the sparkling. Having a recharge and fueling schedule that impresses everyone along with being able to wake up a few nano-kliks before the sparkling does late at night so he can keep the night cries to a minimum.

- bee can already smell and see the signs the bitty is a seeker and he looks in the first places where color comes in to see if the bitty is one of the cons on Earth but to his findings they aren’t.

- to make sure he’s right he does a thorough scent test and shows the bitty freeze frame video clips of the cons stationed here and gets no reaction.

- bee wonders what a stray seeker was doing here so far out from cybertron or one of their other colonies but he soon gets his answer when Sentinel shows up bragging about shooting down two seekers who tried to flee.

- bee figures out pretty quickly what happened and just snaps.

- sentinel is left on the floor leaking energon with his chin broken off and his frame twitching by the time Bee is done with him.

- none of the others can say anything and they just stand there in shock as Ultra Magnus just gives bee a warning on learning to control his anger while Ratchet grimaces because he doesn’t want to help Sentinel but he has to.

- Ultra Magnus understands very well that Bee is by old law still in his rights to do such a thing since Ultra Magnus knows Bee is older than perceived. He also knows Bee came from the harsher outsides and that both outlanders and the cons held endangering sparklings as one of the worst sins a bot could make.

- Personally, Ultra Magnus feels the same and is not happy with his subordinate not following protocol and detaining the seekers so all this could be avoided.

- Bee meanwhile just carefully picks up his fussing sparkling and goes off to his room where he stays for the rest of the evening.

- Optimus tries to talk with him but Ratchet stops him telling the prime to give him a few joors of alone time with his bitty.

“Its not just you whose the carrier hen around here now Prime.”

“If I’m the carrier hen, doesn’t that make you the grand carrier, Ratchet?”

“Slaggin kids and there smart dermas,” Ratchet grouses as they both walk away.

Prowl doesn’t take the hint, he was listening in from the ceiling, and goes inside to talk to Bee.

Its not really talked about but Bee and Prowl are close. Bulkhead is Bee’s best friend but Prowl is his brother and the feeling is mutual.

—

I want to incorporate the decepticons and blitzwing specifically but i’m not thinking that hard right now lol

[fierceawakening]

So I have a weird tmi question.

Is “men are hornier than women” actually true? Because (though I’m not sure I’m a woman) I’ve always heard that it is, but I’ve always wondered how that would be possible without being driven to distraction all the time.

Like. I (here’s the tmi) masturbate pretty much daily, it’s a routine before I sleep. But men are supposed to be more into this than me. To put it crudely, where do they find the time and place to do this more than once a day, unless they’re retired? That just seems like a recipe for getting fired very embarrassingly someday.

But I’ve been watching some YouTube videos exposing crooked stuff about the Mormon church, and they’re talking about shaming men for “sex and porn addiction,” and the men are saying their frequency of masturbation was once every TWO WEEKS, and they thought they were total hounds because the Church shamed them for that!

And I mean, those dudes are in a cult, so they probably WANT more freedom, but given more freedom would they really do this more than me? I’m pretty sure I’ve just found the limit of the practical here.

So I dunno. Am I an outlier, or is that actually Not Very Sexual compared to the bepenised/testosterone-dominant?

(If not, I am VERY amusedly curious about how distracted I’ll be if I do start testosterone…)