#complete shitpost of no value

[stari-hun]

Limbus Maxxing

My live rambles on limbus company as I play (I like Mili so imma play for them).

Prologue rambles under the cut

TRUCK KUN?!

Ok Kaalaa Baunaa ass

Oh great so our name is Dante and we just made a pact with some unknown entities who are vaguely ominous and homosexual

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Faust: Wassup dawg ur now leader of the squad

MC: what squad??? WHO ARE YOU???

Faust: Not the people killing you

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OH GOD WHY DOES THE BATTLE MECHANIC LOOK SO SCARY-

Oh god I’m not understanding shit. Can’t wait to overlevel and just be op

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Panther: 0 stars on Yelp, shit theatre kid performance, will not be going back

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Ah yes a clock with a time gimmick very unexpected much wow very woah

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The CG art is so cool, fully how it’s different than the sprites

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MC is fr deciding trust purely off vibe checking people

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MC: why is everyone calling me Dante?

Faust: It’s your name

MC: Nuh uh

Faust, ignoring MC: You’ll get used to it

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Gregor: ay Buddy just to start off with, I’m not judging with anyone’s representation and what they decide to do with their head yk? Your body ur choice

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Mmm delicious immoral actions and expectations from a higher organization in control the group is forced to rely on. I eat it up every time. Constantine would thrive in this world

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Ishmael: All of your introductions are disappointing as hell. You do know this is us introducing ourselves to a superior right? We’re working right now.

Also Ishmael: I’m Ishmael

LIKE LMAOO????? All that and she also gives an informal introduction. Also the similarities in the way the intro cards treat Sinners and how Arcanists are treated in hit game Reverse 1999

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Heathcliff: Yeah I don’t care about trying to please you or fitting in (proceeds to give one of the only proper self introductions)

HELLOOOO???? If he gets angry we contact HR lmaoooo

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Ok Tsukasa move it on

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Ah yes, the token autistic member, I see you Hong Lu

Ignoring that lady-

Ah another autistic, this time one with an unfortunate but definitely gendered name. Love me a character who just wants to do their job then clock out

Oh ew Dante is French /silly

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MC: wow Meursault you’re really one of the polite people here :)

Meursault: This is the normal reaction for this situation

MC: :)

MC’s thoughts: Something’s deeply wrong with him.

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Outis going on this long chuunibiyou like rant to MC while they have no clue what’s going on still

Outis: I vow to serve you with unrivaled devotion, Executive Manager. My blade is yours to wield.

MC: here I thought you’d be one of the normal ones….

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MC: I mean I want my head back but eh….. eH

Vergilius: smh, I tell you to go to hell and you hesitate? Smh.

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Imagine losing ur head and memories and non-binary company takes you, dies, gets revived, and tells you to literally go to hell

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Faust: Ur strategy game is clearly shit so let me tell you how to improve

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Vergilius: enough useless chatter

No???? Knowing how to revive people is actually incredibly useful?? I need to know how to be doing that

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WE HAVE A FUCKING SANITY BAR??? NOOOOOOOOOOO

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Oh god the designated driver is a speed demon-

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Yeah Kagamine Rin, speak ur truth

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Vergilius is such an antiyapper. Get bro some noise cancelling headphones with the way he hates background dialogue

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Charon: Damn. A missed chance to run someone over.

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AYYYYYYY MILI SONGGG WRAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

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Oh damn it really is a bus and not a train- though to be fair it is like the outer look of a train just compressed into one car

[zorosdimples]

me to myself: the internet will be okay if you don’t post every single thought you have about The Character

also me:

[flamemons]

Izumi is not het-passing

[bookwyrminspiration]

opened a random email in high school now I get college paid for and 2k a semester for being hispanic. I didn’t even do it on purpose

[aurenzo]

Citizen of Tumblr,

Today we come together as a nation to elect our new parliment. This vital and sacred part of our democracy unites us, even in these unprecedented times.

Are you still undecided? Use the Election Values Quiz to see which party aligns with you on the issues:

Reblog to remind fellow citizens to complete their civic duty! Together we keep democracy alive. Thank you.

[secretmellowblog]

I hope tumblr doesn’t die because No other social media site is as good for long, thoughtful, nuanced analyses of media. Yeah tumblr is also full of dumb shallow hot takes and shitposts, but you can make dumb shallow hot takes and shitposts anywhere —-there are no other popular social media sites that let you easily format and share long essays on the media you enjoy, and then have conversations around those long essays.

Fandom on all the other big social websites just seems so utterly …shallow. And it’s not because people on other websites aren’t thoughtful or don’t have deep things to say, but because these sites’ formats do not allow for any kind of long nuanced conversations.

Tiktok? Things have to be crammed into a super short video with an attention grabbing headline, and you can’t hyperlink sources. Instagram? Everything has to be in an image format with strict limits on length, and nothing will be shown to your followers anyway because of how Instagram’s algorithm works, and also no hyperlinks. Twitter? Strict character limits, and if you split it into threads it means someone can retweet a part of your essay completely out of context, and also very little freedom with formatting.

It frustrates me so much. If I go into the Tumblr Les Mis fandom I’ll find really compelling long essays on the original novel (including essays being written for the ongoing book club) on the story’s historical context, or the parallels between different characters and their narrative foils, or the way the politics were defanged for certain adaptations, or the way Victor Hugo’s personal life and failings affected the novel. But on tiktok I’ll get the same five shallow stale jokes from 2013 over and over, or maybe the same “DID U KNO THAT IN THE MUSICAL JAVERT AND VALJEAN SING THE SAME LEITMOTIF” style of basic Intro To Les Mis 101 For Babies media analysis (which is what Tiktok considers deep media analysis), or stale “LOL JAVERT ACTS GAY” style jokes as if we’re living in the early 2000s and calling a character gay is still a funny punchline. And it’s impossible to have any kind of deeper thoughtful discussions than “DID U KNOW <x Kool Fact>” or “lol <shallow observational joke>” on tiktok because the platform just isn’t built for building niche communities around in depth conversations. it’s built to churn out bland generic content for as wide an audience as possible, which means pointing out a small detail like an Easter egg and calling it “cool” is deep media analysis, because you cant have longer more in depth conversations without alienating people. And I hate it. Bc like, it’s not because there aren’t smart clever thoughtful people on Tiktok— there are—it’s because Tiktok isn’t built for these conversations, and anyone who wants to have them has to really fight against the things the website encourages or prioritizes!

Or like, if I go into the LOTR fandom on Tumblr, I’ll find tons of extremely long analysis and fanfic, and analysis of queer readings of the story. On Instagram people will still shriek in terror if you suggest the characters are gay, and most of the popular lotr posts are stale memes recycled from like 2007. There’s really no room for thoughtful media analysis, and even if you did create it, instagram’s algorithm would make sure no one saw your post anyway.

And everyone’s going to say “the algorithm shows you what you’ve seen before so maybe it’s your fault ~” or whatever but i do look for things I want! I do! “The algorithm” doesn’t know me or what I want or value or care about beyond this meaningless surface level.

The only thing that was worthwhile about these sites was the great visual art people were creating, but now the websites are overwhelmed with meaningless soulless machine-generated AI glurge, and it sucks. It just really, really sucks.

I’m honestly confused about why people don’t use tumblr….There’s no character limits! You have freedom with post formatting, and can insert images throughout textposts to illustrate specific points you’re making beneath the paragraphs where they’re necessary! You can add hyperlinks, linking to your sources! People can reblog your entire essay and share it, and then add on with commentary that then becomes part of a larger conversation! People can find your stuff through the tagging system! Reblogging means posts stay in circulation for years instead of being dead 30 minutes after they’re uploaded! If you want to have genuinely interesting text conversations about a piece of media, there really isn’t a better social media website for it anywhere.

To be clear, I’m definitely not saying Tumblr media analysis is *always* clever and thoughtful or etc etc. there are shitposts and nonsense here too (plenty of which I’ve created lol.) I’m saying that Tumblr gives people the tools for in-depth insightful analysis to happen. Whether people choose to do it or not is their own decision XD. But the reason lengthy in-depth conversations and book clubs are even possible here is because Tumblr is built for allowing these conversations to happen, in a way other sites simply aren’t.

It’d really suck if it died, because it’d be a huge blow to…being able to easily find long insightful in-depth media analysis written by fans. I currently don’t think there’s anything that could replace it.

[cadmusfly]

Analysing the Quality of Napoleon's Marshals With Silly Data Science

Let's talk numbers and laugh at funny graphs with missing data!

Other people in this fandom do really lovely detailed information posts, I do weird fanfic, dragon shitposting, body pillow design shitposting and run a stupid Lannes ask rp blog. But! I'm also a programmer with an interest in Numbers, and today we're going to Analyse These Dead Frenchmen with a bunch of screenshots of graphs.

Ethan Arsht published a really interesting article called Napoleon was the Best General Ever, and the Math Proves it., where using data scraped off Wikipedia articles, he creates a statistical model drawing from multiple variables per battle to calculate How Good A General Is At Winning.

Give the article a read, it's great stuff, but if you don't feel like it, he basically applies WAR - "Wins Above Replacement" - which is a value from baseball that measures how many wins a player is worth when compared to a replacement.

So the general's WAR would be how well they compare to a completely average general who replaced them. Yes, as Arsht says, "in other words, I would find the generals’ WAR, in war."

But as he says, this is not a stringent historical analysis and is more of a fun thought experiment. Wikipedia is probably the most comprehensive dataset on this topic that he had access to, but it is Wikipedia the crowdsourced online encyclopedia, so it is going to have holes and inaccuracies. And this was written seven years ago, and the data was collected then, so any updates to these articles since then wouldn't be reflected.

And it's not a perfect model that takes into account everything - it's an approximation, a whole bunch of number crunching. I haven't looked too deeply into how the numbers work exactly, even though I could.

I think that 0 would be "completely and utterly average"? A positive WAR is good, a negative WAR is not. Napoleon is the best general ever at 16.679 WAR, the next highest is Caesar at 7.445 WAR.

(Link, you can hover over each battle and look at each datapoint!)

But I'm interested in Napoleon's marshals. The 26 men he raised up to military nobility! The dramatic assholes who kept arguing with each other. I'll post links for all of them at the end of this, but I won't be screenshotting each of their WAR graphs, just a few.

I'm not entirely sure how the scraper collected the information about what battles a commander is considered in "charge" of - I tried looking at the provided code repository but I am reminded that data science people bless them are not really good at structuring or publishing code and why are all the html pages just straight up saved in the root folder why are the jupyter notebook outputs just uncleared aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Oh yeah this was scraped from seven years ago so current wikipedia pages won't be reflective of what's on the graphs - so we can assume that this is just grabbing stuff from the "Commanders and leaders" part from each individual battle page and collating them into numbers

Anyway let's look at the iron man himself, Davout, considered to be the best of Napoleon's marshals.

(Link)

Heh, here we see the first hole in the dataset - Jena-Auerstedt is considered to be one battle, and Napoleon would like you to think that's the case.

Anyway, pretty good! Let's look at Jean Lannes, the lively Gascon

(Link)

Oooooh, even better than Davout! Helps he didn't go to Russia. Wait, why is Aspern-Essling dated to before Ratisbon, especially when Lannes died in the former?

Let's look at André Masséna, also known as being pretty cool:

(Link)

Damn, neat, though I think there's a lot of omissions here.

Here's Murat:

(Link)

Lol Tolentino, I do like how Murat Peaked there a little bit

But we're forgetting a certain redhead, aren't we?

(Link)

Ouch. But also Waterloo not appearing there, hmmm.

Anyway let's finish off the screenshots with Napoleon's greatest strategist, Jean-de-Dieu Soult, the man that Wellington called a master of the defensive!

(Link)

honestly this is the entire reason why i wanted to write this post

in soult's defense - as a soult defender - he had a pretty shitty army full of conscripts, was isolated, was occasionally pretty bad at adapting tactically to new surprises and had to deal with the english being stubborn fuckers, but he was brilliant in setting things up strategically and forcing the english to catch up through a fighting retreat with a demoralised army, stopping them from closing in on france too

but also the way this graph bullies soult so hard makes me laugh a lot

Anyway, yeah, these graphs are definitely inaccurate and I'm also posting these to see the Napoleonic community on tumblr's reaction to them, but they are a fun way to engage with history!

Just don't take them seriously, and feel free to argue in the tags/comments/reblogs

I could theoretically use this guy's code to rerun this just for the Marshals now - I know my way around some data science code - but I do have a lot on my plate, but it would be a fun experiment!

Marshal WAR Graph Links

Note: So these are under the Wikipedia article names at the time that the web scraper was run seven years ago so some of these names turned out to be different from what they are now and I had to do a bit of digging to fix some

you can definitely tell that the information is incomplete on a lot of these, again i repeat the information was scraped off wikipedia seven years ago

Louis-Nicolas Davout

Jean Lannes

Joachim Murat

Michel Ney

André Masséna

Jean-de-Dieu Soult

Bon-Adrien Jeannot de Moncey (one battle lol)

Jean-Baptiste Jourdan

Charles-Pierre Augereau

Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte aka Charles XIV John of Sweden (Two battles and only Swedish ones I think)

Guillaume Brune

Édouard Mortier (two battles)

Jean-Baptiste Bessières (two battles)

François Christophe de Kellermann (one battle, Valmy)

François Joseph Lefebvre (two battles)

Charles-Victor Perrin (ouch)

Étienne Macdonald

Nicolas Oudinot (lol)

Auguste de Marmont (loll)

Laurent de Gouvion Saint-Cyr

Józef Poniatowski (three battles but hmm. pretty bad but feel like there's too much missing info here)

Emmanuel de Grouchy (two battles, can't make a Where's Grouchy joke)

Marshals Without Graphs Not because they didn't command anything but I couldn't find their graphs on the website or in the code repo

Catherine-Dominique de Pérignon

Jean-Mathieu-Philibert Sérurier

Louis-Gabriel Suchet (wtf? maybe seven years ago the documentation on him was sad)

EDIT: wait i was looking at the notebook (the uh place where the code was being run, to see if i could run the code myself)

soult is one of the lowest ranked generals overall on this initial list pfftHAHAHhahahahahahahaha

[casuallyferal]

It's been announced that Elon is reflecting on making X membership exclusive, ie where you pay to have an X membership.

With the upcoming death of X, I find myself having meta thoughts about my fandoms, the art community, and where they intersect; and, how much those things radically-and-completely changed after the death of Tumblr -- and still haven't recovered.

(this does relate to Cross!Sans' recent win I prommy just give me a minute)

...

To start off with an example:

Some folks still remember the mass death of Tumblr.

It's hard to describe it to people who didn't see it.

There were actual casualties. Y'all remember that, too? The deaths?

Most of them were because for many people, their ~5-10 years of portfolio disappeared overnight with no recovery. Even for folks who had backups, the little things that mattered most, like reblog-chains, had been compromised. I remember reading a vent post that stuck w/ me of a college applicant sobbing because their blog was going to be their portfolio to apply, and the needed morning, it was gone. They lived through an abusive home and lost their out. They stopped posting after that.

There are keystone works that now only exist in our minds.

Cornerstones of both fandom and people's real lives were erased by a mega corp afraid of organic Human sensuality, the artist's familiar muse. A kiss, a shirtless photo, a man lounging in the sun, didn't matter. Gone with no explanatory messages. Everything was very unstable about the rules for a disturbingly long time with ghost-edits to the sitewide rules, and vague lettering. If you posted a single dangly bit, you're out. If you posted male or female nypples at any point, you're out. The rules now aren't the rules that were for a little while, long enough to carve up careers and sink fandoms.

As a case study:

Try to understand that if you're a new arrival into an old fandom from the Before Times, like say Undertale,

... you arrived into a fandom carved into quarters.

Everything we cared about and definitive blogs & art pieces vanished. I was temporarily surprised that Cross!Sans won the AU contest instead of the longtime fandom favorites like G!Sans.

For years, he was our fandom mascot.

I had a harrowing realization and began doomscrolling to confirm that nobody can find 👌the showstopping sensuality 👌😩 of G!Sans. It's gone.

G-o-n-e gone, can't find it anywhere, like that mfker into his smoke.

Our fandom values and cultural pillars that we built ourselves were deleted off-site by some Suits.

Everything the young people inherited was bleached-out and fucking sanitized by a corporation. We had no choice but to tolerate that, even as self aware as we were about it.

...this cultural-drift was not because of natural evolution, but because we weren't sterile enough to "make the cut;" and now, it's definitive with a clear before/after gap.

...

I'm of the opinion that the online art community has never really recovered from these repeat events.

It's never been the same:

I see a lot less WIPs unless it's teasing a piece.

I see less reckless abbandon in artwork. There's less scribbles.

There's less breath on the canvas.

People tightened their shit up into hyper polished presentation-pieces.

There's less shitposting in general. People used to post doodles and silly faces and polished pieces were in between.

I think this new media relationship comes from a place of collective hurt. I think many of us realized all society gives a fuck about is money money money money for something that for many of us is a necessary biproduct of being alive. The people who couldn't handle that never came back. They Told Us So when they left, and coincidentally, never came back -- or came back different.

❕ (brief cw cp)

As necessary aside, I'm not lumping in the CP -- it's that every platform has CP, and addressing CP head-on on a platform like Tumblr also meant having regulations that corporate with legal, consensual sensuality, and that's not feasible without endorsing that exists... AND, is deeply influential to many artists. Tumblr wasn't willing to do that.

Tumblr wasn't willing to accept ads from orgs that are okay with that, either.

❕ (cw over)

I feel like this keeps happening... Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter/X... because it comes from a cultural climate of fear towards the veritable Human qualities, some raw, beastial, or even vestigial, of which is the Creative's foundational wellspring. What inspires is often transgressive, and there's no room for such things on a corporate level due to the sterile inhumanity of present day economics. If it's not palettable enough that it can be sold to stockholders with polished floors and dry-cleaned suits, we're a weed between the concrete.

Get too tall and we're seen as a disordered presentation of society instead of just... just, Human. Raw, beastial, vestigially Human.

...

At the end of the day,

our inherently-self-expressive Human potential keeps getting butchered alive by fear of sex & sensuality and love, and the bitter taste of culturally dominant hatespeech; to really spit on the situation, the biggest driver behind both of those is economic. There's a desire knit into the social fabric to squeeeeeeze every fkn penny possible out of an inherently involuntary part of the Creative's experience.

For many, creating freely is a necessary part of a Creative's self-regulation, regardless of whether it's just a hobby or a career path. Creatives create things. We have to or we wilt. It is counter-intuitive to the nature of Wall Street, as it stands, and so it will never favor us -- let alone begin to understand that, without overhaul.

For me, painting is like breathing, I have to do it or I become ill.

...

...It's like... they bottled our air.

Dammed our wellsprings and sell our own work back to us in plastic jugs. Elusive, ominous "they," vague because it's a lottery for whoever plays "them" next; executioner with hanging-rope in hand to strange the creative experience.

There's nothing sacred left when it's all about making money.

...so, where's next?

(: Might as well grit our teeth about it and stay organized. Mastodon, I think? Dreamwidth also? Misskey? Where have you heard? Where do I go, now?

I miss the reblog-artfights and having Tumblr friends before it was deleted by a suit, and I don't want to lose that.

[yinyuedijun]

actually i have more to say abt tokyo vice, particularly the nirei mention

it's really interesting to me that nirei's decided to completely steer clear, bc nirei's current arc in canon revolves so heavily around suo. his self-actualization seems to hinge on his determination to be able to stick out the messes that sakura gets himself into, and suo functions as a vehicle in which he achieves that goal. it's hard to believe That Nirei would refuse to hang around and keep in contact with reader for her safety.

but maybe in this au, bc suo goes off the rails, he also incidentally derails nirei's character development. if so, i have to give you props on being able to ground this au in the context of the existing canon and being able to extrapolate that far.

OR maybe because nirei is self actualized, he's able to put his foor down and draw a boundary that protects himself (and his current loved ones i imagine). in which case, suo has himself to thank for losing nirei. then i feel bad for him again, because he's clearly self-aware enough to understand how that series of events played out. i know he's like Icky and Evil but after that final confession scene i'll pretty much let him slide unforch

am i overthinking? yes.

i just feel like i don't see enough people acknowledge suo and nirei's special little weird thing (imho, its equally if not more strange than whatever sakura and suo have going on)

ps: sorry for blowing up your notifications i think i've just caught suo flu from you :p

HI FERN omg don't apologize, I love this ask and I love that I gave you suo flu <33 YOU ALSO AREN'T OVERTHINKING AT ALL !! I actually did think long and hard about Nirei's place in this universe, because his and Suo's relationship is probably the most important to Suo's canon characterization. (you are so right about it being a special weird little thing LOL)

can I just say I loved your Nirei analysis also?? it's so spot on about the Suo/Nirei relationship. you're right that Suo is a catalyst for Nirei's development, and also, Nirei is the character who reveals the most about Suo! It always did strike me how unnecessarily violent Suo got when Nirei got injured - that's when I was like oh this boy has yandere potential HRGFSLDHSKSH

in terms of your speculation, it's actually the latter scenario that happened in this universe! due to Suo's support, Nirei grew to the point where he can protect himself & his loved ones and also confidently uphold his values, which include a strong sense of justice. Suo taught him to "stand on his own two feet", so to speak. but because Nirei can now do this, he can't abide by Suo becoming the person he has become - which is, at the end of a day, a violent criminal who perpetuates destructive behaviour. (and you're right lol it does torture Suo a lot. he can't help but feel happy about how Nirei has grown, but he is also so lonely and it's his own fault 💔)

I rambled a little bit about this in my shitpost, but I think Nirei did really well at university and became either an investigative journalist or a detective. putting that analytical mind & strong sense of justice to good use, essentially. he was actually the first person from Furin to figure out that Suo had become such a vicious criminal (this is how Sakura knows Suo's identity, because Nirei told him). he has basically been entangled in a homoerotic game of cat and mouse with Suo, where he's been trying to investigate/catch Suo and Suo has been evading him. so he is indeed afraid of Suo now, but the way he handles his fear is actually confrontation with Suo, rather than avoidance (just as how in canon, he confronts people even when he has reason to be afraid). however, this has led to an estranged relationship between them since Nirei is so serious about it.

your point about Nirei & the reader is a really good one!! he actually does keep in touch with the reader, but he can't be heavily involved in their lives anymore because of the homoerotic cat and mouse game. I think he understands also that he can't make the reader leave Suo - the best way to break them up is to actually make Suo face legal consequences for his actions. I think he and Sakura actually had a bit of an intervention with the reader when they were younger (sometime between the ages of 19-22). they basically tried to get her to leave Suo, because they realised that she was at serious risk of being abused by him, but she reacted so badly that neither of them have brought it up since. so Sakura tries his best to stay close to her and help her in-person, whereas Nirei is trying to help her from afar :')

ANYWAY IM SO SORRY ABT HOW MUCH I TALKED LMFOAJDJS my delusions are too powerful 😔 thank you for this ask and for your Nirei takes!! I'm so happy that you're thinking so much about this little AU, and I love reading all your thoughts about it ♥️

[mindibindi]

Was it Perfect? No. Was it Joyous? Yes.

Okay, I did a bunch of shitposting yesterday but now it's time to collect some coherent thoughts on what I liked and didn't about "The Giggle", the Doctors' bi-generation and RTD's HEA.

───── ⋆⋅*ੈ⋆｡✶.ೃ࿔𖦹 ✩₊˚⋆ ─────

Donna: I would’ve liked Donna to have a little more to do in the final ep. She just worked out the arpeggio thing and followed the Doctor round trying to have earnest conversations with him. When she was sat with the Doctor and the Toymaker, I kept thinking she was gonna insert herself into the game and insist she be dealt in too. Instead, it became another case of supernatural male genius vs supernatural male genius. Maybe this is me being greedy though. Because the last ep was ALL DT and CT and the whole anniversary season has been very focused on Donna and the Doctor. They had to make room somewhere for a fabulous villain (which he was), a new Doctor (also fab) and the UNIT ensemble (fab-est of all), so I guess that meant a little less Donna.

Donna did have some great moments, including annihilating those creepy puppets (which made me lol), meeting Mel and refusing to let the Doctor die alone. I do think Donna should’ve been the one to lust after 15 (much like she did when meeting Captain Jack), but maybe this older, settled version of Donna is less thirsty. As for UNIT, no doubt she will be fired regularly but then promptly rehired because she’s so indispensable (and beloved). Best of all, I love the idea of her, Shirley, Mel and Kate going out for post-work drinks while Donna’s two husbands wait at home, tapping their watches and wondering where their ginger chatterbox has gotten to.

Male Parthenogenesis: Now, RTD knows his DW lore far better than I do and apparently there is some precedent for this. But I still say the metacrisis from ep 1 could have been used to better effect in this episode, with Donna essentially healing the Doctor with her excess regeneration energy and Rose creating the new Doctor with her share of the metacrisis/regeneration energy. Because, modern understandings of gender and deep-dive fan knowledge aside, Doctor Who pretty much revolves around the idea of male parthenogenesis, man birthing man, passing on history, tradition, power, experience and greatness. Socioculturally, asexuality is fairly unfamiliar to us, but we are all indoctrinated with patriarchal, heteronormative narratives from birth. And historically, men have expressed their fear and envy of the power and potential of women/pregnant people by attempting to steal it for themselves, control creation myths and birth male gods and monsters. All the while, they completely disavowed (even denigrated) the role women/pregnant people have played in birthing this world. Through the lens of heteronormativity, regeneration offers men and boys eternal power and godlike creativity. So yeah, I would’ve liked a grown woman/mother and a trans girl just coming into her power as a woman to get a little of that regeneration action that usually belongs to the boys (with the exception of 13). Not because women and birth parents are defined by this biological function but because the male urge to own and control birth, creation and reproduction still has very real-world impacts for girls, women, enbys and trans people.  

Bi-generation: So. The big question is: Does bi-generation diffuse the power and pathos of THE Doctor? Yes. Does it follow that this is a bad thing? No. Not necessarily, not in my mind. I am not a fan of showrunners rewriting known history for shock value or fan service, but I’m not sure this is either. I understand the argument that there is power and meaning in the idea of death and rebirth, letting go and moving on, changing and learning with experience. But for all of that to be owned and embodied by one usually male/male presenting person and played by a popular, powerful cis-het male actor is a problem embedded in this show from the get. NuWho has consistently made an effort to alleviate the inherent power imbalance built into the format, distributing the incredible power of the Doctor amongst a community of extra/ordinary human beings. Some showrunners have been able to do this better than others. That said, we’ve also had a good long stint of the Doctor being a singular, tortured genius who no one quite understands, no one can ever really equal. Whatever gifts companions and their families bring, the Doctor will always be bigger, older, wiser, eternal. But, through the magic of bi-generation, his power can be shared, his centrality dispersed, his reach limited, his experience idiosyncratic, and his knowledge discrete.

Over the years, the Doctor has accrued a lot of trauma and tragedy and suffering and longing, all by virtue of this incredible power. This burden was never been more wetly portrayed than by DT so it’s fitting that he be the one to release both the power and the burden of the sad, wet, lonely Timelord by SHARING IT, by becoming plural rather than singular. It may not feel satisfying, partially because it feels unfamiliar. The trope of the lone tortured genius is recognisable and relatable. We know it well, from so many narratives. Personally, I can’t imagine Ncuti Gatwa as a lone tortured genius. I want him to have a new joyous start. And hey, if you miss the tortured Doctor then 15 has all of time and space in which to once again start accruing trauma and tragedy. But I think it’s good, and time, for 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14 to drop their load and come down to earth. No longer a god, an avenging angel, an objective overseer, but essentially, a human being. Which is kinda what he/she/they wanted to be all along. This IS the death of one version of this show, one version of this character, but it isn’t being offered without regeneration and rebirth right there on the horizon.                   

Happily Ever After: RTD is not like other showrunners. He’s a bold and marvellous beast who isn’t afraid to change things up, especially when they’re not working or have outlived their usefulness. We’re often told that happy endings are trite, trivial, insignificant, unrealistic. Drama, tragedy, sorrow and suffering: that’s where all the weight and meaning of life lies. And look, RTD can write tragedy and pathos as well if not better than the best of them. He could have given us “Journey’s End” or “The End of Time” redux. He could have given twisted and complicated and harrowing. He chose not to. Because, unlike SO MANY SHOWRUNNERS, RTD knows when to write an ending, when to resolve tension, when to heal wounds. It’s common practice, especially in the American television industry, to just…never end, never resolve, never stop, never state, never land. To just flog a creative horse until it drops dead. (At least, this was the television I grew up with; streaming services have altered this model somewhat.)

Doctor Who is exactly the kind of intellectual property that could’ve (and could still under Disney) fall victim to the capitalistic urge for moremoremoremoremoremoremore, despite the fact that such endlessness eventually exhausts creativity and, with it, audience interest. A capitalist never wants the revenue stream to end. But a real writer, a true creator is bold enough to know where to place a well-timed full-stop. In my opinion, RTD read the room and wrote an ending. An ending that the show and the world needed. An ending that shared power. An ending that celebrated ordinary humanity. An ending that healed trauma and prioritised love. An ending that still allows for new life, new potential, new discoveries, new structures, new understandings, and new joy. All of that is totally on-brand for RTD. Those themes of multiplicity, humanity, healing, love and possibility pervade the 60th anniversary specials from beginning to end. They were built into the fabric of each episode. And they’re also the very essence of Doctor Who.     

[yutzen]

The Mandatory(?) Masterpost

Welcome to my page! ...again. Website shutdowns aren't going to stop my sinful hands, but hopefully that won't be a problem.

Expect stories about weird underground creatures and their troubles most of all, but there will be other tales to be told here (and possibly actual illustrations in the future, but that's gonna take a while). A lot of this started as prompt stories spun completely out of control (this will be a recurring theme), so be warned about that one. I'll be outlining what I have under the break to browse more easily if you want to see more, as well as providing a couple extra links if you want to read my work in other sites (or just follow me elsewhere too). Here goes!

First things first: Other accounts to track me in

Archive Of Our Own (I'll probably link to it for cross-posts. Also contains stories that are either too 18+, too fanfic or too personal for me to toss out here)

DreamWidth (May be easier to read)

BlueSky (Maybe you want to be updated easier, but obviously I can't post whole stories there)

Next up: Tags to keep track of when it comes to my stuff. This will probably be the main way for me to sort these things out, since I got used to it back on Cohost and still know the value of proper tagging. Much as there's a few other things I don't know.

#yut-fiction - Any story I actually write will be going under this, no matter the origin

#yut-musings - This one's gonna be stray thoughts and occasional shitposts probably.

#subterraneum (yut) - Subterraneum stories, no matter who they follow and where they're set

#subterraneum: lightless road - Subterraneum stories following what I call the main crew.

I also keep individual characters diligently tagged whenever they recur (or I think they may recur), if that helps!

Finally: Stories so far! I will try to keep this updated but feel free to hit me with a question or comment if I forget anything in the future.

The Subterraneum: Lightless Road - Days in the life of an outlaw gang, plying their trade across the seemingly caverns that form the Subterraneum, the world beneath worlds

A White-Knuckle Climb

The Hard Way

Where the Thrills Lie

Left in the Cold

Reminiscing by Candlelight

Trial by Fire

Of Silk and Fangs

Where the Heart Is

The Subterraneum: Restless Compendium - The caverns are grand, and full of mysteries, and with mysteries come those eager to figure them out for the world to see. Here are fragments from the work of one such individual, one only known by the title of "Ever-Restless Nirrhamidh"

A Quick Biological Primer on Subterraneum Citizens (not in character)

Rock Bottom: The Subterraneum and its Known Exits

The Last Time Around

The Tree and the Worm

Perfect Echoes

Until the Rains Come

The Subterraneum: Other Tales - Day-to-day life in the caverns can be quite a thing. Here, a smattering of tales about other individuals, away from smuggler and scholar alike.

Rainbows in the Dark

Party-Crasher

Just Prime

The Events of Windchime Hill

What's in a Name?

A Raven's Rambles - Just because you're a grand necromancer hungry for conquest and treasure doesn't mean you can't have off days. Here, a few less serious stories about Raven Lord Kaspar Swartrabe and his faithful shrike, Al-Kaud.

Animal-Proofing

Cramped, or Cozy?

Written in Blood(?)

Other stories - One-shots unrelated to any of the above. For now; just about everything before this point started as a one-shot too, once.

The Silver Revolution - In which a dragon finds himself involved in politics just for doing what he always did

More Times than You Could Count - In which an ever-stretching series of time loops is finally put to an end

The Rise and Fall of the Emporium - In which the idea of mid-dungeon shops is given a closer look

[tangibletechnomancy]

But really the thing that gets me about the "AI art isn't REAL art" argument-

More than the fact that this is a complete subjective non-argument, more than the fact that attempts to MAKE it objective inevitably lead to...dark places-

Is the fact that, fine, even if we agree that AI generation isn't INHERENTLY art, that's not going to take away the fact that humans fucking love taking "non-artistic" things and MAKING art out of them.

Look at ASCII art - that's "just" typing characters. Fractal art is a modern iteration of a long, LONG tradition of coloring math to make art. People ascribe meaning to found items and call them art - to broad agreement - all the time. Hell, this website itself has a whole subculture of shitposting artistic presentation into anything from candy wrappers to dog pee, or finding the value in art someone dreamed up and dismissed as nonsense upon waking.

So, sure, by one of my two own personal definitions of Art (1. Something someone creates or presents to project an idea; 2. Something someone finds Meaning in; i.e., potentially anything), yeah, I agree that, say, a generic portrait generated with no real intent beyond "look good on a shelf", because a Midjourney credit cuts into profits less than actually hiring an artist, to fill out a cover for Nepo Baby Cash Grab YA Book Of The Week isn't really Art. But what of when someone gives it an abstract prompt for the sake of seeing what the math engine produces in trying to make sense of it? What of when they find a result and spend 5 hours running it through multiple models, creating meaning in the chaos with every step? What of when someone shitposts up a storm, prints it out, and builds on top of it in the physical world? What of when someone uses it as a meditation on what latent space "looks" and "feels" like? What of when the flaws of the medium are the point? What of when the point is found in the fact that the computer doesn't know how absurd any given prompt is and just creates it anyway?

What if someone with hallucinations decides to take photos and img2img them into a deliberately imperfect approximation of what they see?

What if someone takes photos of their childhood play spots and img2img's them into what they imagined?

What if someone just challenges themself to take this "unartistic" medium and run wild with it for a full 24 hours to create one piece and a full meaning they can ascribe to it?

What if someone makes a whole series of art about jailbreaking the walled gardens of corporate AI?

This isn't a theoretical thing someone COULD do but no one IS - none of this is uncommon in the hobbyist space, because again, human beings will make art out of anything. ANYTHING. It's just what people do!

The Great Cosmic Tomato, created using img2img on a public domain photo of the planet Pluto from NASA's New Horizon's mission Generated under the Code of Ethics of Are We Art Yet?

[andthemouseroared]

I am officially at the "playing virtual Barbie dolls with Ashley by seeing how many different cute outfits I can dress her in" stage of my life with RE4make.

I have decided Ashley is far and away the most fashionable of all the protagonists.

She's the only one who can do midcentury European college student, everyday casual, anime waifu, scenester, emo, professional businesswoman girlboss, eGirl, debutante socialite, foreign diplomat, Actual 18th Century Princess, modern punk and 80s wastelander metalhead and rock them all perfectly. A fitting tribute to her influencer faceclaim.

Believe me, you have not lived until you've seen Ashley spinning kick a Ganado's head into the ground fully decked out in an 18th century ballgown.

Now in true Ashley fashion, this is a shitpost that also reveals some important truths about who The Mouse is as a person.

Fashion is something that's really important to me. I do a lot of vintage and indie clothes shopping, and my style is one of my favourite ways to express myself. Like any form of creative expression, a person's fashion sense can tell us a lot about who they are and what they value. For someone as fashion-forward as Ashley, her style being so versatile and freeform (either officially, through mods, or both) can tell us she perhaps has an equally diverse range of interests and skills: It's even canon she can randomly drive a forklift for reasons which very pointedly go completely unexplained.

This isn't like Jill's locksmithing or her occasional thick Los Angeles accent, which in canon do seem like genuine oversights or boring deus ex machina: Ashley being able to operate heavy machinery or being secretly a scene girl seem like deliberate Noodle Incidents on the part of the writers and designers.

So Ashley has hidden depths, and she's also a bit of a troll with an offbeat sense of humour XD

Taken together, this all makes Ashley come across as unusually developed for a video game protagonist of this type for me: She has a lot of seemingly intentionally dropped threads that seem to hint at a wider backstory that isn't going to be told. She's never coming back in another game or movie, but from a fanfic author/RPer's perspective it's one of the things that make her a lot of fun to think about and play with.

I suppose one could argue these are really all just jokes about how Ashley is often seen as a stereotype (the canon content, anyway), but I choose to read them otherwise, if for no other reason than because Ashley's taken enough flak over the past two decades.

[peridoxikal-redux]

Okay so after posting my prior shitpost I realized I actually had never...properly introduced Sihan as an oc here? So, buckle up. This one is a bit complicated and bumpy.

Very massive warning beforehand that he is, blatantly supposed to be based on predatory people I have met in life or behaviors that I had witnessed. Down to pretty blatant misogyny.

To put it simply, in terms of backstory, Sihan was born to a very successful family. His mother was an opera singer, and his father was a successful diplomat. Sihan had decided early in life that he wanted to be like his father, so he pursued being a diplomat too, and would be aided by a magical circlet he found while walking home from school that allowed him to control the mind of nearly anyone that had become emotionally compromised.

As an adult, he utilizes his good looks and status as a Hera/Zarbon race hybrid to intimidate either by charm or implied strength. He's become a revered diplomat on the planet cluster he resides on to the point of being a celebrity. Though, beneath his charismatic exterior, he's become a man obsessed with having a wife from every known race in the universe that isn't extinct. But, instead of trying to date them, Sihan merely finds a woman who is in a pretty bad emotional state and takes control of her, basically turning her into a mindless zombie that only follows his orders until the magic controlling her is lifted. He's....known for appraising his 'wives' on their physical features to determine their value and is happy to ensure that it'll be impossible for any of their loved ones to save them.

He's very much a despicable man, and despite how pathetic he may seem when backed into a corner, he's well acquainted with knowing how to maniuplate others and completely ruin their psyches. He's extremely dangerous, and knows that his fame will ensure he gets few to no consequences for his actions.

.....He also hates wearing closed toe shoes and any clothes that aren't very baggy.

[cold--carnage]

Ben says the most out of pocket crazy shit and somehow never sees its comedic value but I cherish it all because it brings me joy that he's a shitpost generator completely by accident

[sapphire-weapon]

Sorry to dump this in your ask box but Chreon makes me so fucking weakkkk. The mutual understandings, the mutual respect, the inherent trust, the shared values, the mutual friends, the absolutely batshit amazing sex. I would shave my head and gorge my eyeballs for Chreon to become explicitly canon in an alternate universe.

Okay, hold up. I'm not trying to shitpost at you when I ask:

Do you really think sex would be amazing between Leon and Chris?

Because I don't. And that's not to say that I think it'd be bad, either. I just feel like...

idk maybe it's because I'm an old person; I'm injecting too much of my old person perspective in this. But.

I feel like, by the time Leon and Chris would ever feasibly get together, both of them would be at an age where sex is just the lowest priority in terms of what's important to them in a relationship, because they don't have the libido that they used to and they'd prefer to get their intimacy in other ways.

Like, their priority list for a relationship goes:

creates a calm environment/provides peace of mind

someone I can connect with intellectually

trusts me and who I can trust unconditionally, without question or issue

values align with my own

shared interests

understands/matches my lifestyle

hot sex

Especially for Chris, man, like his body's gotta be beat to shit by this point.

idk I see them as being the type of comfy, friends-first, older couple that maybe has sex a handful of times a month -- if even that frequently -- because it's just not a priority for them. And when they do fuck, it's great, and they don't have any desire to stray from each other, but it's not like... show-stopping, mind-blanking, voice-cracking amazing.

I mean unless we're shipping them at around the RE4/RE5 point in the timeline. Then that's a completely different ballgame LMAO

But whenever I think Chreon, I think early 40s.