#except inasmuch as like

[whetstonefires]

I will say I have no real problem being okay with Chrestomanci being a positive figure who also believes in spanking for extreme misbehavior (iirc the thing Cat gets hit for is having supposedly committed assault on one of the servants and Gwendolyn was also getting spanked for something that could probably get her sent to jail) because the setting is a pseudo-edwardian one where it would be sort of weird if he didn't consider that an option on the table, and he is at no point intended to be read as a flawless person.

In fact, the plot of Charmed Life is in many ways Christopher Chant mishandling the interpersonal situation until it escalates to murder and insurrection.

The physical chastisement explicitly was the wrong thing to do, and achieved the opposite of his aims, and he apologizes later, albeit very casually.

The plot of Lives of Christopher Chant, his origin story, is even more emphatically the story of Christopher making bad decisions about who to trust and communicating very badly, until everything reaches a crisis point. Conrad's Fate also features Christopher largely making situations worse.

He's good at his job and generally means well on the whole, but he's very intentionally written as kind of a dick who's capable of charm but not actually good with people, and is used to getting his way.

On the other hand, the backstory book was written later and one of the few ways his parents didn't fuck up was they never hit him, and no one at his boarding school did either, which retroactively makes the ear-boxing scene in Charmed Life more bizarre. I think he gets hit once in the whole book. Outside of being killed; the cricket bat incident doesn't count.

Also there is internalized sexism in it, sometimes it really pops, but the recurring motif of very fake very pretty extremely controlling women as her main style of female villain is also very much a realistic depiction of what the most effective female abusers act like, and how they get away with it. I'm partway through T. Kingfisher's new A Sorceress Comes to Call that's built around such a villain for the same reasons.

(There are male villains in Jones' books built on the same model, like Uncle Ralph, doing the same things but with slightly different tools because gender affects your practical options in a gendered society.)

Which I think is very appropriate for children's fiction? Children are the people most likely to experience this form of abuse and need perspective on it.

Because a lot of Jones' work is in the same category as like, Steven Universe, where if you forget the intended audience is under the age of thirteen and it is largely concerned with the kinds of life experiences you have as a child, you will have trouble reading it in good faith.

The bit I always struggle with is the bigtime of-her-generation belief that the ideal male love interest is about ten to fifteen years older than the heroine, apparently so he can be masculinely high-handed and confident and mildly condescending, and it's justified by the difference in life experience rather than just his being a prick, a strongminded woman can believably live with it.

And like, this formula is not dead; Naomi Novik has at least two instances of this kind of 'ship in work published since Jones died, although with massively larger age gaps because the annoying men are magic. But it's not usually pursued with intensity anymore outside of contexts where the power difference is being fairly explicitly eroticized, so when you see women of her generation upholding it as aspirational in normal contexts, it is very uncomfortable from a modern feminist perspective.

seeing ppl holding up Diana Wynne Jones as a more progressive alternative to JKR when u know the Terrible Secret (that 1 instance of egregious homophobia) but there's no point bringing it up bcos it's in 1 single instance in a book that's out of print so who gives a shit but also like. you know.

[sufficientlylargen]

Can someone explain to me why the idea of Automattic selling data to Midjourney is so awful?

I get that people don't want their posts and art being used to train generative models but... they already are being used to train generative models. If you make something public on the internet, then you can't stop anyone from scraping it and add it to a training set (there's no such thing as DRM that works against a well-funded opponent), and as I understand it all the big "AI" companies are already doing this.

So it seems like Tumblr is basically telling Midjourney etc. "Hey, wouldn't you like to get this data without having to process out the noise from webscraping? We'll give you cleaner data if you A) pay us and B) don't mind that we're going to let users opt out of it."

Shouldn't this be strictly better than the alternative, which is "Midjourney etc. just keep scraping all publicly available data regardless of what users want and also Tumblr doesn't have enough money to cover its operating expenses"? What am I missing here?

[asinglesock]

If you see me posting motivational memes in excess please forgive me

[anonymusbosch]

.

[dandelionsandderivatives]

Look, there's nothing inherently wrong with writing fanfiction for something you've never seen/read/engaged with. It's not morally wrong.

That said, I can't imagine why anyone would want to do that???

I mean, why spend your precious and limited free time writing something you don't care about? If you're making your living off it, that's one thing, but fanfiction?

I haven't come across this irl yet, but I also can't imagine it would be a super good/interesting experience for the reader, except as a kind of anthropological study to see how much canon a fandom-blind writer can absorb.

This is something I'm seeing more and more on AO3 that I'd never seen when I first got into fandom stuff, so I wanted to find out how you all feel about it.

What are your thoughts about seeing posted fanfiction that isn't commissioned, where the creator says that they have never read/watched the source material? For example, someone putting out a fanfic for a show they've never watched that includes the tag Author Has Never Seen Suchandsuch.

[ergativeabsolutive]

Actually i think i have one unified trans-gender (not this: 🏳️‍⚧️) type instead of separate types for men and women. i’m just really into oddly precocious and nerdy autistic twinks and dykes who either have worrying behavioral problems or an adventurous free spirit if not both, are funny, do drugs, whose family members inevitably come to regard me as a positive influence, and who think my interests are based and have based interests of their own. it’s that simple really.

[marley-manson]

Hawkeye dgaf about BJ's marriage except inasmuch as it makes BJ happy. He has no personal investment in it. In Hanky Panky he thought the idea of BJ fucking Donovan was funny and worth nothing more than lighthearted teasing until BJ turned out to be genuinely upset about it. He's happily friends with many cheaters and willing to fuck married people himself (except when he wants to marry them himself, ie Radar's Report).

When BJ demonstrates that 85% of his character is 'married' Hawkeye backs that marriage up 100% for his sake, but imo if BJ wanted to get a divorce, Hawkeye would back that decision up too, easily. If BJ wanted to fuck him, the only reason Hawkeye might not be down is because BJ could react badly and it could ruin their friendship and he's got a practical side to him, not because he genuinely cares about the sanctity of BJ's marriage.

And I think this is in keeping with other Hawkeye characterization where he tends to prioritize what other people value when it's relevant to making them feel better and supporting them. He's an agnostic but he validates Mulcahy's religious beliefs when he needs validation, he'll tell Radar either that it's awesome to not fuck or that he should go out and get laid depending on what Radar's upset about in any given episode, he cares about his patients a lot and wouldn't even defend himself when one attacked him but he's extremely cool about Mulcahy straight up punching a patient, etc.

Which, yk, is basic supportive character characterization, but he's got it more than other Mash characters imo, and I like it, and it makes a lot more sense to me than Hawkeye being a marriage cheerleader because he thinks marriage is awesome (he generally seems negative to on the slightly positive side of neutral at best on the concept) or because he's scared of BJ choosing him instead and sublimates that into marriage cheerleading. After all, this is the guy who seizes every romance dangled in front of him with both hands even if it is obviously doomed, and isn't repressed about anything to the point where the writers need to rely on actual traumatic amnesia to prevent him from discussing his problems immediately.

[pancake-breakfast]

Post-Imposter Factory, I think I have a clearer picture of the relationship between Neil and Eva. It's clear from the get-go that they're good friends who've been around each other enough to both know exactly what buttons to push and to forgive a lot of button-pushing. But finding out about Neil's history with his mother puts things in better perspective.

Eva's always acted like she's kind of given up on Neil. Like whatever hope she's had for him has been cast aside due to his flippant nature. And that's probably true. What goes overlooked is that his flippancy is this coping mechanism he's developed to keep people at arm's length specifically because he expects to die young from the same disease that took his mother.

He cares deeply about Eva, but has a hell of a time showing it because, to him, caring about someone includes keeping them from the eventual heartbreak of losing him. He's asking himself a lot of the same questions his mom asked herself; in particular, is it worth it to try and build a life with someone else when you have such limited time?

He also has his dad's tendency to embrace the moment, but it seems like he's taken that to the exact kind of extreme his dad was worried about taking it himself, where he's so focused on the moment that he forgets to look at the bigger picture.

Which isn't to say Neil never looks at the bigger picture. He's clearly been plotting stuff with his special machine for ages. But when he looks at that bigger picture, it's never something he looks at with the thought of how others might help him with it. They have to take the Roxie path and sort of force their way there.

The problem is, Eva's not the force-her-way-in type. Or perhaps inasmuch as she is, she's tired of trying to force her way into Neil's life. She's decided all she's done for him and with him thus far is enough... except it isn't. She wants more from him, for him, and for them. But she no longer knows how to ask for it (if she ever did to begin with), and that seems to weigh on her.

Anyway, I'm glad they've suggested this isn't the last game in the series. Looking forward to more of their story.

[txttletale]

I hope you don’t mind me asking, but how could someone like you, who otherwise has such based opinions, be a fan of Stalin? How do you reckon with his crimes? Especially when Trotskyism is right there for you to follow instead?

i'm not a 'fan' of stalin--i don't consider myself a 'fan' of any historical person. i would not even consider myself a 'fan' of people whom i admire, who have seriously influenced my thinking with their theory (e.g. lenin). and for much the same reason i am not a 'fan' of stalin i feel no need to reckon with 'his' crimes--he was just one person. stalin neither 'perpertrated the purges' nor 'starved ukraine' nor 'industrialized the USSR' nor 'defeated nazism'. he would have had to be a very busy man to execute all those folks and eat all that grain and mine all that coal and kill all those fascists on his own!

i think inasmuch as stalin personally influenced policy in the USSR, he mostly did so for the worse (e.g., encouraging a lot of the social reaction of the 30s in regards to LGBT and women's rights and national minorities, standing by lysenko long after it became clear that his theories were bullshit) -- where he did so for the better, it was usually because he recognised the value of adopting the positions of someone who was a better and more capable theorist. so i don't care for the lionization of the man that goes on in some circles.

however, i'm not interested in condemning him as some cartoonish supervillain either. if you have gotten the impression that i am a 'fan' of stalin, it is likely because i refuse to repeat anticommunist propaganda about how he killed One Gazillion People, because i sharply shut down anybody i see trying to propagate the fascist double genocide myth, because i think that the positive achievements of the USSR in the 1930s and 1940s--improving the lives of millions, performing one of the fastest industrializations in history, defeating German fascism--are impressive and laudable and refusing to learn from them because of a fear of 'stalinism' (something which i don't think meaningfully exists or ever did) is misguided and counterproductive, and because i think that the failures of that period are better understood as the results of the legacy of russian chauvinism and of the strain on soviet political systems caused by the civil war and wwii rather than the liberal conception of history where stalin, god-emperor of russia, unilaterally decided to Be Evil because he was a Sicko

as for why i'm not a trotskyist, i've covered that here. i simply don't think that any of trotsky's critiques were useful to anybody except the US empire, i think most of trotsky's theoretical positions are wrong, and i've had nothing but deeply deeply negative interactions with trotskyist organizations in the real world.

[skrunksthatwunk]

kinda thinking about how the women who serve as maternal figures/raise kids in yyh are never quite ready for it. genkai's an arguable exception, but like.. atsuko had yusuke at 15, shizuru's basically in charge of kazuma full time in her early 20s/late teens (depending on version) with very very absent parents, and even shiori is given a kid she wasn't expecting, in the form of an old, old demon rather than like. a regular, blank slate ass human baby. and although shiori seems to do quite well with kurama, kurama can never be honest with shiori about who he is, or much of what he's seen. if he was, it'd probably make things far more complicated and overwhelming. atsuko, no matter how much she cares for yusuke, Could Not Have Been and thus wasn't ready to have him at 15. her attempts to make the most of that situation have had middling success at best. shizuru has also been placed into a parental role. we don't really know how long she's been raising kuwabara, but that's.. probably still parentification anyway. she shouldn't have to do that, and she shouldn't have to do that so young. and i think some of her coarseness with kuwa is out of frustration with her own inexperience + inadequacy + uncertainty, his not cooperating, and their parents for putting this on her in the first place. the ones who know the full extent of their situation grow desperate and it squeaks out in unpleasant ways, and the one who seems unbothered by it is the only one who has no idea that she's in way over her head. and i mean. ok. gonna preface this by saying keiko is NOT yusuke's mom in any sense of the word. but she does take care of him in a way atsuko couldn't manage to. she's often looking after him and cleaning up after his messes and stuff. she takes him on as a responsibility, and that is, in a way, a caretaker role. not to say that it SHOULD be her responsibility, but it's how she ends up being.

and when the stress of trying to make someone take care of themselves or be kind or good or Whatever goes awry, again, the violence and arguing and distance and ugliness of caring for someone reveals itself.

and i wonder about that. for a series dedicated to physical fighting as a form of communication, what does it say that this extends to the complicated, quietly desperate situations of so many of the women/girls it depicts, whom our more central characters were shaped and raised by?

hell, even hiei touches on this, because hina loved hiei, but there was no way she was prepared for him, obviously, nor for the pain of losing him. rui (whom i also see as a sort of caretaker figure to hiei, inasmuch as either of them were caretakers) literally throws him off a cliff because she couldn't face down the village elders, and out of some mixture of care for hina and, likely, fear for her own survival. and the guilt and pain of that killed hina and deeply wounded rui.

it's like motherhood, this thing that's so often treated as sacred and beautiful, is a kind of stitched up, painful, eggshell-walking thing that hurts parent and child and it's just. oughh

[mathlann]

Requisite Disclaimer: I don't see the point in keeping this OC specific but, my game isn't your game etc. etc. I'm coming from a Sub! Marazhai perspective for context but just my interpretation.

So I've been rotating that Act 5 Kiss in my head for too long but I think I've pinned down what makes the Act 5 Kiss work, for me at least. Because inasmuch as the "Marazhai hates kissing" thing is fun, I don't think the actual Act of kissing (with or without teeth) is really what he's objecting to that first time. It's that the Rogue Trader is messing up the Game (ie, the terms of their fling/him teaching them how to be more Drukhari). And I think the Act 5 Kiss, or rather how you get it, is a fun bookend on ending the Game/re-balancing the dynamic?

Long-ass ramble under the cut

So, like I was saying above, the RT and Marazhai's relationship is pretty explicitly a Game that he's playing out of boredom. The Rogue Trader receives "[an education on] the true Aeldari soul" he receives "a fleeting titillation" until it's time for him to become Archon/become a Merc/join the clown show, whatever. He initiates the proposition, and he's the one setting the terms through the whole thing. It's up to the Rogue Trader to stay in their role and meet his standards, or they give up, or he gets bored and leaves. And a major part of his romance is that he's very action over words in regards to what he wants and how he feels.

As far as the first two kisses go, it's not the act itself it's the context imo. The first (bitey) kiss, he initiates, and it's during the lust/murder-high part of the Feast, which is what he invited the Rogue Trader to do. The Kiss Attempt™ by the Rogue Trader is the next morning after all that's worn off. And, granted the scene itself is pretty cozy, considering (he's literally leaning over the RT and telling them not to keep him waiting ie, next hookup) so it makes sense why the Rogue Trader might decide a goodbye kiss is appropriate. But it's a misstep I think because it's too intimate, bordering on sentimental, which is very much not the Drukhari way of doing things (it shows weakness). You aren't lovers in that way, the Rogue Trader is a toy/a pet, fun time is over and he's headed out. To try to pretend more than that is past the Game and an expression of weakness that needs to be put in its place as a "mon-keigh absurdity" as he'd say.

Compare that to the Branding, which is much more his style. It is, for all intents and purposes, a commitment scene, but he doesn't actually say "I want this," he's decided that the Rogue Trader has earned it from him. He talks around, but doesn't even explicitly say, he wants the RT to brand him either, (if asked, best he gives is "well....I mean after I've been so ~submissive~ you would let me just walk around without???? 👀"). And he threatens to walk out if the Rogue Trader keeps asking too many questions because again, he's the lead here and to say so would be to play his hand, which is a major no. If he grabs the RT like he's going to brand them....and it just so happens they have a mighty easy time grabbing that knife from him....well, there's the answer, no words needed. And if the Rogue Trader doesn't grab the knife, well, there's his answer. Y'all don't need to see each other anymore.

Which also makes the final Feast/Big confession hit the way it does because it is the first and only time he's being very direct in how he feels and what he wants, ie. they're equals and he wants the to keep up *all of this* for as long as they've got. And...that's a slip up irt his control of the situation/the Game that the Rogue Trader can exploit. To see:

And for extra juice, the actual threaten to break up line after this is "I am not interested. I think I have played enough with you" which is a nice reversal ie. "testing the limits of who is running the Game." Because if Marazhai's confession is a test, accepting fails it, they were too sentimental. Except he's not actually testing them and he gets genuinely upset and scared at the idea that the Rogue Trader would just leave him like that. Also, (at time of writing iirc), you can't get The Kiss™ if you didn't attempt it earlier at the first Feast. I think it's interesting if, perhaps, that bit of sentimentality made him assume the Rogue Trader was the one who was down bad/being sappy this whole time. Which was fun to play around with before, but now he's caught feelings and the Rogue Trader potentially out-manipulating him on that front only to "abandon" him now is a major blow to his, being, frankly.

And if the Rogue Trader pushes further with the "I do not hear enough pleading in your voice" line, the narration notes he's stuck between "despair and pride" while still refusing to say more because it's not in him to say what he wants with that kind of honesty. And again, like, he's Drukhari so you're never going to get an "I love you" out of him, and he wouldn't accept that from the Rogue Trader in turn, but he doesn't know how to otherwise show that because Drukhari aren't big on straightforward lovey dovey kiss stuff even when they actually feel it. So the Kiss™, a real (romantic) one is an olive branch in the "you don't have to say it but I'll believe you're being honest if you do this" sense but also the Rogue Trader winning irt "the Game is over, show me we're equals, I met you on your level (see: his bullshit), meet me on mine (mon-keigh absurdities)."

[decepti-thots]

☕ MTOs & specifically what do you think they were going for with that?

MTOs are an interesting narrative thing to me in the sense that they really are so localised to only one part of the canon; they're very clearly Roberts' idea and only really matter, inasmuch as they do matter, in MTMTE. It's pretty clear to me that's the case for one specific reason: they'd actually fit SUPER well into the narrative arc of exRiD, especially early-to-mid RiD, but they basically never come up! You'd think 'neutrals and soldiers stuggling to cohabit socially and politically' would be prime fodder (lmao) for taking advantage of a narrative about mechs born of and into war coming back to a civilian life on a planet they really don't know. And yet.

What they're doing in that comic, in MTMTE, is a little headscratching to me at times. It feels, to be honest, somewhat like worldbuilding put in to make the texture of the backstory of the war feel grander than IDW had really managed up to that point in actual on-panel stuff, without a lot of thought when doing so in the moment as to the knock on implications going forward. MTMTE does this a few times, tries to use vague gestures at important sounding stuff to bring a greater sense of history and depth to the war in the face of the actual stuff we saw in phase one being. Mmmm. Basically just twenty dudes we already know shooting at each other across parking lots. LMAO.

(Sidenote: I know for a fact Roberts watched original flavour nuWho, and this is PEAK Russell T Davies doing worldbuilding when he was on Doctor Who, and I fully believe he was cribbing from that playbook. Every damn episode RTD would make them just sort of say stuff about the Time War that made it sound incredibly vast and textured and complex but which, crucially, never made any actual fucking sense. Good examples of stuff like this would be the Crucible, the Simanzi massacre, etc. This is, to be clear, a neutral observation, not praise or criticism per se.)

I say this because MTOs should probably be a bigger deal in terms of the impact on our cast, and their outlook on life and reasons for joining the quest, than they wind up being. An MTO is a character with no experience of living in peacetime at all, likely no experience of Cybertron, no sense of kinship or home necessarily to the planet they came "back" to. All of this provides a really clear motivation, given the implication most surviving non-neutral Cybertronians are now MTOs due to huge numbers of deaths, to join a quest like the Lost Light's! But it tends not to come up much, and I think it's because it wasn't really part of the plan. Later on, there's room to slot in some details here and there- Riptide talking about his experiences with being infodumped at by the 'training' comes to mind- but it takes a while for the comic to come back round to that.

The two big exceptions, of course, are Getaway and Brainstorm. The idea is definitely interacting with their characters more, though again, it... tends to come up later. Especially for Getaway, who I'm not convinced was originally conceived as an MTO, but had it slotted in a bit later as 'well that works' stuff tbh. (And it does, so that's fine!) Which leaves Brainstorm, who lies about being forged to throw off suspicion, who it's implied never got the time of day from Quark in a way I wouldn't be surprised we're supposed to assume is some kind of remaining bias, perhaps. Who didn't see a future for himself 'back on Cybertron' and so concocted a very weird plan to avoid having to. Who never got a choice about his 'side' in the war, and wound up with no real loyalty for anyone.

I think if there's any avenue I'd have liked to see more about MTOs via, it's Brainstorm. I wish there'd been more room to focus on that instead of (I'm so sorry shippers) his thing with Perceptor as the way to talk about his sense of inadequacy, tbh. What did it feel like, lying to Chromedome about remembering a pre-war life he never got a chance to experience? Being made to shoot people and be shot and escaping the fate of having that be the only thing he ever knew by the skin of his teeth? Not being able to imagine an end to the war, so all he wants to do is save one guy and run off with him as a pipe dream? That seems like the character where a lot of this stuff should naturally lie, to me. And I think it's a shame I've seen very little talk in fandom about it!

[anarchotolkienist]

Just to be clear again, the bottleneck for getting people out of Gaza isn't that there isn't enough money coming in, it's that there is a very small number that can leave thanks to the crossings being closed and requiring lots of bribes for border guards and paying a people smuggler. A greater amount of donations coming in wouldn't really change anything, except inasmuch as WHO can get out, not how many. A hundred, a thousand, equally as deserving people will die for every one that can get their family out.

Now, getting people out is good, and I have donated to the ones who approached me specifically. This is not the point of this post. It is to not waste a bunch of energy getting mad at posters on Tumblr when those people, however mean and craven, don't fucking matter. Don't let your analysis get reduced to something it feels like you can win, to another online flame war, and always remember why this is a crisis. Focus your energy on the only people who can stop this genocide - the Israeli state, their American arms suppliers, as well as to some limited extent the Egyptian state and it's border policy.

[thejoyofseax]

SCA Social Media

Aside from being a cooking nerd, I'm also very interested in communications and information flow. It would be reasonable to say that inasmuch as a Pelican is awarded for any one thing, I got mine in comms and diplomacy. (Or at least, I assume so; I don't have visibility on the discussions the Pelican circle had about me pre-elevation.) I'm also Drachenwald's social media minister.

There's a thing I see cropping up recently among Facebook users in the various social media: a strongly stated dislike of Discord. For context, there's a shift underway in Drachenwald for the bulk of day to day communications, from Facebook to Discord. Discord has a wide range of technical advantages over Facebook, and it's more used by the younger generations who are (gradually) taking over running things from the older folks. But there are many people who will happily state that they hate Discord.

I don't like Facebook, myself. It was a decent enough medium in about 2014; it has gotten worse in every measurable way since (except shareholder value, of course). It's particularly useless for trying to get information to people; every part of it is governed by an algorithm that selects what to show on any given screen, based mostly on what will annoy them most (annoyance leads to more time spent looking at the screen than any other emotion, ergo more time looking at ads, ergo more money for Meta).

Discord (at present; I make zero long-term predictions, and fully expect it to start getting worse at some point) has no such issues - the information flow on it is under the control of the server admin, pretty much, and it's searchable and categorisable as needed. Also, I just like the feel of Discord more; it's a lot more like a real conversation than Facebook's shouting-across-the-corporate-lobby atmosphere.

But this dislike of the new medium isn't new. Humans, for all we're supposed to like novelty, dislike change. I wrote as a comment in one of the discussions on Facebook:

"Facebook was massively polarising when it first started, because it was "taking over" from discussion lists. Discussion lists were massively polarising when they first started because they were taking over (assume scare quotes from here on) from newsgroups and phone trees. Phone trees and newsgroups were absolutely HATED when they started, taking over from paper newsletters (some of which were from before printing and photocopying was a thing, and were produced by mimeographic printing). If I dig around, I can find things written by Crusty Old Peers at each stage of this maintaining that the New Thing Will Destroy The SCA."

And you can extend that beyond the SCA right back to Plato complaining that the written word will prevent people from learning properly as they did in oral traditions.

My current position on this is that we should be using our websites - which are the one medium we actually "own", generally - as the source of actual information. We can then link to that from anywhere else on the internet, social or not. And the conversations can fall where they may, for each branch and household and other grouping, because honestly, that's how it's always been. If people don't like Discord, they don't have to use it, and it's only us unfortunate comms people who have to use all the different media.

(I recognise the irony of posting this on Another Social Medium. But Tumblr behaves more like a website for publication purposes, and comes with many of the advantages for getting information to people - RSS feeds, deep linking, etc.)

I'm also going to teach some classes on how to actually use Discord, I think. I've been steeped in talkers, IRC, and other channel-and-text media as long as I've been online, which is closing on 30 years now, so there are almost certainly aspects of functionality there that I take for granted and which are not evident to people unused to it. Or they're expecting it to work the same way as Facebook does, and don't have the technical experience to jump to a different medium. Either way, a start-with-the-basics actual-demonstration of how to use it is almost certainly useful.

[indefinitely-sealed]

Greetings, greetings! At the behest of my two very very good friends @cosmogone-spectacles and @peliginspeaks I have finally made my own sideblog for Flondon :) Do keep in mind I will likely be doing a lot of character work, for the most part, simply because I have been sitting on a lot of them for a long time now and I am simply too fond of them hehe.

My main account is @luckybird7765 and you can see my main Fallen London account here. Feel free to send a calling card!

Character introductions beneath the cut -

Primary Skills: Watchful; Monstrous Anatomy / Artisan of the Red Sciences / Disco̷̱̭͂̊̔̔͂̾̈͜ŗ̶͔̳̤̎͛̐̍̊̓̀̾̅ḑ̷̝̘̹͚͔̝̼̜̳͔̺͉̹͋̓̏͆͠a̷͈̹̟̘̥͈͙̠̞̫̪͘ņ̵̧̢̥͈̞̼̮̭̺̳̹̜̘̀̐͗̃̉̄͂̎́̆̉̇̕͝͝c̴͔̣̜̫̭̠̿͒̇è̸̢̓̿̽

Captain Reginald 'Ren' Haarsink, 36 (though who can say when the year never marches forward), a longtime academic in the corresponding arts (specifically speaking, the interactions between correspondence and forms of zee life, but he has branched into its medical uses too) is one of those stranger looking fellows, more eagerly described as a 'creature' by most not used to the Neath's wilder denizens. He cannot help but be immediately identifiable by the fins that he has (and, if you look even closer, gills as well!) in place of ears, and the scattering of scales upon his skin. No drownie is he, he still appears hale and hearty as much as someone who lives in the Neath can be, but he doesn't really take kindly to the nosy questionings by London newcomers. They were attained in an accident at zee, nothing more.

Haarsink is generally quite a private individual, though he has a well established presence in the academic circles of the reality-altering labs at Benthic University, curiously absent presence in the Benthic University correspondence division despite being apparently quite accomplished credentials that nobody can verify. He is a near life-long Neath resident, having moved to London when he was around 5 years old with his mother, who had had him out of wedlock with a vagrant sailor and needed the freedom that a life in the Neath offered. As such, he is very rarely surprised anymore by what this world has to offer, though he has a very long list of things to dread and fear at his disposal.

He doesn't make friends easy, and doesn't exactly have much of a presence beyond his work in the laboratory that he does not own̶ ̴d̷o̵e̸s̶ ̷n̸o̵t̵ ̶o̷w̴n̵ ̷d̷n̵͎̞͌̈́̀ ̵͕͌͆d̶͕̎̕ǫ̵͖̈e̵̬̘̯̓͒s̷̬̗̹͐͛͑ ̷̳̝̕͝ņ̴͓̅͘͜o̷̤̿͊͂t̵͔̔ ̷̞͈͐ẁ̴͈̺̇̚n̷̩͕͛̑ ̸̳͕̈́̂͛d̴̼̓.

To those who know him, he has a loyalty far too fierce for mere words, and a streak of caring that goes beyond what any sane person would want. He also has the focus and stamina to push to get what he wants with his own two hands, no matter what.

He has committed crimes against reality itself. Parabola as a whole hates his guts (inasmuch as it can, it tries) for what he has done to it, leaving him with no Parabola-altered dreams, no reflection in a mirror that is not of him burning to death. The Dawn Machine would blast him to ash if it were able to reach him. His own lungs have twisted themselves inside out and stretched his throat in unlawful geometries for the blasphemies he has spoken with them.

He dreamed once that he could become a god in his own right. The worst part is that he nearly succeeded.

He is also my silly fish and my soggiest little meow meow. He lives in a big snail shell by the zee and his favorite food is ship biscuits. He absolutely refuses to wear a shirt unless strictly required (though whether that is because he hates the texture or if he is simply THAT proud of his chest tattoo is anyone's guess). He can contain multitudes, after all.

Not on speaking terms with one D. T. Oversol (@cosmogone-spectacles) , owing to some previously mentioned crimes against reality having been inflicted directly upon himself. Would be friendly with one Dola Hallowrove (@peliginspeaks), except the other crimes against reality were inflicted upon them as well, and that could get a little awkward to discuss.

(anyways. god knows i have far too much stuff on him at this point, it's actually quite a relief to be sharing it somewhere at last <3 )

[catkin-morgs-kookaburralover]

It might feel like reality fades in, but what it really is—really really, I mean, inasmuch as this is real—is consciousness fading in. Like someone or something else was piloting the body, and control was just wrested back.

Most people would expect to remember what happened before, but this is just... blank; not like it was removed, or by some other violent means taken away, but like it never existed. All there is is light, not bright enough to hurt but not dim enough to hide. There are walls, but they look vaguely damp.

There is probably poison in the air; every breath is moist and the only reason it cannot be smelled is because the body is used to whatever smell haunts this place. It might kill eventually, if death is possible here.

Perhaps there ought to be fear; even emotions are gone, except for an all-pervading sense of dread, too quiet to notice unless it's looked for. Can you hear breathing? What would happen if someone screamed in here? Would it echo, or would it vanish, swallowed by the distance? Feet are noiseless on the perpetually unrepaired carpet.

That means nobody will hear anyone else coming up behind them unless they make an effort to be audible. Behind, there is a continuation of the same walls and passages. Nobody is visible, but there's the sense of someone at the shoulder, hiding, about to do something dreadful; something worse than death, and not in the Victorian sense, but in the real sense, because at least death would be silence, and darkness, and not the whispering hum of fluorescents on their last legs, and not their uneven flickering illuminating unwell yellows.

None of the passages and rooms are arranged in a way that make sense. There is no larger pattern to be seen, and even if memory was infallible, there is no pattern, no matter how far anyone goes. Is sleep possible in here, even that temporary reprieve? Is there food? Will someone waste away here; is there a skeleton just around the next corner? Or behind—look behind again. There is still nobody, and in a way that is worse.

Does the body just... keep going? Is the consciousness fading in because the last one, eventually, faded out entirely?

Or, worse still, is this the only consciousness in the whole—wherever? Is there doomed to be only yellow, uneven colouring, doorways to nowhere, and the muted howl of dying light forever?