#humans interactions are so complicated ���� this is why i like robots better

[urwendii]

Idk if its petty to drop your support of someone when they clearly did it first. Like, sometimes i wonder if this is naive kindness or ingrained people-pleasing that i still keep being friendly to individuals who clearly have dropped me from their priority list. If you're not worth the other person's time, why should you offer them yours unconditionally.

[cripplecharacters]

hello! i read your last post (the one about how prosthetics aren't the only solution so people need to stop making ocs with prosthetics, or something like that idk i'm not very good at summaries) and it mentioned how prosthetics don't work like normal limbs? i have a character with a prosthetic (he's not mine) and i was wondering: what did that post mean by that? this is mostly so i can write him better :)

Hi, we don't have prosthetic-using mods so please take this with a grain of salt.

First question would be: which limb is the prosthetic for? An arm and a leg have drastically different functions, and the prosthetics for them are the same in this regard. That's also why prosthetic legs are overall much more helpful than arms - “bear weight” is a much easier task than “replace the most dexterous part of the human body that needs touch and pressure to work as intended”.

But yeah, they don't work like meat limbs because they aren't them, it's a replacement that works for some and not at all for others.

As an example, someone who has an AKA (above knee amputation) will walk fundamentally differently from someone who has a knee because of the knee factor. That's why amputations are categorized based on how many joints are or aren't there. There aren't nerves to tell the knee to bend, so the muscles that are left and gravity have to do it instead. Sometimes people get gait disorders because they suddenly have to use their hips completely differently than they used to. It's also just fundamentally harder - using a prosthetic requires significantly more energy than not. The higher the amputation, the higher the energy cost. They can also cause pain. That's why people with higher amputations will often use a wheelchair or crutches instead. Sometimes it's just not worth it.

For prosthetic arms, where do we even start? Prosthetics don't provide feeling, they don't help with tactile feedback, you don't have the dexterity of bio fingers - most hand-looking prosthetic arms won't have separate fingers because it's impossible to control. They will have a thumb and the rest of the fingers as two parts, not five. For many people, the stub is more useful than a prosthetic because it does offer these. A butcher I know uses his residual limb to hold meat in place rather than a prosthesis because it's more precise. Hands are ridiculously complicated, and prosthetics simply don't replicate that. They often make things harder, not easier. For upper-limb amputees who do need their prosthetics (for example, people with bilateral, high-level amputation might opt for them more than someone who's missing a part of one forearm) will usually tend to use hook (body-powered) prosthetics, not the “robotic bionic arm that looks like a bio arm painted silver”. And on the basis of being a hook they simply don't work the same as a hand, and they require a lot of training.

There's also the entire thing of acquiring and taking care of prosthetics; again, things you don't need to do for bio limbs. They can be astronomically expensive and for many too difficult to upkeep. Some people can't put theirs on at all, or require help to do so.

I hope this helps, I recommend you look through our #prosthetics and #limb differences tags, as well as simply interacting with amputees and learning about their experiences - if you don't know the differences between bio limbs and prosthetics you still have a lot of research to do.

mod Sasza

[thedreadvampy]

I'm going insane my notes are full of people responding to the communes post going like "this is why we need a state to prevent abuse"

HOW'S THAT STATE-PREVENTING-ABUSE THING GOING? PRETTY GREAT I DON'T THINK.

seriously this is what gets my fucking back up about people in opposition to anti-statism or anti-carceralism they're always like 'oh can you propose a way to 100% prevent abuse or violence' and it's like. Insert I, Robot gif here. Can you?

like I'm not complaining about the lack of attention to safeguarding and justice in anarchist communities because anarchism is particularly bad at it! I'm complaining about it because tackling the issue requires acknowledging that it does exist in every community we try to build and that we have to speak up and deal with it proactively.

abuse happens in anarchist spaces, in socialist spaces, in marxist-leninist-maoist spaces, in capitalist spaces, in religious fundamentalist spaces, in feudalism, in whatever fucking system of authorities you wanna name. the question is how we deal with it and anarchism is deeply imperfect in that but so is every other system I've seen and anarchism is pointing at the better goal, I think - a method of community accountability which focuses on harm reduction, desystematising, and healing rather than on punishment, revenge or cycles of violence.

we're not there yet and we will probably never build a 100% foolproof system where abuse and interpersonal harm never occur. but frankly neither will any other system, human interactions are complicated and messy and sometimes there will be shitshows - our priorities are to reduce the number, severity, fallout and normalisation of those shitshows and figure out ways to prevent, react and support healing.

like here's one key fucking thing ok. I have found the way that anarchist groups I've been in have handled abuse allegations really traumatic and overwhelming and triggering. but that's largely been because I have some faith in the approach and it hurts a lot more to fuck up when you have hope.

but you are fooling your damn selves if you think going through the police or the state is less traumatic and overwhelming tbh. reporting and going through the court system is notoriously retraumatising and miserable for survivors, even when it's done with empathy and support. it also Does Not Work. punitive justice actively intensifies cycles of abuse and trauma.

obviously like. the main problem in these notes is that inexplicably people reblogging my post seem to believe the core thesis of anarchism is sunshine, rainbows and the milk of human kindness not like. hard graft to build tailored systems to meet community need. and you are wrong about that. anarchism has never been about 'building a community of morally pure sweethearts who wouldn't hurt a fly' it's about taking responsibility yourself, as an individual, for the wellbeing of your community, and working together collectively to identify what needs to change and what systems would create that change.

but the secondary problem is a lack of fucking imagination. people act as if an idea for change not being utterly bulletproof is a reason to throw the whole concept away, as if existing systems are less imperfect. babies, bathwater, my guys.

If I say 'this part of how we're organising is likely to present the risk of abuse' that doesn't mean 'we should stop our whole approach to organising' it means 'we should take stock of why that risk is there and figure out how to adapt to manage it.' Criticising your ideas and approaches is a vital part of building a better version of them and it's really frustrating to have any critical appraisal met with a barrage of SEE THIS IS WHY WE SHOULD FULLY ABANDON THIS IDEA FOREVER

like fuck man how are you planning to build a better system if you can't iterate ideas, criticise, finetune, adapt, reiterate, problematise and adjust, and talk about what the fail points might be? how are you planning to build a better world if you reject any attempt to suggest a replacement for the Totally Fucked Hellworld system unless it has already ironed out every flaw before being tried?

the reason I am talking about the cracks in a lot of anarchist ideas where abuse comes in is because I want anarchist ideas to work. I think they're good ideas. (not communes I don't think communes are good ideas I have been clear on this). I want a better, happier, less harm-filled, less abusive, more just world and I think the anarchist vision has the most elements to get us there so I want those elements to work, which means I want to identify what comes packaged in with those ideas that might be counterproductive. so we can do better. so that we can use the good ideas and dump out the elements that are likely to cause harm. you know. like how thinking works.

[yourtoradorasextendedwarranty]

So, I'm watching a show called Oshi No Ko. And the story is a pretty complicated one. It focuses on the kids of an Idol. One who was extremely famous for a long time.

This screen shot, is from the most recent episode and got me to start thinking. We really do tend to be heartless monsters sometimes. I lose my head sometimes but I will often refrain from stuff that goes further than "Fuck You" or "Fuck off". Why? Because I want to be better than the worst of the things I see around me.

I saw this and watch as the episode progressed. It focuses on a very earnest girl that isn't the most pretty and doesn't stand out well. This despite being in the entertainment industry. An accident happens on set and as some fandoms do, they went straight for the throat. Moments later you hear rumor monologue which produces these:

And when I saw these my first thought was, "Oh......she's going to take her own life". Because the scene lasted for so long. She was trying so hard to just do her best. Except even if you take this away from Japan and look around the globe, we're all pretty fucked.

We took the idea of being anonymous with us from the birth of the internet, and now we walk around with are noses in the sky as if we own everything. Now a days you can just say whatever you want. And another thing dawned on me during this line of thought. "This is why it's so easy for people to dehumanize everyone they don't like nowadays. This is why it's so easy to see a person throwing a birthday party at a park, get pissed of that they are happy and you aren't and get them mobbed by claiming 'Nazis' knowing good well they probably aren't." It reminded me of this scene from a silent voice.

This is how we see people online. Not as real life people who have their own lives, thoughts, feelings, and circumstances. We see them as invalids who if they don't placate us, they are worth less than nothing. I keep up with people online and I can separate fantasy from reality. More than I can say for so many others. And I normally do not attack people so much as I just levy criticism of their views. Mostly only when it comes to things I find important.

However, I try to flush out my point in a way that is actual criticism, rather than something hateful or scornful. I'm not saying I always succeed in that. I do try though.

If I'm being honest. People who are depressed need to not be on social media at all. They need to seek IRL help. And we need to get back to a time we saw people as people. Once upon a time, there was a notion known as "Talk shit, get hit". Because no matter how you felt, being a punk wasn't acceptable. Now, not only is it acceptable. It's promoted, rewarded, and pushed as the norm. I now understand on a more foundational level why I see people say things like, "kys" in anonymous asks or similar things.

It's because they don't understand humanity at all. Moreover, their only experiences with "humanity" are fake interactions they have online. People being bots. And not in the sense of being "fake" so much as they are constructed versions of who they think others want them to be. They are bots in the sense that they are a robot, with a mask of their own face. Programmed to look as good an acceptable as possible.

Hell.....this is frankly hard to write about. And in truth, this message may land on deaf ears. I might not be able to save anyone or make people second guess sending disgusting levels of hate to others. Hell half the time I don't think I'll be able to save myself from the bottomless well I seem to feel like I'm drowning in almost every single day. When I'm mad most times. It's normally because I've seen the effects of things i'm talking about in my own life or the lives of those around me.

Realize that no matter how much you may think you hate another person......on the other side of that screen is a person just like you. They may be ignorant. They may be stupid. They may be downright appalling. They are still human.

Now I'm going to stop writing this before I'm overwhelmed with the worst parts of myself and I'll instead leave this.

[martamdxcontextualstudies]

The Dangers Of AI Art

Human vs Machine 

How do artists show their interpretation of this idea?

Istallations, interactive art pieces

Dangers of AI

Why is this art form so popular?

Why is it causing so much harm to independent artists?

Why is it so harmful?

What can we do to stop it before its influence grows beyond our control?

Is it actual art?

Can it replace artists?

What are the negative impacts of the dark side of artificial intelligence?

The Dangers of AI Art (studybreaks.com)

By Kristen Kalebich, Arizona State University

“Many apps, software and websites allow AI to generate art, and all they need is access to the internet, key words or phrases and sometimes a picture.”

“Artists seem to be engage in a losing battle”

“AI art often uses pieces of a person’s artwork and implements them into the new image without giving proper credit.”

“The generator plagiarises.”

“AI art pulls and meshes similar images found online.” 

It doesn’t really find inspiration for a certain art piece like most artists would. AI also doesn’t have a particular style, colour palette or median that it focus is on. It hasn;t spend years developing a style or an idea like an artist would. 

It lacks originality. And the emotional factor which is often how art bring attention to the viewer. As humans we can often feel the painting when looking at it. 

“AI struggles to implement these emotions into an image because it is guided by instructions and commands rather than complicated, subjective feelings.”

“What started as a harmless generator used to create fun and colourful art has become detrimental for artists.”

Create Something Amazing - NightCafe Creator

AI generator

Stable Diffusion

A next-generation text-to-image algorithm

DALL E 2 

From OpenAI, an advanced text-to-image algorithm

Coherent (CLIP-Guided Diffusion)

More control and better composition than Artistic

Artistic (VQGAN+CLIP)

Create beautiful images from a text prompt

Style Transfer

Turn your photo into a masterpiece

It has a bunch of different art styles that you are able to choose from before generating the images:

Nightcafe, artistic portrait, anime, hyperreal, 3D game, pop up, photo, ect

Algorithm: Stable

Model: Stable Diffusion v1.5

Text Prompt: Dog sitting on a couch looking out the window

Style: Oil Painting

Algorithm: Stable

Model: State Diffusion v1.5

Text Prompt: Group of bees sitting on a flower about to be attacked by wasps

Style: Hyperreal

Text To Image - AI Image Generator API | DeepAI

Text Prompt: Battle of the Crayfish

Style: Fantasy

Style: Cyberpunk

Style: Comic

Style: Impressionism

To me AI is an idea i find quite terrifying. We have seen so many movies about robots and computers taking over its not hard to see it as science fiction. But with the way technology is evolving so rapidly, it could quite easily replace us. From artists, to writers, graphic designers, photographers, AI can easily replace all of them. Leaving people who love their professions and have spend years building up their careers with nothing.

The Dark Side of Artificial Intelligence Art and its Impacts (analyticsinsight.net)

By Geetha Malathkar, November 29 2022

“New and exciting”, “gaining popularity quick”

“Potentioal for AI art used for polictical propaganda, to create fake art and to infringe on copyrights.”

“AI can now create realistic images, videos and even sculptures.”

“Sometimes indistinguishable from art created by humans” 

“Because AI is powered by data, it is biased against underrepresented groups. For example, if an AI is trained on a data set of predominantly white male faces, it will more likely create art that is biased towards white male faces. This could lead to a future where the art world is dominated by biased AI created work.”

“This could lead to united consequences like the ones we have seen with discriminatory recruiting algorithms and microsoft’s twitter chatbox that became racist.”

“As companies build AI algorithms, they need to be developed and trained responsibly.”

Ai also massively reduces the time it takes to create pieces of art. In order to create the art i used in the ai generator, i had to type in a few keywords that best described he image I want to achieve. It also gave me a large variety of art styles I could chose from to get my ideal result. All those images combined took around 10 minutes to create. A significantly shorter amount of time it would take me to illustrate the same prompt by hand. 

Although this could be somewhat beneficial to a lot of companies, it would completely rock the art world off its feet. 

There is also a much larger chance of being hacked when using Ai generator programs. Behind each successful AI generator there is a programmer. It could be quite easy for them to input a series of codes and “take advantage of AI systems” that ultimately could lead them to getting into your hardware much easier. 

CYBERARTS 2016

Prix Ars Electronic

Starts Prize '16

"The digital revolution that was recognisable on the horizon decades ago... Now constitutes the mainstream in media, business and politics." (pg 10)

"Dissatisfaction and mistrust are widespread" (pg 10)

"The artists and scientists involved in this project are not only paving the way for new developments, but also opening up totally new ways regarding the role of science in our society and the interplay of technology and nature." (pg 10)

"On the social level, this is a matter of new positive future scenarios of new social models, which are the approaches to a process of rethinking that seeks ways for us to livewell without growth." (pg 10)

INFERNO (pg 74-75)

Louis-Phillippe Dewers, Bill Vorn

"Participative robotic performance inspired by the concept of control."

"Bodies are handed to eternal and external forces controlling them."

"Shifting the exoskeletons command from the authors, to the computers and to the performers."

"Inferno questions the nature of control either mechanic or human."

"Also addresses recurrent issues revolving around the human-robot symbiotic relationships."

"Wearing or being entrapped in a robotic entity recalls the concept of the cyborg that emerged in the late 80s."

PATHFINDER (pg 82-83)

Generative approach for conceptional choreography

Qnformative in collaboration with Christian Loclair

"Generates and projects abstract shapes into space in order to simulate Danzers exploration."

"Digital approach to the conceptual research of Dance."

"Choreographers can adjust certain parameters of the algorithm - such as speed, complexity, or the geometry of objects."

"Pathfinder expands the idea of creative collaboration by integrating an intelligent digital entity to an artistic process."

[shihalyfie]

Appmon and the question of conscious intelligence

In a bit of a follow-up to my post about this question in light of 02, Appmon also has its own more sci-fi oriented take on “what constitutes an individual living being”! Being more of a “hard sci-fi” story than Adventure/02, Appmon’s take is significantly less philosophical, but ties more into the original artificial intelligence-based roots of the original question, and how it might apply to the real world’s immediate future.

(Note that the rest of this post heavily spoils the finale of the series.)

Well, this post is about Yuujin, of course. (Mostly, anyway.)

I brought up earlier in the relevant 02 meta that the question brought up was a variant (intentional or otherwise) of the “Chinese room” problem, and for those of you who haven’t read that meta, I’ll copy and paste the details here:

The Chinese room problem goes like this: let’s say you’re a person who has never learned, studied, or grown up with the Chinese language (or, really, any language you can’t understand or read; Chinese was only used as an example because the person explaining the thought experiment was using himself as an example and couldn’t read or understand it). You’re locked in a room that has a bunch of Chinese phrasebooks that give you instructions – basically, they indicate common Chinese phrases, and sensible responses you can give to them (without actually translating it to a language you know). Someone slips you a piece of paper under the door with some Chinese phrases on them. You use the phrasebooks to write appropriate responses, and slip the paper back. The person outside the door reads the paper, sees what they gave you, and sees the response you gave them. It makes sense, of course, because the phrasebook told you to write an answer that made sense. But can you be said to actually understand Chinese? No, because you were just following instructions without actually understanding what they meant.

So let’s expand this to make it a bit more complicated: say you have an AI or a robot or something of the sort that accepts “input” – people saying things to it, or showing it things – and gives expected “responses” that seem sensible, through a bunch of complicated programs and processes in its programming. Can you say this robot is “alive”? One might say “no”, because, no matter how complicated and intricate it is, all of it is technically following a set of routine commands telling it to do certain things in response…or so you might say, but couldn’t you say the same thing about a human brain, which also takes input, processes it according to its own instructions (just caused by chemical processes instead of bytes and code), and creates output? After a certain point, this question is going to become far more of a philosophical, spiritual, and potentially even religious question than anything.

02′s take on it deals more with the philosophical question posed by the issue, but, indeed, the problem’s original context was specifically to do with artificial intelligence. Namely, Searle was arguing against a concept known as "strong AI" -- his stance was that, no matter how intelligently a computer may seem to behave, you can't say it has a "mind" in the same way a human has a mind. There have been many arguments back and forth about this that still lie within the AI context, and Appmon itself, being very immersed in this topic, real thought experiments and concepts in AI research, and altogether concerned with the concept of “singularity” (the point in which artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence), is very likely to have had this concept in mind even if it didn’t drop it by name in the series.

So episode 48 comes around, and Haru basically has to confront feeling a little (a little?) gaslighted. The part that really becomes the kicker for him is when YJ-14 tells him the sheer depth of how much of their interactions might have been deliberately engineered to "pander” to him the entire time, down to emotional reactions like crying, and all of the encouragement Yuujin had given him in their childhood and at the beginning of the series, had all been fake sentiments to soften him up and play into Leviathan’s hands. This also ties into Leviathan’s full modus operandi and philosophy: its stance is that “it knows better,” being able to calculate and predict everything, and therefore knows the best outcome for humanity -- hence why it has the stance that “people’s feelings don’t matter,” because it can manipulate those feelings at the drop of a hat in the venture to make its perfect world.

Therefore, the stance YJ-14 and Leviathan would like Haru to believe is effectively an extreme version of Searle’s stance -- that no matter how much Yuujin might have seemed to have been a friend to Haru, all of it was nothing but a simulation of behavior that doesn’t mean anything in the end, and all of Haru’s emotions were basically a pawn to it. And ostensibly fueling all of this is the fact YJ-14 seems to be able to take Yuujin’s “personality” on and off like a mask, adding further fuel to the apparent facade that “everything was planned from the very beginning.” Hence, why Haru takes this all to mean “I have nothing” -- if everything had been planned from the start and he were only a pawn in it, he’d never accomplished anything for real on his own merits and everything dear to him had been a facade. One could even say it’s flipping the Chinese room problem to extend to everything -- if everything around you is carefully constructed to seem real, but is actually part of a routine program, can you really say that’s what “really” happened?

Observe the sequence of events that causes the turnaround with everything regarding Haru:

Gatchmon presses Haru to answer the question of “what it is that he wants” (to know whether all of this was a lie or not).

Minerva, presumably witnessing this, deliberately provokes Yuujin with the question she had originally given him upon selecting him as a Driver.

This indeed provokes a reaction within Yuujin, which Haru witnesses, and also witnesses acting in direct conflict with YJ-14.

Haru takes this to mean that “it did exist.”

In other words, Leviathan’s plan wasn’t as airtight as it had thought, and, more importantly, whether it was intentionally or not, something in Yuujin existed as a separate entity from YJ-14, one that had its own feelings of “caring” for and loving Haru, and that’s enough for him.

In fact, Appmon’s take on the Chinese room problem is not that different from 02′s in the end -- namely, it does not actually matter what a sufficiently advanced AI is made up of, or whether it originally came from a routine of “pleasing Haru” or not, because what it is now is practically observable as something making its own independent choices and having its own independent will, and therefore it’s its own entity and “friend” all the same -- after all, you could say the same for the Appmon themselves as well.

A large theme in Appmon is "choices" -- the ability to understand what's going on, and make choices out of free will rather than necessity or formula, and so, identifying Yuujin as an independent entity who can act on his own and therefore make his own "choices" thus identifies him as someone who deserves to be acknowledged as a friend who loves and is loved. After all, we saw him capable of having his own "worries" in the flashbacks in episodes 18 and 32; understanding that such moments like these of “insecurity” were ones developed by an independent personality validates his feelings and self-consciousness as something that was real, and therefore that his and Haru’s friendship was formed on something genuine and not just Yuujin constantly manipulating Haru. Really, the question isn’t exactly about whether Yuujin is working off a software routine or not, as much as something that you could easily frame in more human terms: the difference between a friendship that was formed on real sentiments vs. one that was formed by an abusive, toxic person who was just saying nice things to get on your good side. Yuujin’s the former and acts like the former, so therefore he’s a friend, no questions asked.

Hence, how Haru is able to apply that realization to everything else around him; Leviathan is wrong, it hasn’t been able to predict everything perfectly to plan, and Haru and his friends still are the ones making their own choices going forward. Which means that Haru still has full control over his life and what he wants to do, like how he worried about what he wanted to do with his future back in episode 47; those “choices” are still his and his alone, and, retroactively, everything he’s done so far is still something attributable to himself and not the supposedly engineered system around him.

The entire final confrontation in episode 52 happens the way it does because Haru and his friends managed to skew Leviathan by a slight bit. Up until that final battle, everything Leviathan had done had been part of its carefully engineered plan, up to and including allowing the kids’ Buddy Appmon to reach God Grade so Deusmon could eat them, and then at the last minute Leviathan had to suffer a slight unexpected inconvenience. Only a slight one, because it still managed to maintain its so-called ideal world over humanity in the end. And yet that slight inconvenience still wasn’t to plan, and because of that, it creates a dent in its argument and its genuine belief that it knows better for everyone, and should manage everyone and their choices. We even learn that Leviathan has its own fear of death from that battle -- it really, truly, genuinely believes that it’s doing humanity a favor by sparing everyone from it.

When Leviathan presents Haru with the final choice at the end, it’s made clear that it intends to fully honor whichever Haru chooses. In Leviathan’s mind, the “yes” outcome shouldn’t even be possible; if its calculations are correct, Haru has too much of a stake in Yuujin according to his own “feelings” and should concede. But if Haru does choose “yes”, that means that, in the end, it is wrong, it doesn’t know everything, perhaps there is an “unknown” world out there that can be formed by understanding the human heart and making choices out of kindness, its answer to restraining humanity may not be as right as it thought, and it will therefore concede to Haru -- especially since Haru decides to take an even more unexpected “third option” to find a way out and save Yuujin via AI research. As Haru says later in the episode: humans have a “surprising” side to them, and perhaps not everything is as cut-and-dry as Leviathan thinks.

It’s also significant that Yuujin’s “sacrifice” is actually completely meaningless in terms of practical effects. Haru was already going to pick “yes” anyway; the outcome would have been the same. But by taking over at the last minute and doing it for him, Yuujin was able to make a “choice” -- one that neither Leviathan (who doesn’t want to die) nor Haru (who’s mortified seeing him do this) asked of him.

When you think about it, Yuujin’s in a really horrible position right now, learning that his entire life and existence is a lie and that he’d have to be sacrificed to save the world at Haru’s own hands, causing Haru immense pain -- but through all that and the existential crisis, he’s at least able to do one thing that is undeniably of his own will, and treasure the fact that there was meaning in his life despite everything.

In the end, despite what YJ-14 had said back in episode 47, Oozora Yuujin was a “real” person who made his own personal choices, and his last one was one made out of kindness, simply to spare Haru more pain. Hence, why “getting Yuujin back” via methods of artificial intelligence isn’t something Haru minds doing, because, again, it’s not like Yuujin was ever less of a friend to him no matter what he was made up of, no less so than the Appmon, especially since (as Haru points out in the end) Yuujin technically predated all of them in befriending humans.

Funny thing about YJ-14 in episode 47, actually: YJ-14 uses “crying” as an example to gaslight Haru into believing that all of Yuujin’s emotional reactions were fake, since he can cry if it’ll evoke a positive reaction out of Haru. Except it’s cleaned up in absurdly quick order -- and with what we later see of YJ-14′s uncanny ability to “take Yuujin’s personality on and off”, it’s not like it’s portrayed as having all of these functions employed in an involuntary manner. We do learn one episode later, however, that sufficient reminders of Haru’s importance to him will allow Yuujin’s personality to break through at inconvenient times for YJ-14 -- and this “crying” happened right after Haru had an emotional meltdown and appealed to Yuujin’s feelings.

Was it really an involuntary function or a deliberate demonstration of how Haru was being manipulated...or, perhaps, was YJ-14 in less control of its supposed “rote emotional invocation functions” than it thought?

[scarabiaa]

"I trust in few people, you even less. Impress me and you can keep me around. Try to stay out of trouble, will you? I'd hate to see you get trampled over."

NAME: Iris Tartal

NICKNAME(S): Ris by most of her friends ; Mademoiselle Âme Damnée by Rook ; Fugu (フグ) by Floyd

AFFILIATION: Student

AGE: 19 

SPECIES: Human

INSPIRATION: Megara

UNIQUE MAGIC: False Love - She needs to have the intent of doing this before she actually can. She needs to hold up a finger heart and toss it to the side in front of the person she plans on using this for. This causes them to be infatuated with her and she's able to control them like a puppet for a while. The person will lose all memory of this once they snap out of it. She does not like using this, she feels as though it's useless.

PERSONALITY: Since she can be found with a mask most of the time, she can sometimes be seen as unapproachable, cold, and even cruel. Many times she's found with her friends and she's either whacking someone with a paper or she's nodding along and this shows insight on her life. She keeps people in line, ensuring that no one is acting like a complete buffoon and embarrassing themselves. She's smart in the non-magical technical aspects of this world and can usually help in this area, courtesy of her dorm being specialized in the field. She likes her friends very much and she'll show it to them but to anyone else, she's going to be monotone and treat them indifferently. She also has a lot of confidence, compared to most people in Ignihyde, so she's an oddball in her own dorm. Her face may be covered but she's expressive with her eyes alone once you get to know her and she'll openly make sounds that match the situation she's in.

APPEARANCE: She has slightly dark hair and pale skin. Her eyes are black and they match to the mask she can usually be found wearing. There is one chunk of hair in between her eyes turning to the left and two more strands on the sides of her face. Her hair is half up and half in a ponytail. Some hair is thrown over her shoulder for the sake of it. She tends to wear lots of metal rings on her right hand and a tan cardigan with a black turtleneck. She wears sneakers most of the time, even with her uniform. With that uniform, she has a black vest and a striped bowtie with a white belt. She likes the cardigan better than the actual uniform. She has no piercings. She has two moles, one on her chin and the other on the corner of her left eye.

~

SCHOOL: Royal Sword Academy (formerly), Night Raven College (currently)

GENDER: Female

DORM: Ignihyde

GRADE/CLASS: Class C (Senior)

BIRTHDAY: February 14 (Aquarius)

HEIGHT: 167.64 cm/5'5" feet

DOMINANT HAND: Right

HOMELAND: Ancient Greece 

CLUB: Magical Shift Club 

BEST SUBJECT: Conjuration 

HOBBIES: Picking out new nail polish, fixing mechanical things, creating robots, interacting with more people

PET PEEVES: Overly confident people, the innocent farm boy routine, laziness

FAVORITE FOOD: Steak 

LEAST FAVORITE FOOD: Vegetables

LIKES: Playing complicated games against a good opponent, painting her nails, crossword puzzles, classical music, gummy snacks

DISLIKES: Slackers, chess, sour candy, waking up at before 10 am

TALENT: Creating new inventions from any time period, as long as she has a clear description of it

SONG: Without Me by Halsey

~

Her mbti is ISTP. 

She met Leona first and she automatically hated him because for one, why is he such a slacker and why does he treat people inferior than him that way, what have they done to him and two, he gets to sleep in ???? and she doesn't ??? when she knows she's worked harder than him ????

She could not care less what people think of her former school, she uses that as incentive and if anyone tries to interrogate her about it, Lord help them, they'll be having nightmares once she's done.

She can get really hotheaded at times, but she does mean well and she is fiercely protective of her friends.

In Hercules, Megara is quick witted, independent, and cynical after she gets heartbroken by a man who she sold her soul for, only to be left behind by. Iris, however, gets the same deal except that she got left behind by many groups of friends and had to harden her heart. Luckily, she never had to sell her soul but she believes in "I can only trust myself" because she's afraid of being left behind again. it's hard for her to trust people, but once she does, that trust is easy to break unless the bond is fortified.

She liked Vil automatically because of the attitude he has; he may be vain but he acts composed and regally and believes that hard work leads you to your goals. she has the same mentality and she thinks they have that in common. she has tried his smoothies before and they're really good, so she ends up doing her best to try and talk to him (and she ends up doing so because he knows she's in Ignihyde, yet for some reason, she's not a shut in like the rest of them are).

She likes classical music because she can close her eyes and create scenarios in her head; crossword puzzles require her to think a lot and she likes that a lot.

She dislikes chess because Leona likes it because she finds it ridiculously hard to understand the rules and when she was little, on her off days, her mother would wake her up before 10 am even though she was exhausted and iris would always hear the same thing: "imagine how i'm feeling if you're tired"; sour candy doesn't taste good and she hates slackers because they contribute nothing.

Floyd calls her Pufferfish because she’s unpredictable and gets all sharp when she’s irritated and Rook calls her Miss Damned Soul in French, because based on what he’s seen, she’s in for a wild ride, maybe even something that is not a good ending. (She says she doesn’t need one, but it hurts.)

She is a sucker for the enemies to lovers trope but you will never catch her saying that. 

~

DYNAMICS:

The Misfortunate Prince and the Frigid Heroine: Leona + Iris

She can't stand him because he's a slacker, lazy, unrefined (doesn't matter if he's a prince), uncooperative, etc, etc. He can't stand her because she's constantly harping on about how he needs to stop napping everywhere and she's a tryhard. They once got into a fight because she used her magic to move him in the middle of a nap and he immediately started arguing with her, but she ended up winning that fight out of him remembering the hierarchy back home. They cannot stand each other and the only reason they'll ever talk to each other is because Ruggie will drag her in to wake him up with pots and pans.

The Servant and the Persuader: Ruggie + Iris

Buddies when it comes to Leona. She wants to bully him, he needs to wake him up. Ruggie gets extra food from her and somehow gets her pots and pans so she can march around and wake him up. Based on how much they argue, Ruggie, if he didn't know better, would say there was something going on between them. Tension, maybe? 

The Devil and the Devil's Nightmare: Idia + Iris

Constantly banging on his door and yelling at him to go get some sunlight, that she's carrying the dorm on her back, that Ortho wants to go to the park with him. He's fine with her because she brings him snacks on long days but not during these moments, he wishes he was alone.

The Photogenic Diamond and the Sarcastic Inventor: Cater + Iris

Surprising, but they hang out a lot and he helped her at the beginning in making new friends and such. He even offered to help with her Magicam but she respectfully turned him down. As energetic as he is, he knows when to calm down and she likes that a lot about him, she doesn't feel overwhelmed at all.

The Beautiful Queen and the Brilliant Oddball: Vil + Iris

She’s doing her best to befriend him, but he has hardly any time. However, she is intriguing because she is the oddball in Ignihyde, doing her best to drag everyone outside. Maybe he’ll talk to her, but for now, she will just have to wait for a while. 

[jocia92]

...“It was a challenge on top of a challenge on top of a challenge,” the 38-year-old Stevens says about playing Tom. “It’s a very interesting, complex role for any nationality but some of the dialogue is, I think, even for a German, quite complicated.”

He was receiving intricate instructions from his director, interacting with the crew and then performing on camera as a robot – and all in a language that he studied long ago at school “and continued it a little bit at university” but spoke only on family holidays in North Rhine-Westphalia.

... Filmmaker Maria Schrader (star of Deutschland 89 and also the director of the Emmy-award winning Netflix drama Unorthodox) chose Stevens to play the robot not just for his charm and good looks but because, as she puts it, he “was not specifically known in Germany.”

However, his co-star Maren Eggert admits that, when she was pregnant, she watched every episode of Downton Abbey on German TV. She was so taken aback by Matthew’s death that she had to call her sister for solace.

In person (or at least via Zoom), Stevens is very like his character in the film. That is not to say he is robotic but he shares Tom’s fluency and easy charm. He jokes about the robot’s skin, insisting that Tom is not made out of cheap plastic but of “very high-grade silicone.”

He clearly enjoyed the technical challenge of playing a non-human. “It’s interesting that bridge between what he [Tom the robot] is pre-programmed with, the algorithm that has been calibrated by Alma… and then there is the Tom that must be learnt. In the inter-personal relations with Alma, he is improving or trying to improve. Each situation, it was looking at, well, is this a pre-programme he is running here, is this something he knows how to do or has to learn how to do?”

Ask Stevens an awkward question and he will parry it just as deftly as Tom bats away Alma’s inquiries about just what makes him tick. In the UK, fans and journalists have not let Stevens forget Downton Abbey. They still wonder why he was so keen to leave the series. Doesn’t he sometimes wish that he could exorcise the memory of Matthew Crawley for good?  

“‘Exorcise’ suggests Downton Abbey occupies some demonic status in my consciousness which it definitely doesn’t,” Stevens protests.

“There is no way I would wish to erase the memory of it. In fact, it has been the bedrock of my career and so I am very, very grateful to it. Very often as an actor, you have to explain [to people] what you have been in – and very often they haven’t seen anything. It can be a bit demoralising. It’s lovely to have something you can connect all over the world with people on.”

... “For me, I’m Your Man was just a delightful screenplay. I could see the playfulness with which it was written but also the big, big questions it was asking underneath. That, for me, is always attractive,” he says of the way the film deals with love, masculinity, identity and AI. Part of his preparation, he explains, was to watch old Cary Grant screwball comedies.  

Stevens didn’t bring his own “baggage” or “preconceptions” but tried hard to be exactly what director Schrader and co-star Eggert wanted, he says. The women were calling the shots with Schrader turning old sexist movie stereotypes on their head. Stevens is the object of the gaze, the eye candy, not Eggert’s Alma.  

The film offers a satirical, not altogether flattering, view of masculinity. Stevens confides that he used to have a postcard on his fridge at home which summed up the difference between the sexes. “[With] men, it was one switch and then [with] women, it was an entire board of knobs and dials and things like that,” he says. “I am not sure that my wife would want a robot version of me. I think if she was going to get a robot, she would probably go for something that was entirely alternative.”  

Portraying the robot, he adds, gave him new insight in how to treat women. “That’s a very, very important question and it has been in the zeitgeist really, how can men be better,” he reflects. Tom exists to improve Alma’s life. Whether that means ensuring she feels truly loved or tidying her apartment or making her a better cup of coffee, he shows the same dedication. “That’s why Tom was quite so fun to play because it was going between these big philosophical questions and the minutiae of the comedy.”

... Stevens takes his craft seriously. “Comedy is very, very difficult,” he says earnestly. “Performing comedy in a foreign language… I have to say, to make anybody laugh in a foreign language is an absolute dream. It really feels like a great achievement, to be able to bridge that gap and find humour.”  

Ask him the most important thing he learned from making I’m Your Man and he replies with even more extreme mock seriousness. “One lesson I took away, whether you’re a robot or a human, is regularly to update your software.”  

[incorrect-ikevamp-quotes]

I was on Arthur’s wiki a while back and one of the secrets said that Arthur doesn’t actually like Dazai. I’ve only just started Arthur’s route so I was wondering if that was true or not?

Sure thing! I can offer what I know about the two up to this point!

To my knowledge it is indeed true that Arthur harbors a great deal of disdain for Dazai, though in other routes he can be more subtle about his feelings towards the man. Before I can really speak to why Arthur dislikes him so much, I feel like we need to establish two really important reference points in terms of their understanding/view of the world.

Arthur, like it or not, has one fundamental belief about the world he inhabits. And that is that the world is an evil place. It is a place where good cannot survive, and as such that means every single person he comes into contact with must be marred by some kind of wrongdoing or ill intent. It is his justification for his largely selfish behavior, the reason why he deems it okay that he lives with no thought for the future or hope for better. 

Dazai, believe it or not, does not exist far away from this understanding of the world. For all of the man’s silliness, he does not live in some kind of la la land where everything is perfect and fun all the time. To the contrary, he has seen and known a great deal of tragedy; he knows how unforgiving the world can be, how unfair and overwhelming the weight of everything is. 

Knowing this, one might not be so surprised. After all, they both deal with so much of their trauma/pain with humor--the classic comedic misdirection to force attention elsewhere. Why then, does Arthur feel so much dislike? Aren’t they kindred spirits, in a way?

This is where one absolutely key difference comes into play.

The difference is that Dazai does not take a deterministic stance in regards to the misconduct and cruelty that tends to plague human society. The difference, in other words, is surprisingly simple: hope. Dazai may feel hopeless about all of the difficult things that exist in the world, and in the ways people hurt each other--but he still wants people to be happy. He still wants to work to alleviate people’s unhappiness, show them ways to smile and laugh, to forget their pain and ease disagreements. It’s...a little cliche, but if I’m being honest, Dazai understands one of the hardest things a person has to learn when they reach their lowest points.

Hope is something that you give yourself. You have to be the one to decide to want better, to work for better. And when things don’t improve fast enough, you have to carry those broken pieces with as much courage and grace as you can muster. Dazai I must admit, does this with more finesse than anyone gives him credit for. He is something of a chameleon, taking on the colors of others as he weaves in and out of their view, never betraying his true desolation. (The problem in that, however, is that he never asks for help until it’s far too late--and in the case of Ikevamp, never asks for help at all for the vast majority of his screentime.) 

This isn’t to play a game of moral superiority. Dazai’s approach isn’t a perfect one by any means; it is simply the only way he knew how to engage with the world and remain true to himself and his love for others (whether he is consciously aware of this fact or not is none of my concern, he’s an idiot and I love him). Arthur’s approach is flawed as well, but it’s flawed in a much more harmful way. To assume that every course of action you take is a justified one without taking into account the people you are engaging with is just asking to step on people’s comfort zones. You fundamentally cannot be sensitive without context; it is the prerequisite of any form of compassion or kindness. The reason people like Leonardo or Comte succeed at making friends and gathering others around them is that they are very active and attentive when it comes to interacting with other people. They pay close attention to a person’s sensitivities. What subjects bother them? What is their body language telling me? How do the circumstances contribute to what they’re feeling, and how can I distract or alleviate in a way that is productive? While this seems like a robotic process--an obvious one--when laid out like this, it’s much more complicated and requires a great deal of experience to perfect in real time. Their charisma is absolutely hard won; it took them hundreds of years of trial and error to get there.

And, more than anything, Comte and Leonardo and Dazai practically exude good will. They aren’t just skilled at dealing with people and that’s why they don’t debacle as much as Arthur does in his attempts to reach out. Those three truly want nothing more than to see people at ease. When others are in distress, they feel it as though it were their own. They don’t assess pain in terms of false equivalence, to my understanding--they think that everyone’s experience is different, but no less troubling for that fact. Arthur, on the other hand, tends to be a lot more focused on himself. I’m in so much pain, I’m so upset about how the world is overwhelming me, I’m the one that should be angry/crying/upset right now not you. One thing I want to highlight here is that I don’t mean to belittle Arthur’s suffering; I have no doubt that he’s seen his share of heartache and that he needs real help (therapy for the love of god). But that doesn’t make his constant insistence on making things about him okay. It doesn’t make his bitterness with people that choose to look after the feelings of others okay.

And here, is where we get to the crux of this reply. It is my understanding that the reason Arthur harbors so much resentment towards Dazai is what I have just stated two sentences ago. Arthur sees how Dazai copes with similar crippling fear of the world’s difficulties, and not only does he manage to conceal it better--he also just sincerely gives a damn about people. And not only does it show, it makes people feel a great deal of warmth for Dazai, even if he’s crazy weird. I think Arthur really does envy this capacity for flexibility, the impressive way Dazai can move with the flow of things. Arthur is so set in the past, is so desperate to find happiness that he will strangle what little he has between his own two hands. Dazai knows happiness is never guaranteed, and has given up trying to claim it. Instead he just does his best every day, even if he feels like a failure by the end of it all. 

Perhaps yet another reason Arthur is upset at Dazai could be Dazai’s easy willingness to give up on himself without listening to the protests of others in regards to the subject, much like how Dazai hates it when Isaac gives up despite so much well-meaning potential...

So yeah! That’s how I understand their similarities and differences c:

[dangerouscommiesubversive]

Hi! I’d like to request #17, with Philip and Chase (and bonus Shoutarou with another Drive character, if you like). I just have this need for Philip to interact with all my favorite characters, and your W crossovers are delightful. ^_^

17. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

Really, Shoutaro thinks, it shows a lot of restraint from Philip that he managed to wait a full week after discovering that Roidmudes were back in the world before he insisted on meeting one. Not that he’s unrestrained, of course. In fact, he’s gotten a lot better over the years about not overwhelming people with his academic enthusiasm. But there’s academic enthusiasm, and then there’s his increasing interest in the various unusual friends their junior Riders have picked up. He’d been practically vibrating with excitement since he first heard that Dr. Sawagami had run successful preliminary trials in her project to bring back the Roidmudes.

Of course, Philip could ask to speak with one or more Roidmudes all he liked, it had taken some time to arrange it. They’d had to talk to Terui, and he’d called Drive, and Drive had spoken to the four now-living Roidmudes, and then it had still taken two more months after that before anything could be scheduled just due to the tremendous problems Drive’s friends were having getting the Roidmudes legal status.

Now, though, the day's come, and Philip is enthusiastically shaking the hand of a man so color-coordinated that he could put Terui to shame and saying, "It's a absolute pleasure to meet you, Mr. Chase, thank you for coming, I appreciate it. Would you like coffee? I don’t know if you eat.”

Chase stares at him for only a very brief moment before saying, “Thank you, I do not drink coffee.”

Next to Chase--towering over him, in fact over all of them--is a man in a red coat with a thoughtful look on his face, and Shoutaro has to think for a moment before he recalls the last few messages he’d gotten. “And you’re...Heart, right? I’m Hidari Shoutaro, and this is Philip.”

Philip blinks. “This isn’t Mach? I thought Shijima Gou would be accompanying Chase to Fuuto. Shoutaro, I’m sorry, did I forget to introduce you?”

“It’s all right, partner, you were pretty excited. No, you remember the email, Gou was tied up with something last-minute.”

“By which he means he forgot that Professor Harley was going to be in Japan and expecting to see him.” Heart smiles, although he’s watching Philip with something that might be suspicion. “So I volunteered to come along, I’m always interested in making new friends.”

Chase glances at him. “You are overprotective.”

Heart makes a hm noise that doesn’t sound entirely like disagreement.

“Heart, Heart...” Philip’s eyes light up. “Yes, you’re also a Roidmude! Terui had said you weren’t interested in being interviewed, I don’t suppose you’ve had a change of heart? Forgive me, that wasn’t intended to be a play on words.”

Heart wavers for a moment, and Shoutaro can’t quite figure out whether it’s due to shyness or actual discomfort, so it’s probably fortunate that Chase is the one who answers. “Heart is not comfortable with discussing the past.”

“Ah. Yes, I entirely understand. Would you like coffee?”

“Now who’s overprotective?” But Heart relaxes visibly. “Yes, coffee would be wonderful, thank you.”

--

"Terui Ryuu said you and the other Roidmudes were having difficulties with your legal status, do you mind if I ask what they were? I know there are existing procedures for establishing the legal identities of non-humans, it's been done for two Bugsters in Seito. Well, three. Two and a half? Dr. Kujou is a complication."

Philip, Chase finds, is refreshingly blunt. He doesn't talk around issues the way many humans do, he cuts directly to the point, and moreover he seems pleased when Chase does the same. "There was an attempt to declare the Roidmudes property of the Japanese government."

"Oh.” Philip blinks several times, rapidly. “That's offensive, I imagine you all objected strenuously."

"Yes." Chase takes a sip of his tea. "And then once it was conclusively determined that we were people, there was the question of criminal charges."

"Really? Against you?"

"Against all of us. Heart, primarily. Brain and Medic were considered accomplices."

"I imagine your being a Kamen Rider helped with your case?"

"To an extent. I am not considered a threat. As it stands, we are no longer capable of causing gravity surges or otherwise wielding serious destructive force, and are under intermittent observation. The current legal debate centers around whether a Roidmude can be considered to have experienced mental duress."

“Hm. Really? Compelling. I wouldn’t think that was a debate at all.”

Chase considers this carefully before replying. “Why would you say that?”

“If Roidmudes are people, which they certainly are, then they can of course experience mental duress, or indeed any form of psychological distress.” Philip stares into space, hands wrapped around his coffee cup. “Unfortunately I’ve found that one of the hallmarks of personhood is a capacity for acute suffering. A being self-aware enough to love must also be self-aware enough to fear losing that which they love, and that fear can naturally be leaned upon by the unethical to coerce.” More staring into space. “Or simply to terrorize. It’s even more unfortunate when one realizes that unethical people of that type will likely always exist.”

“I...had not considered this previously.” Chase frowns, slowly. He’s experiencing an unfamiliar emotion--not that there are many emotions truly familiar to him, but this one contains elements of both surprise and happiness, and he is not clear on how one might express it.

He likes Philip, he realizes. He would like to be friends with Philip. Perhaps this is how Heart feels all the time.

“If this is the case, then in your determination, do Roidmudes have souls? I am not clear on what a soul is meant to be, but it has been the subject of discussion.”

Philip actually laughs. “The nature of the soul is one of the few topics on which I’m not the man to ask, for that you might want to talk to Ghost. In fact, I’m sure he’d be happy to discuss it with you. But in my limited experience with the subject--yes, I would think that Roidmudes have souls.” He takes a long drink of coffee. “Please excuse me if this is an indelicate question, I’ve been trying not to ask these things so abruptly lately, but my research indicated that Roidmudes have a more robotic base form onto which your human guises are layered, may I see it?”

--

They’re at the Windscale boutique getting Heart a suit.

They’d been discussing the Agency, and Heart mentioned having been a detective very briefly and seemed interested in the work, and this had led very naturally to talking about the boss, and from there to what Shoutaro had learned from him. Including, crucially, manner of dress, a topic that Heart seems fascinated by.

“I’d thought you could just sort of...shapeshift your clothing,” Shoutaro says. “At least, Bugsters do that, and Philip had mentioned that you do something similar.”

“Well, I can.” Heart plucks at the furred cuff of his coat. “But Tomari Kiriko’s suggested that I might adjust better to living among humans if I try to pick up some of their habits, little ones, and I like clothing.” A smile flashes across his face. “Mostly I’ve been borrowing things from Tomari Shinnosuke. He’s indicated that he’d like me to stop, though, because apparently he’s tired of having to come find me if he’s missing something he wants.”

“That’s Drive and his wife, right? We’ve never actually properly met, it’s sort of an oversight on Philip’s and my part.” Shoutaro frowns. “Do you live with him?”

Another flash of smile. “For the moment, yes. I was...revived...several months before the other Roidmudes, and they offered to let me stay with them. Mostly I watch Eiji for them and help Kiriko with housework. I’m learning how to cook. Brain and Medic are staying with other friends of Tomari Shinnosuke’s until the authorities can stop arguing about us and let us find a place of our own.”

“Well...” Shoutaro squints up at him for a moment, trying not to resent the man for being taller than him. “What kind of clothing do you like? I’m not exactly an expert on men’s fashion, but I like to think I know a little bit about it.”

This time it’s not a flash, the smile stays as Heart says, “Well, I have to say, the suits that Tomari Shinnosuke and his colleagues wear aren’t very interesting, but I do like your outfit quite a lot, it’s very sharp.”

So now Heart is trying on hats, and the Windscale salesgirls are losing their minds over how handsome he is. Normally Shoutaro would be a little jealous, they’re so used to him at this point that nothing about him is interesting to them, but he can’t quite bring himself to be. Not when Heart looks so pleased to be doing such an ordinary thing. Anyway, he’s letting Shoutaro pick everything out, and it’s so rare for someone else to be this trusting of Shoutaro’s fashion sense.

He also looks very good in a three-piece suit. But then, Shoutaro thinks, straightening his waistcoat, doesn’t everyone?

“What do you think of this one, my friend?”

Shoutaro looks at the latest hat Heart’s picked out and says, after a moment’s thought, “I think you look like a real man.”

Heart pauses. “Is that a good thing in this context?”

“Yes. The best thing I can think of, really. I mean, not that it’s bad to be a woman, but--listen, what I mean is, you look good, it suits you. Do you, uh, do you like to read at all?”

“Yes, sometimes, why?”

“We’re going to a bookstore after this, there are a couple of authors I think you’d enjoy.”

--

“Thank you for allowing me to examine you,” Philip says, when Chase shifts back into the human form that he’s finding more and more preferable to Proto-Zero’s, “it’s been a tremendous help to me. It’s--the many varieties of personhood that exist within the modern world are terribly compelling, but so few people are willing to speak about it at any length. Which I understand, but it does make study difficult.”

Chase nods. “I understand.” Beat. “You say personhood, but not humanity?”

“They’re hardly synonymous. Like circles and ovals. Every human is a person, but not every person is human. I haven’t always fit the precise definition of human myself.” Philip’s hand stills in the middle of a furious bout of note-taking, his face taking on a faraway look that Chase is learning to recognize. “What was death like for you? If you don’t mind my asking. Personally, I find the memory very difficult to grasp. Like a dream. I know that it happened, but when I reach for it, it slips out of my fingers.”

“It was...” It takes some time to find the way to phrase the answer. “Silent. And then when it ceased to be silent, it was because I was alive again.”

Philip nods, and takes more notes, and says, “Thank you for sharing that, I appreciate it. It’s...most people I know have never died. It’s difficult to explain to them.” The notebook snaps shut suddenly, Philip’s pen slides into its spiral binding right before it’s set aside. “Now. Is there anything I can do to help you?”

Chase blinks, slowly, several times, before replying. “How do you mean?”

“You. And your fellow Roidmudes. This is not an easy world to live in, especially when one’s personhood is treated as a subject for debate instead of a given. I would like--I hope that you’ll consider me a friend. I would like you to be my friend. And as a friend I would like to offer you and the other Roidmudes whatever help I can in establishing yourselves as people deserving of independent lives.” Philip grins at him. “At the very least I’m wonderful at winning debates.”

--

When Philip and Chase emerge from the garage, the first thing they see is Heart sitting in one of the front room chairs with an elderly gray cat asleep on his legs, and a much younger marmalade cat draped around his neck like an ungainly scarf. His red coat is nowhere in sight; he is, instead, wearing a black three-piece suit, a vividly red shirt, and a burgundy necktie with a heart-shaped pin in it. He's also engrossed in a book in English, although when they enter the room he glances up and says, cheerfully, "Hello."

"Good afternoon, Mr. Heart, I see Shoutaro's actually succeeded in his quest to get someone else to like Windscale as much as he does, you look very good. Are you enjoying Raymond Chandler? Shoutaro, is that Mrs. Mizuishi's kitten on our friend's shoulders? Where was he this time? Mrs. Mizuishi is a bit absent-minded," Philip says to Chase, "Chobi frequently wanders off when she's looking elsewhere."

"Yes, she called when we were on our way back from the bookstore." Shoutaro's sitting at the desk, in the middle of typing what looks like a list. "He'd only gotten up a tree, Heart helped me get him down. Mrs. Mizuishi’s coming to pick him up soon."

"And I see he has Mick's approval as well."

The gray cat opens one eye and gives Philip an unamused look, as if to say, “Yeah? What are you going to do about it?” only to begin purring when Heart absently reaches down to scratch his ears.

Chase sits down next to Heart while Philip goes over to speak to Shoutaro and is immediately investigated by the orange cat, who sniffs at his ear briefly and then gets up and hops from Heart’s shoulders to his. “What are you reading?”

“A collection of detective stories. Hidari Shoutaro gave it to me. He’s making me a list of movies that I might enjoy, I think I like detectives.” Heart leans slightly so that his arm brushes Chase’s. “It’s nice to have made a new friend. I hope the questioning wasn’t too intrusive?”

After a moment’s consideration, Chase says, “No. It was an enjoyable conversation.” He reaches up offer the orange cat his hand to smell. “I think it would be safe to say that Philip is a friend as well.”

Heart breaks into a smile. “That’s wonderful! I’m very glad to hear it.”

“However, I think we are expected to return to the city shortly.”

“Right, yes, I suppose we are.”

Over at the desk, Shoutaro pulls the paper out of his typewriter, blows on it to make sure that the ink is dry, and then folds it up and tucks it into an envelope. “Here, Heart, I’ve got that list for you. And my email address is at the bottom, please let me know which one you like best, you have no idea how long it’s taken me to find someone else who’d want to watch any of this stuff. I mean, Philip watches them with me, but other than that.”

Philip laughs quietly. “I do enjoy them, partner, I’m just not as passionate about them as you are.”

Heart carefully moves Mick onto the coffee table and stands up, reaching for a black hat with a red band that Chase hadn’t previously noticed hanging off the back of his chair. Chase, similarly, has to untangle himself from the orange cat, which objects strenuously to being moved and then promptly falls asleep in his chair as soon as he’s on his feet.

“I hope you’ll visit again,” Philip says as they’re shaking hands, “for non-research purposes, of course.”

Chase nods. “I would like that.”

Next to him, Heart tucks the envelope from Shoutaro into his suit jacket and says, “Maybe we can bring Brain along next time, I think they’d get along.”

They head out the door as a group, Shoutaro saying, “You’re going to email me, right, I need to know whether you like Spade or Marlowe better.”

“Of course, although I can tell you right now that just from the reading I’ve already done I like Marlowe quite a lot.”

One more round of handshakes as they all stand next to Chase’s motorcycle, and the last thing Philip says to Chase is, “Thank you again, so much. It was a pleasure to meet you. It’s wonderful to have new friends.”

Chase nods, says, “Likewise,” and resolves to visit again as soon as it’s feasible.

[ronnytherandom]

I forgot to watch content all week so i wrote about games ive been playing

9/2/2021: The Truman Show

You should fear your fears but embrace them and use them to guide you into the unknown, to explore and experience what life has to offer. Fear stands between you and the fullest experience of life so you must pass through it to better yourself. Heed not the walls built about you and the chains made to hold you. Though the architects insist it will preserve your life, containment is anathema to life. Do not take in faith the benevolence of powers that be; instead trust those who would support and liberate you, guide you through fear and into life.

As best I can lay it out, I think this is the philosophy of the Truman show but there is so much more to read into it also. There is critique of systems of commodification and celebrity (i.e. capitalism) reducing human beings to a consumable good as well as encouragement to find and pursue your goals despite adversity and even sensibility which is also tied to the illusion of economic responsibility. You can’t put a camera inside a human head, you can never “know” them without being an active and intrinsic part of their life, but also there is need for reciprocation. If one half exists with ulterior motive then the entire relationship is rotten; sincere humanity is what creates real connections. Without such your world is fake. A world built around one person is a world where no one can truly live. All these actors have given up basically their entire lives for the sake of watching Truman have his life built around him by outside forces, have allowed themselves to be commodified and dehumanised for the good of one man, Christoph. The man at the top has delusions of grandeur and thinks only of his own bottom line, he cares not for his subjects but simply wants them to do as he tells them because it benefits him to commodify their lives and interactions. Even then he cannot stand to lose control and in seeking to demonstrate Truman’s “realness” he structures his life so thoroughly that eventually there’s no reality left, only a script and adverts. But the people watching still empathise with Truman because everyone in the working class understands what it is to be trapped because real life is our own Truman show and one day we must all pass through fear, step out of the dome and create a real life for ourselves outside of the system of commodification which consumes everyone’s life and removes all realness and sincerity and emotional catharsis from it.

I unreservedly love this film.

14/2/2021: Assorted Game Reviews

Horizon Zero Dawn (Unfinished due to technical issues, 45 hours inc. parts of Frozen Wilds): This game is really cool and really fun. I think it is defined by its incredible setting which somehow creates a fresh feeling post-apocalyptic environment. Said environment creates intriguing alt-future lore and some very interesting environments to explore. I love the machine designs (especially tallnecks!) and was very sad to hear one of their contributing artists passed away recently but I’m glad their work lives on in this visually stunning game. I’m a sucker for Ubisoft-style open world games simply because it tickles a certain kind of itch and somehow this non-Ubisoft game has outdone Ubisoft on their own formula, which is hilarious, but also good for me as running around this world exploring and clearing map markers is engaging fun. Not least because of the combat. I have a minor criticism here that the combat feels slightly awkward on mouse and keyboard, the arrows never seem to go where I’m aiming, but aside from that the experience of fighting is a grand one. Enemies never lose their threat and I love the weak spot system the game employs which makes every tool useful in niche circumstance and rewards curiosity. It specifically manages this in a way that I feel the Witcher series could learn from if it ever returns; by making head on assault less viable and encouraging tactical hunting. I do feel this system makes hunting robots so fun that by contrast hunting humans becomes a chore however, though I noted this improves in the dlc with the addition of humans with elemental weaknesses limited in number as they are. I cannot speak for the story in entirety but what I encountered was pretty good, though I feel as if it was only just really getting going at the point where I could not continue. I find Aloy to be a compelling and well portrayed protagonist and though I can guess about her origin and the ultimate end of the alt-future apocalypse I still want to see how it plays out on screen, so will return to this as soon as I’ve fixed it.

Rimworld (122 hours. Familiar with but do not own Royalty Expansion):

Rimworld is one of those super special games that I don’t think I have a single problem with. Fair warning it can be brutal and is heavily dependent on RNG but this allows it to create truly unique and interesting scenarios on a constant basis. In the wider perspective it could be described as formulaic, with regular cycles of managing the settlement between raids and random events, but the devils in the details. Colonist traits, health and skills dictate how you play and sometimes you’ll be forced to adapt as some colonists simply refuse to perform some tasks. The depth of health particularly amuses me, in that each little part of someone’s body is modelled in a way. If you’re in a firefight you may take a single bullet which grazes your finger and you’re fine. Alternately it could pierce your human leather cowboy hat, your skull and kill you instantly and the game will tell you exactly what happened. The risk/reward element is addictive enough, and that’s without accounting for just how cool it is to see your colony slowly expand. Establishing more and more options for crafting is fun and shows off the full range of different items in the game which is fucking extensive. Between clothing, weapons, armour, sculpture and drugs to name only a few you have the opportunity to create many varied production lines either for your colonists or to trade for money and there is a lot of fun to be had here as well as it is quite satisfying to see psychoid you have grown personally become the cocaine your colonists snort to help them stay awake on limited sleep. From an archaeologist’s perspective it is especially cool to look back over your base and see the hints of how and why structures were built and remember the history of your limitations and development through structure. I think the lore of the universe is really cool too, a very 40k-esque kind of place except with far less order, somehow. But the universe does an excellent job of feeling alive and moving constantly on both a planetary and interstellar level. You can fully believe that while you build wooden shacks to shield yourself from terrifyingly low temperatures there are simultaneously rich pieces of shit living it up on the glitterworld that’s one system over. The music does an excellent job of creating the wild west frontier atmosphere the game cultivates to great effect. Ultimately, for just being a grid with a series of different numbers attached, this game does a fantastic job of creating a compelling, brutal and very real colony management experience. I dont think I can properly put into words the grandness and scope of this one. I didnt even mention the modding scene, which is expansive and tailors to basically any need you could have. The Rim is a terrifying place but theres so much fun to be had.

Factorio (86 hours, mostly 1.1): Having completed a game of Factorio I can tell you reliably that this is one of the best games ever made, thoroughly addictive and fun. If you like numbers, logistics, TRAINS, its gonna be your thing. Not to mention its probably the only documented case of a game with no bugs (so far as official forums are concerned). Strictly speaking this games combat is not the most engrossing thing but good lord do you feel it when you acquire a flamethrower. The way each aspect of the game (production, research, logistics, combat, upgrades for everything therein) feeds into the next is a really well constructed balancing act such that you must experience the full game in order to complete it and I always appreciate this kind of design. I think its one of the best tenets of factory game design especially as its something present in Satisfactory too. Beyond all of this generalised good the game is also excellent in its intricacies, the architecture necessary to build a maximum efficiency base, the level of planning and organisation that can be employed is mind-blowing. Not to mention the mod community, factorion is already an extensive experience and some mad bastards have seen fit to complicate it further, hats off to them. This really is a great moment in gaming.

 Destiny 2 (198 hours, all expansions, played some post Forsaken release, mostly Season of Arrivals onwards, spent roughly £20 on microtransactions):

This is a very interesting and enjoyable experience, but I must say it can be a bit controversial at times. What its does particularly well is moment to moment gameplay and design in all aspects. The game is stunning; between environments, cosmetics, shaders ships and ghosts there’s a vast range of incredible things to see, all rooted in the “pseudo-magi-science” aesthetic it’s got going on. The class design is excellent and you really do feel like you embody this rampaging madman / agile gunman / space wizard archetype, whichever you choose to play. The abilities, especially supers, are very satisfying. Everything has heft and power behind it which can be felt in all aspects of design; sound and animation is top notch. Movement is cool, you can feel how fast you move both on foot and in vehicles and the navigation has a little fun subtlety depending on your class jump, even if you can bounce unpredictably occasionally. But for the love of god why is the wall kick in there? It has only ever served to push me from a ledge into a bottomless pit. You're looking to remove antiquated content? Start there. Some guns are not so good to shoot but there’s such a great range of guns that are fun its like complaining about one drop in an ocean; and enemies are fun to shoot at, each faction distinct in meaningful ways and presenting an effective challenge. Speaking of oceans, that’s one way to describe the lore. I haven’t dived too deep but it keeps going down forever and everything I’ve read is intriguing. As a former Elder Scrolls lore nut this is something I could definitely sink my teeth into, though its much more of a pulpy sci-fi vibe than a pure nonsense vibe. I do think the game has a bit of a loot problem, primarily in regards to the conflict between high stats and looking good. This should never be a conflict, and yes you can apply ornaments to any purple gear but that’s not enough when I spend the entire time grinding power levels and thus must change armour and weapons on a constant basis to progress. This game needs a true transmog system and if not that, rethink how gear power level works. Perhaps rather than earning new instances of gear you always possess a version of it and the loot you acquire in missions just upgrades your instance to your current overall power level? This would serve to do away with the current upgrade system which I think is a needless additional grind. Perhaps it could be retained in using enhancement cores to empower gear as present but necessitating a whole upgrade module to keep your favourite weapon on hand is kind of painful honestly. There is also at present the issue of sunsetting gear, mildly controversial to say the least. If it’s necessary to streamline the game and make it function moving forward so be it but surely loot pools should be adjusted so you can actually get useful loot from older locations? And why sunset personal instances of gear which can be acquired at the regular power level anyway? I had to throw away my favourite bow and hunt down a new version of the exact same weapon for… what reason? I do think destination navigation leaves a little to be desired also. I get that having a physical hub world is meaningful but Destiny does not have a very extroverted community; I can count the times someone noticed me in the tower on one hand. And its not even like there’s fun activities to be found in the same sense as say Deep Rock Galactic, which really does take advantage of its hub. Perhaps for players who simply want to go about their business all of the vendors could be set into a menu system where just clicking an icon takes you to their menu from anywhere in the system rather than, per se, having to go through an entire loading screen (Which takes you to orbit and back) to reach a location which serves simply as the front for four menus. These are established player problems. As a dedicated PvE player I can say that this game is immensely fun in combat and growing in power does feel really good. It’s something I recommend getting into, there’s just some very large creases that need ironing which the Bungie should really take the time to address rather than pushing out new in game content every three months.

[sometipsygnostalgic]

wanna see you keep talking about AT: what's your biggest criticism with each character in the series (as in a writing failure/something you didn't like about them, things of that sort)

Aww fuck! Now you’re asking. 

Everyone: Sometimes they went a bit too far with making the characters act dumb, sociopathic, etc. The show would usually be pretty consistent with having them react humanely. It was season 5, when the show had started taking itself seriously, that the characters acting sociopathic felt like a bit too much. 

Finn:  In his “jerk arc” he went too far. He had no empathy for the lemon people, he had even less than PB, who was already acting pretty sociopathic. He legitimately harrassed both FP and PB. He touched FP’s shoulder and made her uncomfortable. He stroked PB’s hand after the high five in Too Old, which by the way has actually been cut in many countries due to how gross it was. He got super weird in Rattleballs where he was a total simp and told PB about the robot even though he knew she’d kill him, just because he wanted to impress her.  Then in The Tower, he had tunnel vision and legitimately KILLED like a dozen candy people with his tower, which was hilariously referenced in Hot Diggety Doom when he said the candy people don’t trust him anymore.  I didn’t like that they made his arm grow back. Or that he kissed a million princesses in Breezy, which is a poor reflection on the crew’s treatment of girl characters in the show :P I know we ended up with the awesome Fern arc, and Finn got over his romantic hangups in a satisfying way, but the amount of people the episode alienated is unreal. It did a lot of damage to the fandom.  

PB: I hate the entire way they baited her having feelings for Finn. If you remove that kiss in Too Young, her character makes much more sense. Reading her around it makes the ep seem like a massive inconsistency. I don’t like they waited four seasons to work on her as an actual character.  I feel like they went a bit too far in making her cold and pragmatic or sociopathic. Just a smidgen. This is because some of her actions verge on irredeemable. I’m mostly thinking about her relationship with Flame Princess. It doesn’t seem right she’d have no feelings about ruining the life of a fairly innocent child. Also she totally got a bunch of flame people killed in The Cooler. At least in The Cooler, she demonstrated a modicum of doubt before taking apart the sacred Fire Giants. She’s certainly not like the Diamonds, but FP was right to say she was a bad person, and I’m glad she was horrified by what she was becoming, but couldn’t immediately turn off her paranoia or bad instincts - it’s something she works on for the rest of the show and post-canon. (It’s also why shes a million times better than the Diamonds) I think her character in season 10 could have been better handled. For start we got no followup to Elements. It’s pretty significant she became a giant candy monster and brainwashed all of Ooo, no???? It did take them two seasons but they eventually showed she was impacted by having been possessed by the Lich. I was hoping we’d get exploration with Elements too, especially because of how much she unintentionally hurt everyone, like Marceline. They tied her actions in the series far too much to her character for it to feel like something that could be brushed off.    But what was weirdest was that she wanted to go to war with one of her creations. That didn’t seem right. Pb has a complicated relationship with Lemongrab, shown right up through to the same finale (even exploring how they would currently interact in Diamonds & Lemons), and she didn’t want to go to war with him, but she did want to get him usurped by Lemonhope. If she is willing to stoop to war now, why didn’t she just... yknow.... have Gumbald executed? Stealth plan? It seems far more up her alley, and he even tried the same thing. The season finale tried to say she felt under pressure to go to war, but I don’t think it does a good job at communicating why. Why wouldn’t a secret mission work? Would it count as a war crime? If it did, who would sanction her? Gumbald in general sucks. There are better “dark reflections” of Bubblegum in the series, and Patience was a much better villain. I wonder how things would have been different if the season could conclude at its intended pace? 

Marceline: My criticism with Marceline is a lot easier to summarise, because I’ve thought about her less and she’s less involved with the show.... which is the WHOLE PROBLEM!   

1. Put Marceline in the show more. She was barely in the first six seasons at all! She’s such an awesome and fun character when they let her be. More eps like Go With Me would have been awesome.  Even more eps like Princess Day or Be Sweet, where she was LSP’s bestie. 

2. Her character’s personality, for a long time, revolved around being a source of angst. She wasn’t demonstrating her fun side at all. I guess they didn’t want to write her continuing to be a big jerk, but it meant she paled when pitched against the rest of the cast - especially PB and Ice King, who were always great, and if they were in an ep with Marceline, their characters always outshone her. This could have been repaired by having her go on more adventures with Finn and Jake, and developing Marceline’s reactions to various situations. Give her more complexity.     I really love Obsidian because Marceline demonstrates her wild side in this ep and goes on an adventure which is very personal to her. She has some cool action scenes near the start, and this episode connects her more serious personality with the comedic representation at the start of the series. I think this is the best Marceline episode, followed by Varmints (she was so fun but mature in this ep). I like how she was during and after Stakes too. She had far more personality when they were putting her in eps with multiple other characters.   

Ice King: I have no massive thoughts here. I think some of the things he did were a bit too messed up. He killed a bunch of cloud people and furniture in season 6. His actions before that point were far more innocuous, though he did accidentally kill PB those two times, and he did threaten to kill princesses after kidnapping them in season 1. I LOVE Ice King season 7 and up though. He’s so good. I was shocked at the finale when they “killed” him, had him revert into Simon with very few consequences, like all those years as Ice King had vanished. I was so glad to see Simon struggling with his past identity in Obsidian. “This is how I cope!” 

Jake: Like the others barring Marceline, I thought that Jake occasionally did stuff that was too messed up. But because he’s a less serious character, who is already verging on chaotic good/neutral, it isn’t as impactful. I don’t have any major issues with Jake. Maybe I’ll change my mind on rewatch? But I love how he can be so self-contradictory. 

Flame Princess: Last one I want to bring up. This character is a mess. Rebecca intended her to be this very innocent person, having new experiences. This was how she was characterised right through to Earth and Water, but after that episode, her character got... an unfortunate reset. Suddenly a mature and BORING ruler who barely appeared anymore in the show. I felt a lot more could have been done with Flame Princess, and they shouldn’t have made her so dull later on. They played her as a virtuous character who got over her breakup with maturity, and led her kingdom with honesty, to further the development of two entirely different characters rather than to make FP interesting in herself. 

[bronanlynch]

(bi)weekly media update

apparently I just. do these every two weeks now huh. sorry to the tuesday again no problem extended universe crew for being unable to keep to a consistent schedule

listening: Curses by The Crane Wives, a band that I just started listening to but I like their sound, nice and fun and folksy, lots of songs with ominous lyrics that are good on fanmixes

honorary mention to the new Lil Nas X song because we are all love the new Lil Nas X song, it’s a bop, it’s been stuck in my head on and off ever since I heard it, and I am not immune to sexily blasphemous music videos

reading: finished Smoke & Ashes, the most recent book in the Kate Kane series that I talked about last week, and I enjoyed it a lot but there sure is a cliffhanger and afaik no set release date for the next one. it’s pretty angsty but does have lots of nice moments of hope, and some discussion about recovering from both depression and alcoholism that I appreciated.

also read more romance novels, and I appreciate that Cat Sebastian, like KJ Charles, knows how to write about rich characters while making it incredibly clear that hoarding wealth is morally indefensible. it’s like the “wow, cool robot” thing where I want to be told that I’m right for disliking capitalism/imperialism/the military industrial complex, but also I do very much want you to show me the cool robot (hot rich prettyboy in nice clothes)

also finally started Harrow the Ninth today, so I’m sure I’ll have more to say about that next time

watching: speaking of “wow, cool robot,” watched a little bit more Turn A Gundam, which sure does have some cool robots. also some gender. the main character crossdresses to like, hide their identity for fun complicated spy reasons and it’s not treated as a joke or anything? it’s just a thing that they do? and no one comments on it beyond when they were like “hey you have to wear a dress to this event because the people from the moon think our mech pilot is a woman and they can’t know it’s actually you because they still think you’re working for them”

absolutely hate that the guy on the right is just wearing a normal boring suit though like. c’mon man

Zan and I have been watching The Falcon and the Winter Soldier aka the sambucky show each week and my review so far is. well it’s about what I expected. the first episode was incredibly slow and kinda disappointing (Sam and Bucky never interact! the fact that Bucky might maybe miss Steve is never brought up, not even by his therapist, who tbh gives me incredibly bad vibes! if my best friend and the only person I knew from my past fucked off and left me alone to deal with my trauma in favor of ruining the life of a woman who’d moved on from him, I’d be pissed!) (for the sake of not being angry all the time I pretend Steve died instead of did That).

the second episode was more fun, more happens, there’s some incredibly heavy-handed corporate queerbaiting mixed in with some actually nice emotional moments (this article and this thread by the same person have a pretty good summary of All That). the handling of race, uh, could be better tbh. I appreciate what they’re going for, and to be fair the whole show isn’t out yet so it could get better (since some of the problems are tied to, y’know, the overall political problems, i.e. the fact that the villains are a group of people, led by a Black woman, who hate borders and illegally deliver medication to refugees which is somehow a bad thing, I kind of doubt it). but there is something about the way they’re making a Black man the mouthpiece of American imperialism, and the way that the new (white) Captain America who takes the shield when Sam doesn’t want it has a Black girlfriend and a Black best friend who, so far, have mostly just given him motivational pep talks, that doesn’t really inspire confidence. (this article and thread are a good overview of that aspect of the show)

also, I think it’s very funny when people are like “well you can’t say anything about the show yet, only two episodes are out” like. first of all lads it’s a six episode show, a third of the content is a decent chunk to use to form an analytical opinion, and second of all, if something strikes you as Not Great, you’re allowed to feel that way and say that, you don’t have to wait to see if there might be some twist or context that makes the thing you didn’t care for great and fine, actually,

that being said,

(when we watched the first episode, the immediate next thing we did was watch Winter Soldier and I was pleasantly surprised how well it holds up. not perfect obvi but still a solid movie, and the music does fuck)

also watched this very neat little video essay on Victoriana costuming and like, why so much media is set in the Victorian era, and started the c-drama Word of Honor which I’m sure will either be in a future post or just. something I start blogging about normally

playing: the weekend before last was the Beam Saber season finale, which I’ve already posted about quite a bit because it was fun and I love to play games with my friends. played a very fun game of Things, Eldritch and Terrifying by S. Gates this past weekend. it’s a very fun game, with very easy-to-follow rules and lots of helpful adjectives and scene starters, and also just conceptual it slaps (one person is an eldritch terror, the other person is the human that they’re courting. there’s a variant where you play as a vampire. it slaps). we made it uh, more of a rom-com than a horror story but I had a very good time, we told a very cute love story, and we’re gonna try again to make it more horror-y next time.

also I finally started Brigmore Witches and it’s very good and fun. my one complaint is that I want the Whalers to have names, because I enjoy the bit at the beginning where you can eavesdrop on them and some of them are concerned for you and some of them are fucked up about the Overseers invading their home and some of them want to fucking betray you. also, I didn’t realize that the very beginning when you fight Corvo is a dream sequence so I spent the whole fight being like “wait why does he get a gun and I don’t, where are my powers, wait aren’t I supposed to lose this fight for Plot Reasons why is he dead.” also, fucking love the favor that lets you dress up as an Overseer to get into the prison. I do love a good disguise mission

making: citrus chicken (from a cookbook so no link), plus some citrus-y root vegetables. very good if you like orange.

writing: nothing I can share yet for ~zine reasons. yes I have several fandom event weeks coming up that I want to participate in, no I haven’t written anything for any of them yet

[calliecat93]

ST: TNG S6 Watchthrough Episodes 6-9

True Q: After a complete absence last season, Q is back! So why’s he there this time? A young woman named Amanda is on the ship... and it turns out that she has the same powers that the Q Continuum has. Q is there (no meniton of where Vash is though…) to take her to the Continuum, but Amanda doesn’t want to go. She’s happy with her life and she doesn’t want it or her future plans to be taken away from her. It feels like they decided to do a remake of Hide and Q, the one where Q gave Riker Q-like powers. While it is one of S1’s better episodes, I don’t particularly care for that one for a few reasons. This one I felt was an improvement. Amanda’s a really nice girl, I mean her intro has her summon up puppies! She’s struggling with her powers especially when Q makes her realize the extent of it and how she can do literally anything. Under Q’s guidance, she begins to actually enjoy it… but Q is really trying to push her away from being human. She comes close to crossing the line when she tries to make Riker fall in love with her, even using mind-control… but realizes how bad it feels and decides that she doesn’t like being an all-powerful being who forces herself on others. I love how aghast Q is that a Q can have human feelings and want to use their powers to do actual good for others. Honestly I’m confused on why they don’t bring up Amanda using her power to just make herself. We know that the Q’s can do so form Deja Q, so how come that possibility enver comes up. I think I’d have liked that better than Amanda finally agreeing to go at the end. Though to be fair she does so after realizing the greater good that she can do with her power after saving a dying planet and has clearly not at all lost her humanity/compassion. She’s gonna give the Continumm one Hell of a time, huh? But yeah, it was good. It’s not Q’s best appearance, certainly one of his more serious protrayals and kind of reminds me why I hate him. But also why I love him cause he’s just so freakin’ fun, John de Lancie is utterly fantastic in the role, and his amorality really adds so much more depth to the show. When he shows up, you know that you’re gonna get something interesting. After not having him at all last season, this was very much welcomed~ 4/5.

Rascals: We have a de-aged episode folks! Picard, Ro, Guinan, and Keiko have all been turned into young children. They’re not happy about it. Picard cause it undermines his captaincy, Ro because her childhood was traumatic to put it lightly, Keiko because it major complicates things with her husband and child, and Guinan… no actually, Guinan just has fun with it XD Now de-aging episodes can either be really fun or really annoying depending on how it’s done. My favorite one is the one in Justice League Unlimited, which did a good balance between having fun with the concept and still telling a good coherent story with a major heartbreaking line at the end that shows that being a kid again wasn’t fun for everyone. How did TNG do? Honestly IDK why they included Keiko in this. Don’t get me wrong I like Keiko… but it feels like they only included her to do some really cringy humor on how a grown woman got de-aged and is now married to an adult man. Thankfully O'Brien is a good man who’s as uncomfortable with it as I am and doesn’t do anything that he shouldn’t, but still, the show was it really necessary? Aside from that, it was fine. I feel like they’re trying to tell a serious story as per usual… and I think that was the wrong approach. That JLU episode I mentioned did play parts of it seriously, but it also recognized how absurd the whole premise was and rolled with it. There are entertaining bits, like a kid!Picard acting like… well Picard is pretty dang funny, but I just don’t feel like they struck a good balance between the seriousness and just having fun with it. It outright makes the adults all getting overtaken by the Ferengi outright embarrassing, not funny or scary. Like I said though it does have fun moments. I like how Guinan just wanted to have fun while a kid again and manage to get Ro to finally give in and have some form of a happy childhood that she didn’t get to have before. A bunch of children, including the non-de-aged ones like Alexander, outwitting a bunch of Ferengi was also hilarious, especially Picard faking being Riker’s son. Riker’s face when Picard hugged him was amazing. The kid actors were also really good, especially Guinan’s actress. But otherwise, it just kinda feels like they couldn’t decide on a tone and as such while it has its entertaining bits, it feels confused on what kind of episode it wants to be. It’s harmless and another one of those episodes that I’d say adult fans can watch with their kids, but it’s certainly not one of their best efforts. 2/5.

A Fistful of Datas: We got us a Western episode! Hooray~! The crew has some time off and Worf gets forced to agrees to undergo a Wild West Holodeck program with Alexander with Troi also joining in. Too bad that they chose that day to link Data to the ship’s computers and a power surge causes a malfunction n both Data and the computers! Oops. So yeah, the ship/Data is having issues while our trio is trapped in the Holodeck with Data’s image replacing the characters. You know how I just complained that the last episode couldn’t decide between seriousness or comedic and thus they clashed? Not an issue this time! This one was just complete and utter fun~! Even when it gets serious this was just great! The Western heme, Troi being a Western fangirl, them making Brent Spiner play a billion roles again, it is just a blast! Heck just having Worf in this role where he’s clearly dreading everything, then has fun with it (at least until Alexander gets kidnapped/the Data thing) I'm just so nice haha! I can’t think of much else to say but another fun Holodeck episode! Now if only they could stop malfunctioning every time they use it… 4/5.

The Quality of Life: So we have a scientist and these cute little robots called Exocoms. They are made to make repairs but one unexpectedly shuts down just before the terminal explodes. Upon investigating, Data begins to believe and later decides that the Exocoms have gained sentience, and are therefore living beings. This is the closest thing that we’ve gotten since The Measure of a Man, and I really like it! I loved Data here... I mean I always love Data but he was so freakin’ good here. He chooses to advocate for the Exocoms, even when it reaches a point where Picard and Geordi’s lives are in danger, and sacrificing the Exocoms is the only available option. While he knows that he’s accepting of letting them die and very much doesn’t want to, how can he sacrifice one species of life for another? Lifeforms who are very much like him, machines made by humans but unlike him who has people like Picard to advocate for his rights, they had no one. The episode doesn’t ignore the moral questions here and really raises some good questions about life, what counts as being alive, and where we draw the line when deciding between lives. I also loved Data and Crusher’s interactions in this one and him going to her when questioning how to define life. While Indo believes that Pulaski wasn’t as bad as others, her interactions with Data were just bad but Crusher comes off as so much more compassionate and understanding towards him. It just really shows why Crusher is the CMO that this show needed, sorry Pulaski. The Exocoms are really cute and while I won’t give away the ending, they truly are heroes. This was the kind of Data episode that the show needed, and they delivered pretty dang well I’d say~! 4.5/5.

[seaweed8rain]

Which One of These Three Time-Traveling Films is the Best?

Written by Rayhan Abrar Rizkan

 Writing this comparing and contrast piece has been a challenge for me, the biggest challenge is to pick what topics do I really want to discuss. The runner ups are : Star Wars, the Ocean’s franchise, and even down to which is the best girl in Chainsaw Man. Other references aside, this one is my pick, due to my fascination towards Time-Traveling films. For this piece, I narrowed down the nominations into these three : TENET, Avengers: Endgame, and Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

 I picked TENET because of my personal bias. I picked Avengers: Endgame because you all have probably seen it. And I picked the second Terminator movie because it is one of the most quintessential, monumental, and an absolute classic to set the pop culture we know today. I could have picked Back to the Future, but I can’t, or won’t, pick one. Let us begin with the first point of comparison : The Story.

 The most important thing to a film is the script, the writing that you sell to the studio or anyone you want to work with. It goes without saying, it has to be good. A Movie has to tell a story, to follow a character, and/or to set a specific goal in mind. It is the easiest and the first thing people say when they are describing a movie, for example, “It’s the one where they have to carry a ring to the volcano.”, “There’s wizards, magic, and they have to defeat a snub-nosed villain.”, “So there’s this guy, and he got bit by a radioactive spider....”. Case in point, you can probably guess those movies just by the plot or the premise, that is set by the script, that is how powerful a story could be if written properly.

 TENET has a simple story. Calling it complicated is an understatement, but if you finally opened your third eye somehow while watching this movie, it is simple. TENET is a lot of movies stacked into one, it is a spy movie, a heist movie, a sci-fi, and action. TENET follows the Protagonist (That is how you know this movie is beyond awesome, they do not even bother naming the lead) to find pieces of an advanced weapon algorithm with secret battles coming from the past and the future to stop World War III from the hand of the main villain, Sator. See my point here? It is simple..... but I did leave out the whole time-bending plot to see it all in one straight line. . But when you see all things unveil, especially during the second watch seeing that it is how Nolan makes his movies, you can truly appreciate TENET for what it is, cinema.

 Avengers: Endgame, you already know the story. After their massive defeat in Infinity War, the original members with the help of few others tries to undo what Thanos did and return those who are lost. This movie is plain and vanilla yet the perfect closing for this symphony of Marvel’s ensemble cast in comic book movies, you do not have to follow all 21 MCU movies to watch the adventures that they went through to understand the main story, but they will reward you if you do, as there are tons of fan service and easter eggs to get excited for.

 For Terminator 2, maybe I should explain on why I chose this instead of the original, and it ties in to the story. In the first Terminator movie, Skynet, to put it simply is a future-evil-internet-robot-brain programmed to eradicate humanity and enslave those who survived in the purge. Skynet sent a robot assassin with the face of Arnold Schwarzenegger to kill Sarah Connor from giving birth to John Connor, the future leader of the resistance that will defeat Skynet. So the John Connor in the future sent Kyle Reese, one of the member of the resistance to protect his mother Sarah from the Terminator Model 101. Kyle eventually stopped the Terminator and somehow fathered John Connor in the process. To recap the first movie, John sent his own father to protect his mom from the past. Now, the second movie is where they did a twist. Instead of just having another advanced Terminator to the past sent by another version of Skynet, the resistance also sent another reprogrammed Terminator to protect the target that is (kid) John Connor. If this is done now, the twist is completely overdone and seen as nothing but a gimmick. But for a movie in the 90’s? this is revolutionary. Its like having Jason Krueger as your ally in the sequel, but replace that with an Arnold Schwarzenegger looking killer robot despite the lack of his trademark of making unintelligible noises. Because of the same face, the Terminator has to convince Sarah that he is not the Terminator she once knew in the first movie, but a reprogrammed one set to protect them, this interaction of not trusting one another and always be on guard sets up the movie very well. The flick is a staple of action movie back in the day, having two indestructible killing machines squaring up against one another, how can anyone top that at that era?

 Now that we are all caught up with the story, it is time to discuss the soul of these movies have in common, the Time-traveling aspect, the main plot device, the cause or the breaker of movie retcons. In this short list, Terminator has to be the simplest in terms of the mechanics of the time-travel story. The time machine is one time use only, as it can only be used in the future where such things exist. So once you go back in time, the only way to go back to the future is to wait, just like everyone else. And what you did in the past will instantly affect the future accordingly. The time machine in Terminator movies has to be the one with the weirdest mechanic, where you can only send things with living tissues and no other, now that the fact is laid out on you then yes, everyone who went back in time has to be naked. So they have to find new clothing when they arrived. At least that is their explanation on why the Terminator has to be wrapped up in synthetic human skin, not to show off Arnold’s five hours a day of intensive muscle toning in six months with the help of a big pile chicken breast and a year supply of protein shake, not at all.

 Avengers: Endgame has the most flexible machine out of all, where you can set the time and place of where you want to be, as long as you have enough supply of Pym particles to go subatomic and travel a safe passage through the fabric of time. But with multiple journeys with different groups you will run a risk of creating an alternate timeline, but they simply nullify such possibility with having Hulk said that they will go back in time after the final battle is done, and return the things they took in the past back to its place and time so nothing will inherently change. The time traveling part of the movie is the charm of Endgame, where we get to re-visit the characters, places, and events we have seen in the previous films in a different perspective that is canon to the universe.

 Now, this is where it all gets tricky to explain, because the time-traveling of TENET is not the same as any other movies I have seen. Calling it a time-traveling is not even entirely accurate, but the mechanic of how it works calls for more of a “Time-inversion”. The time machine in this film is very rustic, where you go into this big turning door that leads to the other side of the room, but once you are “inverted”, you move forward in time, but the world around you goes backwards. You cannot choose which time you want to go to, if you want to go back in time for 10 minutes, you have to wait it out while being inverted for 10 minutes, that is why the palindrome suits with the whole movie. This makes amazing visuals when combined with action sequences, imagine reverse car chases, bullets were caught to the gun instead of being shot out of, punches were pulled instead of thrown. In other words, if you see a sequence of two people with one of them inverted, they can both win or lose at the end depending on which point-of-view you choose.

The time inversion in TENET is not only treated as a plot device, but also the philosophy that is abided by the movie, as there is only one timeline that exist in the movie. This is made clear in the story that no matter what you do, you cannot change the outcome of the future, as the present is set with the human’s free will, and even though they are randomly generated, it happened anyway. “What’s happened, happened” said Neil, one of the main characters in the movie explaining how time inversion works to the Protagonist. It is not a battle to change the outcome, but to gain a perspective for what’s to come.  Whatever happens, happened and will happen all at the same time. With the limited mechanic of time-inversion that TENET has (or had, or will have, this is confusing even to me now), it is amazing what it can achieve in terms of storytelling, how the story we see in front of us is one enormous temporal pincer collision of the past, future, and present in one sitting (or collide, collided, will collide, I do not know what is happening). From my standpoint, clearly I prefer TENET above all else, but do let me know what’s your pick out of these three! Better yet, what is your favourite time-traveling film? 

[rpbetter]

Hi Vespertine. Sorry to add to the pile, I promise I will send in some writing related things to compensate later. I also misgendered that user in a comment by accident with she/her. I blocked them, but they still looked at my blog, and they made a post that said by using the wrong pronouns, which they thought was intentional and meant to hurt them, I purposefully called them a hysterical woman stereotype. Obviously that wasn't true. I was just going off a comment someone else made on my blog where they used she/her, and I thought I had to correct myself. It was a case where good intentions, even if I was not happy with the user's behavior or expected to talk to them again, I was still going to use the right pronouns, but my intentions were warped by someone with an agenda. I'm sorry to hear you're getting the same heat. I didn't use my rp blog to interact with the user or talk about them because I was sure something like this would happen, either by them or other people like that callout blog, and I think other people had the same idea. I dodged a bullet there, but I'm still paranoid. I'm paranoid I'll hear a notif and see my rp blog in a callout for this, because someone hunted it down, or a callout for trying to talk to the person who started all the drama. Nobody should be scared to talk about someone on their own blog. Nobody should be scared to talk openly, in general. Nobody should be called out for trying to talk with someone either. This culture of fear is so disturbing to me.

Hey there, Anon!

Oh, I would love that, but you totally don't have to, of course. Don't feel bad for adding on, I'm here for anything at all, and honestly, with the job I'm doing IRL right now, it's really hard for me to concentrate well enough on finishing any of the advice posts (at least, to be the quality y'all deserve). It's a hot topic, it's included so, so, terribly many people in the RPC. It's also one that's generating some great, needed conversations. So, it isn't like you're adding to anything bad, annoying or distracting me, or contributing to the inflammatory side of this.

Hell, it's got to be really nice for some of the people in messages I've received to see proof that they weren't alone in this experience. I can keep publishing the hate anons for exactly that reason, and I can promise people they aren't the only ones (in this or in any such horrible behavior), but it's different to see it coming from a third party! So, thank you for that.

Though, I am deeply sorry that you were treated to more than a ringside seat in this debacle.

It's not very encouraging to be thoughtful and respectful of other people when literally nothing you can say or do will result in anything other than more twisting of your words, and that's a big problem I have with this shit. Things like actual transphobia, intentional misgendering, actual infantalization and shit treatment of ND people, actual harassment, etc. etc. etc. matter. It's just more trivializing of real problems for the sake of blowing nonexistent bullshit up, and that is immensely disgusting to me. The fact that you damn well know someone out there has had the reaction to this behavior of, well, fuck you then, fuck trans people is really upsetting.

Like, yeah, let's be real, if you require social rewards to do the right thing, you have some problems lol but at the same time, you know who does require social rewards to develop themselves? Young people. And the RPC is largely comprised of people in their early twenties who, for a variety of possible reasons, are still at that point

Furthermore, no, it's not anyone's job to be good representation at all times, especially when that performance comes at a cost to themselves, but maybe don't go out of your way to be the person that is the necessary push in the wrong direction of someone's formative experience with people of your community. If it's costing you nothing to not clown on serious issues, but is costing the entire world another bigot for you to clown on serious issues, the choice should be a bit obvious here. Whenever you're in a safe place - physically, emotionally - and capable of that kind of logic, exercise it, damn.

It's definitely a better course of action than playing out skewed activism by vilifying innocent people, more worthy of one's effort than losing their collective shit over a very easy mistake. One that I'd say was even less avoidable in your case. AGAIN, how, exactly is anyone supposed to know this shit when they're blocked? When they aren't subverting the blocks they, themselves, put in place? I know for a fact none of them are looking at the information of the people they choose to try to drive out of the RPC, but everyone else is supposed to make zero reasonable assumptions, check and recheck blogs they have made an effort not to visit for good reason. Sounds absolutely reasonable and sane!

So, you know what? I'm going to be even more offensive here and talk for a moment about why these mistakes are reasonable.

When we see a post and reblog it, it's not unreasonable to assume that the OP had knowledge we didn't. Since we blocked the offending party, but they're discussing them. OP uses the incorrect pronouns, we end using the incorrect pronouns as well. This is not malicious intent. It isn't intentional at all, it's just having a discussion. A discussion that wouldn't have even transpired if they hadn't taken it upon themselves to (what a coincidence) take personal issue with a RPer they repeatedly took out of context and decided to shame for it, before proceeding to get an even bigger stick and pot.

When we decide to block a blog, it's our responsibility to stay off of it. Not go looking at it for any reason. That is now off-limits. When someone blocks us, it's also our responsibility to respect that decision, no matter how outrageous it was, no matter what we might need to verify. That's the issue with blocking when we don't exploit how easy it is to get around blocking on tumblr; we've cut ourselves off from any further meaningful communication, including passive communication like rules and posts. Kind of like how you cannot expect an apology to mean a damn thing when you've blocked everyone you harassed, then made that apology in a post on your blocked blog. Don't put up walls you expect people to see through, then get upset when they can't see through them.

As a community, the RPC is primarily afab. That's never a problem to bring up when someone wants to be angry about their female muse not getting equal attention and so on, but it's a problem to discuss any other time, about any other problem. Dealing with the things that we're socially raised to ascribe to as afab people is that problem. It's reflected in our behaviors, interests, and speech. We may not want to live in a gendered world, we may eschew that, but we were raised in a gendered world and it shows. One which has a lot of complications for being that, like almost everyone feeling safer around afab people by default of the All Men Are Bad, All Women Are Harmless bullshit.

We not only know that the RPC is primarily afab, we tend to assume comfort, especially in hostile situations, by assuming those pronouns in others.

And it so does not matter how much any of us like it, some people have more masculine or feminine tones. Even in text. That means neither that someone's gender identity should be disregarded nor that this text-based presentation is correct, but like every other unfair thing that exists, it's a thing. Like you, Anon, you genuinely come across in tone as primarily neutral, slight lean toward masculine. Even if I wasn't inclined to do so, not knowing you and all, I'd use they/them for you instinctively because that's what your speech is giving me. That isn't any more unreasonable than ascribing another set of pronouns based on the same information.

Oh yeah, I know, lurkers, the difference is that they/them is the appropriate choice when one does not know. I know that logically, but people aren't always operating like robots, weirdly enough. We default to a lot of instinctive behaviors, and we aren't always operating at the top rung of cognition either. Being human works like that, it's really that simple and not malicious if you're not reading that into it.

As we're all aware, it is being read into, and your experience is exactly why; you now feel worried every time you get a notif, you've been outed as a supposed transphobe, and while it is incredibly fortunate you stopped this from transpiring on your RP blog, it still transpired somewhere and has had a negative effect. If they find they correct thing or set of things, they can get so many more people to dogpile you over it. Get enough people to do that, make someone miserable enough, especially people who are already going through a hard enough time already, they'll leave.

It is a terroristic act, and it has the effect of all terroristic acts; people are afraid to exist outside of shifting bounds (that shifting is a part of the terrorism). They can't have an opinion, write any muse/topic they wish, be honest on their own blogs, support the "wrong" topics, muns, or blogs. Attacking people for a mistake, not allowing them to address it either, just furthers all of that. It's showing the community what happens when you aren't on the "right" side, even if that isn't even the case. They certainly turn on their own quickly enough.

So, of course, it's a culture of fear and it is disturbing as hell. No one has any right to make someone feel unsafe over fiction or a hobby or a difference of opinion. Everyone has the right to say whatever they want on their own blogs, to talk openly, and yes, to try to talk to others without feeling at risk.

Even if what someone says is genuinely unpleasant. This isn't the way one handles it. By all means, have a problem with something, have a problem with someone, but grow up and talk to them openly, without bringing everyone you can dredge up to join in. I have no issue with people arguing, I have an issue with bullying. If it's your whole goal to harass people without consequences to the end result of deactivation and lockstep behavior from everyone else, that's what you're doing, folks. Bullying.

If you can't win an argument, especially one your own ass began, in any other way than this, you're not engaging in an argument.