#i do NOT respect the ethos

[ceratedfish24]

Disclaimer: I am very very exclusively talking about the Life Series characters, not their creators. I understand and love and respect that everything the creators do is in the competitive/silly nature of the game.

To me, personally, Flower Husbands is toxic because Jimmy has never done anything for Scott ever. In my head, Scott dotes on Jimmy and protects and takes care of Jimmy, and then Scott gets literally nothing in return. Jimmy lies to him, refuses to say “I love you” back even though Scott is clearly hurt by it, ignores and attacks Scott for no reason even when it's a really bad idea, and never expresses affection for Scott. Scott does SO MUCH and Jimmy won’t even look in his direction and then is so offended when Scott does anything that goes against Jimmy.

This isn’t something that Jimmy does to Scott specifically; he does it to all his past allies who cc!Jimmy is actually close to cause he knows for certain that they won’t get for real mad at him, which is great and I’m really glad that they can trust each other like that.

Still, in my fictional headcanon daydreams, Jimmy is such a horrible husband to Scott and then divorces Scott cause he just got tired of Scott.

And then Scott finds Team TIES. Team TIES LOVES Scott so much for every little part of him. Tango has said multiple times that he loves Scott, Impulse has repeatedly stated his admiration for Scott, Etho seems to pay an unusual amount of attention to Scott compared to the rest of the server like he has a lot of respect for Scott and knows that Scott is a threat but he also feels comfortable making jokes around Scott because he knows that Scott is very logical and trying to intimidate Scott isn’t going to work cause Scott will target whoever is causing him the most trouble no matter how scary they seem and Scott may not win every one of those fights but he certainly leaves carnage behind, and Skizz has spewed time and time again just how much he admires Scott. Skizz clearly and enthusiastically loves Scott so much and isn’t afraid to show it. All of these traits, this open and unapologetic respect, that’s exactly what I want for Scott.

These traits can also be seen in Ren, Martyn, Scar, and Grian. They are not so much seen in BigB, Bdubs, and Joel. As for Mumbo, further research must be conducted🔎hopefully this series!! What I’m trying to say is that, from my perspective, every single man on that server except maybe Joel is a better partner to Scott than Jimmy ever was.

I am excluding the women because I’m specifically talking about romantic relationships and putting Scott with a woman feels wrong and bad, but, platonically, I am also an ENORMOUS fan of Scott’s friendships with Gem, Pearl, Lizzie, and Cleo. They’re all so unafraid of him and comfortable joking with him and improving with him and I love that. Scott and Cleo are my favorite best friends in every series they’re in together.

[aurorashard]

.

[oddrocks]

It’s baffles me that there are people out there who are genuinely mad that Batman has a no killing rule. Like imagine being mad at someone for not wanting to murder people. Imagine being mad at a hero for believing in the inherent worth of life and striving for fair justice.

[thebadtimewolf]

"10too however is very much not that. He has the same mind up to christmas invasion AND THEN NONE OF THE CHARACTER GROWTH WHATSOEVER FROM TEN. HE NEVER EXPERIENCED LOSING ROSE IN DOOMSDAY AND SKIPPED MARTHA ENTIRELY AND SKIPPED WILF AND MISS MINOGUE AND ALL OF DONNA UP TIL the end of turn left and then stolen earth/journey’s end"

youre kidding right? he has all the memories that ten has up until that dalek shoots him in the street. how else would he even know wtf was going on?? once again. ONLY HIS PHYSICAL FORM grew from the hand. the regeneration energy--which is the ESSENCE of the doctor, was after he was shot in the stolen earth. it's the SAME guy. in a different body.

and he quite clearly doesnt have donna's mind because on 2 separate occasions in the show, she says something and BOTH doctors say "we didn't think of that". he is a BIOLOGICAL metacrisis. not a psychological one. that's why he is sustainable and donna isnt

do you really think ten would leave rose with anyone unless he was 100% sure it was a version of him that could give her everything he wanted to but never could?

wow.

someone's big mad of my theoretical observation (one of many many many) that dared to conflict against your own about a ship so stale over time that when we finally get merch for it - its only for the power of the doctor event just to rob us of more jo martin!doctor/fugitive doctor merch and extremely bland roseten audio adventures. and the one mention of rose with nine with ten present in a marketed event by bbc and big finish ad titan comics and - ten literally doesnt give a shit about her but severely effected by losing donna as if she was the love of his life instead of rose. right there. you know. crumbs and dust.

however, i am glad you chose to read all that under the cut to match the length. as well as then choosing to ignore a very real terror they seem to be inflicting on tentoo thru the eyes of rose. you a real trooper🫡

how'd you beat the text limit in an ask?

OH THE DALEK SCENE?? OH I GOT A OBSERVATION YOU REALLY GONNA HATE IT IF THIS IS THE ENERGY YOU WANNA BRING. but. meh. does it need saying?

[lectern-fullcauldron]

in this world of clickbait and youtube trends i have so much respect for the hermits who just keep plugging on doing their own thing. like the integrity of Joe 'im not doing it if it doesn't match my ethics ' Hills, and Iskall 'im not putting out a video if I'm not happy making it' 85, and etho 'never in my life have I made a thumbnail' slab, and zedaph being on his own wavelength is impeccable. wels is always off doing his own thing, and that means we get hermitcraft when he is excited for hermitcraft, and that's great! beef quietly does his own thing and I love it (the team Canada stuff is a vintage feeling YouTube treat as well). Doc's videos are far longer than TikTok culture wants but that's his choice and I respect it so much. Stress is here when she wants to and when she can be and I am always so glad to see her. Mumbo makes what he wants to and I love his bouncing around minecraft building thought processes. Cub does what he wants and it's incredible. I love watching tango work on games, just as much as I love watching him figure out silly things, or run around with zed dressed as ghosts.

You can't put hermits helping hermits on a thumbnail, nor hours of mining resources for someone else. But they're what make hermitcraft brilliant. the very core of Hermitcraft to me, is in the janky tfc videos from demise where he tells people telling him how to play more like grian to get lost, and then goes to play with Cleo, who's hiding in his walls. Hermitcraft is in the laughter. In sending a friend a new computer. In knowing your friend's principles and trying to help them stick to them. In this world of clickbait and youtube trends, there is something at the core of Hermitcraft that carries the core of 2012 youtube, and I think that core is the integrity of the hermits themselves, and the respect that they show for each other and their craft

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How lock-in hurts design

Berliners: Otherland has added a second date (Jan 28) for my book-talk after the first one sold out - book now!

If you've ever read about design, you've probably encountered the idea of "paving the desire path." A "desire path" is an erosion path created by people departing from the official walkway and taking their own route. The story goes that smart campus planners don't fight the desire paths laid down by students; they pave them, formalizing the route that their constituents have voted for with their feet.

Desire paths aren't always great (Wikipedia notes that "desire paths sometimes cut through sensitive habitats and exclusion zones, threatening wildlife and park security"), but in the context of design, a desire path is a way that users communicate with designers, creating a feedback loop between those two groups. The designers make a product, the users use it in ways that surprise the designer, and the designer integrates all that into a new revision of the product.

This method is widely heralded as a means of "co-innovating" between users and companies. Designers who practice the method are lauded for their humility, their willingness to learn from their users. Tech history is strewn with examples of successful paved desire-paths.

Take John Deere. While today the company is notorious for its war on its customers (via its opposition to right to repair), Deere was once a leader in co-innovation, dispatching roving field engineers to visit farms and learn how farmers had modified their tractors. The best of these modifications would then be worked into the next round of tractor designs, in a virtuous cycle:

https://securityledger.com/2019/03/opinion-my-grandfathers-john-deere-would-support-our-right-to-repair/

But this pattern is even more pronounced in the digital world, because it's much easier to update a digital service than it is to update all the tractors in the field, especially if that service is cloud-based, meaning you can modify the back-end everyone is instantly updated. The most celebrated example of this co-creation is Twitter, whose users created a host of its core features.

Retweets, for example, were a user creation. Users who saw something they liked on the service would type "RT" and paste the text and the link into a new tweet composition window. Same for quote-tweets: users copied the URL for a tweet and pasted it in below their own commentary. Twitter designers observed this user innovation and formalized it, turning it into part of Twitter's core feature-set.

Companies are obsessed with discovering digital desire paths. They pay fortunes for analytics software to produce maps of how their users interact with their services, run focus groups, even embed sneaky screen-recording software into their web-pages:

https://www.wired.com/story/the-dark-side-of-replay-sessions-that-record-your-every-move-online/

This relentless surveillance of users is pursued in the name of making things better for them: let us spy on you and we'll figure out where your pain-points and friction are coming from, and remove those. We all win!

But this impulse is a world apart from the humility and respect implied by co-innovation. The constant, nonconsensual observation of users has more to do with controlling users than learning from them.

That is, after all, the ethos of modern technology: the more control a company can exert over its users ,the more value it can transfer from those users to its shareholders. That's the key to enshittification, the ubiquitous platform decay that has degraded virtually all the technology we use, making it worse every day:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

When you are seeking to control users, the desire paths they create are all too frequently a means to wrestling control back from you. Take advertising: every time a service makes its ads more obnoxious and invasive, it creates an incentive for its users to search for "how do I install an ad-blocker":

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

More than half of all web-users have installed ad-blockers. It's the largest consumer boycott in human history:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

But zero app users have installed ad-blockers, because reverse-engineering an app requires that you bypass its encryption, triggering liability under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This law provides for a $500,000 fine and a 5-year prison sentence for "circumvention" of access controls:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

Beyond that, modifying an app creates liability under copyright, trademark, patent, trade secrets, noncompete, nondisclosure and so on. It's what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model":

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

This is why services are so horny to drive you to install their app rather using their websites: they are trying to get you to do something that, given your druthers, you would prefer not to do. They want to force you to exit through the gift shop, you want to carve a desire path straight to the parking lot. Apps let them mobilize the law to literally criminalize those desire paths.

An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to block ads in it (or do anything else that wrestles value back from a company). Apps are web-pages where everything not forbidden is mandatory.

Seen in this light, an app is a way to wage war on desire paths, to abandon the cooperative model for co-innovation in favor of the adversarial model of user control and extraction.

Corporate apologists like to claim that the proliferation of apps proves that users like them. Neoliberal economists love the idea that business as usual represents a "revealed preference." This is an intellectually unserious tautology: "you do this, so you must like it":

https://boingboing.net/2024/01/22/hp-ceo-says-customers-are-a-bad-investment-unless-they-can-be-made-to-buy-companys-drm-ink-cartridges.html

Calling an action where no alternatives are permissible a "preference" or a "choice" is a cheap trick – especially when considered against the "preferences" that reveal themselves when a real choice is possible. Take commercial surveillance: when Apple gave Ios users a choice about being spied on – a one-click opt of of app-based surveillance – 96% of users choice no spying:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-out-of-app-tracking-in-ios-14-5-analytics-find/

But then Apple started spying on those very same users that had opted out of spying by Facebook and other Apple competitors:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Neoclassical economists aren't just obsessed with revealed preferences – they also love to bandy about the idea of "moral hazard": economic arrangements that tempt people to be dishonest. This is typically applied to the public ("consumers" in the contemptuous parlance of econospeak). But apps are pure moral hazard – for corporations. The ability to prohibit desire paths – and literally imprison rivals who help your users thwart those prohibitions – is too tempting for companies to resist.

The fact that the majority of web users block ads reveals a strong preference for not being spied on ("users just want relevant ads" is such an obvious lie that doesn't merit any serious discussion):

https://www.iccl.ie/news/82-of-the-irish-public-wants-big-techs-toxic-algorithms-switched-off/

Giant companies attained their scale by learning from their users, not by thwarting them. The person using technology always knows something about what they need to do and how they want to do it that the designers can never anticipate. This is especially true of people who are unlike those designers – people who live on the other side of the world, or the other side of the economic divide, or whose bodies don't work the way that the designers' bodies do:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/20/benevolent-dictators/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

Apps – and other technologies that are locked down so their users can be locked in – are the height of technological arrogance. They embody a belief that users are to be told, not heard. If a user wants to do something that the designer didn't anticipate, that's the user's fault:

https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/

Corporate enthusiasm for prohibiting you from reconfiguring the tools you use to suit your needs is a declaration of the end of history. "Sure," John Deere execs say, "we once learned from farmers by observing how they modified their tractors. But today's farmers are so much stupider and we are so much smarter that we have nothing to learn from them anymore."

Spying on your users to control them is a poor substitute asking your users their permission to learn from them. Without technological self-determination, preferences can't be revealed. Without the right to seize the means of computation, the desire paths never emerge, leaving designers in the dark about what users really want.

Our policymakers swear loyalty to "innovation" but when corporations ask for the right to decide who can innovate and how, they fall all over themselves to create laws that let companies punish users for the crime of contempt of business-model.

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/24/everything-not-mandatory/#is-prohibited

Image: Belem (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Desire_path_%2819811581366%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[tubbytarchia]

Etho doodles in which I let my inner dinosaur nerd take over 😔 and also have no idea how to shade

Get it cause he's old and washed up haha... ok but actual raptor Etho hybrid justification below cut

To be honest the main reason was because I really wanted a hybrid in the mix who wasn't some furry creature and a reptile or amphibian or smth instead. Etho still ended up feathered but whatever it's close enough! But for ACTUAL reasoning:

He does feel damn ancient, like an old deity of the mcyt space that no one can dislike. Dinosaurs are the same!! They're old but still thought of with great fascination and fondness, everyone loves dinosaurs...

Dinosaurs are ever so mysterious, as many advancements as we make there's still so much we don't know. Just as we know jackshit about mister Kakashi skin man. Also, there are so many incomplete skeletons out there. I didn't have a particular species in mind for Etho, because where's the mystery in that? He can be one of those 5% skeleton 95% speculation dinosaurs like this guy!! Missing jaw and all

"I'm a runner, not a protector" - so, a raptor, or more specifically the Dromaeosauridae family, which literally has "running/runner" in its name

But! I'm always a fan of stuff going against its nature, especially in this case! Etho states he's not a runner yet protects his allies rather fiercely even in total silence. Eg refusing to kill Cleo in SL or to give away Tango's location during the LimL manhunt, same for Grian in SL. He was a bit flaky in 3L I think? And he only started to have genuine care for allies in LL with Bdubs? Though he is still very much a runner in many cases like during the LL Wither fight. Research also strongly suggests that most if not all raptors were solitary hunters, and the way I see Etho (through my shamefully limited watchtime of his POVs...) he feels a lot like someone who ultimately only trusts himself at the start even if he's pleasant and allying with others, and doesn't seem to think he can carry his weight in groups though he doesn't voice this a lot. That's just how Etho is, very composed, but it feels like there's an insecurity there, showcased especially in SL but again I haven't seen almost any of his POVs in full so maybe I'm talking out of my ass!! Sorry ethogirls I'm only a sidegig ethogirl myself... But yeah tldr to me he gives off the vibe of an otherwise solitary animal struggling to find 100% sure footing in a pack. In whichever ways he does go against his nature, its not usually made a show of

At the mention of a raptor, a lot of people will probably think of the glamourized Jurassic Park Velociraptors. But those awesome guys from the movies are actually the size of chickens. In general though, dinosaurs tend to be a bit.. exaggerated in media, despite how inherently fascinating they already are. And I think it fits Etho because we all know how the Lifers seem to fear and mancrush on him when he's just some dork with perfect capability to become pathetic at a moment's notice. Still, he's a clearly skilled player and still respected without question Etho's not some killer machine like some people make dinosaurs out to be. He's just a fellow creature fulfilling his role in the ecosystem 👍

dinosaurs are cool

The hook-like sickle claws on the feet... something something fishing rod

I swear I'm not turning all my Lifers into hybrids I'm not!! Still plenty normal humans in the mix I swear....... But Etho is such a radical dude, I really wanted to do something more for him. The whole Kitsune thing that I often see associated with him is really cool. I don't actually know the reasoning for it but I assume something something naruto, but also, him being this ancient mythical cryptid who people know so little about, you know? It makes SO much sense. So anyway I turned him into a dinosaur instead rawr

As a herbivore advocate I also considered stuff like the triceratops (known for how they protect themselves and their own) but nah the raptor symbolism...

[introboy]

So so excited to share my @mcytblrholidayexchange gift for @follow-the-compass-home! My concept was to combine a bunch of prompts together into one AU.

The premise is a modern-fantasy roommate situation where Tango, Bdubs, and Etho live together in an apartment. The only issue is that none of them are human, but they're all trying desperately to blend in, even though they don't really understand humanity as a concept.

More information can be found below the cut, and an introductory fic snippet can be found here (x)!

Downstairs Neighbors AU

Prompts used as inspiration:

Focus on Tango, Etho, and Bdubs

Include Boatem

Story told from Grian's perspective

Hybrid/inhuman AU

Angst with a happy ending

Emphasis on character dynamics

Here's a summary!!!

Tango, Etho, and Bdubs found each other by looking for roommates on Craigslist. They live in a 4-bedroom apartment together.

Tango is a spirit who wanted to interact with the world in a physical sense, so he built himself a body. He's basically just a ghost possessing an android (but unlike ghosts, he was never alive; he came into being as a fully-formed spirit). He doesn't adhere to normal bodily necessities like food, water, or sleep, which is convenient but also heavily concerning from an outsider's perspective.

Etho is a specific kind of shapeshifter called a mimic. He doesn't have a true form, but can copy the shape and mannerisms of most living creatures. The only constant across all of his appearances is a scarred left eye and white hair. Unfortunately, it takes practice to nail specific species characteristics, so he often forgets what he's supposed to look like and falls into uncanny valley. He wears a mask to cover his more noticable facial slipups.

Bdubs is some sort of plant creature (he doesn't really understand it himself). He has a perfect internal clock and sleeps, without fail, for 12 hours every night. He spends a lot of time in the unoccupied bedroom-- he uses it as a makeshift greenhouse, and it's filled with grow lights and humidifiers. He loves taking care of houseplants, but it's also a cover for him to spend time under the grow lights. Without enough light & water he gets lethargic.

Bdubs, Etho, and Tango, henceforth referred to as BET, all assume that the others are human. But since none of them know how to act human, they continuously pick up stranger and stranger habits from each other.

BET are close friends with Impulse & Skizzleman, who live together across the hall. Their upstairs neighbors are Grian, Pearl, Mumbo, and Scar, who are also besties with Imp & Skizz. BET and Boatem don't know each other well, but Grian especially thinks his neighbors are really odd.

Like BET, Grian is not human, and neither are the rest of his roommates. But they all know about each other, and Grian especially is really good at knowing how to act natural in public places. He's an avian shapeshifter, who can take the form of either a scarlet macaw or a human. Unlike Etho, both forms come equally naturally to Grian, and the shapeshifting process is a lot easier for him.

(Imp & Skizz are not human either-- they are a demon and an angel respectively. But, like Grian, they're really good at blending in when in public.)

One day, Grian gets injured on a flight and accidentally ends up on BET's balcony instead of his own. He's too disoriented to shift back into his human form or fly away, so Bdubs and Etho find him outside their door. Tango calls Impulse over in the hopes that he knows how to fix the random-injured-parrot crisis, but the only result is that Grian and Impulse start to truly take note of how strange their neighbors' living situation is. Incidents like the one pictured above arise (i.e. everyone finding out that there is not a singular scrap of food to be found in the entire apartment).

Ok that's all the rambling I'll do in this post, but I hope you enjoyed! Happy holidays!!

[shepscapades]

DBHC [Detroit Become Hermitcraft] AU MASTERPOST

This is a compiled list of links to every major dbhc post, including links to art, a list of tags that I use to organize everything for this au on my blog, character tags, and any other content for the au that you may want to specifically look for! I will do my best to update this Masterpost with every new major post I publish, so feel free to keep checking the original post (not reblogs, which will not retain edits) for new content! (Likewise, if you stumble upon a link that doesn't seem right, please feel free to let me know!)

Everything is organized below the read more by an Overview of information about the au and content organized by character. Within each character's section, posts are organized in a narrative chronological order-- NOT the order in which the posts were published. Most characters are organized in groups so links do not appear more than once.

Thank you for reading and enjoying my silly au! It's baffling to me how many people have found an interest in or love for this project, and everyone's support, encouragement, and general insanity means the world to me! <3

OVERVIEW

Dbhc, or the Detroit Become Hermitcraft AU, is an au that started as a joke and very quickly stopped being a joke LKFJGDG It’s called Detroit Become Hermitcraft, but not really because it has anything to do with the base game DBH– really, I only yoinked the android mechanics and inserted them into the minecraft-based world of hermitcraft. It’s an au that starts in Hermitcraft Season 8 (aka, many of the first androids were built for the beginning of s8 in this au), meaning that the seasons prior in this au do not technically have those hermits as part of their history. The Life Series are canon to this au, but like earlier hermitcraft seasons, 3rd Life is missing all of the android hermits due to it having taken place prior to HC Season 8.

GUIDE TO ANDROIDS - An official guide to how androids function, for those unfamiliar with dbh androids!

TAG LIST

#dbhc – any and everything dbhc! #dbhc art – any art, comics, or silly doodles that feature the dbhc characters #dbhc ask – any response to an ask or submission that I answer related to dbhc– could be silly asks or asks related to lore! #dbhc music – any art or asks in which I speak about the music on the dbhc playlists or use the songs as inspiration for art of the narrative #dbhc fanart – any dbhc art not made by me! #dbhc fanfic – any dbhc writing not written by me! #dbhc writing – works of writing that either I’ve done or works that I consider canon to the au! (see below for links to each of these works) #dbhc sillies – these are usually asks I’ve answered that include ridiculous doodles or humorous references to more serious or angsty lore posts #dbhc theories – not a consistent tag, but something I decided to start using for asks that have interesting theories that I don't want to confirm or deny. Also used in general for large theory-based asks/my reactions to them #dbhc mechanics – any explanations related to the way the androids function [i'm still currently in the process of going back through everything and working this tag in!] #dbhc ref – official reference sheets for the characters #dbhc explained – Any major comic that I've broken down into explained details and ramblings!

CHARACTER TAG LIST:

Character tags will be listed as #dbhc [name]. They contain both art of those characters and any mentions/discussions of them from asks. If a character is discussed or shown in any capacity, those posts should have the respective character tags! I believe these are all of the characters discussed/referenced so far:

#dbhc android 24 || #dbhc beef || #dbhc bdubs || #dbhc cleo || #dbhc cub || #dbhc doc || #dbhc etho || #dbhc false || #dbhc gem || #dbhc grian || #dbhc hypno || #dbhc impulse || #dbhc iskall || #dbhc jevin || #dbhc joe || #dbhc joel || #dbhc jimmy || #dbhc keralis ||#dbhc mumbo || #dbhc pearl || #dbhc ren || #dbhc scar || #dbhc skizz || #dbhc tango || #dbhc wels || #dbhc xb || #dbhc xisuma || #dbhc zed

CHARACTER POST LIST

Since Tumblr has a link embed limit of 100, I had to move every character section to it's own post :[ Which is a little annoying, but giving each character group their own post will hopefully prevent any issues going forward as I continue to add to the au without fear of hitting a link limit.

As mentioned above, the below individual posts are organized by Characters or Groups of Characters. Within each section, drawings are organized by NARRATIVE CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER (Not the order in which they were posted/published).  These links contain links to posts/art specifically centered around the characters they're listed under. All posts that have a collection of characters, moments, or drawings not centered around any one specific character/characters will be found under "Other Drawings!" Stuff from Secret Life, Decked out, and other silly drawings can be found there. Character's are often cameo'd all over the place, so if you're looking for all of the content of a specific character, your best bet is perusing their respective character tag (listed above)! The posts below are to present a better/more cohesive idea of the ordered narrative of each character.

ETHO + BDUBS

MUMBO + CO.

DOC + CO.

IMPULSE + CO.

TANGO + CO.

CUB + CO.

JOE + CO.

SKIZZ + CO.

XISUMA + 24 + CO.

XB + CO.

OTHER DRAWINGS [GROUPS/COLLECTIONS]

WRITING WORKS

[x] Don't Let it Reach the Heart (Coming Soon!)

Canon Events. To Me (by other authors!) <3

[x] @tunastime Gear of the Heart, Turning [ethubs] [x] @tunastime Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? [docsuma]

Fanfic Works I consider closely adjacent to canon:

[x] @set-in-stardust [ethubs first kiss!] [x] @set-in-stardust [s9 reset etho re-deviates] [x] @drachis917 [Impulse meets Gem!] [x] @listentothelittlebird [A Visit To Doc's Skyblock Jail]

[hannnsh]

team T.I.E.S !!

for that one anon that asked if i can draw ties, i have had this wip for so long and i fjnally finished it for u 😭🙏🏻 sorry for taking so long i have not drawn on my phone in so long i forgor how lol .. i also havent any time to draw bc .. school 😞

long rant + individuals down below ✨

im very happy w tango impulse and skizz, not so much w etho 😓 etho is hard for me to draw for some reason?? design wise, i made them all match outfits w their respective colors tehee oh and the (bow)ties bc, cmon

lore time idk im bad at this, anyways theyre the inventor team (?) like yknow redstone and stuff. but i made skizz like the guy that takes orders of off people bc idk if he knows that much redstone unlike the other three who are nerds at redstone yknow what i mean. but yea if i weren’t so lazy i wouldve desigbed a more steampunk look for them but alas 😔

again sorry for disappearing i watched a dino show (jwct) and got hooked so i’ve been reading fanfics nonstop for a few days 😭 also artblock got to me and exam stress is also consuming me 😓 i do have one more drawibg finished i will post later me thinks

individuals :

pearl and bigb is left and i am FREE

[mysticwinterkit]

Dear Joel,

I just saw the statues at your front gate. While I think you did a fantastic job capturing my likeness, I do worry that your obsession with me might have gone a little too far. Some people might find it in fact, a little weird. I know you hold me in a high regard, and it might feel wrong getting rid of the statues of me that you respect so much, but I think it would be best for everyone.

Signed, Etho.

Joel: I've moved the statues to his house.

[markrosewater]

You have mentioned the player base as a whole or as an amalgam several times on this blog and I think that's a big part of the frustration. We feel like we used to represent a larger share of the player base and what we wanted was more important. Now it feels like we've been outvoted by this larger group that we're not aligned with and it doesn't seem like it's going to stop. Repeating that we have to move according to the popular will doesn't help at all when we know the popular will is against what we want in what used to be our game.

We don't want to hear that Magic is constantly changing or you have to make the game the player base as a whole wants. We want to hear what you're doing to protect the niche game we love from the influence of this new popularity.

I started playing Magic in August of 1993. I have been playing continuously since then. I remember when you had to say “no ante” when sitting down to play a stranger. I remember getting my physical DCI card in the mail. I remember reading the first copy of The Duelist from front to back. I remember when it sucked to open a basic land as your rare. I remember when it was foolish to play with creatures.

I have nostalgia for old time Magic, and it is important to me, and the rest of R&D, that we remember our roots. For example, we enjoy bringing back old favorites when we can. Foundations, in particular, was high in having a throwback feel.

Part of my love of the color pie is the tie to tradition. And while mechanical executions of it might shift, it’s important to me that the core philosophies stay the same.

There is something special to the ethos of the game, and I don’t want to ever lose that.

It’s important to remember though that adaptation is also core to its soul. Part of what makes Magic Magic is that it evolves and changes. That was as true in the mid 90’s as it is today. You can’t respect what Magic has been without acknowledging that.

Part of my job as Head Designer is balancing the past, present, and future. I have to explore new veins of design, but I also want to revisit things that players once loved. This means there will always be a desire to keep alive the spirit of Magic from days gone by.

But that nod to the past won’t be through an exclusion of trying new things. It will be interwoven with it. You’ll note that one of the things we enjoy doing with Universes Beyond is finding opportunities to tie new cards to Magic’s past, to do a new take on an old classic.

So yes, we are trying to keep alive a lot of what Magic has been, but we don’t look at the new influence as a negative force, but as something that will allow Magic to continue to evolve.

[mollysunder]

Lunari Heritage in Zaun

This is gonna be a reach, but from the little we've seen of Vi and Jinx's mom and younger Silco, I'd guess they were both from the same ethnic group.

In a place like Zaun, where the people are left with scraps, any piece of jewelry sticks out. Vi's mom and Silco are both wearing similar pieces of jewelry. Silco's bracelet could likely be fitted as a necklace since it twice wraps over his wrist. Neither are wearing anything of high quality, but the necklace and bracelet in their respective pictures seem decently maintained if not worn. That's when I thought, these are probably heirlooms.

In fact they looked pretty similar too, but in smaller scale of the princess's own pendants. I wouldn't bring this up if it weren't for the fact that Piltovans prioritize elaborate art-deco aesthetics, the more elaborately geometric the better (Councilor Shoola). So you would assume even the simplest jewelry would be a square pendant or a straight line. But no, big plain circles, and then I remembered we saw that before, on the princess Ambessa killed. Big bronze circles.

And when we look at young Vi , you notice that she's wearing jewelry too. A simple necklace with a green (it looks green) gem. And I realized that the princess's necklace was also adorned green gems.

I'm pulling from scraps, but it's interesting that small things these Zaunites have to adorn themselves (though not for long with the time skips) are similar versions if not simpler version's of the princess's.

At first I thought this meant that many of the cast were actually of Ionian descent. But then in the Princess's scene a thought kept coming back to me, "Why is Mel wearing purple?". Mel, a skilled diplomat from a young age, typically wears the main colors of the nations she hosts and is hosted by. White for Piltover, Black for Noxus (Ambessa), and always with her signature accents of gold. So if Mel followed her mother to Ionia ,where green is a culturally significant color, why purple? It's because Mel and Ambessa weren't in Ionia, they were in Targon fighting the Lunari.

The Lunari are Rakkor tribal people in the Targonian region who worship the moon, and are persecuted for it by the Solari, the religious order that worships the sun. While technically Mt. Targon is influenced by Mt. Olympus and Greek mythology aesthetic, that's more the case for the Solari. Overtime the Lunari aesthetic has been mixed it's originally nomadic culture with East Asian influences. The prominent colors of the Lunari happen to be turquoise, silver, black and purple. It was such a little thing to remember but it made me see connections I hadn't thought about.

Suddenly everything starts to connect. The bronze coins represent the 3 moons that exist in Arcane's Runeterra. How do we know there are 3 moons, because the Valdiani piece Jinx stole was depicting their planet. In the Valdiani there are 3 orbits circling the Earth, meaning 3 moons (or satelites). Now the engraving on the gold of the princess's necklace makes sense, because it's supposed to resemble the gates at the peak of Mt. Targon. The pendant itself is shaped like the mountain with the gates fitted at the top.

Frankly, it works for the Princess to have been Lunari and waves of descendants of the Lunari to arrive in Piltover and end up in Zaun. In Arcane, Piltover was created as a safe haven to escape the Rune Wars 200 years from the start of the show. Even after the Rune Wars ended the shipping port has likely seen waves of migrant labor and refugees from the ongoing crisis that occur in Runeterra (*cough*Noxus*cough*). It's likely that many of the current generation of Zaunites are of mixed heritage of the various fleeing people's.

It creates a whole new dynamic of the ways in which Piltover's laws, their Ethos, strips the people of Zaun from their identity and reducing them to tools for the mines. Magic is inherently a part of religious ceremonies and religion in general in Runeterra, especially for the Lunari. How do you practice your religion in a place that has banned the means by which it's conducted? There must have been more people like the Lunari who didn't have a problem with their magic, their problem was that they were being persecuted.

The remnants of family keepsakes brought over as communities fled were clung to as best as possible especially as they had to let go of part their spiritual identity. But even that doesn't seem to have lasted either. Vi doesn't keep her necklace, her mother is dead, so lost is her necklace, and we never see Silco wear his bracelet. They could have been stolen, or at best, hidden for safe keeping, maybe Enforcers get suspicious at the hint of mysticism and suddenly they want to talk.

Finally, maybe a little less related, it is interesting how prominent Piltovans and Zaunites take on day and night aspects. The sun shines over Piltover at their best, begins to set at times of uncertainty. While in the cover of night with moon above, the strongest Zaunites strike hardest. One more thing, it is interesting how Arcane's Jinx has taken on darker tones of purple rather than stick with neon pink. I always have to go back and look at a reference to remember that her pants are purple-er than I recall.

Update: I wanted to include that the large doodle Jinx made on her cup actually looks similar to the Lunari's sigil. And the sigil remains on the cup into the timeskip, also the center moon is made smaller within the crescent like in the necklace. I also noticed Jinx's cup later has more violent bomb imagery around it.

Update 2: With the final season approaching I'm noticing this is getting some attention again. I would like to say that if I could write this from scratch again I'd say it's more likely the princess is from Ionia now, which doesn't up end the Lunari theory.

Previous League canon confirms the Lunari faith does have ties to Ionia. A good portion of the Lunari are Ionian in descent, and Diana, their aspect of the moon (essentially their demigod), currently lives in Ionia. League even created skinline for Ionians blood moon worshippers, an edgy offshoot of the Lunari faith. It's all very interesting and a bit complicated because Riot loves to drop plot points in the lore and never come back. I'll try to clean something up for a longer explanation later. What's crazy is the Medardas are still the aggressors because Noxians and Solarians, which the Medardas are both, terrorize Ionians and Lunaris respectively.

[theminecraftbee]

current hermitcraft star trek AU thoughts: meet some of the crew of the USS Taney (named for a storied US coast guard cutter, for those curious):

chief petty officer joe hills, maintenance chief. it’s my AU and one of the principle characters can be an enlisted sailor instead of a commissioned officer if I want to dammit. spends a LOT of time in jeffries tubes doing essential maintenance and is responsible for a lot if enlisted engineering staff. a betazoid who joined starfleet to see the stars but gets admittedly VERY STRESSED OUT on account of not being great at human social mores, thank god for military formality am I right. well-liked and respected amongst the crew, especially other enlisted sailors but also with commissioned officers. straight-up refuses to use his betazoid abilities for any actual work though because he’s convinced he constantly misinterprets people’s minds. whether or not this is true is… questionable… but he’s maintenance chief not a councilor or something so no one ever actually has real opportunity to call him out on this. well, mostly nobody. except maybe for…

ensign cleo, a former borg drone that was taken prisoner and separated from the hivemind. starfleet has no records of her homeworld or original race and what do you know, she doesn’t know either! thanks, borg, she hates it. took to sarcasm like a duck to water. ended up on the taney because in the early days joe was somehow the person who broke through to her and command is still wary she might regress, even given that she has since passed accelerated academy classes and earned a commission. a security officer and cybersecurity expert (for a given definition of “expert”, given the source of the information). very good at covering insecurities by being Mean. literally everyone who works with her is aware though so literally everyone knows she is Deeply Loyal to the taney’s crew. which is why people keep trying to “helpfully” run interference against starfleet intelligence for her, to her great annoyance, because she actually kind of likes…

commander etho, a vulcan intelligence officer. has had a storied career, meaning people who don’t know much about the intelligence community hate that he’s around, people who do idolize him, and people who know him know he’s just kind of awkward. extremely competent, sure, but awkward. frequently in communication with, traveling on, and otherwise involved with the taney, largely because the taney keeps on somehow tripping over things that should be state secrets and he’s best equipped to clean it up (case in point: cleo). sometimes etho thinks the only way the ship could be more cursed is if they named it enterprise. then he reminds himself that’s an illogical superstition. despite the fact he technically now has a desk job the aforementioned storied career makes him a very competent actual field commander as well, which means he ends up involved in operations whenever he’s on board.

these are the guys I have ideas for so far. still need to think of like. a captain for the ship. most of the senior staff. I just have ideas for this au you know,

[daily-ethoslab]

I have so much respect for you how do you keep the motivation to draw the same character every day I've only been doing this for like a month and you're well past 600 days how

-head mod of a daily character blog

I like seeing the number go up

This is a good way to track my art improvement

ethoslab is epic

originally it was "competition" with the other dailys to see who could last the longest (this competition only existed to me btw)

honestly it's kinda funny

I like Ethoslab

I don't hold myself to a high standard of art quality, I post depending on how much effort I WANT to put in

Honestly? I don't think i can stop

I was gonna type that I hope etho would be proud but tbh he would prob just go

"😐👍 OK"

I think if etho saw this and didn't immediately block me, he would look for a day I missed lol

Tbh I can't tell you how Im doing this. Before this account I had never completed an inktober before. I couldn't last a month drawing daily.

By day 15 of this account I was running out of ideas. I genuinely don't know how I got this far?? I wish I could give advice?

[thydungeongal]

I'm aware 4e was unpopular but I respect its design ethos of making a game with tight tactical grid combat as a focus and sticking to that alongside dungeon crawling. Didn't try and do everything just did what it aimed to do.

(Also the enemies having designated AI in their statblocks like "under half health will do this or this" type stuff is amazing for gms)

4e owns I love it so much