#its just the setting and the characters and the art and the voice acting and the mc

[spiritshaydra]

So

Galvatron’s Revenge right

Click below for a surprise <33 xoxoxo

Minecraft abandoned mine noise

[foxstens]

been reading kin'iro loveriche

[akamitrani]

omg i just read your dht fanfic and it was so good!! if your taking requests could i request that reader is married to david and she was with him on the set if terrifier (2024) and reader asks him to make love to her with his Art costume still on? Thanks!’ (sorry if this makes no sense lmao)

— The After-Hours Act —

David Howard Thornton x Fem!Reader

Warnings: Smut, established relationship, costume kink, roleplay (?), kissing, pining, choking, rough sex, public sex (well, kind of).

Summary: It's late at night, filming is practically done. Your husband, David, gives his final performance of the day.

[A/N: Omg hi, yes I accept requests! Thank you so much for liking my last fic 🤍 Hope you enjoy this one too, it's my first time doing smut. I absolutely loved the idea and probably had way too much fun with it lol.]

The set was alive with chaos. Flickering lights casting long, jagged shadows against the cracked walls, making the abandoned warehouse look even more sinister. Fake blood is pooled on the concrete floor and the air is thick with the smell of sweat, latex and the metallic tang of stage blood.

In the middle of it all stood David, fully transformed into the unnervingly silent and grotesque Art the Clown. His smile stretched wide under the white mask, black lips curling into a grimace that was equal parts amusing and horrifying.

You watched from the shadows just beyond the set, your eyes never leaving him. David had always been able to command a room and, as Art the Clown, he held a power that drew you in no matter how many times you had seen him in character.

The director yelled “Let's wrap it up!” and the tense energy of the set dissipated like smoke. David instantly broke character, his terrifying expression melting into his usual boyish grin as he exchanged a few words with the crew. His eyes flicked over to you and he gave you a subtle wink.

Your heart skipped a beat as he made his way toward you, still in full costume. The other crew members busied themselves with cleanup, leaving you and David in a pocket of relative privacy.

“Enjoy the show?” – he teased, voice low and familiar despite the eerie costume.

You couldn’t help but smile, mix of nerves and excitement – “You were terrifying, as always. But...” – you replied, eyes lingering on the smeared makeup around his lips – “I have a little request tonight”

David’s brow quirked in curiosity, he stayed silent, slipping back into Art’s mute persona for a moment. You took a deep breath, stepping closer so only he could hear your words...

“Can you stay in costume... For a little playtime, with me?” you whispered getting closer to him, a blush creeping up your cheeks.

For a split second you saw a flicker of surprise in his eyes, it was quickly replaced by a mischievous glimmer... He understood the idea. He nodded slowly, slipping fully back into character, his smile turning wickedly playful. Stepping back, he walked towards the door of the warehouse, locking it.

You felt a thrill shoot down your spine, you were completely alone with him now – No crew, no distractions. He moved closer to you, his movements slow and deliberate, like a predator toying with its prey. The game had begun.

David – or rather, Art – stopped just inches away, tilting his head in that unnerving, silent way.

“Are you sure about this?” – he whispered, the question hanging in the air like a dare. You could see it in his eyes, he was more than ready to play along. You wanted to see just how far he would take it, how much you could handle... You nodded.

Without warning, he lunges forwards, pining you against a cold concrete wall. A gasp escapes your lips as his gloved hand wrapped around your throat, not tight enough to hurt but enough to send a wave of adrenaline through your body.

The pressure of his hand on your throat sends waves of heat between your legs, your breath coming out in short gasps. He leaned in closer, his painted lips brushing your ear, he remained silent, true to Art's unsettling nature.

You whimpered softly, feeling the undeniable desire. David's grin widened and he pushed you harder against the wall, his free hand slipping to your waist, pulling you closer. You could feel his growing bulge against your thigh, his gloves rough against your skin. His eyes bored into yours demanding submission.

You gave in willingly, letting him take control over you. The grip on your throat tightened just slightly, enough to make you even more wet.

“David...” – You breathed his name. A futile attempt to break the spell of Art's menacing silence.

But he wasn't ready to break character yet. Instead, he released his hold on your throat and captured your lips in a messy kiss, taste of makeup and sweat mixing between you two.

He pulled back, just enough to look at you. For a moment you thought he might speak, but instead he let out that eerie silent laugh, his shoulders shaking as he looked at you with a mocking expression.

“You really are good at this...” – You said, voice husky with arousal and fear.

He flashed that terrifying grin again and in a heartbeat lifted you up in his arms. You look at him with a surprised look as he carries you to the prop bed in the set and carefully throws you in it. He hovers on top of you, grabbing your waist and pulling you closer to him. This time you completely feel his hard cock pressing against your thigh, making you moan – “Hmm yes...”

David's hands start to wander around your body, you're completely under him, completely at his mercy. His fingers slid under your dress pushing it up, revealing your black lacy set of lingerie. He pulled back and paused for a moment, he had an idea, suddenly getting out of bed – you look at him confused.

"David? What happened?" – You asked, afraid you did something wrong. He doesn't speak, instead he silently laughs gesturing for you to wait with an excited expression.

You watch him happily reach for Art's infamous black trash bag that was in a corner, open it dramatically and start looking for something inside of it. You were about to say something, but before you could do that he threw the bag away, in his hand is a black knife with fake blood still on it. He smiles devilishly pointing to the knife... then you. You freeze, feeling genuine horror with his actions now.

David senses your growing tension and gestures with both hands as what can be understood as 'relax, I'm not going to hurt you... probably'. What an imp. He starts crawling on top of the bed towards you with a hungry look, reaching your legs. He signals for you to open them and you gladly do so, without asking questions. He pauses for a moment as if savoring the situation, the position you're in – He gives you his trademark creepy smirk.

He reaches for your panties, his finger lifted one of the side edges and in a swift motion he uses the knife to slash it, removing it and revealing your throbbing cunt – now on full display for him. You inhale sharply, the cold air making you shiver. He throws away the knife and your undies somewhere around the set.

He pulls you towards him roughly, demanding, pushing your legs more far apart. You notice his bulge is very prominent now, poking through his clown costume. David hovers above you, one hand beside your head and the other ghostly stroking your sensitive bud making you moan. You don't want to wait, can't handle teasing now – you shift slightly as a form of protest.

“Fuck me now” – You breathlessly groan

He stopped in his tracks and looked you dead in the face, up until now he has been real soft with you, taking things slowly... But if you're such a needy bitch with no patience then he will give you exactly what you want.

David pulls back slightly and gathers your legs in front of him, pushing you to the side forcing you to change positions. Your back now is exposed to him, your ass completely tilted up, he uses his knee to once more spread your legs. You tried to look back at him but he shoved your head down in the bed and unspokenly demanded you to stay this way. Not wanting to defy him again you accept his command.

You stayed like this for a few seconds wondering why nothing has happened, you couldn't help but listen to your surroundings, especially behind you – focusing on any sound, any clue to what will happen. Unbeknownst to you, your husband – Art, at the moment – was dazed at the sight before him. Pussy swollen with desire and wetness threatening to drip down your groin, enough to make his dick beg to be released.

A sudden sharp noise of tearing cloth invaded your ears, making you jump a little bit. You were scared to look back but your curiosity was louder at the moment and you couldn't help but slightly glance to the source of the sound. David had torn his clown suit to free his dick, now holding his fully erect member in his hand leaking in precum, pumping it a few times.

He caught you looking and in a futile attempt you tried to avert your gaze, too late now. He smiled wickedly and as punishment, he gave you an unexpected ruthless slap to your butt, making you hiss in both shock and pleasure. The stinging sensation only adding to your burning heat. He continued – two, three, four, five slaps – smacking until you were moaning for the pain, for him.

“Mmm-aah fuck” – you moaned – “fuck me, just fuc-”

Your phrase cut short when he entered your pussy, shoving his dick deep inside you then completely out in a excruciatingly slow speed. He was taunting you, giving you what you wanted but not in the way intended to.

“Mmmm Dave, please ah- please...” – You cried out. You could feel the clown smirking behind you.

David started picking up speed, pounding hard, grabbing your waist for stability. There will definitely be some purple digits engraved there tomorrow.

You can hear his ragged breath and occasional whimpers, you're surprised he could maintain Art's silent persona this far. David is usually quite vocal, he enjoys praising you during sex. The difference is noticeable, you're still unsure about it... On the other hand, his much more dominant demeanor when portraying Art makes up for it.

He takes his dick out and flips you on your back to face him again, he takes your legs and puts them on his shoulder. He promptly aligned his shaft with your entrance again, staring directly at you. David's half-lidded blue eyes peaking through the white mask, black lips slightly open indicating breathlessness. Pounding you, he pushed your bra out of the way, he loved the erotic sight of your tits bouncing just for him.

His cock deliciously hit your sweet spot with expertise – he just knows how to make you feel good – feeling the climax build up more and more on your stomach on each thrust he gives, you're almost there.

He leans in closer to you, one of his hands grabs your throat while the other stays at your waist, pining you completely onto the bed. He's choking you mercilessly, cutting your oxygen this time.

David picks up his speed really fast, making the prop bed creak loudly, the sound of rough slapping skin filling the set – Your orgasm threatening to crash down. The stimulation is overwhelming and you can't hold it anymore.

His dick hits hard and deep in your pussy – you deliciously cum, your juices spilling all over his shaft. He nods maniacally feeling your tightening warm cunt around his cock, it was all that he needed to reach his peak – closing his eyes and throwing his head back, he ejaculates inside you with one final thrust. He releases the hold on your neck allowing you to gasp for air.

You see his face contorting and you think he might break character now. Instead he opened his eyes and smiled at you while clapping his hands cheerfully. The way he stayed silent, embodying Art’s menacing playfulness, drove you to the edge.

He removes himself from you, sweating, panting. You suddenly feel the exhaustion and so does he – literally plopping himself on the bed, by your side.

“I love you so much, you know that?” – he finally spoke after some minutes, the real David finally breaking through.

It was such a relief to hear his voice again – “I love you too... Even when you're being a complete psycho” – you teased, still breathless.

David laughed, genuinely – “I hope I wasn't too rough” – he said, pressing his forehead against yours, his arms wrapping around your waist in a comforting embrace.

“Maybe a little” – you admitted, resting your hands against his chest – “But I like it when you surprise me”

David smiled, leaning in to kiss the top of your head, filled with all the tenderness you knew him for. It was just the two of you, sharing a quiet moment.

“Thank you” – he murmured – “For loving all sides of me... Even the creepy ones”

You laughed softly, running your fingers through his chest – “I wouldn’t have it any other way”

You knew this was a moment you’d cherish – a memory of the man you loved, both the sweet husband and domineering clown... And tonight, you have experienced both.

“Alright, alright. I think we've given Art enough playtime for one night.” - he murmured, gently caressing your back. He kissed you one last time before preparing to get out of bed.

“I think I'll have to buy another clown costume” – he joked, pointing at his groin area, where he had ripped the fabric.

“And new panties for me, ruined my favorite one” – you added with a fake pout pointing at the long gone undies, currently at the floor. (rip undies)

“Yeah, sorry about that... I- I don't know what I was doing honestly” – he said looking down

“No, no. None of that. I loved everything. All of it.” – You quickly replied, forcing him to look at you. You could swear you saw a faint blush creeping up his cheeks.

“C'mon, let's get out of here” – He said sweetly, slipping his hand into yours – “We've had enough fun for one night”

Some minutes later as you both walked out of the darkened set hand in hand, you realized what you had just experienced was a moment you'd never forget. Fear, love and desire collided in the most thrilling way.

[vintagetvstars]

Leonard Nimoy Vs. Avery Brooks

Propaganda

Leonard Nimoy - (Star Trek, Mission: Impossible) - actor, director, musician, writer, photographer and mensch whose hotness as spock CHANGED THE WORLD

Avery Brooks - (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Spenser: For Hire) - ben sisko absolute all time tv dilf and have you heard him SPEAK... the stage background absolutely shows and it truly makes him a standout in a legacy franchise *full* of incredibly talented people. also frankly top 3 all time sexy bald guy

- No Negative Propaganda Please -

Master Poll List | How to submit propaganda | What is vintage? (FAQ)

Additional propaganda below the cut

Leonard Nimoy:

This is the Spock website, come on

its leonard nimoy......

Avery Brooks:

Avery is a certified TV sci-fi hottie as Benjamin Sisko in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The first black star trek Captain, he also negotiated his signature look - the bald head and goatee - against haters who thought a Captain should always be clean-shaven. Thank God for that, because he looks devastatingly hot in a a goatee (a phrase never before uttered). He went on to direct several episodes of DS9, use his pleasant voice to record music and multiple host documentaries, and mostly retire from acting to teach as a professor.

TW: Flashing Lights

with that wonderful stentorian baritone voice he could move from intimidating commander to gentle and compassionate space dad...benjamin sisko is a man of many qualities, thoughtful, morally complex, understatedly hilarious, a lil unhinged, really really excited about baseball, and avery brooks never fails to breathe life, depth and dimension into the character and also did i mention his voice. fun fact he was a professor of theater arts at rutgers while filming deep space nine and would occasionally teach classes via vhs tapes recorded on set, complete with starfleet uniform. he also directed a number of ds9 episodes including notable ones like "rejoined" and "far beyond the stars", and performed many of his own stunts as sisko. stunt coordinator dennis madalone said, "of all the stars that I've worked with on all the Star Treks, and all the other shows that I've been on other than Star Trek, I've never seen an actor so physically capable of just doing everything...every time I'd bring in a stunt double, he'd be angry, sitting on a bench, because Avery was doing so great." he's also a distinguished stage actor and an accomplished musician and singer who's performed everything from jazz to opera. science has yet to discover whether there's anything this man can't do.

[literary-illuminati]

Book Review 68 - Babel by R. F. Kuang

Overview

I came to Babel with extremely little knowledge about the actual contents of the book but a deep sense of all the vibes swirling around its reception – that it was robbed of a Hugo nomination (if the author didn’t outright refuse it), that it’s probably the single buzziest and most Important sf/f release of 2022, that it was stridently political, and plenty more besides. I also went in having mostly enjoyed The Poppy War series and being absolutely enamoured by the elevator pitch of an alternate history Industrial Revolution where translation is literally magic. And, well-

It is wrong to say I hated this book, but only because keeping track of my complaints and starting organize this review in my head was entertaining enough to keep me invested in the reading experience.

The story is set in an alternate 1830s, where the rise of the British Empire relies upon the dominance of its translators, as it is the mixture of translation and silverworking, the inscription of match-pairs in different languages on bars of worked silver and the leveraging of the ambiguity and loss of meaning between them that fuels the world’s magic. The protagonist is pluckted from his childhood home in Canton after his family dies in a cholera outbreak and whisked away to the estate of Professor Lowell, an Oxford translator he quickly realized is his unacknowledged father. He’s made to choose an English name (Robin Swift) and raised and tutored as a future translator in service to the Empire.

The meat of the story is focused on Robin’s education in Oxford, his relationship with the rest of his cohort, and his growing radicalization and entanglement with the revolutionary Hermes Society. Things come to a head when in his fourth year the cohort is sent back to Canton to, well, help provoke the first Opium War, though none of them aware of that. The final act follows the fallout of that, by which I mean it lives up to the full title of “Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution”.

To be clear, this was technically a very accomplished book. The writing never dragged and the prose was, if not exactly lyrical, always clear and often evocative. Despite the breadth of space and time the story covers, I never had any complaints about the pacing – and honestly, the ending was, dramatically speaking, one of the more natural and well-executed ones I’ve read recently. It’s very well-constructed.

All that being said – allow me to apologize for how the rest of this is mostly just going to be a litany of complaints. But the book clearly believes itself to be an important and meaningful work of political art, which means I don’t feel particularly bad about holding it to high standards.

Narrative Voice

To start with, just, dear god the tone. This is a book with absolutely zero faith in its audience’s ability to reach their own conclusions, or even follow the symbolism and implication it lays down. Every important point is stated outright, repeated, and all but bolded and underlined. In this book set in 1830s England there are footnotes fact-checking the imperialists talking heads to, I guess, make sure we don’t accidentally become convinced by their apologia for the slave trade? Everything is just relentlessly didactic, in a way that ended up feeling rather insulting even when I agreed with the points Kuang was making.

More than that, and this is perhaps a more subjective complaint but – for an ostensible period piece, the narrative voice and perspective just felt intensely modern? This was theoretically an omniscient third person book, with the narrative voice being pretty distinct from any of the actual characters – with the result that the implicit narrator was instead the sort of person of spends six hours a day getting into arguments on twitter and for this effort calls themselves a progressive activist. The identities of all the characters – as delivered by the objective narration – were all very neat and legible from the perspective of someone at a 2022 HR department listing how diverse their team was, which was somewhere between a tragic lost opportunity to show how messy and historical racial/ethnic/national identities are and outright anachronistic, depending. (This was honestly one of the bigger disappointments, coming from Kuang’s earlier work. Say what you will of The Poppy War series, the narration is with Rin all the way down, and it trusts the reader enough not to blink.) More than that it was just distracting – the narration ended up feeling like an annoying obstacle between me and the story, and not in any fun postmodern way either.

Characters

Speaking of the cast – they simply do not sound or feel like they actually grew up in the 19th century. Now, some modernization of speech patterns and vocabulary and moral commensense is just the price of doing business with mass market period pieces, granted, but still – no 19th century Anglo-Indian revolutionary is going use the phrase ‘Narco-military state’ (if for no other reason than we’re something like a century early for ‘narco-state’ to be coined as a term at all). An even beyond feeling out of time most of the characters feel kind of thinly sketched?

Or no, it’s not that the characters are thinly sketched so much as their relationships are. We’re repeatedly, insistently told that these four students are fast friends and closer than family and would happily die for each other, but we’re very rarely actually shown it. This is partly just a causality of trying to skim over a four-year university education in the middle third of one book, I think, but still – the good times and happy moments are almost always sort of skimmed over, summarized in the course of a paragraph or two that usually talk in terms of memories and consequences more than the relationships themselves. The points of friction and the arguments, meanwhile, are usually played out entirely on the page, or at least described in much more detail. In the end you kind of have to just take it as read that any of these people actually love each other, given that at least two of them seem to be feuding at any given point for the entire time they know each other.

Letty deserves some special attention. She’s the only white member of Robin’s cohort at Babel and she honestly feels like less of acharacter and more a collection of tropes about white women in progressive spaces? Even more than the rest, it’s hard to believe the rest of the class views her as beloved ride-or-die found family when essentially every time she’s on screen it’s so she can do a microagression or a white fragility or something. Also, just – you know how relatively common it is to see just, blatantly misogynistic memes repackaged as anti-racist because it specifies ‘white women’? There’s a line in this that almost literally says ‘Letty wasn’t doing anything to disprove the stereotype of woman as uselessly emotional and hysteric’.

Also, she’s the one who ends up betraying the other three and trying to turn them in when they turn revolutionary. Which is probably inevitable given the book’s politics, but as it happened felt like less of the shocking betrayal that it was supposed to be and more just, checking off a box for a dramatic reverse. Of course she turned on them, none of them ever really seemed to even like each other.

As a Period Piece

So, the book is set in the 1830s, in the midst of the industrial revolution and its social fallout, and the leadup to the First Opium War (which is, through the magic of, well, magic ,but also mercantilist economics, make into a synecdoche for British global dominion more broadly). On the one hand, the setting is impeccably researched, recent and relevant historical events are referenced whenever they would come up, and the footnotes are full to bursting with quotes and explanations of texts or cultural ephemera that’s brought up in the narration.

On the other, the setting doesn’t feel authentic in the slightest, the portrayal of the British Empire is bizarrely inconsistent, and all that richly researched historical grounding ends up feeling less like a living world and more like a particularly well-down set for a Doctor Who episode.

The story is incredibly focused around Oxford as a city and a university. There’s a whole author’s note about the research and slight changes made into its geography and I absolutely believe its portrayal as a physical location and the laws about how women were treated and how the different colleges were organized and all that is exactly as accurate as Kuang wanted them to be. The issue is really the people. With the exception of a few cartoonish villains who barely get more than a couple pages apiece, no one feels, sounds like, or acts like they actually belong in the 19th century. The racism the protagonists struggle with all feels much more 21st century than Victorian, and the frame of mind everyone inhabits still comes across more as ‘unusually blatantly racist Englishman’ than 19th century scholars and polymaths.

This is especially blatant as far as religion goes. It’s occasionally mentioned, sure enough, but to the extent anyone actually believes in Christianity it’s of a very modern and disenchanted sort – this is a society that sends out missionaries as a conscious tool of colonial expansion, not because of anything as silly or absurd as actually wanting to spread their gospel. Also like, it’s Oxford, in the nineteenth century. For all the racism the protagonists have to deal with, they should be getting so much more shit from ‘well-meaning’ locals and students trying to save their (one Muslim, one atheist, one probably Christian but black and protective of Haitian Vodou on a cultural level which would be more than enough) souls.

Or, and this is more minor, it is a central conceit of the whole finale that if a few (like, two) determined revolutionaries can infiltrate Babel they’ll be able to take the entire place hostage with barely any trouble. This is because the students and professors there are, basically, whimpy bookworms who’ll faint at the sight of blood and have no stomach for the sort of violence their work actually supports and drives. Which – look, I really don’t want to defend the ruling class of Victorian Britain here, but I’m not sure physical cowardice is really one of their failings, as a group? I mean, there’s an entire system of institutionalized child abuse in the boarding schools they went to to get them used to taking and dealing out violence and abuse. Basically every upper-class sport is thinly disguised military drill or ritual combat (okay, or rowing). Half of them would graduate to immediately running off and invading places for the glory of the queen. I’m not sure two sleep-deprived nerds with knives would actually have been able to cow the crowd here, is what I’m saying. (This would stick out less if the text wasn’t so dripping with contempt for them on precisely these grounds.)

Much less minor are our heroic revolutionaries themselves. And okay, this is more a matter of taste than anything but like – the Hermes Society is an illegal conspiracy of renegade current and former Babel scholars dedicated to using their knowledge of magic and access to university resources to oppose and undermine the British Empire in general and the work of the school in particular. Think Metternich’s worse nightmare, but in Oxford instead of Paris and focused on colonial liberation (continental Europe barely exists for the purposes of the book, Britain is Empire.) So! A secret society of professional revolutionaries in the heydey of just that, with a name that just has to be Hermetic symbolism, who concern themselves with both high politics and metaphysics.

They are just so very, very boring. This is the age of the Conspiracy of the Equals, the Carbonari, the Seasons! The literal Illumanti are still within living memory! Where’s the pageantry, the ritual, the grandiosity? The elaborate initiation rituals and oaths of undying loyalty? They’re so pragmatic, so humble, so (and I know I keep coming back to this) modern. It’s just such an utter wasted opportunity. Even beyond the level of aesthetics, these are revolutionaries with remarkably little positive ideology – the oppose colonialism and racism for reasons they take as self-evident and so don’t feel the need to theorize about it (and talk about them with the vocabulary of a modern activist, because of course they do), but they’re pretty much consciously agnostic as to what world should look like instead. They vaguely end up supporting a sort of petty-bourgeois socialism (in the Marxist sense), but the alliance with Luddites is essentially political convenience – they really don’t seem to have any vision of the future at all, either in England or the various places they claim as homelands.

On Empire and Industrialization

The story is set during the early nineteenth century, so of course the Industrial Revolution is a pretty core part of the background. The Silver Industrial Revolution, technically, since the Babellers translation magic is in this world a key and load-bearing part of it. Despite the addition of miracle-working enhancers and supports to its fundamental technology, the industrial revolution plays out pretty identically to history – right down to the same cities becoming hubs of industry, despite steam engines using enchanted silver instead of coal and thus, presumably, the entire economic and logistical system that brought this particular cities to prominence being totally unrecognizable. This is not a book that’s in any way actually about tracing how something would change history – which isn’t a complaint, to be clear, that’s a perfectly valid creative choice.

It does, however, make it rather galling that the single actually significant difference to history is that the introduction of magic turns the industrial revolution into a Legend of Zelda boss with a giant glowing weak point you can hit to destroy the whole enterprise.

On a narrative level, I get it – it simplifies things and allows for a far happier and more dramatic ending if destroying Babel is not just a symbolic act but also literally sends London Bridge falling down and scuttles the entire royal navy and every mill and factory in Britain. It’s just that I think that by doing so it trades away any chance for actually making interesting commentary on anti-colonial and -capitalist resistance. A world where a single act of spectacular terrorism really can destroy a modern empire is frankly so detached from our world that it ceases to be able to really materially comment upon it.

Like, the principle reason to not take the Luddites as your role models is not that they were morally vicious but that they were doomed – capitalism’s ability to repair damage to infrastructure and fixed goods is legitimately very impressive! Trying to force an entire ruling class not to adopt a technology that makes whoever commits to it tremendous amounts of money (thus, power) is a herculean task even when you have a state apparatus and standing army – adding an ‘off’ button to the lot of it just trades all sense of relevance for a satisfyingly cathartic ending.

(This is leaving untouched how the book just takes it as a given that the industrial revolution was a strictly immiserating force that did nothing but redistribute money from artisans to capitalists. Which certainly tracks as something people at the time would have thought but given how resolutely modern all the other politics in the work are rings really weirdly.)

All of which is only my second biggest issue with how the book presents its successful resistance movement. It all pales in comparison to making the Empire a squeamish paper tiger.

Like, the book hates colonialism in general and the British Empire in particular, the narrative and footnotes are filled with little asides about various atrocities and injustices and just ways it was racist or complicit in some particular atrocity. But more than that it is contemptuous of it, it views the empire as (as the cliche goes) a perpetually rotting edifice that just needs one good kick; that it persists only through the myth of its own invincibility, and has no stomach for violent resistance from within. Which is absolutely absurd, and the book does seem to know it on occasion when it off-handedly mentions e.g. the Peterloo Massacre – but a character whose supposed to be the grizzled cynical pragmatic revolutionary still spouts off about how slave rebellions succeed because their masters aren’t willing to massacre their own property. Which is just so spectacularly wrong on every axis its actually almost offensive.

More importantly, the entire final act of the story relies upon the fact that the British Empire would allow a handful of foreign students seize control of a vital piece of infrastructure for weeks on end and do nothing but try to wait them out as the national physically falls apart around them. Like, c’mon, there would be siege artillery set up and taking shots by the end of week two. As with the Oxford students, the Victorian elite had all manner of flaws – take your pick, really – but squeamishness wasn’t really one of them.

On Magic

So the magical system underlying the whole story is – you know how Machinaries of Empire makes imperial ideology and metaphysics literally magical, giving expert technicians the ability to create superweapons and destroy worlds provided that the Hexarchate’s subjects observe the imperial calendar of rites and celebrate its triumphs/participate in rituals glorying in the torture of its ‘heretics’? It’s not exactly a subtle metaphor, but it works.

Babel does something similar, except the foundational atrocity fueling the engine of empire on a metaphysical level is, like, cultural appropriation. As an organizing metaphor, I find this less compelling.

Leaving that aside, the story makes translation literally capable of miracle-working – which of necessity requires making ‘languages’ distinct natural categories with observable metaphysical boundaries. It then sets the story in the 19th century – the era of newborn nation states and education systems and national literatures, where the concept of the national-linguistic community was the obsession of the entire European intelligentsia. Now this is not a book concerned with how the presence of magic would actually have changed history, in the slightest, but like – given how fascinated it is by translation and linguistics you’d think the whole ‘a language is a dialect with a navy’ cliché would at least get a light mention (but then the book doesn’t really treat language as any more inherent or natural than it does any other modern identity category, I suppose.)

As an Allegory

Okay, so having now spent an embarrassing number of words establishing to my own satisfaction that the book really doesn’t work at all as a period piece, let us consider; what if it wasn’t trying to be?

A great many things about the book just fit much better if you take it as a commentary on the modern university with Victorian window-dressing. Certainly the driving resentment of Oxford as an institution that sustains itself and grows rich off the exploitation of international students it considers second-class seems far more apt applied to contemporary elite western schools than 19th century ones. Likewise the racism the heroes face all seems like the kind you’d expect in a modern English town rather than a Victorian one. I’m not well-versed enough on the economics of the city to know for sure, but I would wager that the gleeful characterization of Oxford as a city that literally starts falling to ruin without the university to support it was also less accurate in the 1830s than it is today.

Read like this, everything coheres much better – but the most striking thing becomes the incredible vanity of the book. This is a morality tale where the natural revolutionary vanguard with the power to bring global hegemony to its knees through nothing but witholding their labour are..students at elite western universities (not, I must say, a class I’d consider in dire need of having their egos boosted). The emotions underlying everything make much more sense, but the plot itself becomes positively myopic.

Beyond that – if this is a story about international students at elite universities, it does a terrible job of actually portraying them. Or, properly, it only shows a certain type; just about every foreign-born student or professor we meet is some level of revolutionary, deeply opposed in principle to the empire they work within. No one is actually convinced by the carrot of a life as an exploited but exceedingly comfortable and well-compensated technician in the imperial core, and there’s not really acknowledgement at all of just how much of the apparatus of international institutions and governments in the global south – including positions with quite a bit of real power – end up being staffed by exactly that demographic who just sincerely agree with the various ideological projects employing them. Kuang makes it far too easy on herself by making just about every person of colour in the books one of the good guys, and totally undersells how convincing hegemonic ideology can be, basically.

The Necessity of Violence

This is a pet peeve and it’s a very minor thing that I really wouldn’t bring it up if that wasn’t literally part of the title. But it is, so – it’s a plot point that’s given a decent amount of attention that Griffin (Robin’s secret older brother, grizzled professional revolutionary, his introduction to anti-colonialism) is blamed for murdering one of his classmates who had the bad luck to be studying while he was sneaking in to steal some silver – a student that was quite well-loved by the faculty and her very successful classmates, who have never forgiven him. Later on, it’s revealed that this is an utter rewriting of history, and she’d been a double agent pretending to let herself be recruited into the Hermes Society who’d been luring Griffin into an ambush when he killed her and escaped.

This is – well, the most predictable not-even-a-twist imaginable, for one, but also – just rank cowardice. You titled the book ‘the necessity of violence’, the least you can do is actually own it and show that violent resistance means people (with faces, and names, not just abstractions only ever talked about in general terms) who are essentially personally innocent are going to end up collateral damage, and people are going to hold grudges about it. Have some courage in your convictions!

Translation

Okay, all of that said, this isn’t a book that’s wholly bad, or anything. In particular, you can really tell how much of a passion Kuang has for the art and science of translation. The depth of knowledge and eagerness to share just about overflows from the page whenever the book finds an excuse to talk about it at length, and it’s really very endearing. The philosophizing about translation was also as a rule much more interesting and nuanced then whenever the book tried to opine about high politics or revolutionary tactics.

Anyways, I really can’t recommend the book in any real way, but it did stick in my head for long enough that I’ve now written 4,000 words about it. So at the very least it’s the interesting sort of bad book, y’know?

[kwamiwayzz]

I've been sick in bed all week and decided to watch the pilot so my impressions so far. I'd say spoilers ahead, but who's actually watching out for those for this:

Animation is okay, don't expect KyoAni or Mappa obviously. I can't really say for sure if the "bad and sloppy" art style is completely intended but when you have shots like this

...it kinda screams low quality, low effort

Much of the pilot plot is dumb stuff like the actual games. Nicole is trying to find money to buy this Avril Lavigne belt from Emily and she goes from offering to wash Jecka's car, thinking about doing caricatures for money (Jecka says she can't draw), selling crushed up aspirin and pretend it's cocaine, and she even took the dough from a random pizza place to sell figures while passing it off as "genuine Italian crafts".

Jecka tells her to get a job like usual.

Ari works at Hot Topic and being tortured as usual, but she gets somewhat of a win towards the end of the episode.

We literally see Ari cutting herself out of frustration because of her shitty job.

The rest of the pilot is just going from here to there to what you'd expect if you've played the games. It's not amazing, and I do think the voice acting is still good, but I don't think it translated out super well in an anime-setting.

I did enjoy some parts like...Jeckole

Based on this shot where they're watching TV, it looks like Nicole might be spending time at Jecka's house, despite the second game having her try to keep her away from her pervy dad.

Oh damn, Nicole selling out Jecka for her own gain just so she could get the belt Emily was selling? Then telling Ari she'll get over it? Well, we'll see...

So, you gonna apologize or what?

Trying to fix it by letting Jecka wear the belt every other day? Also, she looks like a lost puppy here lmao.

But similar to that one part in Re-Up, Nicole can win Jecka's favor back again by throwing Jeffery under the bus.

Did Nicole fucking kill Jeffery?? ToT

I guess that's what it takes to win Jecka back bye asdfaklfgkjalskd

Anyway, my overall thoughts on this pilot. It's fine for what it is. Keep your expectations similar to the games, because it's not like there's going to be anything mind-blowing. I'm mostly here for the voice acting, Nicole and Jecka, the rest of the cast, and the dumb stuff.

Out of everything, I think I really enjoyed the dumb dialogue among all the characters. They're just acting like typical (possibly exaggerated) white teenagers in that setting by getting into goofy scenarios and if the rest of the anime is like this, I might actually consider staying for the rest of its run.

[dindjarindiaries]

You reblogged that starter list and before I even saw your message, this one SCREAMED Din to me:

❛ if i could be a different person, i promise you, i would be.

character: Din Djarin (The Mandalorian)

prompt: "If I could be a different person, I promise you, I would be."

main masterlist • prompt masterlist

You looked up at the expanse of stars overhead and let out a soft breath. The slight sting of the night's chilled air nipped at your nose, but the way it filtered through your lungs felt relieving. This was the open air; it was much more freeing than the ship you had started to feel trapped within.

It was that ship's boarding ramp you were sitting on, and as you took a quick glance over your shoulder, you saw its owner watching you from within the cargo hold with a worried tilt to his silver helmet. Having been caught in the act, his armored chest rose and fell in a breath as he started to walk towards you. Your gaze returned to the sky above as you sensed his approach.

"I thought you were charting another course," you said as Din took his place alongside you. "We can't spend too much time here."

Din shrugged in your periphery. "An extra rotation won't hurt."

Your head snapped towards him as your lips parted in disbelief. "A rotation?"

Din's visor was stuck on the stars, but after a moment of you staring, he returned your disbelieving glance. "What?"

You chuckled and shook your head, returning your attention to the night sky. You closed your eyes as your heart began to beat more rapidly. The question you wanted to ask screamed within your mind, but it came out as a mere whisper. "Why?"

There was a pause before Din responded. "Why what?"

You reopened your eyes and kept them on the stars. Looking at Din would make you lose your resolve. "Why are you bending your rules?"

When Din remained silent for a long moment, you quickly glanced over at him. His visor was fixed on his gloved hands as he picked the orange-colored material on his fingertips. "We can afford the time, for now." When he continued, his modulated voice was even lower than before. "And you're happy here."

You furrowed your brow at him. "I'm happy regardless."

Din gave his helmet a brief tilt. "Sure. But..." he paused, as if musing upon something, "not like you are on planets like this one."

You didn't know what to say to that. The sweet inhale of the crisp air you took was enough to prove his words true. As you continued to stare somewhat dumbfounded at Din, he added more.

"You don't like being on the ship."

You instantly shook your head and willed the words to come, but they wouldn't. Your throat had closed up around your wildly beating heart as the truths you tied to each atrium and ventricle came closer and closer to freeing themselves.

Din took your silence as a much more disappointing reality. Even his modulator couldn't hide his hurt. "You don't like being with me."

"No." You couldn't have gotten the word out faster if you'd tried. "That's not true."

"It's okay. I understand." Din's arm rested upon his propped-up knee as he looked at the stars yet again. You watched his visor reflect them with fond admiration. "My lifestyle isn't meant to keep people around for long." He nodded, as if he was still convincing himself of such a truth. "I've grown used to it."

His words, a genuine and honest reflection of himself, shattered your heart enough to let the shards escape through the barrier your throat had attempted to create. Each beautiful truth began to spill out in a stained glass mosaic of the image you had crafted over the past few months. "Yet I'm still here."

That caught Din's attention. His visor found your gaze as you pieced your art together.

"I've felt trapped, yes, but not by you or your ship." You exhaled and watched your hand as you set it on the metal of the ramp beside you. It was just inches from Din's own. "It's a feeling. One that consumes me, really. And while it's centered on you, it's not because of you that I feel so trapped. That's only because I know the truth. I know your guard has to stay up."

You huffed and shook your head at yourself.

"It sounds ridiculous to say out loud, honestly, but... you deserve to know." The corners of your mouth pulled up in a sad smile. "Even if there's nothing you can do about it."

Din's visor never left you as he sat in the heavy silence that followed. Eventually, his visor lowered, his focus moving to his gloved hand as it closed the distance to your own. Only part of his hand covered yours on the boarding ramp as he spoke in the most beautifully honest tone you had ever heard from him. "If I could be a different person, I promise you, I would be."

You shook your head, your gaze also fixed on your hands as you did so. "If you were any different, you wouldn't be the person I've grown such feelings for."

You were delicate in the way you laced your fingers through his, allowing him to pull away at any point if he so wished. He made no such move, instead letting his armored chest rise and fall in a careful breath as your hands became fully entwined. After a few more quiet moments, he spoke up once again. "I can learn."

You looked back up at his visor and hoped your expression wasn't betraying your strong glimmer of hope. Din offered a determined nod.

"I will learn."

Your smile couldn't be stopped as you looked upon him much more favorably than you ever had the stars. "Yeah?"

Din nodded once more, resting your entwined hands on his armored thigh. "Yeah."

[oatmealdoodles]

I promise I’ll make Murder Drones art but let me get this out of my system

GUYS I AM READY TO MAKE THIS MOVIE MY WHOLE PERSONALITY

Going in I was a bit weary since I did in fact watch the original on broadway, and honestly, it didnt really click for me. Don’t get me wrong I LOVED the story and characters but I just never felt emerged, either due to the theater setting or its break-neck pacing. Luckily this movie works WAY better for me, and thats mostly due to them extending the runtime of act 1 to nearly double its length. We really get to breathe and be with these characters, and surprisingly I never once felt bored it was all so well made and paced.

The biggest concern I had though was that they were going to play down the charm of the original to make it “less broadway” and appeal to broader audiences. Mostly because I watched the new Mean Girls movie be so ashamed of being a musical that it got me worried for the whole genera. Luckily they didn’t they turned the campy charm up to 11, with full group choreography and some insanely creative set designs (Dancing Through Life). Like these are the EXACT VIBES I wanted from this movie.

One of my favorite parts of this movie is actually the production. Specifically the set design and filming, where they actual made almost all of the sets irl. They planted thousands of poppies just for the opening number, they actually made Munchkinland and Shiz, it’s all real. This movie also just looks great (ignoring some lighting) like the colors were POPING OFF the screen colorful especially in the beginning of “What is This Feeling” this movie is a visual treat. They really kept CGI to a minimum (obviously the animals but whatever) in order to pay homage to its theater roots. And it looks absolutely PHENOMINAL huge props to the team on that. Secondly they filmed the singing in direct, meaning no voice overs. And that weirdly didn't sound off at all the singing quality was amazing

that reminds me Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande were SO GOOD. They ate, they slayed, they Cooked, they every-other-gen-alpha-term-of-praise-I-can-think-of. Their casting just fits the roles so well with a 110% commitment coming from both of them. Cynthia’s Elpheba might actual be my favorite interpretation of the character I’ve seen. Also the part they added with the original actresses (Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth) interacting with the new ones was maybe the most fan-service thing in this whole movie and I was here for it I gasped in the theater along with my friends.

Like I can’t overstate enough how much I ENJOYED this movie (I guess an essay long Tumblr rant will do) theres just an infectious enthusiasm and passion radiating off the screen. It really feels like a movie made with love, like everyone making this wanted to make it.

I can’t recommend enough that you go watch it if your a fan of musicals or broadway you'll have a ball with this one. 9/10.

[anna-the-undertaker]

Nightmares and Nonsense

This is based on this post. I came up with that idea during one of my insomnia induced sleepless nights. I want to give special thanks to @anunholyabomination for inspiring me with the sheer hilarity of their comment on that post. So this is for you lmao additional tags: @leilakaro @sheep-from-rad

Belphegor's nights were an exercise in futility and simmering rage. Confined within the attic's gloomy walls, his disdain for humans stewed alongside a relentless boredom. The appearance of the human exchange student only served to ignite his contempt further. Yet, a mischievous part of him, the part that delighted in the subtle arts of manipulation and control, saw an opportunity in this unsuspecting human's arrival.

He discovered their dreaming mind by pure coincidence. While wandering the endless expanse of his own subconscious, a new dreamscape overlapped his, leaving Belphie adrift and puzzled. As a demon deeply acquainted with the nuances of sleep and dreams, he rarely encountered a dreamscape that could surprise him—at least he thought none of them could.

The dream before him was vivid, an intricately woven tapestry of colors and sensations that resonated with an unfamiliar yet undeniably human energy. He moved through it with the ease of a shadow, unseen and unnoticed, until he sensed a shift—a ripple of awareness that prickled at the edges of his consciousness.

Turning towards the source, he realized it was the human, and tried to get closer, intrigued by their control and clarity, and eager to exploit this opportunity. But before he could get any closer, a voice, clear and authoritative, cut through the dream’s fabric.

“Did I give you permission to come here?” The voice was neither hostile nor welcoming, carrying a tone of nonchalant power that Belphie wasn't used to being subjected to.

Startled, Belphie had barely a moment to register the dismissal before he was forcibly ejected from the dreamscape. He woke with a gasp, the abrupt return to his own consciousness leaving him disoriented and a single thought crossed his mind, “What the fuck…”

The encounter, however brief, sparked an obsession in Belphie. Night after night, he tried to re-enter the human's subconscious realm. Each attempt, however, ended more ludicrously than the last. The human didn’t just eject him but began to twist his appearances into increasingly absurd scenarios.

One night, he found himself manifested at the edge of a surreal circus. No sooner had he entered he was transformed—his dignified demonic form altered into that of a clown, complete with oversized shoes and a garish red nose. Before he could react, an imposing figure that his dream-altered mind couldn't recognize appeared, tall, bearded and dressed in top hat and singlet, shoving tacos into his mouth while shouting about something called Reese’s Puffs. In the background, aliens, decked out like gangsters, were busy robbing some place called a Chuck E. Cheese, stuffing their bags with what they loudly declared to be diamonds.

Another attempt saw him materialize in a dream-designed version of the wild west, where he was immediately put on a horse that had a mind of its own. As he struggled to maintain his balance, dream-created characters pelted him with bizarre questions about quantum physics—a subject he had no knowledge of, much less in his sleep. The absurdity peaked when the horse decided to join in the conversation, offering insights in a surprisingly sophisticated British accent.

At some point he was a fearsome pirate aboard a sinking ship, desperately trying to scare MC with threats of walking the plank, only to have the scene dissolve into a bizarre beach party where MC forced him to participate in a limbo contest. The dream characters cheered on, including the tall man from before who inexplicably acted as the DJ, blasting 80s pop hits.

And again, he was a villain in a medieval setting, ready to lay siege to a castle. Just as he began his threatening monologue, the scene shifted, turning him into a court jester reciting Shakespearean insults while juggling tomatoes. MC, dressed as the ruler, laughed from their throne, utterly unfazed by his supposed menace.

The indignity of it was almost too much, and he had withdrawn with a seething anger, masked by a forced calm. Yet, Belphie couldn't help but admire the human's deft control over their dreams. It was an ability he hadn't anticipated, one that both infuriated and intrigued him.

After numerous humiliations, Belphie's approach shifted. Perhaps he could weave himself into their subconscious as a constant, albeit ridiculous, presence. Allowing the human to get used to him would make it easier to manipulate them later, but that meant going along with their little game. He knew there would be no way to hide that he was a demon, but that was just a small change to his growing plan. Gradually, his intrusions became less about domination and more about persistence.

Finally, the human seemed to tire of crafting bizarre punishments. Belphie found himself simply present in the dreams, no longer transformed or tormented. He was just another character in the ever-changing tapestry of the human's dream world. This sudden normalcy felt like a cold truce, and while part of him was relieved, another part—a dark, vengeful slice of his soul—simmered with unresolved anger.

When they eventually met in person, the attic's dusty gloom illuminated by the intrusion of this peculiar human, Belphie’s feelings were a complex web of grudging respect, lingering disdain, and a peculiar curiosity.

“You,” Belphie greeted, his voice cool but laced with an undercurrent of amusement and annoyance. “Quite the dream weaver, aren’t you?”

The human's grin was all too knowing, their eyes sparkling with mischief. “Had to keep things interesting. You demons take yourselves so seriously.”

Belphie scoffed, crossing his arms as he leaned back against the wall. “You have no idea what you’re meddling with, human.”

“Maybe,” They conceded with a shrug, their confidence unshaken. “But I think I can handle it. Can you say the same?”

The challenge hung between them, and despite everything, Belphie found himself intrigued. Here was a human, capable of turning nightmares into farce, of standing toe-to-toe with a demon in the battlefield of dreams. As much as he hated to admit it, this might prove more interesting than he’d anticipated.

And, of course, he could find a way to use this to his advantage after all.

[talenlee]

Hanamusa, Explained

There is a nonzero chance if you follow me on tumblr, you’ve seen the term ‘Hanamusa’ attached to something I shared. It’s probably also some super cute art of Delia Ketchum and Jessie Teamrocket, and you may wonder what is going on and also, why is there so much good art of this.

Hanamusa as a term derives from the Japanese names of the characters – Hanako and Musashi. If you’re into shipping name structures, Hana-Musa implies that Hanako is the seme and Musashi the uke, but I don’t think that holds for all use cases of the type of terminology. It’s a ship. It’s an AU ship, as in an ‘alternate universe’ ship, where the two characters are presented in a context outside of the normal context of the anime presentation of them.

The Hanamusa ship as I understand it is set at some point after Jessie and James stop chasing Ash around, and Jessie settles down into a relationship with Delia. There’s tension about her history with Ash and the confusion about finding Your Personal Villain dating your mom, but mostly it’s about showing a sweet domestic life between two characters you know very well in a format I kind of see as like, Comedy-Sabot Romantic 4koma. Like, Hanamusa content is funny (and it is VERY funny) but it doesn’t need to be funny, because the main thing it’s about is showing these two characters and their relationship as they do cute things together.

It’s why people watch shows like K-On basically.

As for where this idea comes from, (EDIT: Slightly wonky wording here, I should have phrased 'this current fandom push' - I don't have any reason to believe Mai INVENTED the ship, just that when you go looking you'll wind up at her work) it seems to have its genesis with the work of one Kiana Mai, who developed this ship some time ago. Kiana Mai is also an extremely skilled artist, and one of those skills seems to be focus, creating these extremely clean-line excellently structured scene vignettes with no unnecessary content in them but also no need to rocket along. It’s amazing, engaging work that uses every part of the small format amazingly well. Which makes sense because one of the things Kiana Mai does is storyboarding work for Disney animated TV shows, a task at which I am sure she no doubt excels.

What I think is the most interesting aspect of Hanamusa, to me specifically, is that it manages to combine three things I don’t actually care about, in a way that doesn’t interfere with something I have unexpectedly strong opinions on. I do not watch Pokemon, and I have not shed a tear for Team Rocket and Ash Ketchum wandering into the sunset. That is a show that is not for or about my interests and that is okay. Indeed, imagining that it should be about what interests me is baffling. I think if I stopped watching a show twenty years ago, I have lost all right to act like I’m entitled to expect it remain the way it was all the way back then.

But I do have opinions on Jessie and James’ character voice. Not their voice acting – I mean, I know for a fact they’ve had to change over time and no voice actor should be obligated to kick it in the same role for what could be their entire career. I mean the way they talk about things and the words they use and kind of emphasis they put on words when they talk. About the way they voice their ideas, or the way they express who they are in the way they talk to one another, that stuff. It’s about affordances and persona, about the kind of people you project being by what words you choose to use and the affect when using them.

It’s why when, if a picture of a character is underneath it, you can read some dril posts as being ‘appropriately’ voiced by a character, even if it’s describing a candle situation that Francis Crozier did not have opinions on.

Jessie has a voice.

Jessie, in my head, is someone capable of moments of tenderness and friendship that is normally overwhelmed by an incredible confidence in ability she does not have and mere reality will never be given permission to infringe on it. Jessie is unassailably unstoppably sure of herself, thoughtlessly stupid in a way that doesn’t mean she is stupid, but which exists in a context of someone who has relentlessly pursued excellence in her job which is also the equivalent of being a late night 7/11 manager. She is the Girlboss that is Gaslighting herself into thinking she has something to Gatekeep.

Delia Ketchum by comparison is a very nice piece of wallpaper. Every appearance of her in my mind is someone Very Nice who is Very Patient and Very Supportive and has managed to keep literally all emotionally challenging conversations from happening around Ash, which can be perhaps easier when you remember that he, too, is an idiot. I don’t know how Delia Ketchum talks, but I do know that there are ways that Delia Ketchum does not talk.

This is interesting! It’s interesting because it presents a character where I am very sure I know what she does do when she does it, and a character about whom I can only be sure wouldn’t do some things. It creates a character space, and it creates expectations of affect and performance within that space. Ash and other characters show up as well, but because they get to interact with this already-defined space, you get treated to this really lovely kind of resonance. Would Ash call Jessie ‘dad’? Maybe, to bug her. He was good at being a twerp. Wasn’t he? I mean I remember it that way, he seems to work out that way, but… how would I know?

I know more of this AU where Jessie is studying to be a Pokemon Doctor and Ash wears glasses than I do of the source material any more. And if you’re wondering ‘hey, do Jessie and Delia ever meet in the source material?’ Like, yeah, for a few seconds. What, the point is creating something new.

If you want to check out Hanamusa stuff and read the comics, I recommend going and clicking on the hashtag on tumblr.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#Anime #Media

[rqbossman]

Hello Mr Bossman! (and possibly anyone else who reads this)

Its an honour to be here, I have a few questions. First i appologise for the long paragraph, you may dismiss it for the questions at the bottom. For context, i am here after finishing TMA and being up to date with TMAP, i then went over and listened to RQG, and have just finished listening to Epilogue 3 and might i just say, good sir I am grateful for your podcasts. I am currently just a few months away from my final exams of High School, and as someone who even just 1 year ago was very lost, struggling with school and being just overwhelmed. TMA isnt exactly comforting, but the characters and plot managed to serve as a good form of escapism while sorting myself out. I found my self engaging more in creative things that i had originally put aside in favour of maths and science (which i hated but thought i needed to do). I started drawing again, even if just fanart. and i found things going well. By finding podcasts, story telling and these communities have helped me in my own understanding of what i want in life. I got an ADHD diagnosis earlier this year, and almost directly after started RQG and as my first hyperfixation (that i was aware of as an hyperfixation) gosh dang it hit hard. (in a good way). Ive been able to do so much more creative writing and drawings, and got re-involved with a small dnd group with some friends who i played one game with almost 4 years ago now. So overall, inspirational sounds cringe, but it was. Im doing my best with the upcoming exams, but trying to get in to Medicine is not my only prority, and the fact ive been re-introduced to my first love (Literature and story telling), im planning to go do an Arts degree and i know i wouldnt have been able to confidently make this decision, or even have survived this long in the school system without the work you and your coworkers do. Now the sap is out of the way, Question time! (if you could answer even just one of these questions it would be so cool)(they go in order of RQ relevant to random stuff)(dont feel pressured to answer all/any. i know i wrote alot): 1. what would you say is the best way to draft out a long-form story. (with "Erasing the Line" as an example) Did you start at the end, with the links to the overarching plot.

2. When working with the players (in a form of TTRPG), what did you do to make sure you didnt miss relevant timing of plot points/ avoid creating spoilers while still giving enough detail?

3. What are good places to start with making a job out of storytelling/voice acting/audio etc. In the case of RQ, how is this a job and where do i sign up please! /j (what i mean is, how is best way/how did you find all the people involved and was there a common path that you were all on before getting to where you are now?) 4. Do you have recommendations for Terry Pratchett Books, i may be an literary-leaning student, but it seems i have never actually properly read any of his books. so where is best place to start?/What did you read first?

5. Similar authors or similar inspirations? Did you have a favourite podcast you listen to in your free time that you havnt had a hand in producing/directing/working on. 6. Favourite song/album/artist. And more specifically, what you like listening to in background when doing either writing or (for ttrpg) character research/game planing. 7. Since the olympics are on at the moment, what has been your favourite sport to watch, if you have been watching at all. Thank you for your time :)

Thankyou for all the kind words. Knowing our work is helping people really keeps our engines fired up. Let's see if I can't answer your questions: 1. I "sandbox" which is where I just shove everything I can think of into an unorganised bullet point list. Characters, setting, plot, all of it in one big mess. Then I decide what type of story you want to tell, copy and paste to a new document and then start to organise the thoughts (with the sandbox on standby if new stuff comes in I don't know what to do with). I think of it like scultping, you cut away bits and reshape until something comes out the other end that is story shaped. Only then do I attempt to build the sandcastle and put something coherant together like a synopsis or scratch draft etc.

2. Very tricky. I did a complete review and update of all notes after each recording session and don't forget the audio eas edited. I made lots of gaffs that you never heard as audience.

3. I contacted anyone I could convince to take part and just proved I was serious by overworking. I don't reccomend that route. Unfortunately it really is "who" you know. That doesn't mean chase established professionals as much as it means you need to get out there and associate with other up-and-comers who match your vibe. For me the route was long and windy and not a particularly good example. 4. I normally recommend people do not read his books in publication order. Don't get me wrong, its wonderful watching his craft grow from one title to the next but I would recommend new readers tip their toe into his later works to see if they like where he ended up before committing the time. I often recommend 'Monstrous Regiment' as people's first one. My favourite though is 'Thief of Time.'

5. I don't get much time to listen to podcasts in the last couple of years. I used to listen to a lot of non fiction. 'Stuff you Should Know' and that ilk. I also read a fair amount of classic YA fiction to unwind (Windinsger trilogy, Bartimeous, stuff like that.) 6. Paul Simon's Graceland but when working I assemble a playlist for each seperate project that is tonally appropriate. If I really need to focus I listen to Classical Minimalism. Or the Old School Runescape soundtrack. I'm allowed to be ecclectic. 7. I am actually in an incredibly busy work crunch at the moment so haven't seen any of it!

[veilder]

War of the Rohirrim: My Thoughts

So, I just got back from seeing this movie and I thought I'd write up a little review, I'll give a brief overview first and put spoilers under the cut.

First off, let me get this out of the way: I really, really enjoyed it! Which isn't to say that the movie didn't have problems, just that I was thoroughly entertained throughout and also got way more invested in it than I thought I would! It was a nice, self-contained little story that did service to Tolkien's Legendarium while still allowing for creative changes and I thought it all worked really well the way it was told. The animation was absolutely stunning in a lot of scenes (notably the fight scenes!), though I did have some issues with it in others. Notably with the compositing of the 2D and 3D art together, some of those just did not look right, but they were few and far enough between that they didn't detract overmuch for me.

The cast of characters were vibrant and well-crafted, especially the supporting cast for me, and the voice acting for everyone was on point. I also really liked the general design and portrayal of the whole cast, I thought they all looked very good. Notable standout character for me would be: the princes, Háma and Haleth, the King's nephew, Fréaláf, and the shieldmaiden, Olwyn. And honorable mention to the Dunlanding general, Turgg, too. I can't tell if it was just the nostalgic Howard Shore score returning in some parts or if I just generally liked the whole soundtrack (notably not composed by Shore this time), but I felt like the music was very good as well. Very suitable to the world and Rohan specifically.

And, last but certainly not least, I thought the vibe of the film was just incredible. Even moreso than with the Hobbit movies, The War of the Rohirrim felt like Middle-Earth. The vibes of the movie were impeccable and it actually seemed like a genuine story set in the original trilogy's Rohan. The styles and dialogue and whole atmosphere of the film seemed very in line with Peter Jackson's original trilogy and I think that's what elevated the whole thing for me, enough to overlook its flaws, which I will get into more detail in below the cut.

Overall, I personally would rank this a solid 6.5/10. It certainly didn't match the original trilogy and likely wasn't even as good as my favorite of the Hobbit movies, either. (Which is the first one, of course. 😌) A very solid addition to the Middle-Earth series and enjoyable enough that I'll definitely be watching it again, but nothing particularly groundbreaking. If you are a LotR fan, I feel like you'll like it. If you're an anime fan, you might get a good story and some pretty characters out of it. If you're a more casual movie watcher, it might be a tad hit or miss. But overall, I consider it a very solid movie.

Now, on to spoilers.

So, first off, let's talk about Héra. I've seen a lot of entertainment outlets and reviewers criticizing her character (or lack thereof) and calling her a "Mary Sue" which is, in my opinion, just a very lazy critique of her. The movie sets her up as this free spirit, a warrior king's daughter who grew up learning to fight and ride and adventure alongside her brothers. She is a beloved princess of the realm who the people greet by name, who is kind and compassionate, clever and competent, who dreams of one day being free of her royal duties and be able to travel where she pleases. Oh, and she has an overprotective father who wants to marry her off to try and keep her safe. A textbook Mary Sue, right?

Well, no, I'd very much beg to differ.

Héra is a flawed character. Time and again, her youth and inexperience lead her into situations she can't handle and she is a liability just as often as she's shown to be a hero. And time and again her compassion is taken advantage of, to the detriment of herself and others. The fact that she is clever and headstrong and grows into a deadly warrior by the end does not make her a Mary Sue. But that's also not to say that I found her to be the most compelling, either.

Don't get me wrong, she definitely had some amazing moments (her conversation with Wulf in Orthanc, her wisdom in evacuating Edoras and her traps laid out before its siege, her amazing "I'm no man's bride." "Who are you promised to?" "Death!" line read?) but she was rather generic to me all things told. However, she's shored up by an excellent supporting cast and a great plot, so I didn't feel I really needed a super interesting protagonist to follow. She is excellent in her role as the POV character for the events happening around her and she becomes anchored enough in the main plot by the role her family plays and the obsession the main antagonist has with her.

Which, speaking of...

Another character I really want to call out is Wulf. Because he... was a missed opportunity imo. I get what they were going for with him I guess? Hm, a sort of Maeglin approach to him almost, for those familiar with the Silmarillion, where becomes obsessed with the object of his desire to the point of madness and villainy. However, I personally feel as if his character could've been so much better if they'd taken him in a different direction? These are all my own thought and you don't have to agree, but hear me out: I think they should've tried to humanize Wulf more. We are told early on that he and Héra are childhood friends, but we're only ever given the barest glimpse of a flashback between them to set that up? We have one short conversation between them at the very beginning after his proposal to her and after that he takes a sheer dive into villainy that he double and triples down on as the story goes. But if the movie truly wanted us to feel as if there was a connection between them at all, I feel like they should've emphasized that relationship a lot more. Show more of their time together as children. Give more scenes to Wulf of him experiencing discrimination because of his Dunlanding blood. Give him moments of hesitation and remorse when he's forced into conflict with Héra. Like, I genuinely believed that's where the movie was going at the end? I really thought that, after their big fight where Héra has him on the ground and shows him mercy, I thought he was leaping up at her to die. I thought he intentionally missed her with his blade because he wanted her to kill him after everything he's done and that was the only way he could accept it happening. I thought the movie might come full circle again to showing that, despite everything, there was something genuine to his affections? That he wasn't wholly evil or deranged and that his declaration of love had been true once upon a time, even if he'd since forswore it after his father was killed. I really thought they would give him some glimpse of humanity. But no, he was genuinely just trying to kill her again and she beat his ass and that's that. Honestly much less impactful to me. Like, don't get me wrong, I absolutely did not want him to be redeemed. (Especially not after the absolutely abhorrent way he killed Háma right in front of Héra and Helm, oof.) But just any show of him not just being some black and white villain would've been welcome. Just the tiniest bit of complexity to a truly vile villain makes them stand out all the more for me and I think Wulf would've been truly memorable if he'd had that.

Now, my issues with the two leads out of the way, I just wanna bring it back around to the positives again and say how delightful I found the rest of the supporting cast? For all that they were barely in it, I was just instantly captivated by Haleth and Háma, not even joking. As soon as Héra rode in to Háma singing his little song for her, I knew I had a favorite. Oh, what's this? He's a poet and a bard and a handsome warrior prince?! Well, I'll be. It seems he was specially crafted to be my new blorbo, lol! And then Haleth showed up and my mind just instantly associated the two of them with my two absolute favorite Tolkien character and I knew I was a goner. (Please tell me I'm not the only one to instantly get Maedhros and Maglor vibes from them, eh? Which, in retrospect, Haleth is much more how I picture Celegorm, lol, but still. That initial projection really stuck in my mind. XD)

Héra's servant, Olwyn, was also such a pleasant surprise? I didn't expect much of her at the start, but she really grew on me as the film went on. I love that you just have to piece together her backstory as a shieldmaiden of Rohan and then you can start using that to theorize about Héra and how she idolizes them and it all just clicks together so well? And it's always nice to see an awesome older woman kicking ass!

And then Fréaláf showed up and he was just like the coolest guy ever?! Yooooooo, I loved him so much, even though he got so sidelined in the movie. 😭 But his appearance at the end wearing Helm's armor and blowing that horn was just awesome. I don't even care if his whole arc was a bit derivative of Éomer's from the films, I still just dug his whole vibe and personality. And it's terrible how Haleth and Háma had to die (like oof, both their deaths were just... so brutal 😭😭😭), but it's obvious that Fréaláf will make a fantastic king for Rohan.

Helm Hammerhand was, of course, amazingly badass, they really kept that part intact. And though I wouldn't say he was particularly likeable as a character, he certainly was compelling to watch. And his death scene, of course, just went so hard.

And yes, shoutout again to Turgg, the Dunlander, for being cool and levelheaded throughout the whole movie. Honestly, if that guy became the Dunlanding leader instead of Wulf, things would've gone like 2000x better for everyone. And I do love that he finally just outright refuses to do Wulf's bidding at the end. It is certainly an instance of too little, too late by that point, but still. I appreciate that he at least had some sort of line he wouldn't cross, even if it was purely because he finally saw how mad Wulf had become. Cool character, I liked him a lot.

I already spoke a bit about the music and the animation up top, so I won't rehash all that, but I just want to highlight a few outlying thoughts I had.

What the heck was up with that Watcher in the Water just chilling in the woods there? That seemed so random. And also, it ate that entire mumik like it was nothing, wot?

In general, the scale of things was kind a crazy? It seemed to vary a lot scene by scene and it was hard sometimes to really tell the perspective of anything.

I absolutely loved Miranda Otto coming back to act as the narrator for this film? Not only was it wonderful to hear Éowyn again in a new project, but I loved how they used it as a sort of framing device, like it was Éowyn telling us a story of her people. (And I love the thought of her being inspired by this legend of Héra as a little girl and dreaming of being a shieldmaiden, too.)

I love that Olwyn didn't die?! I was just waiting for it to happen the whole movie, she had so many death flags it was unreal. But then it just... didn't happen! Yes!

What on Middle-Earth was that dang siege tower Wulf built? Omg, that thing was ridiculous. When they were raising it up and it just kept going higher and higher and higher?! It was like a skyscraper there for a minute, what? And then it just crashed down and didn't break? XD I'm pretty sure I audibly said "Yo, wtf?" in the theater when I saw that part, lol. (It's okay, I was literally the only person there. >_>)

I didn't realize Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd were the voices of those two orcs until I saw the credits? That was a neat cameo!

Why oh why is there no WotR AO3 tag up yet? 😭 How am I supposed to find fix-it fics about mah boi Háma now? 😭😭😭

That one eagle sure was helpful in this movie, omg. And lol, I like that they established that the eagles and wizards can talk to each other? Lol, Maia to Maia communication. XD

But yeah, those are my initial thoughts. Overall, a very enjoyable experience! I was really glad to be back in Middle-Earth again, especially since my interest in all things Tolkien has been massively reinvigorated lately by my newfound fascination with The Silmarillion. This movie hit at a perfect time for me and I enjoyed it greatly. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk movie review. XD

[sumicchin]

CHIMES OF THE HEART

❃ a wind breaker (satoru nii) reader insert.

CHAPTER 4

Violence is the answer to everything in this world (not really). (3.3k words)

content warning: female reader, original characters, character background, slight ooc i fear

When I was little, I often found myself looking forward to the sound of the wind chime as it danced with the breeze. It was fairly quiet inside the shrine when it was just Hayami, me, and a man named Sojiro while waiting for the officiants to inhabit the divine structure.

Furin was my only companion—acting as if its bell were telling me stories from the outside world. It's been there ever since I could remember, and no one bothered to place another one.

Just like the wind chime, I was alone.

While the grownups worked, I occupied myself with little tasks that my stubby fingers could manage. Sometimes I took out a book they had in the study and ran to the adults to ask what certain words meant. I became more involved with the shrine as I grew older, not as a Miko, but just as a random helper. 

I was essentially free to do what I wanted. So when I was 10, I expressed my wish to venture out of the shrine.

"Hey, old man," I greeted Sojiro, tending to the flowers near the statues. His head perked up upon hearing my voice and greeted me back. As odd as it sounded, Sojiro wanted me to call him that way despite his youthful appearance.

"Hi there, little miss," Sojiro says as he stands up to face me, "what's today's agenda?"

For as long as I can remember, Hayami and Sojiro have been caring for me since. I haven't really asked about their relationship, or who my parents were since there was no need to do so. I was fine with how things were for the past couple of years, but the books I read and my trips to the market while accompanying Hayami made me yearn for more.

And so I was determined to confront them that day.

I showed him the book I was carrying. Kusamakura by Natsume Soseki.

Not really something a ten-year-old would read, but I had nothing better to do in this shrine.

"Oh, that's one of Hayami's favorite novels," Sojiro says. "An artist sets on a journey in search of beauty and inspiration for life and art. It's a simple read but very worth it to understand what it's like to be an artist." The man beams, totally lost in his thoughts. I let out a sigh, "That's not what I came for, old man."

"Ah, my bad! You know I get too excited about stuff like that." Sojiro laughs and pats my head, "So, let's cut to the chase. You want to go outside, right?" He chuckles as soon as my face contorts to that of a shocked expression. Sojiro is a man full of secrets.

"H-how'd you know?"

He shows me his infamous grin with eyes closed, "It's a secret power of mine!"

He pats my head, ruffling it in the process, "But sorry kiddo, we can't really make that happen." Already rejected before I could speak the speech I prepared. "Hayami will explain to you once you're older, but right now you have to stay here, 'kay? Think of it as a special mission given by the gods!" I was about to sulk and curse whoever made that decision when Sojiro perked up, "But hey that reminds me! The priest decided to assign you as bodyguard for the Mikos." I let out an audible sound of confusion, telling him I barely knew how to throw a punch. The best I could do was to bite someone like a sewer rat.

"That's why I'm gonna train you starting tomorrow!"

By sheer determination and fear of being on the receiving end of Sojiro's sword and fist (both hurt equally), I became a competent bodyguard for the officiants at the age of 14.

"The wind feels very nice, doesn't it (F/n)?" Manami, one of the older Mikos, glances at the fully bloomed cherry blossom trees by the river.

"Yeah, pretty lucky we got to go out today!" I excitedly say. Becoming the bodyguard for the Mikos allowed me to at least go out more often. It was always fun accompanying the women of the shrine outside, teaching me all sorts of stuff that can't be picked up from books.

"The priest doesn't really trust outsiders let alone men to protect the girls, so he's hoping to rely on us, (F/n)." I recalled Sojiro's words on our first day of training. It was a day full of bruises, and many more came after that but the strength I currently possess made it all worth it. I find myself more comfortable fighting with a sword though, and Sojiro encourages me to keep at my training.

I established one rule as a bodyguard.

To never take someone's life.

The two of us continue talking, heading back to the steps leading to the shrine after buying gifts from the market. We were a few blocks away from returning to our refuge, until I felt a tug on my hakama's left sleeve.

"What is it, Manami?"

"Can we maybe, stay outside for a bit longer?" She timidly asks.

"But we promised to only go to the market," I reluctantly answered, but seeing her crestfallen face made me double take. I guess she's just tired of Miko duties...

"It's just for a moment, I promise! There's something I need to see."

She leads me to a shop that sold fireworks and the like.

"I'd like to get one of these for summer!"

I watched as she hurriedly went inside the shop, already browsing the many varieties of explosives. How do we hide the fireworks from Hayami and the priest, I deadpan.

I was too occupied with my thoughts, but I know for one someone in black just went past me. Still bothered by how I'm supposed to hide the fact we went somewhere other than the market, the scream of a woman registered late to me.

I hurriedly ran inside the shop and saw a dark-haired man in a suit dangerously near Manami.

"Let her go!" I yell as I grab the hilt of my sword.

Upon closer inspection, it became clear that the man was actually just a tall teenager from his features. He must be an artistocrat or something.

"Please fight outside my shop!" The shop owner yells to no avail.

"Are you cosplaying a samurai?" The boy hums, letting go of Manami. She stumbles back but was helped by the store owner. "She took the last sparkler I wanted to buy," he says mockingly while approaching me.

"But I've lost interest now." His tone suddenly drops, approaching slowly as he inspects me and my sword—and to say I'm frightened is an understatement. I've fought many men before, but his aura screamed something awfully dangerous.

I knew right then and there I'll die if I try fighting him.

"Is that sword for real? Must be serious business, huh?" he grins as he points at my sword.

I scoffed, "Wanna see for yourself?"

"Fine with me..." He raises his right arm, my grip on my sword's hilt and scabbard tightening, "been wanting to take out someone armed."

He swiftly tried to go for my neck, but I nearly blocked him with my sword, the blunt edge of the blade near my cheek and the sharper side near the man's wrist. "Don't move a muscle, or the blade will cut you."

His lips twitch, but not so much to pass as a grin, "I'll look forward to that."

Even though I tried resisting, his strength overpowered me by the end and I lost control over my blade. I stared helplessly as my sword fell to the ground, waiting for his fist to strike me. It

"You're interesting! Let's meet again when we're a bit older." He pats my shoulder, walking out of the store. "How about when we're both 16, 'kay?"

He walked unscathed out of the store as I scrambled towards Manami who was shaken.

She and I swore to never talk about the incident ever.

It was then that I realized I'm still weak.

Was I even fit to protect others?

Although I never wished to encounter that man again, the world had different plans for me.

Turns out he was just the start of this madness, and there were more to follow.

❋❋❋❋❋❋❋❋❋❋

You watch the boy from across the room as he sleeps peacefully, just like a child after throwing a fit. That night, he established social distancing before heading to bed, saying he didn't want to accidentally do stuff he'd regret in his sleep.

It was painfully obvious that he was nervous the whole night, stiff as a rock and barely breathing. He eventually (and with difficulty) fell asleep though, thankfully. Sakura would probably stay asleep for a couple more hours, so you decided to get a head start and freshen up for the day.

You unfold the piece of clothing that served as a makeshift pillow last night, recognizing that this is what Sojiro called a hoodie. It smelled very minty and upon checking the pockets, you see some suckers with different flavors. These look really good...

This must belong to Sakura, but no harm in trying it out right? The hoodie, that is. You've had enough of stealing's someone's food. The apparel was obviously loose and too big, but it makes one admire the craftsmanship with how warm and comfortable it felt. 

He told you that night that his friends brought in food and clothes, so you excitedly checked the bag. It's filled with clothes that you used to dream of trying out, too tired of the usual hakama back at the shrine. Nothing bad about being traditional, but seeing vibrant colors and patterns other than flowers and birds makes you feel all giddy inside.

One of the shirts had a drawing of a white cat with a red ribbon. This character often appeared in the teen magazines Sojiro brought back from trips. Why he bought them is beyond you (it's so that you can check out what girls your age like, he says).

This is super adorable! You think while holding the shirt.

The bumpkin has now been in contact with Sanrio characters.

Taking out pants that you think fits the shirt with the white cat, you find the bathroom to freshen up and change.

If Hayami saw you right now, she'd probably start calling you out for looking scandalous. A huge part of your legs and thighs were exposed, and the shirt definitely hugged the torso a bit too much to what I'm you're to, but the cute design is too much to pass up on.

Styling your hair in your preferred way to complete the new look, you step out of the bathroom, seemingly trying your best to fit in with the folks of this city (and accordingly to the magazines).

It seems that Sakura is still out cold. Worriedly, you approached his figure hunched in a fetal position to check his temperature. Your face neared his and touched your foreheads together. Upon contact, it didn't seem like he was ill, but after a few seconds he began heating up rapidly.

You were greeted by his heterochromatic eyes, too wide for someone who was just sleeping moments ago. Didn't this happen already?

"W-WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!" He stammers, backing to a wall behind him.

"Checking your temperature, what else? You were out cold for a while."

He wipes his forehead rapidly like you spread germs on it. Rude.

"Aren't you the sick one here? Stop worrying about me, damn it!"

You unknowingly pout and look at the floor, "I was just worried." Rolling your eyes towards him, he looks away in return.

He clicks his tongue, refusing to look you in the eye. Is he allergic to affection or something?

"So much for a morning call." You stretch, standing up to head out. "I'm feeling all better now, can we go outside?"

"Someone's gonna pay you a visit, so sit your ass down!" He turns on his phone and starts swiping his fingers.

Nirei

Sent a sticker [good morning!].

Suo

Sent a sticker [happy wake up].

Kiryu

Sent a sticker [cat wake up].

Tsugeura

Sent a sticker [muscle ohayo!]

Nirei

Suo and I will be visiting!

Sugishita

Seen

Sakura sees the group chat for his class, then checks out the ones his upperclassmen sent.

Kaji

bring my hoodie to school i cant drop by cuz of errands

Tsubaki

Good morning!

I'll be visiting after school with Kanji and the twins~

Umemiya

Morning!

Kotoha and I will visit soon!

Breakfast is on me!

···

He sees Bofurin's leader still writing another message and waits for it. When it does get sent, he suddenly gets conscious.

Umemiya

Kotoha hopes you're wearing something other than a shirt and boxers, she says!

Sakura immediately looks at himself and suddenly whips his head towards you.

"How come you didn't tell me I was just wearing boxers in front of 'ya the whole time?!"

You blink repeatedly, "You were bothered by that? If it makes you feel better, I've seen uncles only in their loincloths."

He turns red and immediately scrams to the bathroom to check for his used pants.

❋❋❋❋❋❋❋❋❋❋

"Wow, so this is your school uniform?"

Sakura comes out of the bathroom in his iconic green gakuran and pants, acting smug and proud to be wearing symbolic garments. You clapping and looking with amazement just made his head bigger, saying stuff like "Woah, so trendy!" and "You look like a model!"

A knock on the door interrupted the duo's little fashion show, with Sakura heading towards the door to invite his guests.

He sees Umemiya, Suo, Nirei, and Kotoha all carrying bags.

"Morning, Sakura!" Everyone followed suit with their morning greetings, taking off their shoes as they entered his apartment.

"Oh! Looks like our little ghost has recovered now," Umemiya smiles as he takes a seat in front of you. "I'm Umemiya Hajime, but you can call me big bro if you'd like!" He beams.

He starts rummaging the bag he brought out, "Hope you like soup and omurice!"

Kotoha approaches you and waves hello, to which you bow in reply. She was taken aback, saying there was no need to be formal. "Kotoha is fine! And the clothes look really good on you!" She starts gushing about taking you to the shopping district with someone named Tsubaki, happy to have another female companion.

"We've brought you some snacks, courtesy of the class!" Nirei shows you the contents of the bag filled with unfamiliar bags, "O-oh! I'm Nirei Akihiko by the way. If you need help navigating Makochi, I'm your guy!"

The last of the visitors wore an eye patch and felt immensely mysterious, boasting quite the powerful aura. Thinking about it, three of them held overwhelming auras, Umemiya's in particular was overflowing. You didn't notice that you were staring too hard at the eye-patched boy.

"My name is Leonardo DiCaprio!"

Oh! A foreigner, you beamed.

"Don't fall for that, (F/n)!" Sakura points accusingly at Suo, "That guy's Hayato Suo, make sure you're extra careful around him."

"You wound me, Sakura. I thought we were friends," Suo fakes a sigh. "And you're on a first name basis with her."

Sakura blushes, "That's her first name?!"

Nirei realizes and hides his face using his notebook, feeling giddy to have another female friend on a first name basis, "I-it feels really embarrassing to be on a first name basis already!"

"You already gave her your lap yesterday, a name is nothing at this point," Suo chuckles.

You think for a bit, and it reminds you that everyone back at the shrine never mentioned a family name. Gods, am I adopted? Am I the next Momotaro?

"I don't know my parents, and no one really told me about other stuff about them."

Everyone stops and looks at you with a somber expression.

Umemiya lets out a loud wail, eyes comically tearing as he tries to go in for a hug, "Ume-nii and Kotoha over here will be your family then!!!"

Nirei feels himself tear up as well, unable to imagine living a life without knowing who his parents were. Suo's face remained neutral, mouth forming a line and unable to say something to lift the mood.

Sakura on the other hand just stares at you, eyes soft and looking as if he sees himself in you.

"But don't worry about me! I still grew up with caring adults," your smile falters for a bit, wondering how Hayami and Sojiro were faring after your escape. "Let's all eat! Big day ahead of us."

Kotoha begins handing out soup and takeout omurice, "What happened to you anyways? If you don't mind me asking,"

You choke on a potato, clearing your throat before speaking, "Oh uh...I made an enemy out of an aristocrat, he decided to marry me or else he'll destroy my home, but my caretakers wanted me to run away, and now I am searching for something here in this town. Yes, I think that accounts for everything so far!"

"That's quite the story." She says, not sure if she was concerned or amused.

Suo pieces the situation in his head, "I assume that's why you were in a white kimono." Everyone realizes and looks at him, "Do you think your husband will search for you?"

You correct Suo, saying you're technically not wed yet. He mutters a small apology. "I don't want to get married to a man like him."

They all feel the spite and anger behind your words.

You look sternly at everyone, "It's also why I needed to get away from everyone as soon as possible. I fear I'll get you all caught up in this mess."

Everyone hears a scoff from Sakura who was gulping down food just earlier, now looking at you with a smirk.

"Thanks for telling me bits of your story," he puts down his now finished bowl of soup and omurice.

"We just gotta beat up that guy, right?"

changed the writing style for a bit, hope its okay (⁠；⁠^⁠ω⁠^⁠）

[sexhaver]

ive been playing Cassette Beasts for a minute and it never stops being funny to me how flagrant they are about making this "Pokemon but with features you didn't know Pokemon has always needed". off the top of my head:

super effective/NVE hits have added benefits/debuffs beyond just doubling/halving the damage (hitting Electric types with Ground reduces their evasion and speed, hitting Steel types with Poison gives them poison-coated spikes that do contact damage, etc)

legally-distinct-Pokemon will learn new moves while in your party without having to battle, and you can then straight up steal these moves from them and put them on a not-Pokemon you actually care about using, which gives an actual incentive to hunt down and raise otherwise fringe not-mons beyond completing the not-Pokedex

we all played the Pokemon Infinite Fusion fangame right? we know how fusions work? okay so this game has them as temporary per-battle things instead of permanent ones, which is only marginally less cool while being infinitely easier to balance around

attempting to catch something shows you the percentage chance of success so you know whether you just got unlucky or if you should save your Pokeballs-i-mean-blank-cassette-tapes

leveling up is tied to your not-trainer instead of your not-pokemon, so you don't end up in the classic trap where your starter is way overleveled and everything else is underleveled and then you hit a fight your starter can't solo and have to spend an hour grinding to get the weaker not-mons up to par (funnily enough most Pokemon Nuzlocke romhacks have already figured this out and give you infinite rare candies with the only restriction being that you can't level past the next gym leader's ace pokemon, because Pokemon fans have realized that grinding is the worst part of the game way before Game Freak has)

moves, not-Pokeballs, not-PokeCenter visits, and healing items are all bought using entirely separate currencies which stops you from trivially breaking the economy in half

the soundtrack, fittingly, is pretty good! the vocals were a bit much for my taste but there's an option in the settings menu to straight up turn them off (letting the BGM play on its own), which i've never seen in any other game and really appreciate

downsides:

on a game design level, i understand why can i only carry a max of 5 not-Potions and 1 not-Revive at a time - it's to put a limit on how far away from fast travel points i can get by just running away from everything and healing off damage. on a gameplay level, however, this feels pretty bad

the pixel art style is trying to look as much like Pokemon as possible without actually being Pokemon so the overworld sprites look more like beta stuff from Pokemon that they cut for looking too weird. i have yet to find a haircut that doesn't look bad

this is super petty of me but something about the bloom and lighting of the 3d environments combined with pixelated 2d sprites that still cast shadows makes me painfully aware im playing a video game. it's like they were going for the same aesthetic as Octopath Traveler but fell just barely short. i can't think of a better way to articulate this feeling but if you know you know

it does that really obnoxious half-assed style of voice acting where plot-relevant characters will sometimes (maybe every third or fourth textbox) speak the first two or three words of dialogue before trailing off. mashing through textboxes (as one does) means constantly getting jumpscared by "hmm"s and "haha!"s "okay then!"s

i get that they wanted to make the player feel involved in the story, and it has a pretty decent hook so far, but oh my god. the amount of dialogue "choices" that just transparently do not matter. you know how people memed on Fallout 3 and 4's dialogue choices all leading to the same outcome, to the extent that you were basically choosing between "yes" and "yes (rude)"? and you know how Bethesda would at least attempt to justify how both options led to you accepting the quest anyways, even if it was really dumb? Cassette Beasts has streamlined this process even further by making the options in most of their binary decisions so identical that they don't even require different followup dailogue before rejoining into the main conversation thread. a solid 2/3rds of the dialogue options in this game so far feel like checks that you're still awake. i know this is a minor issue because people aren't playing Pokemon-likes for the engaging "choices matter" approach to storytelling, and i did ignore it at first, but it's so pervasive that you really can't ignore it

[vintagetvstars]

Avery Brooks Vs. Ricardo Montalban

Propaganda

Avery Brooks - (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Spenser: For Hire) - ben sisko absolute all time tv dilf and have you heard him SPEAK... the stage background absolutely shows and it truly makes him a standout in a legacy franchise *full* of incredibly talented people. also frankly top 3 all time sexy bald guy

Ricardo Montalban - (Fantasy Island, Star Trek) - While not a tv show, he was 62 years old when he played Khan in the Wrath of Khan movie and he had the best pecks in the business. His chest is so good no one believes its real. In an interview in 2017 the director said, "I have been asked this question 23,472 times. I stopped answering it at 71." but even he said he asked if 'that was really his chest?' the first time he saw it (Source), His run as the star of Fantasy Island was his big roll after this movie. He was also apparently a good dad to his 4 kids, and was married to his wife for 63 years until her death (Source).

- No Negative Propaganda Please -

Master Poll List | How to submit propaganda | What is vintage? (FAQ)

Additional propaganda below the cut

Avery Brooks:

Avery is a certified TV sci-fi hottie as Benjamin Sisko in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The first black star trek Captain, he also negotiated his signature look - the bald head and goatee - against haters who thought a Captain should always be clean-shaven. Thank God for that, because he looks devastatingly hot in a a goatee (a phrase never before uttered). He went on to direct several episodes of DS9, use his pleasant voice to record music and multiple host documentaries, and mostly retire from acting to teach as a professor.

TW: Flashing Lights

with that wonderful stentorian baritone voice he could move from intimidating commander to gentle and compassionate space dad...benjamin sisko is a man of many qualities, thoughtful, morally complex, understatedly hilarious, a lil unhinged, really really excited about baseball, and avery brooks never fails to breathe life, depth and dimension into the character and also did i mention his voice. fun fact he was a professor of theater arts at rutgers while filming deep space nine and would occasionally teach classes via vhs tapes recorded on set, complete with starfleet uniform. he also directed a number of ds9 episodes including notable ones like "rejoined" and "far beyond the stars", and performed many of his own stunts as sisko. stunt coordinator dennis madalone said, "of all the stars that I've worked with on all the Star Treks, and all the other shows that I've been on other than Star Trek, I've never seen an actor so physically capable of just doing everything...every time I'd bring in a stunt double, he'd be angry, sitting on a bench, because Avery was doing so great." he's also a distinguished stage actor and an accomplished musician and singer who's performed everything from jazz to opera. science has yet to discover whether there's anything this man can't do.

Ricardo Montalban:

He was a famous spokesperson for Chrysler and the way he said "Corinthian Leather" was a meme. Here he is seducing us with his voice in a Chrysler commercial

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #56 – Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

At the start of the year, I set out to try and read more proper literature. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow was not a book I had ever heard of, or by an author I knew anything at all about. But it was on my local bookstore's and local library’s staff pick lists, and has a bunch of awards, and I think showed up on some list of Goodreads recommendations. So 9 months later I finally worked down the list to it and went in totally unprepared and with zero expectations or preconceptions.

The book’s well-written and well-executed, but I can’t say it really worked for me. Or properly, it absolutely was working for the first two thirds or so, but by the end just felt like it lost a lot of the touches that had made it interesting and was just drowning in its own sentimentality.

The book follows Sam and Sadie, two Californian wunderkunds growing up in Los Angelos in the 1980s. They meet in a children’s hospital, where Sam is being treated for a foot the was nearly shattered in a car crash and Sadie is visiting her elder sister as she’s treated for cancer. The two of them instantly begin bonding over playing Super Mario Brothers and begin a friendship and a creative partnership that will - as they grow up and found an artistically and commercially successful video game studio in the late 90s – define the shape of both of their lives, no matter how turbulent and conflicted it at points becomes.

For reasons that probably boil down to the audiobooks my mother played on road trips as a child, I’ve always had a fondness for books that track the broad sweep of a life or lives, zooming out and stretching across the years and decades. So I actually digested this a decent bit more easily than I do a lot of modern litfic that I’ve tried. For the first few hundred pages, it all even holds together very well, bouncing around the timeline and providing childhood episodes and context as it's relevant and making the central relationships compelling and emotionally plausible. Unfortunately a couple of experiments in form (one worked for me, one really didn’t) eat up a lot of page count in the final act, and entirely kill the sense of flow and structure. Not at all helped by the narrative voice losing a lot of its charm and the story growing wholly predictable (and a bit saccharine) in the closing pages.

I say ‘central relationships’ and not ‘relationship’ because describing the book as being about the relationship between Sam and Sadie is just, basically false advertising? Marx – Sam’s college roommate, later Sadie’s boyfriend, the business manager of their video game studio - is for most of the book at least as important a character as the two leads. He’s a much less interesting character – entirely too much of a natural saint, compared to how very flawed and petty Sam and Sadie are both allowed to be – but he’s a key part of the dynamic and most of the book is properly about different permutations of the trio bouncing off of each other. No other character gets a tenth of the focus and exploration of those three, and are really more props for narrative and to incite development than anything else.

The book has (until the end, anyway) a strong narrative voice that I really enjoyed, but which also may have caused me to set my expectations entirely wrong for what the book was actually planning. The only way I can really describe it is that the book reads like one of those New Yorker longreads that are trying very hard to convince you they’re not just rubbernecking some fascinatingly dysfunctional relationships and personal drama among some semi-notable creative figures. Your Bad Art Friends and similar. Deeply opinionated and gossipy, but making a show of seeming detached and objective, always making asides written from the perspective of the modern day and quoting interviews from years later about events as they occur in the narrative. As someone who is a slightly guilty fan of exactly those kind of longreads, it did make for a very fun reading experience.

But it also made me get my hopes up. Which is to say, the early chapters make quite a few references to how latter in life Sam and Sadie wouldn’t be on speaking terms, and how ‘something’ happened at Unfair Games in 2005. I was looking forward to something some messy and newsworthy interpersonal drama of the kind that doesn’t leave either of them (or anyone) looking good. The falling out does occur, but in a way that’s mostly just piles of misunderstandings and a stubborn refusal to communicate from both of them. The company always stays ostensibly together, and things never get much worse than quietly cherished bitterness and a refusal to speak. Which feels very emotionally believable, as incredibly frustrating as it is. The dramatic rupture that happens in 2005, well-

The book’s use of violence always feels slightly unreal. It intrudes on the narrative in ways that, like, they are things that happen, but feel so exaggerated and on-the-nose they took me out of the reading experience, at least a bit. A woman jumps off her balcony to her death and happens to land right in front of a young Sam. His mother stops her car on an LA highway to avoid hitting a dog, and he asks her something that keeps her talking and not moving for the crucial moment before an SUV slams into them, killing her and permanently damaging his foot. And the great end-of-second-act rupture that occurs in 2005 is a pair of homophobic gunmen storming into their office and shooting Marx because their cozy MMO lets gay people get married. Any one would have been fine, but combined they make the illusion of violence as random and capricious wear a bit thin and the writerly artifice underneath a bit too clear, at least for me.

As far as period pieces go – the story isn’t nostalgia bait, but it isn’t not nostalgia bait, either? It’s a few years before my time, so I suppose I just don’t appreciate it properly – the experience of growing up in and living through the late ‘80s through 2000s is one the book cares deeply about replicating. It generally does an excellent job making things feel of-the-moment, if occasionally by having the narrative draw pretty heavy-handed comparisons to what would be different in the present. The aesthetics (fashion, public art and marketing, fads and consumer trends) are all there, and the characters experience them like people to whom they’re novel and trendy. (Personally I could have done with a bit less effort spent describing every single outfit, but if I had memories of what people actually looked like wearing them I might appreciate it more.) It does similar things with LA and (to a far lesser extent) Boston – every other place the book touches on feels vague and a bit unreal, but LA is rendered with a real sense of place and love for the city and it’s little eccentricities.

The area where the book is absolutely nostalgia-bait is video games, and the whole heroic era of rapid changes and improvements to the medium where new boundaries were being crossed every year and a handful of sufficiently talented and dedicated first-time devs could create something genuinely revolutionary. The book even manages the neat trick of making almost every fake game the protagonists create a) plausible for the era and technology and b) actually seem like something I would want to play (less so the Pioneerville MMO created in the final act, as with many things). But I do genuinely want to play Master of Revels quite badly.

The book does share a common failing with what feels like almost every period piece, where by complete coincidence the major characters all conveniently happen to be on the Right Side of History for every really major (that is, from the perspective of the present, character-defining) political issues. This is made a bit more irritating by the fact that despite all being quite radical on the issue of e.g. gay marriage (or just not being even slightly homophobic) from the vantage of the early Bush administration, none of Sadie, Sam or Marx ever even conceive of it as being political.

The book doesn’t conceive of itself as really having politics at all – but again, in the way of a New York Magazine feature where having certain sets of liberal convictions is just a matter of personal decency and morality. A certain unexpressed but present sexual conservativism, a view of class where Sam’s grandparents owning and running a successful restaurant counts as being from the wrong side of the tracks, hyper-conscious of race but without much to really say about it. You’re all familiar with the style, I’m sure.

Anyway yeah, not a bad book by any means, but one that lasted long enough and ended weakly enough to expend any real passion or affection I’d built up for it.