#its more than a lot of the 1600s characters get

[delurkr]

So anyway the fact that Andrew gets different dialogue when John goes upstairs with him in the burned house, the fact that on impulse he says "it's ok" instead of "stay here" when John goes to hold him back, and the fact that John looks so proud of Andrew when he saves Mary, and the fact that Andrew actually opens up more to John than he did even to Taylor about his feeling like he didn't change anything when he condemns Carver. The fact that these are facts, I can't handle it I love them SO MUCH.

Btw you know when else he can tell him "it's ok"? In the prologue, as Anthony talking to his dad. You know who is straight up described as "anxious" in his bio? Yeah it's Andrew. I'm not the only one who sees this, right? The way the two are so different on most things but then there's just this unspoken understanding, right?? I don't talk about them much but there is no universe in which I can be normal about these two

[juminies]

in order to get to the heart

marriage of convenience, on occasion, is not so convenient.

♡ — jumin x original female character. small amounts of canon compliant jumin x reader, but mostly canon divergent (jumin is unhappily married prior to the start of the game). 1600 words. title from heartlines by florence + the machine.

They just say anything to each other these days.

“This façade drains me beyond comprehension,” Jumin confesses the minute he walks through the door. His fingers loop into the knot of his tie and pull it looser around his neck.

“So you say,” murmured half into a cushion tucked up to a woman’s chest as she types on her phone. “It’s not for our benefit though, is it?”

On some level, this is always how it was going to be for Jumin, he thinks. In a marriage stripped to its fragile bones. A sacrificial lamb for the sake of the corporation, for mutual social and financial gain.

He leans down to untie his shoes.

It would be untrue to say there weren’t veiled attempts, in the beginning, to love. When that didn’t work there were attempts to like. None successful, of course. Lately it’s becoming more difficult to believe this arrangement is better than any alternative. Between the two of them there is a lot of nothing.

The woman remains quiet—focused—but nods easily against the woven fabric she’s leaning into when Jumin asks, “Do you not get tired of coming home from work to find me occupying your space?”

He knows that in public they look good together. He knows that their careers slot together effortlessly. Despite what the media may suggest, however, they are human. Jumin included. The way he feels nothing for her does not match the way she feels nothing for him. The way she yells that he is robotic does not match the way he stoically calls her irresponsible.

They do not sleep together, or eat together, or do any of the romantic things Jumin wishes he hadn’t let himself privately indulge in the idea of. And it’s not that she’s not nice—she’s intelligent and beautiful and kind, when it suits her. Perfect on paper until she wasn’t. When she laughs with her chest Jumin can almost imagine a world where she smiles at him like she does others and it makes his heart weak. Part of him wishes, truly, that that was the case. In reality it feels like nothing.

It could be worse, he tells himself—repeats it like a mantra.

Concealed beneath it is fear. You could be like him. You could repeat his mistakes.

She throws her phone haphazardly onto the sofa beside her and looks up to where Jumin is standing in the doorway. He’s mostly backlit from the light in the hall, the lamp beside his wife barely grazing his features but lighting up hers in all the wrong ways. The orange glow casts unpleasant shadows over places she’s usually pretty. He should have the bulb changed to something less harsh.

“Not much we can do if you don’t want the press to kick up a huge fuss, sweetie,” she says.

The pet names are a jest he has learned to tune out.

“Will they not make a fuss over our divorce in three years’ time nonetheless?” Jumin asks. It’s hypothetical, of course. They will.

“Maybe we’ll have grown on each other by then.” Her tone is disinterested; feels almost mocking. Her phone chimes to let her know her driver is outside. “I’m going out. Shall I take my card or yours?”

“It makes little difference to me.” Jumin looks at his watch. It’s almost 10pm but he doesn’t ask where she’s going. A bar, perhaps.

“Could you adjust my necklace?”

She holds her hair up messily, and he does.

“Let me know if you need anything,” he tells her, then briefly wonders if she’ll meet someone tonight and sleep with them. He pictures her naked beneath a stranger. It feels like nothing.

She takes her own card and squeezes his bicep softly as she walks by him on the way out. She shuts the door more forcefully than is ever really necessary.

At some point Jumin suggests she move out of their—his—apartment and into the one directly below; just recently made vacant. He probably would have suggested it earlier had the apartment been available earlier, but their district of Seoul tends to be under high demand.

“I thought we agreed it was a bad idea to live separately,” she says. It’s a statement, not a question. They had done exactly that.

Jumin hums, tired. Tired from his trip and tired from trying and at some point, it seems, he has lost an indistinguishable part of himself to her for good.

“We did. Although I would say that that was long enough ago now for us both to have become quite aware that we do not do particularly well sharing the same space for considerable periods of time.”

“You’re gone a lot anyway. The place is big enough for us to avoid each other if needed, and I like it here.”

She exhales sharply; amused.

Jumin has no idea why until she adds, “More so when you’re not around, to be fair.” And that explains it, just about.

“Stay here when I am travelling if you must,” he tells her. Somewhere along the way his suggestion has morphed into more of an instruction.

“Fine. Don’t tell your father, though. Or mine.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

They buy it outright in her name, the cost split fifty-fifty. Jumin tells her to keep it all when she sells it later. She tells him she won’t.

They argue tonight, as usual, about who will be chauffeuring them to a company gala. They had agreed that Jumin’s driver would take them only for her to assert for the hundredth time at the last minute that she doesn’t trust him, though she has not legitimately spoken to him more than once and he has been working for Jumin’s family longer than she has been alive.

It’ll cause a stir if the two of them show up separately so they end up in her car, as usual. Jumin apologises to Driver Kim via text for requesting him when he wasn’t needed on the way there, and they arrive late.

The venue reminds Jumin of the last RFA party. His wife had not attended despite her invitation, so it is not proper grounds for conversation. However, when they are out like this they are a happy couple like the legal drabble says, so he says it anyway—if just to appear interested in her.

“I’m sure this is nicer than your friends’ charity get togethers,” she replies lightheartedly, and they are called over by her father before Jumin can retaliate.

The façade stays firm for the remainder of the event. Jumin can easily distinguish her fake laugh from her real one, and he can tell when she forgets who he is for a moment and touches him a little more tenderly than either of them really mean.

They are silent on the drive home. They are silent in the elevator, until it stops one floor below Jumin’s penthouse. “Goodnight,” he says. “Sleep well.”

“You don’t have to say that, you know,” she counters, and smiles softly as the doors slide shut between them. “Not when it’s just me.”

Elizabeth the 3rd is snoring softly when he unlocks his door, and it is the only sound he can hear. He basks in the bliss of having nobody around when he is already so mentally exhausted, and takes out his phone to see it’s just after midnight and Yoosung has opened a chat room.

He enters it, multitasking as he changes his clothes and brushes his teeth. His cat patters into the room and jumps up beside him when he perches on the edge of his bed. She smells frustratingly like perfume and something oddly like guilt threatens Jumin with a dull blade.

Wait!! says Luciel. Think someone entered the chat room.

Jumin checks. There is a name on his screen he doesn’t recognise.

Odd.

Who are you? Identify yourself.

“Jumin. It’s me,” your voice is soft and bubbly; maybe a little nervous but still pleasant on his ears. An intriguing introduction. He almost finds himself chuckling.

Jumin moves the phone from his ear and glances down at your name again, just to be certain he’s not imagining things, then focuses in on the plainness of the wall in front of him.

“I hope you realise blurting out ‘It’s me’ is not a proper way to identify yourself to the person on the other end of the line.”

He had hesitated briefly before telling you he is married. Now he has known you for five days and whatever he’s feeling is somehow, ridiculously, already far greater than any emotion he has ever felt towards his wife.

He invites her out for dinner at their usual restaurant the following evening, and she tells him if he has something to discuss with her she would rather keep it simple. As an alternative he invites her to the penthouse and opens a bottle of wine he knows she likes. When she arrives her hair is tied up experimentally and she is wearing a new shade of lipstick. She surprises him when she actually accepts his offer to pour her a glass.

“I am going to talk with my father,” Jumin says, and she knows what he means. It’s only later that he will find out she had already brought it up with hers. “For what it’s worth, however, I apologise that it ended up like this.”

“Me too,” she agrees. Jumin notices the light catch a glassiness in her eyes as she continues, “If I could have loved you, I would have.”

She stays for a few hours and it is the most sincere time they have spent together in three years.

That night, Zen has a dream.

[cellarspider]

26/30 PIE to the face

(Previous) | (Index) | (Next)

⛬

We return to a movie that is going to linguistically hurt me again, Prometheus. You get to read a ramble about PIE. You’re welcome.

Content warning for MORE OF ME. I cannot be stopped.

So. Imagine you have found a sleeping alien. You believe that they were on a mission to destroy humanity as a disappointment. What do you do? Not waking them up is certainly an option. But what if you do? You’re going to want to not disappoint them.

One could, for example, study the records still maintained within the alien ship. Learn about their culture. Get more than one guy to learn their language, particularly since this translator you’ve got seems to be a little gung-ho on things like “seeing [his] parents dead.” That’s a bit of a warning sign.

And hey, something horrible happened on this ship, probably right before or right after this alien was put into hibernation. There’s a lot of dead bodies on the ship. Having a trauma counselor or three there would be a good call. People trained in de-escalation, definitely. Give you a chance to talk the alien down, and help them process stuff in what’s hopefully a culturally appropriate manner, given your xenological research before waking them up.

You’ll probably want to make sure to take the “kill humanity” button away from them too, that would be a good idea. And, preferably, not have exploded the head of one of their colleagues.

Am I describing a process that would take years? Yes. It should. This is the most important thing humanity’s ever done.

It’s been two days since the Prometheus landed.

As stated before, my faith in fictional humanity was not high in this scene.

David wakes the Engineer up. Rather than any of the measures I described above, the Engineer is met with David, Weyland, some security guys, Doctor Franenstein the head-exploder, and Shaw.

It took most of the humans a good hour or so to stop looking like death after waking up after a two year nap, and this Engineer’s been under for a thousand times longer. The poor bugger is visibly hung over and feeling sick, almost falling over on Weyland.

Shaw starts demanding David ask where they’re from, what’s in the ship’s cargo, why was it made for humans, all in English as Weyland tries to talk over her. They are speaking a language that only took its modern form 1600 years after the last events on this ship took place. The Engineer has zero clue what anyone’s saying.

The Engineer remains silent, and visibly disturbed by how Wayland orders his security guy to hit Shaw, which just makes the still unintelligible questions louder and less coherent.

And then David starts speaking to them.

There was a short dialog between them filmed, but in the final cut, the Engineer doesn’t speak at all.

The final cut also removes Weyland’s pitch for why he should have immortality–he created life in David. David is something more perfect than human. Therefore Weyland is a god, and gods never die.

This is, as you can imagine, not convincing. It would’ve made Weyland slightly more explicable as a character, but the movie hasn’t even done that for its lead, so of course it doesn’t for Old Man Capitalism.

In the full release, David only says a few sentences. To quote Anil Biltoo, who wrote the translation:

The line that David speaks to the Engineer (which is from a longer sequence that didn’t make the final edit) is as follows: /ida hmanəm aɪ kja namṛtuh zdɛ:taha/…/ghʷɪvah-pjorn-ɪttham sas da:tṛ kredah/ A serviceable translation into English is: ‘This man is here because he does not want to die. He believes you can give him more life’.

This is–okay. In the theater, I did not know precisely what this language was. But I was making a fair imitation of the Engineer's expression in response to this, because I was pretty sure it was PIE.

Proto-Indo-European, that is. A massive swath of world languages are all traceable back to one source, though we have no records of it. Linguistic reconstruction of how they evolved from earlier roots allows us to infer a language that must have existed, and we call that the Proto-Indo-European language. PIE for short. And this is a big ol’ slice of PIE right here. 

And I had a whole thing in early drafts of this post. I’d convinced myself over the years that my inexperience with PIE had led me astray in the theater. I’d convinced myself this was a PIE conlang. Meaning, I thought this was a language created for this movie that sounds like a cousin to PIE. That’s still howlingly weird, for reasons I’ll get into. But then I saw this featurette:

[Video description: A behind the scenes featurette for Prometheus entitled “Language Of The Gods”. It interviews Anil Biltoo on his work for the movie, in which he explains the concept of a proto-language, of PIE in specific, and what he did for the movie.]

It’s PIE. It’s a different reconstruction of PIE than the current standard, but it’s PIE.

And I feel vindicated, because that’s what I heard in the theater. David opened his mouth and out came PIE. 

I can actually read a few words in the excerpt. I could hear them in the theater. The word /hmanəm/ is clearly meant to be a root word of “man”, which standard reconstructions indicate is the descendent of PIE *ǵʰmṓ. /Namṛtuh/ is very clearly from PIE *ne-mért, “not-die”, because anything that looks like “mort” in an indo-european language probably has something to do with death. And “/kredah/” is close to PIE *ḱréddʰh₁eti, hence Latin “crēdit”, hence modern italian “créde”, “he believes”. 

PIE is just like that, sometimes. Some roots are unrecognizable, others are instantly identifiable. I’ll include my attempt at a gloss (a brief technical explanation of the meaning and grammar) at the end of the post.

The implication is that the Engineers taught their language to humans. That was Proto-Indo-European, which then spread from there. I almost started laughing in the theater at this. 

In the real world, we know a few things about where PIE came from. PIE was probably spoken by people north of the Black Sea, at least five thousand years ago. This guy who’s just woken up with a hibernation hangover went to sleep three thousand years after that. 

But, y’know what? Fine. Let’s say it’s a liturgical language. David’s done the equivalent of walking up to somebody and speaking to them in church Latin. Weird, but not impossible that it could be understood. Or maybe they’re just so damn long-lived and linguistically conservative that it’s more like talking to somebody in an old-timey news broadcaster voice. Still weird! But comprehensible.

But you know what we can’t possibly link back to PIE? Egyptian, Sumerian, Akkadian, Hawaiian, or the Mayan languages, most of the other ancient cultures the movie says the Engineers definitely contacted. Did all those come from the same ur-language? We don’t know. We can’t know, because our reconstruction methods are ineffective past a certain point. But if they did, then their root language had to have existed before the Bering Strait closed off the Americas from Asia, making any common ancestor at least twice as old as PIE. The movie’s implication is that it was PIE. The language of the gods is PIE. PIEngineer.

Apparently everybody who the Engineers talked to just forgot the language of the gods, save for the linguistic descendants of some nomads on the Black Sea Steppe.

And that’s before we get into the worse implications. We can’t tie East Asian languages back to PIE. Austronesian languages. American languages. African languages. Were these people just not contacted by the Engineers? Did they forget? Did they refuse to listen?

None of these are good answers! None! They’re all bad!

In Anil Biltoo’s defense, he’s an academic linguist, and, to my knowledge, not one who’s a conlanger. Ridley Scott specifically wanted to work in the oldest possible human language, and Biltoo delivered on that, based on modern scholarship. He did not make an alien language that evolved into a human language. If Scott had wanted that, David and Jesse Peterson would probably go feral for the project, but they weren’t asked. What would be the most naturalistic thing to do, if you wanted to get across the idea that humans inherited language from the Engineers?

You make a Proto-Human language. People have tried before, and others have argued their attempts are bullshit. This is one of those times that Wikipedia has a “the neutrality of this article is disputed” flag at the top of the page, because there are nerd fights everywhere on this. We don’t even know if a Proto-Human language ever existed–there could have been multiple independent origins of language–but if you’re writing fiction, sure, Proto-Human exists.

Come up with a vocabulary and grammar that could work for Proto-Human, have David speak it to the Engineer, it sounds alien to everybody, nobody gets to be the special children of the gods, and no linguistics dork in the audience will laugh at you.

They will definitely laugh at what happens next, though.

But the post is not done! Bonus linguistic nerdery below, including a sample of my constructed language and its script.

⛬

(Previous) | (Index) | (Next)

⛬

Citations for alt-text rambles:

https://moomin.fandom.com/wiki/Stinky 

https://www.deviantart.com/pretty--kittie/art/Prometheus-Engineer-407327934 

https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/news/new-indo-european-language-discovered/

Edit: additional citations!

Movies in 15 Minutes review of Prometheus by @cleolinda, as retrieved from the Internet Archive. Hat tip to @kantama for identifying it!: https://web.archive.org/web/20120726203957/http://m15m.livejournal.com/23209.html

PIEngineer gloss

Alright, for the language nerds in the audience, I’ve put together a potential gloss, entirely based off of PIE roots available on Wiktionary and a shaky understanding of PIE verb construction:

/ida hmanəm aɪ kja namṛtuh zdɛ:taha/…/ghʷɪvah-pjorn-ɪttham sas da:tṛ kredah/ this.[singular neuter??] man.NOM [anaphoric demonstrative].1.NOM.MASC here not-die EMPHATIC/towards.3MASC.PRES(?)…life-many-[resultative or inchoative verb suffix? adjective of possession, accusative singular?] [genitive singular reflexive?] give.[middle 3S] believe.[stative(?) 3S] A more literal translation would therefore be “This man here does not (want to) approach death…he believes he (can be) given more life-having to himself.”

I am not good at figuring out suffix affixation for PIE verbs, so I probably missed or misinterpreted a few in there. I’m not sure how to break down /zdɛ:taha/ in particular, and /sas/ is a bit mysterious to me. Biltoo definitely created his own PIE reconstruction for this. Vowels are all shifted (ex *éy -> /aɪ/), there’s more palatal consonants (*ḱi-Ø -> /kja/, *polh₁-r̥-m -> pjorn), and other sound shifts I’m too scatterbrained to categorize right now.

PIEngineer to Tade Taadži translation

Alright. I previously mentioned that I have a conlang. I have yet to mention that it is distantly related to Prometheus, powered by the spiteful creative energy this movie engendered in me.

So it’s only fair I translate this passage into my language, write it in my script, and give a thorough gloss.

Jàà odormàà, hu sàà id aannãgu … midadjã kii jur kaas ʻus mogeso. /jɐː odoɾmɐː hu sɐː id aːnːãgu/ / … /midadjã kiː juɾ̥ kaːs ʔus mogeso/ This.VOC not-native-person.VOC, death.ALL not go.ATTR want.PRES. Forever.NOM give this.ALL 2S.VOC ACC 3S.NEAR.ponder.PRES.3P.FAR.ACC

Translation notes:

I am assuming David is speaking formally, clearly, and respectfully in this translation, even if one of the people he’s being respectful about is Weyland. Both Weyland and the Engineer are thus addressed using the Vocative case when first directly mentioned.

Due to the formality of the speech, formal style glyphs are also used: these require significant planning ahead of time, to identify ligatures, aesthetic considerations, and, ideally, to select a total number of words that works out to a multiple of six, as this is culturally the ideal number for a line of text.

Formal ligatures can cross glyph boundaries, and are read every time you encounter part of them in the left-to-right, top-to-bottom reading order. The most common ligatures are between grammatical markers, as in this text, but can extend to whole glyphs or even individual components of them. If one is feeling particularly artistic, aesthetic ligatures may also be joined between thematically similar glyphs.

Gendered pronouns are not used in this context. Politeness dictates that any third person pronouns be replaced with the equivalent of “this” or “that”, unless given express permission to use more informal terms of address. This is especially true when referring to non-native speakers, as they do not have an equivalent social role to the five (yes, five) genders of Taadži culture.

The word for “non-native person” used to indicate Weyland literally means “thing that has a spirit”.

Following my shaky PIEngineer gloss, I tweaked the verb in the first sentence: “to die” would normally be “hur hybà” (lit. “to stand at death”), but this has been changed to “hu iddà”, “go to death”, indicating that Weyland fears even getting near the idea.

The word for “forever”, “midadjã”, is derived from the word for 6^6, or 46,656. Tade Taadži uses a base six number system, because I felt like taking Jan Misali up on his heximal advocacy.

The normal word order for the language is SVO, but in dependent clauses it becomes OVS, just to make things harder for everyone, including me, who muttered “ah fuck” when I had to check my notes to remember where to put an allative and vocative in there. It’s after the verb, apparently.

The language has verbal person marking in some contexts, and I deliberately bent the second sentence into a more poetic mode so that I could show it off while retaining formal speech, referring to Weyland’s belief as if it’s a person. The glyphs ligate the person marker to the tense marker, Both to save space and for aesthetic purposes.

I had no word for “believe” when I started writing this sentence, so I grabbed a verb already associated with thinking during unmoving meditation to stand in for it, to get across the idea that “this is something he has thought about a lot”.

It’s a shame David’s being polite, because while I didn’t have a word for “believe”, I do have a word for “to believe despite evidence to the contrary”.

Bonus citations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(computing)

⛬

(Previous) | (Index) | (Next)

⛬

[flandrepudding]

doll collection post

Hi guyz!! so somebody asked me to post my doll collection a while back and I put it off because i'm trying to rearrange my setup but its taking much longer than expected due to irl stuff.

But I dont wanna wait anymore! Feel free to just scroll through the pictures, you don't have to read the commentary if you don't want to. In fact you don't have to scroll through any of this at all. I wrote a lot because I am severely neurodivergent. Having a genuine blogging moment rn.

I have been waiting forever for an excuse to post my collection!! I was so happy someone suggested I do so.

I don't have a lot of room for everybody! Everyone is scattered around my room, but I try my best to display them nicely...

My G1 collection is moderately sized, these dolls are expensive and difficult to find. There are so many more I want, like Dead Tired Lagoona or Sweet 1600 Draculaura to go with my Sweet 1600 Clawdeen...sigh. But it just keeps getting harder! I am actually content with stopping my G1 collecting hunt for now and instead focusing on G3... Many of these dolls are from my dear friends, especially Leo and Raven (hi guyz!). Without my friends, I would only have three of these dolls... I am so lucky to be so loved!!!

I don't have many bratz that are in good enough shape to be on display. I really grew up on bratz rather than monster high... but again...these dolls get expensive! Roxxi was always a favorite of mine and a crush! Growing up, I was the type of kid who almost exclusively wanted one brat though. Yasmin. Not Cloe, Jade, or Sasha. I was devoted to collecting Yasmin because she looked similar to me. In retrospect, I really wish I had gotten more of the other girls...I do have some...though their numbers pale in comparison to the Yasmin army.

The ball-jointed doll is my most expensive doll and my largest doll (she is fucking ginormous). Even when buying her at half the original price (great deal from a great friend) she was hardly affordable.

I bought her because I plan on customizing her to be Flandre Scarlet, my ultimate comfort character! I've always dreamed of having a doll of Flan. SO why not make one myself? I've had her for months but am still too scared to cut that beautiful hair off...I'm no good at cutting wigs/hair in general. I did install her red eyes myself which I've never done before as this is my first and probably last bjd! She is gorgeous but I would consider these dolls luxury items... VERY EXPENSIVE.

(idk why the exposure is so high on these, sorry!! >_<;)

I am so happy to have the coffin bean playset!! I think it was a really good idea to get it. but I am so sad because I have hardly any room for it! So It's sitting on my dresser in front of a giant mirror so please excuse the poor editing I did to obscure the reflection of me and my living space lol...

I gave my Twyla low pigtails, though they aren't very visible, and my Clawdeen braids! I think Clawdeen looks super cute this way tbh I tried curling her hair again and again and again but the curls always fell out (I dont have much experience)...but honestly... I think I like this look even better ^_^. You can see her ears so well this way.

This Clawdeen is basically my holy grail and it was gifted to me by Leo, Leo if you're reading this I hope you know you are basically Jesus.

not to get deep but the OMG doll next to her is special to me because it is one of the last gifts I got from my late Grandpa. He took me to target and when I said I liked the doll, no questions asked, he bought her for me. Didn't give me shit for liking dolls at my big age. He simply got her for me because she made me happy, and he wants me to be happy. Dolls can mean so much. Again, I am so lucky to be so loved!!! >:D

I have this gorgeous Draculaura just chilling next to my jewelry cuz I have nowhere else to put her and honestly she is gorgeous and should stand alone.

Here I have the pride Bratz next to my bed!!! They mean so much to me, as I said earlier I had a crush on Roxxi. To see she's a canon lesbian now is so incredible!! And Nevra, her girlfriend, is beautiful! They are so cute together... they are never leaving that box though. This was actually the first doll/set of dolls where I fully understood why people are content leaving dolls in their boxes. I love to play with my dolls so much... but I could never play with these two!! If anything happened to them I would lose my mind.

Now... you're probably thinking......where the hell is Lagoona?!?! Do you not have one despite loving her this much? Of course I have a Lagoona. I AM GROWING AN ARMY!!!!!!

I really, really love Lagoona...I want to get every Lagoona doll I possibly can. Isn't she so cute! I relate to her character in the cartoon a lot too... her life at home, her difficulties speaking up when she is sad or angry, her sporty personality, etc etc... She has quickly claimed her spot as biggest comfort character #2. I included many pictures because I simply cannot pick one, she is flawless. You might recognize the Lagoona on the left, I drew her in that exact pose recently!!

I have her army on my desk, giving me the strength I need to get through my work... like Homer Simpson with his pictures of baby Maggie at his work. I get endless inspiration and motivation from Lagoona!!!

And here is the Flandre shrine bonus... I adore her!! I also have finally ordered a fumo flan that should arrive in august around my birthday eeek!!!

Anyways that is my collection. It's been many years in the making, though it's almost doubled since monster high G3 released... Mattel truly has me by the balls right now. If you read any of this, thank you. I put a lot of time into making this post, and it was really fun. I feel like a real blogger right now.

I really really enjoy dolls and talking about them. So I will happily do so anytime I get the chance!!! Will probably do an update once I finally install some more shelves and move stuff around <3

[sillyxaly]

Its 2am, my ass isnt sleeping but my brain is remembering the day the Owl House Season 2 'Hollow Mind' first dropped

And im not deep into tumblrs takes on Belos. But I was deep in the instagram Belos takes and I remember vividly a lot of people being disappointed by the episode because it made Belos a "bad guy just for the sake of being bad"

And, to each their own, but that is likely the owl house take I have most hardly disagreed with ever in my life?

And dont get me wrong either. Ill love a shitty guy with a shitty tragic past as much as the next person. Hell if you see any of the guys I obsess about you know I fucking love those with my entire exsistence. And they were fairly popular and happened a lot more at the time as far as I recall so I got why people were expecting that, so was I. So I also kind of got why people were disappointed. But to call him "evil for the sake of evil" just never sat right with me.

And now.

Today

At 2am.

I put some words as to why that is together.

That man is a story about Internalized beliefs you grew up with. And I think the reading comprehension on this site is good enough but Ill reiterate anyway. My guy, grew up in the 1600s roughly. He was but an orphan boy in a community of people that may have not agreed on everything, but they all knew one thing. This certain group of people is evil. In this case witches. And being a little orphan boy with only these people and his brother to teach the world to him of course he believed it. What else should he have believed?

Its the same way you believe the sky is blue.

And its happening. Certain types of people are demonized. Be that queers for one example or others, use as you will there is no shortage of demonized priorities and if you grow up in an environment that adapts that you will believe that.

Belos was never evil for the sake of being evil, he was evil because he thought he was doing good. (Once at least Theres a whole debate i could get into wether he actually still believes that or just refuses to change his viewpoints now because lets be honest he killed his own brother for this shit. Admitting he was wrong now after killing the only person he was probably ever close to? Yeesh would that suck. But moving on.)

And its so easy to blindly do wrong when you think you're doing good because there was never a questions of "are witches actually evil?" of course they are. The alternative was to think everyone he ever knew was just, wrong or lying on purpose. Which isnt the kind of thing thats easy to digest, ever, that your whole worldy belief is a gaint hoax.

But its important that you do it anyway! Even if its hard and confusing and it honestly sucks! You need to be open to having your Perspektive changed even on the things that seem most natural to you because everyone around you thinks the same.

And I will die on the hill that there is a giant lesson to be learnt from belos as a character. Propably more than one tbh but again. Its late. Im tired. Bye.

[not-poignant]

Is there something about video games as a medium that you enjoy for writing fic? Was just curious bcos I was going thru my bookmarks and the only video game fics were yours, books/tv shows seem to be more common? They're great and I love them btw <3 I just love ur explanations for things haha

Hi hi anon!

Yeah I've written rather a lot of video game fanfics now haven't I?

I didn't really set out to do that, but there is something I really like about video game characters:

They're just not characterised as well as most other characters, lmao, which gives a lot of empty spaces to kind of 'fill them up' with my own development, while they still get to be relatively canon compliant.

Like, I'd say the exception there is Dragon Age: Inquisition, where I played my first file for like 220 hours (without any DLC or killing the end boss) and mostly just was gathering information to build Cullen's and Bull's characters in ways that did keep them canon compliant, but there was still a fuckton of stuff that was missing, that could be completely invented and fabricated.

And I love doing that.

Stardew Valley are the 'thinnest' characters I've ever worked with. They can be summed up as 'he's a jock, but...' or 'he's a goth, but...' or 'he's an alcoholic, but...' and then you just add all 98% of the rest of the character in any direction that you want based off about 40 lines of dialogue.

Anon, I've never even played Detroit: Become Human, I just watched some Let's Plays.

And Hades has a lot of dialogue, but also a LOT of empty spaces in general character and world-building where you just get to make up whatever you like with or without a patchwork of whatever Greek mythology you want to draw from that day.

I have actually written quite a few book and movie fanfics, and a few television shows as well. My favourite fanfics are based off a book series and a movie respectively (that would be The Beast that Chose Its Own Bridle and The Golden Age that Never Was). The story Stuck on the Puzzle used to be my fave, but it's still top 3. :)

I think what I also enjoy is, more than anything, all my video game fanfics are the ones that people say 'you don't need to know anything about the game/story, you can just start reading' the most to. I find I generally don't have to do as much research to get started (I'm really lazy), but I guess you could count me having played Stardew Valley for 1600 hours as research, heh.

[lord-pigeon]

The thing you're not getting about why genshin is worse is because events are not meant to be the primary source of quartz in fgo. It comes from your weekly log in, live streams, 50 day ten pull, ascending servants to their second last ascension, story quests, free quests and the ten quartz you get from doing ten of them, rank up and interludes and the quartz you also get for doing ten of those, and special occasions like anniversary and new year. If you do ten rank ups you get a ten pull and you can do this in maybe an hour or two, now try grinding a ten pull in genshin. It'll be a lot more time investing and taxing considering you're just pressing buttons in fate. Also genshin's odds are just lower and it bleeds whales way harder by making constellations do more than just damage and they make modern 4 stars suck without them. Yes genshin has a better pity but that isn't the be all end all, you need to get 5 copies to max a 5 star in fate where as genshin its 6 AND 5 copies of their weapons. I could keep going on about ways that it's worse all day long, especially when genshin has way more micro transactions and predatory practices like battlepasses and resin but take that fate is worse is utterly baffling tbh

Oh boy let's get into the math here because this is where the fun begins.

Don't get me wrong, I'll never defend Genshin's dogshit practices, but I have a personal grudge against FGO fans sucking on it when it's literally the bastard of the mainstream bunch. This argument is me pitting garbage against garbage to say which one is stinkier.

This gonna be long so I'm putting this under a cut:

Alright FGO dailies list (I'll use NA for FGO, since Genshin is a global server schedule):

Day 2=1 SQ, Day 4=1 SQ, Day 6=2 SQ and Day 7=Ticket (3 SQ equivalent)

Total: 7 SQ

Needed for a tenfold: 30 SQ

Weeks needed for a tenfold via Log-In alone: 4 weeks and 4 days. 32 days total.

It should be noted that if you miss a single day, it resets from the very start. You must log in no matter what. It might take but a few moments, but note, you have to.

Genshin dailies list:

10 Primos per Comm/action, total of 40, and a 20 Primo bonus for turning into Katherine

Total: 60 Primos

Needed for tenfold 1600 Primo

Weeks needed for a Log-In alone: 26 days total.

Genshin's big detriment is that while you never lose your place, you need to spend time on Commissions. It can be anywhere from 5-10 minutes, which is a bit of a serious timesink. It's a bit better with the Fontaine update but it's still a pain in the ass for those on the go.

Alright, but Lord, that's just raw Log-In, what about monthlies?

Monthlies are the same, since both give you 5 tickets/fates to use. Genshin is at the disadvantage here since you need to spend the stardust you get from summoning on it, but Fate also requires you to spend Mana Prisms. Fundamentally similar, it's just that Fate wins out by the small margin Mana Prisms are slightly easier to obtain.

What about pity?

Eat my ass, Fate's pity system just happened cause they were getting this ass beat monetarily and they gave up and did a base-tier QOL update. Six FUCKING years we waited for pity and its over 900 SQ??? ((330 pulls btw))

I saved a whole year and a half back for Musashi's inital release and I just barely had that shit. And that was events, dailies, so on and so forth. (I got her in three tickets so nobody come at me with the fact I'm just a bitter old bird who didn't get my cute girl.)

While there's the 50/50 mechanic with Genshin, that levels the idea of 180, and that's going to hard-hard pity. No matter what, you can, and will, at least get the character you want.

Now what if we include Weapon Banner, since people assume Weapons+Characters *must* go together rather than it just being BIS and disregarding the completely different game mechanics of turn-based FGO and action rpg Genshin (<bitter).

Weapon Hard Pity is 240 pulls. You get a Fate Point for 80 pulls if you don't get your directed weapon, and you get another one if you get screwed again. Two Fate Points guarantees the next 80 is what you want.

Now, that might equal 420 pulls, but there's a catch few people acknowledge: Soft Pity.

Genshin has a system that, the closer you get to that hard pity, the higher the rate goes up. Therefore, it's not often someone actually goes to the hard 80 or 90. I'm just using the hard numbers as a point.

FGO is a hard pity, nothing about the rates changes from Summon 1 to Summon 330. Plus no guarantee you actually even get something from those 330 pulls--at least in Genshin you get a Basic Banner character who has some measure of utility you can use to make progress.

Also FGO pity doesn't carry per banner, but Genshin's does, so if you get fucked over and wanna wait a few months, you have another shot instead of wasting all of it cause you got close but no cigar.

But what about upgrades? Constellations?

NP-bonuses are rather minor and not as key as say, Xiao C1 or Hu Tao C1, so FGO has the edge there. However, that leads me to the side point of:

Weapons.

Reasonably, everyone talks about how the 3-star weapons suck, yadda yadda. You get so many weapons from the game as welfare that are good and can be used by multiple characters. You don't need a 5-star weapon, just because you aren't hitting 300k a hit doesn't mean shit.

Genshin has a lot more versatility in team building than FGO tbh, since a lot of FGO's boils down to "Do you have Merlin/Skadi/Chen Gong/Waver/Tamamo/Castoria/Support Caster.png" that you can then use with any other character.

Not saying Genshin doesn't have that too with Qinqiu and Bennett, but due to the nature of Spiral Abyss, people have gotten smart about using others instead of just them cause it's a split up team system.

Citation: I didn't get a single 5-star Weapon until Year 2.5 of Genshin. Fun fact, I also didn't have a single DPS 5-star either (all I had since launch was Diluc and Venti), until fucking Cyno came out. I managed to play the game just fine.

Now in FGO NA, I was also there since Launch, and I didn't get my first SSR until the Solomon raids, in which I finally got Florence Nightingale. I was playing the game carried by Kiyohime, Salter, and throwing SQ at revives. And guides, christ, so many guides it made Arknights look elementary.

What about general SQ/Primo flow (the Anniversaries and whatnot mentioned)?

FGO, the year of 2023, had, according to a Reddit post which I can link if people want the source, is: 2571 SQ, tickets included.

This Reddit post involved Servant NP Ascension Quests, Events, Chunked Log-In Bonus, Live Streams, Bond Stuff, ect ect (also, stuff you can't do if you didn't roll them, the post was being generous with people getting what they rolled or had)

That is about 85.7 tenfolds. So, if you don't spend a penny and not miss a day of logging in, the average joe might get about 2, 3 hard pities on who they want. Presuming I'm doing the math right on that.

Genshin, in the year of 2022, had, according to another Reddit Post, roughly 100k Primogems.

That equals about 62.5 tenfolds, or over 620 Fates. Now, tossing that into the system with someone with the worst luck imaginable that wants a character, that's about the same amount of 3 to 4 guaranteed pities.

One might note that the numbers are about the same, and yeah, that checks. However, there's a lot of variables, such as Spiral Abyss for Genshin, and actually having the characters to do Interludes on.

Half-baked conclusion

FGO is a money sink, Genshin is a time sink. They both sink your serotonin. Nobody wins.

Look, I play both, I have grief with both, I have fond memories of both. I wouldn't have a stupid expensive Okada figurine sitting next to a custom Cyno plushie if I hated these games.

But they're gacha, they're both out for your money, it's just that one is just a raging cunt about the whole affair.

Reddit Post Citations:

[faefaye]

Having finished Library of Heaven's Path (I devour reading material), here's a "positives and negatives" sorta book review about it.

I shall proceed to be vague to avoid spoiling much :p.

Positives:

It's comedic. It gets repetitive a lot, but there's some new stuff now and then :p.

Zhang Xuan (the protag) "hooks or crooks" his way through stuff, and watching him twist situations to his favour is fun.

There's a real good plot twist at around Ch 1600, I was sorta feeling something off but it didn't hit me what until it was revealed and left me speechless.

ZX has some character growth, both as a teacher and a person. He regresses in this often but also acknowledges his own selfishness, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

There are some nice emotional moments, like the times when ZX or his students stand up for each other.

Certain moments, sometimes seeming small, get huge payoffs later on.

I liked how he developed his own techniques in the last part of the novel and how he thought through the inspirations for each one.

As someone who enjoyed Lord of the Mysteries and especially how its protag Klein masqueraded in a lot of identities, ZX's disguises were some of my favourite parts. The best of the lot would be the concrete image he created as "Yang shi".

Negatives:

Several repetitive situations, especially when it comes to the 'face-slapping' and the plot with the places ZX visits (ZX visits as a somewhat weak person, becomes top dog, learns there's a bigger world out there, moves there, rinse and repeat). Also repetitive phrasing, like "you are [x], your entire family is [x]" or "This much spiritual energy would suffice for an ordinary cultivator but ZX cultivated the Heaven's Path so he needs hundredfold more energy". I get it. The last one has happened every time. If I couldn't remember by Ch 1000, calling my brain the size of a peanut would be an insult to peanuts.

The time it takes for the payoffs mentioned in the positives are way too long at times.

The important plot point at around Ch 1500 was dragged out for too long. I knew it would happen the moment we heard about the clan, and every news ZX heard about it was just making it more obvious.

ZX's romantic relation felt too unreal and I don't know what he actually likes in her other than her being pretty. He just feels a sudden interest in her unlike all the women he knows and he goes along with it. And while that can be the nature of love, imo stories should build up more especially if you're going to portray it as some "against the world, we stand" epic tale.

Worldbuilding is meh. Things are brought up only when their plot relevance is at hand and this holds for 99% of stuff- places, groups, beasts, potions, techniques etc. There's also a sub-situation where ZX doubted something or did something important, but we're only told that later when its relevance appears even though we follow the guy every day. This can be good for stories in some cases, but it bothered me fairly in LOHP.

The timeline is insane. 1600 chapters cover a year's time. The first 200 chapters cover three weeks, I think? Can you imagine that?

ZX's emotional and social quotients go to negative numbers for humour purposes, but in so many other situations, he understands every aspect involved. Very frustrating.

He relies on his library so much. I get it's super useful to the point that not using it is dumb and ZX does eventually move to trying something by himself before using his library, but that takes way too much time. For over 1000 chapters, the library is what he always goes for. And past that, when he's explicitly told he needs to stop using his library, he doesn't and the consequences are never mentioned again.

Chapter names can be rather spoilery. I don't want to start a chapter and see that it's called "[x]'s Death" (this is an actual chapter name, I'm not lying). Especially since it's not even obvious [x] is going to die, it's only midway in the chapter we see it.

The ending felt rushed and way too happy. Particularly for Qiqi, I liked her but there were so many ways to give her a satisfying ending than what happened. I pity her more with the ending she got, honestly, than what would have been otherwise.

For whatever it matters, this was like the second cultivation-related novel I've finished (the first one was Faraway Wanderers) so maybe I'm just not used to the genre tropes.

Overall for holding me for all these chapters, I'm inclined to rate LOHP 2/5. A fairly mid work but helped me pass time :p.

[talenlee]

Story Pile: Megatokyo

New Post has been published on PRESS.exe: Story Pile: Megatokyo

Throughout 2022 I made a bit of fun on social media by reminding people that Megatokyo, the webcomic, was still updating, and had through all 22 years of its existence, produced a plot that at this point spanned roughly a week. It’s one of those things that when you present it to people who remember reading it as literal children creates an interesting reaction that shows you what they remember.

But what of me? What did I remember? I thought that maybe I should go check it out, and see what I thought of Megatokyo, since after all, I’d stepped out well before the talking robot girl had made a schoolfriend who was also the avatar of female tragedy. What is Megatokyo now? And how has it changed? Is it what you remember? is it better? is it worse?

What would I answer to the question, What is Megatokyo?

Content Warning: Y’know, there’s a lot of pretty nasty misogyny in Megatokyo, though not anything I’d step up to the level of a content warning. What I would content warn, though, is the commonality with which they suggest an adult Piro date a fifteen year old.

Megatokyo is a webcomic that launched in the year 2000, immensely successful for its form and platform, and one of those ‘top ten most popular’ things in its genre for a number of those years. Famously slow paced, erratic and unreliable in its update schedule, its claims to fame early on mostly were tied to its high art quality compared to other webcomics of the time and its quirky mix of Anime Softboy Piro and Libertarian Gamer Largo, and that’s kind of where the simple summary breaks down. You can’t really look at Megatokyo as the thing it started as, or the reason it was successful, because those things are amorphous and there’s a lot of assumptions. I mean I assume it succeeded because it looked good compared to a dozen sprite comics and stuff that looked like Sluggy Freelance. What’s more, ‘why it was notable in 2000’ is really unimportant in 2022, where I’m trying to look at what Megatokyo, the whole text, is.

The best thing you can give Megatokyo at the moment is abridgement. Twenty-two years on, waiting between strips and the dead strips are all no longer being drawn out by weeks at a time. The first year or so of comic strips are a breezy read, around 129 pages, which load nice and quick and honestly ricochet through the narrative at a pretty breakneck pace. I started this article imagining in my heart of hearts thinking that I’d just read all of Megatokyo. All twenty years of it, which totals up to about 1600 pages. As I write this down now, the ‘jot notes down’ stage of things, I am at 412 pages, which puts me in March 2003. That means that within the first 3 years of the comic, a quarter of it got made, which is honestly pretty good — that’s around 72 pages a year, which is about two pages a week. You could do a lot worse than that in a lot of serialised publications.

Of course, then there’s the question about what is or is not ‘Megatokyo‘ in this context. At first, I started by noting how often pages were what I filed as ‘padding.’ They were dead art days, ringer days, diary days, explainers for delays in the comic, and my numbers found that first ‘chapter’ of Megatokyo was composed of 83 ‘strips’, and 38 pieces of filler content. I don’t know if that content proportion holds; honestly, I imagine it gets worse, with more and more dead art days over time, until updates are instead interspersed with great big gaps of nothing, but I won’t know until I get there.

I wanted to make sure I spent some of this time noting down my reactions to the characters, the ways the story was telling me things and the things the story seems to think of as important, though, because it’s a lot easier to give the benefit of the doubt at the end of an archive binge, when you’re trying to construct the narrative in your own head. And I think that it holds that some of the best things you can do for Megatokyo is cut out a bunch of Megatokyo.

I need to talk about Megatokyo‘s author. No, not Piro. No, not Fred Gallagher. No, not Largo, or Rodney, or Dom or Ser. None of those people, but rather instead, the Author of Megatokyo, in a Barthesian sense.

Fred Gallagher fell out with Rodney Carston. Fred Gallagher has had depressive spirals, and personal medical tragedy and breakdowns and collapses. Fred Gallager is a person, and that person has been influenced in immense ways by material needs and constraints, and I will talk a little about what I think of that. But Fred Gallagher isn’t ‘the Author’ of Megatokyo and should not be regarded as such, because Megatokyo‘s author is the single mind that created the first strip and the most recent strip. Both of those people who did that were called Fred Gallagher, but they were not the same person by any measure.

I want to talk about what Megatokyo makes me think and feel and what it’s about as a historical millenial story. I want to talk about things that the text seems to me to be trying to do, because that seems the most reasonable way to treat this text as a whole object with its own ideas, and not as a diary of the breakdown of a man cursed in a way only capitalism can curse you. To that end:

The Author Of Megatokyo Is Dead, Because The Author Of Megatokyo Was Never Alive.

When I refer to Piro, I use that to mean the character Piro, and the fact that Piro is written by someone who for a while there wanted to be primarily known and seen as Piro is a detail that the diegesis can discard. It’s interesting if you want to particularly pick on him but I think that picking on him at this point is sort of redundant. The Author of Megatokyo then is the collapsed personality you can see in the work, a mind that would make the jokes that are made here and why they might make them. If a comic makes a particular kind of joke, you can probably reliably expect that the author of that comic finds that joke funny; just in the same way you can expect a comic made in English has an author that understands English.

Without delving too much into Megatokyo’s failings at this point, one thing I think is most important about Megatokyo‘s author is that they value nostalgia and impressions. There’s a shocking amount of things in the comic that claim, in some way, to be ‘about’ something in particular, or reference caring about a thing, but then demonstrate a breathtaking ignorance of it; if you told me the Author of Megatokyo had never been to Japan at all I wouldn’t actually doubt you. There are all these little giveaways, like the ways people have their meals, freely available guns, high speed highway chases, american-style health insurance and details like car accidents and a lack of attention paid to trains. This is not about Japan, this is about the Japan you think you like if you liked thinking about Japan a lot in 2000.

The Author has concerns outside of the comic that creep into them, too; there’s an antipathy towards internet forums and commentators, a distrust of normies, a shocking distaste for women and their agency, and a surprisingly common reliance on violence as a punchline in a way that makes me feel like they’re not very confident.

The confidence and distaste for women show up a lot more in the early parts, but don’t seem to have gone away around strip 500. Early strips relied a lot on the joke structure of someone being awful to a woman then being hurt for it, which meant, to make a joke, a lot of characters harrassed women. Repeatedly. A big part of this is a specific joke structure that was, I think, kind of Mcluahn-like, embedded in the form by another media.

Okay, okay, so this is a big reach, this is unprovable, but it explains a trend I lived through and I think that the story has some explanatory power. When I talk about it, please recognise this is a lens that works for me, this is an explanation for a trend that makes sense to me and I think helps me mentally avoid y’know, some creative problems.

I think that weeby webcomics are populated with a particular joke structure that occurs by trying to emulate an anime punchline.

If you watch a lot of 90s comedy anime, a very common thing is a character does something or says something funny but inappropriate, trying to get away with something they shouldn’t or being somewhere they shouldn’t, rather than stay and explain what’s going on or what they were doing, the show tends to keep things pacing on by having someone in the scene whallop them so hard they go flying out of the scene. This is a structure used a lot by Takahashi across her, let’s say, shithead-based narrative stories, and she used it for a lot of sex-based slapstick.

Webcomics that wanted to emulate anime aesthetics of the 90s were often being made by people who could reference that particular vein of punchline-PUNCHline moment. Also, and this is again, conjecture, I think a lot of webcomics were very keenly aware that they weren’t very funny. What’s more, they were often stuck with a four-panel structure, which means you’d get something like:

Panel 1: Framing for a joke

Panel 2: Setup for the punchline

Panel 3: The actual punchline

Panel 4: A reaction for the punchline

And I think, because overwhelmingly these were being made by people who weren’t boiling with confidence, panel 4 would be a reaction of violence, a shocking and abrupt ‘bam you got hurt for the thing you did,’ which was often a bad joke or a thoughtless line or a cheesy pick-up line. And that structure plays into how, in the early Megatokyo stories, a four panel comic that couldn’t come up with a use for its fourth panel would regularly have Largo say or do something misogynistic or awful, and then, the fourth panel is an understated observation of the aftermath of some violence. A doctor patching someone up, or a news report about someone getting hurt, or Piro hearing that something bad just happened to Largo.

What I’m saying is that an attempt to be Takahashi made Megatokyo into Ctrl-Alt-Delete.

Part of what bothers me in the reread is how much Megatokyo seems to have the edges of some ideas, as it is filled with conversations about media, games, and culture, but these ideas are so basic and stupid and dead-end with cliches. There’s this whole recurrent thread about how Piro liking dating sims was a problem because it made him weak, and not Piro objectifying real women was the problem.

It wants to comment on games because of Largo liking games but it has no idea about how people interact with games. It’s full of characters who clearly like hentai but is deeply dismissive of sex work, and in the same way, these characters seem to always be looking for a woman who is to blame for the things that are going wrong in their lives! Largo spends a huge chunk of the story at war with a girl because he thinks there’s something sus about her, and there is something sus about her, but even the ways he tries to address that involve approaching her as a problem who needs to be solved.

It’s not like this isn’t a story with some ideas in it. It’s definitely trying with both hands to pull together a bunch of different ideas, ideas that maybe had some purpose once, when the story started but as the story persists, the longer it goes without being able to resolve or conclude those story bits, the Author just keeps stapling together things they like. It also creates this weird phenomenon of backpedalling, sometimes as quickly as two panels immediately after one another, with a day between them. There’s a sequence where a teenager finds Piro’s books and her reaction at first implies that she’s looking at hentai he draws, but then the next panel, on the next day, opens with her saying ‘well I’m definitely not looking at hentai here.’

Then what the fuck was that first reaction?

This character’s reaction to Piro’s art is one of those other ways the story seems to be telling me ‘hey, here’s what you should think about this,’ and it’s also one of the ways the story underscores the theme of sadness. It keeps bringing up sadness, the sadness of a character, the sadness of an art, the sadness of a fandom, the sadness of a particular interest, and it keeps bringing up sadness itself as if the sadness is what makes someone interesting. This art is so sad, this artist draws sad characters, he was drawn to this character because there was a sadness to her (even if that wasn’t actually who she was).

I think Megatokyo is a story about how being sad is the same thing as being interesting. And hoping that other people in the world think that too. That a character with the right aesthetic presentation, the right drowned babymanchild, is inherently interesting. You should care about Piro because he’s sad. Piro cares about characters because they’re sad. That’s why he draws them to be sad. Piro’s emotional state is soooo strange, so unlike other boys, so much so that a brain-warping AI that manipulated people assumed he was a female player and he didn’t take well to being hit on in a game, where he was also, again, sad.

You can unpack a whole thing there if you want. Seems you can’t manipulate lesbians over the internet.

Good Girl.

There’s a lot of a particular kind of softboy fantasy to Piro. The character is the hub of a lot of attention from people who value him and his opinion a lot when one of his only acts of selflessness so far was giving away someone else’s money. And I don’t get why I’m meant to like that. I don’t feel like Piro is interesting because he is sad, I feel like he is sad, because he gets to be sad, because he keeps seeming to resort to sadness as a personality trait. He complains about the people around him, especially women, and that’s why he’s sad – because people are making him sad, and that’s not interesting. It’s wretched.

According to the timescale of Megatokyo, there have been about twenty days since the start of the story proper, with a two week timeskip early in chapter 0 to set up the predicament of our freeloading idiot protagonists becoming homeless. It means that the world of Megatokyo is a historical one; it is set in a year 2000 Tokyo where Fukushima Daichi hasn’t happened, where no global financial collapse happened, no impeachment of Park Geun-Hye or assassination of Shinzo Abe happened. Hell, in Megatokyo, Sega is still in the eyes of the gamer audience, a leading console manufacturer, which is why they have black vans and sick-ass secret cops with guns. The PS2 is a loathed upstart console made by an Enemy, Love Plus is eight years away, and Metal Gear Solid 2 isn’t out yet.

The entirety of this story then, is the work of a millenial weeby author, perhaps fresh out of college, writing and creating about the way they felt in that one period of time, as the memories get fuzzier and the culture moves on.

This whole thing makes me feel gross. These characters are iconic examples of millenial internet culture, and looking back on them, they make me revolted to remember who they were, how they were. I printed out some of these comics and had them in my schoolbooks. I quoted them. I probably still do, without realising the source of the phrases lingering still in my head.

I recoil from Piro, even remembering my time as a depressed boy who wanted to be prettier than I was and wished Girls Would Just Appreciate How Different I Was. I see the way that his behaviour and thoughts all seem to reflect a disdain for the women around him, and the way he used selfishness and indulgence as an excuse to treat his friends badly. Largo is meant to be the relief from Piro, and he makes me gamerphobic. Someone who has nothing in his life but Being A L337 G4M3R, whose ability to even process emotion is morphed around that, obsessed with his interests in a way that harms other people, and constantly seeking alcohol.

When viewed as page after page of a single text it’s very hard to think of Megatokyo very well. The characters are dreadful, and you sort of need to make excuses for them to put up with them long enough to watch the character development. They were rough, self-insert characters of thoughtless men, they can’t help it, how were they supposed to be good at storytelling?

There are two things in this comic, in the first five hundred strips that stand out now, in hindsight as needing particular explanation. Firstly, at one point early on, Erika and Hayasaka, two Japanese girls from Japan in Japan are having a conversation, and the topic of Hayasaka’s coworker Piro comes up. Erika asks if he’s American, and Hayasaka responds with ‘I don’t know.’ Now, the specific wording there is very obviously easy – after all, any given white boy could be from Canada, Scotland, Romania, Australia, or indeed, Japan as well, there’s nothing about his appearance that makes it obvious.

But these are Japanese characters from Japan speaking in Japanese, and Japanese has a way, as a language, to signify if someone is from Japan or not, and what’s more, in Japan, it’s really obvious that people judge and assume how Japanese you are or are not, based on how you look. That Hayasaka reacts with an ‘I don’t know’ is really weird, and makes me uncomfortable because it almost feels like it’s asking a specific question, “is he white” and the answer is meant to signify “how should I be able to tell?”

It’s a recurrent thing with how people talk about perceiving Piro, the character. He’s seen as female by a mind-warping AI in an MMORPG, a group of girls describe him as attractive (but also a lady), and the Erika moment leave me feeling like this character, in some tiny way, is meant to be a very obviously white boy, who can somehow be seen, in Japan, aracially; that he would ‘pass’ as Asian in a culture that is very aware of what that means.

Oh and one of those groups perceiving him as a ‘her’ includes a group of fifteen year old schoolgirls who are shocked to see a boy reading shojo manga. This is once again one of those things that projects that image of Japan, rather than being set in Japan, because lots of boys buy Shojo manga, it would not be an oddity that children gawp at. But it does let us chain into the other thing that I cannot stop thinking about:

Piro’s Conscience stops the story and has a chat with him about how he should not find those girls attractive, because they are fifteen and he is something like 23. And that’s almost a thing that you could point to as character development, except it’s weird that he needs to be told that by an outside agent, and it’s weird that the Author would think of that as an example of a way to have this character improve. You kind of don’t tend to need to explain ‘by the way, this character is not a sex criminal.’

But okay, the story says ‘Piro will not have sex with that teenager, as a point of ethical growth.’ Cool, not the example I’d leap to but I’m glad they do it. But and oh no there’s a but – but, they then have other characters remark on that, and there’s a plot arc about ‘oh no, what if this teenager hits on him?’

Yeah, what if?

What if this character who is definitely not a sex criminal now, because that’s a thing that the plot said he wasn’t, gets invited to do a sex crime? Well, maybe he’d do it? Because that character development is uncertain? Which means he’s probably a sex criminal, really?

These are the things that make me wonder about the Author of Megatokyo. It makes me wonder, as with other works before it, why would you bring that up?

It’s hard not to be bitter about Megatokyo. Megatokyo was wildly successful on the con circuit, it had printed books and cosplayers and the creators in the first year of the comic’s life went from ‘nobodies with a comic’ to ‘celebrity guests at major conventions.’ And this is in that period where of 121 strips, 38 were just empty filler. There was a lightning strike of it all, and I know that impacts how I feel about it in hindsight. We were hanging on to see the plot developments? From this? At that point? A year in, knowing that twenty-one years later, many of those initial plot points are dangling or forgotten?

But, and now I’d like to talk about Fred Gallagher the person, and not The Author of Megatokyo. I think Fred Gallagher received a special kind of torment that only capitalism can truly give. In a fair or sensible world, Fred wouldn’t need to do this art in a way that generated revenue; he’d be able to do it in his free time when he wanted to and release it at a schedule that pleased him and find a stable feedback loop that worked for him, all while his other needs were met. He wouldn’t need to work as an architect, then as a bus driver, in order to make ends meet while he pushed on with Megatokyo, a thing that he can manage to update maybe twice a month with a single page, often a page full of wordswordswords.

Megatokyo got successful in a capitalist way, and it demanded that in order it work, it had to be consistent, it needed attention, it needed monetisation, it needed to be a hustle, and the result of it really looks like every part of that sucks. Gallagher has written about being a temperamental writer and artist, and doesn’t that bear out in a work which could have months of breaks between its haphazardly crafted plot beats?

Megatokyo is a project that could benefit now with a good editor going through a draft manuscript and saying ‘hey, is this not important? Maybe we get rid of this’ or ‘what are we doing with this?’ and maybe ‘a few less jokes about the fifteen year old flirting with an adult, perhaps?’ and then letting the perfectionist who wanted to drive the story come back through that process and engage with it in its own time. It doesn’t need to be a commercial platform that justifies its existence; it could be a shed project, something someone who loves it does to work on it a little at a time.

But it isn’t.

And the demands of making A Business, a Brand, are clearly things that really hurt its actual existence. The more upset and the more struggle that Gallagher has to go through to make it, the less likely it seems to me that it gets made. That’s the story of what happened to the visual novel (which still shocks me in that it seems like it’d be very easy to get something out, but which now, all that money has dried up).

Gallagher has a patreon. It pays for Megatokyo and it pays for his other webtoon work, which seems driven by improvisation and speed. It gets updated a fair bit more often than Megatokyo with more coherent, directed sequences. I do not wish ill of this man, and for all that I wish the culture had venerated something else, uplifted someone else, I do not want this project to be a failure, to be gone. I’d like it to be better – boy, I’d like it to be better, such as discarding all the jokes about the fifteen year old flirting with an adult, could we please stop that.

But it’s hard sometimes to think about it, about the unfairness that this got to be a Cultural Touchstone where someone nearly twenty years older than me got to be one of ‘the voices’ of my cultural space, and where now he gets to continue making a page or two a month, while some of my friends have to negotiate ‘groceries or rent’ problems with their online presences and the art they give away.

Is Megatokyo, the project, worth a few thousand a month? I mean, yeah, absolutely.

But it doesn’t seem fair to me that this project, this project, limping along over twenty two years to tell a story that is awkward and illformed and thoughtless and selfish and indulgent and focused on some characters who are kinda rotten assholes, gets to be the place where the cyberpunk dystopia is unevently distributed.

There’s an impulse to pull the punch here, or to be crueller. That somehow I should either be kind enough because Gallagher’s been through a lot (and he has! I don’t mean to downplay any of the realities of Being The Megatokyo Guy!) or be able to lay a knockout punch on the work and get rid of it, which, no, of course not; Gallagher should be happily working on this project in his own time in a way that appeals to him, it doesn’t have to go anywhere or have a goal. In this house we don’t do disrespectful teleologies. Maybe I should be ‘aw shucks, well, that Piro learns his lesson after four straight years of narrative,’ but to get there I have to slog through twenty two years of archives, most of which is irrelevant and boring.

Ah well.

Make art, make rent, help others do the same. And helping others make art can be stuff like reading your friends’ work, and asking them if they want to do things differently, or better, or with fewer jokes about flirting with underaged girls.

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

[janet56892]

Info Dump of Owen

Character - 

Setting - 16th/ 17th century fantasy (e.g elves, gnomes, mermaids)  setting on a boat heading for a better land

Goal - , or to reach a better place/land and become more than what people think/expect of him

Challenges - external conflict - people judge him because of his parentage, his fathers family of dryads never acknowledged his existence, and he mother isn’t rich. Society isn’t forgiving

Internal conflict - he thinks he could not be good enough, and what others have always said might be true

Talents - he is half dryad, so he is better than just a human (but halflings aren't widely accepted), he never gives up hope - optimist, can play the violin

20 Questions

1 How old is your character?

Answer 19 years old

2 What's their relationship with their parents? (if their parents are dead then detail the story and their past relationship if you can find it) (if they have a different back story again, then enter that here)

Answer His father was never in the picture, as he is half dryad, half human, so his father (the dryad) doesn’t want be involved. Hs mother and him have a solid relationship, she always tried to be loving and kind, but she does work long hours to support her family

3 Who raised them (ignore if listed in 2)

Answer his Mother raised him on her own

4 Do they have any siblings? - If so, describe them and their relationship(s)

Answer he has a younger half-sister, who is very boisterous, and energetic. He had to raiser her as his mum is working a lot, she always demands him to play her a lullaby on his violine before she goes to sleep,

5 What is the main thing, or some things that challenge them?

Answer accepting his other half, I think he has always tried to ignore his dryad side of him, and tries to pass of as human, but it is always there.

6 Describe two or more relationships with other characters – what characterizes those relationships?

Answer

His relationship with the captain of the ship is a yes sir, as he is just the cabin boy or shanty man, and he is a bit intimidated by the captain, as he is loud, demanding, and can have a short temper if you managed to light his fuse, but he does have a sense of humour. So, my character tries to keep out of his way

My character sees the mentor as a grandfather figure, and holds him in some sense or awe. They become pretty close, and my character comes to him if he has any problem, or needs the mentors wisdom, the mentor sees my character as the grandson/son he never had, and loves seeing my character light up when he discovers something he can do

7 Does your character have children – if so, how does your character relate to them?

Answer no.

8 Does your character have a mentor?

Answer Once he had joined the ship he will get a mentor, who is an old dryad, that doesn’t mind that he is half human, who will teach him about his dryad culture, and helps him embrace who he is

9 How has your character’s upbringing shaped their view of the world?

Answer it has caused him to be more outward focused, like on other people, as he saw from a young age that is mother was working hard, so he would try his best to make things easier for her and his younger sister.

10 Does your character have chosen accessories / clothing / tools / weapons

Answer he carries his violin everywhere with him in its case, which he also stores other belongs. He wears a white shirt and vest, with black trousers and shoes, he also has eaves/flower constantly in his hair because of being a dryad

11 Does your character have any notable enemies?

Answer not nessarily, before he joined the ship, people would judge him on being a “halfling” and thing caused some of the kids his age to be not very nice, especially one particular kid. But once he has joined the ship, he finds a found family – maybe more people like him.

12 Describe your character’s world

Answer My characters world is in the 1600s, the noticeable difference is that this world is filled with mythical creature along side human

13 What are your character’s goals in life?

Answer to have a better life than the one he was given – which is why he joined the ship, as it gives him a chance to make some real money, and maybe find somewhere better for his family

14 What stops your character getting towards their goals?

Answer The weather is unpredictable, and the people on the ship only get their money after they have completed the tasks they were sent to do – which is either to find some treasure or new land. The person that has commissioned the ship is bit of a jerk, and might screw them over

15 What personality flaws does your character have and how do they manage them?

Answer if something happened to him/ or someone wrongs him, he might not speak out, as doing so never went well when he was younger.  He can be a bit of a walking mat

16 What special talents does your character have – were they innate or did they develop them, or discover them – if the latter, then how did this happen over time?

Answer he is half dryad, so he can help things grow, almost turn into leaves/flowers, he does have to develop these talents, as full dryad are taught these things when they are young, while was never taught. He does play the violin really well, and connects to the music

17 Is your character a loner or gregarious – or something more complicated (if so, describe)

Answer I think he want to be around people and have fun, but he does tend to end up alone quiet often

18 what type of Dryad are they

Answer They may be classes as a nymph, but he is a hydrangea dryad, as his father was also a flower dryad. He doesn’t have a bush/flower to connected to him, as he is half human, so that makes traveling easier

19 Where do they live in the world

Answer They live in 17th century Britian, on the cost line in a smallish town near the city, their house isn’t very big

20 why did he join the ship

Answer He thought it would be good pay, and a chance to prove himself and see the world. As the enticing prospect of getting away from, and away from people who know about his parentage. The ship he joined is called Lysander - liberator meaning, also Owen (he has a name!) is welsh and means young warrior

In 1758 Britain where elves, gnomes, and other magical creatures live alongside humans, Owen is a 19 year old half human half dryad. With his father wanting nothing to do with him before he was born, and never fitting in with the other kids Owen took the opportunity to join the Lysander crew as a cabin boy. With his violin in hand, he leaves his mother and younger half sister “sisters name” behind , Owen now faces uncharted waters that rumour has it is home to a giant sea serpent, but no one knows because no ship has lived to tell the tale. 

I think Owen is a tv series, because it would give him more time to grown and learn, while going on a sea adventure

[katindeed]

wow more writing practice this time about my dislike for AI

One thing I’ve had to grapple with during this surgence of AI is that not everyone wants to be an artist or creative. I’ve always just assumed people take other jobs to sustain themselves, but truly many if not most people don’t want to do something creative with their life or leave any sort of lasting impact. Most people just want to enjoy life to the fullest or at the very least just survive. My understanding as art being the ultimate dream is my own experiences clouding my judgment. Despite this art still defines our culture an insane amount along with being a representation of the times. As silly as it is to say stuff like “Seinfeld” reveals us a look into 90s culture just as a more seriously taken art piece like the “Merchant of Venice” can give us a look into the late 1500’s/early 1600’s. Most importantly to me it’s an expression and a look into a part of the human experience. AI is more or less a pattern machine. It takes what it's been fed and finds patterns to make something ““new””. There is no motivation behind what it’s doing. No need to scratch a creative itch or want to share and express one's life. It does what it does because it was told to. With this realization it not only delegitimizes the point of art but also shows that in the end these soul crushing recent events comes not from the AI but still the greed of the richest amongst us (I swear to god if I get one comment about that stupid game)  and the misunderstanding of art by business people. Even if AI art was just as good as a lot of human art, it is not, it still betrays the very core of what art is. Despite what the CEOs of the biggest media companies may think, art is not just entertainment but an important part of the human condition. Of course for the many creatives in every corner of the world but also for everyone in between. More than likely you’ve seen a piece of art that's connected with you. It’s shown a part of you or your experiences that you may have not been able to explain or maybe it’s made you feel for someone in the story evil or good, personal or universal. Isn't that kind of amazing. That us humans’ empathy sense is so strong that even to a character we know isn’t real we can still have an emotional reaction as big as crying or laughing or tensing up or whatever. AI has none of this. It is not a being capable of emotion, free will, or expression. We can not allow these old greed bags to take more from us than they already have. We can not have tech bros decide our culture. We can not have the representation of our culture be made by an emotionless, moralless, and uncreative being incapable of moving things forward. Only by taking the old and rehashing just enough to seem distinct enough. Some may say that humans themselves have no originality but I disagree with our distinct ways of taking old formats and archetypes, then mixing, adapting, and changing the very foundation of the original work. We are not a pattern machine but a remixing artists that take many different ideas and motifs, add a bit of our own likes and experiences and make something wholly distinct from its inspirations. Don't let any billionaire tech bro tell you differently.

[school-of-roses]

✽✾Why We Don’t Use Magic with a K✾✽

A case against Magic[k].

The version of the word has been popularized by a terrible racist, and if that is a good enough reason for you not to want to use it then feel free to stop here.  However if you're interested in learning more about the wider context, here is a short history.

Agrippa

Agrippa is cited as being the author of the first occult book where magic is spelled with a k at the end.  There is a 1600s translation where someone used that specific spelling, and there is no denying that it is technically used. However, those that point to this in order to justify its use now seem like they just don't want to change.  When the document had been written, English had not been codified, and many other spellings of magic (magik, magyk, magique) are also floating around during this time. These do not nearly get the same defense.

The word would not return to the occult community for nearly four hundred years between the book's English translation and the popularization of magic[k].

Aleister Crowley  The real meat and potatoes of why we don't use the word magic[k], is that it was popularized by a man by the name of Aleister Crowley. The quotes from Crowley that demonstrate his character are actually so terrible that for common decency, and the safety of my account, I'm not quoting them here.  They are not too terribly hard to find, and you'll hardly find a soul denying they exist. He wanted to differentiate from stage magic (elaborated on more below).  However, even at the time no one was having trouble telling the difference [see generally: historians at the time, anthropologists, and other practitioners], so Crowley justified it in other ways.  In his mind he wanted magic to have six letters.  He liked hexagrams a lot.  The number six was significant for him.  Thus, giving magic six letters was his mark on the word itself.

He left a nearly irreparable scar on modern occultism both being the progenitor to things like Wicca, and the writer of his own system based on the teachings of the Golden Dawn, Thelema.  Not only are a lot of these systems often more than dipping their toes in, but prone to soaking their whole feet in appropriation and bigotry if the practitioner isn't careful, they were often based on the writings of a lot of people who were wholesale racists/ antisemites. The work that goes into removing the bigotry from these systems, and occultism/ modern practice at large, is often substantial, and this is a step we've chosen to continue doing so. Namely, by removing Crowley's personal influence where we can.

Stage Magic argument

There is an argument that magic[k] as a spelling is necessary to differentiate from stage magic. (Or in some cases differentiate between witchcraft and Magic the Gathering.)  I've personally seen this argument a lot, but have not personally encountered a situation where it was necessary.  There are far too many, in my mind anyway, easy swaps (witchcraft, energy work, etc.).  There has also been no evidence I've found of this ever being the true intentions of the word's use.  Especially since if that were the case, they probably should've also changed the objectively more confusing turn of calling themselves "magicians", or of the word "magical".

Circling Back

Coming back around to why we don't use it today, we find the reasons above to be compelling, and beyond that we strive for above and beyond sourcing, care, and respect for our minority members.  If we can push magic in a direction that has more easily accessible information and less of the past's notions that are often founded in bigotry, we are going to. More often than not, that means trying to remove Crowley’s mark on everything. While some might seek to reclaim it, we've chosen to let it fade.

[chinaaesthetic]

Chinese New Year! 新年快乐!

*please note that the information below isn’t celebrated by everyone in the same way. Some customs are more common in northern China rather than southern China and vice-versa.

How to wish someone a Happy Chinese New Year:

1. 新年快乐！Xīnnián kuàilè! - Happy New Year! (This can be used one the first day of the lunar calendar as well as the Gregorian calendar).

2. 新春快乐！Xīnchūn kuàilè! - Happy Spring Festival!

3. 新年好！Xīnnián hǎo! - Hello! (This is how you greet people during Chinese New Year).

When greeting or wishing someone a Happy Chinese New Year, many Chinese people wish their family and friends things like: “I hope you have a happy and healthy family,” “I hope you get a job promotion,” “I hope you have good fortune and pockets overflowing with gold.” Here are some examples:

4. 恭喜发财！Gōngxǐ fācái! - Wish you a successful and prosperous year! (This saying is known well because of this Chinese New Year song you can watch here).

5. 阖家幸福! Hé jiā xìngfú - Wish you a happy family!

6. 事业有成! Shìyè yǒu chéng - Hope you have a successful career!

You can watch this YouTube video or read this article to learn more about how to wish someone a Happy Chinese New Year!

🧧🧧🧧🧧🧧🧧🧧🧧🧧🧧🧧

What is Chinese New Year?

Chinese New Year, also known as lunar new year or the spring festival, celebrates the first day of the new year on the lunar calendar. In 2021, this holiday falls on Friday, February 12!  This holiday is the most important holiday to those who celebrate this - its importance can be comparable to how Americans celebrate Christmas.

People have been celebrating Chinese New Year for about 3,500 - 3,900 years. It’s exact origins are unknown, but this tradition is believed to have started in the Shang Dynasty (1600-1049 BC) when people would make sacrifices to the gods and their ancestors towards the end of a year. However, the tradition was recorded and official during the Han Dynasty (202 BC - 220 AD) when Emperor Wu began using the lunar calendar. He chose to follow this calendar because it would let him know when second new moon after the winter solstice was.

Now, many Southeast Asian countries and people besides the Chinese celebrate Chinese New Year such as: Koreans, Vietnamese, Tibetans, etc. However, it is common to not see Japan celebrate Chinese New Year.

🐮🐮🐮🐮🐮🐮🐮🐮🐮🐮🐮🐮

Why do I keep hearing about the Year of the Ox/Cow?

Just like in western culture, there are zodiacs in eastern culture that the Chinese follow. There are 12 zodiacs, and these zodiacs follow a cycle of 12 years. Each new year represents one of the zodiacs. 

In order, they are: Rat/mouse, Ox/cow, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Sheep, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, and Pig.

2021 is year of the Ox/Cow - 2020 was year of the Rat/Mouse - 2019 was Year of the Pig... and so on. 

Because each zodiac has its own characteristics, they define a year. Chinese zodiac scholars have said in 2021, Year of the Ox, will be a flip-around positive change. They believe this year will be lucky and that it will be a good time to focus on love and relationships. People who are born in years of the Ox are known to have a lot of endurance, be calm and confident, but are also stubborn.

Just like in western culture, these zodiacs are believed to affect personality, fortune, etc, and instead of getting your zodiac by your birth month, you get your zodiac by your birth year. If you are interested in your Chinese zodiac, you can type in your birthday on this calculator and read about it.

🏮🏮🏮🏮🏮🏮🏮🏮🏮🏮🏮🏮🏮

What happens during Chinese New Year and how long do you celebrate it for? Lantern Festival?

On average, Chinese New Year is celebrated for about 15-16 days (from about New Year’s eve to the first full moon). Preparations start seven days before New Years because stores and restaurants close and people travel to be with their families. Most students are also on their big break during this time - they get off from school around the beginning of january and go back after Chinese New Year. It should also be noted that Northern China and Southern China celebrate the new year differently.

During the preparation period, people go shopping for food and decorations. They also clean the house very well. If living in a different city than one’s family, many people will travel back to their hometown to celebrate with family.

During the New Year’s Eve period, the house is decorated with New Year’s decorations, and there is a reunion dinner with family at the host’s house. Out of all the dinners you have during the year, it is incredibly important you don’t miss this dinner, which is why there are so many issues with travelling during this time. At this dinner, you eat many lucky foods such as dumplings and fish. Also during this time, the older generations will give younger generations something called 红包, which translates to “red envelope.” These envelopes are filled with money and are only given on very special occasions such as new years and weddings. Friends give these to each other, but it is not common at all for a younger generation to give one to an older generation person. There is a custom where families stay up late to “watch over the new year,” which is called 守岁. Late at night, people also like to go to temples to hear the first bells of the new year ring because they believe it will drive away bad luck.

On Chinese New Year’s Day, fireworks go off, families cook and eat large meals together, sacrifices are made to ancestors, etc. (Fireworks are especially important because they believe it will make your business more successful.) One popular tradition you might know of is the dancing lion/dragon parades where people wear a dragon costume and parade through the city. Dragons are very representative of Chinese culture and are thought to bring luck to a community. Lions are a symbol of protection.

For about a week after the first day, most people go visit family and friends. A lot of times people will visit the other side of their family. For example, someone will spend most of the time with their mother’s side of the family during the new year, then during this week, they will go visit relatives of the father’s side.

After that week, most people go back to work. This is around day 8-10. Businesses, restaurants, and stores reopen, and many people leave their hometown to go back to jobs in the city.

Day 15, the final day of Chinese New Year, is the Lantern Festival. On this day, the first full moon of the new year happens. To celebrate, people will light more fireworks, revisit family, eat sweet dumplings (called tangyuan), and participate in the Lantern Festival. People release lit lanterns into the sky to honor dead ancestors. This is called 元宵节.

You can read more here.

🥟🥟🥟🥟🥟🥟🥟🥟🥟🥟🥟🥟🥟

What foods are eaten during Chinese New Year, and what do they represent?

During Chinese New Year, many special foods are eaten, and these are foods that are considered to be lucky and to bring fortune into the new year.

1. Dumplings - represent wealth. Dumplings take hours to make and involve family help. They’ve been eaten for at least 1,800 years and are especially popular in northern China. It is said that the more dumplings you eat during the new year, the more money you will make.

2. Fish - represents prosperity and success. The word “fish” in Chinese sounds like the word “surplus” in Chinese.

3. Glutinous Rice Cake/Nian gao - represents success in your work (more money, better position). 

4. Spring rolls - represent wealth. They get their name because they are most often eaten during the Spring Festival which is CNY. This dish is more popular in eastern and southern China.

5. Oranges, tangerines - represents luck and fortune. This is originally a Cantonese custom, but many people grace their tables with citrus fruits. The word for “tangerine” sounds similar to the word for “good fortune” in Chinese.

6. Longevity noodles - represents longevity. These noodles are longer than usual to represent a person’s long and happy life. This is more commonly eaten in northern China. *It should be noted that these are mostly eaten on birthdays but can be eaten during the NY as well.

7. Sweet rice balls/tang yuan - togetherness in family. This food is eaten during the Lantern Festival, the last day of Chinese New Year. The shape and pronunciation is associated with closeness of the family.

8. Snacks - represent a sweet and pleasant life. Any sweet snack like dried fruit, candy, tanghulu is eaten during this time.

When it comes to food during Chinese New Year, there are superstitions about how foods should be prepared and what makes them lucky. You can read more about them here as well as here.

🎇🎇🎇🎇🎇🎇🎇🎇🎇🎇🎇🎇🎇

What kinds of decorations are put up in houses during the new year? What do the colors represent?

1. Spring/door couplets - These couplets originated in the Shu era. As seen in the picture below, you post these on doors in couples - in Chinese culture, even numbers are seen as good luck. On many of these couplets are written wishes or poems for the new year. Each couplet should have the same rhythm and the same number of words.

2. Paper cutting - Translated as “window flower,” these intricate, red paper cutting pieces are placed on windows and often represent the zodiac of the new year or other symbolic animals such as fish, dragons, and phoenixes.

3. Upside down characters/Fortune - Many Chinese people during the new year hang up positive characters such as Fu, which means happiness and good fortune. It is written in calligraphy on a red piece of paper and then put upside down on doors and windows. It is hung upside down because the people want the good fortune to fall down onto them.

4. Red lanterns - These lanterns push away bad luck and are seen during both the Spring and Autumn Festival. They can be hung on trees, outside houses, etc. There are also many styles - they can come in many shapes and have symbols written on them.

5. Kumquat trees - As said before, citruses represent good luck and fortune. People place kumquats and citrus fruits on their tables or decorate their homes with small kumquat trees.

You can read more about decorations here as well as here.

Common colors seen during Chinese New Year are red and gold, but green can also be found.

The color red is not only dominate during Chinese New Year, but it is also very representative of Chinese culture as well. Red signifies fire, good fortune, and happiness. It is representative of good luck, keeps the holiday very joyous, and scares away bad spirits.

Gold or yellow is considered to be a very beautiful color. Gold symbolizes wealth, riches, and prosperity.

Green represents money, harmony, and growth. 

Though these are the most common colors, it should be noted that a color combination of green and red is considered to be tacky in Chinese culture. 

🍊🍊🍊🍊🍊🍊🍊🍊🍊🍊🍊🍊🍊🍊

What do people wear during Chinese New Year?

On the first day, it is traditional to wear new clothes and new accessories as it symbolizes new beginnings. However, there are people who like to wear sentimental accessories to respect and remember their ancestors.

Some people like to wear traditional Qipao/Cheongsam, Tang Suits, and Hanfu, but many people stick to western clothes like skirts, dresses, and pants. There is also a tradition of wearing lucky, red underwear for New Years.

Tang suits are the most popular to wear during the New Year, Qipao is also popular, but it is often too cold to wear during the winter months. Many people are starting to wear Hanfu again to celebrate the new year, but it isn’t widely accepted yet to wear during the new year.

During the new year, people wear a lot of red and gold. It is important to NOT wear mostly white and/or black. These symbolize death, and white is worn at funerals. Anything that is bright, bold, and upbeat should be fine to wear, but you should go for something that is red.

*If you want to wear something that is traditional Chinese for New Years, please make sure you know about cultural appropriation and know how to wear these properly.

🐉🐉🐉🐉🐉🐉🐉🐉🐉🐉🐉🐉🐉

As there is so much information about Chinese New Year, I cannot possibly tell you all about it in one post. It is truly something that you must experience in your lifetime. It is very beautiful, fun, and there are so many things to do and celebrate. I ask you that you please research this more and look at all the beautiful pictures of food, lanterns, fireworks, etc. 

Please stay safe and 新年快乐！

[thejackofalltrades42069]

1. Stuff I learned from reading Vagabond.

Estimated reading time: 16 minutes.

Vagabond is a manga (Japanese comic) written and drawn by Takehiko Inoue about the life of the most famous swordsman from Japanese history, inspired in true events and characters from that time (around 1600's).

I'll write some quotes and then my interpretation, my input, and stuff I thought about.

I divided the post in parts so it can be read a bit at a time.

1

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Quote:

Takuan: “There is no light for those who do not know darkness. Live on and endure the shadows Takezou! And brightness shall come your way”

Interpretation:

Not everything in life is happiness, and happiness as a goal is a bad idea because during many moments in life there will be unavoidable tragedy (earthquakes, the death of a loved one, an illness, breaking up with your partner), and we have to do stuff like working 8 hours a day which is not usually enjoyable.

If we accept that a part of life is “suffering” and/or doing things we don’t like, we will have a better time in life because we won’t fight and try to avoid something unavoidable. Trying to avoid things you have to do only leads to stress, and to becoming a good for nothing. For example when you have to do a bunch of work, but instead of doing it, you start checking social media or procrastrinating somehow else, eventually you just feel more tired and stressed than you should be and haven't got any work done.

Experiencing tragedy is a natural thing, if we endure and overcome tragedy, and learn from it, we will be able to have amazing moments in life, and appreciate them more.

Quote:

Takuan: “Don’t be preoccupied with a single spot. See everything in its entirety, effortlessly. That is what it means to truly see.”

Interpretation:

If you focus too much on a single thing, it can be at work, at a hobby, doing whatever, you might miss the bigger picture.

Sometimes when working on solving a problem, for example, healing lower back pain (it’s a good example), we think our lower back is the problem, and we think we need to apply heat, rest, and then strengthen our lower back. In many cases, we need to strengthen the parts around the lower back that support it, the legs and glutes, work on having a better posture by strengthening our chest, the upper back, and the abdomen. 

Sometimes thinking that a very specific thing is the problem won’t let us see the stuff around it that could be what’s actually causing the problem.

This quote could also mean: after you practice something a lot, and learn a lot of information about it, part by part first, practicing those parts separately, then all parts together at the same time, eventually you’ll be able to “truly see”, to be really good at something, and to get the bigger picture easily, applying all those individual skills without thinking about them consciously.

This can also be applied to life in general, the more information we learn (like science facts and useful practical information), and the more we practice things, all becomes easier in general.

2

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dialogue:

Musashi: "These wicked thoughts… they're distracting me from the way of the sword."

Takuan: "Wicked thoughts?" "Are you suggesting that Otsu (a female character) is wicked?"

Musashi: "No, I didn't say that! It's just that… My thoughts about her are."

Takuan: "Your thoughts aren't wicked. They're perfectly natural feelings. You think these feelings go against the way of the warrior. But they only get twisted and bent out of shape when you repress them and try to keep them contained."

Interpretation:

Absolutely any thought that goes through your mind is natural, and it’s not a good idea to think they’re wrong, or that something’s wrong with you because of having those thoughts. Everyone will have many useless thoughts yes, and thoughts that you shouldn’t pursue. If you keep thinking about something too much, it's likely you'll eventually do something about it. For example, when you do something about a thought that will cause trouble (like messaging with your ex, or like taking steps that can lead you towards cheating on your partner with someone from work, or like stealing something).

Whenever there’s a thought that is a bad idea, or “useless”, the best thing is to just keep doing something else and see that thought from a distance, it will go away eventually. To achieve this, it’s useful to have things to do (like hobbies, or work), and engaging in those activities with minimal distractions. Meditation is also a useful practice to improve concentration and stop thinking about so many things at once.

Even if thoughts are outside of our control, we can bias ourselves into having better and more useful thoughts (or, worse ones). When we engage in a certain activity for a long time, it will be natural to have ideas related to that activity, and less ideas about something we're spending less time doing. We actually have a huge amount of control when it comes to influencing ourselves in a positive or negative way.

To give an example, spending a lot of time on social media will worsen every aspect of daily life because it will increase our negative thoughts, such as thinking the world is awful, thinking people are stupid (because people mostly post impulsive things), thinking we want something that others have (possessions and experiences). It will increase our anxiety (because we will want to keep looking at our phones) and it will make us feel unsatisfied because of all these thoughts, and because it messes up with our dopamine (reward) system, we will feel more tired and uninterested in life in general.

Quote:

Takuan: “Once your heart is preoccupied, your sword will not be true. Then you will die.”

Interpretation:

Engage in what you’re doing, try not to get distracted, and try to enter into the state of flow* at least once a day.

When we’re doing a task, such as work, reading, or playing videogames, if we keep looking at our cellphone for whatever reason, usually our productivity decreases more than 60%, we take a lot longer to finish what we’re doing, we don’t learn as well what we’re doing, and we get a lot more tired.

If you don’t believe me, watch yourself carefully next time this happens, and then try to put your phone in a drawer in silence, at least for 1-hour periods (also avoid checking any social media early before doing other things, leave that for the afternoon, or just don't), if you do this often, you’ll see what I mean.

When we’re too distracted and don’t practice doing things with no interruptions, we won’t get good at doing anything, such as work, a sport, a board game, anything.

This skill is like a muscle, the more we practice doing activities with no distractions, we will be a lot better at it, we will make less mistakes. Being in the zone* like many sport athletes while doing anything feels great and is great to work this skill.

*Being in the zone, or flow state, is a state of mind in which a person becomes fully immersed in an activity. It usually takes about 20 minutes before you can access this state. I’ve felt it many times while doing sports, working on character animations, and playing certain video games, games like Tetris or "Bullet Hell" games are really good for practicing this skill. This can be achieved at work if you're not being interrupted every 10 minutes.

3

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Quote:

Sekishusai Yagyu: “There is no limit to technique. There is always room for improvement.”

Interpretation:

Whatever you do, you can always get better at it if you keep working on it in a smart way.

Sometimes simply practicing the way one's used to won’t help improve much though. Different approaches, learning different information, and learning skills about different subjects will increase one's general knowledge, and you’ll become better at everything in general.

Even people who are "not talented" at something can work hard and get good at it.

As a side note here. Specialization is good, but overspecialization is a bad idea, someone overspecialized will have a very narrow understanding of the world. An example can be a medic who's great at doing surgeries, but doesn't know much about anything else.

Quote:

Inei Hozoin: “Swimming in the middle of an ocean, one can never realize how vast it truly is.”

Interpretation:

Paying too much attention to one detail, and we’ll miss the bigger picture.

We usually try to achieve things by doing whatever our body and mind dictate at that moment. We can try taking a short break, investigating, thinking it through and then acting. It's most likely this will bring better results.

Quote:

Sekishusai Yagyu: “Invincible. It’s merely a word. To be “invincible”. The more you think about it. The more you squint your eyes in desperation to see, the more obscured the answer becomes.”

Interpretation:

Sometimes we get way too fixated to some ideas or goals.

It’s usually hard to distance ourselves from some ideas because of our culture, our environment, and our biology. I’ve found it very useful to learn basic psychology, philosophy, and biology to better understand myself, other people, and the world. Learning facts from science is also hugely important if we want to better understand everything in general.

Words are a huge simplification of objects and concepts that we probably don’t understand fully. For example, the word “tree”, we use it to refer to a zillion amounts of trees, small trees, big trees, cherry blossoms, oak trees, etc. We can be very biased due to these big simplifications our language does, and because of how each one of us uses language differently.

Taking a distance from our own ideas, our dreams or goals, our usual activities, and learning about random facts, reading a good novel, all these will give us a lot of new insights and will help to avoid being so fixated with the same stuff that can cloud our judgment a lot. What we do daily or often causes us to think or behave in a certain way or to have a specific ideology or tendency, doing something different can have a huge positive impact and help us better understand many things.

Quote:

Musashi: “The “me” in your mind. The story in your mind. That story reflects your own self, your true self. It reflects you as you are now.”

Interpretation:

Be careful, do not think dishonestly, understand what truly is and isn’t.

Sometimes we believe that other people are just like us, and that their situation is like ours, this is not always the case. Talking with people, being honest with them, really listening to what they say, having deep conversations can provide a lot of insights about other people's lives, feelings, and beliefs. Some stories (novels, series, etc.) do the same, but you must pay close attention and ponder on it to really get it. For example, watching some youtubers analyzing characters and events from different series turns out to be a great place to learn.

By understanding that every person is in a different environment from us and have different biology from ours, we can truly get that some people are going through something completely different from us.

Another example; being stressed, angry, or tired won’t leave you with any resources to have empathy for others. I’ve found out I’m really tired and unfriendly right after work. Also, if I use my cellphone (or social networks) a lot during the day, I end up being more moody and tired than I should (it consumes a huge amount of energy and time if you analyze and experience it objectively).

We all have different biases, there’s no such thing as an “unbiased” person or thought, but we can try to better understand everything and have a less biased judgement.

4

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dialogue:

Inei Hozoin: “Young one, you hold such aggression in you. I thought you were going to kill me.”

Musashi: “You’ll have to excuse me, but, you have it all wrong. I felt like you were going to strike me with that hoe. Or was I just imagining things?”

Ine Hozoin: “Bah, you’re still wet behind the ears… It’s that clumsy bloodthirst of yours… Me as well as others—we are only mirrors reflecting your own bloodthirst… Your own bloodthirst turns everyone you encounter against you.”

Interpretation:

The way we behave (usually an unconscious thing) can cause others to be uncomfortable, or even aggressive to us. I try to be more aware of the way I look at other people, what I say, and sometimes even about my body language. I can remember times when other people, women and men have seemed to be troubled by me being there with them (ha). It’s usually a 50/50 thing, it’s not only about you, other people can have upsetting behaviors. But being more aware of the way we behave around other people can help everyone have a better time, simply by staring at someone for a couple of seconds at the wrong time and place, we can make them feel very uncomfortable (at the gym or at work for example).

We can all have a better time by trying to be a bit more easy going. This isn’t easy, it will take a lot of practice. Learning more about people and having more empathy takes time.

*There's a book named The Definitive Book of Body Language by Allan and Barbara Pease that helped me understand a bunch of stuff after reading it and then putting what I had learned into practice a little at a time. I noticed I did a bunch of stuff that was very obvious and that could upset other people. It's a lot of fun seeing what other people do, and how some are very obvious with their body language, some aren't, and some are really hard to figure out.

Quote:

Takuan: “Musashi, you’ve become kinder. You’re getting stronger I see. All truly strong people are kind.”

Interpretation:

Self-confidence is a result from learning information and technique through time, and also a result from being honest with yourself, with others, and from doing things right. There's no need to worry about things like your reputation or about results when you're doing your best and are not lying to other people.

Being kind to others and being generally more calm should come out of those good practices as a result.

Some people confuse being kind with naivety, which is not the case at all, someone self-confident will know how to deal with people that try to take advantage of them by setting limits and stopping them immediately. Besides, being nice to others usually results into them being nicer too, there will always be exceptions.

To further clarify my idea. The “self-confidence” classes or coaches that teach to for example, seduce someone by being dishonest is not real self-confidence, it’s just a pretending game that will only cause a bunch of problems in the long term. On the other hand, assertiveness training is a different thing not to be confused with crappy pretending training, it's something that's useful to many people in many contexts.

5

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Quote:

“There are always crossroads inside the mind. The middle path is the best.”

Interpretation:

When we tend too much towards something, we become extremely biased and don’t consider options that could be best. Social networks (and internet in general) are a good example, they have an incredibly advanced algorithm that throw at you all information that you want to see that’s related to things you like and things you can like, even if it’s fake information. The algorithm is trying to point you in a very specific direction and pushing you more to be in an extreme end of certain ideas, values, or ideologies (making conservatives more conservative, and making liberals more liberals). Besides, they are mind boggling, exhausting, and don’t leave us with anything useful (maybe with a couple of funny memes).

Before eliminating some choices we can make, it’s great to have input from other sources (even listening to ideas from people we don't like and trying to make sense of them), and try not to always listen so much to our own biases like we usually do.

We should try to find a balance between order and chaos, and try to flow, not limiting ourselves too much so we can keep learning, growing, changing (for the best).

I tend to have too much order in my life, when this happens, I get bored, tired, angry, and think about doing crazy things to find some chaos (which is not a good idea). Some other people's lives are 99% chaos, they sleep under 6 hours daily, never get a bunch of important things done, and have eating disorders since their lives don't have any kind of logical structure or order. They could use more structure in their daily lives so they don't end up just wasting a bunch of time daily and feeling tired, or end up doing a lot of random things that lead to nothing.

It’s great to find your weekly activities where you have order, even writing down a daily schedule if necessary, and finding other activities on some weekdays and weekends that will get you “chaos”, this doesn’t mean you have to go out, get drunk, puke, sleep at 6 am, and feel like your brain is going to blow up the next day. It can be small things like going out with friends for a couple hours, doing something different from the usual with your partner, taking a hike, trying to learn something new, taking a class, traveling somewhere, etc. (things you don't usually do and don't know what to expect of them).

Quote:

Musashi: “What is the meaning of “strength”? It’s to have a mind that doesn’t sway, while continuing to move and change.”

Interpretation:

In order to achieve anything, we need to continuously work on it, progressively (this is probably the most important thing many people don’t get, everything must be worked on starting with baby steps), and not giving up if it’s something important, and something realistically achievable.

This is a hard process, learning new information, practicing, making mistakes, learning from them, making more mistakes, moving on. Becoming our better selves by embracing new information instead of rejecting anything new on the spot and just keeping our old ideas, learning to distinguish from useful and not useful information, lies from truth.

All this needs to be done to have “strength”, this is what you’d need to do to learn a language at an advanced level, to get good at coding, to continuously work on and improve the relationship you have with your partner, to get good at your job, etc.

I have another post where I talk a lot more about this last quote and related ideas:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I’ll finish by paraphrasing Musashi from The Book of Five Rings:

-Training morning and evening will give you what will seem to be miraculous skill.

[lunellum]

I'm so glad you asked! And so spontaneous, not at all prompted or anything ;D

I'm currently traveling so this will be a bit messy but a few key points.

About the historical context:

First off, it can be hard to find sources for what daily life was like in the european medieval period, especially if you want to know more about "common" people (not nobles or clergy). That sort of information was just usually not written down let alone preserved. That said, we can find hints in surviving stories, manuscripts, illustrations etc.

Let's address the elephant in the room: the game of thrones-y gritty, dark fantasy/historical fiction that claims all the violence and rape is historically accurate. It's not. I'm not sure how else to say that except... very little about that is accurate to any historical period.

Relatedly, the image people have of the middle ages as drab and brown, see also the complaint that the show is too colourful. Also untrue, it's just that we don't have a lot of surviving examples and those we do have will have discoloured significantly. One of the most difficult colours to achieve was actually true black. If you wanted green, red, yellow, greenish blue, those are all perfectly doable using natural dyes. A Google search will show you many examples.

Regarding the silly and horny accusations: one interesting source is old joke books. I've personally worked with a joke book from the 1600s so that's not quite medieval but I think it's still a good indicator that people are people. In these joke books, you will find that historical people are cruel, funny, horny, silly, and weirdly obsessed with poop jokes. There is no point in history where people weren't making stupid sex jokes. Including in "high" culture.

Another good source is the literature we DO have. For some basic level examples: Chaucer, Reynard the fox and (yes) the Decameron. The problem with all of these is that a fair portion of the jokes and innuendos will be couched in unfamiliar language. To a modern reader, it simple doesn't register as weird when, in a story about a priest, his live-in housekeeper enters the room. Friends, that's his mistress. His mistress he's not supposed to have because he's supposed to be celibate. The joke is that the clergy are horny and corrupt.

Fortunately, there are annotated versions that point these jokes out. Unfortunately, it's hard to get a good one.

Now, the Decameron (the book) is actually much more explicit about its erotic context than most, which is why I'm so baffled by the critics claiming the show is too horny. The source material is horny as hell, what are they talking about?

Finally, I would like to point out medieval marginalia. Just have a Google, look at the images. Are you still gonna claim these people aren't silly? Sure, some of them have an allegorical meaning, but I'm pretty sure the monkey with the trumpet up its ass is just funny.

About the Netflix show directly:

Most importabtly, the show is NOT a one on one adaptation of the book. I think that's what's tripping a lot of people up, but it's not intending or pretending to be that.

The original Decameron is a frame story of ten nobles sitting around telling eachother stories. Each noble serves as a stereotype of a human trait or virtue (except for Dioneo, who is the wildcard). The stories themselves are often short morality tales or bawdy anecdotes. This is, quite frankly, not the most interesting thing to turn into a show! So they didn't!

The show changes around most of the characters, omits some and adds some others. It adds a lot more meat to the frame story and leaves out the storytelling competition except for 2 instances.

The first one: Pampinea's party game. This one serves to illustrate the dysfunctional situation at the villa and each of the characters' worst traits. It is a competition, and she wins regardless of who actually deserves it. No one dares counter.

The second one: at the end, with the survivors. This one illustrates the balance they've found despite all the tragedy and loss. They're sitting together without a clear leader. They're sleeping rough but they find their joy in each other's company. It's not a competition anymore.

Also, there are a lot of nods to the stories in the original text. I can't look up any examples right now but the barrel thing is fresh in my mind.

In my opinion, a lot of the themes they added are wonderful (family, found and otherwise, finding love after grief, breaking free from abusive relationships and abusive friendships) but would not read well to the audience contemporary to the original Decameron so no, that part is not accurate. That's okay! That's what adaptations are all about.

And to circle back to the accusation that it's too silly: yes, parts of the show are very silly. But there is an underlying tragedy and bittersweet core that becomes especially obvious in the last two episodes. I would just like to point out Panfilo's steady decline and Misia's realisation of her situation. These people are fucked up. They're trying, and sometimes all that does is make things worse. But they're not giving up until the bitter end.

Regarding the "accuracy": it's very obvious that the creators of this show did their research. The party games, the costuming, the noble/servant relationships. These people know what they're doing and I'm impressed.

And finally: should anyone bring up the diversity of the cast and characters, the european middle ages had brown and black and asian people. The middle ages had people who engaged in gay acts (even if they didn't have the concept of a gay identity). And even if it didn't, all kinds of people deserve to be in all kinds of stories. The end.

I've seen some folks criticise the Decameron (the Netflix show) for not being "authentic" and "accurate" enough for

being too colourful

being too horny

being too silly and not serious enough when it comes to the subject of death and pandemic...

To which I would like to say they've clearly never looked into actual medieval history, culture and literature.

[kingfakey]

THE PINK SERIES - CHAPTER 1, PART 1

Trigger warnings for: family arguments, mentions of family death. Reader discretion advised. Wordcount: 1600.

OCTOBER 21, 2015

If you’ve ever felt like The Universe is working against you, there may very well be a point to your paranoia. If you ever felt like something wasn't a coincidence, I’m sorry to tell you you may have a point.

I’d like to tell you that The Universe is a benevolent character. I'd like to tell you that It takes your thoughts and feelings into consideration. I wish it were the type of person that minds Its manners, holds open doors, says please and thank you, and cares.

But It isn’t, and It doesn’t. 

The Universe is an asshole. It’s got a sick sense of humor. Why do you think you only run into your exes when you haven’t showered in three days? That touch of sick irony is the work of The Universe. It's idea of funny is pushing people in front of trains.

That’s not to say It’s concerned with you. You may actually be paranoid, I’m afraid (and there’s nothing I can do about that). The Universe isn’t responsible for every bad thing that’s ever happened to you. 

I'm sorry, but there's nobody to blame for their death. 

You ought to consider yourself lucky.

When The Universe takes interest in something, it’s never pretty. It wreaks havoc, in the form of relentless circumstances we call coincidence. 

Coincidence is easier to grasp than fate. 

It’s easier to dismiss, too.

It should serve as some sort of comfort, though, to know that The Universe isn’t interested in you. No, you’re not on Its list of pet projects. There’s no ant farm with your name on it that the Universe picks up and shakes until your world is in shambles.

There is an ant farm labeled Duffy, though.

Boy, if you think you’ve got it bad… The Universe has really got it out for this lot.

It’s been watching them for years. In all actuality, in the long run, relative to The Universe, twenty one years is the blink of an eye. But as it so happens, The Universe isn’t the most patient of natural forces.

On the contrary, The Universe is quite childish despite being eons old. As ancient as It is, It’s still prone to temper tantrums when it doesn’t get Its way.

Rain streaked streets breathe in the night air. Steam floods the pavement and mingles with the midnight mist of the city by the bay, like condensation on one's breath. Rain in San Francisco – how original. 

But in defense of The Universe, creativity’s dead. Believe it or not, It’s not actually responsible for the weather. 

The rain sets the streets aglow, with fluorescent neon signs bleeding onto wet streets. Grease-stained asphalt has a kiss of color in the dark by headlights. Signs for 24/7 pharmacies, cannabis dispensaries, and burnt-out bulbs of street lamps blink. The city is alive as it ever has been.

San Francisco is advancing fast into the twenty first century. It’s not the same little town by the ocean with the fog and the trolleys anymore. It’s louder. bolder, more mature, with less fear of falling into the sea.

To the other billions of people on the planet, it’s any other night, but to one Englishman, it’s the end of the world. The Universe has been watching him the past few years, like a television show that’s always running. It only tunes in when there's nothing better to watch.

The Universe has tuned in at the perfect time.

The apartment is cramped and perched on the corner of the building. It's so close to the traffic stop outside that light dances through the window. The lights are bright enough to cast a sickly glow about the room. It cycles through crimson, emerald and gold. Each is as bad as the next. The menacing glow of red is no better or worse than the yellow light seeping across the skin like jaundice.

If he weren’t so used to them, they’d be a nuisance, but Edgar Duffy isn’t one to dwell on things he can’t change. He doesn’t dwell much of anything, actually. As boys go, he’s nothing special. He’s not the most handsome, nor tall, nor smart. But he's handsome enough, tall enough, smart enough. 

He was enough, but never too much.

As of eighteen seconds ago, it was his birthday. So far, being nineteen doesn’t feel much different than being eighteen.

For a moment there, he thought it might. He thought things might be different, for once. His hopes had been too high to think a birthday with his brother could go any other way. Couldn’t they go one year without lapsing into their pattern of clenched jaws and grit teeth?

As brothers go, Edgar and Ivan Duffy aren’t the type you write home about. They’re more the type you write about in passive-aggressive posts on social media. They're the type to give thoughtless gifts to each other, bought last minute at the corner store. Takeout from the place he hates is paired with a cheap bottle of wine, and a store-bought cake.

If Ivan paid more attention to his brother, he might have a clue about what Edgar likes. The gesture is impersonal and empty. Neither of them have fooled themselves into thinking it’s anything but. 

They made attempts at talking, all feeble and failed. Edgar and Ivan found that they had little more to bond over these days than schoolwork. 

It's obvious that neither of them want to live together.

Edgar stares ahead at the half-full takeout box on the table, heavy brow set into a furrow. All these empty gestures are the sort of thing he’s learned not to dwell on. Instead, he's taught himself to accept this as one of the innumerable things in his life he cannot change. They were fixed and factual things he had to accept. That, or let it destroy him.

Like bad birthdays, filled with lazy attempts at siblinghood. That, and compulsory, celebratory dinners with Ivan. After nineteen years, it’s finally sunk in – some things don’t want to change. 

His lips purse into a line, and at long last the words sitting on Edgar's tongue for the last hour spill out:

“You should go.”

The pair of them serve as a harsh contrast to one another. Where Ivan is a fan of black and leather, Edgar prefers tartan and denim. Where Ivan prefers chocolate, Edgar would rather have vanilla. 

By no means is Edgar tall, but he towers over his older brother. Depending on whom you ask, he’s the better looking of the two, too. His features fit his face, unlike Ivan, whose ears stick out too far and whose brow hangs too heavy. Wide eyes sit deep in sunken sockets, with lips bowed into a permanent pout. The look is complete with ill-aligned teeth and rodential overbite. 

The older Duffy looks a bit pathetic slouching beside his brother. Edgar’s perfect posture, mane of chestnut hair, and green eyes was a startling difference. He made Ivan’s swampy, dark eyes and thicket of black curls look like sickly mange.  It didn't help that Ivan had haphazardly shaved the sides of his head.

While the relation is undeniable, it’s not willing.

Not on Ivan’s part, at least– not if he can help it. Ever since Edgar ripped his way out of their mother, Ivan made it his life’s work to separate himself.

Ivan may be two years older, but he’s not acting it. Sipping wine out of a red plastic cup doesn’t help his case in the slightest. “Go? You can’t kick me out of my own flat.” For whatever reason, his accent’s harsher than his brothers, thicker and far more clumsy on the tongue. It could be the wine staining his lips purple, but Edgar’s always suspected it’s for show. "It's your birthday."

“I don’t want you here ‘cause you’re supposed to be here,” he begins, blundering on forward. Quick! Before he can lose momentum. Edgar’s never been one for boldness. “I want you here ‘cause you wanna be here, not ‘cause you’re supposed to. You can go if you want– don’t force yourself to stay here on my account." Edgar's hands fly into the air. "‘Sides, you’ve got plans, haven’t you? You only wanted to do it tonight so you could get it out of the way and blow me off tomorrow.” His tongue clicks against his teeth as he sits forward, grabbing for his cup to wash the taste of salt out of his mouth. “Right?”

Like a deer in the headlights, Ivan rubs a hand at his jaw and looks about the room. He'll try anything if it’ll buy him time,  if it will spare him having to deal with this. Oh, he’d really rather not. “I mean,” Ivan heaves a sigh. “G wanted to do something… It’s our first anniversary, y’know–”

There wasn’t a nerd alive with a bigger heart and more criticism in his veins than the likes of G Cooper. A year later, Ivan was still there. It wasn’t like it was serious, only comfortable and convenient, lazy and warm. A year, no doubt, is a bigger deal to G than it is to Ivan. As he tends to do, Ivan fails to realize exactly how big of a deal.

Edgar is quick to steer him back onto the path. He had decided early on that he didn’t like G. Something about him never sat right. “Don’t change the subject, Ivan. Don’t drag him into this.”

Ivan’s eyes narrow with a look towards Edgar, mouth taut. Can you blame him for trying?

“Am I right or not?”

“Well–”

“Ivan.”