#long terms projects ahoy | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

vicomaco · 15 days

Text

Ahoy reader, I'm here to vent. My second favorite season is coming, outside the window the sky is showering washing away the sweltering warmth and it inspires me to do the same with my suffocating self, now in pre-mid life (33) and confuse on the direction, tired of all those coats I've put on my shoulders without consent of a self now lost inside the textile. I just spent 2 or more hours of a working day cleaning my tumblr page, I made all of my past drawings private. Doing so I retraced the 10 or more years spent in this platform through different life phases and artistic epiphanies. I realized how much I forgot of myself, especially the joy I had drawing my pictures in my sparetime. Since I remember I have always had a sketchbook and a trousse of pens and pencils on me, everywhere. During elementary, college, high schools, I remember long train trips filling pages with doodles and thoughts. I stopped filling sketchbooks around eight years ago, close to my diploma, I had countless short deadlines, many white nights and a lot of stress. But I still had school assignements and side projects with friends both done in traditional techniques. No more traditional drawing for me, but still drawing for side fun projects. The school trained me to be an illustrator, more than a comic artist. To experiment and test different tools, my favorite still are inks and gouaches. Life after school became all about comics. And comics, at the - fucking long- beginning of your carreer are 90% ridiculously poor payed. The reasonable choice I took to balance that with the time spent on each page was to learn to actually make them on photoshop, safer if you have to erase, remove pages, redo faces. I didn't have much spare time, but when I had I used it experimenting brushes and learning a bit better the programs while making doodles for myself. No, actually a big changement happened: social networks. Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram and all. Part of me was doing them for myself and in order to evolve the technique, part of me was doing them to display them online. The quest for the "likes" serotonin-dispenser just started.

Now, in bigger comic projects, with bigger life events, and less daily energy I have no spare time, I'm full into professional work. Written by someone else, I'm full time into someone else's world. Comics are already life-sucking, but a life-sucking project when it's not even yours it sucks even the ground under your feet. Now I watch, I don't see, I execute, I'm unable to observe anymore. So I don't post on socials anymore, I'm being consumed by them while consuming time, brainless, zombiengly lurking memes and other distractions from the void this job created in me. I don't remember what I like, what I want to draw, what I would write on a sketchbook and god how I miss traditional techniques, I miss having my own ideas, my personal vertical projects and my personal horizontal purpose, I miss the joy behind my work, I don't remember myself. I've never been consistent, nor obsessed too much on something. I've always be in love with the act of drawing, the state of mind you have while doing it, the beautiful line, the beautiful palette. Every subject could be nicely done. I deeply respect artists with the same style, experimenting inside their comfort zone, obsessed with a subject and pursuing it year after year after year. They are coherent, awhile ago they chose one only coat and they decide to wear only that, and year after year it fits them always better. I myself I'm much better than before in terms of style, composition, lines, narration. The appearence of my style is much more solid, the inside is void. My old drawings in this blog were impressive, they could tell the joy I had experimenting. The oldest ones, the traditional ones, were the happiest. My technical traditional skills were better than my actual digital ones and the soul behind each sketch was so alive! I removed the old drawings from my blog not because I'm ashamed by them. But because I had a pity looking at this decline over and over, I wanted a -maybe?- fresh start. Fall always offers me new resolutions and will for changes, now I'm imploding, I'm sick of memes, I'm sick of stupidities, I'm sick of my poor time management. I want to come back in tumblr because it was, to my remindings, the healthier of the social networks, the less silly (at least my dashboard), the more balanced in aesthetic and content. I want to try to let it help me venting or finding myself again, I guess. Are you experiencing my same sickness of the pointless time-sucking web?

#vent #comingout #comingofage #art

5 notes · View notes

bellybiologist · 6 months

Text

April 2024 Patreon Announcements! Changes Ahoy!

Okay oof, April is here. I'm tracking the days until i get some of my outstanding bills paid. Just gotta hang on for a few more months!

Some notable announcements in terms of commissions and restructuring! (This is a long one, so please bare with me!) EDIT: I forgot its April 1st, so as to some assurance so people don't think I'm pulling legs, the updates are forreal.

=====

Firstly, Patreon-specific announcements. Monthly Fills starting this month will be free to view! The Feedback form (which is still open! Feel free to leave some if you haven't) points to people being fine with, and still willing to support me if patreon content was free, so I'm going to see how this goes! Voting will still be Patron only, and higher tiers will for now focus on voter benefits. This may change in the future pending on support and feedback! Fills and Doodles will NOT be directly posted to Patreon. I will be creating google drive folders that will have all the fills from now on. They will be posted to my medias too (discord, tumblr, pixiv, previews on twitter/X, pixiv), but spicier ones will not be posted where they wouldn't be allowed.

April 2024's Poll will be up shortly! and this month's Theme is Prank/April Fool's with the top 3 winners getting single stage fills! I know that we're supposed to be getting a sequence this month, but I want to more immediately address the fact that people are often displeased with the sequence winners due to kink and character tastes (understandably!). See below! I will still be doing Sequences, but they will be longer form projects separated from monthly content and having no deadlines so I can work on them at my leisure. They will also have their own polls which will only be repeated once the previous sequence is finished. =====

Commission Repricing Has Been Decided! Due to feedback, I've decided to implement a more moderate increase to commission pricing. Essentially, Waist up and Full body figures will be getting a 25% increase (to $50 and $75 respectively). Busts will remain the same price, as it's not a popular option, and some Extras will be receiving slight price increases. The form has yet to be updated, and the new prices won't come into effect until I announce that its done. I will also be offering an additional option that is less expensive than the normal figure prices, but pricier than the YCHs, where they'd be done similarly to the weekly stream doodles (ie. Very Quick one-session-and-done style pieces).

=====

Now the usual announcements! Due to fills becoming free, no new pieces will be going to the higher tiers. I'll still release the older fills slowly, but eventually, everything will be free to view! As such...

April 2022 and 2023's fills will be released and free to view! As per usual, I'll bulk upload them onto my drive and pixiv, and spread them out over the course of the week on tumblr and discord (twitter/X site getting previews). I'll also be putting up an April New Uploads Folder in my drive so people can keep up with what goes up this month, while deleting the February Uploads folder.

A new Reward Request Post will be going up, too! Patrons are free to leave one in there even if you already have one from last month's! February's requests will have expired though! So if those haven't been drawn, you will need to re-suggest them. March's will expire when May rolls around. See this document to see whats on the list, what expired, and what has been done!

=====

As always, thanks for the support! I'm hoping these changes will be favorably received by many of you! (and please bare with me as I updated all the stuff that needs updating 😅

#patreon announcements #announcements

2 notes · View notes

renee-writer · 1 year

Text

Loved Her First Chapter 70

AO3

He sits over the desk, quill in his hand. He is writing to his sister telling her about the birth of Grace, Mercy, and Hope. Just writing their names makes him smile. Their darling granddaughters, their sweet virtues.

He had been shocked by their coming. Aye, Claire has warned him that they would come early, still… to be born in the middle of the ocean, two months early, it was terrifying. He is relieved, beyond measure, that they are healthy. Tiny, oh Lord, are they tiny, but Claire assures him that they are healthy. Hope’s scare seemed to be the only issue.

He dips the quill back in the ink pot and returns to the letter.

“Faith remains so happy but exhausted. Brianna has offered to be a wet nurse but, so far, she is committed to seeing to them herself. Claire says it is best for them, even though it makes Faith languished beyond measure.” He lifts his quill as he thinks.

Two weeks after their birth, Faith is confined to bed. She raises for the chamber pot and that is about it. Claire told him that as long as she is able to raise, that she is fine.

“She needs time to recover. Bedding down with her babies, bounding with them, is the absolute best thing she can be doing.”

“Ian is so proud. He walks around, his chest out, a constant smile on his face. It is well earned. They are us, dear sister, though how can they be otherwise.” He chuckles. “Oh dear Jenny, they are so beautiful. Red headed with the Mackenzie eyes, so lovely. Brianna is sketching then, along with Fin. I will send you and Ian some of her drawings so you can see our grandchildren.”

He stretches. Claire ‘s medicine is keeping this voyage bearable. Nevertheless, he is anxious for stable land under his feet. The captain promises they are less then a week away from land.

He returns to his letter.

“We should be land ahoy in a week. It will be a relief. The twins are walking. They need stable ground under them. Marsali is at term and really wishes to have her child in land. We all look forward to stretching our limbs out. To starting our lives in the colonies. To being able to send these missives out.

We miss you dear sister. Please give our regards to Ian and your children.

With love from the Atlantic

Your loving brother,

James Alexander Malcolm Mackenzie Fraser.”

He seals it, placing it on the stack with the others. He then raises and goes to check on his daughter and newest grandbabies.

#my writing #outlander fanfic #omgbarbiegurl's and i's #loved her first #chapter 70 #jamie and claire #cannon divergence #outlander fandom

6 notes · View notes

z34l0t · 1 year

Text

The Unbearable Heaviness of Being

Source

Feeling Doom-Drone Classic Earth 2's Tremors 20 Years On

Dave Segal

Possibly more influential than Nirvana. Dave Harwell (left), Dylan Carlson (right).

Can you feel it? That massive, mind-blotting buzz from the planet's core? That's Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Version. Sub Pop released this record by Seattle duo Earth in early 1993. Its truculent tremors still ripple through the heavy-music underground. Nobody's made a big deal about 2013 being the landmark album's 20th anniversary. We need to redress this oversight. Admittedly, Earth 2 is no Nevermind in terms of sales (understatement, ahoy!), but its impact on subterranean metal may be just as historical as Nirvana's breakout LP has been in mainstream circles.

On Earth 2, guitarist Dylan Carlson—with help from bassist Dave Harwell—invented ambient metal, a devouring swarm of down-tuned guitar and bass dirges that coalesced into a threnody for forward motion... and possibly the human race. Never has sonic stasis been so domineering and exhaustive. It is Metal Machine Music as interpreted by a La Monte Young acolyte. Its infernal growl makes the Stooges' "We Will Fall" seem like sheerest New Age and Black Sabbath's "Iron Man" sound like bubblegum pop. Perhaps only Melvins' Lysol rivals it for sheer mass. Unlike most metal, Earth 2 insinuates doom. It needs no lyrics to convey the dread aura at its molten center. Earth 2 pulverized metal's cartoonishness and took the genre to the ashram.

To commemorate this vastly influential recording, The Stranger interviewed some of the key figures in the making of Earth 2, as well as a musician inspired by it. (Sub Pop boss Jonathan Poneman was unavailable for comment. Harwell did not respond to an interview request.)

BRUCE PAVITT

Sub Pop cofounder

What were your first thoughts when you heard Earth 2? The first time I heard the Earth tapes, I was struck by the conceptual nature of the tracks. Ambient metal. I was fascinated by the extreme nature and artistic vision of the band.

Did you and Jonathan Poneman have any arguments about whether Sub Pop should release the album? Jon and I both recognized that we needed some "sub" to go along with the "pop." It was important for the label to find a balance between the commercial and the adventurous.

Did Earth 2 present any particularly difficult marketing problems? Do you know how many copies it's sold? As for selling it, we felt that people would either get it or not. We didn't have high expectations. By allowing for elaborate packaging (double album, clear vinyl), we hoped that it would attract the interest of collectors and those who appreciated high-concept projects. At the time of release, we only pressed 2,000 copies of the record, which we knew would sell out. We did manage to sell some additional CDs... most likely another 2,000.

Do you view Earth 2 as Sub Pop's most extreme release? I do think that [Earth 2] is the most extreme recording ever put out by Sub Pop.

Where do you think Earth 2 fits in the grand scheme of rock music? I've always felt very proud of Earth 2. In the grand scheme of rock music, I think it stands next to Metal Machine Music by Lou Reed. Conceptual, ambient, challenging. My favorite Earth memory is when they opened up for the Ultra Lame Fest show at the Paramount in '92. Although they opened for more popular bands like Mudhoney, it was amazing to see them perform for a sold-out crowd at such a prestigious venue.

DYLAN CARLSON

Earth mastermind

What was your state of mind when you went into the studio to record Earth 2? There were a couple of ideas. We'd already done long songs. So we wanted to do one album-length piece. Unfortunately, this was before Pro Tools; you only get 30 minutes max per reel of tape, running at 15 ips [inches per second]. That's why there are three parts to [Earth 2]. At the time we were doing that, the CD was like 75 minutes long, and we wanted to fill the entire CD. Those were two of the parameters we were working with. The first stuff we had done at a little eight-track studio. This was our first time using two-inch tape, so we wanted to use every track. The idea was to try to make it as big as the live thing that we did. It's funny, because when I was working with Stuart [Hallerman of Avast! Recording Company] again on Angels of Darkness, we were talking about how if we had to do that album now, how differently we would have gone about it. We loaded all our gear in there that we used in the live show, then turned everything up and did a bunch of stuff that is technically incorrect [laughs]. We mic'd all the speakers individually and ran them to separate tracks. It turns out there's a bunch of fade cancellation and stuff like that that we didn't take into account. And then realizing later on that if you crank up a small amp in the studio and record it, it'll sound bigger than cranking up a big amp in the studio. So we basically set up and played live with that crazy mic'ing going on. Any tracks that weren't filled later, we went back and did some overdubs.

What was the rationale behind using drums very sparingly? We didn't have a drummer at the time, and I got tired of programming the drum machine. The first two tracks, when we played 'em live, had a drum machine, but I didn't really want to record with the drum machine. And I figured it would take tracks away from guitar.

The idea was to come up with overwhelming waves of guitar and bass? Yeah. On ["Like Gold and Faceted"], we tried to have some drums, but it didn't work out well, so we ended up using cymbal washes, but that was it for percussion.

Did you conceive of this album as having a functional value, as the text on the back of the record suggests? That kind of came after we did it, when I was coming up with the cover. I had worked at a record store at the time [Peaches, then Beehive], over there on 45th. I grabbed a bunch of stuff when I worked there, and a series of meditational cassettes Atlantic Records did in the '70s caught my eye. It seemed to fit the mood. There was one that was sea sounds, one that was nature sounds. It went along with a series of Medical records that I had. Stuart mentioned that our songs seemed to be part of something else; they fade up and fade out, but sound like they keep going. I like that idea. It would be like this was a record that was part of a series. But I don't know where the series is; this is the only one that survived. It's funny when I listen to Earth 2—not that I listen to it that often or anything—we were trying to make this really huge record, but in a weird way it has this claustrophobic feel to me. Because of the way we did it, it has this weird murkiness. If I had to do it now, it would sound a lot more expansive.

Do you ever perform those songs live anymore? No. We haven't played those in many a moon.

Is it because you don't want to wallow in nostalgia or is it because you're so far out of that mind-set? Some people had mentioned the idea of us doing that this year. Since Earth is still a going concern, I don't really want to do that. I'm not really into that idea. It would be one thing if Earth had stopped at a certain point and we were coming back. But the fact that we're still going, revisiting stuff... I mean, we revisit stuff in the live set, but when we do 'em, they're updated and altered for the situation. With Earth 2, those would be really hard to do that with because they're just one thing. I don't feel the need to repeat it. I'd like to be the one band that's not playing an album from 20 years ago. [Laughs] It makes sense to me if you're a band that has a hit or hits back then and you're playing the hits for the fans. [Earth 2] is not like that. It's funny how so many people now are like, "Earth 2, Earth 2," but at the time, not many people got it.

It's acquired this [reputation] rather than starting out thinking it was this. People may view it as a seminal work, and that's great. I'm glad people like it, but I still feel there are better Earth records and more to come. So maybe if Earth in the future are doing a last tour, maybe then we'd break it out. But until then, I really don't want to do that.

What about the photograph in the inner part of the CD with you and Dave Harwell aiming the guns at the camera? It seems at odds with everything else on the cover. We were both firearms enthusiasts. It was a jarring bit of aggression in what was otherwise a fairly soporific album cover. [Laughs]

Whose work is that on the front cover? I had originally picked out some other photos from a book, but trying to get the licensing from the photographer was proving difficult. So I went through a book of stock photography with Art Aubrey. They weren't free, but there was just a flat fee. I tried to find photos that were close to the ones originally wanted, which were from this travel book about India. There was a picture of this castle in Rajasthan that has all these little mini towers hanging off the wall. The pill bottles had the same effect. Obviously at the time I had narcotic interests. [Laughs] The front photo is a picture of Mongolia.

Do you view Earth 2 as the band's ultimate statement? Maybe the first iteration of the band, but even then I'm not sure, because Pentastar I really like a lot. But I don't think it's Earth's ultimate statement. That's another thing about redoing stuff like that—a record is a snapshot of a certain time and mental state and environment. You can't re-create that. There was some talk of doing Earth 2 stuff again this year. The only idea that sounded cool to me, I had been talking with Lori [Goldston] about doing an arrangement of it for strings and an orchestra. Something like that would be appealing to me more than a "here we are cranking out the hits on tour" kind of thing.

If an avant-garde classical ensemble could do Metal Machine Music, it seems like you could get Earth 2 into some slightly different context and it would sound just as good. There was talk with ATP about doing that. It's okay to mention now because it never happened. It looked like it wasn't going to work out. They could sense I wasn't super-psyched about it. The logistics were proving to be difficult.

What did your musician friends—particularly Kurt Cobain—think of Earth 2 when it came out? Kurt was kind of in the midst of exploding. [Laughs] Nirvana were not in town very much at that time. You never really know when you play stuff for your friends: They say they like it, but who knows? I can like people and not like their band, but a lot of people you can't do that with. They think that if you like them as friends and you say you don't like their band, they get all huffy or get in a snit about it. I've always been like, I can like you as a friend, but I don't have to dig what you do musically.

Whatever happened to Dave Harwell? I tried to contact him, but he never responded. I see him every now and then—not as buds, but around town. This one time I saw him a couple of years ago, I said, "What's up?" and he acted like I didn't exist. [Laughs] For some reason, he and Joe Preston have some ax to grind. I've never quite figured out why. Back then, there were people I actually fucked over, and I get along with them fine now. Slim Moon, too... I don't know what I did that made them so angry at me. I've never had any ill will toward any of them. I don't know what's up.

Do you think that this album has received its proper due from critics? It's not for me to say what its proper due is. People seem to revere it and mention it quite highly. A lot of people say they were influenced by it. I can't complain. I'm glad people dig it. It took a while, but it's always nice when your work is appreciated.

Do you think Earth 2 was the hardest one to accomplish of all your albums, or the easiest? Hallerman said you guys would join him in the control room while the guitar and bass were going. He was kind of surprised. Earth 2 went pretty easily. (A) The budget was small; (B) we didn't have a ton of studio time. The first two tracks we'd played live, so we had 'em pretty down. The hardest part was playing the first two without any rhythms, since we had a rhythm track to play it live. That was the most difficult aspect of it. And then trying to figure out the weird ways to get as many tracks as possible without... Nowadays, obviously, I would book studio time and do a lot of overdubbing, whereas back then we didn't have that luxury, so we have to get all these at once—especially trying to overdub on a 15- or 20-minute track. It's not like you can do a lot of punch-ins and stuff. It would get pretty messy and mind-warping. But it did go pretty smoothly. The fact that we were young and Stuart was young and willing to try crazy stuff that we'd probably know better about now helped. We were excited to be in the studio with someone paying for our record to be made rather than us paying for it.

Do you remember how Sub Pop reacted when they first heard the record? My relationship with Sub Pop had always sort of been with Bruce, who was the more adventurous, experimental guy. Jonathan's strengths were knowing what would sell—he definitely had an ear for pop and hard rock. They seemed into it, especially Bruce. Bruce asked us to be on the label. They put a lot of effort into it. They did the nice vinyl version and made some nice shirts for it. It didn't get a lot of reviews at the time, other than British press. I remember being excited because the header said, "Slow Death, Immense Decay." Any reference to a Slayer song in a review of something I did I was pretty happy about.

STUART HALLERMAN

Earth 2 engineer, owner of Avast! Recording Company

Can you discuss the recording sessions for Earth 2? Did things go smoothly? What was the mood like in the studio when the tracks were being laid down? It went quite smoothly. They had a plan laid out. It was mostly the two of them—Dave and Dylan. Some things took me by surprise. After tuning up their guitars and getting a good roar going, it was time to get the first bass and guitar tracks; I walked back to the control room, and they followed me there and sat down and said it was time to roll tape [laughs]. The guitars were being played by EBows out there. Okay, interesting. I hit "record," and that was the bed of the first piece of music. Then they went back to retune their guitars and got the EBows going again and again followed me back into the control room. They said, "All right, that'll be our second track." I thought, "What have I gotten myself into here? This is going to be the most boring week on earth." It was already an interesting mood there, but as soon as the layers of the two instruments two times were there, the magic tapestry began to appear. So while filling reels of tape with sounds that way, it was a very relaxed vibe. I wish more days went by like that.

Were there overdubs or was it all just done in real time? Did you go back later and do some editing? They did the background tapestry of the layers of drones and EBow tracks and they did multitrack layers of riffs and parts over that that they played. It was done to tape—two-inch 16-track back in those days. No editing, really.

Did this music present any special challenges to you? It seemed pretty unprecedented up to that point. Patience. One of the stated things of Earth at the time was to out-Melvin the Melvins. I'm appreciative of both the fast Melvins and later the slow Melvins, but that was a noble experiment.

Did you feel like something momentous was happening during the recording of Earth 2? Did it stand out among the sessions you'd done? Not in the way the question would necessarily be wanting me to say, "Yeah." To me, it just seemed like this really cool drone record that I personally liked when it was done. I'd put it on in my living room for roommates or friends or visitors at appropriate moments—maybe late at night or just at a certain place in the evening—put this on and people would say, "What's this?" They'd pay attention to it and then give me this weird look, like, "Why are you doing this to us?" Four minutes later, they'd say, "This is cool." They'd relax into it.

To me, it was almost a parlor trick or experimental music, lovely in its own little porcupine way. It faded into obscurity, and then [in 2003 Autofact Records] reissued it and the label wanted me to write liner notes for it. I had a story or two—the preproduction meeting and first day of the session and whatnot, a few anecdotes, a short remembrance of the making of. Then, while checking the spelling of the members, I learned that unbeknownst to me, in the intervening years, around the world, people were doing doom-drone rock. I was pretty unaware of that. I knew about Sunn O))) and Boris and stuff like that, but didn't really get that there was this whole genre of this stuff. It might've even been before Sunn O))) and Boris. The momentous thing was there, but I was certainly taken by surprise that anyone had noticed or had spawned a genre.

Has anything you've worked on since then surpassed Earth 2 in sheer intensity and heaviness? Sunn O))) and Boris, the planets that orbit around Earth. There's some bombastic stuff that attempts to out-Melvins Earth. There was a Sunn O)))/Boris split record and one of the joking ideas was to release it instead of in a 5.1 surround sound, in 1.5 mono plus five subwoofers. For a moment we thought, "Why wouldn't we do that?" There was a mocking one-tenth-serious proposal to do that with the Sunn O)))/Boris split.

STEPHEN O'MALLEY

Guitarist for Earth-influenced band Sunn O)))

What thoughts were going through your mind the first time you heard Earth 2? What sort of associations did this music trigger in your head? I was living in a house in the U-District. A friend of mine, Curtis Pitts, worked at Sub Pop. He'd come over and hang out. I lived with six people at one of these terrible college houses. He brought over a promo of Earth 2. He wanted to give it to me because Dylan was wearing a Morbid Angel T-shirt on the promo photo. I was really into death metal. He thought I would respond to it. I did, but in a quite different way. I think I was 19 or something. It was my first year at the University of Washington. I was totally getting into LSD and black metal, as a graduation from death metal. Earth 2 was very different from anything I'd heard before. It kind of fit into that frame somehow. I didn't have any real experience with experimental music, so probably like a lot of people who got into that, we were coming from metal. It's kind of a gateway into minimalist music and experimental music—something that now over the years I've been educated on. But at the time, hearing purely instrumental guitar music was rare, especially in this format that I know now is referencing La Monte Young and raga music and various other types of meditational music. To a 19-year-old death-metal kid, it sounded like slow Slayer. Melvins had done some stuff like that, right around the same period, actually, but Melvins were always clearly a rock band. Earth 2 was the most non-rock album that they did. It's the most abstract album they did. Although some of the rock stuff they did on Pentastar is pretty abstract.

I actually saw the Earth duo of Dylan and Dave Harwell play at that time at the Sub Pop Ultra Lame Fest. I think they played right before Mudhoney and right after Seaweed. Earth played some riffs that I recognized from Earth 2, but the audience was not into it. It was at the Paramount Theatre, and after a stage-diving Seaweed set, it was like, "What the fuck is this?" [Laughs]

Did Earth 2 sound to you like an ultimate statement, a kind of ground zero for heavy music? No, it never did. I think people give it more credit than it deserves. I think it's a great experimental record. I don't know if Dylan was trying to make an ultimate statement about music. I think he was trying to follow his ideas and interests into another area. Which is how he still does music. He follows his own path. People worship the past—especially art and music and literature and film. Various works are worshipped as being these pinnacles, and in some cases they were meant to be by the creators, but generally they pick up that reputation or presence after the creative process is done.

I love [Earth 2]; I was very educated by it as a guitar player and a musician, but I don't know if the album itself is really that important in that way. It affected some people. That band was put out on Sub Pop [because Carlson was Kurt Cobain's buddy]. Poneman and Pavitt wanted to please Kurt, so they put it out. Sub Pop didn't know what the fuck they were doing. Now, of course, they've re-pressed all these old records. When they actually came out, it was like, "Whatever," you know? "Bleach sold another 50,000 copies; sure, we'll put out another Earth record. Whatever."

It may be one of the most interesting records the label put out, as far as minimalist music. There's not much minimalist music on that label. It's a great doorway, for someone coming from metal. It introduced New York minimalist music like Tony Conrad, Glenn Branca, guitar orchestra music, La Monte Young, the Western take on raga music. It still sounded heavy, like slowed-down Slayer, as it always was described, but it was drone music played with guitars, extremely long songs.

What do you think about Earth 2 today, 20 years after its release? Do you think the album has gotten its due from the press and the public? I think it's a historical album, and what more could you ask? It's 20 years later, and people still consider it to be a very important record. Every time Sunn O))) puts out a record, [Earth 2] gets mentioned—which is a compliment for us. It's a tower in the musical world. I don't know if it's due anything. Earth got its due when Dylan re-formed the band and turned it into a real band, who produced a lot more music that's more important than that album, actually. That Earth has continued to make interesting, compelling music on their own terms, that's more important. It's nice to have Earth 2 in the background.

#Earth #doom metal #drone metal #Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Version #Sub Pop #Dylan Carlson #Ambient metal

3 notes · View notes

aceofaces-mod · 2 years

Text

Regarding Immortal Sins...

Ahoy, maties!

It's been quite a while since I wrote the last post (longer since the last Monthly Sync). The last few months have been busy for me, resulting into not having enough time to work on the game. It didn't help that I'd have to overhaul the server I used to have the game's documentation (since it broke during migration). So, here's what I've been working so far, and share some of the next steps for the game.

Server Overhaul

For a long time, I had an Azure Web App that hosted the game's documentation. The original setup was powered on a Windows Server, and relied on two PHP sites: one was the (now defunct) bug tracker and a wiki software (Dokuwiki). With the release of PHP 8, there was no support on Windows Server (on MS Azure. You can use PHP on Windows). While it worked, PHP 7.4 was on a limited support. So, I had to migrate it to a Linux powered server. After creating the new one, I downloaded the files via FTP and moved them over to the new one. Simple, right? Well... It broke. Dokuwiki used the file storage to save the pages (no need for a database), so it wasn't it (kind of). First roadblock was that PHP 8 used a different server software to host (Nginx, Win Server has the IIS), so I had to do some configuration. But then, I keep seeing 404 errors. I couldn't understand what went wrong. After spinning up XAMMP locally, I see the issue: the wiki software broke. It seems like a combination of broken cache and breaking changes in code. This would require a ton of work to get it back up and running. The problem here is: I don't know how to code in PHP and it was a large codebase. So, I decided to rebuild it. This time, I'd use .NET and Blazor. Not only this would make it substantially smaller and faster, I could easily integrate features in a language that I know to program. Plus, I get to use my new web design skills (and polish them). And since Dokuwiki didn't rely on a database for storage, I was able to recover most of the pages.

With the new Dragohouse Help Center, the original site has been overhauled. Thanks to Blazor Server, it's rendered better, loads faster and it's more friendly to mobile devices. I've also done some work on the presentation, being nicer to navigate as well. The manuals are now structured in a more traditional manner (more like a book than a wiki page).

Another improvement is the new Bug Report page. Utilising GitHub, it makes it far more streamlined to file in bugs. There is more work to be done (streamlining the login process is on my list), but it opens up tools for me. One of the features that I can use is reporting the status of reported issues in the Trello board, so you can see what's going on with it.

The last thing is that the site is fully managed via a repo. I can easily update the site when needed, send it to my build server and then upload it to the web server. This makes it easy for me to maintain it and update documentation (with an easy way to roll back, in case it breaks). It also means that I can iterate on new features faster, too. Maybe have the server host hotfixes for the game? That would be cool (especially since the game has a package manager built-in). I am seeing this as a long-term project. Something that could be used for future stuff as well.

The future

So... What's next for Immortal Sins? This is one of the questions that I can't answer yet. The last few months have been a bit grueling for me. Training for a future job, losing a close relative and having occasional burn-out periods have drained me. Coupled with a recent wave of feedback and having to prioritize work (which would pay me), I had to shelve the game for a while and once the IRL stuff was in order, I'd pick the game back up. At the moment, I have a lot of thoughts about the game. I'm not sure what to do next. Should I rebuild the game in a new engine? Shelve it for good? Start over in the same engine? I'm going to need some time to gather my thoughts and decide on what to do. I want to give the game a proper conclusion. But I need a bit of time. Until then, I'm going to put the game into maintenance mode for a bit. I'll push out fixes when needed. But I need to make my mind up, before I push out more substantial updates. I am one developer working on the game. I have my own limits.

This is a post that isn't easy for me to write. At the time of this writing, Immortal Sins is a project I love and hate at the same time. It's been a source of frustration (mainly due to the engine) but I am thankful on working on it, as it allowed me to get creative and getting my curiosity in programming to the next level. What future holds, is something that I can't answer. But, whenever it will be in the current state or being rebuilt, I want to get the game in a state I can be happy with.

That's all for now. See you in the next post.

#immortal sins (game)#immortal sins(game)#gamedev #indiedev #rpg maker #rpg maker mv

2 notes · View notes

birdybirdnerd · 8 years

Note

for the excessively detailed hc meme 1, 3, 8, 11, & 27 for the twins, and 16, 31, and 17 for domrick

HOOOOOOO BOY

okay so u sent some artsy things too n ill get those jus not now bc its Late

okay sO this got long so under the cut!!!

twins~

1. What does their bedroom look like?

okay so they shared a bedroom in scana before shit hit the fan. it was a room in master nagaos cool ass mages tower that he totally requested be built for the Aesthetic™

they didnt really do the typical your half - my half of the room thing, instead just sharing a bed and having their shit strewn everywhere. books everywhere, altars to various gods, a window u cant see out of bc its covered in plants that mofi religiously attends to.

theres so much random shit everywhere too?? knick knacks nagao brings them from his occasional travels, weird shit kofi saw in the marketplace from that one occult vendor and bought just to creep the maids out with, coloring books, random bones, minor magical artifacts that u probably shouldnt leave lying around but hey, they dont care

but its a sort of organized chaos, that only they know. ask one of them for anything and its almost like they summon it with how fast it appears in their hand (hell for all we know they did summon it. accio underwear)

3. Do they exercise, and if so, what do they do? How often?

they certainly exercise their magical talents on a daily basis, mostly in the form of playing tricks on nagao and the tower staff. they also do training with him a couple times a week now, and he forces them to get out and do something physical at least once a week. mofi used to swim in the bordering ocean most mornings, but stopped after an encounter with a kraken almost got violent. kofi saved nem tho so everythings good (even if ve was the one to attract its attention in the first place lmao)

8. Favorite indulgence and feelings surrounding indulging

mofi has the sweet tooth to end all sweet teeth and honestly if using magic as much as ne does didnt burn so many calories who knows where ne’d be. ne doesnt care tho, even if it gets a little embarrassing when ne attacks the sweets vendors in the mornings

kofi on the other hand loves sappy romance stories. ves aro and ace and doesnt ‘secretly wish for true love’ or some such bullshit, but ves such a sap and absolutely devours romance novels like mofi does candy. ve would never let anyone know, and only has mofis silence because if ne let slip kofis a secret romantic at heart then kofi would tell the world about the time mofi accidentally ate nagaos liquor chocolate stash and fell asleep on the roof in stolen lingerie

11. Intellectual pursuits?

books. they both love to read most kinds of books, especially books on magic. theyre also both pretty proficient at chess, courtesy of master nagao, but much prefer ‘cheating’ at it. remember that post about cheating at chess? ‘all my pawns found god and are now bishops/we overthrew the kind and made a democracy so thats a puppet ruler you just killed/all the captured soldiers dug their way out and emerged in your court’? thats them. all the fucking time. it drives nagao up the walls but he loves playing along, especially with how creative they get

27. What is their biggest regret?

mmmmmMMMMMMMGOD I WANNA SPOIL THINGS TO ANSWER THIS BUT I DONT WANNA SPOIL THINGS BC SPOILERS

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

okay u know what?? u know fuckin what?? imma do it and yallre just gonna have to Deal

mofis is that ne trusted too much

kofis is that ve never got to say goodbye

oKAY NOW FOR DOMRICK HERE WE GO LADS LETS JUST DIVERT YALLS ATTENTION AWAY FROM T H A T

domrick!

16. Biggest and smallest long term goal?

his biggest long term goal would either be able to find love, or to find a permanent way to transition. theres only so much illusionary spells and testosterone potions can do; the twins may be powerful, but even combined they cant completely rewrite dwarven genes to switch doms sex

smallest before the events of the story i have no idea, but afterwards his smallest long term goal might be to get a better and less ragged outfit. hell lets just say thats from before the story too. hes vain, his clothes are shabby. i dont draw them nearly shabby enough

17. Preferred mode of dress and rituals surrounding dress

okay not really sure what this means?? he dresses himself and doesnt really have any special dressing rituals except trimming his beard now that he has one (thanks mofi for the potions btw)

but if ur asking what style he prefers just. just imagine one of those old timey medieval bards. just. imagine that. but short. and blue

31. Most prized possession?

def his lute, gifted by a long dead grandmother to a tinier dwarf years ago. she was the only one who supported his love of music instead of smithing, and she probs wouldve been the only one to support his transition too, if hed realized what was going on in his head at the time. back then he just thought he was confused so he kept quiet. hell if gramma was still alive when he came out it might not have gone so bad, shed have been on his side from the beginning and wouldve kept the other dwarves from straight up throwing him out on the street. but its a bit late for that

#personal #my ocs #god this was so much fun #also i kinda wanna draw the twins room now??#that would be so much. detail tho #long terms projects ahoy #ideas

1 note · View note

ka-za-ri · 4 years

Text

Prize Pt. 3 (Finale)

Ahoy! The last part of this commission is here! It was so hard to try and fit everything my client wanted into the fic overall, so I’m sorry if it might feel a little off. I did my best to give y’all a good end product! ｡ﾟ(｡ﾉωヽ｡)ﾟ｡

Chapter Index and Obey Me! Masterlist: here Ao3 Mirror: Here Pairing: Satan x Reader Genre: Smut Wordcount: 3,700 ish Tags: Soft smut, fluffy stuff, confessions, Summary: The cards are all on the table and the game is revealed. An uncertain future is discussed and feelings are confessed.

Victory

The months following that fateful day you spent with Satan passed without much commotion. In fact, it felt as though the attempts at usurping your time had diminished since then. It was easy to fool yourself into thinking that they had simply gotten tired of the game they played. It was easier to believe they were all busy with the sudden influx of papers and projects that needed to be completed for classes or that they had other pressing matters to attend.

You didn’t think much of the fatigue or the nausea, chalking it up to having to pull multiple all-nighters in order to get things done on time. The changes in your sleep schedule were easily explained by your terrible habits; and the cravings you had for food you rarely even thought about could just be another symptom of your delusional state as you crammed as much information about Demonic History, Sociology and Sigil Writing as you could within the time allotted to you.

It wasn’t until you missed your monthly cycle more than once that you realized something was distinctly different. From the way the brothers treated you to your mood swings and the tenderness your body felt, it all started to click together. You waited another week, just in case the stress was causing you to be late, but when nothing came of it, you realized that there were certain things you needed to discuss.

“Can we study in your room?” you asked, veering from the usual path to the library and closer to the dorms. “There’s uh…some things I kinda want to discuss, but preferably not in public.”

Satan raised a brow at your request but said nothing, leading you to his room and quietly shutting the door behind him once you were safely within. You sat on his bed, staring mostly at the floor though your gaze flicked up to meet his eyes from time to time. The words you had to say were just at the tip of your tongue, but actually getting them out was going to be the hardest part.

“So, uhm…we need to talk,” you started.

“Yes, that much has been established already,” your demeanor concerned him to say the least. He pulled a chair over to sit across from you, “So, let’s talk.”

“There really isn’t a good way to say this...” you grimaced, already imagining the various tragic outcomes of what you were going to tell him, “but uh…I haven’t had my period this month.”

He blinked, processing what you were telling him. There was an unending awkward silence between the two of you that practically drove you mad. After several excruciating moments of stillness, Satan let out a deep sigh. You couldn’t interpret the meaning of his reaction and waited with bated breath for his reply.

“Is…Is that so. Is this the first time you’ve ah…missed it?” he struggled to understand your human anatomy. “Is this normal?”

“No, It’s not normal…it’s close to the second month I haven’t had it. I’m. I’m pretty sure I’m pregnant.”

He blinked slowly and exhaled deeply through his nose when he heard the news. It was impossible to read his expressions. His face remained impassive for a time before he broke out into a small smile, but that was quickly dashed away and replaced once again with concern. “I…See…Well, I suppose we do need to talk...”

It was your turn to be surprised. “What do you mean?”

Satan leaned back in his chair, folding his hands in his lap and contemplated what he was about to tell you. Things were bound to reach this point anyway, but he was still nervous. He needed to deliver the information to you in the most matter of fact fashion, yet his voice still wavered a bit. “So, you know how you were told that you’re here in an exchange program to strengthen bonds between the realms?”

“Yes...”

“Well, Diavolo was pretty serious about the strengthening bonds and relationships part.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow very well.”

Satan sighed, hating to have to go into a long lecture, but it was the only way for you to properly understand the game they had played ever since you arrived. “To be blunt, Diavolo believes that the demon population is dwindling at an unacceptable rate. In an effort to bolster the population numbers, he started this exchange program as a trial run and requested that denizens of the House of Lamentation assist in his ah…competition to, you know….” he trailed off, not sure how to further explain things.

Ah, there it was. There wasn’t a need for Satan to continue. You had suspected something from the very start, just having your suspicions confirmed laid your doubts to rest. Your gut instincts had been correct, and all the effort you put into spending time with the man in front of you had paid off. It was a winning scenario for all parties. Diavolo’s trial was a success; and you were with someone that you chose to be with, so long as the child was his.

“I see...” you nodded. “Now everything makes sense...”

“I’m, well, I guess I should apologize for all of us, we’re sorry that we didn’t tell you. Rules and everything kept us from saying anything.”

You giggled, “It wasn’t that hard to figure out. I had an idea of what was going on pretty early.”

“You…you did?” Satan looked at you incredulously. He had thought he kept his end of the deal pretty well. He couldn’t speak for his brothers, but he knew for a fact that he hadn’t said anything incriminating nor did he do anything that felt obviously related to the competition.

“None of you are very good at hiding your intentions,” you shrugged, brushing his shock to the side and moving onto more pressing matters that you wanted to discuss. “How…how would you feel if you were the father of this child?”

“Me?” He could hardly believe his ears. He had played the game on the loosest terms, only interacting with you when he had to. The one time he did bed you, it had been in the heat of the moment and when he wasn’t completely himself. “As flattered as I am to hear this, I don’t know if I would be the best candidate for the father.” Even if he was completely elated at the idea, there was no confirmation that the child was his yet he couldn’t bring himself to celebrate his victory just yet. The child could belong to any one of his brothers.

“What if I want you to be the father?” you beckoned him to sit next to you on the bed, guiding his hand to your abdomen and letting him feel the life that was growing there. From there, it only took a little bit of magic to figure out if your suspicions were true. Unfurling a small tendril of magic to assess who the child might belong to. As soon as his magic made contact with the energy within you, there was no doubt in his mind it belonged to him.

“How’d you know?”

You smiled sweetly at him. “Well, let’s just say that out of all the times I’ve been with a demon, you were the only one who I let close when I was the most fertile.”

“Really? You chose me? Out of everyone else?” Realization dawned on his face when he realized you had actually played the rest of them at their own game. His face flushed with a mixture of excitement and bashfulness. He always knew he had the same chance as his brothers to win, however hearing that he had been chosen to win made his victory all the sweeter. He embraced you, tightly holding you against him and laid you down to cuddle in celebration. Satan won. Asmodeus had been first, the others had been more vocal and forward; but he was the victor in the end. It was a fact he struggled to grasp but having felt the life growing within you only confirmed it and it felt incredible.

“Yes, you,” you giggled at how incredulous he sounded. Kissing him softly on the forehead, you brushed his hair away from his eyes. “I’m glad it’s you. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Satan heaved a heavy sigh of relief, the weight of guilt from hiding the competition away from you had stressed him to the point where he couldn’t sleep for many nights. Though the others had followed Diavolos orders and pursued you, he chose to let you come to him. It was a risk, but one that paid off in the end. Hearing that it was what you wanted warmed his heart, and he held onto you tightly in that relief.

The two of you laid mostly in silence together, every now and then murmuring a soft affirmation of your adoration for each other. Other than that, it was a simple, comfortable quiet you had grown accustomed to and cherished with him. You didn’t need to exchange words. Just enjoying his company was enough to have you feel satisfied and loved.

He still couldn’t get over the fact that even if none of the brothers had overtly said anything about the competition, you had been able to piece everything together on your own. There was an undeniable sexiness about how you had all of them eating out of the palm of your hand. To know that out of all his brothers, he was chosen gave him a rather smug sense of pride he couldn’t quite describe. It was easier to just show you his affection and his relief.

What was supposed to be an innocent study date turned into a serious conversation. In turn, that turned into a cuddling session once things were discussed and revealed. Everything being out in the open and on the table released so much of the tension you had been holding onto for so long that you found yourself quickly falling into a doze in Satan’s arms. His words earlier had given you so much reassurance that things would be alright. With the worst of your worries alleviated, you felt like you could properly rest for the first time in weeks.

Though, it seemed as if Satan had other ideas.

With the others out doing errands or going to meetings, it meant the whole dorm was empty; and he could be as vocal as he wanted to be when he was around you. Satan’s legs were tangled with your own, making it easy for him to roll his hips to you and let you feel just what you did to him by being close. His cock already half hard poked at your backside, and you let out a soft giggle as you were roused from your half-asleep state. “Really? This is all you can think about? Can’t we just have a cute cuddling moment here?”

“Well, how often do we get the whole place to ourselves? We can be as loud as we want and no one is here to judge.”

“Okay, well, when you put it that way, how can I resist.”

He wrapped his arms protectively over your abdomen pulling you flush against him as he peppered your neck with soft kisses. The dark mark he left weeks ago had long faded, but he wasn’t adverse to making a few more. You were now his after all. There was so much uncertainty about your future, but it would be fine as long as he was with you. Just the knowledge that he was willing to walk down that unpredictable path with you put you at ease. You sighed in content, melting into his embrace. Satan’s hands wandered away from your belly, trailing up to squeeze your tender breasts. You gasped, arching your back and inadvertently pressing your backside against the growing hardness in his pants.

He let out a soft laugh, loving how receptive your body was to all his touches. It was as if the two of you were meant to be. He wasn’t a superstitious man, but Satan couldn’t help but think meeting you was some stroke of destiny. To have you to himself like this only seemed to cement that notion in his mind.

His hips rocking into your backside became more incessant the more his need for you grew. Though it wasn’t as intense as it had been the last time, there was still an innate desire to mate with you. The kisses on your neck trailed lower to your collar bones. Satan’s hand moved from your breasts to snake under your top, easily peeling it off of you in one swift motion to reveal more skin for him to lavish with attention.

He wanted to do it properly this time, kiss you for hours on end and show you just how much he adored you. Spending so much time with you on the regular had only deepened his affections for you, and he wanted to show you that what he felt was beyond his base instincts. He had feelings past the need to claim and mate with you. He had thousands of years to temper himself into something more than a raging ball of impulse.

His hands returned to your breasts. He teased you through the fabric of your bra; and with every moan that came from your lips, you swore you could feel him grow harder. Satan’s breath felt so hot against your skin. Every kiss seemed to brand you with a heat that spread across your body before pooling between your legs. You groaned, struggling to free yourself from his grasp, but his legs around yours and his hands on your breasts kept you in place.

He made up for all the roughness last time with the sweetest kisses at your jawline and on the shell of your ear. Your nipples strained against the fabric of your bra as he continued to grope and play with your breasts until you were gasping his name, “Please… let me touch you too.”

Satan complied, if only so he could now see your face. As soon as you turned over, you pulled him into a deep kiss full of passion and lots of tongue. He hummed in approval of your enthusiasm, holding you flush against his chest. His hands wandered lower and played at the waistband of your bottoms for a brief moment while you kissed before they slid lower to rest at the swell of your ass. You were forced to break away when he abruptly gave your ass a firm squeeze. Chuckling at your surprised squeak as a result, he redoubled his efforts to work your bottoms off of you.

“Couldn’t help myself,” he poorly explained with a slight shrug.

In retaliation, your hand snaked between the two of you and fondled at the growing bulge in his pants. He let out a soft moan of appreciation once his crotch got more friction, and his hips instinctively moved to meet your touch. Satan wasn’t holding back on being vocal in his appreciation for you. With no one around to judge him, he was more than happy to let you know exactly how he felt about you. “Beautiful. Just beautiful,” he breathed in between the kisses you shared.

He maneuvered you to straddle him. In doing so, he found that he had the best view of you in this new position. With one hand firmly on your hip to keep you from going anywhere, his other hand was free to wander and explore your body as he wished. It only served to heighten his arousal as your clothed heat was constantly grinding against his hardening cock.

It was unfair how many clothes he managed to keep on when you were half naked on top of him. While his hand squeezed your breast and teased your nipple, you focused your concentration on evening the playing field. It was no easy task as every piece of clothing you managed to get off of him was reciprocated with a playful pinch of your nipple which only broke your focus. “Stop that,” you grumbled, swatting his hand away from you as you finally got the last layer of his uniform off of him.

“Stop what? Admiring you? Cherishing you? Treasuring you?” His fingers trailed lower to caress your belly. “That’s going to be hard to do.” There was nothing but love in his eyes as he came to terms with what the future with you would bring.

Hearing those words come from him made your heart flutter. The pressure of his bulge against your clothed heat also added to the emotions roiling through you. You wanted to hide, but there was nowhere to go. His hands reached once again for the waistband of your bottoms, carefully unwrapping you like a present. You were only allowed to move off of him just so he could shuck both your bottoms and your panties in one go.

Once again, you found yourself with significantly less clothing than he did. “Not fair,” you grumbled.

“Oh? Shall we even the playing field once again?” he suggested. Satan allowed you to shift off him just enough for him to navigate your hands to his pants. Your hands brushed across his abs in that motion, causing him to shiver before they started to undo the buttons and zipper to his pants. He watched your every movement, entranced at how you looked when you were concentrating. Heat simmered in his eyes, the hunger in them ever growing the more clothing you took off of him.

You decided to leave his boxers on for the time being. The power had swung in your favor this time, and you gently palmed him through the flimsy fabric. The simple action had him shivering and gasping underneath you. It was a sound you could easily get addicted to. You gave yourself the freedom to tease him a bit more, stroking his length through his boxers until he called out your name and begged for you to do more than just touch him with your hand.

“You’re beautiful,” you echoed his earlier sentiments, finally divesting him of his last garment and tossing it carelessly into the corner of his room. “Absolutely beautiful,” you breathed, crawling back on top of him and kissing him deeply. His hands flew to your hips, positioning himself to enter you. As soon as the kiss broke, he slid into you with one fluid motion.

“Fuck,” Satan hissed, his eyelids fluttering. It had been good the first time, but the energy was so different now. He had every desire to draw the moment with you out, show you just how much he cared; but as soon as he was inside, the innate need to mate and breed with you caused a haze to settle over his mind. He wanted to savor the softness while it lasted, and he strained to take even slow strokes in you.

However, seeing you on top of him, so pretty and moaning as his cock took its first few passes, broke what little control he had over his desires. He thrust into you with his hands holding you firmly in place. Everything about you was absolutely divine in his eyes. Even if heaven was locked away from him for eternity, he could at least imagine what it would be like when he was with you like this. Time didn’t matter. The competition and expectations of what was to come of your child were no longer a factor in those blissful moments.

Satan loved seeing you like this, face flushed and eyes lidded in pleasure as both of you chased your releases. He liked knowing when it was all over, you would be falling into his arms and no one else’s. It made him feel as if he could catch you from anything that happened. You were his, and that fact alone drove him into a possessive frenzy. He let his trusts run deeper, harder into you. With every breathy sigh and every moan he came closer to his climax. He could tell you were close with how your head lolled back and how vocal you had become.

“Fuck, Satan…I love you,” you whined in a moment of reckless abandon before you felt your orgasm wash over you in waves. Your vision blurred for a moment as your senses were overwhelmed with your climax.

Your words sent him over the edge. Satan’s heart soared hearing your proclamation, barely believing that you had said it at all. He gasped at the suddenness of his release. Pulling your hips down flush to his, he released his load deep within you, groaning as his balls twitched in the aftermath of such a climax. He had wanted to prolong the experience of being one with you as long as he could, but it was over all too soon.

Gently cradling you and bringing you down from your perch on top of him, Satan let you rest on top of his chest, not wanting to depart from your warm caverns just yet. His instincts also screamed to keep you filled, making sure sure that none of his seed went to waste, even if he had already impregnated you already.

“Say it again,” he murmured, stroking your hair idly as the endorphins sedated him.

“Say what again? I love you?”

“Yes. Again.”

“Okay, okay. I love you,” you admitted, blushing a bit at how often he was making you say it.

“Good. I like knowing that my love wasn’t misplaced.” His fingers in your hair trailed down to rest at your lower back, and he could feel himself drifting out of consciousness. There were too many things he still wanted to talk to you about, but the two of you had all the time in the world to figure things out together.

He hummed an old, soothing tune as he let his thoughts wander. There was still so much for you to learn about the Devildom. A visit to Diavolo would be in order as soon as possible as discussions on matters pertaining to your child were needed. Then, you would most likely need to be put on an accelerated course to make certain you know the ins and outs of Devildom customs and cultures to ensure that your child would grow up in a proper environment. He thought of the ways he could support you, outside of the obvious help in your studies. There was also the concern of the child being born from such a unique lineage. Surely there would be growing pains associated with that as well…

“Satan?” your sweet voice broke him away from his train of thought.

“Yes?”

“You’re stressed out,” you stated plainly. “Your whole body is all tense. Whatever you’re worrying about can wait, right?”

“Yes, my love,” he agreed, pulling the covers over the both of you. Whatever worries he had about the future didn’t feel so daunting, so long as you were with him.

#Obey Me! Fanfic #Obey Me! Satan #Satan x reader #Shall we date satan #Obey Me! Smut #My writing #i'm trash you're trash we're all trash

71 notes · View notes

fishiousdev · 3 years

Text

First Post : An Introduction

Ahoy, reader! Welcome to the first post of my blog!

Throughout the coming weeks, I will try to regularly write about my current journey as a video game developer. My posts will include progress on my game development, the thought processes and concepts towards the creation, and various other game dev related topics including inspirations, research and the indie game dev scene.

To properly introduce myself and what I am, allow me to talk briefly about my ongoing large game dev project, Fish Sword.

Fish Sword is a 2D side-scrolling action game currently solo developed by me. The game’s code is written in Game Maker Studio 2, the latest and current version of the long running series of Game Maker game engines by YoYo Games. In Fish Sword, you play as a human girl named Jun and her green fish friend, Kv, as they take on an army of nasty frog minions. As the title implies, Jun takes on her foes by swinging the fish around like a sword. The concept sounds like it makes for a relatively simple game doesn’t it? A good old 2d platformer where you occasionally whack away at enemies? Though, simple as it may seem, Fish Sword strives to be a more complex game focused on mastery of its mechanics and tools given to the player. A term more fitting of the genre this game aims to become would be “character action”, a sub-genre of hack-n-slash action games where the gameplay is more centric to the main player character who is given a large variety of actions to be played with by the player, creating high potential for intense combo-driven gameplay and creative expression through the player’s actions in-game.

The player is given a wide range of actions. Here, they are able to perform an attack, jump, an aerial attack, dash and attempt a grab. At the surface, it’s a simple kit of moves, though as you delve deeper, multiple branches of actions open up from singular inputs. By pressing the attack button, you can follow up with another attack, or by holding up before pressing attack again, the character will throw out a launching attack that sends enemies upwards, which creates a potential for juggling enemies in an air combo.

When a foe is sent into the air, it becomes up to the player to dictate their next course of action on how to continue attacking. Do they jump and attempt to continue their barrage of attacks in the air? Or do they continue the onslaught on the ground? The game forces the player to make quick decisions based on their understanding of how the game plays and as a result, creates intense, exciting moments with satisfying game feedback.

The game’s visuals are done in a pixel art style hand drawn and animated by me. Using pixel art, I aim to deliver a cute simplistic art style to the game while still being able to do snappy action animations that emphasize the overall game feel.

I think that makes enough for a brief introduction to Fish Sword. Are you hooked yet? If you’ve been snagged, then I’ll see you in my next post.

3 notes · View notes

canmom · 4 years

Text

Animation Night 36 - Sayo Yamamoto!

AHOY THERE friends! We are on Animation Night no. 6^2! Tonight we’re gonna check out another of those former Madhouse directors with a ton of style - Sayo Yamamoto, best known for her gay figure-skating series Yuri!! on Ice - yet as we’ll see, she has a ton of range...

(yeah, Madhouse again! between Takeshi Koike, Masaaki Yuasa, Mamoru Hosoda and of course Satoshi Kon, not to mention the various OVAs we’ve seen along the way, this might as well be (ex-)Madhouse Night at this point lmao)

We’ve briefly seen Yamamoto’s work before, back at the start of Animation Night in the Japan Animator Expo, where she directed the incredible animated figure-skating sequence “ENDLESS NIGHT” (which, don’t worry, I’ll make sure to run tonight!). But as a quick icebreaker (😏), let’s take a look at her career...

Yamamoto got pretty much the dream start to working in anime: fresh out of university, her samurai-themed student film caught the attention of Satoshi Kon, who liked her work so much that he invited her to work on Millenium Actress - though sadly, it didn’t go so well on the production. In her own words (from this interview):

Yamamoto: In my earlier years I created an animation that had to do with samurai, so yes. I used Toshiro Mifune’s pieces, his films, as an inspiration, and I animated it all by myself.

Sato: The same Mifune from all those Kurosawa Akira films?

Yamamoto: Yes.

Sato: So you made that film when you were a student?

Yamamoto: Yes, all by myself, when I was university student.

Sato: Were you going to a special animation school?

Yamamoto: No, just a design school and it had nothing to do with anime, but I didn’t like the other stuff they were teaching so I did my own thing.

Sato: And they let you graduate?

Yamamoto: Actually, yeah. Doing animation at a non-animation school!

Sato: By the way, did you ever show that film to Watanabe?

Yamamoto: No way! At that point I was looking for a job after I graduated. I knew I wanted to be a director. I was fortunate enough to be able to show that work to Mr. Satoshi Kon. I didn’t realize what I was doing at the time.

Sato: What were his thoughts?

Yamamoto: He clapped his hands laughing! But he had such a kind heart. Because of that he helped me gain some assistant type jobs, and it was my first entry into non-production management type work. The name of the project was Millennium Actress. However, a lot of stuff went on politically, and I ended up stepping down partway through, but that was my first step into the industry.

Despite these internal politics, Yamamoto remained working at Madhouse - working closely with Takeshi Koike (Animation Night 19) on Trava: Fist Planet, World Record and later Redline. At Madhouse, she worked on a few other projects and began directing episodes from a really young age, notably including work on Texhnolyze (kind of a sister show to Lain).

Not very long after, she learned of an opening for episode directors ‘with an interest in samurai’ from someone working on the Bebop movie. This turned out to be, well, Shinichiro Watanabe’s series Samurai Champloo at the sadly rather short-lived Studio Manglobe. Apparently she hit it off really well with Watanabe, very much appreciating the creative freedom she was given.

(Looking at her credits on Champloo, we have: the early one with the ukiyo-e painter, the one where Jin gets fixated on a sex worker and tries to rescue her, the one where Mugen participates in a graffiti competition... and the absolutely bananas, seemingly total non-sequitur late episode where the gang eat mushrooms and spend the rest of the episode working for zombies in a mine, before getting destroyed by an asteroid, which may be ‘canonically’ a hallucination but is definitely one of the strangest episodes of the show. As much as I roll my eyes at Jin’s ‘gallant’ rescue narrative, in terms of direction these are all extremely memorable episodes which do very creative stylistic things... a theme as we’ll see!)

(not 100% sure that’s from her episode... but fairly sure!)

Yamamoto would continue to work with Watanabe on future projects, like Space Dandy, but in the meantime, she finally got the chance to direct a fully original series of her own. After a visit to Brazil, she decided to set her series in a semi-fictionalised version of it, leading to Michiko & Hatchin (2008), a drama about a young girl Hatchin from an extremely abusive foster family. Her rescue unexpectedly comes in the form of Michiko, an endlessly cool, sexy escaped convict who declares she’s Hatchin’s mother and runs away with her on a moped. The two set off to find Hatchin’s real father, and from there we have the classic arc of two people from very different backgrounds building a meaningful relationship while being pursued by gangs, cops etc....

Beyond being a pretty unusual premise, the series is notable for sadly being one of the only anime I can think of to depict dark skin tones for the majority of its cast. I really wish that weren’t so unusual, although hopefully times will change with studios like D’art Shtajio getting more work...

I have at this point only seen one episode of Michiko, and I will say, the first episode does not pull its punches with a really extended sequence of sibling abuse that can be a bit hard to watch! From there, though, it sounds like it’s going to be a lot of fun: there’s a ton of energy and character to the way Michiko herself is animated that shines in every cut from this show.

I’m not sure how far Michiko goes into it beyond well, the character design lol, but a certain degree of explicit sexuality is something Yamamoto would return to again later with Fujiko Mine. But first, well, it’s time for Yuri!!!

Following Michiko & Hatchin, Yamamoto spent the next few years mainly directing OPs and EDs for other shows - among them, a Psycho-Pass OP, an Attack on Titan ED, and the Space Dandy ED.

youtube

OP/ED direction is basically music video direction, albeit with an extra goal of introducing the themes and characters of the show - and it means the director gets to indulge in more abstract imagery and create meaning through cuts, as well as having a very high animation budget to call on for unusual, complex shots. A good place for a creative director like Yamamoto to experiment!

Her next big project would head over to the Lupin III franchise. Lupin’s not got a huge profile in the west (outside of Hayao Miyazaki’s pre-Ghibli Castle of Cagliostro), but it’s an incredibly long-running movie/TV franchise about a scoundrel/gentleman thief lightly based on the literary character Arsène Lupin. The precise characterisation of Lupin himself has varied - in Miyazaki’s hands, he’s doing the thief with a heart of gold thing, while most other movies paint him as a total asshole! - but that is kind of what makes it interesting: each director who deals with the character has quite a lot of freedom to define their own version of Lupin.

Yamamoto especially wanted to do something different, centring the series on Fujiko Mine, who’s typically a secondary character in Lupin works. She remarks:

Q. What is your personal opinion of Fujiko Mine?

Do you mean, as a character? It’s a good question, and one I get asked all of the time as director. When I was growing up watching Fujiko in the original series of Lupin, I always watched her with anticipation of when she was going to take off her clothes.

Her series positions itself as a prequel to the first Lupin TV series, and draws on the character designs of the original Lupin III mangaka, Kazuhiko Katō better known by his pen name Monkey Punch. In the same interview, Yamamoto and screenwriter Dai Sato have a great deal of praise for other staff on the anime, like composer Naruyoshi Kikuchi:

Yamamoto: One of the main reasons is that I wanted to find someone who was not so serious, maybe kind of a delinquent, a rebel, and not someone who was very familiar with anime. He lives in a famous area of Tokyo called Kabuki-cho. The people who live there are kind of known as yakuza, strippers, host club workers, and that type of crowd. When I met him, my first impression was “you fit right into that district!”

Sato: So did that kind of rebel actually work hard for you?

Yamamoto: He was a rebel in everything but his work. In doing his job he was amazing.

Sato: As a matter of fact, during a pre-meeting, when I heard rumor that Kikuchi was going to do the music, I shouted “YEAH!” causing the rest of the staff to jump. I almost added to my contract that I was to be the first person to get the soundtrack. I made a special request to production staff, so that actually did happen. So actually I listened to the music as I wrote the scripts. Many people know that Mr. Ono Yuji’s music is the traditional music for a Lupin series.

...and prolific screenwriter Mari Okada:

Sato: When you worked with her, did you feel your dreams or wishes had come true having to work with her?

Yamamoto: Yes, she’s a very interesting person. It’s not always the case that an interesting scriptwriter can write interesting scripts. But I was really pleased with how amazing the script ended up being, which far exceeded how interesting Ms. Okada is, the script was even more so. She has an amazing reputation for memorable punch lines and memorable quotes that characters say. We felt that we needed to be able to execute good punchy lines, which is critical to a Lupin piece. And I think that we’ve been able to add so many of those punch lines inside the show is really just thanks to Miss Okada.

And of course, it has the work of Takeshi Koike, fresh off his six-year passion project Redline. Yamamoto describes springing the request on him right after the first screening of Redline:

Yamamoto: Mr. Koike is a very talented guy. I met him at Madhouse on the Trava project; which was my first real opportunity to do storyboarding. When I first decided to approach Mr. Koike about the Lupin project, it was right when we were premiering Redline for the first time. So, Mr. Koike spent 6 years working on the Redline project, and that’s a long time to be working on one project; so I figured it was now or maybe never to ask him. Maybe it’s a breach of etiquette to ask such a thing at a debut screening, but I did approach him and he did agree. He always said he admired Castle of Cagliostro. I thought maybe if I approached him to do a Lupin film he might accept, and he did. There was a little luck involved because just about that time Koike was ready to quit Madhouse and make some changes in his career, and things just fell into place.

The result was an immensely visually stylish series, with an unusual approach to rough linework and cross-hatched shading aiming to evoke the style of the manga, and the distinctive desaturated-but-varied colour palette typical of Koike’s work. It received a little controversy for, along with its dark tone, a lot of explicit sexuality, to a pretty unusual degree for the franchise. But it seems to have been a success, praised for its innovation and spawning three movies directed by Koike!

Next for Yamamoto, meanwhile, came Hideaki Anno’s Japan Animator Expo project in 2014, and this is where she started animating figure skating!

Her short portrays a routine choreographed by real figure skating choreographer Kenji Miyamoto, and remarkably elegant animation that does a great job of capturing and slightly stylising the motion of skaters. Figure-skating is interesting to animate, because it is so much about physics: a skater has to have immense control over where they place their weight and their moment of inertia, and know how to redirect their momentum into elegant arcs, which means it’s also a very satisfying kind of motion to animate! Yamamoto’s direction accentuates the movement with a lot of camerawork which I can only imagine was a big challenge to shoot, but the result is pretty great.

I don’t know whether this short was explicitly conceived of as a prototype for Yuri!!!, or if Yuri!!! came about because of its success, but in any case, a couple years later Yamamoto would be directing a full one-cour anime about figure skaters at MAPPA, a studio that’s had a fascinating but somewhat troubled history of overcommitment... in part, awkwardly, on the back of the immense success of Yuri!! on Ice.

The story concerns two young skaters coincidentally both named Yuri, one Japanese and one Russian. Yuri Katsuki suffers a crisis of confidence and retires from skating, but an impromptu performance accidentally makes its way to his idol, Victor Nikiforov. Nikiforov is so struck by it travels to Japan and offers to tutor Yuri... forgetting that he has already made a similar promise to the other Yuri, the Russian Yuri Plisetsky. The two end up as rivals, both for Nikiforov’s training and in competition at the coming Grand Prix series... and meanwhile, a romance starts developing between Katsuki and Nikiforov.

The series was a massive hit, praised as a gay anime that sidesteps some of the standard yaoi conventions but also a little controversial on that front because of the amount of censorship it faced. Despite being forced to e.g. obscure a crucial kiss scene, the message reached its fandom pretty clearly, attracting a vast body of fanwork - not to mention affection from real figure skaters, some of whom even produced routines based on scenes from the show. A lot of that has to do with the show’s subtleties of character animation (as discussed by animation director Tadashi Hiramatsu here) - as befits a skating anime, a great deal of attention is paid to what is communicated by posture and gaze. The figure skating sequences also received a great deal of praise at first, although apparently towards the end, Yamamoto’s ambition outstripped the budget so people groused about the later ones... but we’ll see!

With such a hit on their hands, a movie would naturally follow, a prequel titled Yuri on Ice!!! - Ice Adolescence... but it’s still yet to be released, and plot details are scarce! Presumably Yamamoto’s been working hard on that, but in the meantime, she produced a very impressive intro sequence for the game Persona 5, which also makes use of figure-skating movements...

youtube

Since then, well, it’s been pretty much radio silence, though we can expect the Yuri!!! film sometime this year... probably.

This night’s a bit tricky to schedule, because, well, Yamamoto’s work is mostly in TV so I have to show you samplings of episodes rather than full films with a narrative arc. I understand if that’s a bit too much of a tease but hey, I would love for more people to check out her work! Tonight I’m going to show a sampling of episodes from Michiko, Fujiko Mine and Yuri!!!, as well as some of Yamamoto’s shorter work on OP/EDs and the Animator Expo short.

We’ll be starting in about 40 minutes at 7pm UK time as usual, at twitch.tv/canmom - hope to see you there! ^^

#animation night #sayo yamamoto #yuri!!! on ice #the woman called fujiko mine #michiko and hatchin

10 notes · View notes

purkinje-effect · 6 years

Text

The Anatomy of Melancholy, 21

Table of Contents Go to first. Go to previous. Go to next.

TW’s for pharmacology weirdness and Jared behaving like Jared. Long chapter ahoy.

Melancholy said nothing how things had gone at the assembly plant once he returned home to the pharmacy that night, and he appreciated that Angel at least didn’t seem to catch on that things weren’t right. With his brain already itching with all the tangential proximity closing in on him to his past life, against his judgment he bestilled it all with a dose of Calmex right before bed. In his position he couldn’t afford REM sleep, couldn’t afford dreams--or nightmares.

The chemist’s first task the following day was to confirm Jared’s belief that hubflower contained opioids. He consulted his Merrick Index at length and returned to it often that week. Plucking a few flowers from the hub plants in his office garden, he shut himself into the lab, whereupon he slurried the hubflowers with a pestle and a can of water, and simmered the paste with a hot plate until the liquid grew milky from latex. As he waited, he read the various periodicals salvaged from the grocer’s, or skimmed the inventory to scrutinize its usefulness to the new parameters of his work.

“Sir...” Angel came into the lab with a carafe, mug, and sweet roll. “Could I interest you in a break?”

“I... would love that.” He wiped the sorry and sweat from his face, at being caught in the act, and closed the gun fanatics’ journal to face his Handy. He accepted the warm cup in his hands, and let the steam fog his glasses. “To address the elephant in the china shop. I know you’re wondering why I’m tinkering on what’s supposed to be my day off. My contract’s... changed a bit. Hopefully, not a long-term detour. But he’s got me studying... these plants. He thinks they’re... medically relevant.” When he couldn’t smooth out his cracking voice, he drank the still-hot black beverage to silence himself.

“You’ve worked so hard for Mister Jared,” it insisted after a pause. “I hope you’re not sacrificing your time off this weekend. With you working today, Mister Jared has allowed you an offset weekend, I pray.”

“He’s given me a week before I have to apply what I’ve learned about these plants for the-- medical purposes-- he’s outlined. It’s all highly specialized study. His outfit is having an epidemic problem, and... hopefully this won’t do more harm than good.”

He crushed the compulsion to doctor his caffeine under his heel, and took another drink. It was almost comfortably cool enough to do more than sip at.

“Oh, how I wish you had as much faith in your talents as I do, Mister Carey! If Mister Jared has the confidence you’re the one who can heal his associates, you should believe it twice over. Look at the bars you port. The Americans won Anchorage in part because of you.”

“Can we-- not talk about Anchorage,” he stuttered quietly. He had to set down the coffee on the counter to keep from spilling it in unsteadiness.

“Forgive me, Sir. I’m an unbridled bundle of enthusiasm. I forget at times how hard it was on you to work all those long hours. I double down on my prior remark--you shouldn’t work yourself to the marrow, no matter the urgency or enormity of scope of a project. Taking care of yourself is just as tantamount. Humans aren’t so different to robots. Operations tend to start shutting down if left untended, if you catch my meaning.”

“I... you’re the only real friend I’ve got, Angel.” Melancholy sniffed, looking to it. “Ever since I thawed out, it’s been nothing but what I can do, what I can make. What use I am. I won’t be of any use to anybody, if I push myself until I keel over dead.”

“That’s the spirit.” It neared him, its ocular sensors small and close together just as his tendrils. “You... you mean it, Sir, that you consider me a friend?”

“Truest blue,” he smiled, putting a hand to its spherical chassis. “In every sense, I don’t think I could do it without you.”

“Oh heavens above, you give my continued operation meaning!” It whirled about eagerly, only making ‘Choly smile wider as he slouched back in his wheelchair with the mug in his hands to watch. In a moment of awareness, it set down the pastry and carafe on the counter, and offered up a fresh canister of condensated water from the corrugation just above its thruster. Then, it sped off in search of something to tidy. “Thank you!”

“No... thank you... To think, a mess of metal and circuitry can have more compassion than fifty men.”

Though the irony of being worked to death to synthesize Psycho was not lost on him, after the exchange the gravity of his work lightened significantly. Grateful that the Mister Handy’s condensators had made pure water slightly less scarce, he added the canister to the simmering vessel, and did so several more times over the course of the day, cooking down the plant matter until it completely deliquesced. He then strained it all and simmered the particulate-free solution until it crystallized.

An unfortunate side effect to working where one dwells, he was forming a track record of falling asleep at his desk. Presented with the clearish opalescent salt mix the following morning, he was loathe to determine through isolation of compounds and a series of acid tests that hubflower did in fact contain a composite of narcotic alkaloids. Morphine, paramorphine, codeine, papaverine... and several he could not identify even comparing the test results to the Merrick Index. The most plentiful of any of these alkaloids, he termed hubeine.

Curious whether he had been tricked as to the ornamental nature of any of the other plants from which he had cultivated his little garden, he too collected samples of each and proceeded to run acid tests akin to those he’d applied to the hubflower. The glowing fungus contained compounds similar to chelation agents, which could form the backbone to synthesizing fresh RadAway, if it came to it. Though the melon vine had not yet fruited, the flowers tested positive for eugeroics, and he wondered what purpose the melon itself might serve. He confirmed with excitement that he’d correctly identified the wrinkly sac-like fungi to be the nootropic brain fungus used to make Mentats. The large aquatic lily-like scarlet flowers with white speckles contained an alarmingly high concentration of tropane alkaloids. He expected it to be more closely related to a waterlily, but it seemed somehow more akin to nightshade. Taxonomy in the Wasteland did not follow his entrenched logic tracks, so he discarded them and simply let the findings say what they would of these specimens.

On the fourth day, ‘Choly with the assistance of Angel made a trip to the apartment complex down the way with the swimming pool. He stored his coat in Angel for the errand. His breath snagged at noticing Jerry watching him sternly from her catwalk, and he wondered who else might be watching.

The two rounded the stairs up to the pool sandwiched between the C-shaped formation of the building itself, and he dismounted from the Mister Handy with his cane, to wade into the shallow end of the overgrown involuntary pond. This was where the raiders had found tarberries. They were so similar to cranberries, down to how they grew on the surface of the water, and yet he wondered if their name was a corruption of barberry... and on that hunch, he crouched at two feet deep to feel around for a few handfuls of the dark wine-colored clusters of fruit.

“Sir...”

The chemist picked up his head to find three raiders standing around the pool with their weapons drawn, but not yet directed at him. Eyes fixed on them, he tried to back up the steps of the entry end of the pool, but stumbled back and fell with a shallow splash and a nervous laugh.

“This doesn’t look like what Jared says you’re supposed to be doin’,” the man said, still holding a makeshift copper-pipe rifle.

“Y’coulda asked first,” one of the two women continued with a lyric sarcasm, admiring the blade she’d affixed to a tire iron. “We’d a said no either way, but.” The third raider goose-honked in approval.

“I’m testing a theory for him!” ‘Choly insisted, trying again to stand. The rubber stopper of his cane couldn’t gain traction underwater, even against concrete, and he fumbled again, but stayed standing this time. “I know it’s not hub, but I think these are going to have compounds I need for working with the hub. You... you can be his eyes and ears for all I care. Tell him he was right. After I see if I’m right about these--” He scooped up from the water’s surface what he only then realized he’d dropped, and held out a fistful. “--After I test these, I’ll be able to come talk to him formally and explain the consequences of him being right.”

“Get back to work, chemist,” the third raider jeered.

As he finally afforded mounting Angel again, he mumbled with a grunt, “Thought you’d never ask.”

Back at the pharmacy, ‘Choly went around barefoot in the wheelchair while his dress shoes dried out. With a detached glaze of distress and animation, he popped one of the tart, ripe berries in his mouth and chewed at its firm flesh while he gathered together the materials to test the compounds in the fruit. His sneer at the flavor melted into a comfortable grin as he got to work mashing the berries. Even if not ultimately pharmacologically significant, they sure might make a fine preserve in the right hands. Once he got the pulp prepared, he popped a Berry Mentat and let his mind wander while the lengthy extraction process began.

Concessions must be made. There had to be other chems he could provide. He couldn’t make peace with the idea of solely providing cyclomorphine, or whatever analogue to it hubeine could create, to the inhabitants of Lexington. He couldn’t be the Psycho chemist again. He just couldn’t.

His trauma-addled brain again laced back through the index of hypothetical compounding he’d penned during his Berries-and-Jet evening, and he sat staring at the simmering soupy mess. All work and no play... he’d go insane. A creative mind has to create. Surely, if Jared dabbled in Jet and Psycho up to now, he’d be interested in sampling just about anything in his pursuit of a psychogen--if not for the full purpose Jared had laid out in his terminal entries, then at least for the purposes of ‘growing his ranks’ with the promise of the most lavish and unique buffet of chems in Massachusetts.

And barring opioid manipulation, Melancholy was best at manipulating nootropics. A skill developed out of necessity, under pressure the former necessitated the latter. Mentats seemed to fit the closest description to anything Jared sought to achieve with his manipulation of the human psyche. He could work with Mentats on the side. Test out his theoretical new flavors, bake up classics like Orange and Grape. His sentimentality came in lozenge form.

Doing so would require fresh materials for it. Jared’s outfit might not like scouring the city for mushroom hunting, but the chemist was certain they’d trade the minor nuisance in a heartbeat for the comfort of a warm Mentat. But, how to even get on that line of conversation with the raider leader in the first place...

“I... really did happen upon Eden,” he uttered to himself, awing at the positive test to barberine in the tarberries. “All the pharmacology I could ever need, right down the street, or in my very garden.”

On the tail end of his Berries trek, he threw together a single batch of Grape Mentats from the hubflower extractives--and a little whiskey for good measure. He’d need the anxiolytic and nerve to make it through the next day.

‘Choly slept better than he had in weeks, and awoke rested despite feeling woefully unprepared to face Jared first thing. Before Angel took him to work, he again tucked his Merrick Index back into the Handy’s storage. He could feel supervision at every turn of the city they took to round up to the assembly plant. He wheeled up to the foreman’s mezzanine sucking on a Grape Mentat, where Jared stood waiting, and he went up the ramp to the office. The raider leader came inside and took a seat, kicking his legs up on the desk and pulling out his switchblade to play with it idly.

“So I’ve heard you came to tell me I’m right. I like to hear when I’m right.”

“Good morning to you, too,” ‘Choly huffed, straightening his tie and composure. “Yes, the hubflower contains a lot of the same salts that opium did. I’m sure you’ll like to hear I was right, too--about some of the other wasteland plants being... chemically useful. I can make cyclomorphine for you, or something very, very close. But in order to get that far, you promised me months ago that you had a cache of Abraxo Cleaner. Did you ever intend to pay out on that? I hope for both our sake’s you weren’t bluffing.”

Jared waxed from boredom to zeal to irritation all in a matter of five spoken sentences. He was about to object, but ‘Choly continued.

“Navigating the Jet rig project would have gone much more smoothly if I’d had daily access to Mentats, but I’d had to meter myself because I didn’t have a way to cook the goddamn things. Drawing off gas requires a lot of math, but very little science. And the level of chemistry I’m going to have to utilize to reinvent the wheel will be impossible to reach let alone sustain without the use of my specially formulated Mentats. It was a suggestion before, but it’s a requirement now. I need that soap, Jared. And you need it because you need me.”

Jared could only stare at him at length.

“You trying to tell me that your genius is thanks to some chem? Some chem,” he scoffed, nearly incredulous. “God, your sad excuse for a personality makes so much sense now. You’re in constant withdrawals. Yeah, chemist. I’ll nurse your habit if you hold up your end of the bargain.”

“And one more thing?” ‘Choly flinched when Jared thought it was another demand, but stayed firm. “I’ve noticed more eyes on me this week. Don’t have faith in me?”

“You misunderstand me.” Jared grinned, putting away his knife. “I’m protecting my finest asset. You know, you weren’t the only one doing his research this week,” he began pulling a book from his desk drawer and flipping through it for a particular part. “This is a textbook about the Battle for Anchorage. Here, there’s a unit about the Deenwood Compound. He who controls history, and all that.”

‘Choly frowned and balled his fists in his lap, unsure where this was going. That college textbook had to have been new the very year the bombs fell. With his full attention, Jared continued to read the passage with a vague lyric.

“’Maximizing the efficiency of our foot soldiers’ fighting power helped us meet the turning point to overpower the Chinese and retake Alaska. General Constantine Chase commissioned the Deenwood Military Compound in the New England Commonwealth to synthesize and perfect Psycho (known by the military symbol CM) for our illustrious military. Chase’s keen scrutiny selected the cream of the crop of the Chemical Corps, and from it he forged what is now known as the Pharmaceutical Corps, or Pharm Corps. Our expert knowledge and application of chemistry and pharmacology provided the edge America needed to push past the underhanded tactics of the Chinese.’ --Oh!”

Jared stopped reading a moment to excitedly point to one of the photographs, and he stood to continue dictation.

“Figure 16.4, ‘Major Johnston and Three of His Pharm Corps Chemists.’ We have... Left to right... Second Lieutenant Gary Sydney, and Captains Olivia Francis and Alan Carey. Alan Carey! This is rich. The richest shit on the planet.” Jared shoved the book in ‘Choly’s face and jammed an accusing finger at the photograph where the Deenwood scientists had lined up for a casual photo full of smiles, then at the nameplate on ‘Choly’s coat. “That’s you, isn’t it. It’s you, you freezer burned fuck. 'Cept you weren't in the chair before. ”

‘Choly did his best not to look the part of revulsion, and did his best to unclench his everything. He glared at the photograph of himself, oddly fixated on how badly he missed his crescent half-eye eyeglasses.

“So you’ve been reading a civilian-level textbook about where I worked. You can’t possibly believe you know even a fraction what transpired at Deenwood.”

“And pray tell,” Jared grinned, wild and mocking as ever, “What exactly transpired at Deenwood?”

Speechless, ‘Choly’s jaw hung open and trembled at the mere attempt at humoring this topic. His eyes lost focus for some time.

“Nightmares I could never put in words.” He scowled at Jared, who went from mad to furious. “Do you want me to make you cyclomorphine or not?”

“If we’re done having objections to it,” Jared emphatically smacked the book shut with both hands, “then we’re done screwing around. I know you’re not bullshitting me that you’re a high level chemist. I know who you are. I know what you did before the war. And you’re going to do that for me now.”

The chemist stared at his own feet.

“Loud and clear. But let me make myself loud and clear. None of the patients or soldiers who were administered CM came back swearing they could predict the future. You’re barking up the wrong chem. I’ll do as told, but I won’t make the same mistake I made two hundred years ago. I’m fucking saying something this time. This isn’t the chem that will find your fortuneteller.”

“Do you have a better plan, then...” Jared picked up ‘Choly’s face by the chin to force eye contact, “Chemist.”

“The mode of uptake might be what’s preventing the chem from getting the desired results,” he started, palms sweating. He could palpably feel the Grape Mentats fading right when he needed it most, and his heart raced. “Compounding the chem could alter how the body absorbs it. Which organs it goes through to get where it’s going. I could-- I could compound BuffJet. Make the hallucinogen go straight to the pineal gland. Or Jet-Tats. Make the Jet soak right into the entirety of the grey matter like it’s just another neurotransmitter. Buffout is the harder option, for a lot of reasons. I have way more knowledge with Mentats chemistry, and way better ability to cook up large quantities of it.”

“This is all leading up to another catch. Don’t-- don’t derail me.”

“The catch...” ‘Choly squinted to flinch. “I haven’t compounded with Jet before! It was one of the rarest psychedelic drugs on the market before the war, and there was next to zero literature on it back in my day let alone now. I understand what it is chemically. I just haven’t proven or documented it.”

“Just minutes ago, you were questioning whether I have faith in you. Don’t flip on me, Melancholy. Makes you look like a fucking flake. You were one of the US Army’s best chemists. You’re going to make this compounding work. In the mean time, you’re going to cook us all up a nice big mess of Psycho. And you’re not going to have me lose my patience. You want soap? It’ll be on your stoop first thing in the morning. But you’re going to do as you’re told.”

“Am I being told to get back to work then?” The pained exasperation couldn’t have been thicker.

“You’re being told... to fork over some of your darts.” Jared lunged to reach into the chemist’s coat to withdraw the requested object from one of the suspender cases. He read the box. “Pax Syringes. Hm. And here I thought you cooked your own ammo for that thing.”

“I, I do. Those are just what the gun was made to fire.”

“It can be made to fire whatever the fuck I say it does.” He pocketed it and pointed to the door. “Cook my Psycho. And go back to your showmanship. I’ll make sure you get a real big turnout. This town’s overdue for some fucking revelry.”

“I... I’m being paid in soap for this.”

“You’re the one who named the asking price, you fruit. Sounds dumb as dirt when you put it like that.”

“I... I want the revolver back when you’re done with it. I won’t do--”

‘Choly cried out and tried to shield his face when Jared lunged at him again, only to lean his hands on the armrests to crane in inches to ‘Choly’s face.

“You want your little handgun back. That’s cute. You’re going to earn it. Now GET OUT OF MY OFFICE!”

Jared shoved him down the mezzanine ramp, and only through some miracle did he manage to get enough traction with the heels of his dress shoes to regain control of his own pace. Angel rushed up to its owner and immediately took over powering the wheelchair along.

“Do I need to dismantle Mister Jared for you, Sir?”

He hung his head and withdrew into himself in indignity.

“I’ll do it my fucking self.”

Go to Next »»»

#fallout #fallout fanfic #fo4 fanfic #fallout 4 fanfic #fallout 4 #fo4 #the anatomy of melancholy #melancholy #the purkinje effect

2 notes · View notes

fireblogger · 4 years

Text

Grocery Shopping

Hey everyone! I’m back! Sort of! The next two weeks are likely going to be really busy for me since I have several major projects due and it’s quarter-end at work. So I doubt I will be back to posting every day, but I will try to post something at least!

My partner and I have said that we don't want to budget groceries. We both really enjoy cooking, and we'd like to cook what we want without worrying about what we purchase.

Unfortunately, reality is not so kind, and our grocery bill is perhaps a bit larger than expected. So, I'm going to go through 4 tips you can take to reduce your grocery bill:

Plan your meals cost-effectively. Meal planning in general is excellent for reducing your overall spending since you spend more time eating home-cooked meals and less time eating out. However, planning them cost-effectively can reduce your grocery bill as well. I highly recommend finding a few cheaper meals that taste good, then making those fairly consistently! For example, my partner and I have a Maple Mustard Chicken recipe (attached below), but it's basically chicken Dijon mustard and syrup. All of which can be obtained relatively cheaply with recipe itself lasting a decently amount of time! We also have a great beef stroganoff recipe that tastes great, is decently healthy, and is cheap!

Compare the prices and qualities of different brands. Walmart Great Value brand is surprisingly good for many things, and when you're buying base ingredients (like cream cheese, or chicken) brand is going to make almost no difference! Getting Great Value, or WinCo Foods brand items will save you money in the long term without losing quality! (The exception is Chips Ahoy, don't buy off brand Chips Ahoy).

Think about what you're likely to impulse buy, or what non-essentials you buy on a regular or semi-regular basis. Then decide what is it about them that makes you want to buy them? For example, my partner and I buy soda way too often. He likes root beer and I like Fresca, but do I actually like Fresca or do I just think it's the best 0 calorie drink out there? (spoiler, I do like Fresca - but there are more cost-effective drinks). Recently we did some math and realized how much we've spent on soda, and on our most recent grocery trip decided to buy some water flavors instead. These should be cheaper overall but give us about the same (if not slightly more) non-water beverages to enjoy. If you find yourself buying pringles or something like that every time you go, can you buy a snack-size bag instead? Cheaper, healthier, and still satisfies the immediate craving. (Not buying anything would be even better of course).

This one may seem a little obvious, but think about where you're doing your shopping. I have a friend who does all her shopping at Fred Meyer because she knows the layout of the store. But Fred Meyer overall is WAY more expensive than Walmart or Winco. I understand the allure of knowing exactly where everything is and the ability to get in and out, but you can learn locations in a new store and end up saving a lot of money while doing it. [Here's an example of comparative grocery prices in my area, check for one in yours to confirm the most cost-effective location to shop]

Albertsons - $39.67

WinCo - $29.95

Fred Meyer - $35.88

Wal-Mart - $31.05

Grocery shopping can be an easy bill to let slide since you are saving money on every food item you buy at the store and prepare yourself as opposed to eating out. But the potential price ranges mean that you can probably trim down a lot of your bill by spending a bit of extra time researching different costs and brands in your area!

Maple Mustard Chicken Thighs:

10 boneless, skinless chicken thighs (about 6 lbs)

8 tablespoons Dijon mustard

1.3 teaspoons garlic powder (4 cloves)

1 teaspoon oregano

4 tablespoons maple syrup

Instructions:

Defrost chicken

Heat oven to 375

Rinse chicken and pat dry

Mix mustard, garlic, oregano, and maple syrup in a small bowl

Put chicken in a glass baking dish

Paint the mixture evenly inside and on top of each chicken thigh, trying to cover as much of the surface as possible to form a crust

Bake 45 minutes until chicken is done and mustard forms a crust. (Internal temp of 165 F)

#recipe #budget #money tips #fireblogger #grocery budget #save money #saving #saving money

1 note · View note

jackcliu · 4 years

Text

On tokens, markets, and a path to a real-time economy

Two years ago on March 1, 2019, I posted a Letter to my future self to the Bitcoin blockchain. This is the story of that letter, one where I didn’t write a word, and how two years later, the dream is still alive. There is an actual path with tokens and markets to make utopia a reality, and my case for what that might look like.   

About a month prior to March 1, 2019, I had privately begun telling my close friends, colleagues, and family that I was going to be making a significant career and life change and dedicate the next chapter of my career towards building exclusively for the Bitcoin SV blockchain. You can guess the confused looks and concerns people had about what it was I was doing. Did I lose my mind? To be fair, I still get those messages today. I knew what I had envisioned when I first read the white paper back in 2013 and somewhere along that journey, the crypto industry had taken a path that veered dramatically from the one I had imagined. With Bitcoin having course corrected twice already via hard forks, I wanted and needed a guiding compass - a North Star. That’s when I had the idea to write a letter to my future self.

I confided in one of my best friends, Jackie to help me write it. It was a busy month for me, my mind was all over the place and I needed help. Over two afternoons, I shared with Jackie what I wanted to say, what was the possible world that I imagined. To her I must have been repeating myself since she and many of my friends had heard this for a decade. The future would bring Proof of Work from a term to describe a computer science thing to one that would describe the workings of the entire global economy and drive a seismic shift in how value was created and how we humans would interact and cooperate with one another. I wanted her to include a thank you to some people who helped me along the way - titans of the industry whom I was fortunate to cross paths and work with. Jesse Powell, gave me my first job at Kraken. CZ hired me to OKCoin in 2014. Star believed in me and gave me so many growth opportunities. At Circle, I worked with my long time friend Dan, who would go on to create CMS. A few days later, Jackie sent me a draft. I was pretty shocked at first, thinking hey this doesn’t even say Bitcoin in it. Where are all the names I wanted to include. Then I read it another time and when she asked if I wanted any changes or if the approach was right, I said, “Let’s not change a single word”. It was different, it was exceptional, to me it was perfect. I sent the letter internally as part of my Circle resignation email, flew off to San Antonio with my parents to watch the retirement ceremony of my favourite basketball player Manu Ginobili, and then a month later on April Fools Day, RelayX was launched.

Having this Letter out there has served me well. Nobody could have expected the course of events of the past two years both within BitCoin, and the world at large. Politics, COVID-19, money-printing, delistings, court cases, you name it. Without it as an anchor, I might have lost sight of the bigger picture. If you would have asked me then what BitCoin would look like today, I would have predicted a 100x rosier picture than the current situation. Despite most of the boom in the cryptocurrency industry having not occurred on the Bitcoin SV blockchain, the rapid adoption of blockchain and digital currencies from NFTs to DeFi, to institutions putting BTC on the balance sheet shows the underlying movement is in full force. Just this week, I watched sharpshooter JJ Redick utter the words “non fungible token, and blockchain technology” on his podcast talking about NBA Topshot. That’s incredible.

In the letter are the words - “Your world will be frictionless and marked by truth, freedom and fairness. Your world will truly be one that is defined by human imagination and honest work.”

I am making the case for tokens as the critical solution to a real-time economy. I want to break the spell of the narrow definition of tokens that has bounded the Bitcoin SV ecosystem. For much of the past two years, there appears to be two camps in BSV when it comes to tokens. The dominant one being we want only regulated tokens, security tokens, tokens backed by real assets, with real utility, that real businesses and enterprises can use to make their businesses more efficient. The other, perhaps out of jealousy for what’s going on in other blockchains being let’s just port those Ethereum ERC20’s over and let it run wild for it might pump the BSV price! Funny thing is neither has happened as developers are busy debating whether tokens should be on layer 0 or layer 1 or layer 100 but that’s a topic for another day. Both views are myopic.   

Tokens are going to be a much bigger deal on BitCoin than anyone might imagine.   How many websites are there on the internet? I looked it up recently and the answer is 1.7Bn. How many token contracts are there on the Ethereum chain? The answer is 350,000.   

Websites are kind of hard to set up - you have to purchase a domain name, at least use a website template creator, and there isn’t that much use for getting one for the average person. Not when you can have an Instagram page, a Facebook account, a Twitter handle, a Medium blog without having your own site. Yet there are 1.7Bn of them! Ethereum tokens are prohibitively expensive mining fee wise to generate. Out of interest, I asked one of the devs who minted the original USDC contract during my days at Circle to find the transaction. It cost 0.44 ETH. At today’s prices that’s well over $500 to create a token. Yet there are 350,000 contracts!  

I would wager there will be over 100Bn unique tokens on BitCoin and I’d guess higher but I don’t want to be outside the bounds of the very Overton window I’m creating.

It takes a few seconds to issue a token on BitCoin and at current mining fees, less than a tenth of a cent to issue. If I’m a store owner, I might issue a different gift card a week for the various deals I have going on. If I’m an artist, a different NFT for each piece of artwork. Neither the store owner nor the artist needs more than one website and you start to see the math.

If reading this, you still think tokens are going to be contained to some narrow definition of ‘security’ tokens, or NASDAQ like tokens, or fiat currency tokens, realise it’s like saying the internet will only have The New York Times or CNN or some licensed officially approved site. It’s ok if not every account on Instagram is world class photography. Not every Twitter account is going to be insightful (that’s clear) and that’s ok. In a world of 100Bn unique tokens, You bet there’s going to be a great deal of useless ones and a pretty large number of scams. Just like there are websites that are phishing for your passwords, websites with illegal content, and websites with viruses in them. Over time, services emerged to protect you by blocking, or warning you about potentially dangerous websites.

What’s the bigger picture and what do tokens have to do with a real-time economy? I’ve made the case for there being a ton of tokens. Does that mean it’s just going to be a Coinmarketcap with a lot more pages? An exchange with a lot more trading pairs? No, a lot more exciting than that.

A world with 100Bn tokens means every single asset, service, good, company, project, video, post and many more abstract things than one can imagine is going to have a dynamic, live price. It’s not about the tokens, it’s about the markets. Today, you visit a restaurant and you check Yelp to see if has a good review. BSV entrepreneurs are making some new review site but with reviews posted on the blockchain thinking this is the problem that needs solving. “Immutable reviews”. Much more valuable than a review or immutable review however is if this particular restaurant’s loyalty token is trading at a premium to the other one next door. There’s actually money on the line. Then after eating, instead of being a foodie with a blog and an Instagram to hype up such restaurant, if you’ve got that talent for knowing what’s going to be the next hot restaurant, you can just buy on the open market more of the restaurant’s tokens. Yes, a local foodie just became an crypto trader. Now you profit when you promote the restaurant on your blog. The chef who started that restaurant instead of using Groupon to attract an initial set of customers who have no loyalty to you, can instead issue 10,000 tokens, where each dish costs 100 tokens. Pretty soon if your food is delicious, those token prices are going to jump. Think Global, Live Local is not just going to do good, it’s going to now make you rich.  

 I grew up in a lower middle class first generation immigrant family. I remember being a teenager in those years where oil prices were very volatile as the world approached the idea of “Peak Oil”. We would sometimes drive by a gas station one day where prices were a few cents cheaper than the day before, and even though the tank was half full, we filled up. Other days, the warning light would be on, but we held off for another day to fill up the tank in hopes prices would come down. Is this speculation on oil prices bad? Another fun memory I had was going grocery shopping with my folks and my favourite cookies were the Chip Ahoy Crunchy chocolate. Eating those with milk is probably half the reason for my height. Once in a while they would be on sale but next to them were the No-Name brand versions of the same cookies. Chip Ahoys were definitely better but were they $2/100grams better? No. We would calculate every time to decide which we would buy. Is this speculation on cookie price bad? How come other goods and services in the economy didn’t fluctuate in price? That’s what’s always fascinated me. I knew they would if they could. With Bitcoin, it was possible.

Tokens on Bitcoin with the perpetual scaling design of Bitcoin where it isn’t the holder that’s rewarded (Proof of Stake) but rather those contributing to scaling the network (Proof of Work) will lead to the formation of markets where markets were too inefficient to exist - unlocking trillions of value in the process.   

A fully tokenised economy makes everything efficient, fair, honest, and real-time. I don’t mean efficient like fast transactions or cheap mining fees. It’s the economy that will be efficient. You won’t need to be a big grocery chain or a big oil company or big tech company with financial analysts, and big data and machine learning folks in order to know what to set the price of a Chips Ahoy or a Gallon of oil or surge pricing on a taxi ride. It’ll be orders of magnitudes better than that and for every person on earth because it’s all going to be open, issuable, transferable, tradeable. You won’t be checking page 978,950 of Coinmarketcap. You won’t be scrolling to AHOY/USDT on an exchange. I predict all of this will happen without you realising that it did and all our lives will improve as a result.

For those who immediately think of the regulatory ramifications of this, I’ve thought the same. In 2015, while leading OKCoin, I led our initiative to become the first international benefactors of Coin Center - the industry body working with regulators and governments. I am a minority seed round investor in Chainalysis which looks for criminal activity onchain. I look forward to working with all those who would like to embrace innovation while having an eye on ensuring an orderly, legal transition to this future.

I could not be more excited to support the emerging token projects on BitCoin, through building products, investment, advice, or even in spirit.   Bitcoin is plumbing - just plumbing where billions of trades and speculation down to the satoshi will be happening every second.

0 notes

arcadeidea · 4 years

Text

Spacewar! [1962]

Spacewar is still the first video game. Not technically: the developers of Spacewar were already aware of a playable Tic Tac Toe implementation on the very computer they were working on, which by that point was already a more-than-decade-long tradition for computers, not to mention Tennis For Two [1958]. (For greater detail on this cascade of history, watch Ahoy's fantastic and dry documentary The First Video Game.) These prior works are only trivia, though, and false starts all of them. They're what you find if you look at the past not on its own terms but on ours, applying a rigorous schema of definition aspiring to the condition of a science, searching for something specific they couldn't have known they had. Tennis For Two is the only game of that protozoic era to be relevant or even known of to anyone in the field for the next several decades, and even then all that was required of it was the mere fact of its existence (its status as a trivia item) for the sake of a something so banal as a lawsuit. They are worthy of honorary mention, but a medium is not a prescription, it is a chain of tradition. Not only is Spacewar wholly original and something only achievable with a digital computer and not an attempt at transferring a real-life game, but more importantly and ironically, it did not exist in a vacuum.

Spacewar is not something you apply a definition to, Spacewar IS the definition. Although nothing so strident and bold and definitive was intended as it would be with later games, when it was taken as a prototypical guide by those who followed, that is what it functionally became. Not to be too precious and romantic and mythologize it ("First there was nothing, then there was Spacewar!"), not to be too essentialist about it ("Spacewar contains the seeds for all what followed"), not to use it to answer What Doth Games and fall right back into the checklisting trap — but we can read the game itself as a manifesto, a collection of precepts and assumptions, and one of the creators (JM Graetz) was even considerate enough to give us an itemized list of exactly what the MIT Tech Model Railroad Group hoped to achieve in making Spacewar:

1) It should demonstrate, that is, it should show off as many of the computer's resources as possible, and tax those resources to the limit; 2) Within a consistent framework, it should be interesting, which means every run should be different; 3) It should involve the onlooker in a pleasurable and active way — in short, it should be a game.

The expressed reason video games exist as a distinct artistic medium, as anything more than a shadowplay of traditional games and sports, is to show off the power of our computers. I use that word — power — and not the more prosaic and accurate "computer resources" that Graetz used for a reason. It's 1962, and it can not be put out from anyone's mind, viewer, player, or creator, that computers would be instrumental in a real Space War of the foreseeable future. Or even a terrestrial war, which was the sole practical purpose and reason for the existence and funding of computers up to this point in history (if we take pure mathematics for its own sake as "impractical.") It's a show of force, it could even be a threat if it were leveraged in a Cold War propagandistic context against those with weaker or nonexistent computers and not with the giddy, childish innocence that it was created and received with. Better to call the spirit "utopian frivolity," though. Self-proclaimed hackers brought not only Spacewar to the system, but the music of Bach and by extension his rosy vision of the divine and human. Perhaps these programmers may have had their imaginations circumscribed and imprinted with the hitherto military legacy of computing, not to mention American culture... but these eggheads messing around saw the potential of computers reaching far beyond that, towards a hi-tech Arcadia. There's much to admire there, but it carries the unmistakable stench of classical tragedy, and Spacewar serves as a testament of the damnation from within: not just that it is a window into an imagined future of nothing but war, but that its explicit priority is the poisonous ambition to simply use more and more resources, again endemic to American culture as much as it is to future game development culture.

Things like "crunch" weren't around yet, of course. Spacewar is sometimes casually attributed to Steve Russell as the lead or main developer, as in the current lede of its Wikipedia article. The original concept was borne of three-man bull sessions with Russell, but then the very first step towards practical implementation was taken by a fourth man. Russell then created a barebones prototype, including the ships and their ability to turn and thrust and shoot (and it is not mentioned, but presumably, to die.) In response to playtesting, he added background stars. After that point, it became stone soup. Other people in the Tech Model Railroad Club would have a bright idea — bespoke controllers, accurate background stars, freshly optimized ship-turning code, death animations, hyperspace warp, and the big one, the central gravity-well star — and then just implement it themselves. The end result is a game that's simple, but surprisingly polished and full-featured, especially compared to our image of early games as clunky, primitive, blocky things. It reminds one of the hagiographic myth of early-90s Id, a very small team of friends having as much fun making the game as they are playing it, all leaving their personal touch on the work. Steve Russell was not the auteur with a hand on the tiller and an eye on his vision, but one crucial member of the team. It's all very kumbaya, non-hierarchical, no pressure, if we take testimony about its development on face value and don't chuck it out as rose-tinted nostalgia.

This stands in contrast to the game, which is a fantasy of violent domination in competition, with a definite winner. We could unpack the implications of that more, and what it all means that the very first video game was of war, but, well, we'll have plenty of chances to in the future to say the least. Two opponents, precisely balanced and equal in a space ballet, identical in every way except for visually (the distinctive silhouettes of the needle and the wedge are a minor triumph in character design.) Hey, maybe there's some Tic Tac Toe influence there! Spacewar's idea of gaming is inherently multiplayer, and that makes sense. Solo games like pinball or Solitaire card games exist, but the large majority of games at this point that inform what we understand a game to be are all communal activities. The game even came with inviting options to modify the game's parameters to suit the player's preferences.

[I must confess now: other than maybe a couple minutes at a computer museum with a partner, and a few minutes in the middle of writing this awkwardly sharing a keyboard on a browser emulator with my dad, I don't think I've properly played this. I'm just a tourist. Is this an analysis of Spacewar or of JM Graetz's The Origin Of Spacewar? This is more of a programming note than anything about the game, but part of why I'm starting this project is because I've always been on the outside looking in when it comes to gaming. I've always loved reading about games more than playing them, and this writing and canon-exploring endeavor is a hope that I can fill in the gaps and to force me to form my own thoughts. And what's the point if I can't well play the game for myself? Unless I change my mind, I'll be largely avoiding multiplayer games whenever I possibly can, because not only can securing a Player 2 in these early non-online games be an awkward or high barrier to clear for me, and not only are many of them ephemeral, and/or hard to fix in place and get a read on, such as here where the intention is that every run is different because of the guile and fumbles of your human opponent even though the game blatantly remains static, but their basic legibility depends even more than usual on practiced skill that I just haven't personally built up.]

The game is inherently hostile to your continued existence, and both players are only empowered to make it even moreso. Movement is constant, although very slow so as to facilitate strategic marksmanship over spray-and-pray. It's not an anxious atmosphere though, the edge of threat and action is what keeps the player engaged, throws them into interaction and thought. The central star is the key that makes this dramatic and dangerous gameplay: it makes it impossible to stay still, and it serves as the passive threat of death, one that can't be defeated, only negotiated. The only other gameplay element to speak of is your human opponent, but the star serves as the personification of the game itself. It shares something in common with the roulette wheel, not in the randomization which is more in play with the Hyperspace Warp Hail Mary, not even in the gravitational pull, but in the way it stands as an emblem that ultimately, you're playing the game on the terms of the game-maker and at the mercy of physics. Maybe it's only a small philosophical leap from playing against the computer's game and a player to designing a game played against only the computer.

Spacewar exists already at the fruitful intersection of abstraction, simulation, and fiction that games will never escape. You don't get to brake, but instead have to apply reverse thrust, in a nod to simulating what space flight would really be like. But you can pivot freely without applying any thrust at all as though on a Lazy Susan, so that your nose is always pointing in the opposite direction of the thrust for quick visual clarity. Your bullets don't obey gravity like your ship does. These have their respective knowingly-silly technobabble explanations, papering over the gap between simulation and abstraction with fiction. War is its name and theme, but it's really more of a duel, boiling war down to a single dogfight. Space is its name and theme, but it's not empty and it's not infinite, it's a closed area smaller than a sheet of paper that wraps around at the edges and corners, which if I'm visualizing correctly, would resolve to a teardrop shape (which is then projected onto a rectangle, which is then projected onto a circle.) In each case, we are presented with a small slice of what we understand through the minimal text (the title) to represent an almost incomprehensibly bigger idea.

We easily understand its shorthand mostly through intertextuality. We only understand what we're looking at, and why we can regard war with frivolity, because of the pulpy science-fiction wrapper. The inspiration for the concept is explicitly cited as low-culture "genre fiction" for nerds like the seemingly endless procession of science-fiction B-movies through the movie theaters. Specifically singled out is the cheesy space opera book series The Skylark Of Space. The yearning for the combination, a Skylark Of Space special effect B-Movie, was exactly what produced the creative energy in the bull sessions to dream up the totally-unprecedented gameplay concept of Spacewar. That's right: the first original video game was genre trash born of frustrated aspirations of filmmaking. Doesn't get much more fitting an inauguration.

Spacewar spread like a folk song, not a commercial proposition. The determination was made that there was simply no consumer base, so the source was handed out to anyone who asked. Somehow or another, a fellow hacker would catch a look at Spacewar, then return to their own machine to recode it from scratch if it wasn't a PDP-1, and people would keep adding onto it themselves. That's a remarkable method of propagation that has its successors such as the Type-In game but it relies heavily on a baseline of common computer literacy that necessarily dies out as computers get both more widespread and infinitely less demanding on the user to learn how to program just to use it. I can't help but feel a twinge as Spacewar is cloned into Galaxy Game [1971], one of the first if not the first coin-op arcade video game. Money makes it ugly: Is it stealing when it was freely and casually distributed before?

0 notes

postmodernpostman · 7 years

Text

We just got outlines for our final projects in my studio classes, and they’re so fucking good I can’t believe it?! This whole semester has been a pretty big nightmare in terms of both workload and mundane assignments, so it feels great to finally get excited about something again.

My Advanced Perspective project is all about world building, character design, and, ultimately, a batch of finished illustrations depicting the two. We can reference pre-established works of fiction, so long as the character’s designs are our own, so it’s RVB TIME FOR ME, MOFOS!

And then my Comic Layout class’ final is even more up my alley-- like, actual ‘career goals’ material. We’ve gotta adapt a five page comic from a literary source, so fuckin’ WODEHOUSE AHOY. I have so many Wodehouse comics drafted already that I’ve never had time to actually get to, so boo-yeah.

#i have been SO depressed about school since this semester began but hoooo boy am I looking forward to class work again #p postage #art school bullshit ramblings

2 notes · View notes

littlestarlost · 7 years

Text

On Lofty Goals, Emotional Labour, and YOI Music Week

Hi there. It’s me again.

This post probably isn’t necessary, in that no one has demanded an answer or even asked the question, but I feel compelled to say something nonetheless. Maybe it’s because I’ve been through this experience that divides so clearly into before and after, and even though I know that it’s unlikely someone would have noticed something if I didn’t make this post, I still have to. Maybe it’s because I’m the type who wears her heart on her sleeve, and maybe it’s because the act of writing fiction generally exposes you to your readers so I feel like being emotionally vulnerable here is no more risky than couching it in a fictionalized version of events experienced by the characters you know. For whatever the reason, I need to write this out. So mildly heavy personal stuff ahoy. TW mention of death.

YOI music week is coming up, in the same week that my final semester of grad school begins. Being the person that I am and having the fic that I do, I had predictably ambitious goals for it: I was going to do the full week, writing one fic or ficlet for each day. It was kind of the perfect theme week for me; I’m a music-oriented writer. And since I had a research project that was already a little bit behind my ideal schedule and also haven’t updated my WIPs in a while and also had school to contend with, I had planned to get as much done of that week as possible before the actual event began, and so I began researching and chatting with fellow author friends about ideas and writing down basic plot ideas.

And then on Saturday morning my aunt died of cancer.

We had the funeral very quickly because of our religious beliefs; I flew five hours across the country on Monday, I carried her casket on Tuesday, and I flew five hours back home yesterday. I spent roughly 50 hours in the near-constant company of family members in various stages of grieving: my mother, who lost her only sister; my grandfather, who celebrated his 100th birthday three months ago and had to bury his daughter two weeks before she was set to turn 73 years old; my own sister, who is emotionally intense at the very best of times; and my cousins, who called her many things--surrogate sister, mother, grandmother, friend. I spent some of my 10+ hours in airplanes trying to write, but at the end of the day the words just wouldn’t come.

My dad, who’s far more pragmatic than he is emotional, couldn’t figure out why the day of the funeral left him so exhausted; he “barely did anything”, in terms of physical labour. He drove to a few places and he ate food and he sat and talked to people. But he was exhausted—we were all exhausted—because of the emotional labour involved in realizing that you’ll never hear someone’s voice again, that they won’t be at your future wedding, that there’s a hole in the world and a hole in your heart, of whatever size and shape, because someone you love is gone. Even when you can cry in front of other people, there’s a performative element to it that drains you; you have to be strong for the mourners around you. When I was finally alone on Tuesday night, even though I’d cried a lot throughout the day, I collapsed into bed and started sobbing and I didn’t think I’d be able to stop. I couldn’t figure out why this hit me so hard, except that my aunt was someone I loved and she died a difficult and premature death after an often-difficult life, and I’m just plain fucking going to miss her a lot.

Emotional labour is labour, and it’s tiring, and it will zap you of energy you feel like you should have. And I just don’t have it in me to do all of YOI music week, along with the readings I feel like I should do and the preparations I want to do for the start of school. I don’t want to take another long long break with Setting Sun, and I know it’s been a few weeks already and I am plenty worried about the complications of school and research and stuff as the fall approaches, but I also have to protect against mental burnout and right now, hoo boy, all I want to do is sit on my couch and watch chocolate cake tutorial videos and play a stupid little iPhone game about airplanes.

I know I have supportive and patient readers, and I know that people probably weren’t expecting me to write a fic a day for a whole week. But I wanted to do this, and I had set these goals for myself, and I’m disappointed to have to realize that things probably won’t work out the way that I planned. I don’t want to leave this fandom for a long time but right now the thought of trying to keep even one character in my head, and trying to write out their actions with any style, is just...I can’t. I have nothing.

I’m not officially going on a break or anything. I’m going to be trying my best to keep one foot in the fiction-writing waters because it has made me happier than a lot of things this year, and I know it will keep making me happy. I know my aunt would want me to be happy, and I will be again. But that’s the situation as it is right now. This post functions more as a processing tool than anything else, so if you’ve read this far, thank you. I’ll be around. Please call your family and tell them you love them, and please live the life that makes you happiest.

#TW: death #intensely personal

14 notes · View notes