#lunaticker

[tessadiscordia]

A must-read for anyone who played Girls' Monachopsis. I fear this visual novel will be mostly overlooked due to its short runtime but it will burrow its way into your mind and your heart and nest there if you allow it

In watching the discourse around Girls' Monachopsis unfold I made the observation that there seem to be two categories of reviews for the game:

Camp A: mostly trans women who almost immediately became evangelical about the game and rushed to social media to tell everyone about it

Camp B: a small amount of critics who complained about the writing style, story pacing, and the "romanticization of abuse" in the game

I find it interesting that both camps came to wildly different conclusions about the same elements of the game. Camp A views the writing style as a convention that adds to the story's immersion, while Camp B writes it off as laziness. Camp B thinks the ending left too much unresolved, Camp A appreciates the uncertainty for its familiarity.

It is just another case of a piece of art steeped in layers of cultural context breaching containment. We've seen this happen before with other cultures and niche communities in the past, this isn't really new. I do think there is one thing worth lingering on, though.

I read a post that basically called Monachopsis a game for "white trans femcels" and I honestly cackled a little bit considering that a black trans woman was heavily involved in the making of the game. It feels like "white trans femcels" or some other variant is just something people say when they mean "mentally ill trans women." This is already getting pretty long so I won't waste time explaining the problem here. There's the implication there that "media made for mentally ill trans women has less (if any) value," which is a self-indicting belief when you put it next to the overwhelmingly positive reception the visual novel has received from that very demographic who clearly is not used to seeing themselves represented in media in such a raw and unsanitized way. I think it is wholly unfair to say that any demographic does not deserve to feel seen in media or have media made specifically for them. We all deserve to feel seen, we all deserve to feel understood, and I think it's fairly obvious how the game's themes are relevant here.

The alternative option is alienation, and alienation is always a recipe for disaster. Generally speaking, no one isolated has ever come to any optimistic or generally positive conclusions about the answers to life's many questions. Social alienation tends to bring out the worst in people, and often when it does many of us like to pretend that such a thing could never happen to us. Many of us might like to believe that we are immune to the socially and morally stunting effects of prolonged social isolation, and more importantly that we ourselves are incapable of doing harm.

I think this piece is especially important because it highlights an uncomfortable truth for the average person. Olivia never fully reckoning with the gravity of her actions, combined with Thistle forgiving her way too easily, is a disturbingly accurate portrayal of abuse that may slip under the radar because most people hold a very specific mental image of what abuse looks like. Some people can use this mental image to justify the "subtle" ways that they may engage in abusive behavior, but most people just use it as a way to distance themselves from any perceived capacity to do harm and thus absolve themselves of any need for self-reflection. I think the mantra "anyone is capable of doing harm, even me," is a hard thing to internalize for many people. I think it's even harder to add "even someone they care about. ESPECIALLY someone they care about." We don't want to think about it, but keeping the truth out of sight and out of mind doesn't prevent harm from being done.

Lastly, ostracizing and demonizing groups of people for traits that are out of their control is bound to create more problems in the long run. If we fail to think critically, those problems can look like a vindication of the decision to isolate those people. I can use the stigmatization of neurodivergent people (and I don't just mean autism, I'm talking about BPD and other personality disorders) as an example of this. Queer people who are "too weird," people who find enjoyment in taboo kinks whether as a way of coping with trauma or whatever other reason. It shouldn't have to be justified either way. If two adults lay down clear boundaries and communicate effectively, the activities they consent to is no one else's business besides any other parties they decide to include. Two consenting adult lesbians calling one another "sister" should not make people as rabid as it does. However, when we ostracize queer and neurodivergent people who do not fit our sanitized view of what those things mean, we run the risk of banishing them into spaces that are actually abusive. Sometimes the institutions that we create for ourselves in response to a society that has largely abandoned us can be just as poisonous as the very society we're trying to shelter ourselves from. Your queer community, if left without the tools to facilitate healthy dynamics, can be exploitative. It can be self-sabotaging. It can be just as toxic as the outside world. Sometimes our own institutions fail us too. I feel like this idea is expressed brilliantly in Malcatras' Maiden in addition to Monachopsis. Oftentimes they fail us while trying to do their very best to give us what we need. On an interpersonal level, our partners can do the same. We can also fail our partners while trying to do our very best. Anyone who thinks otherwise is more dangerous than anyone who works to keep that in mind. It is that very line of thinking, "I am incapable of doing harm, I don't have to worry about hurting anyone because I am not a bad person," that increases the possibility of someone getting hurt.

Wrote down some thoughts about Girls' Monachopsis development. Sincere thank you to weird freaks for enjoying this game. https://lunaticker.itch.io/girls-monachopsis/devlog/809599/girls-monachopsis-developer-ramblings

[slimereader]

The official DQ twitter account posted a graffiti-style illustration to celebrate the opening of a new Square Enix Garden store in Shibuya!

https://x.com/SQEX_MD_GOODS/status/1902163117632622738

[facts-i-just-made-up]

What even is the mystery of the druids?

The mystery is that when I played Dragon Warrior on NES, this thing now called a "Lunatick" was called a Druin:

And as a kid, I wasn't 100% on letters or memory so when I saw or heard the word "Druid" this is what I pictured. When people told me the druids made Stonehenge or worshiped nature or whatever, I assumed there was a real world version of these things.

No unreality or joke here, I thought that 'til I was like 12.

[dragonchick2001]

Simplified Ultraman monsters

[friendlyloveaffair]

Ultraman/moon mood board

If you don't know Claude Debussy's "Clair de Lune," it's heard on both episodes.

[chernobog13]

Lunaticks is learning the hard way that he's gotten on Ultraman Ace's last nerve because--

--ULTRAMAN HAS HAD ENOUGH OF YOUR $#@*&%!

Thursday night at 8pm on PBS.

[parkerd0t]

SILLIE DCA OC! Lunatick!

He’s from a line of fazbear’s where they made the daycare attendant models into performers rather than attendants! They do have a sibling however i haven’t finished designing her just yet ^^

More posts of them will be arriving at some point!! I swear!! ^^

PLEASE DONT REPOST‼️

Reblogs are appreciated!! 💙

[daikaiju-chaos]

Inktober of '21 and '22 - Day 18: Moon and Scrape

Featuring: The rabbit choju, Lunaticks from Ultraman Ace!

And monster gal gijinka of an EX Landia.

[streetsofdublin]

GULLIVER MURAL BY MEAGHAN QUINN

Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin on 30th November 1667 and was given over to a nurse to be minded in England. He did not meet his mother again until he was 21 years old, this was not unusual in those days.

JONATHAN SWIFT LIVED FOR A WHILE IN TRIM COUNTY MEATH Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin on 30th November 1667 and was given over to a nurse to be minded in England. He did not meet his mother again until he was 21 years old, this was not unusual in those days. The cost of his education was funded by his uncle Godwin Swift. He was educated at Kilkenny College and Trinity College, Dublin where he…

[bogleech]

MY DRAGON QUEST MONSTERS THREAD

Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince is the first DQM game I've ever gotten to play after admiring the series since childhood. The bad news is that it leaves out exactly the three DQ monsters I love most. The good news is that everything else about it is great. I've been taking regular screenshots as I play and I am going to start adding things about it to this post, so it is going to get long. First of all here are exactly my next three favorite monsters in the franchise, which they fortunately did include, and were all available to me by almost the first area:

"Mad Mollusk" or in other dq games "taileater" is great because it has a sad flabby slug face at one end and a fanged leech mouth at the other end. When it uses magic, it reveals giant eyeballs in its antennae somehow?! Love how big the "carnivorous" mouth gets in the attack animation. What a stretchy guy!

"Lunatick" is just called "meda" (eye) in Japanese, I'm glad they decided it was like a parasite thing in the localization.

Finally there's DROHL, a classic DQ enemy that looks like...well I'm not gonna say what it really looks like but I think it's a cool little freak unrelated to that and I think it talks exactly like Droopy dog. Oddly it's known as a "Drohl DRONE," and I believe there are other "castes" in other DQ games, but only the "drones" are in this one sadly. I've yet to find this in the wild; I got it through the breeding system!

....Which is by far the most addicting thing about this game. The actual gameplay is good solid turn based RPG stuff, if a bit basic, but every monster can be bred with another monster to unlock a slew of other species. This is one of the first games in which they actually call it a "fusion" system now, I guess dropping the word "breed" from the English localization, but all other in-game dialog still calls these the 'parents' and 'offspring' and even makes jokes that they're getting married, so yeah, it's still breeding. What happens when you breed a slime with someone's dead grandpa??

.....There are multiple monsters you can get from that, but one of them, and the one that makes the most sense, is Slimeshroom! This is a new DQ slime that's some fungus! What's also fun is that every monster has up to three skills, and each skill actually unlocks a ton of spells, attacks, boosts and effects as you spend skill points on them. Then when you breed two monsters, you can give the baby any three skills from the parents. Any at all! I used this to make my Slimeshroom both a healer and a fire mage in the early game. This catches you up with the same progress I talked about when I first got the game almost two months ago so here's some things that have happened since:

I bred a flying cat and a vampire chinchilla to get a.....sexy bat??

I helped a fat rat - that's the name of his species - rescue his son

I bred a people ghost with a lamp ghost to get a bag of dirt!

I fought this bastard giraffe man who called an elderly wizard a "naughty boy" and put him in candy jail.

"Duffer" from the Giraffe quest is also best friends with Eileen the eye demon, and when you rescue him, they become your loyal subjects! BAD NEWS: this entire game is actually a prequel to Dragon Quest 4, and the player character of this game is the villain of Dragon Quest 4. Duffer and Eileen are also in Dragon Quest 4. They die :( .......Maybe this game gives you a chance to fix that future??? I don't know.

[euniexenoblade]

please go play red red tarmac it's really fun and really short

[fangirlforeversthings]

When obi wan met cody or: the story why obi wan loves him so much.

A very short story by: me

Obi wan suddenly, dramatically throws his robe down and yells into the skies: WHY IS EVERYONE IN THIS FREAKING GALAXY A KRIFFIN LUNATICK EVEN THE FORCE?! *sinking his shoulders sadly* why am i the only normal reasonable adult here? *sniff*

His robe then is picked up by a pair of gloved hands. Cody, picks it up and hands it to him then calmly crosses his arms behind his back.

Cody: Here you dropped this sir :) My name is marshall commander cody, i am assigned to you as your commander :)

Obi wan:

Obi *whisper*: a normal reasonable adult?!

Cody: oh thank the maker i didn't want to be so forward at our first meeting but yes oh finally A NORMAL PERSON. *leans in and whispers behind held out hand* these lunaticks here all all out of their minds aren't they?

Obi with teary eyes: YESSSS!

*edit

They both then proceeded to sing barbie as the princess and the paupers: i'm just like you (yes with performance)

And since this day they are unseperable. Two tired adults drinking their Whiskey adorned morning coffee and silently judging everyone else around them

They are staring. Furociously. Everbody knows

[sillipededoodles]

posting an oc/exposure

hi! I’m sillipede, an artist/oc maker and I’ve come to find two ex friends of mine have gone out of their way to steal MY original characters, not just one but multiple of my ocs, to which I can provide proof for. I am hurt and outright disgusted by the actions they have taken especially considering how they blocked me out of the blue and cut contact for seemingly no reason.

screenshots shown below are of My ocs with dates of them being made atop of the stolen ocs/links connected to the oc they stole

the first set of oc screenshots shown have their profiles locked so I can’t link them, unfortunately as it would lead to nothing, however I can link the “creators” Toyhouse where further proof can be shown https://toyhou.se/28069150.lunatick/links

these ocs are characters I took time in making and I am beyond hurt they would think it was okay to block me and then steal what I made for nothing.

if either of you see this PLEASE get rid of those characters out of respect for the friendship we had; I’ve taken nothing from you, please take nothing from me.

[randomthefox]

Ya know. This whole stupid thing of the IDW cast constantly preaching about how compashionate they are against a bunch of evil lunaticks, and Sonic with his declaration of freedom reminds me of something.

Are you aware of the prisons in Norway? These inmates don't even get treated like criminals. Their "cells" are just small houses. They cook, clean, hang around with animals, swim and relax. And in a high secuirity prison, the guards don't even carry guns. They get a library, music studio to create songs, have their own keys to their own rooms, etc.

Americans would be baffled if they see this, but Norway claims that it is based off of their founding fathers. "No cruel or unusual punishment"

Their maximum sentence is 21 years, and you only get executed if you did some BAAAD shit. Their focus is rehabilitation, not revenge. IDW Sonic SEEMS to hint at this, only, there is one big difference...

THEY ARE LOCKED UP.

It raises the question of what is the purpose of incarcerating people who break the law? Is it punishment? Rehabilitation? Simply to remove the law breakers from lawful society? Some combination of two or all?

It is sad that in America, the knee jerk answer that most people have been conditioned to have is that the purpose of incarcerating criminals is punishment. You didn't follow the rules, or you broke the rules, so now you have to sit in time out. And all but the most white collar of American prisons are only SLIGHTLY above the level of cruel and unusual confinement compared to people being thrown in the oubliette in medieval society.

It would indeed be baffling to someone raised in American society to hear about a prison system where criminals are all effectively just under house arrest. "Whats the downside of breaking the law?" Sorry to get in my high horse but this is just another example of America still being brainwashed by Christian religious values. Because one of the arguments Christians will sometimes say against the concept of Atheism is "if you don't believe you'll go to hell when you die, then why don't you just run around stealing and raping and murdering people?" or along those lines.

It doesn't seem to occur to them that in a high trust society people don't NEED to be threatened with punishment to convince them to contribute to society instead of disrupting it. I don't believe that I'll go to hell for my sins when I die. So I do indeed rape and murder the exact number of people that I want to. It's just that the number of people I WANT to rape and murder IS ZERO.

Prisons being nice or hellish doesn't have any influence or impact on my desire to break the law, because I don't WANT to break the law. There isn't a single law that carries a sentence of jail time for violating it that I feel tempted to break. And frankly if you presented me with one, then I would most likely conclude that it is an unjust law that should be repealed andor revolted against.

The only prison that we've ever seen in existence in the universe of Sonic is the cell on Prison Island that GUN threw Gerald and later Sonic into. And the space prison on the Death Egg in Sonic Forces, the one that EGGMAN was throwing people into. Prisons are utilized by THE VILLAINS in Sonic. Sonic is OPPOSED to the plan of sealing Chaos back into the Master Emerald in Sonic Adventure, and the possibility of sealing The End back away into Cyberspace is never even floated by him. The morality of the Sonic the Hedgehog universe is clearly presented as Prisons = Bad. Sonic and Co have never and would never throw a bad guy into prison, that would go completely against the demonstrated values of the narrative as presented.

Punitive action against villains is always simply to put a stop to their evil deeds and plans, and to remove them from the immediate area in the process. (Whether they live or die as a consequence is really only a matter of how resilient the villain happens to be. It is certainly NOT a CHOICE that Sonic is making to execute or spare them, he just wants to Stop Them and if they happen to die then that's just the way the cookie crumbles.) And it is that way for the same reason that the worst thing that happens to Team Rocket is they get sent Blasting Off Again. This is a simple action adventure story meant for children, it is not interested in exploring that question of punishment vs rehabilitation vs removal. Because that's not what the purpose of the story this series is telling is about.

And Ian Flynn is also CLEARLY not interested in that question either. But in his case it's because he's a brainwashed north American who thinks the purpose of incarceration is punishment. Which is why he thinks Sonic should be against it as a concept, and thus "always lets [the villain] go." But he's such an incompetent writer that he sidesteps the pothole and falls into an bottomless pit, because now he's presenting Sonic as an intolerant tyrant who says that everyone needs to live their lives according to his values, or else he will inflict punitive violence against them. He's also very overtly still Archie Brained, because in Archie the "good guys" did indeed throw criminals into prison, and the question is never explored there either because it was in the default North American "prisons are to punish law breakers" values. So the Sonic we see in IDW is the result of Ian Flynn TRYING to write the character accurately to the games but he doesn't UNDERSTAND the character from the video games, and he's just filling in the blanks with what he remembers writing for the character back in Archie.

Basically all that to say: IDW Sonic is a cluster fuck.

[theoutcastrogue]

Tom of Bedlam

[by Daniel P. Mason, M.D. | American Journal of Psychiatry, Volume 171, Number 12, December 2014]

Illustration of a 17th-century broadside, featuring a malingering beggar, set “to the tune of Tom of Bedlam” (from Euing Ballad number 55)

In Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear, the King—betrayed by his daughters, bereft of his kingdom—sets off across the heath in a fit of rage. In a forlorn hovel, he encounters a curious character. Half-naked, his face “grimed with filth,” the man introduces himself as

Poor Tom; that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the wall-newt and the water; that in the fury of his heart, when the foul fiend rages, eats cow-dung for sallets; swallows the old rat and the ditch-dog; drinks the green mantle of the standing pool; who is whipped from tithing to tithing, and stock-punished, and imprisoned….

Lear cannot know that Tom, with his wild appetites, hallucinations, and tales of persecution is, in fact, Edgar, son of the Earl of Gloucester. Falsely accused of plotting against his father, Edgar has also fled to the heath, disguised as a “Bedlam beggar.” The conversation that ensues between the two madmen—one feigned, one real— is one of the most dizzying and psychiatrically rich in a play famously brimming with madness in its many forms.

Who then was this “Tom of Bedlam,” featured so prominently on the title page of the first quarto edition of the play? To begin, while Shakespeare may have been Tom’s most famous champion, Tom was not the Bard’s invention. Less a man, than many, Tom was a familiar folkloric “type” well known to 17th-century audiences: a “lunatick” vagabond who claimed to have been released from the notorious London asylum of St. Mary of Bethlehem (Bedlam).

“Claimed,” here, is key. For the earliest references to the figure of Tom are not as madmen but as malingering beggars. In other words, Edgar, rather than just playing a madman, was playing a man playing a madman. First appearing in the printer John Awdeley’s 1561 Fraternitye of Vacabondes, a compendium of Elizabethan beggar types, “poor Tom” was described as one who “walketh bare armed, and bare legged, and faineth him selfe mad”. Later “rogue encyclopedias” listed him among such deceptive vagabonds as “whipjackes” (fake shipwrecked sailors) and “priggers of prauncers” (horse thieves). By the 17th century Tom was familiar enough as to be recognizable by his “long staff, and a cow or ox-horn by his side; his cloathing fantastic and ridiculous... decked and dressed all over with robins [ribbons], feathers, cuttings of cloth”.

No one knows how many flesh-and-blood Toms were wandering the countryside by the time Shakespeare cast him as Edgar’s disguise. But few could have come from the institution itself: Saint Mary of Bethlehem in those decades housed fewer than 30 patients at a time. And yet so many beggars claimed to have been released from Bedlam that in 1675 the overseers of the hospital placed an advertisement in the London Gazette disclaiming the hoaxes.

With the end of the Civil Wars, Tom of Bedlam was said to have disappeared from English highways. By then, however, he had been immortalized, not only by Shakespeare, but in a proliferation of popular songs. There was “Loving Mad Tom” and “The Vagabond” and “To find my Tom of Bedlam.” Some became so famous that other songs could be published with the simple direction “to be sung to the tune of Tom of Bedlam”.

Of all the Mad Tom songs, one in particular stands out: “From the Hagg and Hungry Goblin,” an anonymous piece transcribed around 1615, now surviving in a single manuscript in the British Museum. In it we find Tom, recently released from Bedlam (or claiming so), begging for alms as he travels alone:

With a host of furious fancies Whereof I am commander, With a burning spear and a horse of air, To the wilderness I wander.

The song, quoted by Poe, Kipling, and Scott, was praised by the critic Harold Bloom for a “visionary perspective only rarely achieved in poetic history”. The poet Sir Robert Graves even suggested it was written by Shakespeare himself.

Or perhaps Tom never really vanished, but instead lives in those who have inherited his itinerancy. For, with this remarkable character, Shakespeare also created a mirror for today’s troubled wanderers, pursued by their own “foul fiends.” In them we find Tom’s many-layered complexity: at times seeking pity, at times refusing it, at times threatening, at times forlorn, at times arresting with their colorful clothes and speech. At times mad, at times playing madder: “knights,” as one Mad Tom put it, “of ghosts and shadows.”

[source]

[fruityyamenrunner]

“why would i listen to someone "simply telling" me what words to use?”

….Because it's a necessary step for communication? Because in order to have language we at some point have to agree on a set of sounds to correspond to a given concept?

“in fact, i don't think I've ever seen a "definition" because every time I've seen someone telling me what words to use, it always comes with attached claims, like you easily identify with the dictionary example. if i ever happened to see a "definition" it might well be impossible for it to be wrong, but I don't expect to see one any time soon.”

You seem like someone who has probably done pure mathematics at some point in your life so I highly doubt you've never seen a definition in the purest sense.

The truth claim I identified in the dictionary example does not lie in the definition of horses, it lies in the context of placing that definition in a dictionary, which is an object with a use other than “contain any definition someone could hypothetically invent”. What truth claim do you think is made by using the combination of letters h-o-r-s-e to refer to the particular rideable animal it currently refers to as opposed to any other combination of letters? Is it wrong to also call a seahorse a seahorse because someone might think this implies a seahorse has more in common with that animal than it does?

"what's wrong about the horse definition isn't exactly "it's not the consensus". it's that i got the part of speech wrong and the description is of plasmodia. do you *really* think the most likely reason for the error is that i was trying, in some subtle, "implicit" way to assert consensus that horses are very small and cause malaria”

Yes, I can guess that you probably wouldn't actually have meant to assert that, in the same way that if you made a strange enough typo you might write a sentence I could guess you didn't mean to type. Nonetheless that is what you would be asserting by putting it in a dictionary, the same way your hypothetical typo'd sentence would still have a meaning you didn't intend. The definition is not consensus because someone could, hypothetically, have a personal vocabulary where they call horses plasmodia and plasmodia horses, and not be misled about any actual facts about the world as long as they understand that other people do it the opposite way around and remember to mentally translate every time they encounter the world - it would be an incredibly inconvenient and unusual personal idiosyncrasy but not technically wrong.

It is also ironic that you end your response by using what is clearly a completely personal and idiosyncratic definition of witchcraft and expecting others to understand you.

what irony? throughout this penny-excursion to Bedlam to see the Lunaticks (or rather, Plutoniacks) I have been consistently saying how a worldpicture and the meaning within it can be well disclosed by a purposeful, thoughtful, poetical use of terminology. That is exactly what I am doing! I am posting through a very specific persona, and this whole tumblr blog is a disclosure of a worldview.

You, on the other hand, are an anonymous grey ball. It is just as fitting that you - like the other grey balls I get from time to time who speak to me with a very familiar voice of Millennial Conscience by employing some stereotyped bit of social control (I am "not having a normal one", or am "yikes"worthy, or like your sibling in sphericity suggested of me earlier this week, that i "woke up today and decided to be...") and are appealing precisely above all to an "implicit consensus". You disclose a worldview of "reading the room". Social engineering simplified and operationalised so even shift managers can employ it... Vulgar...

Speaking of dull globes, that reminds me. Before those pictures were beamed back, this is what the best picture of Pluto was:

Do you recognise it? It's an anonymous grey sphere with black markings on it. Is it a cousin of yours? Is this why you have a fondness for the 2005 solar system picture?