#meta resource center

[menolly5600]

If Steph or Leslie get involved at some point they'd have to carefully convince Danny to accept further help. They'd need to convince him to allow them to reach out to any other Bats or heroes to provide support to him outside of just medical care. He needs it. But he needs to agree to accept it. Unless his life is in immediate danger, the choice should be his. It's far too easy for a meta like Danny to do a runner and vanish if they lose his trust.

Short DPXDC Prompts #1036

Danny’s appendix bursts. If he doesn’t go to a hospital now he will die fully. The only place he could think of that wouldn’t get him reported to the GIW is a Meta Emergency Resource Centre.

[swallowtail-ageha]

I think there is something interesting about Yharnam seemingly being stuck as a pre-industrial city. It does have the typical neo-gothic 19th century architecture, but we don't really see anything that could point to factories or anything that implies mass manifacturing. Hell, we even get to the outskirts of the city where there is Hemwick, which is implied to be a centre of production but it's all also very rural? And all of the weapon manifacturing we see is in private workshops made by specialists, but never factories

Just an interesting tidbit of worldbuilding showing how much the isolationism and xenophobia affected the city

[lord-squiggletits]

Speaking of stupid reasons to criticize the Autobots (or rather, the opposite), I actually find the ““““problematic”““““ nature of Cop IDW Optimus and other elements of the plot to be quite essential to enjoying the story and seeing it as a balanced, nuanced story.

Because like... in other continuities, the story of revolution seems to be very much “there were good revolutionaries and there were bad ones, and then the bad ones wanted to be in charge and then they fought about it for 4 million years.” Which seems very weak to me not just in the “revolution bad” sense, but it makes me wonder how the war could go on for millions of years when the Autobots and Decepticons literally had the same goal and achieved it, now they’re just fighting over who gets to be in charge.

But like, in IDW1, the Autobot insignia and stuff already existed as a badge for the previous regime of the Prime/Senate. Orion Pax (now Optimus Prime) was a lackey of Zeta Prime who was either his loyal puppet at best or being groomed for the position of Prime at worst. Most of the people Optimus Prime recruited to help him fight were other police officers and military members he was affiliated with, who were already cracking down on the Decepticon movement as it became more and more violent.

With that base of Optimus/the Autobots being actually ~problematic~, I can absolutely see why the Decepticons wouldn’t consider the war over and would continue fighting. I mean, why the hell would they trust a police enforcer/military officer who was lackeys with the PRIME? Why would they think Optimus actually believes in peace and equality?

Of course, the Decepticons have their own problems as well. What was once a universal political movement (because remember, the Decepticon movement began with Megatron’s writings but he was NOT the leader of a militarized faction until Megatron Origins) was taken over by essentially an underground criminal gladiator organization that began engaging in weapon trafficking, crime, and terrorism. From the Autobot perspective, the Decepticons are allies for equality gone bad due to Megatron’s violent influences and the gladiator/criminal aspects overtaking the actual social equality vibes.

I just think that the premise of IDW1′s Autobot-Decepticon war is so good because like, the Autobots and Decepticons existed in a way BEFORE either Megatron or Optimus became the official leaders of those two specific, organized, militarized factions. But the society that created them and the two different social classes they came from doomed them to distrust each other. It wasn’t ever a fight about who got to be in charge, it was a war between two different factions of people who had every reason to distrust each other and think that the other faction would subjugate them if they allowed them to gain power.

[nimata-beroya]

Note: Since my old masterlist is getting notes again (and I'm hosting @tbb-appreciation-week this year), I thought it's a good time to release a new version with a lot more resources. If any of you know another site or thing that it's missing from the list, let me know and I'll include it!! [Altho, I'm getting this close 🤏 to the hyperlinks limit on this thing 😆]

Note 2: To avoid tagging the 3 people from whom I got multiple resources repeatedly, I've placed 1-3 asterisks between square brackets after the links, depending on the OP. I give the respective credit to them in a legend at the end of the post.

PLACES / TIME

Interactive Galaxy Map by Henry Bernberg

Map of the Galaxy

List of planets and moons [Wikipedia /needs expanding]

Planet Name Generator 1 [SciFi Ideas]

Planetary System Generator [Donjon]

Tatooine Location References [*]

Various locations Cross-Sections (Jedi Temple, Palp's office, Tipoca City & more) [**]

Republic - Separatist - Hutt space during the Clone Wars

Hyperspace Travel Times (to calculate how much time would take to go from point A to point B within the GFFA)

Standard Calendar and Holidays [including month names!]

Galactic Standard Calendar [wookiepedia // including week day names]

Date converter according to SWTOR [Google sheet]

Dated Star Wars Chronological Order (Movies + live-action shows + animation)

TCW Chronological Timeline by @mauvrix

Estimated date for: shared by @spectres-fulcrum

Partisans' attack on Onderon

Siege of Lasan

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT

General

Star Wars Name Generator 1 [Donjon]

Star Wars OC flow chart by @thefoodwiththedood

Star Wars Name Generator 2 [FantasyNames]

Star Wars Name Generator 3 [FantasyNames]

MetaHuman [Unreal Engine]

The character creator

Droid Name Generator

Star Wars Randomizer by @aureutr

Character Picrew [Twi-leks, Zabraks, Torgutas and Nautolans] @/megaramikaeli

Jedi

Taking a Closer Look at the Jedi Order in Star Wars Canon [Meta/Reference Guide] [**]

Jedi Order Structure Flowchart by @rileys-nest

Mandalorians

Mandalorian Armor design by MandoCreator

Keepers of the Way (Mandalorian Lore) [*]

Clones

Complete List Of Named Clone Troopers shared by @propheticfire (Organized by Unit)

Clone Creator [MandoCreator]

Clone Picrew

Star Wars Character Templates by SmacksArt [the ULTIMATE battery of template for any human/humanoid original character in any era. From troopers to droids, from Jedi to Sith, from KOTOR to the sequel Trilogy. 100% RECOMMENDED]

Basic Guide to Clone Trooper Armour by @odekiisu

GAR structure summary by @intermundia

The Clone Wars Republic Military Hierarchy Flowcharts [***]

Clone Trooper Lore [*] [Ranks, Culture, Training, Organization, etc.]

Clones and Kamino [*]

The Bad Batch Characters Concept Art shared by @shadowthestoryteller

MISCELLANEOUS

Star Wars Character Age Comparison Chart by @the-yearning-astronaut

Tusken Raiders lore by @snarwor

Materials (fabrics, leathers, silks, plastics, construction, metal composites, etc.)

Materials in Star Wars by marvel_dc_heart_throbs

Star Wars Fashion [*]

Leisure, Art, Musical Instruments, Ethnography [*]

Political and Criminal Organizations in the GFFA [**]

Financial reference about credits by @thecoffeelorian

List of TCW Opening Quotes

Transcripts of all the TCW episodes shared by @book-of-baba-fett

Star Wars Crawl Creator [not exactly writing-related, but just for fun]

HEALTH AND MEDICINE

Canon Medical Lore [*]

Real World reference for Field organizational structure for corpsman (medics) [*]

Kaliida Shoals Medical Center (Republic Haven-class medical station) shared by @clonewarsarchives

GAR Battalion Aid Station [*]

GAR Clone Medic Q/A [*]

More combat medicine, shipboard medicine, veteran issues, and military culture [*]

SHIPS AND VEHICLES

Ship Generator 3D

Ship Name Generator

All Terrain Tactical Enforcer (AT-TE) shared by @stairset

Republic Vessels Reference [*]

Low Altitude Assault Transport/Infantry (LAAT/i) [*]

List of GAR Flagships in the Clone Wars by @meandmyechoes

Layout of the Havoc Marauder

Dimensions of various ships from the Clone Wars [**]

FOOD AND DRINKS

Star Wars Menu Generator

In-Universe Alcoholic beverages

Canon Cocktails (recipes) [*]

Another In-Universe Drinks list shared by @systemic-dreams

Teas in Star Wars by marvel_dc_heart_throbs

Foodstuff [*]

Canon Star Wars Holiday Recipes [*]

Trask Chowder Recipe (from The Mandalorian) [*]

LANGUAGES; PHRASES AND SLANG; VOCABULARY

Languages of the Galaxy [*]

Script of different languages in the GFFA by @lucif-hare-blog

In-Universe phrases and slang [Google sheet]

List of phrases and slang [wookiepedia]

List of equivalents to real-world objects [wookiepidia]

Talk Like a Clone Trooper shared by @archeo-starwars

Aurebesh Translator [Aurebesh.org]

Learning Aurebesh Tools [Aurebesh.org] Reading - Writing.

Mando'a Database [Mando.org]

Mando'a Transcripticon [MandoCreator] (Create your own text in the Mando'a script.)

@project-shereshoy (Blog that collects and posts sources for Mando'a from all over the internet.)

Mando’a Categorized Spreadsheet

Learning Mando'a Tools [MandoCreator] Reading - Writing.

Setting Thesaurus Entry: Spaceport [Writers helping writers]

Fan-created Conlangs

@dai-bendu-conlang (Jedi Culture Explored) (This blog is the home of the Dai Bendu Conlang, invented by the Archive of Our Own Users aroacejoot, @ghostwriterofthemachine, and loosingletters for the Jedi Order in Star Wars.)

Lasana Lexicon by Anath_Tsurugi (fandom lexicon of the Lasat Language)

HELPFUL BLOGS & SITES

The amazing @fox-trot, who not only makes astonishing art and write an amazing fic, she also responds to medical questions and gives all kinds of references for writing medic characters. Check her #medicposting tag and you'll find tons of information. Also check #star wars reference and her art tag while you're at it.

@writebetterstarwars, which seems to be inactive, but there are a bunch of references there.

@howtofightwrite The place to find out how to write a good fight scene.

@scriptmedic no longer active, but it has a great deal of useful information.

@scripttorture for your whump needs. Major trigger warning for all its content.

@sw-anthrobiology A blog dedicated to collecting headcanons about the biology and cultures of Star Wars species.

@archeo-starwars In-universe sources on culture and history.

@clonewarsarchives Resources & Concept Art Blog for The Clone Wars animated series.

Wookiepedia If you don't find something in here, it's probably because it doesn't exist, neither as a canon nor legends reference.

Star Wars Databank: The official Star Wars website's reference guide. All canon.

WRITING IN GENERAL (For those who don't want to die like Stormtroopers)

SlickWrite: Completely free; online. Checks grammar, punctuation, flow, and writing style according to different settings (including fiction writing).

ProWritingAid: [RECOMMENDED] One of the most thorough online proofreader I've ever used. Although when using a free account gives extremely thorough feedback, with +20 different in-depth reports, for only the first 500 words. However, you can earn a premium account license (for a year or for life) if you get 10 or 20 new users signing up for free; (if you wouldn't mind doing so using the link above and help me earn mine, please). The settings allow you to check your writing according to your needs, from general to formal to creative. It has a bonus that you can check depending on the genre you're writing. For example, in creative, you can choose romance or sci-fiction (there are 14 sub-genre in total). And just like google docs, you can share a document, and people can view, comment or edit it too.

LanguageTool: [RECOMMENDED] Another excellent proofreader. It also has a word limit in free accounts, but if you use the add-on for Google Docs, it counts each page as a new document, so hitting the word limit is nearly impossible. It helps you to rewrite a sentence (3 a day), even if it doesn't raise any flags; it's very useful for when your sentence is grammatically correct, but it doesn't feel quite right.

Grammarly, Hemingway Editor: No so great, but they do the basic job.

Legend

[*] Shared by @fox-trot [**] Shared by @gffa [***] Shared by @cacodaemonia.

[kradogsrats]

Now we know What Viren Did(tm), and...

My personal side-eye aside, that denouement is actually an incredibly elegant application of the story's themes, within the scope of restrictions imposed by this particular medium (i.e. a cartoon targeted for pre-teens and younger). Like, I personally assumed for a long time that we would simply never find out the details, because it would be either too grim and/or violent for the story's intended rating or... kind of a let-down. On the surface, what we got seems like the second.

Most of us have looked at Claudia killing the baby deer to heal Soren's paralysis and went "well, it was obviously that, but y'know... worse, somehow," which is a completely reasonable assumption to make. It was definitely what was narratively implied, which makes the supposedly-damning ingredient being "your mother's tears" instead of like... idk, "your mother was pregnant again and I used the life of that unborn child to save you" or something kind of "... oh. Okay, then."

To be fair, that might also be why they went so hard in the IMO inadvisable male-dominated writer room direction of "so I held her down and took what I wanted" to convey the requisite "he's doing A Bad," which is what all my side-eye is toward. But here's the thing:

On some level, dark magic is about violation—of nature, of others, and of the self. Even violation by Aaravos, ultimately.

But it's also not just that.

Dark magic also sits at the center of one of the primary themes of the whole story, which is the evil of denying others' personhood. We see it again and again from the angle of the heroic cast: "You keep calling it a monster," "You knew he was a person, just like you," "She's not 'the elf.' She's Rayla." The evil they do not allow to take root is seeing people as things, the place where all other evils begin. (GNU Terry Pratchett, IYKYK.)

So Viren's damning crime, the crime that is dark magic, is this:

In that moment, he looks at his wife, and sees only a source of what he needs. One that he can take from as he wills. That's why Lissa leaves—Viren has pulled the circle he draws around "people" versus "abstractions, things to be used" in so tightly that she has found herself suddenly on the outside of it. That's not something you come back from, in a relationship.

As for it all being over something as innocent as Lissa's tears, as opposed to something like her blood, her unborn child, her heart, her last breath—that's also, I think, part of the point. It's a renewable resource, harvested without doing permanent physical harm, but it's still a violation of her. This is the ultimate refutation of the "but what if ethically-sourced phoenix feathers" argument as being, for the final time, bullshit.

When Viren bursts in looking like he walked straight out of hell and demands use of her tears, could Lissa have given them freely? Sure... but she didn't. Could he have talked her around, if he invested the time and respect for her that would require? Probably, but again, he didn't! He took what he'd decided was necessary, did what he decided he had to do, because he could.

And like, he knew, even then. Because while dark magic twists your perceptions and reasoning, dragging you deeper each time—it can't twist you so much that you no longer have a choice. It will do everything it can to make you rationalize making that choice, over and over, but it can't erase that it is a choice.

Like, I'm honestly kind of emotional about it because while the surface level watching experience is kind of hmmmmm, it delivers so well on a thematic and meta level that I'm just like idk. Fuck. It's good.

[musedeluce]

Emergency Procedure: Medic + Hunter

Zayne x Reader -Protecting the medical personnel is priority number one in a combat zone, and you are very good at your job.

Tags/Warnings: Hurt/Comfort, Slight Angst, Injuries, Triage, Medical emergencies, Combat, Hospitalization

⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘

The various sounds of human pain echoed throughout the area. It had one been a pristine, modern park and city center, but debris now littered the ground, rumble and shattered glass strewn around, bodies of the wounded and dead scattered. The response had been quick, the Unicorns squad deployed to neutralized the wanderer attack and medical teams embarking soon after, waiting to enter the area until given the all clear.

Every hunter squad had an assigned area, as did each team of medics. For medics, it generally was the same area the hospital they worked at served. For hunters, it was based on which station throughout the city you were assigned. Then, each hunter was further assigned a specific person or persons on the medical squad to protect. Because Akso Hospital and the Hunter’s Association Headquarters were in the same area of Linkon, Unicorns and Akso’s triage team were assigned together and partnered up. Partnered hunters were usually assigned medics who were also partnered up. Thus, hunter partners could still work together and medical personal wouldn’t work alone even if their Hunter couldn’t work. When the medical teams were cleared to enter, procedure dictated that any capable hunters accompanied their assigned medic to protect and help them, due to the unpredictable nature of metaflux and any lingering danger. Hunters who were able were also expected to cover for hunters who could not. To Zayne’s deep relief, and honestly, some happiness, you were his assigned protector in these situations. Your partner, Xavier, had been assigned to Dr. Greyson.

Quickly, Zanye moved from casualty to casualty, assessing their condition and, essentially deciding between life and death for some. Triage is, perhaps, the most difficult situation any medical professional might have to go through. You must assess the patient’s condition, determine if they can actually be saved, and move on if they cannot. If they can be saved, those with the worst injuries are treated and evacuated first. The goal, of course, is to save as many people as possible with the limited resources available.

“Zayne, there’s a person over there.” You gesture towards a pile of rubble that had once been a building. “There’s small meta – fluctuations, but that’s normal for the aftermath of a protofield event like this. It should be safe, but be careful.” Zayne patiently waited for your assessment, thinking to himself just how useful the energy detection part of your evol was. A small, keening cry sounded from the direction you indicated and the both of you started off, moving quickly and efficiently. The source of the cry was easy to identify. A teenage boy lay trapped under the rubble, buried halfway with blood pooling under his body. Scanning the debris, you relayed information to Zayne. “We could pull him out, in theory because he’s not impaled or stuck on anything according to the scan. But the rubble isn’t stable and his vitals are erratic...” Carefully, Zayne positions himself to pull the boy out, and while he did so, you positioned yourself in a way that if the rubble toppled, you could drag Zayne out of the way, as well as help him with the patient.

“On three.” Zayne put his hand on the ground, an ice crystal materializing under the slab pinning the boy in place, growing towards it to push it off him.. “One.” You both braced yourselves. “Two.” You both began to focus especially on your breathing. “Three!” Applying all your strength, you were able to lift the slab just enough for Zayne to pull the boy out from under the pile of rubble. Unfortunately, the slab falling back into place dislodged large pieces of rubble from the top of the pile, crashing down and dislodging other pieces of rubble. Adrenaline pumping, driven by pure instinct, you dragged Zayne and the boy out of the way. An intense, crushing pain bloomed through your leg as pieces of debris pinned you to the ground instead.

The cry of pain you let out sent panic searing through Zayne’s blood. Actual anguish gnawed at him, swirling with a pang of guilt. Logically, he knew this wasn’t anyone’s fault. Logically, he knew you had been doing your job, and he had been doing his. Oh, but he longed for you to be safe and sound. He finished treating the boy, and called for backup before making his way to you, the very definition of grace under pressure.

“Hello, Doctor.” you smile as he kneels by your side, playful in an effort to diffuse the tension. After a brief pause as he examines you, you ask the main question on your mind at the moment. “How’s the boy? Will he survive?” Luckily, you had managed to get clear of the main debris pile before your leg got pinned under one piece of rubble. Using his evol, ice protected your leg from further damage and held it in place as more ice shifted the debris. “Zayne?”

“He’s alive. I’ve given him the best treatment possible and have called for assistance to pick him, and you, up.”

“And you?”Zayne’s ability to deal with a crisis was something comforting, and you felt happy to be his partner, but he had been at risk too.

“My condition is acceptable for the circumstances. I’m physically fine and able to continue my work.” Zayne pauses, and looks you in the eye again, a subtle smile gracing his face. “Thanks to your quick thinking.” A bright, genuine smile lights up your face.

“I’ll always do my best to keep you safe, Zayne.”

“Your leg won’t be permanently injured, and your protocore syndrome isn’t showing any abnormal symptoms” He finishes bandaging your leg, having set it in an emergency splint. “Our backup should be here soon. I’m going to go check on my other patient, but I’ll return to you.” As he speaks, he slips a small piece of candy into your hand. Right then, your backup arrived and you were evacuated, along with the injured teenager, to Akso Hospital. It wasn’t until most of the chaos died down that you and Zayne crossed paths again.

A soft knock at your hospital room door alerts you to someone’s, you assume Zayne’s, arrival. “Come in.” Gratified to see you were correct, a small smile spreads across your face as Zayne walks in. Despite being on his feet, doing triage and emergency surgeries, he looks almost the same as always. But exhaustion dogs his every step, his eyes narrow as tiredness bears down upon him. “Sit down.” Zayne doesn’t argue, instead sitting in the armchair by your hospital bed, almost melting into it, leaning back and covering his face with the crook of one elbow and resting his other arm on the armrest. You reach out and take his hand, and neither of you move for a while.

“How do you feel?” Zayne is the first to speak.

“Tired, but my injury feels better than before. As for my heart, I’ve been taking my meds diligently and haven’t felt anything since you checked at the site.” Dutifully you report to him, knowing that this information is what would reassure him the most.

“What I wouldn’t give for you to be healthy and safe...” Zayne murmurs, almost to himself. His hand tightens around yours. “Life is better with you here… Please… do your best to stay.”

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A/N: Hopefully I'll improve as I continue to write for these characters. Originally this was going to be all 4 of them together but the length would have been a lot I think, for a single post lol. Still also getting a handle on tagging and stuff, so please let me know if there's anything I can improve.

[lurkingshan]

why do you continue to watch gmmtv shows when you clearly don’t enjoy them?

This is the kind of rude, cowardly anonymous ask that I would typically just delete, but I’m in the mood to be generous so I will respond and use it as an educational moment.

I have to start by rejecting your premise. I enjoy plenty of GMMTV shows. My favorite Thai bl of this year is Cherry Magic Thailand. I wrote quite lovingly about it on this hellsite for 12 weeks. I was also a big fan of Cooking Crush and The Trainee this year, Kidnap is giving me joy weekly, and I’m currently in the midst of a really interesting discussion with people far more mature than you about Peaceful Property. GMMTV is also responsible for some of my all time favorite Thai shows including Bad Buddy, 3 Will Be Free, Midnight Museum, Theory of Love, Moonlight Chicken, and Dark Blue Kiss, and many more besides that I liked a lot. You don't know me. You have made the mistake of assuming that because you’ve seen a small fraction of my posts about specific things, you know what I think about all kinds of things. But as my beloved departed grandfather loved to say, when you assume you make an ass out of u and me. 

So with that out of the way, let’s get to the real question underneath your logical fallacy: why don’t I keep my mouth shut instead of posting about the flaws I observe in these shows? There are a number of reasons for that.

First, I am extremely open about the fact that I am interested in the art and science of narrative storytelling, and I often post about it from a critical lens. This is all in the pinned post at the top of my blog, but I doubt someone with your lack of manners bothered to look there before sending me this ask. 

Second, I don’t believe in the popular fandom idea that all meta discussion of shows should be positive and centered on stanning for actors or pairs and their shows. That's a fine pursuit for folks who enjoy engaging with media that way, but I personally find that boring and intellectually empty, and have very little interest in it. I like to learn from the things I enjoy, and you can't learn if you're not willing to think critically about why something in a story may or may not be working.

Third, my favorite thing about watching media is discussing it with like-minded people, and the way to find like-minded people is to share your honest feelings about what you're watching. I have made some of the best friends of my life by posting my unfiltered thoughts about whatever I'm watching in various social media spaces, and having people come and say "hey, me too" or "I don't quite agree but what an interesting thought." We connect with others through sharing our thoughts and feelings. If you censor yourself in fandom spaces, you will not find your people.

Fourth, on the specific topic of GMMTV: they are the largest and best resourced ql-producing studio in the biggest ql-producing country, and part of a giant media conglomerate that controls much of the media in Thailand. Their shows matter in terms of the influence they have over the rest of the industry, and so the messages they send with their shows also matter. I will never ignore them completely even when I choose not to watch some of their shows, because where they go, the larger ql industry follows. When I see a trend in their shows that is harmful, like, say, the repeated use of marginalized identities for marketing their shows that they then disrespect in the way the stories are executed, that needs to be pointed out and examined, and I am hardly the only one doing so.

I'll end by asking you a question, anon: what did you hope to accomplish by sending me this ask? Unlike many of the other folks who have been engaging in critical discussion with me over the last couple days, you had nothing constructive to say. You didn't put forward an interpretation or share your own feelings, you didn't contribute to the collective analysis process, and you didn't offer any commiseration or even a clear disagreement with anything I said. From where I'm sitting, your only intent was to attempt to shame me for speaking. You will never be successful at that, and it's a pretty ugly impulse that you should examine in yourself. When you find yourself being awful to real human beings because you can't manage your emotions about fictional media, it's time to think about what you're doing here. I hope you'll reflect on that, and take good care.

[appleflavoredkitkats]

sometimes i think about l'manberg as meaning-makers.

they are what made the dsmp transcend minecraft as a statistical, skill-centric game into something where meaning is arbitrary. this works in both an in-narrative and meta angle. on one hand, power in the dsmp before l'manberg was centered on pvp and resources (and ultimately, that also dictated how power is gained and lost for the rest of the dsmp's lifetime). that's the main thing they were fighting against, yeah? that people in l'manberg were not as physically skilled in a more strategic, game-like minecraft sense compared to the dteam and their allies.

l'manberg is literally the introduction of power derived from personal meaning and interests, something more supposedly "arbitrary" than, let's say, being able to pvp like techno or dream. it's the one thing you cannot measure compared to physical power (like dream's insane pvp skills) or resources (dream's ability to build the prison with sam, or dream and the emerald duo being able to blow up nlm). l'manberg literally sets the precedent of the dsmp being controlled by! arbitrary means!

it works in good and bad ways, because i mean like. defying the status quo of power is one thing, but how is a completely other thing. how every l'manbergian viewed l'manberg isn't the same with each other, especially wilbur. besides all the principles he designates to the idea of l'manberg, we can't ignore that he literally brings up geopolitical constructs into the dsmp like discussions of economy (salmon being their main produce) or police (his answer of what they'll do abt pet deaths). but of course meaning-making isn't bad, because, i mean, look at the discs! at the pets everyone owns!

i joke about everyone needing to apologize to the dsmp after the minecraft movie trailer dropped because. the dsmp will forever encapsulate the meaning of minecraft better than that movie ever will. there is always a constant discussion of power - entertaining that this game, this server is winnable. the closemindedness people can have when dictating how minecraft should be played (ie. dream on the pvp side, wilbur on the narrative side) versus minecraft being something entirely up to your decision, something that is a shared space of people with varying opinions and thought processes.

yeah i'm crazy about l'manberg actually, and the precedent it set in the dsmp. what it challenges and what it's caused. what it challenged and reinforced. what a crazy nation

[dipperdesperado]

Get Organized!

I recently made a post about how to get started in doing radical stuff. Said otherwise, that post was meant to answer the question, “Where do I go, when I know the world is fucked?” This post covers similar ground, but is more interested in the theoretical side of things. Not to say it won’t be practical. It’s just saying that if you’re not the kind of person that can read a little bit and feel confident to act, or you like having a little bit more scaffolding, that you also deserve a resource. I’m hoping to contribute to that today. As the title says, we’re going to be focusing on organizing. This is one of those things that is said a lot, but is actually defined much less often. Tangentially, you should be aware and ready for this for literally everything relating to politics. Any word that you hear used, you should always ask for a definition. Many a movement would have gone differently if folks spent more time trying to find semantic alignment. Anyway.

When I say organizing, I mean catalyzing the energy of folks, acting from a specific theory of change. A theory of change is a thought process or method to create some kind of social impact in a particular context. When the world sucks in some particular way, and you want it to stop sucking, the answer is to organize, in the way defined above. By organizing, we lean on the idea of collective power to create changes that are currently only afforded to those with authoritarian power. It’s a game of evening the odds.

I will also note that this assumes that you are going to be framing your work around broad-based movements, that have (mostly) aboveground (as in “legal”) tactics. This is not necessarily a statement of what is correct; small groups that are in concert with larger movements are also able to be successful, even when doing more confrontational tactics.

So, to organize, I’d say it would be useful to be involved in movements already. You can look at my radicalism 100 post to see how that could look. Either way you have to know what your where your niche(s) lie. In other words, what sits in the middle of the intersection between what you like to do, what you are good (or can become good/have a willingness to become good) at, and what is needed in your context. I tend to center the local level, because that is the area where influence is more tangible, and fits into how I see a resilient world coming to fruition. So, you have to ask yourself, “What can I do, that I would enjoy doing, in my community?” Then, you should find some other people who are in that same vibe. Depending on your approach, this may take no time at all, or a lot of time. I listed some ideas for finding folks in radicalism 100, but to reiterate: look for social medias and IRL presences of people who are into the same topics, and connect with them. See where you can plug in, and see where the contours of organizing in your local contexts are. Ideally you can see places where gaps can be filled.

Once you find an issue that you think has potential, and you have a couple of people to do some organizing with, you have what I think of as a catalyst group. This group is meant to start (or assist) in a certain kind of reaction, but not lead it. Trying to control movements is both futile and antithetical to liberation. So, to ground us, we have two very important ingredients: a topic/issue/area of focus to organize around, and a group of folks to work with. Once this is in place, you can co-create a strategy with your organizing team. I’d recommend employing an encircling strategy as your long-term or meta strategy, where multiple sub-strategies and campaigns happen within this frame. Essentially, this allows you to employ campaigns across a matrix of tactics. Within the encircling frame, you can create a campaign (what I consider a “short-term” strategy). Campaigns are a series of actions over time. Strategies are a series of campaigns over time.

A useful way to think of strategic planning is by separating the process into stages, grouped by movement size.

Small: Organize small actions/protests, figuring out ways to build movement visibility and interest

Medium: Focus on scaling up the participation, through mobilizing efforts. Promote your actions, get people involved, and encourage meaningful action.

Large: Create a movement. The kind of thing people hear about.

To organize on the smallest level, the easiest thing might be to just do plan actions that are well within your team’s capacity, organize those actions, and execute. If you can swing it, I’d really recommend to not lean too much into symbolic actions. There are risks with every action, no matter what legal frameworks your locality has. If you’re going to do something, you have to be very intentional with:

what you hope to accomplish through the action

a high likelihood of success for the action

doomsday planning in case something goes wrong

If you’re able to do this, then you will be leagues ahead of a lot of other folks. This is not to make it a race or a competition, but it is moreso to say you can symbolically represent and catalyze action without becoming a martyr.

As you’re doing actions, you should be refining your idea of who’s impacted by the issues more and more. As that picture gets clearer, you should spend more and more time understanding and listening to those folks. Ideally, you get to a point of co-creation, where you are enabling people to fight for themselves and build their autonomy. That is the kind of thing that prevents movements from dying. Organizers should be trying to put themselves out of business, in a sense. Catalysts should be able to come from anywhere.

To scale up, I’d recommend a focus on meeting folks. Take the ideas of deep canvassing, where you empathetically have conversations with whoever is impacted by the issue you’re responding to, through the lens of giving power to those people. Rather than asking them to feed into some established system of power, encourage them to take action into their own hands, as a collective.

I’d also recommend that as capacity grows, build a “positive” or “constructive” power. This can look like a lot of things. Whether it is a block club, neighborhood pod, community council, or community assembly, dedicate energy into creating spaces where people can start building their democratic and consensus muscles. These can simultaneously act as the training ground and alternative governance structure that allows folks to start making decisions for themselves in a very specific way.

This will ideally allow the movement to really start to be intersectional. It should be intersection minded from the outset, but that can be difficult to meaningfully actualize in the early stages of the movement. since single-issue movements are inherently brittle (if your movement revolves around getting something on a ballot, winning or losing just ends the movement)—there are throughlines that connect all movements, and those lines should be made visible and traveled. Environmentalists should fight for housing rights, LandBack, Reparations, and a host of other things. The more developed our networks, the stronger our movements will be.

[makapatag]

thinking about world-first design

My last three games were more or less centered on the character, and consequently the player. I think this is a completely valid way of playing, but having done three kinds of games that had this, I wanted to branch out into a world-first style of design.

World-first design are the ones I associate with the stylings of mostly OSR: where the gameworld and the modules and the adventures and the equipment, the counting of ammo, of resources, are all more important than creating a character in such a way to fulfill a particular fantasy or character concept.

I call this world-first rather than character-first because it puts into primacy the very world and fiction that the players must interact with rather than the player characters being only focus of such games. In the same way that character-first design (WotC D&D, Exalted, Lancer) doesn't inherently preclude an overwhelming focus on a world's lore and vibe, world-first design doesn't inherently preclude a focus on character building or a certain primacy of the player characters over NPCs. In World-First design, to be someone of note is to have played the game and interacted with the world long enough. However, a caveat of this world-first design is that it's very easy to die, to be extinguished (it is important, in a way, in World-First design to showcase the strength of the world and how it doesn't bend to the whims of a player).

The difference of course, is how the mechanics are mostly written and presented. In World-First design, there's not much use for metacurrencies that imply that the PCs are inherently different or privileged over other player characters. World-First PCs gain privilege from things within the gameworld. While diegesis is of value, it is not the be all end all, as long as the game focuses on mechanics of the world rather than of the player. Frex: ROMANCE OF THE LOTUS THRONE has a (very rare, D&D 4e Action Point-esque) reroll system known as DETERMINATION. However Determination is a very real thing in the game, and can be gained from succeeding in particular tasks, or interacting with community and finding some form of purpose. Its sublimated form of willpower. Its also a bit of an Undertale reference. The difference then is that Determination is not meta-currency: it's in-world currency. There's no Determination stat in the character sheet: it instead fills up an inventory slot. It's a mechanic of the world and not of the player. It's simulationism without the tax forms (rules-lite, fiction-first simulationism is a topic for another post).

When I play or run RPGs, my personal preference has always been that of immersionism. The deeper you sink into a world's physics, a world's customs, the more the Other becomes the Self is a point of great joy for me: whether that be the chilling borderlands of SYMBAROUM, the intricate Underworld of VAMPIRE, the ineffable Space Opera of FADING SUNS, or the crimson-gold otherworld of ARTESIA. World-First can be a genre emulation philosophy (frex, if your world is meant to emulate a genre, a la Exalted's Creation) but I believe that Genre Emulation is not the be-all end-all of Role-Playing Games, as some would think it to be. Mechanics aren't automatically good just because it hearkens to a particular genre, a la PbtA. I think mechanics are good when they accomplish the Design Goal of the game. And sometimes Design Goals are to simulate or fabricate an otherworld and transport you there. I think that goal is one of the more difficult ones to truly achieve, so any that attempt it to this day I hold in respect, even if they end up being rules-heavy simulation-esque attempts. I believe that World-First games are like, the immersive sims of TTRPGs (in the sense that they take some getting used to but create for some of the best emergent gameplay moments, as well as potent immersion of a world).

In ROMANCE OF THE LOTUS THRONE, I’ve managed to do a bit of a mixing. Inspired by the likes of Dark Souls and Elden Ring, where the world is important, but its the character builds that make or break a game, I’ve made the characters dependent on the world. This means you more or less start a game with a blank slate of a character, or someone with the bare minimum of detail. Then, as you play, you learn and gain abilities from milieu of the world, gaining items and powers and magicks from playing the game, rather than from a Class Table. In a way, this is also an inherent forcing of diegesis in the game, and diegesis is one of my favorite concepts in all game design, across all mediums.

This does (somewhat) assume that the characters you’re playing are either amnesiac, young, or people that have not really accrued anything over the years. This is just as well: I believe that you can gain world-changing skills and capabilities even at 60 or 70 or beyond. However, if you want to build a character already seasoned, that’s easy enough to do: simply give them a number of starting equipment and Arts.

All of this lends itself to the ROMANCE's Buddhist bent, especially concerning the ideal of Anatta or Non-Self. Metaphysically, there is no self, all individuation arises from a nigh infinite set of other factors that eventually form the character. This enlightenment is inevitable for PCs that live long enough in Romance: a character eventually becomes a master of anything, removing the individuation of specialization as they inch their Cultivation closer to Awakening. To gnosis. To bodhi.

At the end of it, world-first design kind of asks the players to interact with the game not from their own biases but on the game's own terms. For the longest time this has been a no problem: the biggest world-first games are OSR after all, and they carry the baggage of D&D. However, for games that need and deserve worlds to be taken on their foundation and not the player's, both a World First design approach as well as a World First player mentality could provide a different, maybe even enriching experience that most character-first games would not deliver in the same way (character first games deliver a different, honestly more marketable niche in the realms of OC gaming and Power Fantasy).

[joffyworld]

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[jasper-pagan-witch]

The Modal Commander Servitor

An approach to a Magic: The Gathering servitor subtype. This is one of my UPG-filled personal projects.

There are many approaches to making a servitor. There are ways to advance that servitor straight to thoughtform. There are even ways to make an egregore with other magic practitioners. So that’s not what this post is about, though I will leave resources at the bottom for that [1]. This post is about using pop culture in tandem with magic to make a servitor even more powerful. I’m warning you now, we get well into the mechanical weeds of Magic: The Gathering in this one.

The thought came to me a while back in a Discord server with some magic-practicing pals. I got the idea to use my Magic: The Gathering Commander decks as modal spells (more on this term later), which then turned into ideas for making them servitors. To quote myself,

But more to the point, the idea of a Commander deck is that you have a central Guy in charge of particular Things and you typically build the deck around that, so why not treat the central Guy as a servitor empowered by the tools built into the deck (in the form of supporting cards) to accomplish a goal, and it’s empowered every time you play the deck. It’s basically outsourcing magic bullshit to eldritch monsters from between the planes, a toddler cactus person, several pirates, the gods’ most unfortunate bisexual, and a lawyer.

And then I put the idea aside for a while. Summer, my fallow period, happened. But when I came back to my practice near the start of autumn, I found myself revisiting servitor/thoughtform ideas, which prompted me to return to my old notes on Modal Commander Servitors, the Hireling Sliver Hivemind Linking Sigil System (SHILLS), and Echo Summoning. We’ll only be focusing on the first in this post.

But let’s start at the beginning. The crux of this servitor is that it is the Commander of your Commander deck, so let’s talk about the Commander format.

The Commander format (as officially known by Wizards of the Coast aka WOTC) is also called Elder Dragon Highlander or EDH. It is a casual multiplayer format with a competitive form known as cEDH. You have a deck that is 100 cards strong, and with the exception of basic lands, you can only have one copy of a card in your deck. Commander is centered around a Legendary Creature (or, more rarely, a Planeswalker) who exists in the “command zone” separate from the main deck but that still counts towards that 100-card limit. Under certain circumstances, you can have two Commanders (such as with the Partner, Partner With, Friends Forever, Choose a Background/Background, or Doctor’s Companion mechanics). You start at 40 life, and if you end up at or below 0 life, or you take 21 points of Commander damage from a single Commander, you lose the game. Your deck’s available colors are restricted only to your Commander’s color identity – every color that appears in their card, not just the ones in their initial mana cost. [2]

There’s a lot more to it than that, but for the purposes of this post, we’ll be focusing on your Commander itself rather than its format.

Depending on your approach to pop culture entities (PCEs), you may already see them as faces of existing entities (such as Karametra being a face for Demeter) or as embodiments of archetypes (such as Bertram Graywater embodying the “corrupt lawman” of the Western genre). However, these are far from the only approaches. My personal approach is “everything is already so goddamn weird, so why wouldn’t they exist”. Luckily, when creating a servitor, we’re not drawing on an existing PCE. Instead, we’re forming our energy into the shape (and sometimes personality) of one!

In the meta sense, a player of Magic: The Gathering is a planeswalker (a mortal with a spark in their soul that allows them to travel to other planes and access the magic of other planes even if they aren’t there), battles with other players are duels with other planeswalkers, and their deck represents their allies – other planeswalkers they can call in favors for aid with, creatures and allies they can summon for help, and spells and other resources they have at their disposal. [3] Therefore, your Commander is your greatest ally who can help you in this duel, one whom you can keep resummoning easier than others (as seen by the command zone being a separate zone from the graveyard). The crux of this format, in a meta sense, is that your Commander wants to help you. So why not make it into a servitor, a type of energyform, so it can help you for more than merely games?

Okay, so we’ve covered the Commander, and you presumably already read up on servitors and thoughtforms recently. But what about that other word, modal? Modal is an MTG mechanic that gives you the choice of two or more effects of a spell or ability when it’s cast or otherwise put on the stack. Modes are the different effects you may choose on a modal spell or ability. There are keywords that add onto it (escalate, entwine, and spree) that allow you to pick more or all of the options at once. [4] If you’re worried about what “the stack” is, don’t, it’s not actually relevant for what we’re doing with this servitor. Not even MTG players understand the stack. The point is, modal means options, and the only thing better than good stuff is options for good stuff.

So let’s put all of these definitions and mechanics together. A Modal Commander Servitor is an energyform stored in a Legendary Creature (or Planeswalker) card in charge of a Commander deck who uses the cards and resources in the deck (or otherwise given to them) in order to adapt to whatever you need it to do. They’re created like normal servitors and can draw on the same energy sources as normal servitors, but they can also draw power from the lands in their Commander deck. They can be empowered by both magical and in-game usage. The deck theme and archetype (such as an Otter Typal deck for Bria, Riptide Rogue or a Ninjutsu Theme deck for Yuriko, the Tiger’s Shadow [5]) also tie into and empower the Commander as both a Commander and a servitor. Sure, you can build a deck completely divorced from its Commander, but you’re kneecapping yourself and your Commander by doing so.

Let’s circle back to the Partner mechanic. It appears in multiple forms – Partner, Partner With, Friends Forever, Choose a Background and Background, and Doctor’s Companion. These abilities give you the ability to have two Commanders for your deck, with caveats.

Let’s start with Partner, the broadest form of this mechanic. Any Commander with Partner can team up with any other Commander with Partner. While most are monocolored (and there’s a colorless one that you get to choose the color of), there’s also quite a few that are dual-colored, meaning that your deck can have up to four colors with two Commanders. Of course, you could absolutely use two Partner Commanders with the same color identity to make a monocolored deck. There are definitely benefits to that approach, depending on which Commanders you choose. (Cough, Akroma, Vision of Ixidor partnered with literally anyone.)

“Partner With” is similar, but it restricts you to premade pairings. This was seen in the Battlebond set, the Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths set, and several Universes Beyond (aka, officially licensed crossover cards) sets like the Lord of the Rings Commander decks, the Doctor Who Commander decks, and the Assassin’s Creed set. “Partner With” is just a chunk of its keyword. Part of the keyword itself is the card that the Commander is...well, partnered with. “Partner With” is not the mechanic fully, because the full mechanic is “Partner With [specific card]”.

Choose a Background and its partner, the Background Enchantment subtype, were introduced in the Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate set that came out well before Baldur’s Gate 3, leaving most of us confused about all of these named Commanders like Shadowheart and Karlach and Wyll. Backgrounds were a new way to add something to the Command zone that wasn’t necessarily a Creature or Planeswalker – instead, they’re Enchantments that boost your Commander. Even better, they work as part of the normal Commander deck, so they can still boost your Modal Commander Servitor even if they’re not in charge of it!

Friends Forever is a type of Partner originally tied to the Stranger Things Secret Lair cards that was brought in-universe with the Innistrad re-workings of those characters into more lore-accurate cards; any card with Friends Forever can team up with any other card with Friends Forever, but this one can even give you access to all five colors of mana.

Doctor’s Companion is a Partner keyword from the Doctor Who Commander decks that allows the cards with that keyword to partner with any Commander who has the subtype line “Time Lord Doctor”. My coworker, who is way more into Doctor Who than I am but knows very little about Magic: The Gathering, was absolutely giddy when she saw how that worked.

I understand that this is a lot, so let’s circle back to the primary point: using Partner Commanders means that you essentially have two Commanders to try and deal with in a Modal Commander Servitor context. I can think of a few ways to handle this, personally. One way is to just have two servitors and allow them to work together or separately to accomplish goals. Another is to treat them as two sides of the same servitor, drawing on one side at a time. A third that I can think of is to just address them as one unit, since that’s what your Commander deck is – a fusion of their two abilities to create a stronger whole.

There are also the Companions to consider. The Companion mechanic debuted in Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths in 2020, and it was panned as a mechanic. Even being reworked for the Multiverse Legends in 2023 reprint didn’t help the mechanic much. Notably, Lutri, the Spellchaser was banned in Commander the moment it was previewed [6] and Yorion, Sky Nomad can’t be used in Commander because it requires your deck to have more than the 100-card limit the format has. [7] But the other eight Companions are able to function as Companions (provided you have that Rule 0 talk with your pod about allowing a sideboard) within the constraints of the Commander format [8], thus giving you a 101st card and, potentially, an additional servitor. While they may not necessarily be an additional Modal Commander Servitor, they can be crafted as an additional, lesser servitor to aid your Modal Commander Servitor.

And no, you can’t use it as both a Commander and a Companion. The “only one card” rule still applies, so you have to choose one. However, provided that both of your Commanders meet the Companion’s requirements, you can absolutely have two Commanders and a Companion.

Do you see what I mean about getting into the weeds?

So what about when you’re done with your Modal Commander Servitor? My approach is to use a built-in “kill switch” to dissolve the servitor and, since this is tied to a specific Commander deck, to dismantle the deck and cleanse the Commander card. Simple and to the point, because I like simple and to the point.

I also made it easy to activate and dismiss my Modal Commander Servitor. I build all of my energyforms with activation phrases that will pull them out of “hibernation” and dismissal phrases that send them back to it. This allows them to rest and regain energy without having to be actively used. I used this same method and theory for my own Modal Commander Servitor.

I am also in a pod that believes in using every card we own, so even if a card is officially banned in Commander by the Commander Rules Committee (before they recently disbanded) or Wizards of the Coast, we still use them. (I feel the need to mention that I primarily play against my mother, who was a Magic: The Gathering player from the early days and does not believe in mercy.) Naturally, if you play with a specific group, you can talk to them about in-pod bans and allowances, but if you play against random people, it’s probably best to listen to the existing banlist. Of course, with WOTC in charge of the bans now, there’s going to be a whole power scaling thing... Lowkey, this format is kind of a mess right now because people lost their ever-loving minds recently. [9] But this is a post about pop culture occultism, not...that mess, so let’s move on!

For the rest of this post, let’s step through a theoretical Modal Commander Servitor. We’ll pick Yorion, Sky Nomad [7] because I feel bad for it. Although it can’t be a Companion, it’s still entirely legal as a Commander! Yorion is a White and Blue Legendary Bird Serpent for five mana, getting up into the pricier side of a Commander. It has four power and five toughness, meaning it can hit your opponents decently hard and take a pretty big hit. It has the Flying keyword, meaning that it can only be blocked by creatures with the Flying and/or Reach keywords. When it enters the battlefield, you get to exile any number of other, nonland permanents that you both own and control; they then come back to the battlefield at the beginning of your next end step. This is commonly referred to in MTG as “blinking”.

So this is pretty good, at least to me. You can bring it into the battlefield and exile any number of things that also have “enters the battlefield” triggers to get them to pop off once more. And looking at Yorion’s EDHRec page, a lot of people had the same idea. As of writing this, there are over one thousand decks on EDHRec that focus around blinking with Yorion at the helm. But blinking isn’t the only thing Yorion can do. Plenty of deck themes also feature cantrips (cards that draw you cards in addition to doing something else), those damned Persistent Petitioners (who can make your opponents mill their deck until they die from running out of cards), cloning, Flying, and so on, though none of them have nearly the number of Yorion decks that blinking does. Personally, I’d build a Bird deck, because I’m predictable and like Typal decks. I would add cards like Skycat Sovereign, Watcher of the Spheres, Favorable Winds, and other cards meant to boost Birds or Flying creatures. Ultimately, I would focus on making this a functional Commander deck first and foremost, because I’m not going to keep a deck around if it sucks ass. That kind of defeats the point of the Modal Commander Servitor – in order to make it more powerful, you need to use it for both kinds of magic.

So that’s the “Commander” part figured out. Let’s shift focus to the “Servitor” section. I have a fairly quick yet simultaneously detailed approach to making servitors. [10] The important things to emphasize when building this Modal Commander Servitor are to name the servitor for the card (including any epithets or surnames on the card you’re using), to give them the ability to draw on the cards/resources in their Commander deck, and to specify that your Modal Commander Servitor is just that when you are speaking it into existence. Give them the ability to adapt and whatnot.

So now we’ve got a Modal Commander Servitor. Personally, I would focus on pouring energy into it and giving it simple tasks at first so it can get its feet under it. Being spontaneously brought into existence is disorienting, even for things that can’t think for themselves and aren’t sentient, so I give my servitors a chance to exist and hang out in their “dismissed”/hibernation state so they can get used to existing.

Now, let’s talk about potential specificity. Even though I keep my Modal Commander Servitors extremely vague and adaptable, you can outline the particular modes you need them to function in more specifically. For example, Yorion can be given different “modes” focusing on categories of magic typically aligned with White and Blue, such as protection, scouting, travel, and elemental air and water. This can help if you want the Modal Commander Servitor to be more specific than “do whatever”. If you follow the “all entities are ultimately facets of a bigger entity” approach, you could have Yorion channel parts of the Bird overspirit or the Serpent overspirit, if that’s your spiritual cup of tea.

Ultimately, the point of the Modal Commander Servitor is adaptation and flexibility. Sometimes, you just need to outsource a problem and you don’t have the time to make a more specific Guy for it, but if you already have one of these handy, you can just point them at the issue and wait to see what happens.

I hope you enjoyed this post! It got...pretty long, but I think that’s ultimately for the best, since it enabled me to pack more detail in. If you end up doing this, please let me know what you do and how it goes! I’m eager to see what other people experience with this deeply UPG-based approach to servitor creation and usage.

Citations, Resources, And Further Reading

[1] “Jasper’s Servitor/Thoughtform Resource Post”, compiled on Tumblr by jasper-pagan-witch: https://jasper-pagan-witch.tumblr.com/post/762988504970100736/jaspers-servitorthoughtform-resource-post

[2] “Commander (format)” on the MTG wiki, compiled by Fandom users, through a Breezewiki mirror: https://antifandom.com/mtg/wiki/Commander_(format)

[3] “Planeswalker” on the MTG wiki, compiled by Fandom users, through a Breezewiki mirror: https://antifandom.com/mtg/wiki/Planeswalker

[4] “Modal” on the MTG wiki, compiled by Fandom users, through a Breezewiki mirror: https://antifandom.com/mtg/wiki/Modal

[5] “Bria, Riptide Rogue (Commander) – Otter” and “Yuriko, the Tiger’s Shadow (Commander) – Ninjutsu” on EDHRec: https://edhrec.com/commanders/bria-riptide-rogue/otter and https://edhrec.com/commanders/yuriko-the-tigers-shadow/ninjutsu

[6] “Lutri” on the MTG wiki, compiled by Fandom users, through a Breezewiki mirror: https://antifandom.com/mtg/wiki/Lutri

[7] “Yorion, Sky Nomad” on Scryfall: https://scryfall.com/card/mul/64/yorion-sky-nomad

[8] “All Companions” on EDHRec: https://edhrec.com/companions

[9] “On the Future of Commander” on the official Magic: The Gathering website, by Wizards of the Coast: https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/announcements/on-the-future-of-commander

[10] “Entity Creation Worksheet” adapted on Tumblr by jasper-pagan-witch: https://jasper-grimoire.tumblr.com/post/763362895377694720

Condensed Chaos: an introduction to chaos magic by Phil Hine: A good beginner primer on chaos magic, with a fairly extensive chapter on servitors/thoughtforms and a willingness to explain things that I just gloss over and build red string boards about.

Magickal Servitors: Create Your Own Spirits to Attract Pleasure, Power and Prosperity by Damon Brand: A very thorough book on servitor creation, though not necessarily from a chaos magic lens. I found it very funny to read how much the author was frothing at the mouth about chaos magic. Yet, it’s still hands-down the best book dedicated entirely to servitor creation that I’ve read thus far.

EDHRec, a website for comparing Commanders and seeing the most commonly used cards in particular decks: https://edhrec.com/

Scryfall, an MTG card searching database: https://scryfall.com/

[waitmyturtles]

The Old GMMTV Challenge: The Master Post and Explainer

Updated: October 28, 2024

Hello! Welcome to The Old GMMTV Challenge (OGMMTVC), my personal syllabus and journey through the most important, and/or impactful, and/or seminal of Boys Love (BL)/Series Y dramas from Thailand.

I started watching Thai BL series in 2022 with the airing of KinnPorsche. From there, I dallied with shows that were referenced across Tumblr -- but I didn't dig into learning about the genre as a whole until I watched 2021-22's Bad Buddy, and was thoroughly moved by it in countless ways.

I subsequently learned that Bad Buddy was, in large part, constructed to communicate with tropes and expectations established previously by the genre. In order to get to a point where I could appreciate Bad Buddy in all of its historic glory, I therefore decided to start from the top -- to watch Thai BLs in chronological order so as to help me better understand the tentacles of this young genre. I was also impacted by a post from a BL Tumblr lifer, @absolutebl, who talked in 2022 about current shows by the GMMTV network, the biggest producer of BL dramas in Thailand, that were answering for mistakes made in the early Thai BL days.

Bad Buddy is a GMMTV show -- but in order to learn fully about the genre, I've created a syllabus of shows and movies that spans well outside the GMMTV network and sphere of influence. In the spring of 2023, I crowdsourced information about Thai BLs from the INCREDIBLE BL community on Tumblr, and came up with the syllabus below.

This syllabus is ever changing, especially as this young genre (which was arguably born in 2014 with the airing of Love Sick) continues to explore itself outside of its male-and-male romance genre boundaries, by centering women and/or non-binary individuals, and even leaving romance behind for horror, suspense, mystery, crime, and more.

Besides watching dramas on this syllabus, I'm also in the process of reading English-language books and articles about the Thai BL genre and its influences in Thailand and across Asia on queer and non-queer communities, as well as on the most marketed-to BL audience in young women. Links to reading materials are below the syllabus.

If you're looking to learn more about BL, this is but one resource to use. There's an incredible community of bloggers here with vastly more knowledge than me about the history of this genre. This is only my path, and I encourage you to explore the corners of Tumblr to create your own Thai BL journey!

The Drama Syllabus and Review/Meta Links

1) The Love of Siam (2007) (movie) (review here) 2) My Bromance (2014) (movie) (review here) 3) Love Sick and Love Sick 2 (2014 and 2015) (review here) 4) Gay OK Bangkok Season 1 (2016) (a non-BL queer series directed by Jojo Tichakorn and written by Aof Noppharnach) (review here) 5) Make It Right (2016) (review here) 6) SOTUS (2016-2017) (review here) 7) Gay OK Bangkok Season 2 (2017) (a non-BL queer series directed by Jojo Tichakorn and written by Aof Noppharnach) (review here) 8) Make It Right 2 (2017) (review here) 9) Together With Me (2017) (review here) 10) SOTUS S/Our Skyy x SOTUS (2017-2018) (review here) 11) Love By Chance (2018) (review here) 12) Kiss Me Again: PeteKao cuts (2018) (no review) 13) He’s Coming To Me (2019) (review here) 14) The Fallen Leaf (2019) (not a BL; adjacent to the project as Thailand’s first lakorn featuring a queer/transgender main character) (watching) 15) Dark Blue Kiss (2019) and Our Skyy x Kiss Me Again (2018) (review here) 16) TharnType (2019-2020) (review here) 17) Senior Secret Love: Puppy Honey (OffGun BL cuts) (2016 and 2017) (no review) 18) Theory of Love (2019) (review here) 19) 3 Will Be Free (2019) (a non-BL and an important harbinger of things to come in 2019 and beyond re: Jojo Tichakorn pushing queer content in non-BLs) (review here) 20) Dew the Movie (2019) (review here)

21) Until We Meet Again (2019-2020) (review here) (and notes on my UWMA rewatch here) 22) 2gether (2020) and Still 2gether (2020) (review here) 23) I Told Sunset About You (2020) (review here) 24) YYY (2020, out of chronological order) (review here) 25) Manner of Death (2020-2021) (review here) 26) A Tale of Thousand Stars (2021) (review here) 27) A Tale of Thousand Stars (2021) OGMMTVC Fastest Rewatch Known To Humankind For The Sake Of Rewatching Our Skyy 2 x BBS x ATOTS (re-review here) 28) Lovely Writer (2021) (review here) 29) Last Twilight in Phuket (2021) (the mini-special before IPYTM) (review here) 30) I Promised You the Moon (2021) (review here)

31) Not Me (2021-2022) (review here) 32) Bad Buddy (2021-2022) (thesis here) 33) 55:15 Never Too Late (2021-2022) (not a BL, but a GMMTV drama that features a macro BL storyline about shipper culture and the BL industry) (review here) 34) Bad Buddy (2021-2022) and Our Skyy 2 x BBS x ATOTS (2023) OGMMTVC Rewatch (Links to the BBS OGMMTVC Meta Series are here: preamble here, part 1, part 2, part 3a, part 3b, and part 4) 35) Secret Crush On You (2022) (review here) 36) The Miracle of Teddy Bear (2022) (review coming) 37) KinnPorsche (2022) (tag here)  38) KinnPorsche (2022) OGMMTVC Fastest Rewatch Known To Humankind For the Sake of Re-Analyzing the KP Cultural Zeitgeist (part 1 and part 2) 39) Triage (2022) (review coming) 40) Honorable Mention: War of Y (2022) (for the sake of an attempt to provide meta BL commentary within a BL in the modern BL era), with a complementary watch of Aam Anusorn’s documentary, BL: Broken Fantasy (2020) (thoughts here)

41) The Eclipse (2022) (tag here) 42) The Eclipse OGMMTVC Rewatch to Reexamine "Genre BLs," Along With a Critical Take on Branded Ships (review here) 43) Khun Chai/To Sir, With Love (2022) 44) GAP (2022-2023) (Thailand’s first GL) (review coming) 45) My School President (2022-2023) and Our Skyy 2 x My School President (2023), Coupled with a Speed-Watch of My Love Mix-Up Thailand (2024) to Comment on GMMTV Trying to Make Magic Happen Twice 46) Moonlight Chicken (2023) (tag here) 47) Bed Friend (2023) (tag here) 48) La Pluie (2023) (review coming) 49) Be My Favorite (2023) (tag here) (I’m including this for BMF’s sophisticated commentary on Krist’s career past as a BL icon) 50) Wedding Plan (2023) (Recommended as an important trajectory in the course of MAME’s work and influence from TharnType)

51) Only Friends (2023) (tag here) (not technically a BL, but it certainly became one in the end) 52) Last Twilight (2023-24) (tag here) (on the list as Thailand’s first major BL to center disability, successfully or otherwise) 53) Cherry Magic Thailand (2023-24) (tag here) (on the list as the first major Japanese-to-Thai drama adaptation, featuring the comeback of TayNew) 54) Ossan’s Love Returns (Japan) (2024) (adding for the EarthMix cameo and the eventual Thai remake) 55) 23.5 (2024) (GMMTV’s first GL) (thoughts here)

Additional Reading Material

Dr. Thomas Baudinette, Boys Love Media in Thailand

Dr. Peter Jackson, Queer Bangkok

Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific -- Issue 49, Thai Boys Love (BL)/Y(aoi) in Literary and Media Industries: Political and Transnational Practices, June 2023

(Fandom reference) "Fan Leaders' Control on Xiao Zhan's Chinese Fan Community," Transformative Works and Cultures

(Fandom reference) "Xi Jingping Versus the Stans," Vox

[sloanewashingtonappreciationweek]

We're on our very final day of Sloane Washington Appreciation Week!! It's been amazing, especially since we've seen quite a few new faces this year contributing and giving Sloane lots of love. We can't wait to see what more you all have in store for us!! 💞💞💞

Tomorrow is Day 5 - our last day - and we have two themes!!

Our first theme is about Hobbies. Think about things Sloane would like outside of her job and her special interest in science. What would she do for fun? Are there things that the MC or Hayden or the group introduce her to, that she begins to enjoy? Are there things she introduces them to??

Our second is, of course, PETS! We know she loves cats, and in time she warms up to Dipper too. So this is where you can explore what kind of pets you'd like Sloane to have, if any, and how she takes care of them 😍

As always, any form of appreciation is welcome! Fanfic, fanart, meta, edits, moodboards, playlists, headcanons, interactive media, even screenshots of favourite scenes or simple posts about your love for her!! Our only requirement is that you center Sloane in your work, and that the depiction is positive!

We also accept WIPs - we know irl can be hard and you may not always get the time to finish off stuff, so do show us a WIP of what you're working on if you're comfortable! We keep our event open even after the deadline (the deadline is mostly for our thank you video!) so you can send in your work anytime as well.

A friendly reminder that these are merely themes for you to use. It isn't completely necessary for your content for a particular day to be posted on that day only. You can post something you intended for Day 2 when Day 5 is on, as long as you tag the post for the day you meant it for.

Be sure to follow these rules when you make your posts:

1. Use the tags #sloanewashingtonappreciationweek and #SWAW so we can find your posts on the tags, along with the day you intend the post for (#SWAW Day 1, #SWAW Day 2).

2. Tag @sloanewashingtonappreciationweek and hosts @sazanes and @lizzybeth1986 in your work so we don't miss any pieces!

Fan content blogs have been a great resource in terms of showcasing fan content, so we'd definitely like to explore some of them and see if you'd like to send your content to any of them. A number of them are also running some amazing Valentine's Day events, which I urge you to take a look at:

@choicesficwriterscreations - Both fic and art welcome! Check out their rules and weekly roster here!

@choicesmonthlychallenge and @choicesfebruary2024 - All types of creative stuff welcome. This month, they're doing an awesome event with the Seven Types of Love in Greek mythology as prompts!

@choicespride - All content related to LGBTQ+ characters and/or themes welcome! Check out their awesome Valentine's Day event here!

@choicesflashfics - Fics under 2500 words welcome! Find this week's prompt list here!!

@choicesholidays - Both fic and art welcome!! Check out their Valentine's Day event!!

@choicesprompts - Mostly fic-centric!! Currently they're running a round robin, for which the deadline to enter is Feb 15th!

As many of you know by now, we always keep a bonus week after the AW is done, for anyone who couldn't complete their pieces at the time. We'll be keeping SWAW open for all till 24th Feb, after which we will need to start working on our SWAW 2024 video! And don't worry if you weren't able to finish even after that deadline - we will be accepting pieces all year round! Just send it to us and we'll put it up on the final masterlist.

Can't wait to celebrate Sloane for one last day with all of you!!!

Happy Sloane Washington Appreciation Week, everyone!!

[sir-adamus]

so the Rathalos is intentionally designed to work more like a Monster Hunter fight mechanically than an FFXIV fight, so you don't get the usual tells for specific attacks and have to rely on body language, that's the meta reasoning

in-universe though, the tells you get are a manifestation of the Echo, you're essentially reading the intent of the attack through the attacker's Aether (which we get to be on the other side of when Fordola gets her juiced up Resonance), so with the Rathalos, because it's from another world (though implications in dialogue and flavour text implies there's more than a few around and the Monster Hunter elements we see have been there long enough that Rathalos are recognisable and not even the Palico knows it's not supposed to be there), it's not naturally made of Aether, can't channel it and we can't read its intent because it's not integrated into the natural cycle yet

in the YoRHa raids, the machine lifeforms and androids don't fight any differently than anything else you've fought, with the usual Aetheric tells you normally get. now obviously on a meta level, this is because it's a raid series versus the Rathalos trial which can center around that gimmick. however, lore-wise, the NieR Automata canon establishes that the machines are constantly mining resources to build more of themselves and structures (hell the in-universe 'teleports' the androids use to get around aren't even actually teleports. it just deconstructs them to their base components at one station, stores the basic matter locally while transmitting the schematics and consciousness data to the receiving point and reconstructs using the locally stored matter at that point), meaning that when the machine lifeform rocket landed on the First, the network would've started using the local resources to start constructing the machines and androids that we see. and it's established that everything in the FFXIV is made of Aether, so the Echo is able to read their intent

(this also works as a way to disguise that it actually is a crossover and not like previous raids where it's a whole plot reference to another FF game with some details switched around set within the world of FFXIV - like how the Ivalice Raids play around with a lot of the details, allegiances and relationships of the Tactics and FFXII characters)

[the-chombee-cafe]

There isn't enough Metadedede or just general Kirby fanfics out there, so I've been intent on making my own for some time! Ideally I want it to be in the form of a webtoon, but since I don't have the resources at the moment, I'm going to start by posting the prologue on A03.

The fic in its entirety is going to cover all of the events in the Kirby games chronologically, following my own tweaks aka headcanons and the like. Spoiler alert: I'm very passionate about Metadedede and that will be the center of the first installment: my own headcanons of how Dreamland was founded, how Meta and Dedede became who they are, and just the right amount of backstory to set the stage for the story following Kirby's arrival to popstar!

Will be updating on the progress frequently! :)