#ok i mean TECHNICALLY in the cause-and-effect

[imunbreakabledude]

(me putting off working on the long-ago outlined but not yet finished scenes of elena finally meeting maeve's dad): but... what about ANNIE meeting maeve's dad? ... honestly can't decide if she'd try sooo hard to like him or sooo hard to hate him. the true secret third option is annie would never meet him because in a maeveannie universe maeve can NOT go through the specific emotional journey it would take to consider ending her estrangement with him... (clarification: it is not maevelena endgame that makes maeve capable of reconciling with her father. it's actually... ashley.)

[ramblings-of-a-chaotic-neutral]

Time for today's silly Merlin au! This time featuring himbo Arthur!

I think that the show should have leaned into the whole "Merlin's technically a creature of magic" aspect, both in terms of being magic incarnate and kin to the dragons, and I think Arthur should have also been forced to come to terms with it as well. However, this is Arthur we're talking about, so of course he wouldn't come to the right conclusions right away.

In this scenario, around season 5-ish, there's an evil sorcerer seeking revenge against Camelot for the purge who puts a spell on all of the humans in Camelot, one that would weaken them and cause such fatigue that no one would be able to even stand up after a while. But it's a powerful and taxing spell to cast, so the sorcerer can only afford to target the humans in Camelot to keep the number of targets as low as possible. Besides, what could the livestock in Camelot do to stop him anyways?

So everyone in Camelot is falling under this spell, and Arthur and the knights are rushing to prepare for battle against the sorcerer to make him lift the spell. However, with each hour that passes, everyone grows weaker and weaker.

Merlin does, of course, know that this spell has been cast and what it does, but he doesn't feel its affects and assumes that his magic is protecting him. He acts like he's growing weaker so he doesn't fall under anyone's suspicions for the wrong reasons. However, after Merlin summons and talks to Kilgarrah for advice on how to break the spell, Kilgarrah informs him that Merlin wasn't protected by his magic, but rather by the fact that he isn't truly human.

And Merlin decides to unpack the implications of that some other time, because he's got a kingdom and a prat to save.

Fast forwards to the knights getting their asses kicked by the sorcerer and the evil sorcerer preparing to kill Arthur, who's lying on the ground with his eyes closed. All the other knights were knocked out by a blast from the sorcerer, but Arthur's still barely clinging to consciousness, yet he's too weak to even open his eyes. All he can do is listen helplessly as the sorcerer prepares to kill them all.

But then the sorcerer yelps, as if he were hit by something. Arthur's hope skyrockets as the sorcerer yells "You! How are you even still awake?! Every single human in Camelot should be feeling the full effects of the spell by now!" Arthur thinks for a moment that one of his knights has found enough strength to overcome the spell and fight back, but that hope is quickly dashed when he hears Merlin's voice responding like he isn't tired in the slightest, saying, "Well it's a good thing I was never really human then."

Merlin decided to say that to throw the sorcerer off-kilter enough to distract him and give Merlin an advantage in the fight. Besides, Merlin can see that all of the knights, including Arthur, are knocked out on the ground, so there's no harm in admitting it to this sorcerer who he's definitely going to have to kill.

Arthur, meanwhile, is still conscious and completely reeling from Merlin's words. What the hell did he mean he wasn't human?! Has some vile magical creature taken Merlin's place?

After the battle (which sounded to Arthur like a bunch of grunts, pained yelps, and a final, wet gurgle), Arthur could feel the effects of the spell lifting, letting him open his eyes with a gasp. He frantically looks around to make sure Merlin's ok, but Merlin's only a few steps away from him, while the sorcerer lies dead on the ground with a sword buried in his chest.

Hearing Arthur's gasp, Merlin turns to him with a relieved smile and helps pulls Arthur to his feet. Arthur, meanwhile, is too stunned to even ask how Merlin of all people managed to kill a powerful sorcerer by himself, but Merlin's giving some unbelievable explanation that involves distracting the sorcerer and then getting a miraculous opening and stabbing the sorcerer. Arthur's nodding along, but inside, he's really searching man who might be Merlin or might be some magical imposter posing as Merlin, as awful as that is for Arthur to consider, for any signs that he's truly Merlin.

If he's an imposter, Arthur has to give him credit, he plays his part well. The man in front of him looks exactly like Merlin, talks like Merlin, walks with Merlin's lanky gait, and seems to know everything Merlin knows, even their inside jokes. Still, Arthur needs to be sure, so after they get back to the castle, Arthur goes down to the vaults and grabs a secret object that Uther used in the purge that could detect illusions and glamor magics. It was a simple clear crystal in the shape of a sphere and small enough to fit in the palm of a person's hand, but if someone or something that was using magic to alter their appearance came into contact with it, the crystal would glow with a bright light.

Arthur plants the sphere in his chambers and disguises it as a new paperweight. The next day, Arthur pretends to accidentally knock it off his desk, sending it rolling across the floor, and orders the maybe-Merlin to pick it up and bring it back to his desk. Maybe-Merlin rolls his eyes in a perfect imitation of Merlin and walks over to the crystal. To Arthur's shock and relief, the crystal doesn't glow when Merlin picks it up, so he definitely is the true Merlin.

But then that leads Arthur to a horrible conclusion: the Merlin he knew wasn't a human, and never was. And the only creatures with the ability to look convincingly human were creatures of magic.

Oh god, Merlin was a creature of magic.

Arthur decides that, in order for him to plot an appropriate course of action, he needs more information. Namely, he needs to know what exactly Merlin is.

So, Arthur sneaks into the library and secretly takes some of the bestiaries, searching for what manner of creature Merlin truly is. Arthur tries not to jump to the worst possible conclusions, but all of the creatures of magic that can take human form that Arthur knows of are horrible monsters that prey on humans. Take the sidhe and the lamia for examples!

But people don't randomly go missing or turn up dead from monster attacks very frequently in Camelot, and Merlin cries when Arthur so much as shoots a bunny, so if Merlin's some sort of monster that kills and eats humans, he's doing a piss poor job at being one. So, Merlin must be some sort of creature that doesn't hurt humans, which certainly narrows down the list.

Arthur eventually finds a list of peaceful, human-like creatures of magic, and he starts trying to narrow down what Merlin is. He couldn't be an elf, since his ears were huge and round, not pointed. He couldn't be a gnome, he was too tall and gangly. He couldn't be a nymph, he spent too much time indoors to be a nature spirit. He couldn't be a leprechaun, he didn't have a beard or an affinity towards gold. He couldn't be a fae or a sidhe, he doesn't make deals with anyone (besides when he goes gambling at the tavern). And he certainly couldn't be a dragonlord, they were all dead!

Arthur was just about to give up when he finally found what he was looking for! The book's passage on fairies described them as benevolent relatives to the fae who would often disguise themselves as humans and would bring good luck and fortune to whoever befriended them, while sometimes engaging in some fun mischief! That must be Merlin!

Come to think of it, Arthur did have some great moments of luck, some of them almost miraculous! Morgana's magic failing her the day of a battle, defeating a dragon single-handedly, surviving the questing beast's bite, and of course defeating monsters that were said to only be killed through magic. And Merlin had been there for all of those events!

The book also describes fairies as creatures that love all living beings and are closely connected with nature, which makes perfect sense considering how much Merlin hates hunting! And fairies could see into the true hearts of people, which was how Merlin always knew if a person was untrustworthy!

It all made so much sense! This even explained Merlin's random "visits to the tavern", when Arthur knew that Merlin rarely ever drank. According to the book, fairies could only maintain their human forms for so long before they needed to spend some time in their smaller winged forms.

The book even addressed how fairies could be born from a union between a particularly powerful fairy and a human, which even explained why Merlin never knew his father and how Merlin could be a creature of magic while having a human mother!

Now that he knew the truth, Arthur felt so much relief! His best friend wasn't some diabolical monster, he was just a playful and friendly fairy trying to live as a human! It made so much sense!

And now all Arthur had to do was prove it. All evidence pointed to Merlin being a fairy, but he needed concrete proof before he could take any action. According to the book, the blood of a fairy in a human disguise sparkled under the light of a full moon. So, Arthur devised a plan to take Merlin out on an overnight hunting trip the day before the next full moon and "accidentally" cut Merlin's arm with one of the crossbow bolts. Arthur would then bandage the cut for Merlin and, after a couple hours, insist on changing the bandages, and pocket the first bloodied bandage.

Sure, Arthur felt guilty about purposely cutting his friend, but this was Merlin's fault for keeping the fact that he wasn't human a secret over their ten years of friendship! So, Arthur goes through with his plan, and when he held the used bandage up to the moonlight after Merlin had fallen asleep, he has to hold back a gasp as the red blood on the cloth shimmers and turns a bright golden color. Well, the book was right, the blood certainly sparkled!

(It was a shame that Arthur never read into warlocks, and how the magic in a warlock's blood made their blood turn gold under the light of a full moon.)

Arthur then turned to look at his peacefully sleeping friend, and swore that he would do everything he could to help his friendly little fairy.

Shortly after that revelation, Arthur starts actively noticing all of the strokes of luck he has. Bandits can never land a hit on him because they're too busy getting knocked out by tree branches or tripping over roots, his baths and meals are always the perfect temperature no matter how long he waits, and his injuries all heal at near-impossible rates. Hell, Arthur couldn't even recall the last time he got sick with something as small as a cold!

So Arthur tries to do little things for Merlin to show him his appreciation, like giving Merlin flower crowns (which fairies are said to like and Merlin absolutely adores), giving him a shiny silver mirror (fairies are supposed to like shiny things, and Merlin's never had a proper mirror before), and giving Merlin parts of his own meals as a food offering (which Merlin of course isn't about to turn down).

(Arthur's also kinda frustrated at the lack of information about fairy courting rituals lol!)

But Arthur isn't the best at keeping secrets, so the knights of the round table eventually catch him trying to set up a nice little fairy ring for Merlin in the garden, and they also "figure out" that Merlin is a fairy, and it all spirals from there until the entire castle is trying to show their appreciation for their fairy friend.

Merlin's very confused by all of this (since Arthur's terrible at actually communicating, Merlin doesn't know that Arthur thinks he's a fairy), but he's not about to turn down all of these lovely gifts!

And there's lots of different directions the story could go from there! A pretty funny scenario would be some rival king catching wind of how Camelot's great victories are all because of their king befriending a kind fairy, so he kidnaps Merlin in an attempt to make Merlin grant him such great luck and victory in battle. However, all they do to imprison Merlin is pour a circle of salt around him (since they firmly believe that fairies cannot cross a barrier of salt).

Merlin's just kinda raises an eyebrow and thinks that this is the weirdest kidnapping ever, steps over the salt, and escapes back to Camelot.

Thank you for reading through my rambling! :D

[bomber-grl]

Flufftober 2024

Day 2: Black Cat

Pairing(s): Damian Wayne x Gn!Reader

Relationship between Bruce and another

As the air got chillier so did Damian’s insufferable attitude. I mean, he was already insufferable, you can only imagine the heights it’s reached nowadays.

You sighed and turned the corner. Walking to the Wayne manor was less that ideal but you wanted to do something to appease that attitude of his. (Hence, a surprise)

It’s like someone stuck a stick in his ass and left it to marinate, the idea wasn’t totally out of left field, he could’ve been too embarrassed to have brought it up. Maybe that’s why he’s been this way..

Plus the whole week he’s been whining on and on about black cats, like you get that they’re “bad luck” but they’re super cute!

Well your thoughts came to a close as you realize that you passed the gate and was now approaching the front door. You secured your scarf as a particularly harsh wind caused you to shiver, despite going to have to remove it soon enough.

Still, you couldn’t help but feel like you were forgetting something…..

Well, whatever. Problem for future you to deal with.

You lift your arm and knocked as much as you could without hurting your already frozen knuckles. You leaned in to hear footsteps from behind the door and quickly backed away as Alfred opened the door.

He greeted you politely despite your less than ideal guest behavior and let you in. Once you were stripped of your coat, scarf and whatever other “outside” clothes, you scurried on up to Damian’s room.

Sure you bumped into a few of the other residents along the staircase and hallway, perhaps you were enticed with a few snacks here and there, but you finally made it to his room

… and he’s not here.

Another chill ran through you despite the warmth of the inside. Which ofc only means one thing, the window was open.

You headed on over to his windowsill and decided that if you died then it was completely alright, technically it was still a surprise for Damian.

You quickly made your way to the roof of the manor (don’t try this at home) and despite your other half still hanging off the end of the roof, Damian’s figure quickly caught your attention.

He seemed seriously upset. Like actually.

“Hey Damian!” Your shout obviously startled him and caused him to look around before his eyes settled on your face.

“What the- you idiot!” He quickly got up from his seating position and yanked your two arms, effectively hauling your entire body onto the roof.

“Im speechless , how could you be so stupid?!” Despite being “speechless” Damian continued to yell at you for another 10 minutes.

Then the thought had occured to him, why were you up here anyway? “Why’re you here?” So blunt…

“Ok first off, rude” you got up and stood in front of him, “second of all I wanted to surprise you” you rest your arms on your hips, as a ‘gotcha, now you have to apologize’

Instead of graciously falling to his knees he just deadpans, “what surprise? You aren’t much of a gift” ok, tbh he kinda gagged you.

You were so offended, how dare he? Especially hen you went through all the trouble of getting him- oh wait, that’s what you were forgetting.

“Oh shit I bought you some Crumbl Cookie but I forgot it” your hand raced up to your head as Damian just stared at you.

“You do realize I hate those cookies?” Again, feeling judged.

“What? But you always buy them!”

“Uh yea, cuz I thought you liked them”

Now you were just standing there like idiots, then the unbelievable happened: Damian Wayne began to laugh.

“What- why are you laughing??” Your confusion only seem to have prompted Damian to laugh even more.

Finally he seemed to have calmed down and sat down on the edge of the roof that was threatening to kill you not so long ago. He pat the spot next to him.

Obviously, you obliged. Sure your “surprise” might have failed but something still nagged at the back of your mind.

“Soo uh,” you finally spoke up after a moment of silence “what’s your deal with black cats? Like why’ve you got a whole vendetta against them.”

There was a pause but then Damian spoke, well more like sighed then spoke. “It’s not actual black cats that I’m against, did you really think I was going on about an actual black cat and how it finished the rest of my snacks??”

There was disbelief in Damian’s tone but he was right, you totally believed it…

He sighed again, “well it was actually about Selina..” his eyes drifted off to the side.

“Wait.. Catwoman?? Why her?”

“Well she has this weird relationship with my dad, well not weird more like inconvenient.”

“How come?”

“Well she’s a criminal! Plus even then, and sure she’s good sometimes ,”colleagues”(very loose definition btw) shouldn’t date!” His brows furrowed, like it was a core belief of his.

Now it was your turn to deadpan at him “Damian, you do realize we could be considered colleagues and we’re still dating?”

Damian seemed in shock that you’d have the audacity to disagree and offend him in the same moment.

“Well that’s different”

“Hmmm not rlly”

“It is”

“It’s not”

“It is!”

“It’s really not…”

This whole deal with Damian had been bothering you lately but seeing as it was this teen phase he was going through, well it wasn’t that concerning.

“Hey..”

“What.” Damian snapped, still upset at you pointing out the obvious fact that overruled his argument in the first place.

“I’m cold, let’s go inside.”

Damian sighed and got up in one swift motion, then he held a hand out to you, and of course you took it.

Somehow you and Damian managed to successfully get back inside through his window despite the bickering and slips that happened along the way.

Damian stretched a bit and began walking towards his door, “let’s go eat something, I’m hungry.”

“Sure but why were you being all emo out there in the dark anyway?”

“Shut up and just eat what I give you”

——

A/n: I’m sorry if this is cringe 😭

[thewertsearch]

EB: but then you finally killed a guy you liked, and… EB: not so cool anymore? AG: Yeah. OH! AG: Ok, that's not quite right. He's the second person I cared a8out who I killed. […] AG: I guess she wound up getting me 8ack pretty good though, so we're even.

Man...

I know I've been dissecting them for thousands of pages, but sometimes I have to take a step back and remind myself how deeply, deeply fucked up the trolls' lives are. Their teen dramas are our horror movies.

AG: Oh, also, TECHNICALLY I attempted to kill that same guy around the same time. […] AG: I think I had a really juvenile attitude a8out killing 8ack then. I think I was trying too hard? […] AG: […] I was such a confused kid! I didn't know anything a8out what killing really means. I was trying to fake it, and it caused me nothing 8ut pro8lems.

Vriska’s definitely making progress, but she still has a lot of work to do.

She’s correctly identified the problem – that she's fundamentally misunderstood what it means to kill – but her solution is to assume that there's a mature, correct way to be a serial killer, and she just needs to find it.

Grow up, she tells herself. Become the right kind of murderer, and this horrible, horrible feeling will go away.

EB: so… if killing isn't exactly wrong, then what is it? EB: what do you mean by "what killing really means"? AG: I guess I have to admit I don't actually know that much a8out humans either! AG: Other than that you are all pretty soft and mild mannered and seem to 8e friendlier, and think killing totally sucks.

It's very telling, I think, that Vriska doesn't actually answer John's question. She doesn't know what killing really means - and instead of admitting that to herself, she immediately changes the subject.

What she's refusing to acknowledge, I think, is that killing makes her feel like shit. That's what it means to her - but she can't face that yet. That's disgusting.

That's weakness.

AG: When a troll comes of age, you 8etter 8elieve it means they're going to start killing. AG: It's what we do as a race. We are very effective conquerors, and as such, we practically domin8 our galaxy. […]

And to Alternia, killing means serving your empire. Any other justifications its servants invent are irrelevant - they're nothing more than window dressing to the fact that empire is murder, and to be a troll is to participate in its violence.

The empire is gone, of course - but for now, it's still alive in its children's heads.

[galaxygermdraws]

POWER UP TIME!!! I have been meaning to draw some Power Up designs for a while. This isn't all of them, obviously, this is just the ones that are recolors with simple tweaks. And I will be dropping my lore under a read more just in case

(reblogs with tags/comments are appreciated. Thankyu)

OK LORE DUMP

Fire Flowers were created by Firebrand, and are a weaker version of that power. Anyone can use them, and they are one of the most common Power Ups

Ice Flowers are mutated Fire Flowers, and instead of producing Fire Balls, the user produces Ice Crystals. When someone other than the user comes into contact with these crystals, they will be frozen (see the ice blocks in NSMBW and onward).

Ghost Mushrooms, or Boo Mushrooms are only really found in Space. They give the user two forms, one of which is the form of a Boo, who aren't technically ghosts, more so Specters. There is a more humanoid form, although it is pretty creepy.

Rainbow Stars, or Super Stars only show up when they are needed, and are usually caused by a wish or desire. For example, if the main crew were in danger and Mario wanted to protect them, he would most likely get a Super Star gifted to him from the nearest ?-Block. After using a Super Star, the user is revitalized. It can heal wounds, but not as effectively as a 1-Up. Acts kind of like adrenaline

Red Stars are only found in space, and grant the user the ability to fly rather smoothly. They only last for a small amount of time, which could be due to their chemical makeup. (I am still working on this lore)

Bubble Flowers are exclusive to the Flower Kingdom, and are probably mutated from a similar flower to the Fire Flower and Ice Flower. They let the user blow rather large bubbles out of thin air.

Cloud Flowers are mutated Ice Flowers (due to both being water). Instead of being frozen water, it's formed from water that has condensed into a cloud. It allows the user to create clouds. I changed the color to blue because of the sky theme. If Luigi uses it, it will be yellow

Wing Feathers, not caps, give the user the ability to fly with wings. This is only temporary, and is not as smooth as the flying from a Red Star. Mario is one of the only people who have mastered this ability

Gold Flowers coat the user's body in a thin layer of gold, and basically give them something akin to the curse of King Midas. That is to say, this Power Up isn't that good. If Luigi uses it, he will become Silver Luigi, if Peach uses it, she will become Rose Gold Peach.

[drdonogood]

Yes hello I'm hear to listen to your yaps about J&H plz

OMG, HELL YAAAHHHH ok swag. So. Drawing randomly from a hat, some various ideas of mine- My AU/ideas are mish-mashed from some of my favorite Jekyll and Hyde adaptations. And some of my own ideas stitched in. (I'm also putting it out there that this AU has no name yet, and I would love suggestions from anyone) also of there are any typos i'm sorry. This is half word vomit and there are only so many times I can re-read it.

> Other monsters and gothlit bullshit probably exsist in my universe. I just haven't thought enough about it.

> Jekyll is right-handed, Hyde is left-handed. They both have a mole in the same spot under their left eye (his left your right). Hyde's veins look green through his skin- Aaand Hyde vaugly looks like a more feral, compact, and fucked up version of younger Jekyll. These are the absolute basis/my fav JnH ideas I've seen around.

> In that recent Hyde Shitpost, you may notice that he is covered in blood. This is because the pressure of condensing into a smaller body shoots blood out of his face. (There's a lot less blood when turning into Jekyll. A super bad nose bleed- At worse some ear bleeding?) It's kinda like the fun glowing mysterious green goo you see in a lot of adaptations. And I almost went with the green goo too. But decided on blood with freind input 😭 This also means that they have low iron and Jekyll is prone to fainting. (Jekyll has always been a bit of a stress fainter though...Hyde is a bit too energized to faint easily but he might)

> I think I've mentioned it here a little- But my Hyde has a tendency to....eat things that are inedible. Raw fish and rocks and paper and dirt and wood. His stomach acid is strong enough to digest small rocks (because this freak's biology is FUCKED)- anything heftier would be a problem. But it still makes Jekyll... a little ill in the morning. I had the thought that maybe this was because Jekyll had suppressed Pica and it presented itself hevily in Hyde? But I haven't developed that idea too much.

> Hyde has thicker, denser bones. Which helps with his "Amateur Parkour Hobby" (aka: His compulsion to jump and climb on everything like a little freak) He also has beans little callous spots on his hands that help him grip things better! .....beans. sorry.

> Hyde's eyes look like they are void black- but if you shine a light on them, they are iridescent green! Bright lights also seem to bother him quite a lot, and he doesn't like being out on sunny days.

> Jekyll's body was slightly changed/modified after drinking HJ-7, so he has a few toned down physical aspects of Hyde's. Like sharp canines and sharp nails (that he frantically cuts down every time he wakes up) and fucked up eyes and even some of the weird biology stuff (Like the digestive thing, faster heart rate, lower body temperature, slight aversion to light ect. Just not AS much as Hyde has it)

> Jekyll and Hyde don't technically age. Their bodies turn back to the day they took the potion. If one of them was stuck being physical for an extended period of time- they WOULD start to age. But it would be reverted the second they transformed. BUT physical injuries only get slightly healed. So they can't just ITV heal injuries by transforming. It helps! But not entirely.

> Hyde HAS to be let out. It causes major problems if he isn't. He gets VERY stir crazy and it effects the both of them negatively. Physically and mentally. It would eventually trigger an involuntary transformation. And Hyde would be a bit fucked up. Likewise, Hyde uses up too much energy just by existing to stay out for days on end. He has to get back in eventually or else. Yk. Involuntary transformation.

> Also Hyde is biologically both sexes. Something something representing the aforementioned Jekyll closeted Tfem stuff that probably won't ever be addressed. He wouldn't care what pronouns you called them but. Obv victorian era everyone uses He when they see him 🤷🏻‍♂️.

> Depending on how long he gets to live (no set plot so him Jekilling himself could or could not happen) Hyde does infact develop a consciousness. Or...His consciousness develops....Or something. Idk how to describe it in such few words. He's definitely starts off distinct and split enough. But Hyde doesn't think about the nature of his existence or Jekyll all that much. He's clearly far too caught up in the joy and rush on being alive and experiencing things. If he exists for long enough, he will eventually have a pretty bad existential crisis. Bro realises that he thinks, therefore, he is. He'll get better, though. And probably be better off.

> Jekyll and Hyde don't find out until way later that they can see each other and communicate and all that regular fanon stuff. (And even still it takes a long and stubborn while for Jekyll to realise just how conscious Hyde is). They CAN make each other KINDA feel a weird sort of Phantom touch. They can see eachothers apparitions. And maybe the non-physical one can see things in a room even when the physical one isn't looking at it. But that's the extent of their interaction with the real world if they aren't physical.

> I'm not a big fan of Hyde being a serial killer type malicious evil guy? He dosen't represent evil obv. Im much more into that TGS style Hyde characterization. But then again, I don't have a set plot, and the idea is fun sometimes. Like he still has the capacity for murrder.... Maybe as a side AU for my AU. I think reasonably he wouldn't be- and at most kills Carew randomly during an emotional outburst. I do think that Hyde likes to start bar fights and beat the shit out of people, though. He loves the rush of being punched but isn't very happy on the very off chance that he doesn't win. Maybe he isn't evil, but that guy is a freakish asshole. And a bit of a man whore.

> This is my friend @ilovebeesandallthat 's fault. But Jekyll is one of those old people who go CRAZY for the holidays. Like he tries soooo hard to be normal about Christmas. He is not. Jekyll isn't the type to throw big parties (attend them? Maaaybe. Host dinners for his friends and colleagues? Definitely. But throwing a big party? Eeehhh-) And yet every year, high society gets excited for Jekylls' yearly Christmas party. Unfortunately, Jekyll's insane Christmas spirit has pierced the soul of our poor London's night Incarnate- and dragged him down to the hellish depths of Holly Jolly Christmas insanity. I fear both Jekyll AND Hyde turn into the most disgusting Holliday feinds the second it turns midnight on November 1st....

> Oh yeah, also because I'm an unoriginal TGS AND TMA fan- Hyde will sometimes refer to himself as "London's Night Incarnate." Beacuse, I thought it sounded like just the sort of thing he would think was cool.

> Lanyon and Jekyll's families were very close. They both were born and grew up in Scotland (Scottish Jekyll truthhhh sorry). They moved to England for university, and for the first chunk, it was them against everyone else. But then Jekyll started hanging around this 'Utterson' guy and started speaking in an English accent and started being uber charismatic with everyone- and it very much bothered Lanyon. He still stuck with Jekyll- but this is what started the strain on their relationship. Lanyon did end up being close to Utterson. But now his relationship with Utterson is better than his relationship with Jekyll....

> Despie all that- Sorry folks, Lanyon is the token straight (I HAVE joked abour him being a Henriel fudanshi though lolll. He loves the drama). He has a wife named Lindsey (she's a nurse!), and they love each other very very much (even though Lanyon is a grumpy ass stubborn old fart). They have 2 adult kids who have moved out and live elsewhere but visit as much as they can. They had a Scottish wedding, and Jekyll was the best man (even though Lanyon considered making it Utterson out of spite...he had to keep the family peace). Utterson also got to be there.

> Lucy and Emma exist in this world, too! Beacuse I like them too much to leave them out despite my beef with the musical and my more book based ideas. Emma is a...bit less developed. She's a wee inspired by some stuff I have seen about Hyde and Seek (the MazM spin off that I haven't played yet). She is Jekyll's ex-fiancé. She left because- despite how much she cared about him- his work was clearly too much. And honestly, she was a wee bit scared of it and how...weird he would get about it. She just couldn't take it anymore and knew she deserved better. Even despite not getting married, they act like a divorced couple on the off chance they cross paths. BUUUUt they still care about each other. Just...not in a romantic way anymore. And they kinda have their own lives going on. She has a husband now and some grown kids! She hasn't been in London so...she actually doesn't know what's going on with Jekyll. Maybe she finds out later, ooooo.

> I probably won't delve TOO much into Lucy's character as much as I could rn. I have...a LOT I could say about her. I'll save that for another post since I'm tryyying to not prolong this and also keep it at least a little on the topic of JnH spesifically. I always thought that if I *did* have an adaptation of my AU- she'd be either the main or a frequent POV. She isn't a love interest or a victim of Hyde. In fact her and Hyde are kinda besties??? She's like a middle ground between ITV/TGS Lucy and musical (which I haven't yet watched ITV but have been infodumped about it) She meets Jekyll...somewhere idk- and has an interesting philosophical conversation with him. Which is a cover for her pickpocketing him. He is...well aware that she is doing so- but doesn't say anything about it. Much like in the musical, he gives her his card and tells her to keep in touch if she ever needs anything. Later down the line, she gets approached by a weirdo in a bar who yaps her ear off about the most ridiculous things. She keeps expecting this guy to ask for her services and get this over with- but he never does. And she keeps seeing this guy day after day- until one of his yap sessions goes on so long that he's just following her home and yapping (you can probably take the hint that yes, this is Hyde). And now she's starting to realise this guy isn't threatening- he's just weird. And probably not human....and maybe even a tad bit endearing? Mostly weird, though. And now he Kimmy Gibbler-ing his way around her apartment in the middle of the night. Crawling through her window when he feels like it to hang out and show her gift her all the cool new trinkets he has stolen and raid her fridge and bring her dead things. And she starts to appreciate it beacuse it starts to break up her monotonous and depressing daily cycle. They take care of each other and it's nice (once again- can get more into it in another post)

> Hyde is a disgusting little slime ball who is somehow always covered in filth and grime. Lucy fucking hates this.

>Hyde has an accidental common theme of being a Devil-On-The-Shoulder to more than JUST Jekyll. He tends to bring out the most weird and hidden sides of people- which is....fitting considering what he is. It's something that happend accidently as I was thinking of character interactions- but something that I think is really really fun....

ANYWAY THAT'S ALL FOR NOW- MORE LATER.....MAYBE 🫡🫡🫡

[cripplecharacters]

So I have a question regarding sign language and typically spoken/heard superpowers. For reference I have a character who was born dead and is culturally Deaf, her first language is sign language and she doesn’t speak. There are two specific characters with powers that either require something to be spoken or heard by the victim so I wanted to check in with y’all on how it could work with deaf people so I don’t end up picking the worse option.

1. The first power is mind control. The rules for this power is that the command has to be spoken and then the ‘victim’ has to hear it. The deaf character doesn’t have cochlear implants or hearing aids with little residual hearing left so this would technically make her ‘immune’. This wasn’t planned, but she’s also the best friend to the mind control user, so I wanted to see if her being technically immune was something that was ok (idk if the whole medusa and the blind woman trope is a good thing or not and I’m kind of seeing patterns of it here) or if I should find a way to still make her affected if the other route was offensive in any way (note that the mind control guy wouldn’t purposely try to control her or anything he’s just pretty bad at controling the powers since they’re new).

2. The other power is a lie detection power, which I haven’t fully fleshed out hence why I came to ask how it should affect sign language. On the one hand, from what I’ve seen, lie detection powers in media tend to only work on spoken lies, so that criteria would mean that by speaking in sign language you could evade the power. On the other hand, sign language is of course still a language amd should be treated as such, and I don’t want to make it seem like it isn’t, so I’m not sure if the lie detection should be affected or not (my main question here is basically just which of these two options would be better representation here). This one is also pretty important since sign language is quite prevalent in the story - the love interest is semiverbal autistic so the main character is learning sign language to be able to communicate with them, so it’s something that multiple characters could potentially use to ‘evade’ the power.

Sorry it’s pretty long, I thought condensing two similar questions into one post would be easier. Have a nice day and thank you for taking the time to answer ❤️❤️

Hi!

For both questions, I think communication and intent are the biggest things to consider.

For the first one, since the mind-controller has to speak and be heard to cause an effect, I think he should have to sign to affect your Deaf character (and signed commands will only affect those who know sign language). If he can't control whom he affects, then if he signs to her while using his powers he may end up controlling her.

For the second, lies should be detected in any language. From what I've seen, lie detectors rely on either body language or some mind-reading-like power. Either would still work for a signing character. If it's body language based, she might be good at hiding lies, but that shouldn't be language dependent.

Mod Rock

[imthepunchlord]

on one hand i feel like it’d probably be better for balancing to give marinette a miraculous since there’s currently so few calamitous and it’d probably be best to give those to the villains so there can be multiple antagonists, HOWEVER i adore the concept of marinette having a calamitous because it’s so interesting!! like how did she get it? why does she have it? so many questions that could end up having a cool backstory behind it, and i also just love the idea of marinette having to prove herself to the team and work to earn their trust. the concept is just fascinating to me tbh

If it happens, it would be interesting to see. And could be quite tense with what I'm initially thinking so far for how Miraculous and Calamitous work.

Both work off having deals made.

For Miraculous fairies, it's a contract that's to be upheld. They offer to grant a small wish for their humans (very small stuff that won't effect too many others, just their human), but in return that human is expected to step up as a hero and help others or their agenda. And that wish will stay granted so long as the human does as the fairy wants them to. These fairies are fine terminating their deal when the human wants to, or it's time to move on, though humans are to be aware that the continuance of the wish stops (which depending on the wish, may not effect much).

Calamitous fairies though, it's more a deal with a devil that entirely works off that fairy's benefit. They'll grant any wish, big or small, they'll "work" for your agenda, so long as you throw the world into chaos. And the humans that do wind up with a Calamitous, they technically get what they want, but not exactly what they want. And any human that tries to terminate their deal usually have an ill fate given that they're no longer "partners".

Calamitous fairies typically prefer to go to the worst or those that are at their lowest so they're easier to manipulate to play off that low emotional state, so IF Marinette did get one, she'd be a rarity. Most likely, it's her finding one by sheer accident as they like to "latch" onto humans and immediately strike that deal. Most likely was aiming for Chloe and she unknowingly got in the way.

And as I prefer comedy over angst, Endurr/Arrdor are going to find it's not so easy working with Marinette.

Endurr would try to intimidate Marinette into submission, only to get pillowed into submission himself or will wind jarred until he stops being so mean or is ready to leave her alone! Cause she didn't ask for this! Only Endurr is too proud to just up and leave... that's admitting defeat. If Weeve ever found out, he would never live it down. She would stalk him, cackling over his failure for centuries...

So he stays to try and make this work. He'll pressure her into doing bad. To be chaotic. She thinks she's unlucky, he'll make it worse!

Doesn't matter how much she picks up herself, or how much she rolls with the punches. She has to break sometime.

Chloe and Lila are terrible to her. Surely she wants revenge? To get back at them.

No?!

By Oberon, he's so irritated, he wants to take it out on these two girls for daring to harass his human. She's his to try and mess with. And if they're not going to help in their battle of wills they shouldn't bother!

And can she stop offering him cookies!

They're delicious and he hates it.

Arrdor would try to manipulate Marinette emotionally, but he works best over selfish-possessive-toxic people. And Marinette at the core is a selfless, empathetic, and compassionate person. She's going to challenge him on some of these points. She's going to drive him crazy with her need to help others cause no! We're here to cause chaos! We here to upset people!

Ok, yes, yES. Stealing your crush's phone! Now we're talking! Go through it! Discover his secrets! No! Don't just delete the voice mail! At least trash! Throw it in the Seine! DON'T GIVE IT BACK!

And what's worse for Arrdor is that, sometimes, he feels... colorful. He feels... pink.

It's the little things that cause this. They're what's at fault.

She doesn't like him. But she still brings him food.

She made himself a mini gothic dollhouse to haunt.

She'll ask his opinion, wanting a genuine opinion to the topic and not him arguing for arguing sake. And the few times he humors her, he feels heard.

And he... he feels.... warm. Tranquil. Pink.

But he's not pink. He's gray. He's gray. He's gray. He's gray. He'sgrayhe'sgrayhe'sgrayhe'sgrayhe'sgr--

[notcreative360]

So I'm not sure if it's the same with other pp, but I panic when a NEW problem comes my way, and I technically have a mental breakdown when I don't know what's gonna happen, and the effects the new problem could bring me, which does lead me to overreact. So now I'm just wondering how the brothers would react to an overreacting MC who doesn't know about something, cause they never had dealt with it before (they don't know how to deal with the problem either lmao).

.

.

.

MC: Thanks for the allergy pill, Mammon.

Mammon: Heh, you always got your first to rely on.

MC: ..! ...uh oh..

The brothers: 👁️👄👁️

Beel: That didn't sound good...

Mammon: WHAT DO YOU MEAN UH OH?!

MC: I might've chewed the pill by accident...

Lucifer: *Tries to stay calm* What do you mean you chewed the pill by accident?!

MC: I DON'T KNOW! INSTINCT?!

Levi: Are you feeling ok?!

MC: I DON'T KNOW!! My mouth feels bitter, am I foaming?!

Satan: Someone call Solomon!!

Asmo: I'll do it!!

Mammon: Don't worry! I'll carry you to a hospital!

Belphie: What the fuck are the demons gonna do, bitch?!!

Mammon: I'm trying here, don't start calling your big brother names now!

*The brothers fighting in the background*

MC: *Starts having a mental breakdown*

[sincapjelly]

Uhm so... I have something to say about Lilly... (and Vengestone.)

Don't you guys also find Lilly incredibly interesting?? I can't be the only one?? I mean, so much happened in her short life, and there are so much I still want to know. Everything we know about her just intrigue my interest more. Especially after seeing she not only has a shrine in Shintaro, but also the City of Temples. I mean, what are the odds? It makes me wonder why would Temple City keep her stuff and not only that but have her statue? And how, despite being so legendary, people know very little of her?

Ok so. I might be delulu here, but what if, the reason Temple City, and maybe some other sacred place kept track of her, is because her story was erased from the history for some reason. No one tells her story out loud, so places like Temple City kept evidence of her story and her stuff. Maybe she did something she shouldn't have, maybe used some forbidden magic, maybe she knew some stuff and they feared she would share it so they kept her silent and erased all her story from the history?

My take on this story, is that she used Vengestone. I know it sounds so "the hell?" but hear me out on this. A lot of people here talked about her statue in Shintaro and mentioned the possibility of her merging with her element. But my take is her statue looked like that because she was able to use Vengestone, or at least resist the stone's magic and used her earth powers regardless.

I can see her being confused about why a stone, which is a part of her powers technically, would make her unable to use her magic. And talking to other EMs, she realises the effects of the stone is indeed different on her. While other EMs feel their connection to their element is cut, Lilly still can feel the stone. She can feel how Vengestone effects her, but from what she knows from other EMs she was supposed to feel nothing. This makes her curious and she starts to think she can master the stone and resist. She tells some EMs about it but seeing how they react, she decides not to tell Wu, thinking he will forbid her from experimenting and even worse, forbid her being near the stone.

Eventually, she starts to secretly try to control the stone, or use her powers around it. She only goes a tiny further with these practises. But when she visits Shintaro, being surrounded by the stone inside the mountain, she faces a great challange and finds herself succeeding in resisting the stone. Though this proves to be very painful. Glowy scars, just like Vengestone cracks, appear on her arms, hands and neck using the ability. Though they disappear shortly.

She doesn't tell anyone other than Lou, who realises it's dangerous but trusts her when she says we will never do it again. After that, she keeps it secret for a while. Until... she can't. During one fight, she uses this ability again, this time in longer amount of time and stronger. With everyone, the EMs, and civilians watching. After that she starts feeling overcharged and stays still on her knees trying to regain consciousness. Using this magic causes the same scars again, but this time even after healing faint "cracks" are visible on her arms and neck, making her unable to lie or keep it secret.

This is the time Wu learns about everything. He knows Vengestone acts different on earth elementals, that's why he never told her nor any other before her. Because in the past it did not do any good on the user of the magic.

Aftermath of everything, Lilly quickly recovers, though again, scars visible. But a council gathers, and they should punish her for her actions, for using forbidden spells (because you know, her doing it recently makes it harder to keep secret, endangering the next generations because it paves the way?), so they punish her with her existence in the history. It's hard to find anytging about the time she was a ninja, because they hid her from stories.

This drives Lilly angry, she drifts apart from Wu's alliance because she is hurt by his lack of support during this whole time. And she thinks keeping such secrets is doing more harm than good, because hiding the forbidden Vengestone abilities did not protect Lilly from using the magic, in fact, it only made her still use it but with no knowledge, thus no precaution.

After this, Lilly starts going on missions by herself, being her own solo thing. Which is why, in canon, she still went on missions after Cole was born and she lost her powers. She took orders from only herself, so she did what she wanted.

I don't know if this was a contributor to her death, I'd assume she carried some inherited illness that only started showing once she lost her powers and no longer had a super healing, but I'd also say using such magic many times did tire her body greatly.

Oh and, about how she used her powers with Vengestone. I don't know if I am able to explain this correctly, but it's like... the stone allowed her to use her magic, it's like she made a connection with it. I wouldn't say it's like merging with it, not like how Nya did it, but you could say there was some merging in terms her magic, like the stone sharing it's with her. Which is how she became mostly immune, mastering her abilities around the stone.

On the other side of the story, there is Lou, who I need to mention. Because whatever happened, he knows EVERYTHING. And that's canon. Because he met Lilly before she even unlocked her true potential. He was there in every step she took. He knows every single one of her adventures and everything.

When this whole Vengestone incident happened, he was also deeply angry at the reaction everyone had, and he believed it was terrible to just erase her from the history just because she wanted to save people. He wanted to do something but... well, what you can do in this situation, even Lilly couldn't stop it as a part of the Elemental Alliance. He could only watch it unfold, and it was eating him inside.

After everything, he lost his own trust in Wu, getting sick of his secrets and being heartbroken at the reaction, or lack of reaction let's say. Which... is actually the real reason he tried to stop Cole from being a ninja. It was to prevent Cole from becoming one of Wu's ninja.

Because, I know this might as well be a plot hole, but if you watch S1, in ep2 Lou sends a letter to the Monastary, despite Cole claiming he lied to his father and never told him where he actually is. This just proves Lou knows more than we think he does, he knows the Monastary because Lilly have been there too. He knows Wu, he most likely knows the parents of the ninja too. He knows so much, which he briefly shows in Quest for the Lost Powers as well.

I swear y'all always mischaracterize Lou, making him the bad guy and making him a terrible person. Which is sooo wrong, if you look just a little closer to the story you'll actually see it. And we might think he knows very little, but I think he is just really good at playing oblivious.

OKAY that was a long run. I hope I made sense, English isn't my first language lol. I just have this idea in my head, which I'd actually love to write as a fic. There are a lot of aspects to Lilly's story that are canon, or most likely canon, that makes me get so interested in exploring her story. Like how her father was on Chen's side, willingly or not, and how this canonically labeled him a traitor (As Garmadon says in Garmadon #1 or 2), and I wonder how this effected Lilly. In that one canon Ninjago magazine issue, I believe called Mother Earth, we can see a little inside to Lilly's personality which is a plot twist in itself as she is no saint as many people tend to think. She is not just a nice persona, she is actually a lot meaner and daring, like think of it as Cole's playful bullying. She has that to her.

Okay, now I'll shut up about her, FOR NOW. I hope this reaches to people who are interested in Lilly's story as much as I am lol.

[lenaboskow]

Ok what is sentinel cause I’ve seen it a few times in fic and mentioned on here and I have no idea what it is 😭

sorry this took so long i went a little deeper than i probably needed to lol.

so i went on a research binge before i started reading the fics and this is what is what i've gathered. feel free to add onto this in the rbs because this is just what i've seen in the 911 fandom and on my research binge but here it goes:

a sentinel is someone who has extremely heightened senses. think being able to tell the difference between brands of spice, able to hear the heartbeat of someone in a different room, able to read the small text on the wall across the room. when they learn to control their senses, they typically will envision "dials" that go 0-10, with 4-5 being human range. certain things can cause them to "spike", and if it gets too bad, they'll "zone" which puts them in a catatonic state, leaving them vulnerable. this happens when the dial is at 10.

depending on the au, sentinels can function to varying degrees without help/being bonded (because just being around a guide can help to some degrees). but they're always better off when bonded to a guide.

guides are basically what they're named. they help guide the sentinel in controlling their senses. a lot of times, they're also empaths. this means they can sort of sense the emotions of people, and encourage them to feel certain emotions. they're most sensitive to their bonded sentinel.

one thing i didn't see mentioned in research binges is the terms "online" vs "offline". a sentinel or guide doesn't always know they're a sentinel or guide. for the first part of their life, they're offline. then, usually in times of stress (eddie usually comes online in afghanistan, for example) or danger (i've seen buck come online when eddie was in danger before), their senses hit a switch and suddenly they're able to use their abilities, coming online. usually i've seen it depicted that other sentinels and guides can sense when this happens within a certain radius.

also, there's s&g centers that help train s&g teams (and even solos that haven't bonded) and care for them when they're sick in a way that regular hospitals wouldn't be able to (they have shielded rooms, i'll get to shields in a moment). usually these centers have what's called an alpha team (the reason i thought it was similar to omegaverse), who are kind of the highest level. they're like, really strong.

shields are another thing sentinels and guides use to control their abilities. it's an ability that effectively "shields" them from the intense senses (i'm probably not explaining this properly but hopefully you get it). they can create them themselves, or they can enter a shielded room at the s&g center if it gets too much. i've seen guides shield unbonded sentinels and vice versa (there's one fic in particular where chris comes online as a guide when buck is struck by lightning (i think) and the alpha sentinel creates a shield over him until eddie and buck can watch over him because he's still a teenager)

now. bonding. in most cases, bonds can technically be created by an intense mutual meditation session. however, this is fandom and there's another obvious way to create a bond. sex. though i have seen one fic where buck and eddie were bonded before getting together, and then when they got together and had sex for the first time it kind of made it deeper? it depends on the author.

that's all i can think of for now, i'm probably missing some things, but feel free to add onto this like i said. i'll edit with any major things i missed, as well. this is now my favorite au for buddie because it works so well with them being firefighters

[wonderlustmelodies]

WHAT IF HUSH IS THE REMNANTS OF THE SOVEREIGN THAT BURST INTO A MILLION PIECES MAKING FREELANCERS RAK'XIT AND WHAT IF THE SOVEREIGN THAT TELLS BLAKE HES BEEN EXPECTING HIM IS THE SAID BROTHER OF HUSH WHOS BEEN TRYING TO KILL HIM

(Edit)

Ok, so im gonna explain the why I think this is a possibility, in hushs newest audio he makes mention of being able to fix vega if he has enough magic left behind, so what im thinking is that means that when Rak'Xit burst into a million peices not all of them went to humans and could have shot into the void or wherever hush comes from and so if hush was made of those shards of a sovereign it would make sense how hush remembered vega from whatever he was before, and also could link the one seprate sovereign in death as his brother somehow I haven't figured out that part yet cause if hush is supposed to free the sovereigns then wouldn't he technically be helping the drove but also at the same time maybe he's freeing the sovereigns not for the sovereigns sake because Vegas trying to free the sovereigns to kill them and hush didn't tell him that he can't just that its not the right time so I think they have similar plans just couldn't communicate that effectively and so that would make the sovereign in death who manipulated blake there his enemy, im thinking the spellsong itself as a whole made hush from the fragments of Rak'Xit and gave him the task of getting rid of the sovereigns in a very specific way, I also think that with Morgans newest video this ties in really well cause time is a song to him and the spellsong you can guess the notes that will come next yadayadyada the spellsong could be able to effect the future like the sovereigns can and the spellsong couldn't interact directly cause its this force of life of time so it took part of itself the "silence in the spellsong" so to speak and shards of Rak'Xit to make hush for the purpose of saving everyone cause if close knit gets to the sovereigns first everyone will be doomed or maybe close knit needs to release the sovereigns and then hush and vega and I think the others deeply involved in this (avior and starlight, maybe milo and sweetheart if they decide to do what they did in inversion, maybe Elliott and sunshine will go back full force trying to figure it out after the department was not extremely helpful) all of them in the same place for some sort of big showdown the possible end of the world or saving of the world, this was all a ramble as i was writing it sorry if it's like incoherent

[canmom]

l'aventure de canmom à annecy - épisode deux: XR

so I'm going to abandon all semblance of chronological order at this point.

just like last year there was an VR room operating on a morning booking system - each thing had two headsets and a signup sheet. I didn't get to try every one but I did get most of them. enough that the volunteers noticed me coming back every day x3

^ some random people immersed in the Wired

this is easily the longest annecy post so far... so please read on for a big old discussion of the unique difficulties faced by VR film as a medium, and how this year's annecy films meet them... or more often don't.

so annecy's vr films section is for essentially linear vr projects (i refuse to write "experiences") that can be watched/played in less than an hour. i don't know if that's a hard rule but that's how long all the ones here were!

let's get the technical stuff out of the way: the Quest 2/3 was by far the headset of choice. some ran natively, some were PCVR with a wire connecting to a computer, and some were 360° videos which played back on the headset with 3dof tracking. some had a degree of interactivity, up to about a 'walking simulator' level. the average runtime was between 20m and an hour.

the preamble: on the limitations of VR

the big question I have with XR movies is basically... how well does it actually use the medium? like, is it doing anything that wouldn't work better as a flatscreen game or a film?

this might seem like a high bar to clear, like why shouldn't it be in VR - but VR is uncomfortable, the headset is expensive etc etc, and that's before even the formal stuff I'm about to get into. so that's 'why not'. and also, this is a new medium, I want to see what unique features it has to offer!

I'm sure I've said this before, but despite on the face of it being more 'inmersive' than traditional flatscreen games or films, VR is actually a pretty restrictive medium! compared to flatscreen games with their many 'buttons', you are very limited in the possible interactions. your main interaction is to 'pick up' and 'hold' objects, but this is close enough to actual physical interaction to highlight how much it isn't. what it actually means is that you position your hand or controller in a trigger and press a grab button or pinch your fingers, at which point the object snaps to your hand and moves weightlessly with it.

you also can't accelerate the pov too much without causing motion sickness, etc etc.

ok, what about film? well, compared to film, the big big thing VR lacks is the frame of the camera. you can't cut, you can't frame a subject, you don't have long shots or closeups, you can't even rely on the player/viewer looking in the direction of an interesting thing.

since movement is also tricky in VR due to the motion sickness problem, you're also limited in your ability to steer the viewer to interesting sights with Valve-style 'vistas' using the level architecture. it's not impossible - Valve themselves have their familiar vistas in HL Alyx - but it's something that depends on the player being able to move through a large space, so it doesn't fit these kinds of movie-like project so well. otherwise you can draw attention to a direction using various means, like visual effects that converge on a spot, or just keeping most of the action in the same area.

what you can also do, closer to camerawork, is move the viewer's point of view, and shrink or enlarge their surroundings. the language of VR 'shots' is still far from defined, but we have a few recurring ones: standing in a normal sized room, the giant's view in a tiny city, the floating perspective looking down on a diorama, the ant's eye view inside something regular sized.

how about theatre, which also has most of these limitations? well, compared to being in person with a real human being, you're limited by the capabilities of realtime animation systems and the rendering tech available on the device. you're looking at the character in a slightly fuzzy low resolution and unless you have AAA money which noone in VR does, you're a bit limited in the 'acting' you can pull off. this may change if the apple vision pro gets popular - apple already have a 'gertie the dinosaur' style demo where a very detailed dinosaur emerges from a portal - but it's definitely out of reach of most teams working on the Quest.

so compared to all these other media, what does XR offer?

compared to film and theatre, there is the game aspect of agency: a story feels different if you are the one doing it. so most VR narrative games have characters interact with the player somehow, though this introduces the problem of how to write the player into a story without feeling like you're railroading them or that they're superfluous to the real story.

it's very easy to undercut this sense of agency by having an amount that's not zero but still too small, e.g. if it just feels like the player is touching a button that lights up then you wonder why they even bothered.

the role that most games put the (vaguely defined) player character in is 'terrifying violence doer'. this is a fairly easy role to write around, and it gives the player a lot of control of the 'how' while letting the writer control the 'what' and 'where' and 'why'. similarly if the player's role is something like 'puzzle solver'. but for a purely narrative presentation, these roles don't exist.

still, this is the idea that a lot of VR rests on: an 'immersive experience' which puts the player into the story.

the other big thing that VR has is the joy of experiencing visual effects in 3D. particles, trails, transforming geometric shapes etc are cool on a flat screen and even cooler in stereo vision where you can move your head around. another benefit is spatial audio by default - something that is gradually coming to games but provided 'for free' by vr consoles.

in the land of games, you also have incredibly precise position and direction input... as long as it's in arm's length of the player. the most successful genres of VR games (so far) use this: a lot of shooting games, and some games that let you interact with physics objects, offer 3D jigsaw puzzles, or simulate sports to provide some real exercise. it can be really good for rhythm games as beat saber demonstrates.

VR is also really for social games like VRChat - similar to MMOs but with the benefits of more complex tracking in lieu of canned animations.

but... none of these fit the form of a predictable 15-50 minute narrative sequence! they're not films! so the VR films category at annecy is a tough problem to crack.

last year, the VR project that most impressed me was one that put you in the seat of a novice spotter in a bomber in the second world war. this was a great fit for a lot of reasons. you are in a vehicle so you have no reason to move from seated; the scenario is full of loud scary sounds that can make full use of spatial audio; your 'character' is well-defined but also doesn't have much reason to speak within the scenario. this had a small amount of interaction (by pointing your head) which you could actually fail, making it a bit closer to a game, and also giving you reason to play close attention to the bombed out cityscape below you. it did a fantastic job of capturing the tension of a dangerous air mission, the pilot character interacting with you was compelling, and overall it really benefited from being in VR.

this year's films

sadly nothing I saw this year comes close to that. but still, some are interesting, so let's go through them!

My favourite this year was probably Flow - completely unrelated to the movie in the main competition, though they share the trait of being completely wordless, conveying their story simply through imagery and music.

Flow's big trick is a very cool visual effect where characters and objects are conveyed the trails left behind by little particles, causing them to appear ghostlike . At first you're just flying through a cityscape, passing various people on the street and in the subway, with the particle trails conveying the breaths of the passengers; gradually a storm brews, the trails becoming the wind that tears at everything.

I believe this was a prerendered film, with only 3dof tracking - i think i saw some compression artefacts at some point. So it's less technically impressive than if they managed to do it realtime but it does make full use of the power this gives to render loads of particles and move rapidly through different scenes. it was also an effect that benefitted from the ability to put you in the middle of it - something that would not work as well on a flat screen.

But it also benefitted a lot from being more film-like. It has an original soundtrack, and progresses without input from the player. There's no awkward 'player' character to write around, no space you stand about in. The film can simply unfold and let you appreciate it. In this case, no interaction is better than bad interaction.

My Inner Ear Quartet from Japan did not do anything particularly novel with the medium, but to my mind it had by far the most compelling story. It tells of a young, introverted boy who habitually digs in the dirt for objects that other people would consider trash. The title refers to a string quartet which he hears when he cries, imagined to be in his inner ear; also there is a pair of tiny shrimp which he saw grow in a net.

The first half is narrated by a man who turns out to be the boy grown up, now a hearing aid salesman. While the boy abandons his box of treasures, as an adult he returns to collecting and documenting abandoned objects as a kind of urban explorer.

The geometry here is stylised in a kind of rough, children's drawing way. I think this could have been pushed further with more complex shaders but it works. For the most part, you're watching as an invisible observer seated on a floating chair. At certain points, the viewpoint is taken inside the boy's ear, or into the tin of treasures, where you can grab the objects and get the boy's brief, poetic description of each one.

I liked this story because it had substance, but left enough up to interpretation to be engaging. By showing the treasures to us with the descriptions we get to understand why they might be significant to the boy. It plays well with the classic anime theme of objects as vessels for emotional significance. I think it would have worked just as well on a flat screen, but I enjoyed my time with it.

Now the rest...

The Age of the Monster had some things going for it, but honestly I think this one shouldn't have been in VR. It's basically a film about how bad we're fucking up the planet, putting us in the house of a man who works in the nuclear industry in the 70s up to a future where the cooling towers lie in ruins. The 'monster' is a giant anthro catfish, seen first as a B-movie monster and dream vision and finally as a real kaiju scale creature in the final future scene.

We're told about the economic circumstances that led to the man getting this job, and his relief at working in nuclear during the oil crisis; we're told about the infamous repressed oil industry report about how climate change is gonna be a thing; we're told about the man's fraught relationship with his radical daughter who is furious about his extractivist ways. Then we get a collapse and humans learn to take the force of nature more seriously, i forget the exact phrasing they used.

The main problem is? These are mostly things you are told, by voiceover. There is some environmental storytelling in the evolution of the house but not enough to convey much without the v/o. the film does not seem to have the confidence in its imagery to show us what it's trying to say.

I feel like the film's vision of the post-collapse future, with flocks of birds flying over a wide river and collapsed overgrown cooling towers, is a huge missed opportunity. Here's an opportunity to apply some true visual imagination of how humans might live in a climate changed future... but nah, giant catfish kaiju just kinda hanging out there.

t

The environmental message is generally a stance I sympathise with, but the film doesn't make a good case for it on a propaganda level. We see the cooling towers outside the window and eventually the house, flooded, but it does little to make the collapse narrative emotionally compelling - and I question a little the choice to make it nuclear focused in a film about climate change. It's probably based on an actual guy, right? Maybe someone's parent? But... despite putting us in his shoes i don't really feel like i understand him very well.

Does this seem harsh? I know full well how involved vr dev is, and even simple things can take weeks. But i also want someone to make the most of this medium. To make something as compelling as the best short films on the main screens.

Gargoyle Doyle tells another 'skipping though time' story, depicting a gargoyle on an 800 year old church from its construction through to demolition. I would compare this one perhaps to a puppet theatre - it certainly stands out in terms of character animation, with Doyle played by Jason Isaacs as a classic grumpy old British theatre guy, his foyle foil a goofy statue of monk acting as a drainpipe with a penchant for puns.

I didn't get to watch this one in full, since I got to sub in for someone who left early (thanks to the volunteer who took pity on me when it was fully booked lol). So I didn't see the full arc of this. What I saw was... definitely edutainment material, but pretty well done. The player is cast as a visitor to a future museum and nature reserve built on the site of the church. It seems like this was originally shown in a real museum in Venice, with the 'in the museum' sections portrayed in mixed reality; obvs this wouldn't work at Annecy so they have these virtual too.

The narrative as a whole seems a tad self congratulatory and pat, with Doyle learning a valuable lesson about not being a cunt to his only friends as he's resurrected in the museum, and it doesn't do a whole lot with the VR framing, but taking it as an educational puppet show, it works pretty well - the voice performances are good and the jokes, while a little predictable, work for the kid-friendly style it's going for. I'm not sure it really needed to be 40 minutes long, but I can see they wanted to go maximalist for a proof of concept like this. It is kinda limited by the rendering capabilities of the Quest, the lack of shadows in particular, and could definitely benefit from some baked lighting given the relatively static scenes, but I give it a lot of credit for the character animation and VA.

Apparently the jury liked this one too because it won the competition!

Nana Lou has been in development a few years apparently, casting the player in the role of a psychopomp spirit whose role is to ease the passing of a woman dying of a stroke. Visually, this is one of the best looking, with elaborate forest scenes and strong environment design.

What I really like about this one is its use, at times, of a diorama-like presentation where the player looks down on tiny characters in a room. This is a concept I've wanted to try in VR for a while, and it's cool to see someone do it.

I found the kind of spiritual aspect of the story a lot more underwhelming. The player is accompanied by two other spirits who explain everything that's going on and point out the significance of all the imagery. The player is informed they have an important role, but they don't have a name and can't talk back, and the only interaction is to grab floating photos to initiate flashbacks.

I wish this film had had the confidence to trust in its acting and visual storytelling. While Nana Lou's life is a bit too lacking in serious conflict to make the premise work, it would still be far more interesting and compelling with the frame story largely trimmed. You could still cast the player as a psychopomp but you don't need to have a greek chorus telling them what to click on!

The actual story concerns Lou's relationship with her daughter, who became estranged when she quit university to raise her child, instead of staying on as Lou thought she should. This caused them to spend decades estranged. Finding out this story frees up the daughter's spirit as well, and the penultimate scene has her speak to Lou and make up.

There's definitely something to work with there, but the main delivery mechanism is rather ponderous narration triggered by interacting with objects, with the dramatic scenes largely having taken place off screen. Like The Age of the Monster, it suffers a severe telling-not-showing problem.

It's a shame because there are nice touches here. When you are beside Lou's bed in the hospital, your touch leaves a glow effect which is very evocative. The acting is solid, though the script undermines it a bit.

I don't think narration is evil - evidently, Yuri and I used it in our film, it's a very efficient way to convey information - but I do think it requires a lot of thought put into style and rhythm.

Spots of Light... ok. This one tells the story of an Israeli soldier who lost his sight in the Lebanon war, and later regained it temporarily through surgery. Given my general feelings about the Israeli military (presently carrying out a genocide), I was definitely not disposed to like this one. Nevertheless, it was the only one free so I decided to give it a shot.

This is one of those films where you interview someone and then put an animation to it. So this guy tells you what it was like to be blind and then not blind to see his family briefly, and it's illustrated with various images. And (if i remember right) some parts are on tvs showing video (and if you're using vr to embed a flat screen what is even the point??). When he's blind, everything disappears except vague outlines suggested by small points of light.

Ultimately this is a film about blindness, not the war (of course, meaning this is a person who could leave the war behind - though not to make light of the cruelty of conscription). Making a film about the experience of blindness in a purely visual medium is a choice all right, and I don't feel like this film expressed anything unexpected about it - he was sad to lose his sight, glad to see his family, depressed to lose it again but ultimately at peace. Which is conveyed, of course, primarily by narration.

So yeah this one didn't do much for me!

Stay Alive My Son, now. Agh. This one was... this one was a mess.

So this one is about the Cambodian genocide, right. It's based on a memoir by a survivor of the genocide, Pin Yathay, who became separated from his wife and son while fleeing the Khmer Rouge.

The way this is presented is essentially a walking simulator that takes you through a dungeon-like environment full of skeletons. Every so often you encounter 3D films - filmed with some kind of depth camera - showing actors playing out scenes from the life of the family. There is also a frame story where you visit Pin Yathay in his modern day house, where he sees a digital reconstruction of how his son might look as an adult

This one is difficult to review because it was severely marred by technical issues with the spatial audio, which caused the sound to cut out when you turned your head the wrong way or moved it to the wrong place. It would probably be less of a rough experience if the audio worked as intended. Nevertheless, I have plenty of reservations with the way the story is told as well.

It seems the director of the VR experience (fine! I'll write experience, there isn't a better noun for this kind of thing that sits between game and film) met Pin Yathay, there's video of her speaking to him at the end, but he had pretty minimal creative input beyond providing inspiration through his memoir. So this is a Greek/US interpretation of the Cambodian genocide. The narrative it tells is basically: Yathay and his family are living a pretty idyllic life, then the Khmer Rouge happens, seemingly not for any particular reason. Yathay and his family are evacuated and then put to hard labour growing rice; eventually, their son is put to work too, so fearing for his life, they flee into the jungle.

The Cambodian genocide is - obviously! - one of the worst atrocities of the whole bloody 20th century, and the circumstances surrounding it are worth reading about (though pretty unremittingly bleak). But you won't learn much about, say, cold war geopolitical alignment, Prince Sihanouk, the absolutely horrific civil war, the different ideologies in play in the Marxist milieu that influenced Pol Pot, or the spillover from Vietnam and the massive bombing by the Americans here which helped put the Khmer Rouge in power. You definitely won't learn much about the Cambodia that existed before the war. Instead, you're mostly traversing a dungeon that could come from any horror game, shining your torch on the things you're told to in order to unlock another segment of narration from (the actor playing) Yathay. It is, in pretty literal terms, a tour of atrocities.

Unfortunately the '3D film of actors' conceit doesn't really work because... even audio issues aside, the acting is pretty unconvincing. For some reason - perhaps that subtitles are tricky in VR - the dialogue is in accented English rather than Cambodian, and it's pretty quickly evident that they just have one guy in the role of 'Khmer Rouge soldier' and the lines he's given are kinda awkward. The horror game aesthetics of the environments and the amateur actors and costumes all clash pretty badly. The 3D filming is also kind of jank, only really working if you're fairly close to the camera position, so you aren't really free to move too far even if the audio didn't crap out.

The basic feelings it's trying to explore - the horror of living through a genocide, separation from a child, guilt for abandoning him, not knowing if he's alive or dead - is definitely worth depicting, but honestly this would have been far far better expressed as a 10-20 minute film than a slow 55 minute VR walking sim. The more abstract bits toward the end with paper plane imagery and a Buddhist temple (where you have to put a block in a slot to unlock a door) also feel too jank and videogamey to really have much impact, though by that point I had been wrestling with the audio for nearly an hour so I wasn't in the most receptive mood.

But all the execution flaws aside, that leaves the question of what even is the right way to portray a genocide artistically? This approach is very abstract, reducing the events to dislocated symbols - propaganda posters, the tree against which children were dashed - which perhaps might reflect how fragmented memory becomes, but seems to be wasting the potential of VR to establish you in a place. But then, I guess rice fields are harder to render than enclosed dark rooms.

Speaking of rendering, this was PCVR, so your torch casts shadows and it has other features that would be hard on realtime. But the lack of ambient light and general harshness of the materials adds to the 'horror game' feel.

There is something here about how genocides become associated with certain images. For Cambodia, it is primarily phrases like 'killing fields' and the stacked skulls in the genocide memorials such as Choeung Ek - few people know the name of the memorial in the west, but I think everyone who's heard of the genocide has seen the big stack of skulls. I imagine this is what all the skeletons in this experience are supposed to call to mind: they're representatives of the many ways people died. The problem that this kind of environmental storytelling has long ago been made kind of camp by videogames. A photo of a stack of real skeletons still has power to disturb, but less so a low poly 3D skeleton.

Should it have tried for a realism? The idea of trying to realistically simulate the experience of living in Cambodia though the genocide is kind of ghoulish, and I'm glad they didn't take that approach. But the 'tour of images' approach falls flat. I think The Most Precious of Cargoes elsewhere in the festival makes a stronger case for how to approach a topic like a genocide in a consciously constructed way, but it also has the ability to be in dialogue with a lot of other films made about the Holocaust. There is less in English about the Cambodian genocide - the viewer can't even be assumed to know what happened.

Overall, I think it would be possible to make a much stronger film about the genocide in Cambodia. But I'm not sure what that film would look like. I did learn one thing from this story, which is that there is a reality show in Cambodia which shows survivors of the genocide being reunited with their families. Not much is made of this here, it's something of a background detail. What would it be like to grow up in the shadow of an event like that? I wish the film had been willing to portray more of modern Cambodia - and I hope at some point someone in Cambodia will have a film at this festival, in VR or not, which can talk about it all from the first person.

Is there a good way to try to answer the curiosity of people who live safely in rich countries about what it is like to go through an actual genocide... using a Meta Quest 2 VR headset that costs a few hundred quid? I don't really know, but this film could have done with being a bit more reflective, I feel. So it goes.

the others

there were three films I couldn't see - The Imaginary Friend, Oto's Planet and Emperor. If I get some other chance to try them I'll write about them too!

Overall I felt a bit disappointed with the VR this year, but also I kind of want to put my money where my mouth is and try my hand at making this kind of thing. I do have the technical knowledge at least!

If you read all this, thank you.

[cloudcryptid]

Long cotl thought rant

so, my idea of the lamb and narinder's relationship is that, in general, whether you choose to spare or kill him at the end, the lamb loves narinder

not in a romantic partner way, just in that weird kinda devotional love way

cause i mean, this god, that resurrected you, gave you a 2nd chance and real agency and freedom for the first time in your fear-riddled life (more on that later), of course you're gonna love him in some form

it's messy as fuck, but it's there

but diverging from that, narinder has been imprisoned for eons (this is something we can infer) and the slaughter of lambs began after that happened

also, given how long things like mass genocide actually take, we can safely say that the lamb is possibly not even born till eons after

however, sheep are not new, they weren't something that just popped up after narinder's imprisonment cause of the prophecy

meaning that sheep have been just as wide spread and integrated into the old faith as much as any other species

what that leads to, is essentially, years and years of culture and tradition that exist within sheep from the old faith and bishops that get passed down to the lamb

that thing where you have all these little rituals and habits you do throughout life that you don't even know where it actually comes from or why you do it

lost culture or at least the loss of why, the importance

all this to say that the lamb inevitably comes from one of the bishop's faith, not directly, but passed down through generations

so like, what is the lamb like depending on the bishop? what habits do they have that tie back into their "original" bishop? just a little too chaotic and not quite as efficient from leshy? cannibalism and violence from heket? what would they inevitably lean into because of how they were raised

(and obviously, being at the exact end of a genocide, you might not have much culture you were taught other than fear, but ya know

people are hopeful and try to preserve and pass down as much as they can always)

there's rituals and doctrines that can be attributed to all 4 of them

and narinder, being the domain of death, reaches into each of their domains regardless so it's not like it'd be weird or out of narinder's realm (obviously he has his preferences on how you should run the cult, but ultimately let's you handle things as long as you accomplish your goal, tho that might just be for a more gameplay standpoint than anything)

and the way you get raised will inevitably effect how you'd rule/raise other people, and the lamb just wouldn't be fully aware of why they lean towards these specific tendencies

however, on the flip side, if lamb does know what bishop they technically came from, it technically leads to a, much messier, version of what's going on with narinder

the bishops' faith is already run on fear, the threat of death is not at all uncommon, so it's quite possible for the lamb to come out with some form of devotional love on that end too

but it's fucked

cause they kill you, you're resurrected, you're sent to go kill them

and then the most fucked up part, you do

you kill your former god

you kill what demolished everything you ever knew and loved

and that fucks you up

you hate them, you love them, you killed them, it's cathartic, it's painful, it's infuriating, you're in agony

they were killable this whole time

that'll do things to your brain

and then it gets worse, regardless of what you do with narinder in the end, cause then there's post game

where you go through purgatory

you face this bishop again

you kill them

again

but it's different this time

now they're in your cult

they're mortal

regardless of how the lamb handles it, that's fucked

the lamb is not an ok person at the end of all this

so anyway, lamb dating the bishops, possibly poly relationship, thoughts?

and beneath everything that has happened

there is still that devotional love

[funnywormz]

Almost afraid to ask because I suspect there's lizard sex elements based on the posts, but what's threshold day?

the most simple answer to this is that threshold day is an annual star trek fandom celebration of the star trek voyager episode "threshold", the 15th episode of its second season which aired on the 29th of january, 1996!

but why threshold, specifically? a general answer is that it's because the episode is absolutely nuts. it's generally regarded as one of the worst, if not THE worst star trek episode ever (i definitely disagree with this, i think it's a genuinely good episode), but it also won an emmy............

a brief plot summary is that tom paris, voyager's pilot, wants to test a new form of warp drive technology which would enable ships to go at "warp 10" a speed previously thought to be impossible, which is so fast that travelling at it means you'd theoretically be everywhere in the universe at once. he ends up testing it, and initially everything seems fine, but then a few hours after the test he collapses in the mess hall and ends up in sickbay. the doctor determines that going at warp 10 has had an odd effect on paris's dna, causing it to rapidly mutate and "evolve".

throughout the episode, paris continues to mutate physically and mentally, becoming confused and violent and increasingly non-human looking. eventually he manages to bust out of sickbay and kidnaps the captain, taking her with him on another warp 10 flight. they then set down on a random planet.

it takes voyager a while to find them. by that point, both paris and the captain's dna mutations have caused them to transform into salamander-like creatures, almost completely unrecognisable as humans.

they also, at some point, had hyper evolved salamander sex and made salamander triplets.

the voyager crew takes paris and the captain back onto the ship, but leave their babies behind on the planet. a quick bit of (hand-wavy) genetic treatment by the doctor goes on, and paris and janeway are restored back to their original human selves. paris apologises to the captain for getting her knocked up while she was a salamander, and the captain responds by being like "ok but who says it's not the female that initiates mating in this species 😏". and that's the end of the fucking episode basically

i think threshold day is a thing in general bc the episode has some genuinely really cool elements and the practical effects are AWESOME, but also the last 10 minutes of it are absolutely nuts and easy to make fun of. it's like a perfect mixture of being good enough to be watchable but bad enough that you finish it like "what the hell just happened". it's also a popular day bc people generally view commander chakotay's decision to leave paris and janeway's salamander babies behind as a mistake, which i agree with. like what happened to them?? they're just there on that planet all alone???? did they even survive......... and if janeway and paris could be turned back into humans, technically the salamander babies are hypothetically human kids too and they just left them behind? SMH......... it's so sad............

ANYWAYS anon i hope this was a serviceable explanation!

[agapi-kalyptei]

crowdstrike hot take 5: so who was incompetent, really?

OK so it's the first Monday after the incident. CrowdStrike (CS) is being tight-lipped about the actual cause of the incident, which Microsoft estimates to have affected 8.5 million devices.

Here's an unconfirmed rumor: CS has been firing a lot of QA people and replacing them with AI. I will not base this post on that rumor. But...

Here's a fact: wikipedia listed 8429 CS employees as of April 2024. Now the updated page says they have 7925 employees in their "Fiscal Year 2024".

Anyway. Here's a semi-technical video if you want to catch up on what bluescreen and kernel-mode drivers are in the contexts of the CS incident by a former microsoft engineer. He also briefly mentions WHQL certification - a quality assurance option provided by Microsoft for companies who want to make sure their kernel drivers are top-notch.

Now conceptually, there are two types of updates - updates to a software itself, and a definition update. For a videogame, the software update would be a new feature or bugfixes, and content update would add a new map or textures or something. (Realistically they come hand in hand anyway.) For an antivirus/antimalware, a definition update is basically a list of red flags - a custom format file that instructs the main software on how to find threats.

The video mentions an important thing about the faulty update: while many people say "actually it wasn't a software update that broke it, it was a definition file", it seems that CS Falcon downloads an update file and executes code inside that file - thus avoiding the lengthy re-certification by Microsoft while effectively updating the software.

Some background: On audits in software

A lot of software development is unregulated. You can make a website, deploy it, and whether you post puppy pictures or promote terrorism, there's no one reviewing and approving your change. Laws still apply - even the puppy pictures can be problematic if they include humans who did not consent to have their photos taken and published - but no one's stopping you immediately from publishing them.

And a lot of software development IS regulated - you cannot make software for cars without certifications, you cannot use certain programming languages when developing software for spaceships or MRIs. Many industries like online casinos are regulated - IF you want to operate legally in most countries, you need a license, and you need to implement certain features ("responsible gaming"), and you must submit the actual source code for reviews.

This varies country by country (and state by state, in USA, Canada, etc) and can mean things like "you pay $200 for each change you want to put to production*", or it can mean "you have to pay $40'000 if you make a lot of changes and want to get re-certified".

*production means "web servers or software that goes to end customers", as opposed to "dev environment", "developer's laptop", "QA environment" or "staging" or "test machines", "test VMs" or any of the other hundreds way to test things before they go live.

The certification, and regular audits, involves several things:

Testing the software from user's perspective

Validating the transactions are reported correctly (so that you're not avoiding taxes)

Checking for the user-protecting features, like being able to set a monthly limit on depositing money, etc

Checking the source code to make sure customers are not being ripped off

Validating security and permissions, so a janitor can't download or delete production databases

Validating that you have the work process that you said you would - that you have Jira (or similar) tickets for everything that gets done and put to production, etc, and

...that you have Quality Assurance process in place, and that every change that goes to production is tested and approved

You can see why I highlighted the last point, right.

Now, to my knowledge, security software doesn't have its own set of legal requirements - if I want to develop an antivirus, I don't need a special permission from my government, I can write code, not test it at all, and start selling it for, idk for example $185 per machine it gets deployed to.

And here's the thing - while there certainly is a level of corruption / nepotism / favoritism in the IT industry, I don't think CloudStrike became one of the biggest IT security providers in the world just by sweet talking companies. While there isn't any legal regulation, companies do choose carefully before investing into 3rd party solutions that drastically affect their whole IT. What I mean, CloudStrike probably wasn't always incompetent.

(Another rumor from youtube comments: A company with ~1000 employees was apparently pressured by an insurance company to use CrowdStrike - whether it's a genuine recommendation, an "affiliate link" or just plain old bribery... I do not know.)

WHY what happened is still very baffling

See, this is what would be the process if I was running a security solutions company:

a team is assigned a task. this task is documented

the team discusses the task if it's non-trivial, and they work on it together if possible

solo developer taking the task is not ideal, but very common, since you cannot parallelize (split it between several people) some tasks

while developing, ideally the developer can test everything from start to finish on their laptop. If doing it on their laptop isn't possible, then on a virtual machine (a computer that runs only inside software, and can be more or less stored in a file, duplicated, restored to a previous version, backed up, etc, just by copying that file)

in case of automated software updates, you would have "update channels". In this case it means... like if you have a main AO3 account where you put finished things, and then you'd have another AO3 account where you only put beta fics. So in my hypothetical company, you'd have a testing update channel for each developer or each team. The team would first publish their work only on their update channel, and then a separate QA team could test only their changes.

Either way, after maybe-mostly-finishing the task, the code changes would be bundled in something called a "pull request" or "PR" or "merge request". It's basically a web page that displays what was the code before and after. This PR would be reviewed by people who have NOT worked on the change, so they can check and potentially criticize the change. This is one of the most impactful things for software quality.

Either before or after the PR, the change would go to QA. First it would be tested just in the team's update channel. If it passes and no more development is needed on it, it would go to a QA update channel that joins all recent changes across all teams.

After that, it would be released to an early access or prerelease update channel, sometimes called a canary deploy. Generally, this would be either a limited amount - maybe 100 or 1000 computers, either used internally, or semi-randomly spread across real clients, or it could be as much as 10% of all customers' computers.

THEN YOU WAIT AND SEE IF THERE ARE NO ERROR REPORTS.

Basically ALL modern software (and websites! all the cookies!) collect "metrics" - like "how often each day is this running", or "did our application crash"

you absolute MUST have graphs (monitoring - sometimes this is a part of discipline called "reliability engineering") that show visually things like the number of users online, how many customers are lagging behind with updates, how many errors are reported, how many viruses are being caught by our software. If anything goes up or down too much, it's a cause for concern. If 10% of your customers are suddenly offline after a canary deploy is out, you're shitting your pants.

ONLY after waiting for a while to see everything is okay, you can push the update to ALL clients. It is unfathomable how anyone would do that straight away, or maybe how someone could do it without proper checks, or how the wrong thing got sent to the update.

As ClownStrike is still silent about the actual cause of the issue, we can only make guesses about how much they circumvented their own Quality Assurance process to push the faulty update to millions of computers.

It gets worse

Here's the thing: CrowdStrike itself allows users to create computer groups and let them choose the update channel. You, as a business customer, can say

these 100 unimportant laptops will have the latest update

these important servers will have N-1 update (one version behind)

the rest of the company will have N-2 update (two update versions behind)

CrowdStrike has ignored those settings. According to some youtube comments, supposedly they pushed the update to "only" 25% of all devices - which is worrying to think this could have gone even worse.

Third time isn't the charm

And hey, do you know what happened two years before CrowdStrike was founded? The CEO George Kurtz was at the time, in 2010, the CTO of McAfee, the controversial / crappy security company (IMO offering one of the worst antivirus programs of all times, that was aggressively pushed through bundled OEM deals). In both 2009 and 2010 their enterprise software deleted a critical operating system file and bricked a lot of computers, possibly hundreds of thousands.

And yes, the trigger wasn't an update to the antivirus itself, but a faulty "definition update". Funny coincidence, huh.